LINKS

I have just finished reading Joe Gormley's book, "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton Vs. Starr."

This book is surely the definitive account of the sad saga in U.S. history known as the Lewinsky scandal. Ken Gormley, a law professor, interviewed almost all the principle players in the drama (including some now deceased) -- President Clinton, Ken Starr and his wife, Lewinsky as well as both her parents, other prosecutors and judges, Linda Tripp, Susan McDougall, Webster Hubbell, Lew Merletti, head of the Secret Service, Henry Hyde and many many others. The only people who apparently declined the opportunity to speak to him were Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

This book is exhaustive and exhausting but ultimately tremendously rewarding. Gormley has a flair for the dramatic. His descriptions of court scenes, the impeachment trial itself, the depositions and other background discussions read as if they come from the pages of a thriller. One knows the end -- but one is still gripped.

This is also a fair book. All of the main characters are given ample time to reflect and their views are fairly recounted. We get Clinton's extensive musings and his perspective years later, but also that of Starr and the other chief prosecutors.

Gormely also explodes a few minor bombshells. We learn that an investigation into the conduct of the Starr prosecutors concluded they had far overstepped their legal bounds in their first interrogation of Monica Lewinsky. They ignored her repeated requests to speak to her lawyer, bludgeoning her with crude threats of 27 years in prison while bringing her to the brink of mental collapse. Republican judges quashed the report and managed to keep it sealed to protect the privacy of the prosecutors who themselves had totally trashed the privacy of their victims.

This was not the only case of prosecutorial misconduct by the Starr team who in general comported themselves like bullies and thugs unbound by legal constraint, trampling over the privacy and rights of their victims while conducting their legal vendetta against the president.

We also learn about the strange and sinister death in prison of Jim McDougall, the rogue that set the Whitewater scandal in motion. McDougall was seriously mentally ill and a substance abuser -- also a crook and serial liar who would say anything to advance himself. But he did not deserve to die in a prison hole of medical neglect from a prison staff that was criminally negligent. His medical file strangely "disappeared" and was never recovered. Years later, a prison psychologist revealed that he had received a strange visit from an official invesigator who threatened him not to reveal what he knew.

None of the characters of this awful saga emerge looking very good. Clinton still refuses to take full responsibility for his serial womanizing, some of which comes across as crude sexual harrasment if not outright abuse. I was angry at Clinton at the time for wasting the opportunity history had given him to be a truly significant president. He was and remains a self-indulgent man with a vast sense of entitlement. Never in this book did I feel remotely sympathetic toward him.

Starr comes over as a sanctimonious, holier-than-thou crusader willing to do anything to bring the president down. Starr had acted as a legal adviser to Paula Jones before being appointed as special prosecutor, giving him a clear conflict of interest. He was clearly motivated by politics. Yet Starr was a "moderate" among the group of far-right zealots he hired as his senior prosecutors.

Lewinsky comes across as a victim. Sure, she made a big mistake but she was just a kid who deluded herself into thinking she was in love with a much older man who ought to have known better. She did not deserve to be hounded, trashed and victimized in the way that she was.

Susan McDougall, who went to jail for 18 months rather than telling Starr what he wanted to hear, is one of the few heroines of the story.

One thing that emerges clearly from this book is that when Hillary Clinton spoke of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to bring down her husband -- words that I had always previously dismissed as political hyperbole -- she was in fact speaking nothing less than the truth. Conservative financiers, judges, newspapers, activists, legislators, publicists, general trouble-makers and prosecutors, all motivated by acute hatred of the 42nd president, combined to bring about this crisis. The author demonstrates that numerous opportunities to settle the case honorably were sabotaged by right-wing extremists determined to press the scandal to a crisis and so depose a twice democratically-elected president.

So what was this all about in the end? Henry Hyde, himself an adulterer, who managed the House of Representatives "case" (if it can be called such) against Clinton took comfort in the fact that "were in not for the impeachment, George W. Bush would not have been elected president" in 2000.

So we can thank Mr. Starr for eight years of Bush, the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina and our massive national debt.

Thanks a lot Ken.

One of the most fascinating documentaries I've seen recently is Mike Lawrence's "Bach and Friends." It's a two-hour compilation of some extraordinary performances coupled with information about the composer's life and times and personal reflections of musicians.

One thing that emerges most clearly from this DVD is how Bach, of all composers, is universal. Play his music on the organ, the violin, the piano, the cello, the clarinet, the banjo, the ukulele, the glass, the human voice - it doesn't matter. It all sounds wonderful as this movie demonstrates.

Why is that, I wonder? There are many other examples of musical transcriptions from one instrument to another of the work of other composers that succeed in their way, although they are always profoundly altered by the transition.

But no other composer, modern or ancient, is so instantly transferable through so many different media. Perhaps it's because of the strict and formal mathematics that underpins Bach's work. Or perhaps it's because his music is so pure that it exists in a realm beyond the specifics of an individual performance on an individual instrument.

The poet William Blake wrote:
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."

This is what Bach does.

The story behind this movie is interesting. Filmmaker Mike Lawrence was a folksinger and a bluegrass banjo player. Until someone loaned him the Swingle Singers first LP, he was unaware of Bach. "The music completely blew me away and I was hooked. I had never heard anything like it before," he wrote me in an email.

It took three years to make the movie which began with no funding and a crew working on spec. Performers like Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, Bobby McFerrin, Richard Stoltzman, Joshua Bell and Hilary Hahn gave their time and talent.

The result is truly uplifting. But the movie also made me worry about the future. Bach's music is highly accessible to those exposed to it - but it also demands a degree of intellectual engagement and concentration from the listener. In these days when we are cutting back on music education and stinting on "culture," Bach and classical music in general is viewed as elitist and irrelevant. And in an era when we are bombarded by stimuli, I wonder whether we can retain the ability to focus.

In a society obsessed with trivia, can we detach ourselves from the constant "noise" of modern living and reconnect with our inner voices, the music of our souls?

I don't worry about kids not learning to play this music. There are always going to be enough of them -- a small minority but enough. Bach is like a drug; once you experience your first high, you always want more. But I do worry about where the audiences of the future will come from.

Someone in the movie mentions that Bach's music was included on some recordings launched into space in 1977 aboard the Voyager spacecraft as representative samples of the highest achievements of human civilization.

It would be ironic if some extraterrestrial civilization far into the future were one day to find these recordings and become entranced by them at a time when they have become forgotten here on Earth.

A visit last week to the New Hampshire State Prison for Women provided an exhilarating as well as a heartbreaking experience. I had been invited to take part in a writer's forum with inmates, many of whom had read two of my books, which a reader had donated to the prison library. They were of course particularly interested in my book about the prison system.

I donated copies copies my other books including my latest novel, which is about an entire population imprisoned by a Communist dictator and its struggle for freedom.

Over 50 of the 140 inmates dressed in red or green T-shirts and blue pants showed up to the forum. They were an attentive, engaged, intelligent and committed audience. In fact, they compared very favorably to the students I encountered at a nearby college, at which I also conducted several classes during my visit to New Hampshire last week.

Despite their tough circumstances, the women who greeted me were for the most part articulate and intelligent. Some wanted to speak about the prison system in general and prospects for reform. I fielded questions about bringing down recidivism rates, lowering prison costs and fixing the parole system. Warden Joanne Fortier encouraged inmates to bring ideas on how to make life within the walls of the facility better for inmates and staff. "We may not be able to carry out some of your ideas and I may not even be able to tell you why we can't -- but you should all know your ideas will find a listening ear in my office," she said.

Other women wanted to talk about the writing process and their own efforts to write. "Sometimes I'm writing and I get too emotional to continue. How do you deal with that?" one asked. I told her to focus on the nuts and bolts of the sentences she was writing and the words she was choosing. Some wanted to use writing to reach out to loved ones. A few had real ambitions and dreams of reaching others through their writing. Yet others wanted to talk about some of the books they were reading and the impact literature had on their lives. They talked about writing down their own experiences and also of retreating into imagination as a way of coping with their circumstances.

For these women who do not have access to the Internet, or to many of the trivial technological ways that Americans now have to amuse themselves, reading and writing play such an immense role in their lives. Many of the rest of us who live in freedom have lost that sense of literature as a medium that still matters.

A high proportion of women in U.S. prisons including this one are victims of sexual, mental and/or physical abuse. Often, this abuse begins in childhood and continues into adulthood. Around 70 percent of inmates have children or their own, being looked after by relatives or in foster care. Some have been in jail for decades and may never be released. They have never seen a webpage or held a cell-phone.

In recent years, the number of women in the U.S. prison system has been rising even faster than among men. According to the Department of Justice's statistical bureau, there were 114,852 women incarcerated at the end of 2008, a 7 percent increase since 2000.

Looking around the room, listening to inmates' comments, feeling their passion, it was impossible not to be impressed by the wasted potential in that room. Yet U.S. prisons generally do a poor job of rehabilitation. Many incarcerated women face poor prospects after their release. Mostly untrained and unskilled, the best many can hope for is a minimum wage job without benefits with few opportunities to advance.

Every one of the women in that room had gone off the rails to some degree or another. A few had committed horrendous crimes. Yet they retained their humanity, their interest in the world, their desire to live a worthwhile life. Such potential. Such a waste.

Labels: books, literature, New Hampshire, prisons, women

My Year of Reading

I'm a dedicated reader as well as a writer. I don't feel comfrotable unless I have a book or two in my bag. About two years ago, I started writing reviews on Amazon for everything I read as well as movies I saw. They are available here. I had the idea that reviewing books would make me concentrate more as I read -- and also perhaps remember more. It partially succeeded but even with the reviews I find many of the books I spent time with did not linger very long in my mind unfortunately.

I thought I would review my overall reading for 2009.
It turns out I read 49 books during the year, of which 31 were fiction and 18 non-fiction.

I seems to have enjoyed the non-fiction more (or at least admired more of these books.) I gave nine non-fiction books the maximum five stars and two more four stars. Among the fiction books I read, only one got five stars while four received four stars. Perhaps I'm more critical when it comes to fiction. Or perhaps I should just choose better books.

Anyway, in case anyone is interested, here's the complete list together with their ratings:
FICTION
Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Halperin *
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver ****
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson ****
Rough Treatment: The 2nd Charles Resnick Mystery by John Harvey **
Personal Days by Ed Park **
City of Refuge by Tom Piazza ****
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood ****
In the Deep Midwinter by Robert Clark ****
My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey **
This Night’s Foul Work by Fred Vargas ****
Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley ***
Flying by Erik Kraft **
A Dead Man in Barcelona by Michael Pearce
The Philosopher’s Apprentice by James Morrow *
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier ***
A Sundial in a Grave: 1610 by Mary Gentle **
We Can Still Be Friends by Kelly Cherry **
Frozen Sun by Stan Jones ****
The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig ***
The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta ***
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro **
Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe ***
The Fruit of Her Hands by Michelle Cameron *****
Legacy by Alan Judd ****
Flower Ney: A Red Princess Mystery by Lisa See ***
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro **
The Good Nanny by Benjamin Cheever **
A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev ***
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke ***
The Secret Fire by Martin Langfield ****
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostrova ***

NON-FICTION
Bomb Scare;The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons by Joseph Cirincione ***
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath by Robert J. Samuelson **
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen ****
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama *****
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptional by A.J Bacevich ***
Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries) by Jared Bernstein *****
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny *****
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins *****
Barack Obama’s America by John Kenneth White ***
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh ***
1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Armine Howarth *****
Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty Two Days that Decided World War II by David Downing ***
A Life in the Balance by Thomas B. Graboys ****
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines by Richard A. Muller *****
Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) by Frank Schaeffer ***
The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez *****
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literary and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges ***
Resurrecting Hebrew by Ilan Stavans **

Labels: books, fiction, non-fiction, reading

Whenever I have a spare half hour, I head for the piano. Recently, I've faced a tough choice: the English Suites or French Suites? Classical music mavens of course know I'm referring to keyboard music written almost 300 years ago by J.S. Bach.

There's nothing particularly English about the six English Suites. They got their name because of an unsubstantiated 19th century claim that they might have been composed for an English nobleman. The six French Suites got their name to distinguish them from the English ones.

Each suite is comprised of several movements based on dances from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. But their main attraction for me, apart from the lovely music, is that I can actually play them - mostly.

I'm not much of a pianist. On my best days, I'd class myself as "fair-to-middling amateur." I can manage some of the Beethoven and Mozart sonatas and bits of Schubert, Schubert and Mendelssohn, even the odd Brahms Intermezzo. Most of Chopin and all of Liszt are beyond me. But if I really practice, I can play the English and French Suites and sound half reasonable.

When I was a kid, I had a childish fantasy of being able to play fiendishly difficult pieces in front of an admiring audience. Nowadays, I know I'm not going to get any better -- but if I play regularly, I don't seem to be getting any worse and that's reward enough at this stage of the game.

The English Suites are the fancier of the two sets. They begin with flashy fast movements that allow me to show off to myself a bit. The French Suites are more intimate. I turn to them when I want to shut away the world.

Playing the piano isn't like any other pursuit I know. You have to concentrate fully on the fingering, the passage you're playing and one coming up next. Lose concentration and you mess up. Time passes quickly. A piece never sounds quite the same twice (at least not when I'm playing).

When I was a teenager, I could lose myself in a book or listen to music with total focus -- but I lost the ability to concentrate with that kind of intensity years ago. Perhaps it's the Internet, or the way we communicate nowadays or multi-tasking or just aging - but it's just become harder to pay proper attention. Whatever I'm doing, there are always distractions and I'm always distracted.

Playing Bach comforts me in other ways as well. Reading the composer's biography, I learned that he was employed for a while as court musician in the chapel of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar. The Duke must have been an important man in his day - but who cares about him now? Later, Bach worked for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen, another bigwig in his day who is basically only remembered because he gave the great composer a job.

That helps put things into perspective. Today's headlines involve politicians, financiers, CEOs, sports heroes, pop stars and all manner of minor league celebs - or wannabe celebs. When I tried to write a tag for the bottom of this piece and typed in the word "Bach," the auto-prompt suggested Michelle Bachman, the Bachelorette and Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber). These are people we won't remember very long -- but Bach has lasted for centuries and he'll certainly endure for centuries more.

The sudden discovery that the United States has a major problem in Yemen reminded me of the brief trip to Sanaa that then-Secretary of State James Baker made on Thanksgiving Day in 1990.

Yemen at that time held a seat on the U.N. Security Council and Baker was trying to mobilize a majority for a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq -- which four months earlier had invaded Kuwait. There seemed little chance of getting the Yemeni vote but Baker needed to be seen approaching every council member (except Cuba) -- and there was the outside possibility Yemen might abstain.

We flew in from Saudi Arabia and the day began with a walking tour of the old city. Many of the merchants in the market had posters of Saddam Hussein prominently displayed but the atmosphere was unthreatening. Still, Baker's security detail was on high alert. Many of the men milling around in the souk wore curved daggers stuck through their belts with richly decorated hilts made from rhinoceros horns or ivory.

In their meeting, Baker warned Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh he was risking $70 million in annual U.S. aid by refusing to cooperate with the United States in the Security Council. But in a press conference after the meeting, Saleh delivered a resounding no to the resolution. By late afternoon, we were on the plane heading back to Jeddah.

Later that month, when the resolution came up for a vote in New York, the Yemeni ambassador spoke first in the debate and vigorously attacked the United States and its allies. In his memoir, The Politics of Diplomacy Baker wrote the following: "I scribbled a quick note to Bob Kimmitt (a senior aide). 'Yemen's permanent rep. just enjoyed about $200 to $250 million worth of applause for that speech'." In a footnote, Baker explained that while Washington's aid amounted to around $70 million, other coalition partners and allies also had assistance programs which would now be affected.)

Looking back, the episode seems illustrative of a particular U.S. mindset during that heady period. The Cold War had just ended and we were the winners. The Soviet Union was collapsing, leaving the United States unchallenged as the sole remaining superpower. When the U.S. administration spoke, it expected to be listened to. A country like Yemen defied Washington at its own peril.

It's easy to criticize with hindsight and I don't mean to criticize the U.S. administration then for failing to foresee what might happen 20 years later. But it seems fair to say that its worldview at that time looked at international relations as something to be carried on primarily between leaders rather than between nations. If Yemen's leaders offended the United States by voting the wrong way in the Security Council, Washington could react by cutting off aid to its people. After all, those people could not possibly ever be a threat to us.

Twenty years ago on Christmas Day, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed after a summary trial. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, anyone can view the highlights of the proceedings on YouTube.

The Ceausescus had ruled Romania with an iron hand, presiding over what had become the most tyrannical regime in Europe. Under their rule, the economy was run into the ground and the country and its unfortunate citizens reduced to penury. Romanians were subjected to pervasive surveillance. Any and all signs of dissent were crushed.

That changed when brave Romanians, first in the western city of Timisoara and then in the capital of Bucharest, defied the regime's tanks and guns and poured into the streets to demand their freedom. (I describe these events in detail in my novel "Romance Language.") After trying in vain to rally the masses while simultaneously ordering the army to crush the revolt using all necessary force, the Ceausescus fled Bucharest by helicopter on December 22. Their first stop was the presidential retreat of Snagov not far from the capital where Ceausecu apparently made several phone calls, trying to assess his options.

Snagov is the site of a beautiful monastery known as the burial place of Vlad Ţepeş, or Vlad the Impaler, a brutal 15th century Wallachian prince who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. The Dracula theme runs strangely through this narrative. Ceausescu regarded Vlad as a national hero, identified with him and marked the 500th anniversary of his death by issuing a commemorative postage stamp. (Interestingly, the United States issued its own 32 cent Dracula stamp in 1997 -- to honor Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian-born actor who portrayed the vampire on Broadway in in an iconic 1931 movie).

On the subject of tainted blood, it should be noted that one of Ceausescus' most invidious legacies to Romania was Europe's worst HIV/AIDS crisis, the leader having refused to accept the existence of the disease for many years and having banned the use of contraceptives.

To resume our story: after a brief stop at Snagov, the Ceausescus took to the air again until the helicopter pilot warned them they might be tracked by radar and shot down. Ceausescu ordered him to land and the aircraft came to ground in a field northwest of the capital.

In his book, "The Romanian Revolution," historian Peter Siani-Davies describes how the fugitives and their bodyguards next hijacked a car driven by a local doctor. When it ran out of gas, they commandeered a second vehicle which brought them to Târgovişte, fittingly Vlad's historical capital.
It was there they were finally detained and brought to an army barracks where they stayed the next two days in a strange limbo. Meanwhile violence continued to rage in Bucharest.

According to Siani-Davies, the decision to put the couple on trial was taken on the evening of December 24 by a small group of leaders worried that the security situation on Târgovişte was precarious and the Ceausescus might still be able to pose a threat.

The trial lasted for just under an hour. Watching film of the proceedings today, one is filled with a queasy sense of history at its rawest, stripped to brutal fundamentals. Here are two living people, once all powerful rulers of their country, now defenseless, about to become dead. How would it have been, one wonders, to see the show trials of King Louis XVI of France or Marie Antoinette or the trumped-up trial of Anne Boleyn? This comes pretty close.

The Ceausescus were charged with four counts including genocide. Nicolae Ceausescu refused to recognize the authority of the court and maintained that the revolution was organized by a gang of traitors backed by foreign interests. He seemed convinced to the end that the Romanian people still adored him.

Once sentence was pronounced, four soldiers approached the couple to tie their hands with a crude ball of twine. The intention was apparently to shoot them one at a time but they insisted on dying together. The footage takes on an unrefined, unedited quality far more dramatic than any Hollywood production.

Elena: "We have the right to die together. Together, together!"
Nicolae: "What kind of thing is this?" (Still apparently in disbelief that his last moments are approaching).
Elena: "Don't tie us up, don't offend us. Please don't touch me"
Nicolae: "I have the right to do what I want."
Elena: "Shame, shame on you. I brought you up as a mother. Stop it. You're breaking my arms. Let go of them. Let me go. Why are you doing this?"
A soldier: "No-one will help you now."
Elena: "We're powerless now."

They are led outside. The film records the bursts of gunfire and then zooms in on the two twisted bodies lying like broken dolls, blood streaming from their wounds. And then those famous final portraits of death that flashed around the world.

Twenty years later, those images have lost none of their power to shock.