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A new, old review--written in 1982--has been added to the Doris Piserchia Website:
Mister Justice, 1973.My exhaustive, spoiler-ridden explication of the novel is here. Thanks to Joanna for finding the Trombetta review.Crammed into half an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, sci-fi style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930s, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables - they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders.
He then returns to the present, where he arranges an "eye for an eye" treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and "empty the world." With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchmen and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva - she of the constrictor thighs - Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp.
Jim Trombetta, "The Coolest Sci-Fi," from The Catalog of Cool (1982), edited by Gene Sculatti, p. 87.
"If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse." Who said that--John Kerry? Tom Daschle? Don't make me laugh. No, it was Ralph Nader, the man conservative Democrats love to hate (on Meet the Press). Look, you don't have to vote for him, but shouldn't we all be happy if his candidacy gives him a platform to say what mainstream pols are too gutless to say?
One of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated themes is the idea that global capitalism will lift all boats. As he puts it, "No country with a McDonalds has ever fought a war with another country with a McDonalds." Forget that the work is demeaning and the food is crappy. Since 9/11/01 he's been embarrassing himself in print with great regularity, trying to reconcile his "we are the world" thesis with the need to show Muslims who's boss. He's also been weighing in on the exporting of American jobs, which of course he thinks is great, and today he's come up with a clever name for the "new class" of Indians who are getting an increasing chunk of American white-collar work. The hokey neologism shall not be repeated here lest it add to his meme-pool cred, but here's a modest prediction: that it will end up being used, not like he hopes--as a cutesy way of understanding and relating to the people taking our jobs, sorry, our fellow laborers, across the Pacific--but as a term of derision by the so-called "protectionists" he hates. God, if only.