No Fear or Loathing

National Review, August 29, 2005

I was somewhere around Oudezijds Voorburgwal, on the edge of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, when I knew that the drugs would never take hold. My vision was bad, but then it always is; my judgment was no worse than normal; and my usual bleak mood was no better. I had absolutely no interest in tie-dye, Hermann Hesse, granny glasses, world peace, the teachings of the Buddha, or a flower in my hair. I was a loser Leary, a deadbeat De Quincey.

It had all seemed so much simpler just a few hours before. I’d been sitting in an old café on Spuistraat discussing the state of Dutch politics (bad) over a few Dutch beers (good) with my friend Henk. Sixteen biertjes later (between us, between us), it was time to move on. Henk was saying something feeble about a heavily pregnant wife, had to be by her side, baby due any moment, and I, well, I felt the call of investigative journalism. Holland’s reefer madness had to be checked out. Thoroughly.

Cannabis is not exactly legal in the Netherlands. But it’s not exactly illegal either. Finding out exactly what the country’s policy of tolerance (gedoogbeleid) means is about as easy as following stoner logic, but its result is that in certain cities so-called “coffee shops” are allowed to sell small amounts of cannabis (a maximum of five grams at a time) to their customers. Coffee shops are licensed; they pay tax and are regulated: Alcohol is rarely on offer, hard drugs are strictly forbidden, and even soft drugs cannot be advertised. No minors are permitted on the premises, and you have to be 18 before you can graze on the grass (the drinking age in the Netherlands is 16). Finally, in a last, faint, despairing echo of the country’s Calvinist past, a coffee shop can be closed down if it’s a “nuisance.”

And in recent years, many have been. As always, when anything bad happens, France is involved. Concerned by the number of their nationals traveling to the Netherlands to stock up on pot, both France and Germany have been putting pressure on the Dutch to close down the coffee shops, or at least insist that only Dutch citizens be permitted to use them. For the most part, the Dutch have paid no attention, but the purchase limit was reduced to the current five grams (from 30) and other regulations were more strictly enforced. According to the possibly reliable Smokers Guide to Amsterdam (“an unbiased view of Amsterdam for casual party people”) the number of coffee shops in the city fell from 480 in 1990 to 279 in 2001. Once the less permissive center-right Christian Democrats came to power in 2002 this crackdown went further still. A little over 200 coffee shops survive there today.

But that was more than enough to choose from. Even after I had, um, weeded out the coffee shops with names that were either too redolent of the 1960s (The Doors, Flower, Kasbah, the Kashmir Lounge, Mellow Yellow, and Pink Floyd), too scary (Lucifera, Ruthless, Stud, and Xtreme), too derivative (Rick’s Café), too tactless (Midnight-Express), or unacceptably dependent on puns (High School, High Time, Highlander, and Highway), a wide selection still remained. Some were too seedy, others too hip; the place I eventually found was relaxed and welcoming even if some of the people there appeared really, really surprised to see me.

Perhaps my suit, tie, and shirt (Jermyn Street, since you ask) were to blame. Or was the problem my age, a Cruise-Holmes span away from that of the pretty young waitress? Maybe it was just that I quite clearly didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t brought any tobacco with me, or any rolling papers, or even a lighter. The menu was meaningless, but vaguely alarming. White Widow? Bubblegum? Domina Haze? Manali Crema? I felt confident that AK47 was not the way to go, but as for the rest . . .

“Have you ever smoked?” asked the young, young, young waitress, anxiously.

“I was at university during the 1970s,” I replied ambiguously, plagiarizing Newt Gingrich.

She laughed, and I bought five pre-rolled joints for twenty euros — dope for beginners, I suspected, a trip with training wheels. I smoked them quietly in a corner, reading The Economist (what did you expect, High Times?), while the other customers sat across the room, puffing on Bubblegum, occasionally glancing over at this misplaced Methuselah and his Economist and wondering, probably, whether the BTK killer had been caught after all. After an hour or so, nothing seemed to be happening. The joints smelled like 1967, but their effect was 1957. Had years of legal intoxicants taken their toll, or had I simply been had? Supplementing my sad-sap spliffs with more potent space cakes (“once you’re on the ride,” cautioned the Smokers Guide, “there’s no immediate way off!”) seemed unwise. It was time to go. So I did.

If space cakes were unwise, Amsterdam’s “smart shops” look really dumb. These stoner apothecaries, a more recent arrival, sell not cannabis, but a wide selection of nature’s naughtier productions: herbs, mushrooms, cacti, and odd, unidentifiable fungi of the type that usually means trouble in sci-fi movies too low-budget to spring for a proper alien. Some of their offerings may not work at all: To believe in a “natural Viagra best boiled in vodka” took, I felt, brains more thoroughly boiled in vodka even than mine. Others may work all too well: After some Salvia, “your balance is completely lost; gravity pulls you in amazing ways.” Oh, okay.

But Holland as a whole has not lost its balance. There’s no room to recite all the arguments here, but if the coffee-shop experiment has not worked quite as well as some of its boosters claim, its critics have fared even worse. Per capita cannabis consumption in the Netherlands is estimated to be at the EU average, and rather below that prevailing in these Altered States of America; and the Dutch, of course, have avoided much of the destruction, despair, and cost of the drug wars. Disappointingly for drug warriors, there’s no evidence either that easy access to cannabis has acted as a “gateway” to more dangerous pastimes: The incidence of heroin consumption is far less than in the U.S. Overall, Holland has one of the lowest rates of problem drug use in Western Europe.

If there is an objection to the coffee shops, it’s aesthetic. Owing to them, Amsterdam has become to cannabis what Bourbon Street is to Hurricanes. This fine old bourgeois city is in danger of turning into a euro-Kathmandu, a druggy destination overwhelmed by day trippers (literally), cannabis kitsch, and counterculture dreck — which could end up destroying the typically civil Dutch compromise that has made this experiment possible.

And then there are the town’s proliferating cannabis snobs, like wine bores only, somehow, even more irritating. You can read what they have to say (Nepal Temple Balls have, apparently, a “buzzy, chatty high that makes you zone”) on coffee-shop menus and in numerous guidebooks. Or go and hear for yourself. I joined the crowd downstairs at the “Cannabis College” on Oudezijdes Achterburgwal to gaze at some outlaw botany and listen to the mumbling, muttering, meandering Yoda who was its custodian. I could take the interminable, rambling discussion of the merits of one plant over another, but when he started referring to them as his “girls,” I knew that it was time for something else: A good, stiff drink.

Easy Riders

National Review, July 18, 2005

Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Look, I’m not Hemingway, Marco Polo, or Lewis or bloody Clark. I don’t kayak, hike, or bike, but I do know I’m not the only traveler in Mongolia to have gone through a moment of despair, regret (what was so wrong with Cancún anyway?), and panic. And why not? We were somewhere remote in the country that defines remote and our guide’s “short cut” had more than a touch of the Donner Party about it. Were those really vultures, dark, enormous, and optimistic, circling over our dusty and exhausted bus as it bounced, creaked, juddered, and shuddered along the unpaved road that wound across an empty plain that made the Mojave look like the Garden of Eden? Yes, they were vultures. Big ones. Mean ones. Hungry ones.

Hours, hours, bouncing and juddering hours later, broken only by a grim little picnic by a grim little lake previously denuded of fish by dynamite-toting Chinese, we arrived at Lun, a Mad Max scrap of a settlement that shared only a syllable with the British capital, in the hope of refueling the bus. Lun’s wreck of a gas station had gas. It had pumps. It had an attendant. What it didn’t have was electricity. No electricity. No pump. No gas. The power was out all over eastern Mongolia, but the attendant thought that a lady who lived nearby might have a stash of gas, and that stash of gas could be for sale. She did, and it was.

Lun, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

The impossible has a way of happening in the land of the Mongols. They are a people too far-flung, too poor, and too strange to survive. And yet they have. They survived the collapse of the khans’ huge empire, they survived the centuries of Chinese oppression that followed, they survived even the brief, brutal, and bizarre rule of a crazed Baltic baron, and, finally, they survived the decades of Communist dictatorship that ended only in 1990.

Now at last this nation of nomads, lamas, herdsmen, shamans, miners, bureaucrats, and trainee city slickers is back in charge of its own destiny. And as in so many other parts of the old Soviet bloc the first sign of a better future is the return of the long-suppressed past. In Mongolia that can only mean one thing: You Know Who is back. Genghis! In the Communist era, Genghis Khan (or, more accurately, Chinggis Khaan) was regarded as a distinctly disreputable figure, a man best not mentioned by the politically prudent. Not anymore.

Brushed, scrubbed, rehabilitated, and thoroughly whitewashed, the old monster has been transformed into a lawgiver, philosopher, and all-round decent guy. “Yes,” I was told, “he was a mass murderer, but that’s how war is.” Besides, he was “provoked” (it’s a long — and utterly unconvincing — story). Butcher no more, Genghis now shines as a symbol of Mongolia’s lost glory and newfound confidence. There’s even talk of moving the capital from Ulan Bator (Ulaanbaatar) to the spot that Genghis picked, Karakorum (Kharkhorin), these days a tumbledown town distinguished only by a magnificent monastery having, awkwardly, no connection to Genghis. In fact, almost nothing in Karakorum has. Well, there is a modern monument — part Trump, part Brezhnev, all disaster — dedicated to the Mongol empire, but, like Mongolian cuisine, it is best passed over in silence.

Karakorum, Mongolia, May, 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Fortunately, there’s more in Mongolia for Genghis fans than Karakorum, including Chinggis cigarettes, Chinggis beer, and the alarming Chinggis vodka. In Ulan Bator, Chinggis has given his name to the best hotel, a wide avenue, and a good place to munch some mutton. Over in the national history museum, previously preoccupied with the exploits (stupendous) of the Mongolian Communist party, the Commies are out and Genghis is in.

Genghis Khan, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 @ Andrew Stuttaford

If the great Khan’s tale is embellished, mythologized, and sometimes just plain made up, that’s understandable in a people that still seem a little uncomfortable in the trappings of a modern nation-state. And for this, the country’s complex and often savage 20th century must bear no small share of the blame.

As even a quick glance at Ulan Bator’s glum architecture will reveal, today’s Mongolia is in many ways a creation of the Soviet Union. Russia’s Bolsheviks played an important part in establishing Mongolian independence, and their successors did their best to ensure that that independence was a sham. Ulan Bator (the name means “red hero”) resembles a rundown provincial capital anywhere in the former USSR. Like many such cities, Ulan Bator was embellished with the occasional unconvincing local flourish (its wedding palace is built in the shape of a traditional Mongolian hat), but its true spirit was crushed. Most of Ulan Bator’s monasteries were, like the monks who inhabited them, obliterated, their ornate forms replaced by the slovenly grandeur and gimcrack construction so typical of Soviet rule. Even the mausoleum of Mongolia’s other great hero, the “red hero” himself, Damdiny Sükhbaatar, bears a suspicious resemblance to Lenin’s in Moscow.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

At least the statue of Stalin that stood outside the national library was finally pulled down, if only in 1990. Other, more disturbing, traces of the murderous Georgian still remain. In 2003, construction workers uncovered a mass grave containing the remains of perhaps a thousand people. Most of the victims were Buddhist monks, shot, bludgeoned, and dumped in a ravine near Khambyn Ovoo: a small portion of the tens of thousands of victims slaughtered, exiled, or imprisoned in the 1920s and 1930s as the Mongolian party leadership, carefully choreographed by Moscow, brought the grim drama then playing in the USSR to their own country. The script is familiar, complete in every disgusting detail, even down to the rise of Horoloogiin Choibalsan, a puppet Stalin all Mongolia’s own.

Memorial Museum of the Victims of Political Persecutions, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

There’s an old wooden house in Ulan Bator that gives a flavor of those days. Once the residence of a Mongolian prime minister murdered in Moscow in 1937, it now hosts a museum dedicated to the victims, complete, as such museums usually are, with the incomplete: the names and the photographs of just a few of the dead. A wax tableau reproduces the scene in an interrogation chamber, while upstairs a small pile of skulls from the Khambyn ravine shows how such interrogations tended to conclude.

Memorial Museum of the Victims of Political Persecutions, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005, © Andrew Stuttaford

And as expected in the former Soviet empire, the accounting for the Communist years remains unfinished, ambiguous, and uncertain. A statue of Lenin presides over the prostitutes outside a downtown hotel, and Choibalsan still stands on his pedestal outside Ulan Bator’s university. Choibalsan’s party is in Mongolia’s governing coalition and its candidate recently won the country’s presidential elections. But the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary party is not what it was. It has accepted democracy, the free market (more or less), and, even, alliance with the U.S.; the Mongols are back in Baghdad, if rather less bloodily than in the time of the khans. Ulan Bator may be desperately poor, but there are many outward signs of returning enterprise — bustling shops, sidewalk kiosks, even a stock exchange.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005 © Andrew Stuttaford

Outside Ulan Bator conditions are far tougher. For a couple of days our group stayed in a ger (yurt) camp in a high valley to the north. The valley was lovely, with more than a touch of Shangri-La about it, but even this idyll offered a glimpse of a very hardscrabble Arcadia, where few inhabitants had much in the way of, well, anything. Life in Mongolia is harsh: The climate is merciless, incomes are low, and with little in the way of infrastructure (there are, for example, probably fewer than 5,000 miles of paved road, a miserable figure for a country the size of Alaska) it’s difficult to see how that will change any time soon. But if anyone can make this all work, I like to believe that it will be this tough, resilient people.

Mongolia, May 2005,  ©Andrew Stuttaford

And before you say that this is a hopeless dream, go to the steppe and watch a lone horseman riding calmly through that vast impossible space, his herd in front of him, and history just behind.

Global Warning

Michael Crichton: State of Fear

If you want to see what an apoplectic fit looks like in print, check out Michiko Kakutani’s review/denunciation in the New York Times of State of Fear, the latest book from Michael Crichton. Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, Disclosure, The Andromeda Strain, and much more (or, in the case of Prey, less); in State of Fear he dares to challenge the numbskull pieties of “global warming” and that has made Michiko very mad indeed. State of Fear is, she writes, “shrill,” “preposterous,” and, horror of horrors, “right-wing.”

So many angry, foam-flecked adjectives jostle for attention in the text of Kakutani’s padded-cell philippic (I’d use the words “shrill” and “preposterous,” but she got there first) that the fastidious will want to mop the page for spittle before reading. Crichton’s book is, she sneers, “ham-handed”; the plot of this “sorry excuse for a thriller” is “ludicrous,” its disquisitions “talky,” its facts “cherry-picked,” its assertions “dogmatic,” and its efforts to make a case “lumbering.” Still, at least she spared Crichton contemporary culture’s most fashionable insult, that irrevocably staining mark of Cain, that deepest red of all scarlet letters, that other N-word. The Los Angeles Times does not; according to its reviewer, Crichton has written “the first neocon novel.” Ouch.

At this point, wiser, calmer readers will suspect that a book that attracts that sort of condemnation in the pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (reassuringly, The New Yorker didn’t like it either) must be really, really good. The wiser, calmer readers will be right. It is.

Crichton has, unsurprisingly, chosen to incorporate his message into the medium he knows best, the thriller, but what is surprising is that this latest effort is packed with graphs, scientific discussion, footnotes, a manifesto, and an extensive bibliography: not usually the stuff of popular fiction. And, remarkably, the whole package — all 600 pages of it — succeeds. State of Fear is a good, solid, exciting read, and if the writing is occasionally wooden, it is so in the finest, somewhat flat tradition of Ludlum, Turow, and the other bards of the airport bookstore.

State of Fear is a didactic work, but its author has not neglected the conventions of his genre: Men are men, women are hot (it’s the planet that’s not), and deaths are excruciating. Bullets fly, cars crash, poisonous octopi do their worst, hideous catastrophe looms, and, the last surviving fans of the late H. Rider Haggard will be delighted to know, cannibals make an appearance. Cannibals! And not effete Lecters either, but real honest-to-goodness, traditional missionary-in-the-pot anthropophagi, who know that fresh flesh needs neither sips of Chianti nor fava-bean frippery to make it something truly tasty.

But all those daunting graphs and lurking footnotes are a reminder that, populist format or not, Crichton is making a serious point about the dead and dangerous end that modern “environmentalism” has reached. In the hands of contemporary Greens, it no longer has much to do with brains, or, at least, reason. Protecting our planet has, he argues, degenerated into a religion — a matter of faith, not science.

The frenzied response to State of Fear proves his point. Crichton’s arguments have not been treated as a contribution to a legitimate debate, but as blasphemy. Yet if this is an urgent, insistent, sometimes overstated book, it’s because Crichton cares so much about the environment, not so little. Who with any brains does not?

Yes, Crichton raises the rhetorical stakes very high, but the real stakes are even higher. If the prescriptions of the Kyoto Treaty are followed, the cost could run into hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a cost that, if history is any indication, will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poor. Under the circumstances, the science that backs it had better be rock solid. Crichton argues that it is not.

To take just a sample of the intriguing data that turn up in this book, the melting of Antarctica is confined to just one relatively small peninsula. The continent as a whole is getting colder, its ice thicker. At the other end of the planet, Greenland too is chilling up, while here at home, the temperature in the United States is roughly where it was in the 1930s, there has been no increase in extreme weather, and changes in upper-atmospheric temperature have been far smaller than most global-warming models would suggest.

Those are some cherries, Ms. Kakutani.

In her disdain for inconvenient, ornery facts, however, Kakutani is sadly typical. While there are those in the Kyoto crowd who have genuine, and carefully thought-through, scientific concern about the fate of the Earth, the motivation of the many who shout so loudly and so dogmatically about the perils of global warming frequently owes less to logic than to neurosis, misplaced religious faith, and, often, the characteristic dishonesty of a Left looking for yet another stick with which to beat both Western civilization and those wicked, dirty capitalists.

And then there’s something else: greed. One of the more entertaining aspects of Crichton’s tale is that the clever, conniving, white-collar villains, regular thriller fare of course, are not the standard corporate swine. No, in this book they are environmentalists acting from exactly the sort of motives more usually attributed to the bad boys from the boardroom than to the saints from the NGOs. In State of Fear, the Gekkos are Green. They are caricatures, but Crichton is making a fair point: Big Environment is a big, big business, “a great fundraising and media machine — a multi-billion industry in its own right — with its own private agenda that’s not necessarily in the public interest,” and like any big business it comes complete with temptations, timeservers, fat paychecks, fatter payrolls, and a legion of lawyers trying to make a fast buck.

This combination of false gods and real mammon has replaced the hard science of global warming with scaremongering, publicity stunts (both have a key part to play in State of Fear), and relentless pressure, political and otherwise, to sign up for the new orthodoxy. The problem for its believers, however, is that it’s an orthodoxy that the facts do not support. In reality, the facts, such as they are, do not support any orthodoxy. There aren’t enough of them, and those that exist often appear to contradict one another. The hard science of global warming is, as Crichton explains, well, hard; the data are far from reliable, and there are so many variables that, even for today’s computers, the value of most climate-prediction models lies somewhere between a bookie’s tip and a crystal ball.

Crichton has his own theories as to what is going on (very roughly: mild warming, possibly purely natural, perhaps associated with the heat islands of urban development, or maybe both), but he is at pains to describe these as guesses, a humility that would be equally welcome among those who would base their highly interventionist environmental policy on little more than hysteria and a hunch — something, I suspect, that helps explain their reluctance to see their version of the truth subjected to serious intellectual criticism.

For matters to improve, Joe Friday science, freed from agendas, has to return to the center of the investigation of global warming. How mankind responds to those facts, once discovered, is a legitimate topic for political controversy and debate. Trying to establish what they are should not be. If Michael Crichton can push thinking even a little way in this direction, he will have written a very good book indeed.

The Trouble With Harry

G.P. Taylor: Shadowmancer; Wormwood

National Review, December 30, 2004

FOR those of us who like to believe, however tentatively, in human progress, the notion that there are 21st-century Americans who think that the brave, benign—and fictional—Harry Potter can be used as a recruitment officer for the occult is profoundly depressing. And yet there are surprisingly many who fear just that. For year after year now, different school districts across the country have faced complaints whenever the hero of Hogwarts rides his Nimbus 2000 broomstick onto the curriculum or into the library. But the Lord, or the market, works in mysterious ways and those so harried by the thought of Harry have recently found, well, a savior in the shape of a former policeman and roadie for the Sex Pistols, the Reverend G. P. Taylor, the vicar of Cloughton, a small town in the north of England. He’s the author of two bestselling children’s books (both, like Harry Potter, with a surprisingly strong crossover readership among adults), Shadowmancer and Wormwood, novels of deviltry, danger, and intrigue where the ultimate hero is neither wizard nor witch, but God.

Funnily enough, it was that disreputable Master Potter who prompted the parson to pick up his pen. As Taylor explained in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he lectures on the occult and the New Age and, during the course of one talk, he was discussing “the dangers of Harry Potter and all that sort of stuff.” At the end of the evening, a woman suggested that he write a book. It was a sign! Within nine months, Taylor had completed Shadowmancer, and after the now-traditional round of rejections (ask Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling), he published it himself, selling his motorcycle to provide the necessary cash. Word-of-mouth did the rest.

Subsequently, Faber & Faber, a major U.K. publisher, bought the rights to Taylor’s epic, and the rest is history. Shadowmancer spent 15 weeks at the top of the British book charts, and its successor, Wormwood, was also a hit. A Shadowmancer movie is planned and multi-book contracts have been signed on both sides of the Atlantic (the reverend’s writings have also found a large audience in America).

It’s a great story: Taylor’s success makes for an inspirational and possibly miraculous tale. Miraculous? Well, how else to explain that books quite so bad have sold quite so well? Linked chapters in a saga that is (Lord, help us) planned to stretch over many more volumes, Shadowmancer and Wormwood are both set in (to give Taylor his due) a vividly described 18th-century England, a place of squalor, poverty, and oppression, far more Gin Lane than Beer Street. They are an account of two rounds in the eternal battle between the Creator (here called Riathamus, a Latin form of an ancient British word meaning “king of kings”) and You Know Who. The first revolves around the struggle for a sacred relic and—the Reverend Taylor’s psychiatrist can make of this what he will—a wicked vicar’s lust for world domination; the second deals with the coming of a comet that may be the deeply unpleasant “Wormwood” prophesied in one of the Book of Revelation’s gloomier passages.

With such a dramatic background, it’s remarkable that Taylor’s books fail to enthrall; yet somehow they do. The plotting is all over the place, much of the writing is clunky (Iron Maiden meets the Sermon on the Mount) and the ill-defined, but vast, cast of characters and creatures that flit in and out of the narrative will bewilder many of the books’ younger readers—and, trust me, some of the older ones too. Thulak? Seloth? Dunamez? Diakka? Varrigal? Glashan? Life’s too short as it is.

But do Shadowmancer and Wormwood even succeed in fulfilling the spiritual task that Taylor, a devout and obviously sincere man, has set out for them? From these books and numerous interviews that he has given, it’s fairly clear that Taylor wanted to show that the fight against evil must be seen as religious (if not, claims Taylor, necessarily Christian, although his work is filled with Christian imagery). He also set out to deliver the clear message that the occult is far from being a harmless parlor game. It’s no surprise that it’s an angel, not a wizard, who is on hand to help Taylor’s heroes in their adventures, and magic, oh dear, that’s a no-no.

We see this in the middle of one dramatic scene, when Raphah, the young Ethiopian (in a nod to the pieties of multiculturalism, Taylor has boasted that he got “sick of little Harry Potter being a nice little white Anglo-Saxon Protestant”) who is one of the heroes of Shadowmancer, angrily confronts a woman and her faith in the Tarot:

“Do you really believe in the power of those picture cards? There is a far greater law than the one that controls the roll of the dice or the turn of a card . . . each one of you is taken in by what you hear. You’re quick to believe in spirits when it’s really someone banging on the side of the bed. None of you will turn to the one who can truly set you free.”

Fine, but this blunt lecture is a long way from, say, the subtler allegory that is C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, stories written by a man whose Christianity was no less muscular than that of the Reverend Taylor. Other than for those who are already cheering from their pews, the way Taylor punctuates his narrative with sermonettes and preachy nuggets is likely to be more annoying than convincing. In this respect, ironically, he is reminiscent of another best-selling British children’s writer, the gifted but irritating Philip Pullman, whose initially promising His Dark Materials trilogy ultimately dissolved into a dreary atheist rant.

That Taylor dislikes the occult, there’s no doubt. Unfortunately, he sees it not as it is, a conjuring-trick creed of cretins and the credulous, but as something that is genuinely powerful—all too real, and all too dangerous. He’s on the record as believing in ghosts (one of his houses was, he has said, haunted) and has presided over a few exorcisms in his time; earlier, in his wild, and somewhat regretted, youth, he experimented with tarot cards, séances, and Ouija boards.

These beliefs, when linked with Taylor’s violent, lurid, Heavy Metal aesthetic (this vicar puts the Goth in Golgotha), mean that his writing may invest the dark side, even if it always ultimately loses, with rather more seductive force than he may have intended. Here is how the angel Abram describes Hezrin, one of Wormwood’s more sinister demons:

“She is a collector of angels and any other trinket that takes her fancy. I have known her for an eternity, century to century, Paris and Rome, Constantinople and Babylon. The thing with [her] is that she never changes, always those same deep, beautiful eyes that capture the soul—and hands that will tear out your heart.”

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Narnia anymore.

The Fat Police

Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen:  Food Fight - The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It                

National Review, January 26, 2004

Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 1999   ©  Andrew Stuttaford

It is difficult to single out what is most objectionable about this hectoring, lecturing, and altogether dejecting piece of work, but perhaps it's the moment when its authors credit the rest of us with the IQs of greedy rodents. Quoting a study that shows that, presented with a cornucopia of carbohydrates and wicked fatty treats, laboratory rats will abandon a balanced, healthy diet in favor of dangerous excess, they draw a rather insulting conclusion: Civilization's success in creating so much abundance has come at a terrible price, a "toxic environment" so overflowing with temptation that, like those Rabelaisian rats, humanity will be unable to resist. We will eat ourselves if not to death, then to diabetes, decrepitude, and stretch pants.

The "obesity epidemic" is becoming a tiresome refrain and Yale professor Kelly Brownell is one of its most tireless advocates. Nevertheless, for those with the stomach for more on the fat threat, Food Fight is worth a look for what it reveals about the motives and objectives of the busybodies pining to police your plate.

But let's start with the "epidemic" itself. With a relish they are unlikely to show at the dinner table, the authors pepper their readers with data purporting to show that roughly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, products of a feeding frenzy that is dangerous medically and drives up health-care costs by tens of billions of dollars. Some of the numbers may need to be taken with a pinch of low sodium salt, but the trends they represent are a matter of concern. In this at least Food Fight is right.

Over the past couple of decades. Americans have indeed put on some pounds. All too often, heavy isn't healthy. The mere fact of being too fat (calculating what is "too" fat takes more, however, than a wistful glance at the pages of Vogue) can cause problems such as arthritis and a range of other, sometimes serious, diseases. Despite this, corpulence should be seen as symptom of ill health as much as a cause: Being fat won't necessarily kill you, but the sloth and the gluttony that got you there just might.

To their credit, the authors do cite research showing that fit fatties are at lower risk that unfit string beans. Still, they tend to concentrate on obesity as a problem in its own right - and, ironically, that's something that may be counterproductive. Befuddled by standardized notions of an ideal weight, Americans spend an estimated $40 billion a year in the generally unsuccessful pursuit of one miracle diet or another. The result is yo-yoing weight - something often less healthful that having a few too many pounds - and unjustified self-congratulation for a population that likes to tell itself that it is "doing something" about its health, when, in fact, it is doing anything but.

Highlighting fatness, that soft, billowing symbol of self-indulgence, reflects an agenda that has expanded beyond legitimate health concerns to embrace asceticism for its own sake. There's a hint of this in the way the authors respond to the idea that all foods can find a place in a properly balanced diet. While conceding that such an approach has "some utility" in individual cases, they see the argument that flows from it (that no food is intrinsically "bad") as a distraction. They are wrong. An emphasis on balance is the best chance of persuading this country to eat more healthily - and, importantly, to stick with this decision. To Brownell and Horgen, more comfortable with proscription and self-denial than compromise and cheeseburgers, this is, doubtless, dismayingly lax.

Their language too is a giveaway. There is tut-tut-ting over the "glorification of candy" and anguish over restaurants "notorious" for their large portions. Under the circumstances, it's no shock that the reliably alarmist "Center for Science in the Public Interest," an organization famous for its efforts to drain away our pleasures, rates frequent and favorable mention.

Asceticism often brings with it a sense of moral superiority and the urge to spread the joys of deprivation amongst the less enlightened masses - by persuasion if possible, by compulsion if necessary, and sometimes by something that falls in between. So Brownell and Horgen lament the lack of "incentive" for recipients of food stamps to purchase "healthy foods." Common sense, apparently, is not enough. Worse, these wretches might even be tempted into "overbuying." Who knew the food-stamp program was so generous?

With tobacco a useful precedent, it's not difficult to see where all this is going. Brimming with tales of carnage, soaring health-care costs, and the threat to "the children," Food Fight follows a familiar script. That's not to say its writers don't make some telling points. The ways, for instance, in which junk food is marketed to America's no-longer-so-tiny tots are troubling, but at its core this book rests on the unpalatable belief that even adults cannot be trusted with a menu. The authors' solutions include regulation, censorship. subsidies, propaganda, public-spending boondoggles, and a faintly totalitarian-sounding "national strategic plan to increase physical activity." Oh, did I mention the "small" taxes on the sale of "unhealthy" food?

Food Fight is a preview of the techniques that will be used to persuade a chubby country to agree to all this. There are scare tactics (death! disease!), a convenient capitalist demon ) "big food"), and, best of all, an alibi. It's not our fault that we are fat. Yes, the importance of getting up off that sofa is fully acknowledged in Food Fight, but the book's soothing subtext is that we are all so helpless in the face of advertising and abundance that we can no longer be held fully responsible for what we are eating. Even the ultimate alibi (food might be addictive!) makes a tentative appearance, but whether this theory is true is, readers are informed, not "yet" clear.

The notion that eating too much is somehow involuntary is ludicrous, but it fits in with the view repeated in this book that "overconsumption has replaced malnutrition as the world's top food problem," a repugnant claim that makes sense only if feast is indeed no more of a choice that famine. Anyone who believes that will have no problem in arguing that, as people cannot reasonably be expected to fend off Colonel Sanders by themselves, government should step in. And "if the political process is ineffective" (voters can be inconveniently ornery), Brownell and Horgen would back litigation. Such cases might be tricky, but even the treat of mass lawsuits "regardless of legal merit" could, they note, help "encourage" the food industry to change its ways.

And that thuggish suggestion is more nauseating that anything Ronald McDonald could ever cook up.

The Bloodstained Rise

Christopher Logue: All Day Permanent Red

National Review, November 9, 2003

Christopher Logue has been a dealer in stolen property (briefly), a prisoner in a Crusader castle (16 months), a pornographer (the book Lust), and, probably no less discreditably, an actor, a poet, and a writer of screenplays. As if this weren't enough, for over four decades this versatile Englishman has been engaged in a "reworking" of the Iliad. It is not, he is at pains to stress, a translation (he knows no Greek), but an episodic "account" of the ancient epic that has already taken far longer to produce than Troy took to fall.

And, as you read those words. I can hear you sigh. The prospect of yet another tawdry modernization of a classic that needs none seems like nothing to look forward to. Our age often shows itself too restless, unimaginative, and self-important to attempt a genuine understanding of our culture's past. Hot in the pursuit of some imagined relevance, we are forever reinterpreting and updating, here The Tempest as an allegory of slavery, there a few nipples to spice up that boring old Jane Austen. And if, in the process, the sense of the original is lost, we shrug, and settle for what is left: deracinated pap, bland at best, topically—and inconsequentially— "controversial" at worst. Only later do we bother to wonder where our literature has disappeared to.

But All Day Permanent Red is very different from the usual dross. Logue's previous work on the Iliad has been called a masterpiece (Henry Miller, not always a reliable source, described an early section as better than Homer): a devalued term these days, but, in this case, well deserved. All Day Permanent Red is the latest chapter and it doesn't disappoint. Here is Logue's description of the Greek soldiers rising to face their Trojan opponents:

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.

Add the receding traction of its slats

Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.

Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are raised

And many faces change to one vast face.

So, where there were so many masks.

Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.

In earlier installments—War Music (1981). Kings (1991), and The Husbands (1994)—Logue darted in and out of Homer's chronology, starting with the death of Patroclus and the return of Achilles, then taking his readers baek to the early quarrels between Agamemnon and Achilles, and then on to the single combat between wronged Menelaus and spoiled, lethal Paris. In All Day Permanent Red (the title is. wonderfully, borrowed from an advertisement for lipstick), Logue takes a step back—to the very first full day of combat between the two armies.

The language is as ferocious as its subject matter and, in its cinematic intensity, it's easy to see the hand of the former screenwriter:

Sunlight like lamplight.

Brown clouds of dust touch those brown clouds of dust already overhead.

And snuffling through the blood and filth-stained legs

Of those still-standing-thousands goes Nasty, Thersites' little dog.

Now licking this, now tasting that.

But there is more to this saga than a simple recital of slaughter. The savagery on the plains before Troy is echoed in the heavens above. Nowadays we tend to trust in the benign God of the monotheistic imagination or, failing that, in the indifference of a universe that does not actually set out to harm us. The men of Homer's time had no such comfort: "Host must fight host, / And to amuse the Lord our God / Man slaughter man."

The gods of antiquity were capricious - selfish, and vain, playground bullies or the smug members of the smart set in a high-school movie, monsters as often as they were saviors. Pitiless, dangerous Olympus is a recurrent theme that Logue, like Homer, has emphasized throughout his narrative, and this new volume is no exception. Here is Athena's response to a plea for help from Odysseus;

Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly

Emptying her blood-red mouth set in her ice-white face

Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked

"Kill! Kill for me!

Better to die than to live without killing!"

Logue's language, both grand and, at times, oddly conversational ("Only this this is certain: when a lull comes—they do— / You hear the whole ridge coughing"), brings immediacy to an ancient epic. His use of deliberately anachronistic wording neither jars (partly because most English-speaking readers, including this one, are not comparing Logue's work against the original Greek) nor does it break that sense of the past that is no small part of the spell of a tale thousands of years old. And, yes, the references to Venetian blinds, plane crashes, and even an aircraft carrier somehow work in this tale of Bronze Age fury. Their very modernity reminds us both of our vast distance from this saga, and of the extraordinary cultural continuity that its survival represents.

And if we want to understand why, beyond an accident of history, the Iliad has been remembered for so long, Logue's extraordinary, compelling poetry gives us a clue. The Iliad has as much to say about the human condition now as it did when Homer began to write, not least the destructive, glorious, inglorious love of battle that will endure until the Armageddon which, one day, it will doubtless bring about:

Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips.

King Richard calling for another horse (his fifth).

King Marshal Ney shattering his saber on a cannon ball.

King Ivan Kursk, 22.30 hrs, July 4th to 14th '43, 7000 tanks engaged,

"... he clambered up and pushed a stable-bolt Into that Tiger-tank's red-  hot-machine-gun's mouth

And bent the bastard up. Woweee!"

Where would we be if he had lost?

Achilles? Let him sulk,

A masterpiece? Of course it is.

Lancers, Fusiliers, Rats...The ongoing glory of the British regiment

National Review, April 21, 2003

WHEN the British, over 40,000 strong, arrived in the Persian Gulf they brought more than troops, hardware, support staff, and supplies. There was history, too, in their baggage. One need look no further than the names of just some of the units now deployed in the war—storied regiments with lineages that stretch back through the centuries, from Kuwait to Normandy, the Somme, the Crimea, and often far past. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (the successors of a regiment that served in Afghanistan, but in 1879-80) are in the Gulf for the war against Saddam, and so to pick out but a few more, are the Black Watch (whose battle honors include, ahem, a "'successful action" in Brooklyn. N.Y.. against one George Washington), the Life Guards (who first saw action in 1685), and that enduring symbol of Churchill's defiance and determination, the Parachute Regiment.

Each British regiment usually specializes in a specific type of soldiering. There are, for example, artillery, infantry, armored, and engineering (the "sappers") regiments—but when they go to war they are joined together in larger formations, "much like," a brigadier explained to me, "the way in which the different sections. woodwind, strings, and so on, are combined to make up an orchestra." This orchestra is one that often reprises the past: Much of the move across the sands towards Basra has been led by formations grouped together into the 7th Armoured Brigade, a unit that still wears the insignia of the "Desert Rat," that strange scrawny rodent that became a symbol of strange scrawny Monty's World War II triumphs in North Africa.

British history, it seems, is not ready to end quite yet. Who would have thought it? When, more than 20 years ago, the "task force," Margaret Thatcher's marvelous makeshift armada, returned from its Falklands victory to cheers, tears, and Union Jacks on the quayside, Brits were told that it was. at last, goodbye to all that. The curtain had fallen, chaps, and there was no time for an encore. The rascally, glittering, wicked, and glorious age of empire was finally done, finished, buried, and anathematized—exchanged for the obligations of a grayer, more sober era.

And so, it seemed, was the British military. The downsized heirs of Kipling's rough-and-tumble conquistadors were destined now for the shrunken campaigns of a mid-sized European power, fighting budget cuts at home, terrorists in Belfast, and boredom in West Germany as they waited, and watched, and waited some more for the Red Army that never came.

After the Wall came down, so did the money that the U.K. was prepared to spend on its military. A defense "review," carrying the sort of bland. vaguely threatening name—"Options for Change"—that is more McKinsey & Co. than Sandhurst, saw the size of the army reduced by a little under one-third; to not much more than 100,000 men. Regiments were merged or disbanded, often with startlingly little sentiment. To take just one example, the 16th/5th Lancers, a regiment with roots that stretched back over 300 years, led the way into Iraq in February 1991, yet within two years found its proud name on the scrap pile, lost in a merger with little patience for the past.

Yet, somehow, the past has endured, taught in every recruit's basic training and nourished by a system that is the British army's greatest strength: the regiment. To borrow the words of Field Marshal Wavell, "The regiment is the foundation of everything." The concept of the regiment stems from the fact that recruitment was once organized on a local basis, but its survival as an institution owes a great deal to one crucial psychological insight: Men may enlist to serve their country, but they will fight hardest to protect their friends. Most British soldiers spend their entire career within the same regiment—over the years it becomes their principal source of friendship, their clan., their community, almost a surrogate family.

This sense of community is intensified still further by the British army's perception of itself as a caste set somewhat apart from the rest of society. Currently the army is, as it has been for much of British history, made up entirely of volunteers. The notion of the citizen soldier has been rejected in favor of the creation of a smallish force of highly trained professionals. This professionalism is a source of enormous pride to the troops, something Donald Rumsfeld may have discovered if he paid heed to Sgt. McMenamy of the Queen's Royal Lancers in early March. After hearing misinterpreted reports that the defense secretary was considering either leaving the Brits behind or giving them a secondary role in the coming conflict, the sergeant (described by the London Times as an "intimidating figure") was quoted as saying: "We are second to none, so it's a bit cheeky to suggest we can't be trusted to fight in the front line." ("A bit cheeky," let's be clear, is a classic example of British understatement.)

Like any community, the regiment has its own institutional memory that, added to the shared experience of highly intensive training and active duty, binds together the current generation and develops a sense of collective identity far more effectively than abstract notions of patriotism ever could. Visit the head- quarters of a British regiment, and there will almost certainly be a museum dedicated to its past campaigns; dine in its officers' mess and you will, in all probability, eat amid the portraits and the heirlooms of those who came before—silver from India, perhaps, or a tattered banner from one of Napoleon's lost legions.

Even the regiments that have been merged or amalgamated away into bureaucratic oblivion still manage to live on in the souls of their successors. Take the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is now with the Desert Rats in Iraq. Its men celebrate their regimental forebears—the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers, the City of London Regiment, and the Lancashire Fusiliers—on four separate days each year (for Gallipoli, Normandy, Albuhera, and Minden). These honored ancestors are the insistent ghosts of countless past glories, and it would not do to let them down.

Today's warriors, the latest in a long line of British expeditionary forces, as they march through a dusty landscape not so different from the battlefields of Victoria's old empire, are fighting for the honor of their clan, for its past, and for its totems. For some of the men, a former captain in the Irish Guards told me, it's a little "like playing for a famous football team." And would a little scrap of cloth bearing the caricature of a rat really mean something to those who wore it? "Oh yes," he said. Another officer agreed, particularly for those who fought together as Desert Rats in the last Gulf War, but stressed that much of the attention on that famous rodent has been a media creation. a hook to catch the attention of the wider British public, to whom the name of Monty's legendary army will mean much more than the history of any one regiment.

But to the soldiers themselves, it is their regiment that counts the most—not the Desert Rats. It should come as no surprise that Lt. Col. Tim Collins of the Royal Irish, when he spoke to his troops about the conduct that would be expected of them as they prepared to fight in Iraq, chose to emphasize the duty they owed their regiment: Cruelty or cowardice, he warned, could "harm the regiment or its history." And nothing could be worse than that.

It's early yet in this war, but somehow I don't think that Lt. Col. Collins will he disappointed.

The President of the Left

National Review, March 24, 2003 

If there is anyone more sanctimonious than The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet. it's the moralizing old ham who plays him. But prissy, preachy Martin Sheen wasn't always this way. There were times, back in the depths of the wicked, whacked-out 1970s, when today's straitlaced star was a boozer, a three-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day man, and who knows what else. It was also the decade when he gave two of the greatest performances in the history of American cinema. As the restless, murderous Kit Carruthers, Sheen was an astonishingly convincing guide to the beauty, brutality, and strangeness of Terrence Malick's hypnotic Badlands. In Apocalypse Now, he took audiences on a different journey, this time deep into a heart of darkness so profound that it engulfed not only the character he portrayed but also, ultimately, Sheen himself.

The making of Apocalypse Now was—like the war it described—a chaotic, prolonged nightmare, with the tropical heat of its Philippines location only adding to the pressure on an actor "interiorly confused" and also busy partying far, far too hard. By the end of filming, Sheen had suffered a heart attack so severe that he was given last rites. But the "white light" that was, reportedly, a part of his near-death experience seems to have had an effect roughly equivalent to that more famous light seen on the road to Damascus. He cut back on the drink, reconnected with the Catholic Church, and. in the ominous words of a profile in the London Daily Telegraph, "took up politics." While his movie career seemed doomed never to regain its former heights (forget Damascus, the road from Apocalypse Now to Beverly Hills Brats can't have been easy), when it came to politics, Sheen shone.

He has opposed Star Wars (Pentagon, not George Lucas), excessive violence in movies (probably not George Lucas either) sanctions against Iraq, the proposed invasion of Iraq, and, a little belatedly, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He's campaigned for the homeless, pacifism, migrant workers. Bill Clinton (a "hero"). Janet Reno (also a "hero"). Al Gore (heroic status unclear), animal rights, and the environmentalist movement. Gerry Adams, the murkiest of Northern Ireland's politicians, was yet another "hero." although there was to be some subsequent (rather muddled) backtracking. The Contras were not heroes. They were "obscene assassins." Cop-killer Mumia, on the other hand, is an "incisive critic of our criminal-justice system" and a "voice for the voiceless"— except, presumably, when they are murdered Philadelphia policemen.

His authority reinforced by the fact that he portrays a president on an upscale soap opera. Sheen uses celebrity status to push his causes (fair enough—it's our fault, not his, if we take an actor seriously just because of the roles he plays). But "Jed Bartlet" has not been his only taste of office, either on screen (he has played other presidents and at least two Kennedy brothers) or off. In 1989, Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu. Naturally, His Honor marked his appointment with a decree proclaiming the area "a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for [illegal] aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame." Interviewed more than a decade later by Hispanic magazine. Sheen relived the moment with obvious pleasure;

"The reaction was what I kind of half- expected, and it wasn't favorable. I was considered a radical who sold out the city. It just shows you the power of words and the power of someone's convictions. It just scared the hell out of them."

Well, not really—it just shows that people don't like having a loopy mayor. But no matter; If Sheen had become a St. Paul, the rest of us were, to him, like so many Galatians, an errant people to be hectored, lectured, and generally harangued.

And that's the best way to understand his politics - as an extension of his deeply held religious beliefs. Sheen's political views may be wrongheaded, but, despite all the controversy, they are hardly that unusual. Yes, they show strong traces of what Sheen once referred to as the "radical way of the cross," a version of that 1960s Latin American "liberation theology" which in the end proved to be neither liberation nor theology (it's no surprise to discover that Sheen enjoyed a long friendship with those "activist" priests, the Berrigan brothers, both of them, you guessed it, "heroes"), but they are not so far removed from the more mainstream market-skeptical, leftish strain of thought often found within Catholicism. Even his vocal opposition to an invasion of Iraq (which has, most recently, included filming a commercial for Win Without War) looks less exceptional when seen in the light of the Vatican's obvious discomfort with the direction of U.S. policy in the region.

That said, so what? That Sheen's numerous crusades may have religious roots should not exempt them from criticism, nor should the fact that the actor is, by all accounts, "sincere." When it comes to an agenda like Sheen's, sincerity in and of itself is no defense.

His lawyers might wish it were. One of the hallmarks of Sheen's activism is the number of times he has been arrested, around 70 at the latest count, often carefully choreographed for photogenic spectacle, which might include, say, prayer (yet another Nagasaki protest, this one at Los Alamos in 1999) or, for real excitement, fake blood (Fort Benning, same year).

There is another way in which these martyrdoms have been a touch theatrical. None were likely to have serious consequences. Now that there's a chance that they might, Sheen has seemed to shy away. Following a conviction for trespass at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base, he is on three years" probation and is taking care to avoid the police, handcuffs, and the judiciary. As he explained to Newsday last fall, "If I get arrested for anything now, I go right in the slammer." The actor's taste for martyrdom clearly includes neither the big house nor the loss of hundreds of thousands in dollars from his appearances in Aaron Sorkin's fake White House (Sheen reportedly earns around $300,000 for each episode of The West Wing, not so much less than the $400,000 that George W. Bush makes for a year in the real thing), but it's telling that it has taken this, rather than any change of heart, to stop—at least until his probation expires—the seemingly endless run of arrests.

To get arrested once is unfortunate, to get arrested 70 times looks rather more like arrogance. We live in a democracy, a system that, for all its flaws, does offer a legal mechanism for peaceful change. It's called voting. But in a democracy no one, not even Barbra Streisand, always gets his or her way. Most people accept that they have, at least temporarily, to live under some laws with which they may profoundly disagree. In his repeated recourse to (let's be euphemistic) "direct action," Sheen appears not to—an approach that is, at its core, undeniably undemocratic. Sheen's justification would, doubtless, be that much-vaunted "morality" of his. It's a morality that may be commendable in the context of his private life, but applied in the public sphere, it has clearly led him to the belief that he is entitled to ignore the ground rules of a democratic society. In breaking the law to make a political point, he is, in effect, saying that his morality trumps your vote.

Revealingly, when the law and his own notions of what is right coincide, Sheen is only too happy to don the jackboots. For example, driven in part, doubtless, by one son's painful battle with substance abuse, he was a leading opponent of a California ballot initiative designed to allow certain low-level drug users to receive treatment rather than jail. That shouldn't be a surprise. Sheen is a zealot: a man so convinced of his own rectitude that, for him, any compromise becomes a sin. Needless to say, such moral absolutism usually comes with a profound disdain for the points of view of those who disagree—to Sheen, I suspect, their opinions count for no more than their votes.

And when it comes to disdain, Sheen wins the Oscar. For a man supposedly dedicated to Christian values of reconciliation and love, Martin Sheen has a very sharp tongue indeed. George W. Bush, he says, is a "thug," "dull," "dangerous," "a bad comic working the crowd," a "moron." and a "white-knuckle drunk" in denial about his past difficulties with alcohol.

There's not a lot of humility either. Interviewed last year by Time Out, the actor explained how his commitment to "social justice" had helped win him the role of Jed Bartlet:

"It gives the character a level of credibility that somebody who didn't take a stand on issues of social justice wouldn't have projected. And it isn't anything I've done overtly, it's just who I am. I cannot not be who I am, regardless of what part I am playing."

Translation: "My goodness shines through."

Keepers Without Peace

Frederick Fleitz: Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s : Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests

With his good intentions and his blue helmet, the U.N. peacekeeper was an icon of post-World War II internationalism. He was G.I. Joe for the Eleanor Roosevelt set, muscular assurance that the days of the feeble League of Nations would never return. And for a while it seemed to work. The record was far from perfect, but from Cyprus to West New Guinea to Namibia, the presence of relatively small numbers of U.N. troops was sufficient to separate warring forces and supervise the return to peace. The key to their success was evenhandedness and the consent of those whom they had come to police.

In the wake of the Gulf War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, this comparatively restrained approach to peace-keeping underwent a transmutation. The shambles that ensued is neatly summarized in this book’s delightfully blunt title. The author, Frederick Fleitz Jr., knows his material well: He is a former CIA analyst who covered the U.N. and its peacekeeping efforts during parts of the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations. Today, he is special assistant to the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, though readers are warned that his opinions "do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the U.S. government." But what Fleitz has to say makes a great deal of sense, so we must hope that warning is not to be taken literally.

The real starting point for this book is the Soviet collapse, which made it possible for the West to intervene more aggressively in some of the world's most dangerous trouble spots. Fleitz's central thesis is that U.S. policymakers threw this opportunity away; Instead of building on the Cold War victory with a foreign policy that combined the judicious use of force with enlightened national interest, the government decided to expand the United Nations' global role in peacekeeping. The Clinton administration's poorly thought-out liberal-internationalist agenda combined sanctimony, parsimony, and ineffectiveness in roughly equal measure. The consequences were had for the U.N., in that they made a mockery of belief in that organization’s potential usefulness, and often disastrous for the U.S. There is a good reason that this book is dedicated to the U.S. Army Rangers and aircrew killed in Somalia in the terrible events of October 1993.

The rot began in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. As Fleitz explains, supporters of a more activist U.N. "seized on the fact that Operation Desert Storm was authorized by the U.N. Security Council" as proof that a new era had arrived. The U.N.'s role in approving the Gulf War was said by many liberals to herald "an end to the unilateral use of military force, at least by the United States." But as Fleitz correctly observes, "these claims ... ignored the reality that the first Bush administration used the U.N. endorsement... largely as a fig leaf to protect the sensitivities of America's Middle East allies."

These claims may have ignored reality, but they helped create a climate in which U.N. peacekeeping could be transformed. The scope of peace- keeping operations became more ambitious and the traditional requirements of consent and impartiality were abandoned. U.N. forces could now be empowered to impose "peace" on warring parties and, if necessary, take sides in a conflict. Fleitz argues that this more aggressive definition of peacekeeping (and the expansion of the U.N.'s role it implied) fitted in well with a liberal foreign-policy agenda in Washington. "It represented a way to implement . . . dreams of Wilsonian internationalism while drastically cutting defense spending." Beyond that, it is not necessary to hear the whirring of black helicopters to recall, as Fleitz does, that this was also a time when some foreign-policy gurus who were to be influential in the Clinton administration were "talking about how the new world order meant the lowering of national boundaries . . . and the beginning of a slow movement toward world government." It's also worth noting (although Fleitz never does so explicitly) that arguments for a more activist United Nations were always likely to find favor in a Clinton White House instinctively suspicious of the U.S. military and its use as an instrument of American power.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to an examination of how these expanded notions of peacekeeping have worked or, far too frequently, failed to work. With topics that include Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, and Bosnia, this makes for grim but never sensationalist reading: Despite its title, this book is not an exercise in simple U.N.-bashing, satisfying though that would doubtless be. Fleitz is, quite justifiably, highly critical of the U.N., but he is also quick to acknowledge the way the organization has all too often been used as a scapegoat for feckless Western policymaking. And just as the book’s narrative is not sensationalist, neither is its style: The text is often highly detailed (this book will be found on the bookshelves of our more sensible universities for years to come) and brutally burdened down by the fact that U.N. military operations are rich in acronyms if not in achievements.

Above all, Fleitz stresses that these fiascoes were nothing if not predictable. With the precondition of consent abandoned, U.N. peacekeepers ran the risk of being seen as an occupying or hostile force, even when the motives for their mission were primarily humanitarian. The umpires had become players. Despite that, the troops sent in to do the dirty work were often as under-equipped as their objectives were ill-defined. In the course of this book, the author offers up various reasons as to why this was, but touches only briefly on one of the most likely explanations: the fact that the U.N. has been used by Western elites to pursue an internationalist agenda that ordinarily would not secure domestic political approval in their home countries. Using the United Nations to this end is a clever trick, but it ensures that peacekeeping missions will almost always be shortchanged when it comes to resources; proper funding would require politicians to admit the full scope of these operations to their electorates. And voters are rarely enthused by the idea of endangering their soldiers in the name of the United Nations.

This absence of democratic accountability—and the level of blame it should bear for foreign-policy disasters—would make an ideal topic for Fleitz's next book. In the meantime, Fleitz offers some highly practical advice: Continue to use U.N. peacekeepers, but only along the lines of the traditional, limited model that used to work so well. Combine a return to that more modest approach with the adoption by Washington of a realistic foreign policy in which bien pensant internationalism is discarded, American interests are put first, and the isolationist temptation is avoided, and the results could be impressive.

It won't be easy, but an intelligent foreign policy never is.

Chick-Tac-Toe

National Review, December 23, 2002

Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford 

MOST people go to Las Vegas for the gambling. Dazzled by neon, crazed by greed and Wayne Newton, they challenge the odds, trying to outwit the trickster goddess, Lady Luck herself. But I was there for a different, wilier adversary. I was in town for the chicken. It was payback time, a chance for the revenge I'd seen waiting for since that shameful, sultry night in Manhattan's Chinatown all those years ago. You know the sort of evening—too much Tsingtao, not enough sense. Next thing, you're in a seedy airless room doing something you shouldn't: in my case, playing a chicken at tic-tac-toe—and losing. Years later I tried to track the bird down for a rematch, hut it had flown the coop: dead in a heat wave, said some, off hustling in another hutch, said others. And then the rumors began—whispers about tic-tac-toe-playing poultry spotted in Atlantic City, claims of sightings in Indiana and Las Vegas, reports of the theft of three uncannily smart birds from a county fair in Bensalem, Pa. And always there in the background, a muttered, mysterious name: Bunky Boger.

The stories are true. A slick chicken is back on the scene, hut this time it's not alone. Chickens skilled in tic-tac-toe have come home to roost in no fewer than three locales—all of them casinos (and two of them called Tropicana)-— while others, avian carny folk, work the county-fair circuit, usually without being stolen. The source of this scourge? Bunky Boger. Turns out he runs a Springdale, Ark., farm known for training animals to perform the feats some call remarkable and others just plain peculiar. Bunky's brainy brood docs not stop at the O's and the X's. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, these chickens dance and play basketball too.

NATIONAL REVIEW's budget for investigating strange tales from Arkansas has shrunk over the last couple of years, so I can't claim to have checked Boger's methods. There's talk, however, of "positive reinforcement" (basically the use of food as a reward) and other behaviorist techniques of the sort developed by the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Broadly speaking. Skinner saw personality as a blank slate, pliant and ripe for conditioning. This is an idea that played no small part in the disasters of 20th-century collectivism, but it seems to work well when applied to chickens. Far mightier than the Mighty Ducks, Boger's chickens are tricky to lick. Recorded defeats are few and hit between; just a handful this year, so rare that the two Tropicanas (Atlantic City and Las Vegas) are prepared to offer $10,000 to any customer able to take on the chicken, mano a claw, and win.

Ten thousand dollars? That's not chickenfeed. Maybe I was counting chickens before they were dispatched, but revenge, it seemed, was going to be profitable as well as sweet.

Outside the Las Vegas Tropicana, all is anticipation. Large signs proclaim the "Chicken Challenge—Play Tic-Tac-Toe With a Live Chicken." A poster shows a chicken contemplating a tic-tac-toe Götterdämmerung. The creature's blue eyes (contacts?) are bulging with tension. It's sweating pullets. Good.

Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

Once you're inside, there is a brief detour for paperwork (tackling the chicken is free, but prospective foes of the fowl have to sign up beforehand for the casino's optimistically named "Winner's Club") and then it's on to the main event, first heralded by a glimpse of white feathers fluttering in a large, glass-fronted booth and an amazed Italian muttering, "Pollo? Un pollo?”

A crowd has gathered behind the velvet rope, would-be contestants (around 500 over a twelve-hour day) looking for- ward to the game, and, less admirably, spectators waiting to jeer. It's a tough arena. Be felled by the fowl, and the display attached to the booth will declare your shame for all to see with flashing lights and an announcement of the result ("Chicken wins"), followed by insulting slogans ("You're no egg-spert" is one of the milder examples). The crowd is no kinder. The losers slink off amid mocking laughter, crushed and beaten-—well, a little embarrassed anyway.

And then it's my turn. I step up to the booth, staring fiercely at the chicken. It's time for some psychological warfare. The creature gazes back imperturbably. Is that intelligence I see in those beady black eyes? Is it a brainy bird or merely bird-brained? Mr. Boger seems unable to decide. In a confusing interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Springdale Svengali boasted that his chickens were "smart little peckers" but then, in a disloyal twist (did a cock crow three times?), he went on to condemn them as "kind of simple-minded." "You wouldn't," he said, "want to take their advice on the stock market"—which, if New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer is to be believed, would put the chickens on a par with a number of Wall Street's leading investment banks.

Simple-minded or not, my chicken moves away from the glass window of her booth and heads at a leisurely pace into a more secluded area, a "thinking" booth within the booth. Suddenly the chicken makes its choice (the bird always gets to go first). An O appears on an illuminated touch screen, together with the information that I have 15 seconds to respond. And so I do. X. My opponent operates under no such time constraints. As the seconds drag by, the display flashes up the words "Chicken's thinking," this contest's equivalent of the annoying little hourglass that always accompanies those slower software moments. There are, of course, some skeptics, wild-eyed folk—Chicken Challenge's Capricorn One crowd. They whine that the bird is a fake, a feint, fowl play at its worst. The thinking booth, they claim, is nothing more than a device to hide the fact that the chicken does nothing—its "moves" are all the work of a pre-programmed computer. Is there a HAL in the henhouse, an updated twist on "The Turk," that supposedly chess-playing automaton once famous for puzzling 18th-century Europe.' I prefer not to think so.

The Tropicana, Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

O, X, O. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that it's too soon for the chicken to crow. The hen tenses. At one point a move is preceded by a savage, primeval display. Wings beat, and that noble head turns towards me, cruel, merciless, and proud. It's a chilling moment. The chicken, like all birds, is descended from the dinosaur. Could the Tropicana be transformed into Jurassic Park?

Well, no. An O and an X or so later, and the game draws to its close. It's a tie. The chicken acknowledges the result with a curt nod and turns away, ready for the next challenger. I walk off, honor satisfied, but true revenge for the Chinatown fiasco remains elusive. Next stop, Atlantic City.

In conclusion, it's important to point out that, in keeping with NATIONAL REVIEW’s policy, no birds were harmed in the writing of this article. PETA, however, has complained about the Chicken Challenge, and a representative of the chicken activists at the Virginia-based United Poultry Concerns condemned the whole spectacle as "degrading" and "derisive." Judging by the Las Vegas setup, that seems harsh. The Chicken Challenge booth is relatively spacious and housed in an air-conditioned environment. There's food and water inside. What's more, according to a spokeswoman from the Tropicana, no one chicken has to play for more than about 90 minutes at a time. The booth is manned—if that's the word—by chickens drawn from a squad of 15 (all known as "Ginger"). Each Ginger is regularly rotated but never, apparently, rotisseried.

Bunky Boger himself seems untroubled by the controversy. As he explained to the Review-Journal; "A chicken would rather play tic-tac-toe than float around in a can with noodles."

Find me a chicken that could argue with that.