Animaling verbs

There’s a well-known “Calvin & Hobbes” strip in which Calvin declaims on the joy of “verbing words.”

Calvin: I like to verb words

Hobbes: What?

Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “access” was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed.

Calvin goes on to reflect that “verbing weirds language.”

But this is by no means original to Calvin; English words have been verbed from the beginning, and a post I wrote last week left me thinking in particular of the way the characteristic traits and foibles of animals have given us not just a zoo’s worth of adjectives (perhaps my favorite is mulish), but many verbs that are simply the names of the animals themselves.

Here are a few I thought of immediately, along with a grab bag of observations and reflections about the origins, use, and most especially the many fine shades of connotation and meaning of each.

cow

This is the one, which I used in my post last week about attempts to “cancel” specific lines of text in recent novels, that got me thinking about these words, and it’s probably the one I use most often.

Unlike some of these other verbs, the metaphor behind cow, the mental image I’m supposed to get from the word, isn’t particularly clear to me. Cowing someone suggests intimidation—a coercive, overbearing persuasion. Someone who has been cowed has fearfully, submissively given in. Beyond the fear that plays a role here, I’m not sure what this has to do with cows, which are generally unflappable unless spooked en masse. Where I grew up, when teenaged morons amused themselves by trying to frighten or chase cows, the animals usually just began a phlegmatic retreat that ended no farther away than it had to.

But in reading about this verb I learned that it’s possible cow, in this sense, came into English from the Old Norse kúga, a word meaning to force, tyrannize, or oppress. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that this word in turn developed from the standard Old Norse word for cow, kýr, the idea being that cows are “easily herded.” A tantalizing possibility, but I doubt we can know for sure. There’s clearly a lot of figurative work going on here.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting that this is yet another of the many English loanwords from Old Norse that—like knife, die, outlaw, ransack, berserk, and slaughter—has forceful and potentially violent implications.

badger

Badger as a verb is interesting because it vividly evokes a specific animal—an animal that doesn’t actually behave the way the verb would imply. This has to do with the idiom’s origin in early modern gambling and bloodsport. Badger-baiting, akin to cockfighting, bear-baiting, and dogfighting, involved putting a badger in a box or barrel and sending dogs in after it. Though “normally quite docile” and shy, badgers put up a ferocious defense when cornered, and apparently a single badger could last through multiple bouts with the dogs in a badger-baiting contest. These were timed events, with dogs going into the badger’s artificial den many times and the spectators wagering on the dogs’ speed and tenacity, and so badgering is actually what the dog does in this scenario—repeatedly attacking in an attempt to draw the prey out.

With the decline of badger-baiting as a sport this meaning apparently transferred to the badger itself, giving it an outsized reputation for ferocity. The word has also weakened in meaning, I think, as its normal use implies pestering, merely annoying harassment—but nothing lethal for either badger or dog.

ferret and squirrel

Both of these verbs usually take on a preposition (about which more below), often out or away, as in: The guard ferreted out the entrance to the tunnel or He squirreled away the snack for later. I pair these because while one implies searching and the other implies hoarding, both suggest a feverish, jittery quality. There’s a smallness to these images that suggests petty but hyper concern, the kind that can cause problems. Someone ferreting something out is searching too eagerly and minutely for anyone’s good; someone squirreling something away is fussy and anxious, or at least overcautious in preparing for the lean times.

Unlike the actual animal, ferret can take on sinister connotations. As the example I came up with above makes clear, I associate ferret very strongly with The Great Escape, in which the German guards at Stalag Luft III are called “ferrets” and do plenty of ferreting, with sometimes fatal results.

dog and hound

Dogs today are ersatz children and treated as such; there is no more repulsive set of slang terms to me than those built around dogs-as-kids: “fur babies,” “granddogs,” “dog mamas,” etc. These represent a nauseating and poisonous sentimentality.

Dog and hound as verbs, however—The bank is dogging him about his mortgage payment and My boss is hounding me about that expense report—are clearly hunting metaphors. Hound has been in use in this figurative sense for at least 400 years, and dog for at least 500. Both convey continuous, close, unwavering pursuit, with hound carrying a further connotation of nagging or harassment, possibly unjustified. There’s also a neat elaboration on these with the verb bird-dog, in which one pursues a target on behalf of someone else.

The closer we get to the world that first used these words in these senses the better.

wolf

Often with down, as in: He wolfed down his supper and fell asleep on the couch. Another canine metaphor, and I imagine a pretty ancient one, though the Online Etymology Dictionary only records its use in this sense from 1862. As sinister as wolves are in European tradition and folklore, it’s interesting to me that wolfing down one’s food suggests little more than a lack of manners rather than something potentially more wicked.

parrot and ape

Here’s a case study in subtle differences. Both of these are commonly used to mean “imitate” or “mimic,” but note the connotation of each. Parroting someone suggests a mindless, lockstep repetition, as in: He’s just parroting what everyone else is saying about the new Star Wars movie. But aping someone suggests clumsy or offputtingly crude imitation; it carries much more contempt than the other. (Compare monkey below.)

An effect of the uncanny valley, the creepiness of not-quite-human primates doing human things? Maybe, maybe not—but I think it’s an interesting subtlety.

monkey

If aping someone suggests a contemptible attempt at imitation, to monkey around or monkey with something suggests purely foolish, probably childish, and, in the worst case, aimless and destructive tinkering. What all three have in common is a deadly combination of ingenuity and lack of intelligence. Based on my handful of visits to the primate exhibits in zoos, this is apt.

rat

As the above entries make clear, I’m interested in the way some of these verbs take prepositions and others don’t. Rat can take a couple: you can rat on somebody, which is bad enough, but ratting them out is even worse—a total betrayal. Why rats, highly social animals that take good care of each other, should suggest this kind of disloyalty and dishonesty is unclear to me; I reckon it has more to do with rats’ ancient association with darkness, decay, and disease than anything about their behavior.

chicken out and pig out

If you’ve studied German at all you are familiar with the dreaded separable-prefix verb. This is a verb that has a base or root, which is always a recognizable verb, the meaning of which is changed by a preposition that is a prefix in the infinitive form but moves to the end of the sentence when used. These bedevil new students of the language not least because there’s not always a clear logic to which preposition results in which meaning. (Here’s a game effort at explaining some of them, though Mark Twain’s observations on the “rules” of German grammar should always be kept in mind.)

Something similar happens with certain idiomatic expressions in English, as the way we use the verbs chicken and pig shows. Why does one chicken out under pressure rather than chicken up or chicken around? My only guess is that it’s purely intuitive—it just feels right. And we’ve said it this way for so long that saying it any other way feels unnatural.

Regardless, with chicken out and pig out we have two barnyard animals acting on vices—cowardice and gluttony. And not just acting on them; these expressions hint at indulgence. One could be a chicken but still hang on when danger comes, thus proving oneself and building a little character, but to chicken out in the crisis is unforgivable. The sense of indulgence is especially clear with pig out, a verb no American who has ever been to Golden Corral needs to have explained.

hog

Unlike pig above, hog needs no preposition, just an object—one simply hogs something. This was a common complaint when and where I grew up, as in: Quit hogging the couch! or Clint is hogging the crayons! or Don’t hog all the pork rinds! Succinct and potentially vivid—especially if, like us, you accompanied your accusation with snorting—I think it’s been used so much it’s probably lost most of its original power.

buffalo

I began with the verbed animal that I most commonly invoke; here’s one I have less occasion for, but that always amuses me when I run across it. Journalist Kevin D Williamson is particularly fond of it, not only in writing, as here:

They’re hoping that conservatives can be buffaloed with a bit of cheap free-market rhetoric into not noticing that something is excruciatingly amiss here.

but in speech, as in various interviews and podcasts I’ve heard him on, as here:

[T]hey are fools and self-interested, and they know that people are easily scared and easily misled and easily buffaloed into doing whatever it is you want them to do, which is why they become politicians in the first place.

As it happens, these illustrate the two related but different things that may have happened to someone who has been buffaloed: either baffled, confused, or outright hoodwinked, or overawed and intimidated—a sense probably derived from the animal’s real-world effect. You’ll notice that there’s an overlap between these two senses both in definition and in the way they are used in the examples above.

But what I especially love about buffalo as a verb is the faint air of ridiculousness that hangs around it. To be buffaloed is not only unfortunate but preposterous, and I’m glad we have a word for precisely that occasion. We should get a lot of use out of it nowadays.

Conclusion

Merriam-Webster has a longer, more detailed “Words at Play” post on some of these here. I suspect there are plenty more—I can think of goose, beetle, bitch, fox and outfox, and horse (as in horsing around) offhand—especially in more recent or subcultural slang.

At any rate, English is fun, and I hope it stays that way. Try using one of these in writing or conversation this week—just don’t let all my grammatical mumbo jumbo cow you.

More notes on history and presentism

17th century portrait of Clio, muse of history

Today, via my Facebook memories, I revisited this line from the great Herbert Butterfield’s great study The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

A serendipitous quotation to run across, as yesterday I read this post from Alan Jacobs’s blog, an extract from the longer Substack essay “On Compassion” by philosopher Justin EH Smith. (The full essay is, unfortunately for me, paywalled.) Smith, as quoted by Jacobs:

History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse—the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. 

Compare with this from Niall Ferguson, whom I quoted here two years ago in another post against presentism (having begun that post with the same Butterfield quotation):

In my view, applied history, making history, as it were, useful, is all about trying to learn from the past, to understand the experience of the dead, and see how it can illuminate our own predicament. The exact opposite approach is to say “Let’s take our norms and let’s export them to the past and wander around the early seventeenth century going ‘Tut-tut, wicked white supremacists’ at all the people we encounter.” But that’s become the mode in history departments all over this country to the point that they are deeply dull places that don’t in fact illuminate the past, they just import an anachronistic set of values and rather arrogantly condescend to the past.

(Side note: I’m struck that both Smith and Ferguson, in dramatically different contexts, used the seventeenth century as examples.)

All of this falls under the concept, which I borrowed from Chesterton, of “the inside of history”—a concern never far from my mind. (So maybe the above coincidence wasn’t so serendipitous after all.) I’ve written about getting at the inside of history, the charitable attempt to understand our dead forebears from the inside out, in more detail here.

What can we get out of history when we try to do it this way? A final line from Smith:

[A] thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.

Bloody big ship

Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)

One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.

Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:

They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.

The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.

And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.

The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.

But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.

Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:

Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.

I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.

Lewis and Orwell on bad words

Or, that is, words for things we want to label as bad.

George Orwell, under the heading “Meaningless words” in his essay, written in 1945 but published in Horizon in 1946, “Politics and the English Language”:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

CS Lewis in his 1944 Spectator essay “The Death of Words”:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Let the reader understand.

Some years ago I wrote in more detail about carelessness with language and thinking, with reference to Orwell and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

Line-item censorship

It’s not every day that you see writers at Slate and National Review on the same wavelength. And yet here are Laura Miller at the former and Kyle Smith at the latter reporting on the same story: two novelists who have recently been cowed by internet mobs into deleting not entire passages, characters, or plotlines, but individual lines from already published novels.

The novelists are Elin Hilderbrand and Casey McQuiston, and the novels are, respectively, Golden Girl, a “beach read” about a recently deceased author of beach reads trying to help people from beyond the grave, and Red, White, & Royal Blue, a gay romance in which the President’s son falls in love with one of the princes of the UK’s royal family. A mob of online readers attacked the first for an offhand comment by a teenaged character who compares hiding from her family to Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis in an attic. The second took similar flak for a line in which the President complains about having to make a groveling phone call to the Prime Minister of Israel for political reasons. One was criticized as “anti-Semitic,” the other as “Zionist.” You really can’t win.

And I should quote some of this criticism in more detail. According to one online commenter, the single line about the phone call to Israel in McQuiston’s book “normalizes the genocide & war crimes done by Israel that will always be backed up & unashamedly supported by America.” And, on Goodreads, I find someone who thought the other book’s offhand comparison to Anne Frank was (in bold) “one of the most terrible things I read in a book in my entire life.” (Said reviewer also admits to reading the book only because of the controversy.)

You can read more about both incidents in the Miller and Smith pieces above. Both Hilderbrand and McQuiston apologized and both promised that these lines would be cut from future editions of the book.

Note: these lines would be cut.

Social media is doing some weird things to publishing and storytelling, some of the most high-profile examples being YA books that have been un-published before they were even released based on the perceptions of Twitter mobs. Furthermore, we’ve seen increasing pressure to “cancel,” in the sloppy but commonplace term, books that fall afoul of modern sensibilities, including popular bestsellers like the Harry Potter series and classics as diverse as Gone With the Wind and the Iliad. But here we have precision-bombing attacks on particular lines of text and the authors and publishers caving to the mob’s demands. Here outraged online critics have arrogated to themselves the job of editor.

Perhaps this is an attempt to find a compromise, to save face and avoid total “cancelation” while throwing a bone to small but vocal mobs online. I’m not sure—but the trend worries me, because it has no inherent limiting principle (see the Bradbury piece I link to below) and because the people demanding such changes or cuts are never satisfied. The grave, and the barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, fire—and Twitter mobs.

The character of the people driving these cuts matters. I wrote “small but vocal” above, and these are small groups. Look up Hilderbrand and McQuiston’s books on Amazon or Goodreads or some other service and, despite the controversy, they still have good ratings. Both currently have 4.6 out of five stars on Amazon, with a whopping 2,600 and 13,000 reviews and ratings, respectively. This suggests that the overwhelming majority of the people who read these books have no problem with them. It’s also telling that, in both cases, the objects of the mob’s ire were throwaway lines of humor or wry, ironic commentary—and obviously so. People who don’t get jokes, who have no sense of humor, or who are too simple or willfully ignorant to understand that a fictional character’s opinions are not the author’s—a point raised by both Miller and Smith—are not worth listening to. More about that below.

But my primary concern with incidents like this is as an author. How can writers protect themselves from the mob and, more importantly, stay true to their craft, not compromising even a line of their work? I have a few ideas:

• Get off Twitter. Seriously. All social media are part of the problem (note that some of the criticism mentioned in Miller and Smith’s articles originated on Instagram, in my experience the cheeriest of social media networks), but Twitter is a cesspool, as if all ten bolgia of Dante’s eighth circle were upended into one pit of rage, dishonesty, grandstanding, and bad faith assertion. It’s full of glib, self-assured, vindictive liars who can only think in labels and slogans and who make sure they’re always on the winning side (see below). In a word, it’s full of Fillmors. If you’re on Twitter you’re asking for it sooner or later, and opting out means you don’t have to be present when the mob arrives. And when the mob’s target isn’t present, it loses focus (mobs, like all democratic bodies, being small-minded and fickle) and dissipates faster.

• Ignore the mobs. Based on the examples I’ve seen, I’m not sure which is worse—attempting to explain yourself or abjectly apologizing. The former feeds the mob’s outrage; the latter invites the mob to demand more and more specific groveling (about which more below). Woke social media mobs don’t offer good faith criticism or actually want that hoariest of self-serving clichés, “a conversation,” and refusing to participate is the only answer. (Well, perhaps not the only answer: mockery would be best, the devil being unable to tolerate scorn, but I can’t fathom the bravery that would take. I don’t think I have it.)

• Don’t make decisions based on idiots. Lie down with dogs, wrestle with pigs, etc. This should be common sense. Overlaps generously with the first two points above.

• Don’t play games you can’t win. As children, we all knew someone who tried to manipulate our playground games so that they could come out on top every time, and that’s precisely what’s going on with all of these controversies. The only differences are the artificially heightened stakes and po-faced moralism—and the attending fear of wrongdoing—that come along with it. This is still a game, and it’s childish. Witness Tom Hanks, who seems to me a genuinely intelligent, decent, and well-intentioned man, and who recently jumped on the Tulsa Riots bandwagon to reflect on the “whiteness” of the history he learned growing up. Not good enough, his critics were quick to aver, because it’s never good enough. See also Lin-Manuel Miranda. And American Dirt. And, graphically, this. There’s always something more and more granular to acknowledge, “educate yourself” on, or “do better” about, and attempting to explain yourself or admitting guilt means you lose. Automatically. Those kids who did this on the playground eventually learned to play by coherent, ironclad, finite rules comprehensible and applicable to everyone—or they played by themselves. Again: refuse to participate.

• On a final, more positive note—Be yourself. This is a truism from those painful years of learning to date, but nothing is more attractive than a person doing what they like to do because they like to do it. Write the stories you want to write the best way you see fit, and don’t adapt or apologize to appease some offended party, real or imagined. This is an honest way to work, based on love, and it builds genuine community with people who love the same things you do. And, as a bonus, you’ll produce art you can be proud of.

Even with those observations and admonitions out of my system (and I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone there), I look at these two incidents and am still left with questions. There are questions with obvious answers, questions about why the authors or publishers would so cravenly knuckle under to such baseless criticism, but the one I keep asking and have been asking a long time has to do with the members of the mob:

Why do these people bother reading novels?

Why even pick up the book in the first place? What’s the point? Why live this way? Why not write your own stories if those crafted by others are so problematic? Why not just give up fiction altogether and stand in front of the mirror, cooing over your own enlightenment?

I’m not sure I have any insight into this beyond the obvious—the sense of superiority offered by woke ideology, the addictive high of bringing writers and publishers to their knees and making them do things. And control, making others do things, is what this is ultimately all about.

At any rate, this kind of thought policing, to use Smith’s term, is illiterate, incurious, and fatal to the imagination. It sees representation where we should see characters, messaging where we should see themes, and the pieces of a vast game of power and politics where we should see stories. Rather than going out of oneself into strange, wonderful, and terrible new worlds, it demands conformity to the reader’s standards. It is anti-art. Even the much-vaunted empathy that reading fiction is supposed to build finds no purchase in the barren, pride-withered souls of these readers.

But we shouldn’t expect this kind of behavior to correct itself soon. As John Gardner noted in On Becoming a Novelist: “Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.” In the meantime, authors should stay true to their calling—carry the fire, in an evocative phrase from one of my favorite books—and refuse to compromise even a line.

More if you’re interested

For a striking presentiment of the damage readers with ideological axes to grind can do, read Ray Bradbury’s 1979 coda to Fahrenheit 451, available here. I’ve gotten irritated about the ideological demands made on good storytellers before, which you can read more about here.

Jünger's mountain range of narrow-mindedness

This morning I happened across the social media profile of someone I had “hidden” from view but hadn’t remembered hiding. Now why did I do that? I wondered. Ten seconds of scrolling and five glib, dismissive, cocksure, and plainly stupid political memes later: Oh, yeah—that’s why.

I’m currently reading The Glass Bees, a 1957 science-fiction novel by the great German soldier, writer, and thinker Ernst Jünger. The novel’s narrator, Richard, an unemployed former soldier, is offered a shady job by Zapparoni, a titan of the robotics industry—what we would now call a tech billionaire in a field we would now call nanotechnology.

When they meet, Zapparoni has questions for Richard about the memoirs of one of Richard’s old army comrades who has risen to high rank, a man named Fillmor, “who always knows what is possible” and so “doesn’t occupy himself with the absurd or the impossible.” That is, “a man without any imagination.”

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable were in fashion. There were many days when I had the impression of meeting only prison wardens—wardens, moreover, who voluntarily crowd to these positions, are satisfied with them and enjoy them. “Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Middle; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed”—we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again after five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole and mention their relationship to another monster; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end. In this mountain range of narrow-mindedness, Fillmor was one of the highest peaks.

Both authoritative and changeable, possessed of a “briskly disposing intelligence” that shunts everything immediately into “sharply demarcated” categories, given to cant and platitudes and displays of right thinking, and, above all, hubristically self-assured—this should be a familiar type.

Let us call this the Age of Fillmor.

Chesterton on love

Chesterton at work, 1905

GK Chesterton died 85 years ago today, aged 62. Chesterton has long been one of my favorite writers, a witty and topsy-turvy guide to literally everything. To commemorate the anniversary of his passing I was looking through my books and notes and even quotations I had shared as Facebook statuses going back as far as 2009. It was in these statuses that I noticed a recurring theme—love. And I decided that there was no better tribute I could pay him than simply to share his thoughts on six different facets of love.

I use the metaphor of facets deliberately, because, like a finely cut gemstone, while each of these quotations comes at the topic from a different angle they are all of a piece, part of a carefully shaped whole, and it’s that whole vision of Christian love that I believe animated everything Chesterton did and that we can stand to learn from. I know I can.

On love of one’s work:

From Chesterton’s 1903 biography Robert Browning:

The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. . . . A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

One of these days I’ll finally write about my years-long struggle to understand and live out one of Chesterton’s most famous dicta, that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” But the above quotation gets at why even failing at something is worth it.

On love of home:

“I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.”

“I dare say,” I said. “What reason?”

“Because otherwise,” he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, “we might worship that.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Eternity,” he said in his harsh voice, “the largest of the idols—the mightiest of the rivals of God.”

“You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,” I suggested.

“I mean,” he said with increasing vehemence, “that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.”

The above is from his underappreciated novel Manalive, which I read at a very important time in my life and you can read here.

On love of country:

A celebrated passage from “A Defence of Patriotism” in his very first essay collection, The Defendant:

On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word “love” means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word “love” is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. . . . “My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

On love of neighbor:

One of Chesterton’s most famous one-liners comes from a 1910 column for the Illustrated London News:

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

You can read more from the same column here.

On love of others:

From Orthodoxy, chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy.” Compare this insistence on the particularity of love with the passage from Manalive above.

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. . . . Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces.

On unconditional love:

From a meditation on soldiers, the use of force, and defeat in his 1915 essay collection All Things Considered:

To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune.

Conclusion

Devoted attachment to real, particular things and people, unswerving but not uncritical, and always wanting and hoping the best—this is a model of love I hope to live up to, and one we could all certainly use more of. And a good place to look for it not only described but acted out is in the work of Chesterton. Thankful for his memory today, 85 years on, and all that his work has meant to me and many thousands of others.

GK Chesterton, RIP.

George III: Majesty and Madness

Detail of George III in Coronation Robes, a 1765 portrait by Allan Ramsay

King George III was born on this day in 1738. To the extent that he is remembered in America today, it either as the bloody tyrant who tried to oppress the freedom-loving Thirteen Colonies or as an insane weakling, good evidence of the foolishness of royal families and hereditary monarchy. One of these is glib, one is propaganda—both are inaccurate, as made clear by Jeremy Black’s excellent entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, George III: Majesty and Madness.

George’s reign

One thing that is often lost in the caricature versions of George is how long he reigned. He ascended the throne at the height of the French and Indian/Seven Years War and lived five years past the Battle of Waterloo—almost sixty years. Only Victoria and Elizabeth II have ruled England longer.

George rose to the throne relatively young, succeeding his grandfather George II at the age of twenty-two, in the midst of a global war. Over the course of this book’s 115 pages, Black concisely outlines George’s reign, from the crises facing George immediately upon his ascent (whom to marry, how to conclude the Seven Years War) and thereafter (how to recover the cost of the war, how to deal with unrest and rebellion in North America, how to deal with the threat of the French Revolution and, even later, Napoleon), to the ups and downs of George’s popularity among the people, the rising and falling tensions within the governments he formed, and the mental health problems that occasionally cropped up from about the middle of his reign to the Regency, when he was finally and totally overcome by them.

Owing to the length of George’s reign, the intricacy of some of the political questions raised during that time, and the brevity imposed by the Penguin Monarchs series, Black can only briefly treat many of these issues, such as the ongoing debate over the international slave trade at the time. Black also assumes you will know who certain important figures and factions are—Lord North, Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, the Whigs, the Rockingham Whigs, the Wilkesites—so some familiarity with the period will help. But considering the vast time covered, Black does a good job presenting a concise, focused, and comprehensible account of the events of George’s reign.

Naturally, given the way hindsight reorders the importance of events, the American Revolution looms large in this book. Black presents the story well, showing both what motivated the colonials as well as George and his government, and how misunderstandings and mismatched expectations deepened the divide between the two sides.

Black also explodes the American myth of the Mad Tyrant King George, outlining the reasonableness of colonial taxation given the wildly successful but expensive Seven Years’ War—a war that started in the colonies, was fought to defend the colonies, and resulted in the opening of vast new territories for the colonies. Mismanagement of imperial policy, the passage of unpopular acts followed swiftly by their revocation—most famously the Stamp Act—created uncertainty and mistrust about the way the colonies would be run:

Indeed, the revolution occurred not because of a general desire to fight for liberty, but rather as a hesitant, if not unwilling, response on the part of many to the confused tergiversations of British policy, policy changes that apparently pointed the way to new forms of imperial governance. This concern led the colonies to a depth of alienation that was underrated in Britain, at least by the government, or that was misleadingly seen as restricted to a few troublemakers. Separation was a last resort for most of the colonists.

That George took the blame for mismanaged taxation policies is down to American propaganda—especially the Declaration of Independence, a laundry list “of charges thrown incontinently at George by Thomas Jefferson” and bearing only tenuous relation to reality and almost none to George’s role in the crisis.

But another part in the outbreak of revolution was played by George’s personality, and this presents us with some of the greatest ironies of George’s life, reign, and the empire’s loss of America. He saw monarchy not as a privilege to be exploited and enjoyed, but a divinely ordained office with immense responsibilities and obligations. The words “duty” and “conscientiousness” recur over and over in Black’s account. George’s sense of duty, his assumption that good men would cross party lines to cooperate and do the right thing, and his prickliness and disdain for those who refused or avoided their responsibilities or caved in to base instincts all played a role in his leadership before and during the Revolution. What the rebels who vandalized the East India Company’s tea in Boston Harbor needed was a firm line, a reminder that they were part of a whole and had duties incumbent upon them just as George did. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

George’s character

One of the ironies of accusing George of tyranny is precisely that sense of duty, which caused him to observe limits to his own power. He worked scrupulously to defend and uphold what had been entrusted to him. As Black puts it, “far from having unconstitutional tendencies, George saw himself as the constitution’s defender; but his determination to deploy the full powers that could be presented as his appeared to critics to be unconstitutional.” Much of the time he succeeded, but transatlantic miscommunication and misunderstanding frustrated George’s attempts to hold the empire together.

George’s observation of propriety and limitation was not only political but personal. Consider this telling anecdote from Black’s description of George’s lifestyle:

George’s first country residence, Richmond Lodge, was to be demolished, having been judged too small for his rapidly growing family. He turned to the White House in Kew, the country home of his parents, but wanted a new palace in the area; initially at Richmond, for which, in 1765, [architect William] Chambers produced a design for a major neo-classical work in accordance with the traditions of country-house (i.e. rural-palace) building[.] . . . The main façade was to be 328 feet long, but this was never built because, in contradiction to the Declaration of Independence, George was no tyrant: the cost was too great for the modest royal finances. Also, he was unable to purchase some land adjacent to his property which he saw as necessary for the palace, and certainly could not expropriate it as he very much regarded himself as under the law.

Here Black presents us with a king striving to live within his means and refusing to take advantage of his position to confiscate private property for his own use. Recent American presidents have been considerably less scrupulous about running up debt or the use of eminent domain for personal projects.

That’s the low-hanging fruit that first came to mind when I read that passage, but there’s much more, and this is the bitterest irony of all—George was a good man. He married well, to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and never took a mistress or was otherwise unfaithful to his wife at a time when infidelity among monarchs was commonplace. Indeed, his open and public affection toward Charlotte was the subject of approving comment by contemporaries, and his vigorous outdoor walks with her were a customary part of his routine. They had fifteen children in nineteen years and he strove to inculcate in them the same senses of piety and responsibility that had been imparted to him by his mother.

George had a keen interest in and generously patronized the arts and sciences. He helped lead a revival of Handel’s religious oratorios and played several instruments himself, as well as promoting the historical paintings and portraiture of artists like Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West and taking a personal interest—both through study in his own extensive library or conversation with experts—in everything from architecture and engineering to new farming techniques and astronomy. Visitors to court, including John Adams as ambassador of the young American republic, found George approachable and even friendly, talkative, and well-informed on a huge array of subjects.

And he was devoutly and sincerely religious, another trait atypical of monarchs at the time. His faith, indeed, undergirds everything else. “This commitment,” Black notes, “is apt to be downplayed in a secular age, but it was fundamental to George’s life, character and policies, and contemporaries noted the energy with which he said his amens.” George’s senses of duty and even patriotism were religious ones, and his reign was a religious mission to uphold and strengthen what he, by providential accident, had inherited. He only partially succeeded, though not for insincerity or lack of effort.

That George’s memory is denigrated while we excuse, ignore, or personally disavow the failings and evils of the strivers, would-be dictators, and tyrants that have paraded through the office of President simply because they are elected is and should be a judgement on us.

Culture and George’s reputation

So why does this reputation, all these years after the grievances of the Revolution should have faded, still cling to him?

This brings me to one of the most distinctive parts of this volume. Black is not the most elegant writer I’ve read, but he writes capably, commands an astonishing array of sources, and pays careful attention to two things it is easy to neglect in political history—the roles of personality and culture. In the final chapter of George III: Majesty and Madness, Black treats the reader to a tour of George by way of Jane Austen, Hamilton, and others. About Hamilton he doesn’t have much to say, nor should he: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George, a figure both “comic relief” and “sinister,” is “wildly inaccurate.” Period. The earlier play and film The Madness of King George gets more right, particularly about the treatments endured by George during his bouts of insanity, but raised George’s late-life mental health to such visibility that this problem, along with the loss of the North American colonies, has come to define him. That George’s reputation has suffered under the smears and imbalances of depictions in popular culture is clear—and it continues.

But the window into George’s life and reign offered by the works of Jane Austen—a woman whose interests, beliefs, and priorities overlapped a great deal with her king’s—is fascinating, and Black’s examination of George’s reign through her writing is one of the best parts of the book. Black also includes an interesting comparison of George III with George Washington, a man the king—who respected strength of duty and character—was humble enough to praise when Washington turned down dictatorial power.

Conclusion

George III: Madness and Majesty, with its sweeping scope balanced by careful but concise examination of key political events, and most especially in its attention to its subject’s personal life and character, is a very good short biography and a good introduction to a much-maligned and misunderstood man. I highly recommend it.

More if you’re interested

Black has also written a full-scale biography of George III subtitled America’s Last King, which I intend to read soon. Andrew Roberts also has a biography of George coming out this fall; read the description on Amazon and you’ll see that it’s designed precisely to be a corrective. For an extended, fair, and beautifully illustrated kids’ version of the George III/George Washington comparison, let me recommend Rosalyn Schanzer’s George vs. George: The American Revolution As Seen from Both Sides. You can read my old Amazon review here. I’ve previously reviewed another excellent entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, by Helen Castor, here.

The Rocketeer at 30

Here’s an appreciation that’s been a long time coming—growing off and on for thirty years (thirty years exactly on the 21st of this month), through nearly every phase of my own life from childhood to middle age and now extending into the childhoods of my children, and finally prompted by video essays by two of my favorite YouTubers. The subject: a modest action adventure from Disney, back when Disney still produced modestly sized movies, that is nonetheless masterfully crafted and rich with detail, not to mention a ripping good story. That film is The Rocketeer.

The movie

If you haven’t seen The Rocketeer, go and do yourself a favor and watch it. If you have seen it, a summary shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ll provide a short one here out of a sense of duty.

The film takes place outside Los Angeles in the fall of 1938, with Europe a year away from war (the Munich Agreement would have been signed just before our story takes place) and America rather insistently at peace. Our hero is Cliff Secord, a young pilot. When we meet him, he and a bunch of buddies at a rural airfield are taking their brand-new racing plane out for a spin after years of scrimping up what they can from crop-dusting and performing stunts at airshows. A police chase involving the FBI and gangsters with stolen merchandise—some kind of secret “gizmo”—intrudes, wrecking Cliff’s plane and almost killing him. He and his pals, right on the cusp of long-awaited great things, have just been set back years.

But then Cliff and his mentor Peevy discover something hidden in the cockpit of a superannuated biplane that they use for the humiliating “clown act” at airshows: a rocket pack. Cliff and Peevy intuit quickly that it’s designed to be strapped to a pilot’s back for rocket-speed flight. They test it, Peevy tinkers with it, and at the next airshow they are forced to give it a trial run to save an elderly and ailing pilot’s life. It’s a glorious success—but it also brings Cliff and his pals to the attention of the gangsters who were after the thing in the first place, the federal authorities who are hunting them, the industrialist who designed the rocket pack and is trying to recover it, and the highly-placed money behind the gangsters—and even his bosses far, far away.

The plot also sweeps up Cliff’s aviation buddies, including Peevy, Cliff’s beautiful girlfriend and aspiring actress Jenny, and their friends from around the airfield.

From this point forward The Rocketeer is a chase, a swashbuckler, a Flash Gordon adventure, an espionage thriller, a ritzy Hollywood chamber drama, and a gradually unfolding and ever escalating mystery. It’s great.

What makes The Rocketeer great

Why is it great? I can give you a short answer in three words: love, fun, and craftsmanship. Let’s start with the latter two.

First, The Rocketeer is a ton of fun. The period setting, the cast of characters, the heinous and varied villains, the combined dash of classic aviation and romance of classic Hollywood, the high stakes conflict boldly attacked by a spirited young hero who is still finding his calling and learning what is best in life—all contribute to the fun. All tell us, unequivocally, this is an adventure.

For me, the setting is a big part of the appeal. The trappings of the late 1930s are fun—the cars, the clothes, the hats, the planes, the music, the slang (“He hangs one on my kisser and you let him waltz?”), the guns (see below), the payphones and hatchecks and rumble seats, the look of the buildings from the hangars to the nightclub, and, relatedly, all that Art Deco design. The whole movie has a canvas, leather, and steel rivet chic that I’ve heard called dieselpunk. It’s beautiful. All the best of late 1930s material culture is here, and if you’ve ever fancied wearing a fedora (a real fedora, not the hipster hat, which is actually a trilby) and a trenchcoat under the cool light of the moon on a dark street corner, there’s something in The Rocketeer that you’ll like to look at.

But the setting also enriches the tone and dramatic subtext of the film. This is America late in the Depression, on the cusp of World War II but still at peace. This is also an era of change and potential. Everywhere we see the old alongside the new: Peevy’s truck and Cliff’s motorcycle, the biplane Miss Maibel and the Gee Bee, the oil derricks and orange groves of rural Los Angeles and the encroaching glitz of Hollywood. You can see this clearly in the film’s villains. The early villains, an Italian mob, are a known quantity—part of the status quo. Everyone knows who they are and what threat they represent. Howard Hughes is even a bit dismissive of them, calling them “hired muscle.” The film’s brilliant third act revelation of the real villains, the Nazis, points toward a terrifying new unknown.

And that’s another aspect of the setting that works gangbusters—there may have been more evil people or more lethal regimes, but there is no better screen villain than the Nazis. Just ask Indiana Jones.

The revelation of Nazi involvement in the plot also points toward the second thing that makes The Rocketeer so great, which is its craftsmanship.

The plot is perfectly structured, with a steady series of revelations that raise the stakes. Look at how the story progressively intensifies. First we have Cliff just trying to get ahead, then he and his friends are set back by unrelated mob crime, then he publicly rescues a friend using the rocket pack, then not only the mob and the FBI but an unstoppable ogre of a man begin pursuing Cliff, then not only Cliff but Jenny are endangered as Neville Sinclair tries to seduce her, and, the final revelation—the rocket pack isn’t just a MacGuffin for Cliff or the mob or even Neville Sinclair himself to chase, it’s the chosen tool of world domination by the Nazis. By the climax of the film all of the various plot threads have come together and the tension is at fever pitch, the stakes as high as they can go. It’s brilliantly done.

Furthermore—and this is especially important—nothing in the film comes out of nowhere. Everything that matters to the story, from plot points and important props (e.g. chewing gum) right down to jokes and incidental details, is properly set up earlier in the story. Consider Eddie Valentine and his gangsters’ turn on Neville Sinclair at the end. The film has already shown us the tensions in this patron-client relationship and the threat presented by the Nazis, so Eddie’s change of heart isn’t so much a change as the natural and rational step for his character to take given what he has just learned. For this moment to work so well takes the craft and dedication not only of the screenwriter but the director and editor. The Rocketeer, like Cliff’s jetpack, is a well-engineered and smoothly running machine.

So there’s the craftsmanship put into the story, but everything else in the film is finely crafted, too. The production design is stellar. The sets and costumes, from the dingy overalls at the airfield to the black tie and ballgowns at the nightclub, and most especially the Rocketeer’s costume—everything looks fantastic, helped along by Hiro Narita’s beautiful and classically-styled cinematography. The special effects, by ILM, for whom director Joe Johnston had previously worked on the first two Indiana Jones films and all three Star Wars films, are also the best possible for their time, with the climactic Zeppelin sequence being especially convincing and thrilling.

And, of course, there is the cast. The Rocketeer is perfectly cast, not only with good actors from the stars to the extras but with actors who are right for their roles. Even here all of The Rocketeer’s parts fit together smoothly. Billy Campbell is pitch perfect as Cliff, with just the right dash of cockiness and daring to complement his earnestness and naivete; Jenny could easily have been an eye-candy role, but Jennifer Connelly imbues her with life and drive, not to mention her own kind of daring and a radiant, classic Hollywood femininity; Timothy Dalton proves an outstanding villain, showing depth and layers of deception without simply being a caricature of a snobbish actor; and Alan Arkin is wonderful as Peevy (about which more below).

The supporting cast is also excellent, and rather than gush for another thousand words let me focus on three standouts. First, Coen brothers regular Jon Polito, a natural for period films, makes a strong impression with his handful of scenes as Bigelow, the penny-pinching owner of the airfield. Polito also gets one of the best lines in the film (again, see below). Second, Terry O’Quinn as Howard Hughes exudes authority and intelligence and is a natural fit for the story, Hughes being someone Cliff and Peevy would respect enough to make their continued “borrowing” of the rocket pack a real dilemma. And finally, seven-foot-tall Tiny Ron as Lothar, Sinclair’s henchman, is a wonderful old Hollywood type and presents a real threat. I remember dreading his appearance onscreen as a kid. The scene in which Lothar murders injured gangster Wilmer in the hospital, which Johnston and Narita stage in chiaroscuro shadows borrowed straight from black-and-white horror films, is genuinely terrifying and disturbing.

It’s that connection to classic Hollywood that brings me to the final and most important thing that makes The Rocketeer great—love.

I don’t just mean the love story between Cliff and Jenny, but the love the filmmakers had for everything about the movie. It’s apparent that they loved their work, and that love made the story infectious. It’s the root of both the craft and the fun of the movie.

The filmmakers’ love of old Hollywood comes through not only in the setting but in the camerawork and editing. I’ve mentioned the 1930s horror style of Lothar’s first murder, but The Rocketeer also employs classic tools like match dissolves—the best being the transition from Cliff flying over the moonlit mountains outside Los Angeles to the rumpled satin sheets on the bed where Neville Sinclair has deposited the drugged and kidnapped Jenny. That love also extends through every aspect of the look of the film, which I’ve already described but warrants mentioning again.

There’s also the music, an unapologetically heroic and beautiful score by James Horner. Horner was himself a pilot, and his score brings out the adventure, romance, and awe of flight. Look at the way the music during the airshow rescue moves naturally between all of those emotions. This is what flight would feel like if set to music, and it complements the movie perfectly. The Rocketeer is almost certainly my favorite of Horner’s many excellent soundtracks.

And there’s the filmmakers’ love of the story and of adventure for its own sake. The Rocketeer has dangerous villains who wish real evil upon the world, a genuine hero who behaves with integrity despite still having a lot to learn, and a community of people who matter to each other. It’s about courage and boldly facing danger to defend others, about the power of friendship and love and learning that those things are worth taking pains to protect. It’s about a man reaching adulthood and accepting responsibility and learning to think of others, and about the right use of skill, intelligence, and strength. It’s a sincere, heartfelt, uncynical movie of the kind Hollywood doesn’t produce any more, and I think that’s a shame.

Observations

As I’ve hinted above, The Rocketeer isn’t only about its characters, plot, and action, it’s rich with side details and the unnecessary grace notes that show creative people enjoying their work. Here are a few things I want to draw attention to:

• Peevy is a great mentor. His tough-love speech to Cliff about losing Jenny being his own fault is exactly the kind of thing that young men don’t want to hear but need to. Whatever happened to wise older male characters like this?

• Comic relief: I’m sick of Marvel-style quips and gags and pop culture references, especially where they undercut the sincerity of the drama. The Rocketeer is funny throughout without throwing shade at itself, its characters, or its story, and it roots its humor in character, character relationships, and the characters’ responses to their situation. They’re serious when they should be and funny when it’s appropriate to be and the humor isn’t just there to make people laugh but to make the story feel real.

• Cameos: I Like that two big names in 1930s Hollywood show up at the South Seas Club; I also like that the movie didn’t overdo it and turn that scene into one of those Looney Tunes shorts with all the celebrity caricatures. As with so much else, The Rocketeer got this just right.

• Speaking of the South Seas Club, that’s Melora Hardin singing “Begin the Beguine.” You might, like me, know her better now as Jan Levinson of “The Office.” This is one scene in the film that has aged weirdly for me.

• One more thing about the South Seas Club: to this day when I hear the word nightclub I imagine something like the South Seas Club—black tie, big band music, and elegant dining. I’ve gathered that modern nightclubs… aren’t like that.

• Guns: This movie is a smorgasbord of great-looking classic firearms. As I mentioned when reviewing The Highwaymen, I’m a total sucker for interwar and World War II-era hardware like this. The M1928 Thompson submachine gun, one of the most beautiful guns ever designed, is most prominent, and a nighttime shootout at Cliff and Peevy’s house—a gloriously over-the-top use of excessive firepower by the FBI (one of the film’s unintentionally realistic touches)—takes full advantage of the distinctive muzzle flash created by that model’s Cutts compensator. But there are some great automatic handguns, too. Lothar carries two .45 Colt M1911A1 pistols; Sinclair, once fully revealed as a Nazi spy, produces a then-new 9mm Walther P38; but the best of them is the Mauser C96 that Cliff picks up off of one of the German commandos at Griffith Observatory—a pistol he carries for about five minutes and never fires, but that looks fantastic. Those commandos’ main weapon is clearly the MP40 submachine gun, an anachronism as the MP40 wouldn’t be manufactured until 1940. But because the early MP38 looked almost the same (it had milled rather than stamped parts), the MP40 is so cool-looking, and, like the Thompson, its lines are so iconic, I’m happy to give this a pass—and have since I was about ten. You can browse a pretty thorough catalog of the film’s guns at the IMFDB.

• Cussin’: This movie feels squeaky clean now, but as a kid I fretted about watching this when we had a babysitter over and wondered why people in the 1930s and 40s said damn so much. (Another point of reference was my mom’s repeat viewings of Fried Green Tomatoes.) This may also be where I learned the expression son of a bitch—which, if you’ve read Dark Full of Enemies, you may know is McKay’s go-to exclamation.

• This is also where I learned the word fascist. Kudos to my dad for actually trying to explain this concept to seven-year old me.

• This was my first exposure to former 007 Timothy Dalton. I’m in a minority of Bond fans in liking The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, but because I had years and years of The Rocketeer to my credit ahead of watching either of those I always have a hard time shaking my impression of him as a villain.

• Nitpick: Why does Neville Sinclair kind-of, sort-of have a German accent once he’s aboard the Zeppelin at the end? Is he actually German and has been concealing it his whole career? I always took him to be a British Nazi-sympathizer—there were plenty of those in Britain and America in those days—rather than an actual German.

• I’ve mentioned that the cast are perfect from top to bottom, but let me point out one more thing about the bottom here—The Rocketeer is full to the brim of great faces. Pause the film sometime and look, really look, at each of Cliff and Peevy’s friends at the airfield, or the folks at the diner, or the film crew of The Laughing Bandit. It’s easy to fill the small roles and bit parts with just anybody, but I always like a film that gets interesting faces, faces that hint at their own histories and lifestories behind them. (Mel Gibson as a director has this talent in spades.)

• Quotability: This movie supplied and still supplies a lot of one-liners and allusions to my family. To this day my dad will say “It’s all part of the show!” in reference to any oddity that disrupts the regular flow of things. Also, the first time Cliff suits up: “How do I look?” “Like a hood ornament.” This line also has the virtue of feeling period-correct. The director of Neville Sinclair’s movie to the well-connected actress who got a speaking part over Jenny: “Acting is acting like you’re not acting. So act, but don’t act like you’re acting.” Millie, the owner of the diner, after Cliff’s date with Jenny goes down in flames: “Well, go after her, ya dope.” And Peevy after the shootout: “We don’t got a house, we got a gazebo.” I could populate a long list of good lines, but I’ll stop with this immortal line from Eddie Valentine: “I may not make an honest buck, but I’m 100% American and I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.” I couldn’t type that without smiling.

• Aviation stuff: Last but not least, I have to mention the planes. The Rocketeer is a love letter to flying. The movie is full of beautiful vintage planes—real planes, not computer generated ones—and takes aviation seriously, including the gearhead culture of pilots and mechanics, and serves up a beautiful sample of what it is that lovers of aviation care so much about. It helps that Billy Campbell read up on flying ahead of playing Cliff and that composer James Horner was himself a pilot (see above).

Conclusion

The Rocketeer’s “critics’ consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes rather dismissively describes it as “anachronistic.” If this film is an anachronism then I don’t want to be up-to-date. It’s old-fashioned in the best sense of that term—fashioned as in made, shaped, crafted the old way—and it still works.

More fun and craftsmanship motivated by love and untainted by cynicism or—especially now—political partisanship, please. In the meantime, The Rocketeer, even after thirty years, holds up. Watch it if you haven’t.

More if you’re interested

I own the single-disk 20th anniversary Blu-ray of The Rocketeer. It’s of excellent quality; the picture is sharp and the digital transfer is very filmic, with a wonderful texture to the image, only further enhancing its old Hollywood appeal. Alas, it totally lacks special features. (See the episode of “Re:View” below.) The movie is also available on Disney+ with a subscription and to rent from Amazon Prime. James Horner’s magnificent soundtrack is, unfortunately, out of print if you’re a dinosaur who, like me, still likes to buy CDs, and YouTube recently removed a complete playlist of the score. An MP3 album based on a 2020 remaster is available for download on Amazon, albeit at a bit of a stiff price.

The two YouTube essays I mentioned above are Mike and Rich’s episode of “Re:View” from RedLetterMedia and a shorter video from Scots novelist Will Jordan, aka The Critical Drinker. Mike and Jay got me thinking about writing this appreciation when their video posted a year ago. Jordan finally got me writing about it.

The Bomber Mafia

The Sandman, a B-24 Liberator, flying through the smoke above the Ploiesti oil refineries in Romania, August 1, 1943

War is hard on idealists. It proves especially cruel to those modern idealists who have turned so often to technology, inventing new weapons or instruments of war, in hopes of saving lives. One thinks of Richard Gatling, inventor of the first practical machine gun, who developed his weapon after seeing thousands of men on both sides of the Civil War wasted with wounds, disease, and in the stand-up slaughter of battle itself. The firepower his Gatling gun offered, he believed, would “supersede the necessity of large armies.” He could not have foreseen how wrong that hope would be.

Gatling died the same year that the Wright brothers first flew, and just over a decade later both tools—the machine gun and the airplane—would raise the scale of slaughter in modern warfare to unimaginable heights. The devastation of the First World War, with twenty million dead to little perceivable gain, shocked the sensibilities of a world confident in its so far uncontested forward progress.

Idealists and theorists

The Bomber Mafia, half of the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, came along in the aftermath of that war. Surveying the destruction of the war and cognizant of the possibilities of more war in the future, a band of renegade pilots at the out-of-the-way Maxwell Field (now Maxwell-Gunter AFB) in Alabama gradually built a new doctrine of air power. These pilots noted the knock-on effects on the American aviation industry after the destruction of a ball-bearing factory in Pittsburgh and theorized that, by precisely targeting industries critical to an enemy’s military production, fleets of heavy bombers could cripple the enemy and end the war quickly and with little—or at least less—battlefield bloodshed.

Their fervency—Gladwell refers to members of this inner circle as the “true believers”—and their insistence on their as yet untested theories earned them their nickname, which was not meant to be flattering. But the Mafia stuck with it, and the key to their strategy was a piece of technology, a top secret precision instrument called the Norden bombsight. The bombers of the First World War dropped bombs pretty much indiscriminately, and sometimes even by hand. For the Mafia’s idea to work, they would need to be able to drop bombs accurately onto specifically selected targets; the Norden bombsight promised to deliver that.

The bombsight was the invention of Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer who fervently believed in the possibilities opened up by his work. The bombsight was an extremely complex analog computer that factored in speed, altitude, windspeed, and even the rotation of the earth on its axis to enable a trained bombardier at high altitude to site, aim at, and hit targets on the ground—an unimaginable feat during the First World War. The Norden required only clear skies and daylight.

Norden is another of the idealists in Gladwell’s book, and offers a striking contrast to the hotshot pilots of Maxwell Field. Where one of Gladwell’s other focal points, Haywood Hansell Jr, was a chivalrous Southerner, a career Army officer, and scion of six generations of leaders in both the US and Confederate armies, Norden was a private, hard-driven, exacting technician, and a deeply religious man. What the two had in common—through Hansell’s chivalry and Norden’s Christianity—was a moral concern to make warfare as quick, humane, and bloodless as possible. Precision daylight bombing could take the ever-expanding scope of modern warfare and reduce it, shrinking it back toward the old ideal of warriors fighting only other warriors, a throwback to the centuries before Sherman or Napoleon.

Tellingly, Gladwell notes, Hansell’s favorite book was Don Quixote.

Reality ensues

The Bomber Mafia’s doctrine was the result of this confluence of theory and technology, and they finally got their chance to test their ideas with American entry into the Second World War. Members of the Bomber Mafia held key strategic positions in the Eighth Air Force in Europe. These men resisted pressure from the British to join the RAF in “de-housing” or “area bombing”—euphemisms for indiscriminate nighttime bombing of heavily populated urban areas—in favor of carefully planned large-scale daylight raids on key factories, exact implementation of the Bomber Mafia’s dearly held doctrine.

But reality intervened. The fleets of bombers required for these raids had difficulty coordinating their attacks and were vulnerable to flak and German fighters, and weather proved a persistent problem, either fog delaying the start of bombing missions in England or clouds obscuring the targets over Europe. Worse, and more fatally for the Mafia’s doctrine, high altitude flight plunged the crews and equipment of American bombers into temperatures as low as -60° F, causing the oil in Norden’s precision instruments to congeal ever so slightly, introducing just enough friction and throwing off their tolerances just enough to rob the bombers of their vaunted accuracy.

The peak of the Bomber Mafia’s career came with two raids on Germany on August 17, 1943. The first raid targeted the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg and was a diversion meant to draw off the fighters that would inevitably attack any large formation of Allied bombers. If the Messerschmitt plant could also be destroyed, so much the better. But the second raid, timed for slightly later in the day, was the main effort and aimed at a ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt—precisely the kind of industry-crippling target the Mafia had developed their ideas around. After weather delays, the two missions launched, now several hours apart, leaving plenty of time for the Germans to regroup and attack again.

Both raids were savaged. Here’s Gladwell’s description of just one B-17 on the mission to Regensburg; the bomber was

hit six times. One twenty-millimeter cannon shell penetrated the right side of the airplane and exploded beneath the pilot, cutting one of the gunners in the leg. A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. He bled to death. A third hit the bombardier in the head and shoulder. A fourth shell hit the cockpit, taking out the plane’s hydraulic system. A fifth severed the rudder cables. A sixth hit the number 3 engine, setting it on fire. This was all in one plane. The pilot kept flying.

Between them, the two raiding forces lost sixty bombers—meaning over 550 airmen—with many more heavily damaged. The Schweinfurt ball bearing factory was damaged but quickly repaired. Civilians were killed anyway. A second raid two months later met with similar results and took similar losses.

Tinkerers and pragmatists

The failure of precision bombing brought other characters with opposite qualities to the fore.

Carl Norden and his meticulously crafted bombsight gave way to a team of chemists working for the NDRC, the National Defense Research Committee, the same government agency that would produce the atomic bomb. Rather than the high-minded principles and moral qualms of Norden, these chemists were simply curious. They heard about an odd chemical reaction at a paint factory that produced intense fires and started poking into it, looking for ways to amplify the effects of the reaction—hotter, more intense, longer burning fires. They brought in architects to mock up German and Japanese towns and repeatedly bombed them, carefully assessing the relative effectiveness of different flammable compounds. They tinkered with and tested these new incendiaries and eventually produced a weapon far more destructive than the fire-starting bombs dropped on German cities by the British—napalm.

Pragmatist Curtis LeMay (left) arrives in the Marianas to replace idealist Haywood Hansell (right) in early 1945

In the air, the Bomber Mafia came to the end of its run. Hansell had transferred to the Pacific to lead precision bombing of Japan from the Marianas, and tried carefully to target Japanese industry the same way and for the same reasons he had in Germany, and with the same limited results. In the incident with which Gladwell opens his book, after several months of this Hansell was brusquely notified of his replacement by a former subordinate and philosophical opposite, the commander of the Regensburg raid—Curtis LeMay.

LeMay, a hardbitten and taciturn Ohioan (the murderous Midwesterner is something of an American military tradition, it seems), had embraced area bombing in Europe and, with the new technology of napalm at his disposal and knowledge of the highly combustible materials used in traditional Japanese architecture, immediately launched a campaign of firebombing in Japan. The “longest night of the Second World War” alluded to in the subtitle of the book is the night of March 9-10, 1945, in which LeMay’s long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers targeted Tokyo—not an industry or war-critical facility or defensive installation, the city of Tokyo itself. More than 300 bombers hit the city over the course of

almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.

As many as 100,000 people were killed—burned alive. And LeMay would go on to bomb a total of sixty-seven Japanese cities with similar effects, all months before the atomic bombs that ended the war were even ready.

Why? Because it worked. LeMay believed so, and Gladwell even quotes Japanese historians who express a grim gratitude for the bombing in the belief that it shortened the war and prevented either Japan’s annihilation or its partition by the Soviets. The failure of the Bomber Mafia to circumscribe the destruction and provide a surgically precise ending to the war by destroying enemy logistics opened the door to the cold-blooded and amoral pragmatists, the people who care only about what works—a lesson in the amorality of technology.

But at what cost? This is a profound question that Gladwell raises but to which he refuses to provide easy answers, because there are none. The terms of the question itself, and the real-life consequences to which it alludes, should bother us.

Praise and criticism

For such a slender book there’s still a lot I’m leaving out in my description of The Bomber Mafia. Gladwell’s account of American pilots flying “over the hump” from India to China on their way to Japan is harrowing, and points to his strengths as a writer and storyteller—the hook, the unusual angle, the seemingly out-of-place but illuminating side topic, and above all the telling detail. His writing is also exceptionally brisk and vivid. See the block quotes above for a couple examples.

I appreciated that Gladwell did not succumb to the easy accusation of racism in the bombing of Japan that is prevalent in a lot of discussions of the war today. I also liked the sense of moral, philosophical, and even theological seriousness Gladwell brought to the topic. He even frames “the temptation” of the subtitle—the question of whether to use indiscriminate area bombing just to get results—as equivalent to the deals for power that Satan offered to Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus, famously, said no. The Allies and the US military, on the other hand…

Tokyo burns again, May 26, 1945

Furthermore, Gladwell brings human character and personality to the fore in this book in a refreshing way. I’ve seen a few reviewers fault Gladwell for supposedly reducing the tensions within the US military over targeting civilians to a personality clash. That’s not really what’s going on; Gladwell uses Hansell and LeMay and others as avatars of the deeprooted philosophical differences, of two different approaches to the use and morality of technology in warfare, and what’s refreshing about it is his recognition that, on top of all this, personality still matters. Character may not be destiny, but it is nonetheless a large part of it.

But The Bomber Mafia is not a perfect book, of course. While imminently readable, it sometimes reads like the transcript of a podcast—which, in a way, it is, as Gladwell first developed this story as an audiobook. That genesis shows most clearly in how Gladwell uses sources: rather than quoting or citing books, he always introduces outside information by way of interviews (e.g. “I talked to so-and-so about such-and-such, and he said…”). Gladwell has clearly done a lot of research into this topic and found a striking way to present it, but the approach of the writing is sometimes a little too informal. But that’s a relatively minor nitpick.

Some reviewers have faulted Gladwell for insufficient coverage of the issues involved in strategic bombing. Certainly The Bomber Mafia is in many ways a cursory look at the subject, but Gladwell in no way means this story to be exhaustive. He has done what he’s good at—found enough loose threads and unusual approaches to bring fresh insight and raise good questions. More seriously, I’ve seen at least one review accusing Gladwell of glorifying and promoting more recent American bombing. Such a reviewer can’t have been paying much attention; Gladwell clearly presents the horror and death resulting from area and firebombing, and goes out of his way to note the hesitations and sometimes outright refusals of American pilots to participate, incidents he presents as indicative of a troubling change in American air strategy.

These are issues worth considering, but The Bomber Mafia is mostly excellent—a great surprise in my reading. Most surprising to me was the sympathy Gladwell evoked in me for Curtis LeMay (I am ever more the old-fashioned anti-pragmatist as I get older and as I study more and more what warfare since the collapse of chivalry has meant for the innocent). And there is again the set of questions Gladwell advances, both explicitly and implicitly, about morality, technology, warfare, and what it takes to win.

Conclusion

Thanks to its readability, its vivid attention to personality and what it was like for those who lived through these events, its exceptionally lucid explanation of complicated ideas and technologies, and its clear-eyed awareness of the consequences of the technologies it describes, The Bomber Mafia is an outstanding introduction to an important historical topic that still raises hard questions about morality and technology, about ends and means. I look forward to recommending this to students not only in my US and Western History classes, but in a course like Technology & Culture as well. This is worth checking out, and the Memorial Day weekend might just be the best time to do so.

Lukacs on Hitler as Antichrist

Several weeks ago I shared a longish passage from the late John Lukacs’s 1997 study The Hitler of History in which Lukacs warns against thinking of or describing Hitler as insane or mad. Doing so, he argues, absolves Hitler from responsibility for his actions. Likewise with thinking of Hitler as demonic.

I finally finished The Hitler of History today. It’s excellent, and I highly recommend it if you’d like a deep dive into some of the history of the study of Hitler. But a passage in the final chapter—indeed, in the very last pages—jumped out at me. In concluding the book, Lukacs returns to his warnings against the folly of ascribing madness or demonic power to Hitler but notes that there is one spiritual parallel that can, in some circumstances, be appropriately applied—and not only to Hitler, but to other populist leaders in the age of mass politics, a point he makes clear in this chilling footnote:

In this respect we ought to, again, reject the “demonization” of Hitler, or the temptation to attribute to him the qualities of being “diabolical” or “satanic.” To the contrary, we can see elements in his career that bear an uncanny reminder of what St. John of the Apocalypse predicted as the Antichrist. The Antichrist will not be horrid and devilish, incarnating some kind of frightful monster—hence recognizable immediately. He will not seem to be anti-Christian. He will be smiling, generous, popular, an idol, adored by masses of people because of the sunny prosperity he seems to have brought, a false father (or husband) to his people. Save for a small minority, Christians will believe in him and follow him. Like the Jews at the time of the First Coming, Christians at the time of the Antichrist—that is, before the Second Coming—will divide. Before the end of the world the superficial Christians will follow the Antichrist, and only a small minority will recognize his awful portents. Well, Hitler did not bring about the end of the world, but there was a time—not yet the time of the mass murders but the time of the Third Reich in the 1930s—when some of St. John’s prophecies about the Antichrist accorded with this appearance and this appeal. And it may not be unreasonable to imagine that in the coming age of the masses he was but the first of Antichrist-like popular figures.

Let the reader understand.

Gladwell and Lewis on transactive memory

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, about the tension between the ideals of precision bombing and the pragmatic and brutal reality of “area” bombing within the US Army Air Forces. It’s very good so far.

As is his wont, Gladwell includes many interesting asides to buttress his story. Among them is the following:

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

“Transactive memory” gives me a term for a phenomenon described quite memorably and movingly by CS Lewis in his 1960 book The Four Loves. Though Gladwell focuses on romantic or spousal relationships (via the modish but vague “partners”), Lewis’s context is a discussion of friendship. The concept applies to both. Lewis:

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” which C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say to Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.” Of course the scarcity of kindred souls—not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices—set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases.

Is there any more wonderful mystery than friendship? “Transactive memory” names just another facet of the way, through relationship, mere individuals enrich each other.

By the way, the “Charles” and “Ronald” in the passage from Lewis are not substitutes for Tom, Dick, and Harry but real people—Charles Williams and JRR Tolkien, members with Lewis of the writers’ group the Inklings. Charles Williams died suddenly in 1945 at the age of 58, unexpectedly reducing the Inklings by one.