Mimsy Were the Borogoves

All political memoirs should be read after the pendulum shifts. Senator Byrd begins his book decrying the lack of background on the current president:

Presidential leadership requires much, much more than an expensive pollster and God-given charisma… gifted speechwriters… are not enough… [His] power has been wielded with arrogance, calculation, and disdain for dissenting views.

Byrd also laments the polarization of American politics and the lack of cordiality; only three pages after describing White House employees as “Bushies”. A page later, he berates the president for having no vision to beat AIDS—against a president who has done the most to beat AIDS in the known history of the disease.

Spending

We get a glimpse in the first chapter of Senator Byrd’s philosophy of government. Complaining about how reckless tax cuts are¹, he reminisces back to the Great Depression, when he was in tenth grade. It’s bad to cut taxes because we might have another one. Sound almost prescient for 2004? Listen to this:

Any coal miner lucky enough to own a car jacked it off the ground and mounted the axles on railroad crossties to keep the tires from rotting until enough money could be saved for a new license plate.

Emphasis mine. That a license plate’s cost is a tax, and this tax kept his fellow coal miners from using their own property during the depression, appears to completely escape him. Taxes depress the ability of people to earn money. At least, people outside of government; inside of government taxes are (hopefully) the only way to earn money; this seems to confuse him. (There’s also the issue of coal miners owning cars being “lucky” rather than resourceful or thrifty.)

That beltway mentality follows through to his ideas on why Congress is unable to restrain “power-hungry” presidents. The reason is that Congress must investigate everything and legislate everything.

Is there a scandal? Congress must hasten to investigate it. Is there a problem? Congress must hustle through legislation to address it.

I had to read that section several times to be sure he wasn’t being sarcastic. This is a succinct description of the problem with the federal government today. It’s the mindset of a man who has been in politics far too long. Every problem is a nail that the federal government must hammer.

The worst part is that he does recognize the problems of haste. His denigration of the Patriot Act applies perfectly to the “stimulus” bill:

…a case study in the perils of speed, herd instinct, and lack of vigilance when it comes to legislation in the face of a crisis. The only thing worse than hurrying with a major and far-reaching piece of legislation… is hurrying out of a sense of panic.”

I tweeted over a month ago that I’m reading Matt Burden’s The Blog of War, and to expect a review later. This is not a book that can be read in one go. Each selection is important; many are draining.

Among the most critical aspects of the history of war is the role of the gatekeepers. Who reports on war and where do they get their information? Our post 9/11 wars—Afghanistan and Iraq—are a new chapter in that history. For those who cared to learn, the story of these wars was and is available from citizen journalists (Michael Yon and Michael J. Totten), locals (Iraq the Model) and the soldiers fighting the war.

Matt Burden’s book is about the latter group, specifically the “milbloggers” who reported simply by being there and writing home; but writing home in public places. Burden has collected a phenomenal array of blog posts, mostly from Iraq- and Afghanistan-stationed milbloggers, describing the personal experience of war as it happens. It also contains blog posts from their spouses and their friends.

These are people writing letters—public letters, private letters in public places—before going to war. “Some must go to fight the dragons.” In other wars, these are the stories that someone like David Brinkley would relate fifty years later, pulled from dusty letters left in attics. In this war—assuming you didn’t limit yourself to the New York Times—we read them almost as they happened.

Jay Czarga wrote a letter to his family on the occasion of his third trip to Iraq, and posted it for the world on his blog, The Makaha Surf Report:

I chose to go back to Iraq this time, because I believe in a better world. At 30 I am more of an idealist now than I was at 20… The men and women and especially the children of Iraq are worth fighting for. When I see them I know that any sacrifice I make is worth it.

Czarga, according to the fear-alleviating (and sometimes confirming) appendix, is back in Hawaii “with his dolphin-trainer wife, four dogs, and one very demented cat.”

This chapter’s title comes from a line in a post by “Greyhawk” in The Mudville Gazette:

I awoke in the quiet watches with my youngest in my arms, wondering what I might say to her and her brother and sister and their mom and knowing I was done with sleeping for this night.

Here is why: Some must go to fight the Dragons.

And if you think such things don’t exist then it must be I read you the wrong sorts of stories when you were young.

I was walking back from the grocery store today along University, and an emergency supervisor vehicle came blaring up one of the side streets; came out to University, and went left out of sight.

I walked another half a block beyond that side street, and suddenly another siren came from down University. An emergency medical van rushed by, going the same direction as the supervisor vehicle.

Another block, and I walked right down another side street. Just as I turned right, I heard sirens again. The same medical van came barreling around the corner, came up the block, and then went past University. Another third of the block and the supervisor vehicle came and did the same thing.

I’m a writer. I’m on the lookout for the weird and unusual. I start filing this away for future use. What happened? It’s unlikely that both drivers accidentally went the wrong way. Most likely there was an address correction.

So who called in the wrong address? Was it a friend or loved one of the person who needed medical attention? What are they going to think if that person dies or is permanently disabled? Was it the dispatcher? How often do dispatchers give out the wrong address? How quickly do they send out a correction? What were the emergency medical technicians thinking when they discovered they were six to ten blocks the wrong way?

“Something bad happened; how do they cope? What were they thinking?” This situation is one of the driving forces of fiction. We see a mysterious event and we project faces onto it.

Then it occurred to me. There must be emergency responder blogs out there. There must be people blogging about these sorts of mistakes. I don’t have to guess. I can mine these blogs for ideas.

Then this brainstorm went one step further: I don’t need to write the book if we no longer have to guess. Or more specifically, while I still need to write the book, no one else needs to read it.

David Brinkley came to Washington in 1943 after being discharged from the army for medical reasons. He joined NBC news as its White House correspondent. He never uses the first person in this book, but I have the impression that the observations attributed to “a young reporter” refers to his personal experiences. As “a young reporter” he had to dodge amorous landladies and wonder about FDR’s ill-fitting clothes, but most of the book is other people’s experiences.

This is bound to be somewhere close to the last reporting from that period based on first hand sources. One after another, with unsettling rapidity, those in positions of power and responsibility during World War II are passing from the scene. Several who agreed to recall and describe their experiences in the war years died before I could get to them.

War was obvious. Dictators were testing the world in ways very much like we’re seeing now. The United States then—as now—was tired of war and of an economic downturn. President Roosevelt felt that he needed to prepare for war while promising peace. Other world leaders made poorer choices. Churchill famously declared to Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

Some of the advice we’re seeing today is reminiscent of what Roosevelt received as war grew closer: “by setting the United States on fire, we will not put out the fire in Europe.” What will happen to our world when Iran uses nuclear bombs for the first time? History has a strange way of swirling inwards. Are we as a country giving too much to the Mussolinis and the Jew-haters, as other countries did then?

Washington Goes to War is the most readable set of statistics I’ve ever read, interspersed with personal details and captivating stories. Take any five consecutive pages and you could probably write a book on it, or at least a novella. Take, for example, the story of Amy Thorpe sketched on pages 39 to 43 or Jeannette Rankin on page 90. Amy was “a beautiful young American woman” who helped the British acquire an Enigma code machine. Jeanette Rankin was the sole congressperson to vote against war after Pearl Harbor, and then “ran into an anteroom, closed herself inside a telephone booth, and sat there crying.”

If there’s any problem with the book it is that Brinkley shifts seamlessly between the sober statistics and urban hagiography. For example, Brinkley spends several pages describing how incredibly inefficient and wasteful Washington spending was; then describes war bonds as “a financial disappointment” because instead of financing 110 billion dollars of the war, it financed ten billion. “It had never been realistic to expect them [taxpayers] to hand over that much money.”

Perhaps it had been realistic to expect bonds to finance two-thirds of the war, but not two-thirds of the waste.

One of my favorite writing anecdotes is Mike Royko’s tale of finishing Boss, from Doug Moe’s The World of Mike Royko:

He typed the last page of Boss late on a Saturday afternoon in 1970 in his office at the Daily News. Royko pulled the page from the typewriter, put it under the others in the large stack, and walked to Riccardo’s, a restaurant and bar on Rush Street near the newspapers. The bar was quiet and Royko ordered a martini, not his usual drink of choice. This was, after all, quite a moment.

The bartender, who knew him, said, “What’s going on, Mike? Celebrating?”

“I guess so,” Royko said. “I just finished a book.”

“Yeah?” the bartender said. “Me, too.” He reached under the bar and handed Royko a paperback. “You can read it. It’s by Mickey Spillane.”

Well, I’ve just finished a book, too: I’ve finally read Boss. It’s the story of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s rise and reign. It is a very Chicago story, but some of the more interesting parts are where Daley’s story intersects with the national Democratic Party’s story. For example, Daley’s ability to deliver votes got him the 1968 Democratic National Convention. His ability to overreact got him—and the Party—the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. And Daley’s overreaction to the problems caused by his own overreaction got them all bad publicity.

Daley understood how to win by building a machine; he didn’t understand—or just didn’t care—what the machine looked like to outsiders. Royko is almost certainly invoking Animal Farm when he describes Daley’s response to opposition inside the convention hall. I’ve heard some of the convention on audio from the time, and had assumed that the mad ranting audible in the hall was because the rioters were right outside the gates. Turns out, the mad ranting came from Daley. When the other Democrats started making proposals to condemn Daley for his handling of the protests, Daley got his aldermen to bring in supporters, and when an outsider started going off on a tangent Daley didn’t like he signaled them to start yelling praises to him.

It was blunt and blatant. Compare to today, when the press, as President Obama’s popularity wanes, goes into a frenzy over fringe bloggers and Obama birtherism without noting the press’s own foray into the even more ridiculous Trig birtherism emanating from “respected” organizations like the Atlantic.

The prince of the title is both subject and reader. Machiavelli wrote this book as advice to any man with political aspirations who wishes to be the ideal prince. He also had a specific prince in mind, though that prince’s identity may have changed during the writing. He told a friend, while still working on it, that it was for Giuliano de Medici but ultimately presented it to Lorenzo de Medici.

Machiavelli’s ideal prince is one who successfully holds onto power without. He idealizes stability than morality. The book provides advice on how to stay in power once power has been attained. This was something that seemed to elude the leaders of the various Italian states of his era. Given the amount of suffering eternal strife caused the people of the Italian states, Machiavelli’s ennobling of the ability to stay in power is understandable.

Some of his advice is pretty simple, yet still the sort of thing people think won’t happen to them. Such as, if you bring someone else to power, you’re the first person they’ll turn on if they have any ambition whatsoever.

He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.

Of course sometimes that just means betraying them before they betray you. Promise much, provide little. It’s always easy to find someone who will believe your promises.

Men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.

This inability to trust anyone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take sides, as he advises in this somewhat Solomonic advice:

It will always happen that he who is not your friend will demand your neutrality, whilst he who is your friend will entreat you to declare yourself with arms. And irresolute princes, to avoid present dangers, generally follow the neutral path, and are generally ruined.

Machiavelli’s The Prince is easily quoted out of context to prove any point. That may even have been its purpose. It was written in the hope of regaining favor and contains much contradictory advice usable to justify any tactic, from mass murder to avoiding excessive patronage.

He asks simple questions—is it better to be liked than to be feared?—and provides long-winded answers.

One cannot by fair dealing, and without injury to others, satisfy the nobles, but you can satisfy the people, for their object is more righteous than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress, while the former only desire not to be oppressed. It is to be added also that a prince can never secure himself against a hostile people, because of their being too many, whilst from the nobles he can secure himself, as they are few in number.

In 1999, writing about digital restrictions management on the now thankfully defunct DIVX format, I said “They can’t stop you from viewing an already-purchased videotape of course, or an already-purchased DVD video. With DIVX, they can.” The same applies to DRM on music and to books. Any server-based restrictions management can and will be used to retroactively remove things people thought that they paid for. Amazon just did it with, of all things, an edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

It doesn’t matter why Amazon erased Orwell’s books from other people’s e-readers. What matters is that they can, and they are willing to, and they would not be able to do this with paper books. This is why I don’t buy restricted music, and will not buy restricted books. I don’t want to wake up in the morning to discover that Orwell has disappeared down his own memory hole. In my review of Eucalyptus, I wrote that I’d like to highlight sections of the books I read. What happens to those highlights when the text they’re highlighting disappears?

If I absolutely must buy restricted stuff, it will be something like DVD, which doesn’t check back with a server or require changing keys (unlike Blu-Ray, which does require changing keys). But I’ll do my best to avoid DRM altogether.

I have a long moratorium on purchasing hardcovers. I can’t carry hardcovers with me, so they take forever to read. Paperbacks, however, I can put in my bag and read whenever I have a few minutes extra. However, I only carry one at a time, and even some paperbacks nowadays are huge. Even in the mass market paperback version, I had to leave the final book of Stephen King’s Dark Tower home if I needed to carry anything else in my bag. And what happens when I’m finished with a book? Then I carry a temporarily-useless book around until the end of the day.

So the idea of e-readers appeals to me. But the reality of them hasn’t. They’ve either been expensive, bulky, fragile, or tied to proprietary formats—or all of those at once.

When I saw the video of Eucalyptus at the Eucalyptus web site, I was amazed. Eucalyptus looked more readable and more usable than any other e-reader I’ve seen. It pulls from Project Gutenberg’s huge library of great books. And because it works on the portable computer I already have—the iPod Touch—it was very inexpensive. I bought Eucalyptus as soon as it passed Apple’s increasingly dysfunctional approval process¹.

I’m using it on my first generation iPod Touch. Since purchasing it, I’ve read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited, Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, and Machiavelli’s The Prince; and I’m currently re-reading The Three Musketeers. Eucalyptus has let me replace the paperback with my Touch. It is easy to read, comfortable to read for long periods, and more compact even than a paperback.

As a replacement for the paperback, Eucalyptus is just about perfect. I’m very satisfied with this purchase, and am happily queueing up a shelf-load of books from Project Gutenberg that I have never gotten around to reading, including two in my “to-be-read” pile. As long as I know the name and the title, I can easily find any book I want from the Gutenberg site. (They advertise it as “20,000 books to go”.) My “to be read” pile now weighs no more than my iPod, no matter how many books I put in it.