Untitled Document

01 January 2007

Lucky Seven

The last I saw of 2006, the pale wraith was being embraced by an elegantly slim blonde woman from somewhere in the former British Empire. She wore a long and fashionably cut fur, selected to be the Queen of Times Square by the Fox network this year. She was quite impossibly perky.

That is not how I would characterize the now departed year, though I salute her approach. I think you will agree that 2006 it had its challenges.

Checking the mail before toddling out to turn off the holiday lights for the last time, I saw that combat casualties in the war were holding at a steady rate, and December was another tough month. The number now is 3,000, and the main killer is the improvised explosive device. I could do nothing to help last year, despite helping to submit six separate technologies to the Government office responsible for coming up with answers.

It left me profoundly saddened at the lack of urgency. Perhaps I can do something in this new one, help find a silver bullet against the monstrous murdering devices.

When the New Year was only a few hours old, I honored it by listening to London in the safety of the eiderdown at the usual time for waking, even though there is nothing at all on the calendar. It was raining hard, all the moisture coming from out West and arriving here as rain, not snow. My favorite host was doing double-duty to permit some of the others to have the day, and it was pleasant and soothing to hear his voice.

The local radio updates claim the temperature will be in the sixties through the day, and the news amplifies the unsettled feeling in my gut that something is wrong.

When the coffee was done, I found a pink Post It note next to the computer, the same color of the bricks that make up this great pile of a building where I live. Words on it told me to take stock. Not for a list of obvious resolutions; I swear I will quit all my bad habits and take up those of virtue. If we are lucky enough to come together in another new year, I'm sure those resolutions will be the same.

Instead, the note asked for a real list of things that should not have been done, and some that should.

The biggest blunder is far too easy, and I will not address it. I believe in the blunt instrument of war, since being well-prepared to fight used to mean you did not have to. But we are in a different world now. Our easy win in Afghanistan appears to have fueled the inclination to settle the Iraq problem.

The Ethiopians, perhaps at our urging, have rolled with their tanks over the Islamist Courts insurgents in Somalia. The radicals are fleeing their last bastion at Kismayo, some heading for the Kenyan border.

The conventional military solution was attractive in this situation, but I note that the weapons are distributed before the radicals flee, and the cycle of passive-aggressive murder will be the likely outcome. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. I think it is finally time to get a copy of “Fiasco,” by Thomas Ricks. I hear he nails the tail pretty well on how we blithely screwed up

I think we should all read some books, for a start, and think about what we read while we walk.

I intend to have some discipline about that. I love reading and should do more that is not on-line. It is a curious thing that I am as tired and spend almost as much time typing and searching for things while I am waiting to go back to work as I did when I was fully employed. So: read more. Try to understand what is happening to us all.

I have a start at it. There are books piled everywhere in Big Pink. I seem to be reading them a few pages at a time, before darting off on something else. I collected them

I divided them up, topically, into three or four piles. One stack is generally devoted to the proposition of how on earth we got to where we are.

“The Second Messiah” by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas explain how Christ was great, but not divine, and how Paul got it wrong, and why the Freemasons kept, and then lost their great secret.

If any of it is true, I am putting “Join the Masons” high on my list of things to do in 2007.

Working down through the stack, “A War Like No Other “ by Victor Davis Hanson takes stock of how the Athenians and Spartans fought the Peloponnesian War, and destroyed a great empire of Athens, all with the loftiest of intentions. It should be required reading on the National Security Council.

“The Fall of the Roman Empire” by Peter Heather provides a new take on how the Barbarians overwhelmed the most powerful imperial machine. If there is any insight to be gained as we give away our frontiers, I could use it.

Two books address an alternate stream of scholarship about the institution of slavery, that vilest and oldest of human traditions. One is “Breaking the Chains: the Royal Navy's War on White Slavery” by Tom Pocock, and the other is “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters,” by Robert C. Davis.

Living as a character in my fictional life as I do, I would be remiss if there was not some fiction lying around. “The Time Traveler's Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger is right there, along with “Evidence of Things Unseen” by Marianne Wiggins. Both are powerful trips through time, and phenomenology that are eerie reflections of our own collective experience.

My Mom gave me a copy of “Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Gray, and I am going to see what I can learn about the craft of writing from a popular master.

Sincere curiosity and boundless optimism round out a stack on gender sociology. Laura Kipnis has written a remarkable book to answer Freud's eternal question regarding what the hell it is that half of us want. In “The Female Thing,” I have experienced several epiphanies, one approaching the status of a revelation. “The Whole Lesbian Sex Book” by Felice Newman comes at the issue from an entirely different angle, and I am studying it on an intellectual level to have a better understanding of female response, absent the male ego and its intrusive friend.

“The Big Book of Breasts” by Dian Hanson would be a great coffee-table book, if I had one, and is a fascinating photographic appreciation with commentary in English, French and German on the cult of the voluptuous bosom that set the standard of beauty in the art photography of the 1950s and 60s.

Since I am unlikely to ever rally figure out what is going on around me, I also read cook-books so that at least I might eat well on the road to hell. “The New York Cookbook” by Molly O'Neil reveals neighborhood secrets, and is great fun. A more ambitious, and frankly lyrical appreciation of a great city's history, view from the perspective of its public dining-tables, is “New York City Food” by Arthur Schwartz.

It went straight from the bedside to the top of the refrigerator so that it looks down on me as I chop and saute.

I am going to finish all of these tomes, and doubtless buy more before I complete them.

Still, it occurs to me, standing on the balcony at Big Pink, worried not at all about snow and wondering if I might wear shorts today, that I should dig out Al Gore's book “Earth in the Balance” and put it back on the very top of the tallest stack.

If we have managed to tip the climatic balance to disaster, our history, literature, sex and food are really sort of irrelevant, aren't they?

I have heard people saying it, so I believe it. It was an acceptable New Year on the happiness scale, but I would really prefer to have a Lucky Seven. Given the choice between dumb luck and skill, I am inclined to think that at this point, only the former will get us through.