Mark Gilroy

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The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan

The Man Who Would Be King by Ben Macentire

The American Who Became King of Afghanistan

I loved the Michael Caine and Sean Connery movie, The Man Who Would Be King, which came out when I was in high school. The John Huston film was nominated for four Academy Awards. Christopher Plummer played the role of a young journalist by the name of Rudyard Kipling – and the film was based on the Kipling’s short story by the same name.

But who knew that Kipling’s literary bon mot was inspired by a true story – and that truth truly is stranger than fiction?

In 1989, Ben Macintyre was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the 10 year war between the Soviets and the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrillas. While there he read Kipling’s tale of Daniel Dravot (written in 1888 but looking back to the middle of the Victorian Age, the 1820s and 30s), who made it to the heart of Afghanistan disguised as a Muslim holy man to become king of a fierce tribal empire. It was several years later, while combing through stacks of books in the British Library that Macintyre first discovered the name of a man who “reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Man Who Would Be King.'”

So began Macintyre’s search for an elusive footnote in history – all his papers were assumed to have been destroyed in a house fire in 1929 – that culminated in The Man Who Would Be King, a fascinating slice of history that is relevant to today’s most pressing geopolitical hotspot. Following clues that led him from Britain’s war archives to the Punjab, San Francisco, and Pennsylvania, Macintyre was finally able to find a box hidden away in the basement of the archives in a tiny U.S. museum of this mysterious man’s birthplace. At the bottom of the box was a “document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.”

The first American in Afghanistan had many titles: Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, personal surgeon to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Five Rivers, King of Afghanistan … and many others. His highness Halan Sahib – who in 1839, enthroned on a bull elephant, raised his standard and made claim to the Hindu Kush – was known back home in Chester County, Pennsylvania, as Josiah Harlan. The man who followed Alexander the Great’s winding mountain path 21 centuries later and led an army made up of Afghan Pathans, Persian Qizilibash, Hindus, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras who were descendents of the Mongolian Hordes, a pacifist Quaker of Chester County, Pennsylvania.

If you like history, biographies, and tales that seem too fanciful to be true, you’ll love The Man Would Be King.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

 
Enders Game by Orson Scott Card

Card creates a brilliant and nuanced cosmology in the Ender quintet.

I like Science Fiction just fine but must not love it because there have been many years I didn’t read even a single SciFi title. I had read a few of the standards over the years without much prompting and recommend them all – Frank Herbert’s Dune Series, Philip Dick’s Valis Trilogy and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (became the movie Bladerunner), Asimov’s I, Robot, Ray Bradburry’s Farenheit 451, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Arthur Clarke’s 2001: Space Odyssey, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet trilogy, and I’m sure others.

My son Merrick introduced me to Orson Scott Card and his child genius Andrew Wiggin – Ender – in Ender’s Game. A slow start – probably because of my own low expectations – and an ending that was so unexpected that it made me want to read the book again. Immediately. I’ll leave it at that so I don’t even stray towards a spoiler. My reading of preferred genres goes in streaks I admit, but I devoured all the books in Card’s series as quickly as I could get to them: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and I’m sure I’m leaving something out. (Thanks Merrick!)

Ender grows up in a home with a cruel older brother, Peter, and the love of his life, Valentine, his older sister and the only one who doesn’t seem to resent his brilliance. Card does have an ability to see the future – his description of communication over the Internet before Al Gore had the thing really up and going is amazing – and in a world of overpopulation Ender wasn’t even legally allowed to be born. Peter and Valentine are both eligible to be selected for Battle School but Peter’s anger turns to lethal hatred when it is Ender who is chosen to train as a fighter to repel a hostile alien forces’s next invasion.

My description may make this sound trite but the psychological, moral, and physical conflicts are brilliant and emotionally exquisite. [Note: The movie was made after I read the novel. It just didn’t capture the psychology of the book.]

Like Frank Herbert in the Dune books, as you read through Card’s series you find an author who doesn’t just create other settings or even worlds – but whole cosmologies complete with religions, races, histories, and complex moral dilemmas, including definitions of the soul and consciousness. (Yes, there are some slow sections, particularly in Xenocide, but the whole experience is more than satisfactory.)

Just a note or two about Card. He is a descendent of Brigham Young and graduated from BYU and the University of Utah, and did doctoral work at Notre Dame. He served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While passing through Salt Lake City on a Delta flight I saw that he has also written the novels Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel and Leah, which are known as the Women from Genesis Series. The Internet says he lives in North Carolina now. I don’t know anything about his ongoing personal religious life but would simply observe that as with other author’s from a high identity religious background, there is a discipline and training of thought that seems to spawn a counter-intuitive imaginative freedom with the ability to dream up huge, comprehensive, and interconnected realities as he’s done in his Andrew Wiggin novels.

Time for a College Football Playoff? Only If …

Is it time for a college football playoff?

College Football Postseason Is Not Fair to Northern Teams

Utah knocked off Alabama in the Sugar Bowl a couple of days ago, lifting their record to 13-0. Shouldn’t that give them a claim as college football’s national champions? Or how about Texas who beat Oklahoma who is playing for the title against Florida?

I’m somewhat of a traditionalist – okay, a little mix of iconoclast and traditionalist – so I’ve never had a dog in the we-must-have-a-playoff-for-Division-I-college-football fight. I can see both sides of the debate.

The arguments against a D-I college football (CFB) playoff include –

  • the bowl system generates more income for schools and communities than a playoff would
  • a little controversy keeps interest level high
  • the bowl system is a reward to the kids – and allows many schools to claim some form of a championship
  • college football is healthy so why mess with something that’s already working
  • college football is about tradition and the bowls with their parades and pageantry are definitely traditional
  • extra games associated with a playoff would cut into student-athletes’ academic studies

There is an answer for and to every point above. I’m oversimplifying but here’s the quick responses in corresponding order: playoffs would generate NFL type of dollars; controversy is not good when the ‘best team’ gets ripped off due to system rules; you can still keep some form of the bowl system but some of the bowls would go away (and need to go away); sure CFB is healthy but so is basketball and people absolutely love March Madness and filling in their brackets; again, you can keep some of the bowls as part of the playoff system; hey, if athletes from the lower divisions of CFB can do a playoffs and handle the academic work load at some rigorous universities, why can’t the D-I kids?

Like I said, I have no dog in this fight – something Michael Vick wishes he could have said – so you pick the answers you like best and you won’t get me worked up. As you can tell with the associated arguments above, most solutions try to incorporate traditional bowls into the playoff equation. And this is where I have a problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say, dump the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) completely and return to stand-alone bowls with a vote at the end of the year or go strictly with a playoff for the top eight teams. But don’t mix the two.

Why?

Bowls were never set up to determine a national champion. Bowls were about rewarding kids with travel, gifts, and a televised game and giving alums and fans a warm weather place to go for a vacation. As a result the bowls have always favored warm weather schools and penalized cold weather schools.

Warm weather schools can recruit and play a style of football that doesn’t have to change as the leaves fall off of trees. (Texas Tech needs to bring their passing attack to Madison, Wisconsin, in late November to test my theory.) Warm weather schools often travel less distance (and many times stay in-state) for a near home field advantage in bowl season. (USC’s last home game every year is the Rose Bowl! Of course, if the mighty Trojans would stop getting upset by 30-point underdogs they would have to play for a championship instead of relying on ESPN to crown them as best-ever each year.) The pundits discuss and explore home field issues, including weather conditions, in-depth and ad nauseum in the NFL – no one wants to go to Green Bay in December I’ve heard – but college analysts conveniently ignore that reality.

Oh, you’re a Buckeye fan and are just making excuses. Let’s face it, the best football is played in the SEC and Big 12 South! Weather is a non-issue.

Uh oh. The topic of discussion just changed! And yes, I confess, I am defending my much-maligned Buckeyes and the Big 10 and its quality of football as evidenced by the last few bowl seasons. Realistically, I can accept that the Big 10 is down the past two or three years and the SEC is up based on year-end results – but there’s an even more telling statistic that argues against the kind of disparity being argued. It’s number of players in the NFL. The score card reads:

SEC – 263 players / 137 starters
ACC – 238 players / 121 starters
Big Ten – 234 players / 105 starters
Pac-10 – 183 players / 70 starters
Big 12 – 176 players / 72 starters
Big East – 84 players / 33 starters

So admittedly there is a power shift toward the southeast USA, but not to the degree it’s been propagated by fans who claim if you ain’t cheating you ain’t really trying.

But back to the question: Is it time for a college football playoff? I’m all for the top eight teams forming a bracket to set up a Super Bowl type climax to the CFB season – because we all know how great SB games are most years! (Sarcasm font on.) But not if all games are played in warm weather sites.

After all, since weather is just an excuse, shouldn’t Gator, Trojan, Sooner, Tiger, and Seminole fans get to experience football the way it was meant to be played … outdoors in December in Ann Arbor, Columbus, Happy Valley or other northern climes?

That’s a thought that warms my heart!