Letters From Home

I have, for some unknown reason, been reading a lot of “political” books lately. Nothing to do with the upcoming election, since I don’t like either major candidate and I’m already sick of the political ads and they haven’t even had the conventions yet.

There have been a lot of similar books published over the past decade or so, and I have neither the time nor the desire to read most of them. But several have caught my eye in recent months and I thought I’d pass along my comments, for better or for worse.

I’ve already written about The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by Vincent Bugliosi, and you can see my comments on that book here. That book was a quick read. The next one, not so quick.

The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg, is an investigation into the Bush and Walker family history and their collective personalities, in an attempt to explain George W. Bush’s motivations. As with all books where the author is dealing with a living subject at second hand, and the subject of the book has made no personal contributions to it, one must read everything with the proper skepticism for armchair psychoanalysis.

Still, it is apparent that Weisberg has done his best to be evenhanded and to both praise and criticize where each is appropriate. His analysis of why George W. Bush’s presidency is a tragedy that need not have been so is explained in careful terms, and his ongoing analogy with Shakespeare’s tragedy is apt. The book would be an eye-opener for anyone, regardless of his/her opinion of the subject.

It would help, I think, to have read Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty before tackling The Bush Tragedy, because there is even more background information on the Bush, Walker and Pierce families that will show the reader where Weisberg is coming from and round out the details. Say what you wish about Kitty Kelley, she’s an eminently readable writer and she notes quite correctly that no one has ever successfully sued her over the contents of her books. Given the kinds of high-priced lawyers some of her subjects could afford, and the resources at their disposal, that alone says something about the accuracy of Kelley’s reporting. And her notes about her sources for this particular book are eye-opening indeed.

The other book I’m reading right now is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein. I haven’t finished it yet, but what I’ve read so far seems spot-on. I had already read Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon by Anthony Summers, and learned quite a bit more about Tricky Dick than I had ever believed possible.

I wouldn’t have been quite old enough to vote if the 18-year-olds-can-vote amendment had passed in 1968. My first presidential election was in 1972, in which I voted against Richard Nixon. Not for McGovern, who didn’t much appeal to me, but I’d seen enough of Nixon to want to vote for Donald Duck if it meant no more Tricky Dick in the White House. Perlstein’s book gives the historical perspective on the rise and fall and rise and fall of Richard Nixon, along with other “impossible” candidates like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It’s a fascinating portrait of the times and, I think, a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why today’s political climate is the way it is.

That’s a lot of political reading for anyone, but for someone who is fascinated by history and biography (as I am), it’s well worth the time.

Have you read any of those books?

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In my series about taking a stand against ignorance, I said that reading is the key. And that doesn’t just apply to people trying to take a stand against ignorance–it applies to just about everyone. We all buy new appliances or other electronic devices now and again. And believe me, there is no more important time for reading than when one’s learning how to work something new.

I’ve done tech support for over 20 years now. I’ve also learned a lot of new things and tried, at least, to master a lot of new gizmos that have been invented in that time. Thus, it’s hard for me to understand why so many people just never bother to read the manual.

I’m sure almost everyone has heard the old saw “When all else fails, read the directions.” That would not be so universally applicable, of course, if people actually did read the directions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen piteous wails from people who took back a messed-up laptop computer to the uncaring big-box store they bought it from, only to have the computer sent who-knows-where by the service department and who-knows-when they’ll get it back. Do the instructions that came with the computer say “Take it back where you bought it”? No, they do not. They say “Take it to an authorized service center.” But almost nobody bothers to read that part. And then they come to an online forum and carry on about how badly they were treated by the store and how long they’ve been without the computer, and if they’re asked if they found the store’s name on the list of authorized service centers… well, the person asking the question might just as well be speaking Martian.

Unhelpful help, and more

Of course, the manufacturers themselves have contributed to the problem by supplying only quickie setup guides in the box and relegating the real user manuals to computer files of some sort–whether a “help” file or a manual in PDF format. Help files are short, and you often have to know exactly what you’re looking for to get the answer you need. The manufacturer may use terminology that the user wouldn’t think of in a million years. When I was writing software manuals by translating programmer-ese into English, I used to joke that a programmer illuminated a room by disabling the light inhibit. I’m a pretty advanced user of Microsoft Word (having dealt with it since version 3 for DOS) but I long ago gave up trying to do any serious looking-up with its help files (even with the cute little cat I’ve got standing in for that idiot paper clip). One good book on the subject, a minute or so browsing the index, and bingo, I’ve got the answer I could have clicked forever to try to find in “help.”

So why don’t people read the directions? There’s usually no faster way to get things going properly, or to fix things that have gone wrong. And, of course, reading the directions makes one self-reliant. How much better it is, to be able to flip a page or two and fix what’s wrong.

The question of self-reliance

When I started out in radio, if something would go flooie (technical term) when the Chief Engineer was not there, and we called for help, the first question we would be asked was “What have you tried already?” In other words, we were expected to know at least a bit about what might be done to try to fix the problem, and to actually try it, before we threw in the towel and bothered the engineer at home. And yet by the time my husband became a Chief Engineer, it seemed as though nobody bothered to try to solve the problem themselves–they’d just call the engineer, even if it was a problem they’d called about a dozen times before.

I’ve found, in teaching people how to use computers, that there seems to be an almost universal fear of “breaking something” or “messing something up.” Wouldn’t it be easier to read the directions and find the solution in writing? But no, people want someone else to tell them what to do.

I don’t have the answers. I just read the directions. I guess I’m one of the few people in the world who actually does RTFM.

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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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Whether you believe or not, you owe it to yourself to read this book. This link will take you to Amazon.com

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When I was a kid, growing up in central Virginia, I noticed that it always rained on Good Friday. My mother noticed that too and was certain there was a cosmic significance to it.

Of course, my mom was always looking for proof that the things she had been taught to believe were really true. I, on the other hand, had read Greek mythology and the Bible at pretty much the same age (starting at about age six) and viewed them as pretty much the same–history plus an ancient people’s explanation of the way the world worked. So I was no more prone to believe (or disbelieve) that it rained on Good Friday because it had rained on the original Good Friday than I was to believe (or disbelieve) that thunderbolts were thrown by Zeus.

I’ve been re-reading a really extraordinary book, The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor. The book is too complex to do justice to in a brief summary, but the author takes a look at what the evidence suggests really happened 2000 years ago, and it’s not quite what people have come to believe. Among other things, Jesus didn’t die on Good Friday.

I wondered early on about that business about “and on the third day,” because there’s really no way to get a “third day” between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. Christians assumed that because Jesus had to be taken down from the cross before the Sabbath started, he must have died on Friday. But the start of Passover is also a Sabbath, and Passover began on Thursday that year.

So Jesus died on Thursday, was taken down… and on the third day he wasn’t in the tomb. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what really happened (the Gospels don’t even get the story straight among them). The tomb was empty. How it got that way is a matter of facts or faith.

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