How Did We Survive?

Title: The Dead Hand

Rating: 4 Stars

For those of us alive and cognizant during The Cold War, it was a treacherous time. I remember thinking that I was going to see the end of the world. The US and the Soviet Union seemed locked in a struggle to the death. There were already several near misses. On both sides, their early warning system raised false alarms that nearly caused nuclear retaliation. I remember specifically the story of the US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, being woken in the middle of the night with a phone call informing him that a massive Soviet attack was on the way. He specifically chose to not wake his wife up so that her last moments would be peaceful. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet nuclear submarine, thinking that it was under attack, except for the pure chance that a superior officer was on board, would have launched its missiles, thus assuredly causing a massive nuclear war. Back in the days where there were only three television networks to choose from, ABC had a massive audience for the film The Day After, the story of a massive nuclear attack and its aftermath.

And then, just like that, it seemed, it was all over. The propped up charade of Soviet style communism collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Dictators like Ceaușescu in Romania were arrested and executed. The Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in 1991. It was breathtaking to watch.

For a time, it truly looked like we’d reached the end of history. Communism was dead. Democracy was spreading. The world had a bright future, with the US proudly showing the way.

Of course we were naive.

Although the book bounces around a bit, it tells the story primarily of the 1970s through the 1990s. The first part told the story of the destructive and irrational arms race. Starting in the mid 1980s, it dealt with the US and the Soviet Union stumbling towards some kind of arms control agreement, the fall of the Soviet states, and the chaotic aftermath of failed nuclear states.

It also talks about the seemingly paradoxical behavior of the Soviet Union aggressively trying to reduce its nuclear weapon arsenal while at the same time implementing an effort into research, design, and manufacture of a massive biological weapons program.

Especially after the election of Ronald Reagan, there was deep paranoia and misunderstanding on both sides. Reagan was convinced of the immorality of the Evil Empire. After the Soviets downed the Korean airliner, his paranoia only deepened. The Soviet leaders at the time, Andropov and later Chernenko, were stuck in the old Soviet ways and were both mentally and physically debilitated by age.

Reagan’s perspective began to change once he was exposed to the US nuclear war plans, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). It laid bare to Reagan, the eternal optimist, that nearly every option in the plan led to devastation.

It led him to ponder alternatives and ultimately led to him being seduced by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Otherwise known as Star Wars, it envisioned a nuclear umbrella that would protect the entire world from ballistic missile attack. It’s a great idea. The only problem is that it’s impossible. It was especially impossible in the 1980s. Reagan was a man that never let facts and/or reality cloud his vision, so even though it was not technically feasible, it became the cornerstone of his nuclear plan.

Once Chernenko died, the Soviet leadership baton was passed to Mikhail Gorbachev. Relatively young and energetic, he willingly faced the problems that the Soviet Union was facing. The primary one was that its economy was collapsing. Note that it collapsing was in no way related to Reagan’s SDI (as I’ve heard said). In fact, since one of the things that they were really good at producing was ballistic missiles, their response would have been just to mass produce missiles and send them in a mass attack, overwhelming the SDI (a very effective strategy). It was collapsing because their markets were inefficient and the defense industry was consuming a huge percentage of it.

Reducing the defense industry footprint would be very helpful to the Soviet economy. In addition, as the new guy, he understood the folly of the US and the Soviets having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, desperately hoping never to have to use them but spending billions and billions just in case they have to.

So, Reagan, shaken by fears of nuclear Armageddon, and Gorbachev, desperately trying to resurrect the Soviet economy, started stumbling towards a significant nuclear disarmament agreement. This culminated at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. Working together, they came tantalizing close to an agreement that would have eliminated all nuclear weapons. The one sticking point was that Gorbachev required that SDI testing be limited to the laboratory for the next ten years. The Soviets, in their paranoia of the US, were convinced that the SDI program was a cover for the development of space weaponry.

Remember that SDI was technically impossible. In ten years, it might not have ever even made it out of the lab. In fact, it was cancelled in 1993. All Reagan had to do was to allow just a little bit of reality to enter his grand vision and acquiesce to including the word laboratory in the treaty. If he’d allowed that one word, the US and Soviet nuclear weapon arsenals could have been eliminated by 1996. Given their clout, that could have led to all nations renouncing their arsenal. 

But no. Reagan had the chance to truly achieve his nuclear free dream and he whiffed at it. He refused the condition. The summit collapsed with no agreement.

Later agreements were signed. During George H W Bush’s presidency, Gorbachev, now even more desperate, essentially began unilaterally disarming both conventional and nuclear forces. Swept up by history, the US went along as well.

However, we have nuclear weapons today. Where once there were some 60,000 weapons in the two nation’s arsenal, now we’re down to 20,000. That’s definite progress, but 20,000 is still more than enough to destroy the world.

Whenever I read about the CIA, it always makes me question its value. Here once again, the CIA failed its president. Despite the fact that the CIA was spending some twenty-five percent of its budget on the Soviet Union, it was clueless. It didn’t understand Soviet motives. It certainly missed out on the Soviet massive secret biological weapon program. Whenever I read about a nation’s intelligence service, they seem to cause more damage than assistance to their leaders.

Despite Gorbachev’s efforts to stop nuclear proliferation, he doesn’t come out looking great either. The biological weapon program involved mass production and delivery of diseases like anthrax and the plague. Such weapons are not designed for military targets. Their purpose was to take out civilian populations on a mass scale. These were being actively developed simultaneously with his efforts to reduce the nuclear arsenal. They continued on even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Although the biological program finally was shut down, the book was written in 2009. Since then, Vladimir Putin has taken on ever more dictatorial powers. Who knows what state the biological weapon program is in now?

The Laws Of Life

Life can be confusing. Most days there seems to be no order. Some days it appears that we just randomly careen from one thing to the next. Can’t anyone bring some order out of the chaos?

The good news is that several people have. They have created a number of principles and laws that each, in their own small way, manages to bring just a little bit of clarity and understanding in a world of anarchy. This is a list of such nuggets.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute malice to that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I always laugh at conspiracy theories like QAnon or Stop the Steal. Proponents of these theories have never seen a large organization up close and personal. Having spent my entire career working at one of the largest defense contractors in the country, I fully agree with the sentiment of Hanlon’s Razor. Large organizations are riddled with incompetence, bureaucracy, and inertia. To think that some large cabal of people can gen up some complex plan for world domination is laughable. The apparently nefarious acts that you are seeing are nothing but the result of some serious institutional stupidity.

Dunbar’s Law: Are you ever confused or intimidated by a Facebook friend that has hundreds or even thousands of friends? When you look at your own list of friends, do you feel insignificant? Well, don’t worry. Your friend doesn’t know that many people. In fact, research has determined a ceiling of people that any individual can maintain a stable social relationship with. That number is around 150 and is known as Dunbar’s Law. Apparently, there is a ratio of primate brain size to number of social connections. For humans, that ratio resolves to between 100 to 250. 

Flynn Effect: Doesn’t it always seem like the older generation looks down upon the younger generation? When you reach a certain age, it seems to become a requirement that you think that the world is going downhill and it’s always the current generation that is messing things up. Would you be surprised to learn that, in fact, the younger generation is smarter than the older generation? And that this has held true for the last several generations? IQ tests, designed to measure intelligence, by design have to have a mean of 100. It turns out that, over the years, IQ tests have had to be made more difficult for each new generation to maintain the mean value of 100. In fact, people have estimated that the average IQ score of people in 1932 would have been 80 if they used the test from 1997. Some 1/4 of that population would have been considered ‘deficient’ by the 1997 measurement. This is the Flynn Effect. The kids are all right.

Godwin’s Law: This one is important. As any online discussion becomes longer, the probability of a comparison to Nazism or Adolf Hitler approaches one. There is something about anonymity and written communication that brings out the worse in people. Check the comments of any popular youTube video for proof. I even saw this in professional situations. At the company that I worked for we had an internal tool that was a weird combination of Reddit and Facebook. Every now and then there’d be some forum post that stimulated a very large thread of responses. Over time, the tail of the thread would become ever more toxic.

Peter Principle: This is an oldie but goodie and, again from my personal experience, I can absolutely attest to the truth of it. The Peter Principle is that, in any large hierarchical organization, an individual rises to their level of incompetence and then stays there. On the surface this seems strange, but just think about it for a second. A person joins an organization. They excel at their job. Their work is recognized and they are promoted. Again they excel. Again their work is recognized and they are promoted. This continues until they are promoted to a position where they do not excel. In fact, they can barely keep their head above water. Their work is no longer outstanding, so they are not promoted. However, in any large organization, there often isn’t a practical process to move someone out of the way. So they stay stuck in the same job, doing mediocre work, for the rest of their career. Having been in such a large organization, I saw multiple cases of people that were smart and capable but would reach a level of ineffectiveness. There they would languish. Sometimes they’d make a lateral move to another position, but that just resulted in spreading their mediocrity. 

Sturgeon’s Law: Coined by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, his law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. Keep that in mind if you’re feeling down on your own work. Yeah, maybe your work is crap, but so is almost everyone else’s!

Dunning-Krueger Effect: Once again, I have seen this over and over in my career. The Dunning-Krueger effect states that people with limited knowledge or competence in a specific domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain. I have over thirty years experience in the field of software development. Since software has pretty much eaten the world, it is ubiquitous. Therefore, there are large numbers of people, often very smart engineers trained in a different discipline, that believe that they have some special insight into software. I estimate that there have been literally dozens of times that, during the course of my career, people in positions of some responsibility have made completely uninformed decisions about software that I then had to finesse to make it seem like I’m implementing their decision while actively trying to do the technically correct implementation.

Impostor Syndrome: I wasn’t going to write about this, but it’s so synergistic with Dunning-Krueger that I felt that I had to. The Impostor Syndrome states that people with competence in a discipline doubt their abilities and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. Once again from my personal experience, I can attest to the fact that, even after thirty years of experience writing software, that I had such fears and doubts about software development. Therefore, when a person with Dunning-Krueger collides with someone with Impostor Syndrome, terrible tragic actions can come to pass.

Ninety-Ninety Rule: This came out of the software engineering discipline. It states that 90% of the project will consume 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% will also account for 90% of the development time. This is for those wondering why software development projects never meet their schedule. There are actually truths hidden in this saying. Many times, especially in Agile projects, in the interest of showing immediate progress, some of the easier tasks are performed earlier in the project. The thornier tasks, often underestimated, are deferred until the latter stages of development. Also, software requirements morph over time. The cumulative requirement changes can have an impact upon the schedule. Finally, it’s at the end of the project where the really heavy lifting integration work is done (since all of the pieces haven’t been developed until this stage). This integration work nearly always exposes unknown problems and is thus consistently underestimated.

Hofstadter’s Law: I’ve seen this at play in software projects but it is applicable to any complex project. Hofstadter’s Law states that any complex project takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. In my career, I’ve estimated many large complex projects. We very carefully decompose a project into estimable parts. We overestimate each of those parts. We sum up those estimates. We then try to be smart and add a factor on top of the already seemingly overestimated cost. Even then, a good percentage of the projects end up overrunning even that estimate.

Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.

There you have it. Even if the world seems to be collapsing into chaos, there are still some concepts and principles that you can count on!

The Founder Has No Clothes

Title: The Cult Of We

Rating: 5 Stars

Reading this right after Devil in the Grove caused me serious whiplash. Devil in the Grove is the story of brave people courageously fighting civil rights oppression in the South, quite literally risking their lives in the process. The Cult of We is about a feckless man gone grandiosely drunk on power, wealth, and adulation. It really put the spotlight on the type of person that is glorified in our country.

This is the story of Adam Neumann, one of the co-founders of WeWork. In 2010, coming out of the Great Recession, real estate was still hurting. Neumann, along with co-founder Miguel McKelvey, started a new company called WeWork. It leased real estate space and then sub-leased it to tenants. The first building was located in Manhattan.

Not a horrible idea, right? It needs to be done. Others have done it before. It’s a generally profitable, if undramatic, business.

However, Neumann had other ideas. It wasn’t going to be just a real estate sub-leasing company. It would be a community builder. Catering specifically to hipster millennials and their small startups, his office spaces featured shared areas, open configurations, and amenities such as free coffee. They’d hold communities parties so that tenants could network.

The idea proved popular. People thronged to these new areas. WeWork was able to charge a premium rent for this added service.

As it grew, Neumann’s ambition grew along with it. He wanted investors to think of WeWork as a technology company, not just a real estate company. He wanted to use all of the hot buzzwords of other unicorn startups like Uber or DoorDash. He wanted to be thought of as a services company. He wanted to WeWork to be thought of as a platform.

Neumann had a broad vision of WeWork encompassing much more than work spaces. There was WeLive, which would revolutionize housing. There was WeGrow, which was going to revolutionize education. In a bid to become more services oriented, he bought software companies that had at best a barely tangential relationship to the core business.

In the 2010s, there was plenty of money floating around looking for the next unicorn to become huge. There were the venture capitalists. Banks were eager to get in on the ground floor of promising startups. With stock investments not bringing enough return, mutual funds had billions of dollars to invest. Finally, there were the sovereign funds that had huge amounts of money to invest with minimal oversight.

Neumann was brilliant at selling his vision to these private investors. The various fund managers were enthralled and gave him billions of dollars. Most caught up in this vision was Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank. He believed in empowering strong, unorthodox, all powerful founders of companies. He wanted founders to act crazy. Seeing great potential in Neumann, Son gave him billions.

Not that Neumann needed much encouragement to be crazy. Now flush with an almost unimaginable amount of money, he became wild. Staff meetings would feature shots of tequila. Long plane rides were an excuse to smoke marijuana. There would be corporate summer camps, where employees from all over the globe would gather for a party reminiscent of Burning Man. He required the board to provide him with his own private jet. He made arbitrary investments. Because he became obsessed with surfing, WeWork procured a startup that made large pools that created simulated waves.

He became messianic and a megalomaniac. He aspired to become president of the world. He bought multiple houses. He had a large staff, including a hair stylist, accompany him everywhere he went. During this time of extravagance, he preached simplicity to others.

To foster this lifestyle, he began to do ethically dubious acts. He bought buildings that WeWork were leasing so that he could be both an owner and a tenant. He was able to pull money out of WeWork for his own use without giving anyone else the opportunity to do so.

He was on top of the world until suddenly he wasn’t.  Due to its own problems, SoftBank could not provide the promised additional funds. Other funds, now wary of the billions of dollars already invested by WeWork with still no path to profitability, also were no longer interested.

With no other option, WeWork tried to go public. When a company wants to go public, its finances must be open. When the analysts read the reports, they were shocked. It turned out, that after nine years and behind all of the smoke and mirrors, that WeWork really was just a real estate sub-leasing company, and an unprofitable one at that. All of the ethically questionable funds that Neumann had extracted out of the company also became publicly disclosed.

In the ensuing outcry, the IPO was halted just days before it was to launch. The previously compliant board finally woke up and demanded that he resign. Neumann’s dream of being the first trillionaire were dead.

The book was a shocking read. On the news, you hear about these lords of capital with their grand pronouncements. These masters of the universe strut across the stage pretending that they’ve acquired their massive wealth due to their deep financial understanding, high intelligence, or hard work.

The fact is that they are boys playing with toys. The problem is that when they break their toys, millions of people suffer. The head of JP Morgan Chase, Jaime Dimon, is a case in point. He was CEO during the 2008 funding meltdown. In 2012, JP Morgan Chase suffered a $6 billion loss in the London Whale scandal. Here he we see him desperately pursuing Neumann’s business. Yet, despite all of these boneheaded missteps, he still is considered some kind of capitalist royalty.

It’s all so childish. Three investment banks were fighting each other for WeWork’s IPO business. A managing director with JP Morgan actually stayed in an ice bath for longer than five minutes as some kind of macho test for Neumann. It somehow seems appropriate that Neumann tried (and failed) to get the famous single copy Wu Tang Clan that the disgraced Pharma Boy Martin Shkreli purchased. It’s all so pathetic frat boy behavior.

Well, at least Neumann got his karma due, right? He resigned in disgrace and all of his foibles came to light.

Well, WeWork recently did go public. It could not do it on its own but as part of a SPAC (don’t ask). As a result, Neumann is currently worth over $2 billion.

Late stage capitalism indeed.

The Scottish Play In 3 Variations

This past week or so, I decided to take a look at three different cinematic takes on Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

On the one hand, they are all basically similar in plot. There’s a man (Macbeth) loyal to his leader. After bravely fighting for his leader, Macbeth encounters strange spirits that forecast promotions for him, ultimately predicting that he will take the place of the leader. Not believing the spirits, Macbeth becomes intrigued when the first promotion comes true. Then, strongly encouraged by his wife, he decides not to wait for the prediction to unfold naturally but to take definitive action by murdering the leader and assuming command. This leads to success, but guilt and paranoia take over and Macbeth comes to a bad end.

On the other hand, the three films are all quite different.

Let’s start with the weirdest. That would be Scotland, PA. Yes, set in 1975 in the small town of Scotland in Pennsylvania, Macbeth is a lowly cook at a fast food restaurant. He bravely stops a food fight by throwing all participants out of the restaurant. That night, he is visited by three stoned hippies (including, hilariously enough, Andy Dick) that prophesizes a future vision of a restaurant and a bank. From that vision comes the idea of the first drive thru. Macbeth and his wife (Maura Tierney) tie up the restaurant owner, Duncan, intending to murder him. Duncan does die, but in a horrible accident in which he plunges face first into a hot fry vat. A splash of grease gets on Macbeth’s wife’s hand.

Taking over ownership of the restaurant, they implement the drive thru and the restaurant becomes successful, leading to the Macbeths becoming quite wealthy. All is not right, though. The police lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) is suspicious and is poking around. Their best friend Banko (aka Banquo) knows that their alibi for the murder is not true. Macbeth’s wife, Pat, becomes convinced that the now invisible scar on her hand from the grease splatter has become grotesque and is incessantly applying creams and moisturizers to it.

It’s not going to end well for the Macbeths.

This is a dark comedy. The actors have great fun with their roles. Having grown up during that era, I found the callbacks to 1975 to be quite amusing. It was very much Shakespeare light, but entertaining nonetheless.

Throne of Blood is set in Japan during samurai times. Washizu Taketoki (Toshiro Mifune) is the great samurai warrior loyal to his lord, the Lord of the Spider’s Web Castle. After winning a decisive battle for his lord, he and Miki (the film’s Banquo equivalent) are returning home and get lost in a dense fog. There they encounter a spirit that tells them that Washizu will become a lord of a fort and will ultimately become Lord of the Spider’s Web Castle.

The two laugh it off until they return back to their lord and discover that yes, Washizu has in fact been made a lord. Even better, their lord has elected to stay with Washizu. Reluctant to assassinate him, Washizu is convinced by his wife to follow through on his plans. His lord is murdered and now Washizu becomes Lord of the Spider’s Web Castle. 

As always happens, once he has assumed power, paranoia, guilt, and superstition come to consume both Washizu and his wife. His wife goes mad trying to wash out imaginary stains of blood on her hands. Opposing forces prepare to attack his castle. His own forces desert him. Dozens of arrows pierce him. He staggers around looking like a porcupine before he dies.

This is great samurai pageantry. Mifune is at his hyperactive, operatically emotionally, scenery chewing best.

The final film is a 2015 version starring Michael Fassbender as Macbeth and Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth. This is the version that is by far the most faithful to Shakespeare. It’s set in medieval Scotland and the dialog is from the play.

Considering that I’ve now outlined the basic plot three times now, I don’t think that I need to do it again. Also, I wrote about it when it first came out.

It’s beautifully filmed. Scotland appears to be just one continual foggy bog. Here, there is very little pageantry. Scotland a thousand years ago neither had the wealth nor the desire for such things. Macbeth, for the most part, resides in tents. Everyone wears simple clothes. Once he becomes king, his situation improves, but there is not a lot of glitter in Scotland during this time.

As I said in my original post, although it hues the truest to the language, the film itself is a bit ponderous. There are several scenes essentially of Fassbender glowering at the camera as he utters a soliloquy. It’s breathtaking to behold and the language is wonderful. It’s just a bit dour to watch.

So, of the three, Throne of Blood is definitely the most entertaining to watch. Macbeth is truest to Shakespeare and reflects the setting of the play. Scotland, PA is fun and doesn’t wear its Shakespeare too loudly.

I’m still not done. Orson Welles did a version of Macbeth in something like 1948. Roman Polansky’s first film after the Manson murders was Macbeth. It has a reputation of somehow showing his state of mind at that time. Finally another version, called The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, is scheduled to come out soon.

Maybe in a month or so, I’ll do another round.

When Not Getting Executed Counts As Justice

Title: Devil in the Grove

Rating: 4 Stars

Another fairly recent Pulitzer winner (this time in the nonfiction category), this is just another vignette in our country’s horrible history of racism.

In 1949, Willie Padgett went out drinking and dancing with his estranged wife, Norma. They experienced some car trouble. A car with two young black men stopped to help. Willie insulted one of the black men and they fought. That much seems to be clear.

The next morning, Willie and Norma said that four black men, one armed with a gun, had raped Norma. Four black men were immediately identified as suspects. One, Ernest Thomas, saw the handwriting on the wall and fled. The sheriff, with a posse of one thousand men, were able to track him down in the woods. There, Thomas was shot dead while he slept. 400 slugs were found in his body.

The other three men were arrested. They were taken down into the basement of the jail, tied up and hung so that their toes were barely touching the floor, and were beaten with a rubber hose. The beatings only relented when they confessed to the rape.

The NAACP became involved. The trial of the surviving three took place almost immediately. The defendants’ lawyers had virtually no time to prepare. The judge was decidedly biased against them. After a quick trial, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepard were both convicted and sentenced to be executed. The third defendant, Charles Greenlee, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.  This was despite the fact that there was no medical evidence that Padgett had even been raped.

That was the first phase. The NAACP filed a number of motions for a new trial. It’s important to note that the NAACP did not even petition a new trial for Greenlee. They believed that conviction with life imprisonment was the best possible outcome for a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in the South. The appeal went all of the way to The Supreme Court, who overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial.

The sheriff, Willis McCall, picked up Irvin and Shepard at the state prison to take them to the county jail for the retrial. On the way back, McCall stopped the car, ordered the men out, and shot Shepard dead. He shot Irvin but Irvin was able to barely survive by feigning to be dead.

Thurgood Marshall himself came down for the retrial.  Even though the the county was under the microscope of national media coverage, the outcome was the same. Irvin was convicted and sentenced to death.

It now became a race against time. The current governor was actually eager to flip the switch to execute Irvin. The NAACP was able to file enough appeals to forestall the execution date until a new governor was inaugurated. This new governor, focused on making Florida a beacon for tourism and manufacturing, had no appetite to murder a likely innocent black man. However, he was willing to take the step of pardoning Irvin. He instead commuted the penalty to life imprisonment.

Irvin ended up being paroled in 1968. In 1969, he visited the county where the crime occurred. The day that he arrived he was found dead in his car. It was officially of natural causes but it seems quite suspicious.

There are so many horrible things going on here. First of all, let’s talk about the whole Southern obsession with black men raping white women. In Virginia, from 1908 to 1949, forty-five people were executed by the state. Every single one of them was a black man convicted of raping a white woman. Every single one.

In this case specifically, the doctor that evaluated Padgett found no evidence of sexual assault. The morning after the alleged assault, Padgett walked to a cafe and talked to someone working there. She exhibited no stress or impatience. She didn’t mention being attacked. The prosecutor knew about both of these potential witnesses but withheld the information from the defense attorneys.

After the first trial, the NAACP lawyers drove out of town and were pursued by several cars. Fearing for their lives, a high speed chase ensued. After an extensive chase, the pursuers finally gave up.

Violence was a reality for the NAACP. In an earlier case, Thurgood Marshall himself had been pulled over and forced to drive to a remote road. It was only when another attorney, guessing where they were taking him, drove and placed himself between Marshall and the vigilantes, that Marshall’s safety was assured. Henry Moore, a key NAACP organizer in Florida, died, along with his wife, when a bomb placed underneath his house exploded.

The local sheriff, Willis McCall, was a piece of work. At the beginning, he went to significant efforts to prevent the three from being lynched by an angry white mob. His true colors soon came out. He stood in the background as the three men were beaten to extract confessions. He murdered one of the men in cold blood and attempted to murder another. He was a known member of the KKK.

In the South, the sheriff wielded a lot of power, and McCall was not shy about using it. One of the defendants had some connection to a gambling outfit that competed against another black man that paid McCall protection money. It’s thought that the reason why that man was arrested was in response to his gambling interests. Another arrested man’s father was, by the standards of the community, a successful black man. He had his own business, his own land, and his own house. It was thought that the arrest of his son was in retaliation for his father becoming too ‘uppity’. The father’s house was subsequently bombed and he fled the county.

McCall ended up serving as sheriff of the county for close to thirty years, serving until 1972. He was beaten in that election because he was distracted by accusations that he murdered yet another black man.

Reading these types of books are always a tough exercise. Usually I can only read a chapter or two at a time. I’m always left feeling sad and angry. It’s astounding that the best hope that a black man falsely accused of a crime could hope for is to be convicted and sentenced to life in imprisonment. No one, and I mean no one, expected a not guilty verdict.

To read a book like this, and then hear about people protesting against the teaching of precisely instances of systemic racism like this is infuriatingly frustrating. Closing our eyes and pretending that this never happened is no way for our country to come to terms with our past so that we can understand our present and fulfill the promise of our future.

Pyongyang Forrest Gump

Title: The Orphan Master’s Son

Rating: 4 Stars

I have a thing where I read the Pulitzer fiction prize winners. I’ve read a good chunk of the winning books dating as far back as the mid 1960s. It’s not as if I read them as soon as the winners are announced. I usually wait a few years and then notice that I’ve fallen behind a bit and then read a couple more to catch up. The Orphan Master’s Son won in 2013. This was now its time.

This is indeed a strange novel. Written by a white guy about things that happen to Asian people in an Asian nation, it smells a bit of cultural appropriation. But then again, the nation being written about is North Korea, a nation that has somehow managed to reach the year 2021, an age in which there are no secrets and the personal has become public, continuing to live up to its name as the Hermit Kingdom. If there is no public culture to appropriate, can culture be appropriated? I didn’t do a lot of research, but apparently Johnson did make several trips to North Korea, so he’s not completely flying blind.

The structure is also a bit strange. There is the basic story, told in a third person narrative, of Jun Do, the person who is, as the title suggests, the son of a man that runs a home for orphaned children (the father is known as the orphan master). 

Interspersed through the novel are North Korean propaganda radio broadcasts. They are written in the bombastic form of the most extreme communist propaganda. This is set during the reign of Kim Jong Il, otherwise known as the Dear Leader. His superhuman exploits are brilliantly described as he battles with the war mad America and the starving, destitute South Korea. Within this broadcast is the telling of the North Korean prize winning short story about Commander Ga, one of North Korea’s great heroes.

The third path of this novel is a first person narrative of a North Korean interrogator. University educated, he eschews the harsh method of the brutal Pubyok, who simply beats confessions out of suspects. Instead, he works intimately with the suspects and builds up a biography that completely encompasses their lives.

His latest suspect is Commander Ga. The problem is that Commander Ga is an obvious imposter. Arrested for the murder of his wife, Ga refuses to break, even under torture by the Pubyok. The interrogator and Ga begin to develop an ever closer relationship as the interrogator seeks to understand Ga.

All three threads come to a head. The propaganda broadcast tells the story in a manner fit to glorify the state and its Dear Leader. The interrogator desperately tries to find Commander Ga’s truth before the Pubyok finish their brutalization of Ga. The orphan master’s son, Jun Do, is actually the Commander Ga imposter. His path describes what actually happened to Commander Ga’s wife.

If all of that seems to be a lot, then yes, it’s a lot. I haven’t even talked about Jun Do’s, shall we say eventful, life. Although he was not an orphan, his father made the decision to raise him like an orphan so that he would fit in with all of the other orphans at the home. Therefore, we see all of the deprivations that orphans go through, starting with the fact that they are just randomly assigned names of martyred North Korean heroes. Every day is a struggle for existence as food is scarce and they are pulled out of the home to work on back breaking projects.

Jun Do is drafted into the army into a special orphan brigade. Since they are orphans that have no value, they are given the deadliest of tasks. His involves serving in a dark tunnel that runs under South Korea. There he learns how to fight in the dark, which serves him well later. He also learns how to endure pain, which served quite well while he’s being tortured by the Pubyok.

At some point, it’s recognized that Jun Do actually does have value beyond cannon fodder. He’s taught to listen and understand English. He is sent to sail on North Korean fishing vessels to spy. On the boat, he listens and transcribes random English broadcasts as they bounce around the atmosphere. 

In recognition of service to his country, he is sent as part of a secret envoy mission to the United States. There he learns about Texas, barbecue, and makes contact with a US agent operative.

The mission fails and he is condemned to a North Korean work prison. This period makes his time at the orphan home look like a tropical vacation. There he meets Commander Ga. Ga, a renowned taekwondo master and a brutal bully, tries to beat up Jun Do in a mine tunnel. Jun Do turns the tables by kicking out the light. In the complete darkness of the tunnel, Jun Do kills Ga. He takes Ga’s uniform, goes up to the top, and then just brazenly claims to be Ga.

In the upside down world of North Korea where reality can be changed just by baldly stating a lie (hello Trump World!), he’s actually able to pull it off. He is now living the life of Ga, complete with his North Korean movie star wife and their two children. He even pals around with Kim Jong Il. Did I mention that Kim Jong Il is a character in this novel? No? Well, he totally is. This is what I meant by the post title. Jun Do, being everywhere that’s anywhere, is basically the North Korean Forrest Gump.

If you didn’t already think that this is a lot, now I’m sure that you’re thinking that it’s too much. Quite frankly, it probably is. That’s why it got a one star demerit. I really do like authors that swing for the fences and that surprise me. Johnson does both.

It just doesn’t quite jell. Honestly, I probably could have lived without the whole thread about the interrogator. There’s kind of a weird dissonance between part 1 and part 2 of the novel. Part 1 is a realistic brutal description of what Johnson imagines North Korean life is like for the average citizen. Part 2 is almost magic realism in how everyone, including Kim Jong Il, just blithely accepts the imposter Ga. I’m guessing that the brutal reality of the populace contrasting with the ethereal unreality of the Pyongyang elite life is probably intentional.

Although it didn’t quite perfectly work for me, I do recommend it if you’re looking for something original to read.

Neglecting The Eephus

Title: K – A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches

Rating: 5 Stars

I have a confession to make. I don’t really like baseball. I can’t even remember the last time that I watched a game on television (or streamed one, for that matter). In the last ten years, I’ve gone to perhaps one game. I believe that I left after the seventh inning. I say this even though, for a good five years, I lived within pretty easy walking distance of the home stadium of the Mariners.

That begs the question, why read a baseball book? And why give it a 5 star rating?

Well, it was a different story when I was a boy. Although I never played little league, for many years I played in a local school league. Being left handed, I was a pitcher and played first base.

At that age, my parents were motivated to find books that would interest me. One category of books that would consume me were sports trivia books. I would read strange but true tales from basketball, hockey, football, and yes, baseball. I read the sporting sections of the Guiness Book of World Records so much that I memorized the statistics. I could easily recite Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average of .366, Babe Ruth’s home run total of 714, and Lou Gehrig’s consecutive streak of 2,130. Forty-five years later, I can still recite those numbers even though Ruth’s and Gehrig’s records have long since been broken.

For some reason, of the four major sports, baseball trivia books were my favorite. I don’t know, maybe the pastoral nature of the game lends itself to expansive thought and interesting characters. I loved to read about the sometimes bizarre antics of the players as well as tales of their prowess.

Here I am, forty-five years later, still with a soft spot in my heart for books about baseball.

As the title suggests, this is a story about pitching. Specifically, each chapter focuses on one pitch. The types of pitches discussed were the slider, fast ball, curve ball, knuckle ball, screw ball, sinker, change-up, split finger, spit ball, and cutter.

Perhaps another reason that I like to read about baseball is the complexity that is hidden behind the simplicity of the game. After all, it’s easily played. You throw a ball, someone hits it with a stick, and someone tries to catch it or tag the runner out before they reach home.

At the professional level, there is an incredible amount of complexity. Chaos theory reigns supreme. Subtle shifts in finger grip and pressure dramatically affect the flight of the ball. If a ball happens to get even slightly scuffed, the ball can become virtually unhittable. Two pitchers can use what seem to be identical grips and yield dramatically different results.

Understandably, pitchers obsess over these things. They constantly stretch their fingers. Even though they are competitors in an elite field that ruthlessly casts you upon the trash heap once you’re used up, they constantly collaborate with each other to discover some new trick that will dazzle hitters long enough so that they can last just a few more years in the show.

In this book, hundreds of pitchers, crossing over a century of time, many of Hall of Fame legends but others that barely even make an appearance in the majors, discuss the thrill and agony of pitching. You hear stories from the 1880s, where pitchers were required to pitch within an actual circumscribed box and keep their feet on the ground, to Carl Hubbell, whose arm ended in a seemingly permanent corkscrew shape due to the motion of his screwball, to Mordecai “Three Fingered’ Brown, whose childhood accident might have cost him a couple of fingers but ultimately led to a grip perfectly optimized for baseball, to Mariano Riviera, possibly the greatest reliever of all time, who essentially just had one pitch but was so perfect that, even though the batter knew what was coming, they couldn’t do anything with it.

I found it all to be fascinating and entertaining. I felt myself transported back to my childhood bedroom as I eagerly read names long familiar and others newly discovered.

Obviously, this book is not for everyone. If you’re a hardcore baseball fan, I think that you’ll find it engaging and entertaining. However, even if you’re not but if you were once obsessed with baseball as a child and maybe harbored dreams of fame, this book will take you back to that time.

BTW, if you don’t get the title of my blog, then probably the book is not for you. 🙂

The eephus, otherwise known as a blooper, is an infamous pitch thrown high and slow to baffle the hitter. It might fool a hitter once but never twice.

It Could Have Been Worse

Title: The End Of October

Rating: 4 Stars

I like Lawrence Wright. He’s a nonfiction author that dives deeply into really interesting subjects. I believe that his history of Al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, won a Pulitzer Prize. Going Clear, his history of Scientology, is truly a bat shit crazy story that has to be read to be believed.

So, when I heard that he wrote a fiction novel about a global pandemic before the Coronavirus actually hit (The End of October was published in March 2020, so was actually finished some months before than), I was intrigued. I was a little leery because it’s not like we’re actually out of our own pandemic. My life has now been significantly unsettled by it for coming up on two years. What would it be like to read about it?

It turned out OK for me because things go seriously bad in the novel. Things get way worse than they even came close to in our timeline. That’s not to saw that this wasn’t a serious warning shot. If things had taken a few more left turns, our world could have turned out much worse.

It starts out with some unexplained death in an Indonesian camp. Our hero, the epidemiologist Henry Parsons, investigates, leaving his wife, Jill, and their two children, Helen and Teddy, back in Atlanta.

The deaths in Indonesia defy easy diagnosis. Meanwhile, the driver that took Henry to the camp embarks upon his Hajj to Mecca. There, surrounded by millions of fellow Muslims, he falls ill and dies. Despite heroic efforts at containment, some of the pilgrims break free, and thus a world wide contagion is born.

In case this is not complicated enough, there are geopolitical concerns. Saudi Arabia is on the verge of war with Iran. Russia is suspected of launching the virus in an act of bioterrorism and is preparing so-called soft attacks on American infrastructure.

The story unfolds on three main tracks. One is Henry desperately trying to get home to his family while at the same time lending his expertise to diagnose, track, treat, and ultimately prevent the disease. The second track is Jill and their two children trying to survive in a world in which civilization appears on the edge of collapse. The third track is Tildy Nichinsky, a career government bureaucrat promoted to National Security Advisor. as she tries to guide the President through the decisions required to save the country.

It is an action packed story. I read a previous review that called Wright something like the Tom Clancy of pandemics. This is actually quite accurate. Like Clancy, Wright is very strong on technical detail and can certainly tell a compelling story. He’s just not great at building complex characters. In plotting, he has trouble transitioning from one point to another, so there are some fairly large gaps in the narrative.

It is a great story. Wright spares no punches. Major characters die. Shit gets real. There is no pollyannish happy ending where everyone hugs and says well, that was a close call but we made it.

He paints a dire picture of exactly how thin our veneer of civilization is. Things don’t have to go all that bad before catastrophes quickly happen. A very real argument can be made that there are actors in the world that want to see the world burn. Some of them already hold the matches.

Although a work of fiction, there are real people characterized. Vladimir Putin is a sinister force throughout the book. Various other historical figures, especially from the field of biological research, are referenced. I’m not sure if he did it to be intentionally amusing, but I thought it was hilarious that Richard Clarke appears here. For those that need a refresher, Clarke was the dark prince Cassandra of the federal government. It was he that was frantically banging the drum about terrorism in the days before 9/11. Now, in this book, he has reassumed the role of doomsayer. Even after the shit has gone down and the US is teetering on the brink, he still sits ensconced in some elite DC restaurant, dispensing sage advice to any who will listen.

Wright did get many things right. At times it was a bit eerie. Nearly in a flash, the feeling of normality is ripped asunder. Despite all evidence, there are those that think it’s all a hoax. There are panic runs for essentials. There are frantic searches for treatments and vaccines. Government leaders grasp for easy fixes (although no one recommends injecting bleach), but generally are clueless.

Although it was taking place in a much more heightened atmosphere, based upon our now own actual experience, much of what transpired in the novel rang true.