DCJApr05

Volume 19

APRIL 2005

19. 7: THE RATZMAN COMETH 4.27.2005

When a guy dressed in expensive garments, surrounded by sycophants and privilege, who has lusted after power and likely orchestrated his own election, calls himself “a simple, humble worker,” you want to get out the ole polygraph. It was this “simple, humble worker” that sent a letter, with the weight of the Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to (reputedly) only American bishops, to counsel the refusal of holy communion to any politician who supported abortion. It just happened that John Kerry was running for president when this letter arrived. But this was only the new pope's latest rat “zinger.”

Right about here I'd love to tell my favorite pope joke, but this guy is no laughing matter. Many RCs, including this longtime apostate, have known about him for years as he has headed the equivalent of the Church's “Gestapo” unit enforcing strict orthodoxy of a pile of dogma that has about as much to do with the message of Christ as the rigidities of the Pharisees that got the Romans to do their bloody work for them. In the ironic cycle that afflicts so many human institutions that run on power, the Church that Christ built upon this “rock” (he really didn't mean that) has gone, in a couple of millennia, from its “founder's” reform of (Jewish) orthodoxies and a regard for the “least of these,” to a rigid club of old men in silly suits. But the faithful sheep turned out in St. Peter's Square to cheer their new shepherd.

Many more will drift away from the Church, already in decline in many countries. Others, the nuns and real simple, humble priests, will continue to convince themselves that the people of little power and no privilege to whom they minister are not sinning when they pick and choose their dogma to suit the realities of life. Many will go to mass comforting themselves that it is really “their” church; priests will give absolution for sins for which bishops and cardinals would fling them into hell.

The boys in the Vatican know their politics, though. They know that these days their Church grows mainly by the high birthrate of the poor below the equator (like the Republicans, the Church has a “southern strategy' too). A flock deprived even of condoms, living sick and ignorant in countries under weak or oppressive governments, are as easy marks as a bunch of suckers in a revival tent. The Church knows the formula as well as Karl Rove: keep them ignorant, keep them poor, feed them on the Rapture and eternal reward, and don't forget to get them to tithe and cough up “Peter's pence” (after all, these papal garments aren't cheap, and there may be more reparations for the pedophile prelates).

Now this is the point where the faithful begin making novenas to bring plague and pestilence to my private parts. So let me say this. It was said by some Vatican insider that Joseph Ratzinger “has forgotten more theology than most theologians have learned.” Note: the Ratzman has made his career running theologians who challenge the orthodox theology out of the Church. But I'm going somewhere else with this. Theology. And I know a bit of it, having been required to take 12-units of it at my Jesuit college. Theology is what I call a “joke discipline.” Unlike other “-ologies,' which are based on things that can be sensed and “known,” learned by observation, test, experiment and application, theology is based on an entity that nobody, not even the pope, has ever seen, touched, spoken to, or even knows exists ! It is a disciple founded on the totally confabulated!

Ergo, the Ratzman knows no more than an illiterate peasant (maybe less). I'll have more to say about this later, because theology, and popes have nothing, in my view to do with the essentials of faith. When it comes to what we know of God, if God is there to be known, I set myself above no other, and below no other—I don't care whether he calls himself Benedict XVI, or Pope Sponge Bob. But there is one significant difference between us: I'm not pretending that I know.

Now, about my favorite pope joke: The pope is having his annual physical and his doctor says, “Holiness, for the good of your health I have to respectfully recommend that you have . . . ah . . .er . . . intimate relations with a woman. The pope says, “ . . .”

Nah, I think you should send me an email for the rest of that one.

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19. 7: 300,001: The Death of Iris Chang and the RAPE OF NANKING [BR] 4.22.2005

UrbisMedia

As Chinese youth besiege the Japanese embassy in Beijing, venting their rage at the prospect that Japan might be admitted to the UN Security Council I can only wonder what Iris Chang, the young Chinese American author of The Rape of Nanking would think. Who can know what part her internationally acclaimed book played in the consciousness of China's youth in their grandparents' horrific history. But it must have played some part.

Chang brought that history to light in the West, an historical incident that lingered for over sixty years somewhere between faint recollection for the WWII generation, to complete ignorance for most of those younger. And, giving impetus to the protests of China's youth is that the current generation of Japanese may be subjected to the national denial of their parents and grandparents through a bowdlerized history of Japan's aggression in China. (cf. No. 11.3 on the museum in Nagazaki)

I spoke with Iris on the phone a few years ago when she was being interviewed on NPR. I was gathering information for a project of my own about the Japanese military's Unit 731, which engaged in biological experiments using live Chinese prisoners. Iris was well informed on that subject and had encountered some former Japanese participants in Unit 731 when she courageously did a book tour in Japan. But Unit 731 was operating in Harbin and a few places in S.E. Asia, and Chang's book concentrates on what happened in Nanking in several weeks at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938.

That was when the Japanese Army stormed the ancient walls of Nanking and committed one of history's greatest crimes on its few remaining soldiers and mostly its innocent civilian population. Much of the documentation for the mass executions and rape-murders were provided by the Japanese themselves. A picture of two officers who engaged in a beheading contest (the first to kill 100 Chinese was the “winner'), ran in a Japanese newspaper as a glorious achievement. Photos of men tied together and buried alive, or set ablaze, or tied to stakes and used for bayonet practice, often have smiling and laughing Japanese in them. Women were run down, raped and butchered, forced into pornographic photographs, and sent off to brothels for the Japanese Army.

The museum in Nanjing says there were at least 300,000 Chinese killed; the Japanese government maintained for years that it was really only about 3,000 that were sort of “collateral damage” in a battle for the city that that was limited because the Nationalist Army's General Tang was ordered by Chiang Kai-shek to retreat from the city with his troops. Aside from an International Safety Zone for foreign embassies the people of Nanking were left defenseless.

Chang's book also documents that there were foreigners who attempted to save the Chinese, cloistering many in the International Zone, and in the case of some, such as German businessman, John Rabe, rescued thousands from certain death. Today, inside the Nanking Massacre museum is a smaller museum dedicated to Rabe.

The protests in China today may have the cynical fingerprints of the Chinese government on them, not only to keep the Japanese out of the UN Security Council, but to gain advantage in other disputes, such as the sovereignty over some islands. So be it; if the protests bring the truth if the Rape of Nanking out into the light once again it will at lest be some testament to the memory of Iris Chang.

I say “memory” of Iris because this beautiful, brilliant author of four books and many articles took her own life last November. No one knows exactly why, not even the husband and two-year-old son she left behind. It is known that she suffered from depression, and researching the Rape of Nanking can't have been a tonic for depression She was only 36, and it so seems fitting to un-round the victims of Nanking to 300,001. [see gallery of photos]

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This subject merits a few other references. Among those I have read on Nanking and the Japanese in WWII are:

Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony , Yenbooks, 1996 [ironically, I bought this book in Kyoto]

Hua-ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking , Southern Illinois U Press, 2000 [this is the story of Minnie Vautrin, who was dean of studies at Ginling College in Nanking in 1937]

John E. Woods (trans), The Good Man of Nanking , Vintage, 2000 [this is a translation of the diaries of John Rabe]

19. 6: THE POTEMKIN PRESIDENT 4.19.2005

I was listening to one of George Bush's little tetes-a-tete with the red state citizenry the other day. He is taking his hyped-up case for revamping Social Security “to the people” and woe to the congressman, he announced, who crosses him after he has played Pied Piper and made his case whatever the truth of it may be. He calls up people from the audience and there is this little cutesy interchange designed to make you feel he is just this down home boy who really cares about you more than the corporate interests he coddles. Sometimes the hubris sneaks out, as when he had three generations of one family on stage and reminded the kid that it will probably be the “greatest day” of his life to be on stage with the POTUS.

The whole thing is not so much scripted as “staged.” As is typical of Bush his colloquia are only with the faithful. Like his press conferences where he recognizes questions only from the “chosen,” like his campaign appearances, like the time he appeared in front of boxes marked “made in the USA” that turned out to have been made in China, like the carefully missing incriminating materials from this “military service” record, like all of his campaign appearances, or his deception-filled case for the Iraq war, this event is “staged,” conducted in front of carefully selected audiences made to appear to be “us” Americans. But these are frauds, part of a Potemkin's village of deceptions, that cynically, and knowingly, hides the truth in service of – and I apologize for repeating this point that has appeared in several other essays in these pages – the end justifying the means.

In the past this Goebbelesque methodology has obviously played well, or well enough, for the dimwits out in the red states, Limbaugh “dittoheads,” and for the Fox News viewers. They can be fooled into thinking that gay marriage will ruin their holy wedlock, that giving Big Pharm a sweetheart deal is really in their own interests, that no child is being left behind, that tax cuts for the wealthy will really reduce the record deficits, that weapons of mass destruction will yet be found in Iraq, that legislation severely limiting class action lawsuits and bankruptcy are really in the little guy's interests and not the banks and corporations. The can be made to believe that the staged interchange for the audience and the cameras is really an impromptu interchange between the president and the people.

It has worked well enough so far, but that well-enough has been marginal, as we know from the electoral results. The lurking question is whether Bush will reach to far, come to believe his own hype and in the “reality” of his carefully crafted Potemkin's village. Will this latest phony foray into his village expose the underlying truth? Mind you, this is a man who has never had to, and never will, rely on Social Security check to pay the rent, or to file bankruptcy because medical bills wiped him out, or join a class action suit to be recompensed for a wrong done to him, and certainly not to fight in a war he supports or starts. You know, he's the type of guy who gets off easy on a few DUIs, gets into the best schools on family name, and gets bailed out of serial business failures. Now he is messing with a system that has worked very well, does need to address the stresses that will be put upon it by demographics, but that he sees as a bonanza for his friends who are stock brokers and fund managers. Is he reaching too far this time? And, if so, will this gust of wind, blow some reality dust down the streets of his Potemkin's village?

There is another lurking question: How many of those who support Bush and his policies are truly deceived by these practices; or how many see through the Potemkin village, but are willing to let themselves be deceived ? It is a crucial question, maybe the most crucial question with regard to the fate of our nation. If it is the former, then, following the dictum that you can “fool some of the people some of the time,” there is yet hope that this arrogant dunce in the Oval Office will bring himself down, or weaken his party sufficiently, before he brings the country to ruin. If it is the latter, then this much-touted American Empire will go early on the heap with all the others.

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19. 5: SWEET WATERS IN THE PROMISED LAND (Part 2) 4.13.2005

Sweet tomatoes and melons grown by computers was fascinating stuff. But I had finished my interviews and, being a city boy, was ready to forsake the rural for the bright lights of the big city. If one can use those descriptives for Jerusalem. I had three full days to kill.

Or be killed.

Moreover, I don't think I would have survived another of the Israeli breakfasts served at the Beersheva hotel. Whoever conceived of the idea of ingesting raw vegetables like onions, peppers, radishes and soupy concoctions of pureed vegetables as the first meal of the day must have been following some biblical penitence of heartburn and flatulence.

Joe Angel informed me that there were two bus routes from Beersheva to Jerusalem: one sort of up the center of the country, the other up through the West Bank. He recommended the former; it was the “safer of the two”.

But it is not nearly as historical. The West Bank route passed through Hebron and Bethlehem, through the area of Judea. One couldn't blame Joe for suggesting the safer route. It was the time of the “intifada,” and there were almost daily incidents of Israeli-Arab strife.

But it would be unthinkable to miss a city with an urban pedigree like Hebron? Believed to be one of the oldest cities in the world it straddles the old caravan route to Egypt. It is one of the four holy cities of the Talmud; it is the home of Abraham, but also contains the Haram, enclosing the mosque built over the Cave of Machpelah, where tradition says Abraham and Sarah were buried. David called it home for a time. The Macabees, the Romans, Moslems, the Crusaders, you name it, and Hebron figures in it in some way. [1] Indeed, a few years later there would be a horrific incident played out over these religious shrines when an Israeli extremist opened fire on worshippers leaving the mosque, killing several of them.

The road through the West Bank cuts through the Judean Hills on the way up from Beersheva up to Hebron at around a thousand metres above the level of the Dead Sea to the east, a factor which, along with the rather sloppy suspension of the early model the bus we were riding in, the grand prix aspirations of its driver, and the guy across the aisle from me, placed me in my pre-vomit mode. Actually, were it not for the guy across the aisle I might have managed to retain reasonable control of my tendency to motion sickness.

The bus was only about a third full and I had taken the seat just behind the middle door on the right side. I sat on the aisle and my camera bag rested on the window seat. Across from me was a short, sandy-haired, garrulous Israeli, perhaps in his mid-forties. I could not be sure whether it was his garrulity or his arrogance that accounted most for my necessity to constantly repress my gorge. Turning my head to answer his clearly antagonistic interrogation, each time the bus lurched or switched direction, set my head spinning and my eyes out of focus.

His theme seemed to be that my country was nothing but a bunch of either appeasers groveling for cheap Arab oil, or a nation of softies lapsed into lassitude because we, unlike the Israelis, did not have to fight for our freedom every day.

“How long have you been in Israel?” he inquired.

“Just a bit over a week.”

“You're a Jew, right? Where from, New York, Miami?”

“Italian-American, California.” I was curt about it. I know it's the nose, and I didn't want to get into the whole nose thing with him. In fact, it doesn't matter where I am in the Mediterranean – Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel – they all think I'm one of theirs. If there was a genus called “ Homo Mediterreanus” I could be its poster boy. I would have made a good spy in these parts; I seem to blend in.

“You just on a tour, or here for your Easter holidays?” he asked, inferring my Catholicism from my ethnicity.

I wanted to say I was a spy and couldn't give my reasons for being in the country. “Television documentary. I'm the writer.”

“What are you writing about?”

“I'm not at liberty to say,” I replied coldly, hoping this would put an end to the nauseating conversation. I had ceased turning my head when he questioned or I answered.

“So, how does it feel being in a war?” he said with the tone of some guy in a bar aching for a fight. I didn't answer, although in other circumstances I would have liked to ask him if his twisted sense of history and bellicose attitude were caused by eating too many breakfasts of raw vegetables.

Not that there was not some veracity to his remark about being in a nation at war. There were three Israeli soldiers on the bus with us, and several others got on or off at different stops, all carrying their loaded weapons with the casualness that business commuters might their attaché cases. There was indeed no separation between the home front and the battlefield in this “war,” but I didn't need to be reminded of it by this nitwit, nor accused of cowardice because it wasn't my war. I didn't want to mention that the US had been pumping a lot of my tax dollars into this place over the years.

While weaving and careening through the hills, he continued to erode my pledge to be a good guest in his country with leading questions and jibes. By the time we could see the hills surrounding the old city of Hebron in the distance, I had already decided to which direction I would turn my head at the seeming inevitability of my regurgitation of the morning's raw vegetables.

The first sight of Hebron was of the hills above the old city. They were clearly recently developed with new homes and condominiums which I learned were Israeli projects. They looked down on the Palestinians in the old city, to whom their presence was a sign that the Israelis did not intend to soon, if ever, return the territory they had acquired in the 1967 war.

As we entered the old city, a tension seemed to grip those on the bus. Immediately ahead a flock of sheep was blocking the road and the bus stopped. But otherwise, for a Middle Eastern city, the streets seemed unusually unpopulated for a Middle Eastern city. That must have been the reason for the tense atmosphere, because no sooner did I notice that my arrogant inquisitor had ceased his babble when the first window, across the aisle a few seats ahead was cracked into a spider's web by a large rock.

As if on cue, and perhaps there was one, rocks began flying from several directions, smashing windows and banging off the metal sides of the bus as though we were in some sort of hailstorm. Although I heard no gunfire, it appeared on later inspection that the bus had also sustained some bullet holes.

For some inexplicable reason I sat relatively calmly through the assault, as though it were some newsreel footage I was watching, rather than being a part of it. There was a delayed reaction to the danger of it. I even snapped off some photographs of the broken windows and some exterior shots through my window, which remained intact. The bus pushed its way through the sheep and sped onward, a couple of last rocks banging off the back end.

It was only when I turned around and saw two of the soldiers crouched down in their seats and noticed that my tormentor across the aisle was now flat as a flounder in the middle of the aisle that it rushed in on me that we must have been in greater peril than I had realized. In delayed reaction my heart began to pound and sweat began to ooze from my whole upper body. Miraculously, my motion sickness was gone.

Shaken as I was, I had no intention of letting the Israeli know it. He was getting himself up off the aisle floor, a slightly sheepish expression on his face. “I see what you mean about being in a country at war,” I said in as relaxed a tone as I could muster under the circumstances. He didn't reply and silently busied himself with dusting off his pants and shirtfront for the remaining thirty miles up to Jerusalem.

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19. 4: SWEET WATERS IN THE PROMISED LAND (Part 1) 4.10.2005

Israel, April 1990. “Joe Angel,” he said when I asked him a second time to pronounce his name in Hebrew for me. He saw my look of disbelief and repeated: “Joe Angel. That's what my name was in Italian, Giuseppi Angelo. So when I came here I just translated it into Hebrew.”

I was interviewing Joe for a documentary project involving auspices from the US, Israel and Egypt. “Desertification,” the process of the transformation of formerly verdant and arable land into desert sand is a silent and seemingly inexorable threat to prosperity and peace in a great swath of geography from the Sahara to across the Middle East. If ways could be found to arrest, or cope better with this process, the supporters of this project contended, even bitter enemies might find “common ground” and a way to live together in the Promised Land.

Joe Angel is an Italian Jew and Israeli citizen, which he has been since he emigrated from Rome to Israel in 1951. Short, with a paunch, and pure white hair over a ruddy complexion he reminded me a bit of David Ben Gurion, but with a better haircut. Joe is an agronomist, and it was his field of melons we were standing beside in the Negev desert not far from Beersheva.

This wasn't just any old field of melons; this was a field of high-tech melons, melons being raised on soil that looked like kitty litter. Around the perimeter of the field was a short little wire fence of a couple of wire about a foot high. It was to keep little desert varmints from having a melon party. At the corner where we stood was an ensemble of distinctly un-agrarian looking equipment: a couple of large plastic fluid containers, one with a fertilizer, the other a reservoir for “sweet,” or fresh water. Next to that was a post about seven feet high, on which rested a panel of photo-electric cells. The solar panel was connected to a computer attached further on down the pole. The computer ran the little melon farm.

Arrayed over the field of melon plants, if one looked carefully, were little black plastic hoses, drip-irrigation tubes, following the rows of the plants. The Israelis were the wizards of drip-irrigation. Joe Angel had told me that, while this might seem like the latest thing in agriculture, it was actually an ancient people from nearby this area, then called Nabatea, on the other side of the Dead Sea, who practiced this method of watering plants back in biblical times. The Nabateans used to place stones next to each plant, on which, during the cool desert nights, would condense moisture that would then drip off them to the base of the plants. Drip-irrigation had the same effect, ideal for growing things in the desert, where spraying water is wasteful and inefficient.

Water, particularly “sweet” water, or rather the lack of it, is the reason for all this high-tech farming. There isn't much of it in these parts, and what there is must be shared with Israel's neighbors. Religious and historical hurts may fuel much of the unrest among the nations of this region, but water has the potential to raise the stakes to a new level.

That's one of the reasons the Israelis have improved upon the methods of the Nabateans. Beersheva means “seven wells” in Hebrew, so there is some fresh water in the vicinity. But these days there is not enough to go around, so the trick is to find a way to put some of the less desirable water to work. Deep below the desert sand there is plenty of water, but it's very saline since the aquifer is actually a shelf that begins in the Mediterranean sea. Used by itself, salt water ruins crops and degrades soil; but used judiciously along with fresh water and fertilizers, the Israelis have discovered, the desert can be made to bloom with crops and profits, maybe even peace. Israeli scientists have even gone the Nabateans one step better by devising a “pulse” irrigation system that is more effective than the constant drip method. The pulsing of a careful mixture of fresh and salt water and fertilizers is managed by the sun-powered computer.

The Israelis are justly proud of these accomplishments. There were trellises for growing cherry tomatoes that could be plucked them from the vines to eat like candy. They had the sweetness of candy, I learned, because they had been grown partly with saline water. Many of the agronomists had bowls of them on their desks, and ate them the way Americans might jelly beans or peanuts. If they could turn this science into a sweet deal with their Arab neighbors it might put some of the promise back into the “promised land.” [to be continued]

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19. 3: RIP Pope John Paul Ringo George II 4.06.2005

2005 UrbisMedia

Anyone who has been reading this journal knows that I do not count myself among he credulous of any creed. I'll take my chances with my own “faith”; the priests, gurus, mullahs, rabbis and the rest can keep their own counsel.

And now it must be said: that goes double for Pope John Paul II. I know, I know , one should not speak ill of the dead. Well, I spoke plenty ill of him when he was alive, so why turn hypocrite now. First of all, I must say that the papacy itself is a stupid concept that should have died when the Romans crucified Peter (“ Tu es Petrus ”) upside down in AD 67. But since then we have had mostly fools, whoremongers, megalomaniacs, murderers, and a few decent and pious men, running around in that silly costume, making saints, appointing cronies as cardinals, while claiming to be “infallible on matters of faith and morals.”

A few of these guys tried to let some air into the Church, most recently John XXIII with his apertura a sinestra of Vatican II, and Albino Luciani, pope for only 34 days as John Paul I before he was probably murdered (joining the first 33 popes, none of whom reputedly died of “natural causes”) because he was going to clean up the sleazy Vatican Bank-Banco Ambrosiano situation run by Cardinal Marcinkus.

But John Paul II was no reformer; rather a pontifical reactionary, who while posing as an intellectual himself, drove off the Church's theologians, fought against “liberation theology” because he did have the brains to see that it was closer to what the Church should be in developing countries than cardinals and bishops consorting with dictatorial secular powers. He did more praying than thinking, ran the Church more with ideology than theology, and ran around the world sucking up the adulation of the credulous as though he was a rock star. At the same time, if you do the demographics, he was running the Church into the ground. Barely fifteen percent of Europe's Catholics go to mass, and churches and seminaries are closing in Europe and the U.S.

He was an apologist for traditions that kept women “in their place,” and protected, even rewarded, bishops who moved pederast priests around so they could get fresh prey and had to pay off their victims with the first, second and third collections at masses that are more and more thinly attended. He supported new theological SS Church organization like Opus Dei that functions, like his buddy Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to make sure that homosexuals, feminists, and open-minded theologians would be marginalized or purged. No married priests, women priests, birth control, or choice for women with this crowd. With AIDS raging in many countries where they seek converts they oppose even the use of condoms. This pope was more concerned with creating a cult of personality than a culture of ecumenical Christianity. Pontifex means “bridge-builder,” not barrier-builder.

Sure there is all the photo op stuff of going into mosques, apologizing to the Jews, kissing African babies; but if we have a hard time linking that with real sincerity with other politicians, we should be able to see it through the haze of incense and discern its hollowness through the strains of Gregorian chant.

When interviewed on the PBS News Hour about his fellow Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski concluded his sappy encomium by saying that Karol Wojtyla was a “Pope for the ages.” Right. The Middle Ages.

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19. 2: CHINA HANDS , by Peter Rand (1995) BR 4.4.2005

After I had made several trips to China in different capacities an Asian friend commented that I was getting to be a “China hand.” There was more flattery that veracity in that compliment. Beyond a very abbreviated lexicon of words and phrases in Mandarin and Cantonese that are a long way from the conversational, I am illiterate in spoken Chinese and more so in written Chinese. But if I needed any confirmation that this appellation did not apply to me it was Peter Rand's China Hands .

Most of those who became China hands went there when they were young. Some were scholars, some diplomats, some adventurers and businessmen, but most were journalists. Some combined elements of more than one. Most learned the language, some very well, and almost all had a sense that China—in the period of 1905 to 1949—was a place that would not only make their careers or fortunes, but could remake the world. Things turned out somewhat differently than predicted, but some predictions may yet come true.

Their names are fading into them mist of China's history in the first half of the 20 th Century; names like Vincent Sheean, Harold Issacs, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, Theodore White, and the author's father, Christopher Rand. It was the younger Rand's desire to know more about his father, a journalist who spent almost all of his life away from his family, indulging in, as was characteristic of many China hands, his love for China, travel, politics, booze, often a star-crossed love affair, and consorting with the likes of Chiang Kai-shek, Gen. “Vinegar” Joe Stillwell, Madame Sun Yat-sen, Chu The, Zhou En-lai, and Mao Zedong.

China Hands is a meticulously researched and well-composed history of a remarkable period of journalism. Woven into the stories of these reporters for Life, The Christian Science Monitor, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker , and The New York Herald , among many others, are the death of the Manchu Dynasty, the republic, the Japanese invasion, and the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, enough tumultuous history for several nations in so short a period of time.

Then the era of the China hands came to an abrupt end in 1949 when the Communists sealed their victory over Chiang's KMT, which retreated to Taiwan with as much loot as they could carry. China hands Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, and Harold Issacs, among others, had spent years cultivating contacts and friendships while residing in mountain caves alongside Mao, Lin Piao, Chu The and Zhou En-lai; but suddenly they were no longer welcome. This was not because of their reporting; Smedley was herself a communist, and Snow wrote admiringly of the reds. But they got caught up in the complex politics of it all. Many of them were outposted in Chungking (Chongqing) during the Japanese occupation, when it was the KMT's “capitol.” Most China hands knew that Chiang and the KMT were thieves and scoundrels. Stillwell hated Chiang outwardly, leading to his being pulled from the Asian theater even though he was fluent in Mandarin and knew the Chinese culture intimately. But some China hands worked for stridently anti-communist publishers, such as Henry Luce ( Life and Time ) and had to tow the line.

But the main factor affecting the ouster from the inner circles of China's new rulers in 1949 was that the United States had made its choice to back Chiang. China's door pretty much slammed to western reportage and remained shut for nearly 24 years. The China hands were without a country, and with the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S., because of their years in China and their closeness with the reds, they were “purged” at home as well. A half-century of gathering political and cultural intelligence on the world's largest nation was all but shunted aside until—and, ironically, it was Edgar Snow who first brought the overture to Nixon—a rapprochement was opened in 1972.

Since Deng Xiao-ping's further opening of China to the investment and ways of the West in 1978, the country has changed with breathtaking pace. With the economically disastrous “great leaps” and “Cultural Revolution” of Mao behind them the Chinese launched into a sustained period of giddy growth and profound social (if not political, as Tiananmen Square demonstrated) changes chronicled by a new breed of China hands like Robin Lane Fox, Orville Schell and Nicholas Kristoff. China's periods of famine, wars and revolutions seems to be fading into the tapestry of its long history, along with the bold exploits and words of those who witnessed it for the rest of us.

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19. 1: AN ARMY OF ONE AND . . . 4.2.2005

UrbisMedia

Back in 1968, when I and my family flew out to San Diego to begin my job as an assistant professor at SDSU, we were accompanied by a contingent of young Marine Corps recruits, mostly from the southeast. Most of them had never been on a plane before, or even out of their home counties. They were excited, and maybe also anxious. They drank a lot on the flight, which increased their bravado and highlighted their naiveté. They were going to be Marines and kick “Charlie's” butt over in Nam.

The last I saw of them was when we were collecting our baggage. A drill sergeant had them lined up against the wall and was already hammering them, right in front of crowds of civilians, about being wimps and pussies, and other epithets designed to anneal them into the few and the proud and the whatever. They looked embarrassed and scared. They were going to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, and I was going across town to a campus that was as politicized over that war as we are over this one. If I needed any indication of that I got nit from the television in the motel room where we spent our first night in California. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was on and police batons were cracking heads in the streets.

I recall that flight with the young recruits every time I see one of the slick PR campaigns that the Armed Forces runs in television, or in magazines. One has a computer-generated knight in glimmering armor slaying dragons who morphs into a Marine in that spiffy uniform. Another has a muscular rock-climber alone on a sheer cliff, confidently pulling himself to victory at the summit. He's an “Army of One.” (An “Army of One”?! What PR idiot conjured that one?) That's right; you're so tough you can win a battle alone. Then the Navy has silhouetted fighters lifting off a carrier deck into a splendid sunset as though the pilots are off on some sort of irenic adventure “off to see the world.”

There are a “few good men” and a few of them are in the Marine Corps, as there are in the other branches of military service. They are men and women who are ready to put their lives on the line to protect their country, and most of them deserve our support and respect. But they are also sworn to go and do as their Command-in-Chief bids them to do, and to regard that fight as a good, just, and appropriate one. That is the dilemma that American's military has faced in every conflict since WWII. We were not threatened by North Korea (although we may yet have that honor); not by the North Vietnamese, and not by the Iraqis. These were fights our politicians picked and, bound by duty – and sometimes inspired by their own tunes of glory – our military have gone , fought and died in them

These recruiting ads would be laughable were it not for the fact that they will entice the desperate and the gullible to enlist. They are designed mostly for the type of young men, still boys really, who were on that plane in 1968. Many of them then, and too many still, have little promise for much else in life, from hard life family farms and decaying small towns, or from inner cities. That uniform, that paycheck, that student aid, can be hard to resist. But they also cannot resist, that is to abjure, the sworn duty to go into battles their commanders, comfortably “in the rear,” send them to.

Each American soldier in Iraq looks likes “an army of one,” decked out like a terminator with body armor, heavy boots, night vision goggles, and high-tech weapons, computers and communications . The contrast with an enemy in a gallabiya and flip-flops, with a Kalishnikovc could not be more striking. The army of one has tanks, Bradleys and HumVees, the “insurgents” have home-made IEDs and left over RPGs. The other difference is that the “insurgents” and angry Iraqis know what they are fighting for; the Americans have to be deceived into they are fighting for.

Conventional news media showed almost nothing of the anti-war protests on the second anniversary of the Iraq War, almost nothing of the growing numbers of veterans who have come out against it, some losing their pay and benefits for speaking their minds. These dissenters know their Commander-in-Chief has lied to them and to the country. They also know that there is no such thing as an Army of One; but they know that caskets are made for Casualties of One, by One, by One . . .

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GRASS , Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work - I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysberg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this? Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.