DCJApril2006

Volume 31

MARCH 2006

31. 8: L'AMERICA 4.30.2006

I discovered a new restaurant recently. Not much of a restaurant, really, but closer to an Asian deli. Vietnamese fast-food. They are wonderful Vietnamese fillings in freshly-baked French baguettes. Fillings like barbequed meats with spring roll vegetables, and exotic flavors. I bring this up because it's fusion food—we probably never would have had it had not the French ruled Indo-China at one time, and there had been Vietnamese immigration to France (and more recently, Vietnamese immigration to America).

But it is also an illustration of the subtle balances that are involved in immigration. Most cultures—not all, mind you—welcome a little spice from abroad; but no culture welcomes the prospect of their culture becoming dominated by an invading foreign culture. Yet, while we can give some degree of definition to most cultures, admittedly often in stereotype, we can't quite do that with our own. What is “American culture”?

I had occasion to bend my mind on that question When I was lecturing in Beijing a couple years back. I was looking for a way to make the point that the Chinese should not think they can extrapolate American public administration practices the way they have been able to easily copy American products and manufacturing techniques. The approach I took to raising this issue was to ask my Chinese audiences "What is it that makes you a Chinese?" Someone would volunteer "to be born in China," or "to be of the Chinese race," or to "have the culture of a Chinese". Then I would ask them (rhetorically, of course) what they think it makes me an American. I would pull out my passport, hold it up, and say "this, this is the only thing that makes me American--citizenship. There is no race, definitive culture, or even having to be born there, just citizenship." I would tell them that I can never become Chinese in they way that they think of themselves as Chinese, but they could become American in the way that I am American. To achieve that I would have to be an American Indian, which, as I gave it more thought, but did not express, is racially closer to being a Chinese.

America is sui generis as regards culture. It's as much an idea, maybe more so, than it is a specific place or people, or customs and traditions. That, it seems, is both our attraction and our noble purpose—that idea that “all men are created equal.” The idea that we are a self-created social ecology where any plant can take root and grow and prosper is something we wear on our sleeve and are forever tripping over. Living up to it isn't nearly as easy as expressing it; something like democracy in that regard. There are bioth advantages and disadvantages to being a cultural “work in progress.”

This is, of course, a “take” on our “culture” that has been historically divisive in terms of political philosophy—liberals holding the door open and conservatives holding to the status quo , if not the status quo ante . But where the normative rubber meets the road of reality is over perennial issues related to the (interrelated) issues of race and immigration. Indeed, a good part of what we might consider to be “American culture,” at least in terms of its internal struggle with its own principles, is forged on the anvil of assimilation. From Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huckleberry Finn , and Birth of a Nation , to the most pervasive themes of contemporary literature and films like The Border , and Crash , our struggle with race and immigration perhaps gives us our most pronounced “cultural” definition.

Prior to 1820, before which we have no accurate records, it is not known how many people immigrated America. Records were not kept. Since then some 50 million have come, most were running away from something: potato famines for Irish; poor soil in the mezzogiorno for Italians; religious persecution for Jews; wars, revolutions etc., for other ethnic groups. Most were poor. Italians had a saying: Chi sta bene non si muove (the well-off don't emmigrate).

There are two colloquial points of view about those who migrate: they are the dregs of their societies; or that they were the hardier, more ambitious stock who were willing to take a chance to improve themselves. Considering the perils of migration and the difficulties of getting assimilated, it took considerable courage to be an immigrant in the 19 th century. Ships arrived after long voyages in which immigrants sailed in “steerage” with many passengers dead from disease, or sick from bad food and sanitation.

There's a story, apocryphal or not, was repeated by nearly every immigrant group. “I came to America,” an Irishman, Italian or a Pole, might say, “because in the old country I had heard that the streets of America were ‘paved with gold'”. And then, often with an ironic shrug, “But I learned three things after I arrived: One, the streets were not paved with gold; two, the streets were not paved at all, and; three, it was I who was going to have to pave those streets.”

Fortunate for the immigrants, it might be argued. During the heyday of American immigration the American city was being built, rising out of the mythical compost of the founders that America was destined to be a nation primarily of yeoman farmers America's urban adolescence had all the raw and raucous energy and assertiveness of youth. America's cities grew fast, and without benefit of the “parental oversight and example” of a previous American urban age, without especially an American “golden age of cities.” So it was their very building, the buildings, the physical and social infrastructure, the unpaved streets, that provided the gold. Building cities generates a lot of jobs.

America might be the only nation in the world with a “welcome sign” on its front door. In 1883 the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, designed by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, was erected in New York Harbor. Even before the statue went up Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) to raise funds for the pedestal on which the Miss Liberty would stand. That poem's oft-quoted lines were an unqualified call to America's shores that gave voice to the country's values of freedom and democracy.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from

land to land

Here at our sea-washed sunset gates

shall stand

A Mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes

command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”

cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me

I lift up my lamp beside the golden door.

Despite the Statue of Liberty, and a poem welcoming the “wretched refuse of the earth” and the “huddled masses” there was a strong “Nativist” movement that regarded immigrants with suspicion, with bigotry, and even as an unwelcome pollution. Countering Lazarus nearly point for point is the poem of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, submitted to a government commission on restricting immigration. Titled “The Unguarded Gates,” is warned:

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,

And through them press a wild, a motley throng—

Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,

Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho,

Malayan, Sythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,

Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn;

These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,

Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws.

In street and alley what strange tongues are these,

Accents of menace alien to our air,

Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!

O Liberty, white goddess, is it well

To leave the gate unguarded? On thy breast

Fold sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate,

Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel

Stay those who to thy sacred portals come

To waste the fight of freedom. Have a care

Lest from they brow the clustered stars be torn

And trampled in the dust. For so of old

The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,

And where the temples of the Caesars stood

The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.

These days, making their ways around the internet are polemical prognostications with titles like “Mexifornia,” jeremiads calling for legislative remedies to a Great Wall of the Southwest manned by overweight NRA types with Alamo mentality so that our “American culture” is not “overrun” with foreign spawn. It's doubtful they would even be able to define the “culture” they are claiming to protect from adulteration. What these guys really need is a taste of one of those Vietnamese baguette sandwiches.

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31. 7: KILLING MOUSSAOUI 4.26.2006

Listen for it as a Grammy winner next year, an MP3 download, and maybe as the soundtrack for a movie of the week on Fox—the cell phone tapes from passengers on the doomed 9-11 flights. Likely to be released by the Bush administration to get our blood coursing again, stir our primal need for payback, and of course try to give Bush's flagging approval numbers a kick in the arse, the tapes seem to have been held in reserve for a special day.

That day might be the penalty trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the 911 pilot that never got to fly and wouldn't tell the FBI what his murderous colleagues were up to. The Bush administration wants his blood, wants him D-E-A-D. They are going through a lot of trouble to kill this guy. The whole 911 scenario is being wrung out again, the burning buildings and falling bodies, images that are seared in our memories. It's E-X-P-L-O-I-T-A-T-I-O-N time, and Moussaoui is the sacrificial lamb, no, too close to Easter, make that P-I-G. Even self-annointed hero and presidential hopeful, Rudy Guliani, showed up at the trial to describe falling bodies.

Lost in all this is that Moussaoui never even got close to killing anybody. He might have been on the team, but can't even be said to be an accomplice. His crime is that he wouldn't tell the FBI what was going to happen—even though FBI testimony at the trial says they already had been told what was going to happen in New York on 911 . Even the FBI gets to shift some blame from itself. Moussaoui must die for their sins of omission. In a country in which a good percentage still believes that there were Iraqis flying those planes on 9-11 there are likely plenty of dim-witted Republicans who believe that Moussaoui actually did kill somebody.

This is no brief for Moussaoui. He's a wannabe suicide bomber and a piece of moral scum, and I have no problem with him sitting in some prison, going crazier and crazier (he may already be well on his way) for the rest of his rotten life. He will probably always be a danger. But Terry Nichols didn't get the death penalty, so why Moussaoui? There are the immediate reasons, stated above, plus the fact that he is a constant reminder of what a bunch of screw-ups the FBI (with the notable exception of agent Colleen Rowley, who wanted to peek into Moussaoui's hard drive after French authorities informed her that he was a likely terrorist, but was prevented from doing so), and the Bush administration would like to create the fiction that they have finally caught somebody.

Because America just can't seem to get the right guy. It just can't seem to shoot straight. Vietnam seems to have taught us nothing. Cold warriors and war profiteers cocked up the Tonkin incident, flaunted the ‘domino theory” and had enough of the public ready to believe that the Viet Cong were going to invade California from those woven basket boats they use in the Mekong delta. None of the millions dead are recorded on cell phones. Our aim straightened a bit when we took out the Taliban who were hiding out Al Qaeda and bin Laden. But we blew it when we had a chance to get him, and the Bush administration seems to have lost interest in him in the sands of its shifting rationale for the Iraq war. Perhaps finding bin Laden was not a sufficient war profiteering venture; hence Iraq, with its fictitious WMD threat to America, tens of thousands more dead, and no end in sight.

Now the rights of the families of 911 victims—at least some of them—are to be perversely sacrificed to the Bush administration's machinations. The burning buildings are trotted out again, and now the world might be able to hear their loved ones' voices exploited for political opportunity, supposedly to be assuaged with the blood of Zacharias Moussaoui. Yet the irony of an administration that wraps itself in a moral cloak of its own manufacture, yet exploits the very people it claims to protect and avenge, seems to continue to escape the reasoning capabilities of a significant number of Americans. They are unwilling to see their putative “leader” as a person who has a history of never accepting responsibility for his screw-ups, failures and shirking of duty, who has always been bailed out and covered up. He does not admit failure and does not apologize. The most recent evidence of his moral failure appears to be that he may well have been complicit in the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame and, at the very least, in allowing the “leaking” of information about her (via a convenient “declassification”), is a hypocrite.

So Moussaoui is a convenient scapegoat. Most people probably won't even know that he was in jail on 911 or will even be able to identify his national origin or spell his name correctly. He will serve the dual, questionable, purpose of a momentary frisson of—once again—misdirected vengeance. Maybe Moussaoui did have the intent to kill Americans; but since when does intent justify capital punishment? And what kind of crime is it to create the fiction that this one person bears the responsibility for the attack of 911 succeeding.

Once again, the incompetent fools who have concocted ruinous policies have painted themselves into a corner. A living Moussaoui would be a constant reminder that those who bear the real responsibility for the success of 911 failed in their responsibility, and failed us. But killing him would make him the terrorist Muslim-martyr he desires to be? So, if we are to really punish him, we must keep him alive, wondering in his cell for years and years what it would be like to be frolicking in the Islamic afterlife with those seventy-two virgins. *

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*Logic-challenged Republicans should re-read this last paragraph until they get it.

31. 6: DEAD END (1937, Dir., Wm. Wyler [MR] 4.22.2006

I have often wondered where my interest and fascination with cities came from. I remember that I liked playing touch football in the street, But other kids, like little Alberto Gonzales, spent their time torturing cats and insects, that Ratzinger kid was always praying and humming the Horst Wessel song, and then there was Hughie Hefner. I used to joke to my grad students when they asked me about my interest in urban planning that I was born in the back of a taxi because of traffic congestion. The nearest I can trace my urban interest is some of the movies I used to watch when I was a kid. Other kids liked westerns and Disney films. I liked The Bowery Boys.

The Bowery Boys * started out as the “Dead End Kids” in one of my favorite movies, Dead End (1937), a film strongly influenced by the prevailing social thought of the American 1930s and 1940s that stressed the influence, mostly negative, of the urban environment upon the shaping of values in children. The title not only refers to a street that terminates at the East River (a convenience that suited well that fact that the film followed a stage play and was itself filmed on a soundstage), but also unambiguously indicated what social outcome could be expected from the dense, dirty, blighted, tenement environment of the alley-like streets behind luxury high-rises of the rich.

Dead End takes the nurture side of the “nature versus nurture” argument over human behavior: slums were seen as places that breed crime, which was a sociological as well as popular theme in those days. The story centers mostly on the antics of a group of young boys whose playground is the narrow street behind high-rise apartment of the rich. They beat up and rob a rich kid who lives in the high rise, much to the amusement of “Baby Face” Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who used to live in the street and who has grown up to become a notorious public enemy for his crimes. Martin is the quintessential bad example for kids, he has money, expensive clothes, and people are afraid of him. All except his mother, who still lives in the tenement and who greets his return with a smack in the face Martin has had surgically-altered to disguise him from the police. Little doubt is left that Martin's criminality is a result of his upbringing in the streets of the slum. So also is the sorry state of the girlfriend of his youth, Francie (Claire Trevor), whom he learns to his disgust has become a prostitute and now has a venereal disease.

Poverty, a certain contributing variable, also plays a role. Food is stolen from babies, roaches infest the tenements, kids fight over pennies and encourage one another to steal from their parents. But there's also a strong theme related to hardened class divisions that are difficult to breach. Drina (Sylvia Sidney), the sister and sole “parent” of one of Tommy (Billy Halop), joins a picket line striking against the low wages in her place of work and is beaten by the police for her efforts. Dave (Joel McCrea), her love interest, is an architect with ambitions to renew the area of the slums. But all he can manage by way of work is some sign painting for a local restaurant. With his noble ambitions, and his humanity, Dave is an example that the poor might rise to higher station, but also demonstrates that there are no guarantees that getting an education conveys an exit visa from the ghetto. Meanwhile Dina dreams of escape to an idyllic countryside, a more popular fantasy in the late 1930's than today. Drina and Dave are also products of the mean streets of the slum, but are proof that anti-social lives in them are not an inevitability. Dave even has a brief, but doomed, dalliance with a bored and self-indulgent, rich girl, Kay (Wendy Barrie); films of the time still recognized the social class barriers of the big City.

Much of the plot of Dead End is driven by class differences. At the other end of the social scale are those in the high rises that overlook the cramped alleys as well as the East River. In the screenplay the rich come in for their fair share of facile sociology as well. Essentially arrogant, absorbed with their idle pursuits, they are insensitive to the travails of the lower classes with whom they live—spatially at least—side by side. Judge Griswald's brother with his superior attitudes and notions and of what is appropriate to protect the privileges of his class, is particularly galling. The socially parasitic Kay is only pathetic. Although there is spatial proximity there is no social proximity among the denizens of Dead End . The rich live above, the poor below, the rich send their children to tutors and private schools, the poor learn in the streets and reform schools, the rich are insulated in their private cars, the poor get around as they can.

Most of the action of Dead End takes place in the street at the end of the river. Here the young boys convene their indolent lives each day, squabble, plot fights with other gangs, initiate newcomers, and generally comport themselves like they are destined for reform school or worse. Their heroes are not Dave, whom the respect, but figure he's going nowhere, but characters like “Baby Face Martin,” or tough guys from reform school. They taunt the local beat cop and the other “uniform,” the doorman for the rich apartment building. The impression is that these are kids who are one misbehavior away from reform school, which is more likely to teach them more sophisticated criminal behaviors, and the then on to prison. The sociology of the time was that it was the streets, tenements, and lack of parental guidance that made these kids this way. “He's not a bad kid,” it is said of Tommy (Billy Hallop), who his sister is trying to keep out of trouble.

A year Dead End came out the film Boystown was released. The community for orphans and runaway boys was founded by Father Flanagan in countryside in the Midwest, the idea being that a little fresh air, distance from bad influences, and “tough love” were what was needed to put the lives of young boys on a straight path. The notion that abuse breeds abuse, another common present day theme, is also present in Dead End : Angel's father is a drunk and beats him and his mother. The pathologies of slum life almost become a badge of distinction “TB, I got TB,” one of the boys intones almost with pride.

These were common themes of the time the film was made in the Depression, and remain somewhat popular, if leavened by subsequent analysis. Many urbanists regarded slums as breeding places of both social dysfunction and seditious politics. The labor movement was very active and even some Hollywood actors and writers, as the congressional HUAC hearings brought out, had at least an intellectual interest in the prospects of communism. But crime trumped all other cinematic themes for films about and set in the City.

So, you're wondering, with such role models, how did the writer of this piece grow up to be such a nice guy?

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* The street kids of Dead End —Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, and Bernard Punsley—had also played the same roles in the stage version of the story. “The Bowery Boys Series” grew out of the “Dead End Kids” films of 1937-43 and the “East Side Kids” series of 1940-45. In 1938 they appeared with such costars as James Cagney ( Angels with Dirty Faces ), Humphrey Bogart ( Crime School ), and John Garfield ( He Made Me a Criminal ). Most of these films maintained the sociological point of view of portraying these kids as victims of their urban environment. However, as the series progressed, and perhaps because the social-deterministic explanation of such behavior lost currency, their films moved to comedy and farce. In all they made some 48 films and were made right up to the 1950s. They have all gone on to the “big city in the sky.”

31. 5: A TASTE FOR TRAVEL, Part 2, 4.17.2006

In earlier essays on eating foreign food I concentrated on my personal tastes and distastes. This second part of a “taste for travel” recounts my experience as a tour leader, one that included a member with a diet for disaster.

Amphetia is not her real name; but it is a sobriquet that is as apt as it is necessary. Never did I think that I would find myself using the clause in the tour contract that permitted me to “send someone home.” Actually, when my British booking agent had mentioned this in reviewing the contract he had used the term “sent down,” as though we were talking about how students at Oxford and Cambridge were expelled by being “sent down” to London. I wasn't at all sure I could make this expulsion stick. What if she just flat out refused to budge?

But she didn't refuse. She was here in the cab with me, rolling down Vouliagmenis Avenue toward Athens' Ellinikon airport, apparently willing to be “sent down” without a tussle.

It could have gone either way with her. Fight or flight. I know that much now, but at the beginning I had no idea what to expect. The first indication that Amphetia might be a problem came six days earlier when we hit cruising altitude out of LA. We were bound for Athens, with a change of planes at JFK. It's a long ride, and problem people only make it seem longer.

At that point I had never met Amphetia, and spoken with her only once on the phone after she signed up for the tour. She first came up on my “radar screen” when one of the other people on the tour, a former student, came over to my side of the plane to comment on the woman who was sitting in the seat ahead of them. She was making a bit of a scene, she said, complaining to the flight attendant about the food.

That was a curiosity, because we were nowhere near the dinner service. The complaint that Amphetia was making was that the flight attendant had informed her they couldn't comply with her request for watermelon. They did manage to find her a Diet Pepsi, but they couldn't substitute watermelon for the regular dinner menu. Amphetia showed her appreciation for getting half of her order by calling the flight attendant a “bitch.”

At the time I didn't even know what Amphetia looked like. I also didn't know that she had decided to combine our three-week tour with her exclusively “watermelon and Diet Pepsi” diet. Furthermore I didn't know that Amphetia was supplementing the lack of nutrition in this diet with a pharmacopoeia of “uppers” that might have powered our 747 non-stop to Athens.

I was curious, but decided to stay on my side of the plane as long as possible. I could just see the back of her head from my seat: sandy-blond and graying hair piled high, with purposeful straggling strands descending to her shoulders. I also noticed that she continued to harass the flight attendant, and at one point the supervising flight attendant had some admonitory words for her after she nearly threw the meal tray back at the other one.

I introduced myself to “my problem” when I went around the cabin to inform all the members of my group that they should wait to deplane last when we arrived at JFK for our connecting flight to Athens. We had a three-hour wait and I wanted to collect them at the end of the jetway and make sure we had a pre-arranged rendezvous point prior to boarding the next flight.

Amphetia nodded to me in agreement. Now in her middle fifties I judged, Amphetia must have once been a rather stunning woman. In Greece she might even be mistaken for Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress whom she resembled in coloring, facial features, and stature. Long-legged and full-breasted, Amphetia was still an attractive woman, but it is not uncharitable to say, well past her best years. The weird diet was only the first indication that the ravages of time and gravity that spare few of us did not sit well with Amphetia. She wore her hair, make up, and clothing in styles more appropriate for a woman much junior to her.

When we arrived at JFK I noticed that Amphetia not only did not wait in her seat, she bolted down the aisle toward the exit door before most everyone else. I had to hope she would wait at the bottom of the jetway.

She didn't. She was nowhere to be seen as my group of a dozen others collected around me in front of the monitor displays of arrivals and departures for our airline. Somebody joked about her going into New York City to stock up on watermelon. That could have been more than a joke, because it would be a long time before we would see Amphetia again.

I tried to find her, had her paged, and sent out scouts through the TWA terminal. When I checked a third time at the desk of our airline, the agent asked me if I was one of the “group of twelve going to Athens.” I said “yes, in about two and a half hours.” Then he asked if we could like to “go earlier”; in about twenty minutes there was another flight leaving for Athens, and unlike our scheduled flight which was to have another stop in Milan, this one was non-stop. We could leave earlier and arrive earlier. It was a very tempting offer.

I almost forget to ask him to page Amphetia again as I rushed back to our rendezvous point to poll the group on the matter. They all enthusiastically agreed that we should take the earlier departure. But there was the matter of the whereabouts of Amphetia. Wouldn't she be left behind if she didn't show up soon? Could we leave without her? We discussed the issues, but in the end all concurred that she had agreed to wait at the jetway but left without a word or even a message at the airline desk. She'd not tried to contact us, and we had made every reasonable effort to locate her.

I couldn't blame the group. It was a good piece of luck and why should they surrender it for an inconsiderate person? Still, I wondered if Amphetia might be ill in a restroom somewhere. Maybe she was guzzling down pills with her Diet Pepsi, or there was some justifiable reason for her behavior.

In a few minutes the agent came by with our new boarding passes. It was then that I realized that he had really meant another, different “ group of twelve” when he had asked me earlier. We were only twelve because Amphetia, our thirteenth member, was missing. I mentioned this to him, thinking that if he pulled us off this new flight I wouldn't have to worry about Amphetia. But he said that the other group of twelve had been delayed in the Midwest, the flight was leaving and, if we wanted to go, we had better get aboard. I scanned the lounge one last time for Amphetia and boarded at the last moment.

I was a hero to the group. We were not only leaving and arriving earlier than planned, we were flying to Athens in Business Class on the upper deck of a 747! The Olympian pantheon was already smiling on us.

But not on Amphetia. It would be two and a half days before I would know what became of her.

Amphetia, as I learned to my dismay, is one of those persons who, selfish in the extreme, must always be first, always get what she wants. She looked ten years older when she came to the breakfast room the third morning the group had been in Athens. While the waitress went off to try to find watermelon after a protracted description of the fruit, I listened patiently to her bizarre tale.

Due to circumstances that will never be fully understood, when Amphetia arrived first at the bottom of the jetway well ahead of the rest of us she looked at the departures monitor and, confusing the flight number with the departure time (they both were 800 something), she thought our flight was about to depart immediately. The plane on which she thought we were to leave in a matter of minutes was only two gates away. We had been issued all of our boarding passes back in LA. She immediately ran to this gate and, because her boarding pass was not checked, was admitted boarding on the wrong plane.

As things turned out she was sitting there in that aircraft all the time we were paging and searching for her, because that plane's departure was delayed. That it did not occur to her to look about and see if others in her group were aboard the plane in all the time she sat there could, if one were charitable, be attributed to her lack of good nutrition or the fact that she never bothered to find out who was in her group..

The rest of us were over the Atlantic when Amphetia was still waiting out the delay at JFK. It was discovered that she was on the wrong plane when she complained about the delay. As her luck had it, the proper flight, our original flight, was also delayed, apparently caused by departure delays in other flights. The delays continued like falling dominoes, causing a missed connection in Milan, necessitating an overnight stay there, and a subsequent re-routing through Rome. The sum total of these delays was about forty-two hours. Since she went to bed for ten hours or so on arriving at our hotel, it was nearly two and a half days from our last sighting of Amphetia. All this she related to me without the slightest self-reproach, while wolfing downs chunks of watermelon in the hotel breakfast room.

Despite her selfish manner, three of the women on the tour offered sympathy and companionship to Amphetia, taking her along with them on little excursions to different sights in Athens. This they soon regretted. One of them reported to me that each time their group hired a taxi Amphetia immediately commandeered the front passenger seat, leaving the other three to squeeze into the back. It wouldn't have occurred to her to rotate the seating.

Amphetia soon provided the women an excuse to withdraw their kindness and indulgence. At a taverna , after not receiving her watermelon the waiter committed the unpardonable offence of serving Amphetia a Coke instead of the requested and required Pepsi. In a sudden rage she rose up and threw the bottle at his back as he walked away, to teach him a lesson in distinctions of American colas. The three women promptly served notice that she was no longer welcome in their company, paid the bill and left her there.

Had I been present at this breach of tourist etiquette I might have at that point invoked my right to repatriate her to the land of abundant watermelon and proper respect for cola allegiances. But I didn't have to wait long for a suitable offence. The following day, when I booked a local tour for the group to visit Del phi, Amphetia promptly appropriated the front seat of the tour coach opposite the driver. Being the seat with the best view, it is the place of choice on a tour coach. She took up both of the seats, folding her legs up onto the other seat. It was an unnecessary stratagem, since by this time she was so ostracized that no one would have cared to be her seatmate.

She did, however, provoke an argument with the local guide on the tour, a plump and pleasant women who provided us with an informative lecture on classical Greek mythology and history. The guide asked her several times to remove her feet from the seat as a consideration for future passengers. Amphetia would briefly comply, and then return her feet to the seat.

At the archeological museum at Dephi, Amphetia had a fainting spell and broke out in a cold sweat, probably because she was running almost entirely on drugs. She reluctantly took some cheese and fruit juice at the museum, but these did little to improve her temperament. She made enough of a recovery to make sure that she was first back at the bus before the return trip, to reclaim the front seat. As we disembarked from the coach back in Athens, each of us thanked and tipped our guide who had been as pleasant and helpful as she had been informative. Amphetia took that opportunity to kick the woman in the ankle!

When we arrived back at the hotel, I told her to pack her things. I was surprised at her docility. She entered the taxi without comment. Perhaps she was so exhausted, or felt so ostracized, that she was relieved to be out of the tour.

Whatever possessed me to offer her another chance to complete the tour I don't know, but I said that if she quit her ridiculous diet, had decent meals, and adopted a civil manner I would give her one more chance. Perhaps I was momentarily afflicted with that psychological rationalizing that argues that a serial killer is really expressing a “cry for help”. While Amphetia didn't sound particularly contrite as the taxi made its way through the smoggy streets there was something, perhaps just curiosity, spiced with some pity, that moved me to proffer another chance. For all of her selfishness and fits of nastiness, there was something pathetic, something of the Norma Desmond about her. What desperation of fleeting beauty and declining male attention drove her to a diet of watermelon, Pepsi and drugs? She seemed like one of those women who marry men who are on death row.

There's nothing like Greece, with its eternal statues of Athena and Aphrodite, to instill a little humility in us mere mortals.

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30. 4: CASUALTIES OF WAR 4.13.2006

Many years ago I read a book about military technology from the crossbow to the H-Bomb. It advanced the position that, other things being equal, the guys with the most effective and lethal weapons prevailed in war. One could start with the club and the throwing stick and sling. Later, crossbows delivered enough velocity to a bolt (arrow) to puncture a knight's armor; then gunpowder and artillery took down castles and wall and armies had to contend in open battlefields. It is an interesting history, that of technology and warfare, with the single constant that better offensive weapons are often the deciding variable. [1]

Military people know this very well. Why else, for example, would America import as many of the former missile scientists from Nazi Germany—Werner von Braun the most notable—so that we could develop ICBM's and get to the military advantages of space before the other guys (the Soviets were, of course, up to the same tricks). Why else would the American military give Japanese bio-weapon scientists, who performed heinous and hideous experiments on live prisoners, a free pass after the war in order to obtain the “fruits” of their experiments? [2] If truth is the first casualty of war, morality must be second.

A third axiom is that fair play must be the third casualty of war. Forget about those chivalrous WWI “knights of the air” giving a wave to their enemies whose guns jammed. As von Richtoffen said, you show no mercy because that guy might be back to kill you tomorrow. War is about winning.

But there are conundrums, especially being from a country where fair play (isn't democracy about fair play, even if it is rarely played fair?) is often touted as one of its qualities. And isn't another American attribute “pulling for the underdog?” I know this is mostly about myth and stuff for novels and movies—remember, war is about winning—but some of it sticks. I remember as a kid when we played sand lot football there was one guy in the neighborhood, named Parnell, who had a complete set of equipment, from helmet to cleats. The rest of us might have a helmet, or shoulder pads, but no more than that. We hated Parnell (who couldn't play for crap and, anyway, his father had changed his name from Parnello, a no-no in an Italian neighborhood), so we gang-tackled him and roughed him up at every opportunity. I can't help but think of that sometimes when I am watching the news and there's footage of American soldiers outfitted so well they look like those plastic super-hero figures that are like Robo-Cops, and they are fighting guys in flip-flops, gallibiyyas , and carrying rusty AK-47s. No, I am not pulling for these guys, but I wish I didn't have to see this unnecessary fight that America picked, at all.

So let's turn to Iran's pursuit of the bomb. Why try to kid anybody, that's what they want, everybody wants the bomb. Guns used to be called “equalizers”; now it is nuclear weapons. The new Iranian president is a bellicose, anti-Semitic zealot, and the ayatollahs are a bunch of creeps, too. But I can't blame Iran for wanting the bomb. After all, we must accept some responsibility in this. We have conquered their Afghan neighbor to one side, their Iraqi neighbor to the other, destabilizing both countries. On their SE border the Pakistanis already have the nuclear missiles and we have given them a pass on the nuclear issue, as we have the Israelis. And, we have, stupidly, got ourselves in a mess in Iraq, and the Iranians (and the North Koreans) know that we can't fight the whole damn “axis of evil” at the same time. So not only have we created the opportunity (and, I almost forgot, the technology) but we have also created a situation where we chose to act as the overlord of who gets to go nuclear (or “nuk-u-ler”), and who does not. It's not called “The Nuclear Club ” for nothing.

The irony is that the democracies that the Bush administration wishes to implant in governments in its regime changing policy for Middle Eastern states may be more likely, given the religious composition of the region to create sectarian states that are unstable both to each other, but share a common dislike of America. Nothing will make a state feel impotent and vulnerable than when it is prevented from having the latest military toys that its surrounding states have. Nothing will make them feel like they are among the elite than having nuclear weapons. This is not to make a case for Iran to join the club, but if the other “un-invited members” are instructive, there are not many options in keeping them out other than taking them out. Their president looks like a whack-job and sounds like zealot, but then how about Kim Jong Il? Both are paranoid leaders who now have proof that America will attack a nation on the flimsy and bogus evidence, so why should they not seek weapons that they think may give them a deterrent protection? The US is now in the position that threatening one of these members of the club is likely to be met with the threat that they will attack one of our friends. What a fine mess Mr. Bush has made of things! We have called our “enemies” evil and now risk that they will avenge themselves on our “friends.”

My Right-wing friends will now go ballistic and say “there he goes again, blaming America”. That's correct, I do, for our share of it, at any rate. But something else bothers me. Even though “all” is supposed to be “fair in love and war,” it bugs me when we are the big guy who challenges the little guy to a duel and when he shows up with a sword we pull out a machine gun.

I think it was the philosopher Martin Buber who said that civilization begins with “taking on the other.” Putting oneself in the other persons place, seeing things from the other guy's perspective and circumstances. I agree with that. The “golden rule,” the Second Commandment, they are versions of the same notion. People who hold to that notion are people that I would like in my neighborhood, my country, but sadly, they are probably not the kind of people I would like to have in my foxhole. Maybe civilization is the final casualty of war.

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[1] Defensive weapons—and sometimes the distinction is with little difference—have also been proven to be extremely important; radar and sonar, for example.

[2] See,e.g., Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony , 1966

31. 3: BREASTS: A TRAVELER'S APPRECIATION [1] 4.4.2006

A while back, in the Carpe Diem section of this journal I repeated and commented upon a Reuters news item that a Chinese government facility had been pressured to desist in requiring “symmetrical breasts” for its female employees. One of my readers thought it might be one of those Internet hoaxes; but I think not, not if I know a little bit about the Chinese. Anyway, it got me thinking about breasts (although Philip Roth has the literary territory already staked out).

But it is not the first time this subject has come up in these pages. Way back in December of 2003, I posted a travel piece, “Berber Feast,” (Archives 3: 5) an account of an ABG (accidental breast groping) in Morocco some years earlier. The relationship between interest in travel and breasts might be attributed to The National Geographic Magazine , many a young boy's introduction to faraway places and exposed mammary glands with the alluring combination academic curiosity and adolescent voyeurism.

A few years ago I was traveling in Cambodia, spending several days (it requires several days) in the Angkor Wat complex, founded around the 9 th Century A.D. There was one wall on which there were several life-size reliefs, deep reliefs, of sculpted maidens, perhaps dancers, whatever. They were beautiful, swearing headdresses and sort of hip-hugging pantaloons, but were bare-breasted. They were in a row, perhaps a half-dozen of them, and there were the slightest differences in the features of their smiling faces.

But the left breast on the figure closest to the doorway gleamed with a sheen that was obviously produced by the fondlings of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of hands over perhaps a thousand years. I hypothesized that this left breast achieved this gleam because it was closest to the doorway, where a hand could “accidentally” brush across it as one might reach to hold the door jamb on passing through it. Such “ABGs” were also performed by some guys I grew up with who would “cop a feel” while squeezing past an unsuspecting girl on a crowded bus or subway. [2]

Why men, and I am possibly wrong in assuming that it was exclusively men, would want to fondle a stony breast is a curiosity. In this case it might have been at least partially accounted for by the ancient practice of touching something for luck in passing through a doorway, a practice honored by the mezuzah among Jews and the dual-visaged Janus of the Romans. Touching sculpted objects for “luck” is a practice that I have encountered in a variety of places. There is a bronze boar in an open market in Florence whose snout glistens, much as does the paw of a bronze lion in front of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in central Hong Kong. The foot of a statue of St. Peter in his cathedral in Rome and many other statues in churches are touched, rubbed, and sometimes kissed to bestow their magical benefits, [3] and obviously transmit innumerable bacilli and viruses. It seems, then, that there is no reason that the breast might not be a symbol of good fortune in some societies; after all, it was the first food source for so many. So much for anthropology; on to aesthetics. [4]

But this explanation probably also excuses more prurient interests when it comes to shapely parts of female anatomy. To return to the relief maidens of Angkor Wat, my hypothesis is that men find the compulsion to gauge the form of exquisitely-formed breasts almost irresistible, for there is nothing else in Nature that can achieve the perfect form of the human female breast. [5] I am convinced that this form has some eternal and mystical dimensions (though by dimension I am not referring to the obsession of some men with “size”), but, by form, is meant the manner in which the tension between flesh and gravity renders a shape (if transitory, the way a drop of water clings to something by its surface tension) that is incomparable. At its most perfect—the way in which a fruit might be regarded as perfect at the peak of its ripeness—there is no more exquisite form in Nature. When it arrests the attention of a man there are activated urges that can blur the line between the erotic and the mystical, between wantonness and worship, between sustenance and sensuality.

In 1979, while residing in London, my daily morning run was an historical jaunt through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. [6] My route took me from the northwest corner, past Kensington Palace (last abode of Princess Diana), over to the Albert Memorial near the southwest corner. There was always a thrill of anticipation in approaching the Albert Memorial. On the four corners of its base, in the center of which is an ornate pavilion decorated in semi-precious stones, over a statue of the Prince, Victoria's consort and Royal Impregnator, are groupings of oversized statuary that represent the four-corners of the empire on which “the sun never set.” On one corner there is a grouping that I take to represent India, the Middle East and SE Asia. And in that grouping sits a—and there is no more apt word for it— statuesque Indian girl who appears to have been modeled on one of those temple “maidens” that were sculpted to instruct newly-weds in the arts of connubial love. If you have ever seen these deep temple reliefs, you will recall that they are remarkable in their sexual explicitness, but also for the exquisite modeling—approaching mannerist exaggeration—of the breasts of the young women.

But it can also be hypothesized that Miss India of the Albert memorial exhibits the fulsome proportions—those 19 th Century “zaftig,” Rubenseque proportions—that appealed to Victorian tastes, when “bosoms” were the rage. She sits astride an elephant, prominently higher that a Muslim, an Assyrian, and a Far Eastern Asian, her arms raised, giving an open frame and slight “lift” for her elegantly rounded breasts. Oddly, gravity, the arch enemy of the human form in general, and breasts in particular, seems to have had a deleterious pull on even these breasts of stone, as there is an evident fissure (lapidary stretch mark?) above the right breast. But it does not mar the beauty, indeed the majesty, of this marvelous depiction of womanhood, this emblem of the exotic riches and mysterious allure of the East. But I don't suppose that it would do for one to climb up on this exalted corner of the British Empire and, despite its lack of warmth and elasticity, and just for the briefest of moments, mind you, touch one of those magnificent breasts. Just for luck.

Snake Goddess of Knossos, Heraklion Museum, Crete

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[1] Right off the top I need to say that this is being written by a life-long “leg man,” except when it comes to eating fowl. Why am I writing this? Maybe I have a secret desire for the punishment some of my readers are likely to inflict upon me. But I feel the need to express these thoughts and reminiscences, even though they might not be appropriate for young readers.

[2] No, I was not one of them. Only a few guys I knew did this, and I wonder sometimes what they are doing these days for cheap thrills.

[3] There is, of course the Blarney Stone in Ireland and, inanimate, tough not mineral, the (now lost) toe of St. Francis Xavier from his mummified corpse in the Bom Jesus in Goa.

[4] There is a lot more that could be said about this. There is, for example, the bare-breasted Minoan Snake Goddess of Crete with her magical powers, dozens of Venuses and Aphrodites, the bizarre famous statue of Diana of Ephesus, and the Dolly Parton of Memphis. (Just kidding on this last one. Give me a break , I managed to avoid terminology like “hooters” and such.)

[5] Some would argue that the egg is the perfect form. I have heard of a “leg man” (which I regard myself, in spite of the subject of this essay) but not a single “egg man”.

[6] Which I described in "Running Through History in London's Hyde Park,” American Running and Fitness , Vol. 15, No. 4, July/August 1983, 8-9.

31.2: THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI , by Jonathan D. Spence, 1984 [BR] 4.4.2006

Fr. Matteo Ricci was, as were many Jesuits of his time, a man who combined “street smarts” with high native intelligence. A missionary needed those attributes, and a healthy dose of luck, to go off scavenging souls in Asia in the middle of the 16 th Century. My own street smarts didn't serve me that well when I was in Beijing. When I finally found the first Catholic church that Ricci founded around 1577 in Beijing I was in near need of heavenly assistance myself, and oxygen, from plowing through the city's three-pack-a-day pollution. At the time I was persuaded by what I had read that the Chinese had put one over on the wily Italian Jebbie; they sold him a former execution ground, hence an accursed setting, on which to build his catholic church. They must have laughing up their Ming Dynasty sleeves at the evil spirits rising out of the ground to do battle with Catholic angels and saints. Feeling as I do about missionaries and evangelists, [1] I liked that mental image.

But on reading The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci , a fascinating account of the adventures of the Jesuits in Asia, I am not so sure. Spence, who has a knack for going after the “story” in his historical books on China, [2] relates that Ricci might well have known he could get the land for the church cheap, as he did when he purchased supposedly “haunted” houses for his missionaries in other Chinese cities. It would not have been improper for a Jesuit of the time to rank good business up there with spiritual concerns. Blending secular matters with his mission, and maybe turning the tables on authorities out to make a fool of him, would not have been out of character for Ricci.

Ricci arrived in China, after periods of adjustment in India and Macao. He brought with him a gimmick to amaze and ingratiate himself with the locals and their overlords. Well before sixty-gigabyte hard drives people in both the East and the West were very interested in personal memory. The Chinese in particular, with thousands of characters to learn and remember in their quasi-ideographic script, were especially interested in “memory systems.” [3] Ricci had one, an associational method (to simplify it) of placing “people” in various rooms of an imaginary mansion, that worked well enough for him; he could recite long passages from memory. But where Ricci really got clever about teaching his method to the Chinese was his use of passages from the New Testament. What better way of getting the infidels to engage Christian lore and liturgy than to practice committing it to memory. Before they knew it, the Chinese were remembering Christ walking on water, his “virgin” birth, and his crucifixion.

Though Ricci made a share of converts the Chinese didn't always accept Christianity uncritically. There is always the problem of the authenticity of the faith of converts who have been won over, as it were, by the blandishments of mnemonic methods or by commodities such as clocks (one of the few commodities the Chinese thought worthy of interest from the West). In particular, the Chinese thought the image of the crucified Christ as gory and a rather odd way of representing a deity. Why advertise your god as a victim, they wondered. And the Chinese were disposed to see Christianity as worthy of adoption because they approached their gods as supplicants; if the Christians could offer a god that might be better at granting longevity, happiness and wealth, it made sense to convert.

Of all missionaries, the Jesuits were probably best prepared to deal with such concerns. Part of their rigorous ratio studiourm of theology, mathematics, classical literature, and science was their training in methods of “disputation.” As students they were put through a regime that sharpened their rhetorical abilities to counter and parry arguments, expose heretical holdings, and generally make an opponent feel that he has encountered a rhetorical “black belt.” And a well-prepared Jesuit might be capable of holding his own in several languages. Small wonder, then, that these determined prelates in black soutaines were often regarded, even by their co-religionists, as formidable and dangerous. That “SJ” (Society of Jesus) suffix to their names seemed to some to reflect the militaristic background of their founder, Ignatius Loyola. [4]

Ricci's lifetime coincided with the period of the ugly underbelly of the Roman Catholic Church—the Inquisition. Moreover, the Jesuit hierarchy hailed from Portugal ad Spain, where the Inquisition, owing to the presence in those parts of large numbers of Jews and Muslims, was especially nasty. The “heretic” hunt had even gotten to Goa, when Ricci was there, preying upon and praying over a large number of Spanish expelled Jews that had settled there. To his credit Ricci protested to the Jesuit hierarchy about their treatment by the Church. Ricci and the Jesuits of the Asian missions seemed to be more preoccupied with the locals than with hunting down huihui (as the Chinese referred to Muslims) or the perfidia judaica. Indeed, some of Ricci's colleagues were themselves conversos . The Jesuits were always prowling to recruit the most intelligent men into their order.

Matteo Ricci died, at age 58, on May 8, 1610, in bed, probably of overwork from becoming an unofficial tutor for Chinese preparing for the jinshi . [5] He published several books, a dictionary, and religious tracts. By Spence's account he was probably spiritual, but not to the point that it interfered much with his earthly pursuits. A good mind needs constant challenge, and like a good Jesuit missionary he wondered mostly about the world he was in and seemed to leave the other stuff to his God. I like very much something he wrote that indicates that secular ideas had a hold on his interest.

It often happens that those who live at a later time are unable to grasp the point at which the great undertakings or actions of this world had their origin. And I, constantly seeking the reason for this phenomenon, could find no other answer than this, namely that all things (including those that come at last to triumph mightily) are at their beginnings so small and faint in outline that one cannot easily convince oneself that from them will grow matters of great moment . [6]

Ricci might have been referring to a crucifixion the Romans conducted on a Jewish troublemaker in Judea around 34B.C. But like a good Jesuit teacher, he lets us form our own conclusions.

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[1] “Invasion of the Soulsnatchers,” The Wild East, Issue 4, May 2003, Pp. 16-17

[2] Favorites of this reader are his Death of Woman Wang , and The Question of Hu .

[3] A good memory was a prime asset when the Chinese took triennial jinshi examinations, the highest level civil service exams. One of Ricci's students, Xu Guangqi, managed to pass his exams with distinction with the help of memory methods. Such training was also an opportunity for the Jesuits to impart Western knowledge in cartography, chemistry,, geometry, and mathematics to Chinese scholars. Xu assisted Ricci in a translation of Euclid into Chinese.

[4] Like Loyola, Ricci walked with a limp in the latter years of his life. Loyola had been shot in the leg in battle and underwent painful operations to repair a limb that might otherwise have been amputated. Ricci broke his leg jumping from a window when his residence was attacked by a mob of Chinese.

[5] This writer didn't know when he was in Beijing where Ricci's body ended up. His tomb stands behind the French Church at 12 Maweigou (Horsetail Ditch) Road in the Fuchengmen district. According to the code of the Ming Dynasty, foreigners who died in China had to be buried in Macao. The Jesuits made a special plea to the court, requesting a burial plot in Beijing in view of Ricci' s contributions to China. Emperor Wanli of the Ming Dynasty granted his permission and designated a Buddhist temple, which had been appropriated from a court eunuch for the purpose. In October of 1610, Ricci's body was transferred to the tomb.

[6] Quoted from Pasquale M d'Elia, S.J,, Storia dell' Introduzione del Christianismo in Cina (1942-1949)

31. 1: PLANNING FOR DEMOCRACY 4.1.2006

Ever since the Athenians of the Golden Age of Greece contributed their word demos to a new system of governance, but failed to include thousands of slaves in the process, democracy has been a more protean concept than the soaring rhetoric and sound-bite certitudes written for George Bush's regrettable second inaugural address. Nothing has exposed some of its ironies more than a president who was “elected” by less than a majority of the people, under a cloud of rigging votes in key states, and eventually (first) “selected” by a favorable judge, anointing himself democracy's sword-handed champion. Then, incurring the blowback of the refusal of democratic nations to join his crusade, and the “election” of regimes in states in the Middle East and South America that are in ideological opposition to him and his policies, for George Bush, democracy might turn out to be the wish he should have taken care not to make. [1]

Had George Bush been a graduate student in the Seminar in Planning Theory that I gave for three decades (we did occasionally meet over pictures of beer, George) he would have paused before launching his democracy crusade for the Middle East. American planners grapple daily with democracy at the grass roots, at the urban level, down there where the demoi live, work, play, and contend on the battlefields of urban space. Pampered daddy's-boy George never had to do that, or he would have learned a thing or two about democracy. As a planner he would have learned that planning efficacy and democracy are uneasy mates.

Governing is about the exercise of power, and democracy is about getting that power from the people, the demoi. But it's a lot easier to “get things done” (and Georgie fancies himself a “can do” guy) if you get your power from elsewhere. Power is a bit like a bunch of beads of mercury, it has a natural tendency to centralize; you have to force it to break up into little beads. Centralized power makes things easier to get done. If you've ever been on a faculty committee you understand that. So democracies have to continually struggle to keep those little beads from consolidating.

The first lesson that urban planners get in the dual edges of democracy is when they study urban history. They find out that the Greeks envisioned their democracies for rather small, and steady-state cities. They wondered about “ideal size” and came up with the number of citizens (that excludes the slaves) that could be heard by a public speaker from a podium in the agora —about 3,200 people. Small number, but at least they felt that being informed was crucial to the notion of democracy. Wonder what they might have thought of photo-ops and sound bytes?

The second thing planning students learn is from comparative urbanism. They look at those beautiful cities of the past and other countries and observe their architectural continuities and the magnificent public buildings and the grand designs of cities like Paris and Vienna, only to learn that they were not created buy democracies, but quite the opposite. By contrast, their shapeless and uncomely American cities pale in physical comparison, are so often a dull or ugly pastiche of the decisions of councils and committees, neighborhood organizations and planning groups, contending special interests, business interests and, finally, individual citizens who regard themselves as sovereigns over their own little quarter-acre domains, and will vote and petition and create legal initiatives, and punish local politicians when they don't get their way. That's democracy—sloppy, slow, and often homely in its results. Planners with dreams to author the golden city on the hill, the new Rome of marble, or Hausmannian Paris, are defeated by such democracy. Even those grass roots planners who champion “power to the people and their neighborhoods” can be disappointed by the narrow self-interest of those little beads of mercury.

And then there is this: when democracies get to doing business with other states they often find it easier to do it with those with centralized and authoritarian power. That includes the good ole US of A. Where do you think those photos of American officials shaking hands with dictators like Charles Taylor, Noriega, Pinochet, Mao, Saud, and then there's that great shot of Don Rumsfeld with his buddy Saddam Hussein, come from? It's easier doing business with these guys: one, you know who really has the decision-making authority; two, it's easier to bribe one guy and; three, it is also easier to lop off one head when things don't go the way you want them to. Saddam is only the latest.

Then there are the problems you can have when democracy rears its ugly head in within democratic states – Hitler and Mussolini were both elected – or within erstwhile authoritarian regimes. Of the latter, it may have been a safer USSR we dealt with than a Russian Federation that has a tenuous control over its nuclear stockpile and its bio-weapons. In any case it is drifting back towards a re-constitution of authoritarianism. Sudan held “free and fair elections” in 1986, after overthrowing a military regime, and look at the place today, if you can stand the sight of blood and guts. Robert D. Kaplan, who knows the parts of the world that Bush sees fertile for democracy better than Bush could ever dream of knowing them wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: I submit that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.

Don't get this wrong; I sure am not making a case against democracy. I am making a case against democratic hypocrisy. Americans have never been that convincing to me that they are, down deep, great democrats. There was that slavery business, of course, but it was also easier for Americans to avoid having to deal with the exigencies of democracy by virtue of our expansive geography and rich resources. We have been great ones for migrating from what Richard Sennett called the “disorder” of America's urban cultural pluralism. If you didn't like living with those people of color, or of “alien” culture, it was easy in America to move to the suburbs, or keep moving westward. Space not only diminished contact, it opened the prospect of creating your own little suburban “city-state” where it was easier to practice “democracy” with people just like yourself. [2]

It may be that even some Republicans are finding the irony inescapable that George Bush (and I won't repeat what I said about his “election”) poses himself as a champion of democracy while arrogating to himself the authority (as “war president”) to detain “enemies” for years without habeas corpus (and ignore the Supreme Court's dictum to the contrary), torture them, look the other way when his minions court treason and “out” our legitimate spies, promote the seepage of religious authority into government, and unleash the NSA to spy on its own citizens. The man just doesn't “walk his talk,” and, in a true democracy the people need to wise up to that before it's too late.

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[1] This is Dragon City Journal's third essay on this subject. For consistency (or lapses) in its views you are referred to Nos. 9.6 and 12.8. More extensive remarks on the relationship between planning and democracy were made in my paper “Planning and Democracy: Uneasy Partners,” World Planning Schools Congress , Shanghai, China, July 13, 2001

[2] The Uses Of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life ( New York, Knopf, 1970)