Critical Racial Theory As a Window

 

Mad Dog has spent some maddening hours trying to suss out what people mean by "critical race theory.
His initial predisposition was to think it must be a good thing because Donald Trump had issued an executive order against it, which is ordinarily a pretty reliable indicator that it must have some positive value.

August Macke

The whole issue came up because "critical race theory" (CRT) was the subject of a bill from one of Hampton's very own delusional duo, Representatives Abramson and Emerick, outlawing the teaching of CRT in New Hampshire public schools, which stopped short of demanding the burning of books or burning school teachers at the stake, but was very clear it meant to stop discussion of objectionable ideas in public schools, which, after all, should never be places where ideas are discussed unless they are unobjectionable and preferably screened for purity by Mr. Abramson and/or Mr. Emerick.

August Macke

Here is a selection of CRT pearls, which Mad Dog extracted from Wikipedia:

1/ "Critical race theory is loosely unified by two common themes: first, that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law;^[6] and second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power." 

Recently, Mad Dog has become aware of the role played that Federal law which prevented Black veterans from getting low interest loans for houses through the GI bill after World War II. This is one area which is very clear: Most baby boomers benefited from the wealth generated from  home ownership and the appreciation of real estate. Mad Dog was unaware that Black veterans were denied this. Laws which established school segregation played an obvious role in keeping the Negro down. So this seems hardly controversial. 

Obadiah Youngblood

2/ RTC  favors "a race-conscious approach to social transformation, critiquing liberal ideas such as affirmative action, color blindness, role modeling, or the merit principle;^[28] and an approach that relies more on political organizing, in contrast to liberalism's reliance on rights-based remedies." 

Mad Dog has long had reservations about affirmative action, believing it undermines the idea of "meritocracy."  But that has changed, over time, as Mad Dog has come to doubt the legitimacy  of "meritocracy" as it is practiced in academia. It was pretty clear to Mad Dog that for four or five decades, saying a person went to Harvard conveyed with it the idea that person was intellectually superior, because, after all, he had been tested and verified to be a person of genius. Even Harvard graduates talked about the strategy of holding back, before unleashing "the H-bomb" on prospective employers or fellow employees. But if that Harvard grad were Black, whites tended to smile a knowing smile and say, "Oh, well...he's Black," meaning, that credential loses its meaning for a Black. All this meant that the Black genius was denied his due simply because Whites assumed he was judged by a different standard.

Color blindness struck Mad Dog as a good thing, a desirable outcome. Mad Dog loved the idea that when musicians audition for the New York Philharmonic they perform behind a screen, so the judges judge only the music they can hear, and do not choose by gender, race or age.

August Macke

3/ "Criticism of civil-rights scholarship and anti-discrimination law, such as Brown v. Board of Education. Derrick Bell, one of CRT's founders, argues that civil-rights advances for black people coincided with the self-interest of white elitists. Likewise, Mary L. Dudziak performed extensive archival research in the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice, including the correspondence by U.S. ambassadors abroad, and concluded that U.S. civil-rights legislation was not passed because people of color were discriminated against; rather, it was enacted in order to improve the image of the United States in the eyes of third-world countries that the US needed as allies during the Cold War."

So now, the motive for the man who insists on 

anti-discrimination has to be altruistic and pure? 

4/ "Standpoint epistemology: The view that a member of a minority has an authority and ability to speak about racism that members of other racial groups do not have, 

and that this can expose the racial neutrality of law as false."

This is particularly annoying: As if as a White person I cannot speak out 

against mistreatment of Blacks because I haven't suffered it.

Beyond this is the whiff of the aggrandizement of victim hood: 

Nobody knows the troubles I've known.

LeClerc

5/ "Empathetic fallacy: Believing that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative narrative in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take over. Empathy is not enough to change racism as most people are not exposed to many people different from themselves and people mostly seek out information about their own culture and group."

Again, that hierarchy of the true sufferer: As if only a Black can really 

understand the trials and degradation which Blacks have experienced.

Central Park Hippo 

6/ "White privilege is the set of social advantages, benefits, and courtesies that come with being a member of the dominant race (i.e. white people). For example, a shop attendant not following a white person around in a store because of assumption of shoplifting is viewed as white privilege. Another example would be people not crossing the street at night to avoid a white person."

This is one of those complaints with which Mad Dog loses patience. Yes, it's aggravating that a White store clerk views Black customers as potential thieves and White people cross the street out of fear of Black people. But that is the character flaw of the White person and does not directly harm, while it might demean the Black person. Look at those photos of lynchings. Those Black men were harmed and were victims of racism. When you start talking about the small stuff you diminish the really nasty stuff by including it all in the same pot.

Winslow Homer

And then there is the reaction of those who have no love for their Black brothers:

"On October 20, 2020, the Conservative UK Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch stated that, in regard to teaching critical race theory in primary and secondary schools, "we do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.... any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law". 

You know Mr. Badenoch likely has no love for the idea of a multiracial society, but CRT has played right into his hands. The idea that an argument can be presented without allowing for a rebuttal is and should be an anathema.

On the other hand, Mad Dog cannot see that examining CRT, as opposed to "teaching" it can be harmful.

There are other things Mad Dog would like to see incorporated into the curriculum of Winnacunnet High school, things like the biology and anthropology of sexual differentiation and gender identification, but given the structure of Hampton public schools, given the composition of the School Board, given the desire of public school officials to never offend parents, given the background and education of the teachers, that will likely never come to pass. For that matter, as far as Mad Dog knows, if you are parent of a Hampton teen, you could drive him 7 miles up the road to the Phillips Exeter Academy and your child would get no more enlightened on these topics, but it would cost you a lot more. 

Critical Race Theory

 

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,

It's a wonder I can think at all."

--Paul Simon, "Kodacrome"

Mad Dog has been slogging through "Caste" lately and so his ears perked up when the President of the Hampton, New Hampshire Democrats decried a bill in the New Hampshire legislature which would ban the mention of race and "critical race theory" in public schools.

There are really two issues here: 

1. Are public schools really viable any more?

2. What the hell is "critical race theory"?

Mad Dog presumes "A Colony in a Nation" and "Caste" are part of a literature which depicts the actual experience of race in America as does the 1619 project.

But anyone who has read Howard Zinn or James Baldwin or Heather Cox Richardson or Ralph Ellison or Eldridge Cleaver or Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr. knows what any boy who ever grew up south of the Mason Dixon line knows or, for that matter, what a boy who grew up near Southie in Boston knows or Detroit or Watts. Or if you read "The Hemmings of Monticello."

Mad Dog says he was slogging through "Caste" because he finds nothing new and no new insights there. The best parts so far have been about India, where the caste system has such tight connections to religion and origin myths. But the parts about the subjugation of American Blacks falls into that category of "Tell me something I don't already know."

For Mad Dog's money, all he needs to know about race in America can be seen in those photos, many of which were sent as post cards, of lynchings in the South, where girls who look to be somewhere between 8 and 12 years old and boys of the same age look over their shoulders at the camera, grinning as if they are at a carnival, and behind them, hanging from a tree is a black man. Perfectly normal entertainment in Alabama or Mississippi: "Oh, let's go see them hang a nigger."

The offenses of many of these Black men often came down to some intimation from a White woman that these men had somehow been "fresh" toward them; the old and deep fear that Black men lust after White women, who are sexual magnets to these not really men, animals really, to be treated like animals and butchered for sport.

Mad Dog remembers locker room comments growing up. He remembers a high school wrestling match with a Black opponent and how one of the big tough guys in an upper weight class was disgusted Mad Dog had to wrestle a Negro.

"Well, I beat him," Mad Dog said, not understanding what the problem was.

Later, Mad Dog saw his vanquished opponent in the shower and asked how he was. "I got a headache," he replied.

And Mad Dog recalls feeling sorry for him. Mad Dog hoped he hadn't injured him. But Mad Dog did not know and could not imagine that kid's real injuries then or thereafter.

Mad Dog has plenty of regrets about failing to do the right thing now and then when he was growing up, but he never did fail to defend Negroes, then Blacks then African Americans from insult. Being White, Mad Dog could rise to defense without being accused of self interest. 

But somehow, even as a kid, Mad Dog knew the essential truth he later heard Martin Luther King speak, "Injustice anywhere injures justice everywhere,"

How do you teach that in a public school?

Probably you cannot. And you cannot teach about sex or abortion or any of a variety other "hot topics" in public schools.

Mad Dog went to public schools until he went to college. When he arrived at college, classmates from private schools or from public schools in New York had read "The Sun Also Rises" and "Native Son" and "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Catcher in the Rye."

When a middle school teacher wanted to read "Catcher" with his class he had to lead them off campus to the public library to do it.

In Montgomery County, Maryland schools, sex, adolescent angst, pre marital sex, rape, racism were things which simply did not exist.

Mad Dog read "Billy Budd" and "A Tale of Two Cities" in high school. Safe stuff. He knew there was another world, a secret world you weren't allowed to talk about in public out there. A friend, a girl, had read "Naked Lunch" and "Peyton Place" and other forbidden texts. But she could never speak of that in school.

Eventually, Mad Dog caught up with the real world, but he had been blindfolded by public education, protected from exposure to dangerous ideas.

Which raises the question: Had he been educated at all?

The greatest nightmare for the principal of a public school is that telephone from a parent who is outraged that her child has come home distraught because an emotionally disturbing discussion occurred in class. We do not want children exposed to controversy or deeply held contrary opinions.

But if we do not want to teach our children how to respond to opposing points of view, if we want them to not know about things, what is it we are calling "education"? 

The Sniper Effect: Blood Is Their Argument

 

Through all the arguments about how to respond to Donald Trump and his merry band of thugs his opponents despaired about the ineffectiveness about the response to his brand of faux masculinity.

What do you say to the man who is not shamed by logic?

Trump had two kinds of defenders: rich and lower class. 

But in his rallies he had only one kind of supporter, the Sieg Heil mob member, who relished anonymous action, violence and mob solidarity.

It is said Trump has only one book at his bedside: Mein Kampf, where he learned his tactics of never admitting wrong, never accepting defeat, repeating any lie so often it began to acquire truthiness by simple repetition and keeping every statement as simple as possible from Hitler. 

Clearly, if you view documentaries about Hitler, the model is so clear it cannot be accidental. 

But what is forgotten is the role of simple murder: For murder, especially political murder, you need no gathering of evidence or shaping of sentences: you just pull the trigger or throw up the noose.

There was no out glamouring John F. Kennedy.  JFK's smooth humor and elegance could not be undone by any of his political opponents. But a bullet could bring him down and reduce all his arguments to dust.

Same for Martin Luther King: Nobody in the 20th century could approach his eloquence or the forcefulness of his rhetorhic or his power to move with words as he employed vivid imagery with cadence and rhythm. He was truly the rock star of mass communications in the 20th century, the only man who could do in front of a crowd what Hitler had done.

But Hitler's appeal depended on staging, the night rallies, the searchlights, the dramatic staging; King could do it with minimal props, he could do it standing on stone steps  with distracted members of the entourage looking elsewhere.

None of the haters could match that talent, not Strom Thurman, not George Wallace, not Lester Maddox. 

But a bullet could silence him.

And when the bullet speaks, there is no rebuttal and you know the argument is over and won by the gun.

Trump is not gone yet. Hitler went to jail and used his time well, and came back to strike when conditions were right, moving with audacity beyond the ossified Hindenberg and the fractured and fractious forces which opposed him. Taken together there were more Communists and workers/socialists than there were Nazis. But the Nazis were unified and violent and they murdered Rosa Luxemberg and anyone who stood in their way. Even other Nazis felt the blood argument: The night of the long knives consolidated Hitler as the leader of the Nazis and ended discussion about dissent.

I am so glad Obama survived his Presidency, although I still fear for him.

But, the fact is, he never scared the Trumpists. He was never that strong.

Now, we have to think about what we will do with that 14% which is violent and committed to Trump.

And we have to remember what country we come from: we have to look at those pictures of grinning men and boys and girls at the lynchings and remember the violent dark soul of this slave owning nation, a nation conceived in rage and nurtured by hate.

Unyielding Truth

 

Not until I had read "The Premonition" did I take down off my bookshelf a black jacketed volume I had received for Christmas from some relative whose identity is regretfully lost to me, a book called "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry.

And not until I began reading Mr. Barry's book did I understand that Rand Paul and Jimmy Dan Jordan are nothing new or even unusual in the American Congress--they are simply a continuation of the anti intellectual strain deeply rooted in American culture, a weed examined by Richard Hoftstader, but far more pervasive than I had previously appreciated.

In 1876, the same year George Armstrong Custer lost his scalp in Dakota, Johns Hopkins university was opened in Baltimore. The Union Army had court martialed its own Surgeon General for attempting to outlaw the violent purgatives then popular among Army doctors and the Union Army had a grand total of six thermometers.

Dr. Charity Dean

In that time Henry Bigelow, professor of Surgery at Harvard laughed at the suggestion of Harvard President Eliot that medical students be given written exams. "More than half of them can barely write. Of course they can't pass written examinations. No medical school has thought it proper to risk large existing classes and large receipts [tuition] by introducing more rigorous standards."

In 1900 only 34 of 48 states even licensed surgeons.

Why? Because "There is not a greater aristocratic monopoly in existence than this of regular medicine--neither is there greater humbug."

Rand Paul did not graduate from college--he got into Duke University School of Medicine in a story as yet untold, and got his MD without first graduating an undergraduate program. He passed his boards in ophthalmology but he refused to take the follow up board exams, and instead created his own board exams. 

The Smartest Man in Every Room

In this, of course, he was attacking a system which deserves examination--the corruption of exams meant to insure quality which has undergone malignant degeneration in a system designed to generate profit for the test makers, and for the whole infrastructure of test prep courses and professional organizations it supports. But Paul, of course, sullies the righteous cause of expunging corruption in the certification and licensing process by attacking the very idea of standards, when in fact we do need quality controls, we just need good and meaningful quality controls rather than the cynical mess we have. 

And what you get from Paul is the ugly face of sanctimony, as he baits Tony Fauci, in Senate hearings, saying that the COVID virus was "enhanced"  and given "gain of function" in a lab in China with funds from Fauci's own NIH. Paul is echoing the conspiracy theorists who insist:

"Instead, government authorities — self-interested in continuing 'gain of function' research — say there's nothing to see here," he continued. "'Gain of function' research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans. 

"To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus's ability to infect humans."

It's Area 51 all over.  Space aliens kept alive by the US government. The government lies to us. But we are smart enough to know.

If we are to believe in democracy and freedom, then we cannot believe in special knowledge, knowledge possessed only by those folks who the academic elite have sanctified to have such knowledge.

Of course, the universities and the NIH will argue, you can have the knowledge, but only if you do the work to be able to understand the knowledge. And to do that, you must study with us. 

Anthony Fauci, MD 

In the internet age, more and more special knowledge is available from universities and podcasts, but it is dispersed among the rest of the hay which is simply untrue, at best, or magnified conspiracy trash, at worst.

Reading "The Great Influenza" you have to hand it to George W. Bush, who read the book, or at least read enough of it, to demand his administration prepare itself for the next big pandemic. He might have been stupid enough to buy into trickle down economics, stupid enough to take the bait offered by Osma Bin Laden and invade Iraq along with Afghanistan, stupid enough to believe in "weapons of mass destruction," stupid enough to miss the housing bubble which brought down the nation's economy and sent to to the precipice of economic collapse, but he was apparently able to read, and he found Barry's book convincing enough to order a response.

Rand Paul and Jimmy Dan, however are not that smart. 

Government and the Infantile 

It may be SARS COVID 2 escaped from a Wuhan lab, as sort of Chinese version of "Crisis in the Hot Zone" but if it did you know for Goddamn sure we will never find out about it.  What do you think a locked down society like China can do with information it does not want known?

Rand Fan

Reading "The Great Influenza" you realize the ineptitude Michael Lewis exposes in our government is nothing new and in fact is dwarfed by the ignorance and complacency of America past. We are just being what we always have been, a country Churchill described when he said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."

Alienated and Alone

 

"Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone."

               --D.H. Lawrence, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

Till Human voices wake us and we drown.

                 --T.S. Eliot, Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Yesterday, it rained and snowed in mid April. Apart from walks through the town, Mad Dog, spent the day mostly alone. There was a brief visit to a post surgical neighbor, but mostly he was alone with his dog, who never says much. 

The neighbor had the TV going. Mad Dog has been struck, when phoning people in the middle of the day, how often he can hear the sound of the TV in the background.

Often the TV is playing FOX News.

Mad Dog spent most of the day reading, doing household chores. He did not play music, although he has tons in various formats. He was okay with silence and the snoring of his dog.

For one hour, he listened to "The PBS News Hour," where old friends, Judy Woodruff, David Brooks, and the same crew which has been on for years spoke their one way conversations to him.

He has become disappointed with Ms. Woodruff, who, as she has aged, has drifted into drippy maudlin reflexes, often following a story with, "How heartbreaking" or "We are so sorry about that," or some other expression of sympathy or regret at the news of the violent, tumultuous world she finds so regrettable.

She has also stopped challenging people about things Mad Dog wants her to challenge. David Brooks said Americans should not leave Afghanistan because when they did, the Taliban would take over and deny schools to girls and return women to the 13th century, forbid music and generally be nasty and violent. Ms. Woodruff clucked in sympathy, but never asked, "But why should American men and women die or spend years in that God forsaken place to protect Afghan women? If Afghanistan, why not Saudi Arabia, or all those parts of Africa where Boco Haram frequently attacks schools and carts off girls?"

The day before, Mad Dog had signed in to a zoom call among Democrats where a fired up Democrat mentioned a Republican bill in the state legislature which would require all New Hampshire university students to pass the same citizenship test which immigrants have to pass. This struck Mad Dog as an interesting idea, and he had just sparred with the Twitter crowd about the idea that new immigrants had to pass a test about the U.S. Constitution and other features of the United States government which some nameless bureaucrats had deemed essential knowledge for anyone who wants to call himself or herself a U.S. Citizen. Mad Dog had noted that test is waved if you are born in the U.S. with the consequence that some voters have no clue there are three branches to the government or what they do.

When Mad Dog challenged his fellow Democrat asking why she objected to such an educational standard she was clearly surprised to be challenged but she responded that there are lots of foreign students at UNH for whom a requirement to know the workings of the U.S. system are irrelevant. Okay, Mad Dog agreed, then exempt them.

But why not require such a test for all New Hampshire high school graduates? New York and Massachusetts require passing a test to graduate high school, although who knows what questions are on those tests? Likely Mad Dog would be appalled to learn what those questions which pose the hurdle to the rest of life would be. But for Mad Dog, any American high school graduate should know there are three branches of government on the federal level and should have some vague idea what those three branches do differently and what "checks and balances" means and why they exist. And, oh, yes, that there is a Constitution and a Bill of Rights and why and what these are.

The master of ceremonies interjected to calm the shocked woman who had inveighed against this Republican bill, who may have seen the bill as something akin to those Jim Crow travesties of "citizenship tests" which only Black voters had to pass, and nobody Black was ever allowed to pass, so their right to vote was denied in a cynical charade of only allowing "qualified" voters to vote. We have to say she "may have seen" because she never raised that objection. The master of ceremonies (stage manager) of our town Dem meeting assured the woman, "Oh, Mad Dog does that to people. Don't take it personally."

So there we have it, people who play well with others and the other type of person, the Mad Dog type, who is best left to silent solitude to contemplate whether interaction with people is a blessing or a curse. He does that to people. He challenges them, which in a fraternity, is not what is expected. We are all friends here, which means agreeing all the time, not arguing. 

One of Mad Dog's most important experiences as an eight year old was reading Robinson Crusoe, which got him imagining life alone on an island. The wonderful Tom Hanks movie, "Cast Away" addressed the same problem. Are people not social creatures, pack animals?

For Hanks, the solution was to create a person surrogate, which he fashioned using a coconut for a head. Anything, any image that looked halfway human helped with the sense of isolation.

Lady Chatterley, who found English society, at least the niche she occupied, so oppressive yearned for solitude, for isolation from the people who surrounded her. She felt isolated in the presence of people, something we call now "alienation."  For Sartre, "hell is other people" and Lady Chatterley would agree. But for the cast away, the absence of other people is hell.

Mad Dog concludes, tentatively, the solution is other people are necessary, but it may be necessary to limit their expression. For those folks who Mad Dog speaks with on the phone, those FOX News listeners, the images on a screen serve the same purpose as Hanks' coconut headed surrogate. It is after all "FOX and friends." Those people in the bright colors and bright smiles are surrogate friends, doesn't matter what they are saying, really, as long as they resemble something human. Human voices wake us. And in the case of FOX listeners, drown.

And maybe that's the real charm and utility of TV friends. They do not really interact with you; they are just filling a void. 

Polygamy

What does it matter to me whether my neighbor has one wife or five?

What does it matter to me whether my neighbor is married to someone of the same sex?

What does it matter to me whether my neighbors are married or simply living together?

Why does being married need to carry with it any legal status at all? Which is to say, why does the officiant at a marriage ceremony say, "And now by the powers invested in me by the state of New Hampshire, I pronounce you man and wife?

Why do we need marriage at all? 

At a wedding some years ago, in a large AME church, I listened as the pastor outlined a variety of circumstances in which the congregation, the community of faith should act as a policeman of vows: he exhorted his flock to step in when they were at a party and the groom remained behind to frolic as his wife departed to get home to the kids, "And you see his roving eye, step over there and tell him to go home to his wife!" 

So that was one function of the wedding ceremony: to enlist the community, the power of the group to enforce individual fealty and "good behavior."

In a recent NYT article on polygamy it was mentioned there are something like 181 legal rights, obligations and benefits of being legally married, including things having to do with what happens when a spouse gets sick, visitation at the hospital rights, rights having to do with inheritance of property, rights concerning access to children. Apparently, marriage is convenient for government: It confers official status and rights to spouses which otherwise would have to be defined.

Given the commercial basis of health insurance in the United States it also simplified who can be covered under a company's health insurance policy. If General Motors had to cover 5 wives or 5 girlfriends of a single employee, that might be a disadvantage to the bottom line. 

Polygamy has been attacked on the grounds that in some cults, young girls are forced, against their wills to marry older men, but that has to do not with polygamy but with the offenses of cults in controlling the lives of adherents.

The main argument against polygamy might be the burden it would put on the government to cover social security, welfare and Medicare for multiple wives, but the government covers the twelve children of Hassidic couples where the wife works but the husband spends all day in the temple studying the Torah and depends upon the state to support his family. Surely, if the government can tolerate that individual choice, it can tolerate the choice to have so many children among people who cannot afford them, unless it decides not to.

From a woman's point of view, I can see the advantages: A woman might like the idea she can be left alone at certain times and another woman can be called upon to serve her husband's needs. In many marriages, women provide more support in the day to day to the male than the male does to the woman, and this work can be shared. How often have I heard a woman refer to going to bed at night an having to face, "The last chore of the day?"

Reading the stories of families in the NYT piece it was striking that these families had certain characteristics:

1/ It was always a man and multiple wives, never a wife with multiple husbands.

2/ None of these families seemed to be composed of people with high income professions: You did not see a neurosurgeon with five wives; you did not see a movie star with four husbands; you did not see a CEO which two wives and two husbands. it was usually a construction company owner or manager who had two or three wives who also sometimes had jobs of their own.

Of course, one might ask why anyone would want one husband or one wife, let alone three, but that's just me asking. 

Nightmare in China: The Xinjiang Gulag

 There are usually two sides to every story, but reading Raffi Khatchadourian's "Ghost Walls" in the New Yorker (April 12, 2021) if only a small sliver of the truth is contained within this report, the story is beyond the worst nightmare of George Orwell, the most dystopian dreams of Rod Serling.

What Khatchadourian does is to present the case of a single woman from a province called Kuytun,  which borders Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Gobi desert and he juxtaposes her single life against the political decisions all the way up to the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping, and he traces how Xi's perception of religious dissidents as "rats scurrying across the street" has been translated into a force which reverberates down the bureaucratic chain, executed by ambitious men trying to impress Xi and embracing efforts at control which are almost beyond imagining.

Katchadourian does reveal some startling things I had no idea about: In China mass attacks, with mass casualties are frequent. While the favored weapons may not be guns, random attacks on train stations, public gatherings, markets with explosives, knives, axes or even toxic sprays provide the rationale for imposing state control. 

Mr. Xi may well have an idea that by imposing the power of the state he is actually benefiting the Chinese people, but as Mr. Katchadourian builds his case, the horror wells up.

In America, of course, the 2nd amendment freaks have spun a great hobgoblin of "government coming to take your guns" but their imagination is embryonic compared to what government can actually do, if a state is completely in the control of an all powerful leader. All the guns in private hands in America would be swatted aside like so many fleas in Xi's China.

Xi manages, through his underlings, to turn an entire province into an open air prison, through the use of tens of thousands "assistant police officers" and a vast network of huge prisons, prison guards and enforcers. The whole province became a state controlled organ, and though that means millions of people, that's still only a small percentage of China's population of a thousand five hundred million citizens.

The description of the prison, the determination to establish thought control are excruciating and the snatches of official dogma, "Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, development man," are all you need to know. The emphasis in that sentence is on "standardizing."

The woman we follow is Anar Sabit, who is sucked into the maw of the machine, and given so little information about what her offense has been that for the first months of her captivity the real agony emanates from not knowing why she has been swept up, what she has done, what or who she has offended. Her story makes Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" look like a school girl's tea party with Christopher Robin.

At one point she hears some guards say, "Her name is on the list...nobody can save her."

What makes the narrative especially wrenching is her description of her captors, many of whom are exhausted, almost as terrified as she is and thoroughly dehumanized, and they know it.

But where Xi out does Orwell is in the use of high tech: facial recognition, identity cards which are swiped through machines and we wait with breath held to see if an alarm will bring police and guards running. 

And the high tech control is not limited, in China, to just this one region, or to prisons. It is pervasive in a way which exceeds London's CTV cameras or the red light cameras in American intersections:

"At toilets in Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimeters of toilet paper at a time."

                               

Along the way, in the various prisons Ms. Sabit passes, she meets old friends, the father of a school chum who knew her well, and he tries with facial expressions and a brief, furtive phrase to warn her what not to say or do.

Her guards are clearly as terrified as she, fearful if they allow her to sit down or walk across a yard, it will be their heads on the spike.

Her hopes are raised repeatedly--she will be freed, allowed to leave the prison, only to be crushed every time. She tells herself not to allow herself to believe what she has been told about her next date for release will ever happen, but she cannot resist.  The women prisoners are warned they must not cry when inspectors come, but must laugh and smile, which they can hardly manage. 

There is even the echo of enterprise in the prisons: Just as the Nazis culled gold teeth from the dead in their concentration camps, the Chinese cut the long hair of the women and sell it abroad.

This is a 21 page article, and each page is a struggle, but I was pulled along by the same sale espoir of the inmates--hoping there might be escape in the end.

China clearly is not content to control thought at home, but abroad, as Xi Jinping has threatened Western academics who criticize his regime: "They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance."

In a global economy, Americans have to deal with all sorts of people we do not understand, or sometimes, when we do understand them, we loathe them.

There are Afghanistan "allies," military officers who chain village boys to their beds in the barracks and rape them, because that is Afghan custom. 

There are Saudi princes who murder newspaper men and who do not allow women to venture outside the house without a male relative to chaperone.

There are Russians who poison their political opponents.

There are British prime ministers who refer to Black children as "picaninnies." 

There are African dictators who deny the existence of AIDS and who condone murder of homosexuals.

There are Iranian zealots who send suicide bombers to market places.

There is a Brazilian president who refuses to believe in COVID.

The world is filled with deranged and malevolent people who consider themselves virtuous.

Always has been.

And America has Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell and the entire Republican party and Qanon. 

Having said all that, China is one place I am happy not to live.