In a wonderful essay titled “The Reading Cure,” Arthur Blaustein quotes the novelist John Gardner on the power of literature:

In a democratic society, where every individual opinion counts, [literature’s] incomparable ability to instruct, to make alternatives intellectually and emotionally clear, to spotlight falsehood, insincerity, and foolishness—[literature’s] incomparable ability, that is, to make us understand—ought to be a force bringing people together, breaking down the barriers of prejudice and ignorance, and holding up ideals worth pursuing. Literature in America does fulfill these obligations.

In the same essay, Blaustein, who is the Chairman of Progressive Book Club’s editorial board and the author himself of many books, including Make A Difference: America’s Guide to Volunteering and Community Service picks up:

We depend on our fiction for metaphoric news of who we are, or who we think we ought to be. The writers of today’s political and social realism are doing no less than reminding us of our true, traditional American values – the hope, the promises, and the dreams. When we read these novels, we learn about who we are as individuals and as a nation. They inform us, as no other medium does, about the state of our national politics and character—of the difference between what we say we are and how we actually behave. They offer us crucial insights into the moral, social, and emotional conflicts that are taking place in communities across America. We need such exploration today more than ever.

We asked Arthur to recommend, for PBC members and readers, a dozen novels that he considers especially rich explorations of American life — as he says, “the hope, the promises, the dreams.” Here’s what he came back with.

1. Shadow Play, by Charles Baxter (Norton)
   The  city manager of a small, depressed town in Michigan sees the human costs when the chemical plant he lured to town turns out to be an environmental disaster.
2. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, by Michael Dorris (Warner)
   Compassionate and psychologically complex, this novel spans three generations of Native American women in the Pacific Northwest – on and off the reservation – who share a fierce independence and a love of family.
3. Heart Mountain, by Gretel Ehrlich (Penguin)
   Explores the experience of Japanese Americans exiled to a World War II relocation camp in Wyoming and their relationship with local ranchers.
4. The Dogs of March, by Ernest Hebert (New England Press)
   Brilliant, sensitive, and funny. Captures what it is like for blue collar workersto be unemployed. Set in New England, it’s the American dream gone belly-up.
5. Ironweed, William Kennedy (Penguin)
   A Pulitzer Prize winner’s shrewd study of the diceyness of fate. This modern Dante’s Inferno about life on skid row is especially poignant as homelessness continues to cast a shadow across our land.
6. The Secret Life of Bees, by Susan Kidd (Penguin)
   A stunning and lush story of race and gender set in South Carolina. In the struggle between bigotry and love, the latter wins out.
7. Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial)
   A wonderful tale of the Mexican-American experience in the Southwest.  Explores themes of authenticity, community, integrity, and truth.
8. The Diagnosis, by Alan Lightman (Vintage).
   A Kafkaesque tale that questions America’s compulsive love affair with modern technology, efficiency, speed, money and “making it.”
9. The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols (Ballantine)
   Reveals how the economic and political “shell game” is being run on ordinary Americans. Part of the author’s New Mexico trilogy, it explores the underside of rampant development.
10. My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki (Penguin)
    A feisty American filmmaker takes on the beef industry, chemical corporations, and commercial advertising. Muckraking, witty and provocative.A panoramic view of America.
11. Postcards, by E. Annie Proulx, (Collier)
    Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. A remarkable story of the struggle of New England farmers to confront the loss of home and place in economic hard times.
12. Moo, by Jane Smiley (Random House)
    The financial, academic, sexual, and political scandals of a Midwest university are laid bare in this insightful satire of higher education.

Arthur I. Blaustein is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches community development, public policy, and politics. His most recent books are Make a Difference: America’s Guide to Volunteering and Community Service, and The American Promise: Justice and Opportunity. He is the chairman of the editorial board of Progressive Book Club.

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

In 1953 the legendary journalist I.F. Stone was one of the first people to recognize just how dangerous the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, would be. McCarthy had set himself up as a watchman, always on the lookout for Communist subversion. In “Quis Custodiet Custodem?,” Stone asks (following the Roman satirist Juvenal) who will watch the watchmen?

Stone devoted issue after issue of his long-lived political pamphlet, I.F. Stone’s Weekly (selections of which are available in The Best of I.F. Stone), to watching our elected officials. He took a good look at McCarthy’s finances, and this is a taste of what he found:

• $10,000: payment for writing a single pamphlet for the housing company Lustron
• $20,000: a note from the Pepsi-Cola company at a time when McCarthy was chairman of a Senate subcommittee on sugar
• $20,000: amount McCarthy put in a special account for fighting communism; “However,” the report says, “no connection could be established between many of the disbursements from this account and any possible anti-Communist campaign.”
• $10,000: amount McCarthy put into a similar account; removed three weeks later as a loan to a friend speculating in soybeans
• $172,00: deposited in McCarthy’s Washington bank account between 1948 and 1952
• $96,000: amount Ray Kiermas, McCarthy’s administrative assistant, deposited in the account during this same period
• $60,000 and $45,000: amount deposited by McCarthy and Kiermas, respectively, that had “not been identified as to source.”

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

During the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the journalist I.F. Stone published a weekly political pamphlet. He was an independent gadfly, puncturing hypocrisies and uncovering secrets. His articles stung McCarthyites and the Kremlin alike. As he put it succinctly, “All governments lie.” It was his job to find the truth.

He was no cynic, though. He believed deeply in the principles of the Constitution, especially the freedom of speech guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. His overriding concern, the preservation of liberty, is evident throughout The Best of I.F. Stone. This volume, edited by the journalist Karl Weber, includes dozens of essays, short and long, that display Stone at his querulous best. Below, in a 1955 article titled “Incommensurate Equation: Justice and Security,” Stone enumerates six differences between criminal trials and the loyalty-security hearings of the red scare. The former, he concludes, are perfectly American. The latter are not.

“The matter of proof: A trial deals with something that happened. A loyalty-security hearing deals with something that might happen. When a crime has been committed or attempted, objective proof is possible: a body, a cracked safe, a forged check, witnesses, may all be put in evidence. But when a man is up on loyalty or security charges, nothing has happened. The tribunal is … engaged in an exercise in clairvoyance.”

“How any doubt is resolved: In the trial of a crime, even for the most heinous, such as murder or treason, any reasonable doubt is resolved in favor of the accused. … All this is reversed in loyalty-security cases. To bar a man from a job and label him disloyal because in your opinion he might do something bad in the future is by its nature a decision which resolves the doubt in favor of the State and against the individual. “Security” means to take as few chances as possible, even at the expense of injustice to some people who never have committed a crime and never will.”

“Avoidance: The difference in the two procedures becomes clearer if you ask yourself how you avoid getting into trouble. To avoid arrest and trial for a crime, one has to obey the law. But what does one avoid to keep out of loyalty-security trouble? One has to avoid political activity. … Be careful what books you have in your library and what publications you read. These may be held against you. Safety lies in the abnegation of one’s rights.”

“Standards: Here, too, the difference becomes sharp. There is little doubt as to what is murder, larceny, or espionage. … But what is “subversion” or “un-Americanism”? The latter is an epithet, the former is a wholly relative term. …. What one man sees as subversion, another man sees as progress.”

“The mode of defense: In a criminal trial, the accused is furnished with a bill of particulars. It informs him that the government will allege that a safe was cracked at such and such an address in such and such a city at such and such a time. The accused may then prove he was elsewhere. But anything remotely approaching a bill of particulars is rare in loyalty-security cases. The accused is usually asked to rebut vague charges of Communist sympathy. The task of the defense is to prove a negative.

“Witnesses: In a criminal trial, the accusing witness must be produced in court and subjected to cross-examination. The right to confront one’s accuser is fundamental. … But in loyalty-security cases nothing is more familiar than the submission of allegations from undisclosed informers. The accused has no chance to confront the accuser. Such confrontations in criminal cases often disclose mistaken identity. Cross-examination may uncover perjury. All these safeguards are absent in loyalty-security cases because here again the security of the state, its secrets and informers, is ranked ahead of justice to the individual.”

Following up on yesterday’s post about the way unhealthy “food “(and I use the word expansively) is marketed to kids, here’s some straightforward rules for getting the young ‘uns eating better. They’re taken from The Dinner Diaries: Raising Whole Wheat Kids in a White Bread World, by Betsy Block.

1. Quit the clean-plate club
Never force kids to eat everything on their plate. They need to learn how to listen to their bodies so they know when they’re full. (And if they don’t eat enough and they go to be hungry once or twice as a result, chances are that the next time they’ll remember to eat enough dinner, even if you’re not serving chicken nuggets and fries.

2. Rewrite the kids’ menu
Most kids’ menus are a bummer: fries, dogs, burgers. Try to convince kids to order from the appetizer menu, or else share some of your meal or split an adult entree between siblings. Some restaurants will let you order half-plates from the entree menu.

3. Say no to TV dinners
Watching television while eating can lead to overeating or what’s now known as mindless eating. Don’t allow kids to eat while watching TV, playing, or listening to stories. Unless you have to, that is.

In The Dinner Diaries: Raising Whole Wheat Kids in a White Bread World, author Betsy Block good-humoredly chronicles her efforts to improve the family meal, one forkful at a time. Between busy schedules, snack machines, permissive grandparents, and willful temptations, the challenges are great, and none more so than the wall-to-wall marketing–directly to children–of trashy snacks and processed foods — part of a broader commercialization of childhood that we’ve come almost to take for granted. Here are some of the numbers she supplies to illustrate what any parent is up against who wants to get–and keep–their kids eating healthily.

1. Eighty percent of TV commercials are for fast food, candy, cereal, and toys. Thirty-two percent of all ads targeted to children are for candy; 31 percent are for cereal.
2. Fast-food restaurants spend three billion dollars a year on television ads aimed at children.
3. On Saturday mornings, children see one food commercial about every five minutes. Most of these ads are for foods high in fat, sugar, salt, and calories
4. A preschooler’s risk for obesity increases by 6 percent for every hour of TV watched per day. If there’s a TV in the child’s bedroom, the odds jump an additional 31 percent for every hour watched.
5. Ninety-four percent of high schools, 84 percent of middle schools, and 58 percent of elementary schools allow the sale of soda or other sugar-laden drinks on their premises. The likelihood of a child becoming obese increases 1.6 times for each can of sweetened drinks consumed daily.
6. Channel One, viewed in more than twelve thousand schools, regularly shows ads for soda, candy, fast food, and chips.
7. Internet sites, such as candystand.com, that allow children to play games for “free,” are festooned in advertising for sugary and high-calorie snacks.

Source: Commercialfreechildhood.org, cited in The Dinner Diaries: Raising Whole Wheat Kids in a White Bread World by Betsy Block.

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

One of Robert Wright’s major themes in The Evolution of God is the slipperiness of sacred texts. What do they mean? And why have their many followers answered that question so differently? Consider the word jihad. As a noun, it appears only four times in the Koran. “Depending on which of those four verses you pick,” says Wright, “you could make the case that jihad is either about an internal struggle toward spiritual discipline or about war; there is no ‘doctrine’ of jihad in the Koran.” Even single verses can be ambiguous, as is apparent when we try to translate them from Arabic to English. Wright offers four different versions of Sura 66:9, each by a different translator:

• Abdullah Yusuf Ali: “O Prophet! Strive hard against the Unbelievers and the Hypocrites, and be firm against them.”
• Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall: “O Prophet! Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be stern with them.”
• Muhammad Habib Shakir: “O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be hard against them.”
• John Medows Rodwell: “O Prophet! make war on the infidels and hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them.”

The differences between these versions are subtle but they have also shaped our world. Wright’s point is that people who look to religious texts for guidance are always interpreting, even if they claim to be reading literally. He further contends that those who read jihad as permitting terrorism aren’t reading very well:

The doctrine of jihad, the doctrine that modern-day jihadists cite, came into being after Muhammad’s death, and the Koran provides no firm foundation for it. Indeed, that the authors of the doctrine relied so heavily on sayings attributed to the Prophet—and that those attributions often showed up a suspiciously long time after he lived—is itself testament to how hard it would be to ground jihad in the Koran.

[Posted by Elena Sytcheva]

In Where Underpants Come From, Joe Bennett writes, “The direct tangible consequence is that right now I, the big-nose Westerner, am wearing Chinese-made shoes socks, trousers, shirts and underpants. And it’s a statistical near certainty that you are, too.” Below are some numbers that bear out his point.

Exports

Description ($millions)

1. Electrical Machinery (342,082)
2. Machinery (286,740)
3. Knit apparel (60,590)
4. Iron and steel (53,495)
5. Woven apparel (52,430)
6. Iron and steel products (48,344)
7. Optical, photographic, cinematographic, measuring checking, precision, medical or surgical instruments and apparatus; parts and accessories thereof (43,385)
8. Furniture and bedding (42,786)
9. Vehicles, not railway (mainly auto parts, motorcycles, trucks, and bicycles) (39,316)
10. Toys and sports equipment (32,695)

Imports

Description ($millions)

1. Electrical machinery (266,639)
2. Mineral fuel, oil etc. (168,643)
3. Machinery (138,707)
4. Ores, slag and ash (85,263)
5. Optical, photographic, cinematographic, measuring checking, precision, medical or surgical instruments and apparatus; parts and accessories thereof (77,696)
6. Plastic (48,841)
7. Organic chemicals (39,301)
8. Vehicles, not railway (mainly autos and parts) (26,941)
9. Copper and articles thereof (26,085)
10. Iron and steel (24,520)

Source: Congressional Research Service (PDF)

PLUS: U.S.-China Trade Statistics

• It is estimated that in 2008 China was the world’s second largest merchandise exporter and the third largest importer. It was the United States’s second largest trading partner, its third largest export market, and its largest source of imports
• Total trade between the U.S. and China surged from $5 billion in 1980 to $409 billion in 2008 (U.S. data). “In 2008, China was the United States’s second largest trading partner, its third largest export market, and its largest source of imports”
• Approximately 24% of Chinese exports go to the United States

Source: Congressional Research Service (PDF)

In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan sets down four principles for healthy eating. They are…

1. Pay More, Eat Less.

The American food system has for more than a decade devoted its energies to quantity and price rather than to quality. Yes, you can find exceptional food in America, and increasingly so, but historically the guiding principle has been, in the slogan of one supermarket chain, to “pile it high and sell it cheap.”  To make the overall recommendation to “pay more, eat less” more palatable, consider that quality itself, besides tending to cost more, may have a direct bearing on the quantity you’ll want to eat. The better the food, the less of it you need to feel satisfied. Choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories.

2. Do All Your Eating at a Table. No, a desk is not a table.

3. Don’t Get Your Fuel From the Same Place Your Car Does.

American gas stations now make more money selling food (and cigarettes) than gasoline, but consider what kind of food this is: except perhaps for milk and water, it’s all highly processed nonperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become processed corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.

4. Try Not to Eat Alone.

Americans are increasingly eating in solitude. Though there is research suggesting that light eaters will eat more when they dine with others (probably because they spend more time at the table), for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we’re less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching.

[Posted by Corinne Lestch]

In her book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell writes, “Discounting plays many tricks on the human mind, and among the more intriguing is the influence of discounting on our relationship to the purchase itself.” Many times we think we are getting the better deal when we pay less for something, and, as consumers, we light up at the thought of getting a “deal” or “bargain.” But whether we are conscious of it, whether we just grudgingly accept it, we are getting played by a market that has reshaped itself to anticipate how we think. Here are a few of the ways sellers have put knowlege of human psychology to work in the service of their bottom line. They’re all probably familiar–and we all probably fall for them again and again.

Seeing the world in 5s and 10s

Retailers are onto the fact that we think in multiples of five and ten. We would balk at a price of $96.08. In our minds, this price should be, and most often is, either two cents more or eight cents less.

Shell:

We expect and prefer our prices rounded off because, thanks to a quirk of evolution that gave us five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot, we tend to think in multiples of five and ten.

Magic number 99

Instead of making an item $10, taking that penny away $9.99 tends to work magic in our minds. (Other examples: $19.99 instead of $20, $299.99 instead of $300).

Shell:

…Beginning in 1880 or so the magical number nine started creeping into prices. Even though we all ‘know’ this trick…the penny reduction lures by conveying the ‘cheaper’ message subliminally. And, sorry to say, we are fooled every time.

All Low Prices Aren’t Equal

We like bargains if we think we’re getting quality — something retailers plan for.

Shell:

The trick for retailers – and certainly low-price retailers – is not necessarily to ensure that their products are the best they can be but to associate the product with quality in consumers’ minds. Once quality is assumed – as it is for many branded products – a lower price is a plus. When quality is in dispute, as it is when we buy things we know nothing about at flea markets or eBay, low price can be a negative.

Price versus value

When a shirt or a necklace is discounted, we may not mind buying it because they are non-essentials, items of comparatively little value. But when selling something like a car, people want to make sure they are getting value and would rather pay more – in their minds, the value is better than if the price is lowered and the car stays in the same condition.

Shell:

I consulted a number of friends and colleagues and also a neighbor who by odd coincidence had sold her daughter’s Honda CRV earlier that year. She suggested I raise the price. Within a week the car – scratches and all – was sold to a young architect.

Keeping the Rat Pack away

Outlet malls are strategically-placed shopping centers with sales and discounts galore, but they also serve as a haven for many stay-at-home moms, restless teenagers and senior citizen “mall-walkers.” To discourage these people from getting too comfortable, the outlet malls make sure the revolving doors keep swinging – more people coming out makes sure more people can go in to spend money – by making it less amenable than a regular mall.

Shell:

…Many outlet developers follow what might be called the ‘Golden Arches’ approach to social engineering. At McDonald’s and many other fast-food restaurants, the lighting tends to be unflattering fluorescents, and the seats are bolted to the floor at an awkward distance from the tables. The purpose of this is not to prevent theft of the chairs, as many think, but to discourage elders, teenagers, and other undesirables from getting comfortable and congregating for hours over a small coffee, or an order of fries.

What are the greatest political films of all time? Stuart Klawans, film critic for The Nation, runs down his top 25 in The Nation Guide to the Nation, the essential guide to small businesses, cultural institutions, activist organizations, and gathering places, and more for the millions of progressives from coast to coast. Klawans, whose criticism and reviews won the 2007 National Magazine Award, offers his list as “Notes Toward A Filmography Of the Left.” Herewith, ten of his picks, chosen at random. For the full list, see The Nation Guide, available at Progressive Book Club.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

A Grin Without a Cat (1997)

Hearts and Minds (1974)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Modern Times (1936)

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Bicycle Thief (1948)

High School (1968)

Life is to Whistle (1998)

Which films would make your “greatest” list?