On War: Napoleon was God in Funny Pants

[Keep in mind, this post has footnotes on the bottom. Every military treatise has footnotes.]

Oooh, what a big book. Hefty. Almost as big as the latest Harry Potter novel. It’s the unabridged text of Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War.”

Damn thing scares me half to death. It’s been edited, translated and indexed, and includes a commentary, a preface, introductory essays and a reading guide.

Published in 1832, its lessons have guided Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark and French political theorist Raymond Aron. (I didn’t know who Aron was either; I had to look him up. His most popular picture shows him with a pipe and a big nose.)

I skipped the editor’s note (who reads those anyway) and headed straight to the first introductory essay. I plowed through Clause’s Prussian military career, yawning mightily. But then I hit a section about his contemporary theorists – generally, why Clause was right and they were idiots.

The biggest idiot, apparently, was a Swiss-French staff officer named Antoine Jomini. According to Tony Jomini, Napoleon was God in funny pants, and he set the standard for all future conflicts. Clause thought that was ridiculous.

The interesting thing was Jomini’s obsession with Napoleon, and his remark, “Methods change, but principles remain the same.” (1) Jomini was followed by both sides during the American civil war. I liked that. I liked that these military writings could influence events far into the future, although Jomini’s principles didn’t help the Civil War much.

So I turned to the first chapter, which asked “What is War?” That reminded me of my old geology textbooks: “The scientist must first consider, what is erosion?” I liked the chapter. It was filled with nice, simple paragraphs headed by titles in all caps.

Clause liked to talk about the element of chance: “Guesswork and luck play a great part in war.” He thought strict formulas were nutty because you never knew what was going to happen when you marched your little army over the ridge. Commanders rolled the dice on everything, including the weather, although Clause didn’t care much about weather. (2)

He also emphasized that war isn’t just a bunch of battles, but an instrument of policy. You can kill a bunch of guys, capture their hill and blow up their supply dump, but unless all this actually advanced the policy, or purpose of the war, it was all for nothing. Too bad that great military minds forgot this simple fact during the Civil War and World War I.

So basically, although this book still freaks me out, Clause is a guy I can do business with. He doesn’t read like a typical military historian – he actually sounds like a lawyer. He’s the kind of guy that if you asked him, “Is it raining outside?” He wouldn’t answer. He’d run to his pen (or quill, or whatever) and write this:

ON RAIN By Clause

Before we answer the query “Is it raining,” we must ask ourselves, “What is rain?” One might assert that rain is liquid precipitation from the clouds, but things are rarely so simple. The careless observer might spy water on the windowpane and thus answer the query. But such an action is little more than rank folly; it fails to take into account that someone may be dumping bathwater from the second story, or the moisture may stem from the wild and reckless use of a watering can, or finally, although unlikely, that an elephant may be standing in the daffodils and spraying from its tusk. Therefore …

Well, you see what I’m up against here. Perhaps I should just give up and watch “The Apprentice.”


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FOOTNOTES

(1) The snooty historian called this remark “endlessly quoted.” I agree. Why just the other day, when I was pushing Benny through Meijer, I heard a cashier refer to the phrase.

CASHIER: You gotta make sure they swipe the card right on the new machines. You remember what military historian Antoine Jomini always said.

TRAINEE: Oh yes. It’s endlessly quoted.

(2) Except fog, Clause had this weird obsession with fog. To hear him tell it, there’s a 19th century army still wandering around some foggy lowlands, wondering where Boney is.

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Christine’s Military History Seminar

I’m reading Clausewitz these days and I’ll tell you whose fault it is: TV network execs.

I had high hopes for this year’s TV season. Disgusted by last year's tripe, I’ve been watching movie and TV discs from Netflix, emerging only for “West Wing” and the occasional “Supernanny”.

But it’s a real drag, all that DVD renting, just so I could relax after Benny went to bed. (This wasn’t an issue in Benny’s first year. I was too busy washing 300 bottles and folding 600 burp cloths every night to watch anything.)

This year’s season, I thought, had to be better.

It wasn’t.

The Fonz stages a comeback on CBS. Martha launches hers on NBC. William Shatner sports awful ties on ABC. “Law & Order” spawns more shows (“Law & Order: Petty Theft and Parking Meter Vandalism Unit” and “CSI: Vicksburg, Mich.”)

This unholy crew only edges me closer to 18th-century Prussian military officer Carl von Clausewitz (really).

I thought, maybe I could read at night instead. But two hours of reading a night – that’s two books a week. That’s 100 books necessary to get me through one TV season.

Obviously, I needed a reading list, preferably one packed with weighty tomes. What about military history? Nobody blathers in tiny, dense text like a military historian.

So I turned to some very nice folks at Ohio State University, which has a boffo military history department. They’ve posted online a terrifying list: 100 books on European and American military history. Caesar. Engels. Thucydides. McPherson. And at the top of the list, categorized under General Works: Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War.”

Hey, don’t blame me. Blame the TV execs.

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A table by the highway, please

Whew! Well, I'm better now and can take good hard look at my life. Hmm, I think I'll go back to bed.

It's shocking when you realize that you're only one to-do list from total ruin. Make it three days and I might as well chuck it all and move to Miami. I could pitch a tent outside the home of Dr. Arthur Agatston, creator of the S.O.B. diet, until I lose 30 pounds or get eaten by a crocodile, whichever comes first. But I hate Florida and I can get Dave Barry's column online, so I guess I'll stay here.

At least I could drive today, to the hair salon, the car wash and finally, to Benny's daycare. I was a little late, and the minute the door chime rang at my entrance, I heard "Mama!" from the kitchen area.

I hustled back there and saw Benny, hat and shoes on, woefully staring out the window. Then he saw me and I swear, it was a moment worthy of a Celine Dion ballad. His lip stuck out and his eyes filled up. "He's been like this since the first parent came," said a teacher as I held my sniffling boy.

To make up for my tardiness, I took Benny to Applebee's, where the waiter cunningly gave us a table with a clear view of Ann Arbor-Saline Road. Benny's eyes goggled at all the rush-hour traffic.

He did eat some garlic toast and miniscule shred of chicken, but mostly he ignored me. At one point, I played "Snake II" on my cell phone while Benny looked out the window ("Car! Truck! Car! Truck! Wow!").

The guy at the next table ordered a Jack-and-Coke. The woman behind us droned on about her urine samples. Ron called to say he had that damn flu now and he'd been home for hours, and where the hell were we? Ah, those precious mother-son moments.

Meanwhile, dishes cover the kitchen, laundry covers the basement, and despair covers the land. But I'm not sad because I'm Well! Well! Well! Yay!

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Danger: Mad Elephant

Well, I have unfairly maligned the S.O.B. diet. I thought it was the weird veggie dishes and lack of caffeine that made me sick. Instead, it was a monster flu.

I tried to stick to the diet on Tuesday, munching ham-and-egg dishes and watching "North and South" while Benny was at daycare. At 4 p.m., I surrendered my honor for chicken soup and Coke.

But I wasn't out of the woods yet. I started Wednesday at 6 a.m. tossing my cookies all over the kitchen. Then I held an encore performance in the bathroom. Then I nearly passed out.

Ron skipped work that day and put a baby gate across our bedroom door so I could watch them have fun without me. Every so often Benny would run to the gate and talk to me as I lay in my bed of pain. ("Truck! Bye-bye Car! Frog! Quack!") Then we'd sing songs. Really pathetic. I felt like Dumbo's mother locked in the "Mad Elephant" cage. Sometimes I lurched around the house like Quasimodo, but then I'd get dizzy and had to return to bed.

So that's three days lost to my life, and although I can't blame it on the S.O.B. diet, I'm not all that anxious to start it up again.

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The S.O.B. Diet

Well, it's the first day of the South Beach diet, or as I fondly call it, the Son-of-a-Bitch diet. I walk around muttering "Gee, I'd like a coke -- son of a bitch!"

I try to follow the plan to the letter, but my blood sugar plunges at awkward times, making me spastic and generally tough to live with. A pounding headache from caffeine withdrawl isn't helping either.

The SOB diet is a lot like Dante's journey to Heaven (yes, we're back to that again). Phase one is Hell, where you purge your body. No fruit, no alcohol, no starches. You can't even eat carrots.

Phase Two is like purgatory, where you add back fruits and some other good stuff until you reach the weight you want. Then on to Phase Three Heaven, where you bask in your svelteness and eat in (gasp!) moderation.

So here I am, chopping mushrooms and grilling chicken all day. I basically eat chicken, veggies, eggs and mozzerella sticks.

They allow you to eat more than that, but I can't handle the recipes. There's just no way I'm getting up in the morning and whipping together a cheesy frittata.

I don't even know what a frittata is. Do I look like the kind of woman who'd chop bell peppers at 6:30 a.m.? Should half-starved people be forced to handle sharp knives six times a day?

I spent the whole damn day today dicing ham and slicing cucumbers and fileting chicken breasts. 10 a.m. found me cutting up celerly stalks and filing them with some vile light cheese.

Benny had chicken fried rice for dinner tonight. I had chicken kebobs -- just chicken and mushrooms, minus the marinade or potatoes or anything else that makes kebobs good.

Let's return to the frittata. First they want you to slice onions, bell peppers and zucchini, then dice plum tomatoes, then chop some fresh basil. Then you get out a skillet and busily melt stuff, brown stuff, and stir stuff.Then preheat the broiler and whip up a six-ingredient egg mixture in the blender.

Pour the egg mixture over the veggies and cook it. Then broil it. Then sprinkle cheese on it and broil it some more. Serve it for lunch, since you've spent the entire morning on this frittata and your toddler is lying on the kitchen floor, throwing tupperware at the cat and screaming for attention.

Yeah, that's reasonable. And all the recipes are like this. The Chicken en Papillote looks nerve-wracking and the Cherry Snapper Ceviche (which you begin by soaking the fish in lime juice for three hours) looks just insane.

So I'm eating a lot of scrambled eggs and plain chicken breasts. I also drink a lot of ice water, to keep my spirits up. The diet allows more than this, of course, but I hate tomato juice and vegetable cocktails and nobody's catching me with a baggie of fake sugar.

What I wouldn't give for a coke.

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Benny Goes to School

It must be tough to be a toddler. Everyone’s huge, you don’t speak the language, and just when you got a good set of truck-crashing going, someone wants to change your pants.

So I can imagine Benny’s surprise on the first day of childcare. Usually he hops out of bed and runs to the baby gate across his bedroom door. I stumble over, change him, then cart him into the living room for 20 minutes of truck racing while I chug a Snapple and set out Cheerios.

Then I fall into a chair opposite Benny while he eats. “Do you know what time it is?” I moan, “Do you have any idea what time it is? It’s 6:30 a.m., that’s what time it is. Do you know how early that is? Do you have any idea how …” And so it goes.

But this charming domestic ritual was shattered Thursday morning, when Benny was bundled into the car at 7 a.m. with a lunch box. “School!” I chirp as we drive out of town, “School!” We pull up to a brightly painted building and I unload labeled blanket, pillow, stuffed puppy, extra outfit, emergency generator, etc. Then I kiss Benny, wave goodbye and drive off.

Well. You really have to admire toddlers. I don’t know what I’d do if Ron woke me up and put me into a suit, then drove me to a building full of strangers and told me to write 20 inches on Detroit’s housing controversy. And then left. I’d probably wail.

Which is exactly what Benny did, but I’m told he recovered quickly. Until naptime, that is. He refused to lie down; instead he put on his hat and shoes and stood at the door, calling my name. He was ready to go.

The second day he did much better. He ate and napped, and when Ron and I picked him up at 5 p.m. he treated us like pushy guests at a cocktail party. (“Ah yes. Didn’t we meet at some hospital somewhere? Of course I remember you, and how’s Ed?”)

That day we also received a pamphlet called “Innovations: The Infant Curriculum” with tips about helping your toddler’s adjustment to school. I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, but some of these kids sound a little nuts. “In general,” the authors conclude, “most children are well on their way in about six weeks.”

Six weeks? If Benny has an adjustment problem now, what will he be doing in October? Wearing a fake mustache and trying to go home with other people?

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A FranklinCovey Fairy Tale

[This entry appeared as a column in the Business Review newspapers.]

Ah, autumn. Time for that annual source of hilarity: The Fall FranklinCovey catalogue. This thin volume holds a fairy tale more magical than any sleeping beauty or enchanted frog.

Everyone dreams of a wonderful, rewarding, well-organized life. And if you lack the imagination to design your own, FranklinCovey will do it for you. Just flip through its pages and choose your perfect life.

After all, says the cover, “Right now belongs to you. Be proactive.”

Inside you read such gems as:

“Today is always present”

and

“You live right now.”

The catalogue begins with “Simplicity Girl” on page six. Simplicity heads to the gym at 5:30 a.m., where she tweaks her cardio routine and wonders “Do I need new shoes?” She researches Gore-Tex fabric and picks up birthday treats for the office. Hey, you cheapskates paying only $34.95 – this is your life.

For five more dollars you can be a “Seven Habits Guy” on page 8. He has 6:30 a.m. yoga class, an 8:30 zoning commission meeting and a 10 a.m. partner meeting. He doesn’t run out for grocery store cupcakes; he sets up birthday lunches at Bistro 31 – reservations for nine. After an afternoon of mentoring flunkies, he dines at Don Miguel’s at 7 p.m.

But perhaps you’re a woman with a family. Well, then, you need a kicky, spiral-bound planner that patronizes you on every page. Meet “Collages,” with its daily sketches of purses, shoes and wooden benches. The Collages Lady jogs in the park, schedules a manicure and reviews notes for cooking class. In her spare time, she plans her husband’s birthday dinner, Kira’s baby shower and the Collins’ anniversary party.

Other planners may quote Emerson: “The man of genius inspires us with boundless confidence in our own powers.” The Collages planner says, “A little of what you fancy does you good.” By the way, it comes with a free purse.

But hey, we’re wasting time here. Time to shake hands with “The Leader.” This mighty man swims at 7 a.m., builds parking structures until lunch and then runs his firm’s capital improvement board. Leader doesn't waste his time with birthdays or anniversaries. He’s gotta buy swim goggles.

His planner tells us that if you want to build a ship, don’t gather the men to actually build it. Instead, “Teach them the desire for the sea.”

So go, go and seek your planner self. And when you find it, write … write the detritus of your daily life, the stupid branding meeting, the shopping list (nose drops, corn pads, Swanson’s Frozen Chicken Delite) and the aerobics class you haven’t attended in months.

And remember, if you want to heat a frozen dinner, don’t ask your spouse to turn the oven on. Read him a fairy tale about the Prince and the Enchanted Chicken Wing.

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