What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Kansans just don't care about economic issues [...] Kansans have set their sights on grander things, like the purity of the nation. Good wages, fair play in farm country, the fate of the small town, even the one that we live in - all these are a distant second to evolution, which we will strike from the books, and public education, which we will undermine in a hundred inventive ways."

The main thrust of Thomas Frank's What's the matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, published in 2004, has not lost its relevance in 2015, particularly with the elections coming in the U.S. the next year. The author is trying to elucidate the phenomenon that seems beyond rational explanation: why have a large majority of people living in Kansas - the typical working class population who had solidly voted Democratic before 1980s - switched to supporting conservative Republicans? Why have they begun voting against their own economic interests? Why are there more supporters of conservative agenda among working class people than among those who profit from that agenda? Cutting taxes, reducing government, weakening regulations and customer protection - all these goals favor the rich and hurt the poor and the middle class by reducing or eliminating altogether the social safety net that covers the people who cannot afford to cover themselves. A conservative platform is always pro-business: business owners should be free to reduce salaries, cut and outsource jobs, reduce maternity benefits, avoid paying for medical care of their employees, etc. Why then do the poor people and the exploited people in Kansas vote en masse for the agenda that favors the rich and helps the economic exploiters?

Mr. Frank's answer is clear and convincing. The conservative Republican movement - unable to gain support of the working class on the economic issues - appropriated the religious and social agenda and captured the cultural anger of the working, "ordinary" people, the anger aimed at promotion of "disgusting counterculture", liberal judges, attempts to expand gun control, availability of abortion, liberal media, atheist scientists, immoral decadence, and the secular-humanist disease in general. Much of this anger comes as a backlash against the excesses of the "liberal Sixties", and anti-intellectualism is one of the main unifying themes of the conservative movement.

The leaders of the movement have managed to frame the political choices as the struggle between - on the one side - authentic, hard-working Americans, who enjoy hamburgers, cherish guns, and fervently pray to God, and - on the other - depraved, latte-guzzling, Volvo-driving, liberal, Eastern elite whose ideas are alien to the original values of the true Americans. The conservative leaders have understood that people's cultural, moral, and religious convictions drive their political choices.

The unspoken underlying motto of the conservative movement is to "socialize the risk and privatize the profits". The beauty of the monumental swindle performed by the right-wing ideologists is that the working class people - who will carry the burden of the business risks and will not participate in any of the profits - happily vote to ensure their own poverty and irrelevance, getting instead the feeling of superiority of their religious, moral, and cultural convictions.

In my view (here I need to disclaim that this paragraph is not about Mr. Frank's book) during 11 years since the book was published the situation has gotten worse: one reason is the further polarization of society caused by the universal access to Internet, which allows people to read only the news and articles with which they agree. Another reason for growing support of the conservative agenda are the obvious excesses of the liberal-backed political correctness movement, particularly in the area of diversity enforcement. Yet another new factor is the poor people's fierce resistance to the Affordable Care Act, the law that helps them get access to quality health care: in the authentic American way they prefer to not have any health care rather than to follow some socialist-flavored Canadian or European models.

What's the Matter with Kansas is a meticulously researched work (over 40 pages of notes and references) of unparalleled clarity and thoroughness. I have two critical comments: the author is passionately liberal, and his strong bias shows through his writing. His logically sound and factually correct argument and conclusions would be more effective if they were presented in a cold, unemotional style. My other gripe is that everything in the book is binary, black or white: people are either conservative or liberal. True, the polarization is increasing but there are still substantial numbers of people who agree with some tenets of each side - conservative and liberal - but disagree with some others. There are still some centrists out there.

One of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read.

Four and a half stars.


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Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Angels, it is said, are often unsure whether they pass among the living or the dead." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

When trying to characterize Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (2005) in one word, "ethereal" immediately comes to mind. Synonyms of "ethereal" are many: "delicate, exquisite, dainty, elegant, graceful, fragile, airy, fine, subtle". Except for "fragile", all these adjectives fit the book perfectly. I would add three more adjectives to specify my perception of the book: "whimsical, enchanting, and magical". Now, what do the real critics - people who unlike me can write well in English - say about Lost Paradise? Their adjectives are "luminous, numinous, glorious, dreamy, self-conscious, daring, poetic, provocative, cleansing, brief, beautiful, mysterious, radiant, imaginative, dense, layered, magical, innovative, cool, sophisticated, ironic" (the last three are courtesy of J. M. Coetzee).

Even if one can say that Lost Paradise is about angels, the novel has an earthly plot, and not an insubstantial one at that. In a stunning Prologue, Mr. Nooteboom performs the best metafiction trick ever. Let's only say that suddenly - while being inside the story - we are outside of it and looking in. Highly virtuosic! Part One takes us to Australia where two young Brazilian women, girls really, fascinated with the indigenous people's culture, visit the sacred Aboriginal places. For one of the women, the narrator, this journey becomes a life-altering event, in spiritual, physical, and artistic dimensions. Towards the end of the story the women perform as angels in the Perth Angel Project (this is an event that really happened in 2000). Part Two is narrated by a middle-aged Dutch literary critic who travels to a rejuvenation clinic in Austria and is subject to sophisticated healing and anti-aging treatment. Eventually, the two stories merge - obviously angels must have helped.

While the synopsis may sound superficial, an incredible amount of weighty substance is packed into this slim volume (150 pages; Mr. Nooteboom obviously follows Italo Calvino's advice that "books ought to be short"): the dying of the Aboriginal culture, the serendipity of intersecting trajectories of human lives, the transforming power of art that lifts the human existence to transcend its earthly form, the celebration of life, the role of chance, loving as the essence of being, even the trauma of rape, and - perhaps most touchingly - the homage to the ancient humans, our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago.

This being a Cees Nooteboom's work, it is beautifully written, and the translation from Dutch by Susan Massotty is superb as well. (After the rating I am quoting a dazzling passage.) And despite all the depth, this is a very readable book! The last scenes of the first part, the vividly portrayed happenings from the Perth festival, are unforgettable.

Cees Nooteboom has joined the list of my most favorite authors. After the ascetic and serious Rituals, metafictional In the Dutch Mountains, and unforgettably beautiful The Following Story, Lost Paradise is another exceptional work by the Dutch writer. One may be stunned by how different the books are - the supreme quality of prose is the only similarity between them - which to me is one of the marks of truly great writers and artists in general; they rarely if ever repeat themselves.

A few weeks ago I asked my wife - who knows much more about serious literature than I do - to read Nooteboom's The Following Story, which has recently become one of the very best books I have ever read. She liked it, but not as much as I did. "Impenetrable", she said, "Too enigmatic." Maybe. Well, if we put these three novels on a scale of impenetrability, then The Following Story would be somewhere in the middle, with Rituals at the enigmatic end, while in Lost Paradise all is in the plain view of the reader - thus yielding a very low score on the impenetrability scale. Perhaps only the references to Milton's Paradise Lost are a little obscure.

Finally, I should add that the readers who have seen Wim Wenders' magnificent movie about two invisible angels who roam over Berlin, Wings of Desire, will find some similarities in the overall mood. Perhaps one needs angels to reflect so sharply on the human condition.

Five stars.


"I would like to say something about my body, about how I have realised, more than ever, that it will be there only once, that it coincides with what I call 'me', but I reach a point where things can no longer be described in words. One cannot talk about ecstasy. And yet that is what I mean. I have never existed as much."



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