Book Review: Reversing the Rivers

Title: Reversing the Rivers 

Author: William F. Schulz

Date: 2023

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania 

ISBN: 978-1512824032

Length: 267 pages (including the endnotes, because you will want to read the endnotes)

Illustrations: centerfold of black-and-white celebrity photos

Quote: "From 1994 to 2006 I was Amnesty International USA's...executive director."

The quote above is the dullish base for a moderately funny celebrity story. I would've quoted the story but the "secure" coding of the e-book version I received wouldn't let me. Lauren Bacall was acting adorably arrogant and patronizing to Schulz at a party. Lots of famous people patronized Schulz at parties, because, as he confesses in this book, he didn't mind fundraising. He liked the challenge of working out just what he needed to do to get people to give his organization money. 

This is a memoir, not of Schulz's life but of his career with what was called AI first. He raised money. He responded to internal pressure to take on causes that put him on one side or the other of American politics--no points for guessing which side--and thus discredited the organization. He retired. He met lots of famous people along the way, and shares lots of vignettes about which ones screamed at him, which became his personal friends, and why. 

AI has been around for a long time. Margaret Atwood was the first celebrity I remember naming it as her charity. In the 1980s I remember AI taking over a table at the library for letter-writing parties; a sister and I used to read the stories and occasionally sign a letter. Many of the subjects of these letters were high-profile public figures; some went on to become national leaders. 

Even in those days, though, there was some question about which cases one wanted to get involved in. As a Unitarian Universalist, Schulz's position was what most people I know would dismiss as "bleeding-heart." He argues all over again, in this book, that nobody deserves the death penalty, that prisoners of war should be housed and fed as well as our own troops, that "tasing" prisoners is inhumane. (So what about letting them brawl or riot? the reviewer asks, reading this book on a day whose news headlines included a convict's being beaten to death in prison),

People like Schulz seem to think that the purpose of capital punishment is to do some good to rapists and murderers. It is not. The purpose of capital punishment is to spare human beings from having to live with rapists and murderers. 

 

AI took up the causes of many people who were what they called POC--Prisoners Of Conscience--whom people around the world wanted to support. AI also took up the causes of people who were, in fact, criminals, and that reduced people's interest in supporting their selection of prisoners of conscience. 

Schulz notes, with mild and benign bewilderment, that many people who volunteered or even wanted careers with AIUSA were angry and bitter, inclined to waste their energy denouncing one another over minor disagreements. He doesn't note a correspondence between the incidence of screaming hostility and the incidence of extreme left-wing or globalist views among his staff, but the fact is that, when Americans are haters, they tend to hate America. 

By continuing to work with these people and listen to their ideas, Schulz let himself be put in the position of criticizing the War On Terror. "And what do the bleeding-hearts think we should do, let Al-Qaeda get away with what they did?" one heard sweet old church ladies saying. "I think W Bush is handling it rather well, not declaring war on the whole countries these people came from. As for the prisoners, how did they get to be prisoners? Nobody just rounded up all the Arab-types in the cities and locked them up, like Japanese-Americans in the War, They were breaking the law. They're being fed, and not being beaten or stoned to death or beheaded, which is what would probably have been done to them in Iraq. If people would rather do what the French government says, they should go to France."

In 2001 I remember feeling that our culture had gone into a decline, for which I blamed W Bush. The plane that hit the Pentagon hit storage space. The passengers on that plane, and on the fourth plane the passengers "rolled," were casualties. The damage done was to banks the average American would never, left to perself, have missed. Property crimes are crimes, of course, and any casualties from an unprovoked act of war are too many, but the commercial media went into a year-long orgy of reporting All September 11 All The Time that seemed intended to sustain unpleasant moods in people who read the newspapers thoroughly (as many Washingtonians felt their jobs required them to do) or watched television news shows. Book publishers stopped publishing informative material and cranked out war propaganda. A book by Gore Vidal, of all people, seemed the sanest new book in the stores and libraries. When the best book a nation produces comes from a man who, among many other bizarre choices, chose to use "Gore" as a name, that nation is not the cultural leader the United States ought to be, I felt. That was what we got for electing the Walking Target. I don't like war.

But there are some baseline rules for people who don't like war. Chief among them is that, if the country where you live is involved in a war, you don't commit treason. You don't go around bragging about how your correspondents in other countries have gone from saying that 80 or 90% of them approve of your country, last year, to saying that only 30% approve of your country, this year. 

Here let me say this to England, Germany, Turkey, and Indonesia, the countries where Schulz and AIUSA took that little poll. There are those in Europe whose approval of the United States seems to be based on whether, at this point in time, we're willing to behave like a good little colony. There are those in the Islamic countries whose attitudes are similar, only with religious bias. I don't think we should behave like a colony for one minute,. We are not a colony. Against all odds God gave us not only independence but success beyond all previous imagining. We are an exceptional nation and we should not follow would-be leaders who are in denial about this. 

We have made progress far beyond poor old benighted Europe, even beyond Britain, for a reason. That reason was not so that we could impose our values of individual freedom, success according to merit, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to use individual property as the individual sees fit, religious freedom, civil rights for women and ethnic minorities and especially for dissidents, on other countries. We have never wanted to backslide into the benighted European customs, of which war is one, by building an empire and making other countries our vassals. We don't want to bother with that sort of thing even now. It's just too much fun to be a civilized nation where everyone has a chance to succeed under the rule of liberal and egalitarian law. Poor old backward Europe, and Asia and Africa, should try that. But we prefer to lead by example. 

We were not guided into a position of leadership, however, in order to follow Europe back into the bad old ways of enshrining stupid social hierarchies in law, and making it impossible for most people to get educations or own land or have free choices of careers, and punishing dissent as a crime, and tolerating envy enough even to listen to any whines for equality-of-outcome, and whatever else occurs to minds damaged by drinking wine with every meal. Our policy decisions should be made by the American people--who are culturally "conservative"--without reference to anyone overseas. A democracy does not listen to the confusion coming out of the countries whose people are fighting and dying to be allowed to live here instead of there, even when we warn them that they can't expect even jobs in cities any more, much less farms. 

We do not and should not hate Europe, but when Europeans fantasize about dictating policy to us we should sober them up in our sanitary, humane jails and send them home. We should make them aware that displays of envy, such as demands for redistribution of wealth, are embarrassments like toilet paper stuck to shoes. We really would like to give them the opportunity, in their newly less crowded and livable homelands, to learn what civilization is like and try it for themselves. If and whenever Europe can get through a hundred years without a war, then it will be appropriate for us to listen to what they have in the way of leaders as to equals. Today the plain fact is that, as a civilization, Europeans are not our equals. We may wish they were, but they lag and they languish.

But this is supposed to be a review of Schulz's book, and that book ends with a whimper. Schulz writes like a grown-up version of Bridget Jones. Listening to his angry employees, the inverse-racist "voices of diversity" and the deranged homosexual lobbyists who crybullied their way into AIUSA's offices, Schulz tells us, he reduced the popularity of the United States in other countries with active AI organizations, he reduced the respectability of AI in the United States, and then for a follow-up he was diagnosed with a slowly progressing fatal disease. His is a sad story--and he doesn't even seem to realize how tragic it is.

Civilizations limit the damage individuals do. It's possible that, by reading Schulz's memoir in the light of their own memories of the last fifty years, others will be guided to steer AI back in the direction of defending prisoners of conscience, and restore respectability to that organization. Let us hope. 

Anyone with a taste for sober, responsible, truly adult stories should read this book--just for the celebrity gossip, if they're not in a position to need to read it as a cautionary tale. But in a democracy every active citizen can benefit from reading a memoir like this one as a cautionary tale.