I Am Now War Weary

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book about America drifting toward continual military engagement.

A good book but in telling the tale it meanders around in a somewhat anecdotal fashion.

First there was the founding father's intention to make war something difficult to pursue, especially by the president. But as time marches on the country grows accustomed to war to the point that the state of war becomes a habit.

Except it was actually pulled back after the Vietnam war with the War Powers acts restricting presidential use of force and the Abram doctrine of setting things up so any military action will require the American people be invested in the adventure.

Amazingly things change and after some pretty sensible talk by Carter, then come Reagan and things start to change in the other direction. A fair amount of the books involves recounting Reagan's sales pitch to increase military spending. Pretty depressing stuff since it is mostly based on lies, exaggeration and such.

For example there were completely wrong statements of US vs Soviet military strength and then John Wayne was so incensed about his lies about the Panama Canal treaty (not about war but about American might)...

"Even after John Wayne sent Reagan a private and personal note offering to shoe him 'point by goddamn point int the treaty where you are misinforming people'...Ronald Reagan doubled down." Pg 33

And as president he makes a dramatic speech about a WWI solder buried at Arlington Cemetery where a patriotic and inspiring diary was found on his corpse. Long story short, all lies and Reagan was told about it but went ahead with the speech.

Then there is the quote to justify his Iran Contra actions where he quotes Lenin, except Lenin nobody cant find where he said it except for the reference in a John Birch society book from a Russian who was 3 years old when Lenin died.

Well...it goes on and on. Basically Reagan was a liar of amazing regularity in order to grow the military, And it is a one way ratchet pushing to ever higher levels.

I suppose I get hung up on the out and out lying stuff more than I should, since later presidents managed to achieve the same goal but with less obvious deception (why lie when you can just redefine what true actually means). And in a way the lies are really just a small means to an end, so why should the means bother me more than the end? I suppose it is just that Reagan is so deified now and nobody else points out that he was full of it, and I am just a neurotic contrarian.

I need to just let it go. Really I do.

So it paints a sad picture of a people willing to be manipulated, especially when it has little cost to them.

Yeah, it is all bad.

I need a drink.


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Go Cheetah Go!!

this is the coolest thing I've seen in a very long time http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/11/20/beauty-of-the-beast/

A Polished Picture

I bought a $3 camera from a thrift store, painted clear nail polish on the lens, and took some pictures. This is what I got

Polaroid 340

I snagged a Polaroid Land Camera 340 camera off of ebay for $12.50 (plus $12.50 shipping). It took a few tries to figure out some of the settings but so far I am pleased.

The same photos found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeppomanx/sets/72157632033925867/

Ceremony

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What do I think of this book?

That is hard to say. It is simultaneously real, symbolic, metaphorical, painful, inspiring and confusing. But I kind of thing that was the point.

To go all 9th grade level lit analysis...I thought the troubled outsider Native American returning WWII vet was not an example of a unique sociological type, but rather is a version of that part of us that quietly and perhaps painfully, lives with the repressed alienation that comes with being human in the “modern” world.
Sometimes maudlin literary criticism can say more than a more distant mature and measured approach.

So, I may have loved this book.

I wonder what the more scholarly view is, in that this book spoke about that super cool part of the Native American soul, the idea that there is Unity between us and the Universe.

"He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together...to become the story that as being told. He was not crazy.; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the word Pg 246

Story also reenforces a notion that has bugged me off and on my whole life, that the way we live our lives is fundamentally flawed. Yet there is a “right” way to live. And one part is to be careful about words.

...no word existed alone , and the reason for choosing each word and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it mus be said this certain way . That was the responsibility of being human , old Ku'oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demand great patience and love. Pg35

Key to the tale is the belief that the modern disregard for the natural world is caused but destroyers that tricked the white men into pursuing their march of destruction thinking it a virtue while actually killing our souls. These destroyers were created and use “witchery” to carry out this plan. And part of this evil is founded on an approach that view the world from a static, maybe you could say scientific perspective and not a more ambiguous in its essence.

She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Pg 126

There is a poem describing the witchery world view

They see no life
When they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
the trees and the rivers are not alive
The deer and bear are objects
they see no life
pg 135

Oh yeah, the “Ceremony” is more than pretty cool I think but to find out what it is, you will have to read the book yourself!*

*I slipped back into 9th grade book report model



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Book Plan

Via Clarissa's Blog I found the Classics Club where people choose 50 or more “classics” and set a goal to read them in 5 years.

I've decided to join the club so I just took their suggested list and pick ones that caught my attention, regardless of whether I had read them or not.
Here is what I came up with.

Author		Title	Version On Hand
Achebe	Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Adams	Richard	Watership Down	Book
Borges	Jorge Luis	Ficciones	Book
Bronte	Charlotte	Jane Eyre	Kindle
Bulgakov	Mikhail	The Master and Margarita	Book
Burgess	Anthony	A Clockwork Orange	Book
Camus	Albert	Stranger	Kindle
Carroll	Lewis	Alice in Wonderland
Cather	Willa	My Antonia
Chopin	Kate	The Awakening
Conrad	Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Dostoevsky	Fyodor	Crime and Punishment	Book
Dumas	Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot	George	Silas Marner
Faulkner	William	As I Lay Dying
Fitzgerald	F. Scott	Flappers and Philosophers	Kindle
Forster	E.M.	Passage to India
Gibbons	Stella	Cold Comfort Farm
Gogol	Nikolay	Dead Souls	Book
Greene	Graham	The Power and Glory	Kindle
Hardy	Thomas	Jude the Obscure	Kindle
Hawthorne	Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter	Kindle
Heller	Joseph	Catch-22	Kindle
Hemingway	Ernest	A Farewell to Arms	Book
Hurston	Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Irving	John	A Prayer for Owen Meany	Book
Irving	Washington	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Kerouac	Jack	On the Road
Lee	Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
London	Jack	White Fang
Melville	Herman	Billy Budd	Kindle
Miller	Arthur	The Crucible
Mitchell	David	Cloud Atlas
Nabokov	Vladimir	Pale Fire	Kindle
O’Brien	Tim	Going After Cacciato
O’Connor	Flannery	Wise Blood	Kindle
O’Connor	Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find	Book
Orwell	George	1984	Kindle
Pamuk	Orhan	My Name is Red
Plato		The Trial and Death of Socrates
Rushdie	Salman	The Satanic Verses	Book
Scott	Sir Walter	Ivanhoe	Kindle
Shakespeare	William	Hamlet
Shakespeare	William	King Lear
Shakespeare	William	Macbeth
Silko	Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Steinbeck	John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stoker	Bram	Dracula	Kindle
Thoreau	Henry David	Walden	Kindle
Turgenev	Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain	Mark	A Tramp Abroad	Kindle
West	Nathanael	Day of the Locust
White	T.H.	The Once and Future King	Kindle

Patiot, Traitor, American

Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I totally dug that the founding fathers may have all been arrogant imperfect jerks who somehow managed to place the foundation for our current country. AND the thing is, BURR shows us how the future course of the country was really an unknown.

In the popular mind we see those early years though the lens of what is the destiny of our history. Therefore what we became was inevitable from the actions of the revolutionaries. Aaron Burr's story reminds us that the winners write the history and also that the U.S. is pretty freakin amazing since Burr was a true Revolutionary hero, almost a President, was the third Vice President, was accused of murder and treason. Yet still ended his days in New York city as a “normal” citizen practicing law.

The feeling I got was that Gore adopted an SOB attitude of Burr but actually let some endearing patriotic motivations come through. Maybe that is why Gore found Burr an appealing subject. They were both SOBs who under it all had unconventional virtues at their core.

Anyway. Read it.

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