A voice from the past, describing the present

I came late to the writings of C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was already a major motion picture before I got around to reading the Narnia books. Somewhere along the way, I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, but I'd never even heard that Lewis had dabbled in science fiction until recently, when I found his science fiction trilogy at Costco.

I'm on the third volume now, pictured here, but I had to interrupt my reading to make this post.

Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength in or about 1944. But the words he puts in the mouth of a very bad character, in the course of trying to recruit a naive professor into her evil organization, with just minor adjustments for topics and technology, could easily have been written in the last few months:

"Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us---to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."

"I don't believe you can do that," said Mark. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."

"That shows you're still in the nursery, lovey," said Miss Hardcastle. "Haven't you yet realised that it's the other way around?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything."

"As one of the class you mention," said Mark with a smile, "I just don't believe it."

"Good Lord!" said the Fairy, "where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a threat to the purity of our language. And wasn't the Monarchy an expensive abusurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn't the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."

(That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, ch. 5, pp. 97-98, Scribner Ed. 2024.)

Stealing Justice: A timely, chilling, important read

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sold about a bajillion copies and got made into a Tom Hanks movie, which itself sold about a gazillion tickets.

Everyone read it. You read it. Catholics didn't necessarily tell their pastors that they had read it, except perhaps in Confession. The priests had no doubt read it, too. English teachers also read it. They winced, occasionally, but they kept on reading. The Da Vinci Code wasn't necessarily good literature... it probably won't be on high school reading lists a few generations hence... but, oh my, it was a page-turner.

Stealing Justice, the new book from former Cook County Circuit Court Judge Larry Axelrood, is a rip-roaring page-turner, too. But it's better written than The Da Vinci Code. By rights, it too should sell about a bajillion copies. I hope it does. (The above graphic, gleaned from Facebook, suggests it may be on its way.)

Set in a fictional, but very recognizable, Cook County, Stealing Justice is, in the broadest sense, a story about how even well-intended policies or programs can be hijacked or twisted for criminal purposes unless some people are brave enough to expose the frauds. The reader does not have to believe that anything similar is happening in our own real world in order to get pulled into the plot... and start... and keep... turning pages. To keep turning the pages of The Da Vinci Code, readers did not have to actually believe that Jesus married Mary Magdalene.

In a true page-turner, all the author needs is just a degree -- a smidgen -- of plausibility in order to grab, and hold, the reader. After reading Stealing Justice, probably faster than you intended, you, the reader, will decide for yourself how plausible its premise is.

I finished Stealing Justice a few weeks ago. I've driven by Superdawg and Caldwell Woods many times since; they're in my neighborhood, really. I'm not seeing them the same way recently.

Good books can do that to a reader. Stealing Justice is a good book. It is availabe on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, or through the author's home page.

Book focuses on family formation on the frontier

Born of Lakes and Plains, by University of Oklahoma history professor Anne F. Hyde, looks at five different families, over a period of a couple hundred years, from the late 1600s to the late 1800s, each founded by the union of a Native American woman and a European man. The men were traders and trappers (initially beaver trappers) and the women were, with perhaps varying degrees of personal enthusiasm, but in accordance with their duties to their parents and their cultural norms, helping to cement the loyalty and assistance of the European men for their respective tribes. Born of Lakes and Plains tracks the descendants of these unions as they struggled to perserve their property and their culture.

As with all family stories, if told over such a long stretch of time as is involved here, there are conflicts, triumphs and tragedies, people that seem likable, and people that seem loathsome, heroes and villians both in the same or succeeding generations. In this sense in particular, the scope of the work, trying to keep track of so many for so long, left a lot of seemingly interesting stories untold, or told only in outline form.

Perhaps a lot of effort is wasted trying to convince the reader that connubial contact betweeen cultures, and the families resulting, was normal, frequent, and as necessary to European expansion into tribal territories as the erection of forts and the deployment of troops. Perhaps more necessary.

I suppose that the typical reader may not realize how frequently, left to their own devices, Europeans and tribal peoples mixed and began to forge their own cultures, or adopt, more or less, the culture of one of the parties to the union.

Today's history students have heard of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee and other tribes to Oklahoma from their homes in what is now the American Southeast. They probably don't know that the principal Chief of the Cherokee during this dark chapter in American history, John Ross, was, by 'blood', roughly seven-eighths European. This biographic sketch, on the Oklahoma Historical Society website, does not even mention this. Wikipedia notes that Ross was the son of a Scots trader and a mixed-blood Cherokee woman. Ross's great-grandmother, Ghigooie, was a full-blooded Cherokee; she married William Shorey, a Scottish interpreter. Their daughter Anna, Ross's grandmother, married John McDonald, a Scots trader.

But, because Cherokee society was matrilineal, Ross was considered Cherokee by the Cherokee. This was the case with other tribes also, as Hyde explains in Born of Lakes and Plains. This cultural fact explained how and why persons of mixed-descent could, at least initially, move fairly easily between European and tribal societies.

This changed, in time, as Hyde documents. I thought one story in particular illustrated this: Hyde recounts how one mixed-descent person in one of the families she followed, in the Pacific Northwest, could get elected to local office -- but could not vote for himself because he had been branded an 'Indian.'

I read a book a couple of years back, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, by Jill Lepore, which explored the conflict between Indian tribes and English colonoists in New England in the 1670s (a war that, for a time, seemed as if it might result in the conquest of the not-yet-so-well-established English settlers). It occurred to me then that the war resulted because the ministers of Boston and Salem were alarmed that some of their congregants were 'going native' just as tribal chieftains were getting concerned that their subjects were getting too chummy with the English: Leaders on both sides faced loss of status and their respective subjects mixed and mingled and started creating a distinctly American culture... one in which the existing leaders might not play the central role.

We don't have competing cultures clashing on a frontier in our modern day and age... but we seem to have no end of 'leaders' looking to divide us from our neighbors over issues of identity. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven indeed, as Milton had Lucifer put it in Paradise Lost. But however it may benefit some 'leaders' today, it doesn't help the rest of us one bit.

That process of cultural separation divided some of the families Professor Hyde follows in Born of Lakes and Plains. It virtually destroyed some others. It forced people to choose one world or another -- but both worlds were changed, irrevocably, by the personal choices made by persons in proximity to one another, whether the leaders of those worlds recognized it or not. More than tribal place names survive in our world, too, whether you or I carry any mixed-descent heritage or not, or whether we as a society acknowledge it or not. That's not what Hyde's book is about; she's just providing a foundation for people to realize how much adjacent cultures shared, and for how long. But it's important to realize that foundation exists, and Hyde's book is important for that reason.

A summer reading pleasure from Tom Hanks

You would expect a book by Tom Hanks to be likeable, right?

Becuase Tom Hanks is pretty much likeable in everything he does. And folks like Tom Hanks in return. Maybe not in everthing, but at least in some things.

And he's been in so many.

A League of Their Own is one of my favorites. As a long-suffering White Sox fan, I often need to recall Hanks' declaration in that movie: "There's no crying in baseball!" Some nights I need to recall that several times an inning. Some nights I cry anyway.

I'm a big fan, too, of the movies Hanks made with Meg Ryan, even Joe vs. the Volcano. Imagine: There was once a time when "brain fog" was an obviously laughable diagnosis, not a recognized and dire consequence of long-COVID.

You probably have different favorites by Tom Hanks. That something-for-everyone appeal is no mean feat in our fractured society.

But it was one Tom Hanks movie in particular that made me look forward hopefully to The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, namely, That Thing You Do. Not just because it is a sweet, enjoyable movie, but because Tom Hanks directed that film and wrote it. If he could write a good movie, perhaps he might also write a good book.

And he certainly did. Although, obviously, I hate the book's title.

Who wants to type out The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece 15 times in a book review, right?

But that's about the extent of my criticism of Tom Hanks' new book.

That, and maybe the framing device didn't work well/ got lost or forgotten along the way/ wasn't really necessary.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is a book about the making of a movie and, along the way, about the making of movies generally, about acting and actors, and about history (Hollywood and otherwise). In my view, TMAMMPM rivals David Niven's Bring on the Empty Horses as an insider's guided tour of the Great American Dream Factory. Niven, like Hanks, was more than just an affable leading man; he was heavily involved as a producer during the early years of television. He knew how the business worked. Niven's book was largely first-person stuff, episodes about his interactions with others; only occasionally did he not name names. But, in a very real sense, Niven could probably be most truthful in those stories where he was not naming names.

The auteur at the center of TMAMMPM may have started out as Hanks' alter ego. He shares Hanks' well-documented, weird obsession with typewriters, for example. I don't understand the fascination. I used typewriters back when that was all we could use. In the early days of my practice, I could, when necessary, squeeze five and six letters into three and four spaces with an IBM Selectric. I could do wonders with correcting tape and Wite Out. I learned how to touch type in junior high. I made beer money in undergrad, typing other people's papers at a quarter a page (50 cents if someone was truly desparate) on an old, noisy portable manual typewriter. Allegedly portable. But my battered old typewriter is up in the attic these days, not in a shrine.

However much the writer-producer-director character may have started out as just a stand-in for Hanks in TMAMMPM, I think Hanks found a way to make him and all the other show business characters in the novel into believable, stand-alone characters, while still allowing Hanks to weave in truthful anectdotes, about real people, dishing serious dirt, without naming names, and still staying nice. As perhaps only Tom Hanks can. Tom Hanks knows the modern business from all sides, just as Niven knew the business in his time. Hanks has written, directed, produced, acted... I'd bet he could splice the film if it snapped in the projector; he could probably fix the popcorn machine, too, if necessary. Even in the almost completely fictional world of his novel, Hanks easily persuades you that he is telling you some serious truth -- without (apparently) dumping on anyone.

You may wonder how the first part of the book, about the troubles of a single family in post-WWII California, will fit into the movie-making part. It is not at all obvious. But you will expect that it will happen -- I'm not ruining anything for you by telling you that much -- and you will enjoy how it does.

Everybody likes Tom Hanks. You will like him even more after reading The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.

Today's media can only make us despise one another if we let them

Matt Taibbi covered politics for Rolling Stone for a number of years; the Internet advises that he now is self-publishing his work on Substack.

I saw a chapter of Hate Inc. online (it was in my price range... free) and I thought it so good, and so important, that I actually ordered the book. (OK, so I had a gift card.)

The subtitle of the book is "Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another." And so many of us do -- perhaps without wondering why we do. Didn't we always?

And the answer, of course, is "no." Throughout the course of American history there has never been a shortage of instances of vitriolic, ad hominem attacks and partisan extremism -- but there have also been many instances of persons with strongly held, opposite views who somehow remained friends. There are just a lot fewer examples of such persons in these turbulent times. (In mourning her passing, the apparently genuine friendship between the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia has been frequently cited... often with seeming astonishment.) A politician from one party could occasionally speak with an officeholder in the other party without either, or both, being denounced as quislings or traitors. Sometimes they could even meet in public.

Taibbi's book addresses how things have changed, and how the media has changed them... and us... all in the craven pursuit of clicks and bucks.

In particular, I submit that Mr. Taibbi is onto something with his 10 Rules of Hate. These are the rules; I encourage all to read the book to see his explanations:

1. There are only two ideas.
2. The two ideas are in permanent conflict.
3. Hate people, not institutions.
4. Everything is someone else's fault.
5. Nothing is everyone's fault.
6. Root, don't think.
7. No switching teams.
8. The other side is literally Hitler.
9. In the fight against Hitler, everything is permitted.
10. Feel superior.

It is difficult to imagine having a civil conversation with someone who has just called you Hitler, or who accuses you of supporting someone who behaves or acts like Hitler. And living in civil society with people who say we are Hitler or with people who we say are Hitler is pretty much unimaginable.

So this trend to extremism is flat-out dangerous. Dangerous to the future of the country, maybe even dangerous to any of us physically in the near term. Such as, for example, on November 4.

But it doesn't have to be this way. We can see how we are being manipulated. And we can refuse to play.

Naturally, I am inclined to believe that anyone reading me is not likely to live in a "silo" or "echo chamber" and has the wit to recognize how we are being played or manipulated by those who serve us "news," even if you had never before heard of the 10 Rules of Hate. You, Dear Reader, rightly disdain the open sewer that is so much of today's Facebook and Twitter -- but I'll bet you know plenty of people who are hopelessly mired in the quicksand of online hatred, fueled by manipulative media. These acquaintances of yours (perhaps persons whom you once called 'friend' in real life, or to whom you are regrettably related by blood or marriage) are probably denouncing paragons of virtue on your side, too, aren't they?

Oh... wait... maybe you might want to read this book first... before you give it to those poor, benighted idiots with whom you sometimes stoop to engage online....