Thursday, June 26, 2014

Sadness, War, Happiness

Found from an old file of writings from my time in the Army, especially from my time as an Army officer in Iraq from 2007 - 2008.  I wrote this particular piece in May of '08; the file is dated 5/20/2008.  I have changed nothing, and the piece was untitled, although the file is called "Thoughts on Absurd things."

Sadness is a funny thing.  Like the taste of a perfectly ripe orange, the sadness you felt at some given point in your past can’t be conjured up again.  Your sadness always seems a little absurd in retrospect.  You know the orange was good, that it was pungent and sweet and sour all at the same time, and you know that you wept while standing at the graveside of your grandfather, but just now you can’t remember exactly what it was like.
            That’s something of what it was like to say goodbye to my wife and daughters as I boarded a bus bound for the place where I would board a plane to take me to Iraq.  It was sad and would have been gut-wrenchingly so if not for the crowd of adult men and women with me going through the same thing.  Also my wife and I were prepared for it: we’d developed the emotional detachment such a situation requires.  But it was sad.  I didn’t look back through the window longingly the way they do in some movies.  I sat there with my eyes inside the bus they way they do in other movies, the ones where the audience chokes up and thinks, Why doesn’t he just look back?
            Now, of course, the sincerity of the moment is lost to the vacuum of memory and the sadness of it sounds absurd, or at least overblown.  I’ve read of many young men now dead at the hands of our war, and of young men whose minds won’t work quite right after fighting in our war, and of men whose legs were engineered in a lab to be just like real legs for use after our war, and sadness is just changing.  I imagine the sadness of a mother or young wife as they watch the flag shift over the convex lid of their son’s or husband’s coffin.  Now picture me on that bus again looking forward with stalwart resolve.  How sad am I really?  I don’t remember.
            War is not as dangerous as it used to be either.  I’m saying this from in front of a laptop computer, from inside a sandbagged concrete building, which is inside a fenced and watchtowered base.  So for me it’s not dangerous.  There was one morning when I awoke to the alarmingly close explosion of a mortar.  I heard tiny bits of dirt clatter against the roof of my trailer and my first dreamy thought was, Damn that was close.  I assumed it had hit just outside the concrete barriers immediately surrounding my room, but it had actually hit about 40 yards away.  Outside people were scrambling around, most of them sleepy looking like me, trying to find a bunker or some semblance of order and explanation for this rude noise.  I found out later that a guy in a porta-john had been injured pretty badly from the explosion and shrapnel, along with two others.
            So that’s the extent of any danger I’ve known intimately.
            But in general I don’t know that this war is a lot worse than any other.  I could make the most hackneyed of examples by comparing death rates from other conflicts.  I could say that the same numbers of troops as have been killed in Iraq were killed in a matter of hours during the D-Day invasion, but what would be the use?  I could also say that that most attractive of comparisons, the Vietnam Conflict, was responsible for more than 50,000 dead troops, more than ten times as many as in this war, but what would be the point?  If you were a 20 year-old walking through Sadr City with 45 pounds of gee-whiz personal protective technology on your person, searching for a local insurgent among the courtyards and concrete houses, would you think to yourself, I’m glad I’m here and not crawling up a beach in France?
            That’s of course a localized emotion, whereas I’m saying the war is less dangerous in an analytical way.  The same way full-grown and well-paid adults in America say that we need to put more troops into Iraq, or we need to pull more troops out of Iraq, or that our military is breaking and we need to fix it…that’s the kind of dispassionate analysis I’m using to say this: war used to be worse.  Distance is by far the greatest example of technological protection we could ever hope to engineer, and our politicians and national voices are furthering research in this area.  They carry the burdens of proof.  I too was much safer than I am now when I was at home watching the news and saying, We need to pull more troops out of Iraq.  I had the double bias: I was far away from the less dangerous danger, and I would soon be going there.  I like distance, its so much better than the Individual Body Armor (IBA) or the Improved Outer Tactical Vest (IOTV), both of which can stop a 7.62mm round, assuming it hits somewhere within the 500 square inches or so of ballistic plates.  Distance can defeat any bullet, as long as you know how far away to be.  America is far enough away from any bullet in Iraq, just so you know.  You can stop worrying now.
            Distance works for us here, too.  Artillery is the finest example of the combination defensive/offensive approach to killing people.  It uses distance to its advantage, and it’s scary precisely because it chips away at the armor of distance for the bad guys.  Another example of a good use of the technology of distance: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV).  These are like radio-controlled airplanes for fully grown men who want to take video of large swaths of the countryside.  I don’t know for sure if a UAV has been used to kill anyone, but it’s a brilliant idea.  I can imagine the kids lining up at the recruiting office if it were made known that they could kill real people with remote controlled airplanes.  And what a pool of qualified applicants!  What boy in America has not been training his whole life to kill pictures of people from a distance?
            Isn’t distance just a preferred means of separation?  I’m thinking here of separation as an idea, but also as a physical state.  We have to have separation, especially in America.  The separation of Church and State.  The separate but equal powers of government.  And the notorious American sense of personal space, which is nothing but an assertion of the need for separation.  I’ve heard it said that our personal space is more voluminous than that of other cultures, and I’m sure it is.  Hey, we’ve earned it.  It’s a part of us.  How else could you muster the indignation and pure rage required to pull someone from their car on the highway and beat the hell out of them?  Road rage is both a symptom and a cause of separation.  We drive around separately, kept apart by the air between our cars and the steel-and-plastic shells of our cars, and the notional separation we greedily adopt as individuals at battle along the roadway trying to get where we’re going, all others be damned.  Violations of our space infuriate us.  At the same time, fear of repudiation for violating the space of others forces us to remain separate.  I’m not going to wave at a stranger who might be a crazy road-raging bastard.
            There’s that funny equation again: distance = safety.
            Daily life seems as absurd as anything.  As an acquaintance recently pointed out, what could be more absurd than, say, sitting in traffic?  There you sit, in a vehicle, a result of tremendous technological advancement, built at great monetary and ecological expense, on a road built with tremendous technology and at great monetary and ecological expense, burning up a resource extracted by tremendous technology and at great monetary and ecological expense, and I’m going nowhere.  Can such a pedestrian activity as sitting in traffic really be considered as absurd as it is?  I will be amazed if the men who run the government ever get on TV and say that sitting in traffic is stupid.  It is not in the nature of our leaders to point out the obvious.
            I think the best thing we can do for ourselves is to come to terms with how ridiculous we are.  I have done that.  I know now that war is ridiculous (though I always suspected it) because I’ve seen what the TV calls war.  There’s a lot of business and quotidian, bureaucratic ambling that keeps war moving along.  There’s also a lot of money involved, which seems strange.  I would prefer that war was just about killing people and involved less money.  Money makes daily life so much more complicated, so you can imagine how much it complicates something as simple as war.  Paperwork follows money like a dog follows a garbage truck, and in my opinion there’s too much paperwork required in this war.  So this simple, ridiculous equation—less money equals less paperwork—should be applied.  I’ll be the first to adopt this policy.  Everyone, I think, knows the important and absurd correlation between money and war, so of course if we adopt a policy of reduced money input we’ll end the war.  And if we end the war then I can go home.
That has been my only loss thus far, leaving home.  A few months ago I realized what a strange and ridiculous thing it is to mourn my loss.  What have I lost?  I am in a foreign country at the behest of men I will never meet, away from my lovely children and wife.  But I’m not dead.  To be alive is to gain something every day.  Being alive is my default vantage point, but certainly it isn’t as common a thing as I suppose it to be.  After all, look at how many people in our history are dead.

            Over the years I have come to terms with life.  I like that it’s absurd; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t fit in so well.  And so I have to look at myself every now and then and laugh a little.  Who is this sad man?  Why, he’s no sad man at all—it’s just me!  So I’m happy now, not because my wife is still standing there watching my bus pull away, because she isn’t there.  She’s at home right now, possibly thinking of how strange it was to watch a bus take her husband away.  I’m happy now because she’s at home and that is where I’m headed in the weeks to come.  Will we remember our sadness, or will our memories be overwhelmed by the joy of reunion?  I think our memories will be overwhelmed.  And this time I will cast my sight outside of the bus and watch the crowd of happy families draw near.  I will forget the absurdity of sadness, of war, of life.  The anticipation will be crushing, and the reunion as sweet and brilliant as an orange.

(copyright 2014, Colin Cummings)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Craft Beer Ennui

Arguably there has never been a better time in American history to be a craft beer drinker.  The explosion of small breweries in the last three to five years is phenomenal - maening that it is a phenomenon people.  It is amazing and almost unparalleled in our national history.

And it is getting to be boooorrrrring...

I think I'm in the early stages of experiencing craft beer ennui, and there is a tremendous irony here because the craft beer industry has never been more experimental, cutting-edge and unique as it is right now.  I just saw a promo for a smoked porter with chili peppers!  C'mon, that's incredible!  And the other day I read about a brewery in Washington D. C. that aged a porter on the lees of some red wine made in Virginia.  Are you kidding me, that's amazing!  So what the hell is wrong with me?

The smoked pepper porter of which I raved.  And the label is badass too!  What's wrong with me?!

I think I know what's wrong, and both of these examples sum it up.  Ten years ago the release of a smoked porter brewed with chilies would have spun my head backwards and my wallet would have leaped from my back pocket.  But today...not so much.  News flash for those of you who do not read Beerpulse.com: there are a lot of smoked pepper porters out there.  And there are a lot of beers with strange fruits in them, and lots of IPAs with words like "triple" and "imperial" in their descriptors, and big stouts whose dark colors are as threatening as a matterless vortex in outer space.  In sum the craft beer industry is throwing out unparalleled beers left and right and, in our modern age of ceaseless and expanding information delivery (i.e. the interweb), we can't escape the bombardment of the original, to the point that nothing seems original anymore!

Enter my ennui.  A decade ago I could get excited about Sam Calagione poring over the archaeological evidence of an Egyptian tomb to recreate an ancient beer, but today...meh.  The industry that I love and that I want to see thrive is practicing the age-old tradition of shooting itself in the foot with a trend-gun.  This is basically the same thing any thriving beer industry at any particular point in history in a given cultural context has done.  In 18th century London the brewers were hawking porters the way American microbreweries are hawking IPAs.  People were jumping on the bandwagon to make a buck and ride the wave of public taste.  I won't say it was all bad; it certainly wasn't bad for the beer industry in general.  But I'm sure a lot of bad beer was made.  Or perhaps more importantly, a lot of good beer that could have been made instead wasn't.  To me that is the greater crime.

Is there a solution for me?  Well I'm glad you asked, because there is!  I find that when my head is spinning from the constant media barrage of beer labels and new releases and must-haves and all of that, I can do one of two things to clear my head:

  1. Go down to the basement and pour out a pint of a beer of recognizable lineage and flavor, handcrafted by yours truly with love and passsion (blah blah blah); or
  2. Head down to my favorite beer store with it's limited selection, grab a six pack of a reliably well-made standby of recognizable lineage and flavor, and enjoy the serenity of the experience.
There, that's better.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Craft Beer and The Problem With Cleverness

There's a lot going on in the craft beer industry right now, and a lot of it is good.  Beer has probably never been as good as it is right now.  Styles that have languished in obscurity for decades are enjoying a resurgence, and those of us who love all things beer can now taste what we once could only read about.  And standby styles are receiving fresh makeovers from the myriad new breweries popping up all over the country.  All in all it is a good time to be a beer lover.

One of the things that's going on in the craft beer industry right now is a whole lot of cleverness.  Witness the myriad clever beer names.  Some of them are clever by their inclusion of the beer style within the name, such as Pandora's Bock (Breckenridge), GnarlyWine (Lagunitas) and Mother in Lager (Karbach).  Some of them are clever by their reference to ingredients of note (usually hops), such as Hoppy Feet (Clown Shoes), Hoperation (various breweries), Humulus Lager (The Bruery), and so on.  And then there are the lion's share of "clever" beer names which have no specific reference to anything except what the brewery or its marketing group wanted to call it.  Some breweries are really good at this, and more often than not the labels for these beers are also exceedingly clever.  Some examples:



And then there is Clown Shoes, which takes the cake in this category.




And son on and so on.  The problem of course with most (if not all) of the beers in this last category is that without the fine print on the label, it's impossible to know what you would get if you ordered, say, "Muffin Top."  Does it have muffins in it?  Or abdominal fat?  Maybe the name implies the alcohol content - it's so high (and therefore high calorie) that you can expect your gut to burst from your pant waist.  Who knows?

For me this is a problem, but really only until I do get to the fine print.  However, as the team at Clown Shoes exemplifies with some bravado and hyperbole, cleverness for cleverness' sake is not necessarily a good thing.  It may work as a marketing strategy, no doubt about it.  I suspect a lot of people pick up a bottle of Arrogant Bastard for the first time simply because of the name.  And I think the people at Clown Shoes have developed a real knack for over-the-top label art to accompany their whimsical (and frankly inscrutable) beer names.  But to me this kind of thing is problematic.  Allow me to explain one reason why.

The craft beer industry is known for being clever, primarily in the actual practice of craft brewing.  Sierra Nevada broke the mold of what defined American beer when it founded its brand on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.  This break from what was then tradition in American beer - namely pale lagers of minimal character - was a creative coup.  What followed over the decades was a repeated pattern of small scale creative brewers producing beers of new and impressive breeds.  The resurgence of the IPA style represents the zenith of this movement, as brewers one after the other pushed the envelope of the style, incorporating increasingly cleverer methods for infusing hop flavor into their beers.  Now it seems like the floodgates are open for Clever Brewing, so much so that you can find everything from coconut porters to cucumber wheats.  Brewers amateur and professional are cramming ingredients into their beers faster than we can record the shortcomings of their attempts, and the pursuit of Clever Beer is growing.

The problem is that if the craft beer industry is known only for the cleverness of its offerings, there may be less room for the less clever.  The very industry that resurrected the IPA could easily kill anything else.  While this is itself a hyperbolic claim, it's not entirely without merit as a concern.  An example.  I live in a reasonably sized city in which lately I can lay my hands on all kinds of great and new beers from a broad spectrum of breweries both domestic and international.  But if I went looking for a Scottish 60/- or an English ordinary bitter - no way.  Nothing doing.  You know what I can find in profusion?  India pale ales, in all shape, sizes and nationalities.  So while the hopped up styles soar, the low hop styles suffer.  While watermelon enjoys its time in the limelight as a clever addition to beer, no one is making gratzer.  (Well, almost no one; thanks Boston Beer Co. for giving it a try).  Basically if it isn't clever, i.e. big, oaked, fruited, dry-hopped, barrel-aged, soured or smoked, it isn't clever enough to be brewed.  At least not by the companies who distribute to Amarillo, Texas.

Now I know, I know - I'm just a grouch.  And I can see the upside to this argument.  For one thing, it's a great argument for homebrewing.  Can't find a Scottish 60/- at the store?  Then make one!  I agree with this perspective.  And I also like the possibility that small local breweries will spring up all over the country to fill the apparent niche markets for under-produced beers styles.  I'm actually hoping for this to happen in a big way.  But I'm also hoping that the craft beer industry will remain relevant because of something besides whimsy and cleverness.  I'm hoping that craft beer will become dominant and displace the swill from AB Inbev and MillerCoors.  I'm hoping that craft beer will inform and educate palates all across the country, not attempt to tailor pallets to a bombardment of hops or brettanomyces funk.  Those things are good, sure, but they're not the end-all-be-all of good beer.

The problem with cleverness may actually, in the end, be cleverness itself.  While it's important for brewers to be clever, it's more important for them to be very good.  I'd rather enjoy an American lager made well than an imperial IPA just because it was made.  But I must admit I do like those funny labels, and I applaude the creativity behind them.  It gives me something to giggle about as I take my Brooklyn Lager to the register.