Category Archives: Books

Did that mob look familiar?

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Ariail_book

Students of Robert Ariail’s work may note that there’s something really familiar looking about that cartoon criticized on a local feminist blog.

Take a look at the cover of his last book, Ariail! There’s at least one particular character who appears in both. Of course, she appears in a lot of Robert’s cartoons, such as this one and this one and this one. He even has a name for her: He calls her "Auntie Bellum." She was to be a character in a comic strip that Robert and I kicked around a lot back in the 1990s, but never got around to developing (I haven’t given up hope of getting back to it, though).

Here’s how that cover developed: One day in 2001, Robert had another group of women angry at him — Muslim women who maintained that a gag he did about dress codes for pages at the State House (he’d drawn them in burqas) was anti-Islam. I said something like, "You’ve just got everybody on your case lately, don’t you — flag supporters, the governor, Democrats, Republicans, traditional Muslim women…." The drawing arose from that, and then Robert got to thinking that would be a good cover for a book….

You will note that women are not the only people who get really, really mad at Robert.

Actually, Michael DID say it was personal

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Bonasera

Forgive me for going into Cliff Clavin mode here, but…

I had a little fun with the "Godfather" cliche of business-vs.-personal in my Sunday column. But it’s a little-known fact that in the novel (as opposed to the movie), Michael Corleone did say it was personal, and not business.

The irony is that the "it’s not personal… it’s strictly business" line is probably the most quoted from the movie. It’s used in business, sports, anywhere and anytime American males do something distasteful for which they do not wish to be held morally responsible. It’s like the kinder, gentler, all-American version of the Nazis’ "I vas only followink orders."

Hey, I’ve been guilty of using it, to help me separate personal feelings for a newsmaker from the responsibility to report or comment without reference to those feelings (Hey, he’s a nice guy, but this is business…). But it can be a pious copout, if you’re a real human being.

And that was Mario Puzo’s point. In fact, the central theme of the novel, and of other works by Puzo, such as The Fourth K, was the exploration of the personal as opposed to larger societal obligation, such as to the rule of law. The seduction of The Godfather is that you are invited to care about these characters personally, and forget that they are unapologetic, sometimes murderous, criminals.

Anyway, the central speech in the novel occurs just before Michael goes off to kill Sollozzo and the police captain. He’s speaking to Tom Hagen:

…Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business…. They call itPacino business, OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right?…

It’s the epiphany around which the whole story is based. But somehow, as great as the movie is, that got left out. We were left with the opposite impression of the point. Odd, isn’t it?

American Sardaukar? Best combat picture from Iraq, anyway

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Sardaukar
Although Susanna seemed to like it, my analogy back on this post — comparing American troops to the Atreides in Dune — wasn’t quite perfect.

Truth be told, the overwhelmingly superior efficiency, dedication and effectiveness of U.S. troops today is more closely comparable to the Sardaukar. That’s not an analogy I like to make, because the Sardaukar were the bad guys — or at least, allied with the bad guys. They were arrogant, and received their comeuppance from the little-regarded, fanatical desert people they thought they could easily crush. So you can see how I wouldn’t like that analogy at this particular point in history. It doesn’t fit with my worldview at all.

Probably the best way to put it in Dune terms (if one is to be so frivolous as to draw such analogies) is that the U.S. military has the virtue of the Atreides combined with the competence of the Sardaukar. (And now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the reason the emperor sent the Sardaukar after the Atreides was that the Atreides troops under Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck had been trained to the point that they were almost as tough as the Sardaukar, and the emperor saw that as a threat. So maybe our guys are the Atreides after all — or what the Atreides might have been. That makes the sci-fi nerd in me feel so much better.)

This brings me, through a leap that probably makes sense only to me, to a photo I grabbed from AP back during the fighting in Fallujah in 2004, and never used. If I had been blogging then, I would have posted it, but I wasn’t.

It’s the best photo I can remember seeing from the fighting in Iraq. Actually, when you think about it, it was one of the LAST photos of actual fighting I’ve seen. You don’t see pictures of action any more on the wires. You see portraits of soldiers and marines who have died, and pictures of caskets and funerals. You see pictures taken AFTER something happened — say, the aftermath of an IED. Or you see pictures of soldiers on routine patrol, or aiming their weapons from a fixed defensive position, but not firing them.

What you don’t see is American troops inexorably, irresistibly advancing the way they are in this photo. This photo is classic, and illustrates a standard offensive infantry tactic in the act. Maybe some of you with infantry experience will correct me on this, but what I see is one soldier laying down covering fire down a street with his M-240 Bravo (which, as James reminded us Monday, is likely manufactured right here in Columbia SC, at FN) while the other men in the squad cross the street. Another soldier (actually, I’m guessing these are Marines; someone with sharper eyes than mine can probably tell for sure) backs up the machine-gunner, prepared to shoot with aimed fire at any enemy who stick their heads out, using his standard rifle.

The second man to cross the street is another machine-gunner, who will no doubt establish a base of fire from the opposite side of the street in order to allow the first MG operator and the last of the squad to cross.

The squad seems to be operating with a relentless, almost mechanical efficiency that is terrible to behold — if you are the enemy. In fact, it’s probably the unusual perspective of this photo that created the literary (if you can call sci-fi "literary") allusion in my mind: This is probably what it looks like when you are the enemy, and the U.S. Marines are coming to get you — like the Sardaukar with their "hard faces set in battle frenzy."

As I said, you don’t see many pictures like this one. It’s impressive. It certainly made an impression on me.

We will kill Harkonnens together

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James Smith is a very nice guy, and he’s also a Democrat in the post-Vietnam era. These undeniable facts lead to a sense of dissonance sometimes when he talks like a soldier. I’ve noticed this several times in the couple of years since he joined the infantry.

I noticed it again yesterday during his address to Rotary. Now that I’m writing about it, I forget exactly who said the words that kicked off this train of thought, although I remember the context. Maybe James said it, or maybe it was said by one of his comrades during a video clip he showed us. No matter. It was part of his presentation, and I know I have heard James say the same thing at other times.

Anyway, the context had to do with fighting alongside Afghan allies. These are a people bred to unbelievably (by Western standards) harsh deprivation ever since Alexander the Great was there. The dry, stark landscape is practically lunar, and the person you speak with today could get his head cut off and his body left in the dust of the road (there is only one paved road running through the entire province, and you stay off of it because a beaten path invites IEDs) as a warning, just because he spoke to you.

James speaks warmly of the bonds between his men and the Afghan police they work with. He repeatedly says any one of them would have taken a bullet for him. At one point in the presentation, either James or the guy on video, speaking of those allies, mentioned this thing that binds them: They "kill Taliban" together.

Normally, James speaks of the bond in terms that wouldn’t make delicate civilians — especially peace-minded fellow Democrats — wince, such as mutual self-sacrifice (that willingness to take a bullet) or the way the children of the country inspire him to believe in its future. But one gets the impression that among soldiers (and national police), the "kill Taliban together" thing is either said often, or is so understood that it doesn’t have to be said.

When it came up Monday, I immediately thought of Dune. Similar landscape, and the bond that the Atreides sought with the Fremen (too late to save the Atreides, unfortunately) was so very much like this one. There is the passage in which a small band of surviving Atreides form an ad hoc alliance with some Fremen, and the key affirmation that they are now allies goes like this:

    "We will kill Harkonnens," the Fremen said. He grinned.

A Rotary meeting is about as far as you can get from the surface of Arrakis. But I get the impression that Afghanistan is not.

Provocative thoughts about Iraq

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Fallujah

Now that the Surge has been indisputably successful, and the debate is mostly about what one does with that success going forward, it’s possible to have more intelligent and dispassionate discussions of what has happened, is happening and should happen in Iraq.

Here are two examples that were side-by-side on the WSJ‘s opinion pages this morning:

  • Francis Fukuyama’s "Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake," in which he tells of a $100 bet he lost. He had predicted in 2003 that at the end of five years, Iraq would be a mess of the sort that "you’ll know it when you see it." Of course he lost, and paid up. But he is not giving ground on whether we should have gone into Iraq to start with. He still says that much-larger-than-$100 gamble wasn’t worth it.
  • Jonathan Kay, in a book review of The Strongest Tribe by Bing West, describes how local U.S. commanders in Iraq understood from the start what it would take to succeed as we now have. But they were hampered by a SecDef who ironically had a little too much in common with the antiwar folks:

    Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary until November 2006, was focused from the get-go on bringing the troops home and insisted that "the U.S. military doesn’t do nation- building."

    It was only after Bush got rid of Rumsfeld and then decided to do what the likes of Petraeus and McCain advised did our success begin.

    Probably the most compelling part of the review is at the beginning, where a passage describing what it was like to be a gyrene in Fallujah in 2004 was quoted at length:

    "Imagine the scene. You are tired, sweaty, filthy. You’ve been at it day after day, with four hours’ sleep, running down hallways, kicking in doors, rushing in, sweeping the beam of the flashlight on your rifle into the far corners. . . . there’s a flash and the firing hammers your ears. You can’t hear a thing and it’s way too late to think. The jihadist rounds go high — the death blossom — and your M4 is suddenly steady. It has been bucking slightly as you jerked and squeezed through your 30 rounds, not even knowing you were shooting. Trained instinct. . . . ‘Out! Out!’ Your fire team leader is screaming in your face. . . . [He] already has a grenade in his hand, shaking it violently to get your attention. . . . He pulls the pin, plucks off the safety cap, and chucks it underhand into the smoky room."

Slight error in Sunday column

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My pastor, Msgr. Leigh Lehocky, gently corrected me this morning. My column said St. Peter’s "Parishioners live in something like 35 ZIP codes." He told me the number is now 46.

I probably remember the 35 figure from back when I was president of the parish council, back in the early 90s. I’ve heard different numbers since then, and consider it one of those wobbly numbers that can never be perfectly correct — even if you give the precise count for right now, based on parish registration, registration itself is a fuzzy thing — not everyone who attends our masses is registered, and some who are registered could have left us.

My point was that it was a bunch of ZIP codes, and I knew I would not be exaggerating if I said 35, so I covered myself by saying "something like." Bottom line, I’m right — it’s a bunch.

Msgr. Lehocky reminded me of something else I’d forgotten. Speaking of The Big Sort, the book that inspired the Robert Samuelson column that inspired my column, he said, "That’s the book I was telling you about a couple of weeks ago." Monsignor had been reading it, and recommended it to me. All I knew was that when I read the title in the Samuelson piece, I knew that I recognized it from a recent conversation; I had forgotten with whom.

Msgr. Lehocky said the book beats up on churches for the usual MLK thing (about 11 a.m. Sunday being the most segregated hour in America), but agreed that St. Peter’s was something of an exception to that "rule."

"And thank God for that," he added.

And perhaps our parish — and particularly the sub-community of those of us who habitually attend the only Mass that is bi-lingual — is an exception. But it’s the only church community I have, so my point that I don’t have the kinds of associations Mr. Bishop writes of — at least, not in any form that comes to mind — holds true.

Raskolnikov, blogger

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The upstairs bathroom, the one most convenient to the home "office" where I set up my laptop on weekends, has three books balanced atop the tank behind the throne, books which I have grabbed off a shelf on the landing on my way in there at different times, in different moods:

  1. A paperback copy of Spy Hook, part of Len Deighton’s wonderful Bernard Sampson trilogy of trilogies.
  2. A simplified-for-children paperback of The Adventures of Robin Hood.
  3. An elegant little hardbound edition of Crime and Punishment, published by Barnes & Noble, with gilt-edged pages and a built-in ribbon bookmark (original price: $4.95, with 10% off for members).

Just now I was in there and scooped up the Dostoevsky masterpiece (which I would have listed as my favorite novel when I was in college, but which I haven’t read all the way through since), and opened to this passage:

  When the soup had been brought, and he had begun upon it, Nastasya sat down beside him on the sofa and began chatting. She was a country peasant-woman, and a very talkative one.
  “Praskovya Pavlovna means to complain to the police about you,” she said.
  He scowled.
  “To the police? What does she want?”
  “You don’t pay her money and you won’t turn out of the room. That’s what she wants, to be sure.”
  “The devil, that’s the last straw,” he muttered, grinding his teeth, “no, that would not suit me … just now. She is a fool,” he added aloud. “I’ll go and talk to her to-day.”
  “Fool she is and no mistake, just as I am. But why, if you are so clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you do nothing now?”
  “I am doing …” Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.
  “What are you doing?”
  “Work …”
  “What sort of work?”
  “I am thinking,” he answered seriously after a pause.
  Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and shaking all over till she felt ill.
  “And have you made much money by your thinking?” she managed to articulate at last.

The perpetual curse of the intellectual! It can be so hard to get any respect, especially from these pleasant peasant types…

But in that moment, taking a break from blogging as I was, it occurred to me: If Raskolnikov had had the outlet of a blog, maybe he wouldn’t have murdered the old woman and Lizaveta. Maybe he would have gotten it out of his system, clacking away at his keyboard there in his garret. Maybe he could even, with the help of his enterprising friend Razumikhin, have sold some ads on his blog; who knows?

But then something else occurred to me: In his own, tortured, 19th-century way, Raskolnikov was a blogger, or had been before he had shut himself off from the world. Wasn’t that his undoing? Hadn’t Porfiry read his rantings about Napoleon and other rare, "superior" creatures stepping over their inferiors to achieve great things? Wasn’t that just the kind of indiscreet stuff that people put on blogs today, with little concern for the consequences of revealing their madder thoughts?

There’s a blogging thread that runs all the way through Dostoevsky, isn’t there — from Notes from Underground to the collection of atrocities that Ivan Karamazov kept?

Do YOU hang with people “like yourself?”

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First, read this lead paragraph from Robert Samuelson’s column today:

    People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the
celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people
favor friendships with those who share similar backgrounds, interests
and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations
and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is
nearly universal. It’s human nature.

Then share with us your answer to this question: Is this true for you?

I ask that because what Samuelson is saying is accepted as Gospel, as an "of course," by so many people. And you can find all sorts of evidence to back it up, from whitebread suburbs to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the book that inspired the column, The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.

The thing about this for me is this: I don’t know any people like me. I don’t have a group of people who look and act and think like me with whom to identify, with the possible exception of my own close family, and in some respects that’s a stretch — we may look alike and in some cases have similar temperaments, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to being alike, say, in our political views.

Oh, but you’re Catholic, you might say. Yeah, do you know what "catholic" means? It means "universal." At the Mass I attend, we sometimes speak English, sometimes Spanish, and throw in bits of Greek and Latin here and there. The priest who often as not celebrates that Mass is from Africa. We live in, I seem to recall my pastor telling me, 35 zip codes. There are black, white and brown people who either came from, or their parents came from, every continent and every major racial group on the planet. My impression, from casual conversations over time, is that you would find political views as varied as those in the general population. Sure, more of us are probably opposed to abortion than you generally find, but that’s not a predictor of what we think, say, about foreign policy.

Yeah, I might run into someone occasionally who shares my background of having been a military brat. But beyond a comparison of whether you ever were stationed in the same places, there’s not a lot to hang a sense of identity on.

I belong to the Rotary Club, which means I go have lunch with 300 or so other people who also belong to that club once a week. I can’t think of any attitude or opinion I have as a result of being a Rotarian, nor — to turn that around — did I join Rotary because of any attitude or opinion I held previously. I joined Rotary because Jack Van Loan invited me to, and my boss — two publishers ago, now — said he wanted me to join. Wait — there’s one thing that’s different: I started giving blood as a result of being in Rotary. But I don’t feel any particular identification with other people who give blood, or any particular alienation from others who DON’T give blood, the selfish cowards (just kidding).

That’s not to say anything bad about Rotary, or anything good about it. It’s just not a predictor of my attitudes. I suppose people who have an objection to singing the National Anthem and "God Bless America" every week might stay away, but that still leaves a pretty broad spectrum of life here in the Columbia area. Rusty DePass, who worked hard for Rudy Giuliani last years, plays piano at Rotary. Jack, longtime comrade and supporter of John McCain, is our immediate past president. Another prominent member is Jim Leventis, who is the godfather of Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the filmmaker Alexandra. No one of them is any more or less a Rotarian because of his political attitudes.

(I can think of one superficial way in which an outside observer might see sameness at Rotary — a lot of the men in the club are of the 6% of American men who still wear a suit to work every day, although plenty don’t. And it’s whiter than South Carolina, but that seems to go with the suit thing.)

I’m a South Carolinian, but I’m very much at home in Memphis, and have grown quite comfortable during frequent visits to central Pennsylvania, where the Civil War re-enactors wear blue uniforms.

I cannot think of five people not related to me, with whom I regularly congregate, who share my "backgrounds, interests
and values" to any degree worth noting.

Anyway, my point is that all of this is a barrier for me to understanding people who DO identify with large groups of people who look alike and/or think alike and/or have particular interests in common that bind them as a group and set them apart from others. If I tried to be a Democrat or a Republican, I’d quit the first day over at least a dozen policy positions that I couldn’t swallow. And I don’t see why others do.

Maybe I’m a misfit. But the ways in which I’m a misfit helped bring me to supporting John McCain (fellow Navy brat) and Barack Obama (who, like me, graduated from high school in the hyperdiverse ethnic climate of Hawaii). McCain is the "Republican" whom the doctrinaire Republicans love to hate. Obama is the Democrat who was uninterested in continuing the partisan warfare that was so viscerally important to the Clintonistas.

Coming full circle, I guess I like these guys because they’re, well, like me. But not so most people would notice.

It’s going to be interesting, and for me often distressing, to watch what happens as the media and party structures and political elites who DO identify themselves with groups that look, think and act alike sweep up these two misfit individuals in the tidal rush toward November. Will either of them have the strength of mind and will to remain the remarkably unique characters that they are, or will they succumb to the irresistible force of Identity Politics? I’m rooting fervently for the former, but recent history, and all the infrastructure of political expression, are on the side of the latter.

There Will Be Tedium

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Lewis

Do you ever feel you’ve been had, or at least put-upon, by what some will urge upon you as ART?

Tonight I finished, after three highly tedious sessions over as many nights and lots of fast-forwarding, trying to watch "There Will Be Blood." I kept thinking it would get better. Some of the ways in which it was off-putting at the start reminded me of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" — the same sort of heavy-handed atmosphere that seems designed to rub into your head the notion that "the West in olden times was really weird, and not at all like a Gene Autrey movie" — and that one got better. I even enjoyed it by the end.

But this did not. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis acted up a storm, but that’s all there was to it — an actor showing off, really getting into a character that I was sick of by the second reel, a character not worth getting into. So he’s done various American archetypes now — the raw nativist of "Gangs of New York," the effeminate dandy of "The Age of Innocence," and now the rapaciously driven oil man — but frankly, I think he’s repeating himself. In fact, I felt like, having seen his "Bill the Butcher," I’ve already seen the character he did in "There Will Be Blood." And the first version was much, much more interesting, even though "Gangs" is probably tied with "Innocence" in my mind for least-appealing Scorcese movie.

Anyway, it’s presented me with a tough decision. On Netflix, should I give it two stars for "didn’t like it," or the rare one star for "hated it?"

Maybe two stars. Now that I’ve griped to y’all about it, I’m not as ticked as I was about the time I wasted. I need to save the one-star rating for awfulness that is truly inspired, truly worth hating, like Lynch’s "Dune."

NOW you tell me…

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Several people have now pointed out to me the fact that the NRDC backed down on its previous assertion about S.C. beaches being so dirty.

Yeah, I know. I saw the news story. It ran the day I was packing up to leave the beach. So thanks a lot for the heads-up there, you environmental hammerheads. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

And to add insult, in that very day’s paper, as I’m heading back home to the Midlands, I’m greeted by this news:

With temperatures approaching 100 degrees today and Sunday, hundreds of
people would normally flock to the Saluda rapids at Riverbanks Zoo to
cool off.

Bad idea this weekend.

A
combination of high runoff pollution and a sewage leak from an upstream
treatment plant have caused state health officials to continue urging
people against swimming, wading or tubing at “the rocks,” as the area
is known.

“Stay out of the water at that area,” said Adam Myrick,
spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
“And keep your pets out of the water and keep them from drinking the
water.”

Great. All of this goes to back up that the best thing to do on vacation is sit in the house and read a good book. I spent a great deal of my time last week finishing this book and starting this one. It seems appropriate at this point to consider the opening passage of the latter:

Standing at the frigate’s taffrail, and indeed leaning upon it, Jack
Aubrey considered her wake, stretching away neither very far nor
emphatically over the smooth pure green-blue sea: a creditable furrow,
however, in these light airs. She had just come about, with her
larboard tacks aboard, and as he expected her wake showed that curious
nick where, when the sheets were hauled aft, tallied and belayed, she
made a little wanton gripe whatever the helmsman might do….

Fortunately for Capt. Aubrey, he didn’t have to worry about the ocean being to polluted to sail through — at least, not unless she were becalmed, and floating in her own waste…

Obama as Mr. Darcy

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Darcy

For tomorrow’s op-ed page I chose a Maureen Dowd column because I appreciated her insight that Barack Obama, in terms of his relationship with many American voters (particularly diehard female supporters of Hillary) is very much like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

This is dead-on, and it speaks to a truth that certainly should be universally acknowledged: Despite all the chatter about the deep meaning of Obama as the "first black candidate," there is nothing black about his image or persona. Can you think of a black man in literature or popular culture of whom Obama reminds you? Maybe Sidney Poitier in "To Sir With Love," if you stretch the point.

But when Ms. Dowd invokes the archetypically white, Anglo, rich, Establishment Fitzwilliam Darcy, I think, "Exactly."

Mind you, I like Mr. Darcy. When I saw the series that Bridget Jones went gaga over, I identified with him — with his negative aspects that is: his social awkwardness, his aversion to dancing, his refusal to be pleased, etc. (I am, I assure you, no Mr. Bingley.) My daughters identify me — far more accurately, in terms of the way they see me — with a different character altogether: Mr. Bennet. Perhaps if, like that gentleman, I had a study to retreat to, I would be unaware of both Mr. Darcy and Miss Jones. As it is, with so many daughters (and now, granddaughters) in the house, my life is richer. My DVD shelf includes both the definitive 1995 "Pride" and the inimitable 1968 "Where Eagles Dare," with the entire canon of "Firefly" thrown in to bridge the gap. How more well-rounded can a gentleman be, indeed?

But when Maureen tried to stretch the point and cast John McCain in "Pride" terms, her analogy broke down. She compared him to Mr. Wickham, which is not only a gross insult but has no ring of truth whatsoever. Mr. Wickham was what military men of his day would have called a "scrub." He would have garnered no respect in the gunroom of any ship in the Royal Navy in those days, for instance — yet that is precisely the sort of place where Mr. McCain would be most at home back then.

Basically, I don’t think you can find a McCain analogy in Jane Austen. The closest you could come would be the main male character in "Persuasion." At least he was a naval officer.

For that reason among others, I predict Obama will win the Chick Lit vote, hands-down.

Obamaweb

Mike Fitts helped us make up our minds

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A few days back, I shared unwelcome news with colleagues here at The State. You, our readers, ought to know as well.
    It is with the deepest regret that I hereby announce that Associate Editor Mike Fitts has left theChamber_066_0005
newspaper. His last day on the job was Friday, July 18. This page was likely the last of ours that he saw through the composing room.
    Mike, a graduate of the University of Missouri — the gold standard among J-schools — joined the paper in February 1990 after a brief stint at the Anderson Independent Mail.
    I first had the honor of working with him early the next year, when I was asked to drop what I was doing (a year-long project on fundamental problems in South Carolina government called “Power Failure”) to help out on the national desk during the Gulf War. I was immediately impressed with his quick comprehension of the importance and context of national and international events. Not many journalists his age (or mine) took the kind of interest he did in military affairs. He wasChamber_066_0004 no more a veteran than I was, but you didn’t have to tell him the difference between a rifle and a gun. He was fully ready to explain this war to our readers.
    I soon learned that Mike knew something about everything, from current events to national and world
history to the most esoteric bits of popular culture. You didn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with this guy — at least, not for money. Throw a line from an old movie at him, and he’d answer with embellishment. Make a literary allusion or refer to something that happened in politics before he was born, and he’d tell you something about it you didn’t know.
    (After I helped him with something on his last day, he replied by instant message: “Which it’s a kindness, Captain.” He was channeling a character from Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. I first heard of these wonderful books from Mike, and they are a shared passion.Chamber_066_0003 I will miss such exchanges.)
    Most of all, he not only knew things, he knew which ones were important — and why.
    Mike’s abilities in this regard were recognized when he became the newspaper’s national editor, and have been invaluable to the editorial board since he moved to the third floor in 2000.

    Mike has been our expert on national and international issues from Day One. Closer to home, he has taken on the challenging subjects of the environment, energy policy, economic development and higher education. In recent years, as our staff shrank, Mike put his desk experience to work designing our pages.
    But his greatest contribution has not been obvious to the reading public, or indeed to anyone outside of the editorial board. That is his ability to help the group frame difficult decisions, breaking them down into their component parts and setting them out in a logical sequence that does much to lead us to our eventual conclusions. I’ve made passing reference to this in past columns. Of our discussion of whom toChamber_066_0002 endorse in the GOP presidential primary this year, I mentioned that “As our lead editor on national affairs, Mike framed the discussion, speaking at length about each of the Republicans. As others joined in, it quickly became apparent that each of us had reached very similar conclusions….”
    Later that month, I would write that “As he did before the Republican primary, Associate Editor Mike Fitts framed the discussion of our Democratic endorsement, and did a sufficiently thorough job that the rest of us merely elaborated on his observations….”
    It would be an exaggeration to say we endorsed Sens. McCain and Barack Obama because of Mike — we all had our reasons — but he certainly helped us reach consensus more quick
ly and smoothly. Arriving at an answer quickly — if you remain convinced later it’s the right one — is a particular virtue in our profession.
    It’s called “leadership.” Mike has it, and it’s of that rare sort that works unobtrusively, in a collegial setting. This editorial board has benefited greatly, which is why his name’s been on our masthead the last few years.Chamber_066_0001
    Mike is leaving us to work at a new, business-to-business publication that will soon begin here in the Midlands. As far as we are concerned here in editorial, the only good news in his plans is that he will still be around, and we might get to see him and his family from time to time.
    When I asked whether he wanted to write a farewell column, Mike said he’d let his last one stand for
that purpose. In that vein I invite you go to our Web site and read it. It appeared in the last weeks of the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, under the headline, “The necessary ingredient for success: hope.”
    I’ll close with an excerpt:

    In 2008, America needs a strong dose of hope from its politics, which have been a source of gloom for years. Cynicism, partisanship and big-bucks lobbying have led to a government that does too little, as big issues go unaddressed. That’s no fun to cover as a journalist, and brings no satisfaction to suffer through as a citizen, either. In this election year, I hope for better.

For the link to Mike’s last column and more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The vanity of John Adams

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Adamsjohn

As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite Founder was John Adams. This attachment on my part dates from my college days in the early 70s, when I more or less inadvertently earned a second major in history (I had not planned it thus; I suddenly realized, with one semester to go, that I was within six credit hours of such a major, so I took two more courses. Up until then, I had merely taken as many history courses as I could as electives.)

The last week or two, I’ve been watching — gradually — the HBO series based on the Pulitzer-winning McCullough book. I was reminded by the book, and am reminded again by the excellent series, that one of the things that endeared Mr. Adams to me was his all-too-human frailty. It brings him down to a level where I am able to identify with him. The airy aloofness of Jefferson is not my way; nor is the lofty unattainability of Washington, with his natural leadership ability.

But almost every time I read of, or see portrayed so well by Paul Giamatti, the crabby vanity of Adams, I have to laugh, because I see myself. Tonight, my wife and eldest daughter joined me in recognizing his touchiness as he complained mightily of having come in second to Washington in the first presidential election.

Adams was of course right to feel that he had done much — perhaps more than any man — to earn the affection and electoral support of his countrymen. After all, HE had put Washington’s name forward to become commander of the Continental Army so that he could rise to greatness, and HE was the one who insisted that Jefferson write the Declaration, after HE, Adams, had nagged and argued and fought independence into being adopted by Congress. And then there was the matter of being the first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, etc….

But even the lamest modern political consultant could have explained how much more attractive as a candidate Washington was. And Adams’ protests that he should have done better in the election, when you see them portrayed by the brilliant Mr. Giamatti, are comically unbecoming. He was SO vain, so quick to be affronted. And when I noted I would have been the same, my wife and daughter nodded. (You know, they COULD have argued with me just a little, but they didn’t.)

As explained in the series (by way of Abigail reading a letter aloud), Washington got 69 electoral votes, and Mr. Adams only 34, which wounded him deeply. But the guy who came in third (John Jay, no slouch himself) received only nine. Adams received as many as all the rest put together (a field of 8 or 10), and yet he is so put out at getting fewer than half as many as Washington that he pouts to Abigail, "I consider such a showing a stain upon my character!"

This is why I could never offer for public office — I’d be just as petulant, were I to lose, which I probably would, being the way I am.

Far better to suffer such mortification vicariously, through studying (and seeing portrayals of) the life of Adams — and joining Laura Linney’s Abigail in being affectionately amused at his humanity. Far less painful than living it.

Of course, Abigail gets him over his tantrum by calling him "Mr. Vice President," thereby puffing him up a bit. The office had not yet been compared unfavorably to "A warm bucket of spit."

And yes, I realize that seeing myself in John Adams, a great man, is also very vain. See what I mean?

I’m not alone in seeing Bistromathic principles at work in modern finance

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Did you think I was being a tad hyperbolic (just to throw another mathematical concept at you) when I cited Bistromathics in explaining my confusion over the nation’s economic problems?

Well, I had to laugh just now reading tomorrow’s op-ed page, which contains this Paul Krugman column.

Paul Krugman is, according to his billing, an actual economist. Most of his columns might read as though they were written by a summer intern at the National Democratic Party — he is my nominee for Most Partisan Writer Currently Published in Major Newspapers. In fact, I had to double-check to make sure this column was actually written by Paul Krugman, since it did not blame anything whatsoever on George W. Bush. But it actually is a Krugman column. And he actually is an economist.

Anyway, the part of his column that grabbed me was this part:

    The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief
of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure,
the federal government will come to their rescue.

    This implicit
guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized.
If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits,
but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win,
tails we lose.

    Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad
risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic
example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the
1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of
federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money.
When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag.
The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Did you get that? "Someone else’s problem…" As you and I and Zaphod and Ford all know, there is a concept involved in the understanding of Bistromathics called "recipriversexclusons," and recipriversexclusons are essential in the generation of an SEP field, or "Somebody Else’s Problem" field. What’s that? Must I explain everything? Oh, all right:

"An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t
let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The
brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it
directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your
only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

So there you have it. And if you can’t see what I’m saying, just blame it on the recipriversexclusons.

The real Room 101

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HOrwellgeorgeaving made a reference to "Room 101" in Orwell’s 1984, I went to find an explanatory link. (On some
level or other, the very existence of hypertext is one of my biggest motivations for blogging. Even though most of y’all may not — and probably don’t — follow the links, just finding them and setting them up releases endorphins in my brain. I dig making the connections; my favorite literary device is allusion.)

In this case, I was more than usually rewarded.

Like Winston Smith, you probably know already what Room 101 is. As O’Brien explains it to the prisoner,

    You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the
answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the
worst thing in the world…
    The worst thing in the world… varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.

In my case, it was having blood drawn, which is why it took me almost 49 years to work up the nerve to start making donations at the Red Cross.

But the really cool thing, the point of this post, is to share with you what I learned by reading the Wikipedia link:

Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he used to sit through tedious meetings.

Boy, can I identify with that! I certainly hope Wikipedia was right on that one, because it really brings Orwell down to where I can relate.

Here’s a creepier fact I ran across, about the days when the Stasi terrorized East Germany:

The people of the GDR lived through their own private Nineteen Eighty-Four every single day. Funder describes Orwell’s book as "like a manual for the GDR, right down to the most incredible detail". The party, if not the proles, knew that very well. She remembers that the much-dreaded Stasi chief Erich Mielke even managed to renumber the offices in the secret-service headquarters. "His office was on the second floor, so all the office numbers started with ‘2’. Orwell was banned in the GDR, but he would have had access to it. Because he so wanted the room number to be 101, he had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, and so his office was Room 101."

The ‘Jewish lobby’

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Check this letter on today’s page:

Hollings speaks truth about Middle East
    I agree with former Sen. Ernest Hollings on his answer, as stated in the June 15 State, to James T. Hammond’s question, “How do you think our policy in the Middle East should change?” Sen. Hollings said, “Settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and 80 percent of the problems will disappear.”
    In order to solve a problem, all facts must be truthfully presented. As long as it is considered anti-Semitic to state true but politically incorrect facts about Israel, it is impossible to solve the Middle East problems. If we want to solve these problems, get rid of the Jewish lobby (the biggest lobby in Washington), and get the facts on the table.
HARRY L. NORTON SR.
Summerton

I bring it up to suggest that Mr. Norton should check out this piece in Foreign Affairs that I mentioned previously. It makes it pretty clear that U.S. support for Israel — whatever you may think of it — has long been based in widespread support among NON-Jews in this country. Argue that this nation should take a harder line on Israel if you like. But to complain about the "Jewish lobby" is to miss where most of the support of current policy is coming from.

Apparently, black folks don’t have ‘biographies’

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Today, I went to Barnes & Noble to spend a gift certificate I received for Father’s Day. Given the occasion, it seemed fitting to use it to buy a copy of a book I’ve been meaning to read, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

Of course, I sought it under "biography." No dice. I scanned the shelf where the "O’s" would be repeatedly. I looked to see if it had been mistakenly placed under "New Biography." Nope. Then I looked to make sure it hadn’t been filed by "Barack." Nope. Not under the "B’s."

So I went to the "Current Affairs" section. No luck.

Finally, I did the thing I hate, and went to the information desk. The clerk made a beeline for the "Store Favorites" table, and handed me a copy. As one does under such circumstances, I felt constrained to explain why I had had to ask for help, muttering something about having searched and searched under "Biography."

The clerk told me it wouldn’t have been under "Biography." It would have been under "African-American."

You’ll note that on the Web site, it’s considered to be a biography. But apparently not in the store. In case you wondered, John McCain does appear under "biography." Yes, the subtitle of the book is "A Story of Race and Inheritance." I get that. But it’s still a biography — or, to be technical, and autobiography. If it was right to file this under "African-American" instead of "Biography," then the McCain books — which feature him as a Navy aviator on the cover — should have been under "military history." But they weren’t.

After I got home a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that I didn’t go check what the clerk had told me — I didn’t search the "African-American" section, assuming that such a section exists. I’ll try to remember to check next time. But I do know that there were no copies under "Biography."

Through a Marine’s eyes

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This was forwarded to me today, and I pass it on as I received it:

I was part of the Dateline NBC special program titled “Coming Home” that aired Sunday, May 25th. It is about the “cost of killing.” I live in South Carolina. My name is Jesse Odom and I am 25 years old. I served in the Marine Corps and fought in Iraq. Here is my story.  Thank you.

    People on both sides of the spectrum, those for the war in Iraq and those against the war in Iraq, for the most part, say that they support the troops.  That support is typically limited to putting yellow ribbons around trees or by placing some type of sticker on their cars, and of course, by verbally saying that they support our troops. People automatically assume that our troops will get the armor they need to protect themselves in combat, they will assume that they have decent living conditions here in the States and in our warzones, they assume that our men and women are getting all of the health benefits they need, they will assume that our men and women who have been in combat will get the proper mental health care they need in order to get back on a stable mental track. The list goes on. I am tired of our naïve approach to supporting our troops and I pledge to change that. 
    On March 20th, 2003, my unit (Alpha Company 1st Bn 5th Marines) was the very first group to cross the Kuwait-Iraq border. Shortly after, we were engaged in combat and I found myself holding a fatally wounded Marine in my arms, my friend and leader, Shane Childers. I watched him die and he spoke his last words to me. He was the very first American killed in the war. We fought our way to Baghdad, accidentally and unfortunately killing the innocent, constantly living in fear, and trying to stay alive. Once we made it to Baghdad we found ourselves in what many have said was the most violent and fierce firefight during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We fought for nine hours. Nearly a hundred men were wounded and I witnessed the death of another Marine that I looked up to. We raided Saddam’s palace and the Abu Hanifah mosque where Saddam had been sighted. We killed many men and captured others. We lived at the palace for a while and then moved back to southern Iraq and eventually back to the United States.
    Shortly after getting back to the United States I finished my enlistment while my friends in my unit went back to Iraq. I started to write a book when I got out of the Marine Corps. I didn’t plan to publish the book but I used it as a coping mechanism. I camped out at my computer night after night, putting my unit’s story into words. Throughout this process, I kept up with some of my other friends that also got out of the military. Many of them struggled, and some still do. My friend, Chip Wicks, could not handle his problems and hung himself in February of 2004. This put me on a path to try to change some things. I started talking to my other friends and many of these men also had, and still have, a difficult time coping with the fact that they had witnessed and did things that many in our country could never imagine. They have a hard time coping because they are good men with Christian beliefs and a moral conscious; even though many do not regret fighting in Iraq. Many of these men will not get help, but even those that do, have to fight tooth and nail to get the help they need.
     Some of our men are being asked to use their own money to get counseling for their PTSD. The list of faults is too long to list in this email.  The faults are not limited to mental health care. However, I have decided to focus my efforts on PTSD and the suicide epidemic among our combat veterans.  People read my manuscript and loved it. I was told I should get it published and eventually I took the steps to do this. In the book, I tell my unit’s unbelievable story. But, the story does not stop on the battlefield. The battlefield has followed us home. Also, I tell of the haunting aftermath of war. I describe some of the issues that our troops and veterans face today.  I use real examples.
    In this book, I follow my unit as we prepared for war, when we went to war, and now home, where we have been put on the back burner. I am devoted to support our troops and I am going to do what I can to make a difference.
    I set up a fund titled the Chip Wicks Fund in honor of my friend that took his own life.  I am donating 10 percent of my royalties from the book sales to this fund, and the publisher has agreed to contribute 10 percent of their net proceeds from this book to the fund.  I am also accepting donations on my website.  The fund will be used to seek out and help those that have problems adjusting back into the civilian world.  Those that have or may have PTSD.  I don’t want any more of my brothers and sisters to die due to depression (suicide) when they can be helped.  I want you to help me support the troops. Not by simply waiving a flag or putting a ribbon around a tree. I want you to put this story on the front page of your paper and help me change some things.  I am trying to get more support from our government, but that will take some public pressure. 
    My book is eye opening.  It is not written by a seasoned author, a ghost writer, a politician or journalist who went on a fact-finding tour in well protected areas in Iraq. This book was written by a Marine infantryman who went and served his country and is now asking our country to truly support our troops and our combat veterans. You can help me and our men and women in uniform (and veterans). I want people to read my book and see what is going on behind the scenes of our media. I want to sell books and raise money for an unresolved problem in our country. I want people to read the book so they can see the world through an enlisted man’s eyes. My efforts are not limited to the book and the fund, I am going to go to our politicians and demand change.
    My book is titled “Through Our Eyes” (Bella Rosa Books, June 2008, ISBN 978-1-933523-14-9).
    You can go to my website and copy anything on it you want to put in your newspaper article (excerpt, pictures, bio, etc). My website is www.iraqthroughoureyes.com — I want to open the public’s eye and this book will help do that.

Please support the troops.
Thank you,
Jesse Odom

Speaking of books. On a blog related to the Dateline NBC segment referenced above, a producer mentions one called "On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Killing In War And Society" by Lt. Col. David Grossman. I’ve read much of it while drinking coffee on a couple of separate visits to Barnes & Noble. It is truly fascinating, and contains a lot of data I had not encountered before. For instance, I had known that a lot of soldiers never fire their weapons when in contact with the enemy, but an analysis of widely scattered battles through history demonstrated that a startling number of those who DO fire more or less intentionally MISS.

HERE’s that Wolfe quote

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Back on this last post, I made reference to something Tom Wolfe had written, and I just had to run it down, and it turns out to have been from The Right Stuff, and most delightfully of all, it was making fun of my least favorite sector of the MSM:

In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie’s house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o’clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn’t have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity…

Mind you, this was long before the 24/7 cable "news" channels took this sort of foolishness to exponentially greater lengths…