My Life Between Japan and America - Edwin Reischauer

Sometimes I feel that people these days are not nearly as capable of scholarly reflection and thinking as those of previous generations. My thinking, as it goes, is that the bombardment that we receive from mass media combined with the ubiquitous convenience of the internet has turned many of us into a bunch of short-attention-spanned Eloi.

For that matter, why read a book when you could be watching youtube? Anything you think of can be in front of you as fast as you can type it. If a video isn't on the site yet, chances are it will be eventually, and in the meantime, there is always the surprised kitty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8

Moreover, to take this line of thought a bit further, why draw a picture when you could be going out with your friends, taking pictures, and posting them on a social networking site? In many ways, it is as though we are becoming cast members in a self-made reality television show, where we post our own pictures, write our own thoughts, and 'add' other cast members as we meet them. I don't think I have seen a word for this concept, but perhaps we could pervert the word 'television' into a verb, as in, we are now spending a large part of our days 'televising' ourselves through new media.

On the other hand, I can still remember back in the 20th century, people lived the majority of their lives in real life, and at times they did a lot of things in real life. Take for example, Edwin O. Reischauer.

Born in Tokyo to missionary parents, Professor Reischauer attended school in Japan during his childhood and grew up in close contact with Japanese culture. For university, he studied at Oberlin, and then moved to Harvard for postgraduate study, during which time he also studied in Beijing and in Europe. During World War II, he decoded Japanese military transmissions for the United States in Washington DC, and eventually he became the US Ambassador to Japan under the Kennedy administration. After his retirement from the Ambassador post, he returned to the United States and continued to teach at Harvard until the 1980s.

The accomplishments of Professor Reischauer were great, both in the scholarly field and in international diplomacy. However, what this book brings out more than anything is his incredible perspective on US-Japan and US-China relations. For Japan, the professor advocated a more independent and self-defended Japan, and a lower US base presence there. For China, he felt that a more congenial approach to the PRC-US relationship would help to lessen tensions, a change which eventually happened under the Nixon administration, leading to the beginning of a massive change in world geopolitics which continues into the present. The account of Professor Reischauer's life in such interesting times causes the reader to stop and wonder if events occurring today are not worthy of a similar level of attention.

Burmese Days - George Orwell

I have never been to Burma, though I have been studying it these days, which is the reason that I have recently read Burmese Days by Mr. Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell. The action of the book takes place in 1926, in a small station town in Upper Burma called 'Kyauktada'.

The plot mainly flows along two streams, one at the level of the British colonialists and one at the level of the 'local' Burmese and Indians. Flory, an English timber merchant with local sympathies, provides the narration for his unsuccessful romance with the niece of one of the other Englishmen living in the town, while an Indian doctor and a Burmese magistrate narrate their opposing sides of their intrigues over whom would be elected the first 'native' member of the local English Club.

The book has value mainly as a perspective on colonialism, Another of the British characters helpfully summarizes the 'five chief beatitudes of the pukka sahib':
Keeping up our prestige
The firm hand (without the velvet glove)
We white men must hang together
Give them an inch and they'll take an ell and
Espirit de corps
In many ways I can see the echoes of attitudes held by some to the characters in the book in individuals that I met during my time in China, Japan, and even Italy.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Book) - Jon Ronson

"Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the cold war, and we have to do whatever it takes to win this"
--- CIA Director Alan Dulles, in a speech given to his Princeton alumni group in 1953.

These days I read a lot of non-fiction. One huge benefit of having an internet-connected computer is that when I read of a bizarre character or story in a book, I can use the internet to check information and figure out how true claims made in the book are.

The process of checking out ancilliary sources slows reading down quite a bit. The process also disrupts the enjoyment of the narrative experience. On the other hand, it can give a lot of perspective on how much attention should be paid to a book's claims, and from the internet we can learn that Guy Savelli, who apparently has killed small animals with his mind, has a large internet presence, for example here: (http://www.worldkungfu.com/Master.html) and that Pete Brusso, described in chapter 8 'The Predator', is a real person and has videos on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/PeterBrusso).

While the earlier chapters in the book focus more on attempts to harness 'psychic' abilities for military use both during the cold war and during the 'war on terror', later chapters run into lamentably more familiar subjects, like the use of torture in Abu Ghraib and at the Guantanamo detention facility. However, the book's linkages of the recent tactics to previous trends in psyops were novel and hence quite fascinating.

A couple of choice quotes are illustrative:

"It is America's role to lead the world to Paradise"
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon

"People have been so brainwashed by fiction, so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy stuff, they think 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is an immunizaction against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all."
--- Eric Olson, whose father was allegedly murdered by the CIA due to his dissent against the experiments conducted in Project Artichoke

Oh yes, and Uri Geller makes an appearance.

The Dark Side - Jane Mayer

"Whatever it takes"

Key individuals:
Dick Cheney (VP)
David Addington (VP's Chief of Staff)
Timothy Flanigan (Lawyer, White House Counsel's Office)
John Yoo (Deputy Chief of Staff, Office of Legal Counsel, Justice Department)

Key sentiment:
Post-September 11th, the executive branch placed emphasis on getting actionable intelligence quickly, with low priority placed on choice of methods used as long as they were effective.
Senior Executive Branch officials read Matrix intel reports, which somewhat increased an already high level of alert.
Bush: "Rule of Law Be Damned"
Overall, the feeling was that an attack could come at any time, a 'ticking bomb scenario'

CIA: Had no contacts within Al-Qaeda, and partially blamed the judicial and legal limitations and constraints for the intelligence failures leading up to the September 11 attacks. (p.38)

Presidential findings were made for a worldwide anti-terrorist campaign and for domestic spying (p.39), and the supporting legal decisions and memos were kept secret.

Important legal concepts/definitions (from John Yoo):
1)Concept of Presidential powers resembling those of a British King
2) Definition of 'Illegal Enemy Combatants", a new type of prisoner neither criminal nor POW
3) Definition of Afghanistan as a 'Failed State', in conflict with overt US policy
4) Definition of Torture: Physical- "Equivalent in Intensity to the Pain Accompanying Serious Physical Injury" Mental: 1) "Result[ing] in Significant Psychological Harm" 2) "Be of Significant Duration, e.g. Lasting Months or Years"

The findings led to a reversal of the overall trend of increasing oversight of covert operations, as well as the suspension of habeas corpus, denial of lawyers, domestic spying and wiretaps, torture and ignoring the Geneva Conventions.

Jails were established in friendly countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Guantanamo Bay. Tactics were reverse-engineered from SERE training.(e.g. stress positions,dogs, nudity, heat-cold, sleep deprivation, isolation in light/dark, starvation, beating, waterboarding, confinement in closed spaces)

However, according to the book the extreme tactics led to little or no actionable intelligence and caused blowback and loss of support for the United States around the world.

After reading 'The Men Who Stare at Goats', I find out that in the 50s, the USA had experimental programs on Soviet POWs in Germany that left less than 100% surviving, so actually there is some precedent for this sort of thing, although the thrust was different- medical experimentation vs. information extraction

The author also manages to work in Nietzsche's aphorism 146 from Beyond Good and Evil:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

The Mask of Sanity - Hervey Cleckley

The epigraph reads 'Non teneas aurum totum quod spendet ut aurum', by Alanus de Insulis. This phrase closely resembles Tolkien's 'All that glitters is not gold' from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this case however, Dr. Cleckley seems to be describing a sentiment towards individuals with psychopathic personality, the subject of this book.

I read this book at the suggestion of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who mentioned it in his last book of essays, 'A Man Without A Country'- saying that if anyone had any doubts about what a psychopath was, this book would thoroughly describe the phenomenon, and indeed it does.

So what is a psychopath? In short, a psychopath is a person who has a history of engaging in antisocial, destructive, or self-destructive behavior, but somehow cannot learn from the experience, despite possessing demonstrably adequate powers of reasoning and understanding.

The book was a slow read, mainly due to the inevitable reflection that occurs after reading several hundred pages of the errors of others and their inevitable backsliding into trouble despite the best efforts of family, friends, and doctors to rescue them from themselves. While reading it, both I and the author considered what else could have been done to help the individuals considered. Although the author mainly drew on his working experiences to provide examples of the various traits of a psychopath, he also provides a broad survey of possible psychotic individuals in the world of literature and from history. In particular, the author uses Plutarch's description of the Athenian statesman Alcibiades to provide a particularly fascinating example of senseless behavior from over 2000 years in the past.

On the whole, the work takes a relatively descriptive approach to the issue of the psychopathic personality. Rather than describing the causes and cures of such traits, it catalogues a series of behaviors which together are defined as being typical of the psychopath, with the root being a lack of empathy which then causes an inability to learn from past experience. At times veering into sociology and literature, the book nevertheless succeeds in compellingly illustrating its core subject, thereby providing the reader with a better comprehension of personality disorders and their impact on human behavior.