Volume 28

JANUARY 2006

28. 9: REMEMBERING DENIS 1.28.2006

Denis giving direction to Elvis Presley in his production of

Elvis, That's the Way it Is , (MGM, 97 min., 1970)

The Academy Awards are coming up. I can never watch them without wondering about my dear late friend Denis Sanders. Denis walked up there twice to accept an award for his work, once for “short fiction film” ( A Time Out of War ) in 1954, and second in 1968, for “short documentary” ( Czechoslovakia 1968 ). He had a bunch of other awards, seventy in all, but it was those two Oscars on his mantle that stood out. I used to grab one and make impromptu acceptance speeches for “best screenplay,” saying stupid things like how grateful I was to the Academy for “this award for my screenplay adaptation of the classic children's toilet-training story, ‘Goodbye Mr. Turd'.”

Denis didn't rest on his laurels. He would often phone me to say, as he put it, "I had this movie last night . . ." and would start describing a scene, because, as he insisted, he didn't have dreams, he dreamed movies. I believed him. I believed that he was special enough that while the rest of us went to sleep, Denis went the movies. There was every reason to believe him: movies were not only his profession, they were his sustenance, his recreation, his passion, his reason for being. The cinematic form so suffused his life that it was sometimes difficult to tell where his "scenes" left off and reality began. He was a director who saw life best through his art, and I could never escape the feeling that those of us who were his friends and co-workers were all players in Denis' movie. And we willingly played our parts because we took delight in having him weave our lines into his "scenes".

I first met him in 1980, when he was about to begin his teaching career after twenty-five years of distinction in Hollywood working with the likes of Coppola, Redford, Elvis Presley, John Ford and numerous other household "names". He had already won virtually every major film award there is, bracketed by two Oscars, but when he first arrived at my office he didn't look all that "distinguished"; he was short, walked with a shuffle, had a portly paunch, and looked like he slept in his clothes. Just how he got north and south with his feet splayed east and west was a puzzle to me. He had a crumpled pack of cigarettes in one hand and a lighted one dropping ashes from the other.

"You look like somebody," more than one innocent student would say on first meeting him. He was "somebody" enough in his own right, but Denis knew who they meant.

"Yeah, yeah," he would reply, nazalizing his voice, putting on his tough-guy sneer. If they didn't get the clues he'd just let them hang there.

He reminded me of Edward G. Robinson, too. Where his art was concerned he employed an uncompromising toughness. Students would soon learn that idolatry or obsequy were no substitute for hard work and talent. One would err to interpret his good humor, easy rapport, and earnest concern as any relaxation of the excellence he demanded for his art. Those students who understood, the few I dubbed "Sanderistas," could see that he demanded of them no less that he would of himself.

I remember the first class we taught together in our course "The City in the American Cinema". When it came Denis' turn to give his part of the intro lecture he ambled up to the podium and there he stood, not saying a word. The class hushed. A rhetorical pause, I thought, he just wants their full attention. But he just stood there, looking a little nervous and agitated now, like he might have forgotten his own name. The students started to fidget and glance at one another, like watching one of their own aphasic with terror in a speech class.

"Good God!" I murmured to myself, "he can't be freezing up!” Still he said nothing, rocking slightly side to side, as if he might pass out. The students now looked like they were witnessing a hanging. I don't remember how much time went by, but it felt like eternity squared.

Just as I was about to suggest that we might take a break Denis cleared his throat, refocusing their attention. "You have just been 'directed'," he intoned with just a hint of a smile. He went on to deliver a delightful lecture on how movies manipulate time, illustrating it with his recollections of different scenes from classic films. He never needed artifice to get their attention after that. Or mine, for that matter.

Denis' perspective of his own art form was formed in the golden days of American cinema. He felt himself a displaced person from its contemporary rule by accountants, its faddishness, its elevations of gimmickry, gratuitous violence and visual thrills over, as he put it, "characters you can relate to and care about and stories that teach you what life is about". One need only see his most highly acclaimed films, like the Awards winners, or War Hunt , to appreciate his allegiance to that principle. It made him a superb director as well as a fine teacher. But as much as he enjoyed teaching his heart was always behind the camera, not the podium. He was always thinking about the next film because he knew that was the medium in which he did his best teaching.

Sometimes when the phone rings in the morning I think for an instant that it's Denis with another of his movie dreams. I still have to remind myself that he's off shooting on an exotic location . . . somewhere.

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28. 8: A TASTE FOR TRAVEL, Part 1 1.25.2006

Taiwanese menu board

Knowing a little something about a culture's food can help in understanding something of their history and character. One doesn't find a lot of people dashing off to Scandinavian countries for delicacies like herring in cream sauce, which goes some way toward explaining the high suicide rates there. It wasn't until I visited Germany many years ago that I think I understood the reason for their historic bellicosity. You just can't ingest that many calories and that much meat without wanting to invade Poland or France just to work some of them off.

For some travelers going abroad is as much a gastronomic as geographic adventure. Consuming foreign food is anticipated with eagerness and terror, parameters broad enough for a multi-volume treatise on the subject. Indeed, there are numerous books on the subject, and cable cooking shows and magazines for gourmands share an overlap of boundaries with travel publications. Special tours, designed just for “foodies,” offer cooking at Cordon Bleu to fine dining on barges plying French rivers. Life aboard a cruise ship is regulated as much, if not more, by meal times than by the ship's destinations, and it's varied cuisine and pampering to specific tastes serves to insulate the traveler from the difficulties and uncertainties of obtaining sustenance in alien cultures.

These days, at least on the main tourist routes, it is possible to avoid having to submit to the vagaries of foreign cuisine. With the “Cococolinization” and “McDonaldization” of the world, the familiar signs and logos of American-corporate-chain-food offer the succor of familiarity to the squeamy palate and wary G-I tract. (Although it must be admitted that two main competitive features of such establishments abroad can lure even the most intrepid anti-American-fast-food traveler: air-conditioning and clean restrooms.) Thus, it must be confessed that these creature comforts, along with a bit of self-conscious munching on a Mc-This or Mc-That (with super-sized fries, of course), and then exiting into the streets of Paris, Madrid, or Hong Kong, creates the curious sensation of having been teleported from a mall in Orange County.

Yet, such backsliding on my part has been rare [1] or out of dire necessity. Sometimes a “taste of home” tastes better the further one is away from home. [2] Much rarer have been any voluntary encounters with the sorts of foods that I like to call “adventure cuisine.” This is the kind of food that used to be ingested at college fraternity initiations or at carnival shows, and is dished up to the human dung beetles who will do anything for the money and momentary celebrity of Survivor shows. But just why anyone in their right mind would want to voluntarily dine at the bottom of the food chain on locusts, grubs, scorpions, silkworms, and other such crunchy critters, or a bit further up the chain on roasted lizards, or stir-fried snakes, is beyond my comprehension or any level of inebriation to which I am willing to descend. True, it's possible to get some guys will eat week old road kill if it is reputed to give them the sexual energy of a rutting goat on Viagra. Hence, dishes based on tiger penises, bull testicles, rhino and deer horns, washed down with cocktails of snake blood and bile, are considered Big Macs for the satyr set. Never mind that rather sleeping with a guy who ingests this stuff most women would prefer to eat a bad cut of the lethal, but highly prized Japanese fugu fish.

There are places that you just don't travel to for their cuisines unless your gluttony is for self-abasement rather than gustatory. Mongolia and Tibet, for example; they base their cuisine on the yak, a beast that looks like it was designed by a stoned Rastifarian. Yak butter, and we must be talking serious cholesterol and trans fatty acids here, seems to appear in everything on the menu, proving that one person's delicacy in another person's regurgative. They even like to put it in their tea. It was a real nasty thing the Chinese did when they took over Tibet, but at least the conquerors might bring some better food there. [3] Have a cup of yak butter tea and the vision of Mongol hordes rampaging all over Asia starts to make sense; these people must have been after some decent victuals and they would rip apart anybody's country to get at it.

The customary salutation in greeting a Chinese is nihao (sort of “hello, how are you”). But Chinese often greet one another with the phrase chi fan mei ah (have you eaten yet?) Westerners may joke that forty-five minutes after a Chinese meal one is hungry again. It may well be that the Chinese developed their cuisine to actually produce that result: the Chinese love to eat, anytime, anywhere, and often. And pretty much anything. China recently dispatched hundreds of thousands of civet cats that had the misfortune of being fingered as the little varmints who brought SARS to the country. It matters little, since they would have been eaten in any case, pretty much like any other wild critter that is tossed into Chinese woks. The wilder the beast the more coveted (and expensive) it is to the Chinese palate. So much for the ecumenical Chinese palate. Moreover, the Chinese will also eat parts of animals that most Westerners didn't know existed. This may owe less to the Chinese palate than a history that has included many famines. Thus, eating Chinese can be a real adventure, and for fussy palates and finicky intestines such as mine, the “lazy Susan” on a Chinese dining table can seem like a torture rack. Enough picking on the Asians. [4]

So I'll pick on the Egyptians. Well, just for a moment, and then a particular subset. One of the terrors I have is of having to ingest something that the very thought of tends to turn my stomach because I do not want to give offense to my foreign hosts. I once had to eat tongue (langue) at the home of some French acquaintances and survived it by slicing my portion so thin and into such small morsels that it took me so long they finally removed my plate so they could begin their dessert. At a restaurant a French friend also once ordered me an andouillete , [5] which announces its arrival at the table with an odor of putrefaction that makes you wonder if the door to the alley was left open. But my worst food terror was goat's eyeballs. These were what another friend told me I might have to ingest to avoid offending the hospitality, that goat eyeballs are a delicacy where I was going to interview some Bedouin goat herders in the Western Desert of Egypt. I obsessed about it for days before, wondering if one chewed them, or swallowed them whole. I could almost make myself vomit just thinking about it. [6]

I'm not finished with the Egyptians just yet. They were responsible for a visitation of the other terror of eating abroad. You guessed it: in this case called “Pharaoh's revenge”. I had a group on a Nile cruise some years back and there was hardly a day when there were not a half dozen of the puking and fearful of being more than a hop and a lunge from a toilet. Sooner or later, even for the most veteran of travelers, you will ingest, stupidly or unwittingly, some tasty vector for those intestinal parasites that churn your bowels into WADs. [7]

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[1] OK, the Mickey D's in Shanghai does sell the ice cream cone as a loss leader for the equivalent of two-bits and I went there a lot. So does that make me an ugly American?

[2] Other things fall in this category. I have sometimes found myself when abroad engaging Americans in conversation that I would make every effort to avoid when at home.

[3] The reverse effect took place when the the British conquered India. And speaking of the British, how about their "hearty English breakfasts."

[4] I've done that enough in these pages. See “Eating Chinese” I and II

[5] Sounds like a French word for cufflink or those little rubber things they make to massage your gums, but it's a sausage stuffed with grisly chunks of half-cooked innards of various cloven beasts.

[6] Did they blind living goats to get their eyeballs? I didn't want to ask. Chinese fishermen just cut the fins off sharks and toss the sharks back in the sea—which is why I refuse to eat shark fin soup and launch into a polemic about it (screw the hospitality factor). Anyway, it turned out that the goat eyeball delicacy was not served by the Bedouin headman. Aren't you glad you bothered to read the footnote?

[7] No, you figure out what WAD's are. But I will say that I had a situation where almost my entire entourage of 35 was afflicted and confined to their beds with a really nasty intestinal bug. After every pharmacological preparation failed to work on them my local guide prescribed a concoction of Coca Cola (non-diet, and not Pepsi) and canned evaporated milk worked miracles on them,. Regrettably, my chances to become the highly-compensated CEO of a new pharmaceutical company were lost when I forgot to write down the proportions.

28. 7: LACRIMOSI CHRISTIANI 1.22.2006

© 2006, UrbisMedia

I seem to remember the early Xtians as a rather tough lot, most of them anyway. At least in the movies, where they were always being eaten by lions in the Roman arenas, and holding onto their faith with a martyr's stoicism. I don't remember them as cry babies. Not that some of them didn't deserve to be lion food, running around evangelizing that they have found the one, true faith and they were going to bug you with it until you got out those lions. They could be a pain in the ass, but there's not much record of them whining when they had to pay up. Nary a whimper.

Today's Xtians are, of course, quite a different lot in so many ways. Can you imagine Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell staked out for lion lunch in the Colosseum? (Hmmm, that's a pleasant image.) The early Xtians would have wondered what kind of Xtians these were that put chromed little fishes on the backs of their SUV's and wore “what would Jesus do” bracelets. And they would wonder that happened to the Xtian concern for the poor and the oppressed and that “love thy neighbor” and “blessed are the peacemakers” stuff. Today's Xtians just seem to love a holy war. I doubt those early disciples would have bought into all the “rapture” marlarky, and what would they have thought of Ratzinger parading around in his brocaded silly suit and acting like he has the Holy Trinity on his cell phone friends and family plan. Early Xtians didn't whine if they didn't get their way, despite the fact that they were persecuted in ways that would make a contemporary Xtian try to get a better deal than thirty pieces of silver.

Today's lot are a bunch of whiners. You can't get across a radio dial without running into a half dozen sappy psalm-sayers, evangelizing, preaching, and of course, whining about this or that. Xtians are all over K street and pouring the alms into the campaign coffers of their right wing candidates, but they whine that they don't get their due from government, despite their tax-free status for the likes of Purvis's Church of Jesus and Brake and Clutch Repair. They hate the courts because they fear that those “liberal judges” are “gonna let those fairies and dykes get married and pretty soon we'll only have lepers to look down on and they're getting tougher to find,” and “Hollywood is full of libertines and Jews, ‘nuf said.” And there's Roe v Wade, and stem cells and they want to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Bitchy, these fundamentalist Xtian whiners.

Trouble is, these contemporary Xtains want everything the easy way; they don't want to pay the price the way the early Xtaians did. They want the power and the glory without all the hard work, they want heaven for double coupons. Take school. Why waste all that time learning geology, biology, chemistry and that stuff so that you might be able to understand research about earth science. It's all there in Genesis, one book of the Bible, all laid out for you by God speaking through some prophet. Heck, you can read that in a day and then get on to some important classes, like alchemy, astrology, phrenology and memorizing scriptures. But there's resistance to letting those Xtians turn our public schools into institutions of idiocy and credulity. So they whine and whine about how “unfair” it is.

But they aren't done yet. The latest whine is about admissions to respected institutions of higher learning. The complaint against the University of California is that it has standards for admission that do not give credit for science course that are based on creationism and intelligent design. “Unfair” whine the Xtains, society needs doctors who believe in the efficacy of prayer over surgery, or airline pilots who believe that its really little angels that are holding that 747 aloft.

And now we begin to see that there is some strategy in all this whining: Set up a system of knowledge that is based on belief not science, teach it to your kids, then charge the universities with discrimination because they want the kind of proof for what stands as knowledge that comes from reason and rationality. Then the whiners throw themselves on the mercy of the courts and pray (here's where the prayer stuff really comes in) that they end up having their complaint heard by Scalia or Alito.

And if you can get the courts to force some of your idiot kids into the university then you join the growing movement to clamp down on academic freedom and lower academic standards. Enter the likes of Andrew Jones, a smirking right wing twerp who actually managed to graduate from UCLA a couple of years ago and now has a web site “exposing” liberal profs in the UC system. Voila! If you can force out these profs you might be able to turn our public universities into madrassas for the right-wing Xtain fundamentalist dimwits.

This is the new martyrdom of the contemporary Xtians. No lions, no blood, no strapping a few pounds of C-4 and nails on your body and walking into a Wal Mart. Just whining and bitching until you get what you want, sapping the walls of church-state separation with a bitchy drumbeat. And if history is at all instructive, when they do get their way, then we'll really see some persecution.

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28. 6: THE RIVER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, by Simon Winchester, 1996 [BR] 1.18.2006

As a rule, I prefer hanging out in cities rather than the natural environment. But I make an exception for rivers. It may be because rivers are so profoundly associated with cities. Cities began in the fertile river plains around twelve thousand years ago; rivers supplied these first permanent settlements with irrigation for crops, and a cheap highway to other cities, the sea and beyond. There are very few great cities that do not have a river running through them, often a river of commensurate greatness.

Having been fortunate enough to be on several great rivers—the Nile, Mississippi, Pearl, Thames, Plate, Seine, Mekong, Rhine, Hudson, and Yangtse, among them—but yet lacking the Yellow, Amazon and Volga, among others, I have had occasion to enter many cities in what is almost always the most dramatic way, buy water. The next best thing is to sail on a river with fine writer and intrepid traveler.

Like Simon Winchester.

It's a apt title for this book. China has historically believed it is the center of the world. The character for zhongguo, what the Chinese cal their country is a square with a line down the middle of it. China is the “middle kingdom.” Just about in the middle, but stretched across China from west to east, the main part of it from Chongqing to Shanghai, is the Yangtse (the Chiang Jiang , or “long river” to the Chinese).

It is long: nearly ten thousand li , in Chinese terms, or just under four thousand miles. Winchester is determined to every li of it. A Mandarin speaker and a former Asian correspondent, he has a reporter's knack for getting deeper into the fascinating stories that a river that has figured so significantly into the equally long history of China. Escorted by Lily, a tall guide from Manchuria who several times talks and stares down border guards, and difficult officials, Winchester decided to do it the hard way, going upstream from Shanghai all the way to the river's (somewhat disputed) source near Tibet.

I know upstream is the “hard way” from a couple of cruises downstream from Chongqing to Wuhan. The Yangtse has roughly three segments: the relatively placid part eastern third when there river flattens out over the plain (and where much of the flooding can occur), the (barely) navigable middle part between Wuhan and Chongqing, where the water races, roils, and speeds through gorges, and the upper part which is scarcely navigable with outright deadly reaches. Even the most populated central section can be frightening where the café au lait colored water looks like there is a battle of river dragons taking place underneath. It flows so fast that from my narrow cabin balcony one day I spotted a bloated, dead body in the current a hundred yards up ahead. By the time turned around to get my camera it was already racing away astern. How could that be when we were going downstream with the current ? The body was in a parallel opposite current.

The currents help to explain why, until the invention of powerful steam engines, the only way boats could get upstream through gorges and rapids, where the river runs fastest, was to be hauled by teams of straining, naked “trackers”. [1] The navigability of the river also helps to explain part of the rational for the controversial Three Gorges Dam project which will create a deep, navigable “lake” from Xiling to Chongquing, making the latter city an ocean port for freighters and tankers and open western China to economic development. Like so much in China the magnitude of the dam is mind boggling, and its putative benefits (hydroelectric power and flood control as well) are barbed with environmental threats and paid for with a cultural price. Winchester delves into the gorges and the dam that will forever change them in considerable detail after Lily manages to talk authorities into issuing them permits to visit various parts of it under construction.

But the final chapter on the am is yet to be written. Soon enough it will begin to halt the flow of the Yangtse, after millions of people will have been moved to new towns on higher ground, and many cultural sites will be inundated, the Three Gorges will lose their grandeur, and some of those who are rushing to make a cruise on it will be able to say they said the Yangtse “when”.

But this book is at its best when Winchester's reporter's instincts are at their best. Always alert for a story the author is adept at pulling from the river's long past to finding a good tale or vignette on one bank or another. He tells, for example, of Mao Zedong's swim across the river at Wuhan. [2] Mao's retinue tried to dissuade him, not only because the waters are quite turbulent there, and the river wide, but because there are also very poisonous water snakes in the vicinity. This was after Mao had led the beginning of the famous Long March when his army crossed the upper reaches of the river many years before.

There's a story nearly every li of the way up (or down) the Yangtse. Near the end of his quest Winchester in the lands of China's “minorities” (non-Han population), the lands of the Yi, Bai, Moso and other peoples, who do not even speak Mandarin. He recounts seeing a large dead pig being carried by a couple of boys in one of the villages in these remote parts. The story goes that these pigs are gutted and de-boned, and then used as a mattress for as long as a dozen years, after which they are cooked and eaten. That's the great thing about great rivers, they seem to be rivers through time as well. The Nile and Amazon have some great tales to tell, [3] but they have to go some to beat a river that reaches from a city where this computer was assembled, to a place where people eat their own mattresses.

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[1] Winchester gives some historical description of trackers, but they are the central focus of John Hersey's novel of a western engineer going upstream, A Single Pebble (1956).

[2] I remember seeing the photo of The Great Helmsman swimming in a weekly news magazine. Some thought the photo was re-touched because of the way the water looked around his head and shoulders. It was 1966, when he was 73 years old.

[3] See Alan Moorehead's The White Nile (1966) and The Blue Nile (1962), and Joe Kane, Running the Amazon (1986), a downriver journey by kayak.

28. 5: DON'T CALL ME ‘ISHMAEL': a travel memoir 1.15.2006

The ancient mariner briefly looks away from the horizon while

rounding Cape Horn (in the distant right) Photo by S. Walls, ©UrbisMedia 1998

Some people are born travelers; others are made. Most of me fits the first category, but my stomach goes along reluctantly.

My very first recollections of travel are gastro-intestinal. For many of my youthful Summers my parents, and aunt and uncle used to take my brother and me on a long drive up to a lake in the Adirondacks. I loved those two weeks, swimming, fishing and skipping rocks on the placid water after dinner with my brother.

But I didn't much like getting there, which involved several hours of queasiness and heaves in the car. As a kid I had such a a case of motion sickness I could get "mal de sidewalk" just sauntering down the street and turning my head to one side too quickly. I suspect my buddies used to keep a little distance for fear I'd throw up on them.

So when we went on our Summer trip to the lake my mother would make a comfy little space in the back seat of the car, with pillows for me to rest my pukey little head. She had crackers handy; they were bland and were not too offensive in a regurgitated form. But there was always a bucket within reach. Getting there was definitely, for me, a good bit less than "half the fun".

Somehow it my stomach did not deter me from wanting to visit faraway places and peoples. Over the years I've forced my stomach onto nearly every mode of gut-churning transportation. Amazingly, though I've reached for a white bag a time or two I've managed to hold my lunch since those Summer sojourns to the lake. Not without considerable effort however. I nearly lost it on that Hovercraft crossing the Channel back in 1977.

We knew it was stormy when we were on the train from Paris to Boulogne. The conductor kept coming by and muttering something like: "Le bateau, il ne mache pas. Il y a un grand orage." Heck, we weren't worried, we weren't booked on a 'bateau' . We were on the hovercraft; forty-five minutes soaring inches above the waves in an airliner-like cabin. Beats lurching around on a ferry with drunken lorry drivers for three hours.

Well, the notoriously inclement English Channel said, have I got news for you. The Hovercraft lifted itself upon in its rubber skirts and slid aftward off the beach and into the shallows. For the first few hundred metres it looked like it would be a nice smooth trip. Then we hit the huge swells, and rather than gently hover over the surface, the craft rose, then dropped several feet every few seconds, sometimes sliding to one side, then another. It pitched, rolled and yawed, and bashed itself into the larger swells; it did everything but cartwheels. We were well out to sea when one of the "stewardesses" informed us that the storm had put three other hovercraft out of commission that day. Were we riding over them at that very moment?

OK, I can handle this, I said to myself—building you confidence up is a big part of keeping your lunch down. I would use the "horizon-fix method": take a fix on the horizon and lock your eyeballs on it. This keeps one's brain from getting confused by getting mixed messages from one's eyes, the main cause of mal de mer . Only one problem, the spray on the windows and the rain and swells outside obliterated the horizon much of the time.

I was about to panic when I saw the guy across the aisle and two rows up. It was the most pathetic sight in the annals of motion sickness. He was a large guy in his mid-thirties, and by the time I noticed him he had a white-knuckle grip on the seat in front of him and his shirt was already soaked with sweat. He was staring straight ahead, maybe looking for that elusive horizon, his body jerking with each lurch of the craft. In a few minutes more droplets of perspiration were falling from his soaked head, some droplets would spray off him as a yaw lolled his head from side to side, or a smash into a swell lurched him forward. The stewardess brought some towels, but she had to towel him off since he refused to relinquish his grip.

I was so distracted with his plight that I was forgetting to get sick myself. It was as though all the motion sickness in that hovercraft had settled into the one guy's body and he was suffering for all of us. (Actually it was being shared with a young, nicely-dressed Spaniard in the row behind me who was actually groaning with a Castillian lisp.)

Why is it that one person's worst nightmare is like a walk in the park to somebody else? The man across from the sick guy was lighting up a cigar and ordering his third beer. And in the row behind the sick guy were three rather elderly Biritsh ladies getting “pissed”on Beaugelais Nouveau and chocolate, laughing and letting out little whoops when the lurching spilled some wine on their requisite British lady flower print dresses. They, at least, were a little solicitous toward the sick guy in front of them, helping to towel him off (he was now as drenched as if he'd been plucked out of the Channel), and trying to bolster his spirits with "It won't be long now Luvy. Anything I can get you, Ducky?"

I first formulated my theory that British ladies are immune to mal de mer on that crossing. This was later scientifically confirmed many years later by direct observation one morning when I was doing my "horizon-fix method" on a ship in the Pacific. It was going from Manilla to Hong Kong, passing the Luzon Straight where the Northeast Trades have an unobstructed opportunity to roll up the seas for several thousand miles. The spray was flying, the wind howling, and the temperature was dropping as I clung to my deck chair on the promenade deck, bundled up and wiping the spray from my glasses so as not to lose my fix on that horizon or lose my breakfast.

I had been in that attitude for about an hour, cold, wet, alone on the deck, and in a ferocious battle with my GI tract, when the door a few feet away was flung open and two. . . yup. . .grey-haired, British Ladies burst out onto the pitching deck as sure-footed as a couple of old jack tars. It was the one with the blue flower-print dress and the thin grey cardigan who, rubbing her hands more with delight than for circulation, I overheard to remark to the other as they briskly strolled by: "Ah, isn't this more like it, at last, this is SAILING!" I would have got up and pushed them over the side if I hadn't been so afraid to take my eyes off the horizon.

When that hovercraft years earlier finally limped into Folkstone after two hours the sick guy was wrapped in blankets, but still holding onto the seat. A few minutes before we arrived I heard a moan from the seat behind me. The young Spanish man dressed in his Sunday best was coming to see his English girlfriend we had overheard from his conversation with the stewardess. There had not been a sound from him for some time, since the moan and the sound of him passing out on the floor. He was ignominiously carried off in one of the fireman's carries by two deckhands, in between the sick guy still wrapped in blankets, and the British ladies in their flower-print dresses, laughing and chattering like they'd been playing bridge all afternoon.

I still believe in the horizon-fix method. But just in case circumstances are such that I can't see the horizon I always pack a nice flower-print dress.

Un-retiouched photo of ancient mariner in lovely British lady flower-print dress to

ward off mal de mer. The pearls were a nice nautical touch, dontcha think?

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28. 4: THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER 12.11.2006

How can you tell when Sam Alito is lying? Right, when his lips are moving. The Supreme Court candidate has not only been nominated buy a consummate liar, he has also been coached on how to avoid being caught giving a truthful answer by a team that included Senator Lindsay Graham, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary committee that is supposed to get at the truth. Once again we are in the position of putting someone in one of the most powerful positions in government, for life, at a nice cushy salary, a position that is supposed to be concerned with the “whole truth,” and the guy is pretty much going to lie and evasive reply his way into it. Something smells here. So Sam Alito will waste most of our time saying he did not really mean things he said and wrote, or that he said them for a different job (his principles are dictated by his opportunities), or that he has “an open mind” (until he shuts it). Nothing makes me puke like these hearings.

So, a proposal. Put a polygraph (fancy Greek-rooted word for lie-detector) on Alito. The machine will probably go up in smoke as soon as it is hooked up to this guy, but it's better than some Democratic senator bashing his head against the wall trying to get the truth out of Alito (no, not Alito's head, but it's a thought). When you tell a lie the polygraph registers jagged lines of high amplitude. For example, you might ask Alito some questions when he is hooked up.

Question: “Mr. Alito, is it true that you have your mind made up that Roe vs Wade should be overturned?”

Answer: “No, I have an open mind on Roe v Wade

Polygraph:

Question: “Mr. Alito, is it true that you were aware that you owned stock in Vanguard, but still did not recuse yourself from the case?”

Answer: “Uh, what's the Vanguard Case?”

Polygraph:

Question: “Mr Alito, do you believe that the President should be able to wiretap Americans without judicial permission?”

Answer: “Absolutely not.”

Polygraph:

Question: “Mr. Alito, is it true that your nickname in high school was ‘Sam the Masturbator'?”

Well, you sort of get the idea. It cuts through a lot of the BS and wasted time. We can establish that Sam Alito would lie to you if you asked him the time of day. So we should try to get a moderate minority on the Supreme Court instead.

But just in case Sam does make it on the court I have an alternative proposal.

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28. 3: HEY SAMMY, BAHFUNGHOOL! 1.10.2006

Many years ago I was in a wedding party back in New York. It was a big Italian-American wedding and somebody told me that the pretty girl I “stood up” with was the niece of the dapper old guy who sat regally at the back of the large restaurant that held the reception. It turned out he was the don who ran gambling and some other stuff in upstate New York and had be in the infamous Appalachian meeting. Other than a tough kid I used to play baseball with and who collected gambling debts for the mob that was about as close as I knowingly got to the MAFIA.

But there have been a few times since when I found myself wishing that I had some “connections,” where I could have a “favor” done for me like Don Vito Corleone used to do favors for people. You know, have somebody roughed up or the severed head of a beloved pet turn up under their bedclothes. Mostly I have these fantasies about people who I can't “take care of” myself because I would end up in San Quentin, but who have pissed me off in one way or another. Sure, it's a Sicilian way of settling scores, and not exactly just way, I admit, but it can be very poetic. Admit it, isn't there somebody you would like to see laying in their own doo-doo in a deserted parking lot at night and, leaning over him (her) is a guy with a face that has gone too may rounds and a voice like gravel pouring on a tin roof saying “[your name here] sends his [her] regards from the Bahamas.”

You with me now? OK, because I got a candidate that is perfect for just such a lesson. Are you ready for this? Sam Alito (aka San “The Un-Recuser” Scalito). That's right, Bush's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. Him. Somebody's gonna lean on Sam a little bit. (Hey, I'm not saying it's me; I'm just making an innocent prediction.)

Why? You ask. Because he gives Italian-Americans a bad name, that's why. Ironic, you think, that I would have people who putatively give Italian-Americans a bad rep, like Mafiosi, La Cosa Nostra “soldiers,” Lucca Brazzi types, scare the melanzane out of Sam Alito, in order to keep the reputation of Italian-Americans out of the gutter . Capisce? Listen up, we already have a bad rep because that creep, Antonin Scalia, is already on the Supreme Court. It's bad enough that, thanks to The Godfather films and The Sopranos , we have people thinking that every other person with a surname than ends in a vowel is a Mafiosi. Now we are really being slurred if people are going to associate Italian-American with possibly two right-wing, Catholic-fascist greaseballs on the Supreme Court. [1] (BTW: what the hell happened to having some “balance” on the court? Italian-Americans are 8 percent of the American population; so should they be 2/9ths of the Supreme Court? You do the math; I nearly flunked algebra.) These guys give Italian-American's a bad name; they countervail the good repute built by people like Robert DeNiro, Joe Dimaggio, Ann Bancroft, Francis Coppola, Rocky Marciano, Mario Cuomo, and Mother Cabrini, among others. [2]

The appearance of Sam “The Un-Recuser” Alito brings forth various emotions to this Italian-American. One would expect a certain, if subconscious ethnic pride in one of the Latini tribe to have been nominated for such a lofty post as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. One would think that someone who might well have “Justice” prefixing his name would provide some counterweight to the dualities if the Italian-American image. Frankly, I don't give a rat's rump what surnames there are on the Supreme Court.

I want somebody on the court with some integrity, and Scalito does not fill that bill. This is a guy who gets RCMLD (Republican Convenient Memory Lapse Disease) when he is pushed on why he didn't recuse himself from the Vanguard company case, a company which was mentioned on nearly every page of the transcript, and in which he held stock, and which stock increased in value partly due to the ruling in which he participated. You know what a real Italian-American “goombah” would say to that? Bahfunghool!

This is a guy who tries to come across as impartial, but has an all but consistent record of siding with big government and big corporations against individual plaintiffs. I've got one word for a guy who sucks up to power: Bahfunghool!

This is a guy who is on record in memos he wrote when he served the Reagan administration as claiming that Roe v Wade should be overturned, but pretends to be one who respects precedent and would be open minded on the question of this important case. Sammy will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that those were personal opinions he wrote in trying to get a lawyer job, but now he is up for a different job. Sure! Bahfunghool! What this guy needs is a job as a weather vane!

This is a guy who has spent his life writing opinions that would get him judgeships and eventually to right where he is today—ready to park his flabby butt on a Supreme Court chair where nobody can touch him for the rest of his life and he can finally be, unequivocally, the fundamentalist right-wing scumbag that he always has been. Bahfunghool!

Now if that isn't enough for you I want to draw a mental picture (or just find one of Alito) of little creep in your grade school class whose mamma used to cook his pasta al gomma , so he wouldn't get agita in his sensitive little tummy. He's a guy who learned how to suck up early in life, who has waited along time for power and would say and do what it took to get it. That's our little stronzo Sammy Alito; the sort of guy who remains a member of the reactionary “Concerned Alumi of Princeton” that wanted to bar women and minorities from entrance to his hallowed alma mater (and which he also “can't remember” being a member of). Is this is the sort of guy we should want representing the highest court in the land, much less an entire ethnic group? He wouldn't have lasted a week in my neighborhood. Given the bad reputation he is giving Italian-Americans he should probably be careful that some goombahs don't show up and make him “an offer that he can't refues.” Better for him that, when the time comes, enough of the Senate will see through him and give him a rousing, “Hey Sammy, Bahfunghool!” [3]

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[1] OK. You probably noticed that I used an ethnic slur that has been unkindly applied to Italian-Americans. Like rappers and Black movie actors who routinely and liberally use the “N” word in referring to their own kind, I invoke the same privilege. This is my way of saying, with deliberate rudeness, that there are people in my ethnic group for whom I have much contempt. You won't catch me using epithets for other racial and ethnic groups except in deliberate irony, but probably not at all.

[2] You are damn right I left off Rudolph Giuliani. And no, Mother Cabrini was not the founder of Pizza Hut.

[3] It's an Italian-American ghetto corruption of an Italian epithet that means, well, up yours!

28. 2: WHAT'S TROUBLING MISS DIEGO?* America's Finest (?) City, Part 2 1.8.2005

When the woman walked into Dr. Korsakov's office he had to admit to himself that, outwardly, there didn't seem to anything discernibly wrong with her. She was young, and beautiful in that tall, healthy, tanned, California-girl stereotypical way. But the report he had from his colleague indicated otherwise; in fact, it was unique case alright.

Dr. Korsakov had been a psychotherapist for thirty years. He had treated every neurotic oddity known to his profession: phobias about everything from heights to household appliances, manias from sex to sushi, people who thought they were elephants or Elvis Presley. But this was something new, and different. This one might get him into Psychology Today. He began as soon as she settled herself on the leather couch and smoothed out her velour exercise suit. "It's Sandra, isn't it?"

"Yes, but I prefer Sandi," she replied.

"Sandi it is then. Sandi, the first thing I must ask is just when you first began imagining that you were a city," he inquired, stifling an unprofessional urge to snicker.

"What do you mean imagine; I am a city!" she snapped, reminding him that he should approach her on her level of reality. "I've felt this way ever since I was a. . .a. . . little. . .a. . .village," she continued more calmly.

"I see," Dr. Korsakov mumbled, scribbling a note, "and were you happy when you were a . . . a village?"

"Yes, very happy, it's only in recent years, since I've been grown up, that I just don't feel fulfilled."

"Hmm," Korsakov mused," could we go with that thought a little bit. What do you mean, not 'fulfilled'?"

"Well," she began self-consciously, "I don't want to sound immodest, but as you can see, I am a rather beautiful city, exceptionally well-endowed by Mother Nature." Korsakov had to agree with that. Visions of sensuous, undulating topography formed in his mind, lush foliage, and perfumed breezes. With a shudder he shook himself out of this Freudian fantasies.

"A lot of cities would give anything to look like you." he offered.

"That's just the point," she complained, "I'm envied for my beauty, but I don't want to be just another pretty place, a town that's great to look at, that everybody wants to live in because I'm the centerfold in American City Magazine."

"What's wrong with being desirable," Korsakov prodded.

"It's just not enough, I can get all the population I want on my looks, but I want to be desired for more than appearances. I'm not some adolescent village anymore." She looked like she might begin to cry and Korsakov felt he was onto something.

"What other women, I mean cities , do you admire?" he asked.

"Well, cities like New York, San Francisco, and Boston," Sandi replied without hesitation.

"Why them?" he pressed on, "they aren't blessed with your consistently sunny disposition."

"But they have culture, you know, sophistication," she said. They're classy. That's what I want, culture and class."

"Well, you had the Super Bowl and the America's Cup, they're nothing to be ashamed of," Korsakov insisted.

"There ya go, just like everybody else, the first thing you think of is sports. She's a great sports and recreation town that Sandi, I hear them say; boy! look at the beaches on that chick!" She was showing some anger now. "A city get's tired of hearing that she's a real sport, an outdoorsy type, an object; but not the sort you'd sit down with over cappuccino to discuss avant garde films and French impressionism. No, I get, 'Hey Sandi, how're the Padres doin, how about some body surfing and some fish tacos'. What kind of an image is that!"

"You tell me," Dr. Korsakov replied non-directively. "It's an image that doesn't get any respect," she growled.

"Maybe you just need to be more assertive about your image," Korsakov suggested.

"I tried that already," she countered. "For years I went around calling myself 'America's Finest City'; it didn't work."

Dr. Korsakov was stumped. He'd have to figure out something to get this city the self-respect she yearned for. Looking for any inspiration he got up and walked over to his little art collection, picked up his facsimile Faberge egg and studied the Russian icons on the wall. "Were out of time today, Sandi," he said, "but I have an idea I'll discuss with you next time." He walked over and pushed the intercom button: "Mrs. Petersen,** please schedule another appointment for Miss Diego."

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*Originally aired as "Identity Crisis," on KPBS-FM, public radio, October 19, 1988

**Non-San Diegans may not know that Mrs. Petersen is the married name of then mayor of San Diego, Maureen O'Connor. It was Mayor O'Connor who was instrumental in bringing to San Diego an exhibit from Russia of the renowned Faberge Eggs, and along with it whatever cultural image they might hatch for “America's Finest City.”

28. 1: CULTURE WARS II 3.1.2006

For all their support of the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in school science curricula the political Right are fiercer Darwinists than the Left. Social Darwinists. To the cultural Right cultural differences in society are resolved by the mistaken notion of the “survival of the fittest.” Such a worldview does not leave much room for accommodation; things are more dual, good or bad, right or wrong. Since the incursion of religious fundamentalism into the political Right's their rigid, and simplistic perspective of political and social differences has become even less conciliatory. Bad things, like taxes, regulation, secularism, separation of church and state, women's choice, gay rights, immigration, and multiculturalism, among some others, are not things to be woven into the fabric of America's culture, but to be defeated and expunged. In that regard one is either “with us or against us,” there is no middle ground. For the cultural Right the events of 9-11 only seemed to confirm this thesis; survival , a word employed often in the rhetoric of the Right's response to 9-11 was now clearly, and simplistically, posed as a matter of cultural domination, not only on a national, but also a global scale. Moreover, that this struggle is seen by many as one between two great faiths, the differences relating to religion between the American cultural Right and cultural Left have been cast in greater relief.

Take the matter of the separation of church and state. The Right wants, say, prayer in schools (really Christian prayer in schools). Okay, say a little prayer if you want to, just keep it between you and Jesus (silent prayer could also be between you and Allah or Yahweh, or Buddha). No, they want “public” praying in school (and they don't mean that some kid should put down a prayer rug and kneel toward Mecca). Take the matter of religious symbols in and on public buildings and grounds. It matters little that the First Amendment already protects people wearing religious clothing, [1] putting crosses and crucifixes on the homes, churches and businesses, Christmas crèches on their lawns, virtually anywhere other than public buildings. [2] But that is not enough, religion –and we are still talking about Christian religion, here – must be mixed with public function at every opportunity or the hue will go up that the godless Left is out to deliver America to the Devil. The co-mingling of religious and political views often ends up with the posing of public policy as “good” and “evil,” and policies as “crusades.”

The Left wing of the culture tends to regard Social Darwinism not only as a misinterpretation of the way in which Darwinian evolution actually works, but also as a way of resolving political and social differences that eventually leads to the ends justifying the means as well. Social choices are a form of evolution that must reach an accommodation with one's environment. This is perhaps most evident in differing views about the natural environment itself; the Right insisting upon the biblical injunction to “multiply and subdue the earth,” and the Left claiming that to be the most certain road to self-extinction.

Left thinking leans to “cultural relativism,” a view that that recognizes that were any of us to have been born in another culture we would see the world through that culture. Moreover, societies “evolve” normatively, throughself-study, planning, through and regulation and legislation toward socially desirable and progressive conditions and consistent self-evaluation. [3] The “cultural absolutism” of the cultural Right elevates its version of Americanism to an exalted, culturally exceptional position, a notion that worries about being diluted or compromised by immigrants, faiths and ideas that do not conform to that notion, but is a veneer over more deep-seated concerns that harbor racism, ethnic superiority, and religious supremacy. The cultural absolutists vacillate between complaining that immigrants “don't want to fit in” and homogenize, to wanting them to “keeping in their place.”

Perhaps the prime example of this difference is in the matter of social integration, particularly racial integration. The resistance of the Right to school integration, affirmative action, and social programs and various civil rights legislation has been part of the so-called “conservative” agenda that seems more interested in conserving the Republican party's “southern strategy” than in advancing rights that are putatively guaranteed by our Constitution. [4] Advancement of the rights of minorities are often presented as being “hydraulic” in their relationship to the rest of society; that is, the Right likes to pose minority social advancement as something that will reduce the social advantages of the rest of society. The Left is more likely to see such advancements as contributory to economic growth and cultural richness.

This dimension of America's culture wars is, then, one between a mono-culture and a poly-culture . It is between a society of one dominant religion that seeks to erase the line between church and state in order to consolidate their political influence, and a society that retains that division between what should be the private and the public spheres of society. It is between a culture in which political debate might be cleansed of references to matters of faith, and one that conflates faith, rather one faith, with being truly American, to be patriotic. It is between the culture of “us” and the culture of “us” and “them”. It is between a culture of integrity, that refuses to condone torture, illegal detention, and any degree of collateral damage as policies relevant to its cause, and a culture where the ends justify any means and any criticism is labeled giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” It is between a political culture of that values self-reflection and critique, and one that values “staying the course” over efficacy and common sense.

If anything, recent years of political debate in America have proven that it is easier to divide Americans that bring them together, and that the consistent fanning of the fires of fear abet a culture of and exclusiveness over inclusiveness. The cultural Left has a more difficult job of stating its case; its relativity is portrayed buy the cultural Right as weak and waffling in the face of determined enemies and dangerous circumstances. Its pluralism is depicted as arriving a polity that is paralyzed by indecision and placation fractious interests. The easy dualisms of the cultural Right have an easier time of it. It is a far more simple task, especially when contemporary circumstances and the zeitgeist appear to confirm it, to portray the world as battlefield of Social Darwinism. It has all the certainty that a Tyrannosaurus Rex must have felt, even when the temperature was dropping, and furry little mammals were scurrying between its feet.

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[1] What would the political Right have to say about those “cowardly, anti-American French” outlawing Muslim schoolgirls from wearing their scarves to school? They shoulopd be sorry about that “Freedon Fries” business.

[2] See, “The Blancocruxians,” DCJournal

[3] For all of its worshipping of laissez-faire -ism by the Right, they would choose to regulate what women do with their own bodies, what we are able to watch in the media, limit the rights of gays and lesbians, and that we must accept faith as fact in school science curricula. In other words, even laissez-faire needs to be planned and regulated

[4] More will be said of this in a future Culture Wars piece in these pages.