DCJMay05

Volume 20

MAY 2005

20. 8: LYING SNIPPITS: A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENTAL MISHANDLINGS 5.28.2005

I am beginning to think that generals make the worst liars. It must be something about the binary nature of their business; you are either dead or alive, the enemy either controls the terrain, or you do. But it's not because generals are not willing to tell or repeat lies. They just don't do it well. As when an Amy general gave his report of the Pentagon's investigation of the contentious Quran flushing at Guantanamo that Newsweek reported (and withdrew for lack of confirmation) that triggered riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere and caused Bush puppet Hamid Karzai to jump off his strings. The general said that the investigation had not turned up a flushing incident, but did turn up a dozen or so incidents in which the Quran was not properly used in interrogations, and five incidents in which the Quran was "mishandeled." (There is also an interesting FBI report.) In these five incidents. however, the Muslim holy book was "accidentally mishandled." Really !? Would you want to serve under somebody like this? Hey General, when's the last time you accidentally mishandled your Bible?

Let us consider some examples -- using the Bible (at the risk of inciting riots in Red States) -- of holy book mishandling (A = accidental; M = mishandling):

1. You have one leg on a chair that is short by the exact thickness of your Bible. You use the Bible to prop up the short leg. This case is M, but not A.

2. You are reading from your Bible the Song of Solomon, which causes you to dance around the living room (but not the way those sinful druggie heavy metal people and hip-hoppers dance). Your Bible slips out of your hand during your religious ecstasy, and crashes through your stained-glass window of George Bush and Jerry Falwell. The torn pages are A, but this does not meet the standard of M.

3. You are at a special prayer service to ask God to support our troops and give the infidel Muslims itchy venereal diseases. You have a cold and are about to sneeze but can't reach your hanky quickly enough. In a panic that you might spread your cold you tear a couple of pages out of Deuteronomy and sneeze into one of them and blow your nose into the other (Chapter 29: 21 –28, the part about infidelity). Is this A? No way; you should always have your hanky at the ready in church. You might sneeze on your bible, or the bibles of others, causing their pages to stick together. Is it M. Of course it is. You could have covered up your sneeze in the proper manner in church, by going “Ah, ahhh, AHhhh, AHHhhh Halliluliahhhhhh !” (Proper response is “Praise Jesus,” not “Gezundheit”) Anyway, it doesn't matter, the pages you ripped out are full of stuff about a bunch of Jews.

4. You can't find your latest issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition , which you always read while sitting on the toilet. So you decide to bring in your King James version in with you. After forty-five minutes your wife pounds on the door and yells, “George, are you touching yourself inappropriately again?” In a panic, thinking you have the SI Swimsuit edition rather than the Bible, you throw your reading matter into the toilet and flush it away. (You knew where I was going with this one, didn't you?). Hmmmmm, seems A at first consideration, but that might depend on whether your wife is right about what you were doing in there (this is getting sort of Jesuitical, isn't it?). M? Well, we might have to ask the Rev. Billy Graham if it is M to take your Bible to the toilet with you. I think it is OK (ergo not M) to take the Bible into the bathroom; after all, the Gideon Bible is in motel rooms, and you know what goes on in them.

5. You are working for Haliburton in Iraq, faking invoices for services to the Army, when you are kidnapped by “insurgents”. Being a good American patriot and employee of Dick Cheney, you have your Bible with you at all times. The insurgents strip you of all your clothing (but do not take digital photos of you with Iraqi women pointing to your genitals, or threaten same with dogs). In your shame, caused, as you know, by Eve screwing things up in the Garden of Eden (Gen, 3: 21), you place your Bible over you genitals. Is this M? Shouldn't you be willing to bear your shame (no, not for the fake invoices, silly) and keep your Bible untainted by contact with your private parts? It definitely isn't A, is it? I think it's OK to do this; just be careful when you slam the Bible shut.

But, just when you think this one is easy the insurgents take your Bible away from you (“Oh no, and this room is really cold!”). Then one of them opens the Bible to Exodus 20 and begins to read: “Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not bear false witness. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's oil . . . (or something like that). How dare he!!! How dare he use our Bible in such a manner! This is not A, this is not M, this is BD (Bible Desecration) of the most heinous sort! Born-agains will be rioting in Kansas and South Carolina, in Oklahoma, other Red States, and, of course, Texas. We will rise with new resolve to strike the infidel by going deeper into deficit and giving bigger tax cuts to rich people, and by pasting “Support Our Troops” ribbons on our trucks and SUVs. Damn these insensitive infidels! Desecrate our holy book, will they. By Jesus, they want jihad , we'll give ‘em jihad !

Thank you, general, for your customary clarity and candor.

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20. 7: METAPHYSICAL MUSINGS, No. 1 5.25.2005

Catechetics 101 (the unauthorized version)

Why did God make me? God made me to know, love and serve Him in this world, and be with Him in the next.

That was the opening question -- and answer – in my First Grade Catechism . I memorized it, as I memorized everything, walking back and forth in my bedroom.

It seemed so simple, even obvious. As long as you don't give it any thought. A Catholic education teaches you to think, but not about what it means to be a Catholic. Once you do, you're in trouble, and you have bought a one-way ticket to apostate land.

Think about it. [Metaphysical Alert: If you don't want to think about it you should immediately stop reading this and turn on your TV to The Shopping Channel]

So, to “know” God. Really? Nobody can really know God. The Jews were almost afraid to know Him. YHWH (the name of God without the vowels); they didn't even say his name! For them He showed up as a flaming bush, or would that be Flaming Bush, for Moses. A bush is easy to “know.” But really, how can you know the most, what? Significant, Essential? What? “Being,” in the universe? Impossible.

So, He ends up looking like Michelangelo depicted him: some old white-haired guy with a Santa Claus face. He was the “Word” the first thing “to be”; everything was created by Him (yes, usually “Him,” not “Her”). Yes, let's “go there,” the gender thing. So, if God is a Him, does he have a penis, like other “hims”? (Hey, I warned you back there with the Metaphysical Alert.) If so, what does he use His penis for? Does he pee? Does he even eat and drink? If so, what? And does he use His penis for that other purpose? With who, or Whom? He didn't start out with a “Partner,” so he would have to “create” one. (Now you can see the real advantage in being God, can't you? “Hmmm, today I think I'll create Angelina Jolie, no Sophia Loren, no . . .”. ) But you just can't imagine God “doing it ,” can you? You can't even imagine Him having a pee.

So, if you imagine a neutered God, how can you “know” Him in any way that you know any other him. You can't even have a beer with Him because he doesn't pee, or tell him dirty jokes because he doesn't get laid. Forget about it; there's no way you can know God. He's probably a pretty lonely Deity.

So, if that's so, how can you “love” somebody you don't know? You can't. But you better not say you “don't” love God, or you're in trouble. So, if you try to love God, how can you do it? How do you love somebody who could kill you in the next instant? Who has you life and death in His hands. How can you love that kind of power? You don't; you say you love it because your fear it. (By the way, we're assuming here, or the catechism is assuming, that God wants, or needs to be loved. He's never said so; even the first commandment just says that we have to “recognize” Him as the one God, and put no other gods before Him.) Anyway, God is supposed to know everything; so, if he knows we really fear him, but call it love, he knows it's all bullshit. Why would He want to care about it anyway? I'm suspicious of people who say that they really love God. (And He probably is, too.)

To serve Him; that's the third part of the catechism answer. Obviously this was put in there so that some kids would want to become priests and nuns. Certainly not to think about it. What does God want me to become; everybody can't be a priest or a nun. It's the toughest question in your life. And why do some many kids say that want to grow up to be a fireman? OK, forget about that.

Can you “serve” God by being a, say, CPA, even one who doesn't cook the books for Enron or MCI? Are you supposed to use your “God given” talents to serve God. Sure, like you're a real good pole dancer, or a linebacker, or politician. Does God appreciate good pole dancing?* We have to do something, but most things seem to serve Mammon, not God, and render to Caesar, not God, if you know what I mean. That's where the expression “a calling” came from. It was a way for people to say that they were “called” (from vocare , Latin root for “vocation”) to do what they do. (“Hello, this is God: I'm calling you -- hey, I don't give a damn if you're eating dinner!–- to tell you I want you to be a life insurance salesman.”)

OK, the fact is that you can get away with saying that just about anything you do is serving God in some way. That's what the guys who flew those planes into the World Trade Center claimed they were doing. That's what Cardinal Law thought he was doing when he was playing musical parishes with pederast priests.

Serving God. It's a cop out. I say change it: to serving Mankind. I think that's what God meant anyway.

Alright, Alright ! Serving Human kind. Geez, this political correctness stuff can drive you nuts!

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*This could have been one of those mistakes in interpretation. God might have said he wanted to see “a good Pole dancing,” not “good pole dancing.” In which case, instead of Pope John-Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, might have become a competitive Tango specialist in Krakow.

20. 6: O SODOM, O GOMORRAH: a review of SIN CITY 5.20.2005

Bruce Willis ending a partner's sex life

A distributor for Columbia Pictures told me several years ago that the primary target for films these days is a 19-yeat-old male. I doubt that the maxim has changes since. He explained that this “person” was the median of the movie-going public, and also, that “he” was likely to make the movie-going decision for his “date.” In other words, young women were going to be “dragged along” to see action, macho, violent films because Hollywood had targeted the fattest part of the market. Certainly there are other “niche” films targeted to women, teens, etc., but I often think of what that distributor said when I go to the movies.

It is has been a long time since I was a 19-year-old male. Anyway, they didn't make movies for my cohort back then. Where would you classify a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis picture? I could actually go to the movies (and often did) with my parents when I was a kid, at least until about age fifteen. Then things changed; but I'll have more to say about that in another essay. For now, I take my theme from a film that has just been released.

Because I write about both cities and media I am all but obliged to see a film like Sin City . I say “obliged” because I had seen the trailer and my instincts and tastes sort of warned me off this one. (And you know what Ebert and Roeper can do with their thumbs.) I suppose that's because I was never much of a fan of comic books and comic strips. And this film is an animated comic book, brilliantly animated, but still a comic book, based on Frank Miller's comic series, and directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez and kibitzed by Quentin Tarantino.

But I needed to see Sin City because it used exclusively a “green screen” technique or what used to be called a “matte shot,” whereby actors and their actions and dialogue are filmed against a green screen background, upon which the film makers will place, by computer, the background. This is both economical in terms of time and production costs, and is ideal for films that are intended to be cartoon-ish in their look. Graphically, if not cinematically, Sin City is a finely rendered work.

Sin City is heavier on box office boys than it is in script. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Benicio del Toro, have their respective parts of the trilogy of somewhat interrelated stories. The common thread seems to be violence, and not a little of it played upon women (some if it by women). There's a lot of comic book sound effects attending the violence (onomatopoeic words like Whump! Aarrrrghh! Crunch! and Thwack! come out of comic books). In the manner of film noir, from which this movie also liberally borrows, these are troubled, morally-compromised, protagonists doing first person narrations, who must use all forms of violence, from flinging people through windows, to an emasculation with a .44 Magnum, and torturing, putatively to counter the rape, abduction, and cannibalization of the women they “protect.” Violence begets violence; but we don't need to pay nine bucks (which does not beget popcorn, another five bucks) to get that message.

Women viewers can choose to identify with the women being whacked around, or the likes fem-bot Miho, a Japanese martial artist who does, well, all the stuff that is done in Kill Bill movies. Or perhaps they can identify with the hookers and pole dancers who control and do battle half naked in the inner city that they control. Ergo, the plots are shallow and contrived to highlight the equal opportunity gender violence. There's a sense that this is really a fantasy domain for 19-year-old guys who have spent too much time with one hand on their Game Boy and the other down their shorts. Rourke's character, Marv, is perhaps the most “complicated,” mainly because he is a hulk with a face of scar tissue who can't get over the death of the hooker who showed him some “real” affection. So much for depth of character.

The problem is that this is all so skillfully and even artfully done. Borrowing from film noir as well as Frank Miller's (he co-directs with Rodriguez) comics, there is a high contrast, almost Japanese notan , rendering to scenes that seem to perpetually an ambiance of night and rain, that bend perspective and use color sparingly (mostly blood red) for effect. But, while entertaining, without much depth of plot, there seems little more here than nice visual tricks with pasteboard characters.

One detects the kinship of this cinematic form with video games with which, of course, it shares a fascination of action and violence, and with pornographic anime, and Japanese manga , also heavily focused on rough sex. Will it add to the ruination our generation of movie-going 19-year-old guys? That depends on whether they will prefer to stay home with their video games and get interactive with the sex and violence. It also depends on whether you think all this virtual killing and rough sex is causes actual killing and rough sex, or just reflects it. I worry that they'll give the City a bad name.

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20. 5: THE TROJAN MONKEY 5.17.2005

Everything's out-of-date in Kansas Ci – ty / They're back about as far as they can go . . .

The genesis (oops, forgot to capitalize that word) of the debate over evolution lies is the ancient struggle between faith and reason, and its corollary battle between religious and secular authority, between what is written , and what will be written by minds that continue to inquire, not require. In the end it's about power ; threaten the truth of the Biblical literalists' words and you threaten their power. Pull one brick out of their foundation and you threaten their ability to build and maintain the wall of fear [1] around their flock.

The battle in America was fought back in 1925 at the infamous Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. But that didn't leave the matter settled; there's too much power to raise money with the “written word.” Courts and legislatures were back trying the matter again in the last quarter of the last century, when it was the “creationists” who were afraid of being called “a monkey's uncle.” They never went away [2] , and now they are back, in Kansas, where they are about to inject “Intelligent Design” into their school science curriculum. Thanks to a fundamentalist-dominated school board, they can only go back to about 6006 BC [3] , since that's what these creationists in scholarly drag believe is the age of the earth. But that will be far enough to keep their kids' understanding of science somewhere around the time of Noah. [4]

Right. Not 4 billion years, which is about the time it would take any reasonably “intelligent mind” to “create” anything as complex as a single PBS nature show would indicate to you – if you have a freakin' brain in your un-homo sapiens sapiens head! Which obviously, some people in Kansas City do not have!

Ever wonder why Europeans wonder why Americans are such a bunch of nitwits. Well, go to KC and sit in on the hearings they are holding, attended only by IE advocates, testifying that Charles Darwin, whose brain weighed more than the KC Chiefs football team, go it wrong. These are folks who were selling roofing and siding not long ago, not taking a perilous voyage on the Beagle and years of subsequent study to compose The Origin of Species. [5] These are the people who bristle at being “related” to “dumb” apes and chimps, when it is clear that it's the apes and chimps that should be offended. These are people who think that “natural selection” means that you always “super-size” your fries.

That's the thing about these nitwit fundamentalist Christians, they think that people are really as stupid as they are, and that truth is really a matter of how many people your side can get elected to the school board. They don't care if their kids are equally as stupid as they are. They are likely to care that if their kids are taught something that doesn't square with the myth and poetry of the Bible, they will end up choosing the homosexual “lifestyle.” But the rest of us should care, because school kids grow up to be doctors, airline pilots, and politicians, among other things, and you don't want a doctor who believes the devil made you sick, or an airline pilot who doesn't believe in gravity, or a politician who believes that funding “faith-based” organizations is more important than funding reason-based basic and applied scientific research.

Scientists have been clobbering creationists for years in any head-to-head confrontation. The creation “scientists” (who never seem to do any science) are only good at exploiting one of the basic tenets of science, that theories are always subject to new test and evidence. They take legitimate arguments that real scientists have with each other, which exists in all fields of real scientific inquiry, as “proof” that the theories are invalid. They do not realize that scientists are not absolute Biblical literalists, but through rigorous tests, measurements, and the application of all appropriate branches of empirical science, seek truth, not mythical fiction. And why should creationists do science?; they have neither a shred of evidence or anything that can be tested, that there was a “creator,” or that there is a “mind” out there somewhere that does “intelligent design.”

So, they must do their worst to tear down the record of science, to exploit its scientific introspections to their advantage. They counter measurement and test with chapter and verse. How such lazy-minded people will manage to reconcile their chapters and verses with the presence of a fossil record that radio-carbon dates to hundreds of millions of years (ask one of them to explain radioactive decay to you), or why the DNA of a chimp is so close to theirs they wouldn't be able to see the difference, would take dropping a brachiosaurus femur on their head.

And, they may get away with this in their local school districts. They may get it placed in their textbooks that evolution is “only a theory” [6] and that IE – which is really only dressed up faith – is an intellectually reasonable alternative. But how are they going to explain to their kids when they get to, if they don't in fact end up as Wal Mart stock boys and cashiers, why they are the laughing stock of their universities. It is the children who will “inherit the wind.”

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[1] I will have more to say on this aspect of religion in a forthcoming essay.

[2] Thanks much to Tim LaHaye, co-author of the “left-behind” books and founder of the oxymoronic Creation Science Institute in San Diego, California

[3] Awhile back some jerk added up the ages of all the prophets in the Bible, and came up with 6006. Really scientific! (Well, at least he could add) But did he use the Julian calendar year, which didn't start until Julius Caesar?

[4] Never mind that had the world been entirely covered by water as the flood myth alleges the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been so great that no life would have been able to exist or regenerate itself. But that's only the beginning of the problem with the Noah story.

[5] And Darwin held off publishing because there were some dimwit creation science types around in England in his time.

[6] Which, of course it is. All theories are sets of laws and propositions that purport to explain a phenomenon or a class of phenomena. But they are backed up by a body of tested factual evidence. What they are not, is faith.

20. 4: "FRIENDLY FIRE” 5.15.2005

UrbisMedia

When the people at the top lie and deceive it has a way of percolating down to the bottom. The Iraq war has been nothing if not a barrage of lies and deceptions from the outset. More often than not, the troops at the bottom are exploited by the lies as much as is the general public. But they lie, too. The most recent disclosure has been the report on Pat Tillman, the pro football player who considered fighting for his country (you know, the country that was under imminent and dire threat by the non-existent weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein), rather than accept a multi-million dollar contract to play for the Arizona Cardinals. Tillman went to Afghanistan to hunt Al Qaeda, and was killed in a fire-fight. His "heroic" death got major play in the press, a chance for the Pentagon to play up the sacrifice of "an Army of One." It was a lie. Tillman was killed by his own comrades, who did not make sufficient effort to distinguish him from the enemy. The Army lied to Tillman's brother, also a ranger serving nearby where his brother was killed, burned evidence of the "friendly fire" incident, and deceived the parents until after the funeral. The Pentagon has its agenda and, too often, the truth seems to get in the way, even when the truth has no strategic consequences

They did the same thing with Private Jessica Lynch, who's story of "heroism" and vanquishing of the enemy was cocked up out of events that began with a mistake in which her vehicle was driven out of position, in which injuries were caused by its crash and, as it turned out, instead of Pvt Lynch killing the enemy, it was enemy doctors who seem to have saved her life. But that wasn't what the voice over that accompanied the video tape of Lynch being "rescued" by crack assault units who also supposedly vanquished many enemy and saved Pvt Lynch from what some clueless and beguiled commentators repeated torture and rape. Unlike Tillman, Lynch could talk, but that was long after the deceptions had had their propagandistic effect and she had recuperated, returned to some vague hollow in West Virginia, and became bothered enough by the truth to give some interviews and write a book to try to set the record straight. But by then she had served her purpose and the military seemed done with her.

Pictures, it was always said in B.P. days (that's Before Photoshop), don't lie. But the Abu Ghraib photos weren't "Photoshopped" and the Pentagon boys were caught with their "you-know-whats" in their hands. Unfortunately, there appear to be no audiotapes incriminating those further up the chain of command, so the lies turn to alleging the torture and humiliation of prisoners were an aberration committed by some other enlistees at the bottom of the blame ladder. You know, those kids from Appalachia get up to some kinky stuff. But apparently, there was sneaking around the edges of the Geneva Conventions, and recently, several soldiers have come forward putting their careers on the line by attesting that Guantanamo has all but been a university for this sort of thing, even up to staging fake interrogations for visiting brass who could then go back and report what a model operation they have been running.

So why should the Italians be willing to swallow the cocked up story that was fed them as to the killing of Nicola Calipari and the wounding of Guiilana Sgrena by American checkpoint soldiers who felt that they were "threatened" by the car they were riding in to the airport. The Italians refuse to buy the story, but whatever the truth of it, should anyone be inclined to put much credence in anything the Bush gang has to say. The lying has become so endemic of this administration, and insulated from scrutiny by executive branch cover-ups, staged "news conferences," and a complaint Republican majority Congress, that, becoming the norm, it has become journalistically "ho-hum." It may even be, as a recent Washington Post article, in which Downing Street notes seem to indicate, that Prime Minister Blair might have been intimidated into fashioning British intelligence on WMDs to fit the pre-established Iraq invasion plans of Bush and his neo-cons. When the lying gets to this level the only credible thing left is that truth was a victim of "friendly fire."

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20.3: Down into Upper Egypt Part 2 5.13.2005

Americans Abroad No. 8

[Continued] With about two hours to go in the trip the realization hit me that being mummified by desiccation and covered by the drifting sands would be an almost romantic fate for foolish Americans who challenge Egypt's desert. More than once I had thought that I should have heeded Jimmy's admonition. For all I knew, he might even have put some sort of a curse on us. After all, he was a Nubian, and this was his desert.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Christine. The rest of the group was dozing, but she was awake, lost in her thoughts and staring out into the opacity of the desert, but I doubt that she wondered, or even cared, if Jimmy had cursed us. Not after her little contretemps with the Nubian the night before.

Jimmy, a Nubian guide, and I had chatted a couple of times on the deck of the Nile cruise ship. One of the pleasures of the Nile cruise is sitting on the upper deck of the ship, beneath the canopy, sipping a cool drink and engaging in conversation as the banks of the river and the feluccas served as a changing exotic backdrop. With children swimming in the shallows, farmers plowing their fields and irrigating them with the ancient, levered shadufs , and the small villages of mean mud-bricked houses,it was a tableaux that seemed scarcely changed from the days of the pharaohs.

Jimmy could discourse on Egyptian history is English, French, and, of course, Arabic. He happened to be escorting a group of French tourists who shared our ship. He was ebony-skinned, with thick, close-cropped nappy hair, and had an engaging smile of bright, straight teeth. With his chiseled features, and tall stature set off by his gallabiyya , he was handsome and self-confident. I estimated him to be in his late thirties.

Jimmy led his French group around as though they were a royal entourage. In the evenings he liked to sit on the deck and provoke discussions. He was anything but timid in giving his opinions. He was, in fact, a bit full of himself for a guy who had never been more than a few miles from the Nile in his whole life. But more than one of the ladies on the ship found him extremely attractive, and he knew it.

I don't know if Christine was much taken with Jimmy's good looks and strong personality. She was, in nearly every way, his racial, gender and cultural opposite number. She was also about the same age. Christine was a corporate attorney from Baltimore, tall, blonde, and with TV-news-anchor-woman good looks. She, too, was possessed of the self-confidence that comes from being successful at one's work. Divorced, she was traveling alone, and although she could be a little demanding it was usually from her genuine interest and curiosity about Egypt. With her expensive clothes, well-maintained figure and grooming she seemed self-indulgent, but she often asked the best questions and offered the most considered opinions.

It was before I reached the top of the stairs to the upper deck that I heard it. They probably heard it on shore.

“Fuck you, and the rest of you ignorant male chauvinists!”

Christine was just turning away from Jimmy, and as she strode past me I caught sight of Jimmy's face. If a black man could be described as “ashen” he was clearly in a state of shock. Seated, somewhat slumped, his mouth hanging open, he was the legendary “deer caught in headlights.”

There were about six or eight others who had composed the circle that was discussing, as I learned later, “the changing women in the modern world.” Had I been there before the explosion, I would have made an effort to deflect the conversation toward another subject. I already had heard Jimmy on the subject of women. Like most Egyptian men I had met he regarded Western ideas about women as a serious threat to a way of life that was entirely male-constructed and managed. He saw no reason to, or necessity to defend his male-dominated, patriarchic society. In its most extreme, fundamentalist Muslim, manifestation this meant that women were considered about as valuable, if not quite as intelligent and worthy of the same rights, as goats. It was a point of view that owed much to the fact that the family was the most reliable social institution in those parts, and that made every husband-father a little pharaoh with near absolutist powers.

As I learned later, it was Jimmy's glib discourse on the positive conjugal function of wife-beating that elicited Christine's expletive. She had expressed the feelings of the other women in the circle as well, all of whom seemed to have decided that a “good guest” in a foreign country must sometime hold their tongue.

“Beautiful evening,” I said taking a seat next to Jimmy, reckoning that a complete non sequitur might clear the deck for an alternative conversational gambit. But everybody else had suddenly decided they had some laundry or other task that required their departure from the scene.

Except Jimmy, who just sat there dumbstruck and, I concluded, with great loss of face at having been put down in that way in public, and by a woman. Christine had not only told him what he could do, but she had left her chair, hovered above him and jabbed her finger a few inches from his face while scolding him as if he were a naughty child.

Abu Simbel is in Nubia, Jimmy's home territory in Upper Egypt. Earlier that day I had consulted Jimmy about helping to arrange our drive down to Abu Simbel and he had not been helpful, saying “why do you want to do that,” so I obtained the help of another Egyptian guide. When I sat down next to him in his state of shock I told him that the other guide had arranged things for me. He said nothing for almost half a minute and then asked if “that woman” was going on the excursion.

I said, “Yes, of course. She's very interested in Nefertari.” He got up and left without even saying a word in any of his languages.

Reflecting on whether Jimmy had invoked some ancient Nubian curse on our desert drive to Abu Simbel I drifted off into sleep. When I awoke, the distant glow of our ‘caravansary,' Aswan, was visible through the windshield. I looked behind me from the shotgun seat. The rest of the group had all dozed off in uncomfortable postures. Whether they had taken to sleep, like myself, to ward off the grim thought that, in plunging headlong into the Sahara, we might have subjected ourselves to the will of some member of the Egyptian pantheon I thought it better not to ask. It was about the hour that Jimmy, the Nubian tour guide, was probably giving his wife a “good beating.”

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20. 2: DOWN INTO UPPER EGYPT (Part 1) 5.11.2005

Americans Abroad No. 7

Nubia, Upper Egypt, 1991. Putting it as charitably as truth will allow, the domestic airlines of Egypt don't inspire confidence in even the most insouciant of flyers. The ZAS Boeing 727 that I boarded looked to be in reasonable condition. Despite the fact that, in high season, they are regularly jammed to capacity, this plane was clean and didn't have the broken seats and stained and torn carpeting one might expect on some regional Aeroflot equipment.

But when, what I first took to possibly be a romanization of Arabic script on the emergency information card turned out, on closer examination to be Polish, my blood pressure ratcheted up a few points.

My first thought was that I was on a plane that probably was no longer considered serviceable by a Polish airline! The Egyptians apparently had a higher confidence in this castoff Polish airliner than I. Maybe they even felt that not bothering to translate emergency instructions into Arabic, or at least English, lent some prestige to their service. My own Polish vocabulary, which is exhausted after “please,” “thank you” and “where is the toilet?” gave me to wonder what the hell fix we would be in an emergency evacuation of the plane. Unless the pilot and co-pilot happened to be Lech Walesa and Pope John-Paul II we would definitely be in deep doo-doo.

The other unnerving aspect of ZAS is that their computers (maybe also Polish discards) have this disturbing way of deleting some names from their record. As a result, the group of 27 I had booked on the flight from Aswan to Abu Simbel fluctuated between 26 and 11 each time I checked it. On the day we were supposed to fly it was 14, leaving me with an unappealing Solomonic choice of telling half the group they couldn't go, or canceling out completely.

I cancelled. But there were a dozen people who wanted desperately to see the magnificent temples at Abu Simbel. The option that remained was to see if I could rent a van and a driver for the three and a half-hour drive through the desert. I found an air-conditioned van that would accommodate the determined dozen and we set off with our driver, whose English vocabulary was double my Polish vocabulary, around the Aswan Dam, into that part of Upper Egypt that used to be called Nubia.

The imprudence of my consent to this project came crashing into my consciousness a few miles after we had passed the military checkpoint, if one can call two pathetic soldiers standing by a guard box on the blazing tarmac two-lane road a checkpoint. They were the last humans, and their guardhouse the last structures, we were to see for a good two hours.

It soon became evident that the purpose of a mirage is to relieve the eye of the monotony of a landscape devoid of distinguishing features. The 120-degree heat radiated from the two-lane tarmac road, occasionally covered with drifting sand. To our left, somewhere beyond the horizon undulating with waves of super-heated air rising from the dunes was Lake Nasser, the huge water body formed by the Aswan Dam that turned the ancient land of Nubia into an Atlantis. To the right were seemingly endless, and trackless dunes and drifts of the Sahara.

A little reflecting on these facts and it would become apparent to a reasonable person that it wouldn't take too much to go wrong for us to end up in a heap of trouble, or worse. Such potentials must have occurred to others, as I saw some of them hugging their water bottles a little more tightly.

This atmosphere was enhanced by the fact that after some two hours of driving we saw no other vehicles moving in either direction, until our driver flagged an oncoming truck carrying a few camels in its open bed. When we got out to take some photos of the camels it was like stepping from a food locker into a sauna. Our eyeballs dried out, our lungs felt seared and we dashed back to the tenuous cocoon of our air-conditioned van like frightened chicks to a mother hen. If we required proof that an engine failure, or a broken belt on the air compressor, almost any mechanical malfunction, could be our undoing, we had it now. With no cell phone, or any roadside emergency communication equipment, we would have to rely for help, if any, on the luck of a rare vehicle happening by. Judging by some of the gallows humor some of us began to banter around I wasn't alone with my grim imaginings.

Even our driver seemed a trifle relieved as we sighted the town near the temples. It was late in the afternoon, and the temperature had dropped a few degrees, moderated by our proximity to Lake Nasser.

Our driver rousted the caretaker of the temple site from his siesta, greased him with some of the Egyptian pounds I had supplied him, and we were admitted to the magnificence of the temple precinct.

Whatever tourists might have been to the site that day were long gone. With the sun low in the sky gilding the enormous statues, the millennia seemed to roll away and we were alone with the astounding splendor of the monuments to Rameses and Nefertari and their gods.

The very scale and magnificence of Abul Simbel has been matched by the fact that these two temples, carved from Nubian sandstone have been excised out from their original site and relocated in a concrete-constructed sixty-five metres above the waters of Lake Nasser. In the 1960s it took a French, Italian, Swedish and German team of engineers four years and $40 million to rescue them from certain inundation when the Aswan dam was completed. All the risk of getting here seemed well worth the privilege of our private audience with the great Pharaoh and his Nubian queen.

Even though we were returning in the dark, the desert air seemed as hot as when the sun was high in the sky. The air-conditioning was still running full blast. Now there was virtually nothing to be seen that wasn't illuminated by the van's headlights, and the superheated black night air opened briefly before us and closed behind us as though we were traveling through the gut of some giant creature.

About half way back to Aswan we saw some light coming from the only structure we had seen on the entire length of highway: a two-car garage-sized building composed of cinder block. It was closed when we passed it on the way in, but now the front was open, showing itself to be the Sahara's equivalent of a 7-11.

The driver asked if we need any maya (water), and since we could probably still dehydrate even though it was nighttime, we suggested he stop. The air was still sauna temperature when we got out of the van. This was Upper Egypt's idea of a roadside service area: an 80-watt bare bulb illuminating some shelves of tinned meats, snacks, cigarettes, and a selection of beverages. Two men sat drinking glasses of tea and sharing a water pipe. They were fully garbed in galabiyyas and turbans, but probably cooler than we were in our shorts and t-shirts.

In the almost pitch-black desert night this little outpost of dim-light and scant refreshment seemed like a tiny asteroid in the vastness of space. Without ambient illumination there was only what light came from a clear starlit sky that we'd almost forget existed behind our smoggy urban canopies.

We bought the place out of their inventory of maya and drove off into the ink of the Sahara night. [to be continued]

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20. 1: THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK, by T.E. Carhart, [BR]

Even a hack jazz pianist like myself cannot go too long without sitting down to a keyboard and seeing what one can do with the chords and melody lone of some great tune—maybe On Green Dolphin Street , or Angel Eyes , or Stella by Starlight —that's been playing in your head all day, or you caught of chorus of on the car radio. When you're a long time away from your piano at home you start looking for keyboards the way a junkie is needing to see his dealer.

When I picked up T.E. Carhart's book it strangely related some of the same piano yearnings I had experienced when I spent half a year teaching in Paris in 1989. He was living not far from where I lived and where he would pass a piano atelier when he walked his kids to school. He was drawn to back to the shop, much the same way I was when I passed a piano retailer on my way to classes at the University of Paris. I salivated at those shiny uprights and consoles, and majestic grands with strange French brand names on them, making little grease spots on the window with my nose and cheeks as a pressed for a better view.

Carhart seemed to do much the same, but his shop was an atelier that refurbished and repaired pianos in a smaller, and still, cobbled, street. And he, being in Paris longer than I, was bent on buying a piano. Moreover, he obviously didn't live in a studio apartment like mine.

Carhart is what is often called a “trained” pianist, not somebody like myself, who can barely read a note and quit being “trined” after six lessons, and he played what might be called s “serious” (read “classical”) music. Like most pianists he love the instrument, and what makes this book a pleasure is that he finally gathers the courage to knock on the door of the Desforges piano atelier , but gradually gains admittance to its rather guarded and secretive interior by befriending Luc, the heir apparent to the shop's owner, who has a deep affection for pianos as well.

The atelier is described as an almost Willie Wonka world of pianos in various stages oif assembly and repair. There are mostly French pianos such as Erards and Pleyels, but also German, Austrian and American pianos. Carhart, who hasn't played much since his youth decides that it's time to purchase one, and Luc, who tries to match instruments with customers because he also regards pianos as “members of the family,” matches him with a rebuilt Stingl grand.

I have often wondered how grand pianos made their way into upper story European apartments, but Carhart's description of the arrival of his Stingl clearly astonished him as much as this reader. It was hauled up the stairway strapped to the back of a somewhat too old barrel-chested man, without any mechanical assistance! Even without the legs attached, this is an almost superhuman feat.

I thin that Luc is right, a piano is something like a member of the family -- one that is always ready and willing to let you express your joy, Assuage your sadness, or just take you out of yourself and into the realm of harmonics, rhythm, and melody.

If I had mu own grand piano in Paris I already know what I would sit down and Play: Cole Porter's I Love Paris. It's such an apt tune, murmuring along lugubriously in a minor key like the city itself on a chilly slate grey Autumn day, then, almost bursting into a major chord, as if one had just emerged from a narrow Left Bank lane onto a view of the façade of Notre Dame. Like Porter, one would have to spend some time in the city to come up with a tune like that.

But I'm getting away from Carhart again. Through his experience in the atelier we get to know the mechanics of the piano and to understand that what goes into producing great piano sound – and there is nothing, other than the human voice, that approaches its beauty – is made up of a complex permutation of the elements of wood, metal, felt, wire, and the dynamic tension of a stringed instrument tuned to perfection.

That experience rekindled Carhart's interest in taking lessons again, and his daughter soon joins him. I was impressed that the school he chose for her did not engage in piano competitions because, as they put it : “On ne fait pas de musique contre quell qu'un.” I always thought that playing music competitively (there was even a movie about this, The Competition , a few years ago) was a really stupid notion. One should play music the way they feel the music, their own way, not to “win.”

I finally got the courage to enter the piano store I had discovered in rue Cardinal Lemoine. By feigning interest in purchasing a console I was allowed to try out a few of them. But he propriator got one to me, In think, and gently let me know that he had some practice studios in the basement pour louer . So, a couple of time a week, on the way back from class, I would rent one for about five bucks and hour. Each time I began with Porter's I Love Paris.

Back home in San Diego I play a Yamaha electronic keyboard. It has excellent sampled sound and weighted key action. But Carhart planted the idea in my mind to one day own whaty is considered to be the world's finest piano. It is a brand I knew nothing about until I read Carhart's book. Like exclusive hand made Italian racing cars There are only about seventy Fazioli pianos built each year, with sound boards of red spruce found only in Italy's Val de Fiemme. But they can cost as much as $160,000; so, like Carhart, I'll have to keep checking for one to turn up at un bon prix from the piano shop on the Left Bank.

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