Volume 29

FEBRUARY 2006

29. 8: A BEEMER BY ANY NAME 2.23.2006

I drive a BMW. It's the best damn car I ever owned. [1] I bought it because it combines Italian design and German engineering; not because of the time when I placed my keys once on the counter of the café I frequent and the comely lass barista said “Oh, you have a ‘beemer'” with an intonation that implied she would jump in the back seat with me for a little roll in the leather as soon as finished my doppio macciato con Viagra. Beemers can produce that sort of anticipation.

Imagine my astonishment when I read in the International Herald Tribune that China will soon be producing beemers. China! Beemers! Made in China! The article said “ In the latest sign of China's manufacturing ambitions, a major Chinese company, hand-in-hand with the Communist Party, is bidding to buy a car engine plant in Brazil from DaimlerChrysler and BMW.” They plan to disassemble the plant and reassemble it in Chongqing. In no time at all they will be shipping the shiny new B ao M ing W u 325s down the Yangtse to Wal Marts all over the world. My horribly inaccurate translation for the name of this new BMW would be The Fighting Silver Dumpling, but given the alternate translations that Chinese words can have, Bao Ming Wu could also mean Your sister needs breast implants , or Summer clouds sing of thy beauty. [2]

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not bashing the Chinese about this. They can build cars. A couple of years ago I was giving some lectures at universities in Beijing. I was provided a driver, an interpreter, and a Jeep Cherokee. The Jeep was made in a plant just outside Beijing; you couldn't tell the difference between it and one made in the USA. They make Buicks in Shanghai, too. These people are ready to claim their century. They're about ready to be the world's third largest economy and they aren't going to sit in their richshaws and let history record them as the people who invented paper, fireworks, and moo goo gai pan . We can't blame them for really taking anything away from us because this is obviously a case of tri-fold outsourcing. Ask yourself, what the hell was a venerable German car company doing being teamed up with an American company that used to make a piece of crud called the K Car and having its engines manufactured in Brazil. It probably was just China's turn.

I don't mind as long as that Italian design and German engineering don't get dropped in the Pacific off the coast of Taiwan. My beemer is over a decade old, still looks more in style than most cars on the road, and everything still works. Take the security system, for example. You put your own code in with a four-button panel. If a thief tries to start your car it won't start and, after three tries, the horn (this is no prissy Japanese car horn, either) goes off for 30 seconds and a Wermacht infantry division shows up and arrests the thief. OK, I'm just kidding about that last part. But the system will also not let someone break a window, and if you even lean on the car, and happen to be Polish, the alarm goes off again. (Just kidding about the Polish; no nasty emails please, Wadislav). [3]

So, will the Chinese keep this intricate and exquisite BMW engineering? I wonder. Remember, they have been making plastic toys that end up in landfills in less than a year. No, I think that the Fighting Silver Dumplings might exhibit what Deng Xiao Peng might have called “German engineering with Asian characteristics.” Remember, the most salient thing one notices about the Chinese is that . . . well I have to say it . . . they're always eating. The Germans don't put stuff like trays and cup holders in their cars; Europeans in general don't care to eat in their cars. So the Chinese are likely to go to school on the Americans. No Chinese wants to be stuck in traffic for more than 30 minutes (roughly the interval between the 14 meals in a Chinese day). [4] There will definitely be a fold-out dim sum tray reachable from the driver's seat. The tea jar holder will be standard equipment (that's the pickle jar with the floating tealeaves and the screw-on top), but a steam kettle plug will be optional. That's enough distractions to make any Chinese driver even more dangerous, so the GPS system will not be available, but replaced with a one cubic-foot ash tray.

I anticipate a 2007 roll out on the 325e Special Egg Roll Edition, with the new rice cooker (noodle cooker for the northern edition) in what used to be the glove box. The Wu Series, and Qi Series are sure to follow with such features as the “lazy susan” table so passengers can share dishes. And, there will be a standard “one-child only” safety seat.

I'm betting that the Bao Ming Wu will be a big hit with Chinese girls, too. I can't wait to saunter into a Starbuck's in Nanjing Road, drop my beemer keys on the counter and order a Mocha Valencia. That pretty little barista will spot them and look up at me with eyes brimming with desire and say “ Nihao , tai Meiguoren guy , I see that you drive a Fighting Silver Dumpling .”

“I sure do, little Lotus Flower. And it's the one with the new Peiking Duck Roaster, too,” I'll reply, as her delicate little hand fondles the key to pleasurable East-West relations.

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[1] And I was born in WWII and from the newsreels and grew up with the false notion that all Germans were Nazis. Anyway, if NASA could hire Werner von Braun to build them a rocket I was entitled to own a German car if I wanted. My first one was a 1963 VW Beetle, and then I had a Vanagon. I wish I still had them both.

[2] If hitting a baseball is all in the way you “break” your wrists, the right meaning in Chinese is all in the way you pronate your tongue.

[3] I've screwed up a couple of times and forgot my code, and here is where German engineering can be a touch over-engineered. After the horn blows for 30 seconds you have to disconnect the battery, wait 5 minutes for the computer to reset, then re-connect the battery (the horn blows again for 30 seconds) and then you wait for 15 minutes for the computer to count down to where it says “input code”. That done, you can enter a new code and drive off to the relief of people within a half-mile radius. If you screw up that procedure at any point you have to call a guy named Gunter in Munich who will give you a completely different procedure in German. OK, I'm only kidding about the Gunter part to show that I can pick on Germans, too.

[4] And stuck in traffic is what they are going to get. Beijing just opened its 5 th ring highway when I was there last. It looked like it had been there for ten years. The traffic was already close to LA levels and they still have 1, 327, 657, 228 people who want cars.

29. 7: WE'RE SOOOOO SOOOORRY 2.20.2006

Iraq deployed US 82 nd Armored Division in a collective weep-in

It has lately come to the attention of DCJournal that Iraq “Insurgents” have hacked into the computers of US soldiers and installed a virus that defaults their web browsers to Dragon City Journal . Bush administration authorities report that some of the things that have been said in DCJournal pages about the American Military's Commander-in-Chief and his war, have “saddened the troops” and given “aid and comfort to the enemy.” DCJournal's staff of writers and graphic artists is greatly disturbed (don't stop at greatly disturbed, keep reading) to learn of this. So there are some things DCJournal wishes to go on record to set things straight.

We have checked with the Pentagon and it seems that the entire 82 nd Armored Division was sobbing their hearts out at some things we said about George Bush being “an inarticulate idiot.” We are not sure that the reason for their lacrimations is not attributable to the fact that they have learned from DCJournal they might lose their lives because their Commander-in-Chief actually is an inarticulate idiot, or because DCJournal said it. If they did know it already, we apologize for reminding them. To each and every soldier DCJournal wishes to say that we really feel that you would start to feel happy again if they would just stop crying and come home. At least give it a try.

We also apologize for the 2 nd Infantry Battalion being placed on anti-depressant drugs because of remarks we have made about Donald Rumsfeld having “horseshit for brains” (but at least we restrained ourselves about what comes out of his mouth). We probably were mistaken in that your depression might have come from having your tours extended, your benefits cut, and having to fight without flack vests and proper armor. DCJournal will take the blame for you depression, but refuses to pay for the anti-depressants as long as they are part of Mr. Bush's Big Pharm Prescription plan. We think you'll feel better the sooner you get home. How about tomorrow.

And while we're at it, we need to deal with the “aid and comfort to the enemy” thing. Yes, we admit to it; we have given the appropriate enemy “aid and comfort.” First of all, “the aid”; we admit that we did send some aid to Al Qaeda. Actually, we came buy an unused supply of the Kool Aid that the Rev. Jim Jones once distributed to his congregation. DCJournal shipped this concoction to AQ to cool their parched throats from sitting in those mountain caves so long.

We also confess to providing “comfort” to Osama bin Laden. DCJournal learned some time ago that Osama suffers from painful hemorrhoids (too much squatting on cold rocks in mountain caves), and so we thought it the humanitarian thing to do to send him some soothing suppositories with a note in Arabic about how to “shove” (Arabic has no equivalent word for “insert”) them. But we hasten to add that DCJournal did not indicate that the suppositories do not have FDA approval because medical trials have shown that they can cause a fatal case of nine days of projectile diarrhea (higher incidence is tall terrorists). We find that image very “comforting.”

This concludes our current apologies to those whom we have been told we have offended. If you approve of Bush's war and have not been offended by anything DCJournal has written or graphically depicted please try to be more sensitive because being inoffensive “saddens” us. If that does not give you “aid and comfort” we still have some of those suppositories.

With all due respect,

The DCJ staff

This, just in: A photo of Osama bin Laden's private out-house in the Afgahn mountains. Reports are that bin Laden entered eleven days ago and has not emerged. Al Qaeda body guards would only say “Phew” (same in Arabic as in English) when Dragon City Journal correspondent, Ba Feng Gu, inquired about the terrorist's intestinal distress.

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29. 6: WHO'S NO. 1, BABY! 2.17.2006

In America around this time it's “No. 1 Season.” The Golden Globes, the Grammys, the Miss America Pageant, the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, the Winter Olympics, and the NCAA “March Madness” is just around the corner. We have some internal need, or capitalism promotes some extra motive for profit, in winnowing down various aspects of human activity into a pyramid of “excellence.” We can sell a lot of beer, trucks, sports paraphernalia and other crap, and movie tickets, CDs and facial creams, Viagra and breast implants. And we love awards; somebody always has to be “the best,” “No. 1.”

There's must be something primal in all this. There must have been some Cro Magnon named Narg who said “let's see who can throw his spear the farthest, and he will be Champion Spear Thrower, get the best pieces of mastodon meat and mate with our new Miss Troglodyte, who has the biggest things we don't have a name for yet. Then we will go and kick the crap out of those Neanderthals to see who are the Evolutionary Champs of 53,874 BC.” Only humans seem so obsessed with this; maybe because other animals don't have bars to go to and brag in.

On the other hand, this may square up with what seems to be another human compulsion: to put a bet down on who is going to be “best actor,” “Miss America,” “Super Bowl Champs,” or whatever. You can get a bet down on anything: which quarterback will have the most interceptions, or whether Miss Arkansas really gave Bill Clinton a you-know-what. [1] You name it, somebody will take your money and give you odds. That way, not only can the athletes, actors, and meat-rack-beauty-show babes compete to be winners, but the compulsive gambler gets to be a vicarious winner (and more often loser) in our obsessive competitions to get to “the best of the best.”

Then again, the Intelligent Designer may have had some ineluctable purpose in al this “competition.” We could see this as some built in “striving for excellence, that improves the species, weeds out the “losers”. The “winners” not only get to stand on the podium and listen to the Grammy winner do an over-the-top screech of the national anthem for them, they get money, fame, and presumably get to mate with some other champion. Just think of the evolutionary leaps that are made when NASCAR Champion procreates with the winner of the National Spelling Bee; Miss America bearing the children of a Bulgarian weightlifting champion; a Nobel Laureate in Physics inseminating a country and western Grammy winner. Maybe this is how the Intelligent Designer “evolves” guests for the Jerry Springer show.

But as long as we are obsessed with Championships and “Best” awards, why not let everybody in on it. Why should it be only the athletes who get to hold up their No. 1 finger, the actors who get to hold their awards and thank their parents, and NASCAR drivers thank their “personal Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” Let's let some “just plain folks” in on it. For example, just randomly:

Best Cable Installer in a Mid-Sized City who really shows up between 7AM

and 9PM

Best Japanese Gardiner For a An Overcompensated CEO for a Pharmaceutical Company

Best Accountant for a National Corporation Who does not Cook the Books to Screw Little Old Widows and Entire States (Championship yet unfilled)

Best Carpet Cleaner Who Does not Soak You And Your Carpets

Best Pulp Fiction by an Obese Harlequin Romance Writer from a Suburb of Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Best torturer of Iraqi detainees using car battery/attack dogs/broomstick.

Well, one could go on, but why not Best Scientist to Cure Cancer; Best Doctor to got to war torn and disease-ridden countries to save lives; Best Teacher who works for crummy pay to help children with learning disabilities; Best Social Worker, Best Nurse, Best Coast Guardsman, Cop, Fireman, in short, Best people who are unsung but really matter in the social infrastructure of society.

Oh, I almost forgot: Best President for Taking the Most Vacation Time to Clear Freakin' Brush on His Ranch

See, in America, anybody, even a real loser , can be a winner, a champ, and be No. 1, Baby!

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[1] It will take you thirty years to collect on this one because the Republicans will open a commission of inquiry for post-presidential impeachment proceedings that will spend eighty-million dollars of the publics money.

29. 5: THE AMERICA THAT COULD HAVE BEEN 2.14.2006

Back in the Spring of 1979 I was on the roof of a pensione in Sorrento, Italy, looking east as the sun played in the waters of the Bay of Naples and gilded the cone of Vesuvius. I was sneaking a cigarette because my wife and daughters, down below in our room, were on a crusade to get me to quit.

As it happened there was another man on the roof also having a smoke. He was a German and probably twenty-five years older than me, and we fell into conversation. He learned his first English words and phrases, which were now quite good, when he surrendered to American forces near the end of WWII. He felt fortunate not to have had to surrender to the Russians for reasons that needed no elaboration. In the six months he spent in the POW camp he learned rudimentary English and began an affection for Americans. That affection grew when, later, the Marshall Plan helped him revive the family micro brewery. Now he was near retirement, which he could enjoy in traveling to places like Italy.

Listening to that German praise my country I felt very proud that day to be an American, to be liked and respected just because I was an American, to be told by a former enemy that I came from a great and wise country. I had occasion, on making the acquaintance of many other foreigners in the twenty-five years I spent escorting tours of Americans and on my other travels, to feel proud to be an American. I never needed nor did put a bumper sticker on my car saying so, but I often wore and American flag pin when I was abroad. Cab drivers, waiters, hotel people, people from all walks of life said good things about America to me, and yes, several would smile, thrust a thumbs-up and say “ Cleentone , like Cleentone , good man.”

Those days are gone. The American reputation abroad plummeted as fast and deep as did the twin towers on 911. For a brief period there was a wave of sympathy for Americans as many nations condoled with us and offered their support. That was all spent and dissipated with the clumsy, misguided preemptive war on Iraq, the foolish xenophobic lashing out at immigrants and guests, and the sheer swaggering arrogance of defining a world that was either “with us or against us.”

We are the richest, most powerful nation in the world, and we have come to use our wealth for bribery and our power to bully. We have refused to see that our past policies and alliances bear some of the blame for the attitudes that have been expressed in terror, refused to see issues in other than black and white, good and evil, with us or against us. Nothing justifies terror, but something causes it, and while it might need to be dealt with harsh measures, those measures should be carefully and appropriately focused lest they come to be a terror themselves.

American will squander between one and two trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, an expenditure that will weaken our society and plunge it into debt that will match the deficit of good will it has cost us. [1] Some see George Bush and his minions as men for such times, but they are not. They have isolated and weakened us, and they have made many of us less proud, even ashamed, to be Americans. They have brought shame upon us when they could have earned America great credit, respect and love from the world. They have lived by the ugly historical truth that the people, enough of them at least, will always accept tyranny to assuage their fears, their terrors.

Think about it. What far smaller amount than the squandered billions in Iraq could have done for the millions that die of malaria and AIDS in the third world; what it could have done if it went to research and doctors, hospitals, improved public health infrastructure. Think what praises would be sung of an America that took the lead in aiding the victims of natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. Think how much more appealing the blessings of democracy might seem when delivered with the hand of peace, and without the hubris of cultural and religious superiority.

Instead, in its terror, America has delivered itself into the hands of an incompetent buffoon, who is arguably the most despised human on the planet, and whose bellicosity and arrogance have soiled the reputation of a far better nation and better people than he deserves to “lead.” His rationale for his war in Iraq has shifted more quickly, and less predictably, than the sands of that country and innocent Iraqis are dying at a rate far faster than they did under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. And the world has watched, with horror and sorrow, as America has seemingly transmogrified into a reflection of the twisted logic of its own tyrant. They have seen it fall away from its principles, its leaders corrupted by their power and a worldview befitting the dark ages.

I sometimes think back to that encounter with the German brewer in Sorrento. If he's still around I wonder what he might think of America and American's today. [2] Maybe he can see past our current nadir, back to when we were admired, and when people wanted to emulate our “democracy” because we taught by example, with the carrot, not the stick. Perhaps he will see these days as an unfortunate, but temporary, period of American history. Perhaps we can still regain the respect and adulation that we used to get from the world community. But first we need to learn again to teach by example: we need to show military strength when it is called for, and, as importantly, focus it where the offense originates. We need to examine the causes of that offense honestly and fully, not characterize it in absolutes and simplistic political sound-bites, as good and evil. To strike out at the nearest, most convenient “enemy” is what a drunk does in a bar, not what a nation must do in a complex and changing world.

America could have shown great character in its response to being attacked, and still, and more effectively, exacted its due vengeance upon the perpetrators. It could have done so without the destruction of a nation to putatively “save it” and incurring the wrath of many of those it claims to have saved. It could have achieved such ends without squandering what will be trillions of dollars, much of it to enrich corporations with political connections. It could have done so by exposing its strengths rather than its weaknesses.

America could have made us proud to me American's again when we are at home or abroad. It could have shown character and judiciousness. It could have shown itself to be better for its injuries, better than a drunken bully yelling “bring ‘em on” in a bar, not looking for the right fight, by the easy fight. But a drunken bully is exactly what America's vaunted “democracy” gave us.

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[1] The sheer profligacy of the expenditure of the American taxpayer's money is criminal. As a segment of CBS's 60 Minutes broadcast on 2.12.2006 pointed out, between $8 and $9Billion dollars sent to Iraq in cash is completely unaccounted for. That amount excludes the overcharging for services by Halilburton and its subsidiaries.

[2] Not likely I'll meet him as before since I managed to quit smoking many years ago.

29. 4 : SUMMERTIME (1955), Dir. By David Lean 2.11.2006

Movies and travel often evoke similar emotions. Each can transport us to other times and other places. Nowhere in film genre is this more evident than in the ‘romantic travel movie', where the exotic setting can play a fickle cupid to those who cross cultures and times zones in quest of true and lasting love.

On the movie screen Rosano Brazzi is leaning out as far as he can from the side of a little canal in Venice. The Italian tenor-matinee-idol of the 1950s –remember "sahm een-CHAHNTed EEEfff-ning . . ."?—is straining to retrieve a gardenia that was accidentally dropped from a nearby bridge by Katherine Hepburn. Try as he might the flower evades his grasp and he looks up at Kate with a sad smile and an Italic shrug of resignation as it floats away. That elusive flower prefigures the moment of truth in the film Summertime (1955), and represents an almost formula bittersweet scene in that genre of cinema the ‘Romantic Travel Movie.

Brazzi plays the proprietor a small shop that sells gaudy Venetian glass on a little piazza beside a canal. Hepburn is a somewhat skittish American schoolteacher on her summer break first-time trip to Italy, and arguably on the down slope toward what used to be uncharitably called "spinsterism". You just know that they must fall in love: it's Venice, it's tourist season, the soundtrack oozes Vivaldi and Rossini, there's even a cute little Italian boy the play the cupid go-between. You could watch this movie in reverse with Polish subtitles and still figure it out in three scenes.

Summertime displays all the essential ingredients of the Romantic Travel Movie. Brazzi bought Hepburn that gardenia in Piazza San Marco, with its people, pigeons, and ‘people-pigeons' being overcharged for cappuccino and sappy music coming from the Florian café. He's dashing, with a dash of vulnerability; she's vulnerable with more than a dash of Midwestern schoolmarm protective skepticism. It's a match made in a heavenly casting office, with all the dramatic tension of different cultures coming together on some of the most compellingly romantic urban turf anyplace in the world. Summertime, under David Lean's sublime direction, is the “classic” romantic travel movie.

But that elusive flower, sold by to Brazzi by an old woman flower-seller who muttered something enigmatic about “ amore” sets us up for the inevitable “so just where is 'happily every after' going to be?” What happens when the summer trip is over? Shall we live in Venice, or Ohio? Some choice. The corollary to the axiom that “you can't go home again” is, in the RTM, often: “but you must go home again.”

If you haven't seen Summertime , rent it, this won't spoil the ending for you. But the gardenia comes back into it, this time in a train station scene, another regular feature of many romantic travel movies, at least the 1950's vintage. In any event, with Lean's camera directions it doesn't matter whether we fall in love with Hepburn or Brazzi, because this movie is where I first fell in love with Venice. Much in the way that the city's favorite son vedute painter, Antonio Canale (Canaletto), painted it in virtually every kind of light he could find it, Lean's camera evokes a city that hovers somewhere between reality and an otherworldly dream. If you can fall in love in Venice, or with Venice, you need your heart checked.

Summertime is my favorite romantic travel movie, but one can get a good argument from aficionados about what film is the best of this genre. As with romance itself, preferences are nothing if not highly subjective. The younger generation might prefer something like the bitter-sweet Out of Africa (1985) though the leads played by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford might seem too worldly and tormented, and Kenya's lion-prowled savannas hardly serve as an easy place for a romantic picnic or strolling hand-in-hand. Or, Before Sunrise (1995), Forget Paris (1995), or in old reliable Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). But, for me, Summertime is the gold standard, a film that also meets my standard for my personal “classics” list of one I would watch again and again, because you don't have to fall in love with Hepburn or Brazzi, you have Venice.

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29. 3: HOW OPRAH MADE ME RICH 2.8.2006

George Washington cut down a cherry tree and when confronted about it could not lie. Our current George, the brush-cutting president can't seem to

tell the truth. Whether he's lying about WMDs or his military service record, just the other day in presenting his budget, saying that he was addressing the needs of the poor while slashing the Medicare program, Bush wouldn't know the truth if it was a sharp rock and he was sitting on it. Nothing Bush says has what Steven Colbert calls “truthiness,” (unless truthiness means something that has not the “ring” of truth but the “clank” of truth).

Dissembling is infectious in his administration. Never mind that Scott McClellan (maybe his real name) is just plain now expected to lie. He's so reliable at it that we can be confident that the truth is the exact opposite of whatever he says. We just finished listening Bush dump Harriet Miers (but letting her do it), and the Sam “the Masturbator” Alito hype, and then his evasive replies (read “lies”) about Roe v Wade. There's former Secretary of State Colin Powell lying to the world about aluminum rods and yellow cake Nigerian uranium, the current secretary lying about “the US does not torture.” And now Attorney general Gonzales testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the president's spying on Americans saying the “George Washington . . . allowed electronic surveillance.” (Must have been after George finished cutting down that cherry tree with his chain saw.)

No wonder all sorts of people seem to be lying these days. People we need to be able to trust, like journalists, are lying all over the place. People like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilley lie routinely in ways that are easily documented; but there are also the a growing number of he Jayson Blairs Judith Millers, who were from the legitimate press. That moral breakdown of the Bush administration (remember he ran saying he would return morality to Washington) [1] seems to have become an epidemic of prevarication that is infecting the whole country.

It's the “end justifies the means morality” that the Bush administration has brought to Washington, the new morality that says if you believe the cause is right, and the result might not hurt anybody (or anybody you care about) you can call a policy that will allow more, not less, pollution a “Clear Skies Initiative,” or allow the Pentagon to cock up a story like the Jessica Lynch story, or withhold the truth about Pat Tillman's death. You get a society where what is called “reality television” is anything but real. And you get authors, Like James Frey ( A Million Little Pieces , and who knows how many little deviations from the truth) writing what was purported to be a “non fiction” book.

And that's where I'm headed with this. Frey, whose book made the Oprah Book Club, a sure thing for the best-seller list, made millions before it came out that the former drug addict likes to embellish things a bit. He denied that months in jail were not just a night, and other gross exaggerations, were lies. His publisher backed him, and Oprah backed him, until the truth overwhelmed the matter. His publisher has added a “qualification” to his book and Oprah kicked his butt all over her set after apologizing to readers for being taken in by him. My daughter, who read the book before the truth came out, gave it high praise and recommended it to me, now feels cheated.

We all feel cheated when somebody lies to us (and it might cost you your life if Bush is doing the lying). But, remember, the new morality that Bush brought us is that the end justifies the means. You see, even since his book was shown to be fraudulent, James Frey has sold millions more copies. So, I say it's my turn, baby, time to look out for No. 1. So what if my book really didn't make the Oprah Book Club. Pretty soon Oprah will have me on her show to give me a good dressing down for exploiting her book club.

Here's how it will go.

Oprah: Today I am interviewing Dr. James A. Clapp, author of This Urban Life , a book he falsely claims is one of my book club's recommendations. [Oprah holds up copy of my book and camera takes a close up. Yessss! ] You are a liar, Dr. Clapp, and I want the whole world to know it. [Go tell it on a mountain, Oprah, Yipeeeee !] How did my book club sticker get on your book?

Me: Well, James Frey's book was on my floor—I read all your recommended books [a lie]—and my book must have fallen on top of it and the sticker somehow came off his book and attached itself to my book. It happened to be the copy I was sending to the New York Times book review editor.

Oprah: That's preposterous!

Me: Yes, I suppose it sounds that way. So maybe I'll recant that in a few days [after the New York Times bestseller list comes out].

Oprah: Don't you have any respect for the truth, Dr. Clapp? What kind of a person are, anyway?

Me: I greatly respect the truth Miss Winfrey [that's true]. My book is all true. But I want everybody to know that truth, so a little. . . ahem . . . lie about it being selected by you book club seemed harmless. You see, the end justifies the means. And, as to what kind of a person am I? Well, a person who has always had to fight a tendency to put on weight, like . . .

Oprah (scowling fierce): I wouldn't go there, Dr. Clapp; not if you want to live to write another book.

Me (sheepishly): Yes, sorry maam. It's just that there's a chapter in my book about how I lose weight by walking about cities [the truth] after taking a meal from my “urban life diet” that's printed in the book [a lie; I sure hope she hasn't read the book]. You can find interesting restaurants, stop and have coffee and a dessert at wonderful cafés, eat all you want and you won't gain an ounce [yeah, sure, and have a slice of Nigerian Yellow Cake, too].

Oprah: Really? [taking the bait]. Maybe I'll just peruse your book a little.

Me: Oh, I'd be honored if you would, Miss Winfrey, deeply honored. [I'm beginning to sound like Uriah Heap, now; this lying thing is addicting. By the time she finds out there's no “urban life diet” I'll be up another million in sales.]

Oprah: But you must know I'm still pretty upset with you about youR lying. [Oprah flips the book over to the back cover.] But this is sort of a cute photo of you, when you had a bit more hair. [She holds the back cover to the camera, Yahooooo! ] So, are you working on another book, Dr. Clapp?

Me: [scarcely able to contain my glee]: Yes, maam, I am. It's the second volume of what I call the “Lose Your Behind Series” [that's a lie, but now I'm thinking about it]. It's about how, at the Rapture, only city people will be taken into heaven.

Oprah: Well, you're quite the writer aren't you, Dr. Clapp. Maybe we'll consider it for the Oprah Book Club [ Yessss! Oh Yessss, Oh, Thank You, George, you have shown me the way!!! ] What's the title or your next volume?

Me: It's called My Ripped Urban Abs , maam.

Oprah: Super. [Thunderous applause from the studio audience for whom I begin signing copies of my book. Go to commercial].

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[1] I've written before that Clinton lied—hell he did it right on television – but in some sense had a right to because no one had the right to know what he did with a consenting adult in private that had nothing to do with governance, other than his wife. He later recanted.

29. 2: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH 2.5.2006

I can only remember one occasion on which I had what might be called a truly religious experience. It was my First Communion and I think I actually believed I was ingesting the Corpus Christi. [1] It was in St. Monica's church, which had a Gothic feel to it and it had a very good church organ. We were filing down the nave in a smog of incense after the ceremony, the organist was nearly blasting the stained glass out of the windows, playing “Holy God, we praise thy Name” and I was singing my little lungs out, and I felt h o l y ! Metaphysically, for me, it was all down hill after that, into the abyss of doubt and cynicism.

Religions can do this to you, even if you're an apostate like me. It's all in the show . The crucifixion is a great show; just ask Mel Gibson. It's been done straight dozens of times, as a musicale, as a fantasy, even as a comedy, and it still sells. And, of course, it is reprised every day in the RC Church's sacrifice of the mass. Ceremony, ritual, mystery, magic, and downright entertainment, a religion has to know show business if it is going to grow and prosper. The RC Church did some of its best art, architecture, and music after the competition of the Reformation came about. For a long to the Protestants (“Prods”) were a dreary bunch. But look at them today. You have those Black Baptist churches that rock with hallelujah gospel music, mega-churches of various denominations with crowds of believers swaying to expensive production numbers. Keep cranking up the production values or the suckers will be heading off to someone else's show. It's the Woodstock generation, man. Admittedly, Prod architecture is generally total schlock; take a look at the Crystal Cathedral, in which that pompous Schuler guy pontificates, or anything erected by Mormons.

People will choose their church, their religion, based on the sort of show that they like. I remember Catholics who wanted their church to keep the mumbo-jumbo of the Latin mass, and the good old Gregorian chant. They hated the vernacular mass and some kids up on the altar with guitars singing some Bob Dylan or Beatles number. (Frankly, I prefer a nice dirgey Dies Irae , to “He's got the whole world in His hand”.) People seem to choose their religions and churches the way they choose their other entertainment. It matters whether the pastor can do a rollicking homily or the vicar's wife is a hot number.

What prompted these thoughts is a really big show—Islam's annual haj . The haj is in the category of the pilgrimage to the seven churches of Rome, visiting the Western Wall, the Mormon pageant in Palmyra, or The Church of Christ the Redneck Redeemer's annual NASCAR outing and tailgate party. Actually, it's like all of them out together. Recently, there was a British production on television of four Muslims from the UK enthusing over their first haj. They at times were lost in the huge throngs that must circumnavigate the huge kaaba stone seven times without being crushed to death by their fellow hajis . Then they must climb a mountain and spend the night praying (that there is someplace where they can relieve themselves), make their way out into the desert and camp and pray for forgiveness (and that there is someplace where they can relieve themselves), and nor forget to collect 49 stones to “stone the devil” at another site. This is participatory theater with a colossal cast. When a good Muslim accomplishes it—it is one of the pillars or requirements of Islam—he (she) is a haji , and your sins up to that point have been “washed away,” and I think you might get to wear some sort of funny hat.

If you live through it. Three hundred and forty-five hajis were crushed to death by their fellow pilgrims when some luggage fell of a truck and tripped them. [2] They were in one of the massive throngs going from one holy site to another. Since 1987 some 3,418 people have been killed at the haj in Mecca, trampled, bombed, shot by police, falling off of overpasses, stampeded, or crushed by collapsed buildings. Thousands more have been injured. And you thought people did goofy, dangerous stunts on Survivor.

One has to wonder about a religion in which people will crush their own co-religionists to death in a supposed act of piety. [3]

I'm not picking on Islam here; have you ever seen pilgrims coming to see the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe on their bleeding knees, or flagellants in Sicily, people playing with rattlesnakes in those Southern church where the practitioners seem to have done a lot of inbreeding, or Indian fakirs sticking needles in themselves, or heard of those saints who have emasculated themselves or inflicted other “mortifications of the flesh” upon various parts of their anatomy?

Why this strong connection of the proof of ones faith by some sort of trial, some test, some self-abasement? People must want to be part of the show, or to put on a little show themselves; they want to testify, to jump up in the revival tent and tell the world about their infidelities, drunkenness or tumors, they want to carry a full-sized cross through the streets of Jerusalem. Many of these people are in serious need of psychological counseling, but that's what makes “the show” a winner over the ages— drama. Drama is about conflict, in this case the battle of good and evil, or the angels and the devil, between us and our sinful desires. Temptation, sin, guilt, punishment or redemption, rapture, salvation, that's what keeps the Bible as the world's all-time bestseller, and its what makes a religion work, its great drama, a great show. Pope John-Paul II understood that, which is why he took his show on the road to so many countries.

Which returns me to my childhood mystical experience. A good show is an emotionally moving experience, especially when you are part of it. I was primed by the nuns for how transformative an experience my first holy communion was to be; sent to confession to cleanse my filthy seven-year-old soul, tutored in the mysteries of trans-substantiation (see footnote 1 if you didn't the first time), and then paraded in front of the entire congregation through clouds of incense and building-trembling organ music to the holy “Eucharistic” initiation—the little wafer of bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth like a sucker fish on a shark's belly. [4]

Irreverently, some of us used to call the “holy sacrifice of the mass” the “magic show.” But that's really what it is. That's what it must have been way back when people first discovered the power of drama and the way mystery in the unseen forces can influence us.

Life itself is a drama; it has a beginning, middle parts, and an end, struggles and victories, highs and lows, and, religion tells us, all the acting that takes place within that great personal drama, it has consequences . The Great Reviewer decides in the end. We are each the star in our own little drama, and therein perhaps lies the real secret of religion's hold and appeal, the instillation of the belief that our mortality matters , that there is that one “person (deity)” in the audience of our brief and petty little play that cares about our performance. And, if we so choose, there are those who have a script already written for us, if you really have the need to feel h o l y .

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[1] This is a good example of how the Church can screw up a kid's mind. We were taught that the little wafer of bread is actually the body of Christ, by way of a process called transubstantiation that the priest performs at the altar. Ergo, communion is really a silly act of cannibalism—right, that's hardly as great a stretch as to tell a kid that something that looks and tastes like a flattened piece of Wonderbread, is a piece of the body of a guy who died over 2000 years ago. This is how the Church gets you ready to believe just about anything they tell you.

[2] By the way, they were on their way to “Stone the Devil,” who might have pulled that luggage trick because he's had a little too much of the stoning thing and wanted some “payback.”

[3] Tragically, over 800 more Muslim pilgrims drowned in the Red Sea a couple of days ago when their ferry went down.

[4] I was afraid even to stick a finger in my mouth and pry the wafer off so I could swallow it, but I thought it so holy that I couldn't touch it. Today, they actually hand people the wafer and let them pop it into their mouths like a corn chip. What's next, cheese dip?

29. 1: QUEER STUDIES AND QUIRKY THINKING 2.2.2006

Queer Studies? QUEER Studies? I guess it was only a matter of time. DePaul University of Chicago, the largest Catholic University in America, is launching a minor in Queer Studies (Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans Gender Studies). Other “minorities” have made it to this status—Black Studies, Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, so why not homosexuals. If you can major or minor in your race, gender, or ethnicity, then why not your sexual orientation. What's next, Recovering Bald, Alcoholic Wife-Beater Studies?

There's lots of aspects of the development that could be discussed and debated, and, of course I am being a bit hyperbolic here. I don't see anything wrong with courses that explore such introspective subjects (ignorance is far worse), but I don't think we need professional Blacks, Gays, Lesbians and such.

I heard about the Queer Studies course on NPR . What really caught my ear was the answer the professor gave to the question of how, with the official position of the RC Church being what it is, could a catholic university get away with offering such a course. You can access the exact words, but he said close to: “The homosexual orientation is objectively disordered, the homosexual act is intrinsically evil; however homosexual people are loved by God and belong in the Christian community and will be saved by God.” (Obviously they want them at mass, especially when they take up that second collection for what is called “Peter's Pence”)

How do we get to a turn of mind that allows such mealy-mouthing? It is not only the Church that engages in this sort of reasoning. The most egregious manifestation of it these days is the “We love the troops, but hate the war,” that wonderful bit of mental gymnastics that we are forced into by the political rhetoric that accuses any dissent from of the administration's policy as giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” I have even heard it said that opposition to the war “hurts the troops” and “saddens them.” [1] This is the equivalent that our “sins make the heart of Jesus bleed” (Sister Ignatius). [2] Of course, you can “love the troops,” but not enough to want to bring them home. And if they come home in a box, then we are asked to love them in remembrance One more of those sappy bio-eulogies in the media and I'm going to puke. Six PM News Feature Homeward the Hero : [Fluttering flag, quick cuts of soldiers in Iraq]

[V.O.] “Sergeant Purvis Suggs never got to see his young son who was born after he left for Iraq. [over shots of wife, Marvelline, eating a bucket of KFC]

[V.O.] Sgt. Suggs will never get to throw a football with his son [cut to little Richard Petty Suggs, 1-yr-old, who doesn't resemble his father in the slightest], like he did when he was captain of his high school football team, or climb trees to rescue stranded kittens, which his mother said Purvis was always doing

[Cut to tree, then kitten, then pellet gun Purvis used to shoot cats with.]

[V.O.] Purvis's Dad, Fred Suggs [cut to father repairing pick-up truck] said he was proud of his son for “keeping those Mohammadens from making my wife wear one of those blue tablecloth get-ups with holes for the eyes. Reminds me of my KKK outfit. My boy died protecting his country, the way he would have wanted to die, fighting for our freedom.” [Not mentioned in the piece is that Sgt. Suggs and three other soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber while in their tent. Suggs was playing the video game Tank Commander , at the time.]

Well, you get the idea. There's both brutal truth and devious omissions in such reports (not to mention callous media opportunism). The first casualty of war is truth. But you might see this as disrespect to those who have died in the Iraq conflict. Not at all. My disrespect is for the people who feed young men of limited opportunity bullshit about this being a real war against terrorism and protecting America, hauling them off to war without adequate equipment and support, and then when they are killed, exploiting their deaths with a complicit media to make them into “heroic martyrs” for this misguided cause. (Isn't this what the leaders of the suicide bombers do?) Yes, I have perhaps picked on our country boys, but that's the model the government and the media likes to elevate to heroic status; you know, the good, salt-of-the-earth rural types that the military has sought out as the most tractable fighters since antiquity. [3] Think Sergeant York. Hey, maybe our universities should start teaching courses in Faux Patriotism Studies, as well.

When the Republicans were out to impeach Bill Clinton it was often heard that one could “detest the president and respect the ‘office' of the president”. Oh yeah, well that goes triple for the guy in that office now!

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[1] So, “We hate the war, but love the troops, and hate the sadness our unintentional aid and comfort to the enemy that out hatred of the war might engender. Whatever.”

[2] Then don't Bush's sins “make the troops bleed”?

[3] Then, when the Pentagon cocks up a charade for the media's consumption and transmission, a la Jessica Lynch, when they are found out the exploited one is likely to sink back into the hills of West Virginia.