A Goat of a Chance

 

Reviewed by Nancy

Picture this:
• An army general trying to walk through walls (unsuccessfully)
• supersoldiers trained in acute powers of observation and the ability to make decisions intuitively (psychically)
• an army master sergeant who has the ability to stop the heart of a goat, just by thinking about it

These are just some of the things you will learn about when you read The Men Who Stare At Goats (355.3434 RON Main) by Jon Ronson.

I guess this book got my attention because I have spent some time envisioning the atoms, the molecules, the electrons, neutrons, the protons, and the spaces between them. I have conceptualized being able to work the spaces in between all those minute particles in my body into the spaces in between all the minute particles in a wall and, thus, to walk through the wall. Unlike Major General Albert Stubblebine III, I never got so carried away with all this conceptualizing that I actually walked into a wall and banged my nose. If I ever did get anywhere with this I am sure it would be my luck to just half-way pull it off. There I'd be, extended leg and face in one room, other leg and rear end in the room I was attempting to exit, internal organs somewhere in the middle. At any rate, General Stubblebin didn't pull it off, and neither have I.

Who knows what the military is up to? It might be better to float along in a state of blissful ignorance, but if you'd like a clue, try this book on for size. It seems that modern warfare has gone well beyond the fundamental concept of popping up out of a fox hole and firing a gun in the direction of the enemy. Now we're trying to learn to "think them to death." On the one hand, it all seems pretty crazy, but on the other hand, I guess we'd darn well better learn to do it before our enemies do.

In The Men Who Stare At Goats, Jon Ronson, a documentary filmmaker and journalist, takes us on a journey through all this madness, starting way back in the seventies and bringing us to the present with accounts of the shenanigans at Abu Ghraib Prison and Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. So if you want to know, if you think you have the heart to know, here it is. And by the way, there was one guy who did actually learn to kill a goat just by staring at it, so they say. Rest easy. Your tax dollars are at work. A LOT of your tax dollars are at work.

And just when you think it can’t get any stranger, the book is made into a movie starring George Clooney as one of the soldiers and Ewan McGregor as the reporter who stumbles onto the story. According to the movie poster, it also stars “Goat,” presumably as the goat.

What is “a psychospiritual dimension” anyway? I've been psycho, and I've been spiritual, but I'm not sure I've ever been psychospiritual.

Maybe I should work on it. And that wall thing too.