Review of Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac

I'm convinced our modern culture is incapable of understanding the American Civil War without engaging is a lot of prerequisite study first.  The fabric of the United States, the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of my country, has changed so much that one can't idly pick up an overview of the war and read it and really understand it.

Bruce Catton was writing in the 50s.  The Civil War was on it's way out as part of living memory and the recent conclusion of the biggest war ever fought dominated people's concept of what war was.  But even in our time certain myths about the war persist.  And none is more pervasive than the myth that the Army of Northern Virginia and its general Robert E. Lee were virtually super human.  And since the Army of the Potomac was General Lee's punching bag for much of the war it's legacy comes to us as an pathetic by comparison.

Both these myths Catton seeks to dispel in writing his trilogy of narrative history The Army of the Potomac.  He does this by telling the story both from a soldier's eye view and from the view of the officers of the Army of the Potomac.  You won't get much else from the narrative.  Political and social context as well as happenings in other theaters of the war are limited to what is necessary to understand what's going with the Army of the Potomac.  In the 50s I suspect there was more common knowledge about Civil War history.  In volume three, for example, General Grant pops into the narrative with out any explanation of where he came from and why.  The beginning of the first volume drops the reader into the aftermath of the Second Battle of Bull Run, in medias res as they say, without any build up or preparation.

After this quick overview of General Pope's disastrous tenure, the bulk of volume one is dedicated to General George McClellan, his precipitous rise to the absolute heights of military power, his fall, his second rise, and his ultimate disgrace.  McClellan loved his men, and they loved him.  But he loved them too much to win a war.  His over-cautiousness protracted the war by years.  His fear -- I'm sure he would never have used those words -- of General Lee allowed him to be continually out matched when Lee was against the ropes and created a tradition in the Army of the Potomac of an expectation that no matter how well the battle was progressing, Lee was going to win in the end.  And only the doggedness of General Grant was able to overcome it.

If McClellan instigated the tradition of Generals Hooker and Burnside kept it up in grand fashion.  The second volume is devoted to their failings and culminates General Meade taking command and finally giving Lee such a sound beating he would never be able to go on the offensive again.

Finally the third volume introduces Grant as the hands on leader of all Union armies.  He defines the strategy of the war in Northern Virginia from here on out though Meade is still technically in charge of the Army of the Potomac.  The final year of the war is extremely bloody.  Grant's methods are assault until forward momentum is lost, then move the army around the enemy's right flank.  He does this until he's able to lay siege to Richmond and then continues to move around his left until finally General Sheridan is able to bust up Lee's reserves and Lee doesn't have enough men to hold his lines.  Lee is forced to retreat and his army is overtaken outside Appomattox and surrenders.  Speaking of Sheridan, a description of the Shenandoah campaign is included since the VI corps from the Army of the Potomac participated.

Combined with this bird's eye narrative is the description of the foot soldier's life, the horror and violence and madness of it all.  Here Catton his quick to point out that the average soldier that fought for the Union was every bit as good as his opponent.  But the soldiers were lead by Generals that were out matched and incapable of using them properly, soldiers who went willingly into battle even though they knew it was suicide.  I kept wondering if there was something moral or ethical or good in being so devoted to a cause that one would give up one's life for no effect.

In addition to the bullets and fire there are fascinating interludes of day to day life.  I was particularly interested in description of "news bearers".  Grant did a much better job than his predecessors at keeping his plans secret.  So news bearers, common foot soldiers, would wander up and down the lines gathering information and sharing rumors with their fellow soldiers in different outfits.  They would try to synthesize an overall picture of what was going on in order to take the information back to their own units -- and they were famous for stealing anything that wasn't nailed down.

But the most striking thing to me is the camaraderie between the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. When the trenches were built and the battle of the moment stopped they would almost always strike up friendly relationships with each other, trade goods, not interfere with each others outings to gather water or firewood.  They'd even warn each other when they were about to start shooting.  But this friendliness didn't affect their willingness to fight tooth and nail with each other when the time came.  I wonder if there isn't a lesson to be learned here that can be applied to less violent situations of conflict.

Bruce Catton's three volume narrative history The Army of the Potomac is a great overview of a very specific part of the American Civil War.  Catton waxes overly verbose and poetic at times.  But that was the style in mid 19th century America so I let it slide.  But it was a different world back then, a world we can find parallels with in our own, but few direct comparisons.

Whom To Root For

After watching the last world cup I became fascinated with watching sports.  I didn't know anything about soccer but it doesn't take much to see that the team that controlled the middle of the field was able to produce potential scoring opportunities.  Watching the way teams attempted to control the middle was wonderful.

I'm to the point now where I'd rather watch a baseball game than a movie, assuming I have any spare time.  After all, I pretty much know how a movie is going to turn out after the first couple of minutes.  That's not the case with sporting events.

For a number of reasons I'm not much of a fan of college sports.  My favorite sports to watch are baseball, hockey, soccer and basketball.  I really only watch football if I have to.

So which teams to root for?  I try to choose a team or two since I like to have a dog in as many races as possible.  I try to get a nice mix of good and bad teams.  I pick some for their history and some for their club nickname.  I prioritize the west over the east.  Most importantly I root for the Arizona club.  Arizona is the best state in the union, after all.

The following are teams I root for and why.  I've ranked them from favorite to least favorite.  If a team isn't on the list I don't care about them.  Some teams I root against.

Baseball:

1. Arizona Diamondbacks.  They are from Arizona.  They've even won a World Series.  The only Arizona team to go all the way.


2. L.A. Dodgers.  Normally I root against California teams but the Dodgers are an exception.  When I was a kid my favorite color was blue.  Somehow I ended up with a Dodgers t-shirt -- Dodger blue is the best shade of blue -- and would wear it to school.  This was in Texas where they take their sports seriously.  I wasn't allowed to just wear the shirt because I liked the color, people don't like sports in Texas for such shallow reasons.  So I pretended to be a fan.  A few years later, 1988 as I recall, my best friend was rooting for the Oakland As in the World Series.  Well, when I heard they were playing the Dodgers I became a real Dodgers fan.  I've rooted for them ever since, though they've recently taken a back seat to the team at number 1.


3. Tampa Bay Rays.  The *Rays*, get it?  Oh, your just jealous no one named a major league baseball team after you.

Hockey:

1. Phoenix Coyotes.  Despite not being very good they made it to the post season this year.  They are unfortunately deeply in debt and may not be in Arizona much longer.  As far as I can tell the NHL only wants them in Arizona so all the snow birds will buy tickets to see Detroit play.
2. Columbus Blue Jackets.  The only people I see celebrating their Civil War heritage are Southerners.  The North fought too, you know.
3. Calgary Flames.  The Canadian teams are sequestered into two divisions.  Got to root for Canada when I can.  This is hockey after all.  Plus the coolest Canadian I ever met was from Southern Alberta.  Rock on Elder Memmott, where ever you may be.  Oh, and the Flames started in Atlanta where their name was chosen because the city was burned down by General Sherman during the Civil war.
4. Toronto Maple Leafs.  First, they are perennial cursed losers just like the Cubs.  Second, I love the blue and white uniforms.
5. Nashville Predators. Their mascot is a Sabre Tooth Tiger.  Not enough extinct prehistorical beasties representing sports clubs.

Soccer:

1. Real Salt Lake.  I went to school in Utah.  They've been doing great.  Their colors are red, yellow and blue.

 And that's it for Major League Soccer.  There's a lot of problems with being an MLS soccer fan.  I should write more about that in another post.  But the biggest problem is the way the teams try to ape European clubs.  Seriously, what's "real" about Salt Lake?  This is the U.S. of A.  There's no royalty here.  Yet the team chooses the "real" moniker so they can sound like they are somehow related to Real Madrid.  I toyed with being fans of the Wizards, but now they are -- and I'm not making this up -- "Sporting Kansas City".  They gave up an L. Frank Baum reference for that?

Basketball:

1. Phoenix Suns.  It's a dry heat.  I was living in Arizona when I watched them lose to the Jordan and the Bulls in the NBA championships.


2. Toronto Raptors.  Do you remember Jurassic Park fever?  I read that book when it first came out.  I watched the movie opening night.  There aren't enough dinosaur mascots.

Reading List commencing February 2012

In no particular order, these are the books on my reading list:

Glory Road by Bruce Catton
A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Epic of Gilgamesh
Aeneid by Virgil
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes
The Immortal of World's End by Lin Carter
The Barbarian of World's End by Lin Carter
Black Legion of Callisto by Lin Carter
Sky Pirates of Callisto by Lin Carter
Mad Empress of Callisto by Lin Carter

Starship Troopers Vs. Armor

I was talking to a self professed science fiction nut who claimed Armor by John Steakley was much better than Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.

Well, recently I decided to go ahead a read Armor, mainly because I found a first printing paperback at a used book store.  What kind of SF fan can turn down a book covered like this?

After reading I went back and re-read Starship Troopers.  How do they compare?

Well, you get the gist of the different view points each author espouses by reading the following quotations.  The first if from Starship Troopers.

"However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea - a practice I shall always follow.  Anyone who clings the the historically untrue - and thoroughly immoral - doctrine that 'violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it...Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.  Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for with their lives and freedoms."

Here's a quote from Armor.

"It was then, for Felix, it began.  The hatred for the Briefing Officer had expanded to include his superiors, the Captain of the ship, the commanders of Fleet itself, and finally the thick-headed idiot humans who had undertaken something as asinine as interplanetary war in the first place."

Both of these novels are about human space marines caught up in interplanetary war.  The cool gimmick of Starship Troopers, which is borrowed shamelessly by Armor, is the exoskeleton body armor that allows the wearer to run faster, jump higher and blow stuff up better than an unadorned human could do.  In both novels the people of Earth are fighting a race of giant hive-minded insect-like creatures.  Starship Troopers was written in the late 50s, while Armor was written in the early '80s.  One reflects the almost holy respect for soldiers in the post WWII era, while the other evokes the skepticism and distrust of the post Vietnam era.

Starship Troopers is a much better book.  Heinlein's world is extreme but he keeps it honest.  The characters in his book put an immense amount of trust in the government, a level of trust I can't imagine in today's world.  Though he does attempt to explain why the government is more trustworthy than ours.  And despite the fact that violence is presented as the cure to all mankind's ills, it is actually a quite non-violent book.  There are only three chapters dedicated to fighting with bug-eyed aliens.  The majority of the book is the protagonist going to high school, or boot camp, or officer training school and expounding at length on social, governmental, and military philosophy.  The military action, however, when it does show up, is feels very realistic.

Armor, despite its anti-war sentiment, is full of violence.  Lengthy sections are devoted to blood-and-guts hand-to-hand fighting with "ants".  There's a long middle section devoted to humans betraying and killing each other.  Finally it switches back to the "ant war" and a surprise conclusion that is telegraphed to the reader from 2 light years out.  At the end everyone renounces war and lives peacefully ever after. So is violence good or bad?  Armor would have us believe its good for entertainment, but otherwise unsavory.  The action certainly is entertaining, though the military tactics are ludicrous.  I suppose that's in keeping with the notion that everyone running the war is an idiot.

I can't imagine anyone would find the system of government described in Starship Troopers to be a desirable one.  I can't even imagine Heinlein himself took it too seriously considering how staunchly libertarian he was.  As an allegory it's wonderful and makes the reader think.  It was written for teenagers, but it is intellectual to the point that it puts most youth fiction to shame.  At least Heinlein's throwing ideas around.  That's more than I can say for Armor.

The Mountain Goats' Heretic Pride

Moby Dick, Foucalt's Pendulum and Cryptonomicon are some of my favorite novels. If you want to read a good book, my recomendation would be to start with those three.

What makes these books so great is how the are nominally about very sepcific subjects: whales, knights Templar and cryptography. But they perversely refuse to adhere to their subject matter. Or perhaps their subject matter can symbolically encompass all things, because these books go all over the place. The reach emotional and intellectual highs (and lows) that boggle the mind and thrill the soul. You can open any one of these books to a random chapter and be knocked down by its 100% pure awesome.

Anyway, that's also how the Mountain Goats make me feel. I got their album Heretic Pride for Christmas and I can't stop listening to it. One minute he's singing about angels guarding the tree of life, the next moment one of Lovecraft's outer gods is threatening to destroy mankind. The album starts with Sax Rohmer and ends with Michael Meyers.

Smart lyrics, powerful emostions and a folk/folk rock sound combine to make a beautiful album. In closing here's the lyrics to title track, "Heretic Pride":

Well they come and pull me from my house
And they drag my body through the streets
And the sun’s so hot I think I’ll catch fire and burn up
in the summer air so moist and sweet

And the people all come out to cheer
Rocks in the pathway break my skin
And there’s honeysuckle on the faint breeze today
With every breath I’m drawing in

I want to cry out but I don’t scream and I don’t shout
And I feel so proud to be alive
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives

Crowds grow denser by the second
As we near the center of the town
And they dig a trench right in the main square right there
And they pick me up and throw me down

And I start laughing like a child
And I mark their faces one by one
Transfiguration's gonna come for me at last
And I will burn hotter than the sun

I waited so long and now I taste jasmine on my tongue
And I feel so proud to be alive
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives

ERB's Moon Trilogy

Tracking down obscure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs had become a bit of a hobby for me. His dated simplistic prose and writing techniques are beneath the notice of the modern reader enamored with high falootin' "literature" from sources like Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling. Furthermore many of his books are in the public domain. What publisher worth his salt would publish a free book. But I maintain that his joyful energetic writing of fantastical literature is without parallel.

The only place I could find the Moon Trilogy was on the Australian Gutenberg Project web page.

There are three novellas in the series. Each is quite short and, despite the name given the series, most of the narrative takes place on Earth.

The first book, The Moon Maid, is a fairly derivative ERB work. The heroes travel to a hidden realm located in the center of the moon. Strange animals and barbaric alien races are encountered. The protagonist, a guy named Julian the 5th, comes across a beautiful alien with whom he falls in love and goes to great lengths to rescue. There are some cool scenes and the book has a much darker tone than other ERB works. The ending is pretty traumatic. The bad guys are obviously inspired by the Bolsheviks of the Russian revolution and the Moon Maid herself is analogous to Princess Anastasia.

The second book, The Moon Men, takes place on Earth and the hero is Julian the 9th. By this time the Moon Men called Kalkars have taken over the Earth and reduced the native population to slave status. This book chronicles Julian's attempts to throw off his shackles and is an obvious dig at Russian communism. Again, the ending ain't so happy.

The final book, The Red Hawk, is narrated by Julian the 20th a.k.a. the Red Hawk. Life in America has reverted to the stone age. The evil Kalkars are on the run and the Flag worshiping remnants of the Ancient U. S. of A are prepping to push them in to the sea.

John Carter of Mars is mentioned in the first book. But contact is lost by the second book. The sweep of time is a cool affect as is the distinctly different settings of the three books. ERB attributes the ills of socialism to a racial quality of the Kalkars which doesn't really work for me. The series is not one of ERB's best but it does get better as it goes along and eventually defines itself as something unique and different from his other "planetary romances".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Maid

Tons of new CDs

So I took a bunch of my old CDs to the local CD store and traded them for store credit. Which I then promptly turned into other CDs. I'm now awash in so many new CDs it's been difficult to listen to them all. But listen I did (mostly) and here's some comments on them:

Bob Marley - Exodus
A lot of the songs from this album end up on greatest hits releases. This makes the album seem like a light-hearted party affair. With the exception of "Turn You Lights Down Low" these songs are very good. There's a light side to the album but also a very serious side.

Bob Marley - Survival
This album has my favorite Bob Marly song, "Ride Natty Ride". Overall it has Bob Marley taking up the cause of injustice in Africa. Great CD, but probably not as good overall as Exodus.

Black Sabbath - Black Box
This is a box set of the first eight Black Sabbath albums when Ozzie Osbourne was the lead singer. The albums are Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, No. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Sabotage, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die! The slow heavy guitar riffs have a tendency to drag but the guitar solos elevate things. I don't think they ever did anything better than Paranoid, their second album. Though I have yet to actually listen to all of them.

U2 - War
I had War already, but I wanted to hear the remastered version. And it's pretty good. Not too loud and seems to maintain the dynamic range of the original with more clarity. This is a really good album. One of the best U2 ever did.

Pink Floyd - Saucer Full of Secrets
The second Pink Floyd album. There were four other albums released between this one and their big hit Dark Side of the Moon. The sound is much weirder and harder to listen to but it's growing on me.

Pink Floyd - Relics
A collection of songs from Pink Floyd's early days. Three songs come from their first two albums, a couple from the soundtrack for a movie called "Muse" and a lot of early singles and rarities. Not quite as hard to swallow as Saucer and there is some really awesome stuff, particularly the "Muse" songs. But if you are only familiar with later Pink Floyd this will not sound familiar.

Madonna - American Life
Madonna makes a political statement. I'm a fan of this period of Madonna's music which includes her two previous albums. I love the electronica beats harnessed by Madonna's poppy melodies. I love it when artists take on political themes. The scathing title track is almost too over the top with it's satirical faux rap but I dig it. I have the edited version of the album.

Yes - Close to the Edge
How come I've never heard a Yes song before? I love this album and it's probably my favorite of this batch of CDs. It's overblown prog rock and I only bought it based on my love of the prog rock band Jethro Tull. There were only three songs on the original album, but they ranged from 10 minutes to over 20. I love this over the top stuff. It rocks but it's not heavy like Black Sabbath or even Jethro Tull.