--And Now THIS!

                      

Though I am rarely at a loss for words, I couldn't even splutter yesterday when LOML told me on the phone that Condi's getting Colin's job.  "You should like that, right?" he nudged, baiting me--our moratorium on political discussion evidently having developed a glitch--because she's female and African-American.

If I hadn't just finished Edward P. Jones's The Known World after struggling with it for a whole week (I usually inhale a novel that length--388 pp.-- in a day and a half, tops), I might have been less horrified.  But last year's winner of the Pullet Surprise had just taught me something new, something awful:   there were black slaveowners in the American South.  Black people came to own black people in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, some of them relatively innocuous, I guess, like individuals being allowed to work for pay off their owners' properties, earning enough to buy themselves free, then earning enough to liberate their family members.    That's capitalism at its most noble, I guess.

The family relationship functionally effaced the legal indenture, but they still "owned" each other.

Other antebellum African-Americans ingratiated themselves with their owners, bought themselves free, set up their own plantations, bought their own slaves, and worked them just like white people did.

Jones tries hard to explore these relationships and their effects on the souls and spirits of the people involved, but The Known World isn't a very good book.  Though the critics on Amazon.com almost uniformly protest that the book "has too many characters" (47), the size of the population isn't quite the problem.  Gone With the Wind is nearly three times as long (1024 pp.) and has nearly three times as many characters (127), but any reasonably alert GWTW reader retains a distinct impression of each one (including little Willie Kennedy, whom we never see, just hear about) long after Rhett has told Scarlett that he doesn't give a damn; we're able to do this because Mitchell delineates their characters so deftly, so fast.  But by about p. 50 in The Known World, I had to start flipping back to the "Dramatis Personae" appendix, trying to remember who was who, and what their story was, and I had to keep this up for the rest of the book.  Not good, the wrong struggle for a reader, and a problem exacerbated by downright sloppy writing:  often foggy pronoun reference, for example, plus Jones just not being quite up to the task of creating a linear narrative in non-linear form.

But I kept going because the ideas were so startling, the situations completely plausible and so disturbing, and there did seem to be a character crucible at the bottom of it all:  Jones does seem to have a point:  some freed slaves would rather die than sell out their brothers and sisters, while others blithely joined in their exploitation, for their own profit.

Brilliant, articulate, savvy Professor Rice has made a career of doing just that, and not only of colluding in the exploitation of African-Americans, but also of women; she's built a career out of betraying her ethnicity and her gender.  While Provost at Stanford, she used her powers to abolish admissions quotas.  Now she's maneuvered the highest-profile, indefatigable African-American Good Soldier out of her way in order to wield even more power as the Official Apologist for the radical Right, whose agenda creates more poverty in order to keep the rich rich and make them even richer; stomps on the Constitution by doing its best to obliterate the distinction between church and state; lies to the world in order to wage a war for profit; wants to eliminate women's control over their own bodies--need I go on?

More than once, Professor Rice has been heard to say that the job she really wants is Commissioner of the NFL.  Now that, I could go along with.  She could be in charge of all colors of big men (and no women!), pounding each other to mush for profit--their own as well as their owners'.  If she were running the NFL instead of the Armed Forces, we could see what she was doing.  We'd know which knobs she was turning, as we did when she was at Stanford.  Now, though, behind closed doors with Dubya--where she's been for the last three years, but now they're the only two in the room--there's no telling what she'll get up to.  But we know who will pay, don't we? and who won't.

Comments

[fred1st]

So. Thot about running for office? Got my vote. :-]

[Chris Clarke]

"Now, though, behind closed doors with Dubya--where she's been for the last three years, but now they're the only two in the room"

You do *not* want to see the image in my brain right now. [shudder]

[Chris Clarke]

Doc, you've GOT to write something to get Condi off the top of your page. Please. Please oh please.