It’s only looking back on Michael Moorcock’s four Pyat novels, ending with The Vengeance of Rome, that I appreciate how funny they are. You wouldn’t think that a series about the life of a fascist who spends time in Dachau could (or should) be funny, but it is.

Moorcock has turned the inter-war period into one long orgy of sex and cocaine, a grotesque farce as told by a liar. After moving quickly in and out of favor with Mussolini in Rome, the exiled Russian Jew-in-denial Pyat comes to Munich, where he becomes Ernst Röhm’s lover, and, briefly, (in a shocking scene worthy of The Aristocrats), Hitler’s cross-dressing dominatrix. Pyat still dreams of a technocratic utopia, he designs gigantic tanks and other impossible weapons for his friends to build. But in the end he’s just a drug addict who jumps from one bed to the next.

It’s funny, in a very brutal way. But the comedy is not for fun. Moorcock is deadly serious. He’s trying to capture the mindset of the people who exterminated the Jews. The preposterous and grotesque events here are not Moorcock’s way of playing light with fascism and nazism, they’re his way of taking them seriously, while avoiding the clichés of Holocaust fiction. The madness follows naturally from that.

The result is full of insights into fascism, presented with disturbing vividness. I love it. The Pyat Quartet is, as a whole, one of the great novels of our time.

When Edward Bernays wrote Propaganda in 1928, the word already had more negative than positive associations, but Bernays thought he could rescue the original, more neutral meaning: The art of propagating your ideas. Bernays’s vision of propaganda was essentially what we today call public relations, a euphemism he himself popularized.

Bernays distanced himself from mere advertisers. He wanted to consider the whole relationship between a company and the public, thus enabling a deeper level of manipulation. Don’t just tell them to buy. Change their worldview so that they arrive at the decision to buy seemingly out of their own free will.

Bernays is unexpectedly honest about his goals – noone in P.R. would be this frank today – but even so, this book is itself a work of propaganda. The foreword by Mark Crispin Miller points out Bernays’s real agenda, which was to sell his own services to business and government clients. Bernays was a giant in his field. He convinced women to start smoking. He did it by associating it with women’s liberation.

Bernays was a fan of Walter Lippmann. The influence shows in his vision of an elite of benevolent manipulators, kindly guiding their inferiors towards a better, more ordely future. But Propaganda has little of the depth of Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which is one of the great and dangerous works of political philosophy. Lippmann did his harm with ideas, Bernays with actions.

The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead. The dogma that the voice of the people is the voice of God tends to make elected persons the will-less servants of their constituents. [..]

No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people express the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. [..]

The political leader of today should be a leader as finely versed in the technique of propaganda as in political economy and civics. If he remains merely the reflection of the average intelligence of his community, he might as well go out of politics. [..]

“When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great,” says the historian Buckle, “the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits.”

Propaganda bridges this interval in our modern complex civilization.

- Edward Bernays, Propaganda

The essential problem with the newspaper business today is that it is suffering from a huge imbalance between supply and demand. What the Internet has done is broken the geographical constraints on news distribution and flooded the market with stories, with product. Supply so far exceeds demand that the price of the news has dropped to zero. Substitutes are everywhere. [..]

In this environment, you’re about as like to be able to charge for an online news story as you are to charge for air. [..]

Now here’s what a lot of people seem to forget: Excess production capacity goes away, particularly when that capacity consists not of capital but of people. Supply and demand, eventually and often painfully, come back into some sort of balance. Newspapers have, with good reason, been pulling their hair out over the demand side of the business, where a lot of their product has, for the time being, lost its monetary value. But the solution to their dilemma actually lies on the production side: particularly, the radical consolidation and radical reduction of capacity. The number of U.S. newspapers is going to collapse [..]

As all that happens, market power begins – gasp, chuckle, and guffaw all you want – to move back to the producer. The user no longer gets to call all the shots. Substitutes dry up, fungibility dissipates, and quality becomes both visible and valuable. The value of news begins, once again, to have a dollar sign beside it.

- Nick Carr, Misreading newspapers

Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?

[..]

The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and actions is likewise expensive.

For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our natural life.

- Edward Bernays, Propaganda

With short stories it’s a short distance between the fascinating and the simply pointless. With little time to build characters or plots, the focus is often on cleverness, confusion and mood. Something weird and moody happens. Then it gets weirder and moodier. THE END.

Kelly Link illustrates this problem with Magic for Beginners. The two stories I finished are original and well written, possibly even brilliant. But it’s a kind of brilliance that does little for me. The stories are merely .. inventive. Pointless. I’m not looking for a moral, or adventure, just something to pull me in. It’s not far off, it just doesn’t click.

I’ve read a lot of bad short stories by writers who want to be Ray Bradbury, but that isn’t the problem here. Kelly Link follows that same genre-agnostic SF tradition, but unlike just about everybody else she does it really well. If you are going to read a modern SF short story collection, it should probably be this one. It’s won her prizes and a lot of fans.

But how about trying some older stories instead?

A slum is characterized by poverty, informal housing, and lack of public utilities. Which means you’re hungry and sick, and you walk around in shit. You get a slum when hundreds of thousands or millions of poor people want to live in a city that has no room for them. Cities can only grow so fast. When they grow faster, you get slums.

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums is a bird’s-eye view of the slum problem, full of facts and numbers. There are no individuals here, no sentimental stories. There are only masses of people, breaking like waves on the urban shore.

But it’s not a dry account. Planet of Slums is an angry book. Davis’s anger is a cold anger, aimed at everyone. He is angry with the colonial powers for leaving a mess, with Third World elites for making it worse, with the World Bank and the IMF for forcing ivory tower doctrines upon their debtors, and with global NGO’s for bulldozing local initiative.

It’s an interesting approach to popular sociology: Academic in content, moralistic in tone. One reviewer thinks Davis is too bleak, leaving no room for hope, and maybe he is. For my own part, I notice ignorance about the liberal policies he attacks. They may not have worked, but Davis finds even their purpose incomprehensible. He seems to think that market pricing, for instance, is a conspiracy to squeeze the poor.

But that doesn’t matter. This is an important book, and leftist outrage is more appropriate here than rightist pollyannaism.

In the urban Third World, poor people dread high-profile international events – conferences, dignitary visits, sporting events, beauty contests, and international festivals – that prompt authorities to launch crusades to clean up the city: slum-dwellers know that they are the “dirt” or “blight” that their governments prefer the world not to see. During the Nigerian Independence celebration in 1960, for example, one of the first acts of the new government was to fence the route from the airport so that Queen Elizabeth’s representative, Princess Alexandria, would not see Lagos’s slums. These days governments are more likely to improve the view by razing the slums and driving the residents out of the city.

Manilenos have a particular horror of such “beautification campaigns”. During Imelda Marcos’s domination of city government, shanty-dwellers were successively cleared from the parade routes of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant, the visit of President Gerald Ford in 1975, and the IMF-World Bank meeting in 1976. Alltogether 160 000 squatters were moved out of the media’s field of vision, many of them dumped on Manila’s outskirts, 30 kilometers or more from their former homes.

- Mike Davis, Planet of Slums