The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
This book was published in the UK in 2018. It has date stamps in the front from 2020 and 2021 (some of the Sussex libraries still sometimes do things the old way). I borrowed it earlier this year, to read just in case.
Since then, the Biden/Harris circus shot itself in more feet than we knew it had, and the mainstream media in the USA and across the world ignored alternatives as completely as they ignored independents and small parties in the UK elections earlier this year.
Those who did notice there were alternatives were saying you have to vote Harris to keep Trump out, just as UK voters said you have to vote Starmer to get the Tories out.
In the UK there is now a government petition doing the rounds that went from zero to over a million names in a few days, basically saying ‘we didn’t mean it. We don’t like Starmer. Can we have another vote… ?’ Within a few days it was running at nearly two and a half million.
It won’t change anything of course, and those whose politics is limited to distinguishing between good and bad billionaires could write it off because Elon Musk liked it. The hard fact I can’t get away from though, is that you can’t appeal to a broken government to save you from a broken government.
Seeing Trump voted in as President, and all the same things said over there as were said over here didn’t give anyone except the hardest of told-you-sos much pleasure, but it did remind me about The Fifth Risk, and what it might be good for.
Michael Lewis describes the ‘transition’ that took place when Trump became president the first time around. I put the word in inverted commas because the main point of his narrative is that there wasn’t one. Normally, the transition from one president to another is a complex process, put together by hundreds of people in different areas of government, ensuring that the right numbers of staff and the appropriate specialists are on hand to take on all the things the last president was doing without a load of dropped stitches (you don’t want dropped stitches when you’re in the middle of a load of wars, etc etc – I’ll leave you to paint the picture).
Trump basically didn’t bother.
Lewis then goes over all the kinds of things that do go wrong in the massive network that is the US government, and all the ways those things can, by accident or design, be a danger to people. He describes, for example, the scenario discussed in Kate Brown’s Plutopia, around previous governments’ ways of dealing with the risks associated with plutonium. She compares incidents in the US and Russia in the 20th century, and discovers examples where Russian practice was far more aware and realistic than the US equivalent – mainly because the US was closing its eyes rather than admit to things that the Russian government at the time simply wouldn’t have bothered admitting to anyway, and so was better able to deal with — but it still created a very dangerous situation for all concerned, in both countries.
He then discusses what happens when you put people with simplistic views in charge of complex systems. In short, the Fifth Risk is a well informed and thoroughly sensible book, aimed at those who’d like to ‘get back to’ the ‘good old days’ of President Obama.
It’s a bit awkward though, when those annoying radical people point out that where the good old days of President Obama got us was – Trump winning an election. It’s amazing how nasty those nice Obama people get if anyone mentions Tuesday kill lists for example, or the fact that anyone who looks can see that Israel, with the benefit of US funds and protection, is the source of most of the ‘trouble in the Middle East’.
Life in the good ol’ USA be like…
Those nice Obama people
One of the most interesting political panel discussions I have ever seen was staged by FiLiA, the year they were in Bradford. It was about the causes and consequences of military action and one of the panelists had been an Obama staffer. Another was a women from one of the African countries the US had been (quietly!) dropping bombs on during Obama’s years.
Who thought this was a good idea?
I followed The Fifth Risk by a book by another of Obama’s staffers, one Alyssa Mastromonaco. She’s a nice person, and clearly quite starry eyed about her boss. It’s what many women in the UK would call a ‘head girl’ book – the over-riding message being a bracing ‘you too could achieve what I have’. She even bracingly teases herself for the pride she takes in getting a tampon dispenser put in a White House loo whilst Obama was busy signing off far away deaths. It’s well worth a read. A sort of women’s version of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.
Don’t write her off as a fool though. We are all doing that, every minute of the day that we aren’t engaged in seriously trying to stop the human race to destruction. Personally, I’ve been spending my useful hours recently trying to help grow the assemblies movement in my town. Had a meeting on Sunday. Agreed to remove the word ‘radically’ from before ‘democratic’ in the statement of principles, so as not to scare people. People can be scared very easily by words like ‘radical’, just not by the imminent destruction of absolutely everything – I suppose that’s just too big to fit in the head.
It is fixable you know – it’s still fixable. It’s fixable by paying attention, trying really hard to understand, talking to people and talking to more people, more, and everyone trying harder to understand.
Happy reading!
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Kay
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Kay Green 