Great Helmsman Pasta Sauce with Mushrooms and Duck Gizzards

The neologism one hears more and more in these days of globalization is “out-sourcing.” You know, that's when you send a job out to be done by somebody else, increasingly somewhere else, sometimes better, but usually at a lower cost because of less regulations, lower wage rates, or cheaper overhead. Lots of things can be outsourced, maybe just about anything. And that's the concern. Out-sourcing, tucked in the broader linguistic envelope of globalization, is one of the newest, and critical, political issues in America.

But is out-sourcing all that new? I think not. I think it has been around for some time. I'm Italian-American, and I have a relative who was an originator many years ago of something that we take very much for granted today—pasta sauce in a jar. When I was a kid, all pasta sauce was made by mom, right at home, in an American (OK, Italian-American) kitchen. But then, with my cousin, who, by the way, used his mother's recipe, came the convenience of pasta sauce in a jar, made by somebody else.

Yup, the precursor to outsourcing there was out-saucing. Now mom's don't have to slave over huge pots of sauce on kitchen stoves when they can go to the supermarket and pick up a jar of marinara or alfredo, right off the shelf. This remains heresy to pasta sauce purists, but the numbers don't lie. Out-saucing is a success; my cousin, and his fellow out-saucers made millions. The concept doesn't lie either: if we can get somebody else to do the dirty, hard, or drudge work, for less that we would pay ourselves, then we'll usually go for it. But it can also work for stockholders as well as consumers. If they can increase their share value by out-sourcing, they'll usually go for it.

We started out-sourcing with product assembly, which is one of the reasons so many products say “Made in China,” and then with outright manufacturing of products (made in China and a lot of other places), to, most recently, the outsourcing of information processing and other services to places like India, China and Mexico. The latter has proved to be doubly efficient since the cost transmission of the raw material for information processing is almost negligible. Now your city tax bill, or a support call on your computer software, among an expanding list of other services, might be coming from Bangalore, Mexico City, or Shenzhen.. ("Nihao, I mean Hello. My name is Wang Xiao Pei, same initials as Windows XP. But you can call me "Crash." Your call might be recorded for quality assurance . . . ")

What makes this a hot political issue is that American workers are feeling threatened at more turns by foreign labor. People who used to work on the toys, appliances and apparel that have been outsourced might seek retraining and job security in high-tech computer-based jobs. But now those are being outsourced as well. Much like my cousin's mother's recipe, most of the hardware and software were developed by American R and D. Some see this as the future for American workers, but these jobs are scarcer because they are at the top of the employment “food chain.”

What might be called “in-sourcing” is also a concern. This is where immigration, both legal and undocumented, is seen by some as driving down domestic wage rates in already low wage industries, making the Bush Administration's amnesty policy double-edged both politically as well as economically.

Much of this is the result of several of the canons of American economic ideology—competition, de-regulation, free trade, etc.—coming back to bite us. With the fall of less efficient systems, like communism and feudalism, other countries with huge labor pools are now in play in the globalized economy. American's who have wanted countries like China, India and Russia to be “more like us” may end up regretting getting what they wished for. At least we will have to find our new place in the globalized economy we helped create, and for enough of our workers to maintain our vaunted “American way of life.” Before that happens we might well see “Made in China” on a jar of pasta sauce. (Well, they do claim to have invented pasta).

Meanwhile we are likely to have a lot of political discourse on this subject, although it might be more pleasant if we could out-source some of that as well.

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5.13: Streets of Revolution (City Streets, Part IV)

I can't remember the last time I saw anyone on the streets of San Diego consulting a street map. For that matter, I can't remember seeing anyone on the streets of San Diego whose car wasn't in for repairs, or wasn't homeless? I'm exaggerating a bit, but no so much in the matter of consulting street maps.

Not so in Paris, where I have lived in 1989 and 1999, and where one often encounters native Parisians scanning the pocket-sized Paris Par Arrondissement , a vademecum with maps of neighborhoods, Metro and bus maps, street lists, and much more. Cab drivers and commuters, young and old, "don't leave home without it." And even if they do there are maps everywhere in Paris, in Metro stations, at bus stops, intersections, and train stations.

The reason for the ubiquity of these indispensable aids to navigation is most immediately appreciated by a glance at a general map of Paris, which shows that the city has a configuration not unlike that of a spider's web. The main traffic arteries of Paris fan out from several etiole (stars), or traffic circles that may form the confluence of as many as a dozen boulevards.

Paris wasn't always this way; this feature in particular derives from the 1870s, when Louis Napoleon commissioned Baron Haussmann to re-design the entire city. This Haussmann did with an authority and abandon the likes of which few city planners before or since have exercised. Boulevards were driven through narrow-streeted old quarters, sewers emplaced, trees planted, and parks created in an almost ruthless process that outraged much of the citizenry. Similar to today's epithet in San Diego called "Losangelisization," the re-shaping of Paris was referred to as the dreaded "Hausmannization."

Yet, in the curious ways of cities, the Haussmann Plan is seen today as perhaps the single-most influential public enterprise that gives Paris is special style and urban beauty. Those broad boulevards accommodate traffic and parking better than most European cities, create grand vistas focusing on buildings and monuments, and provide shady promenades lined with cafes and brasseries. Driving into an etoile may require the sang froid of a grand prix driver, but then that is precisely what every French driver considers himself to be.

But the efforts of Napoleon and Haussmann were not inspired by anticipation of the automobile. Rather, the motivation for the revolutionary re-design was revolution itself, or more precisely its prevention. Paris had had enough revolutions for several cities since the big one in 1789, and each time those revolting Parisians had frustrated counter-revolutionary forces by blocking up the narrow medieval streets with barricades. The new Napoleon had reason enough to be concerned about such tactics. He had come into power by election, but then decided to declare himself emperor, just like his more renowned uncle. So Louis and Haussmann cleaved the old neighborhoods with boulevards to make them more difficult to barricade and to facilitate the movements of troops and cannon.

As things turned out this politically inspired planning didn't save Napoleon's empire, but it did give Paris the look and feel we are familiar with today. The plan made Paris pretty alright, but it also made it pretty confusing; there isn't a right angle or simple north-south direction in the entire city.

To add a bit more spice to things the Parisians have this tendency to use their streets as a course in this history of Western Civilization. Unlike Manhattan with its numbered streets and avenues, or other American cities that employ numbers or the alphabet for street names, Parisians prefer people, places and events for street names. Taking the opposite approach as San Diego, which can't seem to get one street named for Martin Luther King, Jr., the Parisians have decided to name a street for everybody—painters, poets, politicians, generals, scientists, musicians, sculptors, writers, revolutionaries, saints and sinners. Name a renowned historical figure and he or she likely has a street in Paris. Even famous Americans like Franklin, Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy have their Paris streets. In fact, there are so many famous people, places and events to be honored that single streets have been divided up in order to accommodate them all. Thus, within a length of a few blocks the Blvd. de la Madeleine changes to Blvd. des Capucines, to Blvd. des Italiens, to boulevards Mommartre, Poissionier, Nouvell, St. Denis and St. Martin—one street with eight names. Still there are a few people who have been not honored; the current flap is whether Robespierre should get one. There's not much room left, but it wouldn't be inappropriate to “chop off” a block somewhere to give him a place on the Paris street map.

In the final analysis, between Hausmann's politically motivated city planning and the Parisian practice of street-naming, we might have seen the last of revolutions in the thoroughfares of Paris. After all, it's not easy to conduct a revolution or a counter-revolution with a rifle in one hand and a street map in the other.

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5.12: Is This a Great Country, or What? Part I

Nuptial Terrorism

Laura Boosh considers it “a very, very shocking issue.” In a frenzy of RCD (romantic civil disobedience), gay and lesbian couples are flocking to San Francisco to get hitched. To see the reaction of Laura and various sects of the American Taliban one would think that these were the acts of suicide bombers intent on bringing down the edifice of American matrimony. It is “nuptial terrorism” against the American family. Mrs. Boosh avers that “choices” for this sort of thing should not be made by the Massachusetts legislature and the mayor of San Francisco. Holding to typical American Taliban logic, “choice” means gays and lesbians should not get a choice. This time Mrs. Boosh is “pro-choice,” Taliban choice.

There are laws against this sort of terrorism. California has one, and a whole bunch of other states don't countenance queer nuptials. There's also the Defense of Marriage Act, presumably to keep gays and lesbians from stealing the SUVs of soccer mom's, and jamming the cable signals of the programs of NASCAR dads, and, of course, abducting their children and making the watch cartoon versions of “Queer Eye for a Straight Guy” on Saturday mornings until they become little “fags and lesbos.” But that might not be a high enough wall against HMDs (Homos of Matrimonial Destruction), so a bunch of righteous organizations pushing for a constitutional amendment to keep gays and lesbians from destroying American marriages and families.

She's raising campaign money for her husband, so Mrs. Boosh is coming up shy of saying that these HMDs should be rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo. No, she's saying it should be “debated.” That debate will likely take place in the courts, where HMDs will be shown to be the true threat they are to the magnificent American family.

American Taliban lawyers will prove how gay marriages have caused the over 50 percent heterosexual marriage divorce rates. They will demonstrate how gay marriages will exacerbate the already shameful rates of child abuse and spousal abuse in heterosexual families? They will document convincingly that gay and lesbian marriages force heterosexuals to commit adultery and go way beyond the missionary position. All these years we have been wondering why the American family has been falling apart, and the answer has been hidden away so well even Hans Blix couldn't find it. The “imminent threat” to the American family will finally be “outed.”

Proving their case in court, the American Taliban will not have to admit that their war on HMDs is really about symbolism, illusion, hypocrisy and bigotry. They can continue to conflate heterosexual marriage with the symbols of the flag, fundamentalist Christianity, and “family values.” They will be able to continue the illusion that the American family is fine if you restrict its “choices” to heterosexual, Christian, and fecundity. It will enshrine in law the hypocrisy that gays and lesbians do not deserve the same rights as other Americans. And, of course, their homophobic bigotry will have been transformed into a bright new form of patriotism.

Is this a great country? Or What?

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5.11: The Shangri-La Option

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again

I won't go looking any further than my own backyard.

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

After 25 years of escorting people on travel itineraries in dozens of foreign countries I have learned that some people are travelers, and others are not. To find out which category you fit into I have devised what I call The Shangri-La Test. It only requires the exercise of a little imagination, even less so if you have seen the 1937 film, Lost Horizon . It's really quite simple: you read this little story and, at the end, make a choice (although it could be a little scary because these are life-defining choices).

Ready? Here goes:

You have a dream that you are taking a short plane ride to visit your Aunt Hortense in Peoria. But shortly after you and your fellow passengers are airborne the plane makes a sharp turn and heads in different direction.

Your plane has been hi-jacked and you fly through the night toward an unknown destination. The pilot (if there is one) makes no announcements over the PA system and the flight attendants all look like clones of Linda Tripp so you wouldn't trust what they told you anyway. In the morning you look out the plane window and see huge, snow covered mountains from horizon to horizon.

You and the other passengers wonder where you are, but wonder is soon replaced with worry as the plane begins a rapid descent. A terrifying few minutes ends with the plane half-buried in the snows of a high mountain valley. Everyone is alive and unharmed, but there's a lot of praying, cursing of airlines, and anxiety about lost frequent flier miles, until through the blowing snow some lights can be seen approaching the plane.

You're Saved! And by people with beatific, smiling, ambiguously-Asiatic faces (the sort of faces you get when Western actors are made-up to play Tibetan monks). They dress you up in warm animal skins and lead everyone through a pass in the mountains. Suddenly you emerge above a sunlit valley with streams, woods and fertile farms and orchards, and a pleasant, clean, cute and orderly town. The temperature is ideal as you are lead down to the town, where—lo and behold!—you discover that it's your home town!

Only better. Yes, everything you remember and like is there: the local fast food places, but you don't have to pay to super-size your french fries; the cute girl (guy) is still next door (only he or she now undresses with the blinds up !), your local sports team is there, too, with an unbeaten record. Better yet, every jerk you ever knew in junior high or beyond has died of terminal acne. There is tranquility, abundance, amity and happiness everywhere.

Now for the best part: in this new and improved hometown of yours the way of life is so stress-free, so pleasure-filled, that you will age at only one-third the normal rate! Yup, you can live to a ripe old age of about 210 years (give or take a few depending upon whether you super size those fries). This is all explained to you by the Dalai Lama-looking guy who seems benignly in charge, a guy who looks like a cross between John Guilgud and Bruce Lee.

What a dream! But what's the catch, your suspicious nature wants to know?

No catch really, he tells you. You just have to remain in your new and improved hometown for the rest of your nice, long life. Hey, that's a pretty good deal. But you should also know, he says, that once you make your decision to stay, if you ever so much as set a foot outside of this valley land you will immediately begin to age at three times the normal rate . Sort of like a temporal balloon payment. But who would want to ever leave such a wonderful place anyway. Right?

So you have a couple of days to check out the place, and then, you can choose to stay here in idyllic Shangri-La, or to roam that chaotic and crazy world outside of the valley where you will age at the normal rate wherever you may wander or settle.

Now you wake up in a bit of a cold sweat. What a dream! What a choice!

So, what choice would you make? Oh, one other thing. If you decide to remain in Shangri-La, you won't be able to get on the web and read the Dragon City Journal . I bet that's a help.

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5.10: The Party of Selective Memory

With the release of George A-Dubya-OL Boosh's National Guard records once again the matter of the mnemonic capacities of Republican presidents has become an issue. Boosh seems to remember fulfilling his National Guard duties, which would have been nice give the fact that he was jumped up over some 500 others so that he could avoid Viet Nam. But nobody else seems to remember his being around the base and flying airplanes for large hunks of time when he was at an Alabama base. Boosh seems to have been licking envelopes for a Republican politician rather than licking those pesky North Vietnamese. And only one person has come forward to say that they saw him there, not a good sign for someone who has the juice that got him what may have been a “no-show” job in the first place.

All this has a disturbing déjà vu about it. Not long ago it was Mr. Reagan who couldn't seem to remember if, and when, he was told implicating information about those illegal Iran-Contra machinations. The Gipper might, it turns out, have been in the early phases of what has turned out to be a genuine somatic basis for memory loss, although he was famous for implying that he remembered other things with his patented jibe at political opponents: “There he goes again.” At least was able to remember his lines, which, paradoxically, were “Huh? and “I don't remember.” It was enough to get enough people to forget.

And before there was Iran-Contra there was the mother of all Republican cases of selective amnesia: Watergate. “What did Nixon know, and when did he know it.” This time there might have been something that wouldn't forget, the Oval Office tapes (No, not ones of Mr. Bill and Ms Monica, but we don't need them to remember such a serious breach of national security and constitutional threat). Eighteen minutes of crucial implicating tape just turned up blank this time. Fortunately, there was enough other evidence to send The Tricky One into exile to write self-exculpating books, thanks to the fact that at least Gerald Ford was able to remember what his job was—to pardon Nixon.

Boosh has neither Reagan's medical excuse, nor Nixon's writing abilities. He just remembers that he got paid and received an honorable discharge, proof that he might have some family political juice, but not that he actually did his Guard duty. Records have now been made public, but—and this contradicts what a retired Navy Commander friend tells me—the military penchant for keeping detailed and scrupulous records of service activity seem spotty, blank on signioficant subjects, and altogether insufficient to prove or disprove where Boosh was for months at a time. Maybe this time there are “eighteen blank” pages because there was nothing to put in them.

Such forgetfulness is an ironic trait for a party whose symbol is the elephant. Republicans need an animal that really represents lying, deceitfulness, and blaming others. Something that represents weasel ing out of things, clam ing up, and ratting on people.

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5.9: Scribo, Ergo Amo : A Valentine's Day's Musings

From Ovid and Sappho to Miller and Jong, writers have written boldly about love. But in this imaginary survey of genre writers this ‘thing called love' proves to be as perplexing for them as for the rest of us.

What is this thing called love?

" Voi che sapete, che cosa e amor? " asks Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro . "Tell me, you who know, what is this thing, love?"

Two-hundred years later a great American composer, Cole Porter, was asking the same question. Yet the answer remains, if anything, more elusive than ever. Cherubino might decide to forget the matter altogether in the age of “Sex and the City, "tough love," "civil unions," "significant others," and "co-dependency." Just about any answer carries all the assurances of a badly-drafted prenuptial agreement. Moreover, the sexual revolution has equated " making love" with "doing it ," a reductio ad libidinum that has set love's manifold meanings floating rudderless in an ether of ambiguity.

Writers ought to know something about "love." No other subject—not death, war, or money—comes even close to rivaling it (not just it ) in literature. Authors thrive in the connotative latitudes of this pesky, but indispensable, little noun. Nearly every writer has had a go at "love" (and/or it ) in one manifestation or another: motherly, brotherly, friendly, courtly, narcissistic, homophilic, platonic, sadistic, masochistic, egoistic, theistic, even macrocosmic if you will accept Dante's "love that moves the sun and the other stars". Homer, Sappho, Ovid, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Castiglione, and Judith Krantz, among legions of others have written about love, though with more titillation than clarification.

Could any two of them agree on what it means? To Shakespeare "love is blind"; to Spenser it is "the lesson which the Lord us taught"; Swinburne's "love is sweet for a day"; to Samuel Johnson it is "the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise"; for Mencken it "is a state of perpetual anesthesia". And we shouldn't slight Eric Segal's uncontrite anthem for relationships in the New Age: "Love is not having to say you're sorry."

Philosophers are definitely to be avoided on the subject. Here is Ortega y Gasset's definition from his little volume, On Love : "a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it, and positively reaffirming its being." What shameless smut!

But while we know much of what many literary luminaries thought about love through their characters, we know far less of their personal love lives, what "love means to writer's themselves, by way of their own amorous experiences. I decided the best way to find out how writers personally feel about love was to ask some directly. The following recounts a survey I conducted by telephone under the guise of an interviewer named "Mr. Cherubino" who was researching an article on "The Writers' Ways of Love". I left the definition and interpretation of the L-word to them.

Serena Palp just finished her 34th gothic romance, The Princess of Pendragon. I put the question to her on her car phone as she was on her way to her fitness club in Orange County. She was in a narrative mood.

Palp: "Well, if you must know, there's this old castle up in Big Sur I bought with my royalties. Once a month Jarred—that's my husband—and I go up there. After a candlelight dinner I put on a low-cut negligee and walk out by the cliff overlooking the ocean. Meanwhile Jarred turns off all the lights in the castle except in the top floor bedroom, which casts a beam of light on me out by the cliff. The wind from the sea presses the satin negligee against the curves of my breasts and thighs and blows my long blond hair horizontal, you know, like the hood ornament on my Rolls Royce. A desire synchronous with the pounding surf below wells up in me. I stare out to sea, and then Jarred is behind me, folding me in his powerful tree-surgeon's arms. . . [she paused to take several deep breaths here] and then [more breaths]. . .his hands make their way. . ."

Serena phoned back later to tell me that the man in the Photo kiosk she demolished had was in ‘satisfactory condition'.

Next I phoned Marshall Beebee, the entomologist whose The Passionate Garden spent eighty-four weeks on the bestseller list. The popularizer of insect intimacies was in South America researching his forthcoming Seraglios of the Fire Ants , so I put the question to Mrs. Beebee.

Mrs. Beebee: "You know, our marriage was in real trouble a few years back when Marshall was writing the chapter on arachnids. He just wouldn't come near me for months. I thought he just didn't love me anymore. Marshall is a diminutive man, you know, much smaller than me. I think that's why he loves insects, because he's bigger than they are. I tried everything, even dieting, to get him interested in me again. I was just about to see a marriage counselor when Marshall started his chapter on termites. Well I must tell you that it's been pure bliss ever since. Now he calls me "Queenie" and I call him "my little creepy-crawley." Oh dear, I've been far too candid with you. Please don't print any of this."

Too late, Queenie.

I dialed the number given me by Philip Necro's agent. As usual the master of the macabre was holed-up in his cabin in the Maine woods turning out what would likely be his fourth best-selling bloodcurdler of the year. I apologized for interrupting him.

Necro: "Are you kidding? I glad to hear another human voice. I've been up her for six weeks with every kind of demon and evil force running through my mind and I bored stiff with this silly, make-believe stuff.

Ya wanna know why I'm up here writing? I'll tell ya why: I can't get a date, that's why! Ever since my first book, The Wooby , my love life has been a disaster. Women are terrified of me. I make millions on my books, but I can't buy a relationship. If I reach for a pair of scissors they lock themselves in the bathroom. If I kiss them on the neck they try to drive a wooden stake through my heart. I don't shave just one day and they scream "WEREWOLF!" I can't get them into my bed because they think it has a lid on it. So I've got a wild imagination, that doesn't mean that I'm . . . hey! did you hear that? . . .No?. . Yah, that! Like a thump, or somethin'. Hear it?. . . There it is again!. There's something out there, just outside the door. . . . Oh God! No!. . .Please! No! PLEASE! . . . AAAAAaaaaaargh!"

C'mon Phil, all you had to do is say there was somebody on call waiting.

I reached Elena Churley-Green, Editor-Publisher of Moi at the La Costa resort in Southern California, where she was taking her weekly Italian lava mud bath.

Churley-Green: "Obviously you're not a Moi subscriber, honey, or you would have read last month's special issue on "From Co-Dependency to No Dependency". My piece, “I'm Not Your Nurse and Not Your Purse,” says it all. Read it, honey. Oh, you might also pick up a few tips from Gloria Excelsious' article, "Sharing: Why Take Half When You Can Have It All." But, since you're a guy, you should enjoy the interview we did with Garth LeMain about his forthcoming movie, "Onan the Vulgarian". Oh, honey, gotta run, I'd need to spend a little quality time alone with Number One, Moi. Kissy-kissy."

Take a year, honey.

"He's over in the corner mixing metaphors and vodka-tonics," said the bartender of the sixth gin mill at which I tried to reach Seamus McClosky, the acknowledged poet laureate of the "Keats was a wimp" school of poetry. "You aren't a lawyer, are you? He

hates lawyers, he just beat the beejezus outta two of 'em tryin' to serve him with another paternity suit."

Twenty minutes later the bard of the bottle picked up the phone. "Love? Let me tell yez something Shreebeeno or whatever the feck yer name is. Everybody thinks poets have a special understanding of love. Most poets wouldn't know love if it was a pointed rock and they were sittin' on it. Most of 'em write slop like that Barrett-Browning broad. 'How do I love thee?' Does she write 'let me count the positions'? No. 'Let me count the times'? No. 'Let me count the rooms'? Nah. 'Let me count the ways ,' she writes, and goes on with this 'breadth and depth' drivel. Breadth and depth. Sure, my place or yers, Betty?”

McClosky wasn't finished. “And ya got the French guy with the schnoz, Cyranose, blathering verse about moonbeams and flowers. If that stuff is about love, then I'm the Alcoholics Anonymous poster boy. I'll tell ya what love is: love is what ya get when ya put together a bottle of Irish whiskey, a hooker that don't give you a sob story, and a horse that comes in on yer last two bucks. Hey, that's not bad! Thanks, Beeno, I owe ya a drink. Think I'll try to cram that into iambic pentameter for my reading at the Junior League."

Well if I wasn't convinced that writers have made little progress in clarifying love (and it ) for us I was convinced that they are little different from their readers when it comes to the practice of love (or it ). My little survey probably confirmed the bumper sticker I spied on the freeway the other day: “Writers Do It, Literally.”

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5.8: The Fashion of Christ

Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, a cinematic labor of narrow-mindedness and religious zealotry is raising a lot of hell with its recent release. Yes, the Son of the Father is being crucified again for movie audiences, this time with the gore cranked up to Quentin Tarantino levels for audiences grown insouciant with the prevalence of bloody mayhem on television as well as the big screen.

We're all familiar with the story. No need to keep the end a secret so as not to spoil the outcome. Christ has been nailed to his cross hundreds of times in front of the cameras of all directors, great and small. From Ben Hur , to the Life of Brian , to Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ the Messiah croaks on those movie crosses, and if you don't believe that he will be resurrected, you can bet with assurance that he will be reprised in some future feature.

But this time Gibson caused a real controversy with his version of the passion. The wonder is that he didn't play the Lord himself. He has made his own career of playing messianic characters in Braveheart , The Patriot, Mad Max and We Were Soldiers , among others. It is also becoming better known that Gibson belongs to a zealous Catholic sect that holds to biblical literalism. So literal that the dialogue is in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin. But the English subtitles indict the Jews.

That leads to the controversy. Gibson plays right into the old Jews are Christ-killers case by portraying Pilate as just going along with the Jews wanting Christ done away with. So the Romans, among the meanest, bloody bastards around at the time, were just kvetched into doing the dirty work of the Jews. Then of course, the Christians pick up the ball and set about whacking Jews for a couple of millennia. Gibson's movie cranks up the anti-Semitism factor just at the time the Catholic Church has tardily renounced that interpretation, although I don't know about the rest of the Christian world, but I wouldn't linger in front of any synagogues without a flack vest.

Anyway, I'm no biblical scholar and will leave the fine points of the debate to the real scholars, and the not so fine points to the bigots. What I want to address are three things that have been bothering me since well before I left the Church decades ago. Thay are my contribution to the controversy.

One. So, I ask rhetorically: What if somebody didn't kill Christ? Right: the whole messianic thing implodes. He's gotta go, or you (and Gibson) got no religion. Christianity is pegged to the Savior dying for our sins. No death, no resurrection, no slavation; ergo no religion, no Pope, no Billy Graham, no . . . well you get it. (Hmmm, it's become a rather pleasant thought.) That makes whoever did the job on Christ unavoidable in the creation of Christianity. And make Judas Iscariot the most necessary disciple, and a bit of a hero rather than a snitch, if you think about it. But, no good deed goes unpunished.

Two. This leads to the De-Jewification of Chirst? You need this pesky prophet dead to have your religion of salvation, but you have to dissociate yourself from the dirty deed. So you punish the Jews for it (nobody punishes the Romans) and set about refashioning the founder of your new religion and separating him from his ethnicity. Now Yeshua bar Yusef was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew. He wouldn't have recognized his Greek name from Krispy Kreme Donuts, and I convinced, he would have tossed 87.4 percent of the jerks who call themselves Christians today out of the Temple. (Yeah, and that does include you, Mr. Boosh.)

So Christianity just sort of leaves out that this guy was a rabbi who wanted to reform his own faith, not found another, changes his name, and circumcises away his Semitic identity for something like this:

Not this:

Three: Was he gay? Well, he hung out almost exclusively with guys, but that's a Middle East sort of thing even today. Still, you can get a lot of speculation on that if you Google over to “Jesus” + “gay”. For my money he was married to Magdalen, but the Church didn't like him having normal needs, so they turned her into a whore. Rabbis could be married, but the Church likes to associate celibacy with piety (that's a good one), so his de-Jewification required his bachelorhood. But Magdalene was always around, even at the end, like a good wife and daughter-in-law. I'm betting she was Mrs. Christ.

I also have a theory on Barabbas, too, but I'll save that for after I complete my biblical studies.

Finally, Gibson reportedly sent his film to John-Paul II to get the pontiff's imprimatur on the project. But I understand that the wrong film was shipped to the Vatican. But the Pope like what he saw anyway because at the end of the movie the little lost clownfish was re-united with this father. Close enough.*

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5.7: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors(?)

The paradox of walls is that you can't wall someone out without walling someone in. As we view with some discomfort the erection of the huge walls in Israel's Wes Bank, a desperate and, arguably, necessary measure to fend off the terrors of suicide bombers, it is not without irony that a people who have, in their disasporic history, often been victimized by walls of stone and stigma.

Ghetto Street Menorah on Jewish Shop

© James A. Clapp © James A. Clapp

Foundries of Exploitation

One of the characteristics of urban life from the earliest times has been the designation of certain spaces for specific purposes or segments of the population; temple precincts, market areas, as well as class and caste differentiated residential areas have existed from the beginning. So have ghettos. But what ghettos are, both yesterday and today, is perhaps best understood from their perspective of the place that gave us the term.

In the year 1516 the republic of Venice, Italy issued an edict that required all of its resident Jewish population to relocate to a small area of that city surrounded by canals. The little island was the site of a disused foundry for making cannons. The Venetian verb to cast metal was gettare, from which evolved the word "ghetto." Ostensibly, the purpose of this edict was to protect the Jews from outbreaks of violence against them, although there had been relatively little such violence in Venice as compared with other cities.

So, "for their own good," some 2,000 Jews were herded onto the tiny island, and the two bridges to it were given iron gates that were locked at sunset. Canal-facing windows were bricked-up, and the residents were given insignias for their clothing, or special hats to distinguish them from other Venetians, to wear when they were abroad in other parts of the city. As the edict specified, this could only be during the hours from daybreak to sunset. The remainder of the time they were sealed behind the gates of the ghetto, their involuntary cloister assured by police patrols by gondolas in the surrounding canals. The Ghetto residents were taxed to pay for the patrols.

Perhaps more significantly, the Jews of the ghetto were severely restricted occupationally, relegated to being clothing merchants, shipwrights, and money lenders. This last occupation was both required and reluctantly tolerated by the Venetians. Owing to the fact that the Catholic Church prohibited the loaning of money at interest by its faithful, many Jews were restricted to this work, which earned them substantial profits, and an equal measure of opprobrium. This occupation received its renowned literary documentation in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, published seventy-four years after the establishment of the ghetto.

While the Jews of Venice did manage to establish a flourishing cultural and educational community despite the crushing density and oppressive conditions of their ghetto, they suffered the indignities of this condition for nearly three centuries, until the Napoleonic conquest finally brought down the gates in 1797. By this time, the Ghetto had expanded to conatain several thousand Jews from all points of the disaporic compass-Askenazi, Sephardic, Levantine-and with several synagogues related to different versions of their faith.

Viewed from the perspective of the time and place that gave us the term, ghettos are foundries of exploitation whose unfortunate residents are spatially and socially restricted, and limited to social roles that all but guarantee their assignment of a negative stereotype.

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5.6: Boosh's Brain: Part II

Paul Yodawitz, Dep.Sec. for Offence and evil manipulator of Boosh's brain. (UrbisMedia)

Jus' Doin' the Right Thang

There was Boosh again, this time on a television politics show, mangling logic with the bludgeon of his Texas syntax, having to admit that the substance of his Iraqi war argument no longer holds water, so now the rhetorical justification must be moved to the foreground of his causus belli . In the court of Boosh's 40-watt mind there is no difference between imputed “intent” and “action”: the mere assertion that Saddam Hussein intended to re-build his stick of WMDs is—“what's the difference?” Diane—is the same as actually having them and getting a lot of people killed on and Easter egg hunt when the chickens have already flown the coop. And now he is sitting with Tim Russert, who's smile is even less Martha Stewart-ish than Sawyer's, droning his mantra that, even if he was mistaken (?) misled (?), mis-informed(?), he “did the right thing for America.”

That's it. That's the castle keep of this front man of a sneaky, secretive, conniving cabal of neo-cons. Slap on that arrogant puss, tell the people your the one who knows best (and if you can't prove your case blame it on Tenet, or get somebody to drop a dime on Plame), even if you have to lie to the people. Hell, that's easy as pie. Most of them actually think you were elected president, then huge majorities of them were made to believe that Iraqis flew those planes into the WTC and Pentagon, they're credulous about the “voodoo” (daddy Boosh's term) of supply-side fiscal policy, so they're sure gonna buy the “imminent threat” of that nasty s.o.b. Saddam, who hangs out with his Al-Qaeda buddies, playing with their WMDs. If you have to cook the intel, put the dots so close together that the all but connect themselves, then you do it—because you're doing the right thing for America (oh, and Dick's Hallibuton stock value).

This is the good ole “the end justifies the means,” the same logic that created the “Final Solution,” Stalinist purges, the Khmer Rouge, and numerous other applications of military power and political prevarication.

And yes, also 9-11.

And that's the hard part with the end justifying the means. If this is indeed a new day, (and some pretty good minds, like Thomas Friedman's, have struggled with it) and this is a “duel to the death” of “civilizations,”—East and West, modern and traditional, another “crusade” between” Christendom and Islam—then maybe, some would say, the end does justify the means. The stakes are too high now, they say. This is not some macho European kings setting off in the 12 th Century to the Holy Land to whack infidels in a sandbox; this is everywhere, anytime, and by any means, including those WMDs. It could be us, or them. They drew first blood. So the end could justify the means, if its US who we want to be standing in the END. That's the attitude that makes the “what's the difference” lie seem OK, justified. And the “clash of civilizations,” good versus evil (axis) scenario gets presented as “factual” as those illusive WMDs. It's not up for proof or even debate, it's just doing “what's right for America.” It's the new “don't ask, don't tell.

There might be some elements truth in that scenario. But one has to be very stupid, or very scared, or both, to think that not knowing all the truth justifies making it up to suit your ends, and, worse yet, conflating your ends for those of then nation. That way, the real end to this adulteration of our democracy may be far worse than what frightens us now.

Hey, George, how about the next time you're on with Sawyer or Russert, or anybody, how about you strap on a polygraph. I just love watching things explode.

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5.5: Boosh's Brain: Part I

This first part, of two, considering the brain that might not really be there, has been seen by some subscribers when I emailed it around back in August. So it is slightly dated. But it compliments part II, which will appear in a day or so, so I am reprising it. This time it also gets a graphic.

Inside Boosh's Brain (Actual Size).

The Man Who Wasn't There: A Guide to Bushian Logic

Back in the Pleistocene, when I was a young boy, we used to recite a little quatrain conundrum. As I recall, it went like this: Yesterday, upon a stair, / I saw a man who wasn't there. / Again, he wasn't there today, / Gee, I wish he'd go away.

As a kid, I never regarded this as much more than a clever little poem. I was too young to appreciate that it might also form the basis of a logical system. The poem lay dormant in the recesses of long term memory for decades, only to be recently awakened by none other that George W. Bush.

Although I fervently wish that G.W. was a man who “wasn't there,” he is, regrettably there “again today,” and just won't “go away.” Never mind that he shouldn't be where he is in the first place, because he wasn't elected, and because there he was, President of the United States, telling us why we needed to make war on Iraq.

That war is over (sort of), but the rhetorical war wages on. That's because there are lingering questions about the reasons for it. The most recent of these is, of course, the phantom of WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, which, it seems are turning out to be more like weapons of mass deception. There are the 500 tons of chemical weapons Bush spoke of that are turning out not to be there. There are the aluminum tubes for making “nuk-u-leer” weapons, as Bush would say, that experts say were not designed for that. And, there is request for the tons of “yellowcake” uranium Saddam Hussein was supposedly getting from Niger that turns out to be forged.

These compelling bits of “intelligence” formed the basis for the claim that Saddam Hussein's mass destruction capability formed an “imminent threat” to his neighbors and to the country that had kicked his ass, embargoed him, and sent inspectors to rummage around for, yup, WMDs. Sure, he might have hidden away a few SCUD missiles that couldn't go much farther than Tel Aviv and were about as accurate as a whiffle ball, but he just might give some of this stuff to his “friends” at Al Qaeda, even though they are a bunch of religious extremists who would rather overthrow his secular government than collude with it.

Well we all know what happened to the “imminent threat.” It's no longer there. But was it ever “there” in the first place? Doesn't matter, that's where Bushian logic comes in: he got rid of the threat before anybody could prove it wasn't there. Don't you feel safer? Saddam's gone and won't be able to threaten us with those WMDs he never had in the first place, got rid of, or were “yellowcake” hoaxes. Bush made things go away that were never there. That's Bushian logic. Quod Erat Demonstrandum!

You should feel safer (if poorer). It cost you a lot of money, and it cost a lot of lives, to get rid of that “imminent threat.” You might just want to know if it was all necessary. You might just want to know if those “imminent threats” were really there . Never mind if Bush really can't come up with proof because he still expects it will be found! If Bushian logic were a system of jurisprudence you could execute a person on the basis of charges rather than evidence; you would just look for the evidence later. (Yes, I know, George is from Texas, land of executions.) So, believing that a country is an “imminent threat” is now a sufficient case for war.

What? You don't think so? OK, then, Bushian logic will then ask you to accept that the war was worth it because we rescued the Iraqi people from their rotten tyrant. Clever, eh. How could you gainsay getting rid of somebody as nasty as Saddam Hussein. So, see, we did something good after all even if it was a reason you might not have found sufficient for war in the first place. After all, it's one thing to be a threat to your own people—dictators abound who are that—but another to be an “imminent threat” to the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. But now you have to deal with the question ex post facto . It's a done deal. Kinda like a logical trump card.

I have to admit: a lot of people think that George W. Bush is not a very bright guy. But to anybody who wants to challenge him to a little war of logic he'll likely say “Bring ‘em on.”

But somehow that little poem keeps coming back and haunting me. It just won't “go away.” I keep thinking about Kim Il Jung: yesterday he wasn't there; he wasn't there today, either; gee, I wish he'd go away. I wonder if Bushian logic has an answer for than one.

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5.4: Odessa: In Reel Time

If you like to travel, there is also a pretty good chance that you enjoy movies as well. After all many of us made our first “trips” in a theater seat. Our first tour guide to Rome may have been Fellini. In London, 221 Baker Street might be a more popular tourist site than 10 Downing Street. Who knows how many travelers have gone to Ireland seeking the sweeping panoramas of David Lean's Ryan's Daughter. Today, the erstwhile USSR exists mostly in the frames of Doctor Zhivago and Nicholas and Alexander . Only a couple of months ago I overheard one American tourist whisper to another as we stood before the imperial throne in Beijing's forbidden City: “That's the chair where The Last Emperor hid the cricket cage.” She too had come with images, even if fictional, of Bertolucci's magnificent film.

There are, of course, numerous other film favorites that might be citied, among them Lost Horizon, Lawrence of Arabia, Exodus, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Apocalypse Now, Judgement At Nuremburg, The Year of Living Dangerously, Chinatown, the list is nearly infinite of times and places, past and present.

There's a kinship between travel and the cinema. Movies transport us to far away places and times past. I climbed the bell towers of Notre Dame with three different hunchback's (Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton and Anthony Quinn) before I got to do it myself. I fell in love with Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday; followed Julius Caesar to Cleopatra's Alexandria; and landed on the beaches at Normandy with Robert Mitchum's platoon. I had been all over the world and back and forth through the ages before I ever left my hometown. Movies didn't sate my appetite for travel, they whetted it. More than that, they enriched my travels with curiosity, historical perspective and a sense of quest.

The steps from the seafront The Pacific Princess, not the Potempkin

I was on a sort of pilgrimage when not long ago my ship pulled into the “Pearl of the Black Sea,” the city of Odessa, Ukraine. Odessa has interesting 19th century French Empire architecture, spas and medical clinics are numerous, and sites haunted by the likes of Gogol, Gorky and Pushkin. But my compelling interest was the Potyemskya Lestnitsa , the Potempkin Steps, where Sergei Eisenstein had filmed in 1925 the silent classic, The Battleship Potempkin , named for the ship that might have been berthed in 1905 where mine was now. From the quay there I could see the 192 steps and risers leading up from the harbor to the promontory on which the city stands.

I rushed past a phalanx of prostitutes and hawkers to the foot of the steps. As I began my ascent my mind began to screen what is perhaps the most famous montage in cinematic history when a crowd of civilian sympathizers is massacred by ranks of czarist soldiers. In 155 separate shots Eisenstein employed close-ups, long- shots, overlapping images, juxtapositions, elongating and repeating sequences. He varied tempo and bent time, applying the grammar of film to blur the line between the “reel” and the real.

This great director altered my sense of time as well. I half-expected to see the broken bodies of the victims in place of the groups of tourists. That famous baby carriage in the film, released from a dying mother to careened down the steps that are now lined with vendors carts. The bodies of victims draped over the steps where candy wrappers now cluster. It was the supreme moment of my trip: a conjunction of great urban architecture, history, and the cinematic art.

It didn't diminish the romance of Odessa for me when I learned back home that the actual massacre did not happen at the Potempkin Steps. Sometimes travel, like movies, requires a little “willing suspension of disbelief.”

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5. 3: Super Bowl XXXVIII – XXIV – XXXVI

Super Bowls are like Woodstock for the six-pack-four-wheeler set. Attendance at one is something of a haj , an attendance at the high altar of American pro sports. This most recent Super Bowl, No. XXXVIII, played in Houston, will probably hold a special place, perhaps more exalted than Joe Namath's famous prediction, as the one at which, in the half-time show, Janet Jackson, sister of The Bleached One, flashed (ahem) some tit. More has been made of this display of modestly sized, if not modestly covered, boob than of the championship game itself (never under-estimate prurient interest). But, like past Super Bowls, and past exposures of breasts, this one will soon be forgotten. Those who attended will just have a little extra reason to remember “being there.”

In 1988 the Super Bowl was contested in San Diego and I was given to ponder the civic significant of the event, although my observations might have been slightly different has Ms Jackson, and her bosom, been there.

UrbisMediaProductions

Being There

By the middle of next week it will be all over. The newspapers that were read for every bit of personal profile, prognostication and post mortem will be wrapped around garbage. T-shirts will already have begun to fade from their first wash. The TV crews, reporters, and celebrities will have vanished. Ticket stubs and programs will reside in some memorabilia drawer. Only the effects of overindulgence in food and drink and the yet-to-arrive charge card statements will linger on a bit longer. The party will be over; San Diego will have been prom queen for a day, and Super Bowl '88 will be history. But what kind of history? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all?

In nearly every historical sense Super Bowl '88 will prove to have been a meaningless event. It will not have diverted the course of history for good or ill; it will not have advanced civilization with any great discoveries; nothing of significance aside from yards rushing and receiving will have been lost or gained. Money will have changed hands, products and services will have been produced and consumed; but it will only have been a brief time-out, a minor distraction, an insignificant hiccup in the course of human events. Indeed, it will have been of no conceivable historical consequence whether the Denver Broncos or the Washington Redskins are victorious.

But, surely, there must be some relevance to an event that can bring an entire nation nearly to a halt on a Sunday in January each year. That fact alone would seem to indicate some significance. There are, of course, the obvious candidate explanations: the money to be made, the thrills of athletic contests, the compulsion to know who is really "No. 1". But it seems that there are also less obvious reasons for the popularity of such events.

The Super Bowl is what might be called a manufactured event; it is not an event thrust upon us out of time and circumstance. It flows not from the stream of history, but is a fabricated event that attempts to inject itself into history. It is a collusive construct born of a union of interest in the boardrooms of the owners of sports franchises and the media. History's inevitabilities may include war, natural catastrophes, the extinction of mankind and even the universe, but they do not include the Super Bowl.

My guess is that the underlying appeal of manufactured events like the Super Bowl is that it is an existential product. That is, such events serve a need in us to be spectators in events that provide distinctive benchmarks in our personal histories. We have a need to give our own biographies some historical distinction. It is our need to be there. It makes us feel special, members of an exclusive group if we were there Tunney beat Dempsey, when the American hockey team beat the Russians in the Olympics, or we danced at the Woodstock rock festival. Having been there gives us the special juncture of time an space, affords us a distinction that not everyone can share. It makes us feel special with our own little piece of and place in history—even if it's a manufactured history.

We are creatures of time and place. But we live in circumstances ruled by more by the clock and the calendar than by the rhythms of nature, and in which place is rapidly being homogenized by the relentless features of mass society. Since the beginning of the modern era in the late 15th century we have gradually stripped our existence of cycles and ceremonies, and we have made ourselves cosmopolites, people not of one place, but of everyplace and no place.

Events like the Super Bowl allow us to say we were there when something of significance happened, even if it is a gratuitous significance. It gives those in attendance something different from those who watch on TV--participation in an event. It is that same exclusivity which makes San Diego feel so special, because it has been chosen, of all places, as the sacred ground upon which this ceremony of contrived sacredness is to be performed.

Maybe the Super Bowl won't earn San Diego a place in real history. But in these times when cities are thrust into the grim vortex of real history by the clashes of ideologies and beliefs--cities like Beirut, Baghdad, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Phnom Penh and Port au Prince--maybe a place in manufactured history is preferable to the real thing. _______________________________________________________________________

5.2: Put Down That Scalpel!

The most prominent and commented upon nose in the universe might just be the customized job sported by singer Michael Jackson. Oceans of ink have been expended speculating on the number of surgeries it took to sculpt it, its curious aesthetics, and the psychological circumstances that lie behind such nasal obsession. But The Bleached One is not alone in his dissatisfaction with his original nose. Many other noses have fallen to the scalpel. But others have formed a positive relationship with their noses through History.

A Nose For The Renaissance

If you happen to be one of those people upon whom Nature has bestowed an unusually large, or oddly-shaped proboscis, it has doubtless been the object of comment by foes, and even friends. There is no disguising a prominent or unusual nose; sun glasses won't hide it, you can't comb your hair over it like you can with big ears, and you can't reasonably keep it wrapped in a handkerchief for more than a few seconds unless your are being tear-gassed. No, your nose has to be out there performing its olfactory and respiratory jobs, for all to see . . . and ridicule.

I should know. My nose didn't start off all that badly. Actually it was sort of cute and curt for a few years, as are most kids' noses. But by teenage it took on a Pinocchio -ish growth rate and had lost a couple of battles with fists and another with a football helmet. In consequence today my nose from a bad angle resembles Yasser Arafat's nose from a good angle (Is that possible?).

So, I avoid profile photos. I avoid photos as much as possible.

Long before cosmetic surgery became almost routine I considered various methods to deal with my unhappiness over my nose. For years I kept a clipping of an advertisement I clipped from the back of a magazine that also had ads for building a physique capable of repelling bullies who kicked sand in your face at the beach.

I practiced clever ripostes for verbal assaults on my nose. “Shut up or I'll peck you to death!” was one of my favorites. Or, “Did you skip your annual bath? I could smell you before you left your house this morning.” But, of course, these cracks only drew more attention to what I really wanted to hide.

It wasn't until college, when I was researching a paper on the Italian Renaissance, that my relationship with my nose improved markedly. The Renaissance, as everyone knows, or should know, is one of the most important periods in the history of Western Civilization. It is a period which, because of the re-discovery of antiquity and the changes it engendered in art, science, and philosophy, stands out in history like . . .a . . .well, why not, like a prominent nose.

Now I was interested in the art, science and philosophy of the Renaissance, but what really caught my eye were the noses they had back in the Renaissance. Consider this. If you have an unusual nose, you share a physical feature with many of the great figures of the Renaissance. Take Michelangelo, for example, a bronze bust of him in the Museo Nazionale in Florence shows a mashed-in prizefighter's nose. His nose actually was busted up during a fight in the artist's youth.

Michelangelo is buried in the same church as Machiavelli, whose name has become an eponym for political craftiness. As Santi di Tito's portrait of him shows, the long, weasel snout of the philosopher, which ends in a pendulous drip, may have contributed to his unwarranted reputation. Machiavelli wrote about Renaissance princes, like Duke Federigo Montefeltro of Urbino. Montefeltro was a model of the warrior-scholar-prince, and portraits, which often show him studying in full armor also show a bizarre, hatchet nose that was created by a sword slash that also disfigued his right eye. That explains why he still preferred to be painted only in profile, unflattering

5: 14: The Economics of Out-Saucing 2/23

5.10: The Party of Selective Memory

5.8: The Fashion of Christ

Jus' Doin' the Right Thang

5. 3: Super Bowl XXXVIII – XXIV – XXXVI

Being There

A Nose For The Renaissance