Loki

He who must be obeyed

The count down continues . . .

Chiang Mai, Thailand. I smile dreamily at the blank computer screen. Even the sound of its name is musical -- "Chiang Mai" -- conjuring up visions of saffron-clad monks and monasteries, peasant markets, riverside beer gardens, hidden opium dens and Eastern bandits. Just three weeks from today, Denny and I descend into Chiang Mai, flying in by quick hop from Bangkok. At the hotel, we'll meet and become acquainted with a local guide and twelve other excited travelers, our friends for the following two weeks as we wander bug-eyed through the ancient kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia. (Actually, Laos is now a "People's Democratic Republic," but never mind.)

I've visited Chiang Mai once before, five years ago. It's a beautiful and fascinating city. Chiang Mai's exotic enough, certainly, in its own right. I'm excited to sense how we're now treating it as the last outpost of 21st century civilization, a mere gathering place of convenience, before we boat across the Mekong River into Laos, pressing thence into the unknown.

I exaggerate, of course. Virtually no place in the world, sadly, is today untouristed. Apparently, even the camel caravans and souks of forbidden Timbuktu today witness trans-Sahara auto races. Thousands of Westerners visit Laos, and especially Cambodia, every year. The ruins at Angkor Wat, where we spend our final days of the trip, are a major magnet for tourists visiting Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, we will thankfully be away from those destinations -- the cruise ship ports, the casinos, the beach resorts -- that attract the great bulk of the world's tourist dollar. I deem us, therefore, to be "adventurers."

We'll travel by boat, occasionally by bicycle, on foot along forest trails and over towering ruins, by van on back roads. We'll stay in huts with ethnic tribal families and in river-bank eco-lodges, as well as in small hotels. Admittedly, I dream of weirder and more adventurous travel. I fantasize over Lonely Planet guides. I read nineteenth century explorers' journals. If Denny and I had the time, we'd visit these countries by ourselves, without guides. We'd hitch rides or buy motor bikes, sleep in hostels and tents. But we have two weeks. Life is full of compromises. I'm satisfied that we'll find this compromise to be worth every moment.

Meanwhile, my assignments at work seem to increase exponentially as the date for departure draws closer. The ever-malicious Cosmos seems determined to break my spirit, to exhaust me before I can escape Seattle. Hah! I am indomitable! I may find myself crushed beneath a stack of the accumulated detritus of two weeks of legal practice upon my return, but I am so out of here on the morning of November 16.

My loyal readers can expect a report on my return. Hopefully, you'll be spared a slide show. Meanwhile, however, I hope to find time to fire off a few more postings on subjects of more general interest before I leave.

Photo: Buddhist monk at Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Never Apologize, Never Explain

Maher Arar, 36, is a Canadian software engineer. He immigrated with his family from Syria to Canada in 1988, when he was 17. He earned his Bachelor's degree (computer engineering) from McGill University, perhaps the most prestigious university in Canada, and his Master's degree (telecommunications) from a branch of the University of Québec. While at McGill, he met his future wife, who went on to obtain her Ph.D. in finance from McGill. They have two young children. Mr. Arar ran his own consulting firm for some time, and then was employed as a telecommunications engineer by a firm in Ottawa.

In 2002, he and his family vacationed in Tunisia. On the way home to Ottawa, he flew through JFK in New York. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police mistakenly identified Mr. Arar as no longer a Canadian, although he was traveling on a Canadian passport. Also, the RCMP had been conducting a terrorist investigation in Ottawa, and had earlier observed a conversation between Arar and another engineer who happened to be a "person of interest" in the investigation. This engineer -- the one with whom he was seen speaking -- was not himself a suspect, nor, of course, was Mr. Arar.

Nevertheless, based on this information from the RCMP, the United States seized Mr. Arar as he was changing flights at JFK, interrogated him for two weeks in this country, refused him access to an attorney, and then flew him in a small jet to Syria. He was beaten upon arrival in Damascus.

He was imprisoned in a 6' x 3' cell without light, with rats as company, for ten months. He was tortured the entire time, beaten regularly by cables. Syrian authorities shared the results of his "interrogation" with the United States, and were given access to the results of his interrogation by American intelligence. He was released in October 2003, because the Syrians were unable to find any terrorist links. He was returned to Canada, where he has lived since with his family.

His capture and torture apparently was part of the Bush Administration's "rendition" program.

Arar's lawsuit against the United States is on appeal from its dismissal by a lower court, after the Administration invoked the "state secrets" privilege.

The Canadian government apologized for its part in the fiasco in January 2007, after a lengthy and thorough investigation, and paid Amar $10.5 million in compensation, plus his legal fees. Formal apologies were offered by both the RCMP and the Canadian government.

Former Attorney General Gonzales, on behalf of the Bush Administration, denied any evidence of torture, and asserted that Arar's rendition to Syria had been legal and fully within the Administration's rightful powers.

On October 18, 2007, Congressmen from both parties apologized to Mr. Arar and called on the Bush Administration to apologize on behalf of the nation. An Administration spokesman said there were no plans for an apology. Amar remains banned from entry into the United States.

Today, Secretary of State Rice did acknowledge that the matter had been "mishandled." Mistakes were made, apparently, although she did not use those words.

The Bush Administration still has not apologized.

------------------------

Information for this report was obtained from Wikipedia, and from two articles in MSNBC.

A Cruel Gift

I do not intend for this blog to degenerate into a collection of book and movie reviews. Occasionally, however, I run into books and movies that move me and that I feel are worth discussing. This week and last have been such occasions.

I remember the summer before I started college. It was a normal summer in many respects, but also felt surreal. As I looked ahead, my summer seemed destined, unlike earlier summers, to end abruptly in a massive wall of dense fog. On the other side of the wall, I knew, would be a move to California, palm trees, the university, dorm life, roommates, a future existence unlike anything I could imagine. Besides being opaque, moreover, the wall marked a frightening transition, a definitive line between being a kid and being an adult.

I was eager and excited. But I was also scared to death.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron, is the first-person account of James Sveck, a very smart, very literate, very funny, and very ironic 18-year-old boy from New York City. In September, James will head off to Brown University, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island. Or will he? James is not simply nervous about growing up, about going off by himself to a new life at a university. The prospect actually terrifies him, although he tells himself (and us) that he just can't bear to spend four years with the kind of kids his age who he imagines attend Brown. He is so terrified, in fact, that he has secretly resolved not to go, to move instead to some small town in the Midwest, and to spend four years, in solitide, educating himself by reading books. All the novels of Anthony Trollope, for example. Proust, perhaps. And poetry by obscure poets.

This book is being displayed in the Young Adult section of bookstores, for reasons that escape me. It is no more a book merely for teens than was Catcher in the Rye, to which it is being compared in reviews. James's sardonic sense of humor, his obsessive love for language together with his precocious ability to use and shape it, his fear of change and of adulthood, his desire for solitude, his reluctance to discuss his feelings with others, his distaste for other kids his own age -- if we strip away his veneer of New York sophistication, what's left reminds me of myself at 18, as it will many others of all ages who have successfully, if perhaps painfully, passed through that wall of fog and moved beyond.

The book contains two excruciating set pieces that reveal much about James. In one, suffering a probable panic attack, he flees a national high school leadership conference he was attending in Washington, D.C., and spends the remaining days of the trip by himself. He checks into a hotel with his mother's credit card, and hangs out in the National Gallery of Art (his mom is the proprietor of a small, rather absurd Chelsea art gallery back in Manhattan). While at the conference, he had repulsed every friendly overture by other students:

And then I realized she was really being nice. She was sincerely being nice. She was misguided, but she was being nice. But she didn't know what she was saying, she was saying come sit at our table as if that was something I could do. As if I could get up and sit down at her table and become a person sitting at her table. As if becoming a person sitting at her table only involved getting up and walking down a platform and sitting at her table.

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm fine alone."

In the other scene, he describes in great detail to his psychiatrist four paintings he had loved as an eighth grader, paintings that meant so much to him that he had bought prints of them with his own money, framed them and hung then in his room. The paintings represented the four stages of life. He had gradually come to realize, as he gazed at them, how much he wanted to skip the "adult" painting and move directly from adolescence to old age and death. (And then one day, a school friend visited his room and called the prints "stupid and faggy." Mortified, he took them down and threw them away.)

When his father, a large-firm lawyer, warns him that he couldn't avoid things just because they made him unhappy, he responds that his father doesn't understand. He's not just unhappy in the way his father imagines him to be unhappy. He is unhappy like he wants to die. His father "didn't say anything else after that, he just patted my leg and went to the bar car and bought three of those little bottles of Johnnie Walker."

Now, James may well have a diagnosable personality disorder. But we sense as we read the book that personality disorders are merely exaggerations of the odd but "normal" traits and feelings that many of us share. Nevertheless, the devastating loneliness and fear of human contact that James's words and actions gradually reveal, emotions poorly concealed beneath his superficial sarcasm and disdain for others, will break your heart.

James is the kind of kid whose second grade teacher wrote that he tended to be "too clever for his own good." That's a judgment that his own rather detached, divorced parents, and his patronizing older sister, still appear to hold. (His peers, more bluntly, simply consider him a "misfit.") James recalls how, when he was a child, his mother would tell his sister: "Just ignore him. All he wants is attention." Wasn't it cruel, he wonders, to deny attention to a small child, when he so obviously and desperately needed it?

In harmony with the finest New York City traditions, James spends a considerable amount of the book matching wits -- in some very funny scenes, and in one scene that is quite moving -- with a rather bumbling psychiatrist his family has encouraged him to visit. He gains far greater insights from his beloved grandmother, a former actress who offers him non-judgmental attention along with hot meals. It is she who offers him the most encouraging -- and most perceptively true -- advice that he receives throughout the entire book:

People who have had only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but, well -- it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is not to be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You mustn't let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift -- a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.

As my angst-ridden freshman dormmates would put the question in the course of midnight bull sessions, "Is it better to be happy and dumb, or brilliant and miserable?" James's grandmother assures him (and us) that risking misery beats doing nothing. We learn only from experience how we should spend our lives, and how we shouldn't. James had dismissed similar thoughts from his father. But he assures his more tactful grandmother the next morning, "You gave me a lot of good advice."

In the last chapter, he recalls a prefiguring childhood experience at his grandmother's house. His grandmother had casually suggested that he move from where he was sitting to a more comfortable location. Shortly after, a glass window pane unpredictably collapsed onto his original seat. They laughed at the time.

I don't know if the falling glass would have killed me -- probably not -- but I realized, in retrospect, that my grandmother had saved me, if not from death, then from terrible injury.

The book has no happy ending. Or even, really, an ending. Endings, happy or otherwise, are for Hollywood movies. Learning to live one's life is incremental, not the result of a blazing epiphany. James tells us he does go on to Brown in September. He does feel miserable his first semester. We suspect, we see hints, that his life later improves. But the book ends.

James's life, like all our lives, is a work in progress. We've been privileged to peer into it for a few months while James was 18.

Post Script

A brief post script to the prior post.

Like any good movie, Into the Wild continues to reverberate in my mind, days after I've seen it. As I walked downtown today, I passed the usual scraggly, smelly panhandlers and beggars. A few are witty. Some are incoherent. A few actively solicit money. Most just stand on a corner, looking hopeless and exhausted. Others stroll around or meet together near alleyways. Most, obviously, have serious mental and/or drug and/or alcohol problems.

On the other hand, I note that they look no different from Chris McCandless, as he walked the streets of San Diego, trying to find a place to sleep. Who knows, one of these dirty, bearded men toting a bulky backpack may himself be a straight-A graduate from a prestigious college, just out "finding himself" for a year or two. The movie reminds us not to judge a book from its cover.

And what about the 99 percent who are not waiting for an admissions letter from Harvard Law? The ones who are druggies or mental cases, or just the victims of very bad luck? October 4 was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. You'd never know it from the statues of St. Francis that you find, along with the gnomes, in middle class gardens, but Francis rebelled against his wealthy, middle class father, and the world of luxury into which he had been born. He founded a religious order based on daily begging in the streets. He gave away everything he had, and embraced voluntary poverty. He loved animals and nature. His life reminds us of the Christian teaching that every man and woman -- whether rich or poor, clever or an idiot -- is of equal value before God, and, as our fellow human being, before us as well. This idealistic teaching, of course, is also the foundation stone of democracy, the principle behind the rule of "one-man, one-vote."

I still recoil with distaste from contact with filthy clothes, smelly bodies and unpredictable behavior. Chris and Francis remind me that this is my problem. Quit being so damn superficial. Get over it.

I'll try harder.

Into the Wild

At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. ... In my case -- and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless -- that was a very different thing from wanting to die.

--Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Before he was a writer, Krakauer was a mountain climber. Before writing Into the Wild, his previous books had all been about mountaineering. Like many men and women who climb mountains, he wonders why he does it. He also wonders whether the emotions and self-revelations won by confronting death, supported on a cliffside by fingertips and poorly anchored pitons, or on an ice wall by crampon tips and an ice axe, can ever justify the devastation that his actual death would visit upon his family and friends. Like all adventurers, all radicals, all visionaries, all prophets -- he wonders at the cost to be paid for deviating from the average, the cost not to himself but to those he loves.

In his book, Krakauer devotes a chapter to describing his own experience at the age of 23, attempting a solo first ascent of a peak in Alaska. During that climb, he stared at the face of death. He tells the story not as autobiography, but to explain why Chris McCandless walked into the wild. The only difference between the two, as Krakauer sees it, was that he was lucky and lived, and McCandless was unlucky and died.

Sean Penn's film of Into the Wild, of course, is now showing across the country. The movie is beautiful, exhilarating, funny, and heartbreaking. It faithfully adheres, for the most part, to the conclusions drawn in Krakauer's book about the life of Chris McCandless.

What the film cannot show, however, given the limitations of time and the film medium, is that McCandless's life as portrayed is really Krakauer's painstaking reconstruction of a life from fragmentary clues, from conversations with family members who knew him as a child and with persons who met him only briefly during his wanderings. To some extent, I suspect, the Chris McCandless that emerges is actually a picture of Jon Krakauer, modified to account for the known events of McCandless's life.

I think Krakauer may agree. I think, in fact, that Krakauer suggests as much in his book.

Nevertheless, few people could be as well positioned as a mountaineer to get under the skin of an oddball like Chris McCandless -- Alex Supertramp -- and to intuit the urges and motives that drove him to the post-college life he chose. McCandless was a seer, a prophet, a crazy man -- a person not willing to live an unthinking life amongst the herd, but driven to grasp and feel reality, sensation by sensation, minute by minute. It is the same drive shared by anyone who hikes, camps, climbs, or travels without reservations and guided tours. But he pushed his craziness to the brink of death, and over the brink; the rest of us push it only far enough, perhaps, to embrace discomfort as a road to experience. McCandless insisted on absolute purity in pursuing that dream; the rest of us keep a Visa card in our wallets, just in case.

The book and the movie arouse grief for the shortness of his life, a life that held so much promise, and for the gap his death left in so many other lives -- his parents, his sister, the elderly man who saw him as a grandson, the teenaged girl who dreamed of him as her lover. But it also reminds us how precious is every moment of life, and how wasteful we are of those moments. McCandless, for all his journal writing, for all his reading of Tolstoy and Thoreau and Jack London, sought to experience every blade of grass, every drop of rain, every ray of sunshine. He died at 24, but he experienced more life in those 24 years than many of us will in 90.

At the end of his life, he was ready to return to society, to live to some extent among the humanity that he had never rejected. Happiness must be shared, he notes.

See the movie, by all means. But read Krakauer's book as well.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wild-hearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

--James Joyce

The Cardinal is Waving, Over the Field

Stanford 24, U.S.C. 23

Amongst the many and varied topics I try to place before you, my readers, the role of sports is deservedly minimal. At best, the topic's sometimes worth an occasional ironic rolling of the eyes. In a world contorted by the suffering of the poor and hungry, a world led by the corrupt and the incompetent, a world facing an apocalyptic future of global warming, asteroidal collisions, and mutating strains of viruses run amok -- in such a world, it seems obscene to write seriously of kids throwing a ball around a grassy field when they should be in the library studying.

Cardinal 24, Trojans 23

Oh, I suppose that as a metaphor for human pluck and determination, an occasional sports story might provide a little comic relief, a little inspiration. Bad Luck Bears, Field of Dreams, all that sort of thing. But beyond a little unavoidable misting of the eyes and lump in the throat, akin to reading a child's dog story, such offerings do not fulfill the higher aspirations of you, my readers -- of you who seek after the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Stanford University 24, University of Southern California 23

But still (and again, I insist as metaphor), one occasionally runs into a story sufficiently unexpected and, well, inspiring, that I suppose we might find it worthwhile to mull it over briefly. Take, for example, a small West Coast school known for hard-working nerds blesssed with bigger SAT scores than biceps, whose eyes are fixed on high grades, doctoral programs, and the quixotic quest for the Nobel Prize. Imagine a grove of academe, so populated, trying to recruit students who fully meet its academic standards and, at the same time, are able to throw a pass, sack a quarterback, kick a field goal. Imagine these relatively skinny, idealistic, studious kids all dressed up in red and white running onto a football field week after week, and -- week and after week -- getting their metaphorical blocks knocked off.

Stanford 24, U.S.C. 23

Imagine another West Coast school, a large one, known academically to a few, perhaps, for an excellent film program, but known athletically to the entire sports universe as a factory of pure, vicious, college football power. The New York Yankees, the Green Bay Packers, the L.A. Lakers all distilled into a NCAA bastion of football excellence. A school whose football teams don't just aspire to championships, but consider themselves entitled to them. A school whose teams stumble across the American football landscape like a demented Tyrannosaurus Rex, head swaying from side to side, always seeking new fodder to devour.

Cardinal 24, Trojans 23

Imagine David and Goliath thus meeting face to face. Meeting not on neutral ground, mind you, but in the sacred and most holy mother ship of the beast itself. Imagine the University of Southern California hosting, with fevered howls of merriment from 90,000 boasting fans and a wave of a sword from their mounted and armored mascot, the red and white clad kids from Stanford University at the (all knees bend, all heads bow) Los Angeles Coliseum.

Stanford 24, U.S.C. 23

Imagine Stanford's record of 1-3, its only win being over San Jose State. Imagine Stanford's starting quarterback unable to play because of injury. Imagine a kid, a sophomore from Tacoma, Washington, who had never before started a game for the Cardinal, who had thrown only three passes in college play, stepping in as backup quarterback. Imagine Stanford as 41 point underdogs, when 42 1/2 points was the greatest spread anyone could recall having ever existed between two college teams. Imagine a Trojan team that had not lost a home game in five years.

Imagine what some are now calling the Greatest Upset in the History of College Football.

Stanford 24, U.S.C. 23

Bush vetoes child health care, saves cigarette smokers 61 cents per pack

"Do you think Oz will give me a heart?"

A grape time was had by all

Small towns began losing their swagger about a century ago.

Once easy travel and communications revealed their society and traditions to be not the center of the universe -- indeed, made it all too obvious that they appeared pathetic, laughable and parochial to so-called sophisticates in the large cities -- a crisis of confidence, over several decades, destroyed the unique character and enthusiasm of most small towns.

The "Lake Wobegons" of the nation either transformed themselves into bedroom satellites of large cities, or dwindled in importance economically while their aging residents watched their children leave, one by one, after high school graduation.

But please. Bear with me. I promise I'm depressing you for a reason. I'm happy to report that -- despite this conventional sociological description -- some small towns still flourish, and some are even reviving.

I've just returned from our family's annual gathering in Sonoma, where we helped celebrate the 110th annual Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival. As the name suggests, the festival marks the harvest of the year's grape crop, a critical event in the life of California's wine country. And the festival celebrates not only another year's bounty of the fruit of the vine, but also Sonoma's rich history dating back to Spanish times.

The city dates its origin from the founding of Mission San Francisco Solano -- the northernmost of the chain of Franciscan missions, starting with San Diego in the south -- in 1823. Even today, the center of town remains the original Spanish plaza, a large park surrounded by the restored Mission, the Spanish Presidio, and the house of General Vallejo -- not to mention a sizable number of cafés, bars, and souvenir, antique and gift shops. Sonoma also proudly claims to be the spot where the Bear Flag of the California Republic was first hoisted in revolt against Spanish rule.

But for me, more than the stomping of the grapes and the reveling in history, Sonoma is interesting as a small town that has kept its swagger. The wine tasting attracts not primarily wine snobs from San Francisco -- although they certainly do come -- but local citizens who know their wine and whose lives -- directly or indirectly -- depend on its excellence. This is a town where many local kids can describe the difference between a cabernet and a merlot, and are able to taste the difference, long before they can legally consume them.

The plaza is the site of what is, in effect, a lively town fair. Side by side with tasting booths run by local wineries, local organizations still unashamedly sell corn dogs and beer and cotton candy, local restaurants offer samples of local cooking, and the Boy Scouts give you the chance to win a locally produced salami by pelting one from a distance with a well-pitched potato.

Men and women entertain you by stomping grapes in their purple-stained bare feet.

The Sunday parade marches around the periphery of the plaza -- kids hidden beneath masses of purple or green balloons and thus disguised as bunches of grapes, local auto dealers circling in decorated new cars, the Wells Fargo stagecoach filled with kids and pulled by a fine team of horses, children dressed in Spanish colonial costume throwing cheap candy at other kids scrambling for goodies along the parade route, the Sonoma Valley High School marching band in full regalia (tiny ninth graders with tubas and bass horns marching alongside senior linebackers playing flutes) and followed by a farm tractor proudly blowing a diesel horn that drowns out the brave efforts of the band.

The entire multi-day festival is a wonderful chaos of events and crowds, and an anachronistic display of small-town self-confidence. Aside from the tourists, everyone knows each other and each other's kids. They shop at each other's shops, and eat and drink at each other's bars and eateries. In all the years I've attended, I've never seen any doubt expressed by a soul that -- for this weekend, at least -- there is no place on earth better deserving of everyone's presence. Not a hint that you could have a better time living it up in San Francisco, or watching a show on TV. For one weekend, Sonoma was the center of their universe.

Sonoma is a small town, but not a typical small town. But even so, it serves as a reminder of the high spirits, good nature, enthusiasm and pride that citizens of small towns across America once shared in abundance.