grand hotel abyss

the journalist and the joyrider

2011-07-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

This article dates back 18 years, but the kicker seems as important as ever. "Being a reporter," I wrote, "doesn't mean you stop being a person."

I was writing in reaction to a mostly forgotten tempest--the Jeffrey Masson/Janet Malcolm/Joe McGuinness entanglement--but that one-liner remains relevant given the revelations that many reporters in the UK committed crimes--including hacking phones, phishing for data, and bribing the police in the pursuit of scoops and juicy details.

the journalist and the joyrider.

All reporters, deep down, love good stories. I admit: I love murder. I love tragedy. I love sexy trials. I love political corruption. I love exposing the emperor's new clothes.

Working on a good story is like joyriding in a sports car after having spent your life in a sedan--you want to floor it, patch out, thrash the transmission, put the beast through its paces.

Janet Malcolm undoubtedly saw Jeffrey Masson as a good story. Her profile in the New Yorker was devastating. I am sure she heartily enjoyed every minute of it.

Last month, a jury declared that Malcolm had libeled Masson by using quotes that were not backed up by her notes or tapes. Certainly, all journalists should take note of the verdict. However, there is another concern in the case, one that has not gotten much attention--except, ironically, from Malcolm herself: The issue of bad faith.

I know all about bad faith. I have been guilty of it many times. So have most reporters I know.

I have paid for stories when I knew my money was being used to buy drugs the minute I left the scene. I have deliberately misled people I was interviewing--sometimes putting on a show of sympathy to get juicier quotes.

I have delayed calling people I was writing about until the last possible moment, trying to catch them off guard. I have hidden scoops from my competitors and lied to them about it.

I am not proud about any of this, but I can assure you that, in each case, I thought I was doing my job.

A few years ago, though, that all changed. An editor put me in touch with a man who had had a stroke. He talked haltingly, with a stutter. He could take 15 minutes to find one word. However, this was a big improvement. For almost a year after his stroke, he had been unable to speak at all.

I spent hours with him to make sure I had his story right: He believed the corrupt leaders of his municipal union had poisoned him.

I began to check his account. It was all circumstantial. He had been a member of a dissident union faction. The union president had been accused of corruption, but none of the other dissidents had come down with a mysterious illness, and there was no it known drug that could have caused his symptoms.

As I worked, I decided to pursue a different, more compelling story--the story of a man who had made the arduous journey back from a stroke and was now trying to make sense of his illness.

I told him, over and over, that I was not going to write the story he wanted me to write. He always agreed and then returned to his central theme: This happened to him. It was fact. All I had to do was write it down the way he rehearsed it.

I realized then the difference between his goal and mine. He came to me for vindication. If I told his story, his ideas would be legitimized, his world affirmed. I came to him looking for a good story. I wanted to joyride.

Ultimately, I decided not to write about his case. No story is more important than the person it is about.

I am not saying that journalists should cover up for corrupt politicians because an article might hurt their feelings. But I do believe that if we are going to expose someone in print, we have an obligation to tell them what we think--face to face if possible. We do not let them hide in their houses and offices. So why should we be able to hide behind our pages?

I imagine many journalists will argue that a person who talks with a reporter knows the risks. But I think most people, even the most self-assured, talk to reporters because they want their side of events recorded. They want to be proved right and, if you treat your sources as friends, you owe it to them to tell them straight out what you think.

That is why it was wrong for Joe McGinniss not to tell Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of his true-crime book Fatal Vision, that McGinniss believed MacDonald had murdered his wife and kids.

MacDonald had opened up to McGinniss, had made the author part of his life, and McGinniss had betrayed that trust, not by writing the book but by hiding his conclusions from the man he was writing about.

In her book on the McGinniss-MacDonald dispute, Malcolm says all reporters are, in essence, charlatans, "preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse."

She suggests that we should feel "some compunction about the exploitative character of the journalist-subject relationship."

Indeed we should. So should she. Malcolm spent hours talking with Masson, even putting him up at her house, as if she were his friend.

Ultimately, she concluded that Masson was, in some of her nicer words, "impudent," "complicated," "unruly," but she never told him. To Masson, it appeared that Malcolm had hooked him in and then, with no warning, vilified him. I am sure he felt it was an unprovoked attack.

Certainly, fabricating quotes is wrong. Stitching them together in a dishonest way is wrong. But I am afraid that most journalists will dismiss the Malcolm-Masson case as a simple mater of libel and lose sight of the ethical point. Being a journalist does not mean you stop being a person.

ex libris

2010-07-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

In mid-July, five weeks after the author David Markson died, his books began to show up on the carts at the Strand Book Store for a buck apiece.

Not the books he wrote. The books he owned. His books. The ones he signed his name in.

Early on, in 1951, on the inside cover of an incomplete translation of Mallarmé’s poems, he signed in formal fashion: David M. Markson, in perfect penmanship, the last name set off with a rising fountain pen slash, the graffiti tag of an easier era. Along the tail—the bottom edge of the book—he added a youthful redundancy: his three initials. Markson was 23 then and it would be eight years until his first book, Epitaph for a Tramp, would appear in print.

Once his work moved toward publication, his signature disintegrated. No more first name and middle initial. No monogram on the tail. Just Markson now, occasionally with a line under it, scribbled in ballpoint on the inside of paperbacks of Maimonides, Orwell, Rilke, and de Sade. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin, he added a location and a date—Mexico, 1960—and, as if in confirmation, the volume is stamped in three places as the property of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. Did Markson buy the book or boost it? No point in asking. This organization, founded in 1950 and most famous for giving Juan Rulfo a stipend and a place to go to write Pedro Páramo, his dark novel of the dead, ran out of cash and issued a notice announcing its own death in 2005.

What does it mean for a writer to sign his name in the books he read? Were they as important to him as the books he wrote? Or, maybe, more important? Is his connection to the world to be found in his own works or in the works of others that, by writing his name in them, he announced were his, too?

Markson, who died on June 4, 2010, started as a genre writer. Three detective novels (his recent books refer to these as entertainments rather than novels.) A western. Several realistic fictions. Then, with Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published in 1988 after collecting 54 rejections, his output turned inward.

In my copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I bought at the Strand for a buck, a prior owner, who bought it at the Strand for a few bucks more, left a helpful message on the receipt. Don’t look now but the train to dementia is leaving + you my friend are about to board/Don’t look now but the train to dementia is pulling away from the station and you’re on it.

Markson’s last four books are a series of delicate, almost plotless works in which the narrator—named Author twice, Reader once, and finally Novelist—drops away and the prose slithers forward through terse quotations and stand-alone sentences that resist the imposition of an interlocking whole. To do away with plot and narrative is, in a sense, to do away with time—and Markson’s final four read like an amazing feat of holding your breath out: your pulse slowly slows, the seconds divide into farsighted distance, individuality edges towards an unspoken and unspeakable universal.

Markson lived in the West Village, not far from the Strand, a store which, in a nice parallel, opened its doors in 1927, the same year he was born.

At the end of Markson’s last novel, published in 2007 and called—perhaps aptly—The Last Novel, an aging writer heads up the stairs of his Greenwich Village apartment building, beyond his own floor, to the top:

Access to Roof for Emergency Only. Alarm Will Sound if Door Opened.

Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.

The old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Als ick kan.

Some boilerplate from a lawsuit-leery landlord. Five one-word sentences by Markson himself. A quote from philosopher George Santayana. And, to end the book, a fragment inscribed by Jan van Eyck on the frame of his 1433 canvas Portrait of a Man in a Turban. This last, Markson rendered five ways: The best I can do. That’s it. I can do no more. All I have left. I can go no further.

At a reading at the 92nd Street Y in 2007, Markson noted that 98.5 percent of the book involved quotations from others. At the same reading, Markson defined his literary approach: to see how little I can get away with with.

Five weeks after his death seems too soon for his collection to trickle out. Did no one want the library of this writer whose work was so informed by the words of others? Or perhaps this was his wish—to liberate these books from the lock-down of his shelves and thereby become a literary Johnny Appleseed, strewing odd volumes to the public through the crude mechanism of the free market (and a buck a book is about as free as the free market gets these days.)

These tramp-steamer books, found on the carts outside the Strand, are the last work of a writer who, to the end, let others have the last word.

Adam Smith, Union Man

2009-05-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

Memo to the Washington insiders who have been shying away from Card Check (a.k.a. the Employee Free Choice Act—the bill that would make it possible for workers to vote to join a union by simply filling out a form): Adam Smith, the founding philosopher of the free market, would probably have supported it.

Smith was not afraid of high wages. In Wealth of Nations, his classic outline of capitalist principles that was published in 1776, Smith made it clear that astronomical profits are a much greater contributor to high prices than rising wages. "In reality," he wrote, "high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages."

Here’s his argument, updated: if all the workers making minimum wage (currently $6.55 an hour, and set to rise to $7.25 in July) at a busy D.C. deli want to unionize in order to gain a dollar more per hour, it’s easy to determine what that would cost consumers. Simply multiply the number of laborers times the number of hours they work each day and divide by the number of items they produce. If five employees sell 50 sandwiches each in an eight hour shift, that 15 percent bump in wages would cost customers just 16 cents per tuna melt—a mere 2.3 percent bite on a sandwich that previously sold for $6.95.

By contrast, if the deli owner wants 15 percent more in profits, those same sandwiches would jump to $7.99—$1.04 more. And if the owner and the distributor he buys from both want 15 percent more, the price of a deli sandwich would jump to $9.19—15 percent compounded on top of 15 percent.

"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad," Smith wrote. "They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."

The self-interest of laborers, Smith wrote, is "strictly connected with the interest of the society." By contrast, the self-interest of "those who live from profit" is murkier. The rate of profit, Smith noted, is "naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin."

Smith's conclusion? Capitalists are "an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Which is why—and this is key for consideration of Card Check—he strenuously urged that policy pronouncements from big business and its shills—the folks who are now crying that the Employee Free Choice Act violates democratic principles—"ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous but with the most suspicious attention."

Smith didn’t specifically say that unions were a benign influence. But he understood that giving workers a better deal was an economic stimulus: "The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives."

Reading Smith is revelatory. Our popular assumption about the unfettered pursuit of profit—that it is the world’s greatest method for providing for all people—turns out to be a misreading of the capitalist sage. Here’s a key statement: "In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, where in every particular branch of business there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it, as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it, would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money."

Having enough goods to satisfy every person’s every need, then, would cause profits to droop and interest rates to tumble. So, if the profit motive is paramount, as Smith insisted it is, a businessman should never try to satisfy all the demand for his or her product. That’s why it’s not in the interest of real estate developer to have lots of apartments and homes available—because that lowers rents and purchase prices. And it never behooves grain dealers to market enough rice to feed the world’s starving—because the price per pound would sink into the paddies. Wise capitalists, in short, seek sufficient scarcity to support a high price, and uncontrolled capitalism is unlikely to provide for the needs of all people.

Smith was unconcerned about this. He saw the self-regulating market not as a mechanism for individual riches, but as a system that would provide for the overall well-being of countries. That’s why he called his book Wealth of Nations (the full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) and not simply Wealth. For Smith, the "invisible hand" of the market would naturally bring this about.

Surveying today’s crippled auto industry and the bailed-out banks with their bloated swill of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, many have come to see Smith’s invisible hand as mythical, fictional and delusional. Card check and other appropriate regulations offer a blueprint for creating the stable, healthy, well-educated and well-off populace that is the true wealth of nations.

Up Your Fucking Ass, Mr. Sexy

2008-10-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

The clock says to get moving but I can't. I screw my delicate mousetrap mouth to one side and show my brass stare. Not for nothing I call myself an iceberg. The people I hate are just outside my window.
I want to yell at them, to curse them out. I want to drop marshmallows and watch them splatter with lethal force after the 37 floor Times Square freefall.
But the windows don't open. I'm stuck in this sepulcher, this white man's palace. I sit back and let the phone ring. Voice mail is a very underrated thing.
It's that time of month. That's what my boss says.
He's sure it's that and not impending skin cancer. Or that my tanning lamp burned out. Or that I was badly clawed on my leg by my neighbor's cat which I was taking care of while she was in Bermuda. Or because my favorite neon tetra has been floating upside down near the surface of the fish tank for three days now.
No.
My boss says it's that time of month. That's why he's my boss and not the other way around--because he's a simple charlatan who knows nothing but trusts his gut.
“Call Red Adair,” I tell him. “The oil well's on fire.”
He doesn't say, “Take the day off.”
He says, “What? Like your shit doesn't stink too.”
And I want to shout. Of course it does, you silly man. It stinks on hot ice. You're the one pretending to be perfect, with your Armani suits and your slicked back hair and your immaculate clear polished fingernails. You're the one who thinks he's better than everyone else. You. You, Mister Sexy, you.
But I don't say a word.
Because what angers me is that he's right--it is that time of month. It wasn't supposed to be--not for another eight days according to my regular schedule, which has run like clockwork for two years now--but when one thing goes wrong everything does. The whole damn system breaks down. And then the blood starts flowing. The crowning insult: I'm the Bayonne bleeder. Get me the vacuum cleaner, please.
“Only women bleed,” I tell Eric when I get home.
Of course he has a comeback.
“How about my hemorrhoids?”
And I'm forced to tell him that I don't want to think about his hemorrhoids because that's an everyday thing and asking someone, even your partner, to think about something like that every day is tyranny, is fascism, is oppression, whereas the period, the menses, the brown blood flow, is only once a month and asking someone to be a little considerate once a month is reasonable. Indeed, it's what you should expect of friends. Time to vacuum, Dickhead.
He doesn't say: “I understand. Let me cook you dinner.” Or even: “Can I help you clean?”
He says, “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Which he considers the height of rational discourse.
Sometimes the dude is like a brick wall. There's more responsiveness in a piece of raw meat.
I, on the other hand, am a sponge. Everything leaks because everything in this faulty world must at some point or another lose fluid, it's an unwritten law, and I soak it all up. A blood sandwich. When I was a kid that's what I'd do when we ate meat. Take a piece of white bread--Wonder or Arnold work best--lie it in the juice, and when it was full, soaked to the max, I'd fold it up between my fingers and eat the succulent morsel in one bite. Then I'd lick the running red stuff off my fingers. It was better than Bosco.
When I'm like this, Eric goes to Pittsburgh. Which is to say he doesn't call, doesn't propose a candlelight dinner, doesn't wait for me to call him. He simply digs out his tools and spends his days working with a blowtorch, sweating pipe. Ordinarily he's a graphic artist. When I'm on the rag he's a plumber.
I know he'd like to take that torch to me. A BernzOmatic straight to my borscht belt. He doesn't realize that what I need right now, when I'm groaning and vacuuming and he's monkeying with a hot water heater, is a good roll, a quality lay, a frenzy of fingers all over me. A back rub is not enough. Show me one woman who hasn't at these moments found an excuse to take a hot bath so she could get off on the jetting water flow while her queasy mate sat silently on the bed watching The Price is Right, intimidated by the sheer, unavoidable, natural physicalness of her body. Nice girls do, all the time.
We are, after all, tied to the forces that move the moon and the stars. We are cosmological.
Unfortunately, though, that mystical connection doesn't make it any easier. The philosophers say that with repetition a thing becomes familiar, a part of you. But if more of these western philosophers were women, the whole damn corpus would be different. Kierkegaard and his ilk could hardly deal with the opposite sex. We were the other, the dreaded, the unknowable. “Supposing truth is a woman what then,” wrote Nietzsche. The truth he couldn't handle. A thing beyond good and evil. A bloody thing.
The first time I sent Eric out for tampons, he bought Pampers instead. He said he didn't notice the picture of the baby on the box.
“You don't know anything,” I told him.
He gets rational when he gets angry. He corrected my grammar. “Use proper English,” he said, “The right way to say it is, 'You don't know shit.'” Then he left. That was the start of his monthly disappearances.
It actually didn't matter that he was too embarrassed to buy me my OB's. I used the Pampers anyway. I rolled up one of the diapers and stuffed it in my underwear like a maxi-pad. Talk about roughing it.
Eric doesn't notice much. When I'm pre menstrual I stand in front of the mirror each morning and weigh my breasts, one in each hand. They're so heavy, almost painfully droopy. They scare me. But he has never remarked on it.
He doesn't see the pimple on my forehead or my shoulder that even now, at age 36, comes every month to presage the period.
He remains male, doggedly outside and oblivious. He never breaks out, never gains weight, always wears comfortable clothes, and thinks he looks good without a shirt. So much for justice.
When I have a particularly bloody and painful period, when Eric has disappeared and I'm alone, this is what I do: I save my tampons. I dry them out, let the blood turn brown. Then I send postcards. Each one has a tampon stapled to it by the string.
I call them my monthlies. I send them to certain men I know. I inscribe different sayings on the cards. I have written: “Run for your life. It's a gusher.” I have written, “Warning: If used improperly this device can cause grievous bodily injury.” I have written, “This plug's for you.”
I imagine mailmen throughout the country delivering these missives, holding them gently by the edges so as not to be contaminated. I envision the people who sort the mail refusing to touch my monthlies without rubber gloves.
I have only had one bad reaction--from my sister. She told me my brother in law thought I was being aggressive.
My brother in law's a good man. But I know that aggressive isn't in his vocabulary.
“Was that his word?” I asked.
“No,” she admitted. “What he really said was, 'I like your sister, but she sure can be a ballbuster.'“
I wanted to shout. Of course. I am a ballbuster. Absitively. Posolutely. But only because I've had my balls busted so often myself. Why can men give but not receive? Just what is the deal here?
But I didn't say anything. Sisterhood is powerful, but not that powerful. There is no such thing as solidarity.
When I was a kid, there were icebergs in the Hudson. I saw them from the Jersey side every time we drove over the G.W. Bridge, and I swear my father told me that his father had walked across the river when he was young, because it used to freeze solid. But there are no icebergs anymore. Even in last year's cold snap, the river didn't freeze.
Since I'm almost done with the flow, Eric consents to meet in a bar after work. Eighth Avenue. The neons stain the faces of the people en route to the Port Authority. I stand in the doorway. This is an old men's place. They're watching Jeopardy. The 7 p.m. ritual. I don't find this at all threatening. Guys like getting the answers and trying to guess the questions. Women like giving the answers and not worrying about the questions. We have formalized this in our culture. We call it marriage. We call it relationship. We call it the war between men and women. Jeopardy, in a larger sense.
“What is Kashmir,” the toothless guy at the head of the bar shouts, and everyone nods.
Eric is wearing his Mister Sexy shirt, the one he always leaves unbuttoned one button too far, to show off his chest hair. He's watching TV too.
“What is Macedonia,” Eric shouts. Countries for $200.
He's put himself in this line up. The male fashion show. Guys in jean jackets with hair a la mode thinning but pulled back into a pony tail drinking beer and calling out their responses to an insane TV quiz show, bonding without talking about anything at all.
And I realize that's the point. Eric wants me to choose him. To supply the question to his answer each time: do I recognize him, do I think he's sexy, do I love him.
What would he do if I walked up to some other guy the greasy guy with the paunch sitting next to him, for instance and gave him a tongue kiss? What would he do if I sucked on the guy's neck, Dracula style, and ran my fingers through his hair?
But, of course, I don't do any of that.
This is what I do: I walk up to Eric, down the remainder of his pint beer, and before he can say his usual, casual, super cool, “Hey, babe,” I say, so loud it projects beyond Jeopardy and for all I know beyond the bar and out into the street, “Up your fucking ass, Mister Sexy.”
As I slide onto the stool on the other side of Eric from the fat guy, I'm electric. Eric notices who couldn't and doesn't say anything. His pulse chimes the seconds in his neck. I'm glowing. My nails are redder than the coating on a candy apple. My jacket, and my bustier underneath it, are ruddier than a fresh piece of meat. My lips and cheeks are rosier than a blushing bride. My proud flesh is phosphorescent.
“Sometimes you are so rotten,” Eric finally splutters, and unwittingly speaks the words of the ages. For I am rotten. Women always have been. I curdle cream. I sour milk. I make good meat turn bad. I am the spoiler, the carrier of rot and fermentation and degradation. And yet, at the same time, I am the red cross, the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization.
I just sit there, and Eric disappears and the whole bar disappears. I am brighter than the neons and darker than the moon, hotter than strong acid and colder than any iceberg.
“What is bleeding,” I shout. In the distance, everyone applauds. It's the right answer to the Daily Double and I win a bourbon and a beer.

Radio Controlled Planes

2008-10-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

Sherma watches her father.
“Rafael,” her mother says.
He holds up a hand. He doesn’t have to talk.
He’s tinkering with a wing, so intent he can’t be disturbed. It got bent, last weekend, mangled by a tree when it suddenly lost lift.
“Sherma, don’t bother your father,” her mother says.
Sherma was just looking at his arms. Like banisters, she thinks, meant to hold things up. She admires the way they cradle the broken wooden struts. But she knows not to say anything. The wing, right now, is the only important thing.
Sherma turns and goes into her room. Behind her, she hears her mother: “Rafael.”
Sherma knows, from the safe haven of her bed, that her father has her mother’s head out the window.
He doesn’t say anything.
But Sherma gets the message.
Any time, any place, anyhow, for any reason.
In the morning, her mother has a scarf tied stylishly around her neck. But her eyes give away the lie.

“He threw her in a pond,” Sherma announces to her friend Connie. “Last night.”
Connie shakes her head. “What pond.”
“I dreamed it,” Sherma says. “He threw her in from the third floor and she was floating, head down in the weeds with all her hair spread out. Then he walked away.”

Her mother has fixed dinner but her father wants none of it. He’s standing in the living room sandpapering the epoxy he applied to the wing. There’s white dust sticking to the hair on his arms. He brushes it into a little pile on the coffee table.
“Sherma, be quiet,” her mother says. But the only noise she made was the soft puck of her eyelids as she blinked back tears.
When she was little, Sherma remembers, he wiped her eyes when she cried. She was just a baby, but she can recall his handkerchief, almost as big as her body, and the way it felt against her skin, and his knobby hand moving towards her, smelling slightly of gasoline.

He takes her with him to meet the guys out by Rodman’s Neck, and Sherma sees one plane go out of control. “No no no no,” the guy who owns it shouts. “Sweet mother of God, no.” He jams on the joystick but the plane refuses to respond. It has a mind of its own and just flies away.
Suddenly, he’s running after it, across the parking lot and into the field by the bay. He’s up to his chest in weeds and water before the other men catch him. Silently all the men watch the plane shoot skyward and disappear.
“It’ll keep going till it runs out of gas,” her father tells her.
The men make puddles in the car on the way home. None of them talk.

Sherma dreams that she throws her father’s plane out the window and it hovers in the air, like a hummingbird. Just stays there in the air outside her window and waits for her and her mother to climb in.
Sherma and her mother are in the plane as it breaks free of her father’s control. They soar across the vast blue. Her father is underneath, cursing, and chasing them. She squeezes her mother tight. They fly higher and higher towards the clouds, so high they never have to come down.

Sherma sits at her mother’s feet.
“I want a turn on the dance floor with the most beautiful woman in the room.” Her mother, who loves to dance, shakes her head, so Uncle Nick takes Sherma. Like her father his fingers smell like gasoline.
When the song’s over she steps away without even a thank you. Her father, she sees, is at the bar surveying the scene. Sherma knows he will not ask her mother to dance, even though she wore her green dress, the one that clings to her body without a wrinkle. He sees her looking at him and turns away.

There’s a special landing strip on the deep blue, strong enough to support a plane. It touches down on the rolling surface, settles, and then slowly sinks. But the river is warm.
Sherma feels the pulse of her father’s tears and knows immediately that something dreadful has happened, that instead of taking off, the plane crash landed on the living room floor.
Her father wraps her in a blanket and, cradling her in his arms as gently as he held the broken wing, steps out the window and they drop into the cool night.
Her mother looms out the window and points.
“Go to your father,” she says.
Sherma shakes her head and her mother falls.
Next, her mother pricks her with a safety pin and laughs.

As they drive home, her father and mother don’t talk. Sherma wants to scream, to tell her father to stop. Just stop the car and get out. She wants her father and mother to walk away, hand-in-hand, and in her mind she watches them disappear into the future, where they will be happy, without her.
When they get home, her father scowls and takes up the wing. He needs to attach it to the plane.
“Shhh,” her mother hisses, but Sherma hasn’t said a word all night. Her mother pinches her hard on the leg and she goes to her room.
And, from the darkness under her covers, Sherma rubs her leg and knows what she will do.

Later, after another episode with the window, Sherma hears her father and mother go to bed. She waits for a while, making sure the house is still, then goes to the basement. She pulls out the black plastic bag in which her father keeps his favorite plane. He’s painted it beautifully, with perfect World War I decals and camouflage coloring. She gives the propeller a soft twist, then puts the plane to one side and pulls the bag over her head. It’s dark inside and smells like chemicals. She’s the prize possession now, gone flapping away as her father gives chase into the weeds and emerges covered with slime. Sherma wriggles down to the bottom and breathes in the steamy darkness and shudders as she soars over a bright new world of lipstick lawns and nail polish houses and sunlight glinting off her mother’s man-made gap-toothed smile.

Drag Queen at Home

2008-06-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Freshie looks in the mirror.
Oh God, he says.
Old man says: What’s the matter.
I got a hair, Freshie says.
Everyone’s got hair.
A really long gross one, like 13 inches long, on my face.
Shit.
You got a razor.
Forget razors, honey. They make your skin all rough. Tweezers.
Fuck that. I am not gonna puck my face like I’m a chicken.
Let me see.
No. You go away. I want a razor.
Big man gonna shave.
What gets me is, was it here yesterday. Coiled up so everyone could see.
No one’s looking.
Like a rope right on my face. Like a snake.
Freshie.
A goddamned reptile. A dinosaur.
Freshie.
A monster.
Freshie, look at me.
Freshie stares that sullen stare.
You use powder, he says.
Oh, the insults I put up with.
You gotta paint your face red because you got no color. And all that base all over your face to act like you don’t have wrinkles. It’s disgusting. Be who you are.
Freshie.
Yeah.
You done?
Yeah.
This is who I am. Got that.
The kid stares again.
See: the one with the lipstick and the powder and no wrinkles. That’s me. The other, that’s just this temporary thing. This body. This thing I inhabit. But this, the way I make myself seem: that’s me.
Freshie blinks. The old man looks straight into his flat black eyes. What the hell goes on in there?
How’s that work, being what you aren’t and becoming what you want to be, but it’s not for real. How’s that go? Like to always want to be what you’re not and try to be what you can’t always be.
That’s what the old man wants him to say. But Freshie doesn’t have words for this stuff. He just looks at the old man in the mirror, watches him apply the clown-like eyeliner and the false lashes and the extensions to his nails and the exaggerated, bloated red to his lips. But he doesn’t wonder about all that. He wonders how he got that strange hair on his face and why his friend the old man didn’t want him to use a razor and why it feels like a door that was open just got closed and the room is suddenly surprisingly cold.

blocked!

2007-09-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in Guangzhou, China right now and, because of the 'great firewall of China,' I can't respond to any blog posts. But I apparently can create new posts. If anyone wants to get in touch, try me here: squattercity at yahoo dot com

the myth of the continuous self

2007-04-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Something’s different in the alley.

Something missing. Something new.

Emma peers out the window. Her eyes puzzle pattern from the pavement.

It’s a mutation in the character of the concrete. A discoloration, a stain—perhaps no more than the disappearance of shadow, a trick of the early light affecting the area next to the garbage cans.

Her hand squeezes the sill and her knuckles cast a weird green light.

Yesterday’s stain was her stain. Today it’s gone from liquid to gas to God knows. The future becomes past before it’s present.

Her breath comes short and bumps the ribs of her throat.

There’s no fear in the attic. No clamor. No rancor. No hollow smile of a tin can heart.

Emma’s flat on her back on the plywood. She inhales the comforting dry rot of solitude.

It’s hot and still. Sweat slicks her shirt against the crevices under her breasts. The heat wets wherever flesh presses against flesh. Above her, in the glare of the swaying 40 watt, hundred-year-old dust slips on beams of light.

She pushes a hair out of her eyes and notices that her hands are black with soot and red with blood.

Each door makes its own music.

The latch. The frame. The vibration of the wood as it slams.

But the noise of this door is different.

"Emma," it shouts and shakes with rage.

She backs away and twists the handle.

Her fingers dig at a crack in the mortar. The sand and lime fall away in dry piles. She blows at the residue and it rises in air, caught in a momentary vortex. But still the brick won’t come out of its slot. She chops again with her nails at the scraps of mortar that hold it in place. Her fingertips are sore and abraded but she girds herself for one more effort. With an awkward lunge, she half rips the nail off her index finger. But she emerges from this ordeal with the prize: one brick, mottled and weathered, telling its story to her hand.

Outside the door is another door and behind that another. From hallway to vestibule to elevator. Closet to mailbox to telephone booth. Bathroom to treasure chest to garbage chute.

She opens this door and the stain creeps in.

It has a gray beard and a hooded sweatshirt and it carries a paper bag. Creation out of nothing. The stain made flesh.

You, you, you, you, you, she says.

The stain continues its advance.

You communist.

She fumbles in the silverware drawer and flings a knife at the advancing figure.

The white plastic utensil—these days, that’s all the drawer contains—bounces off the beard and falls harmlessly to the floor.

The stain shows teeth.

Again Emma feels her chest.

"I got coffee," the stain says, and pulls back the hood to reveal a face that spells comfort. It’s Hugo who might be Julio.

To get to the attic she must have climbed the ladder. But this is impossible—for Emma knows that she moves with exaggerated care. She steps high to avoid tripping over the welcome mat. She holds tight to banisters so as not to fall down. She can hardly lie down without worrying about what it will take to sit up again.

And yet here she is, up a ladder and through a heavy hatch.

She doesn’t know how she got here, but she is not alarmed. Perhaps someone carried her. And perhaps that is how she will get down.

Hugo who might be Julio hands her the steaming cup and she smells his hand near her face—an awful anxious animal odor.

She eyes the coffee with suspicion. Where are the people who taste the food first? Where are the servants who pre-taste for poisons?

Hugo who might be Julio pulls out a second cup for himself. He takes a sip and does not fall down dead, so Emma motions.

He shakes his head.

"Don’t be a dirty bastard," she says.

He exchanges cups and she is content.

There are many ways to tear down a house. You can smash it to the ground with a large machine. You can dynamite it so it falls on itself. You can hire men with pickaxes to drop it floor by floor. Emma has a different approach. She dismantles it slowly, consciously, lovingly, removing a brick a day. A brick, she knows, is an extremely private item.

She howls when he mentions it.

It’s sunny this morning, Hugo who might be Julio says.

Howls and looks at him, eyes ragged.

It’s a nice day. Apple weather. If we wait too long, it’ll be winter and you won’t be able to go out for six months.

She howls more and heaves the coffee at him. It stains the stain but doesn’t dissuade him.

Hugo who might be Julio comes over and peels her fingers from the table one-by-one. She notices that his knuckles are wrinkled and bloodless, too, that his skin is as dry and ugly as her own.

She baptizes the brick in warm, soapy water. She rubs it firmly with a washcloth, rinses it, then dries it with a chamois.

Here it reveals its history. The oil of hands. The funnel of time. Hands that shaped and formed and carried and baked, that stacked and hauled and handed and laid. A wall is a product born of sweat.

In the washing and drying Emma comes to know who built the building (she builds it with them) and who carried the brick (she hefts it with them) and who pulled the ropes that hauled it up to third-story height (she throws her weight on the cables.) She sees them squatting on the scaffolding taking lunch. She sees them handle their sandwiches with hands bloody from rope burn.

The mason snaps his line and all the bricks are suddenly equal. Behind him, the plasterer waits, bags of horsehair ready to bind the plaster to the lath. She coughs as he lights a rough cigarette and tells a dirty joke.

The grit of a century washes into her sink as the hostile wall gives up its secrets.

Hugo who might be Julio gets her to the vestibule.

He guides her as an experienced dancer might move his partner—with no visible force, but privately willing her forward, and she feasts off his energy.

Yet, she also resists. With each step, Emma is smaller and more bent over. She has gone from being a vital woman to a hunchback. And the howl is back, this time hidden as a whine.

The final door is a trap door.

It’s midnight and Emma vacuums her armpits.

One moment she’s cleaning the couch and plumping plush pillows. The next, she’s got the wand near her underarms, and feels the backward-rushing wind.

The brick is drying in the dish drain. She has added her labor to its storehouse of fact, making it the cornerstone of a new construction, an unbuilt building yet to be.

The house is quiet. The walls have stopped groaning. The lights are out and through the window, the moon is gloating. Emma raises the hose. Gently, she applies the nozzle to the side of her neck. The vacuum motor races as she gives herself a machine hickey.

Emma squints in the shade. The light is too much for her uneven eyes. She doesn’t want to see.

Hugo who might be Julio has her in sweats and sneakers—the easiest clothes for him to slip onto her heavy frame.

She walks stiff-legged and stone-faced.

In the park, some kids are practicing their skateboard maneuvers.

One of them attempts to jump a railing and loses his board. It scoots down to Emma, who suddenly raises her foot and stops it.

The kid gives her a thumbs up.

So Hugo who might be Julio assists Emma in putting her foot on the board. Usually he finds her to be dead weight, but she is suddenly light, almost like paper. First, she only keeps one foot on the board, and she drags the other as he pulls her forward. Then, with some coaxing, she takes the second foot off the ground. Hugo who might be Julio takes her hands and suddenly she’s rolling forward on ball bearing feet, heading south by southwest across the concrete. She feels the city shake and roll.

When she looks up she realizes that she knows this old man who is pulling her along.

Herman, she says, and giggles at the sudden wash of feeling for the man she’s known for 52 years.

As soon as they’re there, the feeling recedes. She steps off the board, which the kid accepts back wordlessly.

They walk arm-in-arm, but she’s no longer quite sure. And after a few steps, he’s Hugo who might be Julio again. By the time they get home she is more stooped than ever.

The brick is much lighter than she expected. It comes out of the wall so easily, almost like magic. A house is held together by so little.

She raises the brick to her lips and kisses the dirty clay, leaving a thin ring of moisture on the brick and a thick O of dust on her lips. She tastes the dust tentatively with her tongue. Bitter. Gritty. Sad. Upsetting. And totally unhygienic.

Before she finishes the day, there’s another ritual. She looks out the window and notices that all is right with the world: the stain has returned to the alley.

She breathes out, leans her forehead against the plate glass, and falls asleep standing.

the circle of caveats

2006-09-12T04:23:00.000-07:00

We must be careful not to overstate the case. Let us not forget that in this situation it must be noted: nothing could be further from the truth. Because, as they say, it is the exception that proves the rule. Of course, rules are made to be broken and so, in this case, we must make allowances. For the time being, all we can state with certainty is that, given this set of assumptions, all things will be equal. Context is everything. Thus, this is not the final word on the subject. And yet, because of the foregoing doubts, we must be doubly sure. So, in light of current developments and taking stock of all our cultural preconceptions, the conclusion is neither obvious nor buried. It is conditioned by the very factors that condition us all. Beneath all this lies the substratum of unreason, which itself provides the basis for all knowledge. And lest we make too much of this, we must avoid the temptation of turning to speculation, to specious imagining, as it were. We must steer clear of that pathway at all costs—or at least in most instances. In that eventuality, the two sides are further apart than ever. And yet they are closer and closer. Bridging that gap is our task here, and yet we must be careful: a bridge built on quicksand will sink in a snap. It is best to avoid such constructions. Considering the preceding, we must put aside all pretense. The answer lies in the dispassionate pursuit of the truth, wherever that takes us. We must not fail to mention that, generally and in specific, the road is long and hard. Suppositions must be avoided and, conversely and in equal proportion, we cannot avoid them. A house of cards will not sink in the sand but a slight wind will blow it down. The situation, then, is perilous. However, we must press on. Indeed, it is only through that propulsion, that forward seeking movement, that we will find, ultimately (or penultimately), in the worst or best possible case scenarios, that unmistakable aura of glacial impenetrability. Then, and only then, given the parameters outlined above, will there be enough data to suggest a course of action (and its equal and opposite reaction) leading us to a state of wide-eyed suspicion. To put it simply: on or about or perhaps with or above all. Needless to say, this does not always hold true. Sometimes, it is true, it is untrue, depending on circumstances and freak accidents and natural disasters and acts of God. Next to nothing is inessential. We arrive, then, at the central conundrum—-and we must be very careful with words here so as not to state more than we actually know. To recapitulate: given the current state of knowledge, taking into account our biases, and rolling with the punches, we can draw one almost inescapable conclusion from our diverse and disparate researches into our subject. To wit: we must be careful not to overstate the case. Let us not forget that in this situation it must be noted: nothing could be further from the truth.

The Other September 11ths

2006-09-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

September 11th is more than the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. Its resonance goes beyond simply being the day on which hijackers slammed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, while another airplane was brought down in Pennsylvania field after its passengers battled for control of the cockpit.

For a generation of Chileans, September 11th is also the anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende. It was September 11, 1973 when the armed forces, minions of American might, moved against the popularly elected Socialist president of Chile, attacking the presidential palace in Santiago and plunging the nation into decades of brutal dictatorship under which thousands lost their lives. And September 11th is also the anniversary of the day in 1777 when George Washington lost the battle of Brandywine, which allowed the British to storm into our fledgling nation’s capital, Philadelphia, two weeks later.

Every country, and every era, has its 9/11, even if it doesn’t fall on September 11th.

• In Rwanda, it’s April 6th, the day in 1994 when the Hutu majority began the rampage that ultimately claimed the lives of between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsi citizens.
• In Lebanon, perhaps it’s September 16th, the day in1983, when a Christian militia, acting with tacit Israeli approval, invaded refugee camps and began killing thousands of Palestinians. Or perhaps it’s July 12th, the day just two months ago when a Hezbollah war party raided Israel and took several soldiers hostage, to which Israel responded with a month-long bombing campaign and ground invasion that killed perhaps 1,000 people.
• In Argentina, it might be June 20th, the day in 1973 when fascists opened fire on a crowd of 3 million awaiting the return of Juan Peron.
• In South Africa, it might be March 21st, the day in 1960 when police fired on demonstrators in the small town of Sharpeville who were protesting the apartheid pass laws, killing 69 and wounding several hundred. It was the start of a three-decade campaign, in which thousands of innocents gave their lives so that an entire people might be free.
• In Mexico, it might be October 2nd, the night in 1968 that came to be known as the Tlatelolco Massacre because several hundred demonstrators were killed in Mexico City.
• In Sarajevo, it is April 5th, the day in 1992 that the Serbian siege began. The siege that strangled the city lasted almost four years and took more than 12,000 lives.
• For Irish Catholics, it might be January 30th, Bloody Sunday, the day in 1972 when British troops opened fire on civil rights protesters in Derry, killing 26, six of whom were children and five of whom were shot in the back.
• For Armenians, it’s April 24th, the day 91 years ago when Turks started the campaign that led to an estimated 1.5 million Armenians being exterminated.
• For Jews, it’s perhaps November 9th, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, when the Nazis ordered attacks against Jews, one of the most severe salvos in a campaign that systematically killed millions.
• And in Iraq, perhaps, it is both July 16th, the day in 1979 when Saddam Hussein took power, and April 9th, the day in 2003 when U.S. forces took control of Baghdad. No decent citizen of the nation had any inkling then that the U.S. occupation would lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents in what seems a brutal civil war.

So, yes, on this September 11th, let us honor the memory of the thousands who lost their lives five years ago in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. Let us celebrate the fidelity of the tens of thousands who lost loved ones and close friends that painful sun-drenched morning. Let us witness once again our fear and our fervor. But let us also remember that this day we hold in common memory is not exceptional. It is one of a series of days that remind the world of horror.

Senseless suffering is, sadly, universal. And so is the heroism of ordinary people who, despite their own pain and horror, react with incredible bravery and humanity, risking their lives to help their neighbors live on. Let us take this day to honor all victims of organized terror, of senseless violence, of collateral damage, of thoughtless invasion and destruction around the world. And let us honor, too, those patriotic world citizens who demand an end to the madness.

the primitive streak

2006-08-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

"Communication is fatal to a relationship," I say.
She squints.
"You got to admit, the truth can be really bad—sometimes."
Her jaw goes slack. Her tongue comes out. She mimes puking.
"Every so often. Occasionally."
Now she’s glaring.
"All right, all right. Almost never."
I know as I’m saying all this that she hates me—-first for saying it, second for backing down, third because I was right and we just proved it.
She purses her lips. Bloodless, that’s what she is. If I slit her throat, nothing would come out. That’s why we’re together. I’m sure she thinks the same about me.
I try again.
"What I meant to say was communication is fetal."
She warms to this.
"Primitive," she says.
We’re on the subway, whispering to each other in the sexiest voices we can muster. It’s a game we play.
"Do you know," she breathes hot on my ear, "that when the sperm fertilizes an egg, it forms a smear. And that smear—-biologists call it the primitive streak—-ultimately becomes everything. Nervous system, backbone, sensory body, brain, consciousness, you, me, us."
And I say: "Kind of like a bug caught in the windshield wipers."
Again the thing with her lips. Her eyes blaze.
"You," she hisses. "You’re always cutting everything down, cutting me down. Is nothing real?"
I love it when she hisses.
"You got it, babe. Make-believe is best."
She shows her teeth. "I could kill you," she whispers sweetly.
My turn to do the lip thing.
"Right now," she confesses. "I could, you know."
I smile.
"Thank you," I whisper.
"Fuck you," she snarls.
We ride in silence a bit. We’re going to the hospital, to see my father in the cancer ward. He’s fading. I can feel him leaving me-—this man who spent so much of his life trying to do right by me, except I never let him. The human condition in action.
"Ah, my little devil," I say, turning to her.
She pokes me in the ribs.
This is love, I suppose.
She pokes me again.
"Listen buster," she says. Her eyes are swirling agates.
I think of my father, every breath a pain. But his eyes are like rocks at the bottom of a lake. They seem so close, so defined. I think of what they will be like when he’s dead, insensitive to my poking.
"Play," she says.
"I don’t want to," I whisper.
My father can hardly keep food down. But he tries every day. He tries to eat, he tries to smile. I can see the effort in his eyes.
"What’s going on here," she purrs in my ear, "is a lack of communication."
I shrug.
"You think I’m kidding?"
"I think my father’s dying."
"That’s your excuse for everything."
"Here’s your excuse for everything," I whisper back. "You are an exciting woman."
Around us, people flow on and off the train. Maybe one of them knows I’m lying.
My father, I think. My father knows. He would look up at me and wink. A little complicity please. When you’re finally confronted by ultimate things, there’s not much else to say. If we’re to go on living, we don’t acknowledge them. But if we’re to die, then truth can be potent stuff. And yet, as soon as I think this, I know it’s a lie. None of us, none of us can stand the truth. No matter how bad off we are, we rely on patent medicines, nostrums, evasions, tones of voice, mumbo jumbo, lies.
She smiles. I can see the edges of her dog teeth. She hates the truth, too.
I take her hand and we leave the train to go and be with my father for a few moments before visiting hours come to a close.
I can feel her fingers tighten as we get closer to his room.
The oppressive air. The finality, the bottom-line truth in every twist of the corridor.
When we walk in, he manages both a smile and a wink.
"How’re the lovebirds," he says.
She squeezes my hand and I stand there exposed.
I sit on the edge of the bed and take his hand as well, feeling it surprisingly small in my palm, and we stay that way for a moment, all of us holding hands, as if we’re praying.
I could kill him. I could kill her. I could kill the whole world.
But, in the end, I never will.
I’m a collaborator. I belong with the living.

the people of the book

2006-04-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

My mother touched the knife blade. The rabbi was in the corner by the crib, muttering. And far away, my father hovered by the TV. There are some things a man can’t watch.

Sam, my mother said. I think it needs more edge.

My Dad tore himself away from the football game and felt the blade. He nodded slowly.

The stone was doubled-wrapped in baggies and paper towels that were held tight by two rubber bands. My father laid out the layers on the counter. He put a drop of oil on the stone and massaged it with his finger.

Hey Irm, he said.

My mother handed him the knife. He laid the edge carefully against the stone and feathered the blade against the silky surface.

My father worked both sides of the blade. Then he flipped the stone over to the finer side. Again the application of oil and the light scraping of steel on stone. Finally he tested the edge. He drew a sheet of paper from the drawer and, with almost no effort, slit it in half.

My mother nodded. The rabbi shrugged.

My father wiped the blade and the stone with an old towel. He then rewrapped the stone in its many layers and stowed it back in the recesses of the closet.

Then they all approached the crib. My little brother was sleeping and making small satisfied noises. He had just been fed and his face was bloated and red. The rabbi took my brother’s lolling head in his hairy hands and pried his jaws open. He started a soft prayer. My brother’s tongue was white with milk and moved forward and back with his uneven breath.

Suddenly, the rabbi ended his dovening. My father turned away. My mother advanced towards the crib, holding the knife high overhead and then brought it down in a gentle chop in the ritual circumcision of the tongue.

--RN

the mosque at al vitah

2006-04-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

My father always talked about the mosque at Al Vitah.

We would visit it next year -- next year, always next year. And then he was old and walking with a cane and he didn't remember the mosque at Al Vitah. I asked him about it and he seemed on the verge of something, like a light went on, but then he lost it.

He was always a proud man, proud to be from Beirut, proud of his Savile Row suits, but in his last years he escaped all that. He immersed himself in Beethoven. All he wanted to know. Beethoven. Like somehow Beethoven's demonic last harmonies mattered.

He was absorbed in the Diabelli Variations when I asked him about the mosque at Al Vitah. "Listen," he said after his short pause of memory. "Listen to the stupid little theme, and then the way Beethoven blows it apart in the first variation. Now that's inspiration."

I don't remember what was so special about the mosque at Al Vitah. He never really talked about it specifically. It was always in comparison, like when we saw the Chagall windows in the little church in Pocantico Hills, north of New York City. He stood and looked at the stained glass, all of us uncertain about what he would say, this cultured Muslim man in a shrine to Christianity, facing art made by a Jew. Then he nodded. "Nice," he said, "but nothing compared to the mosque at Al Vitah."

He died without ever having been back to the mosque at Al Vitah.

Though I was born in Lebanon, we came here to my father's post at the United Nations when I was scarcely two. So I'm more American than Lebanese. I like McDonald's and Pepsi. Chick peas and tahini were an acquired taste.

Still, as my father lost his mind, and as he turned more and more towards Beethoven, my thoughts turned more and more to the mosque at Al Vitah. I planned a trip as soon as my father's condition stabilized. We would go back to Lebanon the whole family making a pilgrimage. And, of course, we'd see the mosque.

"Count me out," my sister said. "I won't go anywhere with them." My mother, too, in her own way was less than cooperative. "I appreciate the idea," she said, lapsing into French, "but what is there for us to do there?"

Still, I planned. I had a travel agent working out all the details. Nothing threw a monkey wrench into the works -- nothing, that is, except my father's death, an unfortunate aspect of his personal jihad over losing his mind. The doctor couldn't say whether disease had overtaken him or whether he had simply lost the will to fight it. Whatever. I know what I think. I think he gave up that day he could not remember the mosque. It was that simple.

Though none of my family wanted to go, I decided to make the trip to Lebanon as my personal memorial for my father.

But the funny thing was, when I got there, no one knew of any mosque at Al Vitah. Or even a city named Al Vitah.

There was a shrine at Al Vitry, but it was done up new, in garish marble slabs, and could not have been the one my father knew. There was a mosque at Hal Kourtah, a very sacred spot, said to stand where seven martyrs had been burned rather than renounce their faith, but it was 160 miles from Beirut and didn't seem like the kind of place my father would have liked. Dozens of peasants streamed into the squat stone building, leading sheep and goats to have them sanctified, made fruitful, made holy. There was no mark of beauty about the mosque or the ceremony.

This, then, was what I pondered over drinks on the plane home: the miraculous (if I can use that word) disappearance of my father's favorite place, the mosque at Al Vitah.

My sister laughed when I told her.

"Oh, shows you never to believe anything the old goat ever said." She's a modern woman. No veils for her.

My mother wrinkled her already wrinkled upper lip. "He never took me there," she said. "Now let me show you the lovely icon I bought across the street from Bloomingdale's."

I continued to teach -- for that is what I do, teach philosophy (western, mostly, to my father's great shame). Sometimes, in the evenings, I pour myself a scotch, put on the Grosse Fugue, and attempt to discover inspiration.

But of the mosque at Al Vitah, nothing.

I have an idea about it now -- that mosque that exists only as a memory of a memory, my recollection of my father's faulty image -- and it goes like this: we all, every man, every person, have our own mosque at Al Vitah, a place we go to when we need to go to a place that is ours alone.

That was why my father was right to die. When he lost that place, he lost himself.

And that's its true meaning. Each man's mosque at Al Vitah is the only thing worth fighting for. All other battles are pointless. All other wars are unimportant. I am a Western man, steeped in tolerance and multiculturalism, but if someone, anyone--one of my students, for instance--threatened to burn the mosque at Al Vitah, or bomb it, or damage it in any way, I know I would fight to the death. For the mosque at Al Vitah is my jihad and I can never let anything or anyone separate me from that battle.

the air of atrocity

2006-03-22T16:29:00.000-08:00

It is the air of atrocity
An event as ordinary
As a president

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance,
In which people burn.
--from Of Being Numerous, George Oppen, 1968

of monuments, money and the fall of man

2006-03-20T09:39:00.000-08:00

The Paradise Post would have had a field day.

Evicted From Eden!
heavenly host pushes primeval pair from Paradise;
celestial court says pilfering fruit violates terms of creation

There’s trouble in Paradise.
The world’s first residents were ejected from Eden yesterday. Adam and Eve, the original homo sapiens, were pushed from their house by a phalanx of angry angels and ordered never to return to the garden they have called home since six days after the creation of the universe.
The heavenly marshals arrived at dawn with papers stating that Adam and Eve were being dispossessed for taking fruit from a tree at the center of the garden, and stood guard as workers tore down the couple’s stick, mud, and grass dwelling.
Standing silently before the remnants of the hut he had built for his family—the first human habitation ever constructed—Adam grunted and pointed at his wife when asked why they had been sent packing.
“This is absolutely unfair,” Eve said as she picked through the debris for objects that could be used again. “The garden was almost abandoned when we got here. The idea that anyone owns this land, or the fruit on the trees, is insane. We have lived here almost since the beginning of time.”
As night fell, the couple was at work on a new structure just outside the garden. They said they hoped to be moved in before sunrise.
In addition to eviction, the judicial commandment against the couple also called for the earth to be cursed for all time. The owner of Eden, an absentee landlord, could not be reached for comment.

The fall of man was a landlord-tenant dispute.

I thought of this over the past week as I read about the clash between politicos, a public agency, and a developer over the future of Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers, which collapsed in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001.

We the people of New York (and the nation) are the victims of a fundamental category error. We are acting as if real estate development is in the public interest.

Of course, that’s what developers and public agencies enamored of real estate would have us believe. It’s what they say in their carefully couched press briefings and public appearances.

I’ve got one word for them: Fuhgeddaboudit.

A developer exists for one reason only: to make money on his deals. I don’t care what a mensch developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease on the Trade Center site, may be in his private life. The guy is in the business of making money. That’s why he pursued double indemnity for his insurance settlement. And it’s why he’s playing hardball now.

Similarly, a public agency doesn’t get involved in real estate development unless it, too, is interested in money. That’s why the Port Authority started planning to build the towers back in the 1960s. The idea: bring high end offices to the lower end of Manhattan Island, prime the pump, make money (and, in the process, destroy Radio Row, a great and historic area whose only sin was that it offered limited opportunities for making maximum profits.) And that's why they want to rebuild now.

Here’s a quote from Reuters about last week’s squabble: “At issue is who will build which skyscrapers at the site to replace the lost 10 million square feet (930,000 square metres) of lost office space, what rent to charge, and how to divide up Silverstein's $4.6 billion in insurance proceeds.” In addition, the news agency wrote, “A deal is crucial to Silverstein getting $3.4 billion in tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, half each from the state of New York and New York City, which he needs to finance the project.”

This is not about September 11, 2001. It is not about tragedy or terrorism or heroism or consecrating ground that served as a mass grave for 2,749 innocent people, or anything remotely humane. It is about buildable square feet. The redevelopment of the World Trade Center site is nothing more than a real estate deal. And real estate deals are not about higher human emotions. They are about profit.

If the public wants a memorial or, indeed, anything that upholds values more lasting than the Almighty dollar, then let’s take this parcel out of the hands of real estate types. The fall of man hinged on much less.

The Law of War and Peace

2006-03-10T05:34:00.000-08:00

A centuries old text may not seem like the best tool for present-day political analysis. But when I cracked the covers of The Law of War and Peace, by the Dutch Renaissance scholar Hugo Grotius, originally published in 1625, his words seemed hyper-modern and specially constructed to address the situation that exists right now in Iraq.

Unlike most of today’s public figures, Grotius did not glorify military matters. He understood that there was little noble about armed conflict. “War,” he wrote with characteristic candor, “is not one of the honest crafts. Rather it is a thing so horrible that nothing but absolute necessity or true affection can make it honorable.”

In his tome, Grotius tackled a thorny ethical issue that dogs us in Iraq: can a war be considered just? If there’s to be an answer, Grotius argued, the reasons for the war had to be fully aired. This is because the consequences of pitched battle “are so grave as to require more than plausible reasons for war. The reasons should be evident to everybody.” This ancient analyst said it simply wasn’t right for a nation to go to war without persuasive evidence of an enemy’s wrongdoing: “A man who knows his cause is just but who has not documents sufficient to convince the possessor of the injustice of his position may not on that account legitimately go to war.”

The bogus claim about yellow cake from Niger? The spurious story that Saddam Hussein had a chemical arsenal that could be deployed in 45 minutes? The non-existent connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein? There seems little doubt: to Grotius, these busted justifications would make this war illegitimate.

The Law of War and Peace also offers some clear-headed ideas about occupation. Here, Grotius quotes the great Latin orator Cicero: “If, under the pressure of circumstances, individuals promise something, even to an enemy, their promise should be kept exactly.”

The U.S. has promised lots of things. We promised Iraqis a better life, with stability, services, security, civil rights and democracy. Even the Bush Administration has acknowledged that we haven’t yet succeeded in keeping those promises. We promised the world that we would respect human rights. Yet we have suspended habeas corpus (the right of a prisoner to confront the charges against him or her, which has been on the books in English-speaking lands since at least 1305), we have maligned the Geneva Conventions, which ban torture of prisoners, as quaint and outmoded, and we have put forth the notion that our government can spy on citizens without a warrant. We promised that we would tell the truth even if it wasn’t pretty. Yet our leaders continued to declare that we do not torture even as the photos from Abu Ghraib and descriptions of conditions in the prion at Guantanamo were beamed across the planet. We promised that we understood the responsibility of taking over another country. Yet, to this day, no major commander or administration official has accepted responsibility for our shortcomings in Iraq.

Small wonder, then, that we are increasingly viewed as occupiers rather than liberators—even by people who suffered under Saddam’s brutal regime. And small wonder that the insurgency seems to be able to operate with impunity, no matter how many thousands we throw in jail. As it says in the Bible (Proverbs 18:19), “A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city.”

March 19th will be the third anniversary of the day we began the bombing of Baghdad. We tore through the country. By April 9, 2003, American Marines were helping Iraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. And on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush rushed onto the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of major combat operations. In the three years of this war, more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers have died and more than 16,000 have been injured. More than 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the conflict began.

Grotius had strong words to characterize a leader who wades into war without sufficient justification, words that apply to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, and all the others who brought us to this point: “A king who goes to war for light causes, or in order to exact unnecessary penalties involving serious risks, is responsible to his subjects for repairing the damage resulting therefrom. For he committed a true crime, if not against his enemy, yet against his own people, by dragging them on slight excuse into so dire a calamity.”

--Robert Neuwirth