Review of Alex Berenson's Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

Below is my review of Tell Your Children as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine.

The review appeared in the May 2019 issue

America Gone to Pot

Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

By Alex Berenson

Free Press, 2019

Hardcover, 272 Pages

ISBN-10: 1982103663

ISBN-13: 978-1982103668

  

By Richard Morchoe

There is a sense of déjà vu in reading Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.

Except there isn't.  Déjà vu is the illusion or feeling something has already been experienced.  This is not an illusion.  We are over and over again looking at the question of legalized and medicalized marijuana.

You may ask, hadn't the question gone away?  That was devoutly to be wished and if democracy changed anything, it should have by the miracle of a referendum.  Citizens of the region can head up the street to Leicester and purchase what they feel will make them happy and that was to be an end on to it.

Along comes Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children to inform us we have to go back to thinking about what we had wanted to forget.

At the beginning of his book, Mr. Berenson lets us know he was also surprised to be back discussing the subject like the rest of us.  After all, proponents of legalization have had it all their way, or so it seemed.  Studies said cannabis was safe, if not healthy.

Berenson had accepted it.  Heck, he'd toked in Amsterdam.  His mind might never have changed if he were not married to a forensic psychiatrist.

Alex and wife were talking about a case, "the usual horror story, somebody who'd cut up his grandmother" or something.  His wife, who deals with such stuff said, "Of course he was high, been smoking pot his whole life."

Alex replied, "Of course?"  His wife rejoined with, "Yeah, they all smoke."

All the propaganda of the last several years has been pro-cannabis.  The author was incredulous and his wife suggested he read the studies.

Alex Berenson had been a reporter for the New York Times, and had covered the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the drug industry.  He had been away from that for several years having taken up the novel with success.

What his wife had started with the challenge would lead to Tell Your Children.  

Berenson read the studies and statistics and did leg work as well.  He put them together in Tell Your Children, and there is a lot.  Yet, one might accuse him of having a plot, as there is much anecdotal material in the book.  It is necessary from the standpoint that when a horrendous incident occurs, it is not often, if at all, connected to "weed."

One anecdote that is never cited by proponents is the story of Tom Forcade.  Forcade, a pseudonym, was the founder of High Times Magazine.  His journal pushed the liberalization of attitudes to drugs as Playboy did about sex.  Forcade was wildly successful.

Tom may have wanted the country to "mellow out," but he didn't.  

Forcade was transiting to paranoiaville.  Berenson quotes a long diatribe from a 1978 interview about how beleaguered he felt due to the numerous imaginary government agents out to get him.  Forcade lashed out saying "Effectively, I spent the last ten years in jail…" 

Three weeks later, he blew his brains out.

Forcade's staff smoked his ashes at the top of the World Trade Center and went on with the mission without him.  Berenson, the reporter, wrote it without comment.  The lack of any self-awareness from Forcade or his minions said it all.

The other anecdotes are as horrible, but are of tragedies that don't just self-victimize one person. Instead families and relationships can be brutally destroyed and multiple, mostly innocent, lives ended.

One can get into a statistics war where no one escapes the fog, but what seemed most convincing was at the beginning when his wife and he were making conversation.  Evidence unbidden lends weight.

Some statistics argue more convincingly even if not part of research.  When a law changes and rates increase, or decrease sharply over a short span of years, that says more than any study no matter how well planned and executed.  True, the interpretation can be subject to reporting biases, but the stats are there for all sides to chew over.

Your reviewer is not a man for numbers and charts, though he can read the odd table.  Ever cognizant of Mark Twain's dictum, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics" I realized help would be needed for a more nuanced understanding.

I searched for some opposition to his outlook and it exists.  

Not unexpectedly, Rolling Stone weighed in.  The headline, "Is Alex Berenson Trolling Us With His Anti-Weed Book?" lacked for subtlety.  Had one not paid attention the subtitle, "A former ‘New York Times’ journalist wrote about a “hidden epidemic” cause(sic) by pot — but it seems he got the science wrong" would make sure the message got through.  The article, by Amanda Chicago Lewis, an investigative reporter covering cannabis, could be described as tendentious.

Searching for a more reasonable contrast to the author, I found it on a two and three quarter hour video of Berenson and two men not opposed to using pot at least in some circumstances.  The host, Joe Rogan, admits to being a user and the other guest, Dr. Michael Hart uses it in his practice.

Though there was much talking over each other, and both the host and the doctor made some good points for limited clinical use, Berenson held his own.  Other than on the edges of the discussion, he was far more right than wrong.  Tell Your Children stood up well.

Even though the question of the legal status of marijuana has been debated since the 60s, Alex Berenson has made the case convincingly that, at the least, the conversation has been way too short and the rush to legalize too quick.

What now?  Berenson has no illusions as to where our society stands at this point in time.  He is not for restarting the drug war, but sees decriminalization as reasonable.

Legalization, however, has many bad results not the least for young people.  Per Alex, "Most of all, legalization signals that marijuana is not dangerous and encourages teen use.  The states with the highest rates of youth marijuana use all allow legalized recreational sales or medical sales with very loose conditions."

Berenson has asserted much in his book, but he has backed it up well.  If there were two points your reviewer might want to emphasize, the first would be, Marijuana is not medicine.  The second, marijuana is associated with violence.

People like George Soros, a big funder mentioned in the book and busy bodies like Rick Steeves who contributed to our repeal campaign, should give some thought for what their responsibility is.  Senators Schumer and Booker, who are pushing legalization nationally might as well.  As Mark Anthony said, "The evil that men do lives long after them."

As a postscript, the reviewer has two friends he has known for decades.  They are cannabis users of long standing, and have never been involved in a hint of violence.  That, however, does not invalidate Berenson's work.

The High Life-Gambling in Western Massachusetts

Below is the column for the February, 2019 issue of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine.

We don't make as much stuff in New England as we used to so some believe a casino is the ticket for jobs and urban revitalization.  We are not so sure.

Betting on Springfield

By Richard Morchoe

The Game, shown on Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre (1965), starred Cliff Robertson and his then wife, Dina Merrill.  He was someone who wandered into the wrong place. Robertson played Quincey Parke who came upon a high stakes game of baccarat at a casino frequented by society.

Parke was a fish out of water in a place of glamour.  Merrill plays Maralise who takes Robertson’s character under her wing.  Parke is on a winning streak, but to stay in the game, must dress the part and wear formal clothing.

Eventually, the high life is too much for him and Parke expires.    It takes a lot to keep up the pretense of being upper class.  Monaco is not for everyone.

During the late 60s when I was pretending to be a college student, a friend and I hitchhiked to Daytona for Spring Week.  Someone told us it was better and cheaper in Nassau and the flight was in our budget.

It was a great time and we were able to stay in a rooming house for $2.50 a night each.   Not the Ritz, it was easier to rough it at that age.

There was a lot going on.  Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy had arrived on his yacht.  Yacht was an understatement.  The vessel was a converted corvette.  No, that was not a Chevy sports car, but a class of small warships used by many navies, though not ours.  Nassau was a place frequented by the wealthy, as well as near derelict collegians on vacation.

Nassau also had a casino in what was known as Paradise Island.  True, it was unlike the grand spots on the Riviera, but it was not without class.  To be admitted, one had to wear at least a jacket and tie.  We put on blazers and our only cravats and went over.

That evening, if we weren’t the least best dressed, it was by accident.  The dealers and croupiers were all formally attired and the guests, though not as well accoutered as Monte Carlo, were making an effort to look good.

We played the slots and I made one pass at roulette.  Even at that age, the realization that all was in favor of the house led us to put a quick end to our participation.  There was enough debauchery going on elsewhere that coming home sunburnt and broke was easily achievable.

Around that time, our nation was still somewhat puritanical.  Here in New England, that is our settlers’ legacy. When New Hampshire instituted its first in the nation lottery in 1964, it was a big break with the past.  Supposedly, our governor, Endicott “Chub” Peabody, had warned the Granite State’s John King not to sign the sweepstakes bill.

Though known as a liberal, Chub was a direct descendant of the stern Puritans who settled the region.  There is only so much one can deviate from ancestry.

Eventually, the Bay State would give over and why not?  In urban areas we already had the lottery. It was just not a government run enterprise.  The logic was inescapable, besides the Commonwealth has never seen a money raising impost it didn’t like and this one would fleece a willing populace.

Still, casinos were nowhere in sight other than in that land of sin, Nevada.  That’s a place anything goes.  The Mustang Ranch, after all, had no wild horses.

That would change.  Tribes of the indigenous nations began fighting back against Caucasian oppressors by taking them to the cleaners at the gaming tables.  Their reservations being at least semi-sovereign, it was difficult to tell them what not to do on their own land.

Tribal nations opening gaming halls were mostly in western states.  Here in Nova Anglia, the descendants of the natives have been much assimilated and in our neighbor, Connecticut, there was no federally recognized tribe.  

The Pequots had been thoroughly defeated in an early colonial war.  Over the centuries they had only held on to their tiny reservation by a thread. Yet, in the 20th Skip Hayward, a one-eighth Pequot would revitalize them, secure federal recognition and, wait for it, get a casino.

That casino, known as Foxwoods, is quite a complex and might compare to those of Europe, except for who they let in.  That would be you and me, folks.  Yup, the great unwashed are welcomed with open arms.  In our family’s only foray into the Southern Connecticut pleasure palace, we encountered a complex to cater to every legal (at least) sybaritic taste imaginable when not gambling.

We had not come to take a flyer on augmenting our meager fortune.  The Peguots have put up a wonderful museum that documents their existence going back to before they arrived and that was our destination.  After, we went to the buffet, traipsing through the gambling areas enroute.  No one was exquisitely attired, but it did look like the tribe was raking it in.

If one New England casino worked, why not more?  That idea had occurred to others.  The Mohegan Tribe, who allied with the Brits to beat up the Pequots in the 17th Century, wanted and got Mohegan Sun.  It looked like the Town of Palmer to the west of Sturbridge would get one, but the voters could not be swayed by the full court public relations press of the backers.

Springfield, though, would succumb.

There is Industrial Revolution history in Springfield.  The famous Armory produced guns for many wars. The gasoline engine was invented there and it was home to the still iconic Indian Motorcycle.  In the prior two centuries it was known as “The City of Progress.”  Less so now.

Would Springfield be nothing without gaming?  The city did work hard to get it.  Maybe there were other businesses that might have served as well.   It would seem a casino is an idea that arises when there is not a better one.

Last spring, with much hoopla, MGM Springfield, opened its doors and has been operating since.  There have been claims that it is meeting expectations while a morning radio commentator said the several gambling dens now available are sharing a market that has not increased.

Though not feeling overly drawn to the experience, my wife and I found ourselves in Springfield on a Sunday afternoon and easily got a parking space on State Street close to the doors.  Upon entering the din of machines was inescapable.  As one got nearer, there were blinking lights to accompany the sound as players poked and prodded buttons.  Everything on the machines that flashed on and off was of bright, garish colors.

Interestingly, for a weekend afternoon, it did not seem even half full.  Among the blackjack tables, not as suffused with the sensory overload elsewhere, there were a few dealers unoccupied and looking bored.

The gamblers at machines were intense.  They seemed to see nothing else other than the banging and ringing going on in front of them.  My wife noticed that none of them, as well as people walking around were smiling.  Unlike Disney World, it was not the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

Of course, there are dining options.  Cal Mare seemed Italian seafood themed, but also had pizza and meat.  It looked appealing and almost empty.  The Chandler Steakhouse was closed up tight.

One spot doing a roaring business was TAP Sports Bar.   The clientele were there to watch football.  Beer, pub food, and sports on TV packed the house.  If there was any deeper meaning than an abiding love for the Patriots, it was beyond us.

The poker room was active, but even there a big table was empty.  As you entered that room, there was a bureau with pamphlets on it.  One read “Anything You Need To Know About Gambling?  The other would tell you to “Know when to step away.”  The positioning was not obtrusive.  No one was looking for the literature anyway, and I was the only customer.

As not to the manor born, it is impossible for me to say why the upper classes would want to while away their time at the tables in Southern France.  Paradise Island was more understandable.  People were away for vacation and escape and would go home remembering that part as well as the beaches and nightlife.

MGM Springfield was no fun.  One supposes it might be, maybe once a year and taking in a show.  The players looked like they were working harder than at a job.  All this despite the management’s efforts to give it some allure. 

In the Twilight Zone Episode, “A Nice Place to Visit,” a man arrives in a casino and wins everything and can have all he wants.  He thinks himself in heaven.  Soon, however, he is bored and tells his guide he would rather go to hell.  The guide tells him he is in hell. 

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America Review

Below is my review as submitted to the editor for the December issue of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine

Please note, since the review, much has come out about how much management knew about the addictive nature of what they were selling and it is not to managements credit.

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America

By Beth Macy

By now, few have not heard about the opioid crisis.  Governor, Charlie Baker, has recently signed his second piece of legislation to deal with the problem.  It is not new here in Sturbridge Country as several years ago a local doctor closed his practice due to prescription irregularities.

In an episode of his cable TV show, Anthony Bourdain spotlighted the problem, mostly in the old Massachusetts town of Greenfield.  The segment was well done in discussing what seems an epidemic.

However problematic Opioid addiction may be here in the Commonwealth, we are not the epicenter.

Beth Macy may not have found “ground zero,” but the Appalachian region she writes about should not be discounted in consideration for the dubious honor.

Macy has written Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America.  She chronicles the Opioid explosion that has ravaged not an inner city but the coal country that had already been blighted by economic hard times.

Actually, she might have discovered ground zero, not in the old mill towns of the Bay State or lumber camps of rural Maine or her Appalachian home region she has obvious affection for.  The subtitle, The Drug Company That Addicted America, pinpoints a successful pharmaceutical company as the origin of the plague. 

The Sackler family had built Purdue Pharma from a tiny company when they purchased it in 1952 into a powerhouse.  The company developed OxyContin and had gotten Food and Drug Administration approval in 1995.  

The Sacklers were private and more known for their philanthropy than the drug business.  That may be different since Dopesick’s publication.

It is not as if the author avers that the men were sitting around a boardroom planning to devastate rural America by hooking people on a powerful derivative of the opium poppy.  The company “touted the safety of its new opioid-delivery system everywhere its merchants went.  “If you take the medicine like it is prescribed, the risk of addiction when taking the opioid is one-half of 1 percent.” said Dr. J. David Haddox, a pain specialist who became the company’s point man for the drug.””

The Sacklers may have believed this and even that they were doing good.  Doing good was not what Purdue Pharma did best.  Selling was far and away the most important company value, or so it would seem, as they were champions at it.

Purdue Pharma is an easy and valid target, but hardly the whole story.  The region’s coal economy and factories were, like much of the industrialized US, somewhat played out.  Ms. Macy was in the right place at the right time, or maybe in the wrong place at the right time to chronicle the disaster.

Beth Macy reported for the Roanoke Times for about a decade and a half until 2014.  Since, she has been writing essays and op-eds for The New York Times as well as other venues and radio.  Harvard awarded her a Nieman Fellowship in 2010.

Before Dopesick, she had written a couple of other books.  Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local --- and Helped Save an American Townwas published in 2014.  Her Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest; A True Story of the Jim Crow Southcame out in 2016.  Both books garnered positive reviews.

For timeliness, however, Dopesick was, and, will be an important reporter's story.  It is happening now and will continue into the future and our ability to come to terms with the abundantly available chemicals may never happen.  From that point of view, her book’s ending can only be artificial.

Macy provides us with intimate portrayals of those dealing with or succumbing to the problem.  Some of them, such as Dr. Art Van Zee came to Appalachia because he wanted to practice in an underserved community and found one.  His match is his wife, Sue Ella Koback.  Shades of Loretta Lynn, Sue was a coal miner’s daughter from over the mountain in Kentucky.

Dr. Van Zee comes off as a hero.  She describes his struggle with the corporate interest as chronicled by another author as a “David-versus-Goliath battle.”  As the book goes on, he is always fighting that good fight.  How he avoids burn-out seems a mystery. 

Where the good doctor is somewhat mild mannered, Sue Ella seems, as the author put it, “a firecracker lawyer.”  When the abovementioned Dr. J. David Haddox told a parent meeting about a somewhat exculpatory open letter they were going to run in a local newspaper, Sue Ella blew up at him.  The letter did not run.

There are many more stories in Dopesick.  Some even hopeful, and others not. Granted, once OxyContin and drugs like it get control of a victim, the brain structure will be changed and the odds are not good.

One of the hopeful ones is Spencer Mumpower.  Spencer was not on OxyContin, but was a full-fledged heroin addict who sold a drug friend the dose that would kill him.  With some tough love from mom, she refused to bail him out, he started the turnaround.

Once out before trial, he continued the process.  Eventually sentenced, he served his time and came out clean to continue the new life.  A small triumph, but a victory nonetheless.

There is little uplift in the story of Ronnie Jones.  Even so, he comes off as a sympathetic character and that is a problem.

The TV series, The Sopranos did the same thing for the eponymous Tony.  It made a vicious criminal who murdered with impunity into a lovable teddy bear.

The author did not seem to be trying to make the criminal Jones into a Nobel prize level humanitarian.  She does document his crimes in detail.  Having a long interview with the man in prison and getting to know him does allow him to be seen as a complex character and not the sum of his crimes and that is not horrible reporting.  Even so, his wrongdoing is so large that unlike the fictional Tony Soprano, it should dwarf anything of his life that we might want to like.

Is there any optimism in the struggle Beth Macy has written about?  She endorses Drug Courts stating that they “remain among the country’s models for preventing recidivism and relapse, with intensive daily monitoring of participants---and swift consequences.”  If one successfully completes the program, charges can be dropped.

That is heartening, but there is no victory lap.  Graduates of the Drug Court program are “roughly a half or to a third less likely to return to return to crime or drugs than regular probationers.”  This means half to two thirds will. 

Still, the drug court program does offer hope.  Beth tells us parents approach one judge out shopping to beg him to place their kids in the program.

Drug court coupled with MAT or medication assisted treatment seem to work better than much else according to Beth.  MAT is not allowed everywhere; 12 Step programs don’t favor it.  Some see value according to the author, ““We’ve had thirteen babies born to mothers on MAT, and not one of those babies had NAS (neonatal abstinence syndrome),” Tazewell County judge Jack Hurley told me”

Encouraging yes, but not a solution.

The story Beth follows the longest in the book is the saddest.  The drug problems may have started in the coal camps, but more upscale areas were not left untouched.  Tess Henry lived in affluent venues as a child.  The author follows the young woman with a loving mom and a seemingly smooth life.  

Tess was subject to anxiety from an early age, but that does not seem to have been the cause of her downfall.  She experimented in college, but it was a 30-day opioid prescription of codeine cough syrup and hydrocodone at an urgent-care center to treat bronchitis that seemed to do the trick.

Her drug filled odyssey is woven into the book as the author discusses other matters as well.  Beth would come back to the young lady who was spiraling down with occasional slight glimmers of hope until the last chapter where the inevitable is reported.  Tess had been hustling as a prostitute in Las Vegas and was found by a homeless man in a dumpster.

Tess’s return home ends the book, but hardly the story.  Part Three is titled “A Broken System.”  Notwithstanding the author’s favoring of Drug Court and MAT, the system is fractured and we are not yet near any solution.  

Of course, more attempts to solve it will be made and Beth Macy will be covering the story with the same skill and clarity, we should all hope.

Tanglewood-Near Heaven in Lenox

Cabin Fever in Massachusetts during the winter months can be bleak and drury.  A trip to summer in the mind's eye might ameliorate that somewhat.  Below is my Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine column from September, 2018about a wonderful place to spend a day.

Tour of Duty at Tanglewood

By Richard Morchoe

When this issue of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Magazine is mailed out and on newsstands, your columnist will have completed his third summer as a volunteer for the season of music at Tanglewood.  

People volunteer for many reasons.  Some might say they want to “give back.”  Moi, I get much more out of my time in the Berkshires than I give.

It may seem odd that a man with no musical ability would want to travel down the Pike to the far western town of Lenox several times a summer to help people find their seats.  Just because one can’t make music doesn’t mean they cannot listen with immense pleasure while helping out.

I never had much interest in classical music until college.  A sound coming from a classmate’s dorm room more than caught my attention and I borrowed the album.

It was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, popularly known as “The Emperor Concerto” with Leopold Stokowski conducting and Glenn Gould as piano soloist.  Such a rich sound meant it was love at first listen.

Graduation was approaching and we students were all getting ready to go to our separate lives.  Wanting to keep the album, I wrestled with my conscience and lost, Sadly, it was returned.

Though it was back in the ancient days of vinyl, the cost was not prohibitive and not long after, a version with Leonard Bernstein conducting and Rudolf Serkin as pianist began my album collection.

It would be many years before I would experience Tanglewood, and when it happened, it was immediate infatuation.  When you go there, the grounds are so beautiful that you would love it even if you did not come for the music.  That is, if you take the time to explore.

As time went on, the feeling of wanting to be more a part of it took hold.  Obviously, anything to do with the music was beyond me.  While exploring the Tanglewood website in winter, I came across a line that had the word, Volunteer.  Following the links led me to a page that told one how to apply. 

I filled out the application and waited.  Invited in, I found myself with another hopeful undergoing a pleasant interview with Erin Asbury, Manager of Volunteer services.  Notification of acceptance came and with it the requirement for training.  They were not going to unleash us on an unsuspecting public without some knowledge of the basics.

Next was the welcome back event and issuance of badges in a packet of information.  Mine came with the first-year red lanyard.  I was now official.

The protocol is to arrive an hour before the concert and have a meeting, usually with Tammy Lynch Director of Front of House Management.  Tammy will apprise us if there is anything out of the ordinary we need to know.  Then it is off to our posts as ushers.  Our job is to guide those who need help to their seats, and also be aware if anyone is having a problem

My first working concert was on a July, 2016 evening in the Koussevitzky shed. when the Boston Pops brass and percussion sections performed with world class drum corps including the Boston Crusaders. You may ask yourself why drum corps?  It turns out many orchestra brass musicians start out there.

The last piece they all played that night was the 1812 Overture, which you know if you’ve watched the pops on July 4th.  To give people an idea what they were in for, ear plugs were handed out. I don’t know if Tchaikovsky meant it to be played with this much brass, but it was loud.

In my three years of volunteering, there has been a performance that has stood out each summer.  In 2016, it was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.  As a first-year usher, they pair one with an experienced veteran.  After, the man watching me related that someone had complained to him that the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) had played it too fast.  Hey, as a dilettante, what do I know?  We both thought it excellent.  If that was too fast, I hope the BSO never slows down.

In 2017, there would be a wonderful surprise in Ozawa Hall, a lovely space named after the former BSO Music Director. On a Wednesday in July as the evening light declined, Apollo’s Fire, a small Baroque orchestra under the direction of Jeannette Sorrell took the stage. They were there to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but began with a piece called La Bergamasca by the Italian Baroque composer, Marco Uccellini.  I had never heard it before, but I shall never forget it. 

The energy Ms. Sorrell and her ensemble brought to the stage was memorable.  Violinist Olivier Brault was superb as were the other soloists and performers.  If you don’t believe me, it was recorded on Youtube.  Entering “Apollo’s Fire Bergamasca” in the Youtube search window should get you there.

This Summer is the Centennial of a famous man who had a huge connection to Tanglewood.  Much was planned to celebrate the life in music of Leonard Bernstein.  Saturday, July 28, on screens at the Shed, they showed the movie West Side Story and the BSO played Bernstein’s music as the film ran.  Everyone in the audience was thrilled, including this usher.

The last Sunday in August, the BSO plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.  People who never listen to classical music have heard the Ode to Joy.  Though one might never tire of it, The Ninth on recording does not compare to hearing it live at Tanglewood.  Every summer, I look forward to seeing The Tanglewood Festival Chorus rise as one to sing Beethoven’s adaption of Schiller’s words. It will never grow old.

As the last notes fade away, so is summer on the wane.  Life goes on and there are other tasks and pleasures, but be assured your columnist is anticipating the posting of the schedule for the 2019 season.  That is my favorite harbinger of summer.  Symphony Hall is wonderful, but there is nothing like beautiful music on a lovely day in the Berkshires.

Red Scare Redux- Review of The Plot To Scapegoat Russia

Below is my review of Dan Kovalik's The Plot to Scapegoat Russia as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine (now The Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine) for the September 2017 issue.

It's a bit late, but still timely in light of the hysteria at large these days.

Return of the Red Scare

The Plot To Scapegoat Russia

By Dan Kovalik

Skyhorse Publishing, 2017 

Paperback, 240 Pages

Dan Kovalik probably never thought that he would have writtenThe Plot To Scapegoat Russia the way he did. Not that he believed the Central Intelligence Agency was beyond any skullduggery in promoting foreign adventures.  Indeed, he has spent years observing the agency’s antics in Latin America.

Mr. Kovalik must be surprised by the fact that the only man we can pin our hopes on to stop the march to conflict, if not nuclear war is Donald Trump.  Trump, being a reactionary plutocrat is the type of person Kovalik would normally have nothing but disdain for.  

It can’t be anything he is too happy about.  Dan Kovalik is an old-school lefty.  He cut his teeth protesting U.S. involvement south of the border, traveling to Nicaragua in 1988 to oppose the Contras.  There may a social program he’s against, but that is hard to imagine.  The Trump agenda must gall him.

Except for one aspect.

Donald Trump was suggesting, in his campaign utterances, that it may not be a bad idea to actually try and get along with Russia.  He suggested as well that maybe we did not have the solution to the Syrian imbroglio.

In that one aspect at least, Donald stood head and shoulders above the competition.  

How did we get to a point in history where a progressive activist could see Donald Trump as preferable to the Democrat’s standard bearer?  It’s a long story and in no way travels a straight line.

He spends much of the book discussing his activities in Latin America.  Kovalik identifies with the Sandinistas and opposes United Fruit (i.e. Chiquita Brands International) Company and their pervasive and destructive influence in Guatemala going back to the 1954 coup.  His account takes the side of the poor and indigenous peoples.  At first, I thought his narrative dwelt a little bit too much on the past.  It does become obvious that he sees U.S. policy as continuing from the past into the present and all cut from the same cloth.

In his coverage of the Cold War between NATO and the Soviets he is also somewhat kind to the memory of the Eastern Bloc.  Not that there is not sufficient blame to go around.

When he does get to the subject of the book’s title, the author is on solid ground.  His detail of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the role of people from the West in looting the corpse, as well as the continuing demonization of the Putin regime is worth the price of the book for the uninformed.  That would be most Americans. 

On Page 132 he begins the story of how we started on the road to the new cold war and though he does not say it, the origins of 911.  

“Another momentous and arguably disastrous, Cold War maneuver of the US was its support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which at the time shared a 1000-mile-long border with the Soviet Union.”

Without our support for what turned out to include many fanatical Islamic extremists, including Bin Laden, the Soviet Union would probably still have had a lot on its hands, but would have had been better able to manage any changes necessary. 

Our support for the Mujahideen insured, like for us in Vietnam, that the Soviets could never defeat the enemy.  It would be a slow bleed and would fatally weaken the U.S.S.R.

Things had to change and they did. The Reagan Administration and Mikhail Gorbachev came to a modus vivendi.  On Page 111 the author quotes the LA Times,

“In early February 1990, US leaders made the Soviets an offer.  According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9th then- Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation, US could make ‘iron-clad guarantees’ that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”  Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.”

Kovalik notes the promise was quickly broken and most of the old Warsaw Pact are now NATO members.  The expansion continues with the U.S. trying to enlist former Soviet Republics.  It is hard to argue that the world is better for NATO enlargement.

Chapter 7 CLINTON MEDDLES IN RUSSIA WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES gives an account of the machinations of Bill Clinton’s presidency as regards the Yeltsin regime.  He did not do us proud.  Yeltsin was essentially our stooge until he knew he could not continue.  This led to Putin whose big sin is not being our patsy. 

Chapter 11 THE US EXPANDS AS RUSSIA CONTRACTS: BROKEN PROMISES AND HUMILIATION explores the project to extend our influence at the expense of Russia.  None of it is anything we can brag about, but the worst bit is our Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland deciding the fate of the Ukrainian government after we had helped riot out an elected, if corrupt, president.  The pair were recorded doing just that and the heavy-handed discussion is rightly attacked by Kovalik.  He does not mention that the recording went “viral.” *

Mr. Kovalik eventually reaches the reality show of the recent American election.  The desire to blame the Russians for the inept campaign of Hillary Clinton is explored at length as are the commonsense pronouncements of The Donald.  

Suggesting that we not bug the Russkies and maybe overthrowing Syria was not a genius level idea appealed to a population that was tired of wars without result.  The Putin is the devil campaign left something to be desired with many including an old socialist like the author.

Post-election, Trump has not lived up to his better nature.  Kovalik notes on Page 170 that “it is never clear what Trump is truly thinking or intending.”  This is true and whether it is a good strategy or evidence of a scattered mind is a matter for debate.  Trump was quick in throwing some token bombs at a Syrian air base after a supposed chemical attack.  

Since the book has been published, the new president has not bombed North Korea.  He worked out an agreement with Putin for a ceasefire in South West Syria that is holding and cannot make the neocons in or out of his government happy, so we live in hope.

In his short book, Dan Kovalik covers a lot of ground.  The continuing demonization of a nuclear power makes his book an important resource for anyone who wants to understand what is going on.

Some of the author’s views are a bit one sided.  His favoritism of the now Soviet Ancien Regime can seem a bit overboard.  It is at odds with your reviewer’s memory of the brutal repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and certainly the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.  Still, his account of the anti-Russian hysteria is well sourced with ample footnotes.  Unfortunately, with the media’s parroting of the hostile narrative, from NPR to The New York Times, do not expect him to get glowing reviews.

*The recording is still extant and one can hear it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k .  After listening you may be forgiven for wondering if State recruits at clown colleges.

The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of—Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer

I was a boy when I watched the Twilight Zone episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  Rod Serling, who created and produced the Twilight Zone, introduced the episode, “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: in two forms, as it was dreamed... and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination... the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.”

The story was so well done that my memory of the episode haunted me for a long time and still does.

Briefly, during the Civil War, Union soldiers ready a man for hanging.  With noose around neck, he drops, but the rope breaks and he slips into the river below and somehow makes it home to his wife.  As he is about to fall into her arms, the reverie ends.  He has not escaped and dies abruptly.

It was a well-made short and had won at Cannes, but I thought it just an episode and did not know its provenance.  I was well into adulthood when I learned more about the author, Ambrose Bierce.

His The Devil’s Dictionary is how he comes to the attention of most people, unless some high school teacher assigns one of his short stories.  The Devil’s Dictionary reveals a humorous, but deeply cynical man.  Indeed, it is the quality that most defined Bierce.  As an example, his definition of Inhumanity as “n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity” aptly makes the point.

Such people may not be born, but experiences of life lead them to look at the motives of men from a deeply skeptical viewpoint.  How did Bierce get there?

It was the American Civil War that most influenced the man.  In Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American WriterChristopher Kiernan Coleman studies the military career that left its indelible mark on the subject.

Bierce grew up in Indiana and tried his hand at a few trades until the Civil War arrived.  For a time, he was at a military academy, but left after a year.  Kentucky Military Institute (KMI) was mostly southern in sympathy and that might have had some effect, as he was from a staunchly abolitionist family.

When the war came, Bierce had been whiling away the time, and was the second man to enlist in the company that would become part of the Ninth Indiana Regiment. That unit would gain the nickname, “The Bloody Ninth.”  The sobriquet gives an indication of what the young man was in for. 

Coleman’s account makes it seem that before the war Bierce was a bit of a devil-may-care, or liked to think he was.  His enlistment, however, was as an idealistic anti-slavery man as much as, if not more than, to save the Union.

War would change him.  He would not lose his antipathy to involuntary servitude, but idealism would not survive.  The mischievous lad might not have become a martinet, but he came to appreciate the need for discipline in the dangerous business of war.

The author speculates that, pre-war, at military school Bierce could stomach only the year he spent there.  This he contrasts with “a positive preference for spit-and-polish discipline while serving under Brigadier William Hazen” that Bierce acquired.

Hazen met Bierce and his unit after the campaign in Western Virginia.  That effort had been successful and Hazen thought his command would be a disciplined force.  As they did not meet his standards, he set about to put them in shape. This was not popular amongst the troops save for one.  Bierce said of the general that he was “the best hated man that I ever knew, and his very memory is a terror to every unworthy soul in the service.”

Bravery in battle led to a promotion to sergeant.  Distinguishing himself in that role saw Bierce raised to the rank of sergeant major.  The young man was now the senior non-commissioned officer in his regiment.  Considering that he was just shy of nineteen when he first enlisted, it could be considered a meteoric rise.  Of course, the odd Confederate bullet may have opened up the possibility of advancement as well.

Bierce was not finished moving up.  He would be commissioned a second lieutenant and eventually, a first.  Hazen found him useful and he was the General’s topographic engineer.  The making of maps, which he might have learned something of at KMI, was a valuable and necessary skill.  Battles were lost due to lack of accurate geographic knowledge.

As he was clearly a man of skill and bravery in the profession of arms.  Whence came the tendency to cynicism?

A possible clue to the change in spirit would be his wounding.  He had been detailed by General Hazen to take the orders for advancing the picket line to the units involved.  The troops would move forward watched by Confederate snipers who relished officers as targets.

Captain Eastman, leading from the front was shot, fatally as it would turn out.  Bierce went to the assistance of the doomed man.

Coleman began Chapter 13, Casualties of War, with a Bierce story that parallels what happened to Ambrose to a point

“The Butternut(i.e. a confederate soldier)takes aim; he pauses a second.  The shot is more difficult this time.  The second officer is kneeling over the first now.  No mind; he presses the trigger.  A loud report, a flash, a puff of grey smoke, then-nothing.  For a moment the Butternut thinks he misses.  But no; suddenly the second man falls to the ground.  It is a good day for hunting Yankees.” 

Obviously, the second officer would be Bierce.  Coleman does not say it happened exactly that way, but a serious head wound was inflicted.

The story of his journey to the army hospital in Nashville is harrowing.  The recuperation on leave home does not seem to have been complete.  His romance with a local girl apparently died during the furlough.

The author quotes what Ambrose’s brother Albert said of the man post-wound, “He was never the same after that.  Some of the iron of that shell seemed to stick in his brain, he became bitter and suspicious, especially of his close friends.”

Coleman’s account makes clear the words happy camper could never apply to Bierce.  

Was the injury the origin of the literary career of the man who would write so cynically?  If so, his fans owe some gratitude to the shot that wounded him. Bierce’s worldview meant he was not going to write Hallmark card level cheerfulness.

He would continue in the army and after the war, would work with General Hazen in government service and pursue a writer’s career.  His end is mysterious as he disappeared presumably while traveling to another civil war, this time in Mexico.  Considering his life and writings, it was fitting he went as a man of mystery.  He might have wanted it that way.

Full disclosure: Christopher Kiernan Coleman was my undergraduate classmate.  He was and is what I was not, a scholar.  Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strifeis well-ordered and Chris’ prose is a pleasure to read.