D.R. Bell's Blog, page 2
January 27, 2020
January 27 - International Holocaust Remembrance Day
With all the crazy things going on in the world these days, it's easy to forget that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. January 27th is the day when Auschwitz, the largest and most notorious death camp, was liberated.
As we justifiably pride ourselves on technological progress, I'd like to link this post to remind us that more than ever technology and intolerance can make for a deadly combination.
As we justifiably pride ourselves on technological progress, I'd like to link this post to remind us that more than ever technology and intolerance can make for a deadly combination.
October 29, 2019
House Recognizes Armenian Genocide - Again
The House reaffirmed by a 405-to-11 vote that the U.S. government should recognize Armenian Genocide of 1915-16 (link). A similar House resolution passed in 1984 but the U.S. government didn't act.
Governments of 28 nations, including Canada, Sweden, Italy, France, Argentina, Germany, Poland, Brazil and Russia, recognize the Armenian Genocide (in six of these countries denial of this genocide has been criminalized). It’s been recognized by the European Parliament and by the Catholic Church. All but two US states formally recognize the genocide. The government of the United States of America does not - evidently, not wanting to upset Turkey.
It's time to do the right thing.
Governments of 28 nations, including Canada, Sweden, Italy, France, Argentina, Germany, Poland, Brazil and Russia, recognize the Armenian Genocide (in six of these countries denial of this genocide has been criminalized). It’s been recognized by the European Parliament and by the Catholic Church. All but two US states formally recognize the genocide. The government of the United States of America does not - evidently, not wanting to upset Turkey.
It's time to do the right thing.
June 29, 2019
Are You Not Entertained, or What Is the Purpose of the Novel?
When you Google “purpose of a novel,” the first returned item is the definition from a college’s curriculum: “to entertain and to give aesthetic pleasure.” The Miriam-Webster’s definition: “novel – a prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals with human experience.” Milan Kundera, one of my favorite writers, said “The novel is an investigation of human life … Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”
One of these definitions is not at all like the others: entertainment vs. existential discovery. To a degree, they’re in conflict, different ways of absorbing information. Here’s an experiment: look up the Goodreads’ list of popular books with at least 4.5 rating. The Harry Potter series, The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Stormlight Archive, The Infernal Devices … there are no novels at the top of that list.
“The Hunger Games” with 4.33 rating and 163K reviews is better liked than“Anna Karenina” (4.04; 21K) or “Madame Bovary” (3.66; 9K). Perhaps the later novels would fare better? Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” easily beats anything written by Philip Roth. Or by John Updike, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, David Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mikhail Bulgakov, etc., etc.
In fairness, when I was younger - much younger, I’m afraid – I preferred the likes of “The Hunger Games” to such challenging works as Kundera’s “Immortality” or Ondaatje’s “The English Patient.” I haven’t learned anything from these easy reads, but I’m not the one to throw rocks here. Perhaps it does take years to appreciate the complexity of the novel. To understand why Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” You read these novels and you feel that you’re not alone in this world.
A personal experience: one of my earlier works caught the eye of a publishing person. She commented on the draft I sent: “the plot is good, we can turn it into a fast read that’ll appeal to a mass audience. But you must simplify, cut out these philosophical asides, they are of no interest to people. And the ending is way too depressing.” I responded with “but then it won’t be my novel” and we parted ways. I felt somewhat indignant at her suggestion: to me, it was like saying that Anna Karenina should have run away with Vronsky instead of throwing herself under the train. I was kind of full of myself at the time. And I’m fortunate in that writing is a hobby for me: much easier to stand on your principles when your daily bread doesn’t depend on it. The publishing person was right, of course. She knew the business. Many reviewers complained about the complexity and hated the ending.
It does seem to me that Kundera was right: the art of the novel as an exploration of human existence is dying, marginalized by the mass media’s reduction of everything to stereotypes and sound bytes. From books to “action porn” of superheroes of assorted flavors, from letters to emails to tweets. One can’t puzzle the meaning of art or of human existence in a tweet, but we have gotten to the point where the public policy and the political discourse can be conducted on Twitter. Have we gone too far? We might be losing something valuable here.
One of these definitions is not at all like the others: entertainment vs. existential discovery. To a degree, they’re in conflict, different ways of absorbing information. Here’s an experiment: look up the Goodreads’ list of popular books with at least 4.5 rating. The Harry Potter series, The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Stormlight Archive, The Infernal Devices … there are no novels at the top of that list.
“The Hunger Games” with 4.33 rating and 163K reviews is better liked than“Anna Karenina” (4.04; 21K) or “Madame Bovary” (3.66; 9K). Perhaps the later novels would fare better? Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” easily beats anything written by Philip Roth. Or by John Updike, Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, David Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mikhail Bulgakov, etc., etc.
In fairness, when I was younger - much younger, I’m afraid – I preferred the likes of “The Hunger Games” to such challenging works as Kundera’s “Immortality” or Ondaatje’s “The English Patient.” I haven’t learned anything from these easy reads, but I’m not the one to throw rocks here. Perhaps it does take years to appreciate the complexity of the novel. To understand why Flaubert said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” You read these novels and you feel that you’re not alone in this world.
A personal experience: one of my earlier works caught the eye of a publishing person. She commented on the draft I sent: “the plot is good, we can turn it into a fast read that’ll appeal to a mass audience. But you must simplify, cut out these philosophical asides, they are of no interest to people. And the ending is way too depressing.” I responded with “but then it won’t be my novel” and we parted ways. I felt somewhat indignant at her suggestion: to me, it was like saying that Anna Karenina should have run away with Vronsky instead of throwing herself under the train. I was kind of full of myself at the time. And I’m fortunate in that writing is a hobby for me: much easier to stand on your principles when your daily bread doesn’t depend on it. The publishing person was right, of course. She knew the business. Many reviewers complained about the complexity and hated the ending.
It does seem to me that Kundera was right: the art of the novel as an exploration of human existence is dying, marginalized by the mass media’s reduction of everything to stereotypes and sound bytes. From books to “action porn” of superheroes of assorted flavors, from letters to emails to tweets. One can’t puzzle the meaning of art or of human existence in a tweet, but we have gotten to the point where the public policy and the political discourse can be conducted on Twitter. Have we gone too far? We might be losing something valuable here.
May 26, 2019
Is Eleos an Offensive Book?
This post has been prompted by an angry reaction from one of the Eleos readers: a religious person who was upset by Eleos’ portrayal of some of the high-ranking Church leaders as being more sympathetic to the Nazis than their victims. I understand. There are scores of people that can take an issue with some of the material in Eleos: the Germans, the Turks, the Jews, the Armenians, the British, the Americans, the Catholics, the Protestants, readers that like an uplifting ending, etc. The list can go on and on. Eleos is indeed an offensive book. The only defense I can offer is that these things had actually taken place. The characters are fictional, most of the events are not. That’s why the book opens with Friedrich Heer’s quote: “Only the truth will make us free. The whole truth which is always awful.”
The original plot of Eleos was a fictional story of a German soldier saving a Jewish boy. We love stories of heroes and redemption. In Schindler’s List, most of the Jewish characters survive and the Auschwitz showers let out the hot water, not poison gas. In The Promise, the Armenians are safely evacuated from Musa Dagh. Even The Diary of Anne Frank ends on a positive note. And yet the hard truth is that the vast majority of the intended victims were murdered; that the hero saviors were few and far between. Can we continue to believe that history is a rational extension of progress when the past hundred or so years were probably the bloodiest in human history?
One of the characters in Eleos writes: “The public would repress this trial in Frankfurt just as it represses anything uncomfortable to it. Our brain seems to have a self-protective mechanism of blocking the truths that it can’t survive. And in a terrible display of Nietzschean eternal recurrence, the same self-protective mechanism enables the horror to return because we blocked the earlier one.” I don’t know if this statement is true, but it seems plausible that by averting our eyes from the very heart of the darkness - that the crimes were not the work of a few evildoers but required cooperation or indifference of millions – we open the door to its recurrence.
If you do read Eleos, I hope that you, a human being, become offended. Because the truth is indeed awful, truly awful, and I didn’t want to cover it up with a happy or redeeming ending. At any point in time history is existential: we, human beings, are presented with a particular context and we must choose amongst the possibilities within it. Without passing a judgment on those who lived during such terrible times, we can - must - learn from the choices they had made. The only redemption I see is to never let it happen again - to any people.
The original plot of Eleos was a fictional story of a German soldier saving a Jewish boy. We love stories of heroes and redemption. In Schindler’s List, most of the Jewish characters survive and the Auschwitz showers let out the hot water, not poison gas. In The Promise, the Armenians are safely evacuated from Musa Dagh. Even The Diary of Anne Frank ends on a positive note. And yet the hard truth is that the vast majority of the intended victims were murdered; that the hero saviors were few and far between. Can we continue to believe that history is a rational extension of progress when the past hundred or so years were probably the bloodiest in human history?
One of the characters in Eleos writes: “The public would repress this trial in Frankfurt just as it represses anything uncomfortable to it. Our brain seems to have a self-protective mechanism of blocking the truths that it can’t survive. And in a terrible display of Nietzschean eternal recurrence, the same self-protective mechanism enables the horror to return because we blocked the earlier one.” I don’t know if this statement is true, but it seems plausible that by averting our eyes from the very heart of the darkness - that the crimes were not the work of a few evildoers but required cooperation or indifference of millions – we open the door to its recurrence.
If you do read Eleos, I hope that you, a human being, become offended. Because the truth is indeed awful, truly awful, and I didn’t want to cover it up with a happy or redeeming ending. At any point in time history is existential: we, human beings, are presented with a particular context and we must choose amongst the possibilities within it. Without passing a judgment on those who lived during such terrible times, we can - must - learn from the choices they had made. The only redemption I see is to never let it happen again - to any people.
January 17, 2019
The Counterpoint Trilogy – Five Years Later
The Great Game, the first book in The Counterpoint Trilogy, came out in December of 2013. It was set in 2022. I tried to set the story against one possible scenario that was reasonably grounded in our then-present. Five years is probably a good time to compare the how the history had unfolded vs. the trilogy. Here are some of the events and trends described in the books:
- Economic warfare between the US vs. China and Russia, escalating to the edge of a military conflict over South China Sea and Taiwan in 2024,
- A financial and political crisis beginning in late 2019, triggered by a currency attack, growing national debt, income inequality
- Emergence of a populist politician leading to the 2024 election
- Rise of a sharing economy, increased use of cryptocurrencies, continuing loss of privacy, drones, self-driving cars, etc.
While The Counterpoint Trilogy has been intended as more than pure entertainment read, it’s a fictional account rather a book of predictions. Still – and disturbingly - some elements of the plot came true already: rising tensions with China and Russia, China’s aggressive behavior in South China Sea, a populist in the White House, etc. Will others happen as well? Nobody can tell. But each action causes a reaction. When we show imperial arrogance, other countries align against us. When inequality rises, so does discontent. When middle class is eroded, demagogues give rise to aggressive populist movements.
The Great Game was conceived partly in response to the Great Recession of 2008-2009 that cost $70,000 for every American [source: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco]. That’s over $20 Trillion – as if the whole country stopped working for a year! Ten years later, the Great Recession has been largely forgotten. Before the recession, we forgot about the 2000-2001 dot-com financial bust that cost “only” a couple of trillion dollars. Just like then, the US Federal Reserve responded by creating cheap money and the government ran up the national debt. Since the book’s been published, the US debt ballooned by another $6 Trillion and is projected to continue rising at the rate of over a trillion per year. Some people say it doesn’t matter – I think that at some point the time will come to pay the piper. The inequality remains extreme: the richest 1% of the Americans earned an increasing share of the national income, from 8% in the 1980’s to 20% now, the highest since the late 1920’s, just before the Great Depression and World War II. The real median household income is the same as it was twenty years ago.
Will the next crisis happen in late 2019 as described in The Great Game? Historically, we had recessions every 5-10 years, we are due for one. With the same smart finance people still in charge and the price tag of each subsequent crisis rising exponentially, the question is: what may the next crisis look like and what will be the cost? The Counterpoint Trilogy is, of course, a work of fiction that looked at one possible scenario. Alas, it’s hitting closer to home than I would have hoped.
D.R. Bell
- Economic warfare between the US vs. China and Russia, escalating to the edge of a military conflict over South China Sea and Taiwan in 2024,
- A financial and political crisis beginning in late 2019, triggered by a currency attack, growing national debt, income inequality
- Emergence of a populist politician leading to the 2024 election
- Rise of a sharing economy, increased use of cryptocurrencies, continuing loss of privacy, drones, self-driving cars, etc.
While The Counterpoint Trilogy has been intended as more than pure entertainment read, it’s a fictional account rather a book of predictions. Still – and disturbingly - some elements of the plot came true already: rising tensions with China and Russia, China’s aggressive behavior in South China Sea, a populist in the White House, etc. Will others happen as well? Nobody can tell. But each action causes a reaction. When we show imperial arrogance, other countries align against us. When inequality rises, so does discontent. When middle class is eroded, demagogues give rise to aggressive populist movements.
The Great Game was conceived partly in response to the Great Recession of 2008-2009 that cost $70,000 for every American [source: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco]. That’s over $20 Trillion – as if the whole country stopped working for a year! Ten years later, the Great Recession has been largely forgotten. Before the recession, we forgot about the 2000-2001 dot-com financial bust that cost “only” a couple of trillion dollars. Just like then, the US Federal Reserve responded by creating cheap money and the government ran up the national debt. Since the book’s been published, the US debt ballooned by another $6 Trillion and is projected to continue rising at the rate of over a trillion per year. Some people say it doesn’t matter – I think that at some point the time will come to pay the piper. The inequality remains extreme: the richest 1% of the Americans earned an increasing share of the national income, from 8% in the 1980’s to 20% now, the highest since the late 1920’s, just before the Great Depression and World War II. The real median household income is the same as it was twenty years ago.
Will the next crisis happen in late 2019 as described in The Great Game? Historically, we had recessions every 5-10 years, we are due for one. With the same smart finance people still in charge and the price tag of each subsequent crisis rising exponentially, the question is: what may the next crisis look like and what will be the cost? The Counterpoint Trilogy is, of course, a work of fiction that looked at one possible scenario. Alas, it’s hitting closer to home than I would have hoped.
D.R. Bell
