Dietrich, the main protatonist, is a Catholic priest in the small village of Oberhochwald in medieval Germany. In the summer of 1348, just before the Black Plague ravages Europe, a spaceship crashes in the nearby woods, setting off an electrical storm, lightning and fires. Some aliens are wounded, but most survive.

The aliens are adapted enough to earth’s atmosphere that they can exit their craft and survive. They are lanky beings, their heads smaller than human heads with huge yellow bulging, insect-like eyes and antennae. Their mouths are wide and they have soft front lips and horny side lips. With long arms and legs they are between five and over six feet tall. When they haunch down and sit, they hug their legs and their knees extend above their heads. They communicate by creating hissing and chirping sounds out of their side lips and by rubbing their serrated forearms together. To medieval Germans, they look like giant grasshoppers.

Of course, to medieval Germans, who are deeply steeped in religion, they also look like demons. Fortunately, the aliens have universal translating machines and head harnesses that they and humans can wear which do the translating. The translation software has to learn the vocabulary, and it gets built over time. This capability of the aliens saves them, since some of the humans quickly figure out that there are a lot of advantages that come with advanced technology. For instance, the aliens have flying harnesses. They have weapons with bullets, explosives, cameras, medical tools, all of which come in handy when you have to defend yourself against crooks and neighboring war lords.

The story plays in 1348 and 1349, but there is also a frame plot that plays today, where a historian and his physicist girlfriend figure out that there were aliens through a complex set of circumstances. This makes it a book with complex material, and that is confusing and distracting at times.

Flynn writes extensively about medieval lifestyle and history, and you really get immersed into that long-ago world.

He knows a lot of languages, and he shows off his Latin, Greek, German and French, sometimes without translation. I was able to get most of it, but the average American reader would simply not be able to follow. His language is stilted, and people talk unnaturally, or perhaps they really talked that way in the 14^th century, and it just seems unnatural to me.

He uses an abundance of German, with German names of people and places, expressions, exclamations, all intended to make it seem real. Sometimes I wondered why he didn’t place the story into medieval England or Ireland. The spacecraft could easily have crashed there. He could have accomplished the very same goal, but with less confusion, because he could have remained in the English language, alas, he could not have shown off his German.

He waxes extensively about advanced physics and cosmology. This book would have been just fine with a little more focus on the real story and leaving out the modern physics. It simply didn’t connect.

Did he want to write a book about cosmology, the plague, medieval Germany and medieval religion? Maybe. He did write a book about what might happen if an advanced technological and completely alien race were to be mixed up with a feudal, pre-industrial society. That’s the part that kept me reading to the end. All the other stuff was interesting, but distracting and took the story out of focus.

Rating: *

DarwinCatholic: Here is another good review with a theological angle.

Travel day during a business trip. Wake up at 3:45am in Jamestown, New York, because you have to catch a 7:00am flight from Buffalo to Madison, Wisconsin. Icy streets, no coffee, until you get to the Buffalo airport. No Starbucks. Have hot and mediocre coffee and a Danish out of a cellophane wrapper (never eat anything that comes wrapped in cellophane).

Doze on the plane. Ah, O’Hare has Starbucks.

Land in Madison. 35 degrees. A rental car and no place to go. Find the DoubleTree. It turns out to be near the University of Wisconsin, amidst shops, eateries, used book stores, and all the hustle and bustle of a college town. Try to check in, even though it’s too early. Unexpectedly, they have a room ready for me at 10:00am. I have an upgrade to a suite, one of  the best I have had in a long time. The staff is exceedingly friendly. I have a vegetable omelet in the almost empty restaurant, and the coffee is superb. Feeling better now. Taking a long nap until 2:30pm. Feeling much better now.

Walking to the Museum of Modern Art. Then browse the bookstores. One should always visit college bookstores. It’s like there are books from other universes from authors that I have never noticed before. It’s the Anti-Barnes-and-Noble. Picking around science fiction books, art books as always, and some medieval history stuff.

I walk back to the hotel. Having traveled between two cities, having spent a work day not working at all, and feeling like I have had a mini vacation.

And a plug for  the DoubleTree Hotel in Madison: Great hotel, excellent accommodations and amazing staff. Pick this up, Google.

Occasionally I watch a movie that opens my eyes to well-known events and shows me an angle that I had not considered before.

Charlie Wilson’s War is presumably based on true events, and I have no evidence of  this being true or false, so let’s say it’s true. In the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was getting all the credit for ending the Cold War, the Russians were fighting a cruel and bloody war in Afghanistan. They had absolute superiority in terms of numbers and military equipment. The Afghan freedom fighters were resisting with rifles on the ground. The Soviets came in with helicopter gunships and blew away villages, men, women and children indiscriminately. They actually created mines that looked like toys, so the children would pick them up to play, and their hands and sometimes arms were blown away, if they survived. The Russians had figured out that it takes much more time and effort to take care of maimed children than healthy ones, and parents taking care of children had to time or resources to take up arms against the Russians. By 1990, half of the entire population of Afghanistan was under 14 years old, and many of the children were maimed.

In comes a U.S. Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). He travels to Afghanistan and sees the refugee camps, observes the sorry state of the resistance, and is truly moved to do the right thing. That’s a stretch for a hard-drinking, cocaine-using and womanizing congressman from Texas, but he seems like just the right guy for the job. With the help of a Houston Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a cunning and courageous CIA veteran Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour), he raises money from the U.S. government for the Afghans. Five million dollars a year gradually turns into one billion dollars a year for Russian weapons that, through a complex set of maneuvers, comes from Israel through Pakistan into Afghanistan. Helicopters get shot down, tanks get blown up, and the Afghans start getting the upper hand and drive out the mightiest army in the world. The cold war ends, and Charlie Wilson does not get any credit. Really, did you know who Charlie Wilson even was before seeing this movie?

This is where the movie review ends and the social criticism starts: Fast forward a few years. The lost, abused and maimed children grow up. What will their worldview be? They need to survive, without much of a country, with no parents, no industry, no love and no hope. The very freedom fighters that we trained and supplied with arms in 1988 slowly morph into – yes – the Taliban. The poverty, despair, physical pain, hunger and lack of love and security drives them to Muslim fundamentalism. Soon they blow up schools, libraries, art, treasures of antiquity and anything foreign. They brutalize their own women, take away their rights to an education, and start turning against the West. Terrorist camps arise, and soon 9/11 happens. We don’t remember that we helped create this in Afghanistan. Do the research! Just like we armed Saddam Hussein in those days. Oh, how quickly nations forget.

All that and much more buzzed through my head as I was watching Charlie Wilson’s War.

Rating: ***

I purposely waited until I had finished reading the book by David McCullough before I watched the movie. And it was worth the wait. After writing much about the book and adding a number of history vignettes in posts in the last couple of weeks, I won’t spend much time retelling the story and my impressions here. Let’s focus on the impact of the movie after I have read the book.

First I noticed that there were thousands of details missing. The movie had about 5% of the depth of the book, even though it was a 7 hour miniseries. So many things were skipped over, glossed over or omitted, but of course, that’s necessary to make it all fit.

Then I noticed that time just went by faster, and the viewer had no idea of the actual ordeals the people went through. In the beginning, when John Adams would travel to the continental Congress in Philadelphia, he would one day ride away from his house, and in the next scene he would be in Philadelphia. The viewer does not get the impression that there were four weeks of arduous travel between the two scenes. The same thing happens when Adams first leaves for Paris. He boards a ship, we see him seasick, and then he disembarks a coach and meets Franklin in Paris. The viewer does not realize that months of challenging travels occurred between the two scenes. I got the impression the characters traveled back and forth like we do today, in Boston one day, in Philadelphia the next.

I loved seeing how the costumes and living conditions came to life. You don’t realize how bad everyone’s teeth were, given that there was no dentistry, until you see all the gaps and black rotted teeth in people’s mouths. That was well depicted.

I enjoyed seeing the White House built in the middle of the bush, down a few hills from the Capitol. The entire area was surrounded by woods, hills, barren fields, and rough wagon trails. If only the first occupants could see it now.

The movie does a great job helping out the imagination and filling in details that would not have come out by reading. But watching only the movie, without reading the book first, would deprive the viewer of a tremendous wealth of detail. Overall, I am enriched by watching the movie, by fortifying my knowledge of the historical details. They did a fantastic job showing the characters age, with Adams starting out in his thirties at the beginning of the movie, and ending up 90 when he died. They represented this very realistically.

A tour de force. HBO did a remarkable job.

Rating: ****

 
1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2. Get mad; then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done!
5. Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.
8. Check small things.
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision. Be demanding.
12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

Mel Gibson directed this movie and starred in it. It tells the story of a dedicated  teacher who, through a streak of very unfortunate events, ends up severely disfigured and disgraced. He lives as a hermit in a small coastal community in Maine, ostracized by the locals and shrouded in mystery and pure misinformation. A boy, quite by accident, befriends him and ends up being tutored by him for an entrance exam into a prestigious military boarding school.

It is a story about character in a man whose outside is very flawed but whose essence is strong as an oak and clear and clean as crystal. The normal people around him are the neurotic and hysterical ones. Their prejudices eat them, their pettiness keeps them from having fulfilling lives themselves. But they are in the majority and they dictate how our world is run.

Just and fair it is not. But, as this story tells us, integrity perseveres and the tutor and the student succeed in their own way.

Rating: ***

We are now completely used to instant communications, yet not very long ago we didn’t have the Internet, and the only way to communicate “instantly” was by telephone or fax, before that teletypes, before that only letters.

When I was a foreign exchange student in 1974 in New York, communicating back to Germany had to be by hardcopy letter. I still remember that the postage for an airmail letter overseas was 21 cents, and a regular domestic letter was 10 cents. Talking on the telephone overseas was still forbiddingly expensive, so the only time I talked with my family back home was at Christmas time in a short phone call that was actually donated by the telephone company and there was a newspaper article about the phone call in the local paper: “Foreign Exchange Student Calls Home!” – I kid you not.

That was only 35 years ago. An airmail letter home took about a week. So I could expect a response as fast as two weeks after mailing my letter.

Now roll back to 1780, when Franklin, Adams and Jefferson were all in Europe, spread out over England, Holland and France, conducting the ambassadorial business of the fledgling United States. A letter then had to be  carried by coach to the nearest harbor, where it boarded a ship that took at best a month, sometimes 3 or 4 months, to cross the Atlantic, depending on time of year, weather, luck, and avoidance of capture by a warring nation. At the destination harbor, the letter was then carried by coach again to the destination city, and there by horseback rider to the addressee. It was not unheard of that a letter would take 6 months to arrive at its destination.

This made sensible communications difficult. Adams wrote to his wife fairly frequently, and there could be dozens of letters on the way before one response would arrive. Simply coordinating the letters and responses must have been a challenge.

But think about the complexity of conducting the business of a nation. The President of the United States would send instructions to the ambassador in France about how to approach a negotiation. Back home the President would then need to make a decision based on the outcome of that negotiation, so he would need a response letter back. That exchange could easily take half a year. Imagine there is the threat of a naval attack from an enemy that we were trying to negotiate peace with. The peace could already have been agreed to in Europe months before, but both parties in their ships didn’t know about it and proceeded to shoot at each other. News of such unexpected battles would then upset the peace again months later.

Today, and just within the last 10 years, we think nothing of instant messaging or emails for immediate responses. Business of the speed of light. How much easier we have it now, and how few people in history have ever had that luxury.

Some names are forever used up. It is difficult to give a child those names in our society. They include, but I am sure are not limited to:

• Adolf
• Elvis
• Jesus
• Oprah
• Tiger
• Barack

Do you know any other names in this category?

Fact: If you woke up this morning in good health and looking forward to a successful and productive week, you are luckier than 1 million people – who will not live through this week.

Review this PowerPoint slide show. Global Village

Thinking in terms of numbers, it appealed to me. The pictures are a bit syrupy at times, but otherwise the message is powerful.

It was difficult for the founding fathers to make ends meet in revolutionary times.

Adams was a lawyer and a farmer, with very limited means and no great wealth to draw on. Living in Europe was exceedingly expensive, particularly if your status was measured by how many “servants” you had. He only had eight as embassador in France. The Spanish ambassador had 75. Congress’ salaries for their envoys was not enough for their day-to-day living expenses, let along lavish entertaining and travels.

Washington and Jefferson were in a somewhat different position. They were some of the richest men in the country. While Adams never owned slaves, both Washington and Jefferson had vast plantations and both owned over 200 slaves.

Jefferson always spent more than he made. He was constantly in debt, and when he died still left an estate of debt of over $100,000. Adams, in contrast, due to being of  modest means, lived comparatively frugally and left an estate of about $100,000 in value when he died. Jefferson was in such financial straights that he had the Commonwealth of Virginia put up a lottery with the proceeds going to pay off his debts. The lottery was a failure, however.

One way Jefferson raised money late in his life was by selling his library to Congress to re-start the Library of Congress. The British, when burning the Capitol and White House in the war had ended up ruining the fledgling Library of Congress. Jefferson sold 6700 books for $23,000. They were carted from Monticello to Washington and were the seed of the new library. This was only a drop in the bucket of Jefferson’s debt.

Living expenses, paying for travel, having their families make ends meet at home, and paying for the war, were constant sources of agony for all three of the men.

Washington couldn’t even afford shoes for thousands of men of his army even in winter, let alone pay them adequately, feed them and equip them. The tiny and shaky United States of America had to repeatedly borrow from the Dutch financiers to just stay solvent, paying off old debts and interest with the proceeds of new loans.