On Killing

Five things I didn't know about killing people:
1- Immediately after the Second World War, the US Army discovered that only 15 to 20% of all soldiers "along the line of fire" would take any part with their weapons. By Vietnam, the "firing rate" increased to 95%. 

2- Napoleonic and US Civil War regiments, with anywhere from 200 to 1,000 men, firing continuously at exposed enemies only 30 yards away, usually hit an average of one or two men per minute.

3- During the Second World War, the US Army ruled more than 800,000 potential soldiers as mentally unfit for military service.  Despite this effort at weeding out, more than 504,000 US soldiers were removed for psychiatric collapse.  This is enough for 50 divisions. 

4- Between 1985 and 1991 (just six years) the homicide rate among males aged 15 to 19 increased 154%.

5-During the US Civil War, soldiers commonly referred to one's first combat experience as "seeing the elephant."  This was in reference to the old line about three blind men feeling an elephant, each describing something quite different. In other words, combat, death, and killing are indescribable in words alone. 

Mental collateral damage

"The man who ranges in No Man's Land
is dogged by shadows on either hand." 
- James H. Knight-Adkin

Some books you enjoy and set aside once done, probably never to think on again. Rather fewer books make you think long and hard, and of those, a select handful actually keep you up at night.   

On Killing is one of those books. 

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman wades into territory that is necessarily taboo and very poorly understood - namely, what's it like to have to kill someone? What happens to the young men (almost exclusively) we ask to do that?

Ready, aim...pretend to fire!

You'd think the armies of the world would be experts on the subject, and today, most are.  But this is a shockingly recent development. Ever since the first company of musketeers took up arms for their king/prince/country/bag 'o cash, one or two perceptive officers noticed the huge disparity between soldiers who excelled on the target range (quite a few of them) and those who simply could not be persuaded to fire their weapon in combat, even when their own life was threatened. 

Why?  What's the difference between a target of concentric coloured circles on a field, and a living, breathing, moving human being?  Well...that's it right there.  It's hard to kill.  We're wired against it, in almost exactly the same way we're wired to be repulsed by incest.  And this is a nice and reassuring aspect of human psychology.  Except for two things - (a) the armies of the world have finally figured this out, and (b) there's very solid evidence this is changing, even and especially for civilians. 

Grossman goes into fine detail describing the still-nascent psychology of killing, from distance to the target (artillery officers and bomber pilots don't suffer anywhere near as much trauma as the infantry) to societal and training influences. The US military adopted new techniques and training regimens after the Second World War, and by Vietnam, has made for more effective soldiers.

The war that changed everything

You may cavil at that point, probably because of the US' spotty record in guerrilla-style warfare ever since.  But when its soldiers are pressed into "traditional" engagements - including Vietnam - it has been effectively unbeatable.

It's not just the Americans, either. Better-trained soldiers have demolished those trained the old way - those circles on the rifle range - almost without exception.  The Falklands, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Gulf Wars, and so on. 

So what's the downside? Grossman feels - and backs up with a depressing load of data - that same conditioning is being used on the civilian population. 

Not on purpose, mind you - there's no shadowy conspiracy here - but it's happening all the same. What's the easiest way to get a raw recruit "able" to kill people with his weapon? Simulate the experience as closely as possible for as many times as possible.  This started with the basics, from replacing those circular targets with person-shaped ones. Eventually, these were rigged to collapse when hit, exactly like a person would. Crucially, the soldier-in-training receives praise for doing this, either from his superiors, his peers...or maybe an extra life or special power-up. 

Sound familiar?  

Excellent - but costly - military training

Normally, I hate studies like this, and am the first to denounce them as politically-motivated scaremongering.  I have more faith in my fellow man than to think we're simple Monkey See-Monkey Do simpletons. 

But we're not talking about a single murder on TV, or one violent game, but a total cultural blind spot to violence - and minimization of its actual, bloody, painful consequences. Quick, what happens when you kill an enemy soldier in most video games?

He disappears. Maybe he shouldn't. 

The Lost Millennium

Five things Florin Diacu told me but I didn't believe in The Lost Millennium:
1- All historical dates are either false or at the very least, open to question, even if exhaustively documented.  Minute astronomical observations, on the other hand, are infallible. 

2- Augustus, the first Roman Emperor and the guy in charge when Jesus Christ was born, actually reigned from 1175 to 1205 AD. 

3- Troublesome historical sources contradict this theory? No problem! Take the Almagest, which refers to "Alexander" in a context that refers almost unarguably to Alexander the Great.  Well...uh...maybe it refers to Alexander II of Byzantium, who reigned from 886 to 913 AD.  See?  This totally works!

4- What about the Popes?  Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, don't we have a chronological list going back to Peter and extending all the way to Benedict XVI?  Well, many of them were duplicates.  What?  Exactly.

5- So what year is this?  After 257 pages, Diacu says...he doesn't really know. Lucky for him, I'm reasonably sure. 


Around the Second World War, Isaac Asimov wrote a fantastic series of short stories about a mathematician named Hari Seldon who discovered a way to mathematically predict the future. While individuals were unpredictable, huge numbers of people were not - and their reactions could be charted and predicted with near-100% accuracy.

This was fiction, mind you, taking place in the (very) distant future when humans had settled the entire galaxy. Florin Diacu, the mathematician who wrote The Lost Millennium, apparently thinks Seldon and Asimov were onto something. 

The Lost Millennium starts with a funny hypothesis: what if we have history all wrong? Specifically, what if there's a lot less of it (history) than we think?  What if our ways of measuring time - the rotation of the Earth, orbiting the Sun - are fundamentally flawed? 

Best of all, what if all this could only be proved with math?

Every once in a while, you come across a book that...just...fails.  The Lost Millennium is that book.

This either never happened, or quite recently.

The main problem?  There are two.  First, Diacu needs to get out more.  He's the perfect stereotype of the hard science genius who flunks the social sciences, because he has zero understanding of  how people actually think and act, either as individuals or societies.

Let me illustrate this with an example.  Diacu presents language - and specific words, especially in Russian - as evidence.  "Linguistic changes are neither individual nor random - they follow rules."  So when a certain word borrowed or adopted from another language survives more or less intact for suspiciously long, the obvious answer is TIME ITSELF is wrong.

Bullshit. 

Proof that everyone else is wrong about everything.

That's the thing with the social sciences - it's not reducible to formula.  There is simply no way of predicting how random people will act with any certainty.  Sometimes a word survives because people find it useful, elegant, or even just fun to say.  (The word "fuck" is a great example - flexible, very old, and undoubtedly fun to say.)  Math doesn't ever come into play.

The other problem is Diacu uses evidence so selectively, it's hard not to burst out laughing.  Certainly I did more than once reading it.

Consider the problem: you're going to disprove HISTORY, but the only way to do that on more than a theoretical level is to use evidence...from history.  Which apparently is wrong; or at least, parts of it.  Most of it? 

Again, Diacu ignores things like Chinese astronomical observations, which go back thousands of years, or even simple lists of kings from the Greeks to Romans to Carolingians to the English, and many more.  They're all wrong.  But a zodiac painted on an Egyptian tomb ceiling - with characters "commonly associated" with certain planets and constellations, not actual star charts - is conclusive proof: we've got it all wrong. 

The New History

I'm not imagining there are no errors in history.  Maybe the pyramids were built substantially earlier or later than we think.  Maybe we've skipped over a French King or two, or taken a few folk tales as literal truth.  Hell, maybe Beowulf was about a real dude who really did fight and kill a monster called Grendel. 

But no, I don't believe we're collectively stupid enough to invent a thousand years of history - comparatively recent history, too.

Countdown to Lockdown

Five things you didn't know about Mick Foley and/or pro wrestling:

1- Some of the "foreign objects" used in his career include C4 plastic explosive (yes, really) all the way down to a Leonard Cohen album.  Also yes, really. 

2- Foley and Kevin James (King of Queens, Pall Blart: Mall Cop) were on the same high school wrestling team. 

3- Foley, who once had his ear torn off during a match, walked away from an announcing job with WWE because he couldn't stand Vince McMahon yelling at him over the headset.  He lasted less than three months. 

4- On one of Foley's last days with WWE, a gospel choir was booked to sing "Amazing Grace" as a memorial to Vince McMahon, whose onscreen character Mr. McMahon had been "killed' via car bomb some weeks before.  This didn't happen, because that weekend, WWE wrestler Chris Benoit killed his son, wife, and finally himself.

5-Foley has recently offered cryptic criticisms of his perhaps soon-to-be former employer, TNA, for not taking advantage of Foley's considerable exposure on the Daily Show as Senior Asskicker. 

TNA pretended this never happened

First things first: yes, I am a wrestling fan.  Always have been, probably always will be. If you suddenly think less of me, fine.  But it's not changing anything.  Wrestling, to me and others, is misunderstood high art, an interactive, larger than life drama, where good confronts evil on the perfect stage. 

The problem with wrestling is the good is often hard to find amongst all the bad.  Raven, a wrestler whose career has crossed paths with Mick Foley more than once, told me during an interview "when wrestling is good, there's nothing better, but when wrestling is bad, there's nothing worse." 

Raven - a really great interview. Trust me.

By his own admission, Mick Foley's career has seen quite a few moments on either side of the spectrum. At his peak, wrestling as Cactus Jack and Mankind in the mid-to-late '90s, Foley was one of wrestling's artists, and forged a remarkable and unusual career even by the generous standards of pro wrestling, making a name for himself almost by sheer willpower. He literally went from barbed-wire death matches in half-full Japanese high school gymnasiums to sold-out US football stadiums in the space of a decade; a story anyone can marvel at. 

But that story was literally four memoirs ago.  His first book, Have a Nice Day, is well worth checking out.  But while Foley has lived and continues to live an extraordinary life, I'm not sure it warrants four autobiographies.  As a result, his latest work feels like a jumble. Countdown to Lockdown is essentially three books thrown into one.  The first documents his departure from Vince McMahon and WWE - not quite on bad terms, but tense.  The second recounts his preparation for a big pay-per-view match for his new employer, TNA Wrestling, against one of his first and most notable opponents on the national stage, Sting.  The third is essentially a verbal photo album of Foley's life; theme parks he's enjoyed, family stories, celebrity encounters, and lots and lots of Foley's charity work.

The big match TNA wanted you to pay for

The first two work fairly well.  Foley shies away from too much lurid detail - probably not to burn bridges - but you don't have to peer too deeply between the lines to discern that Vince McMahon is a hard guy to work for - impulsive, mercurial, and ludicrously demanding.

Wrestling fan or not, it's also interesting to see the difference between the two major companies (WWE and TNA) operate.  (TNA is far less polished.)  Foley's mental and physical preparation are also interesting, but I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the business end - the storytelling and pitch to get TV viewers to pay to see the big match at the end.

As Foley acknowledges, not nearly enough TNA fans did so. TNA consistently gets around 1.5 million TV viewers each week - very good for cable TV - but converts a paltry percentage of them into pay-per-view buyers, far less per capita than WWE or UFC.  This remains a headache for the still-young promotion, despite bringing in big names like Foley, Kurt Angle, and more recently, Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair. 

The book's third part, however, gets lost. As much as I like Tori Amos, I don't think meeting her warrants an entire chapter. Nor does what appears to have been a ten-minute conversation with Paul Wolfowitz.  And as laudable as Foley's charity work is, ten mentions of the child he sponsors in Sierra Leone would have sufficed.  (I lost count.) 

Countdown to Lockdown ends more or less the same way his first memoir did - with him winning the big match and that company's world title.  But it feels different, both as a reader and as a wrestling fan.  His first win, back in 1999, was unexpected. He was the deserving, hardworking underdog.  It's just not like that anymore, and his title win caused some grumbling by those who felt TNA would do better to showcase their younger, more athletic wrestlers.

Viewers were happy to see Benedick and Beatrice find love (and each other) at the end of Much Ado About Nothing.  But that's where it ends. If Much Ado was a weekly TV series, you'd want to see the happy couple cede the spotlight to Don Pedro or even Dogberry for a while.

Lustrum

Five quick things you didn't know:
1- In Classical Latin (the language of the time), Cicero was pronounced "Ki-kay-ro." 

2- Similarly, Caesar was pronounced "Kay-sar," similar to the German "Kaiser," which makes sense...it means the same thing.

3- Shorthand was invented by Cicero's slave and secretary Tiro.  Much of it survives to this day, including the ampersand (&) and common abbreviations such as etc. (et cetera) , n.b. (nota bene), i.e. (id est), and e.g. (exempli gratia.)

4- Tiro reputedly not only survived Cicero, but lived to the age of 100.  He wrote a widely-read biography of his former master, which sadly has not survived. 

5- Cicero was such a powerful speaker (think Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King) that when his enemies finally had him killed, Mark Antony's wife Fulvia repeatedly stabbed his tongue with her hairpin.  It was the only way to get the last word.

 

Cicero, the unrivaled speaker...

Few books are so comprehensively described by their title alone.

In Latin, Lustrum was apparently a marvelously useful word.  It meant a den or lair of wild beasts, can refer to brothels, was a particular sacrifice offered by Roman censors, or more simply, a period of five years. 


The five-year period Robert Harris writes about, 63 to 58 BC, offered all that and more in the very last days of Republican Rome.  The Senate had never been weaker, having only shortly recovered from a disastrous dictatorship and civil war, the Spartacan slave revolt, and the uncomfortable rise of Pompey Magnus (literally, Pompey the Great) to levels of power, wealth and influence that literally threatened the republic.  Oh, yeah - and the steady rise of an unlikely power broker; a young Senator from a venerable and respected family that had fallen on hard times, Julius Caesar. 

Lustrum is the second of a trilogy centering on Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of Republican Rome's greatest products.  In many respects, Cicero was the Thomas Jefferson of his age, an intellectual giant who just happened to end up in politics.  Cicero is a good choice, because from the start of his rise to prominence as a lawyer (described in Imperium) until his murder in 43 BC, Cicero was a pivotal figure.  Interestingly, both Imperium and Lustrum are presented as memoirs of Cicero's slave and trusted secretary, Tiro. 

...and Cicero, the spineless politician

Being a fan of HBO's Rome, where Cicero was played by David Bamber, (right) it's very hard to picture anyone else.  But Bamber's Cicero is more of a conniving, craven, almost effete political creature, who has none of the real figure's spine.  (Tiro, briefly glimpsed as a blubbering simpleton, fares even worse.) 

This is unfair. Cicero famously averted a coup d'etat, having stared down the Catiline Conspiracy (which he may or may not have "nudged" along to entrap those involved), possibly saving the lives of a quarter of the Senate, including his own. 

For this, Cicero was named Father of the Country, a purely honorific title that probably didn't win him any friends among the later power brokers: Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Octavian, Agrippa, et al.  (See?  Tiro's legacy lives on.)

Rome has been fertile ground for historical fiction, and for good reason. It's relatable yet also alien; recognizable Europeans acting completely outside the now-normal Judeo-Christian ethics, more or less for the very last time.  That's not necessarily a criticism, but is is different and even exotic, particularly where sex and violence are concerned.

While there's no lack of sex and violence in Lustrum, they never occupy the spotlight.  They take place offstage; things other people do, while Tiro and Cicero maneuver around their wreckage.  Or, attempt to.  

Harris' Cicero is a wonderfully realized character. He's noble and motivated by the idea of preserving the Republic, but also vain, which occasionally causes him to wander into obvious traps.  He's also completely incapable of figuring out Caesar until far, far too late - a mistake whose repercussions we feel even today.

Cicero failed to stop this from happening

Is that hyperbole? I don't think so.  If anyone was going to stop Caesar before his civil wars, it probably needed to be Cicero, when Caesar was still chiefly just a politician.  Once he became general and imperator, there was nothing a "mere" politician, no matter how eloquent, could do. 

That's perhaps the real brilliance of Lustrum; a portrait of a lost world and culture, a pivotal moment in history, a fleshing out of familiar names from history - but also a tantalizing glimpse at a missed opportunity.