bloodygranuaile

In August I went to the National DSA Convention in Chicago, where several radical bookstores and small presses were tabling. At the table for Pilsen Community Books I picked up a cute sticker that says “Always Carry A Book” and a copy of Nick Montgomery and carla bergman’s Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. I successfully talked the book group into reading it with me, and am very excited to discuss it this weekend because it definitely seems like the kind of book that should be read in a group and not just off on one’s own.

Joyful Militancy takes as its subject the problem of “rigid radicalism,” a phenomenon that anyone who has spent a lot of time in organizing spaces or social-justice/leftish-flavored non-organizing spaces with pretensions of activism (such as: certain parts of the internet) will instantly recognize, even if you are the person doing it (because other people are probably doing rigid radicalism for flavors other than yours, and it’s easier to see when it’s not you). Due to the instant recognizability it is possibly not necessary to actually define rigid radicalism, but Montgomery and bergman aren’t going to fall into any dumb “vampire’s castle” type traps of just assuming you’ve got the exact same experiences and take they do on how The Vibes Are Bad, Man. Instead, they give a whole intellectual and philosophical history of the concept, tracing it to earlier lines of thinking about the problem of bad vibes in leftist/left-ish spaces, including Spinoza’s writings about “sad militancy” and Eve Sedgwick’s writings about paranoid readings.

As a paranoid reader of writings about social justice in a way that I wasn’t eight years ago, I particularly appreciated how self-aware this book was about the possible pitfalls of critiquing rigid radicalism and exploring the book’s positive concept of joyful militancy (which is also defined and contextualized in a philosophical and historical tradition, all very interesting stuff, lots of Spinoza). The authors are careful to stress that they don’t want joyful militancy to turn into another duty or demand, which I appreciate. I have a distinct memory of planning an action and a comrade made a perfectly good point about adding a fun element to it since, he said, we didn’t often really make a point of showing our joy in antifascist work, and I remember having an instant negative reaction, like “We’ve got enough shit to do to pull this action off and now we have to add ‘show our joy’ to the to-do list?” This was deeply unfair to the comrade, who was actually making a good suggestion. But you see how the psychological trap works–the authors of the book have a good long section trying to separate out joy from happiness, the thing we are constitutionally mandated to continually be in pursuit of, and that companies try to take away from us for the purpose of selling it back for money. At the end of the day the terminology used to differentiate things into two separate concepts is less important than understanding the process by which supposedly freeing concepts become tiresome when they become duties or expectations. (See also: my experiences of people being “supportive” of me exploring “my” sexuality and being confused and hurt when I experienced this “support” as pressuring and invasive.)

I said in my review of Emergent Strategy that I have a hard time trusting any writing about proper leftist behavior that isn’t 90% caveats and doesn’t treat its readers like they’re stupid. I’m pleased to report that this book does seem to hit the “90% caveats” benchmark, which diffused my incipient panic attack well enough that I didn’t even mind that they treated the audience like it was intelligent enough to understand philosophy. I found some of the book a little vague but I found myself forgiving that when they discussed how they were anticipating various critiques of the book, including that it might be too vague or theoretical. I think the point they were making was that all this internalized critique and the endless ways in which leftists critique everything was generally kind of overkill, but it made me trust that they knew what they were talking about and they weren’t so naive as to think that their writing was so special and correct that it would magically get exempted from the bad leftist dynamics.

That said! This book does have some meat to it, especially in the back half. I really enjoyed their interviews with people who admitted to having gotten sucked into rigid radicalism, and why engaging in it is attractive to some people, and the very real places of hurt and trauma that can cause people to use it as a protection mechanism. The authors are good at hitting the balance of explaining the sympathetic origins of the behavior without then concluding that it isn’t a problem and actually the problem is people thinking it's a problem. They are also very clear about stressing that this isn’t an issue of one tendency or another; tendencies have their own ways of having it manifest but it’s basically the same shit every time, whether it manifests as liberal moralism or anti-liberal moralism, a totalizing demand for organizational discipline or a totalizing demand for individual autonomy (there’s an interesting snippet of an interview with a recovered “manarchist” about his realization that all his high theory bullshit about not being controlled by the state just looked to a lot of people like another angry white guy doing whatever the fuck he wanted). Interviewees talk about the important of celebrating the small wins and the partial wins, and the deadening effect of the reflexive leftist habit to always stop to remind people that whatever today’s win is Isn’t Good Enough because it has not fully dismantled all oppression and brought us to anarchocommunist utopia (looking at you, all the people who rushed to publish relentlessly correct takes about how Zohran Mamdani’s primary win isn’t the revolution. WE KNOW, aren’t you exhausted with yourself yet?).

This book is part of a series called “anarchist interventions” and as such it pretty clearly is intended for anarchists, but I know plenty of non-anarchist socialists who have gotten value from this book and as a non-anarchist socialist I also think it’s a really worthwhile read. I think Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You still has my top spot for Most Important Reading About Not Being That Person In Meetings but this is still a really valuable addition to the conversation about how to do leftism that doesn’t suck. Now I’ve just got to come up with some really good discussion questions for Sunday.

The politics book club decided our August read was going to be Peter Bienart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, a short little book that nevertheless took me the better part of an entire week to read. (I’ve been real busy.)

A pretty significant chunk of the regular members of the book club are Jewish, but I am not. As such, I was definitely not the primary target audience for this book. That’s OK; I enjoy reading books where I am not the target audience sometimes. I think it’s good for people to do that now and again. Also, Beinart explains most things well enough that as an outsider I can follow along (or at least the things about Israel and Palestine; there are a number of references to things in Jewish religious culture that I wasn’t always familiar with, but I don’t think that hindered my understanding of the arguments in the book).

I learned quite a bit from this book, not just in terms of things that have actually happened in historic Palestine but also about things that did not happen that I didn’t realize people were being told they did, like that it was totally somebody else that ran three-quarters of a million Palestinians out of their homes at gunpoint when the State of Israel was established.

Beinart’s perspective is also heavily shaped by the fact that he grew up in apartheid South Africa, where white people were absolutely certain that if they gave the Black population an ounce of freedom, they’d all get murdered, and what actually happened was that once the Black population got moderately less crushed under oppression they largely disbanded the guerilla armies because, contrary to popular opinion, people don’t go to all the trouble and danger and expense of forming guerrilla armies just for kicks, they do it because they don’t believe they’ll ever be able to do get anything better until the oppressors are overthrown, and they don’t believe the oppressors will be overthrown in any way except physical force. This is one of those very obvious things that oppressors throughout history have been very averse to learning. This is, also very obviously, because nobody wants to think of themselves as oppressors, and that’s what ends up being the main argument in Beinart’s book: Essentially, that narratives of Jewish victimhood–narratives that have sprung up due to several centuries of actual victimhood, to be clear–are being used to deny Israel’s capacity as a moral agent (and a heavily armed, nuclear state with wealthy Western benefactors) and avoid looking at the stuff it’s actually doing to other people. This argument seems fairly convincing to me, at least from my view in what must admittedly be the cheap seats, which is basically that I’m friends with a lot of left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews and they sometimes tell me what their less left-wing friends and relatives say about stuff, and it seems to correlate.

I figure I will be doing a lot more listening than talking during this book club, and that should hopefully be much less awkward than trying to write a review, where there is no one but me to do the talking.

I have had adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy sitting on The Big Shelf of Unread Leftist Literature for a few years, although not nearly as embarrassingly long as some other items on that shelf. I brought it with me to the DSA Convention in Chicago and read it mostly in O’Hare airport and on the plane back.

I admit I had very mixed feelings about this book, coming to it through almost a decade of socialist organizing and having developed a number of my own suspicions, cynicisms, and general discourse allergies (and also coming immediately out of convention). The bits I liked best were the parts where brown was being either a) concrete or b) gently mean. Frankly, this meant that for me, 80% of the value of the book came in the final 20%, where we get actual tools for facilitation, like agenda templates, sample community agreements, assessment checklists, further reading recommendations, and–my favorite–a list of People Not To Be In A Meeting. (My favorite “don’t be that person in meetings” piece is Mao’s On Practice, but trying to get other people to read Mao can be iffy, so I’m frankly pretty stoked to have a similar list from someone with anarchist credentials.)

The first part of the book has some interesting ideas and anecdotes and was frankly fun to read in a “I would like to hang out in a coffeeshop with adrienne maree brown and shoot the shit about sci-fi” kind of way, but I found it a bit vague and touchy-feely for my liking. I am a deeply vagueness-averse person to start with, and extra suspicious of vagueness in activist spaces. “Emergent strategy” as a concept is based on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which is in fact great and brown is right that you should in fact drop whatever you’re doing and go read it immediately, and seems to be kind of like a variation on dialectics except it’s about the synthesis of more than two sides rather than two opposing sides. This is more reflective of real life but also, apparently, harder to pin down into real concrete case studies that the reader can follow in detail, so instead we get a lot of short anecdotes, references out to other resources, and metaphors about nature. I don’t think the book is entirely intended to be a how-to manual so it seems vaguely unfair to judge it as a how-to manual, but frankly, I want a how-to manual. I just don’t want, need, or trust any more poetical-sounding frameworks. (Activist poetics is one of the things I’ve developed a discourse allergy to over the years.)

The main thing that tends to ruin any sort of even slightly abstract or poetical activist writing for me is I absolutely cannot turn off the little voice in my head reading everything through the lens of “How does this sound once you run it through the ‘self-absorbed straw-leftist I used to think were figments of New York Times opinion writers’ imaginations’ filter?”, or what Eve Sedgwick calls a paranoid reading. I am in theory anti-paranoid-readings because frequently it seeps into fiction that is trying to be high-minded and political and then you end up with a futuristic space opera that clearly is afraid it’s going to be yelled at on 2018 Twitter. But while I get annoyed at novels that are afraid of being yelled at on Twitter, I give a semi-defeated laugh of solidarity at activist writings that are 90% caveats, clearly trying to gentle-parent people with determinedly minimal reading comprehension and maximum defensiveness through basic ideas like “An event planning meeting isn’t therapy.” I understand why they have to do this, and I get nervous when I read stuff that doesn’t seem to be correcting for it. Brown has, in the years since Emergent Strategy was published, written a bunch of stuff specifically about the self-righteous bad habits of many social justice organizing spaces, but when she wrote this in 2017 it seems like she might have been in a more innocent place (although still clearly familiar with many of the ways people can derail meetings, waste time, and seed conflict) and the book is well short of 90% caveats. Also, some of the material seems written under an assumption of at least somewhat more definitively bounded community than the one I organize in, like a nonprofit that has staff that you can hire on purpose, rather than all-volunteer spaces with low barriers to entry and public meetings.

This filter even kind of ruined the stuff I like, because my brain couldn’t stop running through “social justice buzzword word salad” objections I have seen in the wild to things like writing proposals, starting and ending meetings on time, and not taking everything personally. And I hate that I found myself, like, slotting things I already knew away in my head for the purpose of having a properly demographically credentialed source for basic shit, because I know that if you say “decorum” that sounds conservative and fussy but if you say “community agreements” that has sufficient radical cred and is OK.

As a result I am very hesitant to say that the book is actually failing in any way; it is just clear to me that I have sustained far too much psychological damage to be a good reader for it. I get leery any time the writer assumes the reader isn’t stupid. That is unequivocally bad on my end. I need to like, meditate and then go through the book again and mark out the bits that are useful so I can refer back to them without being sent into a total mental spiral by metaphors about mushrooms or any use whatsoever of the word “sacred.”

As the follow-up to Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America, we read American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.

This is basically a textbook, which means its purpose is to educate more than to entertain. And on that note, I think it did good–it’s a pretty hefty book that goes into a lot of the cultural context and surrounding politics of the leadup to the Revolutionary War, the War itself, and its aftermath, and I learned a lot. But I’m also going to rate it on the reading experience, which I must admit was often fun. Taylor seems to subscribe to the same idea I do that you can tell you are reading history and not mythology if basically everybody sucks at least a little, and Taylor seems to take positive glee in laying out a real No Heroes approach to the factions and personalities involved. He is occasionally allows a little humor to sneak in, whether it’s by his choice of epigraphs for each chapter or dry observations like that renaming part of East Florida from “Mosquito Inlet” to “East Smyrna” did not trick the mosquitoes into not biting the colonists. In the acknowledgements, he dunks on his editor for not allowing him to name the book “American Revolutions: Colonize Harder.”

Jokes notwithstanding, this is not otherwise a feel-good book. Taylor gets into the nasty racial politics, classist sneering, financial shenanigans, riots, famine, terrorism, dispossession, disease, and general awfulness that characterized late-colonial and revolutionary-era American life, and the experience of war specifically. He gives a fairer shake to the Loyalists than you usually see in lay history by and for Americans, discussing their suspicions of the Patriot movement and also baldly laying out what actually happened to them during and after the Revolution (how many grade-school accounts of the Revolution teach you that it generated thousands of dispossessed refugees that fled to Canada?). This is not to say that he has convinced me that the British were the good guys or that Loyalists weren’t ultimately a bunch of bootlickers, but I think I have a less cartoonish view of what would cause people to have doubts about the Revolution, especially when it hadn’t won yet. He also gives plenty of page space to various parties outside the borders of the thirteen colonies–particularly Native politics, but also the territories that whites were expanding into, the British possessions that weren’t rebelling in Canada and the West Indies, and the French and Spanish colonies on the North American continent.

Overall I found this to be a very expansive, multi-faceted exploration of the Revolution and I really liked that about it.

The most recent book club book we picked was Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. This had been on my to-read list for a while as I’d heard good, if rather vague, things about it.

The book is split, roughly, into three parts. The first is the history of places that eventually became states, but with a focus on their history in the period before they were granted statehood; much of this focuses on the ever-shrinking “Indian Country” and the undignified specifics of white settlement. The second part is the history of US territorial acquisitions that haven’t become states, such as our half-century of rule over the Philippines, the history of Puerto Rico, and the brief but intense scramble for the guano islands. The third part is about post-World War II American hegemony, and the way the U.S. has been able to use things like army bases, technological standards, and even the English language to maintain its interests all over the world without having to formally conquer large swaths of territory.

This means that the book covers a lot of ground; at 400 pages excluding notes, it still feels like a super fast-paced, whirlwind tour through the times and places it covers. As an American whose American history background, unsurprisingly, gave very short shrift to places like Puerto Rico, the Phillippines, and even Hawaii and Alaska (they’re states now so we’ve got a nice round number of states that looks good on the flag, moving on), I did feel like I was learning quite a lot, even as I could realize that any one of these places clearly deserves a much more in-depth look at its history on its own terms than this one book could give it. I also learned a lot about subjects like architecture and plastics, which I fancied I already knew at least a little about, but had rarely thought about their relationship to colonialism. A real strength of this book, I think, is that while not explicitly Marxist in outlook–no theory words here–it understands colonialism pretty plainly in material terms, pointing out how technological advancement and the changing relationships to raw materials affected the way the US approached exerting influence at different points in its history.

I have to come up with some decent discussion questions first, but I’m very much looking forward to digging into this with company. It’s a really rich book with quite a lot going on.

The second pirate book of the weekend was Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.

Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.

In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.

The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.

The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.

I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.

The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.

Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.

My May entry in the Year of Erics was the only reread of the bunch: Eric Jay Dolan’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. I bought this on my senior year field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum at the end of my Moby-Dick capstone seminar in fall 2009, and read it the first time around in 2011, after a little of the whale trauma had worn off. Now, nearly 15 years later, I a older/wiser/sadder/fatter/etc. and my love-hate relationship with Moby-Dick has turned into a whole-hearted and unironic love of it, and I would give anything to go to three-hour seminars about it at the quite reasonably late-starting hour of 9 am on Wednesdays. (Youth is wasted on the young, etc. etc.).

I decided to include this book in my Year of Erics reading because 15 years is a long time, certainly plenty of time to forget most of the stuff you read in a nonfiction book. This, I think, was a good decision! I had, indeed, forgotten quite a lot of stuff, and there were many fun anecdotes about American whaling, plus some information on Norwegian whaling that some steampunk author or other really ought to incorporate into something. Also, even though Salem was never a big whaling port, the additional 15 years in New England coastal cities makes reading New England maritime history more fun than it was when I had only lived a few years in landlocked Worcester.

The book covers not just the golden age but truly the entire timeline of American whaling, including what little we know about pre-Columbian native whaling practices, and then from the very earliest drift whaling/scavenging of the English in what they would turn into New England up until the very last wooden American whaleship, the Wanderer, left port from New Bedford in 1924, which promptly wrecked on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzard’s Bay. Whoops.

In the middle we learn about drift whaling, shore whaling, open-sea whaling, wartime raiding upon whaleships, the discovery and exploitation of various fisheries, and some whale anatomy. There are silly political cartoons and tales of battles and mutinies where people say all sorts of insane things to each other, because people have always been people. There are not really heroes although there are occasionally villains. Fun anecdotes are enjoyably woven through a narrative that does trace the overall rises and falls in fortune of the industry and explain how it shaped American life and commerce.

I am glad to have brought this old friend off the shelf for a little bit, and now I am going to put it back on the shelf of Boat Books where it will soon be joined by some new friends as summer lakeside reading season gets started.

I have been busy as all get-out so it took me way longer than I’d have liked to finish my April nonfiction commitment, Eric Jay Dolan’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.

This book, as you can probably guess from the title, covers the fur trade on the North American continent, from the first European fur trappers (mainly the French) to start kicking around Canada as early as the 1500s, up through the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, once the near-extinction of the buffalo managed to shock even jingoistic American capitalist types into noticing what destruction they had wrought. Dolin brings his characteristic naturalist’s eye to this story, focusing on the ecological effects of the fur trade nearly as much as the political and cultural ones, and giving the fur animals themselves their due–beavers, buffalo, fur seals, and sea otters are nearly as well-developed characters here as the various humans.

Fur trading was often the “tip of the spear” for European colonization in North America, which lacked the huge and immediately findable gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish set up shop early in the 1500s. The history of the fur trade in what would become Canada, the U.S., and the northern parts of the Mexican territory is therefore basically synonymous with the history of European colonization of those parts, and many of the events recounted here were familiar to me from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, including the complex trade relationships with Indian tribes, and the Russian colonization of Alaska (they did it to obtain fur seals after they’d basically wiped out sable in Siberia).

The story is tragic on basically every level: the fur trade massively upset the ecological balance that Indian nations who hunted fur-bearing animals had lived in pre-colonization, leading to devastation of the habitats and populations of the animals in question; it rendered the Indians dependent on European trade goods and simultaneously vulnerable to European-introduced diseases, gun violence, and alcohol abuse, which facilitated the seizure of their land; it led to the growth of big monopolistic fur companies that mistreated their workers and put them into debt peonage. Lots of human beings died in addition to the animals being hunted. Also, I’ve been watching Blue Planet II when I need some downtime, and have you seen sea otters? They’re so cute! How could you kill so many of these lil guys?

https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/globalassets/mba/images/animals/marine-mammals/sea-otter-327-surrogate-mother-toola-rw05-082.jpg?width=966&height=644&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=60

That said, it’s still quite a fascinating set of stories, and I certainly feel much more educated about stuff I didn’t really know much about before, like the settling of the Southwest and California. Someday I need to read a proper history of California.

My March assigned nonfiction read was Eric Jay Dolin’s When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. This is, broadly, a history of US trade with China, which started approximately five minutes after the US was established, and continues to today, although the President is doing his damndest to stop it because he doesn’t know anything about economics. The book doesn’t get to that point both because it was published in 2012 and also because, as the subtitle suggests, it only goes through the end of the Age of Sail.

Much of early America’s trade with China involved triangulating with the English, and less often the French. China’s system of foreign trade at the time was something called the Canton System, where foreign traders basically were only allowed to go to Canton, where they each had to have a little embassy-type trading house called a factory, from which they engaged in complex trade negotiations with the hong merchants who interfaced between the foreigners and the Chinese consumer base. This was all very complicated but for a while it mostly did its job of keeping the foreigners relatively quarantined so they didn’t disrupt life in China and a minimal sector of the Chinese population was exposed to their bad behavior.

The British were really the big egos here that got everyone into trouble with the Chinese. China, an empire that had been going for about two thousand years, considered itself the most advanced civilization on Earth, and basically acted like it was doing everyone else a big favor by trading with them. Mostly everyone else agreed that China was pretty ancient and advanced and cultured, and in America particularly everyone was quite mad for Chinese fashions. However, this sort of cultural admiration could only go so far, and eventually the Chinese view of imperial China as self-evidently the greatest civilization on earth would end up butting heads with the English view of the British Empire as self-evidently the greatest civilization on Earth. The Americans, in their pre-Manifest Destiny fashion, just wanted to make a buck.

Probably the most important stuff here for your average miseducated American to learn about is the Opium Wars! There were two of them, and the extremely short version is that they cracked Imperial China open like an egg to allow British (and other foreign, but mainly British) merchants to flood China with opium because if it wasn’t illegal in England, then clearly it had no business being illegal anywhere else; who did these Chinese think they were? A sovereign country?

Overall I found this a fun read despite the occasionally dark subject matter; there’s lots of cool stuff about boats and murder trials and tea, and it’s an area of world history that I didn’t know very much about, so I feel all edified and stuff. I definitely need to learn more Asian history but this was a decent start.

For the politics/current events book club, we decided to read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways’ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It tells the very interesting story of the decades-long propaganda campaign that is market fundamentalism, which somehow made it “common sense” in America that any government action (except killing brown people) is tyrannical and too Big, while companies can never be too Big and the invisible hand of the free market can solve all our problems as long as we give it completely free rein to do whatever it wants and do not anger it by attempting to put any checks on the behavior of Big Business (which does not exist), lest it smite us, this is definitely science and not religion.

You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.

The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.

The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.

Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.

Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.