England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.

Substitute Shakespeare with Mark Twain and Goebbels with, say, Glenn Beck, and I’d say this portrait makes for a pretty accurate assessment of the United States today.

In order to be somebody, people must feel themselves part of something. In the nonviolent army, there is room for everyone who wants to join up. There is no color distinction. There is no examination, no pledge, except that, as a soldier in the armies of violence is expected to inspect his carbine and keep it clean, nonviolent soldiers are called upon to examine and burnish their greatest weapons – their heart, their conscience, their courage and their sense of justice.

…

Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers.

MLK, Why We Can’t Wait, 1963.

Compiling such a massive list is probably way too ambitious, so I’m going to go ahead and give myself the option in advance of not finishing them all.

Just finished: A Most Wanted Man, by John LeCarre. Description.

This was my first foray into the well-known LeCarre-nival of spy stories, and pretty much lived up to the hype. If you dig James Bond/Jason Bourne type stuff, but without the machismo and gadgets, you get good stories of espionage that probably had a lot of significance last century. Sort of like the “From Russia With Love” era Bond. All that said, I’m pretty sure I never need to read another LeCarre novel again to know what they’re all about, though I wouldn’t be averse to being proven wrong. File under: pleasant ways to pass time in a peaceful, contented world.

Currently reading: What is the What, by Dave Eggers. Description.

See previous post on the subject here. This is a book much more suited to the day, as it simply and plainly tells the story of a complicated, multi-level world of suffering and perseverance without any illusions of good or evil, us and them, right and wrong. It really is heartbreaking, but it is as honest a description of what it means to be human as I’ve come across. File under: must reads.

Below, in no particular order, are things I’ll hopefully get to in the next couple of five years. If you’ve read any of these, or have any suggestions in terms of order or even substitutes, please feel free to leave your comments.

River Town, by Peter Hessler. Description.

2666, by Roberto Bolano. Description.

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins. Description.

The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Description.

Black Power, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. Description.

All The President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Description.

Why We Can’t Wait and Where Do We Go From Here?, by Martin Luther King, Jr. Description 1, 2.

A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell. Description.

The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Description.

The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Description.

The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux. Description.

Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, edited by Bernard B. Fall. Description.

Seven Short Novels, by Anton Chekhov. Description.

Tuva or Bust!, by Ralph Leighton. Description.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Description.

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Description.

The Tragedy of Man, by Imre Madach. Description.

The Collector’s Book of Science Fiction, by H.G. Wells. Description.

The book was given to me by my uncle, though it has been recommended by others, and he said I’d be hooked almost instantly. I’ve only read about 40 pages, and can already tell you that he was right. However, the reason I’m writing about it now is that something in particular jumped out at me from the first chapter. At this point in the story, Deng has been living in the U.S. for a few years, and although he has been warned about theft and violence in the low-rent community where he lives, he naively opens the door to some strangers and is robbed and beaten. After being intially pistol-whipped and subdued, he begins to take stock of what they might steal:

Lying here, I begin to calculate what they can take from me. I realize with some satisfaction that my computer is in my car, and will be spared. But [Deng's roomate] Achor Achor’s new laptop will be stolen… The records of all the meetings, the finances, thousands of e-mails.

For a victim of civil war, who for years has hidden, been shot at, seen friends killed by planes, soldiers, disease, starvation, even taken by lions, has walked hundreds if not thousands of miles through harsh terrain, then been transplanted to a new and mind-bogglingly different place, a laptop computer is the first thing that he thinks of.

Even for me, having grown up in comfort and stability, a computer is, at it’s root, a metaphysical concept. It is a clever and compact combination of plastics and metals, with the power to hold seemingly infinite amounts of data, project images and sounds, connect to and analyze a limitless amount of information – nearly the sum of human knowledge, an incomprehensible idea in and of itself – that essentially relies on the user’s ability to believe that it exists. It is, as my 91-year-old grandmother might say, magic.

I have absolutely no idea how it works, though I recognize that it is a marvel of human engineering. But somehow, I would have guessed that someone in Deng’s position, having undoubtedly learned firsthand the value of life above all, and the temporary and comparatively meaningless nature of possessions, situations, even information – “stuff”, if you will – would have thought of something else before his computer. What else would he have thought of? It’s hard to say, but perhaps he would have been worried for his own safety; the value of lives in places like Sudan seem to command a lower asking-price than we’d generally be comfortable with. Maybe he’d be worried first that they would steal his paper money, or clothing, or take his food – all things that I would guess have a higher value to those at the desperate edge of survival than a hunk of plastic and metal.

But perhaps I’m underestimating the value of possessions, especially those with the demonstrably “magic” power of a personal computer. Indeed information itself is valuable to people in any situation, and a computer’s most impressive and easily-grasped attribute is that it is the single most powerful, tangible aggregator of information that we come into regular contact with. Though one could perhaps argue that our parents or societies are also immense and powerful conglomerations of information, I think that these quickly become difficult to accurately distill the boundaries of. When one thinks about it, the theft of a computer is more than a theft of a useful machine or expensive toy, but is a theft of the mind and body – memories and creations, the fruits of labors both physical and intellectual.

It makes a pretty good argument to back up your files. Or keep infinite copies on the internet, like this blog.

Of course, I could be reading a little too deeply into this. It could be that Eggers himself, in relating this incident through Deng’s years of dictations and conversations, placed the computer as the first and most important object of value in his character’s mind, and that this entire issue could be boiled down to a first-world author attempting to distill the mind of a third-world refugee. Indeed it would be natural in my own comfortable setting – if my house were burning down, if there was one thing I’d run in to get, or bring with me on my way out, it would probably be my computer (perhaps followed closely by my film negatives, another irreplaceable aggregator of information). What would you take?

Read more about the Lost Boys of Sudan here, and learn about the documentary here.