Bret Easton Ellis, "Lunar Park" (2005)

Novel read, comments not posted yet.
Consider this a placeholder.

Stephen King, "11/22/63" (2011)

Novel read, comments yet to be posted.
Consider this a placeholder.

Debra Weyermann, "Answer Them Nothing" (2011)

Subtitle: "Bringing Down the Polygamous Empire of Warren Jeffs."


Comments to come soon.

If you are interested in this book, you might also be interested in reading my comments on:
Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith (2014),
Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Religion (2012).


QUOTATIONS SELECTED BY GREGORY KLAGES:

Prologue: The Raid
"...the worst fallout came from the ocean of depressing photographs epitomized by Life magazine’s September 14, 1953, pictorial essay of the raid and its aftermath. In the article entitled “The Lonely Men of Short Creek,” Life photographers flexed their renowned artistry with photo after photo of Short Creek’s remaining damaged yet stoic men, determined to do their level best to keep life normal for their motherless children."

"With a few notable exceptions, American media continue to fail the public comprehension of what, exactly, FLDS is by modeling its coverage of the sect on a half-century-old Life article."

2: Section 132
"The energy LDS has spent on polygamy seems almost tragic given the fact that the practice was not even part of the movement’s original theology. Even when the charming and dynamic prophet Joseph Smith wedged polygamy into his doctrine years after starting the church, most of his followers were aghast and repulsed."

"Only about 15 percent of Americans were card-carrying members in any denomination at the time…"

"As a young man, Smith, along with his father and other male family members, made a sideline of 'money digging.' A digger utilized magical “peep stones” to inform his client of the location of buried treasures."

"LDS goes apoplectic when Smith’s money-digging career is broached, even blindly denying Smith’s 1826 misdemeanor conviction as 'a disorderly person' after his only unsatisfied customer complained."

"Smith realized he could translate the reformed Egyptian with his money-digging peep stones. To accomplish the translation, Smith sometimes placed the stones in the bottom of a tall hat placed on a table upon which also rested the gold tablets, which were covered by a sheet. Burying his face in the hat, Smith’s peep stones would transform the reformed Egyptian into a form of English that sounded suspiciously like the King James version of the Bible. A 'scribe' physically separated from Smith by a sheet hung from the ceiling would then write down what Smith saw in the stones for what would become The Book of Mormon."

- Yale professor Harold Bloom - his book The American Religion

"Mormon polygamy came to widespread public attention in the 1840s…"

"Smith allowed publication of a polygamy-advocating pamphlet called The Peace Maker in 1842."

"Some historians speculate that Smith may have started 'marrying' outside women as early as 1831, telling a few intensely close associates at the time, but he told his mostly utterly horrified inner circle about God’s mandate for 'plural marriage' around 1841."

"In March 1832, when the Saints were headquartered in Ohio, Smith was dragged from his bed to be tarred, feathered, and beaten senseless by a mob led by the brother of a teenage girl Smith was suspected of seducing. Smith was not permanently injured, but only because the surgeon enlisted to castrate him lost his enthusiasm for the job."

"After Smith’s death, Emma and her sons eventually joined the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which denied the church had ever sanctioned plural marriage."

- "groundbreaking biography of Joseph Smith, the late excommunicated-Mormon historian Fawn Brodie" (No Man Knows My History)

"Having made the historical case for polygamy, Smith was able to fuse it onto his original premise. There couldn’t be monogamy, he argued, because the kingdoms men would rule as Gods after their deaths were to be populated by that man’s children. The more children, the greater the riches of the world. Obviously, one woman could not produce enough children for a respectable kingdom. Anyone demanding monogamy was trying to trick you out of a decent afterlife."

"Joseph Smith had already concluded the Saints would have to set up their own country after Smith’s 1844 bid to become president of the United States failed in a big way."

"Young’s plans for an independent country hit another snag when the United States acquired all of the prophet’s target territories in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican American War."

"In 1856, a catastrophic drought and a series of crop-devastating grasshopper scourges pushed the Saints to the brink of starvation, and Young decided they all needed to recommit to the religion. The Mormon Reformation of 1856–58 was an unbridled festival of fire and brimstone, stoked by fanatical Smith devotees."

"Young also used the Reformation to push polygamy hard. Declaring that 'any man who denied plural marriage was damned'...”

"Young’s demonization of new settlers, combined with his zealous revivalism, culminated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, the execution-style murders of 120 men, women, and children on their way from Arkansas to California, traveling in the richest wagon train to ever pass through economically disadvantaged Salt Lake City…"

"Before the [U.S. Civil] war became a total distraction, the antipolygamy Morrill Act passed in 1862. After the war, the Edmonds Act again outlawing polygamy passed in 1882, followed by the merciless 1887 Edmonds-Tucker Act, a furious wrecking ball aimed directly at Brigham Young’s Mormons. Edmonds-Tucker allowed for the seizure of church property valued at more than $50,000 and disincorporated the LDS Church and its Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company critical for bringing thousands of European converts to Utah on the grounds that both entities promoted illegal polygamy."

"President James Buchanan had already removed Brigham Young as territorial governor in 1857…"

"In a landmark 1878 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religion did not trump U.S. law, period."

"...president James Buchanan dispatched 2,500 troops to bring the Mormons to heel as early as 1857. That effort fizzled, becoming something of a joke."

"Brigham Young might never have acknowledged it, but his death in 1877 left Mormon leaders free to realistically contemplate their chances…"

"May 1890 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. United States, upholding the Edmonds-Tucker provision allowing the government to seize LDS property."

"Just three months later, in August 1890, a besieged Wilford Woodruff delivered the Manifesto ending plural marriage."

"Smith, and certainly Young, had inexorably established polygamy as a requirement—not an option—for admittance to the celestial kingdom, which was the whole point of being Mormon. From the instant the Manifesto left Woodruff’s lips, Mormon polygamists argued the explanation was an insultingly transparent political capitulation to a secular entity with no authority to override God’s laws."

"LDS officials are squeamishly evasive about the multistory, fifteen-barrel silo outside Salt Lake City stuffed with four hundred thousand pounds of grain, the food is there to sustain Mormons during the worldwide chaos that will precede the Second Coming…"

"Despite two manifestos from separate prophets who were also talking to God, LDS has not removed the plural marriage revelation. To the contrary, LDS has not restored Smith’s 1835 revelation condemning polygamy — a revelation LDS deleted from the Doctrines and Covenants in 1876 because it conflicted with the revelation ordering polygamy."

"The visit was singed with controversy when it came to light that LDS had baptized Obama’s late mother into the church with its dubious practice of using proxies to stand in for the dead at the ceremony without alerting the deceased’s living family members. Mormon leaders were obliged to walk back the Obama baptism quietly, but outraged Jewish leaders forced a public retraction of LDS postmortem baptisms of Jews murdered in the Holocaust."

"LDS published a training manual in 1998 that portrayed Brigham Young as a monogamous husband. Polygamy is mentioned nowhere in the manual. Among the work’s significant omissions is Mormon doctrine holding that God is himself a polygamist, as is Jesus Christ, whose wives included Mary Magdalene. When questioned by reporters, LDS officials Ronald L. Knighton and Craig Manscill staunchly defended the omissions, saying the manual was not intended as a historical document, only a broad introduction to the Mormon faith. The officials insisted the failure to mention polygamy was legitimate because the practice had been stopped in 1890."

"American Indians, called Lamanites, also carry the blood of ancient Israel but, like many Gentiles who have not yet been converted, don’t realize it. The Book of Mormon teaches that ancient Hebrews traveled to the New World around 600 B.C. in a submarine-like boat, creating an advanced civilization with a number of nineteenth-century amenities. This population eventually split into the “good” tribe of Nephites and the “bad” tribe of Lamanites, who became embroiled in a centuries-long war. After Christ’s crucifixion, he visited the New World and was able to remind the Lamanites of their roots, but they soon forgot and eventually wiped out the Nephites. God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin for their wickedness, but Mormon prophets taught they would again become a 'white and delightsome' people when their memories were restored after the apocalypse."

"Smith’s career as a money digger is fairly well known, but in his book Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, excommunicated Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn discusses at good length the Smith family’s dabbling in other areas of magic and the occult, including necromancy, in which spirits of the dead are conjured up to reveal the future."

"Only the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod equivocates its position on whether Mormonism is a Christian faith. All other major Christian denominations, including Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and so on, have position statements advising that, among other things, the Mormon belief that there are many gods, that God was a man, that men may become gods, that God and Jesus Christ were polygamists (a detail Smith added after he’d introduced polygamy years later), and that God and Jesus Christ are separate entities, not part of the holy trinity, are inconsistent with Christianity."

"Until 1978, only white males could attain the end goal of deification."

"Explaining that the 1835 revelation was inconsistent with church dogma, LDS leaders removed it from the Doctrines and Covenants in 1876. Despite the fact that it would now appear to be consistent with church dogma, it has not been reinstated..."

3: Bill Walker and the First Case
"...a dogma true for both LDS and FLDS to this day. Only men have the power to elevate their wives into heaven."

"...children are literally considered FLDS priesthood property. Once born, mothers are understood to have no further claim on their babies, and indeed, Warren Jeffs would soon take up the habit of reassigning children willy-nilly to families of his selection, informing the biological mothers that they would never see their kids again."

4: Judge Shumate
"Certain that LDS was now irredeemably apostated, disgusted polygamists began filtering into what is called the Arizona strip some fifty miles east of St. George, founding a community called The Work. It would evolve into FLDS."

5: The New Sheriff
"Mankind are here because they are the offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet…"

"In both LDS and FLDS, worldly events must be recorded in this life in order to be acknowledged in the next. Joseph Smith urged all his converts to keep punctilious personal journals…"

"...another of Mormonism’s founding tenets: the condemnation of African Americans as actively evil, unsaveable souls whose black skin was the mark of Cain, a curse of God. Black men could not be admitted to the Mormon priesthood."

"Mormon universities and colleges were excluded from national competitions, including sporting competitions. LDS resisted the pressures until 1978, when the prohibition of blacks from holding the priesthood was reversed…"

"...fundamentalist Mormon groups practicing polygamy do not accept the 1978 change. Groups like FLDS still actively portray dark-skinned people as evil and call African Americans 'niggers'…"

6: Dan Fischer and the Lost Boys
"...the land of refuge, where the ten thousand or so FLDS people would soon be tasked with killing every human being on earth."

9: Warren Jeffs
"Fundamentalists marry for 'time' or for 'time and eternity.' Marrying for 'time' is strictly temporal and not such a big deal. Marrying for “time and eternity” means the woman belongs to her husband in perpetuity by God’s iron will…"

"On October 7, 2002, just a month after Rulon [Jeff]’s death, Warren secretly married his first batch of seven of Rulon’s widows. After taking them all upstairs for a little dancing and nuptials, the women were promptly sequestered in rooms lacking the compound’s intercoms to prevent their blabbing about the marriages to anyone else. Warren knew that marrying his father’s women was going to be a community shocker…"

"The number of wives held by Warren Jeffs remains a matter of speculation, but the estimates of ninety-one are certainly low. Myriad ex-FLDS bloggers put the number between two and three hundred. In his dictations, Warren indicates he had almost eighty wives by the end of 2002, and he was just getting started."

"When a young girl was mauled by a stray dog, Warren ordered all the dogs in Short Creek, a community of nearly ten thousand dog owners, to be killed. No selling them or giving them away."

"The spectacularly scenic Canadian lands, with an estimated value of $300 million, were part of the FLDS United Effort Plan trust."

"...the FLDS community in Bountiful, British Columbia, Canada, was in full revolt under the leadership of Winston Blackmore. Warren had excommunicated Blackmore after he forgave a young girl fleeing Short Creek with the boy she wanted to marry, allowing the couple to settle in Canada as husband and wife."

"Warren’s breathless Canadian spy, Jim Oler, told an infuriated Warren many of the thousand FLDS members in the Canadian branch didn’t accept his prophet claims."

"in 2003, Warren Jeffs declared himself prophet."

10: Texas at Bat
"March 25, 2004, with the headline “Corporate Retreat or Prophet’s Refuge?” Mankin published the first of hundreds of scrupulously researched stories about FLDS…"

"In mid-April, FLDS resurrected the elusive David Allred to make the rounds in Schleicher County [Texas], insisting to incredulous town leaders that no matter what it looked like, the property was indeed a corporate retreat hunting lodge."

"It still took a week after this little PR disaster for FLDS attorney Rod Parker to confirm that the property recorded as owned by YFZ Land LLC, was not, in fact, a hunting lodge but “clearly connected” to FLDS."

"Educated about the 'lying for the Lord' and 'bleeding the beast' FLDS mantras, Mankin learned that when Allred said two hundred folks would be coming, he meant two hundred men. Because these were Warren Jeffs’s favored men, all would have at least three, and some more than twenty, wives kept continuously pregnant. Depending on the number of men Warren Jeffs eventually intended to favor, the actual number of FLDS members Texas could expect to receive over time might number well into the thousands."

11: Arizona at Bat, Again
"March 2003, New Times declared war on the sect and the current Secretary of Homeland Security with a seventeen-thousand-word opus, the result of a five-month investigation into FLDS in Colorado City headlined: 'Bound by Fear: Polygamy in Arizona. For Decades the State Has Let a Feudal Colony of Fundamentalist Mormons Force Underage Girls into Illegal Polygamous Marriages.'

"The tiny Colorado City Fire Department received the third largest Homeland Security grant in the state to stave off terrorists—$350,000. Before the Salt Lake Tribune began defending FLDS, it printed an exposé titled “Polygamy on the Dole,” revealing that Colorado City raked in $1.8 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave streets (Hildale got $94,000) and $2.8 million to build an airport used only by the Jeffs, ostensibly to promote tourism in a community that believes outsiders are trying to kill them…"

"More than 80 percent of FLDS members were on some kind of welfare."

"Short Creek raked in approximately $33 million tax dollars a year for around seven thousand residents, including an estimated $15 million to run the combined Short Creek city governments."

"Republican Arizona state representative Sylvia Allen, arguing in favor of “getting the money” by allowing radioactive uranium mining in the state in 2009, enlightened her apprehensive colleagues with the observation that 'the earth has been here for six thousand years, long before anyone had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.'"

"In 1877, Young dispatched Daniel Webster Jones from St. George to Arizona’s center, founding the town of Mesa, which today boasts more LDS members than Salt Lake City, some 470,000 Saints, all of them reliable voters."

"Napolitano admitted that, in varying degrees, FLDS met or exceeded all standardized law enforcement criteria to categorize it as a potentially violent cult along the lines of the Branch Davidians at Waco or the militia types at Ruby Ridge."

"Napolitano said she didn’t send investigators into Short Creek to look into child abuse and underage sex charges because she feared for their safety. She added that she didn’t send uniformed police because she feared for their safety, too, and she also feared their presence might ignite unsightly, casualty-producing gun battles."

"Mormonism addresses this kind of dating and matters like the fossil record by saying that God mashed and rolled the earth together from pieces of other, much older planets, meaning the fossil record is the remains of extraterrestrials."

14: The End Begins
Brigham Young, Deseret News, 6 Aug. 1862: "this MONOGAMIC ORDER OF MARRIAGE so esteemed by modern Christians as a HOLY SACRAMENT and DIVINE INSTITUTION is nothing but a system established by a SET OF ROBBERS."

15: Fun on the Run
Warren Jeffs, 29 July, 2005: "The Lord directed that I go to the sun tanning salon and get sun tanned more evenly on their sun tanning beds that have lights, so Naomie and I went and did that in the afternoon."

"Jeffs explained that the Lord had “commanded” the couple “to go mingle with the rich where there was a live band.” The Lord also commanded that the evening be topped off with “some dancing bars, lounges, and the saloons.”

16: Cops and Taxes
"...1992, when the Arizona Law Enforcement Officer Advisory Council (ALEOAC) moved to decertify Colorado City deputy marshal Sam Barlow, who’d already been denied peace officer status in Utah because the FLDS member had three wives. Incredibly, Barlow had been an Arizona cop for twenty years before ALEOAC noticed the little illegal polygamy problem…"

"Barlow pursued his religious persecution case for five years before Arizona, in an astonishing display of gutlessness, dismissed its complaint against him…"

17: Satan’s Accountant
"...the Bountiful Elementary-Secondary School Society (BESS) received $650,000 a year from the Canadian government…"
NOTE: Given that education is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada, perhaps Weyermann means the British Columbia government.

18: Nailed
Record of President Warren Jeffs, 22 Apr. 2005: "This afternoon, I wrote Paula Jeffs, my wife, a note of correction, teaching her that she needs to be more fervent in seeking the Lord’s will, and not just judging what she thinks will beautify the Lord’s house, as the Lord has rejected the materials for the upstairs sheers and drapes. I told her the Lord will accept the drapes out of the present materials temporarily, but after the dedication of the temple, we will replace the drapes made out of materials that do not have a grain in it or a pattern in the material…"

21: The Courts
"...the FLDS lawsuits had a few audacious themes in common…"

"...it embraced a number of troubling themes that would be standard in all the FLDS suits to follow…"

"As FLDS leaders spit and clawed to regain their kingdom, nobody had seen nothin’ yet."

26: The Lives of Others
In 1859, U.S. Army troops erected a monument to the the more than 120 Arkansas men, women, and children killed in the September 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, a battle between incoming settlers and Utah Mormons. About 1860, Brigham Young's associates dismantled the monument. "...the U.S. Calvary rebuilt the destroyed monument and kept stubbornly rebuilding it over the next seventy years of continued vandalism. In 1932, a monument was left standing."

Stephen Williams, "Karla: A Pact with the Devil" (2003)

It's hard to offer any new insights on the sordid and tragic tale of sexual assaults and murders conducted by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In 2003, when this book was written, Williams was able to provide some new insights into the case, as well as Karla's state of mind in prison. Although he is evasive in the book, Williams apparently opened a mail conversation with her, while also seeking out interviews with a multitude of other people involved in the case.

The book plots out the legal prosecution of Karla Homolka, and explains the development of the plea bargain that would result in her serving much shorter jail time than she might otherwise face in exchange for testifying against her husband. Williams seems to want to tell the valid, but hard to integrate story of bureaucratic bungling in prosecuting Homolka (and Bernardo), along with a sympathetic telling of Homolka's suffering at the hands of a penal and justice system that approached her in a harsher fashion than other inmates guilty of similar crimes. In short, Williams seems to want to tell us that Karla is a criminal that deserved a worse sentence, but having reached a plea bargain, deserved to relish the terms she had been given by the state.

Williams lives in the region from which I grew up, and I wanted to enjoy this book, despite the story it tells. The tale he tells has all the hallmarks of a great work: internationally noteworthy crime, nationally much-discussed and controversial plea bargain, and suggestions of investigative and prosecutorial shortcomings. I found myself distracted by Williams rather awkward story-telling, and the poor editing of the book. Williams seems to fancy himself a cross between Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thomson. He blends comments on his own adventures, the food he's dining on and the company he keeps, with specious psychological analysis of the people he writes about. He makes an unfortunately showy love of vocabulary that I suspect serves to distance most readers, rather than impress them. I can only explain his strategy as a product of fearing his topic pandered to the stereotypical 'true crime' reader, and so sought to elevate his authorial persona with language he felt might better reflect his elevated intelligence. I found it more pompous and off-putting than appealing.


Quotations, and Gregory Klages' notes:

Chapter 7 - Cancer
"...post-traumatic stress disorder and its symptoms were fully extrapolated in a book by Arthur Kardiner, first published in 1941, called The Neuroses of War."

Chapter 9 - The Wedding Planner
"…[Karla] had seen a television program about how Italian men frequently live with their mothers until they are in their fifties. That might have explained it — Paul Bernardo was of Italian descent — but in the television program all the men really loved their mothers and Paul hated his and he wasn’t just saying it either and Karla could understand why."
NOTE: This sort of run-on sentence helps to establish a certain 'voice' for Karla. If it reflects her actual voice in the letters, wouldn't it have been more useful to actually use her words? I suppose this is part of the challenge of writing a textual conversation: if the author doesn't intervene, they become irrelevant. With too much intervention, the text becomes more about them than it does about the topic.

Chapter 22 - Deciphering Code
"Not to mention the anti-psychiatry, such as the idea that Karla was a malingering, histrionic hybristophiliac, developed for Bernardo’s defense team by Dr. Graham Clancy."
NOTE: If the average reader needs to check a dictionary more than once in a sentence, particularly when reading a pulp 'true crime' story, it should be a sign for concern.

Chapter 23 - The Man with Whom the Buck Stops
"And as Murray Segal said in this February 1995 letter to George Walker, they would continue to do exactly."
NOTE: End of sentence?… where are you?

Chapter 26 - A Propensity to Lie
"He was arraigned the next day, and held without bail for months even though Inspector Bevan’s charges on the murder charges had been thrown out."
NOTE: Editor? Did you disappear with the end of the sentence above?

Chapter 27 - The Fine Art of Adjudication
"What is now abundantly clear is that Michael Code’s ultimate decision not to charge Karla with respect to the repeated heinous attacks on Jane Doe, and the subsequent grant of blanket immunity, whereby, theoretically, he reinforced her “credibility” as an “accomplice witness,” has done nothing to maintain the public confidence in the administration of Justice — quite the opposite — but that consideration was clearly not the most important on Michael Code’s list. Although there are many facts and arguments to the contrary, which I tried to press on him time and again, he stubbornly asseverated that any prosecution of Karla Homolka would have put the successful prosecution of Paul Bernardo for first-degree murder at great risk. To him, Karla was by far the lesser of two evils, and was not then and is not now a danger to society."
NOTE: The quotation above is a fine example of all of the primary problems with this book.

"We did, however, agree on two other things. Karla should have been released on her statutory date, and that the prison officials far exceeded their mandate and their role when they detained her."

Chapter 30 - Macabre Cynicism
"On the surface, it seems lucid and logical but its observations and remarks are repetitive and pleonastic, as though they were uncomfortable with their subject matter, their decision and the basis on which it was made."

Chapter 31 - Back to the Future
"...doing time does something to one’s sense of time. You pass through it as though it is a vast mucilaginous bubble, emerging three months later none the wiser, feeling as though only three or four days have gone by."
NOTE: Hmmmm… is this Williams speculating, speaking from experience, or sharing Homolka's confidences? We'll never know.

"Understandably, this pecuniary redemption would ameliorate behavior and provide relief from stress and deliver some good old-fashioned middle-class stability."

Roy Porter, "Madness: A Brief History" (2002)

This short but pithy and informative book is an excellent read.

This similarly short and to-the-point review from Medical History will suffice to whet your appetite.

Comments and references that caught my attention:
- 32/33: “John Locke wrote to insist upon The Reasonableness of Christianity (1694): even religion now had to be rational. This pathologization of religious madness led Enlightenment free-thinkers to pathologize religiosity at large. In effect, this was also, much later, Freud’s position. God was an illusion, faith ‘wish-fulfilment’, and belief, though all too real, was a mental projection satisfying neurotic needs, to be explained in terms of the sublimation of suppressed sexuality or of the death wish. In reducing religion to psychopathology, Freud was echoing the more biting of the philosophes, like Voltaire and Diderot, who adjudged Christian beliefs the morbid secretion of sick brains. These days, while the Churches continue to accept, in principle, the reality of visions, spirit possession, and exorcism, they are profoundly suspicious of credulity and deception. The Roman Catholic or Anglican who claims to be assailed by the Devil has become an embarrassment. His priest may try to persuade him that such doctrines are merely metaphorical; and, if he persists, he may be urged to see a psychotherapist.”

- 89: “Foucault claimed that the great confinement essentially involved the sequestration of the mad poor by supporters of the bourgeois work ethic, and in his Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry (1981) Klaus Doerner followed suit. But there is little trace of organized labour in early asylums—indeed, critics accused them of being dens of idleness. And enterprising madhouse proprietors naturally sought rich and genteel patients, who would not be expected to work.”

- 93/94: “The decades around 1800 brought surging faith in the efficacy of personal treatment in sheltered asylum environments. In England, such doctors as Thomas Arnold, Joseph Mason Cox, and Francis Willis (called in to treat George III in 1788) followed Battie’s watchword that ‘management did more than medicine’ and pioneered a ‘moral management’ through which the experienced therapist would outwit the deluded psyche of his patient.”

- 94: “Shortly afterwards, the York Retreat developed ‘moral therapy’, with its emphasis upon community life in a domestic environment designed to recondition behaviour. The York Asylum, a charitable institution, had become bemired in scandal. By way of a counterinitiative, the local Quaker community, led by a tea merchant, William Tuke, established an alternative, the Retreat, opened in 1796. It was modelled on the ideal of bourgeois family life, and restraint was minimized. Patients and staff lived, worked, and dined together in an environment where recovery was encouraged through praise and blame, rewards and punishment, the goal being the restoration of self-control.”

- 98/99: “Criticism thus led not to the abolition of the madhouse, but to its rebirth, and institutionalization was transformed from a hand-to-mouth expedient into a positive ideal. In France the reforms of Pinel and the new legal requirements of the Napoleonic Code were further codified in the key statute of 1838. This formally required each departement either to establish public asylums, or to ensure the provision of adequate facilities. It guarded against improper confinement by establishing rules for the certification of lunatics by medical officers—though for paupers a prefect’s signature remained sufficient. Prefects were also given powers to inspect. Similar legislation was passed in Belgium twelve years later.
A comparable reform programme was put through in England, despite opposition from vested medical interests. Scandals revealing the improper confinement of the sane had already led to the Madhouses Act of 1774. Under its provisions, private madhouses had to be licensed annually by magistrates; a maximum size for each asylum was established; renewal of licences would depend upon satisfactory maintenance of admissions registers. Magistrates were empowered to carry out visitations (in London the inspecting body was a committee of the Royal College of Physicians). Most importantly, certification was instituted. Henceforth, although paupers could continue to be confined by magistrates, for all others a letter from a medical practitioner would be required to make confinement lawful. Further reforms followed. The 1774 legislation was strengthened in a series of Acts passed from 1828, above all establishing the Commissioners in Lunacy, first for the metropolis and then for the whole country. The Commissioners constituted a permanent body of inspectors (made up of doctors and lawyers) empowered to prosecute unlawful practices and to deny renewal of licences. They also took it upon themselves to improve and standardize care and treatment. The Commission ensured eradication of the worst abuses, for example, by requiring that all cases of the use of restraint should be documented. Safeguards against improper confinement were extended. Under an influential consolidating Act of 1890, two medical certificates were required for the detention of all patients.”

- 100: “Similar developments occurred in the United States, where the asylum arrived in the nineteenth century. The success of the York Retreat was the impulse behind the Frankford Asylum in Pennsylvania (1817), the Friends’ Asylum near Philadelphia (1817), the McClean Hospital in Boston (1818), the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York (1821), and the Hartford Retreat in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1824. Most early American asylums combined private (paying) and public (charity) patients. As in France, the early asylum era in America was spearheaded by physicians specializing in mental disorders, notably Samuel B. Woodward at the Worcester State Hospital and Pliny Earle of the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York, both of whom integrated medical and moral therapies in a climate of Pinelian therapeutic optimism. They were among the thirteen originators of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, established in 1844—it later became the American Psychiatric Association.”

- 101/102: “Throughout Europe, it was the nineteenth century which brought a skyrocketing in the number and scale of mental hospitals. In England, patient numbers climbed from perhaps 10,000 in 1800 to ten times that number in 1900. The jump in numbers was especially marked in new nation states. In Italy, no more than 8,000 had been confined as late as 1881; by 1907 that had soared to 40,000. Such increases are not hard to explain. Positivistic, bureaucratic, utilitarian, and professional mentalities vested great faith in institutional solutions in general— indeed quite literally in bricks and mortar. Schools, workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums—would these not contain and solve the social problems spawned by demographic change, urbanization, and industrialization?”

- 103/104: “In England ‘non-restraint’ was introduced in the 1830s, by Robert Gardiner Hill at the Lincoln Asylum and independently John Conolly at the new Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell on London’s western outskirts. Taking moral therapy to its logical conclusion, Hill and Conolly renounced all forms of mechanical coercion whatsoever: not just irons and manacles but fabric cuffs and straitjackets too. These would be replaced by surveillance under ample trained attendants and a regime of labour, which would stimulate the mind and discipline the body.”

- 105: “…absolute non-restraint was seen by Continental reformers as a quixotically English idée fixe, a foible of doctrinaire liberalism, and it was little imitated. But French and German reformers made resourceful use of the asylum environment in their own ways. Work therapy was widely favoured. Planted in the countryside, the asylum typically became a self-sufficient colony, with its own farms, laundries, and workshops, partly for reasons of economy, partly to implement cures through labour. In France balneological treatments became a key feature of ‘asylum science’ (police intérieure). In Germany, C. F. W. Roller spelt out detailed directives for such matters as non-slip, smell-proof flooring, good drains, apparel, diet, and exercise at the influential Illenau asylum in Baden, where music and movement therapies were also pioneered. Everywhere, the care and cure of the mad became the subjects of the new ‘science’ of asylum management, spread by professional organs such as the significantly named Asylum Journal.”

- 139: “To some extent, psychiatrists were victims of their own propaganda. They had insisted that many of the aberrant and antisocial behaviours traditionally labelled vice, sin, and crime were actually mental disorders in need of the doctor and the asylum. As a result, magistrates deflected difficult cases from the workhouse or jail, but superintendents then discovered to their dismay and cost that rehabilitation posed more problems than anticipated. Furthermore, the senile and the demented, along with epileptics, paralytics, sufferers from tertiary syphilis (GPI), and other degenerative neurological disorders were increasingly shepherded through the asylum gates. For all such conditions, the prognosis was gloomy, and the asylum became a dustbin for hopeless cases.”

- 156: “Pinel’s favourite follower was Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840), whose Mental Maladies (1838) was the outstanding psychiatric text of his age. While asserting the ultimately organic nature of psychiatric disorders, Esquirol concentrated, like his mentor, on their psycho-social triggers. The diagnosis of ‘monomania’ was developed to describe a partial insanity identified with affective disorders, especially those involving paranoia, and he further delineated such conditions as kleptomania, nymphomania, and pyro-mania, detectable in advance only to the trained eye. A champion of the asylum as a therapeutic instrument, he became an authority on its design, and planned the National Asylum at Charenton, a suburb of Paris, of which he was appointed director. (It briefly housed the ageing Marquis de Sade.)”

- 156/7: “…the condition known as general paresis of the insane (one manifestation of tertiary syphilis) was elucidated in 1822 by Antoine Laurent Bayle. Although the micro-organism which causes syphilis had not yet been discovered—the bacteriological era lay ahead— the neurological and psychological features of GPI (notably euphoria and expansiveness), combined with the organic changes revealed by autopsy, supported Esquirol’s conviction that psychiatric disorders could be revealed using the techniques championed by such great French pathological anatomists as Laennec who had investigated tuberculosis and other internal conditions. Closely related to GPI, tabes dorsalis was another disorder, prevalent in the nineteenth century, which became the focus of neuro-pathological research. It was the subject of a masterly clinical study published in 1858 by Guillaume Duchenne, which established its syphilitic origin: so definitive was his account that it was soon named ‘Duchenne’s disease’. He was also at the forefront in describing many other neurological disorders involving personality degeneration, including progressive muscular atrophy and locomotor ataxia (lack of coordination in movement).”

- 177: “in the new world, where George M. Beard (1839-83) popularized the concept of ‘neurasthenia’, nervous breakdown produced by the frantic pressures of advanced civilization, which drained the individual’s reserves of ‘nerve force’. ‘American nervousness is the product of American civilization’ , he pronounced with mingled pride and regret. Neurasthenia’s prevalence in the modern era was no mystery, held Beard: the telegraph, railroad, press, and the market-driven rat race of Wall Street had rendered life insupportably hectic, intense, and stressful. Civilization made demands on nervous systems that nature had never anticipated. As with the eighteenth-century ‘English malady’, neurasthenia struck the elite and flagged up civilization and its discontents. Beard’s ideas were given a practical twist by Silas Weir Mitchell, who introduced the ‘Weir Mitchell treatment’—bed rest, strict isolation, fattening up with milk puddings, and passive massage—to counter such fatiguing tendencies amongst the neurasthenic.”

- 181: “The insanity plea became controversial in Britain when the trial in 1843 of Daniel M’Naghten for the murder of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s private secretary was stopped on the grounds of insanity. The resulting furore led to new guidelines being drawn up, by the House of Lords, to clarify the legal basis for criminal insanity. The M’Naghten Rules (1844) grounded the insanity defence in the defendant’s inability to distinguish right from wrong. This pre-empted the claim advanced by post-Esquirolian psychiatrists that the grounds should be ‘irresistible impulse’, that is, disorders of emotion and volition, independently of delusions of the understanding. In France by contrast, ‘irresistible impulse’ and partial and temporary insanity figured large in the plea of insanity and crime passionelle. Disputes over the insanity defence (who was bad? who was mad?) highlighted conflicts between legal and psychiatric models of the person, and left the public standing of psychiatry dubious.”

- 182: “Mental illness, Hunter and Macalpine believed, was not psychogenic. Hence the utterances of the insane were but cries of distress—and not necessarily even good clues to its nature. You don’t crack mental illness by decoding what the mad say: for, they held, mental disease had a biological base. Powerful psychiatric currents have furthered such tendencies to silence the insane, especially in institutional environments.”

- 183: “…did not the methods of the natural sciences prescribe observation and objectivity, not interaction and interpretation? The noisiest patients were shunted off into the back wards, and all too often those who were shut up were, indeed, ‘shut up’—or at least nobody attended to what they were uttering, there being less communication than excommunication.”

- 215: “The course of psychiatric illness, he insisted, offered the best clue to its nature, rather than, as in common practice, the raft of symptoms the patient showed at a particular moment. On this basis, Kraepelin wrought a great innovation in disease concepts and classification. Amalgamating Morel’s demence precoce with the notion of hebephrenia (psychosis in the young, marked by regressive behaviour) developed by Karl Kahlbaum and his pupil Ewald Hecker, he launched the model of a degenerative condition which he named dementia praecox, to be decisively distinguished from manic-depressive psychoses (Falret’s ‘circular insanity’). The archetypal dementia praecox sufferer as pictured by Kraepelin on the basis of meticulous clinical experience might be astute and clever, but he seemed to have forsaken his humanity, abandoned all desire to participate in society, and withdrawn into a solipsistic world of his own, perhaps mute, violent, and paranoid. Kraepelin routinely used phrases like ‘atrophy of the emotions’ and ‘vitiation of the will’ to convey the sense that they were moral perverts, psychopaths, almost a species apart. As the precursor to schizophrenia, Kraepelin’s dementia praecox has left an indelible mark on modern psychiatry.”

- 242: “Invasive treatments equally reflect the powerlessness of patients in the face of arrogant and reckless doctors, and the ease with which they became experimental fodder. In a now notorious experiment, hundreds of black mental patients at the Tuskeegee Asylum in Alabama were guinea pigs without their knowledge or consent in an experiment to test longterm responses to syphilis, a minor echo of the atrocities committed by Nazi psychiatrists.”

- 272: “The growing centrality of women to psychiatry over the last couple of centuries is superbly handled in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986)…”

- 272: “Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1979)—this has appeared in revised form as The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700—1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993)”

- 276: “Leonard D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (London: Cassell, 1999)”

- 279: “Extracts from nineteenth-century English psychiatric texts may be found in Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).”

- 279: “Autobiographical writings of ‘mad’ people have been anthologized and surveyed in Dale Peterson (ed.), A Mad People’s History of Madness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); Michael Glenn (ed.), Voices from the Asylum (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Allan Ingram, Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 16831796 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) and Roy Porter (ed.), The Faber Book of Madness (London: Faber, 1991; paperback 1993). Some attempt at reproducing their ‘view’ is offered in Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).”

Martin Luther, "Concerning Christian Liberty" (1520)

Page numbers are from my digital edition, and should not be regarded as authoritative:

Letter to Pope Leo X
- 2: "Your see, …which is called the Court of Rome, and which neither you nor any man can deny to be more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom, and quite, as I believe, of a lost, desperate, and hopeless impiety, this I have verily abominated, and have felt indignant that the people of Christ should be cheated under your name and the pretext of the Church of Rome."

- 7: "I cannot bear with laws for the interpretation of the word of God, since the word of God, which teaches liberty in all other things, ought not to be bound."

- 7: "They are in error who raise you above councils and the universal Church; they are in error who attribute to you alone the right of interpreting Scripture."

- 7-8: "How much more rightly did the Apostles speak, who call themselves servants of a present Christ, not the vicars of an absent one!"

Concerning Christian Liberty
- 10: "…the things I have spoken of can be done by any impious person, and only hypocrites are produced by devotion to these things. On the other hand, it will not at all injure the soul that the body should be clothed in profane raiment, should dwell in profane places, should eat and drink in the ordinary fashion, should not pray aloud, and should leave undone all the things above mentioned, which may be done by hypocrites…"

- 10: "One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification, and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ."

- 11: "For the word of God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone. Hence it is clear that as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. For if it could be justified by any other means, it would have no need of the word, nor consequently of faith."

- 11-12: "…it is solely by impiety and incredulity of heart that he becomes guilty and a slave of sin, deserving condemnation, not by any outward sin or work. Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and strengthen his faith alone more and more, and by it grow in the knowledge, not of works, but of Christ Jesus…"

- 12: "…the whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: precepts and promises. The precepts certainly teach us what is good, but what they teach is not forthwith done. For they show us what we ought to do, but do not give us the power to do it. They were ordained, however, for the purpose of showing man to himself, that through them he may learn his own impotence for good and may despair of his own strength. For this reason they are called the Old Testament."

- 13: "…what is impossible for you by all the works of the law, which are many and yet useless, you shall fulfil in an easy and summary way through faith, because God the Father has made everything to depend on faith, so that whosoever has it has all things, and he who has it not has nothing."

- 14: "The highest worship of God is to ascribe to Him truth, righteousness, and whatever qualities we must ascribe to one in whom we believe. In doing this the soul shows itself prepared to do His whole will; in doing this it hallows His name, and gives itself up to be dealt with as it may please God."

- 14: "…what greater rebellion, impiety, or insult to God can there be, than not to believe His promises? What else is this, than either to make God a liar, or to doubt His truth—that is, to attribute truth to ourselves, but to God falsehood and levity?"

- 14: "For faith does truth and righteousness in rendering to God what is His… It is true and righteous that God is true and righteous; and to confess this and ascribe these attributes to Him, this it is to be true and righteous."

- 16: "It is not by working, but by believing, that we glorify God, and confess Him to be true."

- 18: "…there is nothing of which I have need—for faith alone suffices for my salvation—unless that in it faith may exercise the power and empire of its liberty."

- 19: "For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet we cannot, nor, if we could, ought we all to, minister and teach publicly."

- 20: "There are now not a few persons who preach and read about Christ with the object of moving the human affections to sympathise with Christ, to indignation against the Jews, and other childish and womanish absurdities of that kind."

- 20: "Who can injure such a heart, or make it afraid? If the consciousness of sin or the horror of death rush in upon it, it is prepared to hope in the Lord, and is fearless of such evils, and undisturbed, until it shall look down upon its enemies. For it believes that the righteousness of Christ is its own."

- 21: "If faith does everything, and by itself suffices for justification, why then are good works commanded? Are we then to take our ease and do no works, content with faith?" Not so, impious men, I reply; not so. That would indeed really be the case, if we were thoroughly and completely inner and spiritual persons; but that will not happen until the last day, when the dead shall be raised. As long as we live in the flesh, we are but beginning and making advances in that which shall be completed in a future life."

- 21: "…he remains in this mortal life upon earth, in which it is necessary that he should rule his own body and have intercourse with men. Here then works begin; here he must not take his ease; here he must give heed to exercise his body by fastings, watchings, labour, and other regular discipline, so that it may be subdued to the spirit, and obey and conform itself to the inner man and faith, and not rebel against them nor hinder them, as is its nature to do if it is not kept under."

- 21: "…he comes into collision with that contrary will in his own flesh, which is striving to serve the world and to seek its own gratification."

- 22: "…from the requirements of his own body, a man cannot take his ease, but is compelled on its account to do many good works, that he may bring it into subjection. Yet these works are not the means of his justification before God; he does them out of disinterested love to the service of God; looking to no other end than to do what is well-pleasing to Him whom he desires to obey most dutifully in all things."

- 23: "Adam had been created by God just and righteous, so that he could not have needed to be justified and made righteous by keeping the garden and working in it; but, that he might not be unemployed, God gave him the business of keeping and cultivating paradise. These would have indeed been works of perfect freedom, being done for no object but that of pleasing God, and not in order to obtain justification, which he already had to the full, and which would have been innate in us all."

- 23: "Thus a Christian, being consecrated by his faith, does good works; but he is not by these works made a more sacred person, or more a Christian."

- 25: "For if works are brought forward as grounds of justification, and are done under the false persuasion that we can pretend to be justified by them, they lay on us the yoke of necessity, and extinguish liberty along with faith, and by this very addition to their use they become no longer good, but really worthy of condemnation. For such works are not free…"

- 25: "We do not then reject good works; nay, we embrace them and teach them in the highest degree. It is not on their own account that we condemn them, but on account of this impious addition to them and the perverse notion of seeking justification by them."

- 25: "The voice of the law should be brought forward, that men may be terrified and brought to a knowledge of their sins, and thence be converted to penitence and to a better manner of life. But we must not stop here; that would be to wound only and not to bind up, to strike and not to heal…"

- 25: "…the word of grace and of the promised remission of sin must also be preached, in order to teach and set up faith, since without that word contrition, penitence, and all other duties, are performed and taught in vain."

- 26: "…it is impossible that he should take his ease in this life, and not work for the good of his neighbours, since he must needs speak, act, and converse among men…"

- 26: "...but in all his works he ought to entertain this view and look only to this object—that he may serve and be useful to others in all that he does; having nothing before his eyes but the necessities and the advantage of his neighbour."

- 26: "It is the part of a Christian to take care of his own body for the very purpose that, by its soundness and well-being, he may be enabled to labour, and to acquire and preserve property, for the aid of those who are in want, that thus the stronger member may serve the weaker member, and we may be children of God."

- 27: "…the Apostle lays down this rule for a Christian life: that all our works should be directed to the advantage of others, since every Christian has such abundance through his faith that all his other works and his whole life remain over and above wherewith to serve and benefit his neighbour of spontaneous goodwill."

- 28: "Lo! my God, without merit on my part, of His pure and free mercy, has given to me, an unworthy, condemned, and contemptible creature all the riches of justification and salvation in Christ, so that I no longer am in want of anything, except of faith to believe that this is so. For such a Father, then, who has overwhelmed me with these inestimable riches of His, why should I not freely, cheerfully, and with my whole heart, and from voluntary zeal, do all that I know will be pleasing to Him and acceptable in His sight? I will therefore give myself as a sort of Christ, to my neighbour, as Christ has given Himself to me; and will do nothing in this life except what I see will be needful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neighbour, since by faith I abound in all good things in Christ."

- 29: "…we are quite ignorant about our own name, why we are and are called Christians. We are certainly called so from Christ, who is not absent, but dwells among us—provided, that is, that we believe in Him and are reciprocally and mutually one the Christ of the other, doing to our neighbour as Christ does to us."

- 31: "We give this rule: the good things which we have from God ought to flow from one to another and become common to all…"

- 34: "…we ought boldly to resist those teachers of tradition, and though the laws of the pontiffs, by which they make aggressions on the people of God, deserve sharp reproof, yet we must spare the timid crowd, who are held captive by the laws of those impious tyrants, till they are set free. Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep."

- 34: "If you wish to use your liberty, do it secretly, as Paul says, "Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God" (Rom. xiv. 22). … On the other hand, in the presence of tyrants and obstinate opposers, use your liberty in their despite, and with the utmost pertinacity, that they too may understand that they are tyrants, and their laws useless for justification, nay that they had no right to establish such laws."

Steve Miller, "Detroit Rock City" (2013)

Subtitle: "The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City".

The most interesting aspect of this book is its format. Miller has compiled a sequence of direct quotations from well-known rockers, support players, club owners, commentators, and hangers-on of the Detroit rock, punk, and garage rock scene, from the 1960s to the 2000s.

If you're a fan of the Stooges, MC5, Ted Nugent, etc., Detroit Rock City will give you some intriguing insights into how these groups evolved, how they were perceived by their peers, and how they influenced following generations of Detroit players. By the time Miller gets to testimony of figures from the early 1980s, however, the names, relationships, and value begins to overlap and mush together. This confusion may just as much reflect my own musical interests as it does the content. Perhaps if you're a fan of the Gories, the sections on the '80s and '90s will turn your crank. I suspect that the reader that will read this full book with rapt attention is rare indeed, and very likely would have to have lived in Detroit, played with the bands involved, or at least have similar experiences of playing crappy clubs, living in dives, and scarfing down shameless volumes of drugs and alcohol.

David Kirby wrote a very fair review in the Wall Street Journal (because that's where you should go to get your reviews of books about rock'n'roll, right?).

If you're interested in Detroit, you might also visit my notes on Charlie Duff's 2013 Detroit: An American Autopsy.

R. J. Smith, "The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" (2012)

In progress.

Smith's prose sparkles with enthusiasm for Brown's music, her performative abilities, and his capacity to read an audience. Suggesting that Brown based his opinions on his respect for the person making the over the merits of the argument itself, Smith offers what is perhaps too simple an explanation to reconcile Brown's apparently contradictory, often unpredictable positions on socio-political issues.

The book does give insights into some of Brown's noteworthy excesses, particularly his violence and misogyny. His mother left his life very early, and only returned to it when Brown was successful. Even once she was back in his life (in however minor a presence), he would claim that she had in fact died when he was a boy. His father was distant, and Brown came of age in a violent, unpredictable environment that rewarded bluster backed up by fists, knives, and guns. He served time in jail as a young man, an experience that couldn't help but harden him.

You can read Janet Maslin's positive review of the book in the NY Times.

Thom Hartmann, "Crash of 2016" (2013)

Subtitle: "The Plot to Destroy America and What We Can Do About It".

What most surprised me about this book, and I'm not sure why, is that Hartmann seems to be left-leaning. Concern with financial crashes and plotting out one's financial survival generally seems to be associated with libertarian, conservative ideology.

Essentially, Hartmann tracks out a series of political decisions over the last several decades that indicate a potentially fatal loosening of controls over corporations that have allowed wealth to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands, and gutted the kinds of social policies that kept economic/class disparity under control within the United States. He suggests that this problem comes about cyclically, about every 80 years or so, based on the passing of the people who experienced the horrible outcomes of similar decisions within their own lifetime.

Frugal Musings has a very good, if lengthy, discussion of the book.

Gregory Klages -
Quotations from, and notes on: Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America and What We Can Do About It

CHAPTER 3: The Crisis Capitalists
"In 1947, two years after the war ended, Friedrich Hayek gathered a large group of economists, historians, journalists, and businessmen to a meeting in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland.

"...what Hayek was unable to do, mainly because he was operating with the catastrophic consequences of his free-market philosophy still fresh in everyone’s mind, Friedman would do—and that’s lead a global counterrevolution against controlled capitalism

"These so-called free-market reforms promoted by the members of the Mont Pelerin Society and later the Chicago Boys do not constitute a legitimate economic theory, as they’ve never worked anywhere they’ve been tried, anywhere in the world. They constitute a religion.

"...two years into Pinochet and the Chicago Boys’ rule, inflation had reached 341 percent—higher than anywhere else in the world. The price of goods increased by 375 percent. GDP decreased by 15 percent. Agriculture production sputtered to a grinding halt. Export values dropped 28 percent and Chile acquired a $280 million trade deficit. And to top everything off, Chile’s unemployment rate skyrocketed from 3 percent—among the lowest in that hemisphere—before Friedman stepped foot in the country to more than 10 percent and, in some parts of the country, as high as 22 percent

CHAPTER 4: A Middle-Class Primer
"The United States has had two great periods of what we today call a middle class. The first was from the 1700s to the mid-1800s, and was fueled by virtually free land for settlers (stolen from the Indians) and free labor (slavery in the South and indentured immigrants in the North). The result was (as de Tocqueville pointed out) the most well-educated, politically active, middle-class “nonaristocrats” in the world.

"...the period between 1947 and 1979 saw unparalleled equitable growth. During these thirty-plus years, the poorest fifth of Americans saw a 116 percent increase in their incomes. The middle fifth, a 111 percent increase. And the top 5 percent saw an 85 percent increase. All income classes shared in the prosperity of the times when the top marginal income tax rate was above 70 percent.

"...progressive taxation, which gave workers more to spend and gave the rich an incentive to pay their workers better to maintain a stable workplace (since if they took the money themselves, it would just mostly go to taxes), thus stimulating demand for more goods and services.

"Whenever top marginal tax rates were relatively high—above 60 percent usually—the economy was at its most stable.

"...in 1944, FDR...proposed a Second Bill of Rights.

These rights included:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education

"An early instruction manual for the game of Monopoly in 1925 reads, “At the start of the game every player is provided with the same amount of capital and presumably has exactly the same chance of success as every other player. The game ends with one person in possession of all the money. What accounts for the failure of the rest, and what one factor can be singled out to explain the obviously ill-adjusted distributions of the community’s wealth which this situation represents?”

"...not only is the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth in the hands of an elite aristocracy not good for working people, it’s also not good for economies as a whole, which is exactly what the game Monopoly teaches us.

CHAPTER 5: Reagan Kidnapped the Jetsons
"In a 1966 article, TIME magazine looked ahead toward the future and what the rise of automation would mean for average working Americans. It concluded, “By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000–$40,000. How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem.” And that was $30,000–$40,000 in 1966 dollars, which would be roughly $199,000 to $260,000 in 2010 dollars.

CHAPTER 6: “Madness”
"That’s exactly what speculators were doing—buying up huge amounts of wheat contracts and holding on to them until they could be sold at a higher price. This had catastrophic effects on the global food supply.

"The force of Globalism,” [John Ralston] Saul writes, “through trade agreements, deregulation and privatization, would seriously weaken the ability of nation-states to act with any political independence.”

“Richer than a majority of nation-states on the planet, free of the geographical and social obligations of these old states, beyond the embarrassing demands of nationalism, freed in fact from the emotional, immeasurable demands of the citizenry, the transnational would be able to organize world affairs in a more rational, efficient manner.”

"Columnist Chrystia Freeland nailed this mind-set perfectly in her 2011 article “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” which ran in The Atlantic magazine. She reported that one influential American hedge fund manager argued that it didn’t matter if the US economy was in peril, because “if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.”

"By 2008, actual commodity sellers and buyers were completely marginalized in the market by speculator banksters, who accounted for 80 percent of all futures purchases. And with their price manipulations, these derivative bombs cratered our economy with high gas prices.

Economist Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics
"They will always want to lend more money… the banking sector profits by creating debt”...

CHAPTER 7: A Revolution Denied
"The Iroquois Confederation’s “Great Law,” which was a major inspiration for the American Constitution, famously called for all governmental decisions to be made in the context of their impact on “the Seventh Generation” down the line into the future.

CHAPTER 9: Betrayal on the High Court
"...with this decision in place and the law of the land, the First Amendment now protects the “free speech” rights of the presidents of Russia and China and Iran to form corporations in the United States and pour millions of dollars toward supporting or defeating the politicians of their choice. It protects the “right” of the largest polluting corporations on earth to politically destroy any politician who wants to give any more authority to the Environmental Protection Agency. It protects their “right” to elevate to elected status any politician who is willing to dismantle the EPA—or any other government agency that protects or defends the people of America from Royalist predation

"...the bible of legal scholars—the book that the framers of our Constitution had frequently cited and referenced in their deliberations in 1787 in Philadelphia—Sir William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England...

"Stevens recounted the history of the evolution of corporations in America, noting, “Corporations were created, supervised, and conceptualized as quasi-public entities, ‘designed to serve a social function for the state.’

"As a result of Citizens United, outside political spending skyrocketed from just $68 million in the 2006 midterms, to over $304 million in the 2010 midterms. That’s a 400 percent increase in corporate cash influencing elections and buying politicians, just ten months after the Citizens United decision.

CHAPTER 10: Masters of the Universe
"On average, a member of the House of Representatives must raise $5,000 a week for his or her campaign. That means that every morning, Monday through Friday, they must wake up not thinking about governing but about fund-raising—how to scrounge up a thousand bucks that day. In the Senate it’s even worse, at an average of $14,000 a week.152 And those numbers were compiled by PBS before the Citizens United decision—today’s numbers are significantly higher.

American Legislative Exchange Council = ALEC

"...it’s a dating service setting up corporate lobbyists and state legislators,” he told me. “The culmination is the passing of special-interest legislation.”

"I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

"It’s no wonder that the American people have played into the hands of the Royalists and, as a result, have very little trust in government. After all, there is no reason why they should, because democratic government, as we once knew it, no longer exists

CHAPTER 11: This Is the End
"...in 1977, Harold E. Davis wrote a brilliant monograph for the Georgia Historical Society titled The Scissors Thesis, or Frustrated Expectations as the Cause of the Revolution in Georgia...

CHAPTER 12: Organized People v. Organized Money
"Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law. The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable

"On December 6, 2011, Los Angeles became the first major city in the United States to call for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood.

"There have been similar resolutions passed in Boulder, Colorado, and Missoula, Montana, that say corporations are not people and money is not speech.

"I particularly recommend the model put forth by David Cobb at MoveToAmend.org.

"...the headnote to the Santa Clara County 1886 decision that asserted corporations are the same as natural persons in terms of constitutional protections.

"The [U.S.] Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000...

"...the [U.S.] Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Justin Trudeau, "Common Ground" (2014)

Notes will follow, eventually.

Pg. 119 - "...the blogger, who had been telling his readers I was destined for failure, gave me a respectful nod on his website for taking the time to answer his questions. This was a small thing... but it reinforced my belief that today's activists and supporters expect and deserve direct engagement through the digital media."

Pg. 152 - With regard to progress on issues related to Canada's relationship to First Nations' peoples: "With the notable exception of Paul Martin, who through the Kelowna Accord created a framework and principles to tackle so many of these problems... significant progress has eluded most of our prime ministers."

Pg. 185 - A "First Nations prayer" that Justin Trudeau read at his brother's funeral:
O Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds, and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me.
I stand before you: one of your many children,
I am small and weak; I need your strength and wisdom.
Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made, my ears sharp to hear your voice.
Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength, not to be greater than my brothers, but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.
Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes,
So when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.



For those interested in this book, you might also read my comments on related titles:
- Peter Newman, When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada
- Michael Ignatieff, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics
- Lawrence Martin, Harperland
- Brian Topp, How We Almost Gave the Tories the Boot

Alex Beam, "American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith..." (2014)

The full subtitle for this book is: "The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church."

Page numbers correspond with my digital version, and do not likely reflect hard copy pagination.

Benjamin Moser offers a good analysis of the book in the New York Times.

Some observations that I found particularly intriguing:
54: “The Saints helped the Saints; that was a core tenet of Joseph’s religion. In response to a revelation concerning Enoch, a grandson of Adam and Eve, Joseph encouraged his flock to “consecrate” all their property to the church, which in turn redistributed the collective wealth to families in need. This was pure communism, and it benefited many Mormons who followed Joseph to his first religious base in Kirtland, Ohio, having left their belongings behind them. By 1844, in Nauvoo—Joseph’s “Zion” on the banks of the Mississippi—Joseph had abandoned the law of consecration but had substituted tithing in its place. Observant Mormons agreed to donate one-tenth of their goods or services to the bishop’s storehouse for redistribution to the needy. Joseph often staked newly arrived families to (cramped) living quarters, a house plot, a larder full of supplies, or a portion of a working garden. Converts understood that their fellow Mormons would help them get on their feet, which partially explained the Saints’ missionary successes.”

65: “Around the time that the mass baptisms were ramping up, Joseph embraced Freemasonry, with a passion. There are plenty of reasons he would have opposed Masonry. Upstate New York, where he lived until age twenty-four, was a hotbed of anti-Masonry. The European fraternal order, which had established a beachhead in the New World during the eighteenth century, was widely denounced as a shadowy, atheistic cabal aimed at creating a secret world government. William Morgan, famous for publishing the Masons’ secret codes and rituals in the widely disseminated 1826 book Illusions of Masonry, lived in Batavia, New York, and was supposedly drowned by hostile Masons in the Niagara River. (In a curious twist of fate, his widow, Lucinda, became one of Joseph’s first plural wives.) New York even had its own anti-Masonic political party, which fielded a presidential candidate in 1831. The Book of Mormon, wholly composed in upstate New York, repeatedly condemned the “abominations” of secret societies, with “their secret signs and their secret words . . . [that] they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms” (Helaman 6:22). On the other hand, Joseph’s father and brother Hyrum were Masons, as were several other prominent Saints. It was hard not to notice that almost everyone who was anyone in southwestern Illinois—the lawyers, judges, and leading businessmen—were also Masons. So, with considerable fanfare, Joseph became an entered apprentice mason on March 15, 1842. After obtaining a waiver from the usual twenty-eight-day waiting period, he attained two higher degrees the following day.”

71: “In April 1844, he preached the most famous sermon of his life, what some regard as one of the most famous sermons ever preached in America. As if on a whim, Joseph turned nearly 2,000 years of Christian belief on its head at a funeral service for his loyal colleague King Follett. Joseph had laid the groundwork for a new world order, and for the foundational ritual for his entire church, but that was in secret. Now, speaking in Nauvoo’s East Grove, under a massive canopy of elm and chestnut trees, he unpacked some of the most radical Christian doctrine ever preached on the American continent…Joseph started out with his boldest statement: “We suppose that God was God from eternity,” he shouted. “I will refute that idea. God that sits enthroned is a man like one of yourselves.” “It is the first principle to know. We may converse with him and that he once was a man like us. God was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh. I defy all hell and earth to refute it.” Joseph referred to gods in the plural, because he explained that gods evolved from men and were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing. The raw material of godhead was a form of free intelligence that preexisted our creation. From intelligence, God became a man, then perfected himself to become a god. So did Jesus Christ. And so, Joseph said, can you. “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself in order to save yourself,” he proclaimed, “ —to be priests and kings as all Gods have done–by going from a small degree to another—from exaltation to exaltation—till they are able to sit in glory as with those who sit enthroned.” This became the “doctrine of eternal progression,” the Mormons’ supremely optimistic belief in the perfectibility of men and women living on earth. Joseph freed his followers from the strictures of predestination and the inevitability of sin.”

229: “…the dissidents were calling out Joseph’s startling new theology unveiled in the King Follett sermon, his contention that God was once a man who lived on earth, and advanced spiritually under the tutelage of a preceding god. This was indeed blasphemy against the established Christian church, but could a prophet guided by heavenly revelation blaspheme his own theology? Joseph had already rewritten both the Old and New Testaments and created holy rituals, all of them inspired by his direct communications with God.”

259: “Joseph was recapitulating the famous argument of the King Follett sermon, that just as God was the father of Jesus Christ, “you may suppose that He had a Father also.” “Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. . . . I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.” He then cited biblical examples of the plurality of gods, claiming, for instance, that “Paul says there are Gods many and Lords many.”* Smith also applied his modest knowledge of Hebrew, pointing out that “Elohim,” the Old Testament word for “god,” is a plural form, and is almost always used plurally when God, or Elohim, creates the world. It was a stretch to argue that the Old Testament Israelites were polytheists, although Joseph did just that. “In the very beginning the Bible shows there is a plurality of Gods beyond the power of refutation,” he declared. “The word Elohim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods. The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us; and when you take [that] view of the subject, it sets one free to see all the beauty, holiness and perfection of the Gods.” Biblical scholars have called Elohim an example of the “plural of excellence,” akin to the “plural of majesty,” better known as the “royal we.”

Norah Vincent, "Voluntary Madness" (2008)

Vincent undertook to understand the treatment of mental illness by 'immersing' herself in three different American treatment centres: one a public urban institution, one a private rural institution, and one a private 'progressive' institution in the US mid-west. Not purely a 'tourist' or 'poseur', Vincent believes that she may indeed have some form of mental illness, but her problems are not so debilitating as to render her incapable of researching and writing a book.

Her narrative of time spent in these institutions is believable. She captures details of scenery and thought that those who have spent time in psychiatric wards and asylums, particularly as patients, will recognize. In this regard, the work provides excellent insight, something like the affirmation of experiential commonality that an addict finds in a twelve-step program. She offers the kind of insights that "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" can't, and yet affirms in many respects that the situation in America's psychiatric institutions has not greatly improved or even changed.

Her desire to understand mental illness, to document its treatment and challenge some of the premises under which treatment is premised, was not convincing, however. Her capacity to stand back (or willingness to believe that she was) from her own mental illness, and to achieve some kind of overarching or privileged critical position, is unconvincing. The very reality that someone was putting up thousands of dollars for her to enter and stay in these institutions separates her experience from that of many people who find themselves in them - particularly when entry is not voluntary, but as incarceration by court order. I would expect that forced membership in the asylum not only alters the experience, it alters the perception of the experience. While Vincent is critical of many of her peers in the 'system', she particularly directs attention to persons incarcerated in the final institution (the nicest of the three) who do not seem to 'want to get better'. Of course they don't want to get better! They were sent there by court order. A system for caring for mental patients based on force by its very nature is likely going to be much different than one based on a preventative healthcare model.

You can read a short excerpt at Smith Magazine.

The Guardian offers a very prescient review.

Ron Jeremy, "Hardest (Working) Man in Show Biz" (2007)

Ghost-written by Eric Spitznagel.

This is the third autobiography of a porn industry star that I've read in the last year. Each of them are unique, but this one stands out from the rest. Jeremy - if his reputation isn't already familiar to you - is likely one of the most prolific and longest-lived male actors in the porn industry. He has apparently appeared in about 1,700 movies, and moved on to directing them. He has also dabbled in stand-up comedy, 'serious' acting, and now, books.

What is unique about Jeremy's book? He has little negative to say about the industry. He didn't seek it out as a career (he hoped to be a legit actor). He came by it as what he thought might be an entree into serious work, and as an alternative to working with special needs persons.

This leads me to another unique aspect of Jeremy's book. He has a Masters degree in Special Education. He had a good relationship with his parents. He claims to not be a drinker or drug-taker. In this regard, Jeremy's experience of the sex industry, then, comes not from desperation, addiction, depression, or abuse. For him, it seems to have been a pretty decent job that evolved into a career.

Compared to Holmes' and Jameson's books, Jeremy's inattention to the dark side of porn work comes across as disingenuous. This is not to say that everyone's story has to be sad or terrible, but as a male actor who realistically profits off his female (co-)stars, it might have been a good service for him to recognize what like is like on the other end of the penis(es) in the industry. The difference is particularly discernible when he spends time discussing his love of animals, but gives so little attention to ingrained sexism and systemic abuse and risk problems for women and men in the porn industry. Even his discussion of conflicts with the law come across more as failed comedy routines than genuine legal struggles.

The book is entertaining, no doubt, and Jeremy comes across as a nice enough guy; a little naive, a little simple, a little goodhearted. His book is a cotton-candy version of the porn industry. For those looking for fluff, it does nicely. For those looking for something more insightful, balance out Jeremy's view with the biography of John Holmes (another prominent male star of the industry), or Jenna Jameson's book.

A pretty good summary of the book is available at The Bookbag.

My discussion of Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star (A Cautionary Tale)"
My discussion of "Porn King: The Autobiography of John C. Holmes."

Norman Mailer, "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery" (1995)

If you're not aware already, the Oswald in question here is Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of US President Kennedy. Mailer is one of the US's best-known 'old white male' authors, primarily known for his fiction work.

Oswald's Tale is bit of a "dog's breakfast"; the first forty-percent of the book is a close consideration of Oswald's time living in the Soviet Union. Mailer and associates spent about six months locating and interviewing people who had contact with Oswald, ranging through love interests, co-workers, and KGB agents who spied on Oswald. Information gained from these interviews is supplemented with knowledge gained from documents produced during that time, primarily by Soviet state agencies. The second, sixty-percent of the book consists of Mailer's quoting at length from already-published works, interspersed with his own, rather unique speculations about Oswald's activities and motivations.

The first portion of the book is intriguing, and seems to bring some new insights to discussion of Oswald. The second is far more troubling, in that it offers little in the way of insights, and overwhelms with its dubious psychoanalysis and conjecture.

Mailer does try to use observations from the first section to ground some of his ideas developed in the second. For instance, based on some (rather dicey) proposals that Oswald may have been engaged in some kind of homosexual contact during his stint in the Marines, as well as later in Russia, Mailer later tries to propose that Oswald was perhaps receiving money from a male lover in Texas during the year preceding Kennedy's assassination. Mailer suggests also that Oswald's sapiosexuality might explain his sexual relationship with his wife, which apparently went through lengthy periods of non-interest.

Mailer's ideas are generally fairly loosely developed. While this can suggest openness, it can also lead him into excess. Evidence? Read the two following quotations.

Pg. 491: “All through February and March he prepares himself to strike at Walker. The notion that the General was a Hitler in the making was key to choosing him for a target. The soft underbelly, however, of so lofty a notion – stop the second Hitler before he arises - comes in large degree because of Oswald’s concealed sense of himself – even from himself! – of also being a putative Hitler. A physical resemblance between the two men had to be, consciously or unconsciously, in Oswald’s mind. One need only pencil in a mustache on any photograph of Oswald in profile to feel the force of the resemblance. In his fantasies, would Oswald have refused a Faustian pact? Allow him to steal Hitler’s powers of ascendancy, and he could convert them to his own vastly more idealistic vision. But first he must kill a minor god.”

Pg. 551: “It was as if his murderous impulses could only be gathered if he was without sexual release. To continue his marriage was to condemn himself, therefore, to a life of mediocrity, yet – there is no other explanation for so many of his actions – a sizeable part of him adored Marina, and this quite apart from his full affection for June. For that matter, devotion to June was like an open display of his infatuation with himself. But Marina he loved as his woman, his difficult, caustic contrary, and often wholly attractice wife – even if he could hardly tolerate her for most of the month. Are half of the young husbands in existence all that much unlike him? Or young wives?”

I found Mailer's consideration of history writing, particular when trying to understand the motivations of historical characters, intriguing.

Pg. 605: “This book, however, was undertaken without a fixed conclusion in either direction; indeed, it began with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists. All the same, one’s plan for the work was to take Oswald on his own terms as long as that was possible – that is, to try and comprehend his deeds as arising from nothing more than himself until such a premise lost all headway. To study his life in this manner produced a hypothesis: Oswald was a protagonist, a prime mover, a man who made things happen… Indeed, this point of view has by now taken hold to a point where the writer would not like to relinquish it for too little. There is the danger! Hypotheses commence as our servant – they enable us to keep our facts in order while we attempt to learn more about a partially obscured subject. Once the profits of such a method accumulate, however, one is morally obliged… to be scrupulously on guard against one’s own corruption. Otherwise, the hitherto useful hypothesis will insist on prevailing over everything that comes in and so will take over the integrity of the project.”

You can read the final two chapters of the book here, on the Frontline website.

A good review of the book by Thomas Powers can be found in the NY Times.

If you are interested in the Kennedy assassination, I have previously discussed the following:

- Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007)

- Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (2010)

- David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (2009)