People Watching

I promised myself I would not write about politics on this trip. But it´s hard not to think about what's going on in a country that's had an on again off again civil war since the Spanish left. The past five years have seen a dramatic return to peace that no one could have predicted.

I wrote about this transformation last year, the tireless efforts of an executive who refused a conciliatory stance to the guerrillas, about the enthusiasm of the people who could drive on their highways without fear.

Order is probably a better word than peace, human rights groups would argue. The army is everywhere, and the current Pax Romana has had its share of victims. The "false positives" for starters, innocent villagers shot by the military and then claimed to have been guerillas to up the body count in the war against the FARC. President Uribe, who saw unprecedented levels of high support even a year ago, is slipping badly in the polls, perhaps because he is testing the waters for a constitutionaly prohibited third term or because the links to the para-militaries keep surfacing ever higher in his administration. He might also be losing popularity because people have had enough time to take the new security for granted. The problem with a law and order ticket is that once you succeed, the people want to know-- ok, now what next?

In a country where cocaine is the major industry, order from on high will take a constant and tremendous input of energy. This solution will prove impossible without public support. Unless the narcotraffickers are complicit in the order, it is hard to imagine peace can last. To some extent this could be the reality here, who knows and only a fool or suicidal journalist would want to find out. Short of a near simultaneous legalization of cocaine in both producing and consuming countries, the alternatives are sure to be murky compromises.


From a security standpoint a single mafia is less problematic than competing mafias. United States drug enforcement strategy is to go after cartel leadership with the assumption that their substructures will then be unable to function and lose potency. The result been seen a shift to more atomized criminal networks, increasingly the likelihood of a future of competing mafias and a return escalating the violence. That is, once the populace tires of the overwhelming military and security presence that maintains the current order. And the people are getting weary. For the first time in ages, the homicide rates in are pushing back up in the traditional seats of the drug industry.

So, if you´ve had a desire to travel in Colombia, I suggest you visit now before things change again.

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A few of chance encounters in country of over 40 million people should not reflect on a country. That would be akin to judging a baseball player on a single at bat. Unless the baseball player's name was Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds, chances are that one at bat is going to make an out. Still, it's fun to people watch.

Chris and I were getting out of a cab at the bus terminal in San Gil when a woman approached us and asked us if we'd like a ride in a car to Bogota. More comfortable, and only 40,000 pesos (the bus is 50,000). We were both a little cautious but she was a good looking woman with long brown hair, a maintained figure and nice skin. She was about our age and was well dressed. She didn´t look like a kidnapper. We dropped our guard when we saw the car, a four wheel SUV with her boyfriend at the wheel. A young couple wanting to pick up some extra cash on the way home from vacation.

I don´t remember much of we talked about. They were not a memorable couple. He had just started a wine importing company, so far the wines were coming from Argentina. She had just opened a store for baby clothes. They were headed to calle 70 in Bogota, the heart of Alto Chapinero, a tony district full of 30 something yuppies. A neighborhood in Bogota where it is safe to walk around at night.

They asked if we needed to stop for anything and I mentioned it would be nice to get a paper for the ride. The conversation turned to the papers in the country and how some were very ideological. I asked what was the best paper, and he naturally replied El Tiempo, Bogota´s nationally circulated, center-right press. But his description of why it was the best paper was the interesting part.

"Because El Tiempo is just the news," he explained. "It doesn't have a political ideology. It is owned by one of the best families in Colombia."

A paper without political ideology? Could it just be that paper shares his politics, the climate that he grew up in, the 'maybe if everyone else will just be reasonable and let the best families do what is right for the country we'll all be better off' ideology?

Politics weren't their game. No worries here, politics make for boring conversations at best with people one hardly knows. But I assumed that this couple would at least be good at being yuppies.

They invited us to have lunch with them at an Italian place near their apartment building. Bogota is one of the few places in Colombia where the food is consistently good, especially if you are willing to pay international prices for high cuisine.

Their restaurant pick had the international prices, a bit unusual for pizza pasta joint. Good pizza is not that hard to come in Colombia, one of the few dishes they consistently do better than in America outside of New York City.

The pizza looked like it had been baked in its glass serving dish. Flotsam and jetsam of vegetables floating in a mess of cheese and runny sauce. I can't say if the crust was tasty or not. The dough had all drifted to one side of the dish and had set like cement. The dish looked expensive so I did not ask for a chisel,

I don't write up the place for its pizza. I would go back for the decor. The walls were covered with blown up photos of the casts of every 1980's American TV show you wish you could forget. The crown jewel was the flat screen behind our table playing a constant stream of 80's New Wave music videos. An altar toVH1's Dada-inspired golden age.

If I had grown up in the projects and only had music videos to know them by, white people would have scared the hell out me. Just type New Wave Music Videos into YouTube and check out the freak show for yourself. Those people were truly creepy. I would love to interview some of the creators of those videos.

If it wasn't for our new acquaintances and that it was Chris' last hours in Colombia, I might have vegged out all day and basked in the decade of my childhood. We asked the couple for some must dos in the city. Maybe one day I'll write up the place they claimed was an obligation, a steak house/disco/vaudeville circus.

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Last week I visited an American school. I had met a teacher from the school at the beginning of my trip and he had offered me the chance to observe some of his classes. Teaching at an American school has always been one of those paths I've kept in the back of the mind and I didn't want to pass up the chance to see the reality of a day in the life of a teacher abroad.

Nothing really to report from my observations. A typical k-12 private school. The demeanor in the faculty room suggested a usual range of teachers,some good, a few outstanding, and a couple of real weirdos--more Unabomber than the kind you'd put in a music video.

The high school social studies teacher was a frail and nervous looking man amazingly white for someone living in the tropics. He did not look thrilled with his current life, and was clearly more interested in fruit salad than in making any new friends. But he was my ticket to the high school history classroom, so I did my best to make conversation. After some prompting by my acquaintance, he reluctantly invited me to watch his class the last period of the day.
When I arrived at his classroom at the beginning of the period, the door was locked with no evidence of anyone inside the room. I waited a good 20 minutes, no one showed. It could be he got his schedule wrong, or maybe he just didn't like being observed. No matter, I had my blog to attend to. I went to the teacher lounge and then to the administrative offices and said my thank yous. The school day was almost over by the time I started walking out the main gate.

Past the gate and on the other side of the campus guard house I heard a girl was screaming at the security officer at the end of the school's semi circular driveway. She was standing next to the open door of a new Mercedes sedan that was blocking the end of the drive. She was an attractive girl, maybe 17, though it was hard to notice anything about her besides loud mouth and her alarming breasts. I would later learn it was her brand new Mercedes that her father had given her because the trauma she had suffered the first day back from break when she was suspended from school for hitting a girl. I didn´t ask what offense she had committed to get the over sized implants.

The guard was trying to get her to move the car, forcefully at first, but with less conviction once she started threatening him. I couldn't follow it all, though I can assure you it was nasty. She repeated several times that her father was her boss, and that the poor man was going to be fired. The girl already had her cell phone out and apparently Daddy answered as in a breath she transformed from monstrous bitch to crying little girl.

I had nothing to do, so I figured I might as well take a seat in the shade and watch whatever was unfolding. In less than five minutes Daddy´s Land Rover pulled up to the guardhouse. He was yelling at the security guard through the driver's side window before he was out of the car. The guard waited for an opening and tried to explain his case, that the girl was blocking the drive with her car, but the father cut him off. Meanwhile parents were starting to lineup their cars and a balding man in a white Polo shirt was exiting the front gate. The man stopped a few paces from me to watch what was happening.

The father was threatening the office. Apparently, it was his security company, and how dare he yell at his little girl. The guard pleaded with the man, how were the parents going to pick up their children with a car blocking the driveway´s exit.

"You can figure that out somewhere else," Daddy said. (or at least something like that)

"Excuse me", the balding man said, speaking to the father, "I'm a director of this school. If you fire this man the school will find another security company and your daughter will find a new school."

No one had recognised the man in the white Polo. I learned that he was the school's chairman of the board, and was in a position to follow on his words. The father told his daughter, crying again, to move the car. He made a curt apology to the Chairman, and made a quick exit without so much as a glance at the security guard.


I was lucky to work in a private school with a reputation for reasonable parents and in a public school where at least no one was looking over my shoulder (ever). In the Delta, you had to go looking for the parents, who, if not too cracked out or fall down drunk to speak, would ask you heartbreaking questions like, "Can you tell me what to do with this child?" In both cases there was respect. Even the worst war stories I've heard from other teachers don't come close to those five minutes on the sidewalk outside the American school.

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Barranquilla Redux

The sign on the wall reads: This facility has public restrooms, please use them. Do not use your own containers.

Where am I?

Well, start with New Orleans. Remove the Quarter, the tourists, the excellent cuisine. Exchange the columned mansions of the Garden District for Moorish villas of Prado Viejo with more bougainvillea. Uproot the Live Oaks, replant Ceiba trees. Pound more cracks into the sidewalks and elevate them at least two feet above street level. Overlay neighborhoods of shotgun shacks with concrete blocks and corrugated roofs. Swap incomprehensible Cajun drawls for incomprehensible Spanish creole. Turn up the heat by day, add a sea breeze (January and February) at night. Refer to Mardi Gras as Carnaval. Get your Yellow Fever jab.

I present you Barranquilla. Another rotting port town beneath the waters of a dirty river.



First, the river. The Magdalena is Colombia's equivalent of the Mississippi and served as the country's primary commercial artery well into the 20th century. Anyone who has read Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be familiar with Magdalena's importance to Colombian history. In the General and his Labyrinth, Simon Bolivar takes his last journey in South America down the Magdalena to his intended exile. The romantic steamboats of Love in the Time of Cholera plied her waters for generations, and the environmental destruction through the deforestation to feed all those wood burning engines is still in evidence. In many places the tropical canopy never returned, rendering one of the river's silted branches unnavigable for commercial vessels. The setting of Chronicle of a Death Foretold was a victim to the river's strangulation. Cut from its commercial function, time stopped in the colonial city of Mompox. It is now a sweltering time capsule of late 19th century life.

A storied, filthy river. But why again Barranquilla?

It's hard to find a town with any interest these days that is off of the gringo trail. Mompox will give you an idea to the extent of the trail's far reaching tentacles. I thought I got off the beaten path for a moment in Mompox last January. Finally a place for that outstanding adventure travel piece I've always wanted to write. But I had no clips to pitch it with, no matter, within days I found scooped by a Harper's article from that February, "Go Before You Die". the piece was about a writer's trip from Bogota to Mompox in what he called the 'New' Colombia, a place where it is safe to travel just about anywhere. Eleven months later even Mompox has become an established outpost on the backpacker trail.

There still aren't any roads that go all the way through to this South American Timbuktu--you get there by a combination of bus, taxi, boat and tuk tuk--but there is a brand new hostel. Not that I would have cared to stew in the staggering humidity of malarial swamps with all the terrifying insects longer than it takes to see the sites. The churches and graveyards are outstanding, but the best visit is to the villa and courtyard that doubles as a retirement home and an insane asylum where blind man Jose Pupo, both old and insane, will take your hand and ask for the year and date of your birth. He'll then tell you about that day in Mompox, in my case a Friday when in rained in the afternoon. Then he'll break out his harmonica and his old and/or insane colleagues will gather around to dance or at least to rock in their chairs to the music.

This can all be done in a day, or in the Harper's writer's case, a morning--he didn't know to look for Jose. Then the reality of the dead river port creeps back with a sunset that brings mosquitoes but no relief from the staggering heat. No, I've logged my year in the Mississippi Delta, thank you very much.

People know about Barranquilla, but they only come here for the four days of Carnaval. Backpacker Bibles The Rough Guide, Footprint, and The Lonely Planet, all write up Barranquilla as a dusty, noisy cauldron of a place without a single permanent tourist attraction.

Excellent work, ladies and gentlemen. Your readers have listened, and stayed away. I didn't know that some of those South African lads could read. But thanks to your descriptions, I am free to roam this town in total obscurity. The people here aren't clued in to what a backpacker is or looks like.

In a city where many people have never met a foreigner outside of Carnaval, people don't know what to make of me when they do notice. Sure, I speak a little funny, too slow for a Costeña, for a coastal person's patience. But then who from out of town doesn't when they pronounce every last little syllable. When I open my mouth what registers in some people's eyes is not so much foreignness as, 'is this guy retarded?' When my mouth is shut I don't look retarded. So I get asked for directions on the street, which is doubly funny in a country where all the cities are on exactly numbered grids. By appearance I'm just another variation of the many European and Middle Eastern immigrants who chose this town when it seemed like it might have had a future.


Those travel writers were on to something. Aside from hosting the second largest Carnaval in South America, Barranquilla hasn't had much going for it in a long time. Not that it doesn't try, in a developing world sort of way. Following the lead of Medellin and Bogota, Barranquilla raised the money for a rapid transit bus line similar to a subway in that it has special lanes and boarding platforms at stations along the route. The mayor promised that the first line would be ready to open at the beginning of 2008 with more to soon follow. One year later and not only is there not a single rapid transit bus on the street, as far as I can tell there is only evidence of one partially completed station along the route. The city did find a way to spend all of the money.

Last summer a local newspaper broke a story that toxic waste dumps had been discovered on vacant sites throughout the poorer districts of the city. The estimated 10 tons of toxic material had been delivered from a consortium of Colombian hospitals, six in Medellin, three in Barranquilla. The companies contracted to dispose of the material had been making easy money on this fraud for as long as 4 years, maybe longer. Health experts are surprised that there don't seem to be any repercussions yet, at least no deaths have been attributed to the dumping. The mayor demanded explanations, as if he weren't already in on the take.

It is slightly less crazy than it sounds, that the perpetrators could have thought they might get away with dumping 20,000 pounds of toxic medical waste in a major metropolitan area, Colombia's 4th largest city. Every summer and fall the slums of Barranquilla function as an above ground sewer. Barranquilla does not have a drainage system, so when the heavy rains come the city streets become rivers, thus the high sidewalks.

The streets whose swift running rivers have rapids are called arroyos. Dogs, children, cars, buses, and the occasional home gets washed away with the arroyos (check out this footage). Since, like New Orleans, the poorest neighborhoods are in the lowest lying and most flood prone neighborhoods, much of the waste dumped there would be expected to wash out into the river each year. It begs the question how much was actually dumped before the waste was discovered. Then again, in a country run by drug lords, what does one expect will happen to a 'waste management' company for dumping some garbage on a city already acknowledged to be shit hole. Perhaps a fine, if the mayor can pocket a piece of that action too.


So I'm here because it's a surreal place to pick up the paper in the morning. I like dysfunctional port towns and the kinds of characters that wash ashore here, or in Barranquilla's case, to sea.

With every year it gets a little more difficult to learn new language. They say the drop is precipitous after the age of 35 or so, and I'm already losing my hearing. So I´m on the clock if I´m ever going to see my goal of fluency in another language. In the next few months I hope to absorb as much as much Spanish as possible. I figure if I can understand the dirty, half-swallowed Costeña Spanish they speak here, I can understand it anywhere. I don't know if I could survive once the breezes stop (late February or March) and I'm not particularly interested in Carnaval, but for the next few weeks Barranquilla will do me just fine.


There is one place I was immediately recognised. Not just as a foreigner, but as an American. I attended Game One of the Colombian Baseball Championships that opened on Saturday. It was a full house, 8,000 capacity in the single deck stadium. A peanut and cigarette man outside the park produced a ticket for me then ushered me to the front of the entrance line.

For 3 bucks I figure i was headed for the cheap seats. Turns out my 'VIP' ticket landed me on the first row in between the plate and 1st base. Like everything in Latin America, the experience was a little louder and took a little louder than the equivalent back home. The crowd cranked their noisemakers and a couple of sections drummed African beats while the organist blasted an amplified truckers horn to rattle the opposing pitcher throughout the 5 hour, 9 inning affair. The 90 cent beers helped to pass the time, as did the old guys behind me who announced the batters and the pitching changes. They took pride in schooling the Yanqui on the nationalities of the players, mostly Colombians.

My local nine has a couple of links to the game here. AA Prospect Jesse English was at one point on the roster of the visiting squad, though I can not find his name on the recent box scores. New Giant Edgar Renteria's foundation sponsors the Colombian baseball league and contributes to the development of Colombian talent. The talent is not overwhelming, thought the mascot was Big League material. The guy dressed up in the gator outfit managed to be the bat boy, field foul balls, chase around kids in the between-inning promotions, and dance to the organ without once tripping over his ground length tail or passing out inside his foam head on a steamy Caribbean night.

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Cousins

There is something eerie about a city of 8 million empty of its people. It is Saturday night in Bogota and there isn´t a single car or person on the streets. We are in La Candelaria, the city´s charming if crumbling historic neighborhood that seems more like an outer barrio for students and starving artists than a central district even on a busy night. Only a few hungry dogs are wondering about. It is a heavy quiet, broken only by the odd short bus blasting full speed from nowhere and not even slowing for the dark intersections. How can the middle of a capital city be so empty and depressing?

The barman where we got our last drink warned us to take cabs tonight, and that was in a much posher area of town. This is the weekend of the festival of kings when many smaller towns have their annual fairs. Anyone with family outside Bogota and with the means to leave the city does so this weekend.

But there aren´t even any cabs about in La Candelaria, and no radio taxi is going to drive from across town to take us a block or two to the nearest open corner joint. Maybe the muggers have taken their machetes on holiday too. But it doesn´t matter. A mugging might be better than this claustrophobic hostel.

I´d choose these foreboding streets to Anandamayi tonight. Not that it´s a bad hostel. I´d recommend it as one of the best places to stay in Colombia. The bathrooms are spotless. The dorm where I have been sleeping for the last 5 nights is cavernous, and until Sarah arrived it was me and 11 empty bunks. The floors in the dormitory are dark, shiny hardwood and the ceiling is an A frame that easily reaches twenty feet high. Last year there was a fireplace in the room that they have now removed for fear that some moron like myself would burn the place down. It is cold at night in Bogota, at 2,600 meters it often falls into the 30´s, and last year I would fall asleep right in front of a full on blaze. This trip I´ve had to steal blankets from the empty bunks. With five wool blankets, four up an one down on the mattress for insulation my teeth stop chattering and the cold on my face is a nice contrast to warmth of the bed.

A cold, beautiful place, what looks like a farm house nestled the middle of a national capital. There are two spacious courtyards, one whose every inch is filled with flowers and herbs, the other has poi pond, lush plants, trees, more flowers and benches to sit and read in the afternoon, or at night to huddle under a blanket and contemplate the moon. The kitchen has a wood burning stove and there is always a pot of tea ready for the guests. No fireplaces, but they do have hot water this year, I´m not sure how I stayed in a place so cold without hot water (by taking showers at 2 in the afternoon).

But it is the people here that we have to get away from tonight. Sarah and I had holed up in our empty dorm room but we´ve both seen the shadows of faces as they attempt to peer through the thin curtains that don´t quite cover the windows on the door.

Perhaps I shouldn´t have introduced Sarah as my cousin. That is their interest, in the cousins. It was the only way she could share this beautiful room with me, the young girl in charge this holiday weekend wouldn´t permit friends in the dorm, and she was sure we were more.

It is sort of true that we are cousins. Our stepfathers are brothers.

For the past few days we´ve been getting those sideways glances and rolling eyes from everyone, the staff and especially the Americans, an older would-be businessman and a younger eagle scout type who are both staked out in the warmth of the kitchen. The older American who claims to hail from northern Wisconsin was the model gringo yesterday. Under a Panama hat he smoked cigars in the courtyard all afternoon while pitching a real estate scheme to a middle aged South African. The latter is a happy-go-lucky type who sails catamarans across the ocean for an Australian company. He seems very interested in the American´s scheme. I can only hope he is being polite. I asked the old gringo about his business and he mentioned something about ´flipping´, something else about a four unit complex in Minneapolis, and having been out of the market for three years, before changing the subject. He is full of shit.

The eagle scout is a nice boy. I wonder how long he´ll last teaching in Bogota. He´s acted wounded since the first night Sarah arrived and we went out to the Zona Rosa, the club and nightlife district. I think he has a crush on her, though I do not think Sarah was impressed that out of the hundreds of places he took us to an American styled brew pub and sports bar. Whatever the matter, the whispering begins as soon we leave the room.

So tonight the dark, empty, freezing streets of Bogota are more appealing than the sideways glances and forced conversation in the warm kitchen at the hostel. But what can happen in a block? Surely the bar down the street is open on a Saturday night just past nine.

The cafe is closed. So is the restaurant another block down the hill. Another block and more of the same. I haven´t been too many places where I didn´t feel comfortable walking the streets, but I´m thinking its best we turn back. We take another street to return the hostel and we pass a bodega that is open. There are a few tables and chairs squeezed into the floor space along the counter. Sarah gets some cigarettes. We order beers and a man offers us a table across from the register. We sit and talk a little. A man one table away is staring at us. His eyes are big and bloodshot, but I don´t notice this at first, only that he is smiling. I smile back to be polite. I imagine they don´t get too many foreigners at the tables of this little corner store. He takes my gesture as an invitation and jumps from his seat to one at our table with a suddenness that does not seem natural nor sane. Now I notice the bulging eyes. I´d peg him for a meth addict were we back home. This being Colombia, he is probably just a coke head.

He tells us he is from the poorest barrio in Bogota, apparently the one that sits just above La Candelaria. Sarah knows this type, says there is a guy like at any party in South America, especially one with gringas. She is hardly listening to him. He is focused on her, wants to dance with her, in what space and to what music I do not know. I try to divert him by talk of football, I ask him about the national team. He says something, then repeats himself, again and again, though I can´t understand him, and can´t help but notice his spittle flying from his mouth and into my beer.

A second man at a table nearer the street is interested in us, in a saner, where are we from?, kind of way. He knows about football and we talk a bit, at times over the head of the coke addict who again is focusing on Sarah.

¨She is my cousin,¨ I tell him.

This makes him pause for a minute. Sarah and I begin talking in English. We are enjoying the fact that we may as well be speaking Thai. It is a rare place these days where English can be used as a secret language, but no one here understands a word of what we are saying. The coke head is now grabbing at Sarah. The second man seems embarrassed but says nothing. I tell Sarah in our code that it is time to leave.

A block away and we notice that the coke head is following after us, but he is either too drunk or too blasted to make anything of his pursuit. We stop in front of the first open cafe we´ve seen all night, with what sounds like a live jazz piano, and our friend waddles by us and on up the hill.

The kitchen is empty save for Eduardo, the boy who serves as the night guard, nodded off in front of the television. We sip tea and look through the cards in Class Struggle. I remember this Marxist board game from my last trip here. The box has a picture of Karl Marx arm wrestling one of the Rockefellers. The object of the game is the alliance of the non-ruling classes to overthrow the capitalist system. The professor who wrote the game recommends it as a classroom tool. I must get one of these games for my friend James, I remind myself.

Finally back to the dorm. It would be so much warmer to share a bed tonight, but Sarah is my cousin. Sort of. Click Here to Read More..

Hearst Castle, Yellow Journalism, and the Hemp Conspiracy

I took a double take at the herd of zebra grazing in a pasture off the stretch of US 1 north of San Simeon. Then I remembered where I was, a few miles from Hearst Castle. The former estate of William Randolph Hearst used to house one of the most diverse wildlife parks in the world, with over 100 species of grazing animals and 50 types of predator.

The Hearst Castle is now a part of the California State Park system, and for $20 it is possible to take one of five different tours of the estate including an evening tour where local volunteers dress up as guests in period costumes from the 1930’s. The vistas along the 5-mile bus ride up the 1,600 foot rise to the castle’s ridge top setting are nearly worth the price of admission.

William’s father George Hearst purchased the 48,000 acre estate in 1865 for 70 cents per acre. Even at the time this was a discounted price for prime coastal real estate. There was question about the validity of the title based on an old Mexican land grant. As a member of the State Assembly, Hearst sorted out this and other title claims, and the mining baron cemented land holdings that would make him virtual nobility. William acquired these lands upon his mother’s death in 1919, and with the aid of architect Julia Morgan, began a construction of an estate that would remain uncompleted over 28 years and 127 rooms later.

With apologies to Michael Jackson—and his bizarre incorporation of a burn center on his ranch—the Hearst Castle and grounds would have been more aptly named Never-Never Land. Never before and never again could such a house be built.



Prohibitive costs aside, antiquity laws would prevent anything close to Hearst’s fanciful creation. He had entire Renaissance era and Gothic churches dismantled for their intricately carved ceilings, cloisters and choir stalls, though most of these priceless artifacts are easily overlooked amid his world-class collection of tapestries and furnishings from around the world. The façade of the Casa Grande was built to look like a Spanish Cathedral, a fitting style for a host with two strictly enforced rules. His guests were forbidden to bring their own liquor, or sleep with the other guests if not married to them. He was the exception to this rule. The rich and famous flocked to the castle anyway, and the stories along the tour are peppered with the biggest names from the early days of cinema.

The hodgepodge of sacred is contrasted by the motley profane: pools, fountains and gardens with a haphazard mishmash of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, and works from Spain and Italy from various periods dating back to the Renaissance.

Our guide included digestible nuggets of the Hearst legend, heavy on the idiosyncrasies of his personal life and his devotion to his mistress, actress Marion Davies, but disappointingly thin on his influence on the world stage. As a historian and journalist I found the omissions of Hearst’s public life a little sad, especially after we were teased with the opening line from our tour guide, “Most of you had probably never heard of William Randolph Hearst before today, in his time he was one of the most powerful men in the world.”

The guide made only passing reference to Hearst’s power, the circulation of his publications reached 30 percent of the American electorate. Not a word on my two favorite Hearst stories, his well-known role in sparking the Spanish-American War, or his recently popularized crusade against marijuana.


The reign of William Randolph Hearst marked a low point in the integrity of the American press. He is credited with the era of yellow journalism, when publisher moguls including Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer engaged in circulation wars by printing sensationalized and fraudulent stories. He directed his newspapers to manufacture sources and quotes that best fit their agendas. Before television, nothing sold newspapers like a war, and when the opportunity arose, Hearst delivered news in a way that made war inevitable.


On February 15th, 1898, the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor. The warship had been sent to Cuba three weeks earlier in a response aimed at declaring US intentions to protect American citizens amidst an escalating civil war between Spain and Cuban revolutionaries. Though the cause of the explosions aboard the Maine remain unclear to this day, the Hearst papers immediately declared that a Spanish mine had blown up the Maine’s magazines despite the frequency of boiler mishaps aboard the coal fired ships of that day. The New York Journal barked front-page headlines and eight-page spreads denouncing Spanish intrigue in the weeks leading up to the American invasion of Cuba.

That story is now apart of any decent American history survey, not that students read their history textbooks. A lesser known story, though one that has been recently popularized by a spate of books and documentaries about the origin of our country’s drug laws, is Hearst’s relentless crusade against marijuana.

For centuries hemp had been a vital crop for the production of rope, sails, and course fabrics. In the late 1930’s, advances in processing the plant threatened to make hemp a cheap and renewable alternative to paper pulp and allow for mass production of natural hemp fibers. George Schlichten’s new machine, the decorticator, separated the fiber from core of the hemp plant, thereby reducing labor costs and greatly increasing hemp’s fiber yield. Combined with new technology to fashion paper and plastics from hemp-derived cellulose, Schlichten’s machine promised a new direction for the paper and fabric industry.

But what is good for the planet is not necessarily good for the barons of industry. Both Hearst and the Dupont Corporation stood to lose millions of dollars because of the coming hemp revolution. Hearst owned thousands of acres of prime forest and the paper mills that supplied his media empire. Dupont at the time was discovering uses for petroleum-based fabrics including nylon.

To stave of the commercial threat posed by hemp, Hearst began a journalistic crusade against an evil weed from Mexico, marijuana. It would have been impossible to demonize the plant as cannabis or hemp given its centuries long use as a cash crop. Marijuana, on the other hand, was the little known Mexican name for the plant, and Hearst newspapers covered stories of marijuana users incurable hysteria, hopeless dependency and psychotic episodes. The newspaper driven panic against marijuana helped turned public sentiment against the cannabis plant.

Conspiracy buffs note that Harry Anslinger, the drug czar who led the campaign for federal prohibition, was appointed by a Dupont financier. Though the American Medical Association made a stand against the prohibition of a plant with recognized medicinal value, the interest aligned against the fair plant are too strong. In the end, Anslinger coerced the leaders of the medical establishment to change their positions by threats of intense federal scrutiny, paving the way for Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Hearst is freed to saw his trees and the Dupont to clothe a generation in coal and oil based fibers.

It’s a great story, one that books, movies, and countless internet pundits have popularized in recent years. It pulls the heartstrings of an environmentally conscious audience that would like to believe in a miracle plant that could have saved the world from environmental degradation. Though there may be a grain of truth in the tale, the story that a vast corporate conspiracy was responsible for the cannabis prohibition was pulled from the cloud of a bong hit. Some modern revision of the hemp prohibition rival JFK theories in their asinine complexity, and like Hearst’s best yarns, they seem better suited for the yellow press than serious historical discussion.

The Dupont Corporation’s role in the web does not stand scrutiny. Nylon wasn’t discovered until 1935 and had no commercially patented uses until it appeared in toothbrush bristles in 1938, a year after the Marihuana Tax act of 1937 and six years after marijuana’s inclusion in the Uniform Drug Act of 1932. Nylon was envisioned as a substitute for silk, and did not come viable until demand from the WWII helped it become silk replacement in the early 1940’s.

Schlichten patented his decorticator in 1917, yet there was no corresponding boom in hemp production like the boom in cotton that followed Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Perhaps because hemp is not a great clothing alternative, its fibers are coarse and scratchy. Only a conspiracy obsessed, earth-worshipping hippy could stand a hemp wardrobe. Eventually, WWII spurred temporary demand for the production of industrial hemp with full backing of the US government.

Authors and filmmakers would have you believe marijuana was almost completely unknown until Hearst brought it to his readers’ attention in the mid 1930’s. Though it’s true there were very few pot smokers in that time, marijuana was reviled in the press long before the 1930’s, and before the invention the decorticator. Hearst had been waging a campaign against hashish, opiates, and marijuana that spanned the first four decades of the 20th century. Hearst publications were not alone. Articles denouncing the killer weed were also printed in august sources such as The Washington Post—two in March 1905—and The New York Times in January 1901. In 1929, The Denver Post ran a string of articles about the weed after a Mexican man accused of being a marijuana fiend killed his white step-daughter.


The federal laws pursued by Anslinger were only consolidating a prohibition well under way on the state level. Twenty-one states already had marijuana laws in place before the federal regulations of the 1930’s. New York included cannabis on its controlled substances list in 1914. Utah, whose Mormon missionaries returned from Mexico with bundles of the weed, became the first western state to ban cannabis in 1915. Sixteen western states, where the United States’ Mexican population resided, had cannabis bans by 1930. Colorado was late in prohibition, its ban came almost immediately after the 1929 marijuana attributed slaying.

The press on marijuana blamed the drug for the worst stereotypes of a growing Mexican population in the Southwestern US. This fits the pattern of other anti-drug rhetoric from the era, hashish was negatively associated with Middle Easterners, cocaine with southern Blacks, and opiates with Asians. Whether or not racism and xenophobia was the driving force in cannabis prohibition, it was a factor, and almost certainly played a role in Hearst’s news stories. He made no secret of his hatred for Mexicans and Mexican culture.

The best argument in favor of the conspiracy is the curious decision for federal regulators to ban all cannabis production. The smoking weed, cannabis indica, has little in common with the fibrous, tree like cannabis sativa used for industrial purposes. A modern day hemp farmer in Britain illustrates this point with a notice posted on his fence that “it would take a joint the size of a telephone pole for you to you get high,” off the later variety.

Perhaps they weren’t taking any chances. This was after all the era of Prohibition, where alcohol was demonized alongside other mind-altering substances. In that regard the cannabis laws were consistent with the national temperance movement of the day and on the surface less hypocritical than they are today.

Anyway, that’s the Hearst conspiracy and its debunking in a nutshell.

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LDS and Prop 8

On occasion I’m willing to break from what my uncle would call the “pinko-liberal” wing of American politics in search of good political solutions. I’d like to think of myself as a pragmatist in the spirit of Peirce and James willing to praise good ideas from wherever they might come.

A new kind of federalism comes to mind. There are compelling arguments for both sides regarding the proper balance of states rights versus federal power in our federalist system. Most of these arguments were anticipated by the founding fathers, so I’ll reduce the matter for brevity’s sake. On one hand, the Civil Rights Era showed that states can be reactionary in the face of needed reform. It took the power of the federal government to break down resistance to integration and the recalcitrance of state institutions. The Civil Rights Era, like the New Deal a generation before it, wed the liberal wing of American politics to idea of federally based policy solutions.

There are compelling arguments in favor of a federalism that respects constitutionally delegated balance of state and federal power. Though generally a conservative position advocated by those in favor of smaller central government, there is also a case to be made that individual states can better tailor initiatives to the specific needs of her citizens. Let the states innovate and become laboratories of policy and let the successes become models for other states and for federal policy.


State ballot initiatives have ushered a new wave of federalism as they blend direct democracy with the latitudes of state innovation. Issues like medical marijuana, affirmative action, gay marriage, assisted suicide, abortion, and animal rights have all found their way on to state ballots for the upcoming election cycle. There are 12 state-wide ballot propositions this year in California alone, a state where successful initiatives are tacked on the State Constitution, and where an unsuccessful proposition, 1994’s Prop 187 against funding for immigrant social services, triggered epic political realignment.

Two of the most contentious measures on California's ballot are negative propositions. Prop 4 (which has failed in two previous elections) would require minors to attain parental consent for abortions. Prop 8 would overturn the State Supreme Court’s ruling on the legality of gay marriage.

Conservatives should have ideological motives to respect this process of state innovation. State initiative on issues like gay marriage would keep the culture wars out of Washington, D.C. Yet interest groups in red states are not content with outcomes in their own states and do not intend to watch Californians decide these issues for themselves. Money is pouring in across the border in an effort to sway Californians on the aforementioned hot-button evangelical issues. The leadership of the LDS church in Utah has mobilized an effort to pass Prop 8 and has raised over $8.4 million for the campaign.

One would think that the LDS, whose control of state politics once made Utah a virtual theocracy that was constantly at odds with officials in Washington, would be inclined to a live and let live attitude for state innovation. This is not the case. The federalist principle is less important to the LDS than the specter of gays mocking their concept of traditional marriage. Let’s overlook for a moment that an LDS marriage is hardly traditional—Mormons do not espouse till death do you part, rather they believe in a union sealed in this life that continues into the afterlife where man and his woman (for a fundamentalist, his women) govern over their own planet in a Mormon solar system—and call this an exercise in political pragmatism. Or is that hypocrisy, I get confused.

Californians have never been known to pass initiatives restrictive of rights, but the polls suggest that the LDS money is starting to turn the electorate in favor of Prop 8. A pity Californians can’t be left alone to figure it out for themselves.
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Kriza

The Palestinians at my corner store are proclaiming the end of the American Empire. While I am a bit more agnostic about the state of the times, it is staggering to look back over the excesses, public and private, of the last decade.

A bailout is probably necessary to keep the financial system from freezing up and compounding economic freefall. Any Keynesian worth his salt knows we are best off running up deficits in the bad times. For that to work, however, the theory holds for running surpluses when the economy is good, else the deficits will fuck you. I'm not in this for the accounting, but i suspect if you tally up the domestic pork projects and the IOU's of recent foreign adventurism, you'll find yourself with a number well in excess of the 700 Billion hair of the dog solution to the ongoing financial meltdown.

Oh yeah, and because everyone wants ideas for exotic destinations when they are broke, check out my most recent article. Click Here to Read More..

Harper's Ferry

If you are ever stuck in Northern Virginia with an afternoon free and have any interest in American history, then I highly recommend a day trip to Harper's Ferry. The town is situated at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, about a 30 minute drive from Leesburg, VA. The town is sited on a bluff that affords impressive views down rivers and the flanking Appalachian foothills. The cobbled main street has been designated part of Harper's Ferry National Park there, and the recreated shop fronts are filled with living history actors. The actor/rangers I spoke with had a commanding knowledge of the history of the town beyond John Brown's raid in 1859. The conviction in his eyes still burns through the lithographs on the museum walls. Though he failed to provoke a slave uprising, the shop attendant/undergrad at the general store will tell anyone who cares to sit and chat awhile about how Brown effectively lit a powder keg under the fraying Differening political responses to the raid splintered the Democratic party of the time paving electoral possibility for Lincoln's united Republicans and hastening the south's preemptive withdrawal from the Union.

I hadn't realized that Harpers Ferry is now a part of West Virginia, the easternmost tip of the state. Long before West Virginia's formation in 1861, there had been a split between the states coastal population dominated by planter elites and the poorer upland dwellers to the west. Though the surrounding area was mostly lowland planter country aligned with the state's slave holding interests, Jefferson County voted to become a part of West Virginia at the 1861 convention. A dyspeptic mill owner did not break character as he explained how, on the day of the vote, federal troops had surrounded the county seat, thereby discouraging the slave holders from casting ballots against withdrawal from secessionist Virginia.


I walked a half mile of the Appalachian Trail from West Virginia across the bridge into Maryland. Might have ventured farther had I brought something other than my dress shoes. I encountered several hikers on my short walk, a couple of whom had come up from Georgia. I'd like to hike the AT one day, maybe like the folks I met who are hiking it in one or two state installments over the course of 8 summers.

Check out my latest travel writing here and here.

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Four Legs Good

A little over ten years ago, a high school friend took me canoeing on the Harpeth River. We borrowed the canoe from his uncle who has a farm with river frontage out in Williamson County. As we were walking towards the reeds along the shore, a screech came from the trees to the left of us.

Taylor put down the front of canoe. “Come check this out,” he said.

We pushed through the bushy trees and heather to the property of a prominent Nashville family. We reached a clearing with a row of chain link walled huts with A-framed corrugated roofs that I’m reminded of every time I see footage from Guantanamo. The path between the rows of coops gave this place the feel of a miniature village where a single resident perched in each hut. A few sported striking plumage, several with the South Carolina scarlet and black, one had a golden mane. Magnificent birds, sleek and powerful, no pedestrian farm animals these.

“Are they all roosters?” I asked.

“Yup, gamecocks.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“In Tennessee it is, they say M_____ and his kid got busted when the cops raided a fight.”



As of this month, cock fighting is illegal in all 50 states. Louisiana had been the last holdout, but the Legislature in Baton Rouge had come under severe pressure from animal rights activists and finally passed a prohibition that went into effect last week.

Given that over 80% of the Louisiana public was against legalized bird fights, the law makes some sense. But the reasons cited by animal rights advocates, that the sport is cruel, barbarous, and violence promoting, are less compelling. If laws are being written for the roosters, then the average American slaughterhouse or chicken factory better look out.

Of all the brutalities of factory farming with its downer cows and killing floors, the chicken factory ranks up there with the worst. The egg hens spend existence in tiny cages pumped full of speed and antibiotics so they’ll grow quicker and not die of horrible infections while stewing in pools of their own chicken shit. Doesn’t sound like much of a life.

The fighting birds I saw were raised in spacious accommodation. We’re not talking dog fighting. Dogs are social animals that must be bred and conditioned through torture to acquire the aggression to fight one another to the death. You don't have to teach roosters to hate each other, just put two of them together and watch what happens. The razor sharp gaffes attached to a gamecock’s legs are another thing, but the blades do make it quicker. Cruelty, sure, but it beats life on the chicken farm.

Not that I'm a supporter of blood sports, mind you. I’m actually a vegetarian. The closest I’ve been to a gaming pit was with Chicken George in Alex Haley’s Roots. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know how much Chicken George loved those birds.

I'm all for the regulation of factory farming if done for the people. The antibiotic consumption is pretty terrifying from a human health standpoint. Constantly dosed populations create fertile environments for the breeding of dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. I realize that low-yield organic farming cannot feed a world of 7 Billion, even if that world could afford to shop at Whole Paycheck, but there's just got to be a better way.

Animal rights pave a slippery slope to nonsense. Take Switzerland, for example, where parliament has enacted a whole raft of new animal protections. Swiss law now requires that your solitary goldfish now have a companion, they are social animals after all. If you own a fish, your aquarium must not be transparent on all sides, because that might be unsettling for them otherwise. And you must ensure them a natural day and night cycle. Don’t even think about flushing Goldie if he’s still alive, you must at least properly euthanize him first.

If you’re the kind of asshole that still enjoys hooking fish out of the lake, no more catch and release. Because that would hurt. And no more live bait, I'm guessing because it's bad for the bait. To get a fishing license, you’ll have to take a course in pesca-compassion. I made up the name; the class exists.

If you want to own a dog in Switzerland, you’ll also have to take a class. The coursework includes five theories on how to best walk it. They don’t want your dog to develop the anxieties that may make him bite someone next time you take him around the block.

It’s not just fish that must be owned in pairs. Any social animal, be it a horse, parrot, hamster, or guinea pig, must now have a companion of like species. Livestock must have “visual contact with their fellows.” It is now illegal to tether your horse or goat, and because your pigs and cows might have sensitive feet, concrete or stone floors are no longer acceptable for their primary dwellings. After rolling around in the mud, Swiss pigs now have the right to take a shower. Mandatory pig showers, now how could I make that up?

Oh yeah, and Swiss Animal Protection, the country’s leading animal rights group, does not believe the legislation goes far enough to protect their friends. They vow to continue the push for four-legged equality.

Doesn’t seem like we could possibly get to goldfish regulation in the United States, but then until recently I thought the Swiss were a reasonable people. So I ask you, faced with the choice of the pet-sitter state, or a few rednecks out in a town you've never heard of killing a few roosters... well?
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Chinese Sea Power

The start of the Olympics this week in Beijing has prompted media attention on a range of Chinese issues including Tibet and the Chinese environment, the inexorable rise of the Chinese economy and the increasing influence of Chinese policy on the global stage.

As a global historian and a student in the Western world’s first graduate course on Asian Sea Power, I’d like to take a longer view in this week of China speculation. This week’s focus on the rise of China as a world power, with a few turns of history could have been a tribute to unrivaled Chinese supremacy in the past millenium.

By the year 1000, and for several hundred years beyond, virtually every useful technology in the world had its origin in China. Economic historians of the era like to point out that in the twelfth century, Song China was within “a hair’s breadth” of industrialization. Per capita iron output in China circa 1100 was higher than that of Great Britain in 1700. The densely populated Yangtse Delta was one of the few, if not the only pre-industrialized society to realize intensive economic growth, that is sustained growth in per capita output (as opposed to growth due only to increased population). Various geographical factors, resource constraints including dry and poorly located coal deposits, and the looming twelfth century Mongol invasions, leave us to speculate what could have been in Song China.

In the first decades of the 15th century, as the Italian peninsula was experiencing its Renaissance and the first Portuguese explorers were testing the waters of the North Atlantic, the early Ming empire was laying claim as the greatest seaborne power in the pre-modern world. Nine decades before Columbus set sail across the Atlantic with 300 men in three modest caravels , the Chinese Admiral Zheng He embarked on a series of seven voyages with the intention to incorporate the known world into the tribute system of the Ming empire. Zheng He’s flotillas dwarfed those of his contemporary Iberian mariners. His largest expedition included over 300 ships and 28,000 men, including at least 63 treasure ships that measured 450 feet long and 150 feet wide, a surface area greater than a football field. The Ming treasure ship was largest wooden vessel ever constructed, as a treasure ship’s hull could have accommodated Columbus’s fist expedition as well as the four vessels Da Gama used on his voyage to India.

Zheng He visited Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and the east coast of Africa. Though largely discredited, one modern English naval officer and historian Gavin Menzies claims evidence for the eunuch admiral having reached North and South America and even as far as Greenland. In any case, Zheng’s tribute armada must have been an overwhelming site wherever it landed. It helped establish trade routes across the Indian Ocean, and brought the Celestial Empire into the consciousness of most of the known world. Some historians claim that maps from the time of the Zheng expeditions were known to Columbus before he made decision to sail east for China and India.

Then, at the height of Chinese naval supremacy, the Ming court took great pains to cease all Chinese sea trade. At the time of Zheng’s last expedition, a new Emporer decreed a maritime ban in Chinese waters. Sea going trade was punishable with death. All of the empire’s naval records, star charts, route maps, and manuals collected on the imperial expeditions were destroyed by the Chinese minister of war. Some theorize Zheng was considered a threat by the new emperor, others point to the incredible costs of outfitting these expeditions in a time when money was needed to shore up the frontier defenses against the Mongol threat from the north.

Anti-maritime policy was the rule for the next 200 years. In the 1660’s, China’s new Manchu rulers initiated a scorched earth policy along the Chinese coast. They raised coastal towns and villages and forced the seaboard population into the interior. Chinese sea trade persisted in these years only in the southern coastal territories farthest from the Beijing court in the north. The Chinese merchants who established entrepots in Dutch controlled Indonesia and the Spanish dominated Philippines hailed from Fujian and Guangdong (Canton), the two southernmost coastal provinces in China. With this merchant diaspora, Cantonese, and not Mandarin, would become the dominant language of Chinatowns the world over.

By 1840, China had been a dormant naval power for 400 years. When the British East India Company decided to seize ports to distribute its Indian grown opium--the only foreign product it could find with a market demand in China—the Qing state could summon no answer to the steam power and heavy artillery of the British fleet. The Opium Wars humiliated China and began a century of European domination of Asian waters interrupted only by the rise of Japan.

Would China have been so vulnerable if it had not abandoned its sea power? We can only imagine what would have happened if Chinese merchants had been allowed to follow the Zheng expeditions across Indian Ocean, had the Chinese been in a position to rival Portuguese and Muslim traders as the middlemen of the spice trade. The dragon that Napoleon warned the world against had been put to sleep at the height of China’s maritime glory. Click Here to Read More..

Mormons V: Racquetball with Hitler

This is the final chapter in the Mormon installment. Like the final installment about any New Religion (see Scientology), it gets a little weird. You’ve been warned.

Several years after college I had a second encounter with LDS missionaries. I was sitting on the bottom step at the base of Preseren statue, a monument to the national poet of Slovenia who presides over Ljubljana’s old town square. Preseren statue was a popular rendezvous point to wait for friends or lovers before a night on the town. For those without the money, it was a nice place to drink instead of the bar. Students in the latter group perched on the granite shelf above me and passed around a bottle of the kind of wine that comes with a cap instead of a cork. One of them turned and tilted the bottle in tribute to the memory of the hard drinking poet. Preseren did not seem to notice. His forlorn gaze was locked down the cobbled street to a bust of his unrequited love set atop a doorway where her nymph-like smirk forever spurned him. I hoped I wouldn’t be waiting so long.

I waited. Andreja and I were supposed to meet for a drink. I watched the few who trickled into evening vespers at the cathedral and the foot traffic on the triple bridge over the river that split the old town. The pedestrians kept their eyes straight ahead, down along the cobble of the square.

No one paid mind the two smiling young men on the bridge who greeted in competent Slovene. The foot traffic snaked around them—their identical suits and black nametags marked them for what they were a hundred meters away. They held their smiles. They kept up the greetings and a few varied one-liners about the Lord in a language with less than two million speakers and at least 42 dialects, a language they had dedicated two years of their lives to mastering. They devoted hours to pre-dawn study each morning so they could stand on this bridge and be shunned like a two-man leper colony.

If they would just venture beyond the uninterested commuters, past the statue and up the stairs leading up to rose Cathedral buttressing the Northern end of the square, they’d find their competitors faring little better in the competition for souls. The air inside of the Ljubljana Cathedral is heavy, weighted down with history, the arcana of faith. The late afternoon sun bleeds through stain glass to where a priest administers vespers before a dozen old babicas, Slovene grandmothers, wrapped in their headscarves. Tourists filter in and stand and watch the ceremony for a few minutes, then discharge back out onto the square.

Slovenia is not fertile ground for religion. It is an ex-Communist, post-Catholic nation. Most Slovenes claim Catholicism as their religion, around 96% are Roman Catholic by ethnicity. Most Slovenes have a priest administer their weddings and funerals, but in daily life God is kept at a comfortable distance, six feet under to be precise. Few here are interested in religion. The Mormons would have better luck in Baghdad, Kathmandu, anywhere else but ex-communist, post-Catholic Europe.



I checked my phone. Text message—Andreja: can’t make it. More students arrive at the statue and another bottle is passed around the feet of the sodden poet. I am offered a drink. Good timing. Even a 75 cent bottle capped wine tastes good in Slovenia.

One of the missionaries catches me watching them. He says something to his partner and takes the lead as they start walking towards the statue. The front man is short and has a dark complexion. He looks vaguely Polynesian.

“Jaz sem Starsine Lee. Kako ste vi?”

“ Dobro, Hvala. But I’m American, you can speak English if you’d rather.”
“An American! I thought you were Slovene! I’m Elder Lee, this is Elder McFadden, we are with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…”

The shorter one continued the pitch while his partner stood slightly behind him and warily regarded the students behind me as if at any moment they might toss a bottle at him.

“Thanks, but I’m not looking for a religion,” I replied. For some reason I continued. There was something I missed about Americans' friendliness to strangers, even if this was a sales job.

“It’s amazing you guys learn Slovene so well, I’ve been studying for over a year now and can still can’t understand people.”

The leader gave a quick glance back over his shoulder. His partner then rustled in his bag and pulled out a black notebook.

“You know, we give language lessons.”

On cue, Elder McFadden produced a flyer with the phone number and address of their meeting house.


It was a good pitch. They offered the one thing I could have I possibly wanted from them. I had taken two 80-hour Slovene courses at the university, but there wasn’t a class between the intermediate I had just completed and the advanced level. The advanced course was designed for immigrants from Serbia and Bosnia who blended Slovene with their similar sounding mother tongues. The result was an incomprehensible Balkan hodgepodge punctuated only by the laughter from the withering jokes as the rump of South Slavs ganged up on what they saw as their stuffy (rich) Slovene neighbors. I had tried private tutors, but hadn’t found a good one. My last tutor smelled like raw onions and liked to sit six inches from me when we practiced.

I hadn’t given a firm commitment on the lesson, but I decided to meet them. I was curious about these kids who traveled halfway across the world to proselytize to the unconvertible masses, peddling a religion founded by a polygamist from upstate New York. Did they know what a joke they were in the eyes of the residents—those who even noticed them—that they were a source of universal derision, something all Yugoslavs could agree on? There isn’t a whole lot all Yugoslavs can agree on.

Maybe I met them out of boredom. My job was only 20 hours a week, so I had plenty of time on my hands. Almost every social interaction I had revolved around drinking, even hiking and language classes ended in beers, so I maybe welcomed some time with the teetotalers. Since I knew I’d be moving to London in a couple of months, I wouldn’t have to worry about these guys stalking me for my soul. I could easily disappear.

The lesson was at their local ward meeting house, located in a middling suburb to the west of town on the second story of a building that unfolded around an interior courtyard paved over with asphalt. As I locked up my bike I could feel the eyes of the locals who sat at a table drinking pints in the courtyard. Elder Lee met me with a handshake at the door.

The ward had two rooms for services, a large chapel and a smaller annex for when the men and women divided up to discuss gender specific themes. Allegorical paintings decorated the walls. I stopped to look at a photograph of twelve old white men in an unsymmetrical line.

“They’re not arranged by height,” I said.

“Good observation, they are actually lined up in order of seniority. This is what we call the Council of the Twelve Apostles. And that’s the prophet Gordon B. Hinkley,” Lee said, a touch of awe in his voice as he pointed to the shriveled suit at the far left of the lineup. “He is a great man”


Elder McFadden was seated in the smaller of the two meeting rooms, either studying his tie or napping. I took a seat in front of a white marker board set up in the middle of the room prepared in advanced for my lesson. They had written out all the first declension case endings on the board.

Slovene is an inflective language, similar to Latin in that the nouns and adjectives have different endings depending on how they are used in a sentence. Endings must be written out in three columns, since in addition to singular and plural, Slovene has a dual case that is used when referring to two things or persons. Slovene grammar is a nightmare. A manufactured nightmare. Standard Slovene is the product of a 19th century literary movement that restored the language after centuries of occupation left it an informal, unwritten language only spoken in the home. The academics were keen to restore archaic forms like the dual that would have died away otherwise. Few in the capital bother to speak properly anyway, Ljubljanans clip many of the endings at random. The conjugations before me are for the most part a pain in the ass.

Elder Lee stood beside the board and went through the endings case by case, giving an example for each ending. Maybe they were trying to put me to sleep. I could not have conjured a lesson plan better designed to induce hypnosis.

Flagging, I started looking at the pictures hung on the back wall. There was one with a man kneeling in a wood before two identical bearded white men in white robes in a shaft of white light.

“Who is that guy?” I yawned.

Elder Lee, who had also slumped a bit, drowsed by his own mind-numbing lesson, perked up. I had taken the bait. He kicked the bottom of white board and it swung around to reveal the lesson prepared on the on other side of the board. On the top, in bold letters read: JOSEPH SMITH.

After a much livelier twenty-minute presentation, derailed a bit by my questions about Mormon claim to the discovery of the New World, Lee suggested we end with a prayer. Elders Lee and McFadden kneeled and recited in unison a passage from the end of the Book of Mormon. It was a passage they would repeat at end of every meeting:

I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

It was pretty obvious the language lessons wouldn’t be helping me much. Not that I cared, I was becoming interested in these missionaries and their bizarro existence in a land of atheists. Their colleagues in South America were converting souls by the dozen, some claimed upwards of a hundred new members a year. Neither Lee nor McFadden had a single convert between them. I was the first guy who had talked to them in weeks and the first they had brought back to the ward. Though I made it clear up front that I was not interested, that I was even talking to them made me their best prospect in Slovenia.

I agreed to meet them for another lesson. This time they didn’t really have anything prepared, and we quickly fell into another discussion of Mormonism. I was interested in the LDS cosmology, and Elder Lee sketched out on the board a beginners guide to Mormon heaven. He drew a series of circles on the board, each one a bit higher than the next. Then he drew a line at the bottom of the board.

He explained that Mormons in good standing went off to the highest circle, a heaven where they would rejoin their families for eternity. Each descending circle was a less desirable brand of heaven, all of them “nice” though. He did not have to tell me what was below the line at the bottom of the board. I had been to Sunday School.
“Then who goes down there, to hell?” I asked.
“Hell is reserved for the worst kind of sinner, the man who knowingly turns his back on God.”
“So, Hitler is down there,” I said.
“Well… no, Hitler is probably here,” Lee said, pointing with his marker to a circle above damnation.

“Hitler didn’t turn his back on God?”

Hitler couldn’t turn his back on God, according to Lee, because he had never received the testament of the Latter-day Saints. The flip side of claiming to be of the one and true religion is that the Gentiles without God can’t be blamed for their earthly foibles. The way Elder Lee described it, Mormons reserve eternal damnation for those who stray from their own flock. So Pol Pot and Uncle Joe are headed to an eternity near you.

Elder McFadden seldom spoke up during the lesson, when he did it was to give some brief anecdote about his discovery of his faith. Lee nor McFadden had been born into the faith. They were both converts from Catholicism. And neither of them came from Utah. Lee was raised in California, McFadden in Idaho. They both had joined the church after high school friends convinced them to start attending meetings of the one and true religion.

I had lots of questions. They had answers. I asked them about their personal habits. I could see the straight edge appeal of abstinence in high school, and maybe on the campus of BYU, but was it hard giving up caffeine?

After our second language lesson they gave me book of Mormon to take home. They had marked several passages for me to read in my spare time. I thought it better to start from the beginning. Just a few pages into first chapter, describing the Mormons’ last days in the Old World, their leader is commanded by God to decapitate his arch enemy. I thumbed ahead to the wars between the divided factions in the New World, and the apostates whose skins were darkened as a punishment for their paganism. And though now an ocean and a continent away, this account of the ancient Americas still managed a few swipes at the Jews. How did this stuff not catch on in the Old South? This book had the zingers to fill a dozen recruiting pamphlets for the KKK.

I conducted a little research. Turns out the Mormons did market the racism in the Book of Mormon. During the height of southern resistance to integration, the LDS made inroads in southern communities by allying with groups like the White Citizens Councils. The LDS advertised the passages of Mormon scripture that explicitly forbade people of color from obtaining the priesthood. At 12 years old all Mormon males (in good standing) are inducted into the priesthood, and thereby can perform certain functions in the church, so this mandate effectively barred African Americans from joining the LDS.

This became the subject of my next conversation with the missionaries. As long as they were so eager to talk about Mormonism, I figured they should be up to discussing their history. Neither Lee nor McFadden had heard these details, though Lee was quick to point out that people of any color are welcome to become LDS. This is true. In 1978, the acting prophet Spencer Kimball received the revelation that skin color was no longer a criterion for eligibility to the priesthood, and the Mormons thereby became rearguard integrationists. They are now racking up souls in Africa and South America.


The elders were not put off my criticism, rather they seemed to enjoy the challenge. Elder Lee called me a few days later and invited me to my first Family Home Evening. Held each Monday, Family Home Evening is a time for Mormon families to get together, read the scripture, and pray. Since the Saints in Ljubljana were a small group, they held a home evening in common. The hosts were an elderly couple from Utah spending their golden years as an auxiliary to the younger missionaries who hustled the streets and stood invisible amidst the ex-communist, post-Catholic humanity.

That Monday I caught my first glimpse of those rare creatures--Slovene converts to Mormonism. A mother wheeled in her son of indeterminate age who had the shriveled and twisted limbs and suffered spasmodic convulsions of Cerebral Palsy. The mother cast nervous glances to the American Mormons and twice asked Elder Lee if he would perform a laying on of hands for her son. A second mother with a different sort of nervousness arrived, her teenage daughter in-tow. The daughter appeared to be the age of my third year students, about 17, though her ample thighs and magnificent breasts could have passed her for much older.

I wondered which mother sought the bigger miracle. A statistic I had heard in the faculty room at Gimnazija Poljane was that over half of the girls in our school underwent their first abortion by the time they graduated. And these were elite students. A chaste Slovene teenager seemed every bit as implausible as faith-healed Palsy. I needed more information about this laying on of hands before handicapping the miracles. In any event, here was a natural audience for the hard up missionaries, desperate mothers who lacked godless alternatives.

The teenager bounced in behind her mom and immediately locked eyes on me. When I was introduced as an American, she volunteered as my translator. Before anyone could suggest otherwise, the girl was nestled beside me on the couch. I was sitting on an end and so had no real estate to maneuver when her thigh came flush against mine. Now I sought a miracle. I was determined to give no further notice to the magnificent breasts snug in her v-neck sweater.

A middle aged Slovene couple was the last to arrive. Their angle was less obvious than the mothers’. When they sat down Elder Lee took the floor, and introduced me to the group. Perhaps feeling upstaged, the Palsy child belched three or four haunting guttural whines.

Lee started with a reading from the Book of Mormon. My translator leaned into to whisper me bits of the passage, her lips half an inch from my ear. Her tits pressed into my upper arm as she traced a bright red nail beneath the lines in my book.

...but this is a church meeting. Think about the Bible, or that old lady with the wart on her neck who sells onions in the market. No, too disgusting. This is church. The Bible, think about the Bible. Let’s see…Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, ActsoftheRomans and Corinthians…How can she not be wearing a… The Garden. Adam and Eve and the snake... Forbidden Fruit.. Great. Way to sexualize the only thing you learned in Sunday School, dickhead.

I didn’t know much about Joseph Smith at the time, though a flash of inspiration (is this the holy ghost?) suggested his approval.

I now know a great deal more about the Prophet, and I am confident he would have approved. When he proposed celestial union to a girl like this I bet she spared him the obligatory fainting episode.

The passage concluded and the breasts brushed back across my arm and faced the circle. The boy in the wheelchair squealed in approval at amen. The middle aged Slovene with a broad back and rough hands of a factory worker raised his hand to Elder Lee. Lee nodded and the man straightened up in his chair and began to speak.

“America defeats Saddam Hussein, evil in Middle East. 25 years America make world peace.”

Elder McFadden looked my way, “That’s not church doctrine,” he said.

Elder Lee led us in a giving thanks and blessings. At the final amen he looked to the Palsy child who erupted in joyous exclamation. His mother moved in on the Elder and asked a third time if they would bless the child. Lee and McFadden wheeled the boy into a backroom.



“Do you live in the city?” the girl asked me.

Before she was finished with word city, her mother had taken her by the arm and was pulling her up from the couch and towards the door.

The pro-America man must have memorized his speech. He wasn’t able to say much else in English. Since the couple from Utah didn’t speak Slovene, we all sat quietly and munched on the grapes the hostess had brought from the kitchen. The silence was punctuated here and there by grunting and screaming from the back room.

“How old are you, son” the Utah man asked me.
“I’m 26.”
“Well then, it’s about time you started a family!”

I paused for a second and imagined the family scenario, the most conceivable one anyways, the one where I knock up my girlfriend. Flash forward to the force in her tiny foot as it strikes my tailbone, knocking me out of bed to tend to the smelly screaming child in the corner of our one bedroom.

“You're right, sir.”

I thanked my hosts and bid them goodnight. Elders McFadden and Lee were still working with the Palsy child so I left alone. Maybe I would explain if they called again, how there wasn’t any point in further meetings. Jailbait aside—though in Slovenia 16 is the age of consent—my values were not compatible with these people, and as much as I had enjoyed playing the devil’s advocate with these two, the joke was wearing thin. They wanted my soul for the one and true way. I wasn’t about to give it to them.

I didn’t pick up the phone the rest of the week and stayed away from the triple bridge. The following Saturday evening Andreja and I went to see a movie, a pretentious Spanish flick where the main characters, too rich for their own good, drown on their sailboat-yacht. I bashed the film on the way back to the car. Andreja was quiet, but she either liked the movie or was taking my critique personally, because she drove me to my apartment, didn’t park, didn’t offer an explanation. We had been on and off for several months. We were currently together, evidently just barely. Maybe she was cheating on me again.

Late that night, alone in my attic apartment, I lay in bed and listened to a strengthening wind that began to scratch at the shingles. Heavy clouds rolled down from the Julian Alps, and the stars extinguished from north to south in the skylight above my bed. I closed my eyes.

A lightening strike illuminated the exposed beam dividing my room in two. Another strike revealed swirling leaves. It was raining through the skylight.
I opened my eyes and was suspended in the swirl of rain and leaves, now levitated above my bed. I bent forward in a mid-air somersault, and out of my throat came the question Elder Lee had been encouraging me to pray on. “Is the Mormon way the one and true religion of God?” Lightening flooded the room with a powerful light. Only it wasn’t lightening this time, but a blinding shaft of white light. The beam shot into my chest filling me from fingertips to toes. Every hair on my body stood on end. I radiated the pure energy—the concentrated ecstasy of a thousand orgasms.

I opened my eyes and basked in the glow. I felt my boxers, not wet. After a few minutes I looked up at the clock. It was 9:30. With an aftershock up my spine I realized it was Sunday morning, that I had just enough time to put on my suit and make the 20 minute bike ride through the park to the Mormon ward.


There was only one thing to do, so I got dressed. I was already imagining myself telling the elders about my dream, how they’d make me retell it to the entire congregation (all eight of them) with my new high school friend standing at my side offering to translate. Were they going to dunk me in the water on the spot, or would they play the coy Buddhist and give me the cold shoulder for three days, make me prove my revelation? God directing me to a caffeine-free life without coffee and cigarettes, swear words, sex, or booze. And he wants me to put on scratchy underwear.

I went into the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. I stirred a couple spoonfuls of NesCafe into my mug and noticed my hands were shaking. I reached for the bottle with the pirate ship label and poured a nip into the mug. I took a sip. Rum really improves the taste of instant coffee. I sloshed in another shot for good measure. Then another. I had to clear my head, calm my nerves.

There were rational explanations for what had just happened. McFadden and Lee had closed each meeting with the passage about asking the Holy Ghost for the truth about the LDS church. That is exactly what I had done in the dream. I borrowed the bolt of light from the painting in the church. There would have been some leaves in the forest where Joseph Smith received his vision. The thunderstorm was my own embellishment.

I decided not to tell anyone about my dream, especially not Elder Lee. The week kept getting wierder. A heat wave baked my attic apartment to the point I slept outside on the balcony. I broke up with Andreja, again (my suspicions held). I got an email about the death of another former Eclectic member, then heard a guy I went to high school with got run down by a drunk driver. I was homesick. I never get homesick.

I was in line at the bank. Lines were a serious business in Communist times, an experience clearly not forgotten by the grim old ladies who keep a hand on your back while waiting, quick to prod you along the second the person in front of you shuffles a few centimeters closer to the cashier. The babica behind me did not like the inch of personal space I was maintaining with the man directly in front of me. The bank didn’t have air con, so I was sweating and did not want to standing touching the damp shirt in front of me. She was determined to close the gap and kept prodding me just above my tailbone. There was nothing I could say so I just stood and counted backwards from one hundred in Slovene. When my phone ring I forgot to check the number before answering.

“Hey Bill, Elder McFadden and I we’re just talking about how much we missed talking to you. I wanted to make sure everything was all right.” Elder Lee said, “Everything ok?”

I still don’t know why I told him. Was it the heat, the claustrophobia of the line, the relentlessness of the grandmother behind me, or the fact that it had been weeks since anyone asked me if everything was ok? (it wasn’t) I hadn’t allowed myself to think about the dream since the double shot of rum, but once I started talking it all came out. I felt the tingle. It was like a first confession right there in a crowded bank, the hand still shoving at my tailbone.

“We need to meet as soon as possible, can you come by the meeting house this afternoon?”

No, I had nothing better to do than meet with the missionaries. We sat down in front of the white board and Elder Lee asked me to repeat the story to Elder McFadden. I did, but without the conviction from earlier in the day. I had had time to prepare a defense. As cool as a full body immersion might feel with the thermometer reading 35 degrees Celsius in a city without air conditioning, I was about to go and declare myself a Mormon.

I had three main arguments that I gave in order:

1. This was a dream. Nothing I had done or thought in my waking moments since suggested I convert to Mormonism. I have lots of vivid dreams, some of them also end in orgasm.

2. I couldn’t possibly live the Mormon lifestyle. I like coffee, beer, red wine, marijuana, and it turns out the occasional shot of rum in my instant coffee. And I like to fuck—out of wedlock. Now that I am single, I plan to fuck as many girls as possible. I do not plan on marrying.

3. My family. I could not bear telling my family I converted to Mormonism. They would think I had gone insane. I would rather tell my family I had converted to Islam, joined a Krishna cult, married a black woman, become a homosexual, something with precedent among the educated classes. No offense guys, but this was just too ridiculous to contemplate.


To my shock, no offense was taken. After a moment, Elder McFadden started to speak. This was a shock in itself. It was the first time I remember the laconic elder speaking more than a line at one of these meetings. He gave a thoughtful rebuttal, argument by argument. First he addressed the lifestyle question. Yes, living a righteous life is not easy, and it sometimes requires sacrifices. But at the end of the day, he decided to make the sacrifices asked of him out of his personal choice to live a better life. He found that the sacrifices opened doors he couldn’t have possibly imagined before he began walking along the new path.

Next he touched on family. He told the story of sitting down with his mother and father and telling them about his choice. First his father got angry, wanted to know what kids had talked him into this, what adults were involved. His father tried to ground him, then got into a fight with his mother who had suggested that maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, his grades were improving and he wasn’t on drugs. They’d be getting grandchildren. After a few months his father came around. He accepted his choice because he loved him. Families have an enormous capacity for love and acceptance.

Lastly, he addressed my dream. It was not exactly a dream, as according to Elder McFadden, I experienced a vision. Joseph, Daniel, Giddeon, Solomon, and many more of the old prophets received divine inspiration through their dreams. Neither he nor Elder Lee had received such a clear sign from God before their own conversions, nor had they since.

“God only reveals himself to individuals for whom he expects great things. It would be very serious to turn your back on the word of God,” Lee interjected. “We think it is important you be baptized immediately.”

Or go burn in the hell for people worse than Hitler. They didn’t say it. They didn’t have to. We had already had the discussion. An apostate: he who turns his back to God. Apostatism is the worst transgression imaginable in the Mormon religion. What they did not tell me was that the early days of the church, LDS leaders sanctioned the practice of blood atonement whereby apostates were hunted down and murdered. Only an apostate’s blood could atone for his ultimate sin.


In the silence that followed I noticed for the first time that the double door leading to the smaller meeting room was closed. I had never seen it closed before.

“Let’s say a prayer,” Lee said, opening to a passage he had marked in his Book of Mormon.

“And it came to pass that from this time forth there began to be lyings sent forth among the people, by Satan, to harden their hearts, to the intent that they might not believe in those signs and wonders which they had seen…

He flipped forward to another passage.

…I would have you remember also, that there were none who were brought repentance who were not baptized with water…

Then Lee closed the book, and began again in his own halting words.

“Eternal Father, we thank you, for the vision you have given our brother, Bill Wilson, and in showing him the goodness, the righteousness, of Your way. We pray that the Holy Spirit will guide him, and help him to see the choice, the choice to do what is right, so that he can open his heart to You.”

Elder Lee was the first to rise after the prayer. He stood beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

Note: The rest of this entry is fiction, for what really happened, read here.

“If you will only ask with your heart what is right, God will always be there to guide you.”

Meanwhile, McFadden walked in the direction of the closed doors. Just before he reached them, they opened. Four missionaries I had never seen before stood flanking the man who had hosted the family home evening. Instead of matching suits and nametags, they were dressed in white tunics, the fabric down to their knees. Elder Lee and McFadden stood on both sides of me.

“This way, brother.”

Through power of suggestion, or maybe because I might have lost my balance otherwise, I walked in between the two missionaries towards the open double doors.

“Wait,” I said, “Wait a second.”

Elder Lee reached for my upper arm, as if to steady me, but I shied away, knocking into McFadden in the process. I turned in the direction of the outside door. I bolted.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not looking back over my shoulder.

I left my bike on the rack in the courtyard, afraid that they might catch up to me if I fumbled with lock. Looking back it’s an absurd notion to have thought they might have chased after me, but I was not taking chances. I was terrified. If the guys in tunics had put on some hoods they'd have looked like klansmen in summer shorts.
I still am not sure what to make of my dream.

It is a testimony to magnetism of the LDS missionaries that they had a hard-boiled skeptic and militant atheist just a few feet from the baptismal font. Had I not started my own research into LDS doctrine and the history of the Mormon faith, especially their tactics in segregationist south, if I had not been an educated person, there is a good chance I would have converted.

I cannot rationalize my vision; it still gives me the creeps. Yes, Lee and McFadden had laid the foundation for all the elements of the dream: the language, the proximity of nature, and the column of white light. It could all be dismissed as the power of suggestion. Yet there is an opening for doubt.

Religious experience is esoteric, beyond the rational pale. We must embrace it on faith. All of my rational fiber tells me that Mormonism is nonsense, that it is a religion drawn up by a charismatic charlatan, perhaps the greatest ladies man in 19th century America. If I do choose to embrace a faith, it will be in a tradition that accepts there are multiple pathways to experiencing the divine. It will be a religion that does not condemn the rest of humanity to a middling plain in the afterlife playing racquetball with Hitler.
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