LIBERADIO(!)

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I just finished reading Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, and it is most assuredly a must-read. The layering of the narrative is absorbing, and, like its predecessor, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 it reads like a suspense thriller. The most frightening part is reaching the end and realizing that Suskind is a purveyor of fact, not fiction.

I recently read a snarky semi-review of the book by Clive Crook in an analysis of one of the book’s most damning revelations: that the Bush administration forged an intelligence document from a former Iraqi intelligence chief who, in the reality-based community, had told the White House that there were no WMD in Iraq. The forged document fabricated a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda as directed by our White House. Unfortunately, Crook, whom I imagine regards himself as an intellectual, dispenses with the luxuries the book takes in contemporary cultural examination, and seems to have wanted instead a breathless 500-word exposé of a single fact among the many supplied by the book. I’m not dismissing the importance of this or similar and singular facts in the book. Indeed, they make me aghast at how poor our notion of ethics and accountability has become.

For my part, though, I much prefer the view into the life of an Afghan teen participant in a program of the American Councils for International Education; an opportunity to witness the last days of Benazir Bhutto; and the intelligence-community optimism of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recognizes better than anyone in the Bush administration the urgent need to work on non-proliferation. America’s quest to reduce our information to ideologically isolated tweets is causing us to do ourselves and the world a disservice. Every narrative explored by Suskind here is critical to the “human progress” he presents in the sibling tension between two Pakistanis coming to grips with their relationships with each other and with Islam.

The world presented by Suskind in his two most recent books is one with dark, dark clouds casting a shadow across America and the Middle East. In the end, though, I can’t help but read optimism between his urgent and fact-laden lines. I have had a hard time not living with a quiet fear after having read The One Percent Doctrine, which ends ominously. None of the narratives of The Way of the World end happily, in my opinion, but somehow the book itself sounds a hopeful note as it closes. And finishing it on the virtual eve of possibly the most critical election of my lifetime causes me to look to Election Day for a better understanding of how I’ll see the world in a few short months: with hope or fear.

I can’t recommend Suskind’s writing highly enough. If you ever get the opportunity to see him speak in person, avail yourself of it. The only modern narrator of the complex issues of our times I have read and admire with the same capacity is Paul Berman, whose A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 was a fascinating analysis of a world and era I can never know, the 1960s, and its connection to the world I inhabit today.

Suskind’s personal website is a nice repository of supplements to his journalistic efforts in book form. His elaboration on the events of the 21st century thus far is the sort of thing that makes the sensationalism splayed across the entry ways to modern bookstores simply depressing. Suskind is a journalist’s journalist, and Tim Russert’s recent death in advance of the audacity of the McCain-Palin media strategy, makes me realize just how rare such individuals are in our era.