Supreme Courtship

With the U.S. Congress delaying the financial bail-out program until the politicians have achieved maximum hand-wringing and finger-pointing, perhaps it's time for a reprieve in the form of a cleverly funny new book. Supreme Courtship, by Christopher Buckley was released earlier this month, which implies its text was finalized long before the presidential candidates selected their running mates. This is key as one of the main characters sure sounds like a certain V.P. candidate. This similarity, along with a number of pertinent themes, will have readers wondering about the reflecting link between art and real life.

President Donald P. Vanderdamp is portrayed as man so bland as to make Al Gore look like a rock star. His plain vanilla persona even extends to his favorite hobby, bowling. What does set the President apart from other politicos is a commitment to actually do something about mushrooming public spending. The something involves a presidential veto for every spending bill that gets to his desk. As you might expect, this has his personal stock selling at a very low multiple on Capitol Hill. Although he plans to serve only one term, a plan well-supported by his approval ratings, there are ways in which the legislators can pay him back for his swift veto pen; namely the savaging of his nominees to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the enthusiastic point man on this effort being the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one Dexter Mitchell.

After having two eminently qualified nominees destroyed by Mitchell's committee, Vanderdamp decides to take a different tack. He nominates Judge Pepper Cartwright to the Supreme Court. Among the problems with this nomination is the fact that Ms Cartwright's most recent judicial experience consists of six seasons as the star of TV's Courtroom Six. Moreover, the fact that Pepper is certifiably hot adds a lot of spice to the story. She is described, by her slimy husband, who is also the producer of Courtroom Six, as, "... woman in her mid-thirties, tall, lush brown hair,...high cheekbones, and deep dimples. She wore glasses, which she kept putting on and taking off." Except for the fact that she is as Texas as the Alamo, she could easily be confused with a certain Governor of Alaska.

The fun really starts after she is appointed to the Supreme Court. Like any new appointee, she must learn the ropes, including the eccentricities of her fellow justices, which Buckley describes in living color. You might also want to dig out your Latin Cliff Notes. Amid some upheavals between her and her producer husband, who can usually be found plumbing the depths of depravity for potential reality show subjects, the court attempts to deal with the issues of the day, with Pepper, as the new kid, frequently providing the swing vote.

The book ends amid a great brouhaha of constitutional law, in which the Supreme Court must decide the results of the next subsequent presidential election which has been complicated by a proposed constitutional amendment. The ending is all the merrier as the election involves two old antagonists. It's not quite as dramatic as the score-settling scene in The Godfather, interspersed with a baptism in Latin, but there is a certain satisfaction to the resolution of the saga, one which supports Vanderdamp's nickname, Don Veto.

The Supreme Court? Deciding a presidential election? Who would believe this stuff? The View recommends Supreme Courtship with two thumbs up in spite of this far fetched plot.

Author John Fulton to speak at the South Shore Writers Club

The South Shore Writers Club is hosting a talk by writer John Fulton on Saturday, December, 8, 2007 at 11:00 am at the Abington Public Library.
All are cordially invited to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

Fulton's latest book, The Animal Girl, is a collection of two novellas and three stories. He has also written a collection of stories called Retribution and received a ‘Push Cart’ prize for the story, Hunter. Fulton is a Professor in the MFA program at U-Mass, Boston.

The Abington Public Library is located at 600 Gliniewicz Way, Abington, MA 02351

The Man from Pinpoint

In his new book, My Grandfather’s Son, Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, breaks his long-standing silence and produces a poignant memoir of his upbringing, his educational experiences, and the events that helped mold his personal philosophy of independence and self-sufficiency. Much has been written about Thomas, especially since his contentious 1991 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, about this man that liberals love to hate because of his conservative views on many social issues. In reading this frank and revealing book, I was struck by how his life’s journey had dovetailed with the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement which provided him a unique vantage point from which to hammer out his own point of view.

Born in 1948 in the tiny village of Pinpoint, Georgia, Thomas entered a world where black people still lived a segregated existence and during his early years, he had ample experience of the limitations such a system imposes. He came of age just as the budding Civil Rights movement emerged with all of its exciting potential. Thomas had an insider’s perspective as young blacks found themselves surging ahead into uncharted waters. Fortunately, he had been raised with a strong set of values that helped him chart his own course.

Thomas was raised in Savannah by his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, whom he called Daddy. A stern man, Anderson used his own brand of tough-love to teach his belief in self-reliance, hard work and tenacity. While the young Thomas bristled under Daddy’s discipline, he found ample opportunity in later years to fall back on these values. Another powerful influence came from the catholic nuns who taught at the segregated parochial schools that he attended. In addition to providing him with strong academic foundation, the nuns were also instrumental in helping him attend The College of the Holy Cross that he entered following several years of wrestling with the strength of his religious vocation in the seminary.

Thomas worked hard to graduate from Holy Cross as well as Yale Law School. And while his strong academic skills stood him well, he struggled financially, especially in law school where he was a married student with a wife and child. But the more telling struggle was the one he waged with the emerging battle for Civil Rights. As an undergraduate he was part of the black student movement and experienced the heady rhetoric and activism that sought to right century-old wrongs. While Thomas had plenty of firsthand experience of life under the old ways of segregation, he was troubled by some of the new ideas being put forth, especially those that stressed separatism and rejection of white society. He also disagreed with some of the new social theories, such as forced busing to achieve school integration. He felt that while this solution allowed for statistical “progress”, it did not do enough to address the issue of providing quality education for all students. He distrusted the disturbing trend towards increased emphasis on government programs rather than stressing self-reliance as a means of improving one’s lot in life. His experience with Affirmative Action left him bristling over the fact that when he went in search of his first job, he found that his hard-won Yale Law degree was devalued in the marketplace by the assumption that black graduates had not been held to the same standards as other students. At the same time, his efforts to build a career, trying to balance the needs of his family against his determination to achieve a measure of job satisfaction should resonate with generations of young people, especially those who lacked a strong support system, who sought to make their way in the world.

In 1991, President George Bush nominated Thomas to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Among the qualities that supported his nomination was his hard won conservative philosophy that made him an attractive candidate for the Republicans. Unfortunately, it also made him a marked man for the democrats who quickly geared up to block his appointment. The chain of events is well documented, but it is important to recall that the charges brought by Anita Hill came by way of a supposedly confidential FBI investigation that was leaked to the press by committee staffers. In spite of the fact that the Judiciary Committee had already passed his nomination to the full senate, the hearings were re-opened to air Hill’s lurid uncorroborated charges in the public arena. And while, in the final analysis, it boiled down to his word against hers, Thomas brought a spotless record to the table while Hill’s employment record detracted from her credibility.

Fortunately, there were enough tough minded supporters who refused to let Clarence Thomas get Borked. But for a man who had struggled to live his life in a just manner, he realized that Hill’s charges would stick to him forever. Yes, he was eventually appointed to the Supreme Court, but he was left with a besmirched reputation that, in some quarters, will never be retored. In an attempt at blocking the appointment of a man who’s only sin was his conservative views, his detractors, left wing liberals all, stooped to the old segregationist trick of accusing a black man of sexual impropriety. It was more than ironic to watch members of this same group rush to defend Bill Clinton a few years later when was impeached for lying about using the Oval Office as a lair for sex with a subordinate.

On October 9th the Boston Globe ran an editorial by Derrick Z. Jackson’s that I thought at first was a review of My Grandfather’s Son. After reading the article, however,I realized that Jackson, in all likelihood, hadn’t bothered to read the book, which he neglected to name. He simply used snatches of the book to do a hatchet job on the Supreme Court Justice who, according to Jackson, should just forget about Hill’s charges since he had “won” in 1991. The Globe added editorial balance by running a cartoon next to the article depicting Thomas’ car spinning mud on Anita Hill posing as an innocent bystander. Nice Touch. If any of these journalistic wizards had bothered to read the book, they would have realized that the recalling of anecdotes of Hill’s employment were an effort at understanding why she made these charges which Thomas labels sees as totally false.

It is not hard to see how liberals can disagree with Clarence Thomas, but throwing fabricated dirt on his Supreme Court nomination is a far cry from a thoughtful debate on the issues. Don’t make the same mistake as the Globe staff. Read this book and you will come away with an appreciation of the ordeal that Clarence Thomas underwent and the inner steel that allowed him to survive it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

What a difference a few hundred years can make. Writing in the seventeenth century, Afghan poet Saib-e-Tabrizi wrote the following lines as part of a poem about his beloved Kabul:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

The Kabul that we see in this modern tale of Afghani life seems to have slipped a bit. A pervasive drought produces relentless dust that even gets into one’s molars. The Kabul River dries so that the riverbed is used as a bazaar. And heat? Welcome to life in a sauna.

Against this backdrop, which would in itself drive most of us to madness, is layered an ongoing civil unrest that rains rockets on its buildings killing its people at random. Adding a third layer of misery is a domestic arrangement whereby nasty Rasheed, the misogynist shoemaker (custom loafers for the upper crust) terrifies his two wives with overbearing, but innovative, cruelty punctuated by regular beatings, and we are not talking the occasional love tap here. Old Rasheed evokes the image of Rocky using a side of beef as a heavy bag. At one point he sticks his gun (even the cobbler is packing) in his younger wife’s mouth.

Amid this hellish existence, the two wives overcome their initial antagonism and develop a deep bond. Mariam, the elder wife, whose life was marginal even before she was sent off, at 15, to marry Rasheed, missed her one chance at a sliver of appreciation by virtue of her inability to bear him a son. Laila, the backup wife, does come through on this point, but Mariam soon learns that she didn’t miss much. From this morass, a happy ending of sorts is actually attained after Mariam makes the ultimate sacrifice, courtesy of a sentence levied by a Taliban tribunal and carried out in a soccer stadium, freeing Laila and her children to hook up with her childhood sweetheart, Tariq. (Cue the sappy music)

The story is a good read and I kept turning pages to find out what happens to these poor wretches. But of equal interest was the description of daily life under a succession of repressive regimes, not the least of which was the Taliban. Americans got to know of this gang of Islamic crazies during the military actions against Al Quida, post 9/11. But the portrayal of daily life under these maniacs as they cruised through Kabul in their Toyota trucks checking the male citizenry for proper beard length and other infractions necessitating on-the-spot punishment, begins to shed some life on the bizarre philosophy of the Islamo- fascists It’s easy to see why Osama bin Laden seems to be thriving in Tora Bora.

The View recommends A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, who was born in Kabul in 1965, but has lived in California since 1980. In his spare time, Hosseini is an MD active in refugee affairs with the UN.

The Tin Roof Blowdown

Fans of Dave Robicheaux novels are well-advised to grab a copy of James Lee Burke’s latest. It includes all of our old friends from New Iberia Parish, Louisiana, where Dave serves as a detective in the Sheriff’s office, and nearby New Orleans. Clete Purcel makes early and frequent appearances leaving a litter of mayhem, busted heads and empty liquor bottles in his wake, proving the old maxim that there is no situation that can’t be made worse. At the same time, he’s definitely the guy you want watching your six. He and Streak go back to their days on the NOPD, with some Viet Nam flashbacks providing a keyhole view into their shared experiences. There are a number of new names and faces including Sydney Kovick, a fearsome crime boss, who, when not separating his victims from their legs with the help of a chain saw, can be found at his florist shop creating artful flower arrangements.

Robicheaux’s character is a leader in the most nickname category. In addition to Streak, he is also called: Dave, Noble Mon, Pops and Bwana, the last by his boss the androgynous, but highly-effective, Sheriff of New Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau. Dave’s current wife, (he tends to go through them) Molly is an ex Maryknoll nun who’s loyalty vouches for the good side of Streak’s complicated character. His adopted daughter, Alafair, who shares a name with one of Burke’s daughters, has graduated from college and emerged as a smart tough cookie, a characterization that comes in handy when you are Dave Robicheaux’s daughter. Family pets Tripod, the three-legged raccoon and Snuggs, the killer-cat round out the roster at Chez Robicheaux.

The story’s plot follows this full cast of intriguing characters as they each follow their personal quest, which range from the retrieval of a bag of hot diamonds to achieving mere day-to-day survival. But what gives the story added electricity is the fact that it unfolds amid the incredible chaos and devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the most destructive storms in American History.

In addition to being a highly-talented story teller, Burke also possesses some of the best descriptive abilities in popular literature. His description of the southern Louisianna locales both before and after Katrina’s knockout punch comes through in vivid and intriguing detail. At the same time, his deeply-felt love for this part of the country colors his descriptions of its dramatic beauty, presented with warts and all.