Re-reading Dune as an adult, the thing that struck me was the facile surface appearance of depth; somehow, you felt like you were reading a chronicle of a reality, and the suspension of disbelief was so thorough that you didn’t observe the missing bits until you thought to go looking for them.

That is exactly my feeling.

But my perspective is colored by the fact that I encountered as adult who was already familiar with more in depth treatment of its themes. Peter Turchin likes it because it is a fictional representation of Asabiyah style political conquest. But I had already read both Turchin and Ibn Khaldun before I came to Dune.

Not that it is a bad book mind you. It is an engrossing book. I stayed up late into the night to finish it. But I stay up late to finish marvel films as well. I don’t think I would put Dune too much higher than them. Good, entertaining, historically important to the genre–but not something I would know how to teach if I had to put it on a syllabus!

Your story sounds pretty grim especially to a couch potato such as myself. I still laughed. I hope that’s what you were going for. That was funny as hell, especially with your conclusion added. [Fortunately, it's quiet here at the end of the day at the office. We had a medium-large snowstorm in town today and Canadians aren't as robust as we used to be- it takes less to shut a lot down and keep folks at home. I cheat by living walking distance to work, by which I mean 10 minutes...]

I also liked the known space series of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. I’m rereading War World 2: Death’s Head Rebellion (2011) right now.

None of these hold my attention as well as when I was a kid, but they’re still entertaining.

I wish when I was younger I had thought about getting a spiral notebook and writing down all the books I read with a brief paragraph on what they are about. I’ve churned through a vast amount of them. I couldn’t begin to guess how many and on what subjects. All kinds of stuff.

I think about kids now and how they have such a massive amount they can read. How do they even begin to pick where to start if they’re a bookworm?

“On a tangent, your comments make me conclude that one of my weaknesses will likely always be that I’ve bought into some kind of bullshit.”

I’m a seriously weird person, in that I’ve managed to maintain sanity and motivation despite having the clarity of vision to recognize when bullshit is going on around me… I’m that guy who spent most of his initial entry training in the military going “Oh, OK… We’ve done that; they’re about to do this, and they’re gonna do that, next…” in terms of observing the psychological conditioning techniques they were using, and how it would affect us as trainees. “Oh, they’re breaking us down… Now, they’re building us up…” kind of thing, you know?

I recognized it, observed it clinically, and participated wholeheartedly while also recognizing that it was a lot of bullshit, with the false bravado and the “We’re better than those losers over in Charlie Company…” sort of thing going on. Being able to do that is probably indicative of some deeply rooted mental deficiency on my part, but there it is.

What was really disorienting for me, though? Running into one of my drill sergeants in later year, when I was an NCO myself, and discussing the whole thing with him–Mine had been a somewhat memorable training cycle for him, because it was his first one as a Staff Sergeant, and he remembered me (always something to avoid–You really do not want to stand out in the mind of your drill sergeants…). The disorienting bit was me telling him what a wonderful job they’d done of psychologically manipulating us all, back during training, and having him tell me I was completely nuts–None of the things I’d thought were carefully planned had been, they’d just been flying by the seat of their pants. The things I recognized still happened, and had the same effect I’d surmised was intended, but my thinking that it had all been carefully calculated for effect? Delusional…

Funniest thing was him admitting to me that the seminal late-night road march that we’d thought was a punishment/rite-of-passage test of manhood had actually happened because the lead drill sergeant had gotten lost in the woods around Fort Leonard Wood in the snowstorm that came up that night, and what was supposed to have been an 8-mile conditioning road march they’d squeezed in because inclement weather had cancelled another one…? Yeah, that turned into a 16-mile death march in a blizzard and damn near killed a couple of trainees due to exposure. We all thought it was deliberately planned; the drills had actually come about this close (visualize me holding thumb and forefinger about a hairsbreadth apart…) to all going down for losing trainees to weather conditions when they weren’t supposed to even be out in it… They’d had to conceal the whole thing from anyone in authority on Fort Leonard Wood, because if the commanders had gotten word of what was going on that night, heads would have rolled. As it was, we got back into the barracks, and had to run a bunch of guys through the showers with hot water turned all the way up, in order to get their body temps back up to where they weren’t doing the involuntary shivers that indicate hypothermia…

Self-awareness is good, but sometimes you can go a bit too far with it.

Fussell’s powers of invective and general rhetoric were so strong that he could have been a cute fluffy bunny underneath for all I can tell.

I’m not sure which kind, and it’s not the kind that most of my friends, colleagues and neighbours have bought into, but if I were to call them out I’d have to be aware that I’ve got some bullshit too. I’m grateful not to have had the covering fully pulled away from my eyes, though. I would surely miss it.

Searching for Fussell on Gray just led me to reread the New Republic article “Thank God for the atom bomb” by Fussell, 1981. Perhaps that was the reference Bruce had in mind. His comments on Gray are brief in that, and part of his wider comments on what he considered the vast gap in experience between front line and even near-rear, and that Gray had been far-rear. He takes issue with Gray’s assertion that many an American soldier felt shocked and “ashamed” when they heard about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If nothing else, Fussell’s comments certainly bring again home to this civilian just how little anything in ordinary life compares to combat. It’s a powerful little 14 page polemic.

Fussell is one of those guys whose cynicism and disappointment with humanity turned him into a curmudgeon at an early age. Which is what usually happens when you buy into the bullshit wholeheartedly, and then find out that it’s bullshit through sad life experience. I’m not sure that makes him any less worth listening to, but it is worth keeping in mind as you read him.

If I remember rightly, because it’s been a long time since reading Gray, I think Gray was perhaps fortunate enough not to get enough of a dose of combat to become what Fussell turned into, perhaps as a function of not being in the same sorts of places Fussell was. In other words, Gray managed to retain a lot of his illusions/delusions about the nature of things…