In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.

The Mirage also has a vision of a decidedly more moderate global Islam: is there more we could be doing in politics and popular culture to be supportive of moderate interpretations of Islam?

If you give people freedom of conscience, you’re going to get more moderate versions of religion. It’ll take a while. Part of what drives extreme conservativism in relgiion is people are afraid to voice alternate views…if you can go to jail or be killed for voicing a unorthodox opinion… I don’t see anything incompatible in Islam, as I don’t in Christianity, with gay rights or women’s rights. It’s more do with people having breathing room.

Similarly, the way we talk about acts of terrorism committed by people inspired by their Christian beliefs is very different than the way we talk about terrorists who are inspired by Islam. Do you think we should be looking more carefully at things like attacks on abortion providers?

I think you always tend to be much more forgiving of the behavior, even the bad behavior, of people you are more familiar and comfortable with. I don’t think it’s an exact parallel, but the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a Christian war would trouble a lot of people. But obviously it was launched by George Bush, who was asked ‘who’s your favorite philosopher?’ in one of the debates, and he said ‘my favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ.’ People are going to assume that anything you do is essentially a Christian act. If you launch a war, even with the best intentions, that kills thousands of people, a lot of people are going to look at that as Christian terrorism.

A lot of it is being able to put yourself in the mindset of people on the receiving end of violence…[When Christians commit violence, people are able to think] ‘they’re bad, but they’re not representative of what Christianity is supposed to be.’ What are you familiar with? Who are your friends? Does the violence affect you and people you care about? And all of that goes into the calculation of what gets labeled terrorism?…Any religion that lasts for more than 1,000 years and flourished in hundreds of different cultures is going ot have to be pretty adaptable to local traditions and is going to have to speak to you in times of peace and times of war…To condemn an entire religion that way, or to do the other thing and say the violence doesn’t count because the real expression is when we’re being nice, that doesn’t work either.

I think part of the problem, too, with a lot of portrayals of Islam on television and in movies, is if you’ve only got one character who is meant to represent the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims, no actor is good enough to capture all that diversity. The only way to represent a religion organically is to having multiple characters practicing the faith each in their own way, and to go about their lives being Muslim. Which was part of what I was after. I didn’t want to have to say, oviously Osama bin Laden is a bad example of Islam. I wanted to be obvious that what sets him apart from other people in the story is he’s a mass murderer.

I’d love to hear how you developed your characters. One of the things I’ve found really frustrating about popular culture is how it’s essentially failed to provide a pushback to the stereotypical depictions of Muslims as terrorists, and how we haven’t had iconic representations of Muslims that are the equivalent of the Cosbys or tropes like the sassy gay best friend to defuse any anxiety people may feel about having Muslims as friends, neighbors, or even intermarrying into their families.

This was originally a pitch for a TV pilot. It came out of a more general desire to tell a story about 9/11 and the U.S. response ot it. I’m a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I wanted to do something like that where you set up a genre universe where along the way you explore these different issues in a metaphorical or a less direct way, as part of telling a really exciting story. The other thing on my wish list was to give a more central role to the Iraqis who were bearing the brunt of the War on Terror, who got committed to sidekick status or not mentioned at all. I wanted to do this more organic portrait of Islam and get away from it as a problem religion. Because I’m also a big science fiction geek, I hit on this idea of turning the world upside down, and not just the geopolitical situation, but even the idea of who the center of the story should be. Who constitues a protagonist. This is a universe wehre not only are Muslims the center of the universe, but when you turn on TV, you’d expect the elite to be an Arab Muslim, you’d expect the Christians to be the sad sidekicks, the people who remind you that, yes the people in the third world are humans too.

I just started putting together the characters. I was creating the classic thriller setup. You’ve got your main character, Mustafa, who has the tragic marriage, but in his case because they have polygamy, he’s got more than one. His loveable sidekick, who is there for comic relief, is Samir…Amal is the scrappy new recruit who’s got to prove herself. That was the core of the story, and I built out from there.

One of the basic rules was that people’s characters would not be fundamentally altered. Osama in Laden would be more a respectable political figure who was doing dastardly things behind the scenes. Originally, Saddam Hussein was going to be more of a recurring character. But it made sense that he would be a gangster. A number of the biopics about Saddam tend to do the same thing, they portray him as the Al Capone. And of course the Muslim war on drugs would be a war on alcohol.

There was the central conceit of the mirage. Apart from being a neat twist that you could build off of [it was a reminder that] your place in history, at the top of the pyramid of power, is not assured. If the world is turned over once, it could turn over again, and you should maybe build your ethics on the idea that you’ll be on the bottom some day or you’ll be in need of mercy…If you took Americans and you put them in a position where they believe they should be at the top, and instead, had been humiliated and put at the bottom, the rage that would evolve from that is probably not that different than the rage that comes out of the Middle East. They’ve been on the receiving end for a long time. Certainly guys like [Ayman al-]Zawahiri are oppressed, they’re mad. The Mirage was part of the way at getting at some of that mindless violence.

Do you think significant culture change is possible? The book is a very funny, pointed warning for folks who think they can alter the course of history and civilizations easily, but I’m not sure that answers the question of whether those world-historical forces can be altered at all?

History is in part a series of human decisions, but it’s also a series of accidents. It’s not so much that we can’t change hsitory or affect it, but we overestimate our ability to do it and to do it quickly. Desire often gets ahead of reason…If you’re happy with the way your society works, it’s natural to assume this is the way it should work for everybody. Something that drives this adventure of we’ll go into Iraq, and take out the dictator, and democracy will flourish, and that’s the end point of history for everybody, that ignores that history works differently for everybody…It’s not that I don’t hope that Iraq and other countries will eventually have a robust democracy. But part of it is having a robust democracy for long enough that people don’t want to return to dictatorship. In America, we haven’t had a king for over 200 years, so if you tried to set up a monarchy, you’d be faced with a collective disbelief of 300 million people. That interia protects us from more obvious forms of despotism.

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough…a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience…Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Then, in the same speech, he apparently voiced some skepticism about whether President Obama should be spending his time reading: “One of the reasons I love Barack Obama as much as I do is that we finally have a real reader in the White House. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s one of us running the U.S. [Although] when I heard he was reading Freedom I thought, ‘Why are you reading a novel? There are important things to be doing!”

Now, I’m obviously a big advocate of having a reader in the White House, both because I think consuming smart culture, whether it’s Freedom or Homeland can provide perspective on both issues and the national mindset, and because I think even presidents need a break. I’ve never particularly understood people who object to presidential leisure, within reasonable limits, of course. The presidency is an incredibly difficult job, probably too large for one person. But if we’re going to have one person do it, that person needs to be saved from burnout and insanity as best as possible, a process that means both vacations and reading things that are not giant briefings with check boxes attached.

On the larger issue of e-readers, I’m not sure I see Franzen’s point. Most e-readers don’t contain the option to alter the words of the text itself, only to highlight, add bookmarks, and marginalia and notes. Having a print copy of a book doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be treated with reverence, as any college student or deeply engaged reader’s marked-up texts can attest. The move from cotton paper to pulp-based paper actually means that our books are less permanent and lasting edifices than they used to be. Digital copies may last longer, and in more pristine condition, than our paperbacks of today do. That doesn’t mean that books can’t be fetish objects, or artwork, of course. But digital can offer its own interactivity, picture quality, etc., and so if you’re just critiquing the form in terms of its permanence, I think Franzen is barking up the wrong tree. The real question should be whether any innovation in the form brings in more readers and gets them to read more books. It’s still early, but research suggests that people who own e-readers are upping their book consumption. From both an economic and an intellectual perspective, that should make Franzen pretty happy.

My male friends are among the most important in my life. The friend I’m most in touch with from high school is a man, who introduced me to action movies and hung out with me after work and at debate team practices. There’s no question my love of campy movies like Starship Troopers and Hackers is a legacy of our friendship, and part of the reason I’m a critic. My best friends in college were the guys I worked on political campaigns with, lived with during my summer in New Haven (contra Flanagan’s domestic ideals, we survived mostly on fried chicken, pancakes, and deeply terrible takeout Chinese), and argued about movies and music with. It wasn’t that I didn’t have female friends — the women I met in college have been critical to my adult life — but there’s no question that these men were formative to my artistic, social, and moral development.

At one point during the interview, Flanagan says, “Girls are hugely interested in boys. That isn’t ever going to change.” But what she — and a lot of the culture she decries — misses is that there are a lot of different ways to be interested in boys. I would hope she’s raising her sons not just to avoid being sexual predators, but to see women as potential friends as well as lovers and wives. And I hope she wouldn’t see their adolescence as failed if they emerged from it with female friends who would last a lifetime instead of having had a bunch of girlfriends.

1. Paradise Lost, John Milton: Sure, this is supposed to be John Milton’s repentance of his republican apostasy, but what if red-blooded American kiddies get confused by the eloquence of that wily creature Satan? That whole “Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good” thing could cause all sorts of kerfuffles and uprisings, like those darn video games my grandson is always playing.

2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens: It’s a short leap from Marquis Evrémonde to Mitt Romney, and we wouldn’t want to invite that comparison, now would we? Darnay is such an avatar of the politics of envy.

3. The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling: This one might be a squeaker. Sure, the hero advocates strongly against the anti-Muggle, Squib, and Mudblood race politics of Voldemort and his cronies. But that Potter kid is awfully disrespectful to the Minister of Magic and forms of authority in general.

5. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card: Pre-teens plotting an overhaul of world government and resisting the efforts of the military that’s recruited them to manipulate them. Total recipe for disaster. Especially now that blogging is an actual thing that kids can do. Nuke this one. And parents, shut down your kids’ Tumblrs just to be safe.

6. The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Paula Danziger and The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, Nat Hentoff: Because the last thing a state that’s cracking down on curriculum needs is sympathetic novels about students who organize to fight a crackdown on curriculum or fighting a book banning, lining up civil libertarians against censorship-minded feminists and African-American students and parents. How will authority survive if challenging it is seen as reasonable? And how can tender-hearted children face the prospect of standing up for themselves and choosing sides in disagreements?

7. Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence, Marion Diane Bauer: Even though gay people, especially teenagers, are at risk of violence and discrimination, it would be far too dangerous to marginalize the people who hate them and to promote a sense of solidarity and mutual support within the community of gay people and straight allies.

8. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie:: God forbid anyone, particularly from a minority group that’s been demonstrably oppressed and damaged by the actions of the United States government, spend any time contemplating their own identity or doing anything other than instantly assimilating without looking back.

9. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood: It’s critically important that we remind girls as early as possible to accept what the state has to say about their fertility without question, and to make clear that there’s never any point at which it would be justified that women break the law to retain control over their own health and bodies.

10. The Hunger Games series, Suzanne Collins: Again, a mixed bag. The heroine’s an awful rebel, but the series as a whole tends to endorse dropping out of the political process rather than continuing to participate in the furtherance of a revolution, so the net effect might be to neutralize those pesky kids.

Shawn Lawrence Otto’s Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America is a fascinating look at the status of science in American society. Otto’s explanation of the climate change denial machine provides a compelling narrative that places the ‘controversy’ in the context of science’s slipping authority vis-a-vis political rhetoric and pseudoscience that passes for fact.  However, the book’s greatest merit lies in the analysis and resulting suggestions for positive reform – an effort that will require the contributions of politicians, scientists, the media, and the general public.

CSW caught up with Otto at the Union of Concerned Scientists Washington, DC, office for a discussion of Fool Me Twice last Thursday, December 1.

“Whenever people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  Wise and famous words from Thomas Jefferson imply troubling questions as the opening line of Otto’s publication.  Are Americans well-informed on important problems facing society?  If we are not well-informed (and even if we are), are we capable of creating and implementing policies to deal with these problems responsibly?  Otto’s book is compelling as it addresses the conflicting opinions on issues that Americans must sort through on a daily basis.

Debates over climate change are just the beginning, yet it is exemplary in that preconceived ideologies and political rhetoric are elevated to the point where they can confront peer-reviewed scientific findings.  And how has this happened? Otto outlines American society’s tumultuous relationship with scientific inquiry since the days of the founding fathers, coming to the conclusion that science has been gradually forced out of political discussion.  “American democracy relies on a plurality of voices representing economic, scientific, and religious perspectives to arrive at balanced public policy,” he maintains. “With the voice of science going silent in our political dialogue, America no longer has that plurality.”

Science has been ghettoized and pushed aside, Otto maintains, absent from policy debates despite the fact that scientific issues have such huge and lasting impacts on American lives. The cause of this unfortunate reality is attributed to an amalgamation of factors, the most prominent of which seem to be the pervasiveness of campaigns, motivated by monetary investment or a conflicting religious ideology, to subvert the value society places on scientific information.  The media’s tendency to seek out conflicting opinions, even opinions that are not scientifically legitimate; scientists’ tendency to operate as though their respective fields are not political; and the general public’s tendency to ignore the importance of science education, all play a part.

Science is political

Though science is not usually thought of as ‘political’, Otto asserts that “science pushes the boundaries of knowledge … pushes us to constantly redefine our ethics and morality, and that is always political.”  He argues that there is a need for scientists to use their expertise and authority to push for policy prescriptions to our societal challenges.  Without their influence, credibility, and authority, there is more room for pseudoscience and vested interests to exert their power, influencing policy in ways that may not be best for the American people as a whole.

But it is no wonder that scientists shy away from delving any further into the political sphere – take, for example, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), who called for the prosecution of respected climate scientists by the Justice Department, attacking the integrity and character of these scientists because his political ideology does not match their findings.  (See what CSW has to say on this matter here).

However, without the scientific community providing expertise and authority in policy prescriptions, anti-science campaigns, driven by conflicts of values (as in evolution) to conflicts of investment and wealth (as in climate change) subvert real scientific knowledge, prevent the implementation of responsible policy, and put the future of our country in jeopardy.

To this end, Otto provides an excellent summary of American political controversy on climate change, and our inability to take any corrective action despite knowledge of the problem since Jim Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony bringing attention to the matter.  We note that Otto references CSW director Rick Piltz’s whistleblower action in 2005 in his first chapter, as part of a concise discussion on anti-science in the Presidential sphere.  “Bush public relations appointees were muzzling scientists at other agencies, or altering scientific information in official agency reports to fit a preconceived ideological agenda,” Otto reports, with reference to a New York Times article detailing the actions of an oil industry lobbyist in the White House environmental office to manipulate goverernment climate research communication.

Beyond this reference, Otto provides a detailed chapter on the climate change denial machine, the contents of which CSW readers will find familiar.  Again, we are presented with the implications of the power of an industry with vested interests to manipulate public discourse on a topic, and push policy in a desired direction despite clear scientific evidence that these actions are neither sustainable nor in the long term public interest.  Scientists didn’t stand a chance.

Otto walks us through the “oft repeated five prong propaganda strategy of cloaking rhetorical arguments in scientific legitimacy in order to affect a desired policy objective.”  The consequences and ‘scandals’ resulting from these attacks are listed in a lengthy but informative narrative, united by the sobering fact that these tactics have so far successfully prevented any substantial federal action to address climate change. Otto explains Bush’s failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol, ‘Climategate’, Foxgate and the (minor) errors found in the IPCC reports, and Attorney General Ken Cucinelli’s crusade against climate scientist Michael Mann as defrauding taxpayers.  Otto then takes us through the failure of cap-and-trade as an originally Republican idea that is now ridiculed as experimenting with the economy, and the rise of proposals for geoengineering solutions such as sulfur aerosol injections – an idea that “is easily the riskiest suggestion in the history of human civilization,” which resembles “taking up a crack habit.”

Otto’s points out in this chapter that the controversy over climate change is exacerbated by the inadequacy of media coverage as an intermediary between scientists and the general public. CSW has long advocated for the need for objectivity (i.e., regard for empirical evidence), but not for neutrality (e.g., fake ‘balance’ of conflicting views without regard for evaluating the merits) in press coverage of science-related stores.  Indeed, Otto maintains that “Americans find themselves in an absurd and dangerous position: in a time when the majority of the world’s leading country’s largest challenges revolve around science, few reporters are covering them from a scientific angle.”

To restore science to a place in the American political realm, Otto contends that citizens must be better informed; that the media must work to connect the public, scientists, and policymakers in an objective, nonpartisan manner.  Scientific education must be improved. And, as he did during the 2008 presidential campaign, Otto advocates for holding a televised ‘science debate’ between the two presidential candidates in the 2012 election.  That could be a most interesting and illuminating event.  It would be an opportunity to push President Obama to engage in some forthright discussion of climate science before a national audience, which he has appeared most reluctant to do, and to go toe-to-toe with whatever ‘skeptic’ the Republicans put up against him.

If Americans are not well-enough informed to successfully tackle issues like climate change, Otto contends that seeing political leaders directly address the issues will foster greater public interest in the topics, help Americans distinguish scientific finding from rhetoric, and encourage our children to devote their education to the subject. “By putting science in its rightful place as an ongoing part of the policy discussion of the nation, parents can become educated in the context in which they are used to taking in information – policy decisions that affect their lives.”

CSW also believes that increasing scientific literacy is a necessary component to solving the political indecision surrounding action on climate change, and will contribute equally positively to the broad array of science-based dilemmas that face our society.  Getting science-based issues to the forefront with a televised debate is a simple yet powerful tool to encourage scientific literacy.  It could contribute to increased citizen involvement and advocacy for the creation of a comprehensive US policy on climate change.

At the conclusion of the book Otto asks, “will we take up the mantle of freedom and leadership that science gave us — the commitment to knowledge over the assertions of ‘but faith or opinion’ that led us to the disquieting idea of equality that is the foundation of our democracy?”  A worthy challenge.

– by Katherine O’Konski, in a Climate Science Watch cross-post

“Practicing yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” Father Gabriele Amorth said this week. Those seemingly “innocuous” Potter books convince kids to believe in black magic, he said. “In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses,” said Amorth. As for yoga, it leads to Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation,” the 86-year-old priest said.

In an odd way, I respect the honesty of this kind of statement, even as I think it’s ludicrous and somewhat paranoid to see the Harry Potter novels as anything other than a reaffirmation of the power of Christian theology. There’s a refreshing honesty in admitting both the power of ideas, and the fact that your doctrine may have trouble competing with other worldviews. I tend to want to be in the scrum, in part because I think well-articulated progressive visions tend to have a pretty good shot at winning the battle of ideas, and because I don’t think those ideas can survive only if they don’t face competition or opposition. But I do respect people who withdraw from the things they consider temptation entirely.

The problem for folks like Amorth is that abstinence, whether from sex or from generation-defining young adult fantasy series, isn’t likely to be a particularly effective pitch. And when you can’t convince people to abstain from culture voluntarily, bans or purges from libraries like the one instituted by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts parish school in 2007, who said he was just instituting a “spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter,” like rules that are meant to avoid exposing children to possible allergens, seem likely to result even if only on a small scale. But if I were a member of the Catholic hierarchy, I look at book bans as a fallback position rather than a victory. There are only so many enclaves you can carve out that are untouched by the larger culture. And settling for enclaves at all is an acknowledgment that your ideas have a limited appeal.

Durham’s second book, a literary novel titled “Walk Through Darkness,” about an escaped slave and the man tracking him, “never made it to the front of the store, really, because it was immediately shelved as an ‘African-American novel.’” Now, “my stuff is being read by more and a wider range of people than it was in the early days.”

Jemisin has been annoyed to learn that her first novel sometimes gets shelved in the same section, which means that readers searching the science fiction and fantasy area can’t find it. “The inherent danger of that section,” she said, “are the ideas that, a) only African-Americans would be interested in it, and b) African-Americans are interested solely because there is something African-American associated with it — usually the writer. I don’t see the novels of white authors who write black characters getting shoved into that section.” This is all the more irksome when, as was the case with her first novel, people assume her narrator is black; Jemisin envisioned the character and her people as similar to the Incas. “Just because I am black,” she said, “does not mean I am always going to write about black characters.”

I’m sympathetic to both sides here. As someone who is interdisciplinary by profession, it can be really useful to have fiction, history, sociology, etc. on similar themes in juxtaposition with each other,though in reality, that’s not really how African-American or Women’s sections in bookstores tend to work. And just putting books next to each other aren’t a guarantee that someone who comes in for a romance novel will leave with that and something like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I also think that shelving situations that create and promote semi-artificial differences in taste aren’t useful. The idea that Jumping the Broom or Waiting to Exhale are so vastly different from The Wedding Planner or Julia Quinn’s novels that they need to be shelved separately is just bizarre, and separating them keeps readers who might like them from coming across things they might not otherwise seek out while browsing. Yes, of course, we also bear responsibility to get up and explore new things if we want to be widely read. But if we can’t count on most people to do that, I think I’d favor putting a greater diversity of things in the average browser’s path.

As a side note, would folks be interested in starting a side reading project that explores fantasy that draws from religious traditions other than Christianity and by non-white authors? I’m going to start Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan this weekend, and while I’ll probably blog it no matter what, if folks wanted to read it specifically for discussion in a few weeks, I’d be more than game to set up something like the Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project or the book club.

Or you can go even deeper (and weirder) and read Distraction, Bruce Sterling’s wildly entertaining and spookily prescient 1998 satire of American society in 2044. The book begins with our protagonist, political operative Oscar Valparaiso, trying to understand a video that shows a group of seemingly uncoordinated people showing up in a town and working together to demolish a bank in just a few minutes. (Sterling was describing a political flash mob five years before the term “flash mob” was even coined.) Throughout the course of the book, Oscar comes to understand the power of social-network political action and its implications for American democracy.

Oscar and his campaign crew — having just won a U.S. Senate election and now at loose ends — cross over into Texas from Lousiana, where they’re stopped by members of the nearby Air Force base for “voluntary contributions” to their “Air Force bake sale,” because the federal government’s budget crisis is so bad it’s unclear whether the base is being funded any more:

It had never occured to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the same grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus cause large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.

The American economy collapsed years before the book takes place, with a vast divide between the moneyed elite and nearly everyone else, whose abilities have been made economically obsolescent by computing technology, international competition, and the demise of intellectual property. In one exchange, the campaign bus driver tries to explain to Oscar that the forgotten Americans are figuring out how to “make their own lives by themselves”:

“Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’t make any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

“A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

“Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

And this is only one piece of Distraction‘s complex, silly, and dark world, which involves a war-time romance between Oscar and the brilliant neuroscientist Greta Penninger, whom he helps take over a scientific research facility on the budget chopping block as she works on remapping cognition. They then have to defend the facility from the takeover attempts of the insane governor of Louisiana, who is trying to save his state’s people as global warming puts it underwater. Meanwhile, the President is waging war against the Netherlands, and the senator Oscar elected, an eco-architecture billionaire, becomes mentally ill after conducting a hunger strike with all of his vital signs monitored by millions over the Internet.

Sterling’s extrapolations from 1998 into the near-distant future verge on the absurd, but it’s the absurdity of a world changing faster than most people can adapt, one where reputation on social networks can translate into real political power, where it’s hard to tell if things are working great or broken beyond repair. In other words, it’s a lot like the world we live in today.

Without mentioning him by name, Gingrich took what appeared to be a jab at Perry’s flip-flop, telling the Florida Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando today, “I actually believe all the words that I wrote that are in my book.” Watch it:

Gignrich emphasized the words “I wrote” in his quip, insinuating, as some have rumored, that his rival didn’t write his book. Conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin alleged last week that Perry didn’t write an op-ed that bore his named in the Wall Street Journal. Of course, most political books are ghost-written to some degree, but Perry has displayed an unusual level of ignorance about what’s contained in Fed Up!

As for Gingrich’s own books, of which he has written dozens, he recently published one arguing that President Obama poses a Hitler-like threat.

And it looks like Beautiful Boy will be focused more on the aftermath of the shooting and how the killer’s families come to terms both with what he’s done and with their memories of him:

While I think both of these movies may be psychologically useful for audiences, but I’m not sure what their use is—or really any attempt to understand why someone does something like this—in trying to make sure that spree killings happen with less frequency. There are obvious and valuable policy lessons we can take away from these shootings, whether they happen in an Arizona parking lot or rural Virginia campus, about the availability of automatic weapons and ammunition and about how hard it is to get quality and sustained mental health care at a reasonable cost. But we’re not ever going to unlock a motivational key that will keep anyone from ever wanting to commit murder on this scale again.

This is exactly why I think Kings‘ depiction of health care reform is so important, why Tamora Pierce’s integration of dual responsibility for birth control into her fantasy novels matters so much. There’s something so audacious about just presenting the world the way you want it to be, about letting your readers, or your viewers, draw their own conclusions about what it would be like to live in a world with effective herbal male contraceptives, or where environmental stewardship was a form of religious worship. Imagination is key fuel to hope. I’m not saying Avatar‘s going to spur a massive global environmental movement. But making progressive values aspirational through art is important, long-term work.

I asked folks for recommendations about a book to read on the wars in Congo, and basically everyone told me to read Jason Stearns’ new Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. And it is, indeed, a tremendous book. This is a very complicated, largely unfamiliar subject that’s basically off the radar of the American media and he’s managed to produce a genuinely readable and engrossing account. To the extent that it’s possible to breeze through a book about a years-long bloody civil war I breezed right through it. Stearns’ central conceit, I would say, is an effort to sort of “normalize” discourse about the issue. Many important historical events have involved bloody military conflict and bloody military conflict often features atrocities. But when we talk about Napoleon or the 30 Years’ War or whatever else we typically frame these events as important high-stakes political conflicts and not just series of atrocities.

Near the end he critiques some of the Congo-related advocacy efforts in a way that I think reveals his project:

These advocacy efforts have also, however, had unintended effects. They reinforce the impression that the Congo is filled with wanton savages, crazed by power and greed. This view, by focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and from the reasons behind the bloodshed. If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict. We are returned to Joseph Conrad’s notion that the Congo takes you to the heart of darkness, an inscrutable and unimprovable mess. If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.

In a slightly refreshing way, this is the only mention of Heart Of Darkness that occurs in the book, a clear contrast with Michela Wrong’s also excellent In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo which directly highlights the Conradian madness element

Interesting reviews here, here, and brief recommendation here. Stearns’ blog is here.

Esther Duflo won the John Bates Clark medal last year for her work on development economics, so I was excited to read her new book with Abhijit Banerjee Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. It’s a good book. It doesn’t really contain a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty, but it does try to cut past lame debates over whether or not foreign aid “works” to instead attempt to find ways to actually assess which programs are working, which aren’t, and how to improve those that don’t. The book is structured around a set of questions, which are answered with a mix of illustrative anecdotes and randomized control trials of different anti-poverty interventions.

I suppose the RCT methodology is, itself, supposed to be the radical new way to fight poverty, but of course it’s not. It’s a way of assessing anti-poverty interventions. It doesn’t actually fight poverty. And even though bringing additional rigor to the subject is welcome, it hardly makes all difficulties melt away. For one thing, it’s very difficult to know how generalizable the results of any given RCT are. Is a really good experiment in Kenyan farming villages telling us something about Kenya? Something about a particular set of crops? Something about Africa? Something about a specific set of climactic conditions? It’s difficult to know. But this passage near the end about the importance of patient diligent work struck me as convincing:

We also have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world—elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepreneurs—in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day.

And the book is just full of striking factoids, for example this:

We have started including the question “What are your ambitions for your children?” in surveys given to poor people around the world. The results are striking. Everywhere we have asked, the most common dream of the poor is that their children become government workers. Among very poor households in Udaipur, for example, 34 percent of the parents would like to see their son become a government teacher and another 41 percent want him to have a nonteaching government job; 18 percent more want him to be a salaried employee in a private firm. For girls, 31 percent would like her to be a teacher, 31 percent would want her to have another kind of government job, and 19 percent want her to be a nurse. The poor don’t see becoming an entrepreneur as something to aspire to.

What the very poor want, overwhelmingly, is a job where you show up, do as you’re told, and get a guaranteed paycheck at the end. Given the fact that the prospects for government employment are always limited, I assume this explains a lot of the appeal of super low wage sweatshop work when it becomes available in poor countries. Evidently agricultural labor and informal work, even if “entrepreneurial,” is something most of the global poor really hate doing.