This is the story of the day: Sixty years after the end of the war, two men believed to be Japanese soldiers have been found living in the mountainous jungles of the Philippines' remote Mindanao island in an area controlled by Muslim rebel groups. Unlike Hiroo Onoda, it is believed that these guys are aware that the war is over and have chosen to stay on the island for their own reasons. At least one of the two has a local wife and family.
The real thing that caught my attention about this article was this quote:
"Japan invaded the Philippines in 1941, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and set up a brutal puppet government. "
Actually it's that last phrase in particular that captured my interest. Because I know what the author means by "brutal puppet government," but for some reason the image that those words conjure in my mind is highly disturbing and, to be perfectly frank, hilarious.
Attractive and slightly drunken young lady, whose birthday is being celebrated: "How Old are you?"
FlamingBanjo: "I'm (my accurate age.)"
AASDYL: "No way! You look 23!"
FB, flattered but highly skeptical: "Thanks."
AASDYL: "No seriously. You don't have any wrinkles or anything."
FB: "I credit clean living."
AASDYL: "You must have good genes. You should have progeny."
FB: "Okay!"
AASDYL: "Because your offspring would inherit your youthful genes, and they wouldn't have wrinkles either."
FB: "They'd be babies."
Not that anybody asked, but this whole Newsweek story got me to thinking, and one of the reasons I set up a blog in the first place was so that I would have a public soapbox from which to spout my opinions, knowing that they would be read and given careful consideration by a discerning audience of five or six people who are bored at work. So that’s what I’m doing! Here goes:
What this story highlights for me more than anything is why I will never be a member of the Faithful. It makes me sad sometimes, because I was raised in a very religious household and I still have the occasional fond memory of how comforting it was to believe that the whole universe was being run by a kindhearted, white-bearded Santa Claus type who had a plan for everything and would make sure that it would all turn out right in the end and everybody would get what was coming to them. That last part of course worried me, convinced as I was by the age of six that I would probably end up in eternal torment one way or another, although just what I thought I’d done by that age to merit God’s eternal wrath escapes me now. I just remember realizing that there were a lot of rules and that it seemed pretty impossible to obey them all and I was sure I’d screw it up.
I did believe in God for a long time and did everything I could to hold onto those beliefs until I finally just broke down under the silliness of all of it. One too many half-hearted “it’s a mystery” and “maybe it’s God’s will that we not know the answer” bromides from some harried, well-meaning Sunday school teacher trying to field yet another skeptical question from that Banjo Kid Who Never Shuts Up, I guess. But I do on occasion wistfully yearn for that cherished feeling of going to bed at night secure in the knowledge that the kindly white-bearded guy would be watching over me because he loved me (especially when I was asleep and therefore not likely to be doing much sinning). I envy the Faithful their peace of mind sometimes, when I’m not busy mocking them for believing in patently ridiculous things.
And this is where the Newsweek Koran-flushing story comes in. One of the reasons I know I will never number myself among the ranks of the Faithful is because I just can’t imagine a scenario where the threat of book-desecration would worry me more than the threat of a good old-fashioned prison guard beat-down. I mean, I value books a lot, but ever since I found out about these fancy gadgets called printing presses that allow a book to be printed in seconds instead of the months it used to take for a monk to copy one by hand, I’ve adjusted my outlook.
Here’s how I see that scenario playing out, should it ever happen to me:
Note: In order to avoid touching off violent protests or having a Salman Rushdie-style fatweh issued on my blasphemous ass, the holy book I have named as the sacred text of my faith will be “I Am a Bunny”, by Richard Scarry.
The scene is a drab, windowless room lit by a lone light bulb, which dangles from a cord affixed to the ceiling. Cinder block walls are covered in peeling green paint. A burly uniformed guard stands in front of the room’s only door, a four-inch thick iron affair that is bolted from the inside. In the corner of the room is a dingy toilet streaked with orange water stains.
An interrogator dressed in civilian clothing sits at a table which is covered with various objects, including four or five different varieties of blunt instrument, some dental tools, a car battery with a pair of protruding wires terminating in a set of electrodes, a copy of “I Am A Bunny”, and some unidentifiable object that looks like a whoopie cushion with a long tube attached to the narrow end. Mr. Banjo is seated in the room’s only other chair, nervously eyeing the items on the table with great interest.
Interrogator: Now, Mr. Banjo, I’m sure you know why we’re having this conversation. It seems as if your answers to our previous interview may have been, shall I say less than informative?
Flaming Banjo: I told them everything I know! Look, it’s like I said, I’m not even a Shriner! I just happened to be staying at the hotel where they were having their convention!
Interrogator: Yes, it says that right here in the transcript: “Denies all involvement.”
Flaming Banjo: Exactly! I’m an innocent bystander!
I: Ah yes, an innocent bystander. Well, I guess you have nothing to worry about then, do you Mr. Banjo? Still, you won’t mind if I ask you a few questions before we let you go, just to make sure you really are as innocent as you say? It’s just a formality, really, while we’re finalizing your release paperwork. You see, my boss insists that I be thorough – this may surprise you, but sometimes people –unscrupulous people, you understand, not like you Mr. Banjo – sometimes people will tell us that they’re innocent even when they’re really not, just to get out of this place.
FB: I guess some people will say anything to save their skins, huh?
I: Exactly. But since you are innocent, you shouldn’t have any problem. So let’s get down to business, shall we?
FB: Can I have a glass of water?
I: No. Who’s your superior in the organization, Mr. Banjo?
FB: (snorts) My superior? You mean my boss?
I: Alright, Mr. Banjo. I can see how this is going to be. I want you to know that you did this to yourself – I’m just trying to ask you a few simple questions, but you had to be Mr. Smartass.
FB: You know, you’re not the first person to --
I: Shut up. Just remember, you did this to yourself! I notice you’ve been looking at the items on this table in front of me.
FB: Are those electrodes?
I: These?
FB: No, not those. Next to them.
I: These? Yes, these are electrodes.
FB: I see. Are you sure I can’t have that glass of water? Because I’m really thirsty.
I: I’m sure you’re familiar with this book, Mr. Banjo? This book I’m now holding in my hand?
FB: I’ve never seen that book before. Is it a good one?
I: Really? You’ve never seen it before?
He walks over towards the toilet in the corner.
So you won’t mind if I just tear out some pages and see if they’ll go down the toilet?
FB, in full br'er rabbit-in-the-briar-patch mode: You bastard! Give me the electrodes! Anything but that!
I: Who’s your superior?
He begins ripping a page from the book.
FB: No!!! What are you doing?
I: He drops a page into the toilet.
Ooops! Butterfingers! There it goes!
He flushes.
FB: Aaarrrrgh!! Sinister fiend! Give me the electrodes! Hook them up to my testicles! Go on, I can take it!
I: Where's your Richard Scarry now, Banjo? Why hasn't he come to your rescue? Where's your all-powerful Richard Scarry now?!
He rips another page.
FB:You monster!
I:We can do this all day, Mr. Banjo.
FB: Alright, fine! (Sobs melodramatically.) I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Just please stop it...
I, Producing pen and paper: I’ll need names and addresses.
FB, still sobbing: Poor little bunny, never hurt anybody...
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Seriously. I mean, I understand having deeply felt beliefs and all, but I just find it hard to get my head around people getting more upset about somebody defacing a Muslim holy text than about somebody defacing Muslims. Allegations have been circulating about prisoner abuse in Guantanamo and other places pretty much since day one. The current Attorney General wrote a legal brief for the White House specifically stating that the Geneva Convention does not apply to prisoners there. Why would that be necessary unless they were using interrogation methods outlawed by the Geneva Convention? And now people are up in arms because a book might’ve gotten soggy?
And what about the administration? They’re currently vilifying Newsweek for printing the story without double-sourcing it (while being careful to stay away from the question of why the original “highly-placed” source would report such an incident in the first place if there was no substance to it), but they pretty much admit to shipping people off to countries where torture is legal to conduct interrogations? So, “Yeah, we beat the hell out of them, hosed them down, stripped them naked and set the dogs on them, but we would never dream of ripping up a book. We’re not savages.”
The priorities of religious outrage remain mysterious to me.
So this is a question to all of you reading this at work, or those who blog at work, or comment on the blogs of others at work, or ever use a work computer for non-work related purposes: Do your companies have internet policies that categorically forbid all use of company resources for every activity other than entering data into spreadsheets or whatever it is you do that they supposedly got you a computer for in the first place? How do you get around this? Do you just assume that nobody's checking and go about your business? Do you go about your business but "watch what you say" (a la Donald Rumsfeld)? Do you tell your boss you're keeping a blog and then proceed to write nothing but entries about how cool the new product line is going to be once it comes out and how happy you are to be working for such a great corporation? Or do you wait until you get home and spend another couple hours sitting at a home computer doing all your personal web business on your own time, according to the stated policy as clearly delineated in the employee handbook?
My workplace is shifting to a new system within the next few weeks where all computers will now be terminals that run applications on a centralized server and all information will therefore be readily available to system adminstrators (presumably in the form of statistical breakdowns of where time is spent, etc.) This carries with it all the standard boilerplate from management about how employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy and every keystroke is being captured. I currently have no sense of whether there is actually a system administrator working in this organization who has enough free time to monitor me to see if I have too much free time. But I suppose it's possible. If so and that person happens to be reading this, hi! You're doing a great job! You deserve a cigarette break, or a snack!
I assume that the proliferation of employer-approved blogs means that employers have decided to take lemons -- in this case, bitter employees using work time and resources to publish acerbic screeds about how this job is destroying their soul and sucking their will to live or whatever -- and turning them into lemonade: Free PR for the company produced with a rough-hewn, down-home "regular guy" feel that amateur writers whose bosses are looking over their shoulders can produce with such effortless élan.
Between these and all these pseudo-blogs by professional pundits that already have access to other more widely-distributed media (notice my non-use of the cliché term "mainsteam media"), I'm wondering if the golden age is over. Is it all going to be Arianna Huffington and Bill Gates and celebrity blogs from here on out? No more delightfully inchoherent treatises furtively typed by underpaid clerical employees about how the World Bank deliberately keeps indigenous people down or how the Freemasons control professional baseball? No more celebrity-dishing performed by enthusiastically mean-spirited amateurs? No more armchair media criticism (like this)? No more lighthearted office-worker tales of last nights drunken debauch and todays hangover? And the real burning question at the heart of this: Am I finally gonna have to stop goofing off and knuckle down to some real honest-to-goodness work?
Maybe the golden age has been over for a while. I'm usually late to pick up on these things.
Thoughts?
( I'll understand if you wait till you get home to reply. Hell, why not use a pseudonym? It's fun!)
"Damn! I was hoping to get a toaster."
"I think I saw a toaster back in the closet where we stash the extra stuff. Let me look."
He moves some furniture out of the way and opens a door which I have never noticed before. Takes a flashlight in with him and starts rooting around.
"Holy shit!" I hear him yell. "Come have a look at this!"
I go in and he hands me the flashlight and points out a sagging old cardboard box sitting on its side atop a big haphazard pile of boxes. I shine the beam of the flashlight into the darkness and am greeted by the sight of a prehistoric, fuzzy white face baring its fangs and hissing back at me, black marble eyes gleaming in the unwelcome spotlight. It looks like a giant albino rat, something that's evolved in some forgotten subterranean cave until now untroubled by the harsh electric glare of Mankind. It is plainly none too happy about encountering it now. It opens a toothy snout wide and hisses again, a mask of pure animal fear and outrage. I jump a little when I first see it, and then I start laughing.
It is an opossum.
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Today we found him dead in the other room. He had curled up under a sofa and shuffled off this mortal coil, and on his way out he shat himself. We call that "pulling an Elvis" where I'm from.
The smell was really pretty remarkable.
"John Bolton's a blunt guy. Sometimes people say I'm a little too blunt."
-G.W. Bush
Blunt: adj.
1. Having a dull edge or end; not sharp.
2. Abrupt and often disconcertingly frank in speech:
3. Slow to understand or perceive; dull.
4. Lacking in feeling; insensitive.
Let's assume that the definition being used to refer to Mr. Bolton corresponds to def. 2 above, "Abrupt and often disconcertingly frank in speech." For this definition, Thesaurus.com offers the following synonyms:
abrupt, bluff, brief, brusque, candid, crusty, curt, discourteous, explicit, forthright, frank, gruff, impolite, matter-of-fact, outspoken, plain-spoken, rude, short, snappy, snippety, snippy, tab, tactless, trenchant, unceremonious, uncivil, unpolished
(My personal favorite from this list: "Crusty.")
Antonyms (meaning opposites) include:
courteous, diplomatic, gentle, polite, soft-pedaling, subtle
(emphasis mine.)
Now, I may be way out of line here, but doesn't it seem like one of the primary qualities one might expect to find in a diplomat would be, oh I don't know, diplomacy? And yet here Mr. Bush is, publicly praising Bolton for his lack of diplomacy.
So, the question is, does this indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "diplomacy", or just a fundamental disregard for the concept of diplomacy?
"Sometimes people say I'm a little too blunt."
Yes, Mr. President, yes they do. The question is, which definition?
If you listen carefully, sometimes you can hear the zeitgeist talking. It whispers its secret confidences through media synchronicity, that strange phenomenon whereby every channel will simultaneously begin transmitting the same message, as though coordinated by an unseen guiding hand, even though they give every outward appearance of operating independently of one another. You turn around and suddenly everyone up on the screen is talking about shrimps, or plates, or plates of shrimp. No explanation, and no reason to explain it. Who can forget the one-season breakdancing-movie renaissance of 1984? Or the movies-with-asteroids-hitting-the-earth fad of 1998? Future historians will no doubt spend countless hours debating the significance of these fleeting pop-culture moments, and what if any illumination they can shine on the temper of their respective times.
So what is the zeitgeist saying in 2005, the first year of Bush as an elected president, the year of Terri Schiavo and Pope Ratzinger and the "culture of life", the year when Britney Spears made her inevitable reality-show debut? Shhh.. listen closely. Do you hear that? Can you hear that chorus of harsh, choked monotones mindlessly repeating one syllable over and over?:
"Brains...brains.... brains...."
For connoisseurs of the zombie film, this year will go down in history as a golden age. A golden age, my friends! The Year of the Zombie!
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ("For the post-intelligent!"), this summer is bringing an embarassment of riches in the zombie movie department. There are some of you out there, and you know who you are, who should be delighted to hear of the bumper crop of undead-tacular, decompos-o-riffic entertainment shambling into multiplexes and consuming the willing brains of eager moviegoers this summer:
George Romero's "Land of the Dead" opens June 24.
"Undead," an Australian offering, opens July 1.
"Night Watch," a Russian zombie movie opens July 29.
Zombies of the good old-fashioned voodoo variety menace cute-as-a-button Kate Hudson in "the Skeleton Key", also on August 12.
On August 26 "The Cave" opens, which supposedly features blood-thirsty, underwater "zombie-like creatures." (I remain suspicious of this one. "Zombie-like?" What's that supposed to mean? I mean, who isn't "zombie-like" every now and then? What I wanna know is, are they undead or just caffeine-deprived?)
And finally, on August 12 cookie-monster singer turned gross-out horror movie director Rob Zombie brings out his movie "The Devil's Rejects".
Zombies!!
I still remember seeing the tiger in the zoo. I've seen other tigers in other zoos before and since, but I imagine that this is the one that will stick in my mind when I think of the word "tiger" from now on. It was a beautiful late spring day in Ohio and the sun was shining. He was out pacing the length and breadth of his enclosure, back and forth across that same twenty by twenty stretch of molded concrete "rocks" surrounded by a deep moat and high concrete walls that sloped up to a smooth ridge topped with some low bushes and a three-foot high railing. Here visitors could lean over and get a good long look at the greatest of the great cats.
And so there I was leaning against the railing watching him. Tigers have always been one of my favorites but since they spend so much time sleeping on a lot of my prior visits I had stopped by the tiger enclosure only to find that they were sequestered in some barely-visible shady corner, napping. This tiger was awake all right, in fact looking more than a little restless, which stands to reason. The enclosure was bigger than most houses I've lived in but obviously to him it might as well have been a birdcage. I made eye contact with him, staring into this big fiery yellow cat's eye while he stared back at me and my heart actually jumped as a moment of mutual recognition passed between us and I imagined that I could hear the thoughts running through his mind:
"Oh man I bet I could almost make it if I could just get a running start. .."
Maybe it was his way of counting coup, letting me know that, were we to meet in any circumstances other than these, the balance of power between us would be very different indeed.
According to people who know these things, there seems to be a pretty strong likelihood that I'll outlive the entire tiger species, at least the wild variety. The biggest threat to their continued existence is habitat loss. Tigers require a lot of range and human development in South Asia is expanding rapidly. It's not just a matter of preserving large enough stretches of land for them to hunt, but the ranges of many different tigers must overlap sufficiently to allow for a large enough gene pool to keep the species healthy. As the burgeoning economies in the region continue to push development further and further outward, it seems probable that one day soon the unchecked growth of the "Asian Tiger" could spell the end of the Asian tiger.
Of course the other big threat is poaching, which is driven in large part by the fact that tiger penises are widely believed to possess special virility-enhancing properties. Like rhino horns, the fact that they are increasingly hard to obtain only serves to magnify their mystique and therefore heighten their value on the black market. As any avid user of the internet can attest, there is apparently a never-ending demand for Masculinity Enhancements of all varieties, and one can easily see how one as expensive, rare and esoteric as tiger penis might attract a great deal of interest from certain quarters. Such is the law of supply and demand. Not only are tiger penises more valuable than, say, opossum penises due to their relative scarcity, but the chances of a would-be customer already having tried that particular cure and found it wanting are very small. Almost infinitesimally small, one might say.
While I have no reason to believe that the loss of this particular species is any more likely to spell disaster for the whole global ecosystem than the loss of some species of Amazonian fern that nobody's ever heard of, I nevertheless feel a great sentimental attachment to tigers that does not extend to similarly endangered species of fern or lichen. I realize that the tiger that I encountered that day in the zoo could hardly be called a tiger at all -- more like the ghost of a tiger. And I further realize that if a real tiger means a tiger that is in its natural environment going about the everyday business of being a tiger, then I have no actual desire to see a real tiger, because seeing one would mean that something had gone very wrong. Neither do I wish to see a real grizzly or a real polar bear. For now I would prefer to watch them on TV.
But I like living in a world where I know that there are tigers. It's not just that they are beautiful, which they are, but I also have always enjoyed the fact that there are still animals around that can knock us right off our perch on top of the food chain, drag us off into the jungle and eat us. It gives me a warm feeling inside. I don't know why, it just does.