The fictional members of imaginary KPop group Huntr/X, Zoey, Rumi and Mira, Netflix image.
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.” Pierre de Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville”
As a retired media professor, I’ll disclose right up front that I am ignorant of music. I never took an intro to music class, never learned to play an instrument (beyond briefly ringing in a hand bell choir) and don’t have insight into music structure or history or much of anything else.
Yet, I have required students in the past to use music in a communication class—to pick a song of their choice that includes a video, and unpack what they see as the communication meanings or concepts portrayed in the work. I don’t doubt that Pierre had a point—“Baby Shark” is sung, after all. But even a musically ignorant person can understand that music, including pop songs, can be very expressive of ideas both verbally and non verbally.
And one of the points I was indirectly making to students is that communication is both data and feelings. So music, even pop music, can express our inner feelings. Music can have depth.
Which brings me to this year’s movie phenomenon, “KPop Demon Hunters.” As an old man, I freely admit I have zero experience with KPop. I’m aware of the term, but this Netflix movie served as my introduction to the genre.
And what an introduction. The movie follows three pop singers, Rumi, Zoey and Mira. The trio, a KPop group called Huntr/X, is also the chosen group, a mystical, generational set of super heroes who protect the world from demons through both their songs and their fighting prowess.
It’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” meets “Frozen.” Except it’s more than that. For one things, although I wish there was more character development, it’s got multiple characters who are complicated and surprising. Not just the trio, who each has their own distinct characteristics, but the demon boy band, the demon king, the band manager, the quack doctor—there are lots of interesting characters who are well written and well acted.
The story is fantastic, but works because it’s both animated, which gives it lots of license to be in its own imaginary reality, and internally cohesive. The characters believe in their universe and behave reasonably as a result.
And—those songs. This is an animated musical where each song works—they are catchy, well sung, lyrically interesting and advance the story. That it’s pop music doesn’t detract from its quality. Pretty much any of the videos of the songs would have worked in my class—there are characters and depth in each to dig into, communication ideas interestingly expressed.
True, I found the song about soda pop to be the musical equivalent of the food—there’s not a lot of depth there .But then again, in the context of the movie, these are demons attempting to snag fans, not anybody expressing truths about their life.
For me, the song that hit the most was the final one. I wish it had more set up—the quick resolution of the movie was, in my mind, one of its weaknesses—but I like both the sound and the lyrics of this song. “My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like?” Yeah, I have fallen in love with three cartoon girls by that point. There are lots of quotable lines in the song “What it Sounds Like,” but I really love one of its final verses:
“We broke into a million pieces, and we can't go back But now we're seeing all the beauty in the broken glass The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.”
It’s a message of truth and self-acceptance. I’m not a poet, but it seems like decent poetry to me, wrapped in a catchy pop sound.
There is a lot that I like about the movie. The cast, both signing and speaking, seems excellent. The look of the movie is bright, colorful and eye catching. There is a serious tone and message, but also a lot of silliness and levity.
I feel lucky that I didn’t see this movie on Netflix. They released a “sing along” movie theatre version, and a grandson wanted his grandparents to go with him and his mother to see it. Luckily, I saw it in Iowa, a Midwestern state where most movie audiences are too uptight to actually sing along, so no audience voices interfered with the songs.
It’s not a perfect movie. As noted earlier, to me the resolution was nice but too rushed and needed more setup. The demon king could have used a much more effective physical appearance, particularly for the climatic battle. I liked seeing girls portrayed as creatures who actually eat, but they were also razor thin, which cut against that message. The quick cuts and pace sometimes gave the movie a too frantic feel to me.
Still, it’s very good. It’s an animated film that can appeal to a grandson and his grandfather. It’s Golden.
The author John Green has a nifty tradition—when he has a new book coming out, he gets a bunch of paper and signs his name to thousands of sheets, which then go into the first edition of the book.
Thus, my copy of “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” has “signed edition” on the cover and a Sharpie Scrawled “John” on a page before the title page.
I have a J name, too, but not such a great J as John.
I recently read the book. I recommend it. But be prepared for some frustration.
Not with John, whose prose is breezy and readable, but with what he recounts. I’m not surprised that our deadliest infectious disease attacks our lungs—as the recent COVID-19 pandemic and previous flu pandemics show, our bodily oxygen interface is a vulnerable system in our anatomy.
So, why did I feel frustration? As Green reports, in 2023, more than a million people died from tuberculosis, “more than died from malaria, typhoid and war combined.”
We only have ourselves to blame for wars—they are not an inevitable part of nature that is imposed on us.
Tuberculosis, on the other hand, is natural, and it is also curable and has been for many decades. We found out how to cure this stubborn bacterial infection in the 1950s, yet it still harvests more souls than any other other human disease. Why?
“The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not,” Green writes. That reality, made worse this year as America pulls back from life-saving foreign aid efforts, is a result of poor human decisions.
Anyway, one interesting aspect of Green’s book is the history of tuberculosis—how it was framed and what it meant. TB was a bit romanticized before we understood what the disease actually was. It caused sufferers to waste away, and was conflated with some rather messed up feminine body ideals—if the cultural aspiration is that women should be pale and thin, as it has been in some Western cultures, a disease that slowly causes its poor sufferers to waste away (it was once called “consumption” because the disease consumes the body) has some chic, some cool factor, in a sick (literal and figurative) way.
It was even at times associated with intelligence and education—and for many White “experts” back in the day, there was suspicion that Black people could not get TB. It was an upper class disease, or so they thought when diseases overall were way more common and hard to diagnose.
Then, as the 19th century faded in to the 20th, it became known that TB was caused by a specific germ, a bacterium. It was not genetic; it was not from character or intelligence—it was aided by crowding and filthy living conditions. Very quickly, TB went from being “cool” to being associated with the lower orders.
Finally, hooray, in the post WWII world, antibiotics knocked tuberculosis down and made it rare—in places. In others, where drugs are less available and more expensive, where modern health care does not exist—TB never went away.
Thus, we meet a young African who represents the reality of the disease. The book returns often to the narrative of a man who was a boy when Green first met him in Sierra Leone—Henry. Henry had TB, and was treated, on and off (for various reasons, medical treatment in west Africa is often on and off) over years. His case was drug resistant, and his life was endangered for years in slow, painful ways.
Luckily, Henry’s story did not end in one of the millions of deaths that TB causes each year. He eventually got effective treatment. For once, the cure and the disease were in the same place.
Yet, too often they are not. I do not think it is a spoiler to quote the very end of Green’s book, since early in the book the reader already understands the idea Green is stating is central to this text:
“In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. We must also be the cure.”
We must be. We are not, yet. These days, our ability to think well of collective needs has ebbed badly. May the tide of human compassion and knowledge rise soon. If it does, Green’s book may be part of that tide. So, I encourage you to read this book. It will frustrate you, but it’s an important piece of writing.
The shocking announcement this week that the CBS parent company Paramount is cancelling the highest-rated network late-night talk show, “Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” has set off a firestorm of angry reaction, including suspicions that Paramount was cravenly caving in to political pressure from President Trump.
After all, Paramount just opted to donate $16 million to Trump’s library to settle a lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount probably would have won that lawsuit if it stuck to its guns—courts are loathe to dictate the editing process of a free press—but the suspicion is that Paramount would rather have a cozy relationship with Trump than stand up for a free press. Paramount is seeking approval of a large media merger and doesn’t want enmity with the overlords to mess up a business strategy.
Stephen Colbert in 2019. From Wikimedia Commons, image by Montclair Film.
Thus, was Colbert tossed under the bus as part of that larger deal?
The company says it was a purely financial decision, which I’m not buying because I don’t think any media decision is “purely financial.” But the company has a point about finances—the economics of network talk shows have been shifting dramatically in recent years, part of the many shifts in media that for more than a decade have been rocking our information infrastructure.
Ad revenue for network TV talks shows has plunged. While Colbert had the largest audience among such programs, it is the biggest slice of a pie that has shriveled to tart-size in recent years—the New York Times reported recently that Colbert’s TV audience is around 2.4 million viewers, not exactly an avalanche in a country of more than 340 million souls and 219 million TV sets.
The Times further reports that in June, for the first time in media history, online streaming replaced cable and broadcast TV as the leading distribution method for video entertainment. I am part of that trend. A fan of Colbert’s, I catch him most often in YouTube clips, since I months ago stopped watching “live” TV.
The signs of change have been around for a while. In March, Taylor Tomlinson announced she was leaving “After Midnight,” the show that came after Colbert’s, and CBS cancelled that show. (Colbert was executive producer of that show).
Still, while there are powerful economic forces working against late-night talk shows, the timing of the Paramount announcement, the same week that Colbert famously blasted the company for what he called “a big fat bribe” to Trump, certainly does not look good.
And it occurs in a backdrop of a Republican administration and Republican Party willing to use “liberal media” as a punching bag. As the Critics Notebook in the New York Times by James Poniewozik noted July 18: “But you have to wonder about the long-term future of topical comedy on major networks, if the owners are vulnerable to pressure and the shows have diminishing ratings to justify their sharp elbows. Jimmy Kimmel is still on ABC, though that network settled its own lawsuit from the president last year. In January the president said that NBC’s owner, Comcast, should ‘pay a big price’ for the jabs that Seth Meyers has taken at him.”
And it comes at an overall challenging environment for our media system. My local newspaper, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, has withdrawn, like many newspapers, from daily printing. Congress just rescinded federal support for PBS and NPR, with all members of Congress form Iowa voting for that unfortunate change.
This means that at the same time that much of our legacy media doesn’t have the economic strength to fulfill its watchdog function, the alternative of public media is also being undermined. Trump has long called journalists “enemies,” and he’s at least honest in his attack on my tribe. But I think unfettered power in the hands of would-be authoritarians is a more clear and present danger to America’s wellbeing, although that’s an opinion. Still, I’m not in a position to act on my worst instincts. Trump is.
Let’s get real. Do NPR and PBS have a liberal bias? It’s a big question and not a simple one, but bottom line for me is that I think they clearly do. More in the past than now, but to the extent they have a “point of view,” it’s a very urban, educated and thus generally liberal point of view.
Does that embedded political bias mean they are unworthy of public support? No, they fulfill an important function for the public in presenting education and information that is not in the hands of Paramount and other media conglomerates. Public broadcasting’s alleged bias, which I just said I do buy into, calls for more effective oversight and more pressure on those organizations to maintain a higher standard of fairness. Not to chop them. We need a vigorous public media now more than ever. Below, PBS News Hour coverage of Colbert story.
Sadly, we won’t get it. And now, even the late-night shows that helped balance those in power with their sharp wit are also in decline. In recent years, the Daily Show on Comedy Central, the Tonight Show, Late Night—commentators there have been an important set of voices to hold the powerful, to some extent, accountable. Yet, with Colbert cancelled, it all seems to be vulnerable, now. Holding those in power accountable isn’t, these days, a main priority for media companies. To be fair, those media companies are skittish and scared because they don’t see their way through the fog, either—but again, that’s an argument in favor of public media, not against it.
In Colbert’s case, the suspicion is that loyalty to “the man” was lacking, and thus Colbert was being undermined by external political forces led by the evil orange Tribble man. I don’t think that the real narrative is so simple, although I do think this is part of the story.
Ad from 2015 for the then-new host of Late Night, Stephen Colbert. Flickr image by Brecht Bug.
Which is one reason why I want more funding for NPR and PBS, not less. We can’t maintain all aspects of the media systems as they are, yet I wish we could, across the political spectrum, recognize that we still need journalists and journalism. A free press isn’t just there for Paramount to make more money—the media have a key role in our political system.
And like many aspects of that ailing democratic system, the media component seems to be breaking down.
Clouds over lake at Macbride Recreation Area on June 25.
The state of Iowa has, for years, been stingy on support for state universities, and that led, this year, to another unwelcome announcement.
According to a July 10 story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the University of Iowa has decided to end its arrangement with the Army Corp of Engineers for its use of the Macbride Nature Recreation Area. The reason is cost—the university determined that almost $15 million in maintenance is needed for the Macbride facility, money that the university cannot afford.
This June marked my first trip to see the Iowa Raptor Project there. My wife and I took some grandchildren to see the injured birds of prey kept there. Besides those majestic dinosaurs, that June 25 visit marked one of the first days I had seen a Monarch butterfly in Iowa this year, as several were flitting about a garden at the center.
The Macbride Nature Recreation Area is not closing right away, and indeed the Raptor Project may be relocated. But the nature area included numerous programs that enhanced education for University of Iowa students and others. The federal government owns the land via the Army Corps of Engineers, and the university maintained its facilities there to provide the programs.
To quote Vanessa Miller’s article in the Gazette: “In exchange for that upkeep, the university for decades has experienced broad benefits via its UI WILD programs, like the Iowa Raptor Project, Iowa Wildlife Camps, Lifetime Leisure Skills classes, and School of the Wild — a 26-year-old program that brings more than 1,200 elementary and middle school students into the ‘wild’ every year.”
June 25, seen at Iowa Raptor Project at Macbride Recreation Area: Owl, Kestrel, Monarch Butterfly, Eagle.
Well, it’s not the only piece of public property our unwise overlords seem to be abandoning. Public funding for public media—at a time when more high-quality media is more needed, not less—is going away. I know we can’t afford everything that anybody could want, but I do wish the drive to save my tax money wasn’t so ruthless. Jack up my taxes a bit, please, and take care of our collective needs.
Of course, that maintenance at the Macbride facility mounted up to tens of millions may reflect neglected past work. That too often is how it goes in public facilities—to save money today, repairs are delayed until they become too expensive to do and then public property is closed or abandoned.
That makes me sad. I’m feeling that some important things are slipping away from us, not always noticed or mourned, while are eyes and ears are distracted by too noise over too many trivialities.
And I would rather keep the Recreation Area (and PBS and NPR, for that matter).
The Middle East is a region where empires go to die, as we should know by now. Map of Iran during World War II from Wikimedia Commons, attribution notes: Uploaded a work by NEA Telephoto from Iowa City Press Citizen Newspaper Archives August 26, 1941 Page 1 with UploadWizard
I’ve not made a survey of all, or even a diverse range, of news media sources on the war between the U.S. and Iran—I am too busy living life, I suppose. But I have tuned into the war, consuming news media content and watching, with a great deal of anxiety, as the world again descends into violence and madness.
It is said that truth is the first casualty of war, and as is the case in almost any war, nothing is simple about this current conflict nor will we fully understand it for some time. Take, for instance, the ABC newscast of June 22, 2025, which I consumed in full on Sunday:
What impresses me, partly, was the weird war tone of the newscast, which included the anchor’s best wishes for returning American Air Force planes. They could have played martial music in the background. I don’t resent that sentiment—I’m glad they (the air personnel) returned safely—but I would recognize that this weekend was the final one for some people in Iran who likely were atomized by American bunker-busting bombs. I’d like some best wishes for them, too.
And, while I trust neither President Trump nor the yahoos he appointed (I don’t swell with pride when I see the U.S. Secretary of State nor the Secretary of Defense, for example), I want to recognize, too, that the roots of this conflict are deep and convoluted, even if it feels that the war was launched by a petulant orange toddler whose finger was placed on the nuclear trigger by a base of my fellow American voters whose motives and reasoning I don’t get.
Well. That sentence flew from my fingers almost too quickly. I think there are some emotions at boil in my mind. Wars do that, inflame passion before rational thought kicks in.
Anyway, I’m not a fan of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, nor of the current Iranian regime, but neither am I liking the path that we are on. Just recently, President Trump was facing massive No King protests that overshadowed his bizarre birthday party tank fest. And suddenly, bam, we’re in a fight—in war, the first reaction usually is to rally around the flag, and American presidents in the past have used wars as a pretext to exceed their usual powers to quash dissent.
Does that play into Trump’s decision to launch U.S. bombers during an air war between Israel and Iran? Hard to say. I don’t know how deeply Trump thinks about anything, and that’s part of my anxiety over this conflict—we don’t have an FDR or even a Richard Nixon or President Bush at the helm. We’re in a time where the captain of our ship of state is old, ignorant, petulant, and spontaneous. There is a horse in the hospital.
Well, American “wars” since World War II have generally been shooting conflicts where Congress was never asked to declare war—although at least some past Presidents (think Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) have at least worked with Congress. And I hope this “war” does not expand, but anything can happen.
One definite change for me is how much I tune into news. My media consumption has shifted because of this little (I hope) war. I usually check the New York Times daily, but now I would say four or five times a day is the new norm. I’m not as regular a checker of other news apps on my phone—I have CNN and Reuters, for instance—but those buttons are being clicked now more often than usual. I read the “Green Gazette,” the electronic version of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, each day and these days pay more attention to the world-national news pages.
I am no expert, but when did that stop any human from commenting online? Here are some of my other takes on this war:
It’s not over. Sure, Iran attacked a U.S. air base today, and President Trump posted that it is time for peace now that Iran got the need to retaliate out of its system—but I am not buying it. The animosities that fueled this conflict are long simmering, and I think the deep thuds of the bunker busting bombs are going to echo for a while. How do most countries react when they are bombed? Did the U.S. say: “It’s OK, Japan, we don’t really need those antique battleships in the era of aircraft carriers, anyway” when Pearl Harbor was attacked? Did the U.K. give up when London burned? In American mythology, it took atomic bombs to convince the Japanese that their war effort was not sustainable, although many historians note that the end of the IJN plus the entry of the Soviet Union into the war may have had more to do with Japan giving up. In any case, conventional bombs that horrifically burned Tokyo (the deadliest air attacks of the war were not the atomic bomb blasts but incendiary bombing of the Japanese capital city) in March of 1945 didn’t motivate Japan to give up.
From Wikimedia Common: Bomb damage in Iran. This is from Israeli bombing on June 13, 2025. Still, given what we, the U.S., has done, we're going to share the blame. Original description: At dawn today, several explosions were heard in different parts of Tehran and other cities of Iran.The Zionist regime officially confirmed the aggression of this regime against targets on Iranian soil. The US Secretary of State claimed that Israel has taken unilateral military action against Iran. This is an image from the Tasnim News Agency website, which states in its footer, "All Content by Tasnim News Agency is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." Per this discussion, all images without explicitly watermarked attribution to agency photographers are presumed to be outside this license.
Bombs may have complicated the Iranian drive for atomic power. It’s difficult to believe that they ended the drive—instead, they probably strengthened the Iranian resolve. They were attacked. They may not react well. Who could blame them?
I struggle to maintain good spirits and hope. People are dying in a war that we did not start and seemed all too eager to join. May it all work out for the best, but these are perilous times.
As a political strategy, I do think the Iran war did what Trump probably wanted it to do, a least for a brief time. Anybody been fussing over tariffs lately? The “no kings” movement seems of the distant past, for now. But the patriotic boost Americans feel when our armed forces join in a conflict can often be short-lived, and there is also the danger of a backlash. Even parts of Trump’s base can’t figure out what this “peace president” is thinking. Probably, the answer is not very much, and that’s part of the problem.
For now, Trump is having a moment. Moments are fleeting in politics, however, and even this moment is more chaotic than triumphant for this would-be authoritarian.
Today seems like uncharted times. Iran is a large country, more than 90 million people. It’s also a weak country, due to all kinds of economic, social and political problems. Frankly, the U.S., the world’s strongest superpower, faces ongoing economic, social and political problems. Media, government, everything seems to be in flux these days.
Of course, as Billy Joel sang, we didn’t start the fire. Everything is always in flux, it’s just that the pace and severity of flux these days is breathtaking.
From Wikimedia Commons, ethnic makeup of Iran. Attribution notes: By Iretn 847362 - Own workA source (reference) has not been provided for the data in this self-made work., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112682697
This war, as every war does, shows how important history is. Iran has a nuclear program in the first place because it was, historically, a U.S. ally, and the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s had an “atoms for peace” program that Iran participated in. When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the Iranian nuclear program was put briefly on hold, but revived in the 1980s as tensions with the U.S. ratcheted up.
We bombed Fordo (or Fordow, transliteration is messy), Natanz and Isfahan to, maybe, celebrate the summer solstice (makes as much sense as anything else I have read), and now we are in one of those historical pivot moments.
What is good about this situation? A bit. Iran’s drive to be a nuclear power may be stalled (although Iran may have the bomb sooner than we think, they did move nuclear materials before the American bombs fell). The bombings didn’t target cities nor cause mass casualties, even if Trump did tell Iran to “evacuate Tehran.” The retaliation against an airbase in Qatar was not a big deal.
What is bad? A whole bunch of stuff. There is plenty of destroyed Iranian real estate from Israeli bombing, and it is easy to see that we are linked with Isreal in this conflict now, especially from an Iranian point of view. Then, there is what war does to people, to truth, to the fabric of our world. Iran and Isreal are well beyond rhetorical conflict and are trading actual blows. Iran has been driven into the chilling embrace of Vladimir Putin and China. Our U.S. president lied to us during his election campaign when he said he would avoid foreign entanglements—but of all of the huge bucket of bad stuff this unfortunate series of events has unleashed, that somehow seems like the least surprising. We know he lied because his lips are moving. Well, honestly, it is usually his hand toes that are moving on his cell phone when he lies, but you know what I mean.
Supposedly, a Chinese curse is “may you live in interesting times.” I’m not tired of all the winning. I’m exhausted from the interesting.
I have not yet read the novel “Wicked,” but I do plan to, having recently seen the musical movie of the same title.
“The Wizard of Oz” was always a bit of a strange tale to me. I read the book when I was young, and it was OK but not one of my favorites. That also sums up my feelings about the 1939 movie, too—it’s OK, it was on TV in my childhood and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t something that I was all that gaga over.
Never mind, the world of “Wicked” is a radical re-imagining of L Frank Baum’s and Hollywood’s imaginings, and Oz isn’t exactly the same. Yes, in the 1939 movie, the wizard was willing to hoodwink the crowd with his tricks—but in Wicked, we see a much darker Wizard of Oz.
And I like it. It’s relevant to today. I feel that we follow too many wizards in our lives now—fakers whose only talent is to play to the crowd, and who feel that you unite folks by giving them someone to hate.
My wife saw the stage musical “Wicked” in London, but I have not experienced the stage show, so the movie was my first introduction to this alternative alternate reality. I am a fan, and I find myself really enjoying the songs, too.
When they do work, musicals can be magical. I think part of what they do is what the songs in the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” did—the singing is a convention that allows the characters to think aloud, to reveal themselves. It also helps like a musical when there is a great ensemble song.
“Wicked” is wickedly good partly due to the quality of its songs. It’s also good because of they way in which both the songs and the plot beyond the songs subverts expectations of what or who is truly wicked.
I liked that Glinda (or Guh-Linda), while good at heart, is also vain and shallow. That the most intelligent and empathetic characters, Elphaba, is the one who will be falsely branded as “wicked.” That much of the social life of Shiz concerns ephemeral fads and shallow criteria of what or who will be popular—sort of like school actually was, although more high school than university.
Wikipedia image of book cover.
Popularity as a goal is a strong cultural force in this era of orange ogre Presidents and social media and success measured by clicks—and “Wicked” is partly a rumination on how far some people may go in order to achieve popularity.
Plus, it has all those scary parallels with the world we inhabit: “What you need to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” Yikes, Mr. Wizard, that’s so sadly true and sad that it seems so true.
I don’t have an opinion of the way Wicked was “Hobbit”-fied—that is, a shorter story was somehow expanded, for “The Hobbit” was a short children’s book somehow morphed into a trilogy of movies. For “Wicked” a Broadway play was somehow doubled in length and made into two movies.
Poster from www.Wickedmovie.com web site.
I do think that the pace of the first movie was a bit slow at times—I liked the climatic song, but it just went on for a bit too long.
Yet, I can only judge the movie, not it in comparison to the stage show. And I give the movie two thumbs way up. I am excited for part two to come out later this year so this wicked saga can continue. I predict that it’s going to popular, even without a makeover from Gah-Linda.
Life in the British Navy in the early 1700s was quite rough—hard work, authoritarian power structure, harsh penalties—and then there are the diseases. Humans packed together in poorly ventilated, unclean conditions lends itself to raging infectious diseases.
And then, months into a slow voyage dependent on the winds blowing your ship, scurvy. An account I read recently vividly describes what scurvy was like, and it was hell.
I’ve long been a fan of Erik Larson and his books based on historic events. He’s a storyteller who uses literary tools to tell truths.
And recently, on the recommendation of my daughter Nina, I’ve read a book by an author who is new to me, who pulls the same magic that Larson does. It’s David Grann, and I just read his 2023 book “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.”
The ship The Wager was a merchant vessel converted to naval use. British sea power would come to rule the world in the next century, but that lay in the future when The Wager left England as part of a squadron that was tasked with attacking Spanish shipping during a war between the U.K. and Spain.
A newly promoted Captain, David Cheap, obtained his first command due to some command shuffles. The ill-fated Wager had trouble staying with its group as the little wooden vessels were pounded by merciless storms as they attempted to pass from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by sailing around South America.
And the Wager found itself alone, when it also, unfortunately, found rocks off of a desolate island. The ship was pounded by the rocks and damaged beyond sailing, although the wreck, in poor shape, was there on the rocks for some time.
The depleted, demoralized crew were facing winter weather with few provisions and no shelter. On their long journey from England, they had lost many crew members to disease, and most were debilitated by scurvy at the time of the shipwreck. (Desperate, the crew ate wild celery, one of the few foods they found on what they named Wager Island—and, ironically, the fresh vegetable cured their scurvy).
While stranded, the crew broke into factions, some loyal to the captain, others forming their own encampment. They were visited by indigenous people who aided them with food, but they plotted against their helpers, who abandoned them.
1744 painting depicts The Wager. From Wikimedia Commons via Wikipedia.
So much goes wrong There is so much suffering. As starvation and tensions rise, a misunderstanding leads to the captain shooting and killing a sailor.
Eventually, the crew manages to enlarge and repair some small boats. An attempt to head north and continue the Wager’s original mission doesn’t go well, and after that much of the crew abandons the captain on Wager Island and attempts to head to Brazil, where they could potentially find transport back to England.
When survivors start to show up in England, more troubles await them. The Navy doesn’t treat mutiny lightly, and the long arm of the law has to be contended with. And, months after some survivors reach England, the captain, very much alive, unexpectedly shows up.
The Navy sets a court-martial trial to ascertain the facts. Should the captain be tried for murder? The crew tried for mutiny?
After all the suffering and the time spent trying to get home, it’s almost heartbreaking that home turns out to be filled with different kinds of dangers.
Anyway, I found the book gripping. The needs and ambitions and desires of men lead them to contradictions and difficulties that make one glad to be born in these troubled times rather than those.
The books didn’t have any jump scares, but it did have, like life, lots of unexpected twists and turns. It’s a story that is well told, well worth the read.
