Book Review: The Rum Diary

I’m glad I finished it because I almost didn’t. It didn’t demand my attention the way other Hunter S. Thompson books have done, but on the other hand the subject matter was a bit richer than I gave it credit for while reading it. The storyline, without much deviation and outlined in the first ten pages, follows a fictional Thompson to Puerto Rico to work for a dysfunctional newspaper with a horrible crew. It’s not meant to be a humorous setup and it’s not about workplace antics or cartooned bad employees. It describes, in one way or another, almost every workplace I’ve been in. It talks about being just a suckerfish in society, “trying to find the shark with the biggest stomach and smallest mouth” and never really being anything but that. It talks about “The Fear”, the fear that back home there’s just nothing for you. The same Fear that catapults clueless Puerto Ricans to New York City and drunkard writers to San Juan.

The story is mellow and plot twists expected. You can see why it took almost 40 years to be published. But I liked it. In the end, I couldn’t help but making two comparisons. First, who was I in that story of trying to find luck in a foreign land? Though I didn’t strongly identify with any one character, I think I fit the editor/manager archetype - the only one who takes the gig seriously, one of the few actually concerned about the future of the company and willing to put the time, heart, and money into making it something bigger and better despite the odds. What I wasn’t, in any case, were the free-willing shiftless drunks personified and maybe a little glorified by Thompson and the other main characters - running from The Fear further and further, paycheck to paycheck, one mediocre workplace to another, and drink to drink. In the end, the only thing that separated Thompson from the rest of the pack was his razor-sharp wit matched with a rock star charisma and attitude that sold a lot of Rolling Stones back in the day.

The second comparison, or question, I kept running through my head was why Thompson wasn’t part of the Beat Generation – that clique of pre-hippy bohemian artsy types that dominated the counter-culture scene of the 50’s, when Thompson was in his 20’s and getting his start as a writer. The simple answer, I think, is that by that time Thompson wasn’t part of any counter-culture. He wasn’t trying to create an alternate definition of morals or aesthetics. Though disgruntled, he was mostly dealt with those sentiments alone and not part of some bigger picture of collective discontent. He was just an intelligent drunk. He was still trying to fit into American society. He was still trying to sucker up to the man, in his own words, and get his fair share. He was still trying to find his place and despite his pessimism hadn’t fully given up hope that there was room for people like him in the big picture.

Perhaps that’s why I like Thompson a bit more than the Beatnik-types. He finally managed to force his own style into the system and actually made a lasting contribution to journalism. He worked inside the system as much as he could – preferring to submit “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” to mainstream magazines and later writing for Rolling Stone – instead of writing in the ‘zines of the day, like Northern Lights out of San Francisco. In the end, he won, and I like that.

Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut

One of my fondest memories of being a first year teacher last year was when one of my seniors in study hall told he found a book on another teachers shelf called Breakfast of Champions. He read it in a few days and then told me he didn't understand it. Being just a little familiar with the works of Vonnegut I wanted to read it too. Two days later I was done with it to. We spent the next two weeks talking about it and what it meant to each of us. I've spent the past year searching Asian bookstores for more Vonnegut, after giving Cat's Cradle to a Chinese English teacher. I still base a good chunk of my theology on what I remember an old roommate sharing with me after reading a Vonnegut book. That was after I encouraged him to read Slaughterhouse Five and he began reading other books on his own.

And now the good old man is dead. I'll leave it, again, to MetaFilter to someone else to sum up my own thoughts:

Kurt Vonnegut *was* an idiot.

You'd have to be to tell the truth. Sometimes there exists a person who is unafraid to look life if in the eye and accept it for what it is. Has this world ever rewarded these people with anything but sadness and a sense of isolation?

It's the sweet little lies about this world and our lives in it that make living bearable for so many of us, you'd have to be an idiot to give up that comfort, even if you never spoke about it to another soul. You'd have to be an even bigger idiot to open your mouth and speak the truth, or in his case sing it out for all to hear, when everything history has ever taught us is that people will only despise you for it.

He wasn't a particularly happy man, his vision didn't seem to bring him comfort, he struggled with suicide his whole life, and perhaps he could have dulled that pain with some comforting illusions. But he was an idiot, and chose the harder path, and made the world an indelibly better place because he lived here, and chose to live in his manner.

... and from his own imagination, the Book of Bokonon:

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

*

Global Climate Change

I had a rocket scientist once correct my Colonization of Space class in college. "It's not global warming," he said, "it's global climate change."

I believe something is happening. I believe humans are linked to it. Despite the data, I don't think we have any idea what's really fueling it or what's going to happen. In that vein, I wrote this [way too long] comment on Metafilter in a thread tying sunspot cycles and Global Warming:

I remember growing up in the 80's seeing TV commercials telling my childhood super-ego that the oceans would be dead seven years ago. Granted, they're in horrible shape, but they're not dead and I still had shrimp I didn't ask for in my fried rice for dinner tonight. I also remember a great deal of the available data saying something serious would happen in January 1, 2000. Nothing happened besides fireworks and a few DUI's. I also remember hearing about a veritable army of Cat 5 hurricanes that were supposed to bear down on my beloved Florida last summer. They never came.

Correlation is not causation and I know we have a mountain of relatively reliable data saying one thing, but it's kinda hard to turn the Gut-O-Meter off when I hear anyone say that when there were no sunspots, things cooled down. When there were a whole lot of sunspots, things started heating up. And wait... doesn't the sun have something to do with temperature? I've heard of this for years and it's stuck on a deep level.

I want to believe in Global Warming©. I really, really do. And I really think we should be cutting down on emissions no matter what... but, that said, it's really hard to turn my Gut-O-Meter off and buy into the new and improved secularized version Judgment Day.

I think inside of everyone is this eschatological voice screaming that everything will, and should, come to a screeching halt in the very near future because of our sins against each other and our planet. It's inside all of us. It fuels most religious faith. I think there's a very real chance this thanatos seeps into interpreting results. Add in group-think bias and extremely strong pressure to arrive at certain conclusions and I think we're building ourselves up for a widespread loss of faith in the scientific community at the time when we need it most.

I don't want to be a part of the same group that also chooses the simpler, and wrong, claim there's also no massive stockpile of aged and long-sense useless chemical and bio munitions buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert. It sounds easier to say there never were WMD and that's that, just like it's easier to say emissions cause GW and that's that.

In fact, I don't want to be a part of any prediction that's anything but mediocre. We're dealing with desertification, water shortages, and beach erosion now... they're all very serious, but it's not the end of the world. In fact most peoples lots in life keep getting better. There's no reason not to assume that even quite a bit worse isn't manageable.

Book Review: The New Emperors

Pete Salisbury's The New Emperors is one of the best history books I've ever read. In reads like a Bill Bryson take down of one of the most complicated subjects in contemporary history: the rise and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the lives of it's two paramount leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It tracks the Party's rise against the odds - even the Soviets were backing the Kuomintang - to eventually take over and completely remold Chinese society. The remolding might be one of the most brutal yet intriguing social science experiments of all time: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This is where the books shines.

Instead of just telling you that the peasants were melting their farm tools in backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward while the crops rotted, it describes through firsthand account and interviews how these things happened, what Mao was thinking, and how his lieutenants fueled it. It shows the beginnings, starting with Peng Dehuai, of the purging that would define the Cultural Revolution. Like a soap opera it sets up the characters just to watch them fall. Perhaps venturing a bit too far into speculation, but supported with Mao's own words, Salisbury claims what was really going through Mao's head were literal pipe dreams. The opiate-laced sleeping medication that the old warhorses were dependent on fueled the imaginative perceptions of what flipping an entire society on its head would bring.

The book changes direction to chronicle the less interesting but more relevant story that brought Deng Xiaoping out of small tractor repair shop where he was sent during the Cultural Revolution and into Beijing to topple the Gang of Four. Like Mao, the book starts soft on the imminently flexible and results-oriented leader and ends with the rigidity and tragedy of his latter days, culminating in the Tiananmen tragedy where the author was an observer.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s China. Though I didn’t think so at the time, it was worth the Beat Reader I traded it for at Friendly’s Guest House in Manila. Get it.