Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Book Review: Breakfast With the Dirt Cult

“Breakfast With the Dirt Cult” is a sad novel. It’s also frequently funny.

It’s a better read than some of the others that I’ve read, like “Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green.” The author, Samuel Finlay, is a reader of mine, and was kind enough to send a copy. Many reviewers have remarked that the Afghan and Iraqi wars have spawned far fewer novels as compared to some of those further in the past.

Part of the reason for that is contained within this novel: the people who fought the war are more alienated from the rest of society as compared to war-fighters in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. They’re a minority who endure what was once a formative experience for American men, something that they all had in common.

The narrator, Tom Walton, takes up the bulk of the plot. What’s going on with him internally tends to be more important than what’s going on around him. He’s a loner:

On his first trip to New York City, he had developed the habit of carrying around a newspaper, and since then it had become one of his personal SOP’s when by himself in a city. It was something lightweight to pretend to read so that he didn’t look pathetic when he stopped somewhere alone.

Before he’s deployed to Afghanistan, the specialist Walton falls in love with a Canadian stripper, whose fondness keeps him going during some of the more difficult times in war.

One of the themes running through the observations is that women tend not to treat their Army men terribly well. Whereas Vietnam vets groused about Dear John letters, modern soldiers have to handle their lovers sending them amateur porn breakup videos.

Observations of the differences between Americans and the Afghans pop up from time to time:

Haji hadn’t been tamped. He’d kept his traditions and culture. He’d kept his fucking identity. His village and his tribe meant the world to him, and he defied all comers to remain the sovereign lord over his domain. If you would have told him about things like Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, global civil society, or liberal intergovernmentalism, he’d have been pissed off for having his time wasted on such bullshit. He might have even shot you for it if he really felt like showing his nuts.

It’s not exactly a political or anti-war novel. Where there are criticisms, it’s of the people in the media and those involved in planning the war, who are much more insane than even the screwed-up proles that make up the enlisted men.

“Show of force and askin’ questions. A bunch of bullshit,” Sergeant Bronson murmured over a cigarette. “Some of the Hajis have a case of the ass over the new constitution. These people don’t realize theri constitution fuckin’ sucks anyway ’cause the motherfuckers who wrote it don’t go out to where all the Hajis stand by the side of the road and shoot at each other just for fun.

In the end, an old-timer diagnoses the main problem with the modern Army:

The sergeant had sighed wearily, then readjusted his BDU soft cap so that it rested in a more relaxed position. After staring sadly at them for a moment, as though looking into the future, he’d said, “Look fellas. Today’s Army… well… y’all are a bunch of pussies. But that ain’t your fault, ya see, ’cause America today is a bunch of pussies.”

Some of the marketing copy about the novel being about ‘coming of age’ and the ‘horrors of war,’ I didn’t get. The main character, Walton, seems to enjoy the war part of things a lot. It’s like a high-octane version of the Boy Scouts. He gets shot at on mountains, has to cross rivers, and hikes around a lot.

The part that is unbearable is the peace, and being treated like garbage by women, along with living in a culture that’s insane. That part is what’s harder for the main character than having friends die and being shot at. The nihilistic sexual politics are what drives him over the edge, traumatizes him, much more than the war does.

The war part is straightforward by comparison — even when getting shot, it mostly makes sense, at the lower level.

While I wouldn’t call ‘Breakfast’ high literature, it’s an affecting, readable novel that speaks authentically about a certain people in a certain time. Most of the verbiage around the War on Terror experience gets filtered through Baby Boomer sensibilities about the Vietnam War that don’t really translate well to younger people who are enduring the fallout from that generation’s social-revolution-making.

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Book Review: Behind the Housing Crash

Behind the Housing Crash by Aaron Clarey book cover

Aaron Clarey, also known as Captain Capitalism, began his career as a commercial banker.

You might have read about the housing crash from the perspectives of hedge fund managers before, in best-selling books like “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis, but you probably haven’t read an account from someone who was actually examining the underlying loans that were grouped up into those famously toxic CDOs.

In this book, “Behind the Housing Crash,” he writes about his experience evaluating almost universally bad loans, wrestling with banking bureaucrats who won’t even let him optimize a spreadsheet, and glad-handling fraudulent real estate developers to help his bosses make their quarter.

Clarey writes:

Completely ignoring the burgeoning level of supply, brokers, bankers and developers used data dated from the hot and undersupplied housing market of 2004 to legitimize their pricing, and would approach me with deals that when you looked at their appraised values and pricing, you had a hard time taking them seriously.

It was entirely possible to look at housing supply data and nix developments before construction began, but nonetheless, banks continued to green light lending. Fraudulent appraisal methods also added to the problems, as banks assumed that they would be able to recoup losses through foreclosure based on impossibly optimistic projections of home values.

This memoir is also leavened with some humor about the pervasive vanity of commercial bankers:

Ultimately I concluded the bank was very much like the militaries of dictatorships or one of those African rebel groups where seemingly everybody is a “general.” Where all the enlisted men curiously start off as “captains,” giving themselves inflated ranks and titles to boost their egos. Therefore, if you filed, faxed and made the coffee at my bank you were considered a “reserve vice president.”

Although the book doesn’t get into the broader economic context of what was going on during this period, it does have many enjoyable slice-of-life observations of contemporary American life:

I developed the term “Trophy Wife Economics” to describe a phenomenon I noticed while looking at the tax returns of rather well to do clients. If the tax return was filed jointly, typically what you’d see is the husband making all the money and the wife would have some kind of token business that was perpetually losing money. For example, the husband would be a surgeon and the wife would run a little trinket store called “Beads and Bobbles” or “Daisy’s Doilies.” The store would never make money, and I was left to surmise it was some trophy wife who wanted to feel productive, and so the husband would give her some seed capital to start a business.

I have seen this, myself, also — the woman will run a loss-making business that feeds her sense of vanity more than it does her pocketbook. There are rare exceptions, but the Trophy Girl Entrepreneur is the general tendency.

Another thought-criminal act of noticing that Clarey engages in:

They don’t know the difference between debt or equity spending. Trophy wives don’t care if the money you spend on them is debt or equity, as long as you spend it on them. They don’t care if you actually make the money or borrow it, as long as you spend it on them. In other words, you could buy them a diamond bracelet on your credit card or pay cash and they wouldn’t care, let alone know the difference. You could buy them a Ferrari with a home equity line or cash and they couldn’t tell. And the reason why is all they care about is ownership and consumption, not how it is financed or actually paid for.

This fact also makes up the core plot of “The Merchant of Venice:” Portia can’t tell that Antonio has borrowed the gold with which he uses to court her. His gambit is that he’ll be able to borrow from Shylock and overcome her father’s riddles and win her heart, and then repay the lender with his winnings from the marriage.

My main criticism of the book is that there is little to tie the events on the ground with business cycle theory. This prevents it from being a ‘full’ account of the crisis, which is only properly comprehensible within a coherent system of economic theory (which I know that Clarey gets into in other posts elsewhere on his blog).

These problems recur often in the history of banking in the US. When banks can issue credit arbitrarily, they reduce lending standards in a systematic fashion, especially when put under political pressure to do so.

In more direct words, the history of banking in the US is a history of fraud and malpractice at huge, recurring scale. American commercial banks have never enjoyed a reputation for rectitude, apart for some brief periods in which recovery from  the most recent crisis embarrassed the establishment into enforcing something resembling a disciplined banking system based on sound money.

Clarey comes off as someone who should probably be a commercial loan officer, who would have probably done well in banking before 1971, but who found himself out-of-step with the trend to lend as much money as possible to as many people as possible, regardless of their creditworthiness.

My closing critical comment is that this book is better-written and better-edited than I thought that it’d be. If you’re interested in finance, economics, and the recent history of the US with the propaganda filters knocked off, take your $5.50 down to the link below and buy the Kindle edition.

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Book Review: Tremble the Devil

Tremble the Devil ouroubouros cover

In light of the recent assassinations of two NYPD officers amid a general conflict along racial lines, I started thinking about this particular book, which I read a few years back when it came out.

My views about biological differences among humans began to change after I read this book, in part because it encouraged me to re-evaluate the history of civil rights and the Civil War.

The first book that I’m going to review on this topic is called “Tremble the Devil,” written by an anonymous author who claims to be a former NSA worker. You may also read this book, which is partly about terrorism and partly about civil conflict, for free at the author’s site. You can also buy it at the Amazon link below.

The author is apparently going through some financial difficulties, though, and the Kindle edition is well enough put together that it’s worth picking up.

For the first 80% or so, it’s about the phenomenon of terrorism in the context of both history and contemporary Islamic radicalism. That part is not why I’m reviewing it right now: it’s good enough, but plenty of other authors have already covered that territory. While the author is essentially a liberal, he doesn’t deny what Islam is, how it plays into motivating terrorism, and also takes note of the flimsy Western construct known as ‘tolerant’ Islam.

He also brings terrorism into the context of special operations and guerrilla war, but not as well as authors like John Robb or William Lind.

What’s unique about this book is that it brings this analysis into the context of a revised history of the American Civil Rights movement, and the Drug War that followed it. This is made more interesting by the fact that the spook-author published it in 2011, years before the recent spate of race-related chaos.

The author writes:

As the revolutionary decade of the 1960’s found its stride, urban violence in America grew to new heights. Police were regularly acquitted for killing innocent black students, shooting black rioters in the back, and cases that captured the racist injustice of the time came ‘randomly but persistently out of a racism deep in the institutions, the mind of the country.’ Polls showed that nearly half of America’s blacks under the age of twenty-one had great respect for the militant Black Panther Party, and despite some attempts by the white establishment to integrate blacks and provide economic incentives to them the unemployment, crime, drug addiction, and violence that was destroying the black lower class continued to only grow in force.

This, not the integration rhetoric, is what lead to the reaction from the state. That reaction was the Drug War and the ensuing laws, which were used as a pretext to throw enormous quantities of blacks into prison — as he notes, since that legal regime began, America’s incarceration rate has quintupled. At this time, not necessarily for the same reasons, economic outcomes for blacks continued to plummet. The writer sheds some obligatory progressive tears about this, but when he writes on the terrorism issue, he becomes much more compelling.

The author makes a connection between deteriorating economic conditions among Blacks and the growth of the Drug War:

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.” Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in ‘an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.’

The author doesn’t make the connection between this and the Great Society programs, the breakdown in the Black family, or lower average intelligence among Blacks. Despite this, it’s still a worthwhile observation to make: the Drug War is not about drugs, and is about the reaction that began with Nixon to crime among certain minority populations.

If it were about drugs, as liberals are wont to state, then Whites would be thrown in jail for drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than they are, comparative to their use of drugs. The mass incarceration has been a stop-gap measure to handle the consequences of the banning of segregation. The segregation just moves ‘off the books,’ into the prison system. The entire historical narrative about civil rights is false, and it creates a contradictory pressure point that the radical left has been able to use to their advantage repeatedly.

In 2011, this spy predicted that this would create civil conflict, with Black Muslims like the D.C. Sniper engaging in symbolic and tactical terrorist attacks, using this incarceration of an entire male population as a motive. Given the recent assassinations of NYPD officers by a Black Muslim with those motives, it’s fair to say that this particular spook did some bang-up analysis, regardless of the bleeding heart rhetoric that accompanies it.

The spook-author also connects this tension to the financial crisis — as the ability of the state to pay for mass incarceration declines, the problems that this enormous expenditure covers for (racial conflict) begin to return to the forefront. There is simply not enough money left in the public coffers to continue the prison/welfare state as it exists.

Opinions about whether or not the mass-incarceration police state is a good thing begin to become less relevant: as the police state retracts due to lack of funds and public support, the problem that it came into existence to respond to begins to become more dire. The Drug War is and was a sham, but that sham covered a history and social realities that the general public would rather not have acknowledged.

Libertarians and others may be right to call for an end to the corrupt drug war, but the sham that is that war is essentially the only thing that covers up the unpleasant reality of what diversity plus proximity always leads to: a more general war. The pretenses of post-war America are coming undone.

This book was overlooked when it came out, but it’s worth your time to read it (even if you only read the last 20%) because its predictions and analysis have become suddenly relevant. Read it for free at the link above, or buy it from Amazon at the link below.

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