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Smatter of Fact
'The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism' is just one of the new offenders.
- The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism
- Arbeiter Ring Publishing
The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism is a small chapbook compendium of statistics and short essays put together by Vancouver musician and artist David Lester, that could just as easily have been called Some Gruesome Facts of Capitalism. Taken as a whole (admittedly a small, 112-page whole), Lester's book (recently reissued) is an extreme example of the current trend to reduce ideas into disconnected, random factoids that are easy to consume but lead to more noise than understanding -- becoming, instead, a barrage of unrelated, atomized and decontextualized snippets. Whatever its shortcomings, its heart is certainly in the right place, and with royalties going to the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, there are certainly worse ways to spend 11 bucks. But substituting free-floating facts for real discourse is no small thing.
My uncle used to occasionally tease his youngest sister, my dear aunt, for a blustery sentence that she once frustratedly exclaimed in the middle of a fit of panic and confusion: "Don't confuse me with the facts!" A while later, he quietly recanted, explaining that he'd come around to sharing her suspicion -- that people can find facts to prove anything. And that's a fact -- witness a little-known debacle called the war in Iraq to see what charming "facts" people can come up with, fill vials with, and wave in front of the United Nations.
In the era of mass communication, we've been flooded with information that we only half understand, a phenomenon captured perfectly and jarringly in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. The onset of Google, Wikipedia, blogs, "Fact of the Day" features on the TV listings channel and the like have the same effect on knowledge as the massive, uncontrolled printing of money: the value of the currency drops and the detection of counterfeit bills becomes harder. So people, like Stephen Colbert's Report persona, turn to their "guts." Paradoxically, the tumour that is truthiness is built with the cancer cells of devalued fact.
When stats are celebrities
It's a state of affairs captured hilariously on NBC's The Office, when office manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell, who like Colbert, is a Daily Show veteran) tries to drive the fear of drugs into his employees:
Michael: Look to your left. Okay, now look to your right. One of those people will die from drugs at some point in their lives...More people will use cocaine this year than will read a book to their children.
Laconic employee: Where did you get these statistics?
Michael: Why Stanley? Do these statistics scare you?
Laconic employee: They do not.
Even though they're often disconnected, Gruesome Acts does showcase many stats and figures that might be new to many people: "Globally the number one occupation for disabled people is begging," is one. Or "Elizabeth Paige Laurie, an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, was under investigation at the University of Southern California over claims that she paid a fellow student $20,000 to complete her coursework," is another. And it confirms facts I felt I already knew, intuitively, or that I was pretty sure I'd heard before someplace: "In the U.S. in 1998, almost 70% of wealth was in the hands of 10% of the population," or "A child dies of starvation every seven seconds according to the World Food Programme," a fact curiously then attributed not to the World Food Programme but to The Guardian Weekly. (In fact, The Guardian Weekly shows up as a source like peanuts in a can of mixed nuts -- way, way more frequently than anything else that might be sprinkled throughout.)
And while the barrage is a problem, at least the author does properly and helpfully attribute all of the sources. These are no longer just noisy facts and figures out of the ether anymore; they're from somebody or someplace verifiable, and therefore all the more real. In addition, Lester provides short essays about activists and artists, which point us to his politics and morality. He chooses figures from history -- Emma Goldman, for example -- who fought for positive change. And at the end of the book, he provides a list of artists and organizations making a difference. So by anchoring this litany of gruesome acts within a morality and a politics, Lester's chapbook saves itself from being simply a laundry list of horrors, or a terrifying and demoralizing leftist almanac. It's still a fairly superficial work, but one carried out with the best of intentions.
So while the book might have fallen into the trap of adding to the DeLilloan white noise -- and it does come close -- Lester's The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism stays away from the worst extremes of the overuse of disconnected facts, a tendency that Homer Simpson epitomized when he told a news anchor during a televised debate: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Fourteen percent of all people know that."
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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17
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nightbloom
5 years ago
Good, crisp review.
Good, crisp review.
bpither1
5 years ago
T.S. Eliot - One of my favorite quotes
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
eight
5 years ago
Facts
Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing or talk nonsense. - Aldous Huxley (Time Must Have A Stop)
Chris H
5 years ago
Why single this book out?
It seems to me that pretty much every book that has an ideological bias to it is guilty of what this reviewer is going after this book for. The very worst examples include Anne Coulter who will give facts based off negative results of database searches. Simply quoting sources that agree with you, and have the same biases, doesn't do anything to make your argument any more convincing.
anarcho
5 years ago
Facts are also facts.
Yes, people can twist stats, even invent them or take them out of context. But let's not get all post-moderny about this and thus find loopholes to whitewash the crimes that have been committed against people and the environment by the corporate state. For example, sources both right and left claim that anywhere between 10 and 30 thousand people were murdered by the Argentine Military, a group supported by the US government. This crime is areality that is as obvious as a mules ass at high noon. One could go on and on with this, listing the 200,000 kiled in Guatemala, the thousands slaugherred by death squads in El Salvador etc, filling pages and pages with solid, inescapable facts.
NoLeftNutter
5 years ago
Numbers
If you torture the numbers long enough, they'll confess - Anon
Fiat lux
5 years ago
Neoclassical market
Neoclassical market capitalism may have started as an error, in the brains of ideologically impaired academics, incidentally, also using nonsensical, screwball, mathematical formulas and convolutions to justify their actions in what has now become the biggest destroyer of humanity and the ecology, and crime wave in human history.
The Hitler, Stalin and Mao mass murders were kids playing in the sand in comparison.
Ed Deak.
Bluenose
5 years ago
Splitting Heirs
"In the U.S. in 1998, almost 70% of wealth was in the hands of 10% of the population."
An indisputable and (to a sane person) reprehensible fact.
The good news is that they and their heirs will perish along with the rest of us.
"Global warming will destroy us forever, and by the time that happens, the rest of the world will be on an irreversible track toward devastation." (Leo Falcam)
Well, that's a relief!
"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions." (Emerson)
Global warming is the perfect antidote for the delusion of entitlement to which that 10% of the population aspires. It makes me believe in God again.
"My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies." (Mark Twain)
What a negative Nellie! Ah well. All we have to do is wait for the inevitable and the inevitable will certainly come. Then the 90% of the population who hold only 30% of the wealth will break the bank. A small justice, but a necessary one.
Elliot
5 years ago
oh boy....
oh boy....
Skywalker
5 years ago
Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice...
Bluenose
5 years ago
Fire or ice?
Fire or ice? Aggression or apathy? By the year 2050 we will have between 10 and 14 billion people on the planet. Fire in the east and frost in the west. Famine in the south and feast in the north. For a while.
I'm an old man now: I've seen enough to know that a more equitable distribution of income and resources would solve most of the problems that cause global warming. But celebrities and politicians would rather have us preoccupied with recycling than with redistribution. Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
G West
5 years ago
Amen
Amen
alive
5 years ago
about being old
Bluenose, you got it right on!
For once it is an advantage to be old!
At least there was a time when one could have hope that equality would eventually happen!
By now, we are truely going to hell in a handbasket!
Enjoy the ride!
apollyon
5 years ago
Re: Call me crazy but read Capital
Call me crazy but instead of people jumping onboard with superficial documentaries and books like this one people should consider reading Marx's Capital.
The book is hardly dated 150 years later and actually provides a comprehensive analysis. Whether your Marxist and especially if you're not, that book is a worthy read.
Skywalker
5 years ago
The problem with reading Marx
The problem with reading Marx or telling someone to do so is that it is always identified with the powerful thugs in history who were really far removed from any of Marx's ideas. I refer to murderers like Stalin who were more interested in being the next Czar than in doing anything for the "workers of the world".
Then there is this irony that you can kill as many as any communist despot and do it in the name of freedom or something like the Munro Doctrine and it all seems justified. In Canada we trade with countries with terrible records of human rights abuses and no one says a thing. Even what seems commonplace in the violent overthrow of despots is viewed differently depending on whether the despot was friendly to the U.S. or not
Yes Marx is still relevant, but it has perverted so often most people think he is irrelevant.
Perhaps the threat of global warming will make people start to focus on a common enemy.
apollyon
5 years ago
Re: Marx
Doubtless you are correct that Marx has been misread and misapplied. My problem is there doesn't seem to be defenders out there. The Left has abandoned him. Instead they serve up piss-poor analyses such as this one. The least they could do is put the 'wolf' in sheep's clothing so at least whoever reads such aforementioned drivel would be opened up (freshly and without prejudice) too some good analysis...
Skywalker
5 years ago
It may come apollyon.
With the trend in income disparity and the disparity in wealth between the nations the relevance may yet come. I see the corporate business interests who at one time exported jobs to "free labour" Mexico are now heading to communist China. Imagine that.
So once most of the West is unemployed as all the jobs are in China and the few at the top have made even greater fortunes perhaps the system will collapse and then the masses will once again realize hos their gullibility got them where they are. The greed of the multinationals will be their undoing. The masses will then exercise some true democracy.
You never know. Do you?