Die Trying

Hank,

As you know I've been busy. What with the whole mess with Kim Kardashian and the worries over the terrible weight gains and losses of various famous people that I've never heard of, from shows that I've never watched; there hasn't been much time to address other important pressing issues of the day, like who the next great: chef, artist, Republican candidate, home remodeler or cake baker will be.

I have just finished reading Die Trying by Lee Child, his second novel. His writing is in the vein of other murder mystery action writers like John D. MacDonald and Randy Wayne White. Like MacDonald’s Travis McGee or White’s Doc Ford Child’s main character, Jack Reacher, is a strong independent unattached man who just happens to have lots of military training in weapons, hand to hand combat, intelligence and other subjects that come in handy when you accidentally get kidnapped by a group of thugs and handcuffed to big metal pipe in a horse barn. He’s not scared or frightened. He’s actually thinking he’s been in situatons a lot worse. He’s unconcerned when being interrogated by the big bad guy, who is casually suggesting all kinds of awful fates that might befall him. No at that moment Jack Reacher is reading the spines of the books in the fellow’s library and thinking about what this fellow knows. If you like page turning action like Calvin Trillion and Robert Ludlum but with the more introspective outlook that White and MacDonald give you’ll like Lee Child.

In Die Trying, the main bad guy, a fellow named Beau Borkin, is a leader of a para-military group hiding out in Montana. He’s upset at the Federal Reserve and the banks for his father having gone into debt trying to save his farm and no being able to repay the loans when conditions worsened on the farm. The screed, at least that part of it sounds like something that could be right out of Occupy Wall Street. It’s curious how times have changed. This book, first published in paperback in 1998, would be using the motif of the banks are out to get us as a pretext to show how crazy Beau Borkin is. Now, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. Borkin’s financial screed also has a lot of the sound and fury of Taylor Caldwell’s Captain and the Kings.

The idea that The banks are out to screw us has been a recurring theme in history, literature, and the arts. Oftentimes, it is tied to as secret society, or a semi or quasi government agency hidden, partially or wholly, from the public. In a movie like Da Vinci Code it’s the Masonic Order, in a book like Foucault’s Pendulum, it’s The Knights Templar, in history it’s accounts of German bankers coming to meet the Spanish Galleons as they came into port. Jack Kennedy is quoted as saying, “the gnomes of Zurich” in reference to the bankers in Switzerland, institutions long famous for the secrecy of their clients. In recent U.S. history it is known that the man who helped write the regulation to set up the Federal Reserve is also one of the founders of Goldman Sachs.

While on the one hand it’s hard to believe that a large group could keep themselves hidden from view for a clandestine purpose for years, decades, or centuries is it so hard to believe that a mindset, or double mindset, could not enable some of the activities suggested. Could one not believe it’s someone else’s job to watch out for that and also to have a small group of like minded people try to influence governments: state, local, national for a purpose they want?

B