Whatcha Reading, Barack?

On November 1, the Chicago Tribune invited its two heavy-hitter writers, Aleksander Hemon and Garry Wills, to come up with a list of required reading for the new president: five fiction, five non-fiction. You can see their list here: It includes Thucydides, Al Gore, and Jose Saramago, among others. I have to confess, I was underimpressed with their recommendations.

My own list:

Non-fiction: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  Barack will have policy wonks aplenty on specific issues but my physics friends say this should be required reading for anyone having to think seriously about nuclear weapons, proliferation, dirty bombs, and related policy issues.  

Ahmed Rashid's The Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.  Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who covered the Taliban for years, wrote this important book right before 9/11.  We could have avoided a lot of mistakes in Central Asia if we had listened to him and experts like him.

National Security, FBI and CIA Intelligence Briefings.  Given that the nation's security apparatus had warned Bush and Condoleezza Rice of an imminent attack on U.S. soil in the summer of 2001, a great deal of the mess we're in now could have been avoided had the president and his aides only read the briefings and acted appropriately.

Women's lives and bodies have been compromised by eight years of the Bush administration, in which access to contraception and abortion have been curtailed both at home and abroad.  Barack has announced support for Griswold and Roe, allowing people to return to the privacy of their  homes and doctors' offices to make important choices, but the Catholic bishops are demanding that he abandon these views.  There are many books available on reproductive matters; one that is eminently readable is Daniel Maguire's edited volume Sacred Rights. Maguire is Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics at Marquette University (a Catholic Institution) and has a deep and nuanced understanding of religion and reproductive rights.

Finally, Helen Thomas's Watchdogs of Democracy? is a timely critique of the way in which the Washington  Press Corps failed to ask the key questions needed for our citizens to understand what the Bush administration intended to do about war, peace, the environment, the economy, and our nation's health.

Fiction, Poetry

Irina Ratushinkskaya's Grey is the Color of Hope.  This memoir from the Soviet-era gulags tells readers about the human cost of power, and the human capacity for survival and hope.  

The Brothers Karamazov.  A ripping good yarn about faith, families and murder.

Richard II.  What happens when you let power go to your head.

Melissa Benn, One of Us.  This novel about ambition and politics, by the daughter of one of England's important labor leaders, is a gripping novel of the cost to the people who support the big kahuna on his/her quest for power.

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest. Shows what could happen when we let greed rule in the place of justice.

What do you think Barack should be reading?

P.S.  Heman couldn't come up with any books by women; Wills had one.  Extra points for those who imagine women writers.

Victimless Crime

by Sara Paretsky

In the March 24 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg riffs on Eliot Spitzer and American Puritans, and includes a long solo from our own Martha Nussbaum on how stupid we are to be so obsessed about sexual peccadilloes, which don't belong in political discourse. After all, as Alan Dershowitz, among many others, explains, prostitution is a victimless crime. Maybe Eliot's in trouble at home, but he shouldn't be in the State House, not for having sex with another consenting adult.

The most reliable studies on women who are prostitutes show that 85 percent remember a history of childhood sexual abuse. They learned from the earliest time in their lives that they didn't have rights, that they existed to be used and abused.

Eliot Spitzer is almost 50; his "consenting" partner was under twenty. Not that there's anything wrong with that, no, because it's a victimless crime.

It's been just about a year since the Supremes ruled that the so-called "Partial-birth" abortion ban was legal. The law includes a clause which makes a doctor performing such an abortion liable for monetary damanges for psychological injury to the woman’s husband and parents. So the law is a model of pre-1960 law, which holds that a woman is the property, either of her parents or of her husband. They own her; that's why they can sue for alleged damage to their property. The law also explicitly omits any exception if a woman's life or health are at stake: fetal life trumps female life as the law of the land.

Yup. No victims here, just pieces of property to be used at the owners' discretion.