DCJAug2005

Volume 23

AUGUST 2005

23. 9: MR. POOPY-SUIT COMES TO TOWN 8.30.2005

A friend of mine who was in the Navy told me that the flight suit that George Bush wore at his slightly premature ”mission accomplished” visit a few miles off the coast of San Diego is called a “poopy-suit.” Just in case you need an explanation about the suit ? , it is a special suit worn by pilots just in case they are way up in the air in their airplanes that don't happen to have a toilet handy. You can imagine the rest. Well, he's coming back, to San Diego and is in town as of this posting, sans poopy suit this time.

Georgie, at least metaphorically, soiled himself with his “mission accomplished.” And now he returns to the scene of what has turned out to be many misleading and hollow pronouncements. He will—AGAIN!—appear before a vetted crowd of military to make sure that he gets an enthusiastic approval. Chicken George, as I like to refer to him these days, does not face his adversaries (the deft PR hand of Karl Rove at work). Last time they turned the aircraft carrier around so that at would appear it was far out to sea and not just off the coast of San Diego. (Maybe they should issue us all poopy suits.)

This is apparently what Bush means by “staying the course,” his self-deluding mantra that he is actually going to bring political stability to Iraq that lasts much longer than it takes to launder his poopy-suit. The language is already being fashioned that will cover the necessity to begin bringing some of the troops home. Bush's columnist toady David Brooks floated one the other night, something to the effect that “well, we shouldn't expect that democracy in Iraq will be like our democracy; it will reflect their culture.” OK folks, ready for an Islamic “democracy”?

This type of stuff has been central to the Bush administration's PR approach to this war (or “struggle” -- isn't that what kampf means?) Change the wording and it changes the reality. Really? Is your son or daughter any less dead or maimed in a struggle than a war? Change the rationale from destroying weapons of mass destruction, to capturing a brutal dictator, to installing democracy, to “fighting terrorism over there rather than in the streets of America,” whatever, so long as he gets to keep spending the $8million per hour on this ridiculous military adventure that is costing us even more in international reputation.

So how much will television viewers believe that those rounds of applause for “staying the course” elicited from a carefully selected audience in San Diego reflect the mood of the nation? The numbers are close to what they were when public support for America's last military misadventure went in the tank, and Cindy Sheehan is a grieving mother outside of Bush's, not Jane Fonda at an anti-aircraft emplacement outside Hanoi.

When the approval numbers hit one-third that means that even some Red State “useful idiots” are beginning to “get it.” They are beginning to get the idea that the shifting PR actually means that Bush and his Neo-Cons went into this thing without any real clear plan of how to get out of it. The rhetoric actually reflects the reality of this exercise in ad hoc -ery. The terrible thought is beginning to enter those minds that “we could lose this one, too.”

Lost in the dust of Iraq is that even Chicken George's father didn't get out of there cleanly. He let the Shiites in the south think that he would back them up if they rose up against Saddam. Then the old man sat by and watched them get slaughtered. ? So how do you fashion and exit strategy to guard against being more vulnerable as the troops are drawn down and look victorious with the insurgents nipping at your heels as you are on your way out? George's latest, and indefinite, strategy is “ as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

Will they stand up? Saddam won't be around to punish them, but those damned “insurgents” in their flip-flops and gallibbyas , and their kamikazi tactics—they weren't part of this non-plan for withdrawal. And with a constitution that is looking more a bad pre-nuptial agreement for a ménage a trois the mess left behind may be even worse than the one that daddy Bush left behind. Meanwhile, we're getting booted out of our base in Uzbekistan as things seem to be unraveling in Afghanistan.

It's enough to make a guy mess his poop suit.

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? Not about “mission accomplished,” which must really be news to the 1,500 or so dead service people and the thousands of wounded, not to mention un-counted dead Iraqis.

? Shades of Vietnam and what happened to about 30,000 ARVIN when we helicoptered out of there.

23. 8: DEATH GRIP 8.26.2005

Who ARE these guys?

Imagine for a moment two burly men engaged in arm-wrestling, pushing each other a few centimeters one way and the other, but locked in a grip in which neither can release their grip or their pressure against their adversary. This is my simple (simplistic?) metaphor for the state of affairs between the two contending forces that are making a mess, a dangerous mess of our world. (Not that there aren't other factors involved.)

This “arm-wrestle” is sapping strength from the rest of the bodies of the contenders, keeping those bodies tethered to their struggle, draining their resources and, as the struggle goes on, threatening to force the contenders into desperate measures to win, cheating, throwing punches, biting, kicking, whatever. Each, convinced that losing means being vanquished, losing his identity (culture), cannot afford to withdraw. There is no room for compromise; forward, to victory, is the only option and more and more of the other parts of the body must become dedicated to that end.

In many respects this is what it is like with the world being held in a death grip of two fundamentalisms. Some may see it as a struggle between traditionalism and modernism, or as a territorial contest for the unevenly-distributed fossil fuel resources of the planet. But in several respects what seems to be emerging is a death-grip battle between two fundamentalist forces that can be more narrowly circumscribed, but with the dire prospect of functioning as the flash powder for a wider, longer and even uglier global conflict.

The extremist elements (the gripping “hands,” if you will) are Al Qaeda and the Neo-Cons—that share some essential characteristics in common, and terror is one of them. As Al Qaeda does not represent the core values of Muslim peoples, so also the American Neo-Cons do not represent American core values. But these are the two prime contenders, and it is their extreme value sets that are setting the agenda and sapping the resources—and the credibility—of the remainder of the bodies of their respective societies. They have hijacked their respective cultures to raise alarm, sew discord, and conduct “crusades” in their respective and similar interests.

Both are rooted in religious fundamentalism. AQ more directly in that its primary concern is the pollution of sacred Muslim lands and places of the Middle East by the occupation of infidel foreigners. The relationship of the Neo-Cons to Christian religious fundamentals is less evident, but nevertheless essential. Buttressed by an administration that could not hold power without the support fundamentalist religious organizations and churches, the Neo-Con putative “democratizing” agenda for the Middle East occasionally reveals its debt to them in the president's use of a “crusade” language and the bellicose religiosity of the likes of General Boykin.

I wrote above that they both use terrorism. They both will deny it. AQ's terrorists are portrayed by themselves as “freedom fighters,” but the fly planes into buildings and blow up buses and torture innocent people. The Neo-Cons portray themselves as “democracy builders” and drop sophisticated bombs on buildings, torture prisoners, and kill innocent “collateral” people. Now, keep in mind, I'm talking about AQ and the Neo-Cons here, not Iraq and America (but about the extreme fundamentalist elements in each country), or Islam and Christianity (but about the extreme fundamentalist elements in each religion). It is AQ and the Neo-Cons who are the “jihadists” for their respective country.

There are other similarities between these terrorist elements. They both feel the “end” they must seek (because it means the “survival” of their culture) justifies any means necessary to vanquish their adversary. They both employ the gullible, dis-advantaged, poorer, elements of their societies to do the fighting and dying for their causes. They both (AQ more directly than the Neo-Cons) couch their causes is the greater purposes of their “gods” with the assistance of fundamentalist religious leaders in both cultures. They both lie, cheat and steal to maintain public opinion in their favor. If you examine specific elements of their cultures there are other similarities. Fundamentalist Islam is often criticized for its highly restrictive position of women; however, American religious fundamentalists are attempting to achieve, through the political process legal restrictions on women's privacy and rights to control their own bodies, even to the extent of denying rape victims access to the “morning after pill.”

If the metaphor holds then the question becomes how to get these contending extreme fundamentalists to relax their grip on each other, a death grip that threatens to destroy their respective cultures. That must come in each case from within. It has thusfar failed in America because the propaganda has been well managed; but the advantage the Neo-Cons hold with its control of formal political power is slipping. Only recently, with the terrorists incidents in Spain and the U.K. have moderate elements in Muslim culture begun to express the view that their Societies must address their own extremists, not just ours. It should be said that it will take more bravery on their part than it does on ours. Their terrorists are better able and willing to take the most extreme measure to silence their critics. In America, character assassination—Swift Boat Veterans, exposing Valerie Plame, characterizing Cindy Sheehan as a “wacko,” among other tactics—suffices to counter the local “insurgents.”

Have you been wondering who those two faces are at the beginning of this piece? On the left, but really on his own extreme fundamentalist “right” is the father of Mohammad Atta, one of the 9-11 pilots. Papa Atta is on record as being very proud of his son and would have him do it all over again (“Atta boy, Mo, do it again!”)

On the right, in more ways than page right is Republican Senator Tancredo of Colorado. He believes that AQ is attempting to smuggle nuclear weapons across the Mexican border, so he has suggested that we might nuke Mecca and other Islamic “holy places.” And you thought this wasn't a religious war.

Can't you just see these two jerks arm-wrestling?

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23. 7: THE CALL OF THE SEA [BR] 8.22.2005

Call me Ishmael. I've long nursed a desire to go to sea. But, alas, most of the sailing I've done is through the pages of the voyages of others. I am constitutionally unfit to serve in the Navy, or wear some silly commodore outfit of a “yachtie.” I did some cruises, but that's like swimming the English Channel with water wings. I would have preferred to sign on to a Yankee whaler and shout “Thar she blows” from the crosstrees of the mainmast but the PETA people don't want us harpooning whales anymore; or head off single-handedly to discover far seas and myself like Joshua Slocum or Sir Francis Chichester, but I get lonely. I ached to ply distant shores where I could blend the genes of tawny Polynesian beauties with my Milkamagnesian DNA. Such were the yearnings of youth and the fantasies of middle age, and now, despite having plied the waters of every ocean and the Black, Mediterranean, Andaman, Tasman and South China Seas, I face the prospect of being an Ancient Wannabe Mariner, encumbered with the albatross of other, landlubberly, choices.

So I read a lot of books about the sea.

This review is prompted by my stumbling upon a sea tale penned by that great swashbuckler of the silver screen, Errol Flynn. The adventure recounted in Beam Ends took place before Flynn became a film actor, when he bought an aged, forty-four-foot gaff-rigged cutter named “Sirocco” and sailed out of Sydney Harbor with two buddies, bound for New Guinea, some three-thousand miles to the north. Flynn proves to be a facile writer, and by accounts that are not from the pulp of Hollywood, a more literate and artistic sort than the boozing womanizer most people remember him to be.

Beams Ends is sort of a pelagic road picture where the future “Captain Blood” leads his friends into a series of misadventures as they hug the coast of Australia up through the Great Barrier Reef to finally wreck in the Gulf of Papua on the New Guinea coast. Along the way there is plenty of carousing, various encounters with the “authorities,” but it is related with restraint and a gift for narrative, not the sort of “wild boars gored my loins” adventure travelogue one finds today, or something that would rival Lady Chatterly's Lover .

Flynn never lost his proclivity for the momentary pleasures, or his love for sailing and the sea. But unlike innumerable “armchair” mariners he had the audacity to put to sea ill-prepared and later the funds to afford more able vessels. In fact, the sea life was hardly as romantic as would be sailors tend to portray it. Beam Ends turns out to be relatively tame compared to some of the other books I put to sea in recent months. They are worth a brief mention. Charles Tyng's Before the Wind is a “log” of a New England 19 th Century merchantman withy enough mutinies, piracies, and shipwrecks for several books. Mayhem at sea was not uncommon. Merchant ships were often manned by social misfits and even criminals. Batavia's Graveyard , by Mike Dask, is a riveting reconstruction of a flagship of the Dutch East India Company that never quite made it to Dutch Indonesia because of a wreck on a barren atoll off northwestern Australia and a mutiny the resulted in the slaughter of many of the passengers.

Whaleships were equally hazardous, not just from the dangers of attacking whales from flimsey little whaleboats, but brutal ship's masters and crew members who might go berserk from working and living conditions that cause union organizers or OSHA officials to jump overboard. Gregory Gibson drew upon journals of some of the sailors to reconstruct the story of a mutiny on the whaleship Globe in Demon of the Waters that ended in murders and even deaths at the hands of southsea islanders. One is also amazed at how much brutality the average sailor would endure or witness in accounts such as In the Wake of Madness , by Joan Druett in which the savagery of its captain resulted in his own murder and the subsequent deaths of several crewmen.

A different take on the romance of the sea is revealed in Sian Rees's The Floating Brothel , an account of a ship transporting female convicts from England to New South Wales in the 18 th Century. Transportation (usually for life) was preferable to death for petty offences in England or imprisonment on hulk ships in the Thames, but the long, hazardous voyage caused many women to use what they could bargain with for advantage with the crew of the Lady Julian. Once again, a journal by a crew member is the source of a story of what appears to have been a true, if star-crossed, romance between its author and a young woman convicted of a minor theft.

These days it is possible for more people to set out on their own on romantic sea voyages. Large numbers of couples venture into blue waters well offshore or make long voyages in relatively small boats. But the sea can be unforgiving. Of the several accounts I have read of things going bad is Dark Wind . Author Gordon Chaplin and his wife, Susan, an upstate New York couple in a romantic second marriage for both, set out to sail in the Marshall Islands on a midlife adventure. But the wind does indeed turn dark when they unadvisedly try to ride out a typhoon and Chaplin's book turns to a journal of therapy at losing his new wife when she slipped from his grasp in a raging sea.

Uneventful accounts being, of course, less dramatic, are less likely to make it into print, in any age. These days most people answer their call of the sea, or casino, or ship's boutique, or midnight buffet, on cruise ships. Most will succumb to over-eating or drinking, but the most dramatic voyage was that of the Titanic. There are many accounts of that fateful voyage, but the recently published memoirs of Violet Jessop, a stewardess aboard that ship who survived it is especially interesting. One would think that such a brush with death couldn't happen twice. But Ms Jessop, was serving later on the Titanic's sister ship Britannic, being used as a hospital ship in the Mediterranean when it, too, was sunk. She survived to pen the record that became Titanic Survivor, some ninety years after the event . She lived out her days in a cottage in England.

It's best to end with a happy ending.

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23. 6: NO LAUGHING BATTER 8.19.2005

Remember Bea Arthur? She was the wife in a successful sit-com of several years ago who was the 1970s representation of feminism on television. She was sort of the opposite of the verbally abused Edith Bunker. Zaftig, horn-voiced, and sarcastically-satirical, Arthur seemed nobody to mess with. She re-appeared in something called The Golden Girls with a slightly-softened demeanor. I hadn't seen here in years except when my remote glides across some re-run channel.

But there was Bea Arthur, sitting at a Comedy Central Roast of someone(thing?) called Pamela Anderson that I spent a few uncomfortable minutes watching the other night. I barely recognized Arthur, who has lost enough weight to qualify for a bulimia poster. But it was hard for me to believe she would appear on what (and maybe she didn't know it would be this bad) was, in my view, an example of all the worst that cable television can sink to.

Anderson, who appeared in about twelve pounds of teased, bleached and sprayed hair, and double that weight in silicone implants, earned some fame as a pair of water wings on the bouncing beach breast series Bay Watch, and greater renown as a porno star with some guy known mostly for his “size” by the name of Tommy Lee. He was also at the roast, which, I learned subsequently, became Comedy Central's top rated program, and will be re-aired on several dates. The more talented Courtney Love was also there with Ms Anderson, apparently to wipe some of the sewage off of the roastee and get some of her own. What Bea Arthur was doing there is anybody's guess, but she got splattered with some of the filth herself. There was plenty to go around, posing a “good fun” humor, but most of it stupid and mean-spirited.

I say “filth,” sounding a bit to myself like Tipper Gore or Rev. James Dobson, but if that wasn't filth then the word has no meaning. I don't mind excessive use of the Pesci word, even though I think it has now lost much adjectival effect, or even occasional, apt reference to body parts or their functions. (Hey, I'm no f*****g prude, dude!). But Anderson's seeming pride about her porno tape must explain why she sat there grinning while one comedian tried to out-do the previous one in the filthiest jokes about her body parts and what she has used them for. It is noteworthy that her male co-star in the porn tape that received invaluable advertising, was only joked about, with a scarcely-concealed penis-envy. It was porn mocking porn. Even if there were a male equivalent for the word “slut” (which was liberally applied to Anderson), it was absent. It's hard to feel sorry for someone who must have known what was going to be said of her, but Anderson began to look like a porno-piñata after a few minutes. This was no Irma la Douce, but some disposable blow-up doll of a human being. The final insult is that each comic felt compelled to go over and give her a kiss afterwards, sort of the way a wife-batterer might get his dearest an ice pack.

This all-in-good-fun stuff has a dirty social underside that feeds the angers and assuages the egos of men who have not been able to handle the social changes that have given women more education, rights and power. (It also gives some nervous titters to the air-headed women who love these kinds of men, the sort of women, I suppose, who oppose Roe v Wade, because they are even afraid to “have the right” to their own bodies.) I begin to suspect that there are more similarities than differences between Taliban men and, what(?)— the “white- faced- blue -collared- red -necked” American male. One “flaunts” his woman by putting her in a burkha , the other by getting her a boob-job; both are putting her, and keeping her, “in her place.”

It is difficult to parse humor. Like it is said of pornography, you sort of know it when you see it. There is a discernable difference, I would allege, between something that can be “outrageously” funny and something that is an outrage. Comedy Central must know that there is such a line, because they crossed it with the roast of Pamela Anderson. We should be concerned about that line because what is a risk here is the desecration of an art form. Humor, is a way of looking at what is, or at least appears to be, the absurdities of the world, the meaning and meaningless of life, and it can express a truth that sometimes can't be otherwise, or aptly, expressed. In consequence, we have to be allowed to err over censorship, but at the same time, we have to renounce the excess and intrinsically and gratuitously, pornographic—call it what it is.

I generally like Comedy Central. One of my favorite programs is Mad TV, which has some very clever satire and very talented comedic actors. Dave Chappel and South Park are funny, apt and clever, too. But the channel also offers garbage like a “blue collar” show that actually insults, in my view, people who carry lunch boxes to work, drink beer, and like tinkering with their trucks on weekends. So-called “red neck” humor is also part of this equation. This is sort of “guy humor” that categorizes women as the white versions of hip-hop's bitches and whores. (Why do I have the suspicion that the Taliban has a lot of “guy humor” just like this?) So there's a lot of lame stuff about breasts, beer, flatulence, bodily fluids and, of course, intercourse. Women in the audience are often the brunt of this, and one must wonder what desperation there is in such lives to sit there and grin without really getting that the joke is no joke. Maybe Bea Arthur knows, . . . now.

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23. 5: EX LIBRIS 8.16.2005

Still Life , by Francois Bonvin, 1876 (National Gallery, London)

I remember exactly when I fell in love with books. I remember the book, too; it was Smiling Jack Escapes from Devil's Island . At least I think that was the title. It's long gone and I don't even remember who wrote it. I read it around 1947, maybe 48, I think. I've tried to find another copy for years, without any luck. But I do remember the circumstances.

I was sick in bed with some childhood flu or something and it was the first full book that I read. It took me about three days to finish it and I was sad when it was over. That book was the best medicine I ever took; it took me out of my illness, out of my room, down along the east coast of South America. I would fall asleep wondering how Smiling Jack would escape from the prison on Devil's Island. When I finished with it I just turned it over and over in my hands, amazed at the power of a story, all compactly stored in that efficient volume of pages.

I was hooked. Soon after I found a nice little copy of Treasure Island . I printed the words I didn't know in the back I still do that) and learned how to use a dictionary from my father. I went from Stevenson to Kipling to Conrad, not always getting it, but nurturing a love for adventures in faraway places and seas that I retain to this day., Small wonder that my two top favorite books are The Odyssey and Moby Dick .

Having lost that copy of Treasure Island turned me into a book hoarder and, when a dear friend sent me a clipping of an LATimes piece on book hoarders. it was a comfort to know, as I did intuitively, that there were others like myself who must have their books proximate and value all of them as friends. And that brings me to libraries—not the one that burned at Alexandria, the New York Public, or of Congress—but the problem of the personal library of a book hoarder.

I always wanted a library like the one that Henry Higgins had in My Fair Lady (the movie), the one that lined the walls for two stories with mahogany shelves, the kind that have that tracking ladder to reach the upper shelves of dusty, leather bound volumes that you take to a comfy leather chair for an evening of sherry sipping and reading. I could have a library like that if I bought the condo upstairs and took out my ceiling. I've got the books to stock it, how many volumes I have never counted, and very few bound in leather (many were bought for a buck apiece at public library sales).

In fact my “library” doubles as a guest bedroom and triples as a gymnasium (where my exercise bike sits alongside my shelves on the books on Greece, Italy and the Middle East and a huge box of Chinese character flashcards that I try to cram into my hard drive while getting up to “cardio” (so much for mens sana in corpore sano ). But the books dominate, floor to ceiling, everywhere I could put shelves. (I bolted the sometimes double-booked shelves to the walls against any quake over 5.2 after I learned that a fellow San Diego hoarder even worse that me was nearly a victim of self-induced biblio-cide during such a quake.) I have a pretty good system of organization, but I tend to go ballistic when a book is not where I think it was supposed to be, thereby requiring a search of the whole “library.” That means the library annexes as well. Annex one is in the bedroom, where I one read one should not store books because they have molds and little critters that like to eat pages. But some fiction, serial volumes of history and newcomers reside there. All of reference is in annex two, my office, where reference should be.

I don't like to give up my books, but I have to do a pruning once a year or buy that condo upstairs. What I am able to part with I take to the used books stored in my neighborhood

and trade for “store credit,” which is a little like an alcoholic storing a bottle at his local bar. I don't get much for them because I like to write in my books, and make marginalia and references in the blank pages at the back. That makes them just the kind of used books I like to find from others who do the same thing. The older the copy or edition, the better; to find a remark by someone who read the book many years ago is one of the pleasures of reading used books.

Bibliophiles also have a variety of quirks. Mine is that, when I travel, it is very important for me to have just the right books along with me. So I spend a lot of time, more time than I do packing anything else, trying to get the selection just right, since space and weight are always a consideration in travel. Sometimes I really get in right.

Now what would really make my day is if anybody out there happens to have a copy of Smiling Jack Escapes from Devil's Island. Please contact me before posting it in eBay. We're talking “major bucks” here.

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23. 4 GRAND THEFT COUNTRY: IRAQ, The Video War 8.12.2005

Ryan's zits can barely be discerned in the screen glow from the 20-inch monitor. He peers into it with an intense gaze of concentration; his wrist muscles flexing beneath the carpel tunnel syndrome wrist wraps. There is movement, yes, definitely movement in the left corner, by the door. Ryan shifts in his $4,000 task chair as a little perspiration makes his fingers slippery on the controller gripped in his hands.

“Confirm,” he commands the computer through the little mic attached to a headset, the head of the mic not much larger that a huge zit on his right cheek. As he says it he moves the cursor over the place on the monitor where he detected the movement. A right click on the controller and the cursor turns to a crosshairs. Then another click and the infra red heat sensor changes color.

“Confirmed,” he whispers, “adios m*****f****r.” Whoa baby, cool, dude, C-K'd that one! Confirmed Kill, game over for you, raghead. Not bad for a 17-year old, eh?

Ryan puts the controller down and turns to the keypad and hits F5 and the monitor shows the bot pulling back through the doorway. “Backin' out Cent-Com, A01-618004V, Backin' out. Three down, one “collat” at coordinates 000773.2/993005.” Ryan leans back in the task chair that automatically adjusts ergonomically to his position.

Sgt. Brookes comes by. “More nachos, dude? Nice kill, that last one. Yer an Army of one, man, an Army of one.” He slips a tray with a plate of nachos and a big Slurppee from the 7-11 on top of the large CPU beside the desk. “Whyncha relax for a few minutes, have a look at that new animé of Schwartzenegger goin' back door on Hillary Clinton.”

“Yes sir,” Ryan responds, “anything back on my request to be moved over to stealth bombers? I've been practicing on the game and think I'm best in the F111-U.”

You watch the ads for Army recruitment and there are almost always these “soldiers” messing with computers and video screens. The message is that this is not only a modern Army, but that volunteers are leaning skills that will pay off once that are back in the civilian world. Geeks with guns. Well, who knows, maybe these young recruits are hoping that their Army/computer experience will give them some million dollar ideas for a successful video game after Bush and his neo-con buddies call “game over.” Who knows, maybe there'll be just as many comp-geeks going to Camp Pendleton as to Silicon Valley.

In fact, it may work out that the relationship is reciprocal. Already some aircraft manufacturers are mocking up pilot-less fighters and bombers, and robotic “soldiers” (as if the current ones aren't looking pretty robotic) are being developed that can go into buildings like the fictional Ryan's A01-618004V, finding enemy with the aid of heat and movement sensors, through the wall tomography and finishing them off with lasers, nerve gases as well as guns and grenades. The guys (and gals? Hey you girls can get in on the combat now!) who operate these planes, tanks and “sol-bots.”

So what should we make of the concern being voiced in many quarters that video games, rather violent video games, are a scourge on our youth, and addiction taking over their lives, their studies, and producing kids with high body fat, zits, and arrested personalities? Politicians (among the notable Hillary Clinton), clerics, educators, and of course moms and dads, have sounded the alarm.

But not, it seems, the military. I think that they know that these are our next military heroes. In the coming military the ad should say that the Marines need a “few good nerds.” The Army will need a “geek of One,” with 10 gigabytes of computing power. Landing a pilot-less F22X-U on a carrier deck? Piece of cake when you've done it hundreds of times in the simulator while eating nachos. Fighting “insurgents in Iraq, resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Somali warlords, you name it, they will have played the games, whacked those suckahs with cursors and clicks so many times, watched their pixels spray blood and guts, their pixilated body parts fly apart, their buildings and tanks disintegrate, so real that the real thing will be, like routine, dude.

So maybe we should not mess with the current evil rotting the moral fiber of our youth. We may need them in this uncertain world of political instability and global terror. They, and their high-tech weapons and robotics, and their powerful computers, may be our Zit Brigades, and Nacho Warriors of the military future. Sure there will probably still be a need for “boots on the ground,” but there will be more “booting up” of computers, and with high-speed wireless and satellite hook ups, that geeky kid up in his bed unkempt bedroom, with his game controller, might just be keeping the world safe for democracy.

I can hear Ryan now in the WiFi VFW chat rooms some years from now, rapping war stories with his old comrades-in-mouse.

[SavPrivRyan@ArmyO1.mil] “Dudes, I remember the time these three Syrian Migs were on my tail. It felt like that time there were three cops after me in Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas. I joy-sticked over behind the Golan Heights, and came up behind them. Toasted those suckers. Confirm-Com emailed me that one of them came down smack in the middle of Damascus. I thought I didn't have enough backside RAM to pull that move, but I gotta tell you, Dudes, the new Mac G9's can really boot ‘n blast.”

[OsamazNighmare@ArmyO1.mil ] Hey, SPR, gotcha, dude. And speaking of joy-sticks, do you remember that little bit of porn R ‘n R they used to have, the one with Schwartzenegger and Hillary?

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23. 3: WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHIN' IN 8.9.2005

Oh when the saints go marchin' in

Oh Lord I want to be in that number

When the saints go marchin' in

Capezzoli di St. Agatha, a Sicilian delicacy, UrbisMedia

Aside from his concern about the “dictatorship of relativism,” Pope Ratz's version of the culture wars in the battle for the souls of mankind, the new anti-pontifex is busy trying to get his predecessor on the fast-track to sainthood. I frankly don't give a damn if they make John Paul II a saint tomorrow, or if the church decides to canonize the Rolling Stones along with him for that matter. Frankly the only person I know who deserves to be a sainted is a guy I know personally who has remained married to his wife for as along as . . . (oh, oh, I think I just got some guys I know wondering if . . . ). Never mind.

John-Paul II might have thought that he bettered his chances for fast-track sainthood because he was quite a saint-maker himself. On October 1, 2000, he canonized a load of new saints, although many of them “made their bones” as saints hundreds of years ago. For example, a whole bunch of “martyrs of China,” both Chinese and Western missionaries, mostly beheaded, were put into service as saints. But what will J-PII, rather St. J-PII be a patron saint of. I think I should leave that to suggestions from my readers. Just click reply on the email that sent you here. I'll publish the suggestions, with attribution, later. Meanwhile, there might be some inspiration below.

Saints are those people you see in religious paintings who have a nimbus around their heads. You know, like that little ring of golden light that Jesus usually has, that makes their heads look like little versions of Saturn. (It must really come in handy if a saint wants to read in the dark.) The Church borrowed sainthood from the cults and pantheisms of paganism to take some of the heavy lifting off of God Almighty, Jesus, the Holy Ghost and the BVM when it comes to prayer and particularly supplications. Saints handle a lot of the specifics of why people are into religion— they want or need something and they want somebody with high-level spiritual access to intercede for them. Hence, saints are usually the “patron saints” of something or other.

There are a lot of saints, some, (dozens, as in the case of the St. Marys, Marias, etc), buried in myth, many of questionable provenance, most of them patron to some group, interest, need, disease, or whatever. The Church pretty much has everything covered. For example, let's say you are an accountant and you have just been nailed cooking the books for Enron or MCI and you want to say a prayer that your lawyer can keep your ass out of The Big House. Well, you want to pray to St Matthew the Apostle, patron saint of accountants (he also does bankers, stock brokers, money managers and tax collectors—a little conflict of interest in that last one). But you get the idea, St. Matt knows about accountancy, so he can get your prayer on the fast track. By the way, St. Mark the Evangelist is the patron saint for lawyers, so you had better toss off a supplication to him as well. And just in case, guess what, he is also the patron saint of “imprisoned people.”

It is easy to see how some of these people got to be saints—they were heavy hitters in the New Testament. But there are plenty of saints you or I haven't heard of. Some of these saints were into some pretty weird stuff. St. Simon Stylites, a fourth century ermetic, spent much of his life sitting on top of a sixty-foot column (I guess if he had a girl he would have put her on a pedestal—OK, OK, I won't do that again!). There were saints who ate rotten food, buried themselves, scourged themselves, and even emasculated themselves to prove to go that they renounced this awful world.

But it was probably easier—in a relative sense—to get yourself a nimbus by being a martyr rather than a masochist. In fact, being a martyr usually was responsible for what kind of patron assignment you got when you were canonized. For instance take St, Agatha (the one from Catania, Sicily, not the others Agathas); she's the patron saint of women with disorders of the breasts. That's because Roman soldiers cut her breasts off when she refused to go into one of their brothels. She is often represented in religious art holding a tray on which sit her breasts, like a pair of dolce . These days Sicilian bakers make little boob-like confections called Capezzoli di St. Agatha, or Minne de Virgine on her feast day . St. Agatha is also the patroness of bell-makers because, presumably . . . . [1]

Still, martyrdom wasn't always an easy way to make it to sainthood. St. Stephan, the first martyr was stoned to death. I like to think of him as the patron saint of those who overdose with drugs. The Jesuits have a good many saints. When I was in high-school being taught by them they used to like to read to us from the lives of their saints when we were on religious retreat. During meal times they would choose passages from the missionary exploits of St. Issac Jogues, and St. John de Brebeuf, Jebbie missionaries who were taken apart limb by limb and organ by organ by the Mohawks and the Hurons, respectively. The graphic descriptions, one supposes, were intended as an aide-de-digestion . [2]

And that brings me back to one of the prime services of patron saints—to serve as intermediaries for our human problems. My mother always used to pray to St. Anthony when she lost or misplaced something. It took me a long time to look up which St. Anthony because there are thirty-two of them, but it is St. Anthony of Padua, who is the patron saint of “lost articles.” If Mom found, say, her house keys, she would announce that her prayer was answered; if not, well St. Anthony was still working on it, or maybe was busy because he had been assigned new responsibilities for people with lost pensions from American corporations. But it turns out that St. Anthony of Padua has a lot of responsibilities. He is (are you ready for this?) patron saint: against shipwrecks ; against starvation ; against starving ; American Indians ; amputees ; animals ; asses [yes, Bush has a patron saint]; barrenness ; boatmen ; Brazil ; diocese of Beaumont, Texas ; domestic animals ; elderly people ; expectant mothers ; faith in the Blessed Sacrament ; Ferrazzano, Italy ; fishermen ; harvests ; horses ; Lisbon, Portugal ; lost articles ; lower animals ; mail ; mariners ; diocese of Masbate, Philippines ; oppressed people ; Padua, Italy ; paupers ; poor people ; Portugal ; pregnant women ; sailors [and what if it's the sailors who get the women pregnant?]; seekers of lost articles [Eureka!]; shipwrecks ; starvation ; starving people ; sterility ; swineherds ; Tigua Indians ; travel hostesses ; travelers ; watermen. Excuse me, but—Jesus! That's a load of work for one saint! Why not off-load some of this onto one of those other St. Anthony's, like St. Anthony Dich Nguyen of Vietnam, who was beheaded in 1838, and hasn't been assigned any patronage work since. At least give him patron saint of American lost wars .

As one can see, saints have a lot to do, so I won't be any more tedious and list their manifold duties. I'll just close with a reference to St. Fiacre. He was an Irish monk who died in 670 AD. Turns out he is the patron saint of cab drivers, but the connection is a gratuitous one. There was a Hotel de St. Fiacre in Paris with a taxi stand in front. People took to calling the cabs “fiacres”. Simple as that. But since cab drivers spend a lot of time sitting in the cabs while waiting or driving, they may be prone to an occupational malady. Pas problem ; St. Fiacre is also the patron saint of hemorrhoids.

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[1] I want you to know that I resisted a nearly overwhelming impulse to inject here that I used to love Hostess Ding Dongs when I was a kid.

[2] Never at a loss to learn from its experiences the Church put a good number of martyr techniques to use during their Inquisition. But that's a story for another essay.

23. 2 STICKS AND STONES 8.6.2005

One hears and reads a good deal these days about how fundamentalist hate-mongering Muslims are taking over Islam, and how we must battle them and help pacific Muslims purge them from form their faith, and even expose those bent on acts of terror to authorities. Most Westerners do not understand much elided, sibilant tones of Arabic. But we do understand planes flying into buildings and bombs on buses and trains. Good Muslims (not that's not an oxymoron) need to get hold of and deal with their image problem, and deal directly with those who are responsible for the growing equation of Islam with terrorism. But this is not an easy thing to do in most Muslim societies, which tend to be either theocracies or dictatorships, or both, and where taking a public position against extremists may make one as much of a target as the “enemy.” Most people, but no one can know for sure the proportions, remain silent, keep their heads down, and some of them are silently sympathetic with at least what motivates the terrorists, if not their tactics. It must be especially difficult for good Muslims living in Western societies.

One doesn't hear as much about fundamentalist hate-mongering Christians and the need for true Christians to cast them from their temple and expose them for their misdeeds. I don't recall Timothy McVeigh being automatically being referred to a Christian Terrorist McVeigh. Even recently convicted bomber and women's clinic assassin, Eric Rudolph, is not referred to as a Christian extremist. And both might well be viewed as “freedom fighters” by those of a similar extremist bent. There is not, as far as the American press is concerned a phrase such a “Christian Terrorist,” or “Christian Extremist.” There is not much of a call for Christians to clean up their faith of their terrorists and extremists.

What? Christian terrorists? OK, I won't go into the history of what those wearing red crosses on their tunics, or going to mass before creating mass murder, have done over the centuries. I am talking about how much of a distinction there is between a suicide bomber killing innocent people and a stealth bomber dropping laser-guided bombs at strategic targets, but not giving much a damn about “collateral damage.” The distinction is technology, not morality. When you are going about collecting your child's body parts you have earned the right to call the person who did that a “terrorist.”

This may have much to do with the way cultures behave. Muslims may well have become inured to seeing Westerners as “Christian terrorists” the way they certainly see Israelis as ”Jewish terrorists.” They may also tend to see their own terrorists as “freedom fighters” and to see outsiders, like Israelis in Palestine, or Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan as “terrorists” (rather than “liberators”). Despite the intervening centuries this culture clash of the (American) West, and the (Middle) East is not very different than the Crusades of the 11 th and 12 th centuries. Seeing somebody as a threat or an enemy usually requires stereotyping (demonizing) them rather than trying to understand them.

It is not easy for societies to clean up their own act, especially when those in power use terror to retain power and build support for their policies by invoking what could be called “9-11 card.” We tend not to think that is done in America, but it has been. Pearl Harbor resulted in the odious policy of concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, and 9-11 is invoked strategically by the current administration like a code orange for political purposes. The other guys have their cards, especially the ones about foreign troops occupying their sacred lands and holy places. Lebensraum, Japan's Asian Destiny, Pax Romana, whatever, their all cards in the deck of terror.

Woven in between the above lines is that there is a parallel war between these contending forces for the hearts and minds of the bystanders as well as the co-culturalists and co-religionists word wide. When Al Jeezera began broadcasting photographs of victims of collateral damage in America's air campaign Rumsfeld himself went ballistic, raging that this was improper and suggesting that such scenes of the bodies of victims might even have been “staged.” (I am taking this from tapes of Rumsfeld's press conferences which Al Jeezera broadcasted, with translation, as were shown in the documentary Control Room .) This was, of course, the clash between a Pentagon bent upon conducting a PR war on their terms—embedded and compromised reporters, showing mostly (remote) gun sight and bomb sight camera footage, insisting that the do not count or announce enemy body counts,” [1] and staging their own media events in the case of at least Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the falsifying the circumstances the death of Pat Tillman and we must not forget (it has been shown thousands of times) the bogus circumstances of the pulling down if Saddam's statue. But this war is one that the American administration has been losing virtually everywhere but in the sufficient number of Red States to keep them in power. And it seems that, poll numbers indicate (as of this writing that only 38% of Americans approve of Bush's conduct of the war) they are losing there as well. Therefore it has been incumbent upon them to mine the domestic culture war, invoking the terrors of married gays and lesbians destroying the meaning and solidarity of “marriage,” of atheists pulling the Ten Commandments out of the lobbies of public buildings, of stem cells, and of teaching in our schools that we might be descended from apes. It was enough (maybe with a little cheating on the voting here and there) to overcome the bad PR of Abu Ghraib, the renditions, the denial of rights to captives in the “global war on terror,” lately re-spun as the “global struggle against extremism."

Would, and does, the other side do the same thing? Of course—all is fair in war, and anything unfair is to be expected in public relations.

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[1] On the occasion of the 21 American Marines killed in Iraq over August 1 – 3, the Pentagon somehow felt compelled to use some body count numbers, announcing that American forces had killed over 60 of the Insurgents.

23. 1: FINDING ORWELL IN BURMA , by Emma Larkin (2005) [BR ]

There's a photograph that I can recall very vividly, although I haven't seen it since I was a young boy. In it, my Uncle Nick Bianchi is standing in what looks like a small studio photographer's set. He is dressed in his Army uniform (I can't remember his rank) and he has a spear in his hand. I don't remember exactly if he had one of his feet on the dead tiger in front of him. The tiger is big and looks real, although it might be taxidermized.

The photograph was taken in Burma, where my uncle served in WWII. That name, Burma, has since had an exotic meaning to me. Its contemporary military government changed its name to Myanmar, but it's Burma to me. It's also Burma to Emma Larkin, the pseudonymous author of Finding George Orwell in Burma, a splendid book that fuses my interest in Orwell (nee Eric Arthur Blair) with the place where my uncle once “killed” tigers.

I read my 1984 , Animal Farm , and Down and Out in Paris and London during my college years. But I didn't read Burmese Days , which Orwell wrote after a stint as a British colonial cop in Burma in the 1920s, until I made my own visit there in 2001. Burma was a colonial station in the 20s, and no doubt had elements of oppression and surveillance that influenced some aspects of Orwell's later writings on totalitarianism. But one has to read Larkin's book to appreciate how the efficiently brutal military junta that rules Burma today seems almost to have gone to school on Orwell's farm and “futuristic” city.

That's only the beginning of ironies that Larkin, who is fluent in Burmese, exposes in her travels and “interviews” with a fascinating array of local and post-colonials in major cities like Rangoon and Mandalay, and small towns and villages. The tentacles of the tatmadaw, the Burmese Army, reach into all of them. They are virtually everywhere, and that makes Burma a dangerous place for snoopy reporters, [1] and even more dangerous for people who talk to them.

But some Burmese do talk, if often very obliquely. Larkin was introduced to a Mandalay book club where authors hoard forbidden books, struggling to protect them from not just the tatmadaw, but the steamy weather and paper eating parasites. Her experience reminded me of my experience with my guide, Myo. [2] I had discovered in a bookstore in Rangoon, a copy of Burmese Days. Since it is an anti-colonial story it is permitted, even encouraged, to be sold by the junta. I bought the copy as a gift for Myo, who had not read it and knew little of Orwell. I told him about Animal Farm and 1984 and said that I would send copies to him when I got back to Hong Kong. The joke among the Burmese, according to Larkin, is that “Orwell wrote three books about Burma”: Burmese Days , which is about the colonial period, Animal Farm , which—prophetically—describes the disastrous period of socialism started in 1962, and 1984 , which mirrors the features of the present regime. But he said I should not bother since they would be intercepted by the mail inspectors and would never reach him. Not wanting to take a chance of getting him in trouble I never tried to send them.

Reading Larkin's book it is easy to understanding why. The internal spy network is like an almost inescapable web, tied together with the permits and paperwork required of travelers that informs the spies of where one is and whom one has spoken with. She might be talking to someone who suddenly gets up and leaves. People speak of the government only by way of metaphor, or though jokes laced with irony. Larkin does not have to strain in the slightest to draw parallels in the ubiquitous tatmadaw and the ever-present “Big Brother” of 1984. The Burmese, who are the ruling ethnic group of an ethnically diverse country containing many peoples and tribes, have long persecuted, enslaved, and murdered people like the Wa, Padaung and the Karen. [3]

One person that Larkin was not able to interview, however, is Aung San Suu Kyi, the duly-elected leader of Burma (and daughter of the assassinated previous leader of the country) who has been imprisoned under “house arrest” for many years, and whose name can only be spoken in coded language. I never thought that back in my school days when I read Animal Farm and 1984, that the author was such a prescient travel guide to Burma.

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[1] There are nevertheless some courageous journalists, such as Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, whose The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade (London: Phoenix Books, 2001) is not only an engrossing history of jade, but also of the fact that the world's best jade comes from northern Burma. The mining of jade today is conducted in an area of restricted access by the Burmese Army, an almost surreal zone, which these author's penetrated, of slavery, genocide, drugs and the production of the semiprecious green stone.

[2] I had learned from reading signs that myo means “town”in Burmese. So I said to Myo, “Your name must be Town, in English,” but he said that his name, while “romanized” with the same spelling, had a different sound, and therefore a different meaning.

[3] See, for example, Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People; a story of Burma iun the Shadow of Empire, (Washington: Counterpoint, 2002, and Pascal Khoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts (Flamingo, 2003). Marshall took considerable risks in traveling in areas of ethnic minorities, and Thwe, a Paudaung, tells an amazing story that takes him from the jungles of northern Burma to Cambridge University.