“Chesterton foresaw a world in which people were so completely emptied of purpose, roots, and meaning that they could be anything the current despot decided to pour in. In Brave New World especially, people would not have allowed their hungers, desires, and pleasures to become the very gods they allowed to destroy them had they not already been emptied of everything else.”
This is not merely a literary observation; Hannah Arendt identified similar factors as the prerequisites for a totalitarian society:
Loneliness and Social Atomization
Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions
The Desire to Transgress and Destroy
Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies
A Mania for Ideology
A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise
Not sure if there will be posts the remainder of this week; I’m currently engaged in a project that will see a series of reviews next week for my annual Blast from the Past series, so I’ll be finishing titles but not listing or reviewing them until after the launch post on Monday. If you want an oblique idea of what’s coming, I guess you can click here — but I emphasize oblique.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Food from Our Region We Love”. One potential issue with this: I’ve only been out of the Southland a few times in my life, both times to the Southwest. I’m not entirely sure where “food” ends and “Southern Food” begins. I will, however, try to name a few likely prospects. But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer. On the birth of American imperialism and anti-imperialism. Mailman by Steve Grant, a memoir of working as a rural mail carrier in 2020-2021 Appalachia.
WHAT are you reading now? Oh, bother. I started listening to Heroes by Stephen Fry; I’m still trudging along in The Great Crusade, Eisenhower’s WW2 memoir; I’ve started reading a novel about Aeneas and am looking at a book about the discovery of Troy and a book about the Minor Prophets to go along with my Bible in a Year project, and, and, and —
WHAT are you reading next?
I…I have no idea. I mean, LBJ and Truman are glowering at me from a corner because Homer has pulled me into Greece for a week or so, I need to get cracking on the science survey, and I have a great idea for this year’s Blast from the Past. Oh, and I just received Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization in the post. That work has been on my Amazon wishlist since I opened an Amazon account in 2005, but my Greek mood has led to it finally being purchased.
So, uh, southern food
(1) Fried Green Tomatoes. The appearance of green tomatoes in the grocery store means it’s summer, and there’s nothing like fresh FGT’s right out of the skillet. Personally, I slice `em up, dip them in milk or egg, batter them in cornmeal, and then load them with a ridiculous amount of salt and pepper.
(2) Greens. Turnip greens or collard greens, mostly. I didn’t realize these were a regional thing until a friend of mine visiting from the Southwest said he’d never heard of them.
(3) Corn bread, maybe? Surely other people cook cornmeal into bread?
(4) Hush puppies, relatedly. I can’t imagine eating sea food without these little balls of fried corn meal.
(5) Fried okra. I eat this even though I know it’s not good for me. (On any level, besides ‘mm, comfort food’.) Why do southerners eat so much fried food? It’s hot and miserable down here, you’d think we’d be experts in things that don’t require cooking. We should be cold salad experts, not deep-fried aficianados! I also like my okra pickled, especially pickled spicy.
(6) Boiled peanuts. Okay, I’ll admit to cheating now: I search for “foods only in the South”. Surely the rest of you aren’t going around at state fairs without your boiled peanuts? I mean, what do you even carry in your hand if you don’t have that paper sack of peanuts, preferably seasoned ‘cajun’ style.
(7) Biscuits and sausage gravy. The ultimate in breakfast comfort food. Sausage gravy is thick and white. Basically, you fry up an entire thingy of sausage (that’s a technical term for a pound of sausage in a thin plastic wrapper) in small bits, then start adding milk and flour until it’s nice and creamy.
(8) Real grits. Not Quaker instant, that stuff relates to grits as much as frozen fish sticks related to fried catfish. Real grits are cooked slow, with milk and butter, and they’re so creamy and good you’d think this was what the Hebrews were on about with manna. One of my Christmas traditions is to eat grits and tomato gravy for brunch with my godparents (after breakfast with my parents — oofah). Tomato gravy is its own thing, requiring a healthy diet of bacon just to give you the drippings to get started. Southern food means we don’t live as long as everyone else, but by god we enjoy it more.
(9) Pecan pie. Pronounced pu’cahn pie, spare me your pee cans. I always look for this at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
(10) Chicken ‘n’ dumplins’. Another classic that I associate strongly with Thanksgiving. My grandmother used to make them.
March 2020 was a bad time for most people, but for Steve Grant it was worse. He’d just been laid off from his lucrative marketing job. A man who once lectured at the nearby university and dominated corporate boardrooms was now jobless — and status-less. However, the post office still needed carriers. Mailman is Grant’s memoir of going to work for the post office as a rural mail carrier, which would already be more challenging than city jobs even without the unique topography of the Appalachians. I’m no stranger to on-the-job type memoirs, but this one takes the appeal of learning about how the post office works at the carrier level, and adds to it the story of a man going through an existential crisis in the middle of COVID. The soft-handed spokesman was suddenly spending ten or more hours a day in tiny vehicles full of packages and letters, trying to organize and distribute them while baking in the summer sun (or the winter cold) and avoiding getting lost or wiped out by the Mountains. The memoir is sometimes crass, but generally entertaining; working the rural routes was a definite learning experience for Grant, and he does not shy away from mocking himself struggling against the learning curve.
While I have read about the post office before, that was more of a history. What Grant offers is a behind-the-lines account of how rural carriers begin their days building a ‘case’ — that is, a library of all the mail they’re delivering that day, organized in route order, with package cards to remind them that there’s a package in back for the house or a VAC card to remind them that the house has no tenants and its mailbox may be full of angry wasps or something — and then heading out to deliver all the contents. Depending on the route and the carrier, case building and execution can take a long time: Grant confesses to working 14 hour days sometimes because he was so slow at creating his case, or because he ran into issues finding the house he was delivering to. Rural routes, especially in the mountains, are not as simple as walking down the street and plopping mail in. When one home ordered a minifridge that wouldn’t fit in their roadside parcel container, Grant had no choice but to improvise a way to haul the fridge across a creek and into the property. The people there were astonished: between the mountain itself and the pandemic, they hadn’t seen another soul on their property in months.
COVID plays a large role in Grant’s story, and not only because it’s what led to him being laid off and seeking work at the local post office. The imposed isolation of people created a huge surge in mail-order traffic, as people began ordering normal household supplies online, or began developing new hobbies and such during the worst of the lockdown period. This led to Grant and his colleagues delivering a strange upsurge in baby chickens and chicken feed, as well as consumer goods that indicated most Americans were not investing their off-time in learning to be musicians or potters or whatever. They were instead seeking escape into video games and..uh, prurient recreational equipment. Veteran postal workers complained that COVID had brought “Christmas in July” — but if you’re a rural carrier driving a small vehicle packed with parcels, “Christmas” translates to longer days and more work, not glad tidings of comfort and joy. The year 2020 was also an election year, leading to stress over mailed-in ballots (Grant is emphatic that USPS people take the sanctity of ballots seriously) and politics in general. While he worked with a lot of people of varying intense political views, the only time he was physically threatened was when someone accosted him at a gas station and demanded access to the PO Box they’d stopped paying for.
Although the book is fairly entertaining, at least for someone like myself who really enjoys seeing how different institutions and vocations work, it’s laden with digressions on everything from the author’s thoughts on guns to his religious experiences. It is clear that he took something of value from his time spent driving — particularly the idea of it being a service, a vocation, rather than merely a job — but it definitely needed editing, especially towards the end.
Quotations
Tom was about the same age as Hank. Bearded, lean, and an avowed Libertarian. How he was able to square being a Libertarian but working for the largest federal service is beyond me. If you’re wondering how I know he was a Libertarian, then you’ve never spent any time with Libertarians, because all you need to do is wait five minutes.
Everyday, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck, and then disassembles that library in route order. We all worked in a big warehouse room with intake loading docks on one side and outbound loading docks for the mail trucks on the other. Everything smelled of machine oil and cigarette smoke, but there was something else. The smell of ink and paper, the smell of the mail.
Politics were always out in the open at the USPS. At the post office I worked with all sorts of people—militant leftists, MAGA Republicans, general hillbilly government rejectionists, the politically uninformed and uninterested, garden variety labor Democrats and standard-issue rock-rib Republicans. Yes, the politics were there, but there was no hate. Republican red, Democrat blue—at the end of the day we were all postal blue. The mail always came first. When you work with people, when you get to know them as people, it becomes much harder to hate them, at least for 99 percent of folks. And that remaining 1 percent is hateable entirely on their own human merits.
Mom had grown up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She’d never had a dog. So she gave me dog treats in a plastic sandwich bag. “Give these to the dogs and they won’t attack you.” A nice idea, but one that flew in the face of canine nature. Now I was not just a bite-size toy, but one that came with hors d’oeuvres.
I have a hard time believing books are obsolete any more than knives are. Unlike a knife, which wears with use, a book grows more valuable with each reading. Each reading spreads the ideas it contains further, to new minds where, if read with care, they will unlock new thoughts.
I think the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work is a false one. Both forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other. The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it’s one of the great dividing lines in American life. I wonder if part of how we’ve become so atomized is that while we all work, few of us serve. It is service that gives life meaning, and it is service to our community and our nation that gives the ideas of “community” and “nation” meaning as well.
Today’s TTT is books we were reading on this day for the last ten years. My approach to this will be to look at the review posted on or after August 11th for the last decade. Actually, I may have used the date of August 14th, realized that only after compiling the entire list, and then decided “What difference does it make?!” — but that’s strictly between you and me, dear reader. (Just don’t let the others in on it.)
BUT FIRST! Ye Olde Teaseday Tuese, this time from Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering Mail in the Appalachians.
“Everyday, each letter carrier effectively builds a library, loads it into a truck, and then disassembles that library in route order. We all worked in a big warehouse room with intake loading docks on one side and outbound loading docks for the mail trucks on the other. Everything smelled of machine oil and cigarette smoke, but there was something else. The smell of ink and paper, the smell of the mail.
And now, we return to our regularly scheduled Top Ten Tuesday
2025:
Husk, Nathaniel Eliason. A memorable SF title about a world that’s a little Ready Player One, a little Fallout. Fun SF thriller that involves uploading human minds into digital worlds.
2023: Day of Atonement, David Liss. Another compelling historical fiction novel, this one set in Lisbon’s Jewish community in the 18th century or so. Liss’s historical novels are thrillers laden with personal, political, and criminal intrigue.
2022 Boy, do I have my pick: I posted a short round collection on August 16 that included everything from a Gore Vidal essay collection to an underwhelming history of Babylon.
2021 Attack Surface, Cory Doctorow. The third book in his hella cool Little Brother series, this one shifts perspective to a woman named Masha who had gotten involved in law enforcement’s efforts to track down the terrorists responsible for destroying the Bay Bridge….until she realizes that the tools she and her colleagues are developing are also enabling brutal dictators across the world.
2020 American Illiad, Charles P. Roland. A short history of the American Civil War, which I read while I was visiting the Shiloh battlefield.
2018: Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow. Another fun SF novel from Doctorow, this one about copyright. In the novel, a young man who creates new stories by ‘remixing’ footage is persecuted by the government and has to go into hiding.
2017 The Age of Napoleon, Will & Aerial Durant. Jiminy cricket, has it been nearly ten years since I finished the epic Story of Civilization series?
I no longer remember when I first encountered Michael Warren Davis, but his critique of modernity and his countercultural vision of Christianity appealed to me in much the same way that The Plain Readerand Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Conservativesdid years ago.After Christendom is a book written for Christians in a West that is rapidly de-Christianizing, and challenges them to rethink what Christianity is. He cautions believers against trying to hold on to power through political ends, arguing that an emphasis on Christian politics often obscures way of Christ. This is something I am partially sympathetic to, especially as a reaction against people who are flocking to traditional Catholicism or Orthodoxy because they are “based” — the so-called Orthobros and tradbros. Regardless of where one stands on cultural or religious issues, I think it’s safe to say that someone who enters Christ’s door seeking anything other than Christ himself will find nothing but self-defeat.
Davis appears to believe that history is leading to a new phase in which Christianity will become culturally marginalized, but the faith of believers more purified and holy because of that. This makes sense to a large degree: people who are Christian simply for cultural cachet will drop it the moment it becomes ‘uncool’, and persecution has an interesting way of intensifying faith. (Think of Fear No Evil: the author was a secular Jew when he went into the Gulag, but became very observant the more the Soviets tried to punish him for his thought-crime.) Warren then shifts to ways that Christians can get more serious in their devotion, like using the Jesus prayer and avoiding things like smartphones that destroy our ability to ‘attend’ to what matters.
I found this a challenging little book, in part because Davis’s approach would appear to focus only on spirituality: Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option has been libeled as promoting withdrawal from society when he was in fact championing creating Christian institutions which would allow faithful Christians to support one another — but Davis appears to be closer to that attitude. Christ advocated turning the other cheek, yes, but would he truly damn Charles Martel for defending France against invading Muslims? If the sword was not taken up as well as the cross, would medieval Christendom’s hospitals and universities have ever flowered? Would we have cathedrals and hymns? More importantly, would Christians have a society where it is safe or even possible to be Christian? Yes, a marriage with power can easily corrupt the faith, and yes, a society that is ‘culturally Christian’ can allow someone to have an extremely shallow faith with no roots or substance whatsoever — but abandoning politics completely seems just the sort thing the Enemy would want. I’m afraid this book makes me feel like Peter in the garden, lopping off Malchus’ ear rather than giving up without a fight. I can’t help but think of another young man, though, the rich young ruler who was willing to follow Christ — but went away sad because he couldn’t give up what Christ asked him to. I will have to live with this book a while yet.
The Christian must take James Bond’s motto as his own. Orbis non sufficit: “the world is not enough”. Tragically, most Western Christians have lost their sense of xenitia. We don’t feel estranged from this world. We don’t want to feel estranged from this world.
We may not realize it, but so many of us today commit the same sin as the Pharisees. We believe that our God must be a conquering God. We would sacrifice the pure teachings of Christ on the altar of political power. We reject the role of the suffering servant. We refuse the Cross.
“Christ is the only exit from this world; all other exit — sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence — are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.” – Fr Seraphim Rose
“I feel that in another time of crisis and confusion we need to go back to our roots, both literal and spiritual. To flee from the civilized center that denies God and launches salvo after salvo daily against the human soul. To seek out a wild Christianity, which will see us praying for hours in the sea as the otters to play around us. To understand — to remember — that the Earth and the world are not the same thing.” – Paul Kingsnorth
If you read the Greek Fathers, you’ll notice that another word pops up over and over. The word is phronema, and it means “mentality” or “mindset”. The Eastern churches place a strong emphasis on developing a Christian phronema. It’s not enough, they say, simply to memorize Christ’s teaching. You have to learn how to think the way Christ thinks, to see as He sees, to feel as He feels. You have to put on “the mind of Christ”, as St. Paul calls it. Every part of our selves must be converted, baptized, and redeemed, our minds and our bodies, and hearts and our souls.
“If we fail to cultivate this relationship with Christ, we will not weather the coming storm. Saint Ignatius of Antioch made that much abundantly clear. We won’t fight for Christ unless we know Him. We don’t die for Christ unless we love Him.”
We exist in love, by love, through love, for love.
I think it’s good to remind ourselves periodically of the first rule of Scriptural exegesis: You are not Jesus. Whenever you read a story about Jesus’ life, you should not identify with Jesus. You should identify with the sinner whom He is healing, converting, forgiving, upbraiding, flagellating, or what have you.”
The Enemy only wants to lure us from the difficult path that leads to the Gate of Life. He doesn’t care if we stumble to the Left or to the Right. He doesn’t care if we become materialists or magicians. Both suit his purposes nicely.
Our little black rectangles are the essence of the ‘spot’ that sin leaves on our souls. My friend Michael Dominic Taylor, a brilliant young Catholic philosopher, calls them palantirs, portals through which the evils of the world flow into our homes and into our souls. We feed them our fears, ambitions, and desires; and a torrent of corruption and lies pours forth in a ceaseless, demonic whisper. The sensible thing to do would be to banish them from our lives.
Our duty as Christians is to surround ourselves with true and good and beautiful things. We have to purge everything fake and evil and vulgar from our lives. This may sound like an indulgence, but that’s only the world phronema talking. It’s not an indulgence: it’s a solemn Christian duty.
If we take the Philippines under the treaty of peace, the downfall of the American Republic will date from the administration of William McKinley. – Sen. George F. Hoar
I’ve been wanting to read this title for years now after having found Stephen Kinzer’s various books on DC’s overseas adventures, while at the same time stumbling upon Mark Twain’s anti-war writings collected in Weapons of Satire. Coming of age during the Terror War and the interminable occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, learning about the American occupations of Cuba and the Philippines was a pivotal moment for me, shifting me more toward complete cynicism about DC. Stephen Kinzer writes at the beginning of A True Flag that the current debate in the Middle East (referring then to the Terror War, not Trump’s Hormuz disaster) is not a novelty – that Americans have argued about the proper role of America in international affairs since at least the end of the 19th century. Here, focusing on Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt as spokesmen for anti-imperialism and imperialism respectively, Kinzer tells the story of how America became an empire while beating liberty and self-determination’s drum. The number of actors who take the stage, though, make it even more interesting than a debate between Twain and TR, because we witness men like Hearst and Bryan taking unpredictable stances during the debate as it unfolds.
The United States of the 1890s was a virile and booming nation, moving full steam ahead into the industrial future — but to some, the future seemed to promise nothing but stagnation. The frontier was closed! Manifest destiny had been fulfilled — now what were we to do? Where to find new markets for America’s rapidly expanding factories and its cheap immigrant labor? Go west, young man — far west. By way of Spain! Spain was having a bit of a restive colonials problem, and Cuba was close enough that Americans were catching wind of it. Many Americans were sympathetic to the plight of rebels fighting against an overweening empire; wasn’t that the way the US of A got started? There was also a sincere belief that, as the new century dawned, it was time for the New World to throw more full off the rusty shackles of the Old, and America could help. There were, however, less idealistic motives. Some, like Roosevelt, were spoiling for a fight: it had been too long since the US Army wet its blade — a nation that didn’t “get action” would grow soft and feeble, prey to others! Others saw war as a way to turn the Spanish empire into a new market for America’s humming factories — and still others, like Hearst, saw it as a way to sell newspapers.
The Spanish-American war would not last long; in the course of a summer, American forces had won battles against Spain in Cuba and across the great Pacific main, seizing Guam and establishing occupation of the Philippines. While the government had preached that it was going to war purely to take down a tyrannical empire, to allow the Cuban and Filipino people to govern themselves, the peace treaty McKinley offered was strictly between the US and Spain — no input from the peasants, thank you — and effectively ceded the Philippines directly. While anti-war voices had already begun decrying the Spanish-American war before it started, demanding the Constitutional prerogative for going forth in search of monsters to destroy, the debate over the Treaty would so light a fire under them that a proper organization would be formed.
This was not a collection of intellectuals and cranks, either: there were heavyweights like Andrew Carnegie aboard, labor leader Samuel Gompers, andthe very influential Democratic senator, William Jennings Bryan. At this time, foreign intervention was so new, and American constitutionalism so ingrained, that the approval of the treaty came down to the wire. Astonishingly, though, William Jennings Bryan evidently began asking his allies in the Senate to support the treaty, while at the same time making speech after speech against the war itself. When enraged and betrayed anti-imperialists demanded an answer, Bryan meekly responded that he felt it more probable that the Filipinos could arrive more quickly at liberty once a firm foundation of peaceable order had been achieved. (A more cynical take is that Bryan did not want to catch fire during next year’s elections for undermining the treaty: I can’t countenance that given what else I know of Bryan, but it’s not the most outlandish suggestion.) Hearst, too, who’d ginned up the war to sell papers, was by this point more interested in championing other things. Who wants to read about a guerilla war, month after month? As the Filipino resistance to American occupation persisted, however, and the military resorted to more and more brutal measures to destroy it — including treating ten year old boys as potential combatants — people did start taking interest. Still, when McKinley was felled by an anarchist’s bullet and arch-crusader Theodore Roosevelt took over, the anti-imperial movement knew the time had come to admit defeat.
Kinzer closes the book by looking at the course of intervention since then, and to the American public’s generally unreliable resistance to it. We seem to only care about overseas escapades when they impact our lives directly, like Vietnam’s draft or the surge in gasoline prices that followed Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. There was something noble about the anti-imperialist movement Kinzer documents here, because people were outraged at the principle of it. The American Republic was supposed to be a new thing in the world, a shining city set on a hill — and, as that sermon continued, the eyes of the world would be upon us. That meant that engaging in imperialism, even and especially in the name of expanding ‘freedom’, would not only be immoral in itself, but would do lasting damage to the idea of the American republic. The Stars and Stripes would be bloodstained — not by patriots, but by victims.
Quotations
Gómez turned it down, adding poignantly that he wished he had never agreed to American intervention in Cuba. “None of us thought that it would be followed by a military occupation of the country by our allies, who treat us as a people incapable of acting for ourselves, and who have reduced us to obedience, to submission, and to a tutelage imposed by force of circumstances,” Gómez wrote. “This cannot be our fate after years of struggle.
From the interrogation, Funston learned that Aguinaldo was in a remote outpost called Palanan awaiting reinforcements. Funston developed an astonishing Trojan horse plan: assemble a force of Macabebe scouts, dress them as insurgents, sail with them to the American base closest to Palanan, lead them on a hundred-mile trek inland, take them into Palanan pretending to be the expected reinforcements, and then surprise and capture Aguinaldo.
One of [Twain’s] pieces reads like an obituary for the United States. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic,” he wrote. “She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work. Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.”
Andromache: Hector, must you fight? I don’t want my son to grow up without a father. The Fates: …that can be arranged…
While I enjoyed Stephen Fry’s Mythos tolerably well a few years ago, it didn’t fire up my engines so much that I went after the next ones immediately; recently a Greek wind has hit my imagination, though, and afterlistening to The Odyssey, the only thing to do would be to order Captain Fry to tack back towards Troy. As with his prior works, Troy is a composite. Fry incorporates stories that were connected to the Iliad as well as the Iliad proper — and well he must, because The Iliad doesn’t refer to the sack of Troy at all, except in ominous prophecy. It ends, in fact, with the lion-hearted Achilles relenting from his sorrow and rage and allowing the aged Priam to reclaim his son Hector’s body for proper burial. When Fry said, “Here ends Homer — but not the war”, I checked the time register — three hours left. While Troy is a grand story of huge human personalities clashing against one another, it’s also one of the gods being absolute bloody nuisances. Even the storm-gatherer Zeus has to call his children out on it after Ares limps back to Olympus holding his innards in because some plucky Mortal given eyes to see threw a spear right at the lord of war. (Said mortal also stabbed Aphrodite, which is unchivalrous but holy Zeus did she have it coming. The entire bloody war is her fault!) The gods are all over the place meddling; the cursed Paris would be mourning the lack of mirrors in Hades, and the armies gone home, if Aphrodite (you again!) didn’t interfere to prevent Menelaus from strangling him. At one point, Achilles’ fury is such that he kills so many Trojans in the river Scamander that the river itself starts attacking him, at which point other gods take pity on the son of Peleus and stay the river with fire. So wild is the imagination of men, yet 21st century movie theaters can’t vomit anything else up but hackneyed sequels.
As with Fry’s other books, I enjoyed his little sidebars and stuff, but his talent for a wide range of voices allows the many strong characters here to shine. The Iliad is agog with huge personalities, and many of them are those who people who’ve only seen Troy have forgotten — like Diomedes, who would be the action hero of the Achaeans if not for Achilles — at least, until the little worm Paris shot him in the foot. What is it with you and shooting grown men in the foot? (Diomedes at least gets to start mocking Paris, whereas Achilles had been hit by a poisoned arrow and had less opportunity to entertain the troops.) They’re also more complex than popular presentations show: while Agamemnon had serious faults as a man and a leader, we get tosee him earn his title of Agamemnon, Ruler of Men here, as well as admit his faults. Sure, he’s trying to get Achilles to stop sulking in his tent, and as such is willing to give him seven cities, various women — including his pick of Agamemnon’s daughters as wife — as well as the concubine Achilles has been brooding over, but gosh darn it, he sounds sincere. Paris….Paris does not become more sympathetic. He’s one of my least favorite characters in all of fiction, a character who inspires revulsion, disdain, and contempt on my part; I didn’t realize, however, how wholly inadequate my loathing for him was until listening to Troy. The little git not only kidnapped a woman, he used her husband being away from the palace to attend a funeral to completely rob the man — violating all the rules of proper guest behavior — and then decided to hit up a few other places and kill another man on his way home. Fry really leans into the sheer weirdness of Greek stories.
While I expected to be entertained — Fry is never not entertaining — the advantage of sinking into a story I knew fairly well, plus the strengths of that story itself and the sheer chaotic absurdity the gods add — made this a fantastic treatment of Homer & co. Will I be finishing the quadrilogy with Heroes? Eh, we’ll see: while it does have some familiar names like Jason and Heracles, I have just listened to 20+ hours of Stephen Fry talking in the last two weeks.
Related: The Illiad, Homer. Translated by Robert Fagles.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? After Christendom, Michael Warren Davis
WHAT are you reading now? Listening to Troy, prepared and read by Stephen Fry.
WHAT are you reading next? Probably The True Flag by Stephen Kinzer, focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain as opposing voices on the question of imperialism. And by “probably”, I mean “I’ve read a quarter of it already”. I say probably because I’ve had an idea for this year’s Blast from the Past, my annual warp back to my younger self’s reading.
(1) Dutton Ranch. (TV) I came for Morgan Wade. I don’t see any Morgan Wade. Someone give me timestamps, life is too short to watch an hour of a show just to spot her playing bartender in the background. Here’s some immediate MW gratification for the curious; her new release, “Love’s Insane”.
(2) Cobra Kai. (TV) Just got distracted. Planning on returning to it. Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!
(3) Star Trek Strange New Worlds, season 3: (TV) Paramount Plus does not like my browser extensions that cripple information-harvesting, so it usually takes 4-5 tries to get it to start streaming. Also, season 3 is a little…odd. I will return.
(4) Rick Riordan’s Norse series. (YA books) At some point I went “Eh, I’m tired of reading about a trio of kids who are told to take a road trip to save Earth from a chaos monster before the Solstice/Equinox in three weeks”.
(5) Rick Riordan’s Roman series. (YA books) I literally just missed everything after The Mark of Athena. So, all of them. (Last read in 2012, oofdah.)
(6) Shrinking. An AppleTV series with Marshall from How I Met Your Mother and Harrison Ford from Witness, in which Marshall plays a therapist whose patients’ problems give him an emotional blue screen of death. I watched the first few episodes and enjoyed it, but I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched an entire series through. Okay, it was late spring, when I re-watched 11.22.63. And before that it was Chernobyl. But except for those, I honestly can’t tell you.
(7) Star Trek Picard (season 3). The less said about season 1 and 2, the better. I liked season three, except for the weird smoking alien, but after they killed off my favorite surly Bajoran (no offense, Colonel Kira), I meh’d right out.
(8) Star Trek Discovery (season 2). I have started watching this 3-4 times. I must persevere, if only for Anson Mount and Ethan Peck. But man. Maybe the next time I’m hospitalized or something.
(9) Clan of the Cave Bear (the last novel). I read all but the last of the Jean M. Auel Cro-Magnon novels in which Ayla invents everything from equestrianism to sewing. Auel did a crazy amount of research, but the books got progressively more like a soap opera, and I just didn’t care enough to tackle the huge one.
(10) History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill. I enjoyed the ones my library had, but we didn’t have all of them. So, I technically haven’t finished it..
I can’t believe I almost missed this. Ray Bradbury’s story, “And There Will Come Soft Rains”, was thecreepiest bit of short fiction I ever read in middle or high school. Images of it have haunted me since. The best way to experience it, of course, is reading it without knowing a single thing about the story – only the general tension of the Cold War. But is that possible today? Well, if you don’t know about it, read it. And then you can listen to this adaptive audio drama which ruins the twist but has its own merits. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an inexplicable interest to play Fallout 4.
Apologies if you are on the list and received a blank email earlier: WordPress ate my words. Fortunately I always draft off-platform.
Many presidents have a defining moment – a call to arms in a speech, a decisive action, a public stumble. That is not quite the case with the Eisenhower administration, which was so undramatic that its opponents sneered at Eisenhower as a do-nothing, a mere custodian of the office pending the arrival of a real president. William I. Hitchcock reviews more recent scholarship and dismisses that caricature of the Eisenhower years, and here offers a more measured look at a very measured man. Going into this volume, I didn’t know much at all about the Eisenhower administration save for Sputnik and the Iran coup, so this was a fun deep dive that meshed nicely with The Hidden Coalition as well as Ike and Dick.
Although Eisenhower was encouraged to run for office the moment D-Day was over, he demurred: he had no interest in that sort of thing, he said. So high was his flag that even President Truman urged him to run in 1948 – the same year that Truman would run for election in his own name, and narrowly beat Dewey. Eisenhower took a Washingtonian approach to seeking high office: he would not seek it. However, soldier that he was, he would serve if he was called and it was necessary. The fact that both parties courted Eisenhower is a testament to both his established leadership during the war, and his general affability: one reporter commented that something about being around Ike just made people feel good. He was like a grandpa with a pocket full of peppermints and a readiness to listen to every detail about how your day had gone.
That was the image. As a president working with Congress, Eisenhower was unpracticed and clumsy – but as a politician, he had a certain dark cunning that Nixon commented on in private. Eisenhower was no Roosevelt, running into the action with a saber in hand yelling “Bully!”: he preferred to work behind the scenes, managing a strong team. He was largely aided by his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who shared his vision for the world. Eisenhower won the Republican domination against Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, who was a conservative of the old school who did not believe the world was America’s to manage: Eisenhower, by contrast, was very internationalist. Part of this owed to the disaster of World War 2, but the Cold War also fed his desire for the United States to be pro-active in building international institutions to govern the affairs of men in a more peaceful fashion. Specifically, he was looking at the third world and the need to win its hearts and minds to the American rather than Soviet way. This was why during the Suez crisis, in which the British, French, and Israelis had invaded Egypt to keep its new dictator from pushing the western powers out of the canal they’d created, Eisenhower astonishingly withheld his support. He could not woo the third world by supporting old colonial powers. (At any rate, the Soviets were then invading Hungary: so much for the 1950s being boring!). Eisenhower’s desire for the United States to be regarded as the friend of liberty was also why he made what little progress in CIvil Rights that he did: he shared the prejudices of his time, and he was extremely cautious about expanding DC’s power over State power – but at the same time, he felt America needed to live up to its creed if it expected to be taken seriously by non-aligned nations like India and those who were emerging as European colonialism began withdrawing. There were, of course, limits to that; Ike was an adamant cold warrior who began constructing the permanent military-industrial complex he later warned against, and he had no qualms overthrowing sovereign governments if they looked like they were going to flip to the Soviets.
This was a wonderfully deep history of the period. LBJ is far more antagonistic in this than The Hidden Coalition led me to expect; he in fact so adulterated Eisenhower’s Civil Rights bill that he makes his 1965 self look like nothing but an opportunistic hypocrite. I had no idea how volatile the international scene was during the Eisenhower years, and the domestic front was no picnic. Either. Hitchcock’s appraisal of Eisenhower is generally fair and grounded in facts, though he’s much too quick to dismiss men like Taft as extremists for merely maintaining a position that was normal before the war (not managing other nations’ business). At any rate, the volume was well-written and I sailed through despite its girth.
Quotations
It was immensely frustrating for Eisenhower to discover that while his appeal to moderation made him admired in the country as a whole, it disarmed him in Congress. Compromise was the ultimate outcome of most congressional proceedings, but to win even half a loaf, you had to fight fiendishly for a whole one while threatening to burn down the bakery. This was not Eisenhower’s style.
Six days later Allen Dulles and Eisenhower stared at photographs of the Soviet Union taken from space. “This one satellite mission,” said the secret CIA history of the program, “yielded photo coverage of a greater area than the total produced by all of the U-2 missions over the Soviet Union.”
What explains this decisive rebuke from the voters? Eisenhower blamed “the seeming desire of the people of our country to depend more and more upon government—they do not seem to understand that more governmental assistance inevitably means more governmental control.”
Khrushchev plied his British guests with caviar, salmon, excellent vodka, Russian brandy, ballet performances, and long late-night suppers. But then Macmillan discovered what all the other Westerners who engaged with Khrushchev learned: there were two Nikitas. The first was a rational statesman, ready to talk about peace, arms control, and coexistence. The other was the communist zealot, the prosecutor, the brawler who threw angry punches in every direction.
Ike had the most sought-after and yet rarest of qualities in politics: “He makes people happy. No cavalcade I have followed in the entourage of any other political figure in this country has ever left so many smiling, glowing people behind as an Eisenhower tour.”
In the fall of 1960, Moos and his assistant, Capt. Ralph E. Williams, sketched out some ideas about the place of militarism in American life. The United States, for the first time in its history, possessed a “permanent war-based industry” and a “war-based industrial complex” that inevitably shaped governmental decisions. “This creates a danger,” Williams wrote, “that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be very careful to ensure that the merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy.”
During the month of March, Kennedy became, as even his loyal and devoted chronicler Arthur Schlesinger Jr. admitted, “a prisoner of events.” The invasion plan had a momentum of its own, and the bureaucratic forces pushing for it would have been hard to resist. Kennedy drew as his chief lesson from the Bay of Pigs affair never to trust the experts, especially the generals and the CIA planners who had all but promised success. But this lesson he could have learned by heeding Ike’s warning, proffered just weeks before, that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Kennedy had mocked “the old asshole” then; he was not laughing now. “No one knows how tough this job is until he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy sighed. Ike could not resist a small moment of triumph: “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
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