I Am Charlotte Simmons

As you may recall, I had been greatly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons when I put it down earlier this year to take up other reading. And so when I picked it up again after finishing A History of the Middle East it was with great expectation and excitement.

But I can't recommend this book—which, considering that I actually recommended A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, should come as something of a surprise. Tom Wolfe has been—and I suppose still remains—one of my favorite writers, certainly one of my favorite novelists (along with T.C. Boyle and Richard Russo). Thus, unfortunately, when I don’t like one of his books it’s rather like the betrayal of a lover, instead of just a lousy read.


I won’t go back on what I said earlier. The beginning of this book is almost scary good. Wolfe got so much right it should make any writer feel like a hack for even trying. But then it starts to get… to get… to get…

Well, actually, once the introductions are all complete the book starts to get really interesting. What Wolfe is great at is taking a group of characters who have no earthly business being in the same story, and throwing them all together. He's given us an interesting cast in this story, and by the middle of the book you're getting jumpy, eager to see how he's going to weave them all together and what miracles he will show you along the way.

But by this time, a few things have really started to irritate you. Wolfe has selected two particular aspects of college life and harped on them so mercilessly they become a cliché before the story itself is even half over:

1. College students fuck a lot.
Wow. I mean, great, great insight, that. Truly deserving of a place in the pantheon of profundity. How much research did he have to do to uncover that little gem? A casual glance at MySpace? In fact, he bases the entire thesis of this book (yes, Wolfe's novels do indeed theses, and I only wish I was good enough that mine did, too) on a study that indicates that even rational non-sexaholics placed in a highly sexually charged atmosphere will turn into raging hornytoads. Too bad he made up said study.

I disagree with this entire thesis. I'm extremely smart. I went to college. A lot of the students at the college I went to fucked around a lot. I didn't turn into a drooling lust-crazed poonchaser within one semester of my arrival there. Nor, surprisingly, did any of my friends—at least, not that they're letting on. I can warrant that people less self-assured or intellectual than myself might have, but young Charlotte Simmons is if anything far more self-assured and intellectual. That she would be so swept away rang a bit hollow for me.

And, of course, I cannot fail to point out Wolfe's continual repetition of the theme: college students fuck a lot. (Sorry for the profanity, but it's Wolfe's choice of word, and, frankly, all of our other euphemisms for the act—even the word "sex" itself—are too soft-edged to be accurate descriptors.) On virtually every page is some reference to the theme. Even on pages that consist of conversations between three adults, there will be some reference to the quantity of rumpus the students engage in. And of course, there's Wolfe's favorite phrase: "rutrutrutrutrut." It was comical the first time, amusing the second, and mildly interesting the third. By the fourth it was simply repetitive. By the time Christmas break finally rolled around, two-thirds of the way through the book, I was sick of it, wanted to cross it out with a Sharpie every time it was written. Find a new fucking metaphor, Tom!

2. Boys in college work out.
This actually rates higher than the previous insight, though that isn't saying much. In fact at first I was quite impressed with some of the comments Wolfe makes—muscles are just like any other thing you put on your body as a fashion statement. How true. How insightful. How many times will I have to read it in the course of this novel? Let's try to keep it under a hundred, if possible.

It's a fair point to make, certainly—when I went to college a mere (dare I admit it?) certain number of years ago, this trend had not yet fully developed, but is certainly the case now. Muscles are in (though only for men, thankfully). Abs are probably the highest altar of this particular religion, at least at the moment, but muscle in general is now fashionable. Hey, good for Madison Avenue! They've given us a trend that isn't unhealthy! How long do you think it'll be before women get one? Never? Probably.

Of course, the reason muscles are in now—and this is my insight, not Tom Wolfe's—is because most fashion designers are homosexual, and most gay men like muscles. I mean, if you gotta have models around, might as well be models you find attractive, right? (I maintain this is why so many female supermodels are so creepy; gay men don't really know what straight men want. The same is true in reverse, of course, but in reverse it doesn't result in mass anorexia, or in even very attractive women claiming they need to go on diets. Give me curves, dammit!)

Apart from the endless repetition of this theme—and I do mean endless, I hadn't even reached the halfway point when I wanted to phone Tom up and yell at him for saying the same thing on every one of the first 300 pages—there is the problem of grotesque exaggeration. I may not be immersed in a college campus at present, but there is one just three blocks away, and I drive by the gym there on my commute home from work twice a week when I take the toll road. The guys walking into and out of said gym are of decidedly average physique, and good for them. We ought all to be satisfied with as much.

I also visit another campus upon (too rare an) occasion. The last time I was up at Clemson I actually paid a great deal of attention to this while walking around the campus (Lord knows it was hard, because there were also women around, and it was spring, and they were in bikinis on the lawn, and… well anyway, Tom never managed to mention the glory of Spring). I can report that at my alma mater at least the guys are not as Tom Wolfe describes them. Every time he describes a guy it is with greater superlatives than the last time. By the time he gets to talking about the lacrosse players, the descriptions read like Lou Ferrigno at his peak. I know lacrosse players. They don't look like that.

Across the bay in St. Petersburg there's a modeling outfit called "All-American Guys." The guys they use are the "epitome of sculpted muscularity" without being hideous steroidal freaks (though I doubt they require urine tests). There was an article about the company in one of the competing tabloid-style papers here last week. Not a one of the guys pictured was even remotely as big as Tom Wolfe wants us to think virtually every guy on the DuPont campus is. The truth is, if even 1% of guys on college campuses looked like the All-American Guys, you wouldn't be able to swing a genuine Dungeons & Dragons quarterstaff around on campus without damaging a promising young model's career. In fact, if you hadn't noticed, the obesity epidemic has not bypassed college campuses.

Ultimately, with this topic the exaggeration might not have been as irritating without the constant repetition—then again, it might have been. Certainly the repetition wore quite thin.


Lest you think me shallow, I don't base my opinion of this book on these two minor, if highly irritating, problems. Repetition unto itself, however, does bog the book down in numerous other ways. Adam Gellin lusts for Charlotte Simmons. Good for him! She's pretty and smart. She's exactly the kind of girl I'd lust after if I couldn't be brought up on charges for doing so. But how many times do we need to cut away to Adam thinking about how he lusts after Charlotte before we get the idea? Two, three dozen? I don't know, it seems a bit much.

And then… and then there's Charlotte's depression. For well over a hundred pages, Wolfe gives us Charlotte Simmons, the depressed freshman (which would make her a "depreshman," a word I just made up that I rather like). Charlotte depressed lying in her dorm room. Charlotte depressed and hiding from the world in the library. Charlotte depressed riding back to campus after the formal. Charlotte depressed trying to avoid talking to her friends. Charlotte depressed at home for the Christmas holiday. Charlotte depressed and wailing for Adam to comfort her.

Hey, guess what? Charlotte's depressed! I assume at some point Wolfe has suffered from it himself, he described it so accurately: How you just want to be alone. How much you really, really hate talking to people. How answering questions is the most miserable thing you can imagine, except for all the other things you'll imagine in a minute if everyone would just let you be. God, I knew exactly what he was writing. I could have written it myself. It was so very familiar. And so… tedious. My God man, I wanted to throw the book in the trash before she even got home for the pain of Christmas break. I knew exactly what was going to happen, what everyone was going to say, how Charlotte would respond… I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry out, "enough already, Tom!! I freaking get it! Let's move on!" Was there anything else to this story? Did I even care any more? Charlotte kept hoping an angel would come steal her away, and frankly, I wouldn't have minded one bit. The other characters were all—every last one of them, even the ones you're supposed to hate—more intriguing by this point, and what's more if Charlotte really had caught the last train for the coast it would have made the rest of the book that much more interesting.

I skimmed about fifty pages. I don't skim, in novels, it's just not right. If it's bad enough to make me skim, I'm about one minute from donating it to the library unfinished. I put down Martin Dressler because it was so tedious I was skimming. I did the same with Scorched Earth. And dadgumit I very nearly did the same with this book—this book by a writer I idolize, this first book he's published in half a decade and which I've been looking forward to for so long—I almost put the damn thing down and started reading something else.

I decided not to. I got up, washed the dishes, fed the cat, and went to bed. I picked it up this afternoon and slogged it out, and it did get better. Once the various characters and their plot threads all began to race together toward their tidy conclusion, the book started to move. But by this point there were fewer than a hundred pages left—less than a seventh of the novel—and all the brilliant insights and interesting moments that had occurred in the first 500 pages—and there were many, like the definition of cool, or the nature of male humiliation—had been forgotten. By this point I was reading simply to finish the thing.

And I did.

And it ended… it ended well, in many ways, and not as well in others. The villain ends up broken, as all villains must. The exact nature of his brokenness is, of course, left to the imagination, as it should be, as Wolfe always does. (There is a reason I so enjoy his work.) Charlotte ends up with the right person, not with either of the wrong people. The right person ends up like Colossus astride the harbor, as he should. The little man ends up making his own way in the world, as he should. It all ends so terribly well.

But how did he get there? I overuse the phrase deus ex machina, but… I want to use it again. The timing, the nature of it all. The setup, such as it is, comes a whopping four pages before the actual climax, in the same narrative stream. Four pages. In a book over 700 pages long, the setup to the climax is first introduced four pages prior. There is a weak element of foreshadowing some hundred pages prior, but after rereading I still don't find it an adequate setup for the animosity that solves the climax.

Lord knows I've written myself into corners before from which there seemed little escape. That sometimes happens when you let your characters take over your story (as you should) and they end up not doing what you wanted them to, the sotty little ingrates. Still, I'm not Tom Wolfe. I can get away with that on first draft, but I try to correct it.

I suppose it can be viewed as a "surprise," an element that should amuse the reader, and perhaps had I been holding a more charitable view of the novel prior to the climax that might have happened. But no. I had just slogged through 700 pages of the exact same witty observations repeated ad nauseum til long after after all the wit had been wrung therefrom.

Yes, Wolfe tackled a big world here. Yes, he got a lot of it right. If you wish, read the first two or three hundred pages and savor the wit and insight. Then put it down and move on to something more interesting. If you bother finishing this book, you'll only end up disappointed.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

As you may recall, I had been greatly enjoying Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons when I put it down earlier this year to take up other reading. And so when I picked it up again after finishing A History of the Middle East it was with great expectation and excitement.

But I can't recommend this book—which, considering that I actually recommended A History of Post-Colonial Lusophone Africa, should come as something of a surprise. Tom Wolfe has been—and I suppose still remains—one of my favorite writers, certainly one of my favorite novelists (along with T.C. Boyle and Richard Russo). Thus, unfortunately, when I don’t like one of his books it’s rather like the betrayal of a lover, instead of just a lousy read.


I won’t go back on what I said earlier. The beginning of this book is almost scary good. Wolfe got so much right it should make any writer feel like a hack for even trying. But then it starts to get… to get… to get…

Well, actually, once the introductions are all complete the book starts to get really interesting. What Wolfe is great at is taking a group of characters who have no earthly business being in the same story, and throwing them all together. He's given us an interesting cast in this story, and by the middle of the book you're getting jumpy, eager to see how he's going to weave them all together and what miracles he will show you along the way.

But by this time, a few things have really started to irritate you. Wolfe has selected two particular aspects of college life and harped on them so mercilessly they become a cliché before the story itself is even half over:

1. College students fuck a lot.
Wow. I mean, great, great insight, that. Truly deserving of a place in the pantheon of profundity. How much research did he have to do to uncover that little gem? A casual glance at MySpace? In fact, he bases the entire thesis of this book (yes, Wolfe's novels do indeed theses, and I only wish I was good enough that mine did, too) on a study that indicates that even rational non-sexaholics placed in a highly sexually charged atmosphere will turn into raging hornytoads. Too bad he made up said study.

I disagree with this entire thesis. I'm extremely smart. I went to college. A lot of the students at the college I went to fucked around a lot. I didn't turn into a drooling lust-crazed poonchaser within one semester of my arrival there. Nor, surprisingly, did any of my friends—at least, not that they're letting on. I can warrant that people less self-assured or intellectual than myself might have, but young Charlotte Simmons is if anything far more self-assured and intellectual. That she would be so swept away rang a bit hollow for me.

And, of course, I cannot fail to point out Wolfe's continual repetition of the theme: college students fuck a lot. (Sorry for the profanity, but it's Wolfe's choice of word, and, frankly, all of our other euphemisms for the act—even the word "sex" itself—are too soft-edged to be accurate descriptors.) On virtually every page is some reference to the theme. Even on pages that consist of conversations between three adults, there will be some reference to the quantity of rumpus the students engage in. And of course, there's Wolfe's favorite phrase: "rutrutrutrutrut." It was comical the first time, amusing the second, and mildly interesting the third. By the fourth it was simply repetitive. By the time Christmas break finally rolled around, two-thirds of the way through the book, I was sick of it, wanted to cross it out with a Sharpie every time it was written. Find a new fucking metaphor, Tom!

2. Boys in college work out.
This actually rates higher than the previous insight, though that isn't saying much. In fact at first I was quite impressed with some of the comments Wolfe makes—muscles are just like any other thing you put on your body as a fashion statement. How true. How insightful. How many times will I have to read it in the course of this novel? Let's try to keep it under a hundred, if possible.

It's a fair point to make, certainly—when I went to college a mere (dare I admit it?) certain number of years ago, this trend had not yet fully developed, but is certainly the case now. Muscles are in (though only for men, thankfully). Abs are probably the highest altar of this particular religion, at least at the moment, but muscle in general is now fashionable. Hey, good for Madison Avenue! They've given us a trend that isn't unhealthy! How long do you think it'll be before women get one? Never? Probably.

Of course, the reason muscles are in now—and this is my insight, not Tom Wolfe's—is because most fashion designers are homosexual, and most gay men like muscles. I mean, if you gotta have models around, might as well be models you find attractive, right? (I maintain this is why so many female supermodels are so creepy; gay men don't really know what straight men want. The same is true in reverse, of course, but in reverse it doesn't result in mass anorexia, or in even very attractive women claiming they need to go on diets. Give me curves, dammit!)

Apart from the endless repetition of this theme—and I do mean endless, I hadn't even reached the halfway point when I wanted to phone Tom up and yell at him for saying the same thing on every one of the first 300 pages—there is the problem of grotesque exaggeration. I may not be immersed in a college campus at present, but there is one just three blocks away, and I drive by the gym there on my commute home from work twice a week when I take the toll road. The guys walking into and out of said gym are of decidedly average physique, and good for them. We ought all to be satisfied with as much.

I also visit another campus upon (too rare an) occasion. The last time I was up at Clemson I actually paid a great deal of attention to this while walking around the campus (Lord knows it was hard, because there were also women around, and it was spring, and they were in bikinis on the lawn, and… well anyway, Tom never managed to mention the glory of Spring). I can report that at my alma mater at least the guys are not as Tom Wolfe describes them. Every time he describes a guy it is with greater superlatives than the last time. By the time he gets to talking about the lacrosse players, the descriptions read like Lou Ferrigno at his peak. I know lacrosse players. They don't look like that.

Across the bay in St. Petersburg there's a modeling outfit called "All-American Guys." The guys they use are the "epitome of sculpted muscularity" without being hideous steroidal freaks (though I doubt they require urine tests). There was an article about the company in one of the competing tabloid-style papers here last week. Not a one of the guys pictured was even remotely as big as Tom Wolfe wants us to think virtually every guy on the DuPont campus is. The truth is, if even 1% of guys on college campuses looked like the All-American Guys, you wouldn't be able to swing a genuine Dungeons & Dragons quarterstaff around on campus without damaging a promising young model's career. In fact, if you hadn't noticed, the obesity epidemic has not bypassed college campuses.

Ultimately, with this topic the exaggeration might not have been as irritating without the constant repetition—then again, it might have been. Certainly the repetition wore quite thin.


Lest you think me shallow, I don't base my opinion of this book on these two minor, if highly irritating, problems. Repetition unto itself, however, does bog the book down in numerous other ways. Adam Gellin lusts for Charlotte Simmons. Good for him! She's pretty and smart. She's exactly the kind of girl I'd lust after if I couldn't be brought up on charges for doing so. But how many times do we need to cut away to Adam thinking about how he lusts after Charlotte before we get the idea? Two, three dozen? I don't know, it seems a bit much.

And then… and then there's Charlotte's depression. For well over a hundred pages, Wolfe gives us Charlotte Simmons, the depressed freshman (which would make her a "depreshman," a word I just made up that I rather like). Charlotte depressed lying in her dorm room. Charlotte depressed and hiding from the world in the library. Charlotte depressed riding back to campus after the formal. Charlotte depressed trying to avoid talking to her friends. Charlotte depressed at home for the Christmas holiday. Charlotte depressed and wailing for Adam to comfort her.

Hey, guess what? Charlotte's depressed! I assume at some point Wolfe has suffered from it himself, he described it so accurately: How you just want to be alone. How much you really, really hate talking to people. How answering questions is the most miserable thing you can imagine, except for all the other things you'll imagine in a minute if everyone would just let you be. God, I knew exactly what he was writing. I could have written it myself. It was so very familiar. And so… tedious. My God man, I wanted to throw the book in the trash before she even got home for the pain of Christmas break. I knew exactly what was going to happen, what everyone was going to say, how Charlotte would respond… I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry out, "enough already, Tom!! I freaking get it! Let's move on!" Was there anything else to this story? Did I even care any more? Charlotte kept hoping an angel would come steal her away, and frankly, I wouldn't have minded one bit. The other characters were all—every last one of them, even the ones you're supposed to hate—more intriguing by this point, and what's more if Charlotte really had caught the last train for the coast it would have made the rest of the book that much more interesting.

I skimmed about fifty pages. I don't skim, in novels, it's just not right. If it's bad enough to make me skim, I'm about one minute from donating it to the library unfinished. I put down Martin Dressler because it was so tedious I was skimming. I did the same with Scorched Earth. And dadgumit I very nearly did the same with this book—this book by a writer I idolize, this first book he's published in half a decade and which I've been looking forward to for so long—I almost put the damn thing down and started reading something else.

I decided not to. I got up, washed the dishes, fed the cat, and went to bed. I picked it up this afternoon and slogged it out, and it did get better. Once the various characters and their plot threads all began to race together toward their tidy conclusion, the book started to move. But by this point there were fewer than a hundred pages left—less than a seventh of the novel—and all the brilliant insights and interesting moments that had occurred in the first 500 pages—and there were many, like the definition of cool, or the nature of male humiliation—had been forgotten. By this point I was reading simply to finish the thing.

And I did.

And it ended… it ended well, in many ways, and not as well in others. The villain ends up broken, as all villains must. The exact nature of his brokenness is, of course, left to the imagination, as it should be, as Wolfe always does. (There is a reason I so enjoy his work.) Charlotte ends up with the right person, not with either of the wrong people. The right person ends up like Colossus astride the harbor, as he should. The little man ends up making his own way in the world, as he should. It all ends so terribly well.

But how did he get there? I overuse the phrase deus ex machina, but… I want to use it again. The timing, the nature of it all. The setup, such as it is, comes a whopping four pages before the actual climax, in the same narrative stream. Four pages. In a book over 700 pages long, the setup to the climax is first introduced four pages prior. There is a weak element of foreshadowing some hundred pages prior, but after rereading I still don't find it an adequate setup for the animosity that solves the climax.

Lord knows I've written myself into corners before from which there seemed little escape. That sometimes happens when you let your characters take over your story (as you should) and they end up not doing what you wanted them to, the sotty little ingrates. Still, I'm not Tom Wolfe. I can get away with that on first draft, but I try to correct it.

I suppose it can be viewed as a "surprise," an element that should amuse the reader, and perhaps had I been holding a more charitable view of the novel prior to the climax that might have happened. But no. I had just slogged through 700 pages of the exact same witty observations repeated ad nauseum til long after after all the wit had been wrung therefrom.

Yes, Wolfe tackled a big world here. Yes, he got a lot of it right. If you wish, read the first two or three hundred pages and savor the wit and insight. Then put it down and move on to something more interesting. If you bother finishing this book, you'll only end up disappointed.

Things I Learned Today

I occasionally have days that are very instructive in a wide range of areas. Today was such a day.

I learned that at least some people in my squadron think I’m a slacker and worse because I don’t deploy. Of course, I’m grounded and thus can’t deploy as aircrew, and I did try to deploy, for four months, to a damn war zone no less, earlier this year until that trip got cancelled. But that’s what some people think, and aren’t afraid to express.

To my great disappointment, I also learned that this matters to me. It should not matter to me in the slightest. Although I like most of my coworkers as coworkers, certainly there are wild personality and ideological conflicts between me and many of the people who work in my squadron, and I have no special need to consider the majority of these people friends. As long as we can work together, I’ve always thought, I could care less what people think of me—-as long as the higher-ups think I’m doing a decent job.

To my disgust, I learned that I can make rash statements on the basis of these peoples’ opinions that I will later come to regret (sometimes within the hour). I learned that I can be petty and immature for very little reason. These are not nice things to learn about yourself. Still, better to have learned than to remain in the dark. Knowledge is the first step to… what, fixing it? Yeah, I guess that’ll have to do.

It’s a simple matter. I know, in rational moments, that other peoples’ opinions of me aren’t worth the space they occupy in other peoples’ brains. But when I get emotional-—and I do get emotional, more now than I used to—-the rational part of my brain shuts down and I just want to hurt people. That’s not a very good thing.

I was doing so well, too—-I was going to be the bigger person, let the issue die, which it probably will anyway. But I let somebody else talk me into making something out of it—-a statement that, hey, you can’t screw up and blame me when it’s your fault. Because that’s how this whole issue started—-somebody screwed up, and blamed me. And they blamed me because I "don’t remember what it’s like" to deploy. I remember just fine. This person just needed a handy scapegoat. Had I focused on the scapegoating, it would have been appropriate to raise the issue above the level of petty interpersonal squabbling. But I couldn’t. I had to focus on what turns out to be a really super-emotional issue for me, namely, people looking down on me because I don’t deploy any more. I’ve always been afraid that would happen. I try to run my shop with the attitude of, hey, we know what it’s like to deploy here, so we’re going to do everything we can to make your lives easier while you do it. But apparently, that’s either not the message that comes across, or people just want their hands held.

No matter. I got so riled up by the personal insult I stopped thinking straight and decided to make an issue out of it. I think the other people I got involved are understanding enough to recognize that I was out of sorts, and will respect my desire to retract my statement and handle the matter on a personal level… but I feel my reputation with the people who matter, or with one of them at any rate, has been sullied by the whole affair.

What I should have done is left. There’s no reason to sit around and stew in your own juices. I could have gone to the gym, left for an early lunch, or just come home and distracted myself until I calmed down. That’s standard anger management (I know, I've been to the class)—-the issue will still be there, but once the emotion has died down I can handle it much more maturely. What a pity I followed my baser, rather than my better, instincts.

Of course, if I wasn't under this absurd stress of being kept utterly in the dark about my future, I probably would have handled this better. I have much less patience these days than I used to--and I've never had an especially long fuse.

But there is hope! You see, I also learned… well, I’m not sure if what I learned qualifies as actual learning or just hope. But I did get some hope, so much so that if I stop kicking myself over the previous issue I might actually get a decent night’s sleep. They’re working on a "waiver."

By "they" of course I mean the Air Force. The waiver would be to release me from my service commitment. If "they" are working on a "waiver," that’s… well, I admit it’s pretty ambiguous ("working" can mean a lot), but it is so much less ambiguous than not having heard anything at all for seven months! I can’t describe the joy and pleasure this little piece of knowledge brings me!

And it might get better! It seems the window has closed for wrapping me up into "force shaping" (the Air Force is shrinking this year; we call it "force shaping" the same way getting fired is referred to as "downsizing"), so my commander asked if perhaps they could see fit to keep me through the end of this calendar year.

Why would I want to stay in so long? Aside from the additional few months of paycheck (always a plus), there has arisen a fascinating opportunity in a country far, far away, much like the opportunity I thought I had earlier this year, only not in the middle of a civil war. How exciting! I could deploy again! I would feel less… leechlike, I suppose, if I could deploy again before I left.

Plus, I’d be getting out in December, rather than in September. In September almost everyone in the squadron, including the majority of the people I actually like (but not, of course, my new least favorite person), will be gone one place or another. But in December I’ll be able to say goodbye to the people I actually want to say goodbye to. How nice. I should like a nice going away lunch at a place like The Green Iguana, or better yet Sonny’s Barbeque (c’mon, how can you not go to a going-away lunch when it’s at Sonny’s?), where everybody can sit around and talk and laugh and not pay a whit of attention to me except for like two or three minutes when I say, gosh, you people sure are cool but I’m not going to miss this job one bit! I look forward to that.

Of course, there’s no telling if this will actually come to pass. But it feels so much more… more… words fail me. It feels less like I’ve been utterly forgotten by the Air Force and may be left to languish at the squadron for another decade. And that feels wonderful.

I learned other things today, too. It’s easier to slice turkey sausage when it’s frozen. Red wine after white is better than white wine after red. It’s impossible to get all the sauce out of a bottle of Bertolli pasta sauce (who makes a freakin' square bottle?). It isn’t necessary to maintain full insurance coverage on your car in Florida once you’ve paid it off. And there’s a chance I could catch a trip (as a passenger) ten days from now that would give me a night in Okinawa, where I could visit my friend Fiesterville. How cool would that be? We only haven’t seen each other in, what, a year?
Yes, it was an instructive day all around. I wonder how much of it I’ll remember tomorrow?

Polling

Another poll today, this one from the American Research Group, gives El Arbusto the lowest marks of his presidency. This isn't really news except that the writeup I read intrigued me enough that I read the actual poll. (Incidentally, ARG posts the actual wording they used in the poll, if you've ever wondered how they get their information.) The writeup indicated that 83% of Americans base their opinion of the national economy on gas prices.

This isn't really fair. Gas prices are not the national economy. Gas prices have a big effect on your personal economy (certainly on mine), and they can have an effect on the national economy just as surely. But they're a potential cause of a weakening economy, not a sign of an already poor economy.

I haven't really studied a poll in long while. This one was interesting. 22% of Republicans disapprove of Bush's leadership; that's high for this president. At the same time only 26% of Independents approve of him; this, combined with a whopping 7% of Democrats who approve (I doubt any of them will show up at Drinking Liberally this Thursday night), is why his overall approval rating is so crappy (only 34%). (If you're curious, on the rare occasion I get called for a poll I always report my party ID as independent.)

Bush's marks on the economy are lower than his overall marks by a few points. This is interesting because if anything the national economy is going better than the Iraq war. However, although economists and White House apparatchiks will tell you that the economy is doing great (although the last two months' numbers indicate potential weakness in the near future), it's interesting to see that Americans by and large do not think the economy is doing very well at all.

67% of people said the economy was either bad, very bad, or terrible, and 58% of people said it was getting worse. 60% thought the economy a year from now would be worse than it is today. More than half of people think we're in the tubes and getting worse, though the economy is actually at worst mediocre (with structural deficiencies that will come back to bite us by year's end like stagnant wage growth). Similar situations in the past caused Jimmy Carter to complain of a "national malaise" and Bill Clinton to say that the country was "in a funk." Bush should be credited for not coming up with a cute phrase, since they always make things worse. Among the 60% of people who disapprove of Bush's job performance, 96% said the economy was either bad, very bad, or terrible.
Remember when Bill Clinton said, "It's the economy, stupid?" Even in the midst of a shooting war, it's still true.

The problem with asking people what they think, of course, is that many of them don't think at all. 37% of Americans said the economy was either very bad or terrible, but only 30% said we were in a recession. If "very bad" is not a recession, then exactly what was the Great Depression? The scale stops before it gets to "throw yourself out the window."

Here's another funny thing. Only 31% of Americans said the economy was good or better, but 52% said their household financial situation was good or better. Of course part of this may be that people whose household finances are "terrible" probably don't answer the phone. However, although we're overall bullish on our own financial situation, 57% of us say our finances are getting worse. 44% of us think our finances will be worse a year from now.

As for me, my finances are fine now but will be worse a year from now, I don't approve of Bush's handling of the economy or his job, I don't think we're in a recession, and think the economy is overall getting worse. But they didn't call me.

Krazy Kat's Corky Coverup

Let me get this straight. She goes to dinner with a lobbyist at a restaurant where the average meal costs more than she is legally allowed to accept as a gift. And she doesn’t pay. And she calls it an “oversight.”

Then she donates $100 to charity (check out the writeup on the charity) to make up for the “beverage and appetizers” that she ate. So she’s chalking up $2700 worth of food and wine to the lobbyist she dined with. This being a person who, she said, walked out of the restaurant with several bottles of uncorked wine, which the restaurant claims they wouldn’t let happen.

You know, it's not a question of exactly which parts of her story are a lie any more. It a question of whether any part of her story is ever true.

The King of Crapulence?

A couple weeks ago I posted a ranking of 20th Century presidents. Nixon came in at the bottom, and at the time I wrote that given current trends the current White Hoser would end up in the bottom third.

Today I read an article in Rolling Stone by a historian who thinks we might be seeing the worst of all time at work.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. I mean, I really don’t; I don’t have any reason one way or the other, I just… it seems early to hang “worst of all time” on somebody when he’s got over two years left. And it seems a little harsh to describe someone’s position in the light of history when the end of his term is still in the future. Still, this is a very interesting article, and apparently free! It’s worth a read.

A Political Rant

I was going to title this, "Why I'm not a Republican Any More," but it went further than that.

My political outlook has changed little in the past decade. I’ve gone a little more green, but I’m still a fiscally conservative/socially libertarian/states’ rights/small government/foreign policy activist with an environmentalist streak. There is no political party that encompasses these views, or even tries to, and at times it’s almost enough to make me stay home on election day (which I will never, ever do).

In college I was a Republican, because I was registered to vote in Clay County, Florida, the most Republican county in the state and a place where all local and legislative offices were decided in the GOP primary. Also, my parents were Republicans. And, I was reading a lot of PJ O’Rourke at the time and he hadn’t yet admitted he was really a libertarian at heart (this was the era of Republican Party Reptile).

But even then I was a half-hearted Republican. I called myself conservative then because the people in power who called themselves conservatives still pretended to give a darn about fiscal responsibility; this they no longer do. I didn’t join the College Republicans. I worked at the official campus newspaper, and made fun of the upstart conservative one (which is still worth making fun of). I didn’t even join my local church like a good little conservative, because the pastor there, during my freshman year, complained to the media that the Carolina Panthers, who were playing home games in Clemson’s Death Valley that fall while Ericsson Stadium was built, should give money to all the local congregations because of the decreased donations from people staying home to tailgate for the football games instead of going to church. Never said a word about the souls that weren’t saved or the good news that wasn’t spread; no, it was about the money that wasn’t collected. I’ve never met a pastor who has so lost his way.

I didn’t even vote for Bob Dole in 1996 (it was a Harry Browne year). By 2000 I was working for the Democratic Party. I didn’t win the race I was managing, but I was drawing a paycheck. At this point I was still a registered Republican—because I was still registered in Clay County (which is now only the second-most Republican county in the state, thank you very much Santa Rosa). But I didn’t vote for Al Gore for President that year (I was one of those horrible Nader voters the Gore camp kept complaining about. No matter. Al Gore is a better person for having lost in 2000; I maintain he would have been a lousy president, though whether lousier than the current louse we will never know).

When I moved to Tampa in 2003 I registered as a Democrat for the first time—again out of necessity, because I now live in a very Democratic district. If I had my choice I’d register without party affiliation, but state law makes that foolish. And yes, in 2004 I did vote for John Kerry, who I think was a terrible candidate and would make a dreadful president. But I also think he might have been just a wee bit less dreadful than the alternative. This was the first time I had voted for a major party candidate for President, and I felt dirty doing it because I knew I wouldn’t be happy with either man.

The one time I’ve ever been really happy with a major-party candidate for President was in 2000, when John McCain raised my hopes that someone with some actual balls, and sense, might have a chance. And he did have a chance, until Karl Rove and his team of miscreants smeared him in South Carolina: Bush supporters suggested McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his illegitimate black child, distributed flyers at South Carolina churches calling McCain “the fag candidate,” claimed that Cindy McCain was a drug addict, suggested that his time in a North Vietnamese prison had actually driven him insane, made suggestions that McCain had committed treasonous acts while a POW (while Bush was safe at home, ready to act in case the Viet Cong came swarming across the Rio Grande), and called McCain a “Manchurian candidate” who had collaborated with the North Vietnamese and was recruited by the Soviets (this last was accomplished by one Ted Sampley, who was the driving force behind the SwiftVets campaign against Kerry last year). Had Bush and his cronies not signed off on this blatant filthmongering, McCain would very likely have been elected President in 2000. (If you’re wondering where my animosity towards Bush comes from, this list of lies is a good place to start. Why do so many military personnel like him, given the things he’s said about a decorated military officer and POW in the past simply to gain political power? What blinders are my colleagues wearing that they trust one word that comes out of his mouth? I’ve always wondered.)

But that’s another matter. McCain looks likely to run in 2008 and I should be thrilled about that, right? I should be. But I’m not. While I still think he’s likely the best of batch of potential candidates in either party, I don’t share the same devotion that led me to send him over $1000 during the course of 2000 campaign. It’s because of Republicans.

He has to win a GOP primary. This means he has to appear more “conservative,” by the narrow definition of the activist right wing of his party. Just this year he has come out in favor of making the Bush tax cuts permanent (the OMB’s budget projections, which show a continuing deficit as far as the eye can see, assume the tax cuts will lapse), agreed to address the graduating class at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s “college” and just a step shy of Bob Jones U), and changed his mind on Roe v Wade (from not supporting its repeal to supporting a nationwide abortion ban).

I certainly don’t think people can’t change their minds; I expect them to, and I hate it when people (frequently Republicans, I’ve noticed, but then only because Democrats don’t have any values to start with) accuse a politician of “flip-flopping” or “waffling” for changing his or her mind on a topic—especially when the change occurred years ago; we are none of us the same person we were five years ago, nor should we wish to be. But it was the positions he took in 2000 that made independents like me support his campaign with our votes and our dollars. For me, the worst was his strong support of Bush’s 2004 campaign. He could have just kept his mouth shut, instead of standing by his man all autumn while the same person who fabricated lies about him in 2000 did the same to John Kerry. I’m sorry, but that strikes me as a total lack of character; to me, McCain’s late 2004 activities were about expediency and making friends with GOP stalwarts and not about principles at all.

I’m not a fool. I know that John McCain is far more conservative than I am, and I knew he was in 2000. I can forgive a politician a lot of faults in ideology if I believe his character and judgment are above reproach. I believed that about John McCain in 2000. I’m not so sure I believe it now.

And I really think it’s partisan politics, especially in the GOP (remember, the Democrats don’t know what their values are so they’re not nearly as prone to attacking each other’s positions), that has caused this diminution in character. Examine Rudy Giuliani, another potential 2008 candidate (though he seems less certain about this than McCain does). Giuliani is as socially liberal (read: tolerant, because that’s what I mean when I say “liberal”) a Republican as exists in this country. The GOP likes him, because he is extremely popular—and he’s popular not just as the very public face of New York after the 9/11 disaster, but for the turnaround he engineered in the city in 1990s. But he’s also a social liberal, and while there are apparently still social liberals in the GOP, right-wing activists and primary voters demand unyielding social conservatism in their candidates. Giuliani has a lot of backtracking to do. He’s been doing it lately, stumping yesterday for Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, one of the most socially conservative members of the Senate, and later this week working a fundraiser for Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition and noted FOA (Friend of Abramoff). Why? What does he have in common with these gentlemen? Giuliani’s popularity in the GOP stems from his stands on things like terrorism, the Iraq war, and foreign policy. Reed doesn’t deal with any of those things, and Giuliani as president would have nothing to do with Reed as lieutenant governor of Georgia. Do they need each other’s support? Does anyone need Ralph Reed’s support right now, given his scandal-plagued campaign? Giuliani must show the right wing that he is one of them; there is no other possible reason for his support for Reed (the two are not personal friends, which would explain it).

Again I come back to the way partisanship seems to eat away at a man’s principles the longer he stays in government or the higher he tries to rise in it. It’s time to start over with new parties, and more of them.

Rumsfeld is Not the Problem

So, what with all these calls going on for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign, I bet you’re wondering what regular folks in the military think. Well, I’m gonna tell you.

I don’t have any idea. Neither does anybody I work with. The SECDEF is so far above our heads it’s hard for us to know what he does and what he doesn’t do. Four years ago I’d have told you he was exactly the person the DOD needed, and I still believe that’s true—he was exactly the person the DOD needed at that time, to be the public face of the department. Few people in Washington so successfully handled the press, especially regarding the sensitive matters of terrorism, war, and national defense.

There’s the matter of the planning for the Iraq war, which was clearly bungled. But was it bungled solely by Rumsfeld? I certainly can’t believe it was; it surely took more than one mind to half-ass the occupation so completely. As the Secretary, of course, the buck stops with him—but one of the guiltiest of the guilty, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, is now running the World Bank (doing a decent job so far, too, to my unending surprise) and hence not around to be sacked.

The fact is, the generals are complaining about things that happened three years ago. Many of them are complaining now because they’re retired and can complain; we are prevented by the Uniform Code of Military Justice from saying anything negative about the civilian leadership of the military (the Prez, VP, and SECDEF primarily) in any official capacity. The last general to try that, Billy Mitchell, was court-martialed in the 1920s (and though vilified by many pundits at the time, last week we had a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times (Tom Lipscomb) lionizing his decision to accept a court-martial rather than accept government policies he disagreed with and blaming Gen. Anthony Zinni for not doing likewise himself).

Still, complaints about the SECDEF from retired generals who were actually running the war they’re complaining about carry infinitely more weight than complaints from the hoi polloi—and intelligent and traveled as Lipscomb is, he’s still the hoi polloi when it comes to military matters. Regardless of what anyone outside this world thinks, if these people believe Rumsfeld is at fault for something, their complaints merit serious discussion, not partisan vitriol.

Some reports indicate that the animosity goes back to the way former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was treated by the DOD after declaring that the number of troops required for an invasion and occupation would be significantly higher than the administration was asking for; the genius John Kerry implied in his 2004 campaign that Shinseki was pushed out for disagreeing with the civilian leadership. In fact, Shinseki served out his full term and retired on schedule. There is no question that his relationship with Rumsfeld et al was frosty. Shinseki was responsible for the decision to make the standard headgear for all soldiers the black beret (previously available only to special ops forces), for which he was roundly criticized throughout the civilian and military worlds. Still, Shinseki is widely respected inside the Army, but it seems unlikely that any lingering Rumsfeld/Shinseki enmity is behind the complaints. It’s worth noting Shinseki has been quiet, although he is already on record as saying the Iraq invasion would require far more troops.

I haven’t examined the generals’ comments in detail. If they are implying that Rumsfeld was dictating military strategy and tactics to military leaders in the field, rather than simply giving them the mission and the leeway to accomplish it, then yes, he should resign. That’s Vietnam-era foolishness, the idea of the Executive Branch sitting around picking targets and defining operations. If it’s going on today it must be stopped immediately.

On the other hand, if they are simply arguing that he didn’t give them (or other military leaders) the necessary manpower and materiel to conduct the war, then there’s more room for debate. There’s no question—at least, not outside the right-wing punditry and blogosphere—but that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has not gone according to plan and could have been done much better. The Economist recently ran an interesting article detailing the cost of the war thus far and the potential costs of continued containment, which shows that ultimately the difference may be close to nil. But they fail to consider what the costs might have been of running the war more effectively, of planning for (even if not expecting) a drawn-out insurgency, a brief period of anarchy, sectarian tensions, and the like, and running the war accordingly.

Rumsfeld reportedly offered to resign during the Abu Ghraib scandals. Rumsfeld is not alone complicit, since Abu Ghraib we’ve learned was the not result of any direct order, but rather a culture of permissiveness, a culture that seeped down from the White House itself. Rumsfeld at that point would merely have been a sacrificial lamb, but his departure would not have changed the culture.

And that, I think, is important in the current debate. Will Rumsfeld’s departure change the culture in the Executive Branch? With him gone, will the President finally be able to admit the occupation was botched? When he is out of the way, will everything suddenly become hunky-dory? I don’t think so.

The fact is, there is an individual at the top of the food chain who keeps his friends close and everyone else as far away as possible. His much-vaunted staff-shakeup has consisted in accepting the resignation of one close friend and promoting an even closer, older friend into the same job. The White House today is a closed information loop. If somebody already inside doesn’t think of something, it doesn’t get thought of. The problem is that the people inside all think exactly alike, because that’s the way the President wants it. Getting rid of Rumsfeld may satisfy a desire on the part of some individuals to have someone pay for the mismanagement of the Iraq war. But retribution is a dead-end street; genuine change is going to take a complete personnel turnover. Barring impeachment proceedings (which, let’s not forget, would only put Cheney into the White House, who would little improve the atmosphere there), we’re just going to have to wait for 2009.

Yes. I'm serious.

Okay, so, we all know Abramoff Buddy and all-around slimeball Tom DeLay, who has resigned from his House seat under a cloud of suspicion and multiple indictments (though of course that had nothing to do with why he resigned, no), but who (surprise, surprise) the White House has repeatedly claimed is innocent of charges (charges that, of course, the White House wouldn't know anything about).

Well, it just gets better. The chief of the Office of Management and the Budget, Josh Bolten, recently stepped up to become Chief of Staff. And who is on the shortlist to replace Bolten?

Tom DeLay! Of course he is! You may recall that DeLay announced last year that the federal budget was as small as it could possibly be. Yeah. He said that. And now this man is on the short-list to become the head budget estimator and manager for the entire Executive Branch. In the administration that has produced the largest deficits in history.

Mm-hmm. We actually have to put up with these clowns for another two years and nine months. I hope the country can handle it.

An Interesting Comparison

As my friend Lucky Bob mentions, I recently took in a viewing of V for Vendetta, and I enjoyed it a great deal. I highly recommend going to see it, and now I want to go buy a copy of the graphic novel on which it's based (and which no doubt now sells for twice the previous going rate). As I've mentioned before I like dystopian fiction and this one's a doozy, primarily as it's so realistic.

Of course my favorite line from it is, "People should not be afraid of their government; governments should be afraid of their people." This is a nice summation of my general belief about government and its virtues.

Thus when I saw this quote yesterday from one of our Supreme Court Justices (Justice Scalia):

For Pete's sake, if you can't trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life.

This is in relation to a tired argument that Scalia should have recused himself from a case involving Dick Cheney, with whom he occasionally goes hunting (insert joke here (it isn't hard)). Frankly I never got all that worked up about, nor do I think I could have.

And then I thought, gosh, why should I trust my Supreme Court Justice enough to let him rule on a case involving his friend? I mean, I didn't appoint him to the seat. I didn't vote for the man who did appoint him to the seat. In fact, I didn't vote, nor have I ever voted, for any of the people who voted to confirm him to that seat (I had a chance in 1996 to vote for Bob Dole, but I punched the ticket for Harry Browne that year). He was, in fact, in grade school when my parents were born. He's been in his job for longer than I've been able to drive, and nothing short of the eternal solitude of the grave can remove him from that job.

His lengthy stay in office has brought to him connections to many people, many people of whom I, personally, disapprove in the strongest fashion (the Vice President being one). I certainly would engage in nepotism were I granted the sort of power a seat on the Supreme Court or in the Congress or Senate or the White House would offer me. So would every other person out there. That's why there are ethics committees and such, and that's why judges recuse themselves from cases involving friends, business associates, or companies in which they have a financial interest. Maybe the judges are heartwarming perfect people who really could be entirely disinterested in such circumstances. And maybe tomorrow morning I'll be awakened by the braying of a purple unicorn in my living room.

My entire political philosophy is based on mistrust of government, mistrust of its intentions, mistrust of its abilities, mistrust of its power, and mistrust of the people who run it. If this sounds paranoid to you, then I'll just add you to my list... But seriously, I don't trust government or its agents. I believe most people generally want to do right when they get into government, but I also believe the form of government, and the more crass needs of politics (politics affect government more than government affects politics), generally cause the quality of government and of the intentions of its agents to degrade endlessly from the moment the institution is created. By this time, in other words, my desire to trust government is approaching nil.

So, no, I don't trust my Supreme Court Justice enough to believe he'll be impartial in a case regarding his friend. If he thinks that means I should "get a life," then I would suggest he be a little less condescending to the people who pay his salary and defend his homeland, whether we get to vote for him or not. Snobbery is unattractive in the powerful.

The Summer of Elm Street

So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Yarr. It's odd, actually, that I should take the news of my friend's decision to move to a new house with great sadness. After all, I never lived at the Manley House, which has been Elm Street's central Clemson address since mid-2000. When the guys moved out of the old Elm Street duplex a year after I graduated, I was a bit heartbroken. Of course you can't expect other people to stay in a cramped place because of your memories (or even theirs), but it was a bit sad to see the old place lost to Elm Street.

Still, sadder was the one trip I made to Clemson after graduation where I stayed at Elm Street as a guest, rather than a resident. All in all, sad as it was to see the nucleus of Elm Street move away from Elm Street, it was a better thing in the end. Since then visits to the Manley House have been a regular occurrence, and on some small level there's a part of you that never wants your friends to grow up and leave the college town, because as long as they stay you have a tenuous connection to the place. You can live vicariously through them, and even though indeed they've grown up and moved on, the fact that they are still there, in the town, in the place that holds so many of your fondest memories, that is comforting.

So Lucky Bob's decision to move out of the Manley House and to a new location 12 miles down the road is tough to take. Once Scanime moved out of the Manley House, it was only a matter of time; Lucky Bob could have taken roommates, I guess, but it would not have been the same. How many roommates would be okay with strangers coming in to sleep on the couch every now and then, sometimes in large numbers? That hardly seems likely. I think the truth is I just wanted Lucky Bob to stay in that house forever, because then I could stay there forever, too.

Still, as sad as it to see one more thread of my connection to Clemson cut, I am reminded of Robert Frost's poem. The Manley House, like good old 43 Elm Street, was surely gold in its time. Yet nothing gold can stay; and in Frost's metaphor gold gives way to green. It is sad, certainly, but in reality green is at least as good as gold ever was, and more lasting. The Manley House may have been late spring for Elm Street, but summer is upon us all. Let's go out and enjoy it.

Weddings 'n Things

I went up to a wedding this weekend. I learned some things.

1. Ten hours is just a long drive. I mean, really, almost too long. I would like to do something about that.

2. Ten hours does give you time to think, though if you're like me you'll listen to NPR and sing to old CDs most of that time to avoid thinking. One thing I thought about was how often the first question people ask me is what I know about my future. Here is what I know about my future, for the record: Nothing. I have heard nothing from the Air Force and have no idea what or when they might decide. If at some point that changes I will not keep it a secret. (Why I'm saying this here I don't know, since most of the people who ask these things don't read this blog. But it feels good to say.)
Among other things, I decided that it's okay to be scared of the future, and resolved to be so immediately and forthwith. I decided that there were a lot of positives to moving out of Tampa, and a lot of negatives, and I need to allow myself a running conversation (it's okay to converse with oneself, right?) before I make any decisions about that. I didn't really settle on what to do about Stetson and UVA and William & Mary, but I did come to two startling, and contradictory, revelations. I have not squared these two things, nor am I sure how to do so, but perhaps I can think about during a three-hour trip this weekend:
a) If I had $50 million, I would tell Virginia to expect me in the fall, no questions asked. If money was no object, that's what I would do.
b) Stripped clean of all the romantic/fantastic ideas, being an attorney ranks near the bottom of all the things I think I would enjoy doing.

3. One of my good friends of long standing is now married, more or less successfully, to a woman he cherishes and who makes him happy. What more can one ask in life? The actual event in question hardly went off without a hitch, and that was the talk of the ride home for many in the audience, I imagine. Yet it's important to remember, not just on the ride but forever, that regardless of what happened or didn't happen, a wedding is just a wedding. It's one day, in fact just an hour of that day. A marriage, however, will long outlast the clear memories of its beginning. What must bear fruit are not all the preparations for that one day, but the preparations for the lifetime that begins that day. I know Scanime and his fair bride can look forward to a wonderful lifetime, and that is all that really matters. Congratulations, J and T.

Surprise

I thought Mandisa did a lousy job last night. But it's a real shame when one of the best singers on American Idol goes home after one bad night. This is a shocker, frankly, and it's the show's loss. I'm sure she'll do fine out there in the wider world, though.

Up Yonder

Smitty's World is going on vacation (again, I know) for a few days. I'm heading up to South Carolina to attend a good friend's wedding. The computer will come with me, but the blog will probably sit idle anyway. Enjoy your weekend as much as I plan to enjoy mine.

The Middle East

Of all the books I've read this year, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, by Bernard Lewis, was undoubtedly the most challenging. Still, I recommend it for anyone with the patience to slog through it, as there are no similar books of such quality, and few books that even attempt to describe so vast a subject in such a relatively short space.

I say relatively short, because of course the book is 400 pages long, and they're big pages and each one is packed with information. Readers like me who hear the words they read rather than seeing them will stumble over the hundreds of unfamiliar Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words and names. And you'll probably find yourself rereading pages and sections to make sure you understand them. It took me three months to finish this book.

This is not a criticism. Like Collapse, this is a big, informative book, and its difficulty is not a problem to overcome but simply a fact attending to the book's subject matter. It is, after all, about 2000 years of history of a region of the world most of us know only from the current news and the Old Testament.

I would like to try to distill the book down for you, but that would force this review to be longer than the Everglades piece. The book takes a while to read because there is so much in it, and I can't summarize. Frankly, I think Lewis has done as good a job as can be of summarizing 2000 years of history.

But I read this book for a reason: understanding. Background on the current conflict (which earlier this year I thought I'd be getting very close to) is limited and generally of poor quality, and I wanted some before I went over there to see it. Surely I must have taken something away from this book, right?

Lewis shows that Islam is the defining feature of the Middle East, as opposed to geography, ethnicity, history, trade, learning, or anything else. It is perhaps the only region of the world so specifically defined by its religion. Like all religions, Islam has been interpreted and reinterpreted throughout history, and the various interpretations that have held sway among the leaders of the region have affected all the people who live there. The caliph, the shah, the sultan and wazir, all ruled their people by ruling religion first. There has never been separation of church and state; the caliph was not a pope, and there has never been a meaningful professional priesthood. Islam permeates the region, and no understanding of the Middle East is possible without understanding Islam.

Lewis looks upon Islam not as a violent religion, but as a missionary one. The mission of all good Muslims is to take the faith to the infidel unbelievers, whether they are next door or beyond the sea. In the early years of the faith this nearly always took the form of literal warfare, but the tenets of Islam dictated that conquered peoples not be forced to convert, but that they must come to the faith through choice alone. Unbelievers could be enslaved, but Lewis argues that Muslim slavery was generally a much more benign experience for the slave than in most other cultures. Even as slaves, though, unbelievers could not be forced to claim Islam, but should be taught about the religion in the hopes that they would choose the "right path;" they were not to be put to the sword except as necessary to pacify their territory.

The power of the Middle East has ebbed and flowed since that time as the reach of Islam has done so. The golden age of Islam coincided with some of the darkest years of European history, and the cultured and educated Muslims looked upon their western brothers as unenlightened, uncultured, and misled. This golden age came to an end gradually, and Muslim power declined over many years as the Europeans lept ahead, for a variety of reasons (it's worth noting that Lewis seems to agree with Jared Diamond's belief that lack of natural resources (timber especially, but most forms of mineral wealth are lacking in the Middle East, too) played an important role in the ultimate decline of Middle Eastern civilization), but the attitude of Muslims toward Europeans really never changed.

For centuries Muslim scholars and Muslim men in the public square debated why the untutored infidels of Europe were growing in power while their own culture stagnated. This debate is still ongoing, and it frames most of the modern history of the Middle East, from the Ottoman defeat in World War I through the period of colonization and the creation of the state of Israel. Lewis doesn't make any prognostications about what the future holds for the Middle East, about whether Muslim culture will seek to challenge Western culture or continue to simply fight a losing battle against it; nor does he claim that conflict there between Muslim and Christian nations is necessarily guaranteed. This is a history book, not an opinion paper, and Lewis very carefully avoids such things.

He does, however, make one interesting comment near the end of the book, which he fails to follow up on. He notes that the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire has been compared to the Soviet Union's decline and collapse, and while there are some true comparisons there, he disagrees that the comparison is especially apt; I'll quote (pg 290):

But there is another aspect of the Ottoman decline that suggests a different present-day parallel. The economic weakness of the Middle East, unlike that of the Soviet Union, was not due to an excess of central control. Such control, on the contrary, was almost entirely lacking... It had also become a predominantly consumer-oriented society... [emphasis mine]
In contrast, the rise of mercantilism in the producer-oriented West helped European trading companies, and the states that protected and encouraged them, to achieve a level of commercial organization and a concentration of economic energies unknown and unparalleled in the East, where...'market forces' operated without serious restrictions.

Lewis continues on without ever coming clean about the present-day parallel he sees. I wonder, though, if this might not be some veiled critique of the West's transition from a production-oriented to a consumer-oriented society. Perhaps he sees in the decline of the Ottoman Empire an important lesson for the West today? I wonder.

This is a challenging, but ultimately a very rewarding, book. I strongly recommend it.

People With Difficult Jobs

You know, regardless of the traffic, the hardest part of this guy's commute to work starts after he parks his car.

American Bile

Man, this is a super-weak episode of American Idol tonight. The first two performers are my favorites, Taylor Hicks and Mandisa. And, frankly, neither one of them did much for me. Taylor sang a great song, but it wasn't Taylor. It was Taylor channeling John Denver (or Bob Denver, maybe), and it justn't wasn't interesting.

Mandisa sang a song I don't like by an artist I hate, and it didn't show off her range at all. And then after her performance, Ryan Secrest said that he thought one of the judges probably had a flask. Given that Paula often seems drunk/high or otherwise heavily medicated (she does have a chronic illness that requires meds, but sometimes I think she just takes too many), this comment may have been way over the line.

Then Elliot sang, and I was bored. And Paula pretended to fall asleep during Randy's comments. It's almost as if everybody has just, all of a sudden, grown extremely bored of the entire American Idol thing. Honestly, there are only about two or three performances left I'm interested in seeing (and I want to see what pregnancy top Katherine McPhee will wear tonight). This season has a lot of talented and interesting artists. I don't know why the last couple episodes have sucked so much.

Ding, Dong, the Hammer's Fled!

Very surprising news today, as noted creepy filth merchant Tom Delay resigns from Congress. Hooray for.... I don't know, exactly, but hooray for his getting out of public office.

Of course he plans to leave Texas, move to Northern Virginia (I'm really, really sorry, Virginia), and become... well, some sort of behind-the-scenes GOP lever-puller. Surprise, surprise. Essentially, I think he's going to become a lobbyist par excellance, though I suppose we'll have to see exactly what sort of slime he's oozing when he finally crawls up out of the Potomac later this year.

This probably means it will be easier for the GOP to hold DeLay's seat in Texas. DeLay's absence from the campaign trail will also make it harder for the Democrats to point to him as the fount and focus of GOP corruption. Still, it's probably better for all of us that he's at least no longer in direct power. Besides, maybe he's going to end up in jail anyway.

I have absolutely nothing to say. Do you have any idea how strange a feeling that is?

Whither the Weather?

Well, I didn’t get to fly to Atlanta this weekend.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, of course; I actually got up at about 5’15 this morning, took a shower, had breakfast. I’d already packed so I was in the car and headed for Peter O. Knight airport on Davis Island by 6’05. At the airport I checked the weather reports, which come across the internet as METARs and TAFs, which are encoded weather observation and forecast reports, respectively. Things did not look too awful. I called up the weather briefer at Flight Services.

Now, this fellow does not have the authority to tell me I can’t fly to Atlanta VFR (VFR means visual flight rules, meaning I have to stay out of clouds and fly visual approaches to land), unless there’s a center NOTAM (notice to airmen) saying the conditions are too bad. There was no such NOTAM—but there was a recommendation against VFR flight running from about Jacksonville all the way up to Atlanta. Hmm.

The briefer saw a lot of low ceilings in Georgia—I wanted to fly at 6,500 feet to save fuel—and rain, thunderstorms, and the like marching south from the north Atlanta suburbs. He couldn’t tell me not to fly there—but he could sure tell me it wasn’t a very good idea. He closed the briefing by saying I’d be hard pressed not to fly on instruments.

This is fine and dandy except I didn’t get my instrument rating recurrent. So… so I called my friend in Atlanta and told him I wouldn’t be able to make it.

But I’d already rented the airplane for the whole day (and Sunday), so I figured I’d go ahead and fly somewhere. I took off around 7’30. What fun! I headed south toward Wauchula, thinking I’d do some touch ‘n goes there, but there was heavy ultralight traffic around the airport and I decided to leave. Ultralights seem like they’d be great fun, but most of them have no radio and the pilots don’t always pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the immediate area. I didn’t want to be in their way.

Instead I flew back west, over the Skyway bridge, and up toward St. Petersburg. I flew a few circles over the Stetson Law campus, but I forgot my camera so I couldn’t take any pictures. Then I headed on north up the coast, as far as Anclote Key (where I’ve thought about taking the kayak sometime), and turned back in toward Tampa. It was about nine by that time and as the ground warmed up in the sun I was started to get bumped around a bit by updrafts. Time to head home.

I went east across New Port Richey, to Odessa, flew over the abandoned Tampa Bay Executive airport (the runway and parking area are still there, but given the neighborhood I’ll be surprised if any trace of that airport remains ten years from now), and turned south toward downtown.

I had hoped to fly right near downtown, but there was a lot of traffic in the pattern and I decided to hang out east of the airport and see what was going on. Obviously I didn’t do a very good job; there were three aircraft in the pattern, myself included, but I never got eyes on one of them and eventually decided I must be between two of them. Since I couldn’t see where one was, I broke out of the pattern and went east again to look for the traffic. Once I found it I got back on downwind. I wanted to be well clear of the airplane in front of me so I flew quite a ways north of the field, turned base, and was treated to a great view of all the Channelside construction as I flew up an extend final approach.

And I can now officially say, wow, that Towers at Channelside project is really going to mess up the Peter O. Knight pattern for runway 17. I can’t imagine flying the line I took this morning when there’s a 30-some story building right there in the middle of it. Now I understand why there’ve been such strict height limits in parts of downtown for so long. I’m probably going to go fly again on Sunday; this time I’ll have to actually bring my camera.

It kills me how nice the weather is here today, knowing I cancelled a flight because of weather. So back home I decided to check the current weather observations in Atlanta, since it was right about landing time.

I’m glad I didn’t go. There were no thunderstorm reports, but most local airports were reporting rain and mist. Hartsfield had a ceiling at 700 feet, and the other local airports all had ceilings under 1500. Even further south, around Albany and Talbotton, ceilings were reported between 1900 and 5000 feet—so there’s no way I could have flown at 6500. I really wanted to go visit this weekend (it’s Scanime’s last weekend as a bachelor), and I’ll miss seeing everybody, but safety is important, too. I just have to come up with an excuse to fly up there another time.