Hell-Hound On My Trail

The cryptozoological terror sighted above torments my existence. If I were to flee to the Swiss Alps and hide out in the conference halls of Davos, it would track me down across continents and seas to emphatically corner me, her whole body trembling like some frenetic freak as she drills her dark expectant eyes into me and telepathically blasts out the message, "Give the dog your food. Give the dog your food!" She also has this routine of "are you ready to go out, are we going out? Are you ready yet because I'd really really like to go out out out and pee on everything and maybe I'll see a squirrel and then I'll climb up a fence or a tree and lick it to death."

Her name is Ripley, she is (allegedly) a Jack Russell terrier, geriatric yet undaunted. For any of you who own one of these accursed fox-hounds you know that one of their many annoying mutant traits is they simply must burrow under the covers with you, any covers, and sometimes you'll wake up to this thing, this awful horrible stink-mouthed thing licking your feet. She also has literally run off walls, caroming off the four corners of a room. This was not my choice, my wife inflicted this animal upon me and somehow it became my job, my job, to feed and entertain it. To top it off, more money has gone into her dental work in the past 4 years than has gone into mine in 20. God help us all.

Twenty-Year Old News

(NYT Redux)

After seven years of war, Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.

The Grandest Novel

Opening paragraph to The Odyssey:

This is a story about a man, one who was never at a loss. He had travelled far in the world, after the sack of Troy, the virgin fortress; he saw many cities of men, and learnt their mind; he endured many troubles and hardships in the struggle to save his own life and to bring back his men safe to their homes. He did his best, but he could not save his companions. For they perished by their own madness, because they killed and ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun-God, and the god took care that they should never see home again.

Huckleberry Finn's Opus And Time Magazine's Feature Of Mark Twain

The editors of Time, buffered like the rest of us upon litanies of atrocity, searched last week for something we could be proud of, and they settled on Mark Twain, who they put on the cover. The main article, written by Roy Blount, Jr., opened like this:

What, if anything, about this benighted moment of American life will anyone in the future look back on with nostalgia?

The nostalgia is this: a country produced a humorist, thinker, and moralist who took the pen-name of Mark Twain. As a young man, the restless, traveling parent-less Sam Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri hitched a boat-ride down to New Orleans, where he schemed to go to South America for to make his fortune smuggling cocaine back to the US. Not finding a ship quickly enough, he signed on as a steamboat pilot's apprentice and went back up the Mississippi. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he signed up briefly for the Confederacy, and pistolled an innocent horseman down in the darkness by his nervous bivouac in the woods. He stood over the man's body, trying to yearn him back to life, and he left the service soon thereafter to light out for silver mining in the territories where he became a yellow journalist.

That's a common story we, all of us Americans as ancestral flotsam, come from. Sam was like any of our other over-reaching rough young opportunists who didn't fit, a printer, a digger, a Billy the Kid, an adventurer who was just another searching inconsiderate who wanted something better. But with this kid there was a twist, and somehow his glimmerings of conscience kept steadily growing, aided by an ability to embroider yarns, to write and observe and express himself in print.

Eventually, in 1884, he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a semi-autobiographical or imagined examination of his childhood. For its sublime, honest, between-the-lines treatment of the turbulent, existential relationships of race, space, and the roiling cultures of an emerging country--themes which haven't calmed down by a long shot--it is the crowning achievement of American literature. I'm not sure if I've ever read a greater work, more accurately plumbing and surveying, more celebrating, capturing and penetrating, including all of Shakespeare's.

I have some inklings of what personal introspections, meditations, and unsparing intellectual braveries it took to write it. Not surprisingly, Twain said it took him the longest of all his books to write. It called all the fundamental assumptions of his boyhood appropriately into question, yet in many if not most high schools in my country today, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a forbidden work. (It makes liberal use of the language which was common at the time of its writing and subject, and of a pejorative word referring to color and race.) Quite simply, this is a cultural crime. Banning such a masterpiece is like burning down trees because they might one day burn, for Huck Finn is nothing less than the secret code and avatar of our national salvation.

In the story, a desperate, regularly abused and abject Huck Finn spreads blood on the ground and makes it look like his father, the notorious vagrant drunkard Pap Finn has killed him and dumped him in the river. At the same time, Miss Watson's slave Jim escapes her ownership because he longs to see his family, and the two wind up on the same mid-stream island. They elude the search parties sent to find them, and then take a raft down the Mississippi. There are misadventures, and Huck is tormented now and again by the legal and moral questions of sheltering an escaped slave. On page 100, he considers the temporal and eternal consequences of going against social and heavenly conscriptions, and decides that he solemnly will risk Hell for harboring a slave.

We gradually begin to realize that Jim is a thoroughly wise and moral man, about the only one we meet in the book, and that he's the best father figure Huck has ever had. At the end of the story, we learn that Jim earlier shielded Huck from the sight or knowledge of his biological father's dead body in the wreck of a gambling house that was swept down the river on a flood. Jim tells Huck to great relief that he's not condemned to return to his father's wrathful fists in St. Petersburg (Hannibal), and Huck may live with Tom Sawyer's family. Jim, having reached a providential freedom, takes his leave to go see his his wife and children at last.

It was Twain's intention that Jim, a slave, was Huck's better father, and if you closely read the story of their journey down the central, massive, live-giving river of our country, their mutual regard for each other gathers steadily until it starts to get unmistakably loud and finally hints of something greater. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a beautiful story, but it was intended even more as an allegory, you see, about the people in our country eventually becoming equal, about the rightness of them loving each other without reference to ownership, poor circumstance, or color. Twain knew that respect and love could be shouted down by present and future crowds, but a beautiful story can't. He sheltered his meditations in impervious armor, and we can be proud of that.

(Note: this version edited for errors regarding points of plot.)

Is It Too Late To Become An Arms Dealer?

If you've been considering a new career, being an arms dealer doesn't mean you can't be an aspiring musician and have a kickin' MySpace page. 25-year old David Packouz, a Miami Beach massage therapist, was vice president of AEY, Inc., a company which last year won the $300 million contract to supply the Afghanistan army with small arms and ammo. The company's 22-year old CEO, Efraim Diveroli, was 18 years old when he started doing business with the US Army in 2004, working hard and growing his business. His search for managerial excellence was somewhat flawed, however, and is further threatened by upcoming congressional hearings in which Packouz has agreed to testify in exchange for immunity.

Young Efraim's father Michael regrets that he didn't grow up to become "a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer," explaining that "as father of a boy genius, he can be hard to control." Indeed. The crafty little RPG hawker has fled the country, and his lawyer, Hy Shapiro, declines comment. From Efraim's MySpace page:

"I definately have the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up alot of my time. I'm one of those guys who needs to be entertained and having lots of fun all the time so if your also an undiagnosed case of ADD look me up."

Scarface and Heat are listed as favorite movies, along with something called Gofather. Which would be consistent with the restraining order a former girlfriend had sought against him. As a budding entrepreneur on the go, he probably didn't realize it was illegal to buy 50-year old loose Chinese ammunition, which is what the Army got all fussy about early this year. By sheer coincidence, the Army also granted defense contracts to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints folks recently famous for marrying/impregnating young girls at their Texas compound, even giving a $1 million loan so they could start making aircraft wheel and brake components.

Nothing to be upset about, folks, move along and remain calm. It's only the apocalypse. We'll get through it ok. Let's take our cue from David Packouz, who has moved on and is doing fine:

"How it will affect me only time will tell. My goal has always been to make a living from my music. I should complete my album within a month or two. There will be a song on there about my former scumbag partner (called 'Hog in the Rat Race')—I'm in the process of recording it now. Hope you enjoy the music!"

(I had missed this story, until The River Blog unearthed video of a call for hearings in Congress. Pardon me, but gotta run now. Have to Google for a handbook on how to apply for defense department contracts.)

The "Tribal Belt"

My friend Still Life Living alerted me to analysts on NPR who kept referring, in the kind of catchy-code from which surges are spun, to a "tribal belt" in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Perhaps by that phrasing we are meant to believe that pesky tribes, though poorer than Africans, are the problem. (Oops. Pardon me. Hang on a sec while I spray my office with Rant-B-Gone.....ok, it seems to be helping. Aaaah. Blood flow, good. Air, check. Al-righty, then.)

It would probably be best to simply look at a few maps. This is the most volatile border in the world, territory where our past sins, unknown as they may be, are manifold; clicking on any of the maps shows closer views. The conflict locus:


The tribe probably targeted most by the "tribal belt" descriptor, which is but one of more than thirty others in 'Afghakistan:'


The Federally Administrated (Unaided, Uncontrolled) Tribal Areas:

Pakistan is unwilling to let the tribal areas inside its borders go because of a deep love for denuded, arid mountains, increasingly hostile refugees, dust, and a bracing climate. (All maps courtesy of the helpful Jesus del Norte.)

Silver And Gold, Silver And Gold

As the graphic from the Onion above says, are we suddenly in "Fear of everything but gold?" Not quite, but we get the picture. Gold settled at a record nominal high today. The previous high was $825.50, set Jan. 21, 1980, or $2,128.09, adjusted for inflation, according to the Minneapolis Fed Calculator. Official US inflation estimates have been laughably conservative through much of that period, so the all-time high probably clocks in nearer to USD $4-5,000 per ounce in today's value.

Gold, the stock markets, and oil are starting to correlate as as you would traditionally expect, meaning they're starting to move in opposite price directions. This is news because it has not been the case for much of the past several years, when both gold, oil, and stock indices had surprisingly strange correlation patterns. This amongst other things led some observant market-watchers (such as the Canadian Govt. Pension Fund) to conclude that a) US stock markets were being gamed back upwards via derivatives buying, and b) that the US, or somebody, was selling its gold reserves in order to finance such buying.

If those sound like conspiracy theories, one might bear in mind (rimshot) that the Soviets emptied their gold reserves via under-the-table sales in the early 1980s while their armies were fighting protracted asymmetrical conflicts with Islamic insurgencies. Of course our government, being so fiscally conservative, could never suffer a similar fate in a million years. But you do have to put your money somewhere.

There are other places offering relatively good value besides gold. For example, Jay-Z, a popular rapper, is flashing Euros like Japanese folding fans in a music video while Gisele Bundchen no longer accepts payment in dollars. Wholesale drug dealers started switching to the Euro three years ago...which means American intelligence agencies are also now, insofar as possible, Euro-denominated. Meanwhile, the Canadian dollar is at an all-time high, as silver nears its nominal all-time peak. Rolls of ordinary copper wire at Home Depot have nearly tripled in price since 2005.

Not espousing any sort of panic here, just an eye to conservative diversification. Besides, everything's FINE!! The city of Cleveland is allocating $100 million to demolish vacant homes. Plenty of building opportunities there, and the new construction markets are still going very strong in Iraq, Africa, and Central Asia. Citicorp, America's largest bank, may have lost a third of its value over the last few weeks, but it hired former (Clinton) Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to more effectively grovel for a bailout at the Fed's door. Speaking of the Fed, it pumped another $40 billion shot into the credit markets last Thursday. Best of all, the American economy grew at a faster-than-expected rate, unemployment is lower than expected, and the core inflation rate is clocking in at, oh, about 2% or so. Mother Russia would be proud.

The Tourism Boom In Afghanistan

"You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," an Afghan Secret Service agent warned Rory Stewart, an avidly naive Scotsman, before he set out to walk across the country in 2002. "It is mid-winter - there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee."

So there's a promotional slogan from an erstwhile Ministry of Tourism for you: Don't come here. You will die. I had the good sense not to go to there as a tourist or otherwise, but, oh, to be in Kandahar, now that the sub-zero winter winds have come and buzkashi matches have begun. Buzkashi is the national pastime, kind of like basketball, except there are no teams and the players fight on horseback for the right to carry a dead goat. The objective is to carry a dead animal, preferably a 30-lb. goat but anything dead of similar size will do, through a distant goal, with anywhere from 10 to a few hundred other riders trying to stop you. There are no rules, the only weapons are fists, and killing your opponents through any means other than the trampling hooves of mischance is considered poor form. I suspect the game originated with the Mongols, passed into the region by Tamerlane, and the Afghan tribes loved it. In a nod to modernity, however, buzkashi is no longer played with a severed human head.

Rory Stewart calls his book "The Places in Between." I must have it, and was surprised to see it's at the #51 sales position on Amazon. Since the Silk Road trade routes and long before, Afghanistan has been known as The Place Which Must Be Crossed, a fact of which Stewart, a former journalist and Foreign Office staffer, is well aware. It was probably one of the first places on earth to be home to caravanserai (caravan palaces) and is one of the last still ruled by tribes. Stewart had already walked through Turkey and Iran, and before crossing he promised his mother it would be his last journey, that he would come home if he didn't get killed. He describes the people of Afghanistan as "greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel," yet praises them for never attempting "to kidnap or kill me" despite representing "a culture that many of them hated." He made it out alive, still wired for adventure, and later went on to write another book, "The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq." The New York Times Book Review says of his his first work:

'The book is replete with fascinating, if fearfully context-dependent, travel tips. If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you're from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you're taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don't carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.'