One of the more irritating aspects of Ian McEwan's novel, Saturday (which I discussed last Saturday), was the rather overblown meditations of the protagonist, Henry Perowne, on the fragility of Western civilization in the face of fundamentalist terror. As he drives through the London streets, he can't help but think that this affluent tranquility could be wrenched apart by a suicide bomber.

Perhaps London is slightly closer than Dublin to the frontline in The War on Terror (apparently called TWOT in Washington circles), but do many people share this unshakeable sense that we're on the edge of a chasm? From my perspective, the world seems immeasurably safer now that humanity has removed the loaded revolver from its mouth with the end of the Cold War. (People my age, people in their thirties, can easily bore you with their teenage nuclear angst, the dreams of mushroom clouds, the fascination with civil defense films, etc.). Nuclear war, or the prospect of it, was the elephant in the living room we couldn't stop ourselves from pointing at.

And the end of the world was closer than even we thought. Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but how many know about Stanislav Petrov?

According to this report in Mosnews.com, we should be thankful that Petrov was in charge of a Russian Ballistic Missile Early Warning System command and control post in the early hours of September 26, 1983. He was at his post when the system detected a missile being launched from the United States, targeted at the Soviet Union. The situation quickly escalated:

"The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union. The “START” command Petrov was expected to give would have started an irreversible chain reaction in a system geared to launch a counter-strike without human interference."

I'm typing this today because Petrov insisted that the computers were wrong. His actions were particularly clearheaded and courageous given that the Russian military establishment was at that time in the grip of a paranoid theory that the U.S. was planning a preemptive nuclear strike (see this fascinating CIA report on the Soviet "war scare" in the early 1980s). So this glitch appeared at a particularly perilous time.

Since retiring from the military, Petrov was been living "on a tiny pension."* He was just been recognized the Association of World Citizens as “the forgotten hero of our time.”

*The fate of Petrov makes me think of an unremarked feature of the countless World War II documentaries I have watched. Usually the Red Army heroes are interviewed with them wearing a chestful of medals. But it doesn't distract from the slightly shabby flat the veterans now occupy. Meanwhile former members of, say, the Waffen SS are seen in gemütlich surroundings, ample evidence of postwar success.

The extensive, some might say endless, coverage of the Pope's passing has focused on the fortitude of the man facing pain and death. These discussions of the Pontiff's suffering usually include reflections on how faith has provided solace, that the knowledge of an eternal afterlife makes the transient pain bearable. While there's no gainsaying this individual example of courage, I then wonder what you can say about the intellectual demands made upon the atheist approaching death. What resources are needed to deal with the final hours with grace and dignity when you're convinced that they will not be crowned with an afterlife but by simple extinction?

Marilynne Robinson isn't exactly a prolific author. Since 1981 she's published four books: two novels, a book of nonfiction on the nuclear industry in the UK, and a collection of essays. However, her first novel, Housekeeping, is acknowledged as an "American classic." (I'm not sure if that accolade is a guarantor of excellence--I've just finished another soi-disant American masterpiece, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, and found it a work of wildly fluctuating quality*.)

Maintaining her impeccable record, Robinson has just scooped the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her second novel, Gilead. (See here for all winners**). I must admit, even with the kudos granted by the judging panel, I'm not in a rush to approach this novel. A synopsis of its themes offered by the Pulitzer site kicks off with the following:

"In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition."

Now, just as some people feel an almost physical queasiness when presented with tales of space exploration or seafaring (some kind of aesthetic seasickness?), stories concerning the lives of honest folk on the American Plains leave me stone cold. I have a fear that the prose required will be as exciting as the nightlife in Topeka.

Stories recounted by screwed-up Mitteleuropeans are more my style.

*Any novel dealing with the various ragged mental states induced by drink, drugs, and a suicidal mindet has to live up to the gold standard set by Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Exley's novel, mawkish where Lowry manifests palpable despair, seems the work of a tinsmith in comparison.

**I wonder how long it will be before a blogger gets a Pulitzer?

Twenty minutes ago I saw the headline "Author Saul Bellow Dies at 89." Paradoxically, his age and the length of his career* made his demise all the more startling--he seemed like such a fixture in the literary firmament that the issue of his mortality somehow seemed beside the point. But in the days to come I'm sure that famous quote from Humboldt's Gift, the product of Charlie Citrine's anguished philosophizing, will be recycled over and over: "Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything."

So now that Bellow's career is definitively ended, we might be able to start to assess the scope of his legacy. It might seem like a grandiose claim, but you could argue that 150 years from now, assuming novels are still produced and humanity is around to read them, Herzog, his most achieved work, will be as widely circulated as anything by, say, Melville or Flaubert is today.

And who can say I'm wrong? As Bellow's passing pointedly reminds us, none of us will be around to find out.

*His breakthrough work, The Adventures of Augie March was published in 1953--astonishingly, more than half a century ago. Its opening sentence seems to encapsulate the ambition and the arrogance of a writer who's convinced now is the time to take over the running of the store from the Europeans:

"I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent."

In case you feel your accommodation lacks that dignified whiff of slowly decaying paper, the following event in Dublin may answer your needs:

Trinity Secondhand Booksale

The 16th Trinity Secondhand Booksale will commence on Thursday 7th April at 5.30pm in the Exam Hall, Front Square (Admission €3.00). An auction of rare books will be held that evening at 7.00pm. The sale continues on Friday from 10.00 to 6.00pm (Admission free) and on Half Price Saturday from 10.00am to 2.00pm. A clearance auction will be held at 2.15pm, everything must go.

I've heard that for your €3.00 fee you'll be given a glass of plonk. Sounds OK...

An article about the Chinese labour force, of all things, has not just made me further question the ambiguous legacy of John Paul II but the whole relationship between "goodness" on the individual level and well-being on the mass level. The article, which appeared earlier this week in the New York Times, suggested that:

The world's most populous nation, which has powered its stunning economic rise with a cheap and supposedly bottomless pool of migrant labor, is experiencing shortages of about two million workers in Guangdong and Fujian, the two provinces at the heart of China's export-driven economy.

Of course, it's not as if recruiters are trying to lure factory workers with promises of two-week vacations and signing-on bonuses, but in many cases young Chinese workers are beginning to realise that they have a degree of bargaining power. In effect, this means that a percentage is beginning to leave employers who pay rock-bottom sweatshop wages to work for others who pay slightly higher sweatshop wages. For example, some factories in the Guangdong province in the south of the country pay just $50 a month. Workers there are being attracted to outfits in the Yangtze Delta, near Shanghai, which pay $150 a month. Both seem like pitiful wages to a European but you can imagine the lure of a region where you could triple your salary.

This situation has arisen, it's argued, from two interwoven factors. The decades-old economic boom in China is labour-intensive and requires untold millions to staff the new workshop of the world. On the other hand, the one-child policy enforced by Chinese authorities and the general drop in fertility is putting a crimp on the supply of labour.

Most economists and development experts agree that a crucial step in dragging a country out of poverty is to allow women to control their fertility. Less children means the ones that are born get a better deal: better nutrition, better education, and, probably, better jobs. A stable population also means that as the economy expands, individuals get a bigger share of the pie--GDP per capita is the true barometer of prosperity.

The one-child policy was only one of a host of measures introduced by the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997. His "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" allowed elements of capitalism to thrive in designated areas while maintaining firm authoritarian control. When Deng died, I remember there was a lot of debate over the degree of official condolence that should be extended. After all, Deng was responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, not to mention the subjugation of Tibet. Yet according to a quote from journalist Jim Rohwer, that appears in the Wikipedia profile of Deng, "the Dengist reforms of 1979–1994 brought about probably the biggest single improvement in human welfare anywhere at any time."

The dilemma facing anyone who wants to look at world affairs according to some kind of moral framework is how do we view someone who was, for want of a better word, a tyrant yet whose actions produced an overwhelming good? Moreover, how can we approach a man such as Pope John Paul II, widely acknowledged as a "good" man with deep moral values, but whose effect on the temporal well-being of his followers is questionable? After all, although he became an eloquent critic of the barrenness of modern capitalism, the Pope famously clamped down on the liberation theologians in South America, who actually offered a program to challenge the injustices caused by exploitative capitalism. More significantly, his resolute objection to contraception means that poor nations with families that adhere to the church's teachings on family planning are likely to have expanding economies but stagnant GDP per capita.*

Of course, the whole debate could be resolved by a crude application of the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, who famously said "The greatest happiness of the greatest numbers is the foundation of morals and legislation."

In such a context, Tiananmen Square, the policy of fining people who broke the one-child policy, and the general corruption of civic life that comes with a totalitarian system would be balanced by the fact that a great swathe of the Chinese peasantry has been lifted out of primeval poverty.

But the calculus of happiness is more complex than that--how many jobs are worth the end of free elections? Or are abortions of female fetuses (one of the side-effects of a one-child policy) an acceptable price for workers' increased bargaining power?

The only pat answer I can offer at the end of this blog (and what do you expect from a blog?) is that if you are going to change the world profoundly, as Deng did, you are also likely to do some nasty things that will make your funeral commemoration an uncomfortable affair. If on the other hand, you symbolize the values and practices that many aspire to but few actually live up, like Pope John Paul II, you will most likely be acclaimed as a modern-day saint in the wake of your death.

*However, if you look at the charts for children born per woman, most of the nations considered Catholic have levels only slightly above or below the replacement rate of 2.1. Brazil, the largest "Catholic nation", has a rate of 1.97 (Ireland's is 1.87, high by European standards). This would lead to the conclusion that although the masses appear to listen to the official line in the churches, they are clearly following their own consciences in the bedroom.

In the bookshop the other day I saw a book called Hitler's Piano Player. While I don't doubt that the book is well researched etc., the title alone seemed like an unintentional satirical jibe at the Hitler industry. In a few years (unless they've already appeared of course), the barrel will doubtlessly be further scraped as the accounts of Hitler's masseuse, barber, and personal cook are given book-length treatments. In terms of entourage, the Führer even puts Elvis in the shade.

Of course any tangentially relevant scribble would be gratefully received by Jack Gladney, protagonist of Don DeLillo's great 1980s novel White Noise and founder of North America's first program in Hitler Studies. Some of the laugh-out-loud passages concern Gladney's flailing attempts to speed-learn German before he hosts an international conference on his area of expertise:

"We advanced to three lessons a week. He [Gladney's teacher] seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls and windows--items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once he reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before."

I've come across a site (via Rake's Progress) that provides some interesting annotations (well, interesting if you're interested in writing) on the opening page of perhaps DeLillo's best work. Apparently he initially wanted to call the book "Panasonic" (not a bad name) but the Matsushita Corporation had an issue with it.

There's a pretty nausea-inducing article about the influence of the super-rich in the recent edition of New York magazine (not to be confused with The New Yorker, which usually affects a patrician disdain for the discussion of moolah). Anyway the gist of the obsequious piece is that the ultra rich may provoke envy, may be crooked, and drive property prices into the stratosphere, but they're shedding so much cash that entire industries have grown up to meet their tastes. Among these remoras attaching themselves to the sharks are a whole class of waiters, art dealers, private tutors, and general gophers. (There's an anecdote—maybe apocryphal?—of the directors of a major hedge fund sending their shoeshine man off to retirement with a $1 million bonus. Shades of Bonfire of the Vanities.)

What was really revealing—and perhaps consoling to 99.9% of the populace who do not fall into the category of ultrarich—was a sidebar that drools over the items that facilitate conspicuous consumption. Even if you had cash to burn, would your moral sense (assuming you still had one) not quail at forking out for these ludicrous items? Two caught my attention:

Hot Dog--$19
Old Homestead Steakhouse’s twelve-inch dog is made of Kobe-style chuck (the rear end of a Texan cow that’s been artificially inseminated by a Japanese bull) and served with Kobe-style beef chili, Vidalia onions, bell peppers, and melted Cheshire cheddar sauce—no additives or nitrates. The eleven-inch roll is made from an old-fashioned recipe by Tom Cat Bakery.

A gourmet hotdog? Doesn't that miss the point?

Powder Brush $375
Only 150 of these Botan brushes were made for the United States; ten found their way to Shu Uemura’s New York store. Just two a day are crafted from black Japanese goat hair by a septuagenarian in Osaka.

Even a veteran satirist would be hard-pressed to come up with that last detail--the hardworking Osakan septuagenarian artisan threading goathair.

James Howard Kunstler is an entertainingly cranky writer based in the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs. He is inordinately fond of the adjective 'necrotic' when describing the contemporary American landscape, he maintains a blog with the somewhat no-holds-barred title of Clusterfuck Nation, and has just written a book that predicts that many of his fellow countrymen will be forced this century to return to a way of living not too far removed from the hardscrabble existence of the sharecropper.

In The Long Emergency, an extract of which is available on the Rolling Stone site, Kunstler envisions a future in which peak production of oil has come and gone. With the end of cheap oil, the whole infrastructure supporting the American way of life--increasingly the world's way of life--will come to an messy end. Suburbia, out-of-town malls, cheap air travel, and industrial-scale agriculture are all likely to go the way of the Dodo.

Conjuring up scenarios that make a J.G. Ballard novel seem like a futurist think-piece commissioned by Shell, Kunstler's apocalyptic visions are as much a vehicle for his critique of the strip-mall nation as a sober prediction of how the world will look in, say, 2050.

Personally I'm more sanguine (or deluded) about the energy crisis. Mainstream oil experts dismiss the Peak Oil theory, which pops up whenever there's a spike in prices (the current rises are more a product of increased demand and a legacy of decades of underinvestment in exploration and production capacity). The more pressing and less disputed threat from climate change will--if responded to correctly--initiate a new generation of far more efficient vehicles as SUVs are replaced by 100 mpg diesels. These developments, along with the inevitable re-embracing of nuclear energy, could push the oil crunch point out as far as the end of this century! By that stage (he says, increasingly sounding like one of those petroleum-funded "visions of the future" papers mocked earlier), it's possible that nuclear fusion, nanotechnology (creating new fuels at the molecular level), or something not even considered yet will have revolutionized the energy problem.

Anyway, Kunstler would scoff at such Candide-like musings (or techno-hubris as he terms it). According to him, it's only a matter of time before liana vines start to poke through the asphalt of deserted highway ramps.

Regardless, I'll definitely look out for his work when I'm wandering around the aircraft-hanger-sized Border's bookshop when I'm visiting my wife's family in Arizona at the end of this month. Of course, if Kunstler's right, Border's and Arizona (as we know it) mightn't be around much longer.

By the way, Three Monkeys Online, always prescient, features an interview with Kunstler and an article over the debate over "Peak Oil." Both are by Robert Looby and both are worth reading.

Martin McDonagh's play, "The Pillowman," which isn't newly written but is new to Broadway, is receiving rave reviews from a wide range of American critics. I'm dubious about the acclaim. The grounds for my scepticism is slightly shaky—I've only seen one of McDonagh's plays, "The Lonesome West," a few years ago but I was taken aback. Taken aback by the disparity between the hosannas of pious praise and the Cro-Magnon playacting unfolding on stage. Commentators have compared McDonagh's style to J.M.Synge-meets-David Mamet-meets-Quentin Tarantino. But the writers that this work about the violent antics of two brutish brothers actually brought to mind were Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, purveyors of the cheerfully brainless and critically reviled sitcom Bottom.

But such questioning of McDonagh's talent does not get much of an airing in the U.S. press (except in an illuminating review by The Village Voice).

For example, Hilton Als in The New Yorker unashamedly reproduces the following exchange from the “The Beauty Queen of Leenane":

Mag: Wet, Maureen?
Maureen: Of course wet.
Mag: Oh-h . . . I did take me Complan.
Maureen: So you can get it yourself so.
Mag: I can. (Pause) Although lumpy it was, Maureen.
Maureen: Well, can I help lumpy?
Mag: No.
Maureen: Write to the Complan people so, if it’s lumpy.
Mag: (Pause) You do make me Complan nice and smooth. (Pause) Not a lump at all, nor the comrade of a lump.

I suppose your estimation of McDonagh's plays might depend on whether, like Als, you see that "[i]t's the “comrade of a lump” that makes this scene vibrate with McDonagh’s hard poetry" or you look at the above exchange as a ripe slice of fabricated Oirishness.

Someone (St. Fintan O'Toole of D'Olier Street?) recently pointed out that the paradox of Pope John Paul II's reign was that he was a fierce anti-Communist who kept control over his organization with a grip that would put General Jaruzelski to shame*.

To flog the slightly divisive comparison, I wonder if, with the election of Pope Benedict XVI, we got the Church's answer to Andropov when everyone was hoping for a Gorbachev?

Then again, since most Russians blame Gorby for the ruination of their country, perhaps the conclave was thinking about the havoc reformers can wreak.

*Five minutes later, I found the relevant quote (via Slugger O'Toole):

"Above all, he despised and crushed internal dissent. Though the language he used was different, his alarm at deviationism and his insistence on adherence to the party line mirrored the Stalinist culture in which he operated for so long. His mixture of idealism and authoritarianism would have made him a brilliant boss of the Polish CP."

It will probably be a few days until my next posting--as I think I mentioned earlier, I'm off to visit my wife's family (well, now mine as well) in Arizona.

It will probably do no harm to be away from a warm laptop for a few days. Aside from what damage having a mildly radioactive device perched above my groin might be doing*, I think I'm starting to suffer some form of Internet-induced ADD. With the Internet always on, whenever a discussion or name on the radio or TV momentarily attracts my attention ("Oh, I forgot about him!"), in goes the relevant text string into Google. Once into the infinite matrix of hyperlinks, you can skip from page to page, superficially absorbing knowledge but in reality entering a zone of semi-etherized blankness. For hours.

It's only a matter of time before some canny lawyer begins crafting a class action on behalf of an addled group of surfers claiming that their ISP knowingly provided a service that damaged his clients' brainstems.

I'll check in again once the withdrawal symptoms become too strong...

*The following alarming quote is from goodhealthinfo.net: "The liquid-crystal display (LCD) in most laptop screens gives off much less radiation than desktop monitors. However, the hard drive may still be a problem, because, as Blake Levitt points out in Electromagnetic Fields, it rests "literally on the user’s lap at genital level." Yikes.

Well, I succeeded in keeping off the net for three days. The flight to Arizona, which I had been slightly dreading because of fears that my two children would be driven to the point of insanity by 9+ hours on a plane, actually went very smoothly. Both of them (the smug father will let you know) couldn't have been better. The only stress came, not unsurprisingly, as we tried to navigate the chaos at LagosDublin International Airport.

After an EU-led investigation revealed that Dublin Airport Authority was found to be operating a security screening process about as thorough as that run at Moscow's Domodeveo airport, the DAA are indulging in a typically Oirish effort to shut the stable doors after the horses have bolted. The queue to gain entry to the newly revamped theatre that passes for a security zone was stretching right around the airport. What would have been funny if it weren't so infuriating is the way the union lags nominally in charge of this zoo behave like outraged dowagers if you voice a timid complaint about being treated like cattle.

As I tried to find the end of the line, I moaned to a bearded representative in a fluorescent tabard, "Is anyone in charge of this mess?" (It was a strictly rhetorical question--I did not expect a candid negative.) This character almost fluttered his eyelashes as he tried to digest the offensiveness of my remark. "Excuse me," he said, "but I'm helping some passengers here!" This help consisted of nothing more than waving two exhausted-looked sexagenarians to the back of the queue. Having completed this mission of mercy, the employee then briskly told me that, actually, someone was in charge. Unfortunately, he did not reveal the identity of this elusive administrator.

Once we finally hit the screening area, the only real difference I could make out is that everybody was being made take their shoes off. I can't help thinking that this reactive approach to security should be called the "Maginot Line" defense. As any WWII buff can tell you, the French built the Maginot Line along the Franco-German border in the aftermath of WWI in the belief that the next war would be very like the last one. They envisioned a static war of attrition along the lines of the trench warfare that characterized the fighting of 1914-18. Of course, Hans Guderian and his panzer divisions quickly outflanked the Maginot Line by plunging through the supposedly impassable Ardennes, making the line of fortresses somewhat irrelevant to the matter in hand.

Similarly, if al-Qaeda is as fiendishly clever as we are endlessly told, it's unlikely that they would plan a carbon copy of 9/11, never mind recruiting someone like Richard Reed, the gormless shoe-bomber. Even if it were the case that terrorists were going to smuggle a shoe-borne bomb on board, I can't see why getting, say, a pregnant woman from Kinnegad or wherever to slip off her shoes is going to thwart their plans.

Not that the zombies who are supposed to run Dublin Airport care about real security versus the appearance of security. All they're worried about is not being made to look like incompetents again. Unfortunately, being who they are, it's probably only a matter of (a very short) time before that happens again.

The critics gave Kazuo Ishiguro a bit of a mauling over his latest novel, particularly in comparison with the garlands thrown at his fellow writing-course graduate (from the University of East Anglia) Ian McEwan. I happen to prefer Ishiguro's book to Saturday--it's far more imaginatively ambitious for starters. My review is available at the Three Monkeys Online site.

The other day, while I was trumpeting my minor contribution to the most recent issue of Three Monkeys Online, I forget to mention some of the other stuff on the site worth taking a look at. In particular, the mag has somehow managed to wrangle interviews with both Peter Jackson and Naomi Watts, director and star, respectively, of the upcoming King Kong. And Alex Mitchell discusses the lingering influence of the 1970s with novelist Jonathan Coe.