Crimea River

Marin Katusa, The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped from America's Grasp

Remember summer of 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s swift, decisive action in Crimea channeled right-wing nostalgia for Reaganesque machismo in Guatemala and El Salvador? Global energy consultant Marin Katusa’s first book provides a TARDIS back to those days of manful moral absolutism. But now, as then, what appears efficacious in the near term demonstrates dire long-term consequences for both the invader and the invaded. Sadly, Katusa’s analysis, under two months after publication, is already badly outdated

Katusa mixes biography, recent history, and sociopolitical examination into, I concede, a fairly interesting analytical product. Despite periodic flashes like that surrounding recent Ukrainian protests and Putin’s store-bought invasions, post-Soviet Russia remains opaque to most American news-watchers. Most American news sources have no bureaus inside Russia itself, simply trusting Russian state-owned media sources to speak truthfully about themselves. American journalists substantially ignore Russia between flare-ups, even though Russia outsells Saudi Arabia on global petroleum markets.

Vladimir Putin, in Katusa’s account, provides the touchpoint transitioning Russia from post-Soviet anarchy and Yeltsin’s profound malaise, into a mostly modern state seriously challenging America and the EU for international status. Domestically, Putin utilizes personal charm, steady media manipulation, and nationalist fervor to maintain firm central control. Internationally, Putin’s hand on the taps of what some consider Earth’s largest petroleum, natural gas, and uranium reserves, gives him unprecedented capacity to blackmail world leaders into complicity.

I’ll buy that. However, that alone isn’t sufficient to support Katusa’s assertion that we’re witnessing the waning of what market watchers call the “petrodollar.” In my favorite passage from recent writing on social issues, Duncan J. Watts notes that many people who purpose to explain situations—economically, politically, artistically—instead merely describe them. Katusa, unfortunately, provides a prime example of this. Eager to pitch his own expertise, he completely fails to notice his personal viewpoint.

Marin Katusa

This book is the kind of sloppy wet kiss American conservative leaders blew Putin during the summer of 2014, when he challenged NATO in Crimea, and NATO flinched. Katusa admits he wrapped up writing “in midsummer 2014,” when Putin’s international prestige enjoyed its zenith. But by late 2014, declining demand, international opprobrium, and investor squeamishness broke Putin’s agenda. The ruble crashed in December, and American corporations fled, fearing repayment of legitimate debts in worthless paper.

Besides such sweeping categories, Katusa broadly writes without (we now know) complete command of the facts. His account of the Crimean annexation recounts Putin’s claim that no Russian troops abetted the rebellion, which Putin himself now admits was untrue. His analysis of global energy markets flatly excludes any possibility of significantly declining prices; many American markets, at this writing, enjoy the cheapest gasoline in twenty years. Katusa’s writing winds up looking like a time capsule.

I get frustrated with Katusa’s frequent omissions. Katusa never mentions Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Putin’s demonstrations of his will to alienate global allies to appease Russian nationalism. He never mentions Russia’s expulsion from the G8, with its resulting economic ostracism. He gives only one fleeting mention, and no critical scrutiny, to Russia’s strategic BRICS alliance, which, quite recently, bemoaned the dollar’s status as global reserve currency, undermining Katusa’s key claim about the dollar’s imminent obsolescence.

As Watts notes, we frequently cannot see every factor contributing to whatever situation we scrutinize. Katusa, a global energy consultant, sees everything in world energy market terms. Therefore, he doesn’t see how Putin placed all Russia’s eggs in one basket. Notice the cover illustration: Obama and Putin staring down above an oil well, against a sunset colored like nuclear fallout. Putin has energy reserves, useless without international buyers, and has cultivated no other economic backbone.

Personally, I support Brookings’ Bruce Jones. Russia may eventually dominate global energy commerce; China’s aggregate economy may eventually outstrip America’s; Germany, via the Eurozone, may eventually pinch international currency markets. But they lack clout to truly dominate world affairs. America may never regain Eisenhower-era global hegemony, but only America has sufficient might, moral force, and wealth to exercise real leadership. Let Putin play bush-league Rockefeller. His people can’t eat oil reserves. He still needs America.

Six months ago, capitalists like Katusa, and Republicans like Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, were all aflutter with admiration for Putin’s John Wayne lonerism. They praised his gumption and shoot-from-the-hip ethic. They extolled in Putin the characteristics, frankly, they once extolled in George W. Bush. But history may remember Autumn 2014 for Putin like it remembers Autumn 2007 for Bush, for largely the same reasons. Katusa’s book is ambitious, but just looks out of touch.

A Domestic Mystery and a Mormon Drama

Mette Ivie Harrison,The Bishop's Wife

Carrie Helm is missing. Her community never realized anything was wrong, until one morning, her husband and daughter knocks on the bishop’s door, looking terrified that their seemingly good Mormon family is in freefall. Now Linda Wallheim, the bishop’s wife and mother of his five sons, finds herself torn. While her husband organizes the community’s spiritual confrontation, Linda channels her inner Miss Marple, testing evidence and asking questions a sedate Utah town doesn’t want asked.

Reading the official description, you’d expect a Mormon version of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl reset amid a religious community that Americans widely know, but largely misunderstand. Not so. Though packaged as a mystery, this novel is essentially a character drama. Carrie’s disappearance upsets first-person protagonist Linda’s life, but that life continues amid her community’s continuing commitments and her personal struggles with Mormonism’s patriarchy. If Jan Karon rewrote her Mitford novels as thrillers, they’d resemble this.

Poor Linda cannot absorb the Helms family’s struggle. Husband Jared gives conflicting signs, first controlling and harsh, next a loving father and bereaved victim of media swarms. Carrie, vanished before page one, could be terrified for her safety and, in Mormon cosmology, her eternal soul; she could, however, suffer terrible paranoid delusions and tyrannize her family. Her crusading father and cowed, shrinking mother don’t simplify matters. And then there’s five-year-old Kelly, driven pillar to post.

But life continues amid this folderol. As bishop’s wife, Linda serves as spiritual surrogate mother to tiny Draper, Utah, thirty minutes outside Provo. So when a teenage wedding causes unexpected trouble at the bride’s house, Linda provides comfort. When a go-getter young wife admits her untreatable infertility, in a church that prizes marriage and childbearing above all else, Linda faces questions she cannot answer. Linda’s church role piles massive responsibility atop her already expanding doubts.

See, Linda’s growing dissatisfied with Mormonism’s staunch, implacable absolutism. Though confident in her faith, her church’s rigid temple system, its patriarchal leadership system, and its demand for female submission even in the hereafter, don’t jibe with Linda’s ethics. A self-professed Obama voter and social moderate, Linda faces challenges from a church hierarchy that remains essentially unchanged since before the Civil War. How can she comfort bereaved parents when her church considers her role basically invisible?

Mette Ivie Harrison

Harrison provides an insider’s view of a powerful but widely misunderstood religion. Critics disparage Mormonism’s sometimes inexplicable beliefs, deafness to science, and general insularity. But Harrison demonstrates how shared beliefs, and their public expression, bind individuals together, making them a people. Emile Durkheim wrote that religion unifies the people first, satisfies their spiritual hunger only later. Mormons, like Amish or Hasidim, are a people as much as a faith. Harrison shows that from ground level.

Readers anticipating excitement and Hollywood-style suspense may find Harrison’s approach trying. Carrie Helm remains missing for chapter upon chapter, and Linda coaxes information from sources incrementally, buying their support with home-baked cinnamon rolls and sympathy. Harrison’s pace runs slower, her narrative runs talkier, than typical paperback mysteries. For Harrison, though, the story’s heart lies outside the unresolved enigma which kick-starts her story. Characters, and the conflicts that drive them, motivate Harrison more than boilerplate thrills.

Therefore, readers weaned on gritty backdrops, physical confrontations, and “just the facts” dialog could find this book jarring. Despite its noir-ish premise of the wronged wife and the morally ambiguous husband, Harrison’s gentle tone, and Linda’s ruminative narration, give this novel an almost Jane Austen texture. Linda romances her husband, but sex is always implicit. Jared Helm might be abusive, but it’s primarily verbal. and religious. Linda, as amateur sleuth, would rather think before acting.

Reading this, I recalled the oversized paperback mysteries, written primarily by women, marketed in Christian bookstores nationwide. Though some crime generally initiates the story, these novels would rather immerse readers in their protagonists’ lives, eschewing nightmarish thrills in favor of deep empathy. I confess, those novels, and this one, aren’t my taste. But why should they be? Should everyone like only what I like?  I’m not arrogant enough to consider myself the yardstick of merit.

For its intended audience, this novel is quite good. Harrison creates a viewpoint narrator, and a community rife with hidden struggles, that her intended audience can vanish into for hours at once. Being largely unaware of Mormon culture, I cannot say whether Harrison has a waiting market of readers for this novel. But judging by the largely female, largely Protestant audience gobbling up similar character mysteries, she probably does. Harrison gives them what they want.

Who Killed Good Music?

We were four hours into our shift when our local Top 40 station began playing Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” for the fifth time. Not an exaggeration. They play that song, on average, once every forty-five minutes. That’s an average, though; I’ve heard them play it twice inside fifteen minutes. Christopher, another line worker who’s been a semi-pro musician, looked over at me. We rolled our eyes in unison. No words even needed spoken.

Andre 3000 in Outkast's "Hey Ya" video

Late in The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg describes how record executives salvaged Outkast’s genre-bending single “Hey Ya” from collapse. Though it’d later spend eight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, in Duhigg’s telling, it languished at low levels, embraced by neither audiences nor DJs, for quite some time. This despite having been analyzed by studio executives, music professionals, and elaborate computer models, and deemed a surefire hit. The song’s incipient failure puzzled everyone.

Duhigg focuses his storytelling on how music professionals turned it around, which, from a psychological perspective, is downright fascinating. Yet the fact that credentialed professionals, not the music-buying public, really stuck in my mind. “Hey Ya” is, in fairness, a really good song, and deserves its success. But its success didn’t arise because ordinary customers enjoyed the song; it happened because corporate executives, with the radio industry’s tacit collusion, manipulated the market behind the scenes.

First, they analyzed “Hey Ya” through sophisticated computer algorithms that compared it to known past hits. According to Duhigg, Arista Records’ proprietary software determined that it sufficiently resembled significant ranking hits that audiences would, supposedly, embrace it. A computer simulation, y’all! Arista records believes they can distill your aggregate buying habits into a predictable template, predict your opinions, and make artistic decisions based on that outcome. Artistic initiative? Independent creativity? Screw you, who needs ‘em.

Anybody who has actual musical taste will understand why, in Duhigg’s account, “Hey Ya” initially failed: it wasn’t bland enough. Top-40 audiences seek comfort, familiarity, and harmlessness. The frustrating part is, when audiences initially failed to embrace the song, industry executives didn’t accept that their predictions were wrong. For all today’s rhetoric about the ineluctable will of free markets, when massed humanity expresses its particular tastes, the powerful respond by attempting to change the market.

Duncan J. Watts recounts running an experiment made possible only by advanced Internet technology. By collecting thousands of participants into groups, and keeping each blind to the others’ choices, he successfully recreated the digital music market. This allowed him to run the same songs through statistically similar populations and assemble significant results. Music listeners completely blind to anybody else’s buying choices gave good indications of which songs were actually “good.” But that wasn’t the end.

None of Watts’ artificial music markets made bestsellers of actually bad music. But being merely good didn’t guarantee market success. Buyers made decisions based on multiple factors: which songs got streamed frequently, what others bought, what fellow buyers recommended in conversation. Published bestseller lists caused bandwagon buying. Importantly, no two markets created identical, or even statistically similar, bestseller lists. No response, not even positive acclaim, was a foregone conclusion… assuming buyers made their own decisions.

Meghan Trainor didn't actually kill good music;
she's just an accessory after the fact

Arista Records couldn’t accept such unpredictability. If markets didn’t embrace their determined product, markets needed manipulated. So, using technocratic interventions designed to integrate edgy new content into their subconscious, and attracting the collusion of DJs and other cultural gatekeepers, they simply got listeners accustomed to “Hey Ya,” until it joined the panoply of other, interchangeable, mundane songs populating our heads. They created a hit by defanging it, deadening its impact upon its intended mass audience.

“All About That Bass” is a guided tour of everything safe, cozy, and bland about contemporary music. Its synth-driven backbeat, highly repetitive lyrics, and extensively borrowed musical motifs, are designed to get audiences dancing, without particularly paying attention. One co-worker thought “That Bass” meant the rhythm. Listening to this music is an abnegation of taste, an abnegation abetted by top-down social engineering which only wealthy, powerful corporations can perpetrate. It’s a failure of aesthetic capitalism.

Christopher and I shook our heads, not because our co-workers jammed along with a deeply unimaginative song, but because that jamming represented a willful obfuscation of art. Sinatra and the Beatles made music which was often tough listening, but rewarded audiences with artistic integrity and improved taste. That ethic, in today’s very wealthy music industry, is dead. If Top-40 programming sounds like a barrage of repetitive insipidity, that isn’t accidental. Industry is killing our taste.

Gypsy Armageddon

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 43
Charles de Lint, Mulengro

In a comfortable middle-class Ottawa neighborhood, a prosperous Eastern European immigrant’s house burns quickly, the flames almost obscuring a strange rune painted along the walls. Janfri la Yayal saves his fiddle, and, to his neighbors’ consternation, just walks away. Across town, two detectives examine a body so savagely mauled, it sickens even veteran cops. It appears the work of feral pack animals, but signs of human presence make them suspect something darker afoot.

In the 1980s, Charles de Lint pioneered urban fantasy, long before paperback publishers repackaged the genre as hardboiled mystery spin-offs. His works generally ran toward gentle, thoughtful humanism and understated psychological drama, coincidentally starring demigods and pixies. This book stands out from most of de Lint's canon of work by being mainly a horror novel. Okay, dark fantasy really, but it scares you badly and reminds you why you love being alive, because it could disappear so quickly.

Janfri la Yayal has a secret his shocked Canadian neighbors don’t know. They think he’s a professional Hungarian fiddler, but he’s secretly Romany, the people also called Gypsies. He’s become famous playing his people’s tunes, selling Gypsy culture at a mark-up. And he recognizes the mysterious rune on his burning house: “Unclean.” He’s been violently exiled from the one people who’ve been exiled more than Jews, leaving him completely alone. Now he only wants to clear his name.

Briggs and Sandler, Ottawa municipal police, want to bring the killer to justice. But clues give conflicting direction: their killer might be human, beast, or something altogether different.Their research uncovers Romany myths of the monstrous Mulengro, a human master controlling bound spirits, driven by purposes unique and inscrutable. The lawmen seek Ottawa’s marginalized Gypsy community— only to discover they’ve suddenly vanished, shrouded in darkness, a caravan of black sedans and anonymous camper vans.

These stories lead quickly into one of Charles de Lint’s trademarks, the Cast of Thousands who don’t realize they share converging quests. Ola Faher, an aging Gypsy, manages to delay the Mulengro, though afterward, she knows she's an imminent target. Jeff Owen, a journalist, Dr. Rainbow, a yurt-dwelling hippie shaman, and Yojo la Kore, a gypsy youth readying for her last stand, want to stand up for the people they love.

Charles de Lint

And the mysterious Mulengro wants to purge his people. Like all good villains, the Mulengro believes himself the hero of his odyssey. His disfigured face and entourage of destructive spirits conceal motivations downright Nietzschean in their savage purity. He kills to serve goals beyond others’ ken. But behind everything, he remains tortured by the past. A survivor of incomprehensible evil, the Mulengro remembers firsthand the moment his Romany people very nearly became extinct.

This book, first released in 1985, predates Newford, the catchall Canadian city that dominated de Lint’s work throughout the 1990s and 2000s. De Lint pioneered the technique, now common, of situating his stories in one shared world, and one could imagine this fitting into that setting. When Ottawa's close-knit Gypsy community begins dying violently, several independent stories originate, converging on a forest cabin where an apocalyptic showdown determines whether the punishments of history continue into the contemporary world.

This reads like something Stephen King might have written back before his work became tiresome and repetitive. I don’t make this comparison lightly. De Lint shares King’s mobius story structures, and love of history impinging on today. The further along you get, the harder it becomes to put the book down. Nothing feels extraneous, nothing feels like a misfire. This is a prime book for people who have never touched fantasy, horror, or Charles de Lint in their lives.

De Lint’s substantial Gypsy content is key to the story. he Romany hold massive audience appeal largely because, even today, they remain largely invisible, dwelling secretly in society’s margins. Therefore, they remain often opaque to outsiders’ romantic, ahistorical notions. Many people demand accuracy in this sort of thing, but the Gypsies are so notoriously secretive that fact-checking isn't an issue. What matters is this: I can imagine these characters, in these situations, performing exactly these actions.

It's amazing, with the slim amount of narrative and the beautifully cinematic characters and situations, that this hasn't been adapted before now. Perhaps soon. De Lint paints an elaborate, fast-moving image for the mind’s eye, and a masterpiece of pacing. Modern technology could turn this into the most beautiful dark fantasy film in history, no problem. Easily readable and worth a second look, this book is one that will become a treasured part of your library in short order.

Sam Spade Stalks the Massive Data Sprawl

Reece Hirsch, Intrusion

You ever have that experience where you dive into a book, love its ideas, commit yourself to reading… then find the book leaves you really, really tired? This book is like that. Reece Hirsch, a career digital privacy attorney, writes a novel about a digital security attorney taking on Earth’s best international online saboteurs. It melds classic science fiction imagery with gritty noir. It addresses today’s top international security concerns. What could go wrong?

Plenty.

Attorney Chris Bruen knows something’s up when Zapper, America’s biggest search engine, phones after midnight. Seems hackers have stolen Zapper’s nigh-priceless proprietary algorithms. Hackers employed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Zapper has assembled dozens of Earth’s top security specialists to plug the leak, but they need their lawyer to squelch possible market-destroying damage. Bruen boldly proposes personally visiting Shanghai.

Reviewers can’t make this shit up. A Silicon Valley attorney proposes personally infiltrating the PLA and bringing stolen data home, like Jack Damn Ryan or something. He admits having no plan, only outdated Chinese connections, and sketchy Mandarin. Yet, the next morning, Bruen arrives in Shanghai, tracking the PLA’s most secure cell, while outrunning Chinese counterintelligence. Either he’s a superhero, or he’ll die doing 25-to-life in Qincheng Prison.

Early on, I had a flash. Hirsch describes an assassin tracking a corporate executive through Tokyo’s neon-lit Shinjuku district, and I realized: this is just like William Gibson’s multiple award-winning novel Neuromancer (best opening line ever!). Hirsch’s present-day setting purges sci-fi trappings like “sprawl cowboys” and “wetware,” but advancing technology means that, exactly thirty years on, what Gibson originally postulated as science fiction, has become disturbingly real.

Twenty pages later, looking down a rain-slicked Shanghai streetscape, Chris Bruen has a flash: this looks just like a William Gibson novel! Though he’s right, I jumped, thinking: “WTF? Did Hirsch just intrude and tell me how to perceive his narration?” Yes, son. Yes he did. I forgave this hiccup, figuring anybody can make mistakes once. Sure, writing coaches encourage Padawans to avoid getting between audiences and their narration. But surely everyone’s occasionally gaffed that way.

Reece Hirsch

With Hirsch, though, it isn’t occasional. He lards his prose with long, discursive soliloquies about, say, China’s mix of authoritative government and semi-free-market capitalism, or how China erects cities cheaply and hastily, backfilling with high-tech architecture once jobs arrive. This doesn’t surprise me; I’ve read Xuefei Ren. Chinese inequality particularly bothers Bruen, Hirsch’s viewpoint character. (Hirsch says Bruen lives in San Francisco, Americas second most unequal city, after NYC.)

Seriously, this continues for pages upon pages upon pages. Also, secondary characters discourse lengthily upon IRC protocols, Chinese prisons, and computer security techniques. Popular thriller writers like Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell use technical descriptions to advance stories while convincing readers they’re learning something. But Hirsch doesn’t explain, he lectures, often in explicitly moralistic terms. He doesn’t want to guide audiences, he wants to dictate their responses.

But any response requires audiences accepting extreme unlikelihoods. Once, captured by a PLA cell, Bruen (again, a Frisco attorney) kills two hackers and their PLA handler, despite having a broken arm and possible concussion. Yeah, right. He then steals the hackers’ laptop and, on the return train to Shanghai, commences unlocking the hackers’ lengthy data trail. With a broken arm. Still. Anyone who’s ever broken a limb knows you can’t just power through, not without a splint and fistfuls of Tylenol.

Hirsch simultaneously intensively researches China’s situation, and demands readers accept staggering Hail Marys. In a nation of staggering urban poverty, Bruen never meets anybody who doesn’t speak either English or Mandarin, even in Cantonese-speaking regions. Though China notoriously surveils nearly all visiting foreign nationals, Bruen stakes out a PLA division HQ for two days, then follows key employees home, without attracting visible attention.

What does the bull say?

This story arguably deserves told. Chinese data piracy increasingly overshadows nuclear proliferation or religious extremism as America’s biggest national security threat. In an epigraph, Hirsch quotes two federal data security specialists saying: any corporation which hasn’t seen data piracy isn’t looking hard enough. If it isn’t already, data security will soon become modern life’s biggest, most persistent force of international instability.

One wonders whether Hirsch might prefer writing New Yorker articles over novels. He’s flush with facts and carefully differentiated information, but his story feels anemic. He lectures us eagerly, while Xerox characters describe various jigsaw puzzle pieces which events gradually assemble. Hirsch proves himself a masterful researcher with wonderfully panoptic view; sadly, he proves himself a really lackluster storyteller.