Book Report Part 4: Trump and Obama and Machiavelli

On November 8, starting at about 7 p.m., almost 63 million Americans were showing signs of depression and disbelief.  Me included.  As the night went on it became clear that a reality TV star, the most famous avowed racist[1] candidate since George Wallace of Alabama, was going to become the 45^th President of the United States.

WTF? 

Almost no one predicted it, even among the 60 million voters who decided “grabbing them by the pussy” was just something a 59-year-old man would say while wearing a microphone.  But Niccolo Machiavelli saw clearly how that Tangerine Tornado would sweep away all opposition and take the most powerful job in the world.

In his most famous book, The Prince, Machiavelli describes what works in politics, not how the world “should be.”  Machiavelli says the Prince (Leader) must “take power and keep power, for without power he can do nothing.”  While the world wondered what Trump really wanted, he kept charging forward and won.  And now he has the power. 

Trump beat 16 Republican opponents in the primaries before beating Hillary Clinton. How did he beat all of them?  Machiavelli says, “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Trump lashed out at his opponents and kept at them until they gave up. Since he could not crush his toughest opponents all at once, he attacked them separately. He made temporary alliances with some, and then crushed them later. 

Ted Cruz fell for this like a bass snapping at bait.  Machiavelli says, “Since love and fear can hardly exist together, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” Trump kept Cruz close with flattery, then crushed.

Trump’s method points to the way he is likely to govern. When Cruz and others on his own side get out of line, he will attack them mercilessly, either by himself, or with his attack dogs at Breitbart, supplied by Steve Bannon.  As President Barack Obama leaves office, it is clear that one of his great failures was trying for years to get the Republicans to work with him.  Obama made deals, then the Republicans would back out or defy him.  Trump will not present his back to be stabbed as Obama did.  Trump may end democracy, but Congress will lose when they challenge him.

Trump told so many outright lies at his campaign rallies that even his most strident critics had trouble keeping track of the outrageous things he said. Yet Trump continued to flourish.  Why?  “Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who deceives will always find those willing to be deceived,” says the writer of The Prince.

Trump followed exactly one of the warnings from Machiavelli that President Obama flouted.  Machiavelli says that the people’s money should be spent in small amounts with great fanfare. President Obama gave away hundreds of billions of dollars to save the economy from depression in 2009. He took no credit.  Many people who owe their jobs to that bailout have no idea they were part of a government rescue program.  Obama’s people said, “We don’t spike the ball.” Sounds admirable, but the loss of the House, the Senate and many state governorships could have been slowed or avoided by taking credit for the way that money was spent.

When Trump saved several hundred jobs Carrier Corporation was sending to Mexico, he took full credit.  In addition, Trump used money from Indiana taxpayers for part of the package.  Machiavelli said the Prince can and should be generous with other people’s money.

For me, re-reading The Prince every four years allows me to keep score on politicians at every level.  With few exceptions, those that defy the advice of Machiavelli bring themselves down.  Machiavelli says that the Prince who touches the women of his subjects will be despised.  I could see this in the reaction to Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comment.  At the time Trump said it, he was not in a political office.  Trump’s response was to attack Bill Clinton for women he slept with while in office, whether in the White House or the State House in Arkansas. Trump could effectively make the case that he was a private citizen and not subject to the same rules.  And 60 million voters clearly accepted that premise.

At just 68 pages of text, The Prince can read in a few hours and provide fun for a lifetime. 

Next post I will discuss the other political books I read in 2016.

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[1] Beginning in 2011, Donald Trump rode the Birther lie to political prominence.  There is no reason to be a Birther except to discredit the President on racial and religious grounds. Every Birther is a racist.

Book Report, Part 3: Books on Faith

The last post was about a book that combined worldwide nuclear war with faith among the few survivors.  It was a bridge of sorts between the 15 books I read about war and the books I read about faith. In this essay, I will discuss seven the books I read in 2016 about faith and religion. 

The first book on faith I read this year was the novel Laurus about a Russian healer and mystic. We follow Laurus from his apprenticeship to a healer near the end of his life, through love and loss, to Laurus finding that he is now a healer himself, a greater healer than his mentor. Then the story takes a long and funny detour. Two thousand miles away, the son of an Italian merchant comes to believe he must travel to rural Russia and find this Laurus in order to know when the end of the world will be.  The Italian goes to Russia, takes Laurus on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the tale takes even stranger twists from there. Laurus is a great story, and a picture of the harrowing reality of a truly spiritual life. 

Which led me to re-read Letters toMalcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis.  Since I first read Mere Christianity in 1977 in Germany, I have read or re-read at least one of Lewis’ 40 books every year. Reading Laurus made me feel shallower than a pie plate spiritually and Malcolm pointed right at one of my weaknesses. 

In the fall I read four books for an ancient Greek language class. They were (1) The Gospel of Mark in Greek in a recent edition, The Gospel of Mark in English in Richmond Lattimore’s translation, and two commentaries by Michel Focant and Mary Ann Beavis. In Greek, the words of Jesus are at once more harsh and more clear than any English translation could convey.  Jesus turned down every form of power and riches offered Him. He healed and fed the poor. He publically condemned to rich and powerful.

While I read these unambiguous words, millionaire TV preachers notably James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Jr. endorsed a candidate who brags of sexual conquest, of having riches, power, and fame, and of having no need of forgiveness—the center of the Christian message.  The health and wealth heresy is now mainstream, the public religion of America.  But you can’t find a word of that in Gospels. 

On Wednesday night, I help out with an English as a Second Language (ESL) ministry at my Church.  In one class I asked the students about studying their Holy Books.  One of the students was from India, one from Ethiopia, one from Afghanistan.  They each said it was strange that in America you could “study” the Bible in translation.  In no other religion could someone be considered as studying a Holy Book if they did not know the language of the Book.

I could tell the students the only writer of the New Testament who was a native speaker of Greek was Luke. The other half dozen were GSL (Greek as a Second Language) writers.  And all of the words of Jesus were spoken in Aramaic or Hebrew, so even the Greek New Testament is a translation of the His words.  By the time you read the words of Jesus in English it has been translated twice: once by the Apostle who heard Jesus speak and translated His words to Greek, then a second time when the Greek was translated to English.  I had a co-worker who learned Aramaic before he learned Greek because he wanted to be able to get a sense of what Jesus said in His language.

The last book in the faith group is Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse.  This lovely book follows the life of two young men who are novices in a monastery at the beginning of the story.  One leaves, one stays but their lives remain intertwined until the prodigal comes home and dies in the arms of his life-long friend.  The book really captures the devotion and drive that leads to a life of faith and how that devotion and drive can be turned to art.  This book is in many ways unlike Laurus, but alike in the intense, lifelong and sometimes funny spiritual journey of the main character(s).

The next post will be books on politics.

Book Report, Part 2, Nuclear War and a Monastery

Before I turn from war to peace, I will add one more book to the war list in which the war is seen only in its effects. That book is A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I re-read for the fourth time this year.  The book is set in the Utah desert in an Abbey hundreds of years after “The Flame Deluge” of the 1960s, a nuclear war. Most of the world was killed. Those that survived had mutant children, the misborn. 

Shortly after the nuclear holocaust, the world turned on the scientists and intellectuals who the survivors believed caused the war.  One of the scientists, before being killed, called the mob “Simpletons.” They took the name as a badge of honor, like the Breitbart followers who embraced being “Deplorables.”  They called themselves “Simpletons from Simpletown.” They burned books as well as killing the learned. They ushered in the “Age of Simplification.”

Some of the survivors started hiding books. The Church hid books in monasteries in the desert.  One of the people who hid books was a nuclear scientist named Isaac Edward Leibowitz.  He was eventually caught and martyred—hung over a burning pile of books.  The Abbey was named for Leibowitz who has been nominated for sainthood when the book opens. 

The book follows life in the Abbey from that time until civilization is reborn. This darkly ironic book is one of my favorites.  With nuclear threats in the air, mistrust of intellectuals common and Deplorables now a moniker for millions, this 1950s book seems sadly contemporary. 

Curl up and wait for the mushroom cloud.  You won’t be disappointed! The New Yorker published a long and thorough review of the book and how it came to be written.

Book Report: The 50 Books I Read in 2016, Beginning with the War Books

In 2016 I read 50 books, more than a dozen for the classes I took in in the spring and fall of the year, many more because of the reading I had done for those classes.  One of the first questions I had in making this list is how to sort it? By author? By Title? By trade category: fiction, non-fiction, etc.?

Since the list is a spreadsheet, I sorted it by the language of the writer or the subject.  With that sort method, 25 of the books are by Russians or about the Russian language, plus a biography of Vladimir Putin, which has a very Russian subject.  Next is 15 books by english-speaking writers, then four by Greek writers, two by Hermann Hesse (German), two by Italian writers, one by an Israeli and one book in French.

Another column told me 15 of the 50 books are about war--some about war itself, some about the effects of war on civilians, some about life after war.

First on the war list is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. As vast as Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book weaves together lives in Russia centering on the Battle for Stalingrad in 1942.  The book includes descriptions of the Holocaust more wrenching than anything I have ever read. A short book of Grossman's dispatches from Stalingrad titled "From the Front Line" shows where he did his research.

Then a completely different book I will say much more about in the next few weeks:  Grunt by Mary Roach.  This is actually a popular science book about the science of keeping soldiers alive, restoring their health, or at least learning from their deaths.  It is a darkly funny book by a brilliant writer.

Three of the four books I read by Kazuo Ishiguro are about before and after war. I wrote about those three books here. The fourth was Nocturnes, five stories of love and music set in Venice.

Returning to sad war stories, Zinky Boys about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979-89.  All of the stories are first-person heart wrenching, especially the mothers.  This book should be sold with a Kleenex box.

Just a few years before the Soviet Afghan War was the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973.  The Lover is a dream-like tale set in the time of that war. It seems to unravel in the middle, but comes together in a very strange way at the end.

The Italian writer Primo Levi tells us about life before, during and after World War II in his native land in the book The Periodic Table. Another book covers the time Levi spent in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The saddest section is when Levi knew his fate and could not avoid it. Levi is a chemist and the chapters are elements.

Three more Russian war stories in three different eras:  A Hero of Our Time by M. Lermontov depicts life during a border war in the Caucuses in the early 19th Century. It has many similarities with the Afghan War in "Zinky Boys" and with Russia's War in Chechnya.  In the book Sin by Z. Prelepin tells us the story of his life in glimpses of his childhood, young love, his service in the Chechen War and how he lived after the war.  The book, by its many glowing reviews in Russia, tells the wrenching truth about life in 21st Century Russia. In between is a book not exactly about war, but about a Russian soldier who wanted to be a warrior and ended up a prison camp guard.  The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov, tells the story of life in a Soviet Prison Camp where the guards are not much better of than the inmates.

Finally, two war books from Ancient Greece: The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I read the first chapter and parts of several others in my spring Ancient Greek class.  The Odyssey is certainly more popular, but the Illiad is the real soldier's story.  It had been two decades since I last read Illiad. I had forgotten how well Homer knows the life and motivations of soldiers.  I read Illiad in translation.  If you read either, I suggest the translation by Richmond Lattimore.

I also used Lattimore's New Testament in the my fall Greek class. I have read a dozen translations of the Bible. Lattimore's New Testament is the best. Most Bibles are translated by a committee and all the writers sound the same. In Greek the individual writers are as different as Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Robert Frost and Junot Diaz. Lattimore gives the reader the writer's true voice, not a dozen writers in a blender.

Next post is the books on peace, or at least the absence of war.

Happy New Year--What a Year It Will Be!

On this first day of 2017, a new year begins and a vastly changed world.  After spending the majority of my military career as a Cold War soldier, the U.S. will be moving closer to Russia after January 20. Who knows what that means.

In good news, arguably the best living general in America, and the entire world, is the nominee for Secretary of Defense.  If General James Mattis is SECDEF, the military will change in stunning ways.

Watching Mattis in action made me sure I will continue the blog in 2017.  It will be the place I blog daily as I ride across what I am calling Russia, but what is really the former Soviet Union. I will be riding south to north primarily in former Soviet states.  Route is not yet fixed.

Another reason to continue blogging about the Army in 2017 was given to me by Google stats.  It turns out seven of the ten most-read posts since I started writing in late 2007 were written and posted during 2016.

The top of the list was a interview with Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard Christopher Kepner.  Also in the top ten was a flight medic with two tours in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Pamela Leggore.

Dropping to second place was the post about the trailers we lived in while we were at Camp Adder, Iraq. A post comparing Soviet and American armor during the 1973 war in Israel was the next most popular. Israel was the Cold War lab for testing NATO weapons against Warsaw Pact (Soviet) weapons.  Staying with the Cold War theme, another popular post was about the Cold War draft Army being the best of the several branches I served in.

Another Cold War post with more than 700 readers is about the Soviet War in Afghanistan.  I just posted that last week.  That terrible war helped bring down the Soviet Union at a huge cost to families in Soviet States.

In the coming year I will be writing about the military under General Mattis (assuming he is confirmed), about visiting NATO countries that were formerly Soviet states, and about being an old soldier who served in the military off and on since 1972.

Happy New Year!

Russian Soldiers/Mothers/Wives Talk About Afghan War

I left the U.S. Army in November of 1979, discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after 6-1/2 years of active duty service.  From 1976 to 1979 I was a tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a war that never happened in Cold War Europe.

Less than a month after I got out, the Cold War got hotter when all NATO forces in Europe went on high alert because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. There were worries at the time that this invasion was a feint and the Soviets were about to invade western Europe.  Neither the Soviets or NATO could know the Afghan War would help to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet War in Afghanistan lasted ten years and became their Vietnam War.  After ten long years, 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded the Soviet Union lost that war, as we did the Vietnam War.

The similarities go sadly further.  In her book Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghan War, Svetlana Alexievich publishes interviews with soldiers, mothers, wives, civilian employees, doctors and nurses who served in that horrible war.

"Zinky" refers to the sealed zinc-coated coffins that dead soldiers came home in.  For years the Soviets denied their was a war. Coffins were buried sealed and families were not told how their soldier died.

Alexievich chronicles their experience of war and their return to civilian life.  The "Afghansi" like Vietnam War veterans here were shunned by many people.  They were not consider "worthy" by some veterans organizations, just as Vietnam veterans were considered something different than World War II vets.

Despite everything that was wrong with the war, some of the veterans said, "If I did not go someone else would have to go in my place."  This statement occurred several times in the words of mothers remembering their sons saying this to try to explain why they were going--to their death. According to Alexievich, some men accepted the draft, some were eager to go, some celebrated when a medical problem made them unfit, some bought their way out.  But over and over again were the words, "someone else would have to go."

The book is painful to read.  In fact it is sad even among Russian books.  But it is refreshingly honest. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature last year for the kind of reporting in this book.  She is most famous for interviewing hundreds of victims of Chernobyl.

The nine presidents from Colonel Harry S. Truman, Army artillery officer, to Lt. JG George H.W. Bush, fighter pilot, were all veterans.  John Kennedy and Bush, decorated veterans of direct combat, and Dwight Eisenhower with a long military career culminating in the liberation of western Europe.  No veterans since Bush 41.

Proud Draft Dodgers Can Now Sneer at Veterans

I was going to write a different post about working with draft dodgers throughout my professional life from the mid 80s to 2015. During that time, draft dodgers who I worked with were deferential to me or avoided me. Because the men I worked with in multi-national companies, especially energy companies, did not serve, but were Conservatives.  Although it was only my word, I began to think of them as NeverServatives.  Some changed their political allegiance with the election of Ronald Reagan, some were always Conservatives, like Dick Cheney who famously said he had better things to do than serving in the Vietnam War.

But this evening a man driving a black Lexus like the one above parked in front of a local Starbucks in a way that blocked both the handicap ramp in the sidewalk and the fire hydrant.  The arrogant SOB at the wheel of this expensive car jumped as much as a 250+pound man can from a drivers seat when I pointed out the error of his ways.  He was belligerent and said he would knock me into next week, I laughed, told him to take a shot, and then called him a plus-size coward in Army language for blustering and backing off.  I was wearing an Army workout jacket and jeans.

He was very well dressed and said my clothes were out of style--a very schoolyard insult for a 65-year-old rich guy.  I said, "Army is out of style?"  He said, "What are you some kind of local Guardsman or something?"  I realized the way he said it, that he was a draft dodger and thought of the Army National Guard as a way to avoid war, the way it was during the Vietnam War.  Looking in his face, I saw a look I had not seen since the Vietnam War. This draft dodger is now vindicated, at least in his own mind.  When Bill Clinton was elected despite begging to get out of the draft, the Conservatives roasted him--with a huge helping of hypocrisy since they were mostly draft dodgers themselves.

But now draft dodging is "ancient history." The President Elect got elected after bragging about dodging the draft.

Draft dodgers wife returned to the car and they left.

Most of the soldiers I served with in our current wars take for granted that the public is pro-military. But now that someone who sneered at draftees will be in the White House, the military could drop in prestige.  Trump has already trashed Prisoners of War.  Every soldier is a government employee so cutting the size of the military would reduce spending.

When the rich, powerful men who dodged the draft are free from guilt for letting another man serve in their place, then Vietnam Veterans will be Losers again, and the veterans of our recent wars will not be far behind.