Comedy of Terrors

I’m writing this the morning of Aug. 7, 61 years and more than a day after the dropping of “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. That event, in juxtaposition with recent history, no longer has the power to surprise me.

Consider this stupid quote from Osama bin Laden: “As I watched [in the eighties] the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me [to] punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.” So the destruction of towers of Lebanon inspired him to want to destroy the World Trade Towers... to start killing... so that we will be inspired to... STOP killing? Why does he think we are so different from him?

Oh, right. He thinks we’re different from him because he hears us telling ourselves so. He’s a terrorist. He targets civilians cheaply using our own overgrown commercial airlines against us. We are not terrorists. We are noble soldiers who have earnestly invested some of our unique vast hoards to amass expensive precision war machines so that we can kill only combatants, except of course when civilians accidentally get in the way, which of course they always do, saddening us always.

CNN says this morning that so far, on this 27th day of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, there have been 95 Israeli deaths, including 35 civilians, and 716 Lebanese deaths, mostly civilians. We are saddened by every one of those deaths, just as we are saddened by the non-terrorist unfortunate deaths of Hiroshima victims who got in the way of our non-terrorist justified war weapon which we dropped on them. Collateral damage is a bitch.

Some of you are probably thinking right now that I’m anti-Israel in all this mess and I want Israel to roll over and let Hezbollah annihilate it. I don’t want that at all. But before I discuss that, I want to talk about my favorite Shakespearean tragedy.

My favorite Shakespearean tragedy is the play I call Mercutio, a Tragedy of About Six Scenes Cobbled Together from Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare. I call the whole play, Romeo and Juliet, A Comedy. What else can you call it when the so-called hero and hero-whine are candidates for the top Darwin Awards of their century?

How is “melancholy” Romeo, “Montague’s only son,” a tragic hero? What heroic stature does he have at the outset of the conflict? He is heroically melancholy? He is heroically hard up? He is heroically able to ponce around with a sword and pretend he knows how to use it? He is, heroically, a stupid fish? How do we pin down this guy’s tragic flaw? The same way we pin down Juliet’s tragic flaw — we lock them both together in a crypt without any air holes and wave generally in the direction of it. Oh, look now! We don’t have to; they’ve killed themselves with their mutual shared stupidity, saving us the trouble. There are your tragic flaws; they’re both perfectly dead, thus imperfectly alive.

Meanwhile, Mercutio has three things going for him. 1) He actually can use the sword, although nobody’s perfect, especially when Romeo’s on the team. 2) He actually has a brain and sense. 3) He knows they’re all ludicrous, and he has a heroic gift for saying so.

We have no trouble finding Mercutio’s fatal tragic flaw. In spite of knowing what I know, namely that Romeo is a fish (“... flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!” —Mercutio to Romeo), in spite of correctly deducing that Romeo is a madman, Mercutio remains faithful to his crazy stupid friend until his very end when he is stuck, thanks to help from the very same stupid friend he is faithful to.

So where was I? I was going to say I can’t turn my back on stupid humans either. But I can still call down a pox on all their houses anyway.

I hope that makes sense to someone.

If You're Screwed, You're Screwed

For today's column I want to talk about how "Science Marches On!" I am very excited about a new discovery that finally gets at the underlying truth about life neither being a rose garden nor a bowlful of cherries. It also deepens the theory that the Rich Get Richer While the Poor Get Poorer, by sinking it to the level of biology and the reproduction of cells. It’s a very factual new discovery that is so scientific and at the same time so scary that it could make the basis for a great new film to bum out kids in high school.

The discovery is a long time coming. I remember reading in history books that way back in the Dark Ages the silly Dark-Ages-people all thought that life was "essentially" a waiting room experience with one good magazine that everyone fought over until they remembered that none of them could read, and then you died and went to heaven.

Then, in the Renaissance, science started, and all the beginner scientists started to believe that life blew. It wasn't until the 1800's before science-greats like Darwin and other guys who actually knew things figured out that life really sucks, as we now know today.

But it is one thing to know that life sucks. It is quite another to know HOW life sucks, or to possess the video. This is where 21^st century scientists have it all over 19^th century scientists: even though they aren't as smart, there's lots more of them, so when you put them all together they end up knowing more. Besides, they have cell-phones and digital cameras and laptops.

Anyway, here it is. Scientists just learned last month that if you experience long-term hardship, and if you experience it as chronic stress, then your telomeres will shrivel up. This is bad, the scientists say, because telomeres are the tips-of-the-shoelace thingies at the end of your chromosomes that need to be big and long so that your cells can divide and multiply. So it's like, you know, with shriveled telomeres your cells might as well be neutered, and pretty soon the cells you have die without replacements, and so do you.

There's more: they've actually figured out how much shriveling happens. As much shriveling happens in a typical case that we are talking about losing roughly a year of lifespan for each year of stress experienced. Give or take a month or two.

So let's say someone, we'll call him Herbert, was genetically predisposed to live 70 years if his life went as well as it does for normal people. But suppose instead the beginning of his life, for the first 35 years, is a genuine living hell, comparatively speaking. According to our old understanding we would have thought that at least Herbert would have had a second 35 years left to him during which things might start looking up. But now we know that Herbert's telomeres will be entirely useless as of his 35^th birthday and Herbert will die of premature old age within days. Or a couple of years. Or he's already dead. Approximately.

Now, some see a silver lining to this discovery. They point out that the telomeres only shrink if you experience the stress. In other words if you don't know you're miserable you won't suffer the ill effects of it. Right, that's it, I could just whack myself up-side my head so hard I don't notice anything at all ever again.

No, there are only two alternatives. Either you're so stupid you not only don't know when you're suffering you also can't fully know when you're having a good time, i.e., you're a fish, metaphorically speaking. Or else you're a sentient being and every year that you suffer you lose that much opportunity to make up for it.

So we may sum up this new discovery as follows. If you're screwed, you're screwed. Unless you're stupid, in which case you're screwed.

Has there ever been a time when we could so clearly see the need for justice as this? Let's stop putting people through genuine living hells, at least until we can find a way to enlarge telomeres.

Torture Simplified

Warning: this won't be one of my more humorous efforts. Not only is the subject too sad, but I also think that I shouldn't have eaten that tuna fish casserole for lunch yesterday.

Continuing from last time and speaking of the value of a free press, has anyone out there reflected on the fact that CBS now plays an essential role in the briefing of the president?

If it weren't for 60 Minutes II, Bush wouldn't have known about the severity or the extent of Abu Ghraib abuses. Bush should publicly thank the 60 Minutes crew and invite them all to dinner at the White House. Bush should use the occasion to ask CBS to advise our military intelligence officers on how you actually learn things. For example they could explain to them that humiliating your sources doesn't work.

Or he could get Bob Woodward. Woodward got Bush and all sorts of administration officials under Bush to open up to him. I'm sure he didn't precede his interrogation of Bush by "softening him up" Pentagon style. He probably did it the way I would do it, by telling Bush what a great guy he is and what a cool president he's been, and "that tie looks absolutely fabulous on you, Sir," and "I'll bet you'll go down in history as the most compassionately conservative president we've ever had."

If I threw up during any of that I could blame it on something I had for lunch.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, on a scale so grand and epic it outdoes Hollywood. One hardly knows where to begin.

How about the fact that the Pentagon directed that some prisoners should receive "softening up" treatment prior to interrogations? Maybe that would be a good start.

So last October, when the Red Cross discovered that Iraqi prisoners were kept naked in dark barren cells for days at a time, and the interrogating officer said that the practice was just "part of the process," he was really describing a process that had been approved by the Pentagon.

Now to be fair where fair isn't deserved, the Pentagon's directive requires that such procedures only be used under orders from the top. But how does the Red Cross know who ordered what they saw? And how does the private who carries out the order in the prison to strip a prisoner know whether the original order came from a general or whether it came from the M. I. officer standing next to him telling him to do it?

The problem is, the description of what the Pentagon allows in the way of "softening up" (bad but not so bad) and the verbal descriptions of what was actually done are too easy to line up. I can easily imagine Rumsfeld, busy as he must be what with protecting the free world and expanding its borders by bombing the unfree world to bring freedom to it, would quickly skim a report of wrongdoing by prison guards at a military prison and not be alarmed.

He could have thought, "Oh, this isn't all that bad. They just got a little carried away doing what we told them to do. Hell, that's why we have a professional army, so we can expect our guys to have initiative."

Likewise it would have been easy to dismiss the Red Cross complaints. A general reviewing the complaints could easily convince him/herself that the Red Cross was misinterpreting the evidence. He/she could think that what they really saw was soldiers carrying out procedures that the Pentagon allows, procedures that would look similar to the abuse that was actually seen.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld reminds us all that it's abuse, not torture. That is so true, Rummy, and we thank you all from deep in our hearts for pointing that out to us.

Torture is when I threaten to electrocute you if you don't tell me where you hid the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Abuse is when I threaten to electrocute you so you'll tell me an hour from now where you hid the nonexistent weapons. See the difference?

We Were Number Seven!

I've got Seattle neighborhoods on my mind. I think the neighborhoods of Seattle are what make this city, or whatever it is, great. It used to be the smell. Back in the sixties downtown Seattle smelled like rotten fish heads, and some of us thought that was pretty cool. But, now, the pretty cool thing about Seattle is its neighborhoods.

Most people don't know just how many Seattle neighborhoods there are. Anyone who has ever watched Almost Live, live or in reruns, knows at least 10 or 11 easy areas of Seattle like Ballard, Wallingford, the U District, Belltown, Pioneer Square, the International District, Rainier Valley, Georgetown (maybe), and West Seattle (the Kent of Seattle Proper.)

But how many of you knew that West Seattle isn't considered a neighborhood itself but is composed of nine neighborhood pieces, namely Alki, North Admiral, Junction, Seaview, Fairmont Park, Genesee, Gatewood , Fauntleroy and Arbor Heights? I certainly couldn't unless I were cribbing off of the neighborhood list of http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us. The Internet is to die for.

When you add it all up our government has identified somewhere around 95 to 97 neighborhoods, depending on whether you lump some together for consistency's sake, or let them all hang out.

They each have their own history and character and reputation. For example, once when I was in college on the East Coast I found myself by chance in a room full of guys who were all from Seattle just like I was. Everybody had to say what neighborhood they were from and when they got around to asking me I told them I was from Mid Beacon Hill and they all laughed. Especially the guy from Broadway. "You're from Beacon Hill? What a loser! Ha, ha!" he said. What a great memory.

Fortunately I have since moved up in life and have lived in more highly regarded neighborhoods. When, a few years out of college I found myself living in a car, it just didn't make sense to park it on Beacon Ave when I could be part of the "In" crowd and park on "The" Ave. Since then I have slept in an alley in Belltown (at a time when it was the seventh coolest neighborhood in the whole country!) and I now live in subsidized housing in Pioneer Square, or as I like to think of it, the hot neighborhood where the cool all began.

A couple of weeks ago the One Night Count of homeless people was held and the big news was that the overnight homeless occupation of Ballard increased by 132 percent this year. It looks like somebody else has got the idea: if I have to sleep outside, at least I can sleep somewhere interesting. Seattle neighborhoods are catching on with our homeless people and I think it's fantastic. I want to see them have to do the count in Blue Ridge next year. By the way, the view of the Sound from Blue Ridge is fabulous in October – so everybody make your travel reservations early!

Speaking of Seattle neighborhoods, I want to complain about the City of Seattle Charter Amendment No. 5 that's being voted on soon. How lame is this? They want to elect city council members from nine city districts instead of city-wide.

Nine? Nine? Out of over ninety neighborhoods they're going to rig nine districts? ARE THEY MAD?

What this city needs to do is wallow in its neighborhood-icity. We've got the neighborhoods, now we need the Neighborhood Representatives. We need a Seattle Congress, a legislative branch consisting of a House and something else I haven't thought of yet.

We need at least one, maybe two, representatives from each of Seattle's 95 or so neighborhoods to legislate and debate and advise and consent and all the other things that representatives do.

Then, and only then, will we be able to witness a roll call in a Seattle House of Reps and hear a guy from Ballard stand up during roll call and talk for fifteen minutes about Norwegians. It would be almost as good as getting the smell back.