A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I have been a part of the Literary Lush Book Club (a local book club) for a few years now. While I write up our current books as we go, I have also gone back and read some of the books that they read either before I joined, or books that I didn’t read at the time because I had a schedule conflict for the meeting. In this case, this is a book that they read before I joined, and one that I heard was good from a few different people. 

 

A Dirty Job is the first of two books that go together, and it also fits in the larger fantasy universe that all Christopher Moore books are a part of, although most of the books stand alone. If this book is any indication of the others, the imaginary universe that Moore creates is a lot like our own, but with supernatural elements and a heck of a lot of absurdity. Okay, so the absurdity also fits our own world, but still. Moore finds plenty of humor in the absurdity - a very dark humor. 

 

The basic premise of the book is that reincarnation is real, all the gods are real, particularly the various personifications of death. But it isn’t quite that simple. Souls migrate, but not all humans have souls. (As a character quips, “this explains the last election.”) One of the underworld jobs needed is that of Soul Merchants. These ordinary-looking people are given the name of someone who has recently died, or will die soon, and the task of finding the object that contains their soul. They must then take that object, and sell it to the person who will get that soul. The right person will be the one who buys the object. At least that is the way it is supposed to work. 

 

Charlie Asher runs a thrift store he inherited from his parents. He managed to find a wife, but she dies at the beginning of the book, soon after giving birth to their child. Charlie sees a mysterious man at her bedside, then starts seeing certain objects glow, gets a book explaining his new job…except his goth employee steals it, leading to significant delay before he figures out what is going on. In the meantime, these harpy creatures start stalking him, and two gigantic dogs appear to guard his infant daughter and…well, you’ll have to read the book. 

 

Set in San Francisco, like many of Moore’s books, it combines dark humor, a feckless protagonist, malevolent supernatural creatures, and a lot of weird stuff. Unlike any book I have read, it also includes the “squirrel people,” inspired by the creations of Monique Motil. (Look under “creatures.”)

 

 Moore grew up with a cop for a father, and this shows in this book, with three characters with law enforcement background or current employment. Apparently, dealing with weird shit was part of the job, so Moore heard a lot of it. Weird raven-women who can’t be killed aren’t that far off from some of the real-life stories that are out there. 

 

I’m not entirely sure I am the target audience for this book, but it was still a fun vacation read. My main quibble with it were the cheap and lazy Chinese stereotypes (they eat everything, amirite?) Since the book was published in 2006, I would have thought those would have been excised by the editor, but apparently not. 

 

The best part of the book were the imagination in conceiving the central idea and the fun details, and the one-line zingers throughout. I’ll try to quote a few of those. 

 

Charlie, like many guys, gets a little weird after the birth of his daughter. Rachel, before she dies suddenly and unexpectedly, explains to little Sophie what is going on. 

 

“Sophie, your Papa isn’t really insane. He just hasn’t slept for a couple of days.”

 

There are pictures of us after the births of our children. My wife looks really good. I look like death warmed over. And so it goes. 

 

A central idea in this book is that of the “Beta Male.” This isn’t meant in any scientifically defensible way, but in the cultural way we find it used. The idea is played for laughs, mostly, but also for some observations about human social structures. This passage was pretty funny, but also perceptive. 

 

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes - size, strength, speed, good looks - selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastadons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an angry, woolly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows. When Alpha Males set out to conquer neighboring tribes, to count coups and take heads, Beta Males could see in advance that in the event of a victory, the influx of female slaves was going to leave a surplus of mateless women cast out for younger trophy models, with nothing to do but salt down the heads and file the uncounted coups., and some would find solace in the arms of any Beta Male smart enough to survive. In the case of defeat, well, there was that widows thing again. The Beta Male is seldom the strongest or the fastest, but because he can anticipate danger, he far outnumbers his Alpha Male competition. The world is led by Alpha Males, but the machinery of the world turns on the bearings of the Beta Male.

 

Again, not scientific - Alpha Males aren’t what is described here, particularly - but not a bad explanation of a facet of human society. I’m a proud Beta, and I agree that we are what makes the world go round. 

 

Another of the Betas in this story is Ray, a former cop who was medically retired after taking a bullet. He is incompetent with women, to say the least, and is always on dubious scam dating sites like “desperatefilipinas.com.” The pictures are as fake as you would expect. These jokes tend to be more funny than the race-based ones. But there is also a cross-over joke that was pretty good. Ray is infatuated with another “girl” on a site. Charlie tries to point out she is a fake profile. 

 

“Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.” 

“They have that?”

Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”

 

The reason this joke is actually funny is that snacks like this are real. My second kid is really into stuff from Japan (she’s double-majoring in Environmental Science and Japanese), so we got her a subscription to Bokksu. She gets a monthly selection of treats, which she usually shares with those of us brave enough. While I do not specifically remember Sour Apple Calamari, some of them were darn close enough. 

 

The highest form of humor, however, is puns. I’ll fight you about that. Wordplay is a sign of high intelligence and a sign of a sense of humor that does not depend on making fun of others. This book is riddled with bad - or good - puns. Even the chapter titles are wordplay. My favorite is chapter 7, entitled “Thanatoast.” 

 

Another literary reference I loved was this one:

 

Charlie had noticed the alley on one of his walks to the financial district. It lay between Montgomery and Kearney Streets and had all the things a good alley should have: fire escapes, Dumpsters, various steel doors tagged with graffiti, a rat, two seagulls, assorted filth, a guy passed out under some cardboard, and a half-dozen “No Parking” signs, three with bullet holes. It was the Platonic ideal of an alley…

 

Throughout the first part of the book, Charlie keeps bringing pets home for Sophie, all of which soon die. (It takes a long time before Charlie realizes that Sophie can kill with a single word - this will be important later in the book too.) Anyway, at one point, there is this passage:

 

At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each a bout as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney-shaped dish that had its own island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

 

Zing! I’m afraid I am agreeing with that last line more and more these days, at least as applied to capitalism and religion. 

 

Speaking of religion, there is a scene involving a radical (and possibly insane) Muslim who objects to the fact that one of the two hellhounds sent to protect Sophie is named Mohammed. (The other is named Alvin - that’s what the name tags said when they appeared, and nobody argues with a hellhound…) 

 

Charlie, feeling pissy is having none of it. 

 

“I tried calling him something else, but he doesn’t listen. Watch. Steve, bite this man’s leg? See, nothing. I might as well be speaking Farsi. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Well, I have named my dog Jesus. How do you feel about that?”

“Well, then I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d lost your dog.”

“I have not lost my dog.”

“Really? I saw these flyers all over town with ‘Have You Found Jesus?’ on them. It must be another dog named Jesus.” 

 

I’d wince more about the Muslim stereotype here if we weren’t currently dealing with a brouhaha - again - about the depiction of Mohammed. I’m glad CAIR seems to be acting reasonably, for the most part. But I wish we could be clear that there is nothing inherent to religion that demands more respect than any other idea. I get that in the US, Muslims are a minority, and subjected to violence and hate. I also don’t go out of my way to insult religions (although I sure as hell speak out about the toxic tradition I came from.) But I think we can and should also be clear that religion is not immune from criticism - indeed from mocking when appropriate. If your religion is threatened by criticism or mockery, then it is pretty damn weak and insecure. 

 

Unexpectedly, there is a rather poignant scene in the book. Charlie’s mother has been hiding her cancer until she is on her deathbed. Charlie and his sister, Jane come to visit her one last time. The final scenes are surprisingly thoughtful, with the complexities of family and rivalry. Jane is a lesbian who has never been fully accepted by her mother, Charlie is the black sheep for other reasons. The two of them get along, but have had issues with mom. There isn’t exactly a cheap reconciliation, but that nostalgic return to the past of childhood and memories that didn’t really happen that way. Moore dedicates the book to hospice workers, and he really means it. In a book that is otherwise pretty snarky and weird and funny and crazy, this middle scene transcends for a moment. As Charlie tells his sister, who is torn between mourning her dying mother, and wanting to punch her (for good reason, too):

 

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - the one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn’t understand. Most of us don’t live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we’re a whole bunch of selves. When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives. You’re just hating the selves you’ve always hated, and loving the ones you’ve always loved. It’s bound to mess you up.”

 

Charlie has thought this through because of Rachel’s death, combined with his new profession as a Death Merchant. I will admit this one hit home a lot. For the last couple of years, I have been grieving the loss of my parents. They aren’t dead, but the good people who raised me are, and the bigots who replaced them have cut me out of their lives. This idea that there are multiple selves at play makes a lot of sense. There are the ones I loved deeply and thoroughly, who gave me a really good childhood, who tried so hard for so long to do right by me. And then there are the selves who dragged me into a cult, limited my education and career options, rejected my wife, played favorites with my sister, and who have gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I have wondered what the end of their lives will look like. Will my narcissistic sister completely isolate them from the rest of us? Probably - and that would be the easiest because there will be no impossible decisions to make. But what if, after throwing me away for years, they do the death-bed thing? Man, I really do not know how that will go down, and what the right decision would be for me at that time. It’s complicated. 

 

After this serious moment, Moore lightens the mood a bit. Jane wonders how Charlie all of a sudden got to be so spiritual. I mean, he wouldn’t even go to yoga with her. 

 

“I wouldn’t go to yoga with you because I’m not bendy, not because I’m not spiritual.”

 

Yeah, me too. 

 

Eventually, Charlie’s secret life ends up coming out in the open. I guess the increasingly materialized manifestations of the harpies are hard to ignore. There is a bizarrely sexual scene where one tries to kill Charlie, but he is saved by Rivera, his cop friend. Rivera tries to explain a bit of what happened to his partner, Cavuto. 

 

“Ever think to ask Asher how he happened to know the flying bulletproof bird woman in the first place?” 

“Yeah I did, but I can’t tell you what he said. It’s too weird.”

Cavuto threw his arms in the air. “Well, sweet Tidy Bowl Jesus skipping on the blue toilet water, we wouldn’t want it to get fucking weird, would we?”

 

One of the secondary characters is another death merchant, Minty Fresh. (Yeah, names are fun in this book…) He runs a second-hand music store, and nearly gets himself killed by the harpies when he goes across the bay to Oakland to listen to some live jazz. There is an interesting passage where Minty compares jazz to zen. 

 

Jazz was a Zen art, dig? Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting, like haiku, like archery, like kendo fencing - jazz wasn’t something you planned, it was something you did. You practiced, you played your scales, you learned your chops, then you brought all your knowledge, your conditioning, to the moment…Like the swordsman, the archer, the poet, and the painter - it’s all right there - no future, no past, just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens. 

 

That is a fantastic description of it. I have done a decent bit of improvisatory music, and that is absolutely how it happens. 

 

Without spoiling things too much, toward the end, Minty and Charlie team up with a female Buddhist monk and the squirrel people to take on the legions of darkness. (Yeah, there is a lot of background there.) Before the big showdown, Charlie finally gets laid. (Jane and the rest of the women in the book have been trying to make this happen for some time - ascribing his increasing paranoia to a lack of sex.) In any case, after they do the deed, I love Charlie’s exchange with Minty.

 

“How’re you doing?”

“I accidentally shagged a monk last night.”

“Sometimes, in times of crisis, that shit cannot be avoided. How are you doing besides that?”

 

I wouldn’t call this book literature or anything, but it was fun. Not quite a light read, perhaps, but pretty close. It had enough of the “what bizarre thing is the author going to come up with next” factor that I like, even if it had a lot of genre conventions. I brought it with me to a rainy weekend at the beach (a lot more fun than that sounds…) and it definitely fit the bill as a beach read. 

 

I will probably take a look at the other Christopher Moore books that friends have enjoyed, as this one was memorable. 

 

Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

We have enjoyed a couple of Jacqueline Woodson books previously: her autobiographical and poetical Brown Girl Dreaming and Feathers, a story about ordinary kids navigating the world. 

Harbor Me is similar to Feathers in that it is about kids about age 11 or 12, in an ordinary school situation, dealing with the world. However, it has a rather different twist. 

 

In this book, a group of six kids end up in a small class together due to their non-typical learning styles. The sort that are often described as “special needs.” But, as the author (see below) noted, her intent was to portray them as fully ordinary kids - which is how kids with, say, ADHD, autism, learning divergence, and other issues often are. They just learn differently, and struggle with the typical classroom environment. 

 

As part of the creative learning environment, the teacher has the kids spend the last period on Fridays in a room by themselves to just talk about whatever they want. While they are initially skeptical, they soon open up to each other, and talk about the issues, personal and societal, that affect them. 

 

Central to this is Esteban’s situation. His parents are undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and his dad has just been arrested by ICE, and may be deported. 

 

Tiago is from Puerto Rico - which, as he keeps having to point out to ignorant people, is part of the United States. While he doesn’t have to worry about his parents being deported, he has been harassed for speaking Spanish with his mother. 

 

Amari is African American (like two of the other kids), but comes from a fairly poor family. He has just gotten the lecture in the wake of the police murder of Tamir Rice about how he can never play with water guns in public. 

 

Ashton, the sole white kid in the group, struggles to understand the racial dynamics at play here. However, he is a good kid, and has been friends with Amari ever since coming to the school when his dad lost his job in Connecticut and had to move to NYC to work for a relative. Also, Ashton gets bullied by some older kids, which nobody really knows. 

 

Holly is also African American, but she comes from an upper-middle-class family. Rich by the standards of the group. Her mom has taken the narrator, Haley, under her wing after her….well, I should explain about Haley separately. Holly hates being called “rich girl” by Amari, and points out that she didn’t choose her circumstances any more than he did. The best she can do is be generous - which she and her parents are. 

 

And then there is Haley, the narrator of the book. Nicknamed “Red” because of her hair, she is biracial. And she has a traumatic history. Her parents fell in love in college, married, and had her. However, when she was age three, her parents were out at a party, had a bit too much to drink, which led to her father crashing their car, killing her mother, and sending him to prison for eight years. Her father’s younger brother stepped up and raised Haley. He is a genuinely kind and decent person, even if he never can figure out Haley’s hair. (Which is where Holly’s mom steps in.) 

 

So, that is the group. Everyone has a story, everyone has issues that affect them. As they grow closer, they find themselves having real conversations about political and social issues - how could they not, because these things are hardly abstract? They literally are part of the fabric of their lives.

 

This is the central premise of the book: children do not exist in some childhood bubble, and are not stupid and ignorant. 

 

This, in my experience, is spot on. My kids have had conversations with their classmates and friends - and each other - that are surprisingly deep and thoughtful and very political. 

 

Some of the Fundie parents of my kids’ friends would be shocked at how many of them identify as LGBTQ, socialist, and even communist. All the sheltering in the world cannot ultimately insulate children from reality - god knows my parents’ generation tried that, and failed spectacularly. 

 

The thing is, the kids are alright. They are often a lot more thoughtful and informed than their parents. I have learned a lot from listening to mine. (Hey, my goal is to be less “cringe” and more “based.” It’s…not easy.) While the direction my kids have gone wasn’t exactly what I have expected, the thing that makes me the happiest is to see that they have grown into empathic and thoughtful people. 

 

The title evolved over time, but Woodson settled on Harbor Me because of the idea that these kids would be shelters - harbors - for each other. They have each others’ back. 

 

“If the worst thing in the world happened, would I help protect someone else? Would I let myself be a harbor for someone who needs it?” 

 

The audiobook version of this is read by an ensemble cast. N’Jameh Camara does the heavy lifting as the narrator, Haley. The author reads the handful of lines spoken by the teacher, Ms. Laverne. The other kids are read by young(ish) people, including the author’s daughter Toshi. (Holly) 

 

Also interesting is the Q and A session after the story itself, featuring the author and her son Jackson. The two of them discuss the themes of the book, favorite characters, and diversity in literature. Woodson enrolled her kids in a school similar to the one described in the book - one that intentionally cultivates diversity - both racial and economic. Woodson and her wife made that decision based on the common dilemma of upwardly mobile minorities: should the kids be raised in a predominantly white school? Or some other option. NYC has the option for greater diversity, although overall it remains a largely de facto segregated city. (This is one of the reasons why Critical Race Theory is actually a very helpful set of ideas and lenses to understand our society. Despite Brown v. Board of Education, our schools remain largely segregated. Why is that? How do our institutions continue to perpetuate racial inequality despite being “race neutral” on their face?) 

 

Young Jackson sounds like a thoughtful young man, which is not surprising coming from a thoughtful mother who writes wonderfully nuanced and compelling books. 

 

Something else I might note: Jackson specifically mentions LGBTQ diversity, which is unsurprising since he has two moms. I think the Fundies of my parents’ generation - and mine too - have been somewhat blindsided by the spectacular failure of their attempts to keep their kids from knowledge about LGBTQ people. I mean, this has been the big theological issue they have rallied around, and, rather than preserve their theopolitical ideology for the next generation, they have created a wedge that continues to drive their children and grandchildren from any desire to be a part of their religion. Just like their embrace (indeed, worship) of Trump is driving the kids away. Our kids have grown up around people of all colors, religions, and sexual/gender identities. And, honestly, their future will require them to live in a diverse world, so maybe all of us should just get used to that and practice being decent people. 

 

And, to be decent people, we need to harbor others. Not just those like us, but the most vulnerable among us. The kids in this book decide to do just that, and it is a beautiful and inspiring thing. 

 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book has been on my reading list for a while - I can’t remember exactly when I put it on there, but it is considered a classic of its genre. 

 

In trying to understand my parents’ generation, and how they got to where they are, I have been wrestling with the meaning of the Vietnam War, which I think was THE event in their lives that most colored how they view politics. Even more so than the Civil Rights Movement, which I think was the event that most colored how my grandparents’ generation of white people viewed things. (That is not in any way a compliment.) 

 

For my parents’ generation, Vietnam was the event that hung over their heads as young people - my dad missed the draft by just a few weeks - and then became the lens through which they viewed so many things thereafter. Vietnam was what ruined the reputation of the US Government for many of them. If the government couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about war, then could it be trusted for anything? (In my parents’ case, this was a factor in their deep distrust of government, and it is hard to blame them.) 

 

But also, because Vietnam was part of the great Cold War - a proxy war between the USSR and the US - Cold War politics is still the lens that all politics runs through for Boomers. All politics is at some level the “good christian capitalist Americans” versus the “evil atheist communists” - and I do mean everything from environmentalism to the basic social safety net other first world countries take for granted to race relations. Ergo, universal health care is the start of the slippery slope toward the Gulags (never mind our world-leading incarceration rate…), teaching about race means reeducation camps for white people, climate change scientists are a conspiracy to end the American way of life in favor of communisms….and the list goes on. 

 

One more way Vietnam looms over Boomer politics: for the most part, they took the wrong lesson from the disaster. 

 

Here is the narrative I was raised on: The United States lost the Vietnam war because we weren’t committed to it enough. We didn’t send enough troops, stay long enough, and god damn it, WIN THE WAR. Thus, the betrayal of our veterans was that we didn’t support them as heroes and give them the resources to actually win. 

 

That narrative led us into the debacles of my own lifetime: 20 years of war in Afghanistan that collapsed as soon as we withdrew, a war in Iraq that led to the rise of ISIS rather than peace. We learned nothing from Vietnam, and thus once again got involved in morally indefensible wars, based on lies, and full of the arrogance that this time we will really light the mofos up and win this with shock and awe.

 

As Tim O’Brien, Vietnam veteran and writer compellingly demonstrates with The Things They Carried, fiction (but only barely) based on his experiences in the war, this was absolutely the wrong lesson. 

 

What we should have learned was this: Never get involved in another country’s civil war. Communism looked attractive to most of the third world because Western Capitalism was really just exploitation and imperialism to them. Also, the United States was an apartheid country at the time, so why the hell would brown-skinned people trust us? Wars without actual military objectives at their core cannot be won in any meaningful sense by military actions. Putting humans in the morally impossible situations we put our soldiers in will inevitably lead to atrocities. 

 

I could add more, but these are the ones that come to mind from the book. 

 

The Things They Carried is a collection of related short stories and vignettes about “Alpha Company,” his version of the unit in which he served. A dozen or so characters populate the stories, including the author himself (more or less - how accurate it is is not clear.) The events recounted are pretty horrifying, although no different from thousands of other true (or mostly true) accounts of the war from tens of thousands of veterans. 

 

There is a lot of intentional repetition in the stories, words and phrases and descriptions that loop back exactly like the traumatic memories described do. It is effective, but often really brutal, particularly for someone like me who hates violence and gore and at times just wanted it to stop. Probably so did O’Brien, which is why he wrote it so effectively. 

 

I won’t try to recap any of it, but did want to mention some particularly moving ideas and passages. 

 

The opening story isn’t so much a story, but a description of the things - tangible items and emotional baggage - that the soldiers carried with them. This serves as an introduction to the characters as well. It is a highly effective and compelling opening to the book, and excellent writing. 

 

Another thing that really stood out was O’Brien’s insistence that he was not brave, but a coward. He considered dodging the draft - fleeing to Canada, or even going to jail. But in the end, he was too cowardly do do what he knew was right. He knew the war was immoral. He knew it was senseless. But he was too afraid of disappointing his parents, of disappointing his family, friends, hometown, and countrymen. And so he went to war, and killed people, and it was as stupid and immoral and senseless as he expected. 

 

I get this, I understand this. In a less deadly way, I did the same thing. In retrospect, I should have pushed back against my parents, I should have sacrificed what I had to in order to get a normal college education, I should have taken action far sooner to make it clear that my wife would not be treated as she was by my family. Should have, should have, should have. But I didn’t have the guts to disappoint them, until there was nothing left but to just admit I had disappointed them all along no matter what I did. 

 

I mentioned earlier the point that atrocities in Vietnam were inevitable under the circumstances, I and I think O’Brien makes a strongly compelling case for this and why it was that way. Vietnam - like most of these proxy wars - lacked actual military objectives. Unlike, say, World War Two, the last morally defensible war the US was involved in, you couldn’t just destroy an official army, then sign a peace treaty, and go on with things. Instead, you had competing bands of revolutionaries and freedom fighters and ordinary people not happy about centuries of brutal rule by the French. As O’Brien notes later in an essay (see below) - he found out later that the Viet Cong didn’t even consider the US soldiers to be their primary opponents - we were just interlopers in a broader conflict that we didn’t even understand, let alone acknowledge. 

 

So, give a bunch of soldiers - very young men pressed into service, with no idea of what they were doing - a situation in which they have few clear objectives, an enemy that cannot even be defined, let alone seen and engaged under the usual rules of war, miserable conditions, poor planning, and the threat of unseen death at any moment. And then, is anyone surprised when they commit atrocities? 

 

This audiobook edition contains the book itself, narrated by Bryan Cranston, who does an excellent job; and also a long essay/memoir entitled “The Vietnam in Me,” written in 1994 about the author’s trip back to Vietnam, read by the author himself. The essay hits a lot of the same notes as the book, but is a lot more political and philosophical and not just descriptive. O’Brien reads the essay well, I must say. It was a solid addition to the book (and also about an hour and a half of disc time, so it isn’t short.) 

 

I think I’ll end with a final observation: the conservative Boomer narrative about Vietnam is that we wronged our Vietnam veterans by failing to welcome them back as heroes. This is bullshit. 

 

We wronged our Vietnam veterans by asking them to do morally indefensible things, and witness things no one should ever have to witness. 

 

The damage was done when we sent them in to an immoral war, asked them to murder citizens of another country in order to preserve Western hegemony, and then failed to give them meaningful treatment for what was, at its core, a moral injury. 

 

Lying and telling them they were heroes would not have helped, and probably would have made the injury even worse. 

 

They knew, and we know, and have always known, that the Vietnam War was morally indefensible. We asked our soldiers to do evil, and false praise and adulation will not fix that. We needed to apologize for using them and their lives as a tool for Empire.

 

As usual, the poets and musicians of the time were the prophets that were hated in their time for telling the truth. 

 

Got in a little hometown jam

So they put a rifle in my hand

Sent me off to a foreign land

To go and kill the yellow man

 

And then Ronald Reagan, the quintessential Boomer hero (although he was Silent Generation), somehow thought this song was about patriotism and rah rah ‘Murica and let’s go bomb the shit out of someone. 

 

O' beautiful, for spacious skies

But now those skies are threatening

They're beating plowshares into swords

For this tired old man that we elected king

Armchair warriors often fail

And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales

The lawyers clean up all details

Since daddy had to lie…

 

Still holds true today, doesn’t it?

 

Weaving down the American highway

Through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk

Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda

Now we're driving dazed and drunk

Been down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay

Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian way

He said, "It's hard to stop this binging once you get a taste

But the road to empire is a bloody stupid waste"

Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools

But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools

And it's a long road out of Eden…

 

The road to Empire is indeed a bloody goddamn waste. And always has been. 

 

Since 1945, the United States military has been involved in five major conflicts and dozens of small ones, and in none of the result been anything that looks like a “victory.” Sure, we blew shit up and killed people. But none of these places we fought seem better off afterward, and often they are worse. As Tacitus put it, “They make a wasteland and call it peace.” It’s not just us, of course - Russia is currently doing the same thing, and both the US and the USSR spent decades fucking up other countries in a mutual dick-measuring contest. Those tired old men, acting as armchair warriors and playing with the lives of the youth. 

 

As I move through any city in the United States, I see sidewalks and overpasses and greenbelts filled with an increasing number of unhoused persons, a shockingly high percentage of which are veterans suffering from mental illness, substance addiction, and poverty. It is no secret that our nation has failed its veterans in so many ways. Solving a “wicked problem” like this is a huge challenge, with no simple, easy, or obvious solutions - and no magic bullets. 

 

But something to consider: the simplest, easiest, and most obvious solution to the problem of post-war trauma is to stop causing the trauma. Cleaning up after the damage is always going to be more difficult and less effective than preventing the damage in the first place. 

 

And the way to minimize the damage is to stop sending soldiers into morally indefensible combat with no clear military objectives. Stop getting involved in wars that cannot (and honestly should not) be winnable. Physical trauma can increasingly be ameliorated, but psychological trauma - particularly moral trauma - is not fixable. The inevitable toll will the kinds of mental illness and substance addiction - self medication - that we see. 

 

Whatever you believe about the theoretical existence of a “just war” - I believe there are a very limited number of circumstances in which such a war exists, and even then only on one side, never both or all - it is pretty obvious that most wars, including all of those the US has entered since 1945, do not fall into that category. 

 

The veterans of World War Two, whatever other damage they suffered, did not have to come home having been part of a morally indefensible war. Hitler was evil. He needed to be stopped. Arguably, the moral tradeoff was the mother of all Trolley Problems. If a war were ever justified, it was the one to stop Hitler. 

 

And yes, I know that so many of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation were convinced that stopping communism in the third world was a moral good. But they also failed to do their homework and gain an understanding of why communism was so attractive to so many. And that would have required the kind of honest admission of the global catastrophe known as colonialism - a conversation that far too many are willing to even consider having. And so, they choose delusion and denialism about a pivotal - perhaps the pivotal event in their own lifetimes. 

 

We lost Vietnam on the battlefield. We lost it badly. But we really lost Vietnam in 1862 with the Treaty of Saigon. Or was it in 1787 when the French missionaries first decided to interfere in local politics? Or maybe when the Jesuits arrived in the 1600s and started the process of cultural imperialism? And in that case, perhaps we should say we lost the war in the 1400s, when the Catholic Church blessed the European conquest, enslavement, and colonization of indigenous peoples around the world in the name of “Christ and Civilization.” 

 

The road to Empire indeed. 

 

Like another book about another senseless war, All Quiet on the Western Front, this book is a powerful use of storytelling to show warfare in all its ugliness and evil - and even more so, in its stupidity and pointlessness. Perhaps the authors of the Vietnam War never read that book. Or maybe, like my parents’ generation, read it but drew the wrong lesson. 

 

The thing is, reality doesn’t give a damn about your ideology. It doesn’t give a damn about your politics. It doesn’t give a damn about your religion. We can see what happens when reality is ignored, and a war fought on the basis of ideology, rather than reality. Vietnam is Exhibit A for that principle. It is a war that was always going to be lost, was in fact lost, damaged those who fought it, and then poisoned decades of political discourse here in the US. 

 

O’Brien spreads the blame for this very broadly, as he thinks senseless war is a social problem, not a mistake by a few people. Just like the mass cowardice of people like him, who knew the war was wrong, but felt powerless to go against the flow wasn’t so much an individual sin on his part, but a symptom of a greater social disease in American society. Whether we ever learn from this mistake and show some willingness to treat the disease, rather than remain in ideological denial remains to be seen. 

 

The Things They Carried is not an easy book to read or listen to. But it is a powerful one. 

 

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I checked this one out after a friend recommended it. I’m sure I have read one of these essays before, although probably online after the fact, given that these were all originally published in the late 1980s or 1990s, mostly in The New Yorker. (The title essay first appeared in Outside, and a single essay each appeared in Esquire and Women Outside.) 

There are two different lengths of essay in the book. About half are long form journalism, in the literary non-fiction category. The other half are grouped into a single chapter, entitled “Short People,” and are one or two page sketches of people. In fact, one might say this entire book is about people, except for one chapter that is about a dog. 

 

I found Orlean’s writing to pleasant and informative. She is in these stories just a little, describing the interview process, which is usually a longer-term thing, over the course of a few days or even longer, following her subjects around, traveling with them, and so on. I thought it was a good balance: Orlean never feels intrusive, but rather every instance where she describes what she is doing to enhance the portrait of those she is writing about. She does her best to enter into their worlds. 

 

The subjects are really all over the place. There is the random 10 year old boy. An obscure and not very good rock band (The Shaggs) with a cult following. A Hip Hop personality. A real estate agent selling high end apartment rentals in NYC. A Southern Gospel vocal group. An aging Hollywood agent. A high school basketball star. A show dog. The king of the Ashanti people in the US. (Fascinating story - one of the best in the book - and also one that I am pretty sure I read before somewhere.) Tiffany. Three Bulgarian sisters who were tennis stars in the 1980s. A clown. Female surfing culture in Hawaii - another favorite. And more. I haven’t even mentioned all the short ones. And, the title essay, about a female bullfighter. 

 

It would be impossible and pointless to summarize beyond this. What ties all this together is Orlean’s compelling writing and her genuine interest in the lives she profiles. 

 

There are, of course, good quotes. 

 

In the section on Freddy, the hip hop personality, Orlean nails the cultural aspect that would eventually sweep much of pop culture in the United States. 

 

His philosophy of career advancement is not a matter of being a successful hanger-on. It’s a philosophy that appreciates mastery and technical proficiency but prises the knack for courting accomplished, proficient people, the knack for noticing which direction popular culture is heading, the knack for grafting one art form or pop form onto another, the knack for attracting a lot of attention to whatever you do, and the knack for understanding that attracting attention is, ultimately, the real art for of this era.

 

There is also fascinating incident recounted in the essay on the Southern Gospel singers. While the genre includes both black and white performers - and the roots are similarly interracial - black southern tradition combined with English revival hymns via the Methodist church - Orlean profiles one of the black groups on tour. 

 

Anyway, the group recounts the time they blew a tire and ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. This farmer came out and assisted them, including putting a tire he had sitting in his barn on the bus. And then showed them his KKK membership card and told them to get going. 

 

Also in this essay is a collection of slang that Orlean heard at the concerts. My favorite was the description of dead people as “having their mail delivered to them by groundhogs.” 

 

One of the shorts is about “Moon Trip.” Which is, well, I’ll let Orlean describe things. 

 

At the very moment the New York street festival season was beginning to seem like one gigantic Pennsylvania funnel cake, we ran across the Big Lee Moon Trip. The Moon Trip is not for sale. It is not a Simpsons T-shirt, a slap bracelet, a neon green ripstop-nylon hip pouch, a souvlaki sandwich, a Dianetics handbook, a six-pack of tube socks, a neon-pink terry-cloth-covered hairband, a pair of fake gold Cleopatra hoop earrings, or fudge. The Moon Trip is, therefore, a street festival anomaly. 

 

Oh my, if that didn’t dump me back to my Junior High years really fast. I guess I got distracted….here is the description:

 

The Moon Trip is an amusement ride, forty-five years old and currently bright red with yellow racing stripes. It is shaped like a huge beach bucket, is lined with seats (capacity eighteen), and is suspended from a ten-foot-high steel sawhorse mounted on a red Chevy one-ton pickup. Its only motion is back and forth, like that of an oversized porch swing. It is not, technically speaking, scary. 

 

Another of the shorts is about Jaleel White, aka Steve Urkel. That’s another one that took me back to Junior High. Remember when everyone was “MC” this or “MC” that? Thank Hammer Time. Well, my brother got the nickname “MC Urkel.” Because he looked like white Urkel, and could do the nerd look perfectly. (Ironically, I am far nerdier, and he is the athletic one in the family. Okay, so we are both nerdy.) (Additional note: MC Hammer was okay for good Christian kids to listen too - as long as it was “Pray.” It was…an era.) 

 

I also found the one on designer Judith Leiber to be pretty funny. Not because I care anything about designer clothing. But because of this exchange. 

 

[A]nother husband and wife come up to the counter. The wife is going crazy for the handbags, and the husband is doing the death grip on his wallet when he notices Mrs. Leiber. So he says to her, “Are you Mrs. Leiber? I’ve long been an admirer of yours.”

Mrs. Leiber says to him, “Oh, really?”
The husband says, “Actually, my wife more than me.”

Mrs. Leiber says, “That’s good. You shouldn’t be carrying handbags. You’re not the type.” 

 

Another hilarious bit was in the short on Steven Jenkins, who runs the Fairway produce market in NYC. He does these hand-lettered signs for stuff, and they tend to be humorous or quirky or both. For example:

 

Raw Sex

Fresh Figs

Same Thing. 69 Cents

 

Going back to “A Gentle Reign,” about the king of the Ashanti - the “king” is actually elected for a two year period, and serves kind of like an MC combined with a judge - there is a fascinating bit that I didn’t notice when I read it years ago, but stood out now because of current circumstances.

 

The Ashanti language has no pronoun genders, unlike English, where everything human is gendered, or Spanish, where most words are gendered. This meant that Ashanti ex-pats tended to call everyone “he” when speaking English. 

 

This is a great reminder that our very ways of thinking are limited by our language, something more than a few philosophers have pointed out. Because of the English language’s gender binary and gendered human pronouns, we end up thinking in a gender binary. For many, using “they” or other gender neutral pronouns - even though “they” as gender-neutral singular goes back hundreds of years - meets as much resistance from habits of language as it does from bigotry. One has to wonder if our language lacked gender, if there would have been nearly the hullabaloo over pronouns. 

 

There is also a scene in this essay about the politics of the position of king. Right before Nana is elected, there is a succession crisis, with a previous occupant insisting on it being a lifetime position. This caused a split in the community. It is to Nana’s credit that he is able to not only gain the near-unanimous support of the community, he even managed to bring the previous king and his supporters back into the fold. When Orlean asks if he has any political ambitions beyond this, he says he isn’t a politician. When she asks “Isn’t this politics?” he responds that he doesn’t think it is - it is just what a king does. 

 

This is an interesting response, and I think it is why Nana is such a beloved king. Of course this is politics. But not the nasty, partisan, scorched earth sort that the Right Wing is currently waging. Rather, it is the common good sort - finding a place for everyone in the community, judging fairly, finding common ground. And Nana is really good at it. 

 

Another essay, “Short Cuts,” is about another sort of admirable character. In this case, Robert Stuart, a hairdresser who once wanted to be a social worker - and kind of is in his own way. He also is against violence (including in movies) and in favor of true emotional intimacy. At one point, he notes that he likes group therapy best of all the kinds he has had, and that he notices that women are more able to open up than men. Furthermore, he considers his own sentimental nature and enthusiasm for conversation to be fundamental feminine traits. 

 

Mind you, he is also heterosexual, which means definitely an unusual sort for American society, which, despite its progress during my lifetime, is still often brutal on men who show their feelings. Like Robert, I think our world would be a better place if men were more emotionally healthy, if they were able to freely express emotions other than anger without being viewed as “effeminate.” And also if caring for others were considered more manly than seeking to punish those different from you. 

 

On a related and contrasting note is Orlean’s observation about bullfighting. She enjoyed certain aspects of it - the idea of an ancient tradition, the uniforms, and the drama of it - before the killing starts. But, like myself, I have a problem with the entire principle. 

 

I loved the ancientness and majesty and excitement of it, the way bullfighting could be at once precious and refined and yet absolutely primal and raw. But beyond that I was lost and nauseous and knew I didn’t understand how so many people, a whole nation of people, weren’t shaken by the gore and the idea of watching a ballet that always, absolutely, unfailingly ends with a gradual and deliberate death. I didn’t understand it then, and I doubt I ever will. 

 

This is a picture at least, of what is in this book. Orlean’s writing is what makes these disparate essays work. At its core, it is about seeking understanding of other lives, of finding commonality amid the diversity of humanity, and about seeing all of us as interesting and worthy of attention. 

 

***

 

Another book that I should plug here is Noodling for Flatheads by Burkhard Bilger, another empathetic look at a slice of American culture. Believe me, it is a great read.