Celluloid Limousine Liberal

Title: Sullivan’s Travels

Rating: 2 Stars

In my continuing quest to watch all films from the 2008 AFI best films list as I’m listening to the Unspooled podcast, Sullivan’s Travels came up. This was maybe one of three or so films that are on the list that I’ve never heard of (others being The Best Years of Our Lives and Sunrise: A Song of Two Lives). It was written by Preston Sturges, a legendary filmmaker that I knew very little about. Sturges’ was best known for his 1930s era screwball comedies, which is a format that I generally enjoy.

The protagonist of the film is John L Sullivan (Joel McCrea). He is a successful Hollywood director (not the famous boxer, it’s a little perplexing to me why Sturges named his protagonist the exact same name as a boxer). He’s best known for directing comedies. However, Sullivan is disenchanted. He feels that his films are lightweight and frivolous. He wants to do a serious film dealing with the weighty struggles of the poor. Given the life of ease that he lives, the studio executives mock his ability to create a truly empathetic portrait of this struggle.

Sullivan acknowledges that the criticism is valid. Instead of abandoning the project, he proposes to temporarily throw off all of his wealth and live the life of a pauper. This causes the studio executives to panic at the thought of their most valuable property being so vulnerable, so they put a support system in place to make sure that no serious harm comes to him.

Sullivan then goes off on his adventure. In a cafe, he meets a young woman (Veronica Lake) that, out of pity, buys him lunch. She joins him on his adventure.

After a lighthearted start where, despite his best intentions, Sullivan always ends up back in Hollywood, things take a dark turn. He and The Girl (that is literally the name of the character) end up living hard lives in soup kitchens. Deciding that he’s had enough and convinced that he now has a deeper understanding of poverty, he goes back to his former life in Hollywood.

Still wanting to help the homeless, Sullivan decides that the best approach is to hand out five dollar bills. The plan goes awry when someone sneaks up on him, knocks him on the head, steals his money, and throws his unconscious body on a passing freight train. Sullivan comes to in a freight yard, and in a confused state, attacks a railroad worker.

For the attack, he’s sentenced to hard labor. While there, he regains his memory and desperately seeks a way out. Due to a weird set of circumstances, people back in Hollywood believe that he has been murdered. Sullivan decides to confess to his own murder in the hope that his picture will subsequently appear in newspapers. The Girl recognizes him, runs to the studio executives, and he is freed. Now free, he recognizes that in hard times that his light comedies are valuable because they bring needed cheer and resolves to continue to make them.

It’s kind of an odd film. It certainly starts off as a fairly conventional screw ball comedy. There is an extended chase scene played purely for laughs. The early scenes where he continues to end up back in Hollywood are humorous.

I’m not sure what Sturges politics are, but Sullivan is portrayed as, what would have been called in the 1970s, a limousine liberal. He is full of sympathy for the poor but really has no true empathy or understanding of them. He thinks, if he puts on raggedy clothes with a dime in his pocket for a month or so, that he’ll have a complete understanding of what it means to be poor. Even in prison (for assaulting a man, a crime that he totally committed), he feels injustice that a man of wealth such of himself has to do time. He doesn’t seem all that concerned about the other prisoners sharing his fate.

Even though he did assault the man and is appropriately sentenced for the crime, once his true identity is identified, he apparently is immediately released. Why? Rich men don’t go to jail if they hit a man with a rock?

It just seemed odd that, on the one hand, the film is clearly satirizing wealthy people that possess false empathy for the poor, but the film itself doesn’t seem to be lacking in such empathy itself.

Japanese Internment Just Keeps Getting Worse

I just recently read and wrote about America for Americans. It’s a depressing description of our treatment to new immigrants going all of the way back to the 18th century.

There’s one episode in particular that absolutely made my head explode. I thought it was interesting enough to warrant its own entry. Over the years, I’ve read a bunch of history and I’d never even heard a whiff of what I’m about to discuss.

Most people know about the Japanese incarceration into internment camps during WWII. Some two thirds of the detainees were actually American citizens. It was done despite the fact that there was no evidence of any espionage. In fact, there are documents that prove that, from the beginning, there was no military value in the internment. It was done for purely racist reasons. The head of West Coast defense, General De Witt, said during congressional testimony that the fact that there is no evidence of espionage and sabotage is actually proof that it is in fact being planned. That’s some awesome logic!

The Supreme Court got a chance to weigh in on this issue with Korematsu vs United States. They whiffed on it. The majority decision basically said that even though people of Japanese descent were being specifically targeted that it was not a racial issue due to the now known to be false assumption that martial necessity required such action.

So, it stood until 1983, when Fred Korematsu was finally able to get his conviction overturned. In 2011, the US Solicitor General officially said that the government acted in error and actively suppressed evidence during the trial. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion, officially said that the Korematsu decision was made in error and disavowed it.

Since this was all started with FDR’s signed executive order, you can say that the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch all failed US citizens of Japanese ancestry.

That’s all bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.

People of Japanese descent also settled in other countries on the American continent. For example, there was a significant contingent in Peru.

The US government perceived these people as threats as well. The US government coordinated with some dozen or so Latin and South American countries. The US government convinced these other nations to round up their citizens of Japanese ancestry and to ship them to the US.

Again, these are citizens of non-US countries. Peruvian citizens were rounded up by Peruvian security forces and were shipped up to a US internment camp in, for example, Arizona. Their lives were uprooted. They had very little time to prepare. They were just packed up and shipped over a thousand miles to stay in the US and were thrown into what were effectively prisons.

That’s really bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.

There were Americans in Japan that found themselves trapped when the war started. The US and Japanese governments set up a civilian exchange program to repatriate their own citizens. For reasons not completely clear to me, the US did not want to send their own people of Japanese descent. Therefore, the US ended up sending some of the internees from other countries to Japan in exchange for American citizens interned in Japan.

Yes, you are reading that correctly. The US government interned Peruvian citizens that were living in the country of Peru just because they happened to have Japanese ancestry. They then took those Peruvian citizens and shipped them off to Japan, a country most had never been to, to get American citizens back.

That’s truly bad, but believe it or not, it gets worse.

At the end of WWII, the US emerges victorious and Japan is in shambles. With buildings bombed to rubble or set ablaze and its infrastructure completely destroyed, the Japanese people were basically living in holes in the ground and desperately scrambling for food.

Since the war was over, the US needed to shut down the internment camps. For the US internees, it was pretty much close the camps, force everyone out, and let them figure out where to restart their lives.

They couldn’t do the same with the non-US internees. The US couldn’t just set random Peruvians off running haphazard into our country, right? And actually going to the trouble of figuring out where each internee came from and making an effort to send them back to their own home country just seems too hard, right?

The US government decided that the right thing to do would be to take all of the non-US internees and ship them off to Japan. Yes, the Peruvian citizen that a few short years ago was happily living in Peru and probably had never even been to Japan was sent to live in a completely devastated Japan that couldn’t even house and feed its own people.

And that’s about as worse as it can be.

Beware The Swarthy!

Title: America For Americans

Rating: 5 Stars

There is a hallowed tradition in the US of celebrating immigration. There’s the Statue of Liberty and it’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There’s the basic mythology of opportunity, that you can come here with nothing and if you work hard you can eventually make your own way. On a personal level, for the last several years, I’ve been attending Seattle’s Independence Day naturalization ceremony, where hundreds of delighted and excited people from dozens of countries, all waving little American flags, proudly recite the citizenship oath. It always leaves me moved.

Yet, there is another, not so hallowed, tradition of anti-immigration. There is a thread constantly running through our nation’s history of hating the ‘other’. These ‘other’ people are lazy, dumb, thieves, rapists, murderers, and will not only never assimilate with us ‘real’ Americans, but are actually actively looking to take it over from us.

And when I say throughout our history, I really do mean it. One group of ‘swarthy’ immigrants refused to learn English. They lived on their own without even attempting to assimilate. Their immigration numbers, in conjunction with their apparently shockingly high birth rate, appeared set to overrun a state.  In fact, the English word foreigner became a synonym for them. The state began to keep a registry of these immigrants and  required them to take a US loyalty oath upon arrival.

These people are (of course!) Germans during the eighteenth century. The state was Pennsylvania. One of the most ardent anti-German politicians was that great founding father Benjamin Franklin.

Eventually, as the Germans settled on the fringes of the frontier and began to fight the Native Americans whose lands they were encroaching upon, the tide began to turn and the English settlers began to recognize them as white. After all, if you’re English and you need to pick a team between Germans and Native Americans, it’s pretty clear who you’re going to choose, right?

This sets the tone for the rest of history. After the Germans came a wave of Irish fleeing the Potato Famine. Germans were now considered good solid Anglo-Saxon stock along with the English. The Irish, being Celtic, were clearly a different, much inferior type of European. Although still above the Native Americans, and heaven forbid, African Americans, they were looked upon with contempt.

After the Irish came the most decidedly non-white Chinese. According to the railroad companies, their physiognomy and temperament made the Chinese uniquely qualified to work and die in large numbers in virtual slavery building the railroad.  Coming in large numbers to California, predictably enough a backlash grew against them. In my city of Seattle, the hundred or so Chinese that were living there were such a threat that they were driven away in a white riot. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1893 outlawed immigration for an entire ethnic group and explicitly made Chinese immigrants ineligible for citizenship.

To me, even sadder is the treatment of earlier immigrants to the coming new wave. For example, the Irish generally held a special contempt for Chinese immigrants. This was a combination of the two groups fighting for the same horrible jobs for nothing wages and the fact that the Irish, after so long being the victim of discrimination, finally had at last a target of their own.

This is also reflected in the early labor unions. You’d hope that labor unions would fight for the right of all workers struggling to eke out a living. However, nearly all labor unions explicitly excluded members of either the most recent immigrant group and/or immigrants that were considered from a then ‘shit hole’ country.

The Southern and Eastern Europeans began to come in waves. This time the Italians, Poles, and Russians were looked upon as being inferior European stock. It was the same old, same old. They couldn’t speak the language, are criminals, won’t assimilate, and will take our jobs.

Criticism wasn’t just based upon nation of origin. Just in case you think that our fear of Islam is a new thing, America has a long history of discriminating by religion. In fact, that was one of the major concerns with the Irish and the Italians. Being Catholic, it was believed that they would take their orders from the Pope and could never be trusted to be loyal Americans. Beliefs such as these led to the Know Nothing Party. It got large enough that there able to be considered a serious third party for a bit.

No discussion of this would be complete without talking about the Japanese. Coming from the ‘orient’, they were considered as suspicious as the Chinese. Believing that having Japanese heritage made you give your first loyalty to the Emperor, they were interned in World War II. This was despite the fact that 2/3 of those interned were US citizens.

Of course, then there are the Mexican / Central American immigrants. Californian farms and low wage companies desperately need immigrant workers. In the 1930s, when work dried up, 20% of the Mexican population in the US was forcibly expelled. It’s estimated that 60% of that number were actually US citizens.

Later there was the Bracero program, which was a legal means for Mexicans to do seasonal work in the US and then go back home to Mexico. Something close to 400,000 Mexicans a year used this program. With the Immigration Act of 1965, it discontinued the Bracero program and allowed a maximum of 20,000 immigrants from any one country. At the same time, it seriously beefed up US / Mexico border security, thus making it difficult to easily cross the border. This paradoxically led to increased illegal immigration because, since there were still jobs to be filled, Mexicans were incentivized to sneak across the border for the wages, and since the border was so secure, would stay in the US instead of going back to Mexico as they used to.

As you read Lee’s book, you see the exact same arguments used against each new wave of immigration. In fact, you even see the exact same words. There are references to swarthy Germans, swarthy Jews, swarthy Italians, and yes, even now, swarthy Middle Easterners. Seemingly innocent, swarthy, as used in immigration debates, is such a loaded term denoting darkness, grittiness, and dirtiness. It is an exotic sounding shorthand word for ‘otherness’.

In each case, each wave of immigration has faced the exact same set of accusations and it does not seem to matter that these accusations has been disproven each time.

Each immigrant just wants to have their chance for success. All realize that the path to success in America is learning the language and adapting to American ways. Even if the first generation has trouble adapting, they inevitably encourage their children to become ‘real’ Americans.

Why is this so hard to understand?

The Resource Curse Strikes Home

Title: Blowout

Rating: 4 Stars

This is the story of the resource curse. You’d think that if huge gas or oil reserves were to be found in a country that that would lead to a veritable bonanza for its population. For example, think of Norway. Flush with surplus cash from its petroleum sales, it established a sovereign fund for its citizens way back in 1990. This fund is to be used as necessary for future generations of Norwegians. It currently has over a trillion dollars. It is the largest stock owner in Europe. For such a small country, having this fund provides a nice healthy safety cushion for possible future troubles. Those crazy Scandinavian socialists and their silly ideas!

Alas, this sensible approach does not hold true for most countries. In fact, the spoils from oil/gas sales usually lands into the pockets of the very powerful few. Similar stories can be told in many countries, but here Maddow concentrates upon Russia and Equatorial Guinea.

The story of Equatorial Guinea is simply tragic. It is a poor nation. It has been ruled by a dictator (OK, fine, a ‘president’ that gets over 90% of the vote in elections) for over 40 years. All power flows from him. All petroleum revenue flows to him, his family, and a small number of his henchmen. In particular, his son (Teodoron Nguema Obiang Mangue) is a failed rapper impresario playboy with a fleet of expensive sports cars and a million dollar mansion in Malibu. While citizens of Equatorial Guinea have a falling literacy rate and limited access to clean drinking water, Teodoron is buying Michael Jackson’s glove and giving his girlfriends a shoebox of cash (some $80,000) to go shopping on Rodeo Drive. Anyone in Equatorial Guinea that has the nerve to even acknowledge this behavior is rewarded with years of torture in a prison.

The biggest kleptocracy of all is Russia. At one time, as hard as it is to believe now, the USSR was considered a legitimate existential threat to the US. I remember hearing news accounts about how much more scientifically advanced the Soviets were to Americans. Their system was considered brutally ruthless and would relentlessly beat down our flaccid liberal values.

We now know that it was all a Potemkin Village. When it did come crashing down and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, it brought into being, for a time, its own version of wild west capitalism. Fortunes were made if a person was lucky, ruthless, and not too concerned with the vagaries of law.

After Putin succeeded Yeltsin, the state became the head gangster. The relative few Western inspired innovative and efficient corporations were brutally taken over by its equivalent state favored corporation. The leaders of those bright new corporations were lucky to escape by only having to give up their equity and pay a massive fine. Some spent years in prison.

The state corporations had no interest in Western values such as return on equity or shareholder value. The corporations were run by Putin cronies of ex-KGB agents, friends from St Petersburg, and yes, believe it or not, judo instructors.

While a very few got unimaginably rich, the plight of the average Russian is sinking. Since Putin’s era, not a single multi-lane highway has been built in Russia. With no hope of succeeding, the current generation of potential Russian entrepreneurs is emigrating. With poor workplace safety, a high homicide rate, a high suicide rate, chronic alcoholism, and poor health care, the life expectancy of a 15 year old male is three years lower than in Haiti.

Who is one of the main enablers of this degeneration of countries such as Russia and Equatorial Guinea? It’s ExxonMobil.

In fact, transnational petroleum companies like ExxonMobil love countries such as these. After all, there is no bureaucratic red tape. There is very little concern with citizen protests if, say, I don’t know, their drinking water becomes polluted. They just have to pay a big enough bribe to the person in charge (and their cronies) and they get carte blanche to suck all of the oil and gas out of the country without regard to environmental damage. It’s great!

The second theme of this book is the role that American petroleum companies have in despoiling our country and our world in the name of the ruthless pursuit of oil and gas, wherever it might be found.

The development of feasible fracking has been a significant factor in the oil business. Previously inaccessible oil is now retrievable. Vast fields of gas are now available. Potentially a hundred years of supply exists within our borders. The dream of energy independence seems within reach.

There is the pesky problem of environmental damage. Near some fracking sites, pets and farm animals have died. Worrying instances of cancer have been identified.  Drinking water is now not so drinkable.

Possibly more scary is that fracking seems to be creating its own earthquakes. For example, Oklahoma, not conventionally thought of as being particularly earthquake prone, began experiencing hundreds of earthquakes a year, some ten times the number that California has.

Even though this growth in earthquakes exactly tracks with the development of fracking, the petroleum industry for years fought the charge. They claimed any number of scientifically dubious reasons to explain this away and actively tried to fire Oklahoman geologists that had the courage to publish their own peer reviewed findings.

This is the US resource curse. There are states like Oklahoma that are absolutely beholden to the petroleum industry. While there are Oklahomans that are now billionaires, their school funding was being slashed. Teachers were some of the lowest paid in the country. Oklahoma, in the heart of tornado alley, did not have the funds to create tornado shelters in their schools.  Ultimately, the people of Oklahoma did rise up, and in a rare burst of democracy, actually forced the Oklahoma government to raise taxes just a bit on the petroleum companies.

This is also acting out at the federal level. Let’s just start with Trump’s first Secretary of State, the former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. With no previous state craft experience but armed with a tremendous amount of knowledge of the transnational oil business and a personal relationship with Putin, Russia was thrilled with his selection. One of the first bills passed by the US Congress during the Trump administration removed the previous requirements that petroleum companies had to report on exactly how much and who they were bribing overseas.

No matter how much they fight or how much power they currently wield, at the end of the day, the petroleum industry is doomed to lose. It should take its signal from the coal industry. It is already dying out. In the open market, coal simply can’t compete anymore. Oil and gas, especially as the costs of climate change become more obvious, will have to adapt or die.

It has huge resources of cash, so it should be able to adapt. However, for 150 years, the petroleum industry has been laser focused on finding, claiming, drilling, and draining every oil/gas field that it can find, anywhere in the world.  Changing that mindset might, at the end of the day, just be too much to ask of an industry.

You might want to think about that if you’re a long term investor with exposure to petroleum stocks.

The Maliciousness Of Innocence

Title: Emma.

Rating: 5 Stars

Since this is one of the dead times of the year for film, I haven’t gone to a movie theater for several weeks. With at best modest expectations, I went to see Emma (the title actually includes a period to identify it as a period piece, yeah, cute, I know).

Most are probably familiar with the plot, either from reading the Jane Austen novel or seeing the film adaptation starring Gywneth Paltrow or the film Clueless. Emma (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the youngest daughter of a wealthy upper class father. As such, she is headstrong, spoiled, and doesn’t even have a shadow of self doubt.

Believing that she has the perfect ability to read people, she actively engages in matchmaking. Believing that she has unparalleled skills as an artist and musician, she willingly performs. She is the undisputed queen of her universe.

Her best friend is Harriet (Mia Goth). A young woman of uncertain parentage, Emma takes her under her wing and tries to raise her up to a match beyond her level. Harriet is already in love with a successful but only middle class farmer and he reciprocates her affection. However, confident that Harriet can do better, Emma convinces her to turn down the farmer’s proposal for a better match with the vicar. The vicar is actually courting Emma, much to her naive astonishment. The vicar indignantly refuses to even consider Harriet, so thanks to Emma she is now in danger of no attachment (gasp!).

George Knightley (Johnny Flynn) is Emma’s next door neighbor. They have known each other their entire lives and at first seem to have a relationship akin to brother / sister. As such, George thinks that gives him license to criticize Emma’s behavior, much to her annoyance. Under the surface it’s clear that they are in love.

Emma continues to make wrong decisions that badly affect other people. Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson) appears on the scene and soon proves herself to be a more talented musician than the frankly mediocre Emma, much to Emma’s chagrin. Emma is thoughtlessly cruel to a bothersome but sweet Miss Bates (Myra McFadyen), Jane’s aunt, who has fallen on hard times.

All of this causes Emma to realize how selfish, misguided, and inconsiderate she has been. Of course, she must have her comeuppance. And since this is a romantic comedy, she will emerge from it much chastened, a better person, and in love. It goes without saying that all people that she might have hurt through her previous actions all end up with happy fates.

This was directed by first time director Autumn de Wilde. She has a background in photography, and it shows. The film is beautifully shot. Exterior shots makes the English countryside look almost impossibly beautiful. Interior shots luxuriate in the ancient elegance of the English upper class.

It’s safe to say that the English upper class does not come out of this looking too good. Mr Woodhouse (Bill Nighy) is a hilarious hypochondriac constantly imagining drafts and can’t imagine living a life without Emma. None of the rest are particularly better. Minor inconveniences such as a crying baby causes panic and a desperate search for a servant to help them. The servants don’t say a line in the film, but their nearly invisible presence clearly is the only thing that is keeping the upper class functioning.

In addition to being useless, they are also foppish. In particular, the men wear absurd clothes. They wear so many layers that they can’t even dress themselves. Their collars are so high that they can barely turn their heads and essentially serve as blinders.

The acting is quite wonderful. Nighy is particularly good as the father. Goth, as Harriet, brings a lighthearted, innocent light to her character.

In a film called Emma, it all pretty much rests upon the actor playing Emma. Taylor-Joy brings to the role the exact right combination of innocence, beauty, charm, vanity, and steely self-assuredness. Watching all of this play across her face as Emma tries to display complete self composure is fascinating. She can express exactly what Emma’s feeling threw a faint raising of an eyebrow or pursing of her lips.

If you’re in the mood for a precious jewel box of a period English romantic comedy, Emma (with a period!) should exactly fit your bill.

!Command && !Control

Title: Command and Control

Rating: 5 Stars

This is a history of the US management of nuclear weapons. Spoiler alert: It has not been managed well. In fact, an argument can be made that it’s been somewhat miraculous that a nuclear weapon has not accidentally detonated.

There are two main threads to this work. One is a general history of the command and control of nuclear weapons in the US and the second is a detailed description of a specific nuclear accident.

Let’s talk about the accident first. In 1980, while doing routine maintenance on a Titan ICBM located near Damascus, Arkansas, an airmen dropped a ratchet socket. It fell eighty feet before hitting and piercing the missile skin. Immediately the silo became full of toxic material, prompting the evacuation of the entire complex. The leak caused pressure to continue to drop in one part of the missile, weakening it. If the two main parts of the missile collapsed together, the missile could explode, including the 9 megaton nuclear warhead.

With everyone evacuated from the site operations center, no one really knew what was going on with the missile. After many hours of delay, two airmen were sent in to check readings. The readings were so high that they nearly immediately evacuated. Before they left, they were requested to turn on an exhaust fan. In so doing, it’s suspected that this caused an electrical arc. The missile fuel exploded.

The explosion destroyed the site. Everyone in the area, military and civilians, frantically left in a state of chaotic survival panic. One of the airmen died. The other was seriously wounded. Some twenty others at the site were wounded as well. The nuclear warhead was launched 100 feet from the silo, but did not explode. Debris was found as far as 400 acres away.

It was a gripping tale. Although Schlosser does not go into as much detail with other accidents, it was by no means isolated. B-52s carrying nuclear weapons crashed. B-52s caught on fire. Nuclear weapons were accidentally dropped in flight.  Nuclear weapons were accidentally/unknowingly placed on planes, which were then flown around the country. Weapons were dropped while being handled. Probably the most scary situation was when a weapon accidentally fell from a plane and somehow all arming fail safes but one failed. If the remaining one had failed as well, the resulting nuclear explosion would have destroyed a good chunk of the East Coast, including Washington D.C.

Imagine if that happened? If a nuclear bomb went off accidentally and took out Washington D.C., how would the surviving government have responded? Of course it would have assumed a USSR sneak attack. In such cases, the response was clear. Full retaliation against all USSR targets. That would have triggered an immediate full response from the USSR. That one fail safe that actually managed to do its job saved the world from an effective Armageddon.

That is the larger theme of Command and Control. The US nuclear weapon strategy had two main goals. It was called always/never. Nuclear weapons must always work when required and they must never go off accidentally.

It doesn’t take even thirty seconds of thought to understand the essential incompatibility of these two goals. Each fail safe / manual intervention that you install into the weapons process to prevent an accident actually means that it is less likely to work in an emergency situation where it must function.

This conundrum is never resolved. The military gained effective control of the nuclear arsenal fairly early. The purpose of the military is, quite simply, to win a war when called upon. This was especially true during the Cold War. The US literally thought that it was in an existential battle with the USSR. I’m not sure if people not alive or cognizant during this part of US history truly understand this. We were brought up truly to think of the USSR as an evil empire intent upon taking away our way of life.

Therefore, the military was inevitably going to be biased towards making sure that the weapons would always work at the expense of additional safety measures to prevent accidents. By doing so, it placed its soldiers at risk, the local community at risk, the country at risk, and ultimately the world at risk.

Command and Control touches on many related subjects. I could probably go on at length, but below are just a couple of nuggets that I found interesting.

At various times in US history, politicians looking to score points on incumbents and defense companies looking to make more dollars would tell horror stories about missile gaps and bomber gaps with the USSR that were completely fabricated. The true reality was known by those in power but since this knowledge was acquired via covert classified activity (think U-2 flights over USSR), the truth could not be shared with the public. Also, for reasons of prestige and influence, even though the USSR was never really competitive with the US in firepower, they pretended to be. This resulted in dramatic buildup of arms in which the US was basically only competing against itself.

In the aftermath of World War II, European nations no longer had the stomach (or financial ability) to stand up its own standing armies in the face of the massive Soviet armies. Knowing that these nations could not possibly win a conventional war with the Soviets was actually one of the driving reasons for the US to amp up its nuclear capability. The idea was that a Soviet invasion of Western Europe would result in nuclear annihilation of the USSR. This was why the US, supposedly the good guy in this fight, was never willing to agree to a no first use policy.

There were people in the nuclear industry that were working diligently on improvements that could be made to existing weapons to make them safer. However, the military consistently placed more emphasis on new nuclear weapon development to the detriment of maintenance of existing weapons. Even though some of the safety improvements would have only been a couple of hundred thousand dollars per missile, these recommendation were almost never acted upon.

Finally, one of Schlosser’s last points is one that is near and dear to my heart. I spent a career in software development. Especially later in my career, I worked on products that had a system of system complexity. There reaches a point where the system of systems becomes so complex that it nearly becomes unmanageable. Doing simple root cause analysis becomes difficult. Things fail due to the interaction of seemingly unrelated events. Changes made to one component causes difficult to explain ripple effects throughout other components of the system.

Systems reach a level of complexity where, no longer how many safeguards that you place on it, no matter how many checklists you create, no matter how many scenarios that you can dream up, errors will inevitably crop up.

The nuclear command and control system is an example of such complexity. Errors were inevitable and did occur. We were just lucky that the errors didn’t trigger unimaginably horrific consequences.

At least so far.

Better Living Through Pharmaceuticals

Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Rating: 3 Stars

I find Ottessa Moshfegh’s work to be fascinating. I’ve previously read her novel Eileen and her short story collection Homesick for Another World.

All of her characters seem to come from some bizarre island of misfit personalities. They are usually some combination of unattractive, addicted, depressed, or sociopathic. She seems incapable of writing about any character exhibiting anything approaching a normative personality. The challenge that she seems to give herself is to create an as unsympathetic protagonist as possible and to see if she can entice the reader into caring and/or rooting for her.

So it is here. The narrator, unnamed, is quite a piece of work. She is young (around 25) and is thin and beautiful. Recently having quit / been fired from an art gallery job, she seems to have resolved to spend a year sleeping as much as possible. She manages to find Dr Tuttle, a psychiatrist, who willingly and cheerfully prescribes all of the drugs that our narrator could ever hope for. She mixes and matches various combinations, along with cough syrup, alcohol, and everything else to find the best mixture of drugs that will allow herself to sleep uninterrupted.

The narrator’s best (and apparently only) friend is Reva. Although Reva acclaims her love for the narrator and expresses concern with her drug use and lack of initiative, it’s clear that she is jealous, envious, and resentful of the narrator’s looks and access to money. The narrator, on the other hand, although acknowledging that Reva is her best friend, can barely stand her and is openly contemptuous of her.

There’s a couple of more characters, but most of the action revolves around these three.

As the narrator continues to try to find the perfect mix of drugs that will finally give her blissful sleep, Dr Tuttle gives her an experimental drug.

After taking it, the narrator has a three day blackout during which she was apparently out and about in the world but now has no memory of it. Worse, after having taken it, she finds it impossible to get back to sleep, regardless of any combination of pills.

Given that she now can no longer sleep, how will she achieve the peace that she thinks that only extended rest can grant her?

So goes another character in the Moshfegh universe. The narrator is deliberately unlikable. As a reader, it’s as if you’re reading the diary of someone bent upon self destruction.

As the story unfolds, Moshfegh does start to open a window into how the narrator got to this point. You hear about her parents and their deaths. You hear about her childhood home that now needs to be sold but that is still a potent source of memories for her. She is stuck and is just grasping for something that might free her.

If I’m a fan of Moshfegh, why the 3 stars?

At least for me, Moshfegh’s characters are best read in short stories. I enjoyed nearly every story in Homesick for Another World. In a short story, the anti-hero can be drawn and can arrive at their conflict / resolution quickly. As a reader, if you’ve reached your fill of Moshfegh’s pitch black humor, you can complete a story and wait a bit before starting the next.

In her novels, you have to marinate in the protagonist. I had a similar issue when I read Eileen. Although I enjoyed it, there were times when I was like, I get it, she’s a horrible person, I don’t need to be buried in all of the various parts of her horribleness.

I think that Moshfegh’s art is this pushing of the envelope. How far can she actually take the protagonist before she loses the reader? How many times do I have to read about her taking some random cocktail of pills and then passing out for sixteen hours for me to understand that she’s reckless and lost? How many times does Dr Tuttle have to ask the narrator how her mother died for me to understand that she’s a really bad psychiatrist? How many times does Reva have to ogle the narrator’s shoes for me to understand that she’s a shallow, envious, consumerist barely interested in the narrator’s actual health?

For me, from a thematic point of view, it all got a bit repetitive. I feel that the same story could have been expressed better in novella form.