The Peace of Wild Things

Posted on December 11, 2016 by smellincoffee

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

© Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry


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Bye Bye Miss American Empire

Posted on December 10, 2016 by smellincoffee

Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map
© 2010 Bill Kauffman

You say you want a devolution?
\
Far beyond the city across the river, this country is pregnant with happy auguries, with the delicious foretaste of sweet rebellion.
(Bill Kauffman, “Love is the Answer to Empire“)
Americans everywhere are angry, disappointed, and frustrated by their government. Politicians demand much,  voters demand much, and much is attempted — but nothing virtually positive actually happens.   Little wonder, when the scale of things is taken into account. The average member of the US House of Representatives now stands in for seven hundred thousand people, making him a representative in name only.  Having written many a book hailing the local and particular — little America — against the big and abstract, Kauffman now turns his pen to celebrate those who have attempted and are currently laboring to restore truly representative democracy at various levels. They lobby for more autonomy for, or from, their state government — perhaps even the fission of cumbersome states into smaller, more responsive entities. Beneath the oil-glazed asphalt expanse of the Empire, hope is growing; dandelions are breaking through the crust — and in chapters dwelling on New York, Vermont, the South, Califorina, and a few other places, Kauffman explores opportunities for resurrection. 
Bill Kauffman consistently refers to his home as Upstate New York, and heretofore I’d heard that as a direction — rather like central Alabama, or southern Idaho.   But Upstate New York is more distinct than that, closer to “The South” — a place, not a direction.  The rural folk of this region, particular the western rim of the state,  feel dominated by the beast below: New York City,  which has practically usurped the very name of New York. Who says those two words with the Adirondacks in mind?   The city itself, a fusion of five once-distinct places, has its own internal dissent,  boroughs that want their freedom back.  Upstate New York’s resentment is shared by West Kansas, which cries exploitation at eastern Wichitia –and by northern California and ‘upper Michigan’, both of which feel ignored by their governments. The fault lines are reliably rural-urban splits, but there are special circumstances:  in its Spanish beginnings, California was organized as Alta and Baja California, and might have settled into the Union as two states were it not for the unpleasantness of the 1860s.   Even today ,there are persistent cries to subdivide the continent-sweeping state into more manageable polities.  In every case, the parties that want to create their own city or state feel abused or ignored by those with perpetual power over them: Staten Island is used as a city dump for the other boroughs, while western Kansas bankrolls the rest of the state at the expense of its own needed services. 
Kauffman addresses Hawaii,  Alaska, and Puerto Rico from an altogether different perspective.  He describes himself as an American sentimentalist with a strong attachment to the 48, who would be saddened to part ways with a seceding state like Vermont or Texas.  But Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico have no geographic link to the rest of the United States;  they were seized as objects of empire, and disrupt the contiguous integrity of the rest. If Hawaii — three thousand miles away from the rest of the country — can be claimed as a state, why not any place? Why not Corsica,  the Canary Islands — “all of Creation, U.S.A!” ?   Here Kauffman champions these places’ independence movements, something touched on lightly before with Vermont and California but never too much encouraged.  
The South, of course, receives repeated mention — in part because it was the South’s failed war of independence that gave secession the odor of treason, its ruination used as an example anyone else who would dare break the Union asunder.  The group Kauffman spends time with doesn’t champion secession, however, merely claims to defend Southern culture against the homogenizing force from without. That’s right up Kauffman’s alley, for as usual he’s not just writing politics. Kauffman’s books brim over with references to forgotten poetry and novels. Kauffman is forever the champion of local cultures, lionizing those who preserve, contribute, and spread their place’s literature, its songs, its stories, its beer.   Bad enough that looking to the distant Capitol frustrates and alienates people;  still worse is that local identities are falling away, the citizens of the States becoming nothing but little bricks in the wall, living frustrating lives in a geography of nowhere. (James Howard Kunstler, another upstate New Yorker, makes a cameo here.) 
Kauffman’s message here is one of hope, hope that comes through in the tone of his voice during speeches, and his playful wordsmithing here. He is not an ideologue; indeed, he scorns ideology. He does not give any voice to race-separatists, declaring that life is too short to waste words on assholes.   Although a ready fellow traveler of libertarians, Kauffman fires a shot across the bow at the Free State Project, which encourages libertarians to move to New Hampshire en masse so that it might be demographically converted into a haven.  What’s important to Kauffman is local control, that people be allowed to live their own lives in peace, flourishing in their distinctiveness: let San Francisco be San Francisco, and Peoria, Peoria.  Kauffman’s hope is connected not only to these political movements, moreover, but to other locally-oriented movements like community-supported agriculture and new urbanism.   
In Kauffman is found a passionate defender of humane living — a man who breaks bread with leftists and reactionaries alike, who would be just at home at a punk rock club as in a bluegrass festival. His affection for little America,  the joy he takes in savoring it and conveying it, are always worth experiencing. 
“The camp guards of contemporary politics will tell you that secession is based in fear or isolation. I say it flows from love and from hopefulness, from the belief that ordinary people, living in cohesive communities, can govern themselves, without the heavy hand of distant experts and tank-and-bomb-wielding statesmen to guide their way. The secession of which I write with (sometimes qualified) admiration is Norman Mailer in love with Brooklyn, native Hawaiians hearing ancestral echoes, Vermonters who think Robert Frost and George Aiken are wiser men than Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”
Related:

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sapiens

Posted on December 7, 2016 by smellincoffee

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
443 pages
© 2014  Yuval Noah Harari

In Sapiens, Yuval Harari presents a natural history of the human race from its flowering across Eurasia to a worried reflection on the prospects of of technohumanism. The book’s ambition is enormous, its execution simultaneously intriguing and annoying.  Its broad strokes are fascinating; the author distills all of human history into a series of ‘revolutions’ and draws lessons from each. The details between all those strokes are the bothersome bit.  Harari begins with the Cognitive revolution, which is still mysterious but resulted in humans developing language and telling stories. He moves then to the Agricultural revolution, and then to the Scientific.   In the 21st century, we stand on the precipice of another — one that may destroy us, either by physical force or by eroding every conception of what it means to be human.

After an opening chapter of strictly-factual anthropology, Harari shifts into broad-strokes historic commentary. He introduces the agricultural revolution as the worst deal man ever struck, trading as we did an active, independent lifestyle for sedentary control — gaining the ability to sustain larger populations, but at the cost of health, happiness, and freedom. Agriculture gave rise to empires, which he does not scorn but views with marginal favor, seeing them as powerful forces that keep the peace and bring people together under common law and trade networks. A keystone of Harari’s perception of mankind is that we are a mythic species, a story-telling species. The much-abused word myth is not a synonym for falsehood, but rather a story of meaning — one which binds the people who tell it together, imparting a common understanding of the world.  The Declaration of Independence, for instance, constitutes a myth; not because it is a falsehood, but because the American “story”,  the tale of colonists standing up for themselves and throwing off the yoke of arbitrary authority in the name of natural rights, is one that forms the basis of American identity, even after the Constitution which followed it is nothing but dirt caked inside the imperial boot.

More to the point, though, Harari asserts that natural rights, law, money, and other core concepts are likewise usual fictions with no material existence. So long as we all believe in them, acting as though they are real, they serve us well. Religions are the ultimate expression of this mythic power — often being not merely an ideology, but an entire corpus of ideas and institutions that bind every part of human life together in the same story.  Interestingly, Harari uses a definition for religion — a system of values and norms based on superhuman order —  which is broad enough to include liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism.   No doubt that tweaks a few noses.   Those ideologies’ connection with the idea of mythos is certainly worth exploring in depth, if only so people realize that the power of ideas has a deeper source than we realize — and care should be exercised.  The examples he uses are a mixed bag; some have obvious religious connections (classic liberalism has the underlying assumption of natural rights; communism has the historic dialectic), while others are more of a stretch, in part because definitions are up in the air.  He references capitalism, for instance, but with no definition  —  is he referring merely to the private ownership of goods,  or to belief in Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

Harari manages to combine constant dismay at what humans have done to the world with an apparent hope that we’ll keep doing more of it. That is, he’s seemingly optimistic that economic globalization will create a world-empire that will do for the globe that Rome did for Europe, but constantly bewails  the effect we have on the world, chronicling extinctions and such. We have little positive to show for our time on Earth, he concludes miserably, and expects still worse from the future as we begin doping ourselves with soma to hide from the misery of existence.

Although I found a few ideas here very intriguing on the whole I was not particularly impressed. Let’s take extinctions, for instance: he blames every extinction since the dinosaurs at the hand of man, but doesn’t connect these to other parts of his own narrative — for example , what if people began farming because they had few other choices,   competition having exhausted hunting and foraging opportunities?  The natural world is not some garden, a static thing to  be taken care of; it teems with life and death.  Harari speaks with absolute confidence on a great many subjects, crossing disciplines as deep and broad as the Pacific in the same breath.  I can only think of Will and Ariel Durant, who — after fourteen thousand pages dwelling on human history, religion, music,  and philosophy — wrote only in humble awareness of how little they knew.  Sapiens is replete with confidently announced facts with no footnote as reference — and no reference in reality, sometimes. To use one particularly pungent example: Harari asserts that in 1860, a majority of Americans agreed that enslaved blacks were persons who should be citizens, and that a bloody civil war was required to get the South to agree.  That laughably bad reference to the Civil War is not merely inaccurate in its simplistic nature: it is inaccurate in every respect.  When did they have this national argument about slaves and citizens? Surely Harari isn’t referencing the 1860 election, in which Lincoln  — the inspiration for South Carolina’s secession —  maintained he had no interest whatsoever in  forcefully eliminating slavery where it existed.  The extension of the franchise came later, as a part of Reconstruction in an effort to keep the old elite from voting itself back into power.  

The most interesting aspect of Sapiens for me is Harari’s emphasis on man as a creature who lives in myths, but that discussion needed more nuance. To refer to everything not material as fictitious is absurd: one might as well say that society doesn’t exist, because it’s a relationship between people and not a tangible thing in itself.  The relationship exists in our minds, as memories — it is not mere fiction. Harari recognizes the importance of our mental reality, I think, but his language intimates that we’re all living in agreed-upon lies — a spectre no less dispiriting than his fearful forecast,  a world wherein people no longer resist death and discouragement by creating beautiful things together, but instead dope themselves with soma and drowsily acquiesce.

In short,  Sapiens has moments of interest as a polemic; in terms of historical substance, it is far more superficial than Guns, Germs, and Steels to which it is often compared.

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Danger Heavy Goods

Posted on December 4, 2016 by smellincoffee

Danger Heavy Goods: Driving the Toughest, Most Dangerous Roads in the World
Also known as: Juggernaut: Trucking to Saudi Arabia
© 1988 Robert Hutchinson
288 pages

“Makes Smokey and the Bandit Look Like Smokey and the Boy Scouts”

When is a lorry not a lorry? When it’s leaving the country, according to the British drivers here. A continental trip makes a lorry a bonafide truck, and the run covered here puts even American transcontinental trips to shame. In Danger: Heavy Goods,  Robert Author recalls a run from England to Saudi Arabia he participated in in the early 1980s, at a time when Arabian ports were so overcrowded that ships sat at sea for weeks waiting for their turn to unload.  He takes readers through a string of countries which no longer exist, across the Bosporus Bridge, and down to Ar’ar by way of  Iraq — which is invading Iran. Well, golly.

Where to start with this book?  It is a snapshot of Europe in the early 1980s, where Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the DDR were still destinations and  Gorbachev is trying to reform the Soviet Union by banning alcohol. It is a road trip of epic proportions and epic aggravation. Time and again the drivers that Hutchinson partnered predict that the middle east run is doomed. The pre-EU customs inspections of Europe — the frequent scrutiny of their records, the endless paperwork — was bad enough, but the middle east is a bonafide nightmare. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, every official from customs agents to parking attendants wants their cut,  a little bit to grease the palm The preferred bribe is cigarettes, and every country has its most-favored denomination: Turkey is Marlboro country,  Syria swears by Gitanes, and Rothmans rule in Saudi Arabia.   Bureaucratic delays are endless, some of them lasting as long as a week, and once the cigarettes are exhausted anything else is up for grabs. English newspapers, catalogs, canned food?  The amount of aggravation drivers throughout Eurasia receive at the hands of customs officials in Iraq and Saudi Arabia  amaze the author: it’s like they don’t want goods.

If one can get by the customs agents without being arrested for mysterious circumstances, there’s still everything else to contend with. Take your pick — roads that turn into bobsled runs as soon as they’re wet,  or threaten to throw trucks into rig-destroying quagmire if they stray from the beaten path. And which is more dangerous, Turkish prostitutes or the fact that Iran and Iraq are bombing one another? Tough call.  There are plenty of surprises which far friendlier, though. Although drivers on the mid-east run are technically in competition with one another, there’s a mild level of camaraderie in the face of a common enemy, customs. In one chapter, the British drivers warn a drunken Turk of a heavy police presence despite Turks being the main rival of British firms for transeuropean traffic. (They warn him in German, while in Czechoslovakia.  German is also used as a go-between language in Ar’ar,  Saudi Arabia.)

Danger is a most interesting ‘memoir’, delivered by a guide who has an honest interest in every country he visits, frequently regaling readers with historical background on the places he and his coworkers are passing through in their two trucks.  Virtually every aspect of the run has been overtaken by history, though. I haven’t been able to find any stats on truck traffic to Saudi Arabia from western Europe, but with a few decades of oil money sunk into the ports I doubt it’s as thick as it was when featured here

Related:
Truck this For a Living: Tales of a UK Lorry Driver, Gary Mottram

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Epic of Gilgamesh

Posted on December 4, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Epic of Gilgamesh
© 1997 verse translation by Danny P. Jackson
116 pages

When I threw in with the Classics Club, I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh had to be  on there. The oldest known recorded story? How could it be missed?  I’ve had intentions of reading it since encountering an excerpt of its Flood narrative in high school world literature, and have even listened to recitations of the drama. For those who have never encountered it: Gilgamesh is a king whose subjects behold him in fear and trembling. So potent is he that he gets away with nicking people’s wives on their wedding night. It’s good to be the king, no? The people of Uruk plea to the gods for relief from the king, and in response they send him…a bro.  A wild man named Enkidu, who alone is Gilgamesh’s match for sheer manliness. He is utterly untamed, in tune with the animals and such, until a priestess seduces him with her feminine wiles (and by this translation, she literally jumps him). Abandoned by his  four-legged friends in the forest, Enkidu goes to meet Gilgamesh, whose reputation precedes him. After a good brawl to shake hands with,  these two men of power start taking down monsters and cutting down trees. They attract the rage of some of the gods — especially that of Ishtar, who attempts to seduce Gilgamesh but is forcefully refused by him delivering a list of all the men she’s  used and destroyed —   and Enkidu dies, deflating Gilgamesh’s sails. Having previously been blithe about death, Gilgamesh is now hit with its reality, and goes to seek out the only man who cheated death, Utnapishtim, he who survived the Great Flood.  Utnapishtim attempts to dissuade him from the immortality quest, but then clues him in on a secret plant — one which is promptly stolen by a snake. Gilgamesh resigns himself to making the best of life that he can, and that’s’ that. (Unless you count the last chapter, which involves Enkidu and a brief visit to the Netherworld.)

Anyone who has read Genesis will see shared aspects and perhaps dimly remember that Abraham originally hailed from the city of Ur, just down the river from the site of Uruk. Most obvious is the Flood story, of course, but so is the snake costing man the secret of immortal life. I found it interesting when I first heard this story that Enkidu’s knowledge of woman immediately ruptured his ‘one with nature’ status.  In Genesis, Adam and Eve aren’t said to ‘know’ each other until they’ve been severed from their own natural paradise and put to work as farmers, but there’s still a tenuous link between sexuality and alienation from the natural world.   I faintly remember reading that  the agricultural Sumerian religious rites involved sex (see the priestess as a reminder), so perhaps that’s the connection: he who would control nature cannot be at home in it, and Enkidu does start learning about farming from the priestess after they leave.   Other, more distant similarities can be found between Gilgamesh and other ancient stories:  Gilgamesh’s refusal of a divine seducer, for instance, brings to mind Circe and Odysseus.

Not included in this translation are the 20 new lines discovered a couple of years ago in Iraq, which add a bit to the Enkidu and Gilgamesh adventures. Apparently they meet monkeys in the forest, and the wild beast Humbaba is presented a forest-king who is entertained. That might explain why Humbaba appears like a man in so much Sumerian art, though that could be laziness or something else.  I’m glad this is the translation of Gilgamesh my library has:  it’s rendered in verse in approachable English, and features 20 illustrations that invoke woodcuts.

Related

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The Flame Bearer

Posted on December 3, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Flame Bearer
© 2016  Bernard Cornwell
304 pages

The Scots were my enemies.
The West Saxons were my enemies.
Bebbanburg’s garrison was my enemy.
Ieremias was my enemy.
Einar the White was my enemy.

So fate had better be my friend.

When the library received this book, I mimicked Johnny Carson’s character “Carnac” and held it to my head, intoning thus: “Uhtred of Bebbanburg is on the verge of recapturing his family fortress, stolen from him decades ago. But then comes a rider with news that a friend is in peril and needs help!  Torn between his lifelong ambition and keeping troth with his friends, Uhtred reluctantly rides away and sees his opportunity fade away yet again.“

Page twenty, folks. I’m a bonafide psychic. Of course, I mock with love. I have read a ludicrous amount of Bernard Cornwell, and the Saxon Stories is responsible.  But there are ten books in this series, and lately I’ve been wondering when Uhtred is going to capture his old castle so he can die in peace already. He’s had his foot in the door — the castle and death’s — a few times before, and every time something  happens off in Northumbria or Wessex or some other heartily-named place. A woman is usually involved, and off he goes to rescue his friends. But now, with The Flame Bearer, the reign of teasing is over. This time the torturedly complex politics of Britain — Saxons fighting over who should rule the free kingdoms of Wessex and Northumbria, those same kingdoms plotting against one another and their mutual enemies the Danes and Scots —  will bring Uhtred back to the gates of Bebbanberg, that fortress of few gates and mighty ramparts.

One of the greatest pleasures of the Saxon Stories series has been Cornwell’s flitations with oratory. Perhaps inspired by Danish warrior lore,  Uhtred often chants his accomplishments to frighten his enemies. He is Uhtred who killed Ubba by the sea, who now as a greybeard  has a reputation that quivers bowels across an island.  Cornwell’s flair for dramatic narration is unmatched, especially while ruminating on the horrors — and joys — of battle. I’m not sure how he does it, since I’m tolerably certain that Cornwell has not in fact fought in a shield wall.  But this is a story that needs a few passages of Epic Narration, because here Uhtred is finally doing what he has yearned to do since he was a boy, and it will require equal parts deception and epic kickassery.  (Pardon my Ænglis.)

The Flame Bearer also exhibits Cornwell’s usual gift for funny dialogue, though not quite as much of it.  Uhtred is too old to take many people seriously;  he has killed too many great men to have any use for the young pups strutting and pretending on the stage. A paragraph of my view for Warriors of the Storm stands:

Need I give the usual praise? Dramatic prose of thunder flashing as armies trudge through the mud to meet destiny,  quick wits amusing each other in conversation, bombastic speeches and a few sly jokes.  All the usual Cornwell strengths are here, though it’s a quick book so they’re over more quickly. The twists and turns aren’t as sharp here, possibly because once the reader has marched with Uhtred for so long, one gets used to his sudden bolts of inspiration […]. 

That ended with “Next Stop: Bebbanburg!”, but Cornwell mentions in his historic note that the series isn’t over.  This is the story of England’s beginning, and now that the spectre of his father has been quietened, now Uhtred of Bebbanburg has reclaimed his legacy, I look forward to seeing his role in fulfilling Alfred’s  vision of a united kingdom.

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Conclave

Posted on November 30, 2016 by smellincoffee

Conclave
© 2016 Robert Harris
484 pages

Inside the Casa Santa Marta, the elders of Rome are again assembling to choose the next bishop of Rome, and thereby the governor of Catholics the world over.  The Dean of the College of Cardinals labors in sadness prompted not only by the death of his friend and boss, but by the fact that he now has to manage the conclave of cardinals,  in which over a hundred men are hidden in a secret chamber until such time as they elect St. Peter’s successor.  Although it is an election covered in the shroud of holiness, it is an election still, and the cardinals who vote are men of ambition. Their desires and foibles bring endless complication — blackmail and simony do stir the pot —  leading to numerous dramatic shifts during successive ballots. The finale, which unfolds in a Europe smoldering under terrorist attack, includes another twist ending which proved an Achilles heel, for me.  Anyone who has followed my reading here knows I read anything Harris writes, delighting in his diverse settings (Rome, Cold War Russia, Belle Epoque France...and so on!)   Everything that lead ups to it was first-rate: the descriptions of  places and processes within the Vatican usually hidden away, the arguments between the cardinals over what sort of man and what sort of direction were needed — and then Harris has this Dan Brown, Angels and Demons moment in the last ten pages.  Ah, well.

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Columbine

Posted on November 29, 2016 by smellincoffee

Columbine
© 2009 Dave Cullen
417 pages

Columbine. I remember it, of course.  I was in eighth grade when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turned their high school into a bloody spectacle. That day on April 20th, 1999, is always referred to as a school shooting, but that label misses the point. Harris and Klebold weren’t shooters, they were failed bombers.  They didn’t turn the cafeteria and library red with blood because they had a score to settle with the jocks, they wanted to depart a world of inferiors in a blaze of glory.  Dave Cullen’s Columbine is a disturbing history of the April attack, one which draws extensively from the corpus of material the two deliberately left behind.  Cullen’s history has a target, though, as he aims to rebuke not only the media for creating and perpetuating various myths about the horror, but the sheriff’s department for negligence and deception.   Most importantly, Cullen maintains that Harris and Klebold were not abused loners who ‘snapped’, but psychologically disturbed individuals who planned the attack for more than a year.

Columbine is a receptively easy read. Cullen is a journalist, and knows how to grease the runners to captivate readers with a story. The problem is the grisly subject — or subjects. The graphic nature of the shootings isn’t dwelt on overmuch, but through Cullen’s research considerable time is spent in the head of Harris and Klebold. This is, to say the least, a toxic atmosphere. Cullen’s thesis is that Harris was a clinical psychopath, one who could lead a double life. In society, he could be productive and charming, convincing adults into purchasing guns on his behalf, and even dating a twenty-something despite being a kid working at a pizza parlor.   By himself — in his journals, with people he regarded as confederates — Eric was full of contempt for society, for virtually everyone.  He acted out his contempt in ‘missions’ of petty vandalism and theft,  and when confronted by authority figures, could always manipulate them into believing he was repentant.  Eric was joined in these missions by Dylan Klebold, a depressive misfit who nontheless managed to snag a prom date; both boys had active social lives.

There is no doubt that the April attack was a methodically planned horror instead of a loner’s ‘snap’.  Not only did the boys ramble and rave in their bloodlust for months prior, but the equipment took time to purchase and put together —  for their bombs were homemade concoctions, based on plans from the internet.  The April 20th attack itself was a multi-stage drama of the horrific: first, a diversionary bomb in the outskirts of the city to draw police away, then several massive explosions would rock the school cafeteria at peak traffic time.  Hundreds would be killed by the inferno, and as students streamed out of the exits, Eric and Dylan would be waiting for them with intent of sweeping up survivors with gunfire  before their inevitable demise at the hands of the police. Still worse, their cars, parked in areas where emergency services would establish a perimeter, were rigged to blow after their deaths, adding still more chaos and death.  This is no impulsive revenge quest, but a premeditated campaign of war against the humanity they loathed. Fortunately for the students of Columbine,  all of the bombs failed to explode. and the murderous pair soon lost interested in shooting people after the first dozen, resigning themselves to self-slaughter.

Their campaign of death should not have been an ambush. Cullen notes that Eric’s sociopathy, his contempt for the world, often displayed itself in the arrogant way he and Dylan both leaked information.  Harris’ toxic website often broadcast his hatred for the world,  and numerous people were aware that they had guns and were experimenting with pipe bombs. The police, having previously arrested the pair for breaking into a van and stealing equipment from it, even had a warrant for a search of Eric’s house — one which was never executed.  Although Cullen labors to dispatch many minor myths associated with the Columbine attack — the pair’s association with a ‘trench coat Mafia’, the sole targeting of ‘jocks’, etc —   he rebukes local authorities far more seriously for their negligence in following up on Harris, and for attempting to conceal how high he had already registered as a potential threat from the public.

Cullen’s case is simple: Eric Harris was a psychopath who essentially co-opted the suicidal tendencies of his manic-depressive buddy into an attempt  to depart a world they loathed in a manner that demonstrated their superiority over the zombies.  Some parts of his argument are stronger than others: for instance, the numerous heavyweight bombs, which would have killed hundreds indiscriminately, indicate that the two weren’t just after jocks. (The intense planning obviously belies any impulsive snap, of course.)    The case for Eric’s sociopathy strikes me as solid as well. Less convincing is the utter denial that Harris and Klebold were bullied, as Cullen points to their circles of friends and the fact that Harris was a bully as well.  A bully can be bullied; the two categories are not exclusive, and Klebold strikes me as an easily-bullied sort of personality. While Harris’ journals are nothing but wrath and rage, Klebold is more relatable, alternating between wrath and idolization of a girl.  Numerous students have also testified in interviews that the two were subjects of abuse — but who in a modern high school is not?  

It is never easy to dwell on this kind of rage, and strong stomachs are definitely required to endure constant exposure to Harris’ utter lack of humanity.  Cullen’s interesting approach — alternating build-up and aftermath chapters — kept me glued to the pages, and I’m grateful for a history that indicates how Columbine attempted to climb back to its feet after the attack, to reclaim the school and honor those who perished.  Columbine’s story after the fact is also difficult, though, riven with lawsuits and slow-to-heal psychological wounds. But the school survives still, and these days much has changed: police have different active-shooter protocols now (immediate engagement, no more waiting for SWAT)  threats of violence are often met with zero-tolerance policies, and it is doubtful in the post 9/11 world that teenagers could get away with leaving mysterious dufflebags in the school cafeteria, ticking away.  Although a cry for stricter gun laws follows every shooting in the United States — understandably — Columbine also points to the limits of those laws, as the culprits’ most potentially dangerous weapons, the bombs, were fashioned from ordinary consumer goods. Thank heavens Harris had to put them together at the last minute for want of safe storage space, otherwise his serial bombing might  have succeeded.   Those with intent to harm will find a way to try it; good security policies are needed to counter these threats. At Columbine, I couldn’t help but notice that the sole guard was off at lunch during the attack. One guard for 2000 students?!  My high school had two deputy sheriffs, and we couldn’t have boasted a thousand students on a good day.  (Of course, we were post-Columbine.)

Columbine is haunting, effective reading.

Related:

  • The Ashes of Waco, Dick Reavis. The boys’ April 20th assault was allegedly timed to ‘honor’ Timothy McVeigh, whose own bombing was allegedly revenge for the Waco massacre. 
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Civilian Warriors

Posted on November 28, 2016 by smellincoffee

Civilian Warriors: the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung  Heroes of the War on Terror
© 2013 Erik Prince
413 pages

In the 21st century, the line between public and private warfare has gotten a bit fuzzy. I realized this most fully when reading a few cybersecurity books early in the year, mulling over how natural security was imperiled by cyber attacks on private firms or networks, but this fuzziness is also expressed via the world of private military contractors.     Flash back seven or so years ago, when my rage at the debacle in Iraq was white-hot, I would have never read a book about Blackwater, let alone a defense of it from its creator, Erik Prince.  Back then, Blackwater was tantamount with evil. They were lawless mercenaries, the very image of what was wrong with the military-industrial complex.  Finally released from confidentiality agreements, here Prince goes to bat for the company he created and guided through the rocky years of the War on Terror.

I purchased this book because I stumbled upon Erik Prince while listening to some podcast or another, and he sounded perfectly normal. He didn’t do an evil laugh even once.  (It helped that the book was on clearance for $6.)  Prince opens with an argument that private military contractors aren’t a novelty. His examples are convenient (he cites the Marquis de Lafayette, not the Hessians), but that’s to be expected. He also notes that military contractors been put to more use in the 20th and 21st centuries than at any other time, but then wars are a lot more complicated they used to be. There’s no more of this telling your peasants with pointy sticks to go stab the peasants with pointy sticks next door, there’s logistics and such.  Prince’s original idea for Blackwater was to fill the need of the American military for training facilities, since budget cuts closed or limited their options. His training lodge not only provided rented space for shooting ranges, but taught courses to interested service organizations. Prince continually responded to the needs of the US as he saw them in the news, achieving rapid success after the Columbine assaults when he began training police in active shooter response scenarios. (Prince created a school mock-up for them to practice in.)  After al-Queda bombed the USS Cole, Prince acquired a NOAA ship and turned it into a training ship for sailors to practice threat interdiction.

It was their work in Iraq that made Blackwater infamous, however. They entered the area as security guards for the United States’ top man in Iraq, Paul Bremer. Later on they would escort other State department officials, and as Iraq was a warzone, that entailed armored vehicles and M4 rifles. As Blackwater grew, it took on other tasks like handling airdrops in their smaller planes. Prince writes that he viewed Blackwater as a military force that had adopted the principles of lean manufacturing, a kind of Fedex to the government’s post office.  If Blackwater’s security convoys drove aggressively, it was to satisfy their contract stipulations:  no losses. Prince would have practiced more discretion than the government allowed him, but they insisted on ambassadors traveling in flagged SUVs, not beaten-looking Iraqi vehicles. Prince also reviews the several bloody incidents which turned Blackwater into a whipping boy for the Bush administration in the war, arguing that his men were merely defending themselves and that they made for effective scapegoats despite also using their resources  in a few humanitarian causes.

I suspect Prince is correct in maintaining that military contractors aren’t going anywhere. In Afghanistan, there are more contractors than US servicemen, and I think it telling that Candidate Obama condemned Blackwater, and then — when the group served as his security detail in Afghanistan —   President Obama commented that they were getting a ‘bad rap’.   If citizens don’t want war, but the  security state does, then the obvious thing to do is hire people to do the war bit on the state’s behalf, or even better to use drones. Although as a candidate Trump indicated that he was less interested in foreign wars than his competitors,  I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever is in the D.C. water leads to military contractors operating discretely in Syria. They’re certainly in Iraq now, fighting ISIS — at least two thousand of them.  They aren’t necessarily active combatants, but filling in a lot of the logistics holes that Prince noticed and started finding people to fill here.

I found Prince to be interesting as a man — rich boy turned volunteer fireman & Navy SEAL, then entrepreneur in his own right —  and his apologia informative about the shifting nature of war as executed   Even if war is a racket, the operation of that racket is worth noting as it changes.

  • Related:
  • The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoir of a humanitarian turned Navy SEAL, one recently elected as governor of Missouri. 

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Lost Enlightenment

Posted on November 28, 2016 by smellincoffee

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps — and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area —  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the ‘silk road’, though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and ‘renaissance men’  — though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions —  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters —  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes — most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished — for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn’t lend itself to easy answers, and there’s no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn’t merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.

* “Central Asians” seems as clumsily artificial as “Yugoslavians” , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it’s easier than “Iranian-Turkic peoples”.

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