Reflection on Working by Robert A. Caro

               Another great book by Caro, this one is much, much shorter than his previous books, as it’s just a few reflections on his writing process and a behind-the-scenes look at his great works on LBJ and Robert Moses. By finishing this book, I can now say that I’ve read every book that Caro has ever published. I am a big fan.

               I learned some new things and realized some things that I probably should have remembered, like that every “expressway” and “parkway” in the NYC/Long Island area was built by Robert Moses.  I was really interested in his explanation of certain behind-the-scenes moments in The Years of Lyndon Johnson. For example, Caro started to research Johnson’s activities in the 1940 elections to re-elect Democratic congressmen when he realized that the tone of letters that he found in the Johnson Library changed after that election. Something else that was very interesting was that to interview Sam Houston Johnson, LBJ’s brother, he had him sit where he sat at the old Johnson table in their childhood home. Caro sat behind him, not wanting to sit at the table. And around 6 PM, which was suppertime in the old household, he began to interview him about his memories of his childhood and got much deeper understanding as a result. I imagine that as a really dramatic moment.

               Towards the end of the book, Caro says something that I think sums up all his work. The quote is taken from an interview he gave. He says, “Really, my books are an examination of what power does to people. Power doesn’t always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you’re climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you’re really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you’re there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he’s doing it. With Robert Moses, you see power becoming an end in itself, transforming him into an utterly ruthless person. In The Passage of Power, I describe the speechwriter Dick Goodwin trying to find out if Johnson is sincere about civil rights, and Johnson tells him, I swore to myself when I was teaching those kids in Cotulla that if I ever had the power, I was going to help them. Now I have the power and I mean to use it. You see what Johnson wanted to do all along. Or at least a thing he wanted to do all along…”

Reflection on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip F. Dick

               Ooof. This is a rough book. It is set in a dark, sad world—the west coast of the United States after nuclear war has made Earth nearly uninhabitable. Most humans have fled to Mars where they are colonizing the planet and are served by humanoid androids. The androids often flee to Earth where they try to live without being detected. The book primarily follows a bounty hunter who hunts down and kills androids.

               It is a very difficult book to read because of the setting and the character we follow. The setting is nasty and post-apocalyptic. The main character is no better than a murderer, as none of the androids threaten the lives of others. The book is all about what makes a person human and focuses on empathy as the key attribute. But if empathy is the thing that makes someone human, how can a human be a bounty hunter and kill androids for whom he feels empathy. It’s just kind of sad to read. That sad it’s a good book, but a sad book.

Reflection on Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

               Debt, a book with a great title, is an anthropological look at debt, covering the economics necessary, but going more profoundly into human conceptions of debt and its symbolic meaning. I thought the book was intriguing for that perspective, but I didn’t like how big the scope of the book was. I feel like books that cover all of human history often try to hard and there are not many authors who can reasonably cover all of that. The author had some controversial points in the book, like saying that human society did not begin with barter, but that debt came first, then money, then barter. I’m not really gonna say any more on it. This is gonna be a short blog since I didn’t really love the book.  

Reflection on The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

               A masterpiece of the English language like Caro’s works on Lyndon Johnson, The Power Broker is an examination of power, urban development and design, and New York politics told through the life of Robert Moses, who dominated the development of New York from 1924 to 1968. Caro’s writing is, of course, excellent, and I cannot stress highly enough that he is a master of his craft. While many refer to him as a biographer, his biographies of Moses and Johnson are so much more than any biographies I have ever read. No other writer of biographies is as captivating and explanatory. No other writer is as poetic in his imagery and no other writer can so seamlessly weave in critical moral judgments into his stories. The most amazing thing about what Caro writes is that all of it is true. He is a non-fiction writer, yet his books read like the best of novels. The Power Broker is nothing short of excellent and now I only have one book left by Caro to read, his newest book, Working, which is about his writing process.

As A Man

               Caro is a big believer in character traits that are passed down through generations along with physical traits. In the Johnson books, Caro talks about certain Bunton and Johnson features that made it into Lyndon. In The Power Broker, the two main traits in Moses’ life come from his grandmother, Rosalie Cohen. They are idealism and arrogance. The intelligence goes without saying, as Moses was a student at both Princeton and Oxford. His intelligence is also less interesting to the author and the reader. The really interesting thing is the conflict that takes over much of Moses’ early life between his idealism, focused on improving the lives of New York’s citizens, and his arrogance, founded in classism, racism, and a feeling of individual, personal superiority over others. In this way, Moses is very different from LBJ, though you could say that they are two sides of the same coin. Both desired power to the point that it was nearly an obsession. However, Moses possessed an elitism that Johnson just couldn’t ever have. After all, as boys Moses was rich, and Johnson was poor. Johnson could be arrogant, but elitism was never his style.

               Moses’ idealism waned in the 1922 New York Governor election, when he supported the Democrat Al Smith of Tammany Hall. Moses had been a reformer and a member of the good government movement, so his choice was strange. Smith’s opponent was a member of that movement, so Republicans and reformers saw Moses as a traitor to the cause. Moses, after all, had been an opponent of Tammany hall, but now he was supporting their candidate as Smith’s victory offered him a taste of power. Caro writes that, “Bob Moses had changed from an uncompromising idealist to a man willing to deal with practical considerations; now the alteration had become more drastic… He was openly scornful of reformers whose first concern was accuracy, who were willing to devote their lives to fighting for principle…” As time went on, Moses became even less idealistic and more willing to engage in patronage politics as it meant that he could accomplish his dream projects. After all, building highways and parks put him in the construction business and soon he had a lot of jobs/patronage to give out, a source of power for him.

               Moses’ elitism manifested itself in the things he built. Frances Perkins, who knew him well before joining FDR’s cabinet, said that, “He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great amorphous mass to him…” Caro tells us that he cut off the parks he built from the poor and middle class by making them accessible only by car. For example, he vetoed an extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. He also limited access by buses by making the bridges across his parkways too low for them to pass. He kept African Americans out by not granting permits to their buses. He stationed black lifeguards furthest away from the popular areas of the beaches and where there were pools, he kept the temperatures lower based on his theory that black and Latino people prefer warmer water temperatures. He also implemented parking fees in the midst of the Great Depression of up to 50 cents to keep the poor out.

               On a personal level, Moses was often brutal. While he would be extremely kind to his superiors as he came up through the ranks, he was a real asshole to his subordinates. He would work them hard and scream at them. By the 1940’s there was nobody left who worked for him that would disagree with him. Moses wanted yes men. Those who knew him in the thirties and forties said that he had “a sadistic joy in hurting other people.” There were several incidents where the 200-pound park commissioner engaged in physical bullying. He would hit his subordinates and lift them up by the scruffs of their necks. His targets were always old, skinny, weak, or inebriated. He would never attempt to physically intimidate anyone his own rank or size.

               In his relations with his family, Moses does not look good. As he dedicated himself more to his work, he separated himself more and more from his relatives. He had a wife and two daughters who he loved, though. His wife was mostly devoted to taking care of him. All of this is fine, but the big mystery is what his brother Paul did to deserve to much of Robert’s hate. Moses left Paul destitute and penniless when he cut him out of their mother’s will and he also spread some sort of rumor to the rest of the family about Paul. Caro details how Bob basically destroyed Paul’s life without remorse and took every cent he had.

New York Before Moses

               New York was sort of a shitshow at the turn of the century. The state had never passed a budget, so the finances were just not kept track of by anyone, especially not the legislators in charge of such a thing. When Moses got involved as a reformer in New York politics in the early 1910s, he was fresh out of Oxford, and he proposed several good government reforms, but was defeated by Tammany Hall and laid off from his job in 1917. He became disillusioned and had a bad time.

               However, thanks to Belle Moskowitz, he started to rise again in the world of city planning. Moskowitz was a political genius and the principal advisor of Al Smith. When Smith became governor, she was his chief of staff. Moskowitz took charge of a reorganization of state government, which in New York at the time was a mess of state departments and commissions that had come together piecemeal, never thought of as a whole. She had hired Moses to lead that effort. It was successful, but Smith lost the election of 1920 as Democrats were badly defeated everywhere, though Smith outperformed the presidential ticket of Cox and Roosevelt.

               Moses’ connection to Smith was the most important professional relationship of his life. It was though Smith that Moses would rise to major responsibilities in the 1920s. Spending 1921 and 1922 out of office, Smith had lots of free time and he started to spend lots of it with Moses. They developed a strong rapport and Smith invited Moses to dinner regularly. When Smith returned to the governorship after success in the 1922 campaign, Moses went with him.

Moses the Young Planner

               Bob Moses never got his driver’s license, but he did believe in the promise that automobiles offered the world, specifically the world of luxury. In the 1920s, there were still not many people with cars, and those that had them were rich. What Moses wanted to create were beautiful roads—roads that took drivers through forests and that were landscaped and had no traffic lights. That was the idea of the parkway. A parkway cuts through an area surrounded by a ribbon of park on either side so that the driver has a more pleasant experience. The whole idea is that the road is scenery in itself. This was the sort of road he would start to build all over Long Island.

               When it came to parks, Moses was a revolutionary. The earlier movements of conservation and preservation had focused on natural beauty. Theodore Roosevelt led a movement dedicated to keeping humans from destroying natural spaces and until the time that Moses rose to power in the 1920s, that’s what parks were. Moses had a different conception. Instead of serving as “breathing spaces,” Moses saw parks as places that could be used “to swing baseball bats, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and the implements of other sports…” Moses wanted to built playgrounds in parks as centers of recreation, not just contemplation of nature. No government of any state or city in the United States had begun to do this.

The Rise to Power From Long Island

               In the Smith administration, Moses was to be the president of the Long Island State Park Commission, a commission created by Moses in legislation drafted by Moses. He gave himself a six-year term, longer than that of the governor—even though he had previously written that in good government no appointed official should have a term longer than the governor. He also provided that the commission would propose its own budget and that no governor could remove the president of the commission just because he did not follow the governor’s orders—the only cause for removal would be if the president can be proven to have committed a crime. Caro writes about the act that created the commission that “almost every clause in the act contained a sleeper.” Moses said that the commission would operate parks, but then later on defined the term “parks” as meaning “parkways… boulevards and also entrances and approaches thereto, docks and piers, and bridges…” The term “parkways” was also key, as the State Highway Law gave each county veto power over highways within its borders, but not parkways. Moses also gave himself the ability to purchase real estate and to, as president of the Long Island State Park Commission, write his own laws for his land, hire his own police, and more. Moses was essentially made a dictator in all of the Commission’s territory.  

               Moses’ first big projects were the construction of major parkways in Long Island along with the construction of Jones Beach. In 1925, he faced huge opposition as he needed to take over lots of private land from owners who did not want to give it up, but within three years he would have it all. He did this through lots of trickery and was very clever. The man was good at his job and was able to use the press as a weapon as well, claiming that those who did not want to give up land were mainly wealthy people who wanted the beauty of Long Island all for themselves.

Sometimes, in the strategies he used, Robert Moses tread the line between genius and evil. For example, Moses wanted to create a truly luxurious experience at Jones Beach. He wanted everything to not just be functional, but beautiful. Therefore, he asked for a huge price—one million dollars—to build the bathhouses and the water tower at the beach. After some haggling, he got the legislature to give him $150,000. He told his men to “just go right on the way you were doing” and to lay the foundation for one bathhouse. Then, he turned around and told the legislature he needed more money. They were trapped because if they didn’t give him the money, they would have to admit that they approved the amount without seriously evaluating the costs. Let that be a lesson to legislatures to not just appropriate less money but to get a blueprint of how the plan will change.

By the 1930’s, Moses, who was associated with all the improvements of parks, was extremely popular in New York. No governor could afford to fire him, so even after Smith left the governorship, FDR renewed Moses’ term as the president of the Long Island State Park Commission in 1932. Moses thought of moving into public office at this time. In 1933, Republicans vetted him for the mayoralty of New York, but ended up giving it to Fiorello La Guardia. Moses gave his support to La Guardia and he won. La Guardia still feared the popularity of Al Smith, so the fact that Smith’s protégé Moses (who himself was very popular) had endorsed him was a relief.

To pay Moses back for his support, La Guardia was about to make him extremely powerful. He wanted Moses as the leader of parks for New York City, and Moses said yes, but only on the condition of complete control, and so it was. He allowed Moses to draft the legislation, much as Smith had allowed regarding the Long Island parks a decade earlier, and Moses gave himself a big job. He unified the five parks departments (one for each borough) into one and became commissioner. He extended the unified department’s authority to include parkways and allowed himself to keep his old jobs. He also got control of the Triborough Bridge Authority as well as a new Marine Parkway Bridge Authority. It was a huge amount of power that put Moses in charge of nearly every major public works project for the next three decades. Throughout the thirties, Moses made huge improvements to parks, repainting walls and benches, reshaping golf courses, resurfacing playgrounds, and reequipping play areas with jungle gyms.

The 1934 New York Governor Election

               In 1934, Moses was to run for governor of New York. It was the first and last time he would run for public office and it was a total failure. He was nominated by the “old guard” of the Republican party in 1934, men who bitterly opposed the New Deal that they saw as socialism. Despite the fact that Moses was a huge spender like FDR, his personal hatred of FDR and his disdain for “the people” convinced the old guard to hand him the nomination. They were able to do so due to their huge amounts of money.

               Moses ran a terrible campaign, making few public appearances and antagonizing the audience in each one. He was seemingly determined to piss people off, and even the slightest criticisms sent him into an unseemly rage. The campaign showed him for who he really was, which was very unpleasant to most people. He threw tantrums essentially and put no effort into really trying to convince people of his candidacy. Simply put he was a terrible candidate and he lost terribly in what was already a terrible year for Republicans. It was then that FDR (then president) tried to get La Guardia to fire Moses as a condition of federal funds. La Guardia would have done it, but legally he couldn’t, as Moses had written the legislation himself that made him un-fireable except for if he committed a crime. When it became public that the feds were trying to fire him, public opinion returned to Moses’ side, as people may not have wanted him for governor, but they recognized all the improvements he had made in charge of parks.

Enjoying His Power

               Moses and La Guardia had an interesting relationship. La Guardia is widely considered the best mayor New York ever had, but even he was not all-powerful. He really wasn’t even as powerful as Robert Moses. The thing is that Moses could get things done that nobody else got done. The man worked constantly and was in such positions of authority that he always had solutions for La Guardia—and quickly.

               That said, Moses’ solutions were not for everyone. He continued to build thinking only of the upper classes, focusing on improving playgrounds and parks in areas where the “best” people lived. Caro points out that Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City during the thirties but only built one in Harlem. He continued to build parkways and highways focused on leisure even though fewer and fewer Americans were driving for the purpose of pleasure. Some started to criticize him for caring about cars more than people. For example, in the area of Riverside Park, he built a highway along the river so that drivers could enjoy the view while the park was placed back. People in the park could barely see the Hudson River at all while drivers didn’t really care about the view anyway. All of this is so ridiculous because MOSES NEVER DROVE A CAR IN HIS LIFE. He never drove in a traffic jam. He was always chauffeured in a custom limo where he sat far back with no window next to him to see out of. Despite that, he was totally dedicated to an image of “the driver” that he had established in the twenties that bore less and less resemblance to reality.

               Moses loved his power. He guarded it jealously and wanted to be in charge of every infrastructure project in New York. He even tried to sabotage projects he was not in charge of, like the Battery Tunnel, which he wanted to lead as a bridge. When he could not get his way, he shut down Battery Park, which locals had managed to save from him, for five years. Of the things he was in charge of, he wanted charge for perpetuity. Take the Triborough Bridge Authority as an example. To limit the lifespan of an “authority,” which is an organization with government license that acts independent of the government to build some infrastructure, governments set dates at which “each authority must redeem all its bonds, surrender control of all its facilities and go out of existence.” The state of New York of course included these provisions in the legislation of the Triborough Bridge Authority, but legislators must not have noticed that in drafting the legislation, Robert Moses made them meaningless. Hidden deep in the bill’s legalese, Moses included a sentence that altered the meaning of the legislation. It read, “The authority shall have the power from time to time to refund any bonds by the issuance of new bonds, whether the bonds to be refunded have or have not matured and may issue bonds partly to refund bonds then outstanding and partly for any other corporate purpose.” This sentence changed everything! The drafter of the original act said that, “With that sentence in there, he had the power to issue forty-year bonds and every thirty-nine years he could call them in and issue new bonds, for another forty years.” Everyone had thought the authorities would be temporary bodies, but Moses had just made his permanent.

               Now, using the tolls from the bridge and also rerouting other money from his other offices, Moses was starting to accumulate huge sums of money. He never took money for himself. He had no interest in getting rich as he was already very comfortable. On the other hand, he wanted to constantly reinvest it and build more to achieve his dreams.

Disconnect from Reality

               The sad thing about Robert Moses was that this was a man whose talents, by the end, were wasted. I would say that his early career was good. Setting up Jones Beach and creating parks was excellent. The state needed a man like him to do it and it was good to set up the highways, parkways, and bridges that he built, too. However, as he clung to power decade after decade, he lost touch with reality. He didn’t understand, especially after World War Two, that the use of the automobile had changed. People didn’t use their cars just to cruise around and see scenery anymore, they were using them to get to work in the morning and get back home at night.

               Most of all, he didn’t understand what is indeed counterintuitive to most of us—that building more roads does not relieve traffic congestion and can even make it worse. When the Van Wyck Expressway opened up, it illustrated this phenomenon well. Going to the airport later named JFK used to take twenty minutes to cover four miles, yet when the Van Wyck opened, it took half an hour! You would think that with supply and demand that adding more roads would reduce congestion, but really, increasing the supply of roads decreases the cost in time of driving, encouraging more people to drive. People will get on the roads so long as they’re not slower than the alternative mode of transportation. However, Robert Moses had planned New York (and since then many more urban planners have done the same) to run on highways. There was no alternative transportation. Since 1933, New York had not made any improvements to its subway and it was getting bad. Without extensions into new neighborhoods as they developed, people had no choice but to get in cars as long as it was faster than walking. And therefore, since walking four miles at four miles an hour takes an hour, people will get in their cars and sit in traffic for half an hour instead, gumming up the roads.

               Moses spent forty years making this problem worse. From 1955 to 1965 alone the metropolitan area of New York spent $1.2 billion on new highways without spending a cent on mass transportation. The massive imbalance this created was reflected in the traffic jams all over the region. Moses’ ideological commitment to highways and cars condemned millions of New Yorkers to countless time lost in traffic jams. He even locked it in for future generations by building highways in such a way that it would cost millions more to put trains on them rather than making small investments up front to make it possible to add trains later. All he needed to do was sink heavier foundations into the center mall of the highway. He knew it could be done since proposals to do so had sat on his desk. But he did not. Robert Moses purposefully killed mass transit in New York.

The Fall of Robert Moses

               Before Moses fell from power, he first fell in the eyes of the people of New York. It came from an attempt to increase the size of the parking lot at the Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant in Central Park. What a mundane issue! Moses had torn down hundreds of city blocks and displaced thousands upon thousands of people! Yet this tiny parking lot would be a watershed moment in his career. The difference between this time and all the other times is that first, this is where rich kids played, with parents who would cause a fuss, and second, that Central Park has more special meaning than any other park in New York, drawing more media attention. When the famous actors and writers who lived nearby got involved, the press attention grew. Moses had always had the press on his side, but now a new generation of reporters was digging deeper into his works.

               Some of them found that Tavern-on-the-Green was paying nothing to the city for its location in Central Park. In return for the excellent location, they would cater Moses’ special events, something that is clearly illegal, as it circumvented budget appropriations. As they dug deeper, another scandal popped up a few years later, when one of Moses’ subordinates removed actors who were performing Shakespeare from the park as he suspected that the director was a Communist. Moses’ reputation was tarnished not only by these scandals, but then by the new critical press environment. When Moses led the World’s Fair in 1965, all of his mistakes (and there were many) were ridiculed in the press.

               Moses was finally brought down by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller could afford to get rid of Moses since as Governor he was stronger than any mayor and since as a Rockefeller he had an unlimited supply of money to use as he pleased. Basically, Rockefeller was able to get him due to New York laws requiring governor approval for state employees over 70 to continue working. Rockefeller basically told him that he wasn’t going to keep Moses on for one of his jobs when he hit another birthday, so Moses pulled his classic move of resigning all his positions. To Moses’ surprise, Governor Rockefeller accepted the resignations. He then took Moses out of the leadership of the Triborough Bridge Authority somewhat easily. Normally, bondholders would sue, or in this case, the agent of the bondholders, since they all had the same agent. They would normally win. That was why no one had done it before. However, the agent/trustee of the bondholders was Chase Manhattan Bank, the only large bank left in the United States to be controlled by a single family—the Rockefellers.

               By the end, Moses was easier to take down without public opinion on his side and then without his many positions to help him. He stopped being as indispensable later on and it didn’t help him that he was mostly deaf, making meetings difficult. It’s hard to say that Moses really got beat, as spending 40 years ruling over the largest city in the most powerful country on Earth only to yield at 80 years old is impressive by any standard. He never lost his desire to keep building though, even in his non-consensual retirement.

Conclusion

               I’ll just say again that this is a great book. Caro is a genius and one of the best writers ever in any genre. Below is a passage I really liked from the book talking about the people who rode the Long Island Railroad in the early seventies when the book was written. The railroad was slow, crowded, and generally terrible due to a total lack of state funding. Robert A. Caro wrote the below:

               A young man might say, as twenty-six-year-old Michael Liberman of Dix Hills did one evening, “People’s lives revolve around the railroad. You can spend five hours a day on it, and then you’re just too tired to work.” He might say, as thirty-six-year-old Allen Siegal of Roslyn did one evening, “I think we’re out of our minds to do this. The trip home is worse than eight or nine hours at the office.” Men who have been commuting for years, however, generally do not go into detail. Nor do they complain much. Their standard reply—one so standard that the questioner can hear it a dozen times in a dozen conversations—apparently sincere, is: “Oh, you get used to it after a while.”

               The implications of this reply should be considered.

               “Get used to it!” Accept as part of your daily existence two or three—or more—hours sitting amid dirt, crammed against strangers, breathing foul air, sweating in summer, shivering in winter. Accept that you will be doing this for a substantial portion of every working day of your life, until you are old. “Get used to it!” One has to think about what those words, so casually uttered, really mean. One has to realize that the man uttering those words has accepted discomfort and exhaustion as a part—a substantial part—of the fabric of his life. Accepted them so completely that he no longer really thinks about them—or about the amount of his life which they are, day by day, robbing. We learn to tolerate intolerable conditions. The numbness that is the defense against intolerable pain has set in—so firmly that many of the victims no longer even realize that the pain is pain. [The italics are Caro’s)

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Something so important that is not just true of the Caro books I’ve read but really all books on great leaders is that they know when to shut up. James (?) Foley said of Al Smith that, “He would never admit that he knew anything about a subject until he knew everything about it.” It is really good leadership to not talk out of your ass since that exposes you as a fool.
• Al Smith was a really smart politician. There’s a good story in the book about a time when Smith was going to give a speech to an audience at a county fair and Moses had given him a speech detailing dollar by dollar how Governor Miller’s claims to have saved the state $14 million were untrue. Instead, Smith said just two sentences: “Governor Miller says he saved the state fourteen million dollars. All I want to know is—where is it, and who’s got it?” After a moment the farmers listening were silent, then murmured, then laughed, and then broke into applause and cheers. That’s a ballsy speech.
• Moses’ signature move was to threaten to resign. He did it so much during La Guardia’s administration that the mayor had a pad of memos printed up that said, “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as ________ effective __________.” That shut him up for a while.
• Tammany Hall has a presence in this book until the 1940s, having lost a lot of power under the Republican Fiorello La Guardia and being broken thereafter.

Reflection on Heads of the Colored People by Nafisa Thompson-Spires

               This is a very weird book. It reminded me of season one of the Office with how uncomfortable it made me. It is a collection of several stories, some featuring the same characters as others, some totally different, but all featuring disturbing elements. There is one about a woman contemplating suicide, another about two office deskmates who engage in passive-aggressive war, another about a woman who is obsessed with men with no legs, and the list goes on. All of them have African American main characters and most touch on race in some way or another, probably all. It’s a good, short book.

Reflection on A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire 3) by George R.R. Martin

               I think that this is the best of the first three books. We are given so many good conversations and moments in it that are combined in Game of Thrones seasons 3 and 4 (the best two seasons) that it is just an overwhelmingly good book. I feel like it is sort of a closing and time of transition that caps the first “trilogy” of the series very well. AGOT has lots of rising action and feels like the main set up to the war of the five kings, the emergence of Daenerys Targaryen, and the rise of the Lannisters in King’s Landing. ACOK is tons of action. The war is set loose and there is a ton of fighting across Westeros. Jon’s story gets interesting as he ranges north of the wall. Daenerys is tested in Qarth. The Battle of the Blackwater! ASOS, then, stands out for its resolution of major storylines brought of earlier and really feels like the end of the first section of Martin’s saga. Jon falls in love, breaks his vows, returns to the watch, and defends the wall. Stannis recovers from his defeat at the Blackwater and eventually defends the wall from wildling attack. Daenerys conquers Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen, deciding to stay in Meereen to rule. In the South, the Lannisters consolidate power, successfully engineering the Red Wedding, and then fall into internal squabbles when Joffrey is poisoned. Arya gives up on finding her family and takes a ship to Braavos. Sansa finally escapes King’s Landing and is now stuck with Littlefinger in the Vale. Things kind of settle in a way in this book, and it feels like a good conclusion but also a new beginning for a lot of characters, especially Arya, Daenerys, and Jaime (who is now in King’s Landing).

               Tyrion has had one of the most interesting journeys in these first three books. In AGOT, he explores the North and is lucky to escape with his life from the Vale. He is in King’s Landing throughout the next two books, but in very different circumstances. In ACOK, before the Battle of the Blackwater, he has power. Afterwards, in ASOS, he does not. His fall is swift, as his father Tywin’s return means that he will no longer be the Hand. Tywin trades his sword for a quill and has even more success writing than he did fighting, orchestrating the Tyrell alliance and the Red Wedding. Both of them, however, have fallen by the end of the book, as Tyrion is sentenced to death for killing Joffrey. Tywin allowed the events to spin out of control under his own nose, and it is his own son who kills him. The Lannisters begin ASOS as the most powerful house and end it in disarray. Throughout the book, Tyrion continues to darken and become more estranged from his family, long before the trial. I felt much more skeptical of his relationship with Shae in the books than in the show. Maybe it’s only because I knew what would happen, but I feel like on my initial time going through the story I had thought that Shae really loved Tyrion. This time around I did not think so. My last thought on Tyrion and the Lannisters is that it is so weird how Varys just lets Tyrion go and kill his father, even giving him the directions on where to go and how to do it. He plays coy but it’s very obvious he wants Tyrion to do it. I guess Varys already knows it’s time to support the fall of the Lannisters.  

               Daenerys has a great arc in this book, though I think as she becomes more of a conqueror, she becomes less relatable as a character. She has huge success after success, but is constantly suspicious of her two chief advisors, Jorah and Barristan. Now, she has good reason, but it’s a tough book for her personally despite her political successes. Early on, Jorah kisses her and it’s a weird-ass moment in the book. She even likes it and then you remember that she is 14-15 and he is like 50. Gross. I keep trying to imagine that the ages are different because so many characters are just too young. My headcanon is that years are actually longer on Planetos and so people are all a little bit older. Something really unique about her character is that hers is the only POV of someone who is trying to get the Iron Throne. We sympathize a lot with her character because we get everything from her point of view, as opposed to Stannis, Renly, Joffrey, Balon, Robb, or any other claimant of the Iron Throne.

               The nature of the others becomes a lot clearer in this book. First of all, we know that they are Craster’s sons, as revealed at the very end of Samwell II. We also learn in Bran IV that the Night’s King was the 13^th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, of which Jon Snow is now the 998^th commander. He was a brave warrior who saw a woman “with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars.” He finds her and they have sex even though “her skin was cold as ice,” and he impregnates her. He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed himself King and her Queen and ruled for 13 years with his “corpse queen” until the Stark in Winterfell and the wildling Joramun (of the famous Horn) brought him down. He had been sacrificing to the Others, which is interesting, and his name was forbidden from being mentioned afterwards. Old Nann says he was thought to have been a Bolton, a Magnar from Skagos, an Umber, a Flint, a Norrey, or a Woodfoot. However, she says that he was really a Stark, and it was his brother who killed him. She even says “mayhaps his name was Brandon.” In Jon X, Mance tells us that “the Others never come when the sun is up.” That makes it clear I think along with the fact that they are connected to the Night’s King and the Night’s Watch that the others are creatures of darkness. It seems to me at this point that the Other is the Others and that the Lord of Light will be led by Azor Ahai, who seems like Daenarys in this book. However, I don’t think we have a good idea of who is the good or bad guy, as the Others seem pretty terrible, but the Old Gods seem nice. It is like a Manichaean struggle without a clear moral side to be on. It is honestly shocking how little forthright conversation happens about the Others in this book. Everyone knows about the danger they represent but there are extremely few conversations about what to do about them.  

               There are some important differences that really start to emerge between show and book. Rhaegar continues to play a huge role in this book, which is a huge difference from the show, where I think it is possible to watch the entire thing and come away with only a vague idea about his importance. There is so much critical conversation of the past, especially the tournament at Harrenhal and the fate of Ashara Dayne. I think that the characters Margaery, Joffrey, Alliser Thorne, Oberyn, and Bronn are all much bigger in the show than in the book and is a credit to the actors who played them for making them so memorable. Lady Stoneheart, on the other hand, is a critical difference in that she appears in the Epilogue of this book (the only epilogue so far), but not in the show.

Things I Noticed:

• Jaime II: When escaping Riverrun with Brienne, they come across a palfrey with a bloodied saddle that had belonged to a Bolton man. It was almost surely one of the men Nymeria attacked earlier on, which we get in one of Arya’s dreams.
• Davos III: Melisandre says that “Azor Ahai shall be born again amidst smoke and salt to wake dragons out of stone. The bleeding star has come and gone, and Dragonstone is the place of smoke and salt. Stannis Baratheon is Azor Ahai reborn!” This clearly has to be Daenerys. The show made Melisandre think that Jon was Lightbringer but seriously… this has to be Daenerys.
• Arya VI: When Arya meets Beric Dondarrion, he is described very similarly to what we will later get for Bloodraven: “The walls were equal parts stone and soil, with huge white roots twisting through them like a thousand slow pale snakes. People were emerging from between those roots as she watched; edging out from the shadows for a look at the captives, stepping from the mouths of pitch-black tunnels, popping out of crannies and crevices on all sides. In one place on the far side of the fire, the roots formed a kind of stairway up to a hollow in the earth where a man sat almost lost in the tangle of weirwood.”
• Jon V: Jon mentions that Ned had wanted to resettle the Gift and called it “a dream for spring,” which we know will be the title of the last book.
• Jaime VI: We get our second mention of Maester Marwyn in the series. First mentioned by Mirri Maz Duur, who had met him in Asshai, now Qyburn brings him up too. This guy will have a role to play.
• Something interesting in this book is how Martin develops Westerosi music. In the previous two book there are definitely mentions of famous songs, but in this book it is constant. I think it is one of the best things about this book that it introduces us to probably a dozen new songs whether by giving us the lyrics or just the name.
• There is definitely a kraken in the Narrow Sea. In Tyrion III, Varys mentions seeing a kraken off the Fingers. In Davos IV, he mentioned that at the Celtigar stronghold of Claw Isle there is “a horn that could summon monster from the deep.” In Davos V, Sallador Saan brings it up.
• The only major information we get on Jon Snow’s parentage comes in Arya VIII, in conversation between Arya and a boy named Edric Dayne, who is the Lord of Starfall. That’s when we learn that Jon was born down south. That connects very well with the geography of the Tower of Joy.

Reflection on How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell

               This is a book about development economics that uses East Asian case studies as examples of success and failure, focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as successes, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand as failures, and China as a special, successful case. The policy prescription for development success is simple: maximize agricultural output through household farming, divert investment to manufacturing and protect local companies until they can export, and use long-term focused financial controls to divert money into the first two. The book largely ignores democracy, rule of law, and geography as drivers of development.

               Studwell argues that household farming is very good for developing countries because it allows the to use their surplus of people to a highly productive end. It is not necessarily good, he argues, to start farming at a large scale because that leaves many unemployed and doesn’t actually lead to the highest output. Larger farms are more efficient, but that is because they use fewer people, producing fewer crops as well. Since most developing countries have lots of young people living in rural areas, it is better to put them to work and focus on making agriculture more efficient later. Studwell points out that “urban bias” was the cause of the failure of many Latin American economies. The urban bias is the opposite of what he recommends. Instead of investing heavily in producing high agricultural output, countries on the wrong path try to industrialize too soon, filling the cities with people and leaving the rural areas without enough workers to feed them. This leads to these countries exporting little food or even importing food, which is really a waste of money for a country that is trying to develop. It is far better to provide one’s own food and export it, building up foreign exchange capital.

It is crucial, therefore, to increase agricultural production through land reform, which is easier said than done. Land reform also has the secondary effect of increasing social mobility in a society by distributing land equally. That means that the smartest and most able people will tend to use their new property wisely. If there is no land reform, plantation owners and large-scale property owners will control the market, and they have little reason to produce high yields. After all, the crops sell for higher prices if plantation owners keep yields down. Household farmers, on the other hand, cannot coordinate such a thing and are much more likely to just produce all that they can, as shown by Studwell using quantitative evidence from several countries. Crucially, as agricultural outputs increase, developing countries should scale up those family farms as technology and technology access improves. At this point, it is good to start deregulating and ending subsidies so that the most efficient farms can drive others out of the market, allowing the free market to take over and saving the government money. What can happen if a government does not do this is shown in Japan, where subsidies have prevented farmers from mechanizing as there is little incentive in harvesting more food.

               As a country begins to scale up in agriculture, there will no longer be a need of new workers in that sector. As such, the nation needs to provide jobs in urban areas for people to move to if they don’t want to work on a farm. This means developing an urban base of manufacturing, which will provide more riches to the country, especially if the native companies can develop enough to export abroad. The policy that Studwell recommends is protectionism in the early stages, gradually diminishing to favor only those companies capable of exporting their products abroad, which will naturally be the best products. Korea’s car industry was very successful with this in the second half of the 20^th century. A true revelation in the book is that in the game of government subsidies, it is not picking winners that is important, but weeding out the losers. There will always be mistakes made, but the latter is easier than the former. Ironically, while Studwell argues that the state has a crucial role to play, he points out that “export discipline,” or the process of weeding out losers who cannot export, is critical to manufacturing success; that is to say that many states fail by not letting the free market work to determine which of their companies is the best. This occurred in Malaysia, where the state was more haphazard in its investments than more successful states and focused too much on state-run enterprises. Malaysia also mixed up its export policies with affirmative action for certain Malaysian ethnic groups that did not have the know-how to lead companies. Furthermore, he circumvented the national bureaucracy, leading to people being afraid to express their opinions. All of these things created an environment where good, new ideas were stifled.

               Studwell also warns developing nations to have strict capital controls so that they can direct money towards development goals. He argues that a major problem that aggravated both the Latin American crashes of 1982 and the Asian crisis of 1997 was that large parts of the financial sector were controlled by business entrepreneurs who were unable to export a successful product but able to use their influence to secure loans to their unproductive companies. Firms can even become big enough that their failure would mean the failure of the banks that lend to them. This became a big problem for Korea in the late 1980s, and by the 1990s, many Korean chaebols controlled major non-bank financial institutions. This often leads to money flowing into luxury real estate instead of innovative new products. He argues that the IMF has had a terrible influence on the developing world as it has encouraged deregulation as an ideological position, yet most developing countries are not ready to do so. More so, Studwell argues that the problems that come from premature deregulation are worse than those that come from delayed deregulation, essentially being the difference between Thailand/Malaysia and Italy/Japan. Premature deregulation doesn’t lead to natural growth, just a movement into short-term profits.

               Studwell does a whole section (one of four in the book) on China, detailing successes (like protectionism) and failures (like premature scaling up of farming). He argues that going to far in protectionism, as China did, is better than going to far in opening up early on. I think he has a good point. While China wasted a lot of time reinventing the wheel with products that already existed in better forms elsewhere, slowing manufacturing, at least they didn’t end up like Indonesia or the Philippines, with no major manufacturing at all. Chinese growth is impressive, though now is the time to open up. State firms are not as responsive to consumer needs, especially retail consumers. It is no surprise then that China’s biggest firms (which are almost all state-run) are mid-stream, business to business sellers, which becomes problematic as those transactions are often subject to government approvals. In addition, due to the massive investments going into the Chinese economy now there is much growth, but we have already likely passed the peak.

               The “economic river” is a really good metaphor that Studwell uses in his book to describe development. He argues that all countries traverse the same river and that they must follow the same path, which is nurturing and protection of industry in the beginning, and a loosening of regulations and removal of subsidies later on to encourage independence. He says that there is development economics, which requires “nurture, protection, and competition.” Then there are efficiency economics, which requires “less state intervention, more deregulation, freer markets, and a closer focus on near-term profits.” The true question is when to switch from one to the other and how quickly.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In China before the Communist Party gained power, landlords demanded that their laborers only poop in their toilets so they could use it as fertilizer.
• After signing the Bowring Treaty with Britain in 1855, Thailand kept the lowest import tariff in Asia of just 3%, ensuring that they could not protect infant industry. Studwell argues that this is why no international firms developed.

Reflection on Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death by Jim Frederick

               This is an impactful book that is astounding in its darkness and gut-wrenching in its writing. Frederick takes the reader through the yearlong deployment of one Army platoon in Iraq, south of Baghdad, where almost everything goes wrong. It is a profoundly disturbing book that makes the reader question a lot about the Iraq War and what it means to be a good leader. There are countless shows of good and bad leadership in the book, though they are mostly bad. The book culminates in a horrific war crime: the murder of an entire Iraqi family, the rape of the 14-year-old daughter, and the burning of her body. It is a book about a descent into evil.

               Frederick starts by giving us some background on the importance of the south Baghdad region and what had been going on in the Iraq war in the leadup to deployment of the 1^st platoon of Bravo Company of the 101^st Airborne’s 2^nd Brigade. He talks about how Jerry Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority fired all party members from government and dissolved the entire Iraqi military and national police force. These moves crippled Iraq, which would have been good if the strategic goal was the destruction of Iraq. However, the goal of the Bush administration was to rebuild, and this destruction early on made construction later on all the more difficult. While the 100,000 men that had been sent to Iraq were sufficient to overthrow the government and win the invasion, they were not enough to hold the country, but when General Eric Shinseki requested more troops, he was publicly criticized. American generals did not request more troops for a long time until around 2006, and they would eventually get 30,000 more under General Patreus.

               A critical phenomenon of the War on Terror was that the war attracted radicals to it. For example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was Jordanian, not Iraqi, but in 2003 he joined forces with Al-Qaeda to set up Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and fight the United States. While he would die in 2006, AQI would eventually develop into ISIS, as thousands of foreign fighters had flocked to Iraq and later Syria to join in what they saw as holy wars. Among the American ranks, there were soldiers who had joined because they also saw it as a holy war and they wanted to kill Muslims. Private Steven Green, who was involved in the infamous quadruple homicide and rape in March 2006 was one of those people.

               The soldiers in Iraq were in a very awkward situation. The book shows us how the majority of the NCOs and commissioned officers just wanted to get all their guys out alive. While many wanted to take on the enemy tactically, that was generally because the Army was more comfortable in gunfights than in patrols that would lead to IEDs exploding out of nowhere. At a fundamental level, by the end of a deployment, nobody was hoping for a better future for Iraq, they just wanted to go home to their families. It shows that soldiers need a good reason to fight a war and that lack of a reason caused huge problems in Iraq.

               The leadership within the 2^nd battalion was not good. It was dominated by conflict, especially due to Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, who was constantly screaming and humiliating his subordinates. It was Kunk who demanded that they set up several checkpoints along a road that overextended the 1^st platoon severely, as each checkpoint was chronically undermanned and a prime target for attack. He also demanded that the soldiers constantly look for IEDs on foot, which was problematic because, while a soldier on foot could spot an IED better than one in a vehicle, he often didn’t see it until it was too late. Private Justin Watt is quoted as saying, “Take something you do every day, like go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that every time you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that the mailbox was going to blow up in your face. The explosion might not be big enough to kill you. But it could be. You just don’t know. Either way, you do know that there was a one-in-four chance that it was going to blow right the fuck up in your face. But you have to go to the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the mailbox. So, I ask you: How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox before you started going crazy?” The pressure of living like this must have been horrible. The author stops to make us think about how different it must have been to fight in Iraq rather than in Korea or WWII, as in Iraq, the intensity of fighting was much lower, but it had soldiers in the line of fire all the time. In previous, more conventional wars, soldiers did not stay at the front lines for more than a few months and then they were allowed to withdraw. In Iraq, the men of Bravo company spent their entire eleven months in country in the porous “front lines.”

               All through the book, we see pressure mounting on the heads of the soldiers and driving them to depression, anger, and hatred. With none is it worse than Private Steven Green, who was a virulent and hateful racist before he ever joined the Army. Something incredibly disappointing is that for all the red flags he showed in psychiatric counseling sessions, he was never marked as someone at risk to do something horrible as he should have been. Obviously, it is easier to see this in retrospect, but there were many red flags. In the end, Green was given life in prison for his part in the murders and rape and the other participants were given 90-100 years in prison.

               This book is very good but definitely heavy to read. It is primarily a reflection on war and why certain men crack and commit horrible acts of evil while others bear it, perhaps harming only themselves. It is an incredibly good look at what it was like to be in Iraq for a year and it is a truly terrible thing to read about. Living in the checkpoints and Forward Operating Bases in the “Triangle of Death” was an experience that destroyed people psychologically even if they could survive it physically.