Rodger's Top 5: Forgiveness Stories (among many)

In the last week, I’ve had two experiences that reminded me of the POWER OF FORGIVENESS. It would be improper to call these examples my top-five forgiveness stories, because they are only a few of many, but I love these.

AD 29, Nailed to a cross, his abdomen torn by spear thrusts administered by Roman soldiers who were commanded to stay with him until he died, Christ not only forgave them, he called out to God saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

In 1945, at the end of WWII, Douglas MacArthur, commander of American forces occupying Japan conducted an investigation of Hirohito, Emperor of Japan. He wanted to know if the Emperor had ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or any of the dozens of other atrocities committed by Japanese forces in the war. Investigators found no hard evidence of Hirohito’s order, but did find evidence that he put his life at risk to end the war. When MacArthur and the Emperor finally met, the Emperor begged MacArthur to punish only him for the crimes and spare his people. MacArthur responded that their meeting was not to discuss punishment, but to begin the rebuilding of Japan and that they would do it together.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II was badly wounded by a would-be assassin. Shot four times, he underwent repeated surgery and an extended convalescence. After recovery, he visited the shooter at his prison cell. The prisoner looked to the Pope for forgiveness, to which the Pope responded that the shooter was his brother and that he was already forgiven.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in prison. Born into a royal family in 1918, he studied law which took him into politics and the anti-apartheid human rights movement in South Africa. Years of inhumane treatment in brutal conditions followed. But in 1990, he was released and became the first president of a multiracial nation. Instead of revenge, he set out to rebuild the nation based on equality and reconciliation. He said, “I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

Phan Thi Kim Phuc is one of the most remarkable women I’ve ever listened to. I was at a breakfast just a week ago where she was the keynote speaker. Most do not know her name, but they know her picture. In 1972 she was the young girl running naked and badly burned from her village just decimated by a napalm bomb strike during the Vietnam War. She was not expected to live. After she was stabilized, she underwent years of surgery. Horribly disfigured she believed she would never marry or have children. To compensate, she set out to become a doctor, but the Communist government of Viet Nam had other ideas. She was to become an anti-American spokesperson. Eventually she was allowed to study in The Soviet Union, where she met another Vietnamese student. Then the couple was allowed to immigrate to Cuba where they married. But along the way Kim picked up a Bible and became a Christian. On a refueling stop between Russia and Cuba, in Canada, she and her husband defected. Among her first acts was to forgive the Vietnamese, the Americans and especially the American officer who ordered the strike. She now campaigns to help children who are victims of war. Like MacArthur, John Paul, and Mandela, Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s Christian faith led her to forgiveness.

Rodger That: Personality Or Policy?

I don’t do much political writing anymore, but a fascination with both American and world politics demands that I pay attention. Like most of us, I discuss what is going on with friends and others including people with like and opposing viewpoints.

One of the questions I hear often is, “How can anyone support Donald Trump?”

As a political scientist, I follow two types of voters in the United States, and from my personal experience, one type votes on personality. They will support people they like, and people who do not challenge their views. If they would not choose a candidate as a friend, the odds are that they will not support them. To many, Trump is hard to like.

The other type of voter supports, not people, but policies. They support candidates who promote policies that they agree with, especially policies that they believe will make their household safer or better off. Donald Trump is a hard-assed New York businessman who can be a first-class jerk. But his policies appeal to a lot of people.

The follow up question I often hear is, “How can people of faith support someone with Trump’s baggage?”

What I truly respect in the many who live their faith, is that they recognize that we all have baggage, we all have ugly in our past. They also recognize that a checkered temperament does not mean that we cannot do more good than bad. And people of faith believe in forgiveness.

The electorate seems to be equally divided between those who choose candidates they like and are passionate about remedying perceived injustice and those who pragmatically support policies that they feel help their household and make them safer. Each group represents approximately 30% of the voters. In between is a larger block of voters who, when things are going well for themselves and, in their perception, the country, will vote personality. When these same voters are hurting or just uncomfortable they almost always focus more on policy.

For both, I want to quote from my earlier political writing. America is imperfect, but exceptional. People from Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela and dozens of other countries would love the opportunity to vote for anyone that the elites feel threatened by.  

Rodger Recommends: Historical Non-Fiction vs. Historical Fiction

I write thrillers. My plots are taken from the headlines, usually international conflicts that are left unresolved. Conflicts like the US and China battles over espionage especially in high tech. Conflicts like US and Iranian differences that have festered for decades. My Team Walker book due out in November follows that pattern but is set a little closer to home. 

I also write Historical Adventure Fiction. My plots for these stories are drawn from my constant fascination with events, not in headlines, but in history, events that warrant a book of their own, but were relegated to some footnote or worse, covered up by the powerful when a plan or policy went completely to hell. Tempest North, (Available July 16) explores superpower conflicts between Spain, England, Russia and the United States, and Native Americans on the North Pacific Coast of the American continent at the moment European power began to crumble. 

Among the 25 to 30 books that I read every year, are four or five of a genre called Historical Nonfiction. Among my favorite authors in this genre is David Grann. I loved his Lost City Of Z.  Killers of the Flower Moon is a story that needed to be told. His latest book, The Wager, like my work, takes a little-known event and through meticulous research tells a story that few ever heard of. Authors of Historical Nonfiction often work from copious notes and literally piles of minutia about an event. They find journals of participants, and logbooks, and government reports, but when they sit down to write, they find that they have little real knowledge of the characters, how they felt, how they coped. To make the books real to the readers, they often include almost excruciating particulars. For example, in The Wager, before things come undone and the adventure begins, we learn about how a 1700s sailing ship is rigged, how it is supplied, how the crew is assembled, who hangs their hammocks where, the ages of the participants, the difficulties in navigation, and other descriptive facts. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that authors have little hard documentation on the characters other than they participated in the event. Grann turns journals into language.

Their work beats the hell out of most history books in supplying that detail. If you want to learn about these little-known events, Historical Nonfiction is a lot more fun than academic history. I love Grann’s books, but it can take me days to finish one.

Characters are not a sum of the details around them. They are flesh and blood, with emotions and souls, and like most of the rest of us, a mixture of devil and saint. The joy of writing Historical Fiction is that I don’t have to bury the reader in details, in fact too much minutia just slows down the story. I can use my imagination to figure out what each character might be thinking when faced with a crisis. As I write, the characters become real, and more interesting. Disagreement and arguments flesh in how the story develops and why. Often the only decision is a bad one. Tempest North is a story of terrible decision making in history that few people know about.

I write about moments and situations. In Two Civil Wars, I write about Lincoln’s meddling in the Mexican Civil War. In Enemy Patriots, I write about how America interred its Japanese American Citizens during WWII because they thought some were spies. Some were, but for which side? I want the reader to join the character in the adventure, to be part of surviving. I want them to feel it in their stomach, in their heart; in a way that might just open an understanding of why the event was covered up in the first place; how humans survived and why that is important to us even today. That works best if the reader has a great time being part of the story. Join the characters of Tempest North, in a little known, dangerous, and wildly beautiful place. 

Rodger's Top 5: Quotes On Success In Politics

As this country and over half the world enter into an election year, I thought I would share five of my favorite quotations on success in politics.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
- Ghandi

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
- H.L. Mencken

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
- Mark Twain

“Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites, experts often possess more data than judgment.”
- Colin Powell

“Let us not seek to fix blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
- J.F. Kennedy

Rodger That: Catch And Release Dog

I’m not a purist fly fisherman. I love almost any kind of fishing experience, lakes, rivers, and saltwater, (both for the grill and catch and release billfish.) But I admit that alone or with a few friends on a crystal stream, catch and release fly fishing is my favorite. Because we fish on streams where brown bears are fattening up on salmon, one of my most important friends is always a dog. I love the beauty of a char, cutthroat or rainbow trout going airborne. I assume that if they knew that I was planning on releasing them, they might not fight so hard and put on an aerial display. But I’m not going to ruin the experience for all of us by telling them.

Which gets me to the story of one brilliant afternoon on our favorite river in Alaska. Carmen and I were fishing with another couple who had flown in to join us at our remote cabin. It was early fall, and the arctic char and rainbow trout were fat from feasting on millions of salmon eggs deposited by spawning sockeye salmon. An eighteen-inch fish might way more than three pounds and we had already hooked fish that were two and three times that size. 

My friend Chris had matched the color of the salmon eggs with a fly and then shared it with the rest of us. The match was so accurate that we were hooking trout about every four or five casts. Often two or three of us would have fish on at the same time. Sometimes I was so busy unhooking fish and releasing them back into a deep pool that I would go a half hour or more without personally making a cast. 

My black setter, Winchester, would race up and down the bank, wading into the water to watch the fight as each of us hooked fish. As I carefully removed the hook from a fish, he’d bark excitedly and then chase the freed fish back into deeper water. He loved the game and seemed most excited when I released the fish.

Occasionally one of us would wander back to the jetboat and retrieve a cold beer from the mesh bag dangling in the cold clear water. Winchester would wander the gravel bar, sometimes barking wildly as a bear in the woods behind us got too close. After several hours of great fishing, the four of us found ourselves sitting on a log, beer in hand, just talking and watching two eagles in a cottonwood tree who hadn’t moved since we’d arrived. 

“They’re waiting for us to leave,” said Carmen, “then they’ll come down for a fish dinner.” The three of us looked over at her and Chris said what we were all thinking. “Why not catch a rainbow for the grill tonight?” A four-pound rainbow, filleted, would feed all of us. If we caught one in the next hour, we’d granted ourselves to fish, the menu was set.

We went back to fishing and ten minutes later I landed a perfect dinner fish. Winchester looked incredulously at me as I pulled it up on the bank and smacked it on the head. He walked up and sat next to the fish as I went back to fishing. A moment later I felt him bump my leg. I looked down and he stood up to his belly in water, the dinner rainbow in his mouth. His eyes smiled and then he walked a bit further into the river, dropped the fish and danced as the current pushed it into deep water. He then turned and gave me a look that said plainly, “Don’t worry about that mistake, I’ve got your back.”

Rodger’s Two Cents: IF— By Rudyard Kipling

As a small boy, being raised by a single mother, I was fortunate to have a mentor who cherished literature. My mom introduced me to authors from around the world and across the ages. She taught me that writers were like mirrors, creating opportunities to see yourself. I remember when she gave me this poem and probably should have passed it on years ago.

If— by Rudyard Kipling  (‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rodger's Top 5: Aspects Of Winter In Alaska

As I write this, it is nine below zero and we have more than 50 inches of snow on the ground. I admit with today’s bitter cold I will only partake of only one of my five favorite winter activities. I’m sure all of my readers will figure out which one after you see the list.

Hiking…Living in Anchorage we are blessed with both urban and forest trail systems totaling hundreds of miles. Even in winter, most are packed snow allowing you to hike in regular boots or even tennis shoes. The trees are alive with dozens of species of birds that overwinter in the north. Meeting up on the trail with others trying to identify a bird’s species is a blast.

Cross Country Skiing…Pushing myself on skis is not my cup of tea, but the floatation of skis on snow allows me to go deeper into the back country, where there is more solitude and occasionally a lynx or fox. I really love this after a couple of days of rewriting a story which includes deleting paragraphs and sometimes entire chapters that I worked hard to craft.

Snowshoeing…There are times, right after a new deep snow or when I need even more solitude, I strap on a pair of snowshoes and head off the trails. Sometimes I’ll bump into a stubborn old moose, or coyote or even a wolf. I swear they will look at me and know that I’ve just spent hours doing my least favorite task as a writer, editing.

Warm Fire, Good Book…I no longer appreciate earning hard man points. When the thermometer reads below zero, and when I have a break in my disciplined writing schedule, a crackling fire and a good book are perfect. During the day, coffee or tea will be close at hand. In the evenings, there might be a Jack & water. I read more than fifty books every year, and I save the best of my friends’ books for these times.

Get the Hell out of Dodge…Winter is beautiful in Alaska. Everything is covered in clean white snow, the air is crisp, and the stars and northern lights add spice to one’s life. But it is also damned cold sometimes and seems especially so early in the season. One of my favorite winter activities is wandering the beach, swimming for hours, and greeting old friends in Zihuantanejo, Mexico, where we’ve been fighting off the other activities of winter for decades.

Rodger Recommends: Contrarians

At a time in both American and world politics, where the concept of compromise is labeled disloyal or even traitorous, I like to study influential people who made an entire career out of such behavior. My favorite was the human paradox, George Bernard Shaw. He was celibate until he was 29 and from that time on a womanizer. He drank like an Irishman and challenged English society including loyalty in war time. He refused to behave.

He was an Irish playwright, music and literary critic, author, and political commentator who at one time or another embraced Marxism and Fascism, Socialism, and the world of a wildly successful artist with all of its trappings. His writings were often political and always critiques of the society he lived in. He labeled his critics. He used satire. He abhorred racism but embraced eugenics, or the use of selective breeding to create better humans. He championed evolutionary rather than revolutionary reform of a world that he felt was unjust. That is until the dictatorships of the early 1900’s in Italy and Germany and Russia seemed on the verge of reforming society. His embracing of authoritarian leadership for a more just world collapsed as those same leaders led the world into the first world war and then the second.

In our times, we might label such men as hypocrites for revising their beliefs. We denounce men of strong beliefs who advance them with words, actions, and method that we don’t like. GBS as he signed most of his work was passionately right until he was wrong, outspoken in his words until they were proven prophetic. His life from the late 1800s until 1950 was one where those who disagreed with him did so with passion and those who somehow followed his mental gyrations to what he saw as a better world supported him. He was the only man to win both an Oscar for film work in the US and the Nobel Prize. Even those who disagreed with him often came to recognize his amazing ability to define us. 

I encourage my readers to learn a little about this walking paradox from our past. It might help us understand each other. I like to reread some of his work when crafting a character who fits my model of a reluctant hero.

The reasonable man adapts his life to the world around him.

The unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (GBS)

Rodger's Top 5: Most-Important Presidents In American Politics

As a writer who writes both historical adventures and current event thrillers, I pay a lot of attention to politics and how present political currents contrast with those in the past. With that in mind, I thought I would devote this column to the Five Presidents who I believe were most important in American politics.

George Washington: The man who could be king, instead retired at the end of the Revolutionary War. Later as President of the Constitutional Convention he helped hammer out the compromises that led to adoption of The Constitution of the United States. As President of the country, he worked diligently not to interfere with policy making which was reserved to Congress. He left the Presidency frustrated by the divisions created by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and warned of the future divisions of powerful political parties.

Abraham Lincoln: As a young attorney, Lincoln was outspoken about the evils of slavery. As the Republican candidate for President, he so scared the Southern political base that his name didn’t even appear on several Southern States ballots. As President he tried to walk a more middle ground, but the outbreak of the Civil War forced his focus on preserving the Union and the federal role in ending slavery. His legacy includes The United States and the end of

Slavery, and a strong Republican Party focused on liberty not popularity.

Teddy Roosevelt: Perhaps our most vigorous president, he charted a new direction for the country by making the government arbiter of economic disagreement, primarily between labor and the all-powerful business trusts which he broke up under the Sherman act. He was our first conservationist, protecting America’s land treasures. He pressed the country into a leadership role in international affairs, under the motto, “speak softly but carry a big stick.” He saw his role as “steward of the people.” He was America’s first populist Republican President.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: Our only four term president, FDR’s first term began as the Great Depression threw 13 million men out of work and collapsed almost every bank in the country. He used the power of the federal government to create new banking controls, massive public relief programs, Social Security, and income-based taxes. He professed a neutral foreign policy, but with the rise of authoritarian governments in Europe and Japan, he began quietly arming other democracies and building America’s military. He left a legacy of government intrusion into the lives of its citizens, (which got him re-elected three times), and the USA as a world power.

Woodrow Wilson: Among his achievements was the prohibition of child labor, federal support for an 8-hour workday, and government limits on unfair business practices. But Wilson did far more damage than good. The son of a Ku Klux Klan leader and rabid racist he dismantled almost all of the reconstruction legislation that had been created to bring former slaves into the general economy of the country. His internationalist foreign policy included supporting the Communist Revolution in Russia, only to be betrayed by the Bolsheviks who took Russia out of World War I just as the United States took up the majority of fighting on the Eastern Front. Feeling betrayed he unleashed his Attorney General and the legal system on perceived enemies and radicals, creating a legacy of judicial persecution.

Rodger’s Two Cents: The Palmer Raids

Be aware of the risks of collective punishment.

In my Rodger’s Top 5 post for this month, I take a shot at the man I believe was our worst president, Woodrow Wilson. One of his most damaging decisions was the appointment of Mitchell Palmer as Attorney General. Wilson was our first self-identified Progressive President, and one of our biggest hypocrites. Faced with the double-cross of the Bolsheviks in Russia, whom he had quietly supported, Wilson unleashed a wave of raids on the country to root out communists, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals. To be fair, the country had seen a small wave of anarchist attacks including letter bombs sent to influential politicians from a tiny group who followed the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani. But Palmer heard politically challenging speech behind every bush.

Wilson had warned against what he called hyphenated-Americans. He had already purged black Americans from the government and rolled back enforcement of his predecessors’ laws to bring former slaves into the fabric of the country. Beginning in November of 1919, Attorney General Palmer ignored due process and the warrant system to launch a series of raids against “radicals” in the country, especially the same Communists that Wilson had helped overthrow the government of Russia. The targets included Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, labor activists, and other “threats.”

These raids did not target individuals, but groups and locations where radicals met. Much of the activity was coordinated by newly appointed 24-year-old J. Edger Hoover. Palmer had given him the go ahead to use almost any means necessary to round up and deport these menaces to society. On November 7, 1919, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, raids on The Russian Workers Party in 12 cities commenced. Many were threatened and beaten, even group of teachers conducting night classes at a targeted building were arrested. All of this was justified by Palmer’s “intelligence” that radicals were going to launch a nationwide effort to overthrow the democracy on May Day 1920.

Over a three-month period, more than 10,000 were arrested, but most of the cases were thrown out over lack of evidence. In New York, over 650 were arrested, but only 43 were ever deported, most over simple immigration law violations. Eventually about 500 in total were deported. When the May Day rebellion against democracy failed to materialize, Palmer’s credibility collapsed, but his efforts and the methods of Hoover to use the justice system to root out opposition had become part of our political fabric.

Today, in a divided nation, both sides label the other and the use of warped judicial processes to subdue our opponents is still with us. Collective labeling and fear mongering has become political strategy. The use of the justice system as part of that is our greatest threat.