Everybody Knows

 

A terrific mystery set in contemporary L.A., the 5th most self-mythologized Western city of the last thousand years after New York, London, Paris & Rome.

Harper’s plot threads through some of the many ethnic subcultures of the city, but its real focus is the L.A. Police and Sheriff’s departments, their daily deputies’ and plods’ desires and drives. Truth and Justice are a long way down the list... One of its strongest virtues is that it continually evokes Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels of the 1970s.

But it’s fifty years later now, and the situation is fifty years worse.

Everybody Knows shares its title with that cynical, elegant, distantly furious Leonard Cohen song about corruption as an open secret, and it does the subject proud.

On the nightstand

dreams of integrity

The Third Man

Last weekend I watched The Third Man – had never seen it, had always put it on when I was really too tired to watch anything. Wish that image of Orson Welles (small tower of black) walking into the bright sterility of bombed out buildings and a Ferris wheel had been in my mind much earlier. It would have explained the Millennium Wheel outside the Houses of Parliament so well.

(It’s not the wheel: it’s the 800 years of slowly successful struggle against the divine right of kleptocracy that lie in ruins behind it.)

The Legacy of Ashes

I'm up to the Bay of Pigs, or between a quarter and a third of the way through, Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA.*

The CIA was deeply lunatic from the git-go. (James Jesus Angleton was a champion alcoholic who shared his operational details beforehand with Kim Philby. For example.)

As always, I'm at a loss. Which aspect of the tale renders me speechless? The epic criminality or the epic incompetence? The kabuki nature of the the Cold War or its hundreds of thousands of real murders?

The one thing that comes reeking off the pages is that every one of these CIA planner-motherfuckers - before or after lunch or electroshock - operated with a sense of impunity.

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*Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA / Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, 2007.

Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 2

Because Matt Taibbi has found the real budget, and we need to know about this steady, continual, corrosive looting of public wealth before the fact, not after.