BLUE BLOOD, by Edward Conlon
Here's what you'll find in BLUE BLOOD:
Cops watch drug dealers; cops rush in to arrest them and the people who bought from them; cops try to get the drug dealers to tell them something about other drug dealers, or about people who might have guns.
There's also a very funny scene - Conlon wasn't there but tells the story - of some detectives who make a lie-detector using a salad bowl, two wires and a photocopier.
They take a sheet of paper with the word "LIE!" in big letters, put the salad bowl on the suspect's head, and "wire" it to the photocopier. Every time the guy tells a lie, they punch the copy button, and the machine spits out a paper that says, "LIE!"
The guy is terrified and confesses everything, but the jury doesn't convict him.
Bronx juries often let guilty people off.
That's pretty much the book. You've just saved yourself 500 pages of reading... which means you can now read the rest of this. (There are a few other nuggets, but with way too high a rock-to-ore ratio.)
If you're left wondering how Blue Blood got such good reviews, join club. Though the jacket describes it as reading like a novel, a lot of us felt it had as much flow as a grocery list, and about as much interest.
One jacket blurb describes it as "a social history" - it's not - and another, incredibly, compares it to Michael Herr's superb collection of Vietnam reportage, Dispatches. When one interviewer told Conlon he wrote "beautifully", I wondered if we'd read the same book, as "ploddingly" would be a far more accurate word.
Well, we didn't read the same book: reviewers skim.
And that's a problem for those of us who actually read books - in skimming, reviewers often miss heaps that's good, and heaps that's bad. If you're skimming, 500 pages might take up a few pleasurable hours. If you're actually reading, they go on interminably.
Much of the criticism towards this book has been of the Where was the editor? variety. You read 500 plus pages, all the while wondering how all this endlessly repetitive droning ever got past an editor, and why.
Is the author trying to give us a feel for how boring and tedious his job is? Do we really need to know all this stuff about filling out forms? And can't he find some way to tell better?
How many times do we have to hear about the warrants that he wasn't even able to get, or about the informant who failed to call him as scheduled?
Then there's the history of his family - a completely misplaced aimless stringing together of facts, trivia and guesses, little of which is of interest.
It's also distressing that he reaches for the larger picture only sort of. There's no history of the NYPD, just glimpses that are as fragmented and incoherent as much of the rest of the book.
The story of how the NYPD became so heavily laden with Irish, in a city that once had signs warning No Blacks or Irish Need Apply, would seem to have a place in a book with a title that plays on the idea of generations of Irish cops.
Conlon is at his worst when he tries for the broad perspective, which, mercifully, he doesn't do very much.
Incredibly, he never even bothers to mention that crime across the country was dropping during this period. Though every big city mayor and small-town sheriff took the credit, crime rates were simply falling throughout the society, regardless of what Sheriff Butch Toughguy in Kentucky or Deputy Bo Badass in Tennessee or Patrolman Eddie Conlon in New York was doing.
Socio-economic factors, such as lower unemployment, played a far more significant role than the police, who were for the most part doing the same things they've always done.
There's little about what was going on in the country, the world, or even what time of year it is... or much of anything else external. And as our hero goes through the same housing project drug operations over and over and over, he reflects upon it so little that might as well be playing soccer (fun to chase people, run around, ug!).
The author's Harvard education is played up in the marketing, but is absent in the book - you'll find no review of alternate ideas of crime control/public safety, no pesky questions about whether the police are really helping, or perhaps even harming, communities, or whether it might be better to pursue an entirely different approach.
Is this is right approach to a social problem? Shouldn't we be exploring these questions?
Apparently not. Instead, there's just this endless I'm-a-foot-soldier-who's-not-gettin'-paid-to-think, so-let's-lock-people-up. Nothing about the ethics of... well, you get the idea.
And that might work if the book didn't pretend, at the same time, to be offering something more. And if The Job wasn't about something more - that is, if it didn't have to do with society, the control of parts of it, with putting human beings in cages, etc.
Which brings us to the War on Drugs. The jacket promises we'll get his view on that. We don't... or we do... or we don't. There are just a few vapid paragraphs regurgitating lame arguments and counter-arguments.
That's a bit strange given that he spends so much time, and these people risk their lives, over it, and so much of the book is about drug busts.
No doubt some of these drug dealers are very bad people, but they'd be just us bad whether the product was cigarettes or rum or blood diamonds. They're selling drugs because there's a lot of money in them, which is because they're illegal. (Same with Prohibition, same with tax-dodging cigarette peddlers in contemporary NYC.)
Conlon vacillates a bit, seeing perhaps, maybe, kinda some validity to the counter-arguments, but then concludes by telling us that heroin gave us crime as we know it.
Um, so before heroin, we didn't have crime as we... um... it was another kind of crime?
Whatever.
The same person (I assume, anyway) also relates that when heroin was legal in the US, most addicts were middle-aged white women who'd become addicted after doctors prescribed it.
Now, presumably those women weren't out doing carjackings.
So what changed?
Don't bother to ask, or at least to look for answers in the book.
(Those who say this book doesn't pretend to offer an analysis, doesn't pretend to be more than just a day-on-the-Job recounting are wrong: It does try, it just does a terrible job of it.)
Someone who spends so much time locking people up and otherwise controlling them for using these substances can't, apparently, be bothered to look at places where the issue is treated differently, and whether that's good or bad for a society, whether tougher enforcement actually leads to a decrease in either drug related violence or deaths (it does neither; in fact, both go up, for reasons directly related to the enforcement).
Because, for all their professed concern for the community, police in general seem to be after something quite different:
Conlon tells us more than once that the best part of the job is smashing people's doors in, a sentiment his colleagues seem to share.
Though police everywhere dress it up with all sorts of rationalizations, too many just get rush out of that storm-trooper power, and that's what they're in it for. They'd be doing it whether what lay behind those doors were drugs or diamonds or Jews. (It could just as well be Jews, for all the thought Conlon gives to the morality of what he's doing.)
Cars with flashing lights, badges, guns, kicking doors in and arresting the people behind them - is it really about public safety?
Conlon pays a smidgeon of lip service to public safety, then goes back to grabbing people and smashing in doors.
Or not smashing doors. Or getting warrants. Or not getting warrants. Or filling out forms. Or getting transferred. Or not getting transferred. Or thinking about his grandfather. For 500 pages.
Cut down by 300 pages or so, it might be worth reading. A skimmer might not mind the tedious, plodding repetitiveness. But those planning to actually read will regret having started Blue Blood.
Cops watch drug dealers; cops rush in to arrest them and the people who bought from them; cops try to get the drug dealers to tell them something about other drug dealers, or about people who might have guns.
There's also a very funny scene - Conlon wasn't there but tells the story - of some detectives who make a lie-detector using a salad bowl, two wires and a photocopier.
They take a sheet of paper with the word "LIE!" in big letters, put the salad bowl on the suspect's head, and "wire" it to the photocopier. Every time the guy tells a lie, they punch the copy button, and the machine spits out a paper that says, "LIE!"
The guy is terrified and confesses everything, but the jury doesn't convict him.
Bronx juries often let guilty people off.
That's pretty much the book. You've just saved yourself 500 pages of reading... which means you can now read the rest of this. (There are a few other nuggets, but with way too high a rock-to-ore ratio.)
If you're left wondering how Blue Blood got such good reviews, join club. Though the jacket describes it as reading like a novel, a lot of us felt it had as much flow as a grocery list, and about as much interest.
One jacket blurb describes it as "a social history" - it's not - and another, incredibly, compares it to Michael Herr's superb collection of Vietnam reportage, Dispatches. When one interviewer told Conlon he wrote "beautifully", I wondered if we'd read the same book, as "ploddingly" would be a far more accurate word.
Well, we didn't read the same book: reviewers skim.
And that's a problem for those of us who actually read books - in skimming, reviewers often miss heaps that's good, and heaps that's bad. If you're skimming, 500 pages might take up a few pleasurable hours. If you're actually reading, they go on interminably.
Much of the criticism towards this book has been of the Where was the editor? variety. You read 500 plus pages, all the while wondering how all this endlessly repetitive droning ever got past an editor, and why.
Is the author trying to give us a feel for how boring and tedious his job is? Do we really need to know all this stuff about filling out forms? And can't he find some way to tell better?
How many times do we have to hear about the warrants that he wasn't even able to get, or about the informant who failed to call him as scheduled?
Then there's the history of his family - a completely misplaced aimless stringing together of facts, trivia and guesses, little of which is of interest.
It's also distressing that he reaches for the larger picture only sort of. There's no history of the NYPD, just glimpses that are as fragmented and incoherent as much of the rest of the book.
The story of how the NYPD became so heavily laden with Irish, in a city that once had signs warning No Blacks or Irish Need Apply, would seem to have a place in a book with a title that plays on the idea of generations of Irish cops.
Conlon is at his worst when he tries for the broad perspective, which, mercifully, he doesn't do very much.
Incredibly, he never even bothers to mention that crime across the country was dropping during this period. Though every big city mayor and small-town sheriff took the credit, crime rates were simply falling throughout the society, regardless of what Sheriff Butch Toughguy in Kentucky or Deputy Bo Badass in Tennessee or Patrolman Eddie Conlon in New York was doing.
Socio-economic factors, such as lower unemployment, played a far more significant role than the police, who were for the most part doing the same things they've always done.
There's little about what was going on in the country, the world, or even what time of year it is... or much of anything else external. And as our hero goes through the same housing project drug operations over and over and over, he reflects upon it so little that might as well be playing soccer (fun to chase people, run around, ug!).
The author's Harvard education is played up in the marketing, but is absent in the book - you'll find no review of alternate ideas of crime control/public safety, no pesky questions about whether the police are really helping, or perhaps even harming, communities, or whether it might be better to pursue an entirely different approach.
Is this is right approach to a social problem? Shouldn't we be exploring these questions?
Apparently not. Instead, there's just this endless I'm-a-foot-soldier-who's-not-gettin'-paid-to-think, so-let's-lock-people-up. Nothing about the ethics of... well, you get the idea.
And that might work if the book didn't pretend, at the same time, to be offering something more. And if The Job wasn't about something more - that is, if it didn't have to do with society, the control of parts of it, with putting human beings in cages, etc.
Which brings us to the War on Drugs. The jacket promises we'll get his view on that. We don't... or we do... or we don't. There are just a few vapid paragraphs regurgitating lame arguments and counter-arguments.
That's a bit strange given that he spends so much time, and these people risk their lives, over it, and so much of the book is about drug busts.
No doubt some of these drug dealers are very bad people, but they'd be just us bad whether the product was cigarettes or rum or blood diamonds. They're selling drugs because there's a lot of money in them, which is because they're illegal. (Same with Prohibition, same with tax-dodging cigarette peddlers in contemporary NYC.)
Conlon vacillates a bit, seeing perhaps, maybe, kinda some validity to the counter-arguments, but then concludes by telling us that heroin gave us crime as we know it.
Um, so before heroin, we didn't have crime as we... um... it was another kind of crime?
Whatever.
The same person (I assume, anyway) also relates that when heroin was legal in the US, most addicts were middle-aged white women who'd become addicted after doctors prescribed it.
Now, presumably those women weren't out doing carjackings.
So what changed?
Don't bother to ask, or at least to look for answers in the book.
(Those who say this book doesn't pretend to offer an analysis, doesn't pretend to be more than just a day-on-the-Job recounting are wrong: It does try, it just does a terrible job of it.)
Someone who spends so much time locking people up and otherwise controlling them for using these substances can't, apparently, be bothered to look at places where the issue is treated differently, and whether that's good or bad for a society, whether tougher enforcement actually leads to a decrease in either drug related violence or deaths (it does neither; in fact, both go up, for reasons directly related to the enforcement).
Because, for all their professed concern for the community, police in general seem to be after something quite different:
Conlon tells us more than once that the best part of the job is smashing people's doors in, a sentiment his colleagues seem to share.
Though police everywhere dress it up with all sorts of rationalizations, too many just get rush out of that storm-trooper power, and that's what they're in it for. They'd be doing it whether what lay behind those doors were drugs or diamonds or Jews. (It could just as well be Jews, for all the thought Conlon gives to the morality of what he's doing.)
Cars with flashing lights, badges, guns, kicking doors in and arresting the people behind them - is it really about public safety?
Conlon pays a smidgeon of lip service to public safety, then goes back to grabbing people and smashing in doors.
Or not smashing doors. Or getting warrants. Or not getting warrants. Or filling out forms. Or getting transferred. Or not getting transferred. Or thinking about his grandfather. For 500 pages.
Cut down by 300 pages or so, it might be worth reading. A skimmer might not mind the tedious, plodding repetitiveness. But those planning to actually read will regret having started Blue Blood.
posted by kneel at 12:53 PM
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