IX - The Forever War

Question one, private. Do you or do you not like Kickback?
Question two, private. Do you or do you not like starship troopers?

If the answers to the above two questions are a resounding masculine 'YEAHUH' then you quite possibly went through the exact same though process as I did when I saw The Forever War sitting on a second hand bookshelf for 50p. Never mind that it's won a Hugo and Nebula award for science fiction writing, it has the same name as a Kickback album, which was reason enough to hand over my pennies. As a quick aside, I bought this from a small shop by Devonshire Green in Sheffield, along with Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, both for 50p. They had about 3 bookshelves just for sci-fi. Needless to say I'm making return trips.

I managed to read The Forever War in about one lie-in and two baths. The words pretty much roll off the pages, there's nothing really to stump the average reader, it's got jargon, but it's more jargon for jargon's sake than important plot developments that you absolutely have to understand 100% (either that or I am a space travel genius and have no idea).

Anyway, the book basically reads like platoon in space. Super soldiers chosen for their intellectual ability and calm demeanours take to war against an alien race they've not yet seen. They use collapsed stars as jumps to get to other parts of the galaxy and fight the enemy, but at a heavy, heavy cost. 6 months of travel in soldier's years is the equivalent to hundreds or even thousands of earth years, depending on distance travelled, so every time the soldiers return home Earth has changed entirely. Furthermore the enemy they fight has often come from the future, often having faced other human troops from a human future who are also ahead of the current humans travelling through space to fight those same aliens. So there's this idea that at times soldiers are on a pathway of certain death just because of time delay. It drew parallels with the First World War to me, with the idead of some historians that the German army had begun to march to war, even though all the leaders of Europe wanted, and agreed upon, peace. They had no way to call the troops back and just had to march on to death.

The book is a heady mix of absolutely over-the-top war machismo (yeahuh) and actually quite thought provoking considerations of future human civilisation. Sometimes the action orientated sequences can get a bit caught up in themselves, and there is a kind of weird homophobic (or at the least homosceptic) undercurrent, whereby Haldeman is pretty much convinced that at some point the whole human race will be homosexual, and I'm not entirely sure what his angle is on it, dystopian? jabbing a funny finger? no clue. But overall it doesn't really spoil the story. If you're not really arsed by 'war epics', it's still worth reading for the equal amount of attention Haldeman pays to the dynamics of human society, asking plenty of moral questions along the way to give any reader some food for thought. Like I've said, it's not mind bending genius like Gravity's Rainbow, and it's not up to the detailed universe of the likes of Ringworld, but it holds its own just through sheer enjoyment. Think along the lines of If I Die in a Combat Zone (see bookclub I) but with space marines and you're pretty much there.

Sci-fi is at it's best when the stories are logical extensions of reality, or of current affairs extended to logical futuristic conclusions. There are some great passages within the book that echo the societal and political and counter-cultural attitudes of Vietnam, the Cold War, etc, and even the more current world conflicts going on today. The passage below follows the soldiers return from active duty.

"Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgement. Earth is
not the same place you left."
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, half-smiling. "Most of you have on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war with their tax dollars. Your income puts you in a 92 percent income tax bracket. Thirty-two thousand dollars could last you about three years if you're very careful.
"Eventually you're going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There aren't that many others available - the population of Earth is over nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed. And all of your training is twenty-six years out of date.
"Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now
going to be twenty-six years older than you. Many of your relatives will
have passed away. I think you'll find it a very lonely world."

You can probably see how this one ends.

VIII - Nothing to Envy

Is it a North Korean Phenomenon that many have observed. For lack of chairs or benches, the people sit for hours on their haunches, along the sides of roads, in parks, in the market. They stare straight ahead as though they are waiting - for a tram, maybe, or a passing car? A friend or relative? Maybe they are waiting for nothing in particular, just waiting for something to change.

I wrote an essay about 7 years ago on the international dynamic between North Korea and the West. I imagine it was pretty naive, knowing my 19 year old self I imagine I would have gone out of my way to 'defend' the North Korean regime and pour scorn on the imperialist West. Being a lot older doesn't necessarily make me a lot wiser, but I at least can appreciate that there are so many nuances on the 'world stage' that to label anyone as a 'good guy' is folly. North Korea as a country has always fascinated me, largely because of the mystery within. Tourists are only allowed to enter at certain times of the year, under constant supervision from government officials. Journalists, of course, are given equally stringent access, and furthermore there is a total communication blockade, in part because their electricity grid is hardly ever switched on. Even countries riddled with economic and political strife are still to a certain extent either welcoming to visitors or at the very least open to journalists. North Korea is one of the few remaining exceptions to the rule. But I'm always curious as to what the world is like for North Koreans. What's normal and everyday for the North Korean people? What do they look forward to? How do they spend their time?

Barbara Demick is a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, and spent several years collecting accounts of people who had defected from North Korea for various reasons. Some political, some economical, some just by accident. These accounts range from a Dr who had become utterly disillusioned by the huge death toll from the famine in North Korea in the 1990's, and her government's inability to do anything about it. Another follows an almost Dickensian story of a street urchin who lives amongst the dead and destitude in Chongjin station, and his eventual escape to a new life in South Korea. The accounts themselves are fascinating, and range from inspiring to tragic. The sour note comes with Demick constantly trying to put her own opinions of North Korea in the way. Reading Nothing to Envy rarely feels like personal accounts, and more often than not comes across as a journalist choosing words and passages to illustrate her damnation of the North Korean regime, which is undoubtedly deserving of pages and pages of scorn, but seems to dilute the personal accounts to a certain extent.

That isn't to say that the book isn't filled with some very moving, intriguing and genuinely page-turning accounts, but that there always seems to be a shadow of critique hanging in the background. We all know that the North Korean regime is an Orwellian nightmare, that the Kim 'dynasty' would be seen in an almost farcical light if it wasn't for the fact that they are indirectly responsible for the death of millions of North Koreans, and responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands more, but it seems this book is geared to a small portion of people out there who have no idea about this country whatsoever.

I also find the exploration of people's lives in South Korea following defection rather short in comparison, yet two of the most memorable quotes for me came from the defector's lives in South Korea, for example when Demick describes one of her sources after having not seen her for a few months.

She's had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasion. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs Song had arrived.

And another account by the Dr, who ended up working as a cleaner in South Korea, on telling her employer, a university professor, that she used to be a Dr.

Dr Kim felt she had no choice but to confess. She blurted out her life story - the divorce and the loss of custody of her son, her father's suicide after Kim Il-Sung's death, the years of semistarvation, the dying children at the hospital.
"Oh my God. You're a doctor!" the professor said. The women hugged and cried together. "If I had known, I would have treated you differently."

The message behind the book seems so confused at times. It holds the every day life of the North Korean as important, but then broadcasts ideological arguments in the background. If I had known the book was the latter, I wouldn't have bothered reading it. There was just enough of the former to maintain my interest. I imagine I am spoiled by having read some of the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series, which dedicate much much more attention to varied and personal accounts, over authorial opinions, and are well worth your attention.

I feel like I've come down a bit hard on Nothing to Envy, it's by no means a bad book, but when reading it I felt misled at times. If you are completely ignorant to North Korea, then this is probably ideal. I'm still just waiting for the Ernest Hemingway of North Korea to step forward and fill my brain with bulbous prose.

Below is a rather heartbreaking account from 1999, again by Dr Kim, of her first day in China, beyond the North Korean border. One day she basically just started walking, and made it to China without even seeing anyone else. It it probably worth mentioning that in the 1990's most North Koreans who didn't starve to death survived on pulped corn cobs or tree bark, and whatever grasses and weeds they could scavenge. Often they would spend all day finding enough edible morsels to have a single meal in the evening. The UN World Food Programme rice bags mostly ended up on the black market.

Dr Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer - it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr Kim couldn't remember the last time she's seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

The Last Patrol

Tomorrow I'm going on my first protest in quite some time. After spending a few years of my life religiously going on marches against the war in Iraq with no effect, and after spending some time with some direct-action types who were some of the biggest buffoons I'd had the pleasure of meeting, I became a bit disillusioned with it all. But one of the only good things so far about the Tories getting back in is they've given us plenty to kick off about already. As you may or may not know, public services across the board are facing crippling cuts through austerity measures to combat the defecit. This means the people who most need public services like the national health, police, social services, welfare, and so on will find themselves with less accessibility, less facilities, less feet on the ground, and more isolation and social poverty. There is a really, really, really, really simple solution that means we can keep public services as they are and that is raise taxes. The rich people pay a lot of tax, the poor don't pay as much. If you have money, you should consider yourself fortunate and not balk at the idea of helping those less fortunate. The only way Britain can be great again is by looking after one another, not shutting the doors and thinking only of ourselves. So I am protesting tomorrow at the Tory conference, and I hope to see tens of thousands of other people there with me, although I don't hold much hope at all and probably following this I will go back to grumbling at home. Because, as I've learned over the years, if there's one thing a plutocratically elected government won't do it's listen to the people they govern.

Anyway, while I was making my banner earlier I was reminded of one of the most memorable parts of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, a long, arduous and bleak journey through the 1972 presidential elections that all-round sod Richard Nixon won against seemingly everyone's efforts. Despite being batshit crazy, Thompson was also one of the most knowledgeable and passionate political commentators I have ever read. The guy can flit between subjects like nobodies business, and keep the readers interest through a 500 page political commentary with ease. This particular scene involves the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marching on the Republican conference that announced Nixon's candidacy, at the Fontainbleau in Miami, and contains some sound advice which has stayed with me since the first time I read it.

As I drove toward Key Biscayne with the top down, squinting into the sun, I saw the Vets... They were moving up Collins Avenue in dead silence; twelve hundred of them dressed in battle fatigues, helmets, combat boots... a few carried full-size plastic M-16s, many peace symbols, girlfriends walking beside vets being pushed along the street in slow moving wheelchairs, others walking jerkily on crutches... But nobody spoke, all the 'stop, start' 'fast, slow' 'left,right' commands came from 'platoon leaders' walking slightly off to the side of the main column and using hand signals...

The silence of the march was contagious, almost threatening. There were hundreds of spectators, but nobody said a word. I walked beside the column for ten blocks, and the only sounds I remember hearing were the soft thump of boot leather on hot asphalt and the occasional rattling of an open canteen top.

The Fontainebleu was already walled off from the street by five hundred heavily armed cops when the front ranks of the Last Patrol arrivedm, still marching in total silence. Several hours earlier, a noisy mob of Yippie/Zippie/SDS 'non-delegates' had shown up in front of the Fontainebleu and been met with jeers and curses from GOP delegates and other partisan spectators, massed behind the police lines... But now there was no jeering. Even the cops seemed deflated. They watched nervously from behind their face shields as the VVAW platoon leaders, still using hand signals, funneled the column into a tight semicircle that clocked all three northbound lanes of Collins Avenue...

For the first and only time during the whole convention, the cops were clearly off balance. The Vets could have closed all six lanes of Collins Avenue if they'd wanted to, and nobody would have argued. I have been covering anti-war demonstrations with depressing regularity since the winter of 1964, in cities all over the country, and I have never seen cops so intimidated by demonstrators as they were in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel on that hot Tuesday afternoon in Miami Beach.

There was an awful tension in that silence. Not even that pack of rich sybarites out there on the foredeck of the Wild Rose of Houston could stay in their seats for this show. They were standing up at the rail, looking worried, getting very bad vibrations from whatever was happening over there in the street. Was something wrong with their gladiators? Were they spooked? And why was there no noise?

After five more minutes of harsh silence, one of the VVAW platoon leaders suddenly picked up a bullhorn and said: 'We want to come inside.'

Nobody answered, but an almost invisible shudder ran through the crowd. 'O my God!' a man standing next to me muttered. I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively - for the first time in a long, long while - by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when its time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.