Book Review: ‘So Sure of Death: A Liam Campbell Mystery,’ by Dana Stabenow, Dutton, 1999, 275 pp.
There are some women mystery writers who write in a way that is more geared to female readers, which is true of this book, and of course there is nothing wrong with that. The chipper storyline is interesting, pleasantly mixing elements of mystery, adventure and romance, and I particularly like the descriptions of the Alaskan landscape. I also like Stabenow’s use of humor.
I would have to say, however, that the book is a bit by-the-numbers. I don’t mean I was expecting anything highly original, but there are not the intriguing, knowing layers of human meaning or unique real-life details that you regularly come across in some of the better crime mysteries, or of course the best ones, like those of Raymond Chandler or John D. MacDonald. The whole narration is a bit too on-the-surface to hold my close attention. And some of the comical scenes seem too set-piece for believability, seemingly cleaver gags for a TV movie of the week.
I’m afraid what finally torpedoes ‘Death’ for me–although perhaps manna from heaven for the hard-line PC crowd–was a scene that would have earned my highly coveted A+ for political correctness, meaning political correctness on such a high level that it becomes unintentionally comical; however, this book has accomplished something even more ambitious. For after it reaches the PC A+ level, as if aided by some magical brainless booster rockets, Dana Stabenow manages to push beyond the surly bonds of a rational Earth and reach orbital PC, achieving an A+(v), a book so PC it becomes viciously anti-White, or anti-Western civilization.
I will attempt brevity (see pp. 192-193, at least in my hard-copy edition). Picture one cute, colorful, petite, spunky, no-nonsense woman named Bill (gosh, don’t you want to hug her already?), sitting around her table with friends, in her warm comfy Alaskan eating and drinking establishment, holding forth:
“First off, before anything else, I’m white. I’m as white as you can get without bleach. Before I’m a woman, before I’m a bartender, before I’m a magistrate, before I’m a goddamn Alaskan, I’m white. And because I’m white, I was BORN at go. I don’t have to work my ass off just to get that far. ... Whereas I, because my ancestors were so kind as to spend the last two thousand years terrorizing the people of color of this world into submission and servitude and too often downright slavery ... I was born at go.” Our warm and lovable, yet as spunky as all get out, Bill continues yammering along like this, but I will spare you.
Since this character is obviously a wise salt-of-the-Earth type, and don’t forget, cute, creative, colorful, funny, surrounded by an appreciative audience of friends, she is obviously a stand-in for the feelings and beliefs of the author. Or at least it would make no sense for the author to go to such trouble to present these views, unopposed, this raving anti-White soliloquy, from such an otherwise attractive and admirable character if Stabenow herself disagreed. To repeat a catchphrase often found on today’s Internet: Just let that sink in.
A few points. First, at its core PC is about race. Second, PC always spins the facts, exaggerating the assumed evils of Whites, while making huge omissions regarding their accomplishments and the historical faults of other peoples. For example, no one casts blame on the descendants of the Aztecs, who would tear the living beating hearts out of their rival surrounding tribes. And, by the way, where is the Aztec Plato or the Aztec Thomas Edison?
Likewise, no one ever suggests that today's Arabs should be weighted down with guilt over their African slave trade, more extensive than that of the Europeans. And forget about the Arab’s coastal pirating and carrying away of White slaves. In fact the reason there are not today large numbers of African slave descendants in North Africa is that female slaves were sexually trafficked while male slaves were castrated.
We could go on and on. It was also Europeans who first banned the slave trade, Britain even trying to stop the practice in Africa (still going). Nor are the countless achievements of Whites fully considered, little things like modern medicine, the Industrial Revolution and, oh, let’s see, the gutsy colorful devil-may-care bush planes that make such a major part of the Alaskan frontier adventures of the Stabenow genre.
Obviously this extreme double standard is not an accident, but an agenda devised to bludgeon Whites and their civilization.
Of course the foundation stones for all this were laid down decades ago, in education, Hollywood, the news media and elsewhere. So today we MUST virtue-signal in support of the all powerful Diversity Equality God. We MUST believe all populations and races are equally intelligent, something that runs counter to centuries of common sense observations by countless people, including the earliest European, Chinese and Arab explorers, observations that have been confirmed in modern times by the study of genetics and IQ.
Therefore since all people are essentially identical in their intellectual and achievement potential, the fact that, say, Africa has still not sent astronauts to the moon must prove ‘Injustice!’ The White man has stolen their resources! Enslaved them! Just ignore the fact that the Greeks, the Romans and the Chinese had advanced societies centuries before explorers even arrived in Africa, Latin America or Australia, to discover, basically, neolithic peoples.
Ancient Africa had copious resources eons before Western colonization, whereas places like the Greek islands or Japan were not overly lush in nature’s bounty. Yes, there was Ancient Egypt, but sometime take a close look at the contemporary artwork depicting their earliest leaders. Look at their features, their skin color. Third world people? Maybe, if you dwell in a Hollywood bubble with Meryl Streep.
Yes, you might say, this book may be nutty, naive bubble-headed virtue-signaling, but vicious?! Yes, I’m afraid so. Ask yourself this: If the accomplishments of Western civilization are the result of Whites tricking, scamming and rigging the system, so that we “start at go,” while the third world lives in painful poverty and deadening violence that is actually our fault. If in fact we just love to lord it over and enslave peoples of color, as we go about “terrorizing,” since we are “lazy,” and because of all this we can gleefully “start at go,” wouldn’t non-Whites be justified--as in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and now in South Africa--in raping, power-tool torturing, murdering, and hacking us and our children limb from limb with machetes and dispossessing us into extinction? If what our colorful cute-as-a-button businesswoman, bartender, magistrate, social justice warrior ‘Bill’ says is true, gosh, wouldn’t such behavior at least be understandable?
It is ironic, as per usual, among our fashionable virtue-signaling people of arts and letters, the novelists, the academicians, the corporatists, the career politicians, etc, Dana Stabenow happens to reside in the wilds of Alaska and probably doesn’t plan any time soon to move to corrupt and violent Detroit, Camden, shantytown LA or the growing Muslim 'refugee' sections of Minneapolis, where she could live cheek to jowl with the downtrodden non-White masses with whom she identifies and so ardently champions. Must be a bitter pill for Dana to swallow.
Alas, she is stuck residing in breathtakingly beautiful Alaska, a place of shocking primordial beauty. ‘Darn it,’ Stabenow must often say to herself, ‘surrounded by all this natural beauty and having no choice but to enjoy all this modern technology of the West, from writing books on my laptop to watching my flat screen TV, all the stuff stolen by Whites. Stolen from everyone from the marvelous Muslims to the obviously better-than-us Bantus. And yet I don’t get to happily live amongst their teeming brilliant hardworking yet unrewarded numbers!’
Motives no doubt vary for these PC Pod People. Likely some are just incredibly naive, others go with what is fashionable and a good career move, while many must know exactly what they are doing.
Theorists have called this type of thinking ‘pathological altruism.’ The most tragic part is that the virtue-signaling Whites who are today calling down a hard bloody rain upon their own people will probably be peacefully resting in their own graves or perhaps someday reduced to ashes lovingly scattered by friends, pleasantly drifting upon natural places like the big blue Pacific long before their great-great grandkids will reap the eventual harvest of their fashionable anti-White hatred.
Grades for ‘So Sure of Death,’ by Dana Stabenow, Dutton, 1999, 275 pp.
Overall Grade as a crime thriller: C-
PC Grade: A+(v) = PC so extreme it is viciously anti-White.
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