Great Expectations

Along with everyone else I keep reading "positive" news on the economy reported by the mass media. Pretty consistently now "a slowing of a decline" is cheered as a sign, well, of... growth! But all this means is that we are still falling into the abyss, only the rate of our falling has slowed down a bit - maybe we bounced off the wall with a little upward movement before continuing our free fall, or met some rising stream of air.

Housing news are seriously cheered by the newsmakers. The sales of new homes rose 3% in July compared to that of June! Never mind that it is still well below what it used to be a year ago when, as real estate professionals, we were looking at each other and saying: "The market is dead." Never mind that it is 3 TIMES less than what is used to be at its peak in 2006.

Well, yes, some number of houses will always be sold no matter what the economy, and at some point job losses will come almost to a standstill because there may be no more jobs to lose.

A friend of mine runs a small company, and an employee of hers recently opined that "thank goodness, we have already hit the bottom." She asked him why he thought this was the case. He said that it was because it became so bad that it CAN'T possibly get any worse: people barely have money to pay for their mortgages, gas and food. My friend is originally from Russia, and she could only stare at him in disbelief after such a statement. A person who has a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home, 2 cars and eats out periodically thinks it cannot get any worse? Why? Just because we are Americans, and nothing bad can happen to us? Seriously?

I realize that it is the "American way" to not lose optimism. But feeding people false hopes of a soon forthcoming recovery is irresponsible, in my mind. We are in this recession for the long run, we need to be prepared to run an exhausting marathon, not use up all our resources to survive a short sprint. We need to adjust our habits, expectations, likes and dislikes. We need to learn to curb our wasteful lifestyles. The orgies of consumption we witnessed in 1990s are not coming back, and - good riddance! But to adjust to the new world, to learn to not only survive in it, but to enjoy and appreciate it, we need to switch our mentality from: "OK, just one more push, and this nightmare is going to be over, and life will be back to normal." Life is not going to be back to "normal", because it was not normal before. I think our world has changed for good. And for the good, too. Our preoccupation with material success, with money as the only measure of a person's worth, our unbridled consumerism, our self-centeredness will hopefully be seriously compromised as a result of this cleansing crisis. And the media is doing all of us a disservice in setting the expectations that the return to our old ways is just around the corner.

Separation of Church and Conscience

For a few weeks now, I have been floowing an email-based discussion of the health care reform by our local medical community. Lately, a participant shared a quote by one Adrian Rogers which reads like this: "You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

Another physician remarked that this quote is inconsistent with Adrian Roger's role as the most prominent Baptist minister of his time who supposedly spent his life spreading Christ's message regarding "leaving the worldly goods behind and following him on the path of righteousness."

To which the original participant of the discussion retorted: "That is called separation of church and state."

I should admit that my jaw dropped, and I am still struggling to bring it back up. This may be the reason why I can't just shut up on the issue. But to admit that what is taught at the church stays at the church made even my jaded self shocked. This is more than separation of church and state. This is separation of church and conscience.

OK, but suppose he is right. We go to church, love our neighbor sitting on the same pew, smile and think happy thoughts of righteousness and goodness, and then leave the church, undercut our neighbor in our haste to get out of the parking lot and speed up to worship the green buck. Nothing wrong with that - separation of church and state, you know, democracy, principles of our forefathers, and stuff. But interestingly enough, those same people who would argue for the separation of church and state in this particular instance would not accept the same logic when discussing government funding for abortions. Sorry, guys! You can't have your cake and eat it, too!

I am advocating consistency, please. If it is acceptable for a Baptist minister to make a successful career spreading the word of our Lord and then, in his off-duty pronouncements promote something completely opposite due to the principle of separation of church and state, then please leave your religious beliefs completely outside of the discussion of whether or not government funding for abortions should be allowed. Fair is fair.

De mortuis aut bene aut nihil

This blogger will remain mum upon the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

I would just say that it strikes me as more than a simple coincidence that Dominick Dunne should have died on the same day. As Edward Kennedy meets the judgement by his Creator, Dominick Dunne may now be witnessing the proceedings for one more episode of "Power, Privilege, and Justice."

What do American Health Care and Soviet Fire Fighters have in common?

I am getting a lot of messages with polarized opinions about the health care reform. I want to point out one of the reasons why the current "system" is ridiculous and unsustainable.

Doctors are paid more to do procedures, and significantly less to just use their brain power for a diagnosis. (Granted, there is also at least one malpractice attorney behind every bush waiting to see you NOT do something which might have helped the patient.) Therefore, the more procedures they do, the higher their pay. Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

Once upon a time, Russian fire fighters were paid by the hour for the time they spent extinguishing fires. And - surprise, surprise - fires became a lot longer and more devastating. Hope you see the analogy here.

I think in the argument about health care we forget that the goal of a good health care system is not to provide people with unlimited and immediate access to all available tests and procedures, not to spend the most money for treatments, but to provide better quality of life, and to increase life expectancy of the citizens. Yes, Americans get the most tests, heart catheterizations, colonoscopies, elective surgeries, etc., but they still live less than people in Europe do, and outcomes of most diseases are worse over here than over there. We are behind every developed European country in those two respects. End of story.

The myth of American superiority in health care is greatly exaggerated. Tough pill to swallow, my fellow Americans, I am sure. But once you get it down, you will feel better.

(By the way, a common misconception also is that doctors somehow benefit financially from the drugs they prescribe - that is, a doctor gets a higher kick-back for prescribing name brand drugs, and a lower one for generics. This is absolutely not true. Unless your doctor is also your pharmacist, he or she is not materially interested in how many and which drugs you get.)

Noblesse oblige

A few days ago I went on a website of a Russian economist Mikhail Khazin. I visit that website regularly for updates, and I had a great respect for this individual and for his economic theory. That theory, incidentally, allowed him to predict the current US crisis in his book published in Russia in 2003 "The sunset of the dollar empire, and the end of Pax Americana". The mechanism of the crisis described there prophetically predicted what we are seeing with our eyes today. His theory also outlines the future development of the crisis, and the picture is not pretty.

Besides his own articles, interviews, and findings, Mr. Khazin also includes other materials on the site. One of the recent ones was an article titled "American GULAG" which postulated that American economy is in the large part dependent of the modern slave labor of prisoners. It further stated that since US prisoners are disproportionately black, this is a good parallel to the modern day continuation of the old practice of enslaving African Americans. One of the quotes in the article was that of a Nigerian American activist of some radical organization whose goal is the closing of ALL prisons and rehabbing criminals in some communes. That guy stated that in the US blacks do not have any opportunities for professional advancement, and that their only choice is to either work for minimal pay or to resort to crime and then become slaves in a prison system.

Never before did I dare to comment any materials on that site, but the egregious statement above motivated me to speak up. I wrote a very level-toned response in the comments section that I find such a statement to be inaccurate judging by my personal experience: the current president of the US is an African American; so is his Harvard and Princeton educated wife; I personally know several black attorneys; among my neighbors are a black surgeon, and an CFO or a large hospital system; my husband's nurse is black, etc. Therefore there most certainly are avenues for advancement for African Americans in present day American other than crime.

I further opined that what hurts African Americans more than anything is the liberal-fostered attitude to them as victims of the system, as people who are less capable, who can't be expected to achieve anything in the society without extra privileges granted to them by the society in the form of affirmative action, quotas, etc. I don't know if many people in the US are aware of the fact that in Russia slavery was abolished around the same time as in America - in 1861, and slavery in Russia was in every way as brutal as it was in the States: a slave owner could kill or sell serfs, he could separate families, and do whatever he pleased with them. All the serfs were white, as were their owners, so it is impossible to say now just by looking at a person if his or her ancestors were slaves. There is absolutely no special rights granted to people based on their underprivileged past, and the society does not feel indebted to the descendants of the "wronged" individuals. One has to rely on his or her own merits to achieve success in life. I think this is a much healthier attitude which allows all to live with the attitude "I think I can."

I concluded my comment on Mr. Khazin's website with a phrase known to each Russian that a small lie breeds big mistrust.

To my utter amazement, Mr. Khazin personally responded to my post with a short remark that I am spreading American propaganda. Numerous other commentators engaged in a lively discussion on whether or not I (who published by comment under my full legal name) was a real person and whether I was a woman. (At that point I noticed with some amazement that I was the only woman writing in that forum - until then it never occurred to me to analyze the gender of the contributors.) Some people opined that the author clearly had balls, and therefore could not be a female. I tried arguing my position again, but to no avail. Mr. Khazin was clearly irritated by insistence that my remarks were just an attempt to point out factual mistake in the premises of an article, a mistake which is clear to any person familiar with the realities of life in America. He reiterated that my letter was propaganda which is "hostile to his analysis" and compared me to a freshman who is showing off at a professional level math seminar (Mr. Khazin was trained as a mathematician, and I suspect could have even been a student of my Dad's at Moscow State University, although that evidently has not helped him much).

What did this experience teach me?

1. That women are still not expected to have an opinion, let alone a gutsy one, in the Russian society.

2. That when facts contradict your analysis, by defending your analysis and ignoring the facts, you risk your reputation of an intelligent and trustworthy person.

3. That great thinkers can be petty individuals.

4. That when you forget that "noblesse oblige," you lose the "noblesse" for good.

Cats, dogs and green grapes

I was recently in a polite professional company where conversation touched upon pets. Several people at the table readily stated that they HATED cats. Some of these people actually live in a household with one or cats (as do 34% Americans), and yet they still publicly share this dislike. In general, I noticed that people are NOT ASHAMED to say that they hate cats. But I think that a person who would dare to say that he or she hated dogs would be universally disapproved of in the US. Why is that?

I came up with an explanation which works for me. Here is an analogy: many Americans are similarly not ashamed to say that they hate the French (but not Latinos, for example). See, we feel that the French act like they are superior to us, they definitely are not infatuated with us, they do not care to learn our language, they make fun of our lack of refinement, style, grace. They have their history, palaces, fashion, flair, Paris - something we could never get. We fear we will never be good enough for them, and as a face saving strategy we hate them in return. This is a case of green grapes logic. Hating somebody superior comes as a way of getting even with them, as an act of defiance. By hating cats we recognize their superiority, and we admit our insecurity and secret desire to be loved by them which we are afraid is not to be.

There is a joke which illustrates the difference between cats and dogs which goes like this. A dog looks at its master and thinks: "He feeds me, he takes care of me, he loves me. He must be God." The cat thinks: "He feeds me, he takes care of me, he loves me. I must be God."

Personally, I am a cat person, and although I do not hate dogs, I rarely find them attractive, or adorable, so I am generally indifferent to them. I do not have respect for dogs as subservient creatures. A master can be nice to it, or rude to it, but it would still be loyal to its master. A dog has a soul of a slave whose loyalty can be taken for granted. A cat is a proud and independently minded creature whose affection you have to win anew every day. But how flattered I feel when one of my cats chooses to rub against my leg, or come sit in my lap and share the music of its purring with me!

So next time you say that you hate cats think that you may be betraying your own insecurity and inferiority complex.

Results of my Health Care Survey

The survey on this blog on whether or not the US needs to have universal health care system has completed with the following results:
Yes - 63%
No - 27%
Don't know - 10%
Don't care - 0%

Foreign mind

Here is a reference to an interesting article from Newsweek on how languages we speak shape our thoughts: http://www.newsweek.com/id/205985. It summarizes the research of a Stanford University psychologist who showed that our perception of the world depends on the grammar, vocabulary and other aspects of the languages we speak. I recommend this article as an illuminating and entertaining reading - it is quite short, too.

This observation has an interesting corollary, too. It means that there is another level of untranslatability between languages apart from the level of cultural allusions and references.

An obvious conclusion then is that there is a practical value in learning foreign languages for this nation. Americans are terribly ignorant of foreign languages compared to people of other countries - developed and otherwise. I have on many occasions felt that Americans think there is a globe of America, and then there is a big void which is the outer world. I think we largely live with the assumption that if they want to trade/have business/communicate with us, they will bother to learn our language. And they do. But by learning our language, they also gain a window into our mind, our mentality while keeping their true identity closed from us. We are clearly putting ourselves at a strategic disadvantage.

Besides, American lack of foreign language command is a source of embarrassment, even in the highest echelons of power. Remember a recent meeting between our Secretary of State Clinton and her Russian counterpart Sergei Larvov during which she gave him a symbolic red button which SHE THOUGHT said "Reset"? This was a double whammy, because the button said it in Latin letters (Russians do have their own alphabet, thank you very much, and if you want to be considerate, just write a Russian word in Russian letters), but it also used the wrong translation, and in fact meant "Overcharge" button. Sergei Lavrov was able to explain it in very good English on the spot to our embarrassed highest diplomat, and he was also able to offer her the correct translation. Mr. Lavrov is able to go on the US national TV and conduct in interview entirely in English. When Putin comes to Germany, he conducts a press conference there without an interpreter.

Can we imagine this situation in reverse? A Russian Foreign Minister (equivalent of Secretary of State) meeting with Hillary Clinton, giving her a red button which has a wrong English word on it written in Russian letters, and her explaining to him in perfect Russian of what and why it should have said? Just think why even such suggestion seems so odd and feels so wrong. It shouldn't!

I think Obama has issued a very timely call for his fellow Americans to learn a foreign language. If we want to adequately position ourselves in this newly globalized economy, we need to be able to truly communicate across cultures, and read the "foreign mind" of our partners.

Of Human Bondage

This weekend is a back-to-school tax free weekend which means that we can buy most of clothing items, computer and school supplies without having to pay a state sales tax. Which translates to a whooping discount of 6.75%. The stores are full of shoppers, the telephone lines for Lenovo computers are jammed, people are really trying to cram their back-to-school shopping into this weekend. Just think about it: if someone announced a once-in-a-year tthree-days-only 7% sale on everything, I don't think this would have caught anybody's attention. 6.75%? You've got to be kidding us! With the recent recession, we are used to having sales of 25%-50%-75%! And even those would probably not make us work our weekend plans around shopping. In fact, retailers know we are going to shop en masse on this weekend, so they are probably holding off on some drastic price reduction till after it. If we can wait two more weeks - and we CAN wait because the school does not start for a couple of more weeks - we could probably see much lower prices, and items would cost us less even though we would be paying a state sales tax. Yet we don't want to wait. We come to shop this weekend. This seems to defy common logic. So what is the matter here?

I think the reason for this is similar to why Russian drivers and passengers persistently break a federal Russian law on buckling up in a moving vehicle. They know they can be stopped and fined for the violation, so they ingeniously just swing the seat belt across their shoulders without actually buckling it - that way the police can't spot them as violators. There is no logic in their actions. The properly buckled seat belts can and do save lives, especially on crazy Russian roads (they say that a Russian calls a road the place where he is planning to ride), yet they are stubborn in not using them. You see, for Russians not wearing a seat belt is a matter of pride, of principle, of defiance, of standing up to the authority, of asserting their freedom from the state.

And I think for us shopping in large hordes on a tax-free holiday stands for the same. Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike, we do not like the government, and we enjoy the thought that the government is not going to get a cut, however small, of our pie at least once in a year.

Please take a poll on universal Health Care

The poll is located on the side bar of my blog midway through the page. The poll ends on August 12, 2009. Please take 3 seconds of your time to voice your opinion. The results will be posted on this blog.

A most unusual and beautiful art form

I want to share this YouTube video I became aware of recently. This was a part of the competition Ukraine's Got Talent, and the girl did win the First Place. Her name is Kseniya Simonova, and she is Russian living in Ukraine. The composition she is "performing" is called a "Sand Requiem", and it is a short version of World War II on the territory of Ukraine, or Western Russia, or possibly Bielorussia. You will see that she really strikes a chord with her audience which weeps through a portion of the show. The most emotional place is accompanied by a song "Cranes" which goes something like this: "Sometimes I dream that our soldiers who did not return from the bloody fields, did not lie down into our earth, but turned into white cranes. Since those bygone days until now they have been flying over us and sending us their calls. Could that be the reason why we often get quiet and look up into the sky with sadness?" Her medium is very fine black volcanic sand. Kseniya is married, and has a young son.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo&feature=related

Should Medvedev be taken seriously?

Many people feel that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is but a comic relief for the true ruler of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Should Medvedev be taken seriously? Judge for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRdAWoAVfCc&feature=related

Manufactured anger

Fox news reports today: "The White House said Tuesday that some of the anger that Democratic lawmakers have encountered at town hall meetings over the past several days is "manufactured." They proceed to ridicule that notion implying that people are genuinely angry at the politicians' attempts to reform our health care system and to introduce universal health care which we alone do not have in the developed world.

As a private individual, not a liberal, and not a Democrat, I will confirm that from my personal experience I believe there is a concentrated effort behind fueling that anger and organizing those "protesting crowds". Over the weekend I received a pre-recorded phone call inviting me to come to such a meeting and "scaring" me with all the horrible things which would happen should the government succeed in their reform plans. You better believe that it cost somebody some serious money to record the message and call thousands of households. Follow the money, and you will know who organized the protests. Maybe it was financed by the Republican Party - I don't know. But it was some special groups' money which financed it anyway. My guess is that the insurance companies, and possibly the big pharma are behind the finances for such protests.

I hang up on them. As a person who originally came from the Soviet Union, and a person who has been married to a physician for a quarter of a century, I can tell them a lot myself about what the consequences will be. However, I know that the current system is deeply corrupted and inefficient. I do believe we as a nation should be able to make some basic health care guarantees to our citizens. I am not familiar with the details of the government plan - I am sure they will screw up the reform, but what we have now is not sustainable and we have no moral right to perpetuate it. The system we have now is wasteful, and it still limits people's access to health care. Your claims processor at the insurance company who may be a high school dropout has the power to deny the doctor prescribed necessary diagnostic procedure or treatment because that processor is charged with the sacred mission of guarding the bonus size for the insurance company's CEO. Don't kid yourselves! We do not have the best health care system in the world. Don't look at how much money we spend on healthcare. Look at the outcomes of teh treatment. We are far from the top of the industrialized nations in the results of all our very technological treatment. And what is important, too, I do not know a single primary care doctor who wishes their children would become primary care doctors in their turn. Reform or no reform, who are you going to have to treat you?

I will be writing more on the subject.

Should Ben Bernanke keep his job?

Here is a good article from The Guardian to the point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/03/ben-bernanke-us-economy

From what we have seen so far, I would love BB not awarded with the continuation of his contract, but really put in jail, along with Alan "Greenstud" - they could keep company to their collegue-crook Bernard Madoff. I am afraid, on the grand scheme of things, Mr. Madoff was less detrimental to this country than those two buddies.

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Review of Bernhard Schlink’s book “The Reader”

Pretenders

This review will not analyze the stylistic assets of the book, of which there are none. We are going to concentrate on the message and the method of its delivery.

Under the guise of a young German coming to terms with the Nazi past of his country through an affair with a former SS guard, this book attempts (and judging by its critical acclaim, succeeds) to desensitize us to the Nazi crimes, to deface the victims, and to put a human face on the very people who exterminated millions just a few decades back. A human face, or better, a mask looking like a human face. But we will see that this book contains many masks in place of human faces, in fact both main characters are nothing but pretenders, and the author is but a magician who pulls a bunny out of a hat and wants to convince us that this is the usual place where one can from now on expect to find a bunny.

The narrator starts with recounting how as a 15-year old boy he came down with hepatitis shortly after the war. And the first time he meets the protagonist, Hanna, she saves him from a disgrace: a complete stranger, she takes him into her home after he throws up on a street , cleans him up, washes his vomit off the street and takes him home helping him carry his book bag. Many months after, when the adolescent recovers, he goes to thank her for that act of kindness, and subsequently starts an affair with Hanna, a woman twice his age. One of her quirks is that she asks him to read aloud to her. Literature she is interested in is not some cheap trashy novels, but great works of literary art, like “War and Peace.”

Several months later she disappears from his life, she spontaneously moves away leaving him to cherish forever some indelible visual images of herself putting on stockings, riding a bike with a long dress swaying in the wind, and the like. The narrator finishes high school, and enters a university where he studies to become a lawyer. When he goes to observe a trial as a part of one of his law classes, he happens to be in the courtroom where several female SS guards are being tried for allowing hundreds of prisoners burn down in a church during an aviation strike in World War II. The guards decided against unlocking the church and letting the prisoners out because they were not sure they could prevent their escape. Hanna is the main guard accused of that crime. She betrays lack of understanding of the proceedings of the trial, she seems to be making statements which are detrimental for the outcome of the trial for her. Sensing her weakness, other defendants and their lawyers make her the scapegoat. They report that she had some unsavory relationship with the weakest of the female prisoners by taking them into her quarters privately for an unknown purpose. (It turns out that Hanna was asking them to read aloud to her.) Hanna is further alleged to have written the report about the incident which betrays full understanding of the situation and the consequences. By that time in the trial the narrator realizes that Hanna’s shameful secret which she is carefully guarding from the world is that she is illiterate. The narrator feels sorry for her, but also admires her pride. Rather than reveal her secret and get a reduced sentence, like the others, Hanna accepts the charge that she was the author of the report, and is sent to prison for life.

During the trial a dramatic moment happens when the judge accuses Hanna of cruelty by not unlocking the doors of the burning church, and she asks him point blank: “What would you have done?” This question remains unanswered as everyone in the court draws a collective breath, and in fact it is implied that many people who are now judging Hanna were former Nazis, just like she was. Their lack of a good answer to her question proves that if they had found themselves in the same situation, they would have done the same thing. Basically, it leaves us with the only logical conclusion: who are we to judge her? And if nobody is in the position to judge, then nobody is actually guilty – it is all the fault of the circumstances.

The narrator then goes on a quest to “understand” Hanna’s crime and her past – he visits a concentration camp in the vicinity of his town and “really tries” to imagine the suffering which went on in the camps, the concrete details of a camp, but all his attempts are “vain”. He claims to be ashamed and embarrassed by his inability to imagine this gruesome past, but he is also clearly relieved. Besides, he does not give us any proof of his hard work of trying to imagine – with all the details he gave us about Hannah and seeing her clearly with his inner eye, we do not get a picture of a single victim whose image the narrator is trying to conjure up mentally. Surely, all of us can come up with visions of emaciated bodies in striped camp uniforms, with huge desperate eyes on a bony face, their gait unsteady from exhaustion. But this particular narrator somehow fails to come up with anything like that. And for a reason, as we will see later.

So the conclusion put in black and white for all to see reads as follows: “I wanted to simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. […] I wanted to pose myself both tasks – understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.” And here lies the clue for the whole purpose of writing the book and the feat the author so masterfully achieves in it. If only we start looking at Nazis as individuals, if we see them first as kind human beings, as passionate lovers, people with some shameful defect to hide (he makes a comparison of Hanna’s situation with someone trying to conceal that he or she is a drug user or gay – possibly to make it ring closer home to the contemporary reader who the author is trying to brain wash with his peace of psychological propaganda), all of a sudden we won’t be able to condemn them. The author clearly invites us to do just that.

But painting a very human and humane portrait of the killer is not the only prerequisite for “understanding” them. One must also, like the narrator, completely abstract from the sufferings of the victims. Like I mentioned before, there are no real portraits of the victims painted. They are never even called victims – only “prisoners” and “creatures” (as if we are dealing with some house elves in “Harry Potter”). I believe, in psychology this effect is called “detachment” when one deliberately disassociates from the other person in order to not feel any pain. Curiously, the narrator even manages to completely avoid describing the appearance of the main witness against Hanna at the trial, the daughter who survived the church inferno. After Hanna’s death, he comes to visit her in New York, he spends some time describing the appearance of her house, but here is the only thing he tells us about the “daughter” (always nameless, and as we see, generically faceless): “Everything about her was matter-of-fact: her manner, her gesture, her dress. Her face was oddly ageless, the way faces look after being lifted.” He creates a visual image on a non-entity, of a totally commonplace unremarkable human being, at the same time managing to obliquely accuse her of falseness with the implication of a face-lift (a surrogate of a mask which he and Hanna have been wearing all along). Even the prison warden who makes but a cameo appearance at the end of the book has more personality. Compare how she is described: “a small, thin woman with dark blond hair and glasses. She seemed insignificant until she began to speak, with force and warmth and a severe gaze and energetic use of both hands and arms.” Well, but this individual is a Hanna’s sympathizer, so no detachment is necessary.

We practice similar detachment when we enjoy a good steak. The aroma of the meat, the succulent taste - all comes at the expense of a cow with large moist eyes being rather brutally killed and cut open while still warm, and axed into pieces, etc. If we make ourselves think about that before dinner, we may lose all appetite for a steak after all. So we are naturally very good at blocking certain images from our minds. The author suggests we do the same with the Nazi crimes. He demonstrates the technique of easily turning us into moral omnivores, and making us even feel good in the process. All you have to do is to see each individual Nazi as a human, and completely ignore the individuality of their victims. Essentially, this is how Hitler was zombying his troops sending them to kill the inferior peoples (one of them being the Jews). Bernhard Schlink makes a not entirely talentless attempt to follow in the footsteps of his great teacher. In this book he makes us all have an affair with the Nazism and not be afraid of finding the experience fairly pleasurable.

I am looking forward to his future books of making us empathize with a pedophile killer who was abused as a child and who resorts to murders only because he is too ashamed and proud to ask for treatment for his early life scars. This author may be particularly well endowed to write a biography of gay serial killer Jeffery Dahmer – too bad Kate Winslet won’t be able to play the title role for the obvious reason, or else she might have claimed another Oscar for it.

The book “The Reader” is fake from beginning to end. First, it never explains why and how it happened that a German woman who was not known to have been raised in a jungle and is not severely demented grew up completely illiterate in highly cultured Germany. Secondly, it is not explained how an illiterate person could be enlisted as a member of the SS force which was regarded as an elite unit by the Nazis. (The suggestion by some critics that Hanna’s illiteracy is a metaphor for her ignorance of the Holocaust does not hold water – anybody who had at least the hearing intact in the Nazi Germany was fully aware of Hitler’s speeches played on the public radio. Such a suggestion of critics tries to give credit to the writer’s style by finding at least one metaphor in his primitive writing, but it is even less persuasive and plausible than Hanna’s “literal” illiteracy.) Proof of racial purity was required as a prerequisite for joining the SS. One would imagine that any perspective candidate was asked to fill out questionnaires. But the author clearly trivializes the process and makes it sound like it was easier to join the SS than to become a street car driver. What he is describing is historically inaccurate and impossible. The supposed “readers” – those “creatures” who read to Hanna at the camp – a “feeder” camp from which prisoners were sent to Auschwitz for the extermination – had to be native speakers of German because Hanna is not known to have been a polyglot. Well, the only problem with that is that the absolute majority of prisoners at Auschwitz did not come from Germany and therefore were unlikely to speak and read German as their native tongue. A small detail which the author bulldozes over, but which leaves an attentive READER disgusted with what trash is being fed to him or her under the guise of a fresh dish. Further, the narrator claims to have become a law historian rather than a prosecutor or a defender. But just like Hanna is wearing a mask of an illiterate person, this harmless book worm is actually an insidious and very skillful advocate of the Nazis. The Western readership, the critics of the book – the jury before which the narrator was making his speech – found it convincing. This makes me seriously concerned for the Western culture which either recognizes its own nationalistic tendencies and is eager to embrace them under the high-brow guise of hailing the book, or is too dumb to see what the book is really about. Regrets,

Svetlana Krylova