Survival at Auschwitz by Primo Levi

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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True story of an Italian Jew who was captured by the Nazis in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz. Very moving at times but in some respects lacking.

Lacking? How do you mean, lacking?

Well, it sounds awful to say, but I did not find it gruesome enough.

There were moments that made you feel like crying, like when they got off the train and were immediately sorted into groups -- those that could be of use in the labor camp and those who could not and would be sent within 48 hours to a gas chamber or a crematorium or both. The former, all able-bodied young men. The latter, all the women, elderly, and children. To think of being separated from your child or your wife under such circumstances and to speculate which would be more awful -- to know what fate had in store for them, or to not know and never find out.

There were other moments that made you shake your head and wonder how such things could ever happen, but knowing at the same time that they did and that they made their own twisted kind of sense.

Like the way the prisoners had to keep everything they had with them at every moment to keep them from being stolen -- showering with their soup bowls clutched between their knees. Or the way those who tried to get out of work for a day due to their diarrhea would be lined up and brought before the doctor one by one and given 60 seconds to squat over a pot to prove that they were indeed ill. The dozens who stood in line desperately trying to hold it in so they could deliver when their turn came, and those who made it having their excrement examined to make sure it was soupy enough to qualify.

There were some of these things there, but not enough. Surely there were more, dozens, hundreds more, but so few seemed to make it to the page. There were some interesting things said about the human condition and the type of individual who survived such an ordeal, but now, very few of those thoughts have stayed with me.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson

My wife introduced me to Heather Cox Richardson, whose almost daily updates on her Letters from an American “blog” have become mandatory reading for the two of us. She is a Professor of History at Boston College who seems to specialize in 19th century America. Her central theses, if she has one -- both on her blog and in How the South Won the Civil War -- is this:

America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democratic republic. For the Founders, the concept that “all men are created equal” depended on the idea that the ringing phrase “all men” did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies was capable -- or worthy -- of self-determination. In their minds, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men such as themselves. Those unable to make good decisions about their own lives must be walled off from government to keep them from using political power to indulge their irresponsible appetites. So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it could be equal. In the Founders’ minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox -- that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality -- shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.

These forces of inequality have been supported throughout America’s history by a wide variety of people and politicians. Sometimes, the coalesce around identifiable groups and movements -- such as the Confederates in the 1860s, the Robber Barons in the 1890s, and, essential to the narrative of this work, the Movement Conservatives of the 1960s and, to a large degree, today.

Richardson helps us see that when we view American history through this lens -- as the on-going tension between the forces of equality and inequality -- we can develop a richer and deeper understanding of our history -- both its successes and its failures, its tragedies and its possibilities -- and, at least for this reader, better solidify one’s commitment to one of these sides or the other.

Here’s a taste of what I mean. 

Taking the Philippines was the underside of Americans’ reflexive humanitarianism in Cuba. If business interests had objected to intervention in Cuba, they were positively quivering with excitement at the idea of expansion into the Pacific. Not only were the islands way stations to Asia, but they also produced sugar -- more than 200,000 tons of it in 1897. At the insistence of the enormously powerful Sugar Trust, which controlled 95 percent of the U.S. sugar market, the 1890 McKinley Tariff had put duties on foreign sugar, and sugar growers wanted a way to avoid those tariffs. In 1893, sugar growers on the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific (Hawaii) staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked for the islands to become an American state, a move that would exempt them from the tariff. McKinley’s friend and confidant President Harrison had cheerfully backed annexation, and westerners had been calling for the islands for years. But before the treaty could be approved, Grover Cleveland took office. With Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business cabal, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.

For me, this is one of those lost stories of history -- the fact, evidently, that the reason Hawaii became a U.S. state (or, at least, why some wanted Hawaii to become a state) was that the Sugar Trust wanted to avoid paying a tariff. Today, we all know that Hawaii became a state. But why? Like most things in American history, there were mercantile and/or political realities operating at the time which took precedence over everything.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution -- called the Newlands Resolution after its sponsor, Francis G. Newlands, [Senator William] Sharon’s son-in-law and an avowed white supremacist -- and McKinley, now president, signed it. America was swallowing “sugar plums,” as the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it: the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war gave the United States the sugar islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands, including Guam.

Love that. Congress annexed it by joint resolution. I guess that’s legal, huh? But, more importantly to Richardson’s narrative, and as just alluded to, this is not just about business interests. White supremacy had to have its say, too.

Those in favor of taking these islands, valuable not just for their sugar but also for their location, did not want to argue that they took the land for private gain, as European colonial powers did. Instead, they fell back on the rhetoric of individualism. The American system was superior to any other, they said, and the country had a duty to export democracy and the capitalism that supported it to benighted peoples. Ignoring the Filipinos’ long history of Catholicism and education, pro-annexationists argued that they were savages unable to govern themselves. The Filipino government was illegitimate, Brigadier General Thomas M. Anderson said from his post in Manila, a “revolutionary” junta that did not truly represent the people; they simply wanted to control politics so they could confiscate the wealth of their betters, as well as take over the railways, tramways, electric plants, and waterworks. An Illinois man wrote to Harper’s Weekly that permitting the Filipinos to govern themselves would like turning “over the entire West to Geronimo and his band of Apache cutthroats when in 1885 they claimed that territory, and pressed their claim, as [General Emilio] Aguinaldo is doing to-day, killing, butchering, devastating any and every thing in his path!”

Those brown people are savages who can’t govern themselves! That rings out loud and clear on the surface, but there is actually something deeper and more nefarious going on here -- and it is directly related to that vision of the Founders where inequality of the other is needed in order to preserve equality of the tribe.

If this was a “part of ‘the white man’s burden’ which we can not now lay down,” as one man declared, it presented a problem. The inhabitants of the territorial islands were people of color who had been defined as savages. How could the United States “provide a safe government for the Philippines, without granting that degree of citizenship in such a colony as will permit actual voting powers in the United States?” Beginning in 1901, the Supreme Court, consisting of all but one of the justices who had handed down the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 maintaining that racial segregation was constitutional so long as accommodations were “separate but equal,” decided the issue with a number of cases collectively known as the Insular Cases. Focusing on the nation’s history of allowing “white” people to be citizens -- the same foundation western states used to deny rights to Chinese and Indians -- the court created a new legal doctrine in America. It concluded that the newly acquired islands were not the same as previous territories. Rather than assuming that any new acquisitions would automatically begin the process of becoming states incorporated into the Union, as had been the case since the signing of the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that the islands were “unincorporated territories”; that is, they were, to paraphrase the southern Democratic Justice Edward Douglass White, “foreign in a domestic sense.” Sugar growers could bring in their product without paying tariffs, but the land was not fully American.”

This, frankly, had never occurred to me before. When America acquired territories on the American continent -- through the Louisiana or the Gadsden Purchases, for example -- the territories were fairly quickly divided and developed into states that subsequently joined the Union. That’s pretty much how America went from 13 to 48 states between 1776 and 1912. But that process seems to have stopped. Business interests evidently wanted Hawaii admitted as a state so they could avoid the sugar tariff there, but the Supreme Court rulings in these Insular Cases made that unnecessary. In 1902, Hawaii, like the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, became a sugar plum, where the white supremacists could have the best of both worlds.

This immediately raised the question of the status of the inhabitants of the newly acquired islands. When a pregnant twenty-year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel Gonzalez arrived in New York City in 1902 to join her fiance, the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. Gonzalez sued. When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded that Gonzalez was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the islands’ inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens, either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights. In short, the Insular Cases meant that exactly what Lincoln had feared in the 1850s -- that America would sort people according to categories -- had become national law.

So to recap: Why did Hawaii become a state? To allow the Sugar Trust to avoid paying tariffs. Why didn’t Puerto Rico become a state? To keep its people of color from becoming U.S. citizens.

It’s amazing what you discover when you start peeling back the onion of American history.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Book of Insults by Nancy McPhee

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Do I really need to say something about this book that I’ve already forgotten?

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill

Here’s an anecdote from the difficult times shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, with the moral of the tale right up front.

The early stages of the post-9/11 rendition program began what would be a multiyear battle between the FBI and the CIA over who would take the lead in investigating the terror attacks. It would also bring to the surface how little regard the Bush White House had for anything vaguely resembling a law enforcement approach to the perpetrators of 9/11. As the Taliban regime crumbled and US troops poured into Afghanistan, scores of al Qaeda operatives began retreating across the border into Pakistan. In November, Pakistani forces picked up al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh Libi, who allegedly ran the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan where the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called Twentieth Hijacker, were both trained. The Pakistanis handed Libi over to FBI agents stationed at Bagram Air Base for questioning. The FBI saw the prisoner as a potentially valuable source of intel on al Qaeda and a possible witness against Moussaoui. New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan told his agents in Afghanistan to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’” Libi’s interrogators described him as cooperative and “genuinely friendly” and said that he had agreed to give them information on Reid in return for promises to protect his family.

The FBI treated the situation like a criminal procedure, where suspects had rights, and deals with informants were struck for access to bigger fish.

However, just as the FBI believed it was making headway with Libi, CIA operatives, on orders from [CIA Station Chief] Cofer Black, showed up at Bagram and demanded to take him into their custody. The FBI agents objected to the CIA taking him, but the White House overruled them. “You know where you are going,” one of the CIA operatives told Libi as he took him from the FBI. “Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her.”

Lovely.

The CIA flew Libi to the USS Bataan in the Arabian Sea, which was also housing the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, who had been picked up in Afghanistan, and other foreign fighters. From there, Libi was transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured by Egyptian agents. Libi’s interrogation focused on a goal that would become a centerpiece of the rendition and torture program: proving an Iraq connection to 9/11. Once he was in CIA custody, interrogators pummeled Libi with questions attempting to link the attacks and al Qaeda to Iraq. Even after the interrogators working Libi over had reported that they had broken him and that he was “compliant,” Cheney’s office directly intervened and ordered that he continue to be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. “After real macho interrogation -- this is enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids -- he admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together. He admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together on WMDs,” former senior FBI interrogator Ali Soufan told PBS’s Frontline. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cast serious doubt on Libi’s claims at the time, observing in a classified intelligence report that he “lacks specific details” on alleged Iraqi involvement, asserting that it was “likely this individual is intentionally misleading” his interrogators. Noting that he had been “undergoing debriefs for several weeks,” the DIA analysis concluded the Libi may have been “describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Despite such doubts, Libi’s “confession” would later be given to Secretary of State Powell when he made the administration’s fraudulent case at the United Nations for the Iraq War. In that speech Powell would say, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.” Later, after these claims were proven false, Libi, according to Soufan, admitted he had lied. “I gave you what you want[ed] to hear,” he said. “I want[ed] the torture to stop. I gave you anything you want[ed] to hear.”

What’s remarkable to me is that, from the very beginning, this was more about cruelty and lies than it ever was about the truth. Some will argue that President Bush’s decision to treat things like war instead of police investigation gave him the legal right to treat his prisoners differently, and that perhaps may be true -- but treating them like garbage is never a good idea and, as New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan would have likely known at the time, is counterproductive.

Scahill’s book is filled with anecdotes like this, more or less chronologically detailing America’s slide into legal fictions that supported policies torture and targeted assassination. Another anecdote is about the targeted drone killing of an al Qaeda operative who happened to be in a car with an American citizen -- Ahmed Hijazi -- who was also killed in the attack.

The targeted assassination of US citizens away from the declared battlefield of Afghanistan sparked outrage from civil liberties and human rights groups. It was the first publicly confirmed targeted killing by the United States outside a battlefield since Gerald Ford implemented a ban on political assassinations in 1976. “If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law,” declared Amnesty International in a letter to President Bush. “The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions in any circumstances, and that any US officials found to be involved in such actions will be brought to justice.”

Yeah. So much for that. 

Far from issuing such a statement, the Bush administration not only owned the operation but pushed back hard, asserting its right under US law to kill people it designated as terrorists in any country, even if they were US citizens. “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News a week after the attack. “The president has given broad authority to U.S. officials in a variety of circumstances to do what they need to do to protect the country. We’re in a new kind of war, and we’ve made very clear that it is important that this new kind of war be fought on different battlefields.” She added, “It’s broad authority.”

The targeted killing didn’t just grab the attention of human rights groups. “To the extent you do more and more of this, it begins to look like it is policy,” said the CIA’s former general counsel, Jeffrey Smith. If used regularly, such attacks would “suggest that it’s acceptable behavior to assassinate people. … Assassianation as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.

In addition to launching a new kind of war in Yemen and the surrounding region, the drone strike that killed Hijazi would prove to be a precedent for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who nearly a decade later asserted the right of the US government to kill another US citizen in Yemen.

That, of course, was Anwar al-Awlaki (and his teenage son), but the broader point is one we see time and time again in history. The power of the U.S. president is nebulously defined. What one president asserts, and is not stopped from doing, becomes precedent, and is used by future presidents. It becomes, de facto, the power of the president, almost regardless of what the Constitution does or does not say about it.

But here, the Bush administration at least tried to concoct a legal construct to justify these actions. Broadly speaking, that was treating terrorism as a war rather than the crime that it had traditionally been viewed as. That opened up tons of nebulous options under the legal war powers of the U.S. president. 

I found this analysis and dissection fascinating.

Within the US laws governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the US code, of federal law, sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. The terms “covert” action and “clandestine” operations are often thrown around as though they mean the same thing. They do not. “Covert action” is a doctrinal and legal term that, broadly speaking, refers to an activity whose sponsorship is meant to be a secret. It is meant to provide the United States with “plausible deniability.” Such operations are extremely risky -- not just in terms of the operational danger, but because they often involve secret US agents conducting operations inside the borders of a sovereign country without alerting its government. If the operation is exposed or disrupted, the potential for scandal is very real. The legal definition of covert action, according to Title 50, is “An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence the political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”

Wait. Put a pin in that. That’s legal?

A covert action requires a presidential finding and for the White House to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” 

Evidently so. With a briefing to Congress.

The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Iran-Contra. Those operations were passionately supported by [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld. Although they no doubt regretted the fact that Iran-Contra became public and stirred controversy, they did not regard the operation itself as a scandal but rather as a model for how the United States should conduct its dirty business.

Okay. So that’s covert action. Do it in secret, but let your overseers know before you do it. Because, you know, according to the Constitution, Congress has oversight authority over the Executive Branch.

Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not conceal its sponsor, the US government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “Traditional Military Activities” and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under US law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the US role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

You can probably see where this is going.

From where Rumsfeld and Cheney were sitting, the United States was at war, and the world was a battlefield. Therefore, hostilities were “anticipated” in every country on earth, necessitating dozens if not hundreds of potential “Traditional Military Activities” across the globe. Cheney and Rumsfeld realized that by using JSOC -- a black-ops force whose activities arguably straddled both Title 10 and Title 50 -- they could operate in the crevice separating US military and intelligence law. Much of JSOC’s operations could be classified under military doctrine as “Preparing the Battlespace,” which is defined by the US Special Operations Command as “the umbrella term for all activities conducted prior to D-Day, H-Hour to plan and prepare for potential follow-on military operations … in likely or potential areas of employment, to train and prepare for follow-on military operations.” Such activities could be conducted as Advance Force Operations (AFOs), which are “military operations conducted by forces which precede the main elements into the area of operations to prepare for follow-on operations.” Unlike CIA operations, AFOs can be carried out with minimal external oversight -- for a significant period of time -- prior to an “overt” hostility, or for a “contingency” that may or may not occur.

Did you follow all that? If we operate under the laws of clandestine operations, we don’t have to tell Congress anything, and if we call everything we do “preparing the battlespace,” we can do anything we want for as long as we want.

The congressional intelligence committees viewed this logic as a workaround to oversight and reporting laws, charging that the Defense Department wanted to liberally deploy its increasingly formidable intelligence capabilities abroad under the pretense of operational planning for future military hostilities, without granting the intelligence committees their due oversight.

I don’t doubt it. One of the things that is amazing to me is all the legal shenanigans that the Bush administration went through in order to accomplish their goals. They spent a lot of time looking for “legal” justifications for their actions. In some ways, that makes it seem like the years after September 11 were much simpler times. One wonders if current administrations would even try to crawl through as many hoops.

Which brings us back to Anwar al-Awlaki.

In early 2013, a US Department of Justice “white paper” surfaced that laid out the “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen.” The government lawyers who wrote the sixteen-page document asserted that the government need not possess specific intelligence indicating that an American citizen is actively engaged in a particular or active terror plot in order to be cleared for targeted killing. Instead, the paper argued that a determination from a “well-informed high level administration official” that a target represents an “imminent threat” to the United States is a sufficient basis to order the killing of an American citizen. But, the Justice Department’s lawyers sought to alter the definition of “imminent,” advocating what they called a “broader concept of imminence.” They wrote, “The condition that an operational leaders present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.” The government lawyers argued that waiting for a targeted killing of a suspect “until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself.” They asserted that such an operation constitutes “a lawful killing in self-defense” and is “not an assassination.”

Again, the need for legal justification -- this time in the Obama administration -- is laudable. But it is also laughable. Don’t like that pesky word ‘imminent’? Then let’s just redefine it to mean exactly its opposite. Big Brother would be so proud! And yes, let’s talk of the United States “defending itself.” Killing that American who hasn’t done anything yet is necessary to keep the United States safe -- so long as a “well-informed high level administration official” says so. Right?

But it goes even farther than that.

In late 2012, the ACLU and the New York Times sought information on the legal rationale for the kill program [of the Obama administration], specifically the strikes that had killed three US citizens -- among them sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In January 2013, a federal judge ruled on the request. In her decision, Judge Colleen McMahon appeared frustrated with the White House’s lack of transparency, writing that the Freedom of Information Act requests raised “serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not men.” She charged that the Obama administration “has engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing to any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions.” She added, “More fulsome disclosure of the legal reasoning on which the Administration relies to justify the targeted killing of individuals, including United States citizens, far from any recognizable ‘hot’ field of battle, would allow for intelligent discussion and assessment of a tactic that (like torture before it) remains hotly debated. It might also help the public understand the scope of the ill-defined yet vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise.”

These are all great points. But unfortunately, it seems, the judge’s hands were tied.

Ultimately, Judge McMahon blocked the release of the documents. Citing her legal concerns about the state of transparency with regard to the kill program, she wrote:

“This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules -- a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allows the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

Not Big Brother, evidently, but Captain Yossarian, or more precisely, General Dreedle or whoever is at the top of that chain of command who can put such powers of paradox into motion. Many of us now live in a country where, evidently, it is legal for the government to murder its citizens without any form of due process, and it is legal for the government to refuse to defend and describe why and how it has the power to do that. Talk about the imperial presidency!

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The World of the Druids by Miranda J. Green

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Incomprehensible.

I’ve just read an entire book about druids and I have no idea what druids are.

Neither, it seems, does the rest of the world or even the people who call themselves druids.

Ancient druids may have existed, but were already dying out when the Romans stumbled across them and started writing about them.

Mythical druids exist in Irish folklore, but it is folklore written by Christian missionaries who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with them. 

And modern druids…well, modern druids basically do anything they want in order to feel closer to their ancient spirits.

What about the Dungeons & Dragons druids? I seem to remember that they could kick some serious ass. 

Maybe we should throw them into the mix and muddy the waters even more.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Women by T. C. Boyle

This is a really challenging novel.

For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.

This, and many paragraphs like it, and the title, The Women, would make one think that the protagonists and narrators of this novel are the women who circled around this man named Frank, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. But they are not. Instead of speaking in their voices -- something I think would have made the novel far more interesting -- Boyle decides to drape the narrative in confusing and successive layers of maleness.

In the Introduction to Part One we are introduced to the real narrator of the text we are reading -- a (fictional?) Japanese student of Wright’s named Tadashi Sato, who is laying out this manuscript in an attempt to outline the contours of Wright’s genius and the effect it had (necessarily?) on the women in his life. But Sato is not the only voice we will need to contend with.

There will be complaints, of course -- I can foresee that. This is an imperfect process, what with the interposition of the years, the vagaries of memory, the re-creation of scenes the accuracy of which no one now living can affirm or deny. And too, I’ve had to rely on my co-author and translator (the young Irish American Seamus O’Flaherty, who is husband to my granddaughter, Noriko, and whose as yet unpublished translations of Fukazawa and Shimizu are, I understand, quite novel), many of whose locutions seem, I must confess, rather odd in the final analysis.

Are you following that? This is, evidently, a document written in Japanese by one man, and translated into English by another, with, as we will come to discover, both the author and the translator popping up regularly in a series of footnotes and commentaries as the story unfolds.

And -- on top of that -- the story is told in reverse, with each part taking us backward in time to an earlier and earlier relationship of Wright’s.

It leaves one thinking constantly: What on earth is Boyle trying to accomplish with this? Why hide these women behind some many layers?

From the Introduction to Part Two:

In closing, I should mention that my distinguished collaborator, Seamus O’Flaherty, is, in addition to the aforementioned translations, the author of two novels, The Ladies’ Heat (not what you might think -- its subject is women’s track and field, and Kit and Caboodle (also a surprise -- this work deals with a fictional detective agency established in Okinawa by two Englishmen, Jonas Kit and Malcolm Caboodle, in the years immediately following the conclusion of the second war). At this point, sadly, neither has found a publisher. And yet, as I’m sure you’ll agree, O’Flaherty-San brings a unique artistic perspective to the text here as it unravels backward in time to attempt to define the true essence of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, Wrieto-San, Wrieto-San, banzai! -- the guiding light and enduring genius of all working architects, past, present and future.

Here Boyle is just taunting the reader. Are we too stupid to realize that this is not really a novel about Frank Lloyd Wright, nor even a novel about its purported premise: “Was [Wright] the wounded genius or the philanderer and sociopath who abused the trust of practically everyone he knew, especially the women, especially them?” Given many of the reviews I read online about the novel, I would wager that the answer is yes, as most of those try to approach the work as some kind of biography of Wright or some kind of analysis of his genius.

In Part Three Sato comments in a footnote about Daisy Hartnett, a woman he falls in love with and whom Wright eventually banishes from their community at Taliesin, reading a work by Swedish writer Ellen Key.

This is a feminist text, a gloss on Ibsen and his female characters. Women, Ibsen felt -- certain liberated women, at any rate -- were less regimented by society and more a natural force than men. Of course, while we make no claims here to be feminists or sociologists or anything of the like, I can say that Daisy Hartnett was certainly a natural force, and I too much constrained by expectation -- and by Wrieto-San -- to fully grasp it. Oh Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. Where are your creamy white thighs and your butterfly mouth now?

And then, a few paragraphs later, oddly, impossibly it seems to me, from Daisy’s point of view:

The world was in desperate need of Ellen Key -- not simply these pigheaded farmers and their prudish wives, but the world at large. People -- women, especially -- absolutely must learn to think for themselves instead of blindly following the dictates of a patriarchal society that would deny them not only the right to vote but the right to love in their own instinctual way. She had a fleeting fantasy of herself as a sort of Joan of Arc of erotoplastics, wielding a radiant sword and cutting them all down to size, and then, though she was exhausted and the house was as cold as an igloo, she turned back to the book in her lap and there it was, right before her, in Ellen Key’s native tongue: till alska, to love. To love. There was no higher purpose in life, no greater duty -- why couldn’t they understand that?

Indeed. Why can’t they? Sato. Wright. His worshippers. The patriarchal worshippers of genius. Why can’t any of them understand?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Another one of those Russian novels written about the time the serfs were emancipated and the changes coming to Russian society.

It’s a story, that much I can follow, but whatever larger points it’s trying to make are lost on me because I’m so far removed from that time and place.

Bazarov is the nihilist in the story, the man who believes in nothing that he can not directly observe, and he dies in the end from an infection he gets from dissecting a corpse. 

Arkady is his devotee who strays from this philosophy, gets married, and lives happily ever after.

What do you think that means?

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.