Why am I caught up in the Wagner Group drama? I love a gripping tale. Besides, I share the cultural fascination with groups that operate outside the law, provided they’re long ago and far away. It’s easy vicariously to relish the supposed freedom and adventure of old-time pirates, train robbers, and freelance fighters on horseback.
Freelance is a term from early-1800s Romanticism to mean medieval mounted warriors who fought for profit rather than loyalty to lord or country. We freelance writers will recognize the trade-off between security and independence. Mercenary is much older, from Latin for “hireling.” Soldier of fortune is another classic term for one who fights in other people’s wars, motivated by pay not patriotism. Long ago and far away? Hardly. Much as the line between legal privateers and illegal pirates in Elizabethan England was a thin one, only a thin line distinguishes some “private security companies” from mercenaries. Remember Blackwater Security Consulting in Iraq, responsible for many civilian deaths? It’s one of many, from Mali to Syria, Sudan to Indonesia. “Business is booming,” Sean McFate of the National Defense University wrote in 2019. As best I can find, neither the U.S. nor Russia has signed the United Nations convention to forbid outsourcing warfare to mercenaries. The attractions are too great. The contracting nations get plausible deniability. Their contractors get a lack of accountability. It’s win/win for them, if not for anyone else. Image: From Paulus Hector Mair, De arte athletica II, 16th century.
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Years ago, a driving vacation brought us to the charming village of Lytton, on the Fraser River in southern British Columbia. It was named for Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), British colonial secretary and author of the much-mocked line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” We’d lunched earlier at Lillooet, where our waitress was almost in tears over wildlife dying in a nearby forest fire.
After a harrowing drive from Lillooet to Lytton, mountains on one side and river on the other, with a blind curve where rockfall blocked half the road, it was a relief to park in Lytton and get out of the car. Smoke and flames were visible across the Fraser. We watched with fascination as firefighting helicopters lowered huge buckets into the river, then flew back over the forest to pour water on the blaze. Last week I learned for the first time that wildfire two years ago destroyed 90 percent of the village. Was I not paying attention, or does the American press ignore Canadian villages? Lytton is no more. Rebuilding is planned but hasn’t yet begun. Air quality health warnings keep many Wisconsinites indoors lately to avoid smoke from wildfires in northern Quebec. Distressing for us, it has to be immeasurably worse for residents evacuated from the path of the fires. Although Lytton is farther away, reading belatedly of the almost-total destruction of a village I’ve visited brings Canadian wildfires up close and personal. Images: (left) wildfire in Yellowstone 2013; (right) welcome to the “hot spot.” The images I found from the Lytton fire are copyright news photos. I attended Oberlin College on scholarship, from a West Virginia high school with excellent teachers but no exotic courses. To make room for me, someone with a fancier transcript from a classy suburb may have lost out. Unfortunately, admission to a specific college or getting hired for a specific job can be a zero-sum game. To choose among promising applicants, what’s “fair”? Fairness at Oberlin meant encouraging student interaction across diverse backgrounds, preparing us to contribute in a changing world. Fairness at another college might mean favoring the children of alumni and corporate CEOs, preparing them to replicate the past.
Replication is a factor in cutting-edge technology, too. Automated help systems are great, so long as my question is one many people have asked before. A chatbot can fake being you by mimicking language patterns and content from the past. You’ll need to write your own essay if you want to say something new. I love to study the past. I want to learn from it and build on it. Creative innovation benefits from established procedures and guidelines. Scientific method enables new discoveries and a way to distinguish them from fads. A written constitution allows for interpretation and amendment while constraining the sway of the mob. Fairness doesn’t have to require systems that merely replicate the past. A week and a half ago, Russia seemed on the verge of civil war. The brutal, Russian-funded mercenary Wagner Group, led by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, advanced on Moscow to demand a change in military leadership. Watching crowds cheer the Wagner Group fighters, I confess to shadenfreude. Chaos might take Russian heat off Ukraine. Prigozhin might replace Putin’s generals. But would that really be better?
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” Though a U.S./Soviet alliance in World War II was essential to defeat Hitler’s Germany, it ushered in a half century of Cold War. The U.S. intervened in other countries’ affairs to protect or install authoritarian dictators. They shared our enmity toward Communism. What’s my point? First, don’t confuse situational allies with the good guys. Some are, some aren’t. I sometimes wonder if we underestimated Russia’s imperial ambitions after 1991 because at least it wasn't Communist. Second, reconsider what counts as an enemy. Immediate threats to our nation used to bring Americans together. Imagining coming together around such threats as pandemics, poverty, and bigotry. Our allies against enemies like these might truly become our friends. Image: Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left to right) at the Teheran Conference, 1943. (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-32833.) Last week temperatures rose to the nineties. Wildfire smoke from northern Quebec made outdoor air unsafe to breathe. My car was in the shop. Our phones were on the fritz. It would be a good week to stay in and clean. Not that I wanted to. Housework wasn’t mandatory, but it beat composing a sensitive email that would be difficult to write. I cleared out a filing cabinet of obsolete papers and made a start on sweeping the garage.
I’m puzzled when people list procrastination among their character defects. So long as a paper or project is finished by its due date, who cares whether it was completed at the last minute or well in advance? True, some obligations feel increasingly heavy the longer I delay. On the other hand, a few grow clearer or melt away of their own accord. Too bad I can’t tell in advance which is which. Perhaps the best thing about putting off the dreaded email was that it motivated me to other useful tasks for the purpose of avoidance. I wrote a few years ago about Stanford philosopher John Perry’s procrastination strategy. The top-priority activity will get done when it must, and meanwhile several lower-priority jobs get done that would never have happened otherwise. Historical novels vary in how they weave fact and fiction. Some, such as Ellis Peters’s medieval Cadfael mysteries, place ordinary people in normal times very different from our own. Some suggest ways cataclysmic events like revolutions turn fictional lives upside down, as in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Others create narratives to fill gaps in the historical record. In The Secret History of Twin Peaks: A Novel, Mark Frost weaves conspiracy theories about the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06 and Lewis’s death into backstory for the TV series he co-created with David Lynch.
A true historical puzzle led me to write fiction for the first time since childhood. Curious about the history of the Roma (pejorative Gypsies in English, Zigeuner in German), I learned that linguists traced their migration from India through Armenia to southeastern Europe by the 1300s. There Roma bands traveled around Hungary and the Balkans as wandering merchants and blacksmiths. Some in Romania were enslaved. Suddenly, with no clear cause, large groups of Roma appeared northern Germany in autumn 1417. City chronicles in Hildesheim, Luneburg, Hamburg, and along the Baltic reported dark-skinned, ragged strangers at the gates. The next year the strangers arrived in Frankfurt, Colmar, and Zurich. Soon they were in Italy and Spain. Claiming to be pilgrims from Egypt and carrying letters of introduction from the king of Bohemia, they accepted alms until townspeople drove them out. What triggered this mysterious migration? My factual draft got so filled with “perhaps,” “conceivably," and “one might hypothesize” that it was cleaner to drop the disclaimers and invent what might have happened. Fiction lets the story continue after the evidence runs out. Image: Evgraf Sorokin, Spanish Gypsies, 1853. As a sociologist’s daughter, I grew up aware that cultural and family background influenced my choices. Later, pondering determinism and free will, I observed how people who knew me well could predict those choices more accurately than strangers. Still, highly predictable people seemed stuck in a rut. Boring. Not me, surely.
Spellcheck made me suspicious at first when it pretended to know my intention. Now I find it useful, though no substitute for proofreading. (No, I don’t scoop up “humus” with my pita.) I’ve partly adjusted to text messaging that predicts the end of a word just started. But when my email program began to offer up whole phrases to add to an outgoing draft, it startled me how often it was right. Was I that predictable? Even to a total stranger? Apparently so. Setting aside the blow to the ego, it’s probably just as well. Imagine if every decision or action had to emerge from fresh consideration. Operating largely on predictable habit frees up mental energy for emergencies, creativity, and new learning. What’s worth fresh attention is partly a matter of choice. Image: Stuck in a rut, April 14, 2019. Covid isn’t over; it’s just past the emergency stage that overwhelmed health systems. Is life getting back to normal, or are some things forever changed? Is your life the same as it was four years ago?
We’re sitting on the riverbank watching the waters subside after a flood, wondering if the deluge left any lasting impact. That’s one perspective. Another is that we’re leaves and twigs floating downstream, flood or no flood. There is no going back. I can’t recall any four-year period in which the end was the same as the beginning. I can’t return now to 2019, whether I want to or not. The pandemic is only one cause among many. How about you? My family moved to West Virginia about the time I turned three. I clearly remember arriving by train at the foot of Tyrone Road near Cheat Lake. A couple met us and took us to their house. Years later, in search of the site, I found no trace of a railroad track near the foot of Tyrone Road. There was not even a level stretch where a track might once have been.
Fast forward to eighth grade at Suncrest-Flatts Junior High. After a statewide West Virginia history test, top scorers in each county visited the state capital to be dubbed Knights and Ladies of the Golden Horseshoe. I have photographic memories of gathering on the Capitol steps and going inside for the induction ceremony. Recently I found an online list of the winners by year, including several classmates. I was not among them. A park I explored after moving to Wisconsin was low and flat, or that’s how I recall it. More recently I went back and was startled to find the terrain high and rugged. These surprises aren’t about how time moves on, like a strip mall in a former farm field, or a statistic that gets updated every year. Nor are they age-associated memory loss; I’ve cherished these reminiscences for decades. My memory plainly can’t be trusted. Moreover, how vividly I remember doesn’t tell whether I remember correctly. When two witnesses give conflicting accounts of an event long past, maybe neither is lying. The more detailed memory may not be the more accurate. No matter how confident, in the absence of further evidence, either or both of them may simply remember it wrong. Every big life change calls for creative reinvention. Aging is a beast. It’s also a privilege; too many friends died too young to have the chance. For many of us, retirement brings new freedom in how we spend our days, while new limitations constrain our choices. Time to reinvent.
First a couple of caveats. Loss is loss; grief is grief; pain is pain. I don’t for a minute suggest that living fully means constant happiness, or that people with clinical depression can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. One person’s path may not be another’s. That said, here’s what works for me just now. Identify a passion or two, something that engrosses you so deeply the rest of the world goes away. A sphere deep enough there’s always more to learn, try out, plan, discover, and create. Mine is exploring history and unfamiliar places. One friend’s eyes light up when she talks about fostering puppies. For others it’s gardening, landscape painting, or campaigning to combat climate change. Forget about balance, unless you’ve found a balance that already suits you. Otherwise, let all the routines and unavoidable nuisances fall into the background. Deal with the crap—computer crashes, raccoons in the attic—and then flip your mind back to your passion. Let it fill you with such joy and excitement there’s no space for anything else. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. Archives
April 2024
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