CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day I set out on the journey to rescue Ignatius Roundtower with the dwarf Nog Shortwhiskers and a man I had known for six years as Roy Stonerow was a turning point in my life. That day I forever left the quiet life as the stepson of a tavernkeeper behind and set out on an adventure that would consume the rest of my days. My life had changed, perhaps subtly at first and without much notice, but changed just as sure as Roy Stonerow had become Roystnof. What I remember most about that journey to Queensburg is the conversation I had with Nog about his gods and religion. For the first time I was introduced to a different philosophy of gods and their creations, and it was a philosophy I found all the other races held. Only humans denied the existence of the gods of the other races and I had been taught this was the only true vision of the universe. Nog disagreed, but he did not seem upset that the humans called his gods pagan. Dwarves have their own truth and humans have theirs, he told me, and neither could prove the other false.

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The day came three weeks after Brisbane had been taken captive on the banks of the Mystic River, when the first of June rolled around with the eternal persistence of the calendar. Brisbane had been a studious pupil of orkish religion and magic and, as such, he knew the part he would have to play in the ceremony, but he had hardly thought of his involvement in anything more than the most superficial terms. He knew what he was expected to do but he hadn’t dwelt upon the implications of such action.

The ceremony was, essentially, a simple one. There was a special chamber in the caves, reserved for this purpose only, where the sacrifice would take place. It was large, as all the important chambers seemed to be, but it had relatively few furnishings. It was roughly oval-shaped with two features at each of the oval’s foci. At one, a short, stout pedestal stood, like the one in the pug-trolang, again with a golden incense burner atop it. At the other, two slender columns of stone rose from the floor, placed several feet apart and each with manacled chains driven into their stone. The victim was to be hung there by these chains locking over their wrists and, after the Grumak had conjured up the clan’s Demosk—the clan’s representative of Gruumsh One-Eye—the victim would be sacrificed for their blood.

Brisbane knew all these things. Ternosh had taught them all to him over their weeks together and when the first of June arrived, Ternosh expected his pupil to be ready and able to do his part. Brisbane wasn’t so sure. Still unwilling to make a fuss in front of the Grumak, afraid he would betray some trust and reveal Gruumsh One-Eye had not really sent him here, Brisbane outwardly learned his lessons and memorized his part, but inwardly his guts rolled at the thought of what he had to do and his head spun in a dizzy delusion. Alone and frightened, he again turned to Angelika for reassurance.

Angelika? he called out mentally one night. I don’t think I can go through with it.

—Brisbane, you must. If you quit now you will destroy yourself and everything we have worked for so far.—

But Angelika, isn’t it evil?

—If your heart is not in it, it is not evil. It is undesirable, but it is something you must do if we are to extract our full vengeance.—

But the prisoners. They are defenseless. They are human.

—We have been over this before. Grecolus has provided for them. He has secured their places in the heavens and he has sent you and me here to avenge their deaths. Be patient and be strong, young Brisbane. The Clan of the Red Eye will not defile the earth for much longer.—

Will we make them pay?

—Yes, Brisbane. Oh, yes. We will make them pay for all eternity.—

When, Angelika? When will we make them pay? When will I have you back?

—Soon, young Brisbane. Be patient and be strong. The day of vengeance will come. I promise you that.—

This, then, is how Brisbane met the first day of June, jittery and unsure of what he might have to do, but trusting enough to believe things would turn out all right in the end. The ceremony was to take place first thing in the morning and when Smurch roused him an hour before dawn, Brisbane quietly got dressed in his red and white robes and the small red hat Ternosh had told him to wear, and made his way to the instruction chamber to meet the Grumak.

Ternosh was there, awaiting his arrival and dressed in red robes and a cap similar to the one Brisbane wore. Wordlessly, he led Brisbane from the room and down a series of tunnels to the sacrificial chamber. Along the way, Brisbane tried to mentally prepare himself for the ordeal ahead, tried to put a wall around his feelings and sensitivities to protect them from the onslaught of horror they were surely about to receive.

When they arrived at the chamber, its torches brightly burning around the oval perimeter, Brisbane could see all the members of the klatru assembled in a rough and disjointed circle around the two objects in the center of the room. They stood at attention, as if in a military formation, and their unblinking eyes twinkled cruelly behind their pig noses. Hanging limp in the chains between the two stone columns was the nude and freshly washed body of the prisoner named Amanda. She was conscious and gagged, but her head hung forward in helpless surrender, her brown hair falling down to cover her face.

When Brisbane saw her hanging there, he almost lost all his nerve and broke down screaming on the spot. It was too much, too much, too much. Did it have to be her? There were three prisoners. Why did it have to be her? He kept walking, following Ternosh into the room, but his knees became weaker and weaker with every step. Just when he thought his next step would collapse under his weight, Angelika’s voice cut into his mind and hardened the jelly his muscles had become.

—Strength, Brisbane. You can survive this. You must.—

Angelika! Brisbane almost cried aloud. You will help me through this?

—I will. This must be done.—

Her presence filled Brisbane with a strange kind of resolve. Suddenly, he was determined to see this thing through to the end. Angelika was right, of course. How could he not have seen it before? He had to do this. If he balked, he would prove himself false to the orks and they would kill him for the symbol he wore. He did not want Amanda to die, but if she did not, he would never wield Angelika in combat again.

Brisbane took his position on the side of the pedestal as he had been taught to do. Ternosh stood on the other side, the golden incense burner sitting between them. The Grumak began to speak in orkish. Brisbane’s knowledge of the language had grown in three weeks, but it was still far from perfect. However, Ternosh had taught him what the ceremony words meant and he found he was able to understand them.

“With the blessing of Gruumsh One-Eye,” the Grumak said, “the klatru of the Clan of the Red Eye has once again gathered to pay rightful tribute to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye,” Brisbane chanted with the other orks in their native tongue.

“The sacrifice we offer today is the lifeblood of his enemy. May this not be the last.”

Again, the chant rang out. “Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

They’re serious about this, aren’t they, Angelika?

—Yes. Their evil knows no bounds. The worship of false gods is forbidden.—

Ternosh lifted the lid from the incense burner beside him and lit the fine red powder with a magic spark from one of his fingers. He replaced the cover as the thick white smoke began to smolder off the incense.

“I will now call up the Demosk that watches over the Clan of the Red Eye, the one called Ollikan, so he may witness our sacrifices to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

The Grumak began his strange incantation to summon the Demosk from the battlefield of forever. Brisbane listened to the words and sounds Ternosh said, trying to make some sort of sense out of them. Over the past three weeks, he had been a student of Ternosh’s magic, learning its forms and its sources, but as yet, he had been unable to truly comprehend it.

It was strange. Ternosh’s magic did so many things in the clan—it kept the torches lit and unsmoking, for example, and it kept the water in the bath chamber warm and pure—so it obviously worked quite well for the Grumak. It was even responsible for the secret doors Vrak had taken Brisbane through in the Crimson Mountains. Ternosh had created them with his magic and set them to open whenever anyone said the word ursh-low, an orkish command to open, in their vicinity. But Brisbane had been unable to make the magic perform for him. It was a different style of magic, but the problem was somehow more than that. Brisbane was nowhere near proficient enough to work a complicated spell like the one used to conjure up the Demosk, but Ternosh felt he should be able to do the simple ones, like the one for starting fires, but so far there had been no success. Ternosh would watch Brisbane carefully, making sure he made the exact hand motions and pronounced the chants properly with the right pitches and inflections, and still nothing would result. It was very frustrating, for both Brisbane and Ternosh. It eventually reached the point where the Grumak became suspicious of whether or not Brisbane could really work magic at all, regardless of what the Demosk had said about his blood, and Brisbane had to resort to one of the cantrips Roystnof had taught him, conjuring up a small dragonfly, to prove he had the right to wear the pentacle medallion.

Now, looking at the pentacle carved into the stone on which the incense burner sat, Brisbane could not help but wonder what he had been doing wrong, why Ternosh could cast the orkish spells but he could not. Maybe it was physiological. The force of magic inside humans could be different from the one inside orks, and each could require different practices to call it forth. Perhaps the orkish chants he had painstakingly learned could not harness the human force inside him. That would mean Ternosh would not be able to cast the spells Brisbane had already learned. It warranted looking into.

The incense smoke was beginning to fill the chamber and it was getting hard for Brisbane to think clearly. He could hear the circle of klatru orks chanting in long, low tones, and he quickly remembered he was supposed to be doing the same. He joined the chorus at a pause for breath and continued to breathe in the smoke coming from the vents in the burner. Standing right next to it like he was, the effect on him was worse than it had been before, and he had to place a steadying hand on the pedestal to keep himself from swooning.

Through orange-scented smoke and watering eyes, Brisbane chanted and watched the body hanging in the chains before him. Amanda had raised her head and was looking around at her strange surroundings with eyes wide in fear and amazement. The strong scent of the smoke stung tartly at the inside of Brisbane’s nostrils as his eyes stared fixedly at the woman’s breasts while the rest of the world seemed to swim around them.

Beautiful, Brisbane thought absently, almost as if someone else thought it for him. They’re beautiful.

His eyes worked their way down her body, over her flat stomach to the patch of her brown pubic hair and down the slender muscles of her legs.

She’s lovely, Brisbane thought, the ideas forming themselves into words with difficulty. Her skin is so healthy and alive. How many other women are walking around with bodies like this hidden under their clothes? It’s wrong. How can they stand to hide such beauty away?

A light winked on next to Brisbane and interrupted his drug-affected thoughts. He started his head turning to see what the light could be and, seemingly hours later, after the muscles and tendons in his neck had creaked and strained under the labor of pivoting his head, he could see the Demosk had arrived and the light came from the eyeless apparition’s head and torso.

Angelika, I’m going to pass out. There’s too much smoke.

—Remain strong, Brisbane. It will soon be over.—

Brisbane felt like his feet had begun to float off the floor. Suddenly, pushing Angelika aside for the moment, the voice of the Demosk hammered its way into his brain.

“Grumak Ternosh, you have summoned me from the battlefield of Gruumsh One-Eye for what purpose?”

Again, the words in Brisbane’s ears were orkish but the ones in his head were in his own language.

“The time has come,” Ternosh said to the room more than to the Demosk, “for our monthly sacrifice to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.” This time Brisbane forgot to add his voice to the chant.

“His eye is open,” the Demosk said. “Proceed.”

—Now, Brisbane.—

With a start, Brisbane moved forward as he was expected to do. His head cleared a little as he moved away from the pedestal, but it was still as if he was walking in a dream. He walked slowly around and behind the body of Amanda and did the only action Ternosh required him to do in the ceremony. He reached up and, grabbing a handful of her brown hair, pulled Amanda’s head back, exposing her neck to the Grumak who now stood directly in front of her.

It’s not that hard, Angelika. It is really such a small and easy thing to do.

—It must be done, young Brisbane. Her death will be like an iron shield. It will protect us until we can strike back. Vengeance shall be ours.—

Yes. Yes. Vengeance. We will make them pay for this.

Ternosh produced a pair of sharp daggers from the belts of his robe. He turned to face the Demosk as the congregated orks stopped their chanting and the Grumak held the knives high above his head.

“Behold!” the Grumak said, his voice rising above the smoke in the chamber. “The blood of the enemy will now be spilled upon our cavern floor.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

Ternosh whirled on Amanda and in two quick swipes, cut the daggers deep into each side of her neck, opening up dozens of major arteries and making the woman screech into her gag.

Brisbane released her hair and backed two or three steps away from her. In the smoky light he watched as twin rivers of her blood, almost black against the paleness of her skin, began to run down her naked body. The ichor spilled onto her shoulders, forked in half, and streaked down her front and back in streams that turned and split at every curve and swelling of flesh until it dripped from the tips of her toes like a leaky beer tap. The sight sickened and excited Brisbane at the same time and, as he watched the blood slide down her back and over the curves of her buttocks, he suddenly wondered, with a series of heart palpitations, what she must look like from the front, with her blood pouring down and around her breasts.

Angelika, what’s going on? Why do I feel so strange?

—It is the smoke. The evil vapor is affecting you. The feeling will pass.—

The circle of orks stood silently as all eyes watched the woman twist and jerk in her bonds, writhing in pain and desperation. Her blood was pooling up beneath her in a small concavity in the rock that was evidently meant for that purpose. Brisbane was surprised to see just how much blood was collecting there, but was even more surprised to see that he could see Amanda’s reflection in the surface of the pool, an unusual and intensely erotic view from below, with foreshortened legs, the cleft at her crotch, and the undersides of her breasts. These surprises did little to shock him out of his stupor. Time stretched out, and it seemed at one point as if he had been watching Amanda die for his entire life. Brisbane’s head began to throb and hurt and his nose seemed cracked open and dried to a crispy mess with the pungent treatment it had received. Tears ran freely down his face from his red eyes and his brain was swimming in a pool of nausea.

Eventually, it was finished. Amanda slowly stopped thrashing about as she bled to death, until she just hung from her chains like a side of beef in an ice house. When the life had finally flown from her, the silence in the chamber was broken by the voice of the Demosk.

“It is done. Gruumsh One-Eye thanks the Clan of the Red Eye for their offering and pledges another month of wealth and well-being.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

With that final chant, the figure of the Demosk vanished from the chamber and the smoke that made up its body stopped pouring out of the vents and began to quickly dissipate from the chamber. The black-clad orks, Tornestor in the lead with his two faithful followers in the red stripes, began to file out of the room.

Brisbane started to come back to himself. More so than ever before, the vanishing of the incense smoke left him feeling decidedly ill and weak in the knees. With the sickness came the rational judgment of what he had just done, what he had just taken part in. He looked up at Amanda’s body and all the tremors of excitement he had felt for her beauty were gone. What he saw now was ugly, uglier than anything he had ever seen before. What he saw was death, yes, but it was a death for no good reason. A messy, torturous death in service to a god that did not exist.

Never again, Angelika. I will not let this happen again.

—I promise you, young Brisbane, it will not. Together we will put an end to such perversion. Our vengeance will be complete and eternal.—

“Brisbane?”

Brisbane saw Ternosh appear from behind one of the pillars that supported Amanda’s naked body. For a moment, he was filled with such hate at the Grumak and his entire miserable race that he almost leapt at the ork in savage fury, intent on ripping his heart out of his chest. But the moment passed, and it was quickly replaced by feelings of nausea and a pounding headache. The fight left Brisbane as quickly as it had come and now he only wanted to lay down.

“Brisbane, are you all right?”

Brisbane staggered forward and leaned heavily against one of the stone columns. He nearly stepped in the pool of Amanda’s blood, already crusting over with a thin film.

“Yes,” Brisbane said wearily. “It’s just all that smoke. It makes me woozy.”

Ternosh seemed upset by this news. “You have said this before. I do not know why it should affect you so. None of us grugan experience any distress.”

Brisbane did not care about any of this. “If you don’t mind, Ternosh, I think I’ll go lay down in my chamber for a while.”

“Of course,” the Grumak said. “Would you like me to help you?”

Brisbane waved him off and slowly began to move away from the pillar. Before he had gone three steps, his head spinning like a top, he lost his balance and collapsed to his knees.

“Brisbane!” Ternosh cried out in shock and he went over to him to prevent him from toppling over. “I had no idea the smoke would affect you so. You weren’t this weak in the pug-trolang.”

Brisbane closed his eyes and tried to will the floor to remain level. “Too much,” he mumbled. “I was too close to that damn burner.”

“Come on,” Ternosh said. “Let’s get you to your chamber.”

As the Grumak was helping his Grum rise to his feet, Brisbane lost consciousness.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

I don’t really know what this book is about.

And McCarthy doesn’t make understanding it easy.

First, there’s his aversion to using quotation marks.

Dont pay no attention to him, John Grady. She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake. I’m goin to say that blond on the end is more your style.

Billy shook his head and reached for his whiskey. They aint no reasonin with the man. He just aint got no taste in women and that’s a mathematical fact.

You stick with your old dad, said Troy. He’ll get you onto somethin with some substance to it. Parham yonder actually claimed that a man ought not to date anything he couldnt lift. Said what if the house caught fire.

There are no quotation marks anywhere in this book (and many of his other books). As a result, it is sometimes impossible to tell who is speaking, or if certain words are part of a character’s speech or part of the narrative voice.

And what about apostrophes? They mostly don’t appear as well, but every once and a while they will surprise you. They certainly aren’t at the end of dialectical truncations, like goin instead of going and reasonin instead of reasoning. And they mostly don’t appear in contractions, like dont instead of don’t and aint instead of ain’t. But what about the I’m in the selection chosen above? Why I’m instead of Im? 

They drove on to Van Horn and stopped for gas and coffee and by then the country that Troy’d grown up in and that he thought he might go back to and where his dead brother was buried was all behind them and it was two oclock in the morning.

Seriously. oclock instead of o’clock but Troy’d instead of Troyd?Are Im and Troyd too hard for us to understand? And why bother at all? Why am I even focused on this? Is that what McCarthy wants from his reader?

I’d much rather focus on things like this -- and sorry, McCarthy, but I’m goin to put in the correct punctuation.

“I think you can train a rooster to do what you want. But you won’t have him. There’s a way to train a horse where when you get done you’ve got the horse. On his own ground. A good horse will figure things out on his own. You can see what’s in his heart. He won’t do one thing while you’re watchin’ him and another when you ain’t. He’s all of a piece. When you’ve got a horse to that place you can’t hardly get him to do somethin’ he knows is wrong. He’ll fight you over it. And if you mistreat him it just about kills him. A good horse has justice in his heart. I’ve seen it.”

Like All the Pretty Horses, the novel that started this Border Trilogy, horses in Cities of the Plain are very much something to pay attention to.

“You got a lot higher opinion of horses than I got,” Oren said.

“I really don’t have all that much in the way of opinions where horses are concerned. When I was a kid I thought I knew all there was to know about a horse. Where horses are concerned I’ve just got dumber and dumber.”

Oren smiled.

“If a man really understood horses,” John Grady said. “If a man really understood horses he could just about train one by lookin’ at it. There wouldn’t be nothin’ to it. My way is a long way from workin’ one over with a tracechain, But it’s a long way from what’s possible, too.”

John Grady is talking about more than horses in this section -- he’s talking about men, too, and that mystical place where men and horses are one, one spirit that abides with the same unknowable source.

He stretched his legs out. He crossed the sprained foot over his boot.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “They’re mostly ruint before they ever bring ‘em out here. They’re ruined at the first saddle. Before that, even. The best horses are the ones been around kids. Or maybe even just a wild horse in off the range that’s never even seen a man. He’s got nothin’ to unlearn.”

“You might have a hard time gettin’ anyone to agree with you on that last one.”

“I know it.”

“You ever break a wild horse?”

“Yeah. You hardly ever train one though.”

“Why not?”

“People don’t want ‘em trained. They just want ‘em broke. You got to train the owner.”

Oren leaned and stubbed out his cigarette. “I hear you,” he said.

John Grady sat studying the smoke rising into the lampshade over the table. “That probably ain’t true what I said about the one that ain’t never seen a man. They need to see people. They need to just see ‘em around. Maybe what they need is to just think people are trees until the trainer comes along.”

There’s a lot of this in the novel -- talk about horses, their wild nature and ways to tame them that can be read in multiple ways. It’s one of the things that makes McCarthy’s writing so compelling in this trilogy. But horses serve more purposes than that.

Here the parallel is between how one treats horses and how one treats men -- how men make their way in the world:

“Oren tells me that squirrel-headed horse you think so much of is eatin’ out of your hand.”

“That might be a bit of an exaggeration.”

“What do you tell ‘em?”

“Who?”

“Horses.”

“I don’t know. The truth.”

“I guess it’s a trade secret.”

“No.”

“How can you lie to a horse?”

He turned and looked at John Grady. “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Do you mean how do you go about it or how can you bring yourself to do it?”

“Go about it.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s just what’s in your heart.”

“You think a horse knows what’s in your heart?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

Billy didn’t answer. After a while he said: “Yeah. I do.”

“I ain’t a very good liar.”

“You just ain’t had enough practice at it.”

And here we have horses as a repository of some secret knowledge, of something that is true but which men can’t always see:

“I used to love to ride of a night.”

“I did, too.”

“You’ll see things on the desert at night that you can’t understand. Your horse will see things. He’ll see things that will spook him, of course, but then he’ll see things that don’t spook him, but still you know he seen somethin’.”

“What sort of things?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean like ghosts or somethin’?”

“No. I don’t know what. You just knows he sees ‘em. They’re out there.”

“Not just some class of varmint?”

“No.”

“Not somethin’ that will booger him?”

“No. It’s more like somethin’ he knows about.”

“But you don’t.”

“But you don’t. Yes.”

The old man smoked. He watched the moon. No further birds flew. After a while he said: “I ain’t talkin’ about spooks. It’s more like just the way things are. If only you knew it.”

So there is a lot about horses in this novel, in this whole trilogy, but at its core, I don’t think it is a story about horses. I think it is a story about men. Men and the lives that they lead and how difficult they can be.

Far out on the plain below the lights of the cities lay shimmering in their grids with the dark serpentine of the river dividing them.

“I thought you had other business to attend to,” Billy said.

“I do.”

“You think it can wait.”

“I hope it can wait. I ain’t sure this can.”

“Well, I’m glad you ain’t forgot all of your raising.”

“I ain’t forgot anything.”

“You’re tired of me gettin’ on your ass though.”

“You’re entitled.”

They sipped their coffee. The wind blew. They pulled their blankets about their shoulders. 

“I ain’t jealous you know.”

“I never said you were.”

“I know. You might of thought it. Truth is, I wouldn’t pull your boots on at gunpoint.”

“I know.”

Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back. He smoked. “It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, don’t it.”

“Yes, it does.”

“There’s a lot of things look better at a distance.”

“Yeah?”

“I think so.”

“I guess there are. That life you’ve lived, for one.”

“Yeah. Maybe what of it you ain’t lived yet, too.”

The mention of the lights of the cities out on the plain was the tip off for me. He comes something important, and it was this, this idea that life, a man’s life, your life, always looks better from a distance. Down on the plain and up against it, it can be downright brutish and short, but up there on the bluff, looking at it from a great distance, it has a sublime beauty that can always be appreciated.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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I’m the only person on the planet who hasn’t seen the movie.

I enjoyed the book.

The title refers to a memory from Clarice Starling’s childhood, when she lived on an orphanage/ranch in Montana and awoke one morning to the screams of the lambs being slaughtered.

It seems as if Clarice has been hearing their screams in her mind for most of her troubled life since then, and longs for a time when she will hear the silence of the lambs.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

It was a slow night at The Quarter Pony when Nog Shortwhiskers walked into my life. I remember seeing him for the first time, before I knew who he was and what kind of friends we would become. He was dressed like no other dwarf I had ever seen, and his beard was trimmed short like no other dwarf I had ever heard of. I could tell he was something special, but when he came up to me and asked in his clandestine way if I had ever heard of a man called Roy Stonerow, my curiosity jumped up and tried to look over the head of caution, who was standing, as usual, in front of him. From that moment on, Nog never stopped surprising me. Whether it was news that he had known my grandfather or that he had purchased a leather jerkin for me to wear on our first expedition south, everything he did or told me was done out of the part of his heart he most often denied having. I’ll never forget him and, wherever he may be right now, I hope he has plenty of ale.

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Time passed. Days turned into weeks and Brisbane found himself getting tangled deeper and deeper into the society of the Clan of the Red Eye. The very next day after his horrible dream, Ternosh began meeting with him to teach and instruct him in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye and in the practice of orkish magic. It could be said Brisbane learned more about the orkish religion than he wanted to. Over the course of time, nearly all of his questions were answered, some of them more graphically than he might have wished.

Early on, he learned all about the orkish vision of the afterlife. It seemed when an ork died, one of two things would happen to him. The newly deceased would stand before Gruumsh One-Eye himself and the god would look over the ork’s life, intent on deciding if he had spent it in proper devotion to his god and his mission. If the ork had been faithful and had waged enough war against Gruumsh’s enemies, He-Who-Watches would induct the ork into his heavenly army and for all time he would do battle against deceased members of the other races. If the ork was found to be lacking in his duties, Gruumsh would crush him under the heel of his mighty foot, thus ending the ork’s existence permanently.

Brisbane found this unusual mythology to be nearly horrific in its implications. The greatest prize an ork could receive was recruitment into the eternal army of their god, where the battle and war that made up their earthly lives would go on for all time, every casualty springing back to fight another day. This was what the orks looked forward to, what they lived their lives in anticipation for. Ternosh did not have to tell him Gruumsh’s army won every battle it fought. That would be axiomatic. It would hardly be heaven for the orks if their enemies continued to kill them in death. In Brisbane’s mind, it was the ultimate expression of red-faced vengeance. Orks lived their lives on Gruumsh’s vengeance, so was it any surprise they lived their deaths on it, too? You lousy humans, you may defeat us when you’re alive, but just wait until you die. Then we’ll really get you.

Brisbane, however, could not afford to take such a light view of it while he was among the orks. To them, this was serious business. It was their god and their religion, and Brisbane knew those were two things you did not pick on if you liked where your nose was placed. He found himself forced to go along with the belief, always on his toes to prevent himself from accidentally ridiculing it or letting his true feelings show. Brisbane believed in Gruumsh One-Eye no more than he believed in Grecolus, but he had to remember Ternosh and the others believed in Gruumsh, and that they believed their god had sent Brisbane among them for some hidden purpose. As long as he stayed here, he was going to have to play that part.

Just how long would he be here? This thought did not occur to him much over the busy weeks, but every once and a while, when he was left alone, it would come to his mind and he would turn it over a few times. The best answer he could come up with was that he was not sure. Originally, the plan had been just long enough to get Angelika and get out, but some things had changed since then.

Regardless of what he had said, Brisbane was surer than ever Ternosh was not going to let him leave. In the beginning, when Ternosh first brought Brisbane out of his cage to take his place in the clan, the Grumak had given him the chance to flee if he wanted to. Then, he had stayed, intent on retrieving Angelika before he left, but even if he had taken the opportunity and left, Ternosh still would not have let him go. If Brisbane had tried to leave, it would have proven to Ternosh that the Demosk had been wrong, and Ternosh would have killed him for wearing the sign of a Grumak. So Brisbane’s only chance then had been to stay, whether he had any reason to or not.

And so Brisbane found himself among the upper class of the clan, treading lightly and biding his time until he could find Angelika. Then, surprisingly, he had found her in the chamber of the pug-trolang right before his combat with Wister. He could have taken her that night and tried to slip out of the camp with her, but knowing what he learned in the following weeks, he was glad he hadn’t tried it.

Tornestor had said Angelika had been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye and, as it turned out, that was not something to be taken lightly in orkish culture. If Brisbane had taken her, and anyone had seen him with her, the whole of the clan would have risen up against him. It was a very serious matter. No one in the klatru had been able to draw Angelika from her scabbard, not even the great Tornestor, and it was concluded the blade had to be enchanted. In the orkish definition of the word, enchanted meant Angelika belonged to Gruumsh and no one else was allowed to touch her. Brisbane wasn’t sure if anyone remembered that Vrak had taken Angelika from him (i.e., she was his), but he wasn’t too keen on reminding them under the circumstances.

So Brisbane did not know when he would be able to leave the clan, if ever. He didn’t want to leave until he got Angelika back, which the orks wouldn’t let him do, and the orks wouldn’t let him go until he did this mysterious job the Demosk had spoken of, and Brisbane didn’t know what that was. The situation did not exactly glisten with hope.

Brisbane could only continue to bide his time, gathering information and waiting for something to happen that would help him out of this mess. He found out what the Demosk really was or, more precisely, what Ternosh believed the Demosk to be. The answer was really not that surprising, given what Brisbane had seen and what he had learned about the orkish afterlife. The Demosk was nothing more than a high-ranking officer in the army of Gruumsh One-Eye that Ternosh could call up from the great beyond for advice and orders. The apparition had no eyes because it had no power to “see” the material world, but it could sense it in a way that went beyond sight. It was very important for the Demosk to witness all masokoms in the pug-trolang for Gruumsh was very interested in the power structures in all his clans. Supposedly, after Brisbane had defeated Wister, the Demosk had gone back to report the change to his god. Ternosh told him he had certainly gained some respect in the eye of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Brisbane thought it was a lot of hogwash, but again he did not let his true feelings show. He was sure the Demosk was just a result of Ternosh’s magic coupled with the hallucinogenic effects of that strange incense smoke. The drug in the smoke made people hallucinate and Ternosh’s magic shaped what they saw. When he asked about the incense, Ternosh told Brisbane it had magical properties and was needed to complete the spell that brought the Demosk’s image into their world. It shaped itself out of the smoke. Without it, the Demosk would not be able to take form. Brisbane mentioned off the cuff that the smoke kind of made him dizzy, but Ternosh acted like he didn’t know what the human was talking about.

As the weeks rolled on, Brisbane did not seem to get anywhere as far as acceptance into the clan. Ternosh treated him with civility, and Smurch fawned over him—although Brisbane had gotten the half-ork to call him Gil in closed quarters—but nearly everyone else in the clan avoided him like a leper. His defeat of Wister in the pug-trolang may have made them think twice about razzing him, but none of them were leaping over each other to become his friend. It was not that Brisbane really wanted or expected their friendship, it just seemed like they went out of their way to avoid him. The whole time he spent among them, he did not have a single conversation with anyone beside Ternosh or Smurch that lasted more than thirty seconds.

Smurch did his best to get Brisbane mainstreamed, but although he could teach his master all about orkish society, the half-ork couldn’t push him all the way into it. Regardless of what the Demosk had said about him, Brisbane remained an outcast for the whole time he spent among the orks of the Red Eye.

One day, in the middle of one of his many lessons on orkish religion and magic, Ternosh shifted gears and began to talk about Brisbane’s place in the clan.

“Brisbane,” the Grumak said painfully. “As a member of the klatru, you have a right you have not yet taken advantage of.”

Brisbane thought about the way he was now allowed to bathe regularly. “Oh? Which one is that?”

Ternosh did not answer right away. “The right of mating.”

Brisbane pretended he didn’t hear the Grumak. “The right of what?”

“The right of mating,” Ternosh repeated. “Any time you wish, you may go into the settlement and select a female to take back to your chamber. There, you can, well…mate with her.”

Brisbane’s head filled with visions of the ork females, with their small pig-features, their hairy bodies, and their large breasts. The thought of mating with one of them did not exactly excite him, but he could not help wondering what it would be like. The way these orks treated their females was barbaric. None of them had names, none of them were allowed to participate in the wondrous afterlife the orks believed in—they were not warriors, after all—and now it seemed that any upper class male could demand sex from them anytime he wanted. Brisbane thought about what it would be like if his culture had the same practices. Choosing any woman you met and ordering her to mate with you. It was certainly an uncivilized practice, but it did have a definite, if impossible, thrill tied to it.

“Unless she is wearing a red arm band, of course.”

Brisbane had not been listening to the Grumak. “What?”

“You cannot choose a female who is wearing a red arm band. As long as she wears it she belongs to the clan chief. Tornestor has a couple of favorites.”

“No offense, Ternosh,” Brisbane said. “But the female of your race is not exactly my type.”

The Grumak nodded. “Understandable. Personally, I find human females unattractive, although there are a few grugan who would disagree with me. I believe your servant is of mixed descent.”

Brisbane was suddenly sorry he had shut off that avenue because he just realized it would have given him an excuse to learn a way from his chamber, through the maze of tunnels, and to the surface. But what a price he would have to pay for such knowledge. A sudden inspiration swept him and he had to fight to keep his voice calm.

“What about the prisoners?” Brisbane asked, trying to add a sly twist to his voice.

Ternosh sobered. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Brisbane said. “There are some females among them, aren’t there? Human females?”

“Ah, I see what you’re driving at,” the Grumak said. “I don’t know. That may not be the best idea.”

“Why not?”

Ternosh pondered for a moment. “Well, I guess it would be all right, so long as you didn’t get attached to any of them. Or didn’t expect children from them.”

Brisbane did not know what the Grumak was talking about, but Ternosh soon explained it to him. The sole reason the orks would occasionally capture a human and keep them locked up in a cage was that in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye, a monthly sacrifice of blood was required. Ternosh calmly explained the kind of blood that pleased He-Who-Watches the most was the blood of his enemies.

The information sickened Brisbane but he kept his cool about it, still clinging to the hope that through this he would be able to obtain a reason to learn a way to the surface. The imprisonment and slaughter of his fellow man was a terrible thing, but Brisbane had to watch out for his own hide first.

And so, that night, when Ternosh had finished with his lessons, Brisbane asked Smurch to lead him to the surface, so he could choose a female prisoner for his right of mating. He, as usual, got no argument from the half-ork, and soon he was being led away from his chamber, carefully memorizing every twist and turn his servant took.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that complicated. The path was fairly direct, once you realized the caves seemed to have been dug out in large sections, maze-like within, but connected to each other with single, straight corridors. Upon entering one section, all you had to do was find the exit, usually located somewhere roughly opposite the entrance, and then move onto the next section. He saw a few orks along the way, some klatru, but most of them servants, and none of them stopped Brisbane to ask where he was going. He should have realized this. They all avoided him anyway. He probably could have done this earlier without any reason and no one would have questioned him. It seemed his outcast standing had pluses as well as minuses.

Soon, he and Smurch emerged from the cave and stepped out into the sunlight. It was a warm day and off in the distance Brisbane could see the ork women and children going about their business apart from the males. Before him stood the circus wagons with their prisoners and the usual gaggle of black-armored orks. Brisbane recognized Vrak among them and was surprised to see the ork come over to speak to him.

“He wants to know if there is anything he can do for you, Grum Brisbane,” Smurch said, translating the ork’s orkish.

Anytime one of the klatru had needed to speak to him, they had used the common tongue of his kind. Brisbane was appreciative of this, but he wanted to learn orkish anyway. Smurch had been giving him lessons in his private chamber, but so far it had been slow going. Brisbane had caught maybe a third of the words Vrak had used.

“Tell him no,” Brisbane said as regally as possible. “I wish to be left alone.”

Smurch did so and Vrak quietly went back to his lower class companions. Brisbane did his best to ignore them and went over to stand before the circus wagons.

For the first since he had been captured, he got a good look at the other humans the orks had taken prisoner. Pale and thin, they reminded him more of ghosts than of human beings. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all in separate cages in a line next to the one Brisbane had been in. They stared back at him with open eyes that had seen their own deaths countless times and had cried all the tears they were ever going to cry. Their eyes were simply waiting, waiting for Brisbane to do something, or waiting for the first of the month to roll around, when one of them would be sacrificed to a god they did not believe in. To them, it did not matter which.

The men had probably been merchants, still wearing the simple clothes of the working class. But the woman was something different entirely. Her clothes, now torn and dirty, were obviously once elegant and beautiful. It seemed to have once been a long dress, cinched together at the waist and once a pristine shade of white. Now, ripped and soiled with the muck of imprisonment, it did little to cover her dirty legs and bony shoulders. With something akin to shock, Brisbane realized it had once been a wedding dress.

Suddenly, her eyes shifted and widened as if she had noticed Brisbane for the first time. She came forward to the bars and reached an arm through as far as it would go. She worked her mouth up and down a few times but no sound came out.

Brisbane was unsure if this had been such a good idea. The woman looked so pathetic, beaten and abused in a cage like some disobedient animal. The wedding dress, that’s what bothered him the most. He could see the whole scene playing out in his mind like a vision of history. The woman and her new husband traveling on the road, traveling to a new life together, when suddenly out of the hills rise a marauding band of ugly orks. They attack ruthlessly and the groom, out of mixed emotions of love and duty and passion, is slain in the doomed protection of his bride. The orks take the woman and force her back to their settlement, here to this cage, and treat her to nothing but prison rations, violent rape, and a promise of sacrificial death. Brisbane could not take this woman back to his chamber under any pretense. He felt bad enough just exposing himself to her, a human like herself, in her eyes, in league with her captors.

“Human,” the woman said, finally finding her voice. “You are human. Who are you? Help me, please, help me.”

Smurch stepped up. “Does this one please you, Grum Brisbane? Shall I have her taken to your chamber?”

Brisbane took the woman’s hand which she had thrust through the bars. “What’s your name?” he asked her softly.

“Amanda. My name is Amanda.”

“Grum Brisbane?”

Brisbane dropped the woman’s hand and stepped away from her cage. Slowly, he felt control slipping away from him.

Amanda tried to push her hand closer to Brisbane. “No, don’t go. Help me, please. Dear Grecolus, I’ll do anything you want.”

“Grum Brisbane?” Smurch asked hesitantly. “What do you desire?”

Brisbane tried to force his heart back down into his chest. “Nothing, Jack,” he heard himself saying. “Let’s get out of here.”

He began to move toward the cave mouth and Smurch fell into step behind him. “But what about your right of mating?” the half-ork asked. “Do you want the female or not?”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Brisbane said through gritted teeth. “Now, drop it.”

“Yes, Grum Brisbane.”

And Smurch did drop it. Brisbane never heard the half-ork mention the subject again, but that did not keep it from his mind. For days afterward he thought about it constantly. What was he doing here anyway? Living among these orks, patiently waiting for an opportunity to steal his sword back while innocent people like Amanda—

Amanda, could her name really be Amanda?

—and the merchants, people wholly like himself, suffered in misery and awaited only their own deaths? He began to wonder if one night he just shouldn’t break the prisoners out of their cages and try a desperate escape with them through the sleeping ork settlement. Assuredly, not all of them would make it, but at least it was a better chance than the one they faced now.

To Brisbane, this is what it all boiled down to. Without his help, the prisoners had no chance to survive their imprisonment. But if he did help them escape, he would have no chance to retrieve Angelika and his life. He had to decide which was more important, the lives of his fellow man or his own wants and desires. Put bluntly like that, it was hard not to run up and try to free as many prisoners as he could, but there were many subtle persuasions that kept him from doing just that. He was confused and needed someone to talk to in order to resolve the problem. But he didn’t think he could trust anyone in the clan with the nature of the question he was debating, not even Smurch.

In the end, desperate for some kind of guidance, he consulted the only friend he seemed to have in the area. Late at night, lying silently in his bed, he opened his mind to Angelika.

Angelika? Are you there?

—Yes,— came the instant response, sweet and strongly persuasive in the darkness. —Yes, I am here, young Brisbane. What troubles you this night?—

It’s the prisoners. The orks plan to sacrifice them to their god.

—I know.—

How can we allow that? Are they not innocents?

—They are, but you must not rush things, Brisbane. Things are going well. You have the potential to destroy much evil here. And soon you will win me back.—

But I may be able to rescue them.

—You will not,— Angelika said. —Their fates have been set. If you try to escape with them, you will all be killed. It will profit you nothing.—

Angelika, how can you know these things?

—I know.—

Yes, Brisbane thought, but how do you know?

—I know. That path leads to despair. You must remain patient and strong. Our vengeance is certain only if you do so.—

But what about the prisoners?

—Their plight cannot be helped. But know their sacrifice will allow us to wreak unbridled vengeance against these demons of Damaleous. Their deaths will add fuel to our fire and sweeten the taste of our victory.—

Then they will die?

—Their bodies will die, yes. But hearken, Grecolus has already prepared their place in the heavens.—

He has? Brisbane thought.

—He has.—

Brisbane had to be satisfied with that solace and, for a while, it was sufficient. He stayed below ground, each day following the tunnels to the surface to be sure he knew the route, but never actually leaving the confines of the orkish lair. He found it strangely easy not to think during his busy days about what was going to happen to the prisoners, but when he was left alone at night, the subject nearly filled his thoughts. He could only keep it at bay by remembering what Angelika had said. Not what she had said about the blessed afterlife of the prisoners, for he knew that was garbage, but what she had said about their deaths. He could not save them but at least he would not let their deaths go unavenged.

Brisbane did not yet realize that as a Grum in the Clan of the Red Eye, a minor priest in the religion of Gruumsh One-Eye, when the time came to sacrifice the blood of one of the prisoners, he would have to assist Grumak Ternosh in the bloodletting.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

True Crimes and Misdemeanors by Jeffrey Toobin

This should have been two books. The first section, as advertised in the book's subtitle, “The Investigation of Donald Trump,” is the story of Robert Mueller’s investigation and resulting report on the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and administration. The second section, which seems rushed and very much like a tack-on, is about Trump’s first impeachment for asking Ukraine to collude with his second campaign for president. I can see how that lens might tie the two sections together, but then why not use a subtitle that makes that connection clear? “Donald Trump and His Attempts to Collude with Foreign Governments?” Maybe that’s not as catchy?

I picked up just a few items of interest as I went through it.

Hillary’s Emails

Both as a candidate and as president, Trump frequently accused [Hillary] Clinton of deleting the emails after they were subpoenaed. In fact, shortly after she left her position as secretary of state, her aides went through her emails, which totaled about sixty thousand, and found approximately half were work related and half were personal. The half that were related to her job as secretary of state were turned over to the State Department and ultimately to investigators. The other half were deleted. This all happened before she was subpoenaed.

This is actually a parenthetical comment in Toobin’s text, but it seems to give away the whole game. There apparently weren’t any missing emails -- 30,000 or otherwise. They were all either turned over to the State Department or deleted.

If You’re Listening

This references the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, hacking into U.S. political and governmental institutions, something that is regularly monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The data showed that some unusual things happened on July 27, 2016. As a rule, the GRU operatives made their hacking rounds during regular business hours, but they worked late on July 27. What were they doing? On that date, the GRU opened new fronts in its data war on Hillary Clinton. First, they started spear phishing at new targets -- accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider used by Clinton’s personal office. In addition, they targeted more spear-phishing attacks at seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign. So [DOJ prosecutor Rush] Atkinson wondered, why this burst of activity? And why these targets in particular? Why then?

The prosecutor started noodling around on the internet. What was so special about July 27? What else happened on that day? Where was Donald Trump? As it turned out, he was at his golf club in Doral, Florida. He had a press conference that morning. What did he say? “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Wait. What?

Atkinson started looking at the timing and time zones. Trump’s press conference started at 10:30 a.m. eastern time. That was toward the end of the working day in Moscow, where the GRU hacking units were located. He checked. He double-checked. But the times lined up. It was possible Russia was listening and took up Trump’s invitation right away.

Yes. I guess they were listening.

The Narcissist and His Thrall

I found this anecdote about Michael Cohen, Trump’s erstwhile lawyer and fixer, revealing.

In the decade before Trump became president, Cohen used intimidation, threats, and bluster to do his bidding. He frequently dealt with the press. On one oft-recounted occasion, Tim Mak, then a reporter for The Daily Beast, asked Cohen about the allegation by Trump’s first wife, Ivana, which she later recanted, that Trump had raped her. Cohen told Mak, “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” Cohen earned a reputation for extreme devotion, even sycophancy, toward Trump, who repaid him, on occasion, with disdain. In 2009, when Trump was dissatisfied with Cohen’s performance, he cut his salary from $400,000 per year to $200,000. (Two years later, he restored the salary.) Notwithstanding the slights, Cohen remained loyal to Trump. As he told me, “I actually enjoyed him, interestingly enough. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s horrible, he’s the worst human being on the planet. I mean it. He has no heart and no soul when he’s mean.”

It is, in so many ways, indicative of the narcissist and the people who willingly enthrall themselves to them. Please, please love me. 

Gnarled, Legalistic Prose

Let me end on this.

Still, that left Mueller with a dilemma. There was clear evidence that Trump did commit crimes. What should Mueller say about that? He decided to lay out the evidence but reach no conclusion about it. This judgment was announced in what became the most famous (and infamous) paragraph of the Mueller Report:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

It takes multiple readings to make sense of the gnarled, legalistic prose of this paragraph. We can investigate the President, but we can’t prosecute the President. If our investigation determined that he was in the clear, we’d say that -- but we’re not saying that. Nor are we saying that he’s guilty of anything. So we’re not saying he’s guilty -- but we’re not saying he’s innocent, either. Basically.

Nothing in Mueller’s mandate required him to reach such a baffling and inconclusive conclusion about the most important issue before him. He was a prosecutor. A prosecutor’s job is to determine whether the evidence is sufficient to bring cases. In this unique situation, the OLC opinion prohibited Mueller from actually bringing a case, but Mueller gave Trump an unnecessary second benefit from the OLC opinion. The first benefit was not prosecuting him; that was mandatory. But the second benefit was not even saying whether the evidence supported a prosecution; that was simply a gift to Trump. In Mueller’s reasoning, a federal prosecutor could neither prosecute the president nor say whether he should be prosecuted, which in this case placed Trump effectively above the law. And Mueller expressed this tortured, overthought conclusion in such confusing language that most mortals could not understand what he had done at all. Sadly, the bewildering denouement undermined the extraordinary, meticulous, and fair-minded work of his staff in building the obstruction of justice case against Trump in the first place.

Mueller’s compromise had another ill effect. Because the language in the report was so complicated and difficult to parse, it opened the door for his work to be misrepresented by partisans acting in bad faith -- like, for example, the attorney general of the United States.

I remember those days. It was painful to watch -- Mueller speaking before Congress in words, if anything, even more convoluted than those contained in his report. He was a patsy, evidently not up to the moment that history had placed before him. It reminds me very much of the saying that it is the good men who end up doing the most harm in the world.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

FDR: The War President by Kenneth S. Davis

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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This is the fifth volume of a huge, multi-volume biography of FDR. It covers the years 1940-1943, and the saddest thing about it is that the author died near the end of writing it—which means that the series will never be finished.

It’s a good read. Scholarly and tedious in some places, but absolutely fascinating when viewed through the prism of today. FDR’s war against fascism and GWB’s war against terror, and the political climates they existed and exist in, are fascinating to compare with one another. Imagine today’s Congress giving GWB the power to loan battleships to Pakistan so they could use them to fight against Iraq. Imagine there being a strike at Ford Motor Company and GWB sending the U.S. Army in to break it up so the workers could go start making bullets and bombs. Imagine John Kerry saying that he fought hard against GWB because he thought he’d make a better president than him, but that GWB won and he was going to support him in this war effort, and would go on a global tour demonstrating to our allies and enemies alike that our political parties are unified at home. Here are some more interesting tidbits:

Thus the swirl and tangle of events, problems, and challenges through which Roosevelt must pick his way and to which his responses are and will be shaped by his sense of himself, of his own innate and adherent capacities. On this morning of rare passivity his self-felt identity is in some respects no larger, no more formidable, than the one his intellectual critics ascribe to him in their moments of severest censure. He completes his breakfast. He puts aside the newspapers. He rises from his bed (he must have help to do so), dresses himself (he must have help to do so), then rides his wheelchair down into the library living room to begin the (for him) relatively meager activities of the day. And as he does this his consciousness of self, within which his awareness of physical dependency upon the strong arms of other men may be somewhat sharper than usual, has nothing in it of the conqueror’s egotistical willfulness. Indeed, against the massive challenges he faces, he measures exceeding small, far smaller than others do, the powers he can wield—the innate powers (of mind, of will) granted him by almighty God, plus the powers that are his by virtue of his high office—and is reaffirmed in his conviction that he cannot actually dominate even immediate events of major importance, much less change the direction or set the course of world history. He can only nudge here, tug there, prod at this point, brake at that one—he can only cautiously encourage the energies of change or, if the impendent change is of the foundations of the present American domestic order, discourage them—as he attempts to guide the turbulent torrent of event, upon which he is otherwise and in general borne irresistibly, toward what he perceives or conceives to be God’s goals.

Such perceptions or conceptions are, for him, highly tentative. They derive from and depend upon information that is imperfect and uncertain—information he obtains, for the most part, not through a thoughtful study of subject matter, but through three kinds of prayer. Two of these are objective, impersonal, almost devoid of religious feeling. One of the two might even be deemed empirically “scientific” insofar as it consists of various kinds of poll taking, various ways of defining the nature and measuring the strength of public opinion on specific issues—this on the tacit assumption that the will of the majority is the will of God. The other of the two is a species of teleological gambling, essentially superstitious—a kind of betting aimed at achieving not material prizes, but signs of divine approval or disapproval of something he contemplates doing. For instance, he may assign to this or that small happening a large significance, saying to himself that if the trivial event occurs within an immediate time span (the next minutes, perhaps, or before he can count to ten), it means that God approved what he has considered doing; if it does not occur, God disapproves. Or he may see as a sign of divine approval or disapproval his luck at cards when he plays poker or, as he does far more frequently, Miss Milliken, a game of solitaire of which he is fond.

The third kind of prayer, however, is truly religious insofar as it is intensely subjective, profoundly emotional, imbued with a sense of awe and personal dependency; and it is this prayerfulness, which is in perfect accord with his somber nostalgic mood on this gray wintry morning, that he now employs, or by which he is now caught up. He looks backward into time. Seeking stability, permanence, eternality, amid or underlying the unceasing flow of eventful change, he contemplates or (more accurately) feels his way into the past—his own individual personal past as well as the historic past of this little Hudson River town in which he grew up. And he does find permanence there. The past presents itself to the remembering mind as a completed reality wherein one can see how events conform to one another, are fitted together through the operations of casual efficacy, this thing happening because that thing does and in turn causing something else, shaping a structure from whose order the contemplative observer may learn something of the workings of God’s mind, something of the nature of God’s will. The lessons thus learned are highly qualified, however. Roosevelt knows well that the past never exactly repeats itself, is therefore no mirror of the future into which he can look for precise instructions as to what he should now do. He realizes through his feeling self that the past as persistent memory is the very stuff or substance of the living flowing present through which it extends, as an ongoing but continuously changing pattern of event, into anticipated, apprehended future time. This is the mainstream flow of the world, this the felt essence of his profound conservatism. And on this morning of gray melancholy, he in his present self and the boy he remembers himself to have been here at Hyde Park—also between this Georgian mansion that is now his one true home and the smaller, more modest Victorian house in which he was born; and between the town of Hyde Park today and the Hyde Park of distant and receding yesterdays. By this awareness his sore and weary spirit is somehow soothed and refreshed, his optimistic faith restored.

First, how about that prose, huh? Second, how about that insight into the mind of a historical figure. Reading this makes me think that this Kenneth Davis could become FDR if he wanted to, could get into the wheelchair, put on the glasses, clamp his teeth down on the cigarette holder, and become Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I also like what this passage says about being a leader, about how a leader’s power is confined to nudging, tugging, prodding, and braking. Because, boy, that is sure what it feels like for me. But what strikes me most about this passage is the way FDR, the leader of the free world at one of that world’s most critical turning points, allowed his mind to be swayed and decisions to be made by cryptic messages he thought he was receiving from God while he played solitaire. The weight of the world teetering on a precarious fulcrum and there he is, looking for answers in the turn of the next random card. GWB would probably be proud.

There’s a one page summary in the FDR book about the sinking of the Bismarck which is one of the things I stumble across in history books sometimes that I immediately want to know more about. I therefore ordered a copy of Sink the Bismarck! By C. S. Forester, evidently the authoritative expert on the subject.

As a “man of action,” Hopkins, like Roosevelt, was the opposite of ideological, and like Roosevelt, he thereby avoided a typical fallacy of the ideological mind, namely, the conclusion that what people do (history, that is) is wholly determined by forces—economic, in Marx; organismic in Spengler; Christian in Toynbee—that are themselves ahistorical and beyond human control. In both Hopkins’s and Roosevelt’s conviction, if more vividly in Roosevelt’s than in Hopkins’s, human beings were by God’s will free to choose; though they worked out God’s grand design, they must do so through the anguish of personal choice, guided by such signs of His will as He permitted them, human freedom being integral to God’s design. But in eschewing both ideology and the quest for fundamental causes, Hopkins, like Roosevelt, also eschewed coherence and fundamental consistency in his dealings with current event. The whole of his mental concern was with the event itself, and about this he asked questions of “what” and “how” to the virtual exclusion of “why.”

This passage is a lot like the whole book. I find it interesting as hell but I’m uncertain as to what it exactly means.

He presented his proposals to Congress on April 27, as a seven-point “economic stabilization program.” Each of the points, in his statement of it, was preceded by the phrase “to keep the cost of living from spiraling upward.” They were: 1) heavy taxation to “keep personal and corporate profits at a reasonable rate, the word ‘reasonable’ being defined at a low level”; 2) price ceilings, including “ceilings on rents for dwellings in all areas affected by war industries”; 3) wage controls (“we must stabilize the remuneration received by individuals for their work”); 4) stabilization of “prices received by growers for the products of their lands”; 5) increased purchase of war bonds by “all citizens” to prevent their using war-increased earnings “to buy articles which are not essential”; 6) strict rationing “of all essential commodities of which there is a scarcity”; 7) discouragement of credit and installment buying joined with encouragement of “the paying off of debts, mortgages, and other obligations.”

Can you believe this? Can you imagine GWB proposing this to help finance the war against terrorism? Roosevelt later defined the “low level” he would keep everyone’s income at after taxes as $25,000. That’s 1942 dollars. Today that would be $282,812.50. Okay, I guess that’s not that bad.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.