Wild Thing: A Novel Read online

  The mention of the impact of climate change on shellfish was inspired by “Dissolute Behavior Up North” from Biogeosciences, 6, 1877 (2009) as excerpted in the Editors’ Choice section of Science magazine, 9 Oct 2009—an article that among other things proves there’s no report so grim that someone won’t put a crappy pun in its title.

  For more on the Koch brothers and the ways they’ve fucked you and will continue to fuck you, see “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war on Obama,” by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 30 Aug 2010. The Kochs’ 2011 meeting was described as a “four-day, invitation-only conclave of about 200 wealthy conservative political activists” by the Associated Press, 30 Jan 2011.

  Two documents that are particularly useful for understanding the damage done by right-wing activist Supreme Court justices in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission are the original dissent by Stevens (joined by Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) and Laurence H. Tribe’s essay on the decision that appeared on the website of Harvard Law School on 25 Jan 2010. The disapproving reaction to the decision by 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain is also interesting.*

  The quote from Orrin Hatch is from the (failed) confirmation hearing of Robert Bork, whom Hatch was trying to portray as apolitical, and who subsequently wrote the apolitical-enough-sounding Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.* Note that three (Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) of the five Supreme Court justices who gave George W. Bush the presidency are still serving. On Citizens United, they were joined by Roberts and Alito.

  According to Armand Hammer’s former personal assistant, Hammer, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum,* used to brag that he had Al Gore’s father, Senator Al Gore Sr., “in my back-pocket,” and would then “touch his wallet and chuckle.”* For more on Al Gore’s financial ties to the oil industry, see “The 2000 Campaign: The Vice President; Gore Family’s Ties to Oil Company Magnate Reap Big Rewards, and a Few Problems,” by Douglas Frantz, the New York Times, 19 March 2000. You may also want to check out The Dark Side of Power: The Real Armand Hammer, by Carl Blumay and Henry Edwards, 1992, although it’s kind of a mess.

  Even leaving aside environmental issues, the amount of corruption in the George W. Bush administration, and the extent to which it went unnoticed, is staggering. For example, when Vice President Dick Cheney shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face on 11 Feb 2006, the story was widely reported, but usually in ways that repeated the White House’s line that Katherine Armstrong, who owned the ranch where the incident occurred, was an old friend of Cheney’s and (in Cheney’s words) “immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department.” Both may have been true (although Armstrong had resigned from the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, to which she had been appointed by G. W. Bush, years earlier), but Armstrong was also a registered lobbyist, including for Parsons—a company with construction and engineering contracts in Iraq—and the defense contractor Lockheed Martin.*

  Regarding Katherine Harris, see, e.g., “Harris backed bill aiding Riscorp,” by Diane Rado, the St. Petersburg Times, 25 Aug 1998; “Harris now regrets her tale of terror plot: Leaders in Carmel, Ind., contest U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris’s comments about an alleged plan to blow up the city’s power grid,” Associated Press, published in the St. Petersburg Times, 5 Aug 2004; “Harris Shuns Spending Requests,” by Keith Epstein, the Tampa Tribune, 3 Mar 2006; etc. Regarding the ties to industry of James L. Connaughton and other policy-making members of the Bush administration, including the companies at which they ended up, see “Bush Environment Chief Joins Power Company,” by Ned Potter, abcnews.com, 5 Mar 2009. For more on Phil Cooney specifically, see, e.g., “Ex-oil lobbyist watered down US climate research,” The Guardian (U.K.), 9 Jun 2005; “Ex-Bush Aide Who Edited Climate Change Reports to Join ExxonMobil,” by Andrew C. Revkin, the New York Times, 15 Jun 2005 (nice ambiguity in the title); etc.

  The facts of the Iran-Contra scandal during the administration of Ronald Reagan are not in dispute. On 13 Nov 1986, Reagan held a press conference denying the exchange had occurred. On 4 Mar 1987, he held another one admitting that it had but denying he had known about it. On 19 Jan 1994, the independent counsel appointed at the request of the U.S. attorney general released its report finding that “the sales of arms to Iran contravened United States Government policy and may have violated the Arms Export Control Act,” “the Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush,” et al., “large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials,” and “Reagan Administration officials deliberately deceived the Congress and public about the level and extent of official knowledge of and support for these operations.” Source: “Excerpts from the Iran-Contra Report: A Secret Foreign Policy,” the New York Times, 19 Jan 1994. For a Christmas Day 1988 article on George H. W. Bush’s pardoning of Iran-Contra suspects, see “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial: Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up,’ ” by David Johnston, the New York Times, 25 Dec 1988.

  Jimmy Carter’s financial ties to the Saudis and other Gulf states, which have come to include tens of millions of dollars (at least*) in donations to the Carter Center, are known to go back to 1978, when the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI; primarily funded by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi), in secret partnership with the son of an adviser to King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, illegally bought controlling interest in the National Bank of Georgia. At the time, Carter owed NBG $830,000, but the bank quickly modified his loans, including by lowering the principal.* Prior to being shut down in 1991 for fraud and money laundering, BCCI donated $8 million to the Carter Center. Afterward, its founder donated an additional $1.5 million.* What Carter’s sponsors, who include OPEC and the Saudi Binladin Group, have gotten for their money is not fully clear, but may be only indirectly connected to oil policy. For example, in March 2001, Carter accepted the $500,000 United Arab Emirates’ Zayed [i.e., the same Zayed who funded BCCI] International Prize for the Environment, and at the ceremony called UAE member state Dubai an “almost completely open and free society.”* In September 2006, Carter legitimized the word “apartheid” in reference to Israel in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and two months later he called Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “even worse… than a place like Rwanda.”* By far the most serious allegation against Carter, however, is that in July 2000, while serving as an adviser to Yassir Arafat, he may have advised Arafat to turn down the peace deal that included essentially everything Arafat had been asking for during the previous seven years. Carter has been asked what advice he gave Arafat but has never answered. In any case, it was eight months later that Carter accepted the Zayed prize.*

  The idea that the November 1962 report to the Kennedy administration had a significant impact on environmental policy is from Overshoot, by William R. Catton Jr., 1980 (see notes for catastrophic paleontology, above). The report itself, “Natural Resources: A Summary Report to the President of the United States by The Committee on National Resources of the National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council,” NAS-NRC Publication 1000, is available on Google Books* and is worth reading. For one thing, it’s a government document that’s only fifty-three pages long.

  The concept of “constructing controversy,” and its invention by Hill & Knowlton, is discussed by Alan M. Brandt in The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America, 2007, which is one of the best books I’ve read in the past ten years.

  The statistic about the population growth of New York City is from Melville: His Life and Work, by Andrew Delbanco, 2005. 1819–91 is Melville’s life span. Don’t pretend you knew that.

  The history of Easter Island appears as a warning in both Ronald Wright’s A Brief History of Progress (see above) and in various works by Jared D
iamond, the earliest that I know of being “Easter Island’s End,” in Discover Magazine, Aug 1995, and the most complete being the bestselling Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005.

  Regarding the decline in whale populations in the second half of the twentieth century, climate change may be a factor. For example, from the early to late 1990s, during which time approximately a thousand minke whales a year are believed to have been killed by whalers, the number of minkes in the Southern Ocean (which circles Antarctica) is believed to have declined from 760,000 to 380,000. Blue whales, which have been protected since 1966, may currently exist in numbers as low as 5,000, down from their pre-whaling height of 275,000. (Source: “Whale population devastated by warming: Retreating of Antarctic sea ice reduces numbers of minkes by 50 per cent and fuels demands to keep whaling ban,” by Geoffrey Lean and Robert Mendick, The Independent [London], 29 July 2001.)

  The quotation from Genesis is from the New International Version.

  Note that while people do pass an average of 50 percent of their genes to their children, only about 1 percent of their genes are unique in the first place, i.e., different from those of their co-breeder. Only about 4 percent are different from those of a chimp. (See, e.g., “Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans,” by Steve Connor, The Independent [U.K.], 23 Nov 2006.)

  For information that didn’t quite make it in but that I’ll use in the future, thanks to James Dorsey.

  The plot of this book was partly inspired, of course, by the hoax perpetrated at Loch Ness in 1933 to rescue the city of Inverness as a tourist destination after the rail line to it was closed during the Great Depression. Two aspects were particularly important to me: the role played by London gynaecologist [Brit sic] Robert Wilson, who agreed to say he had taken what is still the most famous photograph of the monster,* and the brazenness (and ease) with which the conspirators invented a “history” of sightings of the monster going back to the Middle Ages. By far the best book I know of about the Loch Ness Monster and its myth is The Loch Ness Mystery: Solved, by Ronald Binns, 1985. All false beliefs should have as thorough and sympathetic an investigator as Binns. Of the many books that present themselves as believing in the monster’s existence, the most famous are by Tim Dins-dale, who claimed to have personally seen the monster on several occasions.*

  Another case important to the book was the 1855 hoax in Silver Lake, Wyoming County, New York.* The fact that the hoax itself, despite being celebrated in Silver Lake every July, was almost certainly a hoax—that the Walker House Hotel did burn down, but almost certainly no mechanical monster was found in the wreckage*—just makes it better.

  Finally, an ongoing inspiration has been the conversation I’ve been having with Joseph Rhinewine, PhD, for the past few decades about whether it’s better to be too gullible or too cynical. While I have no reason to think the Smurfs and Anatahan are actually related, neither do I have proof that they aren’t.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Professional: Terry Adams, Reagan Arthur, Rebecca Bazell, Marlena Bittner, Sabrina Callahan, everyone who’s taken the time to read my books, Heather Fain, Fischer Verlage, Hachette NY, Hachette sales staff, Ellen Haller, Michael Heuer, Markus Hoffmann, Barbara Marshall, MB Agencia Literaria, Michele McGonigle, Amanda McPherson, Sarah Murphy, numerous independent bookstore workers, Robert Petkoff, Michael Pietsch, Joe Regal, Michael Strong, Txell, Betsy Uhrig, Tracy Williams, Craig Young, David Young, Jesse Zanger, Sam Zanger.

  People who lent spaces in which to live or work: Ben Dattner, Ilene and Michael Gordon, Cassis and Claude Henry, Monica Martin, Joe Regal, Alison Rice.

  Research-related: Robert Bazell, Cassis Henry, Seth Jones of Powell’s Books, John Manning, Barbara A. Matthews.

  Personal: Christa Assad, Bazell family, Michael Bennett, Marlena Bittner, Joseph Caston, Ben Dattner, Rae Dunn, Gordon family, Cassis Henry, Dan Hurwitz, Tamar Hurwitz, Helena Krobath, Elizabeth O’Neill, Joe Rhinewine, Lawrence Stern, David Sugar, Kiko and Maria Torrent, Txell, Jason White, Johnny Wow, Hugh Zanger, Jesse and Corrie Zanger, Sam and Kara Zanger, anyone else who turns up named Zanger.

  Canine: Lottie, Bela, and Greta.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOSH BAZELL has a BA in writing from Brown and an MD from Columbia. His first novel, Beat the Reaper, was an international bestseller and one of Time’s ten best novels of 2009. He lives in New York.

  Also by Josh Bazell

  Beat the Reaper

  * Like the rest of the world, the mob only became interested in cruise ships after the 1977 premiere of The Love Boat—bad timing, since the FBI was then in the middle of an investigation of the International Longshoremen’s Association and already had wiretaps and informants in place. By the time the mob got untangled enough to make a move, the cruise industry had outgrown its reach.

  * Cruise ships have, on average, crew members from sixty different countries. The cruise lines like to sell this as a happy byproduct of Let’s watch World Cup! globalism, but in reality the practice dates to a 1981 sit-in by the predominantly Honduran and Jamaican crews of two Carnival Lines ships that were docked in Miami. Standard practice now is to not allow any single nationality to make up more than 5 percent of a crew, and to have as many officers as possible be of the same nationality—ideally one that speaks a language that most crew members don’t understand, like Greek.

  * Also known as the Jewel of the See Ya, Suckaz.

  * The underlying problem is that cruise lines aren’t generally subject to labor laws, human rights laws, environmental laws, or healthcare regulations (or taxes, for that matter), because most of their ships—even the ones that operate solely out of American ports—are registered out of Panama, Bolivia, or Liberia. The last time anyone tried to do anything about this was during the Clinton administration, at which time the situation was judged too entangled with world trade issues to fuck with.

  * I don’t actually say “Rec Bill.” “Rec Bill” is just a nickname I’ve started using because I keep hearing him referred to as a “reclusive billionaire.”

  * Violet Hurst obviously doesn’t say “Rec Bill” either.

  * Etc.

  * Rec Bill’s wealth, as I understand it, comes from a piece of “underware” he bought for ten thousand dollars from a classmate in high school and then licensed to every computer operating system ever made. It allows computers to calculate time in binary as opposed to in the 60/60/24/7 system.

  * How I know this: Video sent to Rec Bill, subsequent investigation.

  * Hence “White Lake,” maybe.

  * Although I did see a UFO once. I was rotating through the Yucca Indian reservation during med school and one night I was lying on my back on top of a mesa you weren’t supposed to go on because it was sacred, and I saw something classically saucer shaped race upward across the stars. I rolled over to follow it, and as the angle changed I realized it was just a low-flying bird with white wings and a white bar across its chest. I’m still disappointed.

  * This turns out to be a simplification. General Christopher C. Andrews did go there in 1902, and did argue the case for preserving the Boundary Waters to Teddy Roosevelt. However, the closing off of large portions to motorboats and airplanes didn’t happen until decades later. It was still being debated in 1949, for example, when people opposed to the ban (because they owned or worked for deeply placed hunting lodges that could only be reached by boat or plane) bombed the house of an outspoken guide and environmentalist who thought—correctly, it turned out—that a ban would increase rather than diminish the area’s appeal as a tourist destination.

  * 100,000.

  * I’ve also seen the back of his neck, which has the remnants of acanthosis nigricans, a skin condition that for unclear reasons correlates with abdominal cancers. Clearly I should have just told him this, both for ethical reasons and because it might have saved a lot of trouble later, but apparently I’m too much of an angry dick. And besides, I’d already given away the thing with the painti
ng.

  * The Singularity Movement is a bunch of wealthy computer people who believe that when computers become sentient it will be possible to interest them in extending the life spans of wealthy computer people. It’s something you get involved in when you don’t have any problems left that are real. Or at least that are fixable.

  * The issue is that David Locano, a former lawyer for the Sicilians and Russians, has a deal with both mobs where they keep trying to find me and kill me, and he keeps refusing to testify against them—even though that means he rots in supermax at the Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Colorado. I put him there, but that’s not why he wants me dead so badly. He thinks I killed his fuckhead son. Which I did, three years ago, and would happily do again.