[Dear readers:  My first entry of the school year was delayed due to the busy rush at the beginning of the semester and a nagging illness I had difficulty shaking.  That said, I plan to publish weekly for the rest of the school year. 
Thanks for hanging in!]

       “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

    Way back in September 1974, when I first started teaching high school, I really did assign my 9th graders an essay on this topic.  It was a hot day, nearly 100 degrees, an easy temperature for the Sacramento Valley to hit at that time of the year.  The building had no air conditioner; the assignment turned out to be a flop.

     That semester, however, I did garner the absolute best excuse I have ever received from a student who did not do his homework and therefore was unprepared for a Monday morning quiz.  He wrote: “I am not prepared for this morning’s quiz because my father and me drove to Idaho to watch Evil Knievel jump the Snake Canyon.”  Knievel was unsuccessful in his jump; the student wasn’t particularly the best I ever taught.  His excuse, however, still ranks as my #1.

    The second best excuse came here at SMSU.  I had a world-class weightlifter in class.  His reason for missing:  tournament judges for an upcoming championship match came by his apartment that morning and demanded an immediate, unannounced, random urine test to make sure he was not using steroids to enhance his performance.  And so, he was late—but he passed that test.
           
     The semester after this particular incident, I was explaining to my advanced LIT class, one filled with mostly future high school teachers, the range of excuses we hear as teachers.  Of course, I began, Evil Knievel still ranks #1.  But when I next explained the weightlifting #2 excuse, his girlfriend (unbeknownst to me, a member of the class) blurted out, “But, it’s TRUE, he did need to give a urine sample that day.”  
         
     My third best excuse is actually the most chilling.  A student missed class because of a train accident in her home town, an accident that released a tanker car of chlorine gas.  The mustard-colored cloud forced the evacuation of the whole town. It made the national news. 
 
    Coincidentally, this was the semester I was teaching World War One poetry and could tie the accident to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about British Tommies being caught in a poison gas attack:  
    “Gas!  GAS! Quick, boys!" – an ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
    
     This past summer, in addition to trips to Arizona and Grand Marais, I read several excellent books. One, Beatrix Potter:  A Life in Nature, is an engrossing biography of an individual woman who changed the world even though confronted with her culture’s entrenched sexism.  At first aiming to become an amateur botanist and scientific illustrator, Potter was rejected by the decidedly male scientific community of her day.  Over time, her illustrations (which she fortunately kept) proved to be more accurate than many others of the day.  And her theories about mushrooms and how they spread was scientifically correct if not accepted until many years later.  When a work covering all the fungi of Britain was published in the 1990s, the author rediscovered her illustrations and used about two dozen in his work because Potter’s were finer than any other illustrations and photographs of this subject. Potter was long dead by then.
   
     And besides Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck and a host of other children’s favorites, Potter began buying centuries-old farms in the historic
and remote Lakes’ District and restoring them as working farms.  She supervised their renovation; hand-picked their managers; introduced Herdwick sheep (a breeding stock better suited to the harsh climate in Northern England); and eventually donated her considerable land holdings to the National Trust. Today, these farms are owned by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  The Lakes’ District had been the haunt of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and scores of landscape painters a century before Potter settled there; her actions saved a huge slice of English literary and artistic culture in perpetuity.
     
     My literary specialty is the British novel, so it’s no surprise I read a few novels this summer. I finally finished the 20-volume Patrick O’Brien series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  O’Brien’s two heroes are unlikely friends:  Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin. 
 
    “Mad Jack” is a devoted Royal Navy officer with the spleen to fire all his guns and the ambition to capture valuable prizes on the high seas.  In that era, officers grew extremely rich from such tactics that we would describe as piracy today.  The captain’s medical officer, Maturin, is a renowned surgeon, a naturalist, a Catholic whose family came from two natural enemies of England (Spain and Ireland), but an enlightened Renaissance Gentleman devoted to stamping out tyranny wherever he found it.  

     Napoleon is his arch enemy even if the Doctor has latent sympathies for his beloved Irish; he views France’s dictatorial Emperor as worse than anyone sitting on the English throne.  And, Stephen is a spy for the British, a way to insert him on shore for adventures in his native Spain and eventually the fledging United States and the rebellious areas of South America.  He is a way for O’Brien to introduce some cloak-and-dagger plot twists and elements that span a few volumes as subplots.   
      
     Since I started reading the series in the summer of 2001, I have watched this pair woo and wed elegant ladies and then watched one of them lose his beloved wife.  I’ve witnessed in brilliant prose as “Mad Jack” Aubrey attacked French, Spanish, Moroccan, Dutch, and American men-of-war.  I’ve seen the pair cast adrift on the sea, tossed up helpless on deserted islands, been too hot, too cold, too hungry, been overstuffed with the delicacies of the era, been drunk, sober, and been consumed by a cocaine addiction.  They also play a respectable selection of violin and cello pieces together when not waging war or discovering the latest mammal or aviary specimen.    

     I had thought that O’Brien was going to return the pair to England at the end of Volume Twenty, Blue at the Mizzen.  Jack has defeated a superior fleet in the South Pacific as he helped Chile free itself from Spain; Stephen has aided in the political intrigue while pointing out (accurately) the flora and fauna of the South America coastal areas.  Jack’s wife and children are waiting at home in Kent; Stephen has proposed to the one stunning woman who can match his scientific wits.  Napoleon is out of the scene, but trouble is brewing and so. . .

     O’Brien was about a third of the way into his 21st novel when he died.  I have the publisher’s attempt to put the partial manuscript into novel form, but I found it uninviting knowing it will just end without a clear plot conclusion. Yet I envy O’Brien’s grit to keep going, handwriting fifty thousand words, fully committed even in ill health to reach the last paragraph and period of #21.  Surely, the writer’s equivalent of dying with his boots on.  
 
     Also this summer, I ordered the DVD set of The Pacific and watched that.  For those of you who don’t follow HBO Productions, The Pacific is the companion to Band of Brothers, the HBO series that told the story of the “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division in Europe during World War II.  The Pacific follows various Marines as they land on Japanese-held tropical (and fortified) islands to fight a determined enemy and the horrific jungle itself.  Both ten-hour mini-series are worth the effort to watch, as graphic in language, action, and accuracy as they are.  Although made-for-TV movies, they hold nothing back.

     After I finished The Pacific, I downloaded to my Kindle two of the memoirs the film used as sources, Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow:  From Parris Island to the Pacific and E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge’s With the Old Breed:  At Peleliu and Okinawa.  After the war, Leckie became an award-winning AP journalist; Sledge earned his PhD in biology and was a beloved professor for many years.  Both are now dead.  The war stories are harrowing and graphic, not to sensationalize the violence, but to make a point:  war is hell and should not be glorified.  
 
     But both authors accurately point out that those young Marines in the Pacific suffered    unimaginable horrors to defeat a determined enemy capable of unimaginable horrors.  Neither war survivor wanted to write about their buried memories of friends dying painfully, of buddies being mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare or by a cruel enemy, of malaria and other jungle-borne diseases ravaging their own young, healthy bodies.  But they felt compelled to in order to put their post-War demons to rest.  So write they did of these gruesome miseries, of their own fears, and frankly, of their own eventual hatred for their fellow humans whom they killed with ruthless and merciless efficiency.  (Lucky was a machine gunner, Sledgehammer part of a mortar team.)   

     Enrolling in college after his discharge, Sledgehammer was asked by a perky coed what he learned in the Marines that could be used to foster his education.  “I worked with explosives,” he softly replied, embarrassed by the question.  “Well, that might apply to engineering,” the overly-helpful coed chirped.  Bending down to her ear, he whispered, “The Marines taught me to kill Japs. I learned really well and got damned good at it.”  
 
    Upon seeing a stage production of the upbeat South Pacific soon after it first opened on Broadway, Leckie began writing Helmet for my Pillow so people in the peaceful USA wouldn’t think the South Pacific war was a musical.  He succeeded.

     This gives you a glimpse of how I spent my summer on top of Chairing the Department, traveling to a few weddings and graduations, and working on my own sci-fi novels, The Marsco Saga.  By Christmas ’11, you will be able to download the first, The Marsco Dissident, onto your e-readers.  An electronic stocking-stuffer.

     Meanwhile, keep reading in good health!    

                Libya:  2011 – The Great War 1914-1918

        “Only the dead have seen the end to war.”  George Santayana 

    I am sure much of the political irony about Libya is lost on the average American college student.  I think that’s the case because the average American knows little about World War I, “The Great War” which raged in Europe, Africa, parts of Asia, and on all the oceans from 1914 to 1918.  It ended nearly 100 years ago and yet we still live with the repercussions of that debacle.  

    My comments are in no way intended to be a defense of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the self-proclaimed Libyan “King of Kings,” the horrific despot who runs Libya, as all despots do, with an iron fist.  He’s not much of a tyrant since he really only controls a bit of sand and beach plus thousands of square miles of dry wadies and desert wastes dotted with an occasional oasis.  If Libya didn’t sit on vast reserves of oil, few would pay attention to it or to its ranting lunatic of a ruler.  (Compare Libya to the Sudan, and you will know what I mean.)  

    Pan Am Flight 103 and Lockerbie aside, (and Gaddafi was only tangentially involved with these after the fact, it seems), Libya hasn’t hurt Europe, and Europe only cares for Libya when her refugees clamor to seek safety in Sicily or when oil prices soar.  

    And yet, Libya is front page on our few remaining newspapers and on our incessant 24-hour networks.  Today isn’t the first time armies are pushing along the Mediterranean coast road and then falling back as airpower shifts the balance of power.  It happened in the early 40’s during World War II.       

    The crux of the irony right now, however, isn’t World War II, it’s World War I. French and British jets are pounding Gaddafi and his armed forces.  The US is aiding in this, especially with cruise missiles, but the Europeans are the ones driving this campaign.  Since the British, French, and Americans are part of NATO, NATO is also involved, which means, (if you are following me), that Turkey is involved.  Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952.

    And so, here is the historical irony.  European and Euro-Asian nations (Britain, France, and Turkey) are exerting a military presence over North Africa yet again.  Thumb through any world history book, and you’ll see that these nations have done this all before.  Turkey was once the Ottoman Empire and in the Great War, the Ottoman Turks allied themselves with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary.  

    And at this time, the Allies, specifically the British and French (along with their attendant empires) tried to first invade Turkey through the Dardanelles, the ill-fated Gallipoli invasion that made Australian and New Zealand soldiers famous.  (The movie, Gallipoli, helped make Mel Gibson famous to Americans; it’s still worth viewing.)  When this invasion failed, the Allies tried a different tactic.  At this time, the Ottoman Empire stretched through what are today independent nations.  (Perhaps not free nations in any political sense, but independent nonetheless.)  Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, to name only a few nations once dominated by the Turks.  Not as far around the Mediterranean coast as Egypt and beyond all the way to Libya, but in the far reaches of the Mediterranean and down to the Persian Gulf, Ottoman Turkey ruled for centuries without rival.

    Wars have a way of producing an opportunistic guise for adventuring countries.  Britain and France, then the number one and number two European empires and thus the number one and two empires of the world, were no exception.  In heartfelt political proclamations about the rights of peoples to command their own destinies, the British mainly (with the French clamoring for a share of the spoils) destabilized the Turks.  (Another fantastic film, Lawrence of Arabia, tells this story; it is also worth watching.)

    Come 1919 when the whole area was at peace and the new maps drawn, it was no surprise who controlled the areas and who didn’t.  But this heartfelt concern for the locals was a deception.  The European empires wanted to replace the old Turkish Empire with their own, and they did just that.  

    At Southwest Minnesota State University, I teach a great deal about World War I in various classes:  20th Century British LIT, a First-Year Experience class whose topic is solely the Great War, various Global Studies seminars (in which we actually take students to the battlefields of Belgium and France).  As a scholar of the history and literature of the British Empire during this specific period, I often remind students that wherever there is tension in the world today, probably Europeans drew the maps.  And they probably drew them in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles in which the victorious Empires thought that their myopic vision for the world (which was based on the sacrosanct idea that they were right at all times) was not just the best vision for the world, but the only vision for the world.

    It took a second world war to disabuse them of this notion.

    What a difference a war makes.  The end of World War I with its ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles was actually the beginning of World War II.  World War II ended with the United Nations and its two major tenets:  make war impossible and end colonialism.

    With jets hitting targets in Libya, perhaps part of the UN Charter doesn’t seem so successful.  And with these former colonial powers leading this charge, perhaps the second part of the Charter is being overlooked as well.  History will be the judge.  And the irony isn’t lost on the observant.  

    Back in college, I remember reading about the cycle of history:  anarchy becomes tyranny because people want stability more than anything else so they surrender to a strongman.  From this tyranny, an oligarchy rises as the tyrant needs to share power to keep it.  This becomes an aristocratic system as entrenched families pass their power down through the generations.  From this, people clamor for political power, hence republican and democratic ways of governing rise up.  But these all fail in time and collapse back into anarchy which sets the whole political landscape in motion once again.  

    The future world I create for The Marsco Saga explores modern democracies after they fail.  The main characters are struggling amid their personal success:  they are part of the power structure which has risen from post-democracy anarchy to give the world stability.  But, they chaff against the draconian methods Marsco employs to stay in power.  The few chapters I’ve posted give you a sense of this central tension running throughout the novels.