Book review by Michael Isenberg.
On the second night all the creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.
There is some fine writing in Ursula Le Guin’s collection of blog posts, No Time to Spare. No less than one would expect from a writer of her stature, or a book that won the Hugo Award this weekend for Best Related Work.
As a former cat owner, I rather enjoyed “The Annals of Pard,” who only eats kibble. “I could put a piece of bacon on top of his kibbles and he would eat them and leave it. I could lay a filet of sole down on him and he would shake it off with contempt and go away.” Bacon and fish aren’t food. Only kibble is food.
The accounts of the non-cat parts of Ms. Le Guin’s daily life are equally entertaining. I was riveted by a four page instruction manual on how to eat a soft-boiled egg, thereby proving her claim in an earlier essay that a storyteller with “the narrative gift” “can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and a laugh riot.” Granted, my fascination with the egg story had much to do with learning that the egg spoon is a thing. Discovering new breakfast utensils isn’t quite as big a thrill for me as discovering new cocktail paraphernalia, but it’s in the same ballpark.
No Time to Spare is not itself “a laugh riot”—Ms. Le Guin prefers sprinkling gentle humor throughout rather than indulging in ROFL comedy. Most of the essays are quite serious. But there is an amusing account of getting drunk with John Steinbeck and a couple tongue in cheek posts. A sarcastic lecture on the utter lack of imagination in modern swearing uses the f- and s-words in just about every sentence. Another essay, “Vegempathy,” calls out vegetarians for the cruelty they inflict on their food, what with the cutting and the boiling, not to mention the tearing apart with teeth. Only by subsisting on “the unsullied purity of the O in the atmosphere and in H2O” will humans be able to “live in true amity with all animals and all vegetables.” Sadly, any such movement “is fated to be, in each individual case, rather short-lived.”
Ms. Le Guin’s literary observations benefit from her being born at the right time to spend her young adult years in the '50s and '60s, when American liberals had woken up to the fact that there was great literature out there that wasn’t Western, but before they turned their back on the Western canon as the work of “dead, white males.” Thus, her discussion of plot structure is informed both by Homer (or “Papa H” as she calls him) and the Mahabharata.
The book takes its title from her musing about aging. When asked in a Harvard alumni survey what she did in her spare time, her response was, “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.” Her thoughts on the subject can be summed up as: the young have no idea what’s in store for them. So they should stop saying foolish things like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” or telling the senior in their life who’s chronically in pain from sciatica about that ninety year old uncle who walks eight miles a day. “All I’m asking people who aren’t yet really old is…try not to diminish old age itself,” she writes. “Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.” It seems she has come to terms with old age, with grace and equanimity.
She shows no such equanimity—or grace—when it comes to politics and economics however, and on those topics I found myself in disagreement with Ms. Le Guin more often than not. Her rant on the “racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right” is such a cartoon that I wonder if she ever met an actual conservative. Growing up in Berkeley and making her home in Portland, perhaps not. An otherwise heartwarming story about a child who, thanks to a misunderstanding, thought there were horses in the bedroom, had to include a gratuitous dig implying that George W. Bush was Hitler. As with too much political writing these days, the double standards abound. Ms. Le Guin freely acknowledges that she was an angry Second Wave feminist during the 1970s. On the subject of getting angry, she writes, “We were right to do so…We were rousing people to feel and see injustice.” But two pages later, she calls the anger of the Tea Party an “orgy of self-indulgent rage” that threatens the survival of the republic. To her credit, she does call out her own team when she feels it has done wrong, in particular “Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate” with Romney.
Much of her anger is directed at capitalism, which she has long opposed in her writings. But despite Ms. Le Guin’s years of practice, No Time to Spare demonstrates no real insight into economics, merely colorful insults and tired clichés.
Capitalism is “fundamentalist” and “dogmatic,” she writes, capable of “providing security for none but the strongest profiteers.” It’s “social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw.” Economic growth is a “tumor” and a “cancer.” Capitalism is synonymous with environmental destruction, as if we still lived in the 1950s and motorcycle couriers in Los Angeles have to wear gas masks. Never mind that the capitalist countries passed clean air acts while the communist countries, with no property rights, and therefore no concept of externalities, had the sorriest environmental records. Only socialism has promise, and even though it failed wherever it had been tried [at least she admits that], it would have been a great success if only it hadn’t been “run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism.” She can’t even praise the good work done by the Oregon Food Bank, without taking a swipe at Walmart, whose architecture has “the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism,” [and which has fed far more people than the Oregon Food Bank].
I only noticed two instances in the entire book where Ms. Le Guin actually backs up her accusations with statistics. In one, she claims that under American capitalism, one in three children “aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.” That statistic has been widely echoed on the left side of the political divide. But, in the first place, Ms. Le Guin doesn’t get it right: it’s one in five. And in the second place, it’s been completely debunked.
The other statistic she offers concerns income inequality during the years 2000 to 2007. From it, she makes sweeping generalizations that “increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer.” Never mind that the Bush administration wasn’t particularly capitalist, or that income inequality data doesn’t actually show whether anyone is getting richer or poorer (it only shows relative wealth), or that those seven cherry-picked years aren’t representative of the 200-year history of capitalism.
What is representative of capitalism is literally billions of people lifted out of poverty. In the words of the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, writing in National Review:
Capitalism has done more to empower people and raise living standards than any other force in history. Throughout most of human history, nearly everyone was poor. Even our wealthiest ancestors enjoyed lower standards of living than ordinary people in America today. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the masses started to enjoy real and growing prosperity.
What was the difference? Capitalism and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution.
Mr. Tanner offers a number of statistics to back up his claims, but few are as remarkable as this one from Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute:
It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – that has decreased by 80 percent. You never hear about that. It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it.
80 percent of the world’s worst poverty has been eradicated in less than 40 years. That has never, ever happened before.
So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No.
It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.
I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.
As for the effect of capitalism on those who aren’t so poor, such as Ms. Le Guin—judging from the amount of travel she writes about, I gather she was reasonably comfortable—those profiteers she wrung her hands about mass produced her books and distributed them worldwide, thereby keeping her well-supplied with kibble and egg spoons.
Ms. Le Guin began her blog a month before the 2010 election, when the GOP took the House of Representatives and effectively shut down the Obama agenda. So it is not surprising, given Ms. Le Guin’s ideology, that No Time to Spare is grim in its assessment of our political future. And yet, as she is thinking about what matters, she comes to the realization that there are things more important than politics, a perspective we could all benefit from during these times of hyper-partisanship. After enjoying a couple live music performances, she writes, “I came away from both of these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit—making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.”
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. For his own take on what America would look like without capitalism, check out his 2012 comedy novel Full Asylum, available on Amazon.
Photo credit(s): Amazon.com |
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