Dispatch Band Quotes

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.

Born in 1635, Henry Morgan was a Welsh plantation owner and privateer, which was really the same as a pirate, only with the consent of the king who was Charles II of England, Scotland, and Ireland at the time. Little is known about Morgan’s early life or how he got to the Caribbean. He began his career as a privateer in the West Indies and there is evidence that in the 1660’s he was a member of a marauding band of raiders led by Sir Christopher Myngs . Having an engaging personality he soon became a close friend of Sir Thomas Modyford, who was the English Governor of Jamaica. Captain Henry Morgan owned and was the captain of several ships during his lifetime, but his flagship was named the “Satisfaction.” The ship was the largest of Morgan’s fleet and was involved in several profitable conflicts in the waters of the Caribbean and Central America. More recently, on August 8, 2011, near the Lajas Reef, off the coast of Panama, a large section of a wooden hull, that is believed to have been the sail ship “Satisfaction,” was found by Archaeologists from Texas State University. In 1668 Captain Morgan sailed for Lake Maracaibo in modern day Venezuela. There he raided the cities of Maracaibo and Gibraltar and taking the available gold divested the cities of their wealth before destroying a large Spanish naval squadron stationed there. In 1671 Morgan attacked Panama City during which he was arrested and dispatched to London in chains. When he got there, instead of imprisonment he was treated as a hero. Captain Morgan was knighted and in November of 1674 he returned to Jamaica to serve as the territory’s Lieutenant Governor. In 1678 he served as acting governor of Jamaica and again served as such from 1680 to 1682. During his time a governor, the Jamaican legislature passed an anti-piracy law and Morgan even assisted in the prosecution of other pirates. On August 25, 1688 he died on the island, after which he became an inspiration and somewhat of a glorified hero in both pirate stories and in the movies.

always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: “The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which just doesn’t work.” So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing—just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible.

Howard knew that a strong enemy makes an opposing commander look good, and a great opposing general makes the victorious general look even better. Every time he had been called into the Plateau country, it had somehow involved an issue with Joseph. He had heard the man’s eloquence and seen the way that the other nontreaty chiefs had deferred to him on matters concerning the Wallowa. So he erroneously assumed that this imposing, charismatic, formidable chief was also the energetic, charismatic, formidable military leader of all the nontreaty bands. As a result, in his reports and in the dispatches from his friend, Sutherland, his military campaign was depicted as a struggle with the masterful war chief, Joseph, whose brilliant leadership and field strategies and tactics only served to make Howard’s victory seem even greater. Taking Howard’s lead, Sutherland referred to the Nez Perce as “Joseph’s people” and soon adopted the military shorthand of making observations such as “Joseph is in full retreat.” In the public’s mind, the Nez Perce were rapidly becoming “Joseph’s people,” and every military action was becoming an engagement between the Civil War general, Howard, and Joseph, the Nez Perce general and leader of the Nez Perce people. Meanwhile, the Nez Perce were anything but Joseph’s people. They were not even united among themselves. It had been all the chiefs could do to get everyone moving in a single direction. Even questions of allegiance still had not been sorted out. Many families included members who lived among the treaty factions as well as among the nontreaty bands. This had never presented a problem because all knew that a person or family could cross back and forth between sides if they decided that the Christian way or the traditional way was better. But now, with bullets flying, lines were hardening. In fact, in the Clearwater skirmish, one of the treaty Nez Perce fighting for the soldiers and even wearing a blue soldier’s jacket learned that his father had been killed while fighting on the nontreaty side, so he raced across the ground between the two factions, enduring fire from both camps, threw off his coat, and led a charge of the nontreaties against the soldiers he had just abandoned.