DCJJan05

Volume 16

JANUARY 2005

16. 9: Wählen Macht Frei (möglicherweise) 1.30.2005

It would be a stretch to conflate the American torture antics at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with the horrors of Auschwitz and the other Nazi extermination camps that are being remembered on the 60 th anniversary of their liberation. But not a big stretch. There's something disingenuous about members of the Bush administration going on about the Nazi genocide when scarcely below the surface of their pronouncements their war on terror is really viewed as a war between the predominant religions of East and West.

With Iraqis going to the polls this week—in some parts of Iraq with greater fairness and ease than in Ohio—the contrast or comparisons between the liberation of Auschwitz and the “liberation” of Iraq might seem facile to some. But in WWII American soldiers defeated and actual aggressor, not one that was picked for a putative easy “mission accomplished” rather than being the source of the perpetrators of 9-11. And American soldiers liberated the prisoners of Auschwitz from their torturers, not participants in a growing scandalous record of American abuse of Iraqi detainees.

On a BBC broadcast this week young Germans were lamenting that their generation as well will likely have to live their lives with the stain of Nazism and its genocide. Americans will not likely carry the same shame, indeed if even many Americans feel shame for how the Bush administration has squandered the world's erstwhile esteem and admiration for our country by terrorizing its own people. The likelihood of the administration's apologist for torture tactics being confirmed as Attorney General should be sufficient evidence of our capacity for denial.

Perhaps stripping, tormenting, humiliating and battering detainees and holding others for great lengths of time without charges or counsel might seem justified to many Americans traumatized (and kept traumatized) by 9-11. But it is a step down a slippery slope to the horrors of wars based on those twin towers of human divisiveness: race and religion.

Americans love to don the self-deceiving cloak of American exceptionalism when it comes to the nasty chapters of human history. But the edge of that historical slope may not be as remote as some American are willing to believe. After WWII, while we were trying Nazis at Nuremburg for genocide we were letting the perpetrators of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese go free in return for the information they had obtained in their Unit 714 torture facilities. In one of history's ironic twists, that information on chemical and biological warfare formed the basis for our own weapons of mass destruction.

Apparently the Iraqi elections have gone of relatively well, at least in the north and south. But, if elections in that great pillar of democracy, America, are any indications, voting is one thing, getting your vote counted is quite another. The results could be anything from a Shiite state, to civil war, to the installation of a American puppet who will turn on the spigot of petroleum. We probably won't really know that the Iraqis got their freedom until they tell their occupiers to pack up their troops in their helicopters and Humvees and “get the hell out of our country!”

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16. 8: LIBIDO-AT-LARGE 1.23.2005

Americans Abroad No. 5

Typically, after a foreign tour arrives back on home soil a tour leader does not hear again from all but a small fraction of his tour members. This is true of the “friendships” that one forms on a tour, and especially of those with whom relations have been somewhat difficult. So, when I heard from Rosalyn, several months after our return, I was surprised. It was an announcement of her impending marriage to her fiancé who had been unable to join the tour because he had to remain at home to care for his collection of iguanas and snakes.

The announcement evoked vivid memories of Rosalyn, especially of the trip the tour made to the Pont du Gard in southern France. I recalled being both flattered and puzzled by the rapt attention my little group of gave my lecturette on the wonders of Roman engineering. They seemed so fascinated with my recitation of how the marvelous 2000-year-old aqueduct over the Gard River in southern France was so masterfully engineered that it could carry water smoothly and efficiently from the springs at Uzes to Nîmes, some fifty kilometres away. Calcification on the sides of the water channel provides evidence that it was in operation for 400 to 500 years. Some of the students were wide-eyed, others gape-mouthed.

Since my back was to the aqueduct I had no idea that it wasn't my recitation of the feats of Roman engineering that was producing astonishment. Not until someone exclaimed, “Oh my God! She's going to get herself killed!”

I turned to see Rosalyn, perched precariously about fifty meters out on the top of the aqueduct, where there were no railings, no walls, nothing at all to prevent a gust of wind from sweeping her off to a 300 foot plunge to certain death in the river bed below.

There she stood—as well as Rosalyn could stand—for she had a disability that affected her leg and her balance, trying to change lenses on her camera. The wind blew her hair almost horizontal, and she kept shifting her feet for better purchase on the pitted and uneven pavers that surfaced the top of the aqueduct. It had all of the grim expectancy of watching someone who might at any moment jump to death from a building, but with greater probability.

I wasn't particularly anxious to stroll out on the aqueduct to retrieve Rosalyn. Lifeguards are sometime pulled under by the people they are saving from drowning, and Rosalyn just might engage me in the high altitude equivalent. With that sense of foreboding I ventured out toward her.

“Hi,” she said as I approached, as though we were meeting on some street corner, “I'm getting some really great shots from up here.”

“Great, I'll send them to your next of kin. Now let's get the hell back on terra firma before your last shot is of a rapidly approaching river.”

This was not my first occasion to have to instruct Rosalyn that I would prefer not to have to ship her body back home in a plastic bag. A couple of weeks earlier, in London, her roommate of two nights had awakened in the middle of the night to find Rosalyn engaged in sexual calisthenics with a strange guy she had picked up in a bar earlier that evening. After I found her very concerned room mate different accommodations I told her the story of Jack the Ripper, omitting none of the gory details.

But it was soon evident Rosalyn's risk-taking quotient was just about off the chart. Having survived being sliced into sushi by her pick-up guy, and making it safely back off the Pont du Gard, and undaunted by her disability, her betrothal to some gullible jerk tending iguanas and boa constrictors back in San Bernardino, or good sense, she and another young lady she met on the tour later decided to have some drinks and laughs with Turkish border guards. Turkish Border Guards!!! Wait, let me say that again: Turkish Border Guards!!! And behind the closed doors of the border station. They had elected to do a sequel to Midnight Express while the rest of us admired the antiquities at the ruins of ancient Ephesus. If the ship hadn't sent a tender back to port because they were not on board at sailing time, they might still be in some seraglio for the comfort of Turkish Border Guards!!!

Once safely back aboard Rosalyn and her fellow border guard entertainer, both, although it is of no significance other than coincidence, elementary school teachers, proceeded to for the last few days of the cruise to open the offices of Venus to patronage of members of the ship's crew and custodial staff. It was reported to me that at one time there were as many as three crew vacuuming the carpets in the companionway near their cabin so as not to appear forming a queue.

Had I known what I was in for because of Rosalyn's insatiable libido I might have considered giving her a little nudge toward the edge as I escorted her from the top of the Pont du Gard. I would have admired her for her overcoming of her physical adversities if she hadn't been so ready to add a variety of venereal diseases and possible mutilations to her afflictions. What she was doing is no worse than the “stag” antics that many guys go through before getting married, but Rosalyn's libido was inversely proportionate to her discretion.

On the last night of the tour I was forced once again to arrange another room for her second roommate who discovered Rosalyn and the hotel's bartender doing some “synchronized swimming” in the bathtub of their room. I'm not sure how she managed the long flight home; my seat was in another cabin. All I know is that guy she's marrying has something a lot wilder on his hands than iguanas and boa constrictors.

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16. 7: THE OTHER INAUGURAL 1.23.2005

In the Middle Ages the Germans had an adage, stadt luft macht frei , city air make one free. During an historical period when religious authorities and the manorial system were severe limitations on human freedom, cities were places of relative liberty. Since then cities have continued, not without period of interruption, to be engines of liberation. There are many reasons for this, but it is not the purpose of this essay to delve into them.

Yesterday, three days after The Boosh took the oath of office in chilly Washington, D.C., Vikor Yushchenko took his oath in Kiev. The temporal juxtaposition of these two events is not without some ironies. Mr. Yushchenko would not have been standing to take his oath (the assassins who laced his food with dioxin notwithstanding) were it not for the throngs of his supporters who occupied the streets of Kiev because they would not stand for the corrupted results of the election that putatively installed his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych. The city air of Kiev was full of the largely peaceful protest that these Ukranians wanted their democracy and weren't going to have a Moscow-backed puppet shoved down their throats. It was the rural areas and parts of Ukraine aligned with Russia that supported. After two tension-filled months the proper Viktor was the victor.

[It is another level of irony that this was called “The Orange Revolution,” when Mr. Yushchenko was nearly killed with the dioxin, the “Agent Orange” of the Vietnam war.]

Yushchenko's victory probably would not have been possible if Ukraine had a Supreme Court with Antonin Scalia sitting as a justice. The Ukraine court ruled, properly, to re-do the election, this time with much greater electoral scrutiny. Under such glare Mr. Yushchenko prevailed with an uncontestable plurality. Ukranians were not going to be denied a fair shot at democracy.

The U.S. administration applauds this result as well. And, there's an irony. Where were the American people when their election was stolen from them in 2000 (and maybe even again in 2004)? Where were the throngs in the streets demanding that there be a full recount in Florida, or that there be a new election? They sat silently by as Antonin Scalia was allowed to select their president for them. Yushchenko fought his way through a poisoning; but where was Al Gore in leading the cause for a fair election? The Ukranians demanded, the Americans demurred.

And so, while George Bush laces his inaugural speech with numerous references to “freedom,” “liberty” and “democracy,” it is the Ukranians who are more deserving to be the exemplars of the democratic spirit, not the scarcely or un-elected Bush. Another irony: Bush's inaugural speech (from the man who ran in 2000 against the notion of “nation-building) was a bellicose warning that he plans to re-make the world in his image of democracy. It was a tossing down of the gauntlet to selected (his Saudi buddies notably left off then list) undemocratic regimes that they are going to have to kneel to Bush's questionable allegiance to free and fair democratic elections. Democracy out of the barrel of a gun.

Bush's vision for America harkens back to the Middle Ages, when religious authority and the economic elites dominated the productive capital of the time, primarily agricultural, dominated society, and ruled it primarily in their own interests and maintenance of power. The Feudal superstructure aligned authority with those who controlled military power. Plagues, threats to the sovereignty of the fiefdoms and principality, or challenges to ecclesiastical authority, from within or without, were portrayed as threats to the entire ecology that was a rigid caste system of sovereigns and serfs. Small wonder that a whiff of city air made it hard to ‘keep ‘m down on the farm.'

It was for the most part the cities and urbanized areas of the country that supported Kerry in this election. A perusal of the red and blue states and other election demographics makes that clear. Their urban counterparts in Ukraine were the supporters of Mr. Yushchenko. Think of the wellsprings of democracy and you have to think of 5 th Century B.C. Athens, or revolutionary Paris, cities. Where are the Americans who breathe city air, but do not take to city streets? They sit quietly by and watch the monarchical pomp as their democracy crumbles. It takes balls to demand your democracy, and I look to the urbanites of Kiev, not Kanses, when it comes to exemplars of making city air free.

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16. 6: SOUVENIRS 1.20.2005

Since the advent of the Souvenir Shop the word “souvenir” will connote to many, if not most people, something kitschy : the pillow with “Honolulu” embroidered on it; the Eiffel Tower table cigarette lighter; the plastic gondola music box that curiously plays “Come Back to Sorrento.” T-shirts, ash trays, mugs, towels, you name it and some has put some place names or pictures on it. Baubles, googahs, tschochkas, . . . inventory for some future eBay or yard sale.

Yet, as with many things in less than high taste there must be a reason beyond the economics of frivolous consumption that explains the human predilection to fill their baggage and often their closets with “souvenirs.” While I am not fool enough to launch an exegesis on the role of the “souvenir” in the rise (or fall) of Western Civilization, the social scientist in me refuses to be glibly dismissive of some of the aspects of human behavior that can cause head-scratching and sometimes snickers.

It is first necessary to distinguish the souvenir from other acquisitive habits of travelers. Collectors, for example, come from a different motivation, and are often concerned more with adding to a set of the same or similar items. Among my various travel groups there have been collector of such diverse items as dolls, napkins, coke bottles (with Coke in different scripts), ashtrays, chopsticks, and toys. Photographs might also be considered a form of the souvenir, but they are “capture” specifically what is to be “remembered.” It is remembering that is the prime function of the souvenir; it is a selective item in or through which a time, place, even an emotion, can be re-called and mnemonically “re-experienced.”

Consider the souvenir “item”. I have a collection of my own, among them igneous rocks from various volcanos, a chunk of peat from Ireland, a little facsimile krater from Greece, some bones (probably chicken, circa 1963) that I ‘removed' from a ‘loculi' in Roman catacombs, a delicate tree frog carved from a tagua, and ivory-like nut in Panama, a little lapis lazuli head of Buddha from Bombay, three eggs, exquisitely decorated by nuns from Romania, three little stone pyramids from Egypt, a clay naked goddess from Teotihuacan, a three-faced goddess from Burma, a carving of the Chinese goddess Quan Yin . . . [OK, there's a little bit of a goddess thing going on there]

There are dozens of souvenirs. They are mostly small, and they sit on a couple of shelves in my dining room. Some are the kinds of things one buys from a street vendor lying about their wares being just “dug up” or removed from some temple (but the faux antique paint isn't even quite dry). Some are a bit bizarre; my daughters wonder what possessed me to want to possess a little plastic super hero from Hong Kong that emits a laser beam and sounds that are like those awful car alarms.

But there are also among my collection some “treasures.” One is a handle from a ceramic pot. This one I dig up, with my Swiss army knife, right out of the clay in the Agora in Athens, while my daughters protested but kept lookout for the local protectors of Greek antiquities. I pronounced it—as if I knew what I was really talking about—as “definitely a Euphronius, 5 th Century BC.” The girls pronounce it “Eu-phony-us,” but I do believe it predates my catacomb chicken bones, or the bones I dug up from a mass grave site of 14 th Century plague victims near a church in France. As to “really old dug up things” there are the two little votive figurines from Iraq that I got from a Parisian antiquaire . The little clay heads, one human, one equine, have a provenance of having been unearthed by shells in the Iran-Iraq war. Since I have not visited those two countries they are they are really a souvenir of the time I lived in Paris. But perhaps the most auspicious is the eave cap that a bolt of lightening knocked off an ancient temple in a torrential rain storm in a small village along the Yangtse. Since it landed at my feet I felt it was meant for me, so the hand-sized ceramic cap, its glaze burned nearly completely off by the suns of centuries, but its ambiguous insect relief still clearly evident.

I admit that one man's precious souvenirs are also another man's worthless crap. But I love my little “museo” of travel debris, each of them is an aide-memoire . I can remember where each of them came from and how I acquired them. Like a kid who caught a foul ball off the bat of his baseball hero, just holding one of my souvenirs magically transports me back to where I acquired it, but back into its time, not just my time.

No, I'm not going New Age on you here; I'm not likening my souvenirs to crystals, channeling, or the effects of LSD or too much Yanni music. The “magic” is really in the assist that the souvenir object gives to the calling out of the souvenir mnemonic record. Yes, you have to be a little bit imaginative, a little bit intense, and you definitely have to have been there . And you must have what I call a narrative sensibility, a tendency to see that what remember are stories, our own little stories, but stories that we will one day, if the fates ordain, we can draw from as a reservoir of our travel experiences. At its best, the souvenir is evocative of a “story.”

I'll try illustrate. In Sicily, at a place near Enna called Piazza Armarina, while roaming about the recently excavated grounds of this former Roman villa, I chanced upon a reddish-brown item I took to be a fragment of decorative ceramic. Smaller than my fist, it appeared to have been shaped in some vague organic form. Piazza Armarina had been a very wealthy Roman's villa, and contains perhaps the most spectacular mosaic-tiled baths in the Roman Empire. My “find,” which I surreptitiously slipped into a lens case (I realize I am beginning to sound like a tomb raider here) met one of my favorite souvenir criteria—it was old, or seemed to be.

When I later washed of the caked on dirt in my hotel room I discovered that my find was something different than I had first assumed. It wasn't ceramic. I could the porous honeycombed substructure in a chipped facet. It had to be bone, which was also evidenced by the lightness of the object, although this one would have been that of a monster chicken. I nearly tossed it into the trash, thinking I had just picked up an animal bone of recent origin. But it had that reddish patina that gave it an “ancient” look. I tossed it in the bottom of my backpack.

A few days later I took some members of my group the National Museum in Naples to see a lot of the artifacts and bodies that were exhumed from Pompeii. I still wonder what caused me to glance at a small display case. There they were: smaller, and a grayish color, but the same shape, definitely some joint bone from an animal. I copied the description card, which was in Italian. The first word seemed to be the name for a “heel bone”; the second word was “ astrolaghi .”

The museum custodian, who might have spoken some English, dismissed my request for an interpretation with an Italic shrug. The concierge at my hotel was a bit more helpful, speculating that it might have been a bone or bones that were used to do astrological forecasts or read the auspices back in Roman times, sort of like Queequeg did in Moby Dick. Other Italians I asked could only speculate. The word was “ astrolaghi ,” not astrologi, so it may have nothing to do with astrology, or it might be a typo.

It's a mystery. So my souvenir could be ancient. Romans might have rolled it on those wonderful mosaic floors to urge the Fates to disclose their futures. But when I pick it up and hold it in my hand it instantly triggers my memories of that ancient villa in Sicily and to wonder about those long gone Romans who asked it their destinies.

I have thought of rolling it on the carpet and asking it who will win this year's Super Bowl.

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16.5: THE SALVATORE COROLLARY 1.16.2005

Americans Abroad, No. 4

I can still hear Sal's hoarse voice as we stood side by side at urinals at a rest stop on the Italian Autostrada: “Makeh pisshata, makeh pisshata ,” he commanded. For a moment I thought that, in his colloquialized Italian, he might be ordering me to get on with peeing.

I glanced out of the side of my eye at his greasy comb-over and through the corner of his over-tinted, thick-lensed glasses nearly a foot below me. But Sal was looking at his twelve-year-old son on the other side of him, the object of his parental imperiousness. “Makeh pisshata !” he demanded again, “I gonna have to pay two hundred lire so we could pee in dissa place.” He was referring to the lady custodian who guarded the men's room door and exacted paltry tribute from the boated bladders and dribble-pissers who filed off of tour coaches.

Sal was right out of a Fellini film; except he was right out of New Jersey, by way of a birth and childhood in Sicily. This was his return to the “old country” after forty some years.

Nobody cared much for Sal, not me, nor anyone in my group, not Sal's children, and probably not Lena, Sal's long-suffering wife. Sal was an imperious, little, pain in the ass. He reminded me very much of the bullying pater familias in Fellini's autobiographical Amarcord who, to the audience's delight is interrogated by the Fascists and made to drink a whole bottle of cod liver oil that gives him uncontrollable diarrhea. Sal had that same pencil thin mustache and Mussolini jutting chin. Sal was pitifully unlikable.

But it was Sal's son, Tony, who, I was certain, must have really hated Sal's guts. The kid took endless abuse from his father, being slapped up the back of his head for some infraction or another, called stupid, or fat, told what and what not to eat, and when to piss.

Tony was somewhat pudgy, and, at twelve, obviously on his way to being his mother's, rather than Sal's, size. Lena was two inches taller, and probably twice the weight of Sal, and we all hypothesized that she could kick Sal's ass but good anytime she desired. So naturally, we figured that it was only a matter of time that Tony was big enough to turn his old man inside out. That Sal couldn't seem to project this possibility himself attested to what a jerk he was. The rest of us enjoyed sitting around on the bus or in a café and speculating what Tony was going to do to Sal. We were traveling through MAFIA country, and that provoked a lot of mobster-like means of dispatch in our imaginations. We imagined Tony rigging his old man's car with explosives, or Sal finding a horse's head in his bed, but we were convinced Sal would “sleep with the fishes.”

Lena assuaged the harassed Tony in the typical Italian mother's fashion—with food. Tony ate almost without interruption and we figured that he might be large enough by the end of the trip to avenge his father's mistreatment.

Sal and Lena also had a daughter, Philomena. “Phil” was seventeen, tall, blonde and strikingly beautiful. She was the centerpiece that Sal and Lena were bringing back to the old country to show off to the part of the family that didn't emigrate. Phil was also bored to death at being dragged around Italy when she could be with her boyfriend in Newark. She despised Sal for that, but was left alone because she could raise a foul-mouthed rage and knew that embarrassed her parents. Phil insulated herself as best she could with Walkman earphones and her head buried in magazines.

Sal also had the annoying habit of yelling directions to his kids to stand in front of monuments while he fumbled with his oversized video camera. Her was not above telling other people on the tour to move out of frame, or to add themselves as “extras” where he felt that was appropriate. People hoped he might fall off the back of one of the magnificent Roman amphitheaters, or that a temple column might topple in his direction.

So everybody wanted top smack Sal up the back of his head. But, in truth, Sal proved a corollary to an axiom of travel: it is sometimes the things that go wrong that provide our best, or at least most durable, travel memories. The Salvatore Corollary is that it is the weirdest, or even unpleasant, travel mates that we remember in greatest detail and with a “fondness” assisted by time and distance.

So I have to be grateful to Sal for providing me with a little travel memoir. I also owe a part of that thanks to the surly custodial lady who kept the autostrada restroom reasonably clean and sat by the door to collect the pocket change of her patrons. She must have been observing Sal berating Tony at the urinal. When Sal dropped his two-hundred lire coin in her little dish she fished it out an threw it back at him.

I only understood the last word of her scathing putdown of Sal—“ stronzo .” It was an apt reference for Sal, a slang expletive for a part of the anatomy that is used in another facility of her restroom.

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16. 4: “The Truth?! You Can't Handle the Truth!”* 1.14.2005

Don't ever ask Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan “what time is it?” This guy is such an automatic prevaricator he is going to give you the wrong time, probably the wrong date for good measure, just out of reflex. When asked about the announcement that the fruitless search for WMD in Iraq is now over McClellan offered that the invasion of Iraq was not about the search for WMD, it was “about keeping the American people safe.” Obviously, McClellan must be drinking some brain rot with the lady who appeared on national television saying that her son died in Iraq so that she wouldn't be forced to wear a burka .

So how come we're not hearing a national cheer that “it's over, it's over” ? No, I don't mean that Blockbuster has eliminated late fees; I mean the search for WMD in Iraq. That's because everyone knew it , from Blix, to Duelfer, to Powell, to the guy in pee-stained camouflage on the street corner with a sign that says “I'll tell you where the WMD are for some loose change.” And so, with the second election won/stolen, the national family can now admit that Aunt Tilly drinks a little. Just give Scott McClellan the script to change the rationale for an $8 billion per month war and a lot of dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis, and we'll proceed under another monstrous self-deception. Never mind that Iraqi women will no longer be forced to go out in burkas to polish nuclear –tipped SCUDS that were never there. Never mind that it wasn't Saddam who attacked us. Accept the lie; you should be used to it by now.

Feel safe. No American women will be forced to go to a same-sex wedding wearing a burka.

And to maintain the wall of lies and deceptions that the troika of Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney have erected they will soon be asking for another $100 billion to carry on the un-accomplished mission of flattening cities like Fallujah and then paying their cronies at Haliburton, Bechtel and the rest to rebuild. No wonder we only offered the change they scavenged from couches in the Pentagon for the tsunami-flattened cities and kampongs of S. E. Asia. This must be the kind of American largesse that is responsible for McClellan's statement that “We have very good relationships with countries across the world because of the President's efforts over the last few years.” What is this man inhaling?!!!

The new lie by Bush and his stooges is that democracy will flourish across the Middle East once it is installed in Iraq. This neon-conservative crackpot notion is the political equivalent of Bush's voodoo trickle down economics. But then maybe it is not so far from the truth to say that Iraq will be “democratic” like us. After all, all the elements are there: no separation between church and state, torture in prisons, a deeply divided society, rigged elections, diminished civil liberties . . . yes, we're beginning already to look more like each other. You just have to get used to the lies.

But somebody—not Scott McClellan—should tell that lady that they wear burkas in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

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*Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men (1992)

16. 3: FELLOW TRAVELERS 1.11.2005

Americans Abroad, No. 3

Americans abroad are pretty much the people they are at home, often more so. People don't leave there little idiosyncrasies, quirks, prejudices and predispositions at the boarding gate at O'Hare or LAX. These characteristics come right along with them, and sometimes stand in greater relief against foreign backdrops.

Owing to their great variety Americans can seem more difficult to caricature as travelers than those from other countries. Japanese seem to always be photographing one another in front of tourist sites; the French are judgmental about the cuisines of other nations; Australians are often “on walkabout” for months at a time; waiters deride the British for their parsimonious tipping. Every people or culture seems to have some little quirk or ethnic characteristic that seems to be more exposed in foreign light.

Owing to our much-cherished American individualism, which, combined with the ethnic menagerie that we are, Americans can be more difficult to generalize about, even to ourselves. But within that menagerie there appear to me some distinct “subspecies” of American travelers, not all of them necessarily good ambassadors for the rest of us.

Those profiled below are a few of the more prominent “fellow Americans” one might encounter abroad, and the traveling reader may recollect as a seatmate or roommate. They are composites and their names have been changed to protect the author. Maybe you've encountered a few of them on planes, tour coaches, or cruise ships. And, just maybe you'll recognize one of them next time you look at your passport photo. But whoever they were they likely confirmed Mark Twain's sagacious observation when he said he discovered that “… there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them, than to travel with them.”

Here are the first two:

Bill Ablehours' wife Betty threatened to divorce him if he didn't come along on this tour. Only the prospect of coughing up community property and alimony convinced him to go along, grumping and griping all the way.

“Time is money” Bill will be heard to say more than once on this trip, and the idea that he is away from the office, “wasting my time” among these “lazy Europeans who are always on vacation,” galls him to no end. He could be home increasing his “networth” selling life insurance and nearly boring people into collecting on it early, but he's being dragged around the Roman Forum about which he fulminates: “this place is so dangerous to walk in that it's ten thousand personal injury suits waiting to happen” (which several of his tourmates privately wish he would demonstrate).

If we have traveled enough we've all traveled with a Bill Ablehours. He moves about in a hermetic bubble of self-interest, immune to seeing that there is much of a world beyond his narrow vision. Bill is the guy who, when you went back to your fortieth high school reunion seemed to have been in social hibernation since the senior prom. He only pretends to remember you because you look like a good candidate for a whole life policy.

By day five of the tour the mere presence of Bill is likely to generate an epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder. One of the few remaining persons who will listen to him expound on the pros and cons of term life and whole life and is Hans, the German bus driver, who has nine words of English and is vainly expecting a fat tip from Bill at the end of the trip. Bill will stiff him good, after all the advice he gave him on no-load mutual funds is worth much more than a measly tip.

If Bill is going to form a bond with anyone on this trip it is likely to be with Joe Van Nyst . They might well first meet in the hotel bar, where Joe can be overheard telling the bartender how they make his drink back in Dallas; that is, “the American way.” In fact Joe can't find anything anywhere in the world that is done better, or even as well, as in the “good ole US of A”.

At home Joe regards his own government as nothing more than an interfering, tax-sucking, Big Brother; but over here “they're all socialists, commies, and fascists” who would still be back in the Stone Age where we bombed them if it wasn't for American money and ingenuity. For Joe the Renaissance is merely the name of a hotel chain, and the Enlightenment is when Europeans got electric lighting, for which they should be thankful to American Thomas Edison. Joe also has the annoying tendency to expound on these matters to waiters, desk clerks, chambermaids and others who would risk losing their jobs if they called him the bigoted bore he really is. About all they can do when Joe raises his index finger and says “America is No. 1,” is wait until his back is turned and return the gesture, employing a different finger.

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16. 2: A TORQUEMADA GENERAL 1.5.2005

© 2005 UrbisMedia

So now the guy who deserves an executive producer credit for those wonderful photos from Abu Ghraib will likely rise to the chair of Attorney General, or should we make that, Grand Inquisitor. Well, one supposes that it fits the logic of an administration that conducts international policy on the principle that the end justifies the means. We were attacked, and now we are so traumatized that human rights, due process and all the other stuff that we have been harping about to countries from China to, yes, Saddam's Iraq, is suspended. If you're a suspect “enemy combatant” you can forget about seeing your lawyer, your family, or even being charged with anything, while you languish in Guantanamo or some other joint. Sure, they got some real rotten dudes in these places, but to the guys from capitol of capital punishment, you just might have to screw of few innocent guys in the process, especially if they “look” like the bad ones.

In his Senate hearing Alberto will doubtless be asked about his infamous memos to the Prez. Especially the memo that included his opinion that laws prohibiting torture do “not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.” It further puts forth the opinion that the pain caused by an interrogation must include “injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions—in order to constitute torture.”

In another memo Gonzales said “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war” and “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” The memo argues that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees could be exempt from the Geneva Conventions' provisions on the proper, legal treatment of prisoners. The administration has insisted that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Not only do these opinions and practices undermine military protocols and endanger our troops if they are captured, but it places any American traveling and working abroad in greater danger. But how should these compare with the concerns woman from a Midwestern state who was interviewed on one of the national news networks last night. She was being interviewed because her son, an American soldier, had been killed in Iraq. With a breaking voice she said we had to invade Iraq and her son had died because [not exactly verbatim] “they would have overwhelmed us” and “I would be wearing a burka” if it wasn't for his sacrifice.

Hey, it was about that level of hysteria that got the last Inquisition started.

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16. 1: THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS 1.4.2005

UrbisMedia 2005

Despite the tenor of several recent essays it is not my intention to morph Dragon City Journal into a backdoor journal of moral philosophy. But it seems appropriate, in light of recent events, to revisit my recent essay on what I regard as a “sin-biotic” relationship between poverty and the achievement of Christian “merit” via the Samaritan ethos wherein I treaded a narrow edge that risked sounding like a denouncement of Christian charity. That essay had been percolating in my thoughts for some months, but as it happened I tuned it up for a posting only a few days before the earthquake/tsunami disaster of S. E. Asia, with no idea that such thoughts might be cast in secular relief by current events.

I received a few comments on that piece, but none made any connection between my remarks and the international aid and assistance that has been available to the afflicted countries. So I will make that connection myself.

It will be recalled that initially the Bush administration announced that it was earmarking the paltry sum of $35 million as our contribution to the relief effort. This parsimony is, of course, consistent with the general stinginess of American foreign aid. Americans generally do not know that we are, among developed nations, the least charitable, with less than a nickel out of a hundred bucks going to foreign aid. In any event, somebody tapped Bush on the shoulder and the assistance package was raised ten fold to $350 million (contrast that with about $8 billion a month going to the war in Iraq).

But while the dollar amount matters (and today's dollars have a lot less purchasing power), these remarks are more concerned with the philosophical dimension of the issue. It caught my attention yesterday on the radio that Bush said (I'm doing this from memory) that “the American government is sending $350million in aid to the tsunami victims” but that “the American people should also show their charity by sending individual donations.” He went on to announce that he was asking his father and Bill Clinton to lead the effort to encourage private giving. Clearly, Bush feels that “we, the people” are not the same thing as the “American government.” Should we surmise that those taxes we pay each year become his personal account to wage war or play the Good Samaritan? What hypocrisy, for the man who has done more than anyone to destroy the reputation of Americans throughout the world, to arrogate to himself our national charity, measly though it may be.

Americans should, of course, be willing to help out others with their own donations through such organizations as Medecins Sans Frontiers. But they should not, like their president, be Samaritan opportunists and do so only when there is international pressure and high-visibility circumstances.

Which brings me to a broader, underlying theme. The Bush administration represents a hypocritical posture towards the role of government in society and international affairs. It runs its rhetoric on an anti-government philosophy, but uses governmental power and wealth to impose its will and interests, both domestically and internationally, and advance the interests of its corporate and ideological supporters. In the coming months and years it will attempt, under the oxymoronic aegis of “compassionate conservatism,” to make permanent unjust tax cuts, and privatize and shift the burdens of health care and social security away from governmental responsibility, and limit the rights of those it deems morally unworthy, all while prosecuting an aimless and unjust war and running up deficits that will be borne by the least able.

Such Machiavellian policies transcend the “moral issues” which the administration confines to women's rights, same-sex marriage, and Hollywood. It is an abuse of power and responsibility that installs the Samaritan ethos in our government and, in the end, makes those most in need, like Blanche DuBois, dependent upon “the kindness of strangers.”

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