Evil is as evil does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mini-biographies, evil men, evil

In Dante's Inferno, most murderers are found in the seventh circle of Hell, swimming in a river of boiling blood. A special class of those who betrayed their families, usually by murder and headed up by Cain, are found in the ninth circle, frozen into the ice that imprisons Satan. In Gustave Doré's woodcut, Dante and Virgil are seen walking among them over the ice.

Caligula is not mentioned in Inferno, possibly because he was such a prolific sinner, possibly the "Renaissance man" of sinfulness, that Dante didn't know where to place him. In the book Confronting Evil: Assessing the Worst of the Worst, Bill O'Reilly places Caligula first in the long line of the most evil men in all history, primarily because he is first in time. Along with his coauthor Josh Hammer, O'Reilly limns the lives, and deaths, of fifteen of "the Worst" in twelve chapters, with just a bit of editorial comment. The details of their lives provide sufficient comment.

Among those who lived more recently, most have been called The Antichrist, but so far none has proven to be that personage. Actually, the word "antichrist" is never used in Revelation. The apostle John used this word four times in his first epistle, and once in the second, referring to "deceivers" who deny that Jesus is the Messiah, who deny "the Father and the Son", and deny Jesus Christ "coming in the flesh." The word used by John in Revelation can be translated either "wild beast" or "monster". It is much stronger than the ordinary word for a "beast of the field" such as a lion. I prefer to call this person the Monster. This Monster's career is outlined in Daniel 7, 8 and 11 and Revelation chapters 11 through 20.

Confronting Evil was written with the background of growing numbers of people who try to say that good and evil are matters of opinion, that there is no "objective evil". That is a senseless opinion, and these evil men prove it. Further, there are many today who complain that "religion" is evil, and point to the Crusades. Let it be known clearly that the odd phenomenon of the Crusades was in no way based on any truth in the Bible, and was contrary to Christian faith in every way.

The great murderers of the Twentieth Century were all atheists, with one exception. From the top down, by body count: Mao Zedong, directly responsible for 80-120 million murders; Joseph Stalin, 40-60 million; Adolph Hitler, about 25 million; Pol Pot (not mentioned in the book), 3 million; and the one religious man, Ayatollah Khomeini, between half a million and two million. The great murderer of the current Century (so far) is Vladimir Putin, with a body count pushing two million Russians and Ukrainians. One could argue that the Ukrainians killed Putins' soldiers, but it was at Putin's order that they were put in harm's way, so they are counted against him.

It makes for rough reading. I worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who is a Living God, and calls His people to abundant Life. He counts Death as "the last enemy." I need to shelter under His wings to be swept out of the presence of death.

I have sometimes considered composing an essay on "the Totalitarian Impulse," which I take as the root of the deepest evil. We all have a desire to control things, to achieve the greatest satisfaction and comfort with no frustration or sadness. Paul wrote to Timothy that "the love of money is a root of all evils," but behind that is the craving for power – for of what use is a pile of money without the power to use it for your own ends? I count as fearsomely evil any person who thinks he or she has the "right" to usurp anyone else's decision-making. Naturally, we must make most decisions for our offspring when they are small, but a huge part of our maturity is learning to release them to make their own decisions as they grown to adulthood. Some parents never learn it. Some persons take the same lack of self control into the way they treat people they supervise, or companies they may lead, or in the worst cases, nations they may gain power over. Of such are those presented in this book.

I hate to detract from this very valuable book, but I must mention that it is marred by great overuse of the historical present. Using "is" tenses rather than "was" tenses is useful to carry a historical narrative along, but there are situations where it is not appropriate, particularly in footnotes and endnotes, and I conclude that the authors haven't learned that yet.

The Bridge Generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, photo essays, millennials, mini-biographies

This picture, taken twenty years ago, shows my father getting tips on cell phone usage from my son, a Millennial. My father, age 84 in this photo, is of the "Greatest Generation", the generation of World War II and the Korean War, and also of the GI Bill and Suburbia. 

I am a Boomer. Having a son when we were more than forty years old, my wife and I skipped a generation ("X") and produced a Millennial, who now has children of his own, and having skipped yet another generation ("Z"), they are of Generation Alpha. (And yes, I was nearly 75 before the first grandchild was born. A friend close to my age became a great-great grandfather the following year.)

As a Digital Native, our son has vague memories of landline phones and TV's no larger than a coffee-table book, but now has a smart phone (smarter than mine) and a TV that would not fit anywhere in my house; he has numerous friends who are still single and others who are married, and is married himself (plus the 2 kids); and he was in the National Guard for a few years just to make ends meet while stuck as a gig worker but now divides managing a tutoring company with being their lead tutor: I'd call him one of the best of the Millennials. He truly lives on the bridge between generations, more so than either a Gen Xer or a Gen Zer could be. I call Millennials the Bridge Generation.

Charlie Wells is a Millennial who has made his success as a writer. Looking around him at his contemporaries, and having interviewed certain ones to gather a range of context and experiences, he has issued What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation. Note that there is no question mark. The title is a statement, not a question.

In this searching and panoramic book, Mr. Wells illustrates the arc of history through which his generation has passed to date, focusing on five people who agreed to be interviewed on the record. None of them experienced the straight path to adulthood and settled life that was considered "normal" by their parents and grandparents. But perhaps the term should be "ordinary" rather than "normal". The "ordinary" middle-class life path, "Finish your schooling, get a good job, marry young, have two-to-twelve children, own a home, help your kids raise their kids, stay active in your church, retire well, live long, and die contented," can be derailed at any point, and, truthfully, was honored mainly in the breach, in every generation. So why is "the breach", or many breaches, so visible for Millennials?

Quite simply, pervasive technology. I considered retracing the stories of the author's subjects, but decided instead on five characteristics. I conversed with Gemini and we boiled it down to five images that illustrate characteristics that are spread through the book, and a little of each is found in the life story of each of the five subjects. I will leave it to you to read how the author weaves them together.

Digital Natives were born in or after 1981, the year the IBM PC was released. Affordable laptops followed a few years later. In 1992 the first cell phone costing less than $1,000 was on sale, and by 1996, considered the last year a Millennial was born, some phones could be had for less than $500.

My generation and the one before went from computers that were bigger than a living room (I have a vacuum tube from a computer of that era), to "mainframes" that averaged 8-10 feet long and 5-8 feet high, and on to PC's, and now smart phones. We didn't take classes in computer science; we invented it. The classes came later. Gen X computer professionals could get degrees in computer science. Millennials and Gen Z don't need to; they can easily write apps for their phones if they're so inclined.

The 9/11 disaster and COVID-19 bookended the formative years of many Millennials. The dramatic shifts in work and work/life balance that ensued morphed into much more work-at-home and gig work. Gig Workers may not be the norm, but they are now the mainstay of technocratic middle America. 

By contrast, an increasing number of the contractors and technicians that show up at my house to fix plumbing, install appliances, and repair stuff are Millennials who usually have foregone going to college in favor of working in the trades. They typically earn more than a college graduate with a Humanities degree or even most Science degrees. Case in point among Gen X: The curator of a museum nearby, a woman of about 50 with a PhD, is married to a Lawyer, "so I can afford to be a scientist."

As I mentioned, many of our son's friends remain unmarried. Some probably don't even date. So far as I can determine, the younger a Millennial is, the less likely he or she is to be married or "looking". And those younger ones are now thirty and older. This trend is continuing among Gen Z. This "Plant Parent" is one type of contented single .

Some of the people Mr. Wells writes about got married, some didn't; some are gay, some straight, and one is bisexual; one is in an "open relationship", also called polyamory; two have children.

Many Millennials retain hobbies or pastimes of their youth. That in itself is not unusual: so do most people, and so do I. The difference is that for a great many Millennials, that pastime is online gaming. This often gets coupled with a bit of nostalgia, "retro" gaming with outdated consoles, for example.

I don't know if I fairly represent my generation. I tried some Nintendo and online games, and dropped them. I like Sudoku and non-action-oriented computer games, but I spend more time on various collecting hobbies of my youth (stamps, rocks). Our son, last I checked, is still playing an online team game (I forgot the name), and his team members now live in various cities across the TriState area, but went to high school together.

Obsessive gaming is mentioned in the book for one of the persons. So is drug addiction, for a different person. I have observed that many drug addicts who finally break free of the habit wind up working in the drug treatment and peer counseling fields. This is the case with the man in the book also.

Everyone passes through an introspective stage. Not everyone "gets over it," but usually between thirty and forty we become more secure inside our own skin. Nonetheless, many Millennials are still trying on different "skins", learning who they ultimately are or will be.

The phenomena of "the Sixties" characterized this stage for my generation. Gen Z is right in the midst of their own, while most Millennials have gotten on with life. As I recall, in one episode of All in the Family, Edith tells her daughter Gloria, "At some point, you have to do the laundry and clean house." The oldest Millennials are now forty-five, and the youngest, about thirty. So I'd say about half of them have "aged out" of the introspective phase. 

This is not really a review of the book, but of the ideas that swirl through it. Whatever age you may be, I am sure reading it will evoke thoughts of your own. If so, I hope you'll come back to this post and add a comment.

First find out what is there

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, cartography, mini-biographies

Exploration is mainly finding out what is "out there" and the most useful product of exploration is a map or chart.

Here we see mapper Cassie Bongiovanni with a color-coded contour map of the Molloy Hole in the Arctic Ocean, pointing out the deepest location within it. That spot, at a depth of 18,212 feet or 5,551 meters, is the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean, which is the only ocean without a trench that reaches into the Hadal Zone, which is defined to be deeper than 6,000 m (19,685 ft).

Ms Bongiovanni and a rotating crew of helpers accompanied Victor Vescovo on his ship DSSV Pressure Drop during the Five Deeps expedition (I reviewed another book about it in 2021). In the next image she is shown at the ship's mapping station with Aileen Bohan. Over the year-and-a-half of the Five Deeps expedition sponsored and led by Mr. Vescovo she mapped the deepest points in the five oceans and large surrounding areas, a total area exceeding that of Texas. The ship had a million-dollar multibeam sonar attached, which was needed to pinpoint the deepest spots, and to provide high-resolution mapping. The resulting maps were submitted to the Seabed 2030 Project.

When I began reading The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans by Laura Trethewey, I naturally assumed that the focus would be the Seabed 2030 Project. It soon became clear that a major aim of the book is sharing the story of Cassie Bongiovanni, who was just 25, a freshly-minted mapper, when she got the opportunity to be the on-board mapper for the Five Deeps expedition and, as a critical side benefit, prepare detailed maps of several percent of the ocean floor.

It has been said, very frequently!, that we know the surface of the Moon in greater detail than we know the sea floor. Let's think about that a moment. With a 16-inch (40 cm) diameter telescope, visual acuity during moments of the best seeing can be 1/3 of a second of arc, or about 1/620,000 of one's distance to an object. The Moon's distance at closest approach (which occurs monthly) is about 360,000 km. Over time, a dedicated visual observer can get acquainted with the features of the visible side of the moon with a resolution of about 580 meters, or 1,900 feet. Of course, space telescopes and spacecraft have mapped the Moon with much more detail than this. But consider: Right now, we are about halfway through the Seabed 2030 Project, and about 1/4 of the total area of the ocean bottom has been mapped with resolution of 1,000 meters or better. A visual astronomer with a biggish backyard telescope does indeed see the Moon better than we see the ocean floor! The initial goal of Seabed 2030 is 100 m resolution over most of the ocean, and 800 m resolution in the deepest depths. At that point, there will still be parts of the ocean that are less known than the Moon can be known by a visual astronomer.

Once you have a map, what do you do with it? For seafaring purposes, a specialized map called a chart facilitates navigation. On shipboard, "chart" has a special meaning; nautical charts show tons of information, including all the named places known at that time, information about currents and depths that are known, ferry routes, plus navigation aids such as LORAN and, of course, latitude and longitude lines. Near coastlines, the depth indications are crucial; you don't want to run aground.

In the deeper ocean, other business interests predominate. An enormous debate going on right now is what to do about metallic deposits on the seabed, such as "manganese nodules" or "polymetallic seabed nodules". What are these nodules?

Large areas of the sea floor, typically at depths between 2 and 5 km, known as the Abyssal Plain, are littered with, and sometimes almost solidly covered with lumps about the size of a potato, consisting of sulfides and oxides of several metallic elements, such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, and some "rare earths" (which aren't rare, just hard to separate from one another; there are 17 such elements that are chemically very, very similar). Mining companies are just champing at the bit to go out and dredge the sea floor, to hoover up millions of tons of the nodules and refine them for the valuable metals they contain.

Their opponents are environmental and scientific interests, saying, "Let's find out what is there first, before destroying it." The nodules grow slowly, gaining at most an inch in size per million years. The oldest parts of the sea floor are about 200 million years, because the marine plates are pulled down into the trenches and recycled. Depending on where one finds it, a nodule the size of your fist could have taken between five and fifty million years to grow to that size.

Living things dwell on and near them. The shrimp in this picture isn't here on a sightseeing expedition. It expects to find something to eat.

Deep water corals, sponges and other animals live on the nodules, where they can have a firm attachment. The surrounding seabed is soft mud, to which such creatures cannot attach. But burrowing animals live in the mud, where they might be preyed upon, and the nodules provide a modicum of safety compared to an open, flat muddy field.

Ms Trethewey attended meetings of the International Seabed Authority, where such issues are debated. Later she asked Victor Vescovo of his opinion. He has several reasons to say that seabed mining will not prove economical. The most important is the law of supply and demand. A sudden increase in supply will drive prices down. Secondly, it is easy to lose stuff at sea. If a cable breaks and your 50-ton mining machine falls to the seafloor untethered, it will cost more to retrieve it than it did to build it, but building its replacement will take months (years?).

Thanks to Mr. Vescovo and Ms Bongiovanni, we have great maps of the greatest depths. May the mapmaking continue and prosper!

The book covers a lot more ground than the tidbits that interested me, that I've riffed on here. A great read!

Up to his elbows in alligators

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, mini-biographies, law enforcement, alligators, environmentalism, everglades

Decades ago during the misnamed "sexual revolution", protests against many laws were made and we often heard the slogan, "You can't legislate morality." Though I was pretty young then, still in college, I thought, "Nonsense! We legislate nothing but morality." What is lawmaking? It is the process of defining what moral laws we care enough about to sanction (punish people for). As I watched the process unfold, as certain formerly illegal matters were legalized, and other matters were made illegal (often improperly), I came to this conclusion:

Not all that is ethical is legal.
Not all that is legal is ethical.

Fast-forward a generation or so: It has become illegal in some states or cities to call someone "him" or "her" if they prefer to be called "them" or "zhe" or "go away". It has become legal to destroy a city if your reason is "I am offended/oppressed/outraged". These are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It has become illegal to practice common sense, and what was formerly criminal insanity is the "most legal".

Jeff's career was law enforcement. He was working in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and for a good many years, he primarily caught poachers and brought them to prosecution. As chronicled in Gator County: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner, near the end of his career he was asked to embark on an extended sting operation, going undercover. To provide only a mild spoiler (because of course he succeeded, or there'd be no book): his sting caught a ringleader, and a number of lesser figures were caught in the net. But Jeff had seen what it really means to be a poacher, and he was able to weave the net more loosely so as to avoid catching absolutely everyone who'd been involved. He had more than a minimal conscience, and he cared for being ethical more than strict legality. He also knew the conclusions I stated above.

What happens when the enforcer comes to identify with his "prey"? This is the conundrum Jeff faced as he morphed himself into a seedy-looking trying-to-do-better ne'er-do-well, someone who could pass as a newly minted alligator farmer in a countryside filled with a mix of mostly honest alligator farmers and alligator hunters, and some less than honest, and a few downright scoundrels.

A similar process transformed the author as she dug deeper and deeper into Jeff's story, and the stories of others such as Peg Brown, the most legendary of the poachers of the prior generation (she befriended his son). The book's chapters bounce around between her life growing up in Florida, being a Floridian among Floridians who had been on the land for generations. She could internalize their struggles to cope with seeing their day-to-day survival methods becoming illegalized, until in many cases their choices were to poach for a living, to move somewhere else, or to starve. She asks, several times, "How does a family live when they were barely making it and their breadwinner is now incarcerated?"

The allied question that bedeviled Jeff as his operation drew to a close was, "What becomes of children if both parents are imprisoned?" Because many of the men who worked for the ringleader would bring their wives into some of the work, such as gathering alligator eggs in "illegal" quantities. The wives knew what was going on, so they were technically complicit.

Parts of some chapters outline the stages the Everglades went through as Florida became a popular destination. The Army Corps of Engineers, in their efforts to "tame" the 'glades, actually set in motion dramatic environmental changes that led to a reduction by 95% or more of the alligator population, not only in Florida but throughout gator country. But who got blamed? People like Peg Brown. Even after the alligator population rebounded—due more to their adaptability than to the efforts of environmentalists—the poaching laws were kept or even strengthened.

The poaching, at least of alligators, doesn't seem to be wiping them out. Their numbers in every state of the deep south continue to increase. There are millions, dozens to hundreds of times as many as there were 60 years ago.

This book isn't about "the corruption of Goody Two-shoes". When the operation ended, including the deliberate overlooking of some, including the wives, Jeff appeared in court when the chief perpetrators, the ones who weren't just flouting the law but smashing it to bits, were tried. It is about how we relate to others, and the struggle it can be to understand someone with whom we fundamentally disagree. I am reminded of the most remembered line of Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."