Blood Money

♠
War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)

-- Frank Rich for The New York Times

Mr. Rich gives us another piece on the war profiteering in Iraq, and how the Bush Administration has brought this to new heights, and how it can seem that this profiteering was at least as important as the mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. At least they were successful with the profiteering. Rich writes of the suicides and murders that have underwritten this corruption.

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Blood Money

♠
War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)

-- Frank Rich for The New York Times

Mr. Rich gives us another piece on the war profiteering in Iraq, and how the Bush Administration has brought this to new heights, and how it can seem that this profiteering was at least as important as the mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. At least they were successful with the profiteering. Rich writes of the suicides and murders that have underwritten this corruption.

xXx

The Abstinence Teacher

♠
I'm glad I read the review. Being behind on my news rounds, I was going to pass over it. The book is titled "The Abstinence Teacher" and I have had enough of this culture war stuff. I decided to give it a quick skim, and this was the first paragraph:

Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”

Christian fundamentalism is overtaking an American community. It looks like a winner. I may get around to it this winter.


(Source: Liesl Schillinger for The New York Times)

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The Abstinence Teacher

♠
I'm glad I read the review. Being behind on my news rounds, I was going to pass over it. The book is titled "The Abstinence Teacher" and I have had enough of this culture war stuff. I decided to give it a quick skim, and this was the first paragraph:

Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”

Christian fundamentalism is overtaking an American community. It looks like a winner. I may get around to it this winter.


(Source: Liesl Schillinger for The New York Times)

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