A Colossal Wreck (32 page)

But not goat entrails, surely. The animal rights crowd would never stand for it.

February 28

Chalk up another milestone for sex ed. The University of California at Berkeley has put a “male sexuality” class on ice after the campus newspaper, the
Daily Californian
, published allegations that as part of their course students were taken to a strip club where they watched their instructor have sex, and also participated in an “orgy” at an party. A female sexuality course is also under review.

As news of the Berkeley ban came in I happened to be leafing through the analysis of a man code-named “Beta,” the foot fetishist in
Sexual Aberrations
, written by Freud’s sometime pal Wilhelm Stekel. “I must mention,” Stekel writes with perhaps excessive enthusiasm, “Beta wasn’t in the least animated by women’s ankles, legs or lovely shoes.” No, the dirty beast “wanted to see the shoe fit tightly” and “is promptly enlivened by the sight of corns and envies every chiropodist he sees. He likes only male feet: red, swollen, dirty, sweaty and inflamed feet.”

Beta craved to view and smell only the feet of the poor, not out of class solidarity but because their economic condition meant they had badly fitting shoes in which they worked hard all day: “On warm days, he goes to the Danube where poor working men may be found in droves, bathing their sweaty, swollen feet. It is the sight of these large, red feet that then gives him a thrill. He rushes home to masturbate.”

March 2

Life is returning to normalcy in Kandahar after the grim supervision of the Taliban clerics. Joyful sons of Sodom are to be seen driving along the boulevards of the ancient city, their catamites demurely installed in the passenger seat. Kandahar has long been fabled as the San Francisco of South Asia.

It seems that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors behind Mullah Omar’s mobilizing of the Taliban. There was a famous fracas in 1994 when two warlords faced off in a dispute over which of them would have the right to rape an attractive young fellow who had fallen into their clutches. There was gunplay in which civilians were killed. Eventually the lad was freed by Mullah Omar’s group and the one-eyed zealot was promptly inundated with requests to help in other such disputes.

The inhabitants of Kabul, who had seen their city devastated and thousands killed in the war between muj warlords, similarly yearned for the security, albeit puritanical, offered by the Taliban. Farmers and poor city dwellers who had seen mass rapes of their daughters by the warlords’ armed rabbles also strongly supported the Taliban, reckoning that the compulsory burkas were no bad thing if it meant the safety of women going out in public.

One of Omar’s first decrees when the Taliban took power in 1994 was the suppression of homosexuality. Accused sodomites endured Trial by Wall Push. In one such trial in February of 1998, “three men sentenced to death for sodomy in Kandahar were taken to the base of a huge mud and brick wall, which was pushed over by tank.” Two of them died, but in an instructive example of how the Taliban tempered its stern ways with an acknowledgement of the capricious workings of Allah, one crawled away to live and love another day.

But now that pre-Taliban normalcy is returning to Kandahar, just as it is to the rest of Afghanistan, tens of thousands are fleeing to Pakistan to escape banditry and starvation. “One can see the pairs returning,” Tim Reid reports in the London
Times
. “Usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh faced youth.” He adds that “it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned” but they get out of poverty. “Once the boy falls into the
man’s clutches—nearly always men with a wife and family—he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture.”

March 12

Back in April 1989, a Billy Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after he had met with Graham in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.”

Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. I recall finding a small story in the
Syracuse Herald-Journal
. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter.

Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about what Graham refers to as the Jewish “stranglehold” on Hollywood and the media. In this 1972 Oval Office session Nixon raises the topic, saying “we can’t talk about it publicly.” The President cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who was executive producer of the NBC hit
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
, as telling him that “eleven of the twelve writers are Jewish.” “That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that
Life
magazine,
Newsweek
, the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.” Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite are “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares. “You
believe that?” Nixon asks. “Yes, sir,” Graham says. “Oh, boy,” replies Nixon. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.” “No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.

Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does not mean “that all the Jews are bad” but that most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.” “That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. “And they’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds.

Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.” After Graham’s departure Nixon says to Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.” “It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies. “Well,” says Nixon, “it’s also, the Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

Within days of these exchanges becoming public the eighty-three-year old Graham was hauled from his semi-dotage, and impelled to express public contrition. “Experts” on Graham were duly cited as expressing their “shock” at Graham’s White House table talk.

Why the shock? Don’t they know that this sort of stuff is consonant with the standard conversational bill of fare at 75 percent of the country clubs in America, not to mention many a Baptist soiree? Nixon thought American Jews were lefty peaceniks who dominated the Democratic Party and were behind the attacks on him. Graham reckoned it was Hollywood Jews who had sunk the nation in porn. Haldeman agreed with both of them. At whatever level of fantasy they were all acknowledging power. But they didn’t say they wanted to kill a million Jews. That’s what Graham said about the Vietnamese and no one raised a bleat.

April 23

Late in the evening in back-road America you tend to pick the motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There’s nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard, with maybe Jeffrey Dahmer or Norman Bates waiting to greet you in the Reception office. The all-night clerk at the Lincoln Motel (three cars out front) in Austin, Nevada, who checked me in at around 11.30 p.m. a few nights ago, told me she was eighty-one, and putting in two part-time jobs, the other at the library, to help her pay her heating bills since she couldn’t make it on her Social Security.

She imparted this info without self-pity as she took my $29.50, saying that business in Austin last fall had been brisk and that the fifty-seven motel beds available in the old mining town had been filled with crews laying fiber-optic cable along the side of the road, which in the case of Austin meant putting it twenty feet under the graveyard that skirts the road just west of town.

Earlier that day, driving from Utah through the Great Basin along US-50, billed as “the loneliest road,” I’d seen these cables, blue and green and maybe two inches in diameter, sticking out of the ground on the outskirts of Ely, as if despairing at the prospect of the Great Salt Lake desert stretching ahead, through league after league of sagebrush.

So we can run fiber-optic cable through the western deserts but not put enough money in the hands of eighty-one-year-olds so they don’t have to pull all-night shifts clerking in motels. At least the lady in Austin was spry and interested in life, refreshed by her intermittent naps on the couch in the sitting room off the reception office, dipping into her book, with the motel cat to keep her company, across the road from the International Café, which serves good breakfasts and decent drinks from a magnificent wooden bar that came round the Horn from Europe back in Austin’s mining heyday in the 1870s.

People who drive or lecture their way through the American interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational conversations with people about the Middle East, about George W. Bush, and other topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either coast.

April 24

The ripe tones of Archbishop Mahony of Los Angeles filled my house last week, courtesy of National Public Radio. Mahoney spoke of his horror, his shame, at the stories of priestly abuse. He apologized to the victims. The mellifluous sanctimony of his penitence filled the room with such unction that I burst out laughing. What a surprise it all is! Priests hitting on altar boys! Priests molesting children. We’re shocked, shocked!

When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading Jail in 1895 for sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover were soon replete with panicked gays fleeing England to Paris. Hundreds of Catholic priests here, many of them in retirement, must be asking themselves whether it might be prudent to remove themselves from the jurisdiction until the heat dies down.

It was bound to happen. Five years ago a senior dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy confided that over the previous decade the Church had paid out over a billion dollars in out-of-court settlements as well as court fights on priest abuse cases.

Anyone with any knowledge of these cases knows perfectly well that this is no matter of a few rotten apples in the barrel. Sometimes, hearing about one priestly molester after another, one has the impression that not only has the Catholic Church been the prime sanctuary for repressed gays for the past several hundred years but that there isn’t a priest alive that hasn’t at some point made advances to an altar boy or boy scout. At least in the Middle Ages they got off with the nuns, or in the nineteenth century when they could afford domestics, the maid.

And certainly the Church has protected these priests, moved them around the country, away from an area where their activities had become known. The Church has some very dingy closets to clean out.

May 15

THE ROOTS OF WAR RHETORIC

Dear Sir,

I was amused to learn from Alexander Cockburn that the Vietnam War was caused by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. It is tempting to classify this as a fine example of the Mendocino School of deductive logic. In fact, Mr. Cockburn joins a respected group of American social critics with his claim.

In
Life on the Mississippi
, Mark Twain suggests that Sir Walter Scott caused the American Civil War. It seems that the romantic tales of chivalry so imbued the antebellum Southern culture that military conflict was widely supported throughout years of unbelievable destruction. There is a modicum of truth in each claim.

I would suggest a more likely literary trigger to the Vietnam War is
Profiles in Courage
. The author of that work, John F. Kennedy, was certain to believe in the ideals he portrayed, and in fact lived. Sadly, he was also in a position to act on those beliefs.

Sincerely,

Edwin Shelby, Fountain Hills, Arizona

Alexander Cockburn replies: Of all rhetorical modes, irony and hyperbole are the most perilous. There were people who believed Swift’s
Modest Proposal
was for real, Shelby among them no doubt.

May 16

Over the past twenty years I’ve learned there’s a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There’s a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing “the left” of anti-Semitism. Of course the rhetorical trick is to conflate “Israel” or “the State of Israel” with “Jews” and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo, to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic.

These days you can’t even say that the
New York Times
is owned by a Jewish family without risking charges that you stand in Goebbels’s shoes. I even got accused of anti-Semitism the other day for
mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood, which they most certainly did, as recounted in a funny and informative book published in 1988,
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler.

The encouraging fact is that despite the efforts of the Southern Poverty Law Center to drum up funds by hollering that the Nazis are about to march down Main Street, there’s remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US, and almost none that I’ve ever been able to detect on the American left, which is of course amply stocked with non-self-hating Jews.