Reviewing Selling the Dream by Jane Marie, A History of Multi-level Marketing Scams
Hey Hun! Jane Marie’s new book, Selling the Dream, discusses how Multi-Level Marketing schemes work and how to avoid them. This book is packed with information about a legal scam that steals billions of dollars from Americans every year.
The author’s investigation into Multi-Level Marketing scams (MLM) began in 2019 with her podcast, The Dream.
MLMs trick people into “starting a business,” but really, they resell expensive products.
MLMs claim they use “network marketing,” but really, they ask sellers to recruit their family and friends and offer recruiters a percentage of their sales profits.
MLMs promise stable, passive income but always fail to deliver.
The author synthesized her years of interviews, research, and investigation into a brisk non-fiction book that details the history of direct selling and proves that MLMs are a drain on society andone of the most profitable industries in America.
Supplements | Photo by Michele Blackwell on Unsplash
Classic Scams
Early direct-selling scams like Avon, Tupperware, and Nutralite (now Herbalife) pioneered the grift, and they’re still going strong. The founders of these companies all got rich, but the people selling the products are footnotes in the company’s origin stories. Marie’s book details the fiction of these company origin stories.
Women, in particular, are targeted for these scams. Friends and family recruit them. The asks start out small. Just buy some makeup, host a party, and take these vitamins…
But the money adds up fast.
The author demonstrates dozens of examples where people lose tens of thousands of dollars to these scams. Sources told the author that years of their life were wasted trying to sell useless junk.
The book offers two reasons why people stay stuck in direct-sales scams.
The sunk cost fallacy. They have already lost money and believe they must earn it back.
Big number blindness. There are not enough people on earth for everyone to recruit their quota. If everyone recruits 5 people, within just 15 cycles, the entire world is out of people.
Multi-level marketing scams teach their sellers to ignore all outside criticism. Sellers are told they’re “bettering themselves” and learning how to run a business. “Positive thinking” is rebranded as cutting ties with family and friends.
The scammers also leverage that if you give up, your social network might be mad at you because you recruited them into a scam. Truly evil stuff!
The author points out that as people became more desperate for flexible work (like during COVID lockdowns), America saw increased direct selling scams. These scammers preyed on people’s desperation.
Perhaps the evilest direct-selling company is Amway, hilariously short for the American Way.
Ironically, this court case paved the way for legal pyramid schemes. As long as the company can prove it sells products and doesn’t only incentivize recruiting, it’s fine. They can do both: sell products and incentivize recruiting.
It’s a legal scam that goes up to the executive branch.
Jane Marie’s book is the perfect introduction if you want to learn more about direct selling scams. It’s a great pick for readers of Cultish by Amanda Montell, the Reddit board r/antiMLM, or anybody who wants to know why their friend has a bunch of boxes in their garage full of junk they can’t sell.
MLM Red Flags
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include these red flags to help others avoid getting caught in an MLM.
🚩 Upfront Costs: It’s a scam if you must buy the product you’re selling or pay to sell the product.
🚩 Markups: A scam company sells normal products—like pills, clothes, or makeup—at a steep markup. The only differentiating factor is the MLM logo.
🚩 BYOC: Bring your own customers, like friends and family. If they want you to sell to your “network,” it’s a scam.
🚩 Complicated referral schemes: If you get paid a downline or a percentage of sales from your referrals, erroneously called commissions, that’s a scam.
🚩 Any Product: An MLM can sell any product or no product, including makeup, natural cures, essential oils, leggings, sex toys, water ionizers, “financial products,” and some “pass around money.”
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an advanced review copy in exchange for a review!
Reviewing Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and revealing the futility of time management
I’m staring down a to-do list twenty tasks deep. What if I can’t get it all done? What if it sucks? What if everyone gets mad at me?
I take a deep breath and remind myself of three simple truths.
“Nobody cares. Nothing matters. We’re all just dust on a space rock.”
Then I get to work.
A book that reshaped how I see the world and helped me find comfort in the futility of time management is Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. This self-help book strives to teach the advantages of approaching time not as a resource we have but as an experience we get.
It might be the only time management self-help book that reminds readers to face the facts.
Life is finite.
No one is owed time.
You won’t finish everything.
Nobody really cares what you get done.
Things only matter if you think they matter.
Embracing life’s limits will help “manage” your time on earth. In this post, I distill some of the lessons that resonated with me, hoping you can apply them to whatever you need to get done and finally do it!
A Life in Four Thousand Weeks
First, a sobering truth. If you’re lucky, life is about four thousand weeks long.
The book’s title refers to the average human lifespan in weeks. Four thousand weeks equals about 77 years or 28,105 days. It sounds short, but it’s actually the longest thing you’ll ever experience.
In fact, humans have existed for hardly any time at all. Burkeman explains how the entire recorded human history is only about 6000 years or 312,000 weeks. While the earth and the universe have existed for much longer, humans are brand new in comparison.
Do you want to spend your 4000 weeks notching off a never-ending to-do list? Probably not.
Getting things done doesn’t mean you have fewer things to do; the opposite is usually true. The more you get done, the more you get assigned. Every time you finish a task, you prompt more tasks. Burkeman calls this “Sisyphus’ Inbox.”
Sisyphus Opening His Email For Eternity — Credit: Microsoft Designer
Replying to emails can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity. You reply to every email in your inbox today. Then tomorrow it’s full again. Quickly replying to emails sets the expectation that you are always quick to reply.
What if you just don’t? What if you do what you must and forget the rest?
All Time is Free Time
If time is limited, what’s the best way to spend it? Perhaps it’s best not to spend it at all and instead experience it.
Mass agriculture and industrial production provide living essentials for billions of people. To keep these things running, society became increasingly complex, so clocks and standardized time were developed to keep everyone working on the same schedule. As such, we think of time as a resource, something we spend.
When we say we “spend” time, it implies that time has a physical quality, like money. Except it doesn’t. No one owns time. You could go to work, watch TV, or, unfortunately, get hit by a bus.
Avoid the urge to think of time as a resource. Burkeman explains,
“Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.” (18)
The saying goes, “Time waits for no man,” but perhaps it’s more accurate to say time isn’t owed to anybody. It might seem like your boss owns your time, but the unsettling truth is that time is not guaranteed.
In a way, this implies YOLO: You Only Live Once. But rather than an excuse to act recklessly, think of time’s finitude as an imperative to act deliberately. Knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it is the way to manage your time and your fear of the inevitable.
Instead of YOLO, what we really need is…
NOMO: The Necessity of Missing Out
When you dedicate yourself to finishing something, you are also dedicated to not doing something else.
Instead of feeling FOMO (fear of missing out), embrace NOMO (necessity of missing out). Burkeman explains it this way,
“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.” (35)
Sometimes, it seems like there’s not enough time because we choose to focus on too many things. Adding things to a to-do list gives the illusion of productivity, just as starting projects gives the illusion that they’ll eventually finish. It’s like that Onion headline.
Instead, we all must prioritize getting done what is really important. Burkeman articulates Three Principles of Prioritization:
Pay Yourself First — Make it a point to spend part of each day finishing the most important thing to you. If it’s being a good parent, spend time with your kid! If it’s losing weight, work out! If it’s writing a novel, write your pages!
Limit Your Work in Progress — Focus on the tasks at hand. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the fantasy of doing lots of stuff. Instead, choose a maximum of three projects to work on simultaneously. Once you finish the three,
Resist the Allure of Middling Priorities — Once you know what you want to achieve, ignore everything else. Maybe you can’t have a clean kitchen and a finished novel. If the novel’s more important to you, remember that nobody really cares about the dirty kitchen!
The urge to consume extends toward leisure time, too. Ever notice how some vacations leave you more exhausted than going to work? Knowing that you will only be somewhere briefly prompts regret and longing.
But what if it didn’t? What if you prioritize relaxing, having fun, and experiencing something new? It’s much easier said than done, but we’ll always remind ourselves to live in the moment.
Pain, Distractions, and the Future
And yet, doing stuff is hard! We still (hopefully) have 4000 weeks to do stuff. So a lack of time isn’t the only thing preventing us from accomplishing our goals.
Other psychological blocks prevent us from getting things done. Burkeman names these in hopes that identifying them can help us overcome them.
Pain — Doing good work hurts. It brings shame and inadequacy, “What if everyone hates this!” We must accept that nothing is perfect, and striving for perfection is a path to guaranteed pain. If you can accept that you won’t be perfect and embrace that you might suck, that can actually get you over the hump.
Distractions — A tiny computer in my pocket constantly calls me to watch a funny cat video. This is a great excuse for not getting things done. It’s social media’s fault! I’m not to blame! And yet, eventually, I must take ownership of my actions. I’m choosing to look at the funny cat videos because doing difficult things is uncomfortable. It hurts to be bad at things. If I can accept this and remember I’m in control of my actions, I can get more done.
The Future — Ultimately, the pain of inadequacy and the urge for distractions could be seen as fear of the future. What if I get it all done and still have more to do? What if I get everything done, and it sucks?
The pain of failure, the distractions of pleasure, and the anxiety that haunts the future prevent us from achieving our true purpose in life. But what if they stopped? Or, what if we could control how we react to these things? Could this get us closer to achieving our dreams?
Time Trades
If I can convince you of anything in this post, I hope it’s this: spend three minutes and twenty-six seconds listening to “Time Trades” by Jeffrey Lewis.
“Time Trades” by Jeffrey Lewis
I really like this song. A lyric that resonates with me,
“You have no choice you have to pay time’s price
But you can use the price to buy you something nice”
This song asks us to embrace our finite lives! We must accept that we won’t get everything done or do everything cool. And that’s fine. If we’re gentle to ourselves and struggle through the difficulties, perhaps we can do something amazing. We can trade time for what’s most important.
Oh, how I love holidays. And on Love’s Holiday, I consider strange love in a memoir, a romance novel, and a comic book about the true Harlequin.
Books
My Father, The Pornographer | Chris Offutt | Washington Square Press | 2016
My Father, The Pornographer by Chris Offutt | Credit: Washington Square Press
Anyone can imagine the horror of finding your dad’s porno stash, but what if you find out your dad was secretly a hardcore pornographer? Chris Offutt explores the strange, illusive, and uncomfortable love of his father, the pornographer.
Chris Offutt is not a pornographic genre author but an Iowa Writers Workshop-educated AmericanLiterary Regionalist! He’s attuned to those awful, persistent emotions that come from living with erratic parents, the feelings sung about in The Mountain Goats album, Sunset Tree. When he calls his dad to share the good news that he sold a short story collection, his father sadly replies, “I’m sorry I gave you such a terrible childhood that you became an author.”
His father is indeed an odd one. Andrew Offutt wrote over 500 books with seventeen pen names. Almost all of his work is pornographic. Science fiction, fantasy, and erotic of every possible genre, virtually all of his work was sexually charged. He published a multi-book series of SF erotic with Playboy, a historical erotic romance with major publishers. Almost all of Andrew Offutt’s work is obscure or out of print today. He died resenting the literary establishment and even his son for finding literary success. The Offutt family personified the literary/genre divide.
The author recalls his childhood in Kentucky. A. Offutt ruled the house like a tyrannical shut-in, subjugating his wife and children into taking care of every household chore and locking himself in his office to write for 14 hours a day and churn out at least a book a month. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t fit into his Kentucky community. Chris Offutt cites a dozen people insisting his father was “a character!” He was a NEET in the 1970s. One neighbor described, “He put four kids through college without leaving the house.” He once told someone who lost an arm, “You better shut your mouth, or I’ll rip off the other arm.”
Yet Andrew Offutt was also a respected SF author and a member of the 1960s “New Wave.” His story “For Value Received” was published in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s second, famous anthology (in fact, as toastmaster of the 32nd Worldcon in 1974, he developed a lifelong, one-sided grudge against Ellison). Andrew Offutt used science fiction conventions to build a surrogate family and have strange sex. He and his wife participated in couples swapping. At cons, they completely neglected the children, leaving them alone in a hotel room with bread and Kraft singles. Strange stuff happens at Worldcon, man.
Offutt obsessively chronicles his father’s life and papers: his abusive letters to his family, his furious correspondence with authors and agents, his client list, and decades-long correspondence with bondage fetishists, who commissioned private porn for thousands of dollars. He looked at so much pornography it messed with his mind. He couldn’t feel attraction while immersed in his father’s archives.
The strangest thing C. Offutt finds: a 4000-page comic of drawn sexualized torture. A. Offutt tried to stop. He tried to throw all his terrible drawings into a river. But he could not stop. Drawing these things was a compulsion, or perhaps a release, as it seems all day Andrew Offutt thought about torture and murder.
How does one love a parent that acts this way? A relapsed and resentful Catholic with an alcohol dependency, intense pornography addiction, severe delusions of mania, guilt, self-loathing, a persecution complex, and no nurturing instinct. Andrew Offutt had his demons but never dealt with them. I’d argue constantly immersing himself in pornography made all of his problems worse. How could anyone be expected to love this person?
And yet, throughout the book, Chris Offutt explains how he did love his dad. And for many years, he wanted him to love him back, but he didn’t know how. A. Offutt’s fans adored him, bringing him strange gifts and buying his work, enabling this strange lifestyle. And his wife was loyally devoted to her husband. She loved a man who truly hated women, saw them as inferior, and struggled to repress violent urges.
Today, erotic writing is more popular than it’s ever been. Worldcon keeps generating more controversy, and most of the 60s New Wave all turned out to be weirdo Republicans. All Chris Offutt has with his father’s papers a lifetime of trauma and an excellent memoir. I highly recommend this book, and it’s on Hoopla.
While reading, I kept thinking of that Mountain Goats lyric,
“Some things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun
But the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.”
Heartbreak Incorporated | Alex De Campi | Solaris Nova | 2021
Heartbreak Incorporated by Alex De Campi | Credit: Solaris Nova
The state sees marriage as a financial contract, a business. And when billionaires get married, that’s big business! So, who do the billionaires hire when they cook up a Marriage and Acquisition scam? Say you wanna marry an heiress and steal all her money? Who do you call? Heartbreak Incorporated.
A romance of many sub-genres. It’s a girl living in New York trying to make it as a writer, an enemy’s to lovers romance, a murder mystery, a spy plot!
It starts with Evie, our hapless protagonist, trying to make ends meet in New York. She got a journalism degree for a job that doesn’t exist anymore. She wants to break a big story but can’t bear the thought of hurting her sources. So when she interviews to be a secretary for the love interest and most handsome and fascinating man in New York, everything changes.
It’s an atypical Billionaire Romance love interest, Mishka, a Georgian who left Russia after the fall of the USSR and made his fortune in New York. He seduces people for a living, and his job is a mix of a divorce attorney, private investigator, gigolo, and sexual blackmailer. So yes, of course, he’s also ripped and hot. Then, about midway through, something crazy happens that makes this a paranormal romance, too! I can’t spoil it.
There’s a lot to love about this book. I liked how we always see the darker side of wealth: the plots and scheming, the backstabbing and betrayal. Of course, rich people pay someone to break up their unwanted marriages! And it turns out it’s the perfect premise for a multi-genre romance.
Check out Alex de Campi’s second novel if you love her comics. It was re-released today by Solaris Nova. Thanks, Solaris Nova and Netgalley, for the review copy.
Comics
Harlequin Valentine | Neil Gaiman (Words), John Bolton (Art) | Dark Horse | 2001
Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
It’s the most Neil Gaiman urban fantasy story ever that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day. What if Harlequin, the wacky clown from the Comedia D’el Arte, nailed his heart to your door?
Gaiman’s tale personifies the Harlequin, a mischievous, devil demon theater troupe from 1263. He teams up with John Bolton, the artist on Books of Magic, to tell the tale with a strange art style. Sometimes photorealistic, sometimes abstract, some panels almost reminded me of AI-generated art in a cool way.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
Harlequin finds his Columbina, a London woman with a pixie cut and a leather trenchcoat. He haunts her on Valentine’s Day when the stars align, and he’s most likely to appear.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
Until, like all Gaiman stories, our hero realizes we are just floating through a world of endless signifiers that can mean anything so that we can define their meaning and wear the costumes, too. And she becomes Harlequin.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
The archetype of Harlequin lives on in the 21st century. The most prolific and popular romance publisher, Harlequin Romance, pays tribute to the imp. Just as the English remixed Harlequin and paired her with Clown, DC Comics remixed her into Harley Quinn, the Clown Prince of Crime’s sidekick. In Suicide Squad, Harley acts like this character who dates back to the 13th century, a zany, loopy, silly court jester in love.
Gaiman and Bolton’s story is short and entertaining, with a helpful literary history lesson. It’s available on Hoopla, and I recommend it!
Pile of the Week
Love Bears | Credit: The Author
Every year near my apartment, people come outside and sell piles of teddy bears on the sidewalk. I’ve never seen anyone buy one. If I were rich, I’d buy them all.
The Book Piles newsletter returns to review a memoir, a novel and a comic book about finding truth in crime
Thank you for coming to the pile. Let’s consider the psychological impact of closely scrutinized murder.
Books
I Know Who You Are | Barbara Rae-Venter | Ballantine Books | 2023
I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter | Credit: Ballantine Books
Barbara Rae-Venter’s 2022 non-fiction memoir details a forensic genealogist’s quest to catch serial killers. With DNA sample left at the scene, investigators can match it with samples collected from millions of people. This book shocked me in ways few things do.
What shocked me is the conclusive proof that our DNA is not private. Enough people took at-home DNA tests (like 23 and Me), and because of genetic similarity between relatives, gene databases contain 90% of people’s DNA.
The author used this research technique to find the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo. The former police officer admitted guilt, and a judge convicted him after being presented with every possible piece of evidence a prosecution could bring against a person: eyewitness testimony, material evidence, and a well-established and analyzed timeline. A true crime writer, Michelle McNamara laid out a clear timeline in I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Unfortunately, the author died, and her files were given to other investigators.
I Know Who You Are continues the story of the apprehension and prosecution of DeAngelo. Rae-Venter specifies how DNA evidence was used to find him and how police got confirmation samples by swabbing DeAngelo’s car door handle and stealing a used Kleenex. To vastly oversimplify it, an investigator uploads a DNA sequence to Ancestry.com and compares it with other sequences on the site. Rae-Venter built thousands of family trees from possible DNA matches and then researched the individuals on the associated tree.
When they narrowed the suspect profile, the author explained that her co-investigator (a retired detective) couldn’t believe a police officer would do this. They assumed it was someone in the real estate industry who had keys to many locks. It’s just another ominous association between police and real estate.
Of course, it was a police officer. Employed by police departments in both Exeter and Auburn, CA, DeAngelo was a burglary unit officer. He likely learned how to break into houses by investigating many cases where people did just that. In a witness testimony, she recalled DeAngelo cursing his ex-wife and blaming another man for “making him do this.” How weird that, in this case, the actual criminal happened to be the police officer 🙂
The book isn’t just about the Golden State Killer investigation. Rae-Venter explains how she got interested in forensic genealogy, her family history and search for genealogical truth, other non-criminal investigations like reuniting long lost family members, and even tips for aspiring investigative genealogists.
And she confronts the ethical questions head-on, although I disagree with her conclusions. What makes a crime “true”? Can truth be stripped down to the base building blocks of human genetic material? Does one’s right to privacy get trumped by our collective right not to get murdered and catch murderers? These are the questions at the heart of DNA evidence.
The practical concerns are immediately relevant to sexual assault cases. Police departments with DNA evidence now have a much more reliable means of finding these men. The author imagines a future where this could upend how current assault investigations.
Investigative genealogy also has a place in the future of unarmed police response. The author and her co-investigator on the GSK case were both retirees. They solved a cold case for really cheap! Forensic DNA investigations only require biosamples, access to DNA databases and laboratories, and investigator hours. These were unsalaried volunteers. Now imagine a world where this technology scales up to a speed that can solve cases without decades of inactivity.
Of course, corrupt police and prosecuting attorneys can manufacture DNA evidence. Since the American justice system has a quota of people to send people to private prisons, I predict genetic genealogy will convict people than it exonerates. The police could say they found a DNA sample at the scene when they didn’t. How could a defendant falsify the evidence without access to samples or technicians? These are just some horrifying questions to ruminate on throughout the future.
Rabbit Hole | Kate Brody | Soho Crime | 2024
Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody | Credit: Soho Crime
Rabbit Hole, Kate Brody’s debut novel, is a dramatized version of a true crime obsession gone awry. Teddy is a high-achieving English teacher and a woman on the edge. Her sister went missing about a decade ago, her family never dealt with the trauma, and the novel begins after her dad finally committed suicide after an obsessive investigation. Teddy seeks answers.
There are family secrets, a psychic, unprescribed pills, a cam girl, an estranged brother, an illegally purchased firearm, bawdy twists, shocking betrayals, and high-heat sex scenes. The calls come from inside the house, so it’s a domestic thriller but one set firmly in cyberspace. Our protagonist processes her trauma through experiences on the internet.
Reddit acts as a setting, a collection of deranged characters, and the book’s inciting incident. When Teddy pokes her toe in her father’s investigation, Reddit doxxes her, sending her to the titular rabbit hole. Brody fictionalizes Reddit threads and recreates the schizophrenic thrill of a Reddit investigation—look at all these connections and implications! There’s always a Reddit comment to drive somebody just a little bit crazier.
What’s gained from Reddit investigations? Those who dislike ambiguous endings should brace themselves because there are no easy answers or clear conclusions. Does Rabbit Hole make readers reconsider who’s on the True Crime message boards? Sure, there’s a bunch of obsessive freaks (take me, for example), but these traumas also impact the family members. The message boards call themselves “communities,” a misleading name for anonymous people data-mining a dead person’s most vulnerable personal information. These message boards even entice participation from a victim’s loved ones.
There’s the idea that, eventually, the investigation will crack, and the victims will get justice. And
I Know Who You Are offers an example, but I think Rabbit Hole provides a more emotionally truthful outcome to becoming an online vigilante. It hurts one’s spirit.
Comics
Where The Body Was | Ed Brubaker (Writer) | Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Image | 2024
Where The Body Was by Ed Brubaker (Writer) and Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Credit: Image
Brubaker/Phillip’s latest book is their funniest: a graphic mockumentary about how a dead body impacts a neighborhood.
The book begins with a map of Pelican Road, 1984. A Cul de Sac of just a few houses. But in the legend, notice #9. Spoiler: that’s where the body was found.
A page from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
I grew up in a similar-looking cul-de-sac and had first-hand experience to attest that nothing ever happens here by design. A dead body? That’s something! Just being close to action gives these characters a strange new authority. They know where the body was. Listen to them! They must be important!
Maybe. Or what if the witness is a lying psychopath like Palmer Sneed, the “Man with a Badge.”
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Palmer’s not a cop, but he acts like a cop. He resented his cop’s father and stole his badge from his casket to spit on him. Eventually, whenever he needed a confidence boost, he would flash the badge and get into or out of trouble. It helps him get laid. Of course, phony cops would get in the way of figuring out what happened to the body. But that’s just it. These guys come out when a body is found because dead bodies can be a conduit for their repressed vigilante tendencies.
Like Batman! There’s a diminutive parody of vigilantism and superheroes in The Roller Derby Girl, a.k.a. Lila Nguyen. In 1984, she dressed in a mask and cape, ran around the neighborhood, and pretended to be a superhero. Yes, that is weird, but not unheard of as something an American child might do since syndicated radio. So if a body is found,of course, the little kid playing superhero would need to fight crime and solve the case. Somebody has to do it!
Three panels from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
The real crime fighters are trying to solve the case by pinning it on Ranko, the Homeless Veteran.
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Because, come on, he looks like a criminal! He’s squatting on public property, and important people in town wish he were gone. He’s the perfect patsy.
I’ll leave you hanging there because this book was a blast! Fantastic art, dialogue, structure, colors, and vibe. Read it! Buy it at a comic shop, or if you’re broke, get it on Hoopla! Thanks, Image and Netgalley, for the Advanced Readers Copy.
Pile of the Week
This week’s pile has to be this sculpture of incredible birds sitting on top of books by Malia Jenson that I found in the Public Art Archive.
A photo of Malia Jenson’s sculpture, “Pile” in Portland, Oregon | Source: Public Art Archive
This week, the pile pertains to art and state ideology in reviews of Frances Stoner Saunders’ history of the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper and Zodiac, a new graphic memoir about the controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Books
Propaganda was how the West won the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders explains the specifics in Who Paid The Piper, a detailed look into the cultural ideological warfare. She focuses on the men who made the propaganda campaign happen and the overlap between the intelligentsia and the intelligence agents.
During the height of the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a
secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe. A central feature of this programme was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centrepiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967. Its achievements – not least its duration – were considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’ – Frances Stoner Suanders, The Cultural Cold War (1)
Saunders explains how the CIA funded art around the world in an act of “psychological warfare,” or winning the hearts and minds of Europeans. The war destroyed Allied countries, and even in the countries that “won,” they lacked food, water, and jobs, with rates of 50% unemployment. American leaders in business, military, and government worried that Communism would be attractive to people living under these conditions.
To beat the Communists, America made several gigantic investments. American industry publicly and overtly committed to rebuilding Europe, but secretly and covertly, they also funded programs to propagandize an American point of view. Thus begins Pax Americana.
There are tragic ironies, like how Europeans saw exhibits of cutting-edge modernist paintings and how American communists at home faced severe repression. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI surveilled and sabotaged them, and Joseph McCarty blacklisted them from employment.
The book recounts what could be called the inciting incident of the Red Scare: The 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Hotel. Another irony is that a conference for World Peace ignited ideological warfare.
CIA agents in attendance carried out hilariously erudite acts of sabotage, like Nicholas Nabokov (yes, Vladimir’s brother), who asked a question during a panel and tried to get a Soviet musician to denounce the party line and condemn a review in Pravda. Allegedly, Stalin would have murdered or imprisoned the musician for doing this, and that was Nabokov’s point. But it makes N. Nabokov look like a psychopath for trying to trick someone into saying executable opinions.
Life Magazine smeared the attendees of the conference, including the acerbic Dorthy Parker, whose FBI file “…listed variously as ‘an undercover Communist,’ ‘an open Communist,’ and ‘a Communist appeaser’” (53).
Dashiell Hammett also attended the conference; shortly afterward, he’d refuse to testify against his fellow communists, serve jail time, and quit writing in disgust. Arthur Miller was also in attendance; I read Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the 10th grade and taught as a parable for McCarthyism. This disaster conference seems like a direct inspiration for the first act.
The CIA and its many front organizations promoted the “Non-Communist Left” and targeted former Communists like Arthur Koestler and Jackson Pollock. To me, this sounded similar to the way federal police agencies cultivate criminal informants. Both men considered themselves communists who rejected Stalin in the 1930s, and the agency figured, “Who better to fight the communists than the communists?” (62). Agents admit that some artists receiving funding might not have even known about it. We’ll return to dark money’s mysterious role in art funding…
Saunders is concerned with the funding of “freedom and liberty” cultural warfare. She remarks that the Rockefeller family bankrolled the New York Museum of Modern Art from its inception. Nelson Rockefeller even called it “Mommy’s Museum” (258). MoMA was crucial in canonizing American Abstract Impressionism, America’s first “true” art style.
The agency men saw potential in abstract expressionism. There was power in the splotchy globs of paint. One conservative reactionary claimed expressionist paintings hide secret codes, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.” (253). Abstract expressionism was a direct reputation to Soviet social realism. The museums insisted these paintings looked fresh, new, and free, and this uninhibited expression made the Soviet paintings, usually depicting people at work, look corny and boring.
The “Abstract expressionism as CIA Op” has made its way into mainstream publications. And a popular counterargument is, how would paintings win a war? Saunders demonstrates that it wasn’t only paintings. Instead, every artistic medium became an ideological battleground with shadowy funding. WhoPaid the Piper? Pretty much everybody. Music and Radio Free Europe, Hollywood movies, literary prizes like the Nobel Prize for Literature, and every cultural product helped manufacture consent for America’s empire.
Who Paid the Piper? is an excellent book. Make sure to get the British edition, Who Paid The Piper, and **not the censored American edition, Cultural Cold War.
But covertly, I brought up this book for a reason. Did all these art spies go away after the fall of the USSR? Did they go online? What happened after the end of history?
Let us consider Ai Weiwei the “Most Dangerous Man in China.”
Comics
Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir
By Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator)
Penguin Random House, 2024
Zodiac | Credit: Penguin Random House
According to Western media sources, Ai Weiwei is one of Earth’s most accomplished living artists. Every article stresses that Weiwei is very popular and known for speaking truth to power by standing up to the repressive regime of the People’s Republic of China.
Weiwei claims Chinese authorities imprisoned him for 81 days for speaking truth to power. Chinese authorities claim they arrested Weiwei for not paying his taxes. Something strange is happening with the artist’s money. Credit Suisse closed his Swiss account, and he also claimed closed accounts in Germany and Hong Kong because he criticized these governments. Interesting…
Ai Weiwei describes himself as “an activist for freedom.” That’s a noble pursuit, and I’m thankful for my freedom of speech, which lets me say that I think Ai Weiwei’s art is thinly veiled propaganda, not to mention lazy, dumb, and obnoxious.
I don’t recommend Ai Weiwei’s new graphic memoir, Zodiac, but it did lead me to look up the artist’s strange career.
Weiwei grew up in a Chinese labor camp with his family. His father, Ai Qing, was a political exile and a poet with many pen names. While Ai Qing was a member of the Communist Party through the revolution, during the 1959 “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” he was expelled. Mao purged the party of everyone who advocated capitalism because he thought these people were a threat to the state. Ai Qing was sentenced to scrubbing toilets. Curiously, this labor camp allowed the prisoners to have jobs and live with their families, which sounds much better and more humane than an American prison.
When Mao died, China embraced capitalism, and Ai Qing was welcomed back into the party and made the president of the Chinese Writers Association. According to Zodiac, Ai Qing’s poems are printed in children’s textbooks today. Of course, the graphic memoir doesn’t mention why his father was expelled from the party. He was writing against communism.
If all history is family history, the son of a political exile capitalist poet would have no choice but to become an iconoclast, a multi-media performance artist with strange financial backing.
For a guy whose dad cleaned toilets, Weiwei could attend four expensive New York universities. The artist discusses his time in New York, hanging out with art scene icons like Alan Ginsberg and getting influenced by Andy Warhol.
In 1986, one of the first Ai Weiwei pieces to receive acclaim was “Condom Raincoat.” I find it vague and bizarre. Somehow, gluing a condom on a rain jacket was meant to bring awareness to the AIDS crisis.
“This raincoat has a hole near the waist which is covered with a condom. The work is intended to describe the AIDS crisis as Ai saw it in New York City” | Credit: Wikipedia
Weiwei lived in America for a decade, from 1983 to 1993. After this, he returned to China and cared for his elderly father. Surely coincidentally, this is right after the collapse of the USSR, when the global balance of power was shifting, and America was assessing new threats to trade dominance.
In 1995, Weiwei “made” arguably his most controversial work and, quite possibly, the dumbest and laziest piece of his career. Consider, “Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo” (1995).
Weiwei stenciled a Coca-Cola logo on Han pottery over 2000 years old. It’s dated between 206 B.C. and 9 A.D. See, it’s a profound statement about how consumerism overruns history by ruining a cultural artifact. He took this idea further and smashed another priceless vase.
AI WEIWEI, DROPPING A HAN DYNASTY URN, 1995 | Credit: Guggenheim
Why would someone do this? Isn’t this just historical vandalism? Why did Western museums exhibit this work? Why is it any different from the way ISIS destroys art? Here are Weiwei’s unsatisfying explanations in Zodiac.
A page from Zodiac, by Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator) | Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Credit: Penguin Random House
Around this time, Weiwei began work on “Study of Perspective,” a series of photographs from 1995-2003 where the artist gives stuff the middle finger. He flips off cities, buildings, and cultural artifacts from around the world.
This man is praised as one of the world’s most controversial and thought-provoking artists. Really? Are the blurry travel pictures flipping off a painting meant to evoke laughter and derision? It’s like if Kid Rock started shooting on film. Both these photos and the defaced pottery culminated in “FUCK OFF!” an exhibition of the Chinese avant-garde that seemingly featured a lot of gore photography.
Around 2005, Weiwei started doing stuff that got him in trouble. He blogged for Sina. If you read about China, you’ve probably heard of Weibo, a social media app like Blogspot or Twitter, and Weibo acquired Sina. So…anybody could make an account on this website. I cannot verify if Weiwei’s blog differed from the average account profile or if he was invited especially to start blogging on it. Eventually, he was banned from the platform and switched to Twitter, claiming to tweet up to eight hours daily (huh).
2007 brings Weiwei’s Fairy Tale, a 2007 performance piece that, from **what I can tell, was buying Berlin vacations for 1100 Chinese factory workers. Framed as “freedom of expression,” obviously, coordinated vacations for impoverished workers was a provocation against the Chinese government. How would Germany react if China invited migrants living in Germany to tour Beijing? Or America, if migrants in Texas came back from Shanghai?
Sina banned Weiwei for reporting on a 2008 8.0 megaton earthquake that struck Sichuan. The artist as a reporter, too, eh? That’s unusual. The earthquake killed over 68,000 people and left another 4 million people homeless. Weiwei believed the Chinese government was to blame for responding and preparing for this natural disaster. In 2009, Weiwei published leaked classified documents on his blog, claiming the local government cut corners to build a school where over 5000 children died.
Weiwei claims China censored these posts, and I believe China censors media that threaten government leaders. But so does America. So does every government in history. Perhaps there was corruption that led to faulty building planning, but also, as COVID-19 showed us, disasters are great opportunities for insurgent narratives to sew government distrust.
Skeptics of modern art say, “My two-year-old could make that.” Usually, that gives a two-year-old way too much credit, but in this case, I believe a two-year-old could spread a big pile of sunflower seeds on the floor. Perhaps the child wouldn’t know to say the seeds represent Chinese people.
Around this time, in 2011, Weiwei was jailed for 81 days in China, allegedly for thought crimes. He said things that were too controversial for the Chinese government. The Chinese government claims he didn’t pay his taxes.
After his release, he took sanctuary in Germany and spent years devoted to “understanding the migrant crisis” and traveling to hot zones in 41 countries for a documentary. His exhibit “Law of the Journey” focused on migrants. Of all the artist’s pieces, this is my favorite. His writing on migrants is elegant and based on first-hand experience. He even blames “the West” for the global migrant crisis, and even though “America” is more accurate, this is closer to truth than the condom jacket.
A picture of the “Law of the Journey” by Ai Weiwei | Credit: Collater.ai
Fast forward to today. Weiwei has embraced AI art with a cornball-titled exhibit, “AI vs. Ai.” In the Guardian, Weiwei claimed that any art AI can copy is meaningless and that learning to paint realistically is “worthless.”
I enjoy political art, but not tepid propaganda. So much of Weiwei’s work equates transgression with freedom (like flipping off a building or breaking artifacts). The notion is that craft and dedication aren’t worth pursuing, and art should just be some ephemeral experience that makes the viewer say, “Huh?” This ridiculous insistence that the only art worth making pisses off governments (except never America).
This week, Weiwei’s graphic memoir was released. The author tells the conventional story of his life. This graphic memoir is undoubtedly the least exciting thing about Weiwei. Like much of the artists’ work, it seems like assistants made this book. How is this a memoir if Weiwei didn’t write it? It’s a biography with too much oversight from the subject! I dislike Gianluca Costantini’s illustrations: dull, flat, line drawings without shading or depth that evoke coloring book pages. The Chinese Zodiac structures the story as a vague gesture to Chinese culture but not much deeper than the back of the lunch buffet placemat.
Weiwei explains his life in stories to his son and considers his life, art, and ideology of “freedom.” It leaves much to speculation because the artist moves through each subject quickly and offers platitudes instead of reflection. Now, for the real heads, there’s a $275 deluxe edition with a signed print…of an illustration that Ai Weiwei did not illustrate. I can’t decipher that signature, but Weiwei did not draw that picture.
Zodiac Deluxe Edition | Credit: Penguin Random House
I should commend the artist for opening up my perspective to how art and propaganda function in the 21st century, but perhaps different from how the artist intended.
Pile of the Week
And finally, here’s this week’s pile. I am the skeleton angel living on a cloud, filling my head with strange and paranoid truths.
Pile of the Week, 1/23/24 – Credit: the author
Expect this newsletter on Tuesday now! Yes, I know it’s Thursday. And you can even subscribe by email with Beehiiv.
Considering occulted fraternities in America by reviewing true crime, Among the Bros, and the comic Fraternity
Let’s initiate ourselves into a clandestine brotherhood of reading piles. This week’s reviews consider how fraternities harness rituals and drugs to influence reality.
Books
Among the Bros | By Max Marshall | Harper | 2023
Among the Bros By Max Marshall | Credit: Harper
So that’s what a frat’s like! In his 2023 true crime expose, Max Marshall details a 2016 drug bust at the College of Charleston to reveal how fraternities function within drug-dealing economies.
The story centers around two brothers of the Kappa Alpha fraternity, Mikey Schmidt and Robert Liljeberg. Both boys rushed Kappa Alpha but went on divergent paths. Rob looked like the all-American boy: A student and a fraternity president. Secretly, he loved to party and move weight. Our lovable fuckup protagonist, Mikey, looks like a suspect. A college dropout and a chauffeur at a famous club, he developed supply connections within the Atlanta trap scene. The two boys shared a passion for dealing drugs in felony weights.
Frats seem like the perfect place for drug dealing. They’re closed markets with high demand. Customers aren’t price savvy and took public oaths to keep secrets from each other. The Fratboy kingpins primarily sold three drugs: weed, cocaine, and benzodiazepines (Xanax, benzos). They ordered powered benzodiazepine on the dark web and pressed it into pills at rented AirBnBs, then traded pills for weed or coke with other dealers. They distributed these products through frat houses across the south with a pyramid structure of dealers.
In the background is the collectively accepted insanity of fraternities. Every year, people die gruesome deaths in a hazing ritual. The organizations exist to enforce segregation. Marshall points out that the founders of Kappa Alpha saw themselves as the youth wing of the Ku Klux Klan. He also remarks how almost every president and business executive is a fraternity alumnus. What seems like a problem of childish excess is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Fraternities are the incubators for America’s highest institutions.
The story only gets crazier, with high drama, deep betrayals, lengthy prison sentences, and a surprising amount of dead people. Even Waka Flocka Flame makes an appearance. Among The Bros was an entertaining read that implies horrifying conclusions.
Comics
Fraternity | Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Humanoids | 2022
Fraternity by Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Frats are secret societies. Fraternity, a 2022 comic from Humanoids, takes this to its heightened conclusion: are frats covens of wizards summoning Satan?
The comic follows two lifelong friends, Wyatt (Black) and Jake (White); they go to college together, and immediately, a fraternity starts using Satanic ritual magic to ensnare Jake. How does the magic work, exactly? Consider the ritual of the frat party.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Old mansions exist across American college campuses. In those mansions, young men invite over strangers, do secret hand signs, and exchange libations. Sure, this is “just like any party” except for the paddles, the exclusive sub-rooms, and the tendency to consume so much poison one blacks out and forgets everything.
Odd. Now, consider the initiation rites. The men enter a room and do secret rituals, promising always to work to progress the fraternity’s goals. These rituals are passed on from generation to generation. The practices often involve participants doing cruel, humiliating sexual acts.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
The magic must sort of work, right? Why else would a secret brotherhood commit to doing the same silly rituals every autumn? The Sorority Sister Whore of Babylon, laid over this 24-panel grid, suggests the deeply sexualized nature of the Greek system. Sex becomes a means of control and mental programming. Consecrate rituals to Greek deities with sex magic.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Is there any way for your average goddamn independent to resist these demonic forces? Well, it’s a Humanoids comic, so we must harness some demons, too. Wyatt ends up making friends with Antaura, a God of Headaches. He’s not as powerful as the weird, Cthuluian Frat gods, but hey, headaches suck.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Fraternity is a fun, violent, short read on Hoopla and Kindle Prime. I hope to see more from debut writer Jon Ellis, and I have enjoyed watching illustrator Hugo Petrus make comics with Marvel and DC.
Pile of the Week
A pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive
Here is a pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive by searching “Book Pile.” This week, the coveted Pile of the Week Award goes to NYPL’s digital archives! Look for your strange images here.
A review of Parasocial, a graphic novel that’s Stephen King’s Misery for the TikTok era
In Parasocial, a fan kidnaps her idol, and in the process, we consider the exploitative, transactional nature of fandom.
Writer Alex De Campi created some great exploitation comics in her Dark Horse series, GRINDHOUSE. And she previously collaborated with Erica Henderson on their Blaxploitation-homage, DRACULA MOTHERF**KER! I loved that book, too, with its moody pastel pallet.
A panel from Dracula Motherfu**er! by Alex De Campi and Erica Henderson — Credit: Image Comics
The pair developed a working rhythm because Parasocial is a standout work for both creators.
Now, I can tell you with words why this comic book has deep themes and thought-provoking content.But this is comics! Parasocial has impressive illustrations. The story is told visually, combining words and images in ways only comics can.
Consider this four-page car crash:
Two Pages from Parasocial — Credit: Image ComicsTwo More Pages from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Incredible! The layout utilizes dynamic fonts and onomatopoeia, so sounds jump off the page, and you can hear that 18-wheeler’s horn. The headlights on the truck and car illuminate the scene in a halogen glow. As our driver loses consciousness, the panels snap away from the grid, and moments start overlapping, moments and slow, drowsy repetitions. This action is much more visceral than contemporary superhero junk.
Henderson’s style reinvents itself on every page. At one point, I checked to see if there were multiple artist credits. So many styles are represented, but when the characters embrace, and it’s rendered like a 90s Shojo manga, I knew this must be one of the year’s best comics.
Three Panels from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Unlike its celebrity protagonist, Parasocial is not all just surface-level good looks. The work wonders a provocative question: why might a fan deserve revenge on her idol? The introduction uses a montage to show all the people at the fan convention and the scope of the event. For a moment, the focus is on one crying person offering a deeply revealing confession.
One Panel from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
Fandom is a pay-to-play. You belong to the community as long as you can afford to belong to the community. You can’t be a fan if you can’t afford the new thing. Fan conventions and costumes, merch, signings, and photographs cost money. This background character is getting into five figures of credit card debt so she can see her friends and pretend to be a cat.
You belong to the community as long as you can afford to belong to the community.
Something disconcerting is going on here. When our celebrity protagonist, Luke Indiana, is tied to a chair in his #1 fan’s kitchen, he asks why he should remember her. She points to her bulletin board.
Two Panels from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
I count five pictures of Luke and Lizzie together, so they met five times. He even hugged her. Each time, she probably paid $100 to get those photographs. That’s $500 for five minutes of his time.
And he still doesn’t even know she exists. That’s cold. Despite this, the fans persist.
They dream of getting with their celebrity crush. Parasocial bluntly points out that the only way that is actually going to happen is your crush is kidnapped and hogtied.
Is it any surprise Lizzy’s filled with rage? Celebrities treat their fans like servants yet rely on them for financial support. Like all good exploitation stories, Parasocial blurs exactly who’s exploiting who.
A Page from Parasocial — Credit: Image Comics
The work is short, yet every panel counts. I loved this book and immediately reread it.
MaybeI should kidnap the creators and tell them how much I loved their new graphic novel?!?!
It’s out now, so get it from your comic shop or an online retailer.
Thank you, NetGalley and Image Comics, for providing an advanced review copy in exchange for an honest review.
Parasocial by Alex De Campi (writer) and Erica Henderson (artist) Image Comics, 2023
Scorsese’s film is another brutally honest look at how white supremacy won the American West. Not cowboys, but cowards. Powerful psychopaths who cheat, lie, and steal.
David Grann’s 2017 book of the same title is a comprehensive look at the Osage massacre. It also takes a more critical perspective on the FBI and the federal government.
This piece considers the differences between the book and the movie and the FBI’s role in hiding the accurate, staggering death count.
Spoilers ahead! Read this after you see the movie!
The Guardian System
The movie uses a silent film framing device to explain the Osage backstory. Forcibly moved off their land two times, the Osage were given a reservation in Oklahoma by the federal government. Nobody knew it was rich in oil deposits.
A map of the Osage reservation marked for its oil deposits — Credit: National Archive
Grann cites the testimony of an Osage chief, Bacon Rind,
“[the whites had] bunched us down here in the backwoods, the roughest part of the United States, thinking ‘we will drive these Indians down to where there is a big pile of rocks and put them there in that corner.’” Now that the pile of rocks had turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, “everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money.” (88).
Overnight, the tribe was wealthy. Grann describes a scene where oil drillers, like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood (2007), come to bid on the rights, fighting each other to pay millions of dollars to drill Osage oil.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview buying oil rights in There Will Be Blood — Credit: Paramount
Reservations are subject to national authority, so the federal government established the headright system. Oil companies paid dividends as a “headright” to Osage members who could prove blood heritage. To access the money, they required a guardian. So, while the money lawfully belonged to the Osage, the guardian system required Osage to get their checks cashed by a white man, someone directly inserted into their finances. Grann explains, “A full-blooded American Indian was invariably appointed a guardian, whereas a mixed-blood person rarely was.” (83)
This racist system created the financial stakes for murder — a bureaucratic seizing of indigenous property.
In the film, this legal system plays out clearest in the life of Henry Roan. A diagnosed “melancholic,” he needs Bill Hale to give him money to buy moonshine. Hale pretends to care for Roan’s safety, but really he’s waiting on a payout from Roan’s life insurance policy.
A scan of the document certifying William Hale as Henry Roan’s Guardian — Credit: National Archives
The oil industry and the federal government resented paying the Osage money for their oil rights. After fear-mongering news articles about Osage spending their money unwisely, Congress instituted even stricter guardianship laws. Osage with guardians could not withdraw more than a few thousand dollars a year, not even for exceptions like medical expenses (87), making a bad situation even worse.
Then, after the Hale conviction, what finally stopped the massacre was another federal law. Federal legislation created and “solved” the problem. In 1932, the Osage petitioned the federal government to change the qualifications for collecting a head right. Grann summarizes, “It barred anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting head rights from a member of the tribe.” (242).
While the FBI takes credit for solving the case, this legacy distracts from the federal government’s culpability for these crimes.
FBI’s Legacy
The FBI claims they intervened in Oklahoma after county, state, and private investigators and Congress didn’t stop the conspiracy. But Grann proves the FBI didn’t end the conspiracy either.
In the movie, the tribal chief chastises Congress for making the tribe pay money to fund the federal investigation. It’s quaint to imagine an FBI so new they needed funding, but this is the FBI’s “first” case.
The book presents an agency that doesn’t understand the ramifications of its actions. At first, Hoover sent ramshackle agents to interview suspicious, low-income white men and turn them into criminal informants. Multiple witnesses were killed because the investigation raised Bill Hale’s suspicions.
The FBI cultivated informants like Blackie Thompson and let him commit state-sanctioned crimes to build evidence. This FBI tactic is still popular today. When Thompson broke out of jail, he robbed a bank and killed a local police officer (240).
Hoover almost closed the case at the first sign of controversy. When a local lawyer, A.W. Comstock, was critical of the agency’s recklessness, Hoover started suspecting Comstock of the murders and encouraged investigators to pursue him as a lead (136).
Hoover ignored the apparent pattern of murder despite his agents putting it directly into their reports. This is convincing evidence that the FBI was helping to perpetuate a coverup. From an FBI agent’s report,
“An agent described, in a report, just one of the ways the killers did this: “In connection with the mysterious deaths of a large number of Indians, the perpetrators of the crime would get an Indian intoxicated, have a doctor examine him and pronounce him intoxicated, following which a morphine hypodermic would be injected into the Indian, and after the doctor’s departure the [killers] would inject an enormous amount of morphine under the armpit of the drunken Indian, which would result in his death. The doctor’s certificate would subsequently read ‘death from alcoholic poison.’” (307)
Jesse Plemons as Tom White in Killers of the Flower Moon — Credit: Apple
In the film, when Tom White arrives it relieves the tension. But was the FBI heroic?
They only stopped three murderers out of a vast conspiracy of murderers. They had proof and witnesses of other criminal activity, begging the question, why did they stop investigating?
As Grann proves, after the Hale conviction, Hoover promoted the case and made it into the FBI’s origin story. He realized “that the new modes of public relations could expand his bureaucratic power and instill a cult of personality…“ (240).
The FBI’s origin story deliberately did not include Tom White. Hoover never publically thanked White for his contribution, although the Osage tribe did (241). Hoover steered White to offer selective information he could share with the press, “the representatives of the press would have an interest in would be the human interest aspect, so I would like to have you emphasize this angle.” (240). Through his brilliant use of implication, he’s asking White to downplay the conspiracy of lawlessness for oil extraction!
When White asked for files to write a memoir on the case in 1958, Hoover declined. Nor was White allowed to consult on a Hollywood film about the Osage, The FBI Story (1959) with Jimmy Stewart (253).
Grann cites how Hoover would send the story to “sympathetic reporters.” Here’s a headline from a William Randall Hearst syndicate paper.
“NEVER TOLD BEFORE! — How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang” (241)
That headline is similar to the POV of the Scorsese movie.
In the film, the Osage are primarily victims. The FBI convinces white guys to flip, saving the Osage from the deranged murderers.
In reality, J. Edgar Hoover used the Osage just like the Hale family. The FBI built its investigation on years of intel gathered by the Osage and their hired investigators. Hoover came in at the end and took all of the credit. Hoover’s FBI also neglected to investigate others clearly implicated in this conspiracy — the coroner, the doctor, the sheriff, etc. Not so coincidentally, those not investigated were often wealthy and tied to oil companies. By hijacking this narrative, Hoover used the Osage murders to build the agency’s profile and to begin amassing a pool of federal dark money that let him do whatever he wanted.
The Deeper Conspiracy
The book’s final chapters examine new truths Grann discovered in the case, “a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy.” (258).
Grann attempts to count how many people were killed, consulting federal and tribal archives of oral history, and finds manuscripts of unpublished interviews in Osage collections, newspaper obituaries, census records, and historian researchers. He estimates hundreds of Osage were murdered.
The Osage call these years the “Reign of Terror” (264). Grann describes walking through the Osage graveyard, notices a pronounced increase in headstones from the period. According to the cited Authentic Osage Indian Roll Book, 605 Osage died over sixteen years, from 1907 to 1923 — more than 1.5 times the national rate. (307).
While Bill Hale and his nephews were heinous criminals they were not unique. Collectively, the community murdered hundreds of Osage for their head rights. Hale and his nephews conspired together for the oil money, as did the town. On the book’s last page, Grann concludes, “Indeed, virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system.” (316).
I thought Scorsese’s film did a fantastic job of literalizing this. The Klan marches in the town parade, and the Grand Wizard is a city official. Every town official comes together to coach Ernest on lying under oath.
And Scorsese even includes a grander conspiracy. The book mentions Bill Hale: “…often wore a diamond-studded pin from the Masonic lodge…” (30). In the film, they personified this as Hale, a 32nd-degree mason, paddling his nephew.
Grann finds almost no information about the tribal advocate who was assassinated while traveling to Washington. Scorsese dramatizes this by showing the man receiving a note right before his assassination, which raises a fascinating question. How did those Okies in Fairfax hire a hitman in Washington, D.C.?
So …Did You Hate the Movie?
NO! I loved it! I’m not trying to cancel the movie, say it was racist, evil, or I didn’t like it. That would be a dull argument. Who cares if I liked it or not?
A movie costing 200 million dollars cannot be critical of the FBI. Interesting!
Racism is a necessary part of the Osage story. The way Bill Hale and Ernest Burkhart could compartmentalize their lives to both love Osage and plot their extermination is only possible because of white supremacy. They thought they deserved the money, a deeply internalized manifest destiny.
Yet, federal legislation, FBI negligence, and a deep conspiracy of rich oil drillers show that racism wasn’t only in Oklahoma but throughout all of America. The federal government is racist, as is the state government, especially in the context of drilling for oil. Like everything in the 20th century, oil fueled America’s genocidal quest.
Works Cited
The Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann, 2017, Vintage
The United States Government National Archive 1, 2
Reviewing Nishioka Kyodai’s Kafka: A Manga Adaptation
I’m a Kafkahead, or a monstrous vermin, as we Kafkaheads call each other.
Pushkin Press released a collection of eleven Kafka stories adapted to manga by the artist Nishioka Kyodai.
This book marks Nishioka Kyodai’s first English translation, and I hope more English translations come out someday. Kyodai is a pseudonym for a brother (writer) and sister (illustrator) who have been publishing surreal manga since 1989 about things like wonder laboratories, sadness, and hell.
And who is Kafka?
Who is K.?
Who am I?
These are all big questions befitting big text.
Kafka is arguably the most influential European author of the 20th century. He’s a serious author, often considered depressing, but the real heads know his work is funny. Kafka is paranoid, sad, strange, weird, and unforgettable.
Kyodai’s illustration style is a perfect match: unnerving faces, thin lines, and abstractions on top of unconventional panel layouts with densely inked background patterns. Many of their pages remind me of paintings, quilts, and mandellas.
The illustrators hold Kafka in high regard. The collection includes an essay where the author explains resisting the idea of adapting “The Metamorphosis” because Kafka objected to visualizing Samsa’s transformation.
We often think of the monstrous vermin as a cockroach because of visual adaptations. It’s not necessarily a cockroach. Instead, Kyodai uses isometric room drawings to portray Gregor as a looming absence in the Samsa family.
A panel from “The Metamorphosis” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“A Vulture” is the source of the collection’s cover image. The description of the man becoming a puddle (see above) of darkness when observed by the vulture is strangely relatable. The vulture’s facial expression is rendered so perfectly.
A panel from “The Vulture” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“The Country Doctor” appears, and so must the young boy’s wound. The doctor’s happenstance is bizarre when illustrated as stick figures in a bed.
A panel from “The Country Doctor” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
What a wound!
I thought the collection’s boldest choice came in “The Concerns of a Patriarch,” also translated as “The Cares of a Family Man.” Check out Wikipedia. That Adorandak can mean anything! The illustrators choose to visualize the Adorandak as a Star of David.
A panel from “Concerns of a Patriarch” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“The Hunger Artist” in 2023 hits differently. As we all deal with our own planned obsolescence: getting replaced by AIs, overseas contractors, or austerity. Life can feel like wasting away in a cage of our own making.
A panel from “The Hunger Artist” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
“In The Penial Colony” reads prescient in 2023, a story about a horrible colonial island where the military officials subject themselves to an arcane torture device.
A panel from “Concerns of a Patriarch” in Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
I immensely enjoyed this collection, and if you like surreal Japanese comics like Junji Ito or contemporary art comics like Michael DeForge, this is up your alley. Heck, if you’ve never experienced the joys of Kafka, this is a fine place to start.
Kafka: A Manga Adapatation By Nishioka Kyōdai Pushkin Press, 2023
Kafka by Nishioka Kyodai — Credit: Pushkin Press
Thank you Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for a review.
