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Friday, June 07, 2002 |
Roscoe, by William Kennedy
I just finished reading this new Kennedy novel. I haven't read him before, but he's going to be high on my reading list.
This is the story of Roscoe Conway, who's the chief brain behind a Democratic party machine in Albany NY from the early 20s to the late 40s. The book takes place around VJ Day in 1945, and Roscoe has decided he's going to retire. His plans are thwarted, somewhat, when a crony commits suicide. The machine goes to work, and a bum's body is switched for the crony's, in order to fool the coroner so the death doesn't appear to be a suicide. There's a lot of real stuff in here about the use and abuse of political power on the city/state level (at a time when populations were smaller than they are now). On page 8, there's a long paragraph under the heading "Felix declares his principles to Roscoe," that's an amazing recipe for exercising and holding political power.
This death, and the rekindling of Roscoe's love for the crony's wife, allows Kennedy to present Roscoe's character and career. He does it in a series of flashbacks, and such means as encounters with ghosts (sometimes it's a little challenging to figure out what's going on and what time the author is referring to). The past mixes with the present and they come to a head in the last third of the book, which is dramatic and lyrical. There's an inevitability about the ending that's almost tragic; the abilities and techniques that Roscoe uses are the same ones that will prevent him from attaining what he truly wants.
Kennedy is a great writer; the book requires attention, and repays it. The prose is powerful, the characters really well drawn. It's the first book in a long time that I've been tempted to start reading over again as soon as I finished it.
12:11:02 PM Permalink
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Evils of Access and the Teflon AG
Evils of Access. Did the administration fail to act against real threats because it was preoccupied with a preconceived agenda? By Paul Krugman. [New York Times: Opinion]
[White House Council] Mr. Gonzales is pulling the same trick on energy policy that Dick Cheney has pulled on antiterrorist policy: Respond to real, serious questions about the administration's actions by self-righteously denying charges that nobody is actually making. Nobody has accused the White House of helping Enron when it was down, just as no Democratic leader has accused the administration of deliberately allowing Sept. 11 to happen.
The real questions in both cases are whether the administration failed to act against real threats because it was preoccupied with a preconceived agenda; why officials who manifestly got it wrong have not been held accountable; and whether, because nobody has been held accountable, the administration is continuing to make the same mistakes.
In the same vein, the print edition of the 6/602 Wall Street Journal had an editorial about John Ashcroft, "The Unaccountable Attorney General," that gets to something important: perhaps the real reason Ashcroft missed last summers warnings about 9/11 is that he was too busy pursuing his conservative social agenda:
"One reason, the FBI explains, that it didn't respond last summer to an agent's warnings aobut suspicious acivities at flight schools by Middle Eastern men was a lack of resources. Yet there were enough FBI agents to eavesdrop on New Orleans hookers and their clients."
People are focusing on the FBI problems and blaming Mueller, who had been on the job for seven days. But Ashcroft had been there more than seven months! "The attorney general considered counterterrorism a low priority."
"But as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, John Ashcroft's pre-Sept. 11 agenda was fighting gun control, abortion, state laws permitting assisted suicide or medical marijuana and going after hookers and their clients, not terrorism.
"An attorney general sets a tone: there are many more crimes than crime-catchers...Under Robert F. Kennedy, ambitious U.S. attorneys general or FBI agents zeroed in on organized crime. Under Janet Reono, prosecutions for Meidcate and Medicaid fraud, a cause of hers, soared.... [Ashcroft's] underlings clearly knew that proving that sin and sex were pervasive wouldn't displease the boss. The endless drudgering of monitoring flight schools ws not the path to advancement in Ashcroft's criminal justice system.
"What makes this more galling was the willingness of the Bush camp to blame the Clinton Adminstration...documents show that Ms. Reno, whatever her failings, was far more committed to fighting terrorism than Mr. Ashcroft."
11:25:29 AM Permalink
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Fly Away, Little Book
BookCrossing is a program for labelling books and then leaving them in public places to be found.
- Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
- Register it here (along with your journal comments) get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
- Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in an airliner seatback pocket, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!
This looks like lots of fun. I got at $20 bill the other day with some scrawled message on it, a blessing from Saint Lazarus or something like that. Leaving books around, especially certain books in strategic places, seems kind of subversive.
9:30:42 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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