various

I'm so ethnocentric. I've been wishing I could get out. I'd love to live in another country, France, New Zealand, Canada even. I need a job though and I'm insufficiently marketable to transplant myself. It really hadn't occurred to me until today that although I know there are a lot of people like me that don't love this country the way they once did, there is an even larger number of people in other countries that might have once dreamed of living in America and now don't. We have always had our share of simple minded reactionary cowards afraid of change or anything they don't understand, from McCarthy to Haldeman to Rove. Try as I might to see these folks as sincere and good hearted but misguided, I've come more and more to see them as dangerous and threatening. It's simple really, they've never been in power and now they are. They've got their meaty fists wrapped around the steering wheel and they will not listen to the rest of us shouting about the cliff we're headed for. What started all this is a book a friend asked me to read, The Flight of the Creative Class.Author Richard Florida suggests that the measure of economic success now and in the future will no longer be based on natural resources or military might but instead in the creative power of its people. He talks about the creative flow into the United States that resulted from the rise of Fascism in Germany. Einstein and Oppenheimer came to the US because they were no longer welcome in their country. For many decades nations sent their best students to American Universities. For the first time in decades the percent of visa refusals is growing as more and more promising students are denied access to the US. The relegation of science to the status of interest group by the Bush administration is having a chilling effect on the interest of the world's best and brightest to make the US their home. The upshot of this most prescient book is this: US has begun an inexorable decline from its once preeminent position as the world's creative leader. By refusing access to ever larger numbers in a misguided effort to keep terrorists at bay and fostering a Fundamentalist society intolerant of any but those who read the Bible as the inerrant word of God, we are insuring the absence of the world's smartest and most creative people.

This atmosphere is fostered by "well-meaning" folk terrified of the future desperate to freeze a fast moving world in a frame familiar to them. The neo-cons talk openly of rolling the society back to a time before the Warren Court and the social upheaval of the sixties, as if that could be done. These are deeply disturbed and dangerous people and they are running our country. Heaven help us all.

Health Insurance Crimes

I really was proud of this country once. I spent my adolescence in the sixties and celebrated my sixteenth birthday in Los Angeles. Of course, I was proud of what we might become, not what we were. At the time we were maxing out our troop presence in Vietnam and the counter-culture movement looked to my na�ve eyes as if it might actually change the way things were. Huge numbers of people, led by students, were mobilizing against the war, FM radio was just being born, The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead were the bands of the day and anything was possible. We were landing on the moon for heaven's sake! I imagined a future of peace and prosperity and equality. And then came Kent State, S.I. Hayakawa, Nixon, and Watergate. The realization that the power structure saw our dreams as nightmares and that they had the power to awaken us was one of the crushing blows of my young life. Since then I've pretty much sat on the sidelines and carped. All real hope for change is gone. I used to believe in some moral pendulum that would one day swing the other way. It hasn't yet and I've been watching for it for four decades now.

Today I read Malcolm Gladwell's piece in The New Yorker about the failure of our healthcare system. A sampling - we spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, more than twice the industrialized world's average, and forty-five million people have no health insurance. The United States has fewer doctors, fewer immunized children, and a lower life expectancy than our fellow "developed" countries. How can this be? Largely because of what Gladwell describes as the Moral Hazard Myth. This is a belief that insurance changes the behavior of the insured. Insurance will cause people to go to the doctor unnecessarily. People will spend their money wisely if it's their money. If it's the taxpayers money, well, those fools will just waste it. The problem with this assumption is that it presupposes the uninsured have the money to spend in the first place. Any child could see the truth. The 2004 Economic Report of the President suggests that most people who don't have insurance have chosen not to have it. Incredible. The President's solution - have the people without insurance set aside tax free accounts to save for their medical needs. Have them buy catastrophic insurance plans for the really big stuff. Like the poor people in this country have the money! If it weren't so evil it would be insane.

But it's not, it's our country. And it sure hurts that it is.

Who Are You?

I don't possess the credentials that make for proper social interaction in my current milieu. I walked into the dining room to hear a man proclaim his degree from Williams College and postgrad from Harvard. At dinner we asked each other what we did for a living. Most everyone was careful to avoid any conversation that revealed thoughts and feeling about anything other than the food, the weather, the surroundings. We are at Cibolo Creek, a resort for the very wealthy located halfway between Marfa, a community of artists and locals mixing uneasily and Presidio, Texas' oldest town and a picture of destitution and ugliness. Here, like most places I suppose, we are defined by our occupations. A young couple in the construction business is here looking for investors we suspect, the rest look to be retired. We are a half-day drive out of Big Bend, a magnificent and overwhelming example of geological formations from multiple eons stretching back to the time all land was one congealed mass surrounded by ocean. Our colleges and occupations take on an entirely different hue from this perspective. The severe conditions, the radical rock formations, the endless vistas created a sense of selflessness and insignificance at the same time. I read somewhere that if you took the whole of the time it took to create this part of the planet as a calendar year, the Spanish settlers arrived sometime in the afternoon of the 31st of December. We must have shown up ten minutes later. How can we see ourselves as anything other than a wholly transient visitor of questionable significance in the light of the overwhelming scale of time and place one feels here? And how do we stack up against these settlers? Riding on horseback for endless days to fell trees with dull axes and patch together a structure with the few crooked nails they packed in with them. But we are the same people aren't we? The physical has certainly changed; our lives are incomparably easier. But what of the spiritual? Are we richer in our minds as well as our comforts?

These early settlers spent their waking hours making sure they would wake again tomorrow. What time could they have for expanding their cultural and spiritual lives? Discouraged by the local parson, for example, they weren't likely to transfer membership to the West Pecos Unitarian Universalists. But were they poorer for it? Are we poorer for our relative lack of struggle to survive? Where do the two of us meet?

They had theater, music, poetry, just as we do. No TV, no IPOD, though. They spent time in isolation, hacking at a dry ground or walking three miles to the general store for matches just as we spend time in isolation in our cars, under our headphones, in front of our televisions. Did they value their time together more? Was a social call a cause for rejoicing or an intrusion? Did they categorize and dismiss as we do? These too were people with occupations: blacksmith, farmer, rancher, teacher, doctor. Did my grandfather's great grandfather walk into the town hall to hear, "I own everything you can see to the north from Boot Hill?" Was he asked what he did for a living and relegated to his position on the ladder? Probably. Why?

The mullahs in Iran and other theocracies enforce a uniformity that strikes us as bizarre. Men's beards are measured, women are struck by roaming bands of religious police for allowing their hair to show from under their headscarfs. We scoff but are we so different in our desire to be surrounded by people who think, even dress similarly? Why else would we so doggedly pursue questions of employment, education, money when we first meet another? When we ask where someone lives do we ask because we intend to visit? We ask in order to categorize. Over and over again I categorize and dismiss far more quickly than I seek to know. Bush supporter? You must be ignorant of history? Foreigner - terrorist? Are we so frightened by newness or so reassured by similarity that we casually dismiss each other on the basis of utterly superficial criteria? Yes, of course we do.

Can we change? That, I suppose, depends on who you are.

But It's a Dry Heat

A friend sometimes jokes about Houston being a mistake. There shouldn't be a city here and wouldn't be if it weren't for air conditioning. Houston is sub-tropical, it rains an average of more than an inch a week, the temperature hasn't dropped below freezing in three years and right now it's 94 degrees and 95% humidity. It's so wet that in the afternoons when the ground heats up, giant storm clouds are formed from the rising sodden air.

I found a city that's worse. Much much worse. It's the fastest growing city in the country. Gambling and prostitution are legal and actively encouraged. Where the city ends, the desert begins. Real desert, the kind that kills you in a day. Dig under a sidewalk - no there are no sidewalks - dig under a parking lot and you'll strike sand. Construction crews knock off by 2 every day when the temperature is over 100, which is most days.

The mafia owned the city for a while, now Hollywood studios own it. These twin cultural imperatives of crime and make-believe have left their imprint on this place. Morality, at least the more staid morality of my father, the morality that speaks badly of sex for sale and marketing designed to get my grandparents to spend their last few dollars on the fervent hope of a triple pay slot machine jackpot, is missing. Entertainment is heavily weighted toward people who emulate other people. Elvis impersonators, Rat Pack impersonators, Celene Dion impersonators. This is where performers go to die. If watching someone pretend to be someone else isn't your cup of tea you can always find some half naked showgirls to marvel at.

Ironically, water is everywhere. Herbert Hoover dammed one of America's great rivers, the Colorado, so this desert could have water and electricity. Huge fountains shoot water a hundred feet into the air; giant blue pools dot the landscape. Waterfalls abound and bottled water awaits you in your hotel room.

I don't know this city yet, maybe I'll change my mind if I spend some time there. Right now it's just hot. Really, really hot. And it doesn't make any difference that it's a dry heat. So is brimstone.

Two Blondes

On the way out, my seatmate was on my wavelength. It's a quiet one. No chatter. She stuck in the ear buds as soon as she sat down. After an hour or so she pulled out her Mac Workbook and opened what looked like a dissertation on Detroit mosques. I tried reading over her shoulder but didn't get much. When all electronic devices were banned at final descent I leaned over and said, "I'm glad at least one person is trying to understand that faith instead of just hating it." "That's what I do," she said, "I'm an interfaith counselor. I'm coming back from a camp where we put Israeli and Palestinian girls together for two weeks and they just talked." Wow, I said, good work. Keep it up. She told me she was afraid to read the mosque study in public these days. And she was worried that young people didn't seem to be questioning much. They were way too herd-like for her liking, too ready to buy the conventional wisdom. She smiled little and furrowed a lot. She gave me hope.

On the way back my seatmate got worried when a huffing guy pulled her hanging bag out of the overhead and shoved his overstuffed in its place. She asked him if he would mind asking the attendant to hang the bag up instead of stuffing it back into the overhead. Well, I'll try, he says. His tone was incredulous, like she had asked him to put the bag inside his mouth. Or you could put her bag back where it was and find another place for your bag, I muttered just loud enough. The attendant hung up the bag and we all settled in, but not before he gave me a look I'm sure he reserved for street people asking for change.

I kept the headphones on until we were on the way down. She started up as soon as they came off. The bag had the dress she was wearing to her brother-in-laws funeral. Within a few minutes I learned her cop husband had been shot to death by a guy now on death row writing books and giving interviews. During the trial she met and struck up a friendship with the lady that co-founded Justice For All, a victims rights organization. Her friend died in the Pan Am crash a few years back. She told me a few horror stories about victims and their struggles. She was not a sad person despite having received more than her fair share of misery. She smiled and laughed a lot. But she was living her life from the past. Hard not to, I suppose, but it sure sounded like a choice she had no second thoughts about.

Two blondes, one looking forward, one looking back. One gave me hope, the other took it away.

Can We Not Talk

I sat in the airport today for two hours listening to music on the MP3 player I got for Christmas. I love watching people at the airport. Quite the cross section, from the freaked out mad dash runners to those poor souls who never can figure out how the row numbers work. Their boarding stub says ROW 27 and they check every row as if 27 might suddenly appear between 11 and 12.

I took the earphones out today while I was waiting on my plane and listened for a few minutes to the cacophony in terminal 6 at LAX. Besides the way too loud PA announcements about destroying my personal effects if I left them alone, the predominant sound was from a lady on her cell. Why do people on a cell phone talk so loud? There were several people talking with each other and I couldn't hear a word they were saying, but the lady on her cell was so loud I had to crank up the IPOD volume to drown her out.

If we ever do get visited by extra-terrestrials I hope they spend some time in the airport watching before deciding to establish contact. Chances are they'll slip quietly out baggage claim and grab the SuperShuttle back to Alpha Centauri. I'm thinking they might want to grab a cell phone, though, just to stay in touch. I wonder if other sentient species feel the need to remain in constant contact the way we do?

I went to a play last week and the guy five seats to my left kept checking his cell phone every few minutes. I could tell because that blue glow is hard to miss in a darkened theater. Some time back I was at the Walgreens listening to some woman hollering over her pink cell phone about how awful her boss was. I made a suggestion to her for a good comeback the next time her boss was mean to her. Instead of responding to me, though, she told her friend some man was trying to get into her business. Her business had up to that point been projected from Seasonal Specials to Analgesics, but apparently I crossed some sort of privacy barrier by engaging her. The reasoning escapes me, if it were a private conversation I would have assumed it would take place in private. But that's me.

Everyone I know has a cell phone or a pager or both. What are they talking about that can't wait till they get home or to work?
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing, what are you doing?"
"I'm in the bathroom, what's for dinner?"
"I don't know, what do you want."
"Are you there?"
"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"Oh, that's better, what were we saying?"
"I don't know, what are you doing?" Ad nauseum. In the last thirty years I have had maybe fifteen meaningful conversations. Not one over the phone.

And the technology, my God the technology. When "can you hear me now" becomes the basis for an advertising campaign in competition with an advertising campaign based on garbled cell phone transmissions, one would think the technology is in need of work. If real phones had worked so poorly we'd still be visiting and writing letters. If cars had failed as often we'd be invading India to make sure the price of oats wasn't controlled by a cartel of oat producing nations.

Last week I went with a couple of friends into the hill country. I warned them that their cell phones wouldn't work where we were going. They both had their phones out "checking for signal" all the way there. "Still got a signal," they would say and smile smugly as if they had defeated Nature herself. Eventually their phones went dead. I smiled smugly on Nature's behalf.

Cell phones have made constant contact possible. Caller ID allows us to hide from that contact. But it's the tool of the Devil. That's what I told the telemarketer that called to give me one.

"Free," she said, "completely free."
"Can't do it," I said. "Caller ID is evil. Any device that facilitates a decision to not engage in social intercourse through subterfuge is evil." She hung up without saying good bye. Have to be careful where you use intercourse.

There was once a time when people wrote each other letters. There was even a time when people called on each other in person. That's what calling cards were originally designed for. In fact, they served the same purpose as caller ID. Hand your card over to the doorman and wait to see if you will be received. Tremendous snob appeal. That's why caller ID is so popular. It allows you to snub people without actually engaging them. If your card was returned to you at the door you at least had the satisfaction of knowing you were being rejected and could act accordingly. With caller ID, though, you might as well pass your card through the slit in the door and wait to see if it opens. You can't tell if you are being snubbed or if the other person really isn't there.

Smart bomb, that's what caller ID is, a smart bomb. Push a button and pull away in a graceful arc slipping the surly bonds. Let someone (or something) else direct your missile into its target. If you want to kill someone it should be harder than pushing a button. If you want to reject another's attempt to communicate with you then reject it, don't pretend you never heard it. That's cowardly.

Remember how Jack Lemmon got away with killing Virna Lisi in How To Murder Your Wife? He drew a button on the jurors railing and convinced them that they could get rid of their wives by pushing that button. They all pushed it and he was acquitted.

Make it painless and all sorts of behaviors crop up. That is what is evil about caller ID, it makes otherwise unacceptable behavior possible.

Illusions

There must have been over a hundred cans in the shopping basket. Dad was worried. I'd never seen Dad worried before. Dad was a war hero. He knew everything. If he were worried...

It was 1961, back when the Civil Defense authority was active and alert. Radios were manufactured with little triangles pointing at the two Conalrad stations you were to tune in if the sirens went off. The sirens would sound every Friday at noon. We were hearing a lot of reminders about that on the radio so we wouldn't panic this Friday. The sirens sat atop the phone company switching station downtown. A twenty-story tan brick building with no windows, it contained all the electronic switches for the phone company's central routers. I was on the inside once. The sound of tens of thousands of tiny electronic switches clicking open and closed as conversations began and ended was deafening. On the roof were eight horns, each the size of a Ford Explorer. Sitting in a fifth grade classroom I would hear them every Friday as they were tested. Hear them at any other time and it meant catastrophe was minutes away. In October of 1961, catastrophe was imminent. We were eyeball to eyeball with the Russians over their missiles in Cuba and it looked like war. Nuclear war scenarios were being dusted off and new ones created. Survivability was discussed. The Cuban missile crisis ended on Sunday, October 28, when we secretly agreed to remove our own missiles from Russia's neighbor, Turkey. In spite of the agreement reached on Sunday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs suggested a surprise military air strike on Monday.

We were at the local grocery stocking up. I don't know if Dad knew it then, but Houston would have been one of the first targets in a nuclear exchange. As the cornerstone of the largest petrochemical refinery complex in the world, stretching from Houston to Baton Rouge, more refineries, storage facilities and chemical processing plants are concentrated here than anywhere else on the planet. A 50 megaton nuclear weapon exploded over the Houston Ship Channel would have killed half a million people. Our family would have succumbed to radiation poisoning within a month. We had enough canned spinach to last for three. Unbeknownst to me, Dad, like most of the population, was clueless.

One of those refineries blew up recently. The disc jockey on the radio said details were sketchy but there had been an explosion in Deer Park. He hated to start his week off with this kind of news, he said. I logged on and checked my web portal for news. They rarely carry anything local. I went to the local TV stations' websites. The NBC affiliates "Big Story" was about a murder trial beginning this week. "Coming soon" is returned when you try to access the ABC affiliate as they don't yet have a website. The CBS affiliates site carried a banner "Live Coverage of Ship Channel Explosion." One click later I was looking at real time live video.

I went back to the NBC affiliate. A banner at the bottom of the page invited phone calls from citizens with hot news tips. I called.
Newsroom, he said.
There was an explosion in Deer Park.
We've been on the air with it for three hours.
I could almost see his eyes rolling up. Yet another yokel unaware and unappreciative of the crack local news team covering "The Big Story."
You guys have nothing on your website about it and your competition has a live video feed.
I'll get it updated, he said, thanks.
Sure thing, I said.
Within fifteen minutes, "The Big Story" was changed.

Over a hundred professionals work in that news division. No one remembered to update the web site. That night they interviewed the local citizenry for their reaction to the explosion. It was loud and scary, we learned. The population around the refineries has been told the best thing for them to do in case of an explosion or chemical leak is to "shelter in place." That means stay home and turn off the air conditioning. The reason they're told that, of course, is because it would be too late for those living close by to do anything but clog the roads, making life for the "first responders" more difficult. Shelter in place - like duck and cover.

As a child I waited on the sirens every Friday at noon. They were reassuring, comforting. People, knowledgeable people, were constantly on the lookout for missiles. We would be warned if something really terrible were about to happen. I know now that siren would have been a death knell.

The dad that knew everything, shelter in place, the sirens that warn us, our leaders making wise decisions for our welfare, illusions all.

Why Lawyers Proliferate

What follows is a letter I recently sent to the folks who "insured" the poor sap who rear-ended us a few months ago. A kid, he leapt from his barely dented pick-up to inspect the damage. Clearly shaken, he whipped out the cell phone without even asking if we were OK. He called his office. "Well sir, I've had a little accident in your truck."
"Yes. sir."
"Hello?"
"Hello?"

Months later and our car has been repaired, mostly. Yesterday, at the peak of my frustration with his bandit insurance company, I wrote the letter that follows. I copied everyone I could think of, including the Swiss holding company that owns them as well as the Texas Board of Insurance. Obviously, I should have hired a lawyer on day one. I didn't.

President
Notoriously Bad Insurance Company
Dallas, Texas

Dear Sir or Madam:

On November 8, 2002, my wife and I were struck from behind by a truck owned by Evco Industrial Hardware of Freeport, Texas. Our car was hit with sufficient force to throw our car into the car stopped in front of us which was, in turn, thrown into the car stopped in front of it. We were stopped at a train crossing for a locomotive. The driver of the truck owned by Evco, insured by Victory Insurance, and underwritten by Republic, a member of the Winterthur Swiss Insurance Group, saw the locomotive and the three parked cars in time to slow his speed in a failed panic stop but nonetheless struck the left rear of our VW Passat station wagon hard enough to bend the frame and require more than seven thousand dollars in repair, so far.
I was, at the time, scheduled for spinal surgery the following month. My wife and I were planning to spend the weekend at a beach house in anticipation of a long and painful recovery from that pending surgery. Although the pressure and pain in my back was significantly effected by the high speed crash by your insured, I chose to take the high road and not pursue damages through the courts for the additional pain inflicted by the negligence of your insured. It appears I am quite alone on that high road as I continue to struggle with your company to repair our car, pay for the rental car we obtained at your instruction, and put this painful incident finally behind us.
Today is May 15, 2003 and my car is once again in the Body Shop awaiting a call from Notoriously Bad to authorize repair of the window mechanisms broken in the crash. I left a voice mail for Ms. Responsible-Not yesterday, May 14 around ten in the morning pleading with her to contact the body shop to authorize repair. Our contact at the body shop has faxed his report to two different Notoriously Bad employees last week and has yet to hear from anyone at Notoriously Bad regarding the repair.
Last night I opened a letter from our credit card company, American Express, to learn that the rental car charges from November 11 through February 8 (it took nearly four months of wrangling between the body shop and Republic to repair what could be repaired on the car) were being charged to us. Rather the differential between $23.99 and $42.99 incurred when Ms. Responsible-Not authorized the larger car to replace the station wagon's carrying capacity. My wife rides a bicycle and we bought the station wagon in order to accommodate her bike. The larger vehicle was rented as a replacement with the full understanding and approval of Ms. Responsible-Not. In fact, when we received the initial bill from American Express two months ago I spoke with Responsible-Not and she assured me it would be taken care of. It hasn't.
During the nearly four months we were in a rental car, my wife was contacted on four separate occasions by Notoriously Bad, twice called from a meeting, to learn that Notoriously Bad was no longer authorizing a rental car. She would then call Ms. Responsible-Not to be told by Ms. Responsible-Not she had no idea why this was happening.
When we finally did pick the car up four months later, we had to remind Notoriously Bad that the front end of the car was damaged. It had not been repaired. Virtually nothing has happened in this process without either my wife or myself becoming repeatedly personally involved.
While in the process of composing this letter I spoke with Responsible-Not�s manager, Eager But Feckless and he told me Notoriously Bad had trouble with Rental Company before and one of Notoriously Bad 's customers was unable to get a car rental deposit cleared from her account. Taking that as an indication that Notoriously Bad was assuming the role of victim in the Rental Agency/ Notoriously Bad relationship, I called Enterprise myself, conferenced the accounting and branch departments together and appear to have resolved the charges.
My car is still at the repair shop, my back continues to cause grievous pain, and Notoriously Bad Insurance Company says they've done everything they were supposed to do.
So, here's my question, what would you do?

Sincerely,

John W. Stiles

Do you think I'll hear anything?

bad news

When I opened the door I felt it. It was palpable, it hung in the air like smoke. He was dead. I saw it in my sister�s face, in the way my mother�s body slumped. No one had to tell me the bad news, I knew it. The whole process had taken less than eighteen months. From the first pain in his leg to the look on my sisters face, eighteen months. He was behind the counter when things started to go south. He said it was a pain unlike any thing he had ever felt before. This from a guy shot in the stomach by a .50 caliber machine gun on Okinawa.

Within a month we knew. It was terminal. No cure, no treatment, no known cause. I haven�t a clue how he handled that bad news. We never talked about it. If he told mom, she never shared it. I handled it well by not handling it. Like the disembodied spirit floating above the dying body watching, I disengaged. I was keenly aware of how I was reacting to the news, how I was or was not revealing my feelings. The bad news lifted me out of the event. I don�t know that I ever genuinely reacted. Maybe that�s the way it is. The first time you get life-altering bad news, if it's bad enough, and no one around knows what to do or how to help, it takes you away and you never quite make it back. Or maybe, if you�re busy helping others deal with it, you don�t or can�t deal with it yourself.

This bad news just kept getting worse. As the world I knew collapsed and successive waves of bad and worse news came pounding in, I stayed above it, watching. I don't imagine it looked that way from the outside. I imagine I looked fully engaged. I talked with my sister hour after hour. I held my mother's head in my lap as she cried herself out. I reassured my brothers everything was under control. And it was. Or I thought it was. Or it was supposed to be. I really don�t know. Like the poison that goes to work on your insides, you know something is wrong, terribly wrong, but you can�t see or touch it.

"I have some very bad news for you." This from the poor cop in El Paso who had the job of telling me my brother was dead. There must be some sort of training that goes along with it, right? The guys on NYPD Blue always say, �I'm sorry for your loss.� The El Paso guy didn�t say that. I always wondered at the choice of the word - "very." Is that what they use when the news is death? Serious injury probably warrants an adjective - "bad" but no need for an adverb. I had the job of telling his wife, our mother, sister, and brother. His wife fell apart, never to be heard from again. Funny, I don�t remember telling my brother or mother. My sister insisted on viewing the body. Bad idea. He was inside a hospital doorway on a gurney, covered in a sheet. Sister broke a finger on her hand slamming her fist into the wall. She took it worse than anyone. She would be dead from an Aspirin overdose within a few months. Big brother took her in and she died in his apartment within a few weeks. Carefully planned it was. The aspirin guaranteed uncontrollable internal bleeding, like a bullet in the liver, it's over. They say her heart stopped several times as they tried to save her. I wonder if they just got tired. I got the news over a pay phone in a grocery store parking lot.

Maybe it�s the speed. The radical turn. One minute you�re this person with this life and the next you�re not. And you have no control whatsoever over it. Bad news changes everything. That second you get it is the first second of your new life. And the new life is cast by bad news. Bad news you had to hear. Bad news someone had to tell you. Those first few seconds are etched forever. The chemicals that carve the pathways in the brain that are memory must be particularly caustic at these times. Deep, vivid trenches of memory.

I opened the door to my quarter of the qua-plex. Up the stairs and on the left. Opening the door was easy, the two dollar hasp I used to lock it was ripped out and hung by one remaining screw, the lock intact but rendered meaningless. As I walked into the room, I heard it. Like the pop of a paper bag under a blanket. Etched it is. And one more time, everything changed.

Car Repair

This is a miserable place. Hot and humid barely begins to describe. In the same way binge and purge is only truly meaningful if you've done it. The words approximate the experience but the real horror escapes all but the true initiates.

One summer in high school I took a job with a local delivery service. My delivery "truck" was a little Datsun pickup about half the size of an ordinary sedan. From the drivers seat, I could reach forward and loosen the radiator cap, reach back and close the tailgate. Ventilation was supplied by rolling down both windows and directing the "vent" window at your chest. Ventilation is too strong a word perhaps, as the back window of the cab was so close that the air rushing by the driver and passenger windows did just that, rushed by. Direct a swiveling vent window about the size of a postcard into the compartment and you get some breeze. But only if the speed of the vehicle was greater than 20 miles per hour. I was once so desperate for a breeze that I drove up and over the freeway embankment rather than wait in line on the access road. I swore that day, I would never operate a vehicle again in the city without air conditioning.

Last June, the air conditioner on my Jetta stopped blowing cold air. It went about it diabolically. It didn't just stop. The temperature gradually slipped up from fifty to sixty, "didn't this use to be colder?" Then up to seventy, "well, it's cooler than outside but this isn't right." Then, back to fifty, "must be the settings, something I did." This went on for a couple of weeks. Finally, nothing. I take it to a guy that races miniature cars. "Air conditioning, no way. That means taking off the dash and you only want the dealer messing around with your dash." Bummer.

I call the dealer.

Our first appointment is three weeks from today.
Have I called the doctor's office by mistake?
No, we're really busy. The flood, you know.
Ok, fine book me.
I buy a couple of nice hand towels to whisk away the sweat over the next three weeks. I drop it off. They call me that afternoon.
We can't find a thing wrong so we charged it up with freon. One hundred ninety-seven dollars, please.
Cool.
Two weeks later, it starts with the warmer, cooler, warmer stuff again. Back in, this time without an appointment.
You didn't fix it!
Allrighty then, lets shoot some green dye in there and we'll find that darned leak. Two hundred eighty-nine dollars, please.
Two weeks later...
Allrighty then Mr. Stiles, it appears you have a leak in the astral seal. We can fix that right up. Four hundred eighty-six dollars, please.
Two weeks later, I'm back again.
I was hoping it wasn't going to be the master aeon fluctuator but it looks like it may be after all. We'll shoot some more green dye in there and confirm it once and for all. Two hundred eighty-nine dollars, please.
Two weeks later...
Bad news, Mr. Stiles, it appears we didn't clean out the first batch of green dye so we can't tell where the leak is. Good news is we are not going to charge you a dime to do it right this time! Some more green dye and we oughta naill this one down.
Two weeks later and summers end is in sight. So is the cool air from the air conditioner. I'm wondering about this green dye as I've never seen it.
Hardey-har-har, did you hear that? Mr. Stiles wants to know where the green dye is? Hardey-har-har. You need a special light to see it, Mr. Stiles. We'll call you as soon as we know anything.
Two days later.
Bad news Mr. Stiles, you need a new aeon fluctuator. One thousand, three hundred and sixty dollars, please, sir.
Can I get some relief on the nine hundred dollars I paid you for the things that weren't broken?
Well, I spoke with the manager and he says the things we fixed were, in fact, broken so...
You gave it to the same mechanic every time, right?
Yes, sir, that's our policy.
So, the same guy that claimed he knew what was wrong the first time is the same guy that forgot to clean out the dye from the second time and the same guy that has now determined the problem is in the aeon fluctuator? Do you think he has any reason to maintain that all his previous diagnoses were correct and that this is just the latest in a series of sequential failures in the air-conditioning system of a three year old car?
Oh, no sir, we trust him entirely.
OK, FINE. FIX IT.
Two more days and I pick up my now cooling car. But the CD player doesn't work. And there is a scraping sound every time I turn the wheel.
Our earliest appointment is in three weeks...

The scraping sound in the steering column cost five hundred dollars to silence and had absolutely nothing to do they tell me, with taking the dash, and steering column, out. They fixed the CD player in the service drive while I stood there. It played fine until I tried to take out the changer. My new Luscious Jackson CD is stuck somewhere inside. It will cost seven hundred dollars to replace. And for that I don't even need an appointment.

The summers over now, my AC works great and radio isn't so bad, I guess.

I'm mad too, George

I've seen him mad before. When he was Governor and furious with people for driving around barriers erected over flooded streets. Staring into the camera and with all the passion he could muster, he dressed down "those people" too foolish to obey the Department of Public Safety sawhorses. It was startling. Language has always been a second language for George junior. He was on, syntax his friend, words his subjects. Mind and tongue worked in harmony and the result was several coherent sentences. No hungry people had food put on them, no malfeasers malfeased. But that was years ago. I have always suspected his difficulty with every other attempt at public communication was rooted in his utter lack of interest or understanding of the material. The recently convened four hour economic conference of business leaders, campaign contributors, economists, campaign contributors, workers, campaign contributors and campaign contributors must have been a real challenge. He rose to it, though and pronounced the economy would improve. Thank goodness, unchecked descent into the abyss will be avoided. Hip, hip, hoorah. So, imagine my surprise yesterday when I turned on the radio, and for only the second time, heard him both passionate and eloquent. He was furious once again, seems players and owners are again at an impasse and baseball is headed for another work stoppage.

I used to care. To this day, when I see the old Yankee logo with red white and blue top hat above two crossed bats, I smile. I think the first thing I noticed as a tyke were clouds, the second was that cool logo. I remember sitting on my great grandmother Tilford's bed as she, blind and nearly deaf, listened to the Jack Buck play by play. Her team was the Cardinals. My team never won the pennant. Came close a couple of times. Then, teams disintegrated and baseball became players as salaries and free agency rocketed once idyllic summers into oblivion. Players change teams like partners in a square dance. Rooting for a team now means rooting for a logo and the cool logos are all gone.

This strike, if it materializes, will be over the players reluctance to allow a "luxury tax" on high payroll teams. It might have a dampening effect on salaries, they argue. Salaries that average two million dollars a year.

The Little League World Series is coming up, the brackets have been doubled to sixteen teams and twenty odd games will make their way to ESPN and the ABC in the next few weeks. Protests over age and residency have been settled so the games may begin on time.

I coached Little League one year. One of the boys called me from the practice field three hours before practice was scheduled, his brother had dropped him off early. Another came in street clothes to the All Star game. He was an alternate and couldn't suit up unless he was needed. He was and it was the happiest day of his life. Another hit the ball into the high grass in right field. The right fielder was being assisted in his search for the ball by the first baseman and center fielder when, for no apparent reason, he slid into third. "Home," I shouted and pointed, "home!" He looked up and wheezed, "I'm too tired coach."

All gone now. What a shame.

I'm mad too, George.

Two Little Girls

It wasn't so hot today so I walked the three blocks to the restaurant for lunch. The Chicago Tribune dispenser in front of the restaurant was empty. A sign taped to the yellowed and broken plastic invited me to, "buy the Trib inside." Not knowing whether to ask for the Chicago Tribune or the Trib or the Tribune and ever ready to be made to feel stupid by insiders, I dropped three dimes and nickel into the Chicago Sun-Times dispenser. Laid out like a magazine it would make for easier handling at a small table. Sitting alone in a restaurant with nothing to read means either staring at people or pretending to be interested in whatever dreadful decor the restauranteers have plastered to the walls.

I turned through the headline pages and the latest redundancy from a government struggling for credibility in their twin wars on alien terror and corporate greed. The Metro pages went swiftly and as I turned the pages into the World section I was stopped by a four by six picture of a small child with a rope around her neck. She was naked and squatting in what looked like dirt and gravel. The caption explained. Her family hoped that the evil spirits occupying her malnourished frame would be dispelled by her enforced proximity to the Mosque. She was roped to a mosque in a rural Indian village. Her tether wouldn't allow her to get any more than her left arm and shoulder into the shade cast by the mosque's western wall. She died three days after the picture was taken, according to the aid worker who took the picture.

Earlier that morning I watched the Orange County sheriff tell the earnest interviewer from Fox that four hundred people were directly involved in the investigation into the abduction, rape and murder of the four year old girl from Stanton, California. Tonight an arrest was made.

Two four year old girls on opposite sides of the planet. One dead from exposure, the other strangled. One nameless, unrecognized, and uncounted. The other, Samantha, her face on ten thousand posters, her killer apprehended, justice served.

The Original Unnecessary War

Franco Prussian generals trained in the art of war by men who mastered it at the feet of men who answered to Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. Waging war with 19th century tactics and 20th century weapons. Tactics that called for massed formations of men marching against each other in an orgy of shooting, stabbing, and clubbing met twentieth century weapons designed to prevent face to face battle. The evolution from saber to muzzle loading blunderbuss to machine gun took less than one hundred years. Military tactics were tragically slower to evolve. The result: millions marched and ran and dove into a hail of machine gun fire. Trenches were dug, the men climbed in and the slaughter was on. This was the Great War. Battle lines shifted a few hundred yards this way and that at a cost of millions of young lives. The magnitude of the carnage was beyond anything humanity had ever experienced. The simultaneous birth of mass communication and urbanization allowed the horror to be communicated contemporaneously and shared by significant portions of the population. This was no historical event communicated to the privileged few. This was a horror vicariously experienced on a massive scale. And it was a war no one wanted. Germinated in an arms race, nations bent on saving face built in Empires now fading moved armies to borders to show their strength and courage. Generals trained in military academies developed plans for war and defense. Triggered by the assassination of a low level member of a once royal family, the Generals threw their great plans into motion and swept across borders on foot and horseback before anyone could say "wait a minute." Year after year the armies slaughtered each other until they literally ran out of men. The American's arrival shifted the balance through sheer increase in numbers. When it was over millions were dead and no one knew why.

The impact was enormous. It is no coincidence that humanity�s vehicles for expression - art, music, and literature - were torn loose from their underpinnings and charted bizarre new courses in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Painting and sculpture was no longer bound by realism, jazz was born, and the existentialist school surfaced in the writings of Camus, Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard. Our culture began not to build on the past, as had been our experience, but to break with the past. Our traditional modes of expression, along with the social mores, underwent a wrenching change. Few contemporary commentators recognized and connected the realization of what we were capable of inflicting upon ourselves with the 90 degree turn in our cultural expressions.

The nightmare of the holocaust was a precursor to the realization that, with the dawn of the atomic age, we now had the capacity to end all life on the planet. The forty year cold war was a time when our stated policy of national defense went by the acronym of MAD (mutually assured destruction). The horrors of the mass destruction of WWI impacted on us in ways that we could not, and probably still cannot, fathom. Likewise, the specter of a burned out shell of a planet hurtling through the cosmos tore through the psychic scar tissue formed after WWI and created a new set of psychic wounds.

The current picture of a government at war with its leaders and people, an educational system strained and failing, religious zealotry and fundamentalism run amuck, and continued ethnic conflicts manifesting themselves in the basest and most brutal ways imaginable, is a picture none of us can truly grasp. We see parts of the picture just as we received reports from the front lines eighty years ago. We know it�s bad but we are incapable of truly assessing the impact.

Look to our vehicles of expression. Look to television and film, professional sports, the internet. A television program featuring the tales of a sex crimes unit, films finding ever more visually stunning methods of depicting mayhem, the phenomenal popularity of faux-wrestling, our apparent helplessness to control the dissemination and proliferation of pornography on the internet. The most successful magazines celebrate fame, the most successful politicians behave like attack dogs.

Thirteen year olds convicted of murder. Public discussions of the appropriateness of incarcerating children with adult criminals. Decency, common sense, honesty, faith, all challenged and found lacking. The social mores traditionally inculcated in the young and carried forward in the culture are disintegrating. In the absence of any clear image of right, in the sense of hopelessness that grows daily, what should we expect?

When our children mature, they do so without any sense of the commonality of humanity. Belief systems formally based on providing for the common good or founded in an unchanging sense of right and wrong are weakened and collapsing. The cult of the individual and the failure of the collective institutions of the culture give rise to the new humanity - ungrounded, self seeking, without concern for future generations.

Sociopath used to be a term applicable to that rare individual whose sense of right and wrong were missing. This was in a world where social mores communicated an implicit if not explicit sense of right and wrong. These terms were fixed on a continuum and one could measure or be measured accordingly. That continuum has turned in on itself and absolute measurements fail. Behaviors begin to be measured against other behaviors and not against principle.

In a world where right and wrong become relative, if not meaningless, the sociopath becomes the norm.

Lawyers: A Higher Calling 04.12.02

Before Moses and the Tablets was Hammurbai and the Pillar. Hammurbai, absolute ruler of Babylon, ordered his law reduced to a series of hieroglyphics and carved into a pillar on the outskirts of town. Not everyone could read hieroglyphics, though, so some enterprising young scribe set up shop at the foot of the pillar of Hammurbai and offered his services explaining the Code to any interested passerby. History's first lawyer, and our first experience with the law as document. Back then, there were no checks and balances, no Hobbesian concept of "the consent of the governed." These would come four thousand years later. But Hammurbai's Code was the beginning of the law as something separate, an objective reality.

The fabric of society is held together by the threads of this objective reality. Those threads are the laws we live by. Laws represent the social mores and moral imperatives that allow us to live in relative harmony in society. Without law, and the will to abide by and enforce the law, we revert to something less than civilized. This preciously delicate construct between the members of a society, to abide by and be subject to rules of behavior, exists at the behest of each of us. Should any member or group decide to no longer recognize this construct, the social contract, or law, is broken. The creation of laws and their application in the system of justice is the province of lawyers. Lawyers write the law, lawyers defend and prosecute violations, and lawyers interpret and apply the law when they assume the role of judge. Like physicians, the functions performed are so critical as to require the state's participation in licensing this select group of women and men.

Following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the knowledge of nuclear power began to be turned to peacetime use, the US government determined that the public interest would best be served by creating a body to oversee and regulate the burgeoning nuclear industry. The men and women responsible for creating this regulatory body had little knowledge of the business (nuclear power) they were charged with regulating. Their solution was to conduct a series of hearings before Congress and invite representatives from the major power companies to testify as to the proper methods for regulating them. The underlying assumptions were, one, the men and women responsible for the profitability of their company will testify in the public interest before their corporate or personal interest and, two, they will know enough about the dangers of nuclear power to offer solid recommendations on how to best protect the public interest. Both assumptions were incorrect. The nation's power companies have repeatedly behaved in ways that give pause to ordinary citizens. Take the example of Pacific Gas & Electric as portrayed in the recent movie, Erin Brokavich. A true story of PG & E deliberate and long term discharge of deadly chemical waste into the ground water of the community unfortunate enough to be their neighbor. PG & E was one of the principal witnesses in the government's hearings in the 1950's as to the best method of insuring safe development of nuclear power. As to the assumption that these people would be best suited to understand the dangers of nuclear radiation, the US military was, at that time, still lining up troops in the desert to witness nuclear blasts. No one knew the dangers of nuclear radiation then, nor do we now. In short, even had the utility companies known the dangers of nuclear radiation, it is highly unlikely they would have shared that information with a government body in a position to regulate them.

The creation, maintenance, and protection of our legal system is no less important than the application of nuclear power. Our legal system, in fact, is the very foundation of what we think of as our civilized society. A nuclear accident might have disastrous results for hundreds of thousands of our citizenry, but the deterioration or abuse of our legal system effects every single member of our society. The creation, maintenance, and protection of our system of law and justice is vested with our society's lawyers. Like Bishops of the medieval church or the Senators of the Roman republic, lawyers are the keepers of the keys to our system of justice, and by extension, our very social order. They hold the secrets, possess the power, and wield the influence to protect or to do great harm. And to what standards are they held? What is the state of our legal system? Is the law used to protect the public good? Defend the lowly from the unjust attacks of the mighty? Or has the law become the bludgeon of the rich and powerful? And the tool of the greedy? To recant a list of abuses our system suffers at the hands of unscrupulous lawyers would serve no useful purpose. Consider, though, the following:

Cups of coffee now come with warning labels that coffee is hot. Warnings on mascara applicators advise against sticking the applicator in your eye. Fans carry labels about sticking your fingers in the turning blades. These warnings are not about the public safety. They are necessitated to help reduce liability when the inevitable lawsuit comes.

If, as a young attorney, you expect to have any real chance of moving up the ladder in your firm, you better be billing clients at least 2,000 hours per year. Whether you have the clients to bill or not. The pressure to bill in excess of eight hours a day creates an atmosphere where padding your clients bill becomes the norm.

Two currently successful television shows are The Practice and Ally McBeal. Both these programs portray lawyers as doing any and everything they can to win their clients cases. The object is to win at any cost. The Lawyers are trained to use all the tools at their disposal to win. Whether they are prosecuting or defending, the object is to win. The truth is secondary.

Companies routinely settle lawsuits because they are not worth the money to defend. Lawyers, aware of this practice, sue companies for ever more spurious reasons. Individuals without sufficient financial resources to pay attorneys fees often are unable to gain redress for wrongs through our justice system. Lawyers will employ a "deep pockets" strategy of forcing the other party to consume their resources in costly legal maneuvering. The party with the deepest pockets (most money) wins.

These are issues not of right and wrong or justice or even fairness, these are issues of greed. From the attorney able to convince a woman in California to sue McDonalds because she spilled hot coffee on herself while driving, to the recently graduated counselor adding hours to her billings just to "get ahead," to the shills for the rich and powerful, attorneys of today are in the business for the money and are willing to do whatever it takes to make it.

Lawyers are entrusted with the responsibility for making our system of justice viable and legitimate. They must be held to a higher standard. They must hold themselves to a higher standard. If they are unwilling or unable to do so, the society, for its own sake, must take the steps necessary to protect itself. We must develop the will and the means to do so. No less than our very survival depends on it.

Public Radio 07.27.01

Tuned into the local public radio station this morning, and heard National Public Radio's Bob Edwards do a piece on advertising overload. Advertising on ball park walls, blimps, taxicabs, even the darkened interior wall of the new Atlanta subway. The evening before, on All Things Considered, I listened to a story about advertising on horse racing jockeys. A ten square inch patch at the base of the spine was delineated in the matter before the Horse Racing Confederation of California (or whatever their union is called) as an appropriate place for an ad. The NPR interviewer asked the fellow she was interviewing if that meant the jockey's derriere. He was clearly embarrassed by the question. She asked if this would allow a Nike "Swoosh" to be shaved into the horse's backside. He sidestepped.

Both these stories were followed by the local station break. The local station break consists of telling us who makes all this possible, the traffic and weather, and local news.

Who makes this possible if, of course, "listeners like you," and "Sedco Thorax, the deep water drilling company that's never out of it's depth. Sedco Thorax recently acquired Natural Resource Gobbler dot com, and together are scouring the planet for natural resources and digging wells deeper than God..." etc. The other day, "public radio" was brought to me by Rich People's Bank, "dedicated to helping those blessed with wealth to stay that way." Are we supposed to be so stupid that we don't realize these are commercials? Just like "commercial" radio? The only difference is these are read by the local on-air personality (see below for how delightful I think that is).

The traffic and weather portion has always been a mystery to me. So the freeway I'm on is stop and go from here to there. What am I supposed to do with that information? Take surface streets? At 6 PM? Half the time they don't know about the twelve car fatal accident that occurred an hour ago and brought all traffic to a full stop. Or they tell you about a "lost load of carrots blocking the two right lanes." When you get there, of course, all that remains is some bunny rabbit roadkill. The "lost load" occurred six hours ago. Completely useless information and often completely wrong. And the weather. What do I do with a fifty-percent chance of rain? Cancel half my picnic? And where do they get these fifteen year old meteorologists?

Local news more often than not consists of the guy who outlasted everyone else at the radio station reading the PR Newswire. The PR Newswire, if you don't know, is what companies that can't afford a media department use to "get the word out" about their latest invention/acquisition/promotion. Or, PR Newsire is what well connected companies with no real news use to keep their name in front of us poor suckers listening to "public radio." "Compaq Computer announced today their new Placenta 3000 line of personal computers will process information faster than ever. Their spokesperson, Dan Quayle says, 'our Placenta 3000 line will process information faster than ever..' For more information call Dan Quayle at blah blah blah blah."

I might tolerate all this if it weren't for the announcers (disc jockey doesn't apply and "on-air personality" is too generous). The local announcers adopt a "radio voice" that consists of talking VERY softly while dropping the treble levels and boosting the bass. The result is, we get to hear the wet clucking sound of his tongue leaving the side of his mouth after every pause and the whoosh of his inhale before every sentence. Telling you about this, if you have never noticed it, is, I'm sorry, the height of cruelty. Once you notice these sounds it soon becomes all you can hear. Like when some guy told me Dan Rather never blinks when he's on camera. I haven't heard a word Dan's said since then. I'm too busy watching for the blink that never comes.

If you can't stand "commercial radio" and the local "public radio" station has become too commercial, the only alternative left to you is the local Pacifica station. Pacifica is, in fact, listener and not corporate supported. The only problem with Pacifica is you have to tolerate a political agenda somewhere left of Saturn.

I have an idea - silence...

AIDS at 20 06.03.01

In the June 5, 1981 edition of the Center for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, of the UCLA Medical Center, described the appearance of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in five previously healthy young men. Caused by a parasite present in everyone, but normally held in check by our immune system, the manifestation of this disease in a cluster of Dr. Gottlieb's patients was reason for concern. The publication of his article in the CDC's weekly report was the first public announcement that some "new" disease had surfaced. Dubbed GRID (Gay-Related Immunnodeficiency Disease) by the American medical community, this new disease would soon undergo a name change to AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) as incidence of the disease was discovered outside the gay community. Next observed in hemophiliacs and then injecting drug-users, the medical community would soon learn the disease would not restrict itself to such narrow boundaries.

Today, out of 100 people infected with aids, 5 live in Western Europe or North America, 2 in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 2 in East Asia, 1 in the Caribbean, 4 in Latin America, 16 in Southeast Asia, and 70 in sub-Saharan Africa. While some alarming signs of an increase in infection rates have surfaced in the US in the last two years, AIDS has become a disease of the third world.

Half the dead are women. More than half of those who will die in the next few years are women. Thirteen million children have been orphaned by AIDS.

One in every three fifteen-year-old boys living today in Cambodia will contract AIDS and die before they turn 50. Half the teen-age boys in Kenya will die from AIDS. In Botswana, the percentage of fifteen-year-old boys that will die from AIDS before they turn fifty is eighty five.

We are learning lessons about this disease and its effect on the general population from another millennium. Normal population groups, when sorted by age from young to old, take on the appearance of a triangle with the broad lower levels reserved for the young and the progressively narrowing top layers for the old. AIDS, by cutting a broad swath through the 15-50 year age group while holding births down (half the victims are women, most in prime child-bearing age), redraws the traditional pyramid into a shape more like a chimney. In twenty years, in those countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic, the number of men and women in the 35-55 year range will represent a smaller percentage than any time since the Dark Ages. This narrowed band of adults will, as they always have, bear the responsibility for caring for both the old and young of their societies. But, there will not be enough of them. The result will look something like what we see today, only much worse. This is today's situation -

Agricultural output in Zimbabwe has been halved;
Two-thirds of every health care dollar spent in Rwanda is spent on AIDS patients;
Half the hospital beds in a Thai province are filled with AIDS patients;
Health care workers are themselves dying faster than they can be replaced;
Nearly half the public schools in the Central African Republic have closed because more teachers are dying of AIDS than can be replaced.

This has all happened before. The Dark Ages were precipitated by a plague that killed more people than the already strained institutions of the post-Roman era could stand. The failing infrastructure caved in under the weight of the dead. The name of the continent has changed but the circumstances are the same. The failing infrastructure left in the wake of the end of colonialism will collapse. And Africa will once again become The Dark Continent.

Hardware Store

I hate going to the hardware store. It's filled with guys who know a ton more than I do about all sorts of guy things. I don't mind going if I don't have to ask anything. If I need a hose or some poison, no problem. But if I need the little black plastic ring thing that's attached to the chain in the back of the toilet, well, I've got a problem. I wouldn't if these guys would just tell me where stuff is.

Instead, they ask questions, "well, what are you trying to do?"

"The connection from the thing that comes off the wall thing to the back of the heater is too big, I need some sort of adapter."

"Are you trying to adapt it to the garden hose?"

"heh-heh, no, heh-heh."

He takes the garden hose attachment from my hand and tosses it back into the bin. Now he's standing five feet from the bin and he hits it, swish. If I tried that it would bounce off some lady's head first.

I follow like the misbehaving ten-year-old on his way to the principal's office.

"Here's what you need."

"Thanks, thanks a lot."

"Uh-huh." I know what he's thinking - "I could take you with one arm, hammered on Jim Beam, sittin' in my Lazy Boy, you pathetic weasel."

I can feel my ears heating up as I shuffle to the checkout counter. Even here they've devised further means to humiliate me. I pay with a credit card. I notice all the real men are paying with cash. I don't carry cash cause I might lose it fumbling in my pocket for my whistle. The whistle I carry in case some hardware goon follows me into the parking lot.

I went in last Saturday to pick up some stuff to stick on the stairs so I won't slip when it rains. I find some sandpaper looking stuff on a roll. It says "non-skid" or something and I'm thrilled that I've located what I need without having to ask anyone. I pull the end of the roll and the entire display crashes down to the floor. Rolls of sandpaper looking stuff are unfurling down the aisle. Buddy comes over and with a huge grin asks if he can help.

"Yeah, I need about seven feet of this stuff."

"Whaddya going to do with it?" This as he's gathering up rolls from the floor.

"Put it on the stairs so I don't slip."

"How you going to make it stay where you put it?"

This must be a trick question as I'm sure I've got the right stuff.

"It's got a self-adhesive back, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, if you're sticking it to a non-porous surface like porcelain or finished tile. What are you're stairs made of, porcelain?"

"Uh, wood."

"Well, here's what you need," and he grabs a roll of "stair stick for wooden stairs" off the shelf behind me.

God I hate this place.

Africa

Our great mid-twentieth century contest of good versus evil stands alone in Western culture as a defining moment in our history. In the five hundred years since the Dark Ages, no single event so captures our attention and interest as does the Second World War. Many see Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews as the single most horrific event in history. The Good War entered our lexicon as a result of the crystalline clarity that it and our victory over the powers of darkness gave to our time. The ultimate defining moment of our culture, as well as its darkest hour, may very well have occurred only five decades ago.

Only five years ago, eight hundred thousand people were hacked and beaten to death in Rwanda. The Hutu suddenly turned on their neighbors, the Tutsi, and with machetes, clubs and bare hands, murdered their neighbors without fear of reprisal. Thirty years ago, the Ibo tribe was similarly slaughtered by the Uraba in the Nigerian civil war that gave birth to the short-lived nation of Biafra. Recently, the US Assistant Secretary of State pledged US resources in an effort to stop Sudanese traffic in slavery. Some fifteen thousand women and children have been taken from their villages and homes in southern Sudan by Islamic militiamen and sold into slavery in the north. Several sub-Saharan nations will likely collapse into anarchy as their infrastructure fails under the mounting AIDS crisis. Nations are ruled and robbed by dictators. To the extent that civilization on the European and North American continents may be called a success, in Africa civilization is failing. Why? What forces are at work in Africa that spell such disaster for its people? Is the collapse inexorable? Can nothing be done?

Twenty percent of the world's land area, ten percent of the world's population, the planet's highest birth rate, and shortest life span, home to two of the world's great deserts and the densest tropical rain forest, the richest diversity of life forms, the birthplace of mankind, - Africa.

The American exposure to Africa may be best illustrated by two Hollywood films of recent years, Out of Africa and I Dreamed of Africa. Both are stories of white people living and thriving on the "Dark Continent." Neither are stories of Africa's peoples. In most recent history, Africa occupies our consciousness as a great wildlife preserve or the land of apartheid. Once white rule was broken and South Africa was returned to its native people, our focus waned. Who are the native people of Africa?

Two thousand millennia ago, humanity made its way out of the tropical rain forests and into the savannas and grasslands to the north and south. This movement was likely precipitated by homo erectus' mastery of fire and fashion. With fire and clothing, humanity could leave the climatically non-threatening confines of the tropical rain forest for the less temperate but bacteriologically safer (see Bugs) expanses of the grasslands and savannas of north, south and west Africa. One group moved north to the Mediterranean (eventually beyond to Europe), another to the west and south, while a third populated the eastern part of the continent. Over the course of the next million years or so, natural selection produced three fairly distinct human types in accordance with the climatic conditions of their particular locales. The homo-erectus (now homo-sapien) population that moved west, developed slightly lighter skin coloring than their predecessors and evolved into the Khoi (Bushmen), while those migrating to the Mediterranean developed still lighter skin coloring (Caucasoid). The original occupants of the central and eastern lands retained their dark pigmentation (Blacks).

The fossil record indicates all three types met, mingled, and "married" in the great water rich plains of north Africa.

With the last Ice Age, 70 000 to 10 000 BC, the hospitable north began to grow ever more arid. Although the glaciers never reached the continent, dramatic climatic shifts occurred eventually creating the great Saharan desert. The Caucasoid retreated to the Mediterranean coast, the Bushmen to the far southwest corner of Africa, while the Blacks retreated to the central forests. Over the next few thousand years, they gradually penetrate the central forests to the south and expanded into the southern and eastern quadrants of Africa. The people of Africa are more correctly the peoples of Africa. Far and away the largest population segment is comprised of the descendants of the Black Africans that originally populated the central rain forests and later migrated south and east. The north African peoples are today largely Islamic by faith and Caucasoid by racial type. The Bushmen of far southwest Africa are the smallest population segment. Another method of categorizing the peoples of Africa is by language groups. Linguists tell us there are four major categories of language native to Africa. They are Afro-Asiatic, Khosian, Nilo-Saharan, and Congo-Kordofanian.

The Afro-Asiatic trace its roots back to the Cushitic or Hamitic-Semetic language groups. The term Hamitic is in anthropological disfavor as it originated in the belief that the north African peoples were descendants of Noah's sons Ham (Hamitic) and Shem (Semetic). A century old and now discredited school of thought described north African peoples as European (or Hamitic - sons of Ham). Interestingly, Cushitic is still commonly used to describe the linguistic origin (Cush was, by Biblical account, one of Ham's offspring).

Khosian describes the language of the Khoi peoples. Distinguished by the clicking sounds made in speech, this is the language many of us first heard in the classic film, The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Nilo-Saharan is the language belonging to the peoples of the eastern part of Africa (spoken mainly in Chad, Sudan, northeastern Nigeria, and along the Niger river). The largest group belongs to the Congo-Kordofian comprising over a thousand discrete languages of the peoples of West Africa. The Niger-Congo group almost entirely dominates this family of languages but for the inclusion of the Kordofian based language spoken by a small number of people the Kurdufan provinces of the Sudan.

The Nilo-Saharan group is dominated by pastoralists while the Congo-Kordofian (Niger-Congo) group is primarily agriculturist. This may be attributable to their ancestral origins. The Nilo-Saharan group originally occupied portions of Africa more arid and less given to agricultural development while the Niger-Congo group, occupying the central and southeastern portions of the continent were blessed with greater rainfall allowing for agricultural development. The island of Madagascar may have played a pivotal role in this differentiation in the two groups. The language spoken in Madagascar (the huge island off the southeastern coast of Africa) is not a part of any of the aforementioned groups but is more closely linked to the Malagasy language and its Indonesian origins. Contact with the original settlers of this island may have provided the Niger-Congo group with such Asian-origin food crops as rice, bananas, sugar cane and yams. This "jump-start" to their agricultural development may be the largest contributing factor to their domination of the population of the continent.

This mega-classification by language groups was proposed in 1963 by Joseph Greenberg, an American anthropologist. By isolating key words from each language, Greenberg was able to associate apparently dissimilar languages. For example, almost all the inhabitants of central and southern Africa today speak some variety of a language derived from the Bantu group. Despite enormous geographical distances separating them, most any speaker of a language of the Bantu group can make themselves understood by a speaker of another Bantu class language. All four hundred Bantu-like languages share a common root word for human being - ntu. Other fundamental grammatical differences convinced Greenberg that the Bantu language class sprung from a single origin. This work was expanded by British linguist, Malcolm Guthrie. Originally one of Greenberg's harshest critics, Guthrie eventually developed the hypothesis that within the Bantu family there were an even more closely linked set of languages that Guthrie proposed sprung from a "proto-Bantu" language. The geographical location (southeastern Zaire and Zambia) of this particularly close-knit sub-set of the Bantu family convinced Guthrie that the larger Bantu family of languages, and hence the original speakers of these languages, could have only originated in the heart of the African continent. Not from a wandering Semitic people, not from Europeans sojourning to the South, not from Pacific islanders in canoes.

Civilization Along The Nile 12.11.00

Africa is a continent of three indigenous peoples, the Bushmen of the extreme Southwest, the Blacks of sub-Sahara, and the Caucasoid of the northern coast. Water, the lack of and the abundance of, conspired to carve and separate a small segment of the great African continent and one of the three indigenous peoples in such a way that they remain, to this day, less a part of Africa and more a part of the Near East and Europe. The lack of water in the great Saharan desert precludes easy access between the northern coast and the rest of Africa. The abundance of water in the form of the Mediterranean and Red Seas more firmly connect the north coast of Africa to Europe and the Near East than the south. An abundance of rainfall in the Ethiopian Highlands (the October issue of Nature magazine carries an interesting article suggesting that the entire African continent was created by a single magma plume centered under the Ethiopian Highlands) produces annual flooding along the banks of the Nile. This annualized flooding deposited mineral rich soil along the banks season after season, creating a super-fertile soil. It was in this soil (and the soil of three other ancient river systems) that mankind first began to produce more food than could be consumed. In addition to the Nile River system, the Yellow in China, the Indus in northern India, and the Tigris-Euphrates systems all witnessed the birth of civilization at about the same period in history.

Sparsely populated settlements became teeming communities. Teeming communities and abundant food supplies allowed task specialization. With more than enough food produced by the rich soils of the river basin, the human community could afford to dedicate individuals within it to specialized tasks. This task specialization allowed greater attention to tool and language development. As tools became more sophisticated, agricultural output rose. Population grew as food stocks multiplied. A positive feedback loop was created and sustained for centuries, interrupted only occasionally by disease or war.

Remains of settlements along the banks of the Nile indicate continual human habitation as long ago as 7,000 years. It would be another four thousand years before the first signs of communal-social organization would find its way into the archaeological evidence. The political structures that developed in response to this loop of abundant food and people was the beginning of civilization. The first hieroglyphs representing names of rulers date back to 3200 BC. With these hieroglyphs we can say, with no small degree of certainty, civilization had arrived.

The remains of massive earthen tombs date the beginning of Egyptian civilization to between 3100 and 2800 BC. Another five centuries would pass before the unified Egyptian world of Pharaohs and stone pyramids would arrive. Ancient Egypt's Golden Age began with the rule of Zoser in 2737 BC. More important than this great Pharaoh was his architect, Imhotep. It was Imhotep who introduced the use of great stone blocks in building. The construction of huge burial chambers using great blocks of stone transported miles across land required a complex and efficient bureaucracy. Civilization was now in full swing.

Originally in place to direct and control food surpluses generated by the rich Nile valley soil, the ancient Egyptian rulers evolved into royal kings reigning at the behest of the gods. Great ceremony and even greater bureaucratic veils insulated the Pharaohs from the people. It was during this age that the Great Pyramids were constructed. Grand construction projects, military campaigns, taxation, and foreign trade necessitated the development of a second ruling class. These military chiefs and administrators were vested with ever more power by the great Pharaohs of the third thorough the sixth dynasties (2700-2200 BC).

Eventually, the absolute rule of the Pharaoh gave way to the shared power arrangements and regionalism that characterized the Middle Kingdom (2200-1800 BC). The Pharaohs spent much of their time attempting to unify the regionalized Egypt and ward off aggression from without. Between 1800 and 1500 BC, Phoenicians invaded and installed their own rulers over Egypt. Amhose I threw off "foreign" rule and reunited the kingdom, ushering in the period called The New Kingdom (1500-1000 BC). A second Golden Age ensued. It was during the New Kingdom era that the more well known Pharaohs Ramses, Seti and Ramses II ruled (1293-1212 BC). Power again began to ebb and the New Kingdom ended with the death of Ramses III. A royal priesthood developed and began to hold sway at court. Military and religious leaders vied for supremacy without clear success.

The Late Period was marked by foreign rule. Libyans, Persians, and Assyrians all held power at different times until Alexander the Great conquered the occupying Persians in 332 BC. The Ptolemic period began when Alexander named his Macedonian (Greek) general Ptolemy as co-ruler of Egypt. Ptolemy soon consolidated power under him and extended Egyptian power and influence throughout the now Hellenistic world. Cleopatra was the last Ptolemic ruler. Egypt passed into Roman hands with her death and disappeared under seven hundred years of Roman rule.

The Egyptian civilization was the world's first major civilization, pre-dating the Sumerians, Greeks (Minoan) and Chinese. It was the longest lasting civilization, longer even than the Chinese. And it was African. It held more in common, though, with the Near East and Europe than its continental brothers to the south. What of the southern peoples? What were they doing when Ramses was laying waste to Judea, when Cheops was building the Great Pyramid at Giza?

The Early Kingdoms 01.08.01

Much of the history of the African interior will never be known. What can be learned from archeological excavation is limited. Relics of ancient civilizations do not well survive the African tropical climate. The Sahara desert now covers the northern one-third of the continent. Prior to 2000 BC the land consisted of temperate Savanna's and grasslands. These, and any evidence of development, have disappeared under sun bleached sands. Much of what we do know comes from external sources, particularly early Islamic explorers. Myths and legends of the people help to discern what came before but remain, in the final analysis, myths and legends.

Recent archeological evidence does reveal continuous human settlement at Daima, south of Lake Chad, from about the sixth century BC until 1200 AD. Raiding parties from the north may have contributed to, if not caused, the development of organized civil society in the African interior. As the Egyptian and later Roman civilizations disintegrated and remnants along the Mediterranean border sought out sources of food and income, raiding parties likely rode south through the developing Saharan desert (not nearly so foreboding a task then as now) to encounter agricultural communities in the Northern Sudan. These dispersed communities would be forced to aggregate in larger and soon, fortified cities. What had been loosely organized agricultural communities would become more tightly organized political settlements. On the other side of the continent, again at the southern border of the Sahara, north of the Niger River basin, excavations at the Tichit-Walata escarpment reveal an agricultural community dating back to 1000 BC. The community abandoned its flatland community for more secure cliff-side dwellings, ostensibly for defensive purposes. Defense against the raiding parties of the Egyptian-Phoenician-Roman civilizations of the Mediterranean coast. Another, less violent theory of the political development of the interior, purports that trade between northern and eastern peoples (Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian) and the interior necessitated the development of civil government. The theory that civil organization was passed from the more developed cultures of the north (even Europe) to the less developed people of the south has been debunked. Civil organization and political structure appears to have arisen spontaneously in response to external necessities. In much the same way Egyptian civilization arose from the necessities presented by agricultural surplus, non-Egyptian African civilization likely arose from necessities presented by trade or defense from raiders, or both. The salient point is that evidence of interior African civilization exists from as early as 1000 BC. The image of tribal society predominating until the arrival of European imperialism must now be discarded.

The earliest African civilizations (Egypt excepted) developed in central and western Africa, south of the Sahara desert, and known as Ghana and Kanem. Ghana developed north of the great Niger bend and Kanem south of Lake Chad. They were monarchies ruling massive parcels of land encompassing many different tribes. The monarchy was, in all likelihood, an outgrowth of the even more ancient god-like status ascribed to the individual thought to possess power over natural agrarian cycles. Their retinue included Priests and servants that would later evolve into an imperial court.

The Islamic historian al-Fazari describes a Ghana king in the 800's as possessing an army of over 200,000 men, including a large contingent of cavalry. Estimates of the life of ancient Ghana suggest it existed continuously between 500 BC and 1200 AD. That would make it the fourth longest behind the Egyptian, Chinese and Mayan civilizations. As the kingdom of Ghana began to struggle with the increasing desertification of its northern provinces, southern vassal states began to exert more and more influence and control. Eventually, somewhere in the thirteenth century, the Keita people under the leadership of their king, Sundiata, overthrew the rulers of Ghana and lay the foundation for the great Mali empire to follow. Neither Ghana nor Mali, as ancient civilizations, should be confused with the current African states of the same names. Sundiata may actually have overthrown Ghanian usurpers from the Songhai people. The Songhai were originally a fisher people skilled in the art of navigation of the great Niger River. Legends tell of two royal Songhai brothers captured and held in ransom at the Ghana court. They escaped and carried Ghana military skills and knowledge back to their people who then threw off their oppressors from Ghana establishing their own rule over the kingdom.

All this, centuries before the Italian city-states of the sixteenth century would engage in their Machiavellian palace intrigues.

Africa - The Muslims Invade, The Portuguese Follow 02.06.01

In 639 AD, twelve thousand Arabs defeated the ruling Byzantine government of Egypt and Islam was introduced to Africa. Over the next four hundred years more than half the continent would become Muslim in appearance, if not reality. Islam is as much a vehicle for arranging the social order as it a spiritual code. As such, it served the purposes of both leaders and subjects in many African kingdoms. Africa north of the Sahara remains largely Muslim to this day. The Christian kingdom of Nubia served as a bulwark against Islamic expansion further south. The Islamic Egyptian government struck a non-interference treaty with Nubia that lasted for six hundred years. In the North, however, augmented by the established trade routes radiating west and southwest from Egypt, the faith of The Prophet Mohammed spread quickly and surely. Great cultural and educational centers were established along the north African coast. Much of the preserved knowledge and literature of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations is a direct result of these citadels of high Islamic culture. Egypt saw a rebirth of a share of its glory under Islamic rule.

All this began to change with the Arab Bedouin influx throughout the great desert and along the Mediterranean shore. Hundreds of thousand of Bedouin migrated westward collapsing the higher Islamic culture beneath their weight. Hordes of semi- or illiterate masses of Muslims replaced the small, educated upper-class of Muslim clerics and intellectuals. Simultaneously, the Ottoman Turks, Mongols and Tartars were pressing in on classic Islamic culture. What happened in north Africa was repeated throughout the Islamic world as the great light of Islamic intellectualism dimmed forever. In the late Middle Ages, the Christian world responded to the spread of Islam in a series of Crusades. Successful in driving the Moorish Muslim influence from the Iberian peninsula, the Portuguese, under the direction of the Aviz king John I, also called Prince Henry the Navigator, continued their crusade into Africa in search of the Muslim Infidel. Another, more compelling motive behind their crusade was to supply their resource poor country with gold and minerals from the newly discovered African "Gold Coast." For the next five decades, the Portuguese ventured ever further south along the west African coast establishing trade relations with multiple African kingdoms. When Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the African coast in 1500, the Portuguese presence in Africa was complete, albeit tenuous. One subsequent voyage ventured so far off course (the prevailing winds along the west African coast are northerly necessitating a southward path much further west into the Atlantic) Brazil was discovered. Portuguese is still the "native" language in that huge South American country. As the gold trade diminished (in part due to African reluctance to trade for European "goods" of little value to them), the Portuguese began to develop estates for the cultivation of African foodstuffs. These estates, massive in size, needed cheap labor to bring crops to harvest. The cheapest labor available was, of course, slave labor. In 1571, the Portuguese government, with the blessing of the Vatican, authorized a young Portuguese nobleman to colonize Angola. For the next century, a series of wars were waged with the west African peoples standing in the way of Portuguese "national interest." The result was the eventual decimation of the African political structures in west Africa. They were replaced by a colonial system. The initial Portuguese forays into Africa in pursuit of Muslims and gold had given rise to the beginning of the colonization of Africa.

Hiding 01.15.01

I live in a neighborhood of 1940's bungalow style homes. They are daily being replaced by "lot line to lot line" two and three story behemoths. The neighborhood association is powerless to stop what they describe as the destruction of the neighborhood by inconsiderate soulless builders. The other day on NPR I heard a story about the shift from large public buildings and small private dwellings to smaller public places and outsize individual homes. Libraries become utilitarian pillboxes instead of the soaring and spacious structures of yesteryear. Massive homes for the childless urban couple virtually defines inner city chic.

The size of these dwellings and the unused and useless rooms within them are not the real problem. The garage evidences the real problem. It is up front, featured the way gardens once were. It opens as the owner approaches and shuts before the owner exits the car. No porch, no balcony (unless you're in a twenty story high rise). I have neighbors I have literally never seen. The evenings around here are silent affairs save the coming and going of cars or the barking of dogs. Those of us still living in our bungalows and duplexes own the dogs. The hidden owners have no pets. The hidden owners are rarely seen. Their windows are covered in expensive blinds that stay closed. A couple recently moved in across the street from us. They are occasionally outside tending their miniature strip of grass and shrubbery. One of the first things they put up were "No Dogs" signs. They don't speak when spoken to. They raise their head (to detect danger I think) when spoken to and half-nod by way of terminating any further communication. Just before Christmas, a three by five foot projected image of a Christmas tree appeared on the exterior of their stucco three-story townhouse. "Merry Christmas" it said. It has since changed Happy New Year. Soon, I guess, it'll be Happy Valentine or Good President's Day. Very festive, very friendly. These projected images, notwithstanding their incredibly tacky nature, project a sense of warmth and friendliness that appears beyond the owner's capacity to demonstrate. "I will hide from you, but Have A Nice Day," they seem to say. Better than the others, I guess, who simply hide.

Twenty First Century Gladiators 12.25.00

Eight to ten men weighing in excess of three hundred pounds each crouch down facing each other less than a foot apart. They remain perfectly still for three seconds. Another man, with his hands resting on the upturned groin of another, speaks the magic words. A ton of human flesh, bone, muscle and fat crash together for the first of at least one hundred times over a three hour span. One or two will leave in ambulances. Half will take a five month break. Half will prepare to repeat the process a week from now. Most will have joints surgically replaced before they're fifty. Nearly all will wince as they rise in later years. Some will live in constant pain. The life span of those who do not die violently or from drug and alcohol abuse will be shortened by the use of drugs designed to make them unnaturally large. Many will develop testicular or liver cancer or kidney disease. Most will struggle to earn a living when their usefulness to their owners is spent. They won't really be selling anything, though, except their dignity. It's NFL Playoff time! The Roman emperors were more merciful to the gladiators.

Professional football is a shrill testament to our lack of concern for each other. We pay these men to abuse their bodies and each other for our entertainment. We watch endlessly repeating clips of bodies flying in the air and crashing to earth or each other in what should be sickening displays of cruelty. Instead we call them highlight tapes and sell them at a premium. Organize such activity with the lesser animals and you go to jail.

Instead we allow children barely able to hold their head upright under their helmets to learn this stupid and violent game. Violent - no argument, right? Stupid, well now, that's too much, you say. Try running a stopwatch from hike to tackle for one quarter. Fifteen minutes of "playing time" becomes less than five of "live" time. We already watch an hour (four quarters at fifteen minutes each, remember?) of activity take more than three hours. In reality the ball is in play for less than thirty minutes. More time is spent watching commercials than actual "sport" activity. Maybe you don't think of yourself as a football owner's lacky, but you should. An entire industry has grown up around your willingness to watch men, and now women, sacrifice their bodies for your amusement. The average value of an NFL franchise is just under four hundred million dollars. Television networks pay the NFL four and a half billion dollars a year to televise their games.

The leading cause of blindness in the world is a bacterial infection called trachoma. Contract the disease and your eyelashes turn in under your eyelid eventually causing so much scarring that you are permanently blinded. It can be prevented with a simple regimen of antibiotics. The six million people that become permanently blind every year from this disease can't afford the antibiotics. One and half percent of the NFL's annual TV revenue would keep six million people in the world from going blind.

How about those priorities sports fans?

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