Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 
Just when you think that the Bush administration can't get any worse, something like this happens (from BookNotes).

President Bush has selected Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who has characterized AIDS as the "gay plague" and called homosexuality a "deathstyle," to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS.

The appointment stunned some AIDS researchers and activists, who said Thacker has a shaky grasp of science and outdated views on the issue despite being HIV-positive.

They noted that Thacker had argued that religious faith could cure homosexuals, that condoms do not stop the spread of HIV and that people choose to be gay.

What kind of screwed up society do we live in, where Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders had to resign after talking about masturbation, but a nutjob like Thacker can be on a federal AIDS commission?
posted by Julian at 9:00 PM

 
Colson Whitehead conjures up an innovative world in The Intuitionist, in which elevator inspectors are held in very high regard. The elevator inspector community is divided into two schools of thought: the Empiricists who utilize careful measurements and the Intuitionists who subconsciously perceive the condition of the elevator. The story centers on Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, whose life is thrown into turmoil after an elevator that she had recently examined goes into free-fall.

Racial issues play a central role in the novel. The cultural milieu, which evokes the 1940's or 50's, is much more blatantly racist than the present day. The protagonist and many of the people she interacts with are black, each finding different ways to accommodate themselves to a racist society. Time, in a cover quote, praised The Intuitionist as a racial allegory. That's probably the case, but I wasn't sufficiently attuned to literary metaphors and black culture to appreciate the symbolism.

Still, the underlying story held my attention. Whitehead does an excellent job of creating his own world, which holds together by its self-consistent logic despite its unusual nature. The plot twists in unexpected directions, never heading where the reader expects.

I'd give the book a weak endorsement, which is, for me, a rather positive reaction to a literary work. Whitehead is clearly a deft wordsmith, whose artistry is unfortunately wasted on a philistine like myself. The various threads in the novel -- black vs. white, empiricism vs. intuitionism, vertical motion, accomodation vs. conflict, etc. -- never quite coalesced in my mind.
posted by Julian at 11:30 PM

 
Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 is a collection of essays about religion, written by University of Chicago Divinity Professor Bruce Lincoln. Three of them focus on the terrorist attacks, while the other three, written years ago, discuss the relationship between religion and society.

Lincoln analyzes the post-9/11 rhetoric to gain insight into the religious undercurrents present in the US and in al Qaeda. The best essay deconstructs President Bush's speech to the nation on October 7, 2001 and Osama bin Laden's videotaped response a few hours later. Lincoln compares and contrasts the content and symbolism of those two speeches. An online version of that fascinating analysis motivated me to read the book in the first place.

Another essay examines the instructions, focusing primarily on religious preparations, that Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers received. Lincoln also reviews Pat Robertson's controversial interview with Jerry Falwell on the 700 Club two days after the attacks. Though he sheds light on the extreme Christian and Muslim religious vantage points, the extensively planned statements of Bush and bin Laden are much more revealing. The book includes all of the analyzed speeches, letting readers form their own impressions.

The chapter On the Relation of Religion and Culture presents two ways in which people position religion within their lives. With a minimalist approach, which didn't become widespread until the Enlightenment, people go to church on Sunday (or whatever the appropriate day is), and put aside religion in the rest of their daily lives. A maximalist approach, which dominated through most historical periods, sees religion as permeating all of life. Minimalist and maximalists view each other with distrust, if not worse.

Another chapter examines how religious conflict unfolds in the post-colonial state, to better understand, for example, the Iranian revolution and the current unrest across the Muslim world. The final essay discusses how different societies may possess a religion of the status quo, religion of resistance, or religion of revolution.

Overall, Holy Terrors was interesting, though short (92 pages plus appendices and notes). Lincoln writes in an academic style, but he still has some substantive concepts to convey. The book provides a helpful framework for thinking about religion and society. posted by Julian at 11:30 PM

 
In The Emerging Democratic Majority, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira claim that, according to demographic trends, the Democrats are going to regain power over the next decade. Everything boils down to a single argument: the demographic groups who tend to vote Democratic are an increasing proportion of the electorate. It's rather convincing, with ample statistics and solid reasoning supporting their claims.

The book starts with a survey of American political history, focusing on the last several decades. In the 1930's, New Deal Democrats gained control of the government. That coalition started to fall apart in the late 60's, leading to a conservative Republican majority in the 80's. Judis and Teixeira propose that the pendulum is now heading in the other direction, with improving Democratic fortunes. That picture oversimplifies the political gyrations of the last 70 years, but it's still a plausible high-level model.

The next chapter describes the growing demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic more often than not. Highly educated professionals make up 21% of the voting electorate and selected Democrat more frequently than Republican in the last four elections, 52% to 40%. Women who are single, working, and/or highly educated also support Democrats by a large margin. In the last election, Gore received 90% of the Black vote and 64% of Chinese-Americans vote, along with a significant majority of the Hispanic and Vietnamese-American ballots.

According to the book, increasing numbers of professionals, working women, and minorities will lead to future Democratic gains. A state-by-state geographic analysis underscores that point. The authors summarize and effectively rebut the counterarguments for a continuing Republican dominance.

Of course, the 2002 election, which occurred after the book was published, conflicts with its conclusions. The authors reason that terrorist concerns will subside over time as 9/11 becomes more distant, and recent Gallup poll results appear to support that reasoning.

Overall, The Emerging Democratic Majority presents a thoughtful fact-based analysis of our current and future political trends. As its main downside, the book ignored certain topics, such as campaign finance and the media, that play major roles in the American political scene. I just hope that its title ends up being prophetic.
posted by Julian at 11:30 AM