I am appalled and disgusted by you and your government’s bullying attempt to undermine environmental protection in Canada with little or no public debate. The scuttling of the omnibus budget bill with, as a far as I can see it, limited debate in parliament is fundamentally undemocratic and contradicts the core values that makes Canada a respected nation around the world. You should be ashamed. Canada’s standing in the world is being damaged by, among other things, the smothering of rational inquiry. (I point to the muzzling of government scientists, particularly in the area of environmental science.) At the very least, there should be full public disclosure of what you and your government are proposing with the corresponding and appropriate time allowed in parliament for vigorous and open debate. (A few days for a 425-page document? You have got to be joking!) The absence of an open debate clearly shows that you have something to hide, but this is unsurprising as you and your government have been secretive from the start. You must know that the majority of Canadians will not support you when it comes to your utter disregard, indeed your neo-conservative contempt, for the natural world. Getting rid of environmental laws and privileging business interests will not bring about the best of all possible worlds; rather, it will result in short-term profit for the few, and long-term socialized cost for all—even the rich. I am convinced that you and your government have set Canada on a course that is economically, democratically, morally, ethically, socially, and environmentally corrupt. I hope that the good people of Canada will find the courage and the will to resist your sad and narrow vision of the world.

Sincerely,

Patrick Mackenzie
Vancouver

If you want to write a letter of your own to our PM, here’s where you can find his email address: Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Wade Davis’s epic account of the first attempts to summit Mount Everest led by fabled English mountaineer George Mallory in the early 1920s is as dense as any well-researched and well-written history comes. And for many readers, especially the data junkies among us, a history is exactly what they will get: Into the Silence is both linear and information-heavy. Among other things, Davis spends pages and pages revealing the organizational and logistical details of an assault on the highest mountain in the world and all the bits and pieces, material and intellectual, required to get to at least a standing view of Everest from Tibet. Sometimes this approach is numbing. But underneath all the dates, times, and names runs an equally moving and mesmerizing narrative that can best be described as a tragedy.

George Mallory was perhaps the greatest climber of his age, and, as Davis conveys, carried the hopes and dreams of some lost notion of England’s, even in the early twentieth century, fading empire in his attempt to summit the mountain that would in the end take his life and the life of many others in three separate assaults on the 8,858 meter peak between 1920 and 1924. And the use of “assault” is appropriate here, for to be the first to stand on the heights of Everest represented a chance—a fleeting chance—at redemption for England after the unredeemed horror of the industrial slaughter that unequivocally describes World War One.

For what could be described as a non-fiction alpine adventure story—much along the same lines as the output of John Krakauer (minus Krakauer’s annoying tendency to insert himself into the narrative in mediocre journalistic prose), Into the Silence spends a considerable amount of time detailing the absolute nightmare that was trench warfare in France and other war theatres between 1914 and 1918. This is because almost every member of each expedition party experienced the war directly in some way—either through combat or in providing support for troops at the front. As Davis meticulously, and vividly, reports, the chances for survival at the front were ridiculously small. And those that did survive would take to their graves images of living men mechanistically destroyed before their eyes by the first industrial war machine.

Against the enterprise of war and the annihilation it wrought, the pristine mountain wilderness of the Himalayas (at the time) acts like a foil to the killing fields of Europe. But the taint of war seemed to cling to the Englishmen like a ghost limb in the apparent lunacy of their bid for the summit of Everest—one of the most inhospitable places on earth, even on a good day. Indeed a definite cavalier attitude seems to have characterized the entire Everest program of the 1920s, perhaps best captured in the Englishmen’s initial derisive feelings for their Tibetan hosts—as though Mallory and his contemporaries were the embodiment of a class-obsessed empire. And throughout it all, because of their participation in a pointless and ruinous war (and aren’t all wars pointless and ruinous?), the suggestion of outright madness on behalf of the expedition’s participants is never far away.

Although Mallory paid failure on the mountain with his life, Davis doesn’t present the early attempts for Everest as merely the ambitions of misguided Englishmen living off the dreams of empire. The trauma of war and the search for solace in its wreckage seems to be Davis’s explanation for the motivation behind such an apparently foolish quest. In the end, the expedition’s ultimate failure is offered as a moment of redemption for men who, as Davis gracefully puts it, “had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive.”

I did a bit of checking around, and the first several professional reviews I read for Imperial were pretty negative–and for what I thought were pretty lame reasons. For sure William T. Vollmann’s tome is fragmented and lays down a circuitous narrative from start to finish, but his meandering, idiosyncratic, almost pointless story that slowly unravels like a song about doomed love is exactly what makes Imperial so compelling and readable. (And I just read somewhere that the best writing should have no point.) To the detractors of Vollmann’s tome I’ll say I don’t think Imperial is meant to be taken as journalism or non-fiction or biography or any kind of linear narrative. It’s a messy and fractured hybrid of non-fiction, self-involved memoir, and repetitive imagistic history among other things. This is his personal understanding of, as he repeats throughout his book, the “entity” he calls Imperial. Which raises the question, how do any of us relate to a landscape? (For those that don’t know, the Imperial, or Central Valley, cuts a large path through the middle of southern California and extends clear into northern Mexico.)

Western civilization seems to present us with only two options: we control the land or it controls us. Vollmann, as he depicts man’s scheming, presents the landscape of the Imperial Valley as a vanquished object: originally a desert, then by the miracle of irrigation, it became a veritable garden paradise, or so the original Imperial Valley “boosters” wished it to be. For Vollmann, man’s relationship to land–and we are talking about men here–is one of utility and the hubris that that relationship necessarily requires. To this Vollmann ads a second dualism: Imperial exists simultaneously as real and existing in the imagination. But, as if echoing Lacan’s vague idea of the real and the imaginary, the physical reality of Imperial is reproduced here wholly in terms of Vollmann’s idiosyncratic experience of the place (an experience that he himself seems at times mournfully bewildered by)–the least of which touches on an objective account of its physical geology. And this too is rendered like a palimpsest–history, journalism, geography, written one over the other, forever receding from any fixed narrative. This is not to say that Vollmann dispenses with descriptions of the landscape and its prominent features (such as the Salton Sea, Signal Mountain, the US/Mexican border–a literal wall), but his understanding of Imperial is bound mostly to his own emotional attachment to the place, one that is equally bound to history and myth, flitting like a bat between fiction and non-fiction.

Indeed, Imperial has the feel of a novel most of the time. Towards the end of this 1161 page book Vollmann writes,

WATER IS HERE. None of this makes any difference. Nothing can touch this marriage of land and sky, of heat and salt, this hammer and anvil, this procreating couple whose only child is a plane which unlike a rainforest, an empire or a work of art can outlast anything the planet itself can, anything, even human beings, even water or waterlessness; and if, God forbid, Imperial does someday get riddled with cities, its character will remain almost unaffected; it will go on and on, true to itself, long after such temporary superficialities as the ‘U.S.A.’ and ‘Mexico’ have become as washed out as old neon hotel signs in the searing daylight of Indio.

At one time the Imperial Valley was one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the world. Now, the desert is returning. Perhaps a useful way to think of this long, mesmerizing, beautiful, ugly, frustrating book is as a Zen Buddhist koan: paradoxical, contradictory, circular–offering some hint of a clue into the dark puzzle of the world where the desert basin represents the mind and body empty of desire. In Vollmann’s book, the modern history of the Imperial Valley is revealed not so much as an examination of man’s folly, but more like a long meditation on impermanence.

At the beginning of The Fog of War, the documentary/interview featuring Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, says, straight into the camera—set up by film maker Eroll Morris to create the impression that the interviewee is directing his answers at an implied audience, that is, us—in unequivocal language, “I think the human race needs to think more about killing.”

The self-conscious irony of McNamara’s declaration is crushing considering the reality of modern human history—a history littered with the dead, the stiff objects of judgment and antipathy and well thought-out campaigns of mass murder. His statement, which sounds like a question, is really directed at the viewer, you and me, who in all truth have not thought about killing. But we have history, so let it be our guide.

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littlell is presented as a novel, but immediately that rarified distinction is broken down. Historical fiction, the genre this “novel” occupies, along with other forms of literary discourse, troubles the comfortable lines we have set up arbitrarily separating fiction from non-fiction, truth from lies, and, why not, while we’re at it, sanity from insanity. Littell’s subject is that great example of human lack, the holocaust, but told from an insider’s perspective—specifically, a young SS officer within the Reich by the name of Maximilian Aue (apparently pronounced Ah-we, a name with a sound coming suspiciously close to the Jewish name for God, Yahwe). The Kindly Ones is presented as a memoir, much upon the same lines as those written by repentant or unrepentant former Nazis, but goes way beyond the scope of bravado or any sentimental request for forgiveness that Aue accuses some of those authors of making. The book is broken down into an introduction, “Tocatta” where the narrator Aue addresses the reader directly, and six separate chapters. In “Tocatta,” the reader is drawn into the story, indeed becomes a participant in an unrelenting and dense examination of collective madness and social collapse: as if pleading with the reader, Aue writes, for it is made clear that he is writing this for us, “And also, this concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you … I live, I do what can be done, it’s the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!”

Although Aue eventually becomes a high ranking officer in the SS—the vast bureaucracy under Himmler charged with carrying out the Endlosung der Judenfrage, the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables—any anti-Semitism of Aue’s is never made clear. Indeed he vacillates between towing the party line and questioning the rationality of exterminating the Jews. He begins more as a young misguided idealist, seduced by the rhetorical gifts of Adolf Hitler and the national socialist vision of a renewed and powerful Germany. Rather, Aue gets caught up in a wave of, as one reviewer put it, “collective pathology,” the inertia from which he is incapable of stepping away. And so he descends into a kind of self-preserving madness hardly distinguishable from psychopathy: he becomes a hardened witness, the perfect narrator for diabolical events almost beyond the scope of contemplation.

And contemplate is really what Littell asks of us. Not only are we asked to contemplate the mechanism put in place that attempted to wipe out an entire “race”—organization, logistics, management—but we are presented with very specific examples of how such an undertaking was carried out. Take for example the liquidation of the Jewish population of Kiev. Whole families, children, the elderly, were put to death via firing squad in a ravine on the outskirts of the Ukrainian city. Over the period of several days up to 50,000 people were shot. As with much of The Kindly Ones, Littell’s description of these executions is both vivid and hallucinatory:

A very young man was sobbing in pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch, I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. To reach some of the wounded, you had to walk over bodies, it was terribly slippery, the limp white flesh rolled under my boots, bones snapped treacherously and made me stumble, I sank up to my ankles in mud and blood … Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out…

And it goes on, for pages—pages of pure description, block after block of text almost daunting in their presentation. In fact, throughout the novel, all 975 pages of it, not including the glossary, there are relatively few paragraph breaks and no line breaks for dialogue. Furthermore, most of the chapters are hundreds of pages long. The sheer size and design of The Kindly Ones is intimidating, it makes demands on the reader—to get through a book like this you need to be committed not only with time but with attention; and what we are being told to pay attention to is, for the most part, completely intolerable. But this a book that must be read, if not for its breadth and depth, then for its agonizing and relentless puzzlement over the poisoned heart of man. And not “mankind,” but men, twisted and manipulated men.

Besides the densely detailed accounts of brutality is the equally deliberated upon web of ideology and propaganda that painted the Jews as a specific genetic “other”—as easily identifiable as a rat or cockroach. Perhaps the most disheartening thing about the book is that Aue, a highly intelligent, well educated person—educated in the humanities in fact—is so easily seduced by the Nazi belief in racial superiority, as if race could be so casually and confidently defined. Voss, a linguist sent to research the different ethnic groups in the Ukraine, and one of the few characters with an established moral compass, in a conversation with Aue guts the pseudo-scientific validity of racial hierarchy: “…explain to me, if you please, what you mean by ‘race.’ Because for me, that’s a concept that is scientifically indefinable and hence without any theoretical value.” Aue with all the passion of the true believer responds: “But race exists, that’s a fact, our best researchers are studying it and writing about it. You know very well. Our racial anthropologists are the best in the world.” To which Voss responds in anger: “They are clowns. They have no competition in serious countries because their discipline doesn’t exist and isn’t taught there. If it weren’t for politics, none of them would have a job or be published.”

In advance of the massive killing machine, the firing squads, the concentration camps, the Nazis had to establish institutions, legitimate in appearance, that would churn out lies, or rather, turn lies into truth. So in a real way, the holocaust was a failure of institutions before it became the catastrophic nightmare it was. What would have happened had social institutions in 1930s Germany—education, government, the media—been stronger? Perhaps Aue is the physical embodiment of this failure—for all his education and intelligence he can’t recognize that he is being lied to, or rather, he lets himself be lied to. He doesn’t see the consequences of what is merely an ideological commitment—he has sold his soul, he has not thought about killing—until it is too late.

Early in chapter one of Dark Age Ahead, eminent urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote, unequivocally, “we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.” In Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, journalist Charles Bowden states in an unnerving prose style that meanders between the voice of a reporter made numb by the telling of uncountable deaths and a poet trying to make sense of violence that is equally random, unbidden, and appalling in its brutality, that the Dark Age is now here.

After the election of Felipe Calderon in 2006, Mexico saw a massive increase in violence, ostensibly due to a renewed commitment by the newly elected El Presedente to the “war on drugs” at the behest of the U.S. government and paid for by that country’s largely snoring population. Since that time, Ciudad Juarez, a city roughly the size of Vancouver and its surrounding suburbs, has become ground zero in North America’s drug war.

Certainly people are being murdered here at a horrific rate, but what the title “war on drugs” necessarily obfuscates, with its irritating and fundamentally meaningless pandering to bourgeois sentimentalities and anxieties, is that the war on drugs is really two things: a competition among different groups to capture a piece of the huge profits to be made from the illicit drug trade, and, more significantly, a war against the poor.

Bowden writes,

according to the Mexican government and the DEA, the violence in Juarez results from a battle between various drug cartels. This makes perfect sense, except that the war fails to kill cartel members… The only thing that is certain is that various groups—gangs, the army, the city police, the state police, the federal police—are killing people in Juarez as a part of the war for drug profits.

Bowden’s central thesis to explain all this killing is startling yet unsurprising. According to the rationale of the cheerleaders of NAFTA, free trade was to pull Mexico out of poverty. Instead it seems to have made an already poor nation poorer. “It crushed peasant agriculture in Mexico and sent millions of campesinos (farmers) fleeing north…” either to seek jobs in mostly U.S. owned factories in border cities like Juarez—there to earn slave wages in jobs that see one-hundred to two-hundred percent turnover per year, or to take the chance and cross illegally into the promised land. “The only reason people go north… is to survive.” But the factories ruin “the spirit faster than cocaine or meth” and the border authorities are always returning “illegals,” adding to Juarez’s population of the destroyed and powerless, who then turn to drugs or the drug trade.

Bowden, with journalistic precision writes, “the only reason a U.S. company moves to Juarez is to pay lower wages. The only reason people sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages… This is not simply an economic exchange. Unless you are one of those people who own a factory, this is a deal with death and money.” Then a few lines later he replaces his journalist’s prose with a style verging on the poetic when he addresses the reader: “Let me ask you one question: Just what is it you don’t understand that every dead girl here understands, that every dead cholo understands, that everyone ending a shift at the plant understands, and that every corpse coming out of the death warehouse understands?” This switching between reportage and a more creative style occurs throughout Bowden’s book. Some might argue that treating the subject of Murder City with such creative gusto diminishes the plight of those caught in the cross hairs of both the drug war and the ruthless machine of global capitalism. But Bowden’s style, echoing Cormac McCarthy’s sullen ruminations on violence and social collapse, seems like a coping mechanism of someone dealing with ceaseless tragedy more than an attempt to draw attention to his abilities as a writer.

The deaths he describes are so numerous that they literally bleed into one another, in a way becoming an absurdity, a cracked mirror held up to the reader offering a terrifying glimpse into the future. Except that, the future, according to Bowden, is already here: “this is a barrio of people driven off the land, and of people barely surviving in the new world of the city… There is no future here, but a constant struggle in the present.”

Jane Jacobs points to “five pillars” necessary to the proper functioning of any complex society. Among them she cites family and community, and the “effective practice of science and science based technology”—in other words, reason and rationality. In the Juarez of Murder City, all have been abandoned, but as Charles Bowden coldly observes, “this is not a breakdown of the social order. This is the new order. And we will adjust to it and it will be fine.”

Although it never actually says it outright, reading between the lines, Murder City implies that Mexico is very close, if it isn’t there already, to becoming a failed state. And this a country bordering the world’s most powerful nation—a bleak reflection of what is to come if we blindly adhere to the purely ideological war on drugs and an inhuman economic model.

Murder City is a terrifying book that demands to be read.