A Rare Book

I've got a book for you, friend.

It's that rarest of books found today in the late hours of mankind: a collection of short stories that will break your heart, not with profound truths (though you'll find them here, over and over again like little stones in a brook) but with a precise and brutal kind of honesty almost unheard of in our fiction. It is even rarer still because it is a first book, and such honesty is hardly ever found in young writers.

The book, Girl Trouble, by author Holly Goddard Jones is one of the finest collections I have ever read, and one of the bravest. Brave, first, because writing short stories today is in itself an act of defiant bravery. Our culture no longer reads them, no longer accepts them, and the short story is winding down a narrow and stoney path that may end with it tumbling over the edge into oblivion. At the bottom it may meet up with epic poetry and iambic pentameter. Anything is possible.

Brave, more so, because Holly Jones lays out, story by story, emotional honesties that cut deep, that draw blood. There is the wounded mother of the story Parts, who finds herself unable to move past the brutal murder of her only daughter. She hates her husband because he is able to do what she cannot, put his life back together. But even after their divorce and his remarriage, Jones shows us an even more bitter and human truth: the mother cannot, in spite of her hate, deny that her husband is a good and decent man.

Such contradictions are wadings out into murky water, a place where few writers dare to go. Most of us want tidy answers, simple truths, with no complications. If a character hates, they hate completely. If they love, their love is absolute.

But being human is a contradiction. And the best of our writers hold the oppositions together.

What may be most stunning of all is Jones's ability to take tabloid scenarios and turn them on their head, finding the emotional core of stories we would otherwise dismiss as juicy gossip. She brings us into the world of the high school girls basketball coach who is having an affair with his star player, the life of a tired, worn down father who's only son is accused of raping a fifteen-year-old girl, the young man who must come to terms with the fact that he's fallen in love with his best friend, another young man, and his own first sexual experience, which turns tragic.

Painted broadly, they are the usual plots of smutty stories. In Jones's hands, they break you. They haunt you. They make you understand just why it is we read at all.

If the short story is to survive, we will need more writers like Holly Jones. More writers this brave, this honest.

Treat yourself and hunt down this debut, because I have a feeling you're going to be hearing Miss Jones's name quite a bit in the future.

A Letter From My Buddy John (Grisham)

I got a note from my old pal today, asking for some help with a righteous cause. Thought I’d pass it on to everybody here, because I happen to agree with it and will be sending my buddy John a few dollars.

If you feel so moved by the following, I’ll be taking up a collection to send all at once. If you’re interested in pitching in, let me know here on the blog and you can send me a check or hand me some cash the next time you see me. Then I’ll send them all in together.

What Johnny Wrote:

I’m writing to you about Morris Dees, an Alabama lawyer and a friend, who needs your help in his fight to put dangerous hate groups out of business.

Much like myself, Morris grew up on a small cotton farm and went to law school in the Deep South. Soon after her graduated, Klansmen bombed a Birmingham church, killing four little black girls. It was a tragedy that would eventually change Morris’ life.

Leaving behind a successful business career, Morris began taking on highly unpopular cases—the kind of cases I’ve written about in my books. In 1971, he founded the renowned Southern Poverty Law Center to carry on his fight for justice.

Since then, Morris and his colleagues have filed a series of lawsuits that have put dangerous hate groups out of business. More than two dozen people have been convicted in connection with plots to kill Morris or blow up his offices because of his courageous work.

A recent Ted Koppel documentary highlighted the $7 million verdict Morris won against the United Klans for lynching a black youth. This was the same Klan group that was responsible for the church bombing that killed the four little girls in Birmingham. Morris’ case bankrupted the group.

Morris and the Law Center have an impressive track record. But their work is far from over. That’s why they need your help.

Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by more than 50 percent. The backlash against Obama’s election in certain quarters and the tough economic times create a perfect storm for their continued growth.

Just last year, Morris won $2.5 million verdict against the leader of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) and one of his lieutenants for the brutal beating of a teenager in Kentucky. Just days before Morris took the IKA to court, federal agents arrested a member of an IKA splinter group for plotting to assassinate Obama.

Law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, depend upon the Law Center for up-to-date information about the hate groups. CBS News has reported that the Center has “cracked cases that even the FBI couldn’t solve.”

In addition to suing hate groups, the Law Center supplies schools across the country with free education material through its Teaching Tolerance project. It’s a reflection of Morris’ belief that it’s as important to teach acceptance in the classroom as it is to fight hate in the courtroom.

Bill Moyers has called Teaching Tolerance “a bold move into America’s classrooms to curb the rising tide of racial hatred.” As school budgets are slashed during the economic downturn, teachers in increasing numbers will look to the Center for its free, award-winning teaching resources.

Morris and the Southern Poverty Law Center are doing vital work in our nation’s courtrooms and classrooms. As long as hate groups seek to divide us, their work will be crucial to our nation’s health.

Morris and the Law Center never charge their clients any legal fees, and they accept no government money. I urge you to support them in whatever way you can. Just as importantly, I urge you to promote justice and tolerance in your community. Standing together, we can make a difference in our great country.

John


These guys really do have an impressive record (I looked), and I believe their work is indeed vital to our national health. If anyone else agrees, let me know and you can contribute as well. Or, if you’re interested in sending a donation on your own, let me know and I’ll email you the proper info.

Nothing to Fear

It is an interesting idea on the table these days, heard not just here but that I have read elsewhere for months in newspapers and magazines and online, that our government is so large and so powerful and so terrifying that we should not allow it to fix the problems facing us today.

We stand in the wake of an economic ruin. The rubble is all around us, and the smoke is still rising. It is no mystery as to the spark which let off the bomb. Massive greed fueling an unregulated marketplace allowed everyone to overreach…and the topple was, my friends, a foregone conclusion.

Yet, even now, there are those still moving through the ruin waving flags and clamoring upon the wreckage and shouting to all of us that it was not corporate greed that led us here, that it was not private enterprise that is at fault, that it was not deregulation which brought us to our knees. There are still those who shout to the few rafters which remain that this is not the market’s fault, and that if we change the rules now we will never recover.

Government, they say, is what we should fear.

The truth is something different.

For we should fear neither private business nor government, as businessmen are our neighbors and government is ourselves. We must first recognize this fact if we are to take hold of our democracy and steer the ship to a better course. Recognize it, because until we do we remain paralyzed by our fear.

American democracy is not a battle between the private sector and the government. It is a partnership between the two, but each side can, and has, made a grasp for power which can overthrow this balance.

In our infancy, our founding fathers fought a political tyranny. They overthrew a government which controlled the lives and destinies of the average American, at a whim, through inherited political power. This royalist privilege gave power to a government which had no consent of the governed, and they never would.

Our forefathers fought and died to break this tyranny, and to leave to us the rights we have today, which they knew from firsthand experience were worth dying for.

Today, the pendulum has swung, but the system is once again out of balance, and the result is the same.

The same tyranny exists today, as it did before, but instead of political power it is economic power which regulates our lives. And this power has slowly become concentrated in the hands of the very, very few, and their hold of the lives of very, very many is just as strong and dug in as the grasp of King George all those years ago.

We constantly hear the cry today for the ‘free market.’ But when power resides in the hands of only a few, the market is no longer free. Instead of free enterprise, we have privileged enterprise, and the average man and woman is granted privilege only when it pleases the corporation.

We have been here before, in 1929, when corporate America overstepped…and fell. At the time, one man recognized this for what it was. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, in the midst of the Great Depression, speaking of the new economic royalists, that they had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”

As Americans we need to look ourselves blankly in the mirror and sober up to our reality. For the ship is sinking, the water is rushing in, and we need every sober hand on deck, bucket in hand and strong back ready.

The time for finger-pointing has come and passed. One Obama/GE is as good as a Bush/Exxon-Mobile. And neither matters much unless we change the way we do our business, the way we run our government.

We need, desperately, to embrace the level-headed wisdom that nothing is sane at the extremes; the firmest ground is in the middle.

Political autocracy on the one side is a roadmap for tyranny. At the other end, so is unregulated free-market capitalism.

President Obama, if he is lucky and talented and skillful enough, may be able to bring us back from the brink. To do so, he will need to break the backs of the mighty corporations which own and control this nation. That will not be an easy task, and there will be much decrying of socialism! and communism! as he tries to do so. But these cries, which claim that President Obama is attempting to overthrow American institutions, are merely the cries of those in power who wish not to lose it.

But the time has come.

If we are lucky, Teddy’s big stick is still there, gathering dust in a White House closet. And if we’re lucky, Obama will find it rests comfortably in his hands.

Sharing a Thought

I was reading from Teddy Roosevelt's collected letters and speeches this morning (the Library of America edition) and came across this little selection, which I found worthy of sharing.

From a speech given in September, 1901:

"No hard and fast rule can be laid down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man, between interest and interest. All that can be said is that it is highly undesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual initiative, and, on the other hand, that in a constantly increasing number of cases we shall find it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment...

"Yet more and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures; particularly as regards the great business combinations which derive a portion of their importance from the existence of some monopolistic tendency. The right should be exercised with caution and self-restraint; but it should exist, so that it may be invoked if the need arises."

I think if old Teddy was around these days, he'd need that big stick of his more than ever.