saltykris

There is an old saying: ‘Make haste. Slowly.’ That is how it feels when you read Deliverance, by James Dickey. Like a simple, slow burn that is coming down to a nub. There is a sense of elegance, danger, and mankind instinctively fighting back against the elements and the wild to find something akin to peace. I really enjoyed this book (for what it is worth, it is even rated among the top novels of all time on some lists).

This is the tale of three normal guys – the main character, Ed, is an advertising executive at a small town firm – who decide they need to face nature. The fourth character, Lewis, is larger than life and obsessed with survival out in the wild. He “wanted to be immortal.” Yet even Lewis has a normal life with a wife and three kids and a 9-to-5, but “he couldn’t make it work” and feels he must conquer his primal self. So Lewis convinces the others to head out for a weekend canoe trip in the Appalachian hills of Georgia. Ed idolizes the lack of fear in Lewis, and is bored with his life, so he follows. By the end of the book, Ed proves better than his fear; however, along the way, things do not go as planned.

The book was made into a relatively famous 1972 movie with Jon Voight as Ed and Burt Reynolds as the overly adventuresome Lewis.* The movie is known for a certain dueling banjos scene…and another scene that I won’t discuss as it will spoil the entire story. I had never seen the movie, and once I finished the book, I downloaded it. The movie is slow, in the way that older movies sometimes are. It enjoys itself in the slowness, like a memory of the past swirling in the back of your mind. It was good – but the book was better.

What spoke to me from the book was the way Dickey encapsulates one of the struggles of modern life: it can be boring. We yearn for adventure, but spend most of our time in an office. Ed is bored with his life in advertising, and Lewis takes him on an adventure, yet the trip turns into something far more brutal and visceral than they expected. The book opens with this dichotomy: of indifference and boredom contrasted against the excitement of the river and man versus nature. The second part of the book is about the struggle, about facing the wild by putting aside societal norms in order to survive. It reminded me of the life of Hobbes’ mankind: nasty and brutish and short. Finally, the book ends with a return to civilization, and after having changed and adapted to survive, the party finding a way to both cover up their actions as brutes and return to the comforts of modernity. There is even a rather heavy handed metaphor slicing through the story, as the raging river they venture forth on for their canoe trip is about to be drowned out by the building of dam, just as Lewis thinks the essence of mankind is being drowned out by civilization, suburbia, and strip malls.

I think what I enjoyed most was the slowness and the sense of surrealism. The river is made of “alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smooth stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden-staircase steps around another turn.” As Ed summited a cliff for a crucial showdown, he stops and realizes “there was a new light on the water; the moon was going up and up, and [he] stood watching the stream with [his] back to the rock for a few minutes, not thinking of anything, with a deep feeling of nakedness and helplessness and intimacy.” I felt like I understood Ed and where he was. This showed up in the movie as well, with the quick pace of the dueling banjos and the obvious fun the actors were having pushing forward in their canoes.

The story ends with Ed and Lewis content, and together, on another body of water. They grow old in their lake houses next to each other, knowing “that dying is better than immortality.” It is a good ending.

Score: 8.5. A little brutal if you get squeamish, but worth the trip downriver.

 

* In 2010, I visited the Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum in Jupiter Florida.  The canoe and bow from the movie were on display. Unfortunately, the museum closed in 2012.

 

Sometimes you just need to read something easy and simple and that makes you feel good. That’s what I needed. In less than 24 hours, I had devoured The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. It’s a simple book, if a little heavily sentimental at times. It will make you feel good. It will likely make you cry. And it will make you want to go get a dog.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is the story of Enzo, a retriever and terrier mutt, and his life with Denny, the sometimes race car driver. The book is Enzo’s story; he narrates everything from his point of view, and we learn of his desires, his understanding of the world, his bodily functions, his wit, and his heart. And through Enzo’s story, we experience Denny’s life, with all its turbulent twists, turns, and rain on its racetracks.

Enzo is actually pretty funny. The way he sees the world is unique; his description of how Denny and Eve, his wife, being “full of fermented drinks…made them both act funny” is quite on point. His thoughts on how thumbs are wasted on monkeys are priceless. Enzo believes, based upon a National Geographic TV special about a Mongolian tradition, that when dogs pass away, if they have been good, their souls will come back as humans. Also, Enzo really likes TV, which Denny leaves on for him most days while he is at work at the local BMW dealership. I love that Enzo’s two favorite actors are Steve McQueen and Al Pacino, and that his impression of the climatic courtroom scene is based upon having seen a few too many episodes of Law and Order. I really love that he has an imaginary friend named ‘King Karma’ that “will swoop out of the sky and call you names…if you are cruel and vicious.” What Enzo brings to the tables are feelings. He believes in the truth of emotions, and as he lives, he wears his emotions on his sleeve…er…um…I mean his ears at every chance he gets.

We learn in the first chapter that Enzo is dying. He is ready to go to sleep and come back as a human. He spends the book reflecting back on his life with Denny and their friendship. Denny’s life dose have some pretty heavy handed ups and downs (a lot of downs actually, come to think of it), but these are not the point of the book. They are just background plot that enable us to feel the love between Enzo and his master and friend, and how they loyally stand together the entire time, taking care of each other and bringing happiness and comfort into the other’s life for 320 pages.

The racing in the rain theme reoccurs every few pages. Denny the race car driver loves to watch racing videos, and teaches Enzo all about driving. The metaphors about living a good live are rather obvious throughout: “the cars go where the eyes go,” “there is no dishonor in losing the race…there is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid,” or “The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind the others than it is to drive too hard and crash.” But even with the lack of subtlety in the racing life lessons, this book felt good. It was easy to read and relaxing. I enjoyed it. I used to have a dog. I really want to have one again. Maybe a terrier mutt.

Score – 7.5. A little overt and heavy handed, but this book made me feel good.

It was the worst of times. It got worse. So the men onboard the HMS Ulysses rose up and fought on, past the cold, past the exhaustion, past the numbing, past the end of endurance, past the extremes of “fear, suspense, hunger…the things that break a man, that destroy him as surely as fire or steel or pestilence,” past the edge of the world, into the abyss. HMS Ulysses was Alistair MacLean’s first novel. Maclean is one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time, writing such famous thrillers as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare.* He was also a seaman and torpedo operator in the British Navy during World War II, serving part of his time on Arctic convoys. These miserable patrols, where 101 allied vessels were lost between 1941 and 1945, are the background of this tale of human endurance and pain, and the redemption of men of war in the coldest of circumstances.

The Ulysses is a light cruiser (think 6 inch guns, 7000-ish tons displaced, 500-ish feet long). The book opens with the Assistant Director of Naval Operations visiting the ship. There has been a mutiny. The Ulysses has gone out again and again and again and the men have broken, and then mutinied when ordered to set sail on another convoy again. Nearby marines put down the mutiny. In the opening chapter, when discussing the mutiny, the worldly-wise ship’s doctor explains what happens when people are pushed to the very edge of the suffering they can take and still survive, stating that:

“Such is the fantastic resilience and toughness of man that he can tolerate – for extremely short period. But the limit, the saturation capacity for adaption is soon reached. Push men beyond that limit and anything can happen. I say ‘anything’ advisedly because we don’t know the precise form the crackup will take – but crack-up there always is. It may be physical, mental, spiritual – I don’t know. But I do know this…the crew of the Ulysses has been pushed to the limit – and clear beyond.”

This is the essence of HMS Ulysses. The entire book is a character study. How far can you push a human being before they can be pushed no further? How many hours of sleep is too few? How cold is too cold? How many lost lives are too many? And if the crew of the Ulysses have been pushed already to the point of mutiny as the book opens, how much further is there that they can go? And most importantly, when someone has been pushed this far, what drives them to keep moving, to keep trying, to keep fighting?

Of course the Ulysses is ordered back to sea. Disaster quickly ensues. There are massive waves and horrific storms. There is freezing weather north of the Arctic Circle; weather so cold that watches are measured in minutes rather than hours because people will freeze to death. There are constant attacks from the Germans; so many attacks that the convoy runs out of depth charges and guns to shoot. There are men who “crack-up,” such as the Rear Admiral who loses his mind after making a slew of poor decisions. There are heroes, like the sickly, yet “courteous, kind, and considerate” Captain suffering from tuberculosis who can do no wrong, who is slowly working himself to death. There are villains, like the incompetent Junior Officer with a grudge or the Master-At-Arms who does not understand that every man is needed in the fight. There are clichés and fantastic coincidences, like the Seaman who keeps saving the day but must be the one who launches the torpedo to sink his own father’s cargo vessel, lest the German’s use its blazing deck fires to locate the convoy. There are survivors, like the assistant doctor – who survives the convoy and makes it back to England – and is interrogated by the Admiralty and “a small, stocky man with iron-grey hair, eyes still and wise and old,” a clear allusion to Winston Churchill.

Spoiler alert – this is not a book with a happy ending, and that’s ok. Rather it is a story of the horror of war. 32 ships set out in the convoy; only five make it all the way to Murmansk. The Ulysses is not among the survivors. It is also not a book about the horrors of Nazi Germany. The Germans are considered competent, clever, and dangerous adversaries; there is no moralizing tone about how they are evil and the fate of the world is in the balance. It is also not a story where we get to decide how to feel about the characters. MacLean bludgeons us with how we should think about this crew. Individuals are described as “the Royal Navy at its best,” or having intelligence “that barely cleared the moron level,” or for the incompetent Junior Officer (my personal favorite), having “the face of an over-bred racehorse…his grammar was frequently execrable…[he] was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system. Vain, superior, uncouth, and ill-educated, he was a complete ass.”

Rather this is a story about motivation among a crew. The narrator intones that “a ship – any ship – can never be better than its crew.” This crew does not stop and must prove to the world who they are. They are “worn-out, sleepless men, numbed with cold and sodden duffels, grey and drawn and stumbling on their feet with weakness and hunger and lack of rest.” Eventually, we find why they keep going – what can drive them thru these extremes. It is not

“the synthetic national hatreds and the carefully cherished myth of King and country; these are nothing and less than nothing when mankind stands at the last frontier of hope and endurance: for only the basic, simple human emotions, the positive ones of love and grief and pity and distress, can carry a man across that last frontier.”

And by the end, even though only a few make it out alive, we learn that the men of the Ulysses “were the best crew God ever gave a Captain.”

HMS Ulysses is also a fascinating case study of life on a naval vessel. The vernacular, the equipment, the watches, the motions of the sea – these are all familiar yet dated for today’s sailors. For me, they felt a little like an old home. Some equipment was not as familiar and is no longer operated by today’s military, and some of the language is overly British, but I thoroughly enjoyed the realistic dip into the British Navy of World War II.

According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge according to my father), along with The Cruel Sea (by Nicholas Monsarrat) and The Caine Mutiny (by Herman Wouk), HMS Ulysses is one of the “classic tales of World War II at sea.” These three books are all inspiring and fascinating in their own way. Having read all three, each adds a different lens through which to see the sailors of the past. Each is worth your time;  Ulysses absolutely holds its own next to these other two works.

I heartily recommend this book to sailors, both past and present. It started the career of a brilliant thriller writer – one whose books I have read since middle school. And while this is a different sort of story, it still retains MacLean’s prototypical tired, bitter, weary anti-heros who can stay alive and avert disaster.

 

Score: 8.0 – perhaps a little to blunt in its superlatives, but salty to the core.

 

Final note: I do not read much poetry, but the book opens with an epigraph quoting Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses. I added the quote here because it made me smile.

Come, my friends,
‘Tis is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

*Where Eagles Dare was made into an amazing 1968 spy movie starring Richard Burton and a young Clint Eastwood. The number of double crosses is mind boggling.

At the end of Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, King George III sings of President George Washington stepping down, and John Adams, the incumbent Vice President, winning election.* Adams had met King George years before when serving as the first American ambassador to Great Britain in 1785. George III reminisces about his memory of meeting the “little guy” and then blurts out in falsetto: “President John Adams – Good Luck!”

Adams inherited the Presidency from Washington, one of our greatest Presidents. He was filling the shoes of a natural born leader who fit the part straight out of central casting, a General who had used his immense personal strength and abilities to fight the British and bring all Americans together. Adams, on the other hand, was not out of central casting. He was considered short at 5’7” (not that short – I am only 5’6”), squat, cantankerous, and loud. But Adams was also seen as a man of immense principles – he was honest, straight spoken, and a man of both immense wisdom and character. Ben Franklin, who served with Adams in the Second Continental Congress, on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and with him as a diplomat in France, once wrote of Adams that “he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” After reading David McCullough’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Adams, I have an image of Adams in my mind of a sage, proud, loud, and slightly grumpy grandfather, who strives to do what is best for his nation, and who ultimately succeeds, but never received real recognition for all he has done.

McCullough initially set out to write a joint biography of Adams and Thomas Jefferson, however, he felt that Adams, looking back through history, outshined his peer. Adams spent his entire adult life building the foundations of America. He believed in the ideals of republicanism: the rule of law, the separation of powers as a form of checks and balances, and the inherent rights of man. Jefferson, Adams’ one-time friend and virtual arch-nemesis once in office, once called Adams the “Colossus of Independence” for all he had done to help bring America into existence. Adams believed that “Government is nothing more than the combined force of society…for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people,” and he spent his life, until his defeat in the Presidential election of 1800, trying to provide these virtues for the people of America.

Adams grew up firmly in what we would call the middle class. He did not come from wealth, and he definitely did not have the type of social skills that would have ingratiated him with the wealthy. McCullough notes that “he was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter.” Instead, Adams had a keen intellect and a firm sense of morals. He became a lawyer, and rose to fame in Massachusetts opposing the Stamp Act and serving as the defense counsel for the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. Despite the strong risk to personal his reputation and law practice, Adams felt that the soldiers deserved the right to counsel, and won the case (though the two soldiers who had fired into the crowd were convicted of manslaughter). The trial won him fame, and led to his election to the Massachusetts legislature, and eventually the First and Second Continental Congresses.

In the Congresses, Adams quickly joined all the important conversations; he proved to be a work horse sitting on 90 committees and chairing 25 of them. In 1775, it was Adams who nominated George Washington to serve as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army. While in the Congress, he published the pamphlet Thoughts on Government, which laid out a framework for divided government, much of which was adopted by numerous states and eventually the Federal government.** He was also selected to serve on the Committee of Five, which was charged with drafting a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson, also on the Committee, asked Adams to write the document, but Adams declined and laid out three reasons in a letter to Jefferson: “Reason first: you are a Virginian and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can.” Adams did help edit the document and led the oral arguments within the Congress to adopt it, and with Jefferson, signed the Declaration when it was adopted.

In 1778, Adams sailed for France to serve as a commissioner alongside Benjamin Franklin and others. In France, he strongly urged the French to utilize their Navy to support American forces on land, a strategy that ultimately proved successful at the Battle of Yorktown. He later served as the Ambassador to the Netherlands, where he secured a loan for the young American government. McCullough argues that this loan may have saved the Republic, though the loan was not actually granted till nine months after the Battle of Yorktown, when the outcome of the war was mostly decided. Adams then traveled back to France where he helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, formally ended the Revolutionary War. It was during this time that he became close friends with Thomas Jefferson, another commissioner to the peace talks. At one point in 1787, Adams and his wife Abigail even cared for Jefferson’s daughter for a period of many months. In 1785, Adams became the first American Ambassador to Great Britain, where he, as mentioned above, personally met King George III.

In 1788, while the new Constitution was in the midst of a battle for ratification amongst the States, John Adams returned to New England as a private citizen. In January 1789, he was elected Vice President, based upon his diplomatic successes, his leadership in the Continental Congresses, and the need for a prominent New Englander to balance George Washington, a Virginian. Like many who came after him, Adams found the Vice Presidency relatively boring, though he took the role seriously and personally chaired the Senate every day. He became involved in an early scandal regarding by what title the President and other leaders should be addressed, preferring a lofty address such as Highness; for this many derided his character and accused him of being a closet monarchist for the rest of political life.***

In 1796, after George Washington declined to run again following two successful terms, the nation quickly divided into Federalist and Republican (also later called the Democratic-Republican Party) camps. The Federalists, led by Adams and Alexander Hamilton, generally supported Adams for the top job. The Republicans supported Thomas Jefferson. Neither candidate campaigned directly; Adams won by a narrow margin, with Jefferson coming in second and winning the Vice Presidency (the 12^th Amendment, ratified in 1804, would virtually end the possibility of a split administration between opposing parties). Of the day of his inauguration, the new President Adams later wrote that he caught a look on Washington’s face and “Me Thought I heard him think, ‘Aye! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!’”

McCullough makes much of the fact that Adams was not the same type of leader as Washington, stating “nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had [and] no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea [and] French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.” The threat of war with France (known as the Quasi-War) dominated Adams’ Presidency. As a result of the French Revolution and the Jay Treaty, signed between England and America in 1795 that helped resolve many of the lingering issues between the two powers following the Revolutionary War, France became more hostile to the young nation and began seizing American ships on the high seas. Adams called for a peace envoy to France, a national property tax, and a major naval buildup, leading to a Navy of almost 50 ships and 5000 sailors by the time he left office. The peace envoys arrived in France, where massive bribes were demanded of them to begin negotiations (later known as the XYZ Affair). Americans considered this a national insult, much of the country rallied around Adams’ military build-up, and his popularity soared.

At the height of his popularity, Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law in 1798, which allowed the President to imprison and deport non-U.S. citizens deemed to be dangerous or hostile to America and criminalized false statements that were critical of the Federal government. Republicans, led by James Madison and Vice President Jefferson, decried these laws as a way to suppress those opposed to the Federalists. Federalists claimed they were necessary for national security; they were partially created due to the threat of French agents found preparing military plans in France’s Louisiana territory. While the laws were seldom used by Adams, they served as a major catalyst to bring the Republicans together and unite them against the Administration.

In 1799, Adams took “the most decisive action of his presidency.” Siding with Jefferson and the Republicans against Hamilton and the Federalists, he surprised his own Cabinet and his allies in Congress by announcing another peace envoy to France. Adams could have ridden his new-found personal popularity to war with France, a war that likely would have cost thousands their lives and could have ended America before it had yet stood on its own feet. Federalist leadership supported the idea of a potential war, as it likely would have won the support of the people initially and led to their success in the coming election. However, war also would likely have cost thousands of lives and could have been disastrous for the young nation. The decision to pursue peace split the Federalist party, and led to Hamilton opposing Adams’ reelection in 1800.****

The election of 1800 was the first election when “two political parties had come into their own with a vitality and vengeance exceeding anything in the country’s experience,” with Vice President Jefferson running against the President.***** The election quickly turned nasty and personal attacks became routine. McCullough’s witty summary of the various attacks clearly shows that politics has always been a contact sport, even if both men stayed above the fray and let their surrogates do the fighting. Adams was “inevitably excoriated as a monarchist, more British than American, and therefore a bad man. He was ridiculed as old, addled, and toothless.” Jefferson, meanwhile, “was decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling, an intriguer intoxicated with French philosophy, more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man.” Jefferson “tagged Adams with being both mentally unsound and a monarchist.” There is significant irony in the fact that Jefferson, an owner of more than 500 slaves and a large plantation, could paint Adams as an aristocrat who “if he could, would enslave the common people.” Adams, in reality, hated slavery and tilled his own (much smaller) New England farm with his family and only hired labor.

The election was close. Adams received 65 Electoral College votes, in third place behind Jefferson’s and Aaron Burr’s 73 votes each. While the news arrived too late to affect the election, his peace envoy to France had been a success, leading to the Convention of Mortefontaine and ending the Quasi-War. While serving as a lame duck, Adams still took significant actions that he felt were right, such as nominating Secretary of State John Marshall as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall would go on to serve 34 years on the Court, uphold the principle of Judicial Review, and set many of the precedents followed by the Court still today. On March 4, 1801, Jefferson’s inauguration day, Adams rode of our Washington before dawn. He was proud of his accomplishments, writing that he had left his former friend and current nemesis a nation “with its coffers full” and “fair prospects of peace with all the world smiling in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative.”

After leaving office, Adams returned to his farm in Massachusetts and worked the land. Eventually, he and Jefferson reconciled in 1812, beginning a voluminous correspondence between the two. While they rarely discussed politics, they did rekindle their friendship. Following the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, Adams wrote a foreboding letter to Jefferson warning of the possibility of a war over slavery that might “rend this mighty [American] fabric in twain.” Adams had always hated slavery, calling it an “abhorrence” and “foul contagion in the human character.” He thought he and Jefferson should do something, but he didn’t know what they should do. Jefferson never responded to the letter.

Adams lived to see his son inaugurated as the 6^th President in 1825. With John Quincy in office, the elder Adams passed away on the 4^th of July, 1826, fittingly on the 50^th Anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which he had helped write, argued in support of, and signed. His last words, not knowing that Jefferson had passed away a few hours earlier, were “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

President John Adams was a complicated man. He was not a solider, but he was a fighter. He fought for what he believed in. He helped organize and lead the Revolutionary War, even when it seemed there was no hope of winning. He tried to do the right thing, even if it cost him politically and personally. He raised taxes and sued for peace as President, despite both actions being unpopular; yet in the lens of history, both actions were the right ones. He made mistakes, such as signing the Alien and Sedition Acts despite their inherent contradiction with First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech. When weighed against the test of time, Adams was a great, yet imperfect, man, and a strong, yet imperfect, president.

McCullough has written a testament to Adams life. He paints Adams in a favorable light, despite his seemingly irascibility, prideful temperament, and sense of intransigence. The book reads almost as a novel, bringing the 18^th century to life with both a love story between Adams and Abagail (though they rarely living together due to his extensive political travels) and tales of intrigue and hardship as Adams dutifully tried to find ways to make government succeed. The best parts, for me, were the juxta-positioning of Adams and Jefferson, two lions of their day, who were friends, were torn apart by politics, and then reunited as friends again before passing in to history books on the same historic day. However, there were contradictions that I wish McCullough more deeply explored, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts. McCullough shows that Adams, like all our founding fathers and most of our leaders, was a complex man and wrestled with doing what he believed was the right thing. The book has helped rebuild Adams’ reputation – it is worth your time.

Score: 8 – maybe a few too many long winded quotes (possibly like Adams), but a great biography worth the time.

 

* I am a huge Hamilton fan; the George III songs are amazing. Also, I was told this introduction didn’t really fit the tone of this review – but I like the musical too much. I had to include it.

** This pamphlet included the memorable phrase “Fear is the foundation of most governments.”

*** An example of how an early political misstep can haunt someone for the rest of their career.

**** I am an Alexander Hamilton fan as well; he is the father of the Coast Guard after all. Adams once said of Hamilton: “[Either] the man is stark mad or I am.”

***** In a strangely coincidental turn of events, the ensuing Presidential elections would remain relatively pacific until John Quincy Adams was running for reelection as President after just one term and was defeated by Andrew Jackson in 1828.

 

All quotes are from John Adams by David McCullough.

It’s interesting – our lives (or at least my life) sometimes seem so busy that we never have time to think. I am slowly working my way thru presidential biographies, and these esteemed leaders all found time to sit and think (well – most of them thought before they took action) despite incredibly rigorous schedules. They not only found time for thinking, but also for writing – writing a lot (again – most of them wrote). Then again, they didn’t have facebook and Instagram to distract them…

I recently finished George Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow* (side note: Ron Chernow is also the author of an amazing biography of Alexander Hamilton that I have read twice, which was translated into a musical that if you have not seen….you are missing out). Chernow’s deep biography gives readers a sense of who Washington really was – it shows his faults and his virtues (though more time is spent on the virtues). He was not the perfect and ideal man idolized by so many. He had doubts and deep insecurities, and did made mistakes. He struggled with how to lead his family, the Revolutionary Army, the Constitutional Convention, and eventually America. He was a great man, but at times, he let events and circumstances get the best of him. However, he was the defining American of his age, and his actions literally reshaped the world and made it a better place, for me personally, and arguably the entire human race.

Chernow paints a picture of a young, brash, emotional, ambitious, and possibly event cocky Washington. Though he never pursued a collegiate education (and did not even complete a full set of studies beyond elementary school), he early on became a surveyor and was licensed by the College of William and Mary. He was dedicated to improving his position in life. Leveraging his family’s influence, he was commissioned as a major in the Virginia militia at the age of 21. He quickly rose in rank and prestige (and height – he was 6 ft, 2 in tall), and helped start the French and Indian War while on a mission in the Ohio Country. Later, as the aide to British General Edward Braddock, both his tactical cunning and his bravery were noted when he convinced the General to separate his forces to enable quick movement, and during the Battle of Monongahela when he bravely rode back and forth across the battlefield to rally the troops despite extreme peril. As would happen throughout his life, he had multiple horses shot from underneath him and his clothing was shot through, but he miraculously emerged unscathed.

Following the battle, he was promoted to the Commander in Chief of Virginia’s militia, but he desperately coveted the prestige, pay, and honors that came with a commission in the regular British Army. As he would do when commanding the Revolutionary Army, he was a strict taskmaster and disciplinarian, while also constantly emphasizing the value of training and drills. He used these years of frontier fighting during the French and Indian War to hone his military and leadership skills, his personal command presence, and developed a keen understanding of strategic warfare. These abilities would absolutely serve him years later when fighting for American independence. At the same time, his successes and personal bravery allowed him to build his own reputation and following throughout Virginia, which he would successfully leverage for the rest of his life. Also, during this time, he saw the shortcomings of militias (the precursors to today’s reserve forces) as compared to regular troops, and would continue to see these units as undisciplined, unruly, and unreliable throughout the Revolutionary war.

Chernow describes in depth the wooing of the wealthy widow Martha Custis and how his marriage helped him rise in stature and become one of Virginia’s wealthiest men. At the same time, Chernow elaborates on Washington’s relationship with Sally Fairfax, the wife of a friend, and how while likely never acted upon, Washington may have been in love with her. It is possible that his relationship with Fairfax was what taught him to keep his previously visible emotions in check, and helped him assume the more stoic personality he would display for the rest of his life. While he would never have any direct descendants, Washington raised Martha’s two children, and later raised her grandchildren, treating them as if they were his own. Washington was first elected in 1758 to the local Virginia legislature. Chernow notes wryly how he plied voters with alcohol to help influence their voting – thought this was a common practice of the time (President Madison once lost an election because he chose not to use the alcohol-wooing technique, and later changed his stance on this practice on his way to the White House). Over time, his enjoyment of luxury goods from Britain and poor crop yields would leave him perpetually in debt, despite his large land holdings across Virginia (he was considered one of the richest men in America during his life).

Leading up to the Revolutionary War, Washington opposed the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and helped lead Virginia into supporting the First Continental Congress. At the beginning of the Second Continental Congress, shortly after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington arrived in full military uniform, and was quickly appointed the Commander of the Continental Army. Though he claimed a lack of ambition and to never have sought the role, Chernow notes that ordering a brilliant new uniform (from England), and arriving in this dress uniform, certainly showed he was willing to accept the job. Interestingly (and shrewdly), Washington refused to accept a salary during his time as Commander, only asking the Congress to cover his expenses (which likely would have exceeded his salary anyway).

Chernow’s book accurately portrays the intensity and gloom of the Revolutionary War. While Washington eventually proved up to the task, throughout the War, he had many doubters and almost lost everything on numerous occasions. He was up against a wall with volunteer militias operating on limited enlistments and few funds to provide supplies and equipment. He quickly learned what type of war he needed to fight – one of attrition and retreat. He skirmished when necessary, but knew he needed to bide his time and wait for the right opportunities against a better manned, equipped, and trained opponent, all while dealing with politicians and political forces that did not always believe in or trust him. He was a great general, leader, manager, cajoler, and warrior – truly courageous in the face of oncoming fire when needed and able to position his few forces in the right places at the right time for victory – and hold them together while waiting for that time. As Chernow states:

“His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and fleet. But he was a different kind of general fighting a different kind of war, and his military prowess cannot be judged by the usual scorecard of battles won and lost. His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major historic accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise: he had been resilient in the face of every setback, courageous in the face of every danger. He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them.”

Ever the nationalist, focused more on building one America rather than a collection of individual states, on July 4, 1775, he proclaimed that his soldiers were “now the troops of the United Provinces of North America and it is hoped that all distinctions of colonies will be laid aside.” Not everyone always received the message. Later that winter, a large fight began in the Army’s camp, as hundreds of soldiers from Massachusetts and Virginia began fighting each other. Washington dismounted his horse and “seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them.” The rest of the aggrieved troops took off in “all directions from the scene of the conflict.” Washington proved that he would build a national army, to unify all the colonies, if he had to beat his soldiers into submission himself (which he often did to ensure they followed his rule, authorizing numerous whippings for all sorts of petty crimes, showcased his beliefs as a disciplinarian). This passion helped lead Congress to later declare independence a year later, and raise the stakes of conflict as he sought to build a new nation.

Chernow’s flowing style, while lengthy, helps the reader truly understand the ups and downs of the war. The eventual American victory often now seems inevitable, but Chernow clearly shows how it was not, and how it was a combination of strategic brilliance, favorable weather (for the French Navy), and luck that enabled Washington to corner British Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and deliver the fatal blow (though the war would go on for a few more years and peace would not be settled till 1783). In one of the more famous and dramatic events at the end of the war, in 1783 a group of Army officers who had not received pay for almost a year drafted a memo and a series of letters to Congress with a vaguely worded threat of “fatal effects” to the Congress if they were not paid. Eventually, many of the officers mustered for a meeting to discuss their demands at an Army camp in Newburgh, NY. To the officers’ surprise, Washington arrived and, while he sympathized with their lack of pay, he urged patience and trust in civil government and made clear his objections to their demands of Congress and threats against the new nation. He then brought out a letter from Congress to read to them, and after fumbling to find his glasses, he stated, “Gentlemen, you must pardon me, I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” This sense of shared service and passion deflated the officers’ anger and frustrations, who quickly drafted resolutions of loyalty to Congress and a compromise was found.

A few months after the war formally ended, Washington dramatically and nobly resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief, retiring to his plantation at Mt. Vernon and his life as a farmer. After initial resistance, he was drawn back into national politics as the President of the Constitutional Convention. His string of failures and inability to wrangle consensus from Congress during the Revolutionary War led him to believe in the need for a strong central government. While he tried to remain mostly aloof during the Congress, his support for the new Constitution helped sway many delegates along the way. As Chernow notes, Washington had “gone to Philadelphia feeling that the war would be incomplete without a new Constitution; now, he knew, the Constitution would be incomplete without an effective new government.” Because of this need to demonstrate the effective possibilities of government, he allowed himself to be elected the first American President (the only President to be unanimously elected by the Electoral College, though Monroe came close when only one elector voted against him in 1820 during the Era of Good Feelings). He was keenly aware of the precedent setting nature of every decision he made, from the titles others gave him to the clothes he wore to the people he appointed. His ability to judge and utilize the talents of others, and delegate the right tasks to the right people (including the founder of the Coast Guard – Alexander Hamilton), absolutely helped enable his success during his two terms in office, and helped Washington shape the nation as he saw fit.

What surprised me was the venomous nature of politics in the 1790s, just as it is today. He grew to detest political parties, which for Washington, “weren’t so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.” While Washington was often able to remain the one person above the fray due to his reputation and standing following the war, politics was a brutal business of character assassination and fighting for power in a way that many today refuse to recognize as they idolize our early leaders. Chernow does stellar job laying out the many battles of the day, including the fight for where to place the new capital, support for the French Revolution, the financial woes of the new nation, the Whiskey Rebellion, and more. In showcasing his successes, Chernow notes:

“[Washington] had restored American credit and assumed state debt; created a bank, a mint, a coast guard, a customs service, and a diplomatic corps; introduced the first accounting, tax, and budgetary procedures; maintained peace at home and abroad; inaugurated a navy, bolstered the army, and shored up coastal defenses and infrastructure; proved that the country could regulate commerce and negotiate binding treaties; protected frontier settlers, subdued Indian uprisings, and established law and order amid rebellion, scrupulously adhering all the while to the letter of the Constitution. Most of all he had shown a disbelieving world that republican government could prosper without being spineless or disorderly or reverting to authoritarian rule.^”

Multiple times during his first term, Washington became sick and his companions expected him to die. Many saw his as indispensable, and were afraid the nation could not survive without him. Fortunately, he recovered, and strongly considered retiring after just one term, complaining of old age, sickness, politics, and the brutal treatment of his policies in the press. The combined arguments of Jefferson and Hamilton kept him in office, where he again won unanimously in the Electoral College. In 1796, pained with poor health (including his infamous poor dental hygiene) and frustrated with the nature of politics, he magnanimously decided not to run for a third term that he surly would have won. This precedent of stepping down rather than continuing to run for President for the rest of his life would help define American politics and established the democratic transfer of executive power for the nation.

Washington’s farewell address, written with the help of Hamilton, is now required reading in civics classes throughout America. He spoke of the need for unity, to place national identity above State and local identities, and to look beyond religion, habits, manners, and politics to remain united while warning against those who sought to secede and abandon the Union. He spoke of the strength of the Constitution, and while it remained imperfect, that there was a process for changing it. He warned against the growth of factions (or political parties), which he had seen rise during this time as President, as they can subvert the will of the people. He went on to argue for the avoidance of war, abstain from too much borrowing, paying of the debt, and the need to stand firm against foreign interference and entanglements. Washington even seems to argue against the need for a large military establishment, explaining that the Union should “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” He closed with a note of humility and contentment, stating:

“Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope, that my Country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”

In retirement, Washington returned to Mt. Vernon, where he was extremely troubled by his dentures and slowly began losing his hearing. During this time, he became not just the “Father of his country, [but also] revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule” (you will need to read the book for more details). Washington would briefly serve again as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, which was being raised in anticipation of a potential war with France, before he passed away in 1799. Chernow discusses at length the contradictions in Washington’s life – his desire for freedom and support of the rights of man as compared to his ownership of hundreds of slaves. While he did arrange in his will to free all of his slaves following his wife’s later death, Washington was very aware of the abilities of African Americans and the immorality of slavery. At times, he treated his slaves with some respect, refusing to sell them without their permission and allowing them to marry of their own accord, but at the same time, he allowed and even sanctioned extensive corporal punishment and pursued escaped slaves vehemently.

Chernow’s book was as eye-opening and discerning (especially in the way it translates the more formal style of speaking and writing from that of the late 1700’s into today’s vernacular) as it was lengthy. It showcases the flaws and the brilliance of Washington. He, like all of us, suffered for doubts and shortcomings. But he was the great American of his age, and without his actions, nobility, and humility, America would likely not exist today. Many of the lessons he left for us are absolutely still applicable, from his frustration with using religion for partisan purposes to his desire to put country above self and personal gain.  The book, in its incredible detail, walks the reader through the Revolutionary War and the early political struggles in a way that enables one to see these early leaders as real people rather than caricatures. And I think that is how Washington would have preferred to be remembered.

 

Scorre: 8.0 – amazing history, but a little on the long side.

* I met Ron Chernow a few years ago and we discussed his different books and upcoming projects – his is truly a humble and enterprising scholar.

A few years ago, my father called my brothers and me, and asked what we all wanted to do with him before he was too old to venture out into the wilderness anymore. I immediately replied that I wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and raft the Grand Canyon. We climbed Kilimanjaro in 2014, and last summer, we rafted the upper half of the Grand Canyon. It was fast, cold (and hot once you meandered more than 10 ft from the water), slightly dangerous, exhilarating, and a literal blast. In short, it was a perfect adventure and vacation for us. One of our guides recommended a book at the end of the trip – the story of the (then) fastest run thru the Grand Canyon – the story of the Emerald Mile.

In 1983, during one of the strongest El Nino events ever recorded (the book claims it was the strongest, but the internet claims otherwise), the West Coast was battered with record snowfalls. The Colorado River, by now a network of basins and dams that included untouched stretches such as the 277 mile long Grand Canyon, quickly began to rise. The drainage basins, such as Lake Powell, began to fill as the snow melted. The Lake is fenced in by Glen Canyon Dam, just 16 miles above Lee’s Ferry, the starting point of the Grand Canyon. As the flood waters continued to rise, the dam operators (damn operators to some) allowed more and more water to flow through their turbines, and eventually through the emergency spillways. The Grand Canyon water levels rose, the speed of the current increased, and the rapids became exponentially more dangerous. It was at this time, when the water was flying through the canyon at full speed, that three intrepid and foolhardy river guides decided to race the river and attempt to set the speed record for the fastest non-motorized descent of the Canyon (even though two of them already held the previous record). On June 27, 1983, a wooden dory named the Emerald Mile completed its record breaking speed run down 277 miles of river in just 36 hours, 38 minutes, and 29 seconds.*

Years later, after the lead rafting guide, Kenton “Factor” Grua, had passed away, Kevin Fedarko heard of the story. His book, The Emerald Mile, chronicles far more than just the hair-brained antics the three guides onboard a wooden boat plunging through life-threatening rapids of massive size. Rather, it covers the vast history of the Grand Canyon, starting with a Spaniard named Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, a squadron leader of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (yes, the Coronado who was searching for the Seven Cities of Gold).** In 1540, Cardenas and his 12-man squad were the first Europeans to set eyes on Grand Canyon (at a time when there was not a single European settlement along the coast of what would one day become the United States, and more than 67 years before the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown). They were followed centuries later by Major John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first known expedition down the Colorado River in 1869, and who bestowed the name “Grand Canyon” on the geologic formation. Powell set out with 9 other men in his party, 4 of whom would depart along the way (3 disappeared after quitting and hiking out of the Canyon, never to be seen again). When the group finally reached the Virgin River after 3 months of rafting along 930 miles of the Colorado, they were virtually emaciated and had only 1.5 days of food remaining. When he died in 1902, Powell was ranked alongside other great explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark.

As the story winds through history, it also tells of the rise of the environmental movement, much of which came about as a response to a dam-building bender led by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. The Sierra Club’s growth and their victories over proposed dam projects up and down the Colorado, including in the Grand Canyon, are explicit detailed in action-packed tales of successful public policy campaigns (well…as action-packed as bureaucracy can get). This battle, between water usage and control, which has enabled irrigation and cheap power across America, provided commodities like fresh vegetables in the Winter, and helped control floods over the past 50 years, rages against the desire to preserve nature in its most pristine form. Fedarko gives credit to both sides, but definitely leans towards the need for nature to be kept free. During my own trip down the Canyon, I visited scars of this battle, as my brothers and I explored tunnels dug at mile 40 of the Canyon where the proposed Marble Dam was almost built. I was glad the Canyon remained pristine, but these massive dams also prevent the use of huge amounts of fossil fuels annually and provide millions with access to fresh water. Fedarko acknowledges this, but also seems to recognize that the battle is not always between those who would use nature and those who would let it be; but rather it is between those that try to accomplish something grand and those that chose to remain ignorant. He sees that America has “swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than it once was” and that “in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.”

The book also tells a fourth story: the story of modern life inside the canyon. It speaks to how park rangers and river guides today work together with thousands of annual tourists like me at the bottom of the Canyon, and millions at the top along the South Rim. This was the most meaningful story, as guides and others venture into the vast expanses of the Canyon, and stare at the massive walls of stone, question the meaning of life, their own future, and the “universe’s implacable indifference to [their] hopes and longings.” Yet at the same time, these guides and rangers and tourists – they (we) all seem to find happiness sleeping under the stars, dodging the massive ants, plunging through the waves, enjoying the “harrowing beauty” in this “cathedral in the desert,” and pondering the “Canyon’s inscrutable wonder – its seductiveness, its complexity, [and] its symphonic merging of the evanescent and the eternal.”

My trip down the Canyon was very different that Grua’s and his friends. My family and I paddled in rafts, rowed in oar boats, and even spent some time in duckie kayaks along the way. We went slow and enjoyed ourselves. The trip was effervescent and fleeting and gone far too fast, leading us to return to our less adventurous and, at times, mundane lives. But we only rafted the top half of the Canyon. The bottom half, with the bigger and faster rapids, is still calling.

Score: 8.5. I want to go back.

*In 2016, the record was broken twice in 2 days by groups of kayakers, leaving a new record of 34 hours and 2 minutes.

**The book even mentions the “giant, three toed Shasta ground sloths” that inhabited the Canyon 11,000 years ago. I had to look these creatures up. They seem amazing.

I have personally never wanted to run a drug cartel. It is not something that rises to the top when I stop to consider new career paths. However, I am interested in how the drug trade works. So was Tom Wainwright, an editor for the Economist, who wrote this book. He dissected the drug trade by looking at it from an economist’s point of view. What motivates drug cartels and their leaders to take specific actions? Why does this multi-billion dollar industry operate the way it does? What drives the price of drugs at different stops along the supply chain? How should we, as rational consumers and governments (in theory governments should be rational), respond to these actions?

Wainwright opens by walking through the cocaine supply chain. He shows that cartels are successful organizations that are run like giant oligopolies. They are the sole buyers for cocaine sellers (ie. the growers) in their own specific regions. In the past, they have generally set their own avenues or areas of control and then stayed out of each other’s way and often colluded (though Wainwright absolutely discusses how inter-cartel conflict has turned bloody in specific countries like Mexico over the past 20 years). Citing specific figures, he explains how 350 kilos of coca leaves, costing about $385 at the source, is converted into a kilo of cocaine sold in the retail market for more than $120,000. But these huge markups mask an economic mirage. Much of the markup is a result of costs such as smuggling, money laundering, and security along the way. If a country (like Colombia) increases eradication efforts so that the dried coca leaves (the raw materials) double in costs, that doesn’t mean that the cost in the retail market will double. Rather, the new retail price will simply add another $385 per kilo (to $120,385) because the other costs that caused the markup remain constant. And herein lies one of the many economic gems of this book – eradication efforts at the source don’t really end up affecting the retail price of narcotics.

There are scores of other nuggets along the way, than when explained and thought out, suddenly make sense. Just like legal companies are subject to government regulation, cartels need to pay their regulators, the police, through bribery and security efforts. Expecting a certain portion of your drug shipments to be captured is often considered a cost of doing business. Human resource management – hiring and maintaining a quality workforce – is a massive problem for cartels. An excellent location for cartels to recruit is in prisons, where gangs are rampant and job training is minimal, especially across Latin America. Cartels have massive corporate social responsibility and advertising programs to win the support of local communities where they operate by building churches, playgrounds, and other facilities.

For me, the most interesting part of the book dealt with Wainwright’s potential solutions. While he extrapolates on the dangers of legalization as people will overuse and overdose regulated products (as has happened in multiple instances in Colorado with legalized marijuana), Wainwright correctly notes that marijuana legalization in some American states cut Mexican cartel profits by 30% or more. He sees legalization and regulation as a step forward. However, a recent article in Esquire magazine noted that as Mexican cartels were deprived of their profits from the marijuana trade, some turned instead to Heroin and helped drive the epidemic of opioid addiction in America. By legalizing marijuana, we may have made things worse as cartels flooded markets with both home-grown and synthetic heroin.

Wainwright’s other solutions are intriguing and could definitely be helpful. He discusses the need to focus on demand reduction to a far greater extent, the need to invest in programs like job-training in jails and drug addiction treatment to prevent future cartel employees and customers, and the need for more international cooperation in areas beyond just supply reduction. However, these are mostly added in at the end of the book. I feel that the argument would have been much stronger if these were more fully fleshed out. For example, in his discussion of legalization, he never explains how this would work with stronger and more dangerous drugs beyond marijuana, like heroin or methamphetamines.

This book is not quite a how-to manual. But it did make me think about the drug trade from the cartel’s point of view. I definitely recommend it for those who want to learn more. Score: 8.0.

**Opening note: I initially wrote this short story for a class I took on military strategy. I kind of enjoyed writing it. I hope you enjoy reading  it.

 

Introduction

Coco unfurled as the sun crested the hill. He felt content. The sun was shining. He was approaching his third birthday – three whole months since he first budded from the large branch and became a leaf. He was getting big; almost two inches. It was exciting living on the branch.

Then he heard footsteps. Three men approached. Jose was there. He was the one who plucked the weeds, told the leaves to grow, and fed the tree they lived on. The leaves loved Jose. The branch had told them that one day Jose would take them all away for an adventure. Coco was scared of the adventure, but also slightly curious. He did not know what to expect.

The other two men were new. Their voices grew louder. One was tall with hair covering his face and one was short and round. The short one spoke.

“To win a war, you need the right strategy. Strategy is simple. The keys to winning were laid down 150 years ago. Once you have the right strategy, you must align your policy. These same ideas, they could work for you in your war.”

The tall man stroked the hair above his mouth, twisting the edges in big circles. “You don’t think I have the right strategy?”

The shorter man laughed a little. “No, that is not it. I do think we should assess your strategy. The Americans though, they definitely don’t have the right strategy. It is not aligned with their policy. This is why you have been able to survive and even thrive in this war so far.”

Suddenly, Jose was right next to Coco. He reached up and gripped the leaf at his base. Coco felt himself being ripped from large branch. Pain shot up his veins. He dropped and fell into a large rough brown sack. The pain was too much. He blacked out.

 Part 1 – The Trinity

 War is…a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as the blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone. The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government.[1]

Coco woke as Jose lifted him from the pile of his fellow leaves in the sack. He was placed on a large piece of blue plastic. The sun was bright overhead – it was hot. There were leaves everywhere on the blue plastic. Why were they all just lying here? Was this the grand adventure? Coco no longer felt like this was going to be much fun. The other two men were nearby. They were speaking.

“Now they dry out for 5 or 10 hours. They must be fully dry before the processing.” The tall man spoke with thick accent, similar to Jose’s when he had talked to the leaves and told them to grow. “The people – the farmers – they are good people. Their passion makes a beautiful product. And they are proud of this work.”

“No. You are wrong.” The short round man spoke. He seemed to not speak so roughly. He removed a set of glass objects from his face, wiped them on a blue cloth, and then replaced them. “Mr. El Guapo, you do not understand. Your side requires three groups of people. First, you must have the primordial passion and blind demand of addiction and pleasure that drives the masses of the Western world to buy Cocaine. These are people you must cultivate, the ones on whom you must rely. They are your customers. They are ones with passion.”

“Second, you must have your army. But your army is not just your soldiers with guns, who defend your territory and try to slip past the border guards into America. No, your army are these good people too. The ones that grow your crops. They would all turn to other jobs if they could. They do not grow the coco leaves or fight for you because they are passionate. They do it for money. You pay them far more than they could otherwise earn. If there were other good options for them, then they would turn on you.[2] You must be wary of this. They will make mistakes in the fog as they move forward and try to slip your product into the hands of customers. There is always a chance they will be caught or stopped along the way; but if you control them with enough money and fear, then they will be mostly loyal.”

“Finally, you exist. You and your fellow czars. You are the policy makers; the governors of your organization. You own the politicians. You decide how you will operate and how you will fight this war.”

“These are the three crowds that you must differentiate and balance against each other.”

The first man, the tall one called El Guapo, seemed to glare. Then he laughed.

“This is why you here Carlton. This is what I want you for. You see things I do not always see. I need to understand this strategy. I need to know how to keep winning this war. This is why I have paid you to come all the way down here. ” He paused for a minute and twirled the hair on his face again.

Suddenly El Guapo, knelt down and leaned over. Coco could see the short black and grey hairs, combed from one side of his head to the other, almost like he was trying to cover up the area with no hair in the middle. El Guapo plucked Coco up from the ground and placed him inside a pouch on the front left side of Carlton’s shirt.

“I want you to take this leaf. You should become friends with this leaf. We must follow where these leaves go. See how our system works. Learn from it. We will travel together and learn together. We must find the truth. We must find what I need to do so that I will never lose this war.”

Carlton patted his shirt pouch, crunching Coco up against his chest with ever strike. “I will do as you say Mr. El Guapo. I will learn your strategy. And I will teach you what must be done to win.”

Part 2 – Rationality

Since war is not a senseless passion, but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.[3]

Carlton pulled Coco from the shirt pouch and laid him on a table. Coco could see they were in some sort of room with lots of men with cups full of steaming dark liquid. It smelled vaguely of the coffee trees that grew down the valley. Their smell had wafted up to him and the other leaves and warmed their chlorophyll. It made Coco feel much better.

He had not been feeling very good for the past few days. From his vantage point with Carlton, he had been watched as all the other leaves – his friends – had been swept up and taken inside. There they were all dumped into a large machine and chopped into tiny pieces. They all seemed to be in agony. Then different liquids were dumped into the machine. The containers were labeled CEMENT, NITRATES, GASOLINE, and later ACETONE and HYDROCLORIC ACID. Coco had no clue what they meant, but he knew they smelled bad. In the end, all that was left was a small pile of white powder that was packed up tightly into rectangular bricks and taken away.[4] Carlton and El Guapo had laughed the entire time. Coco would have thrown up if it was possible. His friends were all gone, and it smelled very bad.

The bricks were loaded in a truck and covered with bananas. Coco had seen bananas before. Jose loved to eat them while grooming the trees. Coco, Carlton, and El Guapo followed the truck in another vehicle as they traveled on this grand adventure. Then they arrived. The truck sat on a street down at the edge of a road. Beyond the road was some sand, followed by water for as far as Coco could see. He had never seen so much water. Carlton took him inside and put him on the table. He began to speak.

“So Mr. El Guapo, what is it you wish to achieve? You must always have your end state clear in your mind.” Carlton sipped from his mug of steaming liquid.

El Guapo chuckled. “Isn’t it obvious? I want money. I want power.” He stopped and seemed to think for a minute. “I want happiness. I want to retire in peace with my family.”

Carlton starred back. “Yes. Money we can make. Your revenue stream and profits are massive. Your markups are unheard of in the legal world. Think about your supply chain. Your growers are paid roughly $800 for enough leaves to make one kilo of pure cocaine. ” Coco winced at the mention of his friends, but Carlton kept talking. “That kilo is worth $2,400 by the time it leaves South America, $19,000 by the time it arrives in America and is given to your lieutenants there, and more than $122,000 when you sell it on the streets. That doesn’t even factor in cutting it up. That is a 152,500% mark up.[5] The total global drug trade is valued somewhere around $300 billion per year – and you have a large part of it.”[6]

“You also have huge costs. Raw materials are cheap. You have a huge, dispersed work force. You must pay them enough to not only buy their labor, but also their loyalty – or at least use other tactics to scare them into remaining loyal. You have security costs needed to stop other organizations from ambushing and stealing your products. You have finance costs because you can’t simply deposit your revenue in a bank. You deal mostly in cash and exporting all that cash from your sales in America costs a lot. This exporting and scrubbing of cash can cost you 15% off the top.”[7]

“Hmm.” Carlton paused. “Bitcoins seem to be a profitable and might be a helpful mechanism for you now.[8]” He continued. “You also have to deal with the government. Other business have regulatory costs they must overcome; your regulatory costs are the losses to law enforcement organizations. You could send out ten boat loads today; two may get caught and the rest get through. Some more of the drugs may be caught along the way. Roughly 70% probably gets through to the end users.[9] You also have taxes – the costs of bribing officials. Then there are the large costs associated with aiding the communities where you operate, which are your corporate social responsibility costs to sway public opinion. You must win the people to your side enough to earn their tacit support.”[10]

“These costs add up, but even with all of them, you are still making so much profit you don’t know how to spend it. Yet these are not the only costs you need to consider. While there is a risk to your forces that they may be captured or shot, you pay them well for that. You also need to think about the rationale cost of the risks you are taking personally. For years, the Americans and their partners have pursued a strategy to focus on stopping the leadership of drug trafficking organizations. They will offer bribes or immunity to many lower level employees in order to capture the head of a cartel.[11] This is a major risk for you. With all the violence caused by your organization, and the law enforcement mindset of the authorities, you will be hunted for the rest of your life. It will be very difficult to retire and disappear. Look at El Chapo and Pablo Escobar; neither was able to retire.”

Carlton stopped speaking. El Guapo took a deep breath, and pulled the hair on his face taut. He let it go, and then spoke. “Yes, you are right. So how do I get out of this? What is my end state? What should be my goal?”

Carlton had Coco between his thumb and forefinger. He held him up and rubbed him back and forth. Coco enjoyed it, a little like the massage Carlton spoke of needing. “You must set a goal. You must know when enough money is enough. And when your personal fortune is big enough, you have two options to escape. Option one: you turn yourself into the authorities in exchange for information on your comrades. You become a rat. You accept their immunity and, in return, you tell them everything you know. They will hide you. Eventually, you can dig up wherever you stored your money, and live a modest life outside of this war. Whoever replaces you in your organization will hunt you, and you may be found and killed, but that is a risk you must take.”

“Option two: you run. Once you have enough cash saved, you try to escape. You change your face. You disappear, leave this region of the world forever, and hide. Though you must remember, you will be hunted like before, but this time the greatest law enforcement agencies in the world will be looking for you. And if they find you, you will go to jail for the rest of your life.”

“Neither of these is a good option, but remember, this war will go on in perpetuity unless the Americans change their strategy. Your side will keep making massive profits and people will eventually get arrested or try to disappear. The Americans and the governments of the world will keep trying to expunge organizations like yours. They will not stop until they have arrested and destroyed your cartel, occupied your lands, and convinced others like you to not take up this industry.[12] But this will not happen; even if you are stopped, others will find new lands and try to reap these enormous profits. Unless the fundamental values of the world change, caused by a change in America’s strategy, then the war will not end. Your only hope is to get out.”

Part 3 – Intelligence and the Nature of War

The general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are. Whatever is hidden from full view in this feeble light has to be guessed at by talent, or simply left to chance. So…one has to trust to talent or to luck.

The degree of force that must be used against the enemy depends on the scale of political demands on either side.[13]

The air was damp on the boat. They had been at sea for four days. Coco had heard this was a fishing boat and that fish came from the water, but he did not see any work going to pull the fish out of the water. El Guapo had said that they would pretend to be fishermen, but all he and Carlton had done was talk. Well, they would talk when Carlton wasn’t throwing up. His face had seemed a slight shade of green for much of the past few days, almost as if he and Coco were the same color.

Today the water was flat and the boat did not seem to rock back and forth as much. Carlton seemed able to stand. He and El Guapo were in the fresh air talking. You couldn’t see very far in the gray air; you heard the waves rather than saw them. El Guapo kept saying the voyage would end soon, and then he would stroke the hair above his lip while laughing at Carlton. Coco wondered if his adventure would end soon too.

Carlton had muttered yesterday that it was all over. Some men from another boat had come over and seemed to be searching the ship. They had guns and their shirts said COAST GUARD. While they were onboard, Carlton kept sweating and mumbling about how this wasn’t the way it was supposed to end. But the other men looked everywhere and never found anything. Eventually they left. It took a long time for El Guapo to calm Carlton down.

But El Guapo seemed frustrated now; he was waving his arms a lot while he spoke. “They probably knew we were out here. They probably had some sort of intelligence about us. Someone was a rat.”

“Yes,” Carlton responded, “but you must remember, intelligence is often contradictory, false or uncertain. Sometimes they get lucky and sometimes they don’t.”[14]

“You weren’t feeling so lucky yesterday,” El Guapo sneered. “You were scared. Your cowardice almost gave us away.”

“Of course I was scared. In this fog, anything can happen. They could have recognized your face and arrested all of us. They could have realized that you and I do not know how to fish. They could have boarded the boat we are following that actually has the drugs on it, making this trip a waste of time. They could have planted drugs on us just to get another arrest.[15] You would be crazy to not be scared. This fear is part of the cost you must accept, like what we discussed back on shore.”

“But we did get lucky. You never know what is going to happen out here. Some of your boats might get caught. Some might sink. Some of your people might steal the drugs on their own. Anything can happen.”

“You are lucky,” El Guapo pointed at Carlton. “You are lucky they did not find your friend here.” He reached into Carlton’s dirty shirt pouch and plucked out Coco, holding him up. “And you are lucky they did not find the little bit of powder you keep in the bottom of your briefcase.”

Carlton looked surprised and slightly scared. “You know about that?”

“Of course. When you have been around this business as long as I have, you can tell when someone is having some fun.” He paused to let it sink in. “But it is ok. Addiction is what I do. I will give you what you need in the future, but you must continue to help me.”

Carlton seemed to gulp in the air for few seconds. Then he regained his composure. “Yes, we are lucky. If the Americans had destroyed this ship, or run our faces through some crazy satellite, they may have caught us. But they didn’t. They call this a war, but to them, it is no absolute war. They do not kill, or die, or even risk their lives. They do not raise their taxes and force their citizens to work harder to find victory. No, it is a limited war. And this is good for you and for us. If it had been an absolute war, they would have likely found my drugs, identified you, and they may have shot us.”

Carlton paused to let this sink in. He felt much more surefooted when he was talking policy or strategy rather than being searched by the government. “But their politics don’t allow this to be an absolute war. Are their vital national security interests jeopardized by your operations? Absolutely not. And so they limit their force and operations in this war to just law enforcement. Some would even say that the ‘War on Drugs’ is no real war. I would disagree. They are using force, albeit limited force, to compel their enemy – you and your counterparts – to do their will and stop you.[16] This is a war; just a very limited war.”

“In the same way, you must limit the force you use. When the Americans try to stop you, let them. Don’t fight back or escalate. Accept your losses as they come and allow them to think they have the upper-hand while you keep moving additional product. If you escalate the war, they will escalate in response. They have far more resources than you will ever have. Remember what happened with the American Customs agent Zapata. When the Zetas cartel accidently killed him, the Americans arrested more than 100 suspects and came after the Zetas.[17] It was not a good time. You must set the policy for your organization to keep your side of the war limited as well, or it will escalate and go badly for you.”

Part 4 – The Center of Gravity and Policy

One must keep the dominate characteristics of both belligerents in mind. Out of these characteristics a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all…energies should be directed.

We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.[18]

Coco could tell they were a long way from the hill and his home on the long branch. The trip on the boat had ended when they were taken to a stretch of sand and a jeep drove them through a forest. Then a desert. Finally they walked into a house, through a door, and into a small, tight corridor that made Coco long for a breeze. When they came out the other side, Carlton had said that it felt good to be home, but they were in a big empty warehouse and Coco didn’t know what he meant.

Afterwards, they drove for a long time, occasionally stopping and watching as the pile of taped up bricks of what used to be his friends were slowly divided up and exchanged for large stacks of green paper. And then they ended up here: in a red building with a giant M on top of it. El Guapo was eating a sandwich that had some sort of black layer, and a red layer, and bright great leaf in it. It made Coco mad.

Coco could see the two men watching something at another table. Two figures had just exchanged brown paper sacks. Coco had seen one of them put a packet of the powder in one of the sacks earlier that afternoon. He suspected the other sack had more of the green paper. The new one, who was received the sack of powder, had a slight dribble of something red coming out of her nose. Her eyes seemed abnormally big; it was not a good look.

“Well, that’s how it’s done.” El Guapo said. “You see that woman. She is the reason we will never lose this war. She is the reason that we will keep making the profits. She is the reason we exist.”

“Yes. She is the driver that makes you exist,” Carlton responded, “but she is not the reason you have succeeded in this war. You see, in every war, each side has a center of gravity. This is the pinnacle point around which if the enemy force engages and wins, the momentum will favor them and you will be defeated. The center of gravity is simply the key element that allows your side to survive and accomplish what you want. It is the aspect of this war that allows you to keep selling narcotics. Fortunately for you, the Americans have not yet attacked this war’s center of gravity. This is why you have been able to succeed. ”

“I do not understand. What is this center of gravity?”

Carlton held up Coco. “Right now, the Americans see this leaf as the center of gravity. They focus the majority of their efforts and dollars on stopping him from arriving. The Federal Drug Control Budget is around $25 billion each year. Over half is focused on law enforcement efforts and interdictions.[19] This doesn’t even consider the massive local resources spent on the drug war, where local cops dedicate so much of their time and effort. But focusing on this leaf doesn’t matter. If they come after this leaf, and its tree back in Colombia, it will just shift to another country. When the Peruvian government cut down on coca farming in the 1990s, your organization and others shifted to growing in Colombia. When Colombia drove the farmers out, coca came back with a vengeance in Peru. When the Coast Guard and its friends made it harder to send shipments through the Caribbean, you moved your operations to the Central American corridor and through Mexico. It’s the ‘balloon effect.’ You squeeze in one place and it pops up in another.[20] No, supply reduction is not the center of gravity, yet that is where the Americans focus their efforts.”

El Guapo nodded his head. “I think I understand. You are saying that she is the center of mass,” pointing to the woman as she walked out of the room.

“No, not her. Her demand for your addictive narcotics. Hillary Clinton, who may very well be the next President of the United States, once said that America has an ‘insatiable demand for illegal drugs.’[21] If the Americans could stop that demand they would have reached your center of gravity. They would be on track to putting you out of business. If they could grow and increase the effectiveness of their treatment and prevention programs, and thus find a way to reduce the addictive hold drugs have over their users, they could cut demand dramatically.”

“Even worse, look at what the Americans did to the marijuana market. The marijuana market was worth about $2 billion per year to the Mexican cartels. Then it was legalized in four states, and that revenue may be cut by up to 75% in the coming years as people travel to Denver and Seattle rather using the Mexican supply.[22] By making marijuana legal, there will no longer be a demand for illegal marijuana from Mexico, where it had to be grown and imported illegally. They killed the demand for your product. Organizations like yours will need to diversify or die. Just like the end of prohibition, when millions of dollars in tax revenue were made by taxing alcohol while the criminal organizations had to find new ways to produce the revenue needed to survive.[23]”

Carlton was on a roll. Coco could tell because he was talking faster and getting excited. The business man pushed the round circular pieces of glass a little further up his nose and continued. “Cutting supply doesn’t even help. The demand for drugs is relatively inelastic. This means that even if the price changes significantly there will not be a large drop in the number of customers. This makes total sense because drugs are addictive. The people need to have them.” He took a quick breath. “Are you ready for some math?”

El Guapo held up his finger. “I do not like math. I like things I can touch. But I will listen. Keep going.”

“The demand for cocaine is inelastic. By one estimate, for a 10% increase in price, there will be only a 1.7% decrease in users.[24] Let’s say you have a dealer selling 100 grams a week at $100 per gram, making $10,000 per week. Then the government arrests enough of your organization and stops enough of your supply that prices go up 10%, say from $100 to $110 per gram. Now the dealer will lose 1.7% of his business, so he only sells 98.3 grams. But the price has gone up. So each of those grams is worth more. Multiplying 983 grams by $110 gives you $10,813. Less cocaine was sold, but the prices went up, and because of inelastic demand, the dealer, and therefore you, actually made more money.”

“This is the magic of addictive drugs, and how drug traffickers are winning. You may get caught in the long run, but so long as the politicians chose to make policy to fight their war by attacking supply and not dedicating more effort to your center of gravity, the demand for drugs, organizations like yours will keep on profiting with absurd amounts of money. It’s all politics. This is how they chose to fight their war. This is what the people want. They attack our friend here,” Carlton held up Coco again, “and they don’t attack the one thing that could stop you. Their policy does not fit the strategy they need to win.”

El Guapo thought for a minute, twirling his face hair. And then he laughed. He slowly pulled Coco from Carlton’s hand. “Why do they hate you so much my friend?” Coco couldn’t respond, but he did not want to be hated. He just wanted to go back in Carlton’s warm, sweaty shirt pouch. El Guapo set him on the table. “It’s just politics.”

Carlton stood up. He pulled out a piece of paper with a name and number on it. “Have your people call me and we will set up delivery for the rest of my fee.”

El Guapo took the paper and glanced at it. “Your name is Carlton Klass Wits?

Carlton picked up Coco and put him back in his shirt pouch. “It’s a German name.” Coco was happy. He was ready for another adventure.

As Carlton walked out, he looked back and said one more thing. “Call me Carl.”

 

 

 

 

[1] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 89.

[2] A 2014 study found a negative relationship between the price of corn (maize) to the amount of land in Mexico dedicated to growing marijuana and opium. As the price of corn decreased (especially following the introduction of cheap American corn through NAFTA in 1994), the amount of land focused on illicit crops grew. But the level of marijuana cultivation then decreased in 2005 as the price of corn rose. Oeindrila Dube, Omar Garcia-Ponce, and Kevin Thom, “From Maize to Haze: Agricultural Shocks and the Growth of the Mexican Drug Sector,” Center for Global Development (February 2014, accessed 30 April 2016); available from http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/maize-haize-agricultural-shocks-growth-mexican-drug-sector_1.pdf.

[3] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 92.

[4] This process is described in further depth in Tom Wainwright’s Narconomics. Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 23.

[5] Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter, “Prime Numbers: Doped,” Foreign Policy, (16 October 2009, accessed 30 April 2016); available from http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/16/prime-numbers-doped/.

[6] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Time for Policy Change against Crime, not in Favor of Drugs,” (speech presented to the 52^nd Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Vienna, 11 March 2009, accessed 1 May 2016), available from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/about-unodc/speeches/2009-03-11.html.

[7] Patrick Radden Keefe, “Cocaine Incorporated,” The New York Times Magazine, (15 June 2012, accessed 14 April 2016), available from http://nyti.ms/KqGYx9.

[8] Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 171.

[9] The current national interdiction goal is to remove only 40% of the cocaine entering America. In 2010, the U.S. documented seizures of 244 metric tons of cocaine compared to a flow of 804 metric tons, or a 30% removal rate. Office of National Drug Control Policy, “Transit Zone Operations,” The White House, (Date unknown, accessed 1 May 2016), available from https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/transit-zone-operations.

[10] Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 89.

[11] David Epstein, “Devils, Deals and the DEA,” ProPublica (17 December 2015, accessed 14 April 2016), available from https://www.propublica.org/article/devils-deals-and-the-dea.

[12] Thus destroying an enemies forces, occupying their country, and breaking their will. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 90.

[13] Ibid, 140, 585.

[14] Ibid, 117.

[15] While not something the Coast Guard has dealt with, significant corruption has taken place in some other U.S. law enforcement agencies. Josh Ellis, “America’s Dirties Cops: Cash, Cocaine and Corruption on the Texas Border,” Rolling Stone (5 January 2015, accessed 14 April 2016), available from http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/americas-dirtiest-cops-cash-cocaine-texas-hidalgo-county-20150105.

[16] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75.

[17] Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 145.

[18] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 595-596, 87.

[19] The FY2015 Federal Government Budget request included $9.5 billion for treatment, $1.3 billion for prevention, $9.2 billion for domestic law enforcement, $3.9 billion for interdiction, and $1.5 billion for international law enforcement assistance. Executive Office of the President of the United States, “FY2015 Budget and Performance Summary: Companion to the National Drug Control Strategy,” (July 2014, accessed 1 May 2016), available from https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/about-content/fy2015_summary.pdf.

[20] Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 14, 105.

[21] Patrick Radden Keefe, “Cocaine Incorporated,” The New York Times Magazine, (15 June 2012, accessed 14 April 2016), available from http://nyti.ms/KqGYx9.

[22] Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2016), 14, 231.

[23] Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York, Scribner, 2011), 345.

[24] Peter Reuter, “Understanding the Demand for Illegal Drugs,” The National Academics Press (2010, accessed 1 May 2016), available from http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12976/understanding-the-demand-for-illegal-drugs.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. He is still classified as one of the ‘big three’ of the genre, along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. His writing takes mankind and envisions how things would be different and life would change if certain elements of our daily existence were altered. This is precisely how Childhood’s End, often considered Clarke’s best novel, flows.

Written in 1953, during the opening years of the Cold War and less than a decade after nuclear bombs first became a reality, the book opens with aliens, known as Overlords, arriving while military scientists are about to test launch a set of rockets. The Overlords quickly showcase their abilities and while they begin to rule the planet, they do so in a benevolent fashion. They outlaw war and unify mankind. They share technology and help develop a unified utopian society. Hunger, crime, poverty, disease, discrimination, nationalism, and need all quickly fade away. Even religion (except for shades of Buddhism) disappears. Robots take on all the manual labor tasks, leaving people to explore their own personal interests. Clarke uses this setting to examine the nature of man. He quickly finds that “no utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams.” In short, even when we have everything we could possibly desire, we still find ways to want more and become unhappy.

The absolute best parts of the book are when Clarke looks forward from 1953 and envisions the technology of this utopia. For example, the book envisions a world with “too many distractions and entertainments…something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour[ing] out over the various channels” daily. This leads to people becoming “passive sponges” with a distinct lack of original material – the world becomes “placid, featureless, and culturally dead” as “the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day.” I laughed out loud, as TV today produces far more programming than this and the ratings company Nielsen estimates the typical American spends 4 hours and 51 minutes per day in front of a TV; yet I don’t think we have quite totally become culturally dead just yet.

Another set of inventions Clarke foresaw was “completely reliable oral contraceptive” and the “infallible method—as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood—of identifying the father of any child.” These two ideas, which now exist for the most part, have a devastating effect as they sweep “away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration” (ie. Clarke saw Puritan morals as abnormal – not all that surprising as, while he was not open about it, his own sexuality deviated from the norms of the 1950’s).  Today, we have seen that Puritan thoughts have not been completely swept away, but they are far less rigid than they were 63 years ago when this book was written.

While I truly enjoyed examining and considering the effects of that the Overlords’ presence had on society, the book also considered the question of human evolution. This was central to the second half of the book – and was not nearly as interesting or intriguing as first half. In the same way, the characters throughout were plain and rather bland (with the exception of the Overload leader Karellen); they solely existed to move the story along. However, even with these slower sections, they book was great. The 8 hours I spent listening while driving to Virginia Beach and back this weekend gave me a chance to examine how I would live my life differently if I didn’t need to care about needs or money. Would I pursue the same choices? Would l have the same friends and hobbies? I don’t know for sure, but I hope that I would still find a way to work hard and live life, rather than just watching 5 hours of TV a day.

Score: 7.5. Could have skipped the metamorphosis of man and just stuck with examining a new world.

Side note: Clarke’s utopian world had a strange similarity to the world of Star Trek, where people are also free from want (Star Trek debuted in 1966, 13 years after Childhood’s End). The difference is that Star Trek’s world takes a view that man will still work hard and find a way to contribute to art, culture, science, and improving the lives of others, while generally Clarke saw this things a little more bleakly. He does see education as the key to overcoming the perils of too much leisure, but still showcases a world of boring people who have nothing to motivate themselves them to improve their lives.

All of us have regrets. Moments when we turned left, and later wished we had turned right. When we should have taken the road less traveled – or the one more traveled. When we should have spoken up instead of staying silent. When we put our feet in our mouth and need to pull them back out again. Other colleges we should have attended. Other career fields that would have been more exciting. Other people we should have befriended.

What if you could do things again? If you could live life over? What would you change? This is the premise of three books I recently wrapped up on my iphone. They all focused on people who would die, and then their lives would start over again – yet they would remember everything from their previous lives. There was a little bit of science fiction in all of them – but not too much. And all I thought about – through all three books was what I would do differently if at the end of my life, I woke up and was a kid back in the 1980’s again.

The first book was Replay, a 1986 award winning novel by Ken Grimwood. The book opens with a 43 year old man, Jeff Winston, on the phone with his wife, who tells him they need to talk. And as he wonders what she is going to say they need to talk about, he has a heart attack and dies. Then he wakes up in his 18 year old body again. Once he realized what has happened, he begins betting on sporting events that he remembers, makes a fortune, and dies at the age of 43 again, a very unhappy man. As the book progresses, he dies many times, and each time lives a little differently. He feels trapped – like nothing he can do will change anything. And when he finally dies for the last time, he opens his eyes and is still on the phone with his wife. The book never bothers to explain why this is all happening to Mr. Winston – that is not important. Rather, thru its superior cerebral tone, the message of the book comes out: that life is best when things are a little unpredictable and there are endless possibilities out there for you to tackle.

The second book was Repeat by Neal Pollack, which just came out last year. Repeat almost seemed like a replay, or a repeat, of Replay. The books had extremely similar premises. This time, a failed screenwriter named Brad Cohen goes to sleep on his 40^th birthday after realizing he hates his life. He wakes up in the womb. And this happens over and over and over again. He tries out different careers, different styles of living, different cities, different personas. He becomes a Congressman, a stock market extraordinaire, a political pundit, a Jeopardy champion (interesting because Pollack too was a 3 time Jeopardy winner), and more. And finally, he drifts through life making the same bad decisions as the first time and manages to wake up as an ecstatic 40 year old excited to face the world he had once despised. The tone is much lighter and more whimsical, especially the description of being conscious as a baby, but the message is a repeat: that life is best faced when you don’t know what you are facing.

The final book was by far the most science-fiction-y. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North, imagines a world where more than one person gets to repeat their life. Instead, 1 in every 500,000 people dies and wakes back up. This allows messages to be passed through time – as children who have recently been reborn can find aged ‘kalachakra,’ who will then die and take the message back through time to their childhood. But the entire setting is simply that; a backdrop and a setting. The true story is that of Harry August, who on his death bed receives a message that the end of the world is accelerating and coming sooner and sooner each time people die and are reborn. Harry must solve the mystery, and in doing so, he must thwart his best friend. The book does not have a moral to it like the first two – rather is the story of two best friends – both of them geniuses who passionately care about each other, locked in a battle of wits and betrayal.

While all three books were interesting and made me think, the story of Harry August was the most fun. I was able to slip past the idea of dying and being reborn and into the struggle of friendship and duplicity. But more importantly, I spent all three books thinking about my life and what I would do differently. And even though I do have plenty of regrets and have made more than my fair share of mistakes, I don’t know if I do things all that differently. I am sure I would succumb to the some of the temptation for an easy life and play the stock market knowing that I should invest in Apple, but I have a learned a lot from screwing up. Those scars are a part of all of us. I have no doubt if I didn’t have them, I would eventually go on and just make the same mistakes, only on a bigger stage.

Scores: Repeat: 8.0. Replay: 7.0. Harry August: 8.5. Good times and a few deep thoughts.