Common book: Mercy

 “ We’re imperfect people in relationships with imperfect people. Mercy should be mandatory.” -David French

Bag O' Books: 'Wildland: The Making of America's Fury' by Evan Osnos

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The past decade or so has brought readers a fresh round of what's probably an old genre -- the literature of American decline. Books like George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Alec MacGillis' "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America" have documented the forces tearing our society apart -- a financial system that delivers disproportionate wealth to a select few who hide themselves in walled-off supermansions; governments that neuter themselves and their ability to serve their citizens' well-being in order to make the rich richer; the left-behind places in rural America and in the Black parts of our big cities; the hollowed-out newspapers whose meager pages leave the electorate ill-informed and vulnerable to the conspiracy swamps of social media. "Wildland" is another one of these books, and it's a very good book, but it is also -- on top of those earlier examples -- exhausting. Our country is falling apart, and that's tremendously shitty, but it makes for some great literature.

Star Trek movie rankings

For the 25th anniversary of STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, my personal ranking of best Trek movies.

Top Tier Classics:

* Wrath of Khan

* First Contact

Really Good: 

* The Voyage Home

* The Undiscovered Country

Reasonably Entertaining:

* The Search for Spock

* Generations

* Nemesis (I realize I'm on the short list of people who would even rank it this high.)

* 2009 reboot

What fresh hell is this?

* The Final Frontier

* The Motion Picture

* Into Darkness

Nope

* Insurrection

* Beyond

Common book: Social security vs. police security

“In a society that doesn’t provide everyone a lifeline, order will be maintained at the point of a truncheon. There’s a tradeoff between social security and police security." -- Paolo Gerbaudo, Dissent Magazine

Bag O' Books: 'To Start a War' by Robert Draper

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper

"In the aftershocks of 9/11,a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males." I was alive, sentient and angry during the Bush Administration's buildup to the invasion of Iraq, so I'm not sure exactly why I read this book: It just made me angry all over again. Read a certain way, though, it's almost darkly comedic -- like an episode of The Office, only one where hundreds of thousands of people end up dead unnecessarily. Above all, one of the key errors highlighted in this narrative is a sort of neediness -- the CIA needing to be relevant to the "First Customer" or be left behind, and so furnishing Bush with the (as it turns out) intelligence he (and they) wanted to see; Tony Blair's need in his faded empire to be relevant to an American-led world order; Colin Powell's need to not lose his standing in the administration and thus selling himself (and the world) out with his U.N. speech; even the need of certain media members to prove their status in the pecking order. "Careers could be made by wars," Draper notes. "It was equally true that wars could be made my careerists, including those in newsrooms." What a disaster. What an absolute disaster.

Common book: John Banville's unguilty pleasures

 John Banville, NYT:

I'm getting a booster. But I feel kind of guilty about it.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

With boosters widely approved now, I'm planning getting a booster sometime in the next few days: Today is six months since my last shot, and I've got the comorbidities. But I don't feel great about it. 

NYT: "As the United States prepares to offer Covid booster shots to tens of millions of people, representatives of the World Health Organization continue to sound the alarm over the disparity in vaccine access globally, with the world’s poorest countries struggling to get even a first dose into their citizens’ arms." 

How can I justify benefiting from the disparity? 

My local hospital has been slammed the last few months. Some -- not even close to a majority, but some -- of those patients were already vaccinated. I have friends on staff there. Yes, I'm eager to not get sick (and whispers about a possible new Delta sub-variant in the UK terrify me) but anything I can do to stay out of bed seems like a duty to my community. But it still doesn't feel optimal.