Anxious people. A Novel. By Fredrik Backman.

 

I just finished Anxious People: A novel by Fredrik Backman. 

It is hilarious. Really. Actual Laugh Out Loud Hilarious.

Below is the first page and a half. If you like this, you will love the book. Enjoy!!!

A bank robbery. A hostage drama? A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point. Much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. 

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So, it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is, especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human for. Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days.  

You're supposed to have a job, somewhere to live and a family. And you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never managed to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of. The moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control, so we learn to pretend. All the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else, we pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand amortization levels and inflation rates, that we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads. And it always takes us four tries to get the little USB in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round there. In.) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried to keep tropical fish once and they all died, and we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day. Because there will be another one coming along tomorrow.  

Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how because it's so horribly, desperately. Easy to fail at being grown up.  

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight. But which felt like the other way. Like the only way out at the time? 

This Week I Joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard

 

This week I joined the Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard. A veteran helicopter pilot I know suggested I join the group. The This Week Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard exists to make sure that all present and future honorably discharged Veterans are accorded a proper flag folding and live Taps Military Honors as requested by family members.

When I heard about the group, I thought now that I amwell past any sort of active service, I could be part of honoring fellow veterans of all branches of the military for their service at the end of their lives.  I will begin training with Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard later in the year after I return from my next trip.  

If you want to learn more about Red Rose Veterans Honor Guard, click here.

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Revisiting the Line Between Good and Evil

More than three decades ago, I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This short book brought him out of obscurity. Soviet Premier Krushchev allowed the novel to be published. It quickly made its way around the world giving a bleak picture of the reality of Soviet Gulags.  

In the years that followed I read many of Solzhenitsyn's books including Gulag Archipelago and his novels about the revolution beginning with August 1914. Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I agreed. Until I didn't. 

The rise of Trump, especially after Charlottesville in 2017, moved the line from inside my heart to to outside my heart. The line was between Us and Them: between people who wanted American democracy and the Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and their ilk who would trash democracy to make a Handmaid's Tale theocracy. 

It took me a while to realize the line had moved. I wrote about it here.

For the last few months I have been reading about forgiveness and recovering form unforgivable acts with a group at the Hannah Arendt Center. Germany had to move on after the Nazi era. The Balkan nations had to exist within European culture after the slaughter in the 1990s, as did Rwanda after the genocide. Societies have to deal with horror and the threat of violence and continue as societies.

On a political level, I will do whatever is necessary (and legal) to defeat Trump and everyone who supports him. But someday Trump will be gone and life will go on. We will all have to find a way to make a society after the attempted insurrection and its aftermath.  

Masha Gessen Wins 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking

 

Masha Gessen at the annual conference of the 

Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Activist and writer Masha Gessen has won the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. I heard Gessen speak at the Hannah Arendt Center and at the University of Pennsylvania. I read her articles in the New Yorker. She has been a leading dissident voice in Russia for almost two decades, barely escaping Russia after criticizing Vladimir Putin.  She has been warning the world about Putin at the risk of her life. The official announcement follows:

Following the win last year by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, the Hannah-Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Germany today (August 4) has named journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen the winner of its 2023 Prize for Political Thought.
The formal presentation of the honor is set for December 15 in Bremen, and the award carries a purse of €10,000 (US$11,013), the accolade to be presented by the Hannah Arendt board, the Bremen senate, and board members of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. A round-table discussion with Gessen is scheduled for the following day, December 16, its focus to be “The Search for the State in Totalitarian and Autocratic Societies.”

In its announcement today, the program notes the sheer breadth of topical and thematic concern reflected in Gessen’s work, its rationale reading, “For years, Masha Gessen has been describing political tendencies and conflicts in American and Russian society.
“Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom. Masha Gessen writes about the arduous everyday life, cultural conflicts and the struggle for democratic self-determination.
“In a time characterized by autocratic erosion in the United States, war-ready totalitarianism in Russia, and serious conflicts between the great powers, understanding is becoming a civic duty. With books as well as essays in The New Yorker and a strong public presence, Gessen opens up new perspectives that help to understand a world in accelerated change.”

Museum of American Armor, Long Island, New York: Model Collection

 

In addition to the big collection of armored vehicles at the Museum of American Armor in Long Island, the museum has an impressive collection of scale models of World War II armor. Below are photos. 

Museum of American Armor, Bethpage, Long Island, New York

 

Thirty miles west of Manhattan on Long Island is the Museum of American Armor. This collection of mostly World War II armor and equipment is occasionally rolled out for convoys. Museum patrons can ride in halftracks, scout cars and other armored vehicles across fields in Long Island. 

Click on the web site above and you can learn about every vehicle in their collection.

Eternal Life in Very Different Novels

I just read the novel Eternal Life by Dara Horn. It is a dark, captivating beautiful story of a little girl in Jerusalem at the time Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth. The little girl falls in love and marries--but not to the same guy. She has a baby of uncertain paternity. The baby becomes fatally ill.  The guy she did not marry is the son of the Great Rabbi.  Together they make a vow that saves the life of the child but that condemns them to live eternally. They can't die. They can get married and break up over and over again. And oh the resentments that can fester over two millennia!!

The book tracks the pain and tragedy of eternal life, outlasting husbands, wives, lovers, kids: everybody.  It's a wonderful book.  Read it yourself to find out how Jews from ancient Jerusalem get along in modern America, and every major culture in between.

Eternal life is also the underlying theme of a series of books I read near the end of my active-duty service in West Germany.  Before leaving the Army to go to college in 1980, I made several flights back and forth from West Germany to Pennsylvania on Air Force transport planes.  On several of those flights, I passed the time reading Casca: The Eternal Mercenary. 

Casca is a soldier in the squad in the Roman Legion in Jerusalem in 33A.D. assigned to crucify Jesus. Casca stabs Jesus with a spear while he hangs in the cross. A drop of blood runs down the spear and Casca cannot die. He has eternal life, but in the Army. Lots of armies. Every major army from Gaul to Vietnam.  I may have read a dozen of them.  I started college in January 1980. All my reading was assigned and I forgot about Casca until reading Horn.  

The writer of the Casca series is Barry Sadler. He is a novelist and a song writer and served as a Green Beret soldier in the Vietnam War.  His biggest hit was The Ballad of the Green Berets. The link goes to the YouTube version.  

In another irony of life, I started a project recently looking at the Vietnam War as the beginning of many of the deep divides that currently plague life in America. The divide could not be deeper between Sadler's song and "War" by Edwin Starr. 

Horn and Sadler have little in common, but in both books eternal life is eternal suffering. This year I reached the age consider a full life by the Psalmist in the Hebrew Bible:  

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10

Eternal life should not be in this life says Horn, Sadler and the Psalmist.