Life in Central America

The King of Torts

Recently, I listened to The King of Torts by John Grisham. Most of his novels are about the law, and this is one of the best; his characterizations are amazing. Look it up on audible.com and listen to the first chapter, and you will see (or hear) what I am talking about.

And while I’m at it, let me make a pitch for Audible Books. I gobble up a lot of books, and for me listening and reading is more pleasant then reading alone. And if I can afford them anybody can afford them. A hundred bucks a year is not much.

This book about a young, struggling public defender in DC who has a lucky break and strikes it rich in the mass torts business. Some guy, who he finds out later is a crook, hooks him up with a pharmacutical company who desperately wants to hush up some of their operations. He ends up making 110 million. And then it really gets crazy.

Grisham is hard on the mass torts business: huge class-actions suits, where the lawers make obscene profits, and the customers get screwed. In some of his other books, he shows how honest lawyers can earn their contingency fees, so I think he has a balanced approach, overall.

It’s easy to get people worked up about this kind of thievery, but this is nothing compared to what goes on the corporate world every day. Corporate lawyers are busy concocting legal (or semi-legal) ways to cheat the public—and the public, in general, doesn’t seem to care.

But if you are one of those that do care, I propose a simple solution: outlawing outrageous incomes. The IRS is very good at sniffing out this kind of crime. I know, I know, this should be taken care of by the income tax—but as you know, the rich have shot it full of so many loopholes it is useless. I doubt if this can be changed, but we ought to at least give it a try.

Anybody that makes over a million bucks a year is a crook. Nobody’s expertise is worth this much. But I am willing to be flexible; if this limit will make the sky fall in, I am willing to settle for 10 million.

Open veins of Latin America

This book was written by Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan journalist, writer, and storyteller. In the introduction, Isabel Allende says of him:

Galeano denounces exploitation with uncompromising ferocity, yet this book is almost poetic in its description of solidarity and human capacity for survival in the midst of the worst kind of despoliation.

The quote at the front of the book is:

“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity” —From the Revolutionary Proclamation, La Paz, 1809

I have taken some quotes at random:

I am not particularly interested in saving time: I prefer to enjoy it.

We, the living, are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.

To awaken consciousness, reveal identity, —can literature claim a better function in these times?

We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are.

He quotes from the log of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America:

Of gold is treasure made, and with it he who has it does as he wills in the world and even sends souls to paradise.

And later:

Poverty is not written in the stars; underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs.

The right wing is correct in identifying itself with tranquility and order; it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an order nonetheless; it is an tranquility in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry.

A no account president

Review by Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the secret of being boring is to say everything. A team of researchers spent two years winnowing down Clinton’s handwritten memoirs to this slim volume of just under 1000 pages. God help them. If this is the interesting stuff the rest must have been boring to the limit of human endurance.
------
Javier read about it in the Tico papers, and he thought I was crazy because I didn't want to read it—such a big best-seller! This makes me wonder why people buy books. I buy them to read them, but I must be strange this way.

The images we have put in place of reality

The following passages were taken from Daniel J. Boorstin’s masterpiece The Image: A guide to pseudo-events in America. This was written in 1987.

Technology, the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t experience it - Max Frisch

In this book I describe the world of our making; how we have used our wealth, or literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. America has given us the landscape and given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat of national self-hypnosis. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience.

We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word “going beyond the limits of reason or moderation”. They are excessive. We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars that are spacious; luxury cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive.

We fabricate national purposes when we lack them, and pursue these purposes after we have fabricated them. We invent our standards and then respect them as if they had been revealed or discovered.

The making of illusions which flood our experiences has become the business of America, some of its most honest and most necessary and most respectable businesses. [And, I might add, some who are not.] ... I am thinking of all the activities which purport to inform and comfort and improve and elevate us: the work of our best journalists, our most enterprising book publishers, our most energetic manufacturers and and merchandisers, our most successful entertainers...and our most influential leaders in foreign relations. Our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations simply makes them more extravagant and makes our illusions more attractive.

What ails us most is not what we have done with American, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but those images we have put in place of reality.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world can offer.

Want to publish a book?

There is a new kind of vanity press. In the old days, they would print a bunch of books for you, and maybe do a publicity number for your precious baby, and you were left with a garage full of books. A regular publisher does the same thing, but they have enough push to get the bookstores to stock them for a while - before most of them come back.

Trafford (www.trafford.com) is one of the new types that print your book on demand. You pay something like a thousand bucks or so to get the ball rolling, and they take care of the rest. All you have to do is get other people to buy them.

This sounds like a good deal to me. The chances of a book taking off are practically nil, anyway. But if you are determined to try anyway, give it a shot. The Internet will help you; outfits like Amazon will list your book and sell it for you, one book at a time. And since you still own the copyright, you can also publish the book on the Web, where prospective customers can look at it, to see if they like it.

There is a drawback, of course: on-demand printing costs more, per book. I tried their publishing profit calculator and it gave me a price of $8.60, and a retail price of $21.49. But if your book does take off, you can always change over to batch printing and make your big bucks.

But if you have more modest, realistic expectations, this looks like a good way to get into print without getting too depressed, or too broke.

Papillon

This is a classic, one of the world’s great adventure books. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor, buy a used copy and put it on your bookshelf. Then read it the next time you want to read a novel.

In many ways, this is a long recital of man’s inhumanity to man. But it also the story of one man’s escape. We all have our individual bondages, so we can relate to his struggle.
------
But along with all the horror, there was also business as usual – in the strangest places. There were many deals going at the Iles du Salut, one of the penal colonies, anything you could imagine, and them some. For example, there was the camelote. This was an artisan’s kind of deal; many of them worked with tortoise shell, and made bracelots, earrings, necklaces, cigarette holders, combs, and the backs of brushes. Sometimes several talents were combined to make one object. For example, a fisherman caught a shark, and fixed its mouth in the open position, the teeth straight and well-polished. Then a cabinetmaker fashioned a small-scale anchor out of a smooth, fne-grained piece of wood, with enough space inside for a painting. One of the favorite paintings was a view of the point of Ile Royale, the channel, and Ile Saint-Joseph, with the setting sun casting bright rays over the blue sea, and in the water, a boat with six convents naked from the waist up, their oars held upright, behind them three guards holding submachine guns. In the prow of the boat two men were raising a casket containing the corpse of a dead con. Sharks were swimming about with their mouths open, waiting for the body. In the lower right-hand corner of the painting was the inscription: “Burial at Royal,” and the date.

The camelote was sold in the Guard’s houses. The best were often bought in advance, or made to order. This trade brought a lot of money into the islands and it was in the guards interest not to interfere. Beside, the men were easier to handle and adapted better to bagne life if they were busy.

The Age of Belief

The book Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson also gives an excellent introduction to medieval Christian thought - or for that matter contemporary Christian thought, which has not changed all that much. Erikson summarizes Augustinian theology by quoting from another book The Age of Belief, by Anne Freemantle:
------
Things are and are not; they are because from God they derive existence; they are not because they only have being, they are not being ... they exist not all at once, but by passing away and succeeding, they together complete the universe, whereof they are a portion.
-------
This applies to men too, but men also have a mind and a memory. The following passage shows how archaic English, especially the use of the intimate case (thee and thou), is needed to elucidate this theology. The complex construction also proves that these people could work with long, dense thoughts, which for modern minds would have to be broken up. Modern man does not have nearly the verbal/mental skills of his ancestors. The King James version of the bible has never been surpassed.

Note also the lack of the perfect tense (the –ing words). Christ on the cross said “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.” (Not what they are doing.) The emphasis on the present is a modern condition. Medieval man lived in eternity.
-------
These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present within me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience or other’s credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and these again I reflect on, as present. ... Sure I am that in it Thou dwellest, since I have remembered Thee ever since I learnt Thee, and there I find Thee, when I call Thee to remembrance.

Young Luther’s obsession with confession

Martin’s father wanted him to become a successful professional, preferably a lawyer. He had started on this road by leaving his father’s farm and becoming a miner. He could see that the life of a peasant had no future, the medieval world was breaking up. So he sent his son to the university at age 17, at considerable sacrifice to the family, and Martin became a good student. But he had a conversion experience in a thunderstorm when he was 21, and entered an Augustinian monastery. His father was furious, and made a big scene at the monastery when he had to formally give his permission, swearing right in front of the monks.

Martin’s first year at the monastery was no problem for him, or for the monastery. But he was not content to become a simple monk. In confession, for example, he was so meticulous in the attempt to be truthful that he spelled out every intention as well as every deed; he splintered relatively acceptable purities into smaller and smaller impurities; he reported temptations in historical sequence, starting back in childhood; and after having confessed for hours, would ask for special appointments in order to correct previous statements.

His preceptor threatened to punish him for obstruction of confession, because he method of confession was designed to meet ordinary requirements without upsetting monastic efficiency. But Martin was inclined to make the most of small things. At one time his superior Staupitz mocked him in a letter in which he said that Christ was not interested in such trifles and that Martin had better see to it that he have some juicy adultry or murder to confess - perhaps the murder of his parents.

Sleeping With the Devil

Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. This book is unique in that it appeals to conservatives and liberals alike. The text below is from the editorial reviews in Amazon:
-----------
In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups—an end game just waiting to play out.

Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its sand—and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe.

Ideological captivity

This is from the book Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson, subtitled A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. He points out, over and over again, that Luther grew up in another era, and was a formative element of yet another era, neither of which we can really appreciate, no matter what we think.
-------
An appreciation of the sincerity in an idealogical system other than our own is extremely difficult. This is partially because our own idealogy, as it must, forbids us to ever question and analyze the structure of what we hold to be true, since only thus can we maintain the fiction that we chose to believe what in fact we had no choice but to believe. While we are more than eager to find the logical flaws, and particularly the insincerity and captivity, in one who operates in another system. We may fail to understand that the indoctrinated individual of another era or country may feel quite at peace and quite free and productive in his ideological captivity.