Getting my Irish up

I can see my well-worn copy of "The Year of the French" from where I am sitting right now. It was published in 1979, nearly 200 years after the events it portrays. I was a college freshman. I bought it in hardcover, though I hardly had money for whiskey.

I read it that year and I read it again every year – I’m due to begin again mid-March. Flanagan's book is inextricably tied up in whatever precious sense of Irishness I have been able to reclaim from my fractured personal pedigree as an Irish/German half-breed bastard raised by Czechs. In that, and in the facility with which I can now finish its sentences, it is an old and important friend. Indeed, so a good a friend that in kindness, I now leave the first edition on the shelf and read it on my Kindle.

In briefest precis, the book is the story of the '98 Rising, fomented by United Irishmen and a host of other lovers of liberty, men and women of a diversity that will surprise those used to thinking of the more modern variety of Troubles in strictly sectarian terms. Framed by the story of a fictional poet and hedge school master -- a man with equal affections for the jug, comfortable women and Greek, but having no particular inclination toward revolution -- it is a towering work, a staggering literary accomplishment. It is huge and funny and tragic and just so fookin' good.

And that would be enough. Dayenu, to steal the perfect term from another people of words and woe. Except that while that would be enough, that's not all. What boggles the mind to this day, what fills me with a mixture of powerful awe and no little writer’s envy, is that this was Flanagan's first novel. The utter gall of the man, to write such a work as a first thing. Dayenu. Except even that isn't all. Because I will read TYOTF with special attention this year, as I will be 56 – the age Flanagan was when he published it. His first novel – this novel – at 56!

With the exception of its protagonist, the TYOTF comes under the ambit of mostly true historical fiction. Nothing you will learn in it is false, even if there are those -- mostly British, I'd expect -- critics who might complain of what it leaves alone. But frankly, if you wish, you can leave the history alone altogether, if it bores or angers or discomfits you. [I spoil nothing to say this Rising ended more less as you will have come to expect although, thanks to French involvement, with even more treachery and disappointment than was strictly usual.] But you must read this book –at last or again, as the case may be for you.

Who's who.

“I’m going to be training the people I was trying to kill 18 months ago to kill the people I’ll be training 18 months from now.”

That was how a buddy of mine, a lifetime soldier and top sergeant, explained what he was going to be doing on deployment to Iraq a couple of years ago. He said it with a smile, but he pinpointed in a single sentence the problem America had on 9-12-01 and still has today: Who, exactly, is the enemy?

I’ll submit that Lawrence Wright knows and explains the answer to that question better than anyone else in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11.

Wright himself is a fascinating character. A journalist (this book won him the Pulitzer Prize) and sometime screenwriter, he wrote the screenplay for the weirdly prescient 1998 move “The Siege.” That fictional story -- about a series of massive, well-organized terrorist attacks in New York City, and a convulsive, angry, sometimes self-destructive American response -- foreshadowed many of the images, themes and abiding traumas of 9-11. (It was the most rented movie in America in the weeks that followed the real-life attack.)

The movie’s deadly intersection of art and reality wasn't limited to the prescience of its story. Even before the film was released, it was widely protested in the Arab world as being “anti-Muslim” (which it simply was not), and people died as a result of the protests. Wright was by all accounts shaken by the experience and, after 9-11 brought his movie horrifyingly to life, he turned to the question of Muslim extremism in a more journalistic way. The result was The Looming Tower.*

Despite the fact that the book is meticulously detailed and footnoted with an academic fervor, it reads like a thriller. Like the best fiction, you will be let down when you finish that there isn’t more to read. Like few scholarly works you’ve held, you will actually read all those footnotes.

Wright tracks modern Muslim extremism back to where it was just a gleam in the eye of some very angry (justifiably angry, one has to say) Egyptian students. From the earliest stages, you learn, the men who would later lead the movement so effectively against us had a deep familiarity with the United States – having studied, for example, at Midwestern universities. From the earliest beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood, Wright details a burgeoning – then flourishing – ideology that made 9-11 or something like it all but inevitable from the standpoint of the perpetrators. And far from being “anti-Muslim,” Wright’s book makes clear the distinctions between these dedicated enemies and the rest of Islam. Indeed, the book chronicles a volume of Muslim on Muslim terror, perpetrated by Al-Qaeda and its forebears against those seen as apostate, about which you may not have heard before.

Of course, much of the book is dedicated to Osama bin Laden, who turns out to be simultaneously much less and much more of a figure, man, leader and threat than his typically cartoonish depictions in other media let on. (The detailed accounts of OBL’s father, a self-made construction genius with essentially no formal education, are fascinating in themselves and give tremendous insight into who OBL really is.) But Wright also gives much space to issues others simply take as read: Why, for example, are certain Middle Eastern nations such fertile grounds for harvesting willing martyrs? It may not be why you’re thinking.

The book is four years old now, but I re-read it recently and it could not be more relevant to a country that has declared – if not exactly victory – at least an end to the war in Iraq, while leaving 50,000 of our countrymen at risk there, and is simultaneously struggling to define the mission of many more than that in Afghanistan. (And is fighting this war in lots of places like the Philippines and Somalia that do not feature on the nightly news.)

Ultimately, even as Wright’s book provides abundant nuance, it does not fall victim to equivocation. Instead, it identifies our enemy convincingly and definitively: not Islam itself, but a certain strain of Islamists for whom terror is not a means at all, but an end in itself, and who are not susceptible to any dissuasion short of utter destruction.




*In what has to be the best recent example of comprehensive vertical integration in the world of arts and culture, Wright then created a one-man Broadway show to talk about all of this, which was then became an HBO special. One imagines Wright’s wife, if he has one, gently suggesting it might be time for a project about the history nutmeg, or Great Lakes ore boats, or anything else.

Ignorance is.

C.J. Chivers’ new book, The Gun, is topflight history and great journalism. Here, the definite article is the Avtomat Kalashnikova 47, the assault rifle* credited (somewhat unfairly, Chivers demonstrates) to Soviet soldier turned designer Mikhail Kalashnikov.

(Chivers also wrote one of the finest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read: “The School,” in the May 2007 Esquire Magazine, a dissection and analysis of the Chechen terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, Russia. You can read it here here and you should.)

In The Gun, Chivers puts the object into its longitudinal historical context. We see how the world around it shaped the AK-47 and how the AK-47 shaped – and shapes – its world. He does more or less the same thing for the AK-47 that Mark Kurlansky did for salt.

As a former Marine Corps officer and a senior foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Chivers comes to the project honestly, and well prepared and – like all of us – with a context of his own. He writes about weapons of war, and one in particular, in a comprehensively authoritative way that leaves little room for cavil by less-well disposed analysts. The book is strongest when Chivers is writing about technical development, the human stories behind it, and the strategic and tactical impact of fully automatic small arms on the battlefield. I think he does a little less well when treating the object as an icon or a social force of its own. But this is a tremendously commendable book.

Trouble is, the folks who ought to read it won’t.

Because when it comes to guns, to paraphrase Chris Rock, people love to not know. Really, it’s worse than that. In contemporary American discourse, people pride themselves on knowing nearly nothing about firearms while holding the most ardent opinions, making the most impassioned arguments – and setting the most ridiculous policy. The emotional argument reigns supreme and facts are held in frank contempt.
 
It’s a case of ignorance not only as bliss, but as virtue.

Chivers book isn't about self-defense or tending the flock. But it's a good and important book that will be important, among other reasons, for the list of those who won't read it.





*The AK-47 is a true assault rifle in that it fires a rifle caliber in full automatic. (That is, one pull of the trigger results in continuous fire until one lets off on the trigger or the magazine empties out.) About 90 percent of the time anyone in American public life uses the phrase “assault rifle” they are referring to something that cosmetically resembles, but is not really, an assault rifle.

Mr. Occam, meet M. Bastiat.

Across America there are great hordes of folks --  9-11 truthers and birthers and anti-Bilderbergers and a dozen other varieties -- who are convinced not just that things are bad, but that they are bad intentionally, in an organized, centralized way.

Everybody, it seems, loves a good conspiracy theory. In a great new book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, David Aaronovitch explores lots of popular conspiracies (Marylin's death gets plenty of ink), delves into the extremes of credulity, and examines how belief in even the wildest, contra-factual scheme can serve the needs of those who believe it. Often enough, it seems, there's such comfort to be found in the notion that someone is in charge, that events have order and worldly meaning, that belief in a malevolent plan is unconsciously preferable to belief that that there is no plan.

In that vein, what used to interest me in discussions like those now ongoing over TSA abuses was the question of “why?” Even when considering "officials" who groped grandmothers, strip-searched children, seized prosthetic breasts, interrogated travelers carrying legal amounts of currency, evacuated ostomy bags, threatened arrests, shared nude photos, robbed human dignity  and vitiated all manner of rights, I would – in the normal course – have dismissed notions of any grand and evil plan.

Instead, I would have leaned toward two 19th Century French political philosophers from opposite ends of the spectrum: Napoleon Bonaparte (who warned not to attribute to malice what can be accounted for by incompetence) and Claude Frédéric Bastiat* (who wrote extensively on the nature of the State -- most relevant here, the characteristic that it will always seeks to expand its powers). I’d have then wielded Occam’s Razor and concluded that the State was simply being the State, just as the State would always tend to be.

But, of late, I am coming to believe that the line between conspiracy and statist inertia is the wrong place to cut. Instead, the line that matters is the one between analysis and resistance. To put it in terms those my age will recognize, I think we are past the time where it useful to wonder why the boot is pressing down ever more firmly on our throats. Many thousands of people will do that tomorrow in what can only be called protest by way of civil obedience. It's a start.

If you live in the company of other human beings, you are either a citizen or a subject. The difference between them is that the former are governed through a consensual grant of their own authority to the government, while the latter are ruled by the exercise of the ruler's own authority. Since 9-11 -- whether by intent or simple statist inclination -- the question of which we in America shall be has become a live one. Any hope that question was limited to life under the prior administration is gone.

We will answer it -- or it will be answered for us.



* Haven't read Bastiat? He was a French economist and social theorist. His most important work, The Law is available online and, as mid-Nineteenth Century political philosophy goes, you will find it very pleasant reading. An example:

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"