A man eating tiger, suitcase bombs, boiled long pig
Three things I read this week from TUC
I’m not especially pleased with my life right now. Positive change is just over the horizon! But my current mood is like my dog’s raw chicken food that turns puke green and smells like fermented intestines when I leave it in the fridge too long.
In what is arguably one of the healthier responses to a malaise, I’m using books as an escape. Please literature, transport me to somewhere that’s not here! One book every four or five days, that’s my fix. I mention this to clarify that all of these mini book reviews I’m writing are actually based on books I’ve read this week. Or last week, whatever. I’m not digging through the archives at the moment.
As to future readings, long time capitalist Jerome recently recommended There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters and Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure, about James Dyson (the vacuum cleaner chap). I’ve put both books on my list, the Dyson book being the higher priority of the two.
Do you have any good book recommendations? I’d love to hear about them, leave a comment below. I’m chewing through stories like a beaver on crank and, like a beaver on crank, I’m constantly paranoid about where I’m going to get my next hit.
1 - The Tiger
I am the patient tiger. For three days I’ve followed a man’s trail through the snow frosted woods to decode his rambling pattern. The man’s stench reeks in my sensitive nostrils and the buckshot in my leg inflames my nerves, the pain pushing me forward in singular purpose. I don’t have a word for revenge but revenge is my demand. I find his small cabin by the river and wait for him to return. I am hunting the world’s deadliest game. The man has a gun, I have surprise. For a thousand generations there was enough room for the both of us, but this treaty has recently been trampled.
As per the limitations imposed by a human lifespan, there are effectively an infinite number of books in the world. You could read a book a day for the next five decades and barely dent the world’s vast library. However, this is no great loss since most books are not worth reading. They are poorly written, self-serving, or frustratingly unoriginal. I wrote a book several years ago. Even though I exhausted my talent in its creation, in a choice between my work or Hemingway's you’d be a fool not to choose Papa’s. Just as if you’re going to read a book about a cat, you’d be a dulldomed dunderdunce not to read The Tiger. This story is, by many orders of magnitude, excellent.
At this early stage of the investigation, neither Trush nor anyone else had fully grasped the threat this tiger posed to the general public. Trush was hoping that Markov, like Khomenko, would be a one-off and, now that the score was settled, the tiger would return to its usual prey. But it was too late for that now; this tiger was beyond recall.
Glancing at the dust jacket, The Tiger, by John Vaillant, may strike you as limited in scope. A tiger kills a man in the Russian far east. The townsfolk are outraged and terrified, not necessarily in that order. A squad of tiger hunters is called in. The hardened men with their cigarettes rolled from newspaper, SKS rifles and military surplus ammunition give chase and the situation is resolved. Hardly worth 300 some pages. However, like A Gentleman in Moscow — the entirety of which takes place within a hotel — a great author erects his story with so many interesting angles that boredom is refracted clear out of mind.
John Vaillant’s finest achievement is in weaving man and tiger’s history into a single narrative rope, the two species circling each other like opposing strands of DNA. The co-development of two protein hungry, land greedy, cunning, wily tempered, highly intelligent, widely feared apex predators. While we view history through the lens of human accomplishments — The Roman Empire, the Crusades, the American revolution, etc. — the tiger and other large cats have influenced our evolution as much as any great civilization.
Let’s visit the African savanna and tell a true story. A researcher hides in a cave and waits for a troop of baboons to come in for the night. Once the troop has settled, the researcher makes his presence known and the baboons become hysterical. They shriek, grab at their hair and run in incoherent circles as adrenaline flows through their veins.
Despite fearing imminent death from the lurking predator, not one of the baboons will run out of the cave and into the black night. Such is their terror of what lurks out there, that they’d rather take their chance with a single known predator than the feline horrors hiding in the dark. Humans continue to live by this code; there are few among us who would trade their electrified cave to sleep under the stars. Our lineage has propagated via the genetics of those who were wise enough to fear the big cats above all.
This is not to suggest, however, that cats have only done us wrong.
Scavenging, i.e., meat gathering, is far less evocative, but it was gathering, carnal and otherwise, that surely kept our ancestors alive.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, the practice of gathering may offer deeper insight into our relationship with big cats than hunting ever could. In the course of their scavenging experiments, Schaller and Lowther observed a phenomenon that would have had far greater implications for early humans than chance discovering of abandoned meat: “All of the seven lion groups that we encountered while we were on foot fled when we were at distances of 80 to 300 meters.”
If a pride of lions—lions—will flee at the sight of two unarmed human beings, what would they do if approached by a party of five or ten or twenty who were shouting, waving sticks, and throwing stones? Conceivably, such a group, emboldened by experience and empowered by growing brains and advancing technology, could have eaten their way across the Serengeti for hundreds of millennia without lifting a spear.
Humans used the safety of numbers, and the cat’s innate caution, to scavenge kills on the savanna. While we like to describe ourselves as debonair hunter-gatherers, truthfully we evolved as somewhat less glamorous scavenger-gatherer-hunters. As counterintuitive as it seems that a few scraggy humans could scare off a pride of lions and steal their meat, many powerful predators are more cautious than you’d expect. Unless they’re protecting cubs or are caught by surprise, grizzly bears will run away sooner than attack a human.
When hunting seals the great white shark mangles its prey with a vicious bite, then allows the convulsing animal to bleed to death before returning to gorge on the carcass. Researchers believe that the sharks prefer to eat a dead animal because they don’t want to risk injury from a flailing, adrenaline fueled seal with nothing to lose. If another shark spots the kill, the two great whites flap their tails at each other in a harmless albeit powerful display of aggression. The lesser shark surrenders and swims off, and in this way the great whites select a winner without using their teeth.
Tigers and humans have many things in common. If you drop a live cow into a pen of captive raised tigers, they’re surprisingly useless at rendering the bovine dead. Wild tigers learn how to hunt from their mother, and without this instruction they’re like a blind soldier. In much the same way, the internet has disconnected an entire generation of humans from physical reality. To cite just one example, the only way to believe that men and women are psychologically the same (not better or worse, but identical), is if your metaphysical roadmap is derived from Twitter instead of firsthand experience. Tame tigers and bewildered humans, a great disconnect from nature.
The Tiger is an outstanding literary gift. If I were to levy one critique: the detours which make the first half of the book so enthralling — a history of Tsarist Russia, communism’s impact on the environment, traditional Chinese medicine, how to survive a tiger attack, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, archeology, feline physiology, etc. — begin to wear thin by act two. By halfway through I wasn’t hungry for history or tiger lore, I craved only a conclusion to the chase.
Apart from that heavy-handedness, The Tiger is otherwise a masterpiece of non-fiction. Tigers are stunning animals that can jump over a ten-foot fence, kill an animal with a single swat of their paw, and bite through bone with the power of a small hydraulic press. These aren’t your average house cats.
2 - Suitcase bombs
Two Soviet weapons scientists are discussing the possibility of a suitcase nuke.
"It is easy," says Mikhail, "Look how small the warheads have become."
"Even so, it will not work," Yuri retorts.
"But why? Their borders are porous, our agents are brave. We will smuggle the weapon straight to the heart of America."
"Sure," replies Yuri, "but where will we get the suitcase?"
From Ian on Substack.
3 - Long pig
There is a question that gets bandied around quite a bit on Substack: how the hell are people supporting this policy choice? Alternatively: why aren’t more people mad about these reckless political decisions?
A good question! But one that’s not unique to modern America. In this passage from The Party, Li criticizes Yu for questioning the Chinese Communist Party even though Li… Well, you’ll see.
One of the officials who criticized him for speaking out was a man named Li wenyao. Li’s own father had died of starvation. His wife had taken boiled human flesh home to feed to their children, although she was unable to bring herself to eat it. Yu could scarcely believe that the same person was chastising him for trying to aleart Chinese leaders to the famine.
A certain subset of people will adhere to the dominant power structure no matter how rough the going gets. Father died of starvation? Wife is cooking long pig for dinner? Not a big deal, honestly. These things happen, so don’t you dare criticize the Party that’s given us so much. Das ist verboten, du Schwein!
I suppose if you go back through history you can probably even find people who’ve been sentenced to death by the state for no reason whatsoever yet continued to praise the regime with their dying breath. Human beings are weird. If you fall into conversation with someone and they tell you humans are rational, you should immediately be on guard. This person has a bridge to Alaska they’re trying desperately to unload.
And with that, I’ll leave you with this delicious clip of Hannibal Lector preparing long pig thigh and feeding it back to the donor. Ah, the circle of life. If this doesn’t make you hungry I don’t know what will.
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I have never seen the film version of 'Hannibal'. I'm culturally impoverished. Thank you for sharing that sardonic clip here. I *have* been exposed to WaPo's annual updates of "you will eat bugs" as well as The New York Times equivalent, "Consider Cannibalism". I don't know what motivates those periodic NYT human cannibalism articles, as not even our favorite bad guy elites (Klaus and the World Economic Forum) have suggested it... yet?
Getting back to "Hannibal": I recommend the book. It is slow going initially but picks up nicely a third of the way in. Odd as it may seem, 'Hannibal' the book could be considered a literary comedy. Shakespearean comedies involve love, complex plot twists, and end with reunions or marriage. The hero survives and the villain is killed or destroyed in the end, often due to his psychological weakness. I don't think it would be a spoiler to mention that in the end, not one but THREE couples are united, and have wealth and much happiness. Villains are dispatched as deserved. Even the farm animals are spared a gruesome fate. All this, yet there is some cannibalism, but not in the way one might expect.
This was a delightful post, Unhedged Capitalist! I am now your newest subscriber. The Tiger sounds like a good read.
Since Daniel Kahneman passed today, maybe you’ll enjoy his “Thinking, fast and slow”.
A bit long but definitely interesting.
He won Nobel prize for the research in it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow