LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything BARBARA EHRENREICH

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Granta, 2014, 237 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

What are we to make of the latest book by Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of wit, clarity and insight, proud to count herself a socialist, feminist, atheist and scientist, who concludes that her teenage ‘mystical’ experiences with some sort of ‘living Presence’, ‘higher Consciousness’ or ‘mysterious Other’ were real encounters with another dimension, beyond the scope of rational analysis?  Not that much, alas.

Ehrenreich is no “New Age fluffhead” - spirituality is “a crime against reason” especially to one “born to atheism” by parents “who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms” - but her ‘transcendent’ adventures in the 1950s have prompted a late-life rethink of her intellectual roots.

She dismisses the explanatory materialist candidates for her “aberrant mental phenomena” - sleep deprivation, hypoglycaemia, faulty perceptual processing of sensory data, optical illusion, dissociative disorders, impaired  neuronal wiring.

She rejects the hypothesis that the “fabric of space-time was doing just fine” and the problem might be with her internal psychology.  As a good scientist, she does not write off anomalous data like her too-strange-to-be-forgotten experiences, but she opts for the scientifically incredible (mysticism) over the scientifically simple (neuroscience) with her operating assumption that there is something out there,  an animistic force emanating from “conscious beings that normally elude our senses”, a power which is, moreover, “seeking us out”.

This stance has only come about in the last decade, after Ehrenreich’s long immersion in sixties-inspired politicisation and scholarly investigation when she saw her “perceptual wanderings” as a petit-bourgeois “distraction from political activism”.  Now, with the decline of the left  into long, navel-gazing meetings “in windowless conference rooms”, she has re-embraced her illicit ‘mystical’ past.

Ehrenreich has declared that she will never write her life story.  This is a great pity because her current memoir would then have been a more digestible, condensed chapter on, say, ‘Neuroscience and the Teenage Mystic’ whilst the tantalising glimpses of the rest of her wonderful life would elaborate on how her political radicalisation tore apart the “façade of everyday normality” to reveal, not some metaphysical power, but the very real, “ongoing, inexcusable cruelty” of the powerful in human society.

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard PHILIP CHUBB

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard
PHILIP CHUBB
Black Inc., 2014, 302 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

In 2007 in Australia, “climate policy was a reform full of promise and excitement”, writes Monash University journalism academic, Philip Chubb, in Power Failure.  Six years later, however, an “exhausted and confused” electorate had installed a climate-change-denying government that was dismantling the previous Labor government’s few fossil fuel carbon emission reduction programs.  Chubb dissects, with much sorrow, the climate change “policy fiasco” of Labor that led to this outcome.

Labor’s climate change policy in government was to establish a market mechanism to price carbon within an emissions trading scheme to theoretically provide a cost disincentive to the use of fossil fuels.  The schemes of both Labor Prime Ministers, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, seriously misfired, however.

Rudd’s proposed scheme (the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – CPRS) suffered from delay, conceptual complexity, dense technical detail, poor communication, a back-office technocrat (Penny Wong) as climate change minister, the sidelining of the Greens, an autocratic but erratic Prime Minister who refused to call a double dissolution election on the issue when popular support was still significant, and an intensifying political and corporate opposition from aggressive climate change deniers and electricity generators threatening power cuts and job losses.

People “did not know what the government was doing on climate change or believed it was doing nothing”, says Chubb.  They queried Rudd’s commitment and questioned how important the whole issue of climate change could really be given such chameleonic leadership, especially when Rudd suddenly abandoned the CPRS, and, with it, any governmental lead on what he had called ‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’.

Gillard was more inclusive on policy process than Rudd, was a more focused communicator and a better manager of the Greens (buying their support with concessions, albeit important, such as a $10 billion green investment bank) but an antagonistic Murdoch media had so soured the fixed-price carbon tax entrée to her floating price emissions trading reduction scheme that her package died along with the Labor government in the disastrous 2013 election.

For all the apparent differences between Rudd and Gillard, and their respective carbon reduction schemes, however, both were offering essentially the same product – market-based emissions trading in carbon pollution.  What finally sunk both schemes was not, as Chubb proposes, the different flaws in the leaders’ psychology or presentation skills but the common elements of both schemes, namely weak targets and a gushing money tap of compensation for industry.

The pathologically shy target (5% less carbon by 2020) did not match what the science said it should be whilst the free carbon pollution permits and cash compensation for industry was logically contradictory because “the government was trying to force companies to change their behaviour, but then paying them so they did not have to change”.  As could have been predicted, and as subsequent research on the carbon tax (in Victoria) found, says Chubb, coal-fired electricity companies simply passed on the cost of their carbon emissions to consumers through higher prices whilst reaping windfall profits from their taxpayer-funded compensation.

The problem, largely ignored by Chubb, was not the messenger (Rudd versus Gillard) but the message (emissions-trading markets).  Nor was the problem what Chubb terms an “excess of purity” from those environmentalists who were opposed to Labor’s inadequate policies.  Voters were simply underwhelmed by what was on offer.

Chubb does note, without, however, expanding on it, the strong popular support for renewable energy which continues to exist, across class and political divides, including government investment in renewables and the Renewable Energy Target (a Rudd legacy which mandates that electricity generators source a percentage - currently a modest 20% - of electricity from renewables).  There, with state intervention in the market and not in political genuflection to it, lies the future, for a political party willing and capable of grasping it.

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by FINN and COUVEE

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
PETER FINN and PETRA COUVÉE
Harvill Secker, 2014, 352 pages, $35 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Both the KGB and the CIA thought they had the measure of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago.  As Finn and Couvée recount, the Kremlin feared it (as an attack on their rule) and the White House celebrated it (as a condemnation of all things socialist).  Both were right.

A Russian poet who was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution, Pasternak became disillusioned with Soviet Russia after the show trials of Old Bolsheviks and the mass repression of the late 1930s.  His short-lived attempt to ‘think the thoughts of the era, and to live in tune with it’, including his poetry lauding Stalin, was abandoned.

At age 65, Pasternak’s passive opposition went public with his first novel, Doctor Zhivago, about the doctor-poet, Yuri Zhivago (Pasternak’s alter ego), and his love affair with the nurse, Lara Antipova, during the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. 

Doctor Zhivago first saw the light of day, in 1957, thanks to a wealthy and dissident member, and financier, of the Italian Communist Party, who arranged for Pasternak’s manuscript to be smuggled out of Russia.

Courtesy of British spies, the CIA gained access to the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago, which, particularly after Pasternak’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, became a star exhibit in the Agency’s clandestine publishing arm.  This million dollar operation (including the CIA’s own printing press which produced ‘black’ editions) subsidised, translated and disseminated anti-communist books to the Soviet bloc (touring Moscow Philharmonic members, for example, hid pages of Doctor Zhivago in their sheet music).

The CIA recognised the propaganda potential of Doctor Zhivago for its ‘intrinsic message’ (‘a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual’ or, as an anti-communist placard in the US put it, ‘Troubled by communism? Then consult Dr. Zhivago’) as well as for the ‘circumstances of its publication’ – the censorship and vociferous harassment of a writer forced to decline the Nobel Prize.  The 1965 Hollywood film starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie added cinematic melodrama and malign Marxist murderers of the Tsar’s family to the West’s cultural offensive.

Although Pasternak was unhappy with being turned into Cold War fodder in the West, he had left himself open to such treatment.  Doctor Zhivago transfers Pasternak’s disgust with Stalinism to a distaste for the early revolutionary period, implying that Stalinist tyranny was the direct outcome of Bolshevik-led socialist revolution even though the monolithic and repressive nature of the regime did not take shape until a decade after the revolution.

This familiar political revisionism marrs the political integrity of Pasternak, and, not that you know it from the authors’ failure to analyse Doctor Zhivago as a political and literary work, it also infects the artistic virtues of the novel.  The fate of all the novel’s characters is one of misery, despair and death at the hands of the Bolsheviks.  Love and humanity is defeated in a historically and psychologically simplistic battle between the sensitive and the evil, the individual and the collective.

The CIA got the novel right  but it was the crushing of the socialist revolution by Stalin which enabled Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to be turned into the cultural servant of capitalism.

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK by GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK: The Case for Overturning His Conviction
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON
Biteback Publishing, 2013, 194 pages, $24.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Get Ward’, was the order to the heads of Britain’s criminal and political police in 1963 by the Home Secretary.  Dr. Stephen Ward, society osteopath and portrait artist, would thus become, says human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, the scapegoat for a disgraced Tory government out to save its own neck in the sensationalist ‘Profumo affair’.

John Profumo, Minister for War, had had a brief sexual liaison with the promiscuous ‘society girl’, Christine Keeler,  whose brief fling with a Russian embassy defence attaché had implicated their mutual introducer, Ward, in a political panic that loose pillow-talk could threaten ‘national security’.  It helped, by adding some moral alarm to the mix, that Ward was promiscuous, an atheist and “vaguely left-wing”, and thus ripe pickings for a Tory government desperate to silence him, by judicial means, and keep a scandal-plagued government in office.

Grasping at the charge of Ward ‘living off immoral earnings’ from Keeler and the showgirl, Mandy Rice-Davies, who both shared Ward’s flat, police hounded potential witnesses, pressured dozens of genuine prostitutes to give false evidence, persuaded Rice-Davies to change her mind about cooperating courtesy of a spell in Holloway prison on a driver’s licence misdemeanour, and scared off Ward’s patients.

The police ruination of his medical practice prompted Ward to publicly expose the Tory moralist, Profumo, who had sworn in parliament that he had never had sex with Keeler, as a hypocrite and liar.  Thus did the Tories seek vengeance against Ward by making him the fall-guy.

The aggressive police investigation was conducted against a booming extra-judicial prosecution.  With politicians chiming in on Ward’s moral depravities, the press, both tabloid and ‘quality’, slandered Ward, the media honey-pot attracting prostitutes with preposterous stories for sale, whilst both Keeler (the star witness, and confessed perjurer) and Rice-Davies sold theirs for very large sums, with Keeler’s ghost-written ‘exclusive’ for The News of the World massively prejudicing the popular climate against Ward.

Ward’s fate was sealed by a crooked trial judge with well-known views on the sinfulness of prostitution and promiscuity.  He had already pre-judged Ward as guilty of pimping and conveyed this to the jury which convicted Ward even though Keeler and Rice-Davies were not prostitutes (they did not seek payment for the sex they had with the partners they were highly selective about) and even though it was they who lived on Ward’s considerable professional earnings, not the other way round.  The judge’s highly biased summing up was the final indignity that spurred Ward to commit suicide just before the verdict.  An “appalling misuse of state power” had finally silenced Ward.

A host of errors of law, logged with technical precision by Robertson, make a strong legal case for overturning Ward’s verdict.  The artistic case is being made by Andrew Lloyd Webber whose upcoming musical, Stephen Ward, relies on Robertson’s input.  Together, they may just help to deliver historical justice to Ward, and prevent future frame-ups of other “innocent victim[s] of public prejudice and politically expedient prosecution”.

THE GREAT PROSTATE HOAX: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster
RICHARD ABLIN
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 262 pages, $42.50 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Richard Ablin, then a young immunologist and now a University of Arizona pathology professor, discovered, in 1970, an enzyme specific to the prostate gland (prostate-specific antigen or PSA) whose elevated levels in blood indicate an abnormality in the gland, he had no idea how a simple blood test would go on to become the foundation of a “profit-driven public health disaster” through prostate cancer screening.

Elevated PSA levels can be caused by prostate cancer but also by infections, aspirin, riding a bicycle, ejaculation and normal, age-related prostate enlargement.  The PSA test is organ-specific not cancer-specific yet it has become ubiquitous as a diagnostic cancer-detection tool leading to many unnecessary and dangerous treatments.

Most prostate cancers are slow-growing and can be safely left alone because prostate cancer is an older man’s disease and nearly all men will die with it but few of it, succumbing instead to other diseases of ageing (80% of men in their seventies will have prostate cancer but only 3% will die because of it).  Nearly all prostate cancers will do absolutely no harm unlike, however, the screening and treatment for them.

Because of the PSA blood test’s worse-than-chance inaccuracy (15% of its negative results are wrong, 60-80% of its positive results are wrong), the test requires a follow-up biopsy of prostate tissue.  The biopsy causes bleeding and pain and, with the biopsy needle passing through the bowel, carries a risk of potentially fatal infections of genito-urinary organs and of the blood.

The treatments that follow biopsy have their own suite of adverse effects.  Surgical removal of the prostate gland (prostatectomy) carries a high risk of urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction, radiation therapy causes inflammation of the bowel, and chemotherapy is not renowned for its pleasures.

The associated waste of health resources and men’s well-being is staggering.  There are an annual 30 million PSA tests (at $80 a pop) in the US, a million biopsies (at $2,000 each) and 100,00 prostatectomies (each fetching $30,000) for a total cost of US$28 billion, coming from the pocket of patient or taxpayer.  All of this expense is for little clinical benefit – one thousand men have to be PSA-tested to successfully prevent just one prostate cancer-related death.

Yet, the PSA test has become embedded in routine men’s health checks – all because of money, says Ablin.  Entrepreneurial medical scientists and the biotechnology industry saw the potential of mass screening to turn the PSA test, and its more expensive successor blood tests and cancers treatments, into a cash-cow, to be milked by pathology, urology, radiotherapy and oncology practices, medical device companies and ancillary medical businesses (erectile restoration, incontinence pads).

From blood test to diaper, “the prostate cancer business is a self-perpetuating industry that creates a need for its services and products”.  The only difference any of this over-servicing makes is to the corporate medical bottom line, not to prostate cancer mortality.

Corporate influence over government health watchdogs also creates a regulatory culture “that looks the other way” over dodgy data and clinical risk, whilst medical industries finance most clinical trials and dollar-dazzled doctors-for-hire have a financial interest in plugging the PSA test.  The corporate dollar also feeds patient advocacy groups whilst marketing triumphs over evidence as charismatic survivor testimonials and sports celebrity endorsers manipulate millions of men, playing on the fear of cancer, onto the prostate cancer conveyor belt with its unnecessary, costly and dangerous, but above all, lucrative, testing and treatments.

“Powerful interests knowingly misused the PSA test to generate huge profits”, concludes Ablin.  Be informed, is his warning to men when their GP talks prostate.  Ablin’s story of “greed and damaged men and government failure” is a good place to start.

THE BURGLARY: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by BETTY MEDSGER

THE BURGLARY: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI
BETTY MEDSGER
Knopf, 2014, 596 pages, $46.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

As far as burglaries go, this one was pretty audacious.  On 8 March, 1971, nine anti-Vietnam-war activists in Pennsylvania burgled the FBI, stealing the secret files in the regional FBI office in the small town of Media.  With careful planning, a little luck and plenty of pluck, the amateur burglars exposed, for the first time, the FBI’s political spying and suppression of democratic dissent.

Uncaptured for four decades, and with an FBI not keen to revisit the scene of their acute embarrassment, the previously unidentified burglars have now identified themselves and told their story to Betty Medsger, the first journalist to be leaked the stolen files.

With immense daring, the burglars challenged the power of the FBI’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, which came from his role as a “fiery narrator of tales of the communist perils that faced Americans”, his collection of dirt on politicians to use as blackmail against any threats of reform, and a glamorous reputation as a crime-fighting champion (a hollow one, however – only 1% of the Media files  concerned serious crime, which the FBI fought more on the large and small celluloid screen than in the actual criminal world).

With successive Presidents and Attorneys-General giving him license to operate outside the law with no regard to civil liberties, Hoover’s mission was to “harass and destroy” progressive movements which, as well as Marxists, housed mild liberals, intellectuals, religious pacifists, feminists, gays and African-Americans (“Black Americans fell into two categories – black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI”).

The stolen Media files, and subsequent revelations, documented this, in irrefutable black and white.  The FBI used illegal spying practices (with neither subpoena nor concern with privacy), infiltration, entrapment, provocateurs and informers to intimidate critics into silence and passivity - to, as one Hoover directive to agents put it, “enhance the paranoia … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox”.

To disrupt, discredit and disable his targets, Hoover’s bag of dirty tricks, some lethal, ranged from lacing activists’ oranges with strong laxatives and spreading venereal disease to student leaders through infected prostitutes, to fabricated documents and false rumours to sow or exacerbate movement differences.

The FBI also maintained a Security Index of 26,000 activists for arrest and indefinite detention without trial during ‘national emergencies’.  Over one thousand ideologically ‘suspect’ professors at American universities were dismissed because of FBI information provided to campus authorities, whilst FBI material provided to Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee condemned thousands more Americans to sackings and blacklists.

The burglary destroyed the mystique of the FBI, led to its oversight by Congress, and forced a formal apology to the American people for its lawless and anti-democratic behaviour.  With, as Medgers notes, the National Security Agency now putting a digital snooper behind every electronic mailbox, “such people” as the Media burglars, who “thought long and hard” about their dangerous act of resistance before deciding to risk all, “are going to be called upon again”.  Like Snowden and Manning, they will continue to answer that call.

DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER Bob Carr

DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER
BOB CARR
Newsouth, 2014, 502 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Too often, Bob Carr’s diary sounds like an episode of Grumpy Old Ministers.  An eighteen-month Foreign Affairs Minister in the dying stanzas of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd federal Labor government, the globe-trotting Carr gripes about the “dead prose” of his departmental talking points, the lifeless food and draining jetlag of plane travel, the awfulness of hotels, Canberra (“the City of the Dead”) and contracting viruses from shaking unwashed hands all day on the campaign trail “without a hand sanitiser in the car – damn!”.

Carr is, however, smart, erudite, articulate and cultured.  If stuck next to a politician on a long plane flight (assuming you were upgraded to business class), you could do much worse than getting Bob Carr and some stimulating conversations on literature, opera and Shakespeare (once you got the gym bore off-topic, that is).

His Diary of a Foreign Minister entertains with such reflections - and needs to, to compensate for the boilerplate prose of diplomatic negotiations which draws on the foreign policy orthodoxy of Time and The Economist, and whose minutiae, and prose style, makes for a punishing read.

There is little to salvage, however, from Carr’s politics.  A member of the New South Wales ALP Right and former state Premier, Carr ended his political career as a comfortable member of the international foreign policy club.  The powerful are his milieu, the elite of “glittering careerists” (“nothing wrong with that”) who head the “international architecture” of the UN, G20, IMF, EU and NATO.  He is on first name terms with Hillary (Clinton - “any time with Hillary is pure champagne”, he gushes) and Henry (Kissinger - “my favourite world-historical figure”, he writes, without a word about Kissinger’s leading role in the 1973 US-supported military coup against Salvador Allende’s Socialist government in Chile).

Carr is in his element “speed-dating” UN diplomats to garner votes for Australia’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.  This vote-coaxing motive is specifically on display in Carr’s wooing of the Arab bloc when he advocates not isolating Australia in the UN on Arab-Israeli issues.  We “would blow our support from all those Arab states, and that would cost us the Security Council election”, he argues forcefully with Gillard, who is receptive to the “Israel lobby”, the Jewish, Melbourne-based, Labor-funding business interests that prompts Carr to complain that “we are subcontracting our foreign policy to party donors”.

Although there is an element of rank political calculation in Carr’s Middle East position (he is concerned about losing Labor votes in the Arab-flavoured, western Sydney electorates) there is also genuine conviction in his opposition to an “apartheid” Israeli state expanding its settlements on Palestinian land.

Such a display of principle is, however, rare.  Far more often we find Carr defending Australia’s “national interests” and if this means selling Tibet down the river (don’t antagonise our region’s strongest power, biggest economy and most important trading partner - China), or Sri Lanka’s Tamils or Indonesia’s West Papuans (we need their help on refugees), so be it, according to Carr’s diplomacy  logic – “I’m running a foreign policy for Australia, not for Human Rights Watch or the Tamil National Alliance”, he declares petulantly.

More generally, the world’s peoples don’t get much of a look in in Carr’s diary, except as disaster victims needing aid, certainly not as political actors.  Nor are dissidents like Wikileak’s Julian Assange  suffered willingly - the transparency rebel earns an enmity from Carr that is both personal and political, no doubt because Assange has violated the precious secrecy of the diplomatic cables to which Carr is addicted.

On domestic politics, Carr is uninspiring.  If he was Prime Minister, he would “neutralise” the business sector – no mining taxes or “class war” rhetoric.  He would have proudly been a “Liberal in Labor clothing”.  Although he shares the belated insight with a chastened Rudd that Murdoch and the heads of Rio-Tinto, BHP and the banks “run the country”, the ALP that Carr documents in his diary, from the moribund grass roots branch to its squabbling and timid leading lights, are unlikely to be the ones to do something about it.