Letters From Home

I’ve been a fan of Vincent Bugliosi’s since the Helter Skelter days. The Manson bunch were held in the Inyo County Courthouse right up the street from where my grandmother lived, and F’zer and I were in Independence while they were filming the TV miniseries based on the book and we got to see Bugliosi’s alter ego walking across the street being filmed.

I’ve read most of Bugliosi’s books since then. Went to see him give a talk on his Supreme Court book just a few days before 9/11, as a matter of fact, and was very impressed by how he handled the standing-room-only crowd, including a few people who obviously went from talk to talk just to heckle.

In recent books, though, I think he’s gotten a bit too shrill. It isn’t enough to lay out the evidence, he has to hit you over the head with it again and again. Now, granted, there are plenty enough dullards out there nowadays that I’m sure he feels the approach is necessary, but since when did any of them ever read a book?

I just finished The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, and unfortunately it’s more of the same. Bugliosi makes the case, sure enough, but he obviously feels so strongly about the Bushwhackers that he pounds home every single point with all the facts and fury he can muster. Heck, I agree with him and I got tired of the assault long before I reached the halfway point in the book.

I know it’s infuriating to see so many people in the USA who are so utterly clueless about everything they see or hear on the news (if they pay attention to the news at all). I know it’s infuriating to see so many people so utterly incapable of thinking for themselves. (Which is why I wrote my series on taking a stand against ignorance to wind up last year.) It’s understandable for a man as intelligent and articulate as Bugliosi to take on the challenge of “telling it like it is” with regard to the Bushwhackers and their immoral and unnecessary war. But to write a book as though one is presenting a case to a jury full of dummies… well, unfortunately, it wears out its welcome before its time.

I’d like to see him write a companion book that isn’t quite so strident. There’s a case to be made. But this approach isn’t going to reach the people who ought to get it.

Perhaps for his next book Mr. Bugliosi could lay out the case (reasonably, not shrilly) for all the anti-gay-marriage statutes amounting to the establishment of a state religion, and therefore being unconstitutional? I for one would buy that book the day it hit the shelves.

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It might seem a bit off the wall to start out a book review by talking about a TV show, but honestly, that’s the only way I can do it.

One of my all-time favorite series of episodes in one of my all-time favorite shows featured Dennis Dugan as Captain Freedom in “Hill Street Blues.” The Captain showed up in full goofball superhero costume one day and drove Bruce Weitz’ Mick Belker character bonkers for four of the best episodes ever aired on network TV.

The thing about the Captain, though, was that he would start a beautiful speech that had Mick (and the audience) believing, or having their heartstrings tugged, or sympathizing… and then he’d end it by going completely off the deep end without a break in the narrative.

The book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara works the same way. On the one hand, it presents evidence for all kinds of shenanigans and coverups and deliberate misinformation of the general public by the space agency and its collaborators… and on the other hand it seems to be overloaded with over-the-top conspiracy theories that leave the reader shaking her head in utter disbelief.

But the reader did read the whole book, because even with all that it’s utterly fascinating.

I don’t really see what the authors see in a lot of the photographs they use to show artificial structures on the moon and Mars. But that’s inherent in the translation of photograph to printed page–you don’t see everything that’s in the original picture by a long shot, and that’s true of all photos reproduced in mass market books. I don’t know what to think about the authors’ insistence that a lot of information has been withheld from the public and hypnotized into oblivion in the minds of the astronauts who were there and might have seen things that Someone doesn’t want the rest of us to know about. I don’t know whether the supposedly much-more-detailed photos of that “Face on Mars” were doctored to make people think that the original was some trick of light and shadow.

The authors talk about all that and much more in detail and they go into detail about how and why things were done. They have documents and witnesses and a very big axe to grind. Some of what they say sounds plausible. Some sounds crazy. So are these a couple of Captain Freedoms at work, or the guys who really know what’s really out there?

Read the book. Let me know what you think. I still haven’t made up my mind.

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A lot of people have put up YouTube videos with their suggestions of actors to play the characters in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, should they ever be made into a miniseries or movie. (I think the one that included Robert Sean Leonard as Frank and Black Jack Fraser was rather inspired.) I’ve never really thought about finding actors to represent my mental pictures of book characters. But if I were to get started, I’d go for a real true dream cast, for one of my other favorite book series.

Nero Wolfe

Archie Goodwin

Saul Panzer

Fred Durkin

Orrie Cather

Fritz Brenner

Inspector Cramer (on the right)

Purley Stebbins

and….

Lily Rowan

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I just saw Leonard Nimoy on the Colbert Report talking about his new book.  I am bound for Amazon to order a copy.

No matter what Colbert says, I don’t think Nimoy should have included nudie photos of himself as well.

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You may have noticed a common thread running through this series of messages.  That’s not accidental.  Because I firmly believe that the best way to take a stand against ignorance is very simple.

Read.

Read as though your life depended on it, because in a very real sense, it does.  Read the news in depth.  Find a good history book and read that, because if you know your history you’re immunized against claptrap from all sides of the political spectrum.  Nobody can tell you that this, or that, present-day politician is “the best” or “the worst” in history, if you already know what those 19th-century guys were up to.  Nobody can say, as Pat Buchanan did not so long ago, that 1968 was “the most divisive year in United States history,” and get away with it if his audience knows what happened in 1861.

If you have a library card, use it.  If you don’t have a library card, get one.  Make a resolution to visit the library often, and to ask the librarians what’s good to read.  And once you bring your reading material home, of course, read it.

More than 30 years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called “The Ancient and the Ultimate.”  In it, he presents a carefully-thought-out case for the ultimate multimedia device, which even in the wilds of 1973 was not some exotic electronc gizmo or a product of way-out science-fictional thinking.  It was a safe, familiar object, easily obtainable.

A book.

I can’t possibly summarize Asimov’s reasoning on this, but I think he was right.  And I think anyone who reads that essay will understand why he was right.   The essay was collected in a book called The Tragedy of the Moon, which is a collection of essays on various subjects.  You can find it at any public library.  Or, if you really want to be daring, you can order your own copy from Amazon for as little as 89¢ plus shipping.

The great thing about a book of short essays is that if one doesn’t interest you, you can skip to the next one.  And within that same book are two other essays of an eye-opening nature, having to do with social conventions rather than scientific method.  Once you’ve read “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” then read “By the Numbers” to see what Asimov thought about computers and how he predicted they’d affect our world.  And then “Lost in Non Translation” to get a clearer viewpoint about the biases we all share.

Tomorrow starts a new year.  Resolve to take a stand against ignorance.  Individually and collectively, the future we shape will be better if we do.

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To get back to a theme of a previous post, why should any of us bother with “hard copy” reference materials when it’s so easy to look stuff up on the internet?

Yes, I know. Most of us dropped the whole idea of “looking things up” as soon as we got out of school, and most of us said “Good riddance!” as well. Unfortunately, our teachers taught us all kinds of things they never intended to, and the notion that looking things up is sheer drudgery and totally without relevance to the real world is a sad legacy of our years of education.

The main problems with internet reference resources have to do with content and space. Wikipedia, for example, is an extremely popular site for “looking up,” but the content of a Wikipedia article can be altered by anyone with time and an axe to grind. So is what you’re reading a fact or just someone’s opinion? Who knows?

Likewise, web page content tends to be digested down to fit on one or two screens. It’s tough to get all the relevant information cut down to that size (I’m reminded of Billy Joel’s line “It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05″). I’m amused by the fact that I edited this post down quite a bit to make it shorter and easier to read. We internet writers know the consequences of blithering on too long.

And yet–people who won’t look things up are far more likely to be snookered by some “entertainer’s” fast talk and plausible sounding hooey. To take a stand against ignorance, we need to be willing to start looking things up again.

It’s easy to buy a package like Encarta, or the electronic version of the Britannica, which have both expanded over the years to become multifaceted reference works. And that’s a good place to start building your own reference library. Software takes up a lot less space than books, and many people just don’t have shelf space to spare. But that’s not the universal answer. Software enyclopedias suffer from the same shortcomings as web pages and help files–the articles are short and don’t go into a lot of detail.

To get more out of the material, one should add a few “hard copy” books as well.

One of the best all-in-one reference books I’ve seen is the New York Public Library Desk Reference. It even costs less than a copy of Encarta. And it’s a fascinating book in its own right. Once you get started looking stuff up in there, you’ll likely find yourself reading it easily just to learn more about stuff you might never have heard of otherwise. What better way to learn something new and take a stand against ignorance?

Take pride in having your own reference library at hand. It may be the smartest purchase you ever made.

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