A Colossal Wreck (53 page)

During Ford’s all-too-brief tenure a mood of geniality was the rule. Even the attempted assassinations of the President by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Moore, in September 1975, had a slapdash, light-hearted timbre.

2007

January 11

A make-or-break speech by a beleaguered US President is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush’s address last night was no exception.

The AC-130 gunship that massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia’s southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on Sunday to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush’s determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: when the US President schedules a speech, don’t herd, don’t go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave.

February 25

The Clintons have always had short fuses. At the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition, and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic nomination are getting somewhat cloudier. This last week has been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al Gore, no favorite of the Clintons.

On the heels of his $1.3m fundraiser for Hillary’s rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC’s candidacy.

He confided to Maureen Dowd of the
New York Times
that Mrs. Clinton was not the candidate to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison, Clinton
did
pardon financier Marc Rich.

This, and the Oscar triumph for Gore, have left Mrs. Clinton distinctly frayed. But she is defiant. Asked about her vote for the war at a New Hampshire town hall, she said: “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”

February 28

Which scion of which well-known newspaper dynasty assembled a squadron of bulldozers in May of 2005, mounted the lead bulldozer and led this rumbling squadron into a ferocious assault on the house his mother left him on her death in 2001? When it was over, a house that had seen visits from President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan lay in splinters and rubble.

Mohu? It was the name of Katharine Graham’s large house, which roosted on over 235 acres on Lambert’s Cove Road on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard. When the chairman of the
Washington Post
company died in 2001 she willed it to her second son, Billy. A couple of years ago Billy got into an increasingly acrimonious series of battles with the local township of West Tisbury at the property taxes he had to pay each year, challenging his assessments from fiscal years 2003 and 2004, when he paid the town more than half a million dollars in property taxes. The fight matured into the longest tax-appeal case in the history of the Commonwealth.

Early 2005 the owner of Mohu evidently felt the need to express his feelings of profound loathing for … for whom? Start, obviously, with the tax assessors. End, maybe, with the person who hung the curse of Mohu round his neck. Take in also the people who used to run over from their nearby homes to use Mohu’s tennis court. In fact the
very first bit of real property on the estate Billy’s bulldozer scraped into oblivion was indeed that same tennis court. Then it was the house’s turn.

To me the oddest thing about this piece of demolition is that it happened in early May of 2005. Here we are at the end of February, 2007, and there’s barely been a whisper, beyond a tiny reference to Mohu having been demolished, in the
Vineyard Gazette
. Did all interest in the Graham publishing clan die with Katharine?

It certainly seems that way. I checked last year to see how many articles there’d been about the role in the
Washington Post
’s editorial policy being played by her oldest son, Donnie. He’s the one who got the paper. Month after month, as the
Post
ran one pro-war story and editorial after another, I kept waiting for one of those insiderish stories to appear in
Vanity Fair
or some kindred publication about Donnie pushing the
Post
into a hard pro-war stance. Nothing.

Suppose that when G.W.H. and Barbara Bush finally depart this world, they leave Kennebunkport to G.W. and Laura, who promptly whistle up the demolition crew and tell them to level the place. Will the local press content itself with paeans to W’s selfless act of homage to the poor of Maine and Natural Beauty Restored?

Maybe, in the not too distant future, low income structures in Martha’s Vineyard will be enhanced by Mohu’s vertical grain doug fir flooring, thick canyon red quarry tiles, yellow pine bead board, plus lighting fixtures and hardware. John Abrams, the man who supervised the leveling, says that’s the way it’s going to be. It seems unlikely to me, though I can imagine this salvage stock being sold off to rich people restoring their homes and the proceeds donated to a housing charity.

March 12

Since there undoubtedly will be a next time, after these latest campus killings at Virginia Tech, what useful counsel on preventative measures can we offer faculties across America? There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby, but it’s all hot air. America is not
about to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms.

A better idea would be for appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons. This is not as outré as it may sound to European ears. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC training regularly carried rifles around campus.

Five years ago Peter Odighizuwa, a forty-three-year-old Nigerian student, killed three faculty members at Appalachian Law School with a handgun, but before he could wreak further carnage two students fetched weapons from their cars, challenged the murderer with guns leveled, and disarmed him. The stupidity of the campus cops at Virginia Tech will undoubtedly cost the college hefty damages.

There was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho-Seung Hui finished off the last batch of his thirty-two victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatized students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They recommended counseling, then didn’t bother to review the conclusions. And it has emerged that Cho was actually institutionalized as a psychotic and suicide risk in 2005. Yet when he returned to campus the administrators didn’t even tip off his roommate.

College administrators live in constant fear of declining students enrollment. At the first sign of trouble they cover up. So, there’s a double killing in a Virginia Tech dorm at 7.15 a.m., after which Cho has time to go home, make his final home video, walk to the post office, mail his package to NBC and then head off to the engineering building with his guns.

The college’s first email to students goes out more than two hours after the first killings were discovered. The ineffable Warren Steger,
college president, says later: “You can only make decisions based on the information you have at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.” Two dead bodies, a killer somewhere on campus, and Steger makes his big decision to do nothing.

May 3

By far the best performance at the recent Democratic candidates’ debate organized by MSNBC was by a very distant outsider, Mike Gravel, a seventy-seven-year-old former US Senator from Alaska, well known nearly forty years ago for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In some electrifying tirades, he flayed Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the others as two-faced on the absolute imperative of getting out of the war in Iraq and not getting into one in Iran. “They frighten me,” Gravel shouted, gesturing at his rivals. “You know what’s worse than one US soldier dying in vain in Iraq. It’s two soldiers dying in vain. In Vietnam they all died in vain.”

June 12

These are troubling times for evangelical Christians. The born-again President they helped elect is in the autumn of his tenure, the bold promises of Christian revival now tarnished or cast aside. Their great champion, Jerry Falwell, has gone to the Judgment, leaving only the Reverend Pat Robertson as their national champion. Mitt Romney, the front-running Republican contender to be Bush’s successor, is a Mormon, and although leading evangelical Christians have given him the nod, many foot soldiers in the service of Christ entertain doubts. “The world needs Jesus, the REAL JESUS, not Jesus the half-brother of Lucifer,” cries Kevin Stilley on his Christian site.

Then, there’s the never-ending struggle with the Evil One in the arena of sexual temptation where, as a one evangelical put it, “Satan and his demons more aggressively attack and tempt those in Christian leadership because they know that a scandal involving a leader can have devastating results, on both Christians and non-Christians.” Still fresh in the ears of the righteous are the chortles of
unbelievers over the tribulations of Pastor Ted Haggard, leader of the New Life Church and one of the nation’s most prominent and politically connected evangelicals. He was outed last year in Colorado by a former male prostitute declaring that Pastor Ted had enjoyed sex with him, their monthly interactions enhanced by crystal meth. In February of this year Pastor Ted had crash counseling across three weeks, overseen by four ministers, to give, as one put it, “Ted the tools to help embrace his heterosexual side,” but there have been doubts, even among evangelicals, as to whether Satan and his demons have in this instance been decisively routed after so brief an engagement.

And now evangelicals face fresh evidence that the Darker Forces miss no opportunity to make further ravages among the righteous. Earlier this week
ChristiaNet.com
, “the world’s most visited Christian website,” disclosed the results of a survey it has just concluded, asking site visitors questions about their personal sexual conduct. A thousand Christians answered, and ChristiaNet has now evaluated these responses with the analytic assistance of Second Glance Ministries (“a second glance at God’s plan for sex”), led by Clay Jones, founder and President of SGM.

“The poll results indicate that 50 percent of all Christian men and 20 percent of all Christian women are addicted to pornography,” Jones reports bleakly. It seems that 60 percent of the women who answered the survey admitted to having “significant struggles with lust,” 40 percent admitted to “being involved in sexual sin in the past year,” and 20 percent of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

“There have been dynamic paradigm shifts in the behavior of Christians over the last four years,” Jones declares. “Technology [i.e., the internet] has allowed pornography to flood the market place beyond a controllable level.” The phones at Second Glance Ministries are ringing off the hook with calls for counseling from porn addicts.
ChristiaNet.com
’s President Bill Cooper reports that “we directed over 100,000 inquiries to Second Glance Ministries in one year,” and that “we are seeing an escalation of the problem in both men and women who regularly attend church.”

Sex surveys regularly conducted by the University of Chicago suggest why Satan and his legions are finding it easy to beguile these evangelical Christians. Their sex lives are more vital than those paddling in the tepid mainstream, and hence they are more easily led into temptation. One such Chicago survey I have claims that Americans are almost entirely straight (maybe 2 or 3 percent gay at most), and the vast majority revel in the loyal married state and have sparse sex. Evangelicals do better. Among women, conservative Christian evangelicals have the highest rates of orgasm.

June 20

In 1938, three years before the first death camps of the Final Solution, Nazi chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters published a full account, in the German science journal
Anzeiger fur Sahahlinskund
, of the El Paso “disinfection” plant. He included two photos and diagrams of the machinery that sprayed Zyklon B on railroad cars. (Peters went on to acquire Zyklon B’s German patent.)

As David Dorado Romo describes it in his
Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juarez
,
1893–1923
(available from Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B had become available in the US in the early 1920s when fears of alien infection had been inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them from the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.

It should be noted that while the Americans sprayed their victims with toxic chemicals, they restricted use of Zyklon B to freight and clothes. As the Nazis understood, spraying it directly on a human caused almost immediate death. We can only guess what effect it had on the thousands of Mexican men, women, and children who, after a “bath” in DDT or gasoline, were sent away in clothes drenched with Zyklon B.

Romo’s book comes at a time when Mexican immigration is at the top of the list of US political issues. There are twelve million illegals in the United States by official count, and certainly twice that unofficially. Among the solutions is the right-wing’s vociferous call to build a “Berlin wall” 2,000 miles long across the entire Rio Grande border.
Unsurprisingly, Mexican Americans hate this idea. Their memories—the emerging truth of Mexican-American history—and their votes seem certain to undermine it.