Looming Out of Nothing

You're never quite sure you’ll wind up with a novel.  I’m standing on a bus driving slowly, into the arrivals area at the Beijing Capital Airport.  The plane has seemingly been parked at the airport’s furthest perimeter many, many kilometres from the arrival hall.  Plodding we approach the main terminal, lit, looming out of nothing, and then waddle along down underpasses and through connecting alleys until we are let off at a spot that is still a few hundred yards walk from where we’re heading.  I imagine for a while that more competition would teach Air China to treat its passengers better.  Yeah.  This is bad service.  Why in this, the nation’s trophy airport, arriving on the airport’s flagship carrier, is it so hard to park a plane near a gate?  Realism then beckons.  I remember that I do have a choice of airlines and I don’t exercise it and I regularly return for more punishment here with Guo Hang.  The alternatives aren’t any better.  And cutthroat competition hasn’t exactly solved the service challenges for the U.S. domestic carriers, either. 

But fortunately my aching feet and stiff back are trifles, compared to the sorry lot soldiers I’m reading about. We are off on the island of 'Anopopei' and the folks I’m stuck in the jungle with have it much worse.  Waiting and waiting in a South Pacific downpour.  The battle has been about to start for seventy pages now of Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead.” 

I’ve never read any Mailer.  I’ve considered him from a number of angles.  I’ve heard him speak: sometimes in “When We Were Kings” authoritatively, and sometimes, on the Dick Caveat show, like a violent bore.  I’ve read bits of other things he’s done, and of course considered what many other people have said about him, little of it flattering.  But this, his first work was always lauded and I can understand why. 

My older one was asking about ‘books about “World War II.”  I’d gotten her a used copy of “Slaughter House Five”, when I was home over the summer.   I ended up rereading it myself. That was the horror of Dresden.  And now it is the remarkable tenacity of the Japanese.  These are not the flimsy, two dimensional Japanese who fall like ninepins in the Chinese TV shows.  These are the people who sprang forth and conquered the Pacific in a flash and held on to each rock tenaciously.  And these are men, we find, who missed their families and wondered why they were marked to die. It is strikes me reading this work, how so much of what we assume is normal in this region, this "order" that was established, the current fluidity between some nations and not others, was paid for in considerable quantities of blood.  

In a manner perhaps a bit overt, Norman’s cast of infantrymen and officers collide as American stereotypes: the bitter Irishman Gallagher, the cold cruel Texan Croft, the pensive Mexican “Japbait” Martinez, the drunk hick Woodrow, the introspective nebbish Goldstein.  In a manner perhaps unexpected, they all seem to speak to the contemporary America of the 2016 election with great acuity.  I find myself diving these enlisted men in to Trump and Hillary camps.  And you wonder reading through all the racist, sexist, bigoted vitriol, how America ever voted in an FDR, how it was that Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t simply elected president for life, or that we’ve inherited our democracy, down through to us from a time that was so pungently intolerant.   War like a flash of lightening, illuminating everyone's raw make up.