Mormons VIII: Miss Utah, Swine Flu, Dead Babies

It is the penultimate day of my journey back to San Francisco. It has been a long, meandering trip.

Barranquilla by minivan to Cordoba, truck to Turbo, launch to Capurgana, walk to Panama, xx? to Colon, bus rides up the Pan Americana to Mexico, the Swine flu tour of Veracruz, Mexico City, Laredo. An old friend and a few Pogues CD’s on the car ride to Austin and New Orleans, a barge to Natchez, a bike ride to Nashville, a road trip to Richmond, New York City, and Middletown, Connecticut, and an Amtrak ride up to Rochester, over to Chicago, and on to Salt Lake City.


I have traveled over three months and 8,000 miles, and I am now so close to San Francisco that I can taste the California current in the cold rain which I am told is highly unseasonable for a Salt Lake City June. My body is worn down and I know my immune system must be on the brink of capitulation. But I have one day left for Salt Lake City, my last pilgrimage site where I will embrace the role of camera-wielding tourist. I even read the guidebooks for this one. My plan must be executed with a marshal pace, I’ll leave the Clark W. Griswolds in the dust, yet must be time for whoever pops up during the day. There must be characters here in Salt Lake City, and I must find them.



The people and the religion that founded this Zion have weaved themselves into my life story. If nothing else, I owe it to the story to have a look around.


After two days and a night on the train, I got in just before 1am. I was met at the station with a cold steady rain and not the hotel shuttle I had arranged to pick me up. I called the hotel to see what the matter was, and the midnight receptionist was so friendly on the phone it was impossible to be angry even though he had no trace of my reservation. Maybe they had checked the central database after I had booked the room.

A couple hours out of Denver I started calling Salt Lake hotels. The first was not yet open. At the second a honey-voiced receptionist named Pam offered me an exorbitant rack rate, yet before hanging up I asked if there were any cheaper rooms. She paused, then asked me why I was visiting.

“Well, I’m coming to see the sites. My family isn’t from Utah, you see.”

Two short statements both true, but she was free to see whatever she wanted was some deeper meaning connected with my visit, a search for roots maybe, or a return to the homeland. I wanted her to see that I needed a cheaper room. This pilgrim was not about to spend 185 dollars at the Shiloh Inn.

“How much were you looking to spend,” she asked.

“Uhh, a 100 dollars… maybe I should look for another place.”

Pause.

“What about 104 dollars,” she replied, “It’s our introductory rate.”

Open Sesame, a nearly full hotel knocks almost 40% off a single night for a guy who has come to see the Temple.

But eight hours later there is no reservation, no record in the computer of my conversation with Pam. The Shiloh Inn was either full, or did not take guests after midnight. The night clerk found me a room at another inn without a shuttle, so I only spent a few more minutes in the rain before a taxi arrived.

The breakfast buffet at the Crystal Inn was a more auspicious start than my arrival. I had slept through my alarm and woke with 5 minutes to get down to the lobby before the end of breakfast. I was resigned to scraps, frozen bagels halves and frosted flakes, but there was a fully loaded hot bar, fruit, granola, yogurt, fresh juices, and of course, local honey, this the state of Deseret. A banner overhanging the lobby announced the Miss Utah Scholarship Pageant, and there were 25 contestants rearranging little bits of food here and there on their plates while their families and the rest of us tried not breath too deep for fear of asphyxiating on overpowering hairspray fumes.

I sit down to tuck into some eggs and hashbrowns and I notice what’s been following me, though we’ve been onto each other for a while now. From Veracruz to Mexico City, Monterrey, Laredo, Nashville, New York City, Chicago, and now Salt lake, for the last 5,000 miles it has been keeping a few days behind, or to keep me of balance, skiping a few days ahead. Today it has caught up with me in the Crystal Inn, while I breakfasted with anorexic, hairspray huffing beauty queens.

The headlines of the morning Tribune screamed Swine Flu, or least they should have. They’re now printing H1N1 in place of Swine Flu. This is a mistake, first because the pigs are clearly to blame, ask the Egyptians, though more so because acronyms aren’t nearly as frightening as the prospects of rogue farm animals. It’s as if the print industry has already given up, how else are they going to sell papers if they don’t even try to scare people anymore. The hospitals weren’t even testing for Swine Flu in Salt Lake City as they’ve assumed all the cases are of the porcine variety.


With a map in hand I set out for the Genealogy Center where the LDS Church sponsors one of the most comprehensive family research libraries in the world. Between the Center and the Granite Mountain Records Vault a few miles outside the city and beneath 600 feet of nuclear blast proof bedrock, the Saints possess over 3 billion pages of family records. They are now working to digitize this vast collection, but for now the records are available on microfiche.

Right beside the door of the Center there is a desk occupied by a Walmart-style greeter. “Hello! I can just tell you’re a first timer!” the woman with a white beehive hairdo said.

Beaming, she offered me a first timer’s-VIP name sticker and called another white haired woman who directed into a room with a surprisingly helpful introductory film.

The film even included a line that hinted, however obliquely, what the LDS intends to do with all of this genealogical work. In LDS Temples, the Saints conduct post mortem baptisms as a part of their sacred rites. This practice drew some scrutiny when it was reported the church was baptizing from lists of holocaust victims. I am impressed with the backdoor effort, though I wonder if they realize what they are getting into here. One of my ancestors was the last man to be ordered branded by the state of Tennessee, our long line of sinners might need any help they get with the celestial parole board. They might prove regrettable picks as eternal neighbors.

I climbed the stairs to the North America record hall where I sought some concrete connections to “Uncle” Walker. Three years ago, based on a conversation with a living uncle, I had pegged the Grey Eyed Man of Destiny as Grandpa Walker. It did not take genealogy to discover he had no children of his own—that was a matter of the historical record. But what about his brothers and his sister, or even his parents brothers and sisters, where can I find a Walker that fits into our tree? There is a great x4 grandma Walker who was born in Virginia. It’d be nice to have more than speculative ties. I have spent too much on this little tyrant to find out that my great grandfather made up the connection to add luster to his own legend.

After a half hour it sank in why I was the youngest person here by a solid three decades. Genealogy is slow, tedious work requiring geriatric patience even when the records are available. Going back the holes in the county records swallow entire generations. In the colonial period and the in early republic, churches were often the sole repositories of vital documents. Churches were also typically made of wood, and many burned. A burned down church in North Carolina had stymied my paternal grandfather’s pursuits of our family tree, though the Walker line supposedly ran back through my father’s mother’s line.


Even if I had the whole day, or week for that matter, I’m not sure what I would have found what I was looking for. There were no records for Davidson County births in the 1820’s, but I had the names of William Walker’s brothers and sister along with her husband with whom she moved to Kentucky. I checked both Paducah and Louisville, different accounts placed her in both cities, yet nothing jumped out. I searched the lines I suspected that might have linked us in Virginia, again no luck.

Genealogy is not just tedious old fart work, turns out it is also depressing. Where the church sees opportunity, I just found endless lists of forgotten souls. With a few names, locations and dates, one can reel the microfilm and squint through record after record of the reproductions of barely legible scrawl. Some of the poor penmanship had a morose quality. Instead of buzzing through the names, I stopped and read a few. There was a reason for the sad ink, many of the records were for babies that didn’t survive their first day. As a historian I should have realized that records were kept for living and dead births alike, and that infant mortality was extremely high in the time before antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. There was something about reading these records that hammered in both points, and after this little discovery I had a hard time just zooming through the records in search of a single last name with noticing all the dead babies, dead leaves on the family tree.

The sadness of the premature loss was not only evident in the wilted penmanship, but in the abruptness of the half completed records. Judged by the motley styles, these were probably filled out by the grieving fathers themselves. The yellowed reproductions are stuffed 8 to a slide and serve as the only evidence of a child who may or may not have taken a first breath outside his mother’s womb.


If William Walker is in fact a relation, I will have to slog through hundreds of more reels to prove the connection. I didn’t have the stomach for it, and it wasn’t the mission for my only day in Utah.


I crossed the street to Temple Square, which was geared something in between a tourist attraction and an establishment presentation of the Latter Day Saints. The skyline as viewed from the entrance to the square was an impressive juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The towering white granite of the six-spired Temple and the rooftop garden atop the matching granite of the LDS Conference would have been at home on the Mesopotamia plain, yet both buildings are framed by the vertical lines of Salt Lake’s modern skyscrapers that rise up around the square. The silver, turtle back dome atop the tabernacle might well have dropped down from outer space.
Click Here to Read More..

Mormons VII: A Note for the Faithful

Before I post my report from Salt Lake City, I’d like to explain my position a bit further regarding my longstanding interest in Mormonism. I’ve been impressed with how many Mormons have tuned into my blog, and this little foreword is for you. If you are not of the new chosen tribe, and if I haven’t offended you previously on the subject, no need to read on. Check back in a couple days.




Religion is a delicate subject, but an important and fascinating one, especially in a country that embraces a plurality of faiths. I do not mean to be disrespectful of the sacred, yet as a historian this can be tricky, what I may see as historical narrative, others see as god given truth. There is no bridging this divide; critical examination necessarily runs counter to the lion’s leap taken by believers in the miraculous.

The timing of Mormonism compounds these tensions of faith and fact. Joseph Smith established the Church of Latter Day Saints in the first half of the 19th century, so the bulk of the Mormon creation myth is subject to an historical scrutiny not possible with older faiths like Judaism and early Christianity.

As a student of American history, I couldn’t resist exploring the Mormon narrative and the character of Joseph Smith, perhaps the most underappreciated character in American history. Yet because the more colorful dimensions of Joseph Smith— Joe Smith the drinker, gambler, con artist and womanizer extraordinaire—are aspects not easily incorporated into the latest prophet of Jesus Christ on Earth, the history itself is necessarily provocative to the believer. The Mormon story of the New World, though sufficiently ancient to be safe from the historical record, does little better against what we know of pre-Spanish America.

If the historical examination weren’t bad enough, I also bring an echo of the Gonzo journalist to my subject matter. This is where the ice of objectivity begins to crack—I am putting myself into the story, and I’ll push a little if I think someone’s going to add to the tale. It probably doesn’t help noble objectivity that the people out there willing to talk to a guy with a notebook in hand at religious sites are either recruiting souls or are total nut jobs.

So there are obviously limitations to my approach. Sometimes I stumble onto a story, sometimes the fanatics find me.

In the case of the Latter Day Saints, it was a bit of both. For those of you who read this blog, you know that the Mormons first found me in grade school. Years later the hamsters and I drunk dialed an LDS ad. Several years after that I spent my last month in Slovenia with two missionaries, themselves converts to the new gospel as revealed by Joseph Smith.

There is benefit to this Gonzo route. While I have a rough sense of what I am after, I’m not setting out to prove anything. The stories are the experiences. This doesn’t like much, but with this approach I’m abandoning years of schooling and professional training. From high school themes to my first college newspaper assignment, to my first paid clip, I’ve been encouraged to write and think as a determinist. Determinists make a thesis and then seek out the facts to prove the thesis is correct. It is a method hoisted on professional journalists and academics of all stripes in this country. Not that everyone takes the bait, yet most cannot afford not to, it pays to write the story an editor expects or with the slant de jour of the academe.

Thank goodness this little forward isn’t supposed to go anywhere. I respect believers of all faiths, maybe even Scientologists, even if it doesn’t always come off that way.
Click Here to Read More..

New Museum, Old Tricks

As you might have guessed from the dead space here, I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately. Where does the self-doubting writer turn for a pick me up?

This time a trip to New York City and the conceptual art world did the trick.

I went to the New Museum for their exhibition Younger Than Jesus, a collection of works from 50 artists under the age of 33 from 25 countries. The exhibit promises to demonstrate how the best and brightest are defining the latest generation from atop the shifting foundations of the information age.

A worthy aim, but the execution is lacking. For a museum dedicated to being at the vanguard of the global art scene, the curation of Younger Than Jesus relies on a tired sensationalist formula. Had PT Barnum latched onto Dada, they’d call this show retro.





I understand that an exhibition looking to engage the i-generation must embrace the conceit of making art out of the internet. Unfortunately, the internet inspired art was the weakest link in a suspect show in spite of the reaches made in the curators’ descriptions. The placards were more ambitious, sometimes more interesting, than the pieces they introduced.

Take Gutherie Lonergan’s Myspace Playlist, composed of two side-by-side video screens playing looped clips of teenagers’ video introductions from the social networking site. I was seized by the question off limits to critics of conceptual work. What was Lonergan doing that makes this art?

According to the curator, the work is “based on the appropriation of material that he finds online and reconfigures and re-presents in ways that speak to the issues of identity, originality, and creativity in the digital age.” A squat to the floor revealed that these “quasi-anthropological documents” demonstrate the “world altering paradigm shifts in the nature of self presentation.”

Myspace and Facebook have scrambled the delineations of the social and private spheres, paradigm shift or no. It does not take an artist to make this point. Perhaps a careful observation of the paired teens, using their webcams to project into cyberspace, reveals some clever little ironies unique to the medium. Yet there is nothing in the presentation of this footage that enhances the content or suggests the artist's mastery of this driftwood churned out of the cybernetic sea.

I wonder if an art student could have submitted this work for a passing grade. Maybe so, but there are more appropriate forums for Lonergan’s work than a university or, for heaven’s sake, prime museum space in SoHo. Youtube might have been the better fit.

A rule of thumb for the exhibition: the more suspect the concept, the longer the rectangular placard. Some of the postmodern run-ons stretched down to within inches of the floor.

Liu Chang’s Buying Everything on You was accompanied by an especially long placard. At least the process was evident behind Liu’s work. Liu approached individuals on the street and offered money for everything on their person, purses, keys, cell phones, jackets, underwear. The artist then took these possessions and laid them out on plinths. Absorbed in the curators’ thorough explanation of where to find the art amidst the detritus of faceless hipsters, I fumbled my pen and just managed to bat it away before it fell on the nearest plinth and merged with the exhibit.

Where my eyes saw junk, the curator found, “arrangements that call to mind both taxonomical research and funereal rites…a snapshot of contemporary consumer proclivities in an era when personal and social forces encourage us to define ourselves by the things we own.”

Consumerism wants me to identify with the shit I am buying.

Imagine.

My snickering was premature. The omniscient voice on the placard was just building to the punch line. The artist, it explained “is providing us a portrait with an empty center: while his subjects may be defined peripherally… they necessarily remain elusive.” No double speak here, the hipsters have eluded the display table, we have only their knick-knacks, and knickers, to gawk at.

It’s a pity Liu didn’t collaborate with Chu Yun, Chu took no chances that her subjects stay put—she drugged them. The curator lists the medium for Chu’s This is Danielle as a female participant, a sleeping pill, and a bed. As advertised, a naked woman slept fitfully under a white comforter in a white bed in the middle of an exhibit room.

This piece merited the longest rectangle of all. The placard explains that the work “utilizes an economy of means to evoke a rich panoply of associations… the participants…are less real life, modern day Sleeping Beauties than islands of enviable calm. Unperturbed by the frantic pace of contemporary life, or by the exhibition around them, they seem to exist in a charmed atmosphere. There is an inherent irony in the participants’ supernatural tranquility: That they are only able to maintain their state of sleep with the assistance of sleeping aids, suggests that, perhaps, their state is not one of relaxation, but of withdrawal and extreme vulnerability. Provocative, and slightly sensational, This is XX not only brings up questions concerning the role of the female body in the history of art, but larger ones that ponder the museum as a platform for self-display. Furthermore, in the context of this exhibition, This is XX can be read as a counterpoint to, or even a protest against, the stereotyping of this generation as hyperactive and hyper-aware.”

I was sitting Indian style next to the bed so I could copy the end of that paragraph without my legs falling asleep. As I turned my head back to the bed, where the mattress was now at eye level, XX, in this case a mid-twenties, ivory skinned brunette, elbowed at her comforter so that for a moment I pondered a half moon of nipple and a satellite freckle adrift on a heavenly breast. Provocative, and slightly sensational. I have spent sweet time pondering the role of the female body in the history of art, though perhaps I haven’t given conceptual art a fair shake.

It was almost as if Luke Fowler’s short film, what you see is where you’re at, was included as a preemptory rebuke for the curmudgeons who hadn’t been softened by the throws of the sleeping beauty.

The placard in the dark screening room explained that Fowler, “frenetically pastes together footage- much of which has been exhumed from obscure sources—in a manner that evokes rather than explains, his subjects.” I sat in on the last five minutes of the film, and yes, nothing was explained. There was nothing to explain, no subject, no image at all, just occasional grains that flickered as light passed through the overexposed film. The evocation would follow, my reward for waiting for the credits and through to the next loop of the film. It opened with a shot of a brick building, a dreary London skyline, another brick building, and then a cut into a lecture hall with the conclusion of some sort of presentation, circa 1970. A student came to the microphone placed in the aisle to ask the man behind the podium if he expected the audience to accept his rambling and incoherent presentation as art for arts sake and simply applaud him. The lecturer/artist replied “You have been culturally conditioned for a very different sort of lecture.” This line was met with wild applause from the audience. He then goes on to chastise the questioner for having the presumption to challenge the artist or the art.

I’ll spare the details of four other exhibits--a melted chair, three record players stacked on the floor, a wall sized panel in a single hue of an Adobe Photoshop program, and an Atari-style throwback video game. I liked the video game, though I’m skeptical of the curator’s conclusion that, “the compositional elegance…simplistic objectives and Spartan graphics are redolent of a simpler time.”

One sensationalist in this baffling collection struck a chord with me. Brendan Fowler, a musician and conceptual artist, exhibited a show poster with the text of a back and forth between Fowler and a band called AIDS WOLF. Fowler had made a poster for a show he was supposed to do with the band, where he calls out AIDS WOLF for having a horrendous and stupid name.

The band took offense at this tongue-in-cheek attack, and posted a barely literate diatribe against Fowler and the “edumacated (AIDS WOLF’s spelling) trying to pull one over on the pleebs.” From there it spirals into the ever more ridiculous, with Fowler’s mocking commentary of both AIDS WOLF and himself providing the laughs to the end.

Unlike the curators, one gets the feeling Fowler never takes his own bullshit too seriously.
Click Here to Read More..

Erik Roland Larsson

In an episode from The Simpsons' golden years, Homer's new boss, the congenial super-villain Hank Scorpio, asks him which country he likes least, Italy or France, before targeting his doomsday device.

Homer shrugs. He picks France.

It was a false choice. The real answer, of course, was Sweden. That self-righteous slice of Scandinavia wedged between the stoically agreeable Norwegians and the delightfully quirky Finns.

Some might say it is just another of my eccentricities-- a vegetarian with minimal affection for animals, a guy who holds the razor in his fingers rather than shave with the stick and who seldom uses shampoo.

My hatred of Sweden cannot be dismissed as eccentricity.

Mind you, I am mostly talking about the Swedish government. I could not be a hater of a people that produced Anita Ekberg, Ingmar Bergman, or the music of ABBA. Wait, I don't care much for ABBA, but that's just a matter of taste.

I am adamant supporter of Swede Sven Goran Eriksson. I am thrilled that the hapless manager has decided to focus his talents for underperfomance on the Mexican national soccer team. Don't let El Tricolor convince you it is your fault, Sven, even if you do manage to bungle their World Cup qualification for 2010.

No, it is not the people. It is the Swedish government I despise. News items like the following are constantly vindicating me on this point.

On May 16th, 2007, Swedish national Erik Roland Larsson was kidnapped from his farm near Tierralta in the department of Cordoba in the north of Colombia. Larsson had worked as an engineer for a Swedish firm commissioned to complete a number of hydroelectric projects in the area. After a finishing a job in Tierralta, the 68 year old man decided he liked where he was and settled down for a happy retirement. Life was good until the morning when eight FARC guerrillas stormed his property and took him hostage.

It's been nearly two years, and still the Swedish government refuses to acknowledge the situation. Before last week the Swedish press hadn't reported the kidnapping. It was only until Larsson's family forwarded photos to the press that they had received from the guerrillas that anyone believed it was possible-- a Swede held hostage by the FARC.



No one understands why the FARC would knowingly hold hostage a citizen of one of its few remaining allies. While the rest of the world has acknowledged that the FARC long ago degenerated into a narco-terrorist outfit, drug traffickers whose hostages act as a human shield and the last bargaining chip with the Colombian government, the Swedish government clings to the line that the FARC is still a legitimate guerrilla movement fighting for social justice. On this point, Hugo Chavez and the Che Guevara T-shirt wearing Swedish public agree. This from the country that booted The United States off the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2001 yet didn't raise concerns over the seating of human rights stalwarts Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Uganda in the same year.

When the Colombian military seized the PC of former FARC leader Raul Reyes in a cross border raid into neighboring Ecuador last year, they found emails on the computer indicating that Sweden had been providing refuge for the guerrilla fighters. This isn't a case of a couple of squadrons sneaking across a porous, jungle cloaked border. The Swedish trips were R'n'R getaways for high ranking kidnapper-murderer-drug lords who flew first class before waltzing through customs and immigration at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport. It was also discovered that the server for the FARC's web page has been operating in Stockholm. The Swedish government also refuses to discuss these issues.

It was embarrassing for Colombia that this news surfaced in a week that saw the liberation of four hostages, the first releases in nearly a year.

Last week the Cordoban newspaper El Meridiano printed an article discussing Sweden's insistence to directly contact the FARC in order to negotiate for Larsson behind the Colombian government's back.


Because neither the FARC nor the Colombian nor Swedish governments will publicly address this curious kidnapping, we don't know the full story. Meanwhile, Roland Larsson languishes in captivity.

The old man doesn't look good. A doctor who saw the video said it appears that Larsson suffered from a stroke. His right arm, leg and parts of his face were paralyzed.

So, for the Homer Simpsons out there who still think France is the enemy, think again. The cheese eating surrender monkeys helped America get her freedom. She gave us a cool statue, taught us how to kiss, to drink wine, and to shrug.

What has Sweden done for you lately?

Update: Larsson released.

Click Here to Read More..

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.

¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿


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.

¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿

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.

Click Here to Read More..

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.

Click Here to Read More..

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.

Click Here to Read More..

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.
Click Here to Read More..

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..