Michael W Jackson – Page 31 – Political theory and practice

George Will, Men at Work (1989).

GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.91 by 5604 baseball fans.

Genre: Baseball.

Verdict: Sobering, entertaining, insightful.

Will sets out to demystify major league baseball by revealing its inner WORKings. Mission accomplished.

Where the uninitiated sees luck, talent, and inspiration, Will finds calculation, attitude, and preparation. Some of the latter is physical, to be sure, but much of it is mental. It is all W O R K.

Will selected four individuals as case studies, a manager, a pitcher, a batter, and an infielder. Along the way he salts the mine with anecdotes from other times, places, and players, making a rich dish.

Manager Tony La Russa’s abiding aim in the 1980s to advance the runner seems curiously old fashioned read in 2021 when that simple ambition seems from a lost world. Drag bunts, fielder’s choice grounders behind the runner, run and hit, switch hitting, delayed double steals, disguised cut-off throws, using the infield fly rule, all these now belong in a museum as millionaire hitters below the Mendoza Line swing from the heels as if an opposite field single is beneath the dignity of their signing bonus. There speaks the curmudgeon who will be heard from again below.

At times it seemed to this reader that there is a paralysing overkill in the analysis of the work; examine in minute detail any instance and it becomes unique. Whose on first? Free will or determinism?

Listen to the advice of that general manager, Francesco Giucciardini (1483-1540), who wrote that ‘it is fallacious to judge by example, because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest divergence in the angle of conclusion,’ History of Italy, p. 110. Just before dismissing Frank Gee as a pen pusher remember he commanded combat armies in the field long before the Dead Ball Era.

Spurious correlations abound: ceteris paribus, this batter swings at a slider outside on Tuesdays, but not Thursdays. Well that is what the data shows. Today is Tuesday, here comes a slider. Like life, baseball comes from a partly written script. There is determinism entwined with free will as vine to fence. That fact seems obvious to everyone but a sociology PhD.

I half expected it to be in the stars, though astrology has not yet been tapped by the baseballmetricians (aka sabermetricians). It will be one day.

The endless war of batters against pitchers is the heart of the book. Each tries to unsettle the other, using a very great deal of intelligence coupled with honed abilities. Who will blink first? To a batter the opposing pitching staff is a creature with ten arms coming him. The more so in the age of pitcher surfing when they come and go five, six, seven times in a game, if not an inning.

Who knew? John Sain (of Spahn and rain fame) bridged history, throwing the last major league pitch to George ‘Babe’ Ruth and the first to Jack Robinson, two of the immortals.

By the way, the eternal pitchers’ manual is the Book of Job: man is born to troubles. Nowhere is that more true than 60 feet and 6 inches from the plate on a ten-inch high mound. Lamentations for the passing of the fifteen-inch mound in the annus horribilis of 1969.

Speaking of wars of words, I enjoyed being reminded of Steve Carlton’s silent trances before going to the mound to show the world how to throw a slider, and his continued silence afterward. In a twenty plus year career he spoke exactly once at a post game press conference. As a result he became a favourite whipping boy of the ladies and gentlemen of the media for failing to give them copy. (Yes, I know SC went off the deep end.)

To the pitcher the batters are many and varied, and just keep coming, left and right-handed, short and tall, inside hitters and reachers in their infinite variety. Not even the strike zone is a constant (though I relish the always-on-top image of the strike zone now part of television broadcasts which may have brought some visibility and stability to this illusive Bermuda rectangle).

Here is a complaint. Buckle up! The chapters on hitting and pitching are very repetitive, right down to the anecdotes. I started to wonder if it had been proof read or if I was dreaming. Neither is a good sign.

Will comprehensively debunks the natural athlete assertion for the disguised racism it is. To take one example, Willie Mays was a close observer of pitchers who never forgot a move, and with experience got so he could anticipate moves both at bat and on base. As a fielder he was likewise a Cartesian who broke down the outfield into its smallest parts and mastered each of them by turns. He made it all look easy because he worked so hard at it. In the same way it was always said that magician with the bat Tony Gwynn was a natural. Really? Then why did he take five-hours of batting practice on playing days? Ten hours on off-days. By these unnatural practices he became a natural.

Here is a test for the baseball fan that will be inscrutable to the benighted. What these numbers represent? (Note the publication date of the book.)

511

.406

1.12

1,406

(I knew them all but the last, sorry Ricky.) No spoiler, figure them out or go home.

In baseball as in life numerical reduction has grown stronger. Like economic rationalism, McKinsey management, and Pokemon, reduction is a fad and will fade after doing a lot of damage in the hands of those who do not understand it, but cargo-cult it. Originally these were good ideas, but they have been destroyed by acolytes who did not know when to quit. Think of customer feedback. Good idea. Current practice has the effect of destroying it. NO! I do not want to give feedback on the experience of purchasing a bag of kitty litter! Communicating with customers is a good idea, but a dozen emails and text messages from Australia Post about a routine delivery is overkill!

Statistics start as tools and soon become masters. Although the pedant must say that baseball has many numbers and few statistics, but most people, including Friend George, call numbers statistics just to confuse the children. A number is, well, just a number, say 6. A statistic is number subjected to some arithmetic manipulation, divided, multiplied, kissed on both cheeks, or something, like the ERA. That is the Earned Run Average, not the Equal Rights Amendment, Mortimer. (Yes, he’s back.) In the list above there were two statistics while the rest were numbers. I could go on about this but won’t in the interest of world peace.

Yet there still remains the fundamental prejudice for the long ball over winning games. The case in point that Will selects is Nebraska’s own Richie Ashburn whose achievements by any metric were remarkable without hitting home runs. In one of his best seasons he hit but one while dominating most games in which he played with fielding, throwing, running, and batting singles. And yet he is unheard of apart from diehard fans like moi. Then there is Bill Mazeroski who played second like no one before or since (even leaving aside 13 October 1960, a fine birthday-eve present for me). ‘Bill who?’ pretty well sums it up. These two were the perfect Tony La Russa players who played for the team and disappeared from memory down the dugout tunnel.

Loved that old chestnut, how do you pitch to a Henry Aaron? Set up your best pitch, throw it, and then run to back-up third. Found touching the encomium to ABG (if you don’t know who ABG was, hang up your spikes).

I return to my curmudgeon complaint above to note that Will agrees that basic baseball skills are sadly lacking in MLB and offers an explanation. Each year’s new crop of players mostly come from college programs. To get a return on the money paid to these recruits the drafting teams force-feed them into the Big Show. No matter how good the college coaching has been over four years with maybe 150 total games, it is paltry in comparison to four years in the minor leagues playing up to 150 games each year, thus 600 in all. Moreover, the college players are only part-time athletes for those years and full-time students (well, that is the legal fiction), whereas the minor leaguers are full-time athletes and so work at baseball three or four times more each week than a college player. Added to that, a multi-millionaire MLB newcomer is reluctant to practice Little League fundamentals, like bunting, throwing to a cut-off, the first base stretch, choking up on the bat, moving on the rubber, and so on. Likewise the management that gave these newcomers millions is reluctant to display their elementary deficiencies in training before the vultures of the media.

One of Will’s cherished pet peeves is the fashions in baseball stadiums, which even the 1980s were becoming entertainment centres and not cathedrals of the 108-stitch orb. That trend, and many others he reviles, has multiplied since the publication of the book. In these stadia the game on the field is one of many distractions competing for the patrons’ attention with restaurants, bars, music, museums, fish tanks, mascots (shudder!), clowns, more music, stand-up comedians in lounges, giant TV screens showing other games or even – gasp! – other sports and so and on. There are even padded chairs enclosed by glass! (Good grief!) Baseball is best appreciated on a hard seat exposed to the elements is the gospel according to Will. The dual use stadia of the 1980s he cannot abide, suited for neither baseball nor football, and used for both, and rock concerts!

Concern with public health and sanitation means I can no longer watch MLB games with their exquisite camera work of players spitting. While Will notes in one clanger of a scene this disgusting habit he does not make a sufficiently BIG DEAL of it, so I will. Yes, the constant spitting is tiresome, unnecessary, and, well, talk about cargo-culting. Is there data to show that spitting improves performance, George?

While less repulsive, but equally idiotic, is the war paint players apply to their faces. It is a fetish with no basis in fact but there are those stick-on dark lines under the eyes. Really, how stupid can you be. ‘I lost the ball in the glare from the lights on the dark skin off my high cheekbones, Coach, honest! This in a night game.’

I had hoped that Will might explain why we insist on calling these men at work boyish names, Johnny, Ricky, and so on. What’s wrong with calling a John a John? And by the way, George why is that Babe Didrikson was the last woman to hit a major league fastball?

Until 2016 George Will patiently explained the merits of the Republican Party to the uninitiated, but he gave up that Sisyphean task as impossible by that year, and said so in a loud voice.

P.S. Inspired by this reading I watched a few game highlights on You Tube. Superb camera work to be sure, and some snappy curveballs and some very nice plays, until …with his team behind by one run late in the game, a .215 hitter swung and missed at a third strike as the catcher dropped the ball. The batter turned slowly to the dugout walked away as the catcher retrieved the ball and lunged to tag him, and in so doing dropped it again. No matter the batter kept walking and the umpire then called him out as off the base path, I suppose. From the other world, I can hear Coach Kramer screaming his lungs out! Run!

P.P. S. That led me to the blooper videos where there are rich pickings from this young season alone, including outfielders who do not know how many outs there are, pitchers who do not cover home after a wild pitch (as two runs score), a third baseman with no idea where third base is, cut-off men who do not go out for the throw, but stand their ground waiting for it to come to them, a relief pitcher who threw a wild pitch on an intentional walk. I have to lie down just thinking about those.

Good with Maps (2016) by Noëlle Janczewsk

Live theatre at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta (May 2021) with Jane Phegan, 55 minutes with no break.

Described as a verbal essay by a woman whose lifelong dream was to see the Amazon River (page 132 on her schoolgirl atlas) and voyage along the great river, as if into the unknown. That dream come true segues into a metaphor for her father’s parallel voyage into the unknown lands of dementia. Sounds grim perhaps but it is punctuated with wit and insights that relieve the doom and gloom of the inevitable.

There is even a reference to Fordlandia and Henry Ford, and one does not hear that everyday, and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Hank and Fitz were not alone in their failed attempts to conquer the Amazon, but there is no reference to the other Amazon that is a contemporary fact of life, and seems alike impervious to time and tide. I have read about Fordlandia and commented on the books linked below for those who must know.

‘Fordlandia, a Novel’ (1997) by Eduardo Sguiglia

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (2009) by Greg Grandin

Something caught my eye and interest when I read about this one-woman play, maybe it was a reference to Fordlandia, and after due diligence I got tickets on-line for a Saturday matinee and on the appointed day off we went by Metro train via Strathfield. We have been largely bunkered and hunkered down for more than a year like everyone else and it was a treat venturing to distant Parramatta, strolling the streets for a light lunch, dining, and crossing the river to the theatre, and then returning home in the fading sunlight. Though rain was in the forecast it missed us.

The stroll was more like dodging around a construction site as the Parramatta tram line works seems to have totally taken over Church Street.

While that production has come and gone, it may be revived again. Take note. The writer’s website is linked below.

http://noelle-janaczewska.com/

Helena Drysdale, Tibet: A Brief History (2012)

GoodReads meta-data is 107 pages, rated 4.33 by three litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: Brisk and informative.

Tibet is a geographical expression of a vast area bounded by mountains, deserts, and rivers. It was never quite consolidated into political boundaries by its god-kings over the millennia. Absent countervailing pressures at the time, five hundreds years ago – give or take a few decades – the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation became a socio-political institution in the person of Dalai Lama, literally the big master, in a theocracy. Think of Iran today, or Vatican City.

A born ruler removes politics from the equation, as in hereditary monarchies. (Sure.) That desire to rise above locality, personality, and regional conflicts partly underlies the institution. Each incumbent Lama identifies, or hints at his successor. Yes, so far, no Madame D Lama.

Curiously, there is often a gap between the death of DL and the location, identification, and confirmation of his successor, and then the successor’s growth to manhood. In one instance it took years to find the successor who was at discovery and confirmation a boy of five or six. He was then whisked away to Lhasa and surrounded by a court of regents. One imagines that regents enjoyed regenting. The selectee is young enough to be moulded by such regents, thus assuring their pensions. The opportunities for goal displacement in this method are many.

Confirmation involves eight criteria and the scouts who locate the successor have to be satisfied that the candidate meets enough of the criteria to be THE ONE. Yeah, right. Enough. This is starting to sound like Thomas Hobbes’s analysis of political power: arbitrary.

The criteria themselves have elasticity. Location is one. When the incumbent Lama said his own last rites, did the weather vanes on the building point South? If so then the successor will be from the South, or found in the South, or maybe not. The other criteria are likewise vague, opaque, and readily challenged to a recount. Indeed there have been conflicting claims, resulting in a Double Dalai Lamas. Then there are the doctrinal conflicts among the Buddhists, which are many. It all starts to sound like Reformation Europe with its religious wars.

Though Tibet is a crossroads, there has never been a high volume of traffic on it, but Kazacks and other Muslims from the west encountered there Mongols from the North and Hans (Chinese, not Germans) from the East, and Indians from the mountainous south. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries when European powers competed for empire they began to intrude into this region. Defeated by the Japanese in 1905, the Russians turned this direction for softer targets. (When a serving officer in the Russian Tsar’s army, Gustav Mannerheim, later of Finland, went on an exploratory mission to these lands. He missed Shangri-La.) This move alarmed the British in India. Meanwhile, in a dying spasm the Chinese empire reached for Tibet about the same time.

Among Tibetans the major conflict has been between the candidates of the Red Hat monasteries and the Yellow Hat monasteries. In effect, this was a doctrinal religious conflict like the period of Two Popes in Europe. It involved the usual shenanigans, war, intrigue, lies, foreign alliances, theft, murder, imposters, forgery, and betrayal. A typical day in Canberra. The Yellow Hats won and the current, aged incumbent is one of their number. The Chinese propped up a Red Hat rival. It seemed a natural for the Red Chinese.

Divided among themselves, Tibetans have often been easy pickings for outsiders, though there is little in Tibet to pick. Rather the object has often been to make it a buffer between rivals, like Russia in the north and Britain (in India) in the south, the Han Chinese in the East and the Muslims in the West, and so on in the kaleidoscope of changing political alliances. Note, India and China have had numerous armed conflicts along their Himalayan border in 1962, 1967, and as recently as 2020.

Only in 1950, hot on the heels of the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 with all those soldiers and guns still mobilised the Beijing government reached to the far west to insure that neither the British nor the Soviets oozed into those wide open spaces. The Soviets were allies but not friends.

Chinese conquest was bad for Tibetans, especially for Buddhist. Then it got even worse with the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards who went to Tibet to destroy. (One wonders where these geriatric Red Guards are now, and what they think of their deeds in retrospect. Pride probably. The assigned reading is Hegel on the French Revolution.) Monasteries, temples, nuns, priests, lamas, elders, books, scrolls, tapestries, prayer flags, statues, and images, everything old (defined as Tibetan) was destroyed. Savonarola came to mind with his bonfires.

Following the Great Helmsman’s demise there was a brief relaxation of the death grip of Beijing but it soon re-clenched its fists. With the subtlety of a tyrant the Chinese regime decided to out-populate Tibetans in Tibet by building roads and railroads and giving incentives to Han Chinese to go West, settle, and populate, displacing the natives. Sound familiar? Ask Crazy Horse.

There is a major irony in the efforts of the People’s Republic of China’s efforts to eradicate Buddhism in Tibet, least it infect China itself with this opiate. Chinese efforts at suppression and oppression drove Tibet Buddhism onto the world stage, and from thence it spread around the world more effectively than would have been the case if the Chinese had simply left it alone in Tibet and played a long game for generational change. Now there are Buddhist here, there, and everywhere. For years there was a large rooming-house redolent of incense and murmuring of oms full of them near us. And these external Buddhists, many of them westerners, sustain and support the Tibetan Buddhists.

In 1950 no one had ever heard of Lhamo Dhondup, that is, the Dalai Lama (14th), and now he is world figure, known everywhere and anywhere. ‘Instead of being wiped out by China, Tibetan Buddhism had spread around the world.’ thanks mainly the Chinese repression, says the author. We all obey the law of unintended consequences.

Transition from theocracy to democracy of a sort.

Moreover, continued Chinese repression has inspired and stimulated expatriate Tibetans to unite, and there is now a global Tibetan community with a parliament-in-exile and an elected prime minister (shown above). Check out the Facebook page for further enlightenment. The incumbent Dalai Lama renounced his secular authority in 2014, declaring that a theocracy was not the way of the future. No doubt this move was partly to head off a Chinese effort to control and manipulate the reincarnation of his successor. That has been tried before.

The Chinese, by the way, have also made it illegal to reincarnate without permission. Remember that!

The author acknowledges the propensity of Tibetans, just like so many others, to murder each other in the name of god. Buddhism is not all chanting ‘oms.’ Indeed this writer is much even-handed than the fiction writer of Water Touching Stone, discussed in an earlier post. I wanted some background while reading that novel and from a few alternatives, selected this short, easy to read book. It is volume seven (7) in a series of such brief histories. On Amazon Kindle it is credited with 107 pages, but on GoodReads is shrank to 91 pages. What’s in a number?

Eliot Pattison, Water Touching Stone (2002)

GoodReads meta-data is 560 pages rated 4.22 by 1,303 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Incomprehensible. (OK with me.)

Contemporary Beijing detective Chopsticks has been exiled to remote Tibet for prying too deeply into corruption in the northern capital. He rather likes the sparse vastness on the roof of the world after the polluted morass of Beijing. By the invisible and mystical communication (is it those singing bowls?) he is summoned somehow by someone to an even more isolated area where orphan children have been murdered. After a while it diverts into Indiana Jones country without either the wit or humour of that adventurer, and becomes the quest for the jade basket. NBA?

The book begins on the quest and makes few concessions to the reader. If you don’t know what a ‘knob’ is, or a ‘boot squad,’ you’ll get no help from the author. The author’s hand is leaden in describing the havoc wrecked on this ancient land and people by the Chinese. Bad Chinese! They have dug wells, paved roads, installed generators! What’s worse is that they sleep on beds! The Buddhist lamas who sleep on the ground know that the earth does like this interference. Reveal! The lamas are greener than thou; they are Super-Duper Greenies!

Because of that, wherever he goes the locals — Tibetans, Kazakhs, Uyghurs — recoil from him – he is Chopsticks after all. China pays little lip service to multiculturalism, and these people are largely non-people to quote the Great Helmsman. The rapine, murder, and disappearances are many, but cloaked in a care-speak mimicked from the McKinsey-speak of the West. Children are enrolled in residential schools, not stolen from their parents. They are taught life-skills, not forbidden to speak their ethnic language. Shepherds become shareholders in a company, not have their sheep confiscated. Nomadic herdsmen are given houses, not denied the right of movement to follow the seasons with their herds. As to their herds, see the preceding example of sheep. It is ageless tyranny cloaked in managementese.

While wandering around for hundreds of pages with no apparent effect, Chopsticks encounters a screenwriter’s collection of oddbods, a couple of Americans who say ‘Howdy’ on cue, a Kazakh warrior, a comely native woman who is part Tibetan, a mad man, a smuggler, a monk in disguise, some secret archeologists, a mystic, some rogue Chinese soldiers, assorted outlaws, a camel with more personality than some of the aforementioned characters, and so on, and on without ever quite getting to the point while collecting this cast from a Fellini movie. Pitted against the characters are the Public Security Forces of the PRC, the PLA of the PRC, and the local contractors with their managementese. Go on, figure that out, because I cannot.

I kept flipping the pages with less and less interest and enthusiasm, but having sunk costs, continued to the (welcome) end. It felt good when I quit. Conclusion: Chinese bad, very bad, and then worse. Tibetans victims. But then so is everyone else.

I chose it for the exotic locale and it has that aplenty. Disappointed that there are no monks chanting. We heard some of that in Darwin a decade ago and I found it quite…. Well, I found time passed without me being aware of it.

Book Collector CLZ

Book Collector has paid for itself many times over by preventing the purchase of multiple copies of the same book. An appealing book or one I thought I should read and so have on the shelf to encourage me to read it was purchased and stacked away for future reading or reference and… a few years later the same book comes to hand and I have the same thought and buy another copy, and then later another. Nothing but that memory lapse could explain why I had three copies of something like Antonio Gramsci’s unreadable The Modern Prince. (Yes, I know, ‘Why have one copy at all?’ No answer to that.)

I became painfully aware of these multiple copies when upon retirement I was preparing to move my professional library of about 5000 titles. As I was thinning the collection, shredding textbooks and other items I saw of no further use, I told Trevor Cook about this labour and he told me about Book Collector.

Wow! I did not know such applications existed and made it a mission to find out more. That was about ten years ago. The timing was opportune as I was moving and re-shelving and so each book had to be handled a couple of times. Hence I acquired the app and got to work.

I found my first use easy and simple. Of course, I had a long backlog amounting to about 2500 titles after I finished shredding books. I purchased a scanner and used that to ease the burden, and it worked fine on books with a bar code. Recommended.

However, my collection dates back to graduate school in the 1960s and many of the books that I retained had neither as ISBN nor a bar code, while others had an ISBN on the obverse of the title page but no bar code and so had to be keyed in. I paced this work to about 50-60 a day (about 400 a week) so that I could do other things and not go crazy and make too many mistakes. In a month most of the work was done, and I am very pleased.

Cataloguing identified what I had and synchronizing the catalogue to my cell phone has saved me several duplicate purchases very quickly, and more since. Three or four such saves more than paid for the software, the scanner, and the time and trouble to learn its use.

Now there is a hitch here. When I brag to visitors that I have catalogued all the books in my library they assume that means a given order on the shelves, and it does not. I have grouped the books by subject matter but not anchored any of them to a sequence, shelf mark, or locale. Maybe I should have but I did not and now it seems a task beyond my needs, abilities, and interests. The books on a subject like ‘Utopia’ occupy a bay with the tallest on the bottom shelf. All the reference books are in another bay. The titles on the history of political thought occupy the top shelves in the bookcases I face from my desk as my favourites. While there is room in the template to enter such shelving information, it has to be done manually and I have not done that.

Adding books by title and author or ISBN works pretty well but it is not perfect. I find books published in Australia are less likely to be retrieved, and recently issued books with ISBNs still sometimes prove illusive, so there is still more manual entry than I would like.

When I am doing this manual entry at times the application has asked me to enter the data a second time on the master data base (the core) in the Cloud and I found that an annoyance. Since I have already entered the data on my system, could it not be uploaded from there rather than keyed in again? But that practice seems now to have stopped.

When I capture a book by the automated search I find sometimes that the author’s first and last names get transposed and have to keep an eye on that. This becomes even more pesky with several authors. Then there is the need to distinguish translators and editors from authors, say of an edition of Plato’s Republic of which I have six or eight. For scholars these distinctions are crucial.

The templates have pages and boxes for everything imaginable and some things unimaginable to me, but in my case most are empty. Those that come with drop down lists are easy to complete, and I have done that, creating a few categories of my own.

In the last five years I have become converted to digital reading on a Kindle for the convenience, accessibility, text searching, and more. Not having a copy of the book to put in the pending tray on my desk means that sometimes I forget to enter them in the catalogue, and I have not yet developed a method to overcome such slips of memory.

I have been confused a few times when changing to a new computer about the catalogue files and I am sure I lost data at least once. The files names and locations are a mystery to me.

Like everyone else I wish, sometimes, that applications were integrated. I use EndNote a lot (and it is a beast and have never been invited to give feedback on it) and means I key in duplicate information on Book Collector and EndNote quite often. That is no doubt good for the soul but it is tedious.

While listing nits, I should say I also find it impossible to distinguish among the many products associated with Book Collector. CLZ Barry left me blank. Such proliferation I suppose meets some need, but not mine.

Having BC has meant I catalogued my library, something I would not have done without it, and that has been invaluable. I have heard fellow book worms say they know where every one of their 5000 books is shelved without the need for such a computer crutch but I don’t believe them.

S. J. Bennett, The Windsor Knot (2012)

GoodReads meta-data is 299 pages rated 3.75 by 1,829 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

Verdict: Chapeaux!

After a small private late evening reception at Windsor Castle, duties done, Her Majesty the Queen (HMQ) retired for the night only to discover next morning that one of her nocturnal guests has croaked in a castle bedroom … by accident. Bad. (Was the food that bad?) The police arrive and see suicide. Worse. (Was the room so depressing?) The coroner has a look: murder. Worst. (Who dun it?)

Thames Valley plod, the Life Guards, the Security Service, Special Branch, the Met, MI6, and other Secret Squirrels descend on the stately pile tripping over each other in the rush to investigate while decorously not disturbing HMQ, and spend most of their time, as observed by HMQ, disputing the turf. Needless to say, per the McKinsey management manual there is no sharing of information among these game cocks.

HMQ concludes most of these investigators are more interested in claiming the turf with the accompanying prestige and an enlarged budget and promotions to go with it, than with a speedy resolution that would reveal how, why, and who. If justice is to be done, well, the monarch will have to see to it, while these investigators have their pissing contests. One must do what one must do.

There are many etched scenes, as when HMQ summons the Assistant Private Secretary (APS), a woman newly hired, and makes a point of by-passing the long-standing Principal Private Secretary (PPS) who is so correct that he squeaks like a robot when he walks. The APS wonders why she has been selected, and, slowly, she finds out. HMQ says to the APS, ‘I want you to do something for me,’ followed by a long pause. So long is the pause that the APS thinks before she replies, realising that it is ‘for me,’ Elizabeth, and not for the sovereign. This assignment will not go into the duty diary. Indeed, much of the fun and drama in the book lies in what it is not said. That will put off most of the GoodReads crowd.

HMQ proceeds, softly, softly by indirection and implication to find out quite a lot, while the police sort out their turf wars.

There was a big hole in the plot: I could not fathom how the singer had become a trained assassin, and then a victim all in an instant. The resolution was by smoke and mirrors, despite all the foregoing procedural.

I particularly liked the characterisation of the much-maligned Prince Phillip, who in these pages is a thick-skinned, affable, and garrulous man who treats HMQ like a person, not an icon. He is so direct that it is a refreshing change from the ever so subdued approach of any and everyone else. He alone does not cosset her, knowing she is smart, tough, and game.

While I was surprised that there was no demonstration of tying a necktie with a Windsor knot, or at least a school-boy half-Windsor, I pressed on, though I did, and still do, wonder why the knot is called that. Wonders never cease!

Earth versus the Flying Saucers (1956)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 23 minutes, rated 6.4 by 7,087 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Old Gold.

The Skyhook program of communication and weather (sure) satellites is not going well. Eleven Air Force rockets have gone up to deploy satellites and eleven have come crashing down. Low bid contractors indeed. Yet they should work, according to sweaty Hugh in the desert southwest. Well, try, try, try again he concludes and fires up number twelve. Some budget.

En route to hit the next red button his car is buzzed by a big optical illusion. Sure. He is not a man to jump to the conclusions of his own eyes. He proceeds to the red button.

While he is thus engaged a Big Optical Illusion (BOI is code for UFO) lands at the base and blasts it into special effects unbeknownst to bunkered Hugh who only has eyes for the red button. The redoubtable Morris Ankrum is carried off by the BOI for a session of scrambled Eggheads.

While the Illusionists had tried to contact Hugh earlier when their BOI buzzed his car to arrange a meeting, his cell phone battery was dead and he didn’t get the text. So when the Illusionists landed the immediate reaction is bang! Bang! Now that rings true. Intruder! Kill! Whereas I thought maybe they came to lend Hugh some batteries. It is all hot Cold War. There is no negotiation with the Illusionists, but a rush to prepare a new and more deadly weapon. This weapon involves projecting heavy metal music at the UFOs causing them to go all hysterical. Whoops. Just made that up. Do pay attention.

The immediate response is shoot to kill.

Aside: When wondering why no aliens have contacted us, ponder that. Maybe they have been watching our historical tapes, and knowing what to expect by way of reception and so have steered well clear of this rock where the rule is shoot first and read the script later.

Back to the action! We soon discover by tapping their telephones that the Illusionists did not come for the fast food, but rather to conquer, but only after we have killed at least one, though we find out nothing about them except that they are fragile, few, and past retirement age. Are they fleeing from a world ruined by Republicans? By climate change? By Hillary Clinton? The Mendoza Line? All of the above?

Now if Sy Fy stalwart Richard Carlson had been the lead, there would have doubts, questions, very scientific head scratching, tweed jackets, debates, pipes, and – oh hum. Or if it had been John Agar, well, we would have all fallen asleep. But Hugh is a gung-ho soldier-scientist whose wife salutes him before and after. See, I did it again: made something up. The ever grumpy Hugh Marlowe was an odd choice for the hero, but he played the material well enough. He is better, however, as a sinister but cowardly villain, in say The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or Seven Days in May (1964).

But there were four masters of the crafts at work here, the aforementioned actor, the cadaverous Morris Ankrum, Curt Siodmak is credited as writer, technical effects by wizard Ray Harryhausen, and ventriloquist Paul Frees does the narration and the alien-speak. These four all have well-earned Sy Fy credentials. Harryhausen’s flying saucers set the mould for those BOIs (UFOs) to come. Siodmak’s aliens, though undeveloped, stayed with this viewer, as did Frees’s cadence. And Morris, well, he has become an old friend.

I came across an HD coloured version on You Tube and watched it again. When reading about it, there is a rumour of a re-make with Midget Tom playing himself, an alien. That informative and reliable Finnish web site Scifist has not yet got to it, but I hope it will one of these days.

I saw it first in Lexington (KY) with cousin Don about 1956, and remember those spacesuits vividly. And, yes, I have commented on this before. See the 2 November 2017 post for an even more detailed discussion.

Los Alamos (2005) by Joseph Kanon

GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.80 by 2,759 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Trinity!

March 1945 in the high desert of New Mexico near Santa Fé: Get it? A security officer has been murdered and his mutilated body was found miles away, well outside the perimeter of that strange town on the mesa, and I don’t mean Santa Fé. Get it? Nothing must delay the work in the town and a special investigator arrives to put a lid on speculation while getting to the bottom of the crime. Get it?

Welcome to Atomic City at Los Alamos, along the dried up Alameda River, near Alamogordo and Trinity. Get it? Little Boy and Fat Man are aborning. Inside two layers of barbered wire, patrolled by armed guards and dogs, illuminated at night, observed from watch towers, beyond innumerable checkpoints, all monitored by aerial reconnaissance 5,000 people live and work, many with German, Italian, Polish, and Slavic names, each with a pointy head. Among them are immature college boys and all of them are A-class nerds with no interest in the manly arts of pissing contests. In addition there are several thousand guards and construction workers, some of whom regard these alien pin heads with contempt, which is reciprocated by the some of the boys. It is many worlds in one.

Into this mix is thrown our hero, sent from furtherest D.C. to see what he can see about the death of the security officer forty miles off base. Hero is empowered to do what he thinks fit, provided it in no way slows, hampers, or distracts from the project to make the gadget work. Gadget?

Secrecy means no one talks to anyone else, and it also means only one man knows everything, and it is not the commanding General Leslie Groves, but the brainiac of brains, Robert Oppenheimer. Both members of this odd couple — Groves and Oppenheimer —are portrayed with a deft touch in these pages. Groves wants the job done the army way, yet he knows that is not possible, and Oppenheimer wants it done any way it can be done, but he is not sure that it is possible. The friction is between these two ways. They are united on one thing: no delays! To illustrate the tension: for Oppenheimer free discussion will speed progress, but to Groves it will breach security.

There are so many backstories that they get in the way, but the descriptions of the countryside, and the odd assortment of characters are good. And especially good is the implicit parallel between the Thirteenth Century abandoned Anasazi city and Atomic City.

See this article in the Smithsonian Magazine for some tantalising details ruins.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/riddles-of-the-anasazi-85274508/

The conclusion therein is that the Anasazi destroyed themselves, like the GOP.

I read what purported to be a biography of Oppenheimer a couple of years ago, as linked below. It offered more hagiography than analysis, and the title in hand is a good antidote to that.

‘109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos’ (2006) by Jennet Conant.

Most of the action is a police procedural with the constant raking over the facts. The characters are well drawn, including the supporting players like the local sheriff who has learned not to ask too many questions about the Hill (the Mesa). That said, I did find much of the exposition in wordy dialogues a drag that descended to verbal sparring – too many words with too little meaning. In a screen play with actors’ gestures, intonations, facial expression that can work with snappy delivery, but on the page it is deadweight. Still the insights into motivation are the payoff, and they are credible. I wondered also about balance. Much of the early going was leisurely, but the end was rushed, excused by Trinity, but why? That was not the end but a new beginning. In addition, I thought there was too much prescience – hindsight – at the end. Quibble, quibble, quibble….the trouble with quibbles. I am already checking out the author’s other titles.

As usual, many of the thumbnails of the GoodReads comments are about the reviewer and not the book. ‘Me’ seems to be favourite subject of many keyboardians.

Shelved (2013)

Shelved (2013)

IMDb meta-data is 5 minutes 39 seconds runtime, rated by 6.5 by 59 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Droll.

Another Kiwi winner on DUST. In a little over five minutes Shelved establishes character(s), context, and leads to a denouement. Nice. There are also some superb animations that are integral to the story rather than substitutes for it, as is very often the case on DUST where the means becomes the end. The result in Shelved is a kind of anti-Real Humans, the Swedish sy fy series reviewed earlier on this very blog, which also featured a warehouse crew.

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang and the Birth of Modern China (2009) by

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang and the Birth of Modern China (2009) by

Hannah Pakula.

Good Reads meta-data is 816 pages rated 3.75 by 424 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Excellent.

Much is explained about Soong Mei-ling (1897/8-2003). As a boy her father worked passage to the United States on a merchant ship and left it in Wilmington (North Carolina) where he found a philanthropic sponsor who paid for his education at Trinity College (before it became Duke University). Having left China at four years old, first for Bali with his father, and then on State-side, he returned to China when he was twenty, a convinced Christian, accustomed to Western food, inexperienced with chop sticks, and committed to American ways with only a boyish smattering of the Chinese language.

He married an equally unconventional Chinese woman who sang and painted, practices usually associated with prostitutes, and sired six surviving children, including Mei-ling, giving each a Christian name, too, hers being Olive. He became a successful entrepreneur and to show his wealth and western ways, educated his daughters as well as his sons. Thus Olive found her way to Wellesley College (I gave a talk there once, or was that Wesleyan?) in the Connecticut woods where she had novelty value and soon learned to use that to her advantage. She maintained a lifelong correspondence with one of her roommates which is much quoted in these pages.

Already we see the woman in the girl. Her Chinese looks made her exotic to Americans, and her American ways made her exotic to Chinese, and she learned to use both perceptions to her advantage, and to switch back-and-forth from Chinese to American in a single conversation.

Like Charlie Soong, Sun Yat-Sen was well-travelled, imbued with America, a firm Christian, and an advocate of a new, reformed, modern China, and their paths crossed, whence they became friends and allies. Sun was the public face, while Soong became the bagman, securing funding through their trials and tribulations as the old regime tottered on its bound feet. The crucial times were just before the Great War in Europe, around 1910 -1912. Olive would have been about 14. When Sun married her older sister, they became family. She was a witness to the baptism of Twentieth-Century China.

There is much background about Chinese history which aids this reader in locating the characters in time and place, more history than one usually finds in a biography and that adds to its length. As a girl she was wilful, energetic, committed to a New China, took for granted the privilege of wealth, and resisted the pressures to get married young and be a good wife. There is a certain dilettantism to her New China commitment rather like Anglo champagne socialists. Never for a moment did she consider that a New China might have no place for her, that wealth might lose its privileges, that the coolies might want to govern.

The divide between North China (including Shanghai) and South China that had bedevilled the tottering empire remained and at times there were two would-be governments, one in Peking (the ancient capital of the empire) and the other in Canton or Nanking, vying for legitimacy, foreign recognition, loans, allies, and friends. Later the Japanese set up another in Manchukuo, while the Brits held on to Hong Kong.

The Chiang Kai-Shek who appears in these pages is an ambitious and unscrupulous man, but one so lacking imagination he can (possibly) be led. He wanted to marry Sun Yat-Sen’s widow (think Richard III), but she reviled him, and so he settled for her younger sister, Olive, who was more pliable at the time, to gain the social status and financial connections of the Soong family one way or another. Like Henri Quatre he converted to get them, from a nominal Buddhist to a nominal Methodist.

His only purpose was uniting China (under neo-emperor Chiang) by absorbing the fractious war lords who had emerged from the decay of the ancien régime, and this focus distracted him either from the Communist whom he underestimated and the Japanese whom he feared. For her part, Olive did occasionally try to improve the lot of ordinary people through charity and war work, but the scale of China was beyond ever her considerable energies and wits. Chiang could never quite subdue the warlords and the 1920s and 1930s was period of constant conflict somewhere in the celestial kingdom. While he negotiated with this warlord or that, the Japanese decided Manchuria had the resources and industries that Nippon needed to join the Great Powers, and so it annexed what had been the richest and most stable region of China while Chiang continued to play warlords. He accepted that as a fait accompli from his bastion in the South.

Stubborn to the core, Chiang never changed, and when war with Japan became inevitable he stuck to the belief that others (the European Great Powers, the USSR, and the USA) would have to defeat Japan, and meanwhile his purpose was to prepare for the eradication of the Communists to consolidate his rule of China. Olive was steadfast and exercised considerable influence over him as amanuensis, translator, negotiator, advisor, observer, charmer, champion, and loyal operative. She articulated and advocated a social program of sanitation, education, communication, and the like, much of which was embodied in the New Life campaign, but throughout Chiang’s regime the army absorbed at least 40 – 60% of the budget by all estimates. Since the wealthy middle and upper classes who supported Chiang paid no tax, and collecting customs from the International Zone of Shanghai and other Treaty Ports was impossible, the financial burden fell on peasants, who were taxed two or three times a year to amass the wherewithal for yet another campaign of final eradication against another warlord. Olive had a finely developed blind eye for much of this oppression.

Aside, she did not have a sustained and concrete project in the way that Eva Peron did for the shirtless ones. Olive’s good works seem more infrequent and dilettantish than Eva’s. Nor do they compare in scope or depth to Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions to domestic politics.

Uniting China would garner international recognition for Chiang’s government, and that would allow him to raise funds for the army (oh, and for those social programs, if there was any left over, though it never was) from international banks. That was the logic of his focus. To unify the vast, disparate, and querulous regions of China, Chiang looked to the model of European fascism for order and discipline. Olive had the rhetoric of constitutional democracy from her American years, which he learned to tolerate, but never himself espoused, although as his translator Olive sometimes put such phrases in his mouth.

During Chiang’s long ascension he was at times courted by both Stalin and Hitler. Russia wanted a bulwark to hobble Japanese threats to its Far East (including the buffer state of Mongolia), and if the Communist and Nationalist cooperated, China might be strong enough to impede Japanese access to its natural resources. Hitler, on the other hand, simply wanted to bedevil French and British interests in Asia, and so on occasion invested a little time and money in wooing Chiang to undermine the Europeans. In fact, during the early stages of this second Sino-Japanese War in 1938 Chiang’s principle military advisor was a German general — Alexander von Falkenhausen — to whom he seldom listened, but who had trained and equipped several Chinese divisions, which proved to be the best in the Nationalist army. These troops were so good that Chiang tried to withdraw them from combat with the Japanese and reserve them for another eradication campaign with the Communist, a plan that came unstuck when these units became the core of American General Joseph Stilwell’s Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma. CKS quid pro quo for these troops was a pipeline of Lend Lease material through Burma.

Stilwell despised Chiang and the Dragon Lady but put on a happy face for unity.

There is no doubt Madame Chiang was a force. At one point she was the official head of the Nationalist Air Force and instrumental in recruiting, retaining, and giving free reign to Claire Chennault to run it over the objections of many Chinese generals who wanted access to the prestige, money, and goods that went with it. She was the only one who could get Chiang to bend or even change his plans. With all others he was stubborn because he aspired to the infallibility of a son of heaven emperor.

(Chennault was an exceptional flyer, trainer, and organiser of pilots, until he developed a Napoleonic complex and tried to influence grand strategy. His strategies always made him the centre of attention and never worked and that was alway the fault of someone else.)

The oceanic corruption in the Nationalist regime was the price the Chiangs paid, on this telling, to retain allies and subordinates in the vast, fractious landscape of China. Trying to eliminate it would have toppled the regime, per this author. Best then to try to manage the corruption by participating in it! To illustrate the effect of this corruption. The American manufacturer of an airplane would sell it to a Chinese agent for $1,000 who paid for it with Chinese government money but the agent would then change the invoice to $4,000, pocketing the entire sum. Nor were all the $4,000 planes ever delivered despite the payments. Some were sold at the price two or three times. To fund these outlandish prices much of the money raised for Chinese War Relief (of Civilians) by Madame Chiang was siphoned off to these war materials. (There are occasional references to this Relief fund in the contemporary Charlie Chan films.) Without a doubt members of the Soong and Chiang families participated in this profiteering. Strange but this story reminds of a recent crime family’s occupation of the White House.

The disjunction between Olive’s rhetoric of the rule of law and democratic equality and the reality of her personal behaviour is brought home in numerous instances. She used people and once she got what she wanted from them, they disappeared from her consciousness. One day you were her dearest friend, and the next day she looked through you. Servants were treated like slaves, and there were many servants, and she treated many people as though they were servant-slaves, and so ingrained was this haughty manner that it was manifested even in her wartime visits to the United States and Canada when she was tying to win friends, so much so that the press got wind and word of it and her halo started to tarnish. Her speeches, by the way, on this trip are marvellous, though occasionally there are some obtuse passages that would make a Jürgen Habermas proud. Two things are clear: she wrote nearly all of her own speeches and she was good at it. Second, she relied on a dictionary with little sense of usage. She too long retains a sophomoric desire to impress auditors with long and unusual words culled from dictionaries.

While she was in the States raising money for Chinese war orphans, she booked a floor of the Waldorf Hotel for many thousands of dollars, and went on a mink coat shopping spree, purchasing ten, with all the associated accoutrements which added up to more thousands of dollars. This booty had to be flown into China over the Himalayas where every fourth plane crashed, often killing the American crew. This, too, the press sniffed. The author shows, piteously, that much the money raised for orphans went straight to the Soong family, including Olive. (It seemed to me to be a parallel with the argument Pericles made about the Delian League. Think about that!)

When Wendell Wilkie visited China in 1943 he was completely enamoured of Olive and she wrapped him around a little finger, assuming he would succeed FDR. Therein lies a juicy tale for readers of this book. Check it out for yourselves. He thereafter became the number one cheerleader for Kuomintang (KMT) China. No reality check dissuaded him. Much of Wilkie’s memoir One World (1945) is an ode to (Madame) China.

While it is not emphasised, in passing the author makes the observation several times that the the Chinese penchant for avoiding embarrassment and humiliation (face) meant that bad news was not reported. If an army division was destroyed, the report would be about the heroic salvage of spare tires or some such trivia. And Chiang made that cultural reluctance worse by frequently, sometimes literally, shooting the messenger.

An Australian journalist (William Donald; there is an informative entry about this accomplished individual in the Australian Dictionary of Biography) who was undoubtedly smitten with her became her full-time press agent. His coaching and advice did much to create the public image of Madame Chiang.

The book explains much of the post-War hysteria about ‘Who lost China,’ which radio pundits were still rehashing in the 1960s, e.g. Thomas Dodd, Paul Harvey, and Walter Judd, among others. General Joseph Stilwell and his ilk were renounced by the pygmies in D.C. after his 1946 death for his efforts to cooperate with Chou En-lai to fight the Japanese. He had one meeting with Chou who agreed to obey his orders, but Chiang refused to cooperate with Chou on any terms. In the other corner were are all those deluded missionaries who believed Chiang’s superficial commitment to Christianity and overlooked the palpable corruption, cruelty, and incompetence of his regime. Reminds me of the evangelicals and the other guy. No sin is too egregious as long as he holds up an unread Bible. It became obvious by 1943 that CKS had no legitimacy in the parts of China nominally under his control. He was but one war lord among many, with this difference: He had Olive to present him to the world. But no amount of American aid or intervention would have propped up the rotten KMT regime for long.

CKS and KMT were unable to change. All appointments and promotions in the government and the army were based on personal loyalty to CKS, and not competence, ability, motivation, skill, or anything else. The only criterion was loyalty to Chiang. The only thing that trumped loyalty was kinship. CKS appointed numerous, distant relatives to important jobs, though they were unable to perform the duties, having them in place blocked out others who might not be so dependent on and loyal to Chiang. While the nepotism crippled his regime, he never changed it. If anything the transfer to Taiwan exacerbated it.

The native Taiwanese population were not regarded as Chinese, and so by definition they were disloyal to the embodiment of China, namely, Chiang, and, moreover, they had to be displaced to make room for those loyalists who followed CKS to the island. Hence upon arrival his army purged the islanders from administration, education, business, army, and the like on the grounds that they were all communists, many of whom were murdered. Nor was any of this secret. US State Department officials witnessed, documented, and recorded it, but such facts bounced off the Christian China lobby in D.C. (Nothing ever changes with god-botherers.) The result was to shoot the messengers in the McCarthy hysteria.

Soong Mei-ling outlived Chiang, and just about every one else, spending her last thirty years in the States, dying in (1898-) 2003, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior. Olive was manipulative, sly, persistent, wily, played a long game, a user, a snob, a marvellous orator, a much stronger personality than CKS, a power seeker, tyrannical, oblivious to her own contradictions, imperious, a speaker of many hollow phrases, a patriot, without self-knowledge or doubts, and much else. All that said, and more, she was one of the half-dozen major players in World War II, and the only woman to have that role.

It occurred to me that Olive and CKS might have played good-cop, bad-cop in their dealings with the Yankees. He was intransigent and never gave inch so when she asked for the moon it seemed reasonable compared to him, often with the result being they got a lot of what they really wanted.

She had more direct influence over Chiang and his government than, say, Eleanor Roosevelt had with FDR administration or Eva with Juan Peron.

Oddity. Her older sister had married Sun Yat-sen early in the Twentieth Century, and as his widow she tried to adhere to his vision of China, often denouncing, sometimes publicly, the CKS regime. When the Communists took over the country, she chose to stay in China with the masses, and she was regarded as a living embodiment of the continuity of the new regime with Dr Sun, and sequestered in comfort. She likewise occasionally, and publicly rebuked this regime, too, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Her symbolic value was so great that these remarks were overlooked by Emperor Mao.

The book charts Olive’s growth and change from a cloistered college girl to the dragon lady whose death was not mourned by a good part of the population of Taiwan, despite the official gloss. Though she lived in the States for years she continued (to try) to influence Taiwan politics in favour of the old guard (and her family), and her extravagant living arrangements were funded by US Aid money meant for Taiwan. When her house was cleared post-mortem, one closet was found stacked with cardboard boxes of US dollars on top of piles of gold ingots. Rainy day savings.

The author has distance from the subject, and does not take anything at face-value. Yet the picture of Olive is understanding, if not sympathetic, and the digressions on context were informative to this reader (otherwise ignorant of Chinese history) though they added considerably to the length of the book. However the book lacks a last summing-up chapter which I missed. After all the details, a final chapter that weighs things up is valuable but rare in biographies. It seems biographers are exhausted at the end, and just want it to done. Editors are so jaded they have no interested in the needs of readers, and so this book ends without a reckoning apart for a few passages from obituaries.

The author seems to specialise in royal women with other biographies of Prussian Empress Frederick who mothered Kaiser Bill and Queen Marie of Roumania.

Kate had a distant brush with Madame Chiang in Rees family lore. Kate’s mother bred dogs, scores of them at time, and sold one to a local agent acting, she was told, for Olive sometime in the 1960s.

She gave one of her anti-communist speeches at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln on 30 September 1966. I expect I read about in the local newspaper at the time, but have no recollection. I was just starting my sophomore year of college a hundred miles away.