Volume 15

December 2004

15. 9: WHY STEVE LUMB LOVES THE ‘EURO' 12.31.2004

I can't help but think of Steve Lumb every time I hear or read the word “Euro”. Steve had the worst case of FECS (Foreign Exchange Conversion Stress) I ever encountered in over two decades of escorting tour groups abroad. All those zeros on Italian price stickers, those strange monetary symbols for pounds and yen, the difference between' foreign exchange certificate's and renminbi, threw him into a panic. Desperately, apologetically, he would blurt out, “how much is that in DOLLARS?” He couldn't understand that, since dollars are almost as universally acceptable as Marlboros, why other countries just don't get rid of their odd-sized notes, their coins that are either the size of tiny buttons or as large as manhole covers, and adopt our system.

The “euro” saved Steve from having a nervous breakdown every time he had to reach for his wallet in Europe.

And whenever I think of Steve my mind ‘s eye returns to a men's room in the Cologne train station, and I imagine a bronze plaque affixed to the wall above one of the urinals. It gleams from the polish the matronly attendant applies daily.

The plaque reads: THE STEVE LUMB MEMORIAL URINAL

Well, OK, there should be such a plaque. Steve (not his real name to protect his reputation) deserves a plaque, and if that woman attendant had known his name I'm sure she would have honored Steve for making her feel that she'd won the lottery. Maybe she just put one up to the unknown urinator .

That fateful day I was just three or four urinals down the wall from Steve, but the events leading up to Steve's hallowed place in restroom history began weeks earlier, at the beginning of our tour, in Italy. It was in the pre-euro days.

The tour I was leading would visit a half-dozen countries. At first Steve listened intently to my little lectures on foreign exchange: “Remember, pounds are worth more than dollars; the other countries' money will be worth less; try to change money at banks, and only what you need for a couple days; try to end up with scrip, which is easier to change for the next country's currency; etc.” But then Steve's eyes glazed over. Like others who share his problem he

was intelligent and competent in other things, but foreign exchange was voodoo economics. Not long thereafter his FECS began to show itself.

In Venice several of us were ante-ing up for a group lunch. It was an inexpensive restaurant, but the mound of lire we tossed on the table looked like most of the banknotes in Italy. I had kept track of everybody's share and told Steve he owed 5000 lire. As we got up to leave I spied the hue of a 50,000 lire note sticking out from the pile—more than the cost of the meal and a tip for the entire group. I returned it to Steve, but it was only a few hours later that he

was fortunate to get an honest ticket seller when he paid the same note for a 5,000 lire vaporetto ticket and had to be called back to get his change.

I'm not sure just how Steve fared as we transitioned from Swiss francs, to French francs, and to Belgian francs over the next couple of weeks. The different exchange rates and currency colors were probably taking a toll on his mind as well as his bank account. I couldn't help but notice however that he had so much currency leftover money from each place he'd been that he would just pull out the lot and trust the waiter or cabby to take just what he owed in whatever currency he chose.

Near the end of the tour we had a couple of free days at Brussels, and Steve and a few others prevailed on me to lead a little day trip to Cologne, just to see the Cathedral and a couple of museums, have lunch and dinner, and catch a late train back to Brussels. When we arrived at the Cologne Bahnhof I suggested we buy some deutschmarks for admissions and our meals and return ticket. Something must have distracted me from my intention to keep an eye on Steve at the Bureau de Change.

We marveled at the cathedral, force-marched through several museums, wolfing down a lunch in between. At dusk we rewarded ourselves with a huge German meal and enough lager to fuel a return to Brussels on foot. Which is what we would have had to do had I not checked the train timetable in my pocket. We had only minutes to catch the last train back.

In a panic I paid the bill for all of us and said we would settle up on the train. We rushed to the station with only minutes to spare, got our tickets and were heading to the platform when Steve said he needed to relive himself of some of that lager. Not wanting to risk his missing the train I went with him to the rest room. I was nervous; German trains run on time, and there was less than a minute to get to the platform.

I told Steve to hurry, and I would go out and tell the others we were coming and to give us a yell if the conductor blew the all-aboard whistle. On the way out of the restroom I tossed a few fennig in the little dish on the table beside the matronly restroom attendant who threw me a guilt glance from over her magazine. Behind me I heard her perfunctory “ danke .”

On the platform I urged Steve on like a horse I had a big bet on as he raced up the stairs and jumped aboard just ahead of the train's lurch precisely on the second it was scheduled to depart. We plopped into the compartment with the others, self-satisfied that we had drained as much as possible from one day in Cologne, right up to the last second.

Once we caught our breath we began to settle up for the dinner. I told each what they owed and took the deutschmarks that I had told everyone to keep in reserve for the dinner. But when I got to Steve he said he was clean out of deutschmarks . That made me curious.

“How much U.S. money did you change this morning?” I asked.

“A couple hundred bucks,” he said.

“A couple hundred bucks!?” I exclaimed. “I said 'get a couple hundred deutschmarks '; that's about forty bucks at the current rate. You got it backwards. You must have plenty left over,” I replied, fearing the worst.

“I don't, I put all I had left in that dish in the men's room. I thought I was going to miss the train and that lady looked like she wouldn't let me out unless I paid . . .”

“Paper money?” I interrupted, wincing.

“Uh huh.”

I took out some large denomination Deutschmark notes. “Any like these?” I asked, fanning them out like I was playing “pick a card.”

“A few,” he said in a tone of resignation.

One of the other guys snickered: “Hey Steve, I bet that lady in the men's room is already putting up a plaque over the urinal you just purchased. I can just see the shiny brass now: The Steve Lumb Memorial . . . .”.

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15.8: A SIN-BIOTIC RELATIONSHIP 12.27.2004

The Good Samaritan UrbisMedia

Whatever happened to all that stuff that Jesus used to utter about “blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:1-3 for you literalists)? To heck with “spirit,” whatever he meant by that (check out some Christian websites for some stretchy interpretations), what about just being poor? Now, Jesus did seem to care for the materially poor as well, healing lepers and others who could not get adequate health care (whatever that was) in those times, telling parables about good Samaritans. He hung out with working class fishermen and even, the Church would like us to believe, a prostitute. And, he also said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.

But this area of Christian “thought” is full of conundrums. Who the hell wants to be poor other than some deranged mendicant betting on his inheritance of the kingdom of heaven. Poverty is responsible for most wars, crimes, violence, family dissolution, sickness, depression, death – do I have to go on?—OK, then, and people without SUVs and plasma screen TVs, and other human suffering. What was Jesus thinking, anyway? Well, it's one of those goofey Christian notions perhaps best put by: if you don't have a robbed and beaten guy in the ditch, then how can the Samaritan pick his sorry butt out of the ditch and become a “good” Samaritan? What kind of a world is that? Better not to have the guy in the ditch in the first place; why does he have to get beat up some Samaritan can get his Christian “merit”?

It's the same thing with sin; no sin means no guilt, fear of hell, and such, and therefore no redemption (“The Redeemer” would be out of a job), no expensive churches, no tithing, well you get it. And so with the poor. We need them so that we can trickle a few coins in their direction—but not enough to get them out of poverty lest we upset the Samaritan ethos. [When I was in Catholic elementary school the nuns used to give us these little mite boxes to fill up with our candy money that presumably would be used to “adopt” and rescue the souls of “pagan babies” somewhere in the South Pacific. I must have at least half-dozen “Christian” babies—maybe babes by now. And I earned a lot of what the nuns called “grace.”] But I digress. The whole point is this: if you don't have poor, sick and sinful people, the rich and better off don't have a basis for earning their way into heaven through the eye of a needle.

Now don't get me wrong here. (Mom, that means you, too.) The last thing I would want to do is throw good old Christian charity out with the dirty bathwater of hypocrisy. My question is this: is this supposed to be some sort of what economists call, “equilibrium” situation? What happens if we eliminate poverty, sickness, and sin? There, will, of course, always be some of those things; but remember, they are good for the religion “business” (you can't prayer shawls, holy pictures, and indulgences to people who don't need them) and seemingly indispensable for personal redemption.

All of this might be something for your next Bible study class or when your having a beer with Billy Graham. But this is, we are told, a “Christian country,” where church pretty much has its hands in the drawers of state, so such matters as what to do about poverty, sickness, and sinfulness blur from the sacred to the secular, or vice versa, more than ever. Just how Christian is that state going to be? How beneficent should a Christian state be? How merciful? How forgiving? How worthy will the poor, sick and sinful be of Christian state Samaritanism? Will the would-be Samaritan now say: “Hey, don't bug me, I gave on April 15.” Should the unfortunate receive the ministrations of their holy government on the basis of secular rights , or sacred rectitude. Shall the poor be regarded as unworthy laggards, the sick suffering the wages of their self abuse, and the sinful needing to repent from their “chosen” ways. Now there's an “out”: you are in the mess you are in because you deserve to be that way. In other words, in a “Christian state” will the sick and the poor have to be forgiven to receive the charity of their government?

Oh Lord, if you are there, if there was ever a good reason for the separation of church and state it's that church is probably capable of a helluva lot more un-Christ-like behavior than government. Given a choice between rights and righteousness , I'll take my rights.

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15.7: AIN'T SHE SWEET 12.22.2004

Americans Abroad, No. 1

“Meestah, meestah, lady fall, . . . lady fall down! Lady not get up!”

Just what I didn't want to hear from the young Egyptian boy I hired as a “sheep dog” to keep track of the stragglers in the group I was leading.

It might be the worst nightmare for a leader of a package-tour group: a “packer” is down. Moreover, in this circumstance the temperature was 105 degrees, we were in the Temple of Karnak at Luxor, and the bus would not be back to pick us up for ninety-minutes. As I headed back toward that downed packer I muttered imprecations at the ghost of Thomas Cook, father of the package tour.

But why blame Cook? He was only responsible for bringing a lot of people to places they never would have gone to or gotten to on their own. That they might be just as careless or stupid away from home as they were at home could not be laid at his feet.

There are enough risks in foreign travel so that one doesn't have to be careless and downright stupid to end up in trouble. Strange places and modes of transport, strange food, strange viruses and bacilli, and enough hazardous conditions to make an American torts attorney run out of business cards in thirty-minutes, all call for extra caution and common sense.

Nevertheless, out of vanity, orneriness, derring-do, or just plain foolishness, travelers and tourists will often get themselves into some of the damnedest predicaments. They will sometimes throw caution to foreign winds in a way that they never would at home. In foreign travel there is a lot that can go wrong if one is even a little unlucky. Something will almost certainly go wrong if one is a little stupid.

When I arrived back near the entrance to the temple complex there was a knot of people hovering over the supine body of Joellen (not her real name). Since she was already in the shade of a colossal statue of Rameses II (his real name); all they were doing was depriving her of air. She was clammy to the touch, rather gray in complexion, and mumbling in a delirium. She looked like a statue in fresh concrete. “Heat stroke?” I suggested uselessly to those in attendance. Shrugs and silence.

I'm no medical doctor, so like any fool I tried what I had seen in movies, a little gentle face-slapping and requesting that she speak to me. If I hadn't been nervous and scared I would have laughed at myself.

There was no better place in the immediate vicinity to remove her to, a bit of good fortune in that Joellen had probably never heard the adjectives ‘dainty' or ‘petite' attached to her name.

Joellen was beginning to breathe a little erratically, which was beginning to produce the same effect in me, when my “sheep dog” came back with a French MD in tow. I moved aside, he took a quick look, felt her skin and my poor French picked up “insulin,” “ sucre,” and enough other terms to comprehend that his diagnosis was diabetes.

“Beaucoup d'eau, avec sucre, toute suite!” was the Rx, and the medecin sped off into the temple complex like a priest of Amun with the proceeds of the collection box. Maybe he forgot to renew his malpractice insurance before leaving for vacation.

The best we had was a liter of Coke. As it happened, another of our pack walked up just then, said that he, too, was diabetic, and the Coke might just do the job. Fine, except that when I poured some into Joellen's mouth she burbled it out and shook her head from side to side so I couldn't get more than a couple of drops into her. She was in and out of her delirium, but both states of consciousness refused to drink.

“Must be a Pepsi drinker,” I heard someone whisper.

The other diabetic insisted that it was imperative she drink plenty of the lukewarm beverage. But her hair and her blouse were soaked with most of it.

I could feel my frustration and anger rising. Shouldn't this woman have taken precautions for something like this? She knew what the weather was like. She knew her condition. I didn't know, because she had elected not to inform me about it. Were it not for the French doctor, we might be preparing her as the latest addition to the necropolis of the Valley of the Queens just across the river.

When the diabetic man volunteered the information that Joellen had been drinking rather heavily on the ship the evening before and wasn't at breakfast this morning, I became even angrier. I tried to get her to drink again, but again she refused. Since I never took the Hippocratic Oath, I decided that perhaps more forcefulness would be indicated by the situation. Kneeling beside her I put my mouth close to her ear and whispered in my best bedside manner: “Listen, goddammit! This liter of Coke is going into you one way or another, but it's going in because you're not going to die and fuck up this trip for a lot of people!”

To my great relief, this threat, which I had only a vague idea how I could possibly carry out, worked. She began sipping, and in a few minutes was up on her feet and obeying every time I insisted she take more fluid. We walked slowly together along the corridor of recumbent rams and among the peristyles of the enormous ancient temples. Eventually, the others slipped away to avoid being around if there happened to be a relapse. I was stuck with Joellen, but confident that my “sheep dog” would herd the group back to the appointed bus pick-up on time so that he would get his salary and tips.

An hour later we were back on the air-conditioned bus and Joellen was chattering away about some souvenirs she had purchased.

On the advice of the other diabetic, I took to carrying packets of sugar tucked into the elastic of my socks against the likelihood of another incident. I did so up until a couple of weeks later when, as our ship was anchored off the Greek Island of Mykonos, Joellen announced to me about an hour before sailing that she had met a nice young gigolo that afternoon in the town and she was going to do a “Shirley Valentine” and jump the tour. I guesss it was my responsibility as her tour escort and fellow American to dissuade her from such foolishness and perhaps even danger; but I was remiss in that duty with the rather feeble attempt I made. When she boarded the tender for shore I told her that she would no longer be my responsibility, wished her good luck and handed her a few packets of sugar. I never heard from, or about, her, again.

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15. 6: THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES 12.19.2004

I wrote earlier this month (15.3) that what the right wing calls the “heartland” of America, really isn't the heartland. And, at least in terms of security, the type of security that “homeland security” is supposed provide us, it is not the “homeland” either.

From the deck of my condo I can make out the fighter planes on two of the three aircraft carriers moored in San Diego bay. With my telescope I can see a couple of nuclear submarines half-submerged in their pens along Pont Loma. San Diego is a beautiful city, sunny and salubrious; but it might as well be renamed Sword of Damocles. That sword, you will recall, once was suspended by a single horse-hair over the head of an ancient Grecian king. San Diego is similarly imperiled, under the cross-hairs of any enemy bent on doing America great harm and diminishing its ability to avenge it.

The form and fates of cities have varied greatly over time, often as a result of the variable of ballistics. In the earliest days of cities a fence, then a wall, provided security, and, as Aristotle, among others, pointed out, people came to cities for safety and also found a better life. Stadt luft mach frei , Germans claimed in the Dark Ages, “city air makes one free.” Outside of city walls things were a lot more dicey.

To be intra muros was to be as safe as one could be for much of urban history. And within the city the safest place to be was the center; it was furthest from the walls. Remember, siege tactics soon discovered that tossing things like fire bombs, and dead animals and diseased bodies (What? You thought Saddam Hussein invented bio-warfare?) over city walls was a good tactic. Soon walls became more complicated, both defensively and offensively. Parapets and devices for repelling attacks were developed, moats were added, and as cannon became a factors, walls were designed to deflect cannon shot.

But eventually, ballistics got so good that walls were an expensive and ineffective defense. What use to build huge walls when a cannon could send shells all the way to the very center of the city. So down came the walls, many becoming ring roads, our boulevards (from bulwarks), and the new tactic was to find out from which direction your enemy was coming and go out and meet him on the field of battle and make sure his cannon could not get close enough to bombard your city. This was the tactic by the early 19 th Century. It lasted for about a century. In WWI armies were still going out and slaughtering one another in the countryside. Cities were relatively safe once again, and the centers the safest.

By WWII that all changed thanks to the Wright Brothers and Werner von Braun. An aerial photo of German and Japanese cities after WWII makes the point better than I ever could. After WWII the British determined to spread their cities out and America came up with the National Defense Highway Program based on the silly idea that when the enemy came calling with their newfound ICBMs we could just get in our SUVs and head for the countryside (oops, Heartland).

But such ballistics are expensive and tricky to deploy, so not every enemy can readily have them. One enemy figured a way to employ makeshift ballistics from their enemy's own commercial airplanes. Even more difficult for cities to defend against was the emergence of a new and dreaded tactical weapon in the arsenal of some combatants—the human bomb.

Now, even the most powerful nation on the earth cannot build walls high enough, fast enough, or long enough, to defend its “homeland,” to secure its cities. It may go to meet its enemy in the fields, but his fields are far flung, mobile and protean. It may go to vanquish his enemy's cities, but this will only make new enemies with a resolve to infiltrate our cities, the symbols, as well as the engines of our economic and military power. The enemy knows that every resource that is spent on bombing and occupying his cities weaken the defense of his enemy.

And so I sit on my deck, watching the harbor, wondering. I speculate on the various ways by which a determined enemy might penetrate our flimsy defenses. A tanker or a container ship slips slowly by and it seems it would be so easy for a dirty bomb to be detonated that would kill tens of thousands of military and civilians. I ponder on the fact that what is called Homeland Security is a joke. We have fewer first responders than we did before 9-11, our ports and border are sieves, our airport security can be breached by high school pranksters, we don't have enough hospital beds, medicines, vaccines, and if we had to evacuate any of our major cities in a hurry the crumpling of fenders would be heard in Baghdad. It's almost enough to make a guy head for the “heartland.” Almost.

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15. 5: And God sat in the Heavens, wondering Who made Him 12.15.2004

Here we go again. From Acquinas, to the Scopes monkey trial, to creationism to the latest Right Wing Trojan Horse from the people who brought you “partial birth abortion.” “Intelligent Design.” Yup, “creationism” just would not fly as “science” in front of the courts, so the dunces are back with something that sounds scientific. The irony of this term, which is to be offered in our schools as an alternative theory to evolution, relies not on intelligence, but stupidity. If school boards are stupid enough to adopt it, and courts stupid enough to give it a constitutional pass, then our kids can be made more stupid by being fed religious poppycock as science.

But the people behind this backdoor foray into science classrooms are not that stupid. They wrap the project in the notion of “objectivity,” for example. ID is no longer God, the Creator, but now some vague “intelligence” behind creation, some teleological “author”. ID says we should welcome “controversy” as good for science, as though the truly scientific approach does not invite, and thrive on, constant challenge to prevailing theories. What ID proponents are doing is saying there needs to be an “alternative” to evolution theory, although it is incapable of providing any evidence that meets the cannons of scientific analysis. So the debate becomes not one about scientific evidence, but about rhetorical devices. Evolution becomes associated with “naturalism,” contraposed to “spiritualism.” Naturalism become to science what liberalism is to politics.

Unable to tear down the compelling evidence of evolution the ID proponents push the debate into the realm of language. As we know from “Pro Life” the appropriation of language is a major feature of the tactics of the religious right. So the first sortie into the case for getting ID into school curricula is to pose evolution as academically imperialistic, unwilling to allow its tenets to be examined and debated. This is spurious and untrue, but in the age of sound-bites it can be effective. So books such as “The Wedge of Truth,” and videos like “I was a Teenage Darwinist,” become the equivalent of Christian rock music.

One wonders, if ID were admitted to the scrutiny if scientific debate whether other “alternatives” to its view of creation would in turn be admitted, that infer “intelligent design.”. How about the credibility of Narreau the Elder, the Polynesian deity who created everything from “nothing”; or the Australian aborigine “Rainbow Snake” whose serpentine movements created the river beds and mountains, and who spit water that gave life to the land; or Nyame, the sky god of West Africa, who made a trapdoor in the sky from which he placed thing on earth; or Ra and Sekhmet of Egypt, and Nut, the sky goddess, who is the night sky; or Marduk of Mesopotamia, or Odin of Scandinavia, and the pantheon of India. They all have their pre-paleontological stories (theories?) of the intelligent design of the universe. Somehow I think they are going to be trumped by good old Genesis.

Interestingly, ID comes onto the separation of church and state battlefield at the same time as another piece of tricky backdoor legislation. Ant-Abortionists in Congress are pushing a law that would “protect” doctors in hospitals from being “forced” to perform abortions with the threat of being fired. OK, so lets also have a law to protect science teachers from being fired for refusing to teach the Bible as science.

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15. 4: THE PASSION OF THE MEL 12.13.2004

UrbisMedia

Given the shelf life of American popular culture it's unfashionable to discuss a movie after it has been released into DVD, but I just got my first look beyond a trailer, at Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ . I decided to wait until the DVD release so that I rent it from Netflix and watch it at home rather than in a theater full of born-again Christians. Now I'm still trying to wipe the blood off my television set (gives plasma TV another layer of meaning). I suspect that a lot of “born-agains” will be finding the DVD in their stockings “hung by the chimney with care.”

As I was reading the reminder that it was only for home viewing I was reminded of a story of when Oscar Wilde was taking his exams at Oxford (or was it Cambridge?). In any case it was an oral exam, in Greek, and the passage he was given to translate into (or was it from?) the language that gave Christ his name, was the “passion of Christ.” (Not the Christ, as Mr. Gibson likes to stress the Messianic.) The story goes that Wilde was so proficient at Greek that the committee said they heard enough before the story got out of the garden of Gesthemane. But Wilde asked if he could continue translating for a while longer. The committee consented to this, but stopped him again, somewhere around the scourging of Christ, and told that it was more than sufficient. He asked again if he could continue, but was told he could not. At which Wilde said in a disappointed tone: “I did so want to know how things turned out.”

Gibson is clearly terrified that if we aren't convinced that Jesus suffered the worst death of any human being before or since we will not believe that he was supposed to be dying for our sins. And so we get a movie that would better have been titled Beating the Bejeezus Out of Jesus , a self-defeating project of gallons of theatre blood and gore that goes on, and on, and on, for two hours, until we realize that we are being punished for Mel's sins. Worse still, it is hackneyed and hokey filmmaking. Everybody, of course, looks like what they are supposed to look like, a tall and handsome Christ, sneering Pharisees, Roman soldiers who could double as Soprano thugs, Mary and Mary Magdalene are decked out as nuns, and then there is the Devil (how did he get in this thing?), who looks like Boy George with his shaved eyebrows. The dialogue is in Aramaic (or was it Urdu? Who can tell?) and Latin, of which I caught a couple of words and phrases because it was pronounced like, well, Aramaic. In any case it's a blessing, since having to read the subtitles does divert the eye from the carnage.

Since we know Jerusalem as a rather crumbly ancient city Gibson apparently figured it looked that way in Christ's time as well. A little anachronism is acceptable, I guess, as artistic license. But when the high priests tossed Judas a purse of thirty pieces of silver, did the purse actually float through the air in slow motion? Subtlety is not Mel forte, and he really likes to overcrank that camera; we get Christ being flailed in slo-mo, falling a good half dozen times in slo-mo (dust and pieces of flesh flying about in slo-mo), the pounding of nails in slo-mo, sometimes we get some subjective camera, some ground level angles, some overheads, bust mostly slo-mo, lots of slo-mo. We actually end up wishing for the ending we all know is coming (but when, we are stuck in slo-mo!?). By the time Caviezel (Christ) gets to the mount he looks so much like raw hamburger they might be having a barbeque rather than a crucifixion.

Christ finally, and mercifully, succumbs, the skies darken, the Temple starts crumbling, even the Devil, who showed up at the crucifixion with an grotesque little kid left over from a David Lynch film, is thrown back into Hell. We get a closing shot of a naked and unmarked Christ walking out of his tomb, and that's it. The passion of the Mel is over and his sins are expunged.

Well, not do fast there, centurion. There's the controversy over Gibson's portrayal of the Jews as Christ-killers (once again). The Romans get off easy, as either the reluctant Pilate, or the brutal buffoons who do the dirty work for the Jews. There's enough of it to confirm for his prime audience that Christ really wasn't a Jew, he was the Christ, and those Jews preferred Barabbas, who looks like a drooling, snaggled-toothed madman, to the Christ.

People flocked to the theaters to see Gibson's film. He made millions and will make more on the DVD, which many churches are buying in lots for the faithful. But I have to wonder how many people are going to say for the second, third or fourth time: “Hey, let's make some popcorn, slip into our jammies, turn on the DVD player, and watch Roman soldiers beat the bejeezus out of the Christ for a couple of hours. If you're one those masochists, you might want to invite Oscar Wilde over. But don't spoil it by telling him how its ends.

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15. 3: HEARTLAND AND HOMELAND 12.11.2004

In the post election mortem there has emerged a lot of the stuff that falls out of the back ends of bulls about the “heartland” of America. The reference—and this comes from both parties—is to the “center” of the country, the part that these days that is colored red. An aspect of this is the residue of good old-fashioned American “regionalism.” Regionalism was that notion, expressed in paintings and novels in the early decades of the past century, when cities had overtaken the countryside both demographically and economically. It alleged that the true spirit of American, the “heartland,” was in the small towns and rural areas. This might be expected in a nation one of whose founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, said that “great cities are a sore upon the body politic.” The myth of the yeoman farmer and small town American remains alive and well, and is retained as a location where those “moral values” are rooted deep in the soil and preached from white clapboard churches. The “real” America, the heartland regionalists contend, is not in those multicultural, multi-colored, multi-sexual, cities.

Red-state-heartland politics, which are basically George Bush-religious right politics, draw great strength from this myth. It is a place of “straight talk,” “staying the course” no matter what, a countervail to moral relativity of those elitist bastards in big coastal cities, and their dirty movies, their Internet, and their same-sex marriages. It is a place that can produce good, patriotic boys and girls to go and kill whomever their commander–in-chief says are terrorists. And so the myth gains strength as a moral stronghold, the place to go and find America when it seems to have lost its bearings.

It should be said that there are a lot of “pink” and “purple” people in America's heartlands. In the political spectrum “pinkies” are those who have enough reality in their lives to know that the heartland is a myth, but will not or cannot part with it because they have nowhere else to go, physically, morally, or politically. “Purple people” have already “gone” somewhere, usually to one of the major cities in the “heartland,” first to work in a factory, and these days, more and more as their jobs are out-sourced, to be a Wal Mart drone with a plastic “howdy” smile. For them the farm or the little shop or a business in a small town are long gone. They know they just might need unions, public assistance, government-supported health care, and a lot of other stuff that doesn't fit the myth of the self-reliant heartlander. It's the mixture of red and blue that make a “purple” person, often with red “moral values” and blue political leanings. Purple people occupied the no-man's land that was the prime battleground, and most of them voted their red values instead of their best interests.

But what is this “heartland”? Yes, it is first of all the region that produces most of our foodstuff and other natural resources. But these days that is produced predominantly by big corporate agribusinesses, not family farmers, and oil, gas and coal are produced by similar corporations. The fact is that mythical heartland America is an economic drag. Most every red state is a fiscal welfare recipient that receives much more in Federal revenue than it contributes in taxes and agriculture is the biggest hog at the trough. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal dollars and pay the least in taxes are red. Eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most are blue. So much for self-reliance. And as to family values? Massachusetts, the capital of gay marriage, has the lowest divorce rate. Nine of the ten lowest divorce rates are blue states, most in the Northeast. The people that end up paying for the price supports, the welfare, the farms loans, the disaster relief, and the rest that goes to red states are taxpayers in blue states.

Now the Bush administration, bent on paying off its faithful red voters, wants to soak the blue states more. In the guise of overhauling the tax code, one of his campaign promises, Bush is floating the proposal that would kill the deduction for state and local taxes. Dropping this deduction from Federal taxes would fall much harder on citizens of blues states such as New York and California, which have state income taxes (9.3% and 6.5%, respectively, than on states like Texas and Florida, which have no state income taxes at all. Hey, and if they can keep those homosexuals from marrying, then their estates can go to the red states as well.

Heartland? What heartland? America's heartland has been in its cities and on its Northeast and Western coasts since the 1920s, and anybody who takes an de-mythologized look and the economic, social and intellectual progress of America will be able to see that. Bush's “heartland” has been more like a third world backwater living off its urban relatives and exculpating itself of biting the hand that feeds it with its, former slave-owning, backward, Bible-thumping morality. What a waste that a half-million people had to die ton keep these states, and the likes of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott, in the Union. What were we thinking? [Next, the Homeland]

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15. 2: Hi, I'm Jim's Suitcase 12.08.2004

Is it possible that luggage can have feelings? At least one suitcase does; one that has accumulated some “psychological baggage” along with a lot of dents, scrapes and frequent flyer miles.

Illustration by Peter Horjus

Here I go again. I've been recuperating in the back of his closet for the past few months, but I know what it means when I'm hauled out and tossed on his bed. As usual I'm surrounded by enough clothes and lord-know-what-else, to choke a cubic-yard steamer trunk.

What jammed baggage compartments await me, what brutal hairy arms will gleefully fling me about; what baggage carrousels will gouge my finish, and try to break off my wheels? For me all travel is adventure travel.

Hi, I'm Jim's suitcase. If you're not completely put off by the idea of reading a memoir by a piece of luggage you might end up having a different, and hopefully more sympathetic, relationship with your own suitcase.

To my knowledge no suitcase has ever written a memoir before. I've hauled a lot of books for this guy, but not a single one written by, or even about a suitcase. Hopefully this one will be found and published before I end up in a landfill, or a flea market in Ho Chin Minh City.

I'm not exaggerating. Being an international suitcase is not without its dangers. A garment bag I was talking to at Charles De Gaulle airport told me about a friend who was left for just two minutes on a luggage cart while her owner visited the restroom. She was snatched up and taken out to an open field, dropped in a sandbag-bunker and blown up before the owner had finished her business. Most people don't consider what we go through: we are x-rayed until we glow in the dark, aerosol cans explode in our stomachs, dogs sniff us for drugs, and homeland security inspectors rummage through us looking for everything from undeclared purchases to pornography. A suitcase gets little respect and a lot of suspicion.

Maybe it's news to you that a suitcase can have feelings. Well, I do. But sometimes I wish I didn't, especially when I think about Valisa. Hardly a day goes by when I don't recollect that last glimpse of her paisley cloth siding as she rode around that carrousel at JFK with more beauty and grace than any lovely bit of luggage I had ever met before.

Valisa belonged to Tammara, a very attractive ‘non-luggage' with legs that went all the way down to the floor and a credit limit that went all the way up into the stratosphere. In fact, that's how Valisa came into my life. By the time Jim's group had arrived in Rome Tammara had already expanded her luggage from two to four pieces, and two carry-ons.

Valisa was Italian. Tammara bought her on the via Tournabouni in Florence, right next to the shop where she bought two leather jackets. Needless to say this impressed yours truly, who hails from a lowly discount store in San Diego. Valisa had style, Italian style.

I first saw her when Tammara pulled her down from the luggage rack on the train from Florence to Rome and opened her up to put on a fashion shown of purchases befitting some aristocrat's Grand Tour. Dresses, shoes, slacks and accessories, in addition to several leather jackets filled the compartment like spring-worms from some joke box. There had to be a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff in Valisa alone, and there were three other suitcases! Everybody who crowded into the compartment was impressed with Tammara's purchases; but I couldn't take my eyes off Valisa. We spent that night together in the same luggage rack, the beginning of a too-brief, and star-crossed romance.

I nearly lost Valisa a couple of times before we arrived back in New York. She was left on the platform of the train station at Dover during a confused and hurried transfer from the Channel ferry, put in “Left Luggage” by a porter and not discovered for two days before she was sent up to London. Poor Valisa, she must have been terrified.

She was found just hours before our flight back to New York. Our last night together, after a whirlwind European romance worthy of a Harlequin paperback, was in the luggage bay of a 747. It was the only time I didn't want a flight to end.

Valisa was about twenty suitcases ahead of me on the baggage carrousel at JFK, my view partly obscured by some golfclubs and that foul-smelling monster-sized duffel with moldy laundry that flew back with us. I could see her designer tags and the orange yarn pompom Tammara had affixed to her handle. Then she turned round the bend on the carousel and was gone . . . forever.

Nobody knows what happened to her. I heard Jim on the phone a few days later when one of the group called to say that three of Tammara's four suitcases had been kidnapped. Valisa was one of them. There was speculation about baggage handlers, terrorists, or thieves that use leather-jacket sniffing dogs.

Now I never see a paisley-cloth soft-sider that I don't get choked up.

It was the loss of Valisa, in fact, that encouraged me to start my memoirs. I needed something to distract me from thinking about her during the long days in the closet between Jim's travels. But first I needed to know more about my roots before I could write about my globetrotting experiences.

Luggage hasn't exactly been a popular topic among the literati but I did learn that we have a longer history than you would think. Did you know that the Roman name for us was “impedimenta”? Not exactly a kindly term, but it doesn't require any translation. Well, I'm not so crazy about the Romans either; it was probably them that invented the concept of excess baggage. I figure that it was their legions—like the legions of tourist-shoppers of today—that brought along extra luggage to carry home their plunder. The Romans went all over the known world overstuffing their luggage with plunder. We “impedimenta” call it the “ Packs Romana”.

Thanks to the Romans, luggage never seemed to get over being regarded as ‘impediments' to travel. Rather than being regarded as indispensable to travel, as the ones who do all the dirty work of carrying clothing, toiletries, and things that suitcases were never designed to carry, we are blamed for wrinkling clothing, breaking things, and not adequately concealing some little bit of contraband. We are the ones who are “overweight”; we are the ones who are “excess”, but have you ever taken a good look at some of the people we work for?

Well now it can be told. Most people think that luggage gets lost because it's improperly tagged, or baggage-handlers mess up. But the great unspoken secret amongst luggage is that some suitcases are so abused, so unappreciated, so-overstuffed, that they actually mis-route themselves by exchanging baggage tags, or jumping conveyor belts. Some suitcases will go anywhere before going back home for further mistreatment. And, it has to be admitted, some of them take a perverse delight in knowing that their owners are fretting over their lost souvenirs and shopping plunder.

Not me, I've been a faithful workhorse for Jim even though he should have put me out to pasture years ago. I've got more air miles on me than a DC3 from Aero Banana Republica. I've also been in the bowels of enough ships, and the baggage cars of enough trains, to satisfy the wanderlust of a matched set of a dozen pieces of luggage. And I would be retired if Jim didn't have his quirky little obsession with seeing how long he can keep traveling with the same suitcase.

Let me explain. The first trip I made with him after he purchased me was to Israel. Except I got stuck in Frankfurt because our flight was late and I didn't make the connection. So I spent two days in a pressure chamber at the airport just so they could make sure I wasn't carrying a bomb! What a welcome to the fun world of foreign travel. Then my locks were forced and I was searched when I finally got to Israel. I felt so violated.

Since then I've had three wheels and one hinge replaced. My retractable handle was sprained so badly in Spain it wouldn't retract. I've had more dents and cracks repaired by the airlines than I can count, and Jim even repaired one by screwing a six-inch metal plate over a split and spray painted it with the wrong color. He has also bolted a fitting on me for the padlock he uses in place of my broken regular locks. As if anyone would think there is anything of value in a suitcase so covered with torn and shredded hotel, airline, and security check stickers that it looks mummified.

So here I go again. Jim can't use that snobby little roll-aboard I have to share the closet with because it's too small for this trip. At least I won't have to listen to it gloating about the time it flew to London in the overhead bin in “business class”.

Me? I'll be down there in the baggage bay, cramped and shivering, doing the unappreciated, but indispensable, work of an aging “impedimenta”. I checked my baggage tags; we're off to Singapore this trip. Long ride, so I'll have time to make some notes for my memoirs, . . . after I take a look around to see if, just maybe, there happens to be an Italian paisley-cloth soft-sider aboard.

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15. 1: US AND THEM 12.2.2004

The simple, make that simplistic, logic of George Bush's bifurcation of the world into the good and the evil and its correlative those who are “with us or agin us” played well enough on the paranoid fifty percent and a thin fraction of the American public to be regarded by him as a “mandate.” After all, when you lost the popular vote last time, and (presumably) won it by a couple million this time, that looks like a “landslide” to a fool.

Not only that, but a fool is incapable of discerning that his logic just might be self-fulfilling. The world wasn't nearly as divided between the “us” and the “them” until Bush began his “preemptive” (preempting what?) war on Iraq. See, he concluded, they don't like us, and a lot of the other countries we thought were our friends (and who speak French and German), are in league with them. We are isolated and beleaguered; perfect for feeding the paranoia. What the world hates, of course, is not America; they hate George W. Bush and his foreign policies. (Red-staters need to re-read this paragraph twice, no, three times.) Bush deflects that conclusion with his infamous nonsensical phrase “they hate our freedom.” Is Abu Ghraib, trying to install Ahmed Chalabi ,and flattening Fallujah and innocent citizens, respect for their freedom?

In fact, “our freedom” might be being eroded. The third brick in Bush's syllogism is being put in place: the world is us (good) and them (evil) /your government is “us”/ergo, if you criticize your government, you must be with “them.” It's a short leap to the conclusion that “homeland security” therefore means “protecting” our freedom not just from the enemy without, but the enemy within.

We've seen this sort of thing before, being played out over the strains of the Horst Wessel Song, the strictures of the Treaty of Versailles, and the tinkling of Kristallnacht. We're not likely to see the FBI wearing Gestapo leather coats, or Bush's ranch re-named “Bushdesgarten,” or the Dixie Chicks forced to play oompah music, even with a national media that has been neutered by charges of “liberal bias”. It will be more insidious. American citizens have already been held without charges or rights because they have been considered possible “enemy agents or combatants.” The Patriot Act has been expanded to allow more snooping, and the FBI and some local law enforcement have apparently engaged in intimidation of anti-war and environmental organizations. Red-staters remain unconcerned about such matters since they never see anti-war signs at NASCAR and Monster Truck events.

No, the “them within” probably need not worry about being shipped off to Guantanamo, or a refurbished Manzanar; the methods will deal more with control than with such expensive measures. Intimidation works best in that regard; let people be frightened enough to restrain themselves and they won't have to be put in restraints. It's working with the mainstream press, and even with NPR. Judges will be appointed who have to pass a “conservative” litmus test (notice how Arlen Spector was intimidated by having to defend himself against charges that he used a “litmus test”); school children psychological testing without parental consent may be added to legislation; pressure is already being put on Hollywood, which is considered as a prime “enemy within” in the culture war, and of course; the erosion of women's rights to control their own bodies and not be rrequired to wear wear “big hair” will be nibbled away.

This all sounds like I have developed my own case of paranoia. Not yet. But that's the point! They final step in the process is for the victims to dismiss their concerns as just that, their own paranoia. That's when they really have you under control. Caligula knew that, Hitler knew that, Pol Pot knew that, Mao knew that, and yes, Saddam knew that. Does Bush know that? Well, if he does, not in quite the same way. But if he does, he is not a fool, but an evil genius. The evil geniuses could also be those who surround him. He is installed for a second term, a “lame duck” who will not be encumbered by a concern for re-election and can let it all hang out. Some have speculated that this might result in a more reasonable George W. Bush, if in fact he was only “playing” with some of his key constituencies, e.g. the religious right, and will not favor their cultural war as he did in his first term.

Wishful thinking, that is. He has kept all the neo-cons in his administration, the moderates are out, and he had secured their posts with obsequious replacements, especially the incompetent Ms Rice. We thought Mr. Bush might have done enough to hang himself by last November 2. He did, but he didn't swing. Now we may know what the logic of the terrorists really is: get those Americans to destroy themselves—“us” becomes “them.” Osama knows that.

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