Author: Leonard Gill

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso, 150 pp., $22

Exactly who and what is Dr. Henry A. Kissinger? Key expert in
government at Harvard in the late 1950s? Key instrument of Republican Party
politicos in Indochina in the mid-’60s? National security advisor under Nixon
and Ford? Secretary of state under Nixon and Ford? Engineer behind Nixon’s
trip to China in 1972? Nobel Peace Prize co-winner in 1973? The answer, of
course, is all of the above, and all of the above, of course, is on the
record.

But, off the record, what manner of man is he? “An odious
schlump who made war gladly” was novelist Joseph Heller’s
assessment of Kissinger in Good as Gold. “A mediocre and
opportunist academic” intent on becoming “an international
potentate” is Christopher Hitchens putting it mildly in The Trial of
Henry Kissinger. Putting it not so mildly he also calls Kissinger (in
short) “a stupendous liar” and (at length) “a man at home in
the world and on top of his brief” but a Candide too: “naive, and
ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events,” a man whose writings and
speeches “are heavily larded with rhetoric about ‘credibility’ and the
need to impress friend and foe with the mettle of American resolve” but
one who, “in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in crime
and fiasco, … rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional
servants.”

Humiliating country and countrymen may mark Kissinger the man,
but Hitchens means to mark Kissinger a master criminal, which, if you follow
the complicated paper trail that Hitchens documents in this book, could and
should land the good doctor in an international court of law. The crimes,
according to Hitchens, are these:

1) Kissinger’s deliberate sabotaging of Johnson’s Vietnam
peace plan in Paris in order to get his own man, Nixon, elected in 1968. Four
years later, Nixon presents the same plan and ends the war, and an additional
31,205 American servicemen and 475,609 of the enemy forces lose their lives.
In that same period, more than 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian
civilians are unnecessarily killed, injured, or rendered homeless.
(Congratulations, Dr. Kissinger, on that Nobel!)

2) Kissinger’s tacit approval of: A) Pakistan’s takeover
of Bangladesh in 1971 and B) the kidnapping and murder of Bangladesh’s
democratically elected leader. The “secret diplomacy” that kept the
country destabilized for the following four years — four years during which
somewhere between half a million and 3 million Bengali civilians (estimates
vary) were killed — had two aims: U.S. interest in a Pakistani intermediary
who could speed a possible détente between the U.S. and China;
America’s interest in showing China that we stand by our friends and Pakistan
is a friend. (Screw India.)

3) Kissinger’s “direct collusion” in the U.S.-
financed and U.S.-armed 1970 kidnapping and murder of General René
Schneider of Chile, who opposed any military interference in the free election
of Salvador Allende as president. Hitchens calls this act, plain and simple,
“a hit — a piece of state-supported terrorism” designed to
destabilize the democratic government of a country with which the U.S. was not
at war. (Good going, General Pinochet!)

4) Kissinger’s advance knowledge of a plan to depose and
kill Cyprus’ president and overthrow its democratic government — this in
order to satisfy the territorial hunger of the dictatorship in Athens and to
protect U.S. air and intelligence bases in Greece. The coup in 1974 led to the
deaths of thousands of civilians and the uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees.
(Sorry, Cyprus.)

5) Kissinger’s (and Gerald Ford’s) full knowledge and
support of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, during which a
combination of mass slaughter and deliberate starvation resulted in the
deaths, according to Amnesty International estimates, of 200,000 people.
(Congratulations, General Suharto!)

6) Kissinger’s personal involvement in a plan “to
abduct and interrogate, and almost certainly kill,” a Greek journalist
working in Washington who vocally opposed his country’s authoritarian regime
and who vocally reminded readers of that regime’s financial ties to the Nixon
White House. (So sorry, free press.)

Is this sordid stuff really only the stuff of realpolitik,
whatever the world hot spot, whoever the U.S. head, wherever the goon squad?
Or are we talking here, when we talk of Henry Kissinger, about a clear and
still-present danger? About crimes against humanity, crimes beneath the
heading “business as usual” (aka “diplomacy”) as enacted
by a pudgy man with a zombie countenance but a man with (Hitchens’ words)
“the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power”?

You be the judge because someone has to be and because it won’t
be, officially, the United States, which believes itself immune from the truth
and reconciliation commissions being conducted by “lesser” nations
today, immune from international human rights laws, immune from international
criminal law, and immune from the law of civil remedies, a country only too
happy to continue dressing Kissinger up in what Hitchens calls “the cloak
of immunity that has shrouded him until now.”

“Until now” because Hitchens, who treats this material
with none of his easily digestible,Vanity Fair brand of broadside,
means to dress Kissinger seriously down, whether you can or cannot keep up
with the chronology of events Hitchens describes, can or cannot keep tabs on
Kissinger’s highly profitable and private, big-business deals, can or cannot
decipher the damaging evidence in the often heavily redacted CIA cables, White
House journals, declassifed documents, and memorandums he heavily quotes, can
or cannot keep count of the shady doings of the Kissinger-headed “40
Committee,” or can or cannot distinguish between an already-seedy
“Track One” line of diplomatic skullduggery from the even seedier
parts one and two of “Track Two.”

Henry Kissinger has deeded his papers to the Library of Congress
on the stipulation that they not be examined until after his death. If
Christopher Hitchens doesn’t do the doctor’s reputation in, time can tell and
just maybe justice will. — Leonard Gill

Monstruary

By Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you
have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world
of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. Providing narration
for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly
alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of
Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish
by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity,
though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s
— albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our
writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and
acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-
luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-
series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but
one thing in common: chilling imagery.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la
Bosch before his brush touches canvas: “Ill-assorted multitudes of human
figures with the heads of animals and all kinds of beasts and insects with the
heads of men and women. … A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch. A
carp with the head of a duck.”

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details
of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive
roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind
of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by
unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with
possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words,
obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! —
of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character
is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun
is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not
echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this:
“That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of
De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where
dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole
staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss,
pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate
columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators
astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose
interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the
sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But
there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very
challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You
just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles.
The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if
you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton
candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside
the car at all times. — Jeremy Spencer

As it is in Larry Brown’s fiction, so be it in Larry Brown’s nonfiction: straight up. Language: straightforward; method: straight-shooting. He’s made that way his way in short stories and novels, in one work of nonfiction (On Fire), and again in nonfiction, now, in Billy Ray’s Farm (Algonquin), a new selection of previously published magazine articles, plus a closing essay titled super-economically “Shack.”

That “shack,” like the author’s writing, is simply put: a set of walls and roof Brown built with his own hands on his own land in Tula, Mississippi, where, if he wishes, he can watch the rain come down, maybe step outside and fish, maybe strum a guitar. Maybe write? Sometime, perhaps, when the tiny building is finally finished and when, as he describes elsewhere in these pages, he is: not on a book tour, not at the Enid Spillway “fish grab,” not at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, not aiming at coyotes, not rescuing goats, not wrestling with a “calfpuller” and mother heifer and unborn calf, and not remembering the kindnesses shown to him by personal hero Harry Crews and an unsung hero praised nonetheless by Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones.

Brown met Jones in 1989. The occasion: Brown’s first literary conference. And it’s an occasion in Billy Ray’s Farm for Brown to state explicitly what Jones succeeded in doing and what Brown, implicitly, hopes himself to achieve in fiction: “a relentless forward drive of narrative”; “the ordinary things of life [witnessed] with great clarity, [the] weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters”; “people … caught up in the events around them and swept forward … to the point where drastic actions can result.” In short, fiction populated by “people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed.” Better put, shorter still: to make something that “makes you forget that you’re reading.”

Needing, however, more than a cow’s prolapsed uterus in the way of “drastic action”? Conflict both internal and external, on a grand scale? People caught up in events and swept forward, even unto certain death? Something nowhere near the “ordinary” but “things,” the weather, the seasons, the land around people so caught, witnessed with great clarity? Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (in paperback from Penguin) may be a story the author found fully formed when he first set foot in Sarajevo in 1993, but you’ll in no way forget you’re reading. You may in fact feel the urge to stop reading and throw up once inside this eyewitness reporter’s heroin-fed brain and inside his depiction of contemporary warfare, Balkans-style and centuries in the making.

That this author is still alive isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of miracle. When he isn’t shooting up on return trips to London, he’s shooting (as cameraman) any number of atrocities and being shot at (as sitting duck) by any number of sides responsible for those atrocities in war-torn Bosnia.

Loyd’s employer was The Times of London, but Loyd’s outlook isn’t a seasoned newspaperman’s cool detachment. He knowingly, repeatedly, recklessly, suicidally (?) plants himself where the going gets tough and the tough (including innocents) get … what? In the way. Of bullets and bayonets and worse. Those bullets and bayonets, backed by bloodthirsty commanders backed by competing, insane nationalisms, this book does something to explain but in no way explains away. Better, as in the case of a kitten making off with a man’s spilled brains or as in the sight of a disoriented crone wielding a man’s severed leg, you, like Loyd, cast your feelings in the bin marked “horrible” and wait “until the night’s darkness paroles them into your dreams.” That a self-professed fuck-up as major as Anthony Loyd could pull himself together and graduate to writing this good must say something about A) the educational might of England or B) the survivor instinct inbred in Loyd from a host of military forefathers. The result either way: a dispatch from the nightmare also known as front-page news.

An altogether different, private, bloodless nightmare presents itself the second you so much as read a word of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (Knopf), the private portion being the realization, despite education and reading, you don’t know squat. The least but immediate of the book’s virtues? It’s short. Meaning: a complete reread isn’t an option, it’s a given. The topic: nothing less than the foundation of Literature itself, with a capital L; man’s perception of the gods as real entities, interceding, wrecking, inspiring earthly affairs and stretching back to archaic Greece and antique Rome; the much earlier source of that interplay, the early Vedic verses and ritual practices of India; and the revolutionary reworking of individual consciousness that took place in 19th-century Germany and France, according to avant-garde theories of artistic creation, the very well-spring of modernism. Course requirements: a working knowledge (preferably in the original but translations, for wimps, provided) of Baudelaire, Heine, Hölderlin, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and never will you feel stupider than you will reading this book. Dig out from college your thinking cap and forget about forgetting you’re reading.

Dying in the City of the Blues:

Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

By Keith Wailoo

University of North Carolina Press,

325 pp., $34.95 ($16.95, paper)

For every era, there are characteristic diseases that attract
public attention, and in every disease there are particular features that gain
cultural currency and achieve high levels of popular visibility because they
embody social concerns, cultural anxieties, and political realities.”

Obvious case in point: AIDS in the ’80s. Earlier case in point
and of vital concern to African Americans: sickle cell anemia in the ’70s. But
as Keith Wailoo (author of the above quote) explains in his important new
study, Dying in the City of the Blues, sickle cell’s nationwide
visibility beginning some 30 years ago had a visibility some 70 years ago on
the streets of Memphis and on one street in particular: Beale.

When Lizzie Douglas (aka Memphis Minnie) sang “Memphis
Minnie-jitis Blues,” was she singing not of meningitis but of sickle
cell’s symptoms? And “the blues” itself — the “low down
shakin’ chill” of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues,” a chill
born of a malaria-prone river valley, transferred to a city itself a
geographic, commercial, and cultural crossroads — was it not an emblem of one
of sickle cell’s target populations and that “invisible”
population’s predicament: Delta blacks and their quite real but
“invisible” pain?

Wailoo, an award-winning professor of social medicine and history
at the University of North Carolina, doesn’t overdo the possible link with the
blues, but he does establish the undeniable links between sickle cell anemia
and three issues of key meaning to modern Memphis history: “scientific
medicine in friction with race relations and health care politics.” All
three in local terms were to become by the ’70s, in national terms, what
Wailoo calls “a complex cultural negotiation” between what science
shows, society dictates, and leaders legislate. Read what you will into that
academic buzzword “negotiation”; Wailoo’s demonstration of disease
as “commodity,” as “politics,” and as
“narrative” are his book’s triple features. General readers need not
beware; Memphis readers, read the record:

By the 1920s, in a town H.L. Mencken once described as a
“rural-minded city” (and Wailoo adds, “arguably still
is”), Memphis was receiving a steady influx of rural blacks at a time
when the paternalistic “plantation complex” of the South was in its
last stages. And by 1926, the local VA hospital was reporting its first case
of sickle cell anemia, a disease in some African languages referred to as a
“state of suffering” and, in the VA report, a disease diagnosed
independent of the more common conclusion, malaria. Three years later, Dr.
Lemuel W. Diggs, with a “distinctly new, laboratory perception of
disease” taught to him at Johns Hopkins, was brought to UT-Memphis. The
medical school as a teaching institution was suffering; Memphis blacks, many
of them indigent and many of them complaining of repeated infections, joint
and abdominal pains, and general lethargy, were suffering too — from Jim Crow
and the substandard health care that went with it. The opening of the city’s
General Hospital and UT’s affiliation with that hospital helped answer the
needs of both: The school got a concentrated pool of patients; African
Americans got at least a semblance of professional care to compare
(unfavorably) with that of whites.

In the ’30s, however, what the author terms “new habits of
clinical surveillance” and New Deal activism (in the form of New Deal
dollars) raised not only the status of UT nationally but the visibility of
“sicklers” locally, and with it a highly “circumscribed”
visibility for blacks — as patients obviously and as nurses conceivably, as
UT-trained doctors never. Under the political machine of Edward
“Boss” Crump, the health care for blacks improved too but as an
aspect of Democratic Party patronage, until a report by the U.S. Public Health
Service listed Memphis as having the highest infant death rate in America.
Civic action immediately kicked in: in the form of John Gaston’s bequest to
build a new city hospital; in the form of postwar fund-raising efforts among
whites and blacks to build Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital; in the form
of private donations by philanthropists such as Herbert Herff and Abe Plough
to advance the ground-breaking research conducted by Diggs and Dr. Alfred
Kraus at UT; and, beginning in the late ’50s, in the form of St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital, whose mission statement explicitly forbade any
and all racial considerations.

Where did this leave sickle cell the disease? On a molecular
level, thanks to Linus Pauling’s discoveries, and on a “commodity”
level, thanks to federal dollars. Patients were growing in
“immanent” value, the “legitimizers” of research agendas.
But by the ’60s advances in scientific understanding and advances in Memphis’
international reputation as a center for sickle cell research meant also new
views of the disease, with different lessons for different observers. Wailoo
calls it the “politicization of disease” to describe Congressman Dan
Kuykendall’s successful fight to win research dollars (and black votes) in
response to his district’s redrawn boundaries and “changing
complexion,” and he quotes from others the “ethnic disease
politics” to describe the ’70s upswing in new theories of black identity
generally, new theories of sickle cell biology specifically. But with the
recent rise of managed health care and the recent advent of expensive gene
therapies, a free market caused a shift away from academic health centers and
away from sickle cell as well, a disease that afflicts and kills far fewer
than, say, hypertension.

For Memphis, the city at the crossroads of Southern culture that
had managed to make medicine central to its economy, Medicaid-turned-TennCare
meant consignment to the state’s medical-economics margin. The big bucks were
now in Nashville, courtesy of one of that city’s leading cash generators,
Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America. A loss to Memphis, then, and a loss
to the attention paid the city in the closing pages of Dying in the City of
the Blues.

But for a serious loss for readers, consider this: the absence
altogether of case histories to go with Wailoo’s account of sickle cell
science and policy, of names, faces, individuals to go with what is in every
other respect an admirable sociology of medicine. We read of doctors,
lawmakers, concerned citizens, film stars, sports stars. We read of agendas,
protocols. We read of “racial identities” and “strategies of
accommodation,” “explanatory models” and “disease
landscapes,” “forces.” We read of blood smear techniques and
recombinant DNA techniques, of hydroxyurea therapy. What we hear nothing from
are the sufferers themselves, excepting perhaps the lone lyrics of Memphis
Minnie.

Wailoo ends his book on a literary high note, borrowing from
Ralph Ellison and that writer’s Invisible Man. Unfortunate to think in
this one book especially, given Keith Wailoo’s otherwise thorough work, of
sicklers invisible here.