Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4
Chaplain Untermeyer, I’m delighted by your gift of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings. I read it last fall as I sat at a taqueria and practiced Spanish with pretty Mexican girls before going to hapkido training with the Iron Dragon, Mike White, a mere white man (not comparable to the Flying Dragon, Great Grandmaster Yu). The Iron Dragon was only a couple of degrees above your lowly captain, but he sold me on joint locks and grapples as an art form – and on the value of Musashi.
The master samurai was brilliant, profound and true, and I’ll take your gift for a sign that I should immediately begin re-reading him in this finer edition, which has ample room for notes and better still, your friendly note on the cover. I’m sure glad there are enough interested folks to justify The Overlook Press version you’ve given me, but I can’t imagine how folks who can’t do a single knuckle pushup on the sidewalk, stand in a horse’s stance for a minute, or break a board with a karate chop can learn much from it’s explicit martial arts advice. I guess that to businessmen a bit of knowledge of Musashi has been that much-craved illusional edge (kinda like wearing a Rolex or a driving a Mercedes) that keeps ‘em keeping-up with their peers. I think that Musashi himself, poor, dirty and sublime in his martial arts, indifferent to the pleasures and pains of the flesh, would smile to think that folks were trying to delve into his treatise and figure out how to beat other guys by having the most designing friends or, in the end, a the best designer coffin planted in the best-designed mausoleum in town. [Editor’s emphasis, in all cases]
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Mrs. May has gone to mass this morning, limping because of the fury of a frolic yesterday (not to kiss and tell). Well, I’ll smile while she is reading her Bible passages. I think I’ll read from an assortment of my martial-arts breviaries while she’s gone:
First reading, from my new Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings:
“It
is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your
everyday stance your combat stance.”
[My personal applications of this are many. Take, for example, my choice of
neighborhood. Shucks, how can a man
master the way of violence if he walks in an innocuous world? If I failed to be a strong man, I would
receive a beating or mugging from my local brothers once a month. I think Musashi’s
point about constant readiness is parallel to a famous dictum of Augustus: “Si vis pacem, para
bellum” which I translate, Texan-style as “If you’re ready to kick ass, you
usually won’t have to.”]
Second reading, from Sun Tzu’s Art of War:
Li
Chuan: “If the enemy general is
hot-headed his authority can easily be upset.
His character is not firm.”
Chang
Yu: “If the enemy general is obstinate
and prone to anger, insult and enrage him, so that he will be irritated and
confused, and without a plan will recklessly advance against you.”
[I’ve had a star by this passage since March, when the war was
pending. Any opponent of Boy George
should read it a hundred times, because afterwards he’ll have a one-hundred
percent understanding of how to beat him.
I’ve fought the whole Infowar with Sun Tzu’s
advice in mind.]
Third reading (this will end the Sunday sermon, ‘cause I used to hate it when the preacher dragged it out), from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince:
“A
prince has little to fear from conspiracies when his subjects are well disposed
towards him; but when they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has
reason to fear everything and everyone.”
[Hmm… Do you think we could
substitute the word “prez” for “prince”? Just asking, ‘cause I think the prez is losing the infowar pretty
badly now, and as dear old Ambrose Bierce wrote it in The Devil’s Dictionary,
“friendship” is a ship big enough for two in fair weather, but only one in
foul…]
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Thanks for attending to a fair sampling of my current religious doctrines. I’ve tried Christianity a few times (didn’t work), and have a fair regard for both Islam and Judaism, but when all is said and done, I’m no more than a petty priest of Thor. My religion is Martial Arts. It’s the only one people really have any respect for, my friend – just look at the world nowadays and try telling me I’m wrong. Now for one last item…
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Confessional: Forgive me Chaplain, for I have sinned, and have been waiting for things to cool off before telling you. Back on July 13 (a Sunday morning, which is why I now recall it), as Mrs. May and I were driving by my friend Jay’s convenience store, I saw three well-suited young men in a car just ahead of us roll down their window and pitch their trash out onto his parking lot.
“Do you know who that is?” I asked my wife.
“No,” she replied, “but I’ll bet they’re on their way to church.”
I hate it when a good Catholic like Mrs. May catches my Baptist brethren at their hypocritical worst, and into the neighborhood Baptist church parking lot they drove. Since I was already behind them I pulled in as well, stopping a comfortable distance away so as not to be too confrontational, and rolled my window down as they exited their car. Deacon-style, I admonished them not to trash our brother and neighbor on a Sunday morning, and chose to leave it at that – a Christian reminder.
That’s when the devil must have showed up, chaplain, because some evil spirit made those young men begin to swear at me and Mrs. May most vociferously, and one even threatened to kill us. I won’t blame Satan for my own sin or reaction, though. I’m responsible for myself, I guess, except that at that particular instant on that particular Sunday morning I wasn’t thinking when I reflexed into a flow of movements at the speed of fight. I stopped the truck, opened the door, pivoted from the vehicle, stepped out of my sandals, bowed to them and introduced myself to the most egregious one as Captain May, the Brass Dragon. I took a fighting stance, showed him my knuckles and told him that he could choose which of his bones I was going to break. His friends didn’t look real steady at this point, and his knees began to knock a bit, which disgusted and disappointed me because I wanted him to either pick a bone or utter another threat, in which case I intended to pick one out for myself, posthaste.
Well, the Lord delivered us all from the need to try the issue by combat, because a preacher came out of the church, clueless, yelling that the young brothers shouldn’t beat up a white man on Sunday morning in front of Jesus’ house. Well, after hearing this, your humble white man wasn’t going to dis Brother Jesus or his preacher, so I got back into the truck and let him lead his sheep away. He beamed proudly at the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit to induce repentance: The two companions went along with him to church, gentle as lambs, while the brave boy of sixty seconds ago went back to his car until the pee-patch in his pants could dry.
Anyhow, the story can be written now and should be, just to show how irritable I was feeling the day before Valerie Plame got outed and a few days before Dr. Kelly was outed, grilled and killed. Yep, I was mighty cranky. Must have been my paranoia flaring up, the way it has kept doing since the prez started acting a fool and jumped us into the quicksand war.
One last theological point: Wednesday morning, July 16, after the Flying Dragon had trained me for a couple of hours, I asked him to explain a breath-control concept to me. Without a word he motioned me outside to his turtle pen, took a five-gallon bucket, filled it with water and bade me lower my face into it and focus on a method of slow, controlled exhalation. I knelt faithfully as the hand that can shatter a pile of bricks held me under the water for a full minute. I had no anxiety, and stayed under complaisantly until he released me. At that point I figured that I was as close to baptized and in a state of grace as I could be, under my nihilist circumstances, so I bought a new dobok from him for funeral clothes and came out swinging again at the prez.
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Andrew, my
twelve-year-old, has just come in from the back acre, where he and I camped out
last night under the lunar eclipse and warmed ourselves at a hearty fire. We’re practicing for Thanksgiving, which we
will spend out in the sticks on a three-day hike. He’ll be coming to live with me in January,
which ain’t a bad month for camping out on the
Captain May
PS: Thanks for the extra copy of Steven Pressfield’s Tides of
War. With your permission, I’ll give
it to my brother as a Christmas gift.
He’ll enjoy the Peloponnesian Wars.
After all, it looks like we’re gearing up for something very much like
it. Unfortunately, I think we’re
I seem to have a knack for giving you books you’ve already read. But I will send you one soon that almost certainly you don’t have. Thanks for the theological musings. (signed) The Right Rev. Chase.
Not to worry a bit about sending me stuff I’ve read, Herr Untermeyer. It’s a compliment to your knack for the humanities that you’re thinking about the stuff I always study. This process of enlightened minds sharing the same works is the way a classic comes into being in the first place.
This morning in class, The Flying Dragon asked each of the color belts (my juniors in rank) to tell of their single greatest dream in life.
“To study Tae Kwon Do, sir!” shouted the one who has missed every other class in his few months of semi-training.
“To help others, sir!” shouted the one who always does throwing techniques extra hard when he’s working with a woman.
“To serve the Lord, sir!” shouted the one who lies every time he is asked whether he has done his knuckle pushups.
I didn’t get asked what my dream was in class because I had already told Master Yu in private a couple of weeks ago: My dream is to write a classic, my esteemed best-man, something that will make us endure a bit longer than our flesh at worst, and our very bones at best. April Fools, Captain May is my finest attempt to date. Hell’s bells, Chaplain Chase, the highest note in your illustrious biography may cease to be your service to the White Folks’ House back in Reagan/Bush. I’m predicting that you’ll be best remembered as the most enduring and endearing skeptic in my minor classic. You are the Doubting Thomas of the miracle story I’ve been heralding, not a happy one about resurrected Son of God, but a horrible one about the obliviated 3/7 Cavalry.
I’ve got another idea about the extra copy of Tides of War you sent me… How about I send it as a gift from the two of us to Thom Shanker at the New York Times? Shucks, since him and Wolf-wits went wandering around Baghdad last month he’s been rocketed; he’s run straight at danger like a hero; and he’s co-written a mighty cool piece about Task Force 121, our new-and-improved version of Task Force 20 – except that TF 121 looks like it’s tailor-made for internationalizing our Iraq mischief. If it ain’t about black ops, it’s damn sure about shades of gray in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Thom could use a bit of classical perspective, Chaplain Chase, and if he likes Tides of War, I’ll send him Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. God knows, I’m poor, but it’s worth the expense to educate him, seeing as how he’s writing for the masses and he’s the Ghost Troop mascot. These journalists do need deepening… History is happening around them and they’re running in place, rodents on treadmills, baited onward by the temporalities and trivialities hung up just ahead of them. They’re clueless critters always focusing on the deadline, and blind to the dead end.
By the way, do you remember the first book I gave you and Mrs. Untermeyer? Yep, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and I recall that she read it, too. So did Lady Bird Johnson, by the way – respecting your love of historic detail – who read it one summer after she had heard so much D.C. claptrap about the work from folks who’d never made it past the first chapter. I believe Doris Kearns noted in her fine biography of LBJ that this became known as “the summer Lady Bird read War and Peace.” I wish everyone making historic decisions now could take a time out until they had read that greatest of novels, for then they would see what is happening, and they would recoil from it. What are the odds that Boy George has read Tolstoy, Chase? Zip? Yep, that’s what I thought, too. Listening to him the last few days, I get the uneasy feeling that he’s still not having second thoughts, even if some of his advisors are. We’re going deeper into the quicksand of Iraq.
Captain May
PS: Hey, one last question: Do you think Billy Krystal
has read War and Peace? Next time you guys are working on strategy
questions, how ‘bout you ask him (and do you think he’d run any of my
Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4