Lightning Times

The Second Conversation

I've re-posted my piece The Second Conversation, which was originally published on August 19 in the now-defunct Media Tapper. Events since then - the Benghazi consulate attack and the attacks on Buddhists in Bangladesh - only further illustrate how eagerly Muslim extremists will seize on some perceived (or imagined), purely symbolic "insult" to excuse their own acts of violence. This must not be rewarded or tolerated.

"Where the West Ends" - Michael J. Totten

Excerpt from Where the West Ends:

Screwing up in the strange parts of the world is never fun and is usually miserable, but you learn things by doing it. You see things that governments and ministries of tourism wished you would not. Ukraine is so strange that you can even see these things in the dark. We actually saw more of Ukraine’s strangeness because we showed up in the dark.

I don’t remember what time we crossed the frontier. Eight o’clock in the evening? Anyway, it was dark. When I say it was dark, I mean it was dark. The back roads of Western Ukraine are as black at night as the most remote parts of the American West where no humans live in any direction.

Yet Western Ukraine is not empty.

And, oh God, the roads. I don’t care where you’ve been. You almost certainly have never seen anything like them.

The second worst road I’ve ever driven on was in Central America in the mid-1990s. It’s only a fraction as bad as the road Sean and I took into Ukraine. This one would have been no worse off had it been deliberately shredded to ribbons by air strikes. The damage was so thorough that the surface could not possibly have been repaved or repaired even once since the Stalinist era.

I white-knuckled it behind the wheel while Sean cringed in the passenger seat. I did not dare drive faster than five miles an hour. Even at that speed I had to weave all over the place to avoid the worst of the gaping holes, some of which were as wide as mattresses and deep enough to swallow TV sets.

I saw no cars, no street lights, not even a single light from a house. Ukraine looked depopulated. My maps said there were villages all over the place, but where were they? Did we just drive into an episode of Life After People?

“This is exactly like Russia,” Sean said. “Exactly.”

He had visited Russia two years earlier and will never forget the vast darkness at night on the train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. “We’re in Russia!” he said.

Then the ghost figures appeared. ...

You can pre-order the book here.

From my review:

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Probably most of us are guilty of throwing around terms like "the West" and "the Middle East" without really thinking too hard about what they mean, or where those places begin or end. If you want to understand what "the West" is, read this book to learn where it is, and where it is not.

There is a persistent feeling of loneliness in this book. It is the loneliness of communities cut off from one another and from themselves; but it's also the loneliness of certain individuals who refuse to be confined within the communal walls that are assigned to them. ...

One final note: The values and traditions that we cherish in the West are by no means assured of continuance. "The West" is an abstraction that exists in space and also in time. If in the title you replace the word "where" with "when", the book is also a warning.

Read the full review of "Where the West Ends" at Dreams Into Lightning 1.

Direct from Israel

Over at DIL1, go check out my impressions and photographs from my visit to Israel in November 2011. And there's my ongoing interview with an old friend who has been living for the last 21 years in Israel.

New at DiL1

Over at my other blog, Dreams Into Lightning 1:

Notes and pictures from my trip to Israel in November 2011. Also, follow my Culture tag to a blog post by a longtime screen pal of mine, the very talented writer J. E. Muller.