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Movie poster for 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World' featuring Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, with a sailing ship in the background.

It’s become a meme to say derisively that a film has been made for “modern audiences”. This is usually a synonym for the dreaded “W” word, which in today’s usage is curiously not far off in meaning from another “W” word. Essentially, when somebody says that a film is being pitched at “modern audiences”, it is understood to mean that it has changed the demographics of characters, or altered details to reflect modern political concerns, and, perhaps above all else, prioritized the audience’s perceived sensitivities over honest storytelling.

Master and Commander has gained a following over the years as a film that takes us away from all that; a film that hearkens back to the good old naval yarns of yore, about a daring captain and his steadfast crew on a bold seafaring journey. Everyone loves sailing for adventure on the big blue wet thing!

The story begins with the famous intro: “April, 1805. Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.” Captain Jack Aubrey of the HMS Surprise has been ordered to pursue the French frigate Acheron along the coast of South America. Aubrey enthusiastically follows his orders, even after his first encounter with the Archeron goes against him, and through setback after setback after that. 

But of course, that’s not the real meat of the film. The charm of Master and Commander is in its portrayal of life aboard a 19th-century man-o’-war, The confinement to close quarters, the dense ocean fogs, the dependence on the wind (or lack of it), the camaraderie and conflict among the crew, the superstitions of the common Jack Tars, the ambitions of the young boys who hope one day to rise to command a ship themselves… all these elements are portrayed in great detail, making HMS Surprise as vibrant and alive as any city. 

And most memorable of all is the friendship between Capt. Aubrey and the ship’s doctor and amateur biologist, Stephen Maturin. The two men talk, argue, affectionately mock one another, and, when the time comes, stare down death together. At it’s core, it’s a buddy movie, and who doesn’t enjoy a good pair of friends facing adversity together?

Small wonder the film has become a cult classic. I’m reminded of what somebody said about The Man Who Would be King (another great historical epic buddy movie): “even when it was made, they said they don’t make films like that any more.” 

However… there is just one small issue. Go back and read the first paragraph of this post. Now, Master and Commander doesn’t do any of the typical things associated with films for “modern audiences.” Not only are there no female characters who could be accused of being too-perfect “Mary Sues”, there are no female characters, period. It fails the Bechdel-Wallace test almost as hard as Lawrence of Arabia. The crew of the Surprise, while racially diverse, has a distinct and well-defined hierarchy to it. Modern political sensibilities are largely absent, save perhaps for one brief discussion on the ethics of flogging.

But here’s the thing: in the book on which the film is based, the action is set in 1812, not 1805. And the vessel that Captain Aubrey is pursuing is not French, but from a different hemisphere altogether. It is… the USS Norfolk. 

Now, if you know a little something about history, this makes a hell of a lot more sense than the movie’s actual plot. Why would a French ship be sent south to plunder whaling ships, when we have just been told Napoleon is planning an invasion of England, and could use the ships somewhere closer to home?  But it actually seems quite logical for a ship from a piratical upstart nation to be seizing whalers. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing that John Bull would expect Brother Jonathan to be doing, and in fact, did. 

But the North American box office is a considerable market, and a film which portrayed the Americans as antagonists would presumably just not fly. So they made the enemy French instead, and no one questioned it, because Britain and France fighting each other just seems natural. “And I’ll wager in their joy they kissed each other’s cheek / (Which is a-what them furriners do!)”  

Does this ruin the movie? Well, it pretty much did for Peter Hitchens, but he’s a hard guy to please. It does take it down a peg in my estimation, from being “great historical epic” to merely “good flick.” But good flicks are hard to come by these days. So, if you enjoy the minute details of 19th-century naval life, and don’t care about the larger geopolitics of the era, it’s a decent way to spend 138 minutes.

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I promise, I really will get back to this blog’s main purpose of reviewing indie books soon. This strange detour we have been on for the past few weeks is actually related to that project, albeit—in typical Ruined Chapel style—not in an obvious way.

You see, I am trying solve a problem. The problem is what we might call ensloppification. (There’s another term, but I decline to use it.) In other words, why is everything becoming awash in slop? It’s getting hard to even find the kind of books I enjoy reading, due to the fact that the entire market for books is now being flooded with slop. Not all of it is AI-generated slop either, though I think some non-trivial and swiftly growing amount is.

Nor is this problem limited to the realm of books. Every facet of life is subject to this problem. There is a profound feeling among people my age that everything has gotten worse in a significant, yet undefinable way since the end of the 20th century. Maybe this is just nostalgia. But I submit to you that it isn’t. That it is rather the acceleration of trends documented by (among others) Paul Kingsnorth and Daniel J. Boorstin. These trends have been with us for centuries, but are now becoming increasingly large parts of life.

Which is not to say they are all bad. As one commenter pointed out, Kingsnorth’s “Machine” has brought with it innumerable material benefits. And when you come right down to it, slop itself can be viewed as a good. Give a starving man slop, and he’ll enjoy it as though it were a banquet. Give a gourmand a banquet, and he may well complain that the meal is ruined because the appetizers included plain gouda when he specifically asked for smoked. It’s all a matter of perspective.

That’s why I like to seek out different, rare perspectives. The author of today’s book is a case in point. In my opinion, Yukio Mishima is probably the greatest ultranationalist bisexual samurai bodybuilder ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you can find anyone else at the intersection of that Venn diagram, I’d like to hear about them.

So what is Sun and Steel about? Well, the truth is, it’s a self-help book. But, um, not exactly a typical self-help book.

The quick summary is that Mishima was a quiet, sickly, bookish youth who demonstrated great facility with words, and not so much with sports and physical activity. But later in life, he realized the importance of physical exertion and muscular development to complement his artistic and aesthetic sensibility. So he started working out with weights and getting fresh air and sunshine, and in doing so, developed a closer connection with his own body.

That’s the CliffsNotes version. But see, there’s more to how Mishima approaches this than “lift heavy stone, make sad head voice quiet.” As in:

It was thus that I found myself confronted with those lumps of steel: heavy, forbidding, cold, as though the essence of night had in them been still further condensed. 

He makes lifting a dumbbell sound like a magic ritual in communion with powerful spiritual forces. They should have given him the Nobel just for that. And he’s not done:

Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential. 

Of course, this isn’t actually what Mishima wrote. It’s a translation from the Japanese. But something tells me it’s a good translation, because that sticks with you.

In summary, exercise strengthens not only the body, but the mind as well. People forget this, but the mind isn’t just the brain. It’s more complex than that, and anyone who has ever done any kind of physical exercise knows that it has a noticeable effect on one’s mental state.

So far, so good. But now, we have to talk about the more problematic aspects of Mishima’s work. You see that subtitle about “Art, Action, and Ritual Death”? Yes, well, it’s time we talked about that last bit. Part of Mishima’s desire for a powerful physique was driven by his wish to die young as an impressive and tragic figure, rather than wasting away in old age.

What’s more, he accomplished this by committing ritual suicide after attempting—with little hope of success, which he must have realized—to inspire the military to overthrow the Japanese government.

Now, it should go without saying, but this is the internet, so I will say it: Ruined Chapel does not endorse these activities. The fact that I admire Mishima’s writing should not be confused with support of all his actions. Suicide is never the answer, and as for his subversive activities, well, while I am not terribly familiar with the politics of mid 20th-century Japan, (or any other period Japan, for that matter) I do have some general comments on the concept.

Do you know why popular opinion holds that the American Revolution was awesome, but the French Revolution was super creepy? Part of the reason might be that America is a global superpower that spreads its own version of history everywhere, but I think another part of it is that the Americans didn’t insist on destroying the British monarchy. A lot of the revolutionaries probably would have if they could have, but because of the Atlantic Ocean, they couldn’t. So, they were forced to settle for making a new government somewhere else.

Which is actually the much cooler thing to do. If you try to take over the existing government, then even if you succeed, you’re just taking on their problems. It’s like the Statutory Duel in The Grand Duke: “The winner must adopt / The loser’s poor relations / Discharge his debts, / Pay all his bets, / And take his obligations.” After their revolution, the new French government had the same problems as the old one. Even the most obsessive, hyper-focused, and determined administrative nerd of the age couldn’t fix the country’s fundamental problems. Much better to start anew someplace else.

So, in summary, I approve of Mishima’s ideas on the relationship of body and mind, of the inadequacy of words to express certain feelings. I do not approve of his ideas regarding ritual death and leading futile coup attempts. Now that that’s cleared up, we can focus on the important point: how all this relates to the problem of slop I noted earlier.

As the last several posts have discussed, we live in an increasingly technological, mechanical, and fundamentally anti-biological epoch. Our shelter from the harsh realities of the natural world means that our primary emotional experiences come in the form of transmitted images, produced artificially for our passive entertainment.

Now, a lot of people have started to notice this, and they are bothered by it. For example, I cannot tell you how many articles and videos I’ve read and watched about how movies nowadays seem so fake and lifeless. This is a valid critique, but it also does not go far enough.  It’s true that Lawrence of Arabia looks more realistic than Marvel Spandex Brigade #7000, but that makes it easy to forget that Lawrence of Arabia is also fake. Sir David Lean was standing behind the camera, capturing the perfect shot, which he and Anne V. Coates then edited for our consumption. Everything nowadays is so fake that the artisanal, meticulously-crafted fakes of yesteryear seem real to us.

(This, by the way, is why Boorstin is so valuable. He was writing in an era that people of my generation look back on as comparatively brimming with genuine reality—and it was—but that Boorstin already saw as thoroughly laced with the seeds of the fake and the simulated.)

This is where Mishima comes in. Reality is not in images or even words, much as it pained a wordsmith like Mishima to admit. Reality is muscle, it is sweat, it is the “runner’s high” that comes once you are thoroughly exhausted from physical exercise.

Most important, of course, is that reality is not always a pretty picture. Rather it is chiaroscuro of both pleasant and unpleasant things, and the true experience of reality must contain elements that are not strictly pleasurable, at least as the term is normally understood. Physical exercise is the perfect distillation of this concept, because it is an activity that can feel great and hurt like hell at the same time.

Understanding this strange duality, accepting that pain is a part of experiencing actual life, as opposed to consooming slop, is the philosophical insight at the core of Mishima’s writing and his aesthetic sensibility. It is also, in my opinion, the key to experiencing life after Kingsnorth’s “Machine.”

Note that I chose my words there very carefully. I did not say “resist” or “fight” or “destroy” the Machine. As Kingsnorth documented exhaustively, and then somehow himself failed to understand, people have been going against the Machine for over 4,000 years, and they have made no progress on getting rid of it. Despite some of the more occult takes that I’ve entertained, I ultimately don’t think the Machine is a supernatural force. It is just a thing. It does some good things and it does some bad things. Trying to fight it is like trying to fight the existence of atmospheric pressure.

Rather, what we are seeking is a way to survive in the absence of the Machine, just in case it stops. A way to find meaning in life separate from anything Machine-related, whether good or bad. Mishima’s philosophy is the philosophy of someone who has set himself apart from the world of the Machine, and learned to accustom his mind to the harshness of physical reality. Clearly, not everything he found there was idyllic, and to live in reality is by no means synonymous with living happily. It is only a start, not a final goal to be achieved. And as the old saying goes, the best time to start was 30 years ago. The second-best time to start is now.

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How many of you remember the movie Jackie from 2016? It was well-received at the time, but like everything in our age of ephemera, it didn’t make any lasting impression. As the national motto says, “don’t ask questions, just consoom product, then get excited for next product.”

Despite my best efforts (i.e. writing long-winded, rambling reviews) it didn’t even manage to garner Natalie Portman the second Oscar she deserved. It’s too bad, because if it had, it would have made the 2017 Best Picture announcement even more screwed up, since presumably Faye Dunaway would have announced Jackie as the winner when it wasn’t nominated.

On the other hand, more people probably remember Jackie than have read Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image. Which is also too bad, because, as I said in my review, it basically predicted our current society.

If you don’t want to read (or reread) my review, the executive summary of Boorstin’s book is that ours is increasingly a world of what he termed “pseudo-events”. Pseudo-events being artificial creations of publicists and propagandists to generate news items, or what we today call “content.”

Careful readers will notice I’ve referenced one pseudo-event already: the Oscars, which is a ceremony based around people giving themselves awards for pretending to do things and creating elaborate illusions. It is a pseudo-event based on pseudo-events. Naturally, it is one of the biggest news events of the year, every year. Somewhere, Boorstin’s ghost mutters, “Q.E.D.”

And Jackie is a film about the construction of pseudo-events, images, and narratives. As the widow says towards the end of the film, “I believe the characters we read on the page become more real than the men who stand beside us.” Indeed.

Of course, the central precipitating event of the film is anything but pseudo, as it involves the real death of a real man. But from there, after a whirlwind of emotional agony, Mrs. Kennedy sets to work crafting the funeral for her husband, planning it with the same care she put into her renovations of the White House; with an eye to how the public will perceive it.

The film is framed as a conversation with a strangely disrespectful journalist, who strikes a decidedly abrasive tone with Mrs. Kennedy that seems impossible to imagine happening in real life. My interpretation is that this is meant to represent her impressions of the Press as a whole, rather than any single real event. Again: images!

Over the course of the film, the journalist develops a grudging respect for how skillfully she crafted political theater to convey her message, never more so than when she says the whole thing can be summarized by the last lines of the musical Camelot.

To be frank with you, it was the use of Camelot in the soundtrack of Jackie that inspired me to do this post. Let us peel back the layers of this pseudo-event onion: here we have a film about how people used a play based on a legend to craft a fictional narrative that then shapes reality. When you listen to the voice of Richard Burton portraying King Arthur singing about Camelot (which would have been the actual performance Kennedy would have heard) set to footage of Natalie Portman playing Jackie Kennedy spinning the whole thing for a magazine interview—well, it really does start to blur the line between reality and fiction.

Speaking of the footage of Portman-as-Kennedy: the film includes scenes where archival film of the real Jackie Kennedy is intercut with scenes of Portman mimicking her. Many a film reviewer noted how it was impossible to tell which was which. (I can tell which is which—but then, I had a poster of Ms. Portman in my room when I was 12.) Still, there’s no denying that the imitation is expertly done, and that an actress in a movie reenacting the words and mannerisms of a woman who was already putting on a performance for the television cameras just adds another layer to this kaleidoscope of unreality.

Boorstin, writing in 1962, already had plenty of material for his thesis from the Kennedy administration, not least of which was the famous observation that Kennedy’s appearance in a televised debate helped sway voters to him.  Jackie is practically The Image: The Movie, since it’s not only the same theme but even the same time period. (By the way, how excellent of a title is The Image: The Movie? They should have made that the subtitle.)

A lot of the advance press, including interviews from Portman herself, emphasized the “Female Power” aspect of the film. (This was late 2016, remember.) Frankly, this is something I’ve never really gotten from this movie. Jackie isn’t empowered, she’s a slave to public opinion, just like everyone else in Washington. She’s good at dealing with it, perhaps, but ultimately, the nature of the image-based world requires her to sacrifice what should be an intimate, private act of mourning her murdered husband to appease the all-seeing eye of mass media.

At least, I’m certain Boorstin would see it that way. The state of the “Graphic Revolution” as it existed in the early 1960s, and that Boorstin exhaustively documented in his book, is captured vividly in the film, to the point where you can see why Boorstin felt like he needed to sound some alarms.

However, there is one part of the film where the widow relinquishes control of her carefully-managed appearance and bares her soul. These are the scenes where she speaks to a priest, and they are some of the most interesting in the entire picture, so they are worth exploring in detail.

The Priest, played by legendary actor John Hurt in one of his final performances, is even more unlike a priest than The Journalist is unlike a journalist. Mostly in the sense that his attitude towards God seems distinctly atypical, as when he says, by way of consoling the widow:

There comes a time in man’s search for meaning when one realises that there are no answers. And when you come to that horrible, unavoidable realization, you accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching… I have lived a blessed life. And yet every night, when I climb into bed, turn off the lights, and stare in to the dark, I wonder… Is this all there is?

I don’t think they’ll be printing that on sympathy cards anytime soon.

In these scenes, Mrs. Kennedy seems to be confessing to a terrible spiritual emptiness, which she has tried to fill by creating the image of an idyllic “Camelot.” But she has not succeeded, and dreams of surrendering, finally, to the void. The film ends with a strong implication that Jackie’s—and by extension, Jack’s—lasting legacy to the world is in the images they created. But for the people themselves, there is no true peace, no true meaning.

This is probably why the movie feels so disturbing and not completely satisfying. The bitter notes are all on a human level, while the notes of triumph and overcoming are all in the range of images and projections. The sacrificial fire casts beautiful shadows on the wall of the cave.

As a drama, it succeeds only intermittently. As a warning about pseudo-reality overtaking actual reality, it succeeds nearly as well as Boorstin’s magnum opus. Which is to say, (a) incredibly well and (b) not well enough. Because every trend Boorstin identified and every facet of political theater that Jackie exposes have grown exponentially since the 1960s. The only parts of Boorstin’s book that haven’t aged well are the ones where he says things like, “this cascade of pseudo-events reached a climax when…”

Buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This all leaves us with the question of whether it’s even possible to make a film, or any work of fiction, that warns about everything being fake. Since fiction is by definition fake, isn’t that just contributing to the problem?

I hope you aren’t expecting me to answer that, because the truth is, I don’t know. Or perhaps I suspect I do know, but I don’t like the answer I am coming up with. If it’s correct, it implies you should immediately log off and touch grass. In fact, you should never have come here to begin with when you got thinking about pseudo-events. If documenting the problem itself contributes to the problem… well, we have landed ourselves squarely back in one of those hyperstitional situations, as discussed last week.

The only vague shape of something resembling a solution that suggests itself to me are in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness:

“To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road…”

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A spectre is haunting Europe. Actually, it’s probably a lot of spectres. Turns out, a ton of people have died there over the years, especially in wars. Here in the United States, we think of our Civil War as a horribly bloody struggle that rent the national fabric in ways that have yet to be mended. In Europe, it would hardly register as a blip on the radar. They had one of those every few decades

So when you hear the word “Prussia,” it’s natural you think of warfare. In our caricatured version of history, Prussians are basically coded as proto-Nazis.

As this book makes clear, that’s not entirely a fair view of the famous German state. Sure, they had a strong military tradition. But they also had a strong tradition of learning, enlightenment, and civic organization. Frederick the Great would probably get called “Frederick the Woke” today for as much as he talked about values like equality and justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Clark starts at the beginning, when “Prussia” was just a bunch of warring groups. In a process Clark analogizes to the English Civil War and Thomas Hobbes, the violence of the Thirty Years War made a philosopher named Samuel von Pufendorf realize the need for a strong sovereign to maintain peace.

Thus was born the conception of The State. And, in stereotypical German fashion, the Prussian project became an obsessive need to build this new civic instrument into the most powerful and efficient version of itself that anybody could imagine.

The famous quip, often attributed to Voltaire, that “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state,” is, like so many Voltaire quotes, very funny but also misleading; the Prussians believed in having a good army simply because without one, the edicts of the state would be meaningless.

However, to some extent, the very mythology of le epic Prussian Army is just that; mythology. I think at least some of this is attributable to none other than good old Napoleon Bonaparte, who, having defeated the Prussians decisively, thought it would burnish his image to tell everyone how incredibly tough they were.

Not that they weren’t good, because they were. And indeed, in reaction to their defeat at Boney’s hands, the Prussians turned the Prussianism up to 11. They would be the Prussianest Prussians who ever Prussed. This is why the Germany vs. France series became so lopsided after 1813; you could argue that the entire Prussian philosophy was “always have a plan to beat France.”

This worked great in the Franco-Prussian War. It worked less great in World War I, when the plan to immediately invade France in response to a crisis sort of blew up in their faces. And the world’s face.

None of which is to suggest that the Prussian administrative class was unduly warlike or bloodthirsty. Indeed, part of their problem was their bureaucratic emphasis on rules, regulations and strict parliamentary procedures. A mode of operation which persisted into the Weimar Republic period, and which in turn could be exploited by non-Prussians entirely uninterested in rule-following.

Clark doesn’t appear to subscribe the “Great Man Theory,” but nevertheless, throughout the book there do emerge interesting pictures of some of the more vivid characters of Prussian history. The only thing that makes it a bit hard to follow is that almost all their rulers are named Wilhelm, Frederick, or Frederick-Wilhelm.

And then there’s Otto von Bismarck, the comically mis-nicknamed “Iron Chancellor”. “The Rubber Chancellor” would be more apt, because of his ability to bend as needed. Bismarck was the pragmatist to end all pragmatists. Whenever he would pretend to stand on principle, it was only as a ruse to get some practical goal advanced. Naturally, he is considered one of the greatest political figures of his era. (I watched the show Fall of Eagles concurrently with reading this book; and Curt Jürgens’ performance as Bismarck is one of the highlights.)

I picked up this book on a friend’s recommendation, mostly because I was interested in expanding my knowledge of the other players in the Napoleonic Wars. It delivers on that front. Clark’s treatment of the Battle of Leipzig alone is worth the read. And in addition to that, I got a meticulous analysis of 400 years’ worth of history, told in a very readable narrative.

But what’s the upshot, you may ask? What ultimately is to be learned from the rise and fall of the Prussian state? What, in short, is the moral of the story?

Naturally, always-online Gen Y-er that I am, my mind goes to a line from The Simpsons:

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

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Make yourself comfortable. This will not be quick.

Sometimes you’ll see people wringing their hands about why kids don’t read anymore. This is funny, because, as Leonard Cohen might say, “everybody knows” why kids don’t read anymore. It is because they are watching videos on their phones. Is anyone going to do anything about that? No, of course not! The level of political willpower that would require would make even Thomas Hobbes tremble with fear. So everyone goes on hand-wringing and watching videos on their phones and chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas.

But it was not always thus! Once upon a time, children read and delighted in reading. One of the most beloved children’s books of its time was this slender volume, a memoir by Sterling North about his 12th year of life, in 1918, in the state of Wisconsin. One day while playing in the woods, he and his friend startle a nest of raccoons, and recover one of the little masked creatures from their den. Sterling brings the cub home and names him “Rascal.”

What follows is a catalog of Sterling and Rascal’s adventures over the year, from Sterling discovering his little raccoon’s taste for strawberry soda to an amusing incident, unimaginable today, where he brings Rascal to school for show-and-tell.

Interwoven with this are other aspects of a childhood in early 20th-century America, such as Sterling’s ongoing project of building a canoe, town fairs, and similar slices of Americana. If it all sounds idyllic, well, there’s also a dark side which Sterling does not shy away from. Whether from his lingering grief over the death of his mother, which occurred when he was only seven years old, or his fear for his older brother Herschel, who is overseas fighting in World War I, the dangers of the world are in no way sugarcoated.

Yet for all that, it is indeed “a memoir of a better era.” How better of an era was it? The farmers of rural Wisconsin actually ate “second breakfast.” No kidding, down to that detail, it really is like reading an account of some vanished Tolkienesque shire, with the dark threats of mechanical death looming only as vague storm clouds on the horizon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now, this is a children’s book, so you can’t expect the prose to be too–

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber–that day on the river: transcribed in Brule’s water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually gorgeous. They used to write books for kids that didn’t condescend to them.

Also memorable are the other residents of Sterling’s town, like Garth Shadwick, the irascible but good-natured harness maker who makes a leash for Rascal. Mr. Shadwick sees his livelihood threatened by a new technology, which he describes thus:

“It’s these gol-danged automobiles, smelly, noisy, dirty things, scaring horses right off the road… ruin a man’s business.”

We’ve been trained to dismiss the destruction of whole professions by the rise of technology as a normal and even beneficial part of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work. And it is that, of course, but well might we ask: “What is being destroyed? And what is being created?”

For example, when Sterling and Rascal listen to a record of “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” young Sterling asks his father if there are nightingales or other night-birds:

“‘Not nightingales,” he said, “but we do have whippoorwills, of course.”

‘I’ve never heard a whippoorwill.”

“Can that be possible? Why, when I was a boy…” 

And he was off on a pilgrimage into the past when Wisconsin was still half wilderness, when panthers sometimes looked in through the windows , and the whippoorwills called all night long.”

This is where the subtitle of the book really comes into focus. It has a melancholy tone, a wistfulness for an era before the nation was connected by highways and telephones, when it was still wild and natural.

And here is Sterling’s account of armistice day, a week after his 12th birthday:

On the morning of November 11, 1918, the real Armistice was signed in a railroad car in France. Although men were killed up to the final hour, the cease-fire came at last and a sudden silence fell over the batteries and trenches and graveyards of Europe. The world was now ‘safe for Democracy.’ Tyranny had been vanquished forever. ‘The war to end war’ had been won, and there would never be another conflict. Or so we believed in that far-off and innocent time…

During the afternoon, my elation slowly subsided, and I began oiling my muskrat traps for the season ahead. Rascal was always interested in whatever I was doing. But when he came to sniff and feel the traps, a terrible thought slowed my fingers. Putting my traps aside, I opened one of the catalogues sent to trappers by the St. Louis fur buyers. There, in full color, on the very first page was a handsome raccoon, his paw caught in a powerful trap.

How could anyone mutilate the sensitive, questing hands of an animal like Rascal? I picked up my raccoon and hugged him in a passion of remorse. 

I burned my fur catalogues in the furnace and hung my traps in the loft of the barn, never to use them again. 

Men had stopped killing other men in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept.

And you have to understand; this wasn’t just idle “virtue signaling” by Sterling. He actually made money from his muskrat trapping, so he was truly giving up something for his principles. A lost art, these days.

Maybe you think Sterling North is too much of a bleeding-heart environmentalist. Maybe you’d say the same thing about Tolkien. All I know is, the world they inhabited appears to have been full of earnest, hardworking, and resilient people. They were not angels—Sterling records multiple run-ins with bullies of all ages—but for the most part, they were people who appreciated what they had and helped their neighbors.

Reading this book, sharing in Sterling’s triumphs and tragedies, his gentle wit, his love for nature, and above all, his fond memories of his masked friend, makes you nostalgic for a time you never lived in. And more to the point, it makes you look around at the world of today and wonder what happened. True, we are materially vastly richer, our GDP infinitely higher. Quite literally, because GDP did not exist as a metric in 1918.

And yet, are we better off? Sure, you tell me over and over and over again, my friend, that all the statistics say so. Still…

Maybe I am just a cynical misanthrope, constantly longing for a mythical better time that doesn’t exist. Maybe everything is running smoothly. Maybe since at least the Enlightenment, humanity has been steadily progressing, with occasional interruptions but never true retrograde motion, towards a better future. Call this Theory A. “A” can stand for “Accepted by the majority of people,” which probably means it’s true. And again, our standard metrics support this view.

There is, however, another interpretation. Call it Theory Ω.

Theory Ω agrees that technology has certainly been improving over the last 400 years. So when the Theory A’ers make technological progress synonymous with happiness, they are assuredly correct. But if we posit that there is actually an inverse relationship between the quality of human spirit and technology, a different picture emerges. A picture of technology relentlessly eating the world.

Sterling North probably did not know how to build his brand through social media. He was not even proficient with the Microsoft Office suite. But he could make a canoe, scale a cliff, catch a fish, raise a raccoon, ride a bike, write a book, read a book, make a muskrat trap, build a fence, climb a tree, fight a bully, have his heart broken and recover from it. Don’t know if he could conn a ship or plan an invasion, but hey, he was only 11.

Compare this with the 11-year-old nephew of a friend of mine, who, I am told, cries when he receives minor scrapes, can barely read a paragraph, and spends all his free time watching something called skibidi videos.

Theory A has nothing to say about these facts whatsoever. But they are exactly in line with Theory Ω’s predictions.

Under Theory Ω, technology has been steadily improving the ease of life while simultaneously destroying the quality of human capital.

A proponent of Theory Ω might add that material wealth, GDP, ease and comfort are all forms of happiness defined using a Benthamite concept of utility. A certain controversial German philosopher had very unkind things to say about this mode of “English happiness,” believing that only through struggle and hardship could one truly achieve a meaningful form of joy.

In the end, everything has a cost which must be paid in order to get it. Our world of comfort, ease, and plenty must be paid for with a commensurate loss of resilience, nobility of spirit, and strength of character. Let me be quite clear: I am in no way as good a human being as Sterling North was. I am thoroughly a product of the techno-decadent fin de millénaire culture. Even when I went camping, which wasn’t often, I had my Game Boy.

But, to quote Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue: “A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be.” All my complaining, grousing, griping and rhetorical fruit-flinging comes to this: that people my age are unhappy because we know we ought to be something better than we are, but we were robbed of that chance. Robbed by the very labor-saving technology that was supposed to make the modern world such a wonderful place.

In this way, Sterling North’s memoir is more than just a picturesque tale of a beloved childhood pet, and more even than a heartwarming story of growing up and the necessary emotional pain that goes along with it. It is both a warning and symbol of hope; a warning of how much we can lose, and a symbol of what essential qualities of humanity we should fight to preserve.

I rant like this because, like Nietzsche, I believe that struggle builds character, and if you have to struggle to read my posts, it’s better for you in the long run. (A.I. assistant’s suggestions be damned.) But even if you think my ideas are misguided and wrong, I hope you will still give Rascal a try. It’s a beautiful story that has touched the hearts of generations and spans national and cultural divides: in the 1970s, it was the basis for a very popular animated series in Japan, the charming opening of which you can see here. (And here is a website dedicated to the history of Rascal in Japanese culture.)

I said at the outset of this post that it would take an unfathomable degree of political will to get people to put down the gol-danged cell phones and live their lives. But in my more optimistic moods, I wonder if all it takes is to recall the advice of the Duke of Urbino, when asked what was the essential quality of a great leader: “Essere umano,” he answered: “To be human.”

If so, it’s worth mentioning that Sterling North wrote another book, Raccoons are the Brightest People, wherein he says the following:

Those who play God in destroying any form of life are tampering with a master plan too intricate for any of us to understand. All that we can do is to aid that great plan and to keep part of our planet habitable.

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What’s your favorite genre of book? Some people like thrillers, some prefer romance. I know people who love a good cozy mystery and others who enjoy bleak horror. Some are sworn to a specific genre, like high fantasy or sci-fi, others would rather take in a good old slice-of-life narrative from that vast and varied garden of delights broadly dubbed “literary fiction.” Others may still take pleasure in the boy-wizards and sparkling vampire literature of their youth. Well—there is no judgment here.

What’s my favorite genre of book? How nice of you to ask! (You did ask, didn’t you? Of course you did!) Personally, while I have enjoyed books of many and sundry types, I would have to say that my favorite is the kind of book that has multiple layers of meaning to it which must peeled back slowly, like a really thick onion, until at last the different dimensions of the story leave me with a blurred sense of the line between fiction and reality itself.

Of course, it’s hard to fit all that on a sign in Barnes & Noble, so I generally find works of my favorite genre quite by accident. And so much the better; the unexpected nature of finding one makes it more fun.

I am glad to report that the book we discuss today is just such a tale! It is actually a book-within-a-book. It’s best if I start from the inside and work my way out, so we’ll begin by examining the inner book, which is a pulp sci-fi adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world infested by mutants, the result of a great nuclear war.

Into this dystopia steps Feric Jaggar, a man driven by a desire to save non-contaminated humanity from annihilation by the mutant hordes and the monstrous telepathic creatures controlling them, the “Dominators” or “Doms” for short; monstrous, deceptive beings from the evil empire of Zind.

Jaggar relentlessly works his way into the leadership of the human-controlled country of Heldon, most dramatically by winning the right to wield the “Steel Commander”, a fabled ancient weapon only worthy of the greatest of men according to legend. Like Mjölnir, in other words. He wins control of it during a fiery initiation rite into a motorcycle gang known as the Black Avengers. After his victory, Jaggar changes their name and sweeps to control of Heldon, winning the respect of all true humans and the fear of the mutants in the process.

Once in command of the human nation, he quickly raises an army and mounts a furious attack on the Empire of Zind, himself at the helm, fighting tremendous battles against innumerable hordes of monsters.

The battle scenes in this book are bound to be polarizing. Some may find them tedious and repetitive. Personally, I thought they were enjoyable in a campy sort of way. The prose is absurdly overwrought, and probably sets the record for most uses of the word “protoplasm” in a work of fiction. However, it’s also nothing that won’t feel familiar to a regular reader of Lovecraft. HPL rarely wrote extended battle scenes, but if he had, they would read like this.

Jaggar’s quest sends him hurtling from one cataclysmic battle to the next, each time proclaiming, in gloriously hyperbolic terms, how this one is really the great, finally struggle for the future of the universe. Okay, now that’s done with. Oh, but wait! Seriously, now, this one is the big one. Really, no kidding, this is for all the marbles…

It’s so over-the-top it’s almost funny, and indeed, on its own, it works as a fast-paced, violent sci-fi epic. If this appeals to you, I encourage you to stop reading this review right now and go pick up the book. You can come back after you’ve finished reading it. Get the Kindle version, because it automatically skips the introduction, which is an excellent thing. Much like listeners in the 1930s missed the intro to Orson Welles’ adaptation of War of the Worlds, and thought they were hearing a live news report of an alien invasion, this is one where it’s best to get the full context later.

From this point forward, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are never going to, so from here on out spoilers will abound. Think carefully before proceeding.

To begin with, the book-within-the-book is titled “Lord of the Swastika.” Also, the cover above is the one for the Kindle edition. I opted to use it instead of the more colorful, but also more shocking, paperback edition or the appropriately pulpy first edition as seen on Wikipedia. (There are many different covers; this one is probably the best.)

You see, the framing device for this story is that it’s an alternate universe in which, after briefly dabbling in politics, Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and made a career as a sci-fi pulp novelist and illustrator, with “Lord of the Swastika” being his most popular book.

I left out some important details in my plot summary above. The motorcycle gang Jaggar takes over is renamed the “Sons of the Swastika,” or “SS” for short. They wear black uniforms with red swastika armbands, hold torchlight parades, and chant “Hail Jaggar!” at every opportunity.

Also, except for the ending, the entire career of Jaggar is beat-for-beat a thinly-veiled retelling of Hitler’s actual biography, from his elimination of the old gang leader once he’s outlived his usefulness to invading the Zind empire to seize their oil fields.

Of course, in this alternative history, none of that actually happened, and Hitler was just another eccentric writer alongside Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein, and perhaps most pointedly, L. Ron Hubbard.

This is brought home in the afterword, by fictional critic “Homer Whipple,” who proceeds to deconstruct “Lord of the Swastika,” and in so doing reveals more facts about this alternate world, most significantly that, by 1959, the Soviet Union has conquered most of the planet except for the USA and Japan.

Whipple harshly critiques the novel’s poor writing and ridiculously simplistic characters, before turning to a Freudian analysis of the imagery the author chose, as well as adding a few words about what this suggests about the man’s psyche. This Hitler, he ultimately concludes, was a deeply disturbed individual, and it’s lucky that he only channeled his unhealthy desires and fixations into his fiction. Whipple figuratively shakes his head at the idea of such a psychologically abnormal man actually leading a political movement.

Okay, so… what exactly are we to make of all this? We’ve got our book-within-the-book, we’ve got the (apparently dystopian) “real” world, and a fictional literary critic telling us why the book we just read is not very good and in fact kind of disturbing. What does it all add up to?

Well, let’s back up yet another level in this weird metafictional matryoshka, and think about what the actual author, Norman Spinrad, was trying to do here.

To some degree of course, it’s a satire of Nazism. But that’s not really the main goal. After all, mocking Hitler in, say, 1936 took a lot of courage; mocking him in 1972 took rather less. No, Spinrad is after something else.

I think he had in mind two targets: the first is pulp science-fiction generally. With relative ease, he spins a perfectly serviceable sci-fi yarn that also happens to function as Nazi propaganda. Which has to be disquieting to any fan of sci-fi. Some of the messianic speeches Feric Jaggar gives feel not too far off from stuff Paul Atreides says in Dune . (Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a line about Paul’s awakening race consciousness. I remember thinking it odd at the time.)

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not saying Dune is veiled Nazi propaganda. If you go beyond the first book, that series is itself also clearly intended as a criticism of messianic political movements. At the same time, almost everyone who goes beyond the first Dune book agrees that the subsequent books are boring and weird, whereas the first (and most Nazi-ish, or at least fascistic) one is a rollicking adventure. Is this more than just a coincidence?

Well… not when we remember that history did not start in the 1930s. The deficiencies in our system of historical education have led several generations to forget this fact, but in reality, the Nazi movement, despite its overall reactionary character, was in certain respects unusually modern in its technique.

By that, I mean they liked to use what Peggy Noonan once called “political bullshit about narratives.” (Every time someone says “narrative” in a political context, I think of this quote.) The idea of a legendary hero on a quest to save the nation is obviously way older than Nazism. The Nazi propaganda department was extremely adept at casting Hitler into this role, but the role had been written in the minds of the population literally millennia before. Again, the Kwisatz Haderach vibes!

Basically, Nazi propaganda and popular sci-fi were both drawing from the same well of ancient folkloric patterns encoded deeply in human memory to craft their respective stories. So, don’t worry too much that liking old school sci-fi adventure means you are secretly a Nazi. Just be careful about joining any cult-like political movements. I have developed this one weird trick to make sure I don’t do that on accident, which is to never join anything. Cultists hate me!

Speaking of cults, this brings me to Spinrad’s second target, which is much more speculative on my part, but I think I’ve got a sound case.

I mentioned above that the fictionalized Hitler of this book would have been a contemporary of L. Ron Hubbard, who, in addition to founding the Church of Scientology, was a pulp sci-fi author, and achieved some notable success with his fiction.

Spinrad, who in other works criticized Scientology in much less veiled terms, seems here to be suggesting that a man who achieved cult success as an author of sci-fi might be able to start another, much more dangerous movement. Beware of eccentric sci-fi authors, The Iron Dream implies; you never know what else they might be capable of doing.

Of course, this subtle satirical intent was almost certainly lost on most readers, especially in the pre-internet days. As sometimes happens with satirical works, here the author may have succeeded too well in imitating his intended target, to the point where it actually serves the very goal it is supposed to be undermining. As in, some neo-Nazi groups actually endorsed The Iron Dream, despite Spinrad’s best efforts to prevent this misreading. Let this be a caution to all writers who try to get cute and insert subtle messages into their texts; sometimes the readers are just gonna read it how they want to read it.

Most people read a book once, get a vague idea of the gist, and then move on. It takes a special kind of nutcase to, for example, spend almost 2,000 words analyzing the hidden depths and meanings of a book from more than 50 years ago. But hey, that’s why we have to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” right?

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One of my favorite songs for background listening is Hildegard von Blingin”s bardcore rendition of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” with lyrics rewritten to fit the medieval period. It’s this sort of thing that helps history come alive. Just as Joel wrote the original song to explain to some kid that the 1950s and ’60s weren’t exactly a settled time, so this version reminds us that the Middle Ages were a tumultuous era that must have seemed absolutely insane to anyone alive during it.

The point is, every era in recorded history seems terrifyingly apocalyptic to those living though it. Indeed, the history of the world can practically be told as the story of people expecting its imminent annihilation. This brings me to the book with which we are concerned today, which is described as follows: “a cross-cultural and cross-temporal study of models of history considered as a class of story. The book tries to do for doomsday what The Hero with a Thousand Faces did for the myth of the hero.”

Reilly begins his survey with the cyclical interpretations of history: the pessimistic German reactionary Oswald Spengler and the comparatively sunny and hopeful Arnold J. Toynbee. From there, he hops down a number of esoteric rabbit holes, examining apocalyptic cults from Münster to Jonestown, various interpretations of the Book of Revelation, and the Aztec conception of the end of the world, all sprinkled with liberal references and comparisons to works of science fiction, both famous and obscure.

If it all sounds a little rambling, well, that’s because it is. Fortunately, Reilly is a cheerful and good-natured narrator, who never takes himself or his subject too seriously. His witty style makes his treatment of what could have been a bleak subject charming to read:

The embarrassing thing about the history in the Bible is that it is all too familiar. There are stupid kings, sneaky women, ungovernable cities, debt-ridden farmers, and a very lively sense that life is intractably irritating. Even God is sometimes unreasonable. He sends bears to eat obnoxious children and a plague to punish a census taking.

He has a way of cutting through the cruft and making the complex and arcane seem straightforward:

It does not take a lot to destroy a civilization. All you have to do is stop making long-term investments, neglect to repair physical plant, and generally stop thinking about the next generation. All these things happened in late antiquity. The terminal apocalypse in the Roman Empire did not provide a framework for millenarian revolt. How can you fight City Hall when it closed years ago?

And his descriptions of people are no less entertaining. For instance, re. Oswald Spengler:

He was the sort of person who could not walk around the corner to buy a paper without seeing signs of cultural decay.

Guys like that are so annoying, right? 😉

Reilly’s style makes the book a breeze to read, even as he is tackling the most weighty of subjects. Another advantage of his easygoing style is that it gives a sense of neutrality. Despite his tackling political philosophies, I can’t really say with certainty whether he leans left or right. And despite some fairly deep dives into esoteric Jewish and Christian theology, from his attitude, he could have been Christian, Jewish, something else, or atheist. (I know the answer now, from reading the “About the Author” section afterward, but there was nothing definite in the main text.)

The most interesting parts of the book come close to the end, as Reilly examines the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scholar who developed the concept of the noösphere. What’s that, you ask? Well, that’s why we have Wikipedia:

[T]he noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This concept extends Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point – an apex of thought/consciousness – which he saw as the goal of history.

Reilly is quick to point out the remarkable similarity of this concept to the central idea of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, and given how prescient that book was regarding other developments… well, it gives one pause, to say the least. Even Reilly’s considerable sang-froid seems a little shaken when confronting the implications of this.

Still, Teilhard’s ideas are only one of innumerable conceptions about how the world will end. And as Reilly reminds us, there are many different ways to even define what “world-ending” means. As he notes, for the Aztecs, the world effectively did end in the 1500s, much as their own religious beliefs suggested it would. For them, it was the apocalypse. For the Spanish, it was the Golden Age. It’s all relative, man!

A final question to ponder before we wrap this up: as Reilly demonstrates, most cultures and religions have the idea that the world will end. When or how is a subject of some discussion, but they all seem to agree it will. Which makes sense, as the most widely-observed truism in the world is that this, too, shall pass away. And I’ll admit, this seems a bit sad.

On the other hand, though, I wonder if the idea of an ending is itself a kind of comfort. After all, what would be the alternative? Waiting for Godot?

Estragon: “I can’t go on like this.” 

Vladimir: “That’s what you think!”

Or, to bring Arthur C. Clarke into the story again, let me paraphrase him: “There are two possibilities: either the world will end, or it will not. Both are equally terrifying.”

That’s a little too downbeat. On second thought, let me conclude with a quote about The End from another great British science-fiction author:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

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“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”

–Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“Everyone got famous. / Everyone got rich. / Everyone went off the rails / And ended in the ditch.”

–Warren Zevon, “Ourselves to Know.”

Don’t close the window just because this book is about football!

I know, I know; most of you care not a whit about our strange, violent American pastime. The names “Tom Brady” and “Bill Belichick” probably mean nothing to most of my readers. Well, in a way, I envy you.

But football is still America’s game, like it or not, and the story of the New England Patriots dynasty is one of its epics. And mark this well: it is about more than just football. The story it tells is part of the story of the early 21st-century United States, and there are lessons to be gleaned from it that extend far beyond the field. That’s why I wanted to review this book, and why I think even non-football fans should read it.

At the same time… there will still be quite a lot of talk about football here. So, I have highlighted in bold the parts that contain more general information, of interest to the laity. So you can skip over the parts about whether a short pass to Faulk on 4th-and-2 was the best call, if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you.

The book begins at the end, with New England losing to the Tennessee Titans (coached by once and future Patriot, Mike Vrabel) in the 2019-20 playoffs. It then flashes back to the very beginning, when Tom Brady was just another high school kid with dreams of making getting to play for a top college, and when Belichick was an assistant coach for the famously harsh Bill Parcells.

Basically, Belichick and Brady both had massive amounts of resentment over perceived wrongs–Brady because he couldn’t even be named the full-time starting QB for one of the lesser Big Ten schools, Belichick because Parcells treated him badly, and also probably because he coached the Browns. Coaching the Browns would be enough to turn any man to evil, I suppose.

Anyway, these two psychopaths found their way to New England, a historically poor franchise, and in the autumn of 2001—a pivotal time in the history of the United States—Brady became the starting quarterback and the Patriots upset the heavily-favored Rams in the Super Bowl.

It’s hard to remember now, but at the time, they were America’s darlings: with the country united in a spirit of patriotism (also hard to remember now) the fact that the plucky all-American kid could come out of nowhere to lead a team literally called “the Patriots” to an improbable victory was just too much. It was like a Disney movie out there.

Wickersham recounts how Brady, the kid-next-door, started receiving calls from actresses and models and celebrities, and generally fêted by the power elite. It was a classic rags-to-riches story.

Naturally, Brady and Belichick wanted to do it all again. And they did, two years later, winning another championship after a 14-2 season that began with a 31-0 loss to the Buffalo Bills. (Just wanted to get that in there.) And then they won another the next year. And by this point, everyone was pretty much sick of them.

Wickersham notes how, en route to building their dynasty, the Patriots, and more specifically Belichick’s defense, actually changed the way football is played. After a playoff game in which they defeated the Indianapolis Colts by physically dominating their receivers, the league altered the rules to essentially make this type of hard-hitting pass defense illegal.

Naturally, the Patriots also took advantage of the new rules a few years later, creating what was to that point the greatest passing offense in NFL history in 2007.

While I may not like them, I would still contend that the ’07 Patriots are in fact the greatest team in NFL history, or at least, the greatest team of the salary cap era. I don’t care that they lost the Super Bowl on a fluke play; they had an absolutely insane offense and a wily, tough defense coached by the best defensive coach of the era. I still can picture them annihilating my hapless Bills on Sunday Night Football that year.

In any case, Super Bowl XLII is where the first phase of the Patriots dynasty ends. If we want to talk in world-historical Spengler/Toynbee-esque terms, this is the part where the nascent culture has flourished into a full-blown civilization. “The Patriot Way” was now well-established.

Of course, as Wickersham is quick to note, few within the Patriots organization ever uttered the words “Patriot Way” or “culture.” The best line I ever read on this was, “Belichick doesn’t believe in ‘culture.’ He believes in ruthlessness.”  (Another good line from this book: Belichick “‘doesn’t hold grudges,'” someone says. ‘He holds death.'”)

What I would argue “The Patriot Way” is actually describing is asabiyya, as defined by the historian Ibn Khaldun:

[Khaldun] explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of existing empires and use the much stronger asabiyya present in their areas to their advantage, in order to bring about a change in leadership. This implies that the new rulers are at first considered ‘barbarians’ in comparison to the previous ones. 

And indeed, the rise of the Patriots is a prime example of the rise of such a “ruling house.” The old guard of the NFL was annoyed at the rise of these newcomers. The great Don Shula himself repeatedly expressed his antipathy to Belichick, whom he believed to be a cheater. Which he is, but, as this book explains in some detail, basically everyone in the NFL is constantly trying to cheat everyone else at all times. Yes, I know; who would have thought that some of the most competitive alpha males in the world, with millions of dollars as well as prestige at stake, would try to cheat one another? Possibly in a different era, that prized honor and integrity more highly, this would not be tolerated. But we are not in such an era.

And speaking of eras, the Patriots now transitioned to the second phase of their time in the sun, a run during which they would have consistent success, but not quite be able to crack the very pinnacle of the sport.

To some extent, I think the Patriots got away from what made them successful in the early 2000s, which was strong defense. From 2007 – 2013, their strength was unquestionably Brady’s offenses, which were consistently effective in the regular season yet somehow always seemed to fail when they were most needed. I mean, good lord, 17 points against a mediocre Giants team? And let us not forget that Brady gave the Giants 2 points with a stupid safety on the first play of the game. Personally, I think it’s funny that the greatest player of his era, and the most successful player in the history of the Super Bowl, also made one of the dumbest plays in the history of same.

Still, every year the Patriots were a threat to win at all, and always owned the AFC East and my (still) hapless Bills. But that was not enough for the ruthlessly competitive Belichick, and nor was it enough for Brady, who, despite having a supermodel wife and young children, continued to be obsessively dedicated to his craft. Honestly, if the rewards weren’t so spectacular, you’d say someone this absurdly devoted to a mere sport has a mental health issue.

I’m not blaming Brady. Our society has, in a way, failed him. It would be better, I think, if society incentivized intensely-driven and competitive young men to prove themselves as statesmen, explorers, warriors, diplomats, and so forth. Had he lived in the 1950s, Tom Brady might have pushed himself with the same fanaticism to excel as a soldier or an astronaut, instead of merely flinging a ball for our amusement. Still, here we are.

(I’m less bothered by Belichick’s dedication to the sport, simply because Belichick is an old man, “and the vices of peace are the vices of old men” etc.)

Speaking of the vices of old men, it’s time to discuss the third character in the triumvirate on the cover: Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots and noted illegal brothel enjoyer.

Kraft took over the struggling franchise in the early ’90s. The first three coaches to work for him are all Hall-of-Famers: Bill Parcells, Pete Carroll, and Belichick. Which of course is the job of a good owner: to hire good people, then sit back and let them succeed. Kraft did well at this part.

To get even more esoteric than this review is already, it is interesting to me to observe the parallels in the Belichick/Brady/Kraft dynamic with the Victorian comic opera partnership of Gilbert/Sullivan/D’Oyly Carte. (If this seems incongruous, remember that ultimately both football and comic opera are forms of entertainment.) Belichick is an obvious analogue to Gilbert, the irascible, sometimes tyrannical director; overseeing his show with meticulous attention to detail. Brady is Sullivan, a master of his art continually believing himself to be under-appreciated no matter how many accolades come his way. And Kraft is Carte; the businessman desperately working to manage the egos of these two mad geniuses in order to keep the gravy train rolling. In the end, of course, Carte couldn’t, and neither could Kraft.

If there is anything in cyclical theories of history, then it would seem there is an entropic process to which empires, comic opera companies, and football teams alike are subject. Namely, that their prosperity ultimately destroys them, as the ambition for a larger share of the credit divides the very elites who originally powered the success of the organization.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of the story: the Patriots had two of their best seasons in 2014 and 2016, both capped off with victories in two of the most memorable Super Bowl games ever played. These victories cemented their status as the greatest dynasty in NFL history, and Brady and Belichick as the best of their era at their respective roles. To Patriots fans, it was euphoria. To fans of all other 31 teams, it was like a never-ending nightmare, an Ugg boot, stamping on a human face—forever!

Ah, but the brightest light casts the darkest shadow! When you are at the top, there is nowhere to go but down! And any other cliché you care to use. The very fact of the Patriots success now set the stage for their eventual collapse. Wickersham documents how Belichick’s joyless discipline, Brady’s paranoid resentment of backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, and Kraft’s failures to reconcile the two men, made the 2017 season a particularly grim slog. It is a testament to the Patriots’ success that the fact that they made a Super Bowl again that year feels like an afterthought.

Something happened in 2017 to permanently damage the relationship between Belichick and Brady; something that not even another championship a year later could patch up.  Most Patriots fans, spoiled brats that they are, will tell you 2018 is the team’s worst Super Bowl win. (If you are fan of a team which has never won a Super Bowl, you can’t help but feel a sense of schadenfreude about what happened next.)

And so we come back to where the book began: that game against the Titans in the playoffs, with a terrible sense of ending in the air. It’s not often that the word “elegiac” can be applied to a football game, but it fits this one, particularly this play, in which Brady connected with veteran tight end Ben Watson. A combined 34 years of NFL experience allowed them to improvise when the play broke down… but it was negated by a penalty. This is the way the Patriots dynasty ended; not with a bang, but an ineligible man downfield, exploitation of obscure loopholes in the timing rules, and a botched “Stanford band” play. As of this writing, it is the last playoff game played at Gillette Stadium.

The book briefly covers Brady’s escape to Tampa Bay, where he built a team of superstars that won him a 7th title and elevated him above Belichick in the minds of most football fans. The fact that Belichick’s Brady-less teams struggled to achieve even mediocrity further hammers home the point: it was Brady, not Belichick, who was responsible for the Patriots multi-decade run of success. Not that fans don’t continue to debate it even now.

But this “debate” ultimately misses the point: everyone knows it is players, not systems, that win games. The greatest football coach in the universe will not win consistently if he does not have players who can execute his schemes. A great coach gets the most out of his players. His success or failure depends, ultimately, on what the players’ ceiling for “most” is.

There was a very telling incident last season, when Baker Mayfield, Brady’s successor as quarterback of the Buccaneers, talked about how “everybody was pretty stressed out” during the time of TB12, and how Mayfield saw himself as bringing “the joy back to football.”

Brady responded: “I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings… There was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t day care. If I wanted to have fun, I was gonna go to Disneyland with my kids.”

Indeed, Brady so relentlessly pushed himself that he didn’t even go to Disneyland with his kids all that much, and there is some reason to think that his borderline pathological pursuit of greatness destroyed his marriage. But there can be no doubt Brady’s obsession with constantly improving himself and his teammates made him the perfect man to execute Belichick’s scheme. I don’t like to put too much stock in generational stereotypes, but it may be that Brady, with his classic Gen X nose-to-the-grindstone, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, was just a better fit for the quasi-military mindset Belichick demanded, contrasted with the more laid-back attitude often attributed to the millennials who followed him. (I am a millennial, so I can say it: neither Brady nor Belichick would be the sort of guys to take kindly to participation trophies.)

This is where Wickersham’s chronicle ends, and as a rise-and-fall story–well, it ain’t Barry Lyndon, but it ain’t bad. But something is missing. It’s not Wickersham’s fault. His publication deadline prevented him including the last chapter of the saga, which I feel is necessary to complete the story of the Patriots Dynasty.

At the start of the 2023 season, on a rainy, windy day in Foxboro, the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles. The now-retired Tom Brady was the guest of honor, and was named the inaugural “Keeper of the Light” at the newly-renovated Gillette Stadium lighthouse.

As with many another empire, we can learn so much about a place and a people from their architecture. (It’s best if you can imagine the word spoken in the accent of Lord Kenneth Clark: “ar-KEY-tek-sure.”) The Gillette Stadium lighthouse tells the story of the New England Patriots in two simple images. Here is the original lighthouse as it looked from 2002 until 2023, during almost the entire run of New England’s success.

Sleek and spare, more a concept or suggestion of a lighthouse than a full-scale replica, without any unnecessary ornament. A pure column of light; Spartan maximization of efficiency. A turn-of-the-millennium expression of power and energy, just like the great Patriots teams of the era.

And here is its 2023 replacement: an unimaginative, gray, boxy, brutalist beast, squatting low over the field like a miserly ogre. Bigger? Yes. Better? Not by a long shot. It is emblematic of an organization whose vital energy is spent. Whatever fire Brady, Belichick, and Kraft had stolen from the gridiron gods long since burned out. Watching an oddly gaunt Brady standing atop this monstrosity, as the team he once led to glory fumbled its way to an ugly loss, I couldn’t help but think of Shelley’s classic lines:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh, well. “For one brief, shining moment” and all that. As Patriots receiver Julian Edelman prophesied, while in the thick of the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history: “It’s gonna be one helluva story.”

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You might remember the name Theodore Judson from my review of his incredible book Fitzpatrick’s War. It’s one of my favorite books, and I would call it a must-read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi, except that the book is insanely expensive. I thought I paid a lot when I bought it for 12 bucks; as it turns out, that was a steal.

Ever since, I’ve had my eye on The Martian General’s Daughter. (BTW, that sentence shows you why italics matter. Otherwise you might get the wrong idea…) The only thing that kept me from snapping it up right after finishing Fitzpatrick’s War was the fact that some of the reviews were… less than glowing.

But, once I got a few spare coins in my pocket, so to speak, I picked up a copy. After all, the critics just had to be wrong. The man who wrote an epic like Fitzpatrick’s War couldn’t let us down, right?

I’m sad to report that it’s an “honestly great call from the haters” situation.

The Martian General’s Daughter is supposedly set in the late 23rd century, at the height of the Pan-Polarian Empire. It is narrated by Justa, the illegitimate daughter of General Peter Black, an old soldier loyally serving the Emperor, Mathias the Glistening. Emperor Mathias is a wise philosopher-king, whose teachings of self-denial and stoic wisdom are totally ignored by his handsome son, Luke Anthony, who is a sadistic madman obsessed with violent gladiatorial games. So when Mathias dies, and Luke assumes the purple, things start going to hell in a hand-basket.

Okay, I know most of my readers are knowledgeable sorts, so you probably already see the issue here, but just in case you don’t think about the Roman Empire multiple times a day, let me give it to you straight:  “Mathias the Glistening” is a dead ringer for Marcus Aurelius. And Luke Anthony is a carbon copy of his son, Commodus. (You can remember them by the handy mnemonic, Marcus had an aura, but when his son took over, everything went in the commode.)

Almost everything that happens in the story is just thinly-disguised episodes from the history of Rome. Occasionally stuff about rockets or guns or various other high-tech stuff gets thrown in, but it is immaterial. Almost literally, because there is also some sort of vaguely-described plague of metal-eating nano-machines that obligingly reduces nearly everything to Ancient Roman levels of technology.

I mean, seriously, beat for beat, the story is straight outta Gibbon. I’m not an expert on the period, but even I could see the really obvious parallels. The only time this becomes even slightly amusing is when an actor recites a heroic saga based on the deeds of the mythological hero, Elvis.

In his defense, Judson isn’t the first sci-fi author to do this. Isaac Asimov flat-out admitted to it with his Foundation series. But even he at least took some effort to change names and put some kind of novel spin on the whole thing. This  one is pretty much at the level of “this is Mr. Hilter” in terms of an effective disguise. I am not even kidding. Commodus’ favorite mistress was named Marcia. Luke Anthony’s mistress is named… wait for it now… Marcie.

Now, I suppose if you somehow don’t know anything at all about the Roman Empire, you might enjoy this book. Because no one can deny it’s a good story; the husk of a great nation, collapsing with the rot engendered by its own prosperity. The once-virtuous populace now amusing itself to death with festivals, cults, and gambling on sporting events; the leadership of the formerly august institutions handed to depraved criminals and perverts. A story full of debauchery, sex, and violence, underpinned by a longing felt in the heart of the few remaining noble souls for the memory of a better time. Perhaps Judson’s point in writing all this was that these are unending cycles which humanity is doomed to repeat forever. That’s the theme of Fitzpatrick’s War, too. Only in that book, it’s conveyed with subtlety, wit, and above all, originality.

It gives me no pleasure to write these words, and indeed, I debated whether to even post this review at all. I never post negative reviews of indie writers, and typically reserve my harshest critiques for well-known and successful authors. Judson is in a murky middle ground between the two–he’s not a household name, but Fitzpatrick’s War was published by a fairly large publisher, and over the years has acquired something of a cult following. As well it should.

What ultimately made me decide to write this was the reviews on Amazon. Particularly the ones that make the same points as I made above and then say that reading this made them reluctant to try another Judson book. That’s a mistake. Fitzpatrick’s War is fantastic, and I hate to think of anyone passing it up just because they were unimpressed by The Martian General’s Daughter. To make matters worse, this one is available on Kindle, but Fitzpatrick is not. Which raises the possibility that modern readers will base their opinions of Judson on this book, and that would be a shame.

If you really want a good story of intrigue and political machinations in a collapsing empire, check out something by Patrick Prescott or Eileen Stephenson. If you absolutely love their books, then you can read this one too. Despite everything I’ve said, it’s not actually bad, and if Judson had just made it straight-up historical fiction about Rome, I would have said it was an enjoyable enough read. But as it is, it’s very disappointing, especially from a writer who is obviously capable of great work.

Oh well. As Marcus Aurelius himself might well have said, “omnes vincere non potes.“

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To recap the previous episode: when we left our hero, Daniel J. Boorstin, he had just discovered that the foundations of the U.S. government were under threat from competing narratives of pseudo-events, which flood the public discourse and make getting a true understanding of political reality from the news effectively impossible.

A lesser man might have turned away at this point, unable to face any further horrors. But not Boorstin! No, he had to know it all.

Having defined the pseudo-event, Boorstin proceeds to document how every aspect of life is becoming more and more dominated by images, facsimiles, reproductions and imitations. Travel, once truly an adventurous activity, is reduced to tourist packages that offer pre-planned experiences. Celebrities have taken the place of heroes; instead of being famous for great deeds, they are famous because they are famous. Images have replaced ideals as the ultimate goal of people, organizations, and nations.

Among the many aspects of American culture that Boorstin analyzes, I want to highlight some of his thoughts on the literary industry that may be of interest to my fellow authors. For example, this remarkable passage on machine translation:

What Thomas J. Watson Jr., president of International Business Machines Corporation, calls the ‘Information Explosion’ is having an ever wider and deeper effect on the form in which we are willing to have our ideas expressed. And incidentally, it cannot fail to affect the respect we show for literary or any other kind of form. Translation, until recently, has been among the subtlest, most difficult and most respected of literary arts…

Now, in order to make available the increasing printed resources in other languages, the new data processing industry has perfected a machine translator. The Mark II machine, developed jointly by IBM and the Air Force, can take a passage of Russian and translate it into what IBM calls ‘rough but meaningful English.’ Here is a sample product of the machine when applied to a passage of Russian literary criticism:

United States appeared new translation immortal novel L.N. Tolstago ‘war and world / peace’ Truth, not all novel, buttony several fragments out of it, even so few / little, that they occupy all one typewritten page. But nonetheless this achievement. Nevertheless culture not stands / costs on place. Something translate. Something print. Truth, by opinion certain literature sceptics, translation made enough / fairly ‘oak.’

This goes on, but you get the idea. Basically, they have been working on AI literature for way longer than you thought.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Boorstin sees going wrong with the literary industry:

The expression ‘best-seller’ is, of course, another by-product of the Graphic Revolution. It is an Americanism (still not found in some of the best English dictionaries) which first came into use in the United States at the beginning of the present century… the word ‘seller’ in England had originally meant a person who sold; only around 1900 did the word come to mean a book (later any other item) that sold well. This subtle transference of ideas was itself interesting, for the very expression ‘best seller’ or ‘seller’ now implied that a book somehow sold itself: that sales bred more sales.

And so:

Best-sellerism has thus come to dominate the book world. Leaders in the book trade themselves often attacked it. In his Economic Survey of the Book Industry in 1931, O.H. Cheney called best-sellerism ‘an intolerable curse on the industry.’ But, he explained, there was (and there remains) a substantial commercial basis for the institution: one way to make a book a best seller is to call it one. Then many potential book buyers ‘want to join the thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of the inner circle of the readers of the book.’… A buyer going into a bookstore is apt to ask for a best-seller; even if he doesn’t, he is apt to be urged to buy a book because it is one…

…One of the most interesting features of the institution is how flimsy is the factual basis for calling any particular book a best seller. To speak of a best seller—to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items—is, of course, a logical contradiction. But the bookstores are full of ‘best sellers.’

In Boorstin’s view, basically everything is like this; manufactured and carefully-curated simulacra replacing real experiences. And how desperate are we for something that seems genuine to cut through all the public relations verbiage and artificial hype of pseudo-events?

Our hunger for crime news and sports news, then, far from showing we have lost our sense of reality, actually suggests that even in a world so flooded by pseudo-events and images of all kinds, we still know (and are intrigued by) a spontaneous event when we see one.

I’m convinced that part of the reason for the celebration of Luigi Mangione is that his crime was something unexpected and unplanned, and thus instantly attention-grabbing in a world of ads and social media memes.

There’s more—much more—but I can’t quote the whole book, now can I? After all, it would be particularly ironic to confuse the map with the territory in this, of all cases!

Suffice it to say, Boorstin saw the post-Graphic Revolution world as full of images that loom larger than the things they are meant to represent. And just as pseudo-events beget more pseudo-events, so do images beget other images, endlessly refracting until the underlying reality is a distant memory.

In other words, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the modern world is not only faker than we suppose, it is faker than we can suppose. Everything is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow, to where even what we think of as “real” is actually only a really thick shadow.

There is only one sphere of life that Boorstin does not excoriate for its replacement of reality with image. Not because he didn’t see it—it is inconceivable that he did not—but probably just because he was too classy to mention it. Well, I like to think I run a family-friendly blog, even if that family is the Addams Family, but I simply can’t ignore this particular issue.

The topic I am thinking of is, of course, sex. Now, even in Boorstin’s day, sex and media had already intermingled to quite an extent, and it is no doubt only the good librarian’s conservative sense of propriety that kept him from mentioning Playboy etc. But modern life has seen the Sexual and Graphic Revolutions combine to bring forth some real monstrosities.

The examples are endless, but I am thinking of one particular social media controversy from last year. Someone on Twitter modified this poster for the Amazon Prime series Fallout, probably using AI to do so. The modified poster gave the central figure tighter pants and a more toned backside. The person who modified it believed the woman wasn’t eye-catching enough in the original depiction. Naturally, there was a backlash, and a resulting discussion about sexism, male gaze, etc. etc. etc.

Now, what part of this whole sad episode is fake? Haha, trick question: it’s fakery all the way down! It is a poster for a television show adapted from a video game, further modified by machine to resemble a more visually striking conception of the female form. Literally everything about it is fake, and to become emotionally invested in arguing about any aspect of it is to lose oneself in shadows to the nth power.

Indeed, image so dominates modern concepts of sex that it poses a real danger to human reproduction. Does this seem impossible? Did you ever hear the tragedy of Julodimorpha bakewelli, a species of Australian beetle whose males are so attracted to discarded beer bottles that they mate with them instead of the females of their kind? Could a similar fate befall humanity, with the proliferation of things like AI romantic partners and virtual reality erotica? I don’t know, but I think we’re trying to find out.

None of this would come as a surprise to Boorstin, who in 1962 saw a world awash in shadows and illusions. To the extent it has changed, it has been a change in degree, not in kind. Influencers may have replaced movie stars, and social media may have replaced the nightly news, but it is just a more refined version of the same problem.

So what, then, is the solution? It may be impressive that Boorstin saw and understood the danger of trends that now permeate the society you and I inhabit. But that is of no help to us, unless he can offer us some way out, some hope of finding something real to grasp.

Here is Boorstin’s closing statement. It wasn’t enough to save us in 1962, but maybe, just maybe, we can for once harness the power of the internet to promote something true. Marshall McLuhan, whom Boorstin references more than once, said that “the medium is the message.” I am praying he was wrong. We’ve got the medium, now Dr. Boorstin supplies the message:

Each of us must disenchant himself, must moderate his expectations, must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside. The first step is to begin to suspect that there may be a world out there, beyond our present or future power to image or imagine. We should not worry over how to export more of the American images among which we live. We should not try to persuade others to share our illusions. We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions… One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning. 

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.