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Quote from "Postcards from Tomorrow Square"

"America's policy really boils down to the steady effort to give consumers more and more for less and less: deregulation, expanding free trade, embracing Wal-Mart and other chains. Japan's policy has boiled down to a steady effort to develop the country's manufacturing base, even if that leaves consumers paying higher prices and investors getting worse returns. Different systems, different goals - Japan, despite its supposed "lost decade", has done a good job by its own lights. Its current account surplus, widely predicted to have evaporated by the mid-1990s, instead remains the largest in the world in absolute terms. Toyota, which during the "japan as No.1" years dreamed of being the world's leading automaker, will very soon be just that. American economist often scold Japan for its "foolish" emphasis on exports and surpluses at the cost of immediate consumer welfare. But no one who visits modern Japan will think its people look poor."

The Lost Fleet

At the dawn of the age of oil, whale blubber illuminated the homes and streets of America and lubricated the early machinery of the industrial revolution. The United States was once the most important whaling nation. By one estimate we accounted for 70% of the world’s catch. Now Boston Journalist Marc Songini has written a poignant and thought provoking account of the decline of whaling and the people associated with it.

His book, The Lost Fleet, is centered on the fortunes of New Bedford, Massachusetts which was once one the wealthiest cities in 19th century America. The town motto was Lucem Diffundo, “We Light the World”. By 1850 of the 700 or so whalers in the American fleet 80% sailed from the port of New Bedford. As Herman Melville  himself wrote:

The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.

Within a few short years political, economic, and ecology changes had destroyed the fleet and delivered a blow to New Bedford which it has never recovered from.

One punch came with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. After two ill advised efforts to block Charleston Harbor using New England stone laden whalers, the fleet became a special political target of the Confederate Navy. New Bedford’s fleet was decimated first by the CSS Alabama and later by the CSS Shenandoah.

Ecology also played a major role in ending New Bedford’s prominence. As the over-hunted whales retreated further and further north to escape the fleet’s harpoons, whalers where forced to sail further and further to capture them – in some cases to the waters off Alaska. Two unusually early winters in 1871 and 1876 trapped and wrecked many New Bedford ships in the ice around Point Barrow.

Still, the biggest blow to whaling may have been the least dramatic, when in 1859 the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. This shifted the economics of oil, whittling whaling further and further away from profitability.

Yet whaling has cast a very large shadow on the United States in form of the acquisition of Hawaii and Alaska into the Union, one of the greatest American novels Moby Dick, many of its best folk songs, and tattoos. New Bedford was also a hotbed of abolitionism and gave refuge to Frederick Douglass after he escaped from slavery.

With entertaining turns of phrases and memorable characters, Songini captures not only the facts but the sense of the era.

Whaling was a hard, cruel business for men and especially for whales. Today the United States has no whaling industry and it is the national champion of the effort to save them. As we approach the end of the oil age there are many parallels that are worth appreciating and The Lost Fleet is a great book to start considering them.

The Tao Te Ching

One of the best books I have ever read is the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu (My translation is by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English). Here is but one in eighty-one examples:

Sixty Three

Practice non-action.
Work without doing.
Taste the tasteless.
Magnify the small, increase the few.
Reward bitterness with care.

See simplicity in the complicated.
Achieve greatness in little things.

In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy.
In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.
The sage does not attempt anything very big,
And thus achieves greatness.

Easy promises make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.
Because the sage always confronts difficulties,
He never experiences them.

Lao Tsu

The Army Personal System and Iraq

My strong preference in reading is fact over fiction. Although no writing contains more fact than a great novel, most fiction can not compete with say autobiography as a literary form. Now I am beginning the same thing is true of television. Most TV, especially the News, is so over produced it really a form of fiction. Surfing the channels this afternoon I happened on CSPAN's program After Word's which was welcome change.

Colonel Jeffrey McCausland interviewed Thomas Ricks, the author of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,". Ricks made a number of interesting points that made me want to read his book. Most striking among them was the observation that Iraq is a society built on personal relationship that we are fighting by rotating our soldiers through. He went on to say that the Army would rather lose the war than change its personal system which like most bad news is probably true.

Relationship Responsibility

This passage comes from Peter Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Very few people work by themselves and achieve results by themselves – a few great artists, a few great scientists, a few great athletes. Most people work with other people and are effective through other people. That is true whether they are members of an organization or legally independent. To manage oneself, therefore, requires taking relationship responsibility.

There are two parts to it.

The first one is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as one is oneself…..

The second thing to do to manage oneself and to become effective is to take responsibility for communications. After people have thought though what their strengths are, how they perform, what their values are and especially what their contribution should be, they then have to ask: "Who needs to know this? On whom do I depend? And who depends on me?" And then one goes and tell all these people - and tells them in the way in which they receive a message, this is, in a memo if they are readers, or by talking to them if they are listeners and so on.

Organizations are no longer built on force. They are increasingly built on trust. Trust does not mean that people like one another. It means that people can trust one another. And this pre-supposes that people understand one another.

Autobiography

Using legal records, The Smoking Gun is challenging the veracity of best selling James Frey's autobiography.  The controversy is like to spur the sales of more books. I know am buying one because of it. Then again one of the reasons that I like autobiography is that it makes the best fiction. This is another sign that the internet can be powerful force for determining the truth because you can order Frey's book, read it, and examine the original evidence and make your own determination.

Review of Drop City

Finished reading T.C. Boyle's novel Drop City this morning. Drop City is the name of a hippie commune that migrates from the warm hills of California to a remote part of Alaska. Like the hippies, the novel wanders a little bit and ultimately never lives up to its full promise. I would have liked some outline at the end book describing the character's fate and how the experience changed their lives. Clearly no one would have stayed in Drop City after the winter but what life choices did they make? Did some stay in Alaska to trap firs while others went to Berkeley to open heath food restaurants? Most especially I would have liked to see how Boyle linked feminism to the advantages and disadvantages of communal life for women. Were communes the hatching place of NOW? 

Among the words I learned reading the book were sylphine, bota bag, empyrean, cheechako, and proscenium.

Transmission

Transmission is about a young Indian engineer who comes to the United States as a H1B contractor. This is an timely book but not quite a great book. It is important because it describes the interaction of the developing and developed world at precisely the point of overlap. Despite addressing a such an important topic the novel is flawed by its ending. Transmission is best in the beginning and worst with its Hollywood (or Bollywood) happy ending finish. Transmission is unsparing in its view of both East and West which no doubt has hurt its popularity but which also gives the book much of its comic punch.  To give you a sense of what I mean, here are some quotes from Transmission:

"Boy, good programmers like you are gold dust over there. Everyone knows American college students are only interested in cannabis and skateboarding."

"The idea of American poverty, especially a poverty that did not exclude cars, refrigerators, cable TV or obesity, was a new and disturbing paradox."

"He has glimpsed what lies below, the forced motion of the shopping-cart pushers, the collectors of cardboard boxes. At least in India the street people can lie down for a while before being moved on."

"Like many business people he had quasi-theological view of computers. They were important and mysteriously beneficial, but it was the job of the priesthood to engage with them. Finding himself with no technical support was like standing naked before the judgment of God."

"These machines - which had always terrorized them in small ways, by crashing, hanging, demanding meaningless upgrades or simply scolding them in them in the persona of an annoying cartoon paper clip - were now revealed to harbor something more sinister."

Among the words I learned by reading this book were marmoreal, RDX, susurrus, exigency, and coprophiliac.  Despite its flaws, Transmission is an entertaining way to better understand the world around us and well worth reading.

Something to Think About

This passage is from Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" although I prefer the German title Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. The book is the justly famous description of a psychiatrist's personal experience in a concentration camp.

"it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must be consistent, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems....every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand."

The Forgotten Soldier: Factual or Truthful?

One of the most powerful books I have read recently is Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Solider.First published in France in 1967, the The Forgotten Solider is a personal account of life as a ground soldier in the German army in Russian at the end of World War II. I found the book to be a moving description of what it feels to be an average man living through a time of extraordinary hardship and cruelty. The Forgotten Solider  is considered something of a classic in military history and is used today in officer training. But the question lingers, is the book really true?

The Forgotten Solider is the story of Guy Sajer, a 16-year-old French boy with a German mother who lived in a part of France incorporated into Germany at the beginning of the war. The story begins in 1942 after Sajer has washed out of the Luftwaffe, and is marching off to train as solider.  Because of his age he is assigned to a transportation and not a front line unit, but in the spring of 1943 Sajer volunteers to join the elite Gross Deutschland Division mostly because he gets a two week pass in exchange.  Sajer tells us that he remained a part of the Gross Deutschland for the rest of the war as was called on to fill in the breach at Kursk, Kharkov, Kiev, Romania, East Prussia, and Memel. With pride, Sajer writes:

"We each received the famous insignia of the Gross Deutschland division, with its divisional title in silver Gothic letters on a black background. The band remained on my sleeve until 1945 when the rumor ran though our scattered ranks that the Americans where shooting any man with a divisional name instead of a number. At that moment of hasty judgment they might very well have shot a nobody from the Gross Deutschland or the Brandenburg as easily as a hero from the Lebenstandarte or Totenkoph. "

After the war, his Allied captors were unsure if to classify him as a German or as a French collaborator. He was repatriated by joining the French Army and later marrying a French woman to became a graphics illustrator in Paris. One of his illustrations Hope Above the Lines appears in this posting.

The book gives readers a uncannily accurate sense of the emotional reaction of a common solider to battle. It is this emotion that makes The Forgotten Solider so compelling:

"Three Messerschmidts passed overhead, and were greeted with a loud cheer. The confidence the infantry placed in the Luftwaffe was absolute, and on innumerable occasions the familiar shape of the planes with the black crosses restored faltering courage and frustrated a Russian attack."

Sajer writes about the hardships and frustrations experienced by common soldiers and is not uncritical of the German Army. The bullying by NCO's, the hunger, the cold. He also doesn't make any great claims for his own ability as a soldier. This makes The Forgotten Solider a convincing account.

But there are some factual problems with the book, which were debated by Lieutenant Colonel Doug Nash and Lieutenant Colonel Edward L. Kennedy, Jr. in the pages of Army History the official publication of the U.S. Army's Center of Military History. Nash, a combat officer, thinks The Forgotten Solider. is true, while Kennedy, a military historian, thinks it is a novel.

Here is the central problem of all autobiographies - the balance of fact and truth. In our scientific times it seems illogical to separate one from the other, but could Nash and Kennedy both be right? Is it possible for The Forgotten Solider to be true but not factual at the same time?

From my perspective , the most convincing problems with The Forgotten Solider facts is that no record of either Sajer or his respected commander, Hauptmann Wesreidau can be found in the Gross Deutschland records that exist today. Granted these records are incomplete. Both Nash and Kennedy agree that there are many minor factual errors in book, most significantly where the Gross Deutschland uniform insignia was placed. Sajer describes being ordered to sew it on to his left sleeve, when the Gross Deutschland wore the insignia on their right sleeve. (Certain Waffen-SS divisions were also wore cuff titles, but on their left sleeve).

At first glace, this does not seem problem with Albrecht Speer's autobiography "Inside the Third Reich" which seems both factual and true.  Speer's accomplishments as Minster of Armaments were well known. Meticulous minutes of his meetings were kept and later used against him during his trial as war criminal at Nuremberg. so his autobiography is very factual. Yet it does not escape the central dilemma of autobiography, or for that matter experience.

It is a fact that Hitler's bunker had an air vent, but is it true that Speer planed to assassinate him by pouring poison gas into the vent? Can anyone say, even Speer himself, with certainty?

In a letter to Nash, Sajer defends his book "I never had the intention to write a historical reference book; rather I wrote about my innermost emotional experiences as they relate to the events that happened to me in the context of the Second World War."

Sajer may have fought in Russia as part of the German army, but he may not have been a member of the Gross Deutschland.  He may have instead have been with the Waffen SS, or been a part of something that he does not want to be called to account for today.

In its way, this is as strong a repudiation of Nazi Party and everything it stood for as Speer's assassination attempts. in it is the foundation of modern Germany.