With a shudder I look back on the worst professor I had in college, who, among other things, castigated the study of literature and defended the study of trash because, as she explained resentfully to some persistent students, the facts, the facts. I disagree that facts should be enough to satisfy a reader or that any book containing them is above criticism. And it’s frustrating to take a chance on a writer who does seem to think facts alone make the book. My curiosity may be strong enough to carry me to the end. Yet this obstinate neglect of a number of options for enhancement, I’m constantly reminding myself as I struggle to reach it, can undermine the most engrossing material. I don’t demand that anything I read meet the highest aesthetic standard. There is a minimum, though. It’s the difference between a smooth ride through a scenic land with a pleasant (or at least tolerable) guide and a bumpy ride through a barren land with a difficult (or intolerable) guide.
With Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023), the reader is going on a road trip that’s even longer than the book’s 600-plus pages suggest. The question of whether the ride will be smooth or bumpy is answered within paragraph one. We begin with a lurch, the first of roughly 600. At least Harris alerts you inadvertently up front: this is how it’s going to be, leave now if you don’t think you can withstand the journey. I, for one, was able to partly because Harris’s language tends mostly toward flavorless informality that’s only mildly stifling. He makes use of curse words (nothing so imaginative as the title of an earlier book of his, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit) and schoolyard insults and conspiratorial italics. Still, I was never sure I’d be able to, regularly distracted and taken out of the book at every turn by ill-constructed paragraphs and lines on the order of: “Planters premised produce production on premium prices, so they were vulnerable to market fluctuations.”
Palo Alto is a massive history, an attempted synthesis of subjects that could, on their own, be the basis for tomes, the kind of book that can least afford a lack of structure. And yet it does. It unfolds chronologically, more or less, but his subjects tend to mash into each other in lengthy chapters that nearly lose their function, from, say, the iPhone, to China, to Russia, back to China, to Palo Alto, to Facebook, alternating in tone between lecture and riff and whatever this is:
Silicon
Valley’s biggest winners are the slack-limbed puppets who have nailed their
hands to these historical forces. Butterflies pinning themselves to the most
opportune spots in the glass display box. Not the Wozniaks or even the Bezoses
but the Airbnbozos whose defining feature is an eagerness to unleash forces
they don’t understand onto as many people as they can, as fast as possible.
Mickey Mouse surfs the waves in his stolen wizard hat, flashing a four-finger hang
ten.
…Stoned rant that reminds you to find someone else to smoke with? One of the words he leans on most heavily is “recall,” as in recall this or that piece of information among numberless others encountered previously. It’s a clunky means of establishing links across the book that, due to how he organizes the material, or because he chooses not to, don’t naturally form on their own.
The rainbow dust jacket is misleading: despite how much story one would think there’d be, given the scope, this is a monochromatic book, missing almost every element of storytelling. Though Harris considers it a history-as-memoir, it’s largely impersonal, since he isn’t delving into, say, distant family history. He doesn’t do images, scenes, dialogue. Choice anecdotes are few. As for the lack of characters, Harris appears to be suspicious of the very notion of pursuing one, treating such figures as Leland Stanford and Bill Gates as personifications of “forces”—quotidian human details aren’t worth bothering with because if not them, some other men would have played the same role. Instead what he has are villainous names on a page. There’s some warmth of esteem in his discussion of certain radicals and labor leaders, in the first two-thirds of the book, before such figures cease to be mentioned. He pays them tribute but they’re heroes, hardly more fleshed out. And while he doesn’t find much amusing in almost 200 years of human history, in rare moments of levity he ventures a corny crowd silencer: “[Herbert] Hoover was like a vacuum, sucking up precious metals from around the world and depositing a hefty share back into Palo Alto’s giant tax shelter,” “Cyber cafes offered internet access by the minute, and the web itself was built on java.”
So ambition far exceeds verbal skill
and what we’re left with are the facts, artlessly presented. And all of them
are worth knowing as a citizen of our country, to better understand the brutal
way our system has operated and what has and hasn’t changed over time. As
someone born and raised in California, I can attest to this about my public
school education: there are aspects of the formation of the state, with its
reputation as among the bluest of the country, that aren’t nearly inculcated
enough. To begin with: settler enslavement and murder of the native population,
already cut down by disease spread by the Mexicans and the Spanish, was
official policy. The first governor of the state, Peter Burnett, in a speech
called for—his words—“a war of extermination.” One who answered the call would
eventually become California’s first US senator, John C. Frémont. The Bay Area
includes a city called Fremont. I checked to confirm on the city’s website and
it is in fact named after the same murderous Frémont. Or as the website puts
it: “Referred to by historians as ‘The Great Pathfinder,’ John C. Frémont, our
City’s namesake, mapped a trail through Mission Pass, providing American
settlers access to the southeastern San Francisco Bay Area.” Which historians?
That’s the biographical note in its entirety.
Some of what the rest of Palo Alto covers: further episodes of violence, racial exclusion policies, environmental degradation, worker protests and crackdowns. The monopolistic power of the railroads. Bionomics, the theory behind eugenics. Stanford university, founded by a rich scam artist, molded to align with the vision of a man, David Starr Jordan, who appears to have been an accomplice in the murder of the founder’s wife and got away with it. A university that produced, among others, a rich scam artist who eventually became President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, more influential than I’d been previously led to believe. The university’s profitable role in developing advanced technology, including the weapons of war. The scam underlying private housing and redlining. The Black Panthers. The horrors of US foreign policy. Ronald Reagan, rightwing governor of the state and later President of the United States. Silicon Valley, the rise of the PC, the monopolistic power of the tech industry, and its attacks on workers. The surveillance state. The decline of unions and the general worsening of inequality up to the present day.
The capitalist always dreams of the grotesquely enormous payout at the expense of labor. Labor will never settle for anything less than fair pay and various other reasonable protections to ensure a stable, safer life that likely don’t permit grotesquely enormous payouts to a few individuals. Conflict between the two is inevitable. Democracy is supposed to stand in the middle, mediating, which really means civilizing the capitalists. The facts suggest it has failed in its role for most of the country’s history. This is where those who care about finding a solution should start. (One can look to two modern examples set by Hollywood and the auto workers, who’ve had success with a tried-and-true solution.) But speaking as both reader and essential worker, sloppiness doesn’t inspire me or rouse me to action. It just makes grasping what matters that much harder.
