Revelations (Part 5)

One of many distractions...

Tonight's post should be a short one, however, I won't know until I am done. There have been many distractions this weekend. Two five-hour car rides with the family. Eating delicious meals with in-laws. Hanging out with out-of-state siblings. Salty air, sandy beaches, and crashing waves. Indeed, it is four in the afternoon on a Sunday, and I need a nap. But, I can't quit now. There is still a restaurant and my brother's pool. While I have a legitimate excuse to skip it, I feel a need to produce something. So, I decided to get started on this post now, before jumping into the shower. 

Fortunately, there is one bathroom in this house, and three people ahead of me. Unfortunately, two have just completed their turns. And the third is on her way. Like I said, this one should be short. 

In an older post, I mentioned how my family enjoy long road trip annually, between five and twelve hours long. My wife does most of driving. I fill in on occasion. Sitting in the front passenger for long stretches of time affords me a great opportunity to be productive. Reading and writing come to mind. Given the number of trips across our adult life times, I could have written at least one novel. Maybe two. Or, I could have finished several books. But, not once have I been able to whip out the laptop or even my Kindle, and start writing down my thoughts, or thumbing through chapters.

Instead, while songs from our favorite playlists fill the car, and help tick away the mile markers, I am daydreaming. With the various landscapes--from decaying strip malls and sprawling warehouses, to  swift rivers and choked forests--whizzing past window, my mind conjures vivid stories and scenarios. One moment I could be leaping from the roof of one car to another, dogging bullets like some superhero movie. In another, I am searching through the rubble of an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic world. Most of the time, I am creating dialogue with real and imaginary people. Some times the conversations are intellectual; most of the time they play out as mundane misunderstandings. 

In the past, I would have berated myself for not writing any of those musings down. Or for choosing daydreaming over reading a book. This weekend, before leaving home for a five-hour car ride, I let it all go. No laptop. No book. No Kindle. Just me and the family, an iPod full of music, the passing landscapes, and my imaginary chats.

After two decades of fighting it, I have finally accepted that road trips are not places for me to be productive. 

 

On Historical Matters (#1)

I have finished two, started three others, and hoping
to finish the last of them before the end of July.

I skipped two already, and I don't want to make it three. In addition, I am closing in on my two hundredth post. So, here I am. It won't be much. However, like a friend told me, writing about how you are not blogging still counts, as long as you share it on your blog.

The image above is a pile of books. From top to bottom, here are their titles:

• American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
• 1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton
• Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth by Holger Hoock
• Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance by Robert Gildea
• The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham
• Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susan Cahalan

The last two I have finished reading: Brain on Fire back in May, The Taste of War a week or two ago. The former, an easy read on a dark topic, I believe was mentioned on NPR. The latter, an academic approach to a disturbing subject, showed up in a documentary titled Total War. As for Fighters in the Shadows, I cannot recall the source, but it is an interesting and revealing story. Hint, the French Resistance was not really French. Unfortunately, I put it down after only reading 106 of its 481 pages. And not because of boredom. I got distracted. The same could be said for Scars of Independence. Took it out maybe a year ago, or even two. Read a few chapters, before I had to return it. Forgot about it, until this past month, when I discovered the first two books in the list, both of which are about our illustrious war for independence (but "civil war" would be a better term).

My dear readers, I would love to recommend them all to you. Alas, I can only suggest the last one, Brain on Fire. It was written by a journalist in a style enjoyable to most people. The rest by expert historians. That means hundreds of endnote pages, a full bibliography, and, in the case of Fighters in the Shadows, a list of characters and abbreviations. Yet, these books contain a plethora of information and powerful insights. Reading these books, you soon realize that the big players that we are forced to memorize in school are not as influential or central to their contemporary historical periods. There were other characters and ideas making the rounds, frightening and inspiring people to act. The historical myths we draw upon to defend our current thoughts and policies turn out to be oversimplifications, or simply wrong.

For example, Susan Cahalan's severe symptoms, diagnosis, and eventual rehabilitation reveals that some of the people we lock away and hide from us because of severe psychosis, maybe be suffering from viral and bacterial infections of the brain, and require emergency medical attention. 

However, in the other book I have finished, Lizzie Collingham uncovers how food was weaponized, by all participants in World War II. For the Germans, it was a means to eradicate the Slavic countries of people in order to make way for Aryan settlers. The Japanese sought to toughen up their own soldiers, punish prisoners of war, steal from their occupied territories, and keep their own population satiated. The Soviets,  starved constantly, throughout the war, both as a result of German actions, but also their own internal political and economic policies and mistakes. Unless, of course, you were part of the Communist Party elites. The British civilians fared far better, but partly because Churchill had no problem forcing the Empire's colonial assets to suffer more in order to feed the homeland. Above all, the US citizens suffered least, at the expense of everyone else in the world, allies and enemies alike. 

While the 258-paged Brain on Fire read like a detective novel helping me to finish it in a few days, it did not move or excite me quite like the 634-page The Taste of War. Do not get me wrong, the former made me tear up at times, clench its book in anger and frustration at all that the author endured. It also uncovered shortcomings in our healthcare system and our medical experts. In addition, I learned a lot about the brain and how people and their loved ones experience psychosis. 

Yet, discovering how food became a weapon of total war, the millions of lives lost or ruined by governments making calculated and callous decisions, how starvation ruins the body, and the science behind dietary and nutritional requirements for survival, hit me much harder. It was slow, deliberate reading. On any given day, I may have read two-thirds of a chapter or sections. At times, I had to put it down. Some times it was the sorrow of knowing the pain people experienced from starvation and death. Other times it was disgust at misguided or uncaring leaders whose ideas and actions led to tens of thousands of unnecessary or avoidable deaths.

In the end, it was the actions of the allies that was most disappointing. For the majority of American civilians, the war improved both their dietary circumstances and their economic standing. Heading into the war, many Americans suffered from malnutrition and food scarcity. By the end of the war, the poorest in the country was doing much better than the rest of the world, including countries like Great Britain and Australia. And unlike Great Britain, our government refused to require food rationing in any impactful way. There were moments when we refused to feed our own allies, even though we had surpluses.

It is harsh to learn that the myths surrounding the most noble moments of your country's history, are filled with dark truths. But it is necessary. Unfortunately, most people are unable or refuse to read academic-style books, where the amount of information and logical structure make it difficult to ignore facts.

This is the kind of stuff I find so exciting. That is why I grabbed a bunch of books on the American Revolution, and have begun reading them in earnest. So much misinformation. So many half-truths. So few honest discussions about our past, conversations that would prevent us from making bad policies in the present day.

As much as I would love to see you, my dear readers, diving into the pages of these kinds of books (seriously, at least read Brain on Fire, but avoid The Taste of War), my hope is some day to summarize their content in an exciting, but still informative, style, and share it with you on this blog.

Hopefully this post was a decent start.