Literary Indigestion

Posted on by
5

This won’t be the first time I’ve said I love fantasy and have since I was a kid.  During the ’80’s, I read scores of fantasy novels, but the day finally came when I couldn’t anymore.  One too many recycled plots, wise wizards, crusty dwarves, plucky youths, heroic thieves, feisty tavern wenches, and so on.  I developed acute genre indigestion and have only recently started reading adult fantasy again.

History repeats itself.

A dozen years ago, I discovered young adult fantasy and delighted in some of the characters and stories.  Inspired by these, I even wrote my own first novel in just six months, in 2005.  Recently, however, YA fantasy has been “discovered.”  Now I find I can’t read this genre either; bandwagons and the perception of money and names to be made don’t lead to books with much imagination or heart.

A glut of vampire romance was followed by a glut of stories of Faerie and zombies.  After the success of The Hunger Games, “dystopian” tales became the theme du jour.  Now stories of were-beasts are all the rage.  I sometimes wonder if I am a snob or too harsh in my judgements, so I yesterday I took a look at the YA fantasy titles featured on Amazon.  Here are some descriptions I found in the blurbs:

“A lyrical tale of werewolves and first love.”  – I gotta say it, “Awwww!”

“explodes onto the YA scene with a brilliant nail-biter of a dystopian adventure.”  –  Think about the phrase, “YA scene.”

“A kidnapped wolf pup with a rare strain of canine parvovirus tuns regular kids into a crime solving pack.”  –  I’m a sucker for dog stories, and I like wacky superheroes, so this one sounds like the best of the bunch.

“Can a prim young Victorian lady find true love in the arms of a dashing zombie?”  –  I would have said “dashing zombie” is an oxymoron.

“A timeless love story with a unique mythology that captivates the imagination.” – The blurb didn’t say what this unique mythology might be, so you have to take the publicist’s word.

This book is “generating a Twilight-level buzz.”   I’ve never heard of it.

OK, I guess I’m being a little snarky.  It seems that today’s YA represents a successful move by writers and publishers to attract a new demographic of younger readers to what is essentially, romance.  On one hand, this largely excludes me as a reader and writer, because while I think romance is fine, it’s not my thing.   I also find it sad to think that over the near term, we’re going to have zombie love instead of books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Earthsea Trilogy, and The Golden Compass.

So what am I doing about it?  Kicking back with literary comfort food, otherwise known as light detective stories, stories with fun characters you just want to trail along with as they bring justice into the world.  In the past, I’ve devoured stories by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, and Elizabeth Peters.  Now, thanks to my wife, I have a new main-man – Hamish MacBeth, the constable of the village of Lochdubh, Scotland, who, with his dog, Lugs, and his cat, Sonsie – and wee dram now and again – excels at solving murders.  Hamish is the creation of M.C. Beaton, the pseudonym used by author, Marion Chesney, for her mystery stories.  Born in Glasgow in 1936, she has also written 100 historical romances under a different names.

M.C. Beaton

My wife has collected a bookshelf full of MacBeth stories, and I’ve only started.  My current read is, Death of a Chimney Sweep.  In one passage, Hamish is driving an author to meet her publisher. He says to her,  “Angela, you’re taking this all to seriously.”

“What would you know?  You haven’t a single ambitious bone in your body.”

“Aye, and I like it that way.”  Hamish suddenly wished the evening was over.

I love these stories!   I will have more to say about Hamish MacBeth in my next post.

Another Thread in the Social Fabric Unravels

Posted on by
2

My wife and I both come from (different) upstate New York factory towns.  My family moved to San Jose when I was nine.  Mary moved to California after high school, while her brothers stayed in Rochester and went to work for Kodak.  In the early ’70’s, that was a reasonable path to choose.  Kodak was a solid Dow Jones company and historically, one of the first to offer generous benefits to workers.

Over the last three decades, Mary and I have gone back for fun, for weddings, and funerals.  Rochester isn’t the same city.  Weeds grow in the parking lot of many silent factories.  Birds fly out of smokestacks once touted as the tallest in the country.

Kodak is a textbook example of a successful company blindsided by a “disruptive technology.”  But textbooks are the last thing on the minds of many of Kodak’s 38,000 retirees.  Late to the digital party, there is now talk of Kodak going bankrupt, and unfortunately, Kodak retiree health care is tied to the company’s fortunes.  http://www.npr.org/2011/10/12/141257737/the-picture-isnt-pretty-for-some-kodak-retirees

There are way too many stories like this in the news.  This one caught my attention because I know the town a little bit, and know people who are affected, people who played by the rules and now find themselves getting screwed.  A week from now, their story will be forgotten.

***

I found myself thinking again of the Occupy Wall Street protestors and some reactions from our “leaders” to their attempt to give people like the Kodak workers a voice.

According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Eric Cantor has called the protestors a “mob” and denounced them for “pitting Americans against Americans.”  Mitt Romney accused them of “waging class warfare.”  Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”  Senator Rand Paul fears the protestors will start taking iPads from the rich, and according to the talking heads on CNBC, they are “aligned with Lenin.”  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/11/3973680/plutocrats-fearing-scrutiny-demonize.html

***

Hard times bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.  These days I find myself paraphrasing the Serenity Prayer – asking for “the wisdom to know the difference.”

Notes on Worldly Success

Posted on by
4

Yesterday afternoon I sat for a while on the back porch, watching the rain and admiring my neighbor’s and my handiwork.  Over the weekend, we shored up the fence and gate in preparation for winter.  My neighbor knows a lot about carpentry.  I don’t, and because of that, I felt a huge sense of satisfaction, as much or more than I did a few weeks ago, when I finished a pretty good short story for the Writer’s Digest contest.  I guess with that attitude, I’m not likely to get my face on the cover of Time, either for carpentry or for writing, even though both can bring me a great deal of satisfaction.  Sitting on the porch, I started thinking of various examples of success and failure.

***

I’ve been reading a lot about Steve Jobs in recently published tributes.  Viewing the whole sweep of his life, he seems to have had great self-confidence and an unerring instinct for doing the right thing. Much of that impression comes from his 2005 graduation speech, the reflections of a mature man, sobered by a serious brush with mortality.  I found myself wondering how he dealt with setbacks when he was young and first starting to make his way?  Lives written in history books and obituaries often leave out the messiness, the dark nights of the soul, the nights we wake up a 3:00am wondering what to do.

Somehow the story of Jobs’s trek to India leads me to think he connected with his heart and intuition – as he talked about in his speech – at a pretty young age.  You don’t venture to a strange continent, in search of something you aren’t sure of, unless you are confident enough to live with uncertainty and believe you can find the answers.  Unlike many creative people, Jobs’s passion aligned with his livelihood, but that did not prevent the devastation of getting fired at 30 from the company he had founded.   He had enough wealth to retire from active life and never know want again, but failure prodded Jobs to come back and reinvent himself – and animated films while he was at it.

Rule for success:  Find a way to believe in yourself.
Another rule of success:  Never give up.
A useful tip:  Love what you do, if possible.

There are clear parallels in the life of Thomas Edison, 1847-1931, to whom Jobs is often compared.  Edison ran numerous unsuccessful experiments (estimates range from 700 to 10,000) before discovering tungsten as a workable filament for electric lights.  Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”  Did Edison ever come close to giving up?  Did he ever know dark nights of the soul?

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" - Thomas Edison, 1903

Several of the pithy statements he made in maturity sound like things Jobs might have said:  “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.”   Like Jobs, Edison never dreamed of resting on his laurels:  “Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.”  Perhaps my favorite Edison quote is this one:  “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”  Might that include a pile 2×4’s and fence boards?

Tip for success:  A sense of humor and a sense of play are marvelous attributes.

***

The list of Abraham Lincoln’s failures is often used to motivate people, because he had so many of them.  Here’s a more balanced chronology of his victories as well as losses.  He won some and lost some, just like everyone else, and like Jobs and Edison, he kept on trying.  http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/education/failures.htm

Lincoln believed that he was an agent of destiny and spoke of “the chorus of Union” that would sound when touched by “the better angels of our nature.”  This sense of calling may have made his task possible but didn’t make it easy:  I’ve heard that he wept at the casualty counts from the last battles of the Civil War.  Like Jobs, he was aware of his own mortality:  a week before he was shot, Lincoln dreamed of lying in state in Capitol rotunda, but just like the men he ordered into battle, fear of death could not deter him.

Close to Lincoln during the last years of his life was another future president, Ulysses S. Grant, who may have been the only northern general able to win the war, but whose life outside the military reads like a litany of failure.  Born, Hiram Ulysses Grant, he discovered when he entered West Point that he had been registered as, Ulysses Simpson Grant.  He never bothered to change the name, and in a similar vein, gained a reputation as a sloppy cadet.  Though he served with distinction during the Mexican War, afterwards he failed as a businessman and a farmer.

As president, Grant was noted for enforcing civil rights and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but his administration was was rocked by scandal and inept handling of the Panic of 1873, a world-wide financial crisis.  He left office on a note of failure, went into business with a man who cheated him, and died in debt and in great pain from throat cancer.  By force of will, he finished his memoirs before he died, which saved his wife from bankruptcy.

Like so many before and after, Grant was a poster-boy for another truth:  Worldly success is no guarantee of happiness.  This realization raises the critical question of what we really mean by success.  The purpose of life is finding happiness and sharing it with as many others as we can, according to the Dalai Lama, in The Art of Happiness, a book I will have more to say about later.

In the meantime, I come around again to the thought of fixing fences with my neighbor.  When measured by the creation of and sharing of happiness, it may have been even more important than I imagined.

Occupied

Posted on by
2

I sat up and took notice the other night when a local news announcer complained that the “Occupy Sacramento” protestors “could not even say what they want.” In other words, they won’t play by the rules – you know, the unwritten rule that says when a TV station sends a van to cover your event, you need to have your sound-byte ready. How else can they work it into a one minute segment and move on? How else can you be neatly pigeonholed?

Actually, there is at least one articulate answer to the question of what the protestors want, supplied by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and activist, at the “Occupy Wall Street” rally in New York. http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now. This link comes courtesy of Genevieve’s blog, Look Who’s Blogging Now, which you can find on my blogroll. I suggest you check it out if you are interested in this latest eruption of frustration with the status quo, since Genevieve is off to check out the “Occupy Minnesota” protests, and will likely have more to say.

Occupy Wall Street protestors

Perhaps one reason I took special notice of the protests that night, was because I’d been reading of another famous entity that didn’t seem to be playing by the rules; I mean the universe we live in. If – and this is a big if – a large group of European physicists are right, and neutrinos really move faster than light, then some of our core assumptions about the nature of matter are wrong. Here’s a good article by Jason Palmer, science and Technology reporter for the BBC news: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php

So this neutrino walks into a bar a moment after he’s ordered a beer…

Suddenly we’re faced with conclusions like these:

  • Twentieth century politics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century economics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century physics may need to be revised at its core.
  • As I have often discussed here, twentieth century publishing models are spluttering, and I’m sure you can think of other specialty areas where the past no longer functions as a reliable guide to the present.

Something similar happened a hundred years ago. In 1905, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Nineteenth century notions of human nature and the world no longer fit. The start of World War I nine years later marked the greatest failure of business-as-usual in the history of the world (up until then).

So what happens now?

Einstein said, “The mind that creates a problem is not the mind that can solve it.” In other words, we have people who are sick of the status quo, but for the moment, avoid easy answers. Analogies to the Tea Party are obvious enough that even this week’s Saturday Night Live picked up the thread. As I recall, the media was frustrated with the Tea Party in the beginning for the same reasons – no central spokesperson, no succinct Powerpoint agenda. Once they sent people to Washington, the Tea Party got buttonholed pretty fast as a one-issue-movement. “Balance the budget without raising taxes and life will be good again.” Does anyone, even a member of congress, really believe that?

Here’s an observation by a local man:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Despite reasonable differences, tea partyers and “occupiers” have far more in common with each other than with the politicos they elected to represent them. Conversely, Republicans and Democrats have more in common with each other than they do with the people who voted for them.” Bruce Maiman, “Wall Street Protestors, meet the tea partners,” editorial in The Sacramento Bee, Oct. 7, 2011, p. 13

The news media, even NPR, refused to acknowledge the occupiers for more than a week, but they didn’t go away. I hope they stay out in the open long enough for people and especially politicians to really get a glimpse of the underlying disappointment, fear, and outrage that animates so many who can no longer be soothed by simplistic answers.

What do they want? For now, “None of the above,” is a valid answer!

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer: A Book Review

Posted on by
4

Every now and then the fit comes upon me, and I find myself avidly burrowing into American history.  My interest most often centers on the Civil War era, but not exclusively.  David Hackett Fischer presents our struggle for freedom with an in-depth study of the second half of 1776, when the leadership of George Washington transformed the American army from a beaten rabble into a force to be reckoned with in their own eyes, those of the British, and the other European powers.

In his letters, Washington articulated his central problem – how to mold a collection of very different sorts of men, with radically different ideas of freedom, into a force that could stand against the most powerful army in the world.  Shortly after Washington assumed command in New England, a Maine regiment made up of fishermen, with freed slaves among them, got into a brawl with a Virginia regiment that included slave owners.  Others rushed into the fray and soon 1000 troops were fighting each other – more than the total number of soldiers who fought at Lexington and Concord.

Washington – who really was “larger than life” – mounted his horse and galloped into the center of the fight.  He grabbed two combatants by the neck, and alternately shook them and swore.  Everyone else ran away.

In an era when history too often debunks heroes, George Washington emerges as a leader chosen by destiny, as most of his men believed him to be.  A Virginia aristocrat, who could have lived a life of leisure, he trained himself in physical endurance and chose a military career as his means of public service.  As an aid to General Braddock, during the latter’s defeat in the French and Indian War, Washington had two horses shot from under him, and four musket balls tore through his coat, but he was unscathed.  Through the revolution, he inspired his men with courage under fire, and he inspired them in other ways:  putting aside his aristocratic background, he created the first army in the world where private soldiers were addressed as, “Gentlemen,” and their grievances were seriously considered.

The British army was was undefeated in battles on five continents.  In the summer of 1776, King George committed half his total forces to putting down “the rebellion.”  A few thousand American defenders awoke one morning in July to see 500 British transports and warships in New York Harbor.  A simple feint drew the Americans to Brooklyn while the British landed 23,000 royal troops and 8,000 Hessians.  This was just the first wave.  When they moved on Manhattan, with naval cover from the rivers, the only surprise was that most of the American army escaped.

British General Howe swept through New Jersey, pushed Washington’s army across the Delaware, and threatened Philadelphia.  Thomas Payne caught the mood of the times in a pamphlet called, The American Crisis, which begins with the famous line, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

British forces assumed the collapse of the American “peasants” was immanent – the problem was, they did not behave like defeated soldiers.  In early December, Washington sent his forces to collect and hide every boat they could find on the Delaware.  Little by little, the story unfolds of all the telling mistakes the British made:

  • General Howe spread his forces along every ford of the river, with inland garrisons to support them.  In the end, he held numerous strongpoints, but with reduced numbers in each each.
  • Howe attempted to reconcile with the population, but his troops in New Jersey undercut those efforts by plundering farms and private homes, and in some towns, with the mass rape of women and girls.  These actions swelled the ranks of American insurgents.  When British commanders threatened this “third column” with instant execution if they were caught, even more civilians joined.  Soon there were groups of as many as 600 insurgents threatening any British troops who ventured out of their garrisons.
  • Hessian Colonel Rall, who had only 1500 men at Trenton, repeatedly asked for reinforcements, but his requests were denied by a British general who refused to believe the Americans posed a credible threat.
  • Rall’s superior, Carl Von Donop, was stationed six miles away to reinforce Rall in case of trouble, but shortly before Washington’s crossing, Von Donop marched to Mt. Holly to put down a militia attack.  While he was there, Von Donop met an attractive “physician’s widow” and sequestered himself on Dec, 24, 25, and 26.  The man ordered to reinforce Trenton was “occupied” when the Americans crossed the Delaware.  The identity of this colonial Mata Hari, if that is what she was, has never been discovered – no local physicians had died in Mt. Holly.  Some speculate that it could have been Betsy Ross:  her husband had recently died in Philadelphia, she had family in Mt. Holly, and her brother-in-law was a doctor.  There is no historical proof, but after the war, more than one British officer wrote that the colonies were lost because Von Donop could not “keep his passions in check.”
  • The Hessians in Trenton were not drunk when Washinton attacked, as the popular story goes, but they were exhausted after a week of constant alarms from militia attacks that kept them on sentry duty at night in the freezing weather, and under orders to sleep in battle garb when they did get a chance to rest.
***
These are the details and human stories that make history come alive, and David Hackett Fisher’s book is filled with such accounts.  Washington and many others believed Providence would favor the side with the greatest virtue, and Washinton’s Crossing is enough to make you a believer too, both in Providence and the genius of Washington, who repeatedly understood and used “coincidences” that happened outside his plans and even against his orders.  In a fateful period of less than two weeks, his army rose from its “crisis” with stunning victories that convinced both friends and foes that the revolution could be won.  This is a fun book to read if you are in the mood to see that history can sometimes be as fantastic as fiction.

R.I.P Steve Jobs

Posted on by
5

Logging into my mac just now, I was very saddened to see, on the Apple home page, that today we lost a true American original.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” – Steve Jobs

Please take a look at Jobs’s 2005 commencement address, delivered at Stanford University, a source of ongoing inspiration for me:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart – Steve Jobs

A Soul Day

Posted on by
9

One of my psychology professors once described a presentation he made at business conference. His subject was depression among top executives, a problem serious enough to warrant its own session.  After running through professional interventions like medication and psychotherapy, he told his audience, “There’s a simpler and far less expensive approach, though I don’t expect many of you to adopt it.”

He told them to choose one weekday a month to call in sick or take a vacation.  He insisted on a weekday, since weekends are usually given to errands and chores.  The professor called it a “soul day” and the rule was, do nothing of a goal oriented nature.  No work, no phone meetings, no fiddling with Blackberrys.  This was a day for those little desires at the edge of the mind:  a walk in the park, a family picnic when others are working, trying one’s hand at watercolor.

There were lots of protests.  When a CEO said he was too busy; the professor said that might be one of the reasons he was depressed.  Someone else feared that if he let himself “slack off,” he might not want to get out of bed.  “Then stay in bed,” the professor said.  “Sooner or later you’ll get bored and think of something interesting to do.”

I heard this story 20 years ago and still sometimes put it into practice.  It isn’t just for when you’re feeling blue; it meshes with the biblical concept of a day of rest, but it takes a special resolution, since most of the time, our days of rest are not very restful.

I’ve come back to it now because stepping outside of habitual routines can be a way of stepping outside of habitual ways of thinking, which feel a little stale as the season begins to change.  This practice isn’t as easy as it sounds.  It takes discrimination to separate what I want to do from what I think I should do, or other subtle forms of self-improvement.  But I don’t have to get it right, since being perfect takes an inordinate amount of effort.

I began yesterday with a period of an easy sort of meditation, as opposed to some of the more energetic ones.  Then I took a walk around the track at a nearby school – no problem there, for walking each day is a pleasure and something my body craves.

Later that day it took some effort not to attack a story that isn’t working, but the anxiety that came with the thought was a clue to let it go.  I did allow myself 10 minutes with a tape measure, pencil, and paper to survey which parts of the back yard fence are in need of repair.  Goal oriented, yes, but easy and the dogs needed to run around.

That’s how the day went.  No reading except the Sunday paper and a light mystery novel.  No writing except the opening paragraph of this post which I stopped after 10 minutes because I could feel myself starting to work too hard.  No cooking in the evening – we went out to dinner and brought home a key lime pie, my absolute favorite.

Sometimes I think of old pictures of ancestors – those serious, even dour looking men and women, sitting very still as they peer into the camera.  Often I imagine them frowning at “a slacker like me,” but maybe not.

I have a 4″ thick family bible that belonged to my great-great grandfather.  He inscribed the family name on the cover page in 1856.  I imagine him reading the good book aloud to his wife and eight children every evening after dinner.  For all I know, he observed the sabbath better than I ever have.  His family lived on a farm, and maybe they all took one day a week to rest and give thanks.  And eat pie – if not key lime, then almost certainly, apple or peach.

Maybe they knew something I have forgotten – but it is never too late to learn.

Contagion: A Movie Review

Posted on by
8

We’ve all seen pandemic movies before.  Andromeda Strain, The Stand, Outbreak, and 12 Monkeys come to mind, but all of these add something extra to the disease:  aliens, demons, time travel, or a government ready to nuke a California town.  Contagion adds something too, but unfortunately, it is all too plausible – visions of cracks in the thin veneer of order that covers our 21st century civilization.

First, let’s establish that such a disease is plausible.  Dr. Fatimah Dawood, an epidemiologist with the CDC confirms that animal viruses could combine to produce a deadly virus against which humans have no prior immunity.  Contagion is a vision of what people most feared during the H1N1 outbreak two years ago.

Can you imagine looting and outbreaks of violence if there was not enough food to go around?  What about people willing to profit from the distress or death of large numbers of their fellow human beings?  Can you imagine local governments delaying the closure of shopping malls at the start of an epidemic because of the Thanksgiving shopping weekend?  If not, please send me the location of a portal to the universe where you live.

Director, Steven Soderbergh, set out to make a scary and realistic disaster movie set in our post 9/11 and post Katrina world.  He builds and maintains suspense with restraint and subtlety.  Contagion opens with a dark screen and the sound of a woman coughing.  Then we see Gwyneth Paltrow reach into a bowl of nuts at a crowded airport bar.  Twenty seconds into the movie and I was gripping my seat.  The tension remained compelling throughout this two hour film.  As with many books and movies of the action/adventure genre, I didn’t deeply connect with the characters.  There were two many stories going on at once, and perhaps I instinctively held something back, not knowing who would live and who would die.  Most critics have given Contagion three stars out of four and I would agree.  Because of my emotional distance from the protagonists, I wouldn’t call it a great movie, but it is very very good.

We learn at the end of the film exactly how the virus mutation occurred.  Strangely enough, I thought of the novels of Thomas Hardy, where seemingly minor coincidence leads to disaster.  Hardy’s vision of the unfathomable relations between events actually mirrors certain concepts of modern science.  I remember hearing a pithy quote about the beating of a butterfly’s wings affecting weather on the other side of the globe.  One early 20th century physicist – I do not remember his name – said, “Bend down to pluck a flower and you affect the most distant star.”  What do the world views of Thomas Hardy, modern science, eastern religion, and Contagion, have in common?  A sense that events are connected and impact each other in ways beyond what the rational mind can ever grasp.

What is conspicuous by its absence, in the movie as in our culture, is a parallel understanding of ways that our fellow humans are interconnected for good or ill.  Some of the medical workers demonstrate selflessness and compassion, just like certain religious orders during the plague years in Europe, who ministered to the sick until they fell ill.  One thing the CDC people have in the movie which no one else does, is information.  We know from Katrina that orders, and curfews, and martial law, combined missing information, can drive people to the breaking point.

We identify with Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) and his daughter and hope we could do as well as they struggle to stay alive and keep their humanity while the social order crumbles.  Lawlessness is muted in Contagion, but it is there, and I found myself wondering what I would do, after standing in line for hours at a military food distribution point, only to have the rations run out and a soldier say, “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”  What would I do?  Walk away like Emhoff or charge the empty truck like some of the others in a futile display of fear and frustration?

Contagion is a movie I will be thinking about for some time.  As an extra dividend, my hand washing habits instantly improved.  I’m sure yours will too if you see this movie.