Back to Blogging

After a long and unintended hiatus, I'm starting the blog back up.  Folks who have been here before will notice that I dropped the domain name - it just didn't seem worth the hassle of renewing it and changing where I had it registered after I decided not to continue doing business with GoDaddy.

I'll continue with the old type of content, but starting tomorrow, I'll also be posting my notes on the books I'm reading for Ph.D comprehensive exams.  My goal is two books a day, so with any luck at all there will be two daily posts (depending on what football games are televised in the Orlando market).  Since my book lists cover military and naval history, United States History since 1865, and European History since 1815, there will be a wide selection of titles (including some gender history since masculinity is one of the theoretical frameworks appearing in my dissertation).

Holidays? What Holidays?

A testament to the life of many graduate students is that they never really get a break from academic pursuits like they did in halcyon days of being an undergrad.  Although some lucky few manage to eke out a week or so without reading or writing, most of us continue to work year-round, whether summer teaching and research, trying to get ahead on reading for the next semester, preparing to teach, or studying for exams.

In my case, I have a little of all of it.  Not only do I get to spend time studying for comprehensive exams (I brought forty books on France just for that reason), but I need to finish my article on American Military Culture (it is past due), edit two journal articles to send out for publication (one of William Calley and another on George Armstrong Custer), and finish two short papers for a directed reading I've yet to finish (procrastination is the frenemy of the graduate student).  For my sins, I also have to continue working to organize the department's third annual graduate student conference (we need 3 more commentators), and edit more than sixty book reviews since I was also gullible enough to agree to be the book review editor for the Southern Historian.

For the next couple of days, I'll be working on those short papers and the encyclopedia article.  Here's the reading list:

• Knox and Murray The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050
• Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate
• Black, A Military Revolution?
• Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800

• Lewis, The American Culture of War 
• Builder, The Masks of War
• American Military Culture in the Twenty-First Century: A Report of the Csis International Security Program
• Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power
• Toner, The American Military Ethic
• Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War since 1945
• Hoffman, Decisive Force: The New American Way of War
• Barnett, Navy Strategic Culture: Why the Navy Thinks Differently
• Melton, The Clausewitz Delusion

Veteran's Day

This Week's Reading

Now that my grading is getting caught up, I'm launching back into my comprehensive exam preparation.  That means reading books, articles, and book reviews.  I should have my European and Military & Naval reading lists nailed down in the next week, but U.S. is under control.  Since I don't have time to wait, and owe one of my dissertation co-chairs some work, I'm launching right into the Military & Naval, which has some overlap with the European list.

This week's light reading:

1. Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500-1660.
2. Brian M. Dowling, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe.
3. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000.
4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble.
5. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War.
6. Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace.
7. Ronald J. Glasser, 365 Days.

Election Day

If you are a citizen of the United States, and have not voted, get thee to the polls.  This is the most visible opportunity you have to do one of the things that makes you an American: choose our leaders.

Voting is a right, a privilege, a responsibility, and a sacred duty.  As citizens of the world's oldest republic, we are morally responsible for the decisions of our leaders and the actions of our government.  If you don't vote, which represents the absolute minimum level of active citizenship, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution to our nation's many problems. 

Regardless of who you vote for, it is your job as an American to exercise the franchise, and to do so responsibly.  Pick up a newspaper and spend a couple of hours learning the issues and the candidates, and vote what you believe.  Get your information from serious sources, not those entertainers on the radio or television - Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Olbermann, and Maddow get paid to get ratings by pandering to key segments of the political extremes.

Don't just vote for the candidate based on their party designation, but whether you agree or disagree with their stands on the issues.  This is hard work, what Michael Douglas calls in the American President "advanced citizenship."  Despite the difficulty inherent in being a responsible voter, it is your duty to be one.  Make careful and sober choices because there are serious consequences for them.  The lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, not to mention citizens of other nations, depend on the decisions we make every time we vote. 

Heroic Sacrifice, Halo: Reach, and American Pop Culture

I finally finished the campaign for Halo: Reach after 12 hours of game time.  That puts me behind the curve on skill and time, but I've played my First Person Shooters on the PC, not on a console.  Many years ago I started Halo: Combat Evolved, but didn't finish it, so I have no particular affinity for this franchise.  In essence, I started Halo: Reach as a completely new player without any knowledge of the background or skills many players bring to the game.  Of course, I'm not here to review Halo: Reach  Many people have done that with great skill already.

Back when Halo was first released, Trish pointed to a review that linked Halo: Reach to the epic tradition in Western Civilization, particularly that of the Iliad, particularly the self-sacrifice of Noble 6 in his effort to save humanity from destruction at the hands of an alien race (the Covenant).  Noble 6's sacrifice is notable due to his relative anonymity - his face is never seen, voice not heard.  He is the faceless, armored defender who sacrifices to complete his mission, and when it appears that he will escape with his life, goes back to certain death in order to allow humanity's last hope a chance to escape the alien onslaught.

Halo: Reach's narrative is full of heroic self-sacrifice.  Countless Marines desperately fight to the bitter end so that groups of civilians can escape, or so that others can complete critical missions.  The other members of Noble, the elite group of Marine special forces that Noble 6 is a member, similarly meet their fates.  Jorge pilots a corvette into a Covenant cruiser to allow human ships to escape.  He grabs Noble 6 and hurls him to safety, pleading with him to allow him to make this sacrifice, and to make it count.

Most of the rest of Noble Team also meet their fates with their eyes open.  Emile is dragged from an anti-ship battery and killed by Covenant forces while attempting to cover Noble 6's escape.  Jun is last seen escorting a civilian scientist with instructions not to let her fall into Covenant hands.  Carter, the commander of Noble, plows his crippled aircraft into Covenant armor in order to allow Emile and Noble 6 to deliver an AI containing information critical to humanity's survival to a waiting corvette.  The only exception is Cat, Noble's second in command, who is senselessly struck down by a sniper after guiding Noble 6 on a mission to suppress covenant forces allowing civilians to escape.  Her death is the only one that doesn't carry the message of self-sacrifice.

Halo: Reach is just the most recent example of this message of primacy of heroic self-sacrifice in American pop culture.  My initial reaction to Roger Travis' review was to blow it off because it seemed to argue that Halo was the only recent example of this message in recent American media, and to point to Saving Private Ryan (1998) to bolster that argument.  Travis goes a bit deeper than this, linking Halo to a deeper tradition in Western cultures, but I still think that they merely represent a new way of accessing these ancient traditions.  Just in the past thirty years we have numerous examples from a still important mass medium: movies.

Saving Private Ryan is merely an obvious example of the genre, in which a small group of soldiers are sent to find an American soldier whose family has already sacrificed three sons to the war effort so that he can be sent home.  The squad sets out across enemy-occupied territory to find Ryan in the aftermath of the D-Day invasion.  When they find him, he refuses to return to safety until his rag-tag unit defends a critical bridge.  While Ryan survives, the leader of squad, Capt. John Miller dies while defending the bridge, telling Ryan to live a good life in payment for the sacrifice.

There are a plethora of other examples.  One of my earliest movie memories is Star Wars, which I saw in 1977 with my Dad and our parish priest, Fr. George Kitchen.  The key moments of heroic sacrifice that stand out are Obiwan Kenobi's death at the hands of Darth Vader, and the combat deaths of a small group of outgunned rebel pilots who desperately through themselves into the teeth of the Death Star's defenses.  These guys could use their ships to flee, but they stay and fight to save their comrades, and by extension the free peoples of the Galactic Republic.  If we couldn't pick up this theme on our own, Director George Lucas slaps us in the face with it by using an argument between male leads Luke Skywalker and Han Solo over the rationale of the seemingly suicidal defense of the rebel base.  Solo is only redeemed when he returns at the last second, allowing Luke, the lone remaining rebel combatant, to destroy the Death Star in time to save the day.

1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn also features the theme of heroic self-sacrifice on more than one occasion.  The first example occurs off-screen when the civilian crew of scientists aboard a space station above Regula I sacrifice themselves to allow a small group group of scientists to escape with an experimental device that is both potential miracle terraforming device and terror weapon.  Later, Captain Terrell, commander of USS Reliant, kills himself rather than allowing Kahn to force him to kill Admiral James T. Kirk and seize the device.  During the movie's climax, Spock sacrifices himself to save the crew of USS Enterprise by entering a reactor chamber to perform critical repairs to the Enterprise's warp engines.  Radiation kills Spock, but the Enterprise makes it to safety at the very last second because, in his words, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

More recently, The Dark Knight (2008) and Star Trek (2009) reinforce this theme.  In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent, Gotham's District Attorney rages against Batman for saving him rather than his fiance Rachel, both of whom have been kidnapped by the Joker in his efforts to create chaos in the city.  The result pushes Dent over the edge into madness.  At the end of the film, Batman conspires with Lt. Gordon to paint himself as the villain to save Dent's reputation at Gotham's soul.  The city, the masked hero argues needs to have Dent as a symbol of hope, so he volunteers to become hunted as a criminal despite his efforts to save the city.

J.J. Abrams' reboot of the Star Trek franchise in 2009 opens with Lt. George Kirk assuming command of a damaged starship, desperately fighting a superior enemy in order to allow the crew and families of the vessel to escape while he uses the ship to ram another vessel, masking their escape.  His son lives to become the Capt. James T. Kirk, the original franchise revolved around.  Later in the film, Capt. Christopher Pike, commander of USS Enterprise, goes to his almost certain death at the hands of the mysterious enemy in order to give Kirk, Spock, and the crew of the Enterprise vital time to escape and warn Starfleet of an imminent threat to the the Earth itself.

The heroic tradition, thus, lives on in our mass media, of which video games are the most recent incarnation.  The question I'm interested is in what we do with this tradition.  One path is to glorify it as a warrior tradition, in which determined and brave people, usually men, perform heroic feats beyond the ability or expectation of average citizens.  This is the Homeric path that Roger Travis takes us down with his discussion of Halo and the Iliad as examples of the epic ring cycle.  If so, I believe this is a potentially dangerous cultural turn for Americans given the United States Army's current obsession with the "warrior ethos" as the basis for its core ideal.  The Air Force has also adopted the "warrior" mindset as the basis for much of its most basic training, even to the point that it extended Basic Military Training and is working to instill the "warrior ethos" in drone pilots.

The problem is that the mindset of the warrior is intrinsically different from that of the soldier.  Warriors focus on the issue of fulfilling the mission without worrying about the niceties of how they get the mission done.  The primary focus is on physical and mental toughness, veneration of those the attributes that lead to success in combat, and, historically, disparaging the civilians warriors protect and civilian leaders who do not measure up on a small cluster of values.  This trend, in which some members of the United States Military deem themselves somehow morally superior to civilians, particularly politicians, has been evident since the Clinton administration, but has actually been reported in the mass media over the past two or three years.

Contrast this with the mindset of the soldier, particularly the citizen-soldier of the American ideal.  The ideals of the soldier are outwardly similar to those of the "warrior ethos" - focus on mission, not leaving comrades behind, physical and mental toughness.  One difference is that the citizen-soldier is part of American society, not apart from it.  Another, and equally important difference is that soldiers do far more than fight and kill.  The focus on "warrior" detracts from other options - the soft parts of military power like building schools and clinics, restoring law and order, fighting corruption, agricultural reform, etc... When not in combat, these are important missions, particularly when fighting what used to be called "low-intensity conflicts," where they can reduce the combat that does occur.  This is the "hearts and minds" stuff that you have to do along with providing physical security and engaging in traditional combat actions.  Building roads and bridges have been part of the soldierly arts since at least 300 BCE, and they can't just be turned over to contractors.  This is how the British built and maintained their Empire.

I'll have more about the contrasts between "warriors" and "soldiers" another time.  My point here is that while Halo and other media may reach back to our mythic past, as embodied by the Iliad, there is another way of looking at the heritage it represents.  Rather than the Iliad, perhaps the model should be Livy's Cincinnatus, a figure that seemed to speak to 18th century American leaders.  Cincinnatus was a typical Roman citizen.  He had enough wealth in the form of his farm to be a citizen and to serve in the main three lines of the legion, rose to lead Rome as Dictator, and after defeating the Aequians, Sabinians, and the Volscians, resigned his post before his six month term was up to return to his farm.

Cincinnatus represents the tradition we see among most Greek hoplites.  With the exception of Sparta, the Roman and Greek model was that of the citizen soldier.  American tradition venerates the Minutemen and other militia of the American Revolution, the volunteers and conscripts of the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and the citizen soldiers of World War II.  The vast majority of Vietnam Veterans were not professionals, but conscripted citizens who were simply doing their duty as Americans (albeit frequently after being drafted).  This tradition required the United States to maintain small professional forces that could command greatly enlarged forces when wars occurred. 

The tradition of the citizen-soldier is what we see in Saving Private Ryan and Star Trek.  I would argue that we can even interpret Halo in this manner.  The Spartans that are the primary cast of the Halo series are genetically engineered versions of our own Special Forces, which date back to the American Revolution.  They, along with regular Marines, do their duty to defend civilians and help them escape, sacrificing themselves only when they must in order to ensure that others survive to fulfill that mission.  This is part of the grand tradition of the citizen-soldiers of the United States Military.  Yes, there are folks who fit the tradition of Achilles rather than that of Cincinnatus, but Achilles, the sulky, if gifted warrior, does not fit with our tradition of Republican Democracy.

O Kindle, How I Covet Thee

To be honest, I really want an iPad, but that's a different conversation.

My initial objections to Amazon's toy was the original high price, the proprietary file format it required, the minimal support for other types of documents, and the limited availability of content.  Each iteration of the Kindle brought better support for other formats and and third parties have developed methods to add or convert files from most of the major document formats for use on the Kindle. 

I've also noticed expanded content available from Amazon.  The hardcover version of Christopher Coker's The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror is $112 from Amazon, with the paperback coming in at a still hefty $41.  The Kindle version is available for $33.56.  This is a far cry from Amazon's requirement that e-books sell for $9.99, but still a significant savings over the cover price, and using the WiFi or 3G versions of the Kindle gives you instant access to the book, which you can also use on your PC, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, or other devices.  While working on my last project, I came very close to purchasing the Kindle version for use on my Macbook or my iPod Touch.  That same project came close to pushing me to grabbing the Kindle version of James Woulfe's Into the Crucible.  In the past, not only were the works I needed not available as e-books, but I was reluctant to use them for serious work since they are harder to annotate and to refer back to.  Hell, I print out journal articles to read and scribble on.

I'm still averse to using e-books for serious work unless I'm driven there by desperation, but consider the utility of the Kindle for other types of reading based on newish developments.  The big key here is that Amazon's proprietary .azw format is based on the venerable Mobipocket format (.mobi or .prc) files.  Although Amazon doesn't proclaim it from the heights newer Kindles can read those non-DRMed files.  This leads us to a way to create something close to interoperability.  By using the free utility Calibre, you can convert most documents that don't have DRM to the Mobipocket or pdf formats that a Kindle can read.  Have a bunch of Microsoft Reader (.lit) or Epub books without DRM?  Convert those bad boys using Calibre and you're in business.  If you have DRMed e-books, you're going to have to find the software to strip it before converting.  It isn't hard, but you'll have to find it on your own...

The new Kindle also boasts a decent web browser based on the same webkit engine as Apple's Safari browser.  It reportedly does a good job of displaying the mobile versions of most websites, albeit in grey-scale.  The WiFi version does this with just about any WiFi hotspot, but the 3G Kindle lets you access the Internet anywhere AT&T's 3G network is available.  Using 3G doesn't cost you anything, which explains why Amazon doesn't really talk about this feature much.  Amazon foots the data bill for all Kindle web traffic.  Instapaper also works well on the Kindle 3, with some folks calling it the Kindle's "killer app".  Rumor has it a Kindle version is in the works. You can even get RSS feeds, Tweet, and read black and white comics (or even Manga) on the Kindle 3.

The Kindle 3's new functionality combined with the inventiveness of users and business are working to make it a device that is useful far beyond Amazon's limited e-book vision.  The thing is not a tablet like an iPad or an Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it does seem to have carved out a viable niche for consuming text-based content.  I'm a text-based kind of guy, and while I would love to have an iPad to use as a light-weight laptop alternative (paired with an appropriate desktop computer), it's possible that the Kindle + Macbook  combo is also a worthwhile option.