Eric Lanke

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2026-09-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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I know why McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for this. It is an extremely powerful novel that operates effectively on two interconnected levels.

First, it’s a gripping story. A man and his son, trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. You feel for them. You want them to survive in this world gone mad. You want them to get away and be safe. The horror is real when they find the locked basement full of people who are being kept by cannibals for the stringy meat on their bones, one of them laying on a mattress on the floor with both his legs amputated and his stumps burned black to stop him from bleeding to death. Their flight from there, their concealment in the woods under a pile of leaves, their dark and dangerous trek—your heart is in your throat the whole time. And when they get away, and they find the bomb shelter full of canned goods, and plates, and silverware, and new clothes, and soap. The relief and joy in the father’s voice is palpable and strong and true.

I listened to this one as an audio book, and some random reviewer on the site I purchased it from cautioned against that, cautioned that you have to read and linger over McCarthy’s prose to really appreciate it. Having listened to it, I can see that reviewer’s point, and fully intend to get the hard copy and add it to the pile of books to read. But hearing the voices speak to you, especially in a scene like the bomb shelter, is an experience I will not soon forget.

But that’s only one level of the book. The other level is deeper and more primal, and is just as powerful on its level as the suspense story is on its. This is a book about every man and his son, the characters deliberately not given names to accentuate the archetypal role they are playing. And as this man struggles to protect his son from the horrors of their world, we see every man struggling the same way to protect his son from the horrors of his world. There are times when the man gets angry at the son, and he is immediately sorry for being so, and gives his son every indulgence they can afford, from the syrup in the can of cling peaches they find to the grape Kool-Aid he finds and keeps until he gathers enough rain water to mix with it. He tells the boy things about their situation in ways they boy would understand, that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that they are part of the good guys and that they must “carry the fire” of the old world until they join up with other good guys so that the fire can be strengthened. He risks his own life to keep his son alive, to keep his son from harm, and does things the boy is frightened by or does not want him to do, because he knows that the act is in the child’s best interest. And at the end of the novel, when the man lays dying, he remains strong for his boy and tries to help him understand both what is happening and what he must do after the man has died.

“You need to go on. I can’t go with you. You need to keep going. You don’t know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see. Just go. It’s all right.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s all right. This has been a long time coming. Now, it’s here. Keep going south. Do everything the way we did.”

“You’re going to be okay, Papa. You have to.”

“No. I’m not. Keep the gun with you at all times. You need to find the good guys but you can’t take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?”

“I want to be with you.”

“You can’t.”

“Please—”

“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.”

“I don’t know how to.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Is it real? The fire?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”

“Yes, you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”

“Just take me with you. Please!”

“I can’t.”

“Please, Papa.”

“I can’t. I can’t hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

“You said you wouldn’t ever leave me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were. If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.”

“Will I hear you?”

“Yes, you will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just don’t give up. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m really scared, Papa.”

“I know. But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky. I know you are. I’ve got to stop talking. I’m going to start coughing again.”

“It’s okay, Papa. You don’t have to talk. It’s okay.”

In all of these actions we see not only the truth of what we would all do for our sons if we were in the same awful circumstances, but also the truth of what we do for our sons every day in our lives here and now. That is ultimately what makes the novel so powerful.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

2026-08-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day I set out on the journey to rescue Ignatius Roundtower with the dwarf Nog Shortwhiskers and a man I had known for six years as Roy Stonerow was a turning point in my life. That day I forever left the quiet life as the stepson of a tavernkeeper behind and set out on an adventure that would consume the rest of my days. My life had changed, perhaps subtly at first and without much notice, but changed just as sure as Roy Stonerow had become Roystnof. What I remember most about that journey to Queensburg is the conversation I had with Nog about his gods and religion. For the first time I was introduced to a different philosophy of gods and their creations, and it was a philosophy I found all the other races held. Only humans denied the existence of the gods of the other races and I had been taught this was the only true vision of the universe. Nog disagreed, but he did not seem upset that the humans called his gods pagan. Dwarves have their own truth and humans have theirs, he told me, and neither could prove the other false.

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The day came three weeks after Brisbane had been taken captive on the banks of the Mystic River, when the first of June rolled around with the eternal persistence of the calendar. Brisbane had been a studious pupil of orkish religion and magic and, as such, he knew the part he would have to play in the ceremony, but he had hardly thought of his involvement in anything more than the most superficial terms. He knew what he was expected to do but he hadn’t dwelt upon the implications of such action.

The ceremony was, essentially, a simple one. There was a special chamber in the caves, reserved for this purpose only, where the sacrifice would take place. It was large, as all the important chambers seemed to be, but it had relatively few furnishings. It was roughly oval-shaped with two features at each of the oval’s foci. At one, a short, stout pedestal stood, like the one in the pug-trolang, again with a golden incense burner atop it. At the other, two slender columns of stone rose from the floor, placed several feet apart and each with manacled chains driven into their stone. The victim was to be hung there by these chains locking over their wrists and, after the Grumak had conjured up the clan’s Demosk—the clan’s representative of Gruumsh One-Eye—the victim would be sacrificed for their blood.

Brisbane knew all these things. Ternosh had taught them all to him over their weeks together and when the first of June arrived, Ternosh expected his pupil to be ready and able to do his part. Brisbane wasn’t so sure. Still unwilling to make a fuss in front of the Grumak, afraid he would betray some trust and reveal Gruumsh One-Eye had not really sent him here, Brisbane outwardly learned his lessons and memorized his part, but inwardly his guts rolled at the thought of what he had to do and his head spun in a dizzy delusion. Alone and frightened, he again turned to Angelika for reassurance.

Angelika? he called out mentally one night. I don’t think I can go through with it.

—Brisbane, you must. If you quit now you will destroy yourself and everything we have worked for so far.—

But Angelika, isn’t it evil?

—If your heart is not in it, it is not evil. It is undesirable, but it is something you must do if we are to extract our full vengeance.—

But the prisoners. They are defenseless. They are human.

—We have been over this before. Grecolus has provided for them. He has secured their places in the heavens and he has sent you and me here to avenge their deaths. Be patient and be strong, young Brisbane. The Clan of the Red Eye will not defile the earth for much longer.—

Will we make them pay?

—Yes, Brisbane. Oh, yes. We will make them pay for all eternity.—

When, Angelika? When will we make them pay? When will I have you back?

—Soon, young Brisbane. Be patient and be strong. The day of vengeance will come. I promise you that.—

This, then, is how Brisbane met the first day of June, jittery and unsure of what he might have to do, but trusting enough to believe things would turn out all right in the end. The ceremony was to take place first thing in the morning and when Smurch roused him an hour before dawn, Brisbane quietly got dressed in his red and white robes and the small red hat Ternosh had told him to wear, and made his way to the instruction chamber to meet the Grumak.

Ternosh was there, awaiting his arrival and dressed in red robes and a cap similar to the one Brisbane wore. Wordlessly, he led Brisbane from the room and down a series of tunnels to the sacrificial chamber. Along the way, Brisbane tried to mentally prepare himself for the ordeal ahead, tried to put a wall around his feelings and sensitivities to protect them from the onslaught of horror they were surely about to receive.

When they arrived at the chamber, its torches brightly burning around the oval perimeter, Brisbane could see all the members of the klatru assembled in a rough and disjointed circle around the two objects in the center of the room. They stood at attention, as if in a military formation, and their unblinking eyes twinkled cruelly behind their pig noses. Hanging limp in the chains between the two stone columns was the nude and freshly washed body of the prisoner named Amanda. She was conscious and gagged, but her head hung forward in helpless surrender, her brown hair falling down to cover her face.

When Brisbane saw her hanging there, he almost lost all his nerve and broke down screaming on the spot. It was too much, too much, too much. Did it have to be her? There were three prisoners. Why did it have to be her? He kept walking, following Ternosh into the room, but his knees became weaker and weaker with every step. Just when he thought his next step would collapse under his weight, Angelika’s voice cut into his mind and hardened the jelly his muscles had become.

—Strength, Brisbane. You can survive this. You must.—

Angelika! Brisbane almost cried aloud. You will help me through this?

—I will. This must be done.—

Her presence filled Brisbane with a strange kind of resolve. Suddenly, he was determined to see this thing through to the end. Angelika was right, of course. How could he not have seen it before? He had to do this. If he balked, he would prove himself false to the orks and they would kill him for the symbol he wore. He did not want Amanda to die, but if she did not, he would never wield Angelika in combat again.

Brisbane took his position on the side of the pedestal as he had been taught to do. Ternosh stood on the other side, the golden incense burner sitting between them. The Grumak began to speak in orkish. Brisbane’s knowledge of the language had grown in three weeks, but it was still far from perfect. However, Ternosh had taught him what the ceremony words meant and he found he was able to understand them.

“With the blessing of Gruumsh One-Eye,” the Grumak said, “the klatru of the Clan of the Red Eye has once again gathered to pay rightful tribute to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye,” Brisbane chanted with the other orks in their native tongue.

“The sacrifice we offer today is the lifeblood of his enemy. May this not be the last.”

Again, the chant rang out. “Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

They’re serious about this, aren’t they, Angelika?

—Yes. Their evil knows no bounds. The worship of false gods is forbidden.—

Ternosh lifted the lid from the incense burner beside him and lit the fine red powder with a magic spark from one of his fingers. He replaced the cover as the thick white smoke began to smolder off the incense.

“I will now call up the Demosk that watches over the Clan of the Red Eye, the one called Ollikan, so he may witness our sacrifices to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

The Grumak began his strange incantation to summon the Demosk from the battlefield of forever. Brisbane listened to the words and sounds Ternosh said, trying to make some sort of sense out of them. Over the past three weeks, he had been a student of Ternosh’s magic, learning its forms and its sources, but as yet, he had been unable to truly comprehend it.

It was strange. Ternosh’s magic did so many things in the clan—it kept the torches lit and unsmoking, for example, and it kept the water in the bath chamber warm and pure—so it obviously worked quite well for the Grumak. It was even responsible for the secret doors Vrak had taken Brisbane through in the Crimson Mountains. Ternosh had created them with his magic and set them to open whenever anyone said the word ursh-low, an orkish command to open, in their vicinity. But Brisbane had been unable to make the magic perform for him. It was a different style of magic, but the problem was somehow more than that. Brisbane was nowhere near proficient enough to work a complicated spell like the one used to conjure up the Demosk, but Ternosh felt he should be able to do the simple ones, like the one for starting fires, but so far there had been no success. Ternosh would watch Brisbane carefully, making sure he made the exact hand motions and pronounced the chants properly with the right pitches and inflections, and still nothing would result. It was very frustrating, for both Brisbane and Ternosh. It eventually reached the point where the Grumak became suspicious of whether or not Brisbane could really work magic at all, regardless of what the Demosk had said about his blood, and Brisbane had to resort to one of the cantrips Roystnof had taught him, conjuring up a small dragonfly, to prove he had the right to wear the pentacle medallion.

Now, looking at the pentacle carved into the stone on which the incense burner sat, Brisbane could not help but wonder what he had been doing wrong, why Ternosh could cast the orkish spells but he could not. Maybe it was physiological. The force of magic inside humans could be different from the one inside orks, and each could require different practices to call it forth. Perhaps the orkish chants he had painstakingly learned could not harness the human force inside him. That would mean Ternosh would not be able to cast the spells Brisbane had already learned. It warranted looking into.

The incense smoke was beginning to fill the chamber and it was getting hard for Brisbane to think clearly. He could hear the circle of klatru orks chanting in long, low tones, and he quickly remembered he was supposed to be doing the same. He joined the chorus at a pause for breath and continued to breathe in the smoke coming from the vents in the burner. Standing right next to it like he was, the effect on him was worse than it had been before, and he had to place a steadying hand on the pedestal to keep himself from swooning.

Through orange-scented smoke and watering eyes, Brisbane chanted and watched the body hanging in the chains before him. Amanda had raised her head and was looking around at her strange surroundings with eyes wide in fear and amazement. The strong scent of the smoke stung tartly at the inside of Brisbane’s nostrils as his eyes stared fixedly at the woman’s breasts while the rest of the world seemed to swim around them.

Beautiful, Brisbane thought absently, almost as if someone else thought it for him. They’re beautiful.

His eyes worked their way down her body, over her flat stomach to the patch of her brown pubic hair and down the slender muscles of her legs.

She’s lovely, Brisbane thought, the ideas forming themselves into words with difficulty. Her skin is so healthy and alive. How many other women are walking around with bodies like this hidden under their clothes? It’s wrong. How can they stand to hide such beauty away?

A light winked on next to Brisbane and interrupted his drug-affected thoughts. He started his head turning to see what the light could be and, seemingly hours later, after the muscles and tendons in his neck had creaked and strained under the labor of pivoting his head, he could see the Demosk had arrived and the light came from the eyeless apparition’s head and torso.

Angelika, I’m going to pass out. There’s too much smoke.

—Remain strong, Brisbane. It will soon be over.—

Brisbane felt like his feet had begun to float off the floor. Suddenly, pushing Angelika aside for the moment, the voice of the Demosk hammered its way into his brain.

“Grumak Ternosh, you have summoned me from the battlefield of Gruumsh One-Eye for what purpose?”

Again, the words in Brisbane’s ears were orkish but the ones in his head were in his own language.

“The time has come,” Ternosh said to the room more than to the Demosk, “for our monthly sacrifice to our master.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.” This time Brisbane forgot to add his voice to the chant.

“His eye is open,” the Demosk said. “Proceed.”

—Now, Brisbane.—

With a start, Brisbane moved forward as he was expected to do. His head cleared a little as he moved away from the pedestal, but it was still as if he was walking in a dream. He walked slowly around and behind the body of Amanda and did the only action Ternosh required him to do in the ceremony. He reached up and, grabbing a handful of her brown hair, pulled Amanda’s head back, exposing her neck to the Grumak who now stood directly in front of her.

It’s not that hard, Angelika. It is really such a small and easy thing to do.

—It must be done, young Brisbane. Her death will be like an iron shield. It will protect us until we can strike back. Vengeance shall be ours.—

Yes. Yes. Vengeance. We will make them pay for this.

Ternosh produced a pair of sharp daggers from the belts of his robe. He turned to face the Demosk as the congregated orks stopped their chanting and the Grumak held the knives high above his head.

“Behold!” the Grumak said, his voice rising above the smoke in the chamber. “The blood of the enemy will now be spilled upon our cavern floor.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

Ternosh whirled on Amanda and in two quick swipes, cut the daggers deep into each side of her neck, opening up dozens of major arteries and making the woman screech into her gag.

Brisbane released her hair and backed two or three steps away from her. In the smoky light he watched as twin rivers of her blood, almost black against the paleness of her skin, began to run down her naked body. The ichor spilled onto her shoulders, forked in half, and streaked down her front and back in streams that turned and split at every curve and swelling of flesh until it dripped from the tips of her toes like a leaky beer tap. The sight sickened and excited Brisbane at the same time and, as he watched the blood slide down her back and over the curves of her buttocks, he suddenly wondered, with a series of heart palpitations, what she must look like from the front, with her blood pouring down and around her breasts.

Angelika, what’s going on? Why do I feel so strange?

—It is the smoke. The evil vapor is affecting you. The feeling will pass.—

The circle of orks stood silently as all eyes watched the woman twist and jerk in her bonds, writhing in pain and desperation. Her blood was pooling up beneath her in a small concavity in the rock that was evidently meant for that purpose. Brisbane was surprised to see just how much blood was collecting there, but was even more surprised to see that he could see Amanda’s reflection in the surface of the pool, an unusual and intensely erotic view from below, with foreshortened legs, the cleft at her crotch, and the undersides of her breasts. These surprises did little to shock him out of his stupor. Time stretched out, and it seemed at one point as if he had been watching Amanda die for his entire life. Brisbane’s head began to throb and hurt and his nose seemed cracked open and dried to a crispy mess with the pungent treatment it had received. Tears ran freely down his face from his red eyes and his brain was swimming in a pool of nausea.

Eventually, it was finished. Amanda slowly stopped thrashing about as she bled to death, until she just hung from her chains like a side of beef in an ice house. When the life had finally flown from her, the silence in the chamber was broken by the voice of the Demosk.

“It is done. Gruumsh One-Eye thanks the Clan of the Red Eye for their offering and pledges another month of wealth and well-being.”

“Glory and fame to Gruumsh One-Eye.”

With that final chant, the figure of the Demosk vanished from the chamber and the smoke that made up its body stopped pouring out of the vents and began to quickly dissipate from the chamber. The black-clad orks, Tornestor in the lead with his two faithful followers in the red stripes, began to file out of the room.

Brisbane started to come back to himself. More so than ever before, the vanishing of the incense smoke left him feeling decidedly ill and weak in the knees. With the sickness came the rational judgment of what he had just done, what he had just taken part in. He looked up at Amanda’s body and all the tremors of excitement he had felt for her beauty were gone. What he saw now was ugly, uglier than anything he had ever seen before. What he saw was death, yes, but it was a death for no good reason. A messy, torturous death in service to a god that did not exist.

Never again, Angelika. I will not let this happen again.

—I promise you, young Brisbane, it will not. Together we will put an end to such perversion. Our vengeance will be complete and eternal.—

“Brisbane?”

Brisbane saw Ternosh appear from behind one of the pillars that supported Amanda’s naked body. For a moment, he was filled with such hate at the Grumak and his entire miserable race that he almost leapt at the ork in savage fury, intent on ripping his heart out of his chest. But the moment passed, and it was quickly replaced by feelings of nausea and a pounding headache. The fight left Brisbane as quickly as it had come and now he only wanted to lay down.

“Brisbane, are you all right?”

Brisbane staggered forward and leaned heavily against one of the stone columns. He nearly stepped in the pool of Amanda’s blood, already crusting over with a thin film.

“Yes,” Brisbane said wearily. “It’s just all that smoke. It makes me woozy.”

Ternosh seemed upset by this news. “You have said this before. I do not know why it should affect you so. None of us grugan experience any distress.”

Brisbane did not care about any of this. “If you don’t mind, Ternosh, I think I’ll go lay down in my chamber for a while.”

“Of course,” the Grumak said. “Would you like me to help you?”

Brisbane waved him off and slowly began to move away from the pillar. Before he had gone three steps, his head spinning like a top, he lost his balance and collapsed to his knees.

“Brisbane!” Ternosh cried out in shock and he went over to him to prevent him from toppling over. “I had no idea the smoke would affect you so. You weren’t this weak in the pug-trolang.”

Brisbane closed his eyes and tried to will the floor to remain level. “Too much,” he mumbled. “I was too close to that damn burner.”

“Come on,” Ternosh said. “Let’s get you to your chamber.”

As the Grumak was helping his Grum rise to his feet, Brisbane lost consciousness.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

2026-08-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

I don’t really know what this book is about.

And McCarthy doesn’t make understanding it easy.

First, there’s his aversion to using quotation marks.

Dont pay no attention to him, John Grady. She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake. I’m goin to say that blond on the end is more your style.

Billy shook his head and reached for his whiskey. They aint no reasonin with the man. He just aint got no taste in women and that’s a mathematical fact.

You stick with your old dad, said Troy. He’ll get you onto somethin with some substance to it. Parham yonder actually claimed that a man ought not to date anything he couldnt lift. Said what if the house caught fire.

There are no quotation marks anywhere in this book (and many of his other books). As a result, it is sometimes impossible to tell who is speaking, or if certain words are part of a character’s speech or part of the narrative voice.

And what about apostrophes? They mostly don’t appear as well, but every once and a while they will surprise you. They certainly aren’t at the end of dialectical truncations, like goin instead of going and reasonin instead of reasoning. And they mostly don’t appear in contractions, like dont instead of don’t and aint instead of ain’t. But what about the I’m in the selection chosen above? Why I’m instead of Im?

They drove on to Van Horn and stopped for gas and coffee and by then the country that Troy’d grown up in and that he thought he might go back to and where his dead brother was buried was all behind them and it was two oclock in the morning.

Seriously. oclock instead of o’clock but Troy’d instead of Troyd?Are Im and Troyd too hard for us to understand? And why bother at all? Why am I even focused on this? Is that what McCarthy wants from his reader?

I’d much rather focus on things like this -- and sorry, McCarthy, but I’m goin to put in the correct punctuation.

“I think you can train a rooster to do what you want. But you won’t have him. There’s a way to train a horse where when you get done you’ve got the horse. On his own ground. A good horse will figure things out on his own. You can see what’s in his heart. He won’t do one thing while you’re watchin’ him and another when you ain’t. He’s all of a piece. When you’ve got a horse to that place you can’t hardly get him to do somethin’ he knows is wrong. He’ll fight you over it. And if you mistreat him it just about kills him. A good horse has justice in his heart. I’ve seen it.”

Like All the Pretty Horses, the novel that started this Border Trilogy, horses in Cities of the Plain are very much something to pay attention to.

“You got a lot higher opinion of horses than I got,” Oren said.

“I really don’t have all that much in the way of opinions where horses are concerned. When I was a kid I thought I knew all there was to know about a horse. Where horses are concerned I’ve just got dumber and dumber.”

Oren smiled.

“If a man really understood horses,” John Grady said. “If a man really understood horses he could just about train one by lookin’ at it. There wouldn’t be nothin’ to it. My way is a long way from workin’ one over with a tracechain, But it’s a long way from what’s possible, too.”

John Grady is talking about more than horses in this section -- he’s talking about men, too, and that mystical place where men and horses are one, one spirit that abides with the same unknowable source.

He stretched his legs out. He crossed the sprained foot over his boot.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “They’re mostly ruint before they ever bring ‘em out here. They’re ruined at the first saddle. Before that, even. The best horses are the ones been around kids. Or maybe even just a wild horse in off the range that’s never even seen a man. He’s got nothin’ to unlearn.”

“You might have a hard time gettin’ anyone to agree with you on that last one.”

“I know it.”

“You ever break a wild horse?”

“Yeah. You hardly ever train one though.”

“Why not?”

“People don’t want ‘em trained. They just want ‘em broke. You got to train the owner.”

Oren leaned and stubbed out his cigarette. “I hear you,” he said.

John Grady sat studying the smoke rising into the lampshade over the table. “That probably ain’t true what I said about the one that ain’t never seen a man. They need to see people. They need to just see ‘em around. Maybe what they need is to just think people are trees until the trainer comes along.”

There’s a lot of this in the novel -- talk about horses, their wild nature and ways to tame them that can be read in multiple ways. It’s one of the things that makes McCarthy’s writing so compelling in this trilogy. But horses serve more purposes than that.

Here the parallel is between how one treats horses and how one treats men -- how men make their way in the world:

“Oren tells me that squirrel-headed horse you think so much of is eatin’ out of your hand.”

“That might be a bit of an exaggeration.”

“What do you tell ‘em?”

“Who?”

“Horses.”

“I don’t know. The truth.”

“I guess it’s a trade secret.”

“No.”

“How can you lie to a horse?”

He turned and looked at John Grady. “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Do you mean how do you go about it or how can you bring yourself to do it?”

“Go about it.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s just what’s in your heart.”

“You think a horse knows what’s in your heart?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

Billy didn’t answer. After a while he said: “Yeah. I do.”

“I ain’t a very good liar.”

“You just ain’t had enough practice at it.”

And here we have horses as a repository of some secret knowledge, of something that is true but which men can’t always see:

“I used to love to ride of a night.”

“I did, too.”

“You’ll see things on the desert at night that you can’t understand. Your horse will see things. He’ll see things that will spook him, of course, but then he’ll see things that don’t spook him, but still you know he seen somethin’.”

“What sort of things?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean like ghosts or somethin’?”

“No. I don’t know what. You just knows he sees ‘em. They’re out there.”

“Not just some class of varmint?”

“No.”

“Not somethin’ that will booger him?”

“No. It’s more like somethin’ he knows about.”

“But you don’t.”

“But you don’t. Yes.”

The old man smoked. He watched the moon. No further birds flew. After a while he said: “I ain’t talkin’ about spooks. It’s more like just the way things are. If only you knew it.”

So there is a lot about horses in this novel, in this whole trilogy, but at its core, I don’t think it is a story about horses. I think it is a story about men. Men and the lives that they lead and how difficult they can be.

Far out on the plain below the lights of the cities lay shimmering in their grids with the dark serpentine of the river dividing them.

“I thought you had other business to attend to,” Billy said.

“I do.”

“You think it can wait.”

“I hope it can wait. I ain’t sure this can.”

“Well, I’m glad you ain’t forgot all of your raising.”

“I ain’t forgot anything.”

“You’re tired of me gettin’ on your ass though.”

“You’re entitled.”

They sipped their coffee. The wind blew. They pulled their blankets about their shoulders.

“I ain’t jealous you know.”

“I never said you were.”

“I know. You might of thought it. Truth is, I wouldn’t pull your boots on at gunpoint.”

“I know.”

Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back. He smoked. “It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, don’t it.”

“Yes, it does.”

“There’s a lot of things look better at a distance.”

“Yeah?”

“I think so.”

“I guess there are. That life you’ve lived, for one.”

“Yeah. Maybe what of it you ain’t lived yet, too.”

The mention of the lights of the cities out on the plain was the tip off for me. He comes something important, and it was this, this idea that life, a man’s life, your life, always looks better from a distance. Down on the plain and up against it, it can be downright brutish and short, but up there on the bluff, looking at it from a great distance, it has a sublime beauty that can always be appreciated.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

2026-08-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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I’m the only person on the planet who hasn’t seen the movie.

I enjoyed the book.

The title refers to a memory from Clarice Starling’s childhood, when she lived on an orphanage/ranch in Montana and awoke one morning to the screams of the lambs being slaughtered.

It seems as if Clarice has been hearing their screams in her mind for most of her troubled life since then, and longs for a time when she will hear the silence of the lambs.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

2026-08-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

It was a slow night at The Quarter Pony when Nog Shortwhiskers walked into my life. I remember seeing him for the first time, before I knew who he was and what kind of friends we would become. He was dressed like no other dwarf I had ever seen, and his beard was trimmed short like no other dwarf I had ever heard of. I could tell he was something special, but when he came up to me and asked in his clandestine way if I had ever heard of a man called Roy Stonerow, my curiosity jumped up and tried to look over the head of caution, who was standing, as usual, in front of him. From that moment on, Nog never stopped surprising me. Whether it was news that he had known my grandfather or that he had purchased a leather jerkin for me to wear on our first expedition south, everything he did or told me was done out of the part of his heart he most often denied having. I’ll never forget him and, wherever he may be right now, I hope he has plenty of ale.

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Time passed. Days turned into weeks and Brisbane found himself getting tangled deeper and deeper into the society of the Clan of the Red Eye. The very next day after his horrible dream, Ternosh began meeting with him to teach and instruct him in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye and in the practice of orkish magic. It could be said Brisbane learned more about the orkish religion than he wanted to. Over the course of time, nearly all of his questions were answered, some of them more graphically than he might have wished.

Early on, he learned all about the orkish vision of the afterlife. It seemed when an ork died, one of two things would happen to him. The newly deceased would stand before Gruumsh One-Eye himself and the god would look over the ork’s life, intent on deciding if he had spent it in proper devotion to his god and his mission. If the ork had been faithful and had waged enough war against Gruumsh’s enemies, He-Who-Watches would induct the ork into his heavenly army and for all time he would do battle against deceased members of the other races. If the ork was found to be lacking in his duties, Gruumsh would crush him under the heel of his mighty foot, thus ending the ork’s existence permanently.

Brisbane found this unusual mythology to be nearly horrific in its implications. The greatest prize an ork could receive was recruitment into the eternal army of their god, where the battle and war that made up their earthly lives would go on for all time, every casualty springing back to fight another day. This was what the orks looked forward to, what they lived their lives in anticipation for. Ternosh did not have to tell him Gruumsh’s army won every battle it fought. That would be axiomatic. It would hardly be heaven for the orks if their enemies continued to kill them in death. In Brisbane’s mind, it was the ultimate expression of red-faced vengeance. Orks lived their lives on Gruumsh’s vengeance, so was it any surprise they lived their deaths on it, too? You lousy humans, you may defeat us when you’re alive, but just wait until you die. Then we’ll really get you.

Brisbane, however, could not afford to take such a light view of it while he was among the orks. To them, this was serious business. It was their god and their religion, and Brisbane knew those were two things you did not pick on if you liked where your nose was placed. He found himself forced to go along with the belief, always on his toes to prevent himself from accidentally ridiculing it or letting his true feelings show. Brisbane believed in Gruumsh One-Eye no more than he believed in Grecolus, but he had to remember Ternosh and the others believed in Gruumsh, and that they believed their god had sent Brisbane among them for some hidden purpose. As long as he stayed here, he was going to have to play that part.

Just how long would he be here? This thought did not occur to him much over the busy weeks, but every once and a while, when he was left alone, it would come to his mind and he would turn it over a few times. The best answer he could come up with was that he was not sure. Originally, the plan had been just long enough to get Angelika and get out, but some things had changed since then.

Regardless of what he had said, Brisbane was surer than ever Ternosh was not going to let him leave. In the beginning, when Ternosh first brought Brisbane out of his cage to take his place in the clan, the Grumak had given him the chance to flee if he wanted to. Then, he had stayed, intent on retrieving Angelika before he left, but even if he had taken the opportunity and left, Ternosh still would not have let him go. If Brisbane had tried to leave, it would have proven to Ternosh that the Demosk had been wrong, and Ternosh would have killed him for wearing the sign of a Grumak. So Brisbane’s only chance then had been to stay, whether he had any reason to or not.

And so Brisbane found himself among the upper class of the clan, treading lightly and biding his time until he could find Angelika. Then, surprisingly, he had found her in the chamber of the pug-trolang right before his combat with Wister. He could have taken her that night and tried to slip out of the camp with her, but knowing what he learned in the following weeks, he was glad he hadn’t tried it.

Tornestor had said Angelika had been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye and, as it turned out, that was not something to be taken lightly in orkish culture. If Brisbane had taken her, and anyone had seen him with her, the whole of the clan would have risen up against him. It was a very serious matter. No one in the klatru had been able to draw Angelika from her scabbard, not even the great Tornestor, and it was concluded the blade had to be enchanted. In the orkish definition of the word, enchanted meant Angelika belonged to Gruumsh and no one else was allowed to touch her. Brisbane wasn’t sure if anyone remembered that Vrak had taken Angelika from him (i.e., she was his), but he wasn’t too keen on reminding them under the circumstances.

So Brisbane did not know when he would be able to leave the clan, if ever. He didn’t want to leave until he got Angelika back, which the orks wouldn’t let him do, and the orks wouldn’t let him go until he did this mysterious job the Demosk had spoken of, and Brisbane didn’t know what that was. The situation did not exactly glisten with hope.

Brisbane could only continue to bide his time, gathering information and waiting for something to happen that would help him out of this mess. He found out what the Demosk really was or, more precisely, what Ternosh believed the Demosk to be. The answer was really not that surprising, given what Brisbane had seen and what he had learned about the orkish afterlife. The Demosk was nothing more than a high-ranking officer in the army of Gruumsh One-Eye that Ternosh could call up from the great beyond for advice and orders. The apparition had no eyes because it had no power to “see” the material world, but it could sense it in a way that went beyond sight. It was very important for the Demosk to witness all masokoms in the pug-trolang for Gruumsh was very interested in the power structures in all his clans. Supposedly, after Brisbane had defeated Wister, the Demosk had gone back to report the change to his god. Ternosh told him he had certainly gained some respect in the eye of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Brisbane thought it was a lot of hogwash, but again he did not let his true feelings show. He was sure the Demosk was just a result of Ternosh’s magic coupled with the hallucinogenic effects of that strange incense smoke. The drug in the smoke made people hallucinate and Ternosh’s magic shaped what they saw. When he asked about the incense, Ternosh told Brisbane it had magical properties and was needed to complete the spell that brought the Demosk’s image into their world. It shaped itself out of the smoke. Without it, the Demosk would not be able to take form. Brisbane mentioned off the cuff that the smoke kind of made him dizzy, but Ternosh acted like he didn’t know what the human was talking about.

As the weeks rolled on, Brisbane did not seem to get anywhere as far as acceptance into the clan. Ternosh treated him with civility, and Smurch fawned over him—although Brisbane had gotten the half-ork to call him Gil in closed quarters—but nearly everyone else in the clan avoided him like a leper. His defeat of Wister in the pug-trolang may have made them think twice about razzing him, but none of them were leaping over each other to become his friend. It was not that Brisbane really wanted or expected their friendship, it just seemed like they went out of their way to avoid him. The whole time he spent among them, he did not have a single conversation with anyone beside Ternosh or Smurch that lasted more than thirty seconds.

Smurch did his best to get Brisbane mainstreamed, but although he could teach his master all about orkish society, the half-ork couldn’t push him all the way into it. Regardless of what the Demosk had said about him, Brisbane remained an outcast for the whole time he spent among the orks of the Red Eye.

One day, in the middle of one of his many lessons on orkish religion and magic, Ternosh shifted gears and began to talk about Brisbane’s place in the clan.

“Brisbane,” the Grumak said painfully. “As a member of the klatru, you have a right you have not yet taken advantage of.”

Brisbane thought about the way he was now allowed to bathe regularly. “Oh? Which one is that?”

Ternosh did not answer right away. “The right of mating.”

Brisbane pretended he didn’t hear the Grumak. “The right of what?”

“The right of mating,” Ternosh repeated. “Any time you wish, you may go into the settlement and select a female to take back to your chamber. There, you can, well…mate with her.”

Brisbane’s head filled with visions of the ork females, with their small pig-features, their hairy bodies, and their large breasts. The thought of mating with one of them did not exactly excite him, but he could not help wondering what it would be like. The way these orks treated their females was barbaric. None of them had names, none of them were allowed to participate in the wondrous afterlife the orks believed in—they were not warriors, after all—and now it seemed that any upper class male could demand sex from them anytime he wanted. Brisbane thought about what it would be like if his culture had the same practices. Choosing any woman you met and ordering her to mate with you. It was certainly an uncivilized practice, but it did have a definite, if impossible, thrill tied to it.

“Unless she is wearing a red arm band, of course.”

Brisbane had not been listening to the Grumak. “What?”

“You cannot choose a female who is wearing a red arm band. As long as she wears it she belongs to the clan chief. Tornestor has a couple of favorites.”

“No offense, Ternosh,” Brisbane said. “But the female of your race is not exactly my type.”

The Grumak nodded. “Understandable. Personally, I find human females unattractive, although there are a few grugan who would disagree with me. I believe your servant is of mixed descent.”

Brisbane was suddenly sorry he had shut off that avenue because he just realized it would have given him an excuse to learn a way from his chamber, through the maze of tunnels, and to the surface. But what a price he would have to pay for such knowledge. A sudden inspiration swept him and he had to fight to keep his voice calm.

“What about the prisoners?” Brisbane asked, trying to add a sly twist to his voice.

Ternosh sobered. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Brisbane said. “There are some females among them, aren’t there? Human females?”

“Ah, I see what you’re driving at,” the Grumak said. “I don’t know. That may not be the best idea.”

“Why not?”

Ternosh pondered for a moment. “Well, I guess it would be all right, so long as you didn’t get attached to any of them. Or didn’t expect children from them.”

Brisbane did not know what the Grumak was talking about, but Ternosh soon explained it to him. The sole reason the orks would occasionally capture a human and keep them locked up in a cage was that in the worship of Gruumsh One-Eye, a monthly sacrifice of blood was required. Ternosh calmly explained the kind of blood that pleased He-Who-Watches the most was the blood of his enemies.

The information sickened Brisbane but he kept his cool about it, still clinging to the hope that through this he would be able to obtain a reason to learn a way to the surface. The imprisonment and slaughter of his fellow man was a terrible thing, but Brisbane had to watch out for his own hide first.

And so, that night, when Ternosh had finished with his lessons, Brisbane asked Smurch to lead him to the surface, so he could choose a female prisoner for his right of mating. He, as usual, got no argument from the half-ork, and soon he was being led away from his chamber, carefully memorizing every twist and turn his servant took.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that complicated. The path was fairly direct, once you realized the caves seemed to have been dug out in large sections, maze-like within, but connected to each other with single, straight corridors. Upon entering one section, all you had to do was find the exit, usually located somewhere roughly opposite the entrance, and then move onto the next section. He saw a few orks along the way, some klatru, but most of them servants, and none of them stopped Brisbane to ask where he was going. He should have realized this. They all avoided him anyway. He probably could have done this earlier without any reason and no one would have questioned him. It seemed his outcast standing had pluses as well as minuses.

Soon, he and Smurch emerged from the cave and stepped out into the sunlight. It was a warm day and off in the distance Brisbane could see the ork women and children going about their business apart from the males. Before him stood the circus wagons with their prisoners and the usual gaggle of black-armored orks. Brisbane recognized Vrak among them and was surprised to see the ork come over to speak to him.

“He wants to know if there is anything he can do for you, Grum Brisbane,” Smurch said, translating the ork’s orkish.

Anytime one of the klatru had needed to speak to him, they had used the common tongue of his kind. Brisbane was appreciative of this, but he wanted to learn orkish anyway. Smurch had been giving him lessons in his private chamber, but so far it had been slow going. Brisbane had caught maybe a third of the words Vrak had used.

“Tell him no,” Brisbane said as regally as possible. “I wish to be left alone.”

Smurch did so and Vrak quietly went back to his lower class companions. Brisbane did his best to ignore them and went over to stand before the circus wagons.

For the first since he had been captured, he got a good look at the other humans the orks had taken prisoner. Pale and thin, they reminded him more of ghosts than of human beings. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all in separate cages in a line next to the one Brisbane had been in. They stared back at him with open eyes that had seen their own deaths countless times and had cried all the tears they were ever going to cry. Their eyes were simply waiting, waiting for Brisbane to do something, or waiting for the first of the month to roll around, when one of them would be sacrificed to a god they did not believe in. To them, it did not matter which.

The men had probably been merchants, still wearing the simple clothes of the working class. But the woman was something different entirely. Her clothes, now torn and dirty, were obviously once elegant and beautiful. It seemed to have once been a long dress, cinched together at the waist and once a pristine shade of white. Now, ripped and soiled with the muck of imprisonment, it did little to cover her dirty legs and bony shoulders. With something akin to shock, Brisbane realized it had once been a wedding dress.

Suddenly, her eyes shifted and widened as if she had noticed Brisbane for the first time. She came forward to the bars and reached an arm through as far as it would go. She worked her mouth up and down a few times but no sound came out.

Brisbane was unsure if this had been such a good idea. The woman looked so pathetic, beaten and abused in a cage like some disobedient animal. The wedding dress, that’s what bothered him the most. He could see the whole scene playing out in his mind like a vision of history. The woman and her new husband traveling on the road, traveling to a new life together, when suddenly out of the hills rise a marauding band of ugly orks. They attack ruthlessly and the groom, out of mixed emotions of love and duty and passion, is slain in the doomed protection of his bride. The orks take the woman and force her back to their settlement, here to this cage, and treat her to nothing but prison rations, violent rape, and a promise of sacrificial death. Brisbane could not take this woman back to his chamber under any pretense. He felt bad enough just exposing himself to her, a human like herself, in her eyes, in league with her captors.

“Human,” the woman said, finally finding her voice. “You are human. Who are you? Help me, please, help me.”

Smurch stepped up. “Does this one please you, Grum Brisbane? Shall I have her taken to your chamber?”

Brisbane took the woman’s hand which she had thrust through the bars. “What’s your name?” he asked her softly.

“Amanda. My name is Amanda.”

“Grum Brisbane?”

Brisbane dropped the woman’s hand and stepped away from her cage. Slowly, he felt control slipping away from him.

Amanda tried to push her hand closer to Brisbane. “No, don’t go. Help me, please. Dear Grecolus, I’ll do anything you want.”

“Grum Brisbane?” Smurch asked hesitantly. “What do you desire?”

Brisbane tried to force his heart back down into his chest. “Nothing, Jack,” he heard himself saying. “Let’s get out of here.”

He began to move toward the cave mouth and Smurch fell into step behind him. “But what about your right of mating?” the half-ork asked. “Do you want the female or not?”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Brisbane said through gritted teeth. “Now, drop it.”

“Yes, Grum Brisbane.”

And Smurch did drop it. Brisbane never heard the half-ork mention the subject again, but that did not keep it from his mind. For days afterward he thought about it constantly. What was he doing here anyway? Living among these orks, patiently waiting for an opportunity to steal his sword back while innocent people like Amanda—

Amanda, could her name really be Amanda?

—and the merchants, people wholly like himself, suffered in misery and awaited only their own deaths? He began to wonder if one night he just shouldn’t break the prisoners out of their cages and try a desperate escape with them through the sleeping ork settlement. Assuredly, not all of them would make it, but at least it was a better chance than the one they faced now.

To Brisbane, this is what it all boiled down to. Without his help, the prisoners had no chance to survive their imprisonment. But if he did help them escape, he would have no chance to retrieve Angelika and his life. He had to decide which was more important, the lives of his fellow man or his own wants and desires. Put bluntly like that, it was hard not to run up and try to free as many prisoners as he could, but there were many subtle persuasions that kept him from doing just that. He was confused and needed someone to talk to in order to resolve the problem. But he didn’t think he could trust anyone in the clan with the nature of the question he was debating, not even Smurch.

In the end, desperate for some kind of guidance, he consulted the only friend he seemed to have in the area. Late at night, lying silently in his bed, he opened his mind to Angelika.

Angelika? Are you there?

—Yes,— came the instant response, sweet and strongly persuasive in the darkness. —Yes, I am here, young Brisbane. What troubles you this night?—

It’s the prisoners. The orks plan to sacrifice them to their god.

—I know.—

How can we allow that? Are they not innocents?

—They are, but you must not rush things, Brisbane. Things are going well. You have the potential to destroy much evil here. And soon you will win me back.—

But I may be able to rescue them.

—You will not,— Angelika said. —Their fates have been set. If you try to escape with them, you will all be killed. It will profit you nothing.—

Angelika, how can you know these things?

—I know.—

Yes, Brisbane thought, but how do you know?

—I know. That path leads to despair. You must remain patient and strong. Our vengeance is certain only if you do so.—

But what about the prisoners?

—Their plight cannot be helped. But know their sacrifice will allow us to wreak unbridled vengeance against these demons of Damaleous. Their deaths will add fuel to our fire and sweeten the taste of our victory.—

Then they will die?

—Their bodies will die, yes. But hearken, Grecolus has already prepared their place in the heavens.—

He has? Brisbane thought.

—He has.—

Brisbane had to be satisfied with that solace and, for a while, it was sufficient. He stayed below ground, each day following the tunnels to the surface to be sure he knew the route, but never actually leaving the confines of the orkish lair. He found it strangely easy not to think during his busy days about what was going to happen to the prisoners, but when he was left alone at night, the subject nearly filled his thoughts. He could only keep it at bay by remembering what Angelika had said. Not what she had said about the blessed afterlife of the prisoners, for he knew that was garbage, but what she had said about their deaths. He could not save them but at least he would not let their deaths go unavenged.

Brisbane did not yet realize that as a Grum in the Clan of the Red Eye, a minor priest in the religion of Gruumsh One-Eye, when the time came to sacrifice the blood of one of the prisoners, he would have to assist Grumak Ternosh in the bloodletting.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

True Crimes and Misdemeanors by Jeffrey Toobin

2026-08-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

This should have been two books. The first section, as advertised in the book's subtitle, “The Investigation of Donald Trump,” is the story of Robert Mueller’s investigation and resulting report on the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and administration. The second section, which seems rushed and very much like a tack-on, is about Trump’s first impeachment for asking Ukraine to collude with his second campaign for president. I can see how that lens might tie the two sections together, but then why not use a subtitle that makes that connection clear? “Donald Trump and His Attempts to Collude with Foreign Governments?” Maybe that’s not as catchy?

I picked up just a few items of interest as I went through it.

Hillary’s Emails

Both as a candidate and as president, Trump frequently accused [Hillary] Clinton of deleting the emails after they were subpoenaed. In fact, shortly after she left her position as secretary of state, her aides went through her emails, which totaled about sixty thousand, and found approximately half were work related and half were personal. The half that were related to her job as secretary of state were turned over to the State Department and ultimately to investigators. The other half were deleted. This all happened before she was subpoenaed.

This is actually a parenthetical comment in Toobin’s text, but it seems to give away the whole game. There apparently weren’t any missing emails -- 30,000 or otherwise. They were all either turned over to the State Department or deleted.

If You’re Listening

This references the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, hacking into U.S. political and governmental institutions, something that is regularly monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The data showed that some unusual things happened on July 27, 2016. As a rule, the GRU operatives made their hacking rounds during regular business hours, but they worked late on July 27. What were they doing? On that date, the GRU opened new fronts in its data war on Hillary Clinton. First, they started spear phishing at new targets -- accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider used by Clinton’s personal office. In addition, they targeted more spear-phishing attacks at seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign. So [DOJ prosecutor Rush] Atkinson wondered, why this burst of activity? And why these targets in particular? Why then?

The prosecutor started noodling around on the internet. What was so special about July 27? What else happened on that day? Where was Donald Trump? As it turned out, he was at his golf club in Doral, Florida. He had a press conference that morning. What did he say? “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was secretary of state. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Wait. What?

Atkinson started looking at the timing and time zones. Trump’s press conference started at 10:30 a.m. eastern time. That was toward the end of the working day in Moscow, where the GRU hacking units were located. He checked. He double-checked. But the times lined up. It was possible Russia was listening and took up Trump’s invitation right away.

Yes. I guess they were listening.

The Narcissist and His Thrall

I found this anecdote about Michael Cohen, Trump’s erstwhile lawyer and fixer, revealing.

In the decade before Trump became president, Cohen used intimidation, threats, and bluster to do his bidding. He frequently dealt with the press. On one oft-recounted occasion, Tim Mak, then a reporter for The Daily Beast, asked Cohen about the allegation by Trump’s first wife, Ivana, which she later recanted, that Trump had raped her. Cohen told Mak, “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” Cohen earned a reputation for extreme devotion, even sycophancy, toward Trump, who repaid him, on occasion, with disdain. In 2009, when Trump was dissatisfied with Cohen’s performance, he cut his salary from $400,000 per year to $200,000. (Two years later, he restored the salary.) Notwithstanding the slights, Cohen remained loyal to Trump. As he told me, “I actually enjoyed him, interestingly enough. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s horrible, he’s the worst human being on the planet. I mean it. He has no heart and no soul when he’s mean.”

It is, in so many ways, indicative of the narcissist and the people who willingly enthrall themselves to them. Please, please love me.

Gnarled, Legalistic Prose

Let me end on this.

Still, that left Mueller with a dilemma. There was clear evidence that Trump did commit crimes. What should Mueller say about that? He decided to lay out the evidence but reach no conclusion about it. This judgment was announced in what became the most famous (and infamous) paragraph of the Mueller Report:

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

It takes multiple readings to make sense of the gnarled, legalistic prose of this paragraph. We can investigate the President, but we can’t prosecute the President. If our investigation determined that he was in the clear, we’d say that -- but we’re not saying that. Nor are we saying that he’s guilty of anything. So we’re not saying he’s guilty -- but we’re not saying he’s innocent, either. Basically.

Nothing in Mueller’s mandate required him to reach such a baffling and inconclusive conclusion about the most important issue before him. He was a prosecutor. A prosecutor’s job is to determine whether the evidence is sufficient to bring cases. In this unique situation, the OLC opinion prohibited Mueller from actually bringing a case, but Mueller gave Trump an unnecessary second benefit from the OLC opinion. The first benefit was not prosecuting him; that was mandatory. But the second benefit was not even saying whether the evidence supported a prosecution; that was simply a gift to Trump. In Mueller’s reasoning, a federal prosecutor could neither prosecute the president nor say whether he should be prosecuted, which in this case placed Trump effectively above the law. And Mueller expressed this tortured, overthought conclusion in such confusing language that most mortals could not understand what he had done at all. Sadly, the bewildering denouement undermined the extraordinary, meticulous, and fair-minded work of his staff in building the obstruction of justice case against Trump in the first place.

Mueller’s compromise had another ill effect. Because the language in the report was so complicated and difficult to parse, it opened the door for his work to be misrepresented by partisans acting in bad faith -- like, for example, the attorney general of the United States.

I remember those days. It was painful to watch -- Mueller speaking before Congress in words, if anything, even more convoluted than those contained in his report. He was a patsy, evidently not up to the moment that history had placed before him. It reminds me very much of the saying that it is the good men who end up doing the most harm in the world.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

FDR: The War President by Kenneth S. Davis

2026-07-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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This is the fifth volume of a huge, multi-volume biography of FDR. It covers the years 1940-1943, and the saddest thing about it is that the author died near the end of writing it—which means that the series will never be finished.

It’s a good read. Scholarly and tedious in some places, but absolutely fascinating when viewed through the prism of today. FDR’s war against fascism and GWB’s war against terror, and the political climates they existed and exist in, are fascinating to compare with one another. Imagine today’s Congress giving GWB the power to loan battleships to Pakistan so they could use them to fight against Iraq. Imagine there being a strike at Ford Motor Company and GWB sending the U.S. Army in to break it up so the workers could go start making bullets and bombs. Imagine John Kerry saying that he fought hard against GWB because he thought he’d make a better president than him, but that GWB won and he was going to support him in this war effort, and would go on a global tour demonstrating to our allies and enemies alike that our political parties are unified at home. Here are some more interesting tidbits:

Thus the swirl and tangle of events, problems, and challenges through which Roosevelt must pick his way and to which his responses are and will be shaped by his sense of himself, of his own innate and adherent capacities. On this morning of rare passivity his self-felt identity is in some respects no larger, no more formidable, than the one his intellectual critics ascribe to him in their moments of severest censure. He completes his breakfast. He puts aside the newspapers. He rises from his bed (he must have help to do so), dresses himself (he must have help to do so), then rides his wheelchair down into the library living room to begin the (for him) relatively meager activities of the day. And as he does this his consciousness of self, within which his awareness of physical dependency upon the strong arms of other men may be somewhat sharper than usual, has nothing in it of the conqueror’s egotistical willfulness. Indeed, against the massive challenges he faces, he measures exceeding small, far smaller than others do, the powers he can wield—the innate powers (of mind, of will) granted him by almighty God, plus the powers that are his by virtue of his high office—and is reaffirmed in his conviction that he cannot actually dominate even immediate events of major importance, much less change the direction or set the course of world history. He can only nudge here, tug there, prod at this point, brake at that one—he can only cautiously encourage the energies of change or, if the impendent change is of the foundations of the present American domestic order, discourage them—as he attempts to guide the turbulent torrent of event, upon which he is otherwise and in general borne irresistibly, toward what he perceives or conceives to be God’s goals.

Such perceptions or conceptions are, for him, highly tentative. They derive from and depend upon information that is imperfect and uncertain—information he obtains, for the most part, not through a thoughtful study of subject matter, but through three kinds of prayer. Two of these are objective, impersonal, almost devoid of religious feeling. One of the two might even be deemed empirically “scientific” insofar as it consists of various kinds of poll taking, various ways of defining the nature and measuring the strength of public opinion on specific issues—this on the tacit assumption that the will of the majority is the will of God. The other of the two is a species of teleological gambling, essentially superstitious—a kind of betting aimed at achieving not material prizes, but signs of divine approval or disapproval of something he contemplates doing. For instance, he may assign to this or that small happening a large significance, saying to himself that if the trivial event occurs within an immediate time span (the next minutes, perhaps, or before he can count to ten), it means that God approved what he has considered doing; if it does not occur, God disapproves. Or he may see as a sign of divine approval or disapproval his luck at cards when he plays poker or, as he does far more frequently, Miss Milliken, a game of solitaire of which he is fond.

The third kind of prayer, however, is truly religious insofar as it is intensely subjective, profoundly emotional, imbued with a sense of awe and personal dependency; and it is this prayerfulness, which is in perfect accord with his somber nostalgic mood on this gray wintry morning, that he now employs, or by which he is now caught up. He looks backward into time. Seeking stability, permanence, eternality, amid or underlying the unceasing flow of eventful change, he contemplates or (more accurately) feels his way into the past—his own individual personal past as well as the historic past of this little Hudson River town in which he grew up. And he does find permanence there. The past presents itself to the remembering mind as a completed reality wherein one can see how events conform to one another, are fitted together through the operations of casual efficacy, this thing happening because that thing does and in turn causing something else, shaping a structure from whose order the contemplative observer may learn something of the workings of God’s mind, something of the nature of God’s will. The lessons thus learned are highly qualified, however. Roosevelt knows well that the past never exactly repeats itself, is therefore no mirror of the future into which he can look for precise instructions as to what he should now do. He realizes through his feeling self that the past as persistent memory is the very stuff or substance of the living flowing present through which it extends, as an ongoing but continuously changing pattern of event, into anticipated, apprehended future time. This is the mainstream flow of the world, this the felt essence of his profound conservatism. And on this morning of gray melancholy, he in his present self and the boy he remembers himself to have been here at Hyde Park—also between this Georgian mansion that is now his one true home and the smaller, more modest Victorian house in which he was born; and between the town of Hyde Park today and the Hyde Park of distant and receding yesterdays. By this awareness his sore and weary spirit is somehow soothed and refreshed, his optimistic faith restored.

First, how about that prose, huh? Second, how about that insight into the mind of a historical figure. Reading this makes me think that this Kenneth Davis could become FDR if he wanted to, could get into the wheelchair, put on the glasses, clamp his teeth down on the cigarette holder, and become Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I also like what this passage says about being a leader, about how a leader’s power is confined to nudging, tugging, prodding, and braking. Because, boy, that is sure what it feels like for me. But what strikes me most about this passage is the way FDR, the leader of the free world at one of that world’s most critical turning points, allowed his mind to be swayed and decisions to be made by cryptic messages he thought he was receiving from God while he played solitaire. The weight of the world teetering on a precarious fulcrum and there he is, looking for answers in the turn of the next random card. GWB would probably be proud.

There’s a one page summary in the FDR book about the sinking of the Bismarck which is one of the things I stumble across in history books sometimes that I immediately want to know more about. I therefore ordered a copy of Sink the Bismarck! By C. S. Forester, evidently the authoritative expert on the subject.

As a “man of action,” Hopkins, like Roosevelt, was the opposite of ideological, and like Roosevelt, he thereby avoided a typical fallacy of the ideological mind, namely, the conclusion that what people do (history, that is) is wholly determined by forces—economic, in Marx; organismic in Spengler; Christian in Toynbee—that are themselves ahistorical and beyond human control. In both Hopkins’s and Roosevelt’s conviction, if more vividly in Roosevelt’s than in Hopkins’s, human beings were by God’s will free to choose; though they worked out God’s grand design, they must do so through the anguish of personal choice, guided by such signs of His will as He permitted them, human freedom being integral to God’s design. But in eschewing both ideology and the quest for fundamental causes, Hopkins, like Roosevelt, also eschewed coherence and fundamental consistency in his dealings with current event. The whole of his mental concern was with the event itself, and about this he asked questions of “what” and “how” to the virtual exclusion of “why.”

This passage is a lot like the whole book. I find it interesting as hell but I’m uncertain as to what it exactly means.

He presented his proposals to Congress on April 27, as a seven-point “economic stabilization program.” Each of the points, in his statement of it, was preceded by the phrase “to keep the cost of living from spiraling upward.” They were: 1) heavy taxation to “keep personal and corporate profits at a reasonable rate, the word ‘reasonable’ being defined at a low level”; 2) price ceilings, including “ceilings on rents for dwellings in all areas affected by war industries”; 3) wage controls (“we must stabilize the remuneration received by individuals for their work”); 4) stabilization of “prices received by growers for the products of their lands”; 5) increased purchase of war bonds by “all citizens” to prevent their using war-increased earnings “to buy articles which are not essential”; 6) strict rationing “of all essential commodities of which there is a scarcity”; 7) discouragement of credit and installment buying joined with encouragement of “the paying off of debts, mortgages, and other obligations.”

Can you believe this? Can you imagine GWB proposing this to help finance the war against terrorism? Roosevelt later defined the “low level” he would keep everyone’s income at after taxes as $25,000. That’s 1942 dollars. Today that would be $282,812.50. Okay, I guess that’s not that bad.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

2026-07-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day my mother died was the saddest day of my life and, at the time, I couldn’t believe there would be any sadder for as long as I lived. In this, as in so many other things I believed when I was young, time would eventually prove me wrong. I remember so many things about that day. I remember how sickly and pained she looked right before she died and how healthy and peaceful she looked right after. I remember Otis placing a death shroud over her body, careful not to let any of his tears fall onto it and stain the fabric. I remember the crude dinner Otis heated up for us that night and I remember thinking that even in the midst of death, we were still alive and we still needed to eat. I remember the prayer Otis and I offered up for her soul and I remember almost believing it was being heard by an understanding god, for if ever there was a prayer that deserved to be heard, it was that one. But I guess what I remember the most was looking up to see she had died while my head had been turned and feeling an almost overwhelming sense of relief. Relief that her pain had finally ended followed by dreadful sorrow because mine was just beginning.

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When Brisbane turned down the short side passage leading to his chamber he found Smurch lying in the small cubbyhole beneath the lit torch. The half-ork quickly scrambled to his feet as his master approached.

“Grum Brisbane,” Smurch said, standing at attention. “May I congratulate you on your victory in the pug-trolang?”

He was in no mood for Smurch’s formality. “Listen, Jack,” he said. “If you want to congratulate me, go right ahead. But make sure you call me Gil when you do it. The next time you call me Grum Brisbane when we’re alone, I’m going to punch you right in the nose.”

He did not wait for Smurch to react. He went into his chamber and let the curtain fall over the portal. He flung himself down on the mattress that was to be his bed and closed his eyes.

“Congratulations, Gil,” he heard Smurch say from beyond the curtain.

Brisbane smiled. “Thank you, Jack.”

He heard Smurch crawl back into his cubbyhole and he buried himself under some of the blankets and pelts, eager to get some sleep and forget about everything he had been through that day. But, as usual, when sleep was the most desired, it proved the slowest in coming. Brisbane’s mind swirled with thoughts about what he had seen and done that day, and no matter how hard he tried to sweep them aside, they flowed back to the center of his thoughts and kept him from drifting off to sleep.

For the first time in a while he thought about the other prisoners, the other humans, that the orks kept in the circus wagons on the surface. Brisbane had been kept alive because they had thought he might be a Grumak, but why did the orks keep their other prisoners alive? He remembered Shortwhiskers saying orks ate humans, but the meat they had at dinner had obviously been beef. Maybe they only ate people on special occasions, or when their food supply ran short. Everything the orks had they seemed to steal from others. Brisbane was not sure if they produced anything on their own or what it was they did with the other prisoners, but as a new member of the klatru, he had the feeling he would soon find out.

He thought about the way he had momentarily escaped from his cage the night before. This still puzzled him greatly. Supposedly, Ternosh had cast a spell of anti-magic over the wagon and yet, Brisbane had worked his cantrip to magically turn the tumblers in the padlock. He did not know what to make of this. There were too many possibilities and he did not have enough information. Ternosh could have not really been able to cast such a spell and he merely told Brisbane he could to trick him into not trying to escape. But why would they bother with the subterfuge? If they wanted to keep him from casting spells, they could have kept him bound and gagged like Vrak had on the journey to the ork settlement. Ternosh may actually have that kind of power, but for some reason, the spell didn’t work right. But what could cause such a failure? Brisbane had no idea. In the few examples he had seen, Brisbane could tell orkish magic was far different from any kind of magic Roystnof had taught him. He couldn’t even tell how it worked, how could he tell what went wrong with it? Or maybe Ternosh’s spell had worked as promised, but it did not include things outside his cage. Brisbane decided this was a silly line of thought. What kind of sense did it make to cast an anti-magic spell on an area if a wizard inside could magically affect things outside that area? If Roystnof had been out in the cage, he could have sat calmly in the anti-magic shell and magically set every ork in the camp on fire. All Brisbane could really be sure of was that Ternosh had appeared to have cast a spell and, for whatever reason, it did not keep him in his cage.

He thought about the Demosk, the eyeless apparition that Ternosh had twice conjured up in Brisbane’s presence. The first time, when Ternosh had fed it some of his blood to see if it contained the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye, Brisbane might have believed it was a hallucinogenic effect of the incense smoke on his brain, but after seeing it again in the pug-trolang, he felt he could be sure it was some kind of magical manifestation. There hadn’t been as much smoke in the pit, most of it had stayed up in the gallery, and his head had remained reasonably clear. Unless the drug in the smoke was incredibly potent, which he didn’t think it was, the second appearance of the Demosk could not have been a hallucination. So what was it? Brisbane hated to admit it, but it sure seemed like some kind of spirit from the afterlife that Ternosh consulted with on important decisions. He would much rather believe it was a creation of the Grumak’s magic, for with this explanation, he could retain his belief that there was no such thing as an afterlife. Roystnof had taught him that dead meant dead, but it would seem the orks, like most others in the world, didn’t choose to believe that. It was much like the demon Brisbane had encountered with his friends in the basement of the shrine. Most people believed it was a creature summoned from one of the nine hells by some evil wizard in service to his high lord Damaleous. Roystnof had told him such a monster was a creation of the wizard’s magic, something that did not exist anywhere before the invocation of the spell. As with Ternosh’s anti-magic spell, Brisbane thought he would have to learn much more about orkish magic before he would be able to discern the truth about the Demosk.

He thought about the orkish notion of an afterlife. Smurch had told him much about orkish life and religion, but he had said little about what they believed happened to the soul after death. He remembered Wister saying something about the army of Gruumsh One-Eye before Brisbane plunged his sword into the ork’s heart. Was this their vision of the heavens, service in an army of the dead led by their god? Given the violent and combat-minded structure of their creation and their society, Brisbane would not be surprised to find this to be the truth. But if, after death, each orkish soul was enlisted in an army, he wondered just who that army would be fighting. And how could an army of the dead possibly be defeated?

He thought about Wister and the hatred the ork had felt for Brisbane just because he was human. I will not share my position with a human, he had said with a conviction that he took to his death. What kind of madness was this? Brisbane wondered how many other orks would have done the same thing in Wister’s shoes. He was still convinced he had done the right thing in not shying away from the challenge and he hoped his defeat of Wister would keep some of the others off his back, but there was still something about the situation that bothered him. Ternosh had said his Demosk—and implied that Gruumsh One-Eye himself—had said Brisbane was to be treated like any other member of the clan, and even though Tornestor had allowed the masokom to take place on the basis of that argument, Wister had not treated him like any other ork. If Brisbane had been an ork, born with red eyes and raised to be a Grumak, Wister would not have put up a fuss. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to share his position as Grum, it was that he didn’t want to share his position as Grum with a human. This distinction may have eluded Tornestor’s logic, but Brisbane didn’t think so. He believed Tornestor, and everyone at that banquet table, had known Wister’s masokom violated the orders of Ternosh’s Demosk, and they had allowed it to carry through anyway. If they hated humans so much they would ignore the will of their god as handed down by their high priest, Brisbane could expect nothing but trouble ahead for him.

He thought about the orkish customs of the masokom and the pug-trolang. If this was the way they resolved all arguments in the klatru, trial by combat in a circular pit, Brisbane could see why the Clan of the Red Eye never materialized as a serious threat against the power of the Farchrist Empire. It was a wonder they could pull off as many raids against merchant wagons as they did with their upper class constantly fighting amongst themselves. Still, Brisbane could not deny there was something honorable about the way they treated their customs. Here was a society where the ultimate measure of a man was his skill in combat. The finest warrior was clan chief and he reigned until someone came along who could beat him. It was a system where each knew where he stood in relation to his comrades and the only political maneuverings and disagreements came with the issuing of a challenge and the clanging of steel. It was a system Brisbane was going to have to respect and be wary of if he ever expected to leave with Angelika and his life.

Finally, before he fell asleep, he thought about his sword, Angelika. His attitude toward her had shifted slightly in his battle with Wister, but he could not deny he still wanted her back. He wasn’t sure what had changed, but Angelika’s voice seemed to have a lesser effect on him than it had when he had first received her. For one wild moment, he thought perhaps this was because she was getting ready to leave him for another, but he quickly pushed such a horrible thought aside. Hadn’t she said there was no one here who was his equal in combat? Who then would she be leaving him for? No, that couldn’t be the answer. It was just that, for a moment there, Angelika had seemed so…seemed so…wrong? Could that be it? She was wrong? She had told him that standing before him in the pug-trolang was an evil creature that had to be vanquished, but when Brisbane looked closely, all he saw was Wister. He did not see a demon from the nine hells. He saw a man whose pride had been hurt and who was fighting back in the only way he knew how. But Angelika had always sounded so right before, and Brisbane knew when he fought with her in his hands, these things made so much more sense. Maybe he was just upset because she was so close to him and he couldn’t use her. Yes, that must have been it. The kill didn’t feel right because instead of Angelika, he had to use that clumsy sword with the dull blade. That was not the weapon of a warrior.

All these thoughts danced in and out of Brisbane’s head as he drifted off towards sleep. They surely did not come in the neat order they have been presented here. He was really much too tired for such logical thought processes. Instead, they developed from bits and pieces of memory and cogitation, slowly lulling him off to sleep and affecting his dreams.

The longest dream he had that night took place in the banquet chamber of the orks, with the entire klatru gathered around for the nightly draknel. But Brisbane was not at his normal spot beside Ternosh. He was surprised to find himself entering the chamber from the portal Tornestor had used, and when he did, he had two orks with red stripes on their sleeves walking behind him. He looked down at himself and he saw a red sash cutting across his black uniform like an open wound.

The orks at the table all got to their feet. “All hail, Sumak Brisbaner!” they chanted in unison.

He had become clan chief in this dream. He did not know how it had happened, but it was true nonetheless. And he was surprised to find out it felt good to be the Sumak. He watched his dream-self stride to the table and take his seat. He was the only one who had a chair to sit in and he was the only one who had a three-syllable name. Brisbaner. He liked the sound of that.

The orks around the table sat respectfully after Brisbane had taken his seat. He clapped his hands twice to bring the servants carrying their food into the chamber. In response, a single servant entered the room and meekly came over to Brisbane with empty arms. It was Smurch.

“Where is the food for our draknel?” Brisbane bellowed at the half-ork, his voice sounding a lot like Tornestor’s.

Smurch quickly prostrated himself on the floor. “The kitchens are empty, Sumak Brisbaner. There’s no food to be found. I swear it.”

Brisbane rose to his feet and he kicked Smurch. “I told you never to let supplies run this low without telling me. We could have planned another raid. Now we’ll have to eat one of the prisoners.”

Brisbane was surprised to hear these words coming out of his mouth, but in the context of the dream, they flowed naturally. He was the Sumak and he had the power to do as he wished. If he wanted to dine on human flesh, then by Gruumsh, human flesh it would be.

“Which one will it be, Sumak Brisbaner?” Smurch asked him. “Shall I pick the fattest one?”

“No!” Brisbane exploded. “You couldn’t pick the worm out of an apple. I will do it myself.”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.”

With that, Brisbane quickly turned and left the chamber. Smurch scrambled to his feet and dutifully followed him. Brisbane made his way through the endless series of tunnels and passageways with a determination that shocked his sleeping self. Of course, this was a dream and as Sumak, he would know his way around the underground maze. He thought for a moment to try and keep track of where the dream Brisbane was going in case, against odds and logic, it turned out to be the true route out of the caves. Dreams were subconscious processes after all, and maybe his subconscious remembered all the twists and turns when his conscious mind couldn’t. It was worth a try, but there were too many changes which Brisbane couldn’t keep track of in his slumbering state. Besides, this part of the dream seemed long and drawn out, as if he was walking grimly through the corridors for hours, always sure of where he was going but never quite getting there. Brisbane gave up paying attention to the route his dream self was taking and settled back to see what would happen next.

And, as if that was what the dream had been waiting for, Brisbane suddenly found himself emerging from the cave mouth out into the sunshine of the ork settlement. A group of lower class orks sat around a dead campfire on his right, quickly rising to their feet when they saw their clan chief, and on his left was the line of circus wagons. Brisbane stepped up to the cages with Smurch behind his left shoulder.

“A very fine selection, Sumak Brisbaner,” Smurch said. “Any one of them would make a fine feast.”

Brisbane looked at the prisoners and instead of seeing the thin faces he had glimpsed when Vrak had first brought him into the camp, he saw the faces of his friends, the ones he had left on the mountain top overlooking the forgotten temple of Grecolus. Shortwhiskers, Stargazer, Roystnof, and even Dantrius, they were all there in separate cages, looking at him with accusing eyes.

“Yes,” he heard himself say. “They do make one hell of a smorgasbord. This is going to be a difficult decision.”

He began to walk down the line, examining his friends on the basis of their edibility. Again, he was shocked a little at the turn the dream had taken, but it was just a dream after all, and everything he did seemed somehow right and proper. The first person he examined was Shortwhiskers.

“Gil,” the dwarf said. “What are you doing? Let me out of this cage.”

Brisbane turned dispassionately to his servant. “Smurch, didn’t we have dwarf last week?”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.”

Brisbane moved onto the next cage. This one contained Illzeezad Dantrius.

“Brisbane!” the mage spat. “Let me out of this cage, you bastard. I’ll tear your heart out!”

He smiled cruelly at Dantrius. “As much as I would like to see you roasted, Weasel, I’m afraid you are too skinny to provide much of a meal for my men. Smurch?”

The half-ork stepped up. “Yes, Sumak Brisbaner?”

“Make sure this prisoner gets double rations from now on. Maybe he’ll be fat enough for next week.”

“Yes, Sumak Brisbaner.” Smurch stepped back.

Brisbane’s stomach began to roll as he watched the dream progress. For the first time he began to wonder just what kind of dream this was supposed to be. The person in the next cage was Stargazer.

“Gil!” she cried. “What kind of madness is this? Stop it! Please, dear Grecolus, let it stop.”

Brisbane looked her over carefully. Her face had been beaten and there were bruises on her arms and legs. Her clothes were in tatters and she did the best she could to cover her nudity.

Brisbane called for his servant’s attention again. “Has anyone been at this woman?” he asked.

“I think so, Sumak Brisbaner.”

“They raped me, Gil,” Stargazer said, “Three of them. Three of those monsters raped me.” Her voice was hollow and echoed with shame.

Brisbane ignored her. “The fools have damaged her pretty face,” he said to the half-ork. “Tell them to leave her alone. When her wounds have healed, I might want her for myself.”

He began to grow very uncomfortable with the turn this dream was taking. Why didn’t he recognize his friends? What kind of monster had he become? In his bed, he began to toss about and quietly moan out. The last cage he came to held Roystnof prisoner.

“Gil,” the wizard said calmly. “Don't you recognize any of us? Let us out of here. It’s Roy, Gil.”

Brisbane looked blankly at Roystnof. “I guess this one will have to do, Smurch. Get some help.”

The half-ork went over to the burned out campfire and recruited three other orks to help him.

“Gil, stop it,” Roystnof said, his voice rising. “It’s Roy. What’s the matter with you?”

The dream Brisbane stepped back and let the orks come forward and open Roystnof’s cage. They began to wrestle the wizard down to the floor of the wagon and then they produced a rope and began to tie his feet together and his hands behind his back.

“Gil!” Roystnof was shouting. “Have you gone mad? Let me go!”

Brisbane watched in horror as the orks strung Roystnof up by the feet from one of the top crossbars of his cage. He listened in horror as he heard Roystnof and the others cry out for him to help, but was amazed to find his dream self standing aloof and ignoring their pleas. He did not like this dream at all and he began to fight his way back to consciousness. But he seemed trapped in it, and it was not until one of the orks pulled out a gleaming knife and slit Roystnof’s throat, cutting deep into the tendons and cartilage and spurting vividly red blood all over his face and the ground beneath him, that Brisbane was able to jerk himself awake.

He must have cried out, for moments later the curtain to his chamber was pulled back and the figure of Smurch could be seen in the portal.

“Grum Brisbane, are you all right?”

Brisbane was so worked up he didn’t notice the formal address. “I’m fine,” he said, panting. “It was just a bad dream.” Already the details were fleeing from his mind.

“Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head, trying to swallow some of the dryness out of his mouth. “No, thank you. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

The curtain dropped shut again and Brisbane laid back on his makeshift bed. He tried to recall what had horrified him so, but most of the dream was gone from his memory. All he could really remember was the blood. A lot of blood.

In the morning, he would not even remember that.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Unmaking the Presidency by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

2026-07-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is a book written by lawyers. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, but in this case it is a very good thing, as it really takes a pair of lawyers like Hennessey and Wittes to carve out the controlling language of what the American presidency has been and what it may be becoming.

Let’s start here, with what I take to be their central thesis:

Most of all, Trump proposes a presidency that elevates the expressive and personal dimensions of the office over everything else. It is one in which the institutional office and the personality of the occupant are almost entirely merged -- merged in their interests, in their impulses, in their finances, and in their public character. In elevating the expressive, vanity-plate dimensions of the office and making it a personal vehicle for the public self-expression of the officeholder, he proposes sublimating nearly all other traditional features of the presidency: its management functions; its expectation of good-faith execution of law; its expectation of ethical conduct, truthfulness, and service. This vision of the presidency thus unsurprisingly produces a genuinely novel set of deployments of the executive’s traditional powers, ones that are profoundly different from those of prior presidents.

Arthur Schlesinger wrote about the rise of the Imperial Presidency. Hennessey and Wittes are writing about the rise of the Expressive Presidency. A presidency that is dedicated not to “faithfully executing” the powers of the office, but to using those powers to support and express the person holding the office. It’s a very different world than the one we’re used to.

The Oath

And the troubles begin at the very beginning -- on inauguration day when this new expressive president takes the oath of office.

The political scientist Edward Corwin, in his book ‘The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1984,’ described the coronation oath of the English kings “from which the President’s oath is lineally descended,” saying that “its purpose, definitely, was to put the King’s conscience in bonds to the law.” The early constitutional treatise writer Justice Joseph Story considered the purpose of the oath so obvious that he began his one-paragraph discussion of it by saying that there “is little need of commentary upon this clause” because “no man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under to most solemn obligations to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution.” Story described the oath as actively cultivating virtue in a president, “creat[ing] upon his conscience a deep sense of duty, but an appeal, at once in the presence of God and man, to the most sacred and solemn sanctions, which can operate upon the human mind.”

In a recent law review article about the original meaning of the oath and the take care clause, the legal scholars Andrew Kent, Ethan Leib, and Jed Shugerman note that the promise of faithful execution in the clauses was commonly associated at the time of the founding with “true, honest, diligent, due, skillful, careful, good faith, and impartial execution of the law or office.” The oath, they write, is thus a promise on the part of presidents “to exercise their power only when it is motivated in the public interest rather than in their private self-interest, consistent with fiduciary obligation in the private law.”

This is all important background to the essential point of the authors in this section.

The problem is that the oath works only when the president actually means it. It instills a sense of duty only when the oath’s words and the solemn occasion of its delivery matters to the president and when others recognize that he means it. What if the person swearing is the sort of person who cannot credibly swear an oath?

More to the point -- did Trump “mean it” when he took this oath? The authors take us back to that inauguration day in 2017, and provide us with plenty of doubt that not only didn’t he, but that he probably couldn’t.

Return for a moment to the strange scene on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Even in this unusually fractured period of American politics, the day offered a rare show of bipartisanship: Democrats and Republicans sat there united both in their shared commitment to the peaceful transition of power and -- we suspect, but cannot prove -- also in a profound unease about the man who raised his right hand before them. It’s true that around the country, tens of millions of Trump voters delighted in his inauguration. But there was still an undeniable anxiety etched on the faces of many people on that dais about whether this was a man capable of solemnly swearing anything, let alone swearing to “faithfully execute” something like the office of the presidency. It wasn’t just the Democrats. House Speaker Paul Ryan managed a weak smile but tightly gripped the arm of his wife, Janna. Past him, Senator John Cornyn and Representative Kevin McCarthy, both of whom should have been witnessing a moment of Republican triumph, gazed on somberly. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell frowned, even more than usual, and appeared to wish he were anywhere else.

Pinning down the precise defect in Trump’s oath is impossible. Indeed, the claim that there is a defect is inherently unprovable. One cannot know what was in Trump’s heart as he said the words the Constitution prescribes. No public opinion experts polled anyone on public faith in President Trump’s oath. Very few of the many Americans who fear or hate Trump frame their suspicions, either intellectually or emotionally, in terms of doubt as to the integrity of his oath.

Moreover, the history of hating a president, and of suspecting his illegitimacy in office, is old. A great many voters -- including Trump himself -- harbored deep enough questions about Obama’s legitimacy to doubt his American birth. Many Democrats did not believe that George W. Bush was legitimate in office because he had prevailed in the 2000 election only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. And that contested election, in turn, reran aspects of the earlier contested election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden -- one that left a mark of illegitimacy on Hayes’s presidency. Most famously, it was an earlier presidential election and impending inauguration that triggered the South’s secession from the Union in 1861.

The defect in Trump’s oath was certainly not technical. Presidents have flubbed their oaths before. Herbert Hoover swore to “maintain” the Constitution rather than protect it; Nixon inserted an “and” that didn’t belong. At Obama’s first inauguration, Chief Justice Roberts fumbled his role, resulting in the new president swearing to “execute faithfully” rather than “faithfully execute” the office; the fastidious Roberts re-administered the oath the next day to be safe. For his part, Trump said all the right words -- prompted by the chief justice, surrounded by his family, congressional leadership, and justices of the Supreme Court -- and he did so without faltering or ad-libbing. He shook Obama’s hand afterward, as one would expect. He observed all the niceties. Yet an unformed question tugged at the back of millions of minds even as he did so: Is this a man capable of being faithful to anything? Does he even know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself?

The authors don’t think so, and neither do I, and they go on to cite example after example of people in Trump’s inner orbit not trusting him at his word, of documenting their interactions with him in order to preserve a true record of their encounters, rather than what Trump would inevitable say about them later.

The sense of something being wrong was, we submit, rooted in what James Comey would later call “the nature of the person.” Comey would use this phrase before the Senate Intelligence Committee in an attempt to explain why he had felt compelled to memorialize his first interaction with Trump in writing. Senator Mark Warner asked Comey what it was about the interaction with the president-elect that made him so keen to write down the details right away, typing the memo out on a laptop in an FBI car as he was being driven away from Trump Tower. Comey’s response is worth considering in relation to the oath Trump would swear two weeks after their meeting:

“I was alone with the president of the United States, or the president-elect, soon to be president … I was talking about matters that touch on the FBI’s core responsibility, and that relate to the president, president-elect personally. And then the nature of the person. I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document.”

Consider Comey’s invocation of “the nature of the person.” He means, of course, that Trump is the sort of person one does not trust. And Comey was not alone. In the days following Comey’s firing, his successor -- Andrew McCabe -- also memorialized his conversations with Trump, later writing that he “wrote memos about my interactions with President Trump for the same reason that Comey did: to have a contemporaneous record of conversation with a person who cannot be trusted.” It matters if a person swearing the presidential oath is so lacking in civic virtue and trustworthiness that an officer of the government feels compelled to document conversations with him -- and that the desirability of doing so is so self-explanatory that it can be justified by a mere reference to “the nature of the person” with whom he is dealing.

All of this, to my way of thinking, invites a larger question that the authors never fully address. If the “nature of the person” who is the president can prevent that person from taking the oath of office in good faith -- and more pointedly, if everyone recognizes that this expressive president is exactly that kind of person -- then can that person actually BE the president of the United States? Constitutionally speaking, of course, Donald Trump was the president of the United States. The Electoral College took care of that. But if he didn’t mean it when he said the words of the oath of office, as a matter of legal philosophy, did the office of the presidency actually reside in him?

There are so many problems that stem from this initial premise regarding the oath of office. Much later in the book, when the authors are talking about Trump’s giving security clearance to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite Kushner’s inability to pass the necessary background checks, they make this observation.

Then, suddenly, in May 2018, Kushner was granted a full top secret clearance. Everything was aboveboard, the White House insisted. Sources “familiar with the matter” made a point of telling the major papers that the permanent clearance was “granted by career White House and intelligence officials after the completion of his FBI background check.” These sources even pointed to the observance of this rigid process as vindication, evidence that Kushner was no longer any kind of focus of the special counsel’s investigation and that it should clear any suspicion regarding his conduct. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, underscored the point in a statement that Kushner’s “application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process.”

But none of that was true. The process hadn’t cleared Kushner; it had concluded that he posed too great a threat. It took nearly a year before the public learned not only that Trump had personally intervened -- in the face of contrary recommendations at the highest levels -- to order that Kushner be given a clearance but also that the administration had been lying to the public about it ever since. The administration’s response? Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News and declared that while the White House wouldn’t discuss security clearances, “I will tell you the president has the absolute right to do what was described.”

It was the equivalent of a child’s taunt, but Conway was at some level correct. Just as he’d been able to pardon Arpaio, just as he had the power to take away Brennan’s clearance, the president did have the authority to overrule his own staff and the intelligence community to grant his son-in-law access to the nation’s most consequential secrets. For that matter, he also has an absolute right to give a security clearance to Kim Jong Un or Chinese leader Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran if he feels so inclined. What went unaddressed in Conway’s response is that “can” is not the same as “should,” though the only mechanism the founders had for distinguishing between the two -- the oath of office -- has to be felt as a burden by the president in order to do its work of distinguishing. If the president doesn’t feel some difference between self-dealing and working on behalf of the public interest, if she experiences her powers as monarchical prerogatives there for personal grandeur and benefit, the distinction between what she may do and what she ought to do becomes one without meaningful difference.

See how dangerous this idea of a president “not meaning it” when he takes the oath of office can be? In a world in which the president makes no distinction between what is good for him and what is good for the country -- there is no power in the world that can stop him from acting. Again, I ask, can such a person actually BE the president of the United States?

Bad At His Job

But put that idea aside for the moment. It’s probably too esoteric to even make basic sense. There were many other things wrong with the expressive nature of this president -- and one of the most fundamental was that it made him simply bad at the job of being president. As an expressive president, Trump acted like authority and execution resided entirely with him, rarely, if ever, coordinating his decisions and actions with the vast bureaucracy he had at his command. The authors illustrate this in their description of Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” an action he tried to take very early in his presidency designed to prevent people from certain countries from entering the United States.

The chaos the travel ban unleashed outside the administration reflected a certain chaos within the administration that had produced it. Normally, a major presidential action in the national security realm that affects the lives of millions of people and the security of the country at large involves a complex process within the government. An action like the travel ban affects many different agencies with different interests. The Department of Homeland Security mans the ports of entry. The State Department issues visas and has to respond to the diplomatic fallout from countries that don’t want their citizens banned from entering the United States -- not to mention the negative backlash from Muslim countries that perceive such an action as discriminatory with respect to Islam. One would expect consultation with the intelligence agencies as to whether a ban is even necessary -- and, if so, how broadly it should sweep, against which countries it should be directed, and on what sort of people it should focus. If the goal is to protect national security, one would presumably want to hear from the folks who have insight into which kinds of people do and do not pose threats to national security. It turned out that the military had important dogs in this fight too: people who had helped U.S. forces in Iraq, to whom the military had promised shelter, were suddenly barred from entering the country. And, of course, the Justice Department has to consider the legality of any major federal action to make sure it can survive the legal challenges that have to be anticipated.

This is all entirely reasonable -- especially if a president wants to actually do things successfully. And it is really what the executive branch is designed to do.

This sort of complex integration of different governmental entities is why the executive branch developed the so-called interagency process, a system of coordination and discussion between the federal agencies, at escalating levels of authority, designed to unify and deconflict policy and make sure all of the different agencies’ concerns are accounted for and addressed. The goal is ultimately to tee up policy decisions for a president adequately informed of the costs and benefits of different courses -- and, in order to preserve presidential time and focus, to resolve matters between agencies that do not require presidential involvement at lower levels.

Process is hard to love. It slows things down. It is frustrating to people who want action. No one votes for process. All presidents have chafed at and sidestepped it to some degree. But all presidents have been forced to rely on it too. This is because the executive branch is, in reality, a network of giant bureaucracies, not just a person who wants to express herself.

Let’s just stop there for emphasis. The executive branch IS a network of bureaucracies, not just a person. Trump, of course, called those bureaucracies the “deep state,” and complained about how it was working against him. But he and them were part of the same thing, both essential parts of the executive branch. After all…

Some kind of system has to make sure that these bureaucracies are not working at cross-purposes and that the president gets the information she needs in order to act wisely. In the preparation of the travel ban, there was as little process as the modern presidency has seen on a major decision. Consultation with the Justice Department was limited to a facial review of the order’s text for obvious illegality. The Homeland Security Department was briefed only shortly before the ban was released. Neother the military nor the intelligence community was meaningfully consulted.

If the president had consulted with those agencies, the executive order would have looked quite different. It would have applied to fewer groups of people for shorter periods of time; its language would have been cleansed of the lingering hints of racial and religious animus; and it would have contained safety valves in the forms of carve-outs and discretionary exemptions. In other words, it would have been less like what Trump said he wanted: “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” For many of the president’s supporters, this would have been far less satisfying, and they surely would have viewed such an outcome as the kind of business-as-usual watering down of campaign promises delivered by regular politicians. They didn’t want that.

No, they didn’t. But they, like Trump, didn’t get what they wanted. And they didn’t get it because this expressive president worked outside the system, forcing his expressive will and his expressive will only into the process. As the authors note:

The irony is that Trump regularly pays a huge price for this vision of the presidency. Mostly it’s a price in effectiveness. The travel ban debacle turned out to be a kind of template. Time after time, traditional processes have simply vanished, to the detriment of the administration’s ability to carry out the president’s own objectives in a timely, efficient, and coherent manner.

Set aside whether what Trump wanted to do was a good thing or a bad thing. As a practical matter, he wasn’t able to execute on his own objectives -- and that made him bad at his job.

The Deep State

In this regard, the “deep state” was a real thing -- as there were officials in a number of executive branch departments who came to work at cross purposes with President Trump, who, in a number of high-profile Twitter battles, became frequently referred to as the “toddler-in-chief.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to a restoration of the Hamiltonian presidency in Trump’s image (i.e., that of the unitary executive): the executive branch’s unity dissolved visibly before the public’s eye. And as the toddler-in-chief thread showed, in important respects, the president ceased to be at the helm of the executive branch and instead became its mascot. Trump was proposing such a massive and radical change that the rest of the executive branch could not simply continue with business as usual; it had to adapt -- and resist. Its response was in equal parts understandable and destructive of important constitutional norms.

Trump’s supporters were fairly outraged when the executive branch opposed the president -- after all, he is the president and represents the highest expression of executive authority that exists. But what is often overlooked is how dumb and counterfactual Trump’s executive mandates were.

The disuniting of the executive under Trump began immediately on his assumption of the presidency. Recall again that incident in which he was so incensed by the National Park Service crowd size retweet that on his first full day in office, he personally called the acting National Park Service director to demand that the agency produce photos to support Trump’s claim that his crowds were larger. Indeed, an “urgent directive” went to thousands of people at the U.S. Department of the Interior that “all bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice.” Despite the potential impact on emergency communications, officials were permitted to reactivate department Twitter accounts only once messages of atonement -- apologizing for the “accidental” retweet -- had been posted.

That’s right. Stop tweeting things I don’t like. This was the era when alternate, unofficial Twitter accounts were created so that “bureaucrats” could continue to communicate with the public matters important to their agency missions, despite the toddler-in-chief in the White House. I, myself, remember following the “alt-NPS” account for a while.

Ironically, it was not the apology or the discipling of the wayward agency that had a lasting impact. It was the defiance and contradiction of the president by subordinate officers who quickly stopped bothering to retract or to apologize when they strayed.

The Official Voice

Much of this behavior of the “wayward agencies” is attributable less to a conscious desire to thwart the president’s intentions and more to a befuddlement over exactly what the president’s intentions were.

A final exceptional feature of Trump’s rhetoric that operates in tandem with this media ecosystem is his mantra-like repetition of specific phrases -- “Witch Hunt,” “Make America Great Again,” “Build the Wall,” “No Collusion,” “No Obstruction,” “I have nothing to do with Russia,” “It’s a disgrace” -- both in tweets and in speeches, and specifically the repetition of these memes in lieu of argumentation. Trump never made or developed an argument against Robert Mueller’s investigation nor made a reasoned case against the suggestion that there was something untoward in his campaign’s relationship with Russian operatives, for example. He simply repeated key phrases and let others fill in the gaps. These phrases come to represent the terms of the argument that others -- Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Mark Meadows, and Jim Jordan, for example -- will make in his place. Trump himself, instead of making the argument, simply announces the articles of faith around which others have to navigate in building it. His political allies could then criticize Mueller however they wanted and develop the argument against the prosecutor in any number of fashions, as long as they hit -- or at least didn’t contradict -- these key points: Trump didn’t do anything wrong with respect to Russia, however things might appear; he didn’t corruptly seek to impede the investigation of his conduct; and the investigation against him was an unfair effort to damage him and his presidency.

In this environment, it is extremely difficult to understand what it is the president wants, as the “official voice” of his office is practically non-existent. There is a lot of discussion about whether this represents a conscious strategy on Trump’s part -- a clever ploy to keep his opponents off base and his options always open -- or whether this is reactive output of a disordered mind. The authors leave little doubt about what they think.

Indeed, Trump’s lies about intelligence are generally not of a strategic nature, designed to support some policy objective or conceal some short-term operation that publicity may put at risk. They are like his other lies -- self-serving matters of momentary convenience that may deny intelligence, make it up, or mischaracterize it. And they are often less about the intelligence itself than about the agencies responsible for it. When he tweets something that is plausible on its face but lacks public evidence to support, it is impossible to know if he is disclosing sensitive government information or if he just watched a segment on Fox & Friends. Moreover, his policy lies are generally not attempts to persuade the country to follow him on a particular policy course; they are more often simple self-promoting bluster.

On occasion, he has also lied about factual matters by way of creating space for his policies. One of the present authors spent a year litigating a Freedom of Information Act request in an attempt to prove false a single line about immigrants and terrorism and Justice Department statistics in Trump’s February 2017 speech to a joint session of Congress. The line was designed to gin up public fear of immigration and thus generate support for his travel ban executive order. But this sort of lie is actually the expectation, not the rule. Far more often, Trump’s lies serve no policy purpose. They are bloviating swagger and nothing else. In this sense, Trump not only depletes the reserve of trust and presumption of good faith in the presidency; he creates a presidency truly based on the Frankfurtian concept of bullshit. He is the politician of Swift’s precise description -- you “will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not.”

And that’s exactly the point. If you want people to take you seriously, or to understand you clearly, don’t lie to them. And when lies become understood as the bedrock of the “official voice” of the presidency, we are moving into very dangerous ground.

This is Trump’s radical proposed revision to the traditional presidency: not only that the president doesn’t need to be honest, but that he can be known to everyone as a “fucking liar” -- not an occasional liar, not a calculating liar, but a pervasive, constant liar and bullshitter on all subjects at all times. What would this revision mean in the long term for the presidency? In the broadest sense, nobody knows, because nobody knows how deeply such leadership will erode public confidence in the possibility of government -- indeed, to what extent it will erode public belief in objective truth itself. Presidents are, among other things, modelers of public beliefs and aspirations politically. Does having a president who is a bullshitter change the public’s sense of truth over time? The point of Trump’s lies is not to convince the public that he can be believed, but rather to convince people that no one can be believed.

I would make a minor quibble here. It is not the point of Trump’s lies, but rather the result -- since I don’t think that even this is a conscious strategy. And that’s partly what makes it so dangerous. Conscious strategy can be thwarted, can be resisted. But in doing what he does, and in us doing what we do in reaction, there is no consciousness, instead it is the subconscious interplay of the narcissist and his followers. It is part of the slippery slope toward despotism, and once begun, there is little that can be consciously done to retard its progress.

A Culture of Ethics

One other point that is worth illuminating on how the authors see Trump changing the very nature of the presidency.

A culture of ethics is a fragile thing. It begins with the law, but it doesn’t end there. The space the law leaves for self-dealing and graft, either by choice or because of the nature of the presidential office, is vast. And if the president makes a decision to exploit that space rather than prudentially protecting it -- to push every line rather than drawing lines that set confidence-building boundaries, to dare the public rather than reassuring the public -- the law will not substitute for political pushback as a remedy. The culture of ethics will decay. The decay begins at the head and spreads downward. If the president doesn’t actually divest, why should anyone else? If the president’s children aren’t punished for ethical violations, why shouldn’t others break the same rules with impunity? If cabinet officials keep their jobs despite scandals, why should those serving beneath them fear losing their own?

They’re talking here about Trump’s refusal to divest from his private business concerns and even to use the office of the presidency for his personal profit. Like so much of what Trump does -- he just does it, and no one seems to hold him accountable.

Thus far, Trump’s bet has paid off to an astonishing degree. Nobody has taken up his dares. Congress has done little, though it may be beginning to stir. The courts, limited by the slow pace of litigation and legitimate substantive and procedural legal barriers to action, offer little short-term relief. So far, anyway, the only real pushback has come from prosecutors and state attorneys general who have probed the conduct of his campaign and foundation. And it has come from a dogged and relentless press, which has accomplished a great deal of disclosure -- disclosure that, in turn, gives rise to the possibility of political response. As other billionaires eye the presidency, it’s not hard to imagine them following the example of minimal ethical compliance and preserving their business entanglements. Contrary to former OGE director Shaub’s admonition, as far as some very rich people were concerned, divestment has, in fact, been too high a price to pay for the presidency. Now, it seems, it doesn’t need to be paid after all. As Trump has set the presidency to protecting his personal business interests and dared the polity to stop him, the polity has responded with a shrug. Perhaps a disgusted shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.

The point about future billionaires now running for president because they no longer need to divest themselves of their businesses really hit home for me. That is not a world I want to live in.

The authors wrote in 2020 -- and now I am writing in 2024. And although Trump is facing a whole bevy of legal challenges and court cases -- none of them have anything to do with the way he used the office of the president for his private inurement. Future billionaires with presidential aspirations: take note.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Boards That Make a Difference by John Carver

2026-07-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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I’ve heard a lot of people talk about “the Carver Model,” but never really knew what it was. Well, now I do, and I’d have to say I’m a pretty big fan. At least on the theory side of it. But how much of it is practical? I don't know, but why don’t I start by just trying to digest the 24 dogears I added as I went along?

In fact, the importance of the owners-to-board link is so great that the proper board job is best described as ownership one step down rather than management one step up. This concept alone completely changes the nature of governance.

That pretty well sums up Carver’s Policy Governance Model. The board is not a group of “super-managers,” it is a group of “mini-owners.” It does not manage anything. It determines what success looks like and holds the staff accountable for getting there.

Certain common practices are such obvious drains on board effectiveness that one does not need a sophisticated model to recognize them. Although some boards may avoid a few of the following conditions, rarely does any one board avoid them all.

Time spent on the trivial. Items of trivial scope or import receive disproportionate attention compared with matters of greater scope and importance. Richard J. Peckham, on joining a major public board in Kansas, found it so lost in trivia that “I thought I’d been banished to outer darkness.” Major program issues go unresolved while boards conscientiously grapple with some small detail. An Illinois school board proudly proclaimed the “active role the members of our board take in purchasing decisions…The administration [in replacing desks in two classrooms] was directed to select three chairs from different companies and have them available for the next board meeting. The board then made the decision on warranty, durability, price and color.” A national survey found that almost half of America’s school boards made the purchasing decisions for tape recorders, cameras, and television sets (National School Boards Association, n.d.). Little wonder that Chait, Holland, and Taylor (1996) claim, “Trustees are often little more than high-powered, well-intentioned people engaged in low level activities” (p. 1).

Short-term bias. The time horizon for board decisions is more distant than anywhere else in the organization. Yet we find boards dealing mainly with the near term and, even more bizarre, with the past. Last month’s financial statement gets more attention than the organization’s strategic position.

Reactive stance. Boards consistently find themselves reacting to staff initiatives rather than making decisions proactively. Proposals for staff action and recommendations for board action so often come from staff that some boards would cease to function if they were asked to create their own agenda.

Reviewing, rehashing, redoing. Some boards spend most of their time going over what their staff has already done. “Eighty-five percent of our time was spent monitoring staff work,” says Glendora Putnam, Boston, about a prominent national board. “We can’t afford that. We have too much wisdom to be put to use.” Just keeping up with a large staff can take prodigious hours and even then can never be done fully. But the salient point is that reviewing, rehashing, and redoing staff work—no matter how well—do not constitute leadership.

Leaky accountability. Boards often allow accountability to “leak” around the chief executive. Having established a CEO position, the board members continue to relate in their official capacities with other staff, either giving them directions or judging their performance, rather than allowing the CEO to do his or her job.

Diffuse authority. It is rare to find a board-executive partnership wherein each party’s authority has been clarified. Often, a vast gray area exists. When a matter lies in this uncertain area, the safe executive response is to take it to the board. Instead of using this opportunity to clarify to whom the decision belongs, the board simply approves or disapproves. The event has been settled, but the boundaries of authority remain as unclear as they were before.

Complete overload. Unless a board rubber-stamps decisions or just ignores issues, it is likely to be overwhelmed by a seemingly impossible job. The board just cannot get to everything and is likely to miss important red flags.

This is a great list of dangers to avoid.

In constructing a new wisdom of governance, I found it necessary to create categories to guide a board’s debate and pronouncements, groupings not derived from administration but from the nature of governance. These categories also serve as vessels to contain board policies as they accumulate, and thereby become divisions of the board policy manual. The categories embrace board policies about (1) ends to be achieved, (2) means (defined simply as non-ends) to be avoided, (3) the interface of board and management, and (4) the practice of governance itself.

A big part of the book is about these four areas of appropriate board action and policy setting. I like their elegance, but find the formal adherence advocated in the book a little unrealistic unless the whole model is willingly embraced by the board. Still, the can serve me as guideposts as I work with my board and help shape their agendas. Essentially, they should define (1) what we should achieve, and (2) what we should not do in pursuit of that achievement. What Carver means by (3) and (4) is a little fuzzy for me right now. Those lessons may reoccur to me as I continue to transcribe.

Remember that the most effective governance controls what needs to be controlled, yet sets free what can be free.

Yeah, that’s what I just said. The board should have complete control over what success looks like, but only control how to get there by proscribing those strategies that it finds objectionable.

As construed by the Policy Governance model, then, all board policies fall into these groups:

1. Ends. The organizational swap with the world. What human needs are to be met (in results terms), for whom (outside the operating organization), and at what cost or relative worth. It is important that no means be included in this category.

2. Executive Limitations. Boundaries that limit the choice of staff means, normally for reasons of prudence and ethics. While means includes practices, activities, circumstances, and methods, the most comprehensive definition for means is simply “non-ends.”

3. Board-Management Delegation. The manner in which authority is passed to the executive or staff component of the organization and the way in which performance using that authority is reported and assessed.

4. Governance Process. The manner in which the board represents the ownership, disciplines its own activities, and carries out its own work of leadership.

And here’s the (3) and (4) I was a little fuzzy about before. As described in a diagram on page 74 that’s too hard for me to reproduce here, the Board sets policy in each area until the point that any action based on a reasonable interpretation of policy is acceptable to it. The whole organization is represented as a circle, divided into four quadrants, one for each policy area. The Board defines its policies “downward” toward the center of the circle from the boundary of each quadrant, delving more deeply in some areas than in others. The space between the inward edge of these policies and the center of the circle is the territory of action and implementation, which the Board has no direct role in. For (1) and (2), authority over this zone is given to the chief staff executive, and for (3) and (4) that authority is given to the chief governance officer.

The most insidious counterfeits are activities associated with good intentions or with well-accepted reasoning. For example, because making more handouts available for training sessions shows good intent or sense, the number and quality of handouts might come to be judged as more important than the effect of training. The areas to which such confusion can extend are endless. In response to public clamor to compensate teachers on the basis of competence, it is not uncommon for the education establishment to propose incentives for teachers who take more graduate courses!

In the social service field, a revered counterfeit is unit cost. Unit cost is the cost in dollars of providing a time unit of service. Pupil-day expenditure is a comparable public school term. Unit cost comes to be the measure of whether a service organization is doing as much per dollar as it should. But unit cost is not related to the effectiveness of a service, so it does not measure productivity (efficiency in producing benefits per dollar), as social programs pretend it does. For example, the unit cost mentality leads to the assumption that $80 per hour or professional activity is better than $110 per hour, although there is absolutely no reason to believe so. Perhaps the $110-per-hour serve is 150 percent more effective in attaining the results sought! Unit cost would simply be an innocuous measure if institutions had not come to believe it to be a true productivity measure.

An organization can become so permeated by the belief that well-intended or reasonable actions (rather than results) are the reason for existence that no one realizes something is awry. A striking example is the allegiance given to services and programs as if they were results. Services and programs are often treated as if they have value in themselves; however, they are only packages of prescribed activities. In Policy Governance, services and programs are always and only means. The ends concept prevents righteous busyness from becoming just as meaningful as results, or perhaps even more so.

The threat of good activity being perceived as an end is so great that it can hardly be overstated. Without constant vigilance and systems to support that vigilance, says Odiorne (1974), “People tend to become so engrossed in activity that they lose sight of its purpose… They become so enmeshed in activity they lose sight of why they are doing it, and the activity becomes a false goal, an end in itself… Falling into the activity trap is not the result of stupidity. In fact, the most intelligent, highly educated people tend to be those most likely to become entrapped in interesting and complex activities” (pp. 1-7).

It is not that good intentions or sensible actions by staff are unimportant. It is that they in no way constitute the reason for an organization’s existence. Commendable activities are only means.

Boy, do I hear that. In coming up with our measurements of quality, I had better make sure we are measuring ends and not means.

A deputy CEO to whom everyone else reports when the CEO is unavailable is almost sure to represent wasted managerial power. More than two executives vertically configured, each with supervision over only one person, almost certainly means someone has a position but no job.

Had to throw that one in, since that was exactly the situation I was previously in.

Though it is unlikely to do so, the board may choose not to address more detailed specifications after it has adopted the top statement. If the board agrees that any reasonable interpretation of the global ends language on the part of the CEO would be acceptable, then it need say no more. That is, if all the possible priorities among subresults, subrecipients, and costs are acceptable, there is no reason for the board to narrow the expected results by passing more policies. The board can simply refrain from further pronouncements and allow the CEO to resolve all smaller or narrower choices among ends. Most boards are understandably reluctant to leave such broad issues to the CEO, so they rarely stop at this point.

The top statement is the global ends statement, or the mission statement, so this means that some boards may only define that and leave all implementation to the CEO. Few associations would do that, but the point is an important one. They could. The board should only define as much as they need to and no more.

Further, the policies do not give the CEO power to do this or that. They take power or latitude away (“You may not…”). The CEO has whatever power the board does not withhold: the board is saying, “Go till we say stop,” rather than “Stop till we say go.”

This is truly how my new association runs things and it is a new dynamic for me to get used to.

Here’s a good summary of how Carver thinks the Board and the CEO (“president”) should interact with each other:

Garden City Community College, Garden City, Kansas

Board-Management Delegation Policy

“Delegation to the President”

All board authority delegated to staff is delegated through the president so that all authority and accountability of staff—as far as the board is concerned—is considered to be the authority and accountability of the president.

1. The board will direct the president to achieve certain results for certain recipients, at a certain cost through the establishment of Ends policies. The board will limit the latitude the president may exercise in practices, methods, conduct, and other “means” through the establishment of Executive Limitations policies.

2. As long as the president uses any reasonable interpretation of the board’s Ends and Executive Limitations policies, the president is authorized to establish all further policies, make all decisions, take all actions, establish all practices, and develop all activities.

3. The board may change its Ends and Executive Limitations policies, thereby shifting the boundary between the board and president domains. By doing so, the board changes the latitude given to the president. So long as any particular delegation is in place, the board members will respect and support the president’s choices.

4. Only decisions of the board acting as a body are binding upon the president.

5. Decisions or instructions of individual board members, officers, or committees are not binding on the president except in rare circumstances when the board has specifically authorized such exercise of authority.

6. In the case of board members or committees requesting information or assistance without board authorization, the president can refuse such requests that require—in the president’s judgment—a material amount of staff time or funds or are disruptive.

Wouldn’t it be great if it really worked that way? Careful what you wish for. Here’s more:

Board members and the CEO are colleagues. The relationship between the CEO and any individual board member is collegial, not hierarchical. Because the CEO is accountable only to the full board and because no board member has individual authority, the CEO and board members are equals. The relationship between the CEO and the board chairperson should be one of supportive peers as well. They are not hierarchically related, because to be so would shift the CEO function to the chairperson.

This is one I really need to work on. The Chairman is not my boss. The Board is my boss. The Chairman and I are peers, each working to achieve the Ends set by the Board. I should stop acting like he’s my boss.

If the board adopts the discipline of monitoring only what it has already addressed in policy, its anxiety will drive it to develop all the policies needed. “If you haven’t said how it ought to be, don’t ask how it is,” describes the principle that forces a board to monitor instead of meander.

Great advice. How do you implement it?

The importance of limiting CEO evaluation to the criteria represented by board policies on ends and executive limitations is so great as to merit repetition. It is common for boards to indulge their (or their CEO’s) need to assess CEO skills and personality. To be sure, CEOs, like anyone else, have areas that need improvement. It is to their benefit for them to seek the help of knowledgeable advisors and to continue their education and development. But if, commendably, they do so and ends are not achieved or executive limitations not observed, why should they earn points for self-improvement efforts? On the other hand, if they do no self-development but achieve the ends and observe the executive limitations, why should they be penalized? The purpose of evaluating the CEO is not to become the CEO’s coach. In fact, it is best for the board not to think of itself as evaluating the CEO at all. It should evaluate the organization based on relevant board policies and pin that evaluation on the CEO.

Here, here. And dammit, if that isn’t what my new Board is doing with me. They are giving me a mechanism to pursue my own professional development, but they are not tying my evaluation to it. I’m being evaluated on performance goals for the association.

Governing - Hands On!

Examples of What the Board Should Do Hands On

1. Set the board’s work plan and agenda for the year and for each meeting

2. Determine board training and development needs

3. Attend to discipline in board attendance, following bylaws and other self-imposed rules

4. Become expert in governance

5. Meet with and gather wisdom from the ownership

6. Establish the limits of the CEO’s authority to budget, administer finances and compensation, establish programs, and otherwise manage the organization

7. Examine monitoring data and determine where the organization has achieved a reasonable interpretation of board-stated criteria

Managing the Staff - Hands Off!

Examples of What the Board and Its CGO Should Keep Hands Off

1. Establish services, programs, curricula, or budgets

2. Approve the CEO’s personnel, program, or budgetary plans

3. Render any judgments or assessments of staff activity for which no previous board expectations have been stated

4. Determine staff development needs, terminations, or promotions

5. Design staff jobs or instruct any staff member subordinate to the CEO (except when the CEO has assigned a staff member to some board function)

6. Decide on the organizational chart and staffing requirements

7. Establish committees to advice or help staff

+ + +

The Board’s Responsibility for Board Performance

Board members, not staff, are trustees in a moral sense for the ownership and, consequently, must bear initial responsibility for the integrity of governance. “He that would govern others, first should be the master of himself” (Massinger, 1979). The board is responsible for its own development, its own job design, its own discipline, and its own performance. Before any discussion of board process to improve governance, this responsibility must be clear to board and staff alike. Primary responsibility for board development does not rest in the CEO, staff, funding bodies, or government. These other parties doubtless have an interest in better governance. They may even seize the opportunity to affect governance quality. But they are not where responsibility for governance resides.

Only responsible stewardship can justify a board’s considerable authority. Board members who do not choose to accept this breadth of responsibility should resign. If they do not, it is the responsibility of other board members to structure a board development system in which such persons are, if not “converted,” eliminated from the board. Being warm, willing to attend meetings, inclined to donate money, and interested in the organizational subject matter do not constitute responsible board membership. These characteristics are desirable but far from sufficient.

It is inviting to rely on the CEO to motivate a board. This scenario frequently extends further than the provision of an occasional motivational “fix.” It may extend as far as spoon-feeding. No matter how well the CEO tells the board what to do and when to do it, governance cannot be excellent under these conditions. Going through the motions, even the “right” motions, is fake leadership that transforms a CEO into a baby-sitter. Only a deluded board waits for its CEO to make it a good board.

Under these conditions, public-spirited and ethical CEOs prod the board to do and say what they think a responsible governing body should do and say. With time, observers of such a situation may question the need for the board to be responsible: “If everything turns out well, what is the fuss? Getting the board to be truly responsible may be pedantic and perhaps unrealistic. After all, board members frequently are just volunteers; how can a part-time, outside group of largely nonprofessionals presume to tell a professional or technical staff what to do?” This litany impedes any further inclination to motivate leaders to lead.

The preceding unhappy scenario is the best-case scenario! What if the CEO is not public-spirited and ethical? The improprieties resulting from lackadaisical governance are easy to imagine. I have observed boards whose laissez-faire rubber-stamping came to an abrupt end upon discovery of misconduct. Most nonprofit boards are too private or too small for public embarrassment to be a realistic threat, but they must endure their own awareness of having been asleep at the throttle. Their failure may have been not in misjudging a specific issue but simply in not having realized that the throttle belonged to them. The debacles at Enron, WorldCom, and other corporations are prime examples of the failure of governance that are familiar to anyone who reads a newspaper.

Boards are responsible for their attendance, discipline, governance methods, development, agendas, and ability to envision the future. Others can help. Surely the CEO should even be required to help. Helpers, however, can only assist a body that has assumed full responsibility for itself; helpers can only marginally compensate when ostensibly responsible parties are not taking responsibility.

The board of the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine has set the standards to be met in the conduct of board affairs. Notice how the board makes clear that it, not its staff, is responsible for the board’s governance performance.

Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine, Cleveland

Governance Process Policy

“Governing Style”

The board will govern with an emphasis on (a) outward vision rather than an internal preoccupation, (b) strategic leadership more than administrative detail, (c) clear distinction of board and chief executive roles, (d) collective rather than individual decisions, (e) future rather than past or present, and (f) proactivity rather than reactivity. The board will:

1. Deliberate in many voices, but govern in one.

2. Cultivate a sense of group responsibility. The board, not the staff, will be responsible for excellence in governing. The board will be an initiator of policy, not merely a reactor to staff initiatives. The board will use the expertise of individual members to enhance the ability of the board as a body, rather than to substitute the individual judgments for the board’s values.

3. Direct, control and inspire the organization through the careful establishment of broad written policies reflecting the board’s values and perspectives. The board’s major focus will be on the intended long term impacts outside the operating organization, not on the administrative or programmatic means of attaining those effects.

4. Enforce upon itself whatever discipline is needed to govern with excellence. Discipline will apply to matters such as attendance, preparation for meetings, policymaking principles, respect of roles, and ensuring the continuity of governance capability. Continual board development will include orientation of new members in the board’s governance process and periodic board discussion of process improvement. The board will allow no officer, individual or committee of the board to hinder or be an excuse for not fulfilling its commitments.

5. Monitor and discuss the board’s process and performance at each meeting. Self-monitoring will include comparison of board activity and discipline to policies in the Governance Process and Board-Staff Linkage categories.

This stuff really speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Do I really need to say anything?

Here is a summary of the board’s job products:

1. Linkage to the ownership. The board acts in trusteeship for its ownership and serves as the legitimizing connection between this base and the organization.

2. Explicit governing policies. The values of the whole organization are encompassed by the board’s explicit enunciation and proper categorization of broad policies.

3. Assurance of satisfactory organizational performance. Although the board is not responsible for carrying out the staff’s job, it must ensure that the staff as a total body meets the criteria the board has set. In this way, its accountability for that performance is fulfilled.

Each of these three products is a job output, not a job activity, though any number of attendant activities are implied.

+ + +

Bissell Centre of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Governance Process Policy

“Committee Principles”

The board may, from time to time, establish committees to help carry out its responsibilities. To preserve board holism, committees will be used sparingly, only when other methods have been deemed inadequate. Committees will be used so as to minimally interfere with the wholeness of the board’s job.

1. Board committees may not speak or act for the board except when formally given such authority for specific and time-limited purposes. Such authority will be carefully stated in order not to conflict with authority delegated to the Executive Director.

2. Board committees are to help the board do its job, not to help the staff do its job. Committees will assist the board chiefly by preparing policy alternatives and implications for board deliberation. Board committees are not to be created by the board to advise staff.

3. If a board committee is used to monitor organizational performance in a given area, the same committee will not have helped the board create policy in that area. This is to prevent committee identification with organizational parts rather than the whole.

4. Board committees cannot exercise authority over staff, and in keeping with the board’s focus on the future, board committees will ordinarily have no direct dealings with current staff operations. Further, the board will not impede its direct delegation to the Executive Director by requiring approval of a board committee before an executive action.

If ever there were extracts that I need to take out a read from time to time it is these. Things are so clearly stated and they make SO MUCH SENSE!!!

To promote the degree of strategic leadership championed in these pages, five qualifications, among others, are necessary:

1. Commitment to the ownership and to the organization’s specific area of endeavor. As agents of the organization’s ownership, board members must be committed to that trust. Commitment to the ends as currently stated is important, though less so, for ends are a continuing creation of the board itself. Therefore, fidelity to those in whose name ends are created is more essential than fidelity to the current wording.

2. Propensity for thinking in terms of systems and context. Some people focus quickly on parts. Whatever the relationship of whole to part might be, these persons more readily focus on the part itself for inspection, discussion, and decision. Such persons, with all good intentions, place distractions, if not massive roadblocks, in the way of strategic leadership. Prospective members who are more comfortable with parts have a valuable gift, but one that can more usefully be shared as a volunteer advisor to staff than as a board member. The board needs members who are cybernetically aware, drawn naturally to the harmony of the whole.

3. Ability and eagerness to deal with values, vision, and the long term. The board members who make the best contributions are those who have a natural propensity for looking not only beyond the stream of single events but beyond systems to the values on which they are based. It is only a small step from divining today’s values as they currently are to planning tomorrow’s values as they should be. What stronger argument can be made that a board member’s greatest gift to enterprise is educing, weighing, challenging, and frequently fighting over values?

4. Ability to participate assertively in deliberation. Productive board deliberation depends on bringing the foregoing characteristics to the governance struggle. Boards are overly tolerant of members who fail to share their capacities in a way that enhances the deliberative process. It is not enough to have the potential to be a good board member; the potential must be manifested through participation.

5. Willingness to delegate, to allow others to make decisions. Board members, with respect to one another, must be able to share power in the group process and, with respect to staff, must be able to delegate. Board members who are loath to delegate will impair the board’s leadership by constantly bringing small issues up for consideration. They will impair staff by denying them the opportunity to grow.

+ + +

Mediocrity can pass tests that excellence fails.

This is referring specifically to the funding bodies, regulatory agencies, and lawmakers that may require associations to do certain things or organize themselves in certain ways, things and ways that made run counter to the principles of Policy Governance. Carver’s advice is, obviously, you must follow the law, but that’s not why I flagged this quote. To me its another reminder of the way the mediocre world rejects the unrecognized genius. It’s the mediocre ones who design the tests, so is it any wonder that the mediocre are the ones best positioned to pass those tests? When excellence fails, it isn’t because its inferior to mediocrity, it’s because it’s being measured against inappropriate standards. It’s like the CME world that is set up to measure class time instead of learning.

For self-evaluation to have practical effect, it must be frequent. In fact, frequent crude evaluations have a far greater effect than infrequent precise ones. For that reason, boards should devote at least a brief amount of time in each meeting to evaluating whether they are on course. An annual, more meticulous evaluation may be used as well, but it will not have as great an effect on ongoing board performance. In no event should board self-evaluation be a matter of downloading some generic form from the Internet.

Yes, I’m going to do this.

Universally Accepted Principles of Accountable Governance

1. The board governs on behalf of all owners.

2. The board is the highest authority in the company, below only the owners.

3. The board is the initial authority in the company.

4. The board is accountable for everything about the company.

5. All authority and accountability is vested in the board as a group.

6. Governance roles and executive roles have different purposes.

7. Delegation should me maximized, short of risking the board’s fulfillment of its accountability.

8. Assessing board performance requires evaluation of both governance and management.

And here’s the final summary.

So what are the essential elements of the model, in the absence of which one can be said to be borrowing from Policy Governance but not using it? After all, the use of the word model is not happenstance; used in its scientific rather than its structural sense, it means a system of integrated, interacting parts. As with a clock, removing one wheel may not spoil the clock’s looks, but it seriously damages its ability to tell time. It becomes an ornament, not a clock. So in Policy Governance, which wheels would have to be in place to still have our “clock?” Here, adapted from previous publications, is a list of the minimum requirements:

1. The board connects its authority and accountability to those who morally (if not legally) own the organization—if such a class exists beyond the board itself—seeing its role as servant-leader to and for that group. Owners, as used in the Policy Governance model, are not all of the stakeholders but are only those who stand in a position corresponding to shareholders in an equity corporation. Therefore, staff and clients are not owners unless they independently qualify as such.

2. With the ownership above it and operational matters below it, a governing board forms a distinct link in the chain of command or moral authority. Its role is commander, not advisor. It exists to exercise that authority and properly empower others rather than to be management’s consultant, ornament, instrument, or adversary. The board—not the staff—bears full and direct responsibility for the process and products of governance, just as it bears accountability for any authority and performance expectations delegated to others.

3. The board makes authoritative decisions directed toward management and toward itself, its individual members, and committees only as a total group. That is, the board’s authority is a group authority rather than a collection of individual authorities.

4. The board defines in writing (a) the results, changes, or benefits that should come about for (b) the specified recipients, beneficiaries, or other targeted groups, and (c) at what cost or relative priority for the various benefits or various beneficiaries. These are not all the possible benefits that may occur but are those that form the purpose of the organization, the achievement of which constitutes organizational success. Policy documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Ends in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

5. The board defines in writing the behaviors, values added, practices, disciplines, and conduct of the board itself and of the board’s delegation and accountability relationship with its own subcomponents and with the executive part of the organization. Because these are non-ends decisions, they are called board means to distinguish them from ends and staff means. All board behaviors, decisions, and documents must be consistent with these pronouncements. In the terminology of the Policy Governance model, documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Governance Process and Board-Management Delegation but can be called by whatever names a board chooses, as long as the concepts are strictly preserved.

6. The board makes decisions with respect to its staff’s means decisions and actions only in a prospective way in order simultaneously (a) to avoid prescribing means and (b) to place off-limits those means that would be unacceptable even if they work. Policy documents containing solely these decisions are categorized as Executive Limitations in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

7. The board’s decisions in Ends, Governance Process, Board-Management Delegation, and Executive Limitations begin at the broadest, most inclusive level and, if necessary, continue into more detailed levels that narrow the interpretative range of higher levels, proceeding one articulated level at a time. These documents are exhaustive, replacing or obviating board expressions of mission, vision, philosophy, values, strategy, goals, and budget. They are called policies in the terminology of the Policy Governance model but can be called by whatever name a board chooses, as long as the concept is strictly preserved.

8. If the board chooses to delegate to management through a chief executive officer, it honors the exclusive authority and accountability of that role as the sole connector between governance and management. In any event, the board never delegates the same authority or responsibility to more than one point.

9. In delegating decisions beyond the ones recorded in board policies, the board grants the delegatee the right to use any reasonable interpretation of those policies. In the case of Ends and Executive Limitations, when a CEO exists, the delegatee is the CEO. In the case of Governance Process and Board-management Delegation, that delegatee is the CGO (chief governance officer), except when the board has explicitly designated another board member or board committee.

10. The board monitors organizational performance solely through fair but systematic assessment of whether a reasonable interpretation of its Ends policies is being achieved within the boundaries set by a reasonable interpretation of its Executive Limitations policies. If there is a CEO, this assessment constitutes the CEO’s evaluation.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

2026-06-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

At the time, I had thought my secret meetings with Roy Stonerow, where he taught me rudimentary magic and gave me a different vision of the universe, were just that—secret. But now I can’t help but wonder if Otis and my mother might have had some inkling of what I was up to. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it is difficult to believe a young teenage boy could have kept such a thing hidden from his parents in such a small town. But I still like to think they were ignorant, especially my mother. Even now I am just beginning to realize the kind of pain she must have felt knowing what her son was doing in that little red house down the street. I guess I will never know if she knew or not, but I have to say I did not do what I did, I did not learn what I learned, out of any kind of spite for the way of life she offered me. It is a good way, her life, and for thousands it is all they will ever need, but it was not for me. I am not proud of this, but neither am I ashamed.

+ + +

Brisbane followed the back of the black-clad ork down a short, dark hallway with Ternosh and Wister right behind him. The procession marched on in silence and shortly they emerged in another large chamber lit by the flickering light of torches.

How do they keep all these torches lit? Brisbane wondered briefly. And where is all the smoke? These things are burning constantly and none of these rooms are smoky.

Brisbane’s wonderment about the torches did not last long. His attention was quickly captured by the shape and contents of the chamber before him. It was circular, nearly as huge as the banquet chamber, and in the center of the room was a pit, an arena that dropped ten feet below the floor of the chamber with no visible means of entrance or exit. The floor just suddenly gave way and dropped straight down to the circular pit. All around the pit, the pug-trolang which it had to be, were stone benches like the ones surrounding the table in the banquet chamber, except in two places. If the pit was the face of a clock, at six o’clock sat a stone chair and at twelve o’clock stood a stone pedestal. On the pedestal was a golden incense burner like the one Ternosh had used to summon his Demosk.

And, leaning against the face of the pedestal, scabbarded and point down on the edge of the pug-trolang, was Angelika, her emerald twinkling in the torchlight.

Brisbane’s heart rose into his throat as he saw her. Angelika! his mind called out to her. I have found you!

—Be patient,— was her only reply. —Be patient and be strong.—

The black-clad orks quickly went ahead and took their seats around the pit. Ternosh held Brisbane back and Wister stood solidly beside Tornestor. The Sumak gestured to the outer wall of the circular chamber and Brisbane saw it was lined with racks of weapons, red-eye shields, and black armor.

“Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane,” Tornestor said. “These are the finest weapons and armor of the clan. Choose well and may they serve you well in the pug-trolang.”

Wister immediately went to the wall and began to put on a chainmail vest that had been hanging there. Brisbane turned to Tornestor.

“Sumak Tornestor,” he said, summoning as much respect as he could into his voice. “Am I to understand I may arm myself with any weapon here?”

Tornestor looked at Brisbane with a look mixed of surprise and contempt. “You are unfamiliar with our ways,” the Sumak said. “You are not to speak to me unless I speak to you first. I will forget your indiscretion this time. Yes, the choice of weapon is yours.”

Brisbane bowed his head. “I am sorry for misspeaking.” He brought his head up and pointed at Angelika. “May I use that sword?”

Wister was picking out a shield.

Tornestor looked at the sword and then turned back to Brisbane. “No,” he said. “That weapon bares an enchantment upon it and it has been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye. No one may use it.”

Of course you can’t use her, Brisbane told himself. That would have been too easy. He quickly bowed again and backed away from the Sumak.

Tornestor began to discuss something with Ternosh and Brisbane was left alone to arm himself. He looked back at Wister and saw the ork had chosen a huge battle axe to fight with. Brisbane turned back to the weapons.

Angelika, he thought. They won’t let me use you. What should I do?

—Patience, young Brisbane. You will wield me soon enough. You can defeat this evil creature without me. These demons think they can control you and me, but they cannot. Our time will come.—

Demons? Brisbane thought.

—They are abominations of nature, Brisbane. They must be destroyed.—

Brisbane began to look through the pieces of armor, searching for something that would protect him and yet not hamper his movements. He found a chainmail shirt, much like the vest Wister had chosen, and after removing his cumbersome red and white robes, he put it on over the simple cloth shirt and pants he wore underneath. The stiff material under the chains of the armor was black.

Abominations, Angelika?

—Abominations, Brisbane. Twisted creatures of evil born against the will of Grecolus. They must be destroyed.—

Angelika’s voice was like an itch in his head. Brisbane blindly picked a round red-eye shield off the wall and began to examine a rack full of all sorts of swords.

—Choose well, young Brisbane. Even in this den of evil there are some blades of quality. You’ll need something sharp and sturdy to gut this devil.—

Brisbane picked up a sword and swung it experimentally through the air. Its balance was too far off so he returned it to the rack. He chose another and, liking the feel of this one, tested its sharpness against the heel of his head. The weapon was double-edged and had been recently sharpened and oiled. Whoever it had belonged to before the orks got hold of it had taken good care of it.

—A fine weapon, Brisbane. More than enough to spill evil blood.—

Brisbane, oblivious to his surroundings, began to take the sword through the combat exercises Roundtower had taught him so long ago. He whirled it through striking thrusts and defensive postures, getting into the feel of the blade. It felt good in his hands and Brisbane began to speed up the execution of his exercises.

—Yes, Brisbane. That’s the way. You and the sword. You are one.—

Brisbane finished, bringing the blade to his side as if he had a scabbard to put it in. He suddenly became aware of where he was and he looked stiffly up at the orks watching him. Ternosh had left, but both Tornestor and Wister were there, their eyes betraying a certain amazement they felt for what they had just seen.

Brisbane met Wister’s red eyes. “Let’s do it.”

Wister actually smiled at Brisbane and then started off in the direction of the pug-trolang. Brisbane fell into step behind him and Tornestor followed the human.

When they arrived at the edge of the pit, Tornestor took the seat that had been placed there for him and Wister and Brisbane dropped themselves down into the battle circle. They took positions about ten feet apart, facing each other, and stood still waiting for the command to begin.

Brisbane looked up at the edge of the pit and at the orkish faces looking down on him. The black-clad orks sat evenly spaced around the circle, and the two with red stripes sat on either side of the Sumak as they had at dinner. Brisbane was surprised to see Ternosh standing next to the pedestal—and Angelika—with his hands clasped behind his back. Brisbane turned back to Wister and found himself in the middle of an angry staring match.

A hush fell over the proceedings as Tornestor rose to his full seven feet. “The klatru of the Clan of the Red Eye,” he announced formally, “has gathered here around the pug-trolang to witness a masokom between our brothers as described in the ancient ways. At my signal, Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane was clash in battle that will not stop until one of them is dead and gone on to Gruumsh’s battlefield.”

“Praise be to the victor,” the assemblage chanted as one. “And strength to the loser in his new conflict.”

“Grumak Ternosh,” Tornestor said. “Summon your Demosk to witness the masokom.”

Tornestor sat and Ternosh lifted the lid off the incense burner. The Grumak waved his hand over it and Brisbane saw a spark jump off one of his fingers and fall into the golden vessel.

He’s summoning his Demosk, Brisbane thought as Wister’s eyes bore into him. Super. That smoke is going to make us all loopy. I’ll be lucky just to see Wister, to say nothing about killing him.

—He is not your match, Brisbane. None of them are.—

Brisbane looked up to see Angelika but his eyes were drawn to the smoke already pouring out of the five-pointed vents in the lid of the incense burner. Ternosh began his eerie chanting and Brisbane turned back to his opponent.

Wister stood taut, like a dog on a chain, and as the white smoke began to swirl around him, Brisbane thought the ork began to look more and more like a dog. His pig snout became a furry muzzle and his pig ears flopped down like those of a lap dog. The vision was fleeting and sporadic, as most of the smoke stayed well above the floor of the pug-trolang. Every once and a while, a wisp would blow in front of Brisbane, smelling thickly of oranges, distorting Wister from an armored pig-man to an armored dog-man. For a gleeful moment, Brisbane tried to decide which vision was uglier.

Brisbane decided it would be best not to take his eyes off Wister again. There was no telling exactly when Tornestor’s order to commence combat would come, but Brisbane knew when it did, Wister would be on him like all the fury in the hells. To his right, where Ternosh and the pedestal—and Angelika—were, he heard a familiar voice.

“Why have you summoned me, Grumak Ternosh?”

The Demosk. The voice was inside his head again, but this time he could clearly hear it in his ears, too. Except the voice in his mind was speaking common and the voice in his ears was speaking orkish. The effect was strange and unsettling. Wister shifted his grip on the battle axe. Brisbane wondered again exactly what a Demosk was.

“A masokom,” Brisbane heard Ternosh say, “must be witnessed. Grum Wister has challenged Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane’s head spun as a wisp of smoke flowed around it.

“I am ready,” the Demosk said.

Out of the corner of his smoke-irritated eye, Brisbane saw Sumak Tornestor rise to his feet again. Wister’s right foot took a half-step towards Brisbane and was slowly dragged back.

—Here it comes, Brisbane. The evil must be vanquished.—

“Begin!” Tornestor’s gravel voice boomed out over the pug-trolang and Wister seemed to fly at Brisbane, his shield held in front of him and the battle axe cocked back, ready to strike.

Brisbane stood his ground, watching the ork advance and the position of the weapon in his hand. Wister brought the axe down on Brisbane with deathly quickness, but Brisbane was able to shift to the ork’s side and deflect the blow with his shield.

The first clang of metal against metal was met with a rousing cheer from the orks assembled around the pit. Wister ran past Brisbane with his momentum and turned back when he was out of his attack range.

“I’m going to kill you, human!” the Grum shouted as he charged in and swung his axe sideways at Brisbane’s head.

Brisbane ducked easily under the sweeping strike and stabbed at Wister as his body turned a flank towards him. His blade glanced off the ork’s chainmail vest and left Wister uninjured. The ork brought the axe back in another sweeping arc, this one aimed at Brisbane’s midsection. Brisbane had plenty of time to back up and out of the path of the sharp blade and, as he did, a surprising realization came over him.

Wister was, quite simply, a terrible warrior. His attack was certainly ferocious, but it lacked any semblance of grace or finesse. The ork had no sort of practiced control over his weapon, he just madly swung it back and forth and up and down, hoping to hit his opponent and finish him off quickly. Surely if that axe blade did connect with Brisbane’s body, the combat would instantly be over, but the ork’s strikes were clumsy and repetitious, and Brisbane had no problem avoiding them.

Wister charged Brisbane again with a cry of rage and Brisbane easily rotated away from him, pushing the blow off his shield. The orks around the pit were cheering with every charge Wister made and they let out disappointed moans each time Brisbane thwarted the attack.

Wister was turning to charge again.

—What’s the matter?— Angelika’s voice tolled in his head, muted strangely by the effects of the incense smoke. —He has left himself open to your blade many times. Why do you not strike him down?—

“Die!” Wister screamed as Brisbane brushed off another charge and retreated back several steps.

He’s no warrior, Angelika.

Brisbane thought he was just thinking these words to his sword, but he must have said them aloud because Wister, who had been panting for breath, suddenly opened his eyes wide in senseless rage and jumped into another charge.

—Of course not. Evil can never stand up against holy forces. End his unnatural life, Brisbane. Destroy this evil monster.—

Brisbane pushed Wister’s charge aside and ineffectually struck his sword against the ork’s armor.

—That’s the way, Brisbane. Go for the head. It is foolishly unprotected.—

Angelika, this is not combat. It takes no skill to kill such an opponent.

Wister turned and stood panting out of Brisbane’s reach. Sweat was running down his pig face. Groans were beginning to come from the orks assembled around the pit—groans of displeasure. This was evidently not the sort of spectacle they had expected.

“…kill…you…human…” Wister said in between breaths in a mad litany of rage. He rushed into battle again but this time did not charge past Brisbane. Instead he stopped before him and began to engage in more traditional fighting.

This was much better than the crazy charges the ork had made before, but his attack was still unskilled and clumsy. Brisbane had no problem avoiding or deflecting the slow strikes of the battle axe. He could either dodge aside or absorb the impact on his shield and sometimes he could even foil an attack with the blade of his sword. Wister had left himself open to fatal attack many times, but each time he did, Brisbane found himself unable to take advantage of the opening. Occasionally, he would strike at Wister’s armor for show, knowing he would not hurt the ork that way. It was just hard for Brisbane to kill like this. The orks he had killed before had been somehow different. Their skill hadn’t been much better, but the circumstances had been very different. Then, he had been fighting to protect himself and the others in his party from a vicious attack begun by the orks. Now, it was a fight of honor, with rigid rules and customs, wholly different from the slaughter he had taken part in beside the Mystic River. It was hard for Brisbane to pinpoint, but this battle with Wister down here in the pug-trolang with the entire klatru watching was somehow more important than any battle he had ever fought before. It was important that he win this battle, but there was something else that seemed even more important. To strike Wister down so easily, like a rag doll, was far beneath what this kind of combat demanded. In a way, killing the ork with the ease of removing an opponent’s pawn from a chessboard would destroy the entire orkish institution of the masokom and the pug-trolang.

—What do you care of this? They are evil. They are the enemy.—

So I’ve been told.

Suddenly, Wister broke off his attack and stepped back and away from Brisbane. The ork looked up at the edge of the pit and Brisbane’s eyes followed his. The smoke from the burning incense was much thicker up there and through it Brisbane could make out the vague shapes of the other orks. The huge Tornestor at one end, the black-clad klatru lining the rim, and Ternosh with his glowing Demosk at the other. All were silent and seemed to be waiting for something.

Wister took a moment to catch his breath. He returned his gaze to Brisbane and quietly addressed the group. “He is toying with me,” the Grum said. “His skill far surpasses mine. I am no match for him. I declare myself the loser.”

With that statement, Wister dropped his shield and his axe on either side of himself and pulled his chainmail vest apart to reveal his hairy chest. “You have won, Grum Brisbane. Send me quickly to the army of Gruumsh One-Eye.” Wister closed his red eyes.

Brisbane was not sure what to do. Wister’s intention was obvious. He wanted Brisbane to plunge his sword into his heart, killing him. Wister had named him the winner, but now Brisbane felt like anything else but.

When Brisbane had not done anything for a full minute, Tornestor spoke. “Grum Brisbane, Grum Wister had conceded defeat. Will you not end the masokom?”

Brisbane kept his eyes on Wister. The ork had not moved or spoken since he had closed his eyes. Until Tornestor had spoken, Brisbane had thought all time had stopped.

“Must I?” Brisbane asked.

—Yes!—

“It is your duty,” Tornestor said. “Grum Wister has lost his challenge. He cannot be left alive.”

Brisbane slowly raised his sword. He looked at it carefully. It really was a fine weapon, well cared for and perfectly balanced.

—Do it, young Brisbane. It is your first step in regaining me. Do this and none of them will be able to stop you. I will be yours again. I will be yours.—

The voice was like sweet music in his head. Deep and throaty, if Angelika had been a woman she would have been fair of face of voluptuous of figure. The voice was that of a secret harem girl, the one kept in hiding who could please her master like no other. Brisbane listened to that voice and realized he was reacting exactly as if she were a woman whispering wet promises of sexual ecstasy instead of a sword directing him to kill Wister. His heart was beating hard and fast and he could feel the beginnings of an erection in his underpants.

Brisbane thrust his sword into Wister’s chest and the ork dropped to the floor, his life flooding out of the wound. There was no release for Brisbane, the way there should have been if the metaphor of sexual congress was to be extended. There was no sense of victory in it. There was only a sinking feeling of disgust that quivered in his gut and pulled his testicles back up close to his body.

—It is done. Praise Grecolus for his wisdom and Brisbane for his courage.—

Shut up, Angelika. Just shut up.

“Grum Brisbane has defeated Grum Wister,” Brisbane heard the Demosk say. “Do you require anything else of me, Grumak Ternosh?”

Brisbane looked up at Ternosh and the pedestal.

“No,” Ternosh said.

Instantly, the figure of the Demosk vanished and the smoke stopped coming out of the vents. Brisbane went over to the side of the pug-trolang and he was hauled out by some of the black-clad orks. By then the smoke that had filled the room had almost completely dissipated. Slowly and silently, the orks began to file out of the chamber, leaving only Ternosh, Brisbane, and the body of Wister in the pit. The orks all avoided eye contact with Brisbane as they strode past him.

“What now?” Brisbane asked the Grumak.

Ternosh took the sword and shield away from Brisbane and began to help him off with the chainmail shirt. “You have won,” he said. “You now take Wister’s place in the clan. You are now my first Grum.”

Brisbane looked down into the pit. “I’m your only Grum.”

“What was that?” Ternosh asked.

Brisbane shook his head. “What about his body?”

“It will be removed later.”

“What did he mean?” Brisbane asked. “What is the army of Gruumsh One-Eye?”

Ternosh sighed as he helped Brisbane back into his robes. “Another time, Brisbane. It has been a very long day.”

Brisbane agreed it had been a very long day indeed.

Ternosh said goodnight and left Brisbane alone in the chamber. On his way out, the Grumak put the armor and weapon back in the racks against the wall.

Brisbane turned to look at Angelika leaning against the pedestal under the incense burner. He thought about going over there and taking her. He thought about taking her and trying to find his way out of these caves. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out, killing anyone who stood between him and the exit. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out of the compound, killing the orks and their guard dogs in a mad rush for freedom. He thought about all these things, but in the end he decided to leave Angelika where she was for now and go back to his chamber. Ternosh had been right, it had been a long day, and anything he thought about doing could certainly wait until tomorrow.

Brisbane quickly got out of there before Angelika started talking to him again.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry

2026-06-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

This would have been a much better book if it wasn’t a prequel to Lonesome Dove.

In his epic masterpieces ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘Streets of Laredo,’ Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Now McMurtry dazzles us once more with the long-awaited story of their early adventures.

As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions -- led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western -- they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life….

That’s from the back of my paperback copy. And, as usual, Dead Man’s Walk is all of those things, but it is also -- possibly -- something not described.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.

This is clearly the story of “young Gus and young Call” and, as such, it is somewhat limited in its scope. Young Gus and Young Call, after all, have to grow up to be Old Gus and Old Call, so there are only so many scrapes that they can get into in Dead Man’s Walk. But their view here of the “wild Indians” is revealing for what it says and what it doesn’t.

In the narrative, Buffalo Hump and his Comanche warriors had just attacked the squad of Texas Rangers, killing some and scalping others. The encounter unnerves young Gus and young Call, and makes them both realize that they -- even as famed Texas Rangers -- are up against something neither of them understand nor, likely, are competent to deal with.

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

A lot of Dead Man’s Walk is about this journey through another people’s emptiness -- or, more pointedly; another people’s fullness that was only perceived as empty. Time and time again, young Gus and young Call will encounter these Comanches, and the Comanches will slowly kill more and more of their number, steal more and more of their horses, until they are practically alone and barefoot in the emptiness.

They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Thematically, there is this clash of cultures, this way in which “white rules” has been surrounded and subsumed by the “people of the emptiness,” and there are only a handful of times in which McMurtry allows the white rules to exert themselves.

“Ain’t you going to scalp him?” Bigfoot asked. “You killed him. It’s your scalp.”

Call was startled. It had never occurred to him to scalp the Comanche boy. He was a young boy. Although he was glad that he had escaped death himself, he felt no pride in the act he had just committed -- the boy had been daring, in his view, to float down a swollen river, armed only with a knife, clinging to a dead mule in hopes of surprising and killing an armed Ranger. The reward for his bravery had been a bullet wound that nearly tore his head off. He would never ride the prairies again, or raid farms. Although he had had to kill him, Call thought the boy’s bravery deserved better than what it had got him. There would be no time to bury the boy, anyway -- the thought of cutting his hair off did not appeal.

“No, I don’t want to scalp him,” Call said.

“He would have scalped you, if he could have,” Bigfoot said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Call said. “Scalping’s the Indian way. It ain’t my way.”

“It’ll be your way when you’re a year or two older, boy -- if you survive,” Shadrach said. Then he casually knelt by the Comanche boy and took his scalp. When he finished, he pulled the boy well back into the current and let him float away.

It’s small, and it’s feeble, but it is Call’s (and McMurtry’s) way of exerting his misplaced frontier morality. Most of the time, however, it is the Indians and their ways that drive the Rangers, not the other way around.

As Buffalo Hump approached, holding his spotted pony to a slow walk, Call felt the air change. The Comanche’s body shone with grease; a necklace made of claws hung on his bare chest. Call looked at Gus, to see if he felt the change, and Gus nodded. They had entered the air of the wild men -- even the smell of the Indian horses was different.

They change the very air around them, enveloping their white adversaries with an “air of danger,” or the “air where quick death is.”

And even when Call and Gus try to adapt to these Indian ways in order to better survive in their emptiness, they are miserable failures.

“How do Indians ever kill them?” Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.

“Why, with arrows -- how else?” Bigfoot asked.

Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone -- he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.

A sense of trespass. That sums up the hidden part of Dead Man’s Walk pretty well. Gus and Call are trespassing in a place they don’t belong. They collide again and again with this rough reality, and throughout, despite all the painful lessons that they are given, they never seem to adapt or truly learn.

“We’re back where it’s wild again,” Call said.

Lady Carey happened to overhear the remark -- she drew rein for a moment, looking toward a faint outline of mountains in the east.

“Yes, it’s wild, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s like a smell. I smelled it in Africa and now I smell it here.”

“It means we have to be careful,” Call said.

Lady Carey looked again at the distant mountains.

“Quite the contrary, Corporal Call,” she said. “It means we have to be wild, like the wild men.”

And that’s, ultimately, the problem. Young Gus and Young Call can’t be wild, because they have to become Old Gus and Old Call. Perhaps Dead’s Man Walk can be read as the set of experiences that helped form those essential characters, but, frankly, I found myself more frequently rooting for Buffalo Hump and wishing for his story to be more fully told.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright

2026-06-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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Can you beat a book with two colons in its title? Or maybe that’s not the title, because on the first page it just says The Moral Animal, and on the second page it says The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. Whatever the book is called, it’s both a real mindbender and probably the best book I’ve read on evolution. Wright gets my special praise primarily for the following passage:

Before we return to Darwin’s life, one caution is in order. So far we’ve been analyzing the human mind in the abstract; we’ve talked about “species-typical” adaptations designed to maximize fitness. When we shift our focus from the whole species to any one individual, we should not expect that person to chronically maximize fitness, to optimally convey his or her genes to future generations. And the reason goes beyond the one that has so far been stressed: that most human beings don’t live in an environment much like the one for which their minds were designed. Environments—even the environments for which organisms are designed—are unpredictable. That is why behavioral flexibility evolved in the first place. And unpredictability, by its nature, cannot be mastered. As John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put it, “Natural selection cannot directly ‘see’ an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.”

Hallelujah. This is the first time I’ve seen it explicitly stated that people don’t necessarily consciously act in a way designed to move their genes into the next generation. In stating that humans live in an environment today that is radically different from the one in which we were shaped by evolution, Wright is making an essential point often overlooked or taken as given in other evolutionary texts. As he says:

Of course, the designs don’t always work. Individual organisms often fail, for various reasons, to transmit their genes. (Some are bound to fail. That is the reason evolution so assuredly happens.) In the case of human beings, moreover, the design work was done in a social environment quite different from the current environment. We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population. It’s no wonder that people often seem not to be pursuing any particular goal—happiness, inclusive fitness, whatever—very successfully.

But I still have a complaint. I wish the evolutionists would stop using verbs like “design” when talking about natural selection. There is no design in natural selection. There is no envisioned end product that natural selection is working to bring into existence, and too often the language that’s chosen to discuss the subject belies that reality. Wright is cognizant of this, and often uses quotation marks to indicate that he doesn’t mean what he’s saying literally, but feels compelled to use the convenient language.

Naturally, the level of the organism is of primary concern to human beings; human beings are organisms. But it’s of secondary importance to natural selection. If there is a sense in which natural selection “cares” about anything—and there is, metaphorically—that thing isn’t us; it’s the information in our sex cells, our eggs and our sperm. Of course, natural selection “wants” us to behave in certain ways. But, so long as we comply, it doesn’t care whether we are made happy or sad in the process, whether we get physically mangled, even whether we die. The only thing natural selection ultimately “wants” to keep in good shape is the information in our genes, and it will countenance any suffering on our part that serves this purpose.

I won’t beat Wright up too much over this. Although he flirts too frequently with the contradiction, he repeatedly tells us that he is flirting, and has helped me think about evolution in ways I haven’t before. I believe natural selection itself is a misnomer, as nothing is actually being “selected” by it. Natural selection is a result of what happens when certain genes that embody certain traits survive and proliferate over several generations and other genes that embody other traits don’t. Species adapt and change, but none of that is because they were selected to do so or designed for some specific end. As gravity is to mass, evolution is to reproduction—a quality inherently present in the medium.

But here’s the mindbending part:

It’s always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivation, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.

The experiments were conducted on “split-brain” patients—people who have had the link between left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed before the left eye (which leads to the right hemisphere), but not to the right eye (which leads to the left), the subject reports no conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject’s left hand—controlled by the right hemisphere—will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.

When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man’s right brain, and he complies. When asked where he’s going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he’s going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what’s so funny, she give an answer that’s less racy than the truth.

Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the “press agent” for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent—the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”

One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are “consciously” in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection—that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.

That’s right. We’re not really conscious beings, different from all the other animals on the planet that run purely on instinct. We have no free will. Our illusion of consciousness and free will is an evolutionary adaptation that has survived and flourished because it has better adapted us to our environment. Belief in our own consciousness and free will makes us more socially adaptable to our ever-changing environment by making us better able to convince others that our intentions are socially acceptable and not necessarily “driven” by our genes’ “desire” to survive into the next generation. I’ve heard theories of everything before, but this one really takes the cake. Want to get rid of God? Here you go. Evolution will not only destroy the biblical myth of creation, but will completely erase the concept of the soul. What is the soul of a man? Adaptable traits inherited by our procreating ancestors.

Even Wright seems blown away by this concept, that natural selection is responsible not just for our physical traits but our sense of superiority and the higher purpose in our lives:

One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truths. Truly a shameless ploy.

God help me, I can hear Rick Warren squirming on his cross when I read this. Brother Robert! Your conscience is not a shameless ploy of natural selection. It is the voice of God desperately trying to reach you. But Wright’s mind is closed to that possibility—more closed I think than anyone else I have ever read. He doesn’t even consider the alternative. For him evolution has to explain it all, and this is the best way he can find to explain things like the conscience and consciousness through evolution. If there is a hell, Wright is going to one day find himself in the hottest lake of fire it has.

But wait. Here’s where it goes from mindbending to freaky:

There are various ways to answer this question. Today, among biologists, one common answer is that evolution has no discernible end. Spencer, at any rate, believed evolution had tended to move species toward longer and more comfortable lives and the more secure rearing of offspring. Our mission, then, was to nourish these values. And the way to do so was to cooperate with one another, to be nice—to live in “permanently peaceful societies.”

All of this now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. In 1903, the philosopher G. E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the “naturalistic fallacy.” Ever since, philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn’t the first to question the inference of “ought” from “is.” John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill’s dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moore’s, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, that nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn’t omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mill’s answer was: Are you kidding? In an essay called “Nature,” he wrote that nature “impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve.” And she does all this “with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst…” Mill observed, “If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals.” Anyone, “whatever kind of religious phrases he may use,” must concede “that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.” Nor, believed Mill, should we look for guidance to our moral intuition, a device “for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.”

In other words, our nature, be it bred into us by natural selection or breathed into us by God, is something that we are to overcome, to rise above.

Darwin doesn’t seem to have spent much time agonizing over this conflict between natural selection’s “morality” and his own. If a parasitic wasp or a cat playing with mice embodies nature’s values—well, so much the worse for nature’s values. It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin’s moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.

But can we do this? If consciousness itself is merely an adaptation of natural selection, a ploy to keep us from realizing we are acting on pure instinct so we can reason our way through changes in our environment, if free will is only a part of this parlor trick our own minds have been constructed to play on us, how can we possibly step outside of that paradigm and reject it? If natural selection explains it all, even consciousness and the illusion of free will, is it possible for us to have this kind of independent thought? Or isn’t it more likely that any act we think we might take to reject the logic and values of natural selection is one taken by our evolutionary doppelganger instead, and therefore part of the larger force we think we have rejected? Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

There’s a few other random bits that seemed worth quoting:

One factor is the vulnerability of offspring. Following the generic male sexual strategy—roaming around, seducing and abandoning everything in sight—won’t do a male’s genes much good if the resulting offspring get eaten. That seems to be one reason so many bird species are monogamous, or at least relatively monogamous. Eggs left alone while the mother went out and hunted worms wouldn’t last long. When our ancestors moved from the forests out onto the savanna, they had to cope with fleet predators. And this was hardly the only new danger to the young. As the species got smarter and its posture more upright, female anatomy faced a paradox: walking upright implied a narrow pelvis, and thus a narrow birth canal, but the heads of babies were larger than ever. This is presumably why human infants are born prematurely in comparison to other primates. From early on, baby chimps can cling to their mother while she walks around, her hands unencumbered. Human babies, though, seriously compromise a mother’s food gathering. For many months, they’re mounds of helpless flesh: tiger bait.

The whole first part of this book is about men and women, about why they do the things they do in reproducing and how evolution and natural selection created it all. And it’s also where Wright rams home one of the central points of his book—that we are a species that live in an environment very different from the one we were adapted to by natural selection. I noted the above paragraph because it helps illustrate this. Why are human babies so helpless when they are born? Why are their heads so big and malleable? If you believe in God the answer is simple—because that’s the way God made it. If you believe in evolution—the answer is infinitely more complex. Nothing evolves simply or in a direct fashion. Everything is the result of an untold number of variables at play with one another. Our intelligence, walking upright, the pain of childbirth, the vulnerability of our young, our need to care for them. They’re all inter-related in ways we’ll probably never understand.

It is ironic that hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, for often it is these same hints, much later, that drive him out, to seek fresh proof of his virility. But the irony dissolves when reduced to ultimate cause: both the impulses to profess lifelong love to a woman and to wander lie within a man by virtue of how often, in his ancestors, they led to progeny. In that sense, both are an apt antidote to mortality, thought in the end futile (except from the genes’ point of view), and, in the latter case—wandering—often destructive as well.

I’m not sure I’ve even touched on this one yet, that emotions themselves are a product of natural selection, meaning we only feel the things that have been useful in propagating our species. The love I feel for my wife, according to this perspective, is only there because millions in the past who didn’t express such feelings did not reproduce and millions more who did express them did.

Morality is the device of an animal of exceptional cognitive complexity, pursuing its interests in an exceptionally complex social universe.

Somewhere along the way in the book Wright refers to the stages of moral development as expressed by Lawrence Kohlberg in 1971. The seemed interesting to me so I went out to the Internet and found them:

Stages of Moral Development

by Lawrence Kohlberg (1971)

I. Preconventional Level

At this level, the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right or wrong, but he interprets the labels in terms of either the physical or hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors) or the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels. The level is divided into the following three stages:

Stage 0: Egocentric judgement. The child makes judgements of good on the basis of what he likes and wants or what helps him, and bad on the basis of what he does not like or what hurts him. He has no concept of rules or of obligations to obey or conform to independent of his wish.

Stage 1: The punishment and obedience orientation. The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are values in their own right, not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order supported by punishment and authority (the latter is stage 4).

Stage 2: The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action consists of what instrumentally satisfies one's own needs and occasionally the needs of others. Human relations are viewed in terms such as those of the market place. Elements of fairness, reciprocity, and equal sharing are present, but they are always interpreted in a physical, pragmatic way. Reciprocity is a matter of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", not loyalty, gratitude, or justice.

II. Conventional Level

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences. The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining, supporting, and justifying the order and identifying with the persons or group involved in it. The level consists of the following two stages:

Stage 3: The interpersonal concordance or "good boy-nice girl" orientation. Good behavior is what pleases or helps others and is approved by them. There is much conformity to stereotypical images of what is majority or "natural" behavior. Behavior is frequently judged by intention -- "he means well" becomes important for the first time. One earns approval by being "nice".

Stage 4: The "law and order" orientation. The individual is oriented toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order. Right behavior consists in doing one's duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the given social order for its own sake.

III. Post-Conventional, Autonomous, or Principled Level

The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group. The level has the two following stages:

Stage 5: The social-contract legalistic orientation (generally with utilitarian overtones). Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis upon procedural rules for reaching consensus. Aside from what is constitutionally and democratically agreed upon, right action is a matter of personal values and opinions. The result is an emphasis upon the "legal point of view", but with an additional emphasis upon the possibility of changing the law in terms of rational considerations of social utility (rather than freezing it in terms of stage 4 "law and order"). Outside the legal realm, free agreement, and contract, is the binding element of obligation. The "official" morality of the American government and Constitution is at this stage.

Stage 6: The universal ethical-principle orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments. At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons.

After reading them, I’m not sure they were all that interesting after all.

One more thing about The Moral Animal. It was confusing as hell. Interesting and thought-provoking, but confusing as hell. It was clear that Wright was trying to argue a consistent point of view throughout, but his subject matter is so opaque, he could have said the direct opposite thing on page 400 that he said on page 4 and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

2026-06-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

I took the pendant home and showed it to Otis and my mother, liking its shape and the way it glinted in the sunlight. What followed was as big a shock to me as the medallion was to them. My stepfather took the trinket from me and then violently shook me until I told him where and how I had gotten it. Crying, I told him all I knew. I was spanked and punished, and then Otis lectured me on what the five-pointed star stood for and the dangers of associating with men who bore it as their symbol. I said I was sorry and that I had not known and together, Otis and I, we prayed to Grecolus for forgiveness. The matter was settled, even though I still was not sure exactly what I was asking forgiveness for, and Otis threw the pendant deep into the small copse of trees that grew behind our home. It took a long time, skipping out whenever I had an hour or two of free time, but eventually I found it and secretly hid the medallion in my room.

+ + +

Dinner was, in many ways, not what Brisbane expected it to be. After Smurch had helped him into his robes—Brisbane did not seem able to prevent the service—the half-ork took him directly to the banquet chamber where members of the klatru were already gathering to feast on what was their only meal of the day.

The chamber itself was conveniently located at the other end of the main corridor, opposite the bath chamber, and was by far the largest chamber Brisbane had seen so far. Gigantic might have been an understatement. It was so huge Brisbane could not even guess at its dimensions. It was roughly oval with plenty of exits scattered around the walls and a high, vaulted ceiling. Like the other main chambers in this complex, it was lit with torchlight and, in the very center of the room, a huge stone table stood surrounded by numerous stone benches.

There were several orks already seated at the table, none of whom Brisbane recognized, all dressed in black and drinking from great tankards. Smurch stopped Brisbane at one of the portals into the chamber.

“I am forbidden to enter until the time has come to serve the meal,” the half-ork said. “I must go to the kitchen now. Enjoy your meal, Grum Brisbane.”

Smurch walked quickly away from Brisbane and turned down one of the side tunnels. Brisbane raised a weak hand in a wave and said goodbye to his friend under his breath. Suddenly, he wasn’t so eager to go in there and get his dinner, even though he had eaten nothing but prison rations for the last two days. He took a small cautious step into the chamber and, when none of the orks at the table took notice of him, he took another. Soon he was moving steadily towards the center of the room and he did not stop until one of the orks looked up at him.

Their conversation suddenly went silent and all their heads pivoted up to look upon Brisbane. Brisbane stood frozen in their gazes and, for the briefest of moments, he was deadly sure they were going to rise up and snuff out his life.

“You that human Grum?” the ork who had first noticed him asked.

Brisbane could not find his voice. There were eight orks at the table, all of them larger than Brisbane and all of them more fierce-looking than any creatures he had ever seen. He might have turned and fled in fear if a sarcastic vein in his body hadn’t ballooned up and said to his mind, What the hells kind of question is that, dumb ass? Who else would I be, an unarmed human so deep in the lair of a clan or orks?

“Yes,” Brisbane said finally.

The ork nodded his head and fell back into conversation with his comrades around the table. They were speaking orkish and Brisbane couldn’t help but think they were doing that just to spite him. He still did not feel comfortable enough to go on over and take a seat at the table, a seat Smurch would probably have said he now deserved, so he stood lamely in place and tried to will someone he knew into the room. At this point, he would have even been glad to see Wister.

Fortunately, it was not long before Ternosh entered the chamber with Wister right on his heels. The Grum went over to take his place at the table while Ternosh spotted Brisbane and came over to him.

“Well, Brisbane,” the Grumak said kindly. “I see you are now properly attired. I hope you are taking easily to your new life. I imagine it is quite different from the one you knew before.”

Brisbane was still not used to the Grumak’s friendliness. Until what had happened with the Demosk, Ternosh had seemed ready to gut Brisbane with a paring knife, and now it was all warm greetings and friendly overtures. Brisbane did not trust it.

“Things are going okay,” he said cautiously.

Ternosh actually smiled. “This will be your first dinner with us. I’m glad I have a moment to talk to you a little bit before the meal begins.”

“Go ahead,” Brisbane said.

“You may have noticed,” the Grumak said, “that dinner is the only meal we grugan eat in the day.”

“I have,” Brisbane said as he held his stomach.

Ternosh chuckled. “Yes,” he nodded. “Very good. Perhaps because it is our only meal, it has taken on quite a bit of importance in our lives. It’s more than just a meal, it’s a gathering time, when peers come together to eat, drink, talk, and celebrate. The grugan word for it is draknel.”

“Kind of like a holiday feast every day?”

“Yes,” Ternosh said, sounding surprised. “That is one way of putting it. Now, since this is your first draknel, and you are still learning our customs, I think it would be best if you kept to yourself as much as you can. Eat your fill, by all means, but do not initiate any conversations. If questions are put to you, answer them simply and respectfully, but do not offer any needless information. I am telling you to do this for your own safety. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said.

“Fine,” Ternosh said. “When we take our seats at the table, I will sit between you and Wister and you will sit on my left. You may pour yourself some ale and drink it if you wish, but you are not allowed to eat anything until Clan Chief—we call the position Sumak—Tornestor has been seated and has begun to eat. Is that clear?”

Brisbane looked briefly over at the table of orks. Wister was not drinking nor was he conversing with the others.

“I’ll just follow your lead,” Brisbane said. “I won’t do anything unless you do it first.”

The Grumak clapped Brisbane on the shoulder. “That will probably be the best way to handle it. Are you ready?”

“I suppose so,” Brisbane said, not really sure if he was or not.

Ternosh led him over to the table and they took their seats, Brisbane on the Grumak’s left just like he had been told. The black-clad orks were separated away from Brisbane and the red-eyed orks by the many angles cut into the edge of the table. It was a huge sprawling thing, roughly oval but with many sides to it. At one end of it sat a stone chair, not a bench like everyone else was sitting on, but a chair. A throne perhaps, with a high back and regal arms.

Ternosh poured himself a tankard of ale and then poured one for Brisbane. Brisbane took the drink and sipped it, lighting a small fire in his belly and reminding him just how hungry he was. The ale was a fine brew, probably stolen from some merchant on one of the roads, and was much better than the swill Shortwhiskers had taken from the orks on the bank of the Mystic River. They had red eyes on their shields, Brisbane reminded himself. They were members of this clan. When he had first seen their shields, Brisbane had wondered about the great red orbs on them. Now he knew they were representations of the one great unwinking eye of Gruumsh One-Eye, a god Brisbane now had to feign allegiance to. Until he could find Angelika and escape with her, Gildegarde Brisbane III was now Grum Brisbane, wizard and priest-in-training of Gruumsh One-Eye.

A silence fell over the orks at the table. Brisbane looked up and, at one of the many entrances to the chamber, he saw an ork who could only have been Sumak Tornestor.

The chief was huge. His pink pig ears twitched nearly seven feet above the floor and his shoulders stuck out from his neck like the wings of a great bird of prey. Like the orks at the table, he was dressed all in black—black boots, black trousers, and black tunic—but he had a red sash draped over a shoulder that crossed his body on a diagonal. He strode into the room like he owned it which, Brisbane thought, he probably did, followed by two more black-clad orks, these two each with a red stripe on their right sleeves, and sat heavily on the stone chair at what now was no doubt the head of the table. The two orks who followed him sat on benches on either side of the Sumak.

“The Clan of the Red Eye,” Tornestor said in a voice like sandpaper, “extends welcome to Grum Brisbane on the occasion of his first draknel.”

“Welcome,” a chorus of deep voices chanted all around the table.

Ternosh leaned and whispered in Brisbane’s ear. “Say, ‘Thank you all.’”

“Thank you all,” Brisbane said, pitching his voice as low as possible.

Tornestor nodded his head as he appraised Brisbane with his eyes. “And now, before I have the food brought in, does anyone have any statements they wish to make?”

Heads turned back and forth up and down the table. There were perhaps twenty seconds of silence before Wister rose to his feet.

“Grum Wister,” Tornestor said gravely. “You wish to invoke your right of statement. What do you say?”

Brisbane took another sip of his ale and shifted his weight on his bench. He was doing just what Ternosh had warned him to do, minding his own business.

Wister cleared his throat. “I would like to issue a challenge, Sumak Tornestor.”

Mumbles bounced around the table. Tornestor’s brow wrinkled and Brisbane did not think he looked pleased.

“A challenge has not been issued in this hall for quite some time, Grum Wister,” Tornestor said. “But that does not prevent you from issuing one now. You may continue.”

“I do not issue it lightly, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said. “I have given it a great deal of thought. I have decided I cannot share my position in this clan with a human. I challenge Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane heard his name called out and saw all the eyes around the table turn to him. He did not know what this challenge meant, but he had the feeling it was not good news.

Ternosh leapt to his feet.

Tornestor turned to his brother. “You have something to say, Grumak Ternosh?”

“I do, Sumak Tornestor.” Ternosh gestured towards Brisbane. “He was sent here by Gruumsh One-Eye. His purpose among us in still unknown, but it must be direfully important for Gruumsh to send a human to do it. We cannot allow him to face Wister, or anyone else, in a challenge. What would happen to us all if Brisbane were to lose? Gruumsh’s purpose would go undone.”

Tornestor faced Wister. “Grum Wister?”

“I have considered this, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said carefully, “and it means nothing to me. I will not share my position in this clan with a human. My oath to Gruumsh compels me to no other action.”

Brisbane tried to rise to his feet but Ternosh pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder. He still didn’t know what this was all about, but he was getting tired of the way Wister said human. Brisbane figured Wister had been planning this since he first heard the news about Brisbane. That’s why he was so rude to me in the work chamber. He wants nothing to do with me.

Tornestor rubbed his chin. “Ternosh, did your Demosk say Grum Brisbane was to receive special considerations while he lived among us?”

Ternosh paused. “No, Sumak Tornestor.”

“What exactly did it say about Brisbane?”

Brisbane’s ears perked up. This was exactly what he wanted to know.

“The Demosk said three things about Brisbane,” Ternosh said. “First, it said Brisbane’s blood carried the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye. He can work magic and is entitled to possess the pentacle medallion he wears around his neck. Second, the Demosk said Gruumsh had granted this power to a human because he had a special plan for Brisbane among us. And thirdly, it said Brisbane was to be treated as a member of our clan.”

“That is a bit vague,” Tornestor said.

“Information gathering with my Demosk can be a time-consuming practice,” Ternosh said. “That is all I have had time to discover so far.”

Both Ternosh and Wister were still standing while they argued their cases before Tornestor. All the other orks remained seated, quietly drinking their ale. Brisbane could tell some of them were very interested in how this all turned out. Others, Brisbane felt, could not have cared less about it and were just waiting for their dinner to be served.

“It is my job as Sumak of this clan,” Tornestor said, “to listen to the information my Grumak receives from his Demosk and decide how that information would best serve the clan. Is this not true?”

“Of course it is,” Ternosh admitted.

“Brisbane is to be treated as a member of our clan, the Demosk has said,” Tornestor went on, his brow wrinkling as he forced the logic out of his mouth. “This, I have seen to. His blood bares the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye and, even though he does not have red eyes, I have allowed him to assume the position of Grum among us. This is how any grugan with the power of magic would have been treated. This is just and right.”

Brisbane tried to stand up again but Ternosh firmly pushed him back down on the bench.

“However,” the clan chief said, “the rights of challenge and the pit of combat are also part of our society and Grum Brisbane, as a member of the Clan of the Red Eye, should not be exempt from them. Grum Wister is just in issuing his challenge, his rights shall not be denied because of Brisbane’s mysterious origin, and after this evening’s draknel, in the traditional manner, Wister’s challenge shall be answered.”

Both Wister and Ternosh slowly bowed and then reseated themselves.

“I, Sumak Tornestor, have spoken.”

Tornestor clapped his hands twice and immediately the table erupted again in loud conversations and servants entered the chamber carrying platters of food.

Brisbane turned to Ternosh as a steaming plate of potatoes and vegetables was set near him. “So what was that all about?” he asked the Grumak softly. “What exactly does this challenge mean?”

Ternosh picked a plate off a nearby pile and began to spoon potatoes onto it. “Wister has challenged you to combat. After the draknel, you two will fight and the winner will retain the right to be my Grum.”

The smell of the food was inebriating. Brisbane took a big platter of sliced meat from the ork on his left and began to fill his plate. “And the loser?”

Ternosh spooned some potatoes onto Brisbane’s plate. “The loser will be dead. It is a fight to the death.”

To the death.

Swell.

Brisbane stole a couple of looks at Wister, but the Grum ignored him completely. The ork was of average size for his race, which meant he was about Brisbane’s size. Brisbane may have been somewhat of a giant among humans, but among orks, he was as average as the night was dark. More food was passed around the table and Brisbane continued to pile his plate high with a little bit of everything.

“Do we use weapons or something?” Brisbane asked the Grumak. He hated the thought of hand-to-hand combat to the death. He wasn’t very good at street fighting.

“Armor and weapons,” Ternosh said curtly. “Now shut up and mind your manners.”

By this time, all had their plates full and their forks poised. Brisbane remembered not to start eating until Tornestor did, but the aroma coming off his plate nearly drove him mad. He joined everyone else at the table in silence and in staring at the Sumak.

Tornestor paused for a dramatic moment and then dived into his food. A second later, Brisbane and the other orks did the same. The food was delicious. Brisbane ate with an abandon he was sure Otis would have called gluttonous. Brisbane didn’t care. Let Otis have only six small strips of salty meat for two days and then serve him a feast like this and see how much he ate.

Brisbane devoured helping after helping, but through it all, his thoughts were on the challenge Wister had issued to him. Evidently, it wasn’t an ork’s right to refuse a challenge. At least, no one had asked him if he wanted to pick up the glove Wister had thrown down. But Brisbane guessed that wasn’t important for, even if he had been asked, he would not have turned down Wister’s challenge.

He could not, as Brisbane saw it. If he was ever going to get Angelika back, he had to mold into the society of the clan, and this challenge and the pit of combat, whatever that was, were obviously very important to the life of the klatru. Brisbane could not let himself be excluded from that. Ternosh had seemed displeased with Tornestor’s decision, but Brisbane had heard the reasoning behind it and he agreed with it.

Also, Brisbane knew, Wister’s feelings, his hatred of Brisbane because he was human, could not be a sentiment exclusive to Wister. If Brisbane somehow shirked the challenge, what would the orks who hated him for being human think of him then? Brisbane remembered the faces around the table when Tornestor had been casting judgment on Wister’s challenge—the ones that had seemed lined with concern over whether or not Brisbane would be forced to face the challenge—and he thought he knew which ones resented him on the basis of his position and his race. To face Wister in combat was perhaps to gain respect in their eyes.

But then again, this was not an arm wrestling contest. This was a fight to the death. Ternosh had said the combat would be done with armor and weapons, and Brisbane was glad for that. In his opinion, a sword in his hand increased his odds of winning to a more comfortable margin. If he could somehow use Angelika against Wister, he would have no doubts about winning the contest at all.

Eventually, the meal was finished and servants re-entered the chamber to clear the table. Brisbane saw Smurch was among them, but the half-ork paid no attention to his new master and soon he and the other servants left the chamber with the many dirty dishes and the few leftovers.

Brisbane was full, fuller than he had been in a long time, but he had stayed away from too much ale to keep his head clear in the coming battle. He noticed Wister had done the same. Just as he began to wonder what was going to happen next, Tornestor rose to his feet and addressed the table.

“Gentlemen,” the Sumak said. “In the tradition handed down through generations, a tradition begun in the time Gruumsh One-Eye himself walked the earth, a challenge, a masokom, has been issued by one of our number against another. We have all heard the reasons for this masokom. Are there any here who would deny Grum Wister his right in challenging Grum Brisbane?”

The table was silent.

“Then let us move to the pug-trolang, the pit of combat, to settle this masokom before our own eyes.”

All around the table the orks got to their feet. Brisbane, imitatively, did the same. Tornestor and the two orks with the red stripes on their sleeves began to move towards a wide exit from the room, opposite the one Brisbane had used before the draknel. The other black-clad orks soon followed and, when he was given a little shove from Ternosh, so did Brisbane, the Grumak, and Wister.

Brisbane was not sure what lay in store for him at the pit of combat, the pug-trolang, but he was sure he was doing the right thing in facing Wister. He was confident he could defeat the Grum and he was ready to show the rest of the klatru he wasn’t some puny human they could push around like the ones they kept in the circus wagons on the surface.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

2026-06-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

Here’s the blurb from the back of my paperback:

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. That was also the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves the Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

That accurately describes the book I read and the story that Station Eleven is. But that, strangely, is not what I was told Station Eleven was about.

Station Eleven is copyrighted 2014, but it seems to have really grown to prominence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. To one extent, that makes sense. It is, after all, about a pandemic, an apocalyptically deadly one, and about the hellscape that comes after.

But in another sense, that doesn’t make any sense, because Station Eleven takes place before and after a deadly pandemic, but it’s not really about the pandemic and the hellscape that follows. It’s really about Arthur Leander and his quest for connection. The pandemic and the hellscape are just the tableau on which that quest takes place.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2026-05-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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The new audiobook is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Not sure what possessed me to get this one. Fifty bucks and twenty-four cassettes. I hope I like it because I’m going to be listening to it for some time to come.

So far there’s this guy, Ablomski (it’s Russian literature and I’m only listening to it; I’m going to get all the names wrong), who’s had an affair on his wife with their children’s governess, and his friend, Levin, who’s come in from out of town to propose to Ablomski’s wife’s sister. Anna Somebody is coming to visit, but it’s not Anna Karenina. At least not yet. I get the sense that this Anna will become Anna Karenina when she marries another character named Karenin. We’ll see.

The writing is good and in a style that isn’t used much any more. We spend some time inside Ablomski’s head and his sensual-seeking, upper class, unredeeming state of mind is on full display.

+ + +

Levin went ice skating with the woman he intends to propose to -- her name is Kitty -- and although he was filled with love, he had too much self doubt to pop the question. Then he went out to dinner with his friend Ablonski (I think it’s Ablonski, not Ablomski) and Ablonski told him that he thought Kitty would agree to marry him, but only if he hurried up and asked her. Levin has just returned to Moscow after a few years in the country and while he was gone a rival had appeared on Kitty’s horizon. This news both encourages and frightens Levin.

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Levin proposed in a clumsy fashion to Kitty and, although Kitty’s heart was momentarily filled with joy at receiving a proposal, she realized that she truly loved Vronsky and so turned Levin down. Vronsky himself then makes an appearance, along with Kitty’s mother who openly favors Vronsky over Levin for her daughter’s nuptials. Kitty’s father favors Levin, and he comes in as well.

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Not sure I’m going to make it through all 24 tapes of Anna Karenina. Much has happened since last time I wrote, but I’m not sure I remember much of it.

Anna Something is Anna Karenina. The Something was evidently her middle name or the feminized version of her father’s name or whatever crazy thing those nutty Russians do. Vronsky has fallen for her but she’s married to a famous guy and has fled back to Petersburg but Vronsky has followed her. Levin has gone back to live in the country. Ablonski and his wife have reconciled, but Ablonski’s eye is starting to wander again. Kitty has gotten sick and she and her family are planning to go abroad to help her recover. The current action is taking place in Petersburg with Anna and Vronsky and the social circles in which they move. Anna finds herself drifting from one circle to another since her return from Moscow, the modern and bohemian suddenly more attractive that the traditional and stodgy.

One thing I do like about the novel is the way the characters lead their separate lives but are all interconnected through love, friendship and/or family relation. It makes me realize how much drama there is in the day-to-day reality of people and their relationships.

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Lenin and Ablonski argued over Ablonski selling a forest he owned to another guy for what Lenin thought was well below its value. The argument included different perspectives on what it means to be an aristocrat and what it means to be working class, and I could tell that Tolstoy was making commentary on Russian society. I couldn’t tell what the commentary meant -- just like I can never tell what the social commentary means in Russian literature (except for the scene in Crime and Punishment with the old man whipping his lame horse to death; I know what that social commentary meant but only because I read the Cliff Notes) -- but I could tell commentary was being made. Vronsky and Anna have begun an affair and Anna has just told Vronsky that she is pregnant.

+ + +

Long passages in Anna Karenina about Levin and his laborers working in the fields, mowing the grass and bailing the hay. Levin’s half brother has come to the country to stay with Levin, and they have opposite perspectives on the country. To Levin, it is a place free of the corruption of the city, where work can both fortify the body and heal the soul. To the brother, it is a place to relax and do as little as possible. Again, the social commentary is fairly obvious, especially when Levin and his brother get into an argument over some of the social reforms that the brother supports and Levin opposes. Ablonski also wrote and asked Levin to visit his wife Dolly and their country house, where she is staying with the children for the summer. Levin agrees, only to find out after he arrives that Kitty will also be visiting there.

+ + +

Levin is so enamored with the pastoral way of life led by his peasants that he decides to adopt it wholly for himself, but then goes to visit Kitty and is smitten again with her and the “civilized” circles in which she moves. The triangle between Anna, her husband and Vronsky gets more complicated as Vronsky decides that since she is carrying his baby Anna has to leave her husband and pledge her life to him. Karenin decides that he won’t let Anna go because to do so would make her happy and publicly bring scandal down upon his good name, and Anna waffles helplessly in between.

The character study is quite well done, with each set of thoughts and motivations being presented and explained in turn. Tolstoy does a good job making each character’s position seem logical and true given what information they have, but ultimately, each is limited not only by the partial vision each have of the situation, but also by the acts of the other two on which their considerations are only a reaction.

+ + +

Finally finished this audiobook. I did not enjoy it. It was probably a mistake to begin trying to log this one on a day-to-day basis. My god. So much going on. So many characters. No clues as to which ones really matter. Maybe that was the point?

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

2026-05-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

We called the game “kick-the-can,” and I’m sure children have played and will continue to play it for years under that name or under some other simplified nomenclature. I was “it,” and I had just counted up to the mandatory fifty, when I saw the horse-drawn wagon come crawling down the street. The man who drove it was still young, but obviously an adult, and he wore red clothes and a black beard. Behind him, the wagon absolutely tottered with piles of books and boxes, loosely held together with a piece of tarpaulin. The man stopped the cart right beside me, in front of a house that had been vacant for months and whose yard my friends and I had been using as a playground of sorts. He asked me for some help in unloading his wagon. Without much thought I agreed, figuring his books and boxes might be more interesting than another round of kick-the-can. He asked me my name and I said Gil. I asked him his and he said Roy. When the work was finished, and I had seen dozens of things that made my eyes swim with fascination, the man took me aside and pressed a small silver pentacle medallion into my palm.

+ + +

Brisbane did his best to make out Ternosh’s vague form as they walked down the dark tunnel. Every once and a while, he would unconsciously slow down and Vrak would give him an angry shove from behind. In that way, at least, it seemed like old times.

“As I said before,” Ternosh said as he led the way into the ork tunnels, “I pretend to neither understand nor agree with the information I have received from my Demosk, but I do not for a moment doubt its veracity, nor will I shirk my obvious responsibility in the matter.”

Brisbane noticed how talkative Ternosh was being. He decided to try and take advantage of it. “Just what exactly did your Demosk tell you this time?”

Ternosh turned down a side passage and Brisbane quickly followed him, eager to hear anything the ork might say. Ternosh was silent for a moment before he answered.

“I might as well tell you, I suppose. I’m going to have to tell you quite a bit I’d really rather not tell you before this is all over.” Ternosh continued his fast pace down the tunnels and into the earth as he spoke loudly enough for Brisbane to hear. “My Demosk again asserted the bane of He-Who-Watches was in your blood and he also revealed something about his intentions in granting you such a responsibility. I was told even if given the chance, you would not flee from the settlement because you had a job of sorts to do here. I admit I do not know what this job is. I was also told you were to be treated like any other Grum, or Grumak-in-training. This I will do even though I do not know what will possibly result from it.”

Ternosh continued to lead the way through the countless tunnels and corridors. Brisbane was not sure if he was being taken to the same chamber he had been to before, but he did not think so. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and occasionally they would pass near a room or through a corridor that was lit by torchlight.

“Other than that,” Ternosh went on, “I really am not yet sure what He-Who-Watches, Or Gruumsh One-Eye as I am now allowed to refer to him as in your presence, has in store for you. I do know I will continue to ask my Demosk for information, but that can often be slow going. Whatever reason Gruumsh has for this situation, it must be unusual and very important for him to go to these extreme measures.”

Shortly the small party arrived at a small chamber that seemed to be a laboratory of sorts. It was lit by torches and contained workbenches covered with books, glassware filled with liquids, and jars filled with solid ingredients. A single ork stood at one of the workbenches, dressed in red robes like the ones worn by Ternosh, except his had white stripes running down the sleeves and wide white streaks in the folds that fell beneath the waist. The ork seemed busy at working with the liquids and glassware. When he turned to meet the group entering the chamber, Brisbane noticed he had two red eyes.

Ternosh turned to face Brisbane and saw Vrak standing there behind the human. He raised his voice in several curt orders and Vrak quickly turned and fled from the chamber.

“I’m afraid Vrak has not yet accepted the fact that you are no longer a prisoner. It is a problem you are likely to have with the majority of us. I will do as I am told, but I cannot force anyone to treat you cordially. Wister?”

Ternosh addressed the ork in the red and white robes and he stopped his work to come over by the pair at the doorway.

“Brisbane,” Ternosh said, “this is Wister, a Grum like you. I have already discussed your new position with him and, as I am needed elsewhere at the moment, he will have to continue with your indoctrination into our ways.”

Brisbane looked at Wister and nodded his head. “Hello.”

Wister said nothing and turned his red eyes away from Brisbane.

“By the way,” Ternosh cut in. “My name is Ternosh.”

“I know,” Brisbane said, trying not to feel insulted by Wister’s rudeness.

“You know?” Ternosh said, his brow wrinkling. “How would you know that?”

Brisbane did not want to go into what had happened between Smurch and himself. “I heard your Demosk call you Grumak Ternosh. I knew Grumak was your title, so I figured Ternosh was your name.”

Ternosh seemed puzzled. “You can speak our language? That of the grugan?”

“No,” Brisbane said honestly. “The Demosk was speaking the common tongue.”

“You heard your own language?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said.

“Fascinating,” Ternosh said. “This is something I will have to look into.” He snapped out of his puzzlement. “Oh well, no matter, I must be off. I will leave you in Wister’s capable hands.”

Ternosh turned to leave but before he had gone a full step he stopped and turned back. “Oh, Brisbane. Now that you are a member of the klatru, our upper class, you have the right to retain a personal servant. Shall I assign you one or do what want someone in particular?”

“What do you mean?” Brisbane asked.

“Well,” Ternosh said, “if you wanted to pick Vrak or someone else in the party that captured you, they would have no choice in the matter. They would be forced to serve you.”

Brisbane thought about it. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to make any friends that way.”

Ternosh nodded and then focused his attention on the side of Brisbane’s neck. The Grumak reached out and tore off the healing patch he had placed there. Brisbane’s hand went up to his neck and he could feel no trace of a scab or scar.

“So,” Ternosh said. “I’ll just assign you someone.”

“No, wait a minute,” Brisbane said. “Smurch. I would like Smurch to be my personal servant.”

Ternosh looked at him oddly but he eventually nodded his head. “Fine. I’ll have him sent down. Now, I really am leaving. Brisbane, Wister, I’ll see you both at dinner.”

Ternosh spun and this time he did leave the chamber. Brisbane watched him go and when he turned back to the chamber he saw Wister had returned to his workbench. The ork was mixing liquids together in exact amounts.

Brisbane slowly went over to Wister’s work table. It was cluttered with an array of various-sized bottles, but a small work area had been cleared in front of Wister. The ork had a large book open before him and a large vessel in which he was mixing small amounts of the different liquids. Brisbane heard a squeak and amidst all the bottles he saw a small wire cage holding a large black rat. The rat’s body filled the entire cage and left no room for the animal to move around.

“What are you doing?” Brisbane asked.

Wister said nothing. When he had mixed his ingredients to the proper amount, he picked up what appeared to be a small arrowhead on a stick and began to dunk the barb into the mixture he had created. The potion was syrupy and it clung to the arrowhead like glue. When Wister had the point coated with the substance, he brought the small weapon to bear on the rat’s cage. The ork quickly struck the arrow in between two of the bars and into the hide of the rodent.

Brisbane stepped up next to Wister. “What are you doing?”

Wister put out an arm to keep Brisbane away from the rat. The ork kept his eyes on the animal in the cage and Brisbane could do nothing else but watch.

The rat, which had squeaked loudly when the arrow had pierced it, was now silent and stood on shaky feet with its beady black eyes wide open. The wound in its side was not great, and it appeared the sticky potion had actually stopped some of the bleeding, but the rat did not look well. Its whole body was quivering now with rapid muscle spasms and in a short period of time it fell over and stopped moving altogether.

“Is it dead?” Brisbane asked.

Wister still said nothing. Completely ignoring Brisbane, he picked up a quill pen and began to make notes in the book that lay open before him. The script he wrote in was both strange and somewhat familiar to Brisbane.

Poison, Brisbane thought. It must be some kind of poison. Killed that rat quick and easy. Is that what this Wister is doing here? Developing different kinds of poison?

Brisbane decided to try one more time. “Is that some kind of poison?”

To Wister, it must have been like Brisbane was not even there. For a moment, Brisbane considered Wister might in fact be deaf, but he quickly dismissed the idea. Ternosh would have told him that, he thought, and besides, Wister had not only not spoken to him, the ork had paid him no attention whatsoever.

To the hells with him, Brisbane thought. If that’s the way he wants to be—fine. Brisbane could play that game, too. He stepped away from Wister and began to move around the chamber, looking at the other work tables and the things on them. They were all similar to Wister’s table and Brisbane quickly lost interest in them because nothing was being worked on at them. He wasn’t about to go wandering around in the dark tunnels, so it seemed he would have to sit and wait for something to happen. Brisbane squatted down against one of the walls and did just that.

He began to turn the situation over in his mind. He did feel more in control than he had in his cage, but he was in no way near to having control over it. There were still a lot of things that were up in the air, things he didn’t understand, and things of which he wasn’t sure.

What exactly had the Demosk told Ternosh about him? The Grumak had acted like he was coming clean with Brisbane, but Brisbane doubted Ternosh would actually tell him everything he knew. Brisbane could not forget the countless faces that had passed by his cage earlier that day. Whatever was going on, as Ternosh had said, it was not a normal situation. Traditions were going to be suspended, policies changed, and feelings hurt. He was going to have to tread very lightly if he wanted to make any progress.

Brisbane was playing along with this charade just long enough for him to get Angelika back. He knew that on the surface, but he still did not fully understand the deep down importance of such an action. To him it was a rational decision, he figured as long as he still had his life, he had a chance to steal back his sword from the orks. The thought that in his quest for Angelika he might very well lose the life Ternosh had granted him had never occurred to him, nor did the thought that the decision to stay might not have really been his.

Thoughts of Angelika made Brisbane realize he was now in the same caves in which he had seen Vrak take his sword and he may, in fact, be close enough to her to re-establish contact. He didn’t seem to have anything else to do—Wister was still working at his table, oblivious to Brisbane—so he closed his eyes and opened his mind, reaching out in all directions for her.

And ever so quietly, behind all his brain’s activity, underneath even the currents that beat his heart and digested his food, Brisbane could hear that soft, seductive voice he had longed for so much.

—Brisbane? Is that you?—

Brisbane’s heart raced. Angelika! Yes, it’s me. Where are you?

—I am nearby, young Brisbane. I am glad you have found me.—

Where are you? I’ll come and get you right now.

—No. Remember what I have told you. We have the chance to do great good in this den of evil. Be patient and be strong. Vengeance shall be ours.—

Angelika. I’ve missed you so.

—As I have missed you, young Brisbane. Never before have I been wielded by someone with such potential. Our conquests will be written in the Book of Time. Together we will destroy terrible evil. I yearn for our next battle.—

Angelika’s words left Brisbane a little empty. No, Angelika. I need you. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed your voice in my head.

—Be patient and be strong. In your hands, I shall draw evil blood again.—

Angelika?

Her voice was gone. Brisbane felt unusually uneasy. Normally, a little discussion with Angelika would have supported him, given him a boost of confidence to continue facing the odds in such an unfriendly situation. But this time, her voice left him feeling just the opposite. He felt a little bit more alone in his strife, a little less confident, and a little less able to deal with the mess his life had become. It was a feeling he tried not to dwell on. He tried to reassure himself, forcing himself to be nurtured by Angelika’s words, and tried to forget he had never had to force himself before.

There was a noise at the entrance of the chamber, someone clearing their throat in order to draw attention to themselves. Brisbane opened his eyes to see Smurch standing there, dressed in his plain gray clothing. Brisbane quickly got to his feet and went over to his friend. Wister took no notice of them.

“Jack,” Brisbane said in a low voice. “It’s good to see you again.”

Brisbane extended his arm for a handshake but Smurch ignored it. Instead, the half-ork bowed respectfully.

“I am honored,” Smurch said to the floor, “that you have chosen me, Grum Brisbane. I pledge myself and my service to you until such time as you deem it unnecessary.” He slowly straightened back up.

Brisbane tried not to blush. He looked over at Wister and spoke in an even lower voice. “Is there somewhere we can go for some privacy?”

Smurch answered in monotone. “I can show you to your chamber, if that’s what you mean.”

Brisbane turned back to his servant and nodded. “Let’s go.”

Smurch did not move. “Grum Wister,” he said to the ork in the red and white robes. “Do you have any further need of Grum Brisbane?”

Wister did not turn around. He continued his work, mixing different liquids together to make strange potions. Brisbane heard the ork speak for the first time.

“No.”

“Then I shall take him to his chamber,” Smurch said.

The half-ork turned and left the room. Brisbane quickly followed him. They walked down many of the twisting tunnels and Brisbane made a mental note that sometime soon he was going to have to learn the layout of these caverns. He couldn’t very well have Smurch take him everywhere he wanted to go. Brisbane tried to memorize the way from the work chamber to his personal one, but there were so many twists and turns he would not have bet on his ability to find his way back.

Finally, they came to a small corridor branching off one of the main tunnels. It went back about twenty feet and ended in a portal with a dark curtain hanging in it. Next to the portal, in a wall bracket, was a burning torch and under the torch, carved into the wall, was a large cubbyhole, about big enough for a man to lie down in. The floor of the cubbyhole was blanketed with thick animal furs.

Smurch stopped and pulled aside the dark curtain. Brisbane could see a roughly square chamber about twenty feet across. In the center of the room was a low table, and on the table was what appeared to be an oil lantern. A crude bed sat against one wall, a well-worn mattress laying on a wooden rack to keep it off the floor and heaped with old blankets and furs. The room appeared to be otherwise empty.

“This is it,” Smurch said as he went in and set about to lighting the lantern.

Brisbane stepped in and let the curtain swing shut behind him. “A bit frugal, isn’t it, Jack?”

Smurch was getting a warm glow from the lantern. “Only the Grumak and the Sumak have finer accommodations, Grum Brisbane.”

“Jack,” Brisbane said. “You don’t have to be so formal with me.”

Smurch stood up and looked at Brisbane. “Are you not my master? Have you changed your mind? Are you going to choose another to be your servant?”

“No, dammit, I’m not going to choose another. I chose you because I wanted someone I could talk to.”

“I will obey your every command,” Smurch said.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

Smurch made a face as if he was trying to think. “Grum Brisbane, I must treat you with due respect in the presence of others. If I do not, you will become a laughing-stock among the klatru. They will think you are unable to control your own servant.”

Brisbane nodded. “Okay, fine. But we’re alone now. I want you to drop this ‘Grum Brisbane’ horseshit. My name is Gil.”

“Is this an order?”

“If it has to be,” Brisbane said. “If that is the only way I can get you to treat me as an equal.”

Smurch’s eyes went wide. “Grum Brisbane, we can never be equals.”

Brisbane shook his head in frustration. “Then how about friends?”

Smurch did not say anything, but the look on his face was not promising. Brisbane’s stomach suddenly rumbled loud enough for Smurch to hear it.

“Dinner is less than an hour away,” the half-ork said. “If you do not wish to wait until then, I can send for some food to be brought here.”

Brisbane shook his head. In a strange way, he had almost become accustomed to his hunger.

Almost.

“I guess I can wait,” he said. “What else is there to do?”

Smurch looked shocked. “You may do whatever you wish. You are Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane was really getting sick of that. “What would you suggest I do with my time?” he snapped.

Smurch sniffed the air. “Well,” the half-ork said slowly. “No disrespect intended, but it would not be proper for you to show up in the banquet chamber smelling the way you do. As a member of the klatru, it is now your privilege and duty to bathe regularly.”

Brisbane lifted his arm and took a whiff. “I am a little ripe,” he said after his eyes stopped watering. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a bath.”

Smurch nodded. “Shall I take you to the bath chamber?”

“This place sure does seem to have a lot of chambers.”

Smurch said nothing to that.

“Yes,” Brisbane sighed. “Please do.”

Smurch extinguished the lantern and then led Brisbane out of his personal chamber. They turned down the main corridor and began to make their way to one of its ends. Small tunnels branched off the corridor at regular intervals, all of them ending in torchlight and a dark curtain. Brisbane could only assume these were more living quarters for other members of the klatru.

When they reached the end of the corridor, Smurch led Brisbane into another lit chamber. High up on one of the walls, a spout of clear water tumbled out a rough crack in the stone and fell to gather in a large pool that dominated the floor of the room. Next to the pool, freakish and out of place in the rough stone cavern, was a small wooden towel rack, like you would expect to find in someone’s home, stuffed with towels and cakes of soap on a small shelf.

Brisbane looked at all the water before him and had to decide whether he was going to drink it or bathe in it. Both, he decided liberally. I’ll drink from the spout and bathe in the pool.

Smurch was at his elbow. “Would you like me to bathe you, Grum Brisbane?”

“No,” Brisbane said, laughing inwardly at the idea. “There are still some things I prefer to do myself.”

“I understand,” Smurch said. “With your permission, I will go and procure some clean garments for you to wear.”

Brisbane nodded. “That will be fine, Jack. Thank you.”

Smurch stiffened. “I will be back shortly,” he said. “Enjoy your bath, Grum Brisbane.”

“Gil,” Brisbane corrected him, but the half-ork had already turned to leave the chamber.

Brisbane began to remove his clothing. He was still wearing his tanned leather pants and the blue tunic his mother had made for him, but they were filthy, caked with mud and waste. Wash them, he thought. I’ll wash them, too. Smurch was going to bring him new clothes, but he still did not want to get rid of his old ones. He could still remember his mother’s hands as she had stitched the tunic together and had put the gold needlework around the collar. Brisbane put the tunic and the trousers carefully by the side of the pool and removed the tattered remains of his underclothing.

When he was naked, he found some stone steps leading down into the pool and he slowly immersed himself in the water. It was warm and only about waist deep, but Brisbane dunked himself down all the way, and he stayed under for as long as he could hold his breath. He felt good under the water like that, better than he had in a long time. His body was buoyed in the water and it felt like he had left the confines of the earth and was floating in some thick soup that existed between the stars. His eyes were closed so he could see nothing and the only sound he heard was the muffled rumble of water falling into the pool.

When his breath ran out on him, Brisbane resurfaced. He moved over to the rack to get some soap and he began to wash himself. He soaped up and then moved over to the waterfall to rinse off. He turned his face up into the spray and let the water cascade down around him. He took a drink and, although the water was warm, it was clean and refreshing.

Brisbane surveyed his own body as he washed it. The effects of his injuries were diminishing—the swelling on his face had gone down considerably and his abdomen was only a little tender to the touch. This pleased him, the fact that he was healing, but there was something else that disturbed him. His eyes saw a body that was much thinner than the one he had known before. His muscles were noticeably, perhaps only to him, smaller and there seemed to be less fat padding them. He looked hardened, more angular, and different. It was as if he was slowly changing into something else and these were the first steps in the metamorphosis.

Brisbane tried not to think about it. He was a member of the klatru now and, along with bathing, he was sure to get all the food he could ask for. Smurch had said dinner was less than an hour away. Brisbane would then see to putting some meat back on his bones.

He continued his bath, washing out his hair and his clothes when he had removed the grime from his skin. He felt refreshed and invigorated when Smurch returned with his new clothes, red and white robes like the ones Wister had worn. Brisbane felt ready to eat an entire horse at dinner.

Smurch offered to towel dry Grum Brisbane.

Brisbane refused him.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Regulators by Richard Bachman

2026-05-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym used by Stephen King, initially, I think, so that he could write and publish works out of type from that which made him most famous. Or maybe they’re the stuff he wrote before he became famous. Not sure, but in my experience, the Bachman novels are some of the most typical Stephen King novels around.

And The Regulators is not a good example of that type. It’s a bit of a mess -- with too many characters to keep track of; long on gore and short on psychological horror.

Johnny sees everything, hears everything, feels everything; input floods him and his mind insists on lining up each crazy increment, as if something coherent were happening here, something which could actually be narrated.

This is on page 71 (of 489), and even by then I had had enough. Are you trying to tell us something, Bachman? Is something coherent happening here? Is this something which can actually be narrated? It sure doesn’t seem that way to me.

And then there are long stretches of the story that are told in newspaper clippings or as entries in someone’s journal. In order to add to the realism, press clippings are shown as mocked-up newspaper articles, and the journal entries are set in a script-style font.

Sometimes he goes into the den to watch TV, but not even Bonanza held him long today.

Do you see what happened there? Bonanza is the title of a TV show, and so it is properly italicized or underlined when shown in print. Many computer programs “know” this, and can add that feature automatically. You know who else knows that? Book authors and editors, generally speaking. But you know who doesn’t know that? Most people when they’re writing in their journals. And those journal writers who do know that, probably wouldn’t bother to underline Bonanza in their entry about how their son had been possessed by a malevolent spirit.

Later on, this happens.

A little old for that, but it must have been a bad morning at chez Hobart.

Chez. You know, French for “at the house of.” And you know, that’s a foreign word, so it is properly italicized in straight text, or underlined in italicized text. That’s definitely that kind of thing your average journal writer would do. To underscore their sarcasm, I guess?

Look, it’s a nitpick, I know, but it really destroyed the whole gimmick of the journal entries for me. They were supposed to seem real, but every time something was underlined, all it told me was that it wasn’t real.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

2026-05-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

So I read this book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first selection in an online book club I got exposed to at work. It’s work-related so I don’t think I’m going to specifically track it here, but I did have a personal reaction that I would like to mention.

The book is about the snap judgments we all make in the blink of an eye and about how some of them are amazingly accurate, about how some are downright wrong, and the physiological and observable differences between the two.

One chapter is about cops, and about how they are trained to avoid stressful situations, because a highly-stressed state of mind is one of those physiological conditions which make our snap judgments go bad. It made me think of a novel I would like to write. Something about cops and their “good guy/bad guy” view of the world and how it leads to more not less confrontation and violence.

Blink talks about how police departments across the country are eliminating the option of chasing suspects who run, not because it’s dangerous to civilians (which, if in cars, it is) but because it produces a hyper-stressed state in the police officers and destroys their ability to make good snap judgments. That’s why so many chases end in gunplay. He was going for his gun. I swear he was.

Blink tells one story about a cop who chased someone who ran, and when he finally got them to pull over, he broke every regulation about how to approach a suspicious person on a traffic stop and wound up killing the driver, convinced he was pulling a gun on him. Look, he complained during the investigation, being a cop is hard. I put my life on the line every night and I couldn’t take the chance and let the guy pull his gun on me. It was either him or me.

Which, Blink points out, is all bullshit, because the cop used poor judgment and violated procedure to put himself in that situation. If he had shone his high beams on the suspect’s mirrors, kept himself behind the driver’s left shoulder with the car’s door post always between them, and shone his flashlight on the suspect’s hands -- all as he had been trained to do -- he never would have “seen” a gun (there wasn’t one) and never would have shot the suspect.

At the same time, the cop’s actions were not part of some racist attitude, even though he was white and the suspect in question was black, so that usual refrain is also faulty. His snap judgment that the suspect had a gun was based partially on his perception of him as a black man and the stereotypical associations our culture has pummeled into him his whole life, but no more or less than any other white person in the society. His action was not a result of his individual racism, but more of a cultural racism, and in his highly-stressed condition and in the milliseconds he had to make the decision, he could no more control his ingrained associations than he could control his heart rate.

This is the story I want to write. The cop, steeped in his “bad guy out to get me” view of the world and the victim, in the wrong but not deserving to be killed, moving slowly towards each other until they collide in this three second encounter that leaves one of them dead and the other forever changed.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY

2026-04-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day Otis Parkinson became my stepfather was the same day I began my study and worship of the great god humans call Grecolus. I was given a leather-bound copy of the Scriptures, the holy writings of the ancient prophets, and I was quickly taught to read it. I was instructed in the creation of the world, the mandates Grecolus had set down for his followers to live their lives by, and the promise of eternal life for those who remained faithful to him. These things were good, and in my innocence, I believed them with all my heart. But even before the seeds of doubt began to germinate in the topsoil of my consciousness, I recognized that life and death under the law of Grecolus was a structured framework, without room for experimentation or oddity. And at the center of it all, was the undying assertion that Grecolus was the only true god. His story of creation left no room for other gods, because Grecolus had created everything, including it seemed, himself. One of his mandates forbid the worship of false gods. The promise of eternal life in the heavens was revoked for all who did not worship Grecolus. To me, even at that young age, it was all an argument between the acceptance of ultimate truth and the openness to listen to other points of view. The Grecolus-driven universe was indeed the only way to go if it was true, but if it was not, the rejection of such diversity to me seemed unhealthy and cruel.

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Vrak returned Brisbane to his cage, after threading him through the countless tunnels of the ork cave, and Brisbane spent the entire day wallowing in the dirty straw with his two faithful companions, pain and hunger. Before the day was over, the need for a bowel movement came upon him and, unlike urination—which he could direct out of his living space—he was forced to squat in one of the corners of the wagon and leave his refuse of the floor. When finished, he kicked most of the mess out through the bars and scrubbed the fouled area with generous handfuls of straw. He had never felt so low and depraved in his life and could see no difference between himself and the animals that must have once done the same thing in the cage. It was the orks who had done this to him, and Brisbane hung tenaciously to Angelika’s promise of vengeance.

Angelika. Where was she now? Brisbane tried again to contact her but his second attempt was as futile as his first had been. He had seen Vrak take her inside the cave, but Brisbane supposed he could not be sure she was still in there. Vrak had not been able to draw her from her scabbard, Brisbane remembered, and Angelika had said none of the orks would be able to do so. This surely would arouse the curiosity of the orks, to say nothing of the fact that she was found on the person of history’s first human Grumak or, perhaps most importantly, she had an emerald the size of a fist embedded in her pommel.

But, as Brisbane was to find out that day, Angelika was not the only recipient of the orks’ curiosity. Word had evidently spread about the Demosk’s judgment of his blood, and it seemed the whole of the ork encampment passed by Brisbane’s cage that day to catch a glimpse of such a miraculous being. Men in armor and red-eye shields, women with dirty tunics pulled tightly over their large breasts, children with spindly little legs and fingers in their noses—they all came to see the human whose blood bore the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Brisbane did not believe his power came from Gruumsh One-Eye any more than he believed it came from Damaleous. His power came from within himself, as Roystnof had taught him, and the only reason he was not more skillful with his power was because he had not spent enough time mastering it. He was nothing special. All these people, eyes wide with wonder and amazement, who passed by his cage in an endless procession needed to look no farther than themselves to see what they had come to see in Brisbane.

It was a day that passed slowly and during which Brisbane found it difficult to think clearly. The orks—there seemed to be so many of them—passed by with such reverence and awe that it distracted Brisbane and kept his mind from settling down on one idea for long scrutiny. Throughout the day his thoughts passed over many things, maybe as many things as orks that passed by his cage. He thought about his life, the important and not-so-important events that had led up to the situation in which he now found himself.

He thought about Otis, the man who had married his mother and raised him as if he were his own son. He remembered the lessons and the moral training and the occasional spankings, yes, but he also remembered other things, things he had not thought about for quite some time. Brisbane remembered the times they had spent together, not as teacher and student, but as father and son. They had played games together. Otis had been a big fan of card games and had taught young Brisbane just about every kind there was at one time or another. Cribbage was Otis’ favorite and he was very good at it. The day in which Brisbane had finally beaten his stepfather, after years of loss after loss, came flooding back in memory to him now. Brisbane had counted his crib and triumphantly moved his peg into the 121st hole, winning the game. He had looked up at Otis, a smile straining the edges of his small face, and Otis had smiled warmly back at him. Otis had congratulated him and then slyly asked if Brisbane had ever heard of a game called euchre. Brisbane had always known the reason Otis had been strict and sometimes cruel was that he had loved his mother and him like the family they were, but it wasn’t until now, dirty and starving in a broken-down circus wagon, that he realized how much he had loved Otis, too.

He thought about his mother, a woman of impossible beauty named Amanda who had birthed him. Brisbane had many memories about his mother, most of them warm and happy and nurturing, but ever since that fateful day just after his eighteenth birthday

—I’m nineteen now and this December I’ll be twenty—

all his memories had been tainted with the inevitable fact of her weakened death. Somewhere in the mists of his recollection Brisbane could bring up, when he closed his eyes and shut out all other thoughts, the dimmest memory of himself as an infant, teething and drawing milk from his mother’s swollen breast. But even that was ruined by the stigma of her death, for he knew the suckling flow had stopped completely and her breasts, once so full and smooth and round, had drooped and wrinkled with age and disease and were now withering into dry dust in her grave. He missed her so much and it was times like this that he wondered how he could go on living without her. How could he go on for such long periods of time without thinking about her and all she meant to him?

He thought about Roystnof, his oldest friend who he had known for six years as Roy Stonerow. Roystnof was one of his teachers, too, like Otis, and also like Otis, Roystnof was also something more. Brisbane loved him like a brother and felt the separation from him perhaps more than anyone else. Roystnof was a source of other ideas, ideas different from those set down as law by Grecolus, and may therefore have been more appealing to the rebellious Brisbane approaching his adolescence. Roystnof’s world was a world without gods and without the guilt and sacrifices that gods seemed to need when they lived among men. In Roystnof’s world, man was the master of his own destiny and it was his choice to do what he willed with his life. Death was an ending in Roystnof’s world, not a beginning, and when it found you, all that was left of you were your works and the memories of you in others. It was a less comforting world, a world in which mortal meant mortal, but through his experiences with Roystnof, Brisbane had come to suspect it was the only kind of world that made any sense.

He thought about Shortwhiskers, the dwarf who had come into his life one night and shown him a wizard named Roystnof where he had previously seen a friend called Roy Stonerow. The dwarf had also shown him another world, not the one of Moradin and Abbathor and of the dwarven myths, but the one of stalwart adventure, a man and his sword out to win fame and fortune. A world Nog Shortwhiskers had known for longer than Brisbane had been alive, a world he had shared with his friend Roystnof and his grandfather Gildegarde Brisbane. The dwarf had become such a part of his life. They were friends, yes, but they were also something more than that. They were companions in battle. Together they had faced and defeated orks, ogres, ettins, and a demon. There was a special kind of bond forged there, different from the one that attached him to Roystnof, but strong and binding all the same. In the heat of battle, Brisbane had and would again flagrantly risk his own life to protect Shortwhiskers’, as he knew the dwarf had and would do for him.

He thought about Stargazer, the half-elven woman he had first seen in the town square of Queensburg on the eve of the festival of Whiteshine. Brisbane closed his eyes and tried to remember her beauty through the ugly images that had dominated his life since his capture on the banks of the Mystic. He loved her, he could feel the truth of that inflating his heart like a balloon until it pressed almost painfully against his lungs and shortened his breath. He longed to hold her in his arms as he remembered having once done, only this time he wanted to do more than just snuggle for warmth beneath blankets on the floor of some tent lost in the wilderness. Grecolus said what he wanted to do was a sin when it was done out of wedlock, but at that moment he didn’t care. If Grecolus wanted to condemn him for thinking of making love to Allison Stargazer while he waited in an animal’s cage for Ternosh the Grumak to decide his fate by some drug-induced vision of a strange race’s afterlife, Brisbane thought, then Grecolus could take his best shot. Brisbane believed dreams and thoughts of that sort may very well be the only things that kept him sane during this ordeal, and if he somehow survived to see Stargazer again, he vowed to do his very best to make these dreams come true.

He thought about Roundtower, another warrior like Shortwhiskers, but unlike Shortwhiskers in his manner and purpose. He was a teacher of sorts to Brisbane as well, and he was also something more. Brisbane had an amazing amount of respect for Ignatius Roundtower, even though he did not agree with his religious beliefs. They had fought battles together, too, but what was different about Roundtower was the reason why he was fighting the battles. He was following his dream to become a Knight of Farchrist, and Brisbane could respect him for that if for nothing else. The dream was no longer his own, but it had been his mother’s for him, and Brisbane knew it wasn’t necessarily the content of the dream that won his respect. It was the way Roundtower pursued it, never giving it up and moving towards it in everything he did. He had the faith of Grecolus and was not out adventuring to increase his wealth or fame, he was out to increase his skill with his sword so he could serve his lord better. When Brisbane had happened along, Angelika had left Roundtower free to pursue the next stage of his dream. There was no guarantee he would be accepted by some knight to become a squire, but Brisbane knew Roundtower would be there for as long as it took.

He thought about Dantrius, the illusionist Roystnof had restored to flesh in the basilisk’s garden and who had recognized Brisbane from a mental image of his grandfather. The man had been a pain in Brisbane’s side since that day and the small pleasure he took in knowing he was separated from Illzeezad Dantrius was tainted with the fearful knowledge that the mage was still among his friends. Brisbane knew too many things about Dantrius and he didn’t know which, if any, of them were true. Shortwhiskers said he had betrayed King Gregorovich II at the request of the dragon Dalanmire. Roystnof said he worshipped Damaleous and believed he got his power from the Evil One. Brisbane was only sure of the growing dislike he felt for the man, and had felt from him, since they had met. Brisbane hoped Dantrius would leave them all alone, but Roystnof didn’t seem to think he would without disturbing something. Brisbane realized that right now, Illzeezad Dantrius, and what he might do, were the least of his problems.

He thought about Smurch, the half-ork he had named Jack and who had been tossed in his cage the night before. The only person within miles Brisbane could tentatively call a friend, Brisbane was not sure what to make of this half-ork Jack Smurch. He obviously didn’t like his life of abuse from the pure-blooded members of the clan—who would, even if they hadn’t once been the son of a chief? Brisbane would have liked to think he could use this against his captors somehow, maybe get Smurch to do secret favors for him, but he didn’t know if he was ever going to see the half-ork again. He seemed to be the only member of the Clan of the Red Eye who hadn’t passed by to catch a glimpse of the freak Brisbane had become. Brisbane knew. He had kept his eyes peeled for the half-ork all day.

Lastly, he thought about Grumak Ternosh, the ork who had the power of magic at his disposal and the one who would decide Brisbane’s fate. The question of Ternosh’s power was still a puzzle to Brisbane. He had worked a cantrip in what the Grumak had declared as an anti-magic zone, and so Brisbane questioned just how powerful his magic could be. Even what had just happened in the Grumak’s chamber, which appeared to have been a powerful example of summoning and divining magic, might have been no more than a hallucination caused by the inhalation of the smoke from that strange red powder. It was obvious the incense had been some kind of drug and while he was under the influence, Brisbane could be sure of nothing he sensed. The entire episode with the Demosk, whatever that really was, had possessed a dream-like quality, and it could have been as unreal as Brisbane’s feeling of floating free from his chains.

These are the people who walked through Brisbane’s thoughts as he sat in his cage, trying to ignore the orks outside and waiting for the return of Ternosh the Grumak. He wondered if he shouldn’t try to formulate some sort of plan of escape but the idea seemed strangely ridiculous to him, knowing as little as he did about his surroundings and the potential events of the next few hours. Any plan he could devise was more than likely doomed to failure by any one of a thousand variables Brisbane had no control over. To play it by ear was as detailed a plan Brisbane felt he should make and he pessimistically realized this was pretty much the same plan he had followed for his entire life so far.

The waiting and the flood of orkish bodies past his cage finally ended that day when Ternosh emerged from the cave mouth in his red robes with Vrak right on his heels. The Grumak came out and stood before Brisbane, glaring angrily at him for several seconds before turning to address the crowd of orks in their native language.

It was a speech of sorts and Brisbane watched as the men, women, and children listened silently and wide-eyed to every word. The whole while Vrak stood behind Ternosh’s right shoulder and he would occasionally turn and burn Brisbane with a mixed look of fear and hatred. Brisbane wished time and again he could understand orkish so he would know what it was Ternosh was telling his people, but it was a wish that went ungranted. As he finished, Ternosh raised his hands to the massed populace and sent his voice up many decibels. He rang a final sentence out over their heads and the people reacted with cries of surprise and triumph. When Ternosh lowered his arms, the people quieted and began to slowly disperse back into the settlement.

Ternosh and Vrak turned back to Brisbane. He had come to the front of his cage and had his hands curled around the bars as he watched his audience stream away from him.

Ternosh waited until Brisbane took notice of his angry stare. “Well, Brisbane,” the Grumak said when he had the human’s attention. “It seems He-Who-Watches has revealed to me his purpose in granting the powers of my kind upon a human.”

Ternosh motioned to Vrak and the ork went over to the door of the circus wagon. Vrak worked at the lock with his key and opened the door. He did not enter the wagon. He did not have any other guards with him. Brisbane looked at him for a long moment and then turned back to Ternosh.

“We are all creatures of duty,” the Grumak said seriously. “Some of us are more powerful than others, but in the end, we are all creatures of duty. What I am about to do, I do because it is my duty to do so. Personally, I do not agree with this action, but it seems the path has already been made for me, and now I must walk down it.”

All the other orks were still leaving the scene. This discourse confused Brisbane profoundly. What was Ternosh talking about? What was he about to do?

“You can come out of your cage, Brisbane,” Ternosh said.

Brisbane did nothing.

The Grumak addressed Vrak in orkish. Reluctantly, Vrak backed away from the open cage door.

“Come on,” Ternosh said to Brisbane. “I have little time for your dalliance.”

Brisbane began to move slowly out of his cage. He arrived at the door and Vrak backed off another few paces. Brisbane stood half-in and half-out of the door and looked up at the darkening sky. Vrak had freed him of his bonds and his gag when the ork had returned him to the cage, and without them the outside air smelled a bit sweeter and the sky looked a bit wider. Brisbane started down the few wooden steps and stood upon the hard earth. Vrak grimaced at him as he made his way around the wagon to stand in front of Ternosh.

The Grumak put his hands on his hips and sized Brisbane up and down. “You are free, Brisbane. You may leave this camp.”

Brisbane did not move.

Ternosh spoke to Vrak in a commanding tone, then turned back to address Brisbane. “I have told Vrak not to molest you. If you wish it, Vrak will even escort you from the camp. I am serious. You are truly free to go.”

Brisbane looked the Grumak over very carefully. Something smelled extremely fishy here. Vrak and Ternosh were now the only two orks within a hundred yards and the others were getting farther away every second. Ternosh seemed sincere but there was an odd little twinkle in his remaining red eye that sent shivers up and down Brisbane’s spine.

On the surface of his consciousness, Brisbane was convinced this offer of freedom was some kind of trick, something Ternosh wanted Brisbane to jump up at so he could be knocked down even further. He simply could not accept the fact that the orks would just let him go after all they had done to keep him here. But subconsciously, deep down in the pool of Brisbane’s thoughts, so deep that the surface was undisturbed by it, a soft and seductive feminine voice begged Brisbane not to leave without her, reminding Brisbane vengeance would be theirs if he would only be patient and strong.

A full minute of silence went by as Brisbane stood there in indecision. The whole time Ternosh seemed to be studying Brisbane’s face, as if he planned to paint it later from memory. When the minute had passed, and neither Brisbane, Ternosh, nor Vrak had taken a single step in any direction, Ternosh threw his head back and began to laugh.

“So,” the Grumak said, composing himself with some difficulty. “It is true. You will not leave. I did not believe it even though I heard it from the mouth of my own Demosk. There is something holding you here and you will not leave until you have acquired it. Good. Very good.”

Brisbane lowered his head. He could feel the force holding him here and yet he did not fully understand it. How could Angelika exert such a power over him? He was free to go, Ternosh would not stop him, and still his feet did not move. Just how much did that sword come to mean to him, anyway?

“What are you going to do with me?” Brisbane asked.

Ternosh seemed surprised Brisbane had even spoken. “Why, you will go into training, of course. You have just become my apprentice, Brisbane. You will be instructed in the magic and worship of He-Who-Watches and, when the time comes, you might very well become the Grumak of the Clan of the Red Eye.”

Brisbane did not like the sound of that. He wasn’t about to become the Grumak of any clan, and he certainly wasn’t going to start worshipping Gruumsh One-Eye. But that did not really matter, for in Ternosh’s words, Brisbane did not hear the threats of a controlled existence under the repressive arm of yet another primitive religion. What he did hear was a promise to go on living. The orks were not going to kill him, they were going to give him some time and, in that time, Brisbane nurtured a glimmer of hope he would somehow be able to recover Angelika and extract their vengeance from the hides of the orks around him.

Ternosh asked Brisbane to follow him and the Grumak led him into the cave. Vrak predictably fell into step right behind them.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Running With the Demon by Terry Brooks

2026-04-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

This, then, is the beginning of my plan to read all the Shannara books in chronological order. This is actually the start of Brooks’s three-volume The Word and the Void series -- and it begins in pretty much present-day America -- in a town called Hopewell, Illinois.

Here’s the summary from the back of my paperback copy:

Plagued by nightmares that tell him something evil will soon unleash an ancient horror upon the world, John Ross feels irrevocably drawn to the sleepy town of Hopewell, Illinois. In Hopewell, fourteen-year-old Nest Freemark also senses that something is terribly wrong, but she has not yet learned to wield the budding power that sets her apart from her friends. Now the future of humanity depends on a man haunted by his dreams and on a gifted young girl -- two souls who will discover what survives when hope and innocence are shattered forever.

What was most interesting to me was the way this is actually horror and not fantasy -- or at least a kind of merging of horror and fantasy. And that started me thinking about Stephen King’s similar genre-bending attempts with his Dark Tower series. And I was left wondering.

King is a better horror writer than Brooks, and Brooks is a better fantasy writer than King. But which one is better at the opposite craft? In other words, which is better? King’s fantasy or Brooks’s horror?

They are very similar stories, but based on this fresh read of Running With the Demon and my dim recollection of The Gunslinger, I’d have to give the nod to Brooks’s horror.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

2026-04-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

Took me a long time to read this one and as I did so I came to refer to it as “my stupid book.”

That’s probably too harsh. I found myself nodding off a lot, but probably largely because I read it at night before going to bed. On weekend afternoons, I found it a better read.

It seemed to take a long time for the actual story to begin, the first 200 pages seemingly devoted to exposition and character development. Characters, that is, except for Nostromo, who is kind of a ghostly figure until he makes a late appearance in part two and suddenly makes the story his own.

In retrospect, it may have been an effective structure because the characters in the story feel like they have unique histories behind them, but those first 200 pages were kind of tough to get through.

Everyone in the novel thinks Nostromo has unassailable integrity, but through a series of accidents and circumstances, he finds himself the only person who knows where a fortune in silver is buried. Rather than reveal his secret and return the silver to its owner, even after the danger that brought the accidents and circumstances has passed, he decides to keep it to himself and “slowly get rich” under the guise of a successful shipping business with his schooner. His penalty, in the strange morality of fiction, is death by accidental shooting by someone who thinks of him as a son.

That’s the story, but the book is much larger than that, encompassing a revolution in a fictional South American republic and the plunder of its natural resources by foreign commercial exploits at the expense of its own citizens. Although Nostromo’s story fills fewer pages, it seems more real and immediate than its overpowering and sometimes indistinct backstory. I doubt I’ll put any more Conrad on my reading list.

A quote worth noting:

Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not believe in priests in their sacerdotal character. A doctor was an efficacious person; but a priest, as priest, was nothing, incapable of doing either good or harm. Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of them as old Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was what struck him the most.

And:

In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

2026-04-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

My mother realized the necessity of a father-figure in my life—a good, positive role model for her son to emulate and to learn from. Otis seemed to be the perfect choice. A man of Grecolus, he ran a good business and had enough education to impart to a young boy the moral, ethical, and religious training needed to rise above the rabble of the world. Amanda made her decision early in her pregnancy and did everything in her power to make herself available and attractive to Otis. She still loved my father, and would never stop loving him, but the responsibility of their son demanded such actions. Otis Parkinson was wise enough to see what she was doing, but took things slowly and bit by bit worked his unassuming way into my life and my mother’s heart. When I was three years old, the wedding was held in the local temple, and my mother took the name of a man more than ten years older than she.

+ + +

When morning came, Smurch was removed from the cage by a group of groggy orks and put immediately to work around the settlement. Brisbane would not see him again until that night, but his day was filled with enough activity to keep him from missing the half-ork.

After he had returned the night before, Brisbane had shaken off Smurch’s questions about the importance of one sword and concentrated instead on getting Smurch to promise not to tell his superiors about Brisbane’s magic and his little midnight trip. It wasn’t easy, but he eventually got his wish when he reminded the half-ork that Ternosh would supposedly discover his true power the next day anyway.

Before they had finally gone to sleep for the night, Smurch reconsidered his duty to report Brisbane’s power to the clan in the light that Brisbane was, in fact, a Grumak of considerable power. The half-ork decided he would do as Brisbane wished for that reason if for no other. As he had said before, Gruumsh One-Eye must have sent a human Grumak here for a reason, and Smurch decided it was wise to steer clear of whatever that reason might be. He was, after all, just half an ork, and he didn’t know if he even had a place in the eternal army of He-Who-Watches.

The sun had only been up for an hour or two when a determined group of orks, led by Vrak, made their way over to Brisbane’s cage. Vrak opened the door with his key and sent four very large orks into the wagon to tie and gag Brisbane. He did not put up a fight, letting the orks secure his hands behind his back and place another awful-tasting gag in his mouth. Soon he was ready for transport and the orks led him out of the wagon.

Vrak stood there at the exit and when Brisbane reached the ground he snapped a few hostile-sounding words to his prisoner in his harsh language.

Brisbane burned the ork with an angry stare. Your name may be Vrak, but your teeth are no less twisted, you ugly bastard. Did you know I can open that lock without your key? Did you, Vrak?

Vrak pushed Brisbane ahead and he took control of the bonds connecting his wrists. The ork quickly began walking Brisbane toward the entrance of the cave.

Vrak. How many syllables does your name have, Vrak? Can you count that high? You’re just a flunkie, aren’t you, Vrak? A whipping boy with someone to whip.

They entered the cave and Brisbane’s vision suddenly failed him. Vrak kept pushing him forward. It was noticeably colder inside the cave and Brisbane could feel his steps descending into the earth. As they went along, his eyes began to adjust to the darkness and Brisbane could begin to make out the walls and floor of a tunnel. There were many turns and side passages. Some of them he was pushed past, some of them he was pushed into. Even if he could see his surroundings perfectly well, the many twists and turns he had taken would have left him utterly lost in what had to be a confusing maze of corridors.

Eventually, Brisbane was forced through an open portal and into a chamber that would have been unusual in the dark tunnels for no other reason than it was lighted by bright torches. But there was plenty else about the room that made it unusual. It was circular, about thirty feet in diameter, with smoothly polished walls unlike the rough stone found in the tunnels. The torches hung in wall sconces around the chamber, lighting the unusual contents of the room. In the very center, painted on the floor, was a red circled pentagram about three feet in diameter. On one side of the pentagram was a large chair, ornately carved with thousands of tiny ork faces, mouths open in screams of pain or pleasure. Seated in this chair, dressed in the red robes he had worn the day before, was Ternosh the Grumak.

Ternosh said something to Vrak in orkish and the ork pushed Brisbane into the room and onto a small chair in front of the Grumak, on the opposite side of the pentagram. While Vrak fastened a chain to Brisbane’s wrists that would keep them connected to the floor behind him, Brisbane looked around at the rest of the room. A small shelf ran nearly all the way around the wall at about neck level. This shelf was stuffed with all kinds of books and papers and boxes bulging over with miscellaneous items. The cluttered paraphernalia reminded Brisbane of all the things he had carried into a house owned by a man named Roy Stonerow so many years ago. There was a workbench of sorts behind Brisbane, but he did not have much of a chance to see what was on it, apart from a vague impression of some glassware and some rubber tubing.

Ternosh said something else in orkish to Vrak and the ork grudgingly removed Brisbane’s gag and slowly left the chamber. When he was gone, Ternosh fixed his single red eye on Brisbane.

“Well now,” the Grumak said in the common speech of humans, roughly spoken but understandable. “The time has come for our little talk. Let’s start at the beginning. What were you doing in the mountains?”

Brisbane did not see any reason not to answer the Grumak’s questions. Smurch’s opinion had been that his only chance was to cooperate and prove himself to be a human Grumak. If Ternosh discovered him to be a fake, Brisbane was sure he would quickly be killed for the sacrilege of wearing what was, in effect, an orkish holy symbol.

But what was this question about his presence in the mountains? Brisbane thought he had been brought here so the Grumak could somehow test him for magical powers. Why the interrogation? Brisbane was not sure what he should do.

Ternosh rose to his feet. He brought out a slim glass rod that had been concealed in the folds of his red robes. It was about a foot long and had a round glass ball about the size of a tangerine on the end of it.

He held the rod up for Brisbane to see. “Do you know what this is? My people call it the drom-kesh. A loose translation into your tongue renders it ‘the wand of pain.’”

Brisbane still said nothing.

Ternosh went on. “With it, I can channel the power given to me by He-Who-Watches from my mind into your flesh. The raw power, unfocused and unshaped as it is, can then dance across your nerves in a way that I’ve heard can be most painful. If you don’t answer my questions, and answer them now, I will use the drom-kesh on you.”

Brisbane did not know if this was possible, but he didn’t want to test it. He really didn’t see any point in hiding things from the Grumak, anyway. Smurch seemed to believe Ternosh would discover everything in the end, with or without Brisbane’s compliance. If he answered, he was not sure what was going to happen to him. If he did not answer, evidently he was to be tortured.

“So,” Ternosh said. “I shall ask you one more time. What were you doing in the mountains?”

“I was traveling,” Brisbane said.

Ternosh sat back down. He placed the drom-kesh in his lap. “Very good. You were traveling. What was your destination?”

“I was searching for a temple rumored to exist at the source of the Mystic River.” Brisbane did not see any harm in this line of questioning. What would Ternosh care about his expedition?

Ternosh’s brow ridge went up. “A temple? Devoted to which god?”

“Grecolus.”

Ternosh nodded. “I know of this temple. It lies quite a bit farther up the Mystic than the place where you were found. Were you traveling alone?”

“No,” Brisbane said absent-mindedly. The orks knew about the lost temple? They lived in the hills and obviously patrolled the mountains. Brisbane supposed their knowledge of the temple was not that unusual. How long had the Clan of the Red Eye been here? Were they here when, say, the temple was a living part of the religious life of Grecolus? Perhaps they had attacked the temple and killed all the priests in their conquest of other races? It could explain a lot.

“Where are your companions?” Ternosh asked.

Now the questions were getting dangerous, Brisbane judged.

Ternosh held up the drom-kesh.

Brisbane told the ork how he had become separated from his friends. He did not say who his friends were or any of the events that had led up to his fall from the mountain top.

Ternosh stood up and began to pace in a slow, small circle around his carved chair. He tapped the drom-kesh against his chin with contemplative regularity.

“What is your name?” Ternosh asked.

Brisbane again so no reason to lie. “My name is Brisbane.” To most strangers he gave the name Parkinson. It usually avoided a lot of tiresome questions. With Ternosh, Brisbane did not think that would be necessary.

“You must forgive me, Brisbane,” the Grumak said. “I admit I have been delaying the inevitable. The scouting party that found you on the river bank also discovered the massacre of the kroganes in their lair. I believe your race calls them ettins.”

Brisbane said nothing.

“And just this morning,” the Grumak went on, “another party returned from the west with news of a slaughtered group of eight grugan. Orks, as you would call them, from this clan. I am very curious as to who could be responsible for all these deaths. Was it you? Your friends?”

Brisbane lowered his eyes and still said nothing. He fought uselessly against the chain that held him to the floor. They’re going to kill me, he thought. For killing their friends. Ettins and orks. They’re going to kill me.

Ternosh stopped pacing behind his chair. He waited until Brisbane stopped fighting the chain and looked back up at him.

“No matter, really,” the Grumak said. “You see, we grugan take a different look on combat than you humans do. It is a way of life to us and, when a man dies in combat, we believe it is just and that he deserved his death. In this way only the strongest survive.”

Brisbane still did not say anything.

“So,” Ternosh said. “You need have no concern for your own life because you may have killed some of our number. Even Kras, the man you strangled to death when you were taken captive, will not condemn you. If you are to be killed, I will do it, and it will be because you bear the symbol of that which you cannot be.”

With that, Ternosh went quickly over to the shelf that nearly circled the chamber, put the drom-kesh away and took down what appeared to be a large, golden incense burner. Ternosh brought it over and set it down in the middle of the pentagram at Brisbane’s feet. It had a five-pointed base, each point stretching out into one of the arms of the star. The bowl was about the size of a large cooking pot, and it too had five sides to it, set askew to the points of the base. The curving lid rested on a flat lip that ran all the way around the edge of the bowl and was pierced with five star-shaped holes to allow the incense smoke to escape.

Ternosh then went back to the shelf and took down a heavy, folded-up curtain, which he hung from some hooks above the open portal of the chamber. Lastly, from the shelf, he obtained a small golden bowl and a short silver knife. The Grumak returned to his carved chair.

“Now,” Ternosh said. “We shall hear the truth of the matter.” He took the lid off the golden vessel at their feet and Brisbane could see the bottom was filled with a fine red powder. Ternosh said an orkish word and a spark jumped off one of his fingers and fell into the powder. He replaced the lid as dark gray smoke began to trail out of the bowl, and then he stood up and went over to Brisbane.

“I will require some of your blood for the process,” the Grumak said as he brought the silver knife up and cut it into the side of Brisbane’s neck.

The pain was hot and immediate, but Brisbane did not flinch away as Ternosh held the small golden bowl up to catch some of the human’s blood. When he had collected enough for his purposes, the ork brought a sticky bandage out from one of the folds in his robe and pressed it against Brisbane’s wound. It held itself there and the Grumak said it would stop the bleeding.

Ternosh returned to his chair with the bowl of Brisbane’s blood. By now, smoke was pouring out of the vents in the golden burner. It had the smell of sharp oranges and was already beginning to make Brisbane’s eyes water. With the way the smoke was coming out of the vents and the curtain hung in the doorway, it would not be long before the room was thick with it.

“What are you doing?” Brisbane asked, his voice sounding far away from his ears.

“I am summoning my Demosk,” Ternosh said, his voice sounding more inside Brisbane’s head than outside. “He will sample your blood and tell me whether or not He-Who-Watches has infused it with power.”

With that, the Grumak began a low guttural chant in the tongue of magic Brisbane could almost understand. The orange-scented smoke was so thick now as to obscure Ternosh’s form across from Brisbane. He could only see glimpses of the red robes through the haze. His eyes were crying tears in reaction to the smoke, but it was not painful, and his head was swimming in a dizzy sea of pleasant feelings. Brisbane could no longer feel the chain that bound him or the chair he sat upon. He felt like he was floating free in the vapor, and he didn’t care where he might float to. Still, the Grumak’s chanting went on.

Brisbane’s rational mind, small and sheltered deep within his head, whispered that the incense was some kind of drug, and both he and Ternosh were flying on it. But Brisbane did not care about that, and did not care that his defenses were down and he was susceptible to suggestion and delusion. All he cared about was feeling good, and in a room full of this smoke, that was not much of a care at all.

As Ternosh continued to chant, an eerie light began to pour out of the incense burner, five tiny beams that widened and focused together at a spot in the smoky air about five feet

—or was it five miles?—

off the floor. Smoke poured through this light, making it appear as if it moved along without changing position.

Suddenly, Ternosh’s chanting shifted its timbre and the spot of ghostly white began to take shape. Its sphere elongated into the small head and torso of a humanoid figure. Slender arms broke away from the body and darker features began to deepen into it. The figure developed the pig-ears and snout of an ork, but under the heavy brow ridge, there was no trace of any eyes whatsoever. The figure floated in the air before Brisbane, but it only seemed to exist where the smoke was. As the vapor moved across it, where it was thinner, the figure was dimmer, and where it was absent, the figure was transparent.

Ternosh stopped chanting and stood up.

The floating figure opened its mouth and spoke. Brisbane heard it as the common tongue, but if he had had Ternosh’s ears, he would have heard orkish. “Why have you summoned me from the battlefield, Grumak Ternosh?”

Ternosh spoke to his Demosk in the native tongue of the grugan. Brisbane could not understand these words but, again, they seemed to sound more in his head than in his ears.

“I see,” The Demosk said. “The test is a simple one. Give me the bowl.”

Ternosh handed the small bowl with Brisbane’s blood in it to the Demosk. Brisbane’s rational mind might have asked how a creature made of light and smoke could hold and support a golden bowl, but that part of his mind was growing smaller with every inhalation. The Demosk held the bowl in its small hands, raised it to its smoky lips, and drank down its contents.

When finished, the Demosk tossed the bowl back to Ternosh. There was no sign of Brisbane’s blood anywhere. It was indeed as if the apparition had imbibed it.

Ternosh spoke again to the figure in orkish.

“Grumak Ternosh, the taste is unmistakable. The blood does contain the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.”

The bane of Gruumsh One-Eye? What does that mean? The smoke was beginning to make Brisbane sick to his stomach.

Ternosh stiffened and launched into an explosive tirade against the shimmering Demosk. The figure floated patiently before the Grumak, waiting blindly for the ork to run out of breath.

“The blood contains the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye,” the Demosk said when Ternosh had finished. “I was summoned and I have performed as demanded. Grumak Ternosh, do you require anything else?”

Ternosh waved his hand angrily at the Demosk and the figure vanished in the blink of an eye. Instantly, smoke stopped coming out of the incense burner and the smoke already present in the room quickly began to dissipate. Brisbane’s rationality began a long swim back up to the surface and he began to again sense his surroundings. The effect of the drug had left him with an upset stomach and a headache. He began to wonder just what it had been in that smoke that had made him feel so light-headed. He began to wonder what kind of spell Ternosh had used to summon up his Demosk. He began to wonder just where the Demosk had been summoned from. He began to wonder where his blood that had been in the bowl had really gone. And beneath all these wonders, Brisbane still was bothered by what the Demosk could have possibly meant by the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Before long, all the smoke had disappeared from the chamber and Ternosh was returning his items to the shelf that ran around the room. Brisbane’s head was clear but he felt a little tired and his pain and hunger had returned to him in force, seemingly worse after his short reprieve from them.

Ternosh called out for Vrak and moments later the ork burst into the chamber. His eyes scanned the room, his sword in hand, indicating he had expected some kind of trouble, but he saw everything as he had left it.

Ternosh turned to Brisbane. “Well,” he said. “It seems your power has been verified. Personally, I cannot fathom why He-Who-Watches would grant the power on a member of such an inferior race, but evidently he has. I will need time to decide just what his purpose may be in this matter. Vrak will return you to your cage until I have need of you again.”

The Grumak turned to Vrak and repeated his order to him in orkish. Vrak came over to Brisbane, reaffixed the foul gag, and released him from the chain that had kept Brisbane connected to the floor. Roughly, the ork jerked Brisbane to his feet and moved him towards the chamber’s exit.

“Remember,” Ternosh said before Brisbane left, “my spell of anti-magic still protects the circus wagon. Within it, you cannot use any of the spells you might have learned.”

That’s what you think, Brisbane thought. My cantrip worked and it will be interesting to see what else will work. Your anti-magic spell is a joke, Ternosh. It’s a sham, and I think you know it. But I wonder if you know I know it?

Vrak pushed him roughly from the chamber.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Satanstoe by James Fenimore Cooper

2026-03-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

I guess there’s a strange story behind this one.

As I’ve written elsewhere -- anyone who is familiar with Cooper is familiar with The Last of the Mohicans. Some smaller portion of those people are familiar with the larger Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels among which The Last of the Mohicans is the second, chronologically. Some smaller portion of those people are familiar with other series that Cooper wrote, especially one called The Littlepage Manuscripts, of which Satanstoe is the first chronological volume.

I first read Satanstoe in my dimly-remembered past -- 1992ish, based on my log of read books. I didn’t remember much about it, other than it set me on my quest to acquire the other two volumes in the series -- The Chainbearer (which I eventually found in a used bookstore somewhere) and The Redskins (which I broke down and purchased as a ‘print and ship’ option off the Internet).

And now, I’ve recently re-read Satanstoe and it, sadly, left even less of an impression on me this time. The entire series of Littlepage Manuscripts is loosely about the issues behind the American Anti-Rent War of the early 1840s (when the novels were written), in which several “Anti-Renters” declared their independence from the manor system run by their patroons, resisting tax collectors and successfully demanding land reform. To Cooper, these Anti-Renters were a mob, dangerously taking the principles of democracy too far, and stripping inalienable property rights from their betters.

The trilogy is the story of several generations of Littlepages, who own vast tracts of undeveloped land in upstate New York, and who battle against their upstart renters and other indigenous and foreign adversaries. In Satanstoe, the name of their ancestral estate on Long Island, the protagonist is a young Cornelius Littlepage, with the events taking place in the 1750s. As a result, almost none of the anti-rent issues are really explored in the plot. Instead, it is much more of a romance, as young ‘Corny’ pursues and eventually marries an equally young Anneke Mordaunt, thereby becoming the patriarch and matriarch of the Littlepages in the following novels.

It is very much a tale reminiscent of The Last of the Mohicans, with young women in danger in the wilderness, who must be protected by the young white men and their Indian guides. And for me, it is one of these Indian guides, known, as usual, by various names, that proves to be the most interesting.

This Indian was about six-and-twenty years of age; and was called a Mohawk, living with the people of that tribe; though I subsequently ascertained that he was in fact an Onondago by birth. His true name was Susquesus or Crooked Turns; an appellation that might or might not speak well of his character, as the “turns” were regarding in a moral or in a physical sense.

“Take that man. Mr. Littlepage, by all means,” said Herman Mordaunt’s agent, when the matter was under discussion. You will find him as useful in the woods as your pocket-compass, besides being a reasonably good hunter. He left here as a runner during the heaviest of the snows last winter, and a trial was made to find his trail within half an hour after he had quitted the clearing, but without success. He had not gone a mile in the woods before all traces of him were lost, as completely as if he had made the journey in the air.”

It is this ability to move without leaving a trace through the forest that gives Susquesus his most oft-repeated sobriquet, that of Trackless -- but in many ways Trackless is the very Pathfinder that will come out so strongly in Cooper’s more famous novels.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

2026-03-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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I really enjoyed this book. I didn’t think I would after the first 50 pages, but it just goes to show you that you can’t judge a 945-page book by its first 50 pages. In the first 50 pages the characters seemed flat and hollow, caricatures of archetypal characters used in a hundred other stories. Most of all, Lorena, the whore with a heart of gold. But McMurtry throws these characters into real tough situations, doesn’t pull any punches, and they grow and mature and you begin to care about them like people. It was amazing. Some excerpts:

Deets liked his work, liked being part of the outfit and having his name on the sign; yet he often felt sad. His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water tank at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Deets is an interesting character, a black man who is treated as nearly an equal by the cowboys in the Hat Creek Outfit, and respected for his capabilities and dependability by Call and McCrae. His death affects the men severely and, for Newt, it’s practically the last straw.

+ + +

When they left, he went off dutifully to make his rounds. Augustus hitched the new mules to the new wagon. The streets of San Antonio were silent and empty as they left. The moon was high and a couple of stray goats nosed around the walls of the old Alamo, hoping to find a blade of grass. When they had first come to Texas in the Forties people had talked of nothing but Travis and his gallant losing battle, but the battle had mostly been forgotten and the building neglected.

“Well, Call, I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” Augustus said.

“Why wouldn’t they?” Call asked. “We ain’t been around.”

“That ain’t the reason—the reason is we didn’t die,” Augustus said. “Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done to Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”

It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.C.”

But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar—a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes—the more it bothered him.

“I ought to have given that young pup from Mobile a rap or two,” he said.

“He was just scared,” Call said. “I’m sure Tobe will lecture him next time he sees him.”

“It ain’t the pint, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “You never do get the pint.”

“Well, what is it, dern it?” Call asked.

“We’ll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,” Augustus said. “The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.”

“I’d say that’s unlikely,” Call said.

“It’s dern likely,” Augustus said. “If I can find a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent out best years fighting on the wrong side.”

This is a nice summation of the relationship between Call and McCrae, their opposing philosophies, and a poignant commentary on what happens to the pioneers after civilization doesn’t need them any more. A lot of Lonesome Dove feels like this passage, especially the section at the end when Call is taking McCrae’s body back to Texas to be buried in accordance with McCrae’s wishes. No one understands why Call is doing it. The Hat Creek boys think he’s doing it as an excuse to abandon them, Clara thinks it’s to avoid revealing to Newt that Call is really his father, and the Indians he meets along the way think it must be because McCrae was some kind of holy man and that his remains have magical powers. But the right answer is that Call is doing it because he gave his word that he would, and Call is a man to keep his word, especially when it is given to a man like McCrae.

+ + +

Blue Duck hobbled the horses, then came and looked down at her. “I got a treatment for women that try to run away,” he said casually. “I cut a little hole in their stomachs and pull out a gut and wrap it around a limb. Then I drag them thirty or forty feet and tie them down. That way they can watch the coyotes come and eat their guts.”

He went back and lay down under a tree, adjusted his saddlebags for a pillow, and was soon asleep.

Blue Duck is another interesting character. Admittedly, he’s a villain in the shallow kind of way of most fictional villains. We never get to know why Blue Duck is evil. He just is, and he is to such a degree that people fear him even after he is dead and refuse to move his body from the stone street where he flung himself to his death rather than be hung. But having said that, Blue Duck also very well represents the divide between the Indian and White cultures, and is a testament to the view that they can never be reconciled, will always be at odds with one another. This passage struck me because of how vivid it is, but also how diabolical. Torturing people in this way, this unimaginable way to a White culture, shocks us, but also gives Blue Duck a ring of authenticity most fictional Indians don’t have. In that way, he is like the Indians in the Leatherstocking Tales, or the Africans in Henderson the Rain King.

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While he was thinking about it he nodded for a few minutes—it seemed like a few minutes—asleep with his gun cocked. He had a little dream about the wild pigs, not too frightening. The pigs were not as wild as they had been in real life. They were just rooting around a cabin and not trying to harm him, yet he woke in a terrible fright and saw something incomprehensible. Janey was standing a few feet in front of him, with a big rock raised over her head. She was holding it with both hands—why would she do such a thing at that time of night? She wasn’t making a sound; she just stood in front of him holding the rock. It was not until she flung it that he realized someone else was there. But someone was: someone big. In his surprise, Roscoe forgot he had a pistol. He quickly stood up. He didn’t see where the rock went, but Janey suddenly dropped to her knees. She looked around at him. “Shoot at him,” she said. Roscoe remembered the pistol, which was cocked, but before he could raise it, the big shadow that Janey had thrown the rock at slid close to him and shoved him—not a hard shove, but it made him drop the pistol. He knew he was awake and not dreaming, but he didn’t have any more strength than he would have had in a dream in terms of moving quick. He saw the big shadow standing by him but he had felt no fear, and the shadow didn’t shove him again. Roscoe felt warm and sleepy and sat back down. It was like he was in a warm bath. He hadn’t had too many warm baths in his life, but he felt like he was in one and was ready for a long snooze. Janey was crawling, though—crawling right over his legs. “Now what are you doing?” he said, before he saw that her eyes were fixed on the pistol he had dropped. She wanted to pistol, and for some reason crawled right over his legs to get to it. But before she got to it the shadow came back. “Why, you’re a fighter, ain’t you?” the shadow man said. “If I wasn’t in such a hurry I’d show you a trick or two.” Then he raised his arms and struck down at her; Roscoe couldn’t see if it was with an ax or what, but the sound was like an ax striking wood, and Janey stopped moving and lay across his legs. “Joe?” Roscoe said; he had just remembered that he had made Joe stop cocking and uncocking his rifle so he could get to sleep.

“Was that his name?” the shadow man said. Roscoe knew it must be a man, for he had a heavy voice. But he couldn’t see the man’s face. He just seemed to be a big shadow, and anyway Roscoe couldn’t get his mind fixed on it, or on where Joe was or when July would be back, or on anything much, he felt so warm and tired. The big shadow stood astraddle of him and reached down for his belt but Roscoe had let go all concern, he felt so tired. He felt everything would have to stop for a while; it was as if the darkness itself was pushing his eyelids down. Then the warm sleep took him.

This is the scene where Blue Duck kills Roscoe and Joe and Janey, and leaves their bodies for July and Gus to find. I like the way it’s told, not just because the point of view dies in the middle of it and we see the event through his dying eyes, but because it’s a nice way of showing how ill-suited Roscoe was for the challenges that confronted him on his trip, the trip to find July, the trip forced on him by others. Roscoe was only ever happy when he was sitting inside the warm jail in Arkansas, and he was clearly no match for someone the likes of Blue Duck. In a way it’s nice to see that Roscoe doesn’t even know he’s dying, that he goes to his death not understanding what’s happening around him and thinking that he is simply drifting off to sleep.

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Chapter 75

I’m not going to type the whole chapter. That would take too long. But if you ever get around to reading this, do yourself a favor and go read Chapter 75 of Lonesome Dove. That’s the kind of fiction I want to write. Stark, real, and teetering on the edge of unfathomable sadness. Have I ever succeeded?

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“Did you catch the horsethieves?” he asked.

“We did, but not before they murdered Wilbarger and four other people,” Augustus said.

“Hang ‘em?”

“Yes, hung them all, including Jake Spoon.”

“Well, I’ll swear,” Dish said, shocked. “I didn’t like the man but I never figured him for a killer.”

“He wasn’t a killer,” Augustus said. “Jake liked a joke and didn’t like to work. I’ve got exactly the same failings. It’s lucky I ain’t been hung.”

The hanging of Jake Spoon is perhaps the oddest episode in the book. I’m still not sure if McMurtry pulled it off. If my Dad hadn’t spilled the beans on me, I think I might have believed up to very end that Call and McCrae were not going to go through with it, that they were going to string him up with all the others, but dispatch them first and then let Jake go when there was no one left but the old gang. But they did it. They hung him. I guess because they couldn’t take them all into the authorities and their code of justice said either hang them all or let them all go. Of course, in the end it was Jake who hung himself, spurring the horse before the others could break out the whip. But it was Call and McCrae and the others who strung him up with every intent to do it. I guess this is the one piece that doesn’t feel real to me. I don’t think they would have hung him. The men that McMurty’s characters were, I don’t think they would have hung him. If they had been actors reading a script, they would have said, hey, wait a minute, I don’t think my character would do this. It doesn’t ring true. But if they are going to hang Jake Spoon, then spend more time feeling guilty about it afterwards. They hung Jake with no more emotion than they would have shown shooting a prize horse that had gone lame. Less, in fact.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.