SUGGESTED FICTION

Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers: A Novel, with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, 2011) (from the "Introduction": "Midway through his narrative, Doug spells out the fundamental fact that drives it: 'I love my brothers and I hate their guts.' The beauty of the novel is that Antrim has created a narrator who reproduces, in the reader, the same volatile mixture of feelings regarding the narrator himself: Doug is at once irresistibly lovable and unbearably frustrating.  The genius of the novel is that it maps these contradictory feelings onto the archetypal figure of the scapegoat: the exemplary sufferer who recurs throughout human history, most notably in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, as an object of both love and homicidal rage, and who must be ritually killed in order for the rest of us to go in living with the contradictions in our lesser hearts." Id. at ix-x.).


J. G. Ballard, Kingdom Come: A Novel (New York: Liveright, 2006, 2012) ("'... The churches are empty, and the monarchy shipwrecked itself on its own vanity. Politics is a racket, and democracy is just another utility, like gas and electricity. Almost no one has any civic feeling. Consumerism is the one thing that gives us our sense of values. Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode. The great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph, led directly to today's consumerism.' . . . 'But if reason and light have triumphed?' 'They haven't. Because we're not reasonable and rational creatures. Far from it. We resort to reason when it suits us. For most people life is comfortable today, and we have the spare time to be unreasonable if we choose to be. We're like bored children. We've been on holiday for too long, and we've been given too many presents. Anyone who's had children knows that the greatest danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure in one's own malice. Together they can spur a remarkable ingenuity.' 'Let's stuff baby's month with sweets and see if he stops breathing?' 'Exactly.' ...'" Id. at 120. "'Now. I see you as tomorrow's man. Consumerism is the door to the future, and you're helping to open it. People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure. They don't want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quietly about what matters in their lives. It's a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it's really the purest kind of politics. And you're at the leading edge. In fact, you could practically run the country.'" Id. at 166-167. See Charles Baxter, "Brute Force . . . Humanism," NYRB, 7/12/2012; and Scott Bradfield, "Mall Rats," NYT Book Review, Sunday 3/25/2012.).


Louis Begley, Schmidt Steps Back (New York: Knopf, 2012) (See Ron Carlson, "Once More with Feeling, NYT Book Review, Sunday 4/15/2012.).


Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) (See Andrew Miller, "Set in Motion," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/27/2012.).


Nick Dybek, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012).


Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2012) (See Stacy Schiff, "Camp Stories," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/19/2012).


Richard Ford, Canada (New York: Ecco, 2012) ("However, blaming your parents for your life's difficulties finally leads nowhere." Id. at 11. Also, see Michael Dirda, "The Art of Revealing the Wreckage," NYRB, 7/12/2012; & Andre Dubus III, "Points North, NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/10/2012.).


William Goyen, The House of Breath: Under All Land Lies the Title (London: Serpent's Tail, 1949, 1990).


David Guterson, Ed King: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2011) (See David Goodwillie, "Mama's Boy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/27/2011.).


Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) (See Gregory Cowles, "Big League Anxiety on the Baseball Diamond," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/11/2011.).


John Irving, In One Person: Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012) (See Jeanette Winterson, "Behind the Masks," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/13/2012..


Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2012) (See Christopher R. Beha, "North Korean Noir," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/15/2012.).


Thomas Mallon, Watergate: A Novel (New York: Panthon, 2012) (See Curtis Sittenfeld, "Expletives Deleted," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/4/2012.).


Tom McCarthy, Men in Space: A Novel, with an afterword by Simon Critchley (New York: Vintage Books, 2007, 2012) (See Stephen Burns, "Suspended Animation, NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/26/2012.).


Matthew Pearl, The Technologists: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2012 ) (See James Parker, "Science Will Save Us," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/26/2012).


Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) (See David Gates, "Collective Memory," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/29/2012.).


Edward St. Aubyn, At Last: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) ("'If there's an opportunity for irony...' 'You'll take it.' 'It's the hardest addiction of all,' said Patrick. 'Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.' 'Don't! said Julia, 'I'm having enough trouble wearing nicotine patches and still smoking at the same time. Don't take away my irony,' she pleaded, clasping him histrionically, leave me with a little sarcasm.' 'Sarcasm doesn't count. It only means one thing: contempt.' 'You always were a quality freak,' said Julia. 'Some of us like sarcasm.'" Id. at 60-61. "'Don't worry if you change your mind,' said Mary. 'In fact,' said Thomas, 'you should change your mind, because that's what it's for!'" Id. at 256.).


Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) (See Stacey D'Erasmo, "An Island of One," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/22/2012.).


Paul Theroux, The Lower River: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) ("'... Remember this. When your rival stands on an anthill, never say 'I have caught you' until you are up there yourself.' " Id. at 222. Also, see Patrick McGrath, "Retracing His Steps," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/20/2012.).


Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2011).


Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem: A Novel (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

I THINK I AM A HUNGRY GHOST!

Thich Nhat Hanh, Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living, edited by Arnold Kotler; drawings by Mayumi Oda (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1992) ("Every time I see someone without roots, I see him as a hungry ghost. In Buddhist mythology, the term 'hungry ghost' is used to describe a wandering soul who is extremely hungry and thirsty but whose throat is too narrow for food or drink to pass through. On the full moon day or the seventh lunar month in Vietnam, we offer food and drink to the hungry ghosts. We know that it is difficult for them to receive our offerings, so we chant a Mantra to Expand Hungry Ghosts' Throats. There are so many hungry ghosts, and our houses are small, so we make these offerings in the front yard." Id. at 99. " "A sangha in which each person is an island, not communicating with each other, is not helpful. It is just a collection of trees without roots. Transformation and healing cannot be obtained in such an atmosphere. We must be rooted if we want to have a chance to learn and practice meditation." Id. at 99. "Each of us needs a sangha. If we don't have a good sangha yet, we should spend our time and energy building one." Id. at 112. "Interpersonal relationships are the key for success in the practice. Without an intimate, deep relationship with at least one person, transformation is unlikely. With the support of one person, you have stability and support, and later you can reach out to a third person.... You demonstrate your willingness and capacity to live in peace and harmony with everyone in the sangha." Id. at 107. "Meditation is to live each moment of life deeply. Through meditation, we see that waves are made only of water, that the historical and the ultimate dimensions are one. Even while living in the world of waves, we touch the water, knowing that a wave is nothing but water. We suffer if we touch only the waves. But if we learn how to stay in touch with the water, we feel a great relief. Touching nirvana frees us from many worries. Things that upset us in the past are not that important, even one day later--imagine when we are able to touch infinite time and space." "We come to the practice seeking relief in the historical dimension. We calm our body and mind, and establish our stillness, our freshness, and our solidity. We practice loving kindness, concentration, and transforming our anger, and we feel some relief. But when we touch the ultimate dimension of reality, we get the deepest kind of relief. Each of us has the capacity to touch nirvana and be free from birth and death, one and many, coming and going." Id. at 124.).

LOVE CAN BE A KIND OF SICKNESS.

Thich Nhat Hanh, For A Future To Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts, with Robert Aitken, Richard Baker, Stephen Batchelor, Patricia Marx Ellsberg, Joan Halifax, Chan Kbong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jack Kornfield, Annabel Laity, Christopher Reed, Sulak Sivaraksa, Gary Snyder, David Steindl-Rast & Arthur Waskow (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993) ("Love can be a kind of sickness. In the West and in Asia we have the word 'lovesick.' What makes us sick is attachment. Although it is a sweet internal formation, this kind of love with attachment is like a drug. It makes us feel wonderful, but once we are addicted, we cannot have peace. We cannot study, do our daily work, or sleep. We only think of the object of our love. We are sick with love. This kind of love is linked to our willingness to possess and monopolize. We want the object of our love to be entirely ours and only for us. It is totalitarian. We do not want anyone to prevent us from being with him or her. This kind of love can be described as a prison, where we lock up our beloved and create only suffering for him or her. The one who is loved is deprived of freedom--of the right to be him or herself and enjoy life. This kind of love cannot be described as maitri or karuna. It is only the willingness to make use of the other person in order to satisfy our own needs." "When you have sexual energy that makes you feel unhappy, as though you are losing your inner peace, you should know how to practice so that you do not do things that will bring suffering to other people or yourself. We have to learn about this. In Asia, we say there are three sources of energy--sexual, breath, and spirit. Tinh, sexual energy, is the first. When you have more sexual energy than you need, there will be an imbalance in your body and in your being. You need to know how to reestablish the balance, or you may act irresponsibly. According to Taoism and Buddhism, there are practices to help reestablish that balance, such as meditation or martial arts [or yoga?]. You can learn the ways to channel your sexual energy into deep realization in the domains of art and meditation." Id. at 34-35.).

MINDFULNESS AS A BRAKE ON HABIT ENERGY

Thich Nhat Hanh, Beyond the Self: Teachings on the Middle Way (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2010) ("Our habit energy is what causes us to repeat the same behavior thousands of times. Habit energy pushes us to run, to always be doing something, to be lost in thoughts of the past or the future and to blame others for our suffering. And that energy does not allow us to be peaceful and happy in the present moment." "The practice of mindfulness helps us to recognize that habitual energy. Every time  we can recognize the habit energy in us, we are able to stop and to enjoy the present moment. The energy of mindfulness is the best energy to help us embrace our habit energy and transform it." Id. at 43. From the backcover: "Beyond the Self is Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's original translation of and commentary on one of Buddhism's central teachings, The Sutra on the Middle Way. With thoughtfulness and compassion, Nhat Hanh shows us how we can avoid extreme views and transcend dualistic thinking, and in doing so transform the way we see the world. With a whole section devoted to practical application of the sutra, Nhat Hanh suggests that instead we find equanimity by making peace with the moment that exists. When we practice according to the Middle Way, we don't exclude anything, even our dissatisfaction and suffering. Nhat Hanh reminds us that when we embrace all experiences and aspects of life, we can find tranquility.").

IDEAS MATTER: THE MORE (SOURCES) THE MERRIER

George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2012) ("'Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity,' Turing explained.  'Intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning.  These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct (leaving aside the question what is meant by 'correct'). '  Turing saw the role of ingenuity as 'aiding the intuition,' not replacing it.  'In pre-Godel times it was thought by some that it would probably be possible to carry this programme to such a point that all the intuitive judgments of mathematics could be replaced by a finite number of these rules,' he concluded.  'The necessity for intuition would then be entirely eliminated.'  What if intuition could be replaced by ingenuity, and ingenuity, in turn, by brute force search?  'We are always able to obtain from the rules of a formal logic a method of enumerating the propositions proved by its means.  We then imagine that all proofs take the form of a search through this enumeration for the theorem for which a proof is desired.  In this way ingenuity is replaced by patience.'  No amount of patience, however, was enough.  Ingenuity and intuition were here to stay."  Id. at 252.  Also see William Poundstone, "Unleashing the Power," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/6/2012; and Jim Holt, "How the Computers Exploded," NYRB, 6/7/2012.).


Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) ("It seems worth considering not only how [certain] endeavors failed, but what those failures represented.  Innovators make different kinds of mistakes.  The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception.  It was an instance where technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere--in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever-- that solves a particular problem better.  It was perhaps understandable moreover, that a breakthrough in the creation of pure glass fiber wouldn't come from an organization such as Bell Labs, where materials scientists were experts on the behaviors of metals, polymers, and semiconductor crystals.  Rather, it would come from a company like Corning, with over a century of expertise in glass and ceramics."  "Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgment, though.  In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not.  It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it's too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late.  Or because of all those reasons combined.  The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment."  Id. at 262.  Also see Walter Isaacson, "Inventing the Future," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/8/2012.).


Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)  "There is, of course, something very appealing about brainstorming.  It's always nice to be saturated in positive feedback, which is why most participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contributions to the group.  The whiteboard has been filed with free associations, the output of the unchained imagination.  At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity."  "There's just one problem with brainstorming: it doesn't work.  Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, summarizes the science: 'Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. ' . . ."  "The reason brainstorming is so ineffective returns us to the importance of criticism and debate. . . . The only way to maximize group creativity--to make the whole more than the sum of its parts--is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes.  In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces its cost.  When you believe that your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation.  We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong." [] "'Most research and advice suggest that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions.  Freewheeling is welcome; don't be afraid to say anything that comes to mind.  However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other's ideas."  []  "[W]hile the brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, people in the debate condition were far more creative.  On average, they generated nearly 25 percent more ideas.  The most telling part of the study, however, came after the groups had been disbanded.  That's when researchers asked each of the subjects if he or she had any more ideas . . . that had been triggered by the earlier conversation.  While people in the minimal and brainstorming conditions produced, on average, two additional ideas, those in the debate condition produced more than seven,  Nemeth summarizes her results: 'While the instruction 'Do not critize' is often cited as the [most] important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy.  Our finding show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition." []  "According to Nemeth, the reason criticism leads to more new ideas is that it encourages us to fully engage with the work of others.  We think about their concepts because we want to improve them; it's the imperfection that leads us to really listen.  (And isn't that the point of a group?  If we're not here to make one another better, then why are we here?) in contrast when everybody is 'right'--when all new ideas are equally useful, as in a brainstorming session--we stay within ourselves  There is no incentive to think about someone else's thoughts or embrace unfamiliar possibilities.  And so the problems remains impossible.  The absence of criticism has kept us all in the same place."  Id. at 158-161.  Needless to say, if criticism and debate are crucial to having "more new ideas," then organizations with top-down, authoritarian approach to management, where criticism and debate are viewed as evidencing a lack of team or institutional spirit, are likely to generate fewer new ideas, fewer solutions, fewer innovations and less creativity.  Without open and honest debate and criticism, the result is essentially groupthink.  Consensus reached in the absence of open and honest criticism is not real or true 'consensus;' it is an illusion of consensus.  'True consensus' occurs when, after the participants have made every reasonable effort to identify all characterizations of the problem/issue and all possible solutions to same, the participants are able to freely converge on an acceptable joint decision.  Also see Christopher Chabris, "Boggle the Mind," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/13/2012.).  

BARE ATTENTION

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness (New York: Broadway, 1998, 1999) ("The Buddhist way of working with the mind has profound implications for how we as individuals think about change.  In Western theories, the hope is always that emptiness can be healed, that if the character is developed or the trauma resolved that the background feelings will diminish.  If we can make the ego stronger, the expectation is that emptiness will go away.  In Buddhism, the approach is reversed.  Focus on the emptiness, the dissatisfaction, and the feelings of imperfection, and the  character will get stronger.  Learn how to tolerate nothing and your mind will be at rest.  Psychotherapy tends to focus on the personal melodrama, exploring its origins and trying to clean up its mess.  Buddhism seeks, instead, to purify the insight of emptiness." "Emptiness is vast and astonishing, the Buddhist approach insists; it does not have to be toxic.  When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of the truth.   If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way. . . .'  Id. at 19-20.).

Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust For Life: Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy (New York: Gotham Books, 2005) ("In Buddhist psychology, the root cause of fixation is the assumption of thingness' in persons or objects that, from a Buddhist way of thinking, have no inherent, or ultimate, identity.  It is the mind's tendency to become obsessed with this 'thingness,' to see sources of pleasure as more real than they actually are and to chase them with a proliferation of thoughts and feelings. . . .  But this concretization of reality is a mistake.  People are not objects, and, in the Buddhist way of thinking, even objects are not objects. People and things do not exist in and of themselves in any kind of lasting way.  They are all ultimately impermanent, insubstantial and, if we are not very careful, disappointing.  When we try to control them, so that they will meet our needs, they tend to rebel."  "Desire . . . springs from a place of incompleteness.  It is natural reaction to the human predicament.  No one, after all, is self-sufficient.  In searching outside ourselves for wholeness, however, we set ourselves up for clinging.  We assume that solutions all lie in the external: that if we can just be united with that person or this thing that we will be complete, our problems over. . . .  Ever seeking our lost half, we spend our lives trying to resurrect a lost unity, searching for a wholeness, or union, that might bring us back to ourselves.  This is a dangerous fantasy because it overempowers the object of desire, setting it up as capable of providing a satisfaction that is not in its nature.  The path of desire requires something more (or something less) than an imagined unity with the beloved."  Id. at 97-98.).

Mark Epstein, Psychotherapy Without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007) ("Those personality types prone to pathological emptiness who begin Buddhist meditation practices designed to uncover Buddhist emptiness face several potential pitfalls,  In the borderline personality, for instance, what is most lacking is the synthetic or integrative capacity of the ego to consolidate and maintain multiple, conflicting self/object representations.  The relationship of the self with internalized object relationships is distorted by the defense of splitting in which all good and all bad representations of the same person cannot be integrated. . . . The mindfulness practices actually strengthen the synthetic capacities of the ego [] by training the observing ego to attend to whatever arises without clinging to condemnation, thus allowing conflicting images to present themselves just as they are. . . . However, if the insights practices into emptiness of the ideal ego are attempted prematurely, there are real risks of the loss of the good self-images with which it may be fused, with the preservation and exacerbation of the all-bad, destructive light into depersonalization or identity loss.  This would undoubtedly be absolutely terrifying, and this kind of scenario is not uncommon among populations f Western students who undertake intensive practice." Id. at 65.).

Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1995, 1996) ("At my first meditation retreat . . . I was amazed to find myself sitting in the dining hall with an instant judgment about each of the hundred other meditators, based on nothing besides how they looked while eating.  Instinctively, I was searching out whom I liked and whom I did not: I had a comment for each one.  The seemingly simple task of noting the physical sensations of the in and out breath had the unfortunate effect of revealing just how out of control my everyday mind really was."  "Meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath: comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices.  Much of our interior life is characterized by this kind of primary process, almost infantile, way of thinking: 'I like this. I don't like that.  She hurt me.  How can I get that?  More of this, no more of that.' . . .  Much of our inner dialogue, rather than the 'rather' secondary process that is usually associated with the thinking mind, is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist.  None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more." "Buddhist mediation takes this untrained everyday mind as its natural stating point, and it requires the development of one particular attentional posture--of naked or bare, attention.  Defined as 'the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,'  bare attention takes this unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything by by observing the mind, emotions, and body the way they are. . . . "  Id. at 109-110.).

READING PHILOSOPHY

Steven Nadler, Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Steven Nadler presents a collection of essays on the problem of causation in seventeenth-century philosophy. Occasionalism is the doctrine, held by a number of early modern Cartesian thinkers, that created substances are devoid of any true causal powers, and that God is the only real causal agent in the universe. All natural phenomena have God as their direct and immediate cause, with natural things and their states serving only as 'occasions' for God to act. Rather than being merely an ad hoc, deus ex machina response to the mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes to his followers, as it has often been portrayed in the past, occasionalism is in fact a full-blooded, complex, and philosophically interesting account of causal relations. These essays examine the philosophical, scientific, theological, and religious themes and arguments of occasionalism, as well as its roots in medieval views on God and causality.").

Charles Parson, From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012).

LUST

Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness, translated from the Japanese by G. B. Sansom (New York: Cosimo Classics, 1911, 2005) ("Of all things that lead astray the heart of man there is naught like fleshy lust. What a weakly thing is this heart of ours." Id. at 6. Kenko, 1283-1352, was a Buddhist priest, scholar and poet.).

I WILL NOT LET MY ANGER DESTROY ME

Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living, with drawings by Mayumi Oda (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990) ("Breathing in, I know that anger makes me ugly. / Breathing out, I do not want to be contorted by anger. / Breathing in, I know I must take care of myself. / Breathing out, I know loving kindness is the only answer." Id. at 66. "In anger, we tend to think of the other person as the source of our suffering. We see evil in him or her. 'He is cruel.' 'She oppresses me.' 'He wants to destroy me!' In fact, it is our anger that destroys us." Id. at 66.). 

WALK LIKE A BULL ELEPHANT

Sherab Chodzin Kohn, The Awakened One: A Life of the Buddha (Shambhala Dragon Editions) (Boston: Shambhala, 2000).


If you can find a trustworthy companion
With whom to walk, both virtuous and steadfast,
Then walk with him content and mindfully....
If you can find no trustworthy companion...
Then as a king who leaves a vanquished kingdom,
Walk like a tusker [bull elephant] in the woods alone.
Better it is to walk alone:
There is no fellowship with fools.
Walk alone, harm none, and know no conflict;
Be like a tusker in the woods alone.


Id. at 92 (citations omitted).

WHAT IS BUDDHISM?

Damien Keown, Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford & New York; Oxford U. Press, 1996).

THE SHALLOWNESS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, with a revised Introduction and translated from the Japanese by William Scott Wilson (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2012) ("To hate injustice and stand on righteousness is a difficult thing.  Furthermore, to think that being righteous is the best one can do and to do one's utmost to be righteous will, on the contrary, bring many mistakes. The Way is in a higher place than righteousness.  This is very difficult to discover, but it is the highest wisdom. When seen from this standpoint, things like righteous are rather shallow. If one does not understand this on his own, it cannot be known. There is a method of getting to this Way, however, even if one cannot discover it by himself. This is found in consultation with others. Even a person who has not attained this Way sees others from the side. It is like the saying from the game of go: 'He who sees from the side has eight eyes.' The saying, 'Thought by thought we see our mistakes,' also means that the highest Way is in discussion with others. Listening to the old stories and reading books are for the purpose of sloughing off one's own discrimination and attaching oneself to that of the ancients." Id. at 11-12. "A certain swordsman in his declining years said the following: 'In one's life, there are levels in the pursuit of study. . . . " "But there is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain Way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He has no thoughts of pride but with self-abasement knows the Way to the end. It is said that Master Yagyu once remarked, "I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself.: Throughout your life advance daily, becoming more skillful than yesterday, more skillful than today. This is never-ending.'" Id. at 12-13. From the "Introduction": "According to Zen Buddhism,  it is our sense of self that hinders true freedom and becomes a fixation without our being aware of it. Thinking of our 'self' as being a distinct entity, we separate ourselves from our environment, and thus create a dualism that bifurcates reality; from thence it is always 'me' and 'mine' on the one side and the rest of the world on the other. . . ." "Buddhism brings the good news that such a self does not really exist, or that it has no reality of its own. It is simply an illusion fed by memory, culture and the five senses. Further, Zen Buddhism holds that this illusion may be swept away through the discipline of meditation, or zazen. This requires courage as well as concentration, for after the ego is gone one finds that the self no longer exists, and one has died what Zen calls the Great Death, daishi. . . With that death, though, we have at last become free." "This is the substance of the Hagakure, and the meaning of its most famous but least understood passage: 'The Way of the Samurai is found in death. . . . If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.' Zen teaches us that we should live as though not only our bodies but our egos were already dead. . . ." Id. at xxi-xxii.).

Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Spirit of the Samurai (Boston & London: Shambhala Library, 2005) (From the bookjacket: "There are eight virtues of Bushido, the code of the samurai: justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control. Therese virtues comprise the essence of Japanese cultural beliefs, which are still present today." "Inazo Notobe . . . explores the ethical code of the samurai and contextualizes it within Japan's traditions of Buddhism, Shintoism, and Confucianism. He then compares and contrast Eastern values with those present in Western societies. . . .").

Thomas Cleary, ed. & trans., Training the Samurai Mind: A Bushido Sourcebook (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2009) (Nakae Toju: "In the Book of the Shadow of the White Flag it says that a skillful attack cannot match warlike soldiers, warlike soldiers cannot beat elite knights, elite knights cannot match a disciplined system, a disciplined system cannot oppose humanity and justice. The sense of this statement should be thoroughly savored." Id. at 41. Kaibara Ekken: "When among people, if anyone is impolite or insulting to you, as long as it is not a dishonor you should put up with it, pretending you didn't hear it. You wouldn't really want to get into an angry argument with that ignoramus." "However, if he doesn't understand this and arrogantly looks down on you thinking he has shamed you then, considering the concern that he might embarrass you again another day, call him out where no one's around and rebuke him." Id. at 71-72.).

Daidoji Yuzan, Busoshoshinshu: The Warrior's Primer, translated from the Japanes by Willliam Scott Wilson, illustrated by Gary Miller Haskins, edited by Jack Vaughn (Burbank, CA: Ohara Publications, 1984) ("MAKE LIFE REPLETE, CONSTANTLY THINKING OF DEATH: The man who would be a warrior considers it his most basic intention to keep death always in mind, day and night, from the time he picks up his chopsticks in celebrating his morning meal on New Year's Day to the evening of the last day of the year. When one constantly keeps death in mind, both loyalty and filial piety are realized, myriad evils and disasters are avoided, one is without illness and mishap, and lives out a long life. In addition, even his character is improved. Such are the may benefits of this act." Id. at 19. "GOSSIP AND BACK-TALK ARE INEXCUSABLE: It is essential that a warrior in the service of a lord has the prudence not to gossip about the wrong-doings he observed concerning his companions. This is because one should be circumspect enough to consider that he himself is no saint or sage, and that over a long period of time has certainly made mistakes and had misunderstandings." Id. at 33.).


Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind: Writings From a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman, translated from the Japanese by William Scott Wilson (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2012) ("The sword, the spiritual exercise, and the unfettered mind are the pivots upon which these essays turn. With effort and patience, the writer reminds us, they should become one. We are to practice, practice with whatever we may have at hand, until the enemies of our own anger, hesitation, and greed are cut down with the celerity and decisiveness of the stroke of a sword." Id. at ix. "[Takuan's] life may be summed up by his own admonition, 'If you follow the present-day world, you will turn your back on the Way; if you would not turn your back on the Way, do not follow the world.'" Id. at xiii. From "The Clear Sound of Jewels": "A person may be as eloquent as a rushing steam, but if his mind has not been enlightened and if he has not seen into his own true nature, he will not be someone to be relied upon. We should be able to discern this quickly from a person's behavior." Id. at 52-53.).

AMERICAN HUBRIS; OR, ON BEING INFORMED ON AMERICAN FOREIGN AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICIES

Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Knopf, 2004) ("'Never apologize, never explain' may be a good motto for heroes in Western adventure sagas, but it doesn't work as well for writers, and especially for writers on American foreign policy. A book like this one needs generous helpings both of apology and of explanation. American foreign policy may be the most complex subject in the world. Economics, political science, history and the philosophy of history, culture, religion, the nature of human natures: American foreign policy is studied in great detail by professionals and scholars, it must ultimately be debated and decided by tens of millions of voters who have neither the time nor perhaps the inclination to immerse themselves in briefing papers, task force reports, and long scholarly tests." Id. at 8. Still, do we not have to make the effort to so inform ourselves. With liberal arts education in retreat, will American be capable of informing themselves even if they wish to do so? “We are probably seeing the beginnings of the breakup of the learned guilds—the doctors, lawyers, and tenured university professors who monopolized the production and distribution of knowledge and certain high-end services in the old economy. Consumers can write their will using cheap software or on the Internet; the fee-for-service model of health care-care delivery is under attack on all fronts. As the economic pressures on higher education grow, the tenure system is coming under increasing pressure.” Id. at 101. "Arabian Fascism like the European Fascism of the twentieth century comes in two forms: secular and religious. Some of the European fascist movements, especially in Portugal, France, and Spain, were linked to parts of the Catholic church. Others, like the Nazis, were anti-Christian and either secular or neo-pagan. In the same way the totalitarian ideologies now tormenting the Muslim world include secular fascisms, like the Ba'ath party of Iraq, and the religious fascisms like that of Osama Bin Laden. Both movements believe in subordinating the rights and conscience of individuals and eliminating the independence of civil society in favor of a totalitarian politics to restore the exaggerated glories of a romanticized past. Both movements recognize no limits on the right of their leaders to command their followers to carry out lawless violence against innocent civilians. In European history, white was often the color of totalitarian movements claiming some kind of alignment with traditional religion--and people often spoke of a White Terror as opposed to the red Terror of the Jacobins and Communists. Extending this language to the Middle East makes it possible to refer to the fascism of groups like Al-Qaeda as White Fascism; the term Black Fascism can be used for the secular fascism of leaders like Saddam Hussein. Both forms of fascism are deadly enemies of freedom and peace, and the United States and its allies should oppose them both, but the core of the present battle in the Middle East is the fight against the White Fascism of the Al-Qaeda fanatics, not the Black Fascism of the radical Ba'athists." Id. at 176.).

Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq (New York: Doubleday, 2011) (How America got snookered into the War in Iraq. "History will also remember [Chalabi] as the great bluffer of Baghdad. Never has anyone parlayed such a weak hand into such a momentous outcome as he. . . . All he had was guile and his genius, and a single-minded determination to lure the world's last standing superpower into invading Iraq in a war of choice--to send its soldiers to fight and die and to spend upward of a trillion dollars of its national treasure--so that he could go home. . . ." "But for America, what Chalabi maneuvered us into may turn out to have been the biggest foreign policy disaster in a generation: an ill-planned, poorly executed preemptive war that employed torture and gave us the devastating images of Abu Ghraib prison, undermining the region's confidence in both our country's competence and moral authority. Perhaps the greatest irony of all, it fortified an ascendant Oran by eliminating its nemesis next door, Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime." Id. at 261-262.).

Jack Goldsmith, Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012) (Interesting read, especially the Chapter Five, "Warrior-Lawyers". "Some military officials, too, think lawyers have too much influence over command decisions, 'lawyers are much too involved in the execution of our operations at war,' says Jack Keane, an influential former four-star general who, among his many accomplishments, was on of the intellectual architects of the Surge. 'They manage to embed themselves right in the middle of our operational considerations and this process is fundamentally flawed. General guidance in rules of engagement is fine but the specifics of what we're getting down to not only constrains the leaders who are executing the mission on the ground and in the air, in terms of close combat, but it also, I think, has a limiting effect on operational and tactical commanders in restraining them.' Even General Petraeus, who admires and relies heavily on lawyers, cautions that they can 'constrain the initiative [that is] essential to military success.' Lawyers can be 'surprise, surprise,' overly legalistic,' he says, adding that 'operators sometimes have to remind lawyers that these are binary decisions for our troops and they involve decisions that have to be made in the blink of an eye--either life or death for that individual and potentially for the folks that are at the far end of what it is the individual is about to launch down-range.' Martins too recorded the hazards that lawyering poses to initiative and effective fighting in his influential rules-of-engagement article, and he frequently underlines the point." 'Risk aversion, loss of initiative, and intrusion on the commander's prerogative are undeniable costs of a law-dominated military. But there is another side to the story: a properly run, law-dominated military also garners enormous power from the constraint of law. Just as Martin's infantrymen could not accomplish much without the discipline of rules, neither can the U.S. military more generally. The Department of Defense is in many ways the largest organization on the planet. It requires many laws and directives to function, to ensure weapons and personnel arrive on time, with the right equipment, at the right place, and are employed effectively on the battlefield. It also needs laws and directives to ensure that the commands of the President and Secretary of Defense, and the requirements of statutes and treaties, work their way throughout the bureaucracy to the other side of the world, where Sergeant Schwartz follows and implements them. Accomplishing purposeful and constrained behavior in wartime in a large military organization is very hard to do. But it is more vital than ever. For in an era of global media and instant criticism, what Sergeant Schwartz does on the other side of the world can have devastating effects on the entire war-fighting effort. Law and lawyers, when they work properly, keep these events to a minimum." Id. at 144-145.

Jane Kramer, Lone Patriot: The Short Career of An American Militiaman (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002) (Of course, when it comes to terrorism foreign and domestic policy are not that far apart. "Nothing about hate has changed. The Patriots who inspired Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 still have most of the same enemies Osama bin laden had when he organized the murder of 3,061 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania six years later, and if you open their Web site you'll find that most of them still say so. Psychiatrists claim that groups like the Washington State Militia can have, at least in theory, a socializing function, that they can discipline paranoia, and by extension paranoiacs, by focusing on a delusion everyone in the group shares, that they can set perimeters on delusion and thus permit some otherwise dangerously capricious people to live the rest of their lives as useful and harmless citizens. Maybe. John [Pitner], of course, had told me the same thing. I used to wonder if John was right--if apart from his own evident delusion he was actually quite shrewed. The question that haunts me now, in a very changed world, is this: Was it the militia that kept John from terrorism, or simply the fact that he wasn't shrewed enough or smart enough or organized enough or rich enough to do the things he dreamed of?" Id. at 254-255. "In Lone Patriot, Kramer . . . turns to America with an enthralling portrait of the commander-in-chief of an erstwhile Patriot army called the Washington State Militia." "In 1995 Kramer made the first of what would be many trips to Whatcom County, Washington, to talk to John Pitner and some of the veterans of Alpha One, his 'leadership' squad. Through their voices, Pitner's in particular, Kramer tells the story of a movement that surfaced in American in the nineties, as the millennium approached, and has continued--its resolve, if anything, strengthen by the events of the past year [i.e. the al-Qaede attacks of 9/11]--into the new century. Her powerful evocations of Whatcom County could easily describe any number of rural communities in the Pacific Northwest today--a place of refuge to a strange assortment of conspiracy theorists, armed 'constitutionalists,' white supremacists, county secessionists, Freemen, and Christian fanatics, and to the kind of groups that survive on their discontent.").

John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2010) (From the bookjacket: "Ever since the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the prospect of nuclear annihilation has haunted the modern world. And since September 11, 2001, the view that nuclear terrorism is the most serious threat to the security of the United States or, for that matter, of the world has been virtually universal." "But as John Mueller reveals in this eye-opening, compellingly argued, and very reassuring book, our obsession with nuclear weapons is unsupported by history, scientific fact, or logic. Examining the entire atomic era, Mueller boldly contends that nuclear weapons have had little impact on history. Although they have inspired overwrought policies and distorted spending priorities, things generally would have turned out much the same if they had never been invented. For the most part they have proved to be militarily useless, and a key reason so few countries have taken them up is they are a spectacular waste of money and scientific talent. Equally important, Atomic Obsession reveals why current anxieties about terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons are essentially baseless: there are a host of practical and organizational difficulties that make their likelihood of success almost vanishingly small. Mueller . . . goes even further, maintaining that our efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons have produced more suffering and violence than the bombs themselves, and that the proliferation of weapons, while not necessarily desirable, is unlikely to be a major danger or to accelerate.").

John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: The Free Press, 2006) ("Upon discovering that Weeki Wachee Springs, his Florida roadside water park, had been included on the Department of Homeland Security's list of over 80,000 potential terrorist targets, its marketing and promotion manager, John Athanason, turned reflective. 'I can't imagine bin Laden trying to blow up the mermaids,' he mused, 'but with terrorists, who knows what they're thinking. I don't want to think like a terrorist, but what if the terrorists try to poison the water at Weeki Wachee Springs?' " "Whatever his imaginings, however, he went on to report that his enterprise had quickly and creatively risen to the occasion--or seized the opportunity. They were working to get a chunk of the counterterrorism funds allocated to the region by the well-endowed, anxiety-provoking, ever-watchful Department of Homeland Security." "Which is the greater threat: terrorism, or our reaction against it? The Weeki Wachee experience illustrates the problem. A threat that is real but likely to prove to be of limited scope had been massively, perhaps even fancifully, inflated to produce widespread and unjustified anxiety. This process had then led to wasteful, even self-parodic expenditures and policy overreactions, ones that not only very often do more harm and cost more money than anything the terrorists have accomplished, but play into their hands." Id. at 1. From the bookjacket: "Why have there been no terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11? It is ridiculously easy for a single person with a bomb-filled backpack, or a single explosives-laden automobile, to launch an attack. So why hasn't it happened? The answer is surely not the Department of Homeland Security, which cannot stop terrorists form entering the country, legally or otherwise. It is surely not the Iraq war, which has stroked the hatred of Muslim extremists around the world and wasted many thousands of lives. Terrorist attacks have been regular events for many years--usually killing handfuls of people, occasionally more than that." "Is it possible that there is a simple explanation for the peaceful American homefront? Is it possible that there are no al-Qaeda terrorists here? Is it possible that the war on terror has been a radical overreaction to a rare event? Consider: 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, and more than 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned--yet there has not been a single conviction for a terrorist crime in America. A handful of plots--some deadly, some intercepted--have plagued Europe and elsewhere, and even so, the death toll has been modest." "We have gone to war in two countries and killed tens of thousands of people. We have launched a massive domestic wiretapping program and created vast databases of information once considered private. Politicians and pundits have berated us about national security and patriotic duty, while encroaching our freedoms and sending thousands of young men off to die." "It is time to consider the hypothesis that dare not speak its name: we have wildly overreacted. Terrorism has been used by murderous groups for decades, yet even including 9/11, the odds of an American being killed by international terrorism are microscopic. In general, international terrorism doesn't do much damage when considered in almost any reasonable context." "The capacity of al-Qaeda or any similar group to do damage in the United States pales in comparison to the capacity other dedicated enemies, particularly international Communism, have possessed in the past. Lashing out at the terrorist threat is frequently an exercise in self-flagellation because it is usually more expensive than the terrorist attack itself and because it gives the terrorists exactly what they are looking for. Much, probably most, of the money and effort expended on counterterrorism since 2001 (and before, for that matter) has been wasted." "The terrorism industry and its allies in the White House and Congress have preyed on our fears and caused enormous damage. It is time to rethink the entire enterprise and spend much smaller amounts on only those things that do matter: intelligence, law enforcement, and disruption of radical groups overseas. Above all, it is time to stop playing into the terrorists' hands, by fear-mongering and helping spread terror itself." Though published in 2006, the arguments--after adjusting some of the numbers and taking into accounts events of the last 6six to seven years--still hold.).

Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002) ("Power in the global information age is becoming less tangible and less coercive, particularly among the advanced countries, but most of the world does not consist of postindustrial societies, and that limits the transformation of power. Much of Africa and the Middle East remains locked in preindustrial agricultural societies with weak institutions and authoritarian rulers. Other countries, such as China, India, and Brazil, are industrial economies analogous to parts of the West in the mid-twentieth century. In such a variegated world, all three sources of power--military, economic, and soft--remain relevant, although to different degrees in different relationships. However, if current economic and social trends continue, leadership in the information revolution and soft power will become more important in the mix. . . ." "No country is better endowed than the United States in all three dimensions--military, economic, and soft power. Our greatest mistake in such a world would be to fall into one-dimensional analysis and to believe that investing in military power alone will ensure our strength." Id.at at 11-12. Which is pretty much what G. W. Bush did! UGH! "Other things being equal, the United States is well placed to remain the leading power in world politics well into the twenty-first century or beyond. This prognosis depends upon assumptions that can be spelled out. For example, it assume that the long-term productivity of the American economy will be sustained [oops!], that American society will not decay [oops!], that the United States will maintain its military strength but not become overmiltarized [??], that Americans will not become so unilateral and arrogant in their strength that they squander the nation's considerable fund of soft power [oops!], that there will not be some catastrophic series of events that profoundly transform American attitudes in an isolationist direction [?], and that Americans will define their national interest in a broad and farsighted way that incorporates global interests [oops]. Each of these assumptions can be questioned, but they currently seem more plausible than their alternations [really?] If the assumptions hold, America will continue to be number one, but even so, in this global information age, number one ain't gonna be what it used to be. To succeed in such a world, America must not only maintain its hard power but understand its soft power and how to combine the two in the pursuit of national and global interests." Id. at 171.).

Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (As Parsi notes, quoting Albert Einstein, "You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time." Id. at 1. That pretty much sums up the trouble of America's tormented and dangerous relationship with Iran. Who is responsible for this mess is, in many ways, the central theme of this short, but thoughtful book. "[S]anctions neither complement diplomacy nor provide an alternative to engagement. Rather than being an alternative policy, sanctions have become an alternative to policy. If diplomacy is pursued again, it must succeed for the sake of resolving the conflict, not for the sake of creating an impetus for more sanctions. While sanctions can potentially play a role during specific phases of an engagement policy, a sanctions-centric policy that places diplomacy on the margins is unlikely to succeed. The opposite is more likely to yield results--that is, a policy centered on diplomacy whereby sanctions can be used on the margins as one of many instruments rather than as the bedrock of of the policy." Id. at 235-236.).

Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2011) ("Bad foreign policy has numerous possible ingredients, but among the more important presumably are the images that policymakers hold of the foreign situations to which their policies are a response. Those images include the policymakers' perception of current reality, their understanding of the forces and dynamics at play, and usually their sense of where the events in question are heading. The whole package is a construct that, whatever its origins, is tied more closely to the decision maker's mind than to the outside world that the decision maker believes it represents. It is accordingly more appropriate to call this construct an image rather than knowledge." "In one sense, there has been plenty of attention to this ingredient in discussions of U.S. policy. . . . But most of the anguish has an extremely narrow focus that overlooks the most important inputs to the images policymakers hold and how images actually shape policy, if they shape it at all. That narrow focus has been on what are termed 'intelligence failures' and on the need to fix or reform intelligence. Narrowing the focus even more, intelligence gets equated with the output of certain elements of the U.S. government that have the word intelligence in their names or that have the gathering of intelligence as their primary mission." "This very constricted form of attention to the causes of misguided policy stems in part from how the making of foreign and security policy is supposed to work. The textbook model of the policy process involves decision makers dispassionately reflecting on the information and analysis available to them--the principal source being an equal dispassionate intelligence service--and then selecting a course of action based on that reflection." "The narrow focus of attention stems at least as much from emotion and public psychology as it does from textbooks. We like to attribute woebegone wars and shocking surprise attacks to the shortcomings of intelligence services because this explanation is easily understandable and because it offers the comforting prospect that by fixing such shortcomings, we can prevent comparable calamities from occurring. It would be far less comforting to conclude that mistaken images underlying failed policies had sources less susceptible to repair, that relevant misperceptions resided more in our own heads or the heads of political leaders we elected than in unelected bureaucracies, or that some of the most important things we did not know were unknowable to anyone on our side, even if we had the most exemplary intelligence service." "These tendencies are especially marked for Americans. . . . If the United States could win world wars, put a man on the moon, and do all the other marvelous and difficult things it has accomplished, then according to reason it should be able to perform just as well the task of determining what is going on in other countries." "The tendency toward exceptionalsims--the idea that the United States is not only good at many things, but also better than anyone else--contributes to this pattern. This tendency obscures inconsistency between how other countries are believed to form their images of the outside world and how America is believed to form its. Many Americans see nothing contradictory in believing that foreigners are prisoners of parochial biases, but that they themselves are not." Id. at 2-3. READ THIS BOOK!! It is relevant not just to how we think--or don't think-- and how we groupthink about foreign policy and national security, but how we think and problem-solve generally. For instance, are not we all often dazzle by the "new"? "The bias toward exaggeration of newness extends beyond the masses to the intelligentsia and chattering classes. Commentaries and thus the commentators who write them get noticed insofar as they are perceived as conveying new thoughts about new issues, new threats, and new strategies needed to meet them. Observations about what has not changed are less likely to sell. The themes of newness in international affairs and of how the United States and its intelligence community must adapt to the new has been repeated so many times that it now sounds very old." Id. at 208.).

Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of The New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011) ("In practice, most SAR [Suspicious Activity Report] reports--and the names of the people included in them--don't go anywhere; they remain in the uncertain middle and just sit in the database, which feeds into the debate over the privacy implications or retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and residents who have not been charged with anything." "Most of the FBI agents who have doubts about the system won't publicly say so, given that their views are contrary to official policy. But if you asked the question another way, whether more terrorism cases come about as a result of this digital dragnet or from more focused, old-fashioned agent work, the agents responded like Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore division. Talking about the Baltimore suspect in the attempt to bomb the military recruitment center, I asked him whether the new technology had helped crack the case. 'This was good, old-fashioned police work by a lot of different police agencies coming together.' 'Okay, so not so heavy on the technology?' I asked. 'That's correct.' Still, McFeely defended the large database. 'We need it because you never know,' he said. 'And it's that one question mark that is out there.' We need it because you never know is the answer to so many questions about the size, expense, and effectiveness of Top Secret America. But is that really an answer? 'You never know' was the same as saying that all the spending, all the effort, even all the waste was worth it because, well, it might stop one attack. Nowhere else in American life has that kind of logic been an acceptable answer, except perhaps during the cold war, when a first strike by the Soviet Union could have resulted in mutual obliteration." "In every other arena, more rational cost-benefit calculations prevail. . . . " "But if someone is taking pictures of a bridge in some city and a citizen reports it, it will probably end up in the FBI's database . . . If there's no other information connecting any of that to even a whiff of something suspicious, 'that name will lie dormant there' until the same person 'at a later time takes a picture of another bridge across the country or starts taking pictures of the gates at Langley [CIA's headquarters]'. . . Id. at 149-150. From the bookjacketL After 9/11, the United States government embarked on an unparalleled effort to protect America. The result has been calamitous. This new top secret world is so vast that nobody knows how many people it employs or how much taxpayer money is spent on it. Nobody knows how much work is being duplicated or even how to assess the effectiveness of all its programs. Over 850,000 people--an average of more than seventeen thousand per state--now have top secret security clearance, and more than twelve hundred top secret government organizations exists across America to assist with the effort to find and capture terrorists overseas and at home. A private force of nearly two thousand for-profit corporate contractors has made billions of dollars by charging more than the federal government would have spent by doing the worl on its own. Worst of all, after ten years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that a system put in place to keep America safe may in fact be putting us in even greater danger--but we don't know because it's all top seccret." "In Top Secret America . . . Dana Priest and William Arkin lift the curtain on this clandestine universe. From the companies and agencies keeeping track of American citizens, to the military commanders building America's first 'top seccret city,' and a hidden army within the U.S. military more secret than the CIA, this new national security octopus hass become an autonomus, self-sustaining 'fourth branch' of government, one so classified the public never knew it existed--until know.").

Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2011) ("There is an old military saying that amateurs do strategy while the pros do logistics. Likewise, the lawyers often are in charge of developments in national security policy, and this was evident during the final years of the Bush administration and the first years of the Obama administration, as the government struggled to cope with the dramatic emergence of the terrorist threat on the Internet. The military, the intelligence community, and law enforcement agencies had battled to near exhaustion over whether threatening sites should be attacked or monitored. To end the interagency battles, what finally emerged, accoring to a four-star officer involved in the negotiations, was a legal document, the Trilateral Memorandum of Agreement, which set up a process to 'deconflict' these dispute among the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community. This agreement put in place a formal, almost judicial system for arbitrating disputes. Under the classified arbitration system, if one of the military's regional combatant commanders proposed attacking an Internet site, the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies could then articulate their views, usually in opposition to taking down the sites. If disagreement remained, the case would be sent to General Alexander at Cyber Command, who would settle the dispute, although the loser could appeal to the National Security Council and even to the president. If it was a terrorist cyberissue, as opposed to a threat from a nation-state, then the National Counterterrorism Center could weigh in before the National Security Council reviewed the dispute. Alexander wrote to Congress in late 2010 to report that after years of vicious feuding about the rules of the road for attacking or monitoring a terror Web site, a formal accord for settling disputes had finally been reached." Id. at 145-146.).

William Shawcross, Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) ('In 2010 the Obama Administration ordered the targeted killing, by unmanned Predator drone aircraft, of a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, then residing in Yemen. This one man--and the decision to try to kill him--showed most graphically how the continuing war against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups had changed. (The Bush administration was not known ever to have targeted an American citizen for killing. But then it had never confronted a major Al Qaeda operational leader who was a U.S. citizen)." Id. at 157. "The implications of this leaping technology are revolutionary--and frightening. . . ." "The ever-expanding range, intelligence, and firepower of drones raises myriad new questions of law and morality. They bring to the fore once again the Geneva Convention whose interpretation has so dominated the waging of the War on Terror. Dr. Singer has pointed out, 'The prevailing laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, were written in a year [1929] in which people listened to Al Jolson on 78 rpm records and the average house costs 7,400 dollars. Is it too much to ask them to regulate a twenty-first-century technology who is intentionally violating those laws by hiding out in a civilian house?' " "To which the answer is Yes--it is indeed too much to expect Geneva, as written, to cope. The Conventions have been under immense strain in recent decades, particularly since bin Laden declared war on America. The development and proliferation of drones will provide yet another reason to revisit and rewrite them." Id. at 161-162. Also, see Jack Goldsmith, "The Shadow of Nuremberg," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/22/2112.).

Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012) (Also see John Lewis Gaddis, "He Made It Look Easy, NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/22/2012.).

Hal Weitzman, Latin Lessons: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012).

Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From Chapter 1: Andrew J. Bacevich, 'Life at the Dawn of the American Century': "In short, what did the effort to forge an American Century--satisfying the ambitions expressed by Luce and the appetites of the millions who read his magazine--ultimately yield?" "The essays that follow, offered from a variety of vantage points, reflect on these questions. Surveying a considerable swath of U. S. history--in some cases reaching back well before the publication date of Luce's essays--they are, for the most part, critical rather than celebratory. The aim here is not to prop up American self-esteem. Before history can teach, it must challenge and even discomfit. This collection takes stock of U. S. achievements and failures over several crucial decades. It acknowledges the nation;s penchant for oversized aspirations--for attempting big things in a big way--but also confronts evidence of severe myopia and even blindness. And it assesses the consequences that ensure, both intended and unforeseen, for the United States and for the rest of the world. Taken as a whole, the result serves as a sort of dissenter's guide to the American Century." Id. at 1-14, 14. From Chapter 5: T. J. Jackson Lears, 'Pragmatic Realism versus the American Century': "As the Vietnam War unfolded, any realist worth the name had to challenge the hubris at the heart of the enterprise. This William Fulbright did in The Arrogance of Power (1966). 'America is the most fortunate of nations,' he wrote, implying that our preeminent position in the world was a product of luck rather than divine will.  Yet America was losing its perspective on what was within its capability to control and what lay beyond it.  Providential ideas reinforced illusions of omnipotence and infallibility. As Fulbright observed, in words that should be embossed in gold over the door to the Oval Office, 'power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations, to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake then, that is, in its own shining image.' " Id. at 82-120, 111. From Chapter 8: Walter LaFeber, 'Illusions of an American Century': "[S]ome observers concluded by 2010 that the supposed American Century was over." "Actually, it had never begun, certainly not in Luce's version.  Americans like to talk about their 'City on a Hill,' 'Manifest Destiny,' and 'American Century,' but they invariably choose facts that fit their patriotic predispositions and ignore those that do not--a tendency that corrupts some high school history texts as well as foreign policies." Id. at 158-186, 183.).

IT IS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT SIXTEEN YEARS AGO I DEPARTED 123 OCEAN PARK BLVD, SANTA MONICA, CA, TO MOVE TO NEW HAVEN, CT. UGH!.

Sarah C. Bancroft (curator), Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, with essays by Sarah C. Bancroft, Susan Landauer, & Peter Levitt, and with contributions by Anna Brouwer (Newport Beach, CA: Organge County Museum of Art: Munich, London & New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2011).

Were I only still this young.