DCJjune05

Volume 21

JUNE 2005

21. 8: YOU'VE GOT MAIL! 6.28.2005

To: Dragon City Journal

James,

Or Dragon, or whatever you are calling yourself these days. That “Pair-of-Cleats” stuff wasn't funny back in 1957, and it still isn't funny. So I don't appreciate your blabbing it all over the Internet.

Remember, you're older now, and it might not be too long before I get my hands (OK, my wings) on your sorry wise-guy ass, total up your “grace” points and SEND YOU DOWN where you belong.

The Holy Ghost

(aka The Paraclete, and get the spelling right )

[Transcribed from a message on my answering machine]

Actung, Editor of Dragon Stadt Journal,

It hass come to my attenzion via my vormer colleagues at Ze Congregation for ze Doctrine of der Faith zat you haff referred to me as “Ze Rat” in one of your essays. Now you are attacking ze dogma of Holy Mutter Church ass vell.

I vant you to know zat you are not dealing viss my Polish predecessor. No vay, Jose. Ziss is ze new reic . . . Pontificate. Ve haff vays of dealing vis people like you und people who keep bringing up zat business about when I was in the Nazi Youth.

By ze vay, your teacher, Sister Ignatius was incorrect. I am writing a Papal encyclical announcing zat heaven iss not zimply a place vere one looks in ze face of Gott. Nein, heaven vill be like a big hofbrauhaus in ze sky, mit beermaids mit big bosoms, und Mother Theresa iss zinging “Pennies from Heaven” mit ze oompah band, und . . . und . . . ya . . . iss zompzing like zat. John-Paul vill be there, too. He's bringing ze sausages.

I am your Fuhr . . . Pope , vedder you like it or not. Deal mit it!

Benedict XVI

From: sr-ignatius@heaven.com

To: Dragon City Journal

Master James,

I just knew in the First Grade that you would come to no good. I will have you know that I am in heaven now, ever since I keeled over at age 104 while polishing Monsignor Dolan's's Cadillac.

In your Dragon City Journal –- Don't you know that dragons are the devil's hound dogs?—you make fun of when I told you that heaven was looking into the face of God for eternity. Well, I will have you know James that I am in heaven now, and what I said was true! I didn't know back then that it would be a picture of God, or that God looks a lot like that Donald Trump person. I guess that God has some work to do and can't just sit still and be looked at.

But I love to look at that picture of him. I often ask the picture questions, but it just responds to “Be happy and increase production.” And every few minutes its announces “Josephson, Josephson, table of 12; Josephson, your table is ready.”

I guess the Lord still must speak in mysterious ways. I wanted to ask Monsignor Dolan if he knows what it means but it seems he didn't make it to heaven. I asked where he might be and they just say something about that business with the altar boys. I guess he went to the other place, and that's where you are going to end up, you naughty boy, James. And you were so cute, in an Asian sort of way.

You get yourself to confession, right now!

Sister Ignatius

Sisters of St. Joseph

P.S. I haven't seen Jesus yet, but somebody said he went back down to be in a movie for a Mel Gibson.

From: area51@roswell.com

To: Dragon City Journal

Hey Jim,

Just finished reading your Metaphysical Musings. Cool stuff. We think you're just the sort of guy who might like to hook up with us. We don't buy any of the heaven stuff either. But we do think that there are “friends” out there in the universe who want us to join them. And I've calculated that they will be coming by to pick us up on the 4 th of July from the rooftop of the Sycuan Casino. They'll be using all the fireworks for cover, so that other people won't be able to see their flying saucer.

Anyway, we'd like you to join us on this adventure. We won't need any money where we're going, so bring all yours and we'll blow it in the casino before leaving. Oh, and our friends from space just want to be using our bodies, so we will have to be dead when they arrive. Don't worry, I'm bringing the Kool Aid and cyanide.

See ya there,

Rex Klaatu

Software Engineer

From: [Email Address Witheld]

To: Dragon City Journal

Dear James:

I get great pleasure from reading your essays.

As a devout born again atheist I know that at death the game is over. We have no pre-birth experiences and we will have no after life experiences.

Heaven and hell only exist in the imagination of those who believe in these religious superstitions. As Karl Marx may have remarked, religion is opiate for the masses.

Questions for DBAA's are not about an afterlife, but - Was there a creator? If yes - Who created the creator? and - Why did it screw up the earthly part of its creation so badly? Answers to these questions may lead to the conclusion that there was no creator, or if there was the sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey Mouse, got into the laboratory.

It's just that shit happens, which has resulted in hell on earth for about 80 percent of all mankind. SH includes, abject poverty, disease, starvation, enslavement, torture, and fear from political, military and religious dictatorships.

In the mean time, while waiting for the inevitable end, have fun, get along with your fellow man, do no harm, and try to make life a little better.

As the old priest said to the young girl, "We believe in the hereafter - and you know what I am here after".

Keep up the good work.

Regards,

[Name withheld to protect the writer, who lives in a Red State]

From: aq1@cave.com

To: Dragon City Journal

Re: Muslim Heaven

Ah-lan Wa sah lan, Mr. James,

If you know what's good for you, you had better knock it off with that business about the 72 virgins. You are hurting my suicide bomber recruitment campaign.

You might think that you are safe over there in San Diego, but remember that some of my “pilots” were lounging around your city for months eating fish tacos right under the noses of your FBI and they blew it.

And if you don't knock off the 72 virgin jokes, blow it is what's gonna happen to your condo. That Fed Ex delivery man might just be named Mohammed.

Ma ‘as-sa-leh-ma,

Osama

[REPLY TO OSAMA, aq1@cave.com ]

Hey Osama,

Woooooo, Ooooooo, I'm shakin in my boots, man. You want a piece of my action, man? I'm right here, man, right in front of ya. C'mon outa you're hole, man. Bring it on, Trash Bin. Mano a mano, eh, man. You and me. Let's do it. When I'm finished with you, man, it won't matter if you have 772 virgins, you won't have the ‘nads to give one of ‘em a giggle.

I got your al Qaeda, right here , man.

Yours rudely,

jimmy9Dragons

Black Belt, Karate

National Champion, Muay Thai

Sensei, Moo Goo Gai Pan

Bcc: Homeland Security

FBI (and get it right this time, you turkeys!)

CIA

Rubio's Fish Tacos

From: jp2@heaven.com

To: DCJ

Jim,

You were right about that “good Pole dancer” interpretation.

Heaven, I'm in heaven

and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak

And I seem to find the happiness I seek

When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek

Gotta go,

“Twinkle-Toes” Wojtyla

________________________________________

21. 7: CAPITALIST ROADERS 6.25.2005

Fifteen years ago a Beijinger eyes a Hong Qi (Red Flag), the Chinese built limo that

only the privileged used to be able to afford. These days he might be ogling an SUV.

©1990, UrbisMedia

Recently, the Chinese oil company, CNOOC, made a bid to acquire America's Unocal; the equivalent of the “yellow peril” coming to siphon gas out of our SUVs. Never mind the dangers of those Silkworm missiles, this is like sneaking in and abducting our daughters (well, maybe our sons; the Chinese are not big on daughters). Next thing you know they'll be after GM and the Hummer will be called the “Commie.”

This is, of course, an occasion, for some good ole China-bashing in Washington. The Chinese are already accused of eating our lunch with their undervalued yuan , and now this, a strike at the very heart of what it means to be an American—to be able to drive your car where and as far as you like and fill your tank at will. But now the Chinese want to be just like us (isn't this what we wished for?) and there is going to be a price to pay for it, and not just at the pump.

I kind of had an inkling of this when I was lecturing in Beijing a couple of years ago. The driver who took me around in a Jeep Cherokee that was made right in the Jeep plant outside of Bejing (Buick's are made in Shanghai) drove with a Marlboro (Hey, aren't those our cigarettes?!) hanging out of his mouth, adding to the 3-pack-a-day Bejing air. I was already amazed at how much cars had replaced the formerly ubiquitous bicycles and tricycles of Beijing streets in the years I had been going there. We were riding on the 5th “ring road,” which had been completed a few months before, and it already was filled with traffic and looked like a New Jersey Turnpike after a long hard winter. [1] My “minder,” cited the increase in traffic as an index of China's rising prosperity.

He had a point. The car is an index of rising prosperity, but not just because there are more people who can afford them. American's should be able to appreciate this more that anyone. I used to upset some of my anti-automobile students when I argued that the car made the American home-owning middle-class, hence, the car is at the center of the American Dream. Planners were supposed to hate cars and love mass transit, and this didn't fit the profile.

But it's true: what we call urban sprawl today, the “burbs,” or the metropolitanized urban area, was shaped by the car. The car opened up vast areas for development (roads were cheaper than rail lines) and drove down the average price of land in urban areas. Single-family homes could be built more affordably, the car could get you to a from work, the taxes you paid for public services made your home increase in value and – Voila!, thank the Ford Almighty! – you're in the middle class. Not that there haven't been problems and negative side effects (which I will go into in subsequent essays on this subject).

And that's what the Chinese want, whether they know it or not, and they are going to need a lot more ring roads and a lot more gasoline to get there. The scary thing is that they seem to be amassing the economic power to get into second gear and, as always when speaking of the Chinese, there are so damned many of them!

Is it any wonder that crude is nudging $60/barrel?

The political answer will be to shift some of the blame onto the Chinese, a convenience that will only disguise the fact that the Bush administration is nearly as profligate and criminally negligent about addressing this problem as it has been with its egregiously screwed-up notions of cluster-bombing democracy all over the Middle East. Mr. Boosh has done nothing to force the automobile industry to bring down the average miles-per-gallon of the gas-guzzlers plying our roads.

Americans have continually raised the American Dream Bar with unnecessarily bigger vehicles, more of them, and more varieties of them. Meanwhile, their American Dream is being outsourced, exported, and purchased under their very noses while their looking in the rear view mirror to see if the Joneses are acquiring more toys than they have.

But blaming the Chinese for our energy problems makes no more sense, or progress toward a solution, than blaming the yuan for our trade deficit problems, or immigrants for our unemployment, or same-sex marriage for screwing up the mythologized American family. These are troubles that start at home, and it seems that Mr. Boosh may have decided to become a democratic “nation builder” because it makes for a nice distraction from the fact that he can't or won't address the problems in his own back yard.

The Chinese have plenty of problems as well, but they have become, in more ways than one, the “capitalist roaders” they used to take out and shoot. Deng Xiao Peng used to like to say in defense of his notions of capitalism “with Chinese characteristics” that it “doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse.” These days America must be feeling a little bit like Topo Gigio.

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[1] Beijing ring roads owes something to the concentricity begun by the Forbidden City, which lies at the center of the city. Subsequent circumferential roads seem to ripple out to the ever expanding perimeter at somewhat orthogonal intervals from the former compound of the emperors.

21. 6: BANGKOK 8, by John Burdett [BR] 6.19.2005

In a article in Harper's several years ago Tom Wolfe argued that the reality that we see on the news every day was getting so bizarre and extreme that it was outstripping the imaginations of novelists to conjure characters and plots that could compete with reality. [1] In hindsight Wolfe might have been foretelling the emergence of “reality television” where people will eat worms and push their mother's off a cliff for money. Less prophetically, rather than signaling the end of the novel, bizarre reality appears to have pushed novelists to greater efforts to stay ahead of it.

But in some places reality has always to be conflated with a sense of the unreal. Bangkok is one such place. Part of it owes to the steamy and spicy exoticism of Southeast Asia, but then Singapore would never be mistaken for Bangkok. Given a choice where a soldier or sailor might spend his “R & R” there is no choice. Bangkok 8 , is not a book that will remind visitors of the Royal Palace, Wat Po, or the klongs that give the city the air of an Asian Venice. It is the Bangkok of night, of pole dancers half glimpsed through fuchsia-tinted strobe light, of gaggles young whores trotted out behind glass, and all of the twisted, epicene, weirdness produced by the mutual exploitation of East meets West.

This story digs well beneath the underbelly of brothels and bars in search of something kink enough to out to a reality that is reputed to offer just about anything the imagination can conjure. I am not much of a reader of thrillers and detective pulp, particularly those written for guys who need some sort of macho hero. It takes some courage or hubris for a farang author to compose a first-person narrative in the voice of a native in spite of the fact Burdett's protagonist is an Amer-Asian detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. The story opens with a huge Black American ex-patriot being found in a homeless squatter area dead of bites from vipers that somehow got into his Mercedes Benz. In the process of the investigation of the crime scene Sonchai's partner, Pichai, is killed by one of the snakes from a bite in the eye. From there it is a reveal that involves Sonchai, American operatives, corrupt cops/drug dealers, and never anything like straight, missionary position, sex.

I picked up Bangkok 8 for its description of a fascinating city I saw mostly from the tourist's angle, for an inconsequential trip into its under-culture that only guys my age with more money than sense patronize. It delivers that well enough. I have a better sense of how that part of the city is structured to service such a market, and how drugs and corruption mingle to both promote and exploit it. Burdett makes much of the assertion that the place runs on yaa baa , the local version of methamphetamine. But the story of the bizarre murder kept calling for attention. Detective Sonchai never turns out to be the macho hero, nobody does, and maybe misses his dead partner for more reasons. Everybody, the Americans, the corrupt cops, the drug and jade dealers, are undone; only the whores and slave boys seem able to turn being commodified into a form of survival.

Not that Bangkok 8 comes off as some sort of metaphor or classic that stands for something larger than Bangkok or its perversions. [2] I wouldn't expect it to turn up on the reading list in a comparative lit class, more likely in something like SE Asian pop culture. But it also isn't that pulp that is turned out page by formulaic page about former CIA guys who can kick bad guy ass all day and screw sultry Asian women all night. Bangkok's reality is probably too bizarre for that.

_______________________________________

[1] “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” Harper's Magazine , November, 1989, pp. 45-56

[2] Apparently Knopf feels that Burdett might be building a readership for his somewhat improbable detective “hero.” Bangkok Tattoo was recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review (June 5. 2005) with the claim that “Burdett's contribution to the contemporary mystery novel may be his break with the genre's Puritanism about the sex trade.”

21. 5: TRAVELS IN GERM-MANIA 6.16.2005

Most any group of Americans traveling abroad will include someone like Ann T. Sepsis. If Ann is scrupulously hygienic at home, where the bacteria and microbes have an almost comforting familiarity, she is doubly on guard in strange climes and places where, as she often puts it, “Lord only knows what kind of water that was washed in,” or “they probably wrapped mummies in these bed sheets.” Her roommates are lucky to survive the chemical clouds of sterilizers, insecticides, and air fresheners.

About one-quarter of Ann's time abroad is spent disinfecting things: sanitizing toilet seats, sterilizing silverware with alcohol wipes, and, most of all, washing her hands with the obsessive frequency of Lady Macbeth. Every doorknob, railing, elevator button, and bathroom fixture is a potential carrier of “diseases that we eradicated centuries ago back home.”

Ann has had so many immunization and vaccination shots that she has more needle tracks on her limbs than a drug fiend. But, not taking any chances, she is also pumped so full of antibiotics that people might be cured of infections by just sitting next to her. Still, for all of her diligence Ann is often is one to come down with dysentery, or some other form of “revenge” against tourists, which of course, confirms the plague warnings she issues daily. Ann always feels fortunate to get back home alive, where she can properly launder her bio-hazard suit.

If Ann is a bit overzealous in taking precautions, her kindred soul, Sarah Meddick, is likewise with her clinical activities. As ready with a curbside diagnosis as she is to dispense from her astonishingly complete traveling pharmacy, Sarah picks up where Ann's dire warnings have gone unheeded.

Sarah's idea of a good travel guide is the Physician's Desk Reference. Tour managers regularly ask the hotels to give her room 9-1-1. Usually she has one complete piece of luggage devoted to her apothecary, and only the fact that she maintains its medicaments in original prescription bottles and is armed with letters from specialists in communicable diseases distinguishes her from being a ‘mule' for a Colombian drug cartel.

For Sarah a tour coach is more like a M.A.S.H unit that should have a red cross on the side. She plies its aisles each morning checking on her ‘patients': “How'd that ibuprofen work on that swollen ankle, Mr. Smith?"

Though she lavishes her clinical attentions without fee, they might cost dearly in personal dignity: “So, that yogurt having some effect on the yeast infection, Marsha? Need any more nitro glycerin Mr. Evans? Your color looks better today; next time remember to use the elevator to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. "And Mr. Bernstein, didn't I tell you not to drink any liquor with those tranquilizers. Now we're having a hard time keeping our eyes open, aren't we, Mr. Bernstein? Mr. Bernstein? Mr. BERNstein. MR. BERNSTEIN!!! WHERE'S MY DEFIBRILLATOR?!"

____________________________

21. 4: METAPHYSICAL MUSINGS, NO. 2 6.10.2005

Where Can You Find 72 Virgins These Days, and Other Questions?

Anyone who has been in a state of consciousness for the past few years couldn't help hearing about the conception of heaven for Muslim “heros” who have died in a jihad: a place where each martyr has 72 virgins and rivers of wine. Besides asking whether this place applies to women Muslims who have died fighting in a jihad, I have a lot of questions to ask about such a heaven. But I will give the Muslims this much, they at least have some specificity about what they would be doing during their eternity. I can only imagine what some Christians expect their eternity will be like—after the Rapture, of course—but I do seem to remember what Roman Catholics were encouraged lead pious lives to earn.

My elementary school nuns told me that heaven would be an eternity “looking into the face of God.” Now God must have a beautiful face, but looking at it for eternity, even a few hundred thousand years, has got to get older than Gilligan's Island re-runs.

You don't even have to be a “lapsed Catholic,” like myself to see how silly the Church's liturgy can get But why shouldn't my first grade teacher, Sister Ignatius (who looked old enough to be on loan from eternity herself), believe in such a silly notion when every depiction of heaven in church-sponsored art shows a bunch of the enraptured sitting around on clouds and not doing much else than looking into the face of God. So the most fundamental purpose of leading a pious life – to get to heaven – is based on something that sounds . . . sorry, I have to say it . . . boring.

But that's only the beginning.

One of the cardinals interviewed before the Papal Conclave went in session stated to the press that he would pray for “guidance from the Holy Ghost.” He said it with the Matter-of-factness of someone saying he flosses once a day. Now I have a confession to make (Bless me Father; it has been . . . for . . . for-ty . . . ah . . . years since my last confession) – The Holy Ghost thing has always been a big problem for me. It's tied in, of course, with the notion that there are “three persons in one God,” the HG being one of them. Unlike the other two persons, the HG doesn't ever get a face; he's a ghost. He usually gets represented as a dove and called the “Paraclete” (or a pair of cleats , as we used to blaspheme back in high school). So there are really two persons and one bird in God by my reckoning. Never mind that the other two are the Father and the Son at the same time. Confused yet? Well, you were probably never whacked on the back of your head by a nun's ruler. I'm as confused as I was when I was first whacked. And today I am still wondering such things as: do they each have separate email addresses or are they three persons with one email address? (threepersonsinonegod@HOL.com)

These are things you want to know if you are going to spend you whole life trying to get together with these guys (this guy? and the bird) in heaven.

Now let me say at this point that the Church has ways of dealing with these questions. That's their job; that's why they get to wear the silly clothing and pointy hats and beanies; that's why they get to stand in cavernous cathedrals and listen to their sonorous “In NOOOHmEEEEne PaaaaHtrees . . .” reverberate around the nave. But basically, they end up telling you that you are not a priest, so you need to “take such things on faith.” There are things you just can't fathom, but you might find out when you get to heaven. Detecting a catch 22 here? Right, I'm going to take something on faith from a superannuated Bishop who went into the seminary at the age I first started trying to feel up girls, and has a prostate the size and hardness of a bowling ball, and who's main job has been praying for guidance from the HG as to where to move some pederast priest before some altar boy's butt is so sore he can't even genuflect.

But back to the HG. The one thing I remember the nuns saying about the HG is that he was the one who was sort of in charge of “grace”. Now grace is another problem for me. Grace is sort of like metaphysical money the way I see it; you can earn it and store it up. (The Prods sometimes call it “merit.”) Where does it go? Sister Ignatius said it goes in your soul. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what grace looked and felt like (maybe that's because I couldn't quite figure out where my soul was). Surprisingly, I found several people who agreed that when they see sunlight streaming through clouds, making rays of light streaming toward earth, they admitted that they thought of grace coming down from the HG in heaven. It worried me that I was never under one of the rays of grace. If I drove toward it, is seemed to move away from me. Who was getting it?*

I am not an atheist, maybe an agnostic, but I'm more than a little metaphysically-challenged. I still say “Godammit,” and raise my eyes heavenward and curse, or sometimes say things like “gimme a break here, will ya!” (sort of a prayer of supplication) to someone, someplace. You gotta swear at something ! I know this was all programmed into me when I was little. Face it, if I had been taught that God lived down under the ground, I'd be looking down rather than up when I do these things. And, of course, if I had been born in Iraq I would be saying things like “ Inshallah ” and hoping it keeps some semi-literate Christian GI from Suggs Ferry, Tennessee from blowing my butt to hell.

Or heaven. That's where I got started with all this. I don't like Mullah Omar's concept of heaven, or Sister Ignatuis' either. I can't handle 72 virgins, and I don't want to stare at God for eternity. Moreover, I don't want to be there with Mullah Omar, Sister Ig, or those yahoo jerks who believe in the rapture.

But I don't think I want to go to hell either, and not just to spite what some of you were suggesting as you read this. What I would really like is some emails from readers giving their conceptions of what heaven will be like (you can do hell, too, if you want to). How about it? I at least want an answer to this question: What age are you in heaven? If you die as a child are you a child for eternity? If you die as a guy who is too old for 7.2 virgins, much less 72, are you a codger forever? Don't you think this is stuff we ought to know?

If I get a good collection, I can group and print them in these pages (with our without attribution). You won't get paid, but who knows, you just might be in line for some grace.

__________________________________________

*I think that Mary Alice Flynn (not here real name) in the first seat, row 4, of Sister Ig's first grade class, has most of it. She looked like St. Theresa, “The Little Flower,” and to the best of my knowledge, never let any guy I knew feel her up.

21. 3: FLASHBACKS, by Morley Safer [BR] 6.6.2005

Morely Safer has always been my favorite 60 Minutes correspondent. It wasn't just that taciturn expression, which seemed only to crack that craggy visage for a moment to display amusement or skepticism. He is in the mold of the fast diminishing Murrow generation of reporters. In his book I learned that the Vietnamese, who liked to assign Americans sobriquets, called him “Stoneface.” He seems to approve of it.

Safer's book, reflecting on his days as a young reporter during the Vietnam War, is based on a visit there in 1989 to do a 60 Minutes segment, during which he takes the opportunity time to visit places and people who have been changed (in some cases unchanged) by that conflict and the years hence. But Vietnam seems to be changing rapidly. My own visit in 1997 would display, at least in Ho Chi Minh City, even further changes toward that curious amalgam of rollicking street-level capitalism and communist hegemony, a contradiction that China has employed with such vigor. But then, Safer has his tenure as a war correspondent as a dramatic benchmark.

With the majority of Vietnam's population having been born since the end of the war, he found a country bent on getting on with its future. But it is the war, and the flashbacks of it, that was uppermost in his mind. Most interesting to this reader is the perspective of the NVA and Vietcong soldiers and leaders that he interviewed. At the top of that list is General Vo Nguyen Giap, who probably had more to do with defeating the Americans than any other person. Giap, who apparently is still alive, looked fit and sounded feisty when Safer interviewed him. He had been fighting since the 1930s and claimed he never doubted the Americans would be defeated. Safer also visited with a Col. Bui Tin who wondered why the U.S. had a one-year policy for their soldiers. He claimed that it took some six months for an American soldier to become combat effective, then they fought well for another three, but began being tentative and less effective when they had ninety days to go. Nobody wants to get it on his last day. NVA soldiers were in for the duration; they only way they would get to go home alive was to hasten victory.

A lot of NVA never did get to go home. They are buried by the thousands near the sites of big battles such as Khe San, Hue, and along the Ho Chin Minh trail. Interesting to this reader was that several of the former NVA soldiers that Safer interviewed admitted that what they feared the most were B-52s. Helicopter gun ships and fighter jets at least provided some warning and direction with their engine noise. But the imminence of the high-flying B-52s was signaled only by the absence of the choppers and jets; then carpets of bombs fell silently with no indication of where to run or take cover. Col. Bui said, “The worst was the B-52. After the raids you go around and gather up the bits, the pieces of the bodies, and you try to bury them.”

Flashbacks does get into the lingering difficulties between the North and the South of Vietnam. Contrasts remain between a dreary Hanoi and the business and bustle of HCMC, which is still called Saigon by many of its denizens, and what side one fought on stays with one with the indelibility of a war in which, literally in some cases, brother fought brother. Safer had friends and acquaintances who got out in time, other who did not. One, a spy for the South who would have been a certain target by the VC, was the last passenger to board a Huey (in the famous photo of the escape from the top of an American apartment building – not the American Embassy).

But it is the people, on both sides, who now are given a more human face than the pictures of self-immolating monks, the police officer executing a VC in a Saigon street, a screaming naked girl fleeing her napalmed village, or the dead bodies in ditches at My Lai. Safer's interviews a battle hardened NVA veteran with a smile that might morph into a war face at any moment, but the warrior still has nightmares of the war. Van Le, a novelist and former private for the South says, with sad eyes, “Any bullet from wherever it comes is shot at the mother first, not the son who is killed.” A tiny VC woman smiles brightly in recalling her capture of a American soldier and remarks that she was surprised to find him “very handsome.” Professor Nguyen Ngoc Hung, a former sergeant for the South, visited a huge military cemetery with Safer, still feeling the pain over a lost generation. A woman cardiologist who was one of the founders of the Vietcong left the Party disillusioned after the war. “Nobody won this war,” she says, “Nobody.” But she would get plenty of argument. Yet a former spy – although Safer is still unable to discern for which side, perhaps both – and former correspondent for Time magazine, retains his ambiguity to this day, masked by an engaging gentility.

In the final analysis the Vietnamese are shown to be an astonishingly resilient people, far more complex than we knew them to be and, although tough and brave, nowhere near a people who, as was claimed by one of America's generals, value life less than we do. But Flashbacks confirms that they just placed a higher value on the land they were fighting on than we did.

_______________________________________

21. 2: The Political Blunder that Dare not Speak It's Name? 5.25.2005

Elections, like wars, are complex events in which it is difficult to assign specific causality to outcomes. In a close election amidst a “culture war” that difficulty is amplified in manifold ways. With such a slender electoral vote margin in some states could it be that the slander of the “Swift Boat Veterans,” election and vote counting hank-panky, or something that energized a ”veto group” to turn off “Survivor” or the Shopping Channel and go out and vote, that makes the difference in the end. It is as much the first straw as the last straw that “breaks the camel's back.”

And so I am left wondering what Karl Rove was thinking when the first newscasts of gays and lesbians getting married in San Francisco and Boston came on the screen. Rove thinks about things politically. Gays and lesbians who want to get married may be thinking a bit politically as well, but mostly, they're thinking emotionally and symbolically. And I am neither an expert on politics nor homosexuality, but I think that mixing politics with emotion is probably not a good a good idea. It probably wasn't a good idea with a highly disputed and close national election in the offing.

Rove must have been rubbing his sticky, porcine hands with glee. Talk about being handed a nice big fat one when your guy is a certified liar to his country, and the world hates his guts. Suddenly a nice distraction, something to energize that part of the electorate that sees the hand of Satan at work in so much social change. That part of the electorate that regards sexual behavior between same sex consenting adults as an abomination now had nightly newscasts of cheerful, grateful newly-wedded gays and lesbians to reify the notion of a nation losing its moral, or at least their moral, bearings.

Bush jumped on it with promises to keep marriage hetero, and a pledge to pursue an amendment to the Constitution to do it; Kerry characteristically temporized and then came down on the side of hetero marriage, earning another Purple Heart for shooting himself in the political foot. Kerry seemed unable to learn that with those who weigh the merits of public policy on a scale of the sacred and the profane, there is no advantage in being slightly Left of the Right.

Exit poles surprised many pundits. Moral issue played heavily in Red states, more than anticipated (perhaps other than by porky-fingered Rove). Arguably, they might have made enough of a difference in one or two states – that's all it takes – to swing the election. Amazingly, Red State people were proving to have stupidity to match their moral zealotry. Never mind that the jerk they were voting for was dismantling the social structure that would be their economic and medical safety net; never mind that his tax cut was blatantly for his rich friends and not them; that his war was not going to be fought by the children of his rich friends; never mind so many things that, because these numb-skulled red staters could see past their King James versions ands their bigotyry, they were clearly not voting in their best interests. It was more important for them to keep their feet on the necks of those immoral people who “chose” the homosexual “lifestyle.”

Could gays and lesbians have waited a few more months? Might Mayor Newsome of San Francisco have had the political prescience to match his moral courage and correctness? Perhaps the thinking was that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on Bush's Iraq war and the lies that led up to it, and that what surely must have been “expected” outrage “ from the Christian Right over same-sex marriage would not be politically significant. But in close elections the margins must matter, and those of the Christian Right who might have had their problems with the lies and/or the war and who might have stayed home now had a fresh reason to come out and vote for their “messiah.” Gays and lesbians had become for them “moral terrorists” who were trying to highjack “marriage” and fly smack into the steeples of their churches.

This is not to gainsay or second guess the rectitude of gays and lesbians getting their due and the right to whatever rights and blessings marriage brings to them. This writer is on the record with that in these pages [Nov 03, No. 2.2] and elsewhere. But much of what was “gained” in that effort has already been lost or revoked, and winning a battle and losing a war is not a good stratagem. It is clear that the forces of intolerance and hatred have been buoyed by the results of the election and seek to fortify and consolidate their hold on the party they have hijacked. They have been quick and bold to take aim at the courts (judges) whom they have tagged as “activist” (they are masterful at appropriating language). These “moral terrorists” (I can play the language appropriation game, too) are honing in on completing their sweep of all three brnches of government

The brief, euphoric, and hopeful, period of same-sex marriage seems now to be even less than a Pyrrhic victory and is mired in the political blowback that it produced. That is unfortunate, but it is also politics. It was stated at the beginning of this piece that elections, like war, can be complicated. Sometimes in war it is a good strategy to hold one's fire until a more propitious moment. We will never know for certain, but it might have been a good strategy for this past election as well.

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21. 1: STEM-CELLS AND WITCH-DOCTORS 5.30.2005

Remember when all those missionaries used to go to remote, undeveloped places to win new souls for Christ? In addition to all those shiny beads and other material goodies, they used to bring what stood for modern medicine to ingratiate themselves with the “locals.” It was science in the service of religion. Well, maybe selective science.

There have been loads of books and movies one could enlist in aid of memory, films like A Nun's Story , in which (Sister) Audrey Hepburn goes to an African mission to help the sick, and also to assist in medical research being done by Belgian doctors. [1] There have been several dramatic lines that have some doctor or nurse curing the dying son or daughter of the king of some aboriginal tribe, saving the lives of the great white doctors in the bargain.

Real missionary-medical adventures have been more complex than that, especially since they have often been employed as a wedge for economic exploitation of the people that they were putatively “saving” from disease or damnation, not to mention as an excuse to trash their environment as well. Moreover, a case can be made that there have been instances where a couple of good sneezes from the white angels, or some injections of a non-medical sort, could send most or all bodies and souls on their way.

But I want to highlight one other dynamic of this process of bringing modern religion and science to the heathens. I say “modern religion” because the bringing of Christianity (Islam seems to have employed different techniques, which I won't go into here) to the aboriginal world often involves a “faith” that antedates the religions of the subject populations by millennia. So very often the bringing of crucifixes, “moo-moos,” and bibles, as well as vaccinations and surgeries, involves the obliteration of the traditional religions and, of course, those whose power and interests are associated with those belief systems.

How many times has it been the “witch-doctor” of the aboriginal who is portrayed as some vile obstruction to the march of science and the salvation of the Lord? Witch-doctor is an interesting term, combing elements of religion with the some empirically derived medicaments such as toads testicles, some leaves, a dash of secret powdery ingredient and, almost always, some spit. Scaring people well, or convincing them that their sickness was expelled in that vomit, is at least “placebo-istic” medicine. But, usually, the witch-doctor has to go. He's usually toast right after the White Bwana Doctor has brought the chief's favorite wife back from the brink of death.

There is a certain ruthlessness that science exerts on superstition and religious tradition. (Sometimes the reverse is true as well; just ask Galileo.) This seems very much to be the case with the prevailing controversy over stem-cell research. Cast in the role of witch-doctors are those politicians and pastors bent on characterizing the harvesting of embryonic stem-cells as equivalent to the taking of life, when they are little more that balls of cells. The real terror for them is that these “white Bwana-Doctors” in lab coats are the latest heterodox threat to a cosmology that sees life cast in Biblical and doctrinal terms, not it terms of its possibility and process. For the most hidebound religionists all is written, and the mind exists primarily to conjure new ways to bend the state to its will.

Stem cell research holds promise to relieve a range of diseases that afflict hundreds of thousands in America alone. But America, thanks to the lack of prescience or conscience of George Bush, may not take the lead in finding cures for them. The world, and science, will not sit still to see that promise squandered for a the sake of a political payoff to religious zealots masquerading as the protection of “life” by a man who is responsible for thousands of deaths and, who would arrogantly withhold the taxes of those who suffer from scourges like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and other neurological maladies from being expended in service of their cures.

Today it is the descendants of the pill-pushing missionaries who are attempting to bar the door to stem cell research. But these evangelists are interested in winning souls so that they can control the bodies of their converts. They oppose measures – women's choice, right-to-die, and now medical advances – that threaten their self-appointed status as society's witch-doctors. They rattle their rattles and fulminate over the threats to their old superstitions, of Genesis-generated earths and geocentric universes, of whatever does not square with the orthodoxies based on their book of fables, and they base their ministries on the ignition of their flashing powders no hell fire. They claim to serve “the truth, the light ,and the way,” but they have become “the Dark Side.”

In the end the witch doctors will not be able to hold things back. Stem cells, if they hold their promise, will come into the practice of therapeutics, perhaps even with some counterintuitive and negative effects, but they will come because they represent the side of hope that one doesn't have to die for, but to live with.

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[1] Although the canonized Mother Theresa of Calcutta has been criticized for dispatching souls to their salvation with her prayers rather than focusing on secular remedies that might have saved their lives.