The One Percent Doctrine

Ron Suskind, Copyright 2006.

I like to read political type books usually a few years after the publication.  It helps to have a little breathing room from the mercurial present to reflect on events that have transpired.  Unfortunately the subject of this book, the post 9/11 "War on Terror", is even now still too fresh to have a lasting, historically accurate portrait and bias is still too weighty and intrusive in the investigation.

Mr. Suskind follows the post 9/11 response to the most egregious attack on U.S. soil in this century.  It had no real precedent in it's scale and ugliness and our response was and probably still is as a nation finding its way in the dark.
The "One Percent Doctrine", if it is an actual doctrine, is coined from a phrase spoken by Dick Cheney as he contemplated the nexus of terrorism's unfathomable desire for human destruction, the ease of flow of information, money and persons across borders and the post-Cold War lack of controls over weapons of mass destruction.  Basically, the logic of Cheney's argument is:  Even if there is only a one percent chance that a terrorist can find the means and opportunity to detonate a massive weapon, we must act as if it is a certainty.  Ergo, we invade Iraq, even if the intelligence is not conclusive.  Ergo, we subscribe to "aggressive" investigation of culprits to glean whatever information we can get.  Even if that information lacks any standard of verification.  We react.
The book follows the pressures of "notables"; those directors and secretaries that report directly to the President, those that must make the public statements, and contrasts it with the "invisibles"; those agents that must stalk a stealthy, unknown enemy from the far flung and disjointed corners of the earth.  I found the book to be a marvelous insight into how these worlds operate and how their objectives can at times be at loggerheads.
The author makes for riveting reading.  The style is almost like a Grisham or Clancy novel, where the plots twist, villains and heroes circle each other and the action is always moving.  The author will jump from subject to subject, department to department, country to country, agent to agent, notable to notable.  It is well written, and it engages you, but I wonder if the style is appropriate to the subject.
For further criticism, the book is based entirely on interviews with "nearly one hundred well placed sources..." whose identities cannot be revealed.  This is understandable in an environment where livelihoods may be lost by being off message or prosecution may ensue from revealing classified information.  The problem created, is however, credibility.  How much can be trusted from an interview, when you have definite motives for your interviewees?    I can glean from reading the book that George Tenet was probably a major source.
In all, I did enjoy the book.  I do have to wonder, long term, what we will really know 20 years from now about how America reacted during the first several years of this new millennium.

Quito

URL for this route is: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4170580
Begin from teleferico, the cable car up the mountain.  Taxi's all know the place.  Opens at 10AM.  Be there at or before 10AM.  You want an early start on this.  $8.50 for a two way ticket for foreigners.  The hike commences at 13,450'.  Approximately 3 miles.  First 2 miles is pretty much getting to the volcanic outcropping, with relatively easy, uphill hiking.  Gets up to about 14,500 feet.  Follow the trail around the right of the rock, pass the scree and then head up.  The last half mile is harsh if, like me, you were hanging out at sea level just yesterday. You are now at around 15,000' and you have to fight your way up.
Considerations:  Weather can be a factor, ergo, start early.  Thunderstorms can be a bad thing when they are developing around you.  First time I did this, a massive storm developed on the summit while I was hiking down.  I could only imagine the terror of those that I had just passed going up as I was headed down.  Heaviest season for Thunderstorms is March-May (averaging about 6 inches a month), driest would be June-August (1.2 inches), when prevailing winds turn southern.  Temperatures are almost always the same year round.  You're at the equator, but you're at 13,000+ feet.  It will get cold.  Layers are the key to a comfortable climb.
Bring a lot of water.  Altitude will make you dehydrate (as will the exertion) more than you realize.  Bring snacks as well.
This is a primer route for Cotopaxi.

Anywhere, USA

Often, days later, people will ask me where I went on my last trip.  If you ask me this, don't be too surprised to see me respond with a deer-in-the-headlights look.  More often than not, I really don't remember.

Rules of the Road:
#1:  Don't get out of bed until you remember where you are.
You've spent 12 or 14 hours in and out of cockpits and airports.  You've traveled over well worn paths and the view, while stunning at times, becomes a monotony of the infinite.  Then there's the obligatory van ride, hotel check in, decompression in your room ritual and with any luck you're asleep in an hour.  You wake up to use the bathroom and you have no idea where the hell you are.  Don't get out of bed.  Many a stubbed toe has taught me to take a moment and figure out where you are, which direction the bathroom is, how you got there, before you get up.

#2:  Don't patronize the chain restaurants.
The temptation of ease is always there.  It's comforting when you are in an unfamiliar landscape to find things that you can recognize to help you get your bearings.  That's why restaurant chains are so successful.  You pay for that convenience of familiarity with overpriced, mediocre food.  Over the years, I've found that people do actually know how to cook in different parts of the world.  Live a little dangerously and find something local, if you have the time.  More often than not, you'll leave pleasantly surprised at a really good meal.

#3:  Get out there.
It's really cheap.  Put on your running shoes and layer up as appropriate.  Ask the concierge or front desk if there's anything interesting to see nearby.  Sometimes you get real good recommendations.  Sometimes just a blank stare.  Then just head out the door in a direction that seems promising.  You'll be amazed at what you come across sometimes.

#4:  Turn off the idiot box.
You can pass any amount of time watching nothing at all.  An hour to kill?  Five hours?  All day?  TV will accommodate whatever waste of time you need.  Which is fine I guess, if you don't like existence.

#5:  Sometimes you just need to sleep.
It's 11PM.  I'm training for a marathon, so I've got to get my miles in.  I'm on a treadmill in the middle of the night to run 7 or 8 miles.  Don't do that.  It's stupid.

#6:  Treadmills suck.
Not unless you have to.  Not unless you're next to an interstate or it's 10 below and a snow storm...and I'll even bend the snow storm rule sometimes.

#7:  Hotel restaurants suck.
Way overpriced and invariably mediocre.

#8:  Don't trust the iron.
Many a shirt has been ruined by an iron with encrusted gunk because people don't realize that you have to use distilled water in an iron.

#9:  Remember your room number before you go out for a run.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget.

#10:  When your wife calls and wants to talk, turn off the TV.
Sorry honey.  I'm still a slow learner on this one.

The Gorilla Mask

Like most normal people, I have a gorilla suit in my closet.  You never know when it can come in handy.  Years ago, for Halloween, our church had a "Trunk or Treat" in the parking lot.  Kind of a fun, low-key event where you decorate your vehicle and kids in their costumes come by and collect their treat.  So I turn the bed of my truck into a cage, put on my suit and put a bowl on the tailgate to see how many kids are brave enough to reach into the cage to get some candy.  Hey, this stuff shouldn't be free.

So I'm there, making a ruckus, shaking the truck, shaking the cage and making the obligatory gorilla grunts,  simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying the the kids.  Now, this is southeast Texas and even though it's late October, it stays pretty hot and humid and I'm finding that a latex rubber and faux fur mask is pretty sweltering.  From time to time, I have to stop and take the mask off to cool down.  I'm in full view of the children and the moment that the mask comes off, it's like a light switch goes off in their head, and there suddenly before them is a man in a hairy suit.  The magic spell is broken and the kids rapture evaporates.  Poof.  But here's the funny thing:  I put the mask back on and immediately the light comes back on, the magic spell is back in full effect, and the same children are suddenly drawn into it.  One moment I'm just a guy in a suit, the next moment it's a real gorilla sitting there in the back of the truck.  The kids are just as apprehensive as before to take the candy, even though, not two seconds earlier, they could clearly see and understand that this was all just a charade.

"The enigma of the dream, for example, is at first interpreted [by a child] as in no sense mental:  it is external to the dreamer, even though invisible to others.  And the memory of the dream is confused with ordinary memories, so that the two worlds are mixed."  Joseph Campbell, "The Masks of God:  Primitive Mythology"

I wonder if we sometimes are as simple-minded as children when we look at spiritual things.  We have an adult world that we grow up into, full of Aristotle's uncompromising logic, that, more often than not, just does not reconcile with the faith implanted in our hearts.  Read just about any Biblical story, and you are going to be hard pressed and on the defensive to try to explain this from a rational, scientific point of view.  For many people of faith, this puts them in a reactionary, persecuted position.

What if this was all unnecessary?  Why have we gotten it into our heads that the things that we feel so deeply within us have to be proven scientifically?  Is it possible for us to live, as a child, with the acceptance that there are two distinct worlds:  the world the we experience perceptively, concretely, rationally, and the world beyond this?  The world that defines a greater, more sublime truth that in the moment of discovery and transmission is immediately made ephemeral.  Take for example the concept of eternity.  As a tenant of most religions, life is believed to be of an infinite and eternal nature, but how do you reconcile that with anything and everything that we experience in this life?  All that we know has an beginning and an end.  I submit that our brains are not even wired to comprehend the nature of eternity, like alternate dimension that simply lies outside our perception.  At times there can be a glimpse, a parting of the veil, and we can approach this alternate dimension, but the moment that we attempt to express it in any perceptible, concrete form...poof.  It's gone.

Blood and Thunder

Blood and Thunder, by Hampton Sides

As I spend an unusual amount of time flying over the scenery east of the Mississippi, I have always been fascinated and drawn to this land. So barren, so vast and unyielding to man's expansion. At home I have an 1846 map of the United State's west hanging on the wall. There are parts of the map that might well just be labeled: There be dragons.

I found this book, a history of US expansion (the harvest of Manifest Destiny) westward to the Pacific to be a great read. The vastness of scope of the topic is narrowed by focusing on the life of Kit Carson. I won't go the exploits of his life as it would take several pages, but suffice it to say, that this simple, illiterate man seemed to be on scene during many of the critical events of the westward expansion.

Blood and Thunder refers to the dime novel type literature that emerged during the time, of which Mr. Carson was a frequent protagonist. The author does a good job of dispelling some of the hero worship so common for its time. Most appreciably, he does a good job of providing a nuanced view of many of the characters and events of this time. Take John Chivington, hero of the Battle of Glorieta Pass. A man who pretty much shut down the Confederate campaign in New Mexico with a bold action that destroyed their supplies. The same man who would be responsible for the slaughter of a weakened tribe of Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado. 53 men and 110 women and children were killed during this "military" engagement of a people waving white flags.

Even the hero, Kit Carson is not above reproach. While overwhelmingly held in high regard by US generals, presidents and adoring fans on the eastern seaboard as well as many Native American tribesmen for his even and fair nature, he still followed orders to pursue the scorched earth policy that drove the Navajo to starvation and capitulation. The author provides a fairly simplistic rationale for his defense, but his actions in this case are indefensible to history.

Nor is this a simple, Dances with Wolves, narration of the evil white man's conquest of the Native Americans. Vivid detail is given to unprovoked attacks by young, ambitious braves who would rape, torture and kill throughout the region. The initial outreaches and contact with the Navajo were seemingly made in good faith, but quickly fell apart. Blame is to be shared with both parties. Wonderful is the contrast between Barboncito and Manuelito, two leaders of the Navajo. Manuelito, the unflinching, unbending proud man who fought bitterly against the US, a man who would rather see his people starve than yield to the invaders. Compare that then with Barboncito who surrendered to the US forces, lead the Navajo on their "long walk" from their ancestral homes, attempted to adopt the agrarian lifestyle and saw it's failure and finally, successfully pleaded before General Sherman to have his people restored to their homeland. In the long run, it was the older, soft spoken Barboncito who did more for his people than Manuelito with his fire and force.

The author has a fluid style and paints vivid portraits and landscapes. I recommend this book for anyone who has starred out of a window during a long transcontinental flight and wondered who on earth would live in such an arid and unforgiving place.

Calgary

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4160981It's a dark November morning.  I wait for daylight to slowly break, sometime after 7:30, throw on a few layers and stumble out the door, down the elevator, out the hotel.  29 degrees snaps me awake and I slowly roll into my pace.  Overcast, so there's no clear division between night and day, people are bustling their way to work, downtown from where I'm distancing myself.  My ankle is stiff from an old injury, it's cold.  Why am I doing this?  Phyllis asked me that about a year ago.  I still don't have a good answer.  About a mile in, it's coming together now.  My ankle feels good, my breathing is in tempo, I see a runner, I pass.  Two lonely figures on a well worn path.  I used to have a goal for my running.  A marathon, a race, something to focus my energy on.  Now I just run, and I've found that I'm a lot happier.  I can stop if I want, I can run fast if I want, I can daydream, take a picture.  It's much more liberating than focusing on a pace, a distance or a goal.  Fall is well spent here, the trees are just about all barren now.  I cross the river on my way back.  The end is near, my body feels renewed and strong.  It's a Monday morning, I'm 2000 miles or more from my home, my family.  I know no one here, and yet I've breathed their crisp air, seen a brief glimpse of the outstretched plains and their developing, changing city.  In a few hours I'll be flying back to home and hearth.  Why do I do this?  I guess it beats watching TV.

Intersections with God

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

If someone were to ask me what this book was about, I would be hard pressed to give an answer.  How do you summarize a novel of four parts, twelve books about as many chapters as the Bible itself?  A book whose landscape incorporates the most complete psychology (a term barely invented at the time) of man, that Freud himself had to concede that the book was one of the top three novels ever written.  I won't bother here, but would like to tell you about what I've discovered and rediscovered reading this book recently about what it reveals about our relationship with God and what that says about ourselves.

To really appreciate a Dostoevsky novel, it helps to understand certain patterns that he employed in many of his novels.  Dostoevsky will first develop a character that typifies a common trait or personality found in all of us, find its foil character, and then thrust them into a confrontation in some outrageous, scandalous scene (think reality TV show, but with characters that actually have depth).  In this confrontation, a truth is revealed, a correct path will appear before them that will free them from their struggle but inevitably, their natures will out and it all comes crashing down.  Underlying the scene is a landscape often charged with societal, allegorical or religious connotations.  As the characters vie with each other, pulling and straining against their foil, the intersection point on the landscape often reveals a marked, sublime truth.  In the case of the Brothers Karamazov, the intersections often tread on holy and unholy ground and in the process reveal the face of God.

Dimitry vs. Ivan:
Dimitry (Mitya) is a troubled soul.  The  oldest of the Karamazov brothers, raised feral because the father was just too self absorbed to remember that he even had a boy, is the sensualist.  He is large, forceful and impetuous.  Never a plan, but always in action, he is violent and emotional.  Screaming one moment, crying the next.  Forever trapped in a cage of his own consequences, Mitya is forever in motion (usually drunk) and forever in a cycle of self destruction.  The landscape of Mitya's ruin would not surprisingly be the heart of a beautiful but treacherous woman.  "It's a hell of a situation, you know:  what the head brands as shameful may appear as sheer beauty to the heart."  "...God and the devil join battle, and the battlefield is the heart of man."  For Mitya, God and the devil cast him about.  Despite all his seeming strength and power, he his cast about, impotent by the deep emotions that rage within him.  He rides the cycle of elation, degradation, self-loathing, redemption and back to elation.  Yes, God, or at least Mitya's concept of god, torments him.  He is led to commit a despicable act by the implanted idea (Ivan's) that if there is no god, then every thing is permitted.  Although this nihilist philosophy attracts him, even confuses him, he is never fully converted to the idea.  Indeed, he is only attracted to it as a justification for his actions, to relieve his troubled heart.  In this, it fails.  It is not until he is fully trapped by the consequences of his actions, his ability to act literally taken away from him by being imprisoned, that he reaches his catharsis.  In the process of being arrested for murder, he drifts into a dream.  He sees a burnt village and all manner of unearned suffering.  A cold, starving baby cries, unanswered, unable to be soothed or helped.  "Why?"  The answer overwhelms him: We are all guilty.  We are responsible for everything and everyone.  As an aspen colony is a singular, interconnected root system, humanity is all tied together by invisible connections and interactions.  The good and evil we bring in echoes through the system and while we may not be directly responsible for the actions of others, we are all responsible for the evil that exists in the world.  Upon reaching this, Mitya is a changed man.  Although he has been falsely accused of murder, he feels a responsibility to pay the debt, "for someone has to pay."  And yet, this change within him has been brought from without.  "...[M]en like me must be struck down by life; they must be caught as in lasso and bound by an outside force.  Without that, I would have never risen by myself!"  Mitya's final fate is left in doubt in the end.  Although convicted, a realistic escape plan is hatched and the torment of his ability to act returns.  We draw from Mitya the feelings of desperation felt by all of us who struggle against our own natures. Mitya's vision of God is at best imperfect.  He never fully reconciles it, because he is never fully reconciled to himself.  Dostoevsky died before the second novel could be written and we are left to wonder how it all would have ended up.  Perhaps better that way, since I sometimes wonder about the same thing for myself.

Ivan's is a tormented mind.  The second of the brothers, raised with the same neglect as Dimitry, Ivan is best described as intelligent and detached.  Where for Dimitry the war was waged in the heart, for Ivan the war is waged in the mind.  Although Ivan is sincere in his investigation into God, he seems to attack the problem backwards.  He tries to understand Him by understanding the world that He has created and by understanding the opposite of Him.  He sees and is overwhelmed by the most degrading parts of humanity, the most vile parts of our natures; child abusers, mass murders, etc.  With all this bile, the only intelligent response is rebellion.  A simple answer would be; god's work is imperfect, ergo, there is no god, but this is not a satisfying answer to Ivan.  There must be more to the puzzle.  No, Ivan's response is that he rejects it.  He rejects it all.  If God lives and this is the world that He created, if we must forgive the most degraded among us, those that would maliciously hurt children, well, I want no part of that.  If the final resolution of this world is that the mother of the child who has been grotesquely tortured, maimed and killed must embrace and love the man who did it, well what kind of solution is that?
If Dimitry was a man of action, Ivan is a study in inaction.  His culpability in his father's murder is that he knew that it was going to happen and he stood aside and let it.  If Dimitry wanted to plunge head first into either heaven or hell, Ivan just wants to stand back and sneer at all the human drama and stupidity.  And yet, he is tormented.  He is unsatisfied.
Ivan reaches his catharsis in madness.  Rather than being confronted with God, he is confronted with His foil, the devil.  In a wonderful chapter near the end, Ivan is alone in his room he begins to hallucinate that the devil is there with him.  Not a stupid red guy with horns and tail, but an aging gentleman with some nice, if slightly out of fashion clothes.  Ivan knows that this is not real and tries to ignore and dismiss the unwanted visitor, but the devil keeps prattling on and on.  Invariably, Ivan begins to interact with his hallucination and is continually trying to get it to go away, prove that it's not real so that it will disappear.  But he can't.  Finally, infuriated, he throws a glass at the apparition.  Suddenly, a knock at the door, he's lying there unable to move, he's dreaming and there's the glass sitting next to him.  All a dream, but Ivan has been totally unhinged.
It is hard to be too critical of Ivan.  His attempt to understand the divine, the sublime through his gifted mind is sincere and heartfelt.  It is ultimately his aloofness that condemns him to this torture.  His inability to truly love others isolates and destroys him.  There is a message in there for all of us, though.  God cannot be reached through the mind.  The higher that you build the Tower of Babel, the more confounded the effort will become.  Ivan's final fate is also left unresolved and this is appropriate as well.  There can never be a conclusion that can fully satisfy the mind.

Alyosha vs. Rakitin:
By Dostoevsky's own early admission, Alyosha is the unlikely hero of the novel; the beautiful soul.  He is the third of the brothers and we meet him early as a novice in a monastery.  He is young, impressionistic and a little naive.  Hardly a hero.  To understand him, it is probably best to look at who his is not:  Rakitin.
Rakitin is Alyosha's foil.  He is also in the monastery, a divinity student, whose real aim is not to learn about god or any of that nonsense.  He is on the fast track to being a learned, career intellectual; a socialist revolutionary; a leader of men through the violent changes that would shortly come to Russia at the turn of the century.  Nothing amuses him more than a good scandal, or when a lofty person is brought down.  At the heart of all of it, is that Rakitin feels overwhelmingly superior to those around him and anytime that position is challenged he is deeply offended.  In short, Rakitin loves the notion that he loves all men, just not the ones that happen to be around him.  There is no catharsis within him.  No struggle, other than the continuous struggle against others to raise himself up.  Needless to say, he is cynical about god.  He sneers at the simple minded folk with their stupid, sentimental customs which bind them.

Alyosha can best be described as loving and honest.  People trust him, because he simply can always be trusted.  As mentioned before, he begins the novel as a simple novice in a monastery.  He isn't very independent minded and is impressionable, dutifully following everything that he learns from the Elder Zosima.  The elder dies, however, and in this Alyosha confronts his catharsis.  Not that he dies, but in the grotesque scene that occurs at his funeral.  For whatever reason, the local tradition holds that when a saint dies, his body will not decay like normal, but will be preserved and will even have healing powers.  Who knows where this stuff comes from and certainly no one has actually experienced such a phenomenon, but people do like to cling to some pretty ridiculous ideas sometimes.  Well, the body, lying unprepared begins, of course to stink.  Everyone is incensed.  This was no man of God, this is God's judgment, etc...  It's all rather disrespectful and ignorant, but sometimes people like a good scandal.  People like to see a person brought down, degraded.  This is all too much for young Alyosha.  His faith is shattered.  Probably not so much that the miracle didn't occur, but that God would allow this loving, Christlike man (and he really was that) to be so humiliated in the end.  Rakitin sees Alyosha lying on the ground, destroyed.  Rakitin seizes the moment, offers him some liquor and leads him to a lady of ill repute.  How fun to watch "the fall of the upright."  But Alyosha has a good heart, the woman is in pain herself and Alyosha's nature appeals to her, touches her.  He is kind to her, and that kindness, so long absent in her life, touches her, changes her, if only for a moment.  In this he has returned, not to some strange mystical faith of childhood, but in the real faith that matters in this life.  The faith that unites us "by a good and decent feeling, which made us...better people, probably than we would otherwise have been."  He returns to the monastery for the last time, to pay his last respects.  As he listens to the eulogy, a scriptural reading of the life of Christ; the first miracle, the wedding feast where the water is turned to wine, he drifts into sleep.  He imagines the scene, a simple miracle where Christ is among some simple people and all He does is want to bring a little joy to their lives.  That's all.  Nothing huge or profound.  Just be among people and help to bring them joy.  Suddenly the room expands and Alyosha is there himself, the elder Zosima as well, beckons him to join the party.  And then he wakes, but his heart is filled.  "'Someone visited my soul then,' he would later say, with firm faith in his works."

Sure, a simple dream, and I think most people would dismiss such a thing.  I have always been touched by this scene, however, because I've felt the same thing myself at one point in my life, many years ago.  I won't go into details, because, like this scene, the moment it escapes my lips, it's somehow degraded and sounds a bit simple minded, naive and stupid.  Be that as it may, I know what I felt those many years ago and though I've certainly been through my life alternatively a Dimitry, Ivan or even Rakitin, I know that I can always return to that moment when I felt like he did.  Further, when I have found that when I do good things for others, what Christianity teaches us that we should be, I reconnect with that moment and am always refreshed.  Living water from a well that never dries.