The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

The first time I physically remember hearing the Yugo referenced in pop culture was seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance on TV (this must have been 1997 or so, when I was 12 or 13), though I must have known about it before because I laughed: Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson drive a commandeered Yugo down a busy freeway, and when Bruce (John) complains about their pokey pace, Samuel (Zeus) replies “It’s a Yugo; it’s built for economy, not for speed!”

I somehow realized or knew, though I don’t remember how or when I would have learned it, that the word “Yugo” was a punchline for a car only a few steps better than a pennyracer. Jason Vuic’s The Yugo is the story of how the hapless automobile came to be the butt of so many jokes, but also how it ever-so-briefly was a commercial success, and how one enigmatic business was behind it all.

Malcolm Bricklin (born 1939) began his foray into the automotive industry in the 1960s. He made a name for himself by starting an American import company which sold Subaru 360 models to dealers in the United States. To modern readers, this might not seem like a bad idea, but at the time, Subarus were basically matchbox cars, and Consumer Reports labeled the 360 as “The Most Unsafe Car in America”. Bricklin sold his share of Subaru of America, Inc. to his business partner; incidentally, this company would later become a very successful one.

Between the disastrous early days of Subaru of America and the cataclysmic entirety of Yugo America, Bricklin managed to created his own custom car, the Bricklin SV-1, a futuristic car with gullwing doors and an acrylic exterior; 2,854 were manufactured in the mid-70s after Bricklin conned the city of New Brunswick into subsidizing the operation. Bricklin’s habit of making wild, fantastic promises and then completely and utterly failing to deliver are running themes in the story of both Bricklin and the Yugo. It’s very possible that the episode of The Simpsons where Homer discovers a long-lost half-brother (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?“) has veiled references to the SV-1, although it probably acts as an umbrella joke for a number of failed car designs.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard...

After the 1979 oil crisis, the 1980s saw the slow return of muscle cars and luxury cars to the American market; prices and sizes crept steadily upward. Bricklin, believing there was a well-defined market for a cheap, small economy car (a blind optimism that would be his downfall), began importing Fiat cars from Italy, but eventually stumbled across a small, cheap export from Yugoslavia, technically transliterated as the Jugo (but pronounced, and eventually respelled, as Yugo). The car was built by the Zastava corporation, a government-controlled automobile manufacturer (and, during the internecine Balkan crisis, briefly and arms manufacturer), in what was then a Communist but not Soviet-block country. To put it succinctly, the Yugo was a copy of a poor Fiat design, made by largely unskilled workers in an environment more concerned about employing everybody rather than increasing quality of efficiency; it was a cheap piece of shit that fulfilled a market niche in a very poor Communist country. That it ever became (ever so briefly) immensely popular in the United States, and thereafter universally reviled and mocked, has a little to do with the fundamentally poor construction of the car and a lot to do with the obstinacy and near-fanatical optimism of its American cheerleader, Malcolm Bricklin.

...they're like, "It's better than yours"....

What many people don’t realize is that despite its current reputation, Bricklin’s imported Yugoslavian turd was, for a very short time, all the rage. Bricklin predicted the market for cheap compact cars—a niche almost entirely unfulfilled in the early 1980s—and he was entirely correct; so when news of a car costing less than $4000 hit, both dealers and consumers clamored to get on the waiting list. The Yugo experiment quickly began to unravel as a couple of things happened. First, the public quickly realized what an unmitigated disaster the car was; even with extensive aftermarket revision, the product coming out of Yugoslavia barely passed minimum U.S. regulatory requirements, and bottomed out on Consumer Reports and other watchdog publication tests. Second, other foreign manufacturers such as Honda and Hyundai began to reenter the compact market with much higher standards of quality, even if it meant a high market price than the excretory Yugo.

Bricklin was eventually kicked out of the company he created with a generous severance package of around $10 million (he was considered too erratic and his history too failure-ridden to attract investors), a move which ruffled his feathers but was much more than he deserved, since the company imploded shortly thereafter. An endless succession of reorganizations, additional loans, and further failures marred the company, and before long their assets were liquidated and the American-Yugoslavian partnership plopped into the gutter of history. Oddly enough, the Yugo itself only stopped being manufactured in 2008; Eastern Europe, with its lax safety laws and continuously-fumbling economy, apparently still had use of such a car until recently.

This all seems a straightforward tale, and it largely is. Even without the benefit of foreknowledge of the Yugo’s demise and infamy, one can quickly determine from Vuic’s exposition that the Bricklin has doomed every enterprise he’s come in contact with. And the notion of a ridiculous subcompact from a struggling Communist country carving a secure niche in the American market is a stretch even without the nearly criminal lack of quality. Vuic’s explanation of Bricklin’s involvement (leadership, if you can call it that), and the details of the Yugoslavian side of the relationship is genuinely informative; certainly, it explained things about the Yugo of which I was unaware. There are stretches however, as Bricklin and his import company keeping kicking the can down the road with more lies and loans, where the narrative becomes monotonous, saved only by the reader’s growing incredulity that such a debacle managed to survive as long as it did.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

It was Christopher Hitchens that sparked my interest in Graham Greene; I read his introduction to a new edition of Greene’s The Orient Express in Hitchens’ 2004 collected essays, Love, Poverty, and War. Even more recently, Hitchens lent his pen to Penguin’s new publication of Our Man in Havana, one of Greene’s well-known “comedic” novels (as distinct from his “serious” novels like The End of the Affair, a distinction made by Hitchens himself). As I recently had the opportunity to give the book a try, I couldn’t pass it up.

When I call it a “comedic” novel, of course, I don’t mean it is funny in the same way that Mel Brooks films are funny. It’s a “black comedy” or a rather darksome satire, which means that it’s funny only in the sense that it engages our reflex to snort at the absurd. Much hay has been made of the fact that Greene’s novel presaged the Cuban missile crisis; it’s a case of life imitating art, I suppose, and in this case life had as much, if not more of the requisite absurdity for such a comedy of errors.

The year is 1958, during the tail end of the Batista regime in Cuba, and British expat James Wormold works as a vacuum salesman in downtown Havana. His wife long ago eloped with a young Cuban, and Wormold is left to raise his comely Catholic daughter, Milly, as a single father. His only friend is the elderly German Dr. Hasselbacher, an affable lush whiling away his retirement years drinking daiquiris.

Everything changes when Wormold is recruited by a British spy named Hawthorne to be Britain’s “man in Havana”. It is, admittedly, a good deal, as Wormold gets significant leeway to build his own operation and recruit agents, and receives an income both larger and more steady than that from his lagging vacuum business. But Wormold is no spy, not even when given the opportunity to be; though he accepts Hawthorne’s arrangement (and more importantly, his money), he decides after some delay to fabricate from whole cloth both his network of agents and the suspicious movement of materiel, including ostensible weapons and machines which resembled… vacuum cleaners. When interested parties take this seriously, blood is shed and the entire edifice comes crashing down… sort of.

One is hard-pressed to say which is impugned more in this: that Wormold is so unimaginative he must use (one would imagine fairly obvious) sketches of vacuum cleaners as fictional ordnance, or that the entirety of Britain’s intelligence service failed to notice (with the exception of Hawthorne, who kept his mouth shut lest the situation reflect poorly on him). The entire novel, in fact, seems to be a contest to ascertain just who we hate more: Wormold, the sniveling wretch and liar; the British intelligence service, as represented by a self-serving bureaucrat and a senile leader; or perhaps its Cuba itself, a developing country in the dying throes of autocratic rule, at once exotic and decrepit, glossy and irredeemably corrupt, as represented so aptly by a police captain (Señor Segura) whose predilection for torture, he admits, is based upon the socioeconomic class of the captive.

In other words, Greene has managed quite deftly to lampoon just about every farcical institution within arm’s reach. While the intelligence service in 1958 was perhaps not at the peak of its anti-Communist hysteria (and remember, of course, that Cuba was not yet under the thumb of the Soviet Union), it was still in many respects a masturbatory exercise, creating its own work as it went. And, like all institutions of government, it fails to disclose its failings, preferring to swallow the cost and outcome with (in this case) a stiff upper lip. On the other side of the equation, the Batista regime, as a metonym for every other tin-pot dictatorship that has flourished in the 20th century, was simultaneously cruel beyond description and innately self-parodying. I’m given to understand that Castro’s regime later criticized the book (and its film translation) for not adequately portraying the brutality of the Batista regime, but this was clearly not the intent of the book. Greene is a keen enough satirist to allow that Segura has a wallet made of human skin (admittedly that of a torturer himself) and that he lacks any compunction about torturing a member of the “tortureable class” (someone who “expects” to be tortured); this tells us all we need to know about the nature of brutal autocracies. In the same way that Britain (and by popular extension, America) can be simultaneously the last best hope of the world and bumbling, proud bureaucracies, so can Batista’s Cuba be an abhorrent nest of vipers that is simultaneously despicable and not altogether unlikeable.

Rounding out the trifecta of disappointment is Wormold, a feckless and remarkably unlikeable protagonist who nevertheless appears to come out on top. Economically-motivated and politically disinterested, he’s the embodiment of every other person in the middle of a political cold war whose allegiance is nominal and whose real concerns are pragmatic and not entirely noble. Wormold’s one real glint of humanity is his confused care of his daughter (who is a brat—admittedly precocious—who needs a spanking as much as anything else) and his somewhat predictable developed feelings for the difficult secretary, Ms. Beatrice Severn, who is sent by London to help manage his affairs.

It’s extraordinarily easy to lampoon the Cold War and its clockwork with the benefit of hindsight; it’s much more difficult to lampoon the nature of autocratic dictators, so many of which are still in full, excremental bloom today. And yet, though of course no one has ever credited a satirist with regime change, it’s important to remember the role that such comedy ultimately plays in the cultural perception of power and leadership. I write from America, where our continued relative stability and prosperity—bordering on profligacy—has made the practice of political satire something approaching droll 1980s standup comedy; I say this not to lampoon our important media institutions like The Daily Show, which do important work, but merely to point out that even the harshest criticism of America’s government is essentially captious. Greene’s novel, among the first and best-known of his comedies, manages to excoriate all its parties while sympathizing with none in particular, which is at least part of a good satirist’s job, and the reason why they ultimately inhabit such an important place in the clockwork of any culture.

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Science fiction has a tendency to ignore religion; this may have stemmed from its early Enlightenment-style emphasis on rationality, or it may have been sheer laziness, since predicting how some of our oldest cultural institutions would fare years into the (often dystopian) future is difficult at best.

There are notable exceptions to this, and the situation has gotten better as the years wind on and the genre refines itself. Writers aren’t always nice to religion, but they’ve generally stopped ignoring it as a force for (or resistance to) change. But even in scifi’s early days, there were some writers who not only included organized religion in their stories, but actually centered the plots on it. Most frequently cited is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But just a scant year before Miller published his first and last novel, another titan of the early science fiction scene, James Blish, published A Case of Conscience, whose protagonist(?) is a Jesuit priest.

Like most of the best (or longest-lived) science fiction, A Case of Conscience‘s focus is largely sociological; there are no laser battles, though there are plenty of large, reptilian aliens. On the planet of Lithia, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is priest/biologist, one of four human scientists sent to the world to determine if it should be opened to general human availability. This is partially an academic exercise of determining if the environment is malicious or benign to homo sapiens, but also to understand the culture of the native Lithians and predict whether being a spaceport will wind up more like Sweden or more like Afghanistan for loud Westerners.

Blish’s decision to make Sanchez a Jesuit is no coincidence; the Jesuits are [in]famous for being the most scientific and rationalistic of Catholics, so Sanchez seems in many ways more like a scientist than a Padre, but it soon becomes apparent that what could be a nuanced, meaningful interplay of religious conservatism and futuristic scientism is destined to be turned into two flailing caricatures, and I think the Catholics get the worse end of the deal.

The Lithians, though they resemble pulp-era science fiction villains in appearance, are a squeaky-clean species: intelligent to a fault, they are utterly rational, inherently moral without any sort of religion or notion of faith at all; a peaceful, self-sacrificing race whose unique skill at interdisciplinary fields would make them valuable partners to Earthlings, whose economy and minds have been warped by years of a “shelter economy”, driven underground for entire generations by the threat of nuclear holocaust. Schizophrenia is on the rise, and a strange system of have/have-not closely resembling that of the Soviet Union seems to pervade. But this is all thin political blustering; at issue is the apparent “perfection” of the Lithians, which ultimately brings Ruiz-Sanchez to a horrifying conclusion: the planet of Lithia was created by The Devil in order to convince Man to stop believing in God.

Regardless of one’s spiritual convictions, this is a rather hard to accept, even in science fiction. It may stem from Blish’s agnostic misunderstanding of Catholic dogma; perhaps it represents the sort of thing that really would concern a Catholic back in 1958—this was, after all, before Vatican II, when Catholicism was, if it’s even possible, draped even more mysticism and incense-and-dagger horseshit than it is now. In any case, Blish made sure to mitigate the ridiculousness of Ruiz’s sudden revelation with an even more exaggerated Henry-Kissinger-as-comic-book-villain exposition from Paul Carver, another member of the four-man expedition, who hates Lithia and Lithians and wants to turn the entire planet into a thermonuclear weapons factory. This point is about halfway through the book, even before Ruiz-Sanchez shares his blithering revelation, and Blish could not make Carver sound like more of a megalomaniacal Bond villain if he tried. Once again, I’m not sure if Blish simply happened to traffick in caricatures, or if he purposely wrote Carver as a slavering Cold War missile-monger in order to offset what must have seemed, even in context, like a “Dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith” kind of fairy tale from the Jesuit.

The second half of the book deals largely with a young Lithian, Egtverchi, who is given to Sanchez in egg form as a gift/ambassador. Lithians have no real sense of familial structure, evolving into intelligence mostly on their own, but Egtverchi manages to grow up, let’s say “wrong”, and becomes a rabble-rouser on Earth, instigating violence and social upheaval. The image, I suppose, is supposed to be one of leftist rationalism bunker-busting Cold War-style mindsets, though Egtverchi himself is something of a cipher and the events that follow are somewhat tangential, including a party scene at a sex-crazed political socialite’s mansion that accomplishes nothing in its significant length except serving as Egtverchi’s debutante ball, where he “comes out” to the human world as an obnoxious teenager.

I won’t spoil the ending, although it won’t come as a surprise in a story about Cold War politicking. Though one can sense Blish was attempting an ambiguity, he only succeeding in making Ruiz-Sanchez look like a hysterical moonbat, eclipsed only by his (Norwegian!) pope and by extension the entirety of the Catholic church. Though one may guess that I’m no great friend of the institution, I give it, generally, a little more respect than flailing caricatures. Even more disappointing is that Blish’s initial setup seemed so promising; the conflict between Ruiz-Sanchez’s rationalist flavor of faith and crass utilitarian Realpolitik might have been meaningful, but the final execution was poor then, and ages even more poorly.

Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke

I can remember being quite young and looking for books by Dave Barry in my local library. Invariably, I happened upon large collections by such venerated humorists as Lewis Grizzard and P.J. O’Rourke, who even in the early 90s had a large œuvre. I never got into O’Rourke at the time, because I was concerned more with Barry’s slapstick and sometime scatological approach to humor, as opposed to O’Rourke’s which was more straightforward political satire.

When I learned sometime about a decade ago that Barry was a Libertarian, I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant (I was probably about 14), other than he apparently disliked government. This is no surprise, given that a large portion of his work was dedicated to criticizing people in authority, especially the government, which was a fair target for lampooning not just by Libertarian humorists, but just about anybody. Let’s face it: the government is a big dumb ox of a target, and even dyed-in-the-wool liberals have little trouble lambasting it for wasteful spending and making jokes about Congress being the opposite of Progress.

One of the big differences between a straightforward humorist like Dave Barry (who just happens to be a Libertarian) and a pundit-cum-political-satirist like P.J. O’Rourke (who just happens to be a Libertarian) is that Barry goes for the laughs approximately 99.8% of the time; O’Rourke, by comparison, inhabits a grey area intermediate of yuks and real political commentary. He’s joined in this space by Al Franken (whose books, though not particularly funny, fall back on the “I’m a comedian” defense too often) and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame, and it hurts him for a number of reasons.

Let’s say that you’re a reader, like me, who considers himself something of a Leftist Libertarian, and you’re reading O’Rourke’s book. On his basic belief that, w.r.t. government, less is more, you are in theoretical (if not necessarily practical) agreement; you quibble with him on some fine points when he’s rearticulating some report from the Cato Institute. Yet you can’t help but be annoyed that whenever he feels his text is getting too turgid, he shoots his clay pigeons, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. As often as not, these aren’t even political jokes as much as they are jokes about old hags; as a common substitute, enter Bill Clinton as befuddled cocksman. It’s a startling and unnerving contrast, and one can just hear it coming out of Thomas Jefferson’s mouth: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it [and isn't Nancy Pelosi a stupid, wrinkled Bitch?]“. Or not.

Therein lies the danger of political satire: it’s not particular funny. O’Rourke is a seasoned veteran of the field, and should know better than to peddle such easy, cheesy ad hominem blows, even if they are merely a cheap façade for his more principled political objections. The Daily Show manages to avoid a lot of this by (a) avoiding lengthy political discourse altogether and (b) doing less blatant ad hominem jokes in favor of ad argumentum jokes. For better or worse, The Daily Show doesn’t positively stand for much (recent Zadroga Bill activism excepted), and so avoids much of this problem. It’s a problem especially for O’Rourke because although he’s generally considered a satirist/humorist, he’s a very smart guy; we need conservative voices who aren’t greasy douchbags (Sean Hannity), complete nincompoops (Bill O’Reilly), or batshit-crazy caricatures (Ann Coulter). What’s more, we know he’s capable of serious journalism (or at least genuine activism); try saying that about today’s talking heads or weekly columnists squeezing out their quotidian partisan bitch.

O’Rourke is at his best when, like Franken, he isn’t going for the punchline, per-se, but rather sounding out his argument in meaningful—if flippant—way. Whether he’s right or wrong isn’t necessarily a debate for the book review; Franken has too much faith in government, and O’Rourke has too much faith in self-governance, and wherever the twain shall meet is a source of conflict. Needless to say, O’Rourke is bright, relatively amusing (especially during pieces when he’s not being overtly political—e.g. his transplanted magazine article about cars), full of genuinely good points about small government, and a talented writer in his own right. It’s easy to see why he’s become a part of the cultural landscape (he’s a frequent contributer to many magazines, a fixture on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…, &c.), though he’s likely put better compendia than Don’t Vote.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion by Matt Taibbi

Last year and I read and enjoyed Taibbi’s Spanking the Donkey—a cross between DWF’s Up, Simba and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Taibbi is well-known for being acerbic, but admittedly he’s also an excellent writer, and there’s a particular joy in watching a silver-tongued left-libertarian wail on the political and cultural scaffolding with a heavy pipe.

In the preface to The Great Derangement, he expresses his concern that he’s become a victim to this very niche, having become a sort of editorial hatchetman—the guy Rolling Stone calls whenever they need a few pages of righteous fury. His discomfort implies that The Great Derangement will, in theory, be a different beast, but knowing Taibbi as we do, that isn’t necessarily the case.

The modern political dialectic, as presented to us by commercial journalism, is between extremists on the right and extremists on the left. Ask a right-winger to define the two, and you’ll get godless socialist atheist pro-choice libruhls on the left, and a firm insistence that there is no such thing as an American right-wing extremist; perhaps they’ll point to men like Scott Roeder, who murdered a provider of late-term abortions, but perhaps they won’t. Ask a left-winger to define the two, and they’ll likely define their opponents as Bible-thumping, gun-toting, ignorant pro-business thugs; as to the extremes of their own party, they’ll usually be charitable and offer up the conspiracy-loving anti-Bush fringe (e.g. 9/11 “Truth” movement, which believes that 9/11 was an inside job). These are terribly problematic descriptions, and not certain equivalent points of political extremism, either in degree or in prevalence (for one, Birthers are much more common than Truthers).

But this is the dichotomy that Taibbi sets up, offering up these two “extremes” of politics in an attempt to appear evenhanded. And yet, Taibbi invariably spends a couple of chapters, perhaps, on the 9/11 Truth movement and most of his time on Christian fundamentalism, in his typical gonzo style. Taibbi goes undercover at a Texas megachurch called CornerStone, run by (in)famous televangelist John Hagee. In between chapters, he gives brief interludes with some time spent in Washington—a typical muckraking of the great white sausage-grinder called Congress.

But really, The Great Derangement is a book about CornerStone church and charismatic fundamentalist Christians; like the somewhat false characterizations of political and cultural extremes which we and Taibbi appear to take for granted, the choice of a charismatic Texas church as his proving ground is a calculated decision to cast the right in as a deranged a light as possible. By “charismatic”, of course, I mean that the church encourages behavior akin to that of modern Pentecostals; fainting and speaking in tongues and all sorts of ridiculous, showy behavior. Unless you’re a Pentecostal, you are unable to read the book without being acutely aware, however much you may disagree with Taibbi’s atheism and general distaste for religion of all sorts, that the CornerStone church is filled to its brim with absolute horseshit. That Hagee is a rich, fat televangelist is known; that he’s of the sort which actively encourages Zionism in anticipation of the End Times is revealed; that Hagee’s sermons about Iran seem to bore his congregation (or so Taibbi says) is surprising.

This is the point at which church as a sociological phenomenon comes into play. His point of infiltration into CornerStone comes by way of a retreat weekend, which is sort of a great big group hug of a weekend camp. It begins with the premise that everyone has some traumatic incident in their childhood which made them turn from God, and they must think of it and cop to it before, apparently, becoming a good Christian. Taibbi’s disgust with the ridiculous bait-and-switch is justified, since it sounds suspiciously like Scientology’s M.O. In his time as a ersatz Christian, the focus seems to shift from his general disgust for fundamentalists to his conflicted opinions for his newfound friends. People joining CornerStone or its satellite programs often do so because of some secular trouble in their lives—that is, they have immediate need that cares nothing for Hagee’s pro-Israel lobby, and what’s more, these are need that are assuredly not met by the in-church zeitgeist of speaking in “tongues”. Taibbi manages by citing rock songs in Russian, but one gets the distinct impression, when other, less studious disciples are told to “practice” speaking nonsense “at home”, that what we’re witnessing is less evangelism and more a slick, corporate, and nonsensical approach.

Is the conservative Christian right represented by a televangelist and his megachurch? In Washington, perhaps. I think it’s generally unfair to cast disparate groups into the same bucket, even some may be more or less deserving. Taibbi’s problem is that Hagee’s (admittedly large) flock doesn’t really do much to make a point of argument. The best that Taibbi can do is to note that when Hagee spouts some obvious untruth in the course of his sermonizing, his congregation accepts it as a matter of course—that membership necessitates a suspension of disbelief and faculties of reasoning which looks remarkably like the sort practiced by 9/11 Truthers. This latter group, as Taibbi notes, also tends to be nice, working-class people led by crazy blowhards—another resonant but ultimately meaningless parallel.

I can’t help but enjoy Taibbi’s writing, but I think he does himself a disservice by attempting a Pepsi v. Coke approach to his polemics. For better or worse, we generally know where he stands, and pretending to get to know and write about megachurch members as people (and then waxing philosophical about the scaffolding above them) rings hollow. He’s better in short form, where he’s seemingly less afraid to call a spade a spade, to call bullshit on bullshit, and be the incisive, typecast polemicist he’s apparently afraid to be.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.

Whether correct or not (most people find at least something about which to disagree with “Hitch”), it would be unfair at least to say that the man is uninteresting, not simply for his intriguing mix of ideas, but for the rather storied life he’s led—even moreso than I was aware. In latter days, he’s become something of a darling of the pro-liberation crowd with respect to Iraq; he’s a frequent contributor to Fox News, though I imagine he finds most of their bobble-head commentators to be irritating and boorish; simultaneously, he’s come to be a leading voice in anti-theist rhetoric (certainly, his lecture schedule has borne that out). But, in fact, I think Hitchens as political polemicist unfairly impinges upon Hitchens as a literary critic and even, oddly enough, Hitchens as a travel writer.

Given how generally well-spoken and well-read Hitchens is, it should come as no surprise that he was something of a nerdy boy, excelling at the private English boarding school to which his parents sent him. It will be a surprise to those who only know the pro-war latter-day Hitchens to know that he spent most of his life being a card-carrying socialist, getting arrested at rallies, demonstrating against dictators, and generally doing the things that insufferable and indispensable young activists do. It was also a trifle surprising to learn that Hitchens is or was bisexual—or at least took part in homosexual sex up through his college years. Ever the understated Brit when it comes to himself, he never comes out and says this, but it’s clear enough that it’s so. Of the many other stridently homosexual writers that Hitchens knows, he is perhaps the most vocal of Gore Vidal (“massive old darling” that he is).

Rather than stick to a strictly chronological progression, Hitchens divides his chapters by subject, ordered more or less by their order of occurrence. His childhood passes quickly, and I am not terribly surprised that he glosses over this. One of the earliest critical junctions comes at that point where his mother leaves with another man and the two commit suicide in Athens. Hitchens, then in college, describes having to see the crime scene with a sort of distant horror that comes off as heartbreaking. I’ve never known the man to be overly sentimental, and indeed he describes the experience with a philosophical disgust rather than a particularly personal one. This is a memoir, after all, and not a biography: Hitchens controls the content and tone, and thus one shouldn’t expect any shocking revelations from the Hitchens you know and love (hate?) from his appearances on television and previous books. In fact, if you follow his lecture/debate circuit to the extent that Youtube et al. will allow, you’ll find that he uses some of his same phrases, expressions, and stories from the lecture in his book (or vice versa). Though I’ve no doubt that he’s very good at extemporizing (in fact, I’ve seen him do on Uncommon Knowledge), this book as with his speeches is a sort of rehearsed intelligence; or, more likely, he extemporizes from a pool of practiced points, since he lectures so frequently upon the same subject.

One chapter is devoted to his closest friend, Martin Amis; another to Salman Rushdie, which is of course a springboard to Hitchens to express his views on religion, tyrants, and religious tyrants. In fairness to Hitch, he abstains from becoming overly polemical with respect to religion, since his last book was devoted entirely to the subject. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining his views on the various conflicts in the Middle East, which have distanced him from many of his former associates (and employers), but this is largely in service of an overarching point that Hitchens attempts to make with Hitch-22, namely the sort of “double life” that he’s led, both in the sense of believing in two (apparently) contradictory ideas and of having so often compromise his ideals in order to get a story. But don’t mistake me: this is no wistful or maudlin look back, nor an expurgation of youthful indiscretions; though the Hitchens writing his memoirs may be different than the Hitchens planting coffee plants in Cuba after Castro’s revolution, there’s an internal consistency that is at least somewhat gratifying. The same moral impetus made Hitchens (initially) celebrate Castro as made him encourage the invasion (er, “liberation”) of Iraq; defend Paul Wolfowitz and excoriate Henry Kissinger; defame Mother Theresa and laud Thomas Jefferson. The book reminded me more of Love, Poverty, and War than it did his most recent work; stiff-lipped and intellectual, it is occasionally turgid or pedantic, but mostly it’s a fascinating (albeit circumscribed) window into the mind of arguably one of the brightest public commentators of our generation.

Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

If Mark Bowden can be considered a prominent author, it is likely because of Ridley Scott’s Blackhawk Down, a 2001 film based on Bowden’s book of the same name. In fact, Killing Pablo will also be a movie, to be released in 2011. Bowden is a journalist of sorts, whose forte is police or military stories; you can tell because all of his publicity photos make him look like a rough & tumble badass in order to fit his image as a documenter of other rough & tumble badasses.

Killing Pablo is, as the title suggests, about the hunting and eventual killing of Pablo Escobar, one of (if the the) most notorious drug kingpins in history. In 1989 (coincidentally, at a time when American demand for cocaine had skyrocketed), his cartel controlled 80% of the global cocaine market, and Pablo himself boasted a net worth of about $25 billion. Pablo was killed in 1993 by a secretive group of Colombian police and American Delta Force operatives at the end of a year-long, 600-man manhunt that cost literally hundreds of lives. This book is an attempt at chronicling that year, for better or worse.

Bowden isn’t prone to contemplative navel-gazing like, say, Sebastian Junger. The latter is concerned with character dynamics as much as historical action (and this sometimes to his detriment); Bowden, at least in Killing Pablo doesn’t seem to care overly much about making his readers understand or care about the story’s actors; even historical context is limited to the minimum amount necessary to appreciate what’s happening. It’s a visceral and immediately gratifying approach to the subject, but you pay for it later on. The story begins in 1948, a year before Pablo Escobar was born: the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets was just getting underway, and South and Central America was entering a gauntlet of rising and falling dictatorships. Pablo, originally quite poor, was a millionaire by the age of 22, capitalizing on the many opportunities for drug traffickers to be had in those days. But we don’t get much more about Pablo’s history, his rapid rise to power, or the conditions which made a cold-blooded murderer and drug dealer so popular to his home town of Medellín.

The story really begins with the assassination of popular liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989, which Escobar’s cartel was almost certainly behind. Mere assassination was old hat for Escobar: he had, by this point, ordered the murder of many hundreds of rivals, political enemies, and civilians who happened to get in his way. He had also bombed planes and buildings, to boot. Though of course Escobar’s cartel was a criminal organization, it had fought its way to an uneasy standstill with the existing powers in Colombia: Escobar was too power and violent to trifle with, and of course he was unafraid to go after the family members of his enemies in an effort to dissuade them. The assassination of Galán, however, convinced the newly-elected president César Gaviria to go after him, not least because of pressure from the United States to choke the flow of cocaine from the south.

In a story so absurd it must be true, Escobar negotiated a deal with the Colombian government: he would publicly “surrender” to the authorities and go to prison, but it would be a prison built by him, in a location chosen by him, and staffed with guards employed by him. The result, La Catedral, was a lavish mansion built on top of a hill outside Medellín, which Escobar stayed “imprisoned” for about a year while carrying on the cartel business as usual. When he tortured and murdered four of his lieutenants there, however, the Colombian government once again moved against him, seeking to put him in a real prison. Their attempt to recapture him failed: he walked out the back gate and disappeared, sparking the year-long manhunt that culminated in his death.

The manhunt itself is rather typical fare, like something out of a Michael Bay movie: little vignettes of particular actors storming around offices, or having moments of realization, or coming close to capturing Pablo but barely falling short. Actually, the mechanics of the hunt of Pablo Escobar are by and large uninteresting: such things are mostly logistics and boring detective work. Even the final firefight is brief and perfunctory. Far more interesting are the political ramifications, which Bowden does, to his credit, talk about at some length. First, the line between drug trafficker and upstanding citizen was not easy to draw in Colombia: many of the politicians involved in Pablo’s killing were themselves later accused of financial involvement with the drug trade (Attorney General de Greiff, for instance).

Second, though Colombian army/police (known as the Search Bloc) were nominally in charge of the manhunt, there were U.S. Delta Force operatives in-country, assisting with the operation. This is important because Colombian law forbid such troops to be on Colombian soil in an active military capacity: officially, Delta were only acting as “advisors” and so did not technically run afoul of that law. As is usually the case with military “advisors”, however, they tend to do a lot of shooting when no one’s looking. Bowden speculates that a Delta sniper may have fired the bullet which ultimately killed Pablo; he also surmises that Delta operatives participated in raids, though he admits that if they did, they—purposely—left no evidence.

Most interesting of all, the year-long hunt saw the rise of a vigilante group calling itself Los Pepes (Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar; “People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”) which itself went on a murderous rampage, killing Pablo’s business associates, their relatives, and Pablo’s relatives, and destroying the Cartel’s supplies. Some believe that Los Pepes was financed by the rival Cali cartel; Bowden seems to think it was a front for the Search Bloc itself, and potentially Delta Force too; or, alternatively, the Search Bloc members mimicked Los Pepes as a convenient cover. In any case, these hundreds of death put pressure on Pablo, who became increasingly paranoid as his family and cartel began to fall apart around him. Pathetically, the crimes of Los Pepes seem about as terrible as those of Escobar himself in the sense that they likely killed as many innocent civilians as they did real criminals (and besides which, vigilante justice is rather a contradiction in terms).

The one aspect of Pablo’s life which Bowden should have emphasized more is the way that the citizens of Medellín loved and revered him (and even Colombians at large, though to a lesser degree). He was, in a twisted way, considered by some to be a a modern-day Robin Hood, in part because he masked his ruthlessness with public works like churches and playgrounds. To this day, his death is still mourned by a subset of the population, mostly the poor who had benefited most from his fitful philanthropy.

The Escobar that Bowden presents is largely one-dimensional: he is neither particularly vilified, nor is he celebrated. His ambivalent status in the Colombian public eye and his particular ruthlessness are presented with a flattened effect and quickly replaced by some more minute technical detail about the Search Bloc. Killing Pablo really is about just that, and sadly nothing else. Bowden has written a well-researched account of Escobar’s death, but fails to give much of a reason why anyone should care about it, its ramifications, or the culture that created him; it’s a missed opportunity on Bowden’s part, and a damn shame.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

In what has become an unofficial theme for my reading selections this year, I’ve chosen yet another classic or important piece of science fiction; Asimov himself is considered, if not the father of science fiction (that title is usually reserved for Verne), then at least one of its major players during the genre’s ascension in the middle half of last century (along with Heinlein and Clarke). Foundation is the first book in the eponymous trilogy (and later an even longer series), and arguably his most popular and important book. Though parts of it have aged poorly, it’s easy to see how the book propelled its genre into orbit.

The main character of Foundation (and, I’m assuming, the entire series) appears alive only in the first chapter. His name is Hari Seldon, and he is a “psychohistorian” living on the central city of the Empire, a vast galactic empire sometime in the distant future. On a side note, this imperial city—known as Trantor—formed the basis for George Lucas’ Coruscant, since it’s a planet whose entire surface, give or take, has been turned into a single contiguous city.

Psychohistory, perhaps more than Seldon himself, forms the impetus for the plot of Foundation. Though it’s purely Asimov’s invention, it is more or less a melange of statistical probability, sociology, and anthropology: in effect, by understand human behavior, and the statistical likelihood of people and civilizations following expected patterns, one can accurately predict the long-term future of large cultural bodies (such as empires). When we join the story, Seldon is in the middle of predicting the Empire’s ultimate collapse—and with it, the downfall of humanity. To the Emperor, at the head of a seemingly thriving imperial organism, this seems crazy and seditious, but naturally Seldon is proven right and the empire shortly (in psychohistorical terms) collapses. Seldon arranges for his followers to be moved to a far-flung planet called Terminus, where they will ostensibly work non-stop on a giant Encyclopedia, in order to document and codify human knowledge before the 30,000-year galactic dark age sets in.

The rest of the book is a chronicle of Terminus and its surrounding planets on the edge of the galaxy, far from the (collapsed/dying) imperial center. I need hardly tell you that Seldon, though long dead, is right in every prediction, and the events of the book follow his plan—which aims to reduce the interregnum period from 30’000 years to a mere 1’000—with an almost mechanical precision. Generally, this takes the form of some actor having to wait until there is simply no other alternative, and then executing the remaining action. As you may imagine, this makes for something of an impoverished story, and you would be right in the sense that this political vignettes, separated by generations and each starring different descendants of Seldon’s original Encyclopedists, are not individually particularly compelling bits of statecraft or war. Their cumulative effect, however, says a great deal about someone’s idea of human progression (Seldon’s? Asimov’s?).

It is, in some ways, a rather cynical outlook, if a common one: humans, by way of their nature, build themselves and civilizations in cycles or waves. The empire, like each individual in it, will crest and then trough. That this nature should be so predictable and ineluctable that Seldon could predict it with mere statistical calculation (albeit it complex), is not a glowing endorsement for the intelligence or resilience of collective humanity. One must remember, too, that Asimov published Foundation in 1951, after the cataclysmic and literally explosive end of World War II and the foreboding start of the Cold War: the storied and continual squabbling and sabre-rattling of superpowers must have seemed as wearisome then as it does now. To Asimov’s credit, his galactic recreation of the fall of Rome and the ensuing dark ages contains more than simply war: rather, it is a “what-if” analysis of the possibility of concerted effort to retain scientific knowledge in the face of moral and informational vacuum—barbarism, in other words. Everything from religion to commerce is used a vehicle for achieving an end (perpetuating the scientific knowledge of the previous empire, including that of atomic power), an idea which is once again somewhat cynical, but also novel.

During one period, the Foundation turn their knowledge into a religion called Scientism (since many planets, having regressed to a relative Iron Age, could not distinguish between science and magic), and I can’t help but think of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which must have taken some inspiration from Asimov. Both books were serial novels, compiled from separate short stories; both deal with institutions which seek to preserve knowledge during dark ages; both comment upon the cyclical (and let’s face it: destructive) nature of human existence; both, too, comment upon the nature of the institutions doing the safeguarding. But while Miller’s story illustrated his conflicting views on the Catholic Church, Asimov’s Foundation contains very little ambivalence upon its eponymous institution, perhaps in part because Asimov himself had no allegiances to religious institutions (he was a Humanist), and while Foundation‘s view of human nature may have been somewhat cynical, it was paradoxically complimentary, a tribute to the ability of enlightened individuals to preserve societal good from self-destruction.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Singularity Sky is one of Charlie Stross’ first and most famous works, and therefore predates the other books of his that I have read—namely Accelerando and Halting State. If the two, Singularity Sky more closely resembles the former, being something of a treatise on the economic, political, and cultural effects of a point when technology essentially makes humanity part of a post-scarcity economic; Halting State, by contrast, was a narrower work looking more immediately into our future.

Accelerando was, I think, technologically oriented, taking the reader to the further reaches of the technically possible and back again, with all the ramifications of said technology being simply assumed, alluded to, or—at best—covered briefly. Singularity Sky strikes me as more of a political or cultural commentary made possible in the context of fantastic futuristic technology, or in other words a more classical science fiction novel along the lines of Heinlein.

By way of plot setup, the rapid expanse of both technology and population on Earth led to a singularity and the arrival of a power post-human intelligence called Eschaton, which scattered humanity throughout the galaxy, and whose only basic rule is that you cannot violate causality. In other words, any civilization that attempts to travel back into its own past will be stopped, somehow, by Eschaton, even if that means obliterating the entire civilization.

One far-flung colony on which the story focuses is the New Republic, and essentially a transplant of pre-Soviet Russia, right down to the serfdom, Russian names, and fomenting Marxist resistance movement. The colony is comprised mostly of Luddites who consciously rejected that technology that came with Eschaton (i.e. no economic scarcity) in favoring of regaining the “old ways”. The irony, of course, is that in the course of reestablishing tradition, they also reintroduce death, destruction, and misery for a goodly portion of the population. As we open, a planet called Rochard’s World is visited by a roving band of “infovores” known as Festival: basically, a giant space-faring hard-drive with the uploaded consciousnesses of past civilizations that seeks new information (“Entertain us” with stories, they tell colonists) in exchange for pretty much whatever the colonists want, including Cornucopiae Machines, which are powerful matter generators much like the replicators of the Star Trek universe. This generosity is seized on by the Marxist revolutionaries, who with this new information and technology manage to overthrow the planet’s government….. with the help of an artificial technological singularity occurring within the span of a month. Basically, Rochard’s World is put into the technological and cultural equivalent of a meat grinder.

Meanwhile, our two protagonists are a spy named Martin Springfield and a spy named Rachel Mansour end up on a New Republic ship which attempts to break interplanetary (and Eschaton) law by used closed time-like curves to travel into its own past to arrive at Rochard’s World before the festival gets there. I need hardly tell you that chaos ensues, as well as some romantic subplots.

Aside from the interactions of our heroes, there are a number of themes in the book, all of which are interesting and, I would argue, more important than the character-centric plot (typical Strosser).

The Singularity

A fixture of Stross’ more far-out works is the concept of a singularity, usually of the technological sort but of other varieties as well. Briefly put, a singularity is a point at which recursive self-improvement has made progress so fast as to be unimaginable to us today. The singularity-as-imminent-event meme is most closely associated with the crackpot Ray Kurzweil , but in Stross’ books it tends to refer to a point in time where the collective technological intelligence outpaces collective human intelligence, and by extension the idea of scarcity of information becomes an antiquated notion.

Though Stross may or may not label himself (unlikely) or his books (more likely) as “futurist”, that tendency appears to me in his books. The growth and spread of information is little more than a function of time and energy: hence the inevitability of technological singularities in these worlds. Since the arrival of a singularity also ushered in an era when technological made the whole idea of economic scarcity a laughable one, you could argue that this represents an “economic singularity” as well, in the fast-flowing parlance of Stross’ world.

“Information wants to be free”

Some editions of Singularity Sky include the tagline “Information wants to be free”, the famous half-quote by Stewart Brand, the full text of which is “Information wants to be expensive[.] On the other hand, information wants to be free”. A recurring theme of this book is that information and by extension progress are inexorable: the conflict between the neo-luddite/monarchist New Republic and the post-singularity transhuman culture that contacts them is utterly devastating for the status quo of the former, and our spy heroes are world-weary enough to realize this, exasperated not only by the provincial mindset of the New Republicans (whose various martial bumblings comprise an entire subplot), but their apparent inability to understand that one can no more avoid change than one can avoid breathing. Information is, by whatever mechanism, the phlogiston of said change, providing its vital energies.

In this respect, Singularity Sky, like other books by Stross, contains no real heroes in the traditional sense. Generally speaking, any “protagonist” in such a book is not a virtuous, heroic person (though they may have these qualities), but rather someone cynical enough to realize the indefatigable push of information to spoil our conservatism. Similarly, the young secret policeman, Vasily, is not evil just because he’s a member of the secret police of a repressive dictatorship, but rather because he is patently unable to accept that his chosen beliefs about the nature of technology and cultural do not match either what is common or what is possible.

The Good, The Bad, and the Causal

In fact, it would be difficult to describe “good” and “bad” in this post-singularity world. Stross indicates that only provincial planets such as the New Republican still maintain a religion (a Bible-based one, by the look of it), and that the rest of the galaxy has largely given it up. The Eschaton, the transhuman consciousness I mentioned earlier, disseminated this message after scattering humans across the galaxy:

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

It was a message that some took, despite its explicit denials, to be from God-with-a-capital-G; others, more pragmatic, assumed it to be a post-human entity from this future which took advantage of time travel. In order to maintain its power, it kills or otherwise dissuades any other civilization looking to use time travel, and by these methods maintains its superiority.

One could go so far as to say that the issue of causality is the central theme of the book—that is, technological progress is what it is, but violating causality has the potential for disastrous consequences, either because the Eschaton obliterates your planet with an asteroid, or because you temporal meddling rips apart the fabric of spacetime. It’s an overall great book; it’s clear that Stross’ talent for pacing has improved since he wrote this book (his first real novel), but even for a debut work, it’s an impressive bit of hard sci-fi.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

In a sort of theme of futuristic sci-fi war dystopias (see Ender’s Game and Old Man’s War), I’ve decided to read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. It’s a famous book, and over 35 years old at this point. It’s most commonly compared to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but that’s a rather facile comparison, especially today when we all know better.

Last year, the movie District 9 came out to great acclaim; the most common complaint was that its symbolism (hint: it’s an allegory for apartheid) was too ham-fisted and obvious. The Forever War is a little like that, except instead of apartheid, the book is an allegory for the Vietnam War, and most particularly the reacclimation of those who fought in it to post-war civilian life.

The story follows William Mandella, an exceptionally bright physics major who is conscripted into service in the United Nations Exploratory Force, a space-going organization turned war machine when a mysterious alien race they call the Taurans attacks several human vessels. After a rigorous basic training in icy Minnesota, Mandella and the rest of the first round of recruits is further trained on a planet called Charon, where a good portion of them are killed in the dangerous terrain.

What comes next is the narrative crux of the mission: Mandella and his fellow soldiers are sent via collapsars to distant parts of the galaxy; the benefit of the collapsars is that they are able to transport people at almost c, the speed of light. The downside is that traveling at such a speed generates relativistic effects, and by the time Mandella returns home after the battle (in which the humans obliterated a confused and spastic Tauran “army”), a decade has passed on earth, even though it’s been a mere two years from Mandella’s perspective. Imagine his surprise to find that the world no longer exists as he remembers it: after a number of political upheavals, famines, and other nasty business, homosexuality is officially encouraged by the government in order to reduce overpopulation, universal currency is now food (or a kind of “food allowance” that can be traded, etc.), and all sorts of small but important cultural reference points have shifted.

By now, it should be obvious what Haldeman is doing; namely, he’s drawing parallels between the alienation of returning Vietnam vets after a year or two away and the alienation of these future soldiers after a more damning ten years away. I must admit, it’s a rather clever narrative device, not least of which because time dilation is a fascinating concept (and critically underexplored/underexplained in the novel, might I add). I first saw it used in Dafydd ab Hugh’s Endgame, and it’s a ready-made way to introduce technological conflict into any story that includes near-c space travel.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive of Haldeman’s symbolism: remember that The Forever War was written in 1974, when the folly of our treatment of vets wasn’t the foregone conclusion that it is to readers a quarter century later. It was somewhat ballsy, and not a little prescient, considering that veterans in just about every era (including those of our current war in the Persian Gulf) face these psychological problems, but it’s even more difficult with a war (or “conflict”) as poorly-understood and fractious as our incursion into southeast Asia. In reality, Haldeman’s treatment of the subject was well done, as was his technological base. Even early on, I was impressed by the care the author showed for getting his science right, or at least plausible: in Mandella’s early training on Charon, a constant danger was falling in one’s suit, since any contact of the heat radiator fins of the suit with the prevalent liquid hydrogen would cause a large explosion. Haldeman’s attention to detail in explaining this phenomenon—and likewise to other science topics, like the time dilation—was satisfying to a fan of hard science fiction like myself.

The book doesn’t end with Mandella’s first return to earth after 10 years; in fact, Mandella’s stint with UNEF lasts for close to a thousand years from the perspective of Earth, which is not only a little mind-boggling from a personal perspective, but must be a bear to coordinate logistically. By this point, the “time dilation qua shell-shock” point would be exaggerated, but by the end of the book, Haldeman avoids belaboring such a point, instead wrapping up the plot with a somewhat predictable but decent ending that’s both satisfying and a little melancholy. It is a bit reminiscent of Ender’s Game (or vice-versa, actually, since The Forever War was published first), but less hawkish, ultimately more concerned with the ethics of technology than the ethics of warfare. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that the war it describes is a peripheral narrative: though it commands the attention of UNEF for a millennium, readers will become aware that its folly is self-evident. Far more interesting are the speculative changes wrought by another thousand years of human progression, which I won’t spoil by divulging here. Needless to say, I think Haldeman’s eye for culture is what engenders—or what should engender—the frequent and cloying comparisons to Starship Troopers.