DCJ:June2004

VOLUME 9: JUNE 2004

9.8: GAZING INTO THE MIDDLE DISTANCE (Part I)

I was mildly surprised when the elderly man who took his place beside me at the trough-like urinal in the park in Wuhan was my height, maybe even a scratch taller. He was an exception among Chinese men. The second surprise was the excellence of his English.

“You must be finding this weather intolerably hot and humid,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the wall straight ahead of him.

I had noticed his height in my peripheral vision, but didn't want to turn to look at him, the way guys avoid eye contact when doing their “business.”

With barely a trace of accent he continued: “Do you know that Wuhan is one of China's “Four Furnaces”? The others are Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Nanjing, but I think Wuhan burns hottest.” He turned and walked over to the wash basin.

He was wearing one of those almost diaphanous white shirts that are ubiquitous on Chinese men in summer, nicely-pressed gray slacks and rubber flip-flop sandals. On his head was a green baseball cap with a yellow block letter “O” above the peak.

I estimated him to be at least in his seventies. He carried a cane but didn't seem to need to rely on it.

“It's making a well-roasted believer out of me,” I said, quickly, wondering if I was being too idiomatic.

Anticipating my next thought he said, “Not as many tourists come to this furnace as to the others, so I welcome the chance to speak English. I am a retired university lao shi , a teacher of English.”

I wondered silently how he knew that my language was English.

Outside in the little park, enclosed in gray stuccoed walls topped with darker gray scalloped tiles, and opened at various points by graceful “moon gates,” were a few dozen elderly Chinese men. Most were dressed like the English teacher, but several wore shorts and white tank-top undershirts against the heat and humidity. Knots of them played mahjong, checkers and dominoes at small, low tables that they squatted around on low chairs, their ubiquitous jars of green tea beside them.

They chatted, argued, joked and I suspect, told each other the “lies” for which hazy memory can be held to account. Packs of wretched Chinese cigarettes with names like “Double Happiness” and “Phenix” cluttered the tables as well, from which most of them seemed to be chain-smoking. Clouds of blue smoke swirled up in halos around the shaved and bald heads, most of which were speckled with age spots, and a few that showed signs of long ago trauma. They laughed, kibitzed, and spit through their missing teeth and wispy little mustaches.

Off in a corner of the little park beneath a tree a ye-ye (grandfather) sat back in a wooden chair propped against the wall. Beside him a little girl I assumed to be his granddaughter, maybe great-granddaughter, napped in a canvas, hammock chair wearing not more than a little pair of white underpants to keep cool.

I wanted a picture of him and the little girl, a generational tableau that had some vague resonance in my own life. I approached him, pointing to my camera and then making a frame with my hands like a Hollywood director, and asking respectfully if it was OK. He nodded his assent and then looked away.

It wasn't until I was home and looking at the proof sheet of the black and white photos I shot in the park that day that I noticed the eyes of the old ye-ye . The stare, that old man gaze, focused on some cloud bank of memories about which I can only guess. Could he be thinking about his youth on some farm, maybe of the famines and floods that surely marked his time? Maybe he was in the Long March with Mao, or perhaps recalling the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. He's evidently old enough to have spanned all the tumultuous times of China in this century, into a China that is so vastly different from when he was his grandchild's age.

Today's China cannot be said to be his China. Yet it was his contemporary, Deng Xiaopeng, China's last leader from the old order, who thrust his country into the 21 st Century. Market capitalism with “social characteristics” was the justification and connection with the old economic order. “To get rich is glorious” became the anthem for its headlong pursuit. And “it doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice,” served as the rhetoric for those who would remain doctrinaire in their allegiance to what remained of communism's foibles. His China was fading further into the distance of memory.

“May you live in interesting times,” the Chinese saying goes. It's actually a curse, but I think that “boring times” would be a curse upon the memory of an almost equal cruelty.

I found myself thinking that so much of the personal, the human, the particulars of China's modern era resided in the memories of the old men in that park. My curse was that I could not converse with them, to learn what they might divulge to me of their pasts.

I brought that matter up with the English professor when I later encountered him again on the way to the urinals (such frequency being a different curse on old men). But he was not forthcoming. “We have seen many things, good and bad, in our lives,” he said, “but it is the future that matters. Only that we can change.”

Spoken like a true teacher, I thought. So I said, changing the subject, “The ‘O' on your hat, Ohio State University?”

“Oregon State University,” he replied, “Ohio State's color is red.”

“Right, ‘Go Ducks,'” I said, making a little pumping fist gesture.

He mimicked me, smiling. “Go Ducks.”

I wondered whether the smile owed something to the predilection the Chinese have for the flavor of roasted duck.

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9.7: A CUSTER BORN EVERY MINUTE 6.26.2004

California's governfuhrer is proving to be one slippery dude. Ahnold sidestepped his problems with drugs and groping women to win his office handily over an opponent weakened by a smear campaign and a recall. He has so far kept his pledge not to raise taxes, but like a good sneaky Republican he slipped in a $15 billion hunk of debt instead that will be being paid off long after his steroid-pumped physique has flabbed out . But most recently he has maneuvered to strike a deal with the state's Native American tribes to grab a chunk of their substantial casino winnings. In return for a piece of the take, der gov wants to let the Indians vastly expand their numbers of slot machines, a move that could well turn Kaleefornia into the gambling capital of America. This knife in the back of the people of the state evoked memories of an essay nearly a decade ago about the growing sleazy relationship between gambling and public finance.

Was there something wrong with my car radio, or did I really hear it announce that the program I was listening to was being brought to me with funds from a local Indian casino, whose tribal traditions of governance, its promotional tagline asserted, said something like “. . . served as a basis for the democratic principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution.” ? That's not an exact quote since I can't drive and write at the same time, but it's close enough.

Somehow I missed this little tidbit in my somewhat Eurocentric history classes. Maybe there is some historical basis for it. But why did I first hear it from the promoters of Indian gambling—excuse me , gaming ? It seems to me that the U.S. Constitution has never done Native Americans all that much good in the past, so if their casino operators can gain a little positive PR by claiming some authorship it might even the score a bit. But I'm not sure that this 'spin' on American history will enhance the prospects for Indian casinos, or the reputations of Native Americans. After all, it's not about historical revisionism; it's about gambling!

Games of chance are as old as recorded history, and most societies have permitted or looked the other way at gambling. In our national land use scheme we have allowed a few places, like Las Vegas, to function as our national casinos and brothels and nice “legit” businesses for our mobsters. This is not to naively imply that one can't get a bet down in any town in the country on anything from the next Chargers game to whether the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Regulation, formal or by social sanction, not prohibition, has been the accepted practice.

And there have always been the handy rationalizations: What's the harm in putting a couple of bucks down on a horse, a quarterback's arm, or some numbers in the lottery. It's not immoral to get one's kicks pulling down slot levers, or trying to fill an inside straight at the casino; it's 'entertainment.' I have no quarrel with these 'justifications'. They are personal choices. But I do have a quarrel with the gambling 'industry' when it seeks social acceptability by sleazing its way into the sickroom of public finance.

The traditional accommodation of the odds-makers with guardians of the public's health safety, morals and purses, has been to imply that a little bit of vice not only never brought down or destroyed a city or a society (and indeed supplemented some of those anemic public paychecks). But the approach employed by Indian gaming, with due credit to their non-Native American precursor hucksters of lotteries and sweepstakes, is an amalgam public relations and political correctness.

How could any reasonable citizen gainsay the casino operator's claim to providing jobs in ailing local economies? What local economy wouldn't give its regulatory imprimatur for a hundred or so croupiers, cocktail waitresses, cashiers, and parking valets? Just the thing for those laid-off aerospace and defense workers.

Not buying that one? Try this: Those public-spirited casinos grease a couple of high profile charities, or the perennially mendicant arts and culture organizations like public broadcasting, or a symphony, and every time you pop a coin into a slot, or double down on a pair of aces—Bingo!—you're supporting the arts and curing fatal diseases. You remember how those state lotteries saved public education, don'tcha?

Maybe that pitch gives you pause, too. Obviously you're having trouble learning to say “gaming” rather than “gambling”. And you're more than a little ill-at-ease about septic money backing medical research. Does the prospect of the local ballet company staging The Nutcracker Vegas-style (“Mommy, the Sugar Plum Fairy isn't wearing anything on top!”) make you a trifle nervous? Or the symphony leading off each program with “Luck Be A Lady Tonight”? Maybe it's too much of a stretch for you accept that Sesame Street and Mister Rogers Neighborhood are brought to you by a grant from underwriters who toss us some splash from their take on bets, booze and bimbos. Heck, Las Vegas is trying to portray itself as a family fun center; so its all in good fun if The Cookie Monster has already shown the kids how to calculate roulette odds.

Still not buying? Don't worry, here comes the rhetorical designated hitter: it's politically correct to support Indian gaming! We're talkin' abused minority here, stripped of their land and dignity, lied to in treaties, who don't even get royalties on Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves paraphernalia. Never mind the sovereignty issue: how can the rest of society bet in their office football pools, go to the track, play Lotto, blow their rent in Vegas, Atlantic City or on some River boat, and not allow Native-Americans a chance to bring some jobs and money into their reservations, and improve their schools, health programs, and housing? It's like compounding genocide with hypocrisy. Right?

Yeah, RIGHT! Native-Americans have gotten a raw deal, and it would be hypocrisy to keep them from getting a piece of the “gaming” action. Heck, it must seem like every blue-haired woman walking into an Indian casino with her purse full of her social security check or her husbands life insurance payoff looks like General Custer ready to blow his own brains out. But that's not the really point. But there are some points: one for the Indians and Indian gaming in particular, and two for everybody and gambling in general.

One. Do Native-Americans really want to do this? Yes, there's money in “gaming” and some of it might even end up in those noble causes and projects. But there's a down side, not the least of which is that Indian's are a minority, and hence their “association” with an enterprise that has neither restored dignity nor brought respect to any minority associated with it is a reputational sucker's bet. Ask an Italian-American.

Two. There's a down side for society in general. “Gaming” in all its forms is little more than the junk bonds of the 90s: another economic shell game. It drains resources mostly from those who can least afford it, addicts or indebts some to the point where families and society suffer and must pick up the pieces, and the jobs it creates are mostly low-wage, dead end, and sometimes socially destructive. That makes the “public spirit” grease that casinos are offering little more than chump change.

Three. And what can “gaming” do for our cities? Well for Vegas and Monaco its an economic base. But for the rest its an economic activity that does not create new wealth; it re-distributes it, according to odds sets by the house. Like a pyramid or a Ponzi it makes some people very well-off and a lot of people worse-off. It adds next to zip to the local economic base. So, in public economic terms, “gaming” is a “zero-sum” game.

So, will the public and the pols and other seekers of the short and easy money get wise before they learn to their regret that Indian “gaming,” like all gambling, is a sucker's game?

Don't bet on it.

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Originally published as “ Zero-Sum Gam[bl]ing,” in the San Diego American Planning Association Journal Dec. 1995

9.6: THAT PESKY “D” WORD 6.25.2004

When Donald Rumsfeld now famously said that when you make people free they might do some “crazy things.” he was referring to the looting of the Iraqis after the cessation of major hostilities. This was before they started doing some “crazy things” like road side bombs, RPG attacks and other activities that created still mounting casualties in greater numbers before the mission was declared “accomplished.” Mr. Rumsfeld seems to have dropped that assessment of the glories of freedom, although not his dismissive manner.

Freeing Iraq of its dictator was, of course, the necessary preamble to what George Bush seems to regard as his personal gift to the world: democracy. Never mind that his administration is perhaps the greatest threat to our own enfeebled democracy. But image means more than substance in the Bush administration, and ends seem to justify any means. Put a powerful military behind that notion, and keep the home front in a state of post 9-11 terror disorder, and that ambition is, de facto , counterintuitive to spreading democracy. One wonders whether Mr. Bush understands much at all about democracy, about which he seems to have rather simplistic and zealous notions.

In fact, as reported in the Wilson Quarterly and other respected sources, democracy and varying degrees of political liberalization, have been on the increase in this century, without the assistance of George Bush. But the Middle East has been notoriously resistant to the democracy bug, several states with some assistance from the Bush family and their regional oil interests. Other than partially free states like Turkey, Jordan and Yemen, the Middle East has proven to be a black hole for democracy.

Democracy means different things to different people. Some people will die for it, others feel they will die from it. There are those who see it as the dearest aspect of their lives, and there are those who will trade it away cheaply where tyranny renders them better material well-being. There are states that call themselves democracies that are blatant dictatorships and there are states that are not democratic that may be better and more humanely governed than some so-called democracies. The condition of democracy should also not be assumed to automatically be the result of the deployment of a democratic process, such as elections, or produce respect for human rights, or the rights of minorities.

At the most basic level democracy is government by the consent of the governed. But it may also be regarded as a “state of mind” that aims at the best achievable and balanced relationship between the individual and community, between liberty and fraternity. But while democracy guarantees individual rights associated with that notion, it neither foreordains nor guarantees any particular results from is electoral processes. Democracy may result in “bad” decisions, they are just decisions whose culpability might be shared by the majority in a society (hence “people get the kind of government they deserve”). Ironically, democratic processes have elected anti-democratic leaders. As humans, while we come genetically programmed for many of the behaviors that govern our lives and destinies, there does not appear to be a democracy gene. Democracy doesn't come “naturally”; it's on the nurture side of the human behavior equation.

Democracy, however, can be practiced without any theoretical understanding of what actions produce which results. Although people may engage in democracy with the implied rationality that their actions (say voting) will produce intended, or hoped for, results, it should be remembers that fools, rogues and idiots also have participatory rights in a democracy.

It was once the prime tenet of the Marxist-Leninist dogma that capitalism and its democratic consort were merely temporary stopovers in political and economic development on the way the Communist nirvana. Such notions now lie buried under the rubble of the Berlin wall and the oily rhetoric that allows all sorts of capitalistic practices to slip into Asian states “with Chinese characteristics”. The Middle Kingdom that once believed that it did not need anything the West had to offer, and had to have its doors broken down by gunboats, now hankers for WTO membership, the Olympics, and McDonald's and Starbucks franchises. Does this mean that democracy comes “bundled” with capitalism? Not if you were at Tiananmen Square in '89, or have seen the lousy deal Hong Kong got in the handover; not if you can see what's behind the rhetoric of Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew's “Asian values.” Not that those states will shy from calling themselves the “democratic republic” of this or that. But, real democracy may be just a bit too unpredictable, and the voice of the people a tad too cacophonous, for the rough and tumble world of globalism in the new millennium. Bucks seem to trump votes every time.

Call it hypocrisy, but it's a game that has been well played by that Johnny Appleseed of democracy, the good ole US of A. Nixon and Reagan were happy to crush a Central or South American incipient democracy if American business interests were threatened, Marxists made any inroads into the hearts of the disenfranchised, or their buddies like Noriega, Stroessner, or Pinochet needed a little help. That sorry history, combined with Reagan and Bush I's former support for that great democrat, Saddam Hussein, is going to make a hard road for Little Georgie's campaign for a democratized Middle East. Like his own Secretary of Defense said, somewhat sagely: free people will sometimes do some “crazy things.”

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Shanghai, China, July 13, 2001

9.5: ICONS AND ICECREAM 6.22.2004

Even after fifteen years I sometimes slip into saying “the Soviet Union” or “USSR.” When I first went there, only a couple of years before the great scary bugaboo of my generation virtually collapsed under the weight of its dogma and internal corruption, it still had that aura of 1984 like totalitarianism. The 3000 room Rossia Hotel was still rumored to be bugged; KGB were supposed to be stalking tourists; and the austerity of a country that lived, at least at the proletarian levels,in perpetual “guns over borscht” asceticism. Even though remnants of these conditions are still resent in Russia, the following essay, aired in 1988, seems an anachronism of a time further distant than it really is.

The customs agent at the border, her seemingly surgically- implanted scowl of suspicion unbroken, motioned for me to open my suitcase for inspection. I had indicated on my declaration form that I was taking out something that I had defined as “art.” What I had was a modest, contemporary intarsia plaque, barely a work of art, not an authentic Russian religious icon for which the border guards would be on the lookout. Satisfied that I was not taking out of these valuable “images” she made a closing motion with her hands and I was on my way into Finland.

Internally I smiled; there wasn't a damn thing she could do about the icons in my head, the images I had in my mind's suitcase of my visit to the USSR. Unwittingly, she had supplied me with a couple more paradoxical icons: the officially atheist nation concerned about the pilfering of its religious art; then, in perfect English, which for apparent purposes of intimidation she had elected not use on me, she asked the next tourist whether he was taking out any rubles, the currency that trades for five times the official rate on their black market for dollars, those officially-despised emblems of capitalism.

What would she have thought of the “icon” I had acquired the previous day, where in Sunday-thronged streets I encountered hundreds of Leningraders eating chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream on a stick, some carrying a half-dozen of them in their paper wrappers. Tracing back to their source by a process of observing how many bites had been taken out by successive passersby I came finally to a queue people stretching for over one hundred yards, patiently awaiting their chance for one of these conventional confections. Three vendors were offering the same choice (or non-choice), much as the several vendors outside the Hermitage just down the street all offered only Pepsi-Cola. I decided that vanilla wasn't worth what looked like at least an hour's wait.

In fairness I must say that there was a Baskin and Robbins in our hotel, but I never got a chance to discover whether there would indeed be 31 flavors; it was closed every time I went there.

The anecdote stands for two broader “icons” of the USSR. One is the dearth of variety in consumer goods, documented by the fact that the Soviets, young ones in particular, want to buy or trade for just about anything a Westerner is wearing, and that the famed, enormous GUM department store is of little commercial attraction to Westerners not interested in products and styles from the 1950s. A second revelation is the lack of incentive to work; shops and offices regularly shut their doors in the faces of long lines of customers, a behavior that leaves profit-mongering Westerners both frustrated and murmuring praises for capitalism. Coupled with shoddy workmanship that characterizes everything from toasters to automobiles to apartment houses, the lack of variety and incentive are glaring evidence of a long overdue “perestroika.”

But there are other icons, of a non-paradoxical sort. The ubiquitous monuments to what is referred to as the “1941-45 War,” reminding us of the omissions in our history books that the Soviets were in the "big one" as long as we were, but suffered losses in any one city that dwarf all of our own. In parks, squares, even along rural roads, they abound, topped here with a tank, there with a cannon, often draped with fresh flowers that indicate the closeness and indelibility of that war in their minds. Where those monuments aren't, Lenin is, jaw jutting, Asiatic eyes peering into the Bolshevik future, leaning into the winds of rigorously managed change. Always erect, he is supine only in his glistening mausoleum (if it's really him?) in Red Square. So much for official atheism.

But my preferred icons are of the people, and here at last we have some variety. They throng Red Square for the changing of the guard, to place a rose near the flame of the unknown soldier nearby, or have their obligatory photo in front of St. Basil's: Asian eyes from the eastern soviets, Mongol and Tarter, dark eyes from the south, colorful folk costumes from villages in the Ukraine, Western-looking Estonians, or be-medalled old vets in shabby suits, every little girl with Olga Korbut bows in her hair, all gawking, more tourists than us, at the temples of this Mecca of Communism.

Yet my favorite icons of all are of that young father who brought his son to the side of our bus by a rural road to join the other kids receiving bubble gum and gifts from us. I won't forget his odd peace gesture, softly clenched fist on a bent arm overhead, his teary eyes, his shaking vigorously every hand he could reach. He didn't speak a word, but the old woman museum guard at the Summer Palace, with Russian history in every line of her face, did. As I walked by her, seated in her chair she spotted the little pin I had of the American flag and the CCCP flag, fused together, almost as the same moment I noticed a tiny worn paper American flag barely stuck to her shabby grey sweater. I could see her admiration for my shiny new pin, and in the spirit of glasnost, I removed it and handed it to her. “Mir,” she said softly, “peace,” with eyes that confirmed unmistakably that she sincerely meant it. It sure made up for the lack of ice cream.

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9.4: DAD AND DENG 6.20.2004

The news had just come over the radio as I lay in my undersized bed in my undersized flat in Hong Kong: Deng Xiaoping, China's “great leader,” was dead. He was 93, not bad for a diminutive guy who had survived the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and several million cigarettes, to usher his country into the world of market capitalism and unprecedented economic growth and change under the slogan “to get rich is glorious.”

Then the phone rang. It was my brother, calling from San Diego. Our father was in the hospital. The prognosis was not good: my father might only outlive Deng by six months to a year. I would miss witnessing the handover of Hong Kong to China in July and be back to have a couple of months with my father before he was gone.

A half dozen “fathers' days” have passed since then, but I think of him much more often than that, and every time I sit down at the piano. I miss our little jam sessions.

And everytime I hear Deng Xiaoping's name I can't help but think of my father. The contrast. Deng's death would be noticed by literally billions of people. There would be so few who would remember my father, but I knew with certainty that everyone who knew him would remember him with love and respect. Deng led a huge nation; my father, just a family. But Deng was the “father” of the new China; my father was an exemplar of selfless fatherhood.

Fatherhood has gone though a lot in recent decades. The so-called “women's movement “ has battered it's familial hegemony, the traditional pater familias role has been compromised by the necessities of two-income families, paternal blood ties have been attenuated by the fact that four out ten kids today have a step-parent, and there has been the sense that fathers have been left behind in the various movements scrapping for political niche recognition.

Political conservatives and fundamentalist preachers rage and rail at the problems besetting fathers today, often assigning blame on easy targets like feminists, gays and opponents of school prayer; but the roots are deeper and more systemic in the social soil. There are perhaps no more pathetic and whiney illustrations of fatherhood's contemporary identity crisis than the emergence of sappy organizations such as “Promise Keepers,” and events such as the “Million Man March” on Washington, or inanities that “men are from Mars.”

Like most every father in history I became one without much of a clue of its importance and complexities, and struggled to get through my part of parenting without negating the blessings of their mother. I have Dad to thank for how well I did. I'm grateful that, unlike Deng, he didin't have whole nation to lead. When it comes to fatherhood, Dad was my “great leader.”

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9.3. THE RISE OF THE HEALTH BIGOTS 6.18.2004

F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu graphic © UrbisMediaProductions

It would certainly appear outrageous in this day and age for anyone to assail the widespread concern in American over healthier living. Health is unarguably the one facet of life that certainly fits the axiom that “more is better.” No rational person would wish for less health, for pain, suffering, the ravages of disease, or premature death. At the social level, less toxic waste, air pollution, radiation, harmful drugs and other dangers are goals, which on their face, have few, if any, detractors.

Still, there is something paradoxically unhealthy in all this concern for health. Even the most worthy and laudable social changes, like some of the things we do to improve our health, have their negative side affects. I am not referring to runner's knee, back problems from aerobics, or excesses like diets consisting solely of broiled roots and herb tea, though these are not trivial concerns. Rather, my concern might be expressed as a warning that: Excessive concern over one's health might be injurious to one's attitude . More specifically, it appears that along with lighter, better-toned bodies, improved cardio-vascular systems, and abstinence from formerly unhealthy habits, the health movement has created a social type with an unhealthy social attitude— the health bigot.

Bigotry, we all know, is rooted in attitudes of (usually imagined) superiority. The classic, intolerant, and often mean-spirited and prejudicial bigot is typically someone with a deep-seated inferiority masked in an attitude of superiority based on race, class, religion, or some other social attribute, or a moral posture. Bigots come in all forms, and the health bigot is hardly the most dreaded type. Still, while more health is good we certainly don't need more bigotry in the world.

So the first thing we need to do is recognize the characteristics of health bigotry. To be sure, not everybody who is concerned with better health is a health bigot or is likely to become one; but one of the ways we can find out about our own susceptibility to this attitude disease is to take the Health Bigot Test . So get out a pencil and a piece of paper and write the answer “yes” or “no” to the following dozen health bigot questions. Ready? Here goes.

1. When your are booking a table at a restaurant do you ask if they have a fat-free-low cholesterol section?

2. Do you regard people who smoke as the equivalent of child molesters and wave your hands frantically and feign coughing spells when they light up?

3. Do you show up at parties in a velour exercise suit?

4. Is your idea of entertaining friends to offer them fruit juice, rennetless cheese and unsalted crackers, but after they have done a Pilates workout with you?

5. Do you have a “personal trainer”?

6. Are the only T-shirts that you have ones with the words "marathon" or "10-K" written on them?

7. Have you gifted anyone among your friends and family Dr. Phil's books?

8. Do you think that Michelangelo's “David” has poorly “cut” abdominals?

9. Do you provide your dinner guests with your food's breakdown of tryglycerides, high-density lipoproteins, and amino acids?

10. Does you garage have more that six pieces of exercise apparatus that you bought from infomericals?

11. Have you ever made a cheesecake with tofu?

12. Do you deny that Adoph Hitler was a vegetarian?

So, how did you do? Well, let's see. Three “yes” answers make you a “health snob”; six “yes” answers puts you in the “health evangelist” category. But more than six “yes” answers indicates that you are already a health bigot, and you need to get to work on that while you still have some friends and relationships left to lose. I'm not suggesting that that you take up smoking, fatty foods, and the exercise regimen of a couch potato. It's not your healthy habits that are the problem, just your unhealthy attitude. First, you need to recognize that “live and let live” is just as valid an axiom as “you are what you eat.” Second, you need to exercise a little less muscle and a whole lot more tolerance. Third, admit that your physical health is threatening the mental health of others. Only then will you appreciate that longevity isn't so much fun if you spend it all by yourself.

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9.2: NO MORE MR. NICE GUY 6.12.2004

Universal International Pictures, 1951

Graphic by UrbisMediaProductions, 2004

A friend sent me – as a joke – a calendar of the Reagan Library. There's a different photo of Ronnie for each month, smiling his cheerful, but somewhat vacuous, smile. One caught my eye, that of him in an Army uniform and looking like it was taken in the 1940s. Apparently, it was taken from one of the films Reagan made during those years, since there is no record of military service in his biography, although the calendar does not clarify that.

In the funereal pomp of this past week that ambiguity is further played out: military pall bearers, flyovers with the missing plane, the casket carried on a caisson, the 21 gun salutes and flag-draped coffin, all conveying a vague notion that Ronnie had served on battlefields other than those on the back lot at Warner Bros.

Where the actor and the politician left off has always been the mystery of the Reagan persona. He could act the brave president (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.”) and read carefully constructed lies (unlike his successor's) to national audiences, saying he still believed he was right about something he was wrong about while admitting it was wrong (selling arms to enemies to finance guerillas who terrorized innocent people). For this he had convenient (maybe not so) lapses in memory and, although his approval numbers went far lower than his successor's, he “walked”; his successor was impeached for adultery. For all his nobility he had the most indicted administration in history (although that might change).

This is the way “the great communicator” managed things: keep the images broad and vague, with “evil empires” and “mornings in America,” his Hollywood versions of the world. He played this well to his Southern strategy and his massaging of the emerging American Taliban. But behind it was the B-list actor married to the C-list actress, both looking for a better role; the erstwhile union man, who found his true center in sympathies with the Red-baiting HUAC, and as the corporate pitchman, the champion of the rich and the white.

And now is the time for myths, told and re-told about how Reagan ended the cold war, when the Soviet Union had been crumbling for years under its own weight and internal corruption, and Gorbachev, with his perestroika and glasnost , was ready to roll over; never-minding that Carter's arming of the Afghans and the Saudis driving down USSR oil prices ruined their economy. The eulogizing makes little if any mention of the countless dead in Central America thanks to the Gipper's commie phobia. And Margaret Thatcher, her coif as resistant to gale winds as Ronnie's, forgot, in her sappy encomiums to mention the great Invasion of Grenada.

In the last scene The Gipper didn't die with a memorable movie line, but after a long a debilitating illness the possible cure for which his ideological successor opposes research for. It was almost like a B Movie – just not quite enough.

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9.1: Metamorphosis in Mesopotamia 6.6.2004

Graphic by UrbisMediaProductions, 2004

The Very Hungry Caterpillar was reputedly the president's favorite childhood book. Since books often influence the course of people's lives it might well have been that a tale about the rapacious larval stage of an insect could have influenced Mr. Boosh's seemingly insatiable appetite for Middle Eastern territory.

But these days very hungry George's imperial ambitions seem to be provoking his gag reflex. Nevertheless, with his characteristic childlike innocence (and IQ) he continues, undaunted, on his mission to plant democracies with 1000lb, “Bunker Buster” bombs in the various “evil” states of the Middle East. Like most of his imperial predecessors fates, hungry George has little left other than that gosh-darned resolve to “stay the course.” Die-hard Republicans just love that trait, far more than they do reason and intelligence, which those damned liberals are always using to give “aid and comfort” to the enemy. Indeed very hungry George seems to be in a bit of a bunker of his own making, holed up with his neo-con buddies behind a crumbling wall of lies and deceptions, as commissions and exposures of his foolish and failed policies close in on him.

So the imperial ambitions of the erstwhile isolationist continue to fade, unlike the photos of Abu Ghraib, the faces on the “honor roll” of the dead soldiers on nightly newscasts, the depressed visages of his generals appearing before commissions of inquiry, and the sly smile of the sleazy Ahmed Chalabi, who unlike hungry George, could not be installed in office by Antonin Scalia. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Hungry George, could have listened to good counsel, to minds far more acute and capable than his cabal of neo-cons. And now, doubtless wholly unanticipated by his simple mind, the Iraqi proto government might wish to first flex their “democratic” muscles by ejecting him and your armies from their lands. Had he known anything about democracy in the first place he would have known that it is not always a cute and compliant butterflies that emerge from the chrysalis of freedom.

You might be a very hungry caterpillar, Mr. Boosh; but you bit off a lot more than you could chew. Now, on the 60 th anniversary of D-Day, for you to equate your imperial ambitions with the liberation of Europe, is to appropriate that noble cause to justify your pernicious and failed war on Iraq. You oughta choke on that pretzel, Mr. Caterpillar.

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