APRIL 2004

7.5: NIGHT OF THE PYRAMIDS 4.29.2004

In 1991 I made my third trip to Egypt, this time not as a tour escort, but as a scriptwriter for a documentar

on a cooperative agricultural project between Egypt and Israel. Filmmaker Jack Ofield and I arrived in Cairo

after a week with the Israeli scientists on the project. We arrived in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month

of Islam, but found that was only the beginning of the contrasts between these two countries who seem to share

little more common ground that a tenuous peace and an arid landscape. The following journal entry is presented

in three installments. The others should be posted soon enough to retain the thread of narrative.

Cairo curio shop too small for its own sign.

Part I

Somehow the idea of having a meeting at 11PM didn't seem that absurd. After all, there wasn't much chance of getting any sleep at this hotel, or for that matter maybe anywhere in Egypt. Ramadan sort of reverses the circadian patterns of the day: with no eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset, the night becomes the time of feasting, socializing, and, is seems, taking meetings.

At the Hilton the nights have been anything but restful. Last night there was a wedding and reception in the huge atrium and swimming pool area of the hotel. A band played amplified Arabic pop music until 4AM, by which time the furious traffic of Tahrir Square that the hotel backs up to took over the insomnia-producing din.

I had already asked for a room change away from the atrium. The hotel manager cheerfully complied; it was a room further away from the atrium, but closer to the square. The new room came with an enormous bouquet of fresh-cut flowers; a nice gesture of contrition (unless it was left-over from the wedding), but the effect was to make the room smell like a funeral parlor.

I had managed to get a nap in the afternoon, so when our driver-minder, Hisham, arrived with the government car to pick Jack and me up for the 11PM meeting I was almost relieved. It looked like they were setting up for another wedding for tonight.

Hisham had been out driver since we arrived in Egypt. His English was quite good, if perhaps colored with a few too many American idioms from pop culture. His current favorite American pop singer was a woman named Sadé, and he had already extracted a promise from me to send him her latest tapes when I arrived back home. He was pleasant-looking, with that ‘nappy' Egyptian hair cut close, and a bit pudgy as young Egyptians go. I think he comes from a fairly well-off family. And, like many of his age and social class, he seems to be doing work that is well below his education and training. He is a chauffeur with a master's in public administration.

At Doqqi, the area of Cairo of government bureaus, ministries and the university, we were ushered into an anteroom to the Minister's office. Here, typical of most every meeting, we were served tea or cola, offered cigarettes and some cookies, and made to wait while being chatted up by various ministerial underlings. We sat, smoked, drank and chatted for the better part of an hour. Now approaching 12:30AM I couldn't help thinking of contrasts with the experience we'd had with officials in Israel.

The joint agricultural program between Egypt and Israel on which we were preparing a script had been somewhat of a challenge since its inception. Initially funded by a grant from an American foundation looking for some basis to strengthen the peaceful relations between the two nations since the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel, the program now involved the U.S. Government and several universities. The challenge was more than just overcoming the former antipathies between these two Middle-Eastern adversaries, but also to find a type endeavor that would have a long-term benefit to each of them. My working title for the documentary treatment was called “Common Ground.”

The two countries did have a Semitic heritage in common, but this has done little in the past to sew amity in racial brotherhood. They drew their religions from much of the same myths and legends, but they found more reason to fight each other than pray together over that. But they also had to squeeze from their parched and parsimonious landscape a life and livelihood. Much of that landscape was desert. They should both be interested in finding ways to make the desert bloom. That became the joint project, on which Jack and I were preparing to document.

We had met with the Israeli scientists and officials a week earlier. Their meetings had all been in austere offices, in the field, or in labs. They were conducted on a tight schedule, were devoid of interruptions, and began and concluded promptly on time. All very business-like and efficient, very Israeli.

So in the time we sat drinking tea and chatting in the ante-room at Doqqi we might have been able to conduct two or three Israeli-style meetings. The Egyptian meeting had not even started and it was going on 1AM. All of the meetings in Egypt had been pretty much this way. We could only wonder what it was like when the scientists and officials from Israel took meetings in Egypt.

At one-fifteen we were ushered into the Deputy Minister's office. My first impression was that this was what it must have been like to enter Benito Mussolini's office in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Il Duce had a desk at the end of an office the size of a ballroom, and visitors had to walk about forty yards across a hardwood floor to reach his desk. It must have been intimidating.

The minister's office wasn't quite that large, but it was huge by any standards and in its center was a meeting table large enough to accommodate about twenty-five chairs along each side. At the far end of the table sat the minister, surrounded by phones, a few piles of papers, and the ever-present feature of every Egyptian government office we had visited, a legion of supernumeraries-in-waiting.

We were shown to seats along the side to the left of the minister, a couple of officials took up places opposite us. We got to stare at each other because the minister was on one of the phones, speaking authoritatively in rapid Arabic. For all we knew he could be ordering pizza. I wouldn't have minded a slice or two, as something to soak up the endless pots of tea, another of which had been placed before us.

The minister was a large, heavy-set man, handsome, with thinning dark hair, piercing eyes and a growing paunch. He looked more Greek or Italian to me than Egyptian. He flipped through papers during his conversation on the phone and no one else spoke. Jack and I decided to remain silent as well, and I embellished some of my notes to pass the time. I also noticed that my bladder was sending signals to my brain about all the tea I had sent to it.

Just as I had decided that it might make things a bit more comfortable if I visited the men's room the minister put down the receiver and greeted us warmly. I didn't need to hear him ask if we would like anything else to drink. After a few other preliminaries and some kibitzing with some of the officials on the other side of the table there commenced what had to be one of the most frustrating meetings I had ever participated in my life.

My presentation was interrupted in nearly every paragraph by an incoming phone call, or some aide or another coming into the room with a question for the minister or with paper's requiring his signature. Usually he just waved to me to put myself on “pause” while an aide handed him the phone receiver, or showed him where his signature was required. Then he would say: “So, and after you visit the facility at Burg Al Arab you will. . . ?” repeating where I had left-off as a cue for me to continue.

What should have been a thirty-minute meeting dragged out, to the extreme distress to my brain and bladder, for over two hours. It was now nearing 2AM, by Egyptian Ramadan schedule that's just about lunchtime, which brought a merciful adjournment to the meeting in spite of loose ends and unresolved issues that didn't seem to matter at all to the minister.

“You ready to ‘rock and roll'?” Hisham asked back in the ante-room.

“Huh?” I said. I understood the idiom, but wasn't sure he did.

“Rock and roll, have some fun, you know. Where would you like to go? People are eating now. Many restaurants are open. It's Ramadan.”

“Hey, if I want to party it up all I have to do is go back to the Hilton. There's probably a couple of weddings right outside my room right now,” I replied. I would have liked to go back to the hotel and get some sleep, but I knew that was impossible.

“I am available to take you wherever you prefer.” Hisham insisted.

Jack didn't seem to have a preference, other than getting some sleep to rest his ‘curse-of-the-Pharaohs' bronchitis.

“Tell you what I'd like to do,” I said, half expecting that Hisham's offer wasn't really a plenary one, “I'd like to go out to Giza and climb a pyramid, preferably Kufu's. The only time I've seen them at night was at that sound and light show they have, but that's at a distance and very touristic. I'd like to climb up to the top and look at the city and the Nile in the moonlight.”

Hisham looked a little surprised, but Jack didn't.

“Pyramids?”

“Pyramids. At Giza. Those big piles of stones.” I said, making a triangular shape with my hands. Hisham missed the irony of my little joke; I think Hisham was thinking about food and music, and maybe women, not pyramids.

“OK, pyramids,” he said resignedly. “We will go to Giza.” End of Part I

7.4: LIFE “AS WE KNOW IT” 2.24.2004

For someone who, by his own words, speaks to God for daily confirmation of his "duty" to expunge evils (axial and otherwise) and "change the world," The Boosh exhibits perhaps the worst presidential disdain for his creator's most magnificent creation-the natural environment that gives us life and sustenance. Of course, when playing to the cheap seats in the choir, or sucking up to one's contributors at the fund-raisers, mammon trumps every time.

This is typical of his sense of self-anointed exceptionalism and messianic destiny. The so-called “compassionate conservative” is an "uncompassionate conservationist.” No need for the USA to sign the Kyoto environmental accords, like almost all of the developed nations of the world. Then he so bowdlerizes an environmental report that his own Secretary of the Interior, Christie Todd Whitman, resigns. So now he is even freer to let his corporate cronies pollute the air with his Orwellian titled “Clear Skies [of birds] Initiative,” and generally dismantle years of legislative protections of the environment.

So here we are at another Earth Day, and moving in the wrong direction on environmental protection again. The following is a script from a public radio essay I did fourteen years ago.

The Tenants of Spaceship Earth

The origins of the environmental movement have been variously dated from Thoreau's Walden, to Carson's Silent Spring, to the wreck of the tanker Torrey Canyon off the coast of England. But ironically, it may well be that the landing of astronauts on the moon in 1969—a triumph of technology over the bonds of nature that will come to be regarded as the event which provided the basis for the environmental consciousness.

The moon landing not only provided mind-stunning views of our blue-marble planet, it also generated what seems to have become the overarching metaphor of environmentalism: Spaceship Earth, the notion that our spinning capsule of tenuous biosphere is a closed system of physical, biological and chemical processes. It is a metaphor that served to provide the conceptual underpinnings of a more specific benchmark of environmental consciousness, Earth Day 1970. A generation later we are about to observe (“celebrate” would be an inappropriate word) another Earth Day in a more polluted, depleted, and threatened world.

The Spaceship Earth metaphor serves as a useful conceptual envelope for raising our consciousness about ecology. But it is also a somewhat misleading notion on at least two grounds. First, and paradoxically, our venture outside the bounds of our planet also affirms that our terra system is not closed; we have already pushed its boundaries to the solar system. And no reasonable person would counter the fact that all life, as we know it, is dependent upon an external source, the sun's radiation. We are, therefore, actually citizens of a “global village” in a solar nation in the world of the universe.

Secondly, and related, the Spaceship Earth metaphor, conveys the idea that the earth is a system that functions in some sort of ecological equilibrium. But while the earth appears to be, at least in the short term of human tenure, a self-regulating, cyclical system, its life has been anything but constant. Rather its chemical composition and physical form has been subject to unceasing changes in gases and solids, shifting planets, heating and cooling, and life forms which have come into and gone out of existence well before the appearance of our kind. We could become the best environmentalists possible, but one monster meteor, or good volcanic hiccup from Mother Nature and the next residents of this planet could be one-celled organisms in the primordial muck. If you don't believe me, ask a dinosaur.

So, does this mean we should forget about Earth Day, crank up the levels of PCBs, dioxins, throw-away cans, level a few more forests, and finish off the whales? Should we live it up in our wasteful ways while we can because there may be no tomorrow? Of course not [unless you're George Boosh, sucking up to your business cronies].

What it does mean is that earth history did not begin with the evolution of homo sapiens, or our “creation” if you're inclined to biblical literalism. It also means that we might not be around at the end, if there is such a thing, in spite of how good environmentalists we become. What it does mean is that we have an attitude problem: we have led ourselves to believe that the ultimate purpose of creation is us, and in doing so we have arrogated the planet as our exclusive domain. But we are not the owners of Spaceship Earth, merely its current renters (who are likely to lose our entire cleaning deposit).

For 60 million years the renter “terranauts” were the dinosaurs. Somewhere off in the distant future-maybe not too distant-it maybe a life form based not on carbon, as we are, but like our computers, based on silicon, with electron charges coursing in their veins. But for the present the tenant is homo sapiens. What a sorry chapter it will be in the log of Spaceship Earth if we, who have cast its creator in our own image, will not be able to say we did as well as Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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7.3: WAR AND RAPTURE 4.18.2004

The late social historian Lewis Mumford wrote in his classic The City in History that it was back in the days of ancient Iraq, then called Mesopotamia, that the notion of the Priest-Warrior-King first emerged. Names like Sargon the Great, Gilgamesh, Nebuchadrezzar, and Assurbanipal still evoke fearsome rulers who could boast, as the last of these did: “Like the onset of a terrible hurricane I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety, I cut off the head of Teuman, their braggart King, who had plotted evil. . . . Hamanu, Elam's royal city, I besieged, I captured . . . I destroyed it, I devastated it, I burned it with fire.” Now that's “shock and awe.”

Priest-Warrior-Kings were dangerous guys. They took their authority directly from God—divine right—and that, permuted with leadership of the troops and royal lineage, translated to absolute secular power. These days we have rulers with religious authority (Iran), royal authority (Saudi Arabia), and warrior authority (Israel). (I just co-incidentally chose three places in the Middle East.) But there are probably no rulers who combine all three.

Curiously, the country that comes closest, is the good ole US of A, and its good old boy selected president, George W. Boosh. Yes, a certifiable dunce from Texas could be a modern-day P-W-K. Who else could arrogate to himself the authority to “change the world” and teach “brown-skinned people” the ways of democracy.

True, its questionable to call a guy who couldn't even be a “weekend warrior” much of a warrior. But that doesn't stop him from calling himself a “war president.” And a born-again Christian ex-drunk driver doesn't really fulfill the requirements that we would expect of an ayatollah or a Pope Julius; but he is somewhat the darling of the religious right and believes that God (and Scalia) wanted him to be president. Anyway, he prays more than he reads. As to Booshian pretentions to royal lineage, I would suggest you read Kevin Phillips' An American Dynasty. (References that Barbara Boosh is a direct descendent of one of Queen Elizabeth's Welsh Corgies are, however, probably not true).

But being a wannabe P-W-K is not just fulfilling some of the demographics. You need an attitude about your place in history; you have to feel “chosen”(by Scalia) to fulfill a destiny, a destiny that is scripturally revealed, that history will end with the triumph of good over evil. So what makes the Boosh a candidate P-W-K is that the times appear propitious. By propitious I mean consider the popularity of the millennial “Left Behind” series of quite successful books about those who will, at the end of time, receive the “Rapture” and ascend to heaven with Jesus on the Second Coming, and the rest of us who will—lower your voice and speak in hoarse Satanic tones—descend in to “the everlasting fires of Helliburton.”

For example, can you discern much of a difference between the titles of some of the Left Behind books and the Boosh military adventures?

Tribulation Force (Not a military campaign, but a Rapture book)

Enduring Freedom (The Iraqi campaign. Yeah, sure)

End of State (Rapture book, not the fate of California under Steriodenegger)

Soul Harvest (Rapture book, soon to be Baptist campaign to convert Sunnis and Shias)

Apocalypse Dawn (Rapture title, and apt description of mornings in Sadr City of late)

Resolute Sword (Iraq war campaign, but could be a reference to a Clinton affectation)

Desert Storm (Daddy Boosh's Iraqi war, back when Colin Powel had integrity)

Glorious Appearing (Rapture book, but also Boosh's emergence from rabbit hole in Nebraska

on 9-11, 9-12? 9-13?Whatever.)

The Indwelling (Rapture book; also reference to the month Boosh spent on his ranch

prior to 9-11)

Don't they all sound like they should be intoned by the sonorous baritone of James Earl Jones (or more aptly, Jim Jones)?

Still not ready to accept the Boosh as your Priest-Warrior-King and receive the Rapture? Then hear this, from the book of the Bible from which the Rapture prophecy comes:

"Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. . . . And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth." Revelation 20:1–3, 7–8

Right. And you thought I was kidding.

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7.2: “If You Knew Suzie. . .”: a movie, a city, a girl, and a romantic

fantasy 4.13.2004

“Like I knew Suzie / Oh, oh, oh what a gal.”

So the song goes, although I doubt very much that lyric was written for a Wanchai yum yum girl. Quite a gal, that Suzie, Suzie Wong, to have lodged herself so deeply in my subconscious from my first encounter with her forty five years earlier such that she seems to haunt my every step in Hong Kong.

If you knew Suzie, you didn't forget her. Suzie Wong is the heroine of Richard Mason's book, The World of Suzie Wong , and the bar girl played by Nancy Kwan in the 1960 film with the same title. Uncounted are how many other impressionable young men she captivated from print or celluloid as an icon of Asian female beauty, grace, and exotic eroticism.

According to her “bio,” Suzie is reputed to have “known” at least two thousand men, mostly sailors, before she finally walked away from her trade hand in hand with Robert Lomax,, an architect turned painter in Hong Kong, who was an Englishman or an American depending upon whether you met him in the book or the movie played by William Holden. Many more have enjoyed the now-fabled Wanchai enchantress in their imagination.

Legions of American servicemen took their R & R in Wanchai bars. Like much of Hong Kong, which changes as fitfully as the stock quotes and currency rates that run through its veins and arteries, Wanchai has changed; it is no longer the hub of licentiousness. Real estate profit rules Hong Kong, a form of civic prostitution devoid of nostalgia for the city Suzie knew. For that matter, contemporary successors to Suzie's trade have changed and relocated. They are more likely to be found across Victoria Harbour in Mongkok in Kowloon, and be Filippina, Malay, Thai, or girls from the People's Republic of China.

But a fictional prostitute endures. While I am approaching an age no longer worthy of her good offices, she remains the twenty-year-old Shanghainese girl who took up her trade in Wanchai's Namkok Hotel. She's still the Suzie who, after two thousand clients, can claim convincingly that she is still a virgin in her heart, and she can still delude herself that one day she will marry and have a proper Chinese family even though that, by custom, was ruled out from the day her uncle forcibly took her virginity way back in Shanghai.

From Messalina to Irma La Douce to Suzie, the whore with a heart of gold is a literary and cinematic staple. She remains capable of capturing the hearts, and even souls, of her admirers because while her charms may be purchased, her love can only be bought in a dearer currency.

I first came to HK rather late in my own life, although my infatuation with Suzie began at age nineteen in a movie theatre back in New York, it resided, dormant and patient, like a virus, awaiting my immune-compromised middle years.

It is best to board a Star Ferry, those redoubtable fixtures of Victoria Harbour to explain the return of Suzie to the forefront of my consciousness.

The Star Ferry, and that ponytail

In real life the most powerful mnemonic trigger is usually olfactory; in reel life it is ocular. The first time I boarded a Star Ferry, there was a vague familiarity. Their forest green and cream color scheme, the sloping wooden deck planks, the quaint seats, that bluntly-efficient double-ender, lozenge hull, all produced a sense of déjà vu . I seemed to know from some subconscious record that the reversible seat backs could be set to the direction in which the ferry was headed. I was headed from the Kowloon-side of Tsim Sha Tsui to the Hong Kong-side landing at Central.

Ahead of me, a few rows up a silky raven-black pony-tail bounced above the collar of a Burberry trenchcoat, suspended jauntily from a perfectly formed head. Her back was to me, and it seemed unseemly for me to get up and re-seat myself for a better view from the side or the front. Other riders settled into the seats, the loading ramps were hoisted, and the ferry lumbered away from the pier and out into the chop of Victoria Harbour.

In the periphery of my vision, I could see the highrise silver and gold commercial buildings of Central rising against the still higher, and still largely verdant backdrop of Victoria Peak. But my main focus remained on that tantalizing ponytail. While the rest of the passengers were animated with their conversations, arranging their shopping bags, or snapping their tourist photos, Suzie—yes, I think I can call her that, so sure am I that anyone, at least any guy who has seen the opening sequence of The World of Suzie Wong, would agree, must certainly be Suzie—remained motionless. It was indeed as though she had been transported from some other time, as though with some cinematic trick she had been pasted into the scene before me, and maybe only for (by?) me, and no one else, an anachronism summoned by my subconscious past to my conscious present. She herself seemed separate from the others, slightly out of focus in her own space and plane, her hues, if I can say it, “Technicolor”. Others seemed to take no special notice of her.

The mind plays tricks, and I think mine wanted to be a willing participant in the illusion. I looked down at myself. Was I wearing a trenchcoat as well, Robert Lomax's (he the romantic lead played by William Holden) trenchcoat? Did I have a leather suitcase beside my seat as he did when he first encountered Suzie on the Star Ferry? No, I was still me. But that girl with the ponytail; I wasn't so sure. I needed to see her face. There would be a chance when we arrived at Central. She was ahead of me and when she got up to leave would be facing in my direction.

Soon enough the Star Ferry was alongside the pier at Central. The trip was shorter now than in Suzie's day back in the 1950s. Since then there has been more filling in of the harbor and the piers might one-day form a bridge if the relentless pursuit of commercial building space does not abate. But time was of no consequence this day, it seemed undirected and distorted. In a moment I would see what was on the other side of that taunting ponytail.

But when Suzie got up from here seat so did the large Australian guy who was sitting behind her. He completely blotted her out! And then, as if to frustrate me all the more, they seemed to move in unison, with only slight flicks of that ponytail to indicate that she was still there.

There would still be a chance to see her full on when she got to the gangway. If I went around the elliptical housing for the smokestack in the center of the ferry she would be coming from the other side and be facing me. Then I could check to see that face, the face I would know instantly and without a shred of doubt would be Suzie's face. Rather, Nancy Kwan's face, the face that played Suzie and will forever be associated with Suzie. There would be that telltale little apostrophe of hair descending from her brow. That little lick of hair, but also the large eyes, Kwan's Eurasian eyes, a touch rounder than the typical almond Asian eyes. How expressive they were in the film: flirting with sidelong glances, scolding with a dark frown, they could plead, come to tears, express innocence or ecstasy. I'd know in a flash, in a flashback.

If I could only get around to the other side of the stack housing. But other passengers had rushed toward the gangway (rushing is the default speed for all locomotion in Hong Kong) and clogged the way around while the gangplank was being lowered. The clog broke loose when the gangway was open. In a second I would see her. Except that an elderly Chinese man decided that it was time for him to stop and spit, right below the sign that says in Chinese and English that one should not spit on the ferry. At least he chose to spit in the trash receptacle. But that second was gone, and so was Suzie. I caught a glimpse of her coat and a flash of the ponytail as she ascended the ramp toward the exit, obscured by other passengers and the struts and columns of the pier.

I rushed after her, dodging and weaving through the passengers hoping to catch up with her in the terminal, hoping to get that one, brief, confirming look at her. To prove to myself that she was indeed Suzie. Just one confirming look!

She had melted into the throng. Gone. Disappeared as effectively as she had disappeared from Robert Lomax in the movie's first scene; melted into the mystery of Hong Kong.

In my remaining few days of this first visit, I would find myself looking for her among the city's sights and landmarks. There are thousands of pretty Chinese girls with ponytails in Hong Kong. It's a very common way for them to wear their hair here, their raven-black hair, which should never be, although sadly increasingly is, dyed or bleached to another color. In the coming days I would see scores of them, and the faces that preceded them. They were often attractive and beautiful girls, but none of them proved to be Suzie. They were everywhere and pretty young women in ponytails soon multiplied like objects in a funhouse infinity of mirrors.

A few days later when my plane rose over the harbor from Tai Kok I was no closer to the solving the mystery. But before we reached cruising altitude I has resolved to return to Hong Kong, next time for an extended stay, one in which I would take up residence in Suzie Wong's city. I would search for Suzie, but I would also discover Hong Kong.

Hong Kong and Suzie Wong; they're alike in many ways: beautiful, self-assured yet vulnerable, determined and self-deluding. Except that Suzie never changes. What a city, and “Oh, oh, oh what a gal!”

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7.1: Hippity-hoppity, Easter's on its way 4.13.2004

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

For some reason I have never been able to wrap my perhaps overly rationalist mind around the whole business of The Resurrection. Somehow the whole “dying for the sins of Mankind” has always struck me as unnecessary, if not a religious subterfuge to offer forgiveness and redemption for transgressions people when really should pay for those sins. Of course, if you believe the biblical account that all mankind was redeemed by Christ's death then you have to come up with something that is sufficiently momentous, or in the case of the crucifixion, appropriately horrific (thank you Mr.Gibson).

Believers will, of course, put my skepticism down to a lack of faith, and perhaps pray for me because I risk missing out on the Rapture, at which time I will not be able to go to heaven and hang out for eternity with the likes of Tim LaHay, Billy Graham, Pope John-Paul II, George W. Boosh, etc. According to them it won't matter that I think that the Rabbi Yeshua Bar Yusef (or Jesus Christ) was a righteous man who had some darn good things to say about how we should behave toward one another, most of which has been ignored in favor of a load of bullshit that has been heaped upon his story. That he got a little too big for his sandals as far as the Romans and the high mucky-mucks in the Temple were concerned took some “big ones” as we might say today. How dare he preach non-violence, tolerance, and love thy neighbor. If he and his disciples knew a little bit about “shock and awe” he might not have had to go through that nail-up on the cross.

But then he had to, didn't he: “die” and “rise from the dead.” That's how you beat the Romans. When you think about it, it was quite a risk to take, but it was the only way to beat the Romans: create the myth of the resurrected leader, what some have come to call the “death victory.” And in about another 280 years it worked: Constantine converted and Christianity conquered the Roman Empire. And, as they say, the rest is history, a lot of it really ugly history.

But I digress from my theme: Easter, the “resurrection.” Not only do I think that Yeshua did not die on the cross for our sins, because we really are a bunch of jerks and don't deserve that, but I don't think he died on the cross, period, but survived (others, according to Josephus, had survived Roman crucifixion—Shonfield, The Passover Plot , 1966, P.155, not Matthew 28:5-6). I rather think that lived out his days with his fellow Essenes, and might even have finally perished at Masada.

Huh? Well why not. It's plausible; there was no autopsy, not death certificate, and his friends and family did spend a good deal of time working on him in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. And, of course, non habeas corpus.

It's OK if you prefer the story with the angel rolling back the stone on the tomb and announcing that “he is risen.” But I prefer to believe that Yeshua was whisked away by his friends, rested up, and went into the witness protection program. Mission accomplished.

But I still like Easter. It fits the season, one of rebirth and renewal. And if I don't hold to the “personal savior” thing, I do hold to biting off the ears of my “personal chocolate Easter bunny” and inviting over Hans Blix to break anise-flavored Easter bread and join in some hunting for Easter eggs and weapons of mass destruction. Now that's a Rapture I prefer not to miss.

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