Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

The Holy Duckfire

This is sort of a disturbing article--Two Men Charged In Duck Beating--on a couple of levels (one of which is, it's illegal to beat a duck to death with a stick but not illegal to go bowhunting for a buck that can't be brought down with a single arrow; how do we determine where cruelty starts and stops?). But the most disturbing level is this one:

Murcia-Rosa told investigators that he and two friends were fishing in a lake at Parrots Landing Apartments in the 1100 block of Sussex Drive when several ducks swam to the pieces of bread they used as bait.

Parrot's Landing is the apartment complex that Hank Lauderdale lives at in Lauderdale. The ducks in the canal there feature prominently in one of the episodes in the story. One of the minor characters sacrifices a duck in a Santeria ritual. But he isn't cruel about it.

Still. The whole thing's a little weird.

Congo

This week's reading them was The Congo. I wrote a very--very very--long review of these two books, which I've shelved as being about a great many topics apart from the books, and I'll post pieces of it as time goes on. So here's a much quicker
review.
The first book was The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, by Congolese academic Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. The book was more academic than I'd expected and as such I wouldn't call it a fun read. But it was certainly informative. Nzongola is a true believer in the power of democracy, truer I think than most American politicians. That bias (if you can call it that) is evident throughout the book, and Nzongola clearly believes that if real democracy can be brought to the Congo the place will settle down. But the country's history is rapine followed by more rapine; the place has never known a government that didn't consist of wealthy thugs stealing money from the treasury while ignoring the needs of the population--never. Not once since it was created in the 1880s. And it does not know that now. Having searched around on the internet for recent writings from Nzongola (the book was published in 2003, after Laurent Kabila's assassination but before this summer's election was on the calendar), it is clear he does not believe Joseph Kabila, or the elections as constituted this year, will bring democracy to the country. It is hard for me to see much hope for the place, but Nzongola does, and closes the book by reaffirming his belief that it is possible for democracy to come to Congo, and when it does it will bring peace to the country. We can only hope.

Facing the Congo by Jeffrey Tayler was a somewhat different book, a travelogue. Mr. Tayler, finding himself (as I do) bored and dissatisfied with life, decides he has a need for adventure, and that he will find himself somewhere on the Congo River. He determines to fly to Zaire (this was in 1994, while Mobutu was still in power and before the name had changed), take a barge upriver to Kisangani, the highest navigable point on the Congo, and from there purchase a pirogue (a Congolese dugout canoe), and a hire a guide, and pirogue down the river alone all the way to Kinshasa. Suffice to say he has not even made to Kinshasa and he is already wondering whether this is a good idea. It isn't, of course, it's absolutely a dreadful idea, but Tayler proceeds apace and survives to write about his trip. Of the two books, though Nzongola's is an outstanding work and very thought-provoking, this is of course far away the more readable and more interesting. More than that, as travel writing goes, Tayler's trip makes all other so-called "adventure travel" look like a Sunday drive with Miss Daisy. I highly recommend it.

Lauderdale Progress

I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.

Ahem. Excuse me.

I finished the second draft!!!!

I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)

Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.

It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).

I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.