Volume 33

JUNE 2006

33. 8: THE PLAINS OF CHARITHON 6.30.2006

The people laboriously making their way up the hill don't look very athletic to me. Some are a bit too old and out of shape and a few should reconsider wearing running shorts and singlets festooned with a number panel with the “Rock and Roll Marathon” title. They are walking, limping, to their cars.

I have plenty of time to observe them. My car is stuck in a long immobile line on the hill. I was on my way to the café that I frequent to have a cappuccino and a bit of a read, but I've been in this line now for fifteen minutes.

I should have known, the Rock and Roll Marathon begins at some un-godly hour a couple of blocks away for where I live; then it goes seemingly all over the city—clogging up traffic for hours, with the closed-off streets and detoured traffic. People not only don't get to their favorite café, they miss flights, appointments, wet their pants, and curse a lot.

The R&RM is one of those, excuse me, stupid things that American's do; they link some event like this to raising money for a charity. I have no quibble with raising money for charities—God knows, our government is too busy wasting money on stupid wars, tax breaks for the rich, and filling the coffers of the oil companies and Halliburtons—but I don't need to pledge “x” amount of bucks to someone to run a marathon to make a contribution. What's more I don't want to “pledge” a couple of gallons of gas to one of these “charithons” in addition.

Part of the attraction of these events is that it lets some people get dressed up in running outfits and then be festooned with a number tag, stickers, and other paraphernalia, especially the marathon T-shirt, carry water bottles and generally display all those affectations that putatively allow people to convince themselves that that are sweating and suffering for a good cause and not some desperate little need in their ego. Meanwhile thousands of cars are contributing to global warming by idling their engines, or being routed around detour routes, thereby canceling whatever good social effects will be achieved by the funds raised for research for the target charities. Un-accounted is the loss of money due to missed appointments, deliveries, and other activities that are related to people and goods moving as freely as possible over the transportation network. Add to this the fact that it takes some of these people longer to finish a marathon—some of them walking most of it, or being carried by family members, or stopping to play with their blisters—than it took Michelangelo to finish the Sistine Chapel. So the traffic is tied up for most of the day, not just the 2 hours and fifteen minutes it takes some Kenyan herdsman to cover the course.

If it occurs to me, then why does it not occur to the organizers of these “races,” that there is a lot of room out in the countryside, where there are long stretches of road, trees, flowers, and most of all cleaner air to breathe ! That's what we are fighting to preserve the countryside for—for people to go out there in the running outfits and be with the birdies, bunnies and bugs, and run around all they want, for as long as they want, in any direction they want, without bugging the hell out of the rest of us who have better things to do thank make our bodies all smelly. They don't mind those smells out there in the countryside because they're used to the cow pies, horse balls, pig slop and sheep dip. Charithoners will fit right in. And there's no need for those banks of porta-potties that you have to have in the city, just drift out into the fields and add a little fertilizer to the crops. It all makes such good sense: good for charity, good for the environment, good for agriculture and, especially, good for the city, which is where the rest of us have come to avoid those rural aromas.

Now it also occurs to me that a countryside location deprives the poseurs and wannabes among the throng of runners of the chance to be noticed. So we could always arrange for there to be remote video coverage which could be fed into ah . . . say . . . maybe Guantanamo, where the detainees would be forced to watch limping, flabby-assed people sweating and puking for charity until somebody jumps up and screams “OK, OK, turn it off and I'll tell you right where you can find bin Laden, just turn that damned thing off! (Good for the “war on terror”)

And another thing! Why is our charithon called the Rock and Roll Marithon? What the hell does rock and roll have to do with raising money for research for diseases? Is it because rock and roll makes so many people who love music sick? Or is it to raise money for superannuated stoners like Keith Richards and other brain dead rockers? (OK, that's a tad cruel, but you try sitting in dead still traffic for an hour with your car idling away $3.67 a gallon gas and see if you have anything nice to say about anybody or any thing!)

Of course, being typically American (read typically capitalistic), such events are also venues for advertising selling all sorts of products and services that have little nothing to do with the charity or charities for which the event is being staged. As I sit in my car watching people limping back along the roads carrying bags full of stuff I am further angered by the fact that it is necessary at all to have these charitons where people pledge money for people to go out and ruin their knees, ankles, and other body parts to raise money to help other people who suffer from terrible illnesses. It's noble, but why the hell is it necessary? We are the richest country in the world, we seem to be able to afford to blow almost a $billion a week on a useless, stupid war; enough money, spent judiciously on education and scientific research, to save countless more lives than we currently use it to kill and maim people. Is this any way to run a society?

So charitoners, I say betake yourself to Washington D.C., and run around the White House and Capital Hill and the Pentagon until I say you can stop. Keep Bush and that gonad-less Congress cooped up until they agree to shift the next $100billion appropriation to medical research. Run you flabby-assed marathoners! Round the White House. Feel the burn! Round the Capitol. Feel the pain! Run as if somebody's life depended on it—because it does. Run for the money! If we're gonna have a war on disease let's spend like it's a war. This time I'll be at the café, pullin' for ya—every step of the way.

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33. 7: GWOT PEACE? 6.25.2006

Only a fool would think he can defeat a concept. A fool tilting at windmills. But then, a fool, the president of the United States, is exactly what we have.

It has been remarked often enough in these pages that the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake born of the “perfect storm” of 9-11, the machinations and plans cabal of neo-cons in the Bush administration and, of course, the simple mind of the president himself. How these were spun to terrorize the public and its representatives into the all but dictatorial powers of the executive to pursue a “global war on terror,” the GWOT, is now painfully well known, if not painfully corrected.

The issue now, for a public clearly weary of a disastrous war, is when will it end. But if this is a GWOT, and we must, as Bush drones on, “stay the course” until it is won, how will we know when we have won ?

How do we usually know when a war is over. The enemy is vanquished, or surrenders, their territory is subdued and controlled. It's over, there's a VE-Day, or a VJ-Day. Our former enemies now become our “friends,” or at least their nations do. We felt better, safer, victorious.

So how will we know when to celebrate V-GWOT Day? Well, it's “global” isn't it; if it wasn't, the war on Iraq sure made it global. So there's a long way to go—we haven't even got Iraq near to under control, Afghanistan is on its way back to Taliban-stan, and we're three years into the GWOT at nearly a half trillion bucks already, 2,500 dead Americans (18,500 mutilated), uncounted Iraqis, and a lot of people who hate us.

It is possible to capture and kill terrorists. You can find them wherever they are, and do just that. It might take time (see the movie, Munich , for example), but it can be done, effectively, and will very little, if any, collateral damage. Or, you can flatten a whole country, kill tens of thousand of innocents, to kill people who might be terrible , but really aren't the terrorists you should be pursuing. They're just handy, and you remember that the last time, you beat them handily.

Now the whole thing twists absurdly. The terrorists now come to you because you have come to them. And they start killing you, which you can use as your confirmation that there are indeed terrorists in Iraq. But then, to kill them, you must ferret them out from the local populace, who become collateral damage, and now, before you can say GWOT three times, you are the terrorists.

And, perversely, in the process you have made more terrorists—not just there, but almost everywhere. Now you are really in a pickle. Some of these global terrorists start pushing your buttons. The wacky North Korean flips you the bird and says his nuke missile can reach you. The wacky Iranian with the name the Bush won't even attempt to pronounce (hey, that's linguistic terrorism, ain't it?). So where do you take your global war next? Making war on terrorism, it turns out, at least by killing terrorists, is like herding cats. You kill the terrorists, but not the terrorism.

Terror is as fundamental a concept to human behavior as (and sometimes the closest to) disciplining your child. It's been with us since the beginning. It has been given different names, like the Crusades, the Pax Romana, and Pax Britannica, but its just terrorism. It uses threat, fear, and ultimately violence, to produce a result—compliance, submission. It's used by virtually every social institution: insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, religions, political parties. In everyday behavior people ride around on Harleys, sport angry tattoos, to try to be terrifying, to cover their weaknesses. Terror is everywhere. It is about dominance, by demonstration, by intimidation, but not annihilation. It is perhaps because we are so familiar with it that we are fearful of it. If the other guy is willing to go further in getting his way than you are, willing to even kill himself, then that is terrifying.

The justificatory rhetoric like to characterize terrorism as a disease, as if we could wipe it out like we did small pox, by containing it and burning it out, or how we might attack with an anti-biotic and kill it. But it isn't a disease. It is spread by word of mouth, by image, by blog, and of course, by fear. You cannot “make war” on terrorism any more than you can make war on drugs. People will always be interested in altered states will always be interested in altering the balance of power. Terrorism cannot be defeated by war, because it is a form of war.

So can the GWOT be won? Of course not. It's just a stupid piece of rhetoric that uses, what else, its own form of terrorism—if we don't win then they win! It's a dangerous and destructive piece of rhetoric because it obscures the underlying reasons that people engage in terrorism. By implying that there is some sort of human sub-species, like a deadly virus or a cancer (you've heard the metaphors a thousand times) entire peoples become characterized as inferiors and infidels, distant and demonized.

We are convinced of our own purity. Why do they hate us, the naïve, ignorant, and downright stupid bemoan. Maybe some of them do hate us just because we are of a different faith, or have different social values—often this is the way we hate them—but there are more who have come to hate us because we exploit them, occupy their lands, drain their resources, and insinuate our faith and values into their societies. I was as angered and vengeful as the next person at seeing Palestinians dance in the streets on 9-11— but we need to try to understand why . I need to remain angry every time a terrorist blows up innocent people; but I need to get angry when American soldiers kill innocent people.

Can it be that peoples of the world want so different lives and societies from one another that they must terrorize one another? What people would not want to observe the following ten desiderata:

• We wish to live in peace and freedom from fear

• We wish to practice our faith without interference from other faiths

• We wish our children to have a better life than us

• We wish to be treated with equality and respect

• We wish to control the destiny of our own bodies

• We wish to have decent health care and quality education

• We wish to be productive and be free from want

• We wish to control or own social and political lives

• We wish to have the hegemony of our own lands and resources

• We wish these same for all others, and for the desiderata to be observed and respected by all others.

OK, that's just a quick draft. The 10 th is sort of a version of the old “Golden Rule,” or the Second Commandment of the Mosaic Ten. But the point is that I don't know anybody in their right mind who would not want these things, wherever they are from and whatever faith they have. Sure there could be some quibbling, and some possible additions, but, they are a good starting point to find a basis on which we are all somewhat the same. Anybody who would not want these things needs some help, and anybody who would deny them to somebody else, well, watch out; like I said, we will always have terrorism, especially if we try make war on an “-ism” rather than its perpetrators.

V-GWOT Day? Don't hold your breath.

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33. 6: IT'S GREEK TO ME 6.21.2006

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted . . . [The Odyssey, Book I]

In the beginning I resisted studying Greek. But studying Greek, as it turned out, wasn't my choice. Not at McQuaid Jesuit High School in 1955. Anyway, I was just a naïve kid who liked running around on courts and playing fields; how was I to know this was going to be the best damn set of courses I would ever take at any school, anywhere.

I was having a good time playing three sports at McQ—basketball, football and baseball – and with the practices and the study workload there was time for little else. In sort of had a girlfriend, but I saw her so infrequently I probably couldn't have picked her out of a line-up of girls in Catholic girl school uniforms. But in sophomore year students were chosen for “honors” programs, one of which was “Greek Honors.” In place of one period of study hall each day (except on Friday, when that period was used for mass) those “honored” to study Greek would spend the period with Fr. White, and Odysseus.

Greek Honors was a double-whammy; not only would I lose the study period to get a jump on my homework, but between 20 and 30 lines of the Homer's Odyssey would need to be translated for the following day.

At first I went to see Fr. Kelly, the principal, to ask if I could be excused from the honor of classical Greek because I had after school practice for one sport or another every day and usually didn't get started on my homework until at least 8 PM. Adding 20 or so lines of Homer to the 30 Latin lines or so of Caesar's Gallic Wars was going to cause both my grades and athletic performance to suffer.

Fr. Kelly just smiled. It was a smile that would have been most suitable for a 16th century inquisitor—only the mouth smiled, the eyes remained cold, inexpressive, and fixed on me, like a snake sizing up a mouse. He could, and usually did, speak while holding this “smile.”

“Well James,” he said softly, “McQuaid has brought the best Greek teacher in the New York Province here so that you could benefit from the Greek Honors curriculum. Your first year grades make you eligible for that honor. So, if you are concerned about your performance on the field and court more than this honor, you can take those skills to the Catholic boys school across town.”

Notice he said “boys school.” We were always referred to as “men” of McQuaid, never boys. He was putting down Aquinas Academy at the same time he was putting me in my place. That was it, no argument, no appeal, no requesting a letter from my parents; the Jesuits knew what was best for me, even if I couldn't see it.

I could, and did, go on playing ball, but I had added a new team—the band of Ithacans roaming the Eastern Mediterranean with their royal captain, Odysseus, and I had better show up ready to play in that game with the Laestrigonians.

As things turned out it was, educationally, the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn't like knuckling under to Fr. Kelly, but I ended up liking Homer a hell of a lot more than I thought I would. The Odyssey became, and remains all these years later, my all time favorite book, in some measure because it is the only book I ever (participated in) translated from the original Greek. Fr. White was a gentle, patient teacher, and seemed to enjoy wandering from adventure to adventure in the eastern Mediterranean as much or more than his band of students. He was our Odysseus, or “eye” on the prow of our trireme, our captain, and led us to the land of the Lotus Eaters, past Scylla and Charybdis, and into the cave of Polyphemos, the Cyclops--all the way back to our queen, Penelope.

I have forgotten much of the Greek, although its roots, its forms, are always sticking up through the soil of English. Ever since, they have been a indispensable aid to me, as The Odyssey has been a jewel mine of insight on various aspect of human behavior as sung by a blind poet some eight centuries before Christ.

Many years later, my study of Greek actually played a practical, and important, role in my life. We were in Athens, my family and I, in 1979, having driven in a VW all the way from Amsterdam, and youngest daughter Lisa was sick. She had been feverish and fluish since Rome, and now was quite sick in our rather crummy, cheap hotel at the edge of the Plaka. I had managed to get a prescription from a local doctor for some anti-biotics, having been directed to his office rather late at night by American Express. I just had to get it filled.

I was told by the desk clerk that there was a pharmacy a couple of blocks away. I drove around in the little VW Rabbit, looking for some evidence of it at the late hour. But then there wasn't going to be a place called “Pharmacy” in Athens, were the signs were almost all in Greek. I was beginning to panic when I say a place with a sign that read

“Oh, thank you Fr. White, even thank you Fr. Kelley,” I shouted. Right, apotheke, the root word for “apothecary,” the precursor of the pharmacy. “Gotta be the place.”

And it was. Prescription filled, I did feel a bit like Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who thought up the Trojan Horse idea, and led his men around the eastern Mediterranean on one adventure after another. He was called the “one who is never at a loss,” the man who lives by his wits and his resources. My “classical” Greek was almost useless in modern day Greece; they speak a completely different form of the language, although many words are decipherable because the roots are still there, as is the Greek alphabet. But Odysseus taught me that it pays to know your ABCs, whatever they might look like.

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33. 5: THE GOOD GERMAN OF NANKING 6.17.2006

Author at Rabe House, 2001, Photo: N. Lai Rabe (L) at his home, 1937

The map that that showed the location of his house was one I had copied from a book was little more than a sketch itself; the map I bought in Nanjing was in Chinese except for a few streets and sights in English. I had to hope that the streets hadn't been re-routed since 1937 as I tried to match them up. The area was looking for, what was an International Safety Zone in 1937, now abutted the sprawling campus of Nanjing University. When I got there, a few blocks from my hotel, the area was a bustling old district that probably won't survive a few more years of Chinese economic expansion. Already there were hutongs —the old dense and squalid neighborhoods surrounded by walls—nearby that were falling to the wrecker's ball to make way for the almost pre-obsolesced international style crud that is going up everywhere.

I wandered around the narrow streets looking for somebody old, quite old, until I saw a tall, white-haired man ambling along on legs that looked like parentheses. I had only a few words of Mandarin, but hoped that one word would be enough. I put myself in front of him. “Dui bu qi, zai nar Rabe.” I couldn't think of the word for “house,” so it sounded like I was looking for Rabe himself, who has been dead since 1949. “RAH-behr, RAH-behr,” I intoned, hoping I wouldn't get a “Wo bu dong” reply.

“Ahhh, Rah-behr, RAH-behr,” he said through a zillion-cigarette voice, breaking into a slight smile, and shuffling off with a little “follow me” wave. He looked back over his shoulder once: “RAH-behr?” he said, checking to see if he had understood me correctly. The streets were full of people hauling plastic bags on their morning food shopping rounds. Stalls and carts offered all sorts of vegetables, beverages, and Chinese “fast food” like crepes and those bagel-sized buns that are cooked on the inside of brick-lined metal drums. I don't think the scene was this colloquial in 1937 when this area was the site of embassies and consulates.

At the end of the block we came to a wall with a gate and walked through. The courtyard contained some people, cooking on braziers. But there stood the house. I recognized it instantly as Rabe's house, the house that in 1937 was the home of a German businessman for the German pharmaceutical company, Seimans. Were it not for the oriental railing above the porch lintel, it looked like a dwelling one might find in the Ulandstrasse in Munich. After reading his diaries and other accounts of his years in Nanking, I almost felt I was home. There was that dingy gray-brown brick, the unusual window mullions. But it seemed smaller, and more enclosed by the trees and the compound wall. There were no historical markers, and it seemed to be occupied. It had not been turned into a shrine for the man who has been called the “Schindler of China.” I wondered if it would survive the onslaught of redevelopment that was taking place in Nanking, whether the University might be able to incorporate it into its sycamore-shaded campus. [1]

I imagined the courtyard filled with terrified Chinese seeking some sort of asylum over sixty years before. Outside Japanese troops were slaughtering Chinese by the tens of thousands, drunk with their conquest of the erstwhile capitol of the Kuomintang that had abandoned it. Screams and gunfire could be heard, the air was thick with the smoke from burning buildings and bodies. The most horrible atrocities went on for weeks during the end of 1937 and beginning of 1938 in what came to be called the “Rape of Nanking.”

It was the home of a member of a representative of the country that was an ally of Japan, Nazi Germany, although Rabe had lived in China for some thirty years. Outraged at the atrocities Rabe was not only a leader in negotiating with the Japanese to set up an International Safety Zone for the various foreign delegations, but in directly interfering in their murderous activities by Chinese civilians and left-behind military. In one account, given by Iris Chang, Rabe, incensed by the rapes, which often ended in the murder of the woman, strapped on swastika armband and charged into a group of drunken Japanese soldiers to upbraid them and force them to surrender the woman to him. He had no more that the axis between the Nazis and the Japanese against the chance that his body might end up with the thousands of others. [2]

The irony of a Nazi who admired Hitler engaging in such selfless risk would seem to be the sort of historical stuff that merits more attention that it has received. There were many other westerners among the foreign lo wai who occupied the concession areas and eventually the Safety Zone that Rabe was instrumental in securing from the Japanese military. Many were journalists, but little as emerged from their pens. Yet Rabe is responsible for saving more than 200,000 Nankingese, and gave as many as 600 shelter in his own home and yard. There were other westerners who were responsible for saving Chinese lives. One of them, Minnie Vautrin, was an American Midwesterner who was headmistress of a women's college in Nanking and herself faced down rampaging Japanese troops, saving as many as ten-thousand Chinese. [3]

The second irony is when Rabe returned to Germany during the war. He wrote to Hitler about the atrocities, but of course, Hitler was going the Japanese more than one better with his own campaign of extermination. Rabe, a hero in China, was arrested by the Gestapo. He was a “nobody” in his own country, and died almost shilllingless of a stroke His diaries, ultimately made available by his sister, were not published until 1997. [4] To read them is to be transported back seventy years to one of the most horrific instances of man's inhumanity to man, and an act of compassion that keeps the candle of hope from guttering to its last flicker. If only the walls of Rabe House could talk; they might whisper “ xie-xie ,” . . . and Germans who have little to be proud of from the dark years of WWII my respond with a well-deserved “ Danke .” [5]

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[1] Beside the Rape of Nanking Memorial Museum there is a small building devoted to Rabe containing a sculpture of him and documents and photos. It was recently reported in the South China Morning Post that Rabe's house is being restored by the Nanjing University and will be opened to the public as a museum..

[2] Despite his 30 years residency in China Rabe did not speak the language, relying on some pidgen and his fluency in English.

[3] Hual-Ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (2000). Vautrin is also still revered by Nanjingese who remember her service.

[4] The Good Man of Nanking , Translated by John E. Woods (Vintage)

[5] Rabe may finally be getting some recognition. Reportedly there are as man as three film projects in development, one by the writer who was responsible for the HBO series, Rome.

33. 4: POST-911 STRESS SYNDROME 6.14.2006

2006, UrbisMedia

The guy who parked his Ninja crotch-rocket a few feet from my table at the café was offering his disquisition on 911. First of all, the Israelis were behind the whole thing; just how will come out some day, or never, he says with complete assurance. The young girl who is his audience (this guy likes to ride the statutory line) is one of the local kids I call the “illustrati”. She is tattooed to the extent that the only jobs she will ever be able to get are as a barista or a circus sideshow curiosity. “The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down by a missile, and there was no plane that crashed into the Pentagon—it was a missile.” The bemused “illustrata” did not ask as single question, or raise an eyebrow, probably because they were pinned with several silver rings.

With great effort, I kept my mouth filled with espresso rather than what I was thinking. Only blogs exceed cafés and bars in conspiracy theories about 911. They are viruses that arise from the stuff that falls out of the back ends of bulls.

Conspiracy theories are typically the way people connect events to preconceptions. But prophecies are the way that people connect events to what they allege is foretold, or foreordained. Prophecies enjoin those who are “chosen” to fulfill them. I suppose that if this guy was a Ninja-riding evangelical fundamentalist he might have been impressing this illustrata with appropriate passages from Revelations. It doesn't matter, it's just stuff that fell out of the back ends of bulls sometime in the first century A.D. In any case, he didn't supply much more than an intro for this piece.

911 is a date now seared into American history, world history, with exploding jet fuel. It's also, ironically, the number we call when we have “fallen and can't get up!” What is doubly tragic about it is that it occurred “on the watch” of a man least intellectually, or morally apt to promulgate a judicious response to it. After he finished listening to school kids read, and then hiding out in a presidential bunker, George Bush emerged to find himself standing on smoldering rubble at “ground zero,” one hand on the shoulder of a fireman, and the other clenching a bullhorn, seeing his presidency, his destiny, defined for him in World Trade Center debris. The man who had been seen largely as a buffoon, a thief of the office he held, now found himself; God really did want him to be president. His power would grow out of the fear and trepidation of his people the way a black hole sucks matter into its depths. He must have felt it so that very day. The business flop, National Guard gold brick, and pampered daddy's boy and driver under influence, now saw himself in almost prophetic terms. George Coeur de Lion, assuaging his nation's fears with federal largesse now available to him with little question or oversight, and vowing a “crusade” (at least until he was told to stop using that word) top avenge this reprise of Pearl Harbor. He was “the war president.”

If one were a conspiracy theorist it would be facile to assert, in hindsight, that, knowing what they knew beforehand, the Bush operatives just let 911 happen. There's a paper trail that can be fashioned into a veritable “plan” to give George Bush his the presidency he would not have been able to fashion without the assistance of 19 middle-eastern (though non-Iraqi) hijackers. There were the pre-existing neo-con plans to invade Iraq. There were the ignored briefing memos that all but gave the date and time (but Condi called “historical background”). There were even some warnings from our intelligence agencies. The only unknown was if, and when, the enemy would pull the trigger.

This would all be vehemently denied, of course, and by the same kinds of people who, for ideological reasons, might level a similar charge at Roosevelt in 1941. History is full of such trigger events—the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the Mukden Incident, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—but they are the detonators; there has to be a prime charge to create the explosion. It's relatively easy to come up with a detonator, but the prime charge has to be in place and, of course, explosive. The conspiracy theorists are asking for a big stretch in credibility here; the risks of the Bush administration operating a scheme in which Americans fly planes into buildings and fire missiles into the Pentagon, especially for a bunch of bunglers like the Bus crowd, it beyond belief. Unless there is direct proof it is best left to historians and “grassy knoll/second shooter” assassination theorists to build careers around them; better to perceive Bush as a bungler than a perpetrator. Indeed, his lack of perspicacity all but dictates such a conclusion. He may be arrogant, a bully, and an opportunist, but he doesn't have the mental stuff it takes to fashion a conspiracy.

But seeing 911 coming and ignoring it because there might be some political (and other) advantages in letting it happen, is closer to being credible. On that there is a lot of evidence that lends clarity to the 20-20 vision. For Bush it fit the “prophecy” scenario; the credulous are always ready to connect the dots with passages from Revelations. The smarter people among the neo-con cabal knew to seize the political moment, but did not reckon on the quagmire.

It is difficult to imagine (the evil genius theory) that George Bush had an inkling that power would devolve to him as easily, as surprisingly, as it did. Like most acquisitions of power it became addictive, vision blurring, and potentially self-destructive. The shell-shocked electorate, save some sober minds, signed on, Congress got out its rubber stamps and signed off, the dogs of war strained at their leashes. Bush could let his religiosity fashion the fight as one between good and the “axis of evil,” giving vague historical reference to Reagan's “evil empire,” and clear symbolism for his fundamentalist base. This was not time for that liberal moral relativism. This was about survival. Then, when the enemy is routed we will seed the vanquished nations with our secular faith in democracy (and unleash our Christian evangelists on them, too). It was like some chapter and verses from the Book of Revelations—at least to credulous cretins who believe that all has been foretold. Without even taking a “mandatory eight-count” America was up off the deck and heading off to pummel the biggest, but easiest jerk it could find, no matter how irrelevant he happened to be.

It played well at home, but was based on a fallacious and ultimately fateful misreading of its self-delusional prophecy. Bush pere's blitzkrieg was over in a comparative flash, so quick there wasn't a hint of what might have eventuated had they gone all the way to Baghdad. So why shouldn't a debilitated Iraqi army, a weakened economy by years of sanctions and inspections, be a cakewalk for the grand army of Bush fils ? The “Decider” decided to “shock and awe” them with all of that wonderful military might we have been spending our money on. It would be another snap victory, like daddy's, but this time we would pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off, teach ‘em a little democracy, make some war-profiteering friends very rich, and snatch some crude.

But there is always a problem with when events seem to align with “revealed truths”; it turns the telescope around and details become lost, theories become reified, things get neatened up like a pimple-complexioned personal add portrait dropped into Photoshop. But the devil, as they say, “is in the details.” None of the strategists of the Vietnam conflict seemed to be able to imagine that the North Vietnam's would be willing to lose millions to America's “mere” 58,000 casualties. The carpet bombing might have forced them to throw in the towel eventually, and then we would have found ourselves in a perpetual and more debilitation guerilla war, you know, like after the “shock and awe” of Iraq. How do you compare the willingness of people to fight to the death for their land to the tortured proposition that attacking the wrong country on the basis lies somehow makes America safer? And now 911 approaches a sort of full circle, as the number of American soldiers killed there approaches the number of Americans who died here in the events of 911.

The polls are now showing that Americans might be coming out of their post-911 stress syndrome. Now they need to find a way out of the quagmire. The prophecy is dead, but conspiracy theorists will carry on and will continue, mostly to amuse people like me, eavesdropping at cafés. But I would like to know just who is supposed to have fired that missile that allegedly hit the Pentagon. Could it have been the “second gunman on the grassy knoll”?

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33. 3: THE UNWALLED CITY, by Xu Xi, 2001 (6.11.2006)

The 1997 “handover” (actually repatriation) of the erstwhile British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China was an event that, in addition to its many political and economic implications, fostered considerable introspection among it population of some seven million Hong Kong yan . All but a few percent are Hong Kong yan , the local Chinese; the rest are sometimes referred to as “hongkongers,” the westerners who are often referred to by the yan , unaffectionately, as gweilos, or “white ghosts.” Most Hong Kong yan were caught in some “limbo” of citizenship, with passports for an entity that soon would no longer exist in a political system with a fifty-year countdown presumably to communism, and an uncertain economic status.

Both Hong Kong yan and hongkongers variously affected attitudes of flight (to Canada and other points west), fight (the formation of pro-democracy movements), or a party-like posture that said make money while the sun shines, for tomorrow we may have to send our money abroad. Others seized upon its dramatic tensions and wrote about it. In the run up to the handover academics and novelists wrote books, [1] filmmakers cranked their cameras.

Xu's tale is of the love lives of Hong Kong's 20-40-year-old yuppies, a cohort that is not only affected with pre-handover syndrome, but also the more international angst that afflicts that age cohort that has forsaken long-serving traditions and social norms for the freewheeling world of people with self-determination and money. They can't seem to find happiness because they can't seem to define it.

None of the dramatis personae of UC seems to be “into” or care about much more of anything than themselves. Either divorced or having affairs, they all assuage this apparent lack of direction with a roundelay of bed-hopping and comparing the body-types and techniques of their kaleidescope of partners. Vince, a twice-divorced American photographer plays the gweilo stud who seems to get to bang the most of the local lovelies. That includes the Chinese-speaking American nympho-trophy-wife of Kwok Po, one of the local wannabe tai pans . Adanna, a Chinese model who wants to be a canto-pop singer gets it on with her boyfriend's roommate whom she otherwise despises, and Clio, a divorced mother lives in fear that she might be over the hill as far as men are concerned. Take away the sprinkles of Cantonese and Mandarin and the east meets west stuff and you would probably run into these people—if you hung out in whatever is the local Lan Kwai Fong —of any cosmopolitan city just about anywhere these days.

Since Hong Kong is a bit of a village they are all loosely related by blood or professional association, which allows for a good deal of competition and comparison, and some cattiness. If this were one's only window on Hong Kong it might seem to be an Oriental version of Desperate Housewives . As expected there is a local money-bags guy around to remind us that this town of traders—one in which it is not uncommon to see local Chinese women, plastic shopping bags in hand, gathered around a commodity price screen in the window of one of the banks that are on nearly every corner—money is what makes the world go round. Hong Kong people may not always get the value of things right, but they always know its price.

Xu Xi's tale seems drawn from life. An Indonesian-Chinese, raised mostly in Hong Kong, a former international business woman with multiple fluencies who frequents the US, Europe and down-under, she knows the place and personalities quite well and writes their internal voices (the females at least, the men are more mono-dimensional) with assurance and depth, though perhaps with a little too much “ Ayeeeah , I screwed him ‘til his eyes watered and he hasn't called in three weeks!”

Xu Xi comes along at a time when Hong Kong film has attempted to break out of its almost sui generis mode and audience. For decades Hong Kong cinema has been localized, and only recently—and perhaps helped by the attention Hong Kong received in the dramatic pre-handover days—produced some films that have been able to cross-over to western audiences. [2] She has been described as perhaps the “foremost English language writer to capture contemporary Hong Kong in fiction.” Therein lies a bit of a dilemma, however. Writing about a social set that transcends Hong Kong, that is increasingly placeless because it exists everywhere, gives us a Cantonese flavor on a dish that is ubiquitously served up, increasingly in Tokyo, Shanghai, New Delhi, Singapore, and wherever wealth is being created by and for the growing money-ed cosmopolitan class. They are a class that doesn't look back (because there's little relevance for them there), but doesn't see forward very well either. Perhaps this is why they seem mostly interested in the next quarterly report and who they are going the screw this weekend. They do need to be the subject of fiction, and Xu Xi does it well and with a truth, because they are the cohort that will (some of them) rise to be the tai pans of the global economy and we ought to get to know them and their values. Perhaps that is the reason for her choice of title. The city has become unwalled; the transcendent world that is called “globalism” these days has flooded in and settled in the streets of the Midlevels, Discovery Bay, and Central in Hong Kong.

I appreciated The Unwalled City because it is about a social set for which I have neither the entry qualifications nor sustained interest. I encounter them only in passing when I am in their (our?) city. For me, the indigenous Hong Kong exists in the interstices of their city, in the places I call “Cantoville,” the down and dirty (and diminishing) areas where the “real” Hong Kong yan live, work, love and die. It's where little old ladies waddle on bowed legs from their stained Chinese-style blocks of flats with dripping air conditioners to the Man Mo temple, of the Tung Wah hospital, sell fruit and vegetables from wet markets, run little electrical appliance shops or laundries, and dried fish establishments, where little Haaka ladies that look like question marks ply the streets for cardboard boxes. They ride the lower deck of the Star Ferry. Theirs is a different story, with different values, passions and problems. It's waiting for a Xu Xi to write it.

The dramatis personae of Unwalled City are not stereotypical in the way that the cast of a Clavell novel might be. They are cut quite realistically, to the point of banality, at times. And, in spite of this being a “handover” novel they seem quite unconcerned, as does the author, given all the local and international discussion of it. The event itself occupies a few pages at the end, an anti-climax that befits the anti-climax of the lives of her characters. Perhaps that is best. Life did go on in Hong Kong, a protean city with no sense of nostalgia, but a long history of fitting itself to the local winds and currents of money and political power. A Hong Kong friend told me over lunch at the Hong Kong Club in the Spring of 1997 that “Hong Kong people (he meant the Chinese) are traders , not investors; they're in for the short turnover not the long run, like gamblers.” Maybe that's the way you have to be in an “unwalled city,” with your money always close to hand.

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[1] Paul Theroux showed up to write Kowloon Tong. Last Year in Hong Kong, by Robert Elegant, and Asian Values, by Nury Vittachi, among others.

[2] Directors Wayne Wang, Ang Lee and Wong Kar Wai have managed to attract interest and/or financing from the west. Films such as Chinese Box, Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love and Crouching Tiger-Hidden Dragon have brought Hong Kong or Hong Kong actors, directors and cinematographers to the attention of western filmgoers. And, Jackie Chan and the late Bruce Lee brought have successfully exported traditional Hong Kong martial arts genre

33. 2: THE CRAPTURE: It's a Revelation! 6.6.2006

I tried to imagine how St. John the Divine got up to his cave near the summit of the Greek island of Patmos. He must have been in pretty good shape I concluded as I climbed there through the rocky, inclined pastures populated with grazing goats and paved with their turds. Then again, the author of the Book of Revelations (the Apocalypse) might have been cranked up on some narky substance; after all you don't get the sort of visions that this weirdest book of the Bible reports on a couple of glasses of merlot. There aren't any photos of St. John the Divine, but try to imagine the Rev. Jim Jones, or David Koresh, in long locks, whacked out on peyote and a jug of Thunderbird with a crystal-meth chaser.

It was the late 1980s and I was in better shape then. I could have taken a bus up to the top, where a monastery dedicated to John crowns the peak, but a vague asceticism seemed to prod me to ascend on foot. I would stop to catch my breath and look back to see my white ship getting smaller and smaller down at the port. John ensconced himself in a cave for a year, called the “Cave of St. Anne.” As the legend goes, this is where he is reputed to have written, smoking, snorting and drinking God knows what, his nightmarish visions and visitations. Why he wasn't content with the wonderful view of the eastern Aegean I don't know. Instead, he had visions of the past and future that were a bad trip on any uncontrolled substance. Angels, dragons, books of seven seals (lots of stuff in sevens— plagues, angels, golden bowls), horned beasts arising from the sea, whose number, by the way, is 666 (Rev 13:18), armies clashing, and cities thrown down by God's wrath, and of course, those Four Horsemen. Small wonder that John is the patron saint “against poisonings.” Add “overdoses” to that one.

It's doubtful that John had any idea that his ramblings and rants would be picked up and interpreted by legions of mystical charlatans to ensnare the frightened, the gullible, and the credulous dimwits of the bargain basement of Christianity. John's hallucinations are a veritable bottomless mine for the fertile and eschatologically apocalyptic imaginations of the [C]Rapturists. These are the shamsters who have constructed “end time” prophecy for the “saved” who will be taken up to heaven and those who will be “left behind” that sounds like the trailers for a couple dozen horror and end of the world films run through the brain of Charles Manson.

The Crapture has become a billion dollar business. Certainly the authors of the very lucrative Left Behind series which are turned out like Harlequin horrors, and the other books, CDs, movies, T-shirts, and one supposes, soon, Crapture luggage, don't want this fleecing of the suckers to end very soon. The Crapture posits that the earth is really a pretty nasty place, where evil beings like the Anti-Christ run around trying seduce our souls away from ingesting such feculent notions as the “pre-, mid-, and post-tribulations,” and loads of other nonsense. At various times Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and even Ronald Wilson Reagan (each of his three names are 6 letters each, get it?), and maybe even you, can get to where the mark of Satan can be seen on your forehead by the “saved” (i.e., those who have bought, if not necessarily read, the Left Behind series).

What is supposed to happen is that one day (and many adherents believe that is it will happen in their lifetime, so they can be a real pain in the ass to people who they believe have not been “saved”) only the saved will get transported “up there” in a rapturous “beam me up Jesus.” The rest of us will be left down here in an earthly hell of plagues of locusts, wars, famines, disease, death, global warming, Halliburton, and Enron accountants—in short, an endless Bush administration.

In Revelation 20:1–3, 7–8, John “saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. . . . And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth.” From this you sort of get an idea of how latter day eschatologists can really have some fun with Revelations. Think of it as sort of a video game where you can take any number, seven seals, 666, four corners of the earth, or four horseman, and look around for things, events, whatever you can find in similar numbers around you, and voila , instant prophecy! It's the perfect way to interpret your life, if you prefer to substitute bible study classes for, say, advanced algebra (which I personally believe was created by the Horned Beast to screw up my high school GPA).

While they are waiting around to be ascended into heaven, singing “Na na, na, na NA-nah” back at the “unsaved” will they perhaps have a real revelation that, if there is indeed a God, and He inhabits heaven, that He is not likely to be of such poor taste, and so desperate in His eternal loneliness, that he would submit Himself to spending eternity with a bunch of credulous a**h***s?

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33. 1: THREE KONGS AND OUT 6.5.2006

From King Kong (2005, Big Primate/Universal Pictures)

Here's a little Dr. Science quiz for you. Several years ago there were two science fiction movies that were released around the same time. One was called The Incredible Shrinking Man , a story about a guy who drank something—I don't remember what exactly—that caused him to keep shrinking, eventually right out of sight. The special effects people had a lot of fun along the way, pitting him against cats, then rodents, then a spider, and probably eventually, although we never find out, with bacteria.

The other picture, Tarantula , reverses the premise: through some mishap by a wacky scientist a tarantula ends up growing as tall as a ten-story building and, as is the case in this film genre, threatens civilization as we know it until it is nuked out of existence in a flaming finale.

Question: imagine these two premises as options for real-life circumstances. Which predicament would you prefer to find yourself in: a) shrinking person confronting normal-sized tarantula, or, b) normal-sized person confronting giant tarantula? What's the difference, your thinking, you'll end up as spider-lunch either way.

Not necessarily. You should choose "b", the giant tarantula option. You see, a ten-story high tarantula would not only not be able to chase you down and gobble you up. If it could move at all it would probably crumble under its own weight. Its the same reason that an ant, which amazes us by being able to haul a leaf sixty-times heavier than itself, wouldn't be able to carry its own weight if it were human-sized. It has to do with the structure of these creepy-crawlies, and with the laws of physics.

So what's the point? That you should feel a little more secure? No. I mean yes, you should feel more secure, but that's not the point of the quiz. It's a simple one: size makes a difference. So what, there's probably other ways that you have already learned that lesson.

Speaking of outsized critters in movies I recently saw the third version of the movie classic, King Kong (see also Archives, No. 11.5, August 2004). It's one of my favorite movies—the 1933 version, with Fay Wray as Anne Darrow, that is. This second remake [1] by the vastly overrated Peter Jackson, is pure crap and a sop to 19-year-old video game wankers who wouldn't watch a black and white film if you promised them an endless supply of Pepsi, Doritos and Clearasil. The 2005 version really plays the sex thing, with Ann (Naomi Watts) in a perpetual state of dropped-jaw awe at something she apparently sees, but is not revealed to the audience. One would think that they had met through that eHarmony on-line thing but he hadn't mentioned his size. In any case, they spend a good part of the film actually mooning at each other and, presumably after intimate dinners and quiet walks on the beach and, of course, watching sunsets. C'mon, Jackson, we know that Ann and the ape just can't get it on, so why are you screwing up a classic American film? [2] It should have been re-titled as King Klunk .

I argue for keeping to the “purity” of the 1933 version because all the high-tech video effects of later version obscures the fact that the story is really a film about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature. I have two related “takes” on this, both with religious undertones. [3] One is that it is a story about sacrifice . Remember, Ann Darrow is hung out there by the creepy natives of Skull Island to appease the giant ape; she can't help it if he's finally discovered he like blondes. It's a reference back to all those sacrificial practices of bygone times, the notion of offering youthful, virginal purity to propitiate the gods. Sacrifice has been at the core of religion since before God tested Abraham. It most likely harkens to early man's fear of forces he could not comprehend and to animals that lurked just beyond the illumination of his camp fires. Throw ‘em a bone. Almost all religions have a form of sacrifice in one form or another, perhaps the most gory example being the Aztec rites.

The other dimension of King Kong deals with our relationship to Nature. Unlike Frankenstein and giant spiders, which are man-made aberrations, Kong is Nature's aberration, and especially one that can be—in the character of Carl Denham, [4] the film-maker-promoter—commodified, put to profit. So it's more than blond meets ape love story, its about how we exploit nature to our own ends, how we drag Kong off his island and take him to the island of Manhattan for the amusement of sybarites, and force him in desperation to climb up the Empire State building (with the blonde in hand, of course—they really do have more fun). Then, as is the denouement in so many such films and novels, we solve the problem we have created by blasting him with our advanced technology. Finally, taking a cue from that Garden of Eden scene in Genesis, the guy who hauled him off his island and put him on exhibit, has the gall to say in the movie's very last line: “It wasn't the airplanes [that brought him down], it was beauty killed the beast.” That's right, blame it on the blonde.

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[1] The 1976 version is by Dino DeLaurentis, and holds closer to the original, and at least has some humor, and Jessica Lange as the blonde love interest of Kong (She calls him “you big ape!”). It is also the version where Kong ascends the World Trade Center in the final scene and is vanquished by jet fighters. The 2005 piece of garbage is an insult to bother the viewer and the giant ape.

[2] I know, there was that joke going around for years that Fay Wray died giving birth to Kong's child.

[3] There he goes again.

[4] Nobody plays him the way Robert Armstrong did in ‘33