To Wake the Giant

Posted on June 21, 2020 by smellincoffee

To Wake the Giant: A Novel of Pearl Harbor
© 2020 Jeff Shaara
528 pages

boomboomboom

In To Wake the Giant,  Jeff Shaara returns to World War 2, this time with a curveball.  Unlike most of his other novels,  Wake the Giant follows three individuals in peacetime,  covering the year before the attack at Pearl Harbor.  War does arrive, though, as the story culminates in that quiet Sunday morning  in which the US Pacific Fleet was savagely ambushed. Shara uses three viewpoint characters to explore life as a sailor aboard the USS Arizona (Hospital Apprentice Biggs),  follow the Japanese planning and execution of the attack (Yamamoto), and  to lurk in the Oval Office as FDR and the Secretary of  State Cordell Hull  weigh their priorities and wonder what, if anything, the Japanese are up to. Once the attack on Pearl begins in earnest, a few more minor viewpoint characters enter the picture, though there’s not  as much time spent on the day itself as I’d expected.   Also unexpected, our main viewpoint character Biggs didn’t perish, although he certainly gave it the old college try, what with being burned, lacerated, thrown off the ship, and subjected to infection and maggots.  The same cannot be said of other characters throughout the book, as you might expect with a lot of the action set on the Arizona.   All three viewpoints are hugely sympathetic, even Yamamoto who is given the sorry task of plotting a strike against the United States —  the first blow in a war he is almost certain will lead to Japan’s ruin.  I enjoyed this largely to experience life aboard the Arizona; I’ve been aboard few WW2 museum ships (Alabama, Texas, and Kidd), and find the WW2 navy particularly compelling to read about.   It was good to read Shaara again.

 

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American Terrorist

Posted on June 19, 2020 by smellincoffee

American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing
©  2001, 2015 Lou Michel & Dan Herberck
426 pages

mcveigh

 

During a recreation period one day, a prisoner in an adjoining cage poured his heart out to McVeigh, telling him how his life had gone wrong. When he finished, the inmate looked at McVeigh and asked, “Tim, where did you go wrong?” “I didn’t go wrong,” McVeigh said.

The Oklahoma City bombing is one of the first major news events I can remember hearing about as a kid; although I couldn’t appreciate its brutality then, I knew from the look of horror on adults’ faces as they took in the scene that it was serious.The bomber, I was told, was crazy. This was an act of violence perpetuated by a crazy person.  After reading American Terrorist, though,  I’m more disturbed about the bombing than ever — because its perpetrator was so frighteningly normal, and went to his death believing he’d done the right thing.  American Terrorist is the biography of Timothy McVeigh, an-All American boy broken by war and twisted by hate to become the monster he loathed and thought he was fighting.

Once expects, when reading the biography of someone like McVeigh, to find him pulling the limbs off lizards and throwing cats into ponds for laughs as a kid.   That McVeigh isn’t here. We find instead a young man who loved guns but recoiled from hurting others, who learned to hate bullies and yearn to overcome them, like a superhero. In his early youth he worked as a security guard, lauded for his honesty and astonishingly mature professionalism. He looked at Star Trek the Next Generation and saw it in an ideal future: he admired Picard’s moral convictions, Data’s pure reason, and Geordi’s hypercompetence as an engineer. His own interests were diverse, from firearms to computers.

But McVeigh also had his fears, and as they grew older they would dominate him. McVeigh’s interest in guns immersed him in gun culture, and he absorbed its frequent conflicts with the government and grew to see it not as his friend, but more like a really awful neighbor  — one who constantly filches your stuff and makes the very act of coexistence obnoxious. Despite this,  McVeigh’s interest in firearms and desire for a mission in his life took him into the US Army, where he served with distinction despite his misgivings about US foreign policy, which he regarded as invasive.  After being deployed in Iraq, his misgivings ripened into conviction:   the US government was a bully, both to its own people and those around the world.  When he returned home, he was a different man, sick and angry — and when the government managed to create two fiascos in six months, both of which involved besieging private property and then killing the people inside by purpose or accident,  he decided there was only one thing to do: fight back.  He was going to attack the government by finding a Federal building that housed ATF and FBI offices, and then blowing it up. He was inspired in part by The Turner Diaries, in which a revolutionary kicks off a war against an oppressive state by destroying the J. Edgar Hoover building. The book then follows McVeigh as he creates a plan and moves forward with it, then covers the trial. Interestingly, McVeigh had already been arrested when he became a person of interest in the case:  his tagless getaway vehicle attracted the attention of a state trooper, who then arrested him for the misdemeanor of carrying a concealed weapon without an Oklahoma license.

What makes American Terrorist so disturbing is that McVeigh is a fairly likable and interesting guy for most of the book — even after the bombing,  he was amiable to the marshals transporting him. So long as his rage against DC wasn’t activated,  he seems to have made for fairly good company: Ted Kaczynski found him an engaging conversationalist, one of the few prisoners who was still interested in the world around him.  Most striking to me was how McVeigh constantly groped for, but could not find, some purposeful meaning for his life outside of fighting the government  — the security work he took pride in before going into the military seemed pointless afterward, and none of his flirtations with women never grew into a relationship.  Perhaps with counseling after the war,  he could have had created a constructive life for himself, instead of letting hatred for the government poison his soul and motivate him to enact the same behavior he decried from them — returning ‘dirty for dirty’.

 

Those interested in the psychology of terrorism will find NPR’s article on self-radicalization helpful.

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Corona Diary #8

Posted on June 18, 2020 by smellincoffee

Well, the partial re-opening lasted exactly a month. In the face of skyrocketing ‘rona rates across the state, and particularly in the county,  the library today shifted back to curbside-only.   (Since May 18th, we have been following a split schedule:  9-1 open with masks required, 1 to 5 curbside only.)  Some people are relieved, others disappointed; I just go with the flow.   The entire library staff took turns being tested this morning, an experience  I won’t remember fondly.  I found it even more uncomfortable than my visits to the dentist.

The last month with the split schedule has been a positive experience — we were all happy to see most of our regulars back, and traffic was just starting to feel ‘normal’ when the hard decision to close the doors again had to be made.   But, we had anticipated having to retreat; it was the reason we were only slowly easing open.   I’ve gone hiking a few more time, and even bought a pair of binoculars,  but so far I’ve yet to turn them on anything more interesting than a sparrow.

On a quick blog-related note…since we’re approaching the end of June and the hastening of Independence Day, don’t be surprised if American history suddenly makes a strong showing soon!

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Ruby Ridge

Posted on June 17, 2020 by smellincoffee

Every Knee Shall Bow / Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family
© 1995, 2002  Jess Walter
416 pages

rybdy

“[….] people ought not to be murdered by their own government.”

The inherent brutality of the police state sometimes exposes itself to the light for comment. It has happened recently, and it happened in August 1992, when a missed court date resulted in three lives ended, more ruined, and millions of dollars wasted.

I was introduced to the Ruby Ridge case via Rise of the Warrior Cop. The short version: Randy Weaver and his wife had isolated themselves and their family on a mountain to protect them from the Apocalypse and government persecution. After receiving conflicting court summons and choosing to ignore them, Weaver’s property was surrounded by Federal agents, and they shot, in sequence, his dog, his son, a friend, his wife, and him. But why were they there, and why did Weaver resist them for months on the mountain, including eleven days when they were practically in his yard and his wife’s body lady in the kitchen?

The book begins by introducing us to Randy and Vickie, following their stories as they fall in love and begin making a life together. They were both unhappy with just living, and groped for meaning beyond the sex, drugs, and rock and roll embraced by their peers. They sought their meaning in religion, in an epic drama in which the world was a live battlefield between angels and demons — and they were a part of it, their minds consumed with the notion that one day soon a demon-driven goverment was going to come for them. Their electic beliefs, a mix of a race-cult and Jewish practices, drove them to a mountain retreat to live off the grid. The need to Be Prepared also motivated Randy to generate funds by selling firearms, and in so doing he became of interest to an ATF investigation into the remnants of violent white-nationalist groups with a penchant for robbery and explosions. Arrested by FBI agents pretending to be stranded motorists, Weaver retreated to his cabin after making bail and refuse to come down. Enter an increasing army of Federal agents gathering around his property with helicopters, troop carriers, and the works. This played perfectly into the Weavers’ persecution complex, so…the stage was set for a preview of Waco six months later: aggressive Federals sleep-walking to a violent confrontation with an increasingly paranoid target.

But while Waco was purely Federal incompentence at work, at Ruby Ridge the initial agents at least knew they were dealing with a man who didn’t trust them, and so they tread softly. They tried to understand how he was interpreting them, and to avoid escalation they simply waited. Eventually, Weaver would get tired of sitting, watching, and waiting and come out. But as months wore on and more agents became involved, people got careless, confrontational, and stupid. While exploring the Weaver property fringes, agents provoked the family dog and inagurated a firefight that got a child killed, as well as one of the officers. The Weavers were in the dark as to what happened, and assumed the Federals were at last coming in for the kill — and when the Hostage Response Team from the FBI was flown in, they assumed that the entire Weaver clan was actively trying to wipe out their ground forces. Two groups of people, both stumbling in the dark and driven by fear and sorrow, got into an armed standoff. Operating under aggressive orders that declared open season on any adult males, the FBI killed Vickie Weaver, severely wounded a Weaver family friend, and winged Weaver himself. Negotiations were impossible: Randy was paranoid BEFORE his son and wife were killed, and himself and his friend wounded. Both he and his oldest daughter believed they would be gunned down if they attempted to leave the house, and considering there was a remote-control robot with a shotgun barrel close to the house, they can hardly be blamed. Fortunately for all involved, a private citizen stepped in and served as meditator, preventing the FBI’s criminal incompetence and Weaver’s paranoia from killing even more people.

Ruby Ridge is a hard case to read about, with a strange and hostile family on one hand and a needlessly aggressive, frighteningly militaristic, and oblivious-to-apperances government on the other. The worst of it is that Weaver hadn’t even committed any serious crimes beyond refusing to leave his home: unlike David Koresh, he wasn’t screwing kids. When he was put on trial, he was found guilty of failing to apepar in court. When the government was put on trial for its own actions, they paid millions to the Weaver family in restitution. From its needless agression to consistently destructive failures to communicate, the FBI comes off here like Keystone Cops.

This is a hard tragedy to read about, but the expansion of militia groups in the nineties owed much to Ruby Ridge, as people saw they had good reason to fear the government. Ruby Ridge inflamed the minds of men like Timothy McVeigh; when he committed the largest act of domestic terrorism on American soil in 1995, Ruby Ridge and Waco were both on his mind. Ruby Ridge is a helpful reminder that “Goverment is not reason, it is not eloquence….it is force. Like a fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”

 

Related:

 

 

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Tully WAS known as the Roman king of coke

Posted on June 12, 2020 by smellincoffee

tullydrugbusher

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How to Run a Drug Cartel

Posted on June 11, 2020 by smellincoffee

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
© 2016 Tom Wainright
288 pages

fun

I only know of one rule for the drug business, and that via Scarface: never get high on your own supply.  And as Manny could tell you, the Ferengi rules of acquisition also apply, especially #113.  But drug markets often act like regular markets, albiet with distortions,  — and Tom Wainwright suggests that thinking about the economics of those markets can help us create more effective drug policies.  A fascinating look into the drugs trade, Narconomics offers a rare  perspective on a century of failed policies.

Basic economics primers tend to be huge,   and while the scope of this book is much narrower, there’s still a lot to take in.   In each chapter, Wainwright applies an area of traditional business evaluation (supply chains, human resources,  franchises) to the drug business.  We learn that drug cartels down south are much like Wal-Mart:  they don’t produce goods, they market and distribute them, and they have such a command of the market that they dictate prices.   Drug interests also mimic straight businesses in how they choose where to invest in their infrastructure (a failed state with easily-bribeable authorities is ideal),  how they’ve grown into general criminal enterprises that engage in human trafficking (both of immigrants and prostitutes),  and how they rely on brand names  to advertise.  Small-time gangsters might get permission to use a more established gang’s logos, for instance, provided they kick up money to the ‘franchise’.  Wainwright’s analysis extends to the drug market;  the flow of goods is not stopped by the drug war, only diverted. DC closed the Caribbean to trafficking?  The flow merely diverts through Mexico,  where it feeds gangs with easy access to American markets.  Online,  many of the problems of buying drugs (unpredictable prices and quality) disappear,  and the drug market acts like any healthy one:   consumers compare different products and prices, and sellers compete to deliver an enjoyable experience at the best price possible. (This according to Wainwright, anyway. I have no experience offline or online, my vices of choice being caffiene and hooch.)

At the end of each chapter, Wainwright uses his analysis to understand why a half-century of drugging on war  — I’m sorry, warring on drugs —   has proven so ineffective at curbing demand, and resulted only in failed states, profligate corruption, and insidious police militarization.  He points out, for instance, that since cartels can dictate prices, destroying marijuana fields doesn’t hurt them in the least: the farmers take the loss, because the cartel in each area will only buy at a previously-dictated price.  It would be more productive if states concentrated on preventing and rehabilitating users, Wainwright offers.  Ditto for sapping the cartels’ strength in members: throwing them in jail is counterproductive, but if cartel footmen were given vocational training, they would have options aside from the gang.

I wasn’t as interested in the advice as the look inside the narco machine, since I stopped expecting positive change out of government ages ago.   I was as captivated by this as I was reading about the number rackets of the Sicilian Mafia families when they were huge a century ago.   Definitely a memorable read, a look into an underground industry.

 

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To Build a Castle

Posted on June 9, 2020 by smellincoffee

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter
©  1978 Vladimir Bukovsky
438 pages

vlad

When frustrated Soviet officials asked Vlaldimir Bukovsky why he continued to provoke them, he replied that he doubted he could cause them nearly as much trouble outside the gulag system as inside.  Like Natan Sharansky,  Bukovsky entered prison not in defeat after his fight with the Soviets, but in anticipation of continuing it.  He couldn’t do otherwise: even as a teenager he realized that life as a faithful subject of the Soviet state was impossible for him.  It was an empire of lies, where truth changed by the year, where absurdities and corruption were the norm.  Organizing a society of dissidents in his youth, he continued to speak the truth about the Soviet state and to demand it conform itself with its own rule of law, f nothing else — until he was at last expelled.

Having read both Sharansky’s Fear no Evil, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, there weren’t any real surprises in here as far as the universal abuses of the Soviet system go.  Bukovsky’s refusal to wilt in the face of state repression was so outrageous to the Soviets that they regarded him as a mental case, and the abuse of psychiatric medicine makes this memoir stand out from those other two which I’ve read. According to Bukovsky,  late in the sixties the state hit on the idea of  using diagnoses of mental disorders to render individuals “unfit to plead”,  which they used to prevent dissidents and prisoners from fighting oppression via the legal system. (And fight they did–  Bukovsky’s favorite game was to generate mountains of paperwork for the bureaucracy by sending off hundreds of complaints a week on behalf of himself and other prisoners.)

What makes To Build a Castle truly worth reading, though, are Bukovsky’s comments on the human spirit in its eternal struggle with the Soviets.  In a line that strongly reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s observation that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, Bukovsky comments that what he hates most is Soviet man,  the mewling subordinate who is cowed by the state or the pressure of the crowd to conform. Soviet man exists in each of us, he writes, and it is our duty to fight him —  to ensure that he doesn’t prevail.  A man who who stands against the state fights not only for himself, but for each of us  — it is by individual actions that the battle for the soul of a nation is won or lost.

Bukovsky’s memoir is a powerful account, an indictment of not only the Soviet state and its gulags, but the great lies it was built on and which extended its life past reason.  I’m going to share a few quotations later, but I can’t close this without a tease.

In fighting to preserve his integrity he is simultaneously fighting for his people, his class, or his party. It is such individuals who win the right for their communities to live—even, perhaps, if they are not thinking of it at the time. “Why should I do it?” asks each man in the crowd. “I can do nothing alone.” And they are all lost. “If I don’t do it, who will?” asks the man with his back to the wall. And everyone is saved. That is how a man begins building his castle. […]

You have to learn to respect the right of even the most insignificant and repulsive individual to live the way he chooses. You have to renounce once and for all the criminal belief that you can re-educate everyone in your own image. You have to understand that without the use of force it is realistic to create a theoretical equality of opportunity, but not equality of results. People attain absolute equality only in the graveyard, and if you want to turn your country into a gigantic graveyard, go ahead, join the socialists. But man is so constituted that others’ experiences and explanations don’t convince him, he has to try things out for himself; and we Russians now watch events unfolding in Vietnam and Cambodia with increasing horror, listen sadly to all the chatter about Euro-communism and socialism with a human face. Why is it that nobody speaks of fascism with a human face?

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In Remembrance

Posted on June 6, 2020 by smellincoffee

It’s a day quickly only remembered by historians, but I can’t see June 6 without thinking of that night and morning in which young men threw themselves into darkness and death to fight against a genuine enemy of civilization.  In college, I discovered a recording of FDR reading a prayer to the American nation after announcing the onset of D-Day, and even though I was an ardent anti-religionist at the time,  it moved me.  When I listened to it today,  certain parts of it lept out as especially relevant for our time.

“Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the Victory is won. […..]

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.”

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Smuggler Nation

Posted on June 4, 2020 by smellincoffee

Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America
© 2014 Peter Andreas
472 pages

smug

“What can a Governor do, without the assistance of the Governed? What can the Magistrates do, unless they are supported by their fellow Citizens? What can the King’s officers do, if they make themselves obnoxious to the people amongst whom they reside?”   – frustrated colonial customs officer

 

As a libertarian with bootlegging forbears, I reflexively hold smugglers in high esteem, and was eager to read about the proud history of subversive commerce in the United States, even if the author’s intention wasn’t to celebrate them.   Smuggler Nation is a comprehensive history of not only how people thumbed their noses at a state that presumed to tell them what they could and could not buy, or imposed punishing tribute on what they purchased from afar,  but an illustrative account of how the United States government was formed and strengthened by smuggling — either by gaining powers to fight it, or by gaining resources through it.  If war is the health of the state, so too is prohibition.

The story begins in the colonial past, when British subjects in North America were officially expected to conform  to mercantilist policies —  where goods were bought from, or via, England.  I say officially because customs officials were so cheerfully corrupt that little effort was made to enforce these policies until after the Seven Years War,   at which point  Britain so alienated its subjects that they bid for independence.   Smuggling supplied the rebels with arms  and resources,   allowing the rebellion to persist for so long that Parliament gave up. The fledgling American republic would impose its own customs laws — its only resource of revenue back in those halcyon days —  but find them thwarted.   Smuggling meant both evading the tribute demanded of imports, and the selling of  proscribed goods — though throughout the book it’s also used to characterize the slave trade,  illegal immigration,  and wartime blockades.  Customs enforcement would grow with the state, decade by decade, but smuggling flourished and continued to create the nation in its image —  helping open the west and establishing the industrial revolution, for instance. The Civil War was prolonged, in Andreas’ estimation, by smuggling — for it allowed a nation with virtually no industrial resources to sustain several armies for four years. As the United States drifted further from its original vision, increasingly more things became verboten and the powers of the state to police people’s everyday lives grew to extreme proportions that now one in every hundred Americans is in jail, over half of whom are there thanks to the drug war.

Smuggler Nation is a lot of fun, what with its legions of colorful characters —   rebel planters, pirates,  rogue inventors. There are fascinating side stories, too, like the heavy role Mexico played in facilitating early Chinese immigration into the United States. But there are important lessons here, too. Despite the growing march of the state in the background, I was frequently amused and astonished by the means people found to import items on the sly.  Reading this reinforced an observation from Narconomics:  prohibition doesn’t squelch demand, it merely redirects it.    When the United States stamped down hard on cocaine and marijuana imports via the Carribean, it merely redirected the traffic via Mexico  — destabilizing it further and establishing powerful gangs on the southwest’s doorstep. Prohibition led to the revival of hard liquors like whisky over beer, and  suppression of drugs like MDMA have led to far more dangerous synthetic substitutes.   If a substance truly is noxious, cultural pressure is more effective at minimizing it — as has been done with tobacco.    I daresay as the state’s powers continue to swell, more things will become forbidden.  Smuggling in the United States has had a colorful past…and presumably a long future.

 

 

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The Lion at Sea

Posted on May 30, 2020 by smellincoffee

The Lion at Sea
© 1977  Max Hennessy/John Harris
368 pages

kg

The atmosphere was electric and exultant. They were sailing into history at thirty knots. But what history? Defeat or victory?

Kelly McGuire never consciously intended to follow his old man into the Royal Navy, but sometimes fate has a way of dragging you along in its wake.  An efficient young officer, McGuire spends the first two years of the Great War escaping sinking ships,  evading Germans, Turks,and other enemies of the Empire,    and falling into pretty young ladies’ beds.  The battle of Jutland introduces the young lieutenant to his first command after his captain is lost, along with many of his shipmates,  and it’s clear he has a bright future to blaze.  The Lion at Sea is my first WW1 naval novel, I think, and it’s awfully exciting considering how little naval action there was.   McGuire always seems to find himself in the middle of whatever that is, for in this book he’s all over the map: the North Sea, Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and even Egypt.   I’m accustomed to the protagonist’s friends  being introduced and killed off fairly quickly because of  Harris/Hennessy’s  aviation novels,  but here we run into a few people over and over again —  to a degree that even the main character finds it absurd.  He simply can’t escape one of his old shipmates, an odious son of privilege who reminded me very strongly of Courtney Massengale, the cynical and sly officer who made his way in the world by cultivating and exercising ‘pull’.    Readers will witness a young man very uncertain of himself become a highly-decorated, admired, and accomplished senior lieutenant —  one more than capable of sitting in the captain’s seat.    I found this one delightful all around, especially the bit in which Kelly encounters some Lawrence fellow bumming around in an office and shares intelligence with him about some promising Arab allies.

Some Kindle highlights:

‘You are a wart,’ the sub-lieutenant of the gunroom had told him firmly. ‘An excrescence. An ullage. A growth. You probably imagine that when signalled “House your topmast”, you should reply, “fine, how’s yours?” and doubtless the only time you’ll show any enthusiasm for the navy will be on full-belly nights when we’re entertaining visitors.’

Beyond the surface ships, he could see the low hulls of submarines. Despite his father’s attitude that they were a ‘damned un-English weapon,’ he had a feeling that when war came, like aeroplanes, they might prove highly important.

‘We’re at last about to offer our lives for our country!’ Kelly snorted. ‘I’d rather make the Germans offer theirs,’ he said.

‘Seems to me,’ Kelly said grimly, ‘that the naval staff in London exists chiefly to cut out and arrange foreign newspaper stories in scrap books.’

Charley sighed, then she seemed to take hold of her emotions, forcing herself to face the fact that their world – that place of warmth, security and stability they’d known as children – had started to fall apart the day the first shot of the war was fired and was vanishing now in a welter of adult unreason and misery. Young as she was, she’d reached the conclusion that all the tears that could ever be shed would never make it the same again.

He sighed. There was a great deal more to this business of living than met the eye.

 

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