In this online review, Joe Brown of Wired waxes eloquent about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a new ultra-high-end sports convertible.  The Grand Sport costs a cool 2.1 M$ and boosts appropriately over-the-top stats like a top speed of 217 mph and 1001 horsepower from a 16-cylinder engine.  It will come as no suprise to anyone who knows me, but I find this car — all cars, really — singularly unmoving.  I’ve never been an American in love with the road.

Joe Brown is, or at least, he’s in lust with it.  His prose is rapturous while describing this overpriced, inefficient, and essentially unneeded major appliance:  He revels in the “isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you’re moving faster than the world can react” and delights in watching “entire generations of insects die on your prow”.  A major draw seems to be that the car can outrun “not only the 5-0′s cruisers, but their helicopters, too”.  And it’d better, because driving that fast is liable to make your car an overpriced kinetic-kill weapon — the world’s largest and silliest bullet.

But that’s OK, because no real person driving real roads would ever be able to get the car up to that speed, much less maintain it for anything but an infinitesimal time.  I’m always astounded by how crucial top speed seems to be to the ego of a car enthusiast, who must drool (at a distance) at the flights of fancy embodied in the speedometer.  Though the car will never, in any practical usage, reach this speed, the auto junkie needs to know that, by God, it could, if only no one else ever drove on the roads.  Of course, a car like this is by design the opposite of practical.  The admittedly impressive engineering involved (getting a convertible that can function at 200 mph is, I concede, quite a feat) is intended only to impress, not to achieve the elegant solution of a practical problem.  In that sense, it’s the exact opposite of engineering.  Indeed, this comes off as almost a streamlined Rube Goldberg machine:  What is the silliest way to move an individual between point A and point B?  The Grand Sport.  It’s not art in engineering; it’s just peacock feathers.

Towards the end of the review, Mr. Brown admits “It is not perfect — no car will ever be.”  He laments that “We’re at the end of the petroleum era, the end of a golden age of supercars where speed can be sought regardless of consequence.”  Let’s certainly hope so.  Let’s hope we soon wake up from this delusional teenage fantasy of consequence-free open road indulgence.

After the hectic pace on Saturday, the con wound down somewhat before concluding on Sunday. I attended a panel on Galileo, another one on world building, and one on World Domination. Then I attended the dead dog filk and went home. Along the way I finally met up with someone I’d been on the lookout for all con.

After the history panel, I attended another panel on World Building. Although I feared it would retread the ground from Saturday, it was in fact much better and far more useful for me. The panel included two editors and two writers (Barbara Campbell, Wendy Delmater, Jude-Marie Green, and Kate Paulk). Despite speaking from their own experience, the panelists never made the talk all about them, and were quick to praise other authors about their successful work. Their advice was related to craft, not marketing: Find something worthwhile to say, and make your world help you say it. Though light on the specifics (necessarily so), their comments offered some path through the murk that surrounds any effort at serious world-building. They made me think more seriously, which is a recipe for a successful panel.

Perhaps appropriately, after a panel on how to build a world, I attended one on how to take it over. This wasn’t terribly useful but that’s OK because it wasn’t terribly serious. In fact, it largely was an opportunity for the moderators to riff off one another, which they did with speed and wit. Really, at this stage, what more can be said about world domination and cartoonish supervillainy? Although apparently the key is to have a plan…

The “dead dog filk” is “An event held after the formal end of programming at a convention” (definition courtesy of the Filk Glossary) It’s the last chance for the filkers to assuage the pangs of their addiction before the con breaks up. This was billed as “Dead Dog Filk / Gripe Session”, and it was actually far more the latter than the former (though I get the impression this is not the usual case). There weren’t too many specific gripes, except that some of the panels were scheduled too early.

This was explained as being due to the need to reserve the room; otherwise the ConCom (Convention Committee) would have slated something else in that space. Having non-filkers invade the filk room apparently messes with its feng shui. One of the interesting observations I had is the filkers still struggles with being a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by the con at large — which is funny, as con goers are themselves a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by society at large.

At the dead dog filk circle I finally ran into Merav Hoffman, who befriended me when I looked lost at last year’s Lunacon. Merav convinced me to attended Contata, which I ended up enjoying immensely, so I was glad to cross paths with her and catch up. One of my motivations in going to Lunacon every year is to attain a sense of community, and Merav has been very kind in helping me fit in.

After the dead dog filk, it was time to head home. Although NJ Transit once again let me down (two hours to go from NY Penn Station to Princeton Junction — and this was after they abruptly canceled the express I had been literally about to board), it was far from the ordeal from Monday and I got in before too late. Looking back, I’m really glad I went again. Lunacon has really turned into an event I look forward to, and it has yet to disappoint.

Today was the busiest of the convention. I gave blood; saw Mercedes Lackey and others hold forth on building fantasy worlds; participated in a discussion on financial crises in sci fi; participated (sort of) in the Masquerade after all; caught about half of a surprisingly good 1940 adventure film; and caught all of a not-at-all surprisingly bad 1979 space adventure film.

“Financial Meltdowns in SFF” attempted to deal with the depiction of real economics in science fiction. Not a lot of books include functioning, or even dys-functioning, economies. Many authors view them as externalities: The Galaxy is in the middle of a great depression but no one says why. The topic of the session was more interesting than the execution, perhaps because so many are basically not clued into macroeconomics (and I include myself in that).

I was looking forward to “Building a Fantasy World”. The panel included two published authors (including Lackey, whose resume is truly impressive) and two professional editors. Getting the view from “inside the biz” was pretty cool. Alas, it also meant that the discussion focused on the marketability angles: What type of fantasy worlds offer the potential for lucrative sales of multiple novels? I am much more interested in the craft of building worlds: How much detail to work out ahead of time, how to adapt real examples without ripping off history, and so on. Truth be told, I found the focus on selling lots of copies to be a little crass.

Ironically, they kept referring back to Tolkein — whose books did not sell well during his lifetime but which have become truly foundational in large part (I would argue) because he had a theme in mind when he wrote them. He sold well because he built a fantastic world, rather than building that sort of world to sell well. I think the key to successful world building is to build a world in which you can tell a story (or hopefully many stories) — and that just didn’t seem to be central to the panel.

The editor at Baen Books made a distinction that I like but not fully. He offered up a choice between a Star Trek model (many standalone stories in a common framework) versus a Babylon 5 model (a grand story arc). Good insight but I think he got it wrong, because B5 was not a vast and overwhelming epic. It was many episodes which, taken together, moved a larger story along. You could ease into the series, rather than committing to a five-year journey at the outset. I haven’t really encountered that in the fantasy market, though the panelists and the audience offered examples.

I think book publishers shoot themselves in the foot by not being explicit about where a book falls in a series or that it’s a series at all — and I think they’re salting the fields by focusing so heavily on long, multivolume epics. I know that I read less than I used to, just because I hate wandering in partway and because almost everything on the shelves is a continuation of something from before.

I volunteered an hour or so and was a “stage ninja” for the Masquerade costume competition. (At least I didn’t have to change…) My oh-so-crucial job was “human handrail”: I had to help guide people down the steps at the end of the stage. I did alright — no one fell — but it wasn’t particularly engaging. I had wanted to volunteer, though, and it felt nice giving a little time back. After the competition, they had a “Trailer Park” wherein someone showed 8 or 9 previews of upcoming movies.

Following that, I slipped upstairs (after chatting with Annie for a little while) and caught the second half of Thief of Baghdad, a fairly standard Thousand and One Arabian Nights adventure flick. In fact, it bears a lot of resemblance to Aladin, even though Disney apparently maintains the fiction that the two are independent. Thief is actually quite good (even if the FX are dated) and the thief himself is surprisingly charming. (I usually despise cute kids.) It was a bit of a shock to see that the evil counselor is played by none other than Major Strasser — and indeed, by the end, “Major Strasser has been shot”.

Following Thief, I slipped over to “Bad Movies with Bob Eggleton”. We only watched one bad movie, but believe me, it was enough. Starcrash is an extremely poor Star Wars rip-off starring Caroline Munro (of James Bond fame), Christopher Plummer (I kid you not!) and the screen debut of David Hasslehoff. It’s exactly as good as it sounds… that is, horrible. The FX are cheesy, the acting execrable, the writing worse, and the plot virtually incomprehensible. Although I’m sure Bob Eggleton didn’t intend this, it did serve to remind us how little the “outside world” understands sci fi fandom or what makes a movie resonate.

After that assault on my frontal cortex, I decided to call it a night, ending up back in my room, writing this blog entry. Which is now done.

Well, Lunacon is officially underway. So far I’ve tried out a new card game (Fluxx) and attended one session (“Those Terrible Middle Ages”). I’ve also discovered that I can walk out my room (418), down two corridors, around a bend, and directly onto the 7th floor. It’s no accident they call the Hilton Rye Town “the hotel that Escher built”.

“Those Terrible Middle Ages!” was an impassioned defense of, well, the Middle Ages. The panel leader clearly carries a chip on his shoulder about how down people are on the medieval world. Unfortunately, like many taking the side of the underdog, he felt compelled to enhance the stature of his special period by snarking about a different one — in this case, the Renaissance. About 35% of his comments were more “Look how silly those Renaissance guys were” rather “Look at what’s neat about the Middle Ages”.

Most disappointing: He raised the supposedly-widespread allegation that the Church didn’t recognize that “women have souls” until the 15th century. Bosh! He rattled off quite a number of medieval women who not only owned property but charted the course of nations — not to mention became abbesses and saints — and pointed out the absurdity of baptizing a soulless thing. What he didn’t do, alas, was provide any context or nuance to the claim. Since it’s so clearly crazy on its face, there is most likely an interesting root to the claim. It might tell us more about the people making the claim than about the medieval church, but it would be interesting. Sadly, he didn’t actually address that.

I ducked out about 3/4 of the way through the hour-long session, when it turned into a lecture from my Aristotelean Studium course from college twenty years ago. I already know the outlines of medieval thought on form and nature. I’d hoped for a better explication of the culture and politics, but it wasn’t overall a bad session.

Leaving this, I caught the last half of a 1940s Superman cartoon, which was amusing. I can’t imagine watching more than one or two at a time but it was fun.

I wanted to volunteer an hour or so (it’s a con thing) but the volunteers table is apparently more mobile than would be expected. I was told it was in several contradictory places. Perhaps it’s reciproexclusive and can be found only where it is not…

Part of my new regimen is exercising, which for me is going to mostly (entirely?) be walking.  Using a cool google maps feature/app called gmap-pedometer, I’ve computed the walking distance for various routes around my home.  All of these are, for the moment, hypothetical, until it gets warmer out.  And I will add others as they occur to me.

• Basic Hun circuit (1.086 mi.)
• Southern circuit (0.776 mi.)
  
• To Palmer Square (1.577 mi.)
• To the Dinky (1.832 mi.)

So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it was really just a rolling three-day concert. Unlike Lunacon, there were few panels or discussions per se (though I must admit I simply missed a few, on things such as tone-shaping or guitar-making). Instead, there were scheduled performances and “open filking” — which is basically an otherwise-unoccupied room wherein anyone could drop by and begin singing. And of course, the traditional midnight chocolate tasting.

This put me in an odd position. As anyone who’s suffered through the Hun Talent Shows can tell you, I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. The only thing musical that I can play is an iPod. Thus I didn’t really have much to offer. (Only later did I come across Ian, who tells stories rather than sings. I thought, maybe I can do that, with enough prep work.) Indeed, the primary talent I brought to these sessions is my ability to clap loudly, honed at many a high school play. I could also join on the chorus — filk songs tend to have very crowd-friendly choruses — if there were enough other people to render my mangling anonymous.

More below the fold.

And it has to be admitted — there was a huge disparity in talent among the singers. Many people were carried more by enthusiasm than by ability. I don’t want to be cruel but the fact remains. On the other hand, there were as many people who demonstrated real, honest talent — somewhat unpolished, often, which reflects the fact that for almost everyone, this is a hobby not a life. And finally, the guest of honor was Heather Dale, for whom performance is her life. More on Heather in a different post. And don’t get me wrong — enthusiasm carries the filkers pretty far. Almost no moment was truly cringe-worthy and none were nails-on-chalkboard bad. People did get wrapped up in their songs and they brought the rest of us along. In many ways it was more poignant hearing someone unskilled sing from the heart. It worked especially on the bittersweet songs of remembrance that seem common to the genre.

About halfway through the first session on Friday night, I suddenly understood why it felt so familiar. My insight is going to sound snide but I don’t mean it that way: It sounded like hymns at a church meeting. It really had that vibe. The faith that draws these people together is certainly not conventional and it’s more than a little nebulous. But it was clear this was a community united by faith in something. I think it’s a quixotic wonderful mix of the tacitly progressive belief in “the future” as promised in sci fi and a yearning for a past known never to have occurred. It’s a faith that the world is bigger than the everyday, that there’s meaning somewhere in the Universe. Maybe it’s really just a faith in themselves, in their own community. I could see where people take strength from that.

As an example: One of the guests-of-honor was to be Tom Smith, who is apparently a long-living legend in the filk community. A couple of weeks back he had a mishap coming off a stage and did real damage to his leg — so bad that he had to miss Contata because he was in for a second round of surgery. Now, Tom does filking professionally and so he is not covered under anyone’s health plan. (And the absurdity of that is a rant for a different day….) Anyway, at the last moment, Contata was restructured as a sort of impromptu Tom-Aid, a benefit for him to help offset the medical bills. People dug deep to buy merchandise or even just to donate, even though the demographic at a filk con doesn’t slew any more toward the well-off than any other random sample of people. Artists donated tracks to a commemorative CD offered in return for a donation; people donating money seemed honestly surprised to receive anything in return. It was a lot like how people tell us it worked in the good old days of small town America. It was uplifting to see.

Stuff like that happened all weekend. It was like a giant extended-family reunion. And to be brutally honest, science fiction attracts a disproportionate share of people who are socially awkward, for whom the social graces are more theoretical than observed, who have gone through life labeled “Does not play well with others”. But here, everyone jelled. People more than put with each other’s quirks; they celebrated them. Everyone had a spot in which to excel, and everyone gave of their excellence without stint.

What’s more, I doubt anyone else even noticed it. It was just How Things Are Done. As an outsider I could see the entirety in a way probably not available to those steeped in the community. I’ve seen plenty of functional but sterile events, and more than many simply dysfunctional ones. Without taking away anything from the con organizers and their whirlwind of effort to keep things moving, I was struck by how smoothly things seemed to flow. People put aside their egos because they all wanted the con to succeed — everyone felt a greater investment in the larger event than in their own small concerns. Again, from a group the larger culture derides and harries, this was nothing short of transcendent.

I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via type) folk music — it’s folk with a science fiction / fantasy bend. Filking is one of those sundry ways in which being a science fiction fan is not the same as being, say, a New York Mets fan or an opera aficionado. It’s the shared culture and oral history that keeps the community close-knit and vibrant despite being spread over every known continent.

Although I’d heard of the phenomenon, my first exposure to filk was at Lunacon this past March. Filking was a distinct thread woven through Lunacon — a chain of panels and sessions scattered among the calendar of events, at which more or less the same people showed up. I attended one late-night filking session to see what the buzz was about. To be honest, it was a little intimidating. This truly is an organized oral culture with multiple decades of backstory. Everyone knew the words and the anecdotes and the in-jokes — everyone but me, that is. My temptation was to high-tail it out of the room and write it off as a failed exercise.

The story doesn’t end there though — more below the fold.

Happily, though, I lingered just long enough to discover the contradiction of filking. Due to the steep curve and the shared history, filkers are naturally a little separated from other con goers. The richness of the culture can be overwhelming. But the filkers aren’t a closed or exclusive community. To the contrary, the filkers at Lunacon reached out to me as a newbie, Even though most of them have known each other for a decade or more, they went out of their way to include me and make me welcome. They shared songbooks; they shared jokes; they shared stories.

By the time the “open filk” was winding down, it seemed entirely natural to join them at the traditional midnight chocolate tasting. I’m still not clear on whether the chocolate tasting is a general filk tradition, or a Contata one, or a NEFilk one — or just the particular habit of that particular band of filkers. It was a good excuse to get together and socialize and basically not let the night end with the official closing time. Merav Hoffman was the con chair for Contata and she found the chocolate tasting an opportune time to strike and make a pitch for new members. In particular, she told me about the upcoming con in June and invited me to it. Largely because it would be in New Jersey and I could easily get to it, I decided to take her up on it.

So a few days after Lunacon, I booked a hotel room and registered myself for Contata, wondering what would be unique to a filking con. More to come.

Lunacon 51 (2)
Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I check out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard.

It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).

In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

• I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
• I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.

Good morning.

I’m going to break one of the cardinal rules of rhetoric and confess to the trepidation I felt in giving this speech. Or not in giving it — because, as anyone can tell you, I certainly like to talk, especially when the listener can’t talk back. But writing it gave me pause. Sometimes the only thing harder than doing a thing is doing it again. As Mr. Evans is wont to tell me, something cannot be considered “annual” until it happens the second time a year later. So in a sense, it is this speech that is intended to inaugurate an annual tradition of speeches by the holder of the Distinguished Faculty Chair.

For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the subtext here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

The solemnity of the occasion, perhaps, calls for something weightier — something at once soaring and deep, an exposition on the human soul and our never-ending quest for meaning. But having explored last year the very future of humankind, I found myself somewhat at a loss. When you’ve begun by debating the survivability of the species, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of places left to go.

Considering the date on which we meet, it might be considered by some to be a propos to discourse on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The wrenching events of our time demand that we engage with them, wrestle them to the ground, demand meaning from them. On this subject there will be no shortage today of chattering on the airwaves and nattering in the papers. No one needs one more voice thrown into that cacophony. A native son of New York, I still contemplate the skyline with clenched jaw and clenched fist. It has been six years, and there is still a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. And I find I am not ready to talk about that yet.

Instead, I’m going to talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors. In case you’ve forgotten, Rock, Paper, Scissors is a method of decision between two people, wherein each secretly picks one of the items and they compare. The key bit is that each item ties with itself, loses to one item, and beats the other. The traditional phrasing is, “Rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock”. It’s that last one I want to focus on. Paper covers rock? What the heck does that mean? How is that a win?

{Transition needed.}

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit the national Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Commemorating a naval attack, it is fittingly primarily a naval monument. The two great anchors of the monument are the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri. The Arizona was a battleship sunk during the Pearl Harbor attacks. Though most of the Pacific Fleet was refloated and rebuilt in the years following the attack, the Arizona could not be salvaged or moved. It sits at the bottom of what was once Battleship Row. The Navy operates a tender from shore to the stark elegant observation station that has been constructed above the wreck. From it you can look down on the coral-encrusted hulk of the Arizona, watery tomb for the majority of the servicemen killed that day.

The Missouri was BB-63, the last battleship ever constructed by the United States. Now a museum ship docked at Pearl Harbor, the Missouri is still an intimidating sight. Towering over the shoreline, she bears three turrets each with three 16-inch guns capable of throwing an explosive shell a distance of 20 miles and landing within a circle of radius six inches. The Missouri was a great and terrible engine of war, and everything in her design speaks to the awesome destructive powers that could be marshaled by an enraged industrial democracy. But standing on her deck, I found the most stirring and moving part was not her giant main guns, or the anti-aircraft machine guns still deployed on the side, nor even the capped tubes wherein Tomahawk cruise missiles had been installed in the 1980s. It wasn’t the sweeping bow or the grim turrets or the majestic bridge. It was a simple golden circle fixed to an otherwise nondescript spot on the mid-decks.

In 1945, at that spot on the decks of the Missouri, in the waters of Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the formal documents indicating their surrender to the forces of the United Nations, ending the Second World War. In a brisk twenty-three minute ceremony, a band of perhaps twenty men — Japanese, American, Canadian, British, and Russian — affixed their names to two copies of the surrender documents to enact the armistice. From that point on the Missouri, you can just see the alabaster arc of the Arizona memorial. Between Arizona and Missouri lie a few hundred yards of open water and a few hundred thousand American casualties. They bookend the American involvement in a war that spanned a decade and a half and claimed upwards of sixty million victims — a number that, even living at the dawn of the most dangerous century, must give us pause.

Standing on the Missouri in mid August, I overhead a museum guide relate a story that struck me immediately. It’s one of those little tales that museum guides love, a tidbit that uses the mundane to illuminate the immense. Signing the Japanese surrender document was, as you might imagine, an event of great import in anyone’s life and, as you might also imagine, it could be the source of great trepidation. The representative of Canada, L. Moore Cosgrave, was apparently overcome by his nervousness and, while signing the Japanese copy, signed on the line for the French Republic. This forced everyone following him to also sign on the wrong lines. Eventually, concern over the implications of this error led General Richard Sutherland to cross out the names of the nations and pencil in the correct ones.

It was a minor, totally banal detail. Yet it was also a striking, astonishing thing. At that moment, General MacArthur stood in supreme command of the largest, most powerful military forces in the history of the world. Having brought the Empire of Japan to its knees, the Allied Powers held uncontested dominion over East Asia and the Pacific. How truly bizarre – between them, these men standing on the deck of the Missouri had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent millions of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot — that somehow, a misplaced name could unmake the surrender.

And that’s the hidden key. The Missouri, the last and greatest battleship, the apex of naval construction, serves as a very present icon of physical force — standing at the head of an unbroken lineage stretching all the way back to the first rock lifted by a semi-evolved ape in assault upon its brethren. Our long and bloody history attests to the power of that rock. But on that day in Tokyo Bay, it was not the battleship that mattered, or the airplanes or submarines, or even the atomic bombs looming in the background. To the assembled warriors of the most terrible conflict, what mattered was the document. Paper trumps rock.

And isn’t that the way, when you think about it? We often mistake the things as the drivers of history: wheat and salt, gold and oil. But somehow it’s the pieces of paper that seem to truly matter, to truly steer the course of human life. In 1914, a relatively minor Balkan War was transformed into the First World War by German violations of Belgian neutrality, codified in the Treaty of London of 1839. Informed that the British would go to war to defend Belgium’s neutral status, German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg expressed his shock that they would expand the war over what he infamously dismissed as a “scrap of paper”. That scrap of paper shook the foundations of Europe and remade the world order. Its spiritual successor, the Treaty of Versailles, would help engender the next world war.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It was no accident that the Soviets registered every typewriter and made unauthorized use of a photocopier a felony offense, punishable by jail time or even internal exile. They knew in their bones that they faced a greater existential threat from little scratches in black and white than from all the nuclear missiles in the world.

In a very real sense, the most disruptive weapon ever invented has been the printing press.

Words on a page. Scraps of paper. They give form and life to the ideas they contain. Through them we transcend the oral and enter the eternal.