Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

I suppose there are more stories and histories of the Civil War than any other. Wars provide an endless tableau of lives lived in the extreme, facing moral choices that those of us living a relative peaceful existence never have to face, except through our imaginations. Only if we are brutally honest with ourselves, can we imagine ourselves facing the horrors of war and coming out unscathed, with our sanity intact; knowing, as Coal Black Horse vividly illustrates, that, to have survived at all would depend on luck at having avoided truly brutalizing conditions of war rather than as a confirmation of virtue or inner-strength that has withstood the flames.

A mother, Hettie Childs, sends her young 14-year-old son, Robey, from his home in what I believe to be the Shenandoah Mountains, to search for and bring home his father, who has gone off to fight in the Civil War. Hettie has a premonition that he has been killed in battle. She instructs Robey “to be safe, take no help from anyone” and “don’t trust anyone, not man, nor woman, nor child.”

Robey rides off on the back of their “cobby horse”, which grows lame shortly after he leaves home. He stops at a mercantile – the last familiar place in his universe, so far – where the proprietor, Mister Morphew, loans him a magnificent horse, the coal black horse that belonged to a man who had recently died while stopping there. Obeying his mother’s admonition, at first he declined Morphew’s offer, but Morphew persuaded him that it was the only way he would survive.

Robey departs and has many encounters with death, including one with a “goose woman”, a small, lice-infested man, a northern spy, dressed up as a woman surrounded by geese, who tricks Robey with food, then shoots him, almost killing him, and steals the coal black horse. Robey recovers from his wound, a nearly fatal crease to his scalp, and steals a succession of horses, guns and supplies, and witnesses many horrific scenes of war.

At one point, Olmstead declares, “When men go war, war wins”. He goes on to illustrate his point in evocative detail with some of the most vivid descriptions of war I have ever read. He asserts that in war, there are two wars; the one at the front and the one waged by the lawless, marauding profiteers, bounty hunter, battlefield scavengers and spies, like the spy who nearly killed Robey.

After weeks or perhaps months of wandering and searching, Robey finally tracks his father’s unit to Gettysburg and arrives just after that seminal battle is over, wandering amidst its carnage. “Sticking among the rocks and against trunks of trees were hair, brains, entrails, and shreds cooking black in the sun.”

After being attacked by a crazed, mortally wounded soldier, who he had to kick in the head to free himself, Robey realizes that “In war, even the dead will kill you.”

Olmstead’s descriptions of the survivors streaming south and the carnage of the battlefield itself are incredibly vivid, rich with indelible detail; details of the surrounding countryside and its inhabitants that paint a bleak picture of war and those who would profit by it. Chapters 9 and 10 are worth reading several times.

In a central event occurring along the way, well before reaching Gettysburg, Robey witnesses, and feels powerless to stop, a rape of Rachael, a girl just a year older than he is, by her guardian, a itinerant preacher. Rachael missionary parents have gone to Africa where they were killed by lions. During their absence, she was delivered to the care of the preacher and his blind, now pregnant and defenseless wife.

Rachael appears a second time at a Union Army depot-town where Robey is briefly detained by the Union Army as a spy, and again at Gettysburg, where he finds his dying father among the thousands dead and dying. In the interim, of necessity, Robey has been transformed by events into a man – or, at least, a boy with the lethal survival instincts of a man.

Too severely injured to be moved, Robey nurses his dying father on the field of Gettysburg. After several days of suffering, his father dies and Robey departs, but not before killing one of a pair of scavengers, who roam the battlefield extracting gold from the dead and dying; cutting off fingers for their rings, extracting gold fillings from teeth even from the living by hacking the jaws with a hatchet, and slitting pockets with razors to quickly extract their contents. I will always remember this sentence: They moved “like crows in the garden, skipping from one dead body to the next.”

He rescues Rachael from her tormentor and they make their way to his home in the Shenandoah, traveling at night for safety.

About the horse: The coal black horse rescues Robey from many encounters. It possesses a keen sense of danger before Robey does; and it is swifter and stronger than any other horse. Does it kill the spy who has stolen him, the “goose woman”, by running through woods to hang him up in the fork of a tree? Does the horse’s disapproval and then apparent forgiveness in the wake of Robey’s own brutality signify the response of a forgiving god? I don’t know. One reviewer describes this story as a fable. A horse, with an super acuity for sensing danger before it is apparent to its rider, saving him from death on several occasions, and the improbability of Robey having survived and returned home, as well as the many mythological and biblical references which, to be honest, I don’t recognize – as long as a label doesn’t diminish its effect, “fable” is as good as any; a tale rich in authentic detail and moral force.

An "Independent" State of Mind

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, here are some really random thoughts I’ve been musing over recently. If you, my vast audience of one (or maybe two) have anything to add, please do…

Independent … of What?
What accounts for the increase in the number of self-declared “independent” voters in recent years?

Are they truly independent thinkers or simply too confused by the constant noise that passes for information to have an opinion to call their own?
Some say they vote for the man, not the party. But what does that mean? I like the candidate’s looks? He/she seems like a regular guy? She visited our town and I shook her hand?

When someone votes for a candidate one year and for his political opposite the next, one has to wonder; what are they thinking?

Some people may be apolitical or indifferent to what’s happening in the world, more likely to read the sports section than the front page. One friend told me “the front section is there to keep the sports section dry”. (I hope he was joking, but I have my doubts.)

Certainly many people are just too busy earning a living and don’t have time to inform themselves. I’ve been in this position myself. I always felt uncomfortable, exposed even, taking a stand knowing how little I really knew, especially when the issue was complex, requiring serious study-time to digest; time I just didn’t have.

Does the ‘independent’ label inoculate people from having to take a side, or even think? Is it a declaration that says ‘I really am an independent, thoughtful person … really!’ But, it’s so much more entertaining to watch TV, and what’s the point, anyway? I can’t do anything about it.

Some self-declared independents may be trying to project an image of “rugged individualists”, although I suspect many of this group would be as likely to think of themselves as libertarians.

It is reported that, demographically, disaffected Republicans account for the growth of independence voters, but my guess is that a good portion are former Democrats, as well.

Certainly, among their number, there are many thoughtful people who are truly uncomfortable with the extremes of either party; distressed with the idea of being associated with those whose ideologies leave little room for compromise or civil discourse. Although I think of myself as a liberal, I am frequently put off and embarrassed by assumptions or positions of other liberals, or by a particularly strident opinion about a subject that, from my perspective, is far from easy to digest.

So, what do you make of reports that show independents who voted overwhelmingly for President Obama abandoning him just ten months into his administration? Are they just empty windsocks, blown one way, then another, by blowhards like Rush, Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly? Are they free thinkers or just free of thoughts? Is independent just another work for fickle?

Venting Our Frustration
I’ve noticed (or strongly suspect) that the less someone knows, the more emotional he or she become when discussing an issue like, say, the war in Iraq or the financial and banking system. Is this a manifestation of frustration at not knowing, not having time to become informed, or a combination of both? (Or is there another explanation?) We become frustrated when events fail to conform to our preconceptions. No one is comfortable with chaos. It’s human to want to simplify the world to make it comprehensible – and frustrating as hell when we discover we’ve organized our worldview around faulty assumptions or beliefs.

Intellectual honesty is not the fashion. When was the last time you heard anyone say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. I’ll have to rethink my position?’

Today’s media climate gives license to venting one’s frustration rather than admitting we had it all wrong to begin with and taking the time to digest new information. This is all the more difficult when our foundation knowledge is based on parental imprinting.

We’re more likely to cast blame than grapple with complex explanations. It feels so good to vent about greedy bankers or corrupt politicians. In today’s media climate, we’re less likely to listen to contrary views, much less empathize.

Speaking of the Financial Crisis
Many have expressed outrage about the bank bailout and the way the administration handled GM and Chrysler, but few have spent much time imagining what would have happened if the government had failed to act. What would a complete collapse of the banking and financial system have looked like? If this is the “Great Recession”, what would we have called it if the world economy had collapsed completely?

As we dig ourselves out of recession, this is a critical point the administration needs to explain clearly. Otherwise, criticism of how the financial crisis was handled will snuff out the nations memory of the events that lead up to the financial imbroglio, and what the consequences would have been. As Barney Frank put it, “no one ever gets credit for making a situation less bad”.

As justifiably angry as we are at having to throw billions of dollars at the problem and at the outrageous Wall Street pay packages, we forget or fail to imagine what would have happened if the banking and financial system had failed completely, as it surely would have if the Federal Reserve and Administration had failed to act.

Many millions of Americans have investments and depend on them for their retirement. At one point, the stock market was down to less than half of what it had been at its peak and even money market funds – which most people consider as secure as checking account – were on the verge of ‘breaking the buck”, or loosing money. What would the world look like if the stock market had declined half-again, continuing its slide to, say, a DOW index of 3000 – and the buck had been broken, now worth 90 cents or less? How many people would have had to defer retirement or come out of retirement? Money market funds are uninsured; there is no equivalent to the FDIC for mutual funds. There would have been a run on money market funds akin to the bank runs of 1929 (this almost happened when one fund briefly sunk to $.97). What would the social and political consequences have been? Aside from the affects that the freezing of capital – the complete unavailability of loans from any quarter to anybody – would have had, many more businesses and the people they employ would have been hurt. The failure of Wall Street would have bulldozed Main Street. Today, we have an official unemployment rate of 10.2%, and an unofficial rate of 17-18%, if you count those who have given up looking for work. What would an official unemployment rate of 25-30% look like? We know what 25% it looked like in 1932; it was a very dismal time. Put simply, people suffered.

OK, not everyone has investments or a money market fund. But one investment most Americans do have is their home. Home prices have declined by 15% and in some regions, much more. If money had dried up completely, how far would prices have fallen? 40%? 50%? More? What would the effect have been? Renters too have suffered, surprised when their rental property is suddenly foreclosed, forcing them to relocate quickly.

We hear of people who are “underwater”, with houses worth less than what they owe. Fortunately, only a small percentage have walked away from those homes or defaulted. But, if unemployment climbed to 25%, you are looking at a yawning downward spiral of frightening proportions. Millions of families on the streets, political chaos, perhaps even revolution. (There’s a lot more guns around now than there was in 1929, and they’re a lot more lethal.)

I haven’t even mentioned the effects on the international financial system, and the chaos a failure would have there, but it’s easy to imagine, in an age when communications are instantaneous, that a financial collapse would have lead to an immediate decline worldwide – deeper and more rapid than the crash of 1929; a crash that really occurred in slow-motion, over three years.

But all of this is abstract and speculative. As in the run up to the current recession and its aftermath, there will be many opinions from experts to the contrary, experts whose historical perspective is 30 years, or who can point out myriad reasons why this is unlike 1929. My answer is, you’re right, it would probably have been worse. The press towards easy answers – and the hunt for scapegoats like the trial of the two hedge fund managers recently concluding with acquittals in Brooklyn – will continue.

The difficulty in explaining how bad it could have been is that you quickly get into a web if speculative cause and effect that can’t be explained in simple linear fashion. Stocks and bonds collapse, capital freezes, runs on banks and mutual funds, job layoffs, price deflation … and more of the same, again and again – they all have feedback loops whose ripples adversely affect everything else. Our brains just don’t work like that.

For a view of what might have been (or might happen yet), I recommend John Kenneth Galbraith’s elegant, short book, The Great Crash 1929, published in 1955. Unfortunately, he took 26 years to come up with an explanation of what went wrong. Sadly, it will probably take as long this time too.

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So, depending on what kind of “independent” thinker you are – and who doesn’t think he/she is – you either take the time to learn as much as you can or you place your trust in someone else you like, and parrot whatever they say, like a ditto-head.

Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter

Occurring in the final months of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), known in the West as East Germany, just before the wall came down, Henry Porter recreates the conditions in a failed, delusional, paranoid police state dominated by the “state within a state” know as the Stasi (the German secret police); that most feared instrument of repression that numbered 81,000 agents and 1.5 million informers, in a country with a population of 17 million. This is a terrific historic novel that shifts between east and west, with a credible and lengthy cast of characters from the Stasi (variously “inspired”), the CIA, MI6, KGB – even a fictional Putin puts in an appearance – the GDR resistance and, inescapably given the historic landscape, the Nazi party. Be prepared to make a list of characters as they make their entrance – I wrote their names and the page number on which they first appear on the back cover, which was a great help in keeping them straight. Not that this is a difficult mystery to follow – far from it; it’s nearly impossible to put down.

Rudi Rosenharte, a 50-year-old unmarried, former Stasi agent who has been teaching art history in a Dresden university, and occasional in Leipzig, is reactivated, under duress, as a Stasi agent after a hiatus of 15 years to meet a former English spy and lover, who now wants to pass NATO’s highly prized secrets to the GDR. The catch is that as far as Rudi knows, she committed suicide in Geneva fifteen years earlier, in 1974. Rudi’s twin brother, Konrad, a filmmaker of subtly subversion movies viewed by virtually no one (Kafka-esk to be sure), has been jailed in a notorious East German prison and “interrogation” center, Konrad’s wife has been jailed, and their two children taken from them; all to insure against Rudi’s defection during a brief assignment in Trieste.

There are too many characters and details to relate here; suffice it to say, you will be convincingly immersed in the paranoid world that was the GDR in the fall of 1989; with all the dissembling, fear and torture (or worse) that accompanied one of most suppressive police states ever to have existed. Although it opens in Trieste, most of the action takes place in the triangle of Dresden, Berlin and Leipzig. If the measure of a successful novel – almost all novels a historic to some degree – is to come away with a more profound understanding of those remarkable events of 1989 and an admiration for the people who survived, Brandenburg Gate succeeds remarkable well. I only wish I had read this before I traveled in the east with my father, in 2005. Reading this now, at the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, made me want to return to view the landscape and people with renewed appreciation and historic perspective.

The White Tiger by Arivind Adiga

The narrator, Balram, being exceptionally inquisitive and resourceful, is The White Tiger. It is a title bestowed on him by a rural schoolmaster early on, and like all names in India, it defines and shapes his destiny. Having broken the chains of caste and poverty, Balram has emerged from India’s rural “darkness”, and over the course of seven nights, tells his story in a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China.

India is the world compressed; its contradictions and contrasts, hypocrisy and brutality, corruption and greed, sit close to the surface, causing an outside observer to recoil, while most Indians themselves adapt and readapt to their condition.

Is it cynical to view the world – in this case Indian society – as corrupt, dysfunctional and intractable, the scoffing destroyer of idealism and good intentions – or is it simply a realistic, honest portrayal? And is it only India being portrayed here? Or is India simply the world compressed, where an interdependent “darkness” and “light” intermingle, casting shadows of moral complicity in every direction?

Avavind Adiga’s portrays two Indias; rural, dark-skinned poverty and subservience, on the one hand, and a wealthy ruling-class intent on maintaining itself through intimidation, violence and systemic corruption, on the other. India is nothing if not a world within a larger world, like Russian nesting dolls. Like so many great novels, The White Tigers characters inhabit the cusp between two grinding, stark realities.

In India your name defines your caste; it confers on its bearer a lifelong role, as a house servant, a teashop worker (as is the case with Balram, our narrator), a rickshaw driver (his father) or any number of other impoverished, subservient lifelong roles.

In form, The White Tiger appears as a series of audacious letters written over the course of seven nights by a young “entrepreneur”, Balram, to the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, prior to Jiabao’s announced state visit to India.

I’m not giving anything away to say that, at the outset, Balram discloses he has murdered his employer, Mr. Askok, in Delhi and has stolen money that he then uses to establish a business far to the south in Bangalore. The letters, in effect his autobiography, tell his life story as he moves from tea server in rural India, to driver for Mr. Askok, the son of a rural mine owner, to their life in Delhi and Balram’s subsequent disillusionment, awakening, and crime; justified in his mind by unfolding events, and his employers’ willingness to pin on him blame for a hit-and-run accident committed by his employer’s drunken wife. Balram is the White Tiger. He listens, he learns. As Balram wanders among the market in the “darkness” of Delhi’s slums, he observes caged roosters, packed so tightly they “peck and shit on each other;” a metaphor for the poor of India who are themselves enforcer of the very caste system in which they are imprisoned. So corrosive is Indian society, that even his boss, Mr. Askok, who has been educated in America and arrives home with his Indian-American wife for “just a few months”, exuding superficial compassion for his servants, is eventually subjugated by his own corrupt family to a life in a sterile Delhi high-rise, to be driven (by Balram) from ATM to ATM, collecting cash with which to bribe officials to ensure of the survival of his family’s coal mining enterprise. It is dark comedy indeed.

Later in the story, Balram recites these lines of poetry: “I was looking for the keys for years, but the door was always open.” For those born in the darkness, passing through the door is not without its consequences. It required Balram to turn his back on his past and it’s inhabitants forever; to abandon his family with the certain knowledge that they will suffer -- likely killed -- by the feudal lords (local rural politicians), as a lesson to others who contemplate passing through the “open door” themselves.

As a series of letters, Balram purports to inform China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, of how it is that India has become the center of entrepreneurial enterprise; lessons that can be applied to China. But it tells instead the story of two Indias and one dysfunctional, corrupt “democracy” driven by the pursuit of profits without investing in even the most basic infrastructure; of two peoples; masters and servants, enslaved in one emerging, high-tech, feudal system. He admires China for at least having “ring roads and sewers,” infrastructure sadly missing in India. What does Balram’s story foretell? Are India’s poor on the verge of walking through the open doors? Why does Balram decide to write Premier Wen Jiaboa? I haven’t quite worked out why the author chooses this literary technique – casting his protagonist as so presumptuous as to write the prime minister of China – but it is affective. Perhaps it conveys the sense that, in his own mind at least, he has emerged as a man without caste on equal terms even with Wen Jiaboa; that caste is just a frame of mind.

Like any really good literature, one could examine every facet of this book and analyze it for days on end. It has the power to inhabit your dreams for months.