All writers know the column, By the Book, published every Sunday in the New York Times Book Review section. Each week the editors pick a popular writer and ask him or her a fairly standard set of questions that would be impossible for normal people to answer off the top of their heads.
The authors rattle off the names of all kinds of titles and writers and say smart things designed to dazzle the little people who are always starved for an entertaining read.
I’m a pontificator who has never sold a book and never will, most likely. Authors sell their souls to write for money; they do exhausting tours where they answer stupid questions asked by stupid people day after stupid day. From these gatherings of stupidity they hope to sell a few books. It’s stupid.
Through books and other media, the public is exposed to a version of truth filtered by the most powerful people on Earth — to paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winner, Ronan Farrow.
Yes, it’s sickening. People are reading crap; they are immersed literarily in fibs and fabrications, which are shaped to make the world seem less evil, more friendly.
The truth that no wants to hear — I’m screaming it from cell towers to swarming people who seem to lack ears — billionaires have enslaved us. We are living in a gilded prison.
Totalitarianism has already won — not through governments but by supremely advantaged individuals who have no limits on the money they can make and keep — no limits on their power or their reach.
It’s true.
The rest of this essay is a parody of By the Book. The imagined interviewee is Billy Lee, the Pontificator. That’s me.
Billy Lee, the Pontificator
What books are on your nightstand?
I honestly don’t know. Can you give me a minute to run upstairs and look on the floor and my wife’s dresser? I keep current reads close to bed where I do most of my reading. It won’t take long… …
Ok. Thanks for waiting.
“The Periodic Table in Minutes,” by Dan Green; “Genetics in Minutes,” by Tom Jackson; “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Any favorites?
“The Poky Little Puppy,” by Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren was my all time favorite. Mother read it hundreds of times.
I remember being amazed to learn that anyone can dig a hole under a fence to open a world of naughty possibilities. It cost a serving of strawberry shortcake to get caught; it seemed worth it to my little mind.
Your nightstand doesn’t seem to include fiction. What genres do you avoid and which are you drawn to?
I’ve read a lot of good fiction, but most are classics like “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy and “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I would say that Fyodor ruined my interest in fiction. His book was a nightmare that threw me into depression.
War and Peace was different; it taught me how the world works; Leo laid bare the fallacy of the great man theory of history.
But yes, I avoid fiction. As a teenager I read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand a couple times. The book ruined my life more than any other work of fiction, because it claimed to be truth. Living life proved it wrong, but its view of the nature of humans derailed me for decades.
I am drawn to books about science and math. Enough said, I hope.
I enjoy history.
“Retribution” by Max Hastings is a block buster about World War II — as is “Devil’s Voyage” by Jack L. Chalker. “This Kind of War” by T. R. Ferenbach is a history of the Korean War that knocked my socks off.
You like history. Is there any history you learned from reading that isn’t taught in school? Anything you learned that’s shocking?
During the 150 years before America became a constitutional republic, two-thirds of all white people immigrated as slaves, who in those former times were called indentured servants. Amazing, right?
They came unchained on boats voluntarily, because life was brutal in Europe for poor people. Their term of slavery lasted seven years and ended with emancipation.
Africans came in chains. They served until they became too frail to work; they were set free to die of starvation. The term used was manumission. Ten percent of African slaves were set free this way by the time America became a republic in the late 1700s.
From before the beginning, America was a slave state. The privileges of freedom were extended to white men who owned property. Only they could vote, but not for Senators. State legislators with approval from their Governors appointed Senators.
The founders enshrined slavery in the constitution. Eighty-five years after its signing, half of all Americans went to war against the other half to preserve slavery, but they lost.
After the Civil War, it took the Confederates twenty-five years to terrorize blacks back into submission. At the same time, northern whites committed a genocide against the native peoples they called redskins.
In the 1900s, slavery was renamed capitalism by industry titans to help them make a more appealing counter argument against a system that was catching fire in Europe called communism.
Communists believed wealth should be produced cooperatively and then shared. The idea of sharing was anathema to slave holders (business owners) who referred to their slaves as workers.
Owners abrogated their obligation to care for their slaves by forcing them to provide for their own food, housing, and medical care out of a tiny stipend they bestowed, which today people refer to as a minimum wage. The owners somewhat derisively called the new rules freedom.
After WWII, the wealthy created what they liked to call a middle class (which included about ten percent of the population) to reward the mostly poor farm boys who had risked their lives to protect them.
After 1980, the entitled kids and grandkids of the aristocracy began to disassemble the system their fathers and grandfathers had built, because they felt that the little people weren’t grateful enough. They called it the Reagan Revolution.
Today, leaders promise to make America great again. No more Negro presidents. No more subsidized health care. No more regulations to protect the disadvantaged. Everyone will stand on their own two feet or perish.
It’s the way it’s always been. The escape to America, it turned out, was an escape from freedom.
The USA is now the most merciless police state in world history. The country is demoralized by a military occupation punctuated by non-judicial executions and excessive displays of military force against civilians.
The occupation of America is undergirded by a nightmarish penal system that locks up millions in high-tech prisons where tens-of-thousands are tortured with solitary confinement.
What is the worst part? The USA is building a wall to lock people in. Soon everyone in the USA will be a prisoner unable to leave. That’s the future.
America is going to create a society that reflects the values of its billionaires and the cartel of foreign oligarchs they call friends.
Guess what? There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Take the pills they give you and pretend life is great.
Try hard to cope, and you just might.
Wow, Billy Lee. Glad you got that off your chest. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The Bible.
Does he have time? It’s close to 800,000 words — twenty novels. It’s a lot of reading for a man in his seventies who golfs and is known for not reading much.
Who knows how much time any of us have? I don’t.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville. I own the book and have read through the first half at least twice. It’s going to sound strange, but I honestly think the book is about homosexuality. There is a scene in one of the first chapters where two men sleep together in the bowels of a boat. They seem to have an affection for each other that, frankly, I find touching.
The title is a little suspicious. Try screaming it three times in a church without offending anyone. Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! It’s hard. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister to boot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which of three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Well, first, I have to get a buy-in from my wife, Bevy Mae. Beverly isn’t going to throw a dinner party just because I say so. But assuming she agrees, I’d invite Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, and Richard Rhodes.
All three lived on the edge of knowledge where uncertainty rages; where fear can overwhelm the unprepared. Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle is one of the best science books about candle flames that I’ve ever read. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is a joy that anyone can imbibe in a few short hours if they skip the math and physics. And Richard Rhodes proves in his tomes that any idiot can build and store thermonuclear bombs in their basement.
If you would be gracious enough to permit me a fourth invitee, it would be Che Guevara — probably the best read and most informed writer of all time according to declassified CIA assessments. John Kennedy organized the original Green Berets based on one of his books.
Much of Che’s work is unpublished. His published work is under a suppression protocol inside the USA. Expect releases now that new leadership has risen in Cuba and the United States.
Who would you want to write your life story?
Jesus of Nazareth. People say that he never wrote anything, but he was literate and knew things most folks can only wonder about. Of all public figures past and present, Jesus seems to be the one who understood people best and loved enough to be tender. I don’t think he would humiliate me.
What do you plan to read next?
Something I’ve written, probably. I’m the greatest pontificator there’s ever been. Why go out for hamburger when there’s steak at home?
Paul Newman said the same when someone asked why he stayed faithful to his wife, Joanne Woodward. For those who understand what love is, no explanation is necessary.
Billy Lee
Random Reads:
CIVILIZATION AND INEQUALITY
CUBA
ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM
STUPID US
WHY SOMETHING, NOT NOTHING?
