The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

For the past five months, I’ve been making my way through William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It turned up in my building’s lending library, a hardbound volume, nearly three inches thick. By the time I finished, the top and bottom of the binding were a little rough and the pages sagged just a bit, all on account of my holding it in my hands each night as my bedtime reading.

It’s quite an engaging read. For all its detail, for the span of time it covers, and especially given the events that it describes, the individual moments lead continually from one to the next. Shirer starts with the birth and early life of Adolf Hitler, and while it seemed a bit dull at the time, it played into his larger picture of the man in full.

My own interest in the Third Reich comes not only from a broader interest in history, but in having lived in West Germany in the 1980s. I was a teenager, and we were only two generations away from World War II; a child born during the Third Reich would have been just past middle age. While Germany had moved on in many ways, there were so many reminders, including our purpose for being there. My father was in the US Army and we were part of the American armed forces deployed in southern Germany, which was one of the four sectors split up by the allies in the postwar occupation. West Germany was an ally, but the East was not, and the consequences of the war loomed large.

We lived in Ansbach, about an hour’s drive from Nuremberg, the city where the Nazis held their great rallies. There was an American base there, larger than those in Ansbach, with some of the better shopping available. We celebrated one Fourth of July in the old fairgrounds where the Nazi rallies were held, the very same one that is seen in footage of the Nazi broken cross being demolished after the war.

Now, nearly two generations since my time in Germany, the last generations to have lived through the war are in old age, and memory of the events that led to the Third Reich fade with them. Coincidentally, we're at the century mark of the Great War that preceded it, the outcome of which greatly influenced the conditions that resulted in Hitler's rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich.

The Smithsonian Magazine has a good retrospective of Shirer's work. While reading this book, I also finished the audiobook edition of Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about the Great Powers before the Great War, and, for good measure, season two of "The Man in the High Castle", a show about life in an alternate universe where the Axis powers won World War Two.


The book filled in some gaps in my knowledge of German interwar history. I already knew that a wrecked German economy had, after World War I, struggled to form a new government, was saddled with severe reparations payments, and that the failure of this Weimar Republic had precipitated Hitler’s rise to power. What I didn’t know was that Germany had in fact had a civil war, a revolution that was close in many ways to the Russian revolutions just a few years earlier, and that the Kaiser, the German Emperor, had in fact not been removed from his throne by the Allies, but evicted by the German Army.

In fact, the army was essentially running the country throughout most of the twenties. Rather than assume power directly, they simply kept everyone else in check. Hitler’s early attempts to seize power involved, in various ways, attempts to co-opt or bargain with the army. It’s not difficult to see a similar situation in Egypt now (2017) where the army is so integrated into the political and economic fabric of the country that there’s no independence from it.

Ultimately, the army’s failure was that they thought they could co-opt Hitler, when in fact he used the army to solidify his control of the country once the Nazis were voted into power, and Hitler was given the Chancellorship as leader of the most powerful political party in Germany. While Hitler had tried to take power in his famed Beer Hall Putsch, following that failure he told his followers that they would have to take power by purely legal means, and that is exactly what they did.

From there on I knew the broad strokes: the Reichstag fire, Kristalnacht, the concentration camps, the annexation of Austria and later the Sudetenland (don't forget the Rhineland), and eventually the invasion of Poland, which finally prompted the war. Yet here again, the details resonate with modern times. The Germans sent agents provocateur to attack German facilities in the guise of Polish uniforms; they trained Germans in Poland to rise up against the Poles, and before that, trained Germans in Czechoslovakia to agitate for annexation, and Austrians in Austria to press for Anschluss. It’s not hard to see similar actions by modern Russia in the Crimea and the Ukraine.

Here in the present, as we make our way through the centennial years of the Great War, World War I, Shirer’s detailed accounting of the Great Powers’ response to Hitler casts a more nuanced light on the now-disfavored attempts at appeasement prior to World War II. World War I was so devastating to the Great Powers, to Europe in particular, than no one who was alive then wanted another great war. Well, no one except perhaps Winston Churchill, but he was not in charge until Chamberlain had passed away.

Chamberlain had been a younger man in politics during the Great War. Along with many of his peers, he knew the great toll that the Great War had taken on the entire population of the Commonwealth, England to Scotland, to the Canadian and the ANZAC forces, in all theaters around the world. The French, who had borne the bulk of fighting on their soil, were in no mood to go to war once again to protect the rights of less powerful nations, at cost to their own nation.
In Shirer's accounting, and every other history I have come across, Hitler could have been stopped at the Rhineland and the Sudetenland, and even probably in Austria, though Nazi political agitators there made the issue more complex. But no one did, because no one wanted to risk hundreds of thousands more dead, only a generation after the last slaughter.

 The Great War changed the attitude that the Great Powers and their leaders had of war; it awakened the populace of every nation to the great costs and horrors of war; it created veterans who came home talking not of their heroic exploits, but of muddy disease-ridden trenches, death in the form of motorized and armored cannons and machineguns, death, blindness, and mutilation by toxic gas. Like nuclear weapons a generation later, the scale of destruction in the Great War created a great pause in our self-destructive tendencies.

The invasion of Poland, however, was the last straw. The British and the French finally declared war, and war would rage in Europe for over full two years before the United States was drawn in by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war on the United States – an act which Germany was not committed to until after their erstwhile ally had committed their act.


Shirer's account was taken to task by historians almost from the beginning, in large part because he put forward a thesis that National Socialism and Der Fuhrer were inevitable outcomes of German culture and history. Shirer's account is better understood as post-facto journalism, and his account of Germany prior to his having to leave in 1940 is very much the writing of an American living in-country for an extended period - he was a reporter living in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is therefore more of a primary source, one that reflects the opinions and bias of its writer, but its meticulous attention to detail and breadth of scope make it useful for anyone making a more academic study of the period.

Shirer's biases are not hard to ignore. As with many of his time, when he writes of homosexuality in the Nazi Party, particularly of Rohm's fatal sidelining in the Night of the Long Knives, his own contempt for homosexuality reads, in modern eyes, as different only in degree from the Nazi view. Yet, even there, his higher aim is to demonstrate how Hitler, despite his rhetoric and promises, ultimately was ready to betray anyone in pursuit of his own political power. Rohm and the SA were useful. When they became a problem, he eliminated them.

On the question of moral culpability – for the war, for the Holocaust, for the destruction of Germany – Shirer leaves no room for doubt that Hitler and his lieutenants are to blame. Yet, neither does he let the German military off the hook, and not even the German people. He does lay out when and where specific war crimes were and were not committed – this general did that, this general did not do this. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in his lengthy description of the Stauffenberg plot to murder Hitler, when on the one hand he commends the plotters for committing, finally, to assassinate Hitler and take control of the country from the Nazis, while at the same time, more than once, remarking on how this commitment came too late in the war to be redemptive in a meaningful way.

Yet, all along the way – from the chaos of the interwar and Weimar years, to the Beer Hall Putsch, to the rise of the Nazi party, to Hitler being appointed Chancellor, to the emergency powers granted to him, from which the rise to dictatorship accelerated – there is no clear point where the German people as a whole, explicitly or implicitly, agreed to the entire menu of horror that the Nazis eventually implemented. This, in my view, should be the central lesson of the Third Reich: that fascism and an authoritarian regime do come on like a light switch, but incrementally. The corollary would be that democracy moves at much the same pace; it can't be imposed, all at one, but must developed in stages.

On the other hand, it is clear that, after a certain point, the average citizen knew that terrible acts were being perpetrated offstage. They knew that there were concentration camps, for political prisoners as well as the regular scapegoats of Nazi ideology. Turning a blind eye is a morally complicit act. Other authors have written about this in more detail – Hannah Arendt comes to mind – but Shirer states early on that Germans have a strong cultural preference for a strong leader, and were predisposed to overlook any number of character flaws in order to have that leader.

I think this mistakes a specific moment and place in history for a broader cultural trait. I would say that, human beings, in the absence of what we now call polite or political society, will settle for a strong leader rather than in the messy, time-consuming work of political compromise. Germans had polite society, but it was greatly damaged following the revolution.

In particular, this is a conversation we are having in modern times, as some of the great Western democracies face populist wrath, and second-tier and developing nations unfetter their executive branches. We need look no farther than stalwart American allies like Turkey and the Philippines to see burgeoning dictators, and even in the US, UK, and France, significant political victories are being made by parties whose top focus is on containing minorities and the outside world.

In Germany before the Great War, we had a nation that was still ruled directly by an autocrat. This was not unusual, and even the more democratically-oriented nations of Western Europe had only recently shifted pure autocracy to republican monarchies. The Victorian age was not too distant, Russia was still ruled by an autocrat as well, and France and Germany both had seen serial revolutions in the nineteenth century as rapid technological progress and capitalism resulted in disproportionate economic winners and losers. If your choices in 1885 or 1905 were autocracy, democracy, or anarchy, it would not have been clear that democracy was the best choice.

In the wake of the Great War, then, with the Kaiser forced to abdicate by the German army, and no meaningful tradition of polite society, is it any wonder that Germany struggled politically? Germany had a long history of philosophical and scientific reasoning, but that was no preparation for political fighting between parties vying for control – not to mention the army putting its thumb on the scales now and then.

In the years before the start of World War Two, Hitler displayed an undeniable political genius. After being jailed for his attempted putsch, he realized, and stated openly within the party, that they had to win power legitimately at the polls. He did this, and the Nazi party, with a mix of streetfighting and sloganeering, and providing services to citizens, quickly rose to power.

Why is this important? I can name at least three countries, as of 2017, that are on that same trajectory. Turkey. Egypt. Iraq. Not far behind are Venezuela and Libya. Yet, rather than recognize that these countries are new to democracy and the etiquette required to function, many Americans (and other Westerners) prefer to criticize them as nations filled with extremists, who will never, ever, be fit for democracy.

If there is any more direct complicity to be found, it would be in the army. Following the end of the Great War, the German army essentially told the Kaiser that they could no longer support him. The Germans were already revolting, ground down and war-weary and demanding participatory government. The Kaiser was exiled to the Netherlands, where he lived until about 1940. As Nazi Germany invaded Western Europe, Hitler and his lieutenants could hardly be bothered to say hello as they passed by in the Lower Countries.

Yet, in the period leading up to the war, senior leadership in the army favored Hitler as a means to an end. Hitler was not taken seriously as a leader, but his political ability was useful. He was uniting the country. According to Shirer, many in the army hoped to restore the German monarchy, not to Wilhelm II, but to one of his heirs or another member of the Hollenzollern dynasty. Their thinking seems to have been, to unite the country under Hitler, then rally the people around a new Kaiser.
Hitler was having none of that.

It's true that early on, he had to make compromises. He had to disband his "Sturmabteilung" (SA), the uniformed thugs the Nazis had used to mete out street justice, and execute their leadership; the SA was dissatisfied with the rate of change accomplished by the Nazis, and demanded that the German army be placed in a role subordinate to the SA.

While General von Hindenberg, hero of the Great War, was President, Hitler was kept somewhat in check. It was only on Hindenberg's death, along with some skullduggery by Hitler, that Hitler's role as Chancellor was broadened in scope, and after the Reichstag fire, became dictator in all but name. Even then, several in the army plotted against Hitler, especially as he engineered the annexation first of Austria and then the Sudetenland.

The army knew he was leading them into a war they could not win. Yet, the failure of the Great Powers to stop Hitler early on allowed Hitlier to succeed enough that he was able to consolidate power and strengthen the military to the point where they were winning battles.
Guess what? Generals like winning battles. After that, overthrowing Hitler became a sort of, "eh, after we win a few more".

Even by the end of the war, as far back as the Stauffenberg plot, German military leaders hoped to negotiate with the allies to keep the land they'd taken early on. They expected to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, banking on the capitalist West turning against the communist Soviet Union. While Stalin was treacherous in his own way, it is a tribute to the arrogance of the generals that they could not believe that the alliance fighting through their country from the West, South and East, would hold together.


The so-called Thousand Year Reich only lasted a dozen years. World War II was six of those years, and American involvement less than four. In popular culture, the war lasted a much longer time, and served as a perpetual backdrop to thousands of individual stories. Compared to modern wars and related crises of international relationships, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have each lasted longer. I'd almost say at lower intensity, but I could not look at a Syrian refugee with a straight face and say that the war in Syria was lower in intensity to, say, the bombing of London, or Germany, or the Soviet Union.

When I was growing up, World War Two movies were old enough to play on TV near-constantly, and in the wake of the Vietnam and Korean wars, their subject was the only war in living memory we could feel good about. The cause was noble, with villains so clearly cut that fictional villains of popular films were almost literally cut from the same cloth: the Imperial military of Star Wars, the Wehrmacht and Nazis who fought Indiana Jones. The war was long over. We, the good guys, had won, and now, like so many warring tribes over the centuries, we sat around the campfires while shamans told us stories of great warriors and noble sacrifice.

Reading Shirer's account is to revisit these stories in near-clinical detail. The gauze of memory is removed and at once and every detail is seen clearly, and all the more disturbing for it. The lessons of the period come from knowing what individual human beings did, and failed to do. There's no calling to higher moral purpose, no celebration of good over evil. It's not even a horror story, though events are horrible. The tone is flat, and matter of fact. Attention must be paid.

Clearly, the lessons of "what to do if you want to establish and perpetuate an authoritarian regime" are being studied and applied by various political factions, but what do the rest of us do? Nazis are easy to recognize when they call themselves, "Nazis", or "Nationalists" even, but how do we recognize less familiar forms or fascism or authoritarianism? How do we recognize forces like an army or a political party hoping to use a populist to rally citizens to their cause, or industrial interests supporting a populist in hopes of cracking down on disruptive labor movements?

There is an assumption, in particular from our comfortable perch in well-to-do West, that history inexorably moves forward and that society, as a whole, advances in line with our notions of human kindness, scientific progress, and shared prosperity. This is not a given. Societies have been known to advance greatly and collapse suddenly. They can stagnate. They can be torn apart by infighting. I would not assume that events beyond the borders of my neighborhood will work themselves out satisfactorily in the end.

The "rise" part of the Third Reich illuminated so clearly how a society already on the road to recovery can take a turn for the worse, minor at first but tracking far off course in the long term. The political system at the time pit dozens of parties against each other, and included street fights between parties. The Nazis' SA brigades were basically underemployed men willing to throw and take punches, intimidating others at the polls and in the streets. In the midst of disorder, the Nazis promised order, and drew voters and members from a middle-class that might otherwise not have gone in for their xenophobic messages of hate.

They were abetted by the military and industrial interests who thought they could control or use Hitler to achieve their own ends – restoration of a monarchy, control against labor. They did indeed assume that Hitler was just a showman, a silver-tongued mesmerist who could unite the proletariat for them. But he wasn't. Hitler was a strong-willed leader in his own right, with his own plans, and he was able to achieve them despite underlying opposition from his erstwhile allies.
Globally, today, there are long-term parallels to the period: a global collapse of markets; a loss of faith in government leaders and institutions; multiple conflicts between the major powers in the affairs of smaller nations; nationalist political movements aiming to restore "pride" and "honor" by building up the military and retreating behind tariffs and walls.


The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is comprehensive look at a period of modern history that is relevant to our current times. Technological and political process is not enough to guarantee freedom or fairness among peoples or between nations. Following a global economic depression, with growth in inequality and a corresponding surge in populism, the modern world is not too dissimilar from the world of a century ago.

This isn't to say that any one person today will be the next Hitler. Shirer's book is about the Third Reich, after all. Even without a Hitler, a group of strong leaders, or individual leaders of nations and parties, could lead their people to ruin.

Furthermore, the crimes of the Third Reich were multiple crimes; as terrible as the Holocaust was, plunging the world into a global war following the unlawful invasion and occupation of neighboring nations was criminal. Their treatment of prisoners of war and citizens of occupied nations was criminal enough, before adding the industrialized extermination of entire ethnic groups and political minorities.

We must forever be on the lookout against terrible leaders and the conditions that lead to their rise. I found Shirer's book to be surprising engaging and informative. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history and an interest in what is happening in the world today.

Bond Films: Skyfall

Skyfall is (as of this writing) the most recent Bond film, and the third with Daniel Craig. It's the third since the series formally rebooted, starting Bond at more or less the beginning of his career, and with one of the earlier works, Casino Royale. This makes it more interesting that Skyfall deals with age, and obsolescence, with parallel stories involving Bond and M, played by Judi Dench. Skyfall is also familial, playing the villain as a dark parallel of Bond, the flip side of an all-business, manipulative M.

The basic plot of Skyfall is: after apparently during an operation in Istanbul, Bond comes back in to assist with the investigation of a series of hacks and attacks on MI6. Using bullet fragments from his earlier wounds, MI6 identifies his assailant, and Bond tales him to Shanghai, where he gains another clue leading him to Macau. He meets the girl, who takes him to Silva, the antagnoist. After some repartee, and the killing of the girl, Silva is captured and taken to MI6 for interrogation. However, his capture is part of his plan, and he escapes, and Bond must race to save M. They evacuate to Bond's ancestral home in Scotland, using the original Aston Martin first rolled out in Goldfinger, and after a very intense series of shootouts and explosions, Bond defeats his nemesis, only to see - well you'll have to see for yourself.

Skyfall is one of the better Bond films. It's easy to say that about a recent Bond film, since it's of-the-moment, but all the same, I think this will hold up well. It dives a little more into Bond's psyche and the history that shaped it. Javier Bardem, as Silva, brings a borderline queeny, pathological affect to what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill villain. Skyfall also brings in more of the cyber-intelligence element to what is otherwise a throwback - Bond has little in the way of gadgets, save for a gun he never fires, and a radio the size of a piece of gum. Later, this theme of old-fashioned spywork is reinforced when Bond, armed only with a couple of shotguns and a knife, defends against a platoon of men with helicopter support.

Nuances of Google Maps

I had a bit of an adventure on my new commute this morning.

Basically, I have a long commute with a choice of routes: Take I-95 and pay its associated tolls, or take I-80 to I-287 and pay almost no tolls. The latter is longer by about ten miles and fifteen to thirty minutes - but multiplied out over five days a week, four weeks a month, it saves me about $300 in tolls. So, that's my preferred route.

There are a lot of switches to get through on the way, and while I'm still learning them, I rely on Google Maps to guide me (sidebar: I've tested against other mapping and routing services, and might write them up later - Google's working out the best). I've taken to looking at traffic on my computer at home, and then "send to iPhone" to get the play-by-play up on my dashboard.

A couple of times now, once for work and once for another destination, I've selected the route I want, sent to phone, and then blindly followed instructions before realizing Google is not sending me on the route I wanted.  I finally spent some time figuring out why.

Basically, Google Maps does not send the route. It seems to send your start and end points, and if you've checked a route pref, includes that. The details I tested:

In Chrome at home with no route prefs selected. Choose the non-fastest route and send to phone. On the phone, the fastest route displays.

In Chrome at home, with 'avoid tolls' selected, the route I want is the default. Send to phone, that route route displays.

Just for fun, in Chrome at home, with 'avoid tolls' selected, the route I normally want is the default. Select the 'fastest' route (i.e. with tolls) and send to fold. The default (i.e. avoid tolls) route displays.

Finally, just for fun, I tried toggling the route options in Google Maps on my iPhone. If I send a route that has no prefs selected, the phone's prefs will be in effect. However if I select a pref in Chrome and send that to Google Maps, the original prefs seem to be in effect.

So, it seems that when Chrome sends a route to my phone, it will send along prefs that I selected, and the start and end point, but otherwise I may as well be starting over.

More thorough testing would clear the behavior up more definitively. For now, this explains some of the "Google on crack" trips I've had.

Saab

So a few months ago, I bought the first car I've owned in over eighteen years: a 2005 Saab 95 wagon in Linear trim.

It's been grand to drive. Five-speed manual, turbo-charged 2.3 liter engine. Apparently Saab turbos are well-regarded, with no "turbo lag". I've never had a car with turbo. It's nice to have a car that doesn't flinch at accelerating, even uphill.

My Saab, with kayaks on top.

As it turns out, Richard Hammond (of British Top Gear fame) had a piece on this wagon a while ago, compared with a Volvo.

Everything highlighted about the Saab is true of mine, except for the multi-point tie-downs. I'm sure I have them, I just haven't used them yet.

Why did I buy a Saab? By all rights I ought to have been a Subaru buyer, or a Toyota. My main goal was to have a small SUV-ish vehicle for hauling my boats around, and at one point, I even considered something new because I might have needed a daily driver - living in Manhattan I've got quite a few mass transit options, and in the end I found ways to get to work without driving. But by the time I was looking seriously at the used market in my price range, I came across Saabs priced about the same as Subarus, and I decided I didn't like Toyota's control layup.

Eventually, it came down to dealership experience. I found a Saab dealer I liked, and had two bad experiences at Subaru dealerships. I suppose when your cars are so popular that they're back-ordered, you don't need to give new customers the time of day.

Back up a minute, you might say. Did you say Saab dealership? They went out of business years ago!

True. When owner General Motors declared bankruptcy, Saab was put on the market and several deals fell through until the company was eventually acquired by a Chinese joint venture in electric batteries for cars. What I found was, a luxury used car dealership in New Jersey that has Saab-experienced mechanics and sales guys on hand.

I took them another Saab wagon to them for a once-over, and it came back with so many problems I returned it and came back to try their stock. I test drove a 2008 95 sedan and the car I bought, and decided I liked the wagon better. I had a good dealership experience, and I figured that even with a used car I'd have a place to bring it in for service. One the high end of consumer goods and services, it's relationships that count.

In short order I was Saab this, Saab that. I used Saab as an adjective (that's very Saaby), as a verb, (I don't need a lift to the spa, I'm Saabin'), and an exclamation (Saaberific!). I still Saab around, but only on the weekends, and less in the winter than in the fall.

Regular car people tried to warn me off Saab, mainly on two key points: hard to work on and hard to get parts. The first is less true in the GM era than in the pre-GM era. Saabs still do unusual things like placing the ignition next to the emergency brake, but in the old days they also mounted the engines backwards, with the radiator and other smaller pieces facing the cabin wall, making them hard to reach. On the second point, fellow Saab enthusiasts (Saaberati) and the dealership assured me that parts can be gotten, and in fact are still being made. Additionally, in the GM era, enough components were repurposed from GM's global brands that the part I need may not be a Saab-specific part at all.

On the flip side, some Saaberati turn their noses up at the GM era, though most respect Saabs as Saab no matter their pedigree. I do have to say that I feel my Saab is in the sweet spot for GM ownership - a second gneration, after they solved some oil sludging problems in the engine, but before the console had its Saab look replaced by the more, er, general General Motors look.

Driving
The Saab is a beaut to drive. It accelerates, handles amazingly well, though as Hammon points out in the video, brakes kinda shrug their shoulders at first before getting to it. Mine's a five-speed stick and I've found that fifth gear is way the hell over in the passenger's lap practically, but by now I'm used to it.

Little features present themselves well. There's an armrest that slides forward for the perfect position to keep the right hand on the shifting knob - and that is exactly where the fabric is most worn. The console tilts towards me and is easy to read and operate. My favorite bit though is "night mode": all the lights on the console go off, every gauge except speedometer goes dark, and then, it's just you and the road. It's brilliant, and makes driving the local parkways a lot of fun at night.

Neighborhood
Now, of course I had to find other enthusiasts nearby. I've counted about half a dozen Saabs in the neighborhood both before and since I bought mine. There' the 93 Aero sedan, and a 93 ragtop coup up the way. There's an old 900 series with ski racks on top, and another 95 wagon just like mine a bit further afield - I've only run into it on the way to the grocery store.

One day I saw a woman in the Aero. I walked past, wondered, dithered, then walked back and introduced myself. Yes, I am that weird woman in your neighborhood, "Hi, I've been admiring your car for months now and I just wanted to say so, and I've bought my own." She said her two-year-old son could spot and identify all the Saabs in the neighborhood. Saab on, lady.

Shortly after, I spotted a man in the ragtop. Now, I couldn't help myself. "Hi," I told him I was not only a new Saab owner but had just chatted up another in the neighborhood. He was very friendly as well, loved to drive with the top down, which is still possible given our unusually warm weather lately.

A friend has joked about there being a secret Saab handshake. I'm pretty sure I could form one as this point.

That Conversation

I was at an early spring party, a club on a deck overlooking the Hudson river, well north in Manhattan. We were talking about superhero movies, my friend whose son went to see the new Spider-Man movie. He liked it.

"I missed the Captain America movie. I liked the first one."

"Yeah. I heard it was good."

"New Godzilla movie out."

"Yeah, only this time he tears up the west coast, not New York."

"I think the last superhero movie I saw was the last Superman movie - "

"Man of Steel?"

"Yeah, it was good, good."

" I liked it, but it reminded me too much of 9/11."

"How so?"

"The dust, the destruction. The scenes where they attack the city."

"I though War of the Worlds was the first movie about 9/11."

I thought, despite its plot, it captured the fear, the inexplicable randomness of thousands of people, vaporized before our eyes, the sky filled with dust, so many fleeing in terror.

"Yeah, yeah I can see that."

"I'm not ready to go to the museum, the memorial downtown."

"Yeah, me neither."

"I don't need a reminder, I remember it."

"My niece asked me about it. She's ten, she was surprised it happened before she was born."

"Yeah?"

"She thought, 9/11 meant the year 2011."

Chuckling.

"She asked me what I was doing that day and, I'm OK talking about it, I told her, but I was surprised at how emotional I felt."

"Yeah."

Moments.

"So new new X-Men is coming out. I liked the last one."

"It's like, a prequel to the sequels."

"A se-pre-quel I guess."

"Yeah. "

"I'm gonna grab another beer."

Traveler

clack. clack. clack. New Jersey rolls by in the distance, the urban sprawl of Newark and Seacaucus giving way to the wider fields past Elizabeth, onwards to Metuchen and New Brunswick, until, at last, in the fields near Princeton, the Garden State resembles its sublime moniker.

Or, all the same, as I fly down 95 after a detour by my home, across the George Washington Bridge, the radio playing, left for this connection, right for the other, through the turnpike and into the express lane.

I've traveled a lot lately, sometimes for fun, sometimes for work. Though my office is in New York City, my company has another office in East Windsor, New Jersey, closer to Trenton. My boss lives in Pennsylvania, as does a former colleague. We have a huge project on hand, and the Windsor office has become the central command post in our campaign.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Tulsa for my brother's wedding, departing out of Newark, the smoking steel towers of the region giving way quickly to fields and streams before we climbed so high that we might have been anywhere.

Before that, I went with some friends to a paddlesport expo, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the air blowers of which form one of the corners of our kayaking area. I've driven under, and paddled over, the same spot in the river, and that seemed kind of surreal to me.

While I'm at it, every day I walk three blocks up a hill to take and escalator nearly as far down, to board a subway that whisks me to work, in a building that, curiously, is built immediately above the train station that would take me to New Jersey.

I applied for a job out there, and almost took it, before deciding my current job wasn't so bad, and I wasn't prepared to leave the city.

I wrote some years ago that I feel at home in a terminal; there are signs, there is order, there are goals and destinations, rest stops and a feeling of motion, sometimes paused. I'll say that is my life, though I have carved out a home, and the stability I crave. I have a home base, but I am an interloper, seeing all these places, from all these angles.

The wind whips through the fields. I've seen the same marshes around Seacaucus in spring, summer, winter, fall, in howling rain and driven snow, in sunshine and in darkness. Past Newark, where all the inexperienced travelers que because they think it's the airport, then past the airport, and onwards, away from sprawl, to suburbia, to exurbia, and eventually to the municipal haven of New Brunswick.

How much space does one man need? In the end, not a lot, at least not all at once. But to see it, experience it, traverse it all, there can never be too much.

Walking After Midnight on the Doomsday Clock

The second half of the Walking Dead, season four, premiered tonight. I watch the show regularly, but I can't say I'm a zombie fan. It's more, I'm a post-apocalypse fan.

Being an eighties child, I grew up with the apocalypse. The threat of nuclear armageddon, and the movies that it spawned, was the main thread. Certainly, having a childhood in Oklahoma there was plenty of "Bible/Nostradamus" end of the world anticipation, not to mention having a father in the military, and later living in West Germany in the final years of the Cold War. I regularly saw tanks on the highway and attack helicopters on the ground near my high school. The prospect of global annihilation was very real to me.

Nowadays, with the threat of superpowers lobbing ICBMs at each other much less likely, other feast have taken hold. EMPs wiping out our modern technology, asteroids hitting the Earth, or plague films. These last seem to be the most common, from Outbreak to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion film. Modern zombie films seem to be variants of these.

A former boyfriend pointed this out when we were dating. He was an avowed zombie fan, not an infection fan. Perhaps it's best he joined my list of exes.

I have to say, though, he was right. When I was a kid, zombies were the undead, brought back to life. They were not demons, and they were not vampires (Robert Rodriguez seems to conflate all three). Culturally, they were placed under a course by a voodoo priest or witch doctor - the living dead were more or less human but with no minds of their own.

The Walking Dead, and other contemporary zombie shows, seem to use infection as a modern explanation of how this would work. Being a zombie is like being rabid, much like 28 Days (and eventually, Weeks) later. You get bit, you lose your mind, and attack the nearest non-rabid humans.

Except . .  .the Walking Dead still acknowledges death. People die before they become zombies. They die of disease. They die of wounds and injuries. Early in the show, MRI scans are shown of the brain as it "reboots" into is zombie state. The zombie pathogen somehow rewires the brain to function after the brain has died.

OK, so far. But then, what about the rest of biology? Or, necrology rather. In the show, bodies appear to deteriorate. As the show has moved forward in time, zombies have gotten squishier and fall apart more easily. Yet, how are they able to move? What little knowledge I have of human necrology is that we tend to bloat until all those gasses come out. After that we dry up.

For that matter, how does regular sustenance work. Do zombies need water? Do they get dehydrated? How is protein being converted into muscle mass if their muscles have already deteriorated? For that matter how do they digest if there is not digestive tract? In the first episode, a little girl was show crawling . . .with no abdomen. How are these neurons firing? What is powering these things?

All little trifles to be overlooked, zombie fans assure me. Don't take it so seriously. And, I don't. Like I said, I watch for the post-apocalyptic aspect.Things like, the breakdown of civilization. Scavenging for food and fuel. Organizing into groups and attempting to rebuild civilization. I watch The Walking Dead for the same reason I watched a reboot of the British show Survivors - it's about a small group of people who survive a more conventional though severely lethal plague, and who then fight over he scraps.

It's insight into our base motivations, and the tribal conflicts that have been smoothed over by centuries of laws, customs, and agreements - and which still flare up today. I watch these shows because they remind me how fragile the whole system it - and how glad I am that it works at all.

Scotch

A few month ago, I passed a kayaking test, and ever since then, I've been able to enjoy the taste of Scotch. All the best sea kayakers are from Scotland, you see, and that is what I attribute the change to. Previously a Bourbon drinker, I've spent the past couple of months trying different Scotches, doing some reading about them, and learning what I like.

Laphroaig -I'm not sure what year this was; I expect the 10 Year. I had his to celebrate success on my exam, and I was really taken with its deep, smoky flavor. Apparently I am odd in liking the smoky, peaty Scotches. I don't always need it this intense, but I do like it.

Macallen 12 - I had this as a victory lap following a long kayaking day trip. I was in a bar with a smaller selection, and after asking about their single malts, tried the Macallen on the recommendation of the bartender and another patron. It's far more balanced the the Laphraig, and was a nice step down from the Laphraig.

Belvenie Double-Cask (Sherry) - In a fancy hotel in Tulsa, I found an excellent selection, and tried this one. I loved it so much I bought a bottle of my own. There are actually two double casks, one finished in sherry and the other in rum; I have not tried the rum, but the sherry finish is excellent. This is by far the most complex Scotch I have had, with an array of flavors in succession: honey, salt, a little peat, heather.

Talisker - from the Isle of Skye, where I hope to train one day. Peaty, but not as much as the Laphraig. I rather enjoyed it, it is mild, but not especially sweet.

Glenfiddich - I tried this at a whisky party, and can see why it's so successful. It's a wonderful combination of all the good things in Scotch, but a bit more subdued than the Macallen.

Highland Park - my new favorite, from the northernmost tip of Scotland, where some of my ancestors supposedly came from. Not too sweet, and complex but not so complicated as the Belvenie, sweet up front with a smoky finish.

Scotch, or whisky of any kind, is insane when you think about it. Someone had to think, I'll take some grain wet it and then let it spoil and ferment, and then I'll put it in water, and boil it. Then I'll build some tubes above it, bend them, and capture the condensate. Then, I'll put all that in a barrel and store it for, I dunno, ten years, at least. At least! And then I will drink it."

It's crazy, it's engineering, it's something only people on a rocky outcrop between the Atlantic and the North Sea could perfect.