Volume 25

25. 8: GET OUTTA TOWN! 10.29.2005

Booo! It's Halloween again, that time of the year when we like to flirt with the macabre, with and ghosts and goblins, and death. Ah, but it all seems a bit too real to be surreal, too close for kidding around these days. Then again, it might seem rather tame compared to the hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, and now, the specter of Bird Flu, with dire predictions that it might kill as many as 150 million people! That's scary stuff; seems like you aren't safe anywhere these days.

I'm a city person. They fascinate me, and they are where I like to be. But while Aristotle said, “We come to cities for safety, and remain there for the good life,” there are circumstances when cities are not safe and the life there can be very short. I learned that before I even became interested in cities when I read Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. I got hooked on bubonic plague, [1] moved on to Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History: A Chronicle of Disease, Plagues, and Pestilence , and other grisly treatises on deadly viruses and bacilli. But it was Boccacio's Decameron , the cycle of stories about Florentines escaping their plague-ridden city in the 14 th century to engage in fun and games in the countryside, that brought it to my attention that the densities of cities are not a good environment for avoiding highly communicable virulent diseases.

Richard Preston, author of The Demon in the Freezer , the non-fiction bio-thriller about smallpox, writes that epidemiologists have figured out that smallpox needs densities of about “two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days travel of one another, or the [smallpox] virus can't keep its life cycle going, and it dies out.” [2] That level of density was first achieved about seven thousand years ago with city-centered settled agricultural areas. Preston calls smallpox, which is a very virulent and very nasty disease, the “first urban virus.” What's really unnerving for epidemiologists is that, today, with air travel, there's just about no place on earth that isn't fourteen hours from anyplace else. Add to that that an airliner, with its internal air re-circulation, is an almost ideal vector for airborne infectives. We shouldn't think homeland security is going to be much help; while they're scanning your shoes or your laptop for explosives for explosives they don't have an instrument that takes a swab of your seatmate's hanky and then slap him in quarantine.

So, can you get a little paranoid about these things? Yes. Because unless you walk around with a microscope you are going to have a difficult time determining whether you are even in the presence of microbe or spore of mass destruction. Forget about those aliens who are allegedly arriving from outer galaxies with perverse curiosity about our genitalia. These micro- aliens from our own planet (unless you subscribe to the notion that they arrived on asteroids) want us to be their hosts, invited or not.

But if you are thinking of decamping form your urban habitat for the safer countryside you need to take a few other things into consideration. The countryside is where most of these miniature monsters hail from. The culprits might well be those old friends of ours, domesticated animals. Intelligent design (see how I slipped that in there) might have made it OK for us to eat all critters great and small, but not sleep with them . No, I'm not referring to bestiality here, just something as simple as keeping warm in winter. Think of the crèche scene at Xmas. Those cows and sheep were there to keep baby Jesus warm. Large animals, cows, sheep, and pigs, give off a good bit of heat, so having them in the parlor and bedroom was preferable to freezing. In a lot of countries there are still very cozy relationships between people and animals. But animals have their own little microbes and bacilli and these sometimes make the jump to human hosts (cowpox, swine flu, syphilis, etc.)

Small wonder, then, that countries with a lot of population in agriculture, particularly poor populations, are the Petrie dishes for diseases that jump hosts. That's why so many influenzas seem to have Asian names on them. China in particular, with three-quarters of its 1.3 billion people being farmers and herders is the reason that two medical authorities could write “Throughout history epidemics had generally run from east to west.” [3] If personal empirics fit the trend then breathing is believing. I hadn't had a flu for a good decade before a little consulting gig in Guangzhou in 2002. Formerly Canton, this huge city is the center of Guandong, the province that is suspected to have been the epicenter of the SARS scare that broke out a few months later. I didn't have SARS, but I did have a raging flu that I took back with me to Hong Kong and three days later was coughing it up on a flight back to California. It's no fun being a vector. [4]

So far the only people dying of H5N1 “bird flu” are people who have had direct contact with infected chicken, ducks and geese. This is the same circumstance of bubonic plague. But the great fear is that viruses can mutate into versions that are communicated by sputum, infected sores, or through the air; bubonic killed a lot of people, but it was much more virulent when it mutated into pneumonic. If there is an bird flu mutation there is not only the prospect that infected persons might spread the disease by getting on airliners and flying to cities all over the world, but migrating birds themselves might serve to spread the virus to the southern hemisphere.

So far epidemiologists are trying to raise public consciousness and alert governments to be prepared with vaccine countermeasures. We should get past this Halloween safely, but there could come a Halloween when a really cool costume would be a bio-hazard suit.

Booo! It isn't so scary any more. Flooo! That's enough to scare you right out of town!

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[1] I'm still hooked, see DCJournal, No. 18.1

[2] Page 66. Preston also wrote the bio-thriller, The Hot Zone , (1995) about the Ebola virus.

[3] Geoffrey Marks and William K. Beatty, Epidemics , (1976), P. 273

[4] Fortunately, I was in less crowded business class and had no seatmate. But even keeping my head wrapped in a napkin was not enough to assuage the middle-aged Chinese guy in the seat in front of me, who turned around at one point and whined, “I am going to be very angry with you if my trip is spoiled by your coughing.” Now why couldn't we have been in an alley someplace instead of an airliner.

25. 7: ROTTEN TO THE CORPS 10.26.2005

Source: The Economist 10/22/05 P. 114

The table to the left, based on a survey of Transparency International, is admittedly based on the subjective ratings of country experts and international businessmen. Even so, this writer, although no such expert, was not only somewhat surprised to find the good ole US of A beneath Hong Kong, but it is rated not as much less corrupt than countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia, and Columbia.

Of course, one stolen and one contestable presidential election we now know that our electoral system is subject to being rigged. But there is a body of other factual information to buttress the poor US rating. Consider that since George W. Bush took office in 2000 the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled from 16,342 to 34,785. That means that there are 18,000 more people hankering after the borrow-and-spend president's enormous budgets.

The lobbyists must well know that the goodies will be there. Bush is the first president in 176 years to go a full term without ever using his veto. No need to wonder how easy it is to get some pork into those appropriations. He didn't even veto the recent scandalous Transportation bill, which contained 6,371 “earmarks” for pork. Even Reagan vetoed a transportation bill because it contained 152 earmarks, and was $20 billion less.

Then you have folks like Tom DeLay and his illegal money-raising techniques, Sen. Bill Frist who pulled a Martha Stewart with his holdings in his “blind” trust, and let's not forget The Dick Cheney, who stonewalled his collusion with energy traders like Enron, and holds a nice chuck of Halliburton stock that has risen exponentially with is sweetheart no-bid contracts to suck up billions in our taxes.

If the Bush administration tries harder in the next couple of years they should be able to catch up with China.

Source for the above numbers: George F. Will, “On K Street Conservatism,” Newsweek , 10/12/2005, P. 78

25. 6: A MATTER OF HABITUDE 10.21.2005

Somewhat maniacally trying to atone for his lassitude while Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast some weeks ago, asleep-at-the-switch George Bush has now made his eighth (and counting) visit to the area. Most recently he joined up with Habitat for Humanity, the NGO that builds houses with volunteers and what used to be called “sweat equity” in developing countries and in developed and declining countries like this one. There was George, whacking away at nails the way he likes to go at clearing brush on his ranch in Texas.

Damn it! Now I have something in common with Bush, a guy I had been able to reliably use as a benchmark as to what kind of a human being not to be. I, too, have pounded a few nails on a Habitat for Humanity project. (OK, OK, I got drunk a few times in my youth, too; but I never lied about WMD.)

In June of 1990 I crossed the border (legally) into Mexico to visit the Habitat for Humanity project in the hills beside Tijuana. My mission was to see if I could get an interview with Jimmy Carter, who, along with Rosalyn, was camping in a tent and working several days for H for H, with which he had some participation in founding. I was doing radio documentaries for KPBS-FM, the NPR Public Radio affiliate in San Diego, and this was, as they say, right up my alley, a piece that really fit my program, Metropolitan Journal. Volunteers from around the country and foreign countries as well, were working alongside local Mexican families and an ex-president of the United States, to assemble 100 or so 850 sq. ft, partially pre-fabricated homes on a muddy hillside.

The Secret Service guy brought my credentials to Carter, who was expertly slathering stucco on the walls of a house, and I was immediately ushered in (Carter is a major Public Radio fan who has all of his radios locked on to NPR). He was gracious and most generous with his time, but did eventually remind me that the stucco was setting. Jimmy told me that he has always done manual labor, especially slinging thousands of bags of peanuts onto trucks, so this was no big deal as far a he was concerned. He said he gets to H for H projects as much as his activities at the Carter Center and monitoring elections around the world will permit him. (Gee, doesn't this guy have any golf clubs?)

There is not a phony bone in Jimmy Carter, or in wife Rosalyn, who came by holding a little Mexican girl, with several more in tow, from the nursery where she works tending the kids of the working parents. They did their interviews without any self-promotion or agenda other than endorsing the project with their presence. If Jimmy hadn't been “blessed” with a major oil crisis and the Iran Hostage crisis we might not have ended up with that Reagan “October Surprise,” that “morning in America” malarkey that falls out of the butts of bulls, Iran-Contra, and the biggest deficit until the current phony came into office.

The rest of my program* is composed from interviews with the volunteers who were working alongside the locals. Although H for H is what would be called a “faith-based” organization there was no discernable in-your-face Christian stuff evident as I moved among the houses. There were two middle-aged women from northern California on one house, using their limited Spanish while working alongside the locals; a dancer from Wales, and her Black tent-mate from London on another house; a young guy named Klaus all the way from Frankfort, Germany. These people weren't getting anything but fed; they weren't asking for those nice fat Halliburton and KBR salaries, or the six figures that that the bodyguards get paid to keep Bush administration sycophants alive when they race from the green zone to the airport.

Then there was this little bantamweight from New York, named Johnny Gallo, a wiry, tough stonemason who retired to travel around volunteering for H for H projects. Like the rest of the volunteers on this project Johnny wasn't a phony and, as far as I could tell, wasn't there for any other reason than to give, as he put it, “something back” for his own rising out of poverty. Who knows, Johnny may be down in New Orleans, or Mississippi, working on a project. If he is, he'll counterbalance that phony from Crawford, Texas.

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*"Habitat for Humanity: Tijuana," aired in KPBS-FM Morning Edition , June 29, 1990. One of these days, when I figure out how to get my audiotapes digitized, these programs will be available for listening on the UrbisMedia site.

25. 5: THE PLANNERS ARE COMING! THE PLANNERS ARE COMING!! 10.17.2005

Could the governor of Mississippi really be inviting 100 planners and architects to come to his Kartrina-ravaged coastal cities to expound upon their urbanisme nouveau to guide their massive rebuilding? Will the un-invited post-bellum carpetbaggers become today's welcomed “carpetplanners”? And, by the way, where was my invitation? I confess to a fleeting envy of the invitees, the hubristic thought that offering my services might be a beau geste to cap a less-than-illustrious planning career. On almost instantaneous reflection I thought it best to stay home, but not shut up.

“Shut up,” or worse, is what I would likely have been told to do had I climbed up on a pedestal of debris and pontificated about “mixed uses,” “density transfers,” “smart growth,” “sustainable communities,” “neo-traditionalism,” and other secular googahs and gizmos of l'urbanisme nouveau . “Never one for planning's latest fashions, I doubt I would have had little to offer to bring everything up-to-date in Mississippi. But I do understand the allure of the challenge; that's because I am no exception to the sublimated hankering that many planners have for the tabula rasa, clean slate of space upon which their unfettered minds might give rise to the golden city on a hill, the New Jerusalem of urban order and beauty.

That brief inkling I had for booking a flight to the Gulf coast (figuring that FEMA would not be sending me a pre-paid business class ticket) is a carry-over from the enthusiasm I had when I was researching my book, New Towns and Urban Policy , many years and many urban disasters ago. That was back in the mid-60s when so much seemed possible in the “great Society” days of Kennedy and Johnson. Taking a page from utopian socialist English planner, the venerable Sir Ebenezer Howard, I was among the eager new generation of planners who would build whole, new towns from scratch that would stand as exemplary temples of what was at the time the urbanisme nouveau . We cared as well for the fates of inner cities and our new towns constructed upon the tabula rasa of suburbia would be part of the metropolitan matrix—decentralizing central cities, congealing suburban sprawl, and making regional mass transit efficient and open space permanent. Our new towns, built with financial assistance of the Federal government, would be a new beginning for American urbanism, an opportunity to plan free of the clutter and impediments of existing development.

So why not take such heady notions south to where opportunity beckons? C'mon, Jim, you could be like one of those “experts” that CNN plops down next to their blow-dried anchors to wax on about cities and peppering your exegesis with PUDs,” “TDRs,” and “TODs.”

It would be a grave error for planners, or the local pols who invite them, to mistake the communities that were leveled by Katrina as a clean slate upon which to construct a new urbanism. Beneath the rubble lie years and generations of urban experience, the ghost of a sense of place that was not blown away by Katrina's category 5. There exist the lot lines and land tenure and ownership patterns and rights that were not washed away by storm surges. There is a pattern of lives that were interrupted and scattered, but not exterminated. Put differently, the Gulf coast communities are not a tabula rasa upon which planners possess the right to imprint their notions of land use upon what may have been an inefficient, and/or an aesthetically deficient urbanism, but it is a “shadow” urbanism that must be respected.

Leveled as these communities might be, they are not blank spaces ; they are residual places. This is a distinction that, in the past, the failure to understand or respect has resulted in the obliteration of viable urban communities in the name of such “slum clearance” and urban re-development. Planners are at risk to repress this distinction in the same atmosphere of complimentary advantages that existed between planners, civic and commercial interests in some of the lamentable applications of “urban renewal” a few decades ago. Planners, particularly “carpetplanners” could become unwitting accomplices to development interests who see the circumstances as a sort of meteorological urban renewal.

This is not to ignore that there are certainly aspects of the erstwhile land development pattern that violated the canons of public safety, efficiency and other public interests, particularly those that compromised environmental and ecological factors that exacerbated storm conditions and increased the amount of property damage and loss of life. But whether the latest fashions in urban planning, design and architecture will necessarily address such concerns is not axiomatic. Katrina's winds and surges have scattered these residents of these communities, with now only memories of the places they called “home.” It is yet to be determined how many will be drawn back by dreams of regaining a life that approximates “as they knew it.” If they are not the client of the “carpetplanners” then who is?

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25. 4: THE WINDS OF MEMORY: A Travel Memoir 10.14.2005

If the temperature is high, and the air humid; if the light has mellowed to a creamy custard; if the traffic noise has softened from its late afternoon fury; and especially, if there is a zephyr that turns the sweaty glaze on my neck and forehead to a soothing unction; if all these atmospherics are present and, if I shut my eyes, I can almost, almost, be back there .

Behind my eyelids I can raise my sight upward and there it will be, a building as stately and as glorious as the goddess for whom it was built. Time and circumstances may have re-defined, but not diminished, the essence of its beauty. The Parthenon is, after all, the virginal Athena's abode.

In my mind's lens I can pull back the focus, widening the frame, drawing back down from the Acropolis, across the scattered ruins in the ancient Agora, right back to my table opposite the Taverna Pente Adelphoi. In wide-angle I can now see my fellow travelers, pulling open their collars and sleeves to accept a zephyr's blessing. I can almost reconstruct the aroma of the Greek salad, feel the texture of the yeasty,coarse bread, and hear one of my companions remark with surprise and equivocation at her first taste of retsina wine.

And I can't help myself remarking at the coincidence that this street, Eolou St., should be named for the ancient Greek god, Aeolus, whose harp strummed up the earth's winds. [1] Perhaps it received that name because, nearby, just a few metres from our table stands the Temple of the Four Winds; as though from here, in this area of Athens called the Plaka, a little octagonal temple issues forth all the world's air currents.

In this particular location, more than any other that I can bring to mind, and experience the sublime experience of the nexus of time, place and people. For me, foreign travel just doesn't get much better than such conjunctions. There are other ‘coordinates' that might qualify nearly as well, and each traveler has his or her own particular and special mnemonic souvenirs; but this surely is one of mine. Here I feel just that little bit more both “alive” and yet humbled by the sense that my personal existence is an historical hiccup. It is, paradoxically, a pleasurable memento mori .

I have been at these tables in the Plaka many times, with many friends, family members and fellow travelers. It has seemed in those times, as it does in my reverie, that for brief moments our secular existence is transformed by that ancient Greek sense of an immediate and proximate divine dimension. That breeze that lifted the tablecloth, rustled the vines hanging over the wall and cooled our humidity-glazed skin, was it the strum of some long ago Olympian harp? Who can say.

Somehow the memory strives to connect this bustling, smoggy, noisy and commercialized quarter of Athens with the Greece of Homer, of Plato. Or, Philhellenes like Byron, or Kitto, or Mary Renault. But even they can only help prepare one for what must be our own encounter, our personal discoveries, with a place and its times.

The essence of travel memory is not composed of the iconic, of what is consensual, or what is the distilled imagery of the National Tourist Office. To the contrary, the personal discovery may stand for the general, but it is a particular, an aide-memoire, that assists the senses in re-calling the flavors, aromas, and textures of the place, and to situate that memory at a particular point, not just ‘in time,' but in our ‘ life-time' .

Perhaps it is fitting to situate these thoughts on travel and memory in Greece. It is from here that our knowledge of the Classical world was handed down by tradition, by the spoken and chanted histories that only later were taken down in writing.

The 5th C B.C. poet Simonides of Ceos was a chanter of lyric poems, as well as a practitioner of the art of memory. Much later Cicero wrote that Simonides “. . . inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things . . . and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.” [2]

It was also a fellow Greek of the same age, the historian Herodotus, often referred to as “the father of history,” who, through his accounts of the places as well as the events he observed throughout much of the known world of his time, can legitimately claim to be the first “travel writer.” The Temple of the Four Winds came to be built later, and the Taverna Pente Adelphoi much, much later; but I'll bet old Herodotus also knew the pleasures of sitting with friends in a place rich in history, sharing Greek salad and bread and wine, and the blessing of a cool breeze. Foreign travel just doesn't get more "classical" than that.

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[1] It was a meteorological station built by the Syrian Astronomer Kyrrhestes in the first century with a hydraulic clock and a mechanical device that represented the sun, the moon and the five known planets. The frieze depicts the winds and their personalities.

[2] As quoted in James McConkey, The Anatomy of Memory , New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 10

25. 3: ENGLISH PASSENGERS, by Matthew Kneale (2000) [BR] 10.9.2005

Australia has long been known as a place with an exotic menagerie. Flipped down-under-wise, its bestiary exhibits an antipodean cockeyedness. One almost expects creatures to be not only marsupial, but to be equipped with suction feet to keep from falling off the planet. That may be just some northern hemisphere centrism about a place where water putatively whirlpools in the opposite direction when going down (up?) the drain. Such matters might seem to dominated in a place where not much has been going on down there” that is not measured in geologic or evolutionary pace of time. I confess to seeing it, with a slight squint of the eyes, rather like a set for America in the 1950s.

But in the pens of a Patrick White, Colleen McCollough, Peter Carey, or the cinematic view of Peter Weir or Jane Campion Australia proves to be mysterious, funny, brooding, adventurous, rich and varied social setting with its own unique history. Much of that is thanks to the English, who enter the story, and begin the continent's social history in the 18 th Century. With its swelling population and concomitant crime rate the faraway colonial acquisition seemed to possess great penitential prospects. “Transportation,” they called it, being sent down, mostly for life, and mostly for offenses that would receive a slap on the wrist today, to a place where most of the land is inhospitable, where every other critter has a venomous bite and disposition to match, and where the aboriginals slathered themselves with fish oil and still, technically, lived in the Neolithic.

Even more bizarre is Tasmania, a place where even Aussie's might “transport” unrepentant miscreants. Further “down under,” across the Bass Strait and below the 40 th parallel South, the shark-toothed-shaped island once called Van Dieman's Land is the locus of Matthew Kneale's splendid English Passengers. Kneale's story of the follies and brutalities of the English is narrated by no less that twenty different members of his extensive dramtis personae , giving the lengthy tale a somewhat cubistic structure in which we see a clash of civilizations played out from multiple perspectives. When the fact that the tale alternates between two different time periods (the 1920s and the 1850s) is added to the different voices its is evident that the author's skill in weaving them together and finally bring the characters together in the same time frame was likely responsible for the book's being short-listed for the Booker Prize.

If there is a center to this narrative it is shared by Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, a Manxman bent on smuggling a contraband of brandy and cigars to Australia in 1857, and a half-caste aboriginal boy, the product of a rape who is spurned by his bellicose mother and educated by well-meaning colonials in the 1820s, but only after they have removed his clan from Tasmania to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. The title refers to passengers that Kewley is required to take on as cover and finance for his voyage: The Rev. Geoffrey Wilson, a sanctimonious Bible-thumper who believes that Tasmania might well have been the Garden of Eden, and Dr. Thomas Potter, a pseudo-scientist who is looking for proof in his thesis about the fundamental differences among the races of the earth, the English being at the apex.

It is that English superiority complex that Kneale dismantles with the assistance of well-wrought characterizations, clever plotting, and intensive research into the history of the settlement of Australia. The brutal penal system, often overseen by officials with more criminal minds than their prisoners, spills over into the racism and literal genocide on the aboriginal people who are completely eradicated from Tasmania after being hunted down and massacred by settlers, going the way of some of the local fauna, such as the Tasmanian wolf. Typical of imperialism's religious impulses there are the “well-meaning” soul-snatchers who at least want to see the dispatched locals sent off as Christians.

Captain Kewley's quest is simply to make a killing selling booze and nicotine to the colonials; half-caste, Peevay (renamed George Vandieman by the settlers) is based on some actual aboriginals who unsuccessfully revolted and managed to kill some of the marauding settlers with their stone-age spears. Their space-time coordinated nearly intersect near the end of the book, when Kewley, after many a mishap, manages to sell his contraband only to suffer a mutiny led by Dr. Potter, who he has just rescued after the latter's ill-fated expedition to obtain more evidence for his race thesis. Peevay steals aboard the ship to rescue his own mother's bones, which Potter intended to return to England and put on exhibit.

Kneale's characters and plot twists are hilarious, but the reader is always aware that the roguish and foolish cast and their changes of fortune have the ring of dark truths and the evidence of history just beneath the fictional surface.

Down-under exacted its revenge on the exploiters and brutalizers, often with its physical inhospitality. A few years ago I strolled through a cemetery in Hobart, Tasmania, amazed that, even accounting for the headstones placed there more than a century earlier, so many settlers from “Up-above” met early premature demise from disease and accident. The author might have been writing a more philosophical epitaph for many of those that I observed when he has one of his characters ponder, “How suddenly the hand of fate falls among us! How near, every instant, as we blindly go about our lives, lost in the comfort of routine, lurks the icy embrace of death.” Looking back through Kneale's English Passengers makes it easier to smile at the fates of people when hemisphere's collide.

©1992, UrbisMedia

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25. 2: “LET HIM CAST THE FIRST STONE . . . ,” (Metaphysical Musings No. 4) 10.6.2005

One second, two seconds, three . . . a blackish smoke curled up from Fr. Fahey's index finger. Four seconds! Five seconds! Oh, Jesus !

Fahey was trembling now, beads of sweat jumped out on his brow. Still he kept the match there. Six seconds, seven seconds—long, excruuuuuciating seconds. Some of us cringed, nearly everybody was empathically rubbing his own index finger, but nobody looked away. A couple of guys looked faint.

Finally , Fahey whipped the spent match to the floor. Still he said nothing; his smoldering digit, blackened and trembling, still pointing. Every eye was riveted on that finger. He let the suspense build a few seconds longer, or maybe he couldn't speak. At last, he spoke.

“THE FIRES OF HELL!” he bellowed, as much to release the pent-up pain as for emphasis. Everyone jumped. “THE FIRES OF HELL!” now even louder, echoed out in amplification from the stone apse of the chapel. Then, pointing the finger upward beside his face in a gesture of admonishment, in a softer voice, “That match was nothing . . . nothing . . NOTHING compared to the white-hot fires of hell. Think about that, young men; the WHITE-HOT fires of hell, not just on your finger, but licking at every square inch of your body, . . . licking at your eyes, your hair, your torso, your genitalia (emphasis his, Latin apt, pause pregnant).

He continued. “Pain beyond your imagination, compared to which that match would be a blessed relief. Pain only exceeded by Christ's pain on the cross because He felt the pain of your sins as well, but more pain than you ever believed possible.”

Nobody moved. Fahey's lips glistened from the saliva expelled by the force of his speech. We noticed that he hadn't touched that finger yet. We were unable to understand how he could resist rubbing it. Fahey just waited, wanting us to try to comprehend the incomprehensible pain we could only imagine. Our evil-doing digits flexed and twitched.

Fahey soon brought us out of our imaginations. “And no death!” Fahey shouted out, “No DEATH! You want to die to escape the pain of the fire, but you can't, young men. You're ALREADY dead! Your flesh sizzles and sizzles, but it doesn't stop. You scream for it to stop, but it just goes on. You scream to God for it to stop, the God you turned away from when you committed your filthy mortal sins. But it's too late now. You had your chance buddy . . . and you blew it. This is for ETERNITY!” He poked his scorched finger into the air to stress the syllables: “EEE-TER-NIT-TEEE! The syllables spilled over each other as the echoed around the vault of the chapel. I can hear its reverberations still. “EEE-TER-NIT-TEEE! “EEE-TER-nit-teee! “EEE-ter-nit-teeeeeeee!

This was the clincher lecture at my retreat (three days of prayer, reflection and penance) at my high school. It was designed to scare the hell out of you, literally. Fr. Fahey would go on, demonstrating how long eternity would be with various metaphors. Scary stuff; you could tell from the number of guys lined up for confession when the lecture was over.

The operative term here is “mortal” sin. Die with one of those on your soul, young man – like the young Catholic couple who were having sex in a parked car that was hit by a speeding truck—and it's the fires of hell for EEE-TER-NIT-TEEE! Fahey relished telling that story about the young couple, otherwise good Catholics, who made one mistake, died with a mortal sin on their souls and are condemned forever to hell. Every retreat had an apocryphal story about a nice, devout young couple who made that one mistake. They were the Ken and Barbie dolls of retreat lore.

But if the Jesuits taught us to fear hell, they also taught us to be “Jesuitical,” to be rhetorically slicker than a Michael Jackson lawyer basted with Johnson's Baby Lotion. The Jebbies were the Church's shock troops during the Counter Reformation. Get on the other end of an argument with a Jesuit and you will not only renounce and recant, you will donate your rent to some scheme they have for teaching Latin to pagan babies..

We learned from the best. So we needed to look up the “requirements” for a Mortal Sin. And here's what the Church says they are. To commit a “mortal” sin you must have: 1. Grievous Matter; 2. Sufficient Reflection, and; 3. Full and Free Consent of the Will . The Church says that one has to fulfill all three requirements to commit a mortal sin and, then, if you don't get to a confessional for absolution, run the risk of going to the Devil's barbeque . . . for Eternity .

So, let's get to work on a defense for Fahey's fabled Catholic couple making out in the back seat of a car and hit by truck, and see if we can keep them out of hell.

Grievous Matter : First, your honor, we concede that making out in a car is a grievous matter for an un-married couple. But, Fr. Fahey never does specify the level to which this “making out” was taking place at the time the truck arrived. Were they simply engaging in some “petting,” or were they, ah . . . you know . . . “doing it.” Would a little “exploration” meet the Church's test of grievous matter? Just asking. (By the way, your honor, we would like to know if the truck driver had been drinking, or was perhaps “possessed” by the Devil; in which case we feel the couple was the victim of negligence or “entrapment” by evil forces.)

Sufficient Reflection: Your, honor, we allege that our clients did not have time to give the matter, grievous or not, sufficient reflection. They had to be on the lookout for the police who are always rapping on steamy windows of parked cars, not to mention the mental distraction of looking out for speeding trucks being driven by drivers possessed by the Devil. (Notice how we are getting the possession thing established as “fact”). Moreover, how long must reflection be to be regarded as “sufficient”? One minute? Five minutes? And must the “reflection” be mutual in such cases? The Church does not specify a time period or whether there must be reciprocity of reflection when a sin is committed by two persons.

Was Fr. Fahey keeping time? Of course, not; he was not there. He was likely somewhere else,drunk as a Irishman with a winning lottery ticket, and God knows, doing what with that charred finger of his . . . Sorry, your honor, I will try to restrain myself in the future. (But notice how we got the possibility that Fr. Fahey has a drinking problem, and maybe more, into the “record”)

Full and Free Consent of the Will: We submit, your honor, that our clients did not, could not, give their full and free consent to their actions in the car. Our clients have testified that they kept saying during their, ah . . . activities: “We shouldn't be doing this. We really shouldn't be doing this.” Such ambivalence cannot be considered full consent of their wills. They were consumed with passion, with all the pent up carnal urgings of youth and the Senior Prom. How could their consent be considered a free act of their wills? No, your honor, they were full of doubt as well as passion, and therefore, they are not culpable of commission of a mortal sin according to the very requirements of Holy Mother Church.

We therefore request a reduction of their “sin” to category venial , and a Purgatorial sentence of three to five years, with time off for good behavior (if they can be kept apart during that time) before being re-eternalized to heaven, where, we would hope, they can mess around to their heart's content without consequence. The defense rests.

Now who could not agree with that defense. OK, so what if it sounds a little like it was written by some guy who has some residual guilt over having spent too much time with girls in parked cars and . . . Whoa, baby! That truck was really close!

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25. 1: THE FRAGGING OF "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 10.1.2005

Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end.

Janis Karpinski, interview with Marjorie Cohn, August 3, 2005

For being a cabal of hypocrites and military cowards, shirkers, and people who “had other priorities,” during the Vietnam War, Chicken George Bush and his Neo-cons are not a bunch to be taken lightly when it comes to doing political battle. While they adopt the posture of great supporters of our troops (cf. March 2005, No. 18.2) the record of their “fragging” military people exposes the hypocrisy behind that façade. Military people who do not play along with them, or who are not unquestioning “good soldiers” that will “follow orders,” are attacked, defamed, disgraced, demoted, or otherwise dispatched.

It would make a most interesting seminar to convene John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry, and Generals Shinseki, Karpinski, and Colin Powell. There are probably some I have missed, but they suffice to make the point. McCain, after enduring several years iof torture in a POW camp came home and found out what political torture was at the hands of Karl Rove who had him fathering black babies. Cleland, a triple amputee, and a decorated veteran got smeared by the same bunch. They like to kick a guy when he's down. Then there were the calumnious Swift Boat Veterans who had Kerry shooting Vietnamese kids in the back and throwing away his medals. Shinseki's offense was telling Rumsfeld, prophetically, that he couldn't pacify Iraq with 130,000 troops, and Karpinski is taking the hit to cover up Pentagon responsibility for Abu Ghraib. This is how they like to show their support for the troops. With “friends” like that who needs “insurgents.”

But Powell, you might question? Of course. One has to roll back to that fateful scene of Colin Powell, widely respected Secretary of State of the United States of America, probably the most respected person the Bush Administration, not only for his war service, but because he seemed to be the voice of moderation, a rational voice that counseled caution and non-military methods of addressing the problem of terrorism and the political and cultural complexities of the Middle East. Powell who might prove to be a problem with his more “liberal” state department people, and who received more respect and credence than the president.

Bringing down Powell was a political masterstroke, probably orchestrated by Cheney or Rove, or both: put Powell in front of the UN with that bogus pile of lies and suppositions they called “intelligence” and let the old general make the case for war on Iraq. Then when we are closing in on Baghdad and the intel gets exposed for the bullshit that it is, Colin will no longer be a problem with that albatross of being a dupe or a dope around his neck.

Because they are its very antithesis, the cabal knew that they could get Powell to cooperate in their fragging him in front of the watching world (and, bonus points here, in the UN the neo-cons despise). Powell, who seems unable to desist in being “the good soldier” at any cost (didn't he ever see The Man in the Glass Booth ?) was the perfect target to the Bush fraggers when it become evident to them that he didn't share their perspective on Iraq. But the good soldier would follow the orders of Chicken George, his commander-in-chief, saluting, as they say, the rank, if not the man.

In may respects it is the same “good soldier” mentality that overrides realities in the minds of so many military people in Iraq. The Romans used to regard farm boys as the best recruits for the Roman Army. They were used to hard work, understood defending territory, and were not used to the freedoms to which city boys were accustomed. Being little more than slaves, they fit the military life and even regarded it as an honor to serve. And most importantly, they followed orders without question and fought valiantly. They were “good soldiers.” While making for good armies and victories, under a corrupt command, such as the Nazis, for example, you could end up with the Eichmann factor—“I was just following orders, like a good soldier.”

I hasten to clarify that my point is not to associate in any way Powell's behavior with that of Eichmann, but both “following orders” resulted in a lot of dead people. Powell, a very intelligent man, is certainly aware of having been fragged. He knew he had to leave, his effectiveness, his role in the administration, even as a voice of reason and moderation, gone in a few minutes of video tape. They hung him out to twist in the wind. Colin Powell, once regarded as Presidential timber, is, rather than making history, history. Done in by men who are not fit to polish his boots or dust off his rack of campaign ribbons. All's fair in politics the way the Republicans play it.

Fragging was a term that came into the lexicon of war in Vietnam, although there probably have been in every war, incidents of soldiers creating “accidents” or “friendly fire” in the chaos of battle that did away with superior officers. And there have always been situations where the upper brass have used the lower ranks to take the blame, one of the most notorious being when the US Navy blamed the explosion in a battleship gun turret on a seaman's “homosexuality.” The execution of three soldiers for supposed “cowardice” in the face of the enemy as portrayed in the WW I film, Paths of Glory , is not a fiction without factual backing. The Romans used to “decimate” (execute every tenth legionnaire) a legion if it failed to perform.

Should Powell have seen it coming? Yes, he was too smart to not know what a bunch of ruthless backstabbers he hooked up with. Should he have seen it coming and ducked the UN presentation (hell, let Rumsfeld do it, or Bolton, he would have loved it)? Maybe Powell “owed one” to the people who gave his son a nice nepotistic FCC Chairman job. Should I feel sorry for him for getting it this way, even though he bears some responsibility for getting us into this war and getting Cindy Sheehan's kid and over 1,900 killed and thousands maimed. My sympathies are with them; Colin Powell can wait at the end of the line, and the line keeps getting longer.

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