Lost in Reamde

Americana, Around home, Books

On a rainy fall day, there is almost nothing better than curling up with a good book in front of the fireplace. For me, this fall, the book has been Reamde by Neil Stephenson. But, now it is a bright sunny day and the book still has me in its clutches. To quote from the New York times book review:

Let us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting.

This is the kind of book that it is easy to get lost in, easy to be transported to a new place in . The world on the printed page becomes more real than the real world which fades to being only a distraction from the book. Lord of the Rings was like that. I think that I read Lord of the Rings about three times over a six year period. I knew I was hooked when I would try to catch a few paragraphs while stopped at traffic lights. Another, for me, was Shogun by James Clavell.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer – for some strange reason – was one of those books and it started me on a World War II binge.

Not that Stephenson always makes it easy: his characters usually have goofy names that are hard to pronounce like Richard Forthrast, they are sort of improbable, and the first hundred pages are setup. But then it takes off, much like Shogun, in an episodic blast. Each event leads to another with consequences that seems both improbable and,  somehow,  inevitable.  Along the way, while we are running at full speed, Stephenson – running alongside and whispering in our ear – explains the world. For example, a British handler explains to a spy how the American counter-terrorist system works:

The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex…. It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.

How can a nice, sunny, fall, day compete with that?

 

 

 

 

Why are we in Afghanistan? We shouldn’t be.

Americana, Current Affairs, War

I don’t understand why we are in Afghanistan. I don’t understand what we are fighting for. I don’t understand what our men – and women – are getting wounded and dying for. I don’t know, even, how we would know if we were winning.

We are paying for truck companies to bring supplies in from Pakistan and up the highways across Afghanistan that, in many cases, we paid to build; then the truckers have to pay off the Taliban to pass on those highways. Or get killed. We are fighting the Taliban and funding them. And we can’t stop because we need the supplies to fight the Taliban but, if we were not fighting them, they wouldn’t be getting all that money. It is more bazaar than Catch 22.

Our strategy is to develop Afghanistan but almost everybody we hire is corrupt and Karzai’s family is especially corrupt. Because we are there, houses in Kabul rent for over $6,000 per month. The owners now live in Bahrain or Dubai, or some other nice safe place on the Gulf Coast. Drug export is a – if not the –  major source of export income for Afghanistan and the counter-narcotics mission is a waste of time and resources that just alienates the Afghans we are trying to get on our side.

Paradoxically, under Obama, we now have more troops in Afghanistan so we can fight the “big war” with American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. The plan in Afghanistan is to flood an area with troops, secure it, then rebuild it, and leave them a new, rebuilt area, in control of our “good” Afghan allies. In Vietnam, this was called the Oil-blot Strategy with fortified Strategic Hamlets. It doesn’t work.

When Obama first started talking about Afghanistan being the good war, I thought it sounded like such a good idea. I was wrong – which means nothing – and Obama was wrong – which means a lot. We should get out. Say it was a mistake, say we got Osama and we won, say whatever; just get out. This will not end well and it is time to cut our losses.

 

A thought on moral cowardice and Joe Paterno

Psychological Musings

In his memoir, General Ulysses S Grant talks about being a moral coward on two occasions that I can remember. The first was while riding through the wilderness of Texas at the time:

After the second night at Goliad, Benjamin and I started to make the remainder of the journey alone….On the evening of the first day out from Goliad we heard the most unearthly howling of wolves, directly in our front. The prairie grass was tall and we could not see the beasts, but the sound indicated that they were near. To my ear it appeared that there must have been enough of them to devour our party, horses and all, at a single meal. The part of Ohio that I hailed from was not thickly settled, but wolves had been driven out long before I left. Benjamin was from Indiana, still less populated, where the wolf yet roamed over the prairies. He understood the nature of the animal and the capacity of a few to make believe there was an unlimited number of them. He kept on towards the noise, unmoved. I followed in his trail, lacking moral courage to turn back and join our sick companion. I have no doubt that if Benjamin had proposed returning to Goliad, I would not only have “seconded the motion” but have suggested that it was very hard-hearted in us to leave Augur sick there in the first place….

The second was the first time he lead troops into battle:

While preparations for the move were going on I felt quite comfortable; but when we got on the road and found every house deserted I was anything but easy….As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.

In Grant’s case, he takes what we would consider the more heroic path but he points out that he only did it because he is afraid of what other people will think of him.

Looking at it – from here in my nice warm home – it seems impossible that Joe Paterno could have shown such a moral cowardice as to let a subordinate – or his boss for that matter – rape a 10 year boy and not call the police. But like most of us, even Joe Paterno, the most powerful man in town, was afraid of what other people would think of him if he became a trouble maker.

 

A nostalgia trip to Death Valley 2

California, Camping, Death Valley, Sierras, Uncategorized

We have probably camped just off the Hole in the Wall road almost a dozen times. We can pretty much find all the good camping spots in the dark which is how we got there last night. It is near downtown Death Valley and because it is about 3.5 miles up a unpaved road and behind a rock formation – we are not supposed to camp within 3 miles of a paved road – very quiet with no light pollution. We camped is a nice intimate area that opens into a larger valley.

Because we were so close to our old haunts, we decided to visit a couple of them, starting with Dante’s View just a couple of miles up the paved road. Dante’s View is on the crest of the Black Mountains at about 5,500 feet, overlooking  Badwater, the lowest point in North America at about 280 feet below sealevel.

 

Death Valley is not actually a valley but a graben or basin. A valley is caused by a river eroding the land and a graben is caused by a block of the earth dropping, usually with parallel mountains on each side. In this case, the water that runs into death Valley does not flow out, it evaporates, leaving salts and minerals behind. In February of 2005, after a very unusual, rainy, winter, the valley – OK, graben – actually became a very shallow lake.

Looking down at the salt patterns, sometimes they almost look like clouds.

No trip to our old haunts would be complete without visiting Furnace Creek Inn, where we got married 18 years ago.

We decided to camp off a favorite, easily accessible, road in the north of the Panamint Valley – really another basin or graben to the east – which would put us about an hour closer to home and give us some time to photograph the fall color on Highway 395. But it was starting to cloud up and I was getting concerned that the weather – which had been warm and windless so far –   would turn nasty. When we got to the Panamint, everything was clouded over but it was warm and still.

It is always good to remember that the reason this is a desert is because it does not rain here very often. Even though it was overcast, the chances of rain – at least any meaningful rain – were pretty slim. The big problem would be the wind.

As an aside, just off the Big 4 Mine Road, is a old abandoned car. One abandoned car! A Buick. I have probably passed it ten times. Now there are two and I can’t figure out which is more improbable; somebody dragged another car up the road and dropped it or there were always two cars and I mis-remember. Intellectually, I know that the later must be true, BUT I so distinctly misremember that there was only one car. End aside.

As I wandered around the – now – two cars, Ed came over, took one look, and said Look, there is a baby rattlesnake. And there – between the two cars, in a place I had just walked by – it was. The first rattlesnake I have ever seen in Death Valley in over 30 years of looking.  Crotalus stephensi – Panamint Rattlesnake – Crotalus is from the Greek for rattle and it was named after somebody named Stephen. This little guy did not rattle or even move and there is only so long you can watch anything that lays there like a rock, so we moved on, looking for a place to throw down our bags.

Or, more accurately, a place to set up some chairs and sit around, gabbing.

Looking around, it was pretty easy to believe we were the only people in the valley, certainly the only people within sight. As the sun went down, the clouds started to clear and the sky put on a show that seemed to be just for us.

The next morning, we were up nice and early, said Goodbye to the Panamint and headed for home.