A Soviet MacGuffin

Film: Stalker

Rating: 2 Stars

It’s that time again. I’m ever so slowly making my way through the British Film Institute Sight and Sounds best films list. I’ve just finished Stalker, a 1979 film out of the Soviet Union.

Apparently, aliens have visited the Earth. They left behind an area where physical laws don’t always apply. There’s a room in this area that, whenever anyone enters the room, their most private wish will be granted. This area has been named the zone. The government has fenced off the zone and have set up patrols to keep people out.

As a result, a profession has cropped up that sneaks people past the fence and the guards and guides them through the zone. In the film, the person is called Stalker. Despite his wife’s tearful objections, he has agreed to guide two people into the zone. One is named the Writer and the other is the Professor.

The Writer has become embittered and disillusioned with writing and, more than that, with life. He considers it all to be dreary and boring. He apparently wishes to regain his genius. The Professor ostensibly wants to investigate the zone in the hopes that he will gain a Nobel Prize for his discoveries.

The Stalker successfully manages to bypass the authorities and infiltrate the Writer and the Professor into the zone. As an aside, I do have to say that security around the zone wasn’t exactly state of the art. He wasn’t particularly subtle or quiet but still managed to fairly effortlessly slip into the zone following behind a train.

While the environment outside the zone was a post industrial wasteland devoid of color, once inside the zone, all is lush and green. You still see the remnants of abandoned or broken technology, but for the most part wilderness has taken over. Because apparently the laws of gravity are variable and ever changing in the zone, the Stalker has to tie up bolts with strips of cloth and periodically hurl them forward to assess the state of the gravity in which they’re heading.

The three of them have to navigate a Meat Grinder, which is essentially a dark and dank long tunnel. Eventually they reach the room. There, the Stalker narrates the story of a previous stalker named Porcupine. Porcupine once sacrificed his younger brother. Haunted by the guilt, Porcupine entered the room resolved to save his brother. Instead, he found himself extremely wealthy. Understanding that his desire for wealth was stronger than his desire to save his brother drove Porcupine to suicide.

The Professor then announces his real intention, which is to explode a bomb that he smuggled in and destroy the room. He believes that no one should have the power to have their most powerful wish be fulfilled. The three of them fight over the bomb until the Professor changes his mind.

By this time, the Writer has also decided not to enter the room. After the long arduous journey, neither men actually go into the room. We never see the inside of the room.

The three return. The Stalker’s wife has forgiven him and tends to him as he collapses into bed. In a monologue, she explains that she knew that she’d have a hard life being married to an outlaw like the Stalker, but she had no regrets because she’d rather live an interesting life than an easy one. In the final scene, the Stalker’s daughter (who apparently has some disability with her legs) reads a poem and then psychokinetically moves glasses around a table.

And curtain.

So, why 2 stars?

Let’s start with the length. It’s something over two hours and forty minutes. Perhaps this is a sign of me getting old and my attention span deteriorating, but I’m getting increasingly disenchanted with films that need more than two and a half hours to tell their story. I’ve recently watched Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, both of whom clocked in at over three hours. They were fine but, in both cases, I think that director hubris resulted in a film longer than necessary.

With Stalker, for over two hours of the running time, there are only three characters. It’s not as if a whole lot happens while they’re in the zone. They’ll walk a bit, then one of the three will go off on some philosophical monologue. They’ll walk a bit more and then another will have some thoughts that they feel the need to express. Rinse and repeat.

A common saying in film, being a visual medium, is to show and not tell. Well, in this film, it pretty much is all tell. Every time the camera moved into a closeup of one of the three, in the back of my mind I was thinking, oh boy, here comes another soliloquy. Not only that, but the director Andrei Tarkovsky is never content showing a quick closeup. Every closeup, even if it’s a reaction shot, seemed to have to take at least five to ten seconds. Accordingly, the film moved at a snail’s pace.

In Tarkovsky’s defense, he was aware of the criticism of the slow moving pace of his film. Hilariously, his response was:

The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

A second beef that I have with the film is giving the character names of Stalker, Writer, and Professor gives it all of the subtly of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (with character names like Christian, Pliable, Obstinate, and Mr Worldly Wiseman). One of the themes is the conflict between art (Writer) and science (Professor). You hear the tired arguments of how science, through the act of measuring, somehow removes the magic of living. It’s mildly interesting that, by the end, both art and science seem to be at a dead end. Stalker, speaking to his wife, complains that the two men were empty headed and dead eyed and that it’s a waste of time to take people like that into the zone.

In other not so subtle filmmaking, everything outside the zone is filmed in tired sepia tones while the zone is vibrantly filmed in color. I imagine that this is making the point that we live in a world devoid of magic and life.

As I watched the film, there did seem to be a kind of echo back to Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad’s novel, this film is a long journey that abandons civilization in search of a deeper truth.

In other ways, I was reminded of a Grimm fairy tale. The three embark on this long mission wanting to have their most private wish granted. Along the way, they learn that maybe getting what you want isn’t always what you need. It might even have blowback consequences. At the decisive moment, even though going into the room was the sole purpose of the journey, none of them actually enter.

Finally, the room itself is a classic MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is a term most popularized by Alfred Hitchcock. A MacGuffin is a thing that propels a plot forward but ultimately proves to be unimportant or irrelevant. A classic MacGuffin is whatever is in the briefcase that Jules (Samuel L Jackson) is carrying around in Pulp Fiction. Here, the room is the entire reason for the journey and yet is never seen.

It could very well be that the director, Andrei Tarkovsky, is just not my cup of tea. After all, Stalker is not his only film in the BFI top 50. In fact, one of his films, Mirror, is even rated higher than Stalker. I watched it a couple of months ago. Not only did I also give it a paltry two star rating but I was so unenamored by it that I didn’t even bother writing an article about it.

Here’s hoping that there’s not a third Tarkovsky coming up any time soon.

More Than One Way To Skin A President

In my last post, I wrote about the book How To Get Rid of a President. As the title suggests, it takes a look at all of our past Presidents and the various ways that some have been marginalized. In that post I discussed the more obvious ways that this can happen to a President (death, assassination, and impeachment). As promised, I’ll continue on with some of the less subtle ways that this has been done.

Before I start that, let me talk about probably the most obvious way that we can get rid of a President. We can simply vote them out. Sitting Presidents that got voted out include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, and Donald Trump (yes, he actually did lose). Let’s not forget the weird grudge match where Benjamin Harrison defeated the sitting President Grover Cleveland and then four years later Cleveland returned the favor.

There are occasions where the party steps in. The poster boy for this is poor John Tyler. He really doesn’t get any love. The problem boiled down to the fact that he was a member of the Whig party only in name. He was a Democrat that became so disenchanted with Andrew Jackson that he switched to the Whig party. However, he didn’t bother changing his philosophy. He was put on the ballot as Vice President exclusively for ticket balancing purposes. When William Henry Harrison unexpectedly died a month into his term, Tyler was unexpectedly thrust into the Presidency. On the good side, he did establish several norms about presidential succession that we still follow today.

However, the Whigs were definitely unhappy with him. The Whigs dominated the election, controlling the legislature and the Presidency. Harrison had promised to follow the direction of the Whig legislature. Whigs like Henry Clay thought that this was their moment to shine.

Alas, it was not to be. Tyler believed that Whig priorities like infrastructure projects were unconstitutional. He expressed that belief with a, at the time, record number of vetoes. This understandably frustrated not only the Whig legislature but voters that felt deceived. There were riots in front of the White House where stones were thrown. When walking in public, stones were actually thrown at Tyler himself. There were vague mutterings about impeachment. There was no way that the Whigs were going to renominate Tyler. Tyler apparently hoped that he would gain the Democratic nomination, but that proved to be a delusion. By the end of his term, Tyler was a man without a party.

A similar fate came to pass for the two Presidents immediately before the Civil War, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. They both seemed to think that their parties were going to renominate them. This seems strange since both of their Presidencies are generally considered to be failures. Especially with Buchanan, where he seemed to imply that, although he didn’t want the Southern states to secede, he seemed to be under the impression that he couldn’t do anything about it. Both of them usually fall into the bottom five of Presidential rankings. The Democratic party seemed to agree with the historians because it refused to renominate them.

Another interesting example was Chester Arthur. Taking over for the assassinated James Garfield, people were horrified at the prospect of his Presidency. Never been elected to office and the poster boy for spoils system abuse, people expected him to do the bidding of the party boss Roscoe Conkling. What makes it even worse was that one of the motives of Garfield’s bat shit insane assassin, Charles Guiteau, was to elevate Arthur to the Presidency. Not a great way to start.

To the shock of all, Arthur turned out to be a decent President. Although a Stalwart Republican (ie a fan of the spoils system) he championed Garfield’s proposal to reform the civil service reform. Even though a baby step, it was meaningful in moving forward to creating a professional class of government employees based upon expertise instead of party affiliation. For those that care, one of Trump’s second term promises is to reverse that progress (ie he wants to replace expertise with ‘his guys’). Arthur also made progress modernizing the Navy. He seemed to be disappointed not to even be considered for renomination. On the other hand, even during his Presidency he was diagnosed with a serious, usually fatal disease. He died about two years after his Presidency, so it was probably just as well that he wasn’t nominated.

Another example of party rejecting a President actually happened in my lifetime that I was not aware of. Lyndon Baines Johnson, famously said, at the end of a televised national address, that he would not seek the nomination in 1968. I’d always heard the story that, after this announcement, Johnson was generally content with his decision. In the book, Priess suggests that Johnson had second thoughts. Especially after Robert F Kennedy was assassinated and Eugene McCarthy did not seem to have party wide support, Johnson thought, during the heat of the convention, that the Democratic party leaders would come to their senses and plead for him to accept a draft. According to Priess, Johnson had a speech ready and a plane fueled to go. The call never came and his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, ended up getting the nomination.

I could go on. There are the candidates that look very Presidential and have all of the qualities that one looks for in a President but just never make the grade. The poster boy for this is Henry Clay. He is probably the most accomplished American politician to never become President. It wasn’t for lack of trying. He ran for President three times. He tried to pull off a sneaky end around in 1824 (which I might about later because it’s kind of funny how it worked out for him). He ran again in 1832 but fell to his arch enemy Andrew Jackson. In 1844, trying one more time, he lost to Jackson’s protege, James Polk. The poor guy just couldn’t catch a break.

A final shout-out has to go out to Samuel Tilden. Again, we have a very successful politician that had the added benefit of having a squeaky clean reputation. Running in 1876, on election night it looked like he had a clear majority. However, there were three states whose votes were somehow still in limbo. A commission was established to determine the winner of each state. All three being Southern states, the wink-wink promise of ending Reconstruction by the Republican apparatchiks proved to be quite the seductive argument. The committee arbitrarily awarded all electoral votes in all three states to the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes. By doing so, Hayes squeaked by in the electoral college by one vote, forever earning the nickname Rutherfraud Hayes.

There you go. Isn’t Presidential trivia fun?

Catnip For President Geek

Title: How To Get Rid Of A President

Rating: 4 Stars

For those long time readers of this blog, you know that I’m kind of obsessed with US Presidents. Especially during the 2020 election, when I was low key stressing, I relieved some of that anxiety by regurgitating semi-random facts about US Presidents that I found interesting. Since 2024 is shaping up to be a rematch of 2020, there’s a reasonable chance that I’ll do it again.

This book, written over five years ago, has a grand total of about 200 ratings and about 50 reviews on Goodreads, which doesn’t exactly make it a viral trending book. The Lincoln Highway, by comparison, has about 250,000 ratings and 25,000 reviews. It’s fair to say that a book like this has a limited audience.

Well, I’m certainly a member of that audience. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly an amazing book about Presidents. Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen is an example of such an amazing book. Even so, there was more than enough Presidential inside baseball in this book to make it worth my while.

The title of the book pretty much says it all. Priess looks back at the 45 men that have served as Presidents (written in 2018, it obviously did not know about Biden and barely talks about Trump) and discusses how our country managed to get rid of sitting Presidents. He excludes those Presidents that took the normal route of serving two full terms and then retiring.

First of all, there were the Presidents that, I don’t know, conveniently died in office. There have been four: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt. Not a lot to be said there except RIP.

Of course, the most obvious way to get rid of a President is assassination. There have been four successful assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy. He went into the motivations of each assassin. Interestingly, there really isn’t a common thread among the four. One wanted to avenge the South, one was clearly mad as a hatter, one was an anarchist wanting to overthrow the system, and with Oswald, it’s not really all that clear, maybe he just wanted to strike a blow against someone bigger than himself.

Those are the successful ones. There have been many unsuccessful attempts. The first was a madman who got within six feet or so of Andrew Jackson with two guns, and they both misfired. This being Andrew Jackson, he responded by beating the assassin so severely with his cane that he had to be pulled off of him. Weirdly enough, the two guns were in perfect working order. There was no reason for them to misfire.

There have been others. Booth wasn’t even Lincoln’s first assassin. While he was on a horse ride, he heard a gun shot and the bullet embedded in a tree, just missing his head. The shooter was never found. Although not actually president at the time (he was running again under the Bull Moose banner), Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest but still proceeded to give a ninety minute speech. Franklin Roosevelt was also once a target. An Italian anarchist took a shot at him in a parade. The Chicago mayor sitting next to Roosevelt died from his wounds.

While the White House was undergoing repairs, Truman was napping at the Blair House when a couple Puerto Rican nationalists tried to rush in to shoot him. They ended up killing an agent before they themselves were killed or captured. Truman, hearing the gunfire, instead of doing the reasonable thing and ducking down, looked out the window to see what was going on.

In my lifetime, Reagan was shot by someone trying to impress Jodie Foster. Spoiler alert: it did not work. Nowadays, people have forgotten how close Reagan actually came to dying. Considering that this happened only about two months into his term, this could have altered history in really interesting ways.

Jerry Ford gets a prize for two assassination attempts taking place within a month. Even better, both of them were women. As far as I know, they have been the only two women that have tried to assassinate a President.

Various people have taken long shots at the White House. One was during the Obama administration and the other was, I believe, during the Clinton administration. The only overseas attempt that I’m aware of is when someone threw a grenade at George W Bush in the former Soviet state of Georgia.

There are other ways to try to remove a President. According to the Constitution, impeachment and conviction is the approved path. Again, this book was published in 2018, so it only talked about two Senate trials after a successful impeachment.

Andrew Johnson escaped getting convicted in the Senate by one vote. Don’t get me wrong. Johnson was a bad President. He pardoned thousands of treasonous Southerners. He tried really hard to stop Reconstruction. He was an open racist with no interest in helping Black Americans that were recently enslaved. Even so, Johnson’s impeachment was kind of a frame. The Congress, dominated by Radical Republicans that were in a supermajority, passed a law that they knew that Johnson would violate. Once he inevitably did, they brought about articles of impeachment. Even though they had more than enough votes in the Senate, just enough Republicans defected so that Johnson survived. It’s interesting that one of the reasons that some Republicans apparently voted to acquit because, at the time there was no Vice President, so the next in line was the president pro tempore, the radical Republican Benjamin Wade. In fact, he was considered so extreme that even his party members were like, nah, we don’t need that now, especially since they knew that in a couple of months, the war hero US Grant was going to win the election anyway.

The other impeachment and trial that was discussed was Bill Clinton. This exercise shows the folly of trying to impeach a President that is popular. This is especially so when the entire exercise seemed to be a politically partisan exercise. I mean, impeaching him for lying under oath about sexual relations as part of a completely different investigation into obscure financial shenanigans for which he wasn’t even charged seems dubious at best.

Although he doesn’t talk about Trump, I’ll do so a bit. It’s especially interesting in comparison to the other impeached President, Richard Nixon. Nixon was impeached for the Watergate coverup. It became clear that an overwhelming majority of Senators, both Republican and Democrat, were shocked at the accusations and would vote to convict. Seeing these insurmountable odds, Nixon resigned to avoid the ignominy of being convicted and ousted.

Compare that to Trump. He wins the prize for being impeached twice. The first time was for trying to coerce a foreign government (Ukraine) into starting an investigation into his political opponent Biden if they wanted US to provide weapons that they desperately needed. It’s hard to imagine a better example of a high crime and misdemeanor than that. Unless, you think about his activities after the 2020 election, where he actively encouraged his supporters to march on the capitol and disrupt the electoral vote count proceedings. In either case, instead of being disgusted, nearly all Republicans steadfastly stood by him. Those few that didn’t were subsequently hounded from office.

Trump’s actions have shown that, in these intensely partisan times, that it will be essentially impossible for the removal procedure, as called out by the Constitution, to ever work.

The book discusses other, more subtle ways that Presidents (or those that want to become Presidents) are shunted out of the way. I’ll try to write more about those in a future post.

Regardless, if you found this post interesting, then it would probably be worth your while to check out Priess’ book. I did find it interesting that this book was written in 2018 during the Trump presidency. It makes me wonder if Priess, like me, used writing to channel out some of the anxiety that the Trump administration was causing.

Shakespeare Walking A Tightrope

I just finished reading William Shakespeare’s Henriad. I’m using the classic definition of it, which is the plays comprising Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. As is usual with literary analysis, it’s not as simple as it seems. Some critics claim that the Henriad consists of eight plays. In addition to the four just mentioned, they also include Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, and Richard III.

Some critics claim that there are two Henriads. Unfortunately, Shakespeare wrote the later set of kings (ie Henry VI and Richard III) before he wrote about Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, so the first Henriad refers to later kings while the second Henriad refers to the earlier kings. The second Henriad, since they were written during Shakespeare’s prime, are considered the classic Henriad.

Got that?

What’s interesting is that, of the ten histories that are typically assigned to Shakespeare, eight of them are related. They tell of the nearly sequential reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III, and ending with Henry Tudor defeating Richard III and assuming the title of Henry VII. Included in this is the telling of the War of the Roses.

Several hundred years later, all of this seems pretty innocuous. However, at the time, Shakespeare had to tread very carefully.

Why? As Shakespeare once said, therein lies a tale.

Most of these plays are about kings and when to overthrow them. Richard II is pompous, arrogant, indecisive, and inconsistent. He’s pretty much a mercurial drama queen who’s much more interested in fighting the Irish than he is in ruling England. When Henry Bolingbroke’s father dies, Richard II arbitrarily confiscates his holdings. Previously exiled by Richard, this action leads Henry to come back to England to press his claims, decide to overthrow Richard II, and claim the crown as Henry IV. Although not covered in the play, apparently Richard II was starved to death while he was imprisoned.

Although now king, Henry IV is not secure in his seat. People that were once followers of Richard II still question Henry’s seizure of power. Hence, in the Henry IV plays, while his son Hal is playing the dissolute lout with Falstaff, Henry IV has to put down rebellions. He seems to never get to enjoy being king.

When the time comes, Hal throws off his frat boy ways and assumes his responsibility as the heir apparent. When Henry IV dies, Henry V is crowned. His father’s dying words to him are, to keep domestic strife at a minimum, that Hal should engage in foreign wars. Indeed he does and he ends up defeating France, marrying a French princess, and their child will be crowned king of both England and France.

Although I did not read the first Henriad during this round (ie Henry VI and Richard III), I know from history how it went. Henry V dies young. Henry VI becomes king at the age of nine months. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t go well. First of all, being crowned that young means that there was no real mentor that he could learn from. It’s also safe to safe that the French royalty did not exactly have the sanest genetic makeup. All of that means that Henry VI was weak and mentally unstable.

During his reign, France reasserted his independence. This was also when the civil war known as the War of the Roses broke out. It was between the Yorks and the Lancasters, two different branches of the Plantagenet ruling family. At one point, a York overthrew Henry VI (a Lancaster), became Edward IV, and imprisoned Henry VI. Henry VI was rescued and regained the throne. Henry VI lost another battle and was imprisoned again by Edward IV. Not taking any chances, Edward IV had Henry VI murdered, possibly at the hands of his brother, Richard.

Edward IV was not on the throne very long. He died of intestinal disease. It’s possible that his brother Richard murdered him as well, but probably it was because Edward was a notorious splurge and purger, gastronomically speaking. Edward IV’s big mistake was making his brother Richard protector over his two young sons. This mistake became obvious when the two young boys ‘disappeared’, almost certainly murdered at Richard’s order.

Thus, after possibly murdering two kings, one of which was his brother, and two children, Richard was crowned as Richard III. Henry Tudor used this, shall we say, chaos, to press his quite dubious claims to the throne. In battle, Henry defeats Richard III, claims the crown as Henry VII, and ends the War of the Roses.

So, that’s this history that Shakespeare decided to write about.

For most of the time that Shakespeare was writing, Elizabeth I was the queen. The challenge was that Elizabeth was not exactly secure on her throne. First of all, she was a woman. Secondly, she was the head of the Church of England. The Catholic nations (specifically Spain, with the Pope’s active encouragement) were sending secret agents over to England to sow discord and were actively trying to overthrow her. She was the the third of Henry VIII’s children to ascend the throne. His son, Edward VI, died at fifteen. On his deathbed, he tried to cheat the succession by naming Lady Jane Grey as the queen. She lasted a grand total of nine days. Next up was Henry VIII eldest daughter, Mary I, who died after about three years on the throne (and trying to move England back to Catholicism). Almost as an afterthought, Elizabeth I then became queen. Keep in mind that she never married, so there was no heir apparent waiting, which caused additional angst for royal watchers.

Finally, all of that royal chaos that I described earlier is not that much in England’s past. After all, Henry VII was her grandfather. Her grandfather, the reason why she’s on the throne, led a rebellion and fought a battle that killed a sitting king. Bloodwise, she’s not that far away from regicide herself.

This was the woman that was Shakespeare had to make sure not to offend. She had the power of life and death over him. If what Shakespeare wrote could be in anyway interpreted as being anti-royal or dangerous to the tenuous Tudor dynasty (which will die off with Elizabeth), he could be arrested, convicted, and executed. Her censors had the authority to shut down theaters on any pretext. As Shakespeare’s patron, she could withhold funds. His life and livelihood was in her hands.

Knowing that, the underlying themes of his histories become clearer. Those kings that are overthrown have to be asking for it. They must clearly deserve it. Thus you see Richard II’s selfishness, indecisiveness, and inconstancy. He is the very model of an ineffective king. Richard III is pictured as the epitome of evil. Even physically, he’s an ugly, deformed man. They don’t deserve the crown and those that rebel against them are righteous.

Not only that, but Shakespeare makes clear that all is not happiness for those that overthrow a king, regardless of the righteousness of their claim. He is silent on the reign of Henry VI (the plays ends with the death of Richard III), but you see this play out with the Henry IV plays. Even though he’s the king, his struggles continue. He has to deal with multiple rebellions. The Scots and the Welsh have risen up against him. He’s having trouble controlling his seemingly wastrel son. In short, he’s unhappy and is perhaps questioning whether or not it was all worth it. In fact, it is Henry IV that says that immortal line used by kings and CEO’s alike, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

It is only Henry V, the only king that is not a usurper and that is not being usurped that emerges as the unalloyed hero of Shakespeare’s histories. Also, it didn’t hurt that he beat the hated French while at a tremendous manpower disadvantage at Agincourt and ever so temporarily united the crowns of England and France.

So, there you have it. Shakespeare was a playwright that wrote plays that had to tell a semi-accurate story without risking his life or his career. It turns out that he did it so well that his plays have lived on, over four hundred years later.

An American Odyssey

Before I start my normal bloviating, I’d just like to acknowledge that this is my 1,000 post. When I started this way back in November of 2015, I had no idea that I’d still be plugging along in 2024. It’s proven to be a good method for me to actually record and then later remember books that I’ve read, films that I’ve watched, presidential trivia, and the other various semi-interesting things that I decide to write about. I’m not sure if I have another 850,000 words in me but I guess time will tell.

Title: The Lincoln Highway

Rating: 5 Stars

I’ve become a fan of Amor Towles. To date, he has only written three novels (I say only because he’s about my age, ie old, but he did have a career as an investment banker before hitting the literary jackpot with his debut novel).

This is the second novel of his that I’ve read. The other is A Gentleman in Moscow, which I really enjoyed but for some reason did not write an article about it.

What I really like to see with authors and their work is when their novels are completely distinct from each other. To me, the perfect example of such a writer is John Williams. He only wrote three novels (a fourth one was published but he kind of disavowed it). He wrote Butcher’s Crossing, which is kind of a Western genre novel. Stoner is a novel about a mundane academic career at a small college. Finally, he wrote Augustus, a historical fiction about Roman times. All three, in different ways, are absolutely brilliant. It’s an amazing achievement.

Perhaps not with quite the literary high brow quality of Williams, Towles seems to be going down a similar path. A Gentleman in Moscow starts at the Bolshevik revolution. A Russian count stands accused by a Bolshevik court. Such cases nearly always end in death for the defendant. However, a poem written by the count in his youth surfaces that seems to express empathy for the working class. For that reason, the court decides to spare him but still wants to punish him. Instead, he is condemned to spend the rest of his days without ever setting foot outside of the luxurious hotel at which he is currently residing. The novel spans the next thirty years of Russian history, as told by a count that can never set foot outside of his hotel.

The Lincoln Highway is nothing like that. First of all, the novel only spans ten days. It’s set in 1950s America. The protagonists drive or ride rails all around the country.

The novel starts with eighteen year old Emmett Watson. Recently released from juvenile prison after accidentally killing someone in a fight, he comes back to a farm that is being foreclosed due to his recently deceased father’s debts. Wanting a new start, he decides that he and his eight year old brother Billy will drive to California and start their lives anew.

Those plans are thwarted when a couple of his fellow inmates at the prison escape by sneaking out in the trunk of the car that was taking Emmett back to his farm. Both also around eighteen, the young man named Duchess wants Emmett to take him, not to California, but to New York, where the other escapee, a dreamy, aimless, wealthy scion nicknamed Woolly apparently has $150,000 in cash waiting for him as his inheritance.

Emmett has no intention of driving all of the way to New York just to turn around and then drive to California. It’s safe to say, however, that Emmett doesn’t always get what he wants.

Thus begins quite the adventure. At various times, Duchess steals Emmett’s car and then randomly gives it away. Emmett, determined to catch up to him, rides freight trains to make up time. On the train, Emmett and Billy meet a large Black man named Ulysses, who having left his wife and child to fight in World War II, is now on an seemingly endless quest to somehow meet up with them again.

It is Billy that tells Ulysses that he actually is not named for the great Union general Ulysses Grant but for the Greek hero Ulysses. Billy is quite precocious for eight years old. Not only is he smart with maps and, just generally, with life, but he also packs along for the trip a book that contains abbreviated versions of great trips, adventures, and heroes. It includes, of course, Ulysses and his Odyssey, but also Jason and the Argonauts, the explorations of Daniel Boone, as well as biographies of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. One chapter in this book has several blank pages and is simply titled You. On these pages you are to write your own adventure. It can be assumed that this novel is the result of Billy writing in these pages.

Besides the obvious themes of travel, quest, and discovery, the major protagonists all are struggling with reconciling themselves with their fathers. In the case of Emmett, his father turned his back on wealth and privilege to become an unsuccessful farmer, much to Emmett’s embarrassment and shame. Woolly’s father died in World War II and his mother’s subsequent remarriage has hit him hard. Worse of all is Duchess. The son of a philandering borderline successful but always charismatic actor, Duchess had been, among other things, once abandoned at an orphanage so that his father could go off with his latest paramour and only was sentenced to the juvenile prison because he was set up for the crime by his father. Not only does Duchess want his hands on his share of Woolly’s money but he is determined to wreak vengeance upon his father.

This is one of those books where when you first pick it up, you see that it’s nearly six hundred pages and it fills you with dread. However, you find that once you finish the first hundred pages or so, that you simply can’t put it down. By the time that I finished it, I was disappointed that there wasn’t more to read.

I’m now looking forward to reading Towles debut novel, The Age of Civility, to see if it rises to the level of his two subsequent novels.

Policy By Imagination Over Evidence

When I wrote about the book To Start A War, the story of how the Bush administration came to invade Iraq, I promised that I’d write a follow-on article about some of the interesting things that I learned while reading.

What made the read more relevant to me was that I was just at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. It’s a pretty awesome museum about both the successes and failures of spying.

One of the big failures that the museum highlights was 9/11. How was it that we weren’t able to prevent it? A real argument can be made that the intelligence agencies did send up a number of increasingly alarming warnings to President Bush. Consumed with his domestic agenda of tax cuts as well as taking the CEO approach to the Presidency of ignoring operational details while focusing on strategy, President Bush did not take the threats seriously.

As easy as it is for intelligence agencies to make that argument, it doesn’t really hold up. Although they were reporting threats as late as August, the fact is that the Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB) weren’t emphatic enough to inspire action. Not that I like to quote Henry Kissinger, but back in his Secretary of State days, in a similar situation where he was informed of a situation but did not take action, he replied “I was told but not convinced”. That seems to be what happened here and the intelligence agencies bear responsibility for not being convincing enough.

This failure led to an even larger intelligence failure in the leadup to war in Iraq.

The CIA’s failure in predicting 9/11, as well as past failures such as failing to predict the fall of the USSR, led many leading officials in the Bush administration to hold a low opinion of the CIA. The director, George Tenet, was pretty desperate in his attempts to keep the CIA relevant. He brought in a customer service perspective to the CIA, thinking of President Bush as the First Customer.

While giving the customer what they want is generally a good idea when running, say, a restaurant, it turns out not to be a great idea for an intelligence agency. President Bush, along with critical members of his staff like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Vice President Dick Cheney, somehow managed to convince themselves that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were somehow in cahoots. This despite the fact that there was no evidence and frankly, it doesn’t even make any sense. They were equally convinced that Hussein had WMDs and was eagerly looking to give them to terrorist groups to use.

The CIA specialists in areas such as Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the Middle East in general were all in agreement that this was simply not true. Al Qaeda’s radical Islam and Hussein’s secularism (and basic survival instincts) were polar opposites. No fresh evidence of Iraqi WMDs were ever found.

There were whispers about the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent in the Czech Republic. Based upon one person’s testimony, it was quickly proven that the person was lying. There was a Iraqi refugee claiming to have first hand knowledge of mobile biological weapons vehicles. That person was also proven to be lying. There was evidence of tubes being purchased for uranium processing. It was proven that these tubes could not be used for that function. There was evidence of Iraq buying yellow cake uranium from Niger. That was proven to be a forgery. Much intelligence was gathered by another Iraqi agent. His work was considered so suspect that he was given the code name of Curveball. Again, most of his reporting was proven to be false.

The CIA agents diligently reported the truth of all of this. None of their reporting was convincing to the Bush leadership. They took it as proof that CIA thinking was mired in some old school way of analysis.

Desperate to keep a seat at the table, Tenet began to come up with creative ways to put his thumb on the scale. In the CIA, he created a Red Cell team. This team had no Middle East expertise but was basically given the charter to come up with out of the box thinking. In the aftermath of 9/11, such thinking led naturally to potentially disastrous scenarios. The Bush administration was finally getting the CIA analysis that it was looking for. With that positive reinforcement, the CIA started getting out of the rational analysis that it should have been providing and began feeding the Bush administration the analysis that it thought that it wanted to hear.

That wasn’t the only problem. Fundamentally, the State Department and the Department of Defense hated each other. Even at the highest levels, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were at continual loggerheads. You’d think that one of the leading generals in the Gulf War would have significant clout in such discussions, but Powell underestimated (or was not interested) in establishing a close personal relationship with President Bush. This meant that, even as he saw the folly of what was happening, he was never the so-called last person in the room with President Bush. National Security Advisor Condi Rice, brilliant in her own right, spent way too much of her energy managing the egos of the cabinet leaders and their deputies. Thinking of himself as the ‘Decider’, President Bush did not want to have such conflicts brought in front of him. Therefore, he remained oblivious to the level of dissension that actually existed on his staff.

The press was also complicit. With the media center being New York City, the site of 9/11, the media was determined not to be left behind in the chase to discover the next possible terrorist attack. Even the normally conservative New York Times ran cover stories about WMDs and Hussein’s allegedly nefarious actions that were single sourced or unconfirmed. It led to a general national anxiety and that culminated in feeling that we really need to do something to stop Hussein.

During all of this time, Hussein was letting arms inspectors in to do their work. Not only were no WMDs found, but the slight traces that were found seemed to be at least a decade old. For examples, factories would be inspected that were covered in dust and bird droppings. Clearly there had been no work done for many years. When this was reported back, it was ignored. As one Defense department official said, “We’re going to war, we’ll find it then”. It turns out, not so much.

The most significant failure was the nearly complete lack of post invasion planning. There was a general belief that Iraqis, with no history of democracy, would just rise up and start self governing themselves. The post war reconstruction would be paid for by proceeds of Iraqi oil.

This view was promulgated by Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi. The only problem was that people like Chalabi hadn’t been to Iraq in decades. Chalabi himself had last been in Iraq forty-five years previously. The Iraq that they remembered no longer existed. At the time of the war, Iraqi literacy was around fifty percent. Its society was riven by sectarianism. There was no national Iraqi identity. This mistake ended up costing the US multiple trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of soldiers dead or injured. It cost Iraq multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths.

A final mistake was made almost immediately after fighting stopped. There was a de-Baathification effort that resulted in teachers and doctors being summarily dismissed. Arguably worse, the Iraqi army was disbanded. This had the effect of rendering tens of thousands of highly trained experienced military unemployed. From these two decisions, the ingredients for a long, bitter, internecine conflict were laid.

Of all people, the brutal Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad had the most accurate prediction before the invasion started. He said that “most Iraqis hate Saddam, all Iraqis hate the US”.

And so it came to pass.

Why Aren’t They Cheering?

Title: To Start A War

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s been twenty years since the US invaded Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11 on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and was somehow in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Along with this justification, the Bush administration believed that overthrowing Hussein would usher in a wealthy, democratic Iraq that would in turn inspire a sea of Middle East democracies. The invasion and the resurrection of a democratic Iraq would be relatively painless and would pay for itself with Iraqi’s own oil revenues.

We now know that none of this came to pass. Hussein had gotten rid of all of his WMD’s after 1991. It’s inconceivable that Hussein and bin Laden would have ever worked together. The only new democratic election in the Middle East was in Palestine back around 2006 or so, when they voted in, checks notes, Hamas. In Iraq, the US ended spent some two trillion dollars, 4,400 soldiers died, 32,000 were injured, and some 300,000 came back suffering from PTSD. It’s estimated that over 400,000 Iraqis died.

Back in the day, when all of this was happening, it seemed like nonsense to me. After all, there had been years of inspections with no evidence found of WMDs. It was known that bin Laden and Hussein, occupying two polar opposite philosophies in the Middle East, despised each other. There was no history of democracy in the Middle East, so it seemed unreasonable to think that it would just start magically flourishing.

Given that, I thought that our leaders had such richer access to intelligence and analysis that they must know what they’re doing. I mean, they really wouldn’t lead us into a ruinous war based upon their own misconceptions and biases, right?

Well, as this book will tell you, that’s exactly what happened. Ever since Gulf War I, Paul Wolfowitz had been aggressively campaigning to remove Hussein. Donald Rumsfeld was so intent on finding any excuse to prove that his theories of a smaller, more mobile army was the army of the future that he was eager to go to war. Vice President Dick Cheney, massively frightened by 9/11, became so overwhelmed by the fear of terrorist possible operations against the US that he would buy into any conspiracy, realistic or not.

President George W Bush, knowing that Hussein at one time tried to assassinate his father when he visited Iraq, certainly didn’t need any encouragement. Also, as the first supposedly CEO president, he felt that he didn’t need to know details, especially if those details contradicted his already established strategy. Finally, the Bush administration valued loyalty over nearly everything else. This led to groupthink where people, wanting to be seen as team players, would not raise their objections in meetings with President Bush.

This all started to come out almost immediately in the aftermath of the initial invasion. When I first started learning of the chaos around the decision making process to go to war, I became viscerally angry. For years, just thinking about the key decision makers would set my teeth on edge.

I remember watching the film Vice, starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney. It was written and directed by Adam McKay, who also made the film The Big Short. The Big Short was a smart, angry, but also funny film about the chicanery around the mortgage crisis that triggered the Great Recession and nearly caused our economy to crash. Similar to Gulf War 2, this was a subject that drove me into fits of rage. Much to my surprise, I was able to enjoy the film.

I was hoping that with Vice, by it following along the same formula as The Big Short, I could also find the humor in the film. However, I failed. Every time I saw a new character, my first thought would be, oh, it’s that asshole (I wrote about this here).

Well I’m happy to say that, after twenty years, some of my rage must have dissipated. I was able to read this book without seeing red. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an infuriating read. When you consider how supportive the world was of the US in the aftermath of 9/11 and then think about the trillions of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of deaths, it was an opportunity lost of incalculable cost.

Although it’s an infuriating read, it’s also a compelling read. Draper tells a tragic tale that is Shakespearean in scope. As much as I would like to think otherwise, no one here is actually evil or even stupid. I’m sure that all of them would think of themselves as patriots deeply committed to doing what they think is right.

Perhaps that is the personal tragedy. A deeply religious man that loves his country, I wonder where George W Bush’s thoughts go nowadays.

Even in the moment he began to have his doubts. One chapter closes with him and Colin Powell watching television together. It’s showing a city that is now occupied by the invading coalition. As the television camera pans, the residents of the city just gaze stolidly at the camera.

Bush, trying to reconcile his vision of being welcomed as a liberator with the stony stares of the population, plaintively asked Powell, “Why aren’t they cheering?”

This book was a fascinating read and I strongly recommend it. I’ll probably write a follow-on post with some of the details that stuck with me as I read it.

Revisiting The Second Oldest Profession

Several years ago, way back in 2017, I visited Washington DC. Among many other sites, I went to the International Spy Museum (I wrote about it here). It seemed like it’d be a bit kitschy but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the artifacts on display.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Washington DC. Since we didn’t have much time and because of the requirement that anywhere that we went had to be kid friendly, the International Spy Museum made the list of stops to make.

Having just visited the museum five or six years ago, I didn’t think that it’d have that much more to offer me. Well, apparently it moved to a new building in 2019. It is substantially larger than what I remembered before. With the move to a new building, it underwent a major facelift in its entire approach. I have to say that I was very impressed.

One of my old man complaints is that when museums undergo such renovations, the end result is often a Disney-ification of the material. It seems dumbed down and weighted heavily towards children. I understand why it’s done and I’m certainly a fan of introducing children to history however you can, but as a now very mature man of years, doing so removes some of the, I don’t know, fusty magic of museums.

Well, the International Spy Museum did an excellent job of making its exhibits both kid friendly as well as for adults.

For the kids, there’s an ongoing game where you are an undercover agent going on covert missions. Every display had at least one interactive, multi-media component. There were lots of things to feel and touch. The kids seemed to have a fun time.

There was plenty of interest for adults as well. They did an outstanding job of organizing their artifacts. Instead of doing some kind of dry, timeline of history, the artifacts were organized by a facet of spying. For each topic, there would be a number of interesting artifacts about it. Not only that, but every topic had one or two specific events that crystallized the topic.

Even better, most of these events are from semi recent history. Many of the events happened during my life time. Learning about these events again led me to forgotten memories of my own. Even for those events that were before my time, I’m enough of a history geek to really appreciate the way that the material was presented.

To provide some examples, let me list several of the topics and the events that the museum used to highlight them.

Failure: Whenever you read about spies, the narrative usually highlights how successful spy craft is and how lost we’d be without spies. It doesn’t always work out like that. There are times where, in hindsight, things that seem blindingly obvious are missed. The two events used to describe intelligence failures were Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Cyber: This is an area that will only become more critical. There were brief discussions on Edward Snowdon and the 2016 election. The focus event was Stuxnet. I’m not sure how many people remember Stuxnet, but the US and Israel were concerned about Iran’s progress on building nuclear weapons. US/Israeli hackers wrote a software worm that was somehow installed and then was propagated on controllers that ended up seriously damaging nuclear centrifuges.

World War II: This was where code breaking really came of age. The museum had both German and the more complex Japanese Enigma machines.

Spies and Spycatchers: The two main characters here are the FBI spy Robert Hanssen and the CIA spy Aldrich Ames. Among the interesting things here is an interview with the women that actually caught Ames. Among other artifacts that are on display here are the actual handcuffs that Hanssen and Ames were arrested in.

Analysis: Gathering data is only part of the job of a spy agency. Much more important is understanding what it means. All of these strands of seemingly random data are collected and some sense must be made of it. The topic highlighted here is the Bay of Pigs and the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis. This display discussed how the rival spy agencies built up psychological profiles of Kennedy and Krushchev.

Interrogation: Not that surprising, the emphasis on this section is the moral quandary facing modern spies: to torture or not to torture. What is torture? Most interesting is the interviews from people related to the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the US in the aftermath of 9/11. The fact that, nearly twenty years later, the museum was able to get someone to justify these actions was extraordinary.

Covert Action: This is probably the section that most people think of when they think of spying. This is the James Bond stuff of sneaking in and doing damage to the enemy. Here you understand that the gadgets used by James Bond aren’t that farfetched. There is a knife hidden inside a glove. There is a gun hidden inside of a cigarette box. The two events highlighted in this section are the assassinations of Georgi Markov and Leon Trotsky. Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, died in London four days after being poked by an umbrella. Leon Trotsky was killed when the assassin hit him on the top of his head with an ice axe. Amazingly enough, the museum has, in its possession, the actual axe used to kill Trotsky.

To top all of that off, it actually has a pretty impressive gift shop!