Stories of hypocrisy are always fascinating, and this one has the added charm of blackmail, if the sherriff really did threaten to turn ICE loose on Jose unless he kept quiet. But Babeau’s respnse was a bit different; denying the extortion, he said of the rest, “My private life is just that, private.”
And he’s right. I would even go further, and say that one should be careful about making fun of other people’s desires; in my case, I am puzzled that so many boys and girls are attracted to figures of pwer and authority, especially gun-toting uniformed he-men. My personal taste does not run to bossy, powerful people of any gender, so I need to remind myself that we should encourage any pleasure that doesn’t involve hurting people or destroying the environment or stuff like that.

So all I would say to Jose and his many brothers and sisters is, wouldn’t you ultimately be happier if you found a nice boy who was willing to dress up like a hardass redneck lawman?  You could put on some country songs about state troopers (I suggest Junior Brown  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_wLVCLPx0M).  I t would save  a lot of hassle and heartbreak.

Anyway, to get back to our own hardass redneck lawman, we should definitely respect his views as long as he’s willing to take them seriously himself.  Of course what you do in private is your own business, just as it’s none of your business what form of contraception a woman does or does not use, or what god someone does or does not believe in.  Just as you should be able to drive legally down an Arizona highway without being pulled over and investigated because you’re looking too brown today.  These things are all part of your Republican platform, right, Sherriff?

Well, no.  You hear stuff about limiting government, but all it means is that when the Republican party gropes in your pants, it’s not lookign for your wallet.  I suppose Ron Paul is closer to a libertarian than most, but his newsletters tell another story: his credo seems to be “Much as I hate and fear black and brown and gay people, I believe that the task of persecuting them does not belong to the Federal government.”  It is possible to imagine an alternate universe where a Republican party stood for libertarian values, but it’s also possible to imagine one where pigs fly.

I think I know what would make me take Babeu’s idea of privacy seriously.  It would have to be an expressive of genuine positive values, not just an attempt to weasel out of his predicament.  So here’s what I want to see.  Sherriff, you’re Mitt Romney’s AZ co-chair; go to his next rally there, stand up on stage, join hands and say “What I do with a hot Mexican stud in the privacy of my own bedroom is nobody’s business!”  And now everybody, all together, say it loud and say it proud: “What I do with a hot Mexican stud in the privacy of my own bedroom is nobody’s business!”  I’ll join in if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Until then, Sherriff…shut the fuck up.

[Update: Babeu has apparently announced at a press conference that he is gay, which changes things (I still want to hear the chant from Romney, though).  He denies the allegations of threatening Jose, and of course I have no idea who is telling the truth there.  Those very serious charges aside, I am sad that he chose political friends who will probably tear him to pieces.]

First, does Mitt Romney’s erratic performance in the primary season, and especially his wipeout in MN, MO, and CO Tuesday, tell us anything about his chances in the fall? There doesn’t seem to be much evidence historically for a correlation between primary and general election performance, but I think we can learn something from the epic battle between Obama and Clinton last time around. Some trends in the primaries predictably disappeared in the general election; for example, most Latinos preferred Clinton over Obama, but they had no trouble preferring Obama over McCain.
But some patterns in the primary voting did persist, most notably Obama’s Appalachian problem. The demographics in the belt from West Virginia to Arkansas, and including parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, was never going to be extra Barack-friendly, being largely devoid of liberal yuppies, black people, and universities, and his campaign invested few resrouces in that part of the country. Even so, it’s impressive to see how badly Clinton kicked his ass there: 67%-26% in WV, 65-30 in KY, even worse in AR (admittedly a state where Clintons are popular). And looking at the November results, you have to think that Appalachians just didn’t like him, whether it was Bittergate, or his somewhat swarthy complexion, or his taste in music, I don’t know. Obama actually lost Arkansas and Tennessee by wider margins than John Kerry had in ’04, and about as badly in WV, despite his overall much better national performance and despite the fact that Kerry was never mistaken for a coal miner’s daughter either.
Getting back to the present, I think Romney’s problem in South Carolina is comparable to Obama’s problem with Latinos: Southern white men are not going to vote for Obama even if the Republican nominee is Abraham Lincoln. But what to make of the more recent disasters? It’s not just that he lost Colorado, which he was suppsed to win easily, but that he was obliterated in the Midwestern races…I mean, in Minnesota I don’t think he won a single county, not even the suburban ring counties that are supposed to be his base. He lost by a mile to Santorum, but he also lost to Ron Paul, and it wasn’t close. I mean seriously, Ron Paul, the Andy Rooney of Presidential politics.
This looks to me like genuine distaste, something like what made so many residents of the border South unwilling to vote for someone smarter and darker than themselves in 2008. But while Democrats can afford to write off Appalachia with only a small pang of regret that this once-bluish region has gone off the rails, a Republican who writes off the Midwest is making his life very hard. The people in MN and MO who apparently loathe Mitt are pretty similar to people in Iowa and Michigan and Wisconsin.
To be sure, these were low-turnout affairs, and it could be that the sort of Bachmann-style irredentists who turned out Tuesday will all hold their noses and vote Mitt in November. But I wonder if it isn’t also a class thing—Midwesterners, like the rest of American, worhip wealth, but as an old girlfriend of mine from Massachusetts once commented, in Minnesota the rich seem to be just middle-class people with lots of money—they own six personal watercraft instead of one. Mitt may be sending out whatever the opposite of a dog-whistle is (my brother’s dog used to be deeply disturbed by the theme song for a soap opera, “Young and the Restless” maybe—I guess that would be the opposite of a dog-whistle. I gather that Newt has even accused him of speaking French. ‘Course, none of this will matter if he doesn’t win the nomination.

Hmm, this is getting a bit long, so I’ll just tackly one more thing quickly: What are the most likely battleground states?
The best place to start is the last election, but keep in mind that the battleground states won’t be the states that were close last time, but (this is obvious, right?) the states that would have been close in an overall close election. For example, Missouri and Montana were close in ’08, because Obama was romping to an easy victory, and if they’re close this year, the state-by-state details won’t matter much because the election will be another wipeout. So what we want are states where the margin was similar to Obama’s national margin of about 7%.
In the narrow 4%-10% window we have Virginia and Ohio (leaning slightly Republican), Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire (leaning slightly Democratic), with Florida, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania at the next level. (2-12%). One might also want to throw in Michigan, which Obama won by 16 points. That margin is a bit deceptive because the McCain campaign, in one of its many erratic and even petulant moves, publicly abandoned the state, pulling out its resources and presumably creating ill-will as well as puzzlement. It’s also possible that Arizona could be close, though it hasn’t been much of a battleground in recent years (of course 2008’s 8-point McCain victory was largely due to his native-son status).

Note: I get my stats from the lovely US Election Atlas:

http://www.uselectionatlas.org/

And of course the guy who does this kind of stuff best is Nate Silver: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

If I seem to be overdramatizing the split, my defense is that this is how she treats herself in A Widow’s Story, the memoir of her “posthumous life” after Ray’s death in 2008.  She speaks of impersonating JCO, and indeed finds some comfort in the impersonation, since Mrs. Smith seems to have lost her identity–even the cats have grown hostile, and she thinks they are blaming her for Ray’s disappearance.  She is pleased to think that her Princeton students have no idea that her husband has died, and is shocked when some of them offer condolences.

This is something of a paradox, for the fascination of the book lies in taking us deep into the world of Joyce Smith as she reconciles herself to the fact that she must go on living: at one point, someone mentions a woman afflicted with agoraphobia, and Joyce thinks hopefully, “Agoraphobia!  That’s something I might try.”  Still, by the time these experiences become a book, it is a book by JCO, not Joyce Smith.

It is surprising to learn that Joyce considers it a moral duty to shield a spouse from disturbing thoughts or news–I am surely not that unusual in feeling that sharing one’s fears and misfortunes is part of what friends (and especially spouses) do for each other.  It is even more surprising to learn that she took this principle to its logical conclusion: since her fiction was so violent and disturbing, she did not show it to Ray, and he did not ask to read it, even though, as a high-brow editor and publisher, he would certainly have read her books if she had not been his wife.  As she says, she shielded him from Joyce Carol Oates.

These reticences, all the more startling in a marriage that seems to have been unusually close and harmonious, didn’t go only in one direction.  Ray didn’t seem comfortable talking about his family, so Joyce felt it her wifely duty never to ask him what happened between him and his father, or why she could never meet the younger sister who had been for some reason institutionalized.  Does it not strike you as a little weird that, after 47 years of marriage, he couldn’t tell his wife why he hated his father?  Eventually she does get some answers by reading his unfinished novel and accompanying notes, something he had led her to believe was written before the two met, but which turns out to include many aspects of their life together.  It also includes an account of the disturbed younger sister, who may have been mentally ill or may simply have been too rebellious to suit her rigidly conservative Catholic family, but in any case was subjected first to exorcism and later to lobotomy.  By all accounts, Ray Smith was a perfect gentleman, a model of calm courtesy–I can’t help thinking that he must also have kept a dynamo of rage coiled as tight as one of those megajoule springs in The Windup Girl.  Joyce is also, touchingly, shocked to discover that Ray had had a love affair before age 30, when he met her–I wasn’t kidding about the “innocent bride” bit.

Joyce has an odd habit of generalizing, especially with respect to gender, talking about how “a widow” or “the widow” will feel or what she will do, or how “a woman will try to console a man, any woman, any man.”  I don’t have much faith that people’s experiences of faith are so comparable; I certainly would not expect every man to share my varying responses to various losses (parents, grandparents, pets, romances, eyesight).  For example, my impression is that many people are more deeply affected by the death of their mother than that of a cat.  Or to return to Joyce, I don’t think every grieving wife feels driven to blast Rachmaninoff and polish all the furniture at 2 A.M., or develops a virulent hatred for Harry & David.  But it is Joyce Smith’s weirdness that makes her seem so authentic, and as a gifted writer, I’m sure Joyce Carol Oates knows it.

I’ll spare you the video–I can feel brain cells dying every time I hear Ms. Bachmann’s voice–and I’ll pass over her assertion, surprising for a Christian, that the U.S. has been a greater force for good than Jesus Christ.  But I do wonder what principles of freedom she imagines the Pilgrims to have made sacrifices for.  The freedom to dispossess or kill Indians whenever you want more of their land?  The freedom to practice your own brand of fanatical Protestantism and to hang or exile anyone who doesn’t?  Hmm, that one sounds like it might be what Michele has in mind.

Anyway, if Rep. Bachmann would like to learn a little bit about early American history, I can recommend Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, the first volume in a Penguin History of the United States.  Like any attempt at an honest account, it’s a bit depressing, but it has lots of stuff that I didn’t know, especially about environmental history and the experiences of the non-Brits who occupied this part of the world (Native Americans, French, Spanish, even Russian).

For example, the West Indies embodied a particularly brutal version of the slave economy, in which the slaves were worked to death in a few years, so that they were replaced, not by their children, but by fresh imports.  For example, after more than a century of the plantation system in Haiti, at the time of the 1791 slave revolt, more than half the inhabitants had been born in Africa.  I had a good account in Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World of this horrifying practice; it seems quite similar to the Buna camp at Auschwitz, where prisoners like Primo Levi were given sufficient extra rations to anable to Nazis to get more work out of them before they were murdered.

Anyway, what I didn’t know was that Carolina was founded by planters from Barbados and Jamaica who were looking for a bigger territory with greater opportunities to implement their special exploitation/extermination brand of the “principles of freedom.”  This was different from Virginia, where the slave economy and the racist ideology to support it grew gradually (there was a time when a free black man in Virginia could own land and even sue his white neighbors in court, and when the indentured white rent-a-slaves were treated almost as badly as Africans, but that didn’t last).

For the Carolina planters, the familiar fear and paranoia attendant on being vastly outnumbered by their slaves was compounded by the presence of many natives.  They addressed this problem cleverly, by paying one group of native s to kill or enslave another.  A captured or dead Native American was worth a gun and three blankets, so if you were an indigenous resident of the Carolinas, it was much more profitable to hunt your neighbors than deer.  The Brits would thus get tribe A to kill off and/or subjugate tribe B, and once tribe B was used up, they would get tribe C to exterminate tribe B.  And if B and C got wise and decided to band together, well, you could always find another tribe from futhernorth that had been displaced by white settlers and was desperate.  Plus, though the natives after a while had lots of guns, they never developed the ability to make their own ammunition, so the planters would win any war of attrition.

One of the by-products of this policy was that the Carolinians bought a lot of Indian slaves, but the last thing they wanted was for their African victims to get all chummy with their Indian victims, especially since the latter might still have friends on the outside.  So they had the brilliant idea of selling their Native slaves to the West Indies in return for African slaves (the exchange rate was 2 Native Americans for 1 African–I guess the Africans were considered more durable).

Here’s another tidbit: the planters often justified the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans because they were introducing them to Christianity and thus saving them from eternal damnation, but this argument, pathetic in any case, was utterly insincere: in most case no effort was made to convert the slaves.  The Spanish in New Mexico and California were at least sincere about evangelizing, however misguided their ideas and however brutal their methods.

Not all the settlers were as evil as the Carolina planters, and Taylor is careful to distinguish hypocritical, genocidal sadism from mere chauvinistic stupidity.  But the stories all tend to end up the same way for the natives, with plague, massacre, cultural destruction, and at best the survival of a few on a reservation.  Which made me wonder, over and over, what advice I would give the first band of Tainos or Pequots or Cherokees to encounter a boatload of initially outnumbered Europeans.  What could they have done to avoid or postpone the catastrophe, short of killing every one of the newcomers?

And, not to leave you on such a depressing note, did you know that the Spaniards conquered California not because they wanted anything there, but because they wanted to protect Mexico from Russian invasion?  Apparently they had heard about Russian fur traders (well, more like fur pirates, but whatevs) in Alaska, and were a little confused about distances.  Perhaps someone had told them Sarah Palin could see LA from her office window.

Fitzgerald has a flair for satire, in an arch style that sometimes seems odd coming from the pen of our otherwise colorless, flavorless narrator Nick:

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

The first paragraph has an elegant poise that serves as the straight man for the Thurberian sendup of society gossip that follows.  My own fave is Doctor Benjamin Civet, but it’s all good.

Fitzgerald is at his best when he seems to be satirizing Gatsby’s little fantasy world.  At a party, Nick and his girlfriend (if that is the right word for Jordan) wander into the mansion’s lavish library, where a drunken guest raves about the “realism” of it, atonished that the library contains actual books, not just pasted on spines, and that Gatsby has had the good sense not to cut the pages (which would implausibly have implied that he had read them).  When Gatsby finally realizes his dream of showing his house to Daisy, she marvels at his collection of shirts:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher–shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”

Surely Fitzgerald has an eyebrow raised at this shallow, idle rich girl being overcome with the tragic grandeur of Gatsby’s shirt collection…or maybe not.  It’s easier to tell where he stands with his heavy-handed and not very pleasing mockery of Daisyt’s vulgar husband Tom and his odious mistress.  They are generally nasty and brutish, but one suspects that her greatest sins are a lack of breeding and large hips, and the force of the satire is undermined by the lack of any basis in real values from which to launch criticisms.

The problem gets worse for me when things get serious.  For Nick, Gatsby assumes a tragic nobility; he is worth more than the rest of them put together (given the cast of characters, this is rather lame praise, but I think Nick is sincere).  As the style becomes more elevated and elegiac, I gather that we too are supposed to admire Gatsby, but for what?  Because, seeing the world dominated by vapid exploiters, he determined to lie and exploit on a grand enough scale to be accepted as one of them, and for a while accomplished this with some flair?  Gatsby’s pathetic deceptions, such as his treasured Oxford photograph, do arouse some pity, but it would be easier for me to understand why he wants to belong to high society if the people at his parties were at least witty or interesting rather than just drunk, and especially if his belle ideale had more to offer than a voice that drips with money.

If it seems that I’m being too hard on Scott, consider that, having chosen Princeton as (in his view) more fashionable than Harvard or Yale, and having somehow gotten in despite crappy high-school grades, his great ambition was to gain entrance into the most snooty and exclusive of the “eating clubs” (actually his first great ambition was to be a start football player, which he considered the best route to social distinction, but having failed at that, he moved on to the eating club project, at which he succeeded).  He never appears to have questioned the inane and repellent class system, only to have longed to reach the top of it.  He had little time to spare for classes, many of which he flunked.

And here is the advice he wrote, at age 19, to his 14-year-old sister.  They were not close, and one can hardly imagine that she asked for this guidance, but Scott was notoriously bossy.  He begins by evaluating her main attributes, good (e.g., overall size, eyes) and bad (e.g., teeth only fair, large hands and feet).

“(c)You should never rub cold cream into your face because you have a slight tendency to grow hairs on it…(d) A girl should always be careful about such things as underskirts showing, long drawers showing under stockings, bad breath, mussy eyebrows.  With such splendid eyebrows as yours you should brush them or wet them, and train them every morning and night as I advised you to do long ago.  They oughtn’t have a hair out of place.  (e)…I noticed last Saturday that your gestures are awkward and so unnatural as to seem affected.  Notice the way graceful girls hold their hands and feet, how they stoop, wave, run, and then try, because you can’t practice those things when men are around, it’s too late then. 

Just what every 14-year-old girl needs to hear about what’s important in life.  Way to go, dickhead.

In Riley’s case, though, the idiosyncratic diction and syntax are an achievement, and they, more than anything, make the lowland Carolina childhood world of ‘Romey’ (the speaker of his poems) worth inhabiting.  Here is Riley reading “Picture”:

(I wish he would go a bit faster, but it’s his poem, I guess he gets to read it the way he likes.)

And here is a linguistic tribute to his father, a shameless dive into sonic texture (read it aloud, of course–you might have to do it twice to get the rhythm just right):

Map

You will not, I think, have trouble recognizing the next Atsuro Riley poem you see.  That said, he is also a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve; even if he didn’t quote them, I would have had no difficulty identifying an affinity with Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Here is Heaney’s digging, which has a good deal thematically in commong with “Picture” as well as sharing the feel for the “squelch and slap” of language:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetheaney/diggingrev1.shtml

And at one more remove we can hear Hopkins, the poet whose influenced almost overwhelmed the young Heaney.  The way he throws stressed syllables together, along with the various kind of sound-repetition, seem to me especially Rileyesque, as in the opening of  ”The Windhover”:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

[....]

(I recommend reading with a Carolina accent to get the full effect.)

Obama was the smartest candidate in my memory, and the best writer–this made quite a contrast with the incumbent, but not only with him (go check out any clip of Michele Bachmann, or watch Rick Perry try to answer a question about Lawrence v. Texas if you want a reminder of how stupid you can be and still run for President).  But he also came across, and comes across in Plouffe’s book, as a grownup, a man who didn’t throw temper tantrums like most candidates, and who habitually began the assessment of a defeat with a list of his own shortcomings.  When they started hiring top staff, the campaign had a “no assholes” policy; if the Clinton campaign had done likewise, we might be discussing Hillary’s re-election chances right now.

But those of us who followed the campaign from internet-nerd-land had a quite particular and familiar feeling about the difference between the Obama campaign and everyone else, in particular Camp Clinton.  It was oddly reminiscent of being a baseball stathead in the 1980s and early ’90s, that feeling that people like Bill James and Craig Wright and Pete Palmer and the participants on the rec.sport.baseball discussion board were trying to understand things from a fact-based perspective, using the techniques that rational people use to evalutate and analyze phenomena, and though we might disagree, we could have an intelligent argument.  On the other side was the rest of the world, where people had a basically medieval attitude: a player’s peak was at ages 28-32 because Stan Musial said so, and he was a great player. Joe Carter was a great hitter because he had a lot of RBIs, and RBIs are the most important thing because that’s what we were always told.  And so on.  Eventually, the edifice of medievalism began to erode, and rational people like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein got a chance to show that using your brain could be an effective approach.

So the 2008 primaries were like deva vu all over again.  When the Obama campaign decided to try to win caucuses by attracting young people and sporadic voters instead of the retirees who traditionally dominate them, most outsiders thought this was stupid because that’s not how it had worked in the past, and when Iowa demonstrated the power of the new approach, some Clinton insiders just got peeved and started their long program of disparagement and denial (Mark Penn was particularly notorious, putting down Obama supporters as too young, too well-educated, and generally not the sort of people whose votes should count).

In the runup to and aftermath of Super Tuesday, I repeatedly had the experience of reading detailed, reasoned explanations on the Daily Kos (and later 538.com) of why Obama was winning the battle for delegates and why Clinton was in ddep trouble–basically, his team had put monster efforts into states where they could rack up big margins, while letting Clinton enjoy glamorous big-state wins.  For example, Obama got a bigger delegate edge from Idaho than Clinton did from New Jersey (it was something like 76-66 in NJ, 15-3 in ID).  The Clinton campaign had clearly been schooled, either because they thought they should be able to win without really trying or because (this seems absurd but later recriminations indicate that it was true in some cases) they lacked the interest or intelligence to do the delegate math.

Even after those of us in the election-geek community could tell that Obama had a commanding delegate lead, both the Clinton campaign and the mainstream press continued to treat the race as a dead heat.  When Clinton won Ohio and ‘won’ Texas, she got big headlines but made up a grand total of 4 net delegates, at a time when they trailed by about 150.  Eventually the press did catch on, though even very late the Clinton campaign seemed convinced that it wasn’t fair, that they were entitled to victory and should get it even if it meant changning the rules after the fact (they started talking about the ‘popular vote’ and wanting to count the fake Michigan and Florida prmaries). 

In this environment of Moneyball-like cognitive dissonance, it was amusing to learn that perhaps the most prolific political stathead, who posted under the pseudonym Poblano, was actually Nate Silver, a well-known analyst and model designer for Baseball Prospectus, among the geekiest of baseball websites.

Plouffe notes how hard it was to get the press to understand the math, and to convince them that his analysis wasn’t just spin.  I don’t know if he was aware of people like Nate Silver and his many readers–if so, he doesn’t mention it.  But it would be wise for him to notice the phenomenon, for after all, who the hell else is going to read a book by a campaign manager?  Too much of what he presents is already old hat to readers of 538.com, and in order to appeal to what I suspect is an imaginery wider audience, he dumbs his presentation down to the point where some of the things he says aren’t even true (e.g., that Washington was very close in 2000 and 2004 while Nevada was “not particularly close”).  I would have welcomed something meatier.

There also isn’t very much juicy gossip, a few amusing stories but overall not very titillating…but then that was one of the virtues of his operation: no purges, no backbiting, just professionalism.  Both the Clinton and the McCain outfits made for better copy, and both lost.

Anyway, all this is more fun to think about than what went wrong, and why so few of us can muster much passion about 2012.

The setting in this case is a mildly post-apocalyptic Bangkok reshaped by the disastrous exhaustion of fossil fuels, global warming, and out-of-control genetic engineering, a landscape that is becoming as familiar in SF now as radioactive post-nuclear moonscapes were when I was a kid.

Bacigalupi has some very cute touches:
–The richest man in town is the Dunglord, whose control of solid-waste disposal gives him a monopoly on methane fuel.
–People do computing on treadle-computers, which they have to pedal while they type in order to obtain power. Naturally the monitors are very small.

–The most feared bogey-man is the so-called Calorie Man (surely a joke on the Japanese Salary Man), an operative of the future version of ADM or Monsanto, usually based in the Satanic capital of Des Moines.

Another cute idea is that energy is stored not in batteries or fuel but in very tightly-wound springs, which power, for example, police mopeds.  But this introduces the downside of PB’s imaginative fertility: you will ask yourself, why is it easier to use springs than batteries?  It’s not as if the people in this book have stopped making sophisticated objects (and for that matter, I bet it requires some fancy industrial tech to make compact steel springs capable of bearing enough tension to power a moped).  There may be an answer, but it isn’t given to us.

More broadly, consider that two of the dominating motifs are the desperate seach for energy, which prompts solutions ranging from steampunk to Rube Goldberg, and the intense, suffocating power of the sun.  Hmm…how long would it take you to wonder if there might be a way to use the sun to get energy?  We could even coin a term for such power, “solar energy”–has a ring to it, don’t you think?  I understand that today’s solar cells may use materials that are hard to get or make, but surely the sun could be used to make water evaporate (speaking of steampunk).  Someone, at some point, could at least mention the possibility, and someone else could explain why it wouldn’t work.

I’m also a little bit worried about Bacigalupi’s biology, and I wish someone who (unlike me) knows about such things would tell me if it makes any sense, because a lot of what the book has to say seems fishy.  For example, I can well believe that out-of-control genetic engineering might lead to unexpected plant diseases, but in Windup Girl these diseases spread from plants to humans with amazing ease.  Is this for real?  I know James Thurber said that his uncle died of the chestnut blight, but I always thought he was joking.

The Windup Girl herself is that now-familiar character, the sex slave, in this case the genetically-modified sex slave.  She is the closest thing to an appealing person in the book (I think we’re supposed to like the guy who is a combination HSA/DEA agent and martial arts star, but he just strikes me as a bullying blowhard), and her issues with overheating are interesting, since her designers gave her skin with tiny pores, enhancing bearty but crippling her ability to dissipate heat through sweat.  Even here, though, the author is rather lazy: why does she need ice-water all the time?  Any water on the skin would do–after all, sweat is body-temerature water, and it works just fine.   Anyway, the descriptions of her brutal workday are extravagantly detailed, so much so that I wonder if PB is mixing righteous outrage with arousal, a combination I find awkward.

So I am torn–Windup Girl left me with several compelling images, but also an overall dissatisfaction at its failure to think hard about the scientific and human issues it deals with.  If you want that feeling of “This person has thought long and hard about this difficult idea and come up with a deep imaginative realization of it,” give Ted Chiang a try.

*I believe the currently PC term is “developing world,” which seems to me both arrogant in its presumption that other countires are an immature version of our ‘developed’ selves, and simply wrong as applied to some countries taht appear locked in a cycle of disaster and exploitation, and which  can only be described as developing in that sense that TV news-people will speak of a developing hostage crisis.