A saint for our times

A couple of friends of mine are spending the month of May traveling through Austria, the Czech Republic and Eastern Germany. I’m acting as conduit for their electronic postcards, because there appears to be some difficulty accessing Facebook on his mobile device. So he emails me a photo and blurb; I post it to FB and then email it to a list of people with whom he regularly shares jokes.

This one—a photo of Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna—came with this annotation:

"One of the most successful public relations creations of all time. By putting Prague's St. Virus Cathedral in the shade, its creators won archbishopric status that eventually transformed Vienna from a frontier encampment to the capital of the Holy Roman Empire."

First of all, I am not in the least making fun of what he wrote. Because I'm laying big money on the probability that he actually did type “St. Vitus Cathedral”, but Nanny Autocorrect changed it to St. Virus. Because virus is something it knows; Vitus, not so much.

But thinking about it, it seems to me that there really ought to be a Saint Virus, perhaps the patron saint of black-hat hackers, venture capitalists and officers of the People’s Liberation Army.

Why not? Saint Vitus is the patron of actors, comedians, dancers and epileptics. There should be someone looking after their Internet-age equivalents.

The Roman Catholic Church has been on a real canonization tear lately. If they’re going declare John Paul II a saint, I think this Virus guy should get a shot at it, too

Maybe this'll go viral.

Bind up the wounds

As we approach Memorial Day, when we’re meant to pause, think about and thank the men and women who’ve made great sacrifices in the defense of our country, it saddens and infuriates me that those on whom we depend can’t count on us for much of anything.

It’s bad enough that the military can’t discharge veterans who have physical or psychological scars from their tours in Iraq and Afghanistan fast enough, so the services don’t have to finance and provide support for them. But it turns out that the Veterans Administration medical system—which is supposed to guarantee them care for life—has apparently been a lot better at delaying treatment and falsifying records than it has at actually providing the care these people deserve.

This isn’t just some rogue facility doing it, either. Administrators in VA hospitals in Washington, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and other states have systematically instructed schedulers to book medical appointments for months out, but to classify those appointments as having been requested by the patient, so the hospital’s stats look good.

So good, in fact, that facility senior managers get performance bonuses. Monetary bonuses. They profit from these practices.

But veterans, on the other hand, die while waiting for those appointments.

President Obama and Secretary for Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki have pronounced themselves “mad as hell” about the revelations, although it’s not clear how much of a surprise this can be, since these practices have been reported by whistle-blowers for more than five years. And they are preceded by conditions in what should be one of the flagship military care facilities, Walter Reed Hospital, being worse than you’d expect to find in a facility in Central African Republic.

Investigations have been launched. Congress is on its hind legs. And blah, blah, blah.

You know—the harm’s way into which we send our defenders is not supposed to include the systems that were established to support them. I am ashamed that the people we elected to office—Congress and Executive branch alike—think they can cut corners and score points off the wounds suffered by the men and women of our armed forces.

We should keep that in mind on Monday, when our pols show up at Memorial Day parades. On their way to fundraising events.

Close to a catastrophe

Okay, I’m getting on my Ms. Language-Person cranky horse again. Yesterday I mentioned that I was relieved to leave rock and roll and return to World War I, where I could count on a better class of writing.

And I really like Max Hastings, the British journalist/historian. I’ve read several of his books and have found them accurate and engaging. Most recently I enjoyed All Hell Let Loose, his narrative history of World War II.

But I don’t know what happened with Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. Specifically, I don’t know what happened with citing his sources. There are a lot more facts that in my opinion need citations, but he only provides references for the ones between quotation marks.

Actually, make that for some of the ones between quotation marks.

(In particular, I’d really like to know which historian(s) he’s slagging off when he says things like “recent analyses claim that XYZ, but…” I think he’s going after Christopher Clark and maybe Sean McMeekin, but I’d really like to know which one, and for which particular allegedly erroneous conclusion(s).)

I mean, it’s all well and good to say “I have omitted references for quotations from the principals’ speeches and statements long in the public record or domain.” But I think that’s a cop-out, because I’m pretty conversant with a lot of the principals' public utterances, and many of the ones here aren’t ringing a bell. For example, on page 85 when he says, “Wilhelm thought Britain would be wise to [not enter the war] in any event, since, as he cleverly observed, ‘dreadnoughts have no wheels.’” No citation.

What—I’m supposed to go Googling that up for myself? No—that’s the historian’s job; that’s what s/he and his/her fact checkers are getting paid to do. Shame on you, Knopf, for letting this kind of thing through.

But then there’s the matter of a citation source that I just plain cannot find anywhere in the book.

On page 75 he says, “A German author predicted in 1910 that during the period of political and military tension preceding any conflict, ‘the press and its key instruments, telegraph and telephone, will exercise immense influence, which may be for either good or ill’. [German Chief of Staff Helmut von] Moltke agreed.”

Well—I wanted to know more about that prediction. But here’s the sum-total of the reference in the end notes: “75 ’the press and its’ Hesse p.2”

When you see a citation with just the author’s name and a page number, it means the work has already appeared in the notes. But I went through every citation from the beginning of the book; nada.

So I looked in the bibliography. There was no work attributed to anyone named Hesse. I sort of think it might be referring to Hermann Hesse, but that’s just a guess. On account of Hermann is the only Hesse I know who’s a German author from around that period. And I Googled variations on the actual quotation, and found nothing.

Plus—there’s no citation for where I could find Moltke agreeing about the influence of communications on building up to war.

Seriously, Max—I’m so disappointed. Was it your hurry to get this published before June? Or you wanted to get it out ASAP to refute Clark and others?

Either way, #professionalfail.

Zero gravity

I interrupted my binge of 600-page accounts of the immediate run-up to the outbreak of the First World War (Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, and Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War) to read There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, by Lisa Robinson.

I did that because someone on NPR interviewed Robinson, whom I’d never heard of, and I thought she might have an interesting story to tell. She wrote about pop music for various publications for more than 40 years.

About 20 pages into it I realized it was going to be mostly name-dropping and product placement, and so it was. The names include both the musicians she accompanied on tours—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, the New York Dolls, Lady Gaga—and the hotels, clubs and restaurants she frequented on some publication or record company’s dime.

And she never mentioned her cassette recorder without reminding us it was a Sony.

It turns out that she didn’t so much cover pop musicians for all those years as she gossiped about them, which explains the non-substance of this memoir. I did think it rather rich that at one point she told a story about dealing with Motown Records founder Berry Gordy—how he wanted final say on what she wrote in a story about him and she got up on her high horse as “a journalist” and refused; and he came around. Because she was perfectly down with giving some of her pop friends that content control, and she was stretching the definition of “journalism” in applying it to the stuff she wrote.

Anyhow, I slogged all the way to the end, even though by page 20 she’d also become extremely tiresome and clearly hadn’t bothered with an editor. She was sloppy with some of her facts (such as inventing a county in England called Stratfordshire), and appears to have sworn a vow to never apply the objective case to "who". Oh—and no journalist would regularly write run-on paragraphs that stretch across two pages.

But if I could make it through [Steven—you remember, the Smiths?] Morrissey’s Autobiography, in which he jumped back and forth in verb tense for no discernable reason, and was clearly in love with the sound of his own cleverly-turned phrases, then I can do anything. Although he at least is familiar with "whom".

But I’m relieved to get back to Hastings and real writing.

Gratitude Monday: In a library far, far away

It’s Gratitude Monday again. Today what I’m feeling may not be precisely gratitude; perhaps more along the lines of enchanted and delighted.

But I think it’s just cool that the Mountain View Public Library will be holding a “May the 24^th Be with You celebration, and that they posted the question “Who is the best Star Wars Character? Why?” on a bulletin board at the top of the stairs. They also put out slips of paper and pencils for people to answer.

But where I really melted was when I saw one of the responses:

I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

(P.S. No one said Jar-Jar Binks.)