The 1890 U.S. Census was the first to report that all of the territory of the United States had been charted. As the twentieth century dawned, and technology created more and more ways to connect people to the government, from utility service to cellular phones to IP addresses, there were fewer and fewer ways to stay "off the grid."
All three of James Lee Burke's main characters (Dave Robicheaux, Billy Bob Holland and Hackberry Holland) find their lives intersecting with unsavory characters who revel in their ability to stay hidden, even in the twenty-first century. Hackberry Holland is in some ways the flattest of the three characters, as he carries around all of Robicheaux's rage without the lapses in judgment that make the Robicheaux novels bristle with tension. While "Feast Day of Fools" fits right in with the Burke tradition of providing an amusing collection of villains, the way that Hackberry and his deputy, Pam, skate around the plot push this book more toward what I would call a "spaghetti mystery," in the grand tradition of the "spaghetti Western."
Don't get me wrong -- the outrage that the murderer Preacher Jack Collins shows when the people who fall into conversation with him refer to the wrong literary device is genius, and the brief appearance of Eliado and Jaime, two bad guys who make the mistake of double-crossing the Preacher, had me casting about in my head for the two best actors to portray these knuckleheads.
You'll love the way that Burke describes the very southwestern tip of Texas, and the northern parts of Mexico, which does indeed look more like features of the moon than anywhere else that this planet has to provide. And the scene where Hackberry convinces a bartender to give him information with a pool cue is up there with another Burke scene where Clete Purcel uses a fire hose inside a casino bathroom to completely humiliate (and soak) a greaseball who has been giving him a hard time.
But if you're like me, you'll end up wishing that Pam and Hackberry would either hook up or not, and you'll realize that there are a few too many villains, and a few too many connections, such as the random appearance of the Predator drone and al Qaeda, to keep this latest work on track.
A couple of days ago, the great Josh Hamilton became the 16th player to hit four home runs in the same game. He also hit a double, for 18 total bases, the second most of all time. If you haven't seen the highlights yet, you can see them here:
Because we live in a free-market, capitalist society, the historical nature of this athletic feat, as well as the raw talent that wrought it, were quickly shoved aside in the media by the question of what this would do for Hamilton's long-term contract prospects. After all, if Hamilton is hitting like Pujols, shouldn't Hamilton get a contract like the one Pujols received?
Local sports-talk radio in Dallas this morning was spewing outrage over an interview that Josh Hamilton gave to Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci. Basically, when Verducci asked if Hamilton felt like he should come back to Texas with a new contract after this year, Hamilton said that, because of the foundation of his faith and his basic preparation, he could play anywhere. He acknowledged the depth of the support the Rangers have shown him, and said that it is "appreciated on both ends."
According to the Gentle Musers on KTCK-1310 AM in Dallas, Josh apparently owes much more to the Rangers. He should give them a "hometown discount" to resign with them, because of the way that they have supported him since he came to the team. They have paid for an accountability partner to shadow him and to keep him out of trouble, which apparently has benefited the team, because since he came to Texas, Hamilton has only gone drinking twice. None of the illegal drugs that waylaid Hamilton during his years with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have resurfaced.
As Onlooker Slowdown previously noted, Josh Hamilton will always fight the demons of addiction. So far, thanks to his faith and dedication, he has done fairly well. The Rangers have helped him a lot.
But he does not owe them a "hometown discount." After all, if Hamilton's back suddenly gave out, or if he tore an ACL, or his timing went away, the Rangers would no doubt become less forgiving. As long as he is a star, he is worth the extra effort and expense -- on the bottom line. As Hamilton keeps hitting, fans will keep showing up to games, buying beer and hot dogs, paying for Josh Hamilton T shirts, and contributing to the bottom line.
Do you think that bullpen nightmare Mark Lowe, or last year's castaways like Arthur Rhodes and Esteban German, would have gotten the same level of grace -- and support -- that Hamilton has received? Not a chance.
Hamilton knows this. That's why he's preparing himself for life as, say, a Yankee. Or a Diamondback. Or even an Angel. Just in case the Rangers no longer see him as a business asset with a value that matches the way that he views himself.
More importantly, he is preparing himself for life as a well-balanced individual, buoyed by his faith and discipline to be the same person everywhere. Which is all of any of us should strive to be.
Given that a story about a ruthless government exterminating the unruly among its citizenry, insisting on ritual sacrifice from its outlying districts, and starving the poor to maintain a decent quality of life in the Capitol is currently one of the most popular movies and books in the "tween" market, it is hard to believe that "Where the Wild Things Are," just the most famous piece in a mammoth portfolio of children's literature by Maurice Sendak, was banned from many libraries for the first two years after it was published.
Apparently, the fact that young Max had a fit and was punished, but had some imaginative fun while he was in his room, agitated the sensibilities of parents and librarians in 1963. Luckily, once the uproar from children who wanted to check out the book reached their ears, librarians started adding the book to their holdings.
Max's rumpus made it safe for many children to let themselves get mad.
It is fitting, though, on Sendak's passing, to think of all he wrought for children's writing. In the days before Sendak, the strongest emotions that generally made it into children's publishing were the irritation that Tigger's constant bouncing created in Rabbit, or the wrath of Mr. McGregor at finding that Benjamin Bunny had gotten into his lettuce yet again.
Because if "Where the Wild Things Are" is about anything other than a whimsical few minutes of daydreaming, it is about what happens when we listen to anger. Children do not know what to do with anger when it comes, as anyone who has spent much time at all around a two-year-old or a three-year-old can tell you. Without the right sort of parenting, those tantrums can reach grotesque heights in a seven-year-old, and can lead to incarceration for a thirteen-year-old. Or a thirty-year-old.
However, the books that children used to read did not teach them how to deal with anger. In the stories that they were given to read, nothing bad ever happened. People (and animals) got annoyed, or irritated, but never enraged.
But then came Max. If, as Colin Parr, one of my most talented writing students, put it, "the rage of Achilles is the rudder that steers the Iliad," then it is also the rage of Max that directs his ship, as he leaves the confinement of his room:
And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
A wild rumpus later, Max begins to yearn for home, and so he makes his return journey, to find that his parents did not truly hate him, as he might have feared, as the supper from which he had been banished was waiting for him -- "and it was still hot."
It may be that, now, we put too much of our emotional selves out for public display. If you make the mistake of turning to the wrong channel on your cable box, for example, you may see shows that are dedicated to watching people yell at (and do silly things to) the people they do not like. It seems to me that the Real Housewives shows, and all of their spinoffs, have this as their purpose. What with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, there is nothing keeping any of us from laying our angst bare for the entire virtual universe to see.
However, if you want to see what happens when we repress our frustrations or pretend that they do not exist, look at the girl (or boy) at your local middle school who is cutting herself (or himself) in places where most people won't see. Look at the child who is grinding his teeth in class, because of the aggregate wrath that those bullies he walks by on the way to school has built.
"Where the Wild Things Are" let kids know that it is OK to be angry. In healthy homes, their parents will still love them, will still hug them, when the "rumpus" is over. It is part of growing up to learn the best way to let the "rumpus" take place, but letting the anger out is so, so important. When we are allowed to let the "wild" in, just a little bit, the true dangers of repression stay on the far side of that wine-dark sea, far away from our children, and from us.
At times, I envy the Margaret Atwoods, George Orwells, and Jonathan Swifts of our literary profession. While cynicism is often so corrosive that it produces bitterness, the anger that it generates can lead to powerful writing that serves as a corrective for many of the ills of society. When Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" delivered a rhetorical roundhouse to the British establishment, with its suggestion that the poor infants of the Irish be prepared for slaughter rather than be forced to endure the privations of life in an unfair, oppressive economic system, the very nature of writing changed, as sarcasm became a mode of discourse.
Several hundred years later, as the depravity inherent in the clouds of mustard gas in the Great War, the speculative greed that fueled the Great Depression, the destructive might that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into rubble, and the slow constriction of freedom that ensued after V-J and V-E Days, as the increases in technology and information created more for government to control, the dystopian voices that informed "The Handmaiden," "1984," and a wealth of other dystopian visions burst onto the scene. While the first instances of this trend were popular, it is unlikely that their authors thought that their successors, such as Suzanne Collins, would find their works had become bestsellers, or that the dark truths that inform dystopian writing would become mass entertainment.
The flocks of dystopian trilogies (yes, Hunger Games, I'm talking to you)that are sashaying into the public spotlight and garnering hordes of increasingly younger fans are, as any form of shock value does, starting to lose their edge. Oppressive government engaging in secret espionage to control/terrify/oppress/harass the innocent? Heard it. Seen it. The idea that the government has a secret program that might end the human race as we know it? Already know that movie.
Into this morass bravely steps Christopher Gorham Calvin's "Shortcake," the first in a planned trilogy detailed the story of "Evan" and "Amanda," a pair of children genetically modified to have superhuman powers of violence, but who ultimately team up to change the world, after a brief encounter with a violently annoying mass murderer, a brutally apathetic mayor, a secret prison stocked with animals who are supposed to kill any human inhabitants, and many other surprises.
By the time Amanda and Evan find each other, after they've escaped their cloning facility, the city of Eden has almost collapsed into ruin. The wordy description and the questionable motives that follow them (not to mention the unrealistic survivor of at least one ally, and the unforeseeable sympathy from a soldier, the "twins" have dragged us through several hundred pages...and apparently resolved nothing, as this is only Book I. It will require some persuasion for me to put aside some of the other promising books in my reading list to have the time for Book II.
If you look at newsreels from the Second World War, it feels like 200 or 300 years have gone by. The very idea of a European country trying to take over all of its neighbors, and then shove millions of the conquered into death camps and eliminate them, without the rest of the world knowing, is simply inconceivable. The World Wide Web has made too much of the world transparent for things like to happen, except perhaps in parts of Africa. Even the Chinese are having a hard time keeping their protesters from making it into the light of the Web.
However, it has only been 74 years since Germany invaded Poland, and one of those most terrifying wars in the world's history got underway. Only 69 years since the most destructive weapon in history melted away most of two cities. Since then, war has become less dramatic, but more permanent. The surveillance that is possible now makes life safer, yet somehow less diverse.
A case in point is the apartment building where the recently separated Dr. Anton Beer lives in Vienna in 1939. Downstairs from him lives Professor Speckstein, who was acquitted of sexual assault, but who received such disgrace that he resigned his position anyway, lives with his housekeeper and a niece, Zuzka, who has ostensibly come to the city for university but really is at ends about what do with her life.
Across the courtyard is a little girl, Lieschen, who lives with her alcoholic father and has a spinal disorder that makes her stand at an awkward angle. Above them lives Otto Frei, a mime who may or may not have killed Professor Speckstein's dog, whose twin sister lives in his apartment, slowly rotting in bed because of what may be a neurological disease but may also be psychological trauma -- it turns out that she may have been the girl who was sexually assaulted, leading to Professor Speckstein's trial.
Dr. Beer is enlisted by a Detective Teuben (imagine a hungry, prurient Robert Goren, from Law & Order: Criminal Intent) to help in solving a recent rash of knife murders (including the dog, but also four other people), and he takes on the case of Otto's twin sister, Eva, moving her into his apartment to cure her of her disease, as psychiatric conditions are his area of interest. He and Zuzka keep an eye on Lieschen, too, as she must monitor when it is safe to go in and spend time with her father, even though she is only nine. It is his discoveries, and his revelations, that show so much, and perhaps so little, about human nature.
Finding out what is, and what is not, true about all of these people, and their situations, is what makes the book compel the reader onward and onward into the labyrinth of life at the dawn of the Second World War inside Hitler's lands, a labyrinth from which no one would escape unchanged.
Usually, one of the signs of a successful pro sports franchise is a steady, level-headed owner or ownership group. Think about the Rooney family in Pittsburgh (the NFL's Steelers), or the Mara family in New York City (the NFL's Giants). You almost never read about these owners, because the attention is where it belongs -- on the field.
If an owner is in the news more than his (or her, thank you Marge Schott, former owner of MLB's Cincinnati Reds) team, then the team is usually having problems of some sort. Whether it's Donald Sterling (the NBA's Clippers) being sued for keeping blacks from living in the properties he owns or Frank McCourt using the storied Dodgers as one of the shells in his divorce court carney game, when there is chaos at the top, the team usually isn't very good.
In our own beloved burgh of Dallas, we've seen this in just about all of our sports. Take the Texas Rangers. Yes, they've been to the last two World Series, but it wasn't always this way. The ownership group led by Nolan Ryan has set the stage for stability -- and for calm. When manager Ron Washington disclosed his positive test result for cocaine, Ryan and the rest of the management group decided to trust him and give him another chance. The players and the rest of the team have thrived in an atmosphere of trust and respect -- and of high expectations.
Of course, Nolan Ryan wasn't always this calm, cool and collected.
And it wasn't always this way for the Rangers. Brad Corbett, who owned the team during the crazy days of the 1970's, a decade that featured a manager getting punched by a player, another manager only coaching the team for one day, and Billy Martin, may have been just the loudest of a series of odd owners. After a loss on July 1, 1977, Corbett broke down in tears and said he was going to sell the team, "because it's killing me. They're dogs on the field and they're dogs off the field." (Sports Illustrated). A year later, he went down to the Rangers' clubhouse after a 10th-inning loss to the Brewers (and after some drinks of his own), kicked open the clubhouse door, and yelled at everyone he saw. Not surprisingly, the streak didn't end, and the Rangers ended up finishing far back in their division.
But it's not just the Rangers. Jerry Jones took a team that could possibly have won five straight Super Bowls and turned it into one that won 3 out of 4, and then dragging it down into mediocrity, or worse, for the next 20 years. He has inserted himself into the media spotlight, meddled in decisions at every level, built a stadium that made the city (and himself) a laughingstock because of the cramped corners in which he was able to shove seats, only to have some of those seats fail at the worst possible time. He has managed to put the Cowboys' star on every imaginable product, from shirts and hats to charcoal and barbecue sauce.
Check out Jerry's look after yet another loss to the Giants.
Tom Hicks, who owned both the Rangers and the Stars, didn't get out much in public, but that was probably because he was busy losing money in his private businesses and funneling income from the sports franchises to cover the funds. He also bought an interest in the storied English soccer club Liverpool, and in the aftermath of that nightmare, the judge sorting things out won't even give him unrestricted access to the litigation documents, because he doesn't trust him. (London Daily Mail).
So, chaos at the top generally means failure on the field, or rink, or court.
But that brings us to the curious case of Mark Cuban. His Dallas Mavericks have made the playoffs for the past 12 years in a row. They won a championship in 2011, defeating the heavily favored Miami Heat in 6 games.
However, Mark Cuban has developed a reputation about complaining -- about officiating. He has compiled statistics and sent them to the league. There's nothing wrong with research, but when he sits on the sideline and screams at officials, opposing players, and people who are traveling with opposing players, that crosses the line. Not only is it inappropriate, but it hurts the team.
The year the Mavericks won 62 games, but lost to the Golden State Warriors in the first round of the playoffs, the team panicked. Coach Avery Johnson shifted his rotations when he should have trusted him, but the lack of confidence appears to have gone all the way to the top. Here's Mark Cuban ranting at the officials:
In 2009, when the Mavericks lost to the Nuggets in the playoffs, Cuban got into it with...
not a referee....but a player's mother.
In 2011, Mark Cuban noticed that the less he said on the court, the better his team did in the playoffs. The results: a title, and a $90,000 bottle of champagne for the celebration:
This year, though, even though Mark Cuban decided to wait a year to go after Deron Williams and Dwight Howard, which meant that this year would be more of a holding pattern than a title defense, the playoffs again brought out the worst from the top. As ESPN.com's Jean-Jacques Taylor wrote last night, after the Mavericks went down 3-0 in the first round against the Thunder, "no team seemingly whines about the officials more than the Mavs, who follow their owner's lead. Rick Carlisle, the best coach the Mavs have ever had, has been doing it all series.
Whether he realize[s] it or not, all the complaining [does is] give the rest of his squad permission to moan and groan about every whistle that didn't go their way."
Mark Cuban has brought the Mavericks back from the NBA's graveyard. He has restored honor and glory to a team that had its first peak at an unfortunate time, the late 1980's, when the Lakers were also at a peak with Magic and Kareem.
As Cuban goes, so goes the team. He has proven, time and again, that he has plans for this team to be among the league's elite. Even if you don't like what happened this year, if his plan to bring in Deron and Dwight next year works, and we're going deep into next year's playoffs, he'll be back on top again -- and he will have been right.
But getting the right players (and the right coach, which he has) is not enough. The team follows their owner. When he's upbeat and passionate, the team soars. When he's over there ranting and screaming, the team falls apart. It happened in 2006, when he started panicking in the Finals. In 2007, when they collapsed against the Warriors. In 2009, when they fell apart against the Nuggets.
The year he was calm, we raised a banner. If his plan works, and if he remembers to be confident next summer, we should be raising another one.
In the book of Genesis, Jacob and his family are making their way back to their homeland, when they stop and buy some land near the city of Shechem. Shechem himself sees Jacob's daughter, Dinah, is attracted to her, and rapes her. Then, he visits Jacob and his sons with his own father, Hamor, and asks for Dinah's hand in marriage. He even offers to let the two peoples intermarry over time.
Taking after their father's tricky ways, Jacob's sons insist that all of the men of the city be circumcised, to be like them, before anything else can happen. Then, a few days later, after all of the men of Shechem have gone under the knife, and are recovering, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob's sons, slaughtered all of the men in town, looted their homes, and made off with their women and children.
Revenge? Yes. Compensation? Yes. Enough compensation for Dinah? Justice? What if you were one of the women in the city, and you had just seen your husband killed, and you were kidnapped by a foreign band of men? Would you think that justice had been served?
The truth is that there is no way to make up to Dinah for what has happened. The damage that occurred cannot be undone. Jacob could kill everyone in the region, and it would not turn back time.
It is also true that nothing will bring Trayvon Martin back from the grave. The remedies that our legal system provides to his family involve an attempt to punish the man who killed him.
The first attempt will involve trying to send George Zimmermann to prison. However, the fact remains that there are no witnesses to the events that happened. The pictures of blood on George Zimmermann appear to support, at least in some way, his account of being attacked. No matter how deep the news may have hidden these pictures, they will come out at trial. The law in Florida allows for self-defense when being attacked. As has been well covered in the media, the special prosecutor has laid charges that will be just about impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
Which brings us to the question of what a jury would decide. In Florida, we just saw last summer how unreliable jury verdicts can be. Of course, Caylee Anthony doesn't have Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in her corner, and now her mother is biding her time until the public forgets that it was angry and decides that it is time to start buying the book that someone will ghostwrite for her.
Afterward, according to attorneys for Trayvon Martin's family, a civil suit will follow. Even if George Zimmermann is acquitted, he can still be sued for wrongful death, and in civil court, the burden of proof is less. If enough people on THAT jury decide that he just should not have been carrying that gun, even though it was licensed to him, he could lose everything.
But will that be enough? A verdict of millions that would bankrupt the person who, according to Trayvon Martin's mother, committed an accident? Of course, she retracted that statement after someone probably told her the right words to use in order to prepare for that civil suit, or convict George Zimmermann in court, or do whatever else will help her attorneys.
Here, it's an accident.
Here, it was cold blood.
This is why it was so right for George Zimmermann to apologize in the first public forum in which he could safely appear -- his first court hearing. Whatever happened that night was a tragic mistake that could have been avoided in so many different ways.
It feeds the needs of the media, and the prosecution, to have this be a racist hate crime. However, as with most stories, it will not fit neatly into a box. Instead, it seems to be a messy accident. The "depravity" that goes along with second-degree murder might sound good on television, and it might ring true to Trayvon Martin's parents, but the truth is that if both men had been of the same ethnic background, this case would have ended when George Zimmermann was sent home by the police, for lack of evidence.
So how can we compensate the Martin family for the tragic loss of their son? I hope that we will not do it by engineering the same sort of ridiculously flawed verdicts that made the American court system look like it was run by clowns in the decades before the civil rights movement. We will not have become an equal society until the same standards of the law apply to everyone, in every situation.
Feast Day Of Fools by James Lee Burke
