Peer Pressure Works!

Well, as THAT title clearly states, this is obviously a post about what I’ve been reading. Y’know, with the eye being the calm part of the hurricane, which clearly indicates…y’know…a respite from guiding little digitized armies to their doom…and cracking open a book, and such. It also indicates that, when it comes to titles, I remain an ambiguous retard. And that I apparently will never tire from the ongoing gag of “Haha…check out THIS title stupidity!” (Is it just me, though, or would ‘This Title Stupidity’ be a pretty solid name for a boat? Not any sort of commercial vessel, but maybe the private oceangoing sanctuary for some drunken C-List Never-Was type).

I was planning on writing this up last week, but then I ended up getting involved in the book I polished off last night. A chapter or two in I pretty much knew that, in my honest opinion, it was a fantastic book, the quality of which I would want to sort of shout in the general direction of people bored enough to read this. Well, that and I kept using my “I should really write a post about those books I’ve read lately” time for “You fucking noob and your goddamn grenade launcher! I shall make the rest of my evening a festival of you-pwnage! I don’t care if I die 300 times, I will now utterly focus my energies on ravaging your cheap ass!” Call of Duty 4. (I’ve sort of re-acquainted myself with this game online over the last couple weeks. Good fucking God, do I love poppin’ heads with a sniper rifle…but NOTHING, NOTHING beats fiendishly placing Claymores in high traffic locations, then seeing the quickly typed, horribly spelled rants of their victims appear on screen when they turn a corner and die.) Anyway, that ends…at least briefly enough to let me actually type this goddamn thing up!

Anyway, the book that so captured my fancy for the past few days is Generation Kill by Evan Wright. He’s a Rolling Stone writer who was embedded with a unit from Marine Force Recon during the ridiculously titled ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ (Seriously, I don’t care what side you come down on in the Iraq War…this was the chosen title? This is like a B-side reject Fox News would call hacky and condescending.). The reason I liked this so damn much is the fact that it comes off as a lot more straightforward and honest than a lot of the other books out there on the topic (also, check one out called My War by Colby Buzzell). The writer dropped his ego off on the flight to Kuwait and just wrote what he saw, and what the guys said. That’s it. None of the pretentious bullshit that typically pisses me off about Rolling Stone magazine, which seems to be written exclusively by dickslaps who all think they’re better than the people paying their damn salary by buying the fucking thing. A lot of the people in the book have also come out and said that, yeah, this is what happened…it hasn’t been sexed up at all.

What it results in is more than just a war story (I apologize for THAT sentence…geez, apparently my subscription to Hack Writing Quarterly is paying off in spades). These guys are real human beings, and, like real human beings, they tend to be real screwed up. You take a bunch of 19 year olds, most of whom have never been out of their home state, and ship them overseas, arm them to the teeth, put them at the very front edge of an entire army, and keep them moving so far so often that they’re subsisting on cold C-rations, chewing down packets of coffee, and sucking down pep pills like they’re candy, and you’ll get some weird, weird stuff. My favourite example…one unit is being engaged by mortars somewhere in a small village about a mile off. While the rounds are falling, the unit members are scanning the horizon, looking for any signs of enemy forces. Suddenly, one of the drivers starts laughing, and the following conversation occurs.

“Brad, take a look over by that gate”. (Brad, the Sgt., does so…a moment passes.)

“Person…are those ducks?”

“Yeah, and they’re fucking!”

This is taking place while explosives are going off everywhere. It’s laugh out loud silly, simply because it seems to bizarrely out of place. It’s stuff like this (and some of the moronic officers…these guys are normally to the rear, while the grunts actually do the work. This time, the officers went along…WOW. One particular Mensa, who they nickname Captain America, and whose real identity is never given, at one point issues forth a banshee scream and bayonet charges an Iraqi who had already surrendered and been cuffed. It’s dark, so he sort of misses, and just bowls the Iraqi over. Now, he decides, while growling, to just boot him in the groin. Not only does he somehow miss his target of a helpless guy lying on the ground, he somehow manages to somehow kick the arresting Marine in the stomach, instead. This is one of the more…sedate examples of this guy’s ‘genius’) that just made this book ‘work’ for me. It’s also very well written, so that doesn’t hurt, either. The writer is also honest about himself, which helps. For example…a unit newcomer named Trombley accidentally mows down a pair of shepherds during a firefight with his M249. Rather than castigating him for it, since he was there, and knows how confused the whole situation was, the writer finds that he LIKES having this kid in that gun, simply because to hit those 2 civvies from a bouncing Hummer at a distance of 250 feet means the kid can shoot. The fact that he reaches this conclusion actually kind of disturbs him.

The previous book to this one was The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs. Basically, an atheistic Jewish guy (who has several EXTREMELY religious relatives, one of whom is an actual, honest to goodness, ex-cult leader now living in The Holy Land) decides to try and find out why religion is such a draw for so many people. How does he do it? By following the bible for a year. And I mean LITERALLY following the bible. No shaving, no pork, all those weird little rules, he follows. Hell, in one funny part, he decides he needs to literally follow part of the Old Testament and goes out to stone sinners. Not wanting to be beaten to death, he ends up dropping the tiniest pebbles he can find on their shoes, and then apologizing, as though it were accidental.

I think the idea was that the whole book would be like this , “Haha, look at the ridiculousness of organized religion! Let’s all point and laugh!”  Now, he’s an amusing enough guy to pull it off, so it still would have been decent, and there’s certainly material in all of the confines of the Bible. However, he did go beyond that. He ended up talking to EVERYBODY…creationists, red letter Christians, ultra-orthodox Jews, Hell, he went to Israel and met with the few remaining Samaritans. Anyway, in the end, he still remains atheistic, but he does find a more spiritual side to things. It makes for a better read. And, really, we already have Richard Dawkins if we’d prefer the words of a self-aggrandizing, humourless dolt who decries religion being ‘forced’ in to public discourse, yet apparently is too utterly dense to see the hypocrisy of his desire to force lack of belief on those whose views differ. Great guy.

Read an interesting WW2 History book called Warlords by Simon Birthon and Joanna Potts. Very different angle on things, as it’s completely from the perspective of Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. It certainly does explain a lot of the reasons Roosevelt waited to enter the US in to the war (public sentiment was VERY much towards entering before they did…he waited, partially, because he saw that it would be easier to force England to divest itself of her Empire afterwards if the US waited for them to be at the point of desperately agreeing to anything. Oddly, he also tended to favour Stalin over Churchill when it came to debates because he egotistically though he could ‘control;’ Stalin once Germany and Japan were defeated). Very interesting perspective on the war. It would have been nice to also see the Japanese side of things included, but Tojo never really had people around him who he confided in (at least, none who lived), and Hirohito was pretty much separated from the entire war purposely by Japan’s military leadership (and, again, as someone still seen at that time as a living embodiment of God, nobody was going to sit down and chat strategy with him, anyway), so I can understand that their side would pretty much be impossible to piece together.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine was another good read. If you’re unfamiliar with the ridiculous, corrupt, fucked up mess that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have become, I would recommend giving it a read. Hell, if you ARE familiar, still give it a read. She draws some pretty interesting, and reasonable, connections between Economic Shock Therapy and LITERAL shock therapy as it pertains to torture, and how, any time the IMF and World Bank have succeeded in railroading their policies through, it’s either with the fist of a brutal dictator to enforce them, or because the region has been so utterly devastated that they don’t care what all the caveats and permutations are. If you liked No Logo, check it out. IT’s a nice comeback from her previous book…the name escapes me, but it was an insanely one sided ,look at revolutionaries that pilloried brutal right wing governments, but glossed over the atrocities committed by leftist guerilla factions.

Finally, I read Tom Clancy’s Endwar. First off…Tom Clancy did not write the book. Some other guy did. It’s, I guess, associated with the forthcoming game of the same name. Clancy has a bunch of series right now (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Endwar, Op-Center, .Net, Politika) which bear his name, but that he doesn’t write. I normally don’t care, but I picked this one up because of the premise…Islamist reactionaries take over Saudi Arabia, so, suddenly, Alberta’s oil becomes a bigger deal, to the point that Russia invades. So, it’s a war in Alberta. Stupid, yes, but I was curious to see how the province fares. I shouldn’t have bothered.

Clancy’s own books have REALLY dropped off lately…Red Rabbit was a weird “Let’s go back in time!” book that showed he has no idea where the Hell to go with any of his characters. The one before that, Tiger by the Tail, flat out SUCKED. It was supposed to be a followup to Rainbow Six (he did write the first in that series, which was good), but it was just badly written dreck (I’m hardly saying Clancy is a great, all time wondrous author, but his earlier work could be REALLY good. If you’re at all serious, pick up a three book series…Debt of Honour, Executive Orders, and The Bear and The Dragon. It’s one long story arc between them, and it is DAMN good! If you like military writing, combat fiction, and political drama, you’ll dig ‘em!). This, however, made the Tiger book read like Hemingway. First off, the author, David Michaels, doesn’t really give much of a backstory. It’s like he thinks this completely new entity is already totally understood by the writer, when there’ no way it CAN be. All we gets are bits and pieces, and it’s very badly put together. Secondly, the writing that IS there is PUTRID. One hack, awful cliche after another (did we REALLY need the female F22 pilot who blathers on about her unrequited love for her wingman after he’s shot by Russian infantry after being shot down?), and just generally BAAAAAAAAAAAAD. Sure, it IS still kind of neat reading about a strike of Tomahawk cruise missiles flying over Elk Island park, or a group of Delta Force commandos mobilizing local townspeople and leading a resistance against a Soviet Mechanized regiment. However, it just isn’t worth it. This book needs to go back in time to the Reichstag around 1938 and be thrown on the pyre. Maybe David Michaels should join it. And, actually, if Richard Dawkins could be tossed on for general dickishness, as well, that would be cool.

Finally, Vlad loaned me a couple of books I read through. Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up was pretty decent. And Todd Gallagher’s Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan was hilarious. Basically, a series of sports ‘What ifs?” For example, would the author stand a chance against Roddick if they played tennis, but Roddick had to use a skillet instead of a racket. They also look in to the longstanding curiosity “Why don’t hockey teams just hire fat guys to be goalies?” If you like sports, you’ll be amused.

Anyway, that’ll do, pig, that’ll do.