Dressed from head to toe in a vibrant red uniform with gleaming gold buttons, hands defiantly on hips, legs spread wide, the bellboy perfectly captures the tension, seen throughout the exhibition “Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys,” between personal dignity and professional subservience. A Russian émigré and the son of a poor Jewish tailor, Soutine rarely gave his portraits titles (hence the generic ones provided here), let alone bothered to note the names of his sitters. And yet he is known for posing his anonymous subjects like the royalty of yore: the bellboy’s regal red livery is reminiscent of ceremonial dress; and a pastry cook, his fluffed-up white cap perched on his head like a bejeweled crown, sits resplendent in a kitchen chair like a monarch on his throne.
Books
‘My Only Friend Is My Conscience’: Face to Face With El Salvador’s Cold Killer
Talking about the civil war was futile with Ochoa. A rambling discussion of Vietnam and ancient Rome, and Putin, Napoleon, and General MacArthur (three of his idols) was peppered with bald, personal pronouncements. When I brought up the theft of CIA documents again, he leaned back and looked at me for the first time with an expression of hostility. Five months later, the Salvadoran Supreme Court declared the country’s amnesty law unconstitutional. With the amnesty law lifted, a judge had recently agreed to hear a human rights case against Ochoa, and the colonel was said to be retaining counsel.
A Failure of Vision
Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article was originally published on December 7, 2016.
The battered and scorched Nevada lay aground to one side. Ahead, the Arizona still burned wildly. All day, workmen had swarmed the exposed keel of the turned-turtle Oklahoma, trying to cut holes. Hundreds of sailors, living and dead, remained encased in her, the living tapping for help, running out of air. The harbor reeked of smoke and fuel, and defeat.
— from Steve Twomey’s Countdown to Pearl Harbor
Seventy-six years later, the moment-by-moment, witness-by-witness accounts of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor have lost none of their power, and the images of the vaunted Pacific Fleet in ruins still summon horror on the scale of Greek tragedy. Some 2,400 were killed that morning; today, about the same number of Pearl Harbor veterans are still alive, and many of them, along with their families, will be present at this year’s commemoration events in Hawaii, to honor and be honored.
In A Matter of Honor, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan say that the story of Pearl Harbor is not only one of large-scale hubris and small-scale heroism but “Betrayal, Blame, and a Family’s Quest for Justice.” As blame foretold, that story began in the first minutes of the Japanese attack with Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, watching the devastation in anguish:
So close are the enemy planes that the watchers at headquarters can from time to time see an “exultant look on the faces of the Japanese pilots as they dive past our window. We worry about the Admiral exposing himself.” They worry with good reason. Marine Colonel Omar Pfeiffer will recall the “slight ping as a spent and tumbling 50-caliber bullet breaks through the window glass and strikes Admiral Kimmel on the left breast, in the area where the service ribbons are usually worn.” But for a bruise on his chest — the Admiral has been protected by the eyeglass case in his uniform jacket pocket — Kimmel is unhurt. Glancing down at the bullet on the floor, according to communications officer Maurice Curts, Kimmel says quietly, “Too bad it didn’t kill me.”
Even the eyeglass case seems prescient, for once the immediate shock of the attack was over Pearl Harbor became itself encased in issues of foresight and hindsight — who knew or should have known this, who did or should have done that, who deserves what portion of blame. Kimmel and his immediate subordinate became the primary targets, both of them demoted and humiliated for “dereliction of duty.” In A Matter of Honor, Summers and Swan ask if Kimmel was “a failed commander or a man cynically maligned;” their exhaustive analysis of the facts and testimonies presented in nine separate investigations, and of some newly available documents, demonstrates how Pearl Harbor was the result of systematic unpreparedness and of human error and misjudgment up and down the chain of command. While this convincing exoneration of Kimmel is no doubt encouraging to his family, his grandsons carry on the fight for the official restoration of his naval rank and good name.
Pearl Harbor is not one of the six battles featured in Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century, but military historian Alistair Horne does discuss its precedent, the 1904 Battle of Port Arthur. This surprise attack on the Russian fleet by the Japanese was so similar to Pearl Harbor, and a lesson so ignored by U.S. military command, that an incredulous Commander Fuchida, leader of the Pearl Harbor attack, afterward wondered, “Have these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?” This is the same sort of question being asked again today by those who are warning that a “cyber Pearl Harbor” is all too possible:
Our cyber warriors and, to the extent that they think of cyber war, our national security leaders in general, may take comfort in the fact that we could perhaps see a cyber attack coming. They may think that we could block some of it, and they may believe we could respond in kind, and then some. The reality is that a major cyber attack from another nation is likely to originate in the U.S., so we will not be able to see it coming and block it with the systems we have now or those that are planned . . . The reality may also be that when the U.S. President wants to retaliate further, he will be the one who will have to escalate. (Richard A. Clarke and Robert Knake in Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It)
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A Hero in His Own Words
The theme is an ancient one, fondly nurtured by the Jews for the last two millennia. The Passover Haggadah says it explicitly: “In every generation they come at us to exterminate us, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” Needless to say, the Jews have good reason to recite these sentences once a year. The problem lies not in the historical record that gives them credibility but in the emotional and cultural investment in the idea, or perhaps the romance, of life on the edge of extinction, and in the political consequences of that idea in a generation for which the threat has vastly diminished, perhaps even disappeared.
A Philadelphia Lawyer’s Gilded Age Collection
John G. Johnson’s acquisitiveness and acumen are commemorated on the 100th anniversary of his bequest in “Old Masters Now: Celebrating the Johnson Collection,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As the title of the exhibition implies, Johnson chiefly collected medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque painting, but the glorious eye-opener of the show turns out to be his discerning response to the art of his own time.
Donald Trump’s Brains
A battle for the future of conservatism is in effect being fought between anti-Trump conservatives—those who, like Eliot A. Cohen, David Frum, and Stuart Stevens, see him as a sinister mountebank who is destroying true conservative principles—and pro-Trump conservatives associated with the Claremont Institute, which for years has been discussing the Federalist Papers, the dangers of progressivism, and, above all, the wisdom of the German exile and political philosopher Leo Strauss. For some both in and out of government, the Trump presidency is a deliverance—or at least offers tantalizing promises of an audacious new conservative era in domestic and foreign policy.
Theresa May’s Blue Monday
Britain’s agreement to accept Ireland’s demands over Brexit and the border is an expression of its weakness: it can’t even bully little Ireland anymore. And this would have been bad enough for one day. But there was another humiliation in store. Having backed down, May was then peremptorily informed by her DUP coalition partner that she was not even allowed to back down. It is a scarcely credible position for a once great state to find itself in: its leader does not even have the power to conduct a dignified retreat.
Radio Free Vermont
What good can fiction do? Dust jacket patter says it can take us to new places and introduce us to voices we’d otherwise miss. Neuroscientists insist it can help us develop empathy. Kafka famously said it can take an ax to that frozen sea within us. All noble accomplishments, to be sure — but also abstracted, hard-to-quantify ones. (How much empathy? How many seas?) So what are the concrete things that a novel can accomplish? Can a work of fiction be a meaningful form of activism?
A handful of American novels have roughly answered in the affirmative. There’s no solid proof that Abraham Lincoln actually told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” upon meeting her, but that story, apocryphal or not, exists because Uncle Tom’s Cabin played a critical role in the abolitionist cause. The horrific stockyard scenes in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle helped tighten meat inspection regulations — though it didn’t foment an American socialist uprising, Sinclair’s true hope for the book. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath helped prompt congressional hearings on Dust Bowl migrant camps. Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, was a totemic work for the environmental movement and a direct inspiration for Earth First!, an infamous group of sand-in-the-gears radicals.
All of those novels, critics agree, are unified by the impact they had. But critics generally agree on another thing, too: They’re not especially well written. Exhortations to do things, or earnestly trained spotlights upon a political problem, tend to grate against the matters of careful style and characterization that make for good fiction. Calls to action tend to involve emotional appeals alongside the sober presentation of evidence. That translates to melodrama and reportage — twin daggers to the heart of a novel.
So while it’s a criticism to say that Bill McKibben’s debut novel, Radio Free Vermont, is not a very good work of fiction, it’s also a way to say that it’s a novel that’s part of a long lineage. McKibben is a longtime environmental writer and activist who’s written a stack of nonfiction books sounding warnings about climate and the influence of money and government upon it; along with Al Gore and Naomi Klein, he’s threaded the needle of stating the seriousness of the stakes without being a panic-stricken catastrophist. The very existence of Radio Free Vermont reveals how passionate he is about his cause — he’d write an epic poem in iambic tetrameter on CO2 levels if he thought it’d help get his message over. But he’s also cognizant of how gently he needs to tread. The plot of his novel involves a Vermont secessionist movement stoked by computer hacking and vandalism (in one scene a Walmart is flooded with sewage). But its center is an avuncular seventy-two-year-old radio host named Vern Barclay, who agitates for radical action with avuncular calm. “The towns where we knew each other and looked out for each other weren’t working so well anymore,” he laments on-air, explaining how he got religion on secession.
Vern is assisted in his mission by a young hacker with an encyclopedic knowledge of ’60s Soul and R&B; a fellow old-timer who trains wealthy out-of-towners to respect (and escape) the perils of the state’s wilderness; and an Iraq vet and former Olympic biathlete Vern once trained. Together, the foursome concoct a series of antics ostensibly designed to promote the secessionist cause but, like the encrappening of the Walmart, mostly manifest themselves as anti-corporate counterprogramming. A Coors truck is waylaid and its contents replaced by local microbrews. Vern hacks a Starbucks PA and talks up locally owned coffee shops. Said biathlete goes off-script during the dedication of a sports arena/concert venue to lament how as a soldier “I felt like I was protecting bigness — big oil and big companies who made big money running those wars.” And, also, that “Nickelback really sucks.”
Within such actions, we are meant to believe, are borne the seeds of revolution. (I wrote “C’mon!” a lot in the margins.) To be fair, McKibben means to keep his story light — it’s brief and subtitled A Fable of Resistance. But even by that standard, the story is vapor-thin: Nefarious federals from central casting chase down Vern’s cohort, there is much talk about the fate of Social Security benefits in the sovereign nation of Vermont, and its final plot twist is reminiscent of ’80s teen dramedies where the school principal is revealed saying something super-duper-mean that got caught on tape. Even Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in his blurb for the book, can’t bring himself to wholeheartedly board this train. (“I hope no one secedes, but I also hope . . . “)
Radio Free Vermont‘s flaws reveal just how pronounced the problem of writing an activist novel in the twenty-first century is. How do you write an optimistic, progressive novel in a literary culture steeped in dystopia, where the prevailing mood is failure and collapse? McKibben has not been alone in this struggle — the non-dystopian activist novel has had a rough road in recent years. It is either too much a function of the politics of the moment, which gives it a short shelf life. (Consider Frederic C. Rich’s 2013 novel, Christian Nation, which imagined a Sarah Palin presidency.) Or it re-litigates the past, which blunts its impact. (Sunil Yapa’s 2016 novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, which revisits the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, is a prominent recent example.) As evidence of what stokes activism, and what activism demands, they’re effective enough works. But as stories about people, with a longer view of the errors of history and their aftereffects, they face the same struggles McKibben does.
One seemingly obvious influence on Radio Free Vermont suggests a way forward, though. The novel’s setup strongly evokes The Monkey Wrench Gang, which also involves a quartet of law-flouting radicals who protest the power structure but are mindful not to put anybody in harm’s way. Abbey’s radicals travel across Utah and Arizona pulling out survey stakes, breaking bulldozers, and blowing up (empty) bridges in the name of slowing down the advance of progress and the rough soles of developers’ boots. Story-wise, it’s full of the kind of hokum that’d make Mark Twain blush — impossible escapes, bad puns, sexist banter.
And yet, the driving force of Abbey’s outrage — the wellspring of his activism — is also evident on the page, because he’s never more careful in his prose than when he’s writing about the environment that’s in peril. “The clouds passed, in phrases and paragraphs, like incomprehensible messages of troubling import, overhead across the forested ridges,” he writes in the book. “Above the unscaled cliffs, beyond the uninhabited fields of lonely mesas, followed by their faithful shadows flowing with effortless adaptation over each crack, crevice, crease and crag on the wrinkled skin of the Utahn earth.”
Which is to say, we know what these people are blowing up a bridge for. That kind of breather never arrives in Radio Free Vermont, and as such McKibben can’t clear a fictional path to move us to upend a trashcan in a Costco. More often, the vista that Vern contemplates is a drier political scene. “The U.S. has worked, not perfectly but perfectly well, for a very long time,” he muses. “Trump, true. But we survived Nixon. And Warren Harding. What kind of stunt was it to insist that he’d figured out some better future?” The activist novel will last as long as writers are willing imagine that better future. But it’s also a clumsy, difficult genre that transcends itself, if it ever does, when the novelist places us not just in our current predicament but in the just and fair place we imagine we might someday be.
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Michael Flynn: What We Know, What Mueller Knows
In the efforts to figure out how much damage Flynn’s plea will do to Trump and other senior administration officials, most observers seem to have overlooked one of the few available metrics on the Mueller investigation: the size of his team. While the numbers have fluctuated, Mueller has somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen prosecutors. Thus far, we’ve seen official notice of what just half of them have been up to. Robert Mueller has put only a few of his cards on the table.
In Merkel’s Crisis, Echoes of Weimar
The recent setback to coalition talks in Berlin has heralded Germany’s most intractable political crisis in modern times. The deadlock created after the Free Democratic Party quit talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc and the Greens has left only what the major protagonists have previously ruled out as unacceptable alternatives: for the chancellor to try governing with a parliamentary minority, and for the Social Democrats to agree to enter a “Grand Coalition” once again; or for Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to call new elections. Germany owes its difficulty to the results of September’s election for the Bundestag, in which a party of the nationalist far right won seats for the first time in decades.
Sig Nordal 