AUGUST 2004

11. 8: G.W. BUSH MILITARY SERVICE MEDALS FOUND 8.25.2004

Courtesy of the Texas Air National Guard Veterans for Truth ©UrbisMediaProductions

With all the lies talk about the medals awarded to Senator John Kerry for his service in Vietnam there has been no attention paid to the military decorations awarded to G.W. Bush for his service(?) in the Texas Air National Guard. Now, discovered behind a bar in Alabama, where Bush is said to have thrown them in protest over being named a “designated driver,” the Bush medals have finally been brought to light.

The medals are, for left to right:

The Valorous Trigger-Finger Digit , awarded to Bush for a paper cut he incurred while stuffing envelopes for an Alabama Republican political candidate, which prevented him from using the weapons systems on his airplane.

The BarFly Shotglass of Merit . This was awarded to Bush for consistently drinking over and above the level of sobriety expected of phony hot-shot pilots.

The Chickenhawk Poulet d'Honneur, awarded at an Alabama KFC franchise to Mr. Bush for avoiding taking his physical exam and being grounded for using controlled substances.

The Purple Liver . This medal is typically awarded to those who have also been awarded the BarFly Shotglass of Merit.

And finally

The Order of the Legion of the Daddy “D” (With Oakleaf Cluster) , given to boys whose daddy's have the political juice to keep him from getting in the way of the John Kerry's who are doing his fighting for him.

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11.7: A Feeling of A.N.G.S.T 8.22.2004

A.N.G.S.T, The Air National Guard Spooks for Truth, issued a report today to counter the charges that George W. Bush was a coward who had his father get him bumped up in line to get in the Air National Guard and avoid service in Viet Nam. General Jack D. Ripper (USAF, Ret.), took leave as CEO of a successful bottled water company in Alabama to head up A.N.G.S.T. and act as its spokesman. Ripper said to an assemblage of reporters that the reason that Mr. Bush's records are spotty on his attendance at Guard duties is that his activities were classified as Top Secret. Ripper was in charge of the base at the time in which Mr. Bush served.

The general opened by saying that George W. Bush was one of the “unsung heroes” of the Vietnam War. “We were fighting the Viet Nam war with the wrong tactics, “ Ripper, who is noted for his outspokenness and irascible demeanor, said to a startled press corps, breathlessly waiting to ask inane softball questions. When asked what he meant by wrong tactics Ripper said that some commanders in Vietnam were putting our troops on Swift Boats and having them go up rivers where the enemy VC could shoot at them. “Our guys could get shot up or killed,“ Ripper responded, “is that any way to fight a war?”

Ripper went on to say that the real war, a secret war, “the most dangerous war, “was being fought right here in Alabama, “A war against the Viet Cong's campaign to poison our bodily fluids! That's the war that Airman Bush fought, while fools were aiming their Swift Boats right at the VC and shooting them and getting shot themselves!”

“That must have been a very perilous assignment for Airman Bush?” asked Mr. Novak, a reporter who had just won a Pukeitzer Prize for exposing fourteen CIA undercover agents.

“So dangerous that only now can I tell you anything about it,” Ripper said. “Airman Bush was undercover all those twelve months when nothing – and I mean nothing – shows up in his record. He was undercover as Col. Mandrake, a British officer, attached to me. And by the way, he does one hell of a British accent if I say so myself. We had to watch what we were drinking all the time to protect our precious bodily fluids. Airman Bush suggested that we restrict ourselves only to beverages with a high alcoholic content in order to ward off any poisons.”

Columnist Toady Brooks interjected: “Sir, could you elaborate a little, without compromising the safety of your current Commander-in-Chief, of course?”

“I'll tell you what is necessary to protect the sullied reputation our CIC, and our precious bodily fluids, and nothing more. And don't interrupt me again, you wimpy balding bag of pus, or I'll come down there a tear you a new one.” The general chomped down harder on his cigar and continued: “I assigned Airman Bush-Mandrake to General Buck Turgidson, who was coordinating an operation that was masked as a political campaign. Bush-Mandrake was to work with the politician's to see if poisons had been injected into the glue on stamps and envelopes. Of course, he was undercover and had to do a lot of licking. You can imagine how dangerous that was, so he had to do a lot of drinking of alcoholic beverages afterward.”

A hand went up from best-selling polemicist Ann Coldsore. Flipping her signature blond tresses she inquired, “General, why do those treasonous Democrats keep saying that Mr. Bush did not practice flying his airplane?”

For a moment Ripper warmed up. “That's a good question, Ann,” he said in an almost intimate manner. “By the way, I'm sorry I didn't recognize you when you are not wearing anything but a bag over your head. Anyway, it's an easy answer: would you fly with a pilot who's been drinking that much?”

“But those dirty, stinking, rotten Democrats keep saying that our president only showed up at the base to get some dental work,” Ann insisted, more interested in her polemic than the question, as was her habit.

Ripper smiled his sinister smile. “Oh that. That was to install the transmitter in one of his molars in case we needed to trace him to whatever bar he was at. Unfortunately it permanently affected his speech and he speaks only in iambic dimeter and screws up any word over one syllable. The man has given so much for his country. OK, last question,” Ripper said imperiously.

A New York Times reporter in the rear shouted, “General, does A.N.G.S.T have any knowledge of the reason Mr. Bush, excuse me, Mr. Bush-Mandrake, did not show up for his require physical when he was in the Air National Guard?”

Ripper chomped down on his cigar. “We saw no reason to require Bush-Mandrake to come in and blow his cover just to have some medical officer grab his, ahem, testicles and have him cough. Does that answer your question, Mr. New York Times reporter?”

“It does indeed, sir,” the reporter shouted back. “Such a diagnostic procedure would not have discovered anything at all.”

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11.6: Synch or Swim

The story of Jim's bid to represent his country in the 2004 Olympics

Standing on that podium, hearing the refrains of the National Anthem, Old Glory rising up in the middle – the Gold Medal position – this has long been Jim's dream. A chance to compete, to excel, to win, to “medal,” to “bring home the gold for his country (and who knows, maybe to pick up a few endorsements, or at least some chicks), these have been the noble ambitions of a young man of modest athletic ability and high patriotism: to be A member of the American Olympic team.

But Olympiad after Olympiad Jim could only be a spectator, watching as others stole his glory as he sat before his television set.

Not that Jim didn't try to make the team. The frustrating years trying to master a “double axel” when he thought figuring skating was his sport. For years after women were asking him to do their hair. They wouldn't even give him a tryout for the wrestling team after that. The steroids he took to be the last white guy to ever be entered in the 100 meter dash, the ruptures and hernias trying to make the weight-lifting team, that unfortunate incident with the pole that ended his pole-vaulting hopes. He was always not big enough, fast enough, strong enough, or cute enough.

The years went by and with it the dissipation of Jim's athletic abilities. But his dream remained alive. There were always new sports coming into the Olympics. Beach volleyball, baseball, they were even considering ballroom dancing. Maybe one would be included that was his sport. Or, Jim reasoned (he was still able to do this with some facility): why not pick a sport that you think you would be good at and try to get it accepted into the Olympic Games? Better yet, practice and practice that sport until you're the best, then make your proposal.

And so Jim chose his event: Solo Synchronized Swimming.

For four arduous years he was in the pool from morning to night, perfecting his moves, holding his breath under water, sticking his leg up in the air, and of course, smiling and waving and not drowning. He even thought of growing a ponytail that he could tie up into a cute little bun. And he was good, damn good, some would say.

When the Olympic Committee laughed him out of their office Jim was crushed. He shed the tears he was saving for the award ceremony for days, the cruel words reverberating in his brain: “Synchronized swimming is a team sport, you moron, a team sport!”

As Jim saw it he had one last chance for a gold medal. If they insist on it being a team sport then he would play it their way. So Jim decided to get a cute yellow swimsuit and start working out with the American team.

Unfortunately, Jim got a little too close in his synchronization and was asked to leave the American team tryouts.

Undaunted, Jim said the heck with the American team, he would swim with the Italians, since he was of Italian heritage.

Regrettably, Jim got his Italian gestures confused and offended the Italian team coaches.

Finally, Jim felt that his chances might be good with a team that used different gestures. So Jim decided that his best chance was to infiltrate the Chinese Syncho-swimming team because he used to look Asian when he was a boy. It also occurred to him that it will be fun taking showers with them after practice.

Yeah, Go China! Go Zhongguo! Go Jim!!!

11.5: GOING APE OVER BLONDES 8.13.2004

UrbisMediaProductions

Fay Wray died this past week. In case you don't remember Fay, here's a hint: she outlived King Kong by seventy-one years. Wray is the actress who is immortalized as the screaming blond beauty over whom the giant ape went “ape” in the 1993 version of King Kong . It's a classic of American film, which is why Fay Wray is remembered almost exclusively for her role as the object of Kong's infatuation although she acted nearly one-hundred films. The actress was quoted in 1963 that “I used to resent King Kong. But now I don't fight it anymore. I realize that it is a classic, and I am pleased to be associated with it.

Kong, wrenched from his far away island to the island of Manhattan to be displayed for the amusement of sybaritic New Yorkers was really smitten by Ann Darrow (Wray). So he breaks loose, crunches some cars, plays with the elevated trains, apprehends Ann and takes her to the top of the Empire State building. (No, he couldn't have seen Sleepless in Seattle ; it wasn't even made then). In the last Kong scene succumbs to the bullets of the warplanes, sets Ann gently down, and plunges to the street below. The showman who brought him there, played by Robert Armstrong, intones by his lifeless body the line that is supposed to sum up the poor creature's fate: “Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”

In actuality the beast was only an eighteen inch high model for stop-action animation; one of the reasons the movie earned its “classic” status. Only one arm was “life (over) sized,” with a huge hand that caressed and even groped Ms Wray. (Oh, yeah; check that scene by the waterfall.)

But King Kong became a classic for several reasons. First, it was in the incipient genre of films, begun in part by Frankenstein two years earlier, that questioned man's changing relationship to Nature, a theme that continues right up to Jaws , Godzilla, and Jurassic Park . The new technologies of the 20 th Century fed human hubris, and beneath the pure entertainment value of a titillating story about an ape and a blond girl, there lurked in movie audiences wonder about whether we had lost our respect for the power of Nature. In Kong's case Nature loses out to technology.

RKO reprised the theme in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young . This time the big ape's weakness is for actress Terry Moore, but the relationship closer to that of a blonde girl and her dog than Kong's ardor. Mighty Joe gets hauled off to the city, too, but escapes and returns with his girl and her new cowboy-friend to his home jungle. Kong, who would never permit any such male competition turns up again in the Dino Di Laurentis remake (1976) with blonde Jessica Lang as the object of his desires. Same result though.

But is all this romantic pursuit just in one direction? Could another reason that King Kong is a classic be that it influenced a generation of blonde women primatologists? So far the best-known blonde to go chasing apes was in Gorillas in the Mist (1988) the story of primatologist and ill-fated gorilla activist, Diane Fossey. Film critic Pauline Kael called it a “ . . . feminist version of King Kong.” There are others, but perhaps the most renowned student of the species is once blonde Jane Goodall, who has lived and worked among her troops of chimps for decades.

If so, then Fay Wray really started something. No, I don't mean all the jokes about apes and blondes, but the interest of many women in the study of primates. The likely explanation is just that women are probably more sensitive, patient, and less threatening to approach and build relation ships with our nearest simian relatives.

But could it be that being a blonde is an added advantage?

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©2004, James A. Clapp. OK, I wasn't trying to be offensive or sexist with this piece or the visual. So, if you are comfortable with that you can handle my favorite Blonde and Ape joke. It goes like this: A young blonde woman trekking in the highlands of Africa is abducted by a large male ape. After several months in his captivity she awakes one day and the ape is gone. She escapes to civilization, and because of her physical condition is hospitalized. Her mother comes to visit her in the hospital and says, “Oh, my dear we are so happy to have you back safe. I can't imagine what you have gone through. You must feel just awful.”

The girl looks up, tears in her eyes, and replies: “Of course I feel awful, mother; he doesn't call, he doesn't write, he doesn't fax . . . .

11.4: MOVIETONE MEMORIES 8.9.2004

Traveling among former enemies, Part II

“ Enschuldigen Sie, Enschuldigen Sie ! Bitte ” the lady is calling to me. She's clearly asking for help. Unlike most German forms of address this doesn't sound imperative; rather, plaintive.

I didn't have to know what it meant. There was this old guy sprawled on his back at her feet, his tan overcoat still buttoned up, fedora bent and slightly askew. He wasn't moving.

“Damn, “ I said under my breath, “I don't need this.” Why did she have to pick on me. Because there's nobody else in sight, that's why. Here I am, minutes from having slipped away from my ‘pack' of tourists for a leisurely stroll in this beautiful park wound around this lovely lake, and I'm going to have to earn a Boy Scout badge.

“ Enschuldigen Sie ,” she calls again, the tone more insistent. She's kneeling beside the old guy now. He hasn't even twitched.

Scheiss! I go over to them. “ Ich bin ein Amerikaner ,” I blurt, remembering JFK at the wall, and to interrupt her unintelligible explanation, or whatever she's saying. But she only returns a quick glance at me.

I look at the guy and he doesn't look very good to me. First, he's pretty gray in the face; second, his respiration's is shallow. I grab his pudgy wrist to check his pulse, but I really don't know what the hell I'm doing.

“Doktor?” she asks. “Nice going Dr. Kildare,” I say to myself. Maybe she wants to know how much I'm going to bill her.

“ w rong kind,” I say, but I don't think she understands. Maybe I just can't find his pulse, but this guy doesn't need a Doctor of Philosophy; he need a Doctor Doktor!

Then I notice something about myself: I don't seem very anxious, or even all that concerned about this guy. It's unlike me; I'm a compassionate person, and I get pretty nervous around sick or injured people. And following right on that introspection is the answer: There's something I dislike about this guy: it's that he looks like central casting's idea of a concentration camp Kommandant . Heck, he's the right age, probably late sixties to early seventies, stocky, jowly, and moon-faced, probably ruddy when it isn't ashen. His lips are thin and his eyes would probably be shifty and mean if he wasn't wearing an expression that reads: the Furher shot himself, the Russians are streaming through the Brandenburg Gate and raping anything that resembles a woman, and I'm disguised as a Bavarian bar maid!

He's gurgling, too, and I can smell the beer on his stale breath, and the cigar smoke in his clothes. He just stares at me with a slightly terrified face. Maybe he thinks I'm a Russian soldier.

This is crazy; I don't even know this guy and I'm ready to try him at Nuremberg. He might be croaking and all I can think is: What was this guy doing during WWII? Was he SS? Gestapo? What horrendous war crimes are hidden behind those terrified eyes? It is as though my mind refuses to consider any other options for his life.

I looked into the frightened eyes of his wife and I did feel compassion for her. But him, he could have slipped off to the “afterreich” and I'm not sure I would have given it a second thought. All because his appearance and age fit a stereotype that quickened images I harbored of Germans that were a montage of Movietone Newsreel footage, some George Groz and Otto Dix paintings, and “Hogan's Heros”.

I wished for somebody to come down the footpath so that I could turn this guy over to his own people. I couldn't get over my dislike for him, and shame I was starting to feel at my prejudice.

I had gestured to his wife to loosen his collar and tie, and now he started to come around. Color began to return to his face and his breathing picked up pace. I helped him to his feet with her assistance. He was maybe five-eight, or five-nine at most. Upright he looked more pathetic than menacing. His eyes were rheumy and still had panic in them. We plopped him on the bench and she steadied him and wiped his brow.

I walked back a few yards to where I had set down my camera bag, gestured with my hands that they should remain on the bench for awhile, then headed off down the footpath. A faint “ danke” came from the direction of the bench, but I pretended not to hear it. I was trying to get those damn newsreels out of my head.

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11.3: Three Hills in Nagasaki

Traveling in the countries of former enemies raises memories and different emotions. This entry in an occasional series on the subject is from travel journal notes in 1997.

There are places on the face of the earth that are etched by the nexus of time and circumstance. The Atom Bomb Museum in the hills of Nagasaki is not far from what was ground zero on August 9, 1945. I'd spent most of the day in the area beneath the bomb's detonation. The nearby hill that was directly beneath the blast is now a shrine called The Peace Park, a focal point of anti-nuclear demonstrations and a variety of sculptural memorials from various nations. On the long staircase leading up from the main street below I had followed the ascent of a troop of drum-beating monks in white and black robes, chanting, I could only guess, some incantation to ward off any fissionable repetition.

At the summit of the hill most of the reminders of what effect “Fat Man,” the plutonium bomb that exploded three miles above this district called Urakami, have been erected since that fateful day. A fountain greets one at the top of the staircase. Its sign explains that water was precious to the parched throats of the victims. An array of monuments for different nations offers sculptural pity and regret, some serene depictions of mothers holding dead babies, others with mouths with silent screams, or hands grasping at the sky in torment. The last of these is nearly genre; similar holocaustal evocations can be seen at Dachau, the Holocaust section of Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and elsewhere—blackened bronze figures in the throes of cruel death. On this hilltop in Nagasaki only the flattened footings and grotesquely-twisted reinforcing bars of a couple of buildings at ground zero are artifacts of the blast.

It was a pleasant, sunny day with a cool breeze coming up off the harbor. Instinctively I looked up. On that day the heat at this spot where I stood reached 4000 degrees Celsius. On that day those in whose place I stood were vaporized, which made them the “lucky” ones of the 70,000 who died in the gruesome afflictions of wind, heat and radiation.

In fact, it was the industrial city of Kokura, in northern Kyushu, not Nagasaki, that was the primary target for “Fat Man” on August 9. But that day Kokura was covered in smoke, and with the B-29 running low on fuel, Nagasaki was selected. Even that city might have been spared because of cloud cover, but a “decision” was made, literally in the last minutes, to drop the bomb by radar.

In a sense Nagasaki has remained in “second place”. Having been “first,” and having had a more direct hit with greater loses, Hiroshima is the city associated more with the history of atomic warfare and has become the “Mecca” of the ant-nuclear movement.

At the terminus of Nagasaki's Peace Park is another fountain, and atop it sits, literally, a two-story figure of a man of incongruous, steroid-pumped, body-builder, proportions. One arm skyward, the other pointing to the side like a traffic cop, and an almost Buddha-beatific smile on his face, he conveys all the warmth and meaning of bad Soviet-era political sculpture. Its message is vague, but then an atomic bomb can make a scramble of meanings and emotions for ages.

Of more interest was the group of Japanese pilgrims assembled along the edge of the fountain pool. They wore T-shirts with Japanese characters on them, some carried banners of characters, and they sat quietly listening to the guttural intonations of a speaker with a bull-horn amplification. Only a drawing of a mushroom cloud on one of the banners provided me any legibility.

A slight unease came over me as I had to walk around the group to get to the other side of the fountain. I'd wanted to take a photo, but quickly dismissed the idea. The mood is somber, and perhaps intensely personal for some of the pilgrims who seem of an age to have had relatives who were victims. From the side of my eye even tried to see if there might be some people showing the effects of having been victims, crippled bodies or disfigured skin. But I am leery of looking and, although some of them look up at me their faces are, to put it stereotypically, ‘inscrutable'. I feel that they know I'm an American, and I almost reflexively try to affect a contrite appearance.

Then I noticed another symbol among the Japanese characters on banners and T-shirts: a cross. They are Christians, and I wouldn't be too much of a stretch, I hazard a mental guess, that they're Roman Catholic.

Although I have long ceased “practicing” the faith that was drummed into me by Sisters of St. Joseph and then put at risk by black-robed Jesuits, my apostasy has been somewhat tempered by an abiding interest in the “history” of Catholicism. In the early morning I had made my way up another of Nagasaki's hills, this one up to a hill upon which, in 1596, the Shogun Hideoyoshi had twenty-six Catholic Japanese coverts and their European priests crucified on the site that now bears a bas-relief of each of them on a shrine.

I went up that hill in search of some sign of the presence of Francis Xavier, the Spanish Jesuit who was the first missionary to Kyushu in 1549. In the museum behind the shrine are a collection of artifacts from the days of the Jesuit mission including some writings from Xavier himself, and stained-glass coats-of-arms of the families of Xavier and his co-founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola. But much had been lost, destroyed by the bomb, and the church built by a French Jesuit in 1814 to commemorate the twenty-six martyrs was partially destroyed as well.

One can well understand the basis for the shogun's brutality. By the time of his little demonstration of the Roman execution method there were already nearly a third of a million Roman Catholic converts in Japan. Like his successors he was afraid that the converts would act as a “fifth column” for a Spanish invasion, a fear that the rival Protestant Dutch helped to encourage. So the persecution of Catholics began in earnest a few years later, and over the years tens of thousands were brutally tortured and killed.

The ban on Christianity wasn't lifted in Japan until 1873, and the remainder of the Catholic community completed their Cathedral in 1925 on a hill a short walk to ground zero. Twenty years later the bomb blew most of it to bits. By that time the Roman Catholic community in Nagasaki had grown back to number 14,000. Half of them perished in the nuclear holocaust.

Were those survivors or relatives of the remaining Catholics in pilgrimage at the Peace Park fountain? I could only guess. In the vortex of emotions that has been churned up in the history of Western relations with Japan since it was pried open with guns and bibles the questions was best left to speculation, at least at ground zero.

My country's dropping of the bomb on Japan had never been an unresolved moral complexity for me; all things considered I tended to side with the argument that more lives were saved than lost. I was less sure as I entered the Atomic Bomb Museum on the third hill late in the afternoon. Here the collected curiosities of melted glass, twisted steel, and clocks eternally stopped a couple of minutes after the B-29 passed over the city, gave their mute testimony of the power of a bomb that is little more than a firecracker when compared to today's warheads. But it was the poignant photographs, many taken by American photographers immediately after the surrender, that conveyed the most power.

I shuffled along amongst the exhibits, and dioramas, overhearing, but not understanding, the muffled comments of the Japanese visitors. The museum is designed around a descending spiral ramp, miming the Guggenheim in New York, and its curators employ the continuity it affords to situate the event of the bomb within a longer history of Japanese relations with the West, and America in particular.

The curators appear to have intended that American visitors not miss their interpretation of the bombing; all captions and commentaries for the exhibits were translated into English. One caught my eye in particular. It was a linear timeline titled “Events Leading Up To the Nagasaki Atomic Bombing” in text and photos that ran for several yards along a curved wall and lit with spotlights. The timeline was divided into yearly panels. The discomfort I had been feeling for much of the day gave way to astonishment when I read the English below the Japanese characters describing the “first” event: “May 5, 1943, The Japanese fleet at Truk Bay is proposed as an atomic bomb target at a meeting the Military Policy Committee.”

Somehow this didn't seem to align with the history of events in the Pacific Theater that I was familiar with. To my knowledge there was no such decision-making organ as “The Military Policy Committee.” And why, except to add to the ambiguity of the statement, not specify “American,” or “Allied” policy committee. Owing to the curved wall I thought that perhaps the timeline started beyond the door, or around a corner. I looked there, and on the wall behind, but there was no sign there, or anywhere, of December 7, 1941.

I did not come to Japan unaware of the deep strain of denial about the causes and events of the war that yet pervades their culture. The national paranoia of a long-cloistered island, the monarchism and militarism and, the sense of racial superiority that got them into trouble in the first place, have been modified and challenged by the war's end and their nation's impressive reconstruction and economic success. But the bomb did not obliterate those characteristics.

I descended from hill three with muddled feelings about the Japanese. Why this delusion and denial, this twisted self-absolving revisionist history? What can possibly be gained from such self-deception? At the base of the hill I encountered a teacher with her class of perhaps first-graders, all holding hands as they prepared to cross the intersection. Compliant to my gesture that I take their photo, they smiled and giggled beneath their pastel-colored caps. I wondered if the cap colors might represent some rank order, perhaps of their academic performance, in this highly structured society. But would these kids someday be on their honeymoon to Hawaii and wonder what the Pearl Harbor memorial was all about because they had been fed the deceitful history of their museums and history texts?

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11.2: Welcome to Bugsyland 8.4.2004

I have to be right up front about this: I don't like Las Vegas. Gambling, prostitution, and glitz-schlock, over-priced entertainers like Liberace (yes, I know he's dead), Wayne Newton, or the guy who was nearly eaten by his own tiger, are not my thing. Not that I want Las Vegas banned or razed, or anything like that. I just don't like it, or what it stands for (or what I think it stands for). And not that I have ever set foot in Las Vegas; my sole direct experience has been a recent torturous ride down the venerable “Strip,” and then not even at night. Total Las Vegas time: less than one hour. Total Las Vegas losses: around 1.2 gallons of gas. I still don't like it.

At the same time I have to hand it to Bugsy Segal; the mobster had a knack for understanding human nature that is the envy of social scientists like myself. He sized up Americans and knew that if you made them feel they were important by surrounding them with a glitzy licentious world set off away from the normal sanctions, that, however false, you could separate them from their money and make them feel like they were getting something for it. Barnum had the same idea about American suckers, but at least he gave them something that, however bizarre, was real. Maybe that's why I retired on a professor's pension and not as the operator of some casino that puts up Saudi sheiks in palatial rooms and then reams them for the equivalent of the GDP of a medium-sized developed nation. Then, too, Bugsy didn't end up all that well-off either.

These days, along with the rich crowd that arrives on the private jets parked at the edge of the strip, there is the Las Vegas for the rest of us. Kids are the new interest; bring ‘em along, they can frolic on the rides, and play the penny slots that will hook them for later on. Then there's the cultural offerings. Those suckers promenading the Strip, buying cheap T-shirts, and making their way past the pimps selling “strippers in your room” can now edify themselves with a visit to the Bellagio's Renaissance-themed hotel casino that features, reputedly, fine art by the masters (“Hey honey, I just got a jackpot with 3 Caravaggios on the quarter slot machine!”). Yup. No need to go all the way to the Uffizzi, or the Louvre, you can get you art education right here in a casino. (“Hi, I'm your docent, Vikki. I want to point out to you that the boobs on the Virgin Mary in this ‘Annunciation' by Da Vinci are quite a bit smaller than mine. And just check out the cute ‘thingy' on this ‘David' by Michelangelo.”)

See, you don't have to travel to those old, musty, museums. In fact, you don't have to travel anywhere. It's all here, right in this tawdry town in the desert. Never mind seeing the pyramids at Giza; one of them has been moved to Luxor, right on the strip, with a full-sized Sphynx in the bargain. No luck at the pharaoh's slots? Try the ones in Paris (no surly French waiters to deal with here), the one with the faux Eiffel Tower; or head over a block to Venice, and ride your way to the slots in a fake gondola, on a fake canal, into a fake Palazzo Ducale. No need to risk a terror alert if you head for the ersatz phony skyline at New York, New York, complete with a rollercoaster in front. Well, you get Bugsy's idea: a theme park for the gullible, a nice “legit” front to fleece the suckers.

It's all right here, for you

So why should I object to all these people having a good time handing over their money to mobsters and pimps? I don't. It's a free country, and there is no place freer in it that Las Vegas. Anything goes there. And, as an urbanist*, I recognize that many cities have always had a district or precinct where people could satiate their less noble impulses and their vices. It's as old as cities themselves. So if cities can have erogenous zones, why not one for the whole nation?

What I do object to is the metastasis of Las Vegas, to its insinuation into every state and city, into the malls, and mails and into the Internet. It is a corrupting rot that has installed itself into the fabric of our society and weakens it with its siphoning of wealth and its non-productivity, turning over more monetary power to forces that know all to well that, in America, a good business or a good racket trumps all the sanctimonious bullshit about values, and all the disingenuous references to the public interest.

Like I said at the top: I don't like Las Vegas. Let the suckers have their place – as long as it stays where it belongs.

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*My less polemical views on this subject appeared in my article: “'X' Marks the Spot: The Problem of the Erogenous Zone of the American City,” Revue Francaise D'Etudes Americaines , Vol. 13, No. 36, April 1988.

11.1: The Ugly Americans 8.2.2004

©Fawcett Books

When I and my friend Sue flew into Hanoi from Hong Kong in 1997 a young State Department officer, and his wife and child occupied seats nearby. He was taking up a rather high-level post in the new, amicable relations between America and its erstwhile adversary. We only got to chat a little, he being preoccupied somewhat equally with his young daughter and his portfolio. He seemed eager and not at all apprehensive going into what would seemingly be a relationship of some delicacy; one could still discern what I took to be bomb craters in the verdant countryside on our approach.

I remember at the time having a recollection of the book, The Ugly American, a novel by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer, set in a fictitious S.E. Asian country back in the 1950s, when Communism was winning many hearts and minds as colonialism crumbled into what came to be called, somewhat charitably, “developing countries.” It was later made into a movie that starred Marlon Brando as some sort of consular official who somehow just doesn't get what's going on with the incipient nationalism and sort of blows it. It was a harbinger for a number of misguided American policies to follow, such as “domino theories” and miscontructions of nationalism and communism. From such faulty intelligence, as we know even today, things can get really “ugly.”

My discomfort with the term “ugly American” was thankfully contradicted by the friendliness of people we had rained bombs on for several years. Americans might be “ugly” in diplomacy, and their nation's policies might be at times woefully misguided, but Americans themselves are generally liked by people in foreign countries, even countries we have dropped a lot of bombs upon. I say this not only on the basis of short acquaintance with Vietnam, but from the experience of travel to over 60 countries, in the past 25 years, often escorting groups of American tourists, some of whom did not always conduct themselves in an endearing manner.

Once, a Coptic tailor in Cairo pulled me into the back room of his shop and proudly showed me his picture of Jimmy Carter, telling me that he regarded the former president as an honorable man and good Christian. I recall a cab driver in Shanghai explaining to me that he thought Clinton was a great American president because the Chinese leadership respected and feared him. In other places, when I would identify myself as an American in would get a thumbs up sign and hear “Cleenton,” or “Clintone, good.” My cyclo driver in Saigon, Minh (no relation to Ho Chi), probably wasn't born when the Americans who fled in helicopters from the roof of the American Embassy that he pointed out to me, told me of his dream of going to America. There might be the occasional snide remark, but usually it was from those of the more educated classes, and from those in the more developed countries.

Misguided American policies have been responsible for losing the respect of foreigners in the past, but no American president and his policies have produced the ruinous results as those of G.W. Bush. With his simple-minded dichotomizing of a world that is either “with us or against us,” he has appealed to morons and neo-cons, while insulting and alienating millions of people around the world, forcing the American forces he has unleashed in the putative cause of bringing freedom to fight and die with only token support of bribed and strong-armed “coalition” allies. American troops entering Baghdad, who were supposed to be greeted like those who rode down the Champs Elysee in 1944, have been sniped and car-bombed by the hundreds; the Muslim world in general has been lumped with extreme jihadists, insulting millions of allies and driving others closer to Islamic fundamentalism; the administration continues to cozy up with fundamentalists such as the Saudi family; and the its policies leading to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib have shamed Americans before the entire world and provided “justification” for brutal acts of retaliation. Never have Americans had to face so much ill will from foreigners, never have we had so much to answer for, never has our reputation been put so low.

Most civilian Americans will, of course, not be going abroad, where they might encounter slights, or worse, from foreigners. Those going abroad in uniform will have reason to feel their job has been made more perilous. Some Americans might just feel too ashamed to take out their U.S. Passport. That's a long way down for a country that once enjoyed wide love and respect from freedom-loving peoples around the world. It is a hard reality to bear for Americans who live, work and travel abroad.

George Bush might have the arrogant face of the quintessential “Ugly American,” but he has put a face on the rest of us to the entire world that looks bad.

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