I’ve been returning to this book off and on for the last two years and finally finished it.  In fairness, it’s five books in one volume, each covering a segment of the author’s geological journeys across the United States.

But don’t let 660 pages about rocks intimidate you. McPhee combines detailed explanations of geology with anecdotes from his travels and often amazing biographies of the geologists he travels with.

He manages to humanize a subject full of unfamiliar terms and nearly unimaginable timescales.  While you might occasionally get lost in the schists and faults and sutures and orogenies, you will come out seeing the world differently.

Most remarkable to me was how these scientists managed to imagine the unimaginable — to stand on a piece of earth and see how it looked tens and hundreds and thousands of millions of years ago — based only on clues in the rocks which are themselves moving in all directions, in the process being melted into magma, buried under mountains and seas, eroded, compressed, and deformed.

To take one not-so-small example, the summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.  The highest rocks on earth were born beneath an ancient sea.

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The media has given plenty of attention to what Obama will do with his unprecedentedly large and detailed database of voters collected during the campaign.  This was the backbone of their wildly successful fundraising from small donors, but even before election day, the flush with cash campaign’s pleas for ever more money grew increasingly absurd.

I laughed out loud at one e-mail from Oct. 30 that cited “unexpected spending against us in Montana and West Virginia.”

As we saw on election day, if the GOP was having to spend money to defend Montana and West Virginia, Obama did not need any more of our money to beat them.

(Unlike most e-mails which came from luminaries like Joe Biden, David Plouffe, or Obama himself, it was from “Chief Financial Officer Marianne Markowitz,” perhaps because the others were too embarrassed to put their names to that particular beg.)

But hey, them’s elections.  I don’t hold it against them.  Even when the odds look good, the presidency is too important to worry about e-mail dignity.

But now that it’s over, they can devote this valuable resource to more altruistic ends, right?

Not so far.

The most recent plea promises a “limited edition sterling silver Obama keychain” for giving $30 or more to the Democratic National Committee.  Leaving aside that they are relying on tactics reminiscent of the Home Shopping Network, what the Democrats need now is not more money from us.  They will soon control the Congress and Presidency based on millions of selfless contributors and volunteers, and now it’s their turn to prove they deserved it.

Not to mention that improving the country, putting our economy back on track, bringing us health care and renewable energy… all of these things will do far more to get them reelected than a $30 contribution for a keychain.

It’s not a frivolous complaint.  The economy sucks, many people are hurting, and there are plenty of groups out there that could use that $30 to do much more good than putting it into the ad budget of the DNC.

And if they do eventually put the list to better ends, the attrition of those who unsubscribed because they were as annoyed as I was will make it that much less useful.

Obama has a powerful resource in the database and social network of committed donors and volunteers, but, unlike some of the critics have said, we aren’t a mob of mindless supporters.

Appeal to our desire to restore our communities and give us the tools to do so, and we will take action in a million beneficial ways.  Treat us like a bag a money to occasionally shake, and you may get a few extra dollars, but you will lose the potential for real community organizing and a new kind of politics that you claim to represent.

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Some encouraging reporting from The New York Times:

When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it will include two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops.Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

I’m still a little skeptical of a Secretary of State Clinton because the personalities and culture of her campaign were so completely dysfunctional. But a new reliance on diplomacy and non-military forms of power of all types can dramatically change the role of America in the world, and it is probably a necessary precursor to releasing the defense industry’s death grip on their billion dollar contracts.  Meaningfully reducing our defense spending is extremely important if we are to return our budget to a sustainable course.  It’s also going to be the most difficult political problem Obama will face.

The “hawks” have done great damage to our country in recent years, but to face down the defense industry, Obama will sadly need the support of people who have more credibility among other hawks.  The key point is, these defectors need to be committed to Obama’s policy, and the policy needs to set a genuinely new direction away from the reckless conventional wisdom of the past.

We will see how that turns out, but this article is a good sign.