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.