50 Books: Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming: Problematic?

I read my first James Bond novel—From Russia, With Love—last Christmas, and I was surprised by how good it was. The prose captured a sense of anomie and moral ambiguity that is missing from the movies, and the plot moved along briskly. It was a yarn, and I wanted to read it when I wasn’t—the mark of a good genre novel. The Book Exchange here in Missoula sells used Bond paperbacks for $1.88 apiece, and I picked up three more when I got From Russia, With LoveAmong them was Live and Let Die, which I finished yesterday. If I were going to recommend a Bond novel from the two I have read, I would go with From Russia, both because the prose is better and because I don’t want to develop a reputation. Live and Let Die is enjoyable, but only if you can get past the astonishing racism.

I guess we should all stop being astonished by racism, especially when we read books published in 1954. It’s fair to say that the exoticization of African Americans is not just an aspect but the central premise of Live and Let Die. The second novel in the 007 series, it is basically a crime/adventure story grafted onto the spy template. Tracing the source of ancient gold coins that have mysteriously appeared on the international market, Bond discovers the Harlem gangster Mr. Big, a genius endomorph who runs his criminal empire through a reputation for voodoo powers. One of the best parts of the novel is everyone’s agreement that voodoo isn’t real, right up until they get really scared and start to worry that it might be. Even Bond is not immune to this creeping terror, and it’s a great atmospheric effect.

To get to it, though, you have to wade through a lot of attitudes toward race that can charitably be described as “old-timey British.” The major set piece of the first act is America, and Fleming does not disguise his  disdain for the diner food, clipped speech, and retirement communities of the USA. If America is a foreign country through the lens of Bond’s wry English chauvinism, Harlem is another planet. Every man is a superstitious hustler in peg-topped trousers, and the only (black) woman is a jazz sex witch. Mr. Big’s whole gang is black—Fleming scrupulously uses the word “negro,” which was polite at the time—and the key to his hold over them is their natural superstition. They have colorful names like Poxy and Tee-Hee, and they speak in the apostrophized dialect of southern sharecroppers, even though they live in New York. When Bond sneaks into Florida, he is made by a black cab driver who calls him in to Mr. Big’s operation. Almost every black person in this book is part of the same criminal underground.

I was curious whether Bond would get a black love interest, but the girl in Live and Let Die is a white daughter of Haitian planters named Solitaire. Mr. Big believes she has psychic powers, and he is determined to make her his wife. The adventure that ensues takes them to Florida and then Jamaica, with plenty of booby traps, voodoo curses, and carnivorous fish along the way. Bond and his friends are in danger an impressively high percentage of the time, which keeps the pages turning. In order to enjoy the story, though, you have to overlook the author’s presentation of black people as a type—some good, some bad, but all as exotic as the barracudas and tropical islands that compose the rest of the mise en scene.

I could do that, because I like genre fiction and enjoy looking past the details to the mechanics underneath. Also, I’m white. It’s easy for me to forgive Fleming his “don’ choo move, Mistah Bond” and monologues about how black people are superstitious because they grew up without education in an atmosphere of terror. That’s just an unfortunate aspect of the past, and I condemn it in roughly the same way I condemn its contemporary manifestations, i.e. comfortably, from a place they do not reach. If I were black, Live and Let Die would probably not be a charming adventure story with problematic features, but rather another example of how most books in English were written on the presumption that I would not read them.

The sixty-five-dollar question is what we do with books like that now. We can throw Live and Let Die on the fire and read some China Mieville instead, but are we prepared to do the same with Othello? That’s a work by a well-meaning author that’s astonishingly racist by contemporary standards, too; it’s just better, probably, than a Bond novel. The easy solution is to approach racism in old books like the word “shan’t”—something that jangles the modern ear but was ultimately just a feature of the time. This calculus breaks down, however, when we ask why we’re excusing it. Was the racism of the 1830s any less bad because everyone bought into it?

These questions do not have simple answers, but I do think it’s possible to read Live and Let Die in spite of the racism, without endorsing it. I listen to a lot of Future, but I don’t endorse prescription drugs and cynical materialism. Those elements are part of a larger, ambiguous whole. I’d be willing to split hairs so finely as to say it’s not Future that I endorse so much as the act of listening to Future. Maybe this is sophistry, though, and we’re only trying to gloss over the sins of someone we like. If you haven’t read any Bond books, check out From Russia, With Love. I’m glad I read Live and Let Die, but the baggage may not be worth the trip.

I’m reading 50 Books in 2018; Live and Let Die was number seven. Next, we’re reading The 20 Days of Turin by Georgio De Maria.

From White House, Sanders calls for firing of ESPN host

Jemele Hill, who called Donald Trump a white supremacist

In the 21st century, the go-to move when someone expresses an unacceptable opinion is to try to get them fired. It’s a consequence of internet discourse: you can’t reach out and slap someone for, say, making a problematic joke about race and AIDS, but you can harness the power of social media to crowdsource complaints to their employer. When it comes to censoring bad speech, work is the new government. It was therefore kind of whiplash-inducing to see the original government—Government Classic, if you will—appeal to the power of ESPN to silence someone.

Monday night, SportsCenter host Jamele Hill tweeted that the president “owed his rise to white supremacy.” Conservative media has criticized ESPN for being too liberal, and the network duly chastised her for “inappropriate” remarks. Now seems like a good time to pause and point out that Hill’s tweets were probably unwise, from a career standpoint, but they are hardly inappropriate. There are good arguments to be made that Trump does owe his political success to white supremacists, and it’s appropriate for any American to criticize him for that. Anyway, despite this display of corporate submission, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today from the White House briefing room that Hill ought to be fired.

Maybe there’s a precedent for a White House spokesperson saying in an official capacity that a critic of the president should lose her job, but I can’t think of one. It’s crazy, first of all, that the White House would even take notice. Huckabee Sanders’s remarks came in response to a direct question about Hill, but still—the obvious play is to say “who?” and move on. Setting aside the dignity-of-office issue, though, it’s nanners for the White House to single out one of the president’s critics and call for her to be fired.

Is ESPN supposed to understand these remarks as a request from the president? Will the most powerful man in the world be mad at the cable network if they don’t fire Hill? And if they do, what new era might it signal in American democracy? You don’t need bills of attainder when the executive branch can wreck the career of anyone whose criticism catches the attention of the president. Anyway, the important thing is that even as fundamental norms of American democracy break down, the Law of Trump Tweets remains inviolable:

 

Carlson agrees with King: “Nothing racist” about tweet

Fox News personality and racism expert Tucker Carlson

Boarding school graduate Tucker Carlson, whose first job out of college was an editorial position at Policy Review, knows something about the relationship between demographics and destiny. His father was George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the Seychelles and ran the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as Voice of America. His stepmother is the heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune. From these beginnings, Tucker somehow found his way into broadcasting and conservative politics. Yesterday he interviewed Rep. Steve King (R-IA) in this capacity, discussing the congressman’s controversial tweet from this weekend. And he held King’s feet to the fire in his signature, hard-nosed style. Quote:

Everything you said is, I think defensible, and probably right. The problem with the [other peoples’ babies] tweet was it suggested a racial component of American identity.

Yeah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Fortunately, the two men talked it over, and they agreed there was nothing racist about King’s tweet. Video after the jump.

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Rep. King: Can’t “restore civilization” with “somebody else’s babies”

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) describes a beautiful sandwich only white people can eat.

For the last year or so, Representative Steve King of Iowa has flirted with white nationalism. It’s the kind of flirting where you drink four cocktails and just start talking, although King was presumably sober in October when he tweeted that “cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.” That was ominous. “Cultural suicide” and “demographic transformation” are vague terms, but the accompanying photo with European ethno-nationalists Frauke Petry and Geert Wilders offered a hint of what he meant. This weekend, the congressman praised Wilders again and got a little more explicit:

To paraphrase an old joke: What do you mean “we,” white man? The tweet raises some obvious questions. Who are we, again? And which babies aren’t ours? While we’re at it, we should probably figure out what the congressman means by “restore civilization,” considering that he is tweeting this message using a cell phone that distributes his words via a worldwide communication network to people who can read. Mad Max it ain’t. The questions about what King means by “we” and “our civilization” and “somebody else” lie at the heart of this tweet and, increasingly, his whole perspective.

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Joke book “literally kills lives,” says person so right I cannot agree

A satirical cover from the recently-pulled Bad Little Children’s Books

Following accusations of racism, Abrams has taken the collection of satirical illustrations Bad Little Children’s Books off the market at the author’s request. The pseudonymous Arthur Gackley maintains that neither he nor his book is prejudiced, but that public outcry has made it impossible to have “the kind of dialogue I hoped to promote.” If that sounds suspiciously high-minded to you, you’ll love his quote in The Guardian:

This act of censorship is dangerous on so many levels, as free speech, satire and parody are tools to help make us a stronger society, not a more divided one.

Totally true re: speech and satire, but I question his use of the phrase “act of censorship.” When you pull your own book because people said you were a jerk for writing it, that’s not censorship. That’s free speech convincing you. I’m kind of surprised it did, though, because the speech used to condemn Bad Little Children’s Books seems like the wrong way to convince anybody. Example after the jump.

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