Books and War: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

A Tour Bus Ride from Hell to Heaven

War gave me faith in 1973 when I was blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion. War almost took my faith away in 2009 when I saw the people we had invaded in Iraq trying to live in the wake of all we had done through misguided policy. Were the wretched people a thousand feet below our helicopters going to Hell because they did not believe the way a 300-pound millionaire preacher on TV said they should?  If rich televangelists were right, God was unjust.

In Iraq, I re-read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. Lewis says the doors of Hell are locked from the inside. He says in many of his works that Pride is the worst sin, a thousand times worse than Lust.  The proud will lock the doors of Hell from the inside rather than admit they are wrong.

The central story in the Great Divorce is a tour bus ride that takes residents of Hell to visit Heaven.  All but one of the tourists decides to return to Hell.  They could all stay, but it would mean asking forgiveness and admitting they were wrong.  Their punishment is not the exquisite torment in Dante or the flames licking the pews in Hellfire preaching.  The only punishment is separation from God forever. 

The problem with most visions of Hell is that they are radically unjust.  How could someone who murders another man and is then executed for his crime get the same punishment as Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot? Could Jerry Falwell Jr. really be going to Heaven after selling out his faith for access to the most corrupt Presidential candidate ever? 

If the price of admission to Heaven begins with saying, “I was wrong, forgive me” then Heaven is open to everyone, and Hell is home to everyone who insists they are right.  As Lewis noted elsewhere, that means Hell is disproportionally home to the rich, the old and the opinionated. So I am properly worried about my own soul. 

I can’t say that this insight from the Great Divorce made the life of faith easy. But it keeps me from being distracted by the claims and counter claims of faith leaders and followers who are absolutely sure they are doing God’s will. In this context I know all defenders of God are wrong. 

Whenever someone makes punishing the sins of others their purpose in life, they are always wrong. Always. Jihad claims to be defense of God. Racism exalts one group over another and uses God as their excuse. All defenders of God from every faith will lock Hell’s doors behind them: whether they wave a bloody sword or preach from a plush pulpit for millions of donated dollars.

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My Next Race--Fighting Back Against Aging

Riding at Camp Adder, Iraq.

The Army won't deploy a soldier who is more than sixty years old without a waiver signed by a general officer.

I had one of those waivers in 2013 when I turned 60. I was supposed to deploy to Afghanistan with the 56th Stryker Brigade.  But President Obama cut troop deployments to our nation's longest war and I stayed home.

In preparation for that deployment, I went to a three-month Army school at Fort Meade, Maryland.

During the school I was training to do an Ironman triathlon the following year.  If the deployment fell through, I would have a huge athletic challenge. While I was at Fort Meade, I took two fitness tests. I scored 296 and 300--the max.  I completed the Ironman at age 61.

Since the Ironman, I have tried a couple of times to start running again, and could not.

The next year swimming got more difficult. My left shoulder would last for a mile before giving out, then less.  It's a good thing I did the Ironman when I did, because running and swimming got harder and harder in the two years following.

Last year I rode across Eastern Europe.  This year I rode to Boston but I was having knee trouble.

Now, four years after the Ironman, I get knee surgery in three weeks. Next week I get an MRI for a lower back problem and I just got a cortisone shot in my right shoulder.

In 2013, I was ready to deploy to Afghanistan with an infantry brigade.  In 2014 I did an Ironman.  In the coming year I could be getting one or two more surgeries as a result of injuries and a genetic tendency to arthritis.

One of my riding buddies is 71 years old and has none of these problems. He also has no arthritis.  I have an Army buddy who is younger than I am but the cumulative damage of Airborne and Ranger service means his serious workout days are over.

In some ways, I am amazed I could get this far.  Today I rode 10 miles to the doctor to get the shot. On the way back, I met another riding buddy on the road and ended up riding almost 40 miles.

People ask me what my next big event is. My next big event will be getting healthy enough to do another big event.

Catching Up with a World Traveling Friend: Ivan Porccino

Ivan Porccino at a visit to Georgia Military Institute

Twenty years ago I worked for a big American company that bought a big Brazilian company. As a result of this deal Millennium Inorganic Chemicals acquired a manufacturing plant, a sales office and a mine in Brazil; I got a friend I have kept in touch with ever since. I recently met Ivan for dinner in New York. 

When we met in Sao Paulo in 2000 Ivan Porccino was a 27-year-old junior sales guy who knew lots of people in Sao Paulo and could help his American colleagues like me navigate the biggest city in South America.  We worked together in arranging a big event for our CEO to talk to all of our new customers through the acquisition. 

Ivan seemed to know everyone and languages of Brazil’s biggest communities.  So whomever we needed to talk to, Ivan could talk to them in Portuguese, German, Spanish, and Italian, then talk to me in English.  Although Ivan saw his future in international business, he was also interested in philosophy, history and read great books in all the languages he could speak. 

When we were stuck in Sao Paulo cabs going slower than Amish buggies we could talk about whether Hume was right about free will, whether Adam Smith, John Locke and the philosophical Scots were the true beginning of the modern world, and if Dostoevsky saw the world most clearly of all the Russians. 

Ivan was back in New York to take over a major commodity chemical shipping operation. He sees it as the next stepping-stone toward a top job in international commerce in South America. In his eyes, America creating tariff barriers is bad for the world, but it creates opportunities for other countries that live in the shadow of the world dominance of the U.S.  For Ivan, America is the greatest and most brilliant sociological experiment in the history of the world, and it is currently being squandered.

But the long game for 47-year-old Ivan is to get his teenage kids through University then have more time to spend with philosophy and literature. He may retire before he’s 60. After we talked about business, we were back to talking about Dostoevsky and Machiavelli, because they are the authors that see the evil as well as the good inside all of us. 

By the way, dinner was Japanese because what else would a North and a South American eat in New York City?

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Unforgettable Moment, B-52s Scramble, Hill Air Force Base, 1974

B-52 Bombers taking off on full throttle on Strategic Air Command alert

I was stationed at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from 1972-74. Early in 1974, Strategic Air Command stationed a wing of B-52s on Hill.  

My duty station was four miles from the airfield on the north end of the base.  Sometimes I went to the hangar for electronic parts.  On a warm spring day, I happened to be in the hangar when I heard an enormous roar, then another, then another, and another.  

Six B-52s filled the air with black smoke and the howl of 48 jet engines on throttle. The planes took off one after the other less than a minute apart. When all six formed up in the sky above the base, the giant airplanes flew east toward the Rocky Mountains and disappeared.

It was magnificent.

I was 21 years old when those planes took off.  Those airplanes were about my age, first entering service in 1952, a year before I was born. Like me they have had a lot of maintenance, but still have an active life today. Some of them, like me, are in their 60s.  

Fishing My Phone from a Storm Drain

This grabber saved me lots of money 

Yesterday I rode south from Lancaster for about fifteen miles. On the way back I was coasting down a hill on Route 272. I pulled my iPhone from my jersey pocket--and dropped it.

I briefly heard the sound of the phone skidding on the road, then nothing. I looked back and saw the steel grille of a storm drain. I turned around. At the drain, I looked down and there was my phone. It was not submerged, but sitting on a small pile of gravel out of the water.

I rode five miles home, got in my car and drove to a local shopping center with both a Verizon Store and a Home Depot.  The phone was insured, but it would cost almost $100 for a replacement and it would be sent to me. Getting a phone in the store meant buying a new one for $300.  Since it was Saturday on a holiday weekend, it would be 2 or 3 days to get the phone.  And there was a chance I could fish it out. So I left Verizon and went to Home Depot. There I bought a three-foot grabber, the longest they had, and drove back to the storm drain.

The grabber would not reach the bottom of the drain, but there was a gap between the steel drain and the curbstone. I could reach just barely around through that gap. After a few tries, I was able to clamp and lift the phone. It still works.

A few weeks ago I bought a phone holder for my handlebars.  I meant to use, but I am so used to having the phone in my pocket, I did not.  But now I do. Today I rode about 35 miles with the phone clamped on the handlebars.

 Phone clamp on the handlebars of my bike

The phone holder mounts differently on each of my two road bikes, so I will get another phone holder for other bike with carbon handlebars.

And I will use the phone holder instead of my pocket.  By the way, I lost another phone last year exactly the same way--pocket to storm drain. So use of the phone holder is overdue.

Loving the Book is not the Same as Liking the Author

Mark Helprin, I love his books, hate his politics

 My two favorite living authors are very different men. I have read all of the novels of each man and re-read my favorite novel by each. I plan to re-read more and, of course, read anything else they write. C.S. Lewis said “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.” He also cautioned that a reader who loves an author’s work should not believe he would like the company of the author.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Noble Prize in Literature, 2017

I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro in 2014 on the recommendation of a good friend. The first novel I read by him was “Remains of the Day.” In January of this year I finished “The Unconsoled,” making my reading of Ishiguro complete. Two years ago I re-read Remains of the Day, still my favorite, although “TheBuried Giant” is a close second. The Buried Giant was published in March 2015. Two months later Ishiguro spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia.  After hearing Ishiguro speak, I was quite convinced I would love to have a drink with him. His Nobel Prize address last year made me even more sure I would love to hang out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself. That address is moving, brilliant and sad, the common threads in everything Ishiguro writes.

In February 1983, when I was still in graduate school, I first read Mark Helprin in the New Yorker magazine.  I read the story “Jesse Honey Mountain Guide” in the last issue of the month.  The story was a chapter in his second novel “A Winter’s Tale” published the following September. I was hooked.  I read his first novel and two short story collections published to that point. In the years since I read every other novel as each published. I have re-read Winters Tale and plan to re-read Helprin’s most recent novel “Paris in the Present Tense” this year or next year. “Paris in the Present Tense” is now my favorite.

I was so taken with Jesse Honey, I wrote paper in grad school about Helprin’s precise use of exaggeration in the story, comparing to the Walter Mitty stories by James Thurber.  

Over the years I read Helprin’s editorials in the Wall Street Journal and other essays. He is a conservative, so I never imagined we could have a totally friendly conversation, but in 2015 and 2016 Helprin spoke out against Trump and seemed to be a Never-Trump conservative.  Maybe we could have a drink?

Alas, that was in 2016. After Nazis marched in Charlottesville in 2017, Helprin wrote in Trump’s defense in The Claremont Review of Books. Next month Helprin is speaking in New York. I have never heard Helprin speak, and I would like to, but I won’t be attending the event.  He is the featured guest at “Socrates in the City” an occasional gathering organized by author and total Trumpian Eric Metaxas. In 2011, Metaxas wrote a biography of a martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Despite writing about a victim of the Nazis, Metaxas is a full-throated supporter of a man whose campaign was built on the Birther form of racism and spread to every other non-white group as soon as the campaign began.

So I won’t be paying Metaxas to hear Helprin speak. In addition to Helprin, the event is a launch party for a new Children’s book by Metaxas “Donald Drains the Swamp.” Metaxas is a very funny guy. He is one of the creators of the “Veggie Tales” series. But, sadly, in his new book he is not ironical. Metaxas really sees Trump as the savior of the western world. The irony runs the other way though: no one in Washington has ever been more corrupt than the Swamp-Creature-in-Chief. 

When I think of Veggie Tales now, I imagine Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber being thrown into a Black Car driven by the Veggie Gestapo. Bob and Larry plead that wanted to salute The Orange Fuhrer, weakly protesting, “But we don’t have arms!”

Larry and Bob

I will keep reading Helprin, because the things he writes, like all creations, are from, not of, the person who created them.  And 70-year-old conservatives can become cranky—at least that’s what I’ve heard. 

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Military Movies and "The Rule"

Dick Winters, inspiration for the book and video series Band of Brothers

The world is full of good, great and terrible things to watch: movies, TV, and videos. To figure out what to watch, I have The Rules.

The Rule is, I won't watch anything about which I know technical details. Of course, I have exceptions, but in general, if I want to be entertained, I stay away from subjects that are part of my actual experience. I watch car racing; I don't watch car racing movies.

Next on my suspect list are war/military movies.  Even when I like part of a war movie, I know I am going to hate part of it too.  For instance, the first half of "Full Metal Jacket" is amazing. The second half is so predictable it could be a John Wayne movie.

I loved the movie "Fury" which was so right about procedures inside the turret of the tank. But, as with Full Metal Jacket, the final 30 minutes would make John Wayne blush.

And speaking of John Wayne movies, is there a veteran anywhere who does not think "The Green Berets" is the worst war movie ever made? In 1977 in the dayroom of Bravo Company, 1-70th Armor in Wiesbaden, West Germany, that movie came on the one TV channel we had--Armed Forces Network. Half the company crowded into the dayroom throwing rolled up socks and popcorn at the TV and howling about how bad that movie is.

Using The Rule, I will happily watch shows and movies about Secret Agents, Drug Dealers, Mobsters, Undercover Police, Surgeons, and Pirates.  I have no experience in any of those jobs, so when the they get the technical details wrong, I don't know it.  I have watched medical shows with real medics.  That's a hoot, listening to them flare up and yell, "No way! No one does a tracheotomy that way!" I have not had the chance to watch "The Sopranos"with a mobster or "Rome" with a Centurion, but that would be fun!

Just as an aside, I enjoyed all five seasons of "Breaking Bad" until the final episode. I know nothing about teaching high school or cooking meth and the series was brilliant. But when the star of the show welded a remote controlled M-60 machine gun into the trunk of a Cadillac and fired it with a key fob, killing a half-dozen Neo-Nazi drug dealers: "That's Bullshit!" was my reaction.

That's how I acted at the end of "Saving Private Ryan" when the German tanks went into a built up area, just so they could get blown up. "No armor commander would be that stupid" I spluttered in the theater eliciting glares from those around me.  I calmed down, but when I left the theater I called an old friend from 70th Armor and said, "The end of that movie is bullshit....." and we laughed about all the movies we dissed over the past two decades.

The glaring exception to my criticism of military video is "Band of Brothers." I found nothing to criticize in that amazing tribute to Major Dick Winters and the paratroopers he led from D-Day to VE Day.  When I re-enlisted and went to Iraq in 2009, I found many fellow critics of military-themed movies, but I never heard anyone criticize "Band of Brothers."

Next on my "To Watch" list is a video series: To Watch is a real list I keep in the Task List of Google Calendar. When I hear about something good to watch, I add it to the list.  Anyway, next is the final season of "The Americans" on FX. What a great show. I know nothing about being a Russian sleeper cell secret agent.