Herman Cain

When accusations were first heard from women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment, it was possible to pass them off as cultural misunderstandings, perhaps between northern and southern ways of interacting. Because the women were anonymous, one didn’t know anything about their appearance, race or class background.

Then, Sharon Bialek spoke out.

Cain was right. It wasn’t sexual harassment. It was worse. It was abuse of power.

She reported his response to her protests at being groped was “You want a job, right?”

Abuse of power isn’t something most politicians and journalists recognize as a problem. In fact, most don’t recognize it at all. They continued to believe he was a viable candidate for president.

Finally, Ginger White became so disgusted with the way Bialek and others were being treated, she announced she’d had an affair with Cain that lasted for years.

Again, Cain claimed sex wasn’t involved. And, again he was right.

He went on to tell the New Hampshire Union Leader that “She was out of work and had trouble paying her bills, and I had known her as a friend” so he gave her money because “I’m a soft-hearted person when it comes to that stuff.”

He revealed himself to be a predator of an entirely different order, one who feeds off women with financial problems whom he may also suspect are defenseless.

Before he suspended his campaign, rumors were still burbling about other women. Many, if they ever surface, may turn out to be what we first expected, the consequences of a flirtatious nature that occasionally errs from a failure to recognize others don’t see things as he does.

They are not what made people uneasy. It was the nature of the cases that came to light that revealed something more dangerous than sexual harassment was involved.

The media and politicians may tolerate lustful men, but even they get a bit uneasy with more vicious predators.

Notes:
Henderson, Nia-Malika. “ Sharon Bialek Accuses Herman Cain of Sexual Harassment as She Sought Help Getting a Job,” Washington Post, 7 November 2011.

Knickerbocker, Brad. “Herman Cain Admits Payments to Ginger White, Edges Toward Quitting,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 December 2011.

Black Friday

The holidays of fall have changed since I was a child.

Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.

Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.

In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.

The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.

Arthur Upfield

My last experience reading Tony Hillerman wasn’t simply unpleasant, it was aggressively so. After I finished the fifth chapter of The Dark Wind, I didn’t want to go on. When this happens, I usually put a book in the garage or trash. It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to finish what I began.

In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.

After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.

I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.

Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.

The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.

No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.

The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.

Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.

In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.

I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950′s accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.

Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.

I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.

In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.

Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.

Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.

Tony Hillerman, Part 2

I’ve now finished the second Jim Chee novel and can tell you why I don’t like Tony Hillerman novels. This is obviously the place for someone who disagrees or who hasn’t read his books to stop reading.

At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.

A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.

There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.

When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.

Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.

I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.

Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.

The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.

Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.

He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.

The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.

I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.

When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.

In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.

In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.

Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.

The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.

It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.

Mysteries as Morality Tales

The oldest division in mysteries is the one between the English cozy, whose audience is supposed to be the older lady of genteel literary interests, and the American adventure story which appeals to the average, book-reading, if that’s not an oxymoron, male. The one goes back to Arthur Conan-Doyle, the other most famously to Dashiell Hammett.

While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.

The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.

Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.

And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.

In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.

The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.

The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.

One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.

In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.

One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.

I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.

Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.

Tony Hillerman, Part 1

Mystery books fall into many categories, but the most important are readable and unreadable. The distinction is all a matter of taste, for there are many very popular writers I put in the second group.

There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.

Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980′s. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.

This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.

For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.

Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80′s and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.

Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.

The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.

The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.

As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.

In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.

The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”

These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.

The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930′s who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.

Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.

The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.

In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.

In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.

The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.

In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.

In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.

Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.

Of Guns and Men

Recently, the husband of a customer went after our foreman with a loaded gun.

It would be amusing if this were some kind of soap opera and he believed his wife had been fooling around and assumed the good looking Argentinian who parked his painter’s truck in the drive was the villain.

But it was no such thing. My boss had come back from meeting the interior decorator and told me to tell the foreman to go pick up a cupboard door to make a paint sample. I thought it a bit strange, but assumed my boss and the designer had made arrangements. I told the foreman to check the details with the boss, but that man is sometimes difficult to talk to.

The foreman assumed it was a house under construction and was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood. He called to confirm the address. At the time I was watching torrential rain send water over the curb to within 6″ inches of the building I was in. I was wondering how I would know if our carpet was flooded.

He pulled into the drive to wait out the storm.

The people inside weren’t expecting him, and started imagining the worst. When the rain finally did stop, the man of the house went out with the gun and aimed it through the window at the foreman’s head.

The foreman called asking for the number of security. I gave him the one for the development home owners, rather than the county sheriff. I figured they really needed to know about his man.

According to my boss, who got called over, the security person had to treat the residents as the aggrieved party, but he felt she really thought it was all way over the top. As he said later, what kind of thief is the one who calls the police?

I suspect it was a case of an isolated man in his 50′s who listens too much to scare media because he believes it’s a dangerous world, but doesn’t know the threats. Illegal immigrants are everywhere the bogeyman.

He and his wife recently moved from the city of Santa Fe to one of the exurban developments that advertise one acre rural estates. Like many such places, it’s been hard hit by the real estate crisis. Many houses are vacant, many more are for sale. Problems with break-ins at night are common. They, no doubt, got their house at a good price.

I recently talked to another resident there who had just spent the morning out with her dog looking around the owl nests for a missing puppy. When she got back, the seriously traumatized puppy was home.

We continued to talk about the dangers of living on the edge of wilderness here in the southwest where no one lets a small animal out unsupervised. Hawks are the worst problem.

She said she never goes out without a large stick. She said one time a pack of coyotes came at her and her dog. She was lucky to find a broken juniper limb which she swished at them until they left.

More recently I talked with another customer who lives in a slightly less isolated exurban area and installs electronics. He’s been experimenting with surveillance cameras. He put one in his yard to see which neighbor’s dog was messing with his trash.

The first time he caught a coyote. The second time he filmed a fox in his yard. The last time a bear was tearing into the garbage.

And this man’s worried about someone who parks a truck in the drive in daylight.

I live in rural strip development where my property abuts unsettled reservation land. I hear coyotes at night and once came upon a rattle snake in my neighbor’s yard. My neighbor’s dogs bark all night at wandering threats.

When I see someone suspicious I watch and try to remember the vehicle description. If I ever felt threatened I’d call a neighbor or 911. If I felt even more threatened I would try to find a way out of the house and onto the reservation behind the wood fence where I could walk away unseen. Or maybe I’d just try to get into the car, lock the doors, and lay on the horn.

These are things you do consider when you live in these kinds of places

I do know, even if I had gun, I certainly wouldn’t go out to confront a stranger with it.

And, I would never, ever go out at night to see what was disturbing the dogs. It’s been a dry year and food must be scarce.

This man has a lot to learn about real life.

Cat of the Century

Murder is a crime against society, or so W. H. Auden believed.

In his much reprinted 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage,” he divided crimes into those against individuals, those against society, and those against God. He then argued the mystery story was an attempt to return society to the state of innocence that existed before crime disrupted the social order.

So, what happens to the detective novel when the author doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of society, only accepts the hegemony of the individual?

You get Rita Mae Brown’s Cat of the Century.

Brown began writing mysteries after Lilian Jackson Braun had published The Cat Who Could Read Backwards in 1966 in which a pair a Siamese cats brought a journalist’s attention to oddities that led him to solve a mystery. This 2010 book features Mary Minor Haristeen, known as Harry; her dog, Tee Tucker, and two cats, Mrs. Murphy and Pewter.

Brown’s novel begins like a classic detective story with conflicts within a small group, in this case the board of the alumnae association of what had been a woman’s college in Missouri, a finishing school that had grown into a university. Two women on the board, Mariah and Flo, have been feuding since they were students. Their bickering has forced the retired chairman, Inez, to return to replace a woman, Liz, who couldn’t control the board meetings.

Flo makes clear Mariah is selling fakes in her high-end jewelry store and Mariah accuses Flo and Liz of promoting fraudulent investments. Flo is murdered and Mariah disappears.

The dog smells blood in a manure pile. If this were Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, Tucker would have continued to fuss until Mariah’s body was discovered. But there’s a blizzard and this is a description of a narcissistic society in which private knowledge is sufficient. The animals, acting more like a Greek chorus than Koko and Yum Yum, simply comment among themselves and let the humans be.

About page 149, I reached the point where I realized 17 pages had passed since the murder, that nothing was happening and there were another 127 pages to get through. Actually, nearly a hundred passed before anything more important occurred to explain the murders.

A reader of classic writers like Agatha Christie or Rex Stout would be hard pressed to keep reading the sections that seemed little more than an updated Ladies Home Journal filled with product endorsements for Fred Perry, Volvo and Trader Joe’s mixed with descriptions of houses filled with “cinnamon-scented pillar candles” and meals of poached salmon with hollandaise, “endive salad and new potatoes with parsley” or “roast chicken, crisp baby potatoes, and a light salad.”

But this is not a traditional who-done-it. This is one where characters are criticized for believing in a society of laws and where people never outgrow the values of a status conscious college, where civility is prized and a lady never speaks honestly to anyone but her trusted friends.

If one looks at the book as unraveling a crime against the individual, rather than society, it makes more sense.

To conform to Auden’s views of mysteries, this type of narrative needs to describe the bubble that envelopes the lead character, then show escalating threats against it, until the source of danger is removed and life in the bubble restored to its former tranquility.

All the words spent describing the houses and meals, the shopping trips and clothes build the details of a world we want to join, don’t wish to see destroyed. We learn to care about the people who inhabit that world, Harry; her husband’s first partner, Inez; Inez’s best friend, Tally; and, of course, their pets. After all, they are the victims, not Flo.

The real drama isn’t the murder, but the disintegration of a store keeper, Terri Kincaid. In the opening chapters, she makes Harry actually pay for a pot her dog broke. We’re told Harry always considered her to be “a pain in the neck,” “one of those benighted souls who believed laws were the answer,” and a “smarmy little social climber.”

The bickering among the women on the alumnae board is dangerous, not because it leads to murder, but because it disrupts the world of another member of the protected society by making 98-year-old Inez feel too old to handle difficult people. It also threatens to upstage a celebration honoring Tally.

The murder of Flo becomes something the small group can pass time discussing when they meet in one another’s homes in Virginia. The harassing email messages signed by the dead Mariah are less serious threats to their world than the weather, a blizzard in Missouri, sleet in Virginia.

All these seemingly trivial details that destroy the momentum of the traditional mystery story actually contribute to the feeling of a good world that exists outside society besieged by danger from contact with that society.

Kerri turns out to be a link in a chain of drug dealers who has become an addict herself. Harry realizes the situation when she returns to the store and Kerri throws a china figurine at her. She doesn’t tell her police friend, but instead repeats a private solution: it’s “best to steer clear of those people, especially if they won’t go for help.”

The master drug dealer is revealed to be Liz, who murdered both Mariah and Kerri because they threatened to expose her. None of this is figured out by the principals, but is information passed on by their policewoman friend after Liz attacks Inez and Tally to keep them quiet.

The only comment we get from Harry is that Liz was another “social climber” filled with “tawdry ambition.” Earlier another character had told Flo, Liz “suffers from attention-deficit syndrome,” meaning she always has to be the center of attention. Her crime wasn’t bilking investors or selling drugs, but not being sufficiently acclimated to Harry’s social world.

This novel, like most mysteries, has a subplot that’s supposed to serve as a red herring: the death of a heavy drinker whose wife had already left when he was run over twenty years before. In the end, the murderer is prompted to confess. He’s the black, possibly gay, store keeper whose men’s clothing store is next to Kerri’s.

Throughout Garvey is shown to be everything Liz and Kerri are not, a proper retailer who flatters his customers to make his sales, not one who presumes equality. Since he’s moved into the protected society by knowing his proper place, he’s forgiven for his youthful indiscretion, leaving the scene of an accident, and asked to serve a token number of hours of community service as punishment.

In a mystery whose purpose is to protect a good society from the chaos of the outer world, the list of likely motives changes. In the beginning, when the book still resembles a classic detective novel, Flo thinks the reason people fight is sex or money, then giggles at the thought of sex among the members of the alumnae board.

After Mariah’s disappearance, when attention is still focused on her attempt at embezzling money from the alumnae society, Liz suggests the reason is taxes. What begins as the comment of a single character is repeated in so many contexts that the view no longer differentiates individuals, but begins to characterize the authorial presence. After Kerri’s death, Garvey repeats drugs are a “nontaxable milk train.”

In a society that is perceived to be run by politicians driven by ego and financed by drugs, there is no social order, and therefore no role for logic. After their local policewoman friend explains Liz’s financial shenanigans, Harry admits “I would never have figured it out” while Inez and Tally repeat what they learned in college, “Trust your instincts and don’t expect life to be logical.”

We never learn anything more about Flo’s death than we knew when it occurred. Such details are immaterial to the core story, the description of a perfect world, threatened by deranged individuals who are removed, not by society, but by their own actions. People inside the bubble don’t need to figure out who did it, only observe, confident their particular shell of privilege will protect them.

After the outside threats are removed, we know the world has been restored to Auden’s innocence when the 100-year-old Tally says the adventure made her “suddenly felt forty again.”

Their’s is a special world where both natural and manmade laws are suspended. Tally repeatedly says she expects to outlive them all.

Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.

Pneumonia

The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.

Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.

In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.

The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.

Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.

As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.

I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.

False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.

What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.
When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.

The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.

The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.

They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.

However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.

Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.