Really, Because They Were Vikings?

Certainly, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right-and How We Can, by George Lakey, is informative.  The title makes me cringe.  It is designed to sell books, and gives the work less gravitas.  But this is a piddling critique that tells more about me than the book.

Lakey’s work is excellent if you know nothing about the how Scandinavian economics and politics work, and are curious.  We often hear some version of ‘why can’t we be more like…’ Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Iceland, in some area of economic or political life.  This book shows why.

Yet we come back to the title again.  Lakey explains that these countries have only recently become the paragon of X,Y, and Z in the post-war years.  They worked for their greater equality in the last seventy years.  So what does this have to do with Vikings?

the unrecorded folk legacy of ancient Israel

In one of Arthur Green’s essays, he explains that.. 

“...the notion that the Temple is the opening to heaven and hell, or stands on the spot where Creation began, or is located just below the great heavenly Temple, does not find direct narrative expression in scripture.  Such is of course indicated by biblical language and terminology: Beth  El and Sha’ar ha-Shamayim [the House of God, The Gates of  Heaven]… the fact that these terms grow forth into full and explicit narratives in the post-biblical sources, where less care is taken with regard to such anti-mythic “orthodoxy,” and sometimes in forms quite strikingly parallel in expressions in  Mesopotamian literature of more than a millennium earlier, makes it rather likely that these concept were indeed part of the unrecorded folk legacy of ancient Israel.”

The source he quotes for this statement is Raphael Patai’s Man and Temple.  This book is fascinating, and indeed does explore what we can call mythological elements of both the Temple, and the rites that took place within it.  Perhaps the biggest problem with this work is that it was written when Fraser’s The Golden Bough still dominated folklore studies.  It no longer does, so one has to wonder if Patai’s frame for the stories and legends in here are well out of date and misleading.

But with that in mind, in the end these are wonderful and provocative stories worth reading.

A Bit Hallow

The Singer's Gun, by Emily St. John Mandel, suffers from the not as good as Station Eleven Syndrome.  But give her a break.  She wrote this before Station Eleven.  The novel must be judged on its own merits.

On its own merits Mandel has written a solid book, with interesting characters and a steady plot line, but there is something thin about the execution.  Perhaps because the characters are immigrants, and Mandel seems uncomfortable with making them too ethnic.  Did she feel she would be accused of (negative) cultural appropriation?

Either way, it mars the novel; there is no sense of place or purpose to the characters.  They are a bit hallow.  They lack a sense of authentic history

The Pearl Harbor Effect

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll, explores 9-11 and the Pearl Harbor Effect.  Why was American napping before 9-11?  How did the intelligence community, the career bureaucrats, and our elected official fail?

Coil provides a long and detailed view of this, starting with the American support of Islamic fighters in the Afghan Soviet War, to our period of negligence of Afghanistan following the end of the Cold War, to the heat up in terrorist attacks in the 90s.

Coil shows that it was not just one event or moment that the US missed in the buildup the 9-11, but many.  The first Bush was not aware of the Afghan Civil War, Clinton was too cautious and spellbound by legal niceties in attempting to kill bin Ladin, and  the second Bush came too late to the party.  At first he ignored the threat, only taking it up in the summer of 2001, when the planes  operation was well underway.

Again and Again

Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide by Thomas de Waal, is a very complete investigation of the slaughter of the Armenian people in 1915.  

But the book is so much more: de Waal takes a long look at relations between Armenians and Turks both before and after the killings.  And most importantly, how the killings have been framed by Armenians, Turks, and the world community in the decades following the events.

As creatures we do this: we kill an entire people because of who they are, or the threat we believe they possess.  All of them die: men, woman, children, innocent, guilty... and everyone in between. Genocide happens in 1915 and among the Rohingya in Myanmar in 2017.  

There is no reason to think genocide will not happen again and again.