Dualities

One of the things that I'm finding simultaneously fascinating and frustrating while reading Tell Me How This Ends is the sense that nothing in the book is static or one-dimensional. For someone who likes to think in black and white terms, this can be an unsettling experience. For example, one of the young US Army officers comments at one point that the conflict is a civil war, but it isn't a pure civil war; its a combination of a communal fight (a low-level civil war), a failed state (a legitimate but dysfunctional state), a jihad (involving both internal and external forces), and an armed rebellion (involving both internal and external forces). Thus, one of the tasks that he has (not just him) is to determine how to respond; responses that would be appropriate to one type of conflict would be contraindicated for another, and might actually make it worse. His assessments are sometimes shared by others, and sometimes they're denied by others -- making the creation of a common point of view more difficult. Yet at the same time, the duality of the definition is fascinating. Its like looking through a kaleidoscope; like looking at both a piece of information and a piece of meta-information. You can easily get caught up in the experience of trying to see something in multiple ways at the very same time. Its a mind-stretching experience. And I'm only about six years late to the party.

It also makes me think longingly of data retrieval and display technologies that I don’t think exist, but I won’t go into that.