“Brain candy this tasty is rare”

A review of EUDEMONIA, by Gary Kamiya, co-founder of Salon


Sophia Tonemai, the heroine of A.P. Schmitt’s remarkable debut novel
“Eudemonia,” is one of the smartest, strangest -- and in some ways
scariest --protagonists I’ve come across in a long while. A young
Brazilian journalist based in the United States of Hysterica, Sophia
is at once viciously intelligent, deeply compassionate, and alarmingly
cold-blooded. As a reporter, Sophia has witnessed the ugly crimes
committed by the powerful, and she is tortured by the fact that
corporate crooks and warmongering politicians always get away with
their misdeeds. So she becomes obsessed with the idea of punishing
them. Sophia wrestles with an ultimate moral question: Is an
individual justified in meting out punishment to evildoers? She’s the
highest-IQ vigilante in history – Hamlet with a silencer.
This premise might sound unpromisingly abstract, but Schmitt’s
stiletto-sharp dialogue, dazzling range of high and low cultural
references and laugh-out-loud satiric wordplay (“Faecesbook,” “Duck
Chainy”, “Goldman Sucks”) make her protagonist’s quest for moral truth
feel as much like a killer episode of “The Daily Show” as a Socratic
dialogue. (Example: “When it comes to death and killing I always felt
very natural about it, even as a child,” Sophia writes. “For a long
time I thought ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was a statement unfairly singling
out this guy, Thou, and I just wanted to know who did Thou kill to
deserve the mention. I can’t lie about it: I looked up to Thou.”) And
Schmitt captures Sophia's softer side, too, in her relationships with
two memorably-drawn friends.
There is a lot of great stuff in Eudemonia, and it is completely
original. Schmitt’s command of English is alarmingly precise, and she
is an amazingly talented writer and thinker. I have almost never come
across a writer both as smart and as funny as she is and have never
read anything quite like it. Eudemonia is an amazingly original piece
of work.
The way the moral conundrum is ultimately resolved, or not resolved,
may disturb some readers. But Sophia is such an original character,
and this sui generis philosophical/political thriller is so
thought-provoking, that you don’t mind. Brain candy this tasty is rare.

-- Gary Kamiya, co-founder of Salon.com

This is an excerpt from Eudemonia. Any numerically accurate coincidence is just you making inferences.

While she is getting dressed for her first yoga experience, Sophia hears her phone ring. It’s her friend at the FBI.

“You may want to tone down the sweatshop entry on your blog,” he says, even before hello.

“You read it?” she asks with surprise. Sophia waits two seconds for the criticism, or the praise, but he hasn’t called for either.

“Your timing is off, buddy. Or very on, I don’t know. This is exclusive to your ears, you only, we have a gag order on this,” he pauses, waiting for her to promise silence. She does.

“The CEO you were bashing has been kidnapped.”

“Which one?”

“Nife’s.”

“Pill Knife?”

“Yes.”

“Kidnapped?”

“That’s what we’re hoping for at this point. There has been no sign of the man for weeks now. The family got no message, no ransom request, nothing.”

“How long has it been?”

“We don’t know for sure. His disappearance was reported several weeks after his last communication. His personal assistant received a postcard from the Seychelles with a stamp from Victoria’s post-office, signed by her boss, in his own handwriting. But we found no record of him being there, not a single hotel registration, no flight logs with him arriving or leaving the island.”

“What’s on the postcard?”

“Just a short note telling his assistant he had changed his plans, and asking her to cancel appointments for the next two weeks. We now think the card was sent to waste our time, to delay the search. But it’s written by him, that we know for sure.”

“That’s all? Just cancelling his appointments?”

“I never saw the card, but that’s about it. There was also some private joke between them, something like ‘just did it’ and beside it a curvy tick made into a smiley.”

“Right. Just do’em is more like it. The son-of-a-bitch was probably eaten by his sweatshop workers.”

“I suggest you go easy on him, for your own sake” he says gravely. “I think the man’s soon to become a hero. Or a martyr.”

Imagine you work 12 hours a day standing up, sewing shoes, inhaling toxic fumes, part of your brain focused on avoiding an accident that may chop your finger off, the other part castigating you for needing to go to the toilet only four hours into your day, eight more to go and one of your two chances to pee already used up. Your urinary infection is kicking in, your sight is damaged, your lungs have a deadline, you have no health insurance. But what is really killing you is that you only see your children once a year, if the factory allows you the annual leave. You’ve been saving on the daily rice, but the margin is so meagre it still does not pay for your kid’s school books – he too will have to start working, a childhood many years shorter, another member of a whole generation of workers who will beget another generation born for that same end. After 12 hours of mind-numbing repetition your day is over, a two-dollar nightmare from which you will only sleep when you finally reach death. You go to a crammed dormitory to indulge in a bad imitation of rest, hoping your mind will grant you in that abbreviated peace some of what you’ve been deprived of in this long life. But there’s little to help in your self-delusion. Even music, that most immaterial of goods, has become the stuff of dreams – destitute of almost everything, you have no extra money for your radio batteries. And you go to sleep with the certainty – no, with the hope, and the dread – that you will be doing that same thing the next day, and the day after, and every six or seven days of the week, and every week of the month, and every month of the year, and every year till your experience is finally accumulated into nothing – when you reach enough seniority to earn a better pay, the factory will replace you with another underage, cheap human.

And you will live a year, another year, many years like that, tormented and afraid, a life empty of comfort, bereft of happiness, void of even the simple, free pleasures that nature promises everyone at birth, a life where fear leaves no room for sunsets and full moons, an existence whose purpose you will fulfil without ever understanding what it is.

I’ll tell you what it is.

It’s to keep Knife’s 5-billion dollar net worth growing, to keep Tiger fucking, and to make sure the price of your labour is as low as the one-billion dollar in marketing is high, so it can fool those in the Realm of the Unthinking into believing they own a 100-dollar share of that fortune around their feet.

But you’re lucky you cannot read English. It saves you from learning of the sick solution donated by Pill Knife: your life could be much better if you would only “manage your money well.”

That’s it, you unlucky nothing, you’re probably eating too much rice.

Yes, Sophia thinks, her tone is just about right.

Her numbers need updating, and she must add the other manufacturers. But she is not supposed to be dealing with this type of thing yet. She reluctantly glances at the numbers but there’s no point avoiding it, she knows them all by heart.

Nife’s annual marketing budget often surpasses 1.5 billion dollars. They call that budget item ‘demand creation.’ Clever.

The average salary of Nife shoe-makers is around 60 dollars a month, but no one knows for certain. Nife refuses to disclose the wages. In Vietnam, Nife factory workers get $40 a month; in Cambodia they get $30.

Nife’s belated Code of Conduct was hailed with fanfare. The gullible media was relieved to have something good to say, they want a chunk of that damn ad budget.

But the Code is not mandatory. It’s not even a clause in Nife’s contract with suppliers. It just recommends stuff. Like a limit of 60 hours of work per week – wink wink. It also recommends 14 as the minimum working age, but don’t worry, Nife won’t be checking.

And things are done in such a cunning way that workers must actually hope conditions and salaries do not get better, because if they do, Nife just moves out. It’s nothing personal, you see, it’s just that Nife needs to find a poorer place where the minimum salary is lower. Nife is actually shaping government policy. It ended up inspiring whole countries and dictatorships to keep their salaries as low as possible, or else, no Nife factory for you. Nife’s executive explained it clearly: any increase in costs will make the plant ‘price itself out of the market.’

Nife’s business strategy: scour the Earth for people willing to eat less, work more, people who truly have nothing, so the almost-nothing Nife offers is good enough.

no, i am not an egg, and i am not particularly stoned here

Hassan Nasrallah poses with Paula Schmitt

Dush and Paula - sue me, ho!

in the hope this will help sell my books...

Eudemonia

This is an excerpt from my novel Eudemonia, launched on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Eudemonia-ebook/dp/B006E5JI0S

Enjoy!

Eudemonia

A. P. Schmitt

1

“I grew up worried that one day I’d give birth to the son of God and no one would believe I was a virgin. I had a whole speech prepared for the moment the Chosen One started to germinate, and the only thing I now find weird is that I never thought I was the Chosen One himself, and only because at the time I didn’t think a woman could be more than the container of the elect. One time I had an aspiring zit smack in the middle of my forehead, and I know I should have been embarrassed and I tried to hide it and all, but while the other girls called that my uni-horn, I thought that was my third eye finally making itself known – my uber wisdom was becoming physical.

I’m like that. I assume things happen to me for a reason, and they have a cryptic, supernatural meaning. A zit is not a skin problem – it’s the corporeal manifestation of unbound insight. I see purpose related to my person in every little detail, the universe has a plan for me and I can feel it. Even if part of me thinks that’s stupid, the other part retorts no, you stupid. Later in life I was sure I was going to die at 33. That was my connection with the Divine, our magical integer, I thought that number was beautiful – if you put 3 and 3 together side by side, not like they are doing it doggy style but like they are french kissing, you get an 8, which if you lay to sleep becomes the infinite. Life was written in ciphers and I was anxious to crack my code. Some of it was probably hidden in my talents, but they had so many purposes I got confused. What to do with the striking traits I share with cyborgs, like my superhuman sense of smell? Bionic woman or sniffing bitch at airport security?

Confronted with the burning doubt of what the hell I am good for, I sat thinking on lesser conundrums like the chicken, the egg and the incessant quest for the origin of poultry. Meanwhile, I waited for the stars to reveal their plan for me. Yeah, I meant exactly that: stars with the ability to plan and with an eye on me.

That’s the thing about knowing and believing – the first requires reason, validation. The second doesn’t require shit. It just takes some unbalanced hormones, the wrong amount of dopamine and voilà, suspension of disbelief. People with extra dopamine become so credulous they take up gambling or religion. I myself have no dopamine to spare. My disbelief is widespread, deeply ingrained. I’m the unwanted child of the cynic and the nihilist when they were both drunk on half-empty glasses. I doubt almost everything with one nagging exception – my sainthood. When it comes to self-awareness, I am the first to know I’m nuts and the last to question my sanity. This duality could be a type of schizophrenia but I have it on good authority that if you call it first and say you’re crazy (I’m crazy), then you’re sane, because a crazy person never suspects herself to be crazy.

So one day I woke up and decided to do something for the world, something meaningful, a thing that could change people’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, I feel sorry for those afflicted with messiah syndrome and I’m often annoyed by their lack of efficiency. People are so bent on making the world a better place they hardly worry about their sidewalk. I mean, yes, ok, go ahead and try improve the world, halt global warming, stop war, free Tibet, save the fucking whales, but we’ll be happy enough if you just help the elderly cross the street, recycle your damn bottles, learn to fucking vote. But of course, not me – those were way too small for my mission. I did some of those things and was rewarded with instant gratification, but then I thought:

Am I not being selfish with the world?

How could I limit the scope of my interference when I had more means than the average Joe and could thus do more for the world than recycling my bottles? Even my physical beauty, always searching for a tangible purpose – how could I confine it to the emptiness of fashion just for the hope of saving a bunch of seal cubs? And how best to join these two powers together, attractiveness and intelligence, into something truly useful? These two unmerited gifts must come with a burden, I thought. With a point. So I pondered: what do I want to do? And then I re-pondered: what must I do? Because the problem when you get the calling is that you may not unscramble it well. I knew I was being called, I just couldn’t tell what I was being called for. It was nothing small, that much I knew. Having a baby? Riiight. Planting a tree? Nah. Writing a book? Too much trouble. I thought I should do something meaningful, far-reaching, and yet something that didn’t require much work. (That’s when my reason always kicks in, by the way, in applying the law of the least effort, the only law I really bow to.)

So I considered my multi-purpose task:

1) help the world be a better place;

2) inspire people;

3) perpetuate my teaching.

How can I do all of that at once, with one single strike? And it dawned on me, at dawn no less, that I should kill someone.

Yeah, I know, killing is not cute – it’s messy and it horrifies people, who then go to the movies to see people being killed. But I was never horrified. When it comes to death and killing I always felt very natural about it, even as a child. For a long time I thought Thou shall not kill was a statement unfairly singling out this guy, Thou, and I just wanted to know who did Thou kill to deserve the mention. I can’t lie about it: I looked up to Thou. Later when I saw the other commandments I had to ask my dad what drug was Thou taking – the guy was on a rampage. I was eventually very happy to know he didn’t exist, because the murderous Thou I admired would never bear false witness. Never.

I imagine most people think the power of killing is one that should not belong to men. But, please, let us not be so adamant about killing, will us? There is a taboo against murder that’s very boring, it makes me yawn. Like death, killing is just part of life, yet try telling anyone something that includes the phrase ‘when you die’ and see the reaction. It’s rather poignant that humans cannot accept the one true certainty we are born with, that all those eons of guaranteed ending haven’t managed to make the ending any more acceptable. And if death is taboo, killing is an even bigger one, because it’s death by design. But then, consider this: What human would have objected to my attending a parade of the Third Reich and putting a bullet into the fuehrer’s head? It’d be very hard to find someone who’d blame me if I had chosen to kill Hitler. Now, if that is the case – and I believe it is – then we have established that people are not so inflexible against killing – it’s just a matter of finding the right target.

So I figured killing would be my way of helping the world. Of taking a stand, making a few things right. I had this feeling I could be fairer than most judges I knew of. And what do judges do? Well, for one, they sentence the criminal to prevent him from repeating his crime. But, more important than that, the punishment serves as a warning to future criminals, something that will pre-emptively hamper similar crimes. ‘Hmm…’ I thought, ‘what type of crime do I want to hamper?’

But I didn’t need think too hard. There is one crime that is almost never discouraged here, on the contrary – it’s mostly praised, rewarded, and serves as an inspiration. The criminals usually make it to the cover of magazines, Man of the Year type of thing. People grow up wanting to be exactly like that. It’s practically taught in universities. What is the crime? Corruption.

Surely I don’t mean small-time corruption. Yeah, yeah, corruption is corruption in any form, with any amount, and you may even want to include in the definition things like jumping the line and bribing the maitre d’. But as I said before, I think big. The people injured by those misdemeanours are so few, and the harm is so small, that I say just go soc the jumper on the mouth and send him to the end of the line. What I’m talking about is not that type of corruption, that you can fix yourself. Let us optimise my powers here, please, I hate waste. (It’s like that managing-editor I had, who paid me a fortune to research and write, and one day he sees me asking the assistant to make photocopies. He then makes a Marxist face, the bonus-stuffed bastard, and says, ‘In this newsroom we all make our own photocopies, we’re equal’ (some damn weird definition of equality) to which I reply ‘Then you must be a stupid manager, and this must be the most expensive photocopy ever.’)

Yes, I was fired, and no, he is not on my death list. Digression.

When I say corruption I mean corruption of the worst form, corporate-political thievery, the one that is part of the rules and regulations, the sort of crime that makes dishonesty legal with the strike of a pen or the swift rental of a judge. I wanna get those guys who know they will never enter a courtroom through the right door because they are the very ones making the laws, squeezing, stretching, bending them forward and fucking them from behind.

So I made that decision, and was beginning to get ready for action. It had to be done in the right way, not only because killing was complicated but because I wanted to make sure it would become an inspiration, something to scare the bejeezus out of every white-collar criminal for years to come. I wanted others to follow in my footsteps. I wanted to create a precedent. I wanted future criminals to think twice before stealing money from senior citizens. So I had to do it in a way that was going to be easy, and could be easily imitated, something like finding one of those bastards at a restaurant, a Ken Lay type, catwalk up to him, purr a ‘Nice tie,’ or ‘Have you got a lighter,’ and thrust my butter knife right into his throat. Once the killing is done a manifesto is issued and fear will finally spread to where fear doesn’t reach. That’s what I want – I want those rascals to be afraid for once, to be terrorised. It’s the reason why looming punishment works so well – because it’s preventive. Only the guys who are never at risk are the ones who control us, who hold our money, our future, the guys who should in fact be terrorised, be kept on their toes. These are the men who have not one boss, they have millions – all of us – and yet they are never made accountable or compelled to perform. I want to slap one of those sons-of-bitches in the face and say ‘You broke my heart, Fredo,’ then break his neck in return and leave a note stapled to his forehead with a message to other evil-doers, ‘Truth is gonna get you, buddy, and it will smash your teeth, chop your pinky and break your kneecaps.’

Now, get this. I used to be against gun ownership. I thought only idiots bore weapons. But I was wrong. In fact, the basis for gun rights is so enlightened Jefferson would have an attack of cognitive dissonance if he came back today. The founding fathers believed that citizens should have the means to revolt against an unjust government. They believed the state should not be more powerful than its own people united. We must spread the word that guns are not only useful against burglars, they also protect us against the tyranny of corporatocracy and the government, its most obedient slut; that guns may help us equalise some stuff – not all stuff, some stuff. I don’t want to make guns seem more important than they are. We can also kill white-collar criminals with the right injection. With a heavy book. Something in their food. We can strangle them to death in their neckties. We just have to know how to infiltrate, enter their environment, climb the elevator in that rotten corporation until we reach the penthouse office and crack the crook’s head with a paper weight. I say let us all be potential vigilantes. Let us make them scared. Let the miscreants and their enablers fear the streets, traffic lights, restaurant tables, even the corridors of power – because there will always be someone with a bucket and a broom cleaning it. Let them fear every minion worker in the world. Let them be terrorised with the idea that they can never hire a nanny for their brat because she may have been inspired by the same indignation.

I know there is one glitch in this: who can know for sure who are the white-collar criminals? That’s a bitch, because the same papers that should expose the criminals are the ones usually owned by them. The papers may even try to throw us off course. So now the drag is to find the sources that would keep us reasonably informed of the crimes we want to curb. And I know it’s hard to find them. Even the well-intentioned ones have problems. They are often badly written, or way too passionate, and way-er too left-wingy. They think it’s wrong for corporations to fuck us but they assume it’s ok for the government to do it. I don’t get that. They also think the salaries of politicians and technocrats should be small by principle – objection! Get bloody real. If we don’t pay them well, we get only two main types of political candidates: the ones full of good intentions who can’t tell budget from revenue, or the skilled thieves who are there to become rich. The political aberration known as an honest-and-competent politician can hardly happen in our world, because the men with those qualities know they will not be fairly rewarded. So we’re left with the ones seeking the unfair reward.

Anyways, I want to go back to the killing topic because that’s my pet salvation of the soul. Who should I kill, I wondered. Then I wondered some more. And then I thought, wait, I know a guy who should be on my list. (It’s not you, Prof.) And I am ready to do it. But the method is still unknown. I imagine it will occur to me in a dream, or I will have a vision, or someone will read it in my coffee cup. Until then, I continue being a journalist waiting to strike. By strike I obviously don’t mean writing. Writing is tamed, it’s yet another way we deviate from action and stay in the realm of ideas, stuck in the brain fog, living a life of words and grammatical errors while real life is happening outside and we are doing fuck-all. So I thought, ‘Hmm… here is my opportunity to transform my work into some real achievement: I could kill someone I’m interviewing.’ Oops, have to postpone killing, my breakfast is ready. Breakfast of champions (and it’s not me saying it, it’s the cereal box. Uncanny.)”

Sophia got an F on that essay.

On top of a compulsory visit to the university’s psychiatrist.

She named her dissertation “On the Very Personal Responsibility to Punish the Wrong-Doer When the Justice System Keeps Refusing To,” but her professor called it “a narcissistic and rather infantile apology of assassination.”

Tomayto, tomahto.

Iran and the Principle of Mutually Assured Destruction

Like a cheap war pamphlet prodding a very susceptible bully president, the weekly The Economist had on its January 31 cover the question-headline “Has Iran won?” The Economist has lost much of its respect and has ceased to be a sober reference (remember the cover just before the Iraqi invasion saying “Why war would be justified?”) but the magazine’s articles on Iran are important because they spill the beans on the reasons for an attack – a rationale that is as irrational as it can get. There are several fallacies in The Economist’s article, and I am using the piece precisely because it repeats the average, lowbrow arguments with which we have been swamped in the days leading to the IAEA report on Iran. Let us not belittle the importance of a biased press – while not giving us the truth, they dutifully authenticate and spell out the day’s agenda. If recent news articles are any indication, we are no more than months away from an attack on Iran. Now, I have little fondness for Islamic republics or any religious republic for that matter. And yes, I would rather live in a world without nuclear weapons. But in the current setup of weapons distribution, Iran is only doing what it politically should, and what it is legally entitled to.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the most widely accepted arms control agreement in the world. According to the NPT, only five countries are entitled to own nuclear weapons: USA, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom. It is no coincidence that these countries are the permanent members of the Security Council – they are the most capable of destroying the world, and thus keep it on a leash. What happens if one of the permanent members wants to attack another? That is prevented, or so one hopes, by the principle of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Countries are deterred more efficiently, it seems, by the certainty of their destruction. This logic is laid clear by the chronology of weapons acquisition. Allegedly out of fear of Nazi Germany, America was the first country to develop a nuclear weapon, efficiently tested on the Japanese. The US was then made, ad hoc, the world’s police not based on its prudence and justice, but on its power – and willingness – to destroy. Yet fear breeds dread and four years later Russia started building its own nuclear arsenal, as a defence against a possible US attack. Three years later, fearing the proximity of Russia, the United Kingdom also chose to have nuclear weapons, then it was France and then China. It’s worth noticing that this logic is at the core of the very right to bear arms in the US: citizens should have the means to defend themselves – even against their own government. If the monopoly of power was left in the hands of the state, citizens could be made hostage to an illegitimate ruler.

Now, if the US government can be seen as a potential threat even to its own people, it was therefore very naïve to imagine that in a multi-polar world all the rest of the non-nuclear countries would be fine with having five nuclear states dictating the rules. Hence, since the exclusive club of nuclear states was closed for membership, countries that wanted to go nuclear simply chose to not sign the treaty. To protect itself against China and Russia, India got its nukes. Pakistan felt threatened and started developing its own weapons program. Israel, which feels menaced by its neighbours, got its own nuclear warheads, also refusing to sign the NPT. Why, in this scenario, is Iran considered a rogue state, or, to borrow The Economist’s appalling words, should be made to “quake in its boots”? Here is where the whole story of nuclear proliferation gets even more sinister.

Iran is a subscriber to the NPT, and according to the IAEA, as of yet, has never failed to comply with the treaty itself. On the other hand, India, who did not sign the NPT, was rewarded by the American Congress with transfer of civilian nuclear material. The USA also mocks the NPT when it violates its first article by providing nuclear weapons to Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands, under the official excuse that those weapons are “under constant and complete custody and control” of the United States, being there only for storage. In fact, Iran started its nuclear program precisely when it was on good terms with America, under the shah’s government. Why is Iran now considered a bigger threat than Israel? What qualifies a state as ‘rogue’? Is it its ruler? Its people? Its rhetoric and pathetic rants? Shouldn’t a country’s actions, rather than words, determine its level of threat to the rest of the planet? Haven’t we learned that governments, even in supposed democratic states like the US, do not always represent their people, and sometimes are not even actually elected? How can one think America is the same America under Bush as it was under Jefferson, or under Carter, to find a more recent comparison?

Mohammed ElBaradei is doing a decent, technical and honest job at the IAEA, despite all the external pressure. A lawyer by formation, he has refused to skip due process and is sticking to the letter of the treaty. It is not his, or America’s job, to guess the ‘motivation’ of countries. Israel believes its soil belongs to the Jewish people, and that they have been chosen by God. This type of religious premise is as horrifying, though more dangerous, than India calling its first nuclear test the “Smiling Buddha” or Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust – something more pathetic than harmful. In politics, words mean very little. Actions, on the other hand, mean a lot. It is the IAEA, not the US, which has the means, competence and independence to decide Iran’s nuclear future. America doesn’t have the legal mandate to decide, much less the moral right – the one thing we expect from the police is that they are less criminal and corrupt than the thugs they are trying to protect us from.

Paula Schmitt

Op-Ed published in Executive Magazine, March 2008.