The echoes of history in our lives

Colum McCann, whose novel Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award, engages us once again with a multinarrative work that is more ambitious, if not quite as marvelous as his previous novel. Nevertheless, it is an arresting, lyrical work that is well worth reading and savoring.

TransAtlantic (Random House, 2013, $27, 304 pages), his sixth novel, mixes historical figures with fictional characters over several centuries, all with a connection to Ireland and the United States. It distills the reverberations of history in our lives.

He begins in Newfoundland in 1919, when two aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, prepare to make the first nonstop flight across the Altantic, to Ireland. McCann captures their love of flying and their strong connection to each other: “… they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.” They both see the point of flight being “to get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.”

The next chapter is set in 1845-46 in Dublin, where Frederick Douglass has arrived on his international lecture tour after publishing his narrative of growing up in slavery. He finds welcome and sympathy for abolition but also encounters widespread famine among the Irish people.

The third chapter, set in 1998, follows Senator George Mitchell as he works on bringing bitter sides in Ireland together for peace talks. After an agreement is reached, Mitchell understands that peace will only come if enough people want it. “Generations of mothers will understand this,” he muses.

Halfway through the novel, McCann switches from stories of historical figures to fictional stories of women who had some connection to Alcock, Brown, Douglass and Mitchell. This is where the novel comes alive.

McCann opens Book Two with a vivid description of Lily Duggan tending to wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield. Lily, who was a maid in the house where Frederick Douglass was staying in Dublin, is a widowed mother who has followed her young son when he enlists. After he dies, she remarks on “this fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers.”

Lily later marries and has five sons and one daughter, Emily, who is the subject of the second chapter in Book Two. She, a writer, and her daughter, Lottie, a photographer, report on the flight of Alcock and Brown in 1919. In 1929, they travel to Ireland to visit Brown (Alcock has died).

Brown confesses that he failed to mail a letter written years earlier by Lily that Emily had given him to carry on his transatlantic flight. This letter, unopened, becomes a symbol in the novel for the history that lives within us, even if unacknowledged.

The third chapter in Book Two belongs to Lottie, who has married, has a daughter and a grandson, and loves to play tennis. Back in Chapter Three, she was the elderly woman in a wheelchair who played tennis and told Senator Mitchell he had an “awful backhand.” Now, in 1978, she visits her daughter and son-in-law at their cottage on a lake, where a tragedy soon occurs.

Finally, in Book Three, we are with Hannah, Lottie’s daughter, now alone with her dog in 2011. About to lose her cottage to the creditors, she tries to find a buyer for the unopened letter she has inherited. Despite the implausibility of such a letter remaining unopened for 92 years, we as readers want to know what it says. One of its sentences sums up the theme of this absorbing novel: “We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”

Even if not quite the feat of Let the Great World Spin, a rare gem, TransAtlantic is really good. McCann has a deft touch with language, whether describing a beach “penciled by a series of soft sand ripples” or capturing the diction of the Irish: “Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.”

What moves the narrative, finally, is the voice of women, those whose lives run parallel, in the shadows, beside the historical figures we think move history. We learn that “the ordinary people own [history] now.”

When Hannah opens that letter she realizes a lesson this book teaches: “What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s mystery in the obvious, too.”

War on the poor

The 2012 documentary The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki finally came up in my Netflix queue, and I watched it, spellbound. Afterward, I thought, had I seen it in 2012, it would have made the top five of my year’s top 10 films. And not because of its technical expertise, though it’s fine. No, because it is so important.

Some people hear that and think, I don’t want to be preached to; I don’t want to feel guilty; I don’t want to have to think about hard subjects. Your reaction is up to you, but for what it’s worth, this film offers good insights into a larger reality that may change or enhance your perspective.

House addresses the war on drugs. It looks at its beginnings during the Nixon administration, when drug abuse was not particularly a problem in terms of crime, but it drew voters. So there you go.(Interestingly, Nixon stipulated that two-thirds of the funds go toward treatment. That's far from the case today.)

The film uses historical footage and many interviews. The most engaging interviewee, in my mind, is David Simon, creator of The Wire, an outstanding series that first played on HBO. He is articulate, knowledgeable and passionate. He speaks not only from his head knowledge but from his experience as a reporter working with police in Baltimore.

The film also gets personal. Jarecki narrates it and notes that it began as an exploration of what happened to the son of the African-American woman, named Nannie, who worked as his parents’ housekeeper and helped raise him. Partly because of her being gone while working for the Jareckis, she intimates, she wasn’t around her adult son as much, and he got into drugs and eventually died of AIDS from a contaminated needle.

The film goes on to explore the judicial system that has filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders whose crime is often selling drugs. Because of harsh sentencing requirements established by Congress during the Reagan and Clinton administrations (and carried on by others), judges are handicapped in handing out sentences to those found guilty of drug offenses. Jarecki interviews a judge in Iowa who eventually resigns out of frustration about the harsh mandatory sentences.

He also interviews a prison guard in Oklahoma who loves his job but comes to see that the judicial system is broken and that most of the prisoners he oversees should not be there.

Who benefits by putting nonviolent drug offenders in prison for five to 20 years at a time? Politicians who win votes from a fickle and ignorant populace. Private prisons who rake in billions of dollars housing nonviolent prisoners at a huge cost to taxpayers (more than $20,000 per year per prisoner). Corporations who get all these poor people off the streets.

Simon says at one point, “They might as well say, Let’s get rid of the bottom 15 percent of the population.” That’s the effect of this so-called war on drugs. It destroys individual lives; it destroys communities. It costs all of us.

Simon points out that it also hurts police and fighting violent crime. He says that when police go out and arrest people for possessing drugs, they make money. First, they confiscate whatever drugs or money is on the people they arrest (and get to keep it). They get paid extra for overtime, since it takes time to do the paper work. And at the end of the month, they can say they made 60 arrests, which looks impressive to the public and their superiors. Meanwhile, a detective may work hard on a murder case and make one arrest in a month. He gets no overtime pay and little credit from his superiors because he hasn’t brought in money to the department.

In other words, the war on drugs is a moneymaker for those in power. But for most of us, it’s not. Instead it takes our resources and invests them in prisons and police rather than in education or health care. It ties up the courts with cases that need not even come to the courts.

Jarecki interviews offenders and family members. He notes that for years the war on drugs was a war primarily on young African-American men, who were filling the prisons and unable to get jobs when they got out, since they were felons.

Simon points out that when an economy fails a community, when the people there cannot find jobs that allow them to live, an alternative economy emerges. This happens all over the world and throughout history. We should not be surprised. People will try to survive. Fix the economy, create jobs that provide a living wage, and the drug trade will diminish rapidly.

Since the late 1990s, many more poor whites have entered prison because of the emergence of meth. Again, the use and sale of this drug comes out people’s desperate circumstances. Blue collar jobs have been disappearing, and people can’t find work.

If you watch House, be sure to check out the extras. In one, called “Jury Nullification,” Simon points out that juries are not required to go by the judge’s instruction or the letter of the law. They can rule as they see fit. Simon says that if he’s on a jury, he will never convict anyone charged with a nonviolent crime.

I’ll stop. This is an informative and heartbreaking film. I highly recommend it.

Graphic images in media

Should U.S. media publish graphic images of war, abortion or car accidents? Or do such images do more harm than good?

Conor Friedersdorf raises such questions in “The Gutless Press” (The Atlantic, July/August). 

He discusses coverage of the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist convicted of delivering babies alive and then murdering them. This coverage included descriptions of what Gosnell called “fetal demise” far more graphic than anything normally found in the media.

Friedersdorf points out that “members of the pro-life movement have long believed that they can win converts by confronting Americans with ‘what abortion really is’ in the most-graphic terms possible.”

On the other hand, critics of U.S. drone strikes wish “more Americans saw graphic photos of the results: the charred corpses, the severed arms and legs, the bloodied children.”

While many pro-life activists charge the U.S. media with a pro-choice bias, the fact is, writes Friedersdorf, “the American media sanitize almost all death." He adds, “During the Iraq War, an American could watch hours of TV coverage without ever seeing the dead body of a U.S. soldier.”

While the news media have grown less likely to publish explicitly violent images in recent decades, portrayals of violence in film and video games have intesified.

Why the change? Friedersdorf believes it’s about not offending the audience. “And because consumers do not want grisly images, neither do advertisers,” he writes. At the same time, the military has clamped down on access to combat scenes.

Friedersdorf notes that “other countries’ media do not contrive such a bloodless world.” He cites a study that shows that foreign media are generally more willing to show graphic images.

Susan Sontag, among others, have argued that showing graphic images might lead to other responses than “shocking people of conscience into action.” They may, in fact, inure us to horror.

Graphic images of war certainly haven’t stopped violent killings, Friedersdorf notes. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t had an impact on public thinking. He cites certain images from the Vietnam War and the photos of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison as examples.

Friedersdorf goes on to point out that “images in media determine not just what we see but how journalists describe the world, and thus what we know about it and how we talk about it.” It might be harder for the government to talk about “collateral damage,” for example, “if an article or TV footage included the image of a bloody corpse,” he writes.

Likewise, he adds, “it is difficult to discuss ‘fetal demise’ abstractly when the accompanying images show the little arms and legs that were dismembered.”

Without doubt, images are powerful. Think about artwork depicting scenes from Scripture (no photos are available): David holding Goliath’s severed head, soldiers killing infants on Herod’s orders, Jesus’ crucifixion. We may read these stories without fully appreciating their horror.

Friedersdorf concludes that “the case for publishing graphic images of killing has less to do with the merits of a specific policy view than with photography’s power to keep us from evading a subject entirely.”

We need to face what’s going on in our world, and images can help us do that.