The Bomber Mafia - Gladwell

 

I finished Gladwell’s book, “The Bomber Mafia” in less than a day.  Not difficult if you’ve spent  four decades in and around the United States Air ForceI spent my formative years in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) weighing the morality of high altitude  bombing, both conventional and nuclear, preparing for war as a part of the strategic triad.  And of course, the first Gulf War, in 1991, ushered in the first and most telling use of the GPS constellation for precision bombing.  The mighty B-52 bomber aircraft, getting old at the time, still in noble service to our country another 30 years later, became new again as a large truck to haul many of these precision munitions. Gen John Chain was the last of the Bomber General’s that ended what military historians such as Jeff Smith (The Future AIr Force) call’s the rise of the Bomber Generals, one of sevearl epochs of the USAF through it’s maturation as a armed service.  After that came the Rise of the Fighter Generals (Mike Worden), an epoch the USAF is slowly  evolving away from, both with the increasing use of unmanned systems, and of course with the new break off service, the United States Space Force.  

Beyond the great storytelling is one simple fact.  If you are a military history buff, read military history.  Gladwell doesn’t write for historians.  He writes the equivalent of pop-history as he does for the things in his other books, such as analytics and sociology. He writes for his audience to hear a great yarn and learn a few things, hopefully cutting through the chaff and flares for the occasional profound insight into the human condition.   It’s not like these stories from WWII haven’t been told before, numerous times, and in many Hollywood treatments as well.  What Gladwell nailed, in this short collection of stories about WWII and the early Army Air Forces, before we had a separate Air Force,  is that some military leaders are profoundly moral. Some military leaders are great tacticians of war and build a careful plan of action that solves a set of complex problems that lead to positive outcomes.  Also, Gladwell tells us, some military leaders are sadistic. In this manner, Gladwell always captures the richness of human behavior, it’s idiosyncrasies, along with our many strengths and weaknesses.  He doesn’t pass judgment, just puts it out there for us to consider right and wrong for ourselves.

Anyone in the military should have studied WWII in great depth.    Anyone who considers themself well read has also read the fiction coming out of WWII.   Novels such as Slaughterhouse V, by  Kurt Vonegut, and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.  Great books of military history abound be they histories of various military campaigns, the political posturing, biographies of the great characters…many not so great.  Recent histories of World War II include the stories of courage and the many thousand’s of personalities.  Recently the story of Louis Zamperini, and B-24’s in the Pacific, told by Laura Hillenbrand in “Unbroken” captivated the Country.   WWII will continue to be studied by historians for the length of human existence…but of it’s lessons for the masses and ordinary citizens, it will be but a passing chapter in high school history books.  Unless, great stories and anecdotes told by great authors and storytellers like Gladwell (and Hillenbrand) persist. 

The sheer horrors of war, Gladwell does more that hint about the furnace, the tinderbox homes in Japan where 100,000 died in the napalm firebombing.  He glosses over Dressand theo topic of Voguts nightmare, attributing only 20,000 to a conflagration that probably cause similar numbers as Tokyo, but goes on to remind us that Curtis Le May, fire bombed Japanese cities as many as 667  times, a fact that get’s whisked away in the days after Hiroshima and Nagazaki, and beyond teh horrors of a confligration, inwhich human babies ignited on their mother’s backs as the hellish furnace of the napalm conflgration consumed every life in it’s path, the horrors of radiation sickness soon materialized.  Like Vonugut, you cannot not read these passages and find any nobility in war.  The book “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning”, written by Chris Hedges in 2002, is tells us perhaps, why humanity wages wars. Gladwell reminds us why we must continue to find ways to solve our differences peacefully even in the midst of wanting to strike out at those who oppose us, conquer us, or lead us into tyranny.

To be sure there are technical errors and errors of historical fact.  But that does not detract from this story of what happened.  This is not a revisionist history of WW II arieal bombing as some of military critics of his work have stated.  These men existed.  These bombing missions happened.  The results are historical fact, Germany was defeated.  Japan surrendered.  

The Bomber Mafia grew up in Maxwell AFB, in Alabama, by technologies believing several things…  Air Power could help bring wars to a close faster.  The method, precise aerial bombardment of strategic targets that could cripple and adversary's ability to wage war.  The doctrine of Strategic bombardment to  crush critical nodes of production and transportation is sound.  That doesn’t preclude the use of boots on the ground or naval blockades or the coming required to own the high ground in space.  Those advocates of singular domain centric war fighting strategies are either idiots, having studied joint doctrine, or are simply arguing for a larger share of the defense budget…  They can’t really believe anyone can prevail in war without all it’s levers. But the visionaries of Air Power, and control, superiority, or supremacy, in and from the air, are not singularly the thoughts of this bomber mafia or the diffrences between Le May and Hansell.  Where is Giulio Douhet, where is Billy Mitchell,  John Boyd,  John Warden?    Hansell was basing aerial bombardment on strategy and morality.  Le May was getting a job done.  These are not mutually exclusive.  But it’s worth noting for air power was a revolution in military affairs.  Many aspects of air power for a multitude of reasons.

A lesson for the current technology mafia that believes with unwavering optimism that the revolution in military affairs before us, has to do with software and networks.  

All the technology in the world, the B-29, couldn't overcome with technology (the Norden Bombsight) the environment which it was forced to fight in either theater.

The sheer mass required, the range, and the environmental conditions.  Sure, the analog nature of the bombsight couldn’t adapt flexibly enough to the changing conditions, whereas software could recalculate…yet software can’t really extend beyond the realm of ist’s analog (physical/kinetic) requirement to kill people and break things.

Much like, instead of precision, high altitude, daytime bombing (with bomb site), of strategic choke points,  Moved to night time, low altitude, area bombing, because  no air defensese exiosting.  What allowed this change was a strategist (Le May) not tied to the doctrine of aerial warfare, but the doctrine of solving problems faster than the adversary can react.  Flexibility is the key to AIr Power (Douhet), react faster than your adversary (Boyd).

Interesting stories…

Developnet o the norden Bomb sight, its been told a miliion times…  can such a precise analoge instrument be combat ready and take the abuse of combat particularly if mass produced…thousands were required.  

Development of  Napalm by neurotic pyromaniacs in Cambridge MA.  

Sadistic area bombing of civlians due to the terror of the advesary area/terror bombing of yoru own homeland durign the Battle of Britain.

Sadistic area bombing of cvilieans due to what appears to be 1) revenge for pearl Harbor 2) racist stereo typing of an entire culturee.  Who was more human… Japanese gave Le May a metal not for conflagrating perhaps a million of their citizenry, something the Atomic Bombs never came close to doing, but because Le May turned around and assisted the Japanese people in building an air defense.   

Flexibility of air power through deliberate change in CONOPs to overcome the descent not realized in the advanced technology of air power but the flexibility of air power itself.

3-dimension of maneuver room in the battle space pulse time.  Ground and sea forces are by and large restricted to 2 dimensions plus slower time, and space, believe it or not, fights in a single  dimension, and doesn’t even have the flexibility of time.  

Because of this new invention things will get better…

RMA 

Warfare remains hard.  There is no single technology that changes the outcome. Some technology has indeed become an RMA but they are few and far between and they were not viewed as RMAs at the time.  Andy Marshall didn’t coin the phrase until 1991.  But it’s easy to argue that  Gun powder significantly changed things.  Air power significantly changed things.  And finally, PNT from space significantly changed things.  That’s about it.  The current argument that integrated, netted, webbed, everything with AI and agile software development will now be an RMA is simply wrong.  Gladwell doesn’t explicitly start out shooting that particular RMA in the face, but he presents a pretty good case for it.  The Norden Bombsight, perhaps, being the technology that would usher in daytime, high altitude, precision bombing…which would change everything.  It didn’t.  The argument for the RMA will only be a reality if the CONOPS and Tactics involved in the operational art of war also change. Those don’t change with the technologies currently on the table.  If a software change is necessary to fix a problem (something isn’t working right or a vulnerability has been discovered) that doesn’t change the way we fight.  It would be nice to fix it, fast, but not at the expense of creating a bigger problem that hasn’t been understood or grasped (training issue, new vulnerability, untested)

If you bomb people, unless you kill them all (Cathars in Besnzie), people become more resilient to a cause, war is a force that gives us meaning.

Warfare crosses more than just physical domains air sea and space, economic, political…

There are tradeoffs, there are heros, there are idiots, there are arrogant bastards, there are lunatics…this is a human endeavor for both sides…

Innocent loss of life must be evaluated and minimized.

Uav/rpa advocates ..  automation vs remote pilotong

Network centric web vs stove pipe

The internet ushered in the belief in a revolution of military affairs in the form of network centric warfare when multiple nodes and decentralized execution, wrought combat power.  Several factors conspired against this reality, yet the advocates continue to believe.  We fight in stove piped kill chaines not because we don’t have open standards but because it remains the most effective way to kill people and break things kinetically, aide the  survival of the combat mission, and minimize fratricide from those who ought not be firing beyond the FLOT or FEBA and into the GRCA beyond the FSCL into the FEZ or MEZ. 

Software disciples

Agile development  vs legacy waterfall 

Agile software development in the vernacular “DevOps” grew up in the miliinal tee-shirt clad, fake it till you make it culture in Silicon Valley where getting to market first was paramount, and software developers learned that Beta Testing could be done for free by the public.  Compare this to the development of software for the space shuttle where software programmers wore suits to work and the code was the closest to error free of any code ever developed.  Does the military need error free code? Or do we want pilots beta testing code in battle?

Acquisition agility

Is not a war fighting conops.  If faced with an existental threat, such as Nazi Germany, acquisition can move rapidly.  We have to buy pass laws of commerce and fair trade to by pass such things a competition to simply field development.  Laws exist under the war powers act to eliminate some of these acquisition hang up.ucusions hang ups.

Space junkies

Space is the ultimate high ground thus it should be its own warfighting service (the won this pissing contest) complete it’s it’s own doctrine, CONOPS, and Tactics. 

Everyone has their revolution.  Which revolution of military affairs has actually achieved a change to the way we actually fight wars?  Certainly airpower in general.  From space, certainly the space based PNT solutions ushered in precision gilded weapons, as well as so many other things that exquisite timing can bring to the fight, maneuver, logistics, and advanced communications.

The Bat - Nesbo

 As a huge fan of Stieg Larsson, what’s a reader to do when the Millennium Trilogy ended?  My boss suggested I move on to Jo Nesbo and “Redbreast”.  Just ahead of my beach vacation I stumbled into B&N looking for where to start and found “The Bat”, the first in the Harry Hole series.  A bit confused, since I wasn’t sure where the series began, I purchased it and headed to the beach, partially thinking there was a reason the publisher didn’t translate this one first.  They started with “Redbreast”, that one’s probably the blockbuster, so I resigned myself to thinking I’ll be reading at least two Jo Nesbo novels before deciding if he’s my next Scandinavian crime story fix.  Of course now it look’s like “Cockroaches” lies between me and “Redbreast” but I’ll sort that out later.

Since Nesbo wrote “The Bat” in the mid nineties we are reading it perhaps 20 years later.  As crime stories go he was entering the genre about the same time Larsson was sitting down in the evenings to tap out “Dragon”.  Optimistically, his writing talents show through even though his sophistication as a crime novelist was just beginning...that is assuming his sophistication does in fact increase through the HH series--to be determined.  In “The Bat”, there really is only a single character that he develops...Detective Harry Hole.  Whereas following the first of the Larsson’s series we are left with several major characters with plenty of potential life remaining.  Regardless, Harry is just good enough, bad enough, and broken enough to have had the alcoholism driven out of him, just in time to for another series of misfortunes to drive his love of drink back to the surface.

In a crowded beach house, with distractions a plenty, it’s hard to find a quiet place to read--yet Nesbo was still able to get me to turn the page.  Yet his most compelling element was not Detective Hole, rather it was his adding cultural stories pertaining to the Aborigines of Australia where between the shores of Brisbane and Sydney, the entire story takes place. Granted that’s not an entire continent, only about 600 miles of shoreline, he introduces us to an urban Australia that we miss in most of the stereotypical depictions of the outback.  His snippets of Aborigine culture are conveyed through the story of the “Bat”, the “Snake”, and a few other tales that have been handed down in some 40,000 years of folklore.  I have to assume he has conveyed these ancient stories accurately, despite struggling with a few other facts, a bit more modern.  In particular, during critical dialogue between the two pivotal characters, Harry and Andrew (the detective of Aboriginal descent he becomes friends with) we learn we wouldn’t want to learn astronomy from either of them.  Still learning something, anything, in a novel provides added value to the intrigue and the entertainment.  Of particular value to me was the legal understanding of the term Terra Nullis which basically applies to the lack of legal ownership of the land that the Aboriginal people occupied, because they did not occupy the land full-time.  In essence they continuously migrated, thus, as we in the west like to say (and apparently down under as well), possession is nine-tenths of the law.  The Aborigines never had possession of anything even though they existed on the continent for more than 40,000 years.  Nesbo cleverly ties this concept to this crime motive although it’s not that compelling. 

In the end I’m giving Nesbo 3-Stars for “The Bat”.  It was good enough to finish and good enough for me to want to crack the binding on “Redbreast” in the near future.  Stay tuned.

The Spark - Bacon & Heward

Why does every little kid dream of running off to join the circus?  Didn’t we all have an inner desire to be acrobats and clowns?  I’m not a psychologist but within the pages of, “The Spark, Igniting the Creative Fire that Lives Within Us All” the clues to our shared passion as children to run off and join the circus can be found.  When does the passion to be creative die?  Perhaps it occurs when a young child first recognizes that life is difficult.  The creative passion of uninhibited play is coming to an end.  The realities of the “real world’ perhaps from school, perhaps from parents, begins to paint us into a box.  Now it’s time to color “within” the lines.  You’re growing up and it’s unacceptable to color outside the lines.  When we sense the lines closing in on us and our creativity dying as children,  I believe that is when we we long to join the circus.  And of course, it’s not long before the real world cures us of those yearnings as well.  

Every once in awhile something comes along, so different, so unique as to restore those creative passions we are all born with and are free to explore as young children.  Cirque du Soleil has a 30 year track record of restoring those passions...if one is fortunate enough to see the show.  Otherwise, you can just read this book.  It would be impossible for Cirque to have been successful, for three decades, without constantly finding creative ways to express the spirit and beauty of human action, to scale mountains seemingly impossible to climb.  But here, within the pages of this book, the creative collective genius of the show is contained within a simple story, about a journey to rekindle the creative spirit.  And it doesn’t mean you have to run off and join their show..  It simply means you have to be awaken to what drives creativity, and once alive,  to recognize it is possible to bring back the awe and wonder of your childhood and apply it to your day job.

Most of us do live in the real world, not the wonderland of creative places such as Disney or Cirque, and, by most accounts, one doesn’t have to look very far to find the clowns.  We live among them, they among us.  They are the system.   It’s the artists, that rise above the comedy to inspire us to do great things.  And being an artist is no harder that dedicating yourself to your day job in order to first, do it well and then later, do it with ease.  After you have mastered your job, the ability to move outside the confines of structure, to be creative, will materialize.  Most of us, once we do our jobs well, are not incentivized to do more, and never realize we can.  As we try, legions of those struggling to stay within the lines, for safety and security, push us back.  When they do this we are beaten down and each time we lose a little bit of our creative soul.  

Here’s an example:  What could be safer than asking for additional white-board space to think and illustrate ideas at one’s office?  This  would help collaborate with others and perhaps spark creative ideas.  A friend recommended instead of purchasing a white-board, I move beyond the borders of a white-board and paint the entire wall of my office with a product called “IdeaPaint”.  This product will transform any surface into a space upon which creativity can thrive.  Immediately after the request, all the reasons it can’t be done, quickly surfaced.  In short order the “system” took over and the initial requirement was completely lost.  What eventually materialized was the “system’s” perceived solution to the requirement.  That solution was safe, well within the bounds of normal, and completely unusable.  On top of that it cost twice as much.  Instead of two pints of special paint to transform 100 square feet of wall into a whiteboard...two monster 4’ x 12’ rigid white boards were delivered.  These are tiny hills of set-back that we face everyday.  The Spark calls it red tape.  Unless we are careful, these hills accumulate into the unscalable mountains of the real world that chip away at our creative souls.

This book is a must read.  It doesn't mean you have to run off and join the circus.  It’s about looking for ways to bring the passion you have for your day job, or once had, back to a place where you are no longer working in the real world, but rather playing as a young child.  If you’re not having fun at your day job, the place where you spend most of your adult life, you are probably in the wrong profession.  Maybe it’s time to talk to your boss.  But the rules are simple and easily accessible in this text.  This book is a five-star life changer for those who can see the beauty and creativity inside. If it’s too late and your soul has not survived the “real world” this book will probably not help.  If you are soul is already dead, joining the circus is not going to help either...

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Foer

When Something is Nothing

Add Milan Kundera's, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" to the list of books Johathan Safran Foer chose to emulate in his "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close".  To emulate style is a high sign of flattery and I think ok from a literary perspective.  To emulate plot, stories, and characters...well not so much...but it's still all fiction.  I have not read the books that Foer has presumably lifted his plot and character from but I will.  Why?  Because I liked this book and want more of it.  I don't necessarily care where the creative inspiration for some of what he does comes from, I'm just glad he was inspired and took us for this ride...this journey of nine year old Oskar Schell... as he tries to put his life together following the death of his father in the World Trade Center attacks.  

Oskar no doubt (and no doubt Foer as well) has attention deficit disorder.  The energy of his fast paced writing and wide ranging thoughts leave no doubt as to this diagnosis.  Since Foer adeptly articulates a child's short attention span he gives us breaks, thankfully, from Oskar's high energy narratives by letting us read letters written to his father.  These letters are from his grand parents who both survived the firebombing of Dresden during World War II (Shades of Vonnegut).  The letters are of a much slower pace and provide the secondary and tertiary stories that intertwine with Oskar's.  His grandparents lost families, lost each other, and then lost their only son who, of course, was Oskar's father.  Oskar is not alone in his suffering or his secrets.  As Oskar travels New York we meet many other's who are suffering, in various ways,  on his journey to find a lock to fit the key to how his father died.  His secrets and many others are unlocked along the way. 

This book is heavy, you know it's heavy when it's hard to breath.  There is something and their is nothing.  There is something to see and nothing to see. There is noise and there is silence.  There is something to hear and something not to be heard...ever again.   Maybe Foer took some poetic license or grabbed creative techniques from others, but there can be no doubt this emotional story about ordinary people trying to maintain ordinary lives though extreme circumstances has a healing quality.  We all have lost something and tend to keep that loss a secret, believing that it is something.  Should we continue in silence and forever search for that something only to discover that it might be nothing?  This book attempts to answer that question.

Blackness is not probable cause

 

Professor Laymon: You are a real American writer.  My friends who advise me on ethnic and racial matters tell me it’s prejudice to make the “black” qualification. But I note it might be impossible for you to be a professor of Africana studies without the modifier.  What if, however, as an intellectual exercise, we removed the word “black” from every use of it in your book of essays, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”.  Would your book speak to any greater human condition?  I think it would...not perfectly in all cases...but with a few more subtle changes, learning how to slowly kill yourself and others, in America, might not be a “black” monopoly.  One need look no further than the book I finished reading yesterday, “The Catcher in the Rye”.  The human condition comes with it the innate ability to self-destruct.  Self-destruction crosses all ethnic and cultural boundaries.  The trick, I believe you are trying to teach, is, in the words of John Wayne, “Life is tough, it’s tougher if you're stupid”.  Don’t be stupid and intentionally push the self destruct button.  You don’t have too.  There is a better way.  But yes, it would be easier without the presumption of guilt that “my people” carry so easily around with them, but conceal--just out of view--our chief white hustle.  When I pull up to the intersection and roll to a stop, close by to those kids wearing hoodies, I’m not going to push the door locks, even though my hustle is to pretend that thought didn’t cross my mind.  It did.  Where are the thought police when I need them.  Yet I kept the doors unlocked.  Does my hustle help or hurt the human condition?  

Here is another confession.  I bought the wrong book.  I’m pretty sure the book I wanted to read was “Long Division”, the second book you’ve published in a single year.  Congratulations are certainly in order on both books.  But I needed something to read on my vacation, which is, it has to be said, a pretty stereotypical vacation for us...beach house, family, NC, OBX, etc.  The beach house isn’t inherently white but the location is as sun bleached as the Adirondack chairs on the deck.  Not the place where I would actually like to discuss the topics contained in your book, primarily because to really pull this material apart, you need to be talking to scholars, not vacation intellectuals such as myself.  So... no debate and the wrong book.  But I’ve read it and it’s time to post my review.

First, I hate a book of essays.  Going into it I couldn’t even conceive of a 5-star rating.  You shouldn’t have called them essays. You’ve achieved what you set out to do.  These are in fact musical tracks that tell a crucial story.  That’s enough.  This is not a collection of essays.  As for you other goals, it’s debatable whether or not I’m your intended audience...but I believe I’ve learned far more from you in a few hours,  then I learned reading, “Sounder” with my daughter, during our trip to the beach last year.  But let’s just start with your good writing.  Brilliant.  Here are my favorites.

“...the reckless order of American human being…” -- Brilliant

“The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads...The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and grandmas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it need to believe it had made from scratch.” -- Brilliant

“Nineteen-year-old black boys cannot be perfect in America. Neither can sixty-year-old white boys named George.” -- Brilliant

“I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dream, a teacher, a student, a failure, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay read, and I'm a child of this nation.”  -- Brilliant

“I convince myself that Mississippi is on the other side of the field.” -- Brilliant

On Kayne West, “He has proven himself good enough, brave enough, conceptual genius enough, compassionate enough, and now rich enough to use his voice to explore, with prickly honesty and dramatic irony, what black women deserve.” -- Brilliant

On Tupac Shakur, “By age twenty-five, Tupac Amaru Shakur had recorded six albums and starred in five movies.  Five bullets had entered his body and he’d gone to prison for eleven months.  He  traveled around the world, influencing the life and are of millions of people and talking about organizing a movement against poverty and police brutality.  He had shot two white off-duty cops in Atlanta who were harassing a black man, and beat the case. By age twenty five , Tupac Shakur had fought to stay alive for six days in a a Las Vegas hospital after three new bullets entered his body, And less than three months after his twenty-fifth birthday, Tupac Shakur was dead.” -- Brilliant

That’s enough.  I will read  “Long Division”.  I will post my review.   But I will continue to read your work for one reason alone.  

“Blackness is not probable cause.” -- Sublime

Mooch - Fante

 

I just finished reading the book "Mooch", by Dan Fante.  I consider reading this book highly appropriate since my nickname, and the name of this blog for that matter, is Mooch.  I enjoyed the book.  Here is the overinflated, 5-star review, I posed on Amazon.com.  How could I help but give it rave reviews?

" Brilliant!  What Orwell would have written had he tried telemarketing instead of dish washing.  What Fitzgerald would have written had he known about the "Big Book".  What Kerouac did write except for a PG-13 audience in the late 40's.   Fante get's it right.  You are down and out, on the road, and in love with a muse that is every bit as crazy as Fitzgerald's own Zelda.  It's all there.  The insanity, the recovery, the obsession and the biggest mooch of them all, Fante himself.  Since a mooch can be a free loader, a drug addict, a wanderer, or a sucker, you have to read the book to decide which definition Fante is using.  I'm off to find the rest of his books."

Well perhaps I'm not actually off to find the rest of Fante's books -- but I was definitely taken by his writing and I may, one day, venture into some of his father's novels as well.  Apparently John Fante, was quite the novelist, however never really being recognized during is actual life, he was reduced to scraping out a meager living writing for TV and Hollywood.  But for today, I am interested in a subject much closer to home.  I am interested in my very own nickname, "Mooch".  Why do I have it?  What does it mean?  It has been a natural name in some instances, it has been the source of interesting reactions from some people, perhaps a bit to polite to call me "a" mooch.    Which, perhaps, if you use all of Fante's definitions might not be too far from the truth.  But let's explore this word "Mooch" , just for a little, before we decide.

As I have mentioned, Fante has, I am sure, been playing with all four definitions of Mooch.  He wouldn't have used the word for his title if he didn't have some affinity with the word itself and perhaps it's multiple meanings.  The first definition, and the one with the most universal negative connotation has to be that of a free loader.  A mooch is someone who, well, mooches.  You can mooch cigarettes, mooch money, mooch places to stay.  If there is anything to be had for free, a mooch is probably close by trying to ply their moochy trade.  We all mooch off our parents for at least the first 16 years of our life -- some of us much (or mooch) longer.  A mooch can be a sponge or a parasite.  I'm personally glad the kid's cartoon, however, is named after the sponge.  I'm not sure there is room in our world for me and a  yellow mooch with square pants, called Bob.

Now whereas I could be guilty of mooching from my parents, from time to time, I could never be guilty of being the mooch known as the drug addict.  The sorry sort who is so addicted to their chosen drug that all other pursuits in life become irrelevant.  This mooch is in a never ending quest for their next fix.  Most of us, fortunately, never become the addicts of such destructive behaviour that we commit crimes in search of our chosen high.  However, don't be so sure that a seemingly innocent obsession, doesn't necessarily qualify you as a mooch.  Most of us do know the addition of Love, for instance, either for a spouse or a child.  The obsession, or the tie, to such another type of addicting drug that happens to comes with our emotions.  Fools rush in.  Perhaps a fool is a mooch -- a fool certainly fits a definition of mooch yet to come.  But do we have to look so far to find coffee or caffeine junkies.  Certainly, these addictions too, could or should qualify for the mooch moniker.  And what about other activities we pursue with passion.  Soccer, for instance.  Aside from my morning fix of Mountain Dew, soccer could be my greatest addiction.  And, as it turns out, the fundamental reason I'm called Mooch.  Calling Mooch, on the soccer field, it seems, is the quickest way to receive a pass from, well, Mooch.  But what of this Mooch.  My name is Muccio.  Americanized by my grandfather in New York City in the early part of the 19th Century.  An immigrant from Italy it seems the family name was Mucia -- pronounced "Mew-Cee-Ah".  In Italian the single "c" is pronounced with a soft "cee".  My grandfather was not the only Mucia in New York City and he kept receiving the other guy's mail.  So one day he went down to the court house and changed the final "a" in his name to an "o" and added the second "c" to the middle of his name.  Muccio was the result.  He pronounced it "Mew-Cee-Oh", instead of, it seems, the more appropriate actual Italian pronunciation of the double "cc" as a "ch" as in "church", or "Mew-Chee-Oh".  However, no one could actually make the effort to pronounce the "Mew" and the "Chee" together, it's too difficult.  You can either take the effort to say "Mew" or make the effort to say "Chee", never both.  So the result is that, the family pronounces our name "Mew-cee-oh".  But Italian's who come across the name, instinctively want to say "Chee" and a soft "Moo" slips out ahead of it.  The end result is a pronunciation of the form "Mooch-ee-oh".  Verse the more Americanized "Moose-ee-oh", which resulted, of course, in my father being called "Moose" for most of his life.  For some reason, "Moose" never caught on with me -- perhaps because I ran track with an upperclassman named "Moose" -- and he already laid claim.  My father, has admitted however, that some of his friends in New York, did in fact, call him "Mooch".  But for him, it was "Moose" that caught on.  Conveniently leaving Mooch for me to use and ponder. 

Dan Fante's character, Bruno Dante, however is not addicted to Mountain Dew or soccer.  He is an alcoholic.  For most of the book, though,he is struggling to stay on the wagon.  It is the characters around him that fall, and, eventually drag him back into the hell that is drug abuse.  His friend's, his business associates, just about everyone he comes in contact with is either an addict or a recovering addict.  And everyone in this story is looking for a hand out.  Everyone is looking to survive as best they can, taking what is given to them, trying to take what is not given to them, and attending to their given addiction.  They are all mooches of the first and second sort.  In the process, the move about from place to place.  They drift.  A third definition for a mooch is a wanderer.  The route of this definition is not clear, at all, but the use of the phrase, "too mooch around", literally means to wander around, from place to place.  Bruno Dante wanders too.  He mooches from place to place and he is a mooch, taking what he can from who he can.  And finally, he is an addict.  Not just for his chosen drug but for the love he has for love interest in this great American Novel.  The crazy muse that gives his life meaning and drives him to the bring of despair and almost death.  She is also a mooch -- wandering from job to job and from addiction to addiction, taking what she can from who she can.  When she runs into Bruno, she has met her moochly match.

Oddly, of all these meanings, definitions, and human behavior Fante uses to illustrate his story, he only explicitly defines Mooch once, and it's none of these definitions.  Fante define's mooch in it's forth state.  A mooch is the target of a telemarketer's sale.  It is used in a derogatory manner to refer to a client who has just been hooked into a sale.  This is the definition given to the word by grifters, or two-bit con-artists to discuss their mark, or the sucker to be taken advantage of during the con.  A mooch is to a con-artist as a John is to a prostitute would be the appropriate and just as seedy analogy.  But to take the definition more general, just about anybody who is suckered into doing something they would rather not, or once in possession of all the facts, would not do.  A sucker by any other definition, and of course, as we all know, a sucker is born every minute.  "There, but for the grace of God, go I."  Indeed, by this definition, couldn't we all be considered, "Mooch"?  Is not being a mooch a part of the universal human condition.  Fante hit's the nail on the head with this definition.  So the struggle, the actual human drama that the hero must overcome in order to move forward in the story comes from this definition of mooch.  It is the mooches that can lift his life out of poverty -- if he can sell enough unwanted product too them.  But it is the mooches around him that can drag him just as quickly down.  Put another way, we all have something to sell in this world, we are just looking for a Mooch to buy it.  Conversely, everybody has something to sell us, we just hope we don't play the Mooch every-time.

So, in the end, and we find Bruno, discovering his mooch-hood, and it takes his obsession and love for the biggest mooch of them all to lead him to the promised land.  It is in the very last line of the book that he chooses to stop the madness.  And as his mooch, begs him for one more sale, as he plays her mooch,  he decides to no longer play mooch, and hangs up the phone.  I will need to read the sequel to "Mooch" to discover if the main character, has truly shed his Moochness.  As for me, call me Mooch.  I sure I have been a Mooch in my life, more than once.

What I Talk About - Murakami

Thank God for airport book stores.  I've never been one to pick up exhausting tomes while traveling--too much to read too much to carry--therefore when Haruki Murakami's new memoir, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" caught my eye at Atlanta's Hartsfield, it looked just right. Short, light, with a little bit of F. Scott and a little bit of Zen philosophy tucked inside (He never mentions Zen directly).  As a runner who runs and doesn't believe in walking during a marathon Murakami captures this essential truth with quality and gives us his recipe for endurance.  Not just with running but with life in general.  His analogies to running and writing are simple yet powerful.  For fans of Murakami's work this book should provide some insight into his his daily life,  simple yet somehow powerful.  For those unfamiliar with his novels, such as myself, I was sufficiently intrigued by his prose to grab a copy of "Norwegian Wood", one of his acclaimed works, as my next read.  At 60 Murakami still intends to publish novels and run marathons, presumably without walking.  His recipe works.

Constant Peg - Peck

Ever wonder what’s been happening in the skies over central Nevada?   Much is still speculation and many extra-terrestrial hunters spend a large percentage of their waking hours trying to peer into the valleys and canyons of those regions certain that if they stay vigilant they will remove the fog of government lies and discover the existence of aliens.   The truth is out there, but whereas it might not be as spectacular as it could be to discover the US government has been conducting horrific biological experiments on ET, which no doubt include our own spin on alien anal probing, the real truth is less science fiction and more history and heroics courtesy of some fine Americans and the United States Air Force (USAF).  The aliens, of course, would not be life forms from another planet, but rather technology from a forgien country...in this case from Russia--in the form of their jet fighter aircraft.

Ever heard of the Tonopah Test Range or TTR?  Long before it became a secret base concealing the first operational home of the F-117 stealth fighter jet, it was a remote Department of Energy laboratory.  Later, it was to host the first cover story to explain the increase in operations and construction that would surround the arrival of the super-secret F-117.  What’s really weird, and awesome at the same time, is that this cover story was also so sensitive and treated with such respect by those in the know, that even as the F-117 jets were arriving at Tonopah and going operational, the word of the cover story, never got leaked…  The story was thus never told.  A failed cover story.  Finally, in 2006 the mission was declassified.   And one of those fine American’s decided to write some of their previously undisclosed history down.

Before they were the Red Eagles they were the TAC Red Hats.  TAC stands for Tactical AIr Command.  Back then, TAC was on a leadership rampage. What resulted was the rise of the “fighter generals” as described in the great history book by Mike Worden of the same name.  This was, and has been, their heyday.  Yet their rise to prominence culminated in the dissolution of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the previous reign of the “bomber generals” over the USAF.  This was thirty years ago.  This event ushered in the 3rd epoch of USAF maturity since it’s birth as a new service in 1947.  The epochs were defined and characterized by Jeff Smith in his illuminating work entitled.  “Tomorrow’s Air Force”.  The rise of the fighter generals happened on the eve of the first Desert Storm war in Iraq. It was the late 80’s and I was a newly commissioned officer in the USAF.  A SAC trained warrior as we were called...forged in the fire of a nuclear weapons maintenance squadron, inside a profession and an Air Force Speciality or AFSC (maintenance) well known for eating their young.  Everyone remembers the 80’s with the movies, Top Gun, the music, Billy Idol, and our clothing choices, parachute pants. It was a fine time to be young and unafraid. 

With all that going on it’s no wonder that a few fearless pioneers went unobserved in that high desert of Nevada.  They were guided by a vision to train fighter pilots, the cream of the crop fighter pilots, to join an echelon above the best of the best, to cap-off their training with an aerial engagement of actual adversary alien (forgien) aircraft.  In this case, actual Russian MiG fighters straight from behind the Iron Curtain. The training would be conducted in complete secrecy.  The Cold War was still in full swing. We were still a decade away from the fall of the Berlin Wall.  America’s strategy was still nuclear deterrence with actual limited nuclear strike options materializing to confront the nightmare of the Fulda Gap scenario which was deemed not only real,  but likely.  What burned in the heart of Air Force planners at the Pentagon  was the ability to gain Air Supremacy over the communists in the event a conventional war kicked off in Europe and 50,000 Soviet Union tanks streamed across the border, through the Fulda Gap, and  into Germany.

Who were these planners at the Pentagon? Enter Gaillard Peck, known as Evil Peck in his band of fighter pilot brothers. These brothers, seasoned in the aerial combat of VIetnam, knew the Air Force could do better.  Their plan, build a squadron of real Russian MiGs and train pilots to fly them, and to fly against our best of the best in training scenarios.  

“America’s Secret MiG Squadron, The Red Eagles of Project Constant Peg”, is an effort by Evil Peck, to describe how he got it done, in complete secrecy.  How did he pull it off? How did he get it approved, funded, and operational?  What it took, despite the huge bureaucracy, and what was the resulting success of this elite squadron of US owned and operated Russian MiGs?  It is also an essay about winning and losing, It is an essay on leadership and egos.  What is wrong with the United States AIr Force  but also, what can be done right?  Evil Peck, through his own eyes reports on being inside the bureaucracy that made it all happen.  There was also some losing going on and Evil is too much of a gentleman to describe and place blame where it belongs.  Having been in and around the Air Force myself, since 1982, as an officer in the field, a civilian on the Air Staff, and as a contractor supporting the Pentagon, I have seen it all.  Evil Peck nails it.  He also tells the story of Bud “Chops” Horan, who cloaked the program in secrecy, almost to a fault...given the need for a cover story that never really emerged...and for good reason.  OBTW that story still hasn’t emerged.  More on that later.

First some background before I get deeper into this book review. Flying high performance jet aircraft is a lethal enterprise...not  just because of the necessity to dogfight in combat.  These technical marvels of the sky can kill you very quickly. Thus the training required to learn just how to strap on engines with more thrust than weight is not something those who are in the profession have ever taken lightly.  It demands no compromise and the best of the best training required is an absolute.   A block approach was adopted by the Air Force to build the best of the best.  Baby steps.  Learn and master in stages.  Finally, when you’ve mastered the jet you still have a long way to go.  You are only learning for one reason, to fly in combat.  At the top of the flyer’s pyramid stand the aerial aces.  Those who have downed other enemy fyers in combat.  During wartime,  experience was gained in the heat of the dogfight.  What did you do?  What worked and how did you survive? Pass that on to the flyers in your squadron.  From previous combat it is well known in the fighter community that 10 missions is the number required to gain comfort and some proficiency...that is if you don’t die first.  After all the book learning, after all the block training, after all the tactics and techniques have been described, you still must fly in a hostile exchange to really know how you will perform.  Enter,  Red Flag.  At the top of the heap, pilots are invited to Red Flag exercises to gain their 10 sorties of combat proficiency against a simulated aggressor aircraft….but is that even enough to eliminate “Buck Fever”.  The first time you look through your rifle scope while hunting a deer and hesitate before you pull the trigger.  That’s buck fever.  It’s a well known phenomenon.  How then, do you get the deer in the room? Let the pilot  see the deer, run with the deer, and down the deer in combat, or be bested by the deer...and learn that lesson too How do you put a highly trained USAF fighter pilot in place with their crosshairs on said deer...a Russia pilot in a MiG trying to kill you.  How do you get the deer to 20,000 ft, AGL, moving at near the speed of sound?  Evil Peck figured it out.

Back then the Air Force fostered what was known as the one mistake mentality.  A single mistake would mean the end of your career, unless you were very lucky.  Some of this grew out of the nuclear posture of the Air Force where we constantly hung under the Sword of Damocles and a single mistake could not be tolerated.  But yet, how do you learn?  Particularly when you are coloring outside the lines.  When I was a maintenance officer on the flightline in 1988, I remember an issue came up and at one point I had 10 senior NCO’s in my office, totalling 220 years of USAF maintenance experience.  I did the math but I didn’t try to solve the problem.  I told them to solve the problem.  My two years of maintenance experience wasn’t going to get it done.  And guess what?  In the morning 220 years of experience had that problem solved. As Evil describes leadership within the Red Eagles, the difference in styles jumps off the page, from the maintenance officer, David Stringer, who went on to be a 1-Star general, a very very high rank for a logistics officer in those days, to George Gennin,  a commander who single handedly destroyed the Red Eagles because of his commander’s ego and blind spots. Later Col John Manclark would have to repair the  mess made by Gennin and get the sortie rates back up.

In his new best seller, “Talking to Strangers”, Malcomn gladwell describes what happens when two people don’t understand one another at a very basic level. In the case of Bobby “Daddy” Ellis, the SMSgt who was the Chief of Maintenance, for the Red Eagles nothing could be closer to the truth.  When the 6th Red Eagles Commander showed up, Col George Gennin, they immediately had a communication barrier.  They didn’t speak anything close to the same language.  Gennin seemed unwilling to even try to learn.  Ellis, on the other hand, owned those jets in every sense of the word.  He built them  from scratch.  He repaired them.  He maintained them.  He knew them down to the last rivet.  Gennin, on the other hand, knew none of this. What he knew was Air Force good order and discipline.  And this is what he imposed on the Red Eagles when he showed up.  Gennin was out for himself.  And hypocritically, as he would condemn Ellis for doing things outside the chain of command, he himself evaded  the chain of command, not reported in Evil's book, but in other published accounts of the Red Eagles.  Gennin himself frequently  jumped the Chain of Command and would have routine conversations with the Commander of TAC, Gen Creech, behind his own bosses back.  He, better than anyone, understood the value of these back channel communications.  But fundamentally failed to understand the magic that was taking place right in front of him.  Instead of finding a way to join the team he decided to crush the spirit of the unit.  He claims credit for increasing the sortie rate, where the numbers reported by Evil show he did nothing of the sort.  Sortie rates decreased under his watch, the lowest to date in the history of the Red Eagles and  he handed a broken squadron to the next commander’s White and Manclark who really turned the sortie rates around.

This is a great book which captures a brief moment of Air Force culture.  Apart from Evil’s story and personal involvement he was humble and truthful enough to include stories of the Red Eagles written by other Red Eagles in his book.  These are all fascination stories told in their own words. I’ve mentioned several times that the Red Eagles should have been the cover story for the F-117s.  They were not.  Perhaps, again, we return to Gerrin.  Perhaps, we may never know, trying to break the Red Eagles into conformance with the USAF was one way to thrust them into the light of day...to assume their envisioned role as a cover story for those F-117’s, the primary reason for Tonopah’s resurgence, visibility, and obvious influx of major funding..  Ultimately the Red Eagle squadron at Tonopah was shut down as the F-117’s went public due to their involvement and success in the first Gulf War.

I alluded to it earlier, but a word about Intelligence collection in the United States...

What Evil doesn’t describe is this book is the inherent relationship the Red Eagles must have had with the United States intelligence community.  For obvious reasons this has been left out. And perhaps the reason you don’t use an intelligence program as a cover story for another classified program.  Evidence in the book would suggest you don’t run off to Egypt and other countries around the world, as Daddy Ellis did,  to collect Russian aircraft parts, without US Intel in the room.  So they must have been there and Daddy Ellis must have been eyeballs deep in this community.  This is another piece of the puzzle that Geoge Gerrin would have never understood.  It’s a blind spot for most inside the Department of Defense, primarily because most employees of the DoD never possess the coveted clearances to go behind the intel curtain.  And whereas they may brush up against it, they never understand it’s depth.  The relationship between DoD and US Intel meet at organizations such as the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) under Air Force Systems Command (AFSC).  You are on your own to research such things but I would start with digging up some history on the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). And keep in mind the rules are different on the intel side.  Those guys grow beards and don’t wear uniforms.. They also don’t serve as cover stories for DoD missions.  Typically it’s the other way around...

I close with a question for those alien hunters out there who may be reading this review and searching for ET.  Ever seen a fighter pilot complete with face-mask and oxygen line connected to their helmet?  Check it out sometime... 

Braving the Wilderness - Brown

Brene Brown is a force of nature.  I didn't know who she was until reading her latest book, Braving the Wilderness.  Perhaps a bit off topic, for who she really is, but a necessary book in these trying times.  Her skill set is perhaps what the world needs right now as we struggle with so much divisiveness which, while appearing to be human nature, it is not. We live in society for a reason.  We need one another.  And generally speaking, humans have prospered in societies.  She boils it all down into a recipe based on the acronym BRAVING.  Each letter represents a word that we, as human's, should adopt in our lives.  I'm not going to repeat the acronym, you can read the book.  Generally speaking, it's too much of an acronym.  If I have to look up the meaning of each word, it doesn't even work as a mnemonic.  So boo to the over use of bad acronyms in general and her specific use of a particularly bad one in this book..  Forget BRAVING and focus on her greater message.

It's a good book.  Her insight into human nature, backed by a ton of social research and conversations with 1000's of people, she has a solid foundation to assert why we people are such idiots when it comes to attempting to be decent to one another.   It's all about our fear...which inhibits us from truly connecting with one another. We need to show our vulnerability, like a doggo would roll over to have it's belly rubbed. Then we can confront the fear that really inhibits us.   Human connection is at the heart of it.  We all know how to do it.  We just don't.  Or insist on connecting in dysfunctional ways with other dysfunctional, though like minded, people.  The echo chamber is not the way to make meaningful relationships.  Sure, you will enjoy having a beer with a like minded person, but you can't grow and heal divisiveness in that way.  You only become entrenched in what you already think..  So if your thinking is wrong, you're screwed.  And so is the world.  Extremism begets extremism. The world is full of societies gone bad when they enter the echo chamber of extremism.  My words not hers.  Her more pertinent rules, not the acronym, I will repeat here.  They don't require much more defining.

1)  People are hard to hate, move  closer to them.  Essentially have that beer with someone who isn't of like mind.  You might find common ground. Rub each other's belly.

2) Speak truth to bullshit.  Here you must identify what is fact based, and what is a complete fabrication.  Lies are counterfactual.  Bullshit ignores false facts and goes straight for fantasy land.

3) Hold hands with strangers.  Kinda the same as bullet 2.  You just don't know it yet.

4) Have a strong back, but a soft front.  She adds have a wild heart.  I'll be honest, I have no idea what she means by wild heart.  It has something to do with her premise of wilderness. The soft belly  seems repetitive--see above.

Wrapped up in her notion of the wilderness, however, is her introduction of the Junian definition of the paradox.  We live in a paradox. We must be able to process conflicting thoughts at the same time.  I don't like that to understand her premise we have to also understand the Jungian concept of paradox.  It's not wrong, it's just too obscure.   I greatly prefer the Nietzschian notion of eternal returns.  More to the point, Henry David Henry David Thoreau said, "In Wildness is the preservation of the World."  Both concepts drive to her point about connectedness and the return.  Meaning is connectedness.  Even Victor Frankel will agree, in his Logotherapy, that meaning is derived at that moment we connect, not with other humans specifically, but with the universe in general.  That can be achieved simply by connecting with anything.  To a pet. To nature.  To the forces of energy that surround us.  Or more simply to your own thoughts.  It simply means waking up.  We can start, to Brene's most salient point, by truly connecting with the human's around us.  We speak, euphemistically, the same language. It's easier than you think.  You don't have to hold a stranger's hand, literally, but if they are in line at the grocery store, and annoying the crap out of you because they insist on writing a check, give them a pass.  Walk a mile in their shoes and try to understand why they have eschewed the bank card in favor of this arcane activity.  So what does it all boil down too?  Do not bullshit, nor allow yourself to be swayed by bullshit.  And treat each other like puppies.   Rub each other's belly.  Be willing to have yours rubbed too.  Not literally.  Or at least don't try it at the line at the supermarket.

Black Ops - Prado

If you pick up a book about the CIA the first thing you should understand is that you are not going to be reading about top secret things.  At least not anything current, say within the last 75 years or so.   It’s funny the number of reviewers out there that think they are going to finally know what actually goes on at Langley, or at the Farm, or at any of the Country “Stations”, or at many clandestine overseas operating locations.   Even in a book describing events that happened a few decades ago, at best we will only catch a glimpse of these events, and these people, these fine Americans, if one, we have a clearance and have seen more behind the curtain already, or two, if some political upheaval was happening and one of the agents found themselves on the wrong end of a politically motivated, and very public, congressional inquiry.  That’s not the best time to know about them.  It’s better, most of the time, to let them go about their job and stay in the shadows.  Contrary to Hollywood belief, these folks do their job in silence to protect America from those who would do us harm.  Ric Prado, author of the new book about his life in the CIA, “Black Ops, The Life of a Shadow Warrior” gives us his perspective. If you know what goes on, at these places, having been there personally, having been through it all, you will know that Ric Prado has reliably translated actual experience into a worthy unclassified representation of the work of these hidden heros. They are Americans who labor in the shadows, to keep those who actively strive to “do us harm” all day, everyday, from doing so.   It’s an impossible job.  It’s a thankless job.  Ric Prado is attempting to thank them.  I think he succeeds.  In addition to successfully telling his story, Prado’s book reads like a recruitment manifesto.  He  has reached  out to a younger generation, those who might consider a job at the Central Intelligence Agency, and asked for them to apply.  He is offering them slightly more insight, into the Agency, than they could gain at a job fair or anecdotally through conversations with those “in the know”.  He’s giving them a glimpse of the life they could expect. I think Prado succeeds.  Hand this book to your young niece or nephew who would like to do something for their country.  Also, Prado helps the next generation understand that the world is an unstable place.   There is a lot of evil running around.   How do we attempt to know about that evil let alone keep in check.

The best part about Prado’s book, particularly if you were alive and politically aware of the National scene over the three decades from 1980 through about 2010 is that he walks through a number of the high profile situations that were on the front page offering not much other than a public admission that the CIA was deeply involved in covert actions in those areas of the world.  It will be tough to talk through these chapters without being mired in politics.   Some of the critics of Prado’s book accuse him of wrapping politics into his writing.   I do not find those criticisms to hold true.  Prado was very even handed about dealing with politics at the time.   He was not, however, even handed the truth regarding the reality of bad people wanting to do our Country harm and the vigilance we must possess to know them, watch them, and in cases where action against our country is imminent, act accordingly as it is our right, as a sovereign nation, to protect our people and our interests at home and abroad, in accordance with all applicable laws, treaties, orders, customs, and truths.  This is where it gets dicey.   I’ll try to be apolitical about the covert activities taking place, but less so regarding the clear and present danger the required action sought to eliminate.   Let’s start with the tyranny of evil men, to quote Samuel L Jackson (or Quentin Tarintino - since he rewrote the quote from Ezekiel 25:17).  “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides

by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.”  Prado was born in Cuba just as Fidel Castro was rising to power and Marxism was taking ideological hold on many of the have-nots due primarily to instances of economic imbalance and the perception of corruption in the hands of the powerful.  Whenever there is corruption or the perception of corruption those that would clean the government of these acts by sweeping them from power do so by attacking the political ideology, blaming the corruption on the politics rather than the corruption of those in power.  This happens on both the left and the right. Rather than attack politics, particularly in a functional democracy, why not simply root at the criminals.  Instead, by sweeping out the political party, instability in government arises.  When this happens, we form, or keep forming, third world countries that cease to function because they are always living on the edge. When a 1st world country experiences this political instability the entire world feels the machinations.

Prado begins in  his childhood.  Living a comfortable middle class life in a democratic Cuba he witnessed first hand the fall of the Cuban government, and the rise of Marxism under Fidel Castro.   Prado was forced to leave Cuba, ousted from his country,  his family losing their possessions and wealth at the hands of the new Marxist government, and had to start over in the United States.   Having nothing to do with the story of the CIA this revolution will put a bad taste in your mouth.  Having everything to do with the story of the CIA as it sets the stage for why the CIA must combat these revolutions on the streets of these countries whose instability could easily fall to a Marxist or Fascist regime inside the power vacuum and thus pose a threat to the freedoms and liberties of citizens world wide.  Prado witness, from an early age, why doing nothing, is not an option.

Nicaragua - Contra;s  Tyranny and Marxism

Peru -- Tyranny and Marxism

North Korea - Tyranny and Marxism

Africa -- Tyranny and Islamic Fundamentalism

Philippines --  Tyranny and Islamic Fundamentalism

Afghanistan  -- Tyranny and Islamic Fundamentalism

What currently divides our country is this belief that progressives on the left are all Marxist and conservatives on the right are all fundamentalists.   The truth is that both sides, left unchecked, lead to the tyranny of evil men on either side of the spectrum.  Socialistic leanings easily cascades into unchecked Marxism and the abuses of a communist dictatorship.  Ascribing to conservatives rule, cascades into  radical fundamentalism and the abuses of a fascist dictatorships.  These two extremes have been demonstrated in the petri dish of so many countries we easily lose count.  These social experiments have played out again and again to the misery and destruction of so many innocent civilians…it quickly becomes impossible for the human mind to grasp the world wide tragedies that have in so many cases led to genocide.    

So, in a nutshell, here’s what goes on.  Training, a lot of training.  Education, a lot of education.  Reading, a lot of reading for the purpose of researching a topic, coupled with a lot of writing, to report on that topic.  The subject, however, is as fascinating as the world has places to go, and people to see.    It can be as boring and mundane as……but in a dangerous world and someone needs to be ready for it.

Five Stars for Prado’s attempt at explaining why we must stay vigilant and ready in a world of evildoers.  It’s not the political  ideology itself that is at issue.  There are as many belief systems for how to create a Utopia as there are ways to raise your child.  All of us would like to live in Utopia.  The human condition, whether handed to us through millions of years of evolution to favor one’s self, or through a more Biblically based belief that evil exists as a by-product of original sin, we live in a dangerous and treacherous world.  Peace and prosperity, 1st world countries built on democracy with a constitution and respect for liveries and legal process should be sufficient evidence of the superiority of these social constructs as to be irrefutable.  

All the Light We Cannot See - Doer

Apparently it took 10 years for Anthony Doerr to complete his epic novel, “All the Light We Cannot See”.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 10 years for Hollywood to adapt his novel for the silver screen.  This book, although highly readable, in tiny bite sized chapters, perhaps indicative of our shortening attention span in the age of microblogging, doesn’t stand as an epic achievement in literature.  If fails as a love story, it fails as an historic novel, it fails as a mystery, it fails as a thriller, it simply fails.  Hollywood, in a two hour visually enhanced (ironic) production complete with broad sweeping vistas of both Paris and Saint-Malo France during World War II, and with close attention to a soundtrack which would include classical pieces, such as Clair de loon, as well as the static of early radio transmissions, and the bone quaking vibrations from aerial bombardment, is sure to please and no doubt win cinematic acclaim in multiple categories.  

The story itself, could also be corrected to tie up numerous loose ends, culminating in both grand love for the hero and heroine and of visceral hatred for the numerous antagonists, of both character and of circumstance.  This book is destine to be a classic, because the movie will be a classic.  Yet the movie, will undoubtedly be better than the book, unless, for some ridiculous reason, Doerr would win creative rights on the picture and insist the storyline be kept true.  In which case, both would not be worth more time and thought than a best selling paperback that took the author two months to produce...let alone 10 years.  Without historical accuracy it’s not literature.  Without true love it’s not literature.  Without true mystery it’s not literature.  Good prose which Doerr clearly possess an unbounded talent to create does not overcome these serious flaws in his story.  

What he gets right.  The love of a father for his daughter.  The mindless machine that drives atrocity. The doubt welling up in the mind of ardent followers of a cause. The hopelessness of a military occupation.  What he gets wrong.  It fails as a love story between the hero and heroine.  It fails as a mystery surrounding the “Sea of Flames” a priceless diamond we are not sure whether to protect of cast into the sea.  If fails as a history lesson, there are too many things simply wrong about WWII.  It fails scientifically...for which Doerr has been given too much credit.  

The failures can all be corrected in the screenplay.  I can’t wait for the movie.  3-Stars for the book, 5-Stars for the soon to be movie adaptation, I hope.  4-Stars overall.