DCJ:July2004

VOLUME 10: JULY 2004

10. 5: 1984+20, WILLING MASS DELUSION 7.31.2004

Big Brother speaks at Buffalo, New York, Apr. 20, 2004

It is likely that you have a right-wing friend or associate (or that you are the right-wing friend or associate), since the country is now almost evenly divided ideologically (thanks to the man who ran on bringing us together ). But in this piece I am preaching more to my own choir: those of us trying to keep our right-wing friends in such a polarized political atmosphere (screw the associates).

If, like me, you feel there is there is more than a faint Orwellian feel to the country these days, then it is likely because there are two versions of the truth running about for primacy in the hearts and minds of the people. You will recall that Orwell, in his 1984 , coined the term newspeak , for the argot of his totalitarian overlords and controllers of Big Brother, for a rhetoric in which things meant the opposite of what was stated. So if you have right-wing friends or associates, you might have noticed their tendency to pick up the language of their “big brother”.

The problem with keeping our right wing friends (and maybe one should include some family members in this category), is that they are increasingly suffering from WMD, Willing Mass Delusion. And for this they are perhaps to be pitied, although not to the extent of being out-voted. They have been consistently lied to by their leaders, treated as “dittoheads,” distracted with conjured “values” issues, and jerked around morally by cheap revival tent hucksters of hate and bigotry. But they hold on to their delusions and are expected to walk drone-like into voting booths in November and screw themselves.

Yes, that's what they are doing. Dean tried to tell them that in his clumsy attempted rapprochement with the South's NASCAR dads; other's have made the point since that the war, the economy, the phony drug plan that is really for Big Pharm not old mom, the rich-skewed tax cuts, the “Clear Skies Initiative” that is really a fog obscure that companies can use the atmosphere for a toilet, and many other of Bush's policies, are counter to the interests of working class people in his “base.” But Republicans are going to dutifully punch the Bush chad and screw themselves. Bush tells them that economy is recovering , but not that the jobs being created are nowhere near in number those that have been lost under Bush, that many of them are Wal Mart-greeter jobs, or that bankruptcies are on the increase, and the right-wingers of WMD blithely accept the deception. One begins to wonder whether the division in America is not so much between the political parties, or the Left and the Right, but between the wise and the dummies.

But, of course, they don't want to know. Facts are for liberals, and they have been taught to fear and scorn that word. And when the facts intrude the Bushies have two cranks: one cranks up the “values issues” to get the faithful riled about prayer in schools, the ten commandments in public buildings, and the destruction of the family because gays and lesbians would like the same rights as the rest of us. It doesn't matter that there are no facts to support such contentions. It doesn't matter that their rantings about Hollywood's ruination of American morality contradicts right-wing adoration of the market place. Your right wing friends just blankly stare back and accept the connections that have been made for them. Duuuuhhhhhh!

The other crank left to the Busies is the terror crank. This one, of course, vaguely justifies the occupation of Iraq, after your right wing friends no longer have WMDs (“they just ain't been found yet), Saddam al Qaeda connections (“but Cheney keeps saying there were”), and Abu Ghraib is “just an anomaly by a few messed up misfits from West Virginia.” Accepting the Bush rationale for the preemptive invasion of Iraq is tantamount to having a lobotomy with tire iron. So that zombie look in the eyes of your right wing friends isn't from doing a lot of illegal substances (which they will tell you is what those Hollywood commie liberals do).

When they have nothing left they, after they have tried to convince you, as they have convinced themselves, that George Bush was in greater danger in Alabama licking envelopes for a political candidate than John Kerry was in fire fights in the Mekong Delta, your right wing friends will likely resort to their trump crank—the Clintons. Try to be forgiving; without this last one they really don't have a life.

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10.4: Rest In Peace (a while) 7.17.2004

Never at a loss for mourners; San Juan, P.R. (Courtesy of and © S.G. Walls)

Travelers planning their local itineraries for many foreign cities might at first take the suggestion that they include a visit to a cemetery as the raving of a fool or a ghoul. Why spend precious vacation time in a place that seems counter to the idea of “living it up”?

Yet this is precisely this recommendation I have often made to travelers who have sought my advice on interesting, if uncommon, places in the often frenetic doings of foreign travel, to requiescat in pace (for a while). In my own experience such visitations have frequently proven to be a refreshing, unique, and informative investment of time (and costless in terms of money) in the historical, architectural, and cultural interests that cemeteries offer. Furthermore, these places of final repose can provide a temporary peaceful retreat from the crowds, noise, and delays at the popular tourist venues.

In over two dozen years as a professor-escort for travel-study tours I have guided many of my charges through London's Highgate, Paris's Pere Lachaise , and Rome's Protestant Cemetery, among others, where they have visited the final addresses of Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, Modigliani, Shelly and many others in the same rank of renown. The monuments, mausoleums, and other funerary architecture they find were often done by masters, and run the gamut of styles, from classical to contemporary, the beautiful to the bizarre. I recall the same delight of discovery that one woman in my group had at finding Brancusi's exquisite little sculpture, “The Kiss,” in a remote corner of Monteparnasse Cemetery; another was deeply touched by the fresh flowers on the tomb of the star-crossed lovers, Abelard and Heloise, in Pere Lachaise .

In London's Highgate Cemetery I learned from a guide-custodian, Nigel, that, in times past, cemeteries were also used by the living as retreats from cares and concerns of life. In the 19 th century visitors often made a day of re-uniting with their dearly departed, bringing a picnic lunch along with flowers and reading poetry. In 1869 there was a more intimate re-union when the Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet Dante Rossetti exhumed his deceased wife, Elizabeth Siddel from whom he retrieved a book of his romantic poems that he had interred with her. But most inveterate cemetery visitors go for the refreshing repose. Honore Balzac, now a permanent resident there, wrote: “I seldom go out, but when I feel myself flagging I go and cheer myself up in Pere Lachaise .” This was before stoned rock fans flocked to the grave of self-dispatched Jim Morrison in the same cemetery.

Ancient Egyptians are, of course, renowned for their funerary rites and, in the case of their pharaohs, the massiveness of their tombs. But while the plateau at Giza, outside of Cairo, is best known for the cemetery which includes the great pyramids of Kufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the huge necropolis nearby whose tombs once housed the dead has been re-employed as a thriving residence for Cairo's homeless, and beneath them have been found the cemeteries of the workers who built the pyramids.

As one might expect the main cemetery in Venice is its own island, Isola di San Michele, is mainly for Roman Catholics, but it contains two mini-graveyards for other Christian sects: the Greci or Greek Orthodox cemetery, where Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev are buried; and the Protestant graveyard, whose most famous resident is Ezra Pound. Jews, who were segregated in a ghetto (the word originates from this place) from 1517 to 1757, have their own cemetery on the Lido, Venice's resort island.

In a seaside cemetery in San Juan, Puerto Rico a I sat with the wife and children of the deceased man buried in one of its graves. They mourned in silence, since they were full-sized sculpted replicas of the family members, permanently beside their fallen pater familias . But this was only one of numberless unusual funerary monuments, from sculpted weeping wives lying on gravestones, to sculpted joined hands emerging from the graves of a couple of lovers. At a modest cemetery in Puerto Montt, Chile, the graves of children are topped with their caskets enclosed in little houses that contain their favorite toys, school awards and photos. It wasn't only the Egyptians who “took” their treasured possessions with them.

Rarely is a visit to a cemetery without its moments of poignancy. In a churchyard cemetery in New Zealand I couldn't help but notice how the tombstones read that so many young people died of drowning down in this part of the world in the 19th century. And in a protestant cemetery in Macao the tombstones attested to the perils of the tropics for westerners in the 19th century; the average age of death for residents of the same period was in their twenties, mostly from diseases and infections that would be treated by over-the-counter prescriptions today.

A few years ago a member of the tour I was escorting asked if it might be possible to locate the grave of her brother when we visited Hong Kong. He had been a member of the Canadian regiment of the Queen's Rifles in 1941 when the Japanese army took the Crown Colony and was killed in action just a few days after his arrival, at the age of nineteen. Through the British Consulate I was given the name of a former British officer who kept scrupulous records of the military cemeteries on the island and located his grave. It was gratifying to see his sister standing at the neatly kept grave and tombstone of the brother she had last seen sixty years ago, forever at final in pace with rows of his fallen comrades, on a slope overlooking the entrance to Victoria Harbor. It was a peaceful place to rest, and reflect, for a while.

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10.3: Gazing into the Middle Distance Part II 7.16.2004

An encounter with the Chinese English teach in Wuhan, China in Part I inspires a recollection of childhood days:

My favorite playmate when I was a little boy was my grandfather, Sebastian. He was also my first traveling companion. I'm convinced that my relationship with him is the reason that wherever I travel I am fascinated with old men idling in cafes, sitting on benches in parks, or watching the theater of the piazza. I always wonder what memories are playing in their minds as they sip their espresso or wine, argue with their cronies, or gaze wistfully upon some passing beautiful girl.

Sebastian is long gone now and I, myself now a recent grandfather, have him only in memory. But he comes freshly to mind, often bringing a smile to me, whenever I see some old guys playing petanque beside a café in the south of France, or sitting in the shade of a pepper tree outside a kapheneion in Crete, or slapping down mahjong tiles on a park table in Wuhan. That's when I can vividly recall my grandfather playing cards with his old country buddies in that neighborhood bar back in Rochester in the early 1940s. I'll never forget the name of that bar either, The Knotty Pine, because my grandfather never stopped mispronouncing it as the K'noddidy Pine.

Sebastian Bianchi, ca 1900

Sebastian would bring me there almost every day before I began school. I sat on the floor, my toy truck making and unmaking piles of sawdust and cigar butts, listening to the Abruzzese-accented Italian of their gesticulated discourse. They gibed, joked, and, of course, told each other those embellished stories of their youthful exploits old men everywhere tell.

Then, of course, my curiosity about old men's memories was unformed. All my life lay before me, as did those encounters and events that would form my own memories. Faraway places and peoples, passions, loves, lost loves, victories and disappointments, were yet to come. But at that time I was fascinated with who I thought was the best playmate and travel-companion a young boy could have: Sebastian Bianchi.

I also had no idea then that these childhood experiences would factor into my subsequent interest in travel and, more particularly, the way in which the experience of travel, especially the introspection it can bring, would have their origins in that eccentric wizard of a grandfather. Little inkling did I have that one day, in some faraway place, in seeking Sebastian out in the form of some old gent leaning on a cane, or staring into the middle distance of some memory, I would also be venturing into my own existential territory.

Sebastian's own travels were not very extensive; thirty or so days in steerage from Civitavecchia to New York in the last decade of the last century. His story is an oft-told tale of immigrants from all over Europe: slim prospects for his hunting and farming skills in the big, foreign city, but a strong back and a will to ruin it with hard labor to make a stake to take back home, or buy into America's dream. He told his own version of the old immigrant's story. “I came to New York because in the old country I heard that New York streets were paved with gold. When I got there I discovered three things: the streets were not paved with gold; the streets were not paved at all, and; I was the one who was going to have to pave them.”

Sebastian paved streets in New York until he nearly sliced up a non-Italian supervisor who kept pronouncing his given name in a way that he, perhaps intentionally, intoned too close to the Italian word for “bastard.” Shortly thereafter, and perhaps because he had a brother living up in Rochester, he headed upstate. He might have returned to Italy after building a nest-egg had he not met the beautiful Loretta Corona.

Why my grandmother married Sebastian has always been a source of wonder in my family. The daughter of a middle-class family, also from Abbruzzi, that owned a tile-making factory, she had come over to upstate New York not to immigrate, but to visit relatives. But something in the wild and dapper countryman, who probably wouldn't have had a chance with her in the old country, caught her fancy. Neither of them ever went back, or ventured more than a few miles from their new American home.

They were an unlikely couple. The wedding photo of them shows my grandmother in the contemporary “Gibson Girl” hairdo and high-collar, but her stunning, classic beauty would turn heads in any age. Her face features the same huge, light-blue eyes set in cream skin that turned up two generations later in my daughter Lisa. Beside her in the photo is the droopy-mustachioed, wiry, Sebastian, wearing an almost fierce glare on a face with a mashed, Michelangelo-nose that betrayed the wages of a quick temper that would turn up again in his admiring grandson.

My parents and brother and I lived in the same house with my maternal grandparents, as did two other families of relatives. My grandmother was a saint to me, and to everyone who encountered her. She was beautiful, loving, and strong. Her legs had been badly burned in a religious bonfire back in Italy, but she gave no sign of the pain that lingered in them, preparation perhaps for the courage with which she faced a painful death.

I could do no wrong in my grandmother's eyes. I was her first grandchild, to be coddled and cosseted, and made to feel like I was being groomed for some special destiny. In the evenings, after the dinner dishes had been put away, she would sit in a soft chair in the corner of the darkened dining room. Only the light from the dial of the radio would cast a sepia nimbus around her face. It was 7:30PM and Fr. Ciccignioni, from Sts. Peter and Paul was leading the nightly rosary. If I happened through the dining room, which connected the parlor to the kitchen, she would summon me:

“Jeemee, Jeemee, vene qua , vene qua, caro mio. ” I would climb up on her lap for a few “Hail Marys” until I squirmed too much and she would release her embrace. My memory can still summon her earthy aroma, and soft, warm flesh. She was the Madonna incarnate.

At such times my grandfather was usually in the kitchen with a bottle of “klu-klu”. If the were an occupation called “onomopietist” Sebastian would have been a master. “Klu-klu” was his term for a bottle of whiskey, because that was the sound it made when the first few ounces were being poured out. Whenever I pour from a new bottle and it makes that sound, I think of him.

Since Italian was his first language, he figured that creating neologisms from the sounds that things made was an appropriate intermediate language. For much of my youth “klu-klu” meant liquor. He also coined the word “keek-a-da-geee,” which I still regard as a much more appropriate term for a rooster's “coxcomb.” Moreover, when you said, rather called, “keek-a-da-geee,” you were supposed to put your hand above your forehead, fingers pointing skyward and front to rear, spreading them as you trumpeted: “keek-a-da-geeeEEE, keek-a-da-geeeEEE!” It always made perfect sense to me.

But these “linguistics” were only part of an original and mischievous personality that would capture the imagination of a little boy. What little boy would not be transfixed by a basement wonderland that, scattered around fermenting wine vats, where boxes, drawers and shelves bursting with tools, toys, found objects, things thrown away by others but treasured by little boys and at least one old Italian man. What possibilities to carry-out all sorts of boyish fantasies.

There was that summer day—it had to be after 1945 because my uncle was home for good from the war, and had brought a few souvenirs—when I discovered in a box in that basement a starter's cannon. Where, or how, my grandfather acquired a foot-long brass cannon on a little wheel carriage, that was perhaps used to start off yacht races, I will never know. Of course, it was designed to make only noise, not war; but that didn't stop my imagination, nor my grandfather's delight at a chance to please his grandson.

And so, as I looked on like a rapt pupil, Sebastian drilled out the bore on the cannon to accept a ballbearing about a half-inch in diameter. Here one of my uncle's ‘souvenirs' came into play: a clip of 30.06 rifle shells from which my grandfather extracted some gunpowder. Take a fuse from a cherry bomb found in another drawer, drill a flash hole for it, and we were ready for battle.

Ten minutes later we were cowering in that basement hoping any knock on the door wouldn't be the police. Actually we were in my grandfather's private toilet, a sanctum sanctorum he had built for himself, a cozy little place with walls covered with pictures of bosomy 19 th century French postcard girls and, for some reason, a large photo of Pope Pius XII. It was a privilege to be allowed into this private domain.

The cannon, which we had placed on the back of his tool shed on the alley behind the house, almost killed us. The charge was way too much and the ballbearing blew out a bedroom window in the house on the other side of the alley. The recoil on the cannon threw it back up against our house. The wonder is that it didn't just explode and kill us both. But part of our shaking down there in the dark toilet room was from the thrill of the danger, as well as from our fear of the police that never came.

To all the women in the family, my grandmother, mother and aunts, Sebastian's facility with firearms—the makeshift artillery excepted—was a source of ongoing exasperation. My grandfather was a hunter back in the old country, and still was, in his 70s, a crack shot with a rifle. But he lived in the middle of the city now, and at least at that time there were not many guns in the city.

So when he concocted his little plan to exterminate the large brown sewer rats that were knocking off his rabbits, he got us in hot water again. This time he hung ears of corn on strings from the gutters of the garage until they dangled about a foot above the ground. At dawn he and I were in the back upstairs bedroom, the .22 caliber rifle loaded and propped on the sill. Like Sergeant York he picked off one rat after another as they reached up to pull down the corn. He let me fire coup de grace rounds into a couple that were still squirming.

He caught hell for that from the women, but they also eagerly ate his delicious rabbit a la cacciatore , which he told me was chicken. I never suspected anything when, periodically, he would announce that the rabbits had dug under their pen and escaped, or that the rats got them.

That faculty for the good story, even if it is a good ‘cover' story, made him all the more engaging and interesting. The Italians have an exculpatory saying, that “it may not be true, but it's a good story”.

He would tell me about his youth in the Apennines, of the animals he shot, and cooked and ate. “But no snake,” he would say. He would eat anything but snake. Anything, even starlings, those scavenger city birds. Here again I was invited into Sebastian's world of the man-boy. In the white winter snow of our backyard lay a box the size of a casket. “Casket for bords ,” he would say gleefully. The hinged lid was actually a screen, and this was propped up with a stick so that the starlings could settle into their “casket” to feast on the garbage my grandfather had laid out for them. A rope tied to the stick ran from the box, across the back yard and through a hole drilled in the frame of a basement window. When the casket filled up with starlings he would let me pull the rope that dropped the lid. There was a little door on the side of the casket to allow him to reach in and wring their little necks. They were delicious, cooked in his patented cacciatore sauce.

Usually, after one of his meals, he would bring out his bottle of “klu-klu,” and for me and my brother and cousins, he would place little bottles of “klu-klu” on the table. We each had our own bottle—little bottles that had contained the flavorings he used when he made his liquors—and now were refilled with watered down anisette. We would sit around the table, pretending to drink like men, listening to his stories of the old country, neither suspecting, nor caring, that they might not be completely true.

I never saw him drunk, and not one of his grandchildren has a problem with alcohol. Not that he couldn't put the stuff away with the best of them. He regularly greeted our mailman, whose name was also Bianchi, with a couple of shot glasses of one whisky or another. They would toast the good name of Bianchi and the mailman would immediately set off on his rounds, to the disappointment of Sebastian who for years wanted to have a long chat with the mailman. No matter what my grandfather served, whether scotch, bourbon, rye, gin, the mailman downed it briskly, said grazie tante , and departed. Except the day my grandfather served him a little something special he imported from Italy. Centerba 72 it was called, a mean, green, throat-burner supposedly containg “100 herbs” that Sebastian claimed would seek out and destroy any germ that dared to invade your body.

I was told later by my uncle that Dom, the mailman, downed his shot of Centerbe 72 that day, turned without saying his thanks, stopped at the edge of the porch, turned back to Sebastian, opened his mouth and tried to say something. His eyes were watery and the sound was just a faint, hoarse, whisper: “ Aqua, . . . aqua ,” he said pleadingly. My grandfather already had the glass of water ready. That day the mailman talked.

That resourcefulness, even if occasionally laced with mischief, was so much of the legend of Sebastian. To a young boy his abilities were almost heroic. He was an accomplished tailor and shoemaker, he made his own wine (which was his one great failure because it was like battery acid), his own sausage, herbs, and liquors. He could grow anything and cook it. He once discovered a crack in the plaster in the kitchen. His carpentry skills were so good that when he found some dry rot behind it he knocked out the whole section and there was a complete window in its place a few hours later. Never mind that my grandmother didn't want a window there. Why didn't he put it where the light would shine on the counter, she demanded?

“But that's where the dry rot was,” he countered.

Sebastian never had a regular job from the time I was a child. But that never seemed odd to me, his job seemed to be being my grandfather-playmate. He was also my first tourguide. He loved to travel about the city and parks, and outlying wooded areas especially seemed to appeal to long forsaken mountains in Abruzzi.

But his mountain-man background never seemed congruent with my grandfather's sartorial attitudes. No one in my family can recall his ever leaving the house in anything but a suit, tie, glistening shoes, and his fedora. The suits and hats were always in seasonally appropriate styles and colors, and always cleaned and pressed. With his twig-like Di Nobili cigar in his teeth he was a dapper boulevardier worthy of a Fellini film.

He insisted that I also be well-dressed when we went on our excursions about the city and environs. These were always on public transit, busses or subways. He may have been dressed like he owned a car and a chauffeur, but he was a confirmed transit rider with a bus and subway pass and I trace my own preference to riding these modes in any city I visit back to those days. We would often ride to the park and walk along the river, stopping to watch the old Hasidic Jews fishing for carp with dough balls on their hooks. As usual he would have stories of the old country, of getting into and out of trouble, hiking and hunting in the mountains he would never see again. He would tell and retell them as we walked along the tree-lined riverbank, only breaking the stories when—and to my mother and aunts' consternation when they learned of it—we stopped to pee together into the river.

Even in later years as he grew feeble and I, being a student, had less time to spend with him, the Sebastian legend grew. My school buddies all wanted to meet the guy who, fully dressed in his suit and hat, rode the bus from the inner city to my parent's house in the suburbs where we had moved when I was a teenager. It was his second trip of the day, because earlier he had come to visit my mother who was doing laundry in the basement and did not hear him come in to our large backyard that backed up to woods. There he spied a flock of pheasants rooting around in the carpet of autumn leaves. He turned around, bussed back into the city, grabbed his rifle and a bandoleer of ammunition and rode back out to our house. The first my mother knew of his presence was when the first shot took the head off the first pheasant. He caught holy hell for that one, and became the hero of my buddies as well.

I'll always have his stories, but I still miss Sebastian. I suppose that's why I find myself always looking for him in the eyes of those old Chinese guys, or old guys wherever I travel.

In the years before his death he would often come to my parents' yard and sit quietly with that gaze into the middle distance of memory in his eyes. He would doze in his suit and hat, but mostly peer into the woods, perhaps remembering those pheasants, perhaps pheasants in those hills of his youth in Italy. At times he would get a little smile, just as I do in writing about him.

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10.2: THE THEOPATHS 7.15.2004

I don't care much for organized religion and never did, really. Now don't jump to any conclusions that I am an atheist, or an agnostic (although I doubt that I am not one). But organized religion of any kind I don't like or trust. Organized religion is what you get when you teach Theology in a Business School—salvation that somebody else has put a price on. And organized religion is what gives you people like Osama bin Laden, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and a President of the United States who says he consults his “personal savior” on decisions like making preemptive war on Iraq. I have no objection to people wondering, or even believing that there is something or somebody out there or “up there” making the sun shines and things grow; but when it gets to “my god can kick the crap out of your god,” and “God wrote this book that has the all the rules for your life,” and there are people who claim to have a special line to what their god wants not only for them, but for you as well, then its time to worry that organized religion is actually a sickness.

And I worry that it is a plague of sickness afflicting our world. I know that we don't need another neologism to thicken the Oxford English Dictionary, but I am proposing the word theopathic to stand for a disease that afflicts individuals and societies with a condition that increasingly sees and interprets all things through what is, essentially, mythology, through a cosmology that elevates belief over reason, faith above rationality , the imagined over the empirical, one would think that after millennia of human experience in which religion has given pulpits to theopathic madmen, in which innumerable wars, massacres, persecutions, pogroms, crusades and ethnic cleansings have been waged in the name of one god (read religion here, and its greed for wealth and power) and the sovereignty or domination of this or that faith, that, if the fundaments of faith are still open to debate, the judicious notion of the separation of church and state is not.

But, alas, the theopaths will not rest until God and country becomes God's country, until patriotism and faith are fused in the minds of the gullible, until the law of the land is sharia or the ten commandments. In the current “crusade” the Muslim combatants might wear their theopathology as closely as their girded suicide bombs, but the Christian warriors scarcely conceal their religious fervor beneath their body armor, and at least one American general has espoused that the conflict is one between faiths as well as armies.

Theopathology is, of course, rooted in the homeland, and in America its virulence is pandemic. Nurtured in the most credulous developed society in the world—vast majorities profess not just belief in God but belief in the “virgin birth” as well—all public policies are vetted through the prism of metaphysical-correctness. With one political party so beholden to and solicitous of Christian fundamentalism, and where, reciprocally, evangelists openly court political power, a sickness has invaded and corrupted the secular marrow of American society. Public interests in health, scientific research, women's control of their own bodies, and the rights of those with "lifestyles" that "threaten" the religiously righteousness are more influenced by thumpings of dim-witted pray-boys rather than judicious policy analysis.

The war between and among theopathic societies is a race to the bottom where the basest instincts of intolerant and inflexible fundamentalism contend for dominion over a new dark age of their own creation. Theopathy is religion drained of love of one's neighbor, devoid of grace, bereft of tolerance, and that revels in its own ignorance of history. It's a religion that that is organized to inherit the wind.

Amen.

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10.1: Matters of Perspective 3.7.2004

There is perhaps absolutely nothing in common between Saddam Hussein and Bill Cosby, other than on this July 1 they both made news for their rants against their respective causes. Saddam's jeremiad was at his first day in court, and is clearly intended to save what is left of his sorry butt; Cosby was speaking at an event in Chicago, with harsh words for the Black community, which he castigated for allowing its youth to fall into a culture of excuses and excesses for its plight.

Saddam is a butcher who deserves to be executed or stuck back in the hole he emerged from for the rest of his rotten life. There is no need to recount his crimes, now so commonly known. Cosby is an icon of the American Black community, and immensely successful stand-up comedian, comic actor, and author.

So what is the connection between the alpha and omega of humankind? No more than that they both have unpopular and uncomfortable things to say—Cosby to the Black community about its “dirty laundry”; Saddam to the world in what he will regard as a “defense” of his heinous actions.

Cosby will likely receive the dissent of a well-meaning, but sometimes wrong –headed “establishment” in the Black and Civil Rights communities. Some will say that he “blames the victims” when he derides black youth for dropping out of school, or using Black slang in the place of good English, for their devotion to rap music that demeans women, and fouls the air with expletives and employing the “N” word as almost a badge of honor. It is a culture that he believes will consign them to the bottom of the social structure.

Saddam will have no credibility as a man who will attempt to justify his heinous actions as in the interest of the people over whom he ruled. He terrorized, brutalized and murdered them to maintain his tyranny and loot his country. But he will, if allowed, have things to say that will draw his enemies, especially in their roles as former supporters, into the orbit of shared guilt. There's the photo of Rumsfeld smiling and shaking his hand as an ally, there's the “permission” of April Glaspie to annex Kuwait. There was the arms and intelligence supplied to him when he was “the enemy of our enemy,” Iran. And there was the way we looked the other way when he used his chemical weapons on the Kurds.

Cosby was bringing the hard news that the Black community cannot lay all blame at the door of white racism and discrimination. While that is not to be excused, neither should be decisions and behaviors that are self-destructive. The Black community must accept some of the responsibility for teen pregnancies, high crime and drop out rates, and actions that confirm the most negative of stereotypes. The Black community is fortunate to have a spokesman who will deliver such a perspective on its problems.

And so also must the US and other western powers accept some of the responsibility for the creation of monsters like Saddam. Justice demands that he has the right to say that much in his own defense; not so much justice for Saddam, but justice for us, so that maybe next time we might be less likely to create and maintain his like, until it become politically expedient to hang him out to dry to obscure our own dirty political laundry.

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