I am currently reading The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption by John Perkins about which Joe Queenan writes a brutal take down. It is a book I picked up at the airport, and I have some of the same reservations about the book expressed by Queenan.
In another forum and before I read Queenan’s review, I wrote:
The author strikes me as more than a bit self-aggrandizing and not necessarily reliable on all points. But, the book strikes me as reliable enough to get me riled up.
In particular, he seems to report pretty well on the con game run through World Bank and IMF getting third world countries to take on huge debt to finance projects that benefit local elites and foreign corporations and which get paid back by squeezing the poor and middle-class.
Y’know, I’ve been a Queenan fan since the Golden Age of Spy and Movieline, and I’ve read all of his books except the last one, but I do sometimes wish the man would get over his forty-year grudge match with the Sixties for making him choose between a career in finance and a communal life of Free Love and bong hits.
“…somehow confusing the monstrously inhospitable Iroquois tribes with the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
Haven’t read Perkins, but I have read enough of this neo-How the West Was Won stuff to recognize the genre: “Hippies thought the Indians were all peaceful and, like, harmonizing with Nature and tripping on peyote an’ stuff, but they were actually bloodthirsty killers”. But that’s as simple-minded as the supposed idea it refutes. No scholar has ever denied the violence in pre-contact America. You would not have wanted to see any Iroquoian people move into your neighborhood. Neither would you have wanted to be a Hugenot living next door to anyone from the Little Sisters’ parent corporation, or a Jew, or a landless serf used as cannon fodder in the Europe of the same period. For that matter, you wouldn’t have cared to be an Iroquois when the French showed up and gave rifles to your enemies, or when the English were through with you, and if you happened to be a woman you’d’a been much better off with the inhospitable savages.
You’d think this sort of stuff might have disappeared along with misreading Bruce Springsteen lyrics, but apparently it is still enough to say “Castro’s myriad crimes” without bothering to mention them, or to consider who’s been conducting the torture on that island in this decade.