Category Archives: Politics

Joe Biden: Beer-Swilling Working-Class Yokel or Wordy Egghead?

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You know, humor writers are fond of portraying Joe Biden as a beer-swilling bumpkin.

In fact, he’s a tea-totaler, and the guy quotes Keats in speeches. The worst offenders are The Onion and The Daily Show.

Could the characterization derive from the fact that he went to a public university as an undergrad, and a non-Ivy (the private Syracuse University) for law school?

Could there be, oh, an element of, I don’t know, CLASSISM to this characterization of Joe, particularly from The Onion, which is famously staffed by Ivy League types?

Nah…classism in the U.S.? What are the chances?

Nonetheless, there’s always good comedy to be found in copper wire theft. And yeah, I went to public school, too, so draw your own conclusions…

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War by W. Craig Reed

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Red November

Craig Reed’s Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War is a hell of a book. Both the author and his father served as U.S. submariners, and he knows his stuff on the U.S. side. But the reason it’s so damned fascinating is the extensive coverage of Soviet operations during the Cold War, based on only recently declassified sources.

The politics is a bit thin, but that doesn’t hurt the book; it’s a periscope view of the field. It’s the science that is so fascinating to me — the many troubles involved in locating an enemy sub, for instance, and the way that technology has developed to make it possible. I found it utterly fascinating.

One thing I would have liked was more coverage of the nuclear technology involved in subs. That wasn’t really the author’s focus, but I would have liked to consider it more in the context of the other submarine technology as it developed throughout the Cold War.

Great book. I enjoyed it a lot.

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan

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Monsoon

I finally read Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon after quite a while wanting to and never getting around it. I’m glad I did, but it wasn’t quite the work of genius that I thought it would be.

As far as I can tell, Kaplan is a fairly balanced moderate, politically speaking, when it comes to world affairs. More importantly, Kaplan seems to have traveled extensively around the area and many of his country portraits are utterly fascinating.

However, the book’s weakness is that format…it sort of starts with an argument, then jumps from country to country. I love that, but it inhibits the book’s coherency. In a sense, Kaplan fails to make a coherent series of arguments because there are so many competing influences to paint portraits of.

That said, it does make one convincing argument: American single-superpower global hegemony is eroding in favor of a more diffuse distribution of power.

I would add the observation, which Kaplan doesn’t make, that the ascendant nations of the Indian Ocean region have very different concerns and challenges than the U.S., but in many ways their expectations are framed by the U.S.’s largely unsustainable model of consumer behavior. Ooops. There’s no way to distribute resources with current technology and not engender disaster within the next fifty years. Without some revolution in sustainable energy, and a second revolution in the use of water, life on Earth is going to get… interesting.

That’s not Kaplan’s focus, however. His focus is geopolitics, and to a lesser extent culture. In that context, it’s an invigorating read.

Its central arguments are in pretty much the same territory as The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria. However, Zakaria was born in India, and strongly focuses on India in that book. This one, while professing a smaller focus, actually covers more ground.

Kaplan’s perspective doesn’t differ that much from Zakaria’s, but Kaplan goes deeper into the culture of the countries of the region other than India.

One of the most important points I get from all my reading on the region is that U.S. policy toward India during the Cold War was problematic. I also consider it tragically wrong-headed. Yeah, that could be said about a lot of places, but in the case of India it’s particularly disappointing.

I could write another 10,000 words on why that is, but I’ll give you the short version. The U.S., with its Cold War view, was pissed off by India’s insistence on remaining non-aligned. Successive U.S. administrations saw the developing flavor of socialism in India to be “pink.” The U.S. spent the next fifty years punishing India politically in various contexts.

It should also be added that Indian immigration to the U.S. was considerably less than it was from other countries, population-for-population.

However, India was NEVER in the Soviet orbit, so the Sino-U.S. Chinese relationship becomes that much more bizarre when compared to U.S.-Indian relations. Anyway…it’s all changing radically, and in fascinating ways. A book worth reading.

The Taste of Laphroaig in the Morning

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Laphroaig

Do you drink Scotch? Religiously? Then you probably know Laphroaig, which produces the most “challenging” product of all widely-distributed distilleries.

Weirdly, I was just thinking about Laphroaig this morning, when I hit Facebook and it is the first thing that I see in my Facebook feed after being away from FB for days. That’s because Night Shade Books editor Ross E. Lockhart, who performed the development edit on my 2011 novel The Panama Laugh (and did a hell of a job) digs Laphroaig, apparently, and marked it as a “LIKE.”

And that was the very first thing I saw on FB after thinking of Laphroaig while I was walking the dog. I mean, like, did anyone else just get chills or something? I mean, like, I think a butterfly just flapped its wings over Jung’s grave, right? I think Sting just had a Tantric smugness attack, right? Am I right?

It’s pretty unusual for me to think about Laphroaig, especially before breakfast. I don’t think about Laphroaig more than once every couple of years, or whenever I pass a burned-down seaweed processing plant.

Laphroaig drinkers may not want to continue, as it may inhibit the apparently religious experience they have not so much when they drink Laphroaig, but when they talk about it. They can go off and, I don’t know, drink Laphroaig or something.

But for those of you who don’t know, Laphroaig is a Scottish distillery that produces some exceedingly distinctive single-malt Scotches. Laphroaig tates like no other whisky in the world. Most dedicated Scotch drinkers speak of it as if it were Communion wine. I can’t stand the stuff.

Y’see, while I love many things about the sea, for the most part I am not a fan of the edibles that come from it. Though I’m fond of blowing the top off my head with the occasional meal of wasabi-drenched sushi, I’ve never liked the salty taste that permeates seaweed.

Seaweed in Scotch, you say? Why, yes, yes. Seaweed. A significant number of Islay malts have the taste of of seaweed to them that those who love it simply swear by.

Y’see, Scotches have a smoky flavor. It’s more pronounced in Scotch than in whiskey from other regions, though in my experience all good whiskey has some smoke to it, whether subtle or otherwise. That’s (mostly) because the process of making Scotch involves a lot of burning peat, which is essentially decomposed vegetable matter. It gives Scotch whiskys many of their distinctive characteristics.

I would argue (as would others) that the burning of peat makes Scotch more connected to the land where it’s made than any other distilled liquor. (Hey, maybe it makes getting hammered kind of like some earth-based ritual, right? At least, if you can afford it…) The importance of peat (along with the large number of distilleries and the hundreds of years of tradition preserved in making Scotch) is one of the things that make Scotch whisky so different than other whiskies.

Owing to different processes, some Scotch whiskys are much smokier than others. Some of this comes from the aging process, where whiskies take on characteristics of the wood in their aging barrels. (Some whiskies are aged in charred oak barrels, for instance — this gives them a much smokier flavor.) But for very smoky Scotch whiskys, the peat used is paramount.

Scotch is thought of by region, with distinctive characteristics peculiar to each region (along with an enormous amount of variation). The Islay region of Scotland is where Laphroaig is made (as are many other Scotches). I haven’t really kept up with my Scotch drinking in recent years, and I was never a seriously dedicated Scotch drinker. But as I recall, to my palate the Islay region may actually have the greatest variation among distilleries.

Islays tend to be very idiosyncratic whiskeys. I find that Scotch drinkers with a taste of adventure — and a real appreciation for evocatively unusual flavors — often turn out to be huge fans of the Islay region.

The Islay region gets its name from the fact that it’s a maritime area — Islay = Islands. That’s why Islay malts have a lot of sea-borne vegetable matter in the peat. That’s right, seaweed.

As Scotch whiskys go, Laphroaig falls on the “very smoky” end of the spectrum.

I do tend to like somewhat smoky Scotches, in general.

But to me, drinking Laphroaig is like smoking a dirt cigar laced with shredded cod.

I think it’s safe to say that if you are a casual cocktail-drinker — that is, if you like some drinks because “you can’t even taste the alcohol!” then you probably do NOT want to try Laphroaig.

Scotch fiends will tell you that you do want to try Laphroaig.

They’ll get this far-away look on their face, like they’re talking about their first love, or the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, or reciting the Declaration of Independence.

“You should try Laphroaig,” they’ll say rapturously, breathlessly. They may even have tears in their eyes. “It’s wonderful. It’s like…tasting the soul of the universe. It’s like reading the mind of God. You know, one time I went to this Scotch bar downtown and I drank Laphroaig, for 12 hours. That taste, that smoky whisky taste. I love the taste of Laphroaig. Tastes like…

“…VICTORY.”

When a Scotch drinker tries to get you to try Laphroaig, don’t listen to them. Just throw your appletini in their face.

Unless they’re buying, of course.

Then, go ahead and guzzle as much as you can. Good whisky is EXPENSIVE.

 

 

 

 

NOTE: In the question of whether to use “whiskey/whiskies” or “whisky/whiskys,” I have gone back and forth. According to the Associated Press Style Manual, “whisky” is usually correct only when talking about Scotch whisky, in which case the plural is “whiskys.”

Some sources now say that “Scotch inspired beverages” can be referred to as whisky.

As a whisky/whiskey drinker, I think that’s psycho. What the hell is a “Scotch-inspired beverage?” It’s either Scotch or it’s whiskey, and if it’s Scotch it’s also whiskey, but Scotch is Scotch. All whiskies are “inspired” by Scotch to some degree. Bourbon is inspired by Scotch, for fuck’s sake — a few hundred years on, but that’s not the point.

I’ve probably mixed it up above, because that’s the way it goes. I’m not a copyeditor anymore, so I play it fast and loose with the foodie terms, homie. That’s how I role.

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

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Monsoon

I’m finally reading Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.

So far, I like it. It seems pretty balanced and Kaplan seems to have traveled extensively around the area. Pretty much the same territory as The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria (who was born in India). Their perspectives don’t differ that much, but Kaplan goes deeper into the region. That’s understandable since Zakaria was covering, supposedly, the whole world.

One of the most important points I get from all my reading on the region is that U.S. policy toward India during the Cold War was utterly inexplicable. Or maybe explicable…just tragically wrong-headed. Yeah, that could be said about a lot of places, but in the case of India it’s particularly weird.

Representative Joe Walsh vs. Lieutenant Colonel Tammy Duckworth

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Tammy Duckworth

I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican (or whether you’re lucky enough to still have your legs), but Congressman Joe Walsh’s insistence on REPEATEDLY bringing up his opponent Tammy Duckworth’s military career so he can berate her for “Talking about her service too much” is completely inappropriate.

She’s not the one talking about it, Joe. If that’s the way he feels he needs to win an election, and voters are still willing to vote for him, that’s pretty pathetic.

Duckworth, in case you don’t know, is a Bangkok-born US National Guard helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq.

I do not mean to suggest that is, in and of itself a good enough reason to vote for her.

But it’s a good enough reason to WATCH YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, Representative Walsh.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael Oren

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Six Days of War

Six Days of War at GoodReads.com — at Amazon.com – at Audible.com.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren

Overall, I found this to be a well-done book. The author, Michael B. Oren, PhD, is an American-born Jew, served in the IDF as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War, and is the current Israeli ambassador to the United States. He’s had his speeches disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters on numerous occasions. Other readers may assume that means a de facto pro-Israeli bias, and it’s impossible to ignore the fact that objectivity would be a tall order for someone in Oren’s role and with Oren’s background. But good historical writing is good historical writing, and I honestly believe that with the honest study of history, any single writer’s bias, evident or covert, should ultimately be irrelevant, because no savvy historian, amateur or otherwise, should ever believe a goddamn thing he or she reads. I’ve always found complete distrust of everyone to be the best policy; it allows utter credulousness. This is a privilege that I enjoy as someone who does not have to make policy. Every time I read modern history, I am damned glad I never plan to run for office.

While I’m on the topic of bias: In my experience, American and British books on the region tend to show a pro-Israeli bias…strangely, sometimes more than Israeli books do. Israeli writers are often more willing to acknowledge the moral ambiguity in the choices made by Israeli leaders. So it shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose, that I found this book to be acceptably balanced, or that I found the view of Nasser, King Hussein and the other Arab leaders to be remarkably nuanced. To my reading at least, it doesn’t show an overt tendency to demonize them or to take their actions out of context. The coverage of the internal Israeli politics is more extensive than the equivalent events on the Egyptian side — but it’s all so damned interesting that it doesn’t bother me one bit. I would like to read a similar history from an Arab writer, for the sake of balance. But Israeli politics of this era is so unbelievably fascinating to me that every page of this book was like crack to me.

In any event, there is no way in HELL I would recommend this as an introductory text to the conflict. I have done a fair amount of reading on the Middle East and I was at sea much of the time. I needed to check Wikipedia, literally, about 100 times, trying to bone up on the period in question. And this is FAR from the first book I’ve read on modern Middle Eastern history.

I ended up loving the book. It is basically a very sharp, very good popular history, not an academic work per se. I would recommend it to someone with a good strong background in the Cold War politics of the era, and of the players in the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and even Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

When it comes to the Israeli pantheon of the time, I’m not sure if I’m just more familiar with those politicians and military leaders, or if the book does a better job of giving the basic background. Certainly, Oren’s coverage of the US diplomatic and political background is cursory, so I wouldn’t have understood the book very well if I didn’t already know a certain amount about the Johnson administration.

Short version: Great book, but not for beginners. I enjoyed it, but I wish I had read this AFTER having read a book about the events immediately preceding the 1967 war.

Indifferent Cats in Feminist Paul Ryan Gosling Porn

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Feminist Ryan Gosling

Over on Twitter, I made a crack about my new business idea, “Indifferent Cats in Erotic Stories,” which would be a (hopefully more lucrative) ripoff of the hilarious Tumblog Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn. My fellow erotica writers are thus far unimpressed.

In “Indifferent Cats in Erotic Stories,” cat owners would pay authors like me to have their cats mentioned as disinterested observers n written porn. No, they wouldn’t participate. It’s not like I’m sick or something.

This strikes me as the perfect gift for your cat’s birthday or other celebratory occasion. Yes, the cat is indifferent, but how often do you buy them a mousey friend and find they could give a shit about it? This way, you already know they’ll be indifferent.

Personally, I think this could be as big a hit as my other business idea, Feminist Ryan Philippe, which no one seems to undrstand could blow Feminist Ryan Gosling out of the water. Of course, the meme’s bastard stepmonster, Paul Ryan Gosling, has fucked everything up for entrepreneurs like me…as usual. Thanks, Paul Ryan.

Mitt Romney Attacks American Embassy in Libya

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My condolences to the families of the Americans killed in Libya, and my respect and gratitude to the American personnel still in danger there. R.I.P. Chris Stevens, as brave and important an American as any US soldier, sailor, airman or Marine killed in combat. All of them are mourned and honored here.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney and the Americans now de facto besieged in Libya are basically in what amounts to a Tweetwar. It seems he likes to tell them how to do their job, and in so doing he managed to show just much how he despises any statement in support of religious freedom and plurality.

If the account of Huffington Post is too “biased” for you, check out CBS News. There’s no angle from whcih this can be viewed that doesn’t leave Romney looking like an incompetent buffoon who hates America…but I’m pretty sure the Fox News crew are going to try to spin him as a brave warrior. Bullshit.

If you want to say word one about the political and religious situation in the Arab world, learn at least the very basics. And if you want to fuck with the Diplomatic Corps because you think you have the faintest idea what they’re going through, at least read the Cliff’s Notes.

Unfortunately, Romney is too lazy to learn anything about how to govern. He’d rather sit around and wait for the Presidency that’s owed him, as evidenced by his lazy refusal to develop an independent foreign policy. Instead, he throws shitbombs like this and pretends that just by being “conservative,” he gets to assume the mantle of leadership.

Romney’s attempt to mine this situation for political gain, while making obvious his hatred of religious freedom and his unwillingness to even make the slightest attempt to understand the situation in the Arab world, shows that this silver-spoon fool doesn’t have the faintest idea what America stands for. This man is deplorable.

A Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa

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A Rainbow in the Night: The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa by Dominique Lapierre is, ultimately, a good book about a great story. It is only “good,” in and of itself, rather than “great,” because while parts of it are amazing, and all of it tells an amazing story, too much of it tells an amazing story in overwrought, hand-wringing fashion….like far too much writing about South Africa.

The main problem with it is that it begins as a fairly objective, fairly reasonable and very well-told history of South African history pre-World War II (which is back when the racism that would become Apartheid was not yet formalized).

That’s good — it’s going strong. The bad news is that it turns about halfway through into a hagiography of the poor. It’s also a hagiography of Mandela, which I feel like I’ve heard a thousand times. The real messy story feels like it’s avoided in favor of pouring out overwrought prose about how hard it was to be black during the Apartheid era. I’m already fairly clear that it blew pretty seriously. That’s why I’m reading a book on South Africa in the first place. Lapierre hits too hard on the same old messages of martyrdom, which makes this book not an effective history.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t think “objective” makes a lot of sense when it comes to Apartheid, racism or Afrikaans-dominated South Africa. But I also don’t need to be beaten to death with overheated, overwrought, hand-wringing prose about the troubles of the poor. I read a LOT of books on Africa, and I see the kind of heartfelt, weepy prose engaged in here to be borderline condescending. It’s not intended that way, sure. But certainly many African writers express a deep-distaste for the hand-wringing of the West vis-a-vis Africa, and this book seems to be guilty of that. Lapierre is sort of the chief of it, having written a number of very good but very overwrought pieces of tragedy tourism (Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, for instance, and his magnum opus City of Joy). With Joy, he certainly did the right thing…spending part of the proceeds of the book to set up a foundation to help the poor of Calcutta — whom the book is about. I don’t fault his impulses, only his execution, in City of Joy as well as Rainbow in the Night. It’s not that he’s done anything wrong as that the way he does it, to some extent, dehumanizes rather than humanizes the poor of the developing world — at least to Lapierre’s Western audience.

I understand that Lapierre (and presumably his translator…not sure if this was written in English or French) are trying to communicate the agonies of being poor and black in South Africa — which are EXTREME today and were vastly more so during the Apartheid era. But I found the overdone prose in certain sections to be somewhat insulting in its obviousness.

That said, however, Lapierre’s heart is in the right place, and it’s the most accessible (and actually LEAST overwrought) thing I’ve read to-date on South Africa. The struggle the black South Africans, Mandela included, went through is amazing. I do wish there had been less hagiography and more, for instance, about the Zulu nationalist movement to the North, which opposed the African National Congress, and the criminal elements that flourished in the slums in the context of rampant soul-crushing poverty; it is in THOSE elements, it seems to me, that South Africa’s contemporary troubles have their origin.

We can attack the white Afrikaaner fascist racist murderers all we want. But as Michael Moorcock said, “All tyrants are pretty much the same, but there are many kinds of victims.” By spending the second half of this book making the racist demons as demonic as possible and the black South Africans saintly, I feel Lapierre has missed the real story in the ongoing triumph and tragedy of the struggle in post-colonial Africa overall, not just in South Africa. The result is an immensely readable book but one that’s a bit hard to take seriously as history, insofar as it concerns the Apartheid period itself (after World War II).

Speaking of which, why is this subtitled “The Tumultuous Birth of South Africa?” The author’s intention is to establish that the period from the landing of the first Dutch settlers on the Cape to the establishment of pluralist democracy is *ALL* the birth of South Africa…but out of context, it’s a little bewildering of a subtitle. It seems like it misleads the potential reader a bit.

The book still gets an honored place on my bookshelf, principally because I think it’s SO accessible that I hope it’ll be read by people who wouldn’t tackle a denser book or a more nuanced history about South Africa. The struggles the black South Africans and the Apartheid-opposing whites, Indians, those of mixed race etc. went through should be known to every person of conscience everywhere in the world.

Therefore, my nitpicks aside, if a zillion people read this book the world will be a much better place, and for that alone it gets some extra credit.

When all is said and done, it is an inspiring book and well worth reading.