Ok ok so they’re not all big long reviews… but one is! I decided to clear my reviewing backlog by doing shorter reviews. So there’s a bunch of them today!
REVIEWS
Chatelain, Franchise
SHORT REVIEWS
Didion, Play It As It Lays
Eco, The Name of the Rose
Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust
Saslow, Rising Out of Hatred
Wedgwood, The Great Rebellion
Pérez-Reverte, Captain Alatriste
Nash, Animals Eat Each Other
Tanaka, Dawn
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Seat Thief, Reprise
REVIEWS
Marcia Chatelain, “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” (2020) (read aloud by Machelle Williams) - This is a fucker of a sad story. If there’s one thing I’m not going to moralize about, it’s eating “bad” food. I actually think fast food is a good concept with godawful externalities in terms of ecological damage, labor practices, and health. I don’t think whatever kind of vaguely-elven/hobbit-ish “slow food” vision some people have for a better food world should be the only one available in a better future (and how many farm-to-table, slow food type restaurants also have terrible labor practices?). And I think people have the right not to optimize for physical or mental health- they have the right to pursue experiences that might harm them, up to and including eating unhealthy food.
People have the right to eat unhealthy food- but they also have the right to healthy, wholesome food, and McDonalds, and other fast food companies, are what many black communities in this country have instead of that. Fast food is so ubiquitous it can fool us into thinking it’s always been there- I’ve lost count of the number of medieval fantasy novels I’ve read where the author treats eating at a roadside inn as structurally similar to Denny’s, if not quite up to McDonald’s speed and efficiency. The most relevant differences between the fast food giants that grew to prominence in the US after WWII and other eateries were that fast food chains were labor-intensive, highly standardized enterprises, run by out-of-town corporate giants but dependent on local buy-in, from customers, workers, and key to the growth of McDonald’s and other chains, franchisees.
Drop something like that in the cities that were soon to roil and burn with discontent and there was bound to be an interesting situation. Black communities had a bifurcated response to McDonald’s at first. Most McDonald’s franchises, early on, went into suburbs and other areas black people often didn’t or couldn’t go. McDonald’s obeyed the usual segregation customs, and at least once dozens of sit-in participants were trapped and brutalized in a southern McDonald’s. But, and this is a dynamic that historians of consumer capitalism have identified elsewhere, there was one special appeal that chains like McDonald’s had for black customers: unless something went wrong, culpably wrong, with the process, when you ordered something at McDonald’s, you got the same thing, at the same price, everyone else got. This is a similar logic to why black customers were early adopters of packaged food and chain supermarkets- you weren’t going to get cheated buying a box of corn flakes like you would be by a racist small shop owner who has to weigh you out your flour or whatever.
Moreover, once McDonald’s got somewhat less racist, both black entrepreneurs and the Chicago-based company saw another appealing facet to establishing the chain in black communities. It did not take that much money, in the grand scheme of things, to buy a McDonald’s franchise, and the company would help you set up, without banks or whoever else involved. McDonald’s quickly noticed that franchises with black owners often did better in black neighborhoods than if they were owned by white people. Moreover, in the wake of the ideological conflicts within the black freedom struggle and the exhausting round of riots, assassinations, and recrimination that happened around the same time, McDonald’s lucked into an ideological fad- black capitalism was, for a little while, on everyone’s lips, even people like Ishmael Reed, who should have known better.
Richard Nixon knew what he was doing when he promoted black capitalism as a solution to black America’s woes, even as the fulfillment of “black power.” It’s a placeholder idea, a vacuous non-concept that can still effectively stand in for where an idea might otherwise be, if no one kicks the tires (not unlike a McDonald’s meal is a placeholder for something better, come to that). Nobody — not Nixon, not such movement veterans as Floyd McKissick who embraced the concept — articulated how, exactly, you were going to get black capitalism without a critical mass of capital in black hands, without some kind of massive redistribution program. That wasn’t on the table. What was on the table was a certain amount of grant money, much of which went to businesses who could prove they were promoting black business ownership and job growth. In a period of deindustrialization, McDonald’s, with its franchise model (you’re hardly going to franchise steel manufacturing plants), was poised to take advantage, massively increasing its footprint in black America and posing as a community investor.
McDonald’s proved skillful at playing the cultural games that grew in importance in the late twentieth century as the possibilities for material change receded. In this, an earlier investment paid off- those black franchisees, some of whom moved into senior corporate positions, proved vital to McDonald’s efforts to adapt. This involved both learning marketing targeted at black people and figuring out how to defuse challenges from local community organizations who either wanted a bigger slice of the profits McDonald’s was extracting or else keep the company out in general. McDonald’s was also helped by the times- it “fit right in there,” as Sam Elliott put it in another nineties classic, The Big Lebowski. Vague aspirationalism, cheap products produced by increasingly globalized supply chains and taylorized workforces from the farm to the cash register, relying on people not to look too close… the eighties and nineties, despite some academic trends, poor times for close criticism.
Really, it was just sad to watch these communities, with leaders who had struggled so hard and done so much during the course of the black freedom struggle, reduced to slinging slogans about burger restaurants, whether they’re good or bad or whatever. It’s sad to see the hopes people invested in black franchising, and not just McDonald’s either- a chain named after Chicken George, from “Roots,” was in fact black owned and was doing pretty good… before it got poleaxed by market changes. That’s what happened to the numerous chains opened up by black celebrities during the black capitalism fad, too, when they weren’t just vaporware to begin with. That’s what the kind of deep fundament of capital that established — read, white — firms have, their relationships across the web of capitalism from banks to suppliers to media, can get you. McDonald’s could afford to screw up everything from its initial introduction of chicken sandwiches to avoiding lawsuits for discrimination, because they’re established and backed by other established players. None of these black enterprises had that. Black capitalism can’t replace black power because you need power to do capitalism.
And so, McDonald’s grew omnipresent in black America. As black communities continued their slide into immiseration, fast food places are often the only places to affordably feed a family with the kind of time people scrambling to make a living have, so the worse things got, the more McDonald’s was in demand. A franchisee conman who got his start using black pride sloganeering to boost his McDonald’s franchises stood behind Bill Clinton as he signed the welfare reform bill, further cheapening McDonald’s labor pool and encouraging people to spend their dwindling food budget there, in case the ironies involved were too subtle.
It’s sad, but also hard to blame the individual black people involved. Capitalism in general, and consumer companies like McDonald’s in particular, does everything it can to obscure what actually makes the machine go, to impersonate natural forces or acts of god. And anyone who knows anything about the struggles of the sixties knows the profound exhaustion that came after a decade of fighting seemed to fall short of tangible goals. You can’t blame drowning people for scrabbling at any kind of driftwood they can lay their hands on. And it’s not like the opposition — Chatelain begins the book with the kind of sneering, “junk food” criticism of fast food that misses a lot of the point — was great, either, immersed in whatever spell seemed to stop Americans, especially but not exclusively white ones. from taking anything structural into account until, maybe, 2010 or so in their understandings of the world. All in all, a discouraging picture, well painted. ****’
SMALL REVIEWS
Joan Didion, “Play It As It Lays” (1970) - I like her nonfiction better… and I find her nonfiction to be a little fatuous, but well-written enough to be enjoyable when she can be bothered to really notice anything. I will say Didion worked early enough to get that rich-kid blues work better when you give them something to be actually blue about, beyond their own lack of sincerity or whatever. Maria, Didion’s stand-in, doesn’t suffer from that so much. She’s rich and beautiful but depressed in part because she’s treated as a non-human status symbol for fathers, lovers, husbands to negotiate over. Don’t think she’ll get all didactic and feminist about it though! No, she’ll just do some compulsive behaviors around beautiful people and environs in sixties Southern California. Cover copy calls this “terrifying.” What even are critics? **’
Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose” (1980) - The eighties were such a weird time that you had intellectual potboilers! Eco drops a lot of references and medieval history here. Presumably it was a lot harder to keep up with pre-wikipedia! An English monk based on Sherlock Holmes and his Watson of a novice come to a rich Italian abbey where monks are dying in bad ways, in the 1300s. Could it have something to do with various vaguely-gnostic-inspired heretic movements and a scary library? This was reasonably fun, but I kept waiting for something “more,” I guess, to justify the hype, some interesting prose or ideas that weren’t quite there. It’s also weird that Eco based the worst character, a guy who hates ideas and laughter and only lives for orthodoxy, on Jorge Luis Borges. Borges wasn’t perfect but he wasn’t that. ****
Deborah Lipstadt, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory” (1993) - This was reasonably important when it first came out, to shine the light on the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Arguably more important was the attempt by Holocaust denier, and generally foul sack of shit, David Irving to sue Deborah Lipstadt for libel, and getting his ass handed to him in court. That said, this book would be important now if it made a good theoretical contribution- obviously, the field has moved on some in the last almost thirty years. But it doesn’t. For someone who tends to believe that any anti-Zionism is also antisemitism (which presumably helped get her a State Department job), Lipstadt is weirdly reticent about how antisemitism, and basically antisemitism alone, motivates Holocaust denial. Instead she blames the “assault on truth” by postmodernists and deconstructionists. That’s just stupid. Her biggest piece of evidence for this thesis is that Noam Chomsky defended some French Holocaust denier. Chomsky is not any kind of subjectivist, and he makes dumb calls sometimes. The rest of the book is a respectably thorough guide to the beginnings and propagations of Holocaust denial as a movement, but it hasn’t aged well, with this perspective. ***
Eli Saslow, “Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist” (2018) - People praised this book to the skies when it came out. It’s pretty ok, as far as profile journalism goes. It’s the story of Derek Black. Black is a few years younger than me, so in his thirties now, and his father is Don Black, a longtime white nationalist leader, Klansman, and founder of the website Stormfront. There really isn’t another site like Stormfront, no agreed-upon single internet epicenter for a given ideology like Stormfront is for white supremacists (the Blacks at the time insisted they were merely white separatists, not supremacists, but we know that’s bullshit)... maybe Moveon, at one point, for antiwar liberals, but that’s long since passed. Young Derek Black helped build Stormfront, and was a frequent poster from the age of ten on. Then he went to college, specifically the New College, a sort of hippie-ish public liberal arts school in his native Florida. He did not wear his beliefs on his sleeve and befriended people from a wide variety of backgrounds. He got outed as a Nazi a few years in. He lost friends. Some other friends – including one Orthodox Jew – stood by him. So did a girlfriend. As a history student, he learned some actual history, and found that the picture taught him about the history of the world was mostly wrong. He quit the movement. He tried to get his dad to quit, but failed. Various people have tried to sell this as the “real way” to deal with Nazis- patient conversation and community-building. The antifascist students who out Black are treated by Saslow as self-righteous martinets. Here’s the deal: if you’re willing to try to fucking Dangerous Minds this situation, go right ahead. It’ll probably work better on a smart, sensitive kid who – was raised in the movement and never felt a choice in the matter, but now has one – than the dumb, cruel men that specifically chose white supremacy, given every chance not to, who make up the bulk of fascist movements today. I’m glad Black got out. But it’s silly to treat this as anything other than a nice story based on deeply unusual circumstances. ***
C.V. Wedgwood, The Great Rebellion (1955-1958) - Dame C.V. Wedgwood wrote a great narrative history of the Thirty Years War, which is no easy feat given that conflict’s protracted length and complexity. A few decades later she tackled the contemporaneous British early modern war of religion, which we’ve come to call the English Civil War (even though Scotland and Ireland were central to the conflict). Let’s put it this way: imagery from the Thirty Years War has added horror flavor to works from von Grimmelstauffen to Warhammer 40K, while the English Civil War has provided historical fanfic fodder for the English political parties and for American regionalist pedants since at least the early nineteenth century. Wedgwood has a side- descendant of radical Quaker potters, she was a Tory, and thought that the Parliament side were grasping men bringing down someone flawed but fundamentally decent in Charles I and Archbishop Laud, for basically petty and irrational reasons. While I basically disagree with this take (less than you might think- the Parliamentary side was also shitty, especially to the Irish), the issue with this book, insofar as it had one for me, was bloat. Two long hardcovers and way too much blow-by-blow- Wedgwood meant to write this history through the Restoration but died around the time she was writing about Charles’ execution. Hey, a king got got by his erstwhile subjects- how bad could it be? The writing is still graceful, just too much narrative, not enough analysis to be as good as the other work of hers’ I’ve read. ****
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, “Captain Alatriste” (1996) (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers-Peden) (read aloud by Scott Brick) - This was a pretty fun swashbuckler! The titular Captain is a veteran of Spain’s wars, bumming around early 17th century Madrid, doing odd swordsman jobs. He gets commissioned into a sketchy job, with different people giving him different orders, which lands him into a world of hurt involving the Spanish throne, the heirs to the British throne, and the Inquisition. Pérez-Reverte gets across a sense of danger and already-faded grandeur, as the great things about Spain near its height clash against the things dragging it down throughout the background of Alatriste’s swashbuckling deeds. There’s still plenty of “cool” factor, though, even as the narrator – Alatriste’s boy ward! – waxes lachrymose about how badly the Spaniards were being screwed by their leaders. Swordfights, friendship with the famous poet Quevedo, etc etc. Pretty fun. Unfortunately the sequel is not yet in English language audiobook form, so I’ll have to just grab the physical book. ****’
Elle Nash, “Animals Eat Each Other” (2018) (read aloud by Kasi Hallowell) - I think a friend of mine is an editor at the small press that published this! Or else published something else by Elle Nash. I think “alt lit” might mean something different and more time-specific, some 2000s Brooklyn nonsense, but this shares some similarities- autofictional conceit, emotive content about rather flatly-affected people, etc. I will say that Nash has a better ear and eye for how people communicate than a lot of people who write flat and try to pass it off as realistic (some of the usual suspects you’re probably sick of hearing me kvetch about- Ellis, Lin, etc). Nash appears to be about my age, so became a legal adult in the early aughts. Being a conventionally attractive and somewhat emotionally needy (who isn’t, at 18? Needy, anyway) young woman, naturally, creeps and weirdos swoop down on the Nash-substitute who narrates this novel. The creeps and weirdos at the center of this story are a young (but not that young) man and woman in a couple who take the narrator in as a third in their relationship, tinged strongly by S&M and satanism. Among other smart things Nash manages, she gets across how stuff that no longer feels especially edgy – the aforementioned S&M and satanism as well as tattooery – felt not long ago, as transgressive and exciting, especially for young people. Naturally, things do not go well in this menage, or in the other, mostly exploitative, sexual relationships the narrator gets in. This is not a story of safe, sane, consensual anything. Maybe this is just the prude in me, but the sex intrigued me a lot less than the ways in which the couple managed to maintain their senses of themselves – despite? Because of? Satanism, baiting barely-legal girls into manipulative relationships, general early-aughts vaguely-countercultural exurb (takes place in Colorado Springs) sleaze – as good, normative somehow, through it all. I suspect they could do that because of the scapegoat they recruited in the form of the narrator- who, like a lot of scapegoats, got into it with her eyes open, if not necessarily fairly, and does not take all of the liberties to which we have decided victims are now entitled. A strong work. ****’
Yoshiki Tanaka, “Dawn” (1982) (translated by Daniel Huddleston) (read aloud by Tim Gerard Reynolds) - This is the first novel in a long scifi series that has been turned into an anime beloved by certain sorts of nerds the world over. I’m not much of anime guy – another separation between me and a lot of people I’m friends with, my cohort, more or less – but I was interested in trying scifi from various countries and languages so I thought I’d give this series a try. “Dawn” is pretty fun. In the post-faster-than-light space travel future, space combat resembles something between WWII carrier-fleet battles and Napoleonic naval maneuvering, because… well, because it makes for compelling nerd battles, I guess. A galactic empire and a notionally-democratic alliance of planets are at odds. Neither are depicted as “good,” exactly- for all that the Alliance is democratic, it’s also deeply unequal and demagogic. Two commanders emerge on the opposite sides to mirror each other as war heats up between the two. The “Golden Brat” Reinhard von Lohengrimm (sp?) is a beautiful, impetuous youth from the minor imperial aristocracy with flair, panache, and a desire to overthrow the corrupt Emperor – and enthrone himself – for basically personal trauma reasons. Yang Wen-Li is a self-effacing military genius who really just wants to read books and drink brandy, but got stuck with a military career and fires off brilliant strategies. Both manage major coups of strategy, foiled by politicians on their respective sides. This is a ten-novel series, so obviously, nothing is concluded by the end. Maybe because he’s coming at it from Japan, but Tanaka avoids such military scifi tics as weapon/spaceship pedantry, excessive speechifying (obviously there’s some, mostly about the futility of war, despite the fact there’s no fun book/anime series without it, but not excessive), etc… only the multiplication of names of subordinate commanding officers during battle scenes, which isn’t so bad. Pretty fun, I will pick up the sequel sometime. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Seat Thief Reprise
I thought I could save my seat with mere headphones. I should have known better.