Set in 60s and 70s America and featuring a cast of athletes and sports writers that I have no familiarity with, I think I would have found this book hard going if it wasn’t for the fascinating ideas about sports, culture and the intersection between the two that it contains. Structurally, the book is a pastiche; part memoir, part history of sports journalism in America, part feature piece on significant sportspeople, part philosophy of sports and part reflection on society. It was the last two facets that were really exciting to me and made the book worth reading. Like a lot of journalist’s books I’ve read, it struck me as a collection of long form articles rather than an especially coherent whole. I can forgive this as the individual articles are interesting enough, told with an experienced newspaper writer’s turn of phrase and eye for a story. What really made the book so interesting were the unfamiliar and uncommon observations Lipsyte makes about ‘Sportsworld’ and what that, in turn, says about society. First published in 1975, they still seem highly pertinent today.
Before I attempt to summarise the most powerful parts of the book, I’ll preface it by saying a bit about how I found out about it. I came across Robert Lipsyte while watching the excellent documentary OJ: Made in America, which also tries to locate sports in the wider context of society. Thinking that his comments as a talking head in the film were eloquent and erudite, I googled him and found out about this book. Out of print at the time, I pre-ordered it online and waited for a couple of months until it arrived. Reading the introduction and first chapters, I realised that Lipsyte is probably quite unusual for a sportswriter insofar as he is not a sports obsessive. He writes that he fell into sports writing ‘accidentally’ and never really attended many sports games before becoming a journalist. Equally, he wrote this book as, ‘my valedictory to sportswriting before I headed off to fiction’. Both of these facts may contribute to the refreshing and original flavour of this book. Neither sentimental glamorization of ‘Sportsworld’ and his role in it nor bleary eyed hagiographies of the sportspeople he writes about are to be found here. It is this unorthodox perspective that makes this book good.
The things I didn’t like about the book were outnumbered by the wealth of interesting ideas I found within it. That said, I do have a few criticism. As I mentioned in the introduction, it’s somewhat haphazard in its construction. Mixed in amongst the characterisations and reflections on SportsWorld are less appealing chapters such as a long and rambling chapter on Muhammad Ali (Chp 4), an arcane history of modern American sports journalism (Chp 6) and some fairly mundane meditations on Lipsyte’s own experiences learning to play tennis (Chp 7). They’re not totally unconnected to what he is writing about; Ali is the quintessentially objectified athlete, journalism is the means of observing and marketing sports to the masses and Lipsyte’s tennis lessons are an example of sports being played and enjoyed rather than consumed. These were not terrible chapters in and of themselves but seemed to stray from the central argument of the book. The writing is generally good but there is one absolute clanger for a British reader. Lipsyte, clearly with one eye on his mainly American readership, recounts an anecdote where former French president Charles De Gaulle uses a rugby metaphor about, then UK Prime Minister, Harold Wilson’s attempt to push Britain into the Common Market. “He’s a linesman who thinks he’s an offensive back” (p10), quotes Lipsyte, apparently unconcerned by the fact that these are American football positions and not rugby football ones! To my mind, he should have kept the original quote and explained it or discarded it altogether. For any reader who knows anything about rugby it’s a meaningless aberration and a brazen misuse of quotation marks! I’ll refrain from making any further comments about journalists and their propensity to fabricate helpful quotations. Lastly, whoever was responsible for ‘editing’ this book did almost no work at all as the text is littered with scores of basic typos and spelling errors.
When you grow up loving to compete and play sports this very easily leads to loving to watch competitive sports. Watching the most skillful players practice their craft holds an addictive allure. That allure is only enhanced by the opportunity to discuss their exploits with your friends and competitors in the playground. The view that sports are a pretty much unmitigated positive seemed a fairly orthodox and uncontroversial truth to me for most of my life. Sports are fun, sports are cool, what could possibly be wrong with sports? Occasionally, I would wonder if it was quite such an unmitigated good that society allocates so much money to go to such a small group of young men. But I would tell myself that was just the way a market for talent worked and that I too was contributing to these astronomical salaries by loving sport so much! I also feel that this positive view of sports is fairly mainstream and widely held. For example, here is a quote from The Economist, June 9th 2018 that I was reading at the same time as Sportsworld, “We see in the World Cup the fulfilment of some of our most cherished values”. Sport represents progress via the formative crucible of competition. Competition is fun and natural. As a race, we compete our way to greater and greater achievement and glory. It’s evolution, it’s the way the world works! Sportsworld helped me to think about these beliefs and preconceptions in a new light.
To continue with the example of the soccer world cup that’s taking place in Russia at the moment. First, the current tournament, and the next in Qatar, take place in authoritarian countries with dodgy human rights records. This is probably connected to FIFA’s well publicised problems with bribery and corruption. Are these the ‘most cherished values’ of the Western, capitalist world as exemplified by The Economist? The truthful answer may well be, ‘Yes!’ but this is most definitely not the image that ‘SportsWorld’ wants to portray of itself, which is broadly one of clean, fair competition and sporting excellence. Players choose which country they will represent based on what the law will allow. Some have special visas issued and even switch allegiances halfway through their careers, if their lawyers can appease the relevant authorities. This is hardly a representation of the much vaunted pride and passion of playing for one’s country that is constantly referred to by pundits, media and commentators alike. On the pitch too , I think there is a good case to be made for questioning the values on display. Players dive, hack, spit at each other, feign injury, run down the clock when it suits them, use abusive language towards the officials and will broadly do whatever they can to win. This is fundamental to SportsWorld; win at all costs. But why do we accept, and even celebrate, these otherwise repugnant and sociopathic behaviours? In any other arena they would surely be explicitly condemned even if they might find more acceptance privately. What does it say about our society? A cheat is branded a ‘ruthless competitor’, with a good deal of admiration in many cases, and his or her indiscretions on the field are explained away by the fact that they’re ‘a different person off the pitch’ and give money to orphanages and old folks' homes. What SportsWorld is really saying, behind all the marketing razzmatazz and bullshit, is, ‘it doesn’t matter how you achieve it but you must win’. This is a highly questionable message that Lipsyte exposes and examines in several interesting ways.
As well as exemplifying questionable behaviour and ethics, the structure of sports also attracts criticism from Lipsyte. Owners bully competing cities into building stadiums with public money and ruthlessly move their franchises based on the best deal available to them. Is this really the best use of public funds or the kind of attitude that a true fan of a sports team would display? Instead, Lipsyte sees America’s major league owners as motivated by the same suspect values of Sportsworld; self interest and success at all costs. Wealthy owner’s teams are useful tax shelters, players are seen as assets to be depreciated over time as their utility declines with age and damage to their bodies. This kind of objectification of individuals is in some senses inhumane. It’s interesting to note that sports seems to be the only industry where an employee is legally sold by one employer to another. A player cannot move without the consent of his owner, a situation which would be illegal and intolerable in any other industry. This strikes me as a clear example of the owners supremacy over the employees; who are objectified and commodified. Sports has little interest in the well-being of its players once they have ceased to serve their useful purpose. That purpose is to perform for their owners and to please them by bringing success to the team, the town and the fans. If they can’t do this then they are discarded. Their entire existence revolves around pleasing others whether that be making their owner rich and famous or carrying the dreams of their childhood friends and neighbours into the major leagues. Problems like these are usually dismissed with a scoff because some sports people are paid so much money to do something many other people wish they could do too. How can these people be exploited when they earn so much money? A much quoted Sports Illustrated statistic that 78% of players of former NFL players are, ‘bankrupt or under ‘financial stress’ within two years of retirement’ gives a drastically different perspective. Not to mention all those who never make it to the rarified atmosphere of the highly paid top leagues and work in the far less remunerative lower tiers of the professional sports.
Perhaps the problem is more easily apprehended via the hyper competitive world of high school and college recruitment. Indeed, it may be here that many American sportsmen and women begin the shambolic induction into SportsWorld that will serve them so poorly in the real world. In high school and college, the money isn’t so big. Although large amounts of it change hands under the table in yet another indictment of the true values of SportsWorld. Young athletes are incessantly recruited from an early age by multiple intermediaries, often with their own best interests taking precedence over the child’s. They will move house to fit into the right catchment area, sometimes they are seperated from the ‘bad influences’ of their parents and siblings to be transplanted into a foreign world where they are only loved for what they can do on the pitch and the glory they can bring to their coaches and schools. Academic and behavioural rules cease to apply to this ‘privileged’ class and they are showered with scholarships, illicit payments and hundreds of other perks as long as they keep producing the goods on the pitch. The scale and extent of cheating that goes on could fill several volumes and, again, paints a sorry picture of the world’s best loved pastime. Why do elite academic institutions, supposedly existing to promote knowledge, truth and learning, ride roughshod over these supposedly sacred values in the name of sporting success? Essentially because it is good marketing, serves the vicarious fantasies of other students, fans and alumni and can be profitable too. Lipsyte writes about poor teenagers from the ghettos in NY and their progression to the big athletic schools in basketball:
“Products of the “city game”, they reappear as college stars in South Carolina and Tennessee and West Texas and Wisconsin, often after a year of ‘prepping’ at one of several small private academies in the South and West that seem to exist primarily to sand off the roughest of their streety ways and teach them to understand, if not speak, white English. The conventional SportsWorld wisdom, that most of these young men would never have a chance to attend college without basketball, is absolutely true. And a condemnation of the educational system that barely needs comment.” p126
This reminded me a lot of Netflix series I watched called Last Chance U about a junior college where misfits from the college recruitment processes go for one last chance to gain a scholarship to a big school for American football. Almost all are poor, almost all struggle academically; but in Mississippi there exists a place where they can go on a full scholarship to serve the continual drive for competitive success. The coaches in these environments are often seen as quasi social workers, helping underprivileged children to find a way out of the poverty and deprivation of their indigenous social environments. But Lipsyte asks us to question if they’re not simply exploiting these children for their own ends in the same way the whole system seems to? The fact that I enjoyed watching it so much made me sad that I am so enthrall to what is ultimately such an empty fantasy for the vast majority of the young people that pass through the sporting scholarship process. Books like Friday Night Lights and films like Hoop Dreams highlight the same issues. Are these young people really being granted opportunities or are they simply grist to the mill for a system that exploits them for other people’s ends? They are sold a fantasy of escapism that will eventually do them more harm than good and, crucially, do nothing to alter the horrifying social circumstances they are trying to escape. Lipsyte likens it to drug addiction in a different form when writing about young basketball players:
“Basketball is a hard drug too...He is not practicing to gain the recognition of his peers or to impress girls or get a college scholarship; at that moment [flashy slam dunk] he is on a trip, and for as long as he is on it, he is everything he wants to be. It should not be surprising that so many playground aces are junkies with dope, too.” (p130-1)
SportsWorld is intimately involved in selling this empty fantasy to both players and fans alike. Lipsyte is very candid about the role that journalists and sports media play in this marketing machine. SportsWorld is a dreamland where talent, competitive spirit and a win at all costs mentality can get you millions of dollars, beautiful women and the adoration of all sports fans. Nevermind that the vast majority of aspiring athletes fail to make anything out of their total dedication to their sport and leave it with nothing more than a neglected education and significantly impaired employment prospects. Fans too dream of being paid astronomical sums for doing something they love without ever being exposed to the negative side of the system. Journalists, according to Lipsyte, can’t and won’t write about it for fear of upsetting the apple cart and losing their access to teams and players. SportsWorld wants positive press and not revelations that will damage the sport that is being successfully used to market every conceivable product and service. As such, the media perpetuate the myth of SportsWorld as a healthy, wholesome utopia. Wages and transfer fees are one good example that Lipsyte uses. These figures are usually vastly inflated but it is no one’s interest to expose this. Athletes don’t want their egos damaged by revealing that they are being paid far less than their rivals or peers. Journalists, owners and marketing departments know that it’s great advertising; everyone wants to see the man who is worth $200m or is being paid $20m a year to play. It gets a huge amount of press coverage, makes good headlines, sells replica shirts and brings more fans to the stadium and eyeballs to the screens showing the game, which in turn brings more endorsements. It’s not in anyone’s interest to uncover the darker side of sports and the fans don’t want their fantasy spoilt. Lipsyte is remarkably candid on this topic and writes:
“Sportswriters, presumably speaking for their constituents, the fans, react badly against holdouts, strikes, and lawsuits by players, because it unmakes the magic: Fans do not really want players to humanise themselves too much. Pictures of wives and kids in the yearbook, okay, but the sportswriters thought Ron Swoboda went too far the year he said he was ashamed to face his wife after the paltry raise the Mets had given him. He was ashamed to face his wife. Who isn’t? Who needs a National Pastime to hear that?” (p210)
Lipsyte also extrapolates how the rhetoric and implied values of SportsWorld extend into other aspects of our lives and society. It’s hard, if not impossible, to decipher which of these came first. A classic chicken and egg situation. However, when you look at the exploding popularity of sports and the ever more commercialised and personality driven nature of politics you could be forgiven for thinking the situation is deteriorating. Against that, Roman books like Cicero’s How to Win An Election would give the impression that the more things change, the more they stay the same! For Lipsyte, Nixon was the apotheosis of SportsWorld culture as represented in the political world. In the 2018 preface to the book he also refers to Trump as, ‘an avatar of the worst aspects of jock culture’. He also bemoans the fact that he granted him column inches as, ‘an entertaining if unreliable subject’ admitting that, ‘we didn’t take him seriously enough because we stayed in the press boxes interviewing each other instead of wandering through the bleachers talking to the fans’. This is characteristically honest and self-critical writing from Lipsyte and other examples abound throughout the book. Nonetheless, in spite of the urge to view contemporary events as the worst in history and the temptations to identify signs of the end of empire all around us, the culture is probably largely the same now as it was in the 70s. This theory would explain the abiding relevance that I see in the ideas of this book. Returning to Nixon and the similarities between the empty fantasy and the grubby realty in both sports and politics, Lipsyte writes this:
“It took Nixon and the seventies for us to realise that both American capitalism and American football were elaborate hoaxes, and that not only were they contradictory to each other, but each was self-contradictory.
Here was football demanding that gratification be deferred until a specific goal was reached, while capitalism urged us to desire and consume without purpose, or selectively sacrifice so we could desire and consume again.
Here was football demanding collective spirit within each team and total antagonism among all opposing teams, while opposing owners operated jointly to keep their costs down, their prices up, and their employees indentured. If there was a larger lesson in that, perhaps it was that in capitalism, as in football, the regulations to balance growth and power were actually conspiracies to control the workers. And just as football was mock war, contained and regulated, so had war become mock war, contained and regulated. But shoulders and knees still popped , and young men still came home in rubber bags.” p46
There is an element of newspaper sensationalism in this but also an undeniable element of truth. The rich get richer and control more and more of the world while the masses are fed the distractions of sports and politics, which are both reported on by and controlled by elite interests. The ideas and philosophies of SportsWorld are both ethically questionable and fundamentally conformist. As Lipsyte puts it:
“The player who will do anything to win may turn maddog on the field, but he will not march in campus demonstrations during the season. The coach who will do anything to win may divert anti poverty grants to the athletic department slush fund but he will not disparage the educational standards of the university. The businessman who will do anything to win may steal a rival’s formula but he will not expose price-fixing in the industry. And the presidential candidate who will do anything to win may lie, steal, commit unspeakable perversions, but he can be relied upon never to upset the social structure that allowed him to play in the biggest leagues” (p8)
One of the strangest things about looking back on this book from 2018 is that two of the books non-conformist heros, Muhammed Ali and Billie Jean King, have been recruited to its pantheon of heroes. This involves more than a little hypocrisy on the part of SportsWorld but also highlights its ability to assimilate new ideas to adjust to the tastes and beliefs of different ages. As Lipsyte puts it in his introduction, these former rebels, ‘have been bleached into sainthood’. Only time will tell if the early signs of fresh athletic protest represented by Colin Kaepernick and several championship teams refusal to endorse Trump by attending the White House will result in a fundamental change of culture in SportsWorld or will be, ‘subverted and co-opted as it was fifty years ago’. Sadly, I feel like the power of self interest and money may see it, ‘channelled into hustling for endorsements’ once again.
None of this goes to say that sports are inherently evil or bad. Quite the opposite, it is the pleasure and exhilaration of sports that makes it such a powerful tool for advertisers and others to exploit. It would hardly work so well if it were not. Just like sex has been used to sell and influence public opinion in ways described in documentaries like Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self, so too has sports. In probably the best single sentence synopsis of the book’s central argument, Lipsyte writes:
“The joy of sport is as real and accessible as the joy of sex; and both have been distorted and commercialised to make us consume and conform” (p254)
However, these issues are so complex and hard to apprehend I think it is a fair criticism of this book and films like Century of the Self that they’re a little too glib and slick. Both reduce mind-boggling complexity and confusion into a comprehensible, unorthodox thesis that’s easy to dismiss as a conspiracy theory. Against this, in order to make a powerful and compelling idea accessible, it is necessary to simplify it. It is impossible to write a opinion without bias and there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion. The value of an idea is not totally negated just because it has some flaws or doesn’t deal with every single objection. Given that the ideas contained in both presentations of consumerism are quite rare, I feel it is forgivable that both take a hugely difficult subject and attempt to make it more facile in their pursuit of making the strongest possible counter-argument to accepted thinking.
After reading this damning indictment of SportsWorld, I began to wonder, ‘is all competition a bad thing?’ Looking around for evidence to support this theory, it’s not hard to find. The career of Lance Armstrong is an excellent example of how extreme competition creates extreme cheating, lying and deception. The 2017 film Icarus, shows that successfully avoiding doping rules and regulations is perhaps the most important part of a cycling team’s job. Many riders have come out to say that the problem is endemic. Cycling is certainly not alone. The entire Russian Olympic team was banned from competition after the discovery of a state sponsored doping program. Track athletes are regularly banned or stripped of their medals for failing drugs tests. Baseball too has had its own widespread use of doping exposed. The examples are too numerous to go on listing.
Perhaps sports like soccer are less prone to this kind of cheating as there is no simple way to boost skill in the ways athletics or cycling teams can boost endurance and shorten recovery times. Nonetheless, when there is so much money involved and winning is pursued at all costs it feels naive to assume that teams and individuals in all sports aren’t doing everything in their power, legal and illegal, to achieve this aim. Perhaps we should just accept that doping is so widespread that we should abandon any regulations and allow athletes to do whatever they want in their pursuit of victory. I would agree with this type of philosophy when it comes to the use of recreational drugs. The ‘War on Drugs’ has been such an abject failure, why continue to criminalise citizens, at huge expense to the taxpayer, when all these drugs are freely available almost anywhere in the world? Here, the argument goes that it is better to regulate, supervise and tax these highly dangerous substances rather than put their production and distribution in the hands of violent and dangerous criminals. But in the case of sports, leaving aside the long term health of athletes, which strikes me as an equivalent concern in recreational drugs, it feels like the spirit and joy of sports is being undermined by this obsession with competition and winning. It’s exactly the kind of distortion that Lipsyte is writing about.
Some may counter these kinds of arguments by saying that competition is fun and natural. But I would counter by asking if cheating is really a value that we should celebrating and upholding so vigorously in society. Many financial crises, wars, public health, bribery and price fixing scandals can trace their cause to exactly this kind of win at all costs, SportsWorld mentality. Inequality and all its attendant social issues may well also trace its roots to this competitive fervour. It could be argued that this kind of self-interest is fundamental to human behaviour and the way the world operates both within society and within nature. But this strikes me as rather determinist and fatalistic. Shouldn’t we be trying to overcome our social or genetic pre-conditioning? More primitive societies concerned themselves with fighting over land, cattle and women. We rightly place ourselves above them and can justifiably feel proud of public healthcare, education and infrastructure. Perhaps future generations will look back scornfully on this era where competition and victory were deified in the same way we now look at war as uncivilised and destructive. Until very recently, soldiers were celebrated for killing and overcoming enemies whereas now almost no one can name the top officials in their country’s armed forces. Lipsyte makes this point too:
“Once we had carelessly scooped out our heroes from the soldier-statesmen-athlete pool. But in 1951 the military dried up when President Truman dismantled Douglas MacArthur, posthumously demoting Mad Anthony, Stonewall Jackson, Sergeant York, and Patton. Soldiers would never again be given their moments in the sun, much less their seven days in May. By the late sixties, the media had somehow turned the medal of honour into a psycho’s badge. Vietnam veterans and prisoners of war came home in 1974 to the perfunctory welcomes reserved for losing teams in state championships” (p209)
But it is also possible that the last few relatively peaceful decades in Western Europe are just a statistical anomaly and that humans will forever compete and fight each other. It could even be argued that this is the only way for our species to progress, evolve and survive. As I wrote before, I find this a depressing prospect. Institutions like slavery, ownership of women and punishing homosexuality were all thought of as natural at certain points in history. I would argue that it is a sign of progress that we have abandoned these cruel and inhumane practices and I hope that murdering and warmongering will have the same fate. Clearly, these are incredibly difficult subjects to prognosticate upon and no one can know what he future holds. Good, evil and morality can all be seen as entirely relative concepts, which would relegate my opinions and theories to little more than a reflections of the fashions and fads of my particular period of history. I hope this isn’t true but it’s not possible to prove or support this in any concrete way.
This book led me to think about sports, its place in society and what it says about us as a people and civilisation in many interesting ways. Much like this essay, it could probably be accused of oversimplification and grandiose theorising about mankind. Nonetheless, I feel like this kind of thinking is both fascinating and valuable. I can certainly say that I enjoyed reading it and thinking about the ideas it contains.
Saturday 30 June 2018
Saturday 23 June 2018
Yu Hua - China in Ten Words
Written in plain, flowing and readable prose this book organises one author’s reflections on the China’s history and development around the ten words that he feels best characterise it. It has an easy, conversational feel of a man recounting stories from his eclectic past. Deceptively homely and easy to read, nevertheless it conjures vivid depictions. He draws on his experiences of childhood during the Cultural Revolution, his work as a tooth-puller and then an author under the Communist regime and observations about China since the advent of the open door policy and market reforms. He moves easily from one anecdote or observation to the next, varying between highly personal, childhood recollections, national news reports and even macro-economic observations. While such a disparate selection of vignettes might run the risk of becoming rambling or veering off topic when dealing with such complex, wide-ranging issues. His account strikes a fine balance between his own experience and his ideas about Chinese culture and history as a whole. Yu Hua always manages to gather together the various strands and leaves you with a feeling of comprehension and appreciation of a zeitgeist that can be absent from more strictly factual or chronological accounts. I felt this was supported by his skill in selecting poignant stories to tell, his eye for detail in furnishing these accounts with details and his smooth prose.
China’s passion for revolution and the chaotic society that it created left me feeling dumbstruck that something so widespread could have happened in such a huge country. How did these ideas take root so rapidly and deeply, I kept wondering? It’s easy, and comforting, to dismiss it as a quixotic mass mania, completely alien to me and the society I know and have grown up in. But this must surely be a mistake as what a Chinese revolutionary, or a Russian one, or a French one or a German Nazi felt at the time is probably what I would have felt in the same context. Whatever seems incomprehensible in history, in some sense, exists within us, however repressed, and needs only the correct circumstances to become patent. While I believe this to be fundamentally true, it is still a huge imaginative challenge to think of having such strong feelings of loyalty and devotion to Chairman Mao and the Revolution that I would happily inform on my friends and family in the full knowledge that they would face prison or be shot. But these things happened with such regularity that it must be accepted, however wild and unlikely it seems today. Yu Hua doesn’t seem to try and spare his own revolutionary activities from the repugnant light that they’re seen in by Western eyes today. He honestly recounts a horrible story about beating up a peasant who had come to his town to illegally sell his oil coupons to fund his wedding. He and his friends do this out of vigilance against counter revolutionaries that seems cruel and unnecessary by today’s standards. Such was the fervour of their revolutionary zeal. Another facet of this incredible enthusiasm that I was unaware of before is the position of popularity that Mao still occupies in China today. In the West, Mao is a criminal; guilty of atrocious human rights abuses with the blood of millions of his starved countrymen on his hands. But 85% of modern Chinese people interviewed think his return would be a good thing! I still find myself incredulous at this statistic even as I write it now and even when I reflect on the huge amount of propaganda that supported Mao’s life and legacy I still find it hard to see why the huge number of deaths under his regime don’t identify him as a shambolic and evil leader among ordinary citizens today although I supposed I could be accused of parroting Western propaganda by saying that!
One aspect that may support this lasting positive view of Mao and Communism is the euphoria Yu Hua describes during the early days of revolution. All classes and factories close as people are all too busy, ‘making revolution’. Goods and services that normally cost money become free, food is abundant and plentiful, people travel freely around the country with all trains and accommodation expenses provided for and everyone feels bound together by feelings of camaraderie and revolutionary spirit. He describes a scene in Beijing when he feels a blast of warm air on a chilly night during the early days of the revolution and eventually discovers its source as tens of thousands of people singing revolutionary songs at a bridge. They have come together to defend it against the army and are undeterred by their lack of weapons such is the strength of their feeling.
If the consequences of the revolution weren’t so tragic they would certainly be comic. Suddenly, social order is totally inverted. Children can openly insult and assault their teachers, Yu Hua’s brother burnishes his revolutionary credentials by punching his teacher in the face as a 9 year old, and everything is justifiable by reference to one of Mao’s sayings. Usually, ‘to rebel is necessary’. People form themselves into impromptu gangs, claim power and legitimacy from Mao and the Revolution and fight to the death for the government seals that signify power like school children playing capture the flag. Yu Hua remembers walking around his town watching street fights as a form of entertainment in his childhood days. Adults can be cowed by children simply by their threatening to brand them ‘counter revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist roaders’. Mass humiliation and public execution appear to become the norm in terms of public entertainment. People are thrown in jail or shot for folding a picture of Mao across his face or accidentally contradicting something he said. Rich people suddenly become society’s least fortunate members, almost sure to be purged as capitalists, and those who lost fortunes in the recent past count their lucky stars that they are poor now. This was the case with Yu Hua’s family and is also depicted by the main protagonist in the film To Live. A gang of revolutionaries can authorise travel, condemn people to death, invade people’s homes and steal their property all in the name of the revolution and Chairman Mao. Only to be purged and replaced by another gang proclaiming exactly the same thing! It reminded me of what I have read about witch hunts in Britain during the 16th and 17th century. Everyone lives in fear in a fevered environment of violence and accusations where anything is justifiable by appeal to an unquestioned principle. Everyone accuses everyone of being a counter revolutionary and no one is safe from this ill-defined and changeable crime that carries the most deadly consequences. The contradiction and chaos are too much to comprehend and have all the trappings of high farce. Yu Hua does a good job of capturing some of this topsy-turvy world through his quotidien observations of childhood during this period. Again, it is hard to think of any ideology powerful enough to make me think that shooting my neighbour is a justifiable or acceptable act but surely I would have behaved in the same way or have ended up dead for my failure to conform. What happened to people’s humanitarian conscience in this era? Did people cease to care for one another? How did death and violence become so everyday so suddenly? It shows what a powerful drug revolution must have been.
Yu Hua draws interesting parallels between the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic miracle of the past 30 years. Just as the fervour of revolution swept all before it, now the obsession with wealth, growth and personal gain justifies all. This may be, in part, what makes people nostalgic for certain aspects of revolutionary philosophy. In the same way people went mad for revolution, now people go mad for money and development in a way that Yu Hua depicts as characteristically Chinese. The same zeal that allowed a whole society to be turned on its head has allowed it to grow rich and expand faster than any other in history. But just as the revolution spawned violence, death and tragedy in its wake; so the explosion of capitalism has lead to what Yu Hua calls ‘unequal development’. Old women are bulldozed in their houses by government officials chasing ever higher GDP growth, company directors have their legs broken in pursuit of company seals, corruption has become endemic and the powerful spend millions of dollars on apartments while millions of their countrymen still live in poverty. ‘Copycatting’ and ‘bamboozling’, once frowned upon as immoral and distasteful, are now considered acceptable, even desirable, in the pursuit of wealth. Yu Hua paints both as the results of Chinese avidity and intensity.
There were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy about this book. Both relate to what I see as a tendency to sentimentalise and romanticise. First, although the general quality of the prose is excellent, it is occasionally spoiled by a hackneyed simile or metaphor like, ‘scattered far and wide like leaves in the autumn breeze’ or something equally cliched. Secondly, when Yu Hua relates his tale of copying out illegal books he talks about copying Duma’s ‘La dame aux Camelias’ in one night with his friend. Even though he tells us that the beginnings and endings of these dogeared, underground editions would often be missing, I find it impossible to believe that two young boys copied out 250 pages of text in one night. Especially as this would have been in Chinese characters, which are wildly inefficient and time consuming to write! The subsequent story about how he couldn’t read his friend’s characters and vice versa, while amusing, is equally unlikely as they could hardly have stood under a street lamp and read 200 odd pages out loud in one evening. I suppose Yu Hua is a born storyteller and, like most storytellers, is inclined to embellish his stories a bit for artistic improvement or narrative efficiency! Yu Hua quotes a Chinese saying himself that says, ‘there’s no tax on bullshit’!
On the whole, I enjoyed this book and felt it gave a vivid depiction of a period of Chinese history that is often encountered in a more formally historical fashion. He also draws interesting connections between this period and modern China while making illustrative observations about both. Of course, as I have written throughout this piece, much of the psychology and mindset of this era must remain a mystery to me as an anachronistic observer, living in an entirely different context. Nonetheless, I have the feeling, perhaps misplaced, that I understand a little more now than I did when I started the book.
China’s passion for revolution and the chaotic society that it created left me feeling dumbstruck that something so widespread could have happened in such a huge country. How did these ideas take root so rapidly and deeply, I kept wondering? It’s easy, and comforting, to dismiss it as a quixotic mass mania, completely alien to me and the society I know and have grown up in. But this must surely be a mistake as what a Chinese revolutionary, or a Russian one, or a French one or a German Nazi felt at the time is probably what I would have felt in the same context. Whatever seems incomprehensible in history, in some sense, exists within us, however repressed, and needs only the correct circumstances to become patent. While I believe this to be fundamentally true, it is still a huge imaginative challenge to think of having such strong feelings of loyalty and devotion to Chairman Mao and the Revolution that I would happily inform on my friends and family in the full knowledge that they would face prison or be shot. But these things happened with such regularity that it must be accepted, however wild and unlikely it seems today. Yu Hua doesn’t seem to try and spare his own revolutionary activities from the repugnant light that they’re seen in by Western eyes today. He honestly recounts a horrible story about beating up a peasant who had come to his town to illegally sell his oil coupons to fund his wedding. He and his friends do this out of vigilance against counter revolutionaries that seems cruel and unnecessary by today’s standards. Such was the fervour of their revolutionary zeal. Another facet of this incredible enthusiasm that I was unaware of before is the position of popularity that Mao still occupies in China today. In the West, Mao is a criminal; guilty of atrocious human rights abuses with the blood of millions of his starved countrymen on his hands. But 85% of modern Chinese people interviewed think his return would be a good thing! I still find myself incredulous at this statistic even as I write it now and even when I reflect on the huge amount of propaganda that supported Mao’s life and legacy I still find it hard to see why the huge number of deaths under his regime don’t identify him as a shambolic and evil leader among ordinary citizens today although I supposed I could be accused of parroting Western propaganda by saying that!
One aspect that may support this lasting positive view of Mao and Communism is the euphoria Yu Hua describes during the early days of revolution. All classes and factories close as people are all too busy, ‘making revolution’. Goods and services that normally cost money become free, food is abundant and plentiful, people travel freely around the country with all trains and accommodation expenses provided for and everyone feels bound together by feelings of camaraderie and revolutionary spirit. He describes a scene in Beijing when he feels a blast of warm air on a chilly night during the early days of the revolution and eventually discovers its source as tens of thousands of people singing revolutionary songs at a bridge. They have come together to defend it against the army and are undeterred by their lack of weapons such is the strength of their feeling.
If the consequences of the revolution weren’t so tragic they would certainly be comic. Suddenly, social order is totally inverted. Children can openly insult and assault their teachers, Yu Hua’s brother burnishes his revolutionary credentials by punching his teacher in the face as a 9 year old, and everything is justifiable by reference to one of Mao’s sayings. Usually, ‘to rebel is necessary’. People form themselves into impromptu gangs, claim power and legitimacy from Mao and the Revolution and fight to the death for the government seals that signify power like school children playing capture the flag. Yu Hua remembers walking around his town watching street fights as a form of entertainment in his childhood days. Adults can be cowed by children simply by their threatening to brand them ‘counter revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist roaders’. Mass humiliation and public execution appear to become the norm in terms of public entertainment. People are thrown in jail or shot for folding a picture of Mao across his face or accidentally contradicting something he said. Rich people suddenly become society’s least fortunate members, almost sure to be purged as capitalists, and those who lost fortunes in the recent past count their lucky stars that they are poor now. This was the case with Yu Hua’s family and is also depicted by the main protagonist in the film To Live. A gang of revolutionaries can authorise travel, condemn people to death, invade people’s homes and steal their property all in the name of the revolution and Chairman Mao. Only to be purged and replaced by another gang proclaiming exactly the same thing! It reminded me of what I have read about witch hunts in Britain during the 16th and 17th century. Everyone lives in fear in a fevered environment of violence and accusations where anything is justifiable by appeal to an unquestioned principle. Everyone accuses everyone of being a counter revolutionary and no one is safe from this ill-defined and changeable crime that carries the most deadly consequences. The contradiction and chaos are too much to comprehend and have all the trappings of high farce. Yu Hua does a good job of capturing some of this topsy-turvy world through his quotidien observations of childhood during this period. Again, it is hard to think of any ideology powerful enough to make me think that shooting my neighbour is a justifiable or acceptable act but surely I would have behaved in the same way or have ended up dead for my failure to conform. What happened to people’s humanitarian conscience in this era? Did people cease to care for one another? How did death and violence become so everyday so suddenly? It shows what a powerful drug revolution must have been.
Yu Hua draws interesting parallels between the Cultural Revolution and China’s economic miracle of the past 30 years. Just as the fervour of revolution swept all before it, now the obsession with wealth, growth and personal gain justifies all. This may be, in part, what makes people nostalgic for certain aspects of revolutionary philosophy. In the same way people went mad for revolution, now people go mad for money and development in a way that Yu Hua depicts as characteristically Chinese. The same zeal that allowed a whole society to be turned on its head has allowed it to grow rich and expand faster than any other in history. But just as the revolution spawned violence, death and tragedy in its wake; so the explosion of capitalism has lead to what Yu Hua calls ‘unequal development’. Old women are bulldozed in their houses by government officials chasing ever higher GDP growth, company directors have their legs broken in pursuit of company seals, corruption has become endemic and the powerful spend millions of dollars on apartments while millions of their countrymen still live in poverty. ‘Copycatting’ and ‘bamboozling’, once frowned upon as immoral and distasteful, are now considered acceptable, even desirable, in the pursuit of wealth. Yu Hua paints both as the results of Chinese avidity and intensity.
There were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy about this book. Both relate to what I see as a tendency to sentimentalise and romanticise. First, although the general quality of the prose is excellent, it is occasionally spoiled by a hackneyed simile or metaphor like, ‘scattered far and wide like leaves in the autumn breeze’ or something equally cliched. Secondly, when Yu Hua relates his tale of copying out illegal books he talks about copying Duma’s ‘La dame aux Camelias’ in one night with his friend. Even though he tells us that the beginnings and endings of these dogeared, underground editions would often be missing, I find it impossible to believe that two young boys copied out 250 pages of text in one night. Especially as this would have been in Chinese characters, which are wildly inefficient and time consuming to write! The subsequent story about how he couldn’t read his friend’s characters and vice versa, while amusing, is equally unlikely as they could hardly have stood under a street lamp and read 200 odd pages out loud in one evening. I suppose Yu Hua is a born storyteller and, like most storytellers, is inclined to embellish his stories a bit for artistic improvement or narrative efficiency! Yu Hua quotes a Chinese saying himself that says, ‘there’s no tax on bullshit’!
On the whole, I enjoyed this book and felt it gave a vivid depiction of a period of Chinese history that is often encountered in a more formally historical fashion. He also draws interesting connections between this period and modern China while making illustrative observations about both. Of course, as I have written throughout this piece, much of the psychology and mindset of this era must remain a mystery to me as an anachronistic observer, living in an entirely different context. Nonetheless, I have the feeling, perhaps misplaced, that I understand a little more now than I did when I started the book.
Monday 18 June 2018
George Orwell - Animal Farm
I read this book as a teenager and my overwhelming recollection is a feeling of anger and injustice at the lot of the ordinary, unintelligent animals at the hands of first the humans and then, more gratuitously because they purport to be helping them, the pigs. This feeling of indignation is best represented by the treatment of Boxer. When I re-read the book these feelings remained but what I found new, or at least failed to recall from my last reading, was a grim sense of inevitability about the pigs’ corruption once they get into power and the descent into brutal exploitation of the weaker members of the their society. The animals could never break free from the humans and establish their own order without the intelligence of the pigs. Old Major gives the philosophical underpinnings of their revolution in his excellent rallying speech at the book’s beginning. Beyond that, the animals would never have been able to defend the farm from the first attack of the humans if it were not for the pigs learning about military strategy from the books they find in the farmhouse (Chp 4, pp24-9). As such, when Squealer argues that the pigs deserve their special treatment and dispensations in order to prevent the return of the humans; there is some truth to it. For example:
“‘Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades,’ cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, ‘surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?’” (p23)
To me, this seems to indicate that those with superior intelligence or abilities must necessarily lead and sustain the revolution but that once they have achieved this aim they will naturally see themselves as more deserving than their fellow animals. This sense of entitlement leads to a corruption of equality, the inauguration of special privileges and the establishment of a ruling class. ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’ (Chp 10). Once in power, Orwell seems to be saying, everyone becomes a despot, it’s just the natural order of things. This message seems to be repeated at the book’s conclusion when Orwell writes, ‘Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be, much better or much worse - hunger, hardship and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.’ (p86). This looks like an admission that inequality and exploitation are the inevitable outcomes of leadership or even of the functioning of life in the world as we know it. Self-interest trumps any communal spirit and the strong manipulate and mistreat the weak to their own ends. The book seems to be saying leadership necessarily leads to corruption and the creation of an elite, which then exploits and suppresses the working class. I was reminded of this quote from the character Mark Staithes in Aldous Huxley’s, Eyeless in Gaza:
“What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.”
Perhaps I’m simply more jaded and cynical than I was as a teenager but this bleak conclusion was the overriding impression the book left upon me.
As a treatise against communism, or perhaps just its Russian manifestation, the book has clearly identifiable themes and equivalents that are apparent even to someone as ignorant about Soviet era communism as I am. Old Major as Marx, Napoleon as Stalin, Boxer as some version of Stakhanov, Snowball as Trotsky and Squealer as a wily head of propaganda who’s name I don’t know! There are also events and themes that obviously ape Communist Russia; mismanagement of large projects and misallocation of resources leads to hunger and famine (p50), Napoleon’s use of young puppies to create an indoctrinated secret police (p22), the re-writing of Snowball’s place in the farm’s history and its battles (p54, p65, p78), Napoleon’s adoption of more and more grandiose titles (p61), the creation of a bureaucracy to justify and cement the elites position (p86), variable and contradictory foreign policies (p66), wildly positive official statistics (p61) and Squealer’s repeated sophistry in explaining away the pigs’ abrogation of the original rules (p23, p37, p44, p46, p83). Another facet of Communism that I thought was well portrayed was how the birth of Napoleon’s children definitively establishment of a ruling class (p76). I’ve always thought that the strength of family ties and the desire to see one’s children succeed or be comfortable must always undermine a Communist philosophy. You could also argue that self-interest performs the same role; both seem to be too powerful and fundamental to be restrained for any substantial period of time. Beyond these more obvious representations there were some that I was less sure about. For example, who do the wild animals in the following quote represent?
“The attempt to tame the wild creatures, for instance , broke down almost immediately. They continued to behave very much as before, and when treated with generosity simply took advantage of it” (Snowball, p20)
Is it simply a representation of true human nature or does it refer to efforts at Communist foreign policy and diplomacy towards non-Communist countries? I also wondered if the windmill represented nuclear power specifically or just a brighter, less laborious future facilitated by technology more generally? Moses the raven seems to clearly represent religion with his talk of a promised ‘Sugarland’ above the clouds but I was less clear what his reappearance later on symbolised (p78)? I presume that anyone preaching religion in Stalinist Russia wouldn’t have lasted long but perhaps he represents those missionaries brave enough to try!
The sale of Boxer to the slaughter house after he can no longer work and the pigs’ spending of the proceeds on a banquet is the most heart-rending and repugnant episode in the book. Here, Orwell seems to be displaying Russian Communism as evil and not just making the more general point about the strong exploiting the weak that I started this essay with. Alternatively, he may be making the point that while power in a democracy is limited, thus limiting the extent of corruption amongst the elites, that in a Communist system the absolute nature of the leader’s power results in absolute corruption! Beyond this, I wondered what Orwell would make of the rich, powerful families that fund and control so much of politics in many democracies.
If there was anything that I would criticise in this book it would be these two very minor points. First, on p16 the disappearance of the milk is the first hint of greed and selfishness on the part of the pigs. However, on p18 it also says ‘nobody stole’ but, to my mind, the pigs appropriation of the milk should be seen as theft. Equally, on p51, the farm begins to sell eggs to make up for short falls elsewhere but if all the eggs up to this point had hatched chicks then wouldn’t the farm be absolutely overrun with chickens?!
These very minor considerations aside, I really loved this book and thought it was powerful, pithy and provocative!
“‘Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades,’ cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, ‘surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?’” (p23)
To me, this seems to indicate that those with superior intelligence or abilities must necessarily lead and sustain the revolution but that once they have achieved this aim they will naturally see themselves as more deserving than their fellow animals. This sense of entitlement leads to a corruption of equality, the inauguration of special privileges and the establishment of a ruling class. ‘All animals are equal but some are more equal than others’ (Chp 10). Once in power, Orwell seems to be saying, everyone becomes a despot, it’s just the natural order of things. This message seems to be repeated at the book’s conclusion when Orwell writes, ‘Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be, much better or much worse - hunger, hardship and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.’ (p86). This looks like an admission that inequality and exploitation are the inevitable outcomes of leadership or even of the functioning of life in the world as we know it. Self-interest trumps any communal spirit and the strong manipulate and mistreat the weak to their own ends. The book seems to be saying leadership necessarily leads to corruption and the creation of an elite, which then exploits and suppresses the working class. I was reminded of this quote from the character Mark Staithes in Aldous Huxley’s, Eyeless in Gaza:
“What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.”
Perhaps I’m simply more jaded and cynical than I was as a teenager but this bleak conclusion was the overriding impression the book left upon me.
As a treatise against communism, or perhaps just its Russian manifestation, the book has clearly identifiable themes and equivalents that are apparent even to someone as ignorant about Soviet era communism as I am. Old Major as Marx, Napoleon as Stalin, Boxer as some version of Stakhanov, Snowball as Trotsky and Squealer as a wily head of propaganda who’s name I don’t know! There are also events and themes that obviously ape Communist Russia; mismanagement of large projects and misallocation of resources leads to hunger and famine (p50), Napoleon’s use of young puppies to create an indoctrinated secret police (p22), the re-writing of Snowball’s place in the farm’s history and its battles (p54, p65, p78), Napoleon’s adoption of more and more grandiose titles (p61), the creation of a bureaucracy to justify and cement the elites position (p86), variable and contradictory foreign policies (p66), wildly positive official statistics (p61) and Squealer’s repeated sophistry in explaining away the pigs’ abrogation of the original rules (p23, p37, p44, p46, p83). Another facet of Communism that I thought was well portrayed was how the birth of Napoleon’s children definitively establishment of a ruling class (p76). I’ve always thought that the strength of family ties and the desire to see one’s children succeed or be comfortable must always undermine a Communist philosophy. You could also argue that self-interest performs the same role; both seem to be too powerful and fundamental to be restrained for any substantial period of time. Beyond these more obvious representations there were some that I was less sure about. For example, who do the wild animals in the following quote represent?
“The attempt to tame the wild creatures, for instance , broke down almost immediately. They continued to behave very much as before, and when treated with generosity simply took advantage of it” (Snowball, p20)
Is it simply a representation of true human nature or does it refer to efforts at Communist foreign policy and diplomacy towards non-Communist countries? I also wondered if the windmill represented nuclear power specifically or just a brighter, less laborious future facilitated by technology more generally? Moses the raven seems to clearly represent religion with his talk of a promised ‘Sugarland’ above the clouds but I was less clear what his reappearance later on symbolised (p78)? I presume that anyone preaching religion in Stalinist Russia wouldn’t have lasted long but perhaps he represents those missionaries brave enough to try!
The sale of Boxer to the slaughter house after he can no longer work and the pigs’ spending of the proceeds on a banquet is the most heart-rending and repugnant episode in the book. Here, Orwell seems to be displaying Russian Communism as evil and not just making the more general point about the strong exploiting the weak that I started this essay with. Alternatively, he may be making the point that while power in a democracy is limited, thus limiting the extent of corruption amongst the elites, that in a Communist system the absolute nature of the leader’s power results in absolute corruption! Beyond this, I wondered what Orwell would make of the rich, powerful families that fund and control so much of politics in many democracies.
If there was anything that I would criticise in this book it would be these two very minor points. First, on p16 the disappearance of the milk is the first hint of greed and selfishness on the part of the pigs. However, on p18 it also says ‘nobody stole’ but, to my mind, the pigs appropriation of the milk should be seen as theft. Equally, on p51, the farm begins to sell eggs to make up for short falls elsewhere but if all the eggs up to this point had hatched chicks then wouldn’t the farm be absolutely overrun with chickens?!
These very minor considerations aside, I really loved this book and thought it was powerful, pithy and provocative!
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