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December 8, 2007

Stephen Hunter captures Baltimore ... and sex tourism, and more

OK! Here is an older post -- and much revised and I hope improved post -- from just before my blog got broken back around July 25, when my Web host moved from California to Ohio and my shopping cart also got wrecked in the process. I've finally got the wonderful Richard Kersey at SlickRicky.com to get me up and running again, with this entry lost however. Now I will figure out this newfangled Movable Type 4.0. To resume ...

Anyone interested in Baltimore should not miss this terrific essay by Stephen Hunter, the movie critic for the Washington Post (and formerly the Baltimore Sun).

'Hairspray' Is an Aerosol Version of the Real Baltimore

Hat tip to my former Sun colleague Duncan Moore for pointing this one out.

Hunter looks at how both Cal Ripkin and John Waters are in the news. Hunter notes how Waters transformed the view of outsiders of Baltimore into his own vision:

That image of Baltimore, changing merrily, became the Baltimore of record: so unhip it was hip, so uncool it was cool. Long forgotten is the fact that in the beginning many Baltimoreans hated Waters for his trick of processing an elegant, intellectual city with powerhouse financial, advertising and shipping chops into a kind of Happy Valley U.S.A. of mild, funky rebels and hair enameled lifeless and piled to the stars. Soon the Waters view prevailed, not necessarily a bad thing, and everybody bought into it. "Hon," that exemplar of down-home Bawlamore charm (and not mumbled, embittered Baltimore condescension), became so positive an identifier it was featured on a welcome-to-Baltimore sign on the B-W Parkway.

It's okay. That's the way it goes. When the legend conflicts with the truth, print the legend, as John Ford knew. Waters is not a documentary filmmaker; he's a mythmaker, a parable-spinner, an illusion merchant. But you can't forget what's there, too, a vast, flat, hot tragedy, where young men pop each other at record pace and nobody seems to know why or what to do. In a few happy glades -- Federal Hill, Homeland, Canton -- one can live as elegant an urban life as anywhere in America, enjoying a Georgetown at Patapsco River basin prices. But go out on Federal Hill at night, and you see before you the Inner Harbor all agleam, the bold new downtown skyline, and have the sense of a town that seized on the fame and momentum Waters and Ripken lent it, and did its best to become what it seemed to be.

But don't listen to the sirens that blaze into the dark night, or pay attention to the blinking police and emergency service vehicles that look like blood-red pulsing pinpricks in the dark seen from the sleek buildings around the harbor far from where the real dying happens far too frequently.

Hunter channels Tom Wolfe's various takeouts on hair (most especially in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) here:

(Baltimore)'s a place of funky neighborhoods, populated by happy peasants, some of them cross-dressed. The defining mark is the hairdo, a kind of individual tower of protein, a high-rise lacquered in place by aerosol droplets so that the ziggurat is as motionless as if built by slaves on the Mesopotamian plain. As for the men, the hair is weighted with glowing unguents that play sparkle games with the light.

I think the wildly individualistic hairdos that once defined Baltimore are disappearing as the older set dies off. What you now have to visit the Honfest to see, used to be just everyday Baltimore. We seem to be getting more homogenous as time goes on.

But on to the important point. Baltimore can be Heaven, Hell, or Camp, or sometimes all three.

It depends on whether you are walking along the Canton waterfront promenade or playing soccer at Tudor Arms (Heaven), or getting stabbed and beaten to death with a shovel in Washington Hill (Hell).

Hell was perpetrated on a Marine on leave who was murdered in June, according to police charging documents, by a girl I've known since she was 8 years old, maybe four blocks northeast of our house.

Then we have Baltimore as Camp -- Travolta as Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray," with her "arhnin' (ironing) and howled elastic "no" ("noeeeewwwh-ha" in Balmerese).

The "Hell" aspect seems to be predominately lately, with two savage beatings of individuals overpowered by youth gangs: that of Hopkins financial analyst Zach Sowers near Patterson Park by four yout's -- they took his watch, credit card and $10 and he remains in a coma -- and a female bus rider outnumbered nine to one.

Edna Turnblad, played by John Travolta, and daughter Tracy, played by Nikki Blonsky.

Now with these observations about Baltimore made, let's return for a bit to the writing of Stephen Hunter.

I heard from Stephen with a thank after this blog entry originally went up in July -- a little note of appreciation that made me want to bow like Wayne and Garth chorusing, "We are not worthy," and also shamed me into realizing that Steve deserved a lot more praise than in my original quick-hit blog entry.

Some background. I first encountered Stephen face to face at the Baltimore Sun when I was sent back, circa 1988, from the copy desk to the Features Department. Everyone in Features called him "Hunter." He wore a short beard and cargo pants and had a powerful, animal-like quickness as he moved around the department, rolling to his desk to file stories, spending most of his time elsewhere, screening films.

As a fill-in assistant features editor, I couldn't believe my luck when I was asked to edit Steve's reviews, which I already enjoyed tremendously just as a regular reader of the paper. I found Steve reliable, observant and tremendously skilled at just nailing the essence of any movie he reviewed, and doing so with elegant, precise and darned funny text.

So here I was going to be the first person to read a future Pulitzer Prizewinner's reviews. I could feel Steve's eyes on me from across the room as he surreptitiously tried to see if his first reader would react with a smile or laugh out loud. He often succeeded.

Editing his reviews consisted really of reading for pleasure and changing nothing, but on one or two occasions, I made the tiniest of suggestions -- one word for another -- and he enthusiastically agreed each time.

For a writer, le mot juste, l'idee juste, the exactly correct word and concept, forcing your brain to really THINK all the way to the implications of a work of entertainment ... it's hard work, like chipping rocks in the prison yard. So many writers skim on the surface and never get to the perfection that even a simple movie review can aim for.

I've taught travel writing on book tours to Colorado and San Francisco and tried to make it clear to those present whenever they are writing, to ponder, "What do I think about this. Why is it important?" Notice and then dig and polish.

I taught as an example part of a chapter on the Yucatan, in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, where I write about having a panic attack on top of the Maya pyramid of Tikal. As a writer, first you describe the panic, and then you have to dig awfully deep to really understand why you want to share it with others ... does the panic suggest something about the awfulness of the human sacrifices at Tikal, or how a phenomenal travel destination can induce trembling wonder?

Somehow Steve could arrive in one afternoon at the sort of insight that would take me 17 revises (yes, that's a real number for some of the chapters in my books). And do this routinely.

Read his reviews of "Lord of the Rings" ...

I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop.

"Troy" ...

(Director Wolfgang) Petersen is an old pro. His is a narrative sensibility, and he's capable of keeping the story moving and subplots straight. He's got an eye for beauty too, though mainly of the male kind. He so loves the image of the helmeted, husky warrior boys, bulgy of bicep, lean of loin, aglow of sweat, eyes feral and fierce in the slits of their art-deco steel pots, that he hits it over and over and over. Many a gay man will consider this the ultimate date movie.

"Apocalypto" ...

One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty.

Many times after we've seen a movie, Lamont gets to have the entire review read to him aloud as he pulls on his work shoes near my computer.

And, I've had a note to myself for ages to commend Stephen for his fantastic review of Heading South, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:

You see it all over the Third World, anywhere poverty and beauty converge under balmy skies, and the liquor is sweet and hits hard. A Westerner, north of 45, with fallen arches, hair, belly and spirit, clearly no longer sexually competitive in the meat markets of the big city, shows up, hunting an arrangement.

The arrangement will be with a younger, suppler body, owned by a younger, duller, more beautiful person. The two will share not an hour of anonymous sex, a la the streetwalker and her beau, but something tangentially more dignified: a kind of ersatz relationship, with life narratives exchanged, laughs and drinks sampled to lubricate the awkwardness, day trips to the mountains or the monuments to eat up the afternoon hours, and then discreet nights of sweat and bliss. Finally, certain monies will be quietly exchanged, "gifts," not payments, addresses passed between the two for the letters that will never get written, the photos that will never be sent, and ... that's it.

Hello, Monday morning, back in the office. Hmm, you look so refreshed. Have a good time down south? That glow in your face? You must have gotten good weather. Meanwhile, you are thinking, Good Lord, I didn't even notice the weather.

This passage has all the knowledge and the insight one could possibly muster to separate common notions of sex tourism as evil exploitation from the reality of a relationship, albeit an ersatz one, with "life narratives exchanged." I flashed when I read this on my event-packed several days with a Bahamian lobster fisherman with whom I spent a staggering amount of time talking and dancing and strolling and sharing meals, as I recounted in Romance on the Road.

It was challenging to return to a conference around the National Desk of the Washington Post and think, "Well, I just had an X-rated vacation ... now it's back to this dead world."

What is astounding also is Hunter's concluding sentence about the film "Heading South."

"It's quietly terrific," he writes, words that shocked me to read ... so many light-years from pretty much the entire universe of white male reviewerdom who can't stand ... you can feel them getting sick at the very assignment ... to sit through "Heading South," which must feed every insecurity known to the paunchy cubicle worker lacking the sculpted body of a Caribbean beach boy.

Thanks Stephen on behalf of your readership for nailing so many reviews like Michael Jordan winning a threepeat via a hotly contested jumper.

To learn more about our era's most gifted reviewer, here's some links:

An excellent profile in the Baltimore Sun:

Bullets in his head: Author, film critic and gun aficionado Stephen Hunter takes some of his best shots on paper - and in a new movie

Stephen's astounding take on the Virginia Tech massacre:

Cinematic Clues To Understand The Slaughter: Did Asian Thrillers Like 'Oldboy' Influence the Va. Tech Shooter?

Oh, and on to yet another tangent, check out this credit to Weyman Swagger on the Unofficial Stephen Hunter Web site:

Weyman Swagger: He's actually a photo editor on my old paper, The Sun, and a grizzled old truck-driver looking man, without college education and a little rough and hilly in his ways. He's also a brilliant natural editor, who has helped me immeasureably; he knows things the pros in NY don't and my books are much the better for his ideas. I don't always use them but they are usually so provocative that they jigger me into something that works. He's also a very smart perceptive line reader, who's got a sense of voice and timing and colloquialism bar none. It's a privilege to have him help me.

I had no idea! One of my favorite people at the Baltimore Sun, photo editor Weyman Swagger, helps Hunter with his books.

I shouldn't be so surprised. Weyman and I used to collaborate on that old newspaper tradition of creating stories for a mock front page whenever someone leaves the paper. When a colleague named Bill Higgins moved along to the Minneapolis paper, we wrote a spoof of him becoming a champion ice fisherman -- full of deliberate factual errors and internal contradictions -- and laughed so hard at our own creation (yes, this violates the first rule of comedy) that we thought we might as well just delete the whole thing, we'd had so much fun just creating it.

Weyman and former colleague Peter Meredith also collaborated on hilarious send-ups of AP stories capturing all the peculiarities of wire stories -- comparing the acreage of foreign countries to U.S. states or portions thereof ("the size of East Texas"), the mysterious AP-speak on updates and corrections slathered across breaking stories, the goofy quotations. Many on the internal Sun e-mail loops enjoyed their running collaborations on stories about coupon-stealing rings, lists of notable vehicle accidents involving cows, surfboards, chainsaws or Kelvinators, and even some stories written entirely in a pretend version of Dutch that could be readable in English.

Disclaimer: Hunter once praised and warned me in an e-mail reading something like, "You're too obviously intelligent for this place, you'll have to hide it better." It's the kind of compliment that really creates a lifelong buzz ... and creates an added loyalty to the speaker ... and tells a little truth about how being too smart is just as tough, or tougher, than being not smart enough, in most workplaces. I know I would praise and enjoy Steve's reviews only 0.0001 percent less without that little career moment.

posted by jbelliveau at 6:09 PM in Culture
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December 11, 2006

Ordering pizza with a biometric card

Hat tip to my brother, Jim, for this incredible link on what it will be like to order pizza in 2010 if we all have biometric ID cards.

posted by jbelliveau at 6:33 PM in Culture
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May 11, 2006

Gay marriage vs. religious liberty

What an eye-opening column by marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher -- Banned in Boston: The coming conflict between same-sex marriage and religious liberty.

In a nutshell, Catholic Charities of Boston placed children for adoption. A small number of these children were placed with gay couples.

The Catholic Church told Catholic Charities such placements were against church policy. When Catholic Charities complied, refusing to place any more children with gay couples, the state of Massachusetts blocked it from engaging in adoptions at all.

What has happened is that gay activitists have persuaded the courts (and to some extent public opinion) that their cause is a civil rights issue (an equivalence that maddens a significant number of African Americans who flatly reject this comparison), for which no religious or conscience exemptions could be made. From the article:

From there, it was only a short step to the headline "State Putting Church Out of Adoption Business," which ran over an opinion piece in the Boston Globe by John Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School. It's worth underscoring that Catholic Charities' problem with the state didn't hinge on its receipt of public money. Ron Madnick, president of the Massachusetts chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, agreed with Garvey's assessment: "Even if Catholic Charities ceased receiving tax support and gave up its role as a state contractor, it still could not refuse to place children with same-sex couples."
This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve's marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage.

Gallagher asked numerous legal scholars, including Anthony Picarello, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, what this all means. How serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage? "The impact will be severe and pervasive," Picarello says flatly.

These experts' comments make clear that it is not only gay marriage, but also the set of ideas that leads to gay marriage--the insistence on one specific vision of gay rights--that has placed church and state on a collision course. Once sexual orientation is conceptualized as a protected status on a par with race, traditional religions that condemn homosexual conduct will face increasing legal pressures regardless of what courts and Congress do about marriage itself.
Nevertheless, marriage is a particularly potent legal "bright line." Support for marriage is firmly established in our legal tradition and in our public policy. After it became apparent that no religious exemption would be available for Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, the church looked hard for legal avenues to continue helping kids without violating Catholic principles. If the stumbling block had been Catholic Charities' unwillingness to place children with single people--or with gay singles--marriage might have provided a legal "safe harbor": Catholic Charities might have been able to specialize in placing children with married couples and thus avoid collision with state laws banning orientation discrimination. After Goodridge, however, "marriage" includes gay marriage, so no such haven would have been available in Massachusetts.

Precisely because support for marriage is public policy, once marriage includes gay couples, groups who oppose gay marriage are likely to be judged in violation of public policy, triggering a host of negative consequences, including the loss of tax-exempt status. Because marriage is not a private act, but a protected public status, the legalization of gay marriage sends a strong signal that orientation is now on a par with race in the nondiscrimination game. And when we get gay marriage because courts have declared it a constitutional right, the signal is stronger still.

The method and the mechanism for achieving protected status may be different for orientation and for race. Even the Massachusetts supreme court, for example, declined to rule explicitly that orientation is a protected class, subject to strict scrutiny. But in Massachusetts, the end result may be similar. If state courts declare gay marriage a constitutional right, they are likely to see support for gay marriage as state public policy.

The article quotes some leading legal minds on the extent to which placing gays on the same level as minorities will impact activities sponsored by religious groups, from adoptions to schools (can they expel lesbian students?), homeless shelters, marriage counseling and retreats.

It even remains cloudy whether free speech -- the freedom to argue against gay marriage -- would be freely permitted.

Even a lesbian legal scholar at Georgetown University has some pause about where we are heading. Chai Feldblum, raised an Orthodox Jew, notes:

She pauses over cases like the one at Tufts University, one of many current legal battles in which a Christian group is fighting for the right to limit its leaders to people who subscribe to its particular vision of Christianity.
She's uncertain about Catholic Charities of Boston, too: "I do not know the details of that case," she told me. "I do believe a state should be permitted to withhold tax exempt status, as in the Bob Jones case, from a group that is clearly contrary to the state's policy. But to go further and say to a group that it is not permitted to engage in a particular type of work, such as adoptions, unless it also does adoptions for gay couples, that's a heavier hand from the state."

Indeed. Do read Gallagher's full article to see an amazingly wide range of legal views on the implications of gay marriage as a civil rights issue.

I'll also highly recommend reading Gallagher's excellent book The Case for Marriage, which takes on feminist notions that marriage is only good for men.

Other blogs commenting on "Banned in Boston:"

Bettnet.com (note a lively set of comments after the blog entry).
Rod Dreher: Why I Can't Help Voting GOP.
And National Review's the Corner, where Stanley Kurtz foresees that "same-sex marriage will be used as a tool, not only to silence opposition, but to unstring religion itself as a force in American life." He summarizes:
Scholars on the left and right agree that the gay marriage movement has raised the specter of a massive and protracted battle over religious liberty. In states that adopt same-sex marriage, religious liberty is clearly going to lose. The source of the problem is the flawed analogy between the battle for same-sex marriage and the sixties movement for civil rights. Gay marriage proponents argue that sexual orientation is like race, and that opponents of same-sex marriage are therefore like bigots who oppose interracial marriage. Once same-sex marriage becomes law, that understanding will be controlling.

Update: A month after I first wrote this, the New York Times examines this issue today, see link here: Will Same-Sex Marriage Collide With Religious Liberty?, by Peter Steinfels (June 10, 2006).

posted by jbelliveau at 11:51 AM in Culture
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April 24, 2006

My daily diary of hearing F bombs

You never know exactly when it's coming ... only that it is coming.

At some point in every day, you will be subjected to a completely gratuitous dropping of the F bomb.

Or if you live in Baltimore, let's be more accurate: You may be subjected to near-continual dropping of F bombs.

Last night, I walked our older sheltie, Beau, and got ready to bring him up the front steps. I stopped to chat with two of the neighbors. Neighbor 1 told me about his girlfriend, his future job in New York, his own dog, and minor problems with other dogs who are walked off leash. These little stories required at least three glaringly inappropriate uses of "f-ing" as an adjective.

Note to Neighbor 1: I nearly flinched each time you used the word -- it felt like being hit in the ear. My mind struggled to come up with a proper way to make this known. Should I have noted brightly, "F Bomb"? Or ask him, "When did the memo come out saying that word was appropriate around women? I must have missed that."

If there is a such a secret memo, is this more fiery blowback, another unintended consequence, of feminism? Is it the case that now that some women (especially girl gangbangers) think they can swear like sailors, men (especially sons) no longer have a clue about how to behave?

Anyway, when Neighbor 1 said he was moving in four months, I took the easy way out: Wimping out. It won't be a problem for long if he's moving soon and I avoid him in the meantime. Later I learned that Neighbor 2 (male) was equally offended by the language, and similarly reasoned that Neighbor 1 is moving soon.

That just leaves thousands of other Baltimoreans who still sling the word around. Professionals, gangbangers passing by on the street, construction workers, athletes, and many in between. Note to everybody: You're not cool, you're not shocking anyone, you're just tone-deaf and making almost every corner of our city coarse.

Maybe I need to print out the chart above and carry it around Baltimore, the City that F-Carpetbombs Everyone's Ears, to show to people. Guess what -- two-thirds of the public is offended by your language.

Walking around our neighborhood, I often also hear the M-F Superbomb. From a distance, it sounds like, "m'h fhuh, that m'h fhuh m'h fhuh." Muffled but menacing, the individual syllables of the word aren't crystal clear, but the hostility and anger are. It sounds really ugly -- maybe the ugliest sound humans can make.

The graphic above was published with an article entited, Poll: Americans See, Hear More Profanity. When I read the article, it reminded me that I have thought about keeping a diary of the appalling language that I hear everyday. If compressed, it would read something like this. All examples are real:

8 a.m. Walk dogs. Overhear, "m'h FH, that m'h FH m'h FR," from pair of gangstas. Cross the light at Ann and Lombard and hear F bombs in stereo! One from two guys on scaffolding doing their work, the other from three men strolling by, one saying, "I'm not going down f-ing Broadway."
9 a.m. Go to Light Street Cycles. Gen-X repair crew pumps out loud rap with high F-bomb quotient. They apparently assume that every single customer wanting to buy or repair a bike or get supplies enjoys smutty language.
10 a.m. Guys getting on Light Rail at Camden Yards drop a few F-bombs. "C'mon guys," I implore, shaking my head. They respond, "We're not talking to you." "You're in a public place!" I point out. Their body language -- quieter, calmer, subdued -- acknowledges that on some level, they know they should clean it up.
Noon. I have a hair appointment at the home of my hairdresser. Her daughter's friend, John, high school age, Fs this and Fs that. John and the daughter leave the kitchen, where my haircut and color are taking place. "What do you think of them?" my hairdresser asks. As she washes my hair in the sink, I reply, "Using the F word is inappropriate around women. It just is. And he won't know that if he's allowed to use bad language in the house." She's quiet, neither agrees or disagrees.
3 p.m. Go to Du Burns Arena to watch Lamont's soccer team play. A tall player, mid-20s, in athletic gear, waits in stands for his game to begin. He pulls cell phone out of his gym bag and engages in loud conversation that includes the word M-F. As he passes me to take the steps down to start his game, I quietly say, "Some language." He snaps back immediately an attempt at something clever. The metacommunication, or message behind the message, is, This is a men's space. If you don't like it, you can leave.
"Guess no one ever told you to watch your language around women," I say evenly.
5 p.m. Next, to Tyson's bar in Canton, which sponsors Lamont's team, the Slackers. A guy with a red Abe Lincoln beard F-bombs merrily at the NCAA basketball game on the TV screen. He may be a regular, and I've never been here before. No leverage to get him to watch his mouth around ladies. I shrug this one off. If I had the graphic above, maybe I could hand it to him.
7 p.m. Off to catch the latest play at Center Stage, Radio Golf. From the stage, the actors emit F bombs, S words and I believe the M-F word.

I just don't understand the need for this language anymore. Playwright August Wilson must have thought he was lending street cred to his script. It's nearly 40 years after the Sixties -- I thought we were long past using language for shock value? No one in the audience seems to blink at the words.

Hail to my mom, who just turned 80 with a bangup birthday celebration, for knowing what good behavior -- heck, with knowing what a little class -- consists of, and instilling this knowledge in her children, without concessions to being faux-hip. It really isn't as cool as people think it is to throw around bad language once past the junior-high rebellion stage.

To me, bad language -- especially that of the jock at Du Burns arena -- is (or should be) a rather serious matter against women. Males (but not men, or gentlemen) sometimes use bad language to mark an area as off-limits to women -- as a hostile move.

Maybe what's really going on is that there is no concept anymore of what being a gentleman entails.

I confess my own failings in the matter. I am not perfect in abstaining from the F bomb. It is something that escapes the mouth when, say, a hammer hits my thumb, or I am playing goalie in soccer and a shot goes by, into the net. Even then, I try to keep swearing at a murmur, not for the ears of others.

This quote from the article linked above also sees the F-word as something only for moments of extreme frustration:

And Donnell Neal of Madison Lake, Minn., notes how she'll hear the F-word used as a mere form of emphasis, as in: "That person scared the f--- out of me!" Neal, 26, who works with disabled adults, says she swears only in moments of extreme frustration, "like if someone cuts me off when I'm driving, or if I'm carrying something and someone shuts the door in my face." Even then, she says, she'll likely use "milder cuss words" -- and never at work.

Some young folks have bought into the canard that the F word, and the C word (which I truly detest), is "just a word." At Tyson's bar, Slacker pal George goaded me to say "c" word. "It's just a word," he said, his Gen-X pseudo-reasoning as predictable as the sun coming up in the East.

I thought, "George, I'm not restraining myself because I'm inhibited. I'm restraining myself because it's a matter of having a little class and decorum."

And I'm restraining myself because, as a writer, I know the power of words. Almost no word is "just a word." All have meanings. It's precisely because of their power that they need to be saved for the right times. I'd say vulgarity may be forgivable if you are hitting your thumb with a hammer. If there's no hammer in sight, save it -- I'm tired of the hammering on my ears.

posted by jbelliveau at 11:25 AM in The Neighborhood
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April 18, 2006

My husband the rock star

Anyone look familiar in this picture?

The guy front and center is Lamont Weston Harvey dressed as a rock star. In his words:

Hey, I'm a rock star!
The people from the Live! section were doing a cover shoot on
"cover bands" and they needed an extra body to make a 4-piece band.
I just happened to be wearing a Pantera concert shirt under my
layers.

I initially grabbed the Paul Stanley mask but when the drum sticks
were passed out I saw it as an opportunity to show off my tatoo and
flex a bit.

- - Rock ON! Wes

Hey babe you look like you LOVED helping out on this!

posted by jbelliveau at 2:19 PM in Culture
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April 13, 2006

The heroes of Flight 93

With rapt attention, we watched the Discovery Channel special, Flight 93 "The Flight That Fought Back," last September.

"If you'd be on that plane ...," Lamont said, speculating on my famous temper.

"... it would have crashed in Cleveland," I finished his thought.

After a moment, I continued. "No way I would have waited until Pennsylvania and plotted with others," pantomiming grabbing my ever-present Swiss Army knife (Flight 93, obviously, was pre-airport screening) and bum-rushing the hijackers reflexively, as soon as they made themselves known.

"RAARRRRRRRRRR!" Yes, women, at least some of us, fantasize about being heroes or warriors, giving a battle yell and charging the bullies. If you're going to go down, take your enemies with you, right?

That sentiment still stands. But in reality, the fearful details of the flight, revealed yesterday, would have scared the breath out of me. Thus the courage of the passengers becomes even more apparent.

Most of the details in the A+E re-enactment were born out by the playing of the cockpit tape yesterday at the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui.

What comes from the tapes is a better sense of the heroism of the passengers. Having courage required:

dealing with the impending doom of an airplane heading for a crash, which must be utter Hell.
knowing that other human beings (bringing a new wrinkle to cruelty), and not mechanical failure, doomed them.
and knowing that they had little hope for themselves -- two of their number lay with their throats slit -- but could at best only avoid further deaths on the ground.

How did they act with such surety, in a situation far past that of Hell, subjecting them to some unfathomable level of fear and pure terror?

Somehow the passengers deliberated, got information from friends on the ground watching the World Trade Center burn, planned, made final calls home, acted and succeeded -- as maniacs in the cockpit screamed "Allah is great" nine times and turned the plane upside down.

The thought that any human could imagine that the use of an airplane for homicide honors the greatness of Allah is beyond chilling.

It's interesting to note Moussaoui's nonchalance in these two accounts below. Zacharias, you are moving into John Wayne Gacy territory with your casual attitude toward exterminating others, but maybe that's exactly how you can manage to be so evil.

Striking details from yesterday's court trial in Alexandria, Va. (from the New York Times, Final Struggles on 9/11 Plane Fill Courtroom, by Neil A. Lewis):

There are also the sounds of what may have been the killing of a flight attendant as the hijackers took control: a woman in the cockpit moaning, "Please, please, don't hurt me." Her voice soon appears again for the last time as she is heard to say, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die" followed by one of the hijackers saying in Arabic: "Everything is fine. I finished."
Mr. Moussaoui has mostly evinced an air of indifference during the trial.
Violence in the cabin had told the passengers that something was different than an ordinary hijacking. In evidence presented Tuesday, jurors heard the phone call of Marion Britton, a passenger, to a friend on the ground. "Don't worry," the friend consoled. "They'll probably take you to another country."

Ms. Britton replied, "Two passengers have had their throats cut."

From the Washington Post, At Trial, Flight 93 Myth Finally Becomes Reality:

It began with a muted series of thumps from a sharp knife or maybe clenched fists. The sounds were muffled but unmistakable, one body blow after another, ending with a squishy thud.

"No, no, no, no, no. No," came the high-pitched voice of a crew member or flight attendant being subdued. " . . . Please, please don't hurt me," the person said later. " . . . I don't want to die."
A foreign-accented voice, increasingly agitated, screamed: "Down. Down. Down!" as the whacking sound continued. Then there was silence. "That's it. Go back," a hijacker said calmly. "Everything is fine. I finished."
"Let's get them!" one passenger yelled as dishes crashed to the floor. "In the cockpit. If we don't we'll die," screamed another amid more thumping and crashing and breaking of glass.
In the end, as the passengers were either in the cockpit or moments from entering it, the hijackers turned the plane upside down -- and crashed it.

"Allah is the greatest!" one screamed nine times as the plane went down. The recording then went dead. The courtroom was silent.
More than 35 survivors and family members testified in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, including Lorne Lyles, whose wife, CeeCee, was a flight attendant on Flight 93 (see photo of family, right). He brought several jurors to the brink of tears with his testimony yesterday about his wife's two calls from the plane.

The first time the phone rang, Lyles, a Fort Myers, Fla., police officer who had worked the overnight shift, rolled over and went back to sleep. He did speak to his wife briefly when she called again. But only a week later did he hear the message she had left on his voice mail.

"Hi, baby," CeeCee Lyles said in the call, a tape of which was played in court yesterday. "Baby, you have to listen to me very carefully. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. . . . I'm trying to be calm."

Saying she knew that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, Lyles tried to keep her composure, but her voice broke as she ended the call. "I hope to be able to see your face again, baby," she said. "I love you, baby."

Lyles said he has been in and out of counseling for the past five years. "I'm just now being able to appreciate a full night's sleep," he testified. "They say closure, but there's never any closure. It takes a piece of you."
Moussaoui looked bored, as he did when the cockpit voice recorder was played. Jurors leaned forward in their seats.
Passengers, who had made cellphone calls and learned of the earlier trade center attack, then rushed the cockpit. "They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside," a hijacker said.

"Shall we finish it off?" one hijacker asked.

"No, not yet," responded another. "When they all come, we finish it off."

Within seconds, there was bedlam -- the sounds of a violent, almost animalistic struggle. People yelled and objects crashed, which Sept. 11 commissioners say was probably the passengers hurling objects at the cockpit door or ramming it with a beverage cart.

"Down, down. Pull it down, pull it down," a hijacker said just before his colleague praised Allah and crashed the plane.

In the background, a single voice could be heard screaming "No!"

Zacharias, what goes on in that mind of you and your friends, to do what you did to CeeCee Lyles and 39 others?

posted by jbelliveau at 1:45 PM in Culture
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February 9, 2006

Missionaries, Brazil's tribes and 'cultural contagion'

An article in the Washington Post today, Evangelical Missionaries Move Into Amazon Villages, looks at wrangling between anthropologists, Indian officials and missionaries over who essentially "owns" members of remote Brazilian tribes.

From the article:

But [the missionaries] often lack the permission of Brazil's government, which is now trying to regain control of the activity. Many anthropologists fear the missionaries will harm indigenous people by weakening native culture and religion and by exposing them to new germs and illnesses.
... But critics say a weak Brazilian state has left the 215 known tribes vulnerable to the outreach efforts of evangelicals, however well-intentioned they may be. They fear oral history, origin myths and native religions will be lost.

"The Surui no longer worship shamans because missionaries told them it was bad. That's a terrible, immense cultural loss," said Ivaneide Cardozo, a board member at Kaninde, a nonreligious group in Rondonia state.

Christian groups say the government is acting irresponsibly and that its policies prevent it from intervening even in life-or-death situations involving tribespeople. In an effort to protect indigenous culture, many government officials do not want to introduce outside influences in tribal villages including food and medicine.

"This relativist stance violates the human rights of Indian children all over Brazil," said Braulia Ribeiro, who heads the Brazilian chapter of the international missionary group Youth With A Mission ... .

This is a very complex topic. It's funny to me to see in this article the usual proprietary interest anthropologists take in indigenous peoples -- they often resent both missionaries and backpackers who "invade" their turf, even though the anthropologists themselves also bring change through contact with remote people, no matter how careful they are.

In my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, I looked at missionaries who visited the remote upcountry of Borneo. I'll quote a passage from Chapter 3.

Language, transmitted today by a world pop and computer culture dominated by English, ultimately exerts a much bigger influence than religion on a cultures such as that of [Borneo's] Dayaks.
Lesson : Language may be a more irreversible re-director of thought patterns than the discarding of animism for Christian beliefs.

For example, Afro-Brazilians, despite adopting Portuguese and nominally Catholicism, fused tribal gods to saints to create the religion called candomblé. They use the Yoruba language for ceremonies to the present day, and thus preserve an important aspect of African culture.

Professor Jerome Rousseau of McGill University put it this way in an e-mail to the author:

"The main threat to local cultures, in Borneo as in Canada, France, the United States, or what have you, is probably television. It, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. [And] the the most significant re-director of thought patterns is the socio-economic changes of a society, e.g., moving from subsistence to commodity production, moving from the country to the city and changing educational patterns and media of communication."

Change wrought by missionaries, logging and emigration had already come to the Dayaks. Perhaps it had weakened their art, perhaps it had created a need for kerosene and 90-minute air transport to the coast that people had previously managed to cope without. Possibly this was bad. But as [medical anthropologist Sjaak] van der Geest pointed out, if one accepts change as a normal part of life, “it will be agreed that the prevention of change is indeed ‘change’ in another more complex sense of the term.”

The modern world was bound to reach the remote Apau Kayan, in the same way that Chinese bead traders, Javanese transmigrasi and people who enjoyed Redmond O’Hanlon’s book have also turned up.

Lesson: Explorers, adventurer travelers, anthropologists and missionaries alike bring change no matter how much lip service they pay to cultural preservation.

Van der Geest wrote of anthropologists and missionaries (he could have included travelers as well) that "their mere presence is in itself a formidable factor of change. The culture which missionaries and anthropologists carry with them is 'contagious.' "

Exactly! All contact with the outside world is contagious -- and inevitable. While one understands the beauty and mystery of premodern people and the value of probing their beliefs, it is ultimately patronizing to exclude them from the lives we choose for ourselves, free of superstition and with top-notch nutrition, health care, choices and ultimately ease.

posted by jbelliveau at 8:52 AM in Culture
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December 1, 2005

Please don't use Evite!

I just received a party invitation from a soccer teammate via eVite. That is the surest way to ruin a friendship!

Evite makes it clear from their Web site that they will harvest the emails of recipients of an Evite for spam purposes, see here:

Evite works with third-party advertising companies, sponsors and other companies with whom we do business ("Business Partners") to place advertising on our site and in email communications sent to our registered users and to recipients of invitations, Reminders, and other communications related to the Evite service. Information about your visit to this site, such as number of times you have viewed an ad, may be used to serve advertising to you on this site.

I had the unhappy task of sending this e-mail to my soccer teammate:

I must ask that you not put my e-mail address on any Web site. THis is my own company's e-mail address and it is costly and dangerous for it to be spammed. I don't have some big IT department to handle this problem.
Basically, everyone you invited via the evite is now vulnerable to getting spammed!!

It's not like this is the first time this has happened. I received months of "free movie tickets" offers from Yahoo after another teammate entered my e-mail address on a Web site. She also entered my email address on some stupid site showing a dancing monkey. It took two requests to get the idea to her, don't place my e-mail on any Web site!

A fellow blogger notes:

I understand why people like to use Evite. I'm sure it's very convenient for providing party information, directions, and a guest list all in one place. In spite of this, I think the problems with it far outweigh the benefits. These problems mainly revolve around whether or not it's ok to give out the personal information of your friends to a third party, especially one with a privacy policy as questionable as Evite's, or their parent company, Ticketmaster.
In other words, when you use Evite, you are "opting-in" all of your friends to potentially be sold and spammed. You agreed to their terms when you used their service, but the people on your invitation list did not, yet they will potentially receive spam all the same. In fact, this is likely one of the reasons for Evite's existence; by now they've got a huge database of confirmed-good e-mail addresses just waiting to be sold to those third-party advertisers.

Basically, here's a rule of thumb: Never provide any e-mail but your own to any Web site. It's that simple.

Ask yourself, why is this Web site offering me a free service and asking for e-mail addresses in return? Your answer should be, quite possibly to harvest e-mails for spam. Please respect the privacy of your friends, family and soccer teammates!

posted by jbelliveau at 9:16 AM in Culture
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July 5, 2005

Would you want an HIV-positive nurse?

The topic of HIV-positive nurses came up in conversation the other day.

The current class of nurses at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, I was told, has one gay, male, seroconverted student in its ranks.

My immediate question: Is this student planning to nurse HIV-negative patients? Because I, for one, certainly hope not -- for a good number of reasons, he might be better off serving HIV-positive patients.

In fact, given the numbers of HIV-positive intravenous drug users in Baltimore -- including some that apparently deliberately stick doctors with needles -- you could make a case that HIV-positive nurses could carve out a little specialty niche treating HIV-positive patients.

A true story:

Accidents in health care happen all the time. One of our housemates, a medical doctor from Britain, while working at Johns Hopkins Hospital was deliberately stuck with a needle by an HIV-positive drug addict in a rage. Our badly shaken doctor friend had to immediately receive an anti-viral cocktail of drugs.

The best assumption in a profession such as nursing that involves intimate contact is that Murphy's law will prevail.

My sailing party was told, for example, by the Johns Hopkins international clinic before our trip to Thailand not to get so much as a manicure on the beach because of the risk of being nicked by infected clippers. (See An Amateur's Guide to the Planet p. 140.)

What if an HIV-positive nurse has a nick from shaving, scratches it, and then fiddles with an intravenous line?

What of hundreds of other similar scenarios?

Further, the issue of nosocomial diseases -- ailments caught while in the hospital -- is a growing one. In "Data Show Scourge of Hospital Infections," the Washington Post reported July 13:

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has estimated that as many as 2 million infections are acquired in hospitals each year, resulting in 90,000 deaths, said Denise Cardo, director of the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

Add HIV as a long-shot problem to this the list.

It's sad to read the position of the American Nurses Association, which views the matter as one of "protecting the workforce" rather than avoiding unneeded risks to patients:

PROTECTING THE WORKFORCE
Workplace issues of HIV-Positive Nurses

The number of nurses with HIV in the United States or globally is not known. There is also little scientific evidence regarding health care workers transmitting HIV to their patients during care. What is known, however, is that the use of highly active, antiretroviral therapy has dramatically improved the health of HIV-positive persons, which has led to HIV being viewed as a chronic condition and not a terminal disease. Although this shift in prognosis is good news, it has created new workplace concerns, including HIV-positive nurses fearing the loss of their jobs due to employer discrimination and/or patient concerns.

We have the usual dipsy-doodle "modern" thinking leading to advocacy of HIV-positive nurses. First, there is the notion that stigma = bad. The reluctance of patients to be treated by someone with a chronic infectious disease comes from an unwillingness to face even a small risk of contracting a disorder that requires an intensive drug regimen and safe-sex practices for life. Is this so unreasonable? It seems to me patients have a reasonable right to decline treatment by health professionals with HIV.

There is the further modern notion that everyone needs to be "self actualized," as described in the now-discredited heirarchy of human needs by Maslow. (See a wonderful debunking of Maslow in One Nation Under Therapy, by Christina Hoff Sommers.)

So it is now ostensibly more important for a nurse to "do her thing" (or "do his thing" in the case of male nurses) than for a patient to be protected against preventable risks.

See as an example an "Ask the Experts" email to an outfit called "The Body: The Complete HIV / AIDS Resource:"

Q: I am a HIV postitive nurse. What kind of work can I do now? Should I not work in the hospital setting or be restricted from other areas of nursing? Nursing was my calling and I am torn between ethics and confidentiality.
A: Response from Ms. Breuer

Who told you that nurses with HIV couldn't work as nurses? It isn't true!

First, check with your own employer's policy on bloodborne pathogens and disclosure. Unless you are performing blind invasive procedures, you may not face restrictions.

Then take yourself quickly to the Web site of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, ANAC, and learn from their extensive experience with HIV+ nurses. You have LOTS of options within nursing: www.anacnet.org

Nurses are quite often exceptionally kind people who want to make the world a better place. I say that knowing a fair number of nurses as housemates. No doubt this explains this kindliness to those who are sick.

However, the first obligation of a medical professional is to care for patients, and to do no harm! Especially to those who already face risks of getting sicker in the hospital (due to the phenomenon of nosocomial, or hospital-contracted, infection; a related term is iatrogenic, which means illness caused by medical action).

One also must note a certain anti-intellectualism to remarks such as that by the American Nurses Association above, that "The number of nurses with HIV in the United States or globally is not known. There is also little scientific evidence regarding health care workers transmitting HIV to their patients during care."

Well, a search of the medical literature might just tell us the reality of such a scenario. In just a few minutes, you can learn the following from Google:

Apparently there may have been six cases of transmissions by health-care provider to patients in the United States (involving the notorious dentist in Florida) and one case in France (an infected orthopaedic surgeon).

It just seems obvious that one's risk of contracting HIV declines as one assiduously avoiding contact with members of high-risk groups.

And it seems as though involuntary contact with HIV-positive health-care providers is about to become another potential vector.

My area of expertise, such as it is, involves the HIV risks of casual travel sex by female travelers (to be explored in my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road. I can readily crank out a 20-citation bibliography of warnings in respected medical journals for women to avoid sexual contact with strangers during their travels, and if passion strikes, to use a condom bought from a Western manufacturer, and to roll it on themselves.

Question for the medical profession:

Are there two kinds of HIV out there?

One that is menacing and lurking in clever seducers in foreign countries, the other, benign and safely encapsulated in that caring man (or woman) in the nurse's scrubs attending to my health care?

Hospitals (and nursing schools) should put the concerns of the patient, not the nurse, first. But that is not the way it is now. The hospital, not you the patient, decides if an HIV-positive nurse is to be in an operating theatre or not. Check out these complicated guidelines in Scotland on what sorts of assignments HIV-positive nurses can receive.

Wouldn't it be simpler to have HIV-negative nurses work with HIV-negative patients? I will grant the following points: That in many places (such as right here in Baltimore), the risk of a health professional getting HIV from a patient, in circumstances such as occured with our housemate who was a resident, is greater than the risk of a patient getting HIV from a health professional.

Still, it seems the right of the patient to make an informed choice. At least one HIV-positive nurse doesn't see it that way, as Operating Theatre Online (scroll down to "HIV-positive NHS worker fights for right to privacy") described of a worker in Britain's National Health Service:

An HIV-positive worker in the NHS is fighting a landmark legal action that could prevent those he has treated knowing that they could have been in contact with the virus. The worker is reportedly claiming that his right to privacy should supersede the rights of patients he has treated to know of his condition. If his claim is upheld in law, the case could have "serious implications" for the way in which the NHS handles such cases. The worker won an injunction on Saturday (17/11/01) to prevent a newspaper publishing his name or the branch of medicine he works in, although the newspaper said he worked in a field that involved the routine wearing of rubber gloves to prevent the transmission of infection. (From The Guardian 19/11/01; p.8)

Well, there you have it: A medical worker's right to privacy supercedes the risk to the patient, at least in one medical worker's mind.

Ideally, nursing schools should address the question of what chronic, communicable diseases are acceptable in students they accept, hospitals should try to make sure only 100 percent healthy nurses treat patients, and patients should have a right to know a hospital's policy toward HIV-positive staff, especially for invasive procedures.

If the demographic of nursing schools is going to increasingly include gay men, or other risk populations, as seems to be anecdotally the case, this question of policy will attain increasing importance.

posted by jbelliveau at 9:02 AM in Culture
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July 4, 2005

Africa, poverty and Live8

I enjoyed watching parts of the Live8 concert on MTV, especially the generally superior lineup from London. Seeing Pink Floyd looking way older than even the Rolling Stones -- that's David Gilmour and Roger Waters, above, but playing brilliantly, was a highlight.

Madonna, who strikes me as a very confused person straining to achieve predictable sacrilegiousness in her videos, did well to perform holding the hand of a beautiful Ethiopian woman, Birhan Woldu, below, who had been on the brink of starvation as a 3-year-old and now attends college, due to efforts to combat the effects of famine.

In Philadelphia, Linkin Park teamed with Jay-Z, and like many of the other artists, seemed to put their all in the performance.

Their call to eliminate poverty in Africa, and prevent 30,000 deaths a day from its effect, is a worthy, noble and necessary one. Let's just hope the musicians and concert organizers fail in their attempt to get the G8 to increase aid to the continent. MTV interviewed plenty of 20-something, dreamy kids who said essentially how jazzed they were that by watching U2 play for free, world poverty would end.

Here's what I envision when Bob Geldof, Bono and others call for debt relief in Africa: More money for the kleptocrats who already steal most of the so-called Western aid.

More aid = more Mercedes tooling around Lusaka, Kampala, Windhoek and other capitals.

For a brilliant article on what Africa, and most of the developing world, really needs -- a crackdown on corruption, private property rights, the rule of law -- see this terrific article, Live8: a triumph for sentiment, not for results, by Allister Heath, in the BusinessOnline:

The history of Africa since the 1960s is the history of groups of elites seeking the political kingdom with the primary purpose of enriching themselves, Mbeki says. To rectify this situation, he believes that Africa's poorest people must be empowered through the institutions of the free society: property rights and markets: It is necessary that peasants who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa become the real owners of their primary asset: land. To enable such ownership, freehold must be introduced and the so-called communal land tenure system, which is really state ownership of land, ought to be abolished.

Heath notes that "Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest average customs delays in the world; Estonia requires one day for customs clearance versus 30 days on average for Ethiopia."

Some additional excellent reading on this topic:

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. Could something as simple as cultural attitudes toward thrift, honesty and persistance, as well as a systematic approach to science, explain the gulf in rich and poor nations that grew after the Industrial Revolution?

Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux.

Theroux returned to Africa after serving in the 1960s in Malawi to find backsliding everywhere. He lambastes the professional anti-poverty workers in their gleaming, air-conditioned Land Rovers playing CDs on state-of-the-art sound systems. He returns to the school where he taught to find it decrepit and his former house in disrepair. Where are the Africans stepping forward to teach their own children, to build, to repair, he wonders, as he concludes that many aid efforts are futile, doomed until Africans themselves decide it is time to have good government, good schools and decent housing.

The solution to Africa's poverty must come from Africans, Heath also concludes:

There is an urgent need for Africans to boost their inter-regional trade, partly to reduce their dependency on commodity exports to the West. Ask an African business person what needs to be done and chances are that very high on their list will be facilitating internal African trade by sweeping away bureaucracy and taxes. The facts speak for themselves: it costs the same to clear a 20-foot container through the ports of Abidjan or Dakar as it does to ship it all the way to a north European port.
... The West can help by tearing up its trade barriers and scrapping its deadly export subsidies; but not by handing out cash. If only those demonstrating in Edinburgh this weekend were to accept this, they would actually be helping to make poverty history. Instead, despite their good intentions, they may inadvertently be helping to prolong Africas misery.

posted by jbelliveau at 9:10 AM in Culture
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June 27, 2005

Families and schizophrenia

The Washington Post has a must-read article today, Social Network's Healing Power Is Borne Out in Poorer Nations, on how poor countries often do a better job than rich ones with patients with mental illness.

Why? Parents, husbands, wives, children work together to monitor a mentally ill person's behavior, adjusting their drugs, quietly arranging make-work jobs and keeping them part of a social milieu.

This immediately struck a huge chord with me -- it is a central theme of my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet. The West's nuclear family, it seems, is quite good at freeing its members for individual achievement. The extended family, by contrast, serves as a far better safety net for the frail and vulnerable. It's a pattern that was obvious to me in my world travels, from Ireland to Africa, in so many places where the village idiot and the town drunk are considered harmless and are humored by all as they wander, unhospitalized, over country roads and into shops.

This article, by Shankar Vedantam, also jibes with a fascinating book by Martin Seligman entitled
Learned Learned Optimism, which holds that far higher proportions of Western populations suffer from depression today than a century ago, when more people belonged to extended families, churches and community organizations -- all bulwarks against the difficulty of negotiating the modern world.

Bravo to Vedantam for spotlighting our overly technical reliance on the modern religions -- psychiatry, counseling and miracle drugs -- and showing how family healing and love are crucial too.

posted by jbelliveau at 9:10 AM in Culture
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March 27, 2005

Terry Schiavo and ethics

I will humbly say I may well be wrong about this, but it seems to me from the video clips shown on cable news that Terri Schiavo smiles when she sees her mother.
One detects the light of a simple happiness in that reaction, not some random reflex.

In 2003 when Terri's feeding tube was first removed, and I read about the case, it did not seem such a big deal. If she was in a state like that of Karen Ann Quinlan -- who lay curled on her side in the fetal position for a decade after a drinking-and-Valium binge -- it seemed kindest to let her go.

Then when I saw the video clips of Terri's face on TV -- in marked contrast to just reading about the case -- I was appalled and incredulous that someone would want to remove her feeding tube.

She wasn't a vegetable at all, but someone brain damaged. The spark of personhood seemed obviously apparent to anyone who cared to watch.

Could anyone be serious that she was a vegetable on life support? I saw in Terri a real person, albeit disabled. Having covered the Special Olympics once as a newspaper reporter, it was obvious that Down's children had much to teach about devotion and joy, and I had nothing but admiration for parents who loved their limited children. A sophisticated ability to communicate verbally did not a person make, nor a life.

If her blood relatives possessed the Christlike, unjudgmental love for Terri even with her severe limitations, and the patience to care for her, we should be applauding their heroism.

One begins to think one is hallucinating such an interpretation of Terri's videos, given the culture of death that leads much of the country to oppose government intervention in this case, but others see her the same way. As Wesley J. Smith wrote on National Review Online:

Videotapes of Terri clearly show her responding to requests. For example, a closed-eyed Terri is asked to open her eyes by a doctor. Her eyes flutter and she does as he requests. She is asked in another video to follow a balloon with her eyes, and she does. In a heartbreaking video, Terri's mother kisses her on the cheek and Terri smiles and responds, clearly happy that her mom is with her.

Can anyone explain to me why Judge George Greer found Michael Schiavo's arguments to kill his former wife (he now has a new family) compelling? Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times of March 27, 2005, seems as baffled as the rest of us:

This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of ''plaintiffs'' and ''petitions'' and ''en banc review'' and ''de novo'' and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and ''put her out of her misery'' after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile. ...
Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children. I make no judgment on that. Who of us can say how we would react in his circumstances? Maybe I'd pull my hat down over my face and slink off to the cathouse on the other side of town once a week. Maybe I'd embark on a discreet companionship with a lonely widow. But if I take on a new wife (in all but name) and make a new family, I would think it not unreasonable to forfeit any right of life or death over my previous wife.

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr. Schiavo's position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.

Many observers find interesting, as did Peggy Noonan in "In Love with Death: the bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people," the vehemence of proponents of starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo.

Part of this is displaced, visceral and inexplicable loathing for the president, Republicans or conservatism in general.

Part of it is elitist views that might be expressed as "the unexamined life is not worth living," as expanded into a view that "a life constrained by severe disability is not worth living." In other words, sophisticates in particular project their own fears of being severely disabled, and no longer worthwhile to a spouse, on to a Terri Schiavo. They do not see the smile for her mother, they see only the immobile body unable to perform many of its prior functions.

They are, in the words of Joe Ford, "bigots:"

Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots. A close examination of the facts of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country’s decency.
Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, as well. This has gotten so perturbing to me that when I fly, I try to wear my Harvard t-shirt so I can “pass” as a person without cognitive disability. (I have severe cerebral palsy, the result of being deprived of oxygen at birth. While some people with cerebral palsy do have cognitive disability, my articulation difference and atypical muscle tone are automatically associated with cognitive disability in the minds of some people.)

Much of the vehemence against Terri Shiavo is liberals exploiting her as a proxy for the abortion issue, as Thomas Sowell notes:

Terri Schiavo is being killed because she is inconvenient to her husband and because she is inconvenient to those who do not want the idea of the sanctity of life to be strengthened and become an impediment to abortion. Nor do they want the supremacy of judges to be challenged, when judges are the liberals' last refuge.

This explains the mainstream media's refusal to publicize Schiavo's nurses who concur with her family that she is a human presence who smiles at familiar visitors and caregivers, or who tell of her "husband's" reference to her as bitch.

One of Terri's nurses, Trudy Capone, related many conversations where Michael Schiavo admitted (I paraphrase the quote from memory) that he did not know Terri's wishes on being kept living: "I don't know what do to, we never talked about this" (source: interview with Capone on Greta Van Susteren's MSNBC show, Good Friday, 2005).

Hundreds of thousands watch this show and know the entire underpinning of Michael Schiavo's case to starve Terri is without merit. But Judge George Greer refuses to weigh such evidence, available since at least 2001 via an affidavit.

And finally, as regards unseemly glee in the undoing of this disabled woman, there is a sort of emotional retardation, an autism if you will, that ignores the spark of happiness in Terri's eyes in the videos, a tone-deafness among some (not all) men toward reading faces of those who trust others for their care. We women may be hardwired to read faces of dependents correctly and find the person within. That is the only explanation I can find for the cruelty and heartlessness on sites such as Fark.com, partly dominated by information technology types, who were nothing short of elated at the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of Terri's appeal.

Numerous commentators have sensed the intelligentsia's squeamishness at becoming disabled, being an inconvenience to others, or "unproductive." John Leo notes:

Among bioethicists, [Leon] Kass [a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics] says, "there is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured." Under pressure from bioethicists, norms have been collapsing. Fifteen years ago, as author Wesley Smith writes in his 2002 book The Culture of Death, legally assisted suicide was unthinkable. So was harvesting the organs of terminally ill patients, which is done today and approved by bioethicists.

Orson Scott Card describes being at a party of literati in the New Republic:

It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.
“Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed.

They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars.

I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.

It’s so easy to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living. Lacking something that we regard as essential, we cannot fathom how they get through a day.

The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the “unexamined life” might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren’t for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people “for their own good.”

... For instance, we now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.

She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma.

She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings.

And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us.

The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.

The people who love Terri Schiavo apparently do not include her husband, who seems awfully impatient to get rid of her.

And under our bizarre laws, he has the only vote, and her parents and brothers and sisters are completely disregarded.

What is the husband’s case for killing her?

It couldn’t possibly be because he wants to be able to marry the woman he’s living with now. After all, to accomplish that he need only divorce the brain-damaged woman in a hospital bed.

Oh, but wait. If he divorces her, then he won’t get as much of that million-dollar settlement that’s paying for her care right now. Only if she dies will he get any of that.

No, his motive is completely noble and unselfish. He wants to shut off her feeding tube because she “wouldn’t have wanted to live like this.”

Hmmmm. Convenient that she can’t speak, isn’t it?

The incredible thing — to me, at least, and yet I have to believe it, don’t I — is that he was able to find a judge who would give him the right to kill this woman.

Despite the fact that she has loved ones who are desperate to keep her alive and take responsibility for her care. Despite the fact that the husband’s motives are suspect at best. Somehow, judges in Florida keep finding a “right to kill” hidden somewhere in the law.

Well, we have a precedent for that, don’t we. When it comes to legalized killing, our judges are way ahead of our legislatures ...

Once you plunge out onto that slippery slope of allowing the killing of another human organism for no better reason than personal convenience, it’s so hard to find a handhold to let you climb back up.

The intellectual may imagine that he or she may be far more threatened by a state of minimal consciousness than the more typical person -- Schiavo was an insurance-claims clerk. But let's consider the extraordinary book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

After a massive stroke, former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote this book by blinking his left eye, to indicate one letter and then another, and having his blinks transcribed into a manuscript. In his book, Bauby described his imagination's rich journeys to sensual places. As one perceptive reviewer noted:

Public opinion surveys reveal an interesting contrast in modern opinions on the "right to die." Contrary to the accepted wisdom, the so-called right is favored by those who are young and healthy, but opposed by those who are old and sick. The very premise which underlies such a right is the belief that the quality of life experienced by the aged and the ill is so inadequate that they would willingly choose death instead. In fact, the evidence suggests that--despite the anecdotal horror stories with which all of us are familiar--people generally cling to life even in the face of suffering which seems unendurable to the well.

McBryde

Harriet McBryde Johnson, above, a deeply impressive, wheelchair-bound woman whom I caught on TV last week, eloquently defends Congress's intervention in "Not Dead at All," noting:

In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.

Pat Buchanan noted with a sorrowful, dignified "quiet outrage" on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Friday that you would be prosecuted in this country for denying water and food to a cat. Where is the upwelling of national outrage for dehydrating a brain-damaged woman? I do challenge all the heartless ones out there overjoyed by the setback to Terri Schiavo, delighted that this may bump down the president's poll numbers, to start right now not drinking a drop of any liquid for nine days before you wish such a fate on any living being.

Desert explorer William Langwiesche described thirst as the most terrible of deaths in Sahara Unveiled -- on pages 149-51, he describes a Belgian family lost in the Sahara in Algeria. They drank in rough order radiator fluid, gasoline, their own urine and finally each other's blood, as thirst maddened them. Their son begged for death, and they killed him. The husband begged for death, and the wife broke his neck with a rock.

We would treat anyone this way? Condemn them to die of thirst, in a hospice where they should be made comfortable? How does Judge Greer or Michael Schiavo or his lawyer George J. Felos live with their decisions?

Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon in the Weekly Standard urge us not to make too much of the opinion polls that purport to show opposition to Congress's (failed) intervention in the Schiavo case:

It is no anomaly that roughly half of the Democratic congressmen who returned to Washington to vote on the pro-Terri Schiavo emergency legislation in March voted Yes instead of No. And it is no anomaly that it's impossible to find a Democratic leader acting as if he takes at face value the ABC and CBS polls that purport to show strong national approval of Michael Schiavo and the array of federal and state judges who effectively gave him their blessing.
For President Bush and the social conservatives who comprise the central rampart of his base, the courts' naked assertion of judicial supremacy in deciding the fate of Terri Schiavo represents an important moment. This is because the premise of the Democratic filibuster of the president's conservative judicial nominees is that the Roe v. Wade decision must never again be called into question.

The judicial confirmation debate will now unavoidably be about whether democratic decision-making on abortion should continue to be prohibited by our courts and (effectively) by the American legal profession. From the beginning, those who believed Roe would corrupt the rule of law feared that state sanction of private killing would put all public order and all private restraint in doubt. The fate of Terri Schiavo makes clear that those fears were utterly on target.

A very active and appalled proportion of this nation is more than ever perplexed by our judiciary.

This may not show up now in the polls but expect time to bring greater and greater questioning of how Judge George Greer managed to order the starvation of a disabled woman in a nation supposedly devoted to liberty and justice. What sort of horror must a mother such as Mary Schindler endure as to have a court order deny her daughter even the comfort of ice chips on the tongue or the administration of Holy Communion?

A doctor, Steven Collins, experienced in caring for cancer patients asks these valid questions that an ethical person must consider. While I do not agree that Terri cannot communicate with those around her (a huge proportion of communication is nonverbal), let's give the doctor a hearing:

Should medical intervention (i.e. a feeding tube surgically placed through her skin into her stomach) be continued to indefinitely prolong the life of this woman, who is totally helpless and paralyzed and likely nearly blind, who cannot swallow and enjoy any food, who cannot communicate with the loved ones around her and likely cannot even understand what they have to say to her, who is incapable of rational thought, who may be in intermittent and perhaps severe pain and yet cannot get relief from this pain because she cannot communicate her distress to others, and who has been in this state for the past 15 years with no hope for recovery? What would I want for myself in this situation? What would I want for my children in this situation? What is the most decent and humane and compassionate approach to take?
In the case of Terri Schiavo in my mind the above issues are the only relevant questions -- questions that unfortunately I fail to see being addressed by the politicians, the religious sector, and the media pundits and columnists who have offered their varied opinions.

In "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo," Eric Cohen notes:

A true adherence to procedural liberalism -- respecting a person's clear wishes when they can be discovered, erring on the side of life when they cannot -- would have led to a much better outcome in this case. It would have led the court to preserve Terri Schiavo's life and deny Michael Schiavo's request to let her die. But as we have learned, the descent from procedural liberalism's respect for a person's wishes to ideological liberalism's lack of respect for incapacitated persons is relatively swift. Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person's dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all--everyone else is "life unworthy of life."
This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe--whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism's betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for. Instead of sympathizing with Terri Schiavo--a disabled woman, abandoned by her husband, seen by many as a burden on society--modern liberalism now sympathizes with Michael Schiavo, a healthy man seeking freedom from the burden of his disabled wife and self-fulfillment in the arms of another. And while one would think that divorce was the obvious solution, this was more than Michael Schiavo apparently could bear, since it would require a definitive act of betrayal instead of a supposed demonstration of loyalty to Terri's wishes.

We can pray for Judge Greer to see the light, or Michael Schiavo to grant his "wife" life, but this matter is now in God's hands, for Man has decided somehow that a simple feeding tube is somehow an extraordinary measure to keep this 41-year-old woman alive.

I cannot help but fear, having seen the videos and read affidavits by her sister, Suzanne Vitadamo, and attorney, Barbara Weller, that Terri wants water and sustenance and life right now, that she has tried to communicate her family this to the best of her remaining ability, and cruelness has triumphed over compassion in those black-robed gods who could temper her fate.

posted by jbelliveau at 4:14 PM in Culture
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February 24, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, why?

Stories that begin, "One time I got so wasted, that I ...," followed by a tedious litany of vomiting, passing out, having dry heaves, being pulled over by the cops, fondled by an ex-boyfriend, or loaded limply into a wheelchair by airport security, make me cringe.

Uck. How not hilarious, or remotely interesting, for those past the age of 18. Around the dinner table or the bar railing, one feels the pressure to chortle or at least smile indulgently. For myself, I begin to understand why Carrie Nation carried a hatchet and smashed up saloons. Carrie wanted to put an end to the imbibing of liquor, or what may be worse, banal stories beginning, "I was so drunk that ... ."

Hunter S. Thompson, who took his own life and whose body was found Sunday, unintentionally milked this vein in Fear Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Look, he suggested to us, look at suburban America in their tacky clothes gambling at the slots in Lost Wages, oh how monstrous it appears ...

Suburbanites, monstrous ... to a journalist and a 300-lb. Samoan lawyer whacked out on designer drugs, obscure psychotropics and liquor? As Aretha Franklin would say, who's zoomin' who?

I had looked forward to Fear and Loathing when it first came out (in 1972), having religiously read Thompson's political reporting for Rolling Stone, as well as Hell's Angels (1967). Later I enjoyed Fear Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973).

Yet ... back in the late 1960 and early 1970s, I was already long sick of the stoners in my high school animalistically grubbing around on the floor at psychedelic concerts, grabbing a stepped-on gum wrapper and staring fiercely at it, nose touching the paper, for the answers to the questions of the universe. Though relatively high functioning compared to the stoners, Thompson still operated in the grip of faux insight.

Fearing that Thompson's writing would fare badly in current daylight, I reluctantly (what I force myself to do for my blog ...) cracked open an excerpt of Hell's Angels in my yellowing, crumbling copy of The New Journalism.

This exercise confirmed my suspicion that the good Kentucky doctor would not wear the years well. His first-person reporting and participatory style were cutting edge at the time ("oooh! a reporter buys beer with the greasy-haired Frisco chapter, and Sonny Barger threatens to rape Thompson's wife if they don't like his article").

But Thompson never pulled even with contemporary Tom Wolfe, who simply possessed better reporting skills, insight and a discipline that masked his inner devils. Even the great Wolfe's Thompson reminiscence (here) inadvertently portrays Thompson as a supremely uninteresting attention whore.

One might be tempted to say the Emperor of gonzo journalism wears no clothes. Thompson certainly was an awful lecturer, as I can attest after seeing him at the University of Maryland in 1987, when he rambled incoherently but drew big laughs from we dazzled faithful for ... sticking his wobbly microphone in a roll of toilet paper.

And by 1995, his talent seemed to have fully departed. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, whose office was near my desk, gave me her comp copy of Better Better than Sex, handing it over as if it were a used prophylatic. The title and the cover displeased her. It was the actual content of the interior pages, just a grab bag of what seemed to be memos, scraps, lists and drafts, that was my problem. Off Thompson's last book went to eBay, where I thought it would attract no interest, but a bidder duly appeared.

Peggy Noonan does a good job on why Thompson's reputation is a tad overblown, and concludes:

In time Thompson's swashbuckling came to seem joyless, aggressive and half dead. What he thought fed his gift (drugs, alcohol) killed it. He must have been very scared to get tanked like that to write. The empty page, the blank screen, is scary. But so is a mortgage. So is the stillness of a courtroom before you make the closing argument. And so is a broken leg that needs fixing fast. We all have jobs. You take a bad turn when you start to think your next work must be marked by genius because you are a genius. Thompson's death is an occasion not for inspiration or celebration but compassion. Not pity, but a sense of universal idiocy, and sympathy.

Austin Ruse, writing for National Review, pulls no punches:

Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.
Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about.

Ruse accurately notes Thompson's appeal to "a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55", who "recall his comic-outlaw persona, which many of us found quite appealing in those days." And that is why the Emperor indeed had at least some clothes, for we really loved reading his political coverage back in the day, and he was (at the time, but not now) the perfect ferocious observer of, say, a year such as 1968.

Over at Fark.com, many found Thompson's decision to shoot himself inexplicable. One poster wrote:

As much as I enjoyed his work, I can't imagine why anyone would smoke a .45 over a hip replacement.
But then again, no one really knows if the guys was depressed or otherwise mentally tweaked, especially after 6 decades of heavy bourbon intake.

I've worked with several folks that visited him at Woody Creek (Owl Farm) and while they were merely casual friends, they did say he had huge mood crashes on occassion that lasted days at a clip. My bet's on clinical depression, but what do I know.

From haldrogen bomb:

It's amusing to see you guys fight amongst yourself to see who can best defend a drug-addled, past-his-prime author from some comments on an internet message board. Get over yourselves. HST was a talented writer, but he was also a major jackass. It's too bad he died, but I'm not going to waste time and emotional capital mourning a rich bastard who took his own life. And as far as gonzo goes, you could do a lot better reading the New Journalism of Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe ... .

I deliberately titled this blog "Hunter S. Thompson, why?" because it seems inexplicable that the doctor would commit suicide and also to hint that his writing may become close to irrelevant in the future. He was a writer that I enjoyed during a turbulent time in our history, a time that in retrospect seems more of a disaster than a renaissance.

Thompson did his part to glorify the outlaws and the druggies. Tom Wolfe, who sought to explain and never seemed in awe of the same renegades, holds up much better.

posted by jbelliveau at 11:43 PM in Culture
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June 11, 2004

Farewell, Ronald Reagan

Last night, for hours I watched the mourners visiting the late president's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. Isn't C-Span wonderful? No voice-over, just the quiet dignity of the changing of the military honor guard, the mothers shepherding well-dressed children in the line, soldiers offering salutes, Lech Walesa kneeling in private prayer. I found the procession hypnotic and watched it past midnight, riveting despite a lack of anything resembling traditional entertainment values. Just wanted to make sure that Mr. Reagan had company, in person from more than 100,000 people, and electronically from stay-at-homes like myself.

What stood out for me were the thousands of mourners clearly in their mid-20s to mid-30s, some fighting tears. Reagan had a set of values and beliefs that Americans born three generations later have fervently adopted.

It's a remarkable generational transference. When I watch specials on Reagan, such as MSNBC's Headliners and Legends bio, I am struck by the profound innocence on the face of Ron as a young lifeguard and actor. He kept his hair in that antiquated but poignant wavy style hearkening back to Dick Tracy cartoons -- one my little brothers wore as late as the early 1960s.

You would think, no way would anyone under age 90 find Reagan so cool. And nothing is more important to some Baby Boomers than being hip. But Reagan is cool as can be to Boomers and even, apparently, much of Generations X and Y.

To me, Reagan was infinitely hipper than Jimmy Carter -- Reagan wanted our country strong and the world free. He was cutting-edge hip despite that innocent, bygone-era face with the Irish twinkle to the eyes (like my mom's) and modified pompadour and gentle smile, which even now wows young Americans tired of endless sleaze from Madonna and rappers and others who just don't comprehend how much nice and decent this country can be.

I had originally feared (believe it or not) that at the viewings in liberal California and liberal Washington, D.C., that almost no one would come. I know from working at the Washington Post the overwhelming antipathy toward Reagan and conservatives in general among D.C. journalists and residents in general.

Judging from interviews with people waiting in line near the Mall in Washington, Americans from the Midwest, Virginia, and other places, including Northeasterners like myself in the minority of our communities as conservatives, made a yeoman's effort to give the former president a proper, respectful and well-attended sendoff.

Typical of journalist's low-grade but evident hostility are comments such as this from Washington Post associate editor Bob Kaiser, in his online chat, reminding us that AIDS "became an epidemic when [Reagan] was president." Huh? Was it Reagan, or Dionysian gays, who encouraged promiscuous rough-stuff in the bath houses? When will the absurd lack of responsibility for behaviors that spread vile germs (not just HIV and STDs, but amoebas and all sorts of things) stop? From the unintentionally revealing Kaiser:

My gay brother Charles Kaiser, himself a very good writer, wants us all to remember that Reagan really did almost nothing about AIDS, which, sadly, became an epidemic when he was president. Charles is right. But Reagan was far from alone in neglecting this crisis when it first emerged. Indeed, I think it's a measure of how America has changed in 20 years that we look back now at the beginning of the epidemic with some dismay at the way our government and leaders handled it.

Typical of Washington, D.C. and Maryland liberalism is this question posted to Kaiser from Jessup, Md.:

Why isn't the press covering that the legacy of Ronald Reagan's civil rights policies was to divide the nation along racial lines? The lines to see his casket were almost all white, and except for Colin Powell it was hard to see any person of color at this "state funeral." Its a travesty to applaud this type of legacy, and an embarrassment for the nation.

Robert G. Kaiser: Referred to this earlier. Thanks for the comment. I too was struck by the crowd in the Cathedral.

Oh, well. Here we have two errors. One, the lines weren't all white, unless one choses to ignore steady numbers of black