Staring at Goats

Jon Ronson seems an unlikely investigative journalist. Yet he’s managed to infiltrate some of the most secretive societies in the world, including the Klu Klux Klan and the US military. Partly because he asked. And partly because he presents as so utterly unthreatening. In person, Ronson is crumpled and affable, a Woody Allenish character with a street-smart wardrobe. There’s not a hard edge in sight.

People who believe in very strange things are at the core of his bestselling books, Them and The Men Who Stare at Goats. Ronson’s unique talent is to portray his fringe dwellers as they are – in shades of light and dark – rather than viewing them as caricatures from under ironically arched eyebrows. “I don’t like the people who do the kinds of things that I do, but are just there to mock,” he says.

Them follows a mismatched band of extremists, bound only by their shared belief in Bilderberg, a shadowy group that rules the world from a secret room. Ronson, a self-described ‘nebbish, urbane Jew’ hung out with Klansmen, gun-toting isolationists, white supremacists, and Omar, a London-based Islamic fundamentalist who funds his plans to overthrow the government with his Social Security payments. Most shockingly of all, he stumbled upon a secret Bilderberg meeting and crashed an owl-burning ritual at San Francisco’s Bohemian Grove, both attended by, well . . . the people who rule the world.

It was during the infamous owl-burning ritual, surrounded by world leaders fervently chanting “Burn him!”, that Ronson had the germ of an idea that became The Men Who Stare At Goats. “I thought, these are people of wealth and power, and they’re just as crazy as Omar!”

The Men Who Stare at Goats, Ronson’s alternately hilarious and disturbing account of ‘our’ crazies delves deep into the recesses of the US military, where he uncovers an underground network of highly-placed men who believe they can walk through walls, literally stare goats to death, and psychically spy on their enemies.

At the root of these bizarre theories is The First Earth Battalion, a manual for an alternative military by Hawaiian-based Vietnam veteran Jim Channon. Declaring that the post-Vietnam US army “doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful”, the 125-page document suggests, among other things, that soldiers be able to bend metal with their minds, walk through walls, and see into the future.

“I think Jim is really pragmatic,” says Ronson. “He never really thought that people could walk through walls.” The efforts of some literal-minded military members to train themselves to be supernatural makes for hilarious reading (so long as you don’t think about the government money spent in the process). However, the stories about the savvy soldiers who more accurately read Channon’s message to aim for the impossible are not so funny.

When the story broke that the military had been torturing prisoners in a shipping container in Iraq by blasting songs from Sesame Street and Barney and Friends at them, the whole world was laughing. But Ronson, halfway through his research on unorthodox military methods, knew that something wasn’t right. Digging deeper, he had his suspicions confirmed that whatever they were doing, it was neither cute nor funny. Ronson was sent a photograph of a blindfolded Iraqi on his knees in that shipping container. He was screaming so hard it looked like he was laughing.

“We had the wool pulled over our eyes so effortlessly,” sighs Ronson, who is convinced that the activity was linked to Channon’s ideas about using sound frequencies to disorient enemies. “For all our wise urbanity, we get tricked by a gag. That was pretty shocking to me.” Approximately two weeks after Jon received the photograph, the Abu Ghraib photographs – which weren’t received with quite the same hilarity – hit the headlines.

Perhaps surprisingly, Ronson doesn’t consider himself a political person. “I think the last four years has turned everyone political,” he says. “I sort of hate Bush like everyone else does. But I’m a humanist. I’m much more interested in people, and what makes them tick. I think that’s what makes me better than Michael Moore.”

We both laugh quite hysterically for a moment before he quickly adds “I’m half-joking of course”, then goes on to explain. “If you’re too political, you run the risk of being a polemicist. That’s lying, when you take out the half of the facts that don’t fit within your argument. Polemicism is bad for the left. All of the left’s big stars these days are liars, just by the nature of what they do.” He pauses. “I don’t mean that cruelly. Some of my best friends do that.”

Maybe it’s this brand of refreshing candour (the kind that allows him to admit that his team is headed by liars) that convinces people to tell him their secrets – particularly a wartime US military.

Sales of The Men Who Stare at Goats (100,000 copies in the US and Britain) certainly don’t seem to have hurt The First Earth Battalion. Recently discovered offshoots include the development of the ‘gay bomb’. Combined with a stink bomb, the weapon would hopelessly confuse enemy forces, who would find themselves both attracted to and repelled by each other. (It failed, of course.) Only a week ago, the Americans revealed that their trained dolphins, armed with poison darts, had escaped during Hurricane Katrina, posing a potential threat to scuba divers in the region. And the fabled goat starer (a civilian who runs a martial arts academy) still makes regular trips to Fort Bragg to teach his death stare techniques.

“Rumsfeld is asking for creative ways of fighting the war on terror. It’s a time of crisis, and in times of crisis, they turn to crazy ideas.”

Dreams From My Father is not the kind of book you’d expect from a politician, much less one who hopes to be president of the United States (and is in with a chance). Maybe that’s because it was written before he entered politics – in 1995, when Obama was the first black president of Harvard Law Review. It’s a book about growing up and coming to terms with his identity as a black man in a racially divded America, as the son of a white American woman and a black African father.

Obama’s mother was originally from Kansas, and grew up in Hawaii. She met Barack Obama Sr at the University of Hawaii, where they were both students. They married at a time when ‘mixed race’ marriages were still illegal in many US states. When Obama (Jr) was two years old, his father returned to Africa (via Harvard). He had a wife and family in Kenya, and acquired another wife when he got there – and American who followed him from Harvard and settled in Africa.

Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and (Muslim) stepfather from the age of six, where he grew up in a very different world to affluent America. His pets included a chimpanzee and crocodiles, in his backyard pond. He got up at 5am every morning to do lessons in English with his mother before he went to school. Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents when he won a scholarship to a prestigious Honolulu prep school. This represented an elevation in the family status; the most anyone had yet achieved.

His first day at school, a redheaded girl asked to touch his hair and was offended when he refused. A boy asked him if his father ate people. He was one of only a handful of African American students. From the outset, he felt his outsider status, though he fit in more as time went by.

One of the things he struggles with is trying to learn how to be an African American man, with no real role models to speak of. The closes thing he has is his grandfather’s friend, an ageing poet. He turns to pop culture, particularly basketball.

He writes: “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” Obama’s varied background and upbringing means that he is adept at moving between worlds and speaking the language of different people from different backgrounds, in a language they will relate to: an ideal skill for campaigning for president.

He made his first speeches at university in LA, on affirmative action: “I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions. It was a discovery that made me hungry for words. Not words to hide behind but words that could carry a message, support an idea.” Observed “the power of words to transform”. The seeds of his future political career are sown, but also the seeds of his style as a speechmaker – a politician whose way with words is compared to Kennedy and Lincoln. It’s the start of the concept that words and ideas are important, not just window dressing. After he makes his first speech, a student comes up to him after his speech and tells him that he moved her, that he spoke from the heart.

Jonathan Raban writes, in an absolutely wonderful article in the London Review of Books: “He courts his listeners not as legions of the blissful but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognisable as their own”. This memoir is about alienation, about looking for identity, for a place and a people to call home. Obama is a lifelong outsider looking in, and this memoir is full of close observations of people and society.

Hillary and Obama have many similar ideas about the changes that need to happen in American society. The big difference in their positions is how those changes should happen. Raban makes the point that Hillary is “a classic technocrat and rationalist”. For her, change comes from the top down. For Obama, change is from the bottom up – inspiring and organising a shift in the popular consciousness. Traditionally, this approach is associated with the political right. His style – from his organising days, and even more, from his ambition to be a community organiser, is to listen to people’s experiences, problems, hopes and dreams, and build practical solutions and policies from what he hears. It’s the opposite of bringing a set of beliefs to a problem and imposing them – top down. It’s also why he’s very good at engaging people on an individual basis, why he formulates answers to questions in interviews and doesn’t just use the questions as springboards for pre-prepared answers.

The Audacity of Hope is Obama’s policy book, specifically outlining his views on various policy issues and the way government should function. It’s the book tour that segued into a political campaign. 

But Dreams From My Father offers a window into the inner workings of the man. It’s a much more unguarded look into the way he thinks, and the circumstances that made him the politician he is today. It’s a beautifully written, sharply intelligent, sometimes provocative book about race and identity, one that contains echoes of Malcolm X’s autobiography in the way that it links one man’s story and political evolution to the world he sees around him. (Interestingly, when Obama turned to literature looking for answers to his identity crisis, Macolm X’s book was the one that really resonated with him.)

Read Dreams from my Father to understand the presidential hopeful Barack Obama. But, more than that, read it because it’s a fantastic book, and would be worth reading if Obama worked at the local milk bar.

JC (reviewed on Triple R Breakfasters, March 2008)

“It’s so weird to see Germaine Greer walking around,” says one of Australia’s leading literary figures over a glass of champagne at an Adelaide Writer’s Week party. “I mean, it’s Germaine Greer!”

Minutes later, I’m standing on North Terrace, waiting for a cab. Germaine Greer is just metres away, deep in conversation by the kerbside. She’s off to the next event, as are we. There are no cabs in sight. A woman on a bicycle passes slowly along the footpath. Germaine looks at her.

“We could get a dink,” she murmurs. As the woman draws near, she calls out to her. “Hey! Can I have a dink?”

The woman stops short, planting her feet from the pedals to the ground. She stares at her. She says something I can’t hear and thrusts out her hand. Germaine smiles and shakes it and they stand talking for a while before the woman rides off again, her wheels teetering a little, her face glowing.

 “I think there’s been more muddled thinking by muddled people on Germaine Greer than on any other person in recent times,” said novelist Deborah Robertson, speaking on a Writer’s Week panel about The Female Eunuch, a panel made extraordinary by the fact that Germaine herself was on it.

Indeed, the pleasant grey-haired woman who stopped to chat with a stranger on a bike bore no resemblance to the savage harpy she is often depicted as. Nor did the passionate – and, yes, fiery – speaker who wiped tears from under her glasses as about 2000 people rose to give her a thunderous standing ovation at Writer’s Week.

I attended the session on my way to the airport – and only just managed to make it – and was very, very pleased that I did. Germaine’s speech rates as one of the three most inspiring talks I’ve heard (the others being the first time I heard Julian Burnside speak about asylum seekers and Robert Fisk at the last Adelaide Writers’ Week).

Here’s a taste of it:

“It is not true that I sneer at Australia,” she began. “If I groan at the mismanagement of this continent, it is not because I despise it and its people. It’s because both the land and its people deserve better.”

Greer said that she had been “spat upon in public places” because of the distortion of what she said about the notorious Guardian piece on Steve Irwin, which she hinted she will write about in the future. On the topic, she said that she is critical of Steve Irwin because “his approach to conservation is profoundly misguided, and that’s why I did it.”

“You’ll have to believe me that when I say things that are bitter about what is going on here, it is because my heart is breaking, it is not because I feel superior,” she went on. “I have just driven through the Coorong, which is becoming the Dead Sea, because it so excessively saline. I know that the Murray is already a salt lagoon and not a river at all. And our rulers are sitting around chewing the fat about a plan that they might one day arrive at. It’s A DISGRACE! And you should be ANGRY!”

“Four years ago on the Bert Newton program, I said to him that all the people in Melbourne should rise up as one to declaim against the channel deepening project that will destroy Port Philip Bay … Now, as usual, we’ve left it to kids on jet-skis to throw themselves in front of the Queen of the Netherlands, which would not be allowed to do in Rotterdam what it is doing in Port Philip Bay. Why? Because the Dutch GIVE a shit!”

“I wrote The Female Eunuch because I couldn’t really do anything else. I was, as usual, cross. I was cross because I was being told by cultural analysts that giving women the vote had been a total bust. They’d done nothing with it, they hadn’t instituted a new world order, they had not solved the problem of international warfare, blah blah blah. And I found myself saying, ‘you gave us the vote because you KNEW we could do nothing with it. You KNEW that we would be operating within sclerotic institutions that were incapable of change.’”

“And then it occurred to me that one of the arguments I was hearing, and particularly from Betty Friedan, was that after World War II women had been sexualised because they’d been sent back home to have babies and they were suddenly wearing push-up bras and big skirts and lots of lipstick.”

“And I thought, what’s that got to do with sexuality? Isn’t sexuality that other thing – that elan vital, that curiosity, that, the thing that makes us take risks, the thing that makes us fall in love – that thing – that thing that makes us endure the vicissitudes of a blood sport … Sex is a blood sport. I will allow no mitigation of that basic sentiment … And so I wrote a book, the best book I could write, the first thing I had ever written.”

“I had written lots of things before, for the underground press, you know, I’d done my apprenticeship, and I set about writing a book, and at first I had no real idea. Then one day I realised that the women I wanted to read the book had no time, and I had to write short things. I had to write a lavatory book that you could actually swallow a bit of before you went back to what your daily chores might be. And so I wrote the book the way did.”

“Now what is extraordinary is not the book. A book doesn’t exist until it is read. What was extraordinary was the way women read that book. And they filled in its inadequacies; they built out its juvenilities. They turned it into a phenomenon and I am immensely honoured. All those women who say to me ‘you changed my life’, there are some of you here today. And you know what I always say? No, I didn’t. YOU changed your life and if I was of any help to you in that process I am truly, truly honoured and grateful. You owe me NOTHING. I owe you EVERYTHING. I owe you the courage to go on doing things the way I do them.”

AND:

“There was a lot of rubbish when I first appeared on the scene. I was supposed to be the one good-looking feminist. I was no better looking then than I am now. I was the feminist that men liked. As if! As if I gave a shit!”

Germaine Greer has a book in progress with Melbourne University Press, On Rage. I can’t wait.

An interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon

Thomas Homer-Dixon seems the archetypal academic: greying hair, pale blue shirt tucked into pressed trousers, blazer folded by his side. He speaks in measured tones: earnestly, urgently, with a rising undercurrent of frustration that only occasionally spills over. It would be impossible, in his line of work, not to be frustrated. 

Thomas Homer-Dixon is visiting Melbourne to talk about The Upside of Down, a book that looks at why the world is in real trouble and what we need to do in response. He identifies five major stresses that are building to a crisis point: climate change, energy crises (particularly the approach of peak oil), environmental pressures, population stress and economic instability and inequity, which could trigger global conflict.  Added to those stresses are two forces that will amplify the effects of breakdown if and when it occurs: our much-lauded global connectivity, and the increasing ability of small groups to wreak large-scale destruction, best demonstrated by September 11.  

“As I finished each chapter, I would feel like I’d been kicked in the stomach, as I learned more and more,” says Homer-Dixon.  In the coming years, we will face not one or two, but several global crises at once. The question is not if breakdown will occur, but how severe it will be – and if we can learn from it, to change things for the better.  “Often it’s in times of crisis that people are most creative and there’s the greatest opportunity for making real change. What matters is people seeing the evidence outside their windows.” 

Australians, he observes, are at the forefront of global awareness when it comes to climate change – because of the drought. It’s hard to deny that climate change exists or that the world is changing when it becomes illegal to water your garden or fill your swimming pool from the tap. Melting Arctic ices are ringing alarm bells in Canada; climate change has topped opinion polls as an issue for voters for the past 18 months. This year’s unprecedentedly warm North American winter has created “a palpable shift in attitude” there, too – even if it’s not reflected by the government. 

As we think about solutions for the immense problems we face, we also need to think about what we want them to look like. What is most important to us? What kind of world do we want for our children? If we don’t do that, says Homer-Dixon, our solutions will be based on maintaining the lifestyles we have rather than challenging the status quo – what he calls “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solutions”. 

“Well, that’s probably not going to work.” He waves around at the hotel we’re in, encased in glass several floors above the city below. “This is nice, this climate-controlled environment, but is this what we want? I’d rather my kids be able to get outside and walk on the seashore like I did when I was a kid.” 

The biggest obstacle to change is not technological: it’s social. The kinds of radical, large-scale changes we need to make in order to avert or survive global crisis will need to be made by our politicians. Those kinds of changes will be inconvenient. They will cost money. They will not win votes. 

“We need to think decades ahead, not just a few years. Politicians aren’t going to do that unless we expect them to.”

first published in The Big Issue, 2007

 Nicola Barker’s Darkmans was the ‘dark horse’ of this year’s Man Booker shortlist.  As we all know, it didn’t win, but in my humble opinion, Darkmans is a literary masterpiece – and one of the most endlessly fascinating books I have ever read.  

Reading Darkmans is a bit like watching one of those nature documentaries where the camera lingers on an utterly ordinary, banal, patch of lawn, slowly drilling down to capture the intricate anthropological detail of the insect life buzzing among the blades.  

This 800-plus page novel takes place over just a few days in Ashford, England, a nondescript town most noted for its position at the mouth of the English Channel Tunnel. Its characters are similarly ordinary – on the surface, at least.  There is Beede, a formerly passionate community activist, now hardened against modern life by a disappointing crusade that ended in the significant loss of a part of the town’s history. His son Kane is a prescription drug dealer who has ‘gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti’.   

Darkmans opens with this determinedly opposite father and son meeting by accident in a sordid cafe, the scene of a drug deal. It is here that Kane meets his father’s friend Elen, a chiropodist with a mentally disturbed husband, Dory, and a decidedly eerie young son, Fleet. Elen once treated Kane’s long-dead mother and remembers him as her stoic carer, an observation that delivers the first of many chinks in Kane’s meticulously assembled armour. This chance meeting is also the beginning of Kane’s reawakened interest – or obsession – with his father.  

Other characters include Kane’s anorexic ex-girlfriend, Kelly; a Kurdish immigrant, Gaffar, who becomes Kane’s right-hand man (and suffers from a fear of salad); a seemingly proper academic with a wild side and a mystery-loving ice queen art forger who seems to hold the key to several secrets. Nicola Barker has said that as a writer she is ‘presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters’ with the desire ‘to make them understood’.  

Nobody is who they seem in Darkmans. Kelly, who comes from a ‘notorious’ family of slackers and swindlers, is actually a misunderstood sweetheart, despite her short skirts and rough drawl. ‘Venerable’ Beede, who presents himself as straight-up and transparent, is embroiled in secrets involving debt, desire and revenge. And Kane, introduced as ‘easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral)’, is gradually revealed to be not only kinder, but far smarter than he looks.  

‘Darkmans is really about history’ says Barker. ‘The history’s the missing character.’ History is most obviously embodied by John Scogin, an infamous court jester (and favourite of Edward IV) who seems to possess Dory, and, at times, both Kane and Beede. Most of what we know about Scogin comes from six-year-old Fleet, who solemnly tells stories of ‘John’s’ escapades, often at highly incongruous or inappropriate moments. Fleet’s stories often echo earlier, fragmented, versions, as dreamed or acted out by other characters.  

But history is everywhere. The recent past is the key to the true nature of most of the characters. Beede’s manic opposition to progress is rooted in bitter experience. The icy lack of rapport between him and Kane begins with Beede’s reaction against Kane’s mother’s smothering presence. Kane’s job as a dispenser of ‘pain relief’ can be traced to his caretaking role with his mother and witnessing her suffering. Dory’s schizophrenia is related to his move to Germany as a child and his wrenching separation from the English language.  

‘All struggles could be encapsulated as some kind of battle between an object’s natural function and its actual – often thwarted – circumstances,’ observes Elen.  There are multiple interpretations of characters and events, and it is up to the reader to decide which to go with, and how deep to delve. For instance, there are plausible psychological, supernatural or even spiritual explanations for many of the strange happenings in the book.  

None of those explanations are without holes, but that is (I’m sure) part of the point of it. In life, the truth is not black and white. No one narrator is ever completely reliable. Motives are usually mixed.  

This is the kind of novel that offers fresh waves of understanding on a second reading, as the clues planted early in the novel and resolved at the end are encountered anew. Why does Beede keep labelled boxes in his bedroom, containing, among other things, a cat and a chipped mug? Why does Elen find a hospital-issue spoon in her pocket on the beach? And why is Gaffar afraid of lettuce?   

Darkmans is an intellectual adventure of the highest order – and entertaining into the bargain. No wonder it took four years to write.  

first published/broadcast on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, November 2007       

The overwhelming tone of some of these articles is: ‘yes, he was a great asshole as well as a great writer, but who will replace him?’ The Sydney Morning Herald bemoans the replacement of “characters such as Mailer” who “fame fitted well” with “Idol winners and reality television contestants”. The UK’s Independent complains that the dream of the Great American Novel will die along with Mailer’s generation (including Updike, Roth and Bellow), writing of the current crop of young writers that: “It’s like seeing the faces on Mount Rushmore replaced by snapshots on Facebook.”I don’t think the next generation of would-be writers are turning to Shannon Noll or the latest Big Brother tartlet for inspiration. The next generation of American literary ‘characters’ includes impressive writers like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Foer – all of them still mid-career.

Norman Mailer is survived by an impressive body of work. Unlike the man, it is said to be well worth visiting.

From The Big Issue, 3/1/07