Insipid Wheatfields (The News, Part II)

Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:

- "Rather than an impression of political possibility, an encounter with the news may usher in an impression of our nothingness in an unimprovable and fundamentally chaotic universe."

- "Before we despair at the calamities that apparently surround us on all sides, we should remember that the news is ultimately only one set of stories about what is happening out there, no more and no less."

- "It invites us to the conference table and into the parliament, it introduces us to the key players, then it shows us nothing but inexplicable delays, strange compromises and maddening evasions. It can feel as though we are daily being invited to watch helplessly while a close friend drowns behind a plate-glass window."

- "The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which house keys never go astray."

- "Here was a homogenizing force in danger of stamping out all the productive oddities of interior life and of turning the rich, idiosyncratic handcrafted kitchen gardens of the mind into rolling, mechanized, insipid wheatfields."

A New Planet in Our Minds (The News, Part I)

Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:

- "Yet for all its determined pursuit of the anomalous, the one thing the news skilfully avoids training its eye on is itself, and the predominant position it has achieved in our lives."

- "It fails to disclose that it does not merely report on the world, but is instead constantly at work crafting a new planet in our minds in line with its own often highly distinctive priorities."

- "Once our formal education is finished, the news is our teacher."

- "The news, however dire it may be and perhaps especially when it is at its worst, can come as a relief from the claustrophobic burden of living with ourselves, of forever trying to do justice to our own potential and of struggling to persuade a few people in our limited orbit to take our ideas and needs seriously."

- "What an achievement a moment of calm is now, what a minor miracle the ability to fall asleep or to talk undistracted with a friend - and what monastic discipline would be required to make us turn away from the maelstrom of news and listen for a day to nothing but the rain and our own thoughts."

- "News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are miniscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years - and that it would hence be often wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line."

A form suitable for direct propaganda

 At the novel's conclusion [Zabiba and the King, Saddam Hussein], a people's council debates about what sort of ruler should follow the king. "We do not want our children and ourselves to be under the rule of some madman from among the children or grandchildren of this king, do we?" one representative asks, to laughter and applause. As it deliberates inconclusively, the council goes on to banish a Jewish citizen from the country, celebrate the army, and shower curses on "those who had gained their fortunes at the expense of the people."

Writing became a preoccupation as Saddam spent more time in relative isolation following the near-fatal assassination attempt against Uday. In 1998, Saddam ordered a poet who worked in the press office to tutor him for a month on the rules of poetry. Verse had deep roots and visibility in Iraqi and Arab culture, yet while Saddam did compose some poems, he seemed more attracted to the novel, a form suitable for direct propaganda. (Muammar Qaddafi had published a collection of short stories in 1993, so perhaps Saddam thought his lengthy novels would establish his superior credentials.) Crude and awkward as his allegories were, his writing did offer the private joy of composition, as Saddam worked through creative choices about how to render as literary types the dramatis personae of Baathist Iraq - devilish America, the wayward Kurds, despicable landowners. He weaved these allegorical figures into stories of love and war. Saman Majid came to think of his novel writing as "Saddam's secret garden."

- from The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll, p. 373

Do You Still Not Understand?

 In Austria, foreign military attachés noticed that the multilingual ideal was rarely attained in practice; theoretically, the men in a Slovenian regiment, for example, would speak Slovenian among themselves but be commanded in German. The troops therefore learned a few dozen phrases in German, but officers in such a regiment were expected to be fluent in Slovenian in order to explain complicated matters and build esprit de corps with their men. In reality, the largely German officer corps would lean hard on cheat sheets like Military Slovenian: A Handbook, which contained useful phrases including "Shut your mouth," "Don't speak unless spoken to," "Wait for me in my office," "No smoking in the stables," and "Do you still not understand?"

- from A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Geoffrey Wawro, 34-35