To the memory of talented crank, Hunter S. Thompson.

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This is another recycled screed; this one written in 2004-03-06.

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A review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
By Biff Cappuccino


Hunter S. Thompson first published his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a series of articles in Rolling Stone under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke. Raoul, the Hispanic lowlife, and Duke, John Wayne's nickname, are an apt combo as the book is an alloy of sleaze and the sort of shallow white chutzpah/cool that was popular back in an era of liberated thinking whose sterile staging ground was the hard-core political correctness of the 1950's and 1960's. After the dope decade, disco, punk, and AIDS, we got wiser as a culture and generated a more informed, compassionate and intellectual PC which has been at our throats ever since.

Part of what makes this book work is Thompson's ability to lay out simple, clear images, most of which are subversive and unsympathetic to the perennial American uplift. They appeal because they're familiar and because so much of white-collar America, like white-collar Taiwan and China, retains blue-collar values at heart.

For example: "a lot of cops are good vicious Catholics", "fat gold credit risk", and "a savage journey to the heart of the American dream." But this quickly moves on to other themes like: "the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals", "extremely dangerous drugs", "rotten stuff", "nothing is more helpless or irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge." A recurring deflection of blame. It's not Hunter's fault. Now that the drugs are taken, what can you do? Nothing. The book is full of this bogus fatalism that comes across as comedy, though the joke was on this reader who guesses now that Hunter was perfectly sincere. Drugs are the bad guys, the perps. Hunter is an escape artist whose cover is playing the victim.

Thompson's style is imitative of Henry Miller, containing a similar bravado, machismo, dramatic portrayal of self and others. It has the same hustling overdrive to portray the mundane as crucial; the pedestrian as heroic; the insignificant as overwhelming. However, Hunter reminds us in timely fashion that he's on drugs. Henry never comes up with an excuse for his stream-of-consciousness rambling. And unlike Miller, Thompson doesn't forget the audience has a memory and knows when it's being fed the same line for a second time, a third, or even a fourth. When Hunter runs out of material, he ends the book. He fills up space with quality illustrations, runs up the size of the print to fill even more space, and then gets out while the going is good at page 204.

In addition to just hyping up the subject, he also has an outstanding ability to create striking scenes with very simple words. But sometimes those scenes are unbelievable. For example, when he claims he howled at LA traffic with impunity. People just aren't that docile. Or when he explains why he backs up a car too quickly. He writes: "No harm done," I said. "I always test a transmission that way. The rear end. For stress factors."

Stress factors? Is that really what he said? The first page opens with an excellent scene which includes: My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. Again there's an odd choice of words: to facilitate. My impression is that when Hunter wanted to tell a fib, his conscience betrayed him and made his English go queerly formal and school-like.

But he also achieves, in outstanding fashion, the Mark Twain trick (ex: Huckleberry Finn) of putting complex ideas into accessible English.

For example: ... when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said -- a sign that my body's desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. "I have great faith in the natural processes," he said. "But in your case... well... I find no precedent. We'll just have to wait and see, then work with what's left."

Poison... flushing mechanism... natural processes... work with what's left. This looks easy, but it's not. It's a sign of literary virtuosity to be sure.

Jorge Luis Borges in "On Oscar Wilde": If I'm not mistaken, [Wilde] was much more than a sort of Irish Moreas; he was a man of the 18th century who occasionally condescended to games of symbolism. Like Gibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was a wit; a wit who was also right. ... Perfection has injured him; his work is so harmonious that he can seem inevitable and even banal.

It's not that Oscar Wilde or Hunter S. Thompson were wits who were also right, but that both were right and softened their harsh discoveries with wit. Over the years they had both seen clearly and thus unavoidably developed entirely unorthodox worldviews. To the mainstream, these worldviews seem familiar and yet exotic. Their authors -- deft, insolvent, and eager to please -- issued them to a timid public in the congenial guise of parody. But Wilde and Thompson, like so many other literary jesters, meant pretty much what they wrote.

And though I think neither Wilde nor Thompson offered perfection, the statement that (for each) "his work is so harmonious that he can seem inevitable and even banal," is right on the money.

Thompson's bluster, the larger-than-life theater, the overwrought verbiage, but also the often almost miraculously succinct hit-it-right-on-the-nail poignancy that produces splashes of emotion and kick-starts streams of thought, this produces great satisfaction at times.

It also brought to mind Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience. It's this echo of pre-WWII -- the age of Henry Miller; of politicians who won votes by refusing to wear socks; of social activists who campaigned to ban tobacco cigarettes (but not pipes) on the theory that the next step was opium followed by the gallows. This retro-flavor gives this book much of its bizarre pungency. It's this which also insulates it from criticism. It's so weirdly unfamiliar that it often seems like satire. How are you to judge it? There's the sneaking suspicion that if you don't get the joke, then the joke is on you. This gives the book air, frees it from the tight restrictions of analysis and makes it better than it is.

And this echo has been updated and modernized into a vocabulary of citified stuffed-shirts, as opposed to rural boosters, and angst, not anger. It’s the tempest-in-a-tea-pot faux-rebellion of an egghead paranoiac. But it also demonstrates how free and giddily irresponsible and unwound life, ideas, and speech can be when one is free of the paralyzing grasp of extended families, geriatric moral traditions, uptight faiths, and so on.

George Orwell: [he] is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in 'character', in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are both removed from it... they are as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices... If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west…

This is Orwell describing Mark Twain. How little some things have changed.

Thompson's style seems particularly American too. My impression of English writers is a tradition of precision, reserve and remove, from Wolfe to Orwell to Amis; whereas America's tradition is more forthright and pugnacious. Perhaps it's a Celtic outgrowth. Perhaps it's peculiarly Irish or Scottish. Perhaps its stress upon self-promotion, sound-bytes, imprecision and excess ended up inspiring more false roads of promise, more bullshit artists, and more literary disasters than it was worth. Either way, from the beginning initiated by Crocket, if indeed this was the beginning, one moves forward through history to the brag and bluster of Mark Twain, Henry Mencken, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and (the recently reformed) P.J. O'Rourke.

Does this have something to do with the non-university-educated backgrounds of so many successful American writers? Is it connected with the private longing of the bulk of North American academics to be the martial and sexual analogues of defectively imagined truck drivers and cattlemen? Perhaps. Probably.

The book launches with a bang in a brilliantly effective two paragraph road scene (probably cribbed for the best segment of the Oliver Stone/James Woods film Salvador), rolls through a mostly interesting series of vignettes (except for chapter nine, which should’ve have been edited out), and terminates with a brief rant on the changing drug times and a parting scam with Thompson hustling pills at a pharmacy with a license stamped Doctor of Divinities.

The book ends with the line: I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger… A Man on the Move, and sick enough to be totally confident.

That’s the real Hunter S. Thompson, right there. That’s who he thought he was, felt he was, and wished he could always be. And he could only achieve it, and be a real American as he saw it, when stoned out of his tree. To be a hero, he had to be a deviant. To be a somebody, he had to retreat from almost everybody. That’s the comedy. And, of course, the irony, the pathos, and the tragedy.

I'd recommend this book to nearly any reader, but I bought it for its reference value. It contains reams of compressed sagacity for the reference of writers-in-training like myself. It’s a genuine literary canon. Enjoy.

More old stuff from the old website. This second review was scrabbled down on 2003-05-15

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Hatchet-Job: A Review of Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu


Hotel Honolulu is a first-rate hatchet job poking fun at, amongst other things, the sub-literate. It’s neither provocative nor pregnant with meaning and unless you’re a writer, or a writer in training wheels like myself, it’s unlikely to change much in your life. But what this book does do is give great pleasure through its quirkily detailed, fast-paced, keenly observant narrative that feels so very much like non-fiction. Most importantly, like the best of non-fiction, it doesn’t waste your time. It's that rare novel from which you can actually learn something useful about your fellow man and not feel that you might as well have been watching the videot box for all that sticks to the brainpan the day after. Perhaps the other major reason I like this book is that it's authoritative and witty, i.e. frankly elitist and unabashedly sadistic. Books written by authors who fall over themselves to be fair to their subject matter are usually dull and full of platitudes. Such authors are often too polite to become more than half-versed in the human aspect of their subject matter and are unwilling to take risks in print for fear of offending. Fairness of course, has its place: the court-room, the formalism of binding arbitration, or moony Hollywood productions. Surely there are better traits for the ambitious writer such as a willingness to employ sharp words and ask uncomfortable questions when appropriate, and integrity sufficient to refuse to cut corners and to refuse to please the customers willy-nilly to the detriment of the material.

Unlike Paul Hessler's River Town, which is conflict-averse, Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu is pro-conflict. It sets up chapter after chapter of combat and then lets the games begin. Like Mark Twain, he has a perverse love of creating absurd situations and then letting his imagination and knowledge of human nature serve as engine and fuel to animate them. Paul Theroux creates a number of odd characters but, because he's understated, i.e. not trying too hard, and well experienced in character portrayal, his characters really work. They are memorable because they are all individuals with specific mannerisms, weaknesses, follies, physiognomies, tastes in apparel, personal histories, and so forth. And, they are memorable because the characters are not worked to exhaustion. They last several chapters, flickering and shining into three full dimensions and then fizzle out in a pop! to conveniently disappear forever.

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If only real life was so convenient. On second thought, I suppose it can be. I was a great fan of hostels when I was younger. You could observe the lives of strangers taking place before you: their fights with the landlord, their employers, their girlfriends. Everything was in public, no secrets, no pretence. And you never even had to befriend them, humor them, or even talk to them. You could peer deeply into the lives of people you’d never wish to spend five minutes with if it required the effort of cultivating friendship. A pleasure indeed.

Perhaps it’s a sign of my own shallow knowledge of people, but Theroux’s people came across to me as being very lifelike and almost consistently in character. Part of the reason for this is probably cynical. Theroux perhaps correctly recognizes his limitations and so designed this novel to play to his forte, which is character construction and assassination. He sedulously avoids his greatest weakness which is lengthy plot development.

Below is an example of what I’m referring to in all of the above. This is from the chapter, "The Limping Waiters." The story revolves around two waiters, each of whom has one leg shorter than the other.

She suddenly got up, went to the window, and peered through the blinds, turning her back on him. If she heard the door open and shut she did not show it.

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Holding the Gideon Bible, Fishlow came bobbing and swaying behind her, hiked up her happi coat, moved her feet wider part, and as she canted forward to receive him, Fishlow chucked the Bible to the floor, placed his foot on it to brace his short leg, and the thus braced, he entered, lifting her. Then she reacted, as though lifted onto a peg.

'No! No!' she cried out, which terrified him. He stopped, fearing that her plea might carry even through the closed window. But in a softer voice she implored him to continue. All the while, she remained turned away from him, said nothing more, did not appear to see him balancing on one leg to hoist his pants before peddling out of the room, stride-hop, stride-hop.

What could be more irreverent to religion, disrespectful of the handicapped, and sneeringly dismissive of those capable of only clumsy encounters than “Fishlow chucked the bible to the floor, etc.” And yet it slides down the throat and massages like a rich curry. He manages to tweak the mood in the direction of humor, while portraying the scene convincingly and deviously in a manner that suggests detachment, thereby muffling the alarm bells of the guilty conscience. Outstanding!

The book also features a murder carried out by the cross-dressing bisexual son of the same son's married bisexual lover when the first finds out that his role as sex toy to his mom has been taken over by his lover. Again very improbable, even if true to life. But because Paul Theroux does not focus upon moral dilemmas, and instead lightly mocks his people or lends the suggestion that they had whatever coming to them, he never gets bogged down. He reinforces tendencies and suspicions that we all have on vengeful days when we’ve been wronged or feel fed up with yet another shyster play for sympathy. Sod the bastards! we silently wish. Theroux grants it.

His chapters are also spiced up with a naturally fumbling colloquial diction that does far more to breathe the life of recognizable stereotypes into his people than would lengthy description. Every page has characters mangling and slurring English. Hawaii becomes ‘Whyee’, kids becomes ‘keeds’, frustrating becomes ‘falustrating’, What’s the matter with you brother? becomes ‘Assa madda you, brah?’ Or, the opposite occurs, for example when Puamana a prostitute is talking to the narrator:

‘Men are less threatened by me – they’ve kind of vouchsafed that,’ she said.

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I stared, not at her but at the word.

After all, lengthy description has been worked to death by masters of the English language since Chaucer’s time, whereas colloquialisms are freshly churned out with each generation. Not to mention that truth really is stranger than fiction. Theroux’s selections of dialogue verbiage sound very true to life. And when you come across this on every page, it reminds you of just how little imagination goes into the average novel, work of history, and so forth.

It’s worth repeating that Paul Theroux operates as a conscious sadist. In all forms of humor, someone has to win and someone has to lose. So perhaps we can agree that slapstick is reducible to physical abuse, humor to mental cruelty, and that wit is a kind of sadism put on a leash. Given that Paul Theroux clearly has no problem with being brutal in what ever manner pleases him, he is able to bring his many years of experience trashing people up and down the food chain to bear upon the subject matter. And not the full brunt of his wrath, but just the right touch of devilishness to bring out your smile and not a frown.

In Peter Hessler's River Town, there's very little by way of humor because the author cannot bring himself to look down upon the people he's living and working with and educating. He acts responsibly and has a martinet of a social conscience, plus a keen desire to be a combination Good Samaritan and Johnny Appleseed. Perhaps this has something to do with being a member of the Peace Corps, or is reflected by his decision to join the Peace Corps. On second thought, Paul Theroux was formerly a member of the Peace Corps, so perhaps this has nothing to do with it.

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Either way, Peter Hessler wishes to relate to the people he's with, wishes to immerse himself in their culture and the civilization, their habits and their mores. And of course it is part and parcel of the current politically correct scheme that one respects any and all cultures, especially those abroad and not yet well understood.

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This ideology aims to achieve good ends, and I imagine that it does often achieve them. But I also imagine that this ideology is better suited to people incapable of thinking for themselves for such reasons as youth and inexperience or because they’re incapable of or prefer not to think for themselves. If one's aim is to tame the antisocial tendencies of rednecks and gangbangers, then educating them with the notion that they should respect other cultures is a great idea. Otherwise, they’re not likely to figure how to deal with other cultures appropriately until after they’ve committed an act of vandalism.

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However, for the rest of us, I would beg for greater tolerance of dissenting opinion. Paul Theroux’s Hotel Honolulu is a fine example of worthy dissent: the opinion that life is not fair and that it is in fact full of random and meaningless events that are often best met with a good laugh for starters. On the other hand, because he has so skillfully understated a variety of dissenting opinions, most of us are unaware that he even presents any in the book. For what it’s worth, it didn’t occur to me either for quite a while.

In sum, unembarrassed by cruelty, craft or dishonesty when dealing with people, Paul Theroux is able to choose from, and reproduce in his work, 100% of the human condition, as it perhaps exists in second-rate Whyee hotels. If he was a scrupulous and moral person, or at least posed as one on paper, then there would be many aspects of human nature and behavior that he would not allow himself to write about for fear that this would suggest that he was less than scrupulous and moral in his private life. Fortunately, he’s too smart for that, and so he can investigate, immerse himself within, partake of, and portray lying, whoring, hypocrisy, and so forth in a frank and natural way. This is part of the real charm of the book. It allows him to illustrate full body characters and allows him to show folly and cruelty in a natural and almost innocent light because he’s not moralizing. In so doing, though he often writes about what most people would consider quite negative aspects of human nature, there is no dark feel to his book at all. He operates under no moral scheme, so has no desire to poke an angry finger in the direction of transgressors of society’s moral and ethical laws. Thus the book is free from heavy handedness and is indeed just a delightful light read.

Biff Cappuccino

Am busy with grad school preparations so I'm putting up some old essays from the original, now defunct website, www.eastcathay.com. This puppy was a first attempt at a book review and written on 2003-05-11

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The Inscrutable Occidental
A Review of River Town: Two years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler


River Town is a good read, but in large part because it is a consciously slick production. The author introduces many quite interesting aspects of life as he saw it in the interior of China, but of equal interest to me was his avoidance of risky material in a scrupulous effort to avoid offending the reader. Generally, this would restrict an author to nothing but cliché, and perhaps the same is the case here. But because Peter Hessler’s clichés are vignettes of ‘foreigner meets contemporary Chinese life’, a genre still quite underrepresented, it comes across as fresh and insightful. Which, in a sense, it genuinely is.

Indeed it took 250 pages before the book bored me, which, if I may be forgiven for saying so, is quite impressive because I seem to become bored far more easily than most people. The boredom set in precisely when the author tried to do what he is manifestly incapable of doing: penetrate established issues and bring fresh insight to bear upon them. But perhaps this a flaw common to most travel writers. Writing successfully for a home audience about home issues means adherence to higher standards of knowledge, argument, and rhetoric for one is writing in a more competitive and established marketplace. For those unacquainted with China, even the dustiest of clichés will be perceived as being fresh, the reader charmed by their apparent novelty, while superficial knowledge and trivia are misunderstood to be the wisdom of the veteran expatriate. Graham Greene made a career out of this. But please don’t be put off: for most of the book, the author delivers information of sufficient novelty and agreeability that I didn’t want to put it down. It is a genuinely good back and one that I think will last. For a while, anyway.

In brief, River Town is exotic due to its understated pictorial descriptions of rural China and somewhat familiar because events are interpreted by a sensitive, transplanted mid-western American who studied at Oxford and uses such terms as ‘sporting.’ And everything is laid out in forms and terms that most readers will understand immediately. In other words, the book provides a middling description of China that lies somewhere between giving the reader something new and nothing new. The downside to this marketing strategy is that the book is never riveting. To be riveting would require taking a position on issues. Unfortunately, all positions are potentially offensive to someone, i.e. some potential customer.

As might be expected, the book is most noteworthy, not because of what happened to Peter Hessler in China but because of what he believes happened to him in China. A book is usually only as interesting as its author, the writer being the prism producing the kaleidoscope of events we see in his work. In this regard, key is Peter Hessler’s passive personality and the clumsy encounters with the locals that he sprinkles the book with; his sensible choice of material with regards as to what to put into the book and, more importantly, what to safely keep out of it (most of unrelenting hostility from some of the locals, and most of the abiding unhappiness and hostility he himself felt during the first several months); his multicultural mindset and unrelenting sympathy for other cultures and the common man in particular; his understanding of people and himself that changes with the passage of time and his increasing fluency in Chinese. Perhaps for me the most interesting aspect of all was the author's apparent complete lack of interest in penetrating beyond the first layer of human psychology and his almost unbelievably superficial understanding of human interaction. His comprehension of what is going on around him is only marginally better than that of non-Chinese speaking Bunt, the straight-up, right-thinking, confused, and ultimately easily manipulated central character of Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong.

Having said this, I should also say in his favor that he makes a diligent effort to understand that people are indeed a product of their backgrounds and that disparity of income breeds envy and so forth. I just wish he could have done something with this other than to just state it in a manner that sounds almost like a tenet of dogma. Again, this is a good book. It could have been better, but it’s not bad. But perhaps I do protest too much.

After all, it is not easy to make a living by writing books. (For what it’s worth, I have yet to find a publisher of my own work.) This being his first book, perhaps he thought it wise that he confine himself to the readily acceptable. Perhaps the next book will be better. Most likely it will be. One can always hope…

For all of the reasons above, the present book lacks striking passages and quickly slips from the memory. Without trying to be harsh, the book is simply and genuinely quite forgettable. For the first 150 pages it conveys the message that everything in the world is intelligible, that well-meaning individuals are the key to resolving every issue, that everything, when it is reduced to its fundamentals, is simply a matter of being friendly and sympathetic to the other side. Obviously this is a worldview that many of us would question. But, this being a book that plies one with scenes of a new place and people, the cinematic suspension of disbelief launches and critical thinking is adjourned in favor of the pleasure of experiencing this fresh and exciting setting and its folk. For most of the book, you're too drawn in by the understated descriptive passages, the bizarre human interaction, and the passage of odd events in general to really notice.

Having said all of this, I still find it impressive Peter Hessler manipulated and massaged his material to such a smooth outcome. And much of what I have criticized about this book did not strike me until many, many pages into it. So, if it's in the bookstore give it a gander. If you’re in a library, check it out. If you’ve been to China it will certainly bring back memories, even if it might not inspire new ones...

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Biff Cappuccino

Monday Feb. 21: Am now busy preparing for the National Taiwan University Poly-sci grad school exam. So, I'm learning how to write Chinese, a language I can speak and read but never bothered to write. I have 90 days to commit to memory something along the lines of 3000 characters. Impossible for my brain is a sieve at the best of times.

Anyway, posts will be sporadic for the next week or so as time will be of the essence.

Biff Cappuccino

Review of The German Generals Talk (1948), by B.H. Liddell Hart

This book is a concise, sensible, readable summary of oral interviews conducted by Hart in 1948 with those of Hitler’s generals who survived the second, and counting, Great War to end all wars. It covers all of the major campaigns and is good as its word, offering "Startling revelations from Hitler's high command." (probably not the hyperbole of choice the late Hart would have gone for, but then again, one regularly reads blurbs for worthy books that depart from the tone of the book itself so far as to not only be misleading but likely to repel the author's intended audience. As is so often the case, the publisher is a Philistine and his crew of education-burdened information-workers are jakes hawking paper & ink widgets to the lowest common denominator in the commode reader marketplace. If Orwell was to really Turn Over in his Grave, rather than due to the double-speak somberly denounced by the (nearly) eponymous documentary, it would more likely be due to the dreadful testimonials on the Penguin editions of his works that make him out to be a latter-day Messiah hybrid of Oprah Winfrey, Christopher Hitchens, and Spencer Johnson (author of Who Moved My Cheese: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and In your Life). Orwell, when not feeling our pain, was inflicting it. In those early less civilized days, in addition to beating 'niggers' as a cop in Burma, he punched out the occasional friend when they got too much for him. Norman Mailer seems to have limited himself to head-butting his literary nemeses (ex: Gore Vidal); Bill O'Reilly's reduced to hate-sex and self-affirming barks of "Pinhead" and bellows of "Shaddup!")

Progress, progress. But I digress. As usual.

Anyway, this is a difficult book to review because it is so overstuffed with novel explanations for a grab-bag of main events, despite being written in 1948. For someone like myself who picked up most of his WWII impressions from school books, newspapers and maybe PBS, as usual I made the mistake of assuming the core issues were well-understood, well-ventilated, and old news indeed.

But, as usual, the mainstream edition of events is not shepherded by inventors of novel ideas, as there are too few of these freaks to go around. Instead events are stage-managed, in a manner most politicians would recognize, by diploma-bearing parrots of respectable (i.e. uncontroversial, lawsuit and scandal-proof) exegeses of events. If one holds one’s breath to delve into the low-oxygen works of the more respectable historians, especially if one flips through the tomes of those poor doomed clowns who win literary prizes, such as the appalling Pulitzer (a sort of literary albatross around the neck of good taste), one finds that most respectable authors have only a handful of ideas to market, which they then proceed to bulwark with 300 pages of impressively indexed and annotated facts and figures, examples, anecdotes, and quotes, mostly if not entirely borrowed from the works of other respectable factotums; i.e. by tossing in bale of packaging and a truckload of recycled filler which, to the connoisseur of the field, is indistinguishable from literary oatmeal. For me, a frank ignoramus of the events of WWII, anything would serve to impress. But this book almost overwhelms with its cataracts of ideas and heretical views clearly expressed. I emerged from several days reading this work with my head spinning and three pages of notes written in excitable ink, all of which are refer to specific original ideas which in turn beg further exploration and extrapolation. However, doing so would probably result in a 30 page review which I'm no more prepared to write than you're prepared to read.

Perhaps the best way to introduce this book is to let it speak for itself. This is from chapter 10, titled "How Hitler Beat France -- And Saved Britain"

The real story of any great event is apt to be very different to what appears at the time. That is especially the case in war. The fate of millions of people turns on decisions that are taken by one man - who may be influenced by the most curious of motives in reaching a decision that changes the whole course of history. The way he makes up his mind is known only by a few men behind the scenes, who usually have good reason for keeping it quiet. The truth sometimes leaks out later; sometimes never.

When it emerges it often bears out the saying that "truth is stranger than fiction." The novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occurred in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology.

Nothing could be more extraordinary than the way that the decisive events of 1940 were shaped. France was overcome by an offensive in which few of the higher executants had any faith, and the invasion only succeeded through a belated change of plan on the German side that happened to fit the situation produced by rigidity of plan combined with overconfidence on the French side. Stranger still was the way that the British Army escaped, and Britain itself was preserved from invasion. The truth here is quite contrary to the popular picture. It would have seemed incredible to the British people at that time, and equally incredible to most of Hitler's ardent followers in Germany.

... The escape of the British army from France has often been called "the miracle of Dunkirk." For the German armored forces had reached the channel coast behind the back of the British army while this was still deep in the interior of Flanders.... Those who got away have often wondered how they managed to do so.

The answer is that Hitler's intervention saved them -- when nothing else could have. A sudden order from them over the telephone stopped the armed forces just as they were inside of Dunkirk...Rundstedt and other generals concerned, as executive commanders or on the higher staffs, gave me accounts from their different angles of the staggering order and its effects.

Hitler turns out not to be the three-testicled psycho and sociopath whose arch-fantasy was to have German heifers dollop Aryan turds on his mongrel Bavarian snout. Well, no surprise there. And surely the whole mystique about Hitler’s allegedly inscrutable personality is easily understood as the inability of the unintelligent to understand someone who can think for himself: i.e. an entirely removed species from themselves. Most of these dunderheads are like the sort of Christian who opines in a knowing way that God works in mysterious ways, a face-saving camouflage for “I don’t care to think about it” which is usually a patent admission of “I’m incompetent to think about it.” Reading the works of bold Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas or Tertullian, one is at least impressed by the entertainment value of their colorful inventions, their over-stretched casuistry, their tortured attempts to plug round holes with square pegs in their fearless rationalizations of the implausible.

Either way, Hitler proves to be much like any other highly adept politician. Like Lincoln and like Churchill, because he's thoroughly familiar with political trends and economic developments, not only domestic but foreign, he sees farther and much more clearly that his generals, who were professional soldiers and aristocrats who took pride in their distance from politics and disesteem for the mob.

It’s perhaps worth prefacing that it took Lincoln two years to find a general that could prosecute his war, having passed over various political appointees (politicians, wire-pullers, and CEOs who canvassed for the job) and incompetent professional military commanders before he stumbled across the oft-drunk Ulysses Grant, whose primary strength turned out to be his willingness to throw his men into the slaughter without hesitation, thus earning himself the nickname of "the Butcher" from his own troops. Hitler, likewise, found his own generals to be lacking in foresight, timid (like Lincoln's General Mclellan, they also consistently overestimated the strength and difficulty of defeating enemy troops, while sneering at their political handler as being no better than a monkey), and tactically and strategically conservative.

Hitler's generals were also very politically unaware which greatly hampered their ability to prosecute strategic warfare. His generals were often very competent with the nuts and bolts of military tactics and quick studies therein, but they had very little sense of how European politics worked.

For example, Hitler's generals were overwhelmingly opposed to launching an attack against France in 1940. So opposed were they that they established a cabal of generals to lead their armies on Berlin to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis in a military coup, thus reviving the ancient Roman tradition begun by Julius Caesar and which threatened to take place figuratively speaking with McArthur and Truman. In the end, the leading general refused to cooperate believing, probably correctly, that Hitler's popularity with the masses was too great and that they would not survive the coup. But equally surprising is that Hitler himself was very worried about moving on France. He saw it as a gamble, one that he could lose easily. He went into France apparently, not because he wished to expand his empire into France, but because he was unable to secure a peace treaty with France or England. The enemy he feared most was Soviet Russia. He felt he could not fight both France and Russia at the same time in 1942. Thus, he had to take out France first. (I had previously presumed the Hitler peace overtures were a ruse.)

The miracle of Dunkirk took place apparently because Hitler was opposed to invading England. He felt that England and the Catholic Church were pillars of stability in Europe. He believed Germans were racially not constituted for living in the tropics and that the British colonies were thus of no interest to Aryan Germans. Thus, he let the British troops depart from Dunkirk unhampered for three days. Similarly, he prosecuted the Battle of Britain with little fervor and apparently only attacked England by air after first being pushed by Churchill's repeated bombings of German cities. Most of Churchill's government wished to sue for peace with the Germans, but Churchill was adamant about going to war. Churchill could not get the Germans to sink British shipping, so he tried getting Hitler's goat by ordering the secret bombing of Hamburg, etc. (FDR of course pursued a lite-version, via trade wars and contrived international incidents, of the same tactic with the Japanese)

Apparently Hitler was not interested in attacking North Africa either, but he worried that Mussolini would change sides and join the Allied countries. This was the only reason he participated in the North Africa campaign at first.

The list of surprises goes on and on. The German military apparently, like the Americans and British, first prepared for the Second World War by amassing cavalry. Rommel, for example loved horses and disliked tanks. He initially knew nothing about armored divisions and his successes were due primarily to tactical brilliance (example: driving truck caravans towards Allied bases from different directions to create a misimpression that they were being attacked by a vast armada of tanks). Rommel was held in such high esteem by the British troops that a positive accomplishment was termed by them "a Rommel."

In contrast to the standard notion that Hitler acted in the manner of an Oriental despot, one of his generals, Zeitzler, often lost his temper with him. He tendered his resignation on numerous occasions and it was only in 1944 after committing himself to hospital and faking an illness that he was relieved of command. In other words, Hitler's generals, this was not the only one, could be contumacious and retain their positions. Indeed, it could be difficult to get fired.

This is not to say that Hitler didn't make numerous mistakes. He fired good generals over sex scandals because he was a prude. He was also in the habit of ensuring loyalty to his command by promoting younger generals over those more qualified. This of course led to disgruntled senior staff and incompetence in the field. Towards the end of the war, because of Hitler's great successes overruling the judgment of his generals, he tended not to trust their judgment in anything. He micromanaged battles with results that his generals were like Hollywood rent-a-directors slavishly following film scripts. He refused on many occasions to let generals retreat and this led to avoidable losses on innumerable occasions. It turns out that, rather than offense being the best defense, that in fact the best defense is defense. Apparently, German divisions holding good defensive postures were often able to fend off allied troops up 18 times their own number. This is one of the reasons it took so long to defeat the Germans after D-Day despite the Germans being vastly outnumbered and never having anything approaching air superiority.

Hitler also put Gestapo spies on all of his generals which did nothing for morale or creative thinking, as one can imagine. And, the nature of military orders changed for the worse. In WWI orders were deliberately brief to permit flexibility of execution by field officers. With Hitler on the throne, propaganda was written on high and then inserted into orders for the troops below and micromanagement became the order of the day. Hitler envied Stalin, including his purge of the Russian military because, post-purge, Stalin's generals were so completely obedient. On the other hand, what he did not realize was that the Russians, more fearful of Stalin than the Germans, were terrified of taking any sort of risk and dared not deviate in any form from their orders. As a result, they tended to attack in a cyclical fashion enabling German generals to predict like clockwork their attacks. It was this sort of dogmatic manner which led to so many deaths in the First World War, where generals would operate in an honorable fashion and launch attacks after giving the enemy sufficient time to down its breakfast, for example.

Apparently, German troops were prepared for the winter conditions in Russia after the end of the first winter. So much for the prevailing cliché. Russia's strength was Stalin's ability to drive large numbers of men like slaves into battle, as was the case with the Chinese Nationalists and Communists and with Vietnam's Ho Chi-min. With sufficient cannon-fodder much can be achieved, though surely the achievement is usually not worth the effort if one dispassionately weighs the pros against the cons. The Russians, like the US soldiers in the Civil War, were gunned down by their own officers if they tried to run in the heat of battle. Again, was the US really improved by the Civil War? A topic of discussion which leads profitably to some highly provocative and searching conclusions when the bilge of patriotism is purged from the podium.

Last but not least, Hart mentions that French Communists, Gaullists, and Girandists (the primary French resistance groups) constantly ratted to the Germans about each other's activities like the anti-Roman revolutionary splittists of Monty Python's Life of Brian. This mockery went on until 1943 when the British secret service walked in and forced them to act like adults, supplying them and directing their operations. This was successful because French resistance bombing disrupted trains carrying supplies and reinforcements after D-Day. Additionally, allied air supremacy and the unexpected long-range, power and accuracy of Allied Navy artillery led to significant German losses and tactical failures.

There’s this and much, much more. Highly recommended.

Biff Cappuccino

Patriotism - another Mark Twain knock-off. I haven’t changed the original story (“Political Economy”) much at all really. Just run through it with a rake and clippers, pruning verbs and adjectives and grafting my own on. Hard work for my brain’s not in the habit of manufacturing metaphors and off-color verbiage on demand like this. But practice makes for perfection… Sort of like practicing rap. After a few weeks of mumbling to yourself in step as you clip down the sidewalk, it becomes second nature to speak in rhyming couplets. I prefer creative stuff, building from scratch, to this spade and shovel drudgery, but it's got to be done as I see it... Biff Cappuccino

Patriotism is the basis of all good citizenry. The ablest men of all ages have brought to bear upon the subject the...

[I was interrupted and told that a stranger wished to see me down at the door. I went and confronted him, and asked to know his business, struggling the whole time to keep a hold on my thoughts, which were wriggling mischievously and ready to bust loose at any point and flock off to the netherlands. Privately, I wished the stranger would be sullied by a mob of pariah dogs and chased away to hell which, given the heat these several days, was reasoned to presently be due north. I was all hot and bothered; he cool as a cumquat. He was dreadfully sorry to have disturbed me but on passing by the premises he ventured that I'd profit from the satellite TV dish paradigm. I said, "Yes, yes good man -- go on -- what about it?" He said there was nothing about it, nothing in particular -- nothing but that he would like to install one for my education and edification. I was new to housekeeping, sojourning in hotels and boarding houses all of my life. Like most anyone else would in my station, I try to appear (to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an offhand way that I had been wanting for some time to have a parcel of TV dishes planted, but -- and the stranger started, and looked inquisitively at me, but I was tranquil. I thought that if I chanced to make any mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance. He said he would rather have my bidness than any man's in town. I was warmed by his enthusiasm and said, "Well all right then," and went off to do battle with my great subject again, when he called me back and noted that it would be important to know exactly how much "flatware" I wanted put up, what parts of the home I wanted adorned, and what quality of gear I preferred. He threatened to catch me out at this point, given my unfamiliarity with the customs of domiciles in these parts; but I went through creditably and he probably never suspected that I was new around here. I told him to put up eight "pots," and plant them all on the roof, and use the best quality of ceramic. He said he could furnish the "plain" article at 20 dollars; "glazed," 25 dollars; "Teflon-coated all-weather coaxial cable," at 30 dollars, that would fetch a signal at any time, no matter where it was emanating from, and "persuade it that further wandering was surplus to requirements; plus a decoder to dephlogisticcate and domesticate it." I said dephlogisticcate was no mean designation, emanating from a man of his professional persuasion, but, the study of pragmatics aside, I liked the Teflon-coated all-weather coaxial cable and would take that model. Then he said he COULD make do with two hundred and fifty feet; but to do it proper, and make the best job in the borough of it, and entice the admiration of the vulgar and profane alike, and compel all audiences to admit they never saw a more shambolic and hyperborean display of TV flatware since they came into this world, he supposed he really couldn`t get along without four hundred, though he wouldn’t hold it against me if I was squeamish, and trusted he was willing to try. I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and engineer any kind of project he pleased out of it, but let me get back to my work. So he was off my hands at last; and now, after half an hour spent in getting my train of patriotic thoughts coupled together again, I am ready to go on once more.]
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gallantest lights of commutarian sensibility, their empirical wisdom, and founts of learning. The mystery-workers of deep folk-feeling, the mighty protectors of anointed realm, and the sacred apostles of chauvinistic multiculturalism, of all ages, all civilizations, and one nation undivided, from Confucius down to Mao Zedong, have --

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[Here my train of thought was uncoupled, and I was required to go down and confer further with that TV flatware man. I hurried off, bubbling and frothing with precocious mind-pictures swaddled in words of such grace and fascination that each one of them was in itself a rolling juggernaut of polysyllables that might be ten minutes passing by an applauding audience, and once more I confronted him -- he so mild and phlegmatic, I so roiled and agitated. He was standing erect with the reflective composure of a face in Mount Rushmore, with one shoe amidst my orchids, and the other steady among my poinsettia, his palms fixed akimbo, his hat-brim tilted forward, one eye shut and the other contemplating critically and admiringly the jungle of excrescences embellishing my rooftop. He said now THERE was a state of things to make a man glad to be alive; and added, "I leave it to YOU if you ever saw anything more deliriously picturesque than eight co-axial dishes on the southwest corner of a building facing northeast?" I said I had no present recollection of any artwork that transcended it. He opined that nothing in heaven or earth but the Buddhas carved into the living stone of the Three Gorges was superior to it by way of natural scenery. All that was needed now, he verily believed, to render my house a balanced esthetic was to kind of touch up the other corners a little, and thus "add to the generous coup d`oeil a soothing uniformity of spiritual propriety which would harmonize the excitement naturally consequent upon the first coup d`etat." I asked him if he learned to talk out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere? He smiled amiably, and instructed me that his rhetorical form was not taught in books, and that nothing but familiarity with the mysteries of applied science could prepare a man to manage his style of palaver with impunity. He then calculated an estimate, and said that about a dozen more pots distributed about my roof would about do me proper, and he guessed five hundred feet of cable would serve the purpose; and added that the first eight had got a head start of him, so to speak, and he’d used up a mere trifle of material more than he had figured on -- a hundred feet or round abouts. I said I was in a fearful rush, and I wished we could get this project configured once and for all, so that I could get on with my proper business. He said, "I could have put up those eight pots, and be done with it -- some men WOULD have done so. But no; I said to myself, this man is new around here and I will perish before I do him wrong; there ain`t pots sufficient to their appointed purpose on that rooftop, and I for one will never sleep proper again unless I`ve done as I would have done to me, by the Lord’s eternal grace, and told him so. Stranger, my obligation is fulfilled and I breathe easier but for a tightness due to a pang of unavoidable regret; now if the satellites should suffer seasonal rearrangement for the peregrinations of the magnetic north pole or daylight savings time, leaving your signal beyond the pale, and if --" "There, now, there," I said, "plant the other dozen -- add five hundred feet of coaxial cable -- do anything and everything you feel is wanted; but calm your intimations and premonitions, and try to keep your feelings where they remain accessible to the dictionary. Meanwhile, if we have achieved an understanding, I shall return to my work again."

It took a full painful hour this time just to resuscitate the frame of mind frustrated by the last interruption; but I had accomplished it at last and ventured to proceed again.

…scrapped with this wondrous subject, and the worthiest among them have found it a great opponent, and one that always comes up fresh and smiling after every knockdown. The great Confucius said that he would rather be a patriotic philosopher than a congressman. George Washington related that professional patriotism was the grandest profession that the patriot was worthy of professing; and even our own GW has said obscurely, but manly-like, that "Patriotism --

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Biff: That's as much as I can stomache for now. Off to try my hand at working up something completely fresh story-wise by my own hand, but which operates in a similar vein to tickle both fancy and funny bone... (judging by that last infelicitious phrase...haha...this is going to take a few more days...)

My Scooter (a knockoff of Mark Twain’s My Watch)

The following crude imitation of Twain’s work is going to suck, and suck badly no doubt. But, you have to bust a few eggs to make an omelet. Mine are still scrambled. This is some rocky cornball, but I have to start somewhere. Bottom is usually where that somewhere lies. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Either way, it’s going to take a couple of weeks to figure out how to do this sort of stuff. But I shall…

My Scooter: An Instructive Little Tale

My new scooter had been a buck stallion these six months. She was infallible and reliable, a trustworthy and boon companion, her constitution and anatomy imperishable. But at last, one day I had to take her to the repair shop. Nothing adventurous, just to tap up the tires, which I’d put off for a while, and which were now soft and become twin fish-tailing accident-generating disasters in tandem. I had dithered and put the thing off, gripped as I was by a premonition of doom featuring my beloved machine anatomized by death merchants going chop-chop in a chop shop.

But by and by I got it together and commanded my concerns to depart and made for a certified repair outlet. A grubby personage trotted over. I kicked the tires in the casual way of the connoisseur and suggested “Top ‘em up, sir, if you will please.” The head of the establishment took a personal fancy to my machine, preambled over and looked her up and down knowingly. With a sonorous gravitas he said, “Why fellah, what she needs is a new spark plug.” Before I could digest the import and implications of this declaration, he snapped his fingers and his No. 1 grease monkey was having at her with his profane hands.

I broke out in a sweat. I tried to remonstrate, to have the headman understand there was nothing the matter with the mechanical operation of my pet. But no; all this human cabbage could see was that it had a touch of blue smoke and so just HAD to have a new spark plug. I danced around him with anguish and implored him to let her alone. But like Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the dice was cast and came up craps.

I put my foot down. I refused to pay for services unrequired. But he would have none of my requirements. Waving me down from his modest height, he informed me that I was freshly arrived and an American to boot and proudly stated to all and sundry grubby fellows in attendance that he was providing his services gratis; that it was a free courtesy and a fine karmic gesture to a stranger from a strange land, a hale and hearty welcome from the sons of the Yellow Emperor as it were. A round of huzzah! went up from his crew.

But as for I, well I trembled with exasperation. I inquired if I could have the privilege of perusing the operating manual. "Manual?" he inquired. I explained, "For the spark plug, my good man." He replied that for a professional of his years and experience, manuals weren’t for reading but for writing. “Is that a fact,” I responded. And he looked at me strangely, snorted at his boys, placed his arm over his chest and began hooting with a sudden pain. I slunk away with my scooter, launching her into the colorful twilight smog, I looked back to find him settled in his Buddha-bead boss chair, still chuckling, but tired now, the unusual exertion having tuckered him out, leaving him a sort of snorfling and crying himself to sleep as it were.

My scooter ran faster now, but unpredictably, like she was on the laughing gas. She launched from the sidelines with gusto, whooshing like a rocket, blowing sparks out the back end, thrusting me violently into turbulent traffic and threatening to fetch me to my Great Reward before I had time to enjoy it. During the first day, the damage was limited to an old crone, her groceries scattered hither and thither; it cost me my lunch money to compensate her. The following day, my pet chose a taxi, pitching me over the hood and beaching herself alongside the vehicle where I found her, a picture of mechanical serenity. The taxi operator thumped me with a baseball bat and filched my wallet while I was still snatching at stars. The next day we soared like a missile into the backside of a bus, rattling my teeth and my confidence. Then a red light tempted her and we got broadsided in the intersection by a gravel truck, the driver considerate in the usual way of his vocation, backing up and driving over me again to be sure I was feeling no pain.

Things were getting out of hand, so I took her to another dealer. He took a look and pronounced authoritatively that the carburetor was in need of winding up. The float was drowning and needed First Aid. I took her back on the road, and now she huffed and puffed like a paralytic, despondent and unable to build a respectable head of steam. She wheeled pathetically along, her spirits sunk. We were passed by wrist rockets, pocket rockets. Then busses and then even the rag and bone man, the greybeard peddling past in shorts and skinny shanks, waving as he passed us by. Pedestrians felt sorry and offered to push. I was never going to get anywhere in life. I missed appointments, went hungry, was late for dinner.

So I got me to another industrial specialist. He opined that the carburetor was fine, but that the seals on the shocks were losing their tether. They was frayed. He pointed to a leak. But now I was fond for the former days when I took the damaged scooter slow-poking around. Now she bottomed out in every pothole, jarring my bones and knocking me half-senseless.

I hunted up another professional opinion. This one offered that the tires were scalloping. I smiled in a knowing way, not wanting to be mistaken for a newbie in the vehicular arts. He planted new steel-belted studded radials on her and I felt satisfied. But then I discovered that every time I aimed the handle bars in the direction of a left turn, my pet kept plowing straight ahead. Whenever I wanted to go straight, she insisted on a right turn. Formerly, getting to a destination was an easy navigation. Now, I perforce I had to aim by a circular route, going counterclockwise and taking into account wind speed, humidity, and ambient temperature. I apprehended that I had to look at my destination and then point my pet 180° in the opposite direction of the one I was aiming for. She’d take me in a long camber, wandering royally across lanes, scaling sidewalks like it was nobody’s business but her own, and just generally breaking all the legal laws and busting out a myriad infractions of common sense. By and by, though, she did her best to get me somewhere proximate to my destination. Whereupon I hailed a cab.

Getting impatient with taxi drivers, also frequent victims of vehicles that refuse all by circuitous routes, I took the poor suffering scooter to another doctor to have the tires diagnosed, anatomized, and entered into the surgery clinic if need be. This splendid gentleman informed me with great majesty and generosity that he’d fix the tires for free, but that the clutch plates was unfortunately worn a tad. I emerged on the street again, this time with a creative transmission whose gears took uncalled for liberties with artistic license. The automatic transmission now automatically shifted from first to third gear, from third to fifth, and from fifth into second and then from fourth into first gear, with the impressive precision of a musician running through his scales. My loyal pet took on the mien of a bohemian rascal. With all this shifting and jerking I could neither hold onto my groceries or my lunch. I lost my wife off the back, leaving me lonesome and holding on for dear life itself. I have never seen her since and do not quite know who abandoned whom or whom abandoned who. But then I realized this was a capital favor of magnificent magnitude and I returned to the smiling doctor and gave the good man a bonus. But too much of a good thing can make it a bad one. I plain got to missing my wife, my gears, my groceries and my lunch.

I took the scooter to yet another expert, priding myself on never allowing the sacred flame of hope extinguish in a valiant breast. When I looked him over I recognized a seedy former acquaintance from Atlantic Canada, but, who, unlike myself, was unreconstituted and unrevaluated and just plain unrepentant. Living overseas hadn’t cured him of his pastoral afflictions, but spoiled him by infecting him with a new crust of city ones. I never had a particular high opinion of him and was not surprised to discover the slacker had departed the high and mighty art of English teaching for Zen and the increasingly low, as I was beginning to see it, art of motorcycle maintenance.

Fortunately he was too busy getting acquainted with my pet to recognize me. He looked her over with a lascivious grin and pronounced, "Well Holy O Martha! If she ain't just defective all around? Even a gravelroader goaler knows this here's a gonner. By gum, she needs to be fixed up and replaced, root and branch, hook and sinker, whole hog I tell ye. Hmm… But maybe this here mother-scratcher's got potential. Sure. Tell ye what I’m going to do, Sir. I'll make it my personal mission to save her from the heathen’s junkyard. She just needs an overhaul, a tuneup, and a life insurance policy. Follow me into my office sir and let’s see if we can’t find us a contract to be signed."

I picked up a crow bar and brained him on the spot. I had him cremated, his ashes placed in a pristine Buddhist urn overlooking a mountainous heap of fengsui at my own expense.

Chinese friends of mine often wonder what happens to English teachers when they get old. Do they just retire and fade away? Or is there a special fate for them in heaven? I've never had the heart to tell them.
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Biff: Yeah, I know this is crap. I hate it too. But, it's a start.

Parsing Nonsense

“Would you send your child to die in Iraq?” was a question posed recently by straw man Michael Moore to stuffed shirt Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly countered that the issue was better settled by asking whether he personally was willing to risk his life, trying to bring a wholesome manliness to the issue and sensing somehow that Moore was trying to spin the question for emotional effect. Moore sensed that he might lose some tear-pulling momentum and tried to return the spotlight to sending in the children, as opposed to saving them, given the awesomely tedious predictability of the emotional tug this would have for most folks. It has none for me, and injections of manliness usually serve to squeeze sense out of the picture, and just leave me looking for the door. But these are other issues for another day.

However, on the bike in traffic, on a doomed quest to get to the south of the island today during Chinese New Year, and in between taking the bike boldly on to sidewalks and otherwise ignoring the elastic traffic laws to the south of Taipei City, this question entered my mind a few times:

Would you SEND your CHILD to DIE in Iraq? Something was wrong with the question. Some buffoonery was afoot.

To DIE? Nobody sends children to die in Iraq that I’m aware of except for the parents of Muslim martyrs. US soldiers go to Iraq to achieve military ends but with the goal of returning alive. This is why grunts wear body armor; why armored divisions have – what else? - armor; why evasive maneuvers are designed to evade incoming bullets and missiles. In other words, one doesn’t send one’s children to Iraq on suicide missions. They go there to accomplish military objectives, to live and fight another day. Ergo the rapid rotation of experienced troops out of Iraq to train fresh recruits back in the US. Who in the US military goes to Eye-rack to die?

CHILD? Are there any children serving in the US forces, as opposed to Third World militaries where they’re often to be found? No. But of course Michael was referring to adult children. But one doesn’t send adults to war. Adults aren’t children. Adults make their own decisions. Bill can no more send his adult children (if he has any) to war than my father could have prevented me from enlisting in the reserves and possibly being called up to serve in Beirut during the early 1980’s. My father was adamantly opposed to my weekend warrior service. The hell with him, I thought. I’m not a child. I can do what the fuck I want. So I joined up. I also applied later to serve as a regular in the Canadian Air Force and was tested and accepted but turned down the position offered (navigator; I wanted to be a pilot). In other words, nobody is sending any children, either juvenile or adult, to any military theater. If adult children go, it’s of their own accord. After all, the military is not conscript-based, it’s professional.

Which brings us to the next issue: SEND? How do you send your children to die in Iraq? Clearly Mike doesn’t mean putting kids in a box and mailing them there. And you can’t just show up as a Rambo vigilante character with grenades, rocket launchers and an M-16 because you’ll be arrested and probably sent to a loony bin for R&R. Mike means send your (adult) children to join the US Armed Forces and send them to Eye-rack. But if you sign up, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get there. The Armed Forces decide, not you. You could be posted to Korea or Japan or a myriad other locations. You could be deployed to Iraq. But there you’d probably not see action, as most of the military works in logistics (everything from accounting to running warehouses to kitchen patrol). In other words, Bill doesn’t have the power to send his adult children anywhere dangerous if they’re in the military.

So, NOBODY growing up in democratic America is likely to be in a position to SEND CHILDREN to DIE in Iraq.

So ‘would you send your child to die in Iraq?’ is a moot question for it implies the impossible on three fronts, at least.

So maybe Mike phrased it badly. But the key question, if rearranged, is still valid, right? No. Watch. Mike’s hard question, when tempered with a dose of reality, translates to this: Bill, would you encourage a relative of yours to make up his own mind, as an adult, and apply to the US forces, apply for deployment in Iraq, apply for non-logistics-related duties in patrol or active military theater that would place this relative at a low risk for suffering bodily harm. (As I understand it, it is a low risk) In other words, Mike is asking Bill: “Do you support the war and are you willing to encourage other adults to support it in their own way?”

Well, this dispassionate mainstream news phrasing of the question doesn’t sell mockumentaries like Fahrenheit 911. No zip. No pizzazz. If it doesn’t bleed, how can it lead? So, it’s much better for corporate sales and ad revenues, much easier to get the customer’s attention, by asking: “Would you send your children to die in Iraq?”

Mike seems guilty of more of that best-selling wishful thinking and populist fustian that’s made him such a household name and a multi-gazzilionnaire who travels by private jet to feel our pain in person. And Bill’s no-spin zone seems to have met its match and been spun by a whopper, the Big Lie, in this case three implied ones, at least.

Thus are the issues debated and decided by the elect. More times than you might think.

Biff Cappuccino

More On IQ:

How about the key role of methodology in the modern conception of intelligence, or at least in my amateur notion of it? Most of our habits of thought, particularly those which distinguish us from the Third World, are culturally derived. This seems obvious I'm sure, but bear with me for a moment.

Take the ability to work with logic. Logic, in the sense of syllogism, is by no means intrinsic to the human brain as demonstrated by the difficulty with which logical propositions are expressed clearly only to be followed by the additional uphill battle of persuading the largely sentimental population at large.

For example, key to thinking and speaking logically is firewalling oneself off from the emotions of your audience, singular or plural. If you care about the other person's feelings and worry about the impression you're making on them, you can't focus on that trickiest and most elusive element: logic. It takes full concentration upon following syllogism, context, points of reference, and so forth to be logical.

The brain's like a computer with too little RAM. Run one program at a time, and it's quick. Run a parcel of programs and it's slow. In debates, rather than try to interact with your opponent across the board, if you remove emotional involvement this frees up RAM and you're back to being quick again. Of course it means that you have to be cold; it means that you have to adjourn the usual protocol, instincts, and so forth. A very unnatural process. Which is why so few people do it. But you'll see, if you watch, that the better grade of logician does this. They're indifferent to you. You mean nothing to them. They only care about what you say, not that you say it.

But it works. I've been doing this since my teens. Not because I'm intrinsically smart, but because I picked it up from a Scottish father whose relatives do the same thing. In other words, I got it from culture. When I was younger, I thought it was because I was smarter. I made the easy mistake of confusing cultural acquirements with genetic advantage.

Similarly, to be logical, one can't invest emotional capital into perspectives. The way to proceed rapidly, deftly, and successfully through the maze of logical propositions that constitute modern life is to never be loyal to any of them ever. When you discover a handsome, cherished proposition is wrong, abandon it like yesterday's newspaper and immediately move on. Even better: never cherish a proposition. Never allow yourself to feel embarrassed, ashamed or regretful. Not because you're too tough to admit that you're just as dumb as the rest of us, but because these emotions are not helpful. They slow you down and distract you. The point of debate is the pursuit of truth, not the pursuit of comeuppance, revenge, and ego gratification. Chase those three, and you'll get your butt kicked by any logician worthy of the name. Just as you would be able to kick his arse where he to chase these three.

Again, a very simple methodology. But when you think about it, how many people actually do this? They usually do the opposite.

Invest emotional capital and it becomes critical whether or not you're right. The correctness of a perspective becomes entangled in one's sense of self-esteem. Divest yourself of this emotional capital and you can be very nimble and intelligent, even wise because you can plow rapidly through logical propositions and figure out what's most likely to be correct. You're never in defense mode. Only in offense mode.

Furthermore, one has to be almost pathological about the pursuit of truth. Only through doing so, for whatever reason, can one develop reasonable logical propositions and be in a position to explode unreasonable ones. Again, it's a very simple methodology. Anyone can do this.

However, I don't think I've ever met another person who's scrupulously honest. Who does not fudge. Who is not polite when telling the truth will be deemed offensive. And yet, the only way to test your own views is to give them as expansive a hearing as possible. You never know who is going to cut the legs out from under one of your arguments.

Again, this sort of approach goes against the grain of normal human interaction. But only through doing so does a person have a chance of becoming intelligent. Again, we're talking about adherence to an unnatural methodology. A methodology that has nothing to do with genetic superiority, but entirely to do with the serendipity of being born into a culture and era which tolerates, even values, such eccentricities as penetrating intelligence. Many cultures, of course do not.

Cultures which are oppressed by martial law tend not to esteemed penetrating intelligence. On the one hand, it's of course because of the control of free speech and punishment of dissidents. On the other hand, it's a matter of parents not wanting their children to get in trouble and discouraging them from airing their views. This is often done to the point where parents do not tell their children what they themselves think for fear of being accidentally incriminated by their kids or because their kids may speak up and get in trouble. A couple of generations of this and the grandkids are feebs.

Again, in many, many cultures and for many, many reasons, intelligence of the penetrating kind is by no means encouraged. It's discouraged, and actively so. Can imagine how penetrating intelligence goes down in modern theocracies, for example? Think back to all the thinkers burned at the stake during the Christian Middle Ages. Ask yourself what the average IQ must have been in those days? Pretty depressing I'm sure.

There are many rules of thumb whose digestion and application are required for membership in the First World mindset. Adjourning violence in favor of respecting the opinions of others and their right to disagree with you. Time management. In other words, a three o'clock appointment means meeting someone at three o'clock and not at 3:30 or 4 p.m. The adjournment of superstitions. In other words, the abandoning of prohibitions on fishing on certain days, the forbidding of planting on others, and so forth. Adjournment of the notion that lending money at interest is evil. Thou must covet, for otherwise the global economy collapses.

There are many others. Again, membership in the modern world is mostly about adherence to a set of rules and guidelines which work in our commercial era and information age, where time is money, knowledge is power, and, I personally find, honesty is still the best policy. I might make a capable liar if I was to devote myself to the craft, but rest assured my IQ would drop precipitously. No thanks.

Biff Cappuccino

PostScript to the review of Race - The Reality of Human Differences:

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Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free-Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability sheds light on the behavioral genesis, as opposed to genetic provenance, of IQ. In reading the following, you might want to ask yourself which of the correspondents will have children who perform well at school and on IQ tests, and which, unfortunately, will not.

From pp 106-107, World on Fire: I recently posted on the Web the following question: "why have the Kikuyu been more economically successful than other Kenyans?" (In Kenya, the term "Kenyans" is still understood to mean black Kenyans.) Many Kenyans, including self identified Kikuyus,Luos,and Kalenjin respondents. Here's a sampling of their comments.

W.: the Kikuyu, of which I'm one, have become successful economically due to various reasons. One, civilization came early to our community when the colonial settlers settle in our land and introduced the start of the Kenyan economy. Second, the Kikuyus have a different attitude. They like to invest and try ventures, however small they are. They believe that being a small-business owner is better than being a manager here or there... in my family, there is no one who is an employee. We believe that the worst offense you can do to yourself is to remain an employee. Rightly so, wealth is created by those who engage in business.

K: It Is Out Of Hard Work. Hard Hard Work and Confidence. The Same Reasons All Other People Become Strong Economically.

S. [responding to K]: you are a sick puppy. If I remind you of Kamaliza [a Swahili name for "exterminator" and a nickname used by some Kenyans to refer to presidents Kenyatta], you will realize that your fathers and mothers have an unfair advantage vis-à-vis other Kenyans. During Kenyatta's reign, he transferred all the "white settlers" lands to Kikuyus. Please don't give me that BS of I work hard and own my own business. If you don't care to learn history then stop spouting ignorance... you should at the very least to stop corrupting this media with misinformation. Please acknowledge the sins of your ancestors, then propose solutions. Non-Kikuyus sat on the sidelines while Kamaliza and his Kikuyu henchmen raped the country, denying other Kenyans jobs and land. We are all hard-working folks and don't think for a moment that your likes have cornered the market on success, by virtue of being Kikuyu.

J: this is what you say to a stranger, with no idea about Kenya and how Kikuyus got wealthy! You say that Kikuyus were outright thieves?! Next time check your words!!! I insist, Kikuyus are not thieves. They were aided to their wealth, but nobody makes it to financial success without help. That is why banks offer loans. The difference is that Kikuyus appreciate the little they have and have a drive towards enterprise like no other tribe in Kenya. I was brought up by my aunt, she fed us by selling the local brew, and now she owns a restaurant!! Am I not allowed to be proud of that??? She was never a relation of a certain minister and neither did she finish her formal education!!... you being a Kenyan should have some sensitivity on what you write!!! The Kikuyu bashing has to stop!! I am tired of everyone picking on Kikuyus because we happen to be the first at the top!!!!!

S: what I'm trying to tell your kinsman is that hard work is not a genetic trait of Kikuyus only... you have to accept facts such as outright stealing favoring Kikuyus that was perpetrated by Kamaliza henchmen -- like the series of Kikuyu governors and department heads that are in charge of the central bank. Moi and his henchmen [who are Kalenjin] may be stealing now, but is he doing anything different from what Kamaliza did? You don't have to defend Kamaliza because you are a Kikuyu.

P: Guys, calling each other names IS NOT going to resolve anything. I suggest you respect each other's opinions or positions, and stick with ONLY THE FACTS.

M.: it is as simple as having self-determination and being afraid of poverty. To be poor means being hopeless to Kikuyu. You are not accorded respect by other men. They can even swindle your wife, they regard you like garbage. These are some of the reasons that make Kikuyus economically strong. It is like part of the culture of the people. But not anymore, not under Moi.

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Concerning the scandal over Ward Churchill, an ethnic impersonator (fake Amerindian) and professor at the University of Colorado, a fellow professor, Paul Campos, at UC wrote the following:

Anyone who reads widely in the collected works of professor Churchill, and especially anyone who listens to his speeches, will, if they are not blinded by certain ideological commitments, recognize the essentially fascist tendency of his work. If a white American were to speak of any foreign people or nation in anything like the way Churchill discusses America and Americans, the fascist character of his work would be obvious to everyone.

Most interesting to me, and with regard to the above dialogue between Kenyans, was Campos' working definition for fascism:

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As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:

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• The worship of violence as a purifying social force. This often manifests itself as an aggressive and romanticized militarism, that produces a kind of cult of the warrior, and that advocates violent action as a mechanism for social change, and an appropriate way of crushing dissent.

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• A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.

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• The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents, who are characterized by turns as demonically clever conspirators plotting to undermine the possibility of a virtuous society, and soulless automatons mindlessly carrying out the orders of a vast and evil bureaucracy. This dehumanization often leads to demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.

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• The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter. The supposed virtues and sins of a nation or people are ascribed to all of its individual members, so that, for example, one speaks of "the Jew" (meaning all Jews collectively and each Jewish person individually) being responsible for the decadence of modern culture.

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So again, which mindset will produce children with higher IQ's? The whining, self-indulgent, entitlement chasing, blame-game, violence as holy climax and catharsis paradigm? Or the pro-active, can-do, keep your nose clean, take responsibility for your actions, positive-think business paradigm?

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Biff Cappuccino

Review of Race: the Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele (2004)

Don't know what I was smoking when I wrote the first draft of this review this morning. When I'm away from a given style of writing for a while, in this case, critical prose, I completely fuck it up the first time or so when I get back to it... So, I'm taking the bastard down and re-doing her.

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Second Attempt follows (I only looked at the first fifth of it, if that much. I've got too much stuff on the go. No time!!):

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Review of Race: the Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele (2004)
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This was quite an interesting and well-written book, one that I will read, quote, and refer to again, without a doubt. But, first a couple of throwaway paragraphs, apologetics for having read and, even worse, enjoyed this profane work.

First of all, I have my doubts per the significance of IQ. So much in life depends on methodology. We all meet sluggish people who get along well in life by being steady, nose to the grindstone. We all meet fast maniacs who seem in a rush to dig their own graves. Slow can lead to pensiveness and focus, just like speed can lead to frivolity and shallowness. Along the way to watching a couple of hundred videos of authors being interviewed, I was surprised not to find any correlation between intelligence (or at least the intelligence required to speak well and not waste the audience’s time) and mental quickness. Acuity, at least that which works for writing, doesn’t seem to correlate with manifestly high IQs. Some writers of high-quality content-jammed, insight-infested books yet speak so damn slowly that I literally can’t suffer to watch them on video or listen to their radio interviews.

Another problem is the lower speed and probably lower IQs of the average urban Taiwanese vs. other urban Chinese around the region, Indonesia and north China in particular. Taiwan is the butt of jokes all over Greater China. I was mocked endlessly in Malaysia for speaking Taiwanese Mandarin. The slang in China for the Taiwanese is the replacement of ‘taibao’ (Taiwanese compatriot) with ‘daiboa’ (Dumb compatriot). And yet the Taiwanese are among the wealthiest and probably are the happiest Chinese in the region. And surely it is this often dimwitted happiness, due to the relative ease and simplicity of the local lifestyle, that doesn’t require people to be that smart. The same phenomenon can be seen in the English ex-colonies (Canada and the US for example. Simple, happy ex-colonists.) Are the IQs of these ex-colonists lower? Probably. But is their racial stock different? I doubt it. Environment, social environment especially, makes such a difference.

To the book: On page 24, the authors start pulling apart a PBS special entitled Race: the Power of an Illusion which promotes the PC message that race is a social contract. A social contract? Who would have thought? Who could have thought?

How does such nonsense gain currency?

Via the ambitious wordsmith. This species of academic takes a dubious pleasure in pushing and pulling at facts – in this case, the existence of racial characteristics – by claiming that skin color, hair type, facial morphology and so forth are only skin deep. In other words, skin deep is only skin deep and is therefore only skin deep and thus only skin deep.

I have little argument with racial characteristics having negligible impact on intelligence (they’re certainly not negligible with regard to sports, altitude acclimatization, immunity to disease, inherited disease, alcohol and lactose tolerance, etc.). But to claim that racial characteristics are in fact wholly imaginary; worse, a sort of deliberate ploy and endgame of a huge conspiracy of ignoramuses, such as myself, well that just leaves me flummoxed and tired.

Besides, why all emotional racket about inherited IQ? Most of what constitutes intelligence today is in fact just disciplined adherence to a methodology well-suited for our age of commerce and information overload. These methodologies are usually filched from someone else, mine certainly is: as far as I can determine it's a mongrel welter of Scottish/English/Greco-Roman/Philosophe methods and principles. All of this was pioneered by various high IQ genius and pioneers who cleared the way for the naive, the inert, and everyone else.

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Take the genius of capitalism. It works great because it’s so simple. Even a moron, to cite a common exempler of the captains of industry breed, can run a corner store. Many morons do in fact and earn more per annum than many top-flight white-collar wage-slaves. So which person, if income is the arbiter of things and given that most of us work mostly for monetary ends, is the most intelligent when all is said and done? The corner store running philistine with a new Lexus or Yours Truly, getting wet in the rain on a second-hand scooter? I’m poor as a church mouse. I'm 40 years old. How intelligent, really, has my decision-making been so far?
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Back to the 'social contract' hustle. Was I just dreaming the whole time? Or are certain professorial herds dreaming borrowed lavender dreams awash with the usual lofty rhetoric that deliberately defies parsing and which aims, given today's transformation of the victim into the morally correct hero (in effect beatifying failure and translating it into something reverential), to induce good feelings at the expense of common sense.

It's all so very familiar, in the eternal manner of the manufacturers of religions, patriotic slogans, and ideologies for the chic. 'Race as a social contract' becomes another preposterous entry into the cannon of ever-failing mirages and monkeyshines that respected professors drum into credulous students. Every season a new cannon of thought ends up peer-pressuring its way through the faculty, though not before a mess of doubtful blinking and trembling accompanies the fearful apostasy of departing the old faith, last year’s or last season's cannon. The formally overeducated emerge at the end of the day armed with a grab-bag of logical inversions and worthy slogans: i.e. fully conversant with what passes for this season's intellectual fashions, the new improved faith, the revealed truth. Until that same truth is falsified by next year's hirsute apostle and fellow traveler.

Organizing a faith, parochial or secular, is mostly got started by hawking rhetorical, theoretical, and ethereal goods in an effort to troll for herbivores, already lowing for a leader, their udders painful if not milked. To boldly mix metaphors: Having tickled the fish, one must get oneself into the saddle and ride herd. Inspiring belief, i.e. parochial or secular faith in the incredible, is mostly about fetching fidgety crowds with freshly-scented salvos of moving rhetoric: i.e. it’s about passing off the same old bill of goods but in new packaging. It's about lining up the modest blank-cartridges and proud stuffed-shirts that compose the majority of every population the planet has ever known. This crew of eternal followers and movement-joiners lacks the wherewithal and self-assurance required for pugnacious grappling with new ideas and new idea-mongers. For without putting claims to the fire, there is no way to distinguish between fact and fiction.

My point is: this book is essentially doing battle with academic cant: the cant makers, its franchises and account executives.

This is another book in which Stephen Jay Gould gets caught overreaching himself in polemic and founders horribly comfortably in the eternal American uplift. It's worth remembering that the uplift has been responsible for such prodigies as the banning of cigarettes on the theory that fags, as opposed to pipes, inspired masturbation and other citified debaucheries; plus Prohibition on the theory that just one sip of hooch and it's a straight tumble down to Gin Lane, beating the wife along the way. It also gave us the Drug War which operates on the theory that the sight of a pill of raw opium is a temptation beyond refusing which shall turn us all into Chinamen prostrate on teak beds, pipe in hand, the house triple-mortgaged, the children sold into slavery.

Stephen J. made a name for himself writing monthly articles on paleontology and evolution, spoiling good work by dumbing it down with baseball metaphors and personalizing it with anecdotes from the proletariat. But the formula worked and he blossomed from a young professor and writer in the wings, into the Lord of popular science and, finally, the avuncular Patron Saint of the field. He went out with a glow, and the glimmer of his ghost keeps marching on amongst us still. I used to be one of his biggest fans.

However, following the footsteps of many a successful Hollywood actor and actress, he began to feel his public duty: to lead the untaught masses to a New Canaan. Like many another Messiah, in the interest of truth, he promptly abandoned the facts. In the interest of leadership, he abandoned the aforementioned sense in favor of the aforementioned good feelings, lavender rhetoric, the technique of turning of unpalatable truths on their head and, most importantly, of righting wrongs by packaging them as rights. The masses can't be trusted to think on their own: this is the old left-wing do-gooder mantra, predicated on the healthy supposition, shared by both sides of the political aisle, that everyone else is stupid. The difference is that part of today's right wing, or, more accurately stated, the entirety of the libertarian wing, is in favor of letting people make their own mistakes in their own time on the theory that everyone is capable of learning. That's the theory.
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The social contract nature of race, i.e. that race is an illusion (ex: Michael Jackson), was proven beyond a reasonable doubt on PBS via a panel of expert witnesses (i.e. high-priced, high-class fact-checkers) and the testing of mtDNA. On the PBS show, tissue samples were gleaned from the inside of the cheeks of several students. From page 24 of the book I'm reviewing: Then the students examined six selected mtDNA markers and used them to guess which other student's DNA would be most like theirs. The authors counter that the PBS experiment, in effect, stacked the deck. First, the number of markers used in the experiment was below the standard of 13 required by the FBI crime labs for even an individual identification. A good analogy would be political opinion polling. In order to get a valid result, the pollster must sample enough people.

Then the authors question why mtDNA was even used, when this is a form of DNA that only passes through the maternal line, thus not reflecting the potential racial characteristics of the paternal line.

Page 25: The usual pattern found in recorded history is that a small number of intruding males in a dominant position, either as powerful conquerors or rich merchants, mate with a much larger number of indigenous females. The top prize in this regard, perhaps, goes to Genghis Khan and his Mongol Golden Horde. One Y-chromosome study has shown that one every 200 males alive today, mostly in Asia, is descended from the great Khan.

This caught my attention because Mencken mentioned the same sort of thing back in the 1920s, offending readers yet again with a commonsense observation. In other words DNA can now be employed to demonstrate what was obvious to observers a century ago. Now, even that majority of liberal arts academia which is flummoxed and harried by information, facts and figures, schools of thought, politically correct shibboleths and other fashions of the season into chronically doubting its own senses can relax a bit. With the publishing of this book, as with the publishing of The Bell Curve, several truths are out. From the perspective of some, they've escaped, they're on the loose. However, all and sundry can take a breather, relax, take a load off. For the lightening rod is working.

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For as usual with the liberal arts, truth has reemerged not due to the fearlessness of academia and its famed protections for the campus heretic, but because the majority of that supreme herd of pedigreed blanks long ago chucked up intellectual courage in favor of letting the occasional heckler up to the podium, pump an awkward truth into the air, and take his salvo of rotten tomatoes. With someone else scandalizing the audience and become infamous, the hacks can begin to state plainly, first double-checking the coast is clear, what has been obvious to even itself for ages.

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In the UK, the best example of this in action that I can think of is best-selling amateur historian David (alleged holocaust denier) Irving. He stated decades ago that Hitler didn't order the killing of the European Jews, that Hitler's anti-Jewish bias was a political tactic to win votes. That Hitler's loony underlings commissioned the dreadful business. That Hitler, like Marx, like many other ethnic Germans from the south of Germany or from Austria, reserved his murderous contempt for the people of the Balkans. Well, after years of being attacked as a proto-Nazi by those who knew better, his peers in academia, guess who now agrees with his assessment? A growing number of his peers in academia, as a reading of pertinent book reviews reveals. (No one was more surprised to see this than me, I must say.) As far as I can tell, the major names conducting related reseach in academia were only bold when it became safe to do so. I.e. when European anti-Israeli sentiment began to peak during the late 1990's and newspaper-readers could now accept the false premise that denying Hitler killed the Jews was tantamount to being anti-Jewish. In other words, with the public's revival of racism, David Irving, an avowed non-racist, was now acceptable to the public.
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On page 27 the author states, "the same ethical philosophers have shown much less interest in disabusing their readers off "the moralistic fallacy," that is, arguing that since, according to many moral codes, humans ought not be aggressive, rapacious, or prejudiced, therefore, we are not - the scientific evidence be damned. We have already noted the recent tendency of proceeding from what one thinks ought to be to what is. One corollary of the moralistic fallacy has been the argument that since "race" is really a social construction, and a very evil one at that, used to justify European colonialism and the enslavement and extermination of native peoples, the study of "race" inherently leads to "racism" in both thought and deed."

This illogical, feel-good or feel-bad manner of thinking is naturally most common in the serially dishonest. Being in the habit of trimming and hedging one’s own opinions, it is only natural to expect others to do the same. A lack of transparency, i.e. personal honesty and integrity, makes it next to impossible to challenge the ideas that these pathological types cherish. But this paranoid pathology is less and less mainstream. These days, the media increasingly aggressively attacks any and all received wisdoms and is more and more fact-driven.

And given the broad range of expression from the mainstream media to blogs, the very public success of respectable personalities such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, the steady increase in interracial dating, and the exposure through Internet porn that penis size does not directly correlate to a woman's pleasure during sex, makes it seem quite unlikely to me that an open discussion of race would lead to racism. For that matter, Internet porn has led to a significant drop in the frequency of sex in many nations, Japan in particular for example. One of the long-standing causes of tension between blacks and whites in America was sexual. Now that many men derive sexual release primarily from Internet porn, and only secondarily from women, and the fact that anyone with eyes in their head can see that porn stars impaled on 14 inch penises still masturbate to beat the band, suggests to me that sex as a source of inter-racial tension is far less than what it was before.

Furthermore, the United States has come a long way over the last 400 years. IQs have jumped across the board in American schools (probably a result of TV, a savvier culture, and improved nutrition, and despite public education's decline) something upwards of 30 points since the end of WWII. These days, truth has a much higher value and esteem. Rhetoric, the opiate of the yokel, is in decline as evidenced by the growing popularity for nonfiction works, as opposed to novels. These days, the former is just as likely to become a bestseller as the latter. And, notably, biography has become a consistent best-seller. Much of biography consists in deconstructing glory and media spin, and in unearthing the dirt on individuals. This popularity is in part motivated by the already growing skepticism of the reading public and in turn reinforces and deepens that skepticism and embellishes it with understanding, pragmatism, and an Olympian mindset.

In other words, it is only the inert, untutored, and childlike mind which can accept the notion that race might inherently lead to the racism of yesteryear. And yet, it is precisely this mindset that one finds throughout humanities graduates. So much for liberal arts programs as finishing schools for ironing out the crudities of high school graduates. They're not even up to that challenge anymore.

Yet another example is the reaction of the US government to the 9/11 attacks. Within days, GW Bush visited a mosque to demonstrate ecumenicalism. That the United States would stop on a dime and return to the South of the 1960's seems so unlikely as to suggest that the advocate just wants to stir up the animals.

From page 32: in the case of race, the consensus view in contemporary social sciences that Western European culture, and it alone, falsely and self-serving constructed such a view of human variation and then imposed it on the rest of humanity until our minds were liberated with the advent of deconstructionism. An outgrowth of postmodernist philosophy, deconstructionism denies that any signs can establish ultimate meaning. It "deconstructs" scientific statements, claiming to reveal their hidden, underlying racial, sexual, and political biases.

In other words, the age-old trick of the media maven and politician: invent a bogus issue and propose to cure it via a bogus nostrum, in this case, deconstructionism. The latter is a remake in terms of its operating philosophy of the ancient inscrutable arts of Kabbalah, decoding Bible codes, numerology, astrology, animism and all the other failed worldviews and exploded eschatologies, bully-ragged and hunted to near extinction by the workers of the Information Age. Marxism and Communism were invented to save us from the evil of greed by a Messiah who faked his statistics and made mooching off others a well-paying life-long obsession. Christianity, a collective pilfering and 3rd century AD committee-edited welter of timeless Fertile Crescent myths, professes to save us from a devil which does not exist while it's conceptions of human immorality and wickedness reached their executive climax in that great success known as the Dark Ages. Adherence to Commandment Ten, thou shalt not covet, squelched European economies for a thousand years and continues to impoverish the votaries of Islam. Capitalism is founded on thou shalt covet. Which is why Great Communicator, GW, commanded the faithful after 9-11 to go shopping.

Page 72: the author points out that Stephen J. Gould, in his book The MisMeasure of Man, a history and polemic gallantly opposing what had already been defeated, racism, Gould points out that Samuel George Morton, a 18th-century researcher had botched measurements of cranial capacity employed to account for racial differences in intellectual ability. For example, Morton had written that "52 Caucasians skulls he measured had the highest average cranial capacity (87 in.³); his 10 Mongolians were next at 83; and 18 Malays at 81; 147 American (Indian) at 80; and finally 29 Ethiopians skulls at 78 in.³.

The PBS documentary states that his measurements more than "made systematic errors in favor of his assumptions" that whites should have "decided and unquestioned superiority over all the nations of the earth." Gould accused Morton of bungling. However, William Stanton, off the American school anthropology, concluded that Morton's measurements were "painstaking" and taken with "great care" to "ensure accuracy." The skulls have been re-measured recently as well and the errors made in measuring attributed to Dr. Gould, since called to his rightful place in Heaven, and not to Morton, who can presently be reached in Hell.

In other words because Morton's innocent pursuit of the truth might mislead the masses, a group inflammatory and unfortunately liable to orgies of bad thinking when granted access to the facts, Gould headed Morton off at the pass. He trumped up authoritative professorial opinions and juggled counterfactual facts, sonorously priming the pump of PC and greasing the pole of truth. In his own mind, he fought fire with fire, but to my mind, in so doing he reduced himself to the level of the professional patriot, the blathering pedagogue suspicious of his own teachings, to being just another tinpot Messiah gloriously leading a people he privately suspected were not worth the leading and who would achieve nothing worthwhile once they got there. In other words, more accidental comedy.

Anyway, time to wrap this review up. This is actually quite a good book, one that does not insult the intelligence of the reader, and which has the supremely ironical role of being a polemic from the fringe which argues for the accuracy of platitudes. Platitudes such as: there are differences between races, just as there are differences between individuals and these differences constitute larger differences than those which separate sub-species of chimpanzee or subspecies of gorilla.

What could be more obvious? Are there blond-maned chimpanzees? Ruddy-skinned chimpanzees? Chimpanzees with folded eyelids? And how could these exterior differences not be matched by interior differences, i.e. to the various organs, to the immune system, the skeletal structure, and so forth? Humans have prospered over a much broader range of territories and climates than the great apes and the historical success of our species as a whole has quite clearly produced varying physiology and morphology, just as it has with all other species. To deny that these differences could exist is tantamount to denying evolution. Either God make people in divergent forms or they evolved that way. And, evolution means change, means difference.

Unlike many, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right. Fibbing, whether minimizing or exaggerating, about racial differences is silly. Decision-making should be based as much as possible on facts and not wishful thinking.

And besides, what are people so worried about out? To suggest that in this day and age the scientific assessment of these differences would somehow lead Western society to a moral collapse and a revival of the barbarism of racial discrimination is tantamount to suggesting that all of the advances that have been made in terms of relieving sexual discrimination would be set back to Day One by a book revealing there are differences between male and female physiologies.

But is it really all that ridiculous? Hardly. I was a good student and swallowed much of the same reassuring blather at one time, and that time was not so long ago. Just a handful of years in the past. That a book is vigorously attacked (and it's chief author briefly in danger of losing his tenure at UC Berkeley) for attempting to demonstrate the truth of platitudes is surely an absurdity. But I suppose we can take solace in the fact that all other ages have had, and will continue to have, absurdities peculiar to theirs.

A tempest in a teapot. Life goes on.

Biff Cappuccino