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David Lester, The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism (Winnipeg:
Arbeiter Ring,
2005)
Reviewed by Colin Smith
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 4
What we have here is an artist’s book of statistics with some
complementary extracurricular elements. A montage and an essay.
Fabricated with exacting care and a checked rage by someone who, you
get the sense, went straight from Mother’s Milk to having the Harper’s
Index read to him as a bedtime story.
§
1. Income distribution – Statistics. 2. Poverty – Statistics. 3.
Capitalism – Social aspects. 4. Globalization –
Social aspects. (2)
§
Predominant editorial strain comes up large and fast, before we even
see the Contents page:
“If you don’t share your wealth with
us, we will share our poverty with
you.”
– Nigerian tribal chief
SOURCE: Utne Reader, 2003
US actress Julia Roberts reportedly gets paid $20 million to make a
film.
SOURCE: celebritywonder.com, 2003 (4)
Welcome to the land of high-contrast gross disparity. Sometimes, as
above, David Lester will place side by each social facts that are
topically and geographically well apart from each other. Other times
the obliquity is not so obvious and the lateral is whispering in your
ear:
Up to 24,000 people a day die of
hunger-related causes in the African
country of Malawi. 25% of them are children.
SOURCE: John Vidal, Guardian Weekly, 2002
At 400,000 operations a year, liposuction is now the leading form of
cosmetic surgery in the US.
SOURCE: Worldwatch Institute, 2000 (40)
Sometimes Lester will key off and key up similar numbers:
In the 1990s, 13 million children died
from diarrhea (more than all the
people in the world killed because of armed conflict since the Second
World War).
SOURCE: United Nations, Guardian Weekly, 2003
$13 billion a year (about as much as the people of the US and European
Union spend each year on perfume) would satisfy the world’s sanitation
and food needs.
SOURCE: Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique, 1998 (10-11)
And sometimes it’ll be the qualities of a proper name that’ll set him
off:
In 1999, and 2000, Carnival Cruise Line
earned profits of approximately
$1 billion, but paid virtually no corporate income tax.
SOURCE: Cruise Ship Blues (New Society), 2003
A janitor employed by Carnival Cruise Line makes less than $1.55 an
hour.
SOURCE: Cruise Ship Blues (New Society), 2003
Tom Cruise reportedly made $75 million for Mission: Impossible 2.
SOURCE: Internet Movie Database, 2003 (98)
So some quantity of metaphorical engagement is going on here. Anarchic
whimsy as well. Why? To garnish the hook, my guess. The Gruesome
Acts
of Capitalism is a pretty painful read; a planetary farrago of dry
gore: real and enormous human suffering and death alongside a
voluptuous, greed-hearted gathering of excessive material wealth and
power, all of it served up through the abstracted sadism of statistics.
One can absorb only so much of this stuff before going numb or losing
context and sentience within a dense, foul universe of numbers. Before
needing to be “snapped to” by a pitch that wasn’t anticipated, or
reawakened into life by something as vulgarly outrageous as the
following:
A birthday party for former Tyco chief
executive Dennis Kozlowski’s
wife Karen cost $2.2 million. It included an ice sculpture of
Michelangelo’s David that urinated vodka.
SOURCE: Guardian Weekly, 2004 (45)
§
Pushed into laughter. Pushed into tears. Pushed into disgust, into
anger. To propel through all these into anything compelling us
to
action.
§
Anaesthetized by the numbers. Overwhelmed into apathy.
§
Another tactic Lester uses to goose the vitality of his text is by
altering it graphically, which he has done comprehensively. From a
baseline of a handsome and quite readable sans serif typeface obtrude
key phrases in a much larger italic and the numbers set in bold and
ginormous. Lester has mollified this chaos by sculpting the sentences
into lines and something approaching stanzas—and by restricting the
quantity of entries per page to a tidy one to three—but the overall
effect is wonderfully jarring. Spacing between words becomes
inconsistent and the leading is hectic. The many numbers rise like
monsters cut out of a forest and stick in your eye.
And mind, because these graphics impede a fast reading. As with
a
sentence cluttered with punctuation or a poem of short lines, one is
forced to slow down reading this book. Potential agony and
comprehension occur.
Not to push the analogy into a hernia, but a kind of poetry is
schematized here. Concrete poetry is certainly evoked. So is the
poem-of-lists, the social lyric, and some of the “language” poetries.
“Poetry is information” said Louis Zukofsky, and anyone who feels
fondly about that maxim might feel kindly toward The Gruesome Acts
of
Capitalism.
§
Portrait of repetition. Repetition of elements. Elements of horror,
what marks Lester’s consciousness, what really might heat up his
daymares: malnourished children shitting their lives out; ridiculously
expensive celebrity marriages and divorces; women and children
conscripted into sexual labour; US military spending; insanely high and
low wages for various jobs; cosmetic surgeries; an Africa dying
significantly of starvation and AIDS. Hunger.
Hunger. Lack of sanitation, unsafe drinking water, inadequate housing,
not enough food, lack of medical services. Conrad Black and Barbara
Amiel billing the company for $25,000 worth of summer drinks.
§
Those “complementary extracurricular elements” alluded to earlier are:
a four-page appendix titled “Further Inspiration” that sketches the
mandates and gives contact info for sixteen progressive organizations
(most of them NGOs); nine illustrations littered throughout (three
theatricalize a statistic, while a fourth invokes one outside the
book); and a gnomic and piquant two-page intro by Jean Smith (Lester’s
editor for Gruesome Acts and his cohort over about twenty years
in the
“rock band” Mecca Normal).
Lester’s illustrations here are thicker and darker—more painterly—than
in earlier work. Mimesis of a darkening world? They are quite
effective. Often featuring barely not hysterical figures barely sprung
out of androgyny reacting to something via word balloon. “Once I had
ideas, now I have money” (3). A scruffy guy with a placard sitting
askew on the ground while a sharp-looking suited guy responds right at
him with “Sorry, my palm pilot hasn’t scheduled your poverty” (79).
Most cuttingly, a portrait of Mother Mary with the Child Jesus—she
looks forlorn, and he’s had his head stripped out and replaced by a
round blank with the Nike Swoosh in it (112, the last page of the
book).
§
Mecca Normal is a minimalist and uncompromising music project whose
concession to rock’n’roll nomenclature is limited to sometimes having a
drummer. Smith’s talky, snarling vocals a weave with Lester’s
electric-guitar lines, which are often angular and abrasive. Meandering
yet direct lyrics. Gruesome Acts is working out an equivalent
editorial
praxis.
Scenes of moth trapped on a Vancouver bus becomes one of a girl in
Russia being bought a McDonald’s Happy Meal by her parents. And many of
Gruesome Acts’ statistics are more than an octave apart.
§
Arbeiter Ring is a tiny Winnipeg press, founded in 1996 as a
not-for-profit. A few titles per year. Eclectic back list ranges from
Allisa York’s first book (short stories), a couple of books by Ward
Churchill (likely the most rigorously demanding American First Nations
activist and scholar), and the “Destroy Chapters” broadside (“...in
these times of unbridled greed and the deification of markets, books
are treated like disposable razors rather than essential tools for
change”). Leftist sociopolitical matters and quirky cultural studies.
Two co-founders: Todd Scarth, director of the Manitoba branch of the
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and editor of Manitoba
Alternatives magazine, and John K. Samson, lyricist, lead singer,
and
guitarist for the consummately intelligent rock band The Weakerthans.
§
There are 149 statistics as the textual body of The Gruesome Acts
of
Capitalism. Spanning 1996 through 2004, and 116 of them are a
most-current accretion (2002 through 2004). Every single one is cited.
There’s a good range of sources, though it’s obvious Lester has a
liking for various NGO reports and particularly The Guardian Weekly:
an
English newspaper still committed to investigative journalism, still
resistant to being a vector for government, business and military press
releases. But then we get this curveball, page 111, literally the last
words of the book: “Es Konnte auch anders sein. // It could just as
well be otherwise.”—No source given! And doesn’t it sound familiar?
Sure seems so ... is it a maxim plucked from the whirlwind of
collective utterance or something someone wrote somewhere, or a bit of
language that is both? (Set me off toward the compulsive research
bin—result? It’s a catchphrase from Milan Kundera’s novel The
Unbearable Lightness of Being. Did Kundera make or pick it up?)
Guessing that Lester here is complicating his text with an ironic tweak
to its veracity.
§
Any book like this will wind up foregrounding a theological problem
that, simply put, is sung to the tune of this: How do we know what we
know, and how can we trust our sources?
There are three kinds of lies: lies,
damned lies and statistics. –
attributed to Benjamin Disraeli
Perhaps by being always as sceptical and contextual as possible. No act
or piece of language is ideologically neutral, yet will also exist in a
matrix of conflict, or alternative viewpoints. Our scrutinizing lens
needs to be dialectical and dialogistic simultaneously; a kind
of magic
trick that shoves manifest surface down and pressures the underworld up
until they meet, commingle: while we look at this loose fusion with
many prescriptions of glasses. And trouble it.
Always remember that your own safety is
as important as the
statistician.
– Kevin Davies, Pause Button (18)
Still, I’d rather be a statistic than a metaphor.
– Jeff Derksen, Dwell (63)
I tend not to cite my source material,
so just do your homework and get back at me.
– Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Ogress Oblige (23)
No authority without a jester.
Perhaps “any book” period.
§
Accuse author of sincerity.
Figuring Lester’s book as productively sincere. It is not
casual to
name the four chapters of one’s book after a quartet of anarchists
(Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, Rudolph Rocker, and Voltairine de
Cleyre). Nor casual to include some statistics outside the paradigm of
high-low big-little that suggest a counter-argument:
The gap between the incomes of the
richest and poorest countries was
about 3 to 1 in 1820, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973, and 72 to
1 in 1992.
SOURCE: United Nations Development Report, 1999 (14)
A Canadian study shows that the wealthiest nations do not have the
healthiest people. Instead, it is the countries with the smallest
economic gap between rich and poor.
SOURCE: Mark Bourrie, Inter Press Service, 1999 (62)
Research shows that community-based efforts, whether in a small village
or a large city, are most effective in meeting people’s needs.
SOURCE: World Health Organization, 1996 (64)
Interpreting these as an absolute call for global redistribution of
wealth. In face of what globalization seems capable of universalizing
only: inequality and injustice.
What we have here is a failure to prevaricate.
§
In what could be regarded as a form of anti-copyright, “Royalties from
this book will be donated to The Canadian Centre for Victims of
Torture” (back cover).
It could just as well be otherwise.