The many skills this "gumshoe" brings into his work outnumber those of his colleagues, and that may explain why he has unearthed so much more than his nearest competitor, and also why he treads new ground, aside from disillusioned graduate studies with trickle-down supply-siders like Milton Friedman (he later shares space with Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner)--from wood shop and metal shop in the wrong high school to corruption investigation, witty journalism, chemistry, and how to power up a broken boat rudder (and so much more), and the versatile brilliance that can assimilate all this knowledge and apply it in ways that exasperate and sometimes stymy the earth-bound vultures fixated on oil.
Palast also teaches his readers, in comprehensible terms, all about junk bonds and hedge funds and bundled garbage sold for a fortune that afflicted us with the latest recession. There's also the fall of the Greek economy (for dummies) that we can consult whenever we need to. The anecdotes are so extensive, so far-reaching, encompassing so much of today's corrupt reality.
Palast may be the biggest threat of all to the status quo. Long may he live--he's still a babe at 57 with that piercing curiosity most of us lose way too soon, and an intellectual, he slyly adds, slipping in classical quotes he promises to reward us for finding.
But the content distracts. reality trumps Spenser's Faery Queen, though Palast knows how to use even that if he needs it.
*****
He can't succeed in love, which he confesses he knows nothing about--that may be his ultimate mystery.
*****
But he ends with Hamsah's hand, a symbol of power, having traversed the horrors of how gasoline ends up in our engines. Enough of it has been spilled, all over creation, to empower many an engine. "Crime, power, mystification" is the thread that runs throughout the book. I say oil is even more fundamental, hugely trumping windmills and solar power, whose advocates are simply not ruthless enough, I say, to spread one iota as densely as do oil spills.
Crime unpunished as a black youth caught stealing $100 languishes behind bars.
The amount of truth from this indefatigable truth sleuth is unending--one discovery only yields another heinous crime that the punitive powers manage to dismiss. A glaring exception is the light Palast shines on then Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, who jumped up from his project of subpoenaing Karl Rove and Tim Griffin for attempting to perpetrate caging, which eliminated Democrats from the 2004 presidential polls that fed us four more sleazy and tainted years of Bush 43. Palast, by the way, caught Griffin in the act, forcing him to switch careers--he is now a congressman (for more on this, see Armed Madhouse).
Conyers jumped--who else in Congress would when receiving a message from Palast? Kucinich?--and confronted Bush 43 with the Goldfinger bribery-masquerading-as charitable-donations scandal, which he had learned about by listening to an interview of Palast on Democracy Now!
The Democratic success in 2008 put another president in office but somehow freed Goldfinger, but consider the good side: he's not in Congress yet.
Now, after all this, and his other publications, who is more qualified to stand back and discuss life in general, as occurs often in Greek tragedy, than Palast, after turning his own life inside-out for us toward the end of the book?
"I know this is an incredibly simple story: Indians in white hats with their dead kids, and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.
"But maybe it's just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.
"Maybe Santa will sort it out for us. . . . Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil sludge out of the Cofans' drinking water."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
