The most frustrating thing about Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow isn't the overwrought title — mass incarceration in the era of the War on Drugs has a lot of layers of bad but it just doesn't seem as bad as the Jim Crow era was described; the title kind of hangs over you as you read the book and distracts (sort of like a bad headline). What's more frustrating is that the bad policies, blunt-force military-style, stat-driven policing and prosecutorial overreach that Alexander describes are all things that people of various political backgrounds decry; there are opportunities to make common cause if people bothered to listen.
I came away from Crow thinking that the drug laws and various liberties afforded to the police and especially prosecutors were ill-conceived, full of unintended consequences (Alexander almost argues differently, thus the title) and applied badly — and the people affected the most are on the margins of society, which is a good enough reason to revisit those laws. This is an important distinction: you don't want the logical conclusion of all this to simply apply the same laws/procedures equally across the board — it's shitty policy because it's shitty policy and it's made worse because it also happens to disproportionately affect the most marginalized populations. (This also provides an out for the Civil Rights entities which, as Alexander writes, have been hesitant to pivot to this issue.)
Alexander spends a lot of time showing how the police and prosecutors in the legal system creatively exploit their powers to arrest and lock up African Americans. I think she's giving the lawmakers a huge pass. Cops and attorneys have a job to do, and will do what it takes to do their jobs well. But they don't set the policies or write the laws. They're performing in the way they're expected, as aggressively and effectively as possible.
Something confounding is how Alexander seems to rhetorically treat drug crimes as simply a matter of a younger man being stopped and frisked and having a joint in his pocket and then going to jail. She seems to avoid the violence surrounding the drug trade and all the other neighborhood-destroying elements of drugs (there's an extended portion about how the War on Drugs predated an actual drug problem; this part seems thin). I don't think a joint should mean that one loses his right to vote, but then you're getting into just whether the laws (and application thereof) are too draconian. At some point I also wondered whether it was too much to ask that someone simply not use drugs; as long as society/lawmakers believe that drug users should go to jail, isn't it reasonable to expect someone to follow the law?
To start, Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is good. For one, it's an interesting first-person account of the world of crematory operators, a world that stays mostly hidden, probably mostly because no one really wants to think about it. I'm pretty sure I assumed that cemeteries did that on the side or something, so it was interesting to hear about this world. Eyes is also compelling because the narrator isn't some grizzled veteran — she self-deprecatingly describes herself at points as a dilettante or "girl playing dress up," and the narrative unfolds from her first days on the job.
At least one of us was annoyed by the notion that she — or anyone — does something simply to write about it, or parlay it into a book or some such; I don't disagree, but in an era when every experience is utterly mediated, what difference does it make? Also, if it makes someone more engaged, what's the harm? Just relax and let go; soon the entire planet will be one giant StoryCorps booth.
My only criticism — and it's probably not a fair one, but it's there nonetheless — is that the writing seems like a first pass. And by "first pass" I don't mean first draft but rather the first thing that gets written is the thing that shows up in the final version. In other words, you don't the sense that the ideas were chewed over, mulled over, synthesized, perseverated upon, synergized or whatever else. On the one hand, no one needs it to be that artful — there's a thing going on in the blog era where readers seem to find deeper meaning in knowing about the unmediated firsthand experiences of people, or specifically careers; thus, "Ask a [blank]," whether it's a pilot or a real estate broker or a crematory operator. It's just source material. But at the same time I think it actually could be extraordinary, and that's what's a little frustrating: it's a completely unusual story that dives deep into the guiding force of human existence with tremendous amounts of gallows humor and a pitch-perfect voice — and I want to hear more from this person. Think Joan Didion, Renata Adler, whoever else — we used to write shit in this country, think about shit; now we just crib from our own blogs and hit send.
Why not fair? For one, if it were a totally idiotic book this wouldn't come up, but since it's not, like I said, you want to see more. That said, I imagine an editor is like, sure, fine, don't bother to do more: 97 to 98 percent of the readers don't care if it's extraordinary. And whatever. It's whatever. But whatever. And also, she does find a deeper meaning to all of it except that it's a call to action: people, get more in touch with death rituals. Which is fine, except that — I don't know, maybe it's just me but — I really don't give a shit about calls to action. At least when it comes to books. An op-ed, sure, but a book is just . . . tiresome.
Maybe that's the thing: do books these days want to get you to do something? To change your behavior? To turn "effect" into a flabby transitive verb? My hunch is they do — books can be quite demanding in that respect. Which is weird, because how many people still even read books?
It's interesting that the franchise started out as a radio drama; knowing that you can read it and hear why that is; in fact, the thing seems more interesting that way.
At least one person in book club was nervous to give it the full book club critique, lest a longtime favorite get cut down to size. I don't know why, because it's good, though it is a little disjointed, obviously owing to the retro-whatever nature of its novel form. I remember reading a version of E.T. for a book report in grade school and it felt like this. Also, Mr. Kiddo's written-word versions of stuff like Dinosaur Train and Paw Patrol — in other words, Jesus Fucking Christ don't even ask.
Perseverating on the notion that the radio play was the original version, I'm interested that no one seems to have resurrected it for the podcast world. I don't really listen to podcasts and only have a vague acquaintance with Hitchhiker's but it seems like a kind of no-brainer. In fact, if I googled it I bet someone's figured this out, but I'm feeling incredibly lazy and unmotivated right now and won't google it myself.
Which leaves me with this: this fellow died at what is now emerging to me as a ridiculously young age: 49.
[By the way, I just took an extended deep dive into GG Allin's final day alive; I wondered how old he was when he died — 37 — and got sucked into figuring out what the establishment at 1:14 was today; he, naked, hides out in a sort of plywood vestibule:
For the record, these days it seems it's been some series of shitty SLA/CB-unfriendly venues, basically like this:
Having not known the provenance of the book — i.e., that it was a radio play (and also that Adams apparently had an issue with writer's block, especially later) — I was intrigued that it was such a short book, perhaps for obvious reasons.
