Brief addendum to my essay yesterday on Orwell.

Orwell strikes me as being someone who doesn't have very well developed interpersonal skills. He failed constantly with women, the most obvious sign. At the same time, he shows a distinct sensitivity for the use of words, a knack for catching people when hiding behind words, the various games people play when using words to misrepresent their meaning either deliberately or out of laziness and habit.

When I was younger myself, my own interpersonal skills were atrocious, and I seem to have had the same knack and some of the same sensitivities to fractured logic. In other words, when your interpersonal skills are weak, unlike most people, there is for some of us a temptation not to develop them at all except in the most clumsy and plastic form necessary for communication (Bill O'Reilly comes immediately to mind). To get rid of them in a sense; to suppress one's own emotions and make a concerted effort, often successful, to completely ignore the emotional reactions of other people.

The benefit is that you don't feel a puppet in the sway of others because their emotional reactions don't affect you. But the same time, since your brain is not paying attention to all the various signs and signals that are being thrown at it, one develops a certain inner calm or peace of mind. I don't mean a state of grace, but the peace of mind deriving from smoking weed which blocks minor stimuli thus enabling you to focus intensely, without even trying, and thereby become all the more attentive to what people are doing when they speak.

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Because, again, you're not paying attention to what people are communicating via body language et al; you're simply paying attention to their words. This tendency makes anyone a virtuoso for picking apart weak sentence structure, noticing inadvertent meaning trapped in boggled sentences, and so forth. By pointing these errors out, the virtuoso, here inevitably a species of antisocial monomaniac, easily gets the upper hand on normal people because, during coversation normal people suffer from a heavily divided attention in order to integrate themselves into the usual matrix of communication forms ranging from clothing, timing, expresion, posture, reaction to people in the immediate environment, and so on.

This sort of monomaniac, even as virtuoso, of course tends to be rather unpleasant to be around because he completely ignores the normal cues being sent and functions like an idiot savante with tendency to sadism. At the same time, by being out of touch with so much of what constitutes social interaction, the virtuoso of speech patterns and logic, unless capable creating his own ideas, becomes a sucker for ideologies.

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He dislikes normal people due to their inability to speak or think clearly. Out of sympathy with the perspiring, guffawing reality which constitutes mankind, he's lonely and unappreciated and roves the realm of fantasy, developing a preference for mankind the concept, for the heretofore unrealized potential of mankind (if only he/she/it would listen). Being unfamiliar with how people, normal people that is, make decisions and react to other people's decisions, and wholly ignorant of how the average person's consciousness functions and makes decisions, not to mention clueless as to what makes people tick in the workplace and happy home, something like communism or socialism may be peculiarly attractive. After all, so many leading lights of the left have historically been, and remain today, famous for being evil-tempered pricks up close yet having hearts of gold and their eyes on the stars.

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Hopefully I've somewhat reconciled this contradiction in a general sense, and in particular regarding Orwell's reputation as the "wintry conscience of his generation."

The Alleged Wickedness of Imperialism

While reading John Newsinger's Orwell's Politics I came across the following: [Orwell] resigned from the Indian police while on leave in England in the autumn of 1927 and never returned to Burma. Only three years later in December 1930 a serious rebellion broke out in the Tharrawaddy district, with thousands of peasants rallying to local healer, Saya Sen. The British responded with brutal repression. By the time the rebellion had been put down, some three dozen rebels had been killed or wounded, 8000 arrested and 128, including Saya Sen himself, executed. In one district the heads of rebel dead were displayed on poles as a deterrent.

Implied there, and elsewhere, is that things were dreadful under the boot of the British. By modern standards, perhaps they were. However, by the standards of the time, how do things measure up? And, was it the case generally that when colonialists left, the incoming régime was beneficent? And before the colonialists arrived, were things a sort of unspoiled Eden? Methinks not.

After the secular and despotic Shah of Iran was thrown out in 1979, he was replaced not with a model of liberal democracy but with something approaching the same thing, indeed something even more reactionary, the religious despotism of Ayattolah Khomeini which, 35 years later, has still not been gotten rid of. After the French and American colonialists in Vietnam were thrown out, they were replaced by the communist Vietnamese with their purges of capitalists and collaborators, their ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Chinese, their complete shutdown of the freedom to own property, freedoms of speech, and anything approaching a healthy justice system. In other words, after the colonists left, the situation did not improve, meaning become more libertarian, cosmopolitan, wealthier, and see an efflorescence of the indigenous arts and fine cuisine. Nope: the situation moved rapidly ass-backwards into the darker, chauvinistic, racist, Luddite, poverty-ridden, parochial, philistine past.

In fact, one sees the above phenomena repeated again and again. One of the common misconceptions spread by the ignoramuses infesting the media and academe is that the oppressed are ipso facto a better species morally than their oppressors. Here, I'll take a pass on discussing the tendency for the person proudly moral to be in fact parochial, chauvinistic, and uninformed, and for moralizers to be a peculiarly hypocritical form of vermin, when not outright social parasites.

Instead I'll go straight to the historical precedents and try to demonstrate the actions of a few oppressed workers, considered by many opinion leaders to be a sort of superior equal amongst equals, oppressed and sweating paragons of virtue (most particularly so when compared with the villain of the piece, the cruel money-driven rapacious business owner).

Socialist workers in South Africa during the nineteen-teens formed unions to improve the wages of laborers in the gold and diamond mines. It was a glorious era, a victory for the proletariat, a small step for the working man, a giant step for working mankind. It's hard luck then, but a rather familiar and inevitable discovery, that on closer examination the miners' motivation was far from what we, in this day and age, would consider admirable.

It helps to keep in mind that union is just another word for guild; that it's a non-fancy noun for plainspoken folks without fancy pants or airs about 'em. Guilds were popular, if fortunately not very effective, organizations of like-minded professionals during the middle ages who strove to keep the competition out. Having found, unfortunately, that gentle persuasion didn't dissuade the unemployed for wanting jobs that were open and available, the guild boys would press the flesh and pad the pockets of the city fathers to have city ordnances passed enabling them to bring into play the persuasiveness of blue-suited persuaders with billy sticks. Not much has changed, as unions today function pretty much the same, though they prefer to use lawsuits and persuaders in mufti with bludgeons. Not just to get more bucks from the jackbooted employer, but, again, to keep out normal everyday unemployed chumps in the community who are guilty of nothing more than looking for a job. Unions don't want nobody competing with their boys.

Well, perhaps it can all be put down to a little harmless excess of enthusiasm.

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In South Africa, their boys was white boys. Their mine union was designed to keep out Chinese unskilled labor which, then as now, often works harder and for less money. The union swelled with glorious success after glorious success, successfully ejecting the Chinese and going on to successfully eject the indigenous Africans. Go boys go! Indeed, it was the same socialist labor movement that went on to establish South African apartheid, thus getting the jump on another group of even more famous socialists who stole the historical limelight with their platform of giving jobs to "our boys" and kicking out the chinks, the kikes, the niggers, the gypsies, the gimps, and so forth. Of course, I'm speaking of the German National Socialists, the Nazis, and their best boy, Hitler.

Yet another example of the downtrodden failing to make that move up when given the chance is the early United States. Under the latter stages of British rule, the colonists had freedom of speech and assembly, democratically elected governors, access to reasonably impartial courts of law (i.e. in England), and enjoyed low taxation while enjoying the protection of the British military. After the Revolution everyone knows that things just got even better. Except that, unluckily, they didn't. There was far less freedom of speech, with more Americans jailed between 1792 and 1800 on libel charges (including Thomas Paine who got hit with a jail term) than had been jailed for libel during the entire period from 1620 to 1791. Freedom of speech was curtailed completely during the War for Freedom. After the war, it came and went, more of the latter and got to such a low state that the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 made it illegal to criticize the incumbent political party on the premise that this was sedition. Well, this almost gave the US it's first Civil War. And, Americans were taxed significantly more immediately after winning the war, despite having receiving God's providence and blessing, democracy, than they had been under the colonial régime.

It's also worth pointing out that once the British were removed, and thus no longer responsible for keeping down revolutions, it became the responsibility of the democratic elected government to do so. Thus the Whiskey rebellion and Hay's rebellion were put down by the democratic government. And of course, slavery did not end in 1831 in the United States, as would have been the case had America remained under the British iron heel. For that matter, it's also worth pointing out that Thomas Jefferson as President of the United States did not work to assist the initially successful Haitian slave rebellion of the early 19th century. Instead, to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States -- for there was a grave threat that the Southern states would secede if the Northern states chose to assist the Caribbean slave rebellion -- President Jefferson assisted French forces defeat the slave rebellion's armies and get the slaves back into slavery where some of the French, though certainly not all, felt they belonged.

My point in offering up Jefferson is not to besmirch his fine halo, but to hopefully demonstrate that politics places all of us, good-hearted or ill, in situations that are compromising. Ergo, imperial policy was developed, implemented and terminated by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons: good, bad, and neither.

And if this is not enough for you, then perhaps it's worth looking into some of the nasty indigenous schemes that imperialist régimes ended. In Taiwan, the multicultural practice of headhunting by aboriginals was ended by the Japanese. In Korea, institutionalized slavery was ended by the same damn Japs. The toppling of the Ching dynasty in China, largely the result of the incursions of the foreign powers beginning with the Opium War and it's dastardly design of liberalizing trade and ending the China's Drug War (no less hopeless, cop-corrupting and demagogue-inspiring than our own), helped put an end to pervasive, institutionalized cannibalism in China. The list of these good/bad deeds goes on and on and on. The British ended everything from cannibalism to ritualized murder in their own colonies. The Spanish ended ritualized cannibalism in Central America and toppled the Inca régime which was a despotic régime in its own right.

And, although many of the methods employed by colonial régime's were cruel, it's erroneous to presume that cruelty was applied to the colonized territories and not to the home regions. Although I'm sure there was a time lag, with enlightenment values and institutions first appearing in the home countries, most likely because of their more advanced economies and more pervasive levels of education, I don't think the time lag was all that great.

I say this because in United States, for example, in the early nineteen teens, a prominent strike in Colorado was dealt with by the mine owners hiring the state militia to strafe strikers with machine guns. Not once, but repeatedly over a one month period. This, the Ludlow strike, only ended when a dozen women and children died accidentally resulting in a national bout of indignation at this decidedly moral wrong. Men were expendable in those days. Many would argue they still are. Race riots in Oklahoma after the first world war were subdued by rioting mobs of white folk and through bombing black neighborhoods by plane. As late as the 1930s, US forces were called out to keep Washington DC secure from demonstrations by World War I veterans asking for pay. The first year in modern history in which the US did not see a black lynched was 1953, I believe. There was lots of cruelty to go around, though there was not as much on tap nor was it as pervasive in the newly conquered territories such as the Indian territories and the Philippines. But again, the time lag. For things did indeed get better.

However, it's also good to keep in mind that indigenous régimes prior to colonization were typically far from peaceful and progressive. Why isn't this obvious fact taken for granted? Most people believe that the whole truth lies in what they read because they trust the media and schoolbooks. But the former, like almost any business, operates on the premise that the customer is always right. If you won't read it, then you won't buy it; ergo, the media tucks it's tail and don't write about it. So there's a huge blank where the information actually required for anyone to be informed would otherwise be. As to schoolbooks, they're more subject to political fashions and crazes than politicians. At least politicians get televized debates and can talk back to hecklers. Schoolbook manufacturers just cringe in their New York offices when the good yeomen of rural Texas and California PTA committees wrap themselves in the flag, wind up the choir, and quote the Good Book. The manufactories either end up making a career change or else making every effort to include nothing that will offend nobody. That's why their products are so bland and uninformative, year after tiresome year.

And, ahem, it seems awfully naïve in retrospect to presume that people immersed in the culture and practices of indigenous despotic régime's were enlightened, democratic, and civilized in a manner which we would recognize and agree with today. Our ancestors of the day were not civilized by modern standards, not by a long shot. It's a flight of fancy, of very wishful thinking, to presume that the citizens of régimes even more backward than those of our ancestors were somehow yet morally in accordance with the elastic libertarian standards of today's modern nations.

Last of all, it is well-worth remembering the many benefits brought by colonizers. And I suspect that it is little more than a studied sophomoric cynicism to look at the history of the period, to view the pros and cons of the events of the day, and yet still come away spouting about colonizers with heinous motives. All one has to do is look at the contemporary Iraq war to see the broad range of opinion regarding the invasion. Regardless of whether one agrees with it (ex: on humanitarian or oil access grounds) or disagrees with it (ex: on imperialism or oil access grounds) it is surely a conceit to presume that everyday people (i.e. not politicians or TV personalities) with positions contrary to one's own are ipso facto insincere. Many people go overseas to assist people (ex: my father as a university lecturer working on behalf of the tail end of an imperial regime and my mother as a member of the Peace Corps).

One always prefers peace. But there are many different ways of working to better the situation of others, and sometimes, war or violence is the only way to get some of what needs to be done, done. This was particularly the case in the past. Fortunately, however, with rising standards of living and smart bombs et al, it appears that violence as a tool of persuasion is steadily decreasing today and will continue to diminish in the future.

Some comments on the George Orwell essay Not Counting Niggers published in July 1939. Early on, before I found Henry Mencken, Orwell was my favorite author because he was always interesting, always thinking, always had something fresh to say. Furthermore, I always had the feeling that he could back up everything that he said because in some of his essays you come across a phrase or reference which would then, in another essay, be expanded into several pages. I was consistently impressed.

Now, however, having made an effort to understand the world around me and how it actually works, and in the process discarded nearly everything I had learned in the newspapers and exchanged it for what I've discovered in library books, now, on coming back to George Orwell, I find him far less convincing and appealing than before..

Through finding authors with superior wit, authors such as Wilde, Twain, and Mencken, I came to find Orwell not just plainspoken but also just plain. Having made the obvious discovery that humor requires sadism, my guess is that Orwell generally denied himself the opportunity to be amusing, at least in his writing, feeling that attacking someone when they were down, as is the usual way with comedy, is tantamount to gloating. Not to mention that he probably realized that the humorous are taken much less seriously than the seriously dull. Besides this, there is a hint of the prude, i.e. the failed cavalier, who failing at sex, turns to politics for power, to impose what he can not achieve via persuasion.

On the other hand, Orwell certainly found other writers amusing, Mencken for example. Presumably, Orwell was unable to fully unearth the matrix of values required to generate humor and/or when he attempted wit, he felt guilty of being unfair and unsportsmanlike, i.e. sadistic. This is worth pointing out because it seems to me that Orwell suffers from a rather broad ignorance of human nature. Although he shows definite talent for picking out wordsmithery, this is completely different thing from observing and understanding human behavior, particularly at the individual level. After all, Orwell was known for being a skirt-chaser, but an unsuccessful one. The wit and humor of Oscar Wilde and Henry Mencken enabled them, and neither were pretty-boys, to amicably overcome their prey. This must naturally have made for a view of life which was less sullen, less moralistic, and less sympathetic; and, instead, for a more cynical, vigorous, and Olympean perspective.

I also think that key to understanding Orwell and his outlook on life, is his excessive focus upon what is allegedly morally correct. Moral this and moral that (ex: moral courage), especially when used as a weapon to flog others is no less a fraud than flashing the race card. Both are a dodge and a fraud, whose principle utility is to twit the overly socially conscious and shut down the show with that favorite utility of compassion fascists and philanthropoids, sympathy for the meek.

Morals clearly vary from place to place, time to time. For example, the dynastic Chinese and the Aztecs both made cannibalism into a formal institution and developed moral schemes to accommodate it. The thugee religion in India was a moral scheme developed by a tribe to rationalize the killing of travellers in order to rip them off. One had to kill one's victims with sacred weapons before emptying their pockets. In the same way, capitalism has earned a bad name because it does not adhere, apparently, to the prevailing moral scheme. But the prevailing moral scheme is, in many ways, simply a hand-me-down from an agricultural era that predates capitalism. For example, the notion that money is bad and that money lenders are mean-spirited and evil folk.

Capitalism is a scheme that, in order to be properly understood, requires one to develop an understanding of systems. Through so doing, a great deal in the world starts to make sense and becomes predictable. And, in the process of becoming familiar with systems, bits and pieces of morality start to go out the window. In those areas of one's understanding rendered intelligible by systems, morality has no more place than hay in a car garage, because cause and effect is no longer perceived in terms of the anthropomorphous.

A case in point is male domination over women. It's the late Marvin Harris's hypothesis that this moral scheme served to insure that men were martial and brave to facilitate warring with other tribes. Women were more important than men, because they bear children, and thus shouldn't be risked in military campaigns. For men to fight, they had to be trained to be aggressive and brutal. Naturally, this trait was retained in the after-hours and women, lacking training and encouragement in brutality and insensitivity, were dominated by roughhousing males. In modern nations, wars are no longer fought by every male member of the 'tribe'. Furthermore, nation states require and tend to achieve stability, crucial for modern economies to function. Naturally morality has changed with the times and women play a more frontline role. In other words, modern morality is not the product of fairness and enlightenment. It’s the other way around. Fairness and enlightenment facilitate the strengthening of a system (capitalism) which is inherently superior both martially and in the provision of resources. In other words, as always, morality is simply that system of taboos and positive values that enhances the power of the tribe when fighting to survive in an inclement environment. In brief, morality is whatever works; whatever works is morality.

One of Orwell's pet themes is the immorality of capitalism. Indeed capitalism does not jibe well with the pre-modern moral scheme, be it the impoverished villages of the Sinai -- which gave us ‘it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into heaven’ -- on through to the reductio ad absurdum of the latter: the impoverished cities of medieval Europe were even the rich were poor by modern standards: medieval gentry often had to make do with room and board inferior to that of today’s barn animals. This was in large part because profit-making in general, and banking (usury) in particular, was forbidden. Contemporary Arabia is by and large very poor because lending money with interest is forbidden. Without lending, no banks. Without banks and entrepreneurs have very little access to startup money. Without entrepreneurs, the modern economy does not function. The climax of high-living is the Amish; something that not even Marx, despite his theories to the contrary, was ever going to put up with in fact.

Without the modern economy, you have high populations which cannot be served by traditional economies; thus one has poverty and starvation and the concomitant political uprisings, coup d'etats, civil wars, religious fanatics, and the rest of the primeval mess that suddenly became familiar via explanations for 9/11.

Which brings us back to the primeval worldview of George Orwell. For example, he states, Like everyone of his school of thought, Mr. Strait has coolly lumped the huge British and French empires -- in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting cheap colored labor -- under the heading of democracies!

If there's a problem with exploiting cheap colored labor then surely there's a problem when one exploits cheap noncolored labor, whether in a democracy or not. That's problem number one. The second problem is that exploitation is part and parcel of how capitalism works. When I purchase any product I'm being exploited. So what? I'm exploiting the person from whom I'm buying the product. That's the whole point. Failure to understand this is a failure to understand the nature of buying and selling, markets, capitalism, etc.

The next sentence includes the following: Here and there in the book, but not often, there are references to the "dependencies" of the democratic states. "Dependencies" means subject races. It is explained that they are to go on being dependencies, that their resources are to be pooled among the states of the Union, that the colored inhabitants will lack the right to vote in Union affairs.

Two major problems here: prior to colonization, what were these dependencies but subject races. Does Orwell really imagine pre-colonized peoples to have been free? Where the English tribes free prior to the arrival of Rome? Was he that ignorant of contemporary anthropology? The only democracy that I'm aware of in North American amongst the native Indians was that of the Iroquois who were famous for their raiding parties and for their love of torturing captives. In India, the practice of sutee, the burning of live wives with their deceased husbands' cadavers, only came to an end with the entry of the British. It was the British empire that ended the aforementioned thugee religion. It was only with the end of the Ching dynasty, which came about largely due to the pressure of the European nations, that widespread, popular, and pervasive cannibalism ended in China. It was only with the entry of Japan into Korea that indigenous slavery, which swallowed up five to 10% of the domestic population, came to an end.

Again, one wonders what sort of reading George Orwell did. Was he in fact a fraud? Heresy, I know, but it's a sort of rule of thumb that prominent intellectuals who exhort socialist goals are frauds.

Orwell also complains about the ... British and French empires, with their 600 million disenfranchised human beings, would simply be receiving fresh police forces; the huge strength of the USA would be behind the robbery of India and Africa. Well, the present situation in Iraq, one hopes, gives the lie to the notion that one can impose democracy upon people, that people know enough to consistently want what is in their best interest. Afghanistan too.

Clearly this is a very naive notion; and not just today but then too. The contention that setting people free, regardless of their education or national economic scheme and then expecting them to act sanely (i.e. in accordance with our own eccentricities), to revamp their outdated taboos and replace them with respect for the law and a new set of ethics, to toss off racism and replace it with multiculturalism and gay rights, to wipe the slate clean of xenophobia and love hated enemies who've killed their family or clan members, while also accommodating themselves magnanimously to the widely varying moral and religious standards of other narrow-minded blinkered yokels such as themselves who also claim to have the one and only true faith, surely stretches credulity to the breaking point.

Now that the sub-Saharan African nations have been set free, now that the Arabian nations are free, what has become of their freedom? They surely had a great deal more than while under the boot of the English. When the Japanese pulled out of Taiwan, a despotic Chinese régime came in whose first steps included massacring all the intelligentsia, grossly debasing the local currency to wipe out the indigenous people's savings, and then restructuring land ownership under the guise of fairness in order to give land to their cronies and collaborators. But even this is civilized behavior compared to the rape, looting, massacres of partition era India and Pakistan, and the horrendous civil wars which have been taking place ever since in sub-Saharan Africa.

Indeed, had colonialism have been allowed to remain in place for a much greater length of time, as in Hong Kong for example, many of these countries could have achieved a peaceful post-independence era and been in a solid position structurally and economically for the 21st century. None of the nasty régimes in Africa had to be. One of the greatest mistakes of WWII was Roosevelt's decision to destroy the British empire via bankrupting it. Roosevelt, whose father made his money in the opium trade, was a typical second generation rich family scion, mocking the parvenus and bumpkins who made their own money and fortunes in life. Thus, not understanding how economies worked, he thought the solution very simple. It was an Orwell solution. Set free the "niggers" and everything will work itself out. Fifty years later, that has proven to be very shallow thinking indeed.

Orwell makes a number of other ignorant comments, such as: It is not in Hitler's power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are a great pains to keep it so. This motive strikes me as being improbable, not to mention physically impossible to achieve. You can't control wages in a relatively free economy (as the colonies of East Asia typically enjoyed, propaganda to the contrary). How could Orwell have believed this sort of nonsense, given the broad reading that he had done?

Perhaps one of the best evidences of Orwell's misunderstanding of the world around him are the predictions that appear in his essay. He wrote the following in July of 1939:

The British and Russian governments are still haggling, stalling and uttering muffled threats to change sides, but circumstances will probably drive them together. And what then? No doubt the alliance will stave off war for a year two. Then Hitler's move will be to feel for a weak spot or an unguarded moment; then our move will be more armaments, more militarization, more propaganda, more war-mindedness -- and so on at increasing speed. It is doubtful whether prolonged war preparation is morally any better than war itself; there are even reasons for thinking that it may be slightly worse. Only two or three years of it, and we may sink almost unresisting into some local variant of austro-Fascism. And perhaps a year or two later, in reaction against this, there will appear something we have never had in England yet -- a real fascist movement. And because it will have the guts to speak plainly it will gather into its ranks the very people who ought to be opposing it.

Farther than that it is difficult to see.

Of course, predicting the future is enormously difficult. But my point is not to cavil at his lack of accuracy, but to note the direction in which he believed the future would move. In other words, he believed that England would become fascist due to the war threat, when in fact it became quite the opposite. Orwell had a millenarian, almost apocalyptic outlook. Ergo his book 1984. Ergo his familiar rural, primeval outlook, so much like an agnostic former Christian. He was an eager believer.

Again, perhaps Orwell's unfamiliarity with the day-to-day psychology of the plain folk (his superior intelligence probably made the proletariat an annoyance for him at best), his incompetence picking up women, his ignorance of capitalism and colonialism, and his failure to understand that his morals were feudal (as Marx states boldly in the second page of the Communist Manifesto) and that ethics are far better suited for the modern world, led him far, far astray.

And he was very bright , but sometimes I wonder just how sincere? How sincere about acquiring a working knowledge of the world, in the sedulous manner that Henry Mencken when about it. For Mencken did the obvious: he read widely about music, medicine, law, religion, and politics. He mastered a second language, and competently translated Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ into English, and regularly wrote short fiction, essays, newspaper articles, and book reviews, while also writing biography, a philology series, an exegesis of religion, a book-length condemnation of democracy, and so on and so forth. And, Mencken had no problem getting women or money, mingled regularly with the movers and shakers, be they literary, business, or political. He ran a newspaper, ran a magazine, and so forth. He had a much broader understanding of the world, was far more adventurous in his thinking (not letting morals, indignation, heckling, or law suits get in the way) and strikes me as the much more intellectually curious, enlightened, and readable author. Orwell's primary limitation, as far as I can see at the moment (which is none too far), was his pessimistic temperament, his class fear, and his righteous moral strain which prevented him from considering all of the options available for explaining and interpreting events. He was too proper to be wholly effective. And it is many of the immoral explanations which most intelligibly explain our world. They were right under his nose all the time, if only he'd taken the time, and squelched his moral squeamishness, to look and find them. How much better a writer he would have been had he done so.

Biff Cappuccino

Review (part 1): True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women.

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According to the inside flap, this collection consists of "Testimonies compiled by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the Research Association on the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan" with the testimonies being translated from the original Korean into English. This book is quite the eye-opener and all the more reason to doubt sensational news stories, as if I needed any more prompting. The papers get the facts right some of the time; the exegesis wrong nearly all the time. If there is a superficially persuasive, emotional and emotive, legally defensible explanation of events, preferably cribbed, it's fit to print.

I don't put the latter down to cynicism, at least not all of the time, as, judging by the editorial pages, newspaper editors happily down the swill brewed up by their own freshly-university-graduated keeners. Editors, contrary to my naive opening presumption, aren't hard-boiled and savvy, while privately up for sale behind the closed door; on the contrary, they're eager to please, soft-hearted and soft-headed souls, as easily squeezed for tears as soap opera patrons and as much agape at the media circus as their customers.

That the newspapers are unreliable is not difficult to understand: their raison d'être being, first and foremost, engines of profit. I'm all for getting rich and the problem, as I see it, does not lay with quality control in the news manufactory, but quality demand at the other end: the undiscriminating purchaser, panting and goggle-eyed at the latest incredi-burgable headlines. News-writers and news-makers learn to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the reading public, often the hard way, for there doesn't seem to be any other kind of reading public, at least not in the numbers required to make a public oracle operate in the black. Ergo the media plays to the gallery and offers explanations of events in terms the gallery is disposed to comprehend and, more importantly, get worked up about and willing to pay for more. Purveying of the truth so-called, or even a bona fide attempt in this direction, is naturally hampered by this. But, it is hampered even worse by the professional hack and their hack-work, the former consisting mostly of harried young professionals who spent most of their time cribbing material from one another. This leads, very naturally, to the blind leading the blind. Which brings us back to the Korean Comfort Women.

What best recommends this book is that it gives the reader access to original sources, even though these testimonies are translations and even though, and you know I hate to carp, most translators get in the way of the original. And deliberately so, through redacting the intemperate or lunatic utterance that often livens up original documents; through earnestly bungling the meaning of the original document (common, in part, because so few carvers of original documents ever attain the precision that many translators are forced to acquire); and through prettifying the original to enhance its value to readers and thus make it more saleable, though also to impress unilingual publishers with the translator's virtuosity with the written word. The result is something both less and more than the original document, and, either way, it's a disservice not to mention results in an unreliable document dangerously skirting the fiction category.

This time around though, I suspect the translator got it right. I say so because in these testimonies appears clearly the natural human tendency for documents to consist of an amalgam of both ideas clearly expressed together with the nearly incoherent and the logically improbable.

It's telling that in the preface to the book, the editor points out that of the more than forty women who were originally interviewed for this book, 21 gave testimonies which had to be dropped from the book itself. On page v of the introduction, Keith Howard writes that there were upward of 200,000 comfort women but on the following page he states that by the end of 1991, only three had come forward. Why? He states that “The tragedy then, was exacerbated by silence. The shame of a woman was the shame of her whole family.”

In sum, he pleads the special case of cultural victimization: Koreans don't air their dirty laundry. As opposed to whom? Westerners? Do we gaily air our personal foibles, family follies, or national failures? The author plays the oldest trick of information misers (professors and neighborhood know-it-alls, for example) by announcing that only he understands the special circumstances, the extended details, the historical background, the forensics of the situation. He's sympathetic; he feels their pain. Thus moral authority accrues to him. Having deviously arrogated the soap box, such scamsters go on to plead special cases which they can safely presume to be irrefutable by those readers not possessing library cards, i.e. newspaper readers and TV watchers. Examples of such special cases that come to mind are those civil war historians who make a special exception of Lincoln, calling him the 'benevolent dictator'; quacks who make an exception for SARS: a raging epidemic that required three long months to make it across the world's busiest border; and philanthropoids who make an exception for Mother Theresa and her passion for illicit money grubbing, but confiding to one in private that though Mother was dumb, she was sincere. Agreed; but sincere about what?

On page two Keith Howard writes, "Korea was ill-equipped and unprepared to modernize at the pace dictated by foreign powers." This is sophistry hiding the fact that Korea was originally a despotic monarchy with institutionalized slavery. In other words, it was not a matter of being ill-equipped and unprepared, like a town of Hobbits hit by a swarm of cross-eyed Orcs. The nasty indigenous régime was unwilling to give up power and share it with the man on the street. Had the monarchy opened up Korea's borders and liberalized its economy, it could have financed a modern military and there would've been no way for Japan to get into Korea in the first place.

On the same page, Keith Howard writes, "Policy institutionalized discrimination: Koreans were made to be useful for the empire. The appropriation of resources moved beyond labor, industry and agriculture to encompass language and culture." In the same vein of preposterous thinking one could say that a second generation American receiving a public school education is made useful for the American Empire. This is simply glib spin by someone ignorant of capitalism and laissez-faire economics and the many benefits of Japanese imperialism in particular. It was Japanese imperialism, for example, which ended traditional Korean capital crimes such as commoners giving their kids overly auspicious names and not bowing low enough when the gentry passed by. And, in passing, the common argument that Japan went to Korea only to benefit itself displays a complete misunderstanding of capitalist economics and human nature. Of course Japan went into Korea to benefit itself. What do the bloody Koreans do when they go to work every day but strive to benefit themselves? Since when does anyone not strive to benefit themself? To presume anything but self-interest in any human action is to misunderstand human motivation at its most elemental level.

On page three Keith Howard writes, "The descent into a fratricidal war heaped physical destruction on the colonial inheritance of poverty." This strikes me as being quite unlikely unless there was an exceptionally high birthrate in Korea. Japan was in the habit of heavily investing in its colonies, Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria in particular*. Furthermore, one wonders about the logic of the author's sentence: how does one heap physical destruction on poverty when poverty is the lack of commodities? I'm not trying to be clever, but ask a serious question: what on earth does this sentence, more poetry than sense, really mean?
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* [In 1946] the Soviet commanding General Malinovsky informed Chang Kia-gnau, head of the Chinese economic commission in Manchuria, that all industrial establishments in Manchuria, conservatively estimated at 2 billion US dollars, were to be regarded as war booty of the Soviet forces. Soviet experts then began the systematic looting of Manchuria's industrial plants. The Russians presented a list of 154 Japanese enterprises to be recognized as joint Sino-Soviet enterprises. (From Chang Kai-shek: His Life and Times by Keiji Furuya)

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On the same page Keith Howard writes, "There was little widespread understanding of human rights [in Korea]." But I have to wonder if there is widespread understanding of human rights anywhere in the world? What there is, surely, is agreement with the status quo. It's just that the status quo varies from place to place. Thus, in nations/regions/cities/districts where a significant minority of the population (i.e. the movers and shakers) are persuaded of the value of human rights, human rights enter the public consciousness via the media and then begin to show up on the law books via the legislators. But the public being persuaded of the value of something is surely not the same as understanding it. We may recognize the value of metabolizing food, but how many of us understand it?

In conclusion, Keith Howard's introduction is boggled due to some chronic pathology of the intellect and I abandoned the effort to probe any further.

Chapter 2 is authored by Chin Sung Chung and he cranks up the volume from Keith Howard's reserved and careful indignation to a blustery foam-flecked polemic that is not only ludicrous but demonstrates that the author becomes palpably insane at mention of the topic matter. Page 11; Exhibit A: "Korean victims of atom bombs... war crimes committed against Korea which fall into the recognized classes B and C. The most tragic issue, however, is the case of the comfort women." In other words, forced prostitution is worse than being atom bombed or being the subject of one, or more, of a presumably large array of war crimes.

Exhibit B.: "Japan, unlike Germany, has never tried to resolve postwar issues." First of all, this is complete baloney. Taking the Nanking Massacre for example, it was immediately denounced by the civilian wing of the government and by high-ranking members of the military itself*, and the Massacre has appeared in Japanese children's textbooks every year since 1946! Here the overwrought author applies a common literary dodge, denouncing nations as if the millions of individuals who constitute them should be responsible and held to account for their political leaders, media opinion makers, the ever-changing fashions blowing across and crazing the hacks of academe, social activist preferences (herds subject to much the same fashions), and the marketing and aesthetic decisions made by publishing houses and independent authors.

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* Openly critical of the fanatical ultranationalism that came to grip his country in the late 1930s, [Lieutenant general Masaharu] Homma (who led the successful Japanese attack on the Philippines in World War II) ... in 1938... reportedly traveled to Nanking and authored a stinging document recounting the atrocities that had occurred under the Japanese occupation and berating the commanding officers there - a courageous stand that is said to have diminished his stature within the Japanese military. (From Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides)

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And when Chin Sung Chung talks about Germany, which Germany (to adopt his phraseology) is he referring to? East Germany? Had East Germany come clean on these issues at the time of this book's publication in 1993? Shouldn't we blame the East Germans, with their domestic communist dictatorship and the hegemony of Soviet Mother Russia further saddled around their necks too?

More deliberate verbal swindling. His audience doesn't understand systems and, perhaps, neither does he. He knows their simple brains will be awed and dismayed by systems. Thus, he reduces the vast complexities of a multifarious nation of 120 million individuals into something simple: Snidely Whiplash with buck teeth, knock-knees, and glasses, waving the hated flag of the rising sun. For the discriminating, even the discriminating child, Snidely Whiplash is far too simple, far too transparent to be more than comic. But to a simpleminded polemicist writing for herds of simpletons, Snidely is the perfect clotheshorse, eminently useful just as the shady Jew caricature was to Hitler and his crew of simpletons. Simpletons unable to get the satisfaction of revenge at firsthand are often happy to have a scapegoat (which really was a goat in primeval times) via effigies and giving them the torch. Witness the pathetic spectacle of the witless burning the US flag, for example; no plainer admission of impotence and surrender there ever was.

To get back to the original clumsy complaint about not resolving issues: unfortunately for the author, two books on comfort women were published during the 1970s. I found this in the introduction to Japan's Comfort Women, published in 2001, and written by Susan Brown Miller.

In passing, it is worth mentioning that Ms. Miller is recommended to readers in the introduction as the author of the tautologically entitled Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape.

This intrigued my mischievous side (I'd be embarrassed to have this title appear in an introduction recommending me) and I peered further into Japan's Comfort Women. The very first sentence is a magnificent second example of begging the question. To wit, "Sex becomes a source of brutality and oppression, instead of one of joy and life, when it is exploited in warfare." In other words, sex is a source of oppression when one is oppressed with sex!

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I couldn't help but move my gaze down the page.

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Next comes a testimony from an ex-comfort woman, followed by the author’s comments: Sex is a beautiful and extremely enjoyable human activity when it confirms and reconfirms the intimate relationship with a partner. When out of control, however, sex becomes ugly and monstrously abusive. Unfortunately these are two diametrically opposing characteristics of sex. In other words, a platitude, another begging of the question, followed by another platitude. Both platitudes are patently wrong which, in the way of platitudes, is like not hitting a fish in a barrel.

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More tomorrow: the testimonies of the comfort women. Not what you or I would have expected, I assure you...

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Biff Cappuccino

Letter to Atimes.com

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Coming back to the Chinese edition of Asia Times today after a long hiatus, on looking at the Chinese version of Spengler’s Islam: Religion or political ideology? I found several problems. For example: (1) The first sentence of the second paragraph in the original article is missing completely from the Chinese version. (2) The second sentence of the second paragraph in the original is: “Kant was wrong, but wrong in a way that helps clarify the problem.” This is translated as 筆者不贊成康得的觀點，但認為他澄清了猶太教的問題。In English this translates to something like “The writer disagrees with Kant’s viewpoint, but believes he clarifies the problem with Judaism.” This not only kills the force, rhythm and irony of the sentence, but surely boggles the content as well. My own rough-hewn Chinese translation would be 康得錯了,但是這個錯誤反而有幫助澄清這個議題. In English this translates to something like “Kant was wrong, but his error ironically helps clarify this issue.” Translating English to Chinese is the reverse of what I do for a living, and I’m sure someone more competent could improve upon my attempt. But at least, I hope, I have managed to capture the meaning of the original. (3) I’ll speculate and say that Spengler aims to write in a precise style approaching that of Orwell’s essays. The Chinese version of this essay is however written in the drabbest journalese and as if prepared for a primer for readers of Chinese as a second language. I read the entirety of the English article and feel I learned something. I only read the first two paragraphs of the Chinese version before feeling I was reading just another tired editorial. As a hack translator myself, I realize the peculiar difficulty (but also the challenge and attraction) of translating Spengler's work, but perhaps someone could be hired who better understands what they’re reading, doesn’t delete sentences from the original, and writes precise, flowing Chinese prose.

Biff Cappuccino (Taipei, Taiwan)

A More Reliable Love (3000 words)

She'd been nagging again, pushing him out of the house insensibly. They were both disappointed. She with his silence; he with her noise.

He was back out in his sweet-smelling refuge, his sweet safe harbor: the garage. He was out here in the familiar and reassuring fragrance of gasoline and brake oil. He propped the hood up, pored over the engine, noticed a dip in the brake oil and was in the midst of slowly, delicately, lovingly, topping up the level. The green pea odor wafting up to his nostrils didn't prompt him to pull away for safety's sake, to avoid inhaling carcinogens or some petrochemical spirit that might damage the brain. On the contrary, he enjoyed the aroma, savored it, relaxed within it, found himself at peace within it.

He closed the hood and shuffled back around to the driver's side, gingerly opening up the door with two fingers, taking care not to scuff or scratch the paint job, scrupulously not leaving fingerprints upon the finish, and plopped down in the old-fashioned bucket seat and pumped the brakes, inhaling and being lifted by the soft fragrance of years of decayed tobacco, chewing gum, the faintly fecal whiffs of fast food. The brakes were soft and yielding until they firmed up where they needed to be. And of course, the final test was to take it on the road. The final test, but also the ultimate excuse.

He didn't report to his wife that he was taking the car out. He wasn't about to chance another sneering attack on a manhood growing fragile. As he pulled out of the driveway, he could see her standing in the window gesticulating at him. But he knew he was safe, the sheen of the windshield like reflective sunglasses. He smiled faintly and pretended not to see her.

He put the car out onto the road, his left hand on the steering wheel, his right hand on the gearshift. His left hand was in touch with the car chassis. It was a deep and penetrating touch, one that put him in deep and visceral contact with the living breathing vibrating machine. It unwound remembrance of how his hand used to feel running over his wife's skin. It gave him reassurance, a sense of intimacy, of oneness with another interactive being. With his left hand now, he could feel the running gear, the forward and rear axles, the brakes, the tires, the vibration of the road and vibration as it carried through the undercarriage producing a pink noise that he had learned to read like a book. With his right hand, he could feel the slip and catch of the clutch, the feel of the transmission gears, the viscosity of the lubricating oil, and the rumble of the engine, all of which he had also learned to read fluently. His right hand inspired an intimacy like the former acceptance of his eager finger in his wife's wet mouth and searching the inside of her thighs.

But this thought prompted no erection for he already had what he wanted, directly and without irritating protocol; he had the satisfaction of companionship.

He still loved his wife he thought, but it was now a mellow love, a sort of mature respect he thought, he hoped. Sure, that's what it was. He didn't think about it much. He wasn't a thinker or a dreamer. Perhaps a day-dreamer. Just someone who wanted to be left alone to enjoy his pleasures on his own time and at his own speed. Was that too much to ask?

The chemistry of the marriage had dulled. But dulled sounded like an intellectual failing and so he’d preferred to use the word matured. He was rummaging around for a new word now, something more interesting, introspective sounding, something that expressed the wisdom of a jaded but willing, if passive, acceptance of things. Aged? No she sure wouldn't like the sound of that. Neither did he, now that he thought about it. Seasoned. Yes, a cooking word from the homemaker’s kitchen. She'd appreciate that.

But this stretching after words to mask the dullness, the unrelenting everydayness of their relationship, was dull in itself and unfulfilling. Marriage was like that, his friends had told him. He needed hobbies to fill in the gap. Thus the old car he’d been fixing up. They were right, it was fascinating. More than he’d thought. Increasingly so.

What made his new hobby, the 1970’s car fascinating, was that it changed everyday, had moods, had seasons, had piques of fancy. It spoke to him, constantly pricking his curiosity with endless variations on an assuring theme. Like a teasing soap opera, the car had a knack for recycling the same old tale but twisting and spinning it cheekily. Like a soap opera, the story was familiar while being sufficiently surprising to hook you and pull you by the nose back for more. And always there was a happy ending with resolution and closure. So much better than life’s litany of unresolved slights, performance anxieties, unintelligible intellectual combats, ignoble political scandals about which nothing could be done.

Life in his office meant immersion in an ecology of paper-shufflers, buck-passers, brown-nosers, and arm-chair tyrants. Socializing with his wife’s well-meaning and socially concerned friends meant mingling with craze-chasing enthusiasts, hectoring all-knowing bores, Monday morning footballers with sure-cures for every political issue.

He ought to be inured to it all. And, yet, he was yet another with a life of quiet desperation. He still quietly, politely, but nevertheless reluctantly, gagged on being demanded by the socially adept to put a smiley face on the offensive and patently lunatic, to get with the embarrassing program. There were so many backseat drivers. He stopped for a second, smiled, liked that cliché, which now meant something, a little more to him.

The car didn’t taunt him, didn’t make him anxious, was eminently knowable down to the last detail through a $30 manual, and scandalous auto performance yielded to new or second hand replacement parts, elbow grease, and time. Time. He had more and more of it.

He drove an old enduring Japanese model, designed in the naive days of industrial Nippon when some things were built to last forever. The car was a combination of original and new parts, factory issue chassis and oxyacetylene gas weld. It reacted differently to the elements every day. Some days the brakes acted up, squeaked with dust accumulating in the drums. Once a week he had to reset the timing, and he could distinguish clearly the gradual loss of horsepower from day to day, morning to night. On dry days, the chassis, seats, and dashboard squeaked and rattled. He had trouble with the carburetor leaking, making the engine idle high and sucking horsepower when he gave it gas. But this was self-inflicted and half-deliberate as he had cut the carb gasket out of a cardboard cereal box just for the hell of it. To see what would happen. They were good for about five days, tops. He liked that. Fixing that gave him something to do, something to do in the garage, and gave him an excuse that seemed reasonable and which he could produce without stammering when his wife asked nosy questions.

It was actually a jalopy, an old Datsun 510, in-line four cylinder. That was the 1974 world rally champion and help put Japanese cars on the map. Owning the car, he felt a vanity he knew to be foolish and which he yet guiltily entertained. Through ownership he felt as if he was somehow connected, had a part even, in this rally championship, as if he also was a pioneer of some kind.

He took pride in spending as little as possible on the car. He bought hobby kits, a book of auto/vehicle regulations. He preferred to hand craft his parts. He made a rear bumper out of pine with a chainsaw, planer, sandpaper, and varnish. When he’d been pulled over, he was ready with his regulations and dodged a citation. He was proud of defeating authority for once. He’d done it. They’d done it, the car and he.

He got more and more into it. He rented gas and oxygen tanks, bought a welding kit and mask, and did his own welding. He felt self-reliant and independent. Free.

When he finished his day job in the post-office, he got home to become a secret other, an amateur grease-monkey. Like the air-duct repairman hero of the Monty Python movie, Brazil. He was a productive subversive. By night, in his garage, he was confident, happier, self-actuated, self-realized. Zen and the automobile mechanic.

Every day was a challenge. Over the course of the week, the brakes didn’t know if they were coming or going, the timing slipped reliably, the squeaks and rattles advanced back and forth infiltrating everything from the chassis on through to the trunk, the carburetor gasket flaked, chipped, and sprung leaks. He wanted to put in a new racing carburetor, roof racks, rally tires and take it into the mucky, wild and messy lake district later this fall. He was looking forward to putting steel-studded tires on it, racing it and pulling 180’s on the lake ice in winter.

The car was always fixable. It had moods, but it didn't complain. When it broke down, it didn't complain. It always communicated. Everything could be replaced, upgraded and performance-enhanced. Now try doing that with your significant other.

Half-hour later, he pulled back into the driveway. He took the same precise care closing the door and locking up. He'd been tempted to lock on the garage door, excusing this act to his wife as a precautionary measure to keep out criminals and vandals, though he really wanted to proof it against the most pestiferous intruder of them all: his wife.

As he entered the door, his wife was waiting and remarked sharply, "Well that was quick. You could at least tell me you were going out. What if someone called? What would I say?"

This was old news, old complaints. The man looked down at his shoes, and mumbled, "I had to check the brakes. The fluid was getting low."

"Fluid was getting low? Bull shit!" She sneered, "You just wanted to go out for a ride in your wonderful car.” She threw up her hands in pantomime, delivering herself of stock expressions and stock phrases, performing for a command audience she liked to imagine was watching. “You're so childish. All you want to do is play. How can you be so irresponsible? What if somebody called? What am I supposed to tell them? My husband's outside playing with his toys? Do you know how embarrassing that is? If you can't control yourself for your own sake, at least do it for mine."

He took it like a child. He took his admonition silently. There was no defense. He could think of nothing. She was right, what right did he have to be so selfish and self-centered? He was supposed to be a good husband.

But she couldn’t persuade him. She wasn’t trying. She spoke at him; she only spoke to, with, and for, her imaginary audience.

And so the flood of guilt that her words initially sprung from his brain, like a sponge squeezed by the harridan’s cruel thin hands, was now a spring of emotions that was less and less fecund. It was drying up.

Though he could not justify spending so much time with the car, he had come to feel increasingly comfortable spending that time. In lieu of thinking up a rationale, he was becoming inured happily to it.

He was moving from speechlessness when asked about his undue enthusiasm for the car. His wife’s clever friends joked that he was auto-erotic. But he would soon become completely confident in his affection for the car. When asked why he loved his car more than his wife, he would rise to the occasion and give the too oft assailed rationale of because or I don’t know. I just do. The because was sincere. He meant it. Even if he couldn’t explain it. But it did mean something. It meant he was okay with it, down with it, into it. He didn’t need to understand more than this to function effectively, no more than he needed to understand the fluid dynamics principles behind four-stroke combustion engines in order to drive the car.

His hobby was becoming his lifestyle. After all, why was spending time with your car such a crime? This question posed to himself required no answer. A lack of an answer was his answer. For he trusted implicitly in himself.

He sighed, his only act of resistance, a long suffering sigh, though not loud enough to be provocative, giving himself room for denial. Denial that he was resisting her. He opened the fridge.

"Don't tell me you need another beer now. That's it, drown yourself in alcohol. Run. Run from me."

He made a face, looking at her quickly and then just as rapidly flitting away, his mouth down turned. “It’s just a beer. Why do you have to make such a big deal out of it?"

"Now don't get me started. If I've told you once..."

But he was already walking, past the dining table, and into the living room, where the sun was coming through the picture windows, the Woodland pine trees shimmering, through the glass. She followed him through in the way typical of a person nagging, trailing behind, nipping at his heels, maintaining a safe distance while attacking.

He stopped and turned around, saying, "Now honey, please stop following me around. Can't I get a moments rest?"

She placed her arms akimbo, and began to tap her right foot on hardwood floor. She saw herself again as a mother talking to the child, as a high priestess harpy admonishing, scolding, harping. Selflessly, for the child's own good. It hurt her more to issue punishment than she felt it hurt her apparently emotionally continent child of a husband. Marriage was the centerpiece of her life and marriage was forever.

But he wasn’t there anymore. He was already daydreaming, his mind thinking romantically about what lay outside the crisp autumn window: hunting season, ducks, mallards, Canadian geese. And hunting camps, rounds of beers with the boys, buck-fever shooting in your underwear at anything that moved and even things that didn't. Easy, unquestioning fun.

He could have fought his wife to win back his self-esteem and dignity, but when he had considered doing so, even just the thought of it made him uneasy. He didn't know why. All he knew was that he wasn't a wordsmith, a glib speaker, a smooth talker. He didn't have the gift of gab, he wasn't a person spilling with ideas and rationalizations.

The single eventuality the man saw in his mind's eye was a recurring flashback from his younger days when his grandfather had slapped his grandmother into submission once at the climax of a long and bitter quarrel. The man couldn't do it. It wasn't even that he didn't want to, he just knew he couldn't do it. It was no longer an option for some reason. He didn't know why, didn't think to wonder why. It just was. He didn’t need to know in order to function effectively. Life and he himself just were. That's just the way things were.

When his mind returned to the room, his wife was saying, "You keep spending all that time with car. Sometimes I think you have more affection for it than you have for me. You need to spend more time thinking about us, being with us. Quality time.” She left her imaginary audience behind for a moment and asked, “Are you listening to me?"

He just nodded, put his beer down, and excused himself, mumbling something about going to the bathroom. He left her gaping, mouth hanging with half a word stuck in it keeping it open. He left the living room.

She closed her mouth, the room was completely silent as the sun pored through. She had prodded and prodded him. Why didn't he fight back? What was wrong with him? Wasn't he man enough? She’d fix his bacon when he came back.

But as he went towards the bathroom, he ended up going towards the back door instead. A strange impulse pulled him, a sort of tickle in the brain teased him. Sort of like the devilishly warm buzz of a favorite video game or movie. That same familiar tug, a warm electric glow in his pleasure center. He went with it.

For better or worse, his work and his wife had tamed his instincts in the professional and social sphere, in the combat zone we call human interaction. They’d worn him down to the point where he was passive and domesticated to the point where he hardly felt in possession of himself. And so when the impulse came to go out the back door, he was hardly in a position to say no, let alone rebel. Just as he no longer felt competent to defend himself in front of his wife, just as the impulse to defend himself was now almost vestigial, a sort of living fossil, he simply went along with the impulse. He couldn’t fight it anymore than he could fight anything else.

Possessed, he went with the impulse to open the door, to exit, to go into the garage, pull out his keys and jump into his car. The familiar smells alternately soothed him and pleasantly pricked him. The electric garage door went up, he depressed the gas pedal, and back out he went. Out of the driveway, onto the side road, from the side road out onto the main road, and from the main road out onto the highway. Quality time.

Jody Burrell Buys the Farm
10,800 wds (far too long and meandering...)
first draft July 27, last edited Aug. 08, 2004

When Jody Burrell come to my store, he’d rush through the door, bursting with energy, with no mind for who was inside or might bump into. He was there, and no matter who else was there, he was first. It was like he hardly ever so nobody else, didn’t want them to exist and so they didn’t. He was too country for them, too rural even for me, and I was born here.

He’d go to ask a question of me, fetch up and go shy of a sudden, and brush a wavy cowlick off his forehead -- real men ought to have straight hair, he figured. He’d open a mouth of teeth fit for a mule, real root-crunching choppers, and ask gaily: “Hey, Mr. Richards? Like, when are you going to get around to ordering up bird shot for me? Hunting season or none, there's folks that want to shoot for practice. Even these here millionaires,” pointing with a smirk to whoever might be in the store, “even they must get buck-fever come fall hunting season too, right?”

How many times had I told young Jody that I needed, but didn't have and wasn't going to get, a license for ammo? He didn't quite understand licenses, didn't have none and didn't want any. In a way his mind was pure and virginal. The outside world, and its wicked and fascinating mysteries, began at the door of my highway convenience store out here in boondocks central. He was a piece of history just sitting out the present. Not moving into the future. Not moving a muscle on that account. Nope. No sir.

Jody's family lives up about ten klicks down the Trans-Canada from here in an old rickety wooden relic of a farmhouse left over from before the Depression. Grey and shabby, splintery and temporary-looking, it has those low ceilings from back in the old days when folks ate worse and grew shorter; I hear you have to bend over and watch your head as you go. I fondly call it an icon of the past. Some just call it an eyesore.

Jody didn’t do well in high school. He was picked on by the red-necks for being too much of a cracker. When he got older and bigger, he did some pickin on of his own. He never did graduate, I hear. After the principal got tired of him they cut him loose. Some lucky he didn't end up a jailbird in that jackdaw flock of criminals they’re raising up there at the provincial reform school.

But like most of our poorer folks, he didn't seem to mind his stock in life. He didn't know any better and besides, he had company; in his case the whole feral family Burrell, living under one roof and under what circumstances, nobody really knew.

Nobody I knew personally had ever been in the Burrell home. Nobody'd really wanted to get in there but the taxman and they're federal mostly and ain't nobody's friend. They ain’t much for talking. They seem to resent me for some reason. They come a-scowling into my store and complain: “What? You don't got Doritos? What the hell kind of crazy one-horse dump is this?” They pull their hair some of them and then get to shrieking on my porch. It’s bad for business.

Anyhow, I liked the Burrell's. And I liked Jody. He was a good crazy kid.

But old-fashioned craziness can catch up with you in the modern world. He didn't have a place. He didn't fit in. Didn't try. He wasn't near current enough for the present. How was he going to get a job in the new economy that was showing up, even around here? We were getting a lot of computer people and government employees moving out here. “Getting back to nature” they call it. But then they hire students and foreigners for their menial work. The point is: they’d never hire Jody.

His family was like white Injuns or something. Didn’t fit in with today, and not primitive enough to live off the land anymore. There's skills needed to live off the land. I don't mean farming; I mean live off it like a wild animal. Like before Noah and the Flood, ancient times when people was eating nuts and caterpillars, tickling fish in rivers, and stuff.

Jody wasn't neither fish nor fowl. That's the opposite of what you got to be today. It's like my store here, it's supplying a niche market, you know? I sell more than just gas but it wouldn't pay to open up a grocery store. Not enough customers. Just do the math. I did.

Jody didn’t think that way. Now way, no how. He was all for keeping old-fashioned country traditions going. He didn't have no niche. No niche and you're out of the game. Extinct. This world don't wait for no one.

It all caught up with Jody. It had to. You could say he got lost.

And it's ain’t so easy to get lost in the woods these days. Everybody's got the GSP, cell phones, terrain maps, and all that. But being prepared is more than taking the right gear, especially if you’re out there alone.

Jody was the youngest in the family. He came from a big enough family, but he was the last of the line. The next brother in line was five years ahead of him and the sisters in that family don’t speak much to the brothers.

The Burrell boy’s ain’t giants, but there ain’t no runts in that family neither. Once he got into his mid-twenties he was just shy of six foot tall, but not at all shy of three foot wide. He had muscles on the back of his arms big as thigh muscles on a young city woman. He was strong and proud: had a cap that said Tuf Nut. He took pride in being crazy. He could afford the reputation: he was gainfully unemployed, like the rest of the men in his family, and planned to remain that way. When you don't have a job, when you don't run a business, you can have any old reputation you want.

He was the last in our parts of a breed that's been dying out since the Great Depression: a happy-go-lucky country-boy, born and raised in God's green acre without a care in the whole damn world. But there are country-boys and then there are country-boys. We get a lot of clodhoppers from up the way and when they seen Jody they’d sometimes swell up with pride, suck their teeth, and announce: "By the bejesus that there fellar's a goaler or I ain't never seen 'n before". This was when Jody was safely out of earshot, of course.

But this didn't mean Jody was dumb, or dumber, just that he was hard-scrabble simple. A simple man of simple pleasures. Everyone grows into the life and lifestyle God gives us.

Jody come into my general store right regular, here just off the Trans-Canada highway. When Jody'd come in, his hair usual wasn't washed and he'd be growing the dandruff like wet snow. You could sniff a mustiness in him or his clothes -- I never could tell which it was, and was too polite to ask -- from a good ten yards. His momma, a good woman, bless her soul, would come in smelling like a hard-working man at five in the afternoon. But he was happy and she was satisfied. So was I: all my customers’ money is good enough for me.

They'd come in at all hours and gape at the products, most of which they wouldn't buy, unless they five-fingered ‘er, and Jody would yell, “Holy cats, Mr. Richards, you all got any of that chocolate. The stuff they millionaires eat. You got some or what, eh?” I liked them. They were alright. Characters. Peculiar as an orange tree growing out the ass-end of the North Pole.

Jody’s education wasn’t much better than a foreigner’s. His English, the way he spoke it, was quaint, real backwoods. A dying tongue, you could say, almost, and when the Burrell's get called to heaven, that'll be all she wrote for it. Jody didn't know much history or geography. His math was weak. He could read a little if he had to, traffic signs and that; instead of writing, he could sign his name if he had to.

And like many people who're down-and-out generation after generation, he was addicted to stealing. But stealing wasn't about surviving; not anymore. Stealing was just a part of the family tradition. It was in their blood and maybe they just brought it in from the old country. For them stealing was sport. None of that “stand and deliver” stuff though. More like smaller, pleasanter stuff like calculating when the tax man (a pest to people around here) was coming around and moving the valuables, valuables as measured on the modest Burrell scale of wealth, to a safe haven. Like to one of their ramshackle hunting camps, also unknown to the tax man.

So when Jody's mom told him that they were getting short on meat in the storage freezer again, he showed some Burrell initiative. He stole the neighbor's car, again, knowing they wouldn't report it to the police who were already tired and down at the mouth after years of rescuing stolen goods that the Burrells were constantly piling up in front of their porch right behind a For Sale sign.

Not that anyone in these parts had dared purchase anything from the Burrells for years now anyway. The Burrell's always had a reputation for good-natured wildness. Lately they'd gone and freshened it up some. Just a while back, a couple of millionaires pulled up in a Ford Mustang Fastback (a fine looking woman of a car that'll piss-cutt'n tool down the road, by Gum). Well the millionaires stopped by to take a look at the Burrell tractor on the yard, though of course they didn't know it had been borrowed without permission. They were moseying around this candy-apple red John Deere tractor, a fine one-lunged antique, 1950's vintage, with the engine fired up and idling nicely. That single-cylinder makes it shiver funny, like it has the D.T.'s: you can tell it's special right off as you come up to her. They fingered the moving parts, whispering to each other real eager and sneaky-like about the asking price, while Jody's able elder brother, Vernon, crept around back the side, master-keyed or hot-wired the Fastback and screamed her right off into the bright sunny morning, hooting and hollering in the ecstasy of his success.

Of course, after the joy-ride, Vernon drove it right back on to the family property, the scene of the crime that is. This in itself is an insight into the Burrell understanding, or lack thereof, of just what constitutes criminal behavior. The truth was you just couldn't say such naïve folk was criminals. Real criminals come into my store once complaining hard that the Burrells was giving them a bad name. But us, their neighbors who knew 'em, felt the Burrells just plum didn't deserve the title.

Either way, Vernon was welcomed back as a conquering hero by his pa and his brothers, even though everyone knew he'd have to give the car back. His mom was just used to this business and sighed. His sisters didn't approve at all and fussed and clucked. Not because of the Indian-giving, but because, like all members of the fair sex, they wanted to marry up and snag something more respectable like a grocery store clerk or a gas station attendant; the climax of their romantic ambitions was a traveling insurance salesman: a breed that can retire after ten years in the field, settle down in a prefab with a view of a big rock and eat an Irving Gas Stop lunch right regular. To the man-hunting sisters, the sum and total of Vernon's antics was that he was scaring their prey away.

And so the Burrells was a dying breed; their bloodline was getting watered down to nothing. Their women-folk did their best to marry out of the family, right out of the whole Downeast region if they could manage it, coming back only to show off their newly acquired fancy airs, teeth braces, puffy hair. They always seemed to be trapping men, whether they was from up or down the river. Burrell men though, were happy with the status quo. They didn't have much money sense. They didn't need any. They paid no taxes, hunted or stole the better half of their food supply, brewed wicked moonshine that they sold for a wicked good profit to old-timers who preferred corn liquor and potato beer to the fuzzy horse-piss for tourists that cost an arm and a leg in a grocery store.

In sum, the Burrell boys were a pristine parcel of the wild and untamed past. They didn't have a disposition for the present, and were out of their element in it, though I never heard them complain. They weren't up for planning for the future, at least not a future that was more than 24 hours down the road. They were too boisterous, just full of natural-born animal spirits: the hell with the discipline of planning when there were dirt bikes to race down logging roads, snowmobiles to jump off the low cliff at the front of the property and onto the highway shoulder, game to be poached, and the Holy jumpins hot-damn fun of giving the slip to rangers and tax collectors always in hot pursuit.

Poaching, a high-sounding word used mainly by wardens, might have been Greek to the Burrells who used the proper word for the thing, which is jacking. Negatives in the area of game license and game season were overcome by the Burrells with positives like a flashlight slung with duct tape to the barrel of their shotgun or rifle. They jacked partridge in the spring, deer during the summer, shot crows out of the sky on the Sabbath, and just basically blasted to smithereens anything that moved, any time, anyhow. If you were in the neighborhood and heard buckshot scattering down like a sprinkle of light rain through the leaves behind you, or heard a bullet twang a mean streak as it when by, giving you no time to pull out of the way, the lead already plonked into a tree just over yonder by the time you take a look, well there was half a chance you'd hear a Burrell horse-laugh burst out somewhere in the woods, the echoes hee-hawing in the rocky pine laden hills. They were a bullish breed of goalers and you just couldn't keep their spirit down.

The Burrells were alright. Even if they stole everything, they could never sell nothing. If you went over to their property to reclaim your property, they never got in a snit or showed any bad humor. If anything, you were welcomed in for a glass of lemonade or more likely moonshine by one of the remaining Burrell girls, who never let an opportunity for matrimonial possibilities pass them by. If you needed a hand, and you tucked all the purloinables out of sight, you could always rely on a Burrell to lend a helping hand.

They weren't bad by design, but by habit. And everyone's got bad habits. We knew what theirs was, and adjusted to 'em, so it weren't no big deal for the rest of us. It sounded funny to outsiders, and it took a bit of explaining, but around here we grew up with them and knew them all and we felt they were pretty good reliable people in their own way. And besides, there was never any support for having the kids thrown in jail; if you threw the law at any one of them, he'd go straight into the caboose; you'd end up having to throw them all in. And then who would take care of the parents? Who would provide for their sisters? We're all for self-reliance out here and so we all felt it was better to leave them out in the open, free ranging, gallivanting and frolicking as was there wont. Besides, they were great source of entertainment in a neck of the woods that was otherwise pretty hard up.

So it was hard luck all around, when Jody bought the farm.

Jody stole that car and drove her up river past the Nackawick, Woodstock, and on a ways then. He took her up beyond the covered bridge that keeps getting smashed into by drunk drivers. Up into Acadia he went, where some of the French people only speak English and some of the English people only speak French. Most of them, though, speak both at the same time. “Sur le weekend, Je drivez le car a la gas station pour achete un hotdog ou un hamburger.” That sort of thing. You can't tell if they're coming or going.

Problem was neither did Jody once he got out of the car. This was new territory for him. He'd took his favorite pooch, Martha, just in case he got lost.

Martha was Jody's pit-bull. She was smart and loyal, and did no harm to no one. About thirty five kilos, she came in piebald, her muzzle graying a bit. She and Jody had been introduced during his teens and they grew up together and were real close, like a brother and sister almost. Jody's real sisters were too busy man-hunting to give him the time of day.

Jody peeled off the TransCanada, found himself an unfamiliar paved road going west toward the US border. There was no traffic, none at all. This was one of the new improved roads the gov'ment put in for tourists from out of the province and sportsmen from the city, but which had little real application for locals. He was taking her easier now, peering up both ways through the woods, looking for a good mix of hard and softwoods, not just the northern pine, cedar, larch and tamarack which leave acidic soils no good for much else but theyselves to grow. He was looking for mixed cover, the kind that would provide food for deer. Best of all, he wanted a patch of abandoned farm-land. There was lots of that around his place farther south, with all the people pulling up during the Depression and heading West.

Martha wasn't interested in their destination. She just sat on the front bucket seat, snoozing and cracking an eye when they hit a rougher bump and then snoozing some more. She'd done this all before. She knew there's no sense in worrying about something when you can't do nothing about it.

Heading down the road some more, more excited by the prospect of finding some light broadleaf greenery and not paying attention to where he was, Jody advanced another 20 km or so. Still finding nothing, he made a personal promise to hit the first dirt trail he found ahead. He found something on the right, pulled up, took a look at the tracks. It wasn't a skidder's track, with ruts three foot deep, but a sportsman's track. Or maybe it was a prospecting road built through Crown Land. There was grass growing up, larger in the midsection, but also growing up in the ruts as well. It must have been a couple of months at least since someone else passed through here with a vehicle.

As to who owned the land, it never crossed Jody's mind to wonder. Private property wasn't an obstacle, but a challenge. A natural hunter, his pulse quickened at the thought of virgins, virgin land and virgin wildlife, and he put the car into gear, floored her, spun the tires, and headed in.

Perhaps this is good place as any to explain why he stole the car. It wasn't because he needed a vehicle, although he did, but mostly because if you get caught jacking deer then the government confiscates your vehicle. If you walk out of your house and jack a deer, then the government confiscates your house. They're pretty strict about that kind of thing. I even heard of a fellar's helicopter being confiscated once. Serious.

Jody navigated the road for another twenty or thirty kilometers, coming into the kind of bad lands that was probably underwater once. It looks sort of like seashore: beaten up into weird pretty shapes and demolished into smithereens the rest of it. It's that kind of property that's full of hundred meter bluffs and drop-offs for no good reason. It's full of stumps of mountains just jumped up out of nowhere that got chopped off at the hip and only reach half-way up into the sky. It's full of clumps of land that shoot out the ground wearing a crown of trees like a carrot top. It looks like something out of biblical times or maybe what the world will come to after Armageddon, Lord preserve us.

It ought to be full of savages or demons, but it's empty as a funeral parlor come Monday Night Football. You could never farm it. Your livestock and your women would break their necks every other day if they had to tramp it. I can't even be sure if even the wild animals like it. It gives anyone with imagination the creeps, though I guess in all fairness it's not dangerous to be there and you aren't cursed if you look at it too long, but by Jimminy it's sure not a good place to go out by yourself without a cellphone or a buddy or something.

Well, Jody wasn't well traveled and he'd never seen anything like this. Though, truth be told, down in the Gagetown Military Base, they got plenty of this crazy wildnerness that nobody wants but the airforce and the artillery boys, both of which loves themselves better than Jesus and is crazier than hell and loves to bomb anything that moves, or doesn't even. Their excuse was they were bombing badlands into good lands. Well, whatever gets your crank going.

Jody kept driving through a parcel of these bad lands and was ever so tired of finding nothing what he wanted to find, before he got to something like what he wanted. He put the car into a stop. He rolled down the electric windows, and then rolled them up and down again just for the sheer fun of it, feeling particular proud of himself today and enjoying the fine weather, and inhaling the plasticky smell of the new car which he then figured he'd help break in with a smoke. He got out a pack of Carleton Craven A's, his grandaddy's Zippo, lit 'er up and took a puff. Lazily leaning out, he said to Martha, "Well what's your opinion on this old gal?"

He tickled her and she barked at him, lazily getting up, panting and leaning against the car door, impatiently signaling Jody to open it. He leaned over, patted her graciously and then pushed the door open. Martha plopped out the side door, sniffed around a bit, looking for a place to wee-wee.

Jody got out to do his own business, unzipping his Levis and taking care not to water his Greb Kodiaks, both of which came from the Salvation Army Store down there in Woodstock. Jody was dressed good, wearing a solid tartan lumberjack jacket, cloth gloves in his pockets for heavy work, a Tractor Caterpillar cap (probably quick-fingered from an Irving store) on his head for show. If it wasn't for his nutty yellow teeth, his skin porous like volcano rock, and the sort of stale meaty ripeness that reached out to you when you were indoors with him, you'd never tell him from no one else. He was a little grungy, but that’s almost fashionable these days? He was seldom outright dirty. Burrells had standards like anyone else.

Looking across from the edge of the road, he saw a spit of lazy valley in between two of these menacing breaks. Their color, the speckled yellow autumn leaves of deciduous birch and poplar, contrasting with the hillside cedars and hilltop pines made Jody figure this would be a spot of acreage damper than the rest, maybe warmer too depending on how the wind broke around these pokey hills, and which maybe held a cove of broadleaf trees which might stretch out and prove to be a streak coming on several kilometers. This ought to attract game and might maybe have attracted farm people in the old days. Warm images of apple trees gone wild, fallen feral pears being pecked up by partridge and nibbled on by deer filled his mind's eye. That just goes to show how little Jody knew about farming. He was way out in the middle of nowhere. Farmers need neighbors, amongst other things.

But Jody didn't need a lot of learning, he only needed enough to get by. He'd had enough of homework at school. He went around the back of the car and opened the trunk and took out his 12 gauge, a pack of slugs (for deer or moose) and a pack of bird shot (for everything else). He opened up his Coleman cooler and moved the ice aside to get at his wonderbread bags in which he'd cached his hot dogs, hotdog buns. He reached in and found his sole luxury, a sixpack of Moosehead and stuff the whole kit into a hard-worn blue backpack. He was carrying food and drink for him and Martha.

He loaded up a couple of slugs into the shotgun, feeding them through the breech, called Martha out of the car. He looked for a open way, an animal trail or a barren break in the rocky soil where the brambles and trees hadn't got a foothold into the soil and gone and selfishly choked everything up. Finding something promising, he started tramping down and made his towards the valley area.

But just as soon as he started hoofing good and proper, he felt a gust of wind at his back. He pulled up. When the gust reached a grove of poplar trees ahead of him in the distance, they shed leaves from their upper branches, coming down like flurries of cornflakes.

He pulled up. He needed to get behind this wind so his and Martha's smell wouldn't spook the deer. Today the wind was gusting and blowing, sure to make everything, from the partridge to the red squirrels, flighty and fidgety.

Well that was a pain in the arse. Hunt with the wind in your face and you could load yourself up with cologne and pomade if you liked and you wouldn't scare nothing off. You might attract varmints downwind though, like an old-timer bear that thought you was a pile of garbage on the move or a swarm of bees that mistook you for a pretty flower and decided to settle down in your hair and scrounge around. It's just better to go natural-smelling like Jody and Martha.

Jody thought for a second. He figured he ought'n not tramp through the valley and double back, 'cause that leave tracks and a smell trail behind. These animals not being used to people, might scare particular easy.

He took a round-about route. He'd have to navigate the crazy badlands, but he was full of beans and spirit. When he got tired, he'd light a fire and cook up some hot dogs and crack open a couple of home-brew.

He lit a cigarette and spat on the ground. Martha looked at him and whined, wondering why he was hesitating. She was excited by the new smells, the smell trails that crossed her high-powered nose and got her right eager to search out everything out in her invisible world. Jody said, "Hold your frickin horses girl! We'll get her going up the trail there in just a minute. Give us a second to enjoy our smoke."

Flicking the butt into the bushes, Jody hauled off a few minutes later. They tramped and tramped, Jody keeping the sun to his left as it rose high in the morning sky. They passed through groves of spruce, infested with budworms that fell and got to crawling in his hair. The occasional copse of already naked maples, made things easier now and again, the leaves went red as blush as early as August and had now faded into a healthy dirt-brown. The lay of the territory was uneven, a lot of broken rock and loose gravel tumbled down from the hillsides around them making it like treading on sand sometimes, sapping your energy by making you work twice as hard for every step. Everywhere was hillsides and sloppy ground. Visibility was piss-poor, there being no end in sight of these badlands.

And this forest was virtually un-traveled by man which meant it wasn't cleared of brush. There was a terrible clot of branches at body height every which way you went. Jody had to put on his work gloves right quick but he still got scratched up good in between where the gloves ended and where his sleeves was being pushed back by the tangled brush. Where the light filtered down, speckled and sparkling as it reached the ground, there was knee-high ferns, fiddle-head stumps, and bracken. And where this ran out, there was streams and slippery rocks, where he spent most of his time going slow and careful, trying not to sprain his ankle

But he was a tuf nut, and it didn't bother him much at first. Wild land like this ought to hold a lot of good sized animals back in that valley. Not that there was much here right now. He hadn't raised so much as even a partridge yet and he'd gone, he figured, at least a kilometer, and he'd had such high hopes. Well, he kept going. Further and further, deeper and deeper.

The sun got covered over around noon, about three hours after he'd started out. He and Martha was getting hungry and he looked about for a place to start up some lunch. The forest was thick as thieves with brush and hardly a clearing anywhere, except for deadfalls, where mostly huge red and white pine had died and toppled over. It wasn't safe for a camp fire though, as it was dry as tinder and would go up as fast as kindling. He kept tramping around, through endless spruce forest, sometimes a quarter acre of it half-killed by the budworm. And then he found a patch of bog and some alder, right next to a patch of forest. The alder was useless for fire, and he couldn't find any rocks nearby.

He continued on for another quarter of a kilometer, when he found a patch of pine. He had a sudden premonition that there would be a patch of snow underneath. Sure enough, there it was, and as he followed the rim of it, he saw the outline of half a footprint. He stood up and stared at it. He couldn't have been more shocked if he'd seen a ghost. He was out alone out here for sure, weren't he? He looked around, wondering if there was rangers in the area. He thought, Holy o Martha! Of all the gravelroader places in the world for to meet up with a ranger.

Martha sniffed at the footprint and looked up and started barking. Jody sunk down to his knees and muzzled her with his hands: "Fucking Jesus H., girl! We ain't alone out here maybe now..."

But then he started to have second thoughts. He went over and looked at the tread on the footprint. As he got closer it looked to be Greb Kodiak, though half the people around these parts wear that brand of boot when they go trotting in the woods. He went to measure his foot up beside the print, but not before Martha trotted over and stopped right in the middle of it, staring up at him.

Jody shouted, "Jumpins! Will you get the jeepers away from there, girl?" and shoved Martha impatiently, though she was ready for him and sunk down and put her weight into the snow, making Jody work twice as hard. By the time, he'd shoved her off, he was saying "Aw, for the love o' Christ, girl! Get to..." The track was gone and replaced with Martha's doggy snow angel. He couldn't reckon the size of the print now, but he'd got a good enough glimpse to starting to wonder if it was his own boot print.

Anybody could wander in a circle, he thought. No shame in that. Many people did it. But those that did it often ended up doing it again. And again. Nobody did it on purpose. That was the problem. Nobody ever felt lost until they got lost. And once they got lost, they often stayed lost.

He didn't want to worry; he wasn't the worrying kind anyway. Besides, he and Martha needed some food. Perfect opportunity to stop and think. He pulled out some snow into a pile. But he couldn't get his mind off of where he was. He'd been out of sight of the valley for a while now, and then he thought back, maybe he'd been out of sight of it for an hour. He wasn't sure.

He'd got a watch for his birthday once. He came into the store real proud, but he got tired of it real quick. It was just a toy to him. Not serious.

The Burrell men seldom held a job, so they didn't usually operate by schedules. They laughed at regular people and we laughed back. It was all good-natured.

But now Jody felt like he could do with knowing the time and looked up at the sky. It had been overcast for a while now. How long, he couldn't remember. What time it was now, he didn't have a clue. Somewhere around noon anyway. What'd it really matter, anyway?

He looked around for a patch of white birch trees, for to take the naturally peeling bark as kindling. But he found none. The pine needles would have to do, a little damp as they were on the ground.

He pulled out some snow and piled it in a ring. Then he gathered some twigs for kindling and some larger branches and the like. He piled it up pretty rough as was his way and then scooped up pine needles, mostly from the top drier layer on the ground under the pine trees and placed them in a good way to get the kindling going. He pulled out his daddy's zippo and gave the light to her. The needles started to crackle slowly, resisting the flame. The moisture in 'em made 'em twist and smoke something awful but Jody kept the Zippo moving around, touching up this bit of needles and that bit when they looked like they was getting ready to give up the flame. After fifteen minutes, he finally got the fire going tolerable.

He coaxed it and controlled it right, not letting it get too big and fetching some more snow to keep the fire from spreading on the ground by itself. Sometimes the needles on the forest floor can be several feet thick, but usually the stuff underneath is too damp to burn.

Then he took up a fine long green stick that he'd cut off a poplar and took out a greasy wiener from his pack and impaled it and held it over the fire. Propping it between his knees, he took out another and gave it directly to Martha for her supper. Martha held it down with a paw, like it was threatening to run off, and then attacked it from the side to give herself full advantage over the slippery pink devil. Jody smiled and hauled a bun out and got ready to put toast it as well. He'd put his beer out early, away from the fire, to let it settle after all his tramping so all the fizz didn't come out when he opened it. It was pretty good looking pilsner bottled by his ma in 3/4 liter jam jars, as is her way.

With the weather front coming in, the wind was still carrying away up in the tree tops, but it was no worry to Jody. It didn't look like it was going to rain anytime soon.

The weather up here by the Atlantic, where the St. Lawrence River comes into the ocean, often gets backed up. Weather fronts get hemmed in by hurricanes coming up from the south and Arctic winds blowing down from the north. The weather can stay sunny or overcast or anything else for two weeks at a time.

Jody didn't understand this, and wouldn't have felt he needed to know if you told him. All Jody cared about was whether it was going to rain, which it wasn't, and if the wind was going to stop and make the hunting better. That's what he was wondering.

As if to answer that last question, he heard another gust of wind blew through the trees above him but he didn't pay it any mind. And so he didn't see the flurry of pine needles and broadleaves that started to fall down in the woods around him like in slow motion, all around him. As the first needles hit the fire, they crackled brightly. They were dry as a bone; wind-blown and sun-dried. They fell like chips of cardboard dabbed in kerosene, like bits of paper dipped in starter fuel.

He heard the crackle get louder, but paid it no mind. Fire always wants to grow, especially in dry woods, and the flames started climbing the column of falling needles and leaves. They moved up into the airborne trail in thin lightening-quick orange tongues. Up six feet, then twelve, then twenty, climbing and climbing and making the upper extended branches of the pine tree sizzle and smoke. And then, with a great whoosh that pressed in on your eardrums, the whole side of the pine tree conflagrated.

As he looked up, he instinctively pulled back away. Woodsman cutting down trees were killed every year by falling branches, and it was second nature to move away from any tree when in doubt. Sure enough, termite eaten boughs and wood-pecker decimated branches, began to fall as Jody leaped out and away. Martha joined him barking loudly in a panic, wondering why fire was falling out of the sky.

Jody pulled up about thirty feet away, the tree beside his fire completely aflame in the way only pine trees seem to go. Like nature's fire cracker, they go up into flame real fast, snap and pop and crackle, their branches crashing and exploding into showers of sparks as they hit the ground.

Then Jody realized that all his food plus his shotgun was at near the fire. There was nothing he could do but move to a safer distance and pray. And so he took Martha with them another hundred feet away from the fire, waiting for the shells to heat up in the shotgun and explode.

"For fuck's sake. That's a bitch. Well fuck me, already, eh!"

He cursed and cursed, but what good was it? Anyway, it was clear that it was time to be getting back to the car. At least Martha had some food. He reached in his pockets for his cigarettes, looked as a pocket found, to his relief, his pa's Zippo lighter. Things could have been worse he thought. Much worse. He thanked his lucky stars.

He turned his back on the fire, there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Not that this was how Jody looked at the situation; he was another responsible more not responsible as far as he sighed. The fire happened, it got out of control, and that was the end of it. But he was lucky, the wind was blowing in the right direction, and he was right up close to a rock face so when the fire blew up towards it, it had nowhere to go and it went out within 20 minutes.

Once Jody got going, he started to think about that footprint again. He kept popping into his mind, and he was determined not to go in circles. He tried to get a fix on his general direction, but the sun refused to come out. He didn't know if he was coming or going. There was no line of sight from where he was.

So he made his way to climbed to the top of one of the steeper taller hills. It was a devil getting up but he was made of solid stuff and he'd get there hell or high water. He run into a bee's nest but made it past with only three stings and Martha whimpering with her own complaints now. It was all dry pines up there, about one hundred and fifty foot above the land and all around him all he could for the life of him was more of the same Badlands.

And then he looked real careful and at a great distance, he made out two mountains. Yeah, there they were, coming in and out of focus, at a vast distance, lighter, almost whiter maybe, than the deep green background. He was puzzled. He'd never seen them before. He'd never even seen anything properly described as a mountain in his life. But he'd never looked for one either. He'd never tried. He'd never had to. So he wasn't the preparing kind.

But now that he'd found them where were they? The mountains could've been to the north in Québec, to the south by St. Andrews, or to the west in Maine.

He had no idea what he was looking at, and even if he had, he hadn't brought a map. And even if he had, he couldn't read maps. Geography wasn't an interest of his. The Burrells didn't exactly have hobbies. Life was a hobby and that was the end of it.

Then he thought back to movie that he'd seen, in which this fellow grabbed a couple of geese and wrote directions on pieces of paper and then tied the paper to their ankles. But then he thought, he didn't have a paper, he didn't have a pen, and he couldn't write much more than to sign his name.

With the overcast weather, what he really needed was a compass. But of course that wasn't part of his gear. Instead, he went rooting around the woods looking for some spruce, with Martha tagging along behind. He wanted to find some grandfathers beard, because he knew that it grew on the North Side of spruce trees. But we found some, it was growing in every direction, often wrapping right around the whole tree trunk.

Perhaps the most obvious tool missing from his kit was simply a mobile phone. But Jody spent more time talking to Martha than anyone else. And if Martha didn't have a phone, then who was he going to call? I never heard his mom say nothing to him but: “Don’t touch that Jody.” The only thing she ever said to me was: “He takes after his daddy.”

So Jody realized he was in a fix. But he was nothing if not resourceful.

Smoke was still coming up from the fire, though just a little now, and it occurred to him but maybe he should get another big fire going. This time on purpose. That was the ticket! What he needed to do was get a signal going, like the Injuns with their smoke signals, eh? he thought to himself.

The rangers had professional fire watchers watching in towers, and they'd surely come. Where there's smoke there's fire, the rangers always say. All he had to do was get a good fire going, and that would bring out the government boys like a swarm of flies to a steaming pile of road apples. He'd hide out somewhere close by and follow them when they went out. They'd blame her on heat lightening and never figure out what really happened.

He looked at Martha and patted her shaggy coat lovingly and then exclaimed ouch! Pulling up his hand, he found a bee attached to it by the ass end. He pulled the bee away from his palm, the doomed insect's stinger still inside his skin. But it was a minor irritation, nothing that would slow Jody down. He was a tuf nut.

But now he needed to rely upon his wits. The Burrells weren't dumb, or dumber, just hardscrabble simple.

He looked around, looked around for a good thick clump of trees, ones with leaves still on ‘em or plenty of needles that might make for a good fire that’d have to last long enough for it to be spotted and considered dangerous enough to warrant putting out. And so, instead of setting fire to the clump of trees at the top of his Badlands hills, a fire which would have started and gone out of its own accord, running out of timber and underbrush in a jiffy, he did the smart thing and went down to the floor where the forest was thicker and broader, and with its more mixed stock of wood, just better all around for fires. Well he was right. It would be better all right. Even better than he could have hoped.

He'd used up so much fuel in the Zippo getting that first fire started that he wanted something good and fierce this time, no mistake. He looked around from his elevation and saw a fine bunch of hardwoods, white and gold birch, on the outside of a moist depression in the land that was filled with water-loving cedars. He’d have bark for kindling, the cedars ought to go up like that exploding pine tree of his and the hardwood of the trees themselves would keep burning and smoking for hours he figured, just like in the fireplace.

He was being smart, relying on his wits. He had no choice. He had to. All the more power to him. He had no experience and no primitive man’s common sense for this sort of thing.

Coming down a different side of the hill, he and Martha came down sliding and skidding through the loose stone, fetching up on a tree now and again, but making pretty good time. Jody didn’t want to waste no time and have to spend a damp evening out here getting his arse chewed up by mosquitoes and no-see-ums, and wake up with his clothes soaked in morning dew.

They got down into the flatland and lost sight of the lay of the land. They were back to being surrounded by huge hillocks and knobby shoals of stone with carrot-tops of pines.

When they got to the birches and cedars, Jody found the cedars a bit green for his liking. The worms and caterpillars were eating the spruce and left the cedars alone. Woodpeckers drove holes into them, deer rubbed their antlers on ‘em, and bears practiced their clawing on ‘em, but they weren’t no worse for it. The cedars would burn, but only with an effort and he was worried about his Zippo fuel.

So he went around tearing off birch bark, building up a pile about three feet high. The stuff was everywhere and he was done in twenty minutes. Then he got some wood going, collecting underbrush, which was everywhere too. He looked around and decided to collect it around the base of three birches that was growing close together, like three trees coming out of the same root system. He looked up and figured they’d topple three different ways and the rest of the woods would catch.

He was explaining this to Martha, for no reason other than his lonely habit of talking to her, when he said, “and then girl, the rest of the woods, they’ll fetch a hell of a fire and then…” The words stuck in his mouth at this point as he realized that he was in the woods. If they burned, he’d burn.

That could be a problem. He looked around and figured, he’d better figure out which way the wind was blowing. He looked way up to the top of the hillocks. There was the occasional waft of wind but it looked pretty quiet. He ought to be safe, but which way it was blowing, he still couldn’t be sure. Would the wind change? He looked at the sky. It hadn’t changed a bit. But now that the clear skies had changed to overcast and the new front had moved in good and solid, the original gusting wind had given up the ghost. He wanted to head back up there and check the wind. But he was getting tired, he’d had no food all day now and it took a hell of an effort to climb the loose scree, the gravel that fell away and made you work twice as hard to get anywhere.

And the time… It was late fall and the sun would be going down. He couldn’t tell with the overcast sky and without a watch. Maybe it was down already and the late country twilight would start to fade real quick. If it got dark, there wouldn’t be no rangers until the next morning at the earliest.

He scratched his head. Sea breeze, land breeze, heat lightening, northern lights… The only thing he really knew about weather was to come in from out of the rain.

He didn’t farm, he didn’t sail. The weather forecasts in these here parts was useless anyway. Wicked unpredictable weather. It rained warm rain right regular in winter. It could snow wet snow in summer. The temperature got warmer 10 degrees Celsius a month as you came onto summer and colder 18 degrees Fahrenheit every month as you got towards winter. The only thing that didn’t change was change. The only thing reliable about the weather was that it was unreliable.

But still, it weren’t so crazy that you couldn’t tell if you were coming or going in the next half an hour. He looked around, looking for answers. What would the Injuns do? He cracked a smile. Picturing their casinos, they’d probably call for a taxi and a rent-a-squaw.

Be serious now, he thought. Alright now, he looked around some more. Up and down. He heard ducks and looking up saw a late gaggle flying south, way up high in a high irregular V, missing a couple of birds as if some hunter had already potted two out on their left flank.

His eyes came back down from the sky and landed on a couple of red pines, their branches extended out to his left, out from their chopped flathead mountaintop. That had something to do with something, didn’t it? Maybe. Was they growing out into the sun. Or was they growing away from the wind to get away from it, like a tail on a bird? Or was they growing into the wind to fetch more rain, like a rain spout? Or was it something else, even more scientific? Scientists would know; Injuns would know. But he didn’t.

He blew out his cheeks and said aloud, “Shoot!” Should he flip a coin and decide? He thought about plants: grass (grows every direction), alders (grows out messy), birch (grows up like a light-bulb), cedars (grows up straight like an arrow). He wished to hell he had a phone so he could ask somebody what to do. He thought to himself that if he was a millionaire he’d call in a taxi with a flat of beers and a deluxe pizza. Too slow. He’d have it delivered by helicopter. Tell a ranger to fly it in and be quick about it. He wouldn’t give him no tip if he put on any uppity airs.

And then he snapped out of his reverie. “Boys oh boys! Shut up! For the love of Christ, Jody! We got to get a move on here!”

Martha yawned.

Jody looked up at the trees and made his decision. Up above, behind him, the remaining tree leaves on several maples were starting to come down to ground as the prevailing afternoon breeze started to pick up and gust a little bit.

Jody didn’t notice. He’d already made his guess about the prevailing wind and chosen his direction of retreat after he got the fire going. He took out his lighter and got a nice blaze going. It didn’t take any coaxing, the bark catching quickly, spreading to the dead and dry branches. It was something to behold. The bark on the trees was catching now, sometimes peeling off and falling back to earth and burning out, but more often catching and climbing the tree, piece by piece, until the fire got up to the patch of yellow leaves on the first birch and they went up nice and crisp, faster than newspaper, first one patch then another then another. The first tree was in flames all over and then the second started to go. Jody backed up, turning around and getting some distance, letting Mother Nature do what she does best: destruction on a massive scale.

You get a good forest fire going and it rolls up like a volcano exploding at you, like I seen on TV. It comes at you like a storm-front with the clouds of smoke going up thousands of feet sometimes, like a small slice of Armageddon.

But Jody wasn’t thinking this. He was just playing it safe using what he did know. He was playing it smart too by keeping at a calculated distance and going in the direction his wits and judgment told him to go. And just in case he was wrong, he was staying down in the flat area, where he could run hell for leather in any direction required, though he wasn’t planning on it.

The fire grew and grew and he began to smell the sweet fragrance of success. The perimeter of the fire was growing gradually, but most importantly there was lots of flames and smoke as the underbrush got heated up and the green cedars released clouds of steam before they got dry enough to shoot into flames like rocket fuel.

Jody was sitting down and getting comfortable. He was so tired he fell asleep. The perimeter of the fire kept expanding, but his falling asleep didn’t make his situation any more dangerous. What counted was the prevailing wind, west to east, that moved from up in the hillocks and down into the flatland.

The rangers clocked the fire starting at 4:14 pm. When it was still going and they could see she was getting bigger, they sent a spruce budworm spray plane out to take a gander at about 4:35. The weather folks say the wind that afternoon was ten mile an hour with gusts of 12 to 15.

Ten miles an hour sounds pretty slow and the gusts are only now and again. But the wind don’t quit. On a straight road you’d have to be a marathon runner to outrun this wind and then some. Now try to imagine sprinting through the deep woods. Forget it. Now try to imagine being Jody, three hundred pounds of good-natured muscle and fat. The only time he ever run was to the bathroom when a meal didn’t suit his digestion. Now imagine him hoofing it through the waist-high tangled brush in steel-toed steel-shanked work-boots, crashing through untrimmed trees, traversing tiny slippery brooks too small but for minnows and twisting your leg that they got up there. So Jody’s napping had little to do with anything. Probably just made it worse because he had more energy to panic and fight against what couldn’t be defeated.

He woke to the sound of Martha barking and whining, and as he opened his eyes, he saw the yellow golden light of fire in the branches above him. He jumped up and looked around. “Holy jeepers Mother of Martha!”

There was wall of fire in front of him that rose as it reached around to behind him. He hotfooted it through the back, going straight behind him, leaving his jacket and lighter and booting it, hell for leather. But the fire was traveling with the free unbroken breeze above, in the crown of the forest, leaping and jumping, slower than he could run but with an awful unstoppable purpose. It didn’t slow down to take a breather. It burned from the top down and though Jody got off to a terrific speed, the fire never let up on him.

He never understood what was happening. He had no conception of fire traveling untrammeled through tree tops. He didn’t know that the principle problem, even now, was carbon monoxide poisoning as the oxygen got burned up and sucked out from below, leaving him in a breathless death trap. He didn’t even comprehend carbon monoxide. He’d never heard of it.

All he did know was that embers kept falling down at him, branches crashing down from the top of the forest, threatening to brain him. As soon as he got ahead of the conflagration, it’d catch right back up to him within a couple of minutes. He’d have to sprint all day and all night at top speed to get away from it. A deer maybe could do it, but not a human being, he figured. Maybe not even an Olympic athlete jumped up on crank.

And there was this strange tiredness he felt. His energy being sapped, an odd drowsiness that broke through his excitement, that slowed his footfalls, that gave him a tunnel vision that came and went, but seemed particularly strong when the fire got particularly tight on his heels.

He ought to have tried to head for high-ground, to get himself up and above the flames. But he was so suddenly fagged out that the prospect of a slow climb through sapping gravel seemed crazy. He figured the whole valley had to be in a conflagration by now. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all. He had no view of the forest from where he was and no time to get one. It would be getting dark any minute now, no it was getting dark wasn’t it? With all this smoke, with no way to tell the time, he couldn’t be sure.

But still this didn’t have to be the end of him. He could have headed for wet, low ground, getting his nose down as low as possible to the ground, so that the air he was breathing was the same oxygen-rich brew as Martha’s. Martha wasn’t getting tired, old as she was; or at least no more tired than usual. But he wasn’t paying attention to Martha and even if he had, he wouldn’t have understood the significance of it. He would’ve figured there was something about Martha’s constitution, being a dog, that gave her better wind. That it was natural. He had little knowledge of science. He didn’t know about situating yourself in the right air-stream. He didn’t know that most folks die of bad air before the heat of the fire ever gets to them.

He kept at it heroically for two kilometers, driving himself on and on. He stumbled many a time, falling down flat, cutting up the meat of his hands on the stone and twigs, the pain not hitting him sharply though and his fatigue curiously comforting and evermore accompanied by a strange pressing thought to give in, give in, give in. But Martha barked fiercely whenever he hesitated. More importantly he was determined to win; to defeat this adversary through sheer force of will, through his usual impertinence, through throwing all care to the wind and just going for it, just as he had defeated so many other adversaries: the law, rangers, social conventions. He wasn’t about to die a fool, a failure, a clown who had brought on his own demise. And so he forced himself to get up many a time, over and over, but lurching increasingly drunkenly, with fatigue pulling ever harder at his heels, a smooth fog dulling his mind.

Martha was in the good air and didn’t feel any of this. She only understood the need to get to safety. She was forever barking, whining, pressing him on when he fell. She didn’t understand his tiredness, his heavy footfalls, his tendency to founder and be brought up by even the smallest of obstacles now. This wasn’t like Jody at all.

When it finally got too much for him, he was just tramping along, following Martha who had gone from follower to leader. He stumbled a last time over a stray root, not precisely an obstacle for it only protruded an inch from the ground. But his legs weren’t pumping normally and his feet weren’t rising properly. He fetched up and fell to his knees, as if ready for this, as if only needing the right excuse to fetch up and take it easy.

If he would have collapsed fully, gone prostrate, he might have got a few lungfuls of real air and regained his energy, cleared his head. But, like all of us, he was a creature of habit and dignity. He decided he wanted to meet his maker in a proper dignified manner and so he sat up, leaning against a rock protruding from the thin soil sparsely covering the ancient glacial moraine below. It was more peaceful here he noted.

The wind was howling and swirling around the base of the taller trees like tornadoes, the fire atop of them pulling up the good air from the bottom of the forest and sucking in the already combusted waste air from all around the vicinity, filling Jody’s surroundings with a poisonous miasma.

He suddenly jerked, panicking with a vision of himself found blackened and crispy, like an overdone barbequed chicken, the skin split and the meat scorched. But the panic faded, like everything was strangely fading in his mind. He really was tired, but then calm, relaxed, comfortable, happy, almost delirious. His remaining instincts told him to run, but the rest of him told him to stay a while and take it easy, to see what would happen and take in the sights.

He heard an unusual noise. Not the whoosh of the fire, the crashing of falling tree limbs, or the climbing volume of the crackle of the leaves, which were so regular that he no longer heard them. It was Martha barking right up close at him, baring her teeth as if to attack. She was confused, scared at this odd languorousness of Jody’s in the face of clear and pressing danger. She’d never seen this before.

Jody was feeling really good now, at peace with himself and the world, and decided generously that he wanted to share it Martha. He grabbed her up carelessly, though she felt unusually heavy. But she was his dog, his faithful, his best and only friend. He wanted to protect the old girl, calm her nerves. He’d stay with her till the end.

Martha relented in the old convivial embrace. But another falling branch came crashing down, dropping sparks on her and Jody, and the fear of her coat catching on fire brought her sharply back to the present. She didn’t share Jody’s notion of getting called to Heaven. She barked fiercely at Jody, whose head was falling down, slumping happily, heavily, clumsily, insensibly on his shoulders. She barked again twice, again failing to understand his complacency and then bit hard into Jody’s arm to put some sense back into him. Jody felt the bite, not deeply or sharply, but still he felt it and he made a fish-mouth expression of tired surprise, inhaled more poisoned air, and reflexively let go his grip on Martha. She bounded out of his lap and stood there in front of him barking fiercely to get Jody to move.

But again there was that smile on his face where there should have been fear. His eyes were closed again, when they should have been open. And so Martha left, left him there, running for her own safety, running for her own life, running for the sound of the sirens her sharp ears could vaguely distinguish now and then through the howling hurricane force winds that swirled about her.