I even went so far as to write in my notes that "Palast makes atrocities fun to read about." The principals are so unctuously (no pun intended) despicable, Palast's encounters with them so ridiculous, often wasted time, but he never ceases to return to that drawing board that stops nowhere before it maps out the truth. The book ends in frustration and despair, not exactly catharsis. He hasn't fixed everything yet. And he needs his portable office, so that the streets are not yet his way to go.
An example of the humor-dust that rises out of tragic content: the tsunami that hit Chenega village on Prince William Sound, on Good Friday in 1964, because no one had thought to alert the people there, gutted it entirely, killing most of its people. One man survived by clinging to the cross at the top of a church steeple--"the only verifiable instance in which Jesus saved," quips Palast, and one can understand such blasphemy given the world he prowls around in, though, I admit, he does take vacations no one can deny he needs.
Then there's the ruthless image of oil wells built on the receding ice of North Pole territory, from global warming, that reveals more underground treasures--how low can they go? Way, way under the ocean. Ocean pollution is a concept I have coexisted with where once, for some reason, I thought of it as the last unclouded expanse on this planet.
*****
The word must spread as far as possible. The revolution has begun and must be given such oxygen. There's a reason we're out on our streets. They've stolen all the Manhattan mansions and Sutton Place townhouses. Those proffered to the less wealthy were fish bait and when the bubble burst, so went dreams, belly-up, replaced by Foreclosure. Bankruptcy. Homelessness. Dependency.
Palast doesn't alter history (as one reviewer wrote); rather, he reveals it, because all events, from a homeless man tying his chewed-up shoelace to the queen's coronation, are history. The real current events, the backstage machinations that really run reality, must be exposed. It's a wonder Palast is still alive and walks the streets--"blessed be those who write death threats," he implies at one point, because publicity, such as it is, is one thing, but crystallizing the actions that must follow is another.
Nothing short of the revolution now in its nascent gasps can meet the diamonded-studded bully head-on, garnish it, and throw it out to the people. He gives it a name, Hamsah, "an All-Seeing Eye in a mystical hand," which is a huge step in the direction we must go. Like an evil spirit, Hamsah must reply, "I'm called Hamsah," an Arabic diacritic pronounced like a "slight pause followed by a guttural breathing," among the other definitions that Palast gives, which include the number five; and indeed, at the end of the book, his diagram of the highest-level vultures depicts the five fingers of that "all-seeing eye."
It's all about oil, not real estate; the Oilcan Harrys buy it up with money gobbled up by vultures. This scenario is repeated, one domain after the next, jumping from place to place in a way that dizzifies--how can anyone occupy the ionosphere so much of the time and stay sane, or at least rational? Jump from Azerbaijan to the North Pole in a single bound? He sleeps on planes? No, that's where Palast does his thinking, abstruse charts, diagrams, memos, emails, and other forms of contraband content spread out beneath his furrowed brow and fedora. He is rudely awakened from sleep once in the book, at 5 am, but quickly acquires ecstasy, glad of it.
I wrote a poem about our present economy, with apologies to Shakespeare:
All's well that ends well.
Oil wells end all.
All's well that ends oil.
Even the ongoing Fukushima disaster is about oil--the emergency generators that didn't work when they were crucial were powered by diesel. Corners cut to save "shekels" by big-time, no-bid contractors like Halliburton caused the gusher that vaporized the Deep Water Horizon platform in New Orleans--smaller spouts can be seen from a small plane, shooting out of what once was the Gulf and is now closer to Gulf gasoline.
The Exxon-Valdez disaster, a deadly collision with the last Pleistocene culture on earth, blamed on a drunk pilot, was actually the fault of other financial corners cut in the construction of the mammoth rig, which skimped on the radar that would have prevented a massive tragedy: whales and the sea were the basis of this culture, which used every portion of the world's largest mammal for survival, not profit as does Japan. Mammals and other fauna just can't coexist with a massive oil spill that still hasn't been cleaned up. Gestures have been plenty, but beneath the sand, just a few inches, your probing hand is stained with the stuff. The images of pelicans and other birds doused in oil, paralyzed by it, haunt us all.
*****
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