Reflection on Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

               This book left me feeling sad in a way that not a lot of these books do. I remember reading the Jefferson biography a year or so ago and having a similar feeling, which I think means that the writer did a very good job with the death of their subject. In Disney’s case, it left me especially sad being that he died of lung cancer and very fearful of death. He was always seeking perfection and never really was satisfied with anything he did, which must have left him feeling incomplete. That sort of attitude drove him forward, but it also must have made him feel like his life was so unfinished at his death as he was obsessing over EPCOT.

               Walt had a really good and a really bad childhood. The really good part was in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, where his father Elias was a farmer. However, the really bad part was when the family moved to St. Louis after the farm didn’t work out. Walt hated the city and was forced to work constantly and missed out on a lot of childhood activities that he had in Marceline. Walt’s father Elias was stern and sometimes violent, leading to an incident when he went to beat Walt with a hammer and Walt stopped and disarmed him at 14 years old. After working with the Red Cross in World War One, Walt moved to LA to follow his artistic dreams. Though his first business, Laugh-O-Gram (which produced short cartoons before movies), went bankrupt, Walt wasn’t bitter and continued to work hard.

               With Laugh-O-Gram, Disney had a successful character in Oswald the Rabbit, but lost the rights to him in the bankruptcy. It was then that he created Mickey Mouse. Originally, he was to be called Mortimer Mouse, but Walt’s wife Lillian made him change the name. Mickey defeated his rival, Felix the Cat because Mickey’s shorts contained sound, a major innovation. Not only did they have sound, but they were created with sound in mind so that the action matched up. Felix the Cat’s creator, however, only added the sound in afterwards, a sort of halfhearted attempt to compete with Mickey.

               When the Depression came, Walt and his older brother Roy, who managed the finances, were in a very good position. They had not invested in the markets, rather putting all the money from their business back into their business. You could say that the Depression saved the Disney company since they ended up with a lot of money when nobody else had any. It led to the best talent moving into Disney Studios. In the thirties, Disney’s new innovation was color cartoons, and when Snow White premiered in color it was a sensation, earning $6.7 million, the most of any film to that point.

               One May 29, 1941, Disney’s workers went on strike, a very controversial event that split the studio. At a time of unionization all across the country, the AFL put Disney products on its “unfair” list and that meant that no Disney movies could be shown since the soundmen were unionized. The lab technicians at Technicolor wouldn’t even process Disney film. Walt meanwhile blamed the strike on Communist infiltrators. The strike ended on July 30 with ten percent wage increases for artists earning under $50 a week, backpay and reinstatement of strikers and fired workers, and for future layoffs to be decided by a joint committee of management and workers. The strike marked the end of the carefree days at Disney studios when Walt was just one of the guys. Walt started to get meaner and became a fearsome presence in Disney offices. At the same time, Disney started to face greater competition from Hannah-Barbera and Looney Tunes.

               I think the author protests too much when discussing Disney’s racism and anti-Semitism. While it seems like Walt was not a virulent, hateful racist, it is clear that he harbored prejudices, even if they were not much more than most other powerful white men at the time. I think that Gabler overdoes it when he tries to defend Disney’s statements. I also wish that Gabler had spent more time on the Disney World park, since that was a major reason that I picked up the book, but I guess that was a project that was not occupying most of Walt’s time at his death. I enjoyed this book and found the subject to be a very interesting guy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Walt Disney was not frozen, but cremated.
• By the end of the 30’s, Disney Studios had a row of filing cabinets with 1.5 million jokes grouped under 124 classifications.
• Walt bought a house for his parents in California and sent one of his men to fix the heating system there. Tragically, the handyman made some sort of mistake and created a carbon monoxide leak that rendered his father unconscious and killed his mother. The guilt must have been terrible.
• Disneyland was built with a railroad at 5/8 scale. The buildings are built with the first floor at 9/10 scale, the second floors 8/10, and the third floors 7/10. Other parts were also built at different scales to emphasize and deemphasize certain parts of the park.
• Disney World was built in Orlando so that it wouldn’t have to compete with the gulf or ocean coasts.

Reflection on How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Maine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918 by Heather Venable

               This is another book about the Marines that I’m reading for obvious reasons. This book, which was excellent, focused on an early time in the history of the Marines and their crucial public relations transition into “the first to fight.” The book convers the transition in which Marines stopped calling themselves soldiers and started to call themselves just Marines. In the 19^th century, Marines served onboard ships as sharpshooters and boarders of enemy ships as well as military police to prevent mutinies. But as the Navy developed further, there was less need for Marines except for as secondary gunners on large steel ships, which created conflict with sailors who felt that the big guns were their purview.

               The Marines created their myth before it became a reality. Marine recruiters made exaggerated claims in newspapers about being the oldest service and that the young American republic depended on (as quoted in newspapers) a “faithful cops [that] was its only defense.” Prior to this, Marines had a bad reputation on ships for refusing to do menial tasks that they considered to be part of the Navy’s job. Later on, at the beginning of the 20^th century, they adopted a can-do attitude, claiming that they could and would do any job. However, President Theodore Roosevelt removed Marines from ships in 1908. But by that time, the Marines had already found a new purpose as an expeditionary force in the Spanish-American War. Around the same time, the Marine Corps song, “The Halls of Montezuma,” became referred to as a hymn, suggesting a deeper meaning. All this pride became a part of the Marine Corps’ personality by World War One and future Marines would enter the Corps believing whole-heartedly in their masculinity, toughness, and superiority over other branches of the military.

               Venable tells a story of a World War One-era Marine, who was sleeping in a cot. Some visitor remarked to another, “I think this must be an American soldier.” Venable writes that, “From the depths of the pillow came a muffled voice— ‘Hell no; I’m a Marine!’”

Reflection on The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer

               This was a decent book for international businesspeople who seek to work better with people from other cultures. At its best, the book offers nuanced ways to understand why some people operate one way and other people another. At its worst, it has factual inaccuracies and oversimplifies huge areas. One issue in particular was the way that India was treated as one big culture yet Europe had different cultures for Dutch, German, French, and all other sorts of people. I guess the book is written from a western perspective but that seemed silly since more languages are spoken in India than Europe and I bet they have just as many cultures. The book was alright, but I’m not sure if it was that useful to try to create “culture maps.”

Reflection on How to Defend Australia by Hugh White

               This was a kind of weird book to pick up being that I am not Australian and know very little about Australia but as someone interested in how future conflict in the Western Pacific will look I found Hugh White’s case for Australia to remain a medium power to be fascinating. White points out that America has disengaged from the region due to the War on Terror. Even as the USA returns with the “pivot to Asia,” American power will not be undisputed in the region again in our lifetime. The rise of China, soon to be followed by a likely rise of India, traps Australia between a rock and a hard place (not to mention an ascendant Indonesia). White argues for a reorientation of Australian defense policy to its immediate region and to the important goal of the independent defense of Australia, assuming no outside help.

               White often returns to a critical event in recent Australian military history, the 2000 white paper released by the Howard government, which reoriented Australian military policy to focus less on defending the homeland and more on foreign intervention and assisting US forces in a hypothetical war against China. White argues that this is not in Australia’s interest. Now that both China and Indonesia are far stronger than they were 20 years ago, White points out that Australia cannot focus so much on projecting force far from its borders. With US capabilities in decline in the Western Pacific, Australia must focus on its own self-defense.

               One of White’s most interesting points is that, “History may well judge that the most important long-term consequence of 9/11 was the way the attacks that day distracted American from the biggest strategic shift of our time. They stopped America recognizing China’s rise, made it easier for China to challenge US leadership, and harder for America to remain a significant power in Asia.” He points out that both US and Australian forces began to tailor their capabilities to needs in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed to develop capabilities that are necessary in the Western Pacific. Now, White says, Australia lacks sufficient submarines yet has a huge and useless investment in amphibious land forces and a large surface fleet to protect them. Australian combat aircraft cannot sustain operations without massive US support. Now Australia will survive a major regional war only at the pleasure of the United States.

               The author points out four “permanent strategic interests” of Australia; they are based on Lord Palmerston’s model that required England to oppose the strongest power on continental Europe. Each interest represents an area of importance to Australia’s defense. In declining order of importance, they are:

• The military balance in the waters and airspace immediately surrounding Australia, and especially the area between continental Australia and the archipelago to the north
• The closest islands of the archipelago to the north that can be used to launch attacks against Australia
• The huge archipelago of maritime Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines
• The final ring includes Japan, India, and China and the balance of relations between those countries

This makes it seem kind of ridiculous that Australia participated in the War on Terror. While at the time it must have looked important to maintain good relations with the USA, today Australia’s situation is very different. To look that the geography of where Australia lies, it is clear that its interests lie far closer to home than Iraq or Afghanistan. As a goal, White says that Australia should strive to be able to defend itself from a major Asian power.

               One of the most important things for Australia to achieve is sea denial in its immediate area rather than sea control. While Australia has invested in major surface warships in the past that enable sea control, the ability to move one’s own ships across a stretch of ocean, it would be better for Australia to focus on sea denial, the ability to stop an enemy from moving across an important stretch of ocean. To attack, you need control and to defend you need denial. Since White wants to defend Australia, he focuses on denial. Thanks to technological changes in missiles and air power, most surface ships are just targets, incapable of defending themselves. For that reason, White suggest a dramatic increase in Australia’s submarine fleet paired with a reduction in its number of surface ships. White argues that, “warships will remain valuable for operations in waters that are not contested by other maritime powers, and likewise carriers and amphibious ships will remain useful in uncontested waters against less capable adversaries. But their roles in major maritime conflicts will disappear. Instead, war at sea will be dominated by submarines, aircraft, drones, missiles and satellites.” I found myself very convinced by his thinking. To bring this back to what Australia needs, White says that air and sea forces must be able to deny approaches to Australia and land forces must be able to challenge any landing on Australian shores. As for land forces, White recommends taking a page from the Russians and using the size of their continent-country to their advantage in maneuver warfare.

               In summation, Australia needs to change its military orientation now. Australia continues to develop naval forces for sea control and power projection that would support the US Navy; and while this is great for America, it does Australia no good in defending itself. Australia’s offensive-minded forces should become more defensive. For me, it will be interesting to see if this happens, though as an American I feel like I should hope for the opposite of what White wants. It seems like it would be better to have an Australian ally geared to help us out in the West Pacific rather than just defend itself.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Thanks to technological advances, air-to-air combat will likely not involve much dogfighting in the future. In the modern day, aircraft can launch long-range missiles outside of sight range and accurately hit other planes, meaning that “who wins a clash between fighters will depend on which side launches its missile and gets it within the other’s no-escape zone first.”

Reflection on Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

              Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is a very thorough look at the life and times of the great American thinker, which is especially interesting in the times shortly before and after the Civil War, when Douglass’ influence was greatest and his ideas tested. Going in, I knew that Frederick Douglass was a great thinker, but I didn’t realize that he was really more of an orator than anything else. He gave legendary speeches across the nation rallying Americans to the abolitionist cause. He was a deeply religious man who took great inspiration from the Old Testament, so much that I frequently consulted my bible to find the passages he referenced. Douglass was pretty radical and came around to support a violent end to slavery a few years before the Civil War. I was impressed by the fact that as a young man he was sent to be “broken” by a slave master and instead of being broken, he beat and strangled the man, humiliating him. The man, embarrassed, sent him back to his master without revealing what happened.

              As a young man, Frederick Douglass (then Frederick Bailey) was taken away from his family and sold to a couple in Baltimore, where the wife made the mistake of teaching him how to read. Her husband ordered her to stop, but Douglass found ways to get more books and information and became a rebellious, unmanageable teenage slave. His master was cruel, but not cruel enough to send him to the deep south when he was caught leading a group of runaways at 18 years old. That gave him enough time to plan another attempt, and he finally made it north in 1838, at 20 years old. Douglass went with his new wife, Anna (who we never hear much about), to Massachusetts, where he was discovered by abolitionists in 1840. By 1841, Douglass’ occupation in the town directory was changed from “laborer” to “reverend,” and he gained fame as an orator. He ended up getting to know the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and working with him. Garrison seems kind of condescending and patronizing in this book though, and I didn’t love that about him.

              As a Garrisonian, Douglass denounced political participation from 1841-1851 and argued that all forms of participation in American government were corrupt. However, in the 1850s, Douglass decided to accept working within the system. He also gave up on non-violence, deciding that violence could be acceptable as a means to end slavery. In fact, Douglass met with John Brown before his famous raid in Harper’s Ferry bringing him money and a recruit. That said, Douglass was not a warrior. He did not participate in the struggle at Harper’s Ferry and was not ready to die at 41. With a young family, that was definitely the right choice.

              It must have been incredibly disappointing for Douglass to see so much progress erased for African Americans after the Civil War. In the 8-1 ruling in United States v. Stanley, the court held that the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “applied only to states and not to individual acts of discrimination by a person or business establishment,” as Blight explains. This legalized discrimination against blacks and paved the way for Jim Crow. Through the end of the 19^th century, the Supreme Court consistently found in favor of states’ rights and helped solidify the racist and evil system of the South at that time.



Miscellaneous Facts:

• Frederick Douglass was a feminist and forcefully endorsed the right to vote for women at the Seneca Falls Conference
• Douglass had two white mistresses (Julia Griffiths and Otillie Assing) over the course of his life who regularly visited his and his wife’s house and sometimes stayed for extended periods of time. I can only imagine how terrible it was to be Anna Douglass, who it seems like Frederick did not really treat very well.
• Gerrity Smith, an associate of Douglass, wrote a book called “Heads of the Colored People,” which must have inspired “The Heads of Colored People” by Nafissa Thompson!
• Douglass despised colonization schemes designed to liberate the slaves and send them to Africa or anywhere far from the United States. 
• Despite being an anti-racist, Douglass had pretty bad things to say about Native Americans and often compared blacks to them to show how much better blacks were.
• Douglass wrote three autobiographies, later deemphasizing slavery and emphasizing his ascendance as a great man.
• After his wife Anna died, Douglass married a white woman, Helen Pitts, and that was very controversial among all races. 
• Douglass climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza at 69 years old. 
• Douglass became the US Ambassador to Haiti towards the end of his life.
• In his autobiography, Douglass writes of his father, “I say nothing of father…. Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families.” His father was truly his mother’s white overseer, but his quote gets at a really important truth of slavery that affects the USA to this day—slavery worked by destroying family bonds over decades and centuries. That sort of evil cannot be overcome for several generations.

Reflection on Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

               I enjoyed this book about different Jewish communities around the world from Venezuela to Finland and from Uzbekistan to Morocco. The author visited different synagogues around the world and met the Jewish people who worship in them, creating a really cool book with tons of different cultures and languages and food all part of one Jewish people. One thing that stood out is that most diaspora Jews are poor. The places the author describes are often more or less ghettos and you do not find many doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Hernroth-Rothstein draws some lessons at the end, being that:

• Orthodox communities fare better than their conservative or progressive counterparts
• A larger community is not necessarily a more vibrant community
• Religion begets religion (AKA Jews keep more traditions in majority religious countries than in atheistic countries)
• A level of isolation often benefits Jewish communities
• Diaspora Jews are connected to Israel, but that relationship is complicated
• Holocaust remembrance has both a push and pull on Jewish identity

               While I think that Hernroth-Rothstein has good points, I disagree with a few, primarily that “a level of isolation benefits Jewish communities.” Under that point she writes that, “when the Jews attempt to actively intermingle and adapt, the cultural exchange seems to only go one way—Jews adapting to the majority religion and culture and not the other way around—inevitably blurring the line between integration and assimilation.” I think the author is completely wrong here. One Jewish community she doesn’t address is the American Jewish community, which I think has a huge impact on the country. I don’t know much about others, but I know that Yiddish words, Jewish holidays, and Jewish actors have had huge impacts on American culture from the Rugrats Hannukah special to the show Seinfeld. I think that Hernroth-Rothstein tends to favor a Talmudic, rabbinic, and orthodox Judaism, and that bias comes through in the book. That said, despite those disagreements I really liked the book and would recommend it to others.

Reflection on First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps by Victor Krulak

               This is a pretty cool book all about the Marine Corps, mainly focusing on the period from the 1920’s to the 1960’s in Vietnam. Krulak was a Lieutenant General and most of the book is told from the first-person perspective as he takes you through his long career in the USMC. He also covers earlier history, detailing how in the 19^th century, the Navy wanted to get the Marines off their ships and insisted that a sailor could do anything that a Marine could do. At the turn of the century, the Navy had a good idea, that Krulak says the Marines should have realized first—that the Marines become an expeditionary force in support of the US fleet, clarifying their role, which had been as a sort of raiding party or naval police. The Marines fought it at the time, but started to evolve into that role in Mexico and Cuba, where they earned a reputation for themselves as great fighters. Within the Department of Defense (or Dep. of War), there have been numerous attempts to eliminate or diminish the role of the Marines. Krulak counts 15 times when the Corps was saved by Congress or public opinion due to its exceptional reputation, the most intense occasion occurring shortly after World War Two. Part of the reason that the Marines developed a culture of elitism and high physical requirements was to justify their existence.

               A lot of the Marines’ influence lies in straight-up propaganda. Like how the Spartans used Thermopylae to boost their reputation, the Marines did the same with the “Halls of Montezuma,” Belleau Wood, Okinawa, and Guadalcanal, among others. Harry Truman once said, “They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s…” But the propaganda contains a core of truth, Krulak writes of the 1980’s recruit that, “During his twelve weeks of sixteen-waking hour days a recruit will run ninety miles, run the obstacle course ten times, do at least seventy hours of calisthenics, at least sixteen hours of swimming, and spend ninety hours in field training. It is an intensely physical experience, fueled by a daily thirty-three hundred calorie diet. On an average he will lose eight pounds of fat and gain twelve pounds of muscle.” That is intense!

Reflection on Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson

               I thought this book would be more of social analysis, but I think it falls more into the self-help category. Manson talks about various dilemmas we find ourselves in but it’s hard to find a unifying theme in the book. Some things I did like, though, were his points about how happiness should not be our goal in life. Happiness is a temporary state and you can’t go through life trying to maximize your joy at all times. What is more important is fulfilling your duties to others. He also points out the difference between variety and freedom. If one person has 2 cereal options and another has 100. The person with 100 does not have more freedom, she has more variety. Freedom isn’t how many choices you have, but rather your ability to make a choice without being forced to do anything by anyone or anything else. Manson has good lessons in the book, but I would have been more interested in what he has to say about broader unhappiness in developed countries. He touches on this on a “micro” level. He discusses how variety doesn’t improve our lives and how we’ll always just look for more problems once our problems are solved, but I didn’t feel like I got any real solutions out of the book.

Reflection on The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic by Akhil Reed Amar

               This book is the third in a long series that Amar is writing about the constitution using different perspectives. I didn’t realize that until he mentioned it at the end of this book, when I found out that the one other book I had read by him was the first in the series. This book starts each chapter by discussing one state’s connection with a constitutional concept and explores a lot of different ideas that have been debated in our country’s nearly 250-year history. It was pretty cool, though not as engaging as the first book in the series. I found myself a little bored with it by the end. My problem is that the book lacked any central, unifying theme. It covered lots of different aspects of constitutional law, but quickly changed subject every 20-odd pages, making it hard to follow and really get into. I think I’ll give it four out of five stars, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I will still be interested in reading more of Amar’s work though. He writes with a lot of clarity.