Up, Down, and Strange

Base ten

2012-01-08T10:31:00.001-08:00

One two three four five six seven eight nine ty tyone tytwo tyrhree tyfour tyfive tysix tyseven tyeight tynine twoty twotyone twotytwo...threety fourty fivety sixty seventy eighty ninety one hundred

2011-11-11T09:45:00.001-08:00

My advice is about doorways, windowsills, and entrances and exits generally, but also bathrooms, boxes of tissues, sinks full of dishes, ice trays that need refilling, and so forth. You'll find this kind of thing bunched up around your characters—just as a matter of absolute necessity, for instance, the better-left-unmentioned doors and windows have every room your characters inhabit completely surrounded, unless you've set your tale in a sarcophagus or generational spaceship or some other kind of sealed container—much as you discover such material lying at the edges of attention in your own everyday lives. The comings and goings, loosening and tightening of faucets, shittings and pissings and nose-blowings of everyday circumstances. Keep them at the periphery, in the subliminal range, unless you really want to try to make something of them, and then you'd better make it good. I'm trying to tell you to ignore transitions. Skip to the good stuff. The sex and death, the monkey shines and money shots, the spit-takes, the epiphanies and pratfalls. The epiphanic pratfalls. What you'd remember when you forgot all the rest—forget the rest on your reader's behalf. Write like you'd read—and notice how much you customarily skip as you read. Raymond Chandler said that when he was at a loss for a plot development he'd have a man walk through a doorway with a gun in his hand. Good advice I've heeded a hundred times or more, but it wasn't the doorway, it was the gun that might solve your problem. Arrive without coming in, and leave without leave—leave before you leave, if you get my drift. End the scene with the glance at the door, if even the glance. And there's probably no writer who ever paused in his commitment to realism to consider how often a nose blown or a bladder emptied didn't quite rate mention. Realism goes just so far. It's sort of like Chandler's gunman: unless you're blowing blood out of your nose, don't even reach for a tissue. A tissue full of nothing but snot is a dog-bites-man story. And so, having said his piece, the weary veteran wished the fresh novices good luck, and went out the door, shifting slightly to the left so as not to collide with the guy on his way in with a gun in his hand. -Jonathan Lethem

H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (1933)

2011-10-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (1933):

'via Blog this'

A Sign of the Apocalypse

2011-09-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

Bradford Edwards ~ Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:30 PMTo: mark.norris

Apparently you don't like or want the sign....not one fuckin word fromyou since it was delivered. Yeah, your phone is in the river...and itsthe only phone in Kampot province and you don't have my phone number(since Eric has been relaying msgs to you from me)...really, brother, are you that checked out all the time or what? toobusy? you haven't had one thought to call me and say thanks? 2 minutesand 2000 riel? Just give me the sign back - Eric will pick it up....B

mark norris ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 5:13 PMTo: Bradford Edwards ~

Dear Bradford,We really love the sign. I am sorry I haven't called to thank you- we have been having a really rough time. I am not sure why you couldn't appreciate that possibility. Not sure why you doing us a nice favor should result in the ending of a friendship. I told Eric to tell you we loved the sign and that I was unable to call you. I'll buy a new phone tomorrow. I really cannot understand why you are so upset."Apparently you don't like or want the sign....not one fuckin word fromyou since it was delivered. Yeah, your phone is in the river...and itsthe only phone in Kampot province and you don't have my phone number(since Eric has been relaying msgs to you from me)... "Eric delivered the sign while I was up on Bokor Mountain. It wasn't until that evening that I unwrapped it. Then Eric told me to call you. I was busy setting up movie night and was sunburned and tired so I asked him to text you about my phone and how much we love the sign. Why did you need to hear my voice? Why the big hurry. Why assume I was not busy? Yesterday was one of the worst of my life and if I had called you I would've not been very understanding of your impatience."really, brother, are you that checked out all the time or what? toobusy? you haven't had one thought to call me and say thanks? 2 minutesand 2000 riel? Just give me the sign back - Eric will pick it up....B"Wow. I guess Eric didn't relay how excited we were by the sign. He offered to let me use his phone but I didn't see the urgency and I was busy. Then we were watching the movie, then I was asleep. The next day I went out early. It was a bad day. I didn't have a phone to borrow. Jasmine really loves the sign and I don't see why she should be hurt by this. If you insist on taking the sign back she will be sad and I will not forgive you for being so petty.- Mark

Bradford Edwards ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:35 PMTo: mark norris ~

OK...I understand the situation....I really do....1) You will remember that I made it a point when I called you Sundaynight to get a promise from you to call me when you got the sign...youknow that...2) I went through considerable energy and thought to make that signand paid for it too and had it delivered to you FUCKIN DOOR,Brother....and you couldn't get the energy for 2 friggin minutes tocall me and tell me what you thought? C'mon...really....3) What planet are you on??? That sign was no small gesture - I didn'tsend you a fuckin bagel! I was explicit in telling you I wantedfeedback immediately - what a HUGE outrageous demand after all myeffort - a 2 minute call from you!!......No phone? Pathetic excuse!!You wouldn't care if you were in my position? The reality is that youare checked out in some ways and remarkably inconsiderate - how couldyou not take 2 minutes out of your tragic day to call me? You had timeto watch a movie and have a few bottles of wine...go figure....4) I am NOT being petty...you HAD to watch the movie remember...I feellike I am talking to a 12 year-old and you have the arrogance to callme PETTY!!!! This should be a lesson to you - try thinking of otherpeople - really......those bottles of wine are dulling your brain,brother...or rather your heart....and you have the balls to bedefensive for not making a 2 minute call.....unbelievable...really....you're an infant...I want friends who value and respect me....your "natural" behaviortells me clearly I am not worth 2 minutes of your precious time...itis sad and I am hurt...so it goes...I do love Jasmine and therestaurant and it's not that I don't like you, Mark, but you can be aslug at times and you must know by now that you not a greatcommunicator....and that is Mark - take him or leave him....so, keep the sign - it was for Jasmine - the concept....and I thoughtthat my friend Mark would appreciate the effort......I was wrong onsome levels......as my friend Mark had several glasses of wine andwatched a movie...so it goes...I only hope that this is a small wake up call for you to payattention, be aware, open your eyes, my friend......who in your worldwould have done what I did for you unsolicited? think about it.......and then you gravely insult me by BLAMING ME and saying you won'tFORGIVE ME and then calling me "petty"? un-fuckin'believable..........really...........B

2 messagesBradford Edwards ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:48 PMTo: mark norris ~

re-read your reply,,,,,it isn't really an apology at all - it's adefense and then it ends by blaming me and calling me "petty".....I amlivid over this....you can't even utter the words that you might havemade a mistake.....in the end, I you call me the asshole for expectinga call from you within a year's time....B

Bradford Edwards ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:23 PMTo: mark norris ~

"I would've not been very understanding of your impatience......and Iwill not forgive you for being so petty."......I am the asshole here right? Fuck you......

mark norris ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:12 PMTo: Bradford Edwards ~

You insult me countless times because I didn't call you to thank you for your gift as soon as possible. I did apologize in my first email even though you insulted me. Now you follow that up with a few dozen more insults. Over a phone call I didn't make. I really get pissed when someone blames me for something I didn't do. I didn't deserve your animosity over this. Why all the hate? You could have just waited for me to tell you we love the sign and all would be well. I stand by my reasons for not calling you. You think I am lying or lazy or just an asshole, the truth is that I didn't have time. I thought telling Eric would tide you over until I could tell you over the phone. In what way did I hurt you or insult you? Count to ten and see if you can justify the evil shit you wrote me, brother.

Bradford Edwards ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 8:27 PMTo: mark norris ~

".....I was unable to call you.".....really? All you do is defendyourself..you're not sorry at all...what if you had to call someonethat day to get some money or visa papers or? You can't even apologizeto me....you're a piece of work, Brother....

mark norris ~ Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:50 PMTo: Bradford Edwards ~

I am not lying when I say I was unable to call you. So, I am defending myself against your spurious and insulting assumptions. I have every right and reason to do so. I also clearly and succinctly apologized. Through what kind of E.S.P. can you conclude that I am not sorry at all? What if I had to call someone to get money or visa papers? I would've had to wait. You have some active imagination brother. Do you put conditions on every gift you give? "If you don't thank me enough, soon enough after receipt of this gift I am going to take it back." Try that policy with everyone you know and see where that gets you. I restrained my initial response in the hope that you might value our friendship enough to let this go and not pile on with more insults. Do you really think you are wronged by me somehow? Enough to insult me, to make me livid with anger? What did I do to you! What! Tell me what I fucking did to you.

Bradford Edwards Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 12:52 AMTo: mark norris ~

Look...your initial reply was not an apology at all and you ended it defending your lack of 2 minutes and by blaming me for being "petty" - please re-read it again carefully.... andyes, I do think that there is an emotional/brain disconnect when someone doesn't even bother to call me for 2 minutes to express gratitude and impressions of that considerable effort on my part - and for that I am an asshole???...so be it......c'mon...you didn't have time? you keep saying that.....do you know how ridiculous that sounds? 2 minutes? that is just total bullshit.....the bottom line is that you didn't value the sign or me enough to take the 2 minutes to call me. Period. I have to accept that.You had time to watch the movie, even ask Eric to relay your impressions - even more absurd - but no energy to ask to use the phone yourself and call me personally? Why? because I wasn't worth the time - that's why....yeah, I am pissed - who wouldn't be?......but really I should not have expected anything from you - and that is my problem actually......it is comic-tragic that you feel you have the right to be mad at me....that is funny and sad at the same time.....Mark, we can never agree on this....let's leave it alone....I need to learn to not assume people appreciate my effort and to let go of any expectations....or simply not to do this kind of thing anymore...were there conditions on this major effort/gift to you? You bethca, my dear sweet brother.....specifically a 2 minute 2000 riel phone call from you....and you didn't have and/or make the time to even do that......period.it's a done deal....it's buried....I don't hate you and you certainly don''t have grounds to hate me....it was just a simple friendly gesture gone rancid and sour.....so it goes.....

mark norris Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:42 AMTo: Bradford Edwards

Hey re read the words "I'm sorry" in my initial reply, that was after you rudely asked for the sign back. You write "fuck you" in an email to me. Why? What is it with 2 minutes? Maybe I wanted more than two minutes, maybe I wanted Jasmine to thank you as well, you were worried she wouldn't like it, maybe I wanted to offer you a free place to stay for the rest of your life, maybe two minutes would be like relaying a message via text. The movie was not for me, I would've prefered to be in bed but I had a house full of people expecting the fucking thing. So what's with that? You have a picture in your mind of what was going on? I didn't call you right away for an infinite number of perfectly good reasons - but you ask for the sign back. Petty is a pretty good description of your actions. I never called you an asshole, so where did that come from? The bottom line is we really loved the sign and wanted a calm and stress free moment to tell you. You sound ridiculous. What brought on this shitstorm? Then you insult me, again. I am not supposed to be mad at that? No one would be pissed about not getting a phone call. “Look...your initial reply was not an apology at all and you ended it defending your lack of 2 minutes and by blaming me for being "petty" - please re-read it again carefully.... and” I said I was sorry, I pointed out that if you took back the sign for not getting a quick thank you that would be petty. Look the word up in the dictionary. "yes, I do think that there is an emotional/brain disconnect when someone doesn't even bother to call me for 2 minutes to express gratitude and impressions of that considerable effort on my part - and for that I am an asshole???...so be it......"I had good reasons for not calling. I never called you an asshole. "c'mon...you didn't have time? you keep saying that.....do you know how ridiculous that sounds? 2 minutes? that is just total bullshit....."I didn't have time, I was busy, I was tired, I keep saying it because that is the truth. I could not imagine you would freak out like this. "the bottom line is that you didn't value the sign or me enough to take the 2 minutes to call me. Period. I have to accept that."Why is that the bottom line? It doesn't add up. Check your figures. "You had time to watch the movie, even ask Eric to relay your impressions - even more absurd - but no energy to ask to use the phone yourself and call me personally? Why? because I wasn't worth the time - that's why...".I was showing the movie to a room full of people. I didn't want to bother Eric because I though you could understand that I would call you later-when I had time. "yeah, I am pissed - who wouldn't be?......but really I should not have expected anything from you - and that is my problem actually......it is comic-tragic that you feel you have the right to be mad at me....that is funny and sad at the same time....."I have more right to be mad at you. Tragic comedy aside. You have stepped way out of line. "Mark, we can never agree on this....let's leave it alone....I need to learn to not assume people appreciate my effort and to let go of any expectations....or simply not to do this kind of thing anymore..."You want to leave it alone? Apologize to me. "were there conditions on this major effort/gift to you? You bethca, my dear sweet brother....specifically a 2 minute 2000 riel phone call from you....and you didn't have and/or make the time to even do that......period."That was a condition I could not meet in a timely manner. Please take the gift back. "it's a done deal....it's buried....I don't hate you and you certainly don''t have grounds to hate me....it was just a simple friendly gesture gone rancid and sour.....so it goes....."I see who you are and could never count on you as a friend.Have a mediocre rest of your life, bro

Bradford Edwards Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:04 AMTo: mark norris

Hey there....the real truth is that I believe you're emotionally checked out due to many glasses of wine every night. Period.Everyone I tell the story to, everyone, really everyone, agrees that it is unbelievable that you couldn't take the 2 minutes (even with all your very good reasons) to call me. Period.When we spoke on Sunday night I asked you - point blank - to call me when you got the sign. You said OK. Period. Still, you couldn't be bothered to do it. Period.2 minutes, brother...and all your excuses are weak bullshit and you know it. Eric even offered his phone to you and you didn't want to be bothered - you were too busy, eh? You knew that I was anxious to hear from you about the sign from the promise that you made to me on Sunday night.You did nothing to me or against me.That is for sure. And in a way that's the problem. I was not even in your view at all and that is why you didn't call me. I was not even a thought in your head. Period. Honestly, Mark, you had no idea that I just might want to hear from you immediately? After all that effort and time and...I put into that sign? What were you thinking? Not about me that's for certain.....You should have called me immediately and said thanks - 2 minutes - that's all. That's all. Period. Anyone in my position would have expected that. Anyone.Of course, you lost the only phone in Kampot Province and no one near you had a phone or my phone number and you were tired and busy and ...and....and....As I said before...I should not have expected anything from you. Period. That was my mistake.for sure - I am culpable. Apologize to you? Aint going to happen, my friend. Hate me as you like...this is one incident in your life....of a few others I am sure....emotional communication aint exactly your bag....so it goes....Am I overreacting? for sure I am.....I am hurt and disappointed....and you are righteous and defensive - never once saying that you actually made a mistake in judgement but rather sticking to your ludicrous wall of defense "Ï didn't have the 2 minutes": thang....I love that one - I really do....anyway, our friendship is probably shattered by this.....maybe not....you want me to ask you for your forgiveness and I want you to say that you made a mistake in judgement.....neither is likely to happen before we both die.....so it goes.....I wish you no ill will...I sincerely hope that you wake up someday, that you get sober and see the light, get out of that cloud of fog...I only wish the best for you and your family.....I really do.....B

mark norris ~ Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 5:42 AMTo: Bradford Edwards ~

Hey Bro,Now you get the royal treatment. I always had a feeling that you were the kind of prick who would talk shit about me behind my back. A lot of people have told me that's how you operate. When you "tell the story to everyone" do you mention my name? Here's my response: Hey there....the real truth is that I believe you're emotionally checked out due to many glasses of wine every night. Period. You can believe what you like, but that doesn't make it the real truth. You are saying I don't care about people because I drink too much? What's your excuse? You dump all this shit on a brother, the fuck you and the insults, you ignore my apology because I try to explain that I was having the worst day of my life - are you too checked out emotionally to even ask what happened to me? Don't give a shit if someone is hurting because they didn't do what you wanted and give your ego a stroke? Everyone I tell the story to, everyone, really everyone, agrees that it is unbelievable that you couldn't take the 2 minutes (even with all your very good reasons) to call me. Period.Why the fuck would you feel the need to "tell the story to everyone". Not mature enough to figure this out on your own? You tell the whole story? When we spoke on Sunday night I asked you - point blank - to call me when you got the sign. You said OK. Period. Still, you couldn't be bothered to do it. Period.If I had said that I wouldn't be able to call you right away, would you have sent the sign? Even that was odd. You text me saying call me right away if you want this. And why assume I couldn't be bothered. 2 minutes, brother...and all your excuses are weak bullshit and you know it. Eric even offered his phone to you and you didn't want to be bothered - you were too busy, eh? You knew that I was anxious to hear from you about the sign from the promise that you made to me on Sunday night.Your requirement that I get someone's phone, look up your number and call you, seems ridiculous. Asking for the sign back was petty. What is wrong with calling when I had the time. I texted you that we loved the sign and I would call later. No weak bullshit just common sense. Your whining like a little girl made me not look forward to calling you. You did nothing to me or against me.That is for sure. And in a way that's the problem. I was not even in your view at all and that is why you didn't call me. I was not even a thought in your head. Period. Honestly, Mark, you had no idea that I just might want to hear from you immediately? After all that effort and time and...I put into that sign? What were you thinking? Not about me that's for certain.....I hope you explained to "everyone" that I did nothing to you or against you. The problem is you did something against me in response. Now you will reap the consequences for that emotionally checked out action. "Not a thought on your head"? You are a mind reader. All that time and effort? You remember when and where you took that photo of Jasmine? You need a reminder? Where were you staying? Did you spend hours with a paint brush or did you drop off the photo with a sign painter? Was it your idea to make the text that color? On a silver background? You chose those colors because you know how well they fit with my decor? Maybe the sign isn't as bitchin' as you think. Your crack about having Joe build a frame for 25 cents shows how thin-skinned and petty you are. Couldn't let that one go - some guy you just met and you get a bug up your ass. If I had known you were such a latent homosexual I would've been more sensitive to your feminine needs. You should have called me immediately and said thanks - 2 minutes - that's all. That's all. Period. Anyone in my position would have expected that. Anyone.Of course, you lost the only phone in Kampot Province and no one near you had a phone or my phone number and you were tired and busy and ...and....and....The position you were in? With your head up your ass? It is no wonder all you see and hear is shit. I can't even imagine how this would have turned out if I had called you. My gratitude wouldn't seem genuine enough, then you would insist I get Joe to frame it. What a petty little girl you are. As I said before...I should not have expected anything from you. Period. That was my mistake.for sure - I am culpable. Apologize to you? Aint going to happen, my friend. Hate me as you like...this is one incident in your life....of a few others I am sure....emotional communication aint exactly your bag....so it goes....You should have expected that if you want someone to read lines from your personal screenplay you need to give them a copy and yell "action". You won't apologize for insulting me and talking behind my back? I apologized for not calling and gave my reasons. Who has an emotional disconnect? I'd hate you if I gave a shit about you. But I don't. You are like so many closeted homos who pretend to be straight so they can hang out with the brothers. Is this communicating my emotions enough? Am I overreacting? for sure I am.....I am hurt and disappointed....and you are righteous and defensive - never once saying that you actually made a mistake in judgement but rather sticking to your ludicrous wall of defense "Ï didn't have the 2 minutes": thang....I love that one - I really do....I love it too... I really do. 2 minutes is how long it takes for you to cream in a boy's mouth. anyway, our friendship is probably shattered by this.....maybe not....you want me to ask you for your forgiveness and I want you to say that you made a mistake in judgement.....neither is likely to happen before we both die.....so it goes.....You think? When did you suddenly start becoming so intuitive? As you can tell from this letter I don't expect anything from you. My mistake in judgement was in not believing my friends when they told me you were an asshole. So it goes...Bro. I wish you no ill will...I sincerely hope that you wake up someday, that you get sober and see the light, get out of that cloud of fog...I only wish the best for you and your family.....I really do.....BI wish you the best too. I think if you finally come out of the closet you will find the kinds of friends you really need.And work on the emotional communication, Bro.

apology.....2 messagesBradford Edwards ~ Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:13 AMTo: mark norris ~

Upon reflection, I definitely overreacted and went way too far. WhileI honestly feel I had just cause for being disappointed I had noright to address or comment on your character or life choices. I amnot in any position to judge another person. I do, however, have theright to be concerned when other people's choices effect me.Still I should focus on that behavior, not draw conclusions aboutlarger issues. I was wrong. Period. And for that I apologize. I wentway over the line. I felt baited and then I baited back and provokedyou and then the vicious circle was completed. That is how wars start.We weren't close friends before and it is unlikely that we would haveever been. We do share a number of acquaintances and we have one goodfriend in common - the beloved and widely admired nearly perfect humanbeing known as John Smith.While there is little possibility that we will repair this rift, thereis no reason for us to be sworn enemies either. I did nothing to you,in actual fact, and you did nothing to me. although words wereexchanged to be sure. I did not "talk behind your back" either - whenI described the situation to others I told them exactly what I toldyou in my messages. I only told other people in order to get theirindependent take on the situation.The truth, and tragic irony, is that the original spirit of thisentire fiasco was an attempt to give a gift - it does have a surrealquality to it when considering it all started with a hand-paintedsign. So it goes.....So...again, sorry, your life is your own - I had no businesscommenting on any of your choices and actions. I only wish you goodfortune and always have done......Bradford

mark norris ~ Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 3:18 AMTo: Bradford Edwards ~

Dear Bradford,Thank you for taking the effort to write a very thoughtful and compassionate letter. That is how wars are averted. My bile was spent after that last missive so I'm glad you were able to see past it. I apologize for expressing such raw anger. I agree with your sentiments and hope you have good fortune.Cheers,Mark

Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:15 AM

Dear Bradford,I guess my reply to your last email was insufficient. I assume this because you chose not to reply to it and yet still made an effort to tell Paul Stewart and more recently my wife that you had something else to say to me. Therefor I will make yet another attempt to answer your email. "Upon reflection, I definitely overreacted and went way too far. While I honestly feel I had just cause for being disappointed I had no right to address or comment on your character or life choices. I am not in any position to judge another person. I do, however, have the right to be concerned when other people's choices effect me." You over reacted and went too far... Yes, that is the crux of the problem. You had 'just cause' for being disappointed... well, you were disappointed just because you expected me to call you as soon as I could to thank you for something I didn't ask for. Disappointment or no, you did not have the right to address or comment on my character or "life choices". You are not in any position to judge me, you clearly do not know nor do you wish to know anything about me, yet you have judged me. In what way has any choice I have made affected you? What is your concern? I didn't call you right away not because of any choice on my part and yet you assume that makes you concerned about my choices?Turn all this around on yourself. You may be surprised at what you find. "Still I should focus on that behavior, not draw conclusions about larger issues. I was wrong. Period. And for that I apologize. I went way over the line. I felt baited and then I baited back and provoked you and then the vicious circle was completed. That is how wars start."You should focus on 'that' behavior. I assume you mean your behavior. You brought this entire thing on. Your behavior. I responded as I could. Initially I tried to be polite but your behavior was uncalled for. You went over the line. You were not "baited". "We weren't close friends before and it is unlikely that we would have ever been. We do share a number of acquaintances and we have one good friend in common - the beloved and widely admired nearly perfect human being known as John Smith."So we weren't close friends...I didn't know that. I actually thought we were. Not just because we had many mutual friends but because I had a genuine respect for you. We spent some fun evenings together and we shared our ideas freely. I just played badminton with Jon Smith and I didn't feel the need to tell him anything about you. "While there is little possibility that we will repair this rift, there is no reason for us to be sworn enemies either. I did nothing to you, in actual fact, and you did nothing to me. although words were exchanged to be sure. I did not "talk behind your back" either - when I described the situation to others I told them exactly what I told you in my messages. I only told other people in order to get their independent take on the situation."You set the rules here. "Little possibility" sounds pretty grim . Maybe I shouldn't even make the effort if the odds are so slim. I only swear to be someone's enemy when they prove themselves to be my enemy. Most notably by talking bullshit about me behind my back. You say you did nothing to me... is that really how you feel? Think back on what you did, and on what I did not do. Words were exchanged, and you did "talk behind my back". Anyone given all the facts would conclude that you were on crack. "The truth, and tragic irony, is that the original spirit of this entire fiasco was an attempt to give a gift - it does have a surreal quality to it when considering it all started with a hand-painted sign. So it goes....."The truth is you know little of tragedy nor irony. The original spirit of this fiasco was that you wanted your ego stroked - your attempt at a gift was well off the mark. I will again ask that the next time you give a gift that you tell the recipient that they have 48 hours to call and tell you how much they love the gift or else you will take it back. (When you say "hand-painted sign" do you mean hand painted by you?) "So...again, sorry, your life is your own - I had no business commenting on any of your choices and actions. I only wish you good fortune and always have done......Bradford"I accept your apology, as I did before. I agree with you that my life is my own, and would add that your life is my own too depending on your point of view. Maybe quantum physics isn't your bag. Fortune is like a cookie, depends on the recipe.By the way, I may be angry with you because of a misunderstanding: Eric of the Bokor Mountain Lodge said that you told him that I had never worked a day in my life. This is not true to an extent that only someone with a limited exposure to my history could come up with - like you. Please truthfully tell me that you never had any conversations with him about me.

Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 10:07 AMsubject Re: apology.....

Impressive argument. What can I say? Mark, I predict that perhaps inthe future you will view this situation differently. Funny, I toldJasmine that I thought that the fiasco was ridiculous and we shouldjust bury it and move on. You heard it as I wanted to once againapologize to you. So you again defend your actions/inaction asabsolutely correct and state unequivocally I was the bad guy. WhiteHat vs Black Hat. It's like telling a 6 year-old about why thanking hisUncle for the birthday present is the right thing to do. Where canone go with that?Remember, you're the one who attacked me viciously in e-mails viaa homophobic diatribe - apparently in a drunken rage. But wait - I amactually the evil fuck right? For telling PS what? I don't recall telling PSanything like what you quoted as I have no clue about your history.if you want a more neutral take on this situation - simply show all thecorrespondence between us to a third party and see what they say.While I have not done this it might prove useful to you - it is all there in the e-mails, right?I almost called you and now its perhaps better that I didn't. Youre-mail reveals your delusional reasoning and that is that. Again, Iwish you no ill - you're not a bad fellow and I have genuine affectionfor Jasmine. Still...it is now crystal clear that we see the world insuch vastly different terms as to have no bridge to share. So it goes.Good luck to you and your family......B

Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 1:03 PMsubject Re: apology.....

Dear Bradford,You have proven yourself incapable of writing an email without including some kind of insult. Your very first email was an insult and you asked for the "gift" back. Now you are comparing me to a six year old who needs to be told to thank his kindly uncle for a "birthday present". Who is delusional? Why is it so hard for you to read my defense of my inactions as just that. You need to believe that I didn't call you because I am uncaring and "checked out". I wanted to explain that that was not the case. Where in that exchange did I call you the bad guy? Or worse. Instead of insulting me why don't you try and defend your actions to me.I apologized for the one email that I vented my homophobic anger at you. I went over the top on that one specifically so you might realize what a drag it is to receive such nasty appraisals of one's character in a series of emails. I have no reason to believe you are homosexual, and it wouldn't bother me if you were. And I wrote that email as I did all the others in complete sobriety. I didn't call you an evil fuck. All Paul had to say was that he seemed to think I should write you a nice note because you seemed upset. My question was about any conversations you may have had with the folks at the FCC specifically Erik from the Bokor Mountain Lodge.I will print out the emails and let some people give me their take on it now that you have given your permission.If you can find anything in this email that seems to be a direct attack on your character please point it out to me. Your comment about me being not such a bad fellow comes with the caveat that I suffer delusional reasoning. Care to explain that? Using nice words? You have consistently taken the position that we are unable to repair this rift and that, I predict, will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.Cheers,Mark

Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 2:06 PMsubject Re: apology.....

Mark, your last e-mail was a stalwart defense of your simply nottaking the time to place a 10 second call of gratitude. I asked youthe night before delivering the sign to please call me a soon as youreceived the sign and you readily agreed. Now you state (reread youre-mail carefully):a) it was suspect to give something that was not asked forb) I was unreasonable to expect any gratitude at allc) I did the sign solely to hear my ego praisedd) the value of the sign is dubious anyway because I didn't paint it myselfIn fact, Erik, told me that he tried to hand you his phone more thanonce to call me and he said that you could not be bothered to do it.Is he lying? The most basic question is why you didn't take the 10seconds to call me? Because I just wasn't worth the bother. Ohwell.....So instead of simply apologizing for this mistake in judgement youlist various specious excuses for not having 10 seconds in almost 3days to place the call. You refuse to take responsibility for this. Itis then converted into being all my fault for over-reacting. Well, Iwas disappointed and please show me someone who would not have been?It was highly insulting - especially after defended yourself soardently.I did take you to task for a much larger issue and I still feel thatis, in fact, the real issue here anyway. I do regret doing that andapologized for it - you have to face that issue yourself when you'reready. Period. I am not judging you. I am judging your behavior, butit is futile because it isn't really a fault of your character. I needto step away from any role in this personal process - I aint in noposition to offer advice. I can, however, choose not to be involvedwith people that I don't fully trust. I trusted you to give meimmediate feedback on the sign and you didn't do it. You were too busyand that is the way it went. I have to accept that. I also trust thatfriends will take responsibility for their actions that affect me.Again, I hope that someday you will look back on this situation with anew understanding. I really do.Please.....let's not have this be an ongoing feud - it can be amutually accepted misunderstanding....and maybe someday we can repairit....time will tell....again, I only want the best for you and yourfamily and..............that really is the bottom line here......B

Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 10:33 AMsubject Re: apology.....
Dear Bradford,If your first email had been something like; "Bro, you didn't call me like you said you would, what's up with that." instead of:"Apparently you don't like or want the sign....not one fuckin word from you since it was delivered. Yeah, your phone is in the river...and its the only phone in Kampot province and you don't have my phone number (since Eric has been relaying msgs to you from me)... really, brother, are you that checked out all the time or what? too busy? you haven't had one thought to call me and say thanks? 2 minutes and 2000 riel? Just give me the sign back - Eric will pick it up....B" Then it would've been easy to apologize. I texted you from Eric's phone that the sign had arrived and we loved it and I didn't have a phone. It took more than 10 seconds to write and I have no idea how much it cost. I see now that you thought that was Eric writing not me. He did offer me the phone to call you but he didn't suggest any urgency. You keep mentioning 2000 riels as if that were somehow significant (are you saying I'm too cheap to call - even though I would be borrowing someone's phone?) None of my staff, nor my wife had any credit on their phones, Eric was busy using his phone. Why would I call Eric a liar? Eric told you "he tried to hand you his phone more than once to call me and he said that you could not be bothered to do it."? That may be his interpretation or even your version of his interpretation but I did not say to him that I couldn't be bothered to call. I doubt Eric will be pleased to revisit this but you should write him and ask if you might have misinterpreted his description of the event. This seems to be the core of your initial anger, that I fiddled while Rome burned. I will admit I did not think it so important to call you after I had sent the text message - you were notified of the delivery of the gift and thanked for it, a phone conversation could wait until a quiet moment. If you persist in denying that that is acceptable behavior than I can't help you get over your hurt. No one has ever presented something in this way to me so I was not prepared to face such recriminations. Your first email, however, suggests a pathology that needs serious medication. That I kept my cool and responded with an apology (and explanation) should have indicated to you that I valued our friendship enough to be polite. You responded to that with "Fuck You".As far as your bullet points let me translate them back into English for you:a) it was odd to give something that was not asked for with provisos attached (make Joe build a frame, call me as soon as you get it)b) you were unreasonable to expect more gratitude than you got sooner than you got itc) you did the sign solely to hear you ego praised on the phoned) the value of the sign is what you paid for itAfter all this you still feel as if you were wronged somehow. And why bring into the equation my 'problem' which you do not judge nor name but also cannot but hope I will deal with one day. Where did you come by this diagnosis? The few times we spent together I remember well. Is it possible you overheard some talk? Or were you gossiping? These are actions that affect me that I hold people responsible for. You talk of trust! You think you can't trust me because of this?! Wow... You trusted me to give you immediate feedback on the sign? Trust is not the word to use there.You want to end this feud than stop impugning my character in your fucking emails.Cheers,Mark
Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:43 AMsubject new info....

I never received any message from you via Eric....I only had textsfrom Eric himself and he told me explicitly that you didn't want to bebothered expressing any feedback. It would have been clear if themessage was from you directly and not from Eric and, in fact, this isthe first time that you have said anything like this. Before you havesaid that you were too busy to reply.Anyway, it is a classic "he said-she said" situation that only Ericcan settle and I will ask him about this personally (and I'm prettysure that I have all those msgs saved in my Cambodian phone anyway). Iam certain that he never said you sent me a message personally via hisphone - if that was indeed true - that alone would have placated me.It would have been a undeniable sign of gratitude - that's all Iwanted. None of this absurd situation would have gone past thatmessage.I never got that alleged message. I believe that you might have toldEric something verbally, but you are now stating that you yourselftyped out the message from you to me clearly saying thanks and thatyou liked the sign? really? How come this was never said until now?Only Eric knows the real truth here and he knew of the conflict fromthe beginning - it seems that he would told me that immediately. WhatI remember is that he told me that you never took his phone when itwas offered. He was not happy about being in the middle and would haveshowed me that message right away to clear the air.Mark, let's just leave this. Don't worry about me "talking behind yourback" - I have never told anyone else anything that I have not alreadywritten to you in these e-mails. Moreover, we need to let go of thisbecause it seems so silly and nonsensical. You have to be as weary asI am from this situation....it's over......B

Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 2:05 PMsubject Re: new info....

Dear Bradford,The silly and nonsensical part of this is your inability to come to terms with the vileness you unleashed on me because you imagined that I was ignoring your request to call you about the sign out of some sick malice. How you came to this conclusion remains a mystery but your actions are what I will not forgive. You created this situation and yet have made no effort to undo the damage. You have not explained how you came to the conclusion that I have some sort of problem. It is as easy for me to conclude that you peddle in gossip as it is for you to assume I am lying about texting you. You have done nothing to lesson my justifiable anger - this situation was entirely of your own making. Face that fact.Cheers,MarkPS It seems you are as incapable of reading emails as you are incompetent at writing them, so let's just leave it at that. I was quite content to just part ways with you until you contacted Paul and Jasmine, and I'm twice as content now after this little exchange.

Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:12 PMsubject proof of the truth - from your own words....

after re-reading our exchange of e-mails - this is what you wrote:"Eric delivered the sign while I was up on Bokor Mountain. It wasn'tuntil that evening that I unwrapped it. Then Eric told me to call you.I was busy setting up movie night and was sunburned and tired so Iasked him to text you about my phone and how much we love the sign.Why did you need to hear my voice? Why the big hurry. Why assume I wasnot busy? Yesterday was one of the worst of my life and if I hadcalled you I would've not been very understanding of your impatience."You did not, in fact, text me personally as you just claimed but askedEric to text me. Big Difference. This is how I remember it. Mark, thatis the crux of the initial conflict - you never did call (or text) mepersonally and that was what was so disappointing. If you can't seewhy........then there is no where to go with this.Your anger is out of context here. I am not/have not spread falserumors about you - I overheard nothing. I have called you no names orgossiped, etc.Instead of just saying that you made a mistake in judgement you listedmany reasons for not taking the 10 seconds for calling and/or textingyourself. I admit that I indeed over-reacted and fed the flames andhere we are.....you incredibly angry and me disappointed....so itgoes....damage done....You should take some responsibility for this situation - in fact, weshare the blame for taking it further than it needed to go. Neither ofus was "right" here - we both became inflamed, etc. and kept theconflict going. Re-reading both our e-mails there aint no angelshere.....So...let's just end it, fairly, in the middle - so to speak.....it's a draw....B

Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:34 PMsubject Re: proof of the truth - from your own words....Jul 22 (2 days ago)

Dear Bradford,Ask Eric if I used his phone to text you then pull your head out of your ass. The significance is meaningless anyway, you were informed that I received the sign by Eric and by me. You are still conveniently forgetting your email and the rest of your bullshit. That you would use this email to "prove" something shows how blind you are. You proved once again that you are incapable of reading an email. That you see this as some kind of competition that can end in a draw shows how self-centered you are. You have proven again and again what an unpleasant person you are. This ends our correspondence.You lose,Mark

Date: July 22, 2008 7:22:34 PM PDT

Brad & MarkUm.... I'm writing to confirm that Mark did indeed text Bradford athank you note.I'm leaving the 3rd grade classroom now.Eric

The great bank robbery – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs

2011-09-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

The great bank robbery – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs:

'via Blog this'

My top 25 animated movies

2011-07-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

25. Megamind
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
23. Yellow Submarine (1968)
22. The Point
21. The Fox and the Hound
20. Jungle Book
19. Tangled (2010)
18. The Lion King (1994)
17. Madagascar 2 Escape to Africa
16. Happy Feet (2006)
15. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
14. Despicable Me
13. Curious George
12. The Incredibles
11. Toy Story 3 (2010)
10. Ratatouille
9. Rio (2003)
8. Ponyo
7. Up (2009)
6. Howl’s Moving Castle
5. Spirited Away (2001)
4. Kiki’s Delivery Service
3. Totoro
2. Monsters Inc.
1. WALL-E (2008)
These are not in the exact order of ratings, I will endeavor to write a review of each as time permits.

TIME's 25 best animated movies

2011-07-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

25. Lady and the Tramp (1955)
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
23. Yellow Submarine (1968)
22. ~~Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (2008)~~
21. ~~Kung Fu Panda (2008)~~
20. ~~Paprika (2007)~~
19. Tangled (2010)
18. The Lion King (1994)
17. ~~Akira (1988)~~
16. Happy Feet (2006)
15. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
14. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
13. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
12. ~~Toy Story (1995)~~
11. Toy Story 3 (2010)
10. The Little Mermaid (1989)
9. Finding Nemo (2003)
8. ~~The Triplets of Belleville (2003)~~
7. Up (2009)
6. ~~South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)~~
5. Spirited Away (2001)
4. Dumbo (1941)
3. ~~The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)~~
2. WALL-E (2008)
1. Pinocchio (1940)

I struck out the movies that were not appropriate for children or that just suck or that are sold by TIME/Warner (and suck).

Movie Reviews Part 1 Kids Movies

2011-06-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

The Jungle Book, 1967, Walt Disney Animation Studio.
My daughter likes this movie and so do I. It has fewer of the Disney tropes than the more objectionable titles they have produced. It is less scary too. The animals are well animated and the voice actors are just right, particularly Louie Prima and George Sanders. Mr French is just right as the panther. The few songs are all hits, the swing/scat style of the monkey king must have seemed revolutionary at the time. Still fresh.

**** four stars (out of five)

Last

2008-12-24T22:49:00.000-08:00

The 48 Laws of Power

2007-12-07T20:43:00.001-08:00

by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers

Law 1

Never Outshine the Master

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

Law 2

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Law 3

Conceal your Intentions

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

Law 4

Always Say Less than Necessary

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Law 5

So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Law 6

Court Attention at all Cost

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious, than the bland and timid masses.

Law 7

Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

Law 8

Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary

When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains – then attack. You hold the cards.

Law 9

Win through your Actions, Never through Argument

Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

Law 10

Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky

You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as disease. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

Law 11

Learn to Keep People Dependent on You

To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.

Law 12

Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim

One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift – a Trojan horse – will serve the same purpose.

Law 13

When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest,

Never to their Mercy or Gratitude

If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.

Law 14

Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Law 15

Crush your Enemy Totally

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.

Law 16

Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor

Too much circulation makes the price go down: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.

Law 17

Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

Law 18

Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself – Isolation is Dangerous

The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere – everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from – it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

Law 19

Know Who You’re Dealing with – Do Not Offend the Wrong Person

There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. Choose your victims and opponents carefully, then – never offend or deceive the wrong person.

Law 20

Do Not Commit to Anyone

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

Law 21

Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker – Seem Dumber than your Mark

No one likes feeling stupider than the next persons. The trick, is to make your victims feel smart – and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

Law 22

Use the Surrender Tactic: Transform Weakness into Power

When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead. Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane. Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you – surrender first. By turning the other check you infuriate and unsettle him. Make surrender a tool of power.

Law 23

Concentrate Your Forces

Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point. You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another – intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.

Law 24

Play the Perfect Courtier

The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the mot oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.

Law 25

Re-Create Yourself

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

Law 26

Keep Your Hands Clean

You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency: Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s-paws to disguise your involvement.

Law 27

Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following

People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

Law 28

Enter Action with Boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

Law 29

Plan All the Way to the End

The ending is everything. Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give the glory to others. By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.

Law 30

Make your Accomplishments Seem Effortless

Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease. All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed. When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more. Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work – it only raises questions. Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.

Law 31

Control the Options: Get Others to Play with the Cards you Deal

The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.

Law 32

Play to People’s Fantasies

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Law 33

Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew

Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usual y an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

Law 34

Be Royal in your Own Fashion: Act like a King to be treated like one

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated; In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

Law 35

Master the Art of Timing

Never seem to be in a hurry – hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time. Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually. Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power. Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.

Law 36

Disdain Things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best Revenge

By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

Law 37

Create Compelling Spectacles

Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power – everyone responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.

Law 38

Think as you like but Behave like others

If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.

Law 39

Stir up Waters to Catch Fish

Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive. You must always stay calm and objective. But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage. Put your enemies off-balance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.

Law 40

Despise the Free Lunch

What is offered for free is dangerous – it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price – there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.

Law 41

Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes

What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making: Establish your own name and identity by changing course. Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.

Law 42

Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter

Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual – the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoned of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them – they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.

Law 43

Work on the Hearts and Minds of Others

Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.

Law 44

Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect

The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact. By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson. Few can resist the power of Mirror Effect.

Law 45

Preach the Need for Change, but Never Reform too much at Once

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.

Law 46

Never appear too Perfect

Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.

Law 47

Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop

The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

Law 48

Assume Formlessness

By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack. Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

peace in our time

2006-10-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the -- in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen.
--George w. Bush

Crawford, TX
08/13/2001

republican humor

2006-09-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Q.: Why doesn't Mark Foley use bookmarks?

A. He'd rather just bend the pages over.

Messopotamia

2006-09-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

Mr. Churchill got to the root of the Mesopotamia issue when he said, on June 14, that our `obligation' there is not `unlimited,' that a point might be reached when no more sacrifices could be demanded from British taxpayers, and that the time might come when `the conditions of our finance or our military resources were such that we could do no more' for Mesopotamia. In our view, the point defined by Mr. Churchill was reached long ago. . . . Every child at school has heard of Babylon and its tragic fate; and the mounds of rubble which are all that now recall the vanished glories of the Babylonian empire may still serve to remind our rulers that every Power which has sought to control these dismal lands has met with ultimate disaster.
18 July 1921
Mesopotamia. (Editorial)

Andrei Sakharov writing in 1974:

2006-08-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

“Far in the future, more than 50 years from now, I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike television… the UIS will give each person maximum freedom of choice and will require individual activity. But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people.“

Briefed

2006-06-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.

What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Balls the size of Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3

2006-05-04T04:29:00.000-07:00

STEPHEN COLBERT: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin, I've been asked to make an announcement. Whoever parked 14 black bulletproof SUVs out front, could you please move them? They are blocking in 14 other black bulletproof SUVs, and they need to get out.

Wow! Wow, what an honor! The White House Correspondents' dinner. To actually -- to sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I'm a pretty sound sleeper; that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Damn it! The one guy who could have helped.

By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Someone from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert, and tonight it is my privilege to celebrate this president, ‘cause we're not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we're not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut. Right, sir?

That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, okay? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the "No Fact Zone." FOX News, I hold a copyright on that term.

I'm a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states, and I cannot wait to see how the Washington Post spins that one tomorrow.

I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit. As a matter of fact, Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, welcome. Your great country makes our Happy Meals possible. I said it's a celebration.

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible. I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical!

And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it's yogurt. But I refuse to believe it's not butter.

Most of all, I believe in this president. Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias. So, Mr. President, please, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half full. 32% means the glass -- important to set up your jokes properly, sir. Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash. Okay.

Look, folks, my point is that I don't believe this is a low point in this presidency. I believe it is just a lull before a comeback. I mean, it's like the movie Rocky. Alright? The President, in this case, is Rocky Balboa, and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world. It's the tenth round. He's bloodied. His corner man, Mick, who in this case, I guess, would be the Vice President, he's yelling, "Cut me, Dick, cut me!" And every time he falls, everyone says, "Stay down, Rocky! Stay down!" But does he stay down? No. Like Rocky, he gets back up, and in the end he -- actually loses in the first movie. Okay, doesn't matter. Doesn’t matter.

The point is it is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face, so don't pay attention to the approval ratings that say that 68% of Americans disapprove of the job this man is doing. I ask you this, does that not also logically mean that 68% approve of the job he's not doing? Think about it. I haven't.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man, because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things, things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.

Now, there may be an energy crisis. Well, this president has a very forward-thinking energy policy. Why do you think he's down on the ranch cutting that brush all the time? He's trying to create an alternative energy source. By 2008, we will have a mesquite-powered car.

And I just like the guy. He's a good Joe, obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She's a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma'am. I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the President. Let history decide what did or did not happen.

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.

And as excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of FOX News. FOX News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side, and the Vice President's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking? Reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Because, really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So, the White House has personnel changes. And then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

Now, it's not all bad guys out there. There are some of the heroes out there tonight: Christopher Buckley, Jeff Sacks, Ken Burns, Bob Schieffer. I’ve interviewed all of them. By the way, Mr. President, thank you for agreeing to be on my show. I appreciate it. I was just as shocked as everyone here is, I promise you. How's Tuesday for you? I've got Frank Rich, but we can just bump him. And I mean bump him. I know a guy. Say the word.

See who we've got here tonight. We’ve got General Moseley, Air Force Chief of Staff. We’ve got General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They still support Rumsfeld. Right, you guys aren't retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld. Look, by the way, I've got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble: Don't let them retire! Come on, we've got a stop-loss program; let's use it on these guys. I've seen Zinni in that crowd on Wolf Blitzer. If you're strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows, you’re strong enough to stand on a bank of computers and order men into battle. Come on!

Jesse Jackson is here, the Reverend. Haven't heard from the Reverend in just a little while. I had him on the show. It was a very interesting interview, very challenging interview. You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants at the pace that he wants. It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

Justice Scalia is here. Justice Scalia, may I be the first to say, “Welcome, sir!” You look fantastic! How are you? Just talking some Sicilian with my paisan.

John McCain is here. John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you it wasn't a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There's no predicting him. By the way, Senator McCain, it's so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican fold. I’ve actually got a summer house in South Carolina. Look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University. So glad you've seen the light, sir.

Mayor Nagin! Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city! Yeah, give it up. Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington, D.C., the chocolate city with a marshmallow center and a graham cracker crust of corruption. It's a Mallomar, I guess, is what I'm describing, is a Mallomar. It’s a seasonal cookie.

Joe Wilson is here. Joe Wilson, right down here in front, the most famous husband since Desi Arnaz. And, of course, he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said? Ay, gee monetti! I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife “Joe Wilson's wife.” Patrick Fitzgerald is not here tonight, right? Okay, dodged a bullet.

And, of course, we can't forget the man of the hour, new press secretary, Tony Snow. Secret Service name: "Snow Job." Toughest job. What a hero! Took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq. Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Big shoes to fill. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else. McClellan, of course, eager to retire, really felt like he needed to spend more time with Andrew Card's children.

Now, Mr. President, I wish you hadn't made the decision so quickly, sir. I was vying for the job myself. I think I would have made a fabulous press secretary. I have nothing but contempt for these people.

Turning a Blind Eye to Wi-Fi

2006-01-23T19:52:00.000-08:00

By Robert W. McChesney and John Podesta, Washington Monthly. Posted January 23, 2006.

Broadband internet is the electricity of the 21st century -- and the rest of the world is poised to leave America in the dark. Tools

Two decades ago, the chattering classes fretted about economic upheaval rising from Japan and the Asian Tigers. They feared an invasion of cars, microchips, and karaoke that would take away American jobs, take over U.S.-dominated industries, and shift cultural norms. In the 1990s, America responded with a boom in high technology and Hollywood exports. But a revolution is again brewing in places like Japan and South Korea. This time it's about "broadband" -- a technology that, in terms of powering economies, could be the 21st century equivalent of electricity. But rather than relive the jingoism of the 1980s, American policy makers would be wise to take a cue from the Asian innovators and implement new policies to close the digital divide at home and with the rest of the world.

Most people know broadband as an alternative to their old, slow dial-up Internet connection. These high-capacity data networks made of fiber-optic cables provide a constant, unbroken connection to the Internet. But broadband is about much more than checking your email or browsing on eBay. In the near future, telephone, television, radio and the web all will be delivered to your home via a single broadband connection. In the not-so-distant-future, broadband will be an indispensable part of economic, personal, and public life. Those countries that achieve universal broadband are going to hold significant advantages over those who don't. And so far, the United States is poised to be a follower -- not a leader -- in the broadband economy.

American residents and businesses now pay two to three times as much for slower and poorer quality service than countries like South Korea or Japan. Since 2001, according to the International Telecommunications Union, the United States has fallen from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband penetration. Thomas Bleha recently argued in Foreign Affairs that what passes for broadband in the United States is "the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world." While about 60 percent of U.S. households do not subscribe to broadband because it is either unavailable where they live or they cannot afford it, most Japanese citizens can access a high-speed connection that's more than 10 times faster than what's available here for just $22 a month. (Japan is now rolling out ultra-high speed access at more than 500 times what the Federal Communications Commission considers to be "broadband" in this country.)

The economic ramifications are profound. "Asians will have the first crack at developing the new commercial applications, products, services, and content of the high-speed-broadband era," writes Bleha. Already, South Korea, which leads the world in the percentage of its businesses and homes with broadband, is the number one developer of online video games -- perhaps the fastest-growing industry today. What's more, societies in which broadband use is near-universal will adapt to its uses much more quickly than those where access is available only to the well-to-do few.

The countries surpassing the United States in broadband deployment did so by using a combination of public entities and private firms. The Japanese built their world-class system by ensuring "open access" to residential telephone lines, meaning competitors paid the same wholesale price to use the wires. The country is also establishing a super-fast, nationwide fiber system via a combination of tax breaks, debt guarantees and subsidies. But of particular note, the Japanese government also encouraged municipalities to build their own networks, especially in rural areas. Towns and villages willing to set up their own ultra-high-speed fiber networks received government subsidies covering approximately one-third of their costs.

Unfortunately, the United States has pursued the opposite policy. President Bush has called for "universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007," and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin claims broadband deployment is his "highest priority." But they have made no progress toward these goals; in fact, they have rewarded their corporate cronies for maintaining high prices, low speeds and lackluster innovation. Federal policies have not merely failed to correct our broadband problems, they have made them worse. Instead of encouraging competition, the FCC has allowed DSL providers and cable companies to shut out competitors by denying access to their lines. And whereas the Japanese government encourages individual towns to set up their own "Community Internet," Washington has done nothing. Fourteen states in the United States now have laws on the books restricting cities and towns from building their own high-speed Internet networks. No wonder America is falling behind its Asian competitors.

Despite all the opposition from telecom companies and their political allies, some municipalities are finding ways to provide broadband to their residents. Community Internet projects are already up and running in dozens of small towns and coming soon to bigger cities like Philadelphia, Portland, and Minneapolis. These cities recognize broadband as perhaps the single most important factor in transforming their local economies and the lives of average citizens. Community Internet could revolutionize and democratize communications in this country. But the major obstacle to universal, affordable broadband access for all Americans is not economic or technical. It's political.

"A birch rod in the cupboard"

The dispute over municipal broadband bears a striking similarity to the development of the electric power industry a century ago. As James Baller -- an attorney who represents local governments and public utilities -- first warned in a 1994 paper written for the American Public Power Association: "The history of the electric power industry casts substantial doubt on the notion that our nation can depend on competition among cable and telephone companies alone... to ensure not only prompt and affordable, but also universal, access to the benefits of the information superhighway."

Borrowing from Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley's 1986 book, Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War Over Electricity, Baller showed that when electricity first became available in the 1880s, privately owned utilities marketed "the new technology as synonymous with wealth, power and privilege," lighting large cities, businesses, and the homes of the rich. Electricity also allowed factories to stay open 24 hours a day, and led to the institution of swing shifts. But communities that didn't have electricity couldn't produce as much, and couldn't keep up with urban competitors. Rural communities were left with the choice of forming a government-owned utility or being left in the dark. Even big cities like Detroit built municipal power systems to cut prices and extend service. In response, private utility companies responded with a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign that attacked advocates of municipal power as "un-American," "Bolshevik," and "an unholy alliance of radicals."

But the expansion of electricity, Baller argued, showed that the presence -- or even threat -- of competition from the public sector is one of the surest ways to secure quality service and reasonable prices from private enterprises delivering critical public services. FDR, he notes, called municipal power systems "a birch rod in the cupboard, to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good."

And Roosevelt picked up the birch rod himself. In 1935, he created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), which gave loans and other help to small towns and farmer cooperatives interested in setting up their own power systems. The REA turned out to be one of the New Deal's most successful programs. Within two years, hundreds of new municipal power utilities were up and running across the country, and within 20 years, virtually all of rural America had electricity, provided either by rural co-ops or big utilities spurred to action by municipal competition. Baller concluded: "The plain, hard truth is that universal electric service would never have developed on a timely basis in the absence of municipally owned electric utilities and rural electric cooperatives" -- which still account for more than a quarter of the power in the country today.

Like the advent of electricity, broadband is transforming the daily lives of Americans. The future of U.S. communities depends upon access to advanced high-speed telecommunications services, a fact many urban policymakers already recognize. "Just as with the roads of old," Dianah Neff, Philadelphia's chief information technology officer, recently told BusinessWeek, "if broadband bypasses you, you become a ghost town."

The Philadelphia story

Last year, sensing their citizens were being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, Philadelphia's leaders launched an ambitious plan to blanket the entire city with wireless Internet service. To provide universal, affordable Internet access, Philadelphia plans to construct a gigantic "wireless mesh network" -- a system of interconnected antennas placed on streetlights, traffic signals, and public buildings. Each of these "nodes" broadcasts a broadband signal, which connects up with other nodes to create a cloud of Internet access for PCs, laptops and wireless devices. The technology is similar to the "Wi-Fi hotspots" that have popped up at cafes and libraries across the country. Philadelphia's hotspot, however, will cover 135 square miles. No tax dollars will be used to build the system, which will be financed instead with $10 to $15 million in bonds and private investment. The city is finalizing a contract with a consortium led by Earthlink to build and run the system -- and several Internet service providers (ISPs) will compete to market the service to local residents. The service will cost about $20 a month -- with subsidized access for lower-income households for about $10. The city plans to deploy the first of 3,000 nodes soon and complete the system by 2007.

For all its potential benefits to the city's residents, Wireless Philadelphia was nearly crushed before it started. Last fall, behind closed doors in the state capitol, industry lobbyists slipped a measure into a massive telecommunications bill to stop municipalities from entering the broadband business. "The Verizon bill" -- as it was known around the state legislature -- sailed through both chambers before city officials and media advocates got wind of its contents. A last-minute compromise carved an exception for Philadelphia, allowing that effort to go ahead as planned, but the rest of the state was shut out.

Towns in states where industry lobbyists have not succeeded (yet) in shutting down municipal broadband are doing remarkable things. When three major employers in Scottsburg, Ind. (pop. 6,040), threatened to leave town because they didn't have the communications infrastructure needed to deal with their customers and suppliers, the town's mayor, Bill Graham, went to the major cable and telephone companies for help. They told him that extending high-speed broadband services to Scottsburg wasn't profitable enough. So the city decided to build a municipal wireless "cloud" using transmitters placed on water and electric towers that reach more than 90 percent of the surrounding county's 23,000 residents. "Scottsburg didn't wake up one morning and say, we want to be in the broadband business," Graham told PBS. "Scottsburg had business and industry that was going to leave our community because what we had was not fast enough." Scottsburg's investment worked -- the employers stayed.

In Hermiston, Ore., fire fighters and police officers carry wireless computers that can download blueprints of a building on the way to a fire or track an accident at the nearby Army depot that houses chemical weapons, thanks to that town's Community Internet system. And Community Internet even played a role in helping the evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. With much of the communications network obliterated in the Gulf Coast Region, a cadre of volunteers converged in Louisiana, and used donated equipment to set up wireless networks, computers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones at more than a dozen shelters, allowing evacuees to contact other shelters to search for family members or fill out FEMA forms to get disaster aid.

The industry backlash

Community Internet has the potential to revolutionize and democratize communications in this country. And that may be the reason why big cable and telephone companies and their political allies have launched a sophisticated misinformation campaign. These companies and their coin-operated think tanks generally make three paradoxical arguments against municipal broadband. First, they contend that municipalities have no place in the "free market." Of course, the cable and telephone giants don't mention that their own monopolies -- which control 98 percent of the broadband market -- have been cemented with extensive public subsidies, tax breaks and incentives (as well as free rein to tear up city streets). Verizon, for instance, didn't complain last fall when Pennsylvania handed them subsidies for broadband deployment worth nearly 10 times what Wireless Philadelphia will cost. Neither did Comcast object when Philadelphia approved a $30 million grant to build a skyscraper that will house its headquarters. To the incumbent providers, "unfair competition" means any competition at all.

Opponents also warn that municipalities will "crowd out" more efficient private players. In reality, most municipal networks are a last resort by desperate local governments. Often their choice isn't between a municipal system and a private one, but between municipal and nothing. (Of course, that doesn't stop the phone and cable companies from trying to outlaw Community Internet even in areas where they don't currently offer service.) A recent study by the Florida Municipal Electric Association found "no evidence" to support the argument that municipal systems limit private investment. On the contrary, these systems appear to spur investment by bringing entrepreneurs and new competition into the market. Even threatening to build a system has a funny way of encouraging the incumbents to improve service and lower their prices.

The same critics of Community Internet claim that cities are too "lazy" or inefficient to manage complex systems and will be unable to adapt to changing technologies. But municipalities have a long track record of successfully and efficiently operating power plants, sewage systems and subways. It's hard to imagine that the broadband networks -- most of which will actually be operated by private contractors -- are any more complex. Perhaps the more obvious question is: If these systems are destined to fail, why are the telephone and cable companies expending so much energy trying to stop them?

The high-priced industry lobbyists and their political allies are moving quickly to write their monopolies into law. In 2005, they were able to push through restrictions in five states -- though only Nebraska passed an outright ban. But eight other bills were defeated or derailed thanks to a vocal coalition of media reformers, consumer groups, municipal officials, and the high-tech industry. So now opponents are pushing legislation at the federal level to outlaw municipal broadband nationwide. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), a former executive at phone giant SBC, has introduced a bill in the House that would give incumbent providers the right of first refusal before a city or town could offer broadband service. A similar measure is buried in Sen. John Ensign's (R-Nev.) rewrite of the Telecom Act.

21st-century meal ticket

This is exactly the opposite of what the country needs. Instead, we need political leadership to build popular support for a new national broadband policy. To start, the FCC should swiftly reverse course and restore competition for broadband whether it comes from DSL, cable, power lines, or wireless Community Internet systems.

Congress could boost the speed and reliability of community wireless networks by making available more "unlicensed spectrum"--those portions of the public airwaves not exclusively reserved for government or commercial use. Exisiting "Wi-Fi" networks operate in "junk bands" cluttered with signals from cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors and other consumer devices. At lower frequencies -- like in the television band -- signals travel farther and can go through walls, trees and mountains. Opening up some of this spectrum would make Community Internet systems much faster and cheaper to deploy, allowing a new generation of broadband entrepreneurs to enter the market. The broadcasters are about to return a sizable chunk of spectrum as part of the digital television transition, a portion of which could be reserved for Community Internet if Congress doesn't auction it all off to the cell phone companies. Another option would be to reallocate vast, unused "white spaces" between TV channels for wireless broadband. Either way, more "unlicensed spectrum" is the key to making universal, super-fast broadband for $10 a month a reality.

Most importantly, the federal government must ensure that the cable and telephone monopolies can't crush innovative projects like Wireless Philadelphia and the emerging national movement for Community Internet. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) have introduced a bill that would free municipalities to decide for themselves which technologies best serve their citizens. U.S. policy should create incentives for communities to build advanced telecommunications networks in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, creating robust competition for communications services, assisting small entrepreneurs through public-private partnerships, and bringing opportunity to low-income urban neighborhoods and rural communities too often neglected by large entrenched monopolies.

Without real competition or innovation, broadband deployment in the United States has stagnated. And the stakes of this misguided policy couldn't be higher. According to the Department of Commerce, 95 percent of new jobs created will demand computer skills. And a 2001 Brookings Institution study estimated the widespread adoption of basic broadband could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.2 million new jobs per year. Simply empowering local governments and community groups, in coordination with private entrepreneurs, to provide universal affordable, broadband may be the single best thing we can do to make America the pre-eminent economy -- and democracy -- of the 21st century.

Robert W. McChesney is the founder and president of Free Press, a media-reform organization, and an award-winning author of eight books on media-reform issues. John Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and former Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton.

George Bush and the Treacherous Country

2005-12-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

George Bush and the Treacherous Country
by Steve Erickson

(Illustration by Ryan Ward)

I am a traitor. I’m not sure exactly when I first knew it. Of course for a long time I resisted it; I had always thought of myself as a patriot. But sometime over the last 15 years I came to sense it, and certainly I understood it by the afternoon last October when the president officially launched his re-election campaign. That was the day he gave two speeches in New Hampshire on behalf of a war he thought he had won five months earlier; over the next 24 hours, Iraqi guerrillas in Baghdad killed three American soldiers and wounded four, assassinated a Spanish diplomat in the street, and drove a car into a police station, blowing up eight people. This moment wasn’t just the hinge of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the gales of the past and future blowing it open and shut. It wasn’t just the moment that his presidency became the hinge of modern American history. It was the hinge of my very Americanism, between patriotism and treachery.

Some are loath to bestow upon this president any sort of momentousness. Whatever he does or however dire the moment, some can’t bring themselves to believe George Bush deserves such import, given what they regard as the flukishness of his election or what they perceive to be the limits of his capabilities. Among the erudite, ridicule attends his every mispronunciation of this word, his every mangling of that sentence — mistakes that only endear him to a nation of word mispronouncers and sentence manglers. Among those who fret about the unfairness of life, there’s fury at the fortunate son who inherited his power from his presidential father and the Supreme Court, as though Al Gore would have been any less an inheritor from his own senatorial father and the president who made him vice president (none of which is to even mention what Hillary Clinton has inherited, or may inherit still).

To snicker at Bush’s luck and stupidity not only confirms Bush’s gleeful assertions that he’s underestimated, but misreads everything about both the moment and the man. The fortunate son has more natural political skill than his father ever did, and as he proved in his interview on Meet the Press this past weekend, the president is as able to absorb and command the facts of something as anyone else. As was also clear in the same interview, and given the ways in which his reasons for the Iraq invasion have changed from those that he presented to the country a year ago, what’s important about George Bush’s intelligence isn’t its magnitude but its nature. This is to say it’s a perfectly adequate intellect that chooses what it prefers to know, what it prefers to think, what it prefers to believe. Which is to say that the nature of Bush’s intelligence hasn’t anything to do with intelligence at all. Rather it has to do with — here’s a word we haven’t heard in a while — character.

Bush’s presidency may be more fraught with significance than any since Franklin Roosevelt’s. If you believe in any sort of fate, if you believe things happen according to any sort of Scheme, there was nothing flukish about Bush’s election; to the contrary, there was no way he could not have become president when he did. Gore may have had a better résumé, but manifestly Bush was better suited to the dark poetry of 2000. George W. Bush is the Millennial President, and not simply according to the arithmetic of calendars. He’s the president of all the millennium’s metaphors, a commander in chief for the End Days, collecting RSVPs for the Rapture.

By all accounts the president believes the 11th of September, 2001, was his hour of destiny, the great event with which he was born to contend. Uniquely in recent history, the al Qaeda attack had about it an unalloyed evil that didn’t simply conform to George Bush’s worldview but validated it. Beyond that, radical Islam is an enemy to which Bush relates not on a historical or sociological level but rather one deeply intuitive; at heart the president embraces the same kind of absolutes, and the same promise of eternity and yearning for self-obliteration in which such absolutes are rooted. To a lesser degree, he’s also temperamentally grounded in the same suspicion of the modern world and its complications. For about five weeks this made Bush the perfect president for September 11. When those weeks passed, increasingly he found himself first checked by the mechanisms of democracy that routinely check presidential power — beginning with questions by Congress and the press about secret military trials — and then outclassed by Osama bin Laden, whose vocabulary of obliteration exceeds Bush’s even if his means for achieving it doesn’t.

Notwithstanding Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and Jimmy Carter, a Sunday-school teacher, Bush is more than just the most religious president the country has ever had. His most profound political impulses — of which he barely may be conscious himself, but which are the source of his political strength and bind him to his political base — are theocratic. This isn’t reflected simply by the well-documented bulletins he sends to his base in his speeches, with the evangelic references to “good news” and (from the 2003 State of the Union) “wonder-working power,” or by the fact that he’s expressed on occasions his conviction that his faith is the sole passport to eternity (such as when he told a Jewish reporter for an Austin newspaper that only Christians could enter heaven). The president believes himself to be God’s instrument, as do his most devoted followers — two of every five who voted for Bush in 2000 consider themselves evangelical Christians — and the absolute nature of his religious beliefs, and the way in which they demand that the values of secular democracy ultimately submit to Christian values, inevitably lead him to regard democracy with a latent distrust.

In what is still a secular democracy, the president’s theocratic values translate themselves into the language of secularism, which is ideology. Bill Clinton’s efforts to rip American politics free from ideology failed in part because, to ideologues of the right and even the left, in all his appetites Clinton embodied how an absence of ideology is an absence of morality. From virtues viceroy William Bennett to former Reagan/Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan, the right persistently equates ideology with character, by which more often than not it means sexual behavior, citing Ronald Reagan as an exemplar and the Clintons as depraved. “They have made the political landscape,” Noonan has written of the Clintons, “a lower and lesser thing.” To Noonan, ideology is synonymous not only with principle but with a kind of faith. If ideology is theology secularized, then skepticism of ideology is agnosticism or worse.

Ideology for both right and left has become an irresistible way of viewing the truth through the prism of philosophical biases. By its nature, ideology not only is at ease with intellectual dishonesty but thrives on it. Liberals with an expansive view of the Bill of Rights suddenly become strict constructionists when it comes to the Second Amendment, citing the maintenance of militias over the amendment’s clear principal concern with protecting the individual from disarmament by the state. Conservatives with an abiding mistrust of civil liberties suddenly become champions of the First Amendment when it has to do with campaign-finance reform and the power of the very rich to influence how others vote. In a confused and weary America where the political center doesn’t have the energy to take control of the most troubling issues of the time, ideology is a power base not so much for ideas — because original thinking is anathema to ideology — but for the passion that electorally moves the great non-ideological unwashed. Thus a debate as ethically, even metaphysically disquieting as the one over abortion, which involves nothing less than the unknowable answer to when humanity begins, is dominated by polar positions that will defend every “life” from the moment of conception and every “choice” up to the moment of birth, and that finally will reject one notion of humanity for another, whether it be that of the mother in whose body the fetus grows, or that of the child whom medical science has proved can now exist after a five-month pregnancy.

What President Bush translates into ideology isn’t just religious conviction but something more majestic, which is a theocratic psyche. Although he does this because it’s the constitutional deference that must be paid to secularism if the president is to uphold his oath of office, the new right understands what’s really involved. Speaking to NBC’s Tim Russert last fall, one of the new right’s most prominent spokesmen, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, put it succinctly: There’s a culture war in America, he said, between the “secularists” and the “traditionalists.” Of course O’Reilly is correct, if not exactly as he defines the terms. As O’Reilly defines the terms, secularists are atheists who want to marry homosexuals and abort pregnancies and remove God and religion from American life. Traditionalists fight to protect the family and the unborn and God Himself, a remarkably vulnerable deity. This conflict has marked the American experience from the beginning, with the New World originally settled by Puritans who had a theocratic social vision, which gave way to an idea of “America” invented 150 years later by secularists who were products of the Enlightenment. Of all the Founding Fathers — who had varying degrees of religious interest — only Samuel Adams was distinctly devout. The two presidents most responsible for authoring the American Idea, Thomas Jefferson and, later, Abraham Lincoln, were not Christians in any sense of the word that they or anyone else understood it then or now.

This always has been a nation caught between Cotton Mather and Tom Paine. As the New World’s pre-eminent theologian, Mather wrote Memorable Providences and Wonders of the Invisible World, which marshaled passionate arguments in support of the mass executions of women for witchcraft. Paine, raised in England, where he watched starving children his own age hanged for stealing food, disavowed his Quaker religion; employing the language of the Old Testament (which he preferred to the New) in the writing of Common Sense, Paine chortled to John Adams that he had done so for reasons as perverse as they were strategic. Among others, Jefferson was impressed. Similarly impressed by Paine’s later book The Age of Reason, which included an outright attack on religion, was a young Lincoln, who as a congressional candidate in 1846 was hounded by rumors regarding his lack of religious affiliation until finally he issued a statement assuring voters that, while he didn’t belong to any church, he was nothing but respectful of those who did.

Over the centuries, one side or the other of the Mather/Paine divide hasn’t so much held sway as overplayed its hand, beginning with the traditionalists 300 years ago in Salem. Conversely and more recently, if to less spectacular effect, in 2002 the 9th District Court of Appeals ruled the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance a violation of the First Amendment. First among the problems with this decision was its constitutional wrong-headedness: The First Amendment was never intended to strike from public life all reference to a supreme power. Jefferson, the amendment’s guiding spirit by way of his protégé James Madison, and as hostile to organized religion as Bush is committed, made such a reference in the country’s founding document. Rather the First Amendment was intended to ensure that one religion isn’t favored by the state over another, and that religious practice is neither restricted by the state nor imposed; however much public pressure occasionally is brought to bear on the issue, the Pledge of Allegiance isn’t compulsory, with or without God. But beyond constitutional considerations the 9th Court’s decision was a tactical disaster, the sort that gives the separation between church and state a bad name. It played into the traditionalists’ most inflammatory depiction of secularism and undercut a thousand more credible arguments of the future — so that when the day comes that Republican congressional leader Tom DeLay wants to change the pledge to read “one nation under Jesus Christ,” the moral authority of the First Amendment will have been squandered on judicial reasoning specious at best and elitist at worst.

When George W. Bush found Jesus in the mid-’80s as part of a struggle with alcoholism, he was most electrified by the story of Paul’s conversion en route to Damascus, as told in the Book of Acts. Formerly a persecutor of Christians, Paul had a vision and became a prosecutor for Christianity. As pointed out by essayist and novelist Michael Ventura, American Christian fundamentalism is based largely on Paul’s epistles and the books of Revelation and John, from which the president quoted in his address to the nation on the evening of September 11, 2001 (“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it”). John offers a harsher, more unforgiving portrait of Jesus than is found in the other Gospels. While in the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus turns the other cheek and says on the Mount, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” it’s in the Book of John that Jesus suggests that anyone who doesn’t believe in him is doomed. Most conspicuous about the letters of Paul that so affected Bush is that, in them, Jesus and his actual teachings barely appear at all. Almost exclusively Paul writes of how the soul’s deliverance or damnation resides purely with acceptance of the Resurrection. “Paul constantly insists on his own righteousness,” Ventura explains, “and constantly questions the righteousness of anyone who disagrees with him, as well as twisting the earlier scriptures to suit his views.”

Whether it’s Christian or Islamic, an uncompromising religious vision can’t recognize the legitimacy of democracy without betraying itself. Democracy insists on a pluralism that entertains the possibility that one’s religious beliefs might be wrong and another’s might be right, and that all religious beliefs may be varying degrees of wrong or right — what traditionalists despise as “relativism.” Almost by definition, democracy is at least a little bit blasphemous. It’s a breach of rigorous spiritual discipline, and its mechanisms are among the human works of the modern age, which itself is viewed by fundamentalism as an abomination. Doubt is a critical component of both democracy and its leadership. In the eyes of democracy, doubt is not just moral but necessary; the psychology of democracy must allow for doubt about the rightness of any given political position, because otherwise the position can never be questioned. The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in particular are monuments to the right to doubt, and to the right of one person to doubt the rightness of 200 million. In contrast, the psychology of theocracy not only denies doubt but views it as a cancer on the congregation, prideful temerity in the face of divine righteousness as it’s communicated by God to the leaders of the state.

Nothing about Bush or his presidency makes sense without taking into account the theocratic psyche. Only once you consider the possibility that his administration means to “repeal the Enlightenment,” in the words of Greil Marcus, do Bush’s presidency and his conception of power, their ends and their means, become comprehensible. Doubt is personally abhorrent to Bush; otherwise he couldn’t have assumed the presidency in the manner he did, with decisions and policies that from the first dismissed out of hand the controversy that surrounded his very election. This isn’t to suggest that his presidency is invalid, or to dispute the constitutional and legal process that produced it. It is to try and explain how on the second day of his presidency — in what was his first major act as president — in such draconian fashion he could cut off money to any federally funded family-planning clinic that merely advised women that the option of abortion exists. This was more than just a message to the president’s evangelical constituency that he was undeterred by what happened in Florida in November and December 2000. It was more than just a message to the rest of the country of the president’s contempt for it (which in part accounts for so many people’s intensity of feeling about him). It was, from the second day of the Bush presidency, a frontal assault on doubt.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that a first-class mind could entertain two conflicting ideas at the same time. In the same way, the first-class leader psychologically manages resolve and doubt at the same time. In American history the best example is Lincoln, whose resolve was informed by his doubt and vice versa during the country’s greatest crisis; forged by both doubt and resolve, he evolved into a visionary for the ages. Bush has based his view of leadership on his sense that God has chosen him for this moment. To doubt himself is to doubt God. For all the Bush administration’s efforts four months ago to distance itself from the evangelical Army general who is its deputy undersecretary of defense, William Boykin’s conviction that ours is “an army of God, in the house of God,” and that George Bush is in the White House “because God put him there,” is in no way at odds with either the president’s conduct of the office or the convictions of the president’s bedrock followers.

To secularists, including those who believe in God and attend church or synagogue or mosque on a more or less regular basis, the revelation of a CIA operative’s identity by someone in the government as a form of political retribution seems beyond the pale, particularly in an era of terror. It’s a deliberate violation of national security for partisan purposes. But in the theocratic view of power, national security and political self-interest are inseparable when both are factors in a presidential power that’s in the service of Divine Will. From the vantage point of the theocratic psyche, a divinely interpreted national interest overwhelms narrow ideas of security as held by secularists whose insight lacks a divine scope. The theocratic rationale for the Iraq war and the United States’ subsequent presence in Iraq exists far above petty secular anxieties about justifying either. If the president could barely conceal his impatience on last Sunday’s Meet the Press with distinctions between Iraq actually having weapons or having the capacity to make weapons, between imminent threats or threats that might become imminent, it’s because such distinctions couldn’t be more beside the point. It was never a matter of reasons justifying the war. Rather, the war justifies the reasoning. Some might suggest that the president’s case for the war was made in bad faith, but there is no “bad” in the president’s perception of faith, there’s only true faith that sometimes is confronted with hard tests posed by divine destiny, the hardest of which is whether the president can work his will on God’s behalf, however it must be done. That Iraq had nothing to do with those who attacked America almost two and a half years ago is only a distracting detour in moral reasoning, fine print for those whom God hasn’t called.

One night last October, two days before the president announced his re-election bid, Peggy Noonan and conservative commentator David Horowitz appeared with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on the beaches of Venice where the Doors once wrote songs about American apocalypse. They were there to marvel at a new Republican governor’s ascendancy in the gomorrah of California. For months, Republicans had bemoaned how long it was since one of theirs held high office in the state, so now there was giddy talk about the national implications of such a watershed moment. When Republicans talk about how long it’s been since they held power in California, they mean the distant days of five years ago, when Pete Wilson left the governor’s mansion. Over the decades, California’s sun-addled sodomites have launched the careers of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as — with the passage in 1978 of the tax initiative Proposition 13 — the national conservative tidal wave that made Reagan president and gave Republicans control of the United States Senate. Before Clinton and Gore, whose administration, however much the right casts it in bolshevik terms, was the most conservative of any Democrat since Grover Cleveland, Californians went for Republicans in nine of 10 presidential elections, including the first George Bush, Reagan twice, Gerald Ford, Nixon three times and Dwight Eisenhower twice. Counting the term of the new incumbent, in 40 years Republicans will have held the governorship of California for 27.

The bastion of liberalism that supposedly is California isn’t the California in which real people have lived for half a century, but rather the California of a conservative siege mentality that loves to luxuriate in how beset it is. For so many years that it’s practically become part of genetic memory, conservative Republicans in the country consistently have spoken of their struggle in the face of the Liberal Monolith as manifested by all the established political and cultural organs. Conservatives continue to perish gorgeously in the Roman Coliseum of their fantasies, even though in 35 years Republicans have been president for 23, even though Republicans presently control both houses of Congress, even though they narrowly control the Supreme Court that delivered the White House to its current occupant, even though with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory they now hold the governorships of the nation’s four largest states. Perhaps it’s the still-lingering trauma of the ’60s when, for the better part of the decade, Republicans were a minority party that seemed to be on the wrong side of most major issues; perhaps it’s the more recent trauma of the last presidential campaign, when George W. Bush’s opponent was rude enough to get more votes. Perhaps it’s because over the last decade and a half, as the party is more driven by the evangelical right and becomes more the party of the theocratic psyche, there’s something too exquisite about martyrdom to let go of it. If traditionalists are the Christians and secularists the lions, devourment isn’t just validation but the Void, wherein the Saved finally transcend the Damned.

My first political hero was Barry Goldwater. I was 14 when he ran for president, and was crestfallen at his defeat. As time passed, there were things about his politics I found regrettable, none more so than his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; given his relative progressiveness on racial matters back in his early rough-and-tumble Phoenix days, I like to suppose he himself came to regret that one, but this may be wishful thinking. Some later found startling Goldwater’s positions on gay rights and the legalization of marijuana, and his growing antipathy to the evangelicals who took over both his party and his conservative cause; among those on the right there was a whispering campaign suggesting senility. Before he died, Goldwater himself liked to joke that he had become one of the party’s liberals.

Of course Goldwater hadn’t changed at all. It was conservatism that changed, largely in response to what were seen by many as the ’60s’ countercultural excesses. Libertarian championship of “individual freedom” became a Trojan horse in which lurked more ardently adored values of authority and order; and by the ’80s, the only individual freedoms that conservatives consistently cherished in the specific were the rights to own guns and to make a profit unhindered by government regulation. Wedded to the theocratic psyche, conservatism has upended Goldwaterist notions of how far the government should intrude in individual lives. The most theocratic of any State of the Union ever delivered, the president’s address to Congress three weeks ago not only devoted significant attention but committed public money to a growing governmental role in upholding social values, especially as they have to do with people’s sexuality. Forty years ago a true conservative would have found this repellent if not unthinkable. These are the values that historically have been championed and enforced by theocracies, notably fundamentalist ones. At the height of the terrorist danger in the United States, with a nation constantly teetering between yellow and orange alerts and the news filled with the prospects of a single person at the end of a runway idly blowing out of the sky a major airliner with a small ground-to-air missile, one of the highest priorities of John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has been a sweeping crackdown on the pornography industry of the San Fernando Valley.

In what still purports to be a secular democracy, all of this has taken the form of ideology at its most austere. While there are fair-minded exceptions such as David Brooks of The New York Times and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, the more charismatic spokespeople of the right — from perennials O’Reilly and Bennett and Rush Limbaugh to new superstar Sean Hannity and wannabe Joe Scarborough, from grand mavens Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich to cult figures Michael Savage and Mona Charen, from apostolic fathers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer and Franklin Graham to congressional powers Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum — are hardly opaque about the American civil war of values that’s at hand. Ann Coulter’s recent Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism may be the most important American political tract of its generation, because it reveals what many on the right really think. Besides arguing that Islamic countries should be invaded and “Christianized,” Coulter contends that liberals haven’t been just wrong about every single foreign-policy issue of the last half-century but that they consciously wish to hurt America. Along with liberals who are traitors in a society where everyone is too corrupt or squeamish to say so, in the pages of Treason the greatest traitor is history itself. It’s incidental that Coulter willfully misunderstands the facts of the Vietnam War. The actual historical facts of the Vietnam War don’t matter; fact exists in opposition to conviction, as knowledge exists in opposition to faith. History is the heresy of ideology as science is the heresy of the church. The understanding of history as it actually happened is a secular pursuit, whereas the transfiguration of history is the pursuit of believers.

“Everyone says liberals love America, too,” writes Coulter. “No, they don’t,” and probably nothing is more indicative of the ineffectuality and incomprehension of secularists in this civil war than that they would argue. Because of course Coulter is right; it’s not her America that secularists love. Secularists love the America of Tom Paine, not Cotton Mather, but they keep trying to reconcile the two, since both are part of America’s story and since in fact such a reconciliation always has been the dream of America and those who invented it. The secular center won’t accept that there’s a culture war going on. In the desire to reach accommodation, secularists acquiesce to the right on the very meaning of Americanism, not to mention definitions of character. “At least he’s a decent man,” someone recently protested to me about George Bush, by which she meant in comparison to the last guy, of course, even when as a matter of public policy such “decency” means the abandonment of AmeriCorps programs, which allowed college students to pay off loans by teaching underprivileged children to read, in contrast with the expansion of the earned-income tax credit by the morally vitiated Clinton, who raised millions of people out of poverty as a result. It’s a decency that impeaches a president for lying about a sexual affair but not about a war. Whatever the many compelling reasons to question whether Howard Dean would ever actually make a good president, the former Vermont governor emerged from obscurity last year to galvanize the Democratic presidential race largely because he wouldn’t acquiesce.

If the president first expressed neither concern nor even dismay two weeks ago at the report of his former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, it was because by the president’s moral lights the Kay report was immaterial. What the public might consider the president’s misrepresentations regarding Iraqi weapons or Iraqi collusion with al Qaeda were only the scriptures that testify to a higher meaning, translated into secularese. It remains to be seen in the coming election whether Democrats have the imagination or courage to run against Bush on the issue of terrorism from the right, as John Kennedy did against Richard Nixon in 1960 on the issue of the Cold War. They would need to mount a major argument that secularism — not “liberalism” or atheism, but a Jeffersonian value system in which reason, proportion and the simplest assumptions of justice are brought to bear upon human judgment — is better suited to defeat radical theologism, given how the president’s theocratic psyche and the ways it articulates itself alienate those in and out of the Islamic world who might otherwise be on our side. To credibly make such an argument, the Democratic Party has to admit what the reflexively pacifist ideology of its own base ignores: that terrorism is not common revolutionary warfare simply seen from another perspective, that what distinguishes terrorism from other warfare is the targeting of people not in spite of their innocence but because of it, and that in practical terms the real problem with the Iraq war is that it hasn’t enhanced American security but diminished it. Gratifying as the capture of Saddam two months ago was, close to a thousand Special Operations forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and off the trail of those who committed the wholesale murders of Americans 29 months ago. Billions of dollars earmarked for the reconstruction of Afghanistan are being funneled into Iraq as the Taliban regroups. While money and resources and lives are poured into Iraq, the ports and harbors of the United States remain unprotected. The rails and infrastructure remain unprotected. The water sources remain unprotected. The nuclear-power plants remain unprotected. As the president and vice president and secretary of defense indulge their obsession with Iraq, and as the sympathy and good will of the world that existed on September 12, 2001, is shattered — somewhere down a cobbled French street blows that edition of Le Monde which ran the headline WE ARE ALL AMERICANS — agents of al Qaeda plot to simultaneously detonate three small nuclear devices in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. What we can imagine, they can as well. The idea of George W. Bush running in the upcoming election as the “national security” candidate would be laughable if it weren’t potentially so calamitous. If Bush were a Democrat, Ann Coulter would call it treason.

I’m a traitor. I’m not sure exactly when I first knew this. It may have been when James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior, said there were two kinds of people in the country, Americans and liberals. It may have been when George W. Bush’s father based his entire 1988 presidential campaign on the premise that his opponent with the strange Greek name wasn’t American enough, something for which Bush’s campaign manager offered what was tantamount to deathbed repentance a few years later. It may have been when Rush Limbaugh suggested to 20 million listeners that the Clintons murdered White House aide Vince Foster.

Most likely it was when I was writing about the 1996 election for Rolling Stone and went to interview Gary Bauer in his Washington, D.C., office. At that time Bauer, who now directs an organization called American Values, was head of the Family Research Council. During my visit he was gracious and forthcoming — we even had a brief philosophical exchange about abortion without acrimony, perhaps because my own pro-choice position is conflicted with caveats — and since I feel confident he knew what Rolling Stone was, I gave him credit for seeing me at all. As even novice interviewers learn to do, I saved my big question for the end, when the welcome was feeling worn: “Do you think Bill Clinton is evil?” I asked, and he took a long time to answer before finally conceding that, no, he supposed he couldn’t really call Clinton evil. We both knew he didn’t believe it.

I was watching a late-night debate a few months ago between liberal comedian/writer Al Franken and conservative Crossfire co-host/writer Tucker Carlson, when Carlson complained about the liberal demonization of George W. Bush. Although it sounded odd after 20 years of Watt and Atwater and Limbaugh and Bauer and Coulter, it’s also true that for decades rational, conscientious conservatives have been stung by characterizations of them as greedy, racist warmongers. Carlson also allowed as to how the right similarly demonized Clinton. In case it needs to be said in such combustible times, to compare the theocratic psyches of the president and Osama bin Laden is not to make a moral corollary. While it had about it echoes of Dudley Do-Right denouncing Snidely Whiplash, Bush’s description of bin Laden as an “evildoer” was never so unreasonable; close to 3,000 people were killed in cold blood on American home soil in September 2001 — 3,000 people who rose from bed that morning with no idea this was the day they would die in circumstances that not only defied anything the imagination of horror might conceive but threatened to render irrelevant the legitimate grievances of Muslims and Palestinians in the Middle East. Gazing at the satanic terrain of the concentration camps after World War II, piled high with the rubble of bones that could barely be called corpses, no one shook his head and said, “Yes, but you know, Germany really did get a bad deal on that Treaty of Versailles thing.” Once again, for people on the left to protest the president’s language of good and evil plays into false dichotomies of moral “absolutism” and “relativism” as surely as liberal courts play into false dichotomies of traditionalism and secularism.

But that bin Laden and al Qaeda warrant the appellation of “evil” is exactly what throws the discussion into such stark relief. Once we’ve called Bill Clinton or George Bush evil, the moral glossary is bankrupt; and the more freely the president uses the word, the more precarious the value of moral language becomes. On its face, much of what the president says is not only unobjectionable but echoes some of the most exalted words in American history. When he declares, as he did in last year’s State of the Union, that “the liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity,” it isn’t so far from Jefferson’s contention that it’s God who endows us with unalienable freedom. But when Jefferson wrote his words, the excesses of both the Church of England and American Puritanism were recent memories; as much as anything, at its heart Jefferson’s was a statement of secularism, implicitly disputing whether governments and kings and presidents and even preachers were legitimate intermediaries for God’s wishes. Lincoln, perhaps the most truly spiritual of presidents even though he was attached to no religion, firmly believed the Civil War was God’s test of him and the nation. But unlike George Bush, who seems to believe a policy is God’s will by virtue of its having entered his head, Lincoln ceaselessly wrestled with doubt; as someone once said, Lincoln seemed less concerned that God was on his side than that he was on God’s. “The purposes of the Almighty,” he wrote wearily, “are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains.” Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the greatest speech ever given by an American president, is haunted by a sorrowful apprehension that the country offended God with the sin of slavery. It wasn’t a call to the country presuming to speak on God’s behalf, but a call to God, speaking for the country: Come back to us.

I am a traitor: When will we say it? As the gauntlet is hurled before us in the name of traditionalism, how often will we pick it up and offer it back, so we can be mugged with it? We should say that we are traitors of one America, patriots of another: We’re traitors of the America of the banged gavel, the Salem stench, the hate that hates in the name of God, the America that declares war on its founding ideas in the name of America; we are patriots of the America of Jefferson’s eternal pursuit, Madison’s manifesto, memory’s mystic chord, our nature’s better angels, malice toward none and charity for all, and the promise America still seeks to fulfill that no deity could help loving even when we break it. We’re traitors, we’re patriots, we’re secularists, we’re Americans: and we acquiesce nothing.

Steve Erickson has written about politics for The New York Times (“The End of Cynicism,” 1992), the Los Angeles Times Magazine (“American Weimar,” 1995) and Rolling Stone (“A Nation of Nomads,” 1995), as well as two books about American politics and culture. As an editor at the L.A. Weekly from 1989 until 1993, he covered such stories as Bill Clinton’s first inauguration (“The Last-Chance President,” January 1993). He’s the author of seven novels, including the forthcoming Our Ecstatic Days from Simon & Schuster, and is also the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of Black Clock, a literary journal published by CalArts, where he teaches writing.

Iraq

2005-11-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.

"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.

As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.

But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty.

"He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."

"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.

Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.

U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."

However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations.

"As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.

The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report.

"This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.

The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain.

"The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.

By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.

His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.

Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.

His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death.

"I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."

Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.

On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.

That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.

At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.

Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset.

"He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."

The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed.

"I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."

After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.

Then there was the note.

Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.

The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.

Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."

Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.

Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.

Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.

"He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."

Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.

In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened.

She answered:

"Iraq."

Required Reading

2005-11-23T00:31:00.000-08:00

Following is the transcript of a speech by conservative Democratic Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania on November 17. Murtha is the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriation Committee's defense panel.

I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the war. And I started out by saying the war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It's a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress.

The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq. But it's time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.

General Casey said, in a September 2005 hearing, the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency. General Abizaid said, on the same date, reducing the size of visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy.

For two and a half years, I've been concerned about U.S. policy and the plan in Iraq. I've addressed my concerns with the administration and the Pentagon, and I've spoken out in public about my concerns. The main reason for going to war has been discredited.

A few days before the start of the war, I was in Kuwait.

The military drew a line -- a red line around Baghdad, and they said when U.S. forces cross that line, they will be attacked by the Iraqis with weapons of mass destruction. And I believed it, and they believed it. But the U.S. forces -- the commander said, they were prepared. They said they had well-trained forces with the appropriate protective gear.

Now, let me tell you we've spent more money on intelligence than any -- than all the countries in the world put together and more on intelligence than most countries' GDP. And when they said it's a world intelligence failure, it's a U.S. intelligence failure. It's a U.S. failure, and it's a failure in the way the intelligence was used.

I've been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed, as some of you know, almost every week since the beginning of the war. And what demoralizes them is not the criticism; what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace. The devastation caused by IEDs is what they're concerned about, being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes -- and you've seen these stories about some of the people's whose homes were destroyed, and they were deployed to Iraq after it -- being on their second or third deployment, leaving their families behind without a network of support.

The threat by terrorism is real, but we have other threats that cannot be ignored. We must prepare to face all these threats. The future of our military is at risk. Our military and their families are stretched thin. Many say the Army's broken. Some of our troops are on their third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military's lowered its standards. They expect to take 20 percent Category 4, which is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take, but they've been forced to do that, to try to meet a reduced quota. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made, and we cannot allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care, to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away.

We must be prepared. The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases at home. I've been to three bases in the United States, and each one of them were short of things they need to train the people going to Iraq. Much of our ground equipment is worn out. And I've told the COs you better get in the business of rehabilitating equipment because we're not going to be able to buy any new equipment because the money's not going to be there.

George Washington said to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. We don't want somebody to miscalculate down the road. It takes us 18 years to put a weapon system in the arsenal. And I don't know what the threat is, nobody knows what the threat is, but we better make sure we have what's necessary to preserve our peace. We must rebuild our Army.

Our deficit is growing out of control. The director of the Congressional Budget Office recently admitted to being terrified about the deficit in the coming decades. In other words, where's the money going to come from for defense?

I voted against every tax cut -- every tax cut I voted against. My wife says, "You shouldn't say that." I believe that when we voted for these tax cuts, you can't have a war, you can't have a tragedy like we had, the hurricanes, and then not have a huge deficit, which is going to increase interest rates and could cause real problems. This is the first prolonged war we've ever fought with three years of tax cuts without full mobilization of American industry and without a draft. On the college campuses they always ask me about a draft: You're for a draft. I say yeah, there's only two of us voted for it, so you don't have to worry too much about it.

The burden of this war has not been shared equally. The military and their families are shouldering the burden. Our military has been fighting this war in Iraq for over two and a half years. Our military has accomplished its mission and done its duty.

Our military captured Saddam Hussein, captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, and over 2,079 in confirmed American deaths, over 15,500 have been seriously injured -- half of them returned to duty, and it's estimated over 50,000 will suffer from what I call battle fatigue. And there have been reports that at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.

I just recently visited Anbar province in Iraq in order to assess the conditions on the ground. And last May we put in the emergency supplemental spending bill -- [the] Moran amendment -- which was accepted in conference, which required the secretary of Defense to submit a quarterly report about the -- and accurately measure the stability and security in Iraq. Now -- we've now received two reports. So I've just come back from Iraq, and I looked at the next report. I'm disturbed by the findings in the key indicator areas.

Oil production and energy production are below prewar level. You remember they said that was going to pay for the war, and it's proved to (be) below prewar level. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by security situations. Only $9 billion of $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. And I said on the floor of the House, when they passed the $87 billion, the $18 billion was the most important part of it because you got to get people back to work, you got to get electricity, you got to get water! Unemployment is 60 percent. Now, they tell you in the United States it's less than that, so it may be 40 percent. But in Iraq, they told me it's 60 percent when I was there. Clean water is scarce, and they only spent $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects.

And most importantly -- this is the most important point -- incidents have increased from 150 to a week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over a time when addition of more troops -- when we had addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelation of Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. You look at the timeline. You'll see one per day average before Abu Ghraib. After Abu Ghraib, you'll see two a day -- two killed per day because of the dramatic impact that Abu Ghraib had on what we were doing in [Iraq. And] the State Department reported in 2004, right before they quit putting the reports out, that -- they indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism.

I said over a year ago now, the military and the administration agrees now that Iraq cannot be won militarily.

I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is Iraqitize, internationalize and energize.

Now, we have a packet for you where I sent a letter to the president in September, and I got an answer back from assistant secretary of Defense five months later. I believe the same today. They don't want input. They only want to criticize. They -- Bush One was the opposite; Bush One might not like the criticism and constructive suggestions, but he listened to what we had to say.

I believe that and I have concluded the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress. Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, the Saddamists and the foreign jihadists. And let me tell you, they haven't captured any in this latest activity, so this idea that they're coming in from outside, we still think [they constitute] only seven percent [of the insurgency].

I believe with the U.S. troop redeployment the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted -- this is a British poll reported in The Washington Times -- over 80 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition forces, and about 45 percent of Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice. The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis, this is an immediate redeployment of our American forces because they have become the target.

All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free -- free from a United States occupation, and I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process. My experience in a guerrilla war says that until you find out where they are, until the public is willing to tell you where the insurgent is, you're not going to win this war, and Vietnam was the same way. If you have an operation -- a military operation and you tell the Sunnis because the families are in jeopardy, they -- or you tell the Iraqis, then they are going to tell the insurgents, because they're worried about their families.

My plan calls for immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces, to create a quick reaction force in the region, to create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines, and to diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.

Now let me personalize this thing for you. I go out to the hospitals every week. One of my first visits, two young women. One was 22 or 23, had two children, lost her husband. One was 19. And they both went out to the hospitals to tell the people out there how happy they were -- or how happy they should be to be alive. In other words, they were reaching out because they felt their husbands had done their duty, but they wanted to tell them that they were so fortunate, even though they were wounded, to be alive.

I have a young fellow in my district who was blinded and he lost his foot. They did everything they could for him at Walter Reed, then they sent him home. His father was in jail. He had nobody at home. Imagine this. A young kid that age, 22, 23 years old, goes home to nobody. VA did everything they could do to help him. He was reaching out.

So they sent him -- to make sure that he was a blind, they sent him to Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins started sending bills. Then the collection agency started sending bills. Well, when I found out about it, you could imagine they stopped the collection agency and Walter Reed finally paid the bill. But imagine, a young person being blinded, without a foot, and he's getting bills from a collection agency.

I saw a young soldier who lost two legs and an arm, and his dad was pushing him around.

I go to the mental ward; you know what they say to me? They got battle fatigue. You know what they say? "We don't get nothing. We get nothing. We're just as bruised, just as injured as everybody else, but we don't even get a Purple Heart. We get nothing. We get shunted aside. We get looked at as if there's something wrong with us."

Saw a young woman from Notre Dame. Basketball player, right- handed, lost her right hand. You know what she's worried about? She's worried about her husband because he lost weight worrying about her. These are great people. These soldiers and people who are serving, they're marvelous people.

I saw a Seabee lying there with three children. His mother and his wife were there. He was paralyzed from the neck down. There were 18 of them killed in this one mortar attack. And they were all crying because they knew what it would be like in the future.

I saw a Marine rubbing his boy's hand. He was a Marine in Vietnam, and his son had just come back from Iraq. And he said he wanted his brother to come home. That's what the father said, because the kid couldn't speak. He was in a coma.

He kept rubbing his hand.

He didn't want to come home. I told him the Marine Corps would get him home.

I had one other kid, lost both his hands. Blinded. I was praising him, saying how proud we were of him and how much we appreciate his service to the country. "Anything I can do for you?" His mother said get me a -- "Get him a Purple Heart." I said, "What do you mean, get him a Purple Heart?"

He had been wounded in taking care of bomblets, these bomblets that they drop that they have to dismantle. He had been wounded and lost both his hands. The kid behind him was killed.

His mother said, "Because they're friendly bomblets, they wouldn't give him a Purple Heart."

I met with the commandant. I said, "If you don't give him a Purple Heart, I'll give him one of mine." And they gave him a Purple Heart.

Let me tell you something. We're charged -- Congress is charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, and it's our responsibility, our obligation to speak out for them. That's why I'm speaking out.

Our military's done everything that has been asked of them. U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily; it's time to bring the troops home.

quarentines

2005-11-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

What the heck is going on?

For months the media has been going on about the avian flu, even though there are very few cases, and none from human to human contact.

Yet there are huge orders for the current vaccine, which is inefficient against this virus, or the version of it which it would have to mutate into to be communicable between humans. Ok, maybe the pharmaceutical companies are just exploiting these fears for profit.

Yet the government talks about "developing a vaccine", but that requires developing the virus first.

In April the Bush administration added "pandemic influenza" to the list of diseases that the government can order a quarantine for, and last night CNN reported that the White House reiterated that they intend to use federal troops to enforce any "upcoming flu pandemic". The article also quoted officials in the medical community saying it was a huge draconian overreaction. I wish I had copied it, this morning there was no mention of quarantine enforcement in the news, only the tremendous amount of funds being steered into the 'preparations'.

This is a huge issue to me, I mean, a few years ago federal troops weren't allowed to perform domestic police duties. My how things change. Quarantines? What the ...? Can you imagine FEMA and federal troops shutting down airports and highways? Why is the government gearing up this huge operation, generating all of this concern, for a threat that, actually, has always been with us?

Not occasionally, but consistently, this administration has betrayed my trust in every issue I find important. Now, with this, instead of trusting I am actually beginning to fear our government.

Sincerely,
Christopher

I would only add that Australia has announced that if/when there is an outbreak of human to human avian flu, they will close their borders. They suggest that any overseas citizens get home quickly if/when the first outbreak occurs, after that they are on their own. Somehow this doesn't seem like an effective plan for dealing with a potential medical emergency. It does seem like a plan to control and cull vast populations of human beings.
Cheers,
Mark

places I've been

2005-10-31T10:38:00.000-08:00

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Mark at Bennington

2005-10-25T07:24:00.000-07:00

Mark at Bennington
Originally uploaded by ubikwity.

Weird

2005-10-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

You Are 40% Weird

Normal enough to know that you're weird...
But too damn weird to do anything about it!

How Weird Are You?

2005-10-07T22:08:00.000-07:00

"If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to it. This is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy" - GB Shaw

Pussy

2005-10-06T01:59:00.000-07:00

Bush has finally revealed his true agenda. It is a pattern that repeats in every action he has taken. He appoints people who will be personally loyal to him, fires those whom he suspects may not be, regardless of competence. Katrina was a glaring example, but not the only one. If you look at all the on-going disasters of this Administration, from Enron, Anthrax, 9/11, Abu Graib, Gitmo, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the deficit, the Stock Market ( still hasn’t recovered to pre-Bush levels), Osama Bin Laden, et al, you see warning signs ignored, incompetent managers, and a response that only partially fixes the problem but mainly advances some right wing policy. The avian flu scare should demonstrate this clearly. There is a potential, doctors have said, for a disastrous pandemic flu out break somewhere in the US, and the response is to prepare the military to quarantine large segments of the populace. Not to help people to avoid getting sick, not to offer some kind of emergency heath care program, but to set up a program that would probably result in greater destruction. After the quarantine is in place, and riots have been quelled, and the fires have burned themselves out, Bush will pay Blackwater, Haliburton, and Bechtel, to pick up the bodies and clear the land. Similarly, but in reverse, the Missile Shield is still consuming billions of dollars and diverting scientific talent on a system meant to respond to a failure of diplomacy: China is the only country that could instigate an attack that would be (hopefully) dealt with by the SDI. North Korea, Iran, or some other neophyte nuclear power would as likely deliver the bomb in a boat or balloon, or cruise missile, avoiding the untestable system altogether. The Supreme Court has become another such an example. Appointing young sycophants seems like a preparation for responding to some potential Constitutional crisis that Bush would need to be bailed out of. For example, if the Democrats regain control of either the Senate or House in 2006, he would need the Court to protect him from hearings and independent investigators. Roberts has already shown that he will ‘legislate from the bench’ in the assisted suicide case, in support of a Bush policy.

2005-09-30T01:36:00.000-07:00

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction . . .
George Orwell

Censorship

2005-09-18T19:10:00.000-07:00

All blogspot blogs are banned in China. I seem to be able to post but not review. Looked it up on google and sure enough they are blocking most blog sites completely.

travels

2005-09-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

Travel updates will be posted to: fareastasiareview, I will continue to post other observations, quotes, dreams, and writings here.

flickr

2005-09-15T01:06:00.000-07:00

www.flickr.com

More of ubikwity's photos

Katrina

2005-09-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

Q: What's George Bush's position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

Looking Good

2005-08-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

I'd rather be smarter than I look than look smater than I am. I just got laser eye surgery...Quite the miracle of modern science. They gave me a video tape of the procedure if anyone wants to be grossed out.

Hamlet translated into American

2005-08-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve shaken off the flesh from our souls. That’s certainly something to worry about. That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long. After all, who would put up with all life’s humiliations —the abuse from superiors, the insults of arrogant men, the pangs of unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal system, the rudeness of people in office, and the mistreatment good people have to take from bad—when you could simply take out your knife and call it quits? Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life, unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers from and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all. But shh, here comes the beautiful Ophelia. Pretty lady, please remember me when you pray.

Hiroshima

2005-08-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Mr. Osamu Kataoka. Age: 45; occupation: university professor; family: wife. At that time -- age: 13; at school (800 meters from the hypocenter); father and elder brother died; mother and two elder sisters injured.

"I ran to the edge of the pool. What did I see there? A drowned classmate, who was burned all over. Another classmate was trying to put out a fire on a friend's clothes with his own spouting blood." (written at age 17)

Itinerary

2005-08-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Itinerary

08-29-05 Long Beach to Tokyo:
MS Yellow Sea

09-12-05 Tokyo Accommodations:
Ryokan Kangetsu, Tokyo

09-13-05 Osaka Accommodations:
Kaneyoshi Ryokan, Osaka

09-16-05 Osaka to Shanghai :
Ferry # 1298: depart Osaka : 09/16 (12:00 noon) arrive Shanghai : 09/18(11:00 am)

09-18-05 Shanghai Accommodations:
Shanghai Metropole Hotel, Shanghai, China
No.180, Jiang Xi Zhong Road,, China.

09-20-05 Shanghai to Nanning Train:
Train K181
Departs Shanghai: 20:06 Arrives Nanning: 00:56 Travel Time: 1 day 4 hours 50 min
K181 from SHANGHAI to NANNING Upper berth

09-23-05 Nanning to Hanoi Train:
depart Nanning: 21:15 Friday
arrive Hanoi: 08:10 Saturday

09-24-05 Hanoi Accommodations:
Anh Dao, Hanoi, Vietnam
37 Ma May street, Vietnam.

09-26-05 Hanoi to Saigon Train:
Hanoi - Saigon (1,726 km)

09-28-05 Saigon Accommodations:
PALACE HOTEL - HO CHI MINH CITY - VIETNAM  56-66 Nguyen Hue Street, District 1, Ho chi minh city Saigon, Vietnam

09-30-05 Saigon to Phnom Penh:
Boat

Best worst start to fake novel award

2005-08-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Four unusual neurological syndromes

2005-07-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Brain, Mind, and Language site has a page with short descriptions of four different rare neurological syndromes.

People with "Kluver-Bucy Syndrome" try to put anything they can get their hands on into their mouths and will "typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it."

People with "Capgras' Syndrome" think everyone around them is an impostor. They feel like they are living in a real life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

People with "Cotard's Syndrome" believe they are dead -- walking corpses. "The French physician Charles Bonnet described a lady who insisted of dressing in a death shroud and being put in a coffin. She demanded to be buried and when refused, remained in her coffin until she died several weeks later."

People with "Fregoli Syndrome" see everyone around them as the same person. It must be like seeing the Oompa Loompas in Burton's Willy Wonka Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which were all played by the same actor.

The 10 people who are fucking up America

2005-07-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

A list of the top 10 people who are not only fucking up America, but dismembering, traumatizing and drinking the blood of your children:
1) Dick Cheney
2) Donald Rumsfeld
3) George Bush
4) Tom Delay
5) Bill Frist
6) Antony Scalia
7) Thomas Sowell
8) Bill O'Riley
9) Michael Bay
10) Sean Hannity

Dream- July 2nd 2005

2005-07-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

I dreampt I was resting on a cot with a girl under a blanket in a sort of corner shop. THree tough guys came up and one gives us each some money, saying it is like a loan. I tell him to put the money between my toes. He does so and says that we are in with his gang now and we are taking over the area. They leave. After cuddling with the girl for awhile I get up and go down the street where I see one of the henchmen sitting at a card table on the sidewalk like he was collecting signatures for a petition. I casually dropped all the money on the table and told him to tell the boss that the deal was off and I was leaving town anyway. He says that won't do, but I just walk away. A few blocks later he comes up behind me and grabs me by the neck, and, choking me, he says, "You're either in or you're dead!." I realize it is time to go ape-shit, so I stick my thumbs in his eyes, then clamp onto his ear, ripping it off in my teeth, He recoils and I spit his ear out at him, then lunge at him and bite him in the throat. He wants nothing to do with me. Cradleing his head with both hands, trying to staunch the blood flowing from his ear and neck, he steps away with a panicked look on his face. Just then another thug comes at me, pointing a shotgun at me. I grab the barrel of the gun and aim it at the wounded man. I pulled on the gun and it went off - shooting the guy in the leg. The gunman lets go in horror and I grab the gun and without pause, blast the gunman's arm off.

The dream continued but the preceeding was writen as soon as I woke up, in the dark, in pencil. My later notes refer to an on-going battle with the gang, although with bow and arrow and no fatalities on either side. As soon as I managed to wound my enemies they would be on my side. Eventually they were all vanquished and I returned to where we had been sleeping to see that the door (that had been the entrance to the gang's lair) was gone. Then I and the girl and the remaining allies ( ex badguys) realized the boss was the devil.

Quotes

2005-05-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
-Lao Tsu

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth we cannot bear rather than rest content with the fictions that we manufacture out of each other.
-Lawrence Durrell

Onward!

2005-05-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

"A momentous hour has struck for our country. Envious rivals everywhere force us to legitimate defense. The sword has been forced into our hands. I hope that in the event that my efforts to the very last moment do not succeed in bringing our opponents to reason and in preserving peace, we may use the sword, with the help of God, so that we may sheathe it again with honor. War will demand enormous sacrifices by our people, but we shall show the enemy what it means to attack us. And so I commend you to God. Go forth into the churches, kneel down before God, and implore his help for our brave army.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the expression of your loyalty and your esteem. When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers. One or another party has attacked me in peacetime, but now I forgive them wholeheartedly. If our neighbors do not give us peace, then we hope and wish that our good sword will come victorious out of this war !

The sword is drawn, and I cannot sheathe it again without victory and honor. All of you shall and will see to it that only in honor is it returned to the scabbard. You are my guaranty that I can dictate peace to my enemies. Up and at the enemy! Down with the enemies of our way of life! Three cheers for our army!"
-Kaiser Wilhelm II 1914

Kraut Hammer

2005-04-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

"The 15 months following the pope's elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world's post-Vietnam collapse. It was a time of one defeat after another. Vietnam invaded Cambodia, consolidating Soviet hegemony over all of Indochina. The Khomeni revolution swept away America's strategic anchor in the Middle East. Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas, the first Soviet-allied regime on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. (As an unnoticed but ironic coda, Marxists came to power in Grenada too.)" C. Krauthammer, April 3rd editorial
This right wing cripple seems to suggest that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was in some way a bad thing when in fact they were overthrowing Pol Pot's murderous regime. Khomeni overthrew the despotic Shah, whom we installed after killing the democratically elected leader of Iran. The vile dictator Somosa fell to the Sandinistas. And Grenada was a pathetic joke. It would seem that Krauthammer is saying that the deposing of some of the worst dictators in recent memory was somehow a defeat for the USA.

Khmer New Year

2005-04-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from www.khmer440.com (I didn't write this)

So there I was (in the words of Martin Luther ‘I could do no other’), sitting in one of my favourite male orientated drinking establishments a couple of nights ago. The clock had chimed twelve and the bar was being run by a skeleton staff of one, and that one person really wished that she was in whooping it up in Svay Rieng rather than filling my glass with Bier Laos in Phnom Penh. ‘’It’s a special day now,’’ I offered up in the way of conversation. ‘’Yes it is,’’ replied the dusky waitress, with just the hint of a smile forming around her full Khmer lips. This part time university student paying for her studies through drink pouring was a full blooded Khmer from the boonies with the delightful lack of guile, large faun like eyes and the deep brown complexion that differentiates her provincial compatriots from their fairer skinned pointier nosed, mixed race Sino-Khmer brethren to be found so abundantly in Phnom Penh.
‘’It’s a very special day,’’ she emphasised. ‘’Of course,’’ I responded. ‘’It’s Thai New Year.’’ Sarcasm doesn’t go down so well in Cambodia and those full eyes narrowed. Nevertheless, she cheered up sufficiently to allow me to take her out for a late supper after work (small shellfish cooked with basil in case you’re interested) and now she really is in Svay Rieng back in the bosom of her family as all Khmers hanker to be at this most important time of the year. Yet, even as we hunted for a 2am noodle stall the water throwing idiocy made famous and typified by Thailand’s Songran had kicked off on a smaller scale in Phnom Penh. And guess what? The Khmer’s were innocent. It was the drunken deathpats, pantsniffers and other assorted white loudmouths who were tossing buckets of water onto passers by around the strip adjacent to the Heart of Darkness. For a second I considered cracking a hammer into the skull of the nearest deathpat, staying around just long enough to watch the blood pour from his head and blend in with the spilled water while his limbs malfunctioned and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death. Instead I did a 180 turn and found a quiet little noodle stall near Monivong and around the corner from the Billabong Hotel.

continue at www.khmer440.com
Gladhands/Brickbats etx to peter@khmer440.com

Youth in Asia

2005-03-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

George W Bush has just said that the judiciary should always err on the side of life. This is meant only to apply to one vegitative woman in Florida - not to the hundreds of people on death row or to the suspected enemies of America all around the globe. They have removed the feeding tube from a woman who lost all quality of life many years ago while children in Asia are actually starving to death, completely cognizant of their situation. It seems Bush wants to keep the American people in an irreversable state of vegitation, fed only lies and hyperboly. Halliburton's subsidiary bilks the american people out of one hundred million dollars, (a tenth of a billion) but we must worry about steroid abuse in an illegal monopoly and some poor family's legal battles with natural death. Bush and his cronies have stated clearly that they do not support youth in Asia; well I do support them and I think that they need to be hooked up to a hundred million dollar feeding tube. (All youth deserve this but I am making fun of the idiots who keep talking about euthanasia as if they understood the fucking word.)

In Nazi Germany the term "euthanasia" (Euthanasie) referred to the systematic killing of disabled children and adults under the T-4 Euthanasia Program. This has tainted the word in German-speaking countries; the alternate term is "Sterbehilfe", which means "help to die." Any time that medical personnel determine on behalf of a sentient and responsible individual that his or her life is not worth living, the medical killing of such a person as it is considered to be done for the prevention of suffering is involuntary euthanasia. This is not to be confused with medical killing in cases of capital punishment or as part of genocide. - wikipedia

Not to be confused because capital punishment and genocide* as practiced by the Bush administration is good while letting someone die of natural causes is evil. Up is down and two plus two equals five. Double plus good.

I've been back a few days and I'm cured of my optimism.

* When I say genocide I realize that Bush has not technically begun his program of extermination (that we know of) but it took Hitler eight years to get his under full steam.

Story

2005-03-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

J. B. was just as you would imagine, only a little taller. She lived in a plastic cube that had wheels and was attached to a trike of her own design. In fact it was all of her own design. She built the cube and made it comfortable for both her and Jake. Jake was not at all like you would imagine, he was big and covered with soft black fur. He had big ears that usually stood up straight and a crescent shaped tail that wagged to and fro constantly. He was unusual even for a dog. Other dogs might look at him and wonder, "what an odd dog". But Jake paid no heed as he was convinced he was human like Janiva Beyer (that's her full name-not J.B.), his loyal companion. There was room in the cube for both Jake and Janiva so they didn't need a blanket or a pillow- Jake would just curl up around her. The two of them would travel from commune to commune - she pedaling her trike and he padding along beside. They were never hurried and would often stop to pet the cows that might graze near the path or pick flowers to trade at the next market on down the road.
Janiva was independant like most eleven year olds, but she travelled more than most. Her mother lived in Grass Valley, so named because it is a valley covered in pretty blue-green grass, and her father lived in Sandy Beach, so named because it is by the shore and covered in pretty white sand. Janiva tried to spend an equal amount of time with both so she and Jake travelled back and forth often. She enjoyed stopping along the way and she had many friends all over the Pacific Coast.
Usually the only unusual occurances on her journeys involved wild animals, although Jake would have a word with them and they would go on about their business. On this trip, however, a very odd thing crossed their path.
It was grey from head to foot with goggles for eyes and a black rubber hose where a nose and mouth should be. Janiva was sure it was a man in some strange costume but Jake wasn’t so sure. It waved at them from the side of the path. Janiva stopped her trike beside him and Jake circled around the grey man until he was downwind and could get a good whiff of clues about the stranger. The man raised his goggles and Janiva was proven correct.
“Mumble, mumble...” said the man, and awaited a reply.
Janiva cocked her head the way Jake does when you try a new word on him. The man unhooked his rubber breathing apparatus.
“Hello, Hans am I.” He said unmuffled.
“Hello, my name is Janiva.”
“Woof”
“And this is Jake”
“Pleased. I am pilot of plane. Landed over there.” He pointed over the hill.
“Nice to meet you.”
Jake made a low grunting noise.
“Is town near? I am run out of fuel.”
“Island View is just down the road, about thirty minutes as the dog pads. We are on our way there.”
Janiva wasn’t sure what a ‘plane’ was, and she had never heard of anyone running out of ‘fuel’, but she didsn’t want to let on about this.
“What sort of fuel are you in need of?” She asked assuredly.
“Gasoline, of course.” Said the pilot.
“Well, I don’t think they have that.” Said Janiva trying to look contemplative, as if she were considering other towns that might have this thing she had never heard of.
“This area was known as a producer of gasoline...From the air I have seen trains running out to platforms on the sea...”
“You must mean the monorail. That runs out to the Channel Towns. They harvest seaweed and farm fish, then they trade with the towns along the monorail.”
“They don’t trade oil?”
“Oh, there is a market for fish oil and olive oil and a couple other oils. The communes on the other side of these mountains grow grapes and olives, they trade milk and wine and stuff like that.”
“This monorail it must need fuel, no?”
“I don’t think so...it makes electricity from solar panels on its roof. I can walk faster than it moves, but I could never carry all those fish. It has never run out of ‘fuel’ that I know of.”
“Yes, well, perhaps you take me to this town and we find someone who can explain a solution to my problem.”
“O.K., I’ll pedal slow.” Janiva got on her trike. “It has special gears for going slow, it practically drives itself.”
“It is a very smart looking vehicle.” Said Hans, admiringly.
“Thanks, its of my own design.”
The three rode, padded, and walked along in silence for awhile.
“You live in this village?” Asked Hans.
“Nope, just passing through.”
“You are very young to be travelling by yourself.”
“Well I’m old enough to vote, I should be able to come and go as I please.”
Hans looked at her strangely, “You vote for the leaders of your village?”
“Well, yes, for our representatives, and for any laws that are about to expire. We vote for the entire Sydicated Communities Of the Pacific Association, SCOPA for short. The laws passed by the general assembly all have expiration dates, the more votes a law gets the longer it lasts, and when it expires the general population votes to keep it or let it go. I’ve been voting since I was nine.”
“This SCOPA, it is many communities?”
“It is the entire Pacific Rim, from here in California up to Alaska, to Kamchatcka, China, Japan, Australia, Chile, all the way up the coast back to California, and all the islands inbetween. There are big ships with metal sails that travel back and forth accross the ocean. I think it takes about a month to traverse the Pacific. Along the coast there are also great Airships that stop in the larger cities.” As Janiva was talking to Hans she noticed he was limping slightly. “Are you injured?”
“I hurt my knee when I landed, not too bad.”
“Would you like some money?”
“Money? For my knee?”
“Yes, I have some analgesic notes, they are for my great uncle, but you can have one.” She reached behind her into a pouch hanging from her cube and withdrew a folder. “I should have asked if you were hungry, I have some nutrition notes too, here’s a dollar of analgesic and five food dollars.”
“I, uh, thank you.” Hans looked closely at the money.
“You just eat them, they taste good. They print on seaweed with inks made of vitamins or medicine. Five dollars should be like a nice big dinner. Not as nice as having a nice big dinner but the same nutrition you know.”
Hans ate the money, saving one of the food dollars, “For later...” He said.
“So you must be from far away...” Janiva proposed.
“Yes, from New Germany I come...”
“Oh! I know that, I’ve seen it on maps. It is beyond the great Wasteland and over the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Ach, no that is the old Germany. New Germany is much further...”
“It must have taken months in that plane of yours.”
“The plane I have only been flying from this Wasteland of yours, from the Atlantic city called Cape Canavaral. It is not so long by plane.”
“I haven’t met anyone who has been to the Wasteland.”
“Yes well, the people of the place call themselves Republicans and they mostly live on the coast in the south. I did not travel north as they said it was unhealthy. But I found much of this Republic to be unhealthy. That is why I borrowed the plane to get over the desert and mountains to you.”
“Woof,” said Jake.
“To you and Jake, I mean.”
“Are you trying to get home then? To New Germany?”
“Perhaps...maybe this is impossible. If I cannot even get fuel for my borrowed plane...”
“We’ll ask my great uncle about that. He lives in Island View”.
The three walked on in silence until they came upon a monorail station. It was just some stairs leading up to a platform that sat astride the single rail that passed over the path, curving from the mountains towards the sea.
“We could wait for the next one if your knee is still bothering you.” Said Janiva.
“My knee is fine, thank you. We can walk.”
“Good, because it would take twice as long, and it usually smells of fish.”
“This transport costs money?”
“Oh no, it’s free. That’s one of the laws that didn’t expire.” Janiva smiled.
Over the next hill, the town of Island View appeared. It was nestled between the foothills of the mountains and a shallow curved bay with a low mesa at one end. The houses were all spead about and intermingled with trees and parkscape. Larger buildings were clustered near the shore where the harbor was. Lights were just starting to twinkle as the sun began to set.
“Uncle Mark lives on the Mesa overlooking the harbor - he is a teacher at the university.”
“It is very pretty, this town.”
“Woof, woof,” Said Jake.
“Jake has lots of girlfriends here.”
“We go to your uncle’s direct?” Asked Hans.
“Yeah, I’ll let him know we are comming.” Janiva took a small device from he jacket pocket and held it in front of her face like it was a pocket mirror. “Uncle Mark, Island View.” She spoke to the device. It made a few beeps and then played a little tune. The visage of an old man appeared in the screen of the vidphone.
“Janiva, how nice to see you!” Said Uncle Mark.
“Hi! Me and Jake are just comming into town.”
“Always at the last minute! You couldn’t have called from Grass Valley?”
“But that would spoil the surprise!”
“Yes, yes, you are just like your mother, planning always spoiled the adventure. Well, come on over, I see Sophie has perked up her ears. We’ll throw together some impromptu feast and have the neighbors over!” The old man was a big smile on the little phone.
“O.K. be there in five. Oh and by the way, we picked up a friend along the way. He wants to ask for your help regarding his plane.”
“Plane, huh? Well, all are welcome to ask, come along...”
“See you soon.”
“Right.”
Janiva flipped off the vidphone and tucked it away.
“All set,” She said to Hans, “Sophie is a dog in case you were wondering.”
“Woof, woof, woof,” said Jake.

Four minutes later they were at the front door of Mark’s house. It was a very organic looking house, all curved surfaces and natural building materials, mostly wood. Mark opened the large ornately carved door and Janiva jumped into his arms, “Welcome, welcome!” Sophie darted in-between his legs and went straight to Jake wagging her tail furiously, Jake played it cool so she went up to the stranger in gray and after a quick sussing out gave her human welcome routine. Mark swung Janiva over the threshold into the house and set her down, then offered his hand to Hans, “Hello,” said Mark, “pleased to meet you.”
Hans shook hands, “Hello, I am Hans, pleased to aquaint you.”
“Well, do come in, make yourself comfy.”
Soon they were all settled into the large living room in front of a stone fireplace with a small fire going. Jake curled up next to Sophie while she nibbled at his big ears and he pretended not to like it. Tea was served and biscuits eaten.
“You’re not from these parts, I can see that. Your wearing an old pilot’s outfit, and ‘niva here mentioned you needed help with a plane. Just what kind of plane?”
“An old prop plane, a Cessna. It has run out of gasoline.”
“Crashed?”
“No, a near crash landing.”
“I like that - like a near miss,” Mark slapped his hands together, “bang! nearly missed” He chuckled to himself, then noticed the blank reactions, “Sorry, showing my age - that was an old George Carlin joke.”
“If I may ask, how many years have you?” Hans asked politely.
“Ninety one come next April, this time around.” Mark answered with a glint of pride.
“Ach so! Impressive. You look only forty.”
“Well, there are fewer things to age one, these days. You’ll find many people are older than they look. There is an easy pace to life here.”
“How do you mean by this time around?”
“Well, you know about reincarnation?” Hans nodded. “Well in my last life I was a dog, not unlike Jake here. I led a pretty good life for a dog but I had some lessons to learn as a human so here I am, still learning. You see, Jake was a dog in a previous life and he was pretty good at it and he decided to stay a dog. I think I am still doing pretty good for a dog as a human. Sophie here was Janiva’s Grandmother in a previous life, that’s actually the only way me and ‘niva are related. I live with her grandma, whom I loved as a human and love still as my companion.” Janiva stole a glance at Hans and rolled her eyes.
“Anyway, I’ve been around the block. I know a thing or two. As far as gasoline, I’m afraid it’s nonexistent - this side of the Rockies.”
The doorbell chimed. “The guests!” Mark jumped up and headed for the door, turning momentarily to say, “I’m sure that we will be able to help you someway, Hans.” Sophie and Jake scrambled quickly to the door barking with glee. One by one as the guests came in, some carrying fresh produce or flowers, they were introduced to Hans by Janiva.
[I sort of wrote myself into a corner so, until the paint dries on the inside of my mind, I will proceed in snippets:]
Some time later, all were seated around a great long dining table. Several of the guests had brought food and helped in the preparations.

Clare, the honorable Ambassador from Mozambique
Matt, head of the craft guild
Heddy, village healer
Luka, inventor
London, chief of police
April, head de-domesticator of animals
Tai, inventor of the intanet
Nilsson, music loving dog

“I see you are admiring the painting.” Hans nodded. “That is by the famed artist, Arosha Buddhabelly - it is a depiction of the turning point in the battle for the defense of Island View. ‘At The Barricades’; there you see Sarita Queens with the flag and bared breast, next to her with the black hair and the fiery eyes is Arun Sunray, there is Ken Mugg with the machine gun and Lou Generous, there. All great heroes. Of these, Lou was the only one to survive, if you look closely you can see he is holding a water pistol.” Hans looked again at the painting.

“You see, a lot of the technology of the 20th century was developed initially for warfare - then adapted for civilian use. So these inventions had an inherent yang energy. Take the jet airplane; invented at the end of the second world war, soon it was the principle mode of transportation, and although at first it may have striven for some level of comfort for the passengers, people would even dress up like they were embarking on a ship, in no time jets were nothing more than flying missiles with people crammed inside. There was no way to correct the essential design. They have been replaced by Airships (Zeppelins you would say), and great Sailing Ships, which may take longer to arrive, but are perfectly safe and enjoyable ways to travel.”

“The arrival of true democracy and global suffrage was the real turning point. It, by it’s nature, could not allow poverty or pollution. And without poverty or pollution things slowed down considerably.”

“They used to use a thing called statistics as a way of guaging the relative safety of most things. Jet Airplanes were considered safe because only one in ten thousand people die from using them. Or one in a thousand are killed by cars. The problem was that statistics failed to address the basic problem that these vehicles were travelling too fast to be safe. I mean, you walk down the street and you bump into somebody - according to statistics you would have a one in a gigillion chance of mortal injury, and they would conclude that it is relatively safer to walk, but then they add all kinds of data and divide by the time it takes to get somewhere and how many labor hours are wasted and suddenly being propelled throught the void in an aluminum casket at 500 miles an hour makes economic sense.”

“The Shift came in 2012, just as the Mayans and Magellan had predicted. Not Magellan the explorer, but Frank Magellan, a friend of mine. He was able to decrypt the hidden truths in cartography - from ancient times to the Space Age. He decoded the Nazca Lines, he saw that ancient maps were more than just navigational tools, at the time of thier creation they were embeded with secret knowledge, just as myths are maps of our evolving subconscious, his maps were myths and he was able to tap into this collective knowledge and predict the Shift. His goal was to actually prevent the Shift but by the time he finished his ultimate treatise it was too late. He was in Antartica when it happened. he went down there with a special drilling rig and was set to release a massive pocket of magma building up under the ice. The followers of Magellan believe the Shift would have been worse but for his efforts. I count myslef among those - and you need only read his book to decide for yourself. At the least his warnings saved a lot of people.
“His wife, Kim, was a great advocate for children before the Shift
- she made award-winning documentaries about poverty stricken children around the world. After the Shift (Frank wouldn’t let her go with him on his expedition to Antartica) she began the movement to begin universal suffrage at age 14. This has been improved upon over the years - now it is at age 9. I think once certain animal species are given the vote that human children as young as can talk will be given suffrage.”
“You would allow animals to vote?” Hans asked.
“Well it’s only at a nascent stage. Communication has to improve. Jake-” Jake rose to attention, “would you vote for Hans here? One bark; yes, two barks; no.” Jake sort of grumbled. “See? He hasn’t made up his mind. You will have to give him a stump speech later.”
“It seems like a...a...” Hans searched for a word.
“Jake, do you think you should be able to vote?” Jake barked once. “Should cats be allowed to unionize?” Jake barked twice. “See? an informed electorate is all that is required.” Mark smiled at Hans.
“And Jake will not be swayed by table scraps as he believes he has a right to those," Janiva put in, "although they might work on Nilsson.”

Pacific Journal

2005-01-17T18:21:00.000-08:00

The train was an hour late in getting to Santa Barbara. After a nice send off, I settled into an aisle seat on the ocean-facing side of the train. Somewhere passed Vandenberg I could see a large container ship plodding its way up the coast, a gray rectangle sitting right on the horizon.
I felt overwrought until dinner on the train. An expensive meal but I was lucky to be seated at table 18 with Miss Paso Robles/Hawaiian Tropic, her 3 year old daughter, Mia, and their Italian friend. They were returning home to Oakland after a vacation to Seaworld. I enjoyed their company immensely. Our food was an hour late in arriving but we filled the time with talk. I opined on spoiling children (good!), having siblings (good in small numbers), and food (butter, salt, and wine). Mia was eating a pad of butter with her Shamu spoon, after sprinkling salt on it and taking a sip of wine, “She is a gourmet!” I observed. They said I looked like a movie star. Couldn’t narrow it down - I didn’t offer any suggestions but I’m hoping they thought I was Kyle Mclaughlin.
I was able to secure two empty seats for a fitful nights sleep. Awoke to a beautiful snow covered pine forest in the mountains with a river running alongside the tracks. Unfortunately, we were still in California. The train was now running four hours behind schedule. More snowy scenery and the train was six hours late. Finally arrived in Portland, eight hours late. Got a cab and headed for the docks. Got lost, called the shipping agent, got the correct address, and made it to the boat a little after the New Year. The third engineer, Bjorn, led me to the elevator and up to my room. They were celebrating in the crew rec. room, so I left my bags, and went down to join them.

Captain Hans Kroeger:
I first meet the captain at lunch the day after I came aboard. He was just finishing as I sat down.
“Hello, Mr. Norris, pleased to aquaint you. I am Hans-Rudy Kroeger.”
“Hello,” I said.
“I have met before some Californians. Yes, I know you are one from your passport. You know Andrew Bingham? A very rich man. I ship cargo for him once. From Thailand to California - big stones. You know of this man? He owns all the pineapples in Hawaii. Very rich. What is it called, the pineapple company?”
“Dole?”
“Yes, that’s it, Dole. Very big. He has a very big property in California. He wanted these big boulders shipped from Asia to California. I met him. He flew out to Thailand in a private jet to see to the loading. He stayed on the ship for three days. Very interesting man. About sixty years, very short and wide.”
The first mate interrupted, handing the captain a walkie-talkie.
“O.K. so enjoy your lunch, I have to attend this.” And he was off.
That night we left Portland at around 3 am. I was told not to go to the bridge when the Pilot was onboard - guiding the ship in and out of port. Sometime in the early evening I woke to the sound of a helicopter and a search light flashed by my window. At breakfast the first mate told me the Pilot had left the ship by helicopter. The ship does not have a heli-pad - it landed on the containers. After lunch, after asking permission, I went up to the bridge. The ship was heading north along the coast of Washington State. The captain, second mate, and third engineer were on the bridge in mid conversation. I nodded at the two crew but the captain was facing away from me so I stood by the starboard window and admired the pine covered coastline. The captain had been speaking German but now switched to English and I caught snippets of a story, “ What kind of farmer comes on another’s farm without you know a greeting?” I sensed he had expected me to say hello when I first got on the bridge. There was a pause and I said, “Hello, Captain.” Then he acted like I had just appeared.
“Ah, hello, Mr. Norris. We are underway, calm seas no?” It was a very pretty day. I had already noted that the crew were all expecting me to be seasick but I felt great. “Did the helicopter wake you last night? Yes, most unusual, but the Pilot left by helicopter, the sea was too rough for pilot boat.”
The bridge stretches the width of the ship atop the quarters and living areas, with two outdoor wings on either side. Facing forward it is all windows and the main cockpit-two big chairs with large radar displays, to the aft are two rooms for the communications and navigation equipment.
“There is no steering wheel.” I noted to the captain.
“Yes, all computerized. Very modern. But bad design.” He now was speaking to everyone on the bridge. “These monitors should be centered, you sit here and see! Why they put them here I don’t know. I think ship designed by Americans!” He was clearly enjoying himself. The third engineer, a Filipino, interjected, smiling, “Or perhaps a Philippine design.”
“Hah! Yes, a Filipino... or more likely a Korean.” I knew from the first mate that they didn’t like working for the Koreans, the Hanjin Shipping company. The captain seemed to have finished venting, and spoke to me calmly.
“So, Mr. Norris, I must finish the story of this Bingham, very important. You see these boulders, some were sixty tons, all different sizes and shapes, we put them in the hold. But carefully. You see is designed for containers, rectangle boxes, not big stones. This man had more money than god I think. I asked him where he got the stones, he says to me, ‘You are German you must know the place... you know where the British prisoners of war were made to build the bridge.’”
“The Bridge over the River Kwai.” I interjected.
“Yes, of course. You know it. So they bring these boulders by hand and elephant down from this place, up in Cambodia, down the river to Thailand and we load with cranes into the ship.”
“Why did he say you should know this bridge because you are German? Did he think the Germans had something to do with it?” I interrupted.
“Ach no, he understood I knew the movie, you see. The movie is big known in Germany.”
“Alec Guness.” I said
“Yes, good actor.” I thought about mentioning that the Kwai was nowhere near Cambodia but I let it slide. He went on. “So this funny little man, Bingham, he fly out to oversee the loading of these great boulders, so I ask him ‘what you need these for?’ And he says he is going to put them on his big property in California, all arranged overlooking the ocean. He had too much money I think. So I know Californians.” O.K. I was thinking I could tell him I know Germans and a thing or two.
“Have you seen the movie “Lord Jim’? Starring Peter O’Toole?” I asked.
“No, I know this O’Toole - ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.”
“It is based on a book by Joseph Conrad, takes place in Cambodia.”
“Yes, I know you are going to Cambodia, first mate told me. Why you go there? Lots of girls, and I think what do you say... queers?” I let that slide.
“Well, I am writing a book about the making of this movie, ‘Lord Jim’ back in 1963.” he seemed not the least bit interested so I continued. “The book is about a first mate on a cargo ship that travels up this river to help the locals fight a warlord.” I tried to narrow down my summation to something he might understand.
“Yes, I have not seen this movie.” And that was that.

The next morning we were being piloted into Seattle past the islands, a sunny day, the city’s glass and steel buildings gleaming in the morning sun.
“Yes, you know I am from a small island, one hundred some miles north of Hamburg. It is there Jimmy Hendrix had his last big outdoor concert before he died in some London hotel.”
“Seattle has a museum for...”
“Yes, of course I know, the Jimmy Hendrix museum, the chief told me last night they have such a thing, I have never been. But his last concert was on our little island...”
We were still inching into dock around dinner time. I decided to sup on ship and then head ashore to look up Michelle and Laurent. At dinner the captain was in a state about the Koreans. Talking excitedly with the first mate in German. After he took his leave to meet the Port Agent, the 1st told me that the shipping company wanted us to leave at 3:30 instead of the scheduled 5:30. I didn’t see the significance until I realized he meant 3:30 am the next morning instead of 5:30 pm the next day. So I had only tonight to be in Seattle.
I went ashore with three of the Filipino crew, they were friendly to me as we had all gotten drunk together on New Years Eve. They were heading for the Seaman’s Club and I asked them where there might be a phone. They pointed down the road, “McDonalds has three phones, just a few blocks down.” The port was right downtown, next to the ferry terminal so there were a lot of shops, bookshops, bars and coffeehouses. I went into a cozy place called the Central and ordered an Irish Coffee, as it was freezing out and I needed some change. I called and spoke with Laurent. They were just sitting down to dinner, so I said I would call back. I walked down the street to a Starbucks that had a T-Mobile wireless hotspot and logged on. I wrote a quick response to everyone and then went back to the Central. Michelle said they would be by in fifteen minutes. They asked me what I needed to do. “Bookstore, Liquor Store, Internet Cafe.” I said. We went to a big mall with a Barnes and Noble, I bought a DVD of ‘Lord Jim’ and a copy of Shaw’s ‘Major Barbara’. Then we went to a liquor store where I bought a carton and a half of Exports and a bottle of Shiraz. Then we went to a dark bar that they used to frequent. We talked of old times and caught up on the intervening years. It was wonderful to see them. Then we went to a coffee bar around the corner that had wireless access, had tea and I showed them pictures from the ship and the web site of the FCC in cambodia. They drove me back to the pier and we said our goodbyes near enough to the ship that I could point out my three port side windows two levels below the bridge. The lady at the security checkpoint asked for my ID, I flashed my expired California drivers license, she didn’t look at it and let me through.
That last paragraph (as far as the captain story goes) can be summed up thusly; at Seattle I went ashore and bought cigarettes and a copy of ‘Lord Jim’ on DVD.
The ship left early the next morning. Quickly leaving sight of land the ship headed for the Aleutian Islands. There were several large storms to be avoided so our course would take us in-between the island chain and up into the Bering Sea, then across to the Russian peninsula and then down towards Japan. That evening at dinner I told the chief engineer and first mate that I had bought a DVD and I wanted to give it to the ship but I needed to make sure it would play on their equipment (PAL vs NTSC ect...) So they suggested I try it in the Officer’s Lounge. After dinner the chief engineer and I went to the lounge and I started up the movie which played fine. I asked if they wanted to watch it and they said, “Ya, let it play...” Later, a few other officers stopped in. The movie (I had forgotten) begins with Jim taking a first officer position on a rust bucket cargo ship run by a drunken crew and despotic German captain that runs into bad weather while transporting hundreds of Muslims to Mecca. The crew abandons ship without freeing the other life boats, and Jim falls or jumps in with them out of fear. They arrive in port and discover that the ship did not sink and that they were branded as the worst kind of cowards. The rest of the tale is of his redemption by helping the natives of a Malay village free themselves from Eli Wallach, which was filmed of course in Cambodia. He finally must either leave the town for breaking his word or he must die. He chooses to die, so that his redemption is complete. After the movie, only two of the crew sat through the whole thing (which I had forgotten is intolerably long and overly sentimental), and I commented to them, “The moral of the story is to not abandon ship if there are still passengers onboard...”
Now some quotes from O’Toole on the making of that movie:
"If I live to be a thousand," says O'Toole, "I want nothing like Cambodia again. It was a bloody nightmare.”
“Nicest thing you could say about the food was that it was grotesque."
One day Crown Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia's ruler, showed up. "He started yelling the usual anti-British crud," says O'Toole. "I walked up to him and said, 'I couldn't agree with you more. I'm Irish meself.'"
“ I really hated it there. How much so you can judge by the fact that after six months in the Orient I hadn't picked up a single word there, whereas after nine months in the desert on Lawrence I was speaking Arabic pretty well."

We are now off the coast of Russia. It is snowing. I went up to the bridge earlier when a bit of sun was shining and you could see the Kuril Islands all white and remote off the starboard bow, and the captain and 3rd officer were putting together a needle point kit. The design was of a German farm scene. I watched them fuss with the rollers and the 3rd officer, Rex, from the Philippines, showed the captain how to thread the needle and make a stitch. Then I made my way to lunch. The steward invited me to his birthday party tonight, which will probably be like the New Years Eve party and the 2nd engineer’s birthday party of the night before: ten or so Philippines and a couple of germans sitting in a small lounge listening to the most awful fucking 90’s music.
The captain can be a real pain in the ass. I wandered into the ship’s office, where I usually found the chief officer, Jan Schumann, but the captain and 1st engineer, 3rd engineer, and the mechanic were having their tea there. “Hello, Mr. Norris. Yes, of course, come join us for tea. You can sit and say nothing like you usually do.”
So I did. I literally sat and had my tea and said nothing. They went on in german like I wasn’t there. Finally the 1st engineer got up and asked if I would like to see the engine room. I said yes and bolted.
But apparently the captain and I have something in common. At lunch he asked me where I had been, as he never saw me at meals. I considered this odd as I had not missed a single meal since the first breakfast. So I said, “Well, I’ve been...” I thought for a moment, “Where have you been?”
“Of course, yes, you know I’m not at these parties they are always having,” He looked at the steward whose birthday party was after dinner, “Too many parties they are having...” The steward, Alexander, took his cue and departed. “I am not having drink no more. They took away my license after third time. You know after first offense it is a month’s wages and three days jail, but after third - no driver’s license. But, you know, small island, you can still drive without license.” He then went on to tell me how he had been ripped off by prostitutes in Pusan. I took this as an opportunity to describe how I had been ripped off by prostitutes in Hong Kong, “Yeah they didn’t believe my signature was the same as on the card so they made me sign another check for the same amount. I got billed twice!” He was leaving as I said this and I’m not sure he understood my english.
I should point out that he and I were not talking about your usual kind of prostitute, but what could be called taxi girls, like taxi dancers, they sit with you and make eyes at you and you buy them a cola that costs three times more than your vodka tonic.
The captain has an easy way with his crew, he jokes around with them a lot and takes their back talk in stride. This is probably good as they are all communists. Not just run of the mill communists but Trotskyites. If he were a hard ass they would eat him for tea fucking time. I learned this after teaching the chief engineer, Peter, and second engineer, Edward, how to play scopa at the steward’s birthday party. Most of the officers are in fact from the former East Germany (Edward is from Kenya). They started to warm to me after I established that I was more fervently anti-Bush than they were. They liked Swartzenegger’s movies but couldn’t believe he was governor of California, “another Austrian, no?” I guessed the reference to Hitler. I’m thinking the Captain is no Bush lover too but we haven't discussed politics. Although, when we were in sight of the Kurils I said, “Those are Russian islands?” and he replied, “You think they are maybe American? Of course, no, not yet.”

A few notes about the sea:
When we left Portland the sea was calm, the ship stayed close to the coastline. From Seattle we were out in the open Pacific. It was relatively clear but the swells were big and the ship tilted back and forth 30 plus degrees akimbo to the horizon. I never felt the least bit seasick, but it was difficult to sleep as I was constantly rolling around, tensing my muscles to stay flat on the bed. A hammock would have been the right solution. I know this could have been worse because the elevator never stopped working, the chief explained how it will shut down automatically in heavy swells. The crew were very aware of how unpleasant a big storm can be, and the Pacific in winter has lots of them. We took the extreme northern route and avoided three of these low pressure systems, outrunning one just barely. We passed through the Aleutians at night so I never got a look at them. We also were in a thick fog, you could not see the prow of the ship from the bridge. Eventually the fog lifted but now we were at the furthest extent of our northward progress and the sun barely rose and it was light for just a few hours. I had imagined I would be able to see the stars really well from out in the middle of the Pacific but it was always overcast. On the southbound leg, along the Kamchatka peninsula, it began to snow. There were some pretty big swells too. Blizzard white out conditions at night. It snowed pretty much constantly until we reached Hokkaido and passed through the very crowded strait there. It was a semi-clear day and the coast of Japan was coated in snow, very beautiful. The Sea of Japan is my favorite. It is just like those old paintings of the white capped waves all in a row. And birds flying alongside the ship. And the colors of the sea - indescribable. Finally we had our first true blue sky just off Korea. Korea was discernible from a great distance because it is ensconced in a great brown smog bank. I thought I would have more to say about the ocean... Let’s just say I didn’t get seasick and I would do it over and over again until I could see those stars.

Korea:
We arrived at Pusan at sunset and the Pilot came aboard to slowly steer the ship to dock. Pilots are treated very differently than anyone else. There is a big cabin next to the Captain’s - the Pilot’s Cabin and Day room. They are revered in a strange way. I suppose in this age of computerized navigation the only real challenge is getting into Port, which is done manually by the Pilot. The Pilot knows every current and shoal in the port and must guide dozens of ships per day in and out of harbor. I was thinking of the creatures in DUNE that guide the starships; same kind of veneration. I should note that although the ship has no steering wheel, it does have a joystick. When we were approaching Pusan I had just finished dinner and was waiting for the elevator, the doors opened and the 1st and a little Korean man were there, the 1st held out his hand to mean stop, “Pilot.” he said in explanation. The Pilot bowed to me and I bowed back, he said to the first mate, “It’s all right.” “No,”said the first,”We would have to stop again.” And they went up without me.
After docking everyone has to stay onboard until the Shipping Agent comes aboard. The Agent is not revered like the Pilot, far from it. The Agent is the main conduit between the shipping company and the ship for mail, paychecks, manifests, visas, repair orders and so forth. If the Agent is late or forgot something (like the crew’s mail) or didn’t arrange for requested parts or repairmen then everything is fucked. Nothing you can do about it. They are treated humanely even cordially, but most every problem can be laid squarely upon their head. The agent in Pusan was late. He forgot the mail and did not know of the requests for parts and repairmen. He spoke less english than the captain. But he was efficient in his deficiencies, and got off the ship in a hurry. He took me with him. as I said; they are responsible for visas and mine required a little extra attention owing to my status as a supernumerary. So I follow him to his car, he is on his high tech cell phone, “Mister, please sit.” I got in the passenger seat - the floor of which was littered with empty cigarette boxes. He finished his call and got in. We drove to the main gatehouse. Five armed police were sitting at desks, as I walked in through the metal detector the alarm went off (I was carrying my computer in my bag). One or two looked up then went back to eating or playing cards. I set my bag down on the x-ray machine conveyor belt, and just to show that it was my bag that set off the alarm I walked back through the detector. The alarm went off again, they looked up again. End of story. The agent gave one of them my debarkation pass and signaled me to come with him. So I grabbed my bag and stepped into Korea with my atomic bomb undiscovered. Why would anyone give these guys guns? They do just as half-assed a job as the american port security do without the added burden of side arms. And why five? Four would be better for card games. We get back into the Agent’s car and drive for awhile, he would occasionally talk on his cell phone, occasionally he would stop at a red light. The area was a maze of cargo containers stacked three high, with great speeding trucks zooming back and forth and little cars like the one I was in zipping in between them. Finally we are in a more or less residential area. I need to be reassured so I ask,”Where are we going?”
“Immigration Office.” He says. “First we stop.”
I had already given up on understanding him so I just worried about his driving skills. We turn down a very narrow street, mostly gravel, and continue to turn down ever narrower winding streets, finally stopping in a back alleyway. The street was too narrow for me to open my door so I just sat there. The agent got out and used his cell phone. The person he was calling stepped out from behind a parked car and got in the back seat. “Hello, Mister!” He said gregariously. “Now we go to immigration,” said the Agent. The new guy also worked for Hanjin, and his english was better and he had a sunny disposition, he asked me where I was staying in Pusan. “On the ship,” I said slowly.
“Ah,” said he, “so what you do in Pusan, you want shopping? Girls?”
“No, no shopping, I am looking for an internet connection, wireless preferably.”
“Ah, wireless, yes we have all over Pusan. Very modern city.”
“For my computer, someplace I can get on the internet.” I emphasized internet because I was pretty sure this was the word for it in most languages.
“Ah, intanet...” Then the two had an extended conversation punctuated occasionally by “intanet”.
Then they each talked to someone on their cell phones, “intanet...”
Finally the guy in back said, “No, not sure. You want go to Texas?” I don’t know how to spell this place but that’s what it sounds like. I knew from the Filipinos going ashore that it was the bar district and I knew I didn’t want to go to Texas in any language.
“Do you know the hotel Commodore?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, very expensive... Commodore Hotel.”
“Yes, but perhaps it has intanet?” I was already speaking a word of Korean.
We arrived at the immigration office. They both went in and arranged my visas. I got both my arrival stamp and departure stamp at the same time. I didn’t know if I were coming or going. We got back in the car and they said “Where you want to go?”
I said, “Well someplace I might get on the intanet, maybe the Commodore Hotel?”
“Ah, yes...” We drove along, both of them back on their phones, still occasionally saying “intanet”. The Agent slammed on his breaks and pulled his emergency break to avoid slamming into the back of a container truck. Finally, we arrive at a nice modern train station and what looks like a bustling downtown. We had clearly reached my destination.
“Is the Commodore around here?”
“Yes, not far.” said one.
“This is Texas.” said the other.

I’m sorry dear readers but I’m going to leave off the Pusan adventure there. I will only say that I walked around Texas until I realized it was unacceptably freezing and I was not about to walk into anyplace that didn’t have a word of english on the marquee, nor anyplace that had a big mural of King Kong on it even if it did say ‘Beer Haus’. So I took a cab to the Commodore Hotel which was not “not far”. They thought I was a guest at the hotel and let me use their internet gratis. When I was done I confidently got into a cab. Confident because I had made sure to have the Agent write directions for the dock in Korean in my notebook. The cabby followed the directions and dropped me at the wrong dock and I walked for half an hour in the sub zero chill to the boat. Nothing funny there...

The next port in Korea was Kwangyang, we arrived there the next day. I stayed on the boat.

Pusan was an idustrial port city, Kwangyang was an industrial port port. These places create their own weather - you can see this from the ocean - and it is not pretty weather.

An interlude: The second officer, Daniel Dieter Masera, who is the youngest crew member at 25, and is also the chief security and medical officer, spoke to me at dinner, “So you are Californian?”
“Yes,” Said I.
“How can you live there with all the earthquakes?”
“Well...” I always have to think of the most succinct way to answer these kinds of questions. “You get used to it.” I said, although I was thinking of building codes and school drills and how not many people get hurt, and how exciting they can be, but I left it at that. He seemed unsatisfied with my answer. So I added, “Although I must tell you, I haven’t felt the least bit seasick, even in these big swells, but at night, when the ship quakes - like it has slipped a gear or something, I jump out of bed and stand in the doorway out of instinct.” I smiled as if to say - see? we Californians really are wierd.
“Well, gutten eats...” He said as he left the dinning room.

China:
We arrived at Shanghai in the evening. The dock is a long way from town. A few of the crew were going ashore and I had hoped to tag along but the new Agent needed to take me to immigration. We took a shuttle to the gate where he had a car and driver waiting. We left the port directly, no security check. The agent spoke english better than anyone yet. He had a few things to do but he asked me what I needed to do. I wanted to use the internet I said. He couldn’t think of anyplace. I suggested that a big hotel probably would offer it. He offered to let me use his computer at home. I said I needed to use mine. He said that would be O.K. I said, “DSL?” He said yes. So I agreed. We are driving over a great modern bridge into downtown Shanghai, and he asks from the back seat if I would pay the driver $40. I had assumed the driver was with the shipping company. We had been driving for about 30 minutes so I thought this was a poorly timed request. I had $50 cash american and some travellers checks. I politely asked why I should pay as we weren’t exactly going anyplace I wanted to go, and weren’t you going this way too? He had already shown me he had an excellent grasp of the english language, so I calmly explained further that I didn’t have that much money and would need to stop at a bank. He lowered the price to $30. I asked if this included a ride back to the ship. He thought about it a while and then said, “OK”. We arrived at his home, a little bit of squalor in the shadow of the gleaming Hilton. “Wait here.”He went up some darkened stairs and turned the lights on. It looked better in the dark. On the second floor he had a tiny room crowded with all kinds of belongings, the shared bathroom was down the hall. It reminded me of Phnom Penh. He had an old PC and I hooked up my computer to his DSL. He went to work on his computer. “I have to file manifests for seven ships now. I work for another shiping company as well as Hanjin,.” And niether seems to pay you enough, I thought.
I’m trying to think of a way to describe the difference between Pusan and Shanghai, if Shanghai were Paris than Pusan would be Tiajuana. And I do compare Shanghai to Paris, it had a nice mix of the very old and very new. Broad boulevards with fasionable people walking around and chic shops. It is well kept up but, as in Paris, there are areas that are like your favorite pair of shoes; scruffy, well worn, but comfortable to walk in.

We reached Hong Kong in the morning. I didn’t even wait for the Agent.

“We make preparations for Pirates starting tomorrow night.” Said the chief at lunch.
“Oh, what sort of preparations?” He had said it like he was expecting them for tea.
“We will put paper up on all the windows of the doors.” I felt safer already. I wanted to ask, “colored paper? with ribbons and bows?”
“You will keep your blinds drawn. All the ships lights will be turned off.” The defense against pirates is to hope they won’t see us.
“Is that all you can do?”
“No, there are other methods. I could post a watch on all sides, all night, and use water canons to repel any pirates. But I don’t like this method, I haven’t enough crew to post watch, and the pirates have machine guns, once they shoot no one wants to man the water canon. And then they come on board angry.”
O.K. so lights out it is.
“Have you had any trouble with pirates?” I asked.
“Sure, sure. Not here, but off of Kenya. But many Hanjin ships are attacked here, in the Straights of Malaca.”

Old rants

2005-01-03T19:27:00.001-08:00

For your reading pleasure, unsent letters to the editor:
#1
It is no doubt an unintended irony that your editorial would suggest that “international assistance to build schools and clear mines will never lead to real progress so long as the past remains un-examined...”, in Cambodia it is worth noting for the record where those mines came from: the United States, France, China, Eastern Europe, ect.... It is also worth noting what happened to the schools and infrastructure during the Nixon/Kissenger bombing campaign. There were notable abuses of power commited by Lon Nol and his cohorts (installed by the US because of King Sihanouk’s insistance on nuetrality). Will there ever be a trial investigating america’s complicity in the destruction of Cambodia? If we apply the Nueremburg principles to Cambodia the trial would be adjudicated by the Vietnamese, because they were the ones who finally defeated the Khmer Rouge, just as the judges at Nueremburg were not an international body but were made up of the victor countries. Of course, because it was the Vietnamese who pushed the KR out to the provinces, the Reagan administration compounded Nixon’s abuse of the Cambodian people by backing the KR during the ‘80s. The UN is often credited with restoring free elections after sending an international peacekeeping force in 1993 that legitimized the current dictator, Hun Sen, who clearly lost that election but was forced to share power with the actual winner, Prince Rennarid, who he later ousted in a coup. The UN troops left a black stain on Cambodia in the form of drugs and prostitution as well as forcing the economy to be based on US dollars. The UNHCR also played a role in the continuing struggle after the elections by indirectly supporting the KR when they were pushed out of their lair in Pailin and took refuge in Thailand. All these actions by the international community to meddle in Cambodia have gone “un-examined” for the past 38 years. The right course of action for the UN would be to have a tribunal to calculate the amount of money the various nations involved have spent providing mines and weapons and directly bombing this once beautiful and peaceful country, then require those responsible to pay reparations.
#2
The debate about liberal indoctrination in universities is apt for our local politics as many here believe the citizens attending UCSB have an undue left wing influence on local elections. In a recent letter, however, the writer claims to know the “truth” about liberal professors who “dish out rhetorical slogans in the class room”. In case you are not clear about what a rhetorical slogan is he provides ample examples: “the bankrupt philosophy of leftism”, “far-left dogma”, “left-wing baggage”, and “welfare/warfare leviathan state”. If it were the author’s goal to equip youngsters to think critically about any dogma being “shoved down their throats” he should refrain from using the language of demagoguery to make his fascist argument.

Or...

“Graduates...are usually so unprepared to grapple with the realities of politics that they typically end up voting for left-wing baggage like the Clintons, and supporting the welfare/warfare leviathan state” and they vote for Gore only to realize democracy is more complicated than majority rule. It’s lucky for the god fearing corporatists that these wacko-lefties’ votes don’t matter. Now if we can just put them away someplace where we don’t have to hear their whining about thier “rights”.

Or...

If David Engles screed is any indication of the ability of conservatives to think critically I am glad there are so few right wing professors.

Or...

It seems that the right would be just as capable of “indoctrinating” our impressionable young students into accepting the bankrupt philosophy of fascism if given the chance. Conservatives, representing a shrinking population of oligarchs, seem less and less willing to support democratic institutions. They would have us believe that a liberal wins the support of a majority of citizens because the voters are “unprepared to deal with the reality of politics”. Perhaps we should end this messy buisness of a national presidential vote and just let the congress and electoral college select our national leader, to avoid the input of the brain-washed masses who are under the yoke of the leftist academia-media empire.

Welcome!

2004-12-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

This is my first post...
So a quote:
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest tresures.

There is no greater misfortune
than underestimating your enemy.
Underestimating your enemy
means thinking he is evil.
Thus you destroy your three treasures
and become an enemy yourself.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn-
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting balance,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admited it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he casts himself.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

People are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

Therefor the master remains
serene in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter his heart.

-Lao Tsu circa 500BC

Europe 1997

1997-09-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

My Freaking Trip to Europe

Tuesday, Sept 10th

I made the ten am flight to JFK. Robbie Robertson and two buddhist monks were on the plane. After deplaning I was smoking at the curbside of the terminal and saw one of the monks pull a cell phone from within the folds of his robe. The other monk bowed a greeting to him but got no response.

Wednesday, Sept 11th

I made the eight pm flight to Heathrow. The movie was "The Arrival", about yuppie aliens terraforming the earth to suit their own smog-breathing ecosystem. There was a lengthy promo for ABC-Disney-American Airlines-NFL monday nights that was clearly a rip on "Independence Day". This was followed by a Nightline episode about "life on Mars" that featured scenes from the movie...Coincidence?

Slept well, skipped breakfast. Passed easily through customs and soon found myself on the tube to Earl's Court. Upon exiting the subway station a man asked if I was looking for a hotel. He wanted to direct me to one down the street. I asked how much for a room with a bath. He said 35 pounds. I took out my guide book and asked about the Green Court Hotel. "Oh, you don't want to go there, mate, run by Indians..." I told him I was going to shop around. There were hotels everywhere you look. I went into the first one, the Ramses, and asked for a single with bath. The Indian behind the counter gave me a key to look at a 30 pound room. It was tiny, had a shower at the foot of the bed, a sink at the head of the bed, and no toilet. I went down and asked if any rooms had tubs. He said no, none of the hotels in the area had tubs. I thanked him and left. Across the street was a larger hotel, a Best Western. I asked for a single with bath, they replied yes all our rooms have baths. The receptionist asks if I understood the rates (they were posted right next to her head). 65 pounds. I said yes that's fine. She asked how long I was staying I said one night and the other receptionist suddenly is saying sorry we don't have any singles but we can give you a double...there's a convention you know...I went to a few other hotels and was given some version of the same scam. Finally I reached the Green Court. A very friendly Indian man gave me the key to a single on the 1st landing. He said it was 25 pounds. It had a sink at the foot of the bed and a separate room with toilet and a tub. The window faced the tube tracks and the sheets were moldy. (Although when I returned later they had put fresh sheets on.)

I took the tube to Covent Garden and stopped at a restaurant for lunch and I asked the american waitress if she knew how to find a number through information, or if she had a phone directory. She was no help, said she had similar problems figuring out the English phone system. I walked around then took the tube to Glouster Road, bought a map, and walked towards Earls Court. I bought a watch for 40 quid, it is by Naf Naf. Back at Earls Court I went to a phone service and tried calling everyone. Paid 10 pence for reaching an answering machine in France. Stopped at a pub for a pint and asked to see a phone directory. No listing for Simon but I found an internet service nearby, "declare". It was just round the corner from my hotel. Mostly LCIIIs, they didn't serve food or drinks. I logged on (5/hr) checked my eMail. I tried to update my journal with an old version of Fetch but it uploaded everything as .htm.txt files. Went to another pub. Called Matt. Back to my hotel ( new sheets!). Then took a much needed hot bath. Whoever had changed the sheets had left a girlie mag in the night stand. Then I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant across the street. Went to a grocery store and bought yogurt, beer, sweets, and a Time Out. Back at the hotel I read in the Time Out where all the internet cafes were and a listing of hotels, one of which was the Windermere near Victoria. It was listed at 65 per single. I watched tele for a bit and fell asleep.

Thursday Sept 12th

The next morning I got up and called the hotel. They had a room. I went down the street and made some calls. Took the tube to Sloan Square and then a cab to the hotel (it was 10 am). They let me have a nice double for 65. It had a nice shower and a big bed. I set off for the Internet Cafe near Victoria. I logged on and got my eMail and sent a note to the QTVR list saying I was traveling through Europe, and listed my itinerary. It was a beautiful day. I walked up the road to Buckingham Palace and took three panoramas. Walked up to Piccadilly Circus, found the Global Cafe. Logged on again. Talked to the manager about QTVR, he was interested in having some done when they finished redecorating. I gave him my card and said I'd be back in November. He said he would eMail me a proposal. Took the tube back to Victoria. Stopped for a pint. Took a shower at the hotel, put on my white shirt and went down to happy hour at the hotel bar (7:30pm). I had two Pernods for one then sat down to dinner (Turkey Provençal). Chatted with the french bartender and chef, then went up to sleep.

Friday, Sept 13

Next morning I went down to breakfast ( bacon and eggs, very tasty). Got my things in order. The hotel owner was kind enough to give me a lift to another hotel. It was closer to the station but the room was on the 4th floor. It had a tub. Walked over to the internet cafe, got eMail from Daniel Brugger in Switzerland and Tim Carrol in Paris, both responding to my posting on the QTVR list. Got a note from Matt. Sent notes to Matt and the eCafe. I looked in on the live cam at the eCafe but it was 5am there...
There was a tour bus leaving from across the street. It was one of those double decker jobs with an open top. I figured I could get some good shots and it would be nicer than taking the tube. I asked the driver how much, he said ten bob, but you could get on and off all day- the busses ran every 15 minutes. So I got on. It wasn't very interesting...we passed the American embassy and a large group of protesters were gathered there but the tour guide only mentioned the wing span of the eagle stuck to the side of the soviet-style building, "It's as wide as this bus..." We eventually got to Parliament and I got off. I hadn't bought a ticket so I got a nice free ride around town. The weather was glorious so I took lots of photos (I remember Parliament being black now it’s gold). Walked along the Thames to the Embankment and took the tube to Gough Road. Had a sushi lunch with beer and saki. Then just around the corner was Cyberia. As I was standing in line for a terminal, a guy asked why I had a spirit level on my camera. I explained it was for QuickTime VR panoramas. He says he manages Cyberia and edits an internet magazine and would like to know more ( but he was in a hurry). I gave him my card. Logged on, got a note from Xroads with Andy Bower's eMail address and a note from William Donelson (QTVRer from Earls Court) saying I should call.

I took the tube to the hotel ( stopped at a pub for a pint and a gimlet-the bartender had never heard of a gimlet).Very unfriendly fuckers at every pub so far. Bought some bubble bath. Went back and used it. Fell asleep early- no dinner.

Saturday, Sept 14

Got up for breakfast ( overcooked eggs and greasy bacon with a side of deep fried wonderbread) Took a shower, packed and paid up. Walked to the station and put my bags in a locker. Went to the internet cafe. Note from Matt. Took the tube to Earls Court, to make phone calls. Was able to contact Keith's girlfriend in Prague, she said he was going to be in the Ukraine until October 3rd. I gave her my e mail address and said I would be in Prague around the 1st. I walked to South Kensington, had lunch at the Gran Cafe near the V&A. Went to 'declare' but their system was down, went to phone place- no contact. Took the tube back to Victoria, bought a ticket on the overnight train/ferry to Amsterdam. Departs 7pm arrives 9am. 60 quid. Unfortunately leaves from Liverpool Street on the other side of town. I go kill a few hours at the internet cafe. Then get my bags and take the Circle Line.

On the tube: A street musician is just stepping off the train telling everyone, "I'll be playing at so and so pub next Wednesday...", in a thick Irish brogue. A pinstriped suited old man stepping on says,"get off you IRA bastard!". The longhair with the guitar responds,"You've got as much intelligence as the boot end of my arse you narrow-minded ponce..."

Sometime later

OK, so I'm on the fucking ferry. Sitting in the middle of this fucking disco, talking to my new friend, Roderick, from Utrcht (excuse me). We are talking about this German girl sitting with her friends. I go over and introduce myself, offer to buy them drinks, they ignore me. Later, Roderick, after talking with one of the other German girls tells me that they thought I was 40...So I go to the fucking casino on the fucking ferry and blow 5 pounds on roulette...So its a fucking 7 hour ride through disco hell. I'm just drunk enough to be in sync with the boat...I should have taken the chunnel, like fucking Tom Cruise.

Sunday, September 16th

OK, I feel better. I slept for a while, then we were herded off the boat, given validations. My friend Roderick took the train to Rotterdam and I took the express to Amsterdam. When I arrived I tossed a coin three times: heads go directly to Zwolle, tails stay in Amsterdam. Heads three times, so I bought a ticket to Zwolle.

At this point I'm in some serious hurt. I drag myself off the train in Zwolle and to a taxi. I tell him to take me to a reasonable hotel. It is 150 whatever a night. OK. It has a jacuzzi bath. OK. It won't be ready for an hour. OK. It's a ten minute walk to town. I leave my bags. Take a map with me. The town has a moat. I see Annemieke's old address on the map so I walk by. Nice place. So I'm downtown now- it's Sunday morning- like a fucking neutron bomb went off. A few people ride around on bikes. Thousands of bikes parked everywhere- none locked. I look like an extra from Pulp Fiction in my black two button jacket, white collared shirt and black jeans - I get funny looks. I go back to the hotel, draw a bubble bath (nice big tub), peel off my clothes, and dive in. I still hurt. Crawl into bed and sleep until six. Shave, put my hair in order and go out. I walk to the center of town, legs sore but unencumbered by anything but my journal. I'm taking stock of my aches and pains- mostly my left shoulder, thighs and both knees. I puruse various restaurants, no one is particularly friendly but they all speak english. So I settle on a place called 'Weekends'. I have tomato soup and chicken Sate (the waitress explained that it is a traditional Dutch preparation- chicken skewers with peanut sauce- I asked if that was anything like the Thai dish, she gave me a confused look.

Monday, Sept 17th

Get up early, have breakfast: grapenuts, coffee, oj, canned fruit salad, cold cuts and bread. The coffee was good. Gave my laundry to the hotelier. Organized my camera bag and set out. I stopped at some store; it was either a realtor or travel agency, everyone was sitting at a computer. I said, " This is a little off the wall, but do you know of anyplace in town that has internet access, perhaps a university?" They said, " Yes, there is a university but its quite far to walk..." Another said, " Don't you have a car?", "No I don't have a car", "Taxi, you could take a taxi" I thanked them and left. I walked to the main plaza, set up and took a panorama. Then I walked around town, took another pano of a castle and fountain. Then I walked back to the square and bought some postcards and a Herald. On the way back to the hotel I passed a bar that had a small Mel's style pool table. I ordered a beer and asked to play. Three college kids were playing, one, an asian, was quite good. I played (and won) several games. We talked, they were very friendly. One was wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey. Finally I lost and went back to the hotel. I told them I would be back later.

At the hotel I changed clothes and left my equipment. I set out again for town, stopping on the way at Annemieke's old house. There was a piece of paper taped next to the buzzer: M= 1 buzz W= 2 buzz C= 3 buzz F= 4 buzz Jehovas= 10 buzz. I rang once and got no answer so I rang twice. A young man answered. I told him I was looking for Annemieke. He invited me into the foyer and showed me her address pinned to the wall. He gave me a piece of paper to write on. I wrote down her number, then walked back to the bar. The same guys were still there. I bought them all beers and played another game. I tried calling A's number but got a weird out-of order tone. I asked my new friends what that meant. "Oh, yes, we have a new prefix in Zwolle, you must dial 4 first" So I did. A man answered, undaunted I asked for Annemieke. After a pause she was on the line.

"Hello, Annemieke, this is Mark, Mark Norris, from Amerika,"
"Yes, hello, how are you?"
"I know it's been awhile, a year or so, we met in Chiapas..."
"Yes, of course...This is unexpected. How are you..."
"I'm fine, I was wondering if I could take you to dinner."
"Dinner...?But..."
"I'm in Zwolle...I'm staying at the hotel Fidder."
"You are in Zwolle!" I could hear her talking in Dutch to someone.
Then,"What brings you to Holland?"
"I'm just passing through on my way to Prague, I'm doing photography for the internet..."
"Oh, yes so you are doing the same..."
"Yes, and you, are you still in radio?"
"Yes, yes, a different company but still radio..." There was a pause.
" So I invite you to dinner, here; I will cook for you..."
"OK, that would be nice"
"Yes, you can see my place...just give me an hour and a half. Yes? I need to clean up..."
"OK."
"And if you get lost call I will pick you up, I have a car now..."

So I bought another round for the gang, told them my good news. We played more pool but eventually we just sat around talking about films and conspiracy theories. They were looking forward to the impending release of "Independence Day". Coincidence?

After an hour or so I walked over to Annemieke's. She lived just across from the train station. She answered the door, I didn't recognize her at first. She had short hair. The apartment was dark, she led me down a dark hall to the kitchen. Her boyfriend was at the stove. We exchanged pleasantries. Then I sat down. They chopped food and we chatted. A bottle of wine was opened. They were making cheese fondue. We went outside to set the table but it was too cold. We drank another bottle of wine. Annemieke's friend, Margoram, who was with her in Chiapas, came over. I gave them a picture I took of them there. The boyfriend was in entertainment tv. We talked about politics. He is a Palestinian. Margoram doesn't like him. I drank another bottle of wine (white wine! I should have known better...) I even made myself a martini...Annemieke said she would drive me back to my hotel. Margoram left and Annemieke drove me back (she was very proud of her plastic car). I don't remember what I said to her but I think I said I was glad to see her again. She hastily wrote her address and number on a receipt laying on the dash. This artifact is all I have to show it all went well. I went up to my room, tossed my case on the bed and walked to town. I asked a taxi to take me to "girls"...He drove me down some back alleys and deposited me in front of a garage door that had a video camera. I knocked and was buzzed in. It was a tacky bar, one large blonde at the counter. She was the bartender. I asked for a beer. I talked with her for a while, she asked if I wanted to take a Jacuzzi. I asked 'how much?'. She said 100 of whatever they called money. I had to go to the bank. I walked around the darkened alleys, found the bank, found my way back, and ended up in the tub with this large Dutch woman surrounded by stuffed animals. I asked ' what's up with all the teddy bears?' She said they belong to the Russian girls; this was their room. It was a big room, filled with stuffed animals, with a big bed at one end and a big Jacuzzi at the other. I asked 'where are the Russians?'. She said 'they're around'...

Tuesday

The next morning I was woken at 9 by someone asking if I was coming down to breakfast (served until 10). I said , "No, I would like some coffee." I packed up and went down. A woman I hadn't seen before was behind the desk. She wore a black low-cut blouse that showed a lot of cleavage. She gave me the bill ( the phone bill was more than the room). I asked her to call me a cab and add a pot of coffee to the bill. She said I could have the coffee free because I missed breakfast. The taxi took me to the station. I bought a ticket and sat at a cafe for more coffee and a ham sandwich. I felt like shit. Took the train. I actually got annoyed at all the chain smoking going on around me. Walked right out of the station in Amsterdam and got on a tram. The driver wanted to know how far I was going. I said I didn't know, I would get off when I saw something I liked. She sold me a 3 gilder ticket, saying,"It is good for the center." I rode a few blocks and got off. She seemed disappointed. I walked away from the busy streets until I found a hotel that seemed like it would be clean and quiet. The Nova Hotel; 150 guilders for a single with shower. It was a tacky, modern room compared to Zwolle and it faced a street with a tram track, it had porno on the TV. So I chilled for a bit, took a shower. I asked at the desk where the internet cafe was. They showed me on a map the general area they thought it was. I think they misunderstood me because they sent me to the red-light district (intercourse cafe? intersex cafe?). I walked around worriedly. A lot of seedy looking people lurking in dark alleyways. Some cute girls standing behind windows in their undies. They would tap the glass with their rings as I passed by. Finally, I had dinner at a sushi place (mental note: do not ever go to a sushi place in Europe-they all suck). Then went back to the hotel to watch bad porn and 'Get Shorty'.

Wednesday

Next day, got up and went out with my camera. Went to the Mini-Office, a computer center with internet . Very slow connection. Checked my mail. I asked about the internet cafe and they looked it up in a guide book. I headed towards it, stopped at a used clothing store because it was cold. I wanted to buy a Gaberdine coat but they didn't take credit cards. So I headed for a bank. End up at Top's Internet Cafe. Log on, drink coffee, get eMail. I fix my journal a bit using Fetch on their Mac. Go back towards the hotel, stop at bank, have lunch, write postcards, back to clothing store, buy coat. I go back to the hotel and rest, watch CNN. Get up, take a shower, head for 'Top's'. Stop on the way at 'Shiva' for a delicious dinner (chicken tikka). (mental note: Indian restaurants in Europe are better than sushi places). Very satisfied, I walk through Rembrant Platz, passed-up all the strip joints and made it to 'Tops'. Ordered a beer and started updating my journal. Got as far as Zwolle. More beers at the bar, inhaling all the second hand hash smoke. If I weren't alone and traveling tomorrow I'd be tempted to get some. I'm pretty pleased with my stay in Amsterdam. Tomorrow, I'll check my bags at the station, buy a ticket for Paris, and spend the day photographing. I get a bit freaked out when I think about how much this is costing and how I should have more to show for it. But, I'm learning and I'm writing, and I should have some good photos. Had a few more beers and talked to the manager of 'Tops' about QTVR. He was interested but hadn't downloaded the plug-ins. On the way home I bought some Gaulois Blondes and had a Guiness.

Thursday

Having breakfast at the Nova, I figure I should stay another night. Get some good panos today and tomorrow. I need to rest my leg ( my right shin is fucked-up) Went to the post office, mailed 11 cards. Took a pano from a pretty bridge. Walked and walked, had a shwarma for lunch and ended up at Top's. Had a beer, only seven messages- all to the QTVR list. Bit low on cash so I didn't send any mail nor update my page. Played pinball. Walked towards the Rikjsmuseum, stopped at the Amnesty International bar/cafe/movie house. Some thoughts on Europe: I grew up in a very different England. London, I remember, was a dark, dismal place. The countryside was bucolic, small villages unmarred by superhighways and chain stores where the local pub was a friendly meeting place (yes, even as a little kid I was hanging out in bars). Now London is a big, americanized melting pot boiling over with hatred and mistrust.

The Dutch really pride themselves on speaking English but someone needs to point out that they aren't very good at it. Usually, they speak in a broken pig English (is that redundant?), which is fine, but they don't seem to always understand what is being said. They hear what they want to hear. I suppose, because they are taught English from an early age and they deal with so many tourists, they think it is too easy, but they miss the subtleties. Don't get me wrong, I can't even order a beer in Dutch, this is not some rant about English-uber-alles, I think people should preserve their culture through language. When I go to another country I don't mind if no one speaks my language. It is always possible to make oneself understood. It forces you to pay greater attention to people. I think of Marco Polo traveling the spice route through a myriad of established, exotic cultures; the respect and wonder he showed their customs. He didn't have a phrase book. He didn't eat at the local McDuce's pizzeria everywhere he went. So, to give credit where due, the Dutch speak English better than the Germans, the French, and the English. And they are a handsome race.

What's up with all these Russian whores everywhere? They had them in Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Zwolle...Isn't it enough that Amerika won the cold war, they also have to turn all russian women into sex slaves? How proud to be a Russian today: dad's a drunk, mom works at McDonalds, sis is a whore, little boris is a thug, gramma and gramps are in the street, and I'm in the Mafia...Well I haven't been to Russia yet, but it sounds pretty bad. I'm sure I'll have something to say about the French when I get there. I've been boycotting French wine for a while now because of their killing of a photographer on the Greenpeace boat that their spies blew up in New Zealand.

O.K., enough of that. I'm at a bar called Balls. I think that is because they have pool tables but I'm not sure. The music has turned sour here at Balls. So I'll move on. A bicyclist just rode by singing, "the secret life...of a-ra-bia.." I thought that was amusing. My choice of bars now, just within blocks of my hotel, has dwindled. The last one was packed, no place to sit, a mix of Americans and Dutch but too typical. I walked by the 'Kandinski', which has a nice ring to it, but aside from a few couples necking there was no one there. I chose the place I am now because of the cute bartendress. It is dark with beer stiens and antelope heads on the walls. Full of only self-absorbed Dutch people. Still, it's better than television. It is just after midnight. I will have all day tomorrow to finish my Amsterdam experience.

These fucking French cigarettes suck. Cobblestones are pretty but they wreak hell on my shins. Still, outside of Elsie's, New York, the eCafe, parts of Seattle, San Francisco and LA, Amerika blows compared to Holland. The Dutch do have that annoying throat-clearing conflux of syllables when they speak their own language. I'll have to recommend this bar, if I ever figure out what it's called. It gives a realistic impression of Dutch life. The average Dutchman wears either a windbreaker or a stylish KGB-style leather jacket, wide-collar shirt, and jeans. The women wear short skirts with black stockings, cable turtleneck sweaters. I'm wearing my new gaberdine overcoat, blue shirt, black sweatshirt, black jeans, scarf and Vans. My black-dyed hair is usually standing on end from sleeping on the train or too small a bed. I'll have one more smoke then go back to the hotel.

I was thinking before I left on this trip that I needed to live more to write more and to find a quiet place, free of distractions where I could commit it all to paper, but I haven't really done anything. It is good to write this journal because it is clearing the cobwebs out of my head - but I need to spend some serious time putting it together in a readable format. And I need to write a sensible story involving my dreams and ambitions. Perhaps in this journal I should concentrate less on my comings and goings and more on the atmosphere of places I am. Aside from my asides I have skipped a lot of the visual, tactile details of this trip. The piss smell of the London tube for example. I said this cafe was dark; bars in Holland are called 'brown cafes' because the centuries of tobacco smoke have turned the walls brown. I haven't met anyone who doesn't smoke. Sitting at Top's internet cafe I could taste the second hand hash smoke. So sweet smelling. Luckily, at the time I still had some Exports. I'd rather smoke hash than these shitty french cigarettes.

sometime later

There are similarities in Steve Erickson's stories, particularly his very autobiographical 'Amnesiascope', to my own untold stories and dreams. His obsession with a girl he calls Sally is so similar to my feelings towards Sophie. Each of his previous books have in some way focused on his relation to her. Of equal importance is his respect for the meaning of dreams - not necessarily that his or mine mean anything or are precognitive but he gives their mystery the deference deserved. His stories interweave dreams and a dreamlike reality and are propelled by the passions of very real characters. The best writers I can think of use similar techniques - essentially they are driven to find the truth of consciousness using self-perception and unconscious archetypes. Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursurla K. LeGuin, Martin Amis, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Lethem...that's all that come to mind at the moment. This is an aside but Erickson mentions one of my favorite movies, "In a Lonely Place" in Amnesiascope. It stars Humphrey Bogart as an alcoholic screenwriter accused of murder. Very intense depiction of writer's block. Another great movie few people have ever heard of is "Cry of the Penguins" starring a youthful John Hurt.

I am sitting here in the Lizard Lounge in Le Marais a few blocks from my hotel, the Grand Hotel Mahler. I had a lovely dinner; poulet citron, and was pleased to find it full of and run by americans ( the lounge not my chicken). Now they are playing Portishead so I decided to stay and drink.

Europe 1997

1997-09-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, Sept 10th

I made the ten am flight to JFK. Robbie Robertson and two buddhist monks were on the plane. After deplaning I was smoking at the curbside of the terminal and saw one of the monks pull a cell phone from within the folds of his robe. The other monk bowed a greeting to him but got no response.

Wednesday, Sept 11th

I made the eight pm flight to Heathrow. The movie was "The Arrival", about yuppie aliens terraforming the earth to suit their own smog-breathing ecosystem. There was a lengthy promo for ABC-Disney-American Airlines-NFL monday nights that was clearly a rip on "Independence Day". This was followed by a Nightline episode about "life on Mars" that featured scenes from the movie...Coincidence?

Slept well, skipped breakfast. Passed easily through customs and soon found myself on the tube to Earl's Court. Upon exiting the subway station a man asked if I was looking for a hotel. He wanted to direct me to one down the street. I asked how much for a room with a bath. He said 35 pounds. I took out my guide book and asked about the Green Court Hotel. "Oh, you don't want to go there, mate, run by Indians..." I told him I was going to shop around. There were hotels everywhere you look. I went into the first one, the Ramses, and asked for a single with bath. The Indian behind the counter gave me a key to look at a 30 pound room. It was tiny, had a shower at the foot of the bed, a sink at the head of the bed, and no toilet. I went down and asked if any rooms had tubs. He said no, none of the hotels in the area had tubs. I thanked him and left. Across the street was a larger hotel, a Best Western. I asked for a single with bath, they replied yes all our rooms have baths. The receptionist asks if I understood the rates (they were posted right next to her head). 65 pounds. I said yes that's fine. She asked how long I was staying I said one night and the other receptionist suddenly is saying sorry we don't have any singles but we can give you a double...there's a convention you know...I went to a few other hotels and was given some version of the same scam. Finally I reached the Green Court. A very friendly Indian man gave me the key to a single on the 1st landing. He said it was 25 pounds. It had a sink at the foot of the bed and a separate room with toilet and a tub. The window faced the tube tracks and the sheets were moldy. (Although when I returned later they had put fresh sheets on.)

I took the tube to Covent Garden and stopped at a restaurant for lunch and I asked the american waitress if she knew how to find a number through information, or if she had a phone directory. She was no help, said she had similar problems figuring out the English phone system. I walked around then took the tube to Glouster Road, bought a map, and walked towards Earls Court. I bought a watch for 40 quid, it is by Naf Naf. Back at Earls Court I went to a phone service and tried calling everyone. Paid 10 pence for reaching an answering machine in France. Stopped at a pub for a pint and asked to see a phone directory. No listing for Simon but I found an internet service nearby, "declare". It was just round the corner from my hotel. Mostly LCIIIs, they didn't serve food or drinks. I logged on (5/hr) checked my eMail. I tried to update my journal with an old version of Fetch but it uploaded everything as .htm.txt files. Went to another pub. Called Matt. Back to my hotel ( new sheets!). Then took a much needed hot bath. Whoever had changed the sheets had left a girlie mag in the night stand. Then I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant across the street. Went to a grocery store and bought yogurt, beer, sweets, and a Time Out. Back at the hotel I read in the Time Out where all the internet cafes were and a listing of hotels, one of which was the Windermere near Victoria. It was listed at 65 per single. I watched tele for a bit and fell asleep.

Thursday Sept 12th

The next morning I got up and called the hotel. They had a room. I went down the street and made some calls. Took the tube to Sloan Square and then a cab to the hotel (it was 10 am). They let me have a nice double for 65. It had a nice shower and a big bed. I set off for the Internet Cafe near Victoria. I logged on and got my eMail and sent a note to the QTVR list saying I was traveling through Europe, and listed my itinerary. It was a beautiful day. I walked up the road to Buckingham Palace and took three panoramas. Walked up to Piccadilly Circus, found the Global Cafe. Logged on again. Talked to the manager about QTVR, he was interested in having some done when they finished redecorating. I gave him my card and said I'd be back in November. He said he would eMail me a proposal. Took the tube back to Victoria. Stopped for a pint. Took a shower at the hotel, put on my white shirt and went down to happy hour at the hotel bar (7:30pm). I had two Pernods for one then sat down to dinner (Turkey Provençal). Chatted with the french bartender and chef, then went up to sleep.

Friday, Sept 13

Next morning I went down to breakfast ( bacon and eggs, very tasty). Got my things in order. The hotel owner was kind enough to give me a lift to another hotel. It was closer to the station but the room was on the 4th floor. It had a tub. Walked over to the internet cafe, got eMail from Daniel Brugger in Switzerland and Tim Carrol in Paris, both responding to my posting on the QTVR list. Got a note from Matt. Sent notes to Matt and the eCafe. I looked in on the live cam at the eCafe but it was 5am there...
There was a tour bus leaving from across the street. It was one of those double decker jobs with an open top. I figured I could get some good shots and it would be nicer than taking the tube. I asked the driver how much, he said ten bob, but you could get on and off all day- the busses ran every 15 minutes. So I got on. It wasn't very interesting...we passed the American embassy and a large group of protesters were gathered there but the tour guide only mentioned the wing span of the eagle stuck to the side of the soviet-style building, "It's as wide as this bus..." We eventually got to Parliament and I got off. I hadn't bought a ticket so I got a nice free ride around town. The weather was glorious so I took lots of photos (I remember Parliament being black now it’s gold). Walked along the Thames to the Embankment and took the tube to Gough Road. Had a sushi lunch with beer and saki. Then just around the corner was Cyberia. As I was standing in line for a terminal, a guy asked why I had a spirit level on my camera. I explained it was for QuickTime VR panoramas. He says he manages Cyberia and edits an internet magazine and would like to know more ( but he was in a hurry). I gave him my card. Logged on, got a note from Xroads with Andy Bower's eMail address and a note from William Donelson (QTVRer from Earls Court) saying I should call.

I took the tube to the hotel ( stopped at a pub for a pint and a gimlet-the bartender had never heard of a gimlet).Very unfriendly fuckers at every pub so far. Bought some bubble bath. Went back and used it. Fell asleep early- no dinner.

Saturday, Sept 14

Got up for breakfast ( overcooked eggs and greasy bacon with a side of deep fried wonderbread) Took a shower, packed and paid up. Walked to the station and put my bags in a locker. Went to the internet cafe. Note from Matt. Took the tube to Earls Court, to make phone calls. Was able to contact Keith's girlfriend in Prague, she said he was going to be in the Ukraine until October 3rd. I gave her my e mail address and said I would be in Prague around the 1st. I walked to South Kensington, had lunch at the Gran Cafe near the V&A. Went to 'declare' but their system was down, went to phone place- no contact. Took the tube back to Victoria, bought a ticket on the overnight train/ferry to Amsterdam. Departs 7pm arrives 9am. 60 quid. Unfortunately leaves from Liverpool Street on the other side of town. I go kill a few hours at the internet cafe. Then get my bags and take the Circle Line.

On the tube: A street musician is just stepping off the train telling everyone, "I'll be playing at so and so pub next Wednesday...", in a thick Irish brogue. A pinstriped suited old man stepping on says,"get off you IRA bastard!". The longhair with the guitar responds,"You've got as much intelligence as the boot end of my arse you narrow-minded ponce..."

Sometime later

OK, so I'm on the fucking ferry. Sitting in the middle of this fucking disco, talking to my new friend, Roderick, from Utrcht (excuse me). We are talking about this German girl sitting with her friends. I go over and introduce myself, offer to buy them drinks, they ignore me. Later, Roderick, after talking with one of the other German girls tells me that they thought I was 40...So I go to the fucking casino on the fucking ferry and blow 5 pounds on roulette...So its a fucking 7 hour ride through disco hell. I'm just drunk enough to be in sync with the boat...I should have taken the chunnel, like fucking Tom Cruise.

Sunday, September 16th

OK, I feel better. I slept for a while, then we were herded off the boat, given validations. My friend Roderick took the train to Rotterdam and I took the express to Amsterdam. When I arrived I tossed a coin three times: heads go directly to Zwolle, tails stay in Amsterdam. Heads three times, so I bought a ticket to Zwolle.

At this point I'm in some serious hurt. I drag myself off the train in Zwolle and to a taxi. I tell him to take me to a reasonable hotel. It is 150 whatever a night. OK. It has a jacuzzi bath. OK. It won't be ready for an hour. OK. It's a ten minute walk to town. I leave my bags. Take a map with me. The town has a moat. I see Annemieke's old address on the map so I walk by. Nice place. So I'm downtown now- it's Sunday morning- like a fucking neutron bomb went off. A few people ride around on bikes. Thousands of bikes parked everywhere- none locked. I look like an extra from Pulp Fiction in my black two button jacket, white collared shirt and black jeans - I get funny looks. I go back to the hotel, draw a bubble bath (nice big tub), peel off my clothes, and dive in. I still hurt. Crawl into bed and sleep until six. Shave, put my hair in order and go out. I walk to the center of town, legs sore but unencumbered by anything but my journal. I'm taking stock of my aches and pains- mostly my left shoulder, thighs and both knees. I puruse various restaurants, no one is particularly friendly but they all speak english. So I settle on a place called 'Weekends'. I have tomato soup and chicken Sate (the waitress explained that it is a traditional Dutch preparation- chicken skewers with peanut sauce- I asked if that was anything like the Thai dish, she gave me a confused look.

Monday, Sept 17th

Get up early, have breakfast: grapenuts, coffee, oj, canned fruit salad, cold cuts and bread. The coffee was good. Gave my laundry to the hotelier. Organized my camera bag and set out. I stopped at some store; it was either a realtor or travel agency, everyone was sitting at a computer. I said, " This is a little off the wall, but do you know of anyplace in town that has internet access, perhaps a university?" They said, " Yes, there is a university but its quite far to walk..." Another said, " Don't you have a car?", "No I don't have a car", "Taxi, you could take a taxi" I thanked them and left. I walked to the main plaza, set up and took a panorama. Then I walked around town, took another pano of a castle and fountain. Then I walked back to the square and bought some postcards and a Herald. On the way back to the hotel I passed a bar that had a small Mel's style pool table. I ordered a beer and asked to play. Three college kids were playing, one, an asian, was quite good. I played (and won) several games. We talked, they were very friendly. One was wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey. Finally I lost and went back to the hotel. I told them I would be back later.

At the hotel I changed clothes and left my equipment. I set out again for town, stopping on the way at Annemieke's old house. There was a piece of paper taped next to the buzzer: M= 1 buzz W= 2 buzz C= 3 buzz F= 4 buzz Jehovas= 10 buzz. I rang once and got no answer so I rang twice. A young man answered. I told him I was looking for Annemieke. He invited me into the foyer and showed me her address pinned to the wall. He gave me a piece of paper to write on. I wrote down her number, then walked back to the bar. The same guys were still there. I bought them all beers and played another game. I tried calling A's number but got a weird out-of order tone. I asked my new friends what that meant. "Oh, yes, we have a new prefix in Zwolle, you must dial 4 first" So I did. A man answered, undaunted I asked for Annemieke. After a pause she was on the line.

"Hello, Annemieke, this is Mark, Mark Norris, from Amerika,"
"Yes, hello, how are you?"
"I know it's been awhile, a year or so, we met in Chiapas..."
"Yes, of course...This is unexpected. How are you..."
"I'm fine, I was wondering if I could take you to dinner."
"Dinner...?But..."
"I'm in Zwolle...I'm staying at the hotel Fidder."
"You are in Zwolle!" I could hear her talking in Dutch to someone.
Then,"What brings you to Holland?"
"I'm just passing through on my way to Prague, I'm doing photography for the internet..."
"Oh, yes so you are doing the same..."
"Yes, and you, are you still in radio?"
"Yes, yes, a different company but still radio..." There was a pause.
" So I invite you to dinner, here; I will cook for you..."
"OK, that would be nice"
"Yes, you can see my place...just give me an hour and a half. Yes? I need to clean up..."
"OK."
"And if you get lost call I will pick you up, I have a car now..."

So I bought another round for the gang, told them my good news. We played more pool but eventually we just sat around talking about films and conspiracy theories. They were looking forward to the impending release of "Independence Day". Coincidence?

After an hour or so I walked over to Annemieke's. She lived just across from the train station. She answered the door, I didn't recognize her at first. She had short hair. The apartment was dark, she led me down a dark hall to the kitchen. Her boyfriend was at the stove. We exchanged pleasantries. Then I sat down. They chopped food and we chatted. A bottle of wine was opened. They were making cheese fondue. We went outside to set the table but it was too cold. We drank another bottle of wine. Annemieke's friend, Margoram, who was with her in Chiapas, came over. I gave them a picture I took of them there. The boyfriend was in entertainment tv. We talked about politics. He is a Palestinian. Margoram doesn't like him. I drank another bottle of wine (white wine! I should have known better...) I even made myself a martini...Annemieke said she would drive me back to my hotel. Margoram left and Annemieke drove me back (she was very proud of her plastic car). I don't remember what I said to her but I think I said I was glad to see her again. She hastily wrote her address and number on a receipt laying on the dash. This artifact is all I have to show it all went well. I went up to my room, tossed my case on the bed and walked to town. I asked a taxi to take me to "girls"...He drove me down some back alleys and deposited me in front of a garage door that had a video camera. I knocked and was buzzed in. It was a tacky bar, one large blonde at the counter. She was the bartender. I asked for a beer. I talked with her for a while, she asked if I wanted to take a Jacuzzi. I asked 'how much?'. She said 100 of whatever they called money. I had to go to the bank. I walked around the darkened alleys, found the bank, found my way back, and ended up in the tub with this large Dutch woman surrounded by stuffed animals. I asked ' what's up with all the teddy bears?' She said they belong to the Russian girls; this was their room. It was a big room, filled with stuffed animals, with a big bed at one end and a big Jacuzzi at the other. I asked 'where are the Russians?'. She said 'they're around'...

Tuesday

The next morning I was woken at 9 by someone asking if I was coming down to breakfast (served until 10). I said , "No, I would like some coffee." I packed up and went down. A woman I hadn't seen before was behind the desk. She wore a black low-cut blouse that showed a lot of cleavage. She gave me the bill ( the phone bill was more than the room). I asked her to call me a cab and add a pot of coffee to the bill. She said I could have the coffee free because I missed breakfast. The taxi took me to the station. I bought a ticket and sat at a cafe for more coffee and a ham sandwich. I felt like shit. Took the train. I actually got annoyed at all the chain smoking going on around me. Walked right out of the station in Amsterdam and got on a tram. The driver wanted to know how far I was going. I said I didn't know, I would get off when I saw something I liked. She sold me a 3 gilder ticket, saying,"It is good for the center." I rode a few blocks and got off. She seemed disappointed. I walked away from the busy streets until I found a hotel that seemed like it would be clean and quiet. The Nova Hotel; 150 guilders for a single with shower. It was a tacky, modern room compared to Zwolle and it faced a street with a tram track, it had porno on the TV. So I chilled for a bit, took a shower. I asked at the desk where the internet cafe was. They showed me on a map the general area they thought it was. I think they misunderstood me because they sent me to the red-light district (intercourse cafe? intersex cafe?). I walked around worriedly. A lot of seedy looking people lurking in dark alleyways. Some cute girls standing behind windows in their undies. They would tap the glass with their rings as I passed by. Finally, I had dinner at a sushi place (mental note: do not ever go to a sushi place in Europe-they all suck). Then went back to the hotel to watch bad porn and 'Get Shorty'.

Wednesday

Next day, got up and went out with my camera. Went to the Mini-Office, a computer center with internet . Very slow connection. Checked my mail. I asked about the internet cafe and they looked it up in a guide book. I headed towards it, stopped at a used clothing store because it was cold. I wanted to buy a Gaberdine coat but they didn't take credit cards. So I headed for a bank. End up at Top's Internet Cafe. Log on, drink coffee, get eMail. I fix my journal a bit using Fetch on their Mac. Go back towards the hotel, stop at bank, have lunch, write postcards, back to clothing store, buy coat. I go back to the hotel and rest, watch CNN. Get up, take a shower, head for 'Top's'. Stop on the way at 'Shiva' for a delicious dinner (chicken tikka). (mental note: Indian restaurants in Europe are better than sushi places). Very satisfied, I walk through Rembrant Platz, passed-up all the strip joints and made it to 'Tops'. Ordered a beer and started updating my journal. Got as far as Zwolle. More beers at the bar, inhaling all the second hand hash smoke. If I weren't alone and traveling tomorrow I'd be tempted to get some. I'm pretty pleased with my stay in Amsterdam. Tomorrow, I'll check my bags at the station, buy a ticket for Paris, and spend the day photographing. I get a bit freaked out when I think about how much this is costing and how I should have more to show for it. But, I'm learning and I'm writing, and I should have some good photos. Had a few more beers and talked to the manager of 'Tops' about QTVR. He was interested but hadn't downloaded the plug-ins. On the way home I bought some Gaulois Blondes and had a Guiness.

Thursday

Having breakfast at the Nova, I figure I should stay another night. Get some good panos today and tomorrow. I need to rest my leg ( my right shin is fucked-up) Went to the post office, mailed 11 cards. Took a pano from a pretty bridge. Walked and walked, had a shwarma for lunch and ended up at Top's. Had a beer, only seven messages- all to the QTVR list. Bit low on cash so I didn't send any mail nor update my page. Played pinball. Walked towards the Rikjsmuseum, stopped at the Amnesty International bar/cafe/movie house. Some thoughts on Europe: I grew up in a very different England. London, I remember, was a dark, dismal place. The countryside was bucolic, small villages unmarred by superhighways and chain stores where the local pub was a friendly meeting place (yes, even as a little kid I was hanging out in bars). Now London is a big, americanized melting pot boiling over with hatred and mistrust.

The Dutch really pride themselves on speaking English but someone needs to point out that they aren't very good at it. Usually, they speak in a broken pig English (is that redundant?), which is fine, but they don't seem to always understand what is being said. They hear what they want to hear. I suppose, because they are taught English from an early age and they deal with so many tourists, they think it is too easy, but they miss the subtleties. Don't get me wrong, I can't even order a beer in Dutch, this is not some rant about English-uber-alles, I think people should preserve their culture through language. When I go to another country I don't mind if no one speaks my language. It is always possible to make oneself understood. It forces you to pay greater attention to people. I think of Marco Polo traveling the spice route through a myriad of established, exotic cultures; the respect and wonder he showed their customs. He didn't have a phrase book. He didn't eat at the local McDuce's pizzeria everywhere he went. So, to give credit where due, the Dutch speak English better than the Germans, the French, and the English. And they are a handsome race.

What's up with all these Russian whores everywhere? They had them in Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Zwolle...Isn't it enough that Amerika won the cold war, they also have to turn all russian women into sex slaves? How proud to be a Russian today: dad's a drunk, mom works at McDonalds, sis is a whore, little boris is a thug, gramma and gramps are in the street, and I'm in the Mafia...Well I haven't been to Russia yet, but it sounds pretty bad. I'm sure I'll have something to say about the French when I get there. I've been boycotting French wine for a while now because of their killing of a photographer on the Greenpeace boat that their spies blew up in New Zealand.

O.K., enough of that. I'm at a bar called Balls. I think that is because they have pool tables but I'm not sure. The music has turned sour here at Balls. So I'll move on. A bicyclist just rode by singing, "the secret life...of a-ra-bia.." I thought that was amusing. My choice of bars now, just within blocks of my hotel, has dwindled. The last one was packed, no place to sit, a mix of Americans and Dutch but too typical. I walked by the 'Kandinski', which has a nice ring to it, but aside from a few couples necking there was no one there. I chose the place I am now because of the cute bartendress. It is dark with beer stiens and antelope heads on the walls. Full of only self-absorbed Dutch people. Still, it's better than television. It is just after midnight. I will have all day tomorrow to finish my Amsterdam experience.

These fucking French cigarettes suck. Cobblestones are pretty but they wreak hell on my shins. Still, outside of Elsie's, New York, the eCafe, parts of Seattle, San Francisco and LA, Amerika blows compared to Holland. The Dutch do have that annoying throat-clearing conflux of syllables when they speak their own language. I'll have to recommend this bar, if I ever figure out what it's called. It gives a realistic impression of Dutch life. The average Dutchman wears either a windbreaker or a stylish KGB-style leather jacket, wide-collar shirt, and jeans. The women wear short skirts with black stockings, cable turtleneck sweaters. I'm wearing my new gaberdine overcoat, blue shirt, black sweatshirt, black jeans, scarf and Vans. My black-dyed hair is usually standing on end from sleeping on the train or too small a bed. I'll have one more smoke then go back to the hotel.

I was thinking before I left on this trip that I needed to live more to write more and to find a quiet place, free of distractions where I could commit it all to paper, but I haven't really done anything. It is good to write this journal because it is clearing the cobwebs out of my head - but I need to spend some serious time putting it together in a readable format. And I need to write a sensible story involving my dreams and ambitions. Perhaps in this journal I should concentrate less on my comings and goings and more on the atmosphere of places I am. Aside from my asides I have skipped a lot of the visual, tactile details of this trip. The piss smell of the London tube for example. I said this cafe was dark; bars in Holland are called 'brown cafes' because the centuries of tobacco smoke have turned the walls brown. I haven't met anyone who doesn't smoke. Sitting at Top's internet cafe I could taste the second hand hash smoke. So sweet smelling. Luckily, at the time I still had some Exports. I'd rather smoke hash than these shitty french cigarettes.

sometime later

There are similarities in Steve Erickson's stories, particularly his very autobiographical 'Amnesiascope', to my own untold stories and dreams. His obsession with a girl he calls Sally is so similar to my feelings towards Sophie. Each of his previous books have in some way focused on his relation to her. Of equal importance is his respect for the meaning of dreams - not necessarily that his or mine mean anything or are precognitive but he gives their mystery the deference deserved. His stories interweave dreams and a dreamlike reality and are propelled by the passions of very real characters. The best writers I can think of use similar techniques - essentially they are driven to find the truth of consciousness using self-perception and unconscious archetypes. Thomas Pynchon, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursurla K. LeGuin, Martin Amis, Steve Erickson, Jonathan Lethem...that's all that come to mind at the moment. This is an aside but Erickson mentions one of my favorite movies, "In a Lonely Place" in Amnesiascope. It stars Humphrey Bogart as an alcoholic screenwriter accused of murder. Very intense depiction of writer's block. Another great movie few people have ever heard of is "Cry of the Penguins" starring a youthful John Hurt.

I am sitting here in the Lizard Lounge in Le Marais a few blocks from my hotel, the Grand Hotel Mahler. I had a lovely dinner; poulet citron, and was pleased to find it full of and run by americans ( the lounge not my chicken). Now they are playing Portishead so I decided to stay and drink.

Chiapas 1994

1994-09-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

Chiapas, Mexico, 1994 August

I flew out of LAX at 12 midnight on Tuesday the 9th of August. Arrived at Mexico City at 5:30 am on Wednesday the 10th. waited in a restaurant called the Baron Roja. Made the plane to Tuxtla at 7:30 am. As I left the airport terminal someone said, “Are you a Norris?”. It was Tom and it was a good guess as I was the only gringo getting off the plane. We hugged and walked over to a cafe. As he was ordering me a coke and tamale a policeman came over and asked me to respond to some questions. I told him to wait. Thomas returned and told him I was “solo un touristo”. If I had been a journalist I was required to fill out all these forms because of the election. Then we took a ride in a Ford Bronco for two hours as I nodded in and out of sleep the car careened up switch backs into the mountains of Chiapas. At last we arrived and I took a nap.
We walked to the center of town and rented a bike then went to Thomas’ office.

Took the 1 am bus to Palenque. Arrived at 5:30 am. Had a quesadilla at a small cafe. Took bus to hippy/hammock/RV park near the ruins. set up our hammocks (one was rented) I napped while Tom went and bought mushrooms down the road from some old woman wandering around a cow pasture. I remember when we first walked into the area that the thatched huts where we were going to stay were, i saw a pretty girl putting on her underwear. While it was still early we walked to the ruins of Palenque I took many photos then returned and bought orange juice at the restaurant by the palapas and some chamomile tea to mix with the mushrooms. we mixed the fresh purple psilociben mushrooms with the tea and several vials of ginseng/royal jelly.
Very tasty. It started raining and the two beautiful Dutch girls were running past our hammocks with big grins. Tom got into his bathing suit and went exploring. I was slower in coming on but finally got up and walked into the rain forest with Tom past a barb wire fence and sign that said in English: “Do not enter the ruins this way, if you are caught you will be expelled from the trailer park.” Right away we were in the heart of the rain forest and even though it was pouring rain not a drop reached us. The canopy rattled with the hard falling rain but absorbed it all. I took my glasses off and looked up and saw fractal patterns of green and gold made from the blurred image of the sky through the leaves. We found a small stream that cascaded though rock formation that looked man-made. I said, “Walt Disney would be proud.” The river had eaten such intricate patterns in the stone it looked like placed stones. All was peace. No bugs, no animals, just lush, thick, breathing life. I peaked. We picked a great big flower- all orange and plastic-looking-like a torch. As we left we realized that just next to the barbed wire we entered through was an ancient Maya ruin. Just there in the jungle-untouched, covered in roots and leaves.
We returned to our palapa, bought some beer and chips and ate the dried mushrooms. A young Mexican named Efaigm moved into the palapa next to ours and we invited him over for a beer. He had just come from seeing some ruins over the border in Guatemala. We offered him some mushrooms. We talked about the elections, literature, Don Juan, and the new spirit our generation is bringing into the world. We lit candles. I had a fitful sleep because of the cold and I was worried after finding an ant (they bite!) in my blanket-that there were more. Then in the middle of the night I heard a terrifying growl that rose in pitch until it was deafening and seemed to fade back and forth from one side of the jungle top the other. As it would begin to die down there would be a few quick barks from one side and it would start up again. Tom was sound asleep. I thought the jungle was rising up to crush us. It sounded like hundreds of tigers or jaguars all orchestrating their growls. It was in fact small howling monkeys.
The next day, after breakfast (Corn flakes), I wandered around taking pictures, then went back to the restaurant (Maya Bell) for a beer. The two Dutch girls were sitting with an American hippie bicyclist from San Luis Obisbo. I joined them and began polite conversation. Marjere, the frizzy haired brunette was filling out a psychological test from a woman’s magazine. When she was done she was disappointed because it said she was powerful like Katherine Hepburn. She is a Pisces. Annamieke is a Scorpio. Annamieke reminds me of Sophie so perhaps she has Libra rising. She also looks like Sophie with blond hair, eyebrows and eyelashes. Steel blue eyes that meet yours and have a mirth in them. Both seemed to like me at the time and I had no thought other than to get to know them better. I think Marjere is more romantic than she thinks, perhaps also shy. Annamieke is very playful and (as it turns out) passionate. I invited them to visit San Christobal, and we were leaving that night. They agreed and I told them I would stop by their palapa and give them the address. I was elated - they both were so beautiful, they laughed at my jokes, and they listened to my philosophizing intently.
When I returned to the palapa Tom was gone (to town to buy bus tickets). so I went and sat with Ephraim for awhile. Tom returned and we three relaxed and talked more in our palapa. I bought beers. I told Tom about the visiting Dutch girls. Ephraim said I was in love. I agreed.
Annemieka and Marjere returned from the village and passed by our palapa. I asked if they had a cigarette, they said yes but I would have to come and get it. I said that was fair. I asked Tom to write our address to give them but before I got up to go to their palapa, Annemieka brought me a cigarette. After she left Ephraim said “she likes you” and smiled. I went to the store for more beer and cigarettes and I bought two scarves. I brought the beer back for Tom and Ephraim and then I went and gave the scarves to the girls. I gave them Tom’s address. They offered me Tequila and I sat and talked with them for awhile. Later Ephraim joined us. A friend of the dutch travel agent came by to borrow a candle and we invited him to stay and talk and drink Tequila. Later I suggested we all have dinner together. When I went back to the palapa, Tom was all packed. We went to dinner, our cab was scheduled to come at 9pm so we could catch the 10pm bus back to San Christobal. (San Christo-bosnia as someone put it).
We had all just settled into dinner when our cab came. The six of us sat at the table just so: Annemieka, Marjere, and me on one side, the new guy, Tom and Ephraim on the other. Marj kept telling me that Annemieka wanted something from me and then they both would giggle. Tom and I left and had to take a later bus, so we arrived at San Christobal at 4am. We took a cab home and fell right to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking of Annemieke. (Still can’t!).
The next day Tom and I went to the mercado. I took lots of photos. We bought food and candles and herbs for tea. That night at around 7 we took acid. 5 hits in a glass of water. Tom got the acid from a guy that synthesized the stuff at UC Berkley in the 60’s and has been perfecting ever since, so it was very pure. I only had about a third of the glass. It took effect almost immediately. I had built a fire. Tom cleaned the bathroom. I saw elemental particles and moving fractal patterns in the walls. Tom talked about some visions and plans for video stratification. I sensed my shadow even when there was no light behind me as if there were a bright energy always at my back. I looked at a picture of Sophie and she winked at me. I was able to travel back to the moment I took the picture. I remember she frowned because she didn’t want me to take her picture, so I clicked one and then quickly another, then she shyly smiled, then I fired off six more using the motor drive, and the smile grew into a grin. So I’m looking at this picture and I was there body and soul. I remembered everything I felt and thought. I remembered being in love for the first time. I had trouble coming down but the music and the fire helped. I was on that level where time had literally stopped and I was at one with everything. Tom was speaking of conspiracy theories and at that level I was pretty paranoid. I had to reevaluate my relationship with reality. I thought of Annemieka and the look in her eyes. It was very like the way Sophie would look at me with some mirthful thought glinting through.
Tom and I talked about technology and the interconnectivity that was soon to be unleashed. We wrote some ideas down and Tom put them in a suitcase with some Cambodian postcards that we became convinced were three dimensional and he wanted to go out and find a notary public to seal it up. It was 3am and I was able to convince him that we should stay indoors. Tom told me he was gay, which seemed to make sense, although Ginnie and my dad both seemed to think he had a girlfriend.
We gauged the length of the trip by how far down a huge Our Lady of Guadeloupe candle had burned down. To her eyes! I pointed out. I wrote ‘to her eyes’ as a toast and a record.
Tom went to work late the next day and I slept in until I heard a loud banging on the gate. I instantly knew it was Annamiekee and Marjere. Tom had told them to bang loudly as there was no bell. I was up and dressed when they came to the door. I was overjoyed.
They were tired and dirty from the bus ride so they both took showers. I put their packs in my room ( which had two single beds). I made coffee. I told them I was going into town to do laundry, and they also wanted to do this. So later we walked ( I carried their bag of laundry) down the street and got on a collectivo to the mercado. From there we walked to the laundry. Then we went to the zocalo and had beers and some food. We met Maria, a young Lancandon indian girl and her friends. They were selling little Zapatista dolls. I remember touching Annamieke on her bare arm and feeling an electrical pulse. We met Tom in the zocalo. I told him we had guests and he took the news graciously. he was going to dinner with Brent Berlin. Annamieke and I bought a bottle of red wine and a bottle of Tequila. We went to the galleria. We went back for our laundry which wasn’t done yet (tomorrow at 6 they said). Then we took a cab home.
We drank the wine and talked philosophy, smoked cigarettes and listened to music in front of the fire. They lay in the big hammock I had streched out in the living room. I felt giddy in my idiocy - trying to impress them. Tom came home and we all talked for awhile, then he went to bed. Soon after Marj went to bed also. I began to play with Annemieke’s toes as she lay in the hammock and we talked. Her toes were each insured for 5000 guilder. It was just a look in her eye, a playful spark, and soon we were kissing. I clambered into the hammock and we tussled and played as we kissed more and more passionately. This went on for some time. I would stoke the fire or change the music, we would smoke and take shots of Tequila and touch and kiss more. I felt such joy just looking in her eyes. Finally, she said she should go to bed or Marj might be jealous, or lonely. I was so happy I couldn’t protest. I was at that stage where I wanted to love and to love unconditionally. I know I had shown her my passion for her and I sensed she was happy to be with me and I felt to petition her to stay, or to seem sad would be selfish.
The next morning Tom was up first and went off to work. Later I heard the girls talking dutch in my room. From my hammock I could see as they each walked to the bathroom in their underwear. I got up, started coffee and arranged breakfast: cornflakes with banana and mango and espresso. I was in a bit of a daze and I think they could sense it. Annemieka gave me some B vitamins for my hangover, and I took a Prozac. I was still groggy (mushrooms, LSD, wine, and Tequila plus falling madly in love could have been part of the feeling.) They suggested I rest while they go explore the town. I agreed and we arranged to meet at the zocalo at 3pm. They left and I rested. Annemieka had suggested that she didn’t like my gotee. I shaved it off.
I walked to town at around 2:30. Annemieka had set her travel alarm for 2 so it went off while I was in the shower. I took lots of pictures on the way and met them at the zocalo.
They had a stuffed goat toy for me. They had met with Maria again and had been invited to her house to meet her family. I was parched from the walk over so I stayed and had a beer while they went to post some letters. When they came back, Maria had shown up and we followed her to her home. I stopped occasionally to take pictures of colorful doors and such. At times I held Annemieke’s hand and felt like a teenager.
Maria’s home was at the foot of the mountain in a very poor barrio. her home was just a concrete shack with dirt floors and a corrugated roof. Her family was warm and inviting. Marj took a group portrait. They had changed into their sunday whites to welcome us. Then after some awkward moments we left. Maria walked us back to the zocalo. It was there the girls asked if I wanted to go my own way, I had said earlier that I needed to go to see Tom at CIES to make some calls. I realized I wasn’t showing any emotion, but they had said they wanted to buy a bus ticket and I had become disconsolate at the thought of them leaving.
They wanted to get a cool drink and I thought of a place I had passsed a few days earlier that had a nice patio. I felt awkward because I didn’t know where I was or how to get there and yet I wanted to take them someplace they would like, something to make them want to stay. I was able to find the place but they had shown doubt when I was unsure and this put me in a mood.
We had fruit shakes, pineapple for Marj, banana for Anne, and mango for me. I was able to cheer up a bit when I was able to explain that I was sad because they were leaving so soon. I thought I saw a glimmer in Annemieke’s eye that warmed me and told me to enjoy the moment. (no one likes a sour puss). She has a playful spirit and I felt I could play along. I wanted to touch her and swim in the blue oceans of her eyes. But I didn’t want to ignore Marj and I sensed whenever Anne and I connected that she felt left out. I suggested we get our laundry and get cleaned up and Tom could help them figure out which bus to take to Guatemala. We got the laundry and I thought we should go to CIES to see Tom and then go to the bus station. So we got a cab.
Alejandro was the only person at CIES but he very kindly explained which bus to take and some place to see in Guatemala. he also took us to the colectivo bus that would take us to the bus station. I was very sad at this point because I knew they would have to buy a ticket for very early the next morning. I sat by myself on the bus.
My spirits were lifted when they bought the 9:30 tickets instead of the 7am bus. I suggested that we take our laundry home, freshen up and have a nice dinner in town.
We got a cab in front of the bus station and because I couldn’t remember the street name he was giving us all kinds of attitude. I thought I could direct him once we got to the barrio San Diego. I missed a turn and we ended up on a dead-end street. He stopped and was babbling that he wanted to be paid and we could get out here. I told him to back up and go to the barrio San Diego but he started cussing at us. The girls got out ( he had turned off the engine). I was still trying with my lousy spanish to get him to take us somewhere else but Marj pulled me out and said that he was trouble. I offered him two pesos but he threw them back at me. Annemieka grabbed my bag off the seat as the cab drove away.
We were left in a dark street with a bunch of loitering thugs at one end, catcalling us. We walked quickly up the street and they followed. We finally stopped a cab (a VW bug “I love these cars!” said Marj. He took us home without incident and was very nice.
Once home we all changed into our newly laundered clothes. Talked more, then we walked down to the highway and got a cab to the Madre Tierra restaurant. We sat at a table but they didn’t take visa and I only had 50 pesos so we went to the galleria. As we arrived we met a Spaniard and his american girlfriend that the girls had met at the beach. They joined us for some beers. The couple had met at Georgetown University. She lived in Florida and had just been to Cuba. They sat with us as we ate, we continued with interesting conversation and then we all went downstairs for more beers. Then we danced! We really danced. The band was playing Santana and the Gypsy Kings and all sorts of things and we all just grooved. Anne, Marj and I relaxed after the final song but the Georgetown contingent made the bongo player play on so they could dance an erotic samba. We all talked some more then went home. I carried the address with me so there was no problem with the cab, except that as I was saying goodbye to the couple from georgetown I almost sat on a woman in the front seat.
Marj asked that I build a fire to dry her towel, so I did. They packed as I busied myself with the fire. Marj went to bed and Anne relaxed in the hammock. We talked and I expressed myself to her eloquently. She took off her pants and I got her a blanket then crawled into the hammock with her. We kissed and caressed. I could look into her eyes and fall deeply into the cool glittering water of her soul. I was on fire. I touched gently her brow and temple. I grasped her muscles around her spine and pressed her closer. i inhaled her aroma. I loved her with every molecule I could control.
Tom came home to find us enraptured. She was still in her sexy black underwear and a oversized sweater. I was wearing my pants but not my shirt. He was stoned and sat and talked with us for longer than he needed to, although Annemieka listened politely and asked questions. He went to bed.
We playfully disrobed each other. Naked under the blanket we continued to stare into each others eyes as we touched and caressed. She seemed to have such joy in her eyes. That we made love seemed to be of secondary consequence.
We fell asleep coiled as one. I could not have been more comfortable wrapped in her, in a blanket, in a hammock. I held her and she held me. We matched the timing of our breaths. I know is seems like I’m describing a physical lust being satisfied but it was more like a spiritual bonding. The key was her eyes and I could imagine or hope that she could tell also through my eyes or touch how I felt. I caressed her empathetically, I could sense in my own body how and where to touch her.
You see, I know I could meet someone as pretty or as sexy or as kind as her but she was an archetype.
The next morning the alarm went off several times and each time Annemieka shut it off and we cuddled more. Finally Marj was up and Anne asked me to make coffee and breakfast. I graciously acquiesced. They prepared to go and I made myself busy with the coffee. Each time Annemieka came near I would touch or kiss her. Deep french kisses and electric caresses.
So we go - off to the bus. I’m at a general loss as to what to say. I’m thinking that I’m letting the most valuable prize I’ve ever been offered slip away. I mean I will have to go to Holland if I ever want to see her again. I am consoled because I know that if it is a greater feeling than lust then letters to each other will bear this out. So much of what I cannot say is expressed physically - not as lust - because I touch not to seduce or to fulfil my own desires but to wordlessly express my longing not to be alone spiritually. I sensed Annemieka understood this. Whether this is true will be borne out though our ability to confirm this with written words from great distances. I hope I’m right because true love is rare.

Journal

1994-02-02T19:48:00.000-08:00

In the waning months of 1993 I happened to run into my old high-school friend, Chris Riley. He had just returned from working in Hong Kong and Cambodia as a photo-journalist. He described a proposal he had put together involving "priceless photographic archives in Cambodia, threatened by a volatile political situation, years of neglect, lack of resources and the absence of staff trained to deal with them..." The archives were from the S-21 detention center, "where 20,000 Cambodians were imprisoned, photographed, interrogated, and tortured during the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975-79..." We met a few weeks later and over a game of pool he explained the urgency involved because the recent elections in Cambodia created a coalition government that was trying to appease the Khmer Rouge and there was a distinct possibility that elements of the KR would join the government. I volunteered to help on the project in any way I could. Several weeks later we met and Chris told me that he was going in January whether or not he had raised all the money. I committed to go with him and to help raise money. I made arrangements to pay my way to Cambodia and live for at least a month. Chris was predicting it would take three to four months to finish the project.
We arrived in Hong Kong at 8:30 pm, Tuesday, February 1st. It was a very efficient airport, decorated like a British public lavatory. Riley had arranged for us to stay with John McDougal, a photographer Chris knew from the Agence France Presse. The plan was to meet him at the Press Club. The Press Club is in downtown Hong Kong just on the edge of the red-light district. We carried our luggage up the tiny elevator and into the club. Chris and I had both packed two small bags and each of us carried a box of chemicals. Immediately we were greeted by some friends of Chris' and were invited to join them at their table. John was not there. We quaffed a few pints of Guinness and talked of the project. Someone asked if I had ever been to Cambodia before and I replied that I had never been to Asia before. Comments ensued suggesting that Cambodia was the most intense and inhospitable introduction to Asia that you could imagine. The assembled group consisted of magazine correspondents and photo editors. We exchanged cards and continued to converse until John Eichelberger, another friend of Chris', joined us. He is a painter and lives out on the island of Chung Chao with his girlfriend Michelle who works as a photo editor at the AFP. He sat with us for a while and then we got a call from John McDougal. He was at home and suggested we just meet him there. So Eichelberger, Riley, and I got a cab over to McDougal's apartment where we drank fine single malt and retired.

The next morning McDougal went off to work early and Chris and I woke as he was leaving and had tea with him. Then we set out for breakfast and our plan was to visit Eichelberger at his place on the island. He had left the night before in time to catch the late ferry. Chris knew his way around so we walked through a beautiful central park that was a few blocks from McDougal's. Uniformed school children and old men were doing Tai Chi surrounded by beautiful plants and exotic birds in aviaries with the skyscrapers fencing the sky. We emerged from the far side of the park into the thick chaos of cars and people and trolleys and merchants. The narrow streets were overburdened with intricate signs and neon banners. Laundry and air conditioners dangled from every window.

We went into a Japanese mega-store that Chris knew had a juice bar and decent food. The main floor was like a supermarket and lots of little kiosks lined the walls selling sushi or juice and some things I couldn't guess at. We had fresh squeezed OJ and some sticky rice wraps. Then we got on a trolley to the Business District. The double decked trolleys were tall and narrow and colorful, built of wood and designed for small people and packed full.

We walked to the near-by Ho Gallery where Eichelberger’s paintings were on display. They were stark interpretations of the Hong Kong skyline framed in thick blocks of concrete.

We made the two o'clock ferry. The weather had cleared and it was a pleasant hour-long trip to the island. We were met at the dock by John. The island has no roads; only narrow walkways. We decided to buy food for a barbecue and John had to find some charcoal tablets for Michelle who had an upset stomach. So we wandered through the dark maze-like streets from shop to shop asking at each apothecary for charcoal tablets and having no success. None of the merchants spoke any English. We then proceeded to the fish market. It was actually a fish and meat market with blood flowing down the gutters and flies and the stench of flesh. We picked out a nice sized white fish of unknown variety that was swimming around in a little pool. The fishmonger, once informed of our choice, took the fish out and casually banged it's head on the edge of the table and then wrapped it in paper. We left the narrow streets and followed a series of steps and inclined walkways up the hill towards the house, stopping at a small cafe to buy six large Krønenbergs. We passed a school yard and several large homes of deco-style architecture and pastel colors. The flora encroached the path as we reached the top of the island and only the gates to homes were visible. Just at the apex we reached John and Michelle's house. It also was a pastel deco-style. Clearly built in the twenties and overgrown and crumbling it was perched right on the ridge dividing the island and afforded a spectacular view of the South China Sea from the porch. Which is where we settled into our beers and conversation.

The inside of the house was adorned with John's paintings and curios that he found in the yard; old tin cans and rusty old toys all with intricate and humorous Chinese designs. Michelle had cut out small drawings from an English language book and put them in small black wood frames hanging in odd places in every room. It could have been the inside of an artist's loft in SoHo. As the sun set we gathered up wood and started the barbecue. A friend of theirs named Greg joined us for the meal and brought more beer. He also lived on the island. We drank and talked well into the evening. The last ferry to Hong Kong left at 11:30 pm and John and Greg walked us down to the dock. We stopped at the house of an old Chinese lady who knew John and Greg and even remembered Chris from when he lived on the island. We stopped and talked with her for a while. We mentioned that we were going to Cambodia in the morning and she got very serious and warned us: "very dangerous"... It was a strange situation- we were all a bit drunk having a lively conversation with an old Chinese woman who spoke only a little English in the darkness of the constricted and quiet streets of this island. I was beginning to realize that I had no idea what to expect upon arriving in Phnom Penh; everyone we met to whom we mentioned that we were going to Cambodia looked afraid for our safety and sanity.
We just made the last ferry and napped through the trip. A taxi took us to the Press Club where we met John McDougal and although he insisted we stay and drink, Chris and I were exhausted and our flight to Cambodia was early the next morning.

After a fitful sleep and fighting off a painful hang-over I awoke before dawn. Able to shower and shave while John slept-in, we had a cup of tea with him before we left. There was a taxi stand around the corner from the apartment and we lugged our bags and boxes over just in time to meet the first cab. We got to the airport in time to settle into a couple of bloody marys before departure.

The plane was empty. We had the entire rear section of the airbus to ourselves. After we had settled into our drinks Chris said, "When we land, let me do all the talking." He began imparting his knowledge of Cambodian temperament in anticipation of our arrival with a cargo hold of darkroom chemicals and equipment and the expected customs hassle this would elicit. "Showing impatience or raising your voice only makes them angry. If a Cambodian starts smiling or laughing out of context as you are venting your frustration at them, be assured they are plotting your ultimate demise." He also stressed the importance of keeping the nature of our project a secret because half the government would likely oppose it and the Khmer Rouge were still actively killing.

Our Australian pilot for Dragon Air informed us as we were in the final approach that the runway was a tad short for the 737 jet we were propelled through the void in. He went on to say that the runway was pitted and cracked. He told us not to worry if the plane buckled and rocked. He was an expert pilot and the plane only seemed to tear itself apart at the seams when he laid on the breaks and the wheels recoiled from the pockmarked tarmac. We were unceremoniously deposited via a rickety portable staircase onto the scorching hot runway. The humidity was tangible, as if the atmosphere had turned to warm jello. Doug Niven, Chris' friend and co-director of the project, approached us as we lugged our carry-on past the tail engine's exhaust plume. He wore a Ministry of Information press pass which heartened us as to our chances of an easy entry into Cambodia. This was not to be.

We were corralled into the main terminal building which resembled a warehouse. Dozens of customs officials stood about looking officious. The throng of recent arrivals pressed up to the counter waving passports and entry cards. The smart ones were flashing $20 bills as well. The customs squad picked out the moneyed travelers and those with American or European passports and slowly processed their visas. It was an hour before we were allowed to pay for our visas and move on to the next hurdle. We fought our way through a confused mass of travelers who shared no common tongue or concept of how to pass through the oblivious agents of Cambodian customs. More forms were required to be filled out, even though no one who accepted our honest and exhaustive descriptions of our non-declarable and declarable goods could understand a word of what we had written. We were permitted to pass out the other side of the terminal into a sea of rag-wearing children and legless, armless beggars. There was nothing in-between: no duty free, no information booth, no 'welcome to Cambodia sign', just a glass door slid open by several Khaki clad soldiers who required one last glance at our passports and visas.

Just past the pawing beggars were the shouting and jostling taxi drivers. We had arranged for a car, we even had a 'fixer'- a Cambodian translator who was also a reporter for the Agence France Presse (AFP), named Sok. Riley and I had passed with comparative ease through customs but our cargo had been driven straight from the plane to a building across the street from the airport (down a raised dirt road that ran between paddy fields). It only took an hour or so to determine that this building was where our cargo had been taken. It was then a matter of showing our letter from the Ministry of Culture to the agents in charge with Sok properly interfacing for us. Unfortunately the customs agents could not lift a finger without a letter from the Ministry of Customs. We determined that we would have to take our letter from the Ministry of Culture to the Ministry of Customs. As all these ministries were downtown we decided to settle into our digs and have lunch. We dinned at a fine restaurant called Déja Vu, run by Anthony from Britain and Kelly from New Zealand. They are a charming young couple and served up fine European cuisine in a beautiful French Colonial building that just happened to be across the street from the current Khmer Rouge headquarters.

After lunch, Niven, Riley, and Sok, went to the Ministry of Customs only to be told that their letter was no longer valid as it was issued by the UN interim government that had been replaced by the newly elected Royal Government of Cambodia. It should be mentioned that the conflicting parties in the new government are the same conflicting groups that had been at war for the last ten years. The CCP Minister of Culture supported our project because it could be used as propaganda against the Khmer Rouge. The FUNCINPEC party would be less favorable as they had been allied with the KR during the war.

We had to recover our equipment from the cargo storage area before the photographic paper and chemicals were ruined by the heat. This required that we shuffle from one ministry to the next dropping $5 bills for secretaries and bottles of Scotch for Ministers in order to get letters to get letters to verify the letters we already had. This took several days and in the end we find we were being charged a 'storage fee'. We got to show five different customs agents the letter we finally acquired from the Minister of Customs and all were equally unimpressed. We had our translator fill out detailed forms that even he couldn't understand. Then we had to fill them out again because each Air-bill needed a separate form. It was at this point that we began to wonder where they could store all this paperwork- their desks had no drawers and the rooms were barren of file cabinets. It seemed like they were playing a game and would use our papers to cook dinner with. When we finally had the forms in order, customs wanted to inspect each box. We opened boxes explaining in vain through our interpreter what an enlarger is, what a print washer is, and please don’t open those boxes of light-sensitive paper! (thanks). After inspecting ten boxes the agent stamped our forms and sent us to the final hurdle. The last stamp we needed was in the hands of a bureaucrat who took the trouble to note that our letter from the Minister of customs refers to Air-bill #0516320 instead of #0516350 and he will not release our stuff without a signed and stamped correction from the Minister. On Monday we would give the minister’s secretary $5 to correct her mistake. We signal the driver of the van we have rented to drive up to the loading area and he backs off the road into a paddy field . We have to extricate the heavy van before they close the building. This takes hours in extreme heat. We finally pile enough heavy boxes on the back of the van for the wheels to grip the sandy berm of the road. It was a final irony that when we finally loaded the van no customs agents checked to see which or how many boxes we took. We drove back to the AFP villa and took the champagne out of the freezer where it had been since we arrived. We allowed it to thaw in the 100 degree breeze and then commenced to celebrate. Next we would construct the darkroom.

The room we decided to convert into the darkroom was a large extension to the kitchen that the guard's wife, Ming, used as a laundry room and was often a place where the guard, Sam, could be found napping. It had fifteen foot ceilings, decaying and moldy walls, a concrete floor, one large window facing the alley (where the landlady and her family lived), and two windows facing a dark passageway. There was no door: it was separated from the kitchen by a three quarter length wall. Our first step would be to paint the walls and ceiling to create a moisture barrier and keep the old flaking paint from circulating as dust. We arranged to rent a 50-cc Honda motorcycle through Mr. Sahm, the office manager at AFP. He recommended one that wasn't too new or too powerful so as to be less appealing to thieves. With this we would set out to the market to buy cleaning materials and paint.
Niven had made arrangements for us to stay at the AFP villa. The rooms were spacious and shared a stark bathroom. Each had an air conditioner, a large bed with mosquito netting, wardrobe, desk, chair, and fan. The lights were fluorescent tubes but we later purchased small reading lights. As the power supply was always in flux we used our mini-mag flashlights more often than not. The villa is walled and gated and the guard and his wife and daughter live in what was once the garage. Niven lived at the villa but the AFP corespondent, Kevin Barrington, rented an apartment several blocks away. The AFP had a large generator sitting in the courtyard next to the badminton court for use during the frequent blackouts and brownouts. It often overheated or ran out of fuel; so a small noisy generator was used as backup to keep the computers and wire-service machines running. It made a hell of a racket and spewed fumes all throughout the villa. Having air conditioners in our rooms was more of a tease than a relief as they never had any power to run on. The shower ( a pipe jutting out of the bathroom wall) held similar disappointment as it was supplied by a tank on the roof. The water was cold in the morning when a warm shower would’ve been nice and boiling hot in the evening when washing the sweat and grime from the days travails called for cold water. When the power was out the pump did not carry any water to the roof and the shower would emit rude gurgling noises but no water.
After cleaning the future darkroom with various toxic chemical cleaners produced in Thailand, we put a few layers of thick leaded paint on the walls and ceiling. Even with a fan and all the windows open we were overcome by the fumes. The paint never really dried but the fumes dissipated after several days. We commissioned some local furniture makers to build the tables and shelves we would need. These turned out to be of extremely fine workmanship. We commissioned the making of print drying racks using a drawing from a catalog and these also were very well built. We needed to seal off the room from light and still afford plenty of air circulation. We covered the windows with sheets of plywood and cut holes for a fan and air-conditioner. The entrance was a more difficult proposition. The Cambodians build with hollow bricks stacked on top of one another with reinforcing rods through them. They then plaster over this. The entrance was plaster over brick and could not be hammered into. We had our builders rig a wood frame around the entrance then we stapled four interwoven layers of black curtains to this.
   It's raining in Phnom Penh. Between the claps of thunder and flashes of lightning the reports of AK47's can be heard. Maguire, who can smoke joints like I smoke cigarettes, spent a day at the market looking for some quality pot and returned with a large bag of green buds and a small vial of hash oil. He smoked a few spinners with a healthy dab of the oil smeared the length of each joint and retired to his hotel room. Several days later he left the little brown vial at our office with a skull and crossbones drawn on a scrap of paper taped to it. The Cambodians apparently believe that shooting into the sky is a way of warding off the gods of heavy rain and thunder. It seems to work because it is usually clear the next morning. The sun filters through the lead fumes and presents a white canopy tinged with blue above the strange deco architecture . The buildings remind me of the fantasy cities depicted in Serge Clerc's comic book : The Adventures of Phill Perfect. Standing 4 to 5 stories above the wide tree-lined boulevards, they are divided into cubicles; each with some form of commercial enterprise at street level. A commercial enterprise can be anything from selling used tires, plumbing fixtures, or warm beer and soda. On the sidewalks, women sit on stools shaded by faded striped umbrellas selling cigarettes and gasoline (dispensing the gas from two litre plastic Pepsi bottles). A pack of cigarettes is one dollar. Two litres of gas is 1200 rial (about 50 cents).
The traffic on the pot-hole ridden roads of this capitol city consists of Japanese motor-scooters (Motos), three wheeled Cyclos, small children on adult-sized bikes, and 4-wheel-drive cars and trucks. There are no traffic rules. The right of way belongs to the bigger, stronger vehicle. Police, in their baby blue shirts and navy pants, stand under shade trees ready to extort money from anyone unlucky enough to stop-usually by collision or mechanical failure. No one ever intentionally stops while they are on the road. Pedestrians walk obdurately through the traffic swarming around them. Cyclos plod along, their driver sweating in the sun as his passengers press together under the sack-cloth umbrella. Motos, their drivers donning imitation wayfarers, with two or three or even six passengers clinging on, vie for position even as they veer around potholes, pedestrians, police, and Pathfinders. The cars and pickups and vans (most with U.N. or NGO markings) drive as if the streets were abandoned - only slowing or turning to avoid larger vehicles. Trucks drive down the center of the road and do not slow for anything.
I had never ridden any sort of motorcycle so Riley, having driven one during his last stay in Cambodia, taught me how to drive it, in a empty dirt parking lot which was insufficient preparation for the anarchy of the streets. To actually propel oneself and a passenger through the treacherous avenues, avoiding foot deep pot-holes, dunes of deep fine dirt, and the maniac drivers , required skills only experience could provide.
The chaos of the streets has its own soundtrack; everyone on the road must constantly beep their horns or ring their bells so that the person they are about to cut off knows they are about to be cut off. Roosters crowing, baby's crying, dogs barking, workers hammering, cell phones buzzing, guns popping, are mere background noise compared to the din of scooter and car horns.
Human beings quickly adapt to their environs and soon the noise, heat, dirt, exhaust, rotting garbage and open sewer odor, and mosquitos endemic to Phnom Penh had ceased to affect.
One evening Niven and I drove along the river-front to the Wat Phnom. We were waved through a roadblock manned by MPs, and stopped at a vietnamese ‘night drink’ bar. It was 20 meters from the roadblock on a corner facing the river. We sat outside by the curb and ordered a couple of Tiger beers. Apparently the thai beers come with complimentary vietnamese girl. One sat next to me and perplexingly began massaging my thumb ( this is not innuendo - I mean the actual thumb on my left hand ) Perhaps it was some secret sexual accupressure point. Niven was trying out his new vietnamese phrase-book asking the girl sitting next to him “Why is this shirt damaged”. A series of whistle blows sounded from the guards at the roadblock and we looked in time to see a man on a moto speed through the roadblock towards us. The whistles gave way to warning shots. The MPs fired several rounds into the air then lowered their guns. We dove under the table as they started shooting blindly after the fleeing moto. He escaped by turning down the side street next to the bar. A few rounds embedded themselves in the wall behind our seats.

Perkins was asked to provide a photo for a filler story that Shelly was writing about bats. Apparently, Phnom Penh has the largest urban population of bats in the world. the National History Museum’s attics are home to millions of little bats. He set out one morning with this information, a camera, and the promise of $25 american in cash. At the empty museum he met an old Khmer dressed in a grey uniform that denoted somehow his position as guard. He spoke a little english, introduced himself as “Dada”, and agreed to help Perkins find the bats. Now, every evening at sunset if you are sitting on the balcony of the FCC you can see these millions of bats all fly out of the big spooky museum, so we all knew they were there. Where you might find them during the day was the mystery. Dada led Perkins through the museum to the upper galleries and to the entrance to the attic. Along the way he got one of the other museum staff, a cleaning man to come with. This man agreed to show Perkins the attic for $3. Perkins gave him the money and the man disrobed down to his Kamar, telling Perkins to do the same. In his boots and boxer shorts Perkins followed the man up the thirty foot bamboo ladder to a dark hole in the ceiling with a Pentax and mounted flash unit around his shoulder. They stepped off the ladder onto the floor of the pitch black attic. The rafters were up still another twenty feet and it was raining bat shit. The floor was ankle deep guano, sticky with dead bugs of all sort and size. Perkins understood the reason for stripping down as he was quickly covered in white bat shit. Eager to get the shot and retreat he aims in the general direction of the roof and shoots. No flash. His batteries were dead. Returning down the ladder Perkins tells Dada that he will have to return later with new batteries. Dada smiles, gently flicks some guano off Perkins’ naked shoulder, and says, “No problem.” After going home and showering Perkins returned with fresh batteries and a hat. Dada was waiting with a bundled up shirt squirming with bats. He released them one at a time so Perkins could photograph the tiny pink bats as they flew off. The AFP ran one of these photos with Shelly’s piece, and he made $25 (less $3 for the guano guide).