$10 Million an Hour

That’s what we’re spending in Iraq. Regardless of whether you think the war is justified philosophically or politically, it’s really hard to imagine it is justifiable economically.

Think of all we could do with that money. Years and years of $10 million an hour. My god, it boggles the mind.

We could have paid the salary every military person who’s been deployed, then kept them home to grease the wheels of the economy or sent them off as peacekeepers to Darfur. Could have rebuilt New Orleans and environs, set some smartypants types to work on alternative fuels, and sent enough humanitarian aid to disgruntled teenagers in desperate places that we might have urged them toward hope rather than hate. But I digress.

The $10 million figure came from an interview I heard with Stephen Flynn, who has been all over the FM dial this week with the release of his book The Edge of Disaster. He appeared in short bits on consecutive days on Morning Edition. On Tuesday night, driving home from basketball, I caught a longer interview with him on the Diane Rehm Show—really interesting and inspiring, if you can stand listening to the Diane Rehm Show. (You have to be in a certain mood to bear with her slow and creaky delivery that sounds like she will probably expire at the end of every sentence.)

I like what Flynn has to say: We don’t need so much emphasis on the prevention of every twisted terrorist possibility, but rather need more resiliency. A greater ability to respond and to bounce back from whatever it is—acts of terrorists, acts of god, accidents. By removing known dangers (his example was unnecessarily hazardous chemicals for such things as oil refining stored near population centers) and preparing for reactions to any crisis, we are much safer than with each new restriction on airplane carry-ons or state police orders to look for illegal aliens. (Here’s where the $10 million figure came in: Retrofitting an oil refinery from some particularly lethal chemical to the undeniably-yucky-but-not-so-deadly sulphuric acid would cost about $20-30 million. A tolerable sum in light of oil companies’ recent record profits, and, literally, three hours of government spending.)

Especially by giving people, citizens, and communities the information and the resources to rally and rebuild, Flynn argues, we make the “homeland” stronger. These are often “unsexy” and even simple things that occur at a local level (he refers to the the placing of luminescent strips and handrails on the fire stairs at the World Trade Center towers after the 1993 attack, which helped save so many lives in 2001). He makes really great analogies, all of which I’ve conveniently forgotten just now, but which make me want to read the book.

He’s also critical in the right places, about the lack of national leadership for example, without being emotional or apparently partisan. He was an old Coast Guard guy himself.

And there’s something comforting in his theory, despite his examples involving Bhopal-like terrorist acts. Comforting because, for one thing, he reiterates that natural disasters are much more likely than terrorism to lay us low. The results may be as devastating but to me the absence of evil makes it seem less like the world is rotting from the inside out. The other thing is that, by being resilient we make terrorism less effective.

Stephen Flynn for president!

Forgotten Cultural Icon

Remember Euell Gibbons? You’ve got to be of a certain age to recall him hawking Grape Nuts on TV. The author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) hearkens back to the days when public television called itself “The 21-inch Classroom.” Euell may just have had a show, I don’t know. One of the first “health food nuts” of our times, his Stalking the Wild Asparagus is just the book I need when I think of the uneventful apocalypse ahead, where we have to find our own edible tree bark and make soap from beetles’ wings because the distribution of goods shall have decayed so. He’s got a whole chapter on burdock!

The title has been much riffed on, but I’d completely forgotten it until now, poking through the shelves of my friend’s house in central New Hampshire, where I’m blissfully spending the afternoon doing nothing but drinking tea and reading (and now writing). Toasty on this brisk October day with the sun slanting in the windows, and even the four dogs quiet after our three-hour hike this morning. (Child and husband went on their own camping trip, no dogs allowed.)

While on the topic of reading, I just finished Pere Goriot, the 1834 novel by Honore de Balzac. I do seem to be on the old book kick this year. I read it because a) it has been sitting in my house for 60 years (it came with the house when I moved in) and b) just previously I read an endearing little novel called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. It was a sweet book on a serious topic and I enjoyed it. But it made me realize I had never read any Balzac. I had always admired him though for his reputation, productivity, intriguing name, robust deshabile statue by Rodin, and not least, the fact/story/myth that I’d heard that he drank 60 cups of coffee a day. That is prodigious.

Before the Little Chinese Seamstress, to go yet further back in the conversation monologue, I had read another oldie: Melville Goodwin USA, a 1952 novel by John P. Marquand. I love J.P., and this was the fourth or fifth novel of his I’ve read. Least favorite too, but it wasn’t bad. I’d recommend B.F.’s Daughter over it, or Wickford Point, or his most famous The Late George Appley. (Melville Goodwin, I just discovered, was made into a movie in 1957 called Top Secret Affair.) Before Melville, I finished the previously mentioned Ten Circles Upon the Pond.

Have I wandered enough? Back to my fading afternoon of reading I go. I am loving the come and go of the furnace’s rumble, and the gentle snores of the sacked-out dogs.

The Four Gated City, Before I Forget

So The Four-Gated City is the last in a series, or an epilog to a quartet of novels by Doris Lessing called The Children of Violence (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, and Landlocked). Wow, are they good. The first four are very reality-, almost history-based and usually viewed as autobiographical for the author. The last, The Four Gated City, was written (in 1969) more about the future—probably a time now passed.(In Lessing’s autobiography, she gets much more explicit about the “children of violence” concept, describing how her generation, born between the two world wars (she was born in 1919), were influenced irrevocably by the damage the first war had done to their parents. Which could only lead to the next war…)

I read these five books in a row, bang-bang-bang (bang-bang), which really made them powerful. Such luxury I had back in more youthful summers. I also read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet all in a row (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea—highly recommended). I was training for the national rowing team, and even then I appreciated the time I had and the situation I was in. I appreciated it so much, in fact, I kind of yearned for it even while it was happening. My so-called professional career back then would be annually interrupted by summers away at selection camp where you rowed twice a day and fretted about your position in the seat-racing ladder and what the coach might be thinking and you tried to make sure you would make weight when you had to, but not by too much, and generally had only energy enough left to nap, knit, read, write and get down to the water for the next practice. Since I didn’t nap or knit, I read and wrote. I read a lot. Besides those series I mentioned, I also consumed Doris Lessing’s “space fiction” series (Shikasta, The Sirian Experiments, The Marriages Between Planets Four, Five and Six, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, and The Sentimental Agents), as well as about four volumes of Sufi stories by Idries Shah and a random assortment of other things, mostly novels, that strangely fell into place like a purposeful curriculum.

Oh yeah, but this was a post about the Four Gated City, not my nostalgia for a time when I could read more than one book a month. The Four Gated City is post-apocalyptic, but the apocalypse was slow, an almost imperceptible decline into bedlam. I found the portrayal so convincing that I feel sure this is the way we are headed. Maybe not one big nuclear blast to wipe humanity away, but a series of apparently unrelated Bhopals and Chernobyls and Katrinas that amass and are never recovered from, and the government decays in its obsession with garnering power and with irrelevant ideology while people are left to fend for themselves in the damaged world left to them. Well, it’s damn cheerful, isn’t it. Enough to make anyone go out and start harvesting burdock.

Aw, jeez, I didn’t need to write the above at all. Here’s an excellent description from a Doris Lessing website:

It will provoke disquiet and questioning. Mrs. Lessing’s view of recent politics is not everyone’s. Her view of the future (inevitably brutish and painful) is that it is the present: that we are all hypnotized, awaiting cataclysms which we are in fact living through now; that we are now—as we run and read—in the process of a rapid evolution; that we are mutating fast but can’t see it, the chief characteristic of our race being its inability to see what is under its nose; that historians and scientists, in their timid traditionalism, feed our fantasy view of ourselves—suppressing truths about the human condition, about madness, about sanity, about the essential nature of the mind.

War and War

Another book review. Much shorter book.

Don’t know why after finishing Tolstoy’s War and Peace I launched right into Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation—out of the frying pan of 19th century warfare and chaos into the fire of 21st century warfare and brutality. It may well have been the inviting 160 pages packaged in a tidy 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches. But wow, it was hard to read.

Well written, even beautifully written, I should say, but the brutality and horror told by an innocent narrator just tortures you. The gist of it is a kid of 11 or 12 or so is conscripted by a band of rebel soldiers when his village is attacked. It’s kill or be killed and they don’t even know the why and wherefore.

It took me a long time to read because I didn’t like to read it in bed, and I didn’t like it to be the last thing I read before going to sleep. Just so deeply sad. And some very harsh imagery. So I’d read it for awhile downstairs, then go upstairs and do a crossword puzzle or read a bit of Ten Circles Upon the Pond, the memoir of an apparently sane and charming woman who went and had ten children, the 7th or 8th of whom is a friendly acquaintance of mine.

Anyway, after finishing Beasts, I read a few reviews and some critics took issue with the idiomatic language, complaining that the dialect style was inconsistent or distracting or something. It was unusual, with a heavy use of the gerund form but I was willing to suspend my disbelief a la reading Faulkner, and just try to go with the flow of it. Besides, the author is of African family, not me. Maybe he knows something about regional English patois or perhaps it was a direct transfer of some other language’s grammar into English? Even if totally made up, I found it remarkable but not distracting, and sometimes quite poetic. The last line of the book was made the more effective by it, I thought, and that line a really powerful one. I won’t give it away.

I do recommend reading it, though it is not easy going.

War and Peace

A book review. No, really.

I read it, complete and unabridged, a 1938 (or earlier) Modern Library edition, translated by one Constance Garnett. I feel kind of bad that in the time it took to read it—from Thanksgiving to Mother’s Day; I’m not proud—this antique book took some abuse and now the front cover and binding on the spine are off… (It was at least third-hand, with my having borrowed it from my mother, and its having two other names written inside, one of which says, “Rose Fink ’38.”)

As you may know, it’s bulky, and even when reading in bed it gets beset by its own weight. But still all 1,146 pages of quite small type are still there. Should any of you want to borrow it. (Joke.)

I realize it’s anachronistic and weird to have undertaken such leisure reading in this day and age but I’m so glad I stuck to it, and finished. It’s something I’ve wanted to read for about 20 years. The writing is exquisite of course, a fact almost forgotten in its universal acceptance. Tolstoy writes well. Duh. But really, really well, with an authorial reserve combined with psychological x-ray vision that is lucid and incisive for all its 19th century formality. With occasionally the slightest imaginable shade of irony. Refreshing. He understands how people work at a deeply interior level, and can relay it clearly without Freudian twaddle, whether it’s a peasant soldier, a minor countess of 19 years, or Napoleon Bonaparte, the axis on which the story turns, though he’s written about directly but little.

That scant attention to Napoleon actually embodies one of the main points Tolstoy seems to have been wanting to make (seeing as in the last 50 pages he abandons the characters and their stories as done and pursues this line philosophically from umpteen angles): History is not made by leaders and heroic men alone. It is the sum of all the participants’ decisions, acquiescences, and actions. He avers that Napoleon could not have gotten 600,000 men to march from France to Russia if it was all on his own say-so. It was the concatenation of other events and decisions, and most notably the combined will of those 600,000 that caused it to occur.And yet, is will the right word? Tolstoy questions free will, coming just shy of giving all motive power to the Almighty, but speaks of history in terms of Newtonian physics, irresistible forces and objects in motion….

The commentary on war in the second half is also arresting for Tolstoy wrote about the war when it was fairly recent history (50 years past or so), and in his laments at the barbarousness, the stupidity, and the venality of it all, he sounds downright contemporary. Every generation thinks not only that it is the most advanced, but also that it is the most vicious and degenerate. Guess human development only goes to more, not less, of anything, good or bad.

Of course, LT has a point about the absurd waste of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign. It’s very clearly shown in graphic artist Edward Tufte’s famous poster diagramming the movement of diminishing troops as they invade and retreat from Russia. I attended a Tufte seminar years ago, and still have the very telling poster in my study.

So, about the story part. First you meet a couple dozen characters, each with many names and apparently unconnected to one another, bopping about Moscow, St. Petersburg and the countryside. Then off to the War of 1807, which is not very warlike. Then it’s back to society and all its turmoil for a sizeable chunk of the book, which made me think Leo’s point was that that was where the real war was…. at least that battles and negotiation are as much a thing of home as army. Then the last quarter is mostly focused on the grisly events of 1812 and what our characters are doing through that time. Struggling with financial or spiritual bankruptcy, testing romantic and filial love, surviving…. Our original cast starts getting entwined by this point. A handful of characters we’ve grown slightly or very attached to die. But, without softening any pain or fear, Tolstoy paints a transformation at death to such mystical repose that it is downright comforting.

So the pace, the length, the depth… all written for another time, when reading wasn’t limited to the 15 minutes before you crash asleep or the occasional airplane ride. And yet, completely worth the swimming against the tide to get through. Wonderful.

And oh! Mon dieu, the whole novel is online, searchable by chapter!