DCJMar2008

Volume 49

MARCH-APRIL 2008

49.6: THAT ANGEL COULD FLY! 4.30.2008

Many years ago I was in one of the rooms of the renowned Uffizi Gallery in Florence. At one end of this particular room was, on an easel and behind a velvet rope guard, Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Annunciation.” I happened to be perusing a nearby Canaletto when in walked a local Italian guide at the head of a group of uniformed English high school girls.

The guide, no taller than the girls, reminded me of the 1940s bit actor, Dane Clarke. He wore his sunglasses on top of his head and had his sport jacket on his shoulders, arms outside the sleeves, an Italic affectation. He strutted, as though the salle was his own living room, up to the rope guard, where he stood with his back to the twittering schoolgirls. There he waited, not saying a word, until his pause caused the them to quiet down. I was intrigued. This was a performance by a guy who felt he had mastered his craft. Heb had my attention.

Presently, he turned and faced the girls. Peering over their shoulders I could just see his head. There were tears in his eyes! He waited a few beats longer, then intoned, in that Italic-accented English of Vittorio De Sica, “Young ladies, I have been before this magnificent painting by Maestro Da Vinci many, many times. But, each time, I am so moved by its beauty and the wonder of the subject.” He then went on to deliver an interesting explanation of the painting, the three-quarter pose on the Virgin, Da Vinci’s use of areal perspective and, especially, the angel.

He had them in the palm of his hand. The girls were fixed on the beautiful angel as he went on about the annunciation the angel made to Mary. Then he focused on the angel’s wings, and how Da Vinci had rendered them, how realistic they were. He compared them with the silly little wings of putti in other paintings of the time, how Da Vinci’s feathers were so life-like. He explained that Da Vinci had studied birds and did many sketches of the movement of their wings inn flight. Then he said something that seemed strange: “Young ladies, you look at those wings and you know, you know, that that angel can fly!”

Was it the professor in me? Something in me wanted to shout, “bullshit!” Something in me wanted to say, “that angel couldn’t get a foot off the ground with those wings!” First of all, the wings are too small. I knew that Da Vinci had studied birds, that he was very interested in flight. But he had also studied human anatomy as well. He was the guy who snuck into morgues at night to dissect bodies to see how they were constructed. So, I was convinced that, had Da Vinci been standing beside me, he would have shouted “bullshit,” or merda de toro, or something like that, even though it was his painting. Da Vinci would have known that, in order to drive those wings he painted, that angel would have needed about eight times the muscle mass in his chest—he would have required a chest, with protruding breastbone, like a condor, not like a cute boy. Da Vinci didn’t want to paint an ugly, physically-distorted angel, the patron would have rejected it with an angel that looked like Dolly Parton.

Why Mr. Guide decided to spoil an interesting discussion of painting technique with a literal flight of fancy, I don’t know. Maybe he just got too full of himself. Or, perhaps he just didn’t want to deal with the real subject of the painting—the "annunciation." Did he not want to deal with a question from one of the school girls (he surely would have got one from me) about what this angel was announcing—that Mary had been selected by God to bear His Son, the Messiah, and that Joseph, her husband was not going to be the impregnator-father of who would become the most famous kid in history? Did he not want to have to try to make credible this ludicrous story cocked up by some fathers of the Church. How could he defend the Immaculate Conception when, if pressed, he couldn’t make a credible anatomical case for a flying angel?

It is a painting of a myth. Da Vinci knew that. He would have had the angel arrive in a helicopter (he had a design for one) if the patron had wanted it. Of course, most religious painting of the time was commissioned and paid for by the Church or believers and they preferred their myths beautifully rendered in art and, if their angels had to fly, they would crank them up and down with an aptly-named deus ex machina.

The Annunciation was a Renaissance painting, and though Da Vinci employed enough realism to convince the patron and the viewer that the angel was capable of flight, he knew the limits of faith and reason in artistic representation. (He also probably didn’t want to have the kind of experience that Galileo endured later on.)

This was a period of the beginning of the end for the Church in the “faith and reason” debate. Da Vinci was one of the first to start to take Nature apart and look at it (the Church forbade dissections at the time). There were many others to follow who wanted their art to reflect a realism that came from the growing interest in optics, perspective, mathematics, geography, and other sciences. For centuries, the Church remained the prime patron for the arts. Realism took a back seat, and the purpose of art was to inspire and elevate the spirit, not to dissect Nature and enlighten. But faith had to enter into a Faustian compact with science if cathedrals were not to fall down and if Biblical events were to be represented as though they really did happen. The purveyors of belief could get away with it so long as it was not necessary for angles to fly out of paintings after they had delivered their “annunciations.” But eventually somebody had to have enough of it all and shout: “Bullshit!”
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© 2000, James A. Clapp

49. 5: THE FORBIDDING CITY 4.25.2008

One of the more endearing images I have of a recent visit to Beijing is of a university student peddling down a street on a dilapidated Mao-era Tianjin “Silver Pigeon.” His girlfriend rides side-saddle on the rear carrier, one arm around his waist, the other hand holding a book she is reading while resting her head against his back. There is something romantic about this vision, harkening back to the days when untold numbers of bikes plied Beijing streets with the only the sounds of creaking chains and tinkling warning bells, a vast peloton of placidity.

The image I saw of this couple was nearly wiped out by a $70,000 Mercedes Benz that gave the bike and its riders absolutely no quarter despite being in a bike lane. It doesn’t matter whether it is a couple of students, and old man on one of those motorize trikes, or some delivery person hauling freight on some ancient tricycle, cars rule in Beijing these days. Pedestrians don’t have the right of way, but they are, by law, I am informed, not at fault when they get clobbered by some flashy, expensive sedan. That law is all that stands between people on foot and a lot more greasy spots in the road. The rich do not want to pay, but they play it as close to the bone as they can.

I have a special feeling for this subject. As I am being ferried between the university, where I am giving some lectures, and my hotel, and around town to see the various Olympic sites and the incredible new architecture in this city of 18 million and growing, I am myself still healing from being whacked by a truck while riding my moped in San Diego, still changing wound dressings every other day. I cringe every time a car brakes hard to avoid plowing into a group of pedestrians.

At the same time there is a surprising level of tolerance of the drivers for one another. Following the general Chinese rule if leaving no space unfilled, drivers cut one another off with an intrusiveness that, in the U.S., would result in expletives, flip-offs, and shoot-outs, by the millions. Thusfar, there seems to be no road rage in Beijing. There also do not seem to be any rules of he road. The scene on Beijing’s roads seems like a massive demolition derby about to happen. They honk, they neglect to signal, they change lanes like wildebeest fleeing a cheetah, they park when and where they like. In short, they love their newfound, damn cars. This is the new China, where Deng Xiao-ping said “to get rich is glorious” and, I presume “to change lanes without signaling is downright fun.”

This was my 6th visit to Beijing but, as far as appearances were concerned it could almost have been my first; the place changes that rapidly. The 2008 Summer Olympics, when added to China’s decade-long economic boom, have made Beijing a city on steroids. If cities can suffer from Marfan’s Syndrome Beijing has that as well. If you are getting a little too big for your own ego, come to Beijing; it will cut you down to size with one circuit around the ring roads.

Beijing has developed as a rather orthogonal city, taking its rectilinear form from the cardinal directions of the Forbidden City. That royal compound, like the core of a tree, has dictated successive “rings,” or ring roads, now up to six, that give Beijing its distinctive, and its inexorably expansive plan. It makes travel about the city primarily “circumferential,” necessitating a hopping between rings to achieve radial direction. It is probably rather inefficient, extending travel times and sending more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere than necessary.

This latter effect seems to be producing an atmosphere in which cars will need to come equipped with radar or sonar, whichever is more effective for navigation in a blinding carboniferous soup that literally can reduce visibility to a hundred meters. Regular horns will need to be replace with fog horns if the particulate matter densifies any further. It seems as if this giant metropolis is engaged in a reciprocal dance in which the rising number of automobiles is both accommodated and necessitated—a Faustian compact with seems to threaten a denoument of mass asphyxiation.

So, from the beginning it may not have been a good location for a capitol city, or any city at all. It was a decision that was made by the Mongols (a traditionally nomadic people with little or no discernable principles of city planning). They selected the eastern edge of a desert from which the Westerlies blow dust that produces a lot of hawking and not always effective signs that read “No Spitting.” Surrounding mountains help in the formation of temperature inversions that make things nice and smoggy.

Beijing’s low visibility might explain another feature of its recent urbanism—“monumentalism.” The city has sprouted hundreds of huge buildings. Massive apartment blocks, giant malls, towering office structures, and of course, the new Olympic structures, such as the “Bird’s Nest” field stadium, and the huge block of icy blue that is the aquatic sports venue. Soaring ancillary structures, one a building whose top stories are designed to simulate the Olympic torch, surround the Olympic site. The gigantic new television structure, an arch that makes the one at Paris’s La Defense look like a Lego toy, seems to defy gravity and the laws of physics. Down below thousands of workers are panting trees, re-paving sidewalks, and making other cosmetic changes in a seeming frantic effort to be ready for the onslaught of “foreign devils” at the opening ceremony. An incredible and beautiful new elliptical dome opera house reminiscent of the spaceship that landed in Washington D.C. in the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, sits in a pond that reflects and doubles its volume.

The monumental scale of all these structures seems almost necessitated by the corresponding scale of the vast ringed metropolis. Being driven around by my gracious hosts I never seemed close to them as the loomed in and out of the grey gloom of Beijing’s atmosphere. At various locations in the interstices there still remain some of the relatively ancient hutongs, the compounds of narrow lanes and cramped houses, often without plumbing and gas, but reminders of a more accessible and far less forbidding Beijing of not very long ago. But these, too, are being threatened by the relentless horizontal and vertical urban expansion.

Beijing is truly transforming itself into the world city its leaders want it to be, but will the people who call themselves “Beijinese” have anything of their old city to remember it by?
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

49. 4: True Heroes 4.8.2008

Dith Pran and Haing Gnor

April 4 is Martin Luther King Day. Many writers will be penning another encomium to this great leader and visionary, with a lot of allusions to the prospect of an African-American man residing in the White House. So I’ll take this opportunity to say a few words about another true hero of mine, another “man of the people” who really acted for all people.

By a stroke of good luck the French Embassy was just down the street from my hotel in Phnom Penh when I visited there a few years ago. One of my reasons for my wanting to go to Cambodia was to see the place that was a prime location in the movie The Killing Fields. It still is the French Embassy today. But back then, in April 1975, it was the last, and tenuous, refuge for foreign journalists in Cambodia’s capital that had been taken by the Khmer Rouge. The tense, frantic, scenes from the movie ran in my head as I passed by it, serene and showing no evidence of the time when over 1,400 Cambodians and foreigners took refuge in the compound.

This was brought to mind yesterday by the announcement of the death of Dith Pran. Pran is a real hero of mine (at a time when the word “hero” is used on the likes of John McCain). Pran, a native Cambodian and photographer, was a “fixer” for Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times during the Vietnam War and the political breakdown of Cambodia stimulated by the invasion and bombing tactics of Nixon and Kissinger. A monstrous madness took over Cambodia, with country boy Khmer Rouge who would unload an AK-47 in anybody for a smile. In the end they killed almost half the population, many of them babies, whose heads they enjoyed smashing against trees.

Few reporters, if any, could operate without brave guys like Pran, who put themselves in an extreme danger zone, even more dangerous than that of the Westerners he worked for because local political forces could regard them as collaborators or traitors. So when the bad times came Pran’s family was able to get out safely, but Pran himself was trapped. The Killings Field’s recounts how he saved several reporters, among them Schanberg and Jon Swain and photographer Al Rockoff from almost certain execution by the Khmer Rouge, even though he might have been killed for taking their part. He could have run for his life, but he stayed. In the compound they tried to fashion a foreign passport for Pran, but lacked sufficient photographic supplies to make a credible photograph. The reporters got put, but their “fixer” was in a real fix. He had money for bribes, but he had to strip himself of his identity and try to survive the brutal regime that controlled his country.

When Pran got up near his hometown of Siem Reap, near the magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat, he found that his father had starved to death and four of his five siblings were probably among the thousands of skeletons of the murdered he came upon in fields nearby. But he was blessed with the natural instincts of a survivor—adaptability and audacity. After he was caught for stealing food from a rice field and beaten by the Khmer Rouge he managed to ingratiate himself sufficiently with a local commune chieftain to get enough protection and food to hold on. He managed ton sneak a listen to the chief’s radio, learning from Voice of America that the Vietnamese were mobilizing against the Khmer Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge learned of his previous connection with the New York Times he headed for the Thai border, nearly not making it when a land mine blew up two men walking in front of him and also wounding him in the leg.1 After waiting seventeen days for the right opportunity he crossed the border and still had to convince the Thai authorities of who he was before being allowed into a refuges camp. Shortly afterwards he was re-united with Schanberg.

Dith Pran could easily have been a moldering skull in one of Cambodia’s killing fields, but he survived to serve as a photographer for the New York Times until his death from cancer last week. He managed to be survived in turn by his four children, six grandchildren and two step-grandchildren. His story survives continues to inspire by the great film by Roland Joffe, The Killing Fields (1984). In that film Pran is played by another Kiliing Fields survivor who had been imprisoned and tortured, Dr. Haing S. Ngor. Ngor won an Oscar for his performance but was mysteriously murdered near his home in Los Angeles, perhaps because of his activism in human rights organizations in Cambodia. Another true hero.2
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

1. Even today one can see more one-legged people in Cambodia than probably anywhere else on earth. The place is still riddled with land mines. They warn tourists to stay on the well-worn trails, even near the famous archeological sites. In Cambodia you don’t go far off the trail to pee; you might come hopping back on one leg.
2. See also Archives No. 3. 10 on this subject.

49. 3: SPITZER, SCHLESINGER AND SEX 3.15.2008

I hate morning television, in fact I hate most television. But I was up in the middle of the night with jet-lag, having flown fourteen hours to Hong Kong, so I turned on the set at the earliest for some distraction. Eliot Spitzer was already all over the news, being masticated with glee by people who are called, inappropriately, “the media.”

Sex, Americans love it, and hate it. They (I can call “them” “they” since I am a temporary “expat”) are obsessed by it the way a bunch of Puritan prelates having a circle jerk are obsessed by it. They wallow in the sinfulness of it; the forbidden fruit tastes so much better, and like having a cigarette afterwards, there is the lingering twinge of guilt and the frisson of anticipation for the next time. They love it, they hate it, they can’t do without its "sinfulness."

Spitzer, the unlikely “hero” who went after white collar criminals and rode his legal gunslinger AG image, to the governor’s mansion in Albany. Let’s face it, he guy looks like one of those “ugly dolls” that are all the rage, and seems barely taller than the podium. The picture the “press” enjoyed running of him was of his Muppet-mouth all contorted in shame and what remained of his bravado. Now he has gone down like a gunslinger from a ricochet from his own six-shooter (forgive the simile, please).1

Then along comes Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the Republican advice-show, bitch-bot, hyping a book she wrote about why guys like Spitzer cheat on their wives—basically (and I think I got the right from the show, not the book) because it’s the wives’ fault. Dr. Laura says the wives should look to what they are “doing wrong,” and not blame their husbands.2 Wow! Mrs. Spitzer needs to run out and get a copy of that gem, instead of playing “stand by your man” while he temporizes over whether his peccadilloes3 will end his political career. (A day later it did; the gunslinger bit the dust).

See, that’s what American attitudes about sex will get you. A crusading governor goes in the tank and a crusading sex advice BS artiste gets free publicity for her book. And some people call it “American civilization.”

Spitzer is another bright guy with a loose zipper, but not bright enough to realize that you don’t piss-off a lot of people with money and then go off banging $1000 and hour hookers and think they are not going to get hold of your you-know-whats and squeeze them till your eyes water. Bye-bye Eliot, you have become the Leno-Letterman joke writer’s dream for a few weeks, and this one will be your epitaph (maybe earlier than would have been.)

But while I detest Schlesinger, who trades on the American sex-sickness and adds to its inanity, I have some sympathy for Eliot Spitzer, because, in some sense, he is a victim of that sickness, as well as his own concupiscent-stupidity. Much has been made that he may have committed a crime in his escapades—the Mann Act, for getting an under-age girl to cross a state line—for example. Give me a break! I think this was last used on ancient tennis star Bill Tilden. Spitzer’s bigger crime is getting his wife to stand next to him and have to suffer for his deeds (not according to Schlesinger, of course, since Mrs. Spitzer needs time to find the blame in herself).

The real perversity here—not to excuse in any way the harm Spitzer did to his wife and children and the nine American males who have been faithful to their marriage vows—is American’s just can’t seem to let go of that Puritan heritage of running around the village whispering, or shouting, “guess who is porking who (whom?)? Dust off the pillory, get that old corpse of Clinton down off the gallows, we got fresh meat.” All over America bosses are “doing” their secretaries and subordinates, professors are “doing” their graduate assistants, politicians are “doing” their staff, and where is the “Forty-million-man march on Washington” for a mass confessional, a massive public mea culpa. Adulterous vow-breakers arise, come forward with your secret charge cards for the motel trysts and “tennis” bracelets” for your ladies who make your secret porn site fantasies come true (for a little extra)! Confess! Dr. Laura says it’s OK. It’s not your fault. It’s your wife’s fault. Get her the book! You thought the Koran was the ticket to a suicide bomber’s paradise? Dr. Laura’s book is a free pass to “Mr. Goodtime’s” paradise. It comes with everything but a Taliban’s turban.

Do Spitzer’s adulteries make him a worse political leader? Did Clinton’s? No. And they were not hypocrites—the way Larry Craig is and was—about saying we should not do what they have given themselves permission to do. It doesn’t make them good husbands who kept their nuptial vows, but they didn’t overthrow the Constitution they way Bush and his minion Mukasey have. We just can’t seem to draw a sensible line between the public and the private, as we can’t seem to between church and state—and here they intersect at the corner of Hubris and Hypocrisy.5

Schlesinger’s crime—a crime against logic and reason—is far greater in my scheme of things. She might place the scene of the crime where it belongs, in the relationship between marriage partners, but then perverts justice by blaming the victim. She is one sick woman, and she wants to pass it on to her sisters. In America she will probably get richer doing it.6

Eliot is probably toast. America seems to prefer blurring important lines to delineating them, whether it’s about worship, water-boarding, or what whores have to do with the political system. But Eliot is really toast because nothing in American draws a crowd to the television more than an “execution”—particularly if it is preceded by a castration.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

1. Spitzer earned his bones bringing down the Gambino crime family, then defeated Dennis Vacco for NY Attorney General, then John Faso for governor, not to mention suing Richard Grasso, former Chairman of the NYSE. So what it is with this guy and Italian Americans? Doesn’t Princeton-Harvard rich-boy Eliot know that when the going gets tough, the goombahs get tougher?
2. I think the book is titled The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. That is just one reason I hate this woman, the other is that she gets to hype this garbage on television and I’m doing interviews for the South China Morning Post to hype my new novel to the limited English reading pubic of Hong Kong. And, of course, she is another despicable right-wing radio talk host.
3. Or would that be “peckerdilloes”?
4. Look, post-Lewinsky, it should be no mystery: it takes blood to make a guy a “stand-up” guy and, when that blood goes south to perform its stand-up function, it deprives the brain of the much-needed blood it needs to formulate the crucial postulate “Is it really myself that I am about to screw? Forget the Harvard-Yale-Princeton education; “Mr. Goodtime” went along, but only for the ride (and the coeds).
5 My nine Republican readers—No, they are not the same nine who have been faithful to their marriage vows!—are wondering why I haven’t put Larry Craig in this group. Because he is a hypocrite, and is still lying about it, that’s why.
6. Yes, I realize that there are some “un-responsive” wives, as there are such husbands, and that men are not the only ones to break marriage vows. The same goes for the reverse situation.

49. 2: LEVIATHON, by Eric Jay Dolin [BR] 3.7.2008

My second favorite book, after Homer’s Odyssey, is Moby Dick. They are both tales of men at sea, but there are not many other similarities. After I read Moby Dick I was hooked on whaling lore for a long time. I read A.B.C. Whipple’s Yankee Whalers in the South Seas, Owen Chase’s Wreck of the Whaleship Essex, and maybe a dozen others. Much of my interest owed to the “call me Ishmael” adventurism of a young man, which I had to satisfy in other ways because unless you are Norwegian or Japanese, the last whaleships set sale well before I was born. Still, I could identify the various types of whales and relate a fairly technical account of the catching of whales and the process of rendering them into the whale oil that lit lamps and lubricated machinery and watches, and the other uses of parts of whale anatomy. Curiously, the adventure meant more to me than the plight of the whales, who never meant anybody and harm—even Moby Dick would have been in a better temper if Ahab would have desisted in turning him into a harpoon cushion.

Whaling, as Eric Dolin’s Leviathon will tell you, was a dangerous and dirty industry. These days it is still dirty, but less dangerous, unless Greenpeace is trying to sink your Japanese factory ship. But thanks to Jacques Cousteau and Animal Planet, we have learned to like whales for other things than lighting our oil lamps, or providing stays for out corsets (or being processed into pet food if you are not Japanese). If they lose their way and wander into brinish rivers, or get beached, we will pull out all the humanitarian stops to get them back in safe waters. Still, thanks to factory ships, which could find them with sonar, kill them with harpoon grenades, and haul them out and process them with great efficiency, many types of whales were nearing extinction. In the old Moby Dick days at least whales had a chance for some “payback”; if they didn’t often sink your Pequod, they did do in a fair number of whalers who chased after them in the small and fragile dories from which the beasts were harpooned and lanced.

Whaling was the quintessential capitalist enterprise, maybe America’s first real big business. Conservative New Englanders, often Quakers and other up-tight denominations, owned the fleets of blunt bark-rigged whaleships that were captained by often quite young masters. Crews were, for the most part, drawn from the bottom of the social stratum, with more blacks, “portogees” and even native-Americans in their company than whites. These were brave, stupid, desperate, or just adventurous young men who were willing to set to sea for as long as four years (or until the holds were full of oil, whichever came first) without knowing where they were going and ready to be ordered into the boats, or aloft into the rigging in the worst kind of weather, at a moments notice. This was done with pay so low (a “lay” was a tiny fraction of the proceeds) that they often returned home in debt to the company for provisions they needed from the ship’s “slop chest.” There was no doctor, save the carpenter (who had sharp implements), the food was lousy, and a slip into the water at the “carving in” of a whale meant death by shark, only slightly slower than being smacked in a whale dory by the flukes of an enraged bull sperm whale.

Still going down to the sea in ships must have seemed to many a 19th Century young man more interesting and adventurous than ploughing furrows or descending into a dark mine. These were, save for jobs that were beginning to emerge in cities and factories consonant with the growth of the American whale fishery, the only other occupations of the time.

At least one got to see something of the world. Whalers were often the first white men to encounter island peoples. It could be treacherous; some Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians referred to white men as “long pig” because they required a longer spit to roast them than their usual porcine diet. But there was also the prospect of having a nice romp on the palm-fringed beaches with some giggling cutie and contributing some Milkamagnesian DNA to the genetic pool of the South Pacific seas (along with some sexually-transmittable scourges.) Many a whaler decided to jump ship, if only for a while since others came along, to enjoy the blandishments of island life. Melville himself (read Typee) took such a sabbatical, although whalers didn’t often find their human rights any better ashore in these places than they did aboard ship.

I once read some whaleship logs in a former ship’s master’s home in Falmouth, Massachussetts, in which there were some harrowing encounters recorded with island peoples that didn’t even have names at the time. The house was also a trove of spears, masks and other native paraphernalia that the captain had collected on his journey’s. For a while these places ere as remote and mysterious as the backside of the moon, but before long the missionaries and other exploiters were following in the wakes of the whaleships.

Dolin’s history of whaling is often technical, but in between learning about why spermaceti oil is so-called, the differences between baleen whales and toothed whales, and the economics of the industry, there is the thrill of the hunt on high seas and the sense the hubris of men subduing the “leviathan.” Yet is was something rather mundane that did in the whaling industry—the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, that must, as the author states, have sent up a chorused cheer among the pods of sperm, right, bowheads, blue, humpback and other types of whales. The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 had put dents in the industry because ships were sunk of commandeered, but one gusher in Pennsylvania was the death knell. In a few years the industry, to use its colorful term for the vanquished leviathan, had “rolled over, fin out.”

And so, whaling has lapsed largely into history, where its blood and stench have been expunged and its dangers relegated to paper cuts from turning pages. It was not only a period of great adventure, but one in which there was a heavy price paid for the improvement it gave to life ashore. It was replaced by another “leviathan” and a new industry that harpooned the earth itself to make it disgorge its thick, black blood to serve the rapacious needs of the dwellers on the surface. Indeed, if the dire prospects of a planet warmed in part by its consumption prove true, Mother Earth may summon her inner Moby Dick, and we plunbereres of the planet will “roll over, fin out.”
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

49. 1: Pooter, the Pupper Master 3.5.2008

Years ago I did a piece on KPBS about a trip I made to the ole USSR. In it I related an encounter with a heavy, Nina Kruschev-looking, Russian woman who was a custodian of one of the rooms in the Petrovorets summer house of the former Czars. She was wearing a paper, stick-on American/Soviet flag on her sweater that was years old from the visit of an American delegation. It was just about falling off and I could see that she was eying my shiny metal American/Soviet flag pin on my lapel. So I took off the pin and handed it to her, whispering “mir,” (peace), one of the handful of Russian words I was able to say. She was clearly touched by the gesture, as I am sure now you are, wiping away a tear on reading this account.

Her faded and curling paper flag was emblematic of much that I had encountered in the old USSR. It was a rather shabby, down at the heels place where people stood in lines for everything, even in front of shops that were not open. I recall that there was a Baskin and Robbins place near the old Rossia Hotel that never opened the entire time I was there (they should have advertised “negative 31 flavors”). Once, in Leningrad (again St. Petersburg) I saw someone rushing home with a half-dozen ice-creams on a stick (in plain white paper wrappers). I traced my way to their source by following people who were eating them and arrived at a large truck that was selling them out of the back. They were all the same flavor (vanilla). And if you wanted to wash one down there was only one soft-drink one could buy in Leningrad—Pepsi. No Coke, just Pepsi. Another incident was when a young Cambodian man who was part of my tour group lost his camera and needed to buy a new one. The store had two clunky Russian-made camera models that looked and functioned like something that Kodak had made forty years earlier. Those were his choices. This was also the time when people came to your room in the hotel wanting to buy the jeans, T-shirts, and other clothing right off your body. In return they could barter jars of caviar, or the nested dolls, or a few other hand-crafted items.

The Soviets were pretty good at building dams, making missiles and aircraft, not all that good at making nuclear power generation plants it turned out, and building other heavy infrastructure. But they didn’t make much else; their flags were paper, and their cameras sucked, both of them. They were, of course, a society that had pretty much jumped from feudalism to communism. No bourgeoisie were wanted to build an entrepreneurial class. When glasnost and perestroika came along and the Russians had to dump the old system (or if you want to believe the myth that Ronnie Reagan brought the USSR down), they weren’t much better at making stuff. It’s hard think of anything on our store shelves that says “Made in Russia.” Nevertheless, the Rooskies are “on a roll” economically, mainly helped by the fact that they have a load of oil and natural gas, and with prices for energy sky-high, they are running their economy and receipts. People have more money to buy things, things are more stable, they are relatively better off and they give a lot f the credit to Vladimir Putin, the man who’s soul George Bush “looked into” and thought he saw somebody who would like cut brush on his ranch and say grace before lunch. Talk about mis-reading a guy! Those receipts from $104/barrel oil will allow the Rooskies to flex some muscle they couldn’t afford to do not many years ago. Their subs were rusting and their planes couldn’t fly because they couldn’t afford to fuel them up and maintain them. Not any more. Russia turned out to be another case of “be careful what you wish for” for the Americans. They wanted an end to the USSR, now they might have another formidable adversary that is an energy giant and worrisome rogue economy that can sell that other energy, plutonium, into some dangerous hands. We wanted the same thing with the Chinese and now they make our Barbie Dolls and have four trillion of our bucks in their banks. We worry about them, too.

Presumably, Russia was becoming a democracy, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that any more than we should kid ourselves about our own democracy b y the time Bush and his Constitution dismantlers are finished with it. Putin has created a puppet named Medvedev, a guy even shorter than the Pooter, who as been elected president on the Pooter’s say-so, and who has, if you are going to say it correctly, an unpronounceable name—something like Meyyyedveyyedveyydeff—Oh forget about it, Pooter’s the guy in charge anyway. But this charade is the reason we should be watchful of the Russians because they might be slipping back into their old Cold War ways, except that this time the out-of-control ideology will be very close to ours, a rampant capitalism that puts profits above everything. What is particularly worrisome about that is that the old KGB apparatus never went away after the fall of the USSR. These were the guys who knew all the dirty little secrets and knew how to hurt and manipulate people. When a state-run economy comes down it still s the people who know where the keys are for things who end up running the new economy. Anyone who has been to a totalitarian society knows that there is surprisingly little street-level crime. It is too “disorderly” and, besides, it competes with the “criminals” who are running the society. So when the old system fell there were plenty of opportunities for the people who knew where they keys were. And also new opportunities for crime. Some new millionaires were made, but a really free press and other elements of an open society did not fully emerge. Russia became the kind of place where it could be dangerous to become too successful; a situation that was not too much different from when those guys from la cosa nostra visited your business to and offer you some “protection” from (you guessed it) la cosa nostra.

At present it seems that the Rooskies are much more interested in increasing their standard of living than they are in having a full-functioning democracy. Moreover, the Pooter is playing effectively to the need for this old super-power to get some respect that it lost from their Afgan war and their economic meltdown. They have some problems to overcome, the virus that haunts expanding wealth, inflation, being one of them. Now they just have to figure out whether the person to lead them into their new and prosperous age should be modeled on the Czar, Rasputin, or Al Capone.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp