Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 20 March 2005
Mark was just killing himself yesterday trying to edit down section one ("The Lessons Learned With Iraq") of Chapter Two ("Winning This War With Connectedness"). I mean, I could just hear it in his voice. Family sent to the country, Mark all day in a coffee shop, his brain swelling to twice its normal size . . . GAAAAAD!
"Will no one rid me of this section!" he cries out in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, I keep adding stuff to Chapter 1, compounding Mark's perception that Section 1 of Chapter 2 is getting more and more redundant. He says, "It's killing my sense of momentum in the book. We establish this huge push with Chapter 1 and then need to keep going in Chapter 2, but this first section comes off as too much of a repeat from one."
After reading the section seriously yesterday afternoon, it hit me: Mark was really right. I was so caught up in my trios for each chapter that I stuck one in Chapter 2 that really doesn't need to be there, once I've written Chapter 1 in total the way I have.
So we're talking on the phone and he keeps making the point over and over again, which is when I can tell he wants me to come to some conclusion he's already been entertaining for some time. So we chat about maybe just killing Section 1 of Chapter 2 and using the good bits for some blistering Chapter 0 that does quite a rendition of what went wrong in Iraq, moving all the "Blogging the Future" scenarios from my originally proposed Chapter 0 to some sort of Postscript at the end, after the Conclusion. Mark likes the sound of that, up to a point. He's been gently pushing me to think of shoving all of Chapter 0 into a sequence at the end, because he thinks the material, while neat, is simply too diverting up front. The idea for Chapter 0 came from my agency, and it was a good one on paper, but it just hasn't worked out that way in the text, even as Mark and I both dig what I did in that proposed opening mini-chapter.
So there's at least one breakthrough: we're pretty much decided that if Chapter 0 lives, it will live at the end. Having written now the Preface and the intro to Chapter 1, I feel, as does Mark, that there's enough up front to fire up the reader and send him or her careening through the now big Chapter 1 (although I caution on that perception, because at almost 25,000 words, it's still—as I just discovered—5,000 words shorter than PNM's monstrous Chapter 3).
So we talk about stripping Section 1 of Chapter 2 for parts and reconstructing something in front of Chapter 1, but we quickly kill that notion, me more than Mark. Now I'm quoting him: no one's waiting on me to do a post-mortem on the Iraq occupation per se, only within the context of extending my arguments on the SysAdmin force and beyond, which I do in spades in Chapter 1, so there's no point in a Chapter 0 that tries to do that. If you really want that, read anything Anthony Cordesman's already done. Let Barnett be Barnett and not be a pale version of somebody else, we affirm.
So then I trot out possibility number 2, knowing full well that this is probably Mark's plan for at least the last 24 hours or more: I strip Section 1 of Chapter 2 for parts and insert them in Sections 1 and 2 of Chapter 1. This is what I do tonight after spending a day reconstructing the house after all that painting of the last three days, plus picking up some dinner and doing some long-planned shopping (a boombox for Kev, a mini-tape recorder with lotsa microcassettes and triple A batteries for me—expensed to Esquire for my upcoming interviews in DC for a couple of stories I'm working on). What I end up doing is just grabbing (copy and pasting off the original file of Section 1) the paras I really love and shoving them into the right spots in Chapter 1. It's really quite easy, I find, and in the end Chapter 1's word count jumps from just under 23k to just under 25k (and that's when I go back and do a quick word count on PNM's Chapter 3 and get over my fears on BFA's first chapter being too long).
Mark was so relieved when I proposed this. He said it was like he was getting ready to break up with somebody after dating them for months and then realizing it just wasn't going to work. He didn't have the heart to do it himself against my protestations, but . . . if I were to suggest it myself . . . then man, was he so incredibly relieved!
So, just like that, we kill 5,500 words, leaving Chapter 2 now with just two sections instead of three, which will make it far shorter but likewise far better, because now it will be really focused. Plus, Mark likes a book where the chapters vary in length, feeling that it gets to feel like artificial filling if every chapter stretches the same length for no compelling reason. So now Chapter 2 will be on the Big Bang in the Middle East and fighting the global Salafi jihadist movement, and whatever else I need to say about Iraq I'll make sure it gets into the first of those two sections (if it's not there already).
This was a big turning point for Mark and I on the book. Both of us felt, like last time, that the first two chapters would be the hardest to edit. By chapter 3, which Mark says he's already finished editing, the book is on autopilot, meaning I really know exactly what I want to say and it's coming out in reasonably right-sized and right-paced sections. But just like with PNM, chapters 1 and 2 were all about figuring out—writing and editing-wise—what this book was going to be all about in terms of tone, style, pacing, etc. Now we feel we have all that down, and—not surprisingly—we're looking to shape the book much as Mark predicted to me we should the first night we discussed it last fall. Back then, he said, we should make this second book all the more so in comparison to the first, so that what readers really loved about PNM, they'd love even more about this one, and what the critics hated about PNM, they'd hate even more about this one! So if PNM was about cartography and orientation, this one is far more focused on painting a brilliantly bright future and getting the reader inspired to act on that image. So Neil hits it on the head again: Blueprint for Action. The ambition is going to be all the more ambitious, the optimism all the more optimistic, and so on and so forth. There will be less of me, because less is required, and there will be more of other thinkers' ideas, because more of them are required. But the style and the vision remains infuriatingly my own, and we achieve the same thing we achieved with PNM: producing a book that only I could have written.
And frankly, no one should ever write a book unless it's one that only they could have written . . .
Three fascinating articles in NYT's "Week in Review":
First one ("Beyond the Bullets and Blades," by Marc Lacey, p. WK1) is really good, because it explores, thanks to some pathfinding research by Physicians for Human Rights and the International Rescue Committee, "how a society breaks apart when Africans flee the onslaught." You want war within the context of everything else? This is it.
Two graphics tell it all:
In first one, they note that "for every violent death in Congo's war zone," you get 28 children under 5 dead, plus 6 kids 5-14, plus 13 women 15-and-older, plus 15 men 15-and-older. How do they die? In their movement away from, through, and all around the violence, they come under stress. Six of these 62 nonviolent deaths come from malnutrition, 11 from respiratory diseases and diarrhea. Ten come from anemia, measles, meningitis, accidents, and TB. Seventeen come from fevers of various sorts, and 18 come from "other causes, to include newborn deaths and pregnancy-related deaths.
Graphic in back is even more telling: "destroying a family." A 75-year-old man had lived with his family and livestock in the Darfur region of Sudan, until his local city was hit by the janjaweed. In their retreat to refugee camps and their survival there, what was a man and his wife, their seven kids and at least three times that many grandkids, plus 3 donkeys, 25 camels and 105 sheep and goats is now reduced to this: a man and his wife, 4 kids, 10 grandkids, and 1 donkey. They're guessing 10 family members are dead, along with 104 animals lost or stolen or dead. That's a family destroyed. How many died a violent death? Who knows? But most probably did not.
War within the context of everything else.
Second story (Op-Chart "Two Years and Counting" by Lawrence J. Korb and Nigel Holmes, two personnel experts, p. WK13) does big run-down on the roughly 1,500 U.S. troop deaths since the war/occupation began.
Interesting numbers abound.
30% Marines and 50% Army and 16% Reserve Component. All inner-city poor? Like Michael Moore would have you believe? 26% urban, 40% suburban, and 33% rural. Average poverty rate of public high schools attended was exactly the nation average (30%), so very much a cross-section of the country. 96% were HS grads. 89% were enlisted, but then, 85% of all personnel in the military are enlisted, so no great surprise there. 73% were white, when only 67% of all the military are white. 12% were Hispanic, above their 9% for the military as a whole. African-Americans accounted for 11% of all the deaths, well below the 19% they represent in the military.
Why is that latter point true? African-Americans go in for the SysAdmin jobs more than others (a fact), tending to be in it for the longer haul than most, I'm guessing.
Third story is the usual yin-yang thing on China ("In Hong Kong, China Prefers Power to Law," by Keith Bradsher, p. WK4). China definitely cracking down a bit on Hong Kong as they swap out bosses and cut down terms from five years to two.
But here's the odd part you can't forget: "From purchases of handheld toys to charters of supertankers, contracts in China are frequently written so that disputes must be resolved under Hong Kong law and in Hong Kong courts—even when the parties involved are mainland companies."
The CCP wants its rule sets, but at its own speed. Where have we seen this before? With basically every emerging market over the past half century.
