I feel that I am the poster child for someone with ADHD. My mind wanders from topic to topic, idea to idea, and it drives my wife crazy. One of the symptoms of my problem is that I often find myself reading more than 1 book at the same time, something that is easy for some people, but a bad idea for me, one book the distraction for too long with the other. So, this past year, I have made a kind of pact with myself to try and abstain from multiple books at the same time.
This past week, however, I have been deviating from my little oath, reading two books at the same time. One of these is called 'The Control of Nature' by John McPhee, a book mom brought to me when she visited just a couple weeks ago, and the other, a book entitled 'Sleeping with the Devil' written by an ex-CIA Agent, about our addiction to crude oil from the Middle East and subsequent shady relationships we pay to maintain in the hopes of keeping the Saudis happy.
Now, these are two books that one wouldn't normally put in the same category, but I was hit by some striking similarities in the subject matter. In 'The Control of Nature,' the author spends the first part of the book detailing our control of the Mississippi river, one of the top ten largest rivers in the world, a river that drains about a third of the continental United States. It tells of how the first settlers in the Southern Louisiana area staked their claim on hundreds of thousands of acres of low lying swampland, shifting alluvial floodplains that were home to some of the best farming in the world due to periodic flooding and the shifting riverbed. They looked at this area, and shortsightedly, unknowingly, built their cities, first New Orleans, then Morgan City, and others, in one of the most volatile and difficult-to-control river systems you could imagine. To guard against floods in their new found civilization, the inhabitants first built earthen and rock dams at high cost. As the cities have flourished since, and real estate has become more valuable, a system of earthen dams and levees that was once merely expensive has become a fortress of millions of metric tons of concrete built higher and higher to control more and more water as impermeable surfaces all over the Midwest put a higher volume of stormwater runoff in the river. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to control a river system that wasn't meant to be controlled, but the sad truth is, that we cannot go back and move the cities and industries that are now established in a virtual river bottom. We have no choice but to build the levees higher and higher, the dams thicker and thicker, and spend more and more tax money to maintain our version of what ought to be.
The second book, 'Sleeping with the Devil,' is an incredible peek into the alliances that we have built with rich Saudi princes and royals to maintain assured energy reserves. Just like with Southern Louisiana, we staked a claim a long time ago in the wealth that is sitting in the middle east, namely Saudi Arabia. We built friendships and strategically placed military installations to maintain the balance of power, to keep those families in control so that we could protect our interests. In effect, we took a snap shot of the political and cultural climate of the middle east, and chose to freeze it, keep things the same as long as we could, much like we decided to do with the Mississippi river delta. But here's the thing that I think is the epiphany, culture and politics, just like a huge shifting river delta, moves, and has a natural progression, and if you try to halt it or control a natural process, there are monumental costs that will have to be paid to maintain that balance. In 'The Control of Nature', the Author alludes to the reality that there will be a storm that will undermine the dams to such an extent in Louisiana that they will fail and there will be massive destruction. He says that even the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledges that they cannot keep this up in perpetuity.
Much in the same way, the author of 'Sleeping with the Devil' charges that we have held the cultural and political progression of Saudi Arabia at bay for a long time, but it is inevitable that the Sultans, rich, stupid, and behind the times, will be ousted, and the United States, with its incredible assets at stake, will experience a massive economic meltdown as 60% of the world's oil is suddenly is in the hands of a populace that has endured the punishment of a totalitarian regime for the past 60 years while the U.S. was abetting the whole thing. He, too, claims that this situation is inevitable, and the signs of a frail regime and boiling constituency is already there. He states that it may be in the United States' best interest to take the oil fields in Saudi Arabia by force before they fall into the wrong hands during political conflict, but whatever the best strategy, it is clear that our situation is not very solid. These past few weeks as we all have been watching the situation in the middle east unfold, it has become very clear that the less dependent on assets in that region we can be, the better.
Anyways, that is a long, drawn-out explanation for why I think it may be okay for even the most attention-deprived people to read multiple books at the same time. If any of you have read the books and have another take, I'd be interested to hear about it.
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