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Not just another trashy mystery
Book Review
By Derryll White
MacDonald, John D. (1973). The Scarlet Ruse.
“Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin.” – John D. MacDonald
John D. MacDonald writes mysteries like a social historian comments on high living in Los Angeles or Atlanta. Throughout his novels, with amazing regularity, the reader finds phrases, sentences or pages that comment on wealth, politics, love, environmental decay in ways that cause one to pause and think. As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said, “To diggers a thousand years from now … the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”
MacDonald saw the extreme degradation of our planet, our home, 50 years ago. He wrote about it, here and elsewhere, and nobody seems to have listened. He has an amazing ability to understand, and articulate, how we scheme, how we use and abuse each other, and how we also love and respect individuals. He has written over 50 books and I have yet to read one where I do not feel by the end of the story a need to be a better person.
The size of the excerpts gives some indication of the weight and importance of what the writer says throughout this book. Not just another trashy mystery!
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Excerpts from the novel:
ECONOMICS – “Ten years ago I invented an economic indicator I called the Hedge Index. Activity in works of art, antiques, gold, silver, coins, rare stamps. I felt it could be done on a sampling basis. Fedderman was one of the people who agreed to help. He was absolutely candid. No tricks, no lies, no exaggerations. When I had the bugs ironed out, I ran the index for two years and then published a partial report. There was a direct correlation between rate of inflation and hedge activity, with the hedge activity being a lead indicator of major rises in the announced cost of living by about 90 days. It’s been picked up by the big boys and refined. I wanted the kind of built-in warning they used to have in France. When the peasants started buying gold and hiding it, you knew the storms were coming.”
TEENAGERS – Very difficult for young people these days. Or any days. In what golden epoch was being a teenager a constant joy? There has always been a generation gap. It is called twenty years. Too much talk about unresponsive government, napalm, irrelevant education. Maybe the real point is that young lives have no accepted focal point. The tribe gives them no responsibilities, no earned privileges, no ceremonial place.
PIMPS – My best guess was that the girl was on the edge of leaving for good. And in some city as yet unknown, she would be studied with great care by experts. And if they were to decide it was merchandise worth salvage, she might indeed be beaten into total submission, cleaned up, dressed up, trained and marketed for a few years. The merchandise experts cruise the bus terminals, and they watch the downtown streets for young girls carrying suitcases or packs. Impersonal appraisal. No uggos, no fatties, no gimps, no rich kids, nothing too too young.
ENTITLEMENT – “…. So divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down in to basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations in the world?
“You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge – not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. “
1973 – Yes indeed. I would have truly enjoyed showing her the islands. How the big aluminum plant and the oil refinery of Amerada Hess blackens the stinking skies over St.Croix. Maybe she’d like the San Juan Guayama and Ybucoa areas of Puerto Rico where Commonwealth Oil, Union Carbide, Phillips Petroleum, and Sun Oil have created another new industrial wasteland where the toxic wastes have killed the vegetation, where hot oil effluents are discharged into the sea and flow westward along the shoreline in a black roiling stench, killing all sea life.
She might be impressed were I to cruise into Tallabea Bay and describe to her the one and a half billion tons of untreated wastes from the Commonwealth-Union Carbide which put a two-foot coat on the bottom of the bay. Or we could take a tour up into the mountains to watch how the trade winds carry the bourbon-colored stink of petro-chemical stacks through the passes all the way to Mayaguez, ninety miles from the refineries. While in the hills, we could check and see if Kennecott Copper and American Metal Climax have started to strip-mine the seven square green tropic miles of highland which they covet.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
