Updated
Monday August 19, 2019
443 Days until the 2020 election and 525 days until the Inauguration
I am preparing a talk on Richard Halliburton. He was a childhood hero of mine. He travelled the world in the 1920s and 30s and wrote about it. He did crazy things. He swam the Panama Canal. He flew an airplane to Timbuktu. He hid from guards at the Taj Mahal so he could swim in the pool at night. He died sailing a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1939. Or so I thought.
Halliburton was a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. He was ridiculed by Hemingway and rather ignored by his fellow Princetonian Fitzgerald. Yes, Halliburton’s writing was flowery and dreamy and over the top, but to a young boy? It was the stuff of dreams. Halliburton fired the imagination with thoughts and stories. Tales of what it must have been like in ancient times. How could you not be enthralled? His first book was called “Royal Road to Romance.” In it he spoke of being at Princeton and his chums were studying to be chemists and accountants. How? he asked, could they be chaining themselves to that sort of life when there was this whole world to explore? This world of romance? He used the term “romance” to mean adventure and the mystery of exploring.
Did he embellish his stories? Yeah. Apparently.
Hunter S. Thompson once admitted that if he had done all the drugs he claimed to have done in his books he would have been dead. So…
But then we come to Halliburton and “The Sea Dragon.” The name of his junk. It was 1939, Hong Kong. The Japanese Navy was carrying out war like naval exercises just outside of the Hong Kong harbor. There were delays in building the boat. like three months. They went out on a sea trial and nearly capsized in moderate seas. Many of the original crew decided they had had enough and left. The captain seemed ill equipped. His biggest skill was annoying everyone onboard. When the junk did leave the harbor few noticed. They were on the edge of war. Then halfway to Midway they ran into a typhoon, a monster storm with 40 to 50 foot waves. Admiral “Bull” Halsey was out with his fleet and reported not being able to tell where the air was from the water. Planes broke loose below decks. Several of his ships were in irons and at the mercy of the storm. His fleet was supposed to pass the Sea Dragon the next day. They saw nothing. A ship reported seeing what might have been part of the Sea Dragon’s rudder. That was all that was ever seen or known as to what happened.
Years later an expert on building Chinese junks was asked if he would like to recreate the Sea Dragon and try to repeat the voyage. He scoffed. Why? The Sea Dragon did not look like a junk to him, but rather a prop for a movie set. It certainly wasn’t the type of junk that had been used to cross the ocean.
But Halliburton had reported in glowing terms the beauty and magic of the trial sailing of the Sea Dragon. The reality was much different, of course. Like Gauguin, who came to Tahiti, and not finding what he had supposed painted the world he imagined, Halliburton had written in romantic terms about his adventure; and why not? It had worked for him before. He’d figure it out. Someone or something would come to the rescue.
There’s no rescue from fifty foot waves in the middle of a typhoon in the middle of the Pacific.
Reality can be a bitter place.
I have worked for large corporations. I have seen incompetent managers ignore facts, make stupid decisions and blithely say, “So and so will write some code and bail us out.”
We see this in government too. Currently, all the practices and institutions we have carefully built and crafted are under assault both from within and without. We will be lucky if the only thing destroyed are those things we have created.
The other day our government tested a short range cruise missile. A few days before that Russia had a nuclear powered missile blow up. Reagan and Gorbachev signed a missile treaty banning such weapons. Trump has torn up that treaty as well as many others. We are now embarking on an arms race with Russia. We have left Iran to do the same. This is dangerous stuff.
Bluster and tweeting and alternate facts don’t replace half lifes and e = mc squared.
I remember reading a piece years ago that said no one should be allowed to negotiate a nuclear treaty that hasn’t seen the effects of a nuclear bomb first hand. That they should have to put their forearm over their eyes and see their bones as the X-Rays coarse through them. Then and only then should they be allowed to negotiate.
There’s the analogy about a frog being put in cool water and then slowly turning up the heat. It will stay in the water and be boiled to death. But if you throw the frog into boiling water it will do everything it can to get out. Climate change is the slow boil. Nuclear is the boiling water. Unfortunately, with nuclear war there is nowhere to jump out to safety. There is no one to write some code afterwards to save us.
443 Days until the 2020 election and 525 days until the Inauguration
PS An updated Night Watch
Leave a Reply