A Colossal Wreck (31 page)

As he marched across the arid Asian steppes towards St. Petersburg, the Colonel became mightily impressed not only by the extreme hunger he witnessed on all sides but also by the fact that what little food the locals had often came from plants. All foods, the Colonel suddenly appreciated, come originally from plants. Back in Arizona he swiftly laid plans for an arid land arboretum where plants from
the world’s deserts could be brought together, their uses assayed and their seeds distributed.

Work began in 1923 and by 1929 it was up and running as a joint project of the arboretum, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. These days there are over 3,000 different plants flourishing at Boyce Thompson, and among the beneficiaries of the Colonel are sperm whales, a substitute for whose oil is the oil pressed from seeds of the desert jojoba bush, now planted on a large scale in Arizona.

I wandered about in the 105 degree heat and soon saw in the distance the tapering trunk, some thirty-five feet high, of an
Idria columnaris
, otherwise known as the Boojum, whose erroneous identification proved so fatal to the baker in Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece,
The Hunting of the Snark
. All around were marvelous cacti and kindred succulents such as euphorbias and agaves.

September 26

I had been planning to head straight across Texas to El Paso with a detour south to Big Bend Ranch State Park which sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande, also passing through Marfa which used to, maybe still does, feature Rock Hudson’s house in
Giant
, then coming north again to the Balmorhea springs, with beautiful stone work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. I was there years ago, in 1988, while driving a 1960 Plymouth Valiant across country. But this July it was ferociously hot and though the ’62 Plymouth station wagon was running well, its venerable air conditioning more than satisfactory, I didn’t fancy the thought of breaking down in the middle of the Cuesta de Burro mountains.

So, prior to the visit to Midland, I headed northwest for the Texas hill country, the region of the Pedernales often associated with the ranch and memory of LBJ, and an hour later found myself in Fredericksburg, which offers the curious traveler not only the Admiral Nimitz museum of the Pacific War, plus the George H. Bush Gallery, but also a profusion of German restaurants, each displaying meat-heavy, schlag-strewn menus in the broiling Texan forenoon.

Consulting the copy of
Roemer’s Texas
I’d found in the public library in Midland I found out why. This same Friedrich von Roemer is noted as the father of Texan geology, hence grandfather of the delighted cries of Texan oilmen whenever the geology of Texas yielded its proper bounty. In 1845 Roemer visited Texas and published an excellent account of his explorations four years later, correctly deprecating most previous writings on the state as “crude untruths and fabulous exaggerations.”

Across the Guadeloupe mountain range and down into Alamogordo, sixty miles south of the Trinity site, I found point zero for the explosion of America’s first nuclear device. It’s hard to drive far across the American West without passing a military base or a prison. I drive into White Sands National Monument, which is surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range, some 4,000 square miles of desert which hosted America’s first efforts to adapt German rockets, with Nazi scientists toiling happily in their new homes, spirited westward by the same US intelligence services that extricated Klaus Barbie and sent him to Bolivia.

One such scientist was Georg Richkey, who was the supervisor at the Mettelwerk missile complex that used slave labor from the Dora concentration camp. In retaliation against sabotage to the plant—prisoners would piss on electrical equipment, causing spectacular malfunctions—Richkey would hang them twelve at a time from factory cranes, with wooden sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle their cries. Later US intelligence officers obstructed efforts by the Allies, and the US State Department, to try Richkey as a war criminal, and brought him to the US where he resumed his missile work at Wright AFB.

I drove for a while through the white gypsum dunes that constitute the prime allurement of the Monument, whose best feature is actually the adobe reception and office buildings designed and put up by Hispanic laborers under the supervision of a Kansas journalist who had successfully campaigned for the Monument in the 1930s. The buildings are now deservedly on the register of historic structures. That evening I drive along the main street of Truth or Consequences. I notice that the South West Pharmacy has a sign below it, “Ask Us
About Free Prozac.” Below is another sign for the Wellness Store, “A Neural Pharmacy.” Across the street I see the Hot Springs Health Center. I pick the Trail motel ($24, good wide front court, nice sign, Christians, no phone in the room).

As for the town’s name, I’d always imagined it came from some cowboy bet in the 1880s. Not a bit of it. In 1950, so the Chaparral Guide in my motel told me, NBC TV and radio producer Ralph Edwards took the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his program “Truth or Consequences” to put out the word that he wished “some town in the US liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change its name to Truth or Consequences.” The Mexico State Bureau of tourism promptly relayed his hope to the manager of the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce—at long last an opportunity to shake off the town’s status of second-best to Hot Springs Arkansas, playpen of Boy Clinton. In a special election, 1,294 of the citizenry voted for the change with 294 opposed. Amid cries from the vanquished traditionalists there was soon a second poll with the same result. The people were asked to vote again on the matter in 1964 and yet again in 1967, which suggests the diehards were still fighting.

September 28

Drive through the interior of California and you drive past prisons. In Adelanto the mother and daughter who ran the local Days Inn told me that they already had two in town, one state and one federal, and were scheduled for three more. Higher up Interstate 5 you pass Avenal and Coalinga, with others over the horizon. In San Jose the headlines spoke of further implosion in the e-markets. Hewlett Packard was set to lay off thousands worldwide.

I chugged up through the wine country and into Humboldt County and in mid-afternoon, 4,000 miles, and ten days after I left Landrum, SC, having needed only one quart of oil and having established an average of 17 mpg, the ’62 Plymouth Belvedere swung into my yard in Petrolia. Five minutes later two F-14s, or maybe F-18s, flew down the tiny valley at 500 feet, amid a deafening roar. “The sound of freedom,” they used to call it. These were pilots being assholes. I
watched my horses jump about four feet in the air. A mile down river, Margie Smith’s old horse jumped too, wounded itself on a fence post and bled to death.

November 9

Open the November 5 edition of
Newsweek
and here’s Jonathan Alter, munching coyly on the week’s hot topic, namely the propriety of the FBI torturing obdurate September 11 suspects in the Bureau’s custody here in the United States. Alter says no to cattleprods, but continues the sentence with the observation that something is needed to “jump start” the stalled investigation. The tone is lightly facetious, as in “Couldn’t we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?” There are respectful references to Alan Dershowitz (who is running around the country promoting the idea of “torture warrants” issued by judges) and to Israel, where, “until 1999 an interrogation technique called ‘shaking’ was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment … Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for ‘moderate physical pressure’ in what are called ‘ticking time bomb’ cases.”

As so often with unappealing labor, Alter arrives at the usual American solution: outsource the job: “we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical.”

What’s striking about Alter’s commentary and others in the same idiom is the abstraction from reality, as if torture is so indisputably a dirty business that all painful data had best be avoided. One would have thought it hard to be frivolous about the subject of torture, but Alter managed it.

2002

February 22

The hoof prints of Lucifer are everywhere. And since this is America, eternally at war with the darker forces, the foremost Enemy Within is sex, no quarter given. Here are some bulletins from the battlefront, drawn from a smart essay on “Sex and Empire” in the March issue of
The Guide
, a Boston-based monthly travel magazine, whose features and editorials have “about the best gay sex politics around,” according to Bill Dobbs of Queerwatch, whom I take as my advisor in these matters.

In February 2000, eighteen-year-old Matthew Limon had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old male schoolmate. A Kansas court sentenced him to seventeen years in prison, a punishment upheld by a federal court in February.

Last July, Ohio sentenced twenty-two-year-old Brian Dalton to seven years in prison because of sex fantasies he wrote in his diary. A woman teacher in Arizona up on trial last month for a relationship with a seventeen-year-old boy faces 100 years in prison.

Apropos the triumph of identity politics across the last thirty years, Bill Andriette, the author of “Sex and Empire,” remarks wittily that “In America, your clout as identity group depends how much of an enhanced sentence someone gets for dissing you” and then observes that “The same PR machinery that produces all these feel-good identities naturally segues into manufacturing demonic ones, indeed,
creates a demand for them. The ascription of demonic sexual identities onto people helps drive repression, from attacks on Internet freedom to sex-predator laws. Identity politics works gear-in-gear with a fetishization of children, because the young represent one class of persons free of identity, the last stand of unbranded humanity, precious and rare as virgin prairie.”

This brings us into an Olympian quadruple axis of evil: sexually violent predators (familiarly known as SVPs) preying on minors of the same sex. There’s no quarrelling between prosecutor and judge, jury and governor, Supreme Court and shrinks. Lock ’em up and throw away the key.

I went to a Bar Mitzvah in Berkeley the other day, and after listening to passages from the Torah transmitting Yahweh’s extremely rigorous prescriptions for his temple, right down to the use of acacia wood and dolphin skins, heard Marita Mayer, an attorney in the public defender’s office in Contra Costa county, describe the truly harrowing business of trying to save her clients—SVPs—from indeterminate confinement in Atascadero, the state’s prime psychiatric bin within its prison system.

Among Mayer’s clients are men who pleaded guilty to sex crimes in the mid-1980s, mostly rape of an adult woman, getting a fixed term of anywhere from ten to fifteen years. In the good old days, if you worked and behaved yourself, you’d be up for parole after serving half the sentence.

In California, as in many other states, SVP laws took effect in the mid-1990s, on the crest of the repressive wave of hysteria over child sex abuse and crime generally: mandatory minimum sentences, reduction or elimination of statutes of limitation, erosion of the right to confront witnesses, community notification of released sex offenders, surgical and chemical castration, prohibition of mere possession of certain printed materials, this last an indignity previously only accorded atomic energy secrets.

So California passes its SVP law in January of 1996, decreeing that those falling into the category of SVP have a sickness that requires treatment and cannot be freed, until a jury agrees unanimously that they are no longer a danger to the community. The adjudicators vary
from state to state. Sometimes it’s a jury, or merely a majority of jurors, sometimes a judge, sometimes a panel, sometimes an (unlicensed) “multidisciplinary team.”

Mayer’s clients, serving out their years in Pelican Bay or Vacaville or San Quentin, counting the months down to parole date, suddenly find themselves back to jail in Contra Costa county, told they’ve got a mental disorder and can’t be released till a jury decides they’re no danger to the community. Off to Atascadero they go for a two-year term, at the end of which they get a hearing, and almost always another two-year term.

“Many of them refuse treatment,” Mayer says. “They refuse to sign a piece of paper saying they have a mental disease.” Of course they do. Why sign a document saying that for all practical purposes you may well be beyond reform or redemption, that you are Evil by nature, not just a guy who did something bad and paid the penalty?

It’s the AA model of boozing as sin, having to say you are an alcoholic and will always be in that condition, one lurch away from perdition. Soon everything begins to hinge on someone’s assessment of your state of mind, your future intentions. As with the damnable liberal obsession with hate-crime laws, it’s a nosedive into the category of “thought crimes.”

There the SVPs sit in Atascadero surrounded by psych techs eager to test all sorts of statistical and behavioral models, phallometric devices designed to assist in the persuasion of judge and jury that yes, the prisoner has a more than 50 percent likelihood of exercising his criminal sexual impulses, should he be released.

Thus, by the circuitous route of “civil commitment” (confining persons deemed to be a danger to themselves or others) we have ended up with a situation that, from the constitutional point of view, is indeed absolutely Evil: that of being held in preventive detention or locked up twice for the same crime.

“It’s using psychiatry, like religion, to put people away,” Mayer concludes. “Why not hire an astrologer or a goat-entrail reader to predict what the person might do? Why not the same for robbers as for rapists? What’s happening is double jeopardy. If we don’t watch it, it will come back to haunt us. People don’t care about child rapists,
but the Constitution is about protections. I think it’s shredding the Constitution. I get into trouble because they say I’m into jury nullification and that’s not allowed. Most of my clients tell me it’s worse in Atascadero than in the regular prisons. How do I feel about these guys? When I talk to my clients I don’t presume to think what they’ll do in future. I believe in redemption. I don’t look at them as sexually violent predators, I see them as sad sacks, they have to register. They could be hounded from county to county. Even for a tiny crime they’ll be put away. Their lives are in ruin. I pity them.”