Low Dishonest Decades
Copyright © 2016 by George
Scialabba
ISBN 978-1-940396-22-4
Pressed Wafer
375 Parkside Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11226
I hope Low Dishonest Decades, with its demonstration
that sane political discourse is still possible, will improve your morale as it
has mine in these weeks following Trump’s election. Cambridge’s George
Scialabba is a writer who has mastered that discourse and, now that he has
retired from his position as a building manager for Harvard’s Center for
Government and International Studies, he should have more time to help us think
of ways out of our predicament.
Low Dishonest Decades is a collection of
20 book reviews and a few essays; they examine our political, international,
economic and ethical plight in lucid prose, and appeared over the last three
decades in some 11 periodicals from our Boston
Phoenix to the Village Voice and the Nation. His ability to make the
arguments of his subjects compact and portable meant that by reading Low Dishonest Decades I gained familiarity
with a literature I would otherwise miss, given my preference for fiction and
poetry.
The collection opens with a short section containing four reviews called
"The Long View." The first “Democracy Proof” is a review of How Democratic Is the American Constitution
by Robert Dahl, which makes Trump’s election seem an inevitable result of the
anti-democratic biases of this document that we have been taught to worship.
The concluding review of this section is of three books by Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
and Why America Failed: The Roots of
Imperial Decline) ends with this praise:
There is something immensely refreshing, even cathartic, about Berman’s
refusal to hold out any hope of avoiding our civilization's demise. And our
reaction goes some way toward proving his point: we are so sick of hucksters,
of authors trying – like everyone else on all sides at all times in this
pervasively hustling culture – to sell us something, that it is a relief to
encounter someone who isn't, who has no designs on our money or votes or hopes,
who simply has looked into the depths, into our bleak future, and is compelled
to describe it, as Cassandra was. No doubt his efforts will meet with as much
success as hers.
While this grim ending to Scialabba's opening section does pose the
question “Why continue?” we may take comfort from the fact that, for all of its
individual terror, death is the engine that drives all evolution. Our
democracy may be failing us but that does not mean that democracy has failed. And in the reviews of the middle section,
"Politics," Scialabba makes clear we have a responsibility to
learn the lessons of those failings to guide the modes of our governance so
that democracy will continue to evolve. And that is one, if not the most
important, function of Low Dishonest
Decades.
The reviews of this second section, which have titles such as "Do
Ideas Matter?" "Where Did Our Wealth Go?" and "The Sorry
State of the Union," are divided between critiques of domestic and foreign
policies. In “What Is American Foreign Policy About?" he summarizes those critiques:
Business is not a monolith, of course; sometimes businesses have competing
interests. But there is a large area of shared interests, of all things
businesses favor. They all want week labor unions or none; they all want lower
taxes, especially on the rich; they all want weak or no environmental or
consumer safety or occupational safety regulations; they all want no
restrictions on foreign investment or resource ownership or capital flows; they
all want a minimum of social spending, so that the population will be as
insecure as possible; and they all want a political system that can be
controlled by money, which is to say controlled by them. This is what they want
for the United States, and for most of American history, they'd gotten it,
except when they bankrupted the country with the Great Depression and there
were a few reforms, called the New Deal. But business never accepted the New
Deal. They fought back, in the 1980 they won and now they have all the above
once again.
And that's what they want for the rest of the world: no organized labor,
low taxes, weak regulation, no restrictions on investment or lending, no social
safety net, and no popular sovereignty, that is, no real democracy. To make the
world as much like this as possible: that’s
the purpose of American foreign policy.
And in "What Is to Be Done?" a review of eight books I think he
answers the question of that title well:
To put it non-metaphorically: if we want a durably decent society, we have
to improve the quality of political discussion. Yes, we will always need to
address people's hearts and imaginations. But in the long run, their ability to
think, to see through right-wing (and left-wing) bullshit, is even more
important. If voters had even a slightly enhanced tolerance for position papers
and policy proposals, the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Jerry Falwell,
and other right-wing liars, morons, and demagogues would be vastly diminished.
Isn't that a worthwhile goal?
In 2007, when he continued with this question, “How to accomplish [that
worthwhile goal]?” Scialabba answered, “I don’t know.” And then he put his
tongue in his cheek with this proposal: “Perhaps population exchanges between
blue and red states. …Perhaps secular liberals should go to church and
distribute copies of the Nation to their fellow church goers.” Then he took his tongue out to conclude the
review: "But what's possible is up to us. The main lesson of the
right-wing ascendancy is simply: never give up. As Yeats pointed out: ‘The best
lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.’ The
best had better get – and stay – off their asses." If that was true eight
years ago how much more so today, and fortunately Low Dishonest Decades provides some of the mental exercise we need
to rehabilitate the quads and hamstrings of our convictions so we might get off
our asses and back on our feet. And Scialabba almost always manages to provide
that exercise without ad hominem comments;
“other right-wing liars, morons, and demagogues” is the only time in the volume
that I recall him weakening an argument by yielding to that temptation.
By the third
section “Intellectuals” I was enjoying some satisfaction of my need of food for
thought and one essay "A Rake among Radicals" made me feel I would
like to read some Alexander Cockburn for desert, because Scialabba’s essay
praising him made Cockburn’s writing and personality seem as attractive as his
ideas. This extended quote from the beginning of that essay demonstrates Scialabba’s
lucidity and range of thought and his ability to comprehend and summarize the
thought of others.
On Christmas Eve
2010, Alexander Cockburn began a short column for his newsletter Counterpunch in this fashion: "The
prime constant factor in American politics across the last six decades has been
…" Let us pause for a moment to conjecture how commentators of diverse political
complexion might have completed that sentence. The exercise might give us some
sense of Cockburn's place in the culture of
late-twentieth-/early-twenty-first-century journalism.
A Tea Partier
might say: "… the ever-increasing tyranny of Federal bureaucracies."
A paleoconservative might say: "… the expulsion of God from the public
square." A neoconservative might say: "… the weakening of American
resolve in the global decline of American power." A neoliberal might say:
"… increasing recognition that markets work better than government
intervention." A feminist or gay activist might say: "…the gradual
extension of equal rights." A civil libertarian might say: "… the
gradual erosion of civil liberties." An environmentalist might say:
"…a blind emphasis on economic growth at all costs." A social
Democrat might say: "…the dwindling of social solidarity from its high
point just after World War II."
All these
perspectives have at least a grain of truth. But Cockburn's answer cuts
deepest: "…a counterattack by the rich against the social reforms of the
1930s." Class warfare is not the only kind of social conflict, or always
and everywhere the most important kind. But it is the most intractable and
invisible kind, and Cockburn was one of the few American journalists who never
lost sight of it or failed to rub it in.
When Scialabba retired
from his day job at Harvard, John Summers, the editor of the Baffler, organized a Festschrift
where George was celebrated by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas
Frank and others because he is also an American writer who has never lost sight
of it or failed to rub it in. If you want more details about his reputation you
might check out this profile from the New
Yorker:
or this one
from the Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/hear-hear-george-scialabba/. And you might also want to check out the
other three collections of his work,
that have been published by Pressed
Wafer. (What Are Intellectuals Good For?
– 2009, The Modern Predicament –
2011, and For the Republic – 2013)
– by Wendell
Smith.
Great review, Wendall - a thinking man's concise homage to another thinking man's thought.
ReplyDelete