The Package Tour of the Damned

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 46
Steven P. Unger, In the Footsteps of Dracula

First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has never fallen out of print. Nearly 120 years later, it continues to inspire spinoff literature, movies that mostly misunderstand its heart, and Gothic teen culture celebrating a walking afterlife. It also, like Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, inspires a massive tourist industry dedicated to recapturing the milieu that created the juggernaut. But Dracula tourism mainly lacks a centralized guidebook… until now.

Steven Unger walks backward through Bram Stoker's epoch-making classic to find a journey that not only could have really taken place, but which you and I could follow. Mixing history, travel, and literary criticism, Unger turns Dracula into an experience we can share with other fans. Unger's "Dracula Trail" is a journey with two legs, and if I had the money, I'd follow them both tomorrow.

On the first leg, Unger leads us along Dracula's trip through England. Though he admits that parts of this trip have been heavily commercialized by a lucrative Dracula industry, it's notable how much of Stoker's England, from the Yorkshire coast to the heart of London, is still there. Seeing Dracula's major stops is not only possible, Unger makes it seem downright easy.

It seems difficult to believe, but many locations highlighted in Dracula really exist. A remarkable number of them survived the Blitz, and remain visible to outside viewers. The house where Mina Murray roomed with giddy Lucy Westenra at Number 4, The Crescent, is a private residence, not open to tourists, but its stolid Victorian edifice remains, Unger writes, “unchanged since the 1890s.”

Besides literal locations, like the Whitby fish market, and historical events, like the wreck of the Dmitry, which made their way into Dracula, Unger also visits the generous tourist industry which has arisen surrounding the novel. Both Yorkshire and London host several museums, libraries, and pubs dedicated to Dracula tourism. A generous visitor himself, Unger finds Dracula sites welcoming to outsiders, and the Goth youth who frequent them quite friendly and personable.

Vlad Tepes, the inspiration for Dracula. This was the only
portrait painted of him during his lifetime.

Unger’s second leg takes travelers through Romania, which seems like much more of a safari. Dirt-poor and ravaged by Communism's ghost, Romania is still substantially terra incognita to the rest of the world. This is still a world of horse-carts, pristine ruins, and windswept villages. But in Unger's capable hands, it also seems like the most exquisite destination an adventure tourist could hope for.

Romanian Transylvania retains its mystique for modern travelers mainly because it remains, centuries later, terra incognita to outsiders. Under warns travelers to not expect mobile phone service or WiFi while visiting Transylvania. Romania has, however, accomodated itself to other Dracula-related travel matters. It’s possible to find the exact (ahem, “exact”) hostel where Jonathan Harker ate Robber Steak. And notorious dictator backfilled a “Castle Dracula” into the previously almost vacant Borgo Pass.

This book is lavishly illustrated with original photographs throughout. Unger's street scenes, sweeping landscapes, and charming people are half of this book's appeal. Sadly, the photos have the look of having been taken in color and digitally rendered greyscale. Though six photos are printed in color on the back cover, I wish I could see more the way Unger saw them. Perhaps an accompanying website would be in order?

Unger's history of Vlad Tepes is also an eye-opener. Most of us have probably only encountered Prince Vlad because of Dracula. I had no idea, until this book, that he's considered a national hero in Romania. He seems an intensely fascinating character, and I'd like to do more reading. I caught Unger dropping some minor historical inaccuracies, but not enough to diminish my reading enjoyment.

Apart from these two minor flaws, the greyscale photos and the innaccuracies (presumably corrected in the third edition), this is a fun, exciting, readable book. I'm not a big traveler, but this book makes me want to set out and re-discover what Stoker knew over a century ago. Having undergone two significant revisions since I first read it five years ago, it’s now even more thoroughly detailed, with even more photos and maps.

Like Shakespeare tourism or Dickens tourism, Dracula tourism is a real thing, a lively industry. This book, slim enough to fit in an outside coat pocket, provides a valuable overview of many unpublicized locations available to Dracula tourists. So much of Dracula's world is not only real, it's still there, and you and I can visit it. Unger already did, he shows you what he found there, and he explains how you can find it too.

In the Beginning, There Was Violence

Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947

Georgetown University political historian Bruce Hoffman starts with a simple question: does terrorism work? In current political parlance, the answer seems obvious; heads of state repeatedly decry terrorism’s inefficacy. Yet newly declassified British documents have shed light upon Britain’s governance of the Palestinian Mandate between the World Wars, which Hoffman says tell a different story. As fascism’s rising tide reorganized world Jewry, and Palestinians found themselves colonized, violence began that still remains with us today.

When Britain inherited huge Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration publicized Britain’s intent to create a Jewish homeland. This immediately caused problems for Palestinians, because they were there, and Jews were not. Though European Zionists took this opportunity to relocate into their historic homeland, the pre-World War I Jewish population was vanishingly small. Jewish land purchases, inflammatory rhetoric, and utopian politics made Palestinians fear their historic nation would soon cease to be.

British Commissioners attempted to keep peace between Zionists and Palestinians. This wasn’t easy, though. The Balfour Declaration persuaded Palestinians that Britain was pro-Jewish; attempts to respect existing Palestinian property and legal claims persuaded Jews that Britain was pro-Palestinian. Britain’s succession of High Commissioners tried to remain desperately fair while quelling ethnic violence, but both offended parties believed their respective grievances so inherently right, any discussion was necessarily wrong. Britain found itself hated by every party.

Professor Hoffman’s secondary title is somewhat deceptive. Despite promising a history of the arc from 1917 to 1947, over half that time gets very short mention herein. Hoffman keeps focus primarily on flare-ups of violence, neglecting other arcs of history outside his purview. Thus, despite momentary ethnic explosions in the 1920s, the first sixteen years don’t matter much. Periods of simmering hostility notwithstanding, Hoffman’s real narrative momentum begins in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power.

European Jews displaced into Palestine had little interest in existing traditional power structures. Palestinians, who previously distributed access to holy sites quite generously, found new immigrants circumventing their control. Each side considered the other disruptive, not without reason. Jews ignored Palestinians’ traditions; Palestinian imams urged anti-Jewish violence from within their mosques. Palestinian Muslim mobs drove the entire Jewish population from Hebron. Jews responded by organizing the Haganah, a “self-defense force,” actually an unofficial paramilitary army.

Bruce Hoffman

Herein lies Hoffman’s core thesis. Jews and Palestinians used political violence to marginalize populations they considered undesirable. When Britain intervened, both parties turned their guns on what they considered a colonial occupier. Though Britain held the Mandate desperately, long after states like Iraq and Saudi Arabia became independent, ultimately the Crumbling Empire succumbed. To Hoffman, this proves terrorism sometimes works. Sometimes, dedicated ideological organizations, facing a larger enemy, can use violence to achieve political ends.

Personalities loom large in Hoffman’s exposition. One, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, dominates the entire Mandate period. A Russian Jew who fought for Britain during the war, he later became a Zionist politician and general. His mix of political skill and ruthless military efficiency made even his Jewish allies fear his influence, particularly because of his fervent anti-socialist leanings. He became a sort of Jewish Michael Collins, and like Collins, the nation he created ultimately took his life.

Jabotinsky, Imam al-Qassam, and other outsized personalities represented only the public face of dangerous utopian thinking. The city of Haifa, a peaceful enclave of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, could’ve provided a model of charitable co-existence; but demagogues stirred grudges to the boiling point. When Jews found themselves unwelcome in Muslim-dominated Jaffa, they founded the neighboring city of Tel Aviv, a rare example of willful social engineering that survived the tumult of Twentieth Century political confrontation.

Despite coming from a mainstream, non-academic publisher, this book isn’t streamlined pop history. Hoffman’s scholarly approach features long paragraphs, dense prose, and many source notes. Readers unaccustomed to reading academic writing may find his prose difficult, almost to the point of impenetrability. Even this seasoned scholar found reading required careful pacing: I needed to limit myself to bite-sized segments to digest his intense style. Budget yourself plenty of time to truly savvy Hoffman’s lengthy discursion.

Still, notwithstanding Professor Hoffman’s style, his content is both intense and edifying. The patterns of partisan violence he describes still represent conflicting parties in the same region. Recent rhetoric from Benjamin Netanyahu precisely resembles historic declarations from Ze’ev Jabotinsky. And low-tech modes of political violence still propel wars with no front line. Hoffman only lightly addresses how the history he describes reflects the present we currently live in. But mostly, he just doesn’t have to.

Goodman's Digital Dystopia

Marc Goodman, Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

It always bothers me when I concur with a book’s core assertions, and must recommend audiences not read it anyway. With nonfiction, this usually happens when an author draws our attention to neglected topics, especially those which have often unexamined implications, but the author doesn’t stage the argument well. Maybe it reflects my background in teaching composition, but nothing sours my appreciation like an undifferentiated firehose of information. Such is the case with Marc Goodman.

Ex-LAPD turned global digital security consultant, Marc Goodman has participated in increasing corporate and private security measures. This gives him boots-on-the-ground familiarity with how organized crime, espionage specialists, and crafty teenagers abuse today’s networked world. When ordinary citizens send credit card information across WiFi or smartphones, when social networks market access to private eyeballs, and when market trackers create massive profiles of everybody online, we’re unprecedentedly vulnerable. As Goodman puts it, “Mo’ Screens, Mo’ Problems.”

My problem isn’t anything Goodman says. Informed audiences should already understand his broad outline, though he helpfully provides clarifying details. Those Terms of Service agreements you accept without reading? The average American would need 76 eight-hour workdays annually to read them all. PayPal’s Terms of Service runs nearly 40,000 words—longer than Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, without characters or motivations. Even if you read them, most include stipulations that “they” can change terms without notice.

Meanwhile, criminals have developed elaborate processes to circumvent security. Goodman notes, security specialists must anticipate every possible attack; lawbreakers need only find one liability. Meanwhile, thought leaders like Ben Horowitz recommend deliberately selling bug-ridden early drafts of software, using paying customers as uncompensated beta testers. This leaves consumers vulnerable to spiteful pranksters, the Mafia, and even China’s People’s Liberation Army, known to have deliberately hacked corporations and citizens to expropriate American and international trade secrets.

No, my problem isn’t what Goodman says, it’s how he says it. Goodman divides his text into three parts, and Part One, which consumes nearly half the book’s mass, unrelentingly dumps chilling crime data in readers’ laps. Between tales of deliberate crime, squicky corporate data hoarding, and actual malicious destruction, it mounts up. Goodman doesn’t break this litany of misery, except for the occasional half-page snippet of exposition, for over 150 pages, leaving readers tired.

Marc Goodman

This results in a phenomenon familiar to many professions, from government reformers to Christian missionaries: compassion fatigue. People reading narratives of poverty, oppression, or in this case crime, quickly become discouraged when statistics accumulate. With individual narratives, people feel moved to act; when patterns develop, people become discouraged and fatalistic. According to philanthropist Richard Stearns, that happens appallingly early: when naming actual victims of inequality or crime, people become discouraged when the pattern hits… two.

Thus Goodman says many right things in exactly the wrong way. I’d use exactly this strategy to discourage audiences about their ability to address current problems. Rather than keeping focus on one problem, or one constellation of problems, and appropriate correlating solutions, he completely segregates crisis from resolution. We get crushed by the weight of problems long before reaching the solutions, assuming we do reach the solutions: I frankly got tired and made tortoise-like progress.

Certainly, Goodman also discusses redresses to these problems. But he does this only so late that many readers have already either given into nihilism, or joins the Luddites. Perhaps Goodman thought the story arc from Hollywood dramas, where everything generally gets worse and worse until our white-hatted hero reverses things, would convey his message emotionally. But this isn’t some scripted drama. The answer isn’t Liam Neeson kicking everybody’s ass. This really happens to real people.

Goodman doesn’t trade in hypotheticals. He doesn’t invent threats that need addressed in the airy-fairy future, because he doesn’t need to (though he does sometimes extrapolate). Horror stories abound in nonfiction, from joshing teenagers hijacking municipal rail control networks, to massive data leaks at Symantec. Yes, that Symantec, which manufactures Norton security. Despite the “Future Crimes” title, Goodman details threats that exist right now, and risk becoming even more perilous as our networked technology increases.

I struggled to retain Goodman’s thread beneath the mass of techno-legal horror tales. I should be Goodman’s target audience, since I support his fundamental thesis about digital vulnerabilities. Just as most citizens cannot comprehend their investment portfolios, we also cannot manage our digital privacy individually. Goodman raises important questions for both private and regulatory consideration. These issues will increasingly color life in coming years. Goodman just stages his claims in ways that leave me despondent.

Stupidity For Sale

The abject idiocy of certain people who claim to speak for the public good continues to baffle me.

Late last week, veteran journalist M.D. Kittle wrote a pig-ignorant screed on Wisconsin Reporter, a regional website affiliated with right-wing umbrella group Watchdog.org. Kittle inveighed against any reforms of higher education that persisted in requiring any liberal arts core, insisting that anything other than job skills doesn’t comport with the Wisconsin Idea, a guiding principle of Wisconsin’s higher education system.

I’m accustomed to students complaining about liberal arts requirements. A classmate of mine mocked his additional history prerequisite as a mere money-making racket, a demonstrably nonsensical claim at a land grant university, where tuition barely scratches the surface of costs borne by taxes and endowments. As a teacher, I recall one student bellyaching: “Why study math? I’ll never need to factor polynomials for the rest of my life.”

Kittle takes this complaint, which I understand from students—who by definition don’t recognize their own best interests—and extends it to truly ridiculous ends:

The escalating cost of higher education is due in no small part to an outmoded liberal arts belief that forces computer science majors to take Lithuanian pottery or some other course in order to obtain a degree that is supposed to say the student has the skills to do the job at hand. At the end of the day, it’s safe to say IBM and Microsoft don’t give a damn whether their employees can operate a kiln.

You’re right. Employers don’t care if new hires possess such skills. And, other than arts majors, only an idiot would take such minutely specialized courses. Except at the most high-aspiring research universities, you’ll have difficulty finding anyone who even offers such particular courses to undergraduates. And anybody stuffing their CV with such esoteric subspecialties deserves the ding such choices attract.

However.

Conservatives, like those who run Watchdog.org, formerly advocated restoring firm liberal arts curricula to contemporary universities. The National Review editorial board openly endorsed toughening core studies when Jesse Jackson was organizing protests against “Western Culture” courses. What happened? When did the American Right decide against upholding traditional standards in higher education?

Only in America do families send youth to universities to achieve job skills. America has a highly regarded network of well-developed trade schools, which leaders like President Obama have advocated strengthening. And well they should. While university degree holders have greater lifetime earning potential, trade school graduates have greater immediate earning potential. Tradespeople with associate’s degrees can earn enough, right away, to start paying bills and raising families.

Yet people like Kittle, and the students he cites, want the prestige associated with university credentials. They just don’t want that boring old university education. Rather than elevating themselves to the complexity of university standards, they want universities lowered to mere skills training facilities. Their desire for a la carte education treats universities like shopping malls, and professors as service providers, not mentors or caregivers.

Worse, this attitude is crushingly passive. The desire for mere skills training reduces education to the mere transmission of information from one brain to another, an approach that provably doesn't work. Moreover, students claim they want skills training, but I know they don’t. When I tried lecturing my students, their eyes visibly glazed. When I engaged in dialog and asked questions without obviously correct answers, they came alive again.

Students, by nature, don’t know what they want and need. Important concepts reveal themselves only laterally, often in surprising ways. As I've written before, we never study topics for their own sake. Music is beautiful, but music also relies upon strict mathematical relationships; music is math made tangible. Likewise, literature is a compressed form of thinking, and the ability to comprehend literature is, manifestly, the ability to have empathy.

And, yes, Lithuanian pottery is a stupid course. Besides art majors, only somebody unthinking would take that class. But art history courses provide introductory studies in complicated visual communication, absolutely essential for engineers, physicists, and other skilled professionals who deal in spatial relationships. Just because some twenty-year-old doesn’t grasp why liberal studies doesn’t matter, doesn’t excuse adults indulging their ignorance.

Students who only study their job eventually do their job exactly like everyone else. Employers treasure college grads because they can break the mold. But libertarians like Kittle don’t want such individuality. In reducing education to job training, Kittle by extension reduce schools to industrial parts manufacturing. And those parts are students. I’d consider that sufficient reason to be outraged.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Übermensch

Henry Cavill as Superman

People who don’t read comic books probably don’t realize that DC Comics halted, and completely restarted, their iconic Superman character in 1986. During the Crisis On Infinite Earths, the first of three times (so far) DC has shaken out its frequently unreliable continuity, they ironed out other characters’ kinks; but with Superman, they just  chucked fifty years of inconsistent backstory. Christopher Reeve’s beloved Superman simply ended. The current Superman is less than twenty years old.

In today’s crush of franchise reboot movies, 2013’s Man Of Steel seems superficially ordinary. With Christopher Reeve deceased, Brandon Routh’s starring turn in Superman Returns widely jeered, and director Richard Donner basically retired, relaunching the Superman film franchise in accord with the 1986 comics restart probably appeared logical. But screenwriter David S. Goyer and director Zach Snyder actually made probably the biggest change to Superman’s arc ever: they’ve removed him altogether from ordinary human affairs.

Recalling Donner’s iconic 1978 Superman, audiences will probably remember Christopher Reeve ducking into telephone booths to change costumes, emerging to stop cat burglars attacking skyscrapers, and catching a mugger’s bullet intended for Lois Lane. At various times, he caught falling spacecraft, righted tumbling buildings, chucked world powers’ nuclear arsenals into the sun, and re-flew the American flag on the moon. During periods when Americans believed our future was probably truncated, Superman renewed faith in order.

Introduced during the Great Depression, Superman hit American consciousness during years when a combination of organized crime and top-level corruption left citizens feeling powerless. With war brewing in Europe and lawlessness in America’s streets, Superman reassured struggling youths that a pure heart, and occasional well-placed violence, could restore justice to our land. Donner’s film, four years after Charles Bronson’s bleak Death Wish, reignited belief in integrity when officials literally suggested abandoning Manhattan to the Mafia.

Michael Shannon as General Zod

But today’s focus has shifted. One recalls White House whistleblower Richard Clarke, who complained that FBI director Louis Freeh remained fixated on catching bankrobbers and other criminals when terrorism had become America’s biggest threat. A musclebound white vigilante cannot out-punch criminals today, when literal bankrobbers can haul one billion dollars without entering the bank. Note that, in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, when Bane wanted to wreak terror and undermine society, he attacked Gotham’s stock exchange.

Costumed crime-fighters seem naive and passé anymore. Mere crime lacks panache. As Matt Taibbi reports, the financial swindlers who torpedoed our economy in 2008 waltzed because nobody could agree on jurisdictional protocol, while poor and minority citizens face punitive consequences for spitting on the sidewalk. Order feels like the problem, not the solution. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and ISIS threaten America’s interests internationally, while the Sinaloa and Zeta cartels have reportedly established economic colonies within America’s borders.

Therefore, Snyder’s Superman doesn’t fight crime. How could he? Even Superman can’t punch Goldman Sachs, or rustle up decentralized organizations like the Zetas. In comics, Clark Kent’s father, Jonathan, taught his son to exercise social responsibility via his powers; being superhuman gives Superman duties to society. Snyder’s Jonathan Kent teaches young Clark to fear human society. While arguably not wrong, this change reflects a society-wide flight from public obligation in our time of atomized hyper-individualism.

Snyder’s Superman never does anything public-spirited. Truth, Justice, and the American Way mean nothing in this milieu. Even when General Zod appears, and Superman makes himself visible, he does so primarily out of loyalty to Lois Lane. He has no compunction engaging supervillains in massively destructive dust-ups along Kansas main streets, and when Zod’s army of Kryptonian misfits begin terraforming Earth, Superman abandons the massive nuclear crater in Metropolis’s downtown to rescue Lois Lane. Again.

This isn’t the behavior of a superman; this is the behavior of an übermensch. This Superman demonstrates no interest in becoming part of society’s evolution, protecting humanity’s downtrodden, or ensuring law and order. He shows a strictly ad hoc, self-serving moral underbelly, and when he finally fights Zod one-on-one, Superman arguably does as much damage to Metropolis as Zod does. The Superman I grew up with was everybody’s hero. Snyder’s Superman is somebody to fear.

In the final scene, Superman destroys a surveillance drone and demands his solitude. Snyder’s Superman has essentially surrendered any role in human society. And though we’re promised Superman’s involvement in a Justice League movie, that’ll surely represent a major turnaround for a character basically disinterested in justice or order. This ain’t hay, folks; how we depict our mythic heroes matters. The stories we tell about our heroes are ultimately the stories we believe about ourselves.