The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron

I read this book about a month ago but didn’t have time to properly review it. There’s another book of the same title by TH White, part of the Once and Future King, I believe, and I am certain that Christian Cameron knows that very well. This book is about chivalry too, but about the hard struggle for people who believe in that ideal to implement it in the real world, a vicious world, the world of the early Hundred Years War.

I have read several books by Cameron and they have some common characteristics. They are about war. They are written in the first person. The are very good on detail, especially the details of combat. They are very clearly and entertainingly written. If you don’t mind lots of innocent people getting killed. But that’s an aspect of war that Cameron does not avoid. Indeed, he is obsessed (if that’s a fair word it may not be) by the cost of war to all involved. His characters believe that they can be moral and be fighters too. If you’re not willing to consider this possibility, his books are not for you.

Cameron is a serious reenactor when he’s not writing and it shows. His handling of the details of ordinary life is really exemplary. Just enough of most types of detail to enhance the experience and not to overload it.

There’s one exception to this. In this book as in some others, the main character is telling the story of his long career in arms, and he seems to be able to remember every single blow he ever threw or was struck by. Maybe my skepticism comes from the fact that these days I have a hard time keeping memories from falling out of the holes in my head. Or maybe Cameron the reenactor just loves this stuff, and knows that his core readership does too. I don’t know how much this will bother anybody else but you should be warned.

Finally, Cameron is a fan. What do I mean? His favorite characters from history – people who would necessarily be part of the story – show up in his book. They don’t always get a nice treatment. For instance, there’s nothing particularly  likable about his portrait of the young Geoffrey Chaucer. I would surely like to know where Cameron’s take on Chaucer came from.

Well, I liked it.

A mere ripple

C.S. Lewis, from his classic essay, "Courtly Love:"

Compared to this revolution [the invention of the "romantic species of passion" by medieval poets] the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

Now that was a real, take-no-prisoners medievalist!

Ann Jones on war

From Salon (Josh Eidelson): 

War zone journalist and humanitarian aid volunteer Ann Jones is the author of eight books on war trauma, violence against women, and Afghanistan. She recently spoke with Salon about her latest, the newly released “They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars – The Untold Story” (a Dispatch Books project for Haymarket Books). “The sort of post-deployment crime waves are pretty, pretty frightening,” she said. A condensed version of our conversation follows.

And what’s the nature of the connection you’re suggesting between violence in war and violence at home?

Well, this is the connection that’s been pretty well established in past wars, but it seems to be even more extreme in these wars. And I think probably part of that has to do with the extent to which these people are doped up with drugs that aren’t doing them any good. But there are several different kinds of connections that have been pretty well established by researchers, psychiatrists and so on working with veterans. One is this inability to fit into their own families again, and the kind of hyper-explosiveness that comes out in family violence. And so there is a great deal of wife-beating, sexual assault of wives and girlfriends, and the murder of wives and girlfriends. Because often both partners in a relationship are in the military, often male soldiers are murdering their partners who are also soldiers. This has something to do with the whole macho ethos of the military, because rates of domestic violence have always been much higher in the military population than among civilians.


And a great deal of effort has gone into trying to get the military to institute effective programs to deal with domestic violence, but they’ve never really done it. They’ve made gestures and they’ve instituted some reforms which civilian experts in domestic violence recommended against. And so the results have not been good.

And then the other typical behavior that results in trouble is that guys who’ve been in combat especially tend to come back and engage in very risky behavior. And I don’t know if this is an adrenaline hangover or what. A great number of returning soldiers are killed in single-car crashes, or even more so in motorcycle accidents at a rate much higher than the civilian population. And then there’s getting into bar fights and attacking other guys and so on, and it goes on and on. And then there is quite a lot of this soldiers murdering other soldiers. And I think there are a lot of them who come back and haven’t gotten out of combat mode, and they just kind of carry on. In fact this is especially associated with certain bases … So the Pentagon is well aware of this but they don’t seem to know what to do about it.

And what is it that you think should be done?

I think they shouldn’t send people to war. Particularly, they shouldn’t send people to absolutely pointless wars. But this is the result of having a so-called “all volunteer army” or a standing army such as those wonderful Founding Fathers warned us against, because as long as you have the military drawn from this very small percentage of the population or generally from the poorest 1 percent of the population, that leaves – and this is something that the Founding Fathers predicted — that leaves the executive branch free to use that military as they please, and they don’t get the pushback that they used to get when we had conscription or a draft

… Much of our military is drawn from a portion of the population that just isn’t able to push back effectively on its own. And the rest of the population seems perfectly happy to just look the other way and let these kids fight the wars for them.

Do you believe then that the U.S. should reinstitute the draft?

You know, I don’t want to go into these issues … My book is simply a witness to the damage that’s done to soldiers that serve in the U.S. military, and the cost of that to the soldiers themselves, to their families, to the communities they come from, and to all the rest of us, because we are all paying the costs of this in many ways. We’re paying for the care of all these damaged people … ...


Were there things [given] your father’s experience, or your time in Afghanistan, your past reporting, that surprised you in your reporting for this book, or that reinforced what you had seen before?

Most of my work before this book has been concerned with women and violence against women, and in fact I had worked in Afghanistan since 2002 with women and children as an aid worker in addition to being a reporter. And I didn’t embed with American troops until 2010, and that was to do a story on American women soldiers. But it was when I was on forward bases doing that story that I saw what was happening to the male soldiers, and then began to look at that.

But what I knew from lifelong experience of writing about women who had been trapped in situations where they were subjected to repeated life-threatening violence — I saw the same thing happening to the soldiers … Researchers who have worked with battered women and rape victims have previously identified there’s a remarkable resemblance between the after-effects, the traumatic effects and symptoms that are suffered by soldiers and battered women — particularly those who have also been subjected to repeated rape … Of course the military doesn’t like to talk about that at all because it is still such a macho organization, and to think that they’re suffering from some of the same effects of trauma that women have been suffering for many, many centuries probably it just doesn’t go well with the military bosses.

Given that you’ve written about the question of embedding journalists, how does your experience with war reporting and conflict reporting inform the way you look at some of the debates that go on about questions of what it means for journalists to be objective, what it means for journalists to be independent, what the role of journalists in relation to conflict should be?

I think they should be absolutely independent. I’ve embedded twice, only to get stories that I absolutely could not have seen otherwise …

I just got an email from a veteran … He said his job had been to escort lots of journalists who came to a forward base for one or two days, never left the base, and that was years ago, and they’re still writing articles about all the things they saw in Afghanistan …

I lived among Afghan civilians for so long, so when I went onto military bases I saw how remote they were from any understanding of who Afghans are and how they live. And it was almost like going to a different planet. And you’d hear about their strategies and their plans and what they were doing and their theories about Afghans — and of course a lot of their theories about Afghanistan came from the war in Iraq, which was an entirely different war. So it was really remarkable to me how little there was to be learned from being with the military except the exposure of how little they knew about where they were and who they were dealing with … The military understands the civilians much less well than the civilians understand the military.

On this question of “theories of Afghans”: Sometimes you’ll hear people arguing for getting out of Afghanistan making arguments that seem to rest on a broad-stroke criticism of people in Afghanistan or culture in Afghanistan. I recently interviewed a former congressman who said this is a country where “85 per cent [of the population] deal in rumor.” How do you react when people make those kinds of arguments about some kind of essential nature of Afghanistan?


I’m sorry, but you could say that about any country that depends primarily on word of mouth to transmit news, and that’s what happens in the countryside anywhere. But to believe that because people are not literate, they’re not smart is a big mistake. So that kind of sweeping statement – no, I think you can dismiss that …

I have sat in think tanks in Washington and listened to their strategies for their plans for the next 10 years in Afghanistan and these were plans that were drawn up by very young people who had never been there and never met an Afghan. This is part of the craziness of American arrogance.
...

I think we also forget the shadow army. Those people who are the mercenary contractors in these wars, who greatly outnumber the uniformed military, are completely unsung, never spoken about by the Pentagon, completely ignored. They don’t march in the Veterans Day parades and all of that. But we could not wage wars, and we certainly could not stage these decades-long occupations of other countries, without that huge number of mercenary contractors to do most of the work that used to be done by the uniformed military itself.

But we haven’t gotten this corrupt yet: The government cannot say to the American populace, “OK, we’re just going to send the mercenaries to do this now.” Because to finagle the American populace into supporting these wars, we have to have something going on that looks like war as we think we know it. War as the way Hollywood enacts it. War as we believe it has always happened and continues to happen. So we have to send these uniformed soldiers out there to fight and get killed and blown up and so on to make it look good, so that the American public really thinks that there is some terrible dangerous thing going on, threatening our country. When actually, to my way of thinking, the most dangerous thing threatening our country is the way this militarized culture and these wars successfully transfer enormous amounts of money from the public treasury to the pockets of the already-rich. So these wars are responsible, really, for so much of what people are suffering from in America right now …

If we stop sentimentalizing these combat soldiers and look at what’s really going on with this transfer of wealth and the enormous profits of the war profiteers, we would rise up and have a very different attitude toward these wars.

Aspects of Sufism

Some websites for History 3805, fall 2013:

Sufi poetry by Rumi.

Sufi music and dance at the Smithsonian Institution. Go to 12:00.

Qadiriyya dhikr.

Dhikr and dancing in Chechnya.

A video explaining a Sufi view of religion. 2:30-6:00.

Is Sufism part of Islam? A critical view.

A famous Bollywood musical routine that seems to me to be Sufi influenced. Note the lyrics.

Brad DeLong on who subsidizes who

Brad does not even talk about defense spending.

HALLOWEEN ON THE PRAIRIE: CONGRESSMAN TIM HUELSKAMP IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING I WILL SEE ALL DAY

Congressman Tim Huelskamp:

“I’m from a district that pretty much ignores Washington. If you say government is going to shut down, they say, ‘OK, which part can we shut down?’”
--Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, to Associated Press

Farm subsidies! Shut down farm subsidies! Move farm subsidies from the "mandatory entitlements" to the "discretionary appropriations" side of the budget, and Congressman Huelskamp would switch his attachment to government shutdowns with the force of twenty mules!

In an average year, Congressman Huelskamp's First District collects roughly $1.5 billion in farm commodity and crop instance subsidies. There are about 20,000 farmers in the First District.
You do the math: That's $75,000/year per farmer in the district. That's $9,000/year for every family of four living in the district--a district where mean household income is $50,000/year.

I tell you, the Californias and the New Yorks and the Massachusettses... the Bostons and the San Franciscos and the Los Angeleses and the New York Cities... Those Americans who live in such places know that we work hard, and are smart. But we also know that we have been very lucky. And we know that we are Americans. And so we don't really mind having our net tax dollars flow out of our communities to pay for a Medicaid beneficiary in Salinas, KS, or a Social Security recipient in Emporia, KS. We even don't mind that much paying to keep the farms going--we can envision futures in which global warming disrupts crop production in other places and the world is very glad to have Kansas agriculture on-line and tuned-up.[1]

But we do mind Congressman Huelskamp's and his constituents pretending that it does not happen: that the First is a self-reliant rugged-individualist district, rather than one that feeds much more greedily than most via redistribution of what the rest of us produce.

Living in the material world

Imagine George Harrison and Madonna singing their different versions on the same stage!

Long ago a good friend of mine, Sandra Dodd, drew my attention to a book with the title “Material World”. It was a select survey, pictorially oriented, of living conditions in about two dozen countries around the world. One notable feature was that each family brought all their property out of the house arranged it neatly, and then sat behind their pile of things to have their picture taken. The poorest country in the survey was Mali, and they had next to nothing except various pottery containers. The Americans had a great deal of stuff. The contrast was shocking, as it was meant to be.

When we moved out of Ravenhill, we became that American family. The stuff! Ye gods, the stuff!

There are a lot of excuses that can be offered. As several people have pointed out, if you live in the same location for 22 years of course you’re going to have a lot of stuff. We have a hobby, the Society for Creative Anachronism, that requires a serious player to have clothing, tents, and other props. For a while we ran a bit of a farm, with horses, sheep and poultry. But still…

Even though we are not big shoppers, not really hoarders either, not particularly rich, our move to smaller quarters, a house already full of its own furniture and appliances, put us in the position of throwing away huge and astonishing array of… Things.

We left most of our furniture and all of our major appliances for the buyers, for whom this is the first house. And still…

We were put in the onerous and to me rather depressing situation of throwing out the evidence of the past half-century or so of our lives. It was that, or apply to the federal government for a huge grant for the Muhlberger National Museum (and be rejected of course).

I have to admit that much of the stuff came down to me. Not even counting stuff in my office at the University, I had tremendous amount of paper associated with academic projects that I have either finished or abandoned. I had an amazing amount of paperwork associated with the SCA in Ontario in the 1970s and 80s (mostly). I had to very determinedly ask myself if I would ever look at this particular pile of paper again. If not, out it went.

It was more difficult in some ways to deal with the books. Again, the question asked was will any of us ever read this book again? The alternatives here were not keep or throw, but keep or find some alternative to throwing. I took boxes and boxes to the University and got rid of a great many serious and frivolous volumes  there. Otherwise, they went to a thrift shop/recycling depot called Rebuilt Resources. How many of them they threw out I don’t want to know. It was hard enough to get rid of those old friends, those pocket universes, those enjoyable but not classic science fiction novels that are basically unavailable, relics of an almost lost popular culture. (The book covers, especially from the early 60s, preserve a style of abstract illustration found nowhere else!)

And when I was done with all of this, and the sale of Ravenhill was concluded, I went to my office at Nipissing University and got rid of  about half the stuff that was stored there.

This whole process took a psychic toll on me. Lots of questions were raised,   like what on earth was I thinking. Well, I was probably thinking that I would live forever and didn’t want to lose track of anything that happened to me, especially if it was pleasant. And after all I am a historian. The great purge forced me to wrestle with these attitudes.  It shows the state that I was in during much of it that I took comfort in the idea that if we were in a car crash and killed, it would all have to go anyway. Comfort, eh?

You young whippersnappers, take a lesson from this. You might just maybe want to start cutting down your possessions now instead of having to do it at some very inconvenient time in the future.

Or at least slow down your pace of acquisition.

Edmund Burke, conservative hero

Corey Robin has a noteworthy anecdote.

"That's the way you do it, money for nothing..."