Groundhog Day Meets Quantum Leap Meets Memento Meets …

Title: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Rating: 5 Stars

Fasten your seat belts.

On the surface, it’s a conventional murder mystery. Set in the interim period between the two world wars on a rundown estate in England, a woman (Evelyn Hardcastle) is killed at a party in front of guests. Whodunnit?

But wait.

The day of the murder is repeated indefinitely until the murder is solved. Apparently, the day has been rerun many thousands of times without a solution.

The person that is supposed to solve the murder occupies the body of someone at the estate. It’s a different body each day. One day he might be a butler, the next a wealthy banker, the next a spoiled cad, and so on. After eight days of repeating the day in different characters, all memories are wiped clean and the cycle repeats all over again with our protagonist (named Aidan Bishop) having no memory of any of it.

If that’s not complex enough, Bishop not only assumes the person’s body but actually the person’s personality. Therefore, when he’s in the body of the banker, his mind becomes analytical. When he’s in the body of the spoiled cad, he’s nearly overwhelmed by his lusts. He has to make use of the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the hosts that he occupies.

If that’s not complex enough, there are two other characters occupying bodies. Their memory only exists for a day, so each new day they start again fresh. Bishop has no idea what their motives are. They could be friend or foe, and at different times they appear both.

If that’s not complex enough, there is an omniscient character hanging around the fringes. Disguised as a plague doctor, he sometimes offers advice and criticism.

If that’s not complex enough, the first host that he occupies, Dr Sebastian Bell, has been struck on the head and is suffering from amnesia.

If that’s not complex enough, all of the eight days that Bishop lives seem to be occurring simultaneously. When one of his hosts fall asleep or is knocked unconscious, he leaps to the previous host that he was occupying, picking up where he left off. Since all of this is happening asynchronously, the time of day that he occupies each host is different. Therefore, things are constantly happening in the past or that will occur in the future that has an impact upon him that he’s desperately trying to figure out.

You got all of that, right? Picture a novel that has the setting of a decrepit Downton Abbey, jumping characters like Quantum Leap, a nonlinear narrative like Memento, and constantly repeating the same day like Groundhog Day. This might be a mystery that Borges might have written if he had a particularly strong pot of coffee.

Does it all work? I have no idea. I don’t see any obvious holes in the narrative, but anytime you mess with the past to change the future you’re pretty much guaranteeing any number of paradoxes. I can’t even imagine the byzantine diagrams that Turton had to maintain to keep all of the threads even semi coherent. Trying to keep track of it all made my head spin.

I can say that I’ve never read anything like it. That’s a good thing. 

The Gummint Needs A Publicist

Title: The Fifth Risk

Rating: 4 Stars

This book seems to have two main themes. One is that Donald Trump did not expect to become President. He did not prepare for his transition. When to everyone’s shock, he won then even the preliminary transition work that was done was quite literally thrown into the trash by Steve Bannon. 

By law, presidential administrations need to do extensive preparation for the incoming administration. Accordingly, massive briefs were assembled. Office space was allocated. Desks, chairs, and computers were all prepared. The day after the election, members of the Obama administration patiently waited for the Trump transition team to appear. And waited. And waited.

Days later, sometimes weeks later, one or two individual members of the transition team would appear. Often they were not qualified or had even a minimal expertise in the department that they were theoretically going to lead. Those that did appear would only pop in for a quick visit. They’d allocate an hour for a section of a department that had a multi billion dollar budget and tens of thousands of employees.

Sometimes they’d come in with some preset agenda. Instead of learning about an agency’s function, they’d ask for a list of all names of people that had written about climate change. Even worse, they’d bring in someone from the business community that had a vested interest in the agency not fulfilling its mission.

All of this is infuriating, but after five years of Trump, not even close to surprising. If competence, intelligence, or integrity were qualities that you looked for in your political leaders, you’ve long since left the Trump train unless you’ve drunk from the poisoned well of anti-democratic rantings from the likes of QAnon.

That part of the book read to me like just another Tuesday in the Trump administration, so I met most of it with a sad shrug of what our country has come to.

The other theme of the book resonated more with me. Lewis does a deep dive into a couple of corners of semi obscure departments like the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture. Certainly with the first two, these are departments that previous Republican presidential candidates have vowed to abolish. Amusingly, one of them was Rick Perry, who wanted to abolish, but then forgot its name in a debate, the Department of Energy. Trump nominated him as the secretary to, yes, the Department of Energy.

If you were to look at these departments, you might think that the Department of Energy might have something to do with oil, gas, or coal. You might think that the Department of Agriculture is mainly about paying subsidies to farmers. And you might think that the Department of Commerce is mainly about trade.

Well, it might surprise you to learn that the Department of Energy is crucial to preventing terrorist groups and/or rogue nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is the DoE that’s making sure that the nuclear waste from decades spent in nuclear weapons research doesn’t end up leaching into the Columbia River, the source of clean drinking water for tens of millions.

It might surprise you to learn that the Department of Agriculture is a vital tool keeping rural communities alive. Very conservative businessmen (and yes, they usually are men) are surprised and more than a little shocked and chagrined to learn that the small business loan that they get from their local bank for some entrepreneurial idea actually was funded by the Department of Agriculture.

Those who live in the Tornado Alley of the Midwest get their ever better early tornado warnings from the National Weather Service, which is part of the Department of Commerce.

The point isn’t that the government is some perfect institution of efficiency. Clearly, in any trillion dollar enterprise, there will be waste and, yes, fraud.

However, the fact is that the government does things that are absolutely vital that no one can do. Preventing nuclear proliferation is a good thing, but there’s no money in it. Clean water is a good thing but can easily fall prey to the tragedy of the commons. Rural communities are considered our country’s heartland but, if left unattended, will be strangled by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. The tornado research was based upon decades of weather data collection costing many billions of dollars. What private corporation will spend such sums for decades to save a relatively few lives?

As I read this, I thought back to my review of Evil Geniuses. Starting in 1980, a group of wealthy men (and yes, they were pretty much all men) made a concerted effort to paint the government as incompetent in a bid to reduce their taxes and to promulgate their libertarian philosophies. Governmental officials, not adept in business ideas such as public relations, have done a poor job extolling the virtues of their work. They simply can’t compete with icons like Ronald Reagan and their mocking of the idea that the government is actually here and is here to help you.

In nearly all of the cases that Lewis describes, most of the beneficiaries are from what would be identified as classic red states. Their individualistic ideology refuses to recognize the reality of their reliance upon the federal largesse.

The first three words of our constitution says it all: We the People.

So, the next time that you meet some faceless bureaucrat from some obscure federal organization, make sure to thank them for their service.

No Business Like War Business

Title: Catch-22

Rating: 4 Stars

This is kind of a strange book to review. After all, people who don’t know that the novel even exists know the phrase Catch-22, so even if you haven’t read it, you might think that you have some idea of what it’s about. Guess what? You’re kind of right.

The essence of a Catch-22 situation is that you’re in a paradox. To accomplish something, you must be able to do something else. However, to do this something else keeps you from ever being able to accomplish the thing that you originally wanted to do.

Yossarian’s paradox is that, after having flown several dangerous missions where he’s faced near death, he no longer wants to fly. In fact, the theater that he’s flying in is so dangerous that you have to be crazy to want to fly in it. If a doctor diagnoses you as crazy, then you no longer have to fly. However, if you ask a doctor to diagnose you as crazy to make your flight status inactive, the very fact that you ask to stop doing something that everyone knows is crazy means that, paradoxically, you are sane and therefore must stay on active flight status. Yossarian has no choice but to continue to risk his life flying missions.

Paradoxes are just one example of the absurdities that run throughout the novel. Doctor Daneeka, the medical doctor of the flight squad, is terrified of flying. As a requirement, he must fly a minimal number of hours per month. He gets around this by having pilots falsely list him as a passenger on their flights. This works until the plane that he was supposed to be on crashes. Even though he’s standing right there, the fact that he’s on the manifest list means that he’s declared dead. Despite all of his efforts, he cannot reverse the declaration. By the end, he’s deprived of food and shelter and is living like a ghost.

Although this is clearly an anti-military novel, many of the situations described wouldn’t be out of place in any large bureaucracy.

Having spent decades working for a large corporation, many of the absurdities described in the novel didn’t faze me. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to do something and was told that I couldn’t because what I was doing was nonstandard. When I tried to determine what the standard was, I was told that it didn’t exist. I’ve been on many teams that has had budget to hire personnel but couldn’t get authorization to increase the team’s headcount. Of course, at the end of year, the team gets penalized for not spending to the budget.

As described in Catch-22, I knew many managers that were significantly more invested in personally looking good than in growing the company. Just like Lieutenant (later General) Scheisskopf and his obsession with parades, they were just interested in having all of their stop sign metrics the proper color.

Yet still, through it all, the Allies are winning the war. Reading the novel, this success seems mysterious. I felt the same working at a large corporation. I personally have not only seen made up numbers but have basically made up numbers myself out of something approaching thin air. I’ve seen this essentially everywhere I go and at every level that I have worked at. Yet, somehow, year after year, the corporation somehow managed to make more money than it spent. It never ceased not to baffle me.

Heller takes aim not just at the military. With Milo Minderbinder, you see capitalism out of control. He makes deals so crazy,  byzantine, and shady that no one can figure out how he makes a profit. As long as his bottom line is profit, there are no rules. He hires American pilots to strafe American camps. He hires Nazi air defense to defend against American attacks. Whenever anyone questions him, he just gives assurances that everyone has a share. This shared responsibility somehow absolves all.

If you look at 2008 and the housing crisis, with its plethora of financial devices such as CDOs and CDSs, you see the exact same deadly combination of amorality and complexity for the sake of complexity. The insanity from that period isn’t that far off from Minderbinder’s excesses.

In terms of blemishes, it was a novel that Heller started working on in the very early 1950s. Therefore, not surprisingly, the relatively few women characters are caricatures at best. His treatment of prostitutes is especially problematic. He does beat the paradox idea pretty much to death. Also, it’s a sprawling novel containing many characters. As such, it can be a bit messy to read.

Even so, it is a classic comic read that leaves a bittersweet taste but ultimately does end on a message of hope that Yossarian will ultimately find a way out of his own personal Catch-22.

A Medieval Papal Scribe Saves Civilization

Title: The Swerve

Rating: 4 Stars

The story of how our modern civilization came to be is interesting. Most of the basic underpinnings of what we perceive as modern can be traced back to the Greeks. Most have heard of Plato or Socrates, but there are other figures such as Epicurus. For those few that know of him, it’s mostly in relationship to the word epicurean. Epicurean, depending upon the company that you keep, can be thought of as refined or sophisticated or, alternately, pretentious, frivolous, gluttonous, or even slothful. Epicurean philosophy is much richer than either of those extremes.

As Rome came to power, they respected and incorporated Greek beliefs. This began to change with the rise of Christianity and as Rome became beset by barbarians. As Rome was conquered by barbarians, they ransacked, destroyed, and enslaved the nation. Christians, with their unswerving monotheism and evangelical drive, were inherently suspicious of what they came to think of as pagan beliefs. Seeing these beliefs as a direct challenge to their religion, they sought to eliminate them. Especially in the fourth century as Christianity became the official state religion, these attacks became more overt.

From a loss of knowledge point of view, the destruction of the Library at Alexandria seems most tragic. Once considered the seat of knowledge housing many of the world’s top scholars, it held some hundreds of thousands of scrolls. It underwent a decline for many reasons, one of which was active persecution by Christians that led to the deaths of scholars and the destruction of scrolls.

By the middle of the first millennium, Europe had lost much of the knowledge that had accumulated over the previous thousand years. As a result, there was relative intellectual silence during the succeeding thousand years.

How did we manage to regain some subset of that knowledge? That is the story told by this work.

Even after Rome fell, monasteries continued to exist. At these remote places, monks continued to work and worship. Part of that work included reading and writing. Note that this was not to broaden a monk’s understanding. The philosophy of Christianity was unchallenged there. The writing and reading were done for the sake of doing toil for the sake of work. Ancient manuscripts ended up at these monasteries. Over the centuries, as these manuscripts faded away, monks would blindly rewrite them. Monks made transcription mistakes, but at least some faded copy of a copy would still exist. So, even though the ideas expressed in some of these papers were expressly opposed to their own beliefs, because of their work habits, they ended up preserving them.

Enter Poggio Bracciolini. Born in 1480, he was a high ranking papal secretary with a love of Greek and Roman writings. Using his position, he could visit these ancient monasteries and gain entrance to their libraries. There he would scour the oldest manuscripts looking for any scrap that seemed to be of Greek or Roman origin.

At one monastery, he was able to find Lucretius’ poem On The Nature Of Things. Not only a brilliant poem, it was also a great exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus.

Some of the ideas expressed in this poem were:

• Everything is made of invisible particles (atom)
• These invisible particles are the same regardless of the shape they take (ie all forms are made up of the same atoms)
• These invisible particles are constantly in motion
• The universe has no creator or designer
• Nature ceaselessly experiments (evolution)
• The universe was not created by or for humans
• In the universe, there is nothing particularly special about humans
• Human society began as a primitive battle for survival
• There is no afterlife (death is nothing to us)
• All organized religions are superstitious delusions
• The highest goal of life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder

This was written in the 1st century BCE. Reading through that list again blows the mind in how advanced and, yes, modern it all seems.

Greenblatt does not claim that this poem was the reason for the Renaissance or anything like that. However, once providently found in the library of a remote monastery, a copy was made. Copies were made of that copy and soon it was being bandied about across Europe. During a time of secular book burnings and accused heretics being burnt at the stake by such people as Savonarola, it was documents like this that kept a free thinking intellectual tradition alive.

This book is both the story of how an intellectual tradition was born, was lost, and was born again and of the man that found the poem. Bracciolini wasn’t some grand hero on some heroic quest. He was a man seeking his fortune through the papal bureaucracy that also happened to have an obsession with Greek and Latin antiquities. Being a scribe, he was uniquely positioned to understand what he was looking for and was able to quickly copy it once found.

He was a pretty historically nondescript person that proved to be indispensable for the forming of our modern world today.