PECKING ORDER

May 3, 2012

Now that he's beaten back his opponents and is marching unhindered to the Republican convention, I guess it's time for me to write about Mitt Romney.

But hell, it's springtime, and the world is awash with color and newness. Who wants to write about Mitt Romney in the springtime? I'll write about woodpeckers instead.

For the last couple weeks, I've awakened at first light to the rattle-tap of a woodpecker on some nearby tree. It occurs in spurts, a couple seconds at a time followed by short breaks, consistently through the early morning, then stops for several hours, then resumes in late afternoon and goes on till dusk. The noise is so loud it successfully competes with the jackhammers of Con Edison workers, who have been tearing up the street to lay down new conduit.

On pleasant days I've ventured out with binoculars to search for the suspect bird, but of course, just when I think I'm close, the rattling stops and I'm unable to spot it. I'm a lousy birder.

The reputation of the South Bronx does not lend itself to images of nature's wonders, but there is in fact a forest ecology here. A full quarter of the Bronx is parkland, more than any of the other four boroughs of New York City. Much of it has been developed for human use — playgrounds and ball fields and golf courses (three of them) and lawns for picnicking — but even in the most utilitarian spaces, like 130-acre Crotona Park two blocks north of here, ancient tall trees abound, and there are still many hefty ones shading the streets, hardy survivors of the decades of urban devastation. It's an agreeable habitat for birds of every sort, including large predators like red-tailed hawks, which I often see peering down from low-hanging branches at potential prey — pigeons, rats, squirrels, and off-the-leash Chihuahuas.

The only two kinds of woodpeckers I've actually seen in the neighborhood are the downy, a red-headed little lovely about the size of a starling, and the northern flicker, a larger bird with striking gray-and-yellow plumage. Birders have sighted several other species in the Bronx, such as the mid-size red-bellied, the majestic top-knotted pileated, and the yellow-bellied sapsucker, though these have been found mostly in heavily-wooded areas in the New York Botanical Garden and Van Cortlandt Park, a few miles north of here. So I'd say my guy is either a downy or a flicker.

We all know why bees hum, but why do woodpeckers peck? Of course, they peck to eat, drilling into a tree's bark to expose tasty insects, grubs, and often whole colonies of ants living inside. They also peck to excavate cavities for nesting. But most of the pecking we hear in the spring — the rapid-fire tapping that wakes me up these days — is, say the ornithologists, their version of other birds' warbles and songs, their way of staking out territory and attracting mates. In the forest as in the concert-hall, every symphony needs a drummer.

And as with all drummers, the woodpecker's governing principle is "The louder, the better." They'll always select instruments with the best resonance — hollow trees mostly. Where humans dwell, however, they go for heavy metal — gutters and drainpipes — to produce a sound powerful enough to show who's boss in the neighborhood.

The bird people say that every species of woodpecker has a unique drumming pattern of precise rapidity, duration, and pauses between sets. The downy, for example, drums at 14 taps per second; other kinds do 20 or more. The Cornell University Ornithology website features audio clips of woodpecker drums to assist birders in identifying species by ear, offering these words of encouragement: "With practice, most drumming sounds can be recognized with a high level of confidence." I've listened to all those clips and can barely tell one from the other. I'm no birder.

Another very practical question is: Why don't woodpeckers beat their brains out? Boxers get punch-drunk from blows to the head; do woodpeckers grow dotty after a season or two of passionate drumming? The answer, expectedly, is no. As ever- trustworthy Wikipedia puts it: "Woodpeckers have evolved a number of adaptations to protect the brain," including "short duration of contact" with the wood, "the orientation of the brain within the skull" (a half-turn different from other birds, "which maximizes the area of contact between the brain and the skull"), and "small brain size."

How these creatures can get up day after day and beat out the same old message without variance and without brain-damage is amazing to me.

Don't you wonder the same thing about presidential candidates? Maybe it's for similar reasons.

I guess it's time for me to write about Mitt Romney.

GUNTER GRASS: THE POWER OF A POEM

April 26, 2012

"I'm 84 years old, and I can say any damned thing I want to!"

You've heard that one before. If you qualify in the age category, you may have even said it yourself. It's a great exit strategy for an embarrassing slip of the tongue, usually evoking a good laugh all around and a comfortable transition to other topics.

But not if you're Günter Grass.

The Nobel laureate, the conscience of post-war Germany, the most renowned living German literary figure, found himself in scathing water early this month when he published his latest poem, "Was Gesagt Werden Muss" — "What Must Be Said."

What he felt must be said concerns the ongoing international furor over Iran's nuclear shell-game, and the international silence over a nuclear shell-game that another country may be playing as well.

"Why do I speak only now, / Aged and with my last ink?" he asks in the midst of the poem. Because, he replies, "even tomorrow may be too late" — and here, he's not only speaking about his own future.

Though he's 84 and can say any damned thing he wants to, this is obviously not a work of impulse. That he used the vehicle of poetry, where every line is crafted and every word has a purpose, to set forth his position only makes it the more irrevocable. He knew full well what he was doing, though he may not have exactly known the consequences.

Despite their rigorous construction, poems are often more existential than prose; they reveal in a highly formal way the progress of a thought, and so it is with this one.

He begins in the passive voice: A "right of first strike" that could "annihilate the Iranian people" ("enslaved by a braggart," he adds) is being invoked because "it is conjectured that an atom bomb is in construction."

He then sets up an ironic parallel. Like Iran itself, the country claiming the first-strike prerogative — and which, he writes, "I forbid myself to name" — also holds "nuclear potential," also has kept it secret, also has refused inspection.

Why the "universal silence" on this apparent contradiction? he asks; why his personal silence? His conclusion: "The verdict of ‘Anti-Semitism' is familiar." Though still unnamed, the country in question is now clear.

Compounding the irony, Grass then indicts his own nation for "delivery to Israel" (at last he speaks the word) of "Another U- boat, / Whose specialty consists in guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence / Of a single atom bomb is unproven." (In February, Germany sold a sixth Dolphin attack submarine to Israel after having donated two of them outright following the 1991 Gulf War and sold the others at deep discounts.) Whether this was done "on a purely commercial basis," or "with nimble lips calling it a reparation" doesn't matter to him; "The nuclear power of Israel endangers / The already fragile world peace," and "We — as Germans burdened enough — / Could be suppliers to a crime."

The situation to him is so critical that his guilt-induced silence toward the military policies of "the land of Israel, to which I am bound / And wish to stay bound," must be broken.

In the penultimate stanza, he expresses hope that his words "will free many from silence" and "prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger" — unnamed — "to renounce violence and / Likewise insist / That an unhindered and permanent control / Of the Israeli atomic potential / And the Iranian atomic sites / Be authorized through an international agency."

You have to wonder what Grass thought as he hit the "Send" button; we all know that feeling. Did he expect "the verdict of Anti-Semitism"? He says so himself. Did he expect that this work might diminish his reputation, already called into question by his late-in-life admission that he'd served in the Waffen-SS at the end of World War II? Surely. Did he expect his poem to open up honest discussion by Germans about their attitudes, positive and negative, toward Israel? So he may have hoped. Did he expect that his words would be exploited by his own avowed enemies, the Neo-Nazis? He may not have thoroughly considered that one.

His doomsday scenario, a preemptive atomic attack by Israel against Iran, sounds unthinkable, perhaps reflecting the paranoia of old age. But if in fact Israel has the bomb, and if, as has been speculated, Iran's nuclear development facilities are buried too deeply underground to be penetrated by conventional weaponry, and if Israel is indeed determined to "take whatever steps are necessary" to remove the Iranian threat, the unthinkable suddenly becomes thinkable.

Whether or not Grass's fears are justified, his very legitimate question remains: Would not the cause of peace be furthered if the international community sought, and Israel agreed to, the same accountability for its nuclear projects as for Iran's?

It's astounding that twenty years after the end of the Cold War, a Hot War is even conceivable. But the nuclear torch has been passed to a new and widening generation of nations equally mesmerized by mass destruction, from manipulative North Korea to unstable Pakistan and even to prosperous India, which just last week tested a missile that could send an atom bomb into the heart of China.

The mutual threats by Iran and Israel may be an elaborate bluff. But games like this have been played before — "at the end of which," Grass remarks in his opening lines, "we as survivors are at best footnotes."

In that respect, at least, he is right.

-----------------------------------------
 
Here is the poem in German, followed by an English translation:
 
Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange, was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen

geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt 'Antisemitismus' ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.

Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long

What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.

It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, an atom bomb is being built.
Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no testing is available?
The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.
Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
The very crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence
Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But through fear of what may be conclusive, I say what must be said.

Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I think my origin,
Which has never been affected by this obliterating flaw,
Forbids this fact to be expected as pronounced truth
Of the country of Israel, to which I am bound
And wish to stay bound.
Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.
And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West; in addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
Prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
Of the governments of both countries.
Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
In the end also to help us.

JESUS ON BROADWAY, AND IN THE BRONX

April 5, 2012

Jesus is back on Broadway. In the revival of the hopelessly dated Godspell, he appears as the Profound Clown (not to be confused with the Holy Fool); in the revival of the more durable Jesus Christ Superstar, he appears as the victim of mass hysteria, glorified and vilified by the media, then literally crucified by the politicians (thus its durability).

A few miles uptown in the South Bronx, where "revival" has a different meaning, Jesus made an appearance too. Every year, on Palm Sunday, he takes to the streets as his followers ritually reenact his 15 minutes of worldly fame — the day he rode into Jerusalem as the contrarian king, "meek and riding on an ass," while his momentary enthusiasts strewed palm branches in his path.

Last Sunday, at the corner of Webster Avenue and 168th Street, several hundred Spanish-speaking parishioners of St. Augustine-Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church gathered in chilly and threatening weather to hail their King once more. Living in the bottom 25 of the 99%, they authentically represented the participants in the original, primordial event — the powerless, the illegal, the hungry, the homeless, the very ones that a certain politician recently declared he's "not concerned about" because "they have a safety net." These folks knew that already. They know all about the concern of politicians and about that fraying net. Here, with their church, they've found true concern, and a safety net that will never break.

There was some verisimilitude in the march. The people clutched palm fronds (imported from Florida; a few more years of climate change and New York may be growing its own). And yes, there was a donkey heading up the parade, and a native Bronx donkey at that, rented for the occasion from the Equestrian Center in Pelham Bay Park. The church's pastor, Rev. Thomas Fenlon, books one every year. Most of them have been big enough for a middle-school kid to sit on; this time they sent over a beast the size of an Irish wolfhound. But no matter — he was adorably cute and well-behaved, and ablly supported a fearless and frolicking little girl.

Father Fenlon told his congregation this was a "bilingual donkey," qualified to march both in the Spanish procession and in the English one that preceded it. His light-hearted words evoked the Biblical story of Balaam's ass, the talking donkey, recorded in chapter 22 of the Book of Numbers. The donkey rebukes his master for mercilessly beating him: "What have I done to you?" he pleads. "Am I not your own beast?"

Perhaps the donkey and the child had a conversation too. "If Jesus was a king, why didn't he ride a powerful white horse instead of a pack-animal like me?" "I don't know, donkey." "Nobody got it then, dear, and nobody gets it now."

As the procession made its way the half-mile up Webster Avenue to the church, the marchers shook their fronds and sang lustily: "¡Hosanna!" "¡Alabaré!" "¡Viva Jesús el Rey!" Cars pulled up to the priest, unmistakable in his red robes; he gave the drivers a palm and a prayer. High above the street, in the towering public-housing projects, tenants leaned out their windows and waved. Curious customers poured out of the bodegas and the liquor stores, some of them joining the crowd for a block or two with their bags of soda and chips or a pint of E&J brandy ("Easy Jesus," they call it here) in their pockets.

Hosanna!

After the people had entered the church, their mood abruptly changed. In the Catholic liturgy of Palm Sunday, the procession is followed by the Gospel account of Jesus' trial and execution. The reading is done in oratorio fashion, with a narrator, the priest or deacon as Jesus, various individual speaking parts, and the congregation as the chorus.

When the trial of Jesus reached its climax and the befuddled Roman governor Pilate asked what the crowd wanted him to do with this guiltless man, the entire church roared out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" — as lustily as they'd sung "Hosanna!" just minutes before.

"Liturgy" in Greek means "the work of the people." It's not performance, it's participation. It's not the Great White Way, it's just the Way.

On Palm Sunday, it's real-time immersion in the unchanging fickleness of human nature, and no million-dollar musical can match it.

THE WAR WITHIN

March 22, 2012

As details emerged about the identity of the soldier who allegedly murdered 16 Afghani civilians, mostly women and children, on March 11, I called up a college classmate of mine, a physician who for several years had worked part-time in the family-practice clinic at the man's home base, Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Wash. I wanted his opinion about what the U.S. Armed Forces' own newspaper, Stars and Stripes, in 2010 called "the most troubled base in the military."


I was not ready for what he said first.

"I had him as a patient a couple years ago," he told me. "When I saw his picture in the paper, I recognized him. I don't remember what I treated him for, but I recall his face. He seemed like a good guy to me — nothing unusual about him. This thing was a real shocker."

The profile of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, now being pieced together by the media, reveals the same sentiment of disbelief among his family, childhood friends, and fellow soldiers: The person who did this is not the person we knew.

As unusual things go, it is not all that unusual. You see stories more often than you'd like about mild-mannered men who randomly gun down passers-by on the street, and loving moms who drown their kids. What makes this case more unusual than most is its context.

"I don't know if it's the most troubled base," my friend said, returning to my question. "It may be because it's just so big, and it's primarily for the infantry. They're the ones who do the whites-of-their-eyes fighting, and for some of them it's bound to seep out in other ways, both over there and when they get home."

I asked if he had any ideas about Bales' motives.

"Who knows what made him do it?" he mused. "Maybe he thought that committing some unspeakably horrible deed would finally bring the troops home — the Afghanis would demand that the Americans leave, and the American public would demand it too. Maybe he thought he was sacrificing himself for a greater good.

"Or," he continued, "he could have snapped from the paranoia that all the troops feel over there, where they can't ever tell who the enemy is and isn't. The very same people you meet at those friendly town meetings — even women and children — may be just the ones who are triggering roadside bombs. It's not war with uniformed targets and defined battles followed by periods of calm. The soldiers live in constant fear and suspicion. It's no wonder that most of them have some degree of PTSD. The trauma and stress are not so much from battle as from the constant anxiety and uncertainty."

"Plus," I mentioned, "the paranoia for this guy was endless. He went to Iraq in 2003 and returned twice more after that. The papers say that after his third tour he'd trained to be a recruiter but they sent him to Afghanistan instead — even though he'd injured his head and foot his second time around."

"This is a huge problem," my friend remarked. "Back and forth, back and forth. Even when you're home, there's no closure because as long as we're over there, there's no close."

"Then there's the nation-building business, the hearts-and- minds thing," I added. "Trained to kill and trained to heal at the same time — and on the ground there, both are jumbled up together. It isn't like those World War II newsreels of the troops handing out Hershey bars to a crush of happy kids while their parents cheer their liberators. When you pour your energies into trying to do good while you know all along that many of the people there resent your presence and want you gone, that's a frustration that could easily turn to rage. I'd bet most of the soldiers feel it but somehow they sublimate it. This guy didn't."

"War for almost ten years," my friend reflected. "It sickens me. The brunt of it all has been borne by a very small number of people. The all-volunteer military shifts the responsibility for war away from the public at large. If more people had their own sons and daughters drafted into service, they'd have not been so complacent about these wars."

Who knows why Sgt. Bales did it? Even a trial, by its nature, may reveal little of the truth. But there's one thing for certain: In the midst of the war without, he was fighting a war within.

THE AMNESIA OF WAR

March 15, 2012

PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.


So wrote that intractable cynic Ambrose Bierce in The Devil's Dictionary, published in 1906. His definition still rings true after over a century, even when peace, in international affairs, is a decidedly relative term.

I'll give you my own definition, aways subject to change: Peace is a short episode of amnesia leading to the unwitting reenactment of past wars.

Having already forgotten Iraq, the war based on rumor, and Afghanistan, the war based on revenge, and most recently Libya, the war that was never called war, Republicans in Congress and on the presidential stump are already turning their bellicose eyes to Syria.

Actually, Libya wasn't forgotten, it was mythologized. It's now seen by most Americans, military and civilian alike, as the truly Lovely War, orchestrated but not executed by the United States, approved in a vague way by the United Nations, expending all that pent-up European firepower so long aching for blessed relief, and with no loss of Allied life to boot. What could be better? It was a test-case and model for the New Warfare: state- of -the-art, conducted from above, noble in purpose, limited in scope, started and ended in seven months.

But even Lovely Wars have unlovely consequences. While the NATO forces may have helped the Libyan rebels trap and skin that old fox Qaddafi, they left a leaderless land, with a nominal government unable to rein in the numerous factions still flush with armaments plundered from the dictator's vast stores. The place is a literal panoply of powder-kegs, just waiting for a spark.

Senator John McCain — and remember, he could have been President — is leading the fight to fight in Syria, calling for a Libya-like strategic bombing campaign to cauterize the ruthless forces of Bashar al-Assad's regime and establish "safe havens" to serve "as platforms for the delivery of humanitarian and military assistance" and provide space for the opposition to "organize and plan their political and military activities against Assad."

This must be done, he said in a speech on the Senate floor on March 5, without authorization by the United Nations, and not by coalition forces but by the United States alone, "the only one nation that can alter this dynamic" of Assad's brutality.

"Providing military assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is necessary," McCain asserted, "but at this late hour, that alone will not be sufficient to stop the slaughter and save innocent lives. The only realistic way to do so is with foreign airpower."

Old war-hawks never die, they just lose their eyesight.

In response to this speech, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said, "This is an extremely complex crisis. Intervention at this time could very well exacerbate problems inside the country."

No kidding. If McCain thinks action against Assad would be another Lovely War, he should consult his World Almanac:

Libya: Total area, 680,000 square miles; population, 6 million; population density, 8 persons per square mile.

Syria: Total area, 16,000 square miles; population, 19 million; population density, 265 persons per square mile.

Any child can see that air strikes in Syria, no matter how precise, will inevitably result in a "slaughter" of non- combatants exponentially greater than occurred in Libya (the number of which, by the way, NATO has refused to investigate or disclose).

Though he may not know his demographics, McCain surely knows his geography, which makes his stance crazier still. Libya is bounded by Egypt, Chad, Niger, Algeria, Tunisia, and the Mediterranean Sea. Syria is bounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon — almost every one of those countries a hot- spot in itself. Any interested teenager can see that bombing Syria could blow the Middle East apart.

And then there's that military-aid component. Even without the air strikes, shoveling armaments to the opposition forces is a recipe for internal disaster. It's doing for Syria from the outside what Qaddafi did from the inside, providing the opportunity for the "Free Syrian Army" — whatever that is — and "other opposition groups" — whoever and however many they are — to annihilate not only Assad but each other.

Such actions would further defile — and in a far greater way than those against Libya did — the spirit of the Arab Spring, a movement that has toppled dictators and democratized governments by the disciplined practice of nonviolent resistance. Indeed, there are many in the Syrian opposition — perhaps a majority — who continue to reject force of arms as an instrument of regime change. Unilateral intervention by the U.S. would in fact "alter this dynamic," as McCain put it, but in perverse ways he seems unable to conceive.

As Gene Sharp, the political theorist whose booklet, From Dictatorship to Democracy, formed the blueprint for the Arab Spring movement, wrote: "The historical record indicates that while casualties in dead and wounded must be expected in political defiance, they will be far fewer than the casualties in military warfare. Furthermore, this type of struggle does not contribute to the endless cycle of killing and brutality."

The stories of repression and murder that are smuggled out of Syria daily are truly appalling, and McCain and his sympathizers, like almost everyone else in the world, want to put an end to it.

But his alternative would be so much worse.

BOOK REVIEW: "BROKEN AND SHARED"

March 8, 2012

BOOK REVIEW:  Broken and Shared, by Jeff Dietrich
Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, 2011
418 pp., illustrated. $29.95


Jeff Dietrich is Horatio Alger in reverse. He's the self- unmade man. While his peers were making money, he was making soup. The Social Security Administration calculates his total lifetime income to be $2,553.82.

He's the Man Who Came to Dinner. Over forty years ago, he dropped in at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen on L.A.'s Skid Row and never left.

Fortunately for the world, the leaders of the Catholic Worker community saw talent in the lad and immediately made him the editor of their bimonthly eight-page tabloid, the Catholic Agitator. Now, from hundreds of articles written for the paper over the years, he has culled almost 80 of them for his new book, Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles' Skid Row.

Brilliantly written, combining pathos, outrage, and scholarly analysis with bracingly ironic humor, Dietrich's essays reflect and amplify the vision of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, two radicals who during the Great Depression rejected Marx's social analysis for Jesus', and Lenin's monolithic Communism for simple solidarity with the poor.

In 1970, while hitchhiking across the country, he chanced on a meeting of the Milwaukee Catholic Worker, some of whose members were headed for prison for burning draft files. "This is what Jesus would be doing if he were around today," he recalls thinking. "He'd be feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and burning draft files!"

It was his satori, that Zen flash of insight when all reality falls perfectly into place. Suddenly, the Catholicism of his childhood, dogmatic and institutional, was distilled to its essence: "We were not supposed to worship Jesus," he writes, "we were supposed to practice Jesus."

Taken as a whole, these essays confirm that experience. From the earliest ones to the latest, his basic beliefs remain unchanged; they do not evolve, they deepen. Out of modesty he says he is not a scholar, but his writings reveal a breadth of knowledge greater than many academic professionals'. Interwoven with citations by a wide array of thinkers and theorists, his analyses of social problems and the institutional structures he believes cause them make for compelling, contrarian reading.

Most impressive is his informed and eye-opening exegesis of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Not surprisingly, his focus is on food and why some grow fat while others go hungry. The Hebrew Scriptures, he argues in many articles over many years, consistently point to "big agriculture" and its ensuing commerce and militarization as the root cause, from Cain the farmer (scorned by the Hebrew God for Abel, the hunter-gatherer) to today's global agribusiness: Those who grow the food hold power over those who don't. The mission of Jesus, especially as depicted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, was to liberate the hungry from the institutions that keep them that way. He shows that it's not by chance that Matthew juxtaposes King Herod's banquet, where the main course is John the Baptist's head on a platter ("not a typical dinner party arranged by, say, Martha Stewart") with his feeding of the 5,000 from their own resources. Thus the "power lunches" of Washington, where "decisions are made that consign the poor, the immigrant, and the homeless to death" stand opposed to the soup kitchen at the Catholic Worker: "When food and hospitality are shared outside the money economy, the kingdom of God has come near."

Many other assaults against conventional wisdom await you, such as why Jesus is hardly the exemplar of Christian Family Values.

This book will either drive you crazy or drive you sane.

Read it.

LETTERS MINGLE SOULS

March 1, 2012

I used to love writing letters. Even as a boy, I wrote to anybody I thought would write back — aunts and uncles, cousins by the dozens, kids I'd met on summer vacation. In high school, I joined a pen-pal club and found new correspondents in Holland, Slovenia, Poland, and even a girl in the Soviet Union during a mid-1960's thaw in the Cold War (after about a year, no more letters came). By the time I was 16, I fancied myself a polyglot — I knew at least half a dozen languages, but only two words in each: Par Avion, Mit Luftpost, Correo Aereo. I met people all over the world without leaving my bedroom.

I visited our post office regularly, spending chunks of my allowance on the latest commemorative stamps. I never became a stamp collector because stamps weren't meant to be kept, they were meant to be used.

For my foreign correspondence, I bought aerograms, long sheets of delicate, sky-blue paper that you folded in thirds and sealed up on three sides. I doubt the Postal Service even makes them anymore.

I also used to love getting mail — not just letters but magazines, newspapers, sales pitches for electric trains and baseball souvenirs. I'd send away for just about anything to keep the family mailbox full.

As far as I can remember, throughout my entire childhood our neighborhood in Norwalk, Calif., had exactly two mailmen, now for correctness called letter-carriers. They knew not only the numbers on the houses but the people inside them, taking time for a friendly chat as they handed over the cards and letters. Mailmen in those days were an essential part of the fabric of the community, and some of them, I'd bet, knew more about the personal lives of the folks on their route than even the parish priest.

I hardly write a letter anymore, and I hardly ever get one. The mailbox is still full, but now it's mostly junk — and as advertising becomes more and more Google-specific, even the junk will eventually disappear.

My passion for letter-writing started evaporating maybe a decade ago, along with practically everybody else's. This is commonly attributed to the advent of e-mail, but I know there's more to it than that; the dynamic is more complex than the mere substitution of one medium for another.

The difference between an e-mail message and a handwritten letter is both quantitative and qualitative. E-mails — and now Facebook and, quintessentially, Twitter — are more like the long- gone telegram, where you say what you have to say as if you were paying by the character, complete with a clever vocabulary of abbreviations: "r u ok? :)"

The handwritten letter is just the opposite. It demands the lavishing of time on your recipient, allowing your mind to range widely and creatively. Even on the rare occasions when I do write a long and thoughtful e-mail, sitting at a computer screen can never produce the intimacy elicited by putting pen to paper in a unique hand that has evolved since childhood. Sure, you may change your e-mail font to Comic Sans for a supposedly personal touch, but typefaces are just a bunch of pixels designed by somebody else.

I know all this, I believe all this, I love all this — but I can hardly bring myself to write letters anymore. Why?

There is something in the "communications culture" that thwarts me. Being in constant contact with everybody everywhere has diminished my desire to be in close contact with somebody somewhere. I no longer "have time" to sit at my desk, pen in hand, chewing on the top and staring out the window, thinking of just what to say and just how to say it, devoting my whole attention to one single special person even for 20 minutes. Now I can FW some cartoon or article to a dozen people at once, personalized only by a message that reads: "What do you think?" The ease of instantaneous, worldwide communication has rendered me unable to communicate.

This whole column has become a bittersweet digression from my original intent for it — to write about the financial woes of the United States Postal Service and its latest proposals to do something about it: close half of its 500 mail-processing facilities, eliminate "unprofitable" post offices, halt Saturday delivery. I'll have to deal with those issues later.

Several weeks ago, amidst the detritus of the daily mail, I found a handwritten envelope. I tore it open, half-crazy with anticipation. Inside was a three-page letter from a friend I hadn't heard from, e-mail or otherwise, for months. For a brief moment I felt the exhilaration of years ago, devouring the contents, delighting in her cursive style and even in the crossouts. Especially the crossouts.

It took me nearly a month to "have time," but I wrote her back yesterday. It was an attention-deficient agony, but it put me in touch with a person I'd long forgotten: myself.

A 1974 10-cent stamp commemorating the Universal Postal Union features a Gainsborough painting of an elegant woman pensively reading a letter; the caption on the stamp is: "Letters mingle souls."

I used that stamp, plus 35 cents' worth of others, on my envelope to her.