Book 43: I'm like two more reviews away from Nick Harkaway getting a restraining order against me.

It really says something about how great the first 90% of The Gone Away World is that the finale is the least memorable part of it -- especially because the finale is, itself, a phenomenal piece of writing that caps the story perfectly.

I've read The Gone Away World before, but I wanted to go back and read it again, so this time I did it on audiobook. What I was surprised about was that I remembered, almost verbatim, that first 9/10 of the story, but could only vaguely think of what happened after the big reveal in the story, the swiping aside of a curtain that moves the book from great to phenomenal. I think that's because, like I said, while the ending is great, what comes before it is so perfect as to obscure the closing chapters. It's like sitting on a sunny beach on a bright, calm day with a blue sky having just enough white fluffy clouds in it overhead, and in your hand is an icy drink and the sun is warm on your face, and off in the distance just barely audible a radio is playing a song you love from when you were 13, and your beautiful wife is lying next to you while your kids play in the breakers, and then someone puts Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel there, too. (The ending is the Sistine Chapel.) I can only think of two books that have made me think this: this one, and The Passage. In each the beginning part of the story is so overwhemlingly good that nothing could compare, it has to go down or at least not keep going up.

The Gone Away World is told from the perspective a nameless narrator who hangs on the edges of the life of his best friend, Gonzo Lubitch. He tags along with Gonzo, an athletic daring handsome guy who attracts all the attention and never wants for excitement, through growing up, learning martial arts, going to college, getting briefly abducted by the government and suspected of being a terrorist, getting forced into a shadowy branch of the military, ending up in a war on a small island that results in "The Go Away War," in which all the major countries use a new kind of bomb that takes away the information from matter, resulting in things just... disappearing. This has the unforeseen effect of leaving the world swarming with matter waiting to be formed into something, and when that matter comes close enough to a human mind, it goes through 'reification,' becoming what that person is thinking about. Because this results in a nightmarish sort of existence, a pipeline is built around the world to spray a chemical that neutralizes the free matter -- and then the pipeline is attacked, and Gonzo's crew has to fix it.

That all sounds complicated enough, but the book is so much more than that. Nick Harkaway crams the book full of characters and details and ideas and philosophies, and what's most amazing about it is that not a single one of them is wasted. Every single sidetrip down some minor character's past, every single conversation in a bar, every throwaway reference to bees or Tupperware -- both of which play major roles in the book -- ends up being absolutely integral to the book. It's amazing and awe-inspiring, even more so the second time around when I could really focus on the details. If you've ever seen a cartoon where someone like Bugs Bunny throws a bunch of bricks in the air and then they come down and form a perfect castle, then you know how it feels to finish a Nick Harkaway book. It's like reading a giant magic trick where he spend the first 2/3 of the book showing you a bunch of only-vaguely-related things and then at the end they resolve into a story that becomes almost four dimensional.

It's a book that's entertaining, but has enough action, thoughtfulness, and sentiment to make it feel like something more than 'mere' scifi. And throughout it, Harkaway's writing manages to be the smartest kid in the room but somehow still likeable: big words, new words, sentences that roll on and on like friendly hills, characters who come alive in two or three words of description. It's the kind of thing anyone who likes to write will be able to appreciate, the way people who like dancing would want to watch ballet: it's intricate in detail and simple in execution.

I know I rave about Harkaway every time I mention him, but his books really deserve it. Anyone who likes science fiction should read at least one of his books.  Probably more than once, because I really did enjoy this even more the second time around; I was able to focus more on the sidestories and little eddies of information, to think about the multi-leveled way the title works into the story (put it this way: more than one world disappears throughout the book.)  This one was so good that as soon as it was done I thought about just starting it over from the beginning to go through it a third time.  He's the only author I've ever written a fan letter to -- twice. (He's also the only author who I probably insulted when I left a comment on his Instagram where he was showing a banana bread he baked and I said at first I'd thought it looked like a slab of ground beef. I didn't mean it to be an insult. It's hard to get tone right in a comment on Instagram.)

There are things I like to do over and over in life. I like to go to the zoo, all the time. We have a free zoo in Madison. It's not very big, but it's big enough, and I go there about 4 times a year, even in winter. I like to go to the art museum over and over, too. Every year the boys and I go and wade up the river by the nature trail, swimming in the deep part and playing splash games. I do these things over and over because each time I do them they not only remind me of how great it was the last time I did them, but I get something new out of them again, and my enjoyment of them stretches back into the past to connect me with those earlier mes, but also stretched into the future, because of the knowledge that I will be doing this thing again sometime in the future, that future self of mine looking back on the present me and remembering each time how nice this thing was, and how I've enjoyed it so many times.

I've added reading Nick Harkaway books to that list.

A Conversation Amongst The Animals, At The Henry Vilas Zoo

Hey, hey. Hey. Hey, polar bear. Hey!

WHAT?!?!?!?!

Do you believe in predestination?

You mean like our lives are all mapped out for us, from birth to death,
no chance to change our paths? As in are we all simply following a course
down a hill, blindly, believing that we are in control when
in fact we are merely automatons?

Yeah.

No.

So you believe in free will then?

No, not really.

If you don't believe in predestination, then
doesn't that automatically mean that we have free will?

Well?

They aren't necessarily opposites. Or the only choices.

How can that be?
You just want to have it both ways.

Predestination presupposes a higher power, whether that be a god
or merely orderly machinations of physics, beyond our control and
pushing us around like gamepieces: we go where we must,
regardless of whether
 it is what we would prefer.

True free will, though, posits that there are no controls on us whatsoever;
although, even if you meant 'the freedom to do what is in our
physical capacity to do,' we are never truly free, because the
universe has been shaped around us by the choices we, and every
other thing ever, have made, and as shaped, it pushes
 against us from all sides,
narrowing our options at times, 
widening them at times,
 but at every interval it is the same:
We have only so much choice as we,
acting in concert with everything that has existed to this point in time,
have allowed ourselves.

I don't buy it. I believe in free will

I am my own bear.

You are the bear you helped make yourself,
yes.

Book 42: The more things change, the more I read old comic strips.

I didn't originally set out to read a collection of Doonesbury strips from the 1990s. It came about because Mr Bunches and I draw a lot of alphabets: he writes the letters and the words, I draw the pictures for him. In between pictures I have some down time, a minute or two. I would spend it chatting with Mr Bunches, but he is all business during alphabets so we can't talk about anything.

One night when we were down in the home office/playroom (Mr F wanted to swing in his hammock) Mr Bunches had me drawing the phonics alphabet, which is a long one. In between my pictures, I was glancing through The Portable Doonesbury, one of the several collections I have. As I read more and more I got kind of hooked on going through the 1990s and remembering issues that seemed big, and noting how much, or little, had actually changed.

Doonesbury is like a history book made funny and interesting. I first read the strip when I was about 11 or 12; the Hartland Library had a copy of Doonesbury's Greatest Hits on display, and I paged through it and then checked it out. I can still remember reading comics about "Park's Parking Tickets" and Duke's sojourn as governor of Samoa, and trying to piece together what these things meant. But even then I got the humor of the strip, in which the joke is almost always on society.

Since then I've been a huge fan of the comic, although it's been years since I went back to look at the old strips. Like I said, it was almost startling to remember things I hadn't thought of for years, and to realize that things don't change all that much.

This set of strips takes place roughly between the Kuwait war ("Operation Desert Storm," remember?) and Clinton being sworn in for his first term.  It's not all politics; there are strips about performance art, which was kind of a big deal in the 1990s, especially when the National Endowment For The Arts became controversial.

It's not really clear when the culture wars began and politics began focusing so much on social issues, but looking back at this demonstrates how little lasting effect social issues can have. The NEA was created in 1965; Reagan promised to abolish it but conservatives (including Charlton Heston) convinced him not to. In 1989 it came under attack again for supporting controversial artists -- the infamous (and probably completely forgotten) Piss Christ was the genesis of this battle. It ended up in court, with the US Supreme Court holding that the law requiring the NEA to award its grants based only on artistic merit was constitutional, and awarding damages to four artists whose applications had been denied on the basis of subject matter. NEA funding has remained fairly consistent since 1990, surviving several recessions, and several extremely conservative congresses and presidents. It's still a favorite target of conservatives, though; fake conservative and failed VP candidate Paul Ryan suggested eliminating it in 2014. He failed.

The bulk of the book is taken up with Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. I remember the outbreak of hostilities in that war; it was the first war in my lifetime. I watched blurry news photos of rocket attacks and wondered about my two friends who were in the Army and were over there.

Desert Storm was really the first incidence of a country renting our military; Saudi Arabia paid us $36,000,000,000 of the total cost (the total being estimated at $60,000,000,000.) The primary result of the whole operation would be the lessons learned by the government and military in 'sanitizing' war for the general population. The military's "pooling" of reporters meant that most news organizations had to rely on the government for their information and footage, which meant that the war featured fewer (or no) shocking images like Vietnam had.

The media policy, called "Annex Foxtrot," relied on claims of national security to censor the media and limit coverage. Sound familiar? The media didn't even fight back: Ted Koppel criticized the policy and networks wrote a strongly worded letter to the administration. I wasn't able to find a single report that anyone had challenged the policy in court. Such restrictions on media involvement are common now, and as a result, the war in Afghanistan has, on average, been given less than 2% of the total news coverage since it started.

In 2015 "the US reversed course and determined to maintain a combat presence in Afghanistan indefinitely."  (Wikipedia.) This was roughly the fourth time the Obama administration had announced and then changed plans to "end" the war in Afghanistan.  Obama's proposal now calls for the US to keep those troops there until 2017 (about 10,000 of them) at a cost annually of $15,000,000,000.

"Desert Storm" was, in retrospect, a remarkably short and restrained war. Bush I was criticized for stopping the troops short of Baghdad. Our 21st century leaders will never be accused of stopping a war.

The book also touches on one short-term political matter and one long-term.  The short-term one was Dan Quayle, possibly the most memorable Vice President of the modern era. Quayle is mostly remembered for Murphy Brown and potatoe, and only one of those really mattered: The Murphy Brown claim that she was promoting unwed motherhood continued the rise of the conservative social issues that would ultimately find 'conservative' poor people siding with the Republicans against their own economic interests.  (In a great article, Hamilton Nolan points out how Republicans, and to a lesser extent Democrats, use social issues to get the middle class and poor to vote them into power, with the rich who control the party using access to power to manipulate economic and political policy to keep the money flowing upward to the 1%.) (Access to power helps immensely. The Clintons had a net worth of about $700,000 when Bill was elected. Today they are worth $131,000,000.)

(Dan Quayle was worth "only" $1,000,000 when elected VP. Don't cry for him, Argentina: he has a 1/12 interest in a $600,000,000 family trust.)

In 1976, 41% of people with only a grade school education, or manual labor jobs, or both, voted for Ford. In 1980, Reagan and his Cadillac Welfare Queens for 42-48% of that demographic, and he got 49-54% of it in 1984.

In 1988 and 1992 and 1996, those trends reversed, with Democrats getting the vast majority of the manual labor/lowly educated people. The numbers then evened out for 2000 and 2004, then dropped again with Romney's race. A focus on social issues generally helped Republicans; in 1992 Clinton's campaign motto was "It's the economy, stupid," and he drove the debates in that direction -- resulting in fewer cultural-issue votes for Republicans.

Republicans tried to make character an issue throughout the 80s and 90s, but were far better at covering up their own problems than causing trouble for Democrats. Doonesbury spent a lot of time talking about Brett Kimberlin. Remember him? Nope. Almost nobody does. Kimberlin was a convicted drug dealer/bomber who prior to the election claimed to have sold marijuana to Dan Quayle; he scheduled 3 press conferences but each time was put into solitary before he could talk to the press. Although he was later discredited, a Senator in 1992 alleged that the Bush Administration had gotten Kimberlin thrown into solitary. Kimberlin is now a political activist and gets into frequent battles with conservatives.

Doonesbury was credited with forcing the release of the DEA file on Quayle. At one point, Gary Trudeau was picked as the 10th most influential person alive -- ahead of the Pope, but behind Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The other ongoing storyline in this collection was the review of the Bush Administration's "oppo" research on Clinton -- a large team of people who were designated to dig up dirt on Clinton. A study found that lower-income people tend to believe negative advertising more than those with higher incomes; the same goes for education. Bush I was the candidate behind "Willie Horton," of course, and while it wouldn't be right to say he and his operatives were solely responsible for negative advertising's growth, he played a key role in it.

Doonesbury hit on just what was wrong with that type of operation when a character in the strip said to one of the "oppo" guys, Just imagine if that effort had gone into creating a domestic policy agenda.

History can sometimes be better learned through fiction. History isn't just the study of places and events and people. It's the study of interactions between events and people and places, and how they shaped our current life and systems. Events that seem momentous -- the NEA scandal -- end up having little to no impact ultimately.  Events that seem minor -- government coverups of hyperbolic drug deals -- end up presaging a world in which two wars (and innumerable undocumented drone killings outside of war zones) are carried on with no media coverage and the government has over a million people who have a 'classified' ranking and know information the public cannot learn about.

Comics have never been so depressing.