Satire and Satirists

Sometimes it seems as if modern events were written by a satirist, though a satirist might have thought a few public beliefs and behaviors too implausible for print or television. How can you tell if someone is joking? My wife says my lips move. But insane times are difficult for satirists. Good satire needs a solid rational footing to be funny. People need to be sane for something to strike them as funny.

Anyway, Happy Birthday to Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, born on November 30th in 1667 and 1835 respectively. People didn't always know that Swift was joking, for instance when he modestly proposed to end poverty and starvation in Ireland by feeding the children of the poor to the upper classes. People were outraged––but they were perpetrating the same ends by other means, and that was Swift's point. We recall Gulliver's Travels as a whimsical bit of children's literature, which it's not; it's a brilliantly extended piece of satire, wonderfully deadpan and perfectly targeted at follies our "civilization" has yet to outgrow. Swift appears in four fairly cunning anecdotes in A Book of Ages (which, I modestly propose, contains its own ingredient of satire.)

Twain is better known today as a gentle kidder, a grandfatherly teller of jokes, but he really was a merciless scold, an irate crank, a persistent progressive, enemy of the gilded wealthy, and an undying unapologetic atheist. (Imagine that.) If pious parents had any idea what his politics and beliefs were they'd ban his books from children's bookshelves. He was a great celebrity and a huge success, but his own spectacular bankruptcy made him more understanding of failure in others, and a greater respecter of luck as a shaper of human events. He was the opposite of the Horatio Algers and Norman Vincent Peales and the modern day charlatans who preach (for large sums) that all it takes to be rich is hard work and regular church attendance. Twain vivisected that kind of phony philosophy a century ago, but it's still around. Which is why we need satirists today more than ever. Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages.

(Have I reminded anyone lately that it's the perfect Christmas and birthday gift?)

Evolution and other events

I somehow failed to notice that yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, an event I didn't forget to include in A Book of Ages. What people forget is how scrupulously cautious Darwin was as a revolutionary. He checked and double checked before leaping to a dangerous conclusion. He also remained firmly in the fold of believers. Would this make him a Creationist? Not ideologically, not to fly in the face of science, no. Darwin appears three times in A Book of Ages.

November 24th is also the day Agatha Christie's play "The Mouse Trap" opened in the West End of London. It's still running. I note this event on page 229. Christie was 62.

A Dynamite Idea

On this day in 1867 armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel patented a new explosive which he called Dynamite. It changed warfare and the craft of bank robbery forever, and gave Alfred Nobel a nickname he disliked. In 1888 he read a premature obituary of himself in the newspaper and was so appalled by what people thought of him that he made a decision. To leave his immense wealth to an organization dedicated to undoing what he'd spent his life at. He was 54. You can call the Nobel Peace Prize a change of heart or a masterful public relations achievement, but one thing's certain: when people hear the name Nobel, the first thing that comes to mind isn't blowing people up. Alfred Nobel appears three times in A Book of Ages. His is only one of many life-changing moments I included in the book.

Laurence Sterne, inventor of the inside joke

On Laurence Sterne's birthday, it's appropriate to acknowledge his invention of jokes only well-read people would get. Tristram Shandy remains the longest and best inside joke in literature, and maybe the joke is on modern readers who try to discover things in it that aren't there.

I'm curious to know if anyone who's read A Book of Ages has discovered the inside joke I inserted alongside Laurence Sterne. (Write to me if you have.) As with most jokes, it's all about context. Juxtaposition.

Having read Shandy once, I prefer to have it read to me these days. (John Moffat's Naxos reading is wonderful.) It's like rewatching a familiar episode of Seinfeld in which nothing really happens. (Jerry Seinfeld also appears, once, in A Book of Ages.)

Ben Franklin, the ideal dinner guest

I read in the paper this morning about a new Ben Franklin exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. Who better to spend an hour or two with over Thanksgiving? (Remember it was Franklin who wanted the turkey to be our national emblem, rather than the ill-behaved bald eagle.)

As I was collecting anecdotes and episodes for A Book of Ages, Franklin was the hardest to keep under control: there were so many stories, and so many begged for elaboration. But B. of A. is an ensemble piece. Each story is told at the right length for retelling in one elevator ride. Franklin appears 13 times, the same number as Freud, three fewer than Einstein, one more than Nixon.

At a dinner table ringed with personalities (which is how the book reads) Franklin is the most surprising, the most voluble. The kite is there (did he actually fly it in a thunderstorm?), the illegitimate son, the meeting with Voltaire in Paris (which many consider the high moment of the Enlightenment), his comment about the first manned flight (asked what good it was, he answered "What good is a newborn baby?"), as well as everyday matters of life and age: his retirement fund, his gout. Also his inventions: bifocals, the fire department, etc. Does anyone remember that Franklin was America's first best-selling author? On that score alone he'd have been an interesting person to know.

One item I edited out of the book (I had to edit out some things): it was Ben Franklin who brought rhubarb to America, in 1772.

"Four Score, etc."

It was on this day in 1863 that Abraham Lincoln stood up to say a few words about the Union and Confederate dead at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Address was around 265 words long (it wouldn't have qualified as a minor essay in one of our children's writing classes), and it only took a couple of minutes to deliver it. The president was preceded on the program by Edward Everett who spoke for over two hours. There is one photograph of Lincoln on the occasion. It shows him getting down from the podium, which suggests that the photographer had barely gotten set up when he realized the speech was over, which is a bit like life itself, isn't it? Two years later, the war was over and Lincoln was dead. Abraham Lincoln appears nine times in A Book of Ages. Edward Everett doesn't appear at all.

Mark Twain

On this day in 1865, Mark Twain made his first impression on the reading public with the publication of "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press. He was 29. The story was retitled "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and became the title story of his first book in 1867.

Twain was a Midwesterner transplanted to the California gold fields writing for a New York audience, but there was something universal, or at least All-American, in his colloquial humor and his mixture of high and low life. People felt they knew his characters; the lowlifes put on airs and the toffs were phonies, and only the reader and the author were wise.

Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages. When he was 21 he was training to be a riverboat pilot. (An education as rigorous as becoming an airline pilot today, a process he describes in his book Life on the Mississippi). At age 27 he set aside Samuel Clemens and began writing under the famous pen name. He didn't write his masterpiece until he was 49.

At 60 he was a famous novelist––and bankrupt. To recoup his losses he embarked on a world lecture tour. He met Gandhi and Sigmund Freud, visited Rome and the Taj Mahal. He had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. He owned a grand house in Connecticut. But his finances were always tenuous. Success was a fragile thing. This realization fed his cynicism and made him the greatest American writer of his time.

"I am not a crook"

It was on this day in 1973 that Richard Nixon qualified for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Just five words. Five words everybody knew were not true. "I am not a crook." It happened in Orlando, Florida in front of a few hundred AP editors, which made it hard to retract or clarify. By then he didn't have anybody skilled enough to clarify him out of his situation. He hung on for another ten months. He was 60 years-old.

It's hard to correct the habits of a lifetime. What I remember, watching as a kid from my Republican household, was a kindly, sincere, trustworthy man in a conservative banker's gray or blue suit. His eyes twinkled. He smiled at you right through the television. Behind the facade there was a lot of animal cunning. He was especially good at seeing and exploiting weaknesses in other people. He beat Helen Gahagan Douglas for his Senate seat by suggesting she wore pink underwear. Everybody knew that closet Communists wore pink underwear, but he never offered any eyewitness testimony. He was 37 when he got into the Senate. When he was 30 (the age Hitler was when he grew his famous moustache) Nixon won more than $10,000 off fellow servicemen in the South Pacific. I wonder what that did for morale.

I can still see Nixon's face and hear his voice, coming out of the old Zenith. He seemed so believable, but maybe it was the medium. We believed people we saw on TV. In 1977 the deposed Nixon appeared on TV with David Frost and explained that when a president does something it's not illegal. Nixon appears a dozen times in A Book of Ages. This isn't counting all the times he shows up in other people's stories. Like Kissinger's and Rose Mary Woods', Nixon's loyal, and remarkably elastic, secretary. Nixon's name comes up when Paul Newman finds he's on the president's enemies list, and he comes to mind when William Safire wins a Pulitzer Prize (Safire was a Nixon speechwriter before he became a trusted columnist.)

I'm not changing the subject too much when I mention this. It was on this day in 1970 that Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for his part in the My Lai Massacre. Calley appears twice in A Book of Ages. 102 villagers died in the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 Vietnamese civilians had been killed in similar incidents in that same period. The Courts Martial eventually found Calley guilty of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The public reaction was mixed. The day after Calley was sentenced President Nixon ordered him transferred from Leavenworth Prison to house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the end he only served 3 1/2 years of his sentence. After his release Calley managed to lead a fairly normal life. He worked in a jewelry store. He got a divorce. In August of this year, he apologized for what he had been a part of. He'd gotten on with his life. What a burden to carry, though. But people didn't stop him on the street. They didn't associate the guy passing them on the sidewalk with something that had happened long ago in a war zone. I suppose the name rang a bell when he wrote a check; maybe he paid cash. The thing is he looked just like everybody else. So did Richard Nixon.

Moby Dick and the life around it

Moby Dick was published on this day in 1851. It was Herman Melville's sixth book and his most ambitious, but it didn't sell, and the experience nearly destroyed him. Readers wanted roistering sea tales more than deep dish metaphors. Melville's family life suffered. He drank. His wife's relatives urged her to have him put in an asylum. In 1852 the New York Day Book published an article titled "Herman Melville Crazy." Perhaps he was. He continued writing. He wrote an epic poem of 16,000 lines, which also failed. He eventually retired on legacies from dead relatives.

Herman Melville grew up in New York, the third child of a merchant and importer, descended from an old New England family––Melville's grandfather had participated in the Boston Tea Party. But the family fell into poverty when the import firm collapsed. Allan Melvill died bankrupt when Herman was 12, and his widow added an "e" to the end of the family name. Melville went to sea when he was 20. When he was 23 he jumped ship onto an island in the south Pacific, where he lived among the natives for several weeks. No clothes, free love and cannibalism provided material for a book which he called Typee. Despite the title, the manuscript was handwritten. He followed Typee with four other books about the sea, which found a ready audience. But this is the loop often followed by authors: repeated effort finds success and success creates a thirst for deeper significance, a masterpiece is written and published and the author learns that readers only wanted to be amused. They wanted sensation more than meaning. Herman Melville died at age 72, a forgotten author. Moby Dick had only sold a little over 3000 copies. Nobody read it in school. It wouldn't become the great nineteenth century novel until well into the twentieth.

Herman Melville appears three times in A Book of Ages. I have never read Moby Dick, though I admire people who have tried. I put it in a special category among books written to be written about, and maybe that is its problem. I remember reading Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" with a classroom of serious literary types––I could barely keep a straight face. When it comes to downbeat books about Man's Fate I prefer brisker, funnier, more ironic books, like Waugh's "A Handful of Dust", and Voltaire's "Candide". Among the hundreds of allusive fictions set upon the sea––Hemingway's, Jack London's, Joseph Conrad's, Waugh's, Homer's and Virginia Woolf's––I prize the short story by Stephen Crane most, perhaps because it is so brief and simply told. When he was 25 he was shipwrecked and set adrift in an open boat. The story begins "None of them knew the color of the sky." Now there is a description of man's helplessness.

The events of life gather their significance from what is occurring around them, the juxtapositions, tragedy alongside comedy, innocence beside grim experience, goodness prosecuted while villainy proceeds uninterrupted, seriousness (like Melville's) mocked and ignored while frivolousness sells and bad writing makes authors rich. Juxtapositions supply the irony. In A Book of Ages, the entry about Melville's Moby Dick is preceded by Clare Boothe finally letting Henry Luce go "all the way" on a trip to Florida. The next entry is about Carl Jung meeting Sigmund Freud for the first time; they spent thirteen hours talking about word association. Speaking of word association: the title Moby Dick always made adolescent boys laugh in the back of the classroom. I wonder what Melville was thinking. All of the authors cited here appear multiple times in my book. It's as if they are still conversing among themselves.

Veterans' Day

Ninety one years ago, at 11 minutes and 11 seconds after 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month, the war ended. Sixteen million had died. Twenty one million were wounded. Blinded and maimed veterans would populate city streets for years, selling pencils or pen-wipes or whatever passersby might want. An entire generation was depleted, offices couldn't find the people they needed, women didn't marry. Poets and authors and painters didn't create great works because they died in the trenches.

Some did survive. J. R. R. Tolkien began writing about elves and hobbits while hunkering in a dugout on the Somme. E. E. Cummings wrote The Enormous Room about his experience being imprisoned in France; he'd written about the insanity of the war, and the generals didn't like it.

Ernest Hemingway was wounded on the Italian Front; he was a noncombatant, an ambulance driver. He had over 200 pieces of shrapnel removed from his legs. He was 18. He met and fell in love with a nurse; years later he wrote a book about it. Gertrude Stein called them The Lost Generation, a name that suited them, they were survivors but the battlefield would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

A few days before his 21st birthday, Robert Graves was wounded on the Western Front. His death was reported in the Times. His parents received his belongings. But he wasn't dead. He would survive another 69 years and write more than a hundred books.

War supplies the defining moment in many novels, some written by authors who were there, others, like Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage, written by authors who weren't even born when the conflict took place. Some of the most vivid depictions of heroism are acted out by film stars––John Wayne comes to mind––who stayed home. And then there are combat veterans like James Stewart––who was also too old to be drafted––who avoided war movies, instead playing disappointed men like George Bailey and Elwood P. Dowd. Veterans of World War I wrote America's musical comedies and edited its newspapers, performed surgeries, taught school and invented everyday products, built its cars and designed its skyscrapers. Many of their stories are in A Book of Ages. Whichever era they fought in, war runs like a seam through hundreds of the lives I included in the book, and it reverberates down the years, coloring everything they did.

Stanley and Livingstone

Victorian newspapers thrilled their readers with tales of explorers finding the sources of tropical rivers, discovering unknown species of birds and lost tribes. Often as not the famous explorers eventually disappeared themselves, which is what happened to African explorer, Dr. David Livingstone. When Henry Morton Stanley set off to find him in the spring of 1871, Livingstone hadn't been heard from for six years. Stanley found him on November 10th, uttering the famous words "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," or so it was reported in the New York Herald. The Herald paid Stanley's expenses and the story sold a lot of papers. Livingstone had survived pneumonia, exhaustion, disorientation, kidnapping, theft and extreme conditions. At one point the natives confined him in a roped enclosure where he begged passersby for food. Though Stanley found him, he couldn't make him leave. Livingstone died in central Africa two years later, of malaria and an advanced case of dysentery. He was 60. Stanley and Livingstone both appear in A Book of Ages, as do Hernando De Soto, Hernan Cortez, Robert Falcon Scott, Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Roald Amundsen who discovered the South Pole and Christopher Robin Milne who discovered the North Pole in a memorable expedition described in one of his father's books.

The High Priest of Self-Centeredness

There are two new biographies of Ayn Rand on the market. She of the icy glare, the modified Hitler hairdo, the large dollar-sign brooch. Her philosophy behaved more like a religion or a cult, with fierce dogmas and sudden excommunications. But her devotees are legion. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was one of the earliest, sitting at her feet during her living room sermonettes in the early days in New York. And her books have sold millions of copies, mostly, it seems, to disgruntled and arrested adolescents who think nobody understands them.

Rand was traumatized by the Russian Revolution. Her family lost everything when the Bolsheviks took over. Impoverishment at the hands of Russian governments has shaped some of the greatest and most peculiar literature we have, from Conrad to Nabokov (his sister was Ayn Rand's best friend). None, perhaps, as odd as Rand's. Nabokov's peculiarities are well cataloged in A Book of Ages. Had these Rand biographies been published earlier I would have included more about her. She preached holy individualism, and fixated on muscular, dominant males in her novels, yet she kept her husband in a state of servility. He was fully informed about her twice weekly sexual intercourse with her lover and deputy. She made Frank wear a bell on his shoes so she could hear his movements around the house. During the 1970s her Wednesday evenings were devoted to watching Charlie's Angels. Odd doesn't begin to describe her.

The Revolution

On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the short-lived democratic government that had replaced the Tsarist government, putting in place a ragtag, ruthless, disorganized, incompetent, religiously committed but fanatically irreligious Soviet government that nobody thought would last three months, much less 70 years. It lasted far longer than the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis, who had superior planning and machinery, not to mention far better art direction. In the end it was hard to distinguish the heroic statues promoting the two violently opposed ideologies. The two systems weren't that different in their design and operation. Both kleptocracies, both wonderfully efficient at appropriating property and killing their citizens.

During the Twenties capitalists didn't sleep at night, worrying about the Red Menace, expecting a Revolution to occur here any day. Communism made the Nazis seem far more attractive to people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and the Duke of Windsor, something I note in A Book of Ages. When the Crash came in 1929 Capitalism appeared doomed. For three years, the Hoover administration waited patiently for the economy to revive itself magically, but it didn't. It turned out that money hidden away by plutocrats was no more useful at stimulating an economy than money stolen by Bolsheviks.

Then on November 8th, 1932, FDR was elected president. He quickly betrayed his fellow patricians and rewrote the rulebook. His regulatory system presided over the best half century the US or any nation ever enjoyed. Until Ronald Reagan arrived and put things back to where they were before. But pure, unopposed capitalism is uninteresting on its own. It doesn't galvanize people. Twenty years after its death, Communism remains the energizing philosophy of an important part of the American political spectrum––not the left, but the right. They love it still. It's why they exist, even when it isn't there.

Guy Fawkes

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England with bonfires and with stuffed effigies that children use to extort money and sweets.

On November 5th 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught leaving a rented cellar adjacent to the Houses of Parliament where a subsequent search discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough explosives to break all the windows within a kilometer's radius and exterminate the Mother of Parliaments and King James I during the State Opening scheduled for that day. The Catholic conspirators also planned to kidnap the royal children. They expected a popular uprising to follow that would restore the kingdom to the Catholic faith. If they had succeeded the King James Bible would, like the breed of spaniels, have been named after James's son Charles instead. Unless, of course, the kidnapping had succeeded as well; in that event, who knows. History is a mare's nest of causes and effects.

James I appears once in A Book of Ages. Charles I also appears once. Fawkes doesn't appear at all, but does feature prominently in the film "V for Vendetta." Some consider Guy Fawkes the patron saint of anarchists and pyromaniacs. What the anarchists couldn't achieve, Parliament achieved, at least partly, by legal means, when they beheaded Charles I in 1649.

Did Not Invent Levis

I just read the obituary of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who died last Friday in Paris. He was 100. Why didn't I include him in the book? Why indeed.

Although he didn't invent Levis (that was a different Levi Strauss entirely) Claude L-S changed the way we thought about humanity by asking questions that sounded fundamental and were. "Who are we? How did we come to be be in this time and place?" Questions which conjure the same thoughts of simultaneity raised by A Book of Ages. If I ever get asked to publish a French edition I might have greater latitude to include the kind of public intellectual they have in France. Not pundits but thinkers. If Letterman were on TV in France, Claude Levi-Strauss would have been a regular guest.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was born on this day in 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. The family lived in Missouri until he was ten, when they moved to Houston. He was a Boy Scout and went to church. The family changed denominations three times when he was a kid, finally settling on Episcopalian. Young Walter was a member of a youth branch of the Freemasons. He joined things. He joined a theatre group in college; two friends in the company went on to successful film careers. He wrote for the newspaper at the University of Texas, but he dropped out of college in his junior year to become a newsman, and he was a newsman for the rest of his life. He was 20 years old.

Cronkite was more trustworthy than glamorous. One doubts he would be given an anchor chair today, not in any major TV market anyway. Not pretty enough. He didn't have the jawline or the hair for it. He wore a mustache. He exuded affability tempered with seriousness, tolerance (up to a point; no tolerance for bullshit,) sincerity, sympathy, judgment, and what used to be called "sound Midwestern values." Although that term has suffered noticeably in recent years. When he gave his opinion, as he did in his report on the Vietnam War in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, it was a departure from form and done only after careful sifting of evidence and information. He'd been lied to; we all had. As I mentioned in a post just the other day, the Johnson administration had decided to spin the dispatches from the war zone. The president himself had lied us into the war. For a man from Missouri, especially a newsman, this was intolerable. It demanded a reality check, and he delivered one.

Those who downplay Cronkite's plausibility today or call him biased tend to be implausible and biased themselves, many of them tied in with a cable news organization that was created to spin the daily news feed, disguising it as "fair and balanced." Cronkite recognized their product as packaged, adulterated baloney, and said so, but he no longer had an anchor desk to broadcast from. Walter Cronkite appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Snapshots

Today is the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis in 1903. His father abandoned the family when he was 15, and it was around this time that Walker picked up his first camera. It was a Kodak Brownie. He took it around Toledo, everywhere he went, taking pictures of people unaware, "like a spy" is how he later described it. He spent a year in Paris, thought about being a painter, then settled in New York among the Bohemians. His first published photographs were of the Brooklyn Bridge. They appeared in a 1930 book of poems by Hart Crane. Evans was 27. Most of his photography was of people, though, people sitting on stoops, people working, people sitting on subways who didn't know they were having their picture taken. He took pictures of working men's bedrooms and empty houses.

In 1935 he embarked on a tour of the South, paid for by FDR's Farm Security Administration. Until this time poverty was a private matter, something that wasn't reported in newspapers, wasn't measured, certainly wasn't shown. The photographs appeared in a book accompanied by a text written by James Agee. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men wasn't about famous men at all, but about invisible men––poor men, women and children. Most didn't like having their pictures taken, some were too worn down to protest. Viewers took umbrage, but it brought poverty into the open where people felt obliged to do something about it. For a while anyway. After the Depression was over, poverty went back in the back of the closet. After World War II, Walker Evans spent twenty years taking pictures for Fortune magazine, and he and his wife moved to Connecticut. He appears five times in A Book of Ages.

(Other photographers appear in the book too: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Mathew Brady, Louis Lumiére, Alfred Stieglitz, Alberto Korda, Lewis Carroll, Annie Lebowitz, Abraham Zapruder among them.)

Shaw, Icarus and Keith Richards

I am reminded by today's Writer's Almanac that George Bernard Shaw died on this day in 1950. He was 94, too old to be climbing trees, but that's what he was doing. Not whimsically or playfully. He died of injuries after falling out of the tree he was pruning.

Which makes me think of Keith Richards who fell out of a palm tree while vacationing in Fiji in 2006. Richards survived, and he continues to defy the actuaries' predictions about his lifespan. Based upon his smoking and drinking and carrying on they had arrived at a life expectancy of 52. He is now pushing 66. I doubt he will rival George Bernard Shaw, though, who was a teetotaler, vegetarian and a bit obsessive about physical fitness. I am sure pruning a tree seemed a sensible thing to do at the time. Mr. Richards and Mr. Shaw appear several times each in A Book of Ages.

Cheerleading and Unwarranted Optimism

I learned during my random reading this morning that cheerleading was invented 111 years ago today. At the University of Minnesota of all places, which makes me either proud or embarrassed or both. There are no cheerleaders or former cheerleaders in A Book of Ages. George W. Bush's cheerleading career was edited out last fall. W. did have an interesting rollercoaster life, full of cautionary notes and alarming incidents. He might have been an excellent baseball commissioner.

It was on this day in 1967 that Lyndon B. Johnson and his privy counselors decided that Americans should be fed a sugar-coated account of "progress" in the Vietnam War. Cheerleading began almost immediately. The daily briefings began to sound chirpier, more upbeat, like something being written by a chamber of commerce booster or a public relations writer.

The war was a trap Johnson had been caught in. After Truman's experience at the hands of the McCarthyites no Democrat dared step back from a fight, afraid of being labelled "soft on Communism". So in we waded, right up to our necks. Johnson didn't send himself or his wife or daughter to fight and die there, but he did sacrifice his beloved Great Society to avoid losing a war. Vietnam has become a metaphor for avoidable failure and political quagmire, taking the place of the term "albatross" which had been put into service by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1800s.

The unnecessary war is a recurring theme in A Book of Ages, seen through episodes in the lives of LBJ and JFK, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. who got into fights over it, Daniel Ellsberg, and Richard Nixon who sent his plumbers after Ellsberg, and Bob Woodward who told us about the plumbers, and Henry Kissinger who won a Nobel after washing his hands thoroughly, and Walter Cronkite and one Lieutenant Calley. We see Lieutenant Calleys in every war. A sad business all around, but probably no more rife with cockups than any war, except that it was foolish to begin with. Like Iraq, some say. Which should remind us why we need newspapers and clear eyed journalists, even though they are expensive to send places. They are our eyes and ears.

Stephen Crane

It's Stephen Crane's birthday. He was born in 1871 and died in 1900 at age 28. Several diseases and conditions conspired to kill him, but his life had already worn him to the bone. He went everywhere covering wars and exploring hardships, acquiring yellow fever and malaria and no doubt a level of pessimism that made it harder to survive his illnesses. A Book of Ages began with the details of his short life. I was curious about people who lived to be famous and then died young. He appears in the book four times, writing his masterpiece at age 24, being shipwrecked, marrying a former bordello owner, settling in England, writing his way out of serial poverty––he told a friend he couldn't afford a typewriter. Stephen Crane is the model for every modern writer-adventurer, the reckless youths who travel to dangerous places and eat strange things and write about them for our safe amusement.