Volume 36

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2006

36. 10: TAKING IT ON FAITH (SOS, Part 4) 11.30.2006

[Continued from 36. 7)

On the fourth day we were on a northward heading in the Moçambique Channel between the African continent and the Island of Madagascar. This is an areas that the captain told us (afterward) is noted for “rogue waves,” those huge waves that come randomly that can turn your cruise into The Poseidon Adventure . The only “rogue” this day was the appearance of a diminutive and quite elderly Jewish man arrived in the group. He seemed almost child-like swallowed up by the lounge chair cushions. Sid looked old enough to have lived through some of the worst of Jewish times in the 20 th Century. He had the bearing of a Talmudic scholar, slumped in his chair with a lap full of books. His mind, we were to learn, was sharp, and his memory long.

Donald began again reading a couple of African parables from a book he had discovered, but again, no one seemed to be able, or inclined, to comment or pick up on the theme of parables he had been pushing since the last meeting. He really needs to learn something about conducting seminars; it's not that a lot of the stuff and approach he uses is uninspiring, but he is repetitive with what doesn't work. It had already been remarked that they were stories with morals, or lessons, and that was about as far as the group had considered the subject. When the mic was passed around no one had anything to add, [1] but Sid took the opportunity to remind the group that the original language of the Bible was Aramaic, which he said he could speak, as well as Hebrew. The presence of that ability among these ‘born agains” was perfunctorily “welcomed” by Donald, but it did nothing to keep him or others from taking scriptures at their most literal in spite of all the translations they have been through. Sid's remark also emphasized that this was primarily a group of amateurs (although some knew their way around the Bible quite well) who did not take an analytical approach to the Bible, but rather accepted Donald's and each others' Christian affirming interpretations of scripture uncritically.

I would have liked to introduce the questions of the curious and tortured relationship between Christians and Jews, but thought better of it because it might put Sid on the spot. Why, I wanted to ask the group did they seem to accept the beliefs and behaviors a chronicle of the dramatic experiences of nomadic tribes of herders from millennia go as relevant to their faith and the present age? And yet, there is such are terrible history of Christian persecution of Jews, the pogroms, the discrimination, and of course the holocaust. I wanted to ask them about Mel Gibson. How many of them had seen that wretched blood fest he created with his The Passion of the Christ that perpetuated the libel against the Jews as “Christ killers,” a point of view he re-confirmed in a drunken diatribe against Jews when he was stopped by the police for a traffic violation. How did these people feel about Mel?

I was even more curious about the American fundamentalist Christian support for Israel. Not that Israel doesn't deserve some support, with millions of Muslims openly demonstrating their hatred for Zionism and their desire to complete Hitler's and Himmler's work. It seems a curious and cynical support: was it that the need the Jews to be in Jerusalem to rebuild Solomon's temple and for Second Coming of Christ to happen—when the final destruction of the Jews will also happen? [2] Christ was born a Jew and died a Jew. But somehow the fundamentalists cast him as the first Christian—at term he would not have recognized, because it was a Greek name he never knew. Christ wanted to reform Judaism by living out its messianic prophecy, not found a new religion, especially one that eventually would persecute Jews. Paul, and the other early true founders of Christianity, exploited Jesus, and the Jews are still being exploited. I wanted to ask these Christians straight in the face to address these thoughts. But it would have really put the Sid in the hot seat. I dropped the idea of raising this subject. I would have come off as a trouble-maker.

Anyway Donald wanted to talk about faith. But this quickly turned into testimonies and affirmations of faith. This testifying business can become quite exasperating. Several people in the group jump on the bandwagon with a practiced facility, expounding on how they believe the “Bible is the word of God,” and that “Jesus died on the cross for their sins and the sins of mankind”; things they have not a shred of proof or evidence for other than the Bibles in their laps, but in which they have complete and unshakable faith.

“I have no interest in impugning anyone's faith,” I said when the mic got to me, “but faith seem to have the opposite attitude toward knowledge than science. Science is constantly testing the validity of its findings and theories; things are not necessarily proved as just not yet disproved. Biblical literalists like ‘Creationists,' see this self-critical feature of science as an opportunity to say that scientific disagreements about aspects of evolution (although there is broad agreement on the fundamentals) overturns the entire body of evolutionary thought in favor of the biblical fairytale, which they accepted uncritically. The Christians were out to prove the validity of scripture by whatever tortured logic and gratuitous connections they could conjure. They might question scientists' data on global warming as too incomplete (without, of course, understanding the science itself), something they would never do when approaching scripture.

I felt I was welcome, but tolerated, because Donald related to me as someone who apparently had no faith and therefore could not understand what it was. Faith was, he said, in paraphrase of some lines from Romans “substance without evidence,” something that was clearly a contradiction, but then, if I had faith, I wouldn't mind that. Never mind, I countered, that for something to be substantial, in the proper meaning of the word it needed to be available to the senses in some way, palpable. Substance is that which is evident .

But that only elicited those sorts if beatific smiles that Christians can give that mean something like “Oh, you poor thing, the Lord just hasn't come into your soul yet,” that I take to mean, “just surrender your rationality, just let go of that need for things to make sense and fit the facts.” Apparently, if you have faith, words can mean what you want them to mean. That was too much.

But “substance without evidence” was too close to that old Catholic flight from reason—transubstantiation—the notion that, during the offertory of the mass the wafer and wine were really turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. The substance of the wafer had literally changed form by the priest's intonation of the words hoc est enim corpus meum. Wow! Imagine that being rammed into your little seven-year-old brain for your First Communion. Ironically, the Church chose age seven because it was regarded as your “age of reason.” No wonder there were all those jokes about the mass being “the magic show” and communion being “swallow the leader.” We laughed, and felt our souls were imperiled at the same time. [3]

Now, here was a Protestant Christian laying the same nonsense on me when life is a lot more serious looking back down on it from almost six decades later.

“Look these words have meanings and you don't seem to appreciate the contradiction with than statement. Sorry, I just can't let that pass as truth. You're talking nonsense. It's linguistically and logically unacceptable.” Nobody said anything. Maybe I was too strident. Maybe some of them didn't disagree with me. Maybe Donald would ask me if I could find something else to do at the ten o'clock hour. There is a magician showing people how to do card tricks up in another lounge; there would be more “truth” in that than what's going on here.

[To be continued]

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[1] Donald also needs to learn to make the circle tighter by doubling it and to get =rid of the mic, which intimidates some people and wastes time being passed around.

[2] Cf. Harris, The End of Faith , p. 153 (an appropriate notes)

[3] Some Catholics now say that the Church has shied away from the doctrine of “transubstantiation.” It would appear so, since they now actually let people handle the communion wafer, taking it from the priest and placing it in their own mouths. Or is this just a concession to hygiene in the age of AIDS and SARS?

36. 9: TOWARD A PROPER EXPLETIVE 11.28.2006

By now everybody has heard about the Michael Richards incident. Since I never watched Seinfeld , I had no idea who this guy was; so the furor over his racial slurs on stage at some African-Americans in his audience who were disturbing his stand up routine or heckling him didn't seem as newsworthy as Mel Gibson's alcohol-fueled spewings of anti-semitism. There has been much opinion, and some analysis, of these behaviors, ranging from celebrity-bashing to “we are all racists” (today in the LA Times [1] ), and a lot of positions in between.

Incidents like this are always a good time to do a little attitude check on oneself. We all think that we would not do such a thing as Richards and Gibson, but more of us than care to admit it might harbor thoughts not too dissimilar than theirs. I have heard only a little analysis of Richards's outburst (and only an inaudible recording of the original) but I am inclined to accept his subsequent contrition about the incident. Not that I really know the truth, but my hypothesis is that what he did was A) get very angry, and B) grope for something to say that would hurt or insult his tormentors. That would be racial epithets in this case. Similarly, I could get very angry at a midget, for example, and say “you damned little midget!” Now I am not prejudiced against midgets [2] I want to make this particular midget feel bad, so I pick something he might be sensitive about, his size. I always call Bush “stupid,” or a “dim-wit.” Why? Not because I am prejudiced against stupid people. Hey, some of my best frie . . . . Never mind.

So that's what I think Michael Richard's did. But he did it in public and, unfortunately, he did not use what I would I have termed, The Proper Expletive. But more about that in a moment. First, a few word's about Mel. I do not put Gibson in the same category as Richards, as some people have. Gibson is a full-fledged bigot. You don't make a film like The Passion of the Christ without having coolly thought out its implications and made conscious choices about representations of Jews, as he did, without being a bigot. Mel just got drunk, and when he needed to fulminate about something he hates categorically (as opposed to being frustrated and angry, incidentally ), he let it all out. I'll tell you what Mel is, he's a . . . well, hold on a little bit.

We all discriminate.We could not go through life without discriminating; we could not make choices without discriminating. It's what we end up choosing that makes the difference. I respect my right, and yours, to discriminate, but I might not respect the results, especially if they are socially harmful, or bigoted. So, I really can't stand Whitney Houston's singing (You know, that screeching stuff they play in the supermarket). And I hate rap and hip hop music(?), too, especially when it is being broadcast from some open-windowed SUV. Does that mean that I am prejudiced against Blacks? Of course not. I love jazz, a major African-American contribution to the world. I love the music of the late Shirley Horn, and the piano jazz of Oscar Petersen. I admire immensely the courage of Muhammed Ali, but I think Clarence Thomas is a jerk. See, I have discriminating tastes. That's just among African-Americans; I could make the same distinctions among Jews, Chinese, Hispanics, probably Azerbijanis, even Italian-Americans. Would that be bigotry? No, just discriminating taste. There is more range of character within any racial or ethnic group than there is between them.

The problem is that we all run around with some stereotypes of different racial and ethnic groups in our heads. Some people, like Mel, just prefer to go with those stereotypes and do not exercise discriminating taste. That “Jews are Christ killers” stuff simplifies things for a bigot. Yet there are some things that seem to be “characteristic” of different groups. You know, they come out in jokes, like Asians are great a math, but they shouldn't be allowed to drive. There are Polish jokes, Irish jokes, Black jokes, Jewish jokes, even Norwegian jokes, [3] that all have some basis in cultural features or predispositions, all are told within their racial and ethnic (if not originate from them), and all are more sensitive when told by somebody outside those groups because that opens the matter to prejudice, or bigotry. The classic example might be the use of the “N” word by Black comedians and actors, something that is socially verboten for non-Blacks to do. (If it had been the late Richard Pryor, rather than Michael Richards, the incident would have been one big joke.)

But having all these stereotypes around gives us a lexicon for insult when we are confronted with an incident that involves a person or persons who “fit” the stereotype. We reach for them when we need a verbal weapon, the same way we are inclined to call someone “fatso” or “big nose” or a “Rumsfeld.” We go categorical when we don't have something specific. Or, if we do, it just doesn't do the job of insult. We can't say “You rude large person cutting in line, please stop that,” when “Hey, fatso, haul your lard ass to the back of the line!” feels so much better. I'm convinced that was Michael Richard's problem (not Mel's), and it's a problem that I might have the solution for.

The “A” word. Yup, my solution is the “A” word. You know the one I mean. Seven letters; begins with A, ends with e. We'll just say A**h*** here, OK, because the FCC fined CBS two-thirds of a million for Janice Jackson's boob, and I think they already have it in for Dragon City Journal. I think we have to accept the great linguistic value of this word, a word we can uses as a “proper expletive” that will avoid the kind of problem that Michael Richards had. Why?

• it is racially and ethnically neutral

• it does not refer to size, or appearance

• it does not refer to religion

• it does not refer to gender

• It does not refer to one's political affiliation [4]

• it is anatomically universal (how's that for euphemism)

• you can explete (is that a word?) this word and make it sound like you are coughing (try it). So sometimes you can call a person an A**h*** without them even knowing it. (Really, try it, like a little cough), AND

• you are not making reference to anyone's mother, or circumstances of birth

Try coming up with another word like that. It's not easy.

Now who would have thought that a distinguished Journal such as DCJ would be recommending that people inure themselves to substituting a somewhat crude expletive in the place of things like the “Nigger, and “Fatso” and “Kike,” “Gook, “Wop,” “Sand Monkey,” “Wetback,” “SOB,” and the newly popular “Bitch and Ho,” and the rest of the lexicon that is used by bigots and racists, misogynists, or people who just want to strike a blow at somebody who is being an A**h***, but have not appreciated the aptness of a word that refers ineluctably and exclusively to their behavior .

Think about it for a minute. Those guys in the audience who upset Michael Richards; they didn't deserve to me called the “N” word. But the rude way they were behaving? They sound to me like a couple of (cough) … A**h***s. (Go ahead, try it).

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[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shermer24nov24,0,4845406.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

[2] Envious, I will admit at times, especially when I see them sitting so comfortably in coach airplane seats. But no prejudiced.

[3] Listen to A Prairie Home Companion sometime.

[4] OK, we have to make an exception for Republicans

36. 8: TRAVELING AS AMERICAN 11.25.2006

Chickenhawks Abroad

When traveling these days the next best thing to not rushing into the street in Sadr City and yelling “Mohammed was a gay alcoholic with a Jewish grandmother,” is to not advertise your citizenship as American. We can thank George Bush for that. On my recent travels I was surprised at how genial people in South Africa and Australia just avoided the painful subject of Arrogant George and his fiasco in Iraq. Rather than people asking where I was from, or how things were back in the USA, they would substitute subjects like “Well, how about that bloody business of de-classifying Pluto as a planet?”

George must know that he has pissed off most of the world. When he dropped in on Indonesia recently, he was afraid to stay more than six hours, whisked from plane to palace while the American press dutifully avoided the raging demonstrations against him in the streets. He is scheduled to meet with Iraqi PM Malaki in Jordan, not Iraq , because it's too dangerous for him to go to the place that is so happy to have American troops as guests for several years (too dangerous for chickenhawks, but apparently not for real soldiers). And the Great Deferer, Mr. Cheney is “scheduled” to make a visit to the Green Zone—sometime, but no one will say when, or for how long, or if he will be disguised as another fake Thanksgiving turkey. He's even afraid of Iraqi quail. Maybe they'll just say he was there. It will be a new form of American travel. Why have the TSA people take away your water bottle and make you remove your shoes. Buy a National Geographic DVD and then just say you were there.

A True, and Embarrassing Parable

Speaking of safe travel I can now recommend that you always wear underpants when traveling (they're recommended, but optional at other times.) I have the following personal incident to butt ress (get the pun?) that point. Passing through Security at the Sydney Airport earlier this month I was having my carry-on bag searched by a security official who was also asking me how much I liked my Macintosh PowerBook. Another official came up and asked if he could do a body frisk on me and if I would outstretch my hands. “Yes, I said, and told the other official that he should definitely join the Macintosh family, “perhaps with a new dual core processor MacBook Pro.” Silly me, maybe the question about the computer was really part of the security drill. Maybe the next question would be “is it true that the new MacBook has ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM?” Anyway, quicker than you could say “fair dinkum” my pants were down around my ankles. There were gasps, giggles, an outright guffaw from me, and a profuse apology from the security official kneeling in front of me. I figured he must a Windows-based computer user, or suspicious that I would go to extremes to smuggle a water bottle aboard the plane.

I don't pray, but I was close to thanking any and all deities that I had selected my black boxers with the snug elastic waist band that day, because in my haste in the men's room I had not tied a secure bow in the waist of my travel pants. (The boxers with the large smiley face on the front unfortunately have a very stretched waist band.) We were all having a good laugh —except the guy who pulled my pants down and was now fearing for his job and a reputation as a priest or a Florida congressman. “Is this a new security procedure for everybody, or are you just looking for the Al Qaeda terrorist who has only one testicle?” I asked. (BTW: all these security officials were wearing rubber surgical gloves.) You can chance that with Aussies, who love a joke more than anybody. In the US I would still be in some back room at the airport and my pants would still be being examined for possible camel hairs or microscopic bits of falafel.

I don't suppose that Georgie Boy, or The Dick have to go through such security procedures. Everybody knows who they are (and what they are). And everybody knows that if their pants got yanked down there's no chance of exposing any testicles.

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36. 7: PEOPLE OF THE BOOK (SOS, Part 3) 11.21.2006

[Continued from 36. 6]

I had noticed the first day that almost everyone in the group had a bible. Donald's was one of those with a leather cover, a mid-sized bible with those crinkly parchment-like pages that looked as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls. My bible, the one I had gotten way back in high school, and still have, has the same sort of pages. When you turn a page it has the sound of the ages; you just know that God wrote all of those thees and thous.

Donald apologized because some of the pages were loose in his bible—translation: “I just read this thing endlessly”—as he looked for a passage. He said he should get another but there were so many marginalia he had made he couldn't part with this one. The others had various-sized bibles; little travel-sized bibles (also with crinkly pages) with print for myopes. Donald also had one that looked like a big novel, with a dust-jacket, which he said was the “Jewish bible,” but it didn't look old and crinkly.

These people seemed to know their way around the Bible pretty well, nodding when passages, like John 44.13, etc, were mentioned and flipping right to them. They read from them comfortably, as if the stilted 17 th century English were something they spoke every day, and also as if the prophets and Christ sole the very same English. The Bibles and the language united them; they were the “people of the book.”

So I took to bringing in my copy of Sam Harris's The End of Faith. I had packed it well before I ever knew I would join this bible study class, and was nearly finished reading it. I didn't quote from it, flaunt it, or open it; it just resided on thigh, or beside my chair. Still, several people noticed it, with its large, searing title, and would raise an eyebrow, or ask if it was interesting. But no one asked to look at it, or borrow it. The title appeared to be burned into the cover—maybe with the claws fingers of Satan. They had their Book and, although they might read widely in a variety of subjects, I suspected that books like Harris's, of which there a not many, are quickly categorized as “heresy” and are not to be read.

That's the basis of my quibble with the “believers.” I have a “problem” with the arrogance of people who insist that they have found the truth , who believe that history—existence itself—turns on the purpose and design they see in that “truth.” It's a cheap, one-book, Wal Mart, lazy-minded “truth,” buttressed by a faux intellectualism that mucks around in a stew of scriptural references and pretentious thees and thous. They lack the most essential characteristic of intellectual curiosity and discourse—a critical faculty. Indeed, such a faculty appears to be for them perilously close to heresy. [1] If there is one thing that cannot be tolerated among the fundamentalists, it is heresy. The very utterance of a critical hypothesis—maybe that Jesus was just a rabbi, a prophet, but not divine—can mean instant separation. They can turn not so much on you as from you, the way a herd of wildebeest leaves a cripple to the hyenas, the believer who turns heretic is beyond salvation “left behind” to the clutches of Satan. Being “bait” to be saved would require some careful navigation.

The most fundamental tensions between the believer and the agnostic are epistemic, and so my first foray into the discourse nearly killed it for good. “Fear, not faith,” I offered, “it seems, to be the basis for belief—fear of the unknown.” I elaborated that the central “unknowns,” about death and beyond, cannot be known—at least by the living—and since no one has ever came back with a report, we all, those with and without faith, simply do not know anything , not me, not the guy sitting next to me, not the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, some mullah, not anybody.

“Wrong,” Dick says. He knows. He knows Christ is the Son of God and following him he is going to heaven. He says he knows that “the Holy Spirit exists.”

And I say, “No, you don't know you believe , It (does the Holy Spirit have gender?) exists.”

“No, he counters,” a bit angrily, “I know !” Ron is a short, bald fellow with a face that reminds me of that character actor in so many Frank Capra films, Jimmy Gleason. But Ron's default facial expression is anger. He clearly doesn't want anyone questioning his faith. Ron evidently has never taken a course in epistemology. He doesn't just conflate knowledge with belief, there is not linguistic distinction for him. But deep down inside, I know, there has to be that part of the brain where evolution has, over the eons, worked to create a faculty of reason , of needing evidence, some proof, to really know something, a faculty Ron's brain needs to constantly repress. In contemporary parlance, Ron just does not want to “go there.”

If Ron admits one doubt , entertains one vexing question (Hey Dick, what does the Holy Spirit look like? Does God have genitals?), one fissure in the shaky edifice of his fundamentalist Christian belief that he has been erected for him over the centuries, then he is in big trouble. He might start thinking . Thinking leads to doubts, doubts lead to blasphemy, blasphemy leads to Hell. That's right where I wanted to go, not Hell, but to the question of what they though would put an agnostic.

My question to the group was simple enough. I wanted to know if they thought that someone like me, a lapsed Roman Catholic, and apostate who doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ could possibly end up in heaven, in other words, attain salvation. It was a question right at the center of their faith, of the notion of being “saved.” I remember that it had been an issue with the Jesuits many years ago when a renegade jebbie by the name of Fr. Feeney was promulgating that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church ! Eventually he was ex-communicated.

The response was interesting. One woman, Joan, said that the best she could do was pray for my soul, but it was up to God; another said that even if I did not come to a decision about Jesus, but I tried to find answers, God would probably be nice to me for the earnest effort. Another woman, from England, read me something from scripture about Jesus saying the he was “the way, the truth, and the life.” The answer was right there, unambiguously as far as she was concerned. Deal with it. Then Ed, an Aussie, told me that I wasn't going to make it, that heaven wasn't for guys like me who had been offer the chance to accept Christ and declined. There was another Aussie guy who said no one could tell, and anyway, just because people say they are born again or saved doesn't mean they won't sin and offend God. Then the mic was back in Donald's's hand. He cleared his throat and proceeded to temporize and muddle through some convoluted bits of scripture that I didn't understand and I don't think he understood either. He was trying to sound pastoral and came off just sententious.

I appreciated the candor of those who spoke up. I was pleasantly surprised by the overall opinion. However, several people had not offered an opinion and I thought that I might provoke them when I turned to Ed and said, “But Ed, I find your view very intolerant and rigid and, if heaven is to be occupied by people like you, I would prefer an alternate eschatological location.”

Donald said that the Line Dancing class was waiting for the dance floor and we should move our chairs to the perimeter.

[To Be Continiued]

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[1] This applies especially so to Muslims, who are quick to issue a fatwa, an edict that can me the assassination of the heretic, for quite minor offenses against the Prophet or the Koran.

36. 6: SOS, Saved on Sea, Part 2 11.18.2006

Ron reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “I know there aren't many things we agree upon,” he said, also taking his wife's had in his left, “but I would like to end our discussion with a prayer.” I reached across the table and took his wife's other hand. Out spirits were joined.

Ron closed his eyes and lowered his head and his voice. “Lord Jesus, who suffered and died upon the cross so that we, who are born and sin and continue to sin, might be saved, we pray that you enter the heart of our friend, Jim, and take him into your loving embrace. Amen.”

What a hubristic little bastard, is what I was thinking. The same superior attitude in an inferior mind I had encountered the previous day when that porcine mound of piety with the huge bible and a smarmy smile said, “You should come back, maybe we can help you.”

Joining a “non-denominational” bible study group was about the last thing I thought I would do when I signed on for this long cruise from South Africa to Eastern Australia. I didn't even know that the cruise line offered this opportunity among its diversions on long sea days such as napkin folding and bingo.

But religion, always a haunting subject of interest had insinuated itself into my activities from my very preparations for the trip. In my readings about the forces that forged the nation of South Africa religion turned out to play a significant role, perhaps a greater role that geography and diamonds and gold. As is often the case in exploration, conquest and colonization, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples, God, or scriptural injunctions and prognoses are prime motivations.

Donald's's bible study group, announced in the little newspaper that the ship puts out each day, had about twenty people in the circle of chairs on the dance floor of the lounge on Deck 10, and a few fringies hanging outside of the circle. It was billed as “non–denominational” and open to all, but was, de facto , a Christian group, with several of the “saved” and “born again” variety. I don't think its putative ecumenism expected apostate Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Animists, Muslims, or even Jews. All the references in the first day “lectionary” prepared by Donald, an American in about his mid-fifties, were from the King James Bible. There were no people of color (although an African-American man joined the group later on), just American, British, South-African, Aussie and Canadian whities with their bibles ready to hunker down and squeeze some faith confirming interpretation from some obscure passages from the chronicles of nomadic Hebrews dead for thousands of years.

My intent was to be a “fly on the wall,” to sit there quietly and observe the kind of people who are reputed to be 27 percent of the American electorate, and the keystone of George Bush's “base,” doing their thing—the base his own political advisors are reputed to refer to as “useful idiots.” For me they were more exotic than the giraffes and lions of the Durban gamed preserve I had visited, or the lemurs on Madagascar, where we had just called. These were the kinds of people I read about and talked about, but with whom I had virtually no meaningful social contact. In metaphysical terms they were the credulous ones, but in recent years, in political terms, at least in America, they had become the “enemy.” They were not as dangerous a mob of zealots as the Taliban, but not too far from becoming their mirror image if they got the political power they craved. And they had invited me, Jim the Apostate, into their spiritual game preserve.

If only I could keep my mouth shut. That lasted until the microphone was passed around for comments in Donald's exegesis on some passage from Deuteronomy and I asked “why is there so much seemingly approved violence in these passages?” I was no longer an observer, but a participant, and they could smell blood on my soul. There were surprised looks at my impertinence and I was almost immediately recognized as a potential troublemaker. The woman who later suggested that I might be “helped” by remaining in the group reminded me that this was bible study, not a forum for posing those sorts of questions. But apparently her view did not prevail and she herself stopped attending.

Maybe this is what I was seeking in the first place—a good, old, Inherit the Wind , mind-whacking metaphysical punch-up with the evangelical fundamentalists. Who were these true believers I was floating around with in the middle of the Indian Ocean? What did they think about the pressing issues of the day; no not whether to take dinner in the dining room or at the buffet today, but abortion, AIDS, globalism and global warming, stem cells, gay marriage, creationism in schools, and Bush's war and Islamic fundamentalism. And where would they be if this “Titanic” hit an iceberg? Singing “nearer my God to Thee” as they went down with the ship, or the first in the lifeboats because they aren't quite ready for the “rapture.”

But they could just drift along comfortably, diddling with their scriptures, teasing out whatever interpretation suited their notion that the fate of the world was “written” in the gospels and in the mad ramblings of the book of Revelation. It occurred to me that perhaps the only way to move the discourse from chapters and verses to topics more germane and contestable, would be to offer myself as “bait.” And there is no more tempting bait for evangelistic Christians than what they might perceive as a soul in distress.

There is a grain of truth to that. Not that I regard my soul as being in distress, but in quest. It may seem contradictory, but I think that I have become, in some sense, more “religious” since I dropped out of the Roman Catholic Church decades ago. Unmoored from its dogma and liturgy, I became a solitary traveler among the faiths and philosophies. Doubting proved not only more interesting, but also more metaphysically “honest.” If there is a God, it seemed, “He” would be more accepting of someone who had come to believe in “Him” by the application of his own mind, not the swallowing of some pre-packaged formula of belief. And, even if he never came to credulity, the Deity would be have to more pleased with someone who used the mind he provided us for that quest, by way of science, philosophy, history and art, to reach out for metaphysical understanding, than He would be with someone who took their indoctrination uncritically. How can one believe, if one dares not to believe? In a way then, I never left the Church; it just became my null hypothesis.

[To Be Continued]

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36. 5: NEW AGE, SAME OLD BS (SOS Part 1) 11.14.2006

I quit the Roman Catholic Church (you don't really “quit” as such, there is no resignation form or anything like that, you just stop showing up) in the early 1960s. My last sufferance was the bumbling homily of a local tongue-tied parish priest that was just too much to bear. I felt so sorry for this guy. He should have been a Trappist monk; they take a vow of silence and I am certain he would have served out his days in aphasic bliss.

I was in grad school, living, literally, in a garret room, with nobody to record my failure to make my Easter Duty, [1] no parents around to please that they had done their duty and raised a nice Catholic boy. The closest I got to a Eucharist was a pepperoni pizza.

The next time I went to church was to get married, more than a year later. My wife went to mass for a while, attending the campus Newman Center with other liberal and attenuated Catholics, but she soon joined my “fallen away” status of her own complete accord.

At the time there was metaphysical energy aplenty to fill the self-induced void. There was plenty of company in my apostate status and some were doing the “inner- searching” thing with various forms of pharmacological assistance. But drugs were not for me. I never liked not being conscious and in control. Some friends experimented with the newly popular LSD behind the perpetually stoned high priest Dr. Timothy Leary. Others tried to go native with the “Yaqui way of knowledge,” [2] induced by peyote and mescaline. If there was a god to be found he would be in some tripped-out haze and probably look like a drummer for The Rolling Stones. Joints were routinely passed around at various social gatherings. But I wasn't about to exchange one opiate for another. The word at the time was what are you “into.” People might be into something one week and into something else the next.

Next week it might be Encounter groups; people sitting around spilling their guts out to strangers who would rush to hug them; or diving into hot tubs at the Esalen Institute up in Big Sur, a warm-up to hooking up with some complete stranger for the search for the big orgasm. It could be sitting in a room full of dim-wits at an EST [3] training squeezing your legs together to keep from pissing yourself, and calling each other “assholes,” and paying big money for the privilege of re-casting yourself to really fitting the appellation. It could be dozens of other spin-offs in the rollicking self-awareness movement that rolled in like a tidal wave of psychobullshit.

It was the wages of the unmooring from the traditional faiths that took place in the liberating 1960s, a period which conservatives still regard at the Lexington and Concord of America's “culture wars.” Liberating it was, but many people were clearly disoriented by its centrifugal forces and quickly set about seeking cosmologies and lifestyles to ”re-center” themselves. It was the early “new age,” a period that is now in its second flowering, fertilized by the nonsense of the Deepak Chopras and Tony Robbins's.

In between there were God and mammon. In the 80s Reaganism made it OK to be greedy and get rich (sort of a retro Calvinism that reasoned that if you were rich then that's what God wants you to be), or join the resurgence of Christianity a la the Bakkers, Swaggerts, Falwells and Robertsons. This was the great counter movement against the liberal legacy of emboldened minorities, the women's movement, sexual liberation and media's fracturing of the (mythical) solidarity of the American family. Men were seeking out their “fire in the belly” manhood rites to counter feminism. Sexual swingers, it was turning out, tended to more conservative people than liberals. Many liberals, not sure that there really was going to be an eternity, set about perfecting their bodies to make them last as long as possible. As usual, true to the essence of American culture, there was a buck to be made everywhere; the core faith, capitalism, seemed well intact.

Somehow my inborn skepticism shielded me from it all. It took long for anything to “take” with me, and by the time I finished reading and thinking about the validity of a new cosmology or lifestyle it was usually out of fashion or superceded by the next one. But there was no going back to my Catholic roots; I had worked too hard to be free of their entanglements. Yet there is never being totally free of them either. They are my roots, and as you can never resign from the Church, you can never not be Catholic. There is a certain indelibility to that baptism thing—once Catholic . . .

Curiously, my departure from the Church engendered a new interest in religion, not so much a search for a new religion to replace Roman Catholicism, but a liberated, critical-historical interest in the nature of belief, into the unreasoned credulities of faith. I read works by biblical scholars such as Hugh Schonfeld ( The Passover Plot ), Donavon Joyce ( The Jesus Scrolls ), Elaine Paigels ( The Gnostic Gospels ), works on the “historical” Jesus , by Michael Graves, historical novels such as Gore Vidal's Creation and James Michener's The Source, even edgy stuff like Holy Blood, Holy Grail , the precursor of The Da Vinci Code . Malachi Martin's The Final Conclave. I looked at religious art, listened to the music and missas , read of the lives of saints and popes, long monographs on Mary and Mary Magdalen, even the writings of Josephus. It was almost all very interesting, but there were no accounts of, from, or about anybody who had been to the other side, who had had a real audience with The Deity, the father the son, or the flaky one, the Holy Ghost. Not one single, sane, person. Nobody, not the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Ayatollah, or Sister Ignatius, my first grade teacher, knew one single shred of evidence, knew anything more than me. Everything on which the great faiths were based was made up, conjured, imagined.

I never recovered my faith—if I ever had it in the first place—but I did get some insights that gradually evolved into a sort of modus vivendi composed of bits and pieces from here and there. A good part of it came from that First Century radical Jewish rabbi, Yeshua Bar Yusef. Thankfully, my concoction was neither complete nor communicable enough to comprise a faith, or religion, or this would be a solicitation for funds, an urging to bomb and woman's clinic, or an email to a congressional page asking him if he likes to play leap frog.

Much of my metaphysical odyssey took place before the resurgence of Christian Fundamental Evangelism in America. I had some to my accommodation with the believers: they can leave me alone, or I could make them wish they never brought up the subject. They could have their faith and I would even fight for their right to have their faith.

But no, they just couldn't live and let live believe and let not believe. No, they had to take their faith into the classrooms, into the legislatures, into the streets, into the media. America had to be “a Christian nation” and our laws had to become subject to Christian principles (which, if they were true Christian principles, would actually make us a better nation). Our leaders had to pray in public and proclaim their faith, and wear cross pins next to their lapel flag pins. They had to plant giant white crosses on our public hilltops. They wanted to tell women what they could do, and could not do, with their bodies, they wanted our kids to believe the world was created in six days, and Noah could actually fit all fauna on a barge, they wanted to judge the worthiness of science with the mumbo-jumbo of people who speak in tongues and see the face of Mary in the guano deposits on the side of a parking garage. They want to deprive homosexuals of their rights and keep public monies from being spent on condoms for the HIV-ravaged African states. They want to take us back to the dark ages, before the age of enlightenment. And when they do that, they aren't just people of faith anymore— they are the enemy of reason.

When I went into that Bible Study class, I was “locked and loaded.”

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[1] If I recall correctly this is the requirement—under pain of mortal sin—that you make a confession and receive communion at least once a year. Or am I confusing that with the requirement that you not bite the ears off your chocolate bunny until the angel has rolled back the stone on Jesus's tomb?

[2] A boring exegesis by Carlos Casreneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1985)

[3] Erhard Seminars Training, a scam conceived by a guy named Jack Rosenberg who changed his name to Werner Erhard.

36. 4: ENOUGH ALREADY! 11.11.2006

When a semblance of democracy returned to America this past week I was about as far away from my country as it had become from its principles. I did my celebrating the return of Congress to the control of the Democrats after twelve years of ruinous political corruption by dancing a jig in my cabin on a cruise ship in the Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania. The people had spoken, and some of them were people who I had come to believe had pretty much surrendered their thinking to the knee-jerk approval of the jerk who has (probably illegally, if not immorally) occupied the Oval Office for the past six years.

I was a fellow passenger of mostly senior people from several of the countries of the erstwhile British Empire, who were sailing to and from countries where the harshness of the days of British imperialism seems faded and anachronistic. In Cape Town, where I began this month-long journey the language is English (and some Afrikaans) and there is an ugly history that is only a couple of decades past. At the other end, at the bottom of Australia, is an island where the Aboriginals were extinguished by the English who hunted them for sport. Neither the passengers from Africa nor Australia brought up the subject of contemporary American imperialism, either out of the shame of their nations, or, I like to think, just courtesy.

So it was I, who had become almost accustomed to answering the question “are you American?” with the response “Not necessarily,” who mostly raised the subject that has made us personae universae non grata. I reflexively distanced myself from the sins of the Bush Administration like a drunk testifying at an AA meeting. “Hi, I'm Jim, I'm an American and I hate Bush's guts, too.” Not many of the passengers were aware, or said anything, of the impending mid-term election. Maybe, like me, they figured there would be another corrupted process that the Republicans, with their gerrymandering, judicial appointees, and strategically-placed electoral officials, would just pull off another plebiscite worthy of a banana republic.

There was a segment if the trip—eight consecutive days at sea just prior to the election—that cut out access even to the ubiquitous CNN. It seems that the lower Indian Ocean is a place of such vacuity, that there are holes in communications satellite coverage. Not a single other ship was, not a plane overhead, not even a whale, was sighted the entire time from Mauritius to Freemantle; a great time and locus for reading and writing. So what impelled me to the on board Bible study class? It wasn't an urging to spiritual companionship, of that I am certain. The only explanation was that I was looking for some action, the sort of action that people from that part of the Republican base of “useful idiots” can provide. I was looking for the sort of action that intelligent design, abortion, gay marriage, and stem cells can provide. I wanted to kick some Christian Fundamentalist Evangelist butt. Here was a chance to leave politics well in my wake and I was looking for a good ole normative squall to sail into. I was looking for Bushies.

Things in the Bible study turned out quite different, but that's a story I will leave to chapters I will be posting in these pages in the following days. It is a story that, as things turned out, did have a sort of spirituality, a sort that I least expected. So I will leave it for now as just as “tease.”

When I returned to America a couple of days ago there was a bit of the feeling of coming into a Third World country. There on the wall at Passport Control were the snarly pictures of Bush and Cheney (no doubt to scare any “Islamo-fascists” back to their homelands) and there were just three—three!—customs officials manning the thirty or so desks, while we returning citizens grumbled that this is what you get when you pour a half-trillion bucks into the Iraqi sand. An hour later, I was standing in my socks at security, with my belongings scattered among four trays going through the X-ray, when the woman behind me said, “Look at this filthy floor! It's like we've come back to a Third World country and our government is making us clean it with our socks!” She was right, it was filthy, and the staff were tired and surly. We had to throw away our bottles of water and cans of soda, and other liquids, divesting ourselves of essentials as though we were entering a death camp. We were made to walk back and forth through the metal detector and hold our hands out and be frisked. That wasn't their fault, but at least our own country should try to do it was some consideration for our dignity.

Perhaps that lady was like the swing voters who finally said, “Enough, already, with the corruption, the lies and the stealing.” Or, like, surprisingly, the Red-staters and Christian fundamentalists who woke up and recognized that they were, in fact, acting like “useful idiots” in ratifying the policies of this corrupt administration that regards them as such. Maybe America is waking up from the self-terrorizing that the fear-mongering Rove, and the neo-cons, put into them. Maybe now they could see the un-manned customs booths and the filthy floors of the Third World country Bush has created while his friends have enriched themselves. Maybe, the lies about WMD, Katrina, Abramoff, the Shiaivo affair, the sexual predations of bible-spouting Republicans, etc. etc., just got to be too much for them, and they got their ballot, or in front of their touch screens and screamed, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to suffer these bastards any more!”

We shall see just how much of the erstwhile government of the people that was usurped by the government of the scumbags has been restored to them. But a majority Democratic Congress is a good place to start. Some of my faith in democracy as been restored. The people have kicked butt. That jerk still resides in the Oval Office, but maybe he has been served a political pretzel. The people have said “enough, already!” Now, we must hope they have the patience to wait for a restoration of the damage that has been done to them while they were soooo afraid.

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36. 2: ON WRITING FICTION 10.11.2006

My grandfather, Sebastian (see, No. 10.3, Archives), was the ultimate urban scavenger. After he died it took weeks to throw out the accumulation of decades of his stopping to pick up anything—and I mean anything —that he thought might be put to some good use. I'll give just a couple of numerous instances I can recall. Once, I asked him if he might have key, one of those old types that had a little barrel hole in them and were used to lock desks and pianos (my purpose). He came up with a 4-inch diameter ring of just those types of keys, and three fit my purpose. Another time he just picked up a gnarled piece of wood about a foot long. By the end of the day it had been affixed with two found teddy bear eyes, given a mouth with a hacksaw, and the other end stuck into a small bell that was filled with cement. Ecco! A sculpture, a work of art, by Sebastian Bianchi. I still, as you can see, have it. It's weird, but it's a treasure to me.

Since I began writing fiction I have developed a deeper appreciation for the magpie impulse. Fiction uses experience the way a Hummer uses fossil fuel, so the writer needs to keep collecting, looking and listening and, of course, jotting down all sorts of experiences and circumstances. Fiction writing is often described as permissible “lying”, but it's also stealing. I'm referring to stealing glances, quickly making notes of things overheard in restaurants, on subways, or on the street, grabbing a facial feature, or a walk, or texture or aroma, all to be squirreled awa for some possible fictional element.

Then there are people themselves. In various notebooks that I keep, especially when traveling, I have what I call “sketches” of people that I encounter. Some I have actually met, like a French guy with those skewed eyes like Jean-Paul Satre, others that I have just sat near at a café, or seen on the street. Much in the way an artist might make a sketch (this is reputed to be the way that some artists, particularly after Giotto, began to put real people into their paintings. There is a scene in the film of the Agony and the Ecstasy, where Michelangelo makes quick sketches of patrons in a taverna of people who end up as saints and such on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I recall sitting on a park bench in Paris opposite an elderly Frenchman, complete with beret and cane. He was impassive almost a statue for the longest time, as though he were sitting for the portrait I tried to paint, in words, of him. After describing him as meticulously as possible, I then decided to give him “life,” and proceeded to imbue him with a past, where he was born, who he married,, what his work was, what he did during the war, what his passions were, and his disappointments and regrets, and looking for features in his face, and his posture, to give tem physical referents. I would go on as long as I could, stealing his appearance, and lying about his biography. Maybe I would never use him in a story, but the very practice of ”sketching” him honed my descriptions. I remember writing that he had “cowrie shell eyes,” because the looked puffy and slitted, and deciding that I would make him a “collaborateur,” with the Nazis during WWII who betrayed his best friend, who was a Jew, and now he sits with the weight of that regret—stuff like that. Later, I might take his features and stick them on a priest, or some other character. It's like making a Mr. Potato Head; you can mix and match.

Locations are another element I collect. Being an urbanist I have an eye that is drawn to the way in which cities are places that are articulated by all aspects of human experience, from the towering penile edifices of huge corporate office buildings, to the way in which the most mundane elements of a streetscape might betray the aesthetics of a grocer, or the paint floor preferences of the owner of an apartment building. In a part of Hong Kong called Shau Kei Wan if saw a building that combined two colors (sort of a purple, but not quite, and sort of a yellow, but not quite) in a manner that produced a chromatic effect that I had never seen before, and was strangely arresting. Was this the work of someone who had an unusual aesthetic sensibility, or just happened to have two leftover colors from some other project (or two “found” paint colors such as Sebastian might drag out of a trashcan.) It doesn't matter, of course, but it might be used to enliven and give a location in a story something that makes it more real, and more memorable. In one story I wrote I tried to put life into tall apartment buildings in Hong Kong at night.

Back in my flat I opened a cold beer and sat on the ledge of the little bay window that afforded a fifteen-degree view of the harbor. Around me the lights in a few flats in the towers of flats made like the holes in those old computer punch cards signifying the thousands of little urban dramas played out in the tiny cramped flats every day. Over in those darkened flats and those which always seem to have bare bulbs of illumination, almost surely a couple is making love with sweat-glazed bodies; another couple ignores each other, taking with them to sleep their day's angry words; a young boy flips the pages of a porn magazine as quietly as he can in a bathroom; a young girl is cramming for an exam because someday she wants to live in a place that is not smaller than a walk-in closet on the Peak; a glitzy Cantonese television program plays to an already sleeping amah; a woman is crying into her pillow; and a sick, old man is falling asleep for the last time.

Cities have their own smells and sounds. I believe that I can identify them with a few sniffs—the smell of a New York subway; the moldy scent of Hong Kong in its wet seasons, the hint of incense in Bangkok, the exhaust of a London bus, the wooden brakes on a San Francisco cable car, the musty ancientness of Rome early on a Summer morning, or the pungent curried atmosphere of the hawker stalls in Singapore. Finding ways to turn aromas into words can be as challenging as turning sounds in to words. I don't need a picture to imagine the sound that the Paris Metro makes when the doors are about to close; or the slosh of a Star Ferry through the chop of Victoria Harbor, or the whirr of its trams; the distinctive call to prayer of a muzzein in Marrakesh or Cairo, or the symphony of traffic of a LA freeway.

As with many things experiences are best preserved from when they are fresh, and for me that means making notes. However, in the end you still have to have a story. And that's what makes it art—it is synthesis. If we put things to together in ways in which they never were or seem they couldn't be, then we have something that is truly our own creation.

When I used to rummage through Sebastian's magic basement of collectables when I was a kid I was always wondering what kinds of things I could fashion from them. Like a child Dr. Frankenstein I imagined them coming alive as vehicles, weapons, and robots. Many years later I rummage through my experiences and notebooks. Having lived a good part of one life I imagine that these “collectables” might be cobbled together lives that might have been, or is yet to be.

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36. 2: BREAKER MORANT [MR] 10.7.2006

Just up the road a ways from where I am writing this there is a military courts martial in progress. Three Marines might be convicted of murdering an Iraqi man they kidnapped from his house, executed, and then staged the scene with an AK47 to make it look as though he had attacked them. Other marines might be tried as well, but the three in the dock at present, and the crime for which they are there, took on a particular resonance to the film that I watched again in preparation for my trip to South Africa.

Breaker Morant is based ion a true story from the South African Boer War at the turn of the 19 th Century, when the British battled the erstwhile Dutch settlers who had wrested much of tip of the continent from the indigenous Black Africans. Hegemony eventually went to the more numerous and stronger British forces, but the Boers, mostly farmers who considered this their homeland, were a formidable foe that fought with mobile “commando” units that the British considered “ungentlemanly” (probably how they felt about the American “Minutemen” as well).

Like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Boers were not uniformed and, although the term probably did not exist at the time, they fit the definition of “enemy noncombatants,” a convenience used to justify—along with the tactics of terrorists—deviations from the Geneva Conventions and other “rules” of war and the treatment of prisoners. The Boers frustrated the British with their commando tactics and the British high command created cavalry units of Australians to counter them—the Bushveldt Carboniers. Their encounters often took place out in the vastness of the African veldt, where they could be conveniently dispatched.

Breaker Morant (Edward Woodward), a consummate horseman, and a poet, and two other Aussies were Bushveldt Carboniers horsemen who were “carrying out orders” from the highest command, Kitchener himself. But were scapegoated for a political expediency [1] they could never have seen coming and, after a kangaroo courts martial, all three were convicted of murder, and Lt. Morant and Lt. Handcock (Bryan Brown) were executed by firing squad. The third officer served three years on a life sentence and eventually wrote a book about the affair.

But none of this does the script, the acting, or the direction by Bruce Beresford, or even the location (shot in Australia) any justice, because they are permuted seamlessly into as gripping, poignant, and memorable an anti-war film as was Paths of Glory. One feels the same sort of Aussie resentment for the treatment their British overlords and military officers gave them a few years later at Gallipoli [2] . The fine speech by defense lawyer Lt. Thomas (Jack Thompson) about what a dirty business war is would make a good closing statement a century later.

There are other parallels between the history behind Breaker Morant and the sordid business behind the American war on Iraq. The Boers were not so much invaders as colonizers, although when the local Bushmen and Hottentots got in their way they all but exterminated them. [3] But South Africa had become their homeland, which made the British the invaders, just as the Americans are in Iraq. The Brits were after diamonds and gold, just as we are after the crude. As usual, the “locals” end up as being characterized as “inferior” and “heathens” or infidels. So guys (and now, gals) are dispatched to do the dirty work for the pols and the brass. The grunts often being “colonials” themselves from ghettos and across the Mexican border. And when the politics intrude sometimes a nice show trial is the fix.

This is not to excuse the guys who took an innocent Iraqi out of his house, executed him and tossed his body in a ditch, or even Morant, who was a sensitive man, but may have lost his earlier restraint when a friend was mutilated by the Boers. Are the Americans “under orders” as well? Well, not likely, but they have a Commander-in-Chief who condones and promotes torture of prisoners. Like the Boers their enemy are not uniformed, hence the ambiguity of “enemy noncombatants” that leads to “shoot them all and let God sort it out,” the way Rusty Calley reasoned about the Viet Cong in the My Lai massacre in 1968.

The swirl of politics, religion and warfare can make culpability difficult to sort out, but usually it's the guys as the bottom, not up where the “buck” supposedly stops, that get screwed and scapegoated [4] —you know, the current Bushian logic that there are “a few bad apples.” The current scapegoats will not be executed, that would be bad politics; but the show will go on because the prevailing cover of this administration is the charade of the application of the “full extent of the law.” It gets the problem off the radar.

So Breaker Morant has a classic, timeless, quality about it of a morality play (it was a play before it was filmed), that is sealed by superb performances, and a masterful employment of the visual grammar and temporal syntax of the motion picture. It has a resonance today with the crimes of the privileged classes who send their ”colonials” out to do their dirty work, and praise them and punish them as the politics dictate. It should be viewed with regularity, in every barrack. Anti-war films have not ended wars, but films like Breaker Morant keep truth, the first casualty of war, from being the forgotten casualty. “Shoot straight, you bastards,” Morant was recorded to have shouted just before the bullets tore into his chest. He was speaking to his firing squad, who would do their best as “straight shooters,” not the upper echelons of the British Army. By then he knew better.

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[1] It seems that the Germans, who had colonial designs on S.E. Africa, were considering coming in on the side of the Boers, who were of Dutch ancestry and hence more like them than like the English, although Germany's king was the nephew of the late Queen Elizabeth, who was like the queen termite for much of the royalty of Europe and bred offspring with the assistance of His Royal Gonads, Prince Albert, who was, Ja, ein Deutschlander himself. The Germans were thinking of using the merciless slaughter of Boer prisoners—and we know what an aversion the Germans had of merciless slaughter—as a pretext to come to Africa (like the reason they invaded Poland was because they needed Polish sausage). So, if the British could just convict and execute a few of their own “colonials” as a show of “good faith” they might be able to wait until 1914 to fight the Germans. And you thought Iraq was complicated.

[2] That film (1981), directed by Australian Peter Weir, chronicles another case of the Brits sending their colonials off to their deaths, and launched the career of Mel Gibson.

[3] The Boers were Calvinists, who believed they were ”predestined” to rule the “descendants of Ham” (Blacks) described in the Old Testament. So extermination was OK. Some Boers were also French Huguenots, and equally self-exalted , racist and metaphysically ill.

[4] That master of cowardice, G.W. Bush, made sure that he would not be liable for war crimes when he has prisoners tortured by having it written into the bill being considered by the Senate.

36. 1: HOLD THE PHONE 10.3.2006

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