dan collier

I’ve been impressed since I first noticed Jim Webb, the current junior Senator from Virginia, during his run for his Senate seat. While I don’t agree with all of his politics, he seems more of a plain-spoken man with good intentions than the average politician.

The recent article on Jim Webb in the New York Review of Books sparked my interest in his writing, and I recently finished Fields of Fire. Webb, a highly decorated combat Marine in Vietnam, wrote Fields of Fire in 1979 as a fictionalized account of the real war that was fought by men dying for nameless hills in endless jungle only to give them up a day or two later.

In the excerpt below, a newly arrived Lieutenant Hodges (a central character) is being briefed by a battle-scarred Major prior to his deployment to his troops in the bush. I think it both gives the flavor of Webb’s writing and a synopsis of his view of the war:

The Major offered Hodges a small, challenging smile. “They go wild, Lieutenant. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll go wild, too. Wild as hell. You spend a month in the bush and you’re not a Marine anymore. Hell. You’re not even a goddamn person. There’s no tents, no barbed wire, no hot food, no jeeps or trucks, no clean clothes. Nothing. You’re an animal. It gets so that it’s natural to squat when you take a shit. You get ringworm and hookworm and gooksores. You roll around in your own filth. You forget how bad you smell. Dead people, guts in the goddamn dirt, miserable civilians, it all gets sort of boring. You cry when your friends are killed, but a new friend comes in on the helicopter a few days later, and the dead friend becomes enshrined, a martyr to friendship. You teach the new friend about him, and you all remember him. It’s very romantic.”

“It doesn’t sound romantic.” [replied Hodges]

“That’s after a month. Or two. But Lieutenant. When you do it for six, or nine, or even longer, by Christ, you’ll never shake it. The bush gets in your blood and you hate anyone who hasn’t fermented in his own stench for months, or stood inside a dirt hole all night, waiting to kill a man who’s trying to kill him first.”

Major Otto scrutinized Hodges. “Oh, yeah. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. That’s something a grunt isn’t supposed to do.” He chuckled again, a sort of dry bark. “But what else can a man do in An Hoa? Oh. And An Hoa. It becomes an oasis. You like An Hoa, Lieutenant?”

“I hate it.”

“You’ll like it when you get back to it from the bush, I guarantee. So. What kind of person can take it, for months on end?”

Hodges felt uneasy. He had expected the Major to wave the flag and talk about Iwo Jima, then send him aboard a resupply helicopter with fire in his heart.

“Someone who is very dedicated, sir. Either that or someone who is very crazy.”

“Well, there you are. That’s it in a nutshell. You just hit the nail on the goddamn head.”

Fields of Fire has been well reviewed by critics and grunts for its detailed account of a story told many times over. As one may expect in a book about the US Marines by a US Marine, the book does fail to offer a realistic picture of the Vietnamese as a people fighting colonialism and occupation. But I’ve seen many of the Hollywood movies, read a handful of books, and heard my share of Vietnam War stories. If I was going to recommend one book or movie about the American war in Viet Nam, it would be Fields of Fire.

As I prepare to move abroad in July, to a locale not yet chosen, I have been rereading the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson is among the Old Masters that I reread for familiar wisdom, along with Lao Tzu and Hunter S. Thompson, but I last read RWE at length during the summer of 2001 as I prepared to move back to the US from Stockholm. The ease with which Emerson dismisses society’s judgements is inspiring as I hear the complaints politely rephrased as questions from people who are already happy or secure with their station and location in life. I admit I might not even realize if I found such a place, but I’ll definitely know when it is time to move on.

So here are some passages I found too good not to post:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Self-Reliance

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds….

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him alone.

Illusions

One great thing about traveling is having time to read books. Having given up newspapers in print form for the internet, I can’t imagine that books in the physical form will be so easily replaced. Travel is treat because for a rare day, I can put the computer away, turn the cell phone off, and be consumed by a book. The lack of hyperlinks in books results in a lengthy internalized discussion with the author that has no equal on the Net.

On the way home from Jackson Hole yesterday, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. At that link, you can read it free online. Here is the Manifesto. The book is about how the internet is changing, perhaps returning, the market from mass-production/mass-consumption to conversations among equals. It is a book about the fuzzy side of business and marketing as much as an attempt to capture the ethos of the modern knowledge worker and relay that to megacorp management types. I think the excerpt below gives you a taste of the book, which I thought was good and of general interest beyond tech workers.

To find anything that isn’t overtly complicit with the Great Technology Sitcom, you have to dig down to the underbelly of the Web. You have to get past the sites with commercial pretensions that are slicing and dicing you, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep. You are being incorporated into their demographic surveys. And, predictably, the lowest common denominator is getting all the juice. You are being packaged for advertisers by some of the hippest hucksters on the planet.

Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what’s coming like a freight train. What you’ll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.

What are these underbelly sites about? What’s a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we’ve been brainwashed into believing never existed?

Conspiracy theory, my ass. Schools and teachers, the motor vehicle bureau, the IRS, the military, the line at the bank, the television set, the newspapers at the checkout stand, the news on your radio, the billboards along the highway, and now a hundred thousand cold-comfort Web sites. All are tuned to your brain at the deepest level and you have lined up for the coolest, latest-model implant. The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.

If you’re OK with this, then eat it up. There’s a bulimic’s dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it - rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we’re here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we’re gonna rip the fucking lid off.

There’s your market.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter 1

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes about creating and sharing art as the only true form of prayer. I don’t have the book anymore and ironically I can’t quote it any better because corporate copyright concerns think they’ll sell more copies by keeping it out of Google Books, but it is, in a sense, the same sentiment as expressed above.

I was familiar with three of the four authors previously, and because of the tone of the book it should probably be mentioned that they were and are highly regarded in the high technology business world. Two are Fellows at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The Berkman People blog includes both their blogs, and is very good.

A final quote, from the final chapter:

Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday.

Today, I finished The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart. Last year, I read Stewart’s first book, The Places In Between, about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002. To say that I liked both books is an understatement, in these books Stewart presents invaluable knowledge about the world-at-large, and Muslim lands in particular.

Seyyed Rory, as he is known in Muslim lands, relates how success and failure in Iraq was fundamentally a local phenomena. Without stating it outright, he clearly believes all politics are local. He relates the following:

I did not agree with the governorate coordinators in neighboring provinces who felt fatally wounded by poor planning, ill-defined missions, insufficient resources, and little support. I believed that our small teams, fluid identity, and relative isolation were inevitable consequences of the invasion and, indeed, advantages. I was pleased to work without interference from Baghdad or London; our team was by now experienced, flexible, and energetic; we had good relations with other parts of the system and were able to acquire more money than we could manage and spend. If we now failed to help [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] build a functioning state, this would not be the fault of poor organization or grand planning at the center but rather a failure of local relationships.
p. 259

Only five pages and a week later, Stewart recounts the failure of the central coalition government to provide for the daily concerns of Iraqis.

In the evening [the Iraqi interim governor of Maysan province] asked me for fifty dollars to repair his windows, which had been destroyed in a recent demonstration. Although he was the governor, his salary was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month, and Baghdad had still not agreed to give the governors an independent budget…. For the sake of a tiny sum of money - a couple thousand dollars a month from the hundred billion we had spent on the invasion - we were alienating our key partner and successor.
p. 264

Stewart was unable to obtain the funds from the Coalition Provisional Authority, and finally gave the Iraqi governor money from his own pocket.

Each chapter of The Prince of Marshes starts with a quote, most from Machiavelli’s “The Prince” (I reread The Prince earlier this fall and was pleasantly surprised to see its wisdom put to good use in this book). While the Prince of the Marshes refers to an Iraqi tribal sheik, the use of Machiavelli’s Prince seems refers to Stewart’s ambiguous feeling about his role as neo-colonial governor. One quote is:

For this may be said fo men generally: they are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers, avoiders of danger, eager for gain.
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 17

Another chapter starts:

Many have imagined principalities and states that have never been seen, nor known to exist. However, how men live is so different from how they should live that a ruler who does not do generally what is done but persists in doing what ought to be done will undermine his power rather than maintain it.
Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 15

The front cover of The Prince of the Marshes carries the quote:

Off all the books I’ve read about the tragedy in Iraq, I think Stewart’s in the most likely to last.
Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Having been against the invasion from the start because I followed the news and watched carefully what Hans Blix was reporting, I have not felt the need to delve too deeply in the bellicose group-think that overtook Washington, D.C and London in 2003. However, I can certainly agree with Mr Weisberg’s assessment, because The Prince of the Marshes is a day-to-day account of dealing with Iraqi people crucial to the goal of a democratic and peaceful Iraq. When all the justifications for the Iraq War have been thoroughly refuted, the people of Iraq will remain the determining factor in the success or failure of US policy.
Tagged: books foreignpolicy iraq

Once Seung Sahn Soen-sa and a student of his attended a talk at a Zen center in California. The Dharma teacher spoke about Bodhidharma. After the talk, someone asked him “What’s the difference between Bodhidharma’s sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?”

The Dharma teacher said, “About five thousand miles.”
The questioner said, “Is that all?”
The Dharma teacher said, “Give or take a few miles.”

Later on, Soen-sa asked his student, “What do you think of these answers?”
“Not bad, not good. But the dog runs after the bone.”
“How would you answer?”
“I’d say, ‘Why do you make a difference?’ “

Soen-sa said, “Not bad. Now you ask me.”
“What’s the difference between Bodhidharma’s sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m listening.”
“Bodhidharma sat in Sorim for nine years. I am sitting here now.”

The student smiled.

Seung Sahn, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, Chapter 87