Book Review: Dark Money (2016) by Jane Mayer

There is no getting around or understating the fact that Charles and David Koch, the multi-billionaire brothers from Kansas, have been engaged in a campaign of unarmed insurrection against the American state since the 1980s. Through their underwriting of dozens (hundreds?) of advocacy groups, think tanks, academic institutions, and political campaigns they have advanced the cause of what could be called the abridgment of American democracy. They have spent hundreds of millions of their own dollars to achieve this, and have solicited/badgered their plutocratic peers into giving as much and more to support their goal of reducing the role of government to something resembling that of a concierge at a luxury hotel--a mere functionary tasked with keeping the unwashed out of the lobby and satisfying every whim of the guests.

Jane Mayer has done a remarkable and tenacious job of showing all the roots and branches of the Koch brothers propaganda war. Aided by like-minded billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson, Richard Mellon Scaife, John Menard, and a torch- and pitchfork-bearing mob of mere centimillionaires, the fruit of the tree planted by the Kochs and watered with the furious tears of anti-tax tycoons is that slouching beast known as the Republican Party. What was once upon time a conservative, but mostly rational, political party has now become the marionette and mouthpiece for a cabal who seek to turn the political/capitalist clock back to roughly 1900, which, in their view, was a golden age of capitalism unfettered by unions, taxes or government regulations.

Mayer makes it very clear that the Kochs and their allies don't just want a diminution of the government's role in society and the economy, they want it banished from the playing field altogether. The John Birch Society was the incubator for this extreme philosophy back in the '60s, but it took the Kochs to give it mainstream appeal and respectability through the GOP. The Kochs achieved this by creating an entire ecosystem of advocacy and political organizations that promoted and funded policies and politicians that were in accord with their fanatical worldview. The proof of their success is that the GOP is now not so much a political party as it is a counter-revolutionary movement seeking to rollback all progressive policies enacted since the end of World War Two.

Although taxation and government regulations are the main targets of this Koch-led guerilla war, they work equally hard at deconstructing democracy through the gerrymandering of congressional districts and by curtailing voters rights. The Kochs and their allies are mostly concerned with enriching themselves, but they also want to create a new American state in which corporations become the fourth branch of government, surpassing in power the legislative, executive and judicial. It's arguable that that has been the case in the U.S. for quite some time already, but America's billionaires want to rig the democratic game so that their power cannot be challenged by the judiciary or through the ballot box. Politicians have been for sale for a long time, but the Kochs want to take things to the next level by disenfranchising the poor and establishing legal precedents that give corporations and the wealthy de facto control over the electoral process.

What the Kochs are up to sounds, at times, like some kind of conspiracy theory spawned by social media, but Jane Mayer is meticulous in uncovering all the layers in this proto-parallel government that's made up of interlocking foundations, charitable trusts, PACs and advocacy groups. This kind of detailed reporting always risks being tedious, but Mayer is wonderful at balancing facts and figures with a strong sense of narrative structure.

The question that comes to mind from reading this book is why has the U.S. lead the developed world, especially in the postwar era, in producing so many wealthy people with an ideological blood lust for less government and more, far more, profits? I think there are two possible answers. The first is that, as Calvin Coolidge observed in the '20s, "The business of America is business." The foundation myths of the United States like to dwell on warm and fuzzy concepts such as freedom, democracy, opportunity and escape from persecution. It's more accurate, if less romantic, to say that most people came to America for one reason only: to make money. People didn't uproot themselves and make dangerous sea voyages to an unseen, unknown land for the chance to vote or engage in free speech. They came because America offered economic opportunities that couldn't be found in their own countries. America was populated from the beginning with people who had an intrepid desire to better themselves financially, and this became the country's dominant cultural theme. And for some of the richest Americans, financial self-aggrandizement became a quasi-religious impulse; in fact, in the last several decades capitalism and Christianity have become officially linked in many evangelical churches through the so-called prosperity gospel. The Kochs and others of their ilk see themselves as saintly warriors in the holy war against government.

The flip side to the American dream was slavery, and this institution, which shows capitalism in its rawest form, has affected American's view of labour and capital to this day. Slavery, and the Jim Crow-era that followed up until the 1960s, produced a permanent economic underclass that could be identified by race. Blacks were deemed an inferior race, and it followed that their poverty was a natural by-product of an inherent lack of intelligence and ambition. To be black was to be poor, and to be poor was to be black. For white America, economic failure was regarded as a failing on a personal level; it marked one out as a lesser being, it made you black. It wasn't seen as an inevitable by-product of capitalism. In Europe, the working classes, who weren't tripped up by racial questions, grasped the fact that economic hardship and inequality was simply part of the capitalist equation, and they organized and backed unions and political parties that fought directly for their interests. In the U.S., the racial fear of poverty and economic disadvantage was a prime reason a true worker's party (on a national level) never emerged. So the sense of shame, horror and fear that Americans have viewed life at the bottom of the economic ladder played right into the hands of people like the Kochs. If the poor and working poor see themselves as lesser Americans, lesser humans, it follows that those at the top are the best and brightest, and to deny them their wealth and power is simply going against nature. It's this warped logic that helps explain why the white, populist, working-class Tea Party (a quietly Koch-founded movement, as Mayer points out) metastasized into the Red Guard of the GOP. Against their better interests Tea Party supporters embrace the brutalist capitalist ideology of the Kochs as a way of distancing themselves from the poverty they fear and loathe.

Many commentators have made the point that during this election cycle the Kochs have ended up on the outside looking in as Donald Trump has swept aside their preferred candidates. The Kochs may have lost the battle but they've won the war. Politics is broken in the United States, and it's due in no small part to the Kochs. The American right is now an anarchic crew of ideologues who want to cripple federal and state governments. These are vandals, not politicians. Jane Mayer's book is an invaluable and astute guide to the structure, purpose and character of this counter-revolution, and it probably stands as one of the most important political books written in the last ten years. The Kochs certainly think so because they tried very hard to silence her. There's no higher recommendation for the book than that.

Film Review: American Sniper (2014)

Is American Sniper as morally blind, jingoistic and lacking in political context as a host of commentators and critics have described it? Yes. Yes it is. Most of the critical flak has been aimed at director Clint Eastwood, but I'd say scriptwriter Jason Hall and producer/star Bradley Cooper deserve more of the blame.

Eastwood's direction here ranges from efficient to perfunctory to downright lazy, but I'm calling out Hall and Cooper for a jaw-droppingly bad script that feels as though it was crafted by a committee comprised of PR people for the NRA and the Tea Party. The script does such a thorough job of ducking the hard and nasty truths about Chris Kyle and the war in Iraq that it should qualify as a fantasy film. Kyle's ghostwritten autobiography and subsequent revelations about his post-war life made it clear that he was a racist, a sociopath, and a congenital liar who fantasized about killing civilians. These qualities probably helped make him grade A material for the Navy SEALS, but why would a scriptwriter and producer go so far out of their way to whitewash a character who was, to put it mildly, halfway to being a serial killer? The script also cuts and pastes the historical record in order to suggest that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks. I'd say this kind of revisionism, and the film's fawning celebration of good ole boy machismo, is a calculated and cynical strategy to appeal to a specific and considerable American demographic; namely the kind of people who flesh out the ranks of the Tea Party; holiday in Branson, MO; fill the stands at NASCAR races; attend gun shows on Saturdays and pack the pews of megachurches on Sundays. This is the audience this film is tailor-made for. American Sniper glorifies, even beatifies, the values and myths they hold dear and does it with a rigorous disregard for the thorny inconveniences of irony, historical accuracy, psychological insight, and the moral and political consequences of military actions.

American Sniper also continues a tradition of  mainstream Hollywood films portraying wars purely in terms of their effect on American soldiers and civilians. Vietnam films, even politically liberal ones such as Coming Home, had nothing to say about the two million Vietnamese killed in the war. The Hurt Locker, another film about the Iraq war, is very similar in tone and subject matter to American Sniper and also shares its lack of interest in the war's impact on Iraqis. If your only knowledge of Iraq came from those two films you'd be left with the idea that Iraq was entirely filled with terrorists and their civilian supporters. The combination of two wars and brutal economic sanctions between those wars have led to the deaths, by some estimates, of a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more. According to Hollywood's moral accounting, none of that counts for anything compared to the temporary psychological stresses suffered by one soldier, Chris Kyle, and his wife.

Looked at purely from a cinematic perspective, Eastwood's direction is robotic. The plentiful action sequences are visually dull and lack tension, the boot camp section is an afterthought, and the scenes that show Kyle suffering from PTSD make it look like it's a condition akin to having a few too many coffees. I think at some point in pre-production everyone decided this best way to approach this film was to be non-judgmental and let the facts (according to Chris Kyle) speak for themselves. That's translated into a dull, witless, nasty film that might have worked better if it had paraphrased the title of an earlier, better Eastwood film: how does White Sniper, Black Heart sound?

Worst of Breed

When Todd Akin, the Republican congressman from Missouri, recently managed the neat trick of placing his foot in his mouth while at the same time inserting his head up his ass thanks to his theories about "legitimate rape", it caused a richly deserved firestorm of legitimate anger. What wasn't mentioned much, if at all, was that this level of idiocy has now become the new normal on the right wing of American politics. In the last decade or so, but especially since the election of President Obama, Republican politicians have rarely gone a month without saying something so outrageously stupid you have to wonder if they aren't doing it just to keep staffers at The Onion busy; kind of a make-work program for humorists. Don't believe me? Just Google stupidest quotes from Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin,  and Jan Brewer; you'll be spoiled for choice.

So why is it that the right wing is producing more and better knuckleheads? The answer, my friends, is something I'm going to call Selective Ideological Inbreeding. And here's the theory in a nutshell: any organization, political or otherwise, that experiences success with a particular strategy will try and replicate or reinforce that success by enhancing or amplifying their winning strategy. What starts out as a strategic course can then become an entrenched culture, a codified and glorified mode of thinking, an orthodoxy that's held to be the one true path to success. The leaders of such an organization tend to recruit to their cause those who are not only in accord with their ideological vision, but who take it to the next level. In this way organizations can become bastions of inbreeding, with the organization's leaders selecting only those new recruits who resemble themselves in every ideological detail and bring an even more ferocious level of commitment to the organization's strategic philosophy. And what does this selective ideological inbreeding produce? In the case of the Republican Party it's created politicians who try and outdo each other in enthusiastic idiocy, moral viciousness and religious fervour.

The beginning of this process began for the GOP with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. To their delight and surprise the Republicans found that it was possible to elect a genial, flag-waving simpleton to the highest office in the land on a platform based largely on the concept that government is bad for you. By 1984 Reagan's simpleness was slipping into senility, but he still won handily. Reagan's success owed a huge debt to the religious right, which was leading a backlash, a cultural revolution, against liberal social policies and attitudes that had been on the rise since the 1960s. The twinning of simple-mindedness and religiosity became the template Republicans chose for their strategic philosophy. And why not? From a purely practical point of view it seemed to be a surefire winning formula, delivering strong mandates in both '80 and '84.

The dumb and devout template was a new concept in the '80s. Nixon and Eisenhower, the two previous Republican presidents (I'm omitting Gerald Ford because he wasn't elected), were no dummies, and their religion (what little they had) was not put on show. And by present-day Republican standards both were dangerously liberal: Eisenhower pushed through a massive public works bill to create the Interstate Highway System (tax and spend politician!), and Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (job-killing treehugger!). After Reagan, the ideal, and often typical, Republican politician became someone who combined equal levels of anti-intellectualism and old-time, tent revival Christianity. And the poster boy for this job description? George W. Bush. This degradation in the quality of Republican politicos is due to the selective ideological inbreeding syndrome: the backers and promoters of right-wing politicians are in a race to the bottom to find the next candidate who's denser and more pious than the last. We've now reached a point where the standardized Republican politician has become a bug-eyed amalgam of braying piety and Forrest Gump philosophizing.

Given the constant dumbing down of Republican politicians and policies it was almost inevitable that the Tea Party would spring to life. If you view the so-called Reagan Revolution as equivalent to China's Cultural Revolution in its basic aim of creating a purer, more orthodox society, then the Tea Party can be seen as the Red Guards: a spontaneous, populist movement that runs on adrenaline, inchoate outrage and holier-than-thou moral superiority that aims to add vim and vigour to the on-going cultural revolution. And like the Red Guards, the Tea Party became the tail wagging the dog. It's the Tea Party, the children of the Reagan Revolution, who helped produce a climate in which people who one or two generations ago would have been dismissed as nutjobs, cranks or fools, were now competing to become the leader of the free world. If Mitt Romney seems like a reasonable choice for president, it's only because in comparison to the political sideshow freaks he beat out for the nomination he comes across as a pillar of common sense and reasonableness.

What's dangerous about the Republican Party's program of selective ideological inbreeding is that in some future presidential election one of their Frankenstein monsters might win the day. It's far from unthinkable. Earlier this year it looked like Michele Bachmann, the woman who said that hurricanes and earthquakes were God's message that government spending was out of control, appeared to have a good chance of winning the primaries. And if the GOP's ideological inbreeding continues at its current pace the next Michele Bachmann will make the original look like Eleanor Roosevelt. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Related posts:  

Finally, Proof That Jesus Would Vote Republican
What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

Republican or Democrat?

Have you ever wondered why someone chooses to vote Republican or Conservative? Or who agrees with the stuff that comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Is it simply the case that some people weigh the available economic and sociological evidence and, after due consideration, decide that the right wing is the right way to go? Or is there a psychological component to being conservative, especially at the angriest, spittle-flecked end of the right-wing spectrum? It turns out there is a compelling explanation for why people work for and support right-wing political parties and causes. The answer comes in a book titled On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976) by Norman F. Dixon.

Dr. Dixon served ten years in the British Army from 1940-50 and, among other honours, became a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His book is an attempt to explain why military organizations often encourage and promote people who are intellectually incompetent or psychologically unfit for the tasks they're charged with. Here's how Dixon frames his thesis:

"How, if they are so lacking in intelligence, do people become senior military commanders? And what is it about military organizations that they should attract, promote and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may bring opprobrium upon the organizations which they represent?"

One of the main reasons for this situation, as Dixon explains, is that the military tends to attract people with low self-esteem, weak egos, and/or severe anxieties about disorder. A military environment gives strength and value to those who see themselves as weak or outsiders, and order and structure to those who fear freedom and disorder. Here's how Dixon explains it:

"...displayed behaviour symptomatic of extremely weak egos. In this light, their behaviour typifies the neurotic paradox in which the individual's need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and, on the other, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance. The paradox is that those needs inevitably result in behaviour so unrealistic as to earn for the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid."


And:


"Incompetent commanders, it has been suggested, are often those who were attracted to the military because it promised gratification of certain neurotic needs. These include a reduction of anxiety regarding real or imagined lack of virility/potency/masculinity; defences against anal tendencies; boosts for sagging self-esteem; the discovering of loving mother-figures and strong father-figures; power, dominance and public acclaim; the finding of relatively powerless out-groups on to whom the individual can project those aspects of himself  which he finds distasteful; and legitimate outlets for, and adequate control of, his own aggression."

It's at this point that I want to extrapolate from Dixon's book the idea that what he says about the military mind and character applies equally to the right-wing mind. The two are not far apart. In fact, it would be hard to find a party or person of the right that doesn't offer vociferous support for the military or marital virtues. The most extreme form of this is fascism, in which politics becomes blended with militarism. Right-wing parties, whether it's the Republicans in the U.S. or the Conservatives in Canada and the U.K. are uniformly pro-military. These parties are quick, even eager, to undertake or urge military action, and military spending almost inevitably increases when they're in power. Dixon goes on to show that, unsurprisingly, the military also attracts authoritarian personalities:

"In the place of free-ranging, creative and inventive thought, an authoritarian's thinking is confined to rigid formulae and inflexible attitudes. He is intolerant of unusual ideas and unable to cope with contradictions...the authoritarian personality is intolerant of  ambivalence and ambiguity. Just as he cannot harbour negative and positive feeling for the same person but must dichotomize reality into loved people versus hated people, white versus black and Jew versus Gentile, so also he cannot tolerate ambiguous situations or conflicting issues. To put it bluntly, he constructs of the world an image as simplistic as it is at variance with reality."

If the above passage was creatively rephrased it could stand as an oath of allegiance for Tea Party members. The desire to reduce politics and the world to the most simplistic terms has been a hallmark of rightist politicians from the local to the international level. George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" was one example, of many, of his attempts to turn the world into an Us versus Them situation. And the current crop of GOP presidential candidates go out of their way to boil all issues down to whether something is American (capitalist, Christian, pro-family, patriotic) or un-American (socialist, godless, liberal, elitist). Sarah Palin's success amongst the rightist demographic is based largely on her simple-mindedness; they can rest assured that she has no complex or contradictory thoughts, and her opinions proceed from a simplistic and unalterable set of values.

It would also seem that politicians who are, to put it scientifically, dumber than a bag of hammers, are invariably working for the right. It's a perfect environment for them; they have self-esteem issues from knowing that they're dunces, and right-wing parties keep things simple for them with policies and slogans a sixth grader can understand. Examples of dim bulb rightists are almost too numerous to mention. But I will: the previously mentioned Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and George W. All of these people have been the butt of late-night TV humour precisely because they are stupid. Finding an equal number of high-profile left-wing politicians this dumb is almost impossible. There are leftists who promote policies or causes that could be described as flawed, futile, inefficient or wrong-headed, but it's difficult to find a lefty who's transparently a slack-jawed yokel in the way that Dubya was. This isn't to say that the left can't attract wingnuts, which it can and does, but those wingnuts usually did very well in school.

I'm not arguing that all rightists are dimwits or psychological misfits. Some could be categorized as members of the patrician class, who feel that it's the right and duty of the upper-classes to control the levers of power. George H. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller would be examples of patricians, and British political history is stuffed with this type of politician. An even larger category of rightists consists of careerists. These rightists have chosen their political path because it seems to be a quick and easy route to the top of the political ladder. Even though Barack Obama isn't a rightist (at least by American definitions), his political life story provides a fine example of a careerist at work, constantly moving onward and upward without taking a strong stand on anything in particular on the way up.

I'd love to toss out more quotes from Dixon's book but then this post would run on forever. The conclusion that can certainly be drawn from it is that one's political preference is often determined by psychological traits. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is not as dry a read as I may have made it sound. Dixon is a witty writer, and his stories of military ineptitude through the ages are fascinating and often jaw-dropping. I don't think it's still in print, but Amazon has it in Kindle format, and a good-sized library system probably has a copy or two.

Finally, Proof That Jesus Would Vote Republican

As the rough beast of American presidential politics begins its long slouch towards decision day in November, the civilized world is left wondering, as it does every four years, WTF is up with America's obsession with religion. In just last the few days President Obama has had to come up with a compromise on the birth control portion of his health care package in order to placate the Catholic Church, and this is against the backdrop of the Republican primaries, which consist entirely of white multimillionaires trying to proclaim that not only are they more god-fearing than the next guy, but they'll actually make America more god-fearing if given the chance in November. Once the actual presidential campaign begins the two candidates will invoke or quote Jesus and his dad in virtually every speech, and on Sundays we'll see them drop in on the nearest suburban megachurch where their piety will be on full display. But that won't stop both candidates from inferring, or even declaring, that their opponent is in some way heretical or godless.

The auto-da-fé of the American presidential election is a wonderment to Canadians and Europeans because it's a reminder that Yanks are more religious, by far, than anyone else on the block. But why is this? A few months ago I was researching this issue for an article and I kept looking for cultural and political causes of America's religiosity. Nothing seemed to explain the situation until I thought of the other major difference between Europe and the US: social  welfare spending. Europe believes in it, America (its ruling class, at least) loathes it. So I Googled social welfare spending and religion and came up with this academic paper written by Anthony Gill (his website's here)and Erik Lundsgaarde, professors at the University of Washington. Eureka! Solid evidence to explain the religiosity divide between America and most everyone else. Before I go further here are some quotes from the paper:

"...state welfare spending has a detrimental, albeit unintended, effect on long-term religious participation and overall religiosity."

"People living in countries with high social welfare spending per capita even have less of a tendency to take comfort in religion, perhaps knowing that the state is there to help them in times of crisis."

The professors back up these conclusions with all the necessary facts and figures (graph alert!), and their paper makes for very interesting reading, but be warned that it is an academic paper so it's a tad on the dry side. The profs argue that as church-sponsored social welfare programs (education, relief for the poor, etc.) are replaced by state programs, people see less value in religion itself. Religiosity (it's defined as weekly church attendance in the paper) does not, however, decline immediately upon an increase in social welfare spending. Decreases in religiosity are generational.

The paper emphasizes the role of churches in providing social welfare support as one of the key causes of religiosity. That's where I disagree with them. I don't think American churches have any significant tradition of providing material support for their followers. I think a more likely explanation, which is hinted at in several places in the paper, is that fear is what drives some people to church, and since WW II the US has been one of the most fear-filled countries on the planet. First there was the Cold War and its fear of nuclear war, then the Vietnam War, fear of street crime in the 1970s, and then a reboot of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. Add in the wars in the Middle East and 9/11 and you have society that's filled with dread. It's small wonder that Americans look for supernatural protection and comfort when so much that surrounds them seems so dangerous and unpredictable. And this is all on top of a society that provides the most meagre of social safety nets.

It doesn't come as much of a surprise that the Scandinavian countries, with their broad and comprehensive social welfare programs and non-involvement in military conflicts, sit at the bottom of the league in terms of religiosity. It's a clear message that people who have some confidence in their future well-being, who don't live in fear of death and disaster lurking around the next corner, have no need of imaginary beings to protect them. Needless to say there are probably a dozen other factors that can help account for US religiosity, but it would seem that free, universal health care goes a long way towards creating and maintaining a secular society. Gill and Lundsgaarde's paper provides some more proof of this with the example of the ex-Soviet Union. Once religion was made legal in Russia after the fall of the USSR, spirituality made a big comeback. It was no coincidence that the end of the USSR also marked the end of cradle-to-grave welfare programs for Russians, not to mention the end of a guaranteed job for all.

The role of religion in American politics became a big deal in the 1970s as President Jimmy Carter let it be known that he was a "born again" Christian. That seemed to be the starting bell for the evangelical movement, and it's become a key factor in every presidential election since. The rise of the Christian right has gone in lockstep with the erosion of social welfare programs that began with the election of Reagan in 1980. The US is now at a point where the Tea Party and the various Republican presidential hopefuls spend enormous effort in thinking of ways the US government can do less for its people, except, of course, when it comes to waging wars. All this looks like more evidence of religiosity being largely dependent on social welfare spending.

So, from the point of view of a ruthless, evangelical Republican politician there could be no shrewder political strategy than to cut any and all social welfare programs; its appears to be a guaranteed way to fill the pews and stuff the ballot boxes with votes for the GOP. And, really, it's probably what Jesus would do. He wouldn't want a nation of happy, healthy unbelievers. Of course, there was that time he fed the multitudes with free bread and fish...that does sound a bit welfare-ish, a bit food stamp-y, but it was probably a deliberate mistranslation by some liberal, elitist professor of ancient languages.

Shakespeare Review: Richard II

No one tell the Tea Party, but Shakespeare may well have been on their side. In Richard II the king is opposed and deposed because he's been a profligate spender and tax happy. A tax and spend liberal, as it were. The political and dynastic machinations of England's peers provide the backbone of this play, but its power lies in the character of Richard, and Shakespeare's meditations on the duality of man and king.

In a way, Richard is a cousin to Hamlet, the man whose tragedy. according to Laurence Olivier, was that he could not make up his mind. Richard can't decide whether to act like a king or a man, and his vacillations make him a pitiable and tragic figure. In the early stages of the play Richard is all kingly pride and condescension as he banishes Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) for having taken part in a treasonous plot. When Bolingbroke's father, the Duke of Lancaster, dies Bolingbroke returns to England to claim his dukedom and lead a rebellion against Richard. When Richard returns from Ireland and hears of the rebellion he says, with regal disdain:

For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To lift the shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel, then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the
  right.

Richard's showing a lot of confidence before the big match. But mere moments later Richard gets the bad news that most of the peerage has turned against him and he now faces very long odds. It's at this point that Richard's character splits in two. Half of him becomes a frightened, friendless man who suddenly sees his own mortality as something inevitable and separate from his role as a king. With shocking clarity Richard realizes that kings are very much flesh and blood creatures, and he reveals this to his few followers in a witty and heartbreaking speech shown in the clip below. The performance is a bit too jocular, but it captures the spirit of the thing.


                                           
For the rest of play Richards swings between the role of king and common man. In times of stress he cracks and bemoans his fate, welcoming the idea of simply abdicating. At other times his pride takes hold and he sees himself as a king, having a divinely-ordained obligation to fight against whatever odds to oppose those who would overthrow a man chosen by God to rule on Earth. He dies as a king, sword in hand, cut down by assassins.

Although Shakespeare always paid lip service to the concept of the divine right of kings, and showed equal support for an ordered, hierarchical society, in Richard II we see that there was more than a little ambivalence in his mind on the subject of kings. I think Shakespeare felt this way due to a profound feeling of existential dread, probably rooted in atheism. In Shakespeare's time atheism was, according to historian Keith Thomas, a not uncommon belief, and where atheism goes, agnosticism follows in even greater numbers. In showing Richard losing faith in his kingship, Shakespeare was possibly showing his own loss of faith. It's notable that in this play and others, characters who speak of death in the abstract speak of God and Heaven; characters who are facing their own imminent demise, as Richard is in the clip above, speak of death as the bleak, meaningless end of existence.

As though to replace the idea of kings with something that transcends flesh and blood, Shakespeare invents the concept of nationalism in Richard II. Well, invent may be going a bit far, but prior to Shakespeare if nationalism existed it was bound up with the role of a monarch as a divine representative. Shakespeare has Bolingbroke's father delivers a rousing speech that pretty clearly states that it is England's greatness that produces great kings, not great kings that make England great. The speech is in the clip below from 1:30 to 4:08



Shakespeare adds to his nationalist theme with a short speech by the soon-to-be exiled Mowbray, who feels the bitterest part of leaving England's shores is that he will no longer be able to speak English. Mowbray doesn't mention the loss of family and friends, it's the loss of his language, which he almost seems to regard as part of his soul, that causes him the most grief. A lesser writer would have Mowbray bemoaning leaving behind family, wealth and England's worldly charms. Shakespeare shows England having a spiritual hold on Mowbray.

I give Richard II a solid 8 out of 10 on the Bard-o-Meter.

Book Review: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003) by Richard J. Evans

This is the first in a three volume history of the Third Reich, covering the period from 1919-33. And while the author can't offer any new information about this era, he certainly does an admirable job of analyzing and laying out the reasons for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.

Evans does a particularly good job of pointing out that the Nazis were not voted into power by the German electorate. It's a popular misconception that Hitler gained power democratically, when in fact the most support the Nazis ever got in a free election was 37% of the vote. The left wing vote was only marginally lower, but it was split between two parties, the Communists and the Social Democrats. The appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor in place of Hindenburg in 1933 is what allowed to Nazis to fully grab the reins of power, especially after the Reichstag fire (which wasn't an act of Nazi sabotage) gave Hitler an excuse to declare a state of emergency.

The idea that Germans followed Hitler blindly and unhesitatingly also takes a bit of a drubbing in Evans' analysis. Once Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, the Nazis, via their SA and SS goon squads, began a reign of terror against anyone and everyone they regarded as a real or possible opponent. Hundreds were killed, thousands beaten up, and tens of thousands were arrested and held in the first concentration camps. Although the terror wasn't on a Stalinist scale, a clear message was sent to the German people that dissent from the Nazi party worldview was a guarantee of harsh persecution.  The hundreds of thousands of Germans who joined the Nazi party at this time were, it would seem, motivated by fear more than ideology.

The author also does a good job of placing the Nazis' anti-Semitism in a historical context. Prior to WW I Germans were probably not Europe's most noted anti-Semites. That title could have been given to the French or Russians. Germany's military failure in WW I and its subsequent economic collapse had many Germans looking for a suitable scapegoat and Jews were, of course, the historically-preferred choice for that role. Beyond that, it would seem that it was Hitler's own pathological, visceral loathing of Jews that motivated the Nazi party to move from harassment to persecution to genocide.

There's an interesting parallel that can be drawn between the Nazi party and contemporary right-wing movements such as the Tea Party. The Nazis never had a rational political platform or philosophy. Their "politics" consisted solely of railing against the corruption and ineptitude of the Weimar Republic and appealing to aggressive fantasies about race and nationalism. Likewise, the Tea Party screams that the federal government is incompetent and pernicious, wraps itself in the flag at all times, sees America as preordained to rule the world, and has a thinly disguised dislike of Americans who aren't white and Christian. In both cases, the real or perceived failure of central government provides the impetus for a kind of blind, unreasoning anger that finds expression in a political party built around slogans and imagery rather than coherent policy.