The Inn at Perry Cabin
June 29, 2003
St. Michaels, Maryland 
4 pm

THE OYSTER PAPERS 2003

Stephen:

COVERING A PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION:
HOW A BIG STORY THREW ME FOR A LOOP

Tim:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN AN AGE OF TERRORISM:
WHAT’S CHANGED?

John:

MY TWO STOOGES:
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE KIDS WHO PICKED UP MY GYM CLOTHES?

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Musical Interlude

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Joel:

ME & BEN:
WHEN UPPER CRUSTS COLLIDE

David:

THE INVENTION OF EUROPE:
ISLAM IN THE 8th CENTURY

Marty:

GULLIVER IN FIJI:
A JESUITICAL VIEW OF A FARAWAY LAND

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Musical Finale

THE OYSTER ANTHEM

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COVERING A PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION:

HOW A BIG STORY THREW ME FOR A LOOP

 Stephen Banker

John Meeks, psychiatrist and Oyster Foundation stalwart, says that what happened to me in the aftermath of the assassination was a textbook case of "hypomania." Definition: A mild form of mania, characterized by elation and a feeling of well-being, together with quickness of thought. I asked him if that was a deep-seated condition or if it could be the result of specific circumstances. His answer: "Yes, there is 'circumstantial hypomania'. Indeed the whole concept, as contrasted to mania, implies a basically normal variant which is usually event related." Whew.
I knew I had to get to Europe as soon as I could work it in. It was midday, almost 40 years ago, November 22, 1963, a Friday.  I was standing in the State Department pressroom, waiting for my CBS colleague Marvin Kalb to finish recording a radio piece.  Marvin had an impressive title, “Diplomatic Correspondent,”’ while I was just “State Department Reporter.” He often relied on me for Latin American context, a region I had studied as a CBS Fellow at Columbia, but there was a big world, I knew, outside the Western Hemisphere.  And I had never been to Europe.

The understanding was that if there were important news on a given day, Marvin would do TV and leave radio to me. This was not one of those days. The noon briefing featured Undersecretary Averill Harriman pushing JFK’s Vietnam policy —  only marginally newsworthy. Marvin gave me an amused look — he knew how much I liked to get on the air — and sat down to write a 45-second radio spot. “Where do you want to go for lunch?” he asked. I said I’d think about it while he was filing. He ambled off to the radio booth overlooking the Department auditorium, the site of presidential news conferences in those days.

A minute later, a woman from USIA — Marie was her name —  burst into the pressroom, her face flushed and her body taut. “U.P. says the president’s been shot!” she cried.  I raced to the radio booth.  Marvin was already hearing the same thing from the office over his headset. We dashed to the wire room and there it was — a story by U.P.I.’s Merriman Smith out of Dallas that shots had been fired during the motorcade and the president had been wounded, perhaps seriously. A.P., Agence France-Presse, and Reuters were beginning to move similar stories. Three bells on a teletype machine meant urgent, 5 bells a bulletin, a flash was 10 — the room was an orchestra of tambourines.

Marvin turned to me.  “OK,” he said, “let’s go to lunch.” 

I looked at him, astonished. “This is a Dallas story now,” he said.  “Soon it will be a Washington story. When that starts, we won’t eat for days.”  We hastened to a restaurant across Virginia Avenue, sat at the bar and stoked up on roast beef and mashed potatoes. When we finished, Marvin said he was going to walk the long way back around the State Department to compose his thoughts.  Not me — I made a beeline for the pressroom. In the CBS cubbyhole, our phones were ringing.

I was 29 years old with half a year of radio and television reporting under my belt. This demanding, stimulating new job was helping me, I thought, get over my father’s death a few months earlier. I was known as an excellent writer, a passable broadcaster and someone who could squeeze a story out of a stone. I thought of myself as an even-handed journalist but I liked Jack Kennedy. As a Harvard graduate, I treasured the incident during his 1952 senate race against Henry Cabot Lodge when he spied my chum Michael Halberstam reading The Crimson on a Boston-to-New York train. He bellied up to Michael, who (unknown to Kennedy) was an editor of the paper, and grumbled, “How can The Crimson support Cabot against me?”   

When I arrived in Washington early in 1963, I rejoined a cadre of college friends, many of whom were working in the Kennedy administration. One told me, “The Harvard man coming to Washington finds himself already plugged in.” As if to prove the point, a presidential writer, Fred Holborn, entered into idle conversation with me in the West Wing lounge one slow afternoon, and when I introduced myself, said, “Oh, I’ve heard you on the air.”  This was unsurprising since I had just finished one of those 45-second spots. “I don’t mean CBS,” he said. “I mean your play-by-play basketball on WHRB (the Harvard station).”

So I was among friends and peers. In the wake of my father’s death, this was a bracing crowd. There seemed to be a logic, a continuity to what I was doing.  In a business based on unpredictability — news — it gave me a feeling of stability.  When the president was shot, I knew immediately that bond had been severed. But there wasn’t time to dwell on it.

With correspondent Charles von Fremd, I drove out to Andrews Air Force Base to await the arrival of Mrs. Kennedy and the casket. I tried to call my office, but local lines were out of commission from overuse. I called CBS New York, and they relayed instructions from Washington. When the plane came in, Chuck did TV and I narrated what I saw on radio. Mrs. Kennedy descended on a forklift with the casket. There was blood on her jacket. Lyndon Johnson, now president, emerged a bit later, mumbled a few words and disappeared into a limo.

I managed to call in. The assignment editor expressed satisfaction with what I’d done at Andrews and sent me to the White House, where CBS correspondents Bob Pierpoint and George Herman were working, their faces  damp with tears. And so too were the countenances of our competitors in the next booth, NBC’s Sander Vanocur and Bob Goralski. I realized with wonderment that I felt no sadness. In fact, I was exhilarated.

Even then I understood the hypocrisy of my feeling. The firmament of my Kennedy connection was gone. And by the way, where the hell was my humanity?  But for the moment, I was getting as much broadcast  time as I craved, and  my heart was pounding with excitement and, yes, joy. It was an inappropriate elation, of course, and it dimly occurred to me that a crash might be at the other end. But for the moment, this was definitely fun.  We did stand-ups from the White House lawn for TV and inserts for radio all night long.  Despite my upbeat mood, I affected a grim voice on radio and a dour expression on television.

At dawn, I rendezvoused with a camera crew and we drove to National Airport, parked right in front of the terminal, and went in looking for early-arrival VIPs to interview. The one I remember most vividly is Martin Luther King. He responded as if he were addressing a congregation of 500 people. He didn’t look at me or the camera, he stared at the ceiling and orated. I asked simple, personal questions but it was no use. When I saw the exchange on the air, I kicked myself for not bringing him down to earth.

That night, when the CBS desk gave me time off some 33 hours after the assassination, I slept lightly and fitfully.

The next day, Sunday, November 24th,  the coffin bearing President Kennedy’s body was to be borne to the Capitol, where he would lie in state. I was assigned  to the roof of the Post Office Building on Pennsylvania and 12th. The network crew had rigged a perch so that I could see what was taking place below. Before long, the procession came into view, and the CBS Radio anchorman, Neil Strawser, cued me. I started talking about the clear, cold weather, the military honor guard, the riderless horse, the silence of the crowds lining the avenue.  Just as I was getting up a head of steam, Strawser burst in with, “Stephen, I have to interrupt you. We have word from Dallas that the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, has been shot.”  As my microphone went dead, so almost did I.  This was a catastrophic, unfair twist to the story.

The funeral for the slain president was to take place the next day. My first task was to cover the formation of the procession at the White House. As I stood on the portico, huddled against one of the columns, I described the cortege as it lined up in front of me. And then I said softly, “Mrs. Kennedy has come out of the White House, holding the hands of her children. She’s stopped now just a few feet from where I'm speaking. I had better hush up or else she’ll hear me.”  For the next two minutes, an awfully long time on the air, CBS Radio picked up ambient sounds — the horses, the wind, the flags flapping, the soldiers aligning themselves — but no verbal description. Several colleagues later said that this was a terrific broadcast moment. But I knew that what I’d done was an actor’s trick. I could easily have stepped back a few feet and gone on talking. The silence was my silence.

Then, when the procession moved away from the White House grounds, and assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue, I hurried out to describe the first stage of the march. My press badge got me quickly to the front of the crowd. A CBS engineer saw me coming, reached out with a microphone and pointed his finger at me, indicating the mike was hot, we were on the air.  In front of me, the towering Charles de Gaulle and the diminutive Hailie Selassie, both in military uniforms, walked side by side and stride for stride, and I began my broadcast. The soundman, listening on his headphones, nodded at my description.

After almost four days of non-stop news, the networks, including CBS, began to return to their schedules. But for me, throttling down was impossible. As the story evolved from news into history, I became resentful and agitated. I quarreled, sometimes hotly, with editors in Washington and New York who didn’t share my urgent concern for every breaking detail.

I was due to start a vacation on December 20th, less than a month after the assassination, though it seemed longer. The company’s business manager told me I couldn't put it off.  I felt frozen in place, incapable of any decision. My life, apart from work, became mechanical while at work my intensity continued.

When the first day of vacation arrived, I had made no plans. Early that morning, after a restless night, I sat down on the floor of my apartment, not on the sofa or a chair or even the carpet, but on the hard wooden floor, my back against the door. Was this the long-awaited crash?

I stayed in that severe position well into the day. As I sat, I relived my work over the last few weeks. Had my excitement, approaching frenzy, spilled over when I spoke on the air, when I corralled people for interviews, when I telephoned the office? Why did I like being on so much?  Did my aptitude for the job simply mask my internal disarray? Why was there no sadness in me at the death of a man I admired and who had been a reassuring icon in my life?

Now, at last, waves of feeling flooded through me, inexplicably mixed with a new round of grief for my father.  Hours passed. I had no answers and there were no answers. When I arose, it was to book flights to London, Madrid and Paris.

. __________________________________________________

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN AN AGE OF TERRORISM:

WHAT’S CHANGED?

Tim O’Brien

This is the speech that changed somebody's mind. Marty Moleski said that his course in ethics at Canisius College would be taught differently because of what he heard here. I find that amazing. When was the last time you heard about somebody altering his opinion on a core subject on the basis of a talk? In addition to knowing how to marshal an argument, Tim can also whomp up a mean Cajun dinner.
I started covering the Supreme Court in 1977, less than a year after the Court handed down its landmark decision in Gregg v. Georgia, effectively reinstating the death penalty in those states that chose to have it. In the twenty years that followed, I covered all  the major death penalty cases to reach the Court; they all brought into focus the arguments pro and con.

 I propose there are four ways of looking at capital punishment and whether you’re for it or against it can be heavily influenced by which method you choose. The first is to look solely at a specific crime—only aggravated murder can bring a death sentence, says the Supreme Court. If this is the perspective you choose, you will be more inclined to favor execution. Then there is the broader view; how does the system work?  Looking at the jurisprudential crazy-quilt, one is more apt to oppose it. There are two ways of examining the system. One is through the lens of the legislator, reflecting the views of the majority, and considering social policy. This is the way we most commonly debate capital punishment. The debate is endless to the point that it may well be incapable of resolution. Another way of examining the capital punishment system is to ask whether it is “good law” which, as I shall explain, has possibilities.

One of the policy arguments in favor of capital punishment that I think has been lost in the debate is how awful these offenses are and the lingering effects they have on those who are left behind, trauma that usually lasts for the rest of their lives. Every one of the death penalty cases the Supreme Court chose to consider since 1977 involved crimes of unspeakable brutality committed by individuals who appeared to have little hope for any salvation. Opponents of capital punishment point out there’s no persuasive evidence that it deters. That should not be the end of it.

The death penalty also serves society’s legitimate interest in retribution. Those who favor the death penalty tend to call it “justice,” those who don’t, “revenge.”  Retribution, however, is a legitimate function of our law.

I also came to appreciate many of the arguments advanced against the death penalty. The possibility of error. And the moral component. Can we really persuade people that it is wrong to kill people by killing people?  Justice William Brennan, in one of his few television interviews, told me “Taking human life… That’s God’s work, not man’s.”

Another troubling feature of capital punishment in the U.S.:   More than 90% of the inmates on death row have three characteristics that were beyond their control;  better than 95% of them have at least one of these characteristics. They are:  They were victims of child abuse, were under-educated or had no education at all, and grew up in abject poverty. No excuse, but the striking prominence of these characteristics should be troublesome. We must ask ourselves whether we are, at least to some extent, executing these individuals not only because of what they did but also because of who their parents are and what their parents did. These are policy questions, not legal questions. The Supreme Court would say if they’re the ones who are committing the crimes, then they’re are the ones who should be receiving the punishment.

The arguments on both sides seemed so powerful, I found myself somewhat ambivalent about what the answer should be. I still cannot profess to have the answer, but surely the last twenty-plus years have left me with a profoundly more informed ambivalence.

I’ve also come to question whether there is any usefulness in debating the death penalty as policy.   It seems to me that the arguments are so powerful in favor and so powerful against, that we have a well-justified stalemate. So — right or wrong — the majority rules. While I do not myself  trust the majority, I shudder at how much more frightening it would be if the majority were to be guided solely by my own view of what is right or what might work, or yours, or any other individual’s. Public opinion counts, of course. Institutions have a role to play. But they tend to balance out one another. The news media, for example,  report how the system occasionally fails.    But then, in particularly heinous crimes,  they also help make the case that the death penalty satisfies society’s desire for retribution.   Two steps forward, two steps back. The stalemate continues.

So if the policy debate is irreconcilable, as I believe it is, then how should the death penalty be considered. One cannot argue with a straight face that it is unconstitutional per se—cruel and unusual punishment. It’s specifically authorized several times in the Constitution itself. The Supreme Court has ruled that even that could be overcome if it could be shown that the death penalty is inconsistent with society’s “evolving standards of decency.”   It isn’t. Although popular support has started to wane in the last decade, support for capital punishment in the U.S. still remains quite high.

It seems to me that if capital punishment falls, it does so irrespective of whether it is sound policy, but because it is bad law.   Not that it is bad policy (as many insist it is) or that it is unconstitutional on its face, but because for whatever reason we are incapable of implementing it in a meaningful, rational way.   The Supreme Court should say so and here are some of the reasons why—

When the Court first threw out capital punishment in 1972, it did so because it found it was being implemented in a “wanton and freakish” manner. Despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court to provide a measure of fairness,  nothing has changed.   Justice Department statistics show that race figures prominently in death penalty decisions:  Black or Hispanic defendants are four times more likely to get a death sentence than a white defendant. And the murder of a white person is 11-times more likely to bring a death sentence than the murder of a minority.   On average, a black person who kills a white person is statistically more than 40-times more likely to get a death sentence than when it is the other way around, when a white person kills a black. Can that be due process?  The Supreme Court rejected this argument, 5-to-4, saying that unless the defense can show racial discrimination in his or her individual case, race doesn’t matter. Years after the ruling, one of the Justices in the majority publicly allowed that he came to regret the decision, that he thought it was wrong. Too late!

Another troubling aspect of the capital punishment process besides the arbitrary role played by race is the quality of representation. Lawyers will line up at the courthouse doors for a tedious anti-trust case which can pay huge fees, but no one is lining up to represent capital defendants. The quality of representation in death penalty cases is a national disgrace.    There have been lawyers in capital cases who have fallen asleep, shown up drunk or failed to show up at all. And the appeals courts tend to look the other way. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals a few years back refused to set aside the death sentence for a defendant whose lawyer slept through the trial on the ground that it may have been a clever strategy to win sympathy for his doomed client. The Sixth Amendment is supposed to guarantee the accused “the effective assistance of counsel.”  But as a former President of the American College of Trial Lawyers put it, the test for competency of counsel in death penalty cases is to put a mirror under the lawyer’s nose and if there’s any evidence he’s breathing, he passes. Even though the stakes are the highest when human life is on the line, the failure to find adequate counsel for capital defendants should not be surprising. It doesn’t pay; lawyers often end up spending their own money. The clients tend to be most undesirable. And at the end of the day, every step the lawyer takes is certain to be carefully scrutinized by appeals court after appeals court for any kind of error. The last argument the condemned can make is that all the previous arguments failed because he had an incompetent lawyer.

However one may define “due process of law,” the process the United States now has in place for the death penalty is anything but “due.”  The death penalty is not unconstitutional on its face, but as applied.

So what about terrorists?  As strong as the legal, constitutional arguments against capital punishment are, they  do not seem to apply with the same force in the case of terrorists. And the policy arguments in favor of the death penalty seem to apply with special force.The terrorists who crashed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11th  may or may not have been privileged, but they don’t have the same cultural disadvantages of the typical death row inmate in the U.S. — the child abuse, comparative poverty and lack of education.

The race of terrorists doesn’t play into the formula as the wild card that it is for most death row inmates in the U.S. One’s religion should be irrelevant too, unless it is a motivating force in which case, it becomes an element of the crime.

As for legal representation, in the celebrated cases of terrorism, the defendants are likely to have representation of a  caliber that most of us could never afford. Courts would turn somersaults to see that any conviction is not placed in jeopardy by appointing, or allowing, inadequate counsel.

Not only are the procedural defects more likely to be absent in the case of the accused terrorist, but the traditional justification for the death penalty may be greater.   There are two classic reasons for the death penalty. One is we want “justice,” a euphemism for retribution.   As with 9/11, not only are innocent lives lost, but society is placed in fear that other innocent lives — we don’t know whose — may be next. All because terrorists wish to make a point, or seek to coerce some political concession. The desire for retribution can be particularly great.

The other classic reason for the death penalty is deterrence, not to be confused with prevention, which can be accomplished by merely keeping the perpetrator in prison. Deterrence refers to deterring others. And there is no persuasive evidence the death penalty accomplishes that.

In the case of terrorism, however, the death penalty can be a deterrent. It is the terrorists’ modus operandi to engage in violence, or threaten violence to win the freedom of their jailed colleagues. That kind of violence would be deterred if the colleague were no longer available to be released.

Terrorism, at least in my view,  is in a class by itself. It may take special care for courts and the Justice Department to define with any precision what acts of terrorism should be covered. I believe they are up to this task.

My experiences with capital punishment have led me to three conclusions. One is that as a general matter, it cannot be implemented in a rational way and should therefore be abandoned. Not because it’s immoral, not because it is cruel and unusual punishment per se, but because we have shown we are incapable of implementing it in a rational way.

The second conclusion is that an exception can be made for terrorists, where the justification is stronger and the procedural defects are at least ameliorated.

The third conclusion is that without any legal, constitutional impediment to the execution of terrorists, we’re back where I thought we shouldn’t be. There being no constitutional impediment to the execution of terrorists, the choice  does become purely a policy question with whatever moral implications the majority wishes to attach.

For these reasons, it seems to me that those who feel passionately that the death penalty is wrong in any form and for any reason should, at least in the case of terrorism, excuse those who don’t.

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My Two Stooges

John Meeks

I met John when he was the psychiatrist at a school one of my children attended. I noticed immediately that he looked for what was well in people as distinguished from what was sick. What a difference from the other mental health professionals I'd met who searched for nothing but pathology. John is someone who likes people and that comes through strongly in person. Notice in this piece how he goes out of his way to be gracious, even to those who didn't mean much to him at the time.

In 1951, at the pinnacle of my athletic stardom, I magnanimously befriended a couple of stooges. In that year I was savoring the delicious fruits of fame. Strangers recognized me on the street and offered praise and encouragement. Young girls approached me, shyly flirting — some were even passably attractive. Twice a week I performed in a gymnasium overflowing with passionately cheering fans. I believe that I can say to this august group — without fear of being misunderstood — that the world was my oyster!

Before you begin to wonder why you never heard of my exploits, let me say that my world wasn't very large. Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was a town of 30,000. Of course, compared to Dexter, where I lived on a small truck farm, it seemed a metropolis.

In Pine Bluff, sports was the pick of entertainment offerings, even surpassing the Sanger Theater where the new movie version of Showboat was playing. Since our basketball team was unbeaten, we were an even greater attraction. As a starting forward, I was a hometown hero, eligible for all the perks that Pine Bluff offered.

I guess fame was easily achieved in that tiny universe but I didn’t know that then. In addition, in this era still over a decade before integration, I was spared competition from that half of Pine Bluff's adolescent population who were not allowed to attend Pine Bluff High School. Honestly, though, at the time I didn't understand all this and I thought I had really arrived.

Stooges, on the other hand, were just that — stooges. For those members of the effete establishment who eschew sports, let me explain that the stooge was the student manager. Each team had one and it was his responsibility to pick up our dirty socks, sweaty uniforms and the like. To bring us fresh towels when we showered and to do whatever gofer duties as assigned. All these lowly tasks they gladly performed to be part of the team's glory.

The Zebra's stooge was a quiet, shy fellow who performed his chores almost invisibly. On the team bus, when we traveled around Arkansas to away games, he sat in the back plucking an old guitar. Sometimes Billy Holmes, our All-State guard, would join him, softly singing country tunes. I occasionally went out of my way to say something friendly to them, though I had become much too sophisticated to listen to the hillbilly music I had grown up with!

My second stooge wasn't our student manager. He was the runty student manager for Central High School of Little Rock. Central's Tigers had long dominated Arkansas sports. At that time it was the only white high school in Little Rock, a teeming capitol of 100,000. A few years before the idiot Faubus and long before the hedonist Clinton, Little Rock was mainly known for its championship sports teams.

Late in the season, we managed a startling upset over Central in our gym. With minutes to play we were so far ahead that our coach took us out one at a time to a standing ovation for each player. When the game ended, to my surprise, the Tigers’ student manager sprinted across the court, came over to me, shook my hand and expressed his congratulations. A class act, sure, but who was this kid? Maybe I wasn’t thinking very clearly at that moment of exultation because he had to remind me that he was my cousin. Then I recalled that he and his parents had recently been to our home for a family gathering occasioned by his uncle's visit from Houston.

I only dimly remembered him — after all he was three years my junior. However, I definitely recalled his daddy. Unlike all the grown men I knew, he didn't stay in the house after dinner, talking crops, politics and local gossip. He came out and hit grounders to his son and me for hours. I’d heard it said that he used to be a pro ballplayer. Despite the age difference, the kid managed to keep up with me in fielding the hardest-hit balls.  All this flashed through my mind in that tumultuous moment right after the big game as I accepted the stooge's kind words, and then hurried away to celebrate with my teammates.

So those were my two stooges. Why are they important and what did I learn from them? I learned that humble positions aren't necessarily permanent.

The Zebra's shy musical stooge was Jim Edward Brown. He became one of country music's major stars. Surely all of you remember the smash hit, "I was Looking Back to See if You were Looking Back to See if I was Looking Back to See if You were Looking Back at Me," written and performed by Jim Ed and his sister Maxine. Jim Ed, Maxine, and their other sister, Bonnie, recorded “The Three Bells,” which sold a million copies and was the first song to hit No.1 on the country, pop and rhythm, and blues charts all at once. Around then, Jim Ed invited an up-and-comer named Elvis Presley to tour with him and his sisters, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of you, like my family, were pinned to the TV one Sunday night in 1959 when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to sing his crossover gold-record performance of "The Old Lamplighter". The lad had  come a long way from his anonymity at the back of our bus.

What about my other stooge — my little cuz from Little Rock? Well, two years later, after a serious growth spurt, he led the Little Rock Tigers to the state basketball championship. But actually his best game was baseball. He was outstanding in high school, then signed a contract to play for the Baltimore Orioles. After two years in the minors he became their third baseman and was an All-Star 15 times, the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964 and the MVP in the 1970 World Series. His name was Brooks Robinson and many consider him the greatest third baseman in baseball history.

He and my other stooge taught me an important lesson: early athletic prowess can lead you into the path of greatness — even if a farmboy from Dexter, Arkansas, didn’t know it when he saw it.

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MUSICAL INTERLUDE:
“The Old Lamplighter”
  “Looking Back to See”

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Me and Ben

Joel Dreyfuss

Race is a thorny topic under any circumstances. Here, Joel describes The Washington Post's early attempt to achieve diversity. The effort, sincere as it might have been, was complicated by the clash of two proud, unyielding aristocrats. Years later, when Joel made a journalistic trip to Brazil at my invitation, he noted that while Brazilians deny racial prejudice, the result - rich whites, poor blacks - is largely the same as it is in our country. I suggested he talk the situation over with my boss, a wealthy and influential Brazilian. He said it wouldn't be worth the trouble. "Why not?" "Because it would take me half an hour," he responded, "to explain to him that I'm black." The problem is a daunting one in every part of the world, but someone like Joel, who has held important positions having nothing to do with race, is part of the solution.

The events involving Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who couldn’t tell fact from fiction, remind me of my brief moment in the public spotlight as a young reporter. For several weeks in 1975, I was in the news, with my name published in the Village Voice, various newspaper columns, a number of magazines and then for several years after in books about the Washington Post. My relationship with my bosses became a matter of public debate – at least in journalistic circles – which were a lot more inbred than they are today. And for some time afterward I was black-listed at certain prestigious journalistic institutions. In effect, my few minutes of infamy had a profound effect on my journalistic career, on my life choices, and even the circumstances that bring me here today.

No, I didn’t fake any stories or make up quotes. But I committed a sin almost as great. I disagreed with prevailing views at the Washington Post about how wonderfully liberal the newspaper’s management was, about how well it covered the cities  and about opportunities for young journalists de couleur like me.

In 1973, at the age of 27, I was on a journalism fellowship at the University of Chicago, a kind of Midwest version of the Nieman at Harvard. Among the classes that left an impression on me were a wonderful survey of American history with historian John Hope Franklin, a class on urban education with Edgar Epps, a seminar on African religions and a fascinating course on urban geography, a relatively new field that explored the origin and evolution of cities.

I already had two journalistic jobs and about five years of experience under my belt; I had worked in the New York bureau of  the Associated Press and at the New York Post, then a liberal tabloid. The Washington Post came calling; I had been writing features in the New York Post and a couple of my stories had caught their attention. One was a profile of Leonard Bernstein revolving around the opening of  his crowning work, “Mass” at the Kennedy Center. Nothing gets an editor’s attention like a story poached from their own back yard.

Convincing me to move was easy. The Washington Post was in the midst of Watergate. I flew to Washington. for interviews, accepted an offer to join the Style section and by the end of the summer of 1973, I had gone back to New York. , packed up all my stuff and moved to DC.

I discovered that I had stepped into a hothouse of racial controversy. The year before I joined the paper, seven African-American reporters had sued the newspaper for discrimination. Ben Bradlee alluded to the suit during my round of interviews. “How do you feel about working for a paper that’s been called racist?’’ he snarled. Ben was a fourth generation Harvard Man, a pal of John F. Kennedy. However he worked hard at his tough guy persona;  he liked to walk around with his sleeves rolled up and threw the F word around a lot. I snapped back, ``If I worried about that, there wouldn’t be many places for me to work.” He must have liked my answer because now I was there.

However, the Post, at its core, was still a Southern paper. The paper hired its first black reporter in 1953, Simeon Booker, who was later was the Washington bureau chief of Jet, and suggested he not use the bathroom on the news floor,. Seven years later they hired a second black reporter, Wallace Terry, a Dartmouth. grad. That was the pace of progress in those days. By the time I got there in 1973, the Post probably had more black reporters than any other major U.S. paper. In addition to the Metro Seven, Bob Maynard was on the editorial board after a fine career on the national staff. Hollie West was the jazz critic. Dorothy Gilliam was an editor in Style.

You can imagine the Post’s delight with my success; I was constantly on the front page of Style and even did a couple of page one assignments within a few months of my arrival. In my three years at the Post, features I did were twice nominated for Pulitzers by the paper. But some editors wanted to use me as evidence of their racial acumen, a role I didn’t want to play.

Maybe this clash of titans was inevitable; if Ben was your ultimate WASP upper-crust editor; I was a very proud member of the Haitian elite with roots that are African, Jewish, Spanish and French. I used to tell my American friends that I understood what it meant to be a member of the ruling class. Two of my great-great grandfathers were signers of the 1804 Haitian declaration of independence and one of them became President of Haiti. At least two of my ancestors fought at the Battle of Savannah in 1779 against the British –which would presumably entitle me to membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. The Dreyfuss family traces it roots to Trier, which claims to be the oldest city in Germany—and later, medieval Alsace. My father came to the U.S. . on scholarship in the late 1920s and attended grad school at Yale and Columbia. I grew up a UN brat, living in West Africa, Paris. and New York. before I was 16. I wasn’t about to be intimidated by a Harvard guy who swore a lot.

So you can imagine my shock and anger when some in management appeared surprised at my success and seemed to perceive me as an exception. I didn’t want to be the model Negro nor the token success story. The final trigger was a comment by Elsie Carper, the chief newsroom recruiter. She stopped me one day and said, `’How do we find other blacks as good as Joel Dreyfuss?” Without hesitation, I said, “I don’t know if that’s fair, Elsie; you have whites here not as good as me; why not hire blacks as good as them?” The poor lady turned bright red. Today’s management consultants would describe my response as “not career enhancing.’’

I suddenly found myself a leader. Other black reporters began soliciting my advice. From my experience in my previous jobs, I insisted that any complaints to management be documented with lots of statistics and examples—and always presented in writing. It turned out that the numbers shocked all of us. The Metro desk was a traditional route to the National Desk, the most prestigious department on the paper. When we added up the numbers we found that over a period of eight years, a dozen reporters had made the leap: but not one African-American. We noted that the foreign staff was all white, and that there were no minorities above the rank of assistant city editor.

So we began a process of confronting management on the limits of their tolerance for journalists of color. I look back and think it was a necessary and inevitable process. Like many liberal whites, the editors of the Post had embraced the idea of a visible black presence with some sincerity. The next step was not so obvious: how minorities played a role in the decision process, in shaping how the paper dealt with the city and the world required a further evolution of perception — one that was not easy for some of the editors to make.

That’s where me and Ben got into it. I had learned long ago that people get emotional when they talk about race, and I tried to avoid verbal confrontation. But he was a macho type, likely to punch me in the shoulder and ask me what we were trying to do to his paper. I always answered the same thing: ``We’re trying to make it a better paper, Ben.’’ Then we’d get into an argument. Like the day after the District finally won home rule from Congress in 1975. The paper dispatched a white reporter to 14th and U Streets, a notorious drug crossroad, to ask winos and junkies their thoughts on getting the right to elect a mayor and a city council. In addition to the unsurprising indifference of the sample population, there was even a scene in the story where two cops warned the reporter he could get knifed.

My memo to the editors was not only critical; it had that added element which seems to especially infuriate bosses — sarcasm. I suggested that the next time Congress passed a bill that affected white people, I would volunteer to interview white inmates in a federal prison as a sample of public opinion.

To everyone’s surprise, at first Ben defended me. He told others I was carrying a considerable burden. But we were still needling one another. At some point, I pointed out to Ben that his middle initial, C for Crowninshield, came from a family that made its fortune trading slaves for rum. The worst confrontation I had with Ben was in his glass office, where everyone could see us yelling but not hear the words. One day he exclaimed,   ``How can you be so fucking arrogant?” As I said earlier, Ben was a big fan of that word. “You have to understand, Ben,’’ I answered, ``I come from the first independent black Republic; my ancestors killed a lot of you people.” I think our relationship went downhill from there.

All of this might have been kept private and forgotten except for the big newspaper strike. In 1975, the Newspaper Guild went out on strike for a month, then came back to work for the company’s original offer, while the pressmen stayed out. There was a lot of turmoil. In the meantime, Veronica, whom I had met in Washington. , decided to take a job in San Francisco. I tried to move closer to her. I learned the paper had an opening in L.A.. and I applied for the position.

On New Year’s Day 1976, Bradlee wrote me a memo, recounting the ways I had criticized the paper’s policies, management, etc., and stating that I would not get the job in L.A.  After all, he said, I was “a gifted journalist, but a pain in the ass, and nobody wants a pain in the ass.”  He added, gratuitously, that he’d rather have southern California uncovered than send me. I gave copies to a couple of friends for advice on how to respond. One was a Guild member who decided that circulating the memo could help the union cause. The next thing I knew, I got a call from Alexander Cockburn, who was then writing the media column in the Village Voice. I was actually too terrified to say anything.

I found myself very much alone; people who had been my pals in the newsroom started to shun me. It was as if I’d forgotten to bathe or was slightly radioactive. Unlike Mr. Blair today, no agents came calling and no one wanted to interview me. This was the era of a gentleman’s agreement between media companies: you don’t air my dirty linen and I’ll ignore yours. Interestingly, my name and the famous memo appeared for several years afterward in magazine articles and several books about the paper. Nobody except Cockburn ever called me for my side of the story and a couple of writers even spelled my name wrong.

I also made a couple of undesirables lists. For years afterward, my name apparently set off alarms at the New York Times whenever an editor suggested hiring me. Life worked out. I did move to San Francisco, moved back to New York, married Veronica and went on to work in some fine places. Ben and I even made up: we had lunch a few years back, and he thanked me for forcing the Post to confront  very real issues. He didn’t offer my old job back. Years later, Don Graham even looked at investing in one of my journalistic ventures.

Whenever Ben and I run into each other, there is a genuine bond, created by that momentary glare of publicity and perhaps by something similar, though unacknowledged, in our backgrounds. We remain friendly, and I never bring up the slaveships. That’s just proper blueblood behavior.

__________________________________________________


THE INVENTION OF EUROPE:
ISLAM IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY
Ch. I.  “THE ARRIVAL”

David Levering Lewis

I'm still trying to figure out what conservative newspaper columnist Stanley Crouch meant when he referred to David on C-SPAN as "a bad cat." I think it means that he scratches the furniture and avoids the kitty litter. But others may have different interpretations after this first view of his eye-opening revolutionary new book.
The Syrian warrior-politician Musa ibn Nusayr was not only the finest military strategist in service to Islam west of Damascus, despite his sixty-odd years he was probably the most visionary empire-builder since the great Caliph Mu’awyia I, founder of the Umayyad dynasty. He was a perceptive judge of subalterns, one of whom, Tariq ibn Ziyad, was to carry the message of the Prophet and the organizational genius of the Arabs to the cold land mass where the civilizing legacy of the Roman Empire lay in ruins. Although depiction of the human figure did not disappear in Islam until later, no image of Tariq ibn Ziyad has come down to us. Some historians  claim that he was Persian, but it is almost certain that he was a Berber convert from one of the two fiercely independent tribes of the Maghreb. He is likely to have known something of the Greek and Arab scripts. He would have been not too old, a magnificent horseman, and almost certainly a born leader of men. Such reasonable speculations about him reach the limits of what can be ascertained, other than that Musa ibn Nusayr, must have quickly discerned that Tariq ibn Ziyad’s superb military skills, combined with his familiarity with the land and the people, was an invaluable asset.   The Emir’s confidence had proven well justified by Tariq’s performance as governor at Sijilmasa of the new province of Sus at the edge of the Sahar. His  reward was the governorship in 708 C.E. of Tangier, capital of the restive Maghreb, and command of some twenty thousand crack Berber warriors who were about to carry Islam to a continent for which they had as yet no name.

Tangier was already old when the Greeks anchored ships there and the Phoenicians made it one of their principal entrepots. Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, and King Gaiseric’s migrating Vandals called at its port.   From its beginnings in myth more than 2,500 years ago, the fortunes of this ancient voluptuary at the confluence of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic ebbed and flowed with the tides that carried the great maritime empires of the ancient and classical world. By the time Tariq  ibn Ziyad rode into the honeycombed city the Romans called Tingis, the once vibrant capital of the imperial province of Mauretania Tingitana had become an underpopulated outpost on the edge of the known world. The legions of the Western Roman Empire had withdrawn at the close of the fourth century C.E. Byzantine sea and land forces had made only occasional, halfhearted attempts during the seventh century to patrol and occupy the coastline where the Pillars of Hercules shot out of the Mediterranean. No longer the gateway to and from Africa, galleys crowding the harbor and warehouses gorged with grain, dye, and spice, Tangier, like the Roman Empire that had nurtured it for half a millennium, was now a decayed husk on the rim of the great sea—mare romanum—that once had seemed to abolish the distances between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

In the spring of the 711th year of the Christian Era and the ninety-second of the Muslim calendar, Tangier’s new governor received permission from his master in Barqa, Musa ibn Nusayr, to cross the nine-mile stretch of blue-green water separating two continents.   The land mass on the other side, visible to the eye as a dark sliver on the horizon, would soon acquire its euphonious Arabic designation of al-Andalus, the Arabic rendering of a gutteral Gothic rendering of a Roman unit of landed property—landa-hlauts. For the present, what Tariq and his warriors knew of the Iberian peninsula came from reconnaissance gleaned the previous year by the first Muslim in history to set foot on European soil. Tarif ibn Talib al-Mu’afire had landed in August 710 with some four hundred Berbers on the southernmost stretch of coast directly across the straits and a little to the left of Calpe Mountain, the Jurassic limestone outcropping that the ancients knew as one of the Pillars of Hercules.   It is said that the local Christians chose flight over resistance and divined apocalyptic omens from the unexpected appearance of Tarif  and his men. Laden with booty and women after a few weeks of unhindered plunder, the expedition returned to Morocco with stories of riches to be had almost for the picking. The Andalusian village near the debarkation point would come to bear his name—Tarifa.

History oscillates between meager fact and fabulous hypothesis at this point. The known facts are that in late April or early May of 711 C.E., between seven thousand and twelve thousand Berber horsemen crossed to the Iberian peninsula from a point near the ancient port of Septem (Ceuta) on the Moroccan coast. From the perspective of sweeping historical forces, Tariq’s invasion was part of the rolling Muslim barrage across the known world, a flange on the self-perpetuating Jihad that seemed destined to fill completely the vacuum left by the Roman Empire.

The high-speed incorporation of the Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and pagan peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor into an ecumenical imperium transmogrified conqueror and conquered alike. For the first time since Alexander the Great, an imperial belt of finance, trade, and commerce stretching from Sind on the edge of China to Tanger off the Atlantic coast and to Sijilmasa on the fringe of the Sahara reanimated ancient cultures and sclerotic polities. The while, the Arab knowledge in politics, economics, culture, and technology sharpened in less than a century to an edge as fine as that on the swords of tempered steel wielded by Bedouin cavalry.   The building of the Great Mosque at Damascus would begin but a few years after the final conquest of Morocco. Qayrawan had long since honored the Prophet with a grand mosque, which, along with the elegant, hexagonal Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem erected over the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, were impressive outward aspects of an inner transformation that led leaders like Mu’awiya and Musa to expansive geopolitical  conceptions of Jihad. Finding the door to the land of the Christians at the eastern end of the Mediterranean impregnably battened, Arab strategists shifted their continental onslaught to the entry point at the western end, to the land across the water facing Morocco.

In legends shared equally by Arab and Spaniard, it was not geopolitics that opened Europe to Islam in the first instance, however, but  the gambit of an aristocratic father bent on avenging the violation of his tender young daughter by a scoundrelly monarch, Roderic or Don Rodrigo, ruler of  Visigothic Spain. The sources disclose that the governor of Ceuta had sent his daughter Florinda to Toledo to be educated under the protection of the sovereign as a lady in waiting in the royal court. Shortly after arriving at court, however, the old king died and the vulnerable maiden caught the eye of  the new king and, to some the usurper, Roderic, upon his return, brimming with vanity and testosterone, from a successful military expedition against the Basques. Deflowered and pregnant, Florinda reported her disgrace in piteous detail to her father, Count Julian, governor of Ceuta, who is supposed to have plotted a treasonous comeuppance with Tariq ibn Ziyad. The earliest Arab chronicler of the conquest of Iberia, ‘Ibn Abd al-Hakam, imagines an appropriate soliloquy for the governor:  “I do not see how I can punish him and pay him back except by sending the Arabs against him.”  Messages were then exchanged between Ceuta and Tangier; terms  agreed upon. Similar to the part played by the heroine of Troy, Florinda’s legendary disgrace is said to have launched no less than several hundred ships, if not Helen’s thousand, when Julian’s flotilla rendezvoused with the Arab-Berber force assembled to invade Iberia.

Arab sources unmistakably confirm the existence of  someone in command of the Byzantine garrison at Ceuta (a Julian or perhaps an Urban) who found it expedient to combine forces with the Muslims. As for the shamefully aggrieved Florinda, whose existence an older generation of Spanish historians only acknowledged in order to vilify as “La Cava” (the Whore), the sources are rather more problematic.   Not all professional historians have dismissed the story of Count Julian and his daughter with the withering pronouncement of one notable British authority—“purely unhistoric”— but nearly all have exercised a healthy scepticism about the details. Florinda’s concerns would have been negligible in the mix of dynastic and imperial motives behind the governor of Ceuta’s participation in the Arab invasion of Iberia. After all, even to grant that she was a real person is of little interpretive significance in weighing the role of a woman as causus belli in an age when history was a male monopoly.


_______________________________________________________

Gulliver in Fiji:

A Jesuitical View of a Faraway Land

Martin X. Moleski, SJ.

Years ago, I came across Marty as he was playing "Zork," a computer game, with my young children. The screen said, "You enter a room and there is a necklace on a table." Marty shouted, "Steal the necklace!" The screen said, "The door opens and a dwarf enters the room." Marty exclaimed, "Kill the dwarf!" Later, he explained to me in a shamefaced manner, "In Zork you do not play by the rules of life."

   A couple of months ago, I embarked on a journey that may seem unusual for a Catholic priest, and even caused some mild wonderment among my fellow Jesuits. The purpose was to find Amelia Earhart, the pilot who disappeared in the South Pacific in 1937 near the Phoenix Islands. Of course I didn’t really expect to find her remains and those of her navigator after so long a time, but there had been some mysterious reports regarding unidentified bones now extant on the island nation of Fiji. These bones might (I emphasize might) have been discovered shortly after her plane went down. The coincidence of time and place was sufficient that a group of aviation enthusiasts convening on the Internet, of whom I am one, agreed to sponsor the trip for one among us who was interested in making the trip and had the time to spare. Well, my teaching schedule provided a convenient summer vacation. I qualified.

So early in May, I made the trip, accompanied part of the time by another Internet newsgroup member, Roger Kelley, a retired Los Angeles sheriff's deputy. Our mission was to seek bones, a sextant box and shoe parts collected by the British in 1940 from a Pacific island, not far from where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had intended to land in 1937.

Of course, I didn’t come across Ms. Earhart. (If I had, Stephen would have insisted she join us here at The Inn at Perry Cabin.)  But I did have a variety of experiences along the way, and learned something about a part of the world I would not otherwise have visited.

Back in 1940, Suva, now the capital of Fiji, was the home of the Western Pacific High Commission, the supreme authority for Fiji, Tonga, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and the Solomons. Thirty years later, Fiji gained independence; in the thirty-three years since then, the country has undergone three coups as it has struggled to solve an ethnic puzzle imposed on it by its colonial masters.

In the 19th century, Fiji was known as the Cannibal Islands. Even today, the museum and souvenir shops are filled with cannibal forks. I was especially touched by the display of the utensils used to eat the Reverend Thomas Baker in 1867 — the wooden bowl used to serve his flesh is there, a grail preserved at first by satisfied diners and later by people who felt shame and remorse about their community’s unholy communion.

Britain took the Cannibal Islands under her wing somewhat reluctantly. A chief ceded his authority to the Empire in order to evade a debt owed to an American merchant. It took twenty years for him to persuade Britain to take responsibility for the islands. The first British governor decreed that the lands held by the natives could not be sold but must be held in trust for the various tribal communities. Some Fijians are proud not to have gone the way of the Maori in New Zealand or the natives of Hawaii. By law, the land of Fiji is for Fijians. But over the years, the demographics of the islands have changed.

Holding land in trust for the natives might have been an enlightened policy if the British had not then brought 87 shiploads of Indians to the islands to work the sugar plantations, sowing the seeds of today's ethnic discontent. The system of indentured servitude died a quiet death in 1919, but the descendants of the landless laborers born in Fiji, and other immigrants from India and China, now make up just under half of the population. Not a day went by that I didn't read in the Fiji Times about conflicts between the stakeholders — the ethnic Fijians who own 90% of the land  — and offspring of the immigrant population who largely own, run and staff the businesses that keep Fiji's economy alive. The three coups since independence, two in 1987 and one in 2000, have all been led by ethnic Fijians resisting the rise to power of the Indian party.

Our research into the events that took place in Suva in 1941 necessarily brought us into contact with the remnants of the Empire-builders. Roger loved the colonnades of the old colonial buildings, imagining how beautiful they would have been when they were freshly whitewashed by the family's servants. With one glittering exception — the Fintel building maintained by money earned from its monopoly on telephone and internet services — most of the colonial buildings are covered with some kind of fungus, mold or mildew that can be beaten back periodically but never permanently defeated. Although merchants daily wash the sidewalks outside their shops, the city itself can not stay ahead of the dust and dirt blown about by the wind. The benefits brought by the British, notably a civil service free from graft and corruption, also appear to be in decay.

The streets of Suva, like those in Boston and Tokyo, follow no apparent logic but extend themselves wherever there is an opening, like kudzu. It took me almost a week to find the shortest path from our hotel to the cathedral. I would walk down there in the cool of the morning for Mass at dawn, enjoying the empty streets and the morning light. Within an hour or so, the streets would be inundated with small white taxis and miniature vans and trucks. Roger and I never lost our appetite for playing dodge-cars with them, though we learned early on that vehicles have the right-of-way. The newspaper reminded us regularly that this game of Frogger is played for keeps. A man in his late fifties was killed just outside his shop while we were there.

I often ground my teeth in frustration while waiting for bureaucrats ostensibly trained in the British system to pay attention to our queries. I was exasperated by one bank that provided dozens of chairs for people to sit in while waiting their turn at the desk. I'm an American —  I want to be served now, not later!  I don't want to take a number and wait in line, and I definitely don't want to leave the office and wait for someone to call me back. In our system, in theory at least, the customer is always right. In the British system, the bureaucrat prevails.

In Fiji, the worst traits of the British petit bureaucrat are grafted onto the remnants of the cannibal community. The best of the colonial officers whom we observed were very good men indeed. They brought high standards of education and health care to the Pacific islands. They trained native medical practitioners and nurses, fought plague and tuberculosis, chased mosquitoes away from villages, and virtually eliminated diseases caused by malnutrition and poor hygiene. Many of them worked themselves to death on behalf of the people they had come to serve. But they were also autocratic and governed like the chieftains of the local tribes.

Roger and I failed to find what we were looking for in Suva, but we did come across a treasure chest. It was a small green box bequeathed to one “Doc Murphy”, who had worked for twenty-six years in a hospital for TB patients. Francis Ivor Fleming left the story of his life in the box: a birth certificate from 1888; his commission as a pilot in World War I and his later appointment to the Royal Air Force; the decree making him a Deputy Commissioner for the Phoenix Islands; two flags he had flown above his station on Canton Island, the Union Jack for everyday use and the American flag for a few special occasions; correspondence with his youngest sister, who hoped he would return from the islands to spend his last years with her in Britain; the diary that he kept on his deathbed in 1968; and five manuscripts of poems given to him by Noel Coward on Canton Island in 1941.

Finding Coward’s handwritten poems, though utterly unexpected, made perfect sense to me. I had often hummed "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" as I walked up and down Suva’s sweltering Victoria Parade in my black clerical garb, and on the way back to the U.S. I ate at the Mad Dog Cafe in Auckland just because I loved the name. Among the poems Coward composed 62 years ago on Canton Island was "Onward Christian Soldiers":

Now we have it on impeccable authority
(Without a trace of irony or mirth)
That when the Day of Judgement come, the meek will take priority
And set about inheriting the earth.
For so far as I'm concerned
They can have it if they've earned
So dubious and thankless a reward.
For if all their moral sanctity and smug superiority
Can seriously gratify the Lord,
Let 'em have it--let 'em keep it
Let 'em plough it--let 'em reap it
Let 'em clean it up and polish it and garnish and sweep it
Let 'em face up to its puzzling complexities
And, to their gentle diffident dismay,
Discover what a crucible of hate and crime and sex it is
And start re-organizing right away.
But when they begin to fail
It will be of small avail
For them to turn the other silly cheek
For the Lord will smile remotely on their worries and perplexities
And serve them damn well right for being meek.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I haven't a clue what needs to be done with Fiji's "crucible of hate and crime and sex."  But everybody has problems. We in the United States have certainly not resolved the complexity of Britain's tolerance of slavery in the colonies. Would we have done better with the Fijian model set by the governor's creation of a two-class system, the landowners and the dispossessed?  I have seen Fiji's sorrows — and I have hastened home with gratitude, where our own post-colonial troubles seem so much more tractable than theirs.

Now that the Empire is gone, the Fijian chiefs have moved into the ornate offices of the departed functionaries and are dining again on human flesh.

_______________________________________________________

     
Stephen Banker
Washington, DC
(202) 338-1215
sbanker@aol.com
  Martin X. Moleski SJ
Buffalo, NY
(716) 888-2383
moleski@canisius.edu
     
Boris Berenfeld
Ludmilla Berenfeld
Cape Cod, MA
(978) 526-9528
boris@concord.org
  Tim O’Brien
Petie O’Brien
Kensington, MD
(301) 942-1036
tim.obrien@mindspring.com
     
Joel Dreyfuss
Veronica Pollard
New York, New York
(212) 932-1448
jdreyfuss@attglobal.net
  Peter Riddleberger
Washington, DC
(
202) 244-0583
pbelew@erols.com
     
George Klein
Geneva, Switzerland
41 -22-732-5966
geohelga@freesurf.ch


  Joseph J. Schildkraut
Betsy Schildkraut
Boston MA
(617) 734-7489
ebschildkraut@aol.com
jjschildkraut@aol.com
     
David Levering Lewis
Ruth Ann Stewart
Stanfordville, NY
(845) 758-0208
levering007@frontiernet.net
rastew@earthlink.net
  George Watson
Ellen Watson
Potomac MD
(301) 229-0153
ebw327@aol.com
     
John Meeks
Anita Meeks
Washington, DC
(
202) 337-1127
nitajem@erols.com
jmeeks@fs-dms.org
  Guest:  Elliott Jones
(202) 237-5091
Washington DC