From 1a7159d4ce644849c43cede8240ad54b899f09f3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Lara A. Ross" Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 20:59:56 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Remove corpus --- tests/corpus/a-beautiful-day.md | 337 --------- tests/corpus/art-of-the-steal.md | 184 ----- tests/corpus/chess-master-and-the-computer.md | 73 -- tests/corpus/consider-the-lobster.md | 117 --- tests/corpus/fourth-state-of-matter.md | 269 ------- tests/corpus/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold.md | 530 ------------- tests/corpus/getting-in.md | 81 -- tests/corpus/happiness-is-a-worn-gun.md | 111 --- tests/corpus/hope-change-reality.md | 177 ----- tests/corpus/last-american-hero.md | 371 --------- tests/corpus/lessons-from-late-night.md | 115 --- tests/corpus/love-app.md | 153 ---- tests/corpus/m.md | 709 ------------------ tests/corpus/my-genome-my-self.md | 133 ---- tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/__init__.py | 1 - tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/items.py | 15 - tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/pipelines.py | 35 - tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/settings.py | 11 - .../newyorker/newyorker/spiders/__init__.py | 1 - .../newyorker/spiders/newyorker_spider.py | 42 -- tests/corpus/newyorker/scrapy.cfg | 11 - tests/corpus/pandoras-briefcase.md | 72 -- tests/corpus/prison-without-walls.md | 109 --- tests/corpus/rape-of-american-prisoners.md | 212 ------ tests/corpus/superman.md | 137 ---- tests/corpus/swingers.md | 155 ---- tests/corpus/ted-williams.md | 392 ---------- tests/corpus/the-accidental-universe.md | 67 -- tests/corpus/the-case-for-reparations.md | 371 --------- tests/corpus/the-cost-conundrum.md | 213 ------ tests/corpus/the-devils-bait.md | 209 ------ tests/corpus/the-running-novelist.md | 85 --- tests/corpus/the-school.md | 651 ---------------- tests/corpus/two-heads.md | 182 ----- tests/corpus/vanishing-blonde.md | 235 ------ 35 files changed, 6566 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/a-beautiful-day.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/art-of-the-steal.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/chess-master-and-the-computer.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/consider-the-lobster.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/fourth-state-of-matter.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/getting-in.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/happiness-is-a-worn-gun.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/hope-change-reality.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/last-american-hero.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/lessons-from-late-night.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/love-app.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/m.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/my-genome-my-self.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/__init__.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/items.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/pipelines.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/settings.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/__init__.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/newyorker_spider.py delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/newyorker/scrapy.cfg delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/pandoras-briefcase.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/prison-without-walls.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/rape-of-american-prisoners.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/superman.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/swingers.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/ted-williams.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-accidental-universe.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-case-for-reparations.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-cost-conundrum.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-devils-bait.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-running-novelist.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/the-school.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/two-heads.md delete mode 100644 tests/corpus/vanishing-blonde.md diff --git a/tests/corpus/a-beautiful-day.md b/tests/corpus/a-beautiful-day.md deleted file mode 100644 index 838281290..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/a-beautiful-day.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,337 +0,0 @@ -A Beautiful Day -*Ploughshares* -By Lisa Gruenberg - -In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of his parents’ murders, details released by Austria in the late 1990s. - -“A Beautiful Day” is one of a group of essays and stories titled Searching for Mia. Mia was my father’s younger sister, who disappeared into Germany in 1941 at the age of fifteen. The essays deal with trying to come to grips with my father’s emerging stories, and my search for his sister, his lost family, and his friends and neighbors after his death. They also explore my own experience with depression, and its relationship to creativity and writing. - -Josephine Helwing, my father’s Aunt Pepi, is one of the many relatives I try to recreate on the page. - -* - -My father’s Aunt Pepi’s medical record arrived at our home in 2007, a full two years after his death. I’d plowed through dozens of documents in search of my father’s lost family, but the brevity of this record documenting the last eight weeks of Pepi’s life at Am Steinhof, the mental institution on the outskirts of Vienna, still shocked me. There are only ten notes documenting her decline—from her admission note after she attempted suicide, dated March 7, 1942, to her death certificate seven weeks later. She was forty-five years old, single, unemployed, Mosaisch—Jewish. Her final weight was seventy-one pounds. The cause of death was written in Latin: Marasmus e Psychosis—Severe Malnutrition due to Psychosis. This was not a diagnosis I ever learned about in medical school. - -There was a set of photographs attached to her file. In profile her head is held up on a post with a label spelling out her last name, Helwing. Straight on, her mouth is slightly open; her eyes are closed. Her lower lip is swollen, as if she had been struck. I could not tell if the photo was taken when she was dead or alive. - -Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl signed Pepi’s first evaluation. Frankl survived deportation, concentration camps, and the Death March, and went on to establish a psychiatric institute in Vienna after the war. He wrote a worldwide bestseller, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, describing his particular branch of existential psychiatry honed by his experiences during the Holocaust. - -Although Frankl was head of the female suicide ward at Am Steinhof in the 1930s, he was no longer allowed to work there after the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. He could only recommend admission from the Rothschild Hospital, the Jewish hospital that would be closed down a few months after Pepi’s death. Frankl’s approach to life reminds me so much of my father’s, and of that of so many I interviewed who survived that time and went on to flourish. They carried on by burying part of the past, erasing other memories, and rewriting the remainder of their stories. It’s what we all do—a normal response to suffering so that we can live our lives. But in the setting of overwhelming trauma, I wonder if this adjustment of memory is just another kind of madness. - -Pepi’s admission note stated: “The patient has been psychologically disturbed for the last months…She jumped into the Danube Canal and her mother, who is malnourished and half-blind, can no longer care for her at home.” This was my father’s maternal grandmother, Sabina Helwing, who would be dispatched on one of the last deportations out of Vienna a few months after her daughter’s death at Am Steinhof. Sabina took a passenger train to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on September 10, 1942. She left her luggage on the railway platform and was herded into a cattle car on September 11 and was gassed on arrival in Treblinka. - -The note goes on: “For the last two to three days the patient has refused to eat.” The note doesn’t mention that by 1942, the Jews of Vienna were all starving. Families were forced to share one or two ration cards, and most shops did not allow Jews to enter. - -“The patient is dysphoric, agitated, and voices concerns about cleanliness. She is restless and repetitively strokes the bed linens. She admits she hears voices. She is unkempt and incontinent of urine and feces. She says the whole world is against her. She says she knows the assistant physician, ‘he lives in my building.’ ‘The Frau Doctor is my cook.’” Pepi goes on to talk about her husband and children, even though she is childless and unmarried. “‘My husband went to America—my mother-in-law is making me meshuga.’” - -Pepi’s pulse was described as “rapid and small.” The picture was thought to be consistent with “toxicosis.” Frankl states that this is a catatonic picture in the setting of an acute psychosis of menopause. The note finishes with, “The patient was normal before this and there is no family history of mental illness…There is a reactive component to her presentation and there is good hope for recovery.” Frankl suggests transfusion with her own blood, and heart medication, as well as tube feeding. There is no evidence that any of those recommendations were followed. - -* - -The first time my father mentioned his Aunt Pepi to me was May 2004, when I drove to Syracuse to check in on my parents, right after photographs of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison were released. My 83-year-old father was growing frail. Parkinson’s slowed his movements and his thinking. It made his already serene visage more wooden, and his speech even quieter and less expressive than usual. - -A few days into the visit, we all sat down for breakfast in front of the south-facing windows. I grew up in Syracuse’s flat light, so the rare sunshine delighted me. The clouds that clung to the city were a standing joke between my husband, Martin, and our teenaged daughters. Martin took on a thick Viennese accent or my mother’s clipped British Columbian speech whenever we hit the wall of precipitation that almost always met us on the Thruway outside Rome, New York. - -His version of my father: “Ach, it’s shnowing!” My Canadian mother’s voice: “Pull up your socks, it’s just another spot of bother!” Martin’s imitations made the girls laugh. I didn’t find them funny. I couldn’t hear my parents’ accents. - -“Such a gorgeous day,” my mother said as she whacked the top off her soft-boiled egg. - -My father fiddled with the “Saturday” compartment of his day-of-the-week medicine holder; my mother reached across the table, took the dispenser from him, and handily opened it, dumping the contents into the china bowl next to his orange juice. My father took his pills one by one, rinsing them down with tepid coffee. When his hands settled in his lap, the tremor of Parkinson’s took over. He stared out the window as if too exhausted to pick up his spoon. - -In the garden, tulips broke through the dirt. My frugal mother’s used pantyhose restrained vines against the picket fence. Cotton crotches waited for leaves to cover their immodest display. “What a beautiful day!” My father turned to me suddenly, speaking as if these next words flowed out of my mother’s last sentence about the weather. His voice was steady; he didn’t clear his throat the way he usually did. “A few days after Hitler marched into Vienna, it was a day just like this one. We needed to leave the flat to look for food, even though the streets were dangerous. My parents asked me to walk to the Second District to check on Grandmother Sabina and my mother’s younger sister, Pepi. There was glass everywhere, and on doors and across storefronts was written JEW or DIRTY JEW.” - -My mother stood up and muttered, “Here we go again.” Even though her egg was only half eaten, she grabbed the cardigan from the back of her chair and went out to work in the garden. This wasn’t the first time in the past few years that my father suddenly segued into the 1930s when I visited, but it was a calmer transition compared with outbreaks I witnessed before, and he spoke in English rather than breaking into German, the way he had with earlier flashbacks. - -“I was seventeen,” he continued. “It was a beautiful day just like this one. A crowd gathered around something, and they were laughing and talking.” My father’s voice was modulated, not the usual quiet monotone. - -“Dad?” I always tried to speak to my father when he veered into the past. But this wasn’t the father I knew; I sensed it wasn’t me he was talking to. - -“I walked to the edge of the crowd and then pushed my way to the inside of their circle. They were watching what appeared to be a pile of rags moving in the dirt.” - -A man lay on the ground. It was an orthodox Jew with a long beard and forelocks, his dark clothes covered with dust, his face bloody from a beating. The man moaned and struggled to stand. - -“The Jew begged for help,” my father said. “A young woman, dressed in a blue suit, moved into the center of the circle.” Wavy hair framed her lovely face. She grinned and winked at the crowd. She smiled down on the man with an expression of pity, and reached down as if to help him up. He lifted his hand to hers. Turning again to the crowd, she circled her hips. She raised her skirt up over the tops of her stockings as she continued to gyrate, and then straddled the man who slumped back to the ground. - -My father’s eyes weren’t old and watery when he told me this; they were the clear eyes of an angry young man. I wanted to touch him across the table, but he seemed very far away. He swallowed twice. “She urinated onto the man’s face,” he whispered. - -My father looked down and then back to me. “What kind of a thing is this for a young boy to see?” He turned back to his soggy Cheerios. He shrunk in front of my eyes; the tremor in his hands returned. A little bit of milk dripped from his lower lip. - -“Shall we go for a drive?” he asked. - -Once the episodes were over, they were over. I wiped the milk from his face with a paper napkin. He leaned against the table and pushed himself to his feet and waved me away when I got up to help. - -“I can manage,” he said. - -He carried dishes to the sink one at a time. Back and forth he went, using one hand to prop up his thin body on the table, on the counter and back again. He scrubbed each dish with soap and scalding water before placing it in the dishwasher, and steadied himself against the walls to get back to his room to dress. - -“I’ll get Mom,” I called after him. - -My mother was digging in the garden. - -“Why did you leave?” I asked. - -She leaned the shovel against the side of the house and pulled off her gardening gloves. “I don’t like to see him upset,” she said. - -“He was talking about the Anschluss. When was that?” - -“Who knows?” She answered as if she were really saying, “who cares?” - -“Did he ever talk to you about after the Germans came in?” - -“He seems to be talking about the whole thing a lot. Maybe it’s that new medication he’s on.” She deadheaded a few exhausted peonies. “He used to sit across from me for hours and not say a word—forget about actually having a conversation. Then he’d go to his office and close the door. But now you can’t get him to stop talking.” - -“But, Mom, this wasn’t just Dad running on with one of his old stories.” - -“All I know is this stuff comes up at the most inappropriate times with the wrong people.” My parents adored each other, but my mother couldn’t tolerate the old stories, and she seemed to find my father’s outbursts unbearable. - -“Who are the right people, Mom?” I pictured my father going off the deep end when I wasn’t home. I wondered if my mother continued to fill in The New York Times crossword puzzle with ink, maybe patting his hand, waiting for him to come back to himself. - -“The past belongs in the past, don’t you think?” she said, picking up her shovel again. “You can’t change it.” - -At the end of the day, I asked my father again about the scene he described. He seemed surprised that I knew about it. That was the way it was with the flashbacks. The memory was triggered; the symptoms of Parkinson’s disappeared. He often spoke rapidly in German, a language he rarely spoke when we were growing up and certainly never spoke fluently in our presence. Once the flashback emerged, my father regained a chunk of memory, but when he talked about it afterward, it often sounded as if it happened to someone else. - -“I saw the white lace of the woman’s garter belt,” he said. “I thought I saw the shadow of hair between her thighs.” - -I winced. My father was always so proper. I imagined the urine caught the sunlight and sparkled as it splashed against the Jew’s upturned face. The crowd broke into applause. The woman laughed and they roared with her. Some of the men clapped each other on the back. The Jew coughed and then lay still. - -“A policeman watched the whole thing and did nothing,” my father said. “What would have happened if I walked into that crowd to help the man?” But he turned away and ran up the avenue, toward the Danube Canal and his Grandmother Sabina and Aunt Pepi’s house. Passersby moved in slow motion. My father reined himself in to walk with them. - -“I had to be careful,” he said. “The Nazis changed the traffic rules after the Anschluss, and now the cars were driving on the right side of the street instead of the left.” The change threw the city into turmoil. Leaving aside everything that happened in Vienna during the months after the Anschluss—the beatings, the lootings, hundreds of Jews jumping out of windows because they couldn’t bear the weight of their lives—just this simple fact of a change in traffic rules, something I hadn’t heard about until my father’s outburst, added a tactile disruption to the lovely Vienna he constructed for me when I was a child. A world turned mad. - -Once in the courtyard of his grandmother Sabina’s building, my father took the stairs three at a time. He pounded on the door, but it fell open. He heard Sabina’s reedy voice singing a Yiddish lullaby. He told me the gilded mirrors in the salon were all smashed, breaking up reflections of books scattered on the floor. Omama Sabina was one of my father’s wealthy relatives. His father was usually unemployed and my father’s own family was living hand-to-mouth well before the war. - -My father followed the voice into Sabina’s bedroom. Pepi sat at her mother’s vanity, dressed in a slip, but didn’t move to cover herself when my father came in. A bruise in the shape of a hand marred her white neck. “My aunt’s dark hair was suddenly streaked with gray,” my father told me. - -Sabina’s silver brush cut furrows in her daughter’s hair, and she put a plump finger to her lips when she noticed my father. She led Pepi to bed and pulled down the coverlet. Pepi slipped between the sheets. Sabina moved away but Pepi moaned, then sat up, her eyes wide. - -“Don’t leave me,” she cried. Sabina sat down on the bed. - -“Would you make us some tea, Harry?” Sabina asked my father, not taking her eyes off Pepi. - -“Where’s the maid, Omama?” - -“She hasn’t come since the Germans arrived.” - -Christians were no longer allowed to work for Jews after the Anschluss. My father pumped water into a pot, lit the stove, and put the water on. Scraping a circle of mold off a rind of bread, he sliced it and spread it with marmalade. When the tea was ready, he loaded everything on a tray and carried it in. The grandfather clock in the hallway measured empty seconds. - -Sabina poured tea into a cup and added a large spoonful of sugar and handed it to Pepi. Pepi held the translucent china in her hands but did not bring it to her lips. My father passed onto the balcony. It grew dim by the canal, and he could barely see the buildings of the Inner City across it. - -“An old Jew with a cane hobbled below, and a group of laughing boys chased him,” my father said. - -“Take off your disguise, old man! Take it off or we will have to help you!” - -The old man’s breath was heavy and uneven. One of the youths grabbed his shoulder and spun him. Another took hold of his beard and shouted as he yanked on it, “Take off the disguise, old man!” He swung the Jew around by the beard. The cane flew against the side of the building and clattered to the feet of one of the bigger boys. He picked it up and swung it around to the back of the man’s head. The sound as it hit the Jew’s skull was oddly muffled. The old man dropped to the ground. The boys looked up at the houses that lined the street. - -“I jumped back against the balcony doorway,” my father said. - -At midnight the streets were quiet again, and my father got ready to leave. Sabina threw her arms around his neck. “Harry, don’t leave us!” - -My father pried her fingers apart. “I’ll come back tomorrow, Omama.” - -Outside, the body of the old Jew was gone. My father walked toward home along the dark canal. - -“I thought I heard the boys coming up behind me. I broke into a run.” When my father turned off the Ringstraße, he was sure he saw the boys walking toward him on the other side of the street. - -“A young woman walked tall and straight in front of me,” said my father. “I came up beside her and pretended I was with her. We passed the boys. I think she smiled at me—I think she took my hand.” - -My father ducked into an alley and made his way home. - -* - -When I got ready for bed that evening, I pulled down the family genealogy my father put together after he retired from the Engineering Department at Syracuse University. I barely looked through the weighty binder when he gave me my copy in 1994. There were several pages about history, and then he’d written something about almost everyone, even relatives who died long before the war. His writing was cheerful and full of exclamation points. It didn’t match his carefully rendered family trees, so many branches withered with phrases like “perished at Auschwitz” and “died, Minsk?” - -I realized he’d written several pages about his great-grandparents but less than half a page on each of his parents, who were deported a few weeks after Pepi died. The story of his younger brother Uri, who was sent on a Kindertransport to Palestine in October 1938, received a few paragraphs. Their youngest sister, Mia, who disappeared into Germany in 1941 when she was just fifteen, did not even have a section of her own. - -He wrote that Pepi stayed on with her mother when her five siblings married. In the ’60s, his brother Uri located her pauper’s grave in the Jewish section of the Zentralfriedhof, the central cemetery of Vienna. My father doesn’t mention visiting the grave himself, even though he and my mother visited Austria many times as tourists. Those visits now seem incongruous to me. - -I asked my father about Pepi again the next morning. He remembered her as shy and withdrawn. “She was a little pathetic,” he said, but he couldn’t come up with any details. “She and Sabina were badly beaten on Kristallnacht. I wonder if she might have been raped. She could have been subject of medical experiments, or she might have been euthanized.” He said all those things in his expressionless Parkinson’s voice. - -After the visit, I decided I needed to get down the “real story” once and for all. My father agreed to allow me to videotape him a few weeks later. It would turn out to be his last visit to our home in Boston. - -At the beginning of the first videotape a stuffed chair fills the screen. My father talks to me off camera and then shuffles into view. His back is bent so that he has to angle his head up to look forward. Watching the tapes now, I can’t help but think of my father-in-law, Marty, who was in a nursing home at that time, biding his time while cancer finished digesting his bones. His vertebrae collapsed into that same pitiful C. - -I begin. “When all these things came up, Dad, I thought, ‘Well, it’s not so important now. You lived a long life without telling these stories.’” - -“Well, I think you know I was writing about this, but then—I don’t know—in order to write about it correctly you have to organize it and think about it.” - -He tells me, as he does often throughout the tapes, “It’s the history that I really want to get down on paper.” He stares at the camera and meanders through history or drones about his happy life before the Anschluss. Sometimes there is the clank of dishes in the background, or a hushed conversation between my mother and me captured on tape. My father’s quiet voice marches on. His eyes seem to search for something beyond the lens. - -He unfolds the old narratives in the same way he did for me as a child, even though I can recite all the punch lines with him. He skips the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938, the subject of one of his first flashbacks. He jumps to a tired version of crossing the border into Belgium in March 1939. “A soldier told me we couldn’t keep any currency,” he said, “so I flushed my few pfennigs down the WC.” He speaks as if he is telling me someone else’s story. In this third person version, he and the other Jewish boys and young men traveling with him threw their caps in the air when they crossed the border into Belgium. He leaves out the parts I heard during other flashbacks, about his rail car being uncoupled and pulled off track; he omits the dog straining on the soldier’s leash, his description of the soldier’s eyes, one blue and one green. The soldier forced him and the other Jewish teenagers to play Russian roulette until the next train came along and they were reconnected and sent on their merry way. - -Listening to the tapes now I feel the same impatience I felt when I sat with my father. I keep on thinking, “the history has been written, I want to know what you saw and experienced.” - -He describes in detail his work at the Zionist training farm in the south of England and repeats a lighthearted version of his arrest by the British fourteen months later, in June 1940. He was incarcerated at a ramshackle seaside hotel on the Isle of Man with hundreds of other Jews. Ostensibly, the British were afraid of spies. Every other day soldiers escorted a group through the barbed wire surrounding the hotel, and my father swam in the frigid waters of the Irish Sea under armed guard. Local girls flirted with the soldiers while my father toweled himself off with a monogrammed towel. - -He was shipped out at the end of that summer and imprisoned in POW camps in Quebec and New Brunswick for the next year and a half. Other Jews who were interned by the British were bitter about those lost years. My father focused on the education he received from the Jewish professors and the rabbi incarcerated with him. He spoke about that time as if it were a brief hiatus in his otherwise uneventful life. - -The rabbi and my father were released in December 1941, right after Pearl Harbor. My father’s Uncle Menio, one of Pepi’s four brothers, had managed to escape Vienna via the free port of Shanghai and then was sponsored by the Jewish Community in Salt Lake City. But my father wasn’t allowed to cross the border to join him, because he was considered to be an “enemy alien.” Menio found my father a sponsor in Vancouver, so he went there, finding himself a job as a janitor. He talked his way into the third year of the University of British Columbia in 1943, and graduated at the top of his class in 1946. - -His roommate, Mel, who was engaged to my mother’s sister Phyllis, brought my father home for his first Christmas dinner in 1943. By then, my father had lost contact with his family, but had no idea that almost everyone he left behind had already been slaughtered. In a photograph from my mother’s album, labeled “our first meeting with Harry,” my father sits uncomfortably on the sofa next to his future wife, her sister, and Mel. A Christmas tree looms behind him. - -“The rest is history!” was the way my father always put it. - -* - -I took my first trip to Vienna in 2006, a full year after my father’s death. I went to trace his family and neighbors, but also to visit his old haunts. I walked along the canal to Pepi and Sabina’s home on Obere Donaustraße, with the Danube Canal on one side and whizzing traffic on the other. Cracks fissured the façade at number 65, perhaps left by mortar fire when the Second District became the battleground between German and Russian troops toward the end of the war. The balcony where my father witnessed an old man’s murder still extended off the second floor. - -I was still trying to hang my father’s old stories and outbursts onto the framework of history. The Anschluss was in March 1938. My father was thrown out of school that June. Kristallnacht followed in November, and my father would leave Vienna for England alone, in March 1939, at the age of eighteen. - -In a letter written to Uri in Palestine, my father’s cousin, 15-year-old Kurt Helwing, Pepi’s nephew, recounts the events of Kristallnacht. My father’s most vivid flashback was about the events described in this letter. This is one of the few family letters that openly talks about the events of that night. Kurt was already in England, having been sent on a children’s transport soon after Kristallnacht, so he didn’t have to worry about censors. - -Dear Uri! - -I want to tell you a few things about Vienna after November 10. They took away the keys to our apartment. We did not get the keys to our apartment back for another 14 days, but then we were forced to give up the flat by 10 December. [Jews were systematically moved out of their homes and forced to move in with other families, mostly in the Second District.] So we moved in with Omama. There, all mirrors, some of the windows, the radio, a table and two chairs had been smashed. Your parents were also driven from their home and their keys were taken away from them. In the evening, Göring announced on the radio that all had blown over, so your parents went back home with a second set of keys and went to bed. In the morning the Nazis came back and took away the second set of keys. After about a week they got the keys back [my father’s mother had to go to Gestapo headquarters to get the keys]. Your flat was ransacked. The suitcase from Germany [with supplies for Uri], the lamp, which Harry had made at school, and 1.50 German Marks that Mia had saved, were all gone. Uncle Sisko [one of Pepi’s brothers], Uncle Simel [Sabina’s brother-in-law], and Ludwig [Simel’s son] were all arrested. Uncle Simel was released soon after, but Sisko and Ludwig were sent to Dachau. Ludwig is still there. - -My father translated this letter and a number of family letters from 1938 and early 1939. He promised to translate the rest for me, but he never did. Many of the letters were illegible; they were often written in code to avoid the censors. Even after he died, when I hired a translator, it was hard to understand what was going on in these one-sided conversations, and many of the later letters, from 1941 to 1942, were missing from my father’s files. - -I have no doubt that the events my father described during and after his flashbacks happened, but if they happened exactly as he remembered them, I have to doubt. The broken mirrors in Kurt’s letter would suggest my father’s memory of the events of the Anschluss actually happened months later, on Kristallnacht. My father’s concern that she might have been raped was impossible to substantiate. Many Austrians and Germans who researched the Holocaust said it would have been unusual for a Jewish woman to be raped by a gentile during this period, but I wonder. - -Pepi wrote to my father in England right after he fled, two years before her hospitalization at Am Steinhof. When she wrote this letter, she and Sabina hadn’t been forced out of their home yet to an apartment they shared with distant cousins, a few blocks in from the canal. The letter belies my father’s description of Pepi as addled and incapable. - -Vienna 3. April. 1939 - -Dear Harry! - -I have a big favor to ask of you—if you would be so nice as to follow the advice of Mrs. Novak, who lives in our building, by going to her son and his cousin, Alfred Eiberschütz, so that, with his reference, I will be able to obtain a house maid or nanny position in England. Mrs. Novak’s son is a British citizen and, according to his mother, a nice young man. He is 24 years old and married to a British woman. - -Mr. Alfred Eiberschütz is a member of B’nai B’rith and would be very obliging if you needed anything. Mrs. Novak asks you to give greetings to her cousin and her son and daughter-in-law from her mother, Ms. Dr. Clara Kraus, and from her as well. - -Dear Harry. I hope you are in good health and write to me soon. - -Greetings - -Your Aunt Pepi - -Those still trapped in Vienna had to visit numerous bureaucratic offices to get permissions to leave Austria, but then they also had to find a place that would offer them an entry visa, and those visas were becoming harder and harder to come by. Many sought positions in Britain as domestic servants. Thousands would be deported and murdered because countries like the United States and Britain did not allow them entry. Aunt Pepi was only one of many relatives writing my eighteen-year-old father to find them a place. He didn’t have a clue how to help any of them, and then Britain declared war and he was arrested and deported. - -One of the archivists I befriended in Vienna suggested I go in person to Am Steinhof: to locate Pepi’s medical record, to see an exhibit on Nazi euthanasia, and to visit the Otto Wagner church built on the grounds. I took a cab from Pepi’s home and was dropped off inside the entrance of an enormous compound. A patient interrupted a conversation with himself to ask me for a cigarette. I hadn’t realized that Freud and Viktor Frankl’s institution was still in use as a mental hospital. I headed uphill toward the dome of the church, passed locked wards and a cemetery, then tried to catch my breath as I walked into the vast gallery of the exhibit hall. - -Dozens of children stared at me from photographs. Some had cleft lips, others the features of Down syndrome. Many looked perfectly normal. The captions told me that several hundred children had been murdered at Am Steinhof as part of the Nazi euthanasia program, designed to purify the Master Race. - -At the end of the hall was an office, and sitting at the desk was a red-haired boy I recognized from one of the many archives in town. Young Austrians can avoid military service by working on projects focused on the Holocaust. He turned to his books when I came to the door, but his burning cheeks gave away that he recognized me from an earlier visit at the Archives of the Austrian Resistance. - -“Can you tell me how to find the central office?” I asked. - -“I have no idea,” he answered without looking up. - -“Perhaps you could look up the phone number?” - -“There is no way to get this information.” - -“But surely you could tell me where the administrative offices are?” - -The boy looked up at me finally, with an expression that clearly communicated he thought my request was inappropriate or even perverted, a look I had gotten used to in Vienna and Germany. I wonder if this attitude kept my father from pushing for more information about his family. He grew up in a world where getting on the wrong side of a bureaucrat could get you killed; I did not. By the time I wandered the grounds and found the main office, the doors were locked; Wednesdays they closed early. A young woman was getting into her car and I ran down the steps to her. “I came a long way, and I am trying to locate a medical record from wartime.” - -The woman smiled as if this happened every day. She handed me her business card and waited for mine; on this first trip, I hadn’t known that everyone in Austria had cards. “I will contact the director, Dr. Eberhard Gabriel. He will be more than happy to locate those records for you.” She hesitated, as if still waiting for my card. “Call me tomorrow,” she said. - -There was nothing left to be done. I went back up the hill, following the signs to the church. The guidebook said that they allowed Otto Wagner to build here because he was too radical for the time. What better place for the building of a madman than the outskirts of the city, on the grounds of a mental hospital? I walked into the soaring white nave, sparsely trimmed in gold leaf. I sat in one of the pews. It was hard to feel meditative when I thought about the murdered children buried in tidy rows outside. I tried to focus on the ceiling. - -I realized that I began mourning my father before he died—not the old man I captured on the video screen, but the young man I never knew, who smiles shyly from old photographs. I always sensed a void at the center of my father’s love, and I think I traveled to Vienna to find the source of that feeling. Maybe his love for me was really a love for something left behind—richer for that reason, but, also, less real. - -An older couple approached me when I exited the back of the church. Big hands and feet hung from the man’s narrow limbs. I refit my father’s small smile into the man’s round face. He held the elbow of a woman with mirthful eyes. They struck up a conversation with me. - -“Don’t you love Vienna?” the woman asked. Everyone in Vienna asked me this. - -“Yah, yah.” I couldn’t explain to her my horror that life went on here as if nothing ever happened, or my guilt about not coming when my father was still alive. Vienna heightened all my sensations; her beauty lacerated me. I couldn’t see the city without putting her through the prism of my father’s flashbacks. - -But even after he recovered some of his memory, my father still thought of Vienna as the most delightful place. The first and only chapter of his unfinished memoirs, written after the flashbacks started, begins with a popular song from that time: - -‘Vienna, Vienna, only you will always be the city of my dreams!’…In spite of the hardships my family experienced and the times when there was not enough money for food, I feel I had a very happy childhood. And I was in love with Vienna! - -Without the Holocaust, my father might have married the woman with mirthful eyes and continued to live here. My brothers and I would not exist. The couple said goodbye and supported each other as they walked up the steps and into the church. - -I walked out of the compound into a wide park with a gentle view to the Vienna Woods. Couples and families walked hand in hand, enjoying the sun slanting on lush fields and lighting up Vienna in the distance. Here I thought my father invented the late-afternoon stroll; our neighbors in Syracuse eyed us as if the activity were somewhat suspicious. But those walks were yet another preserved island from my father’s former life. The memory gave me the odd feeling I had arrived home. - -* - -On my last visit to Vienna in 2007, I finally met with Dr. Eberhard Gabriel at an outdoor café in the Inner City. He had retired as the director of Am Steinhof and had just published his book about the history of the institution. Eberhard looked me straight in the eyes and shook my hand warmly with both of his. - -“It’s wonderful to meet you finally,” he said. I liked him immediately. - -Over coffee and strudel, we went over Pepi’s record together. He told me that although she should have been on a separate ward for Jews, they didn’t have the staffing to segregate her. He confirmed there was nothing in the record to support that she was euthanized, or that she was a subject of medical experiments. Family never visited before she died; the trams were closed to Jews and it would have been too far to walk. I wondered if there was information missing from the record, and why there was such a long delay between her death and her burial by the Jewish community. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask Eberhard when we met; I don’t remember what inhibited me. Maybe I thought it was impolite after he’d gone to so much trouble to have the record sent to me. - -Eberhard acknowledged that the Nazi years were a sad chapter in the history of Am Steinhof, but he was clearly proud of the advancements made in the care of patients with mental illness in the years preceding and following the war. - -“There is no way to know for sure what happened,” Eberhard said as he flipped through Pepi’s chart. “She arrived starving. She had an ear infection at one point. She probably just died of neglect.” - -“And the photographs? Was she dead or alive?” - -“Alive, definitely. That would have been quite routine.” - -“But her head is on a post,” I pointed at the photograph. - -Eberhard moved his pastry to one side and considered the pictures. “She was catatonic,” he said. “Quite routine.” he said again. - -I’d learned that Frankl and his wife obtained visas to the United States in 1941, but he didn’t want to leave his parents, so he let the visas lapse. His father died at Theresienstadt, his mother was murdered in Auschwitz, his wife in Bergen-Belsen. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote about a vision he had during the waning days of the war. He’d been separated from his wife and had no idea where she was. He and other prisoners were being driven along by cruel guards. - -Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.” - -That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. - -Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. - -A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. - -Viktor Frankl knew his wife and his parents were gone when he wrote these words in 1946. Did he really think of his wife as he stumbled along? Is that really how he survived, or is that how he chose to remember? - -Eberhard cleared his throat. - -“Do you think survivors rewrite memories to find meaning?” I asked him. - -“I think we all do.” - -“And is it common for survivors to have flashbacks when they get older?” - -“Oddly, it’s when they get older that it often starts. I don’t know if it’s time that wears them down, makes it harder to compartmentalize memory, or if it’s illness, or medications, like the ones your father took.” - -“When he told me these stories, I didn’t know what to do.” - -“Maybe you didn’t need to do anything. He chose to tell you these things. Maybe you just needed to listen.” - -We sat together for some time in silence, watching tourists strolling by the Stephansdom. - -“Isn’t Vienna lovely in spring?” Eberhard asked me. - -“Yes,” I said, stirring my second coffee mélange, releasing its pungent scent. When I spoke again, I had trouble keeping my voice from shaking. “My father used to cringe when I hugged him, like my touch burned him.” I took a sip of coffee. “And he never said I love you unless I said it first. People tell me that’s generational, but he never once told my brothers he loved them. He never hugged them.” - -“The reason for that is obvious, don’t you think?” Eberhard looked at me as if he weighed his decision to elucidate or not. “He loved his family. In the end, he lost them. Maybe it felt too dangerous to say it out loud.” - -He signaled for the bill. “When will you visit us again?” - -“I feel like I’m finished here,” I said. “I don’t think I will ever return.” - -* - -My father lived another year after I finished videotaping him. His nightmares vanished and he never had another outburst. Perhaps, as Frankl and my friend Eberhard suggest, we tell stories to make meaning of our lives. I write mine down in order to find strength to move on. Putting this on paper, I feel my own skin growing less porous. But my father and his family remain inside me. Their memories continue, clear in my mind. - -It was never emptiness I sensed at the center of my father’s love. At his core lay a void that drew in yearning—yearning for connection and for the people he lost. My search for our missing pieces left me aware of the joyous depths of my own life. As unsentimental as I’ve always been, I feel that joy when I catch up with my 93-year-old mother, still sharp as ever. I see it when I gaze at our daughters, both healthy and strong. I sense its warm weight when Martin’s arm settles over my shoulder. Even folding laundry sometimes feels like a prayer. - -I think back to my last conversation with my father in 2005. My father-in-law finally succumbed the day before. The beds upstairs were unmade, dishes were piled in the sink, and the floors were sticky with bits of food and dirt tracked in by family passing through. I sat at my desk with a mug of strong coffee, almost dozing in warmth, feeling the pleasure of a sunny afternoon without the need to comfort anyone. - -When I picked up the receiver, I knew it was my father. - -“Hi, Dad,” I said into the silence. - -We spoke for close to an hour that day. I pulled out my questions about his family and neighbors. I scrawled his answers into the margins of my notebook with purple ink. Those were the last questions I asked him about the past. I didn’t want to tire him out, and I figured we could finish up another time. - -“No imposition,” he said. “None of this bothers me anymore.” - -A few days before that call, my father had been in a head-on collision. He and the other driver walked away from the accident, but their cars were totaled. My father’s neck bothered him, so he drove himself to the emergency room in my mother’s car. The doctors overlooked the small vein seeping blood into his brain. The morning after this conversation, he would wake with a blinding headache. My mother sent him off for a nap. He never woke up again. - -“How are you feeling since the accident?” I asked him. - -“I don’t think I’ll drive anymore.” - -I wrote that down—“No more driving!” underlining it three times. - -Out of the blue, my father asked. “Well, how are you doing with all this with Marty?” My father-in-law was a difficult man, but I’d come to love him in the long months leading up to his death. I started to cry. - -Thinking back on that last conversation now, I can see my young father standing in front of me, and for the first time, I hear his thick accent saying his last words to me. “Don’t worry about asking about the past. You know, despite everything, I had a wonderful childhood. I was loved—when you come down to it, that’s the only thing that really matters.” - -And I remember now, what came next. - -“I love you, Lisa.” - -“I love you too, Dad.” - -Then we both hung up. diff --git a/tests/corpus/art-of-the-steal.md b/tests/corpus/art-of-the-steal.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6e0828ea1..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/art-of-the-steal.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,184 +0,0 @@ -Art of the steal: On the trail of world's most ingenious thief -*Wired* -By Joshuah Bearman - -The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target. - -A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law’s VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it. - -The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star — it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of… - -Blanchard wasn’t listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savantlike ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn’t fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible. - -He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star’s chamber. (He even coyly shot the “No Cameras” sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move — albeit very slowly — inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls. - -But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof. - -Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof’s edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building. - -Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains. - -The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake. - -Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard’s pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared. - -Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso. - -“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.” - -Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.” - -Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn’t look the part — slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates — but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. “The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR,” recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard’s teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class. - -“He was a real natural in there,” Flanagan says. Blanchard’s mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard “was an absolute genius with his hands,” the teacher recalls. In Flanagan’s class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. “He could see that I had talent,” Blanchard says. “And he wanted me to put it to good use.” - -Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out — “You never know when something’s going to change forever for someone,” he says — and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. “But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it,” Flanagan says with a laugh. - -In fact, by early in his high school years, Blanchard had already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, like fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department store employees he had managed to befriend. “I could just tell who would work with me,” he says. “It’s a gift, I guess.” - -Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits, and his huge piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an entire RadioShack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. “She looked the other way,” Blanchard says. “And I tried to keep it all from her.” - -Around this time, Blanchard was arrested for theft. He did several months behind bars and was released into Flanagan’s custody after the older man vouched for him at a hearing. “He was great with our own kids,” Flanagan says. “And I still thought he might come around.” But Blanchard’s burgeoning criminal career was hard to ignore, as he often flaunted his ill-gotten gains. “I wasn’t surprised when the FBI came knocking one day,” Flanagan says. “He’d pull out a fistful of hundreds and peel one off to pay for pizza.” - -In April 1993, Blanchard was nabbed by the cops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a suspected car arson and brought back to police headquarters. “They kept me in the interrogation room past midnight,” Blanchard says. “And at a certain point, I managed to sneak into the next room and slip through the tiles into the ceiling.” Undetected, he heard the cops run down the hall, thinking he’d gone out the fire escape. After waiting a couple of hours, Blanchard lowered himself down into the mostly empty station, stole a police coat, badge, radio, and revolver. After leaving a single bullet on the desk of his interrogator, he took the elevator to the main floor and strolled right past the front desk on his way out of the station. He hitchhiked at dawn back to Omaha on the back of a motorcycle, holding his purloined police cap down in the wind. “Why are you wearing a uniform?” the driver asked. “Costume party,” Blanchard said as the sun came up. “Really fun time.” - -The next day, Blanchard was re-apprehended by a SWAT team, which had to use flash grenades to extricate him from his mother’s attic. But he surprised the cops by escaping yet again, this time from the back of a police cruiser. “They got out of the car and left the keys,” Blanchard says. “There was no barrier, so I fiddled with the cuffs until I got my hands in front of me, locked the doors, slipped up front, and put it in gear.” The authorities gave chase until Blanchard swerved into a steak-house parking lot, fled on foot, and was finally recaptured. - -This time, Blanchard served four years and his sentence came with a deportation order attached. In March 1997, he was released to his Canadian homeland and barred from returning to the US for five years. - -“After that,” Flanagan says, “I heard from Daniel once or twice a year, thanking me for what I had done for him.” Blanchard sent pictures of himself vacationing around the world, on exclusive beaches, posing in front of Viennese castles. He said he had his own security business. “I wanted that to be true,” Flanagan says. “But I had a hunch he was more likely in the anti-security business.” - -In 2001, Blanchard was driving around Edmonton when he saw a new branch of the Alberta Treasury bank going up. His internal algorithm calculated low risk, and he began to case the target meticulously. It had been three years since the Sisi Star theft, and it was time to try something big and new. - -As the bank was being built, Blanchard frequently sneaked inside — sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight, disguised as a delivery person or construction worker. There’s less security before the money shows up, and that allowed Blanchard to plant various surveillance devices in the ATM room. He knew when the cash machines were installed and what kind of locks they had. He ordered the same locks online and reverse engineered them at home. Later he returned to the Alberta Treasury to disassemble, disable, and remount the locks. - -The take at this bank was a modest 60 grand, but the thrill mattered more than the money anyway. Blanchard’s ambition flowered, as did his technique. As Flanagan had observed, Blanchard always wanted to beat the system, and he was getting better at it. - -Blanchard targeted a half-dozen banks over the next few years. He’d get in through the air-conditioning ductwork, at times contorting his body to fit inside really tight spaces. Other times, he would pick the locks. If there were infrared sensors, he’d use IR goggles to see the beams. Or he’d simply fool the sensor by blocking the beam with a lead film bag. - -He assembled an arsenal of tools: night-vision cameras, long-range lenses, high-gain antennas that could pick up the feeds from the audio and video recorders he hid inside a bank, scanners programmed with the encryption keys for police frequencies. He always had a burglary kit on hand containing ropes, uniforms, cameras, and microphones. In the Edmonton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, which he hit in 2002, he installed a metal panel near the AC ducts to create a secret crawl space that he could disappear into if surprised by police. - -Such evasive action was never required, however, in part because Blanchard had also memorized the mechanics of the Mas-Hamilton and La Gard locks that many banks used for their ATMs. (These are big, complicated contraptions, and when police later interrogated Blanchard, they presented him with a Mas-Hamilton lock in dozens of pieces. He stunned them by reassembling it in 40 seconds.) - -Blanchard also learned how to turn himself into someone else. Sometimes it was just a matter of donning a yellow hard hat from Home Depot. But it could also be more involved. Eventually, Blanchard used legitimate baptism and marriage certificates — filled out with his assumed names — to obtain real driver’s licenses. He would even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: James Gehman, Daniel Wall, or Ron Aikins. With the help of makeup, glasses, or dyed hair, Blanchard gave James, Daniel, Ron, and the others each a different look. - -Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes and applied for press cards so he could go to NHL playoff games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts. - -That’s where, in July 2000, Blanchard met Angela James. She had flowing black hair and claimed to work for Ford Models. They got along right away, and Blanchard was elated when she gave him her number. He sensed that the teenager was “down with crime” — someone he could count on for help. - -Blanchard liked having a sidekick. James was a fun, outgoing party animal who had plenty of free time. She eventually began helping Blanchard on bank jobs. They’d tag-team on daylight reconnaissance, where her striking looks provided a distraction while Blanchard gathered information. At night, she’d be the lookout. - -Though they were never involved romantically, James and Blanchard traveled together around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to stash his loot in offshore accounts. They camped out at resorts in Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos islands, depositing money in $10,000 increments into some of Blanchard’s 13 pseudonymously held accounts. The money in the offshore accounts was to pay for his jet-setting lifestyle. The money back in Canada would bankroll his real estate transactions. The funds sitting in Europe were there, well, in case anything happened to him. - -After midnight on Saturday, May 15, 2004, as the northern prairie winter was finally giving way to spring, Blanchard walked up to the front door of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the Mega Centre, a suburban development in Winnipeg. He quickly jimmied the lock, slipped inside, and locked the door behind him. It was a brand-new branch that was set to open for business on Monday, and Blanchard knew that the cash machines had been loaded on Friday. - -Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend’s nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score. - -As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside. - -From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby. - -Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars. - -The following morning was a puzzler for authorities. There were no indications of damage to the door, no fingerprints, and no surveillance recordings — Blanchard had stolen the hard drives that stored footage from the bank’s cameras. Moreover, Blanchard’s own surveillance equipment was still transmitting from inside the ATM room, so before he skipped town, he could listen in on investigators. He knew their names; he knew their leads. He would call both the bank manager’s cell phone and the police, posing as an anonymous informant who had been involved in the heist and was swindled out of his share. It was the contractors, he’d say. Or the Brinks guy. Or the maintenance people. His tips were especially convincing because he had a piece of inside information: One of the bank’s ATMs was left untouched. Blanchard had done that on purpose to make it easier to sow confusion. - - -With the cops outmatched and chasing red herrings, the Winnipeg bank job looked like a perfect crime. Then officials got a call from a vigilant employee at a nearby Walmart, which shared a large parking lot with the bank. He had been annoyed at people leaving cars there, so he took it upon himself to scan the lot. On the night of the break-in, he spotted a blue Dodge Caravan next to the bank. Seeing a dolly and other odd equipment inside, he took down the license plate number. Police ran it. The vehicle had been rented from Avis by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard. - -Blanchard’s use of his real name was as careless as the fingerprints police found inside the getaway van recovered by the rental company. Soon the cops were on his tail. - -Because of the heist’s sophistication, the investigation fell to Winnipeg’s Major Crimes unit. But Blanchard — now divorced and living with his girlfriend, Lynette Tien — learned that he had become a suspect, so he stayed out of their sights. Two years passed, and many of the investigators who had dealt with the initial leads retired or were transferred. - -The case went cold until early 2006, when Mitch McCormick, a veteran officer in his fifties, started working on major crimes and decided to take a look at the unsolved robbery. Intrigued, he called his longtime colleague Larry Levasseur, a wiretap ace who had just been transferred to the Commercial Crimes division. - -One night in early February, McCormick and Levasseur sat down at the King’s Head bar, a favorite local police haunt. Levasseur went through several pints of amber ale, and McCormick had his usual double rye and a Coke tall. McCormick filled him in on the Blanchard leads and gave him the case file to take home. - -The two were interested, but McCormick’s boss was skeptical. Why spend money chasing a criminal who was committing most of his crimes outside their jurisdiction? Eventually, though, the two stubborn cops made such a fuss that the department brass relented. “But we got no resources and had to put together a task force out of thin air,” McCormick says. “It was like the set of Barney Miller. We knew it was bad when we had to buy our own Post-its.” - -They quickly started filling up those Post-its and arranging them on a corkboard, mapping Blanchard’s sprawling network. The case was overwhelming, but they eventually unraveled his tangle of 32 false names. Their preliminary checks also showed that Blanchard was a person of interest in many crimes, including the unsolved theft of the Sisi Star nearly 10 years earlier. They assembled roughly 275 pages of documentation, enough to persuade a judge to let them tap Blanchard’s 18 phones. Now they were in business. They were taking a professional flier on this case. They dubbed their investigation Project Kite. - -Usually wiretaps are a waiting game; cops will listen to secretive organized crime syndicates for years, hoping for one little slip. But Blanchard was surprisingly loose-lipped. The second weekend the wires went live, McCormick and Levasseur heard him directing a team of underlings in a product-return fraud at a Best Buy. More scams followed. They heard him wheeling and dealing in real estate. They listened in as he planned his next bank job. They learned about a vast network of sophisticated crime. For a smart criminal, McCormick and Levasseur thought, this guy sure did talk a lot. - -Then, on November 16, 2006, Blanchard got a particularly intriguing call. - -“Hello, Danny,” a man with a thick British accent said. “Are you ready? I have a job for you. How soon can you get to Cairo?” - -McCormick and Levasseur listened with astonishment as Blanchard immediately set about recruiting his own small team to meet up with another group in Egypt. Blanchard referred to his contact as the Boss — he couldn’t pronounce his real name — and explained to his cohorts that there was money to be made with this guy. - -James was in. But her parents were in town visiting, and her mother didn’t want her to go. James put her mom on the phone so Blanchard could talk the woman into giving her daughter permission to join him in a criminal escapade across the globe. “We’re going to make a lot of money,” he said. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” - -Several of his regular guys couldn’t make it, so Blanchard called his neighbor, a Congolese immigrant named Balume Kashongwe. When Blanchard explained the job, Kashongwe volunteered right away. With his team assembled, Blanchard thought, “This is going to be easy. What could go wrong?” Just a few hours after the Boss’ call, Blanchard, Kashongwe, and James were in the air, en route to Cairo. - -Blanchard had first met the Boss a few months earlier in London at an electronics store. He could tell they were kindred spirits by a glance at the Boss’ purchases: eight DVR recorders. Blanchard knew you didn’t buy a load like that for anything but surveillance. The two struck up a conversation. - -Later that day, a car arrived to take Blanchard to a London café, where the Boss and a dozen Kurdish henchmen, most from northern Iraq, were waiting in the basement, smoking hookahs. The Boss filled Blanchard in on his operation, which spanned Europe and the Middle East and included various criminal activities, including counterfeiting and fraud. The latest endeavor was called skimming: gleaning active debit and credit card numbers by patching into the ISDN lines that companies use to process payments. The group manufactured counterfeit cards magnetized and embossed with the stolen numbers and then used them to withdraw the maximum daily limits before the fraud was reported. It was a lucrative venture for the Boss’ network, which funneled a portion of its take to Kurdish separatists in Iraq. - -Living up to his new nickname, the Boss gave Blanchard a trial job: taking 25 cards to Canada to retrieve cash. Blanchard returned to London with $60,000, and the Boss was pleased. He found the younger man charming and steady as well. “We have something big coming,” he told Blanchard over dinner at a Kurdish restaurant. “I’ll keep you posted.” - -With that job now at hand, Blanchard’s crew arrived in Egypt and checked into the Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino, settling into a couple of suites with sweeping views of the Nile. The next day, three men Blanchard remembered from the London cafè showed up. They brought roughly 1,000 pirated cards, which the group immediately started using in teams of two. Kashongwe and the Kurds from London blended in easily. Blanchard and James bought burkas in the souk as disguises. The Boss directed operations from London. - -They went from ATM to ATM for 12 hours a day, withdrawing Egyptian pounds and stuffing the bills into backpacks and suitcases. Blanchard and James folded their cash into pouches hidden beneath the burkas. And as usual, Blanchard filmed the entire adventure: the wandering through Cairo’s Byzantine streets, the downtime in the city, the money pouring in. - -Back in their bare-bones Winnipeg office, McCormick and Levasseur were monitoring their target’s email accounts and calls back to Tien, who was managing travel arrangements and other administrative details from Blanchard’s condo in Vancouver. The Canadian cops were stunned. They never imagined they’d come across anything this big. They learned about the loot piling up 4 feet high in the suites at the Marriott. And then they learned that everything had gone to hell. - -In the course of a week, the team collected the equivalent of more than $2 million. But the individual ATM payouts were small, so after a couple of days Blanchard sent Kashongwe south to Nairobi, Kenya, with 50 cards to find more-generous machines. Kashongwe had no cell phone, though, and he went suspiciously incommunicado. Soon it became clear that Kashongwe was AWOL. Blanchard wasn’t happy. And neither was the Boss. - -Blanchard was in over his head. In his many years of crime, guns had never been involved. The Boss, however, seemed inclined to change that. Blanchard promised to track down Kashongwe. “Good,” the Boss said. “Otherwise, we’ll find him. And he won’t be happy when we do.” - -McCormick and Levasseur listened to the calls in and out of Cairo as temperatures rose. They could hear Blanchard calling Tien back in Vancouver, trying desperately to reach Kashongwe. He called Kashongwe’s sister in Brussels and his brother in Ottawa. He sounded frantic at times. But Blanchard had no luck; Kashongwe had vanished. - -Things took another turn for the worse when the Boss told Blanchard he couldn’t leave Cairo until the missing cards were accounted for. Two more men arrived to “keep an eye on things.” The Marriott suites had turned into a hostage scene. - -But Blanchard’s natural charm worked on the Boss, too. He took full responsibility, promised to personally pay back Kashongwe’s share, and calmly argued that James didn’t have anything to do with the double cross. The Boss eventually told his men to let James go. Then he agreed to let Blanchard travel to London to smooth things out in person. “I’m pretty honest about that kind of thing,” Blanchard says. “And the Boss could see that I was taking responsibility for my guy.” - -The two decided to set aside the Kashongwe problem in the interest of business. The Boss’ men would meet Blanchard back in Canada with a new batch of cards. “After all,” Blanchard says, “why fight when there was more money to be made?” - -On December 3, 2006, Blanchard landed in Vancouver, where he immediately rented a car and drove straight to a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, 65 miles east in Chilliwack. He’d started prepping to burglarize the bank before his trip. The Kashongwe fiasco ended up nearly costing Blanchard money, and now he was after a sizable payday. Chilliwack was good for $800,000, he figured, and he would work through the holidays to get it done. - -McCormick and Levasseur had both been on duty during the holidays before, but never had a case so consumed them. They were spending 18-hour days in their makeshift headquarters or at the King’s Head, poring over transcripts and evidence. They got no overtime pay. The strain grew, as did the pressure from higher-ups. - -Lucky for them, Blanchard’s disarray was compounding his mistakes. As soon as he touched down, McCormick and Levasseur picked up Blanchard live, discussing Cairo, his next bank, and the potential whereabouts of Kashongwe. While Blanchard was en route to Chilliwack, they listened to him and the Boss discuss details about the arrival of a team in Montreal the next day. - -McCormick and Levasseur called officials at the Montreal airport with names and flight information. As the targets strode through the airport, the cops swarmed in. The team was detained, and police seized dozens of blank credit cards, a card writer, and computers overflowing with evidence that filled in the blanks on the Cairo operation. To top it off, the hard drives also contained some of Blanchard’s comprehensive amateur crime video of that job. Now the police could not only hear him talking about crimes, they could see him committing them. - -The Boss phoned the very next day, panicked. But the call caught Blanchard at an inopportune moment. “I can’t talk right now,” Blanchard whispered. “I’m doing my thing inside the bank right now.” It was 12:30 am, and Blanchard was crawling through the bank’s ductwork. - -“Listen, my guys got arrested in the airport, and I need to find out why,” the Boss said. Blanchard was making his way painstakingly through the air vents, en route to the ATM room. His earpiece was taped in and the phone was on auto-answer, in case he got a call that the police were nearby. “What’s going on with my guys in Montreal?” the Boss demanded. “They got pulled in!” - -“I have no idea,” Blanchard said softly. “But it’s too much of a coincidence that customs knew. The phones must be tapped.” - -The Boss pressed on, asking for news about Kashongwe, but Blanchard interrupted. “I’m looking down. There’s a security guard down there right now,” he breathed. He was deep into the building, making it hard to shimmy his way out in case he needed an emergency escape. “I have too much invested in this job,” he said. “I have to go.” - -“We need to fix this, Danny,” the Boss said. - -As Blanchard whispered back, McCormick and Levasseur were triangulating the call’s location. Now they knew Blanchard was targeting Chilliwack’s Bank of Nova Scotia. In late January, investigators from Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver as well as provincial police and the Mounties had joined McCormick and Levasseur’s small operation. “Project Kite was ready to be reeled in,” McCormick says. - -At 4 am on January 23, 2007, more than a dozen SWAT team members swarmed Blanchard’s Vancouver condo, where they found Blanchard and Tien. Several other search warrants were executed simultaneously across Canada, turning up half a dozen accomplices, including Angela James and Blanchard’s cousin Dale Fedoruk. - -Blanchard was busted. At his various residences and storage facilities, police confiscated 10 pallets of material: 60,000 documents, cash in various currencies, smoke bombs, firearms, and 300 electronic devices, including commercial card printers, card readers, and all manner of surveillance equipment. In his condo, police discovered a hidden room stocked with burglary kits and well-organized, itemized documentation of all Blanchard’s fake identities. He was initially charged with 41 crimes, ranging from fraud to possession of instruments for forging credit cards. - -The Boss called Blanchard in jail on the prison phone. “Why you, Danny?” he asked. “Why would little Winnipeg go to all that trouble? You must have upset the establishment. It’s like we say in England: You fuck with the Queen, and they fuck with you.” - -As McCormick and Levasseur listened in, Blanchard said it wasn’t the establishment, or the Queen. “It was these Keystone Kops out here in Winnipeg.” - -Blanchard says that he could have escaped from jail again, but there was no point. The police had all the evidence, including 120 video- and audiotapes detailing everything. They’d just find him again, and he was tired of running anyhow. - -Blanchard refused to make statements about any of his associates, but he eventually decided to cooperate with authorities about his own case. “He’s a flamboyant guy,” McCormick says. “And an extrovert, recording everything. Some part of him just wanted to tell his story.” He had another incentive, too: Revealing his methods, which would help the banking industry improve its security practices, could earn him a lighter prison sentence. - -The first day that Levasseur sat down with Blanchard in Vancouver, the investigator felt like he “was talking to a wall.” But in later interviews, Blanchard became more courteous and helpful. Finally, after some negotiations through his lawyer, Blanchard offered to take them to the Sisi Star. “It’s right here in my grandmother’s basement in Winnipeg,” he said. Blanchard had tried to steer clear of his family since his arrest; he didn’t want to embarrass them further. But now he had to call. “I need to come to the house,” he said. “And I’m bringing the police.” - -Blanchard, in handcuffs and leg shackles, hugged his grandmother at the door and took McCormick and Levasseur directly into the basement. He disappeared into a crawl space with Levasseur. It was quiet except for the sound of them grappling with the insulation. Eventually, Levasseur removed a square of Styrofoam and pulled out the star. - -They brought it out into the light, where the detectives marveled at the beauty of the piece. They’d never seen anything like it. That kicked off nearly a month of debriefing. The cops had gotten some stuff right, but Blanchard set them straight on the rest. “Never in policing does the bad guy tell you, ‘Here’s how I did it, down to the last detail,'” McCormick says. “And that’s what he did.” - -After spending so much time chasing Blanchard — and then talking to him — McCormick and Levasseur developed a grudging regard for his abilities. And Blanchard grew to admire their relentless investigation. Like a cornered hacker who trades his black hat for white, Blanchard took on a new challenge: working the system from the inside. He provided such good information that McCormick and Levasseur were able to put together an eight-hour presentation for law enforcement and banking professionals. “When those guys hear what Blanchard told us,” McCormick says, “you can hear their assholes pucker shut.” - -Blanchard’s full participation came under consideration when he pled guilty to 16 charges on November 7, 2007. He agreed to sell his four condos and pay restitution to the Canadian government. And he was willing to take a longer sentence for himself in exchange for leniency toward his coaccused, whom he refused to testify against. None of his partners served jail time. - -Blanchard also surprised the court by having his lawyer issue an unusual statement: an expression of gratitude for being arrested. “My client wishes to recognize that this huge lie that he had been living could now finally fall apart.” It added that Blanchard was looking forward to moving on. “He recognizes that the men and women of the Winnipeg Police Service made that all possible.” - -Instead of the maximum of 164 years, Blanchard got eight. And then last summer, after serving less than two, he was released into carefully guarded probation. He now lives in a Vancouver halfway house, where he is prohibited from going anywhere near certain types of surveillance equipment and talking to any of his former associates. One of the people he can call is Randy Flanagan, his old mentor from high school. - -“He filled me in about the past 10 years,” Flanagan says. “I was surprised, but not that surprised, about what our little former son had been up to.” Blanchard told Flanagan he wanted to turn his life around. Working with McCormick and Levasseur had convinced him that he could become a consultant to the banks. “Who knows?” Flanagan says. “Maybe he will get that security business he talked about off the ground after all.” - -The judge had a similar thought during Blanchard’s plea hearing. The banks “should hire him and pay him a million dollars a year,” he said. And right before sentencing, the judge turned directly to Blanchard. “I think that you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life,” he said. “Although I’m not prepared to sign a letter of reference.” diff --git a/tests/corpus/chess-master-and-the-computer.md b/tests/corpus/chess-master-and-the-computer.md deleted file mode 100644 index fea029639..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/chess-master-and-the-computer.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,73 +0,0 @@ -The chess master and the computer -*The New York Review of Books* -By Garry Kasparov - -In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek. - -It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the “Kasparov” brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess. - -Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world. - -It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon….” - -The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force. As Igor Aleksander, a British AI and neural networks pioneer, explained in his 2000 book, How to Build a Mind: - -By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives. - -It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better. - -My hopes for a return match with Deep Blue were dashed, unfortunately. IBM had the publicity it wanted and quickly shut down the project. Other chess computing projects around the world also lost their sponsorship. Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time. Today, for $50 you can buy a home PC program that will crush most grandmasters. In 2003, I played serious matches against two of these programs running on commercially available multiprocessor servers—and, of course, I was playing just one game at a time—and in both cases the score ended in a tie with a win apiece and several draws. - -Inevitable or not, no one understood all the ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on your laptop, especially what this would mean for professional chess. There were many doomsday scenarios about people losing interest in chess with the rise of the machines, especially after my loss to Deep Blue. Some replied to this with variations on the theme of how we still hold footraces despite cars and bicycles going much faster, a spurious analogy since cars do not help humans run faster while chess computers undoubtedly have an effect on the quality of human chess. - -Another group postulated that the game would be solved, i.e., a mathematically conclusive way for a computer to win from the start would be found. (Or perhaps it would prove that a game of chess played in the best possible way always ends in a draw.) Perhaps a real version of HAL 9000 would simply announce move 1.e4, with checkmate in, say, 38,484 moves. These gloomy predictions have not come true, nor will they ever come to pass. Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today. However, our looked-down-upon cousin, checkers, or draughts, suffered this fate quite recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta and his unbeatable program Chinook. - -The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game. They are also handy, and I am not above doing this myself, for impressing people with how complicated chess is, if only in a largely irrelevant mathematical way. - -This astronomical scale is not at all irrelevant to chess programmers. They’ve known from the beginning that solving the game—creating a provably unbeatable program—was not possible with the computer power available, and that effective shortcuts would have to be found. In fact, the first chess program put into practice was designed by legendary British mathematician Alan Turing in 1952, and he didn’t even have a computer! He processed the algorithm on pieces of paper and this “paper machine” played a competent game. - -Rasskin-Gutman covers this well-traveled territory in a book that achieves its goal of being an overview of overviews, if little else. The history of the study of brain function is covered in the first chapter, tempting the reader to skip ahead. You might recall axons and dendrites from high school biology class. We also learn about cholinergic and aminergic systems and many other things that are not found by my computer’s artificially intelligent English spell-checking system—or referenced again by the author. Then it’s on to similarly concise, if inconclusive, surveys of artificial intelligence, chess computers, and how humans play chess. - -There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it’s no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played. - -The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers. - -The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to become an expert” theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell’s earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well. - -Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be. But for the purposes of argument and investigation, chess is, in Russkin-Gutman’s words, “an unparalleled laboratory, since both the learning process and the degree of ability obtained can be objectified and quantified, providing an excellent comparative framework on which to use rigorous analytical techniques.” - -Here I agree wholeheartedly, if for different reasons. I am much more interested in using the chess laboratory to illuminate the workings of the human mind, not the artificial mind. As I put it in my 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, “Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.” Coincidentally the section in which that phrase appears is titled “More than a metaphor.” It makes the case for using the decision-making process of chess as a model for understanding and improving our decision-making everywhere else. - -This is not to say that I am not interested in the quest for intelligent machines. My many exhibitions with chess computers stemmed from a desire to participate in this grand experiment. It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster. - -In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec’s Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine. - -Although I had prepared for the unusual format, my match against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, until recently the world’s number one ranked player, was full of strange sensations. Having a computer program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting. And being able to access a database of a few million games meant that we didn’t have to strain our memories nearly as much in the opening, whose possibilities have been thoroughly catalogued over the years. But since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage still came down to creating a new idea at some point. - -Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions. Despite access to the “best of both worlds,” my games with Topalov were far from perfect. We were playing on the clock and had little time to consult with our silicon assistants. Still, the results were notable. A month earlier I had defeated the Bulgarian in a match of “regular” rapid chess 4–0. Our advanced chess match ended in a 3–3 draw. My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine. - -This experiment goes unmentioned by Russkin-Gutman, a major omission since it relates so closely to his subject. Even more notable was how the advanced chess experiment continued. In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.) - -Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming. - -The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. - -The “freestyle” result, though startling, fits with my belief that talent is a misused term and a misunderstood concept. The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent. Instead of asking about Sicilian Defenses, journalists wanted to know about my diet, my personal life, how many moves ahead I saw, and how many games I held in my memory. - -I soon realized that my answers were disappointing. I didn’t eat anything special. I worked hard because my mother had taught me to. My memory was good, but hardly photographic. As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees, Russkin-Gutman makes much of the answer attributed to the great Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among others: “Just one, the best one.” This answer is as good or bad as any other, a pithy way of disposing with an attempt by an outsider to ask something insightful and failing to do so. It’s the equivalent of asking Lance Armstrong how many times he shifts gears during the Tour de France. - -The only real answer, “It depends on the position and how much time I have,” is unsatisfying. In what may have been my best tournament game at the 1999 Hoogovens tournament in the Netherlands, I visualized the winning position a full fifteen moves ahead—an unusual feat. I sacrificed a great deal of material for an attack, burning my bridges; if my calculations were faulty I would be dead lost. Although my intuition was correct and my opponent, Topalov again, failed to find the best defense under pressure, subsequent analysis showed that despite my Herculean effort I had missed a shorter route to victory. Capablanca’s sarcasm aside, correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves “seen ahead”—that computers rely on. - -There is little doubt that different people are blessed with different amounts of cognitive gifts such as long-term memory and the visuospatial skills chess players are said to employ. One of the reasons chess is an “unparalleled laboratory” and a “unique nexus” is that it demands high performance from so many of the brain’s functions. Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software. - -With the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware. - -This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. - -Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors. - -Perhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management. - -These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites. - -Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can’t enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it. diff --git a/tests/corpus/consider-the-lobster.md b/tests/corpus/consider-the-lobster.md deleted file mode 100644 index 47cbe9b62..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/consider-the-lobster.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,117 +0,0 @@ -Consider the lobster -*Gourmet* -By David Forster Wallace - -For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more. - -The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry. What’s called the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther north than Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is, as you can imagine, unimaginable.) The region’s two main communities are Camden, with its very old money and yachty harbor and five-star restaurants and phenomenal B&Bs, and Rockland, a serious old fishing town that hosts the Festival every summer in historic Harbor Park, right along the water. - -Tourism and lobster are the midcoast region’s two main industries, and they’re both warm-weather enterprises, and the Maine Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of the industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud. The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme was “Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster.” Total paid attendance was over 80,000, due partly to a national CNN spot in June during which a Senior Editor of a certain other epicurean magazine hailed the MLF as one of the best food-themed festivals in the world. 2003 Festival highlights: concerts by Lee Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade, Sunday’s William G. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cooking Competition, carnival rides and midway attractions and food booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where something over 25,000 pounds of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed after preparation in the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available are lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried lobster dumplings. Lobster Thermidor is obtainable at a sit-down restaurant called The Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the Maine Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts. The winner of Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron Lobster Ramekins, the recipe for which is available for public downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com. There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs. Your assigned correspondent saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own parents—one of which parents was actually born and raised in Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is potato country and a world away from the touristic midcoast.2 - -For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are. Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers. They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae. There are dozens of different kinds worldwide, of which the relevant species here is the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. The name “lobster” comes from the Old English loppestre, which is thought to be a corrupt form of the Latin word for locust combined with the Old English loppe, which meant spider. - -Moreover, a crustacean is an aquatic arthropod of the class Crustacea, which comprises crabs, shrimp, barnacles, lobsters, and freshwater crayfish. All this is right there in the encyclopedia. And an arthropod is an invertebrate member of the phylum Arthropoda, which phylum covers insects, spiders, crustaceans, and centipedes/millipedes, all of whose main commonality, besides the absence of a centralized brain-spine assembly, is a chitinous exoskeleton composed of segments, to which appendages are articulated in pairs. - -The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea-insects.3 Like most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period, biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as well be from another planet. And they are—particularly in their natural brown-green state, brandishing their claws like weapons and with thick antennae awhip—not nice to look at. And it’s true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff,4 although they’ll also eat some live shellfish, certain kinds of injured fish, and sometimes each other. - -But they are themselves good eating. Or so we think now. Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England. “Unbelievable abundance” is how one source describes the situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims wading out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early Boston’s seashore being littered with lobsters after hard storms—these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and 5ground up for fertilizer. There is also the fact that premodern lobster was often cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers. Maine’s earliest lobster industry was based around a dozen such seaside canneries in the 1840s, from which lobster was shipped as far away as California, in demand only because it was cheap and high in protein, basically chewable fuel. - -Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down from caviar. The meat is richer and more substantial than most fish, its taste subtle compared to the marine-gaminess of mussels and clams. In the U.S. pop-food imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak, with which it’s so often twinned as Surf ’n’ Turf on the really expensive part of the chain steak house menu. - -In fact, one obvious project of the MLF, and of its omnipresently sponsorial Maine Lobster Promotion Council, is to counter the idea that lobster is unusually luxe or rich or unhealthy or expensive, suitable only for effete palates or the occasional blow-the-diet treat. It is emphasized over and over in presentations and pamphlets at the Festival that Maine lobster meat has fewer calories, less cholesterol, and less saturated fat than chicken.5 And in the Main Eating Tent, you can get a “quarter” (industry shorthand for a 1‰-pound lobster), a 4-ounce cup of melted butter, a bag of chips, and a soft roll w/ butter-pat for around $12.00, which is only slightly more expensive than supper at McDonald’s. - -Be apprised, though, that the Main Eating Tent’s suppers come in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat, and the coffee is convenience-store coffee in yet more Styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic (there are none of the special long skinny forks for pushing out the tail meat, though a few savvy diners bring their own). Nor do they give you near enough napkins, considering how messy lobster is to eat, especially when you’re squeezed onto benches alongside children of various ages and vastly different levels of fine-motor development—not to mention the people who’ve somehow smuggled in their own beer in enormous aisle-blocking coolers, or who all of a sudden produce their own plastic tablecloths and try to spread them over large portions of tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for their little groups. And so on. Any one example is no more than a petty inconvenience, of course, but the MLF turns out to be full of irksome little downers like this—see for instance the Main Stage’s headliner shows, where it turns out that you have to pay $20 extra for a folding chair if you want to sit down; or the North Tent’s mad scramble for the NyQuil-cup-size samples of finalists’ entries handed out after the Cooking Competition; or the much-touted Maine Sea Goddess pageant finals, which turn out to be excruciatingly long and to consist mainly of endless thanks and tributes to local sponsors. What the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid­level county fair with a culinary hook, and in this respect it’s not unlike Tidewater crab festivals, Midwest corn festivals, Texas chili festivals, etc., and shares with these venues the core paradox of all teeming commercial demotic events: It’s not for everyone.6 Nothing against the aforementioned euphoric Senior Editor, but I’d be surprised if she’d spent much time here in Harbor Park, watching people slap canal-zone mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and watch Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children. - -Lobster is essentially a summer food. This is because we now prefer our lobsters fresh, which means they have to be recently caught, which for both tactical and economic reasons takes place at depths of less than 25 fathoms. Lobsters tend to be hungriest and most active (i.e., most trappable) at summer water temperatures of 45–50°F. In the autumn, some Maine lobsters migrate out into deeper water, either for warmth or to avoid the heavy waves that pound New England’s coast all winter. Some burrow into the bottom. They might hibernate; nobody’s sure. Summer is also lobsters’ molting season—specifically early- to mid-July. Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way people have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight. Since lobsters can live to be over 100, they can also get to be quite large, as in 20 pounds or more—though truly senior lobsters are rare now, because New England’s waters are so heavily trapped.7 Anyway, hence the culinary distinction between hard- and soft-shell lobsters, the latter sometimes a.k.a. shedders. A soft-shell lobster is one that has recently molted. In midcoast restaurants, the summer menu often offers both kinds, with shedders being slightly cheaper even though they’re easier to dismantle and the meat is allegedly sweeter. The reason for the discount is that a molting lobster uses a layer of seawater for insulation while its new shell is hardening, so there’s slightly less actual meat when you crack open a shedder, plus a redolent gout of water that gets all over everything and can sometimes jet out lemonlike and catch a tablemate right in the eye. If it’s winter or you’re buying lobster someplace far from New England, on the other hand, you can almost bet that the lobster is a hard-shell, which for obvious reasons travel better. - -As an à la carte entrée, lobster can be baked, broiled, steamed, grilled, sautéed, stir-fried, or microwaved. The most common method, though, is boiling. If you’re someone who enjoys having lobster at home, this is probably the way you do it, since boiling is so easy. You need a large kettle w/ cover, which you fill about half full with water (the standard advice is that you want 2.5 quarts of water per lobster). Seawater is optimal, or you can add two tbsp salt per quart from the tap. It also helps to know how much your lobsters weigh. You get the water boiling, put in the lobsters one at a time, cover the kettle, and bring it back up to a boil. Then you bank the heat and let the kettle simmer—ten minutes for the first pound of lobster, then three minutes for each pound after that. (This is assuming you’ve got hard-shell lobsters, which, again, if you don’t live between Boston and Halifax, is probably what you’ve got. For shedders, you’re supposed to subtract three minutes from the total.) The reason the kettle’s lobsters turn scarlet is that boiling somehow suppresses every pigment in their chitin but one. If you want an easy test of whether the lobsters are done, you try pulling on one of their antennae—if it comes out of the head with minimal effort, you’re ready to eat. - -A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle. This is part of lobster’s modern appeal: It’s the freshest food there is. There’s no decomposition between harvesting and eating. And not only do lobsters require no cleaning or dressing or plucking (though the mechanics of actually eating them are a different matter), but they’re relatively easy for vendors to keep alive. They come up alive in the traps, are placed in containers of seawater, and can, so long as the water’s aerated and the animals’ claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one another up under the stresses of captivity,8 survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point. And part of the overall spectacle of the Maine Lobster Festival is that you can see actual lobstermen’s vessels docking at the wharves along the northeast grounds and unloading freshly caught product, which is transferred by hand or cart 100 yards to the great clear tanks stacked up around the Festival’s cooker—which is, as mentioned, billed as the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker and can process over 100 lobsters at a time for the Main Eating Tent. - -So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice? - -As you may or may not know, a certain well-known group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals thinks that the morality of lobster-boiling is not just a matter of individual conscience. In fact, one of the very first things we hear about the MLF …well, to set the scene: We’re coming in by cab from the almost indescribably odd and rustic Knox County Airport9 very late on the night before the Festival opens, sharing the cab with a wealthy political consultant who lives on Vinalhaven Island in the bay half the year (he’s headed for the island ferry in Rockland). The consultant and cabdriver are responding to informal journalistic probes about how people who live in the midcoast region actually view the MLF, as in is the Festival just a big-dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents look forward to attending, take genuine civic pride in, etc. The cabdriver—who’s in his seventies, one of apparently a whole platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the summer rush, and wears a U.S.-flag lapel pin, and drives in what can only be called a very deliberate way—assures us that locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he himself hasn’t gone in years, and now come to think of it no one he and his wife know has, either. However, the demilocal consultant’s been to recent Festivals a couple times (one gets the impression it was at his wife’s behest), of which his most vivid impression was that “you have to line up for an ungodly long time to get your lobsters, and meanwhile there are all these ex–flower children coming up and down along the line handing out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them.” - -And it turns out that the post-hippies of the consultant’s recollection were activists from PETA. There were no PETA people in obvious view at the 2003 MLF,10 but they’ve been conspicuous at many of the recent Festivals. Since at least the mid-1990s, articles in everything from The Camden Herald to The New York Times have described PETA urging boycotts of the MLF, often deploying celebrity spokespeople like Mary Tyler Moore for open letters and ads saying stuff like “Lobsters are extraordinarily sensitive” and “To me, eating a lobster is out of the question.” More concrete is the oral testimony of Dick, our florid and extremely gregarious rental-car guy, to the effect that PETA’s been around so much in recent years that a kind of brittlely tolerant homeostasis now obtains between the activists and the Festival’s locals, e.g.: “We had some incidents a couple years ago. One lady took most of her clothes off and painted herself like a lobster, almost got herself arrested. But for the most part they’re let alone. [Rapid series of small ambiguous laughs, which with Dick happens a lot.] They do their thing and we do our thing.” - -This whole interchange takes place on Route 1, 30 July, during a four-mile, 50-minute ride from the airport11 to the dealership to sign car-rental papers. Several irreproducible segues down the road from the PETA anecdotes, Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers—articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.” - -Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part of a Test Your Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.” - -Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.12 On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain—i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on. - -Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters. - -The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions. - -There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.13 As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival14 at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way. - -The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).15 A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over. - -There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider.16 One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talked about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.) - -There are, of course, other fairly common ways to kill your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness. Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to render it insensate—and is said at least to eliminate the cowardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water and then fleeing the room. As far as I can tell from talking to proponents of the knife-in-the-head method, the idea is that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a willingness to exert personal agency and accept responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it. (There’s often a vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro-knife arguments.) But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness. Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold salt water and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are going mostly on the analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold. - -Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe: Some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts in the pot. - -And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion number one. Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. “Thus,” in the words of T.M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “it is that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.” And lobsters do have nociceptors,17 as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain. - -Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility: It could be that their lack of endorphin/enkephalin hardware means that lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically different from mammals’ that it may not even deserve the term pain. Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally different way than you and I. These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that they feel it but don’t feel anything about it—the point being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they want to get away from. Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/dislike/want to avoid. - -Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.18 The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half. - -Lobsters, however, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.19 And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light: If a tank of food lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage. - -In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest. - -Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings;20 and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient. - -Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with convictions or rationales and who regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory? - -These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other. - -Footnotes: - -1. There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.” - -2. N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be talked about in this article. - -3. Midcoasters’ native term for a lobster is, in fact, “bug,” as in “Come around on Sunday and we’ll cook up some bugs.” - -4. Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring. - -5. Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in melted butter torpedoes all these happy fat-specs, which none of the Council’s promotional stuff ever mentions, any more than potato-industry PR talks about sour cream and bacon bits. - -6. In truth, there’s a great deal to be said about the differences between working-class Rockland and the heavily populist flavor of its Festival versus comfortable and elitist Camden with its expensive view and shops given entirely over to $200 sweaters and great rows of Victorian homes converted to upscale B&Bs. And about these differences as two sides of the great coin that is U.S. tourism. Very little of which will be said here, except to amplify the above-mentioned paradox and to reveal your assigned correspondent’s own preferences. I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my Festival companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste: The fact that I just do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am probably not the one to talk about it (the supposed appeal). But, since this note will almost surely not survive magazine-editing anyway, here goes: - -As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. - -7. Datum: In a good year, the U.S. industry produces around 80 million pounds of lobster, and Maine accounts for more than half that total. - -8. N.B. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed “debeaking” broiler chickens and brood hens in modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related practices like dehorning cattle in commercial feedlots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew almost nothing about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article. - -9. The terminal used to be somebody’s house, for example, and the lost-luggage-reporting room was clearly once a pantry. - -10. It turned out that one Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas, a high-ranking PETA official out of the group’s Virginia headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo, working the Festival’s main and side entrances on Saturday, August 2, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers emblazoned with “Being Boiled Hurts,” which is the tagline in most of PETA’s published material about lobster. I learned that he’d been there only later, when speaking with Mr. Rivas-Rivas on the phone. I’m not sure how we missed seeing him in situ at the Festival, and I can’t see much to do except apologize for the oversight—although it’s also true that Saturday was the day of the big MLF parade through Rockland, which basic journalistic responsibility seemed to require going to (and which, with all due respect, meant that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the Harbor Park grounds, especially if it was going to be just one person for one day, since a lot of diehard MLF partisans were off-site watching the parade (which, again with no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring, consisting mostly of slow homemade floats and various midcoast people waving at one another, and with an extremely annoying man dressed as Blackbeard ranging up and down the length of the crowd saying “Arrr” over and over and brandishing a plastic sword at people, etc.; plus it rained)). - -11. The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the local National Car Rental franchise was—Dick came out personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more about this man than I do about some members of my own family.) - -12. To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine. - -13. Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. PETA distributes a certain video—the title of which is being omitted as part of the elaborate editorial compromise by which this note appears at all—in which you can see just about everything meat--related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B.2 Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are -fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and self-righteous. Personally, though, I have to say that I found this unnamed video both credible and deeply upsetting.)) - -14. Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?) - -15. There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a pot of boiling lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s flesh and its carapace (this is why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that the sound is the lobster’s rabbitlike death scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine and don’t have anything close to the vocal equipment for screaming, but the myth’s very persistent—which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing. - -16. “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1974 Animal Liberation is more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement: “It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.” - -17. This is the neurological term for special pain receptors that are (according to Jane A. Smith and Kenneth M. Boyd’s Lives in the Balance) “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substances which are released when body tissues are damaged.” - -18. “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interest,” but it is a better term for our purposes because it’s less abstractly philosophical—“preference” seems more personal, and it’s the whole idea of a living creature’s personal experience that’s at issue. - -19. Of course, the most common sort of counterargument here would begin by objecting that “like best” is really just a metaphor, and a misleadingly anthropomorphic one at that. The counterarguer would posit that the lobster seeks to maintain a certain optimal ambient temperature out of nothing but unconscious instinct (with a similar explanation for the low-light affinities about to be mentioned in the main text). The thrust of such a counterargument will be that the lobster’s thrashings and clankings in the kettle express not unpreferred pain but involuntary reflexes, like your leg shooting out when the doctor hits your knee. Be advised that there are professional scientists, including many researchers who use animals in experiments, who hold to the view that nonhuman creatures have no real feelings at all, only “behaviors.” Be further advised that this view has a long history that goes all the way back to Descartes, although its modern support comes mostly from behaviorist psychology. - -To these what-look-like-pain-are-really-only-reflexes counterarguments, however, there happen to be all sorts of scientific and pro-animal-rights countercounterarguments. And then further attempted rebuttals and redirects, and so on. Suffice to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut. - -20. Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals. diff --git a/tests/corpus/fourth-state-of-matter.md b/tests/corpus/fourth-state-of-matter.md deleted file mode 100644 index 14eced47d..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/fourth-state-of-matter.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,269 +0,0 @@ -The fourth state of matter -*The New Yorker* -By Jo Ann Beard - -The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love. - -She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator—careful, almost went down—then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard. - -In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet. - -The dog turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house she drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I’ve climbed back under my covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable. I fix the leg, she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up and she’s gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40 A.M. - -There are squirrels living in the spare bedroom upstairs. Three dogs also live in this house, but they were invited. I keep the door of the spare bedroom shut at all times, because of the squirrels and because that’s where the vanished husband’s belongings are stored. Two of the dogs—the smart little brown mutt and the Labrador—spend hours sitting patiently outside the door, waiting for it to be opened so they can dismantle the squirrels. The collie can no longer make it up the stairs, so she lies at the bottom and snores or stares in an interested manner at the furniture around her. - -I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day. - -Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild strokes, which cause her to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over. She drinks prodigious amounts of water and pees great volumes onto the folded blankets where she sleeps. Each time this happens I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets underneath her, carry the peed-on blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer. By the time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again. The first few times this happened, I found the dog trying to stand up, gazing with frantic concern at her own rear. I praised her and patted her head and gave her treats until she settled down. Now I know whenever it happens, because I hear her tail thumping against the floor in anticipation of reward. In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog. - -I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom. For now, the boxes and the phone calls persuade me that things could turn around at any moment. The boxes are filled with thirteen years of his pack-ratness: statistics textbooks that still harbor an air of desperation; smarmy suit coats from the Goodwill; various old Halloween masks and one giant black papier-mâché thing he made that was supposed to be Elvis’s hair but didn’t turn out. A collection of ancient Rolling Stones T-shirts. You know he’s turning over a new leaf when he leaves the Rolling Stones behind. - -What I can’t take is the squirrels. They come alive at night, throwing terrific parties in the spare bedroom, making thumps and crashes. Occasionally a high-pitched squeal is heard amid bumps and the sound of scrabbling toenails. I’ve begun sleeping downstairs, on the blue vinyl dog couch, the sheets slipping off, my skin stuck to the cushions. This is an affront to the two younger dogs, who know the couch belongs to them; as soon as I settle in they creep up and find their places between my knees and elbows. - -I’m on the couch because the dog on the blanket gets worried at night. During the day she sleeps the catnappy sleep of the elderly, but when it gets dark her eyes open and she is agitated, trying to stand whenever I leave the room, settling down only when I’m next to her. We are in this together, the dying game, and I read for hours in the evening with one foot on her back, getting up only to open a new can of beer or take blankets to the basement. At some point I stretch out on the vinyl couch and close my eyes, one hand hanging down, touching her side. By morning the dog arm has become a nerveless club that doesn’t come around until noon. My friends think I’m nuts. - -One night, for hours, the dog won’t lie down. I call my office pal, Mary, and wake her up. “I’m weary,” I say, in italics. - -Mary listens, sympathetic, on the other end. “Oh my God,” she finally says. “What are you going to do?” - -I calm down immediately. “Exactly what I’m doing,” I tell her. The dog finally parks herself with a thump on the stack of damp blankets. She sets her nose down and tips her eyes up to watch me. We all sleep then, for a bit, while the squirrels sort through the boxes overhead and the dog on the blanket keeps nervous watch. - -I’ve called in tired to work. It’s mid-morning and I’m shuffling around in my long underwear, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The whole house is bathed in sunlight and the faint odor of used diapers. The dogs are being mild-mannered and charming; I nudge the collie with my foot. - -“Wake up and smell zee bacons,” I say. She lifts her nose groggily and falls back asleep. I get ready for the office. - -“I’m leaving and I’m never coming back,” I say while putting on my coat. I use my mother’s aggrieved, underappreciated tone. The little brown dog transfers her gaze from me to the table, the last place she remembers seeing toast. The Labrador, who understands English, begins howling miserably. She wins the toast sweepstakes and is chewing loudly when I leave, the little dog barking ferociously at her. - -At the office, there are three blinks on the answering machine, the first from a scientist who speaks very slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, asking about reprints. “What am I, the village idiot?” I ask the room, taking down his number in large backward characters. The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment dweller. - -The first of his calls makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way. “I have to talk to you right now,” he says grimly. “Where are you? I can never find you.” - -“Try calling your own house,” I say to the machine. In his second message he has composed himself. - -“I’m fine now,” he says firmly. “Disregard previous message and don’t call me back, please; I have meetings.” Click, dial tone, rewind. - -My leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest. I say “Damn it” out loud, just as Chris strides into the office. - -“What?” he asks defensively. He tries to think if he’s done anything wrong recently. He checks the table for work; things are in good shape. A graduate student, Gang Lu, stops by to drop off some reports. Chris and I have a genial relationship these days, reading the paper together in the mornings, congratulating ourselves on each issue of the journal. It’s a space-physics monthly, and he’s the editor and I’m the managing editor. I know nothing about the science part; my job is to shepherd the manuscripts through the review process and create a journal out of the acceptable ones. - -Christoph Goertz. He’s hip in a professorial, cardigan/jeans kind of way. He’s tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old, with an elegant trace of accent from his native Germany. He has a great dog, a giant black outlaw named Mica, who runs through the streets of Iowa City at night, inspecting garbage cans. She’s big and friendly but a bad judge of character, and frequently runs right into the arms of the dogcatcher. Chris is always bailing her out. - -“They don’t understand dogs,” he says. - -I spend more time with Chris than I ever did with my husband. The morning I told him I was being dumped he was genuinely perplexed. “He’s leaving you?” he asked. - -Chris was drinking coffee, sitting at his table in front of the blackboard. Behind his head was a chalk drawing of a hip, professorial man holding a coffee cup. It was a collaborative effort; I had drawn the man and Chris framed him, using blue chalk and a straightedge. The two-dimensional man and the three-dimensional man stared at me intently. - -“He’s leaving you?” And for an instant I saw myself from their vantage point across the room—Jo Ann—and a small bubble of self-esteem percolated up from my depths. Chris shrugged. “You’ll do fine,” he said. - -During my current turmoils I’ve come to think of work as my own kind of Zen practice, the constant barrage of paper hypnotic and soothing. Chris lets me work an eccentric schedule; in return I update his publications list for him and listen to stories about outer space. - -Besides being an editor and a teacher, he’s the head of a theoretical-plasma-physics team made up of graduate students and research scientists. He travels all over the world telling people about the magnetospheres of various planets, and when he comes back he brings me presents—a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the top, a big piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and, once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets made from the hide of an elephant. - -Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these things. - -“Plasma is blood,” I told him. - -“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me. - -This is the kind of conversation we mostly have around the office, but today he’s caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart back inside my chest. I decide to be cavalier. - -“I wish my dog was out tearing up the town and my husband was home sleeping on a blanket,” I say. - -Chris is neutral about my marriage problems, but he thinks the dog thing has gone far enough. “Why are you letting this go on?” he asks solemnly. - -“I’m not letting it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere and he has all the pens over on his side of the room. “It just is, is all. Throw me a pen.” He does, I miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying. - -“You have control over this,” he explains in his professor voice. “You can decide how long she suffers.” - -This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want: for her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world. - -“Exactly,” he says. - -I have an ex-beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long red hair and a smile that can stop trucks. I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told her on the phone that a family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house. - -“They’re making a monkey out of me,” I said. - -So Caroline climbs into her car and drives across half the state, pulls up in front of my house, and gets out carrying zucchini, cigarettes, and a pair of big leather gloves. I’m sitting outside with my old dog, who lurches to her feet, staggers three steps, sits down, and falls over. Caroline starts crying. - -“Don’t try to give me zucchini,” I say. - -We sit companionably on the front stoop for a while, staring at the dog and smoking cigarettes. One time I went to Caroline’s house and she was nursing a dead cat that was still breathing. At some point that afternoon, I saw her spoon baby food into its mouth and as soon as she turned away the whole puréed mess plopped back out. A day later she took it to the vet and had it euthanized. I remind her of this. - -“You’ll do it when you do it,” she says firmly. - -I pick the collie up like a fifty-pound bag of sticks and feathers, stagger inside, place her on the damp blankets, and put the two other nutcases in the back yard. From upstairs comes a crash and a shriek. Caroline stares up at the ceiling. - -“It’s like having the Wallendas stay at your house,” I say cheerfully. All of a sudden I feel fond of the squirrels and fond of Caroline and fond of myself for heroically calling her to help me. The phone rings four times. It’s the husband, and his voice over the answering machine sounds frantic. He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the phone. - -“Please? I think I might be freaking out,” he says. “Am I ruining my life here, or what? Am I making a mistake? Jo?” He breathes raggedly and sniffs into the receiver for a moment, then hangs up with a muffled clatter. - -Caroline stares at the machine as if it’s a copperhead. - -“Holy fuckoly,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re living with this crap?” - -“He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,” I tell her. “Else he won’t have fun on his bike ride. And guess what? I’m too tired to.” But now I can see him in his dank little apartment, wringing his hands and staring out the windows. In his rickety dresser is the new package of condoms he accidentally showed me last week. - -Caroline lights another cigarette. The dog pees and thumps her tail. - -I need to call him back because he’s suffering. - -“You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and points to the phone. “That is evil shit.” - -I tend to agree. It’s blanket time. I roll the collie off onto the floor and put the fresh blankets down, roll her back. Caroline has put on the leather gloves, which go all the way to her elbows. She’s staring at the ceiling with determination. - -The plan is that I’m supposed to separate one squirrel from the herd and get it in a corner. Caroline will take it from there. But when I’m in the room with her and the squirrels are running around, all I can do is scream. I’m not afraid of them, but my screaming button is on and the only way to turn it off is to leave the room. - -“How are you doing?” I ask from the other side of the door. I can hear Caroline crashing around and swearing. The door opens and she falls out into the hall, with a gray squirrel stuck to her glove. She clatters down the stairs and out the front door, and returns looking triumphant. - -The collie appears at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked and her ears up. For an instant she looks like a puppy, then her feet start to slide. I run down and catch her and carry her upstairs so she can watch the show. The squirrels careen around the room, tearing the ancient wallpaper off the walls. The last one is a baby, so we keep it for a few minutes, looking at its little feet and its little tail. We show it to the collie, who stands up immediately and tries to get it. - -Caroline patches the hole where they got in, cutting the wood with a power saw down in the basement. She comes up wearing a tool belt and lugging a ladder. I’ve seen a scrapbook of photos of her wearing evening gowns with a banner across her chest and a crown on her head. Curled hair, lipstick. She climbs down and puts the tools away. We eat nachos. - -“I only make food that’s boiled or melted these days,” I tell her. - -“I know,” she replies. - -The phone rings again, but whoever it is hangs up. - -“Is it him?” she asks. - -“Nope.” - -Caroline gestures toward the sleeping collie and remarks that it seems like just two days ago that she was a puppy. - -“She was never a puppy,” I tell her. “She’s always been older than me.” - -When they say goodbye, Caroline holds the collie’s long nose in one hand and kisses her on the forehead; the collie stares back at her gravely. Caroline is crying when she leaves, a combination of squirrel adrenaline and sadness. I cry, too, although I don’t feel particularly bad about anything. I hand her the zucchini through the window and she pulls away from the curb. - -The house is starting to get dark in that early-evening twilit way. I turn on lights and go upstairs. The black dog comes with me and circles the squirrel room, snorting loudly, nose to floor. There is a spot of turmoil in an open box—they made a nest in some disco shirts from the seventies. I suspect that’s where the baby one slept. The mean landlady has evicted them. - -Downstairs, I turn the lights back off and let evening have its way with me. Waves of pre-nighttime nervousness are coming from the collie’s blanket. I sit next to her in the dimness, touching her ears, and listen for feet at the top of the stairs. - -They’re speaking in physics, so I’m left out of the conversation. Chris apologetically erases one of the pictures I’ve drawn on the blackboard and replaces it with a curving blue arrow surrounded by radiating chalk waves of green. - -“If it’s plasma, make it in red,” I suggest. We’re all smoking semi-illegally in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We’re having a plasma party. - -“We aren’t discussing plasma,” Bob Smith says condescendingly. A stocky, short-tempered man, he’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels as if I’m breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired, which drove me to tell him that he was already fired, and both of us stomped into our offices and slammed our doors. - -“I had to fire Bob,” I tell Chris later. - -“I heard,” he says. Bob is his best friend. They spend at least half of each day standing in front of blackboards, writing equations and arguing about outer space. Then they write theoretical papers about what they come up with. They’re actually quite a big deal in the space-physics community, but around here they’re just two guys who keep erasing my pictures. - -Someone knocks on the door and we put our cigarettes out. Bob hides his pipe in the palm of his hand and opens the door. - -It’s Gang Lu, the doctoral student. Everyone lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris, while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred. - -Bob blows his smoke discreetly in my direction and waits for Chris to finish talking to Gang Lu, who is answering questions in a monotone—yes or no or I don’t know. Another Chinese student, Linhua Shan, lets himself in after knocking lightly. He nods and smiles at me and then stands at a respectful distance, waiting to ask Chris a question. - -It’s like a physics conference in here. I wish they’d all leave so I can make my usual midafternoon spate of personal calls. I begin thumbing through papers in a businesslike way. - -Bob pokes at his pipe with a paper clip. Linhua Shan yawns hugely and then looks embarrassed. Chris erases what he put on the blackboard and tries unsuccessfully to redraw my pecking parakeet. “I don’t know how it goes,” he says to me. - -Gang Lu looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if he is a dog; the student Shan, whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter. - -He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough. - -The collie fell down the basement stairs. I don’t know if she was disoriented and was looking for me, or what. But when I was at work she used her long nose like a lever and got the door open and tried to go down there, except her legs wouldn’t do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on the concrete floor in an unnatural position, one leg still awkwardly resting on the last step. I repositioned the leg and sat down and petted her. We used to play a game called Maserati, where I’d grab her long nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears—first second third fourth—until we were going a hundred miles an hour through town. She thought it was funny. - -Friday, I’m at work, but this morning there’s not much to do, and every time I turn around I see her sprawled, eyes mute, leg bent upward. We’re breaking each other’s heart. I draw a picture of her on the blackboard using brown chalk. I make “X”s where her eyes should be. Chris walks in with the morning paper and a cup of coffee. He looks around the clean office. - -“Why are you here when there’s no work to do?” he asks. - -“I’m hiding from my life, what else?” This sounds perfectly reasonable to him. He gives me part of the paper. - -His mother is visiting from Germany; she’s a robust woman of eighty who is depressed and hoping to be cheered up. In the last year she has lost her one-hundred-year-old mother and her husband of sixty years. She can’t be really cheered up but she likes going to art galleries, so Chris has been driving her around the Midwest, to our best cities, showing her what kind of art Americans like to look at. - -“How’s your mom?” I ask him. - -He shrugs and makes a flat-handed “so-so” motion. - -We read, smoke, drink coffee, and yawn. I decide to go home. - -“Good idea,” he says. - -It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life. Before I leave I pick up the eraser and stand in front of the collie’s picture on the blackboard, thinking. I can feel Chris watching me, drinking his coffee. His long legs are crossed, his eyes are mild. He has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter named Karein, and a son named Göran. A dog named Mica. A mother named Ursula. A friend named me. - -I erase the “X”s. - -Down the hall, Linhua Shan feeds numbers into a computer and watches as a graph is formed. The computer screen is brilliant blue, and the lines appear in red and yellow and green. Four keystrokes and the green becomes purple, the blue background fades to the azure of a summer sky. The wave lines arc over it, crossing against one another. He asks the computer to print, and while it chugs along he pulls up a golf game on the screen and tees off. - -One room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister in China. The study of physics is more and more disappointing, he tells her. Modern physics is self-delusion, and All my life I have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything. Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few travelling companions to accompany me to the grave. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-calibre handgun and a .22-calibre revolver. They’re heavier than they look and weigh the pockets down. My beloved second elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you. - -The collie’s eyes are almond-shaped; I draw them in with brown chalk and put a white bone next to her feet. - -“That’s better,” Chris says kindly. - -Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his coat. He doesn’t answer, and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through. - -Friday-afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone at the head of the long table explains something unexplainable. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the department chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns, walks back up the stairs, and enters the seminar room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then blue smoke. Linhua Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead; the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room. - -Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, expelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office: the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes to him—Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouch over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking to him. From where he lies, Bob can see his best friend still sitting upright in a chair, head thrown back at an unnatural angle. Everything is broken and red. The two young scientists leave the room at gunpoint. Bob closes his eyes. The eighth and ninth bullets in his head. As Bob dies, Chris Goertz’s body settles in his chair, a long sigh escapes his throat. Reload. Two more for Chris, one for Linhua Shan. Exit the building, cross two streets and the green, into the second building and up the stairs. - -The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She speaks to him for a few minutes, he produces the gun and shoots her in the face. The receptionist, a young student working as a temp, is just beginning to stand when he shoots her. He expels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the top of the steps, looks around. Is disoriented suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the dissatisfaction of not checking all the names off the list. A slamming and a running sound, the shout of police. He walks into an empty conference room, takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and puts it over the back of a chair. Checks his watch: twelve minutes since it began. Places the barrel against his right temple. Fires. - -The first call comes at four o’clock. I’m reading on the bench in the kitchen, one foot on a sleeping dog’s back. It’s Mary, calling from work. There’s been some kind of disturbance in the building, a rumor that Dwight was shot; cops are running through the halls carrying rifles. They’re evacuating the building and she’s coming over. Dwight, a tall likable oddball who cut off his ponytail when they made him chair of the department. Greets everyone with a famous booming hello in the morning; studies plasma, just like Chris and Bob. Chris lives two and a half blocks from the physics building; he’ll be home by now if they’ve evacuated. I dial his house and his mother answers. She tells me that Chris won’t be home until five, and then they’re going to a play. Ulrike, her daughter-in-law, is coming back from a trip to Chicago and will join them. She wants to know why I’m looking for Chris—isn’t he where I am? - -No, I’m at home and I just had to ask him something. Could he please call me when he comes in. - -She tells me that Chris showed her a drawing I made of him sitting at his desk behind a stack of manuscripts. She’s so pleased to meet Chris’s friends, and the Midwest is lovely, really, except it’s very brown, isn’t it? - -It is very brown. We hang up. - -The Midwest is very brown. The phone rings. It’s a physicist. His wife, a friend of mine, is on the extension. Well, he’s not sure, but it’s possible that I should brace myself for bad news. I’ve already heard, I tell him—something happened to Dwight. There’s a long pause, and then his wife says, “Jo Ann. It’s possible that Chris was involved.” - -I think she means Chris shot Dwight. “No,” she says gently. “Killed, too.” - -Mary is here. I tell them not to worry and hang up. I have two cigarettes going. Mary takes one and smokes it. She’s not looking at me. I tell her about the phone call. - -“They’re out of it,” I say. “They thought Chris was involved.” - -She repeats what they said: “I think you should brace yourself for bad news.” Pours whiskey into a coffee cup. - -For a few minutes I can’t sit down, I can’t stand up. I can only smoke. The phone rings. Another physicist tells me there’s some bad news. He mentions Chris and Bob and I tell him I don’t want to talk right now. He says O.K. but to be prepared because it’s going to be on the news any minute. It’s four-forty-five. - -“Now they’re trying to stir Bob into the stew,” I tell Mary. She nods; she’s heard this, too. I have the distinct feeling there is something going on that I can either understand or not understand. There’s a choice to be made. - -“I don’t understand,” I tell Mary. - -We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking, Uh-oh, over and over. I’m rattled; I can’t calm down and figure this out. - -“I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” I realize that I don’t know what “braced” means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods again and heads into the kitchen. - -Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the local news reports. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. My husband is having a party and all his guests call, one after another, to ask how I’m doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t. - -It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Linhua Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight Nicholson were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newswoman keeps saying there are five dead and two in critical condition. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room—all those eyes, all that calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up, but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos. - -The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up O.K. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room. - -The newswoman breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can. I’ve already figured out that if they go in alphabetical order Chris will come first: Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, Smith. His name will come on first. She drones on, dead University of Iowa professors, lone gunman named Gang Lu. - -Gang Lu. Lone gunman. Before I have a chance to absorb that, she says, The dead are. - -Chris’s picture. - -Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to stand in the bathroom for a while and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires. In the living room she’s pronouncing all the other names. The two critically wounded are the administrator and her assistant, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson. The administrator is already dead for all practical purposes, although they won’t disconnect the machines until the following afternoon. The student receptionist will survive but will never again be able to move much more than her head. She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her and the bullet lodged in the top of her spine and she will never dance or walk or spend a day alone. She got to keep her head but lost her body. The final victim is Chris’s mother, who will weather it all with a dignified face and an erect spine, then return to Germany and kill herself without further words or fanfare. - -I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and murdered all those people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet. “It’s a good thing none of this happened,” I say to my face. A knock on the door, and I open it. - -Julene’s hesitant face. “She wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring the collie in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly—first second third fourth—all the way through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from people who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens. A knock comes on the door. Julene settles the dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking distraught. He hugs me hard, but I’m made of cement, arms stuck in a down position. - -The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly it’s only me and him, sitting in our living room on a Friday night, just like always. I realize it took courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist. The dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me get through this. Me. He knows how awful this must be. Awful. He knows how I felt about Chris. Past tense. I have to put my hands over my face for a minute. - -We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me. When he looks over at me, it’s with an expression I’ve seen before. It’s the way he looks at the dog on the blanket. - -I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat is. - -The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed again. The television is flickering “Special Report” across the screen and I turn it off before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer. - -After all the commotion the living room feels cavernous and dead. A branch scrapes against the house, and for a brief instant I feel a surge of hope. They might have come back. And I stand at the foot of the stairs staring up into the darkness, listening for the sounds of their little squirrel feet. Silence. No matter how much you miss them. They never come back once they’re gone. - -I wake her up three times between midnight and dawn. She doesn’t usually sleep this soundly, but all the chaos and company in the house tonight have made her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes and drowsily begins licking her lower region. She stops and stares at me, trying to make out my face in the dark, then gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat on her back with her paws limp, wedged between me and the back of the couch. - -I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there are still planets and stars. Above the black branches of a maple is the Dog Star, Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon. - -When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog arm. She rises slowly, faltering, and stands over me in the darkness. My peer, my colleague. In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space. - -Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out. Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber. - -Exactly, he says. diff --git a/tests/corpus/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold.md b/tests/corpus/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold.md deleted file mode 100644 index 8f2752e3e..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,530 +0,0 @@ -Frank Sinatra has a cold -*Esquire* -By Gay Talese - -FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday. - -Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra -- A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. - -Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy. - -For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people -- his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five -- which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done. - -But now, standing at this bar in Beverly Hills, Sinatra had a cold, and he continued to drink quietly and he seemed miles away in his private world, not even reacting when suddenly the stereo in the other room switched to a Sinatra song, "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning." - -It is a lovely ballad that he first recorded ten years ago, and it now inspired many young couples who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. Sinatra's intonation, precisely clipped, yet full and flowing, gave a deeper meaning to the simple lyrics -- "In the wee small hours of the morning/while the whole wide world is fast asleep/you lie awake, and think about the girl...." -- it was like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality, and when blended with the dim light and the alcohol and nicotine and late-night needs, it became a kind of airy aphrodisiac. Undoubtedly the words from this song, and others like it, had put millions in the mood, it was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made by it all over America at night in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, on beaches during balmy summer evenings, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms, in cabin cruisers and cabs and cabanas -- in all places where Sinatra's songs could be heard were these words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; two generations of men had been the beneficiaries of such ballads, for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him. Nevertheless here he was, the man himself, in the early hours of the morning in Beverly Hills, out of range. - -The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra's face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant. - -Leo Durocher, one of Sinatra's closest friends, was now shooting pool in the small room behind the bar. Standing near the door was Jim Mahoney, Sinatra's press agent, a somewhat chunky young man with a square jaw and narrow eyes who would resemble a tough Irish plainclothesman if it were not for the expensive continental suits he wears and his exquisite shoes often adorned with polished buckles. Also nearby was a big, broad-shouldered two-hundred-pound actor named Brad Dexter who seemed always to be thrusting out his chest so that his gut would not show. - -Brad Dexter has appeared in several films and television shows, displaying fine talent as a character actor, but in Beverly Hills he is equally known for the role he played in Hawaii two years ago when he swam a few hundred yards and risked his life to save Sinatra from drowning in a riptide. Since then Dexter has been one of Sinatra's constant companions and has been made a producer in Sinatra's film company. He occupies a plush office near Sinatra's executive suite. He is endlessly searching for literary properties that might be converted into new starring roles for Sinatra. Whenever he is among strangers with Sinatra he worries because he knows that Sinatra brings out the best and worst in people -- some men will become aggressive, some women will become seductive, others will stand around skeptically appraising him, the scene will be somehow intoxicated by his mere presence, and maybe Sinatra himself, if feeling as badly as he was tonight, might become intolerant or tense, and then: headlines. So Brad Dexter tries to anticipate danger and warn Sinatra in advance. He confesses to feeling very protective of Sinatra, admitting in a recent moment of self-revelation: "I'd kill for him." - -While this statement may seem outlandishly dramatic, particularly when taken out of context, it nonetheless expresses a fierce fidelity that is quite common within Sinatra's special circle. It is a characteristic that Sinatra, without admission, seems to prefer: All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn -- fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they're down, adulation when they're up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone. - -I had seen something of this Sicilian side of Sinatra last summer at Jilly's saloon in New York, which was the only other time I'd gotten a close view of him prior to this night in this California club. Jilly's, which is on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, is where Sinatra drinks whenever he is in New York, and there is a special chair reserved for him in the back room against the wall that nobody else may use. When he is occupying it, seated behind a long table flanked by his closest New York friends -- who include the saloonkeeper, Jilly Rizzo, and Jilly's azure-haired wife, Honey, who is known as the "Blue Jew" -- a rather strange ritualistic scene develops. That night dozens of people, some of them casual friends of Sinatra's, some mere acquaintances, some neither, appeared outside of Jilly's saloon. They approached it like a shrine. They had come to pay respect. They were from New York, Brooklyn, Atlantic City, Hoboken. They were old actors, young actors, former prizefighters, tired trumpet players, politicians, a boy with a cane. There was a fat lady who said she remembered Sinatra when he used to throw the Jersey Observer onto her front porch in 1933. There were middle-aged couples who said they had heard Sinatra sing at the Rustic Cabin in 1938 and "We knew then that he really had it!" Or they had heard him when he was with Harry James's band in 1939, or with Tommy Dorsey in 1941 ("Yeah, that's the song, 'I'll Never Smile Again' -- he sang it one night in this dump near Newark and we danced..."); or they remembered that time at the Paramount with the swooners, and him with those bow ties, The Voice; and one woman remembered that awful boy she knew then -- Alexander Dorogokupetz, an eighteen-year-old heckler who had thrown a tomato at Sinatra and the bobby-soxers in the balcony had tried to flail him to death. Whatever became of Alexander Dorogokupetz? The lady did not know. - -And they remembered when Sinatra was a failure and sang trash like "Mairzy Doats," and they remembered his comeback and on this night they were all standing outside Jilly's saloon, dozens of them, but they could not get in. So some of them left. But most of them stayed, hoping that soon they might be able to push or wedge their way into Jilly's between the elbows and backsides of the men drinking three-deep at the bar, and they might be able to peek through and see him sitting back there. This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke and they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home. - -Some of Sinatra's close friends, all of whom are known to the men guarding Jilly's door, do manage to get an escort into the back room. But once they are there they, too, must fend for themselves. On the particular evening, Frank Gifford, the former football player, got only seven yards in three tries. Others who had somehow been close enough to shake Sinatra's hand did not shake it; instead they just touched him on the shoulder or sleeve, or they merely stood close enough for him to see them and, after he'd given them a wink of recognition or a wave or a nod or called out their names (he had a fantastic memory for first names), they would then turn and leave. They had checked in. They had paid their respects. And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was dwelling simultaneously in two worlds that were not contemporary. - -On the one hand he is the swinger -- as he is when talking and joking with Sammy Davis, Jr., Richard Conte, Liza Minelli, Bernie Massi, or any of the other show-business people who get to sit at the table; on the other, as when he is nodding or waving to his paisanos who are close to him (Al Silvani, a boxing manager who works with Sinatra's film company; Dominic Di Bona, his wardrobe man; Ed Pucci, a 300-pound former football lineman who is his aide-de-camp), Frank Sinatra is Il Padrone. Or better still, he is what in traditional Sicily have long been called uomini rispettati -- men of respect: men who are both majestic and humble, men who are loved by all and are very generous by nature, men whose hands are kissed as they walk from village to village, men who would personally go out of their way to redress a wrong. - -Frank Sinatra does things personally. At Christmas time, he will personally pick dozens of presents for his close friends and family, remembering the type of jewelry they like, their favorite colors, the sizes of their shirts and dresses. When a musician friend's house was destroyed and his wife was killed in a Los Angeles mud slide a little more than a year ago, Sinatra personally came to his aid, finding the musician a new home, paying whatever hospital bills were left unpaid by the insurance, then personally supervising the furnishing of the new home down to the replacing of the silverware, the linen, the purchase of new clothing. - -The same Sinatra who did this can, within the same hour, explode in a towering rage of intolerance should a small thing be incorrectly done for him by one of his paisanos. For example, when one of his men brought him a frankfurter with catsup on it, which Sinatra apparently abhors, he angrily threw the bottle at the man, splattering catsup all over him. Most of the men who work around Sinatra are big. But this never seems to intimidate Sinatra nor curb his impetuous behavior with them when he is mad. They will never take a swing back at him. He is Il Padrone. - -At other times, aiming to please, his men will overreact to his desires: when he casually observed that his big orange desert jeep in Palm Springs seemed in need of a new painting, the word was swiftly passed down through the channels, becoming ever more urgent as it went, until finally it was a command that the jeep be painted now, immediately, yesterday. To accomplish this would require the hiring of a special crew of painters to work all night, at overtime rates; which, in turn, meant that the order had to be bucked back up the line for further approval. When it finally got back to Sinatra's desk, he did not know what it was all about; after he had figured it out he confessed, with a tired look on his face, that he did not care when the hell they painted the jeep. - -Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct -- suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow. A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life's Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra's California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces. Suddenly, Miss Hoag recalled, Sinatra's daughter cried, "Oh, that was one of my mother's favorite..." -- but before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while forty other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around Jane Hoag and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, "That's okay, kid." - -NOW SINATRA SAID A FEW words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra's other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra. - -The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers. - -It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60. - -Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar. - -Finally Sinatra could not contain himself. - -"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?" - -"No," Ellison said. - -"Spanish?" - -"No." - -"Are they English boots?" - -"Look, I donno, man," Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again. - -Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra's shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: "You expecting a storm?" - -Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. "Look, is there any reason why you're talking to me?" - -"I don't like the way you're dressed," Sinatra said. - -"Hate to shake you up," Ellison said, "but I dress to suit myself." - -Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, "Com'on, Harlan, let's get out of here," and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, "Yeah, com'on." - -But Ellison stood his ground. - -Sinatra said, "What do you do?" - -"I'm a plumber," Ellison said. - -"No, no, he's not," another young man quickly yelled from across the table. "He wrote The Oscar." - -"Oh, yeah," Sinatra said, "well I've seen it, and it's a piece of crap." - -"That's strange," Ellison said, "because they haven't even released it yet." - -"Well, I've seen it," Sinatra repeated, "and it's a piece of crap." - -Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, "Com'on, kid, I don't want you in this room." - -"Hey," Sinatra interrupted Dexter, "can't you see I'm talking to this guy?" - -Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, "Why do you persist in tormenting me?" - -The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it -- and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom. - -"I don't want anybody in here without coats and ties," Sinatra snapped. - -The assistant manager nodded, and walked back to his office. - -IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER. It was the beginning of another nervous day for Sinatra's press agent, Jim Mahoney. Mahoney had a headache, and he was worried but not over the Sinatra-Ellison incident of the night before. At the time Mahoney had been with his wife at a table in the other room, and possibly he had not even been aware of the little drama. The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life -- as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra. - -It was just as well that Mahoney had not been in the poolroom; he had enough on his mind today. He was worried about Sinatra's cold and worried about the controversial CBS documentary that, despite Sinatra's protests and withdrawal of permission, would be shown on television in less than two weeks. The newspapers this morning were full of hints that Sinatra might sue the network, and Mahoney's phones were ringing without pause, and now he was plugged into New York talking to the Daily News's Kay Gardella, saying: "...that's right, Kay...they made a gentleman's agreement to not ask certain questions about Frank's private life, and then Cronkite went right ahead: 'Frank, tell me about those associations.' That question, Kay -- out! That question should never have been asked...." - -As he spoke, Mahoney leaned back in his leather chair, his head shaking slowly. He is a powerfully built man of thirty-seven; he has a round, ruddy face, a heavy jaw, and narrow pale eyes, and he might appear pugnacious if he did not speak with such clear, soft sincerity and if he were not so meticulous about his clothes. His suits and shoes are superbly tailored, which was one of the first things Sinatra noticed about him, and in his spacious office opposite the bar is a red-muff electrical shoe polisher and a pair of brown wooden shoulders on a stand over which Mahoney can drape his jackets. Near the bar is an autographed photograph of President Kennedy and a few pictures of Frank Sinatra, but there are none of Sinatra in any other rooms in Mahoney's public-relations agency; there once was a large photograph of him hanging in the reception room but this apparently bruised the egos of some of Mahoney's other movie-star clients and, since Sinatra never shows up at the agency anyway, the photograph was removed. - -Still, Sinatra seems ever present, and if Mahoney did not have legitimate worries about Sinatra, as he did today, he could invent them -- and, as worry aids, he surrounds himself with little mementos of moments in the past when he did worry. In his shaving kit there is a two-year-old box of sleeping tablets dispensed by a Reno druggist -- the date on the bottle marks the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr. There is on a table in Mahoney's office a mounted wood reproduction of Frank Sinatra's ransom note written on the aforementioned occasion. One of Mahoney's mannerisms, when he is sitting at his desk worrying, is to tinker with the tiny toy train he keeps in front of him -- the train is a souvenir from the Sinatra film, Von Ryan's Express; it is to men who are close to Sinatra what the PT-109 tie clasps are to men who were close to Kennedy -- and Mahoney then proceeds to roll the little train back and forth on the six inches of track; back and forth, back and forth, click-clack-click-clack. It is his Queeg-thing. - -Now Mahoney quickly put aside the little train. His secretary told him there was a very important call on the line. Mahoney picked it up, and his voice was even softer and more sincere than before. "Yes, Frank," he said. "Right...right...yes, Frank...." - -When Mahoney put down the phone, quietly, he announced that Frank Sinatra had left in his private jet to spend the weekend at his home in Palm Springs, which is a sixteen-minute flight from his home in Los Angeles. Mahoney was now worried again. The Lear jet that Sinatra's pilot would be flying was identical, Mahoney said, to the one that had just crashed in another part of California. - -ON THE FOLLOWING Monday, a cloudy and unseasonably cool California day, more than one hundred people gathered inside a white television studio, an enormous room dominated by a white stage, white walls, and with dozens of lights and lamps dangling: it rather resembled a gigantic operating room. In this room, within an hour or so, NBC was scheduled to begin taping a one-hour show that would be televised in color on the night of November 24 and would highlight, as much as it could in the limited time, the twenty-five-year career of Frank Sinatra as a public entertainer. It would not attempt to probe, as the forthcoming CBS Sinatra documentary allegedly would, that area of Sinatra's life that he regards as private. The NBC show would be mainly an hour of Sinatra singing some of the hits that carried him from Hoboken to Hollywood, a show that would be interrupted only now and then by a few film clips and commercials for Budweiser beer. Prior to his cold, Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers -- in a sense, he was battling The Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney's agency stressed this, reading: "If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons...it should be refreshing, to consider the entertainment value of a video special titled Sinatra -- A Man and His Music...." - -But now in this NBC studio in Los Angeles, there was an atmosphere of anticipation and tension because of the uncertainty of the Sinatra voice. The forty-three musicians in Nelson Riddle's orchestra had already arrived and some were up on the white platform warming up. Dwight Hemion, a youthful sandy-haired director who had won praise for his television special on Barbra Streisand, was seated in the glass-enclosed control booth that overlooked the orchestra and stage. The camera crews, technical teams, security guards, Budweiser ad men were also standing between the floor lamps and cameras, waiting, as were a dozen or so ladies who worked as secretaries in other parts of the building but had sneaked away so they could watch this. - -A few minutes before eleven o'clock, word spread quickly through the long corridor into the big studio that Sinatra was spotted walking through the parking lot and was on his way, and was looking fine. There seemed great relief among the group that was gathered; but when the lean, sharply dressed figure of the man got closer, and closer, they saw to their dismay that it was not Frank Sinatra. It was his double. Johnny Delgado. - -Delgado walks like Sinatra, has Sinatra's build, and from certain facial angles does resemble Sinatra. But he seems a rather shy individual. Fifteen years ago, early in his acting career, Delgado applied for a role in From Here to Eternity. He was hired, finding out later that he was to be Sinatra's double. In Sinatra's latest film, Assault on a Queen, a story in which Sinatra and some fellow conspirators attempt to hijack the Queen Mary, Johnny Delgado doubles for Sinatra in some water scenes; and now, in this NBC studio, his job was to stand under the hot television lights marking Sinatra's spots on the stage for the camera crews. - -Five minutes later, the real Frank Sinatra walked in. His face was pale, his blue eyes seemed a bit watery. He had been unable to rid himself of the cold, but he was going to try to sing anyway because the schedule was tight and thousands of dollars were involved at this moment in the assembling of the orchestra and crews and the rental of the studio. But when Sinatra, on his way to his small rehearsal room to warm up his voice, looked into the studio and saw that the stage and orchestra's platform were not close together, as he had specifically requested, his lips tightened and he was obviously very upset. A few moments later, from his rehearsal room, could be heard the pounding of his fist against the top of the piano and the voice of his accompanist, Bill Miller, saying, softly, "Try not to upset yourself, Frank." - -Later Jim Mahoney and another man walked in, and there was talk of Dorothy Kilgallen's death in New York earlier that morning. She had been an ardent foe of Sinatra for years, and he became equally uncomplimentary about her in his nightclub act, and now, though she was dead, he did not compromise his feelings. "Dorothy Kilgallen's dead," he repeated, walking out of the room toward the studio. "Well, guess I got to change my whole act." - -When he strolled into the studio the musicians all picked up their instruments and stiffened in their seats. Sinatra cleared his throat a few times and then, after rehearsing a few ballads with the orchestra, he sang "Don't Worry About Me" to his satisfaction and, being uncertain of how long his voice could last, suddenly became impatient. - -"Why don't we tape this mother?" he called out, looking up toward the glass booth where the director, Dwight Hemion, and his staff were sitting. Their heads seemed to be down, focusing on the control board. - -"Why don't we tape this mother?" Sinatra repeated. - -The production stage manager, who stands near the camera wearing a headset, repeated Sinatra's words exactly into his line to the control room: "Why don't we tape this mother?" - -Hemion did not answer. Possibly his switch was off. It was hard to know because of the obscuring reflections the lights made against the glass booth. - -"Why don't we put on a coat and tie," said Sinatra, then wearing a high-necked yellow pullover, "and tape this...." - -Suddenly Hemion's voice came over the sound amplifier, very calmly: "Okay, Frank, would you mind going back over...." - -"Yes, I would mind going back," Sinatra snapped. - -The silence from Hemion's end, which lasted a second or two, was then again interrupted by Sinatra saying, "When we stop doing things around here the way we did them in 1950, maybe we..." and Sinatra continued to tear into Hemion, condemning as well the lack of modern techniques in putting such shows together; then, possibly not wanting to use his voice unnecessarily, he stopped. And Dwight Hemion, very patient, so patient and calm that one would assume he had not heard anything that Sinatra had just said, outlined the opening part of the show. And Sinatra a few minutes later was reading his opening remarks, words that would follow "Without a Song," off the large idiot-cards being held near the camera. Then, this done, he prepared to do the same thing on camera. - -"Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 1," called a man with a clapboard, jumping in front of the camera -- clap -- then jumping away again. - -"Did you ever stop to think," Sinatra began, "what the world would be like without a song?... It would be a pretty dreary place.... Gives you something to think about, doesn't it?..." - -Sinatra stopped. - -"Excuse me," he said, adding, "Boy, I need a drink." - -They tried it again. - -"Frank Sinatra Show, Act I, Page 10, Take 2," yelled the jumping guy with the clapboard. - -"Did you ever stop to think what the world would be like without a song?..." Frank Sinatra read it through this time without stopping. Then he rehearsed a few more songs, once or twice interrupting the orchestra when a certain instrumental sound was not quite what he wanted. It was hard to tell how well his voice was going to hold up, for this was early in the show; up to this point, however, everybody in the room seemed pleased, particularly when he sang an old sentimental favorite written more than twenty years ago by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers -- "Nancy," inspired by the first of Sinatra's three children when she was just a few years old. - -If I don't see her each day -I miss her.... -Gee what a thrill -Each time I kiss her.... - -As Sinatra sang these words, though he has sung them hundreds and hundreds of times in the past, it was suddenly obvious to everybody in the studio that something quite special must be going on inside the man, because something quite special was coming out. He was singing now, cold or no cold, with power and warmth, he was letting himself go, the public arrogance was gone, the private side was in this song about the girl who, it is said, understands him better than anybody else, and is the only person in front of whom he can be unashamedly himself. - -Nancy is twenty-five. She lives alone, her marriage to singer Tommy Sands having ended in divorce. Her home is in a Los Angeles suburb and she is now making her third film and is recording for her father's record company. She sees him every day; or, if not, he telephones, no matter if it be from Europe or Asia. When Sinatra's singing first became popular on radio, stimulating the swooners, Nancy would listen at home and cry. When Sinatra's first marriage broke up in 1951 and he left home, Nancy was the only child old enough to remember him as a father. She also saw him with Ava Gardner, Juliet Prowse, Mia Farrow, many others, has gone on double dates with him.... - -She takes the winter -And makes it summer.... -Summer could take -Some lessons from her.... - -Nancy now also sees him visiting at home with his first wife, the former Nancy Barbato, a plasterer's daughter from Jersey City whom he married in 1939 when he was earning $25 a week singing at the Rustic Cabin near Hoboken. - -The first Mrs. Sinatra, a striking woman who has never remarried ("When you've been married to Frank Sinatra..." she once explained to a friend), lives in a magnificent home in Los Angeles with her younger daughter, Tina, who is seventeen. There is no bitterness, only great respect and affection between Sinatra and his first wife, and he has long been welcome in her home and has even been known to wander in at odd hours, stoke the fire, lie on the sofa, and fall asleep. Frank Sinatra can fall asleep anywhere, something he learned when he used to ride bumpy roads with band buses; he also learned at that time, when sitting in a tuxedo, how to pinch the trouser creases in the back and tuck the jacket under and out, and fall asleep perfectly pressed. But he does not ride buses anymore, and his daughter Nancy, who in her younger days felt rejected when he slept on the sofa instead of giving attention to her, later realized that the sofa was one of the few places left in the world where Frank Sinatra could get any privacy, where his famous face would neither be stared at nor cause an abnormal reaction in others. She realized, too, that things normal have always eluded her father: his childhood was one of loneliness and a drive toward attention, and since attaining it he has never again been certain of solitude. Upon looking out the window of a home he once owned in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, he would occasionally see the faces of teen-agers peeking in; and in 1944, after moving to California and buying a home behind a ten-foot fence on Lake Toluca, he discovered that the only way to escape the telephone and other intrusions was to board his paddle boat with a few friends, a card table and a case of beer, and stay afloat all afternoon. But he has tried, insofar as it has been possible, to be like everyone else, Nancy says. He wept on her wedding day, he is very sentimental and sensitive.... - -WHAT THE HELL are you doing up there, Dwight?" - -Silence from the control booth. - -"Got a party or something going on up there, Dwight?" - -Sinatra stood on the stage, arms folded, glaring up across the cameras toward Hemion. Sinatra had sung Nancy with probably all he had in his voice on this day. The next few numbers contained raspy notes, and twice his voice completely cracked. But now Hemion was in the control booth out of communication; then he was down in the studio walking over to where Sinatra stood. A few minutes later they both left the studio and were on the way up to the control booth. The tape was replayed for Sinatra. He watched only about five minutes of it before he started to shake his head. Then he said to Hemion: "Forget it, just forget it. You're wasting your time. What you got there," Sinatra said, nodding to the singing image of himself on the television screen, "is a man with a cold." Then he left the control booth, ordering that the whole day's performance be scrubbed and future taping postponed until he had recovered. - -SOON THE WORD SPREAD like an emotional epidemic down through Sinatra's staff, then fanned out through Hollywood, then was heard across the nation in Jilly's saloon, and also on the other side of the Hudson River in the homes of Frank Sinatra's parents and his other relatives and friends in New Jersey. - -When Frank Sinatra spoke with his father on the telephone and said he was feeling awful, the elder Sinatra reported that he was also feeling awful: that his left arm and fist were so stiff with a circulatory condition he could barely use them, adding that the ailment might be the result of having thrown too many left hooks during his days as a bantamweight almost fifty years ago. - -Martin Sinatra, a ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania, boxed under the name of "Marty O'Brien." In those days, in those places, with the Irish running the lower reaches of city life, it was not uncommon for Italians to wind up with such names. Most of the Italians and Sicilians who migrated to America just prior to the 1900's were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the building-trades unions dominated by the Irish, and were somewhat intimidated by the Irish police, Irish priests, Irish politicians. - -One notable exception was Frank Sinatra's mother, Dolly, a large and very ambitious woman who was brought to this country at two months of age by her mother and father, a lithographer from Genoa. In later years Dolly Sinatra, possessing a round red face and blue eyes, was often mistaken for being Irish, and surprised many at the speed with which she swung her heavy handbag at anyone uttering "Wop." - -By playing skillful politics with North Jersey's Democratic machine, Dolly Sinatra was to become, in her heyday, a kind of Catherine de Medici of Hoboken's third ward. She could always be counted upon to deliver six hundred votes at election time from her Italian neighborhood, and this was her base of power. When she told one of the politicians that she wanted her husband to be appointed to the Hoboken Fire Department, and was told, "But, Dolly, we don't have an opening," she snapped, "Make an opening." - -They did. Years later she requested that her husband be made a captain, and one day she got a call from one of the political bosses that began, "Dolly, congratulations!" - -"For what?" - -"Captain Sinatra." - -"Oh, you finally made him one -- thank you very much." - -Then she called the Hoboken Fire Department. - -"Let me speak to Captain Sinatra," she said. The fireman called Martin Sinatra to the phone, saying, "Marty, I think your wife has gone nuts." When he got on the line, Dolly greeted him: - -"Congratulations, Captain Sinatra!" - -Dolly's only child, christened Francis Albert Sinatra, was born and nearly died on December 12, 1915. It was a difficult birth, and during his first moment on earth he received marks he will carry till death -- the scars on the left side of his neck being the result of a doctor's clumsy forceps, and Sinatra has chosen not to obscure them with surgery. - -After he was six months old, he was reared mainly by his grandmother. His mother had a full-time job as a chocolate dipper with a large firm and was so proficient at it that the firm once offered to send her to the Paris office to train others. While some people in Hoboken remember Frank Sinatra as a lonely child, one who spent many hours on the porch gazing into space, Sinatra was never a slum kid, never in jail, always well-dressed. He had so many pants that some people in Hoboken called him "Slacksey O'Brien." - -Dolly Sinatra was not the sort of Italian mother who could be appeased merely by a child's obedience and good appetite. She made many demands on her son, was always very strict. She dreamed of his becoming an aviation engineer. When she discovered Bing Crosby pictures hanging on his bedroom walls one evening, and learned that her son wished to become a singer too, she became infuriated and threw a shoe at him. Later, finding she could not talk him out of it -- "he takes after me" -- she encouraged his singing. - -Many Italo-American boys of his generation were then shooting for the same star -- they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them: no O'Hara, no Bellow, no Cheever, nor Shaw; yet they could communicate bel canto. This was more in their tradition, no need for a diploma; they could, with a song, someday see their names in lights...Perry Como...Frankie Laine...Tony Bennett...Vic Damone...but none could see it better than Frank Sinatra. - -Though he sang through much of the night at the Rustic Cabin, he was up the next day singing without a fee on New York radio to get more attention. Later he got a job singing with Harry James's band, and it was there in August of 1939 that Sinatra had his first recording hit -- "All or Nothing at All." He became very fond of Harry James and the men in the band, but when he received an offer from Tommy Dorsey, who in those days had probably the best band in the country, Sinatra took it; the job paid $125 a week, and Dorsey knew how to feature a vocalist. Yet Sinatra was very depressed at leaving James's band, and the final night with them was so memorable that, twenty years later, Sinatra could recall the details to a friend: "...the bus pulled out with the rest of the boys at about half-past midnight. I'd said good-bye to them all, and it was snowing, I remember. There was nobody around and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started and I tried to run after the bus. There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band, I hated leaving it...." - -But he did -- as he would leave other warm places, too, in search of something more, never wasting time, trying to do it all in one generation, fighting under his own name, defending underdogs, terrorizing top dogs. He threw a punch at a musician who said something anti-Semitic, espoused the Negro cause two decades before it became fashionable. He also threw a tray of glasses at Buddy Rich when he played the drums too loud. - -Sinatra gave away $50,000 worth of gold cigarette lighters before he was thirty, was living an immigrant's wildest dream of America. He arrived suddenly on the scene when DiMaggio was silent, when paisanos were mournful, were quietly defensive about Hitler in their homeland. Sinatra became, in time, a kind of one-man Anti-Defamation League for Italians in America, the sort of organization that would be unlikely for them because, as the theory goes, they rarely agreed on anything, being extreme individualists: fine as soloists, but not so good in a choir; fine as heroes, but not so good in a parade. - -When many Italian names were used in describing gangsters on a television show, The Untouchables, Sinatra was loud in his disapproval. Sinatra and many thousands of other Italo-Americans were resentful as well when a small-time hoodlum, Joseph Valachi, was brought by Bobby Kennedy into prominence as a Mafia expert, when indeed, from Valachi's testimony on television, he seemed to know less than most waiters on Mulberry Street. Many Italians in Sinatra's circle also regard Bobby Kennedy as something of an Irish cop, more dignified than those in Dolly's day, but no less intimidating. Together with Peter Lawford, Bobby Kennedy is said to have suddenly gotten "cocky" with Sinatra after John Kennedy's election, forgetting the contribution Sinatra had made in both fundraising and in influencing many anti-Irish Italian votes. Lawford and Bobby Kennedy are both suspected of having influenced the late President's decision to stay as a house guest with Bing Crosby instead of Sinatra, as originally planned, a social setback Sinatra may never forget. Peter Lawford has since been drummed out of Sinatra's "summit" in Las Vegas. - -"Yes, my son is like me," Dolly Sinatra says, proudly. "You cross him, he never forgets." And while she concedes his power, she quickly points out, "He can't make his mother do anything she doesn't want to do," adding, "Even today, he wears the same brand of underwear I used to buy him." - -Today Dolly Sinatra is seventy-one years old, a year or two younger than Martin, and all day long people are knocking on the back door of her large home asking her advice, seeking her influence. When she is not seeing people and not cooking in the kitchen, she is looking after her husband, a silent but stubborn man, and telling him to keep his sore left arm resting on the sponge she has placed on the armrest of a soft chair. "Oh, he went to some terrific fires, this guy did," Dolly said to a visitor, nodding with admiration toward her husband in the chair. - -Though Dolly Sinatra has eighty-seven godchildren in Hoboken, and still goes to that city during political campaigns, she now lives with her husband in a beautiful sixteen-room house in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This home was a gift from their son on their fiftieth wedding anniversary three years ago. The home is tastefully furnished and is filled with a remarkable juxtaposition of the pious and the worldly -- photographs of Pope John and Ava Gardner, of Pope Paul and Dean Martin; several statues of saints and holy water, a chair autographed by Sammy Davis, Jr. and bottles of bourbon. In Mrs. Sinatra's jewelry box is a magnificent strand of pearls she had just received from Ava Gardner, whom she liked tremendously as a daughter-in-law and still keeps in touch with and talks about; and hung on the wall is a letter addressed to Dolly and Martin: "The sands of time have turned to gold, yet love continues to unfold like the petals of a rose, in God's garden of life...may God love you thru all eternity. I thank Him, I thank you for the being of one. Your loving son, Francis...." - -Mrs. Sinatra talks to her son on the telephone about once a week, and recently he suggested that, when visiting Manhattan, she make use of his apartment on East Seventy-second Street on the East River. This is an expensive neighborhood of New York even though there is a small factory on the block, but this latter fact was seized upon by Dolly Sinatra as a means of getting back at her son for some unflattering descriptions of his childhood in Hoboken. - -"What -- you want me to stay in your apartment, in that dump?" she asked. "You think I'm going to spend the night in that awful neighborhood?" - -Frank Sinatra got the point, and said, "Excuse me, Mrs. Fort Lee." - -After spending the week in Palm Springs, his cold much better, Frank Sinatra returned to Los Angeles, a lovely city of sun and sex, a Spanish discovery of Mexican misery, a star land of little men and little women sliding in and out of convertibles in tense tight pants. - -Sinatra returned in time to see the long-awaited CBS documentary with his family. At about nine p.m. he drove to the home of his former wife, Nancy, and had dinner with her and their two daughters. Their son, whom they rarely see these days, was out of town. - -Frank, Jr., who is twenty-two, was touring with a band and moving cross country toward a New York engagement at Basin Street East with The Pied Pipers, with whom Frank Sinatra sang when he was with Dorsey's band in the 1940's. Today Frank Sinatra, Jr., whom his father says he named after Franklin D. Roosevelt, lives mostly in hotels, dines each evening in his nightclub dressing room, and sings until two a.m., accepting graciously, because he has no choice, the inevitable comparisons. His voice is smooth and pleasant, and improving with work, and while he is very respectful of his father, he discusses him with objectivity and in an occasional tone of subdued cockiness. - -Concurrent with his father's early fame, Frank, Jr. said, was the creation of a "press-release Sinatra" designed to "set him apart from the common man, separate him from the realities: it was suddenly Sinatra, the electric magnate, Sinatra who is supernormal, not superhuman but supernormal. And here," Frank, Jr. continued, "is the great fallacy, the great bullshit, for Frank Sinatra is normal, is the guy whom you'd meet on a street corner. But this other thing, the supernormal guise, has affected Frank Sinatra as much as anybody who watches one of his television shows, or reads a magazine article about him.... - -"Frank Sinatra's life in the beginning was so normal," he said, "that nobody would have guessed in 1934 that this little Italian kid with the curly hair would become the giant, the monster, the great living legend.... He met my mother one summer on the beach. She was Nancy Barbato, daughter of Mike Barbato, a Jersey City plasterer. And she meets the fireman's son, Frank, one summer day on the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey. Both are Italian, both Roman Catholic, both lower-middle-class summer sweethearts -- it is like a million bad movies starring Frankie Avalon. . . . - -"They have three children. The first child, Nancy, was the most normal of Frank Sinatra's children. Nancy was a cheerleader, went to summer camp, drove a Chevrolet, had the easiest kind of development centered around the home and family. Next is me. My life with the family is very, very normal up until September of 1958 when, in complete contrast to the rearing of both girls, I am put into a college-preparatory school. I am now away from the inner family circle, and my position within has never been remade to this day.... The third child, Tina. And to be dead honest, I really couldn't say what her life is like...." - -The CBS show, narrated by Walter Cronkite, began at ten p.m. A minute before that, the Sinatra family, having finished dinner, turned their chairs around and faced the camera, united for whatever disaster might follow. Sinatra's men in other parts of town, in other parts of the nation, were doing the same thing. Sinatra's lawyer, Milton A. Rudin, smoking a cigar, was watching with a keen eye, an alert legal mind. Other sets were watched by Brad Dexter, Jim Mahoney, Ed Pucci; Sinatra's makeup man, "Shotgun" Britton; his New York representative, Henri Gine; his haberdasher, Richard Carroll; his insurance broker, John Lillie; his valet, George Jacobs, a handsome Negro who, when entertaining girls in his apartment, plays records by Ray Charles. - -And like so much of Hollywood's fear, the apprehension about the CBS show all proved to be without foundation. It was a highly flattering hour that did not deeply probe, as rumors suggested it would, into Sinatra's love life, or the Mafia, or other areas of his private province. While the documentary was not authorized, wrote Jack Gould in the next day's New York Times, "it could have been." - -Immediately after the show, the telephones began to ring throughout the Sinatra system conveying words of joy and relief -- and from New York came Jilly's telegram: "WE RULE THE WORLD!" - -THE NEXT DAY, STANDING in the corridor of the NBC building where he was about to resume taping his show, Sinatra was discussing the CBS show with several of his friends, and he said, "Oh, it was a gas." - -"Yeah, Frank, a helluva show." - -"But I think Jack Gould was right in The Times today," Sinatra said. "There should have been more on the man, not so much on the music...." - -They nodded, nobody mentioning the past hysteria in the Sinatra world when it seemed CBS was zeroing in on the man; they just nodded and two of them laughed about Sinatra's apparently having gotten the word "bird" on the show -- this being a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, "How's your bird?"; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, "Just got a little water on my bird"; and under a large photograph of him holding a whisky bottle, a photo that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads: "Drink, Dickie! It's good for your bird." In the song, "Come Fly with Me," Sinatra sometimes alters the lyrics -- "...just say the words and we'll take our birds down to Acapulco Bay...." - -Ten minutes later Sinatra, following the orchestra, walked into the NBC studio, which did not resemble in the slightest the scene here of eight days ago. On this occasion Sinatra was in fine voice, he cracked jokes between numbers, nothing could upset him. Once, while he was singing "How Can I Ignore the Girl Next Door," standing on the stage next to a tree, a television camera mounted on a vehicle came rolling in too close and plowed against the tree. - -"Kee-rist!" yelled one of the technical assistants. - -But Sinatra seemed hardly to notice it. - -"We've had a slight accident," he said, calmly. Then he began the song all over from the beginning. - -When the show was over, Sinatra watched the rerun on the monitor in the control room. He was very pleased, shaking hands with Dwight Hemion and his assistants. Then the whisky bottles were opened in Sinatra's dressing room. Pat Lawford was there, and so were Andy Williams and a dozen others. The telegrams and telephone calls continued to be received from all over the country with praise for the CBS show. There was even a call, Mahoney said, from the CBS producer, Don Hewitt, with whom Sinatra had been so angry a few days before. And Sinatra was still angry, feeling that CBS had betrayed him, though the show itself was not objectionable. - -"Shall I drop a line to Hewitt?" Mahoney asked. - -"Can you send a fist through the mail?" Sinatra asked. - -He has everything, he cannot sleep, he gives nice gifts, he is not happy, but he would not trade, even for happiness, what he is.... - -He is a piece of our past -- but only we have aged, he hasn't...we are dogged by domesticity, he isn't...we have compunctions, he doesn't...it is our fault, not his.... - -He controls the menus of every Italian restaurant in Los Angeles; if you want North Italian cooking, fly to Milan.... - -Men follow him, imitate him, fight to be near him...there is something of the locker room, the barracks about him...bird...bird.... - -He believes you must play it big, wide, expansively -- the more open you are, the more you take in, your dimensions deepen, you grow, you become more what you are -- bigger, richer.... - -"He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it." --Nancy Sinatra, Jr. - -"He is calm on the outside -- inwardly a million things are happening to him." --Dick Bakalyan - -"He has an insatiable desire to live every moment to its fullest because, I guess, he feels that right around the corner is extinction." --Brad Dexter - -"All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst's couch." --Ava Gardner - -"We weren't mother and son -- we were buddies." --Dolly Sinatra - -"I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel." --Frank Sinatra - -FRANK SINATRA WAS TIRED of all the talk, the gossip, the theory -- tired of reading quotes about himself, of hearing what people were saying about him all over town. It had been a tedious three weeks, he said, and now he just wanted to get away, go to Las Vegas, let off some steam. So he hopped in his jet, soared over the California hills across the Nevada flats, then over miles and miles of desert to The Sands and the Clay-Patterson fight. - -On the eve of the fight he stayed up all night and slept through most of the afternoon, though his recorded voice could be heard singing in the lobby of The Sands, in the gambling casino, even in the toilets, being interrupted every few bars however by the paging public address: "...Telephone call for Mr. Ron Fish, Mr. Ron Fish...with a ribbon of gold in her hair.... Telephone call for Mr. Herbert Rothstein, Mr. Herbert Rothstein...memories of a time so bright, keep me sleepless through dark endless nights...." - -Standing around in the lobby of The Sands and other hotels up and down the strip on this afternoon before the fight were the usual prefight prophets: the gamblers, the old champs, the little cigar butts from Eighth Avenue, the sportswriters who knock the big fights all year but would never miss one, the novelists who seem always to be identifying with one boxer or another, the local prostitutes assisted by some talent in from Los Angeles, and also a young brunette in a wrinkled black cocktail dress who was at the bell captain's desk crying, "But I want to speak to Mr. Sinatra." - -"He's not here," the bell captain said. - -"Won't you put me through to his room?" - -"There are no messages going through, Miss," he said, and then she turned, unsteadily, seeming close to tears, and walked through the lobby into the big noisy casino crowded with men interested only in money. - -Shortly before seven p.m., Jack Entratter, a big grey-haired man who operates The Sands, walked into the gambling room to tell some men around the blackjack table that Sinatra was getting dressed. He also said that he'd been unable to get front-row seats for everybody, and so some of the men -- including Leo Durocher, who had a date, and Joey Bishop, who was accompanied by his wife -- would not be able to fit in Frank Sinatra's row but would have to take seats in the third row. When Entratter walked over to tell this to Joey Bishop, Bishop's face fell. He did not seem angry; he merely looked at Entratter with an empty silence, seeming somewhat stunned. - -"Joey, I'm sorry," Entratter said when the silence persisted, "but we couldn't get more than six together in the front row." - -Bishop still said nothing. But when they all appeared at the fight, Joey Bishop was in the front row, his wife in the third. - -The fight, called a holy war between Muslims and Christians, was preceded by the introduction of three balding ex-champions, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston -- and then there was "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung by another man from out of the past, Eddie Fisher. It had been more than fourteen years ago, but Sinatra could still remember every detail: Eddie Fisher was then the new king of the baritones, with Billy Eckstine and Guy Mitchell right with him, and Sinatra had been long counted out. One day he remembered walking into a broadcasting studio past dozens of Eddie Fisher fans waiting outside the hall, and when they saw Sinatra they began to jeer, "Frankie, Frankie, I'm swooning, I'm swooning." This was also the time when he was selling only about 30,000 records a year, when he was dreadfully miscast as a funny man on his television show, and when he recorded such disasters as "Mama Will Bark," with Dagmar. - -"I growled and barked on the record," Sinatra said, still horrified by the thought. "The only good it did me was with the dogs." - -His voice and his artistic judgment were incredibly bad in 1952, but even more responsible for his decline, say his friends, was his pursuit of Ava Gardner. She was the big movie queen then, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Sinatra's daughter Nancy recalls seeing Ava swimming one day in her father's pool, then climbing out of the water with that fabulous body, walking slowly to the fire, leaning over it for a few moments, and then it suddenly seemed that her long dark hair was all dry, miraculously and effortlessly back in place. - -With most women Sinatra dates, his friends say, he never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now -- or will do for them later. With Ava Gardner, it was different. He could do nothing for her later. She was on top. If Sinatra learned anything from his experience with her, he possibly learned that when a proud man is down a woman cannot help. Particularly a woman on top. - -Nevertheless, despite a tired voice, some deep emotion seeped into his singing during this time. One particular song that is well remembered even now is "I'm a Fool to Want You," and a friend who was in the studio when Sinatra recorded it recalled: "Frank was really worked up that night. He did the song in one take, then turned around and walked out of the studio and that was that...." - -Sinatra's manager at that time, a former song plugger named Hank Sanicola, said, "Ava loved Frank, but not the way he loved her. He needs a great deal of love. He wants it twenty-four hours a day, he must have people around -- Frank is that kind of guy." Ava Gardner, Sanicola said, "was very insecure. She feared she could not really hold a man...twice he went chasing her to Africa, wasting his own career...." - -"Ava didn't want Frank's men hanging around all the time," another friend said, "and this got him mad. With Nancy he used to be able to bring the whole band home with him, and Nancy, the good Italian wife, would never complain -- she'd just make everybody a plate of spaghetti." - -In 1953, after almost two years of marriage, Sinatra and Ava Gardner were divorced. Sinatra's mother reportedly arranged a reconciliation, but if Ava was willing, Frank Sinatra was not. He was seen with other women. The balance had shifted. Somewhere during this period Sinatra seemed to change from the kid singer, the boy actor in the sailor suit, to a man. Even before he had won the Oscar in 1953 for his role in From Here to Eternity, some flashes of his old talent were coming through -- in his recording of "The Birth of the Blues," in his Riviera-nightclub appearance that jazz critics enthusiastically praised; and there was also a trend now toward L.P.'s and away from the quick three-minute deal, and Sinatra's concert style would have capitalized on this with or without an Oscar. - -In 1954, totally committed to his talent once more, Frank Sinatra was selected Metronome's "Singer of the Year," and later he won the U.P.I. disc-jockey poll, unseating Eddie Fisher -- who now, in Las Vegas, having sung "The Star-Spangled Banner," climbed out of the ring, and the fight began. - -Floyd Patterson chased Clay around the ring in the first round, but was unable to reach him, and from then on he was Clay's toy, the bout ending in a technical knockout in the twelfth round. A half hour later, nearly everybody had forgotten about the fight and was back at the gambling tables or lining up to buy tickets for the Dean Martin-Sinatra-Bishop nightclub routine on the stage of The Sands. This routine, which includes Sammy Davis, Jr. when he is in town, consists of a few songs and much cutting up, all of it very informal, very special, and rather ethnic -- Martin, a drink in hand, asking Bishop: "Did you ever see a Jew jitsu?"; and Bishop, playing a Jewish waiter, warning the two Italians to watch out "because I got my own group -- the Matzia." - -Then after the last show at The Sands, the Sinatra crowd, which now numbered about twenty -- and included Jilly, who had flown in from New York; Jimmy Cannon, Sinatra's favorite sports columnist; Harold Gibbons, a Teamster official expected to take over if Hoffa goes to jail -- all got into a line of cars and headed for another club. It was three o'clock. The night was young. - -They stopped at The Sahara, taking a long table near the back, and listened to a baldheaded little comedian named Don Rickles, who is probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one -- it is too offensive to be offensive. Spotting Eddie Fisher among the audience, Rickles proceeded to ridicule him as a lover, saying it was no wonder that he could not handle Elizabeth Taylor; and when two businessmen in the audience acknowledged that they were Egyptian, Rickles cut into them for their country's policy toward Israel; and he strongly suggested that the woman seated at one table with her husband was actually a hooker. - -When the Sinatra crowd walked in, Don Rickles could not be more delighted. Pointing to Jilly, Rickles yelled: "How's it feel to be Frank's tractor?... Yeah, Jilly keeps walking in front of Frank clearing the way." Then, nodding to Durocher, Rickles said, "Stand up Leo, show Frank how you slide." Then he focused on Sinatra, not failing to mention Mia Farrow, nor that he was wearing a toupee, nor to say that Sinatra was washed up as a singer, and when Sinatra laughed, everybody laughed, and Rickles pointed toward Bishop: "Joey Bishop keeps checking with Frank to see what's funny." - -Then, after Rickles told some Jewish jokes, Dean Martin stood up and yelled, "Hey, you're always talking about the Jews, never about the Italians," and Rickles cut him off with, "What do we need the Italians for -- all they do is keep the flies off our fish." - -Sinatra laughed, they all laughed, and Rickles went on this way for nearly an hour until Sinatra, standing up, said, "All right, com'on, get this thing over with. I gotta go." - -"Shaddup and sit down!" Rickles snapped. "I've had to listen to you sing...." - -"Who do you think you're talking to?" Sinatra yelled back. - -"Dick Haymes," Rickles replied, and Sinatra laughed again, and then Dean Martin, pouring a bottle of whisky over his head, entirely drenching his tuxedo, pounded the table. - -"Who would ever believe that staggering would make a star?" Rickles said, but Martin called out, "Hey, I wanna make a speech." - -"Shaddup." - -"No, Don, I wanna tell ya," Dean Martin persisted, "that I think you're a great performer." - -"Well, thank you, Dean," Rickles said, seeming pleased. - -"But don't go by me," Martin said, plopping down into his seat, "I'm drunk." - -"I'll buy that," Rickles said. - -BY FOUR A.M. FRANK SINATRA led the group out of The Sahara, some of them carrying their glasses of whisky with them, sipping it along the sidewalk and in the cars; then, returning to The Sands, they walked into the gambling casino. It was still packed with people, the roulette wheels spinning, the crapshooters screaming in the far corner. - -Frank Sinatra, holding a shot glass of bourbon in his left hand, walked through the crowd. He, unlike some of his friends, was perfectly pressed, his tuxedo tie precisely pointed, his shoes unsmudged. He never seems to lose his dignity, never lets his guard completely down no matter how much he has drunk, nor how long he has been up. He never sways when he walks, like Dean Martin, nor does he ever dance in the aisles or jump up on tables, like Sammy Davis. - -A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there. There is always a part of him, though sometimes a small part, that remains Il Padrone. Even now, resting his shot glass on the blackjack table, facing the dealer, Sinatra stood a bit back from the table, not leaning against it. He reached under his tuxedo jacket into his trouser pocket and came up with a thick but clean wad of bills. Gently he peeled off a one-hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the green-felt table. The dealer dealt him two cards. Sinatra called for a third card, overbid, lost the hundred. - -Without a change of expression, Sinatra put down a second hundred-dollar bill. He lost that. Then he put down a third, and lost that. Then he placed two one-hundred-dollar bills on the table and lost those. Finally, putting his sixth hundred-dollar bill on the table, and losing it, Sinatra moved away from the table, nodding to the man, and announcing, "Good dealer." - -The crowd that had gathered around him now opened up to let him through. But a woman stepped in front of him, handing him a piece of paper to autograph. He signed it and then he said, "Thank you." - -In the rear of The Sands' large dining room was a long table reserved for Sinatra. The dining room was fairly empty at this hour, with perhaps two dozen other people in the room, including a table of four unescorted young ladies sitting near Sinatra. On the other side of the room, at another long table, sat seven men shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, two of them wearing dark glasses, all of them eating quietly, speaking hardly a word, just sitting and eating and missing nothing. - -The Sinatra party, after getting settled and having a few more drinks, ordered something to eat. The table was about the same size as the one reserved for Sinatra whenever he is at Jilly's in New York; and the people seated around this table in Las Vegas were many of the same people who are often seen with Sinatra at Jilly's or at a restaurant in California, or in Italy, or in New Jersey, or wherever Sinatra happens to be. When Sinatra sits to dine, his trusted friends are close; and no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there is something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood -- only now he can take his neighborhood with him. - -In some ways, this quasi-family affair at a reserved table in a public place is the closest thing Sinatra now has to home life. Perhaps, having had a home and left it, this approximation is as close as he cares to come; although this does not seem precisely so because he speaks with such warmth about his family, keeps in close touch with his first wife, and insists that she make no decision without first consulting him. He is always eager to place his furniture or other mementos of himself in her home or his daughter Nancy's, and he also is on amiable terms with Ava Gardner. When he was in Italy making Von Ryan's Express, they spent some time together, being pursued wherever they went by the paparazzi. It was reported then that the paparazzi had made Sinatra a collective offer of $16,000 if he would pose with Ava Gardner; Sinatra was said to have made a counter offer of $32,000 if he could break one paparazzi arm and leg. - -While Sinatra is often delighted that he can be in his home completely without people, enabling him to read and think without interruption, there are occasions when he finds himself alone at night, and not by choice. He may have dialed a half-dozen women, and for one reason or another they are all unavailable. So he will call his valet, George Jacobs. - -"I'll be coming home for dinner tonight, George." - -"How many will there be?" - -"Just myself," Sinatra will say. "I want something light, I'm not very hungry." - -George Jacobs is a twice-divorced man of thirty-six who resembles Billy Eckstine. He has traveled all over the world with Sinatra and is devoted to him. Jacobs lives in a comfortable bachelor's apartment off Sunset Boulevard around the corner from Whiskey à Go Go, and he is known around town for the assortment of frisky California girls he has as friends -- a few of whom, he concedes, were possibly drawn to him initially because of his closeness to Frank Sinatra. - -When Sinatra arrives, Jacobs will serve him dinner in the dining room. Then Sinatra will tell Jacobs that he is free to go home. If Sinatra, on such evenings, should ask Jacobs to stay longer, or to play a few hands of poker, he would be happy to do so. But Sinatra never does. - -THIS WAS HIS SECOND night in Las Vegas, and Frank Sinatra sat with friends in The Sands' dining room until nearly eight a.m. He slept through much of the day, then flew back to Los Angeles, and on the following morning he was driving his little golf cart through the Paramount Pictures movie lot. He was scheduled to complete two final scenes with the sultry blonde actress, Virna Lisi, in the film Assault on a Queen. As he maneuvered the little vehicle up the road between the big studio buildings, he spotted Steve Rossi who, with his comedy partner Marty Allen, was making a film in an adjoining studio with Nancy Sinatra. - -"Hey, Dag," he yelled to Rossi, "stop kissing Nancy." - -"It's part of the film, Frank," Rossi said, turning as he walked. - -"In the garage?" - -"It's my Dago blood, Frank." - -"Well, cool it," Sinatra said, winking, then cutting his golf cart around a corner and parking it outside a big drab building within which the scenes for Assault would be filmed. - -"Where's the fat director?" Sinatra called out, striding into the studio that was crowded with dozens of technical assistants and actors all gathered around cameras. The director, Jack Donohue, a large man who has worked with Sinatra through twenty-two years on one production or other, has had headaches with this film. The script had been chopped, the actors seemed restless, and Sinatra had become bored. But now there were only two scenes left -- a short one to be filmed in the pool, and a longer and passionate one featuring Sinatra and Virna Lisi to be shot on a simulated beach. - -The pool scene, which dramatizes a situation where Sinatra and his hijackers fail in their attempt to sack the Queen Mary, went quickly and well. After Sinatra had been kept in the water shoulder-high for a few minutes, he said, "Let's move it, fellows -- it's cold in this water, and I've just gotten over one cold." - -So the camera crews moved in closer, Virna Lisi splashed next to Sinatra in the water, and Jack Donohue yelled to his assistants operating the fans, "Get the waves going," and another man gave the command, "Agitate!" and Sinatra broke out in song. "Agitate in rhythm," then quieted down just before the cameras started to roll. - -Frank Sinatra was on the beach in the next situation, supposedly gazing up at the stars, and Virna Lisi was to approach him, toss one of her shoes near him to announce her presence, then sit near him and prepare for a passionate session. Just before beginning, Miss Lisi made a practice toss of her shoe toward the prone figure of Sinatra sprawled on the beach. As she tossed her shoe, Sinatra called out, "Hit me in my bird and I'm going home." - -Virna Lisi, who understands little English and certainly none of Sinatra's special vocabulary, looked confused, but everybody behind the camera laughed. She threw the shoe toward him. It twirled in the air, landed on his stomach. - -"Well, that's about three inches too high," he announced. She again was puzzled by the laughter behind the camera. - -Then Jack Donohue had them rehearse their lines, and Sinatra, still very charged from the Las Vegas trip, and anxious to get the cameras rolling, said, "Let's try one." Donohue, not certain that Sinatra and Lisi knew their lines well enough, nevertheless said okay, and an assistant with a clapboard called, "419, Take 1," and Virna Lisi approached with the shoe, tossed it at Frank lying on the beach. It fell short of his thigh, and Sinatra's right eye raised almost imperceptibly, but the crew got the message, smiled. - -"What do the stars tell you tonight?" Miss Lisi said, delivering her first line, and sitting next to Sinatra on the beach. - -"The stars tell me tonight I'm an idiot," Sinatra said, "a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing...." - -"Cut," Donohue said. There were some microphone shadows on the sand, and Virna Lisi was not sitting in the proper place near Sinatra. - -"419, Take 2," the clapboard man called. - -Miss Lisi again approached, threw the shoe at him, this time falling short -- Sinatra exhaling only slightly -- and she said, "What do the stars tell you tonight?" - -"The stars tell me I'm an idiot, a gold-plated idiot to get mixed up in this thing...." Then, according to the script, Sinatra was to continue, "...do you know what we're getting into? The minute we step on the deck of the Queen Mary, we've just tattooed ourselves," but Sinatra, who often improvises on lines, recited them: "...do you know what we're getting into? The minute we step on the deck of that mother's-ass ship...." - -"No, no," Donohue interrupted, shaking his head, "I don't think that's right." - -The cameras stopped, some people laughed, and Sinatra looked up from his position in the sand as if he had been unfairly interrupted. - -"I don't see why that can't work..." he began, but Richard Conte, standing behind the camera, yelled, "It won't play in London." - -Donohue pushed his hand through his thinning grey hair and said, but not really in anger, "You know, that scene was pretty good until somebody blew the line...." - -"Yeah," agreed the cameraman, Billy Daniels, his head popping out from around the camera, "it was a pretty good piece...." - -"Watch your language," Sinatra cut in. Then Sinatra, who has a genius for figuring out ways of not reshooting scenes, suggested a way in which the film could be used and the "mother" line could be recorded later. This met with approval. Then the cameras were rolling again, Virna Lisi was leaning toward Sinatra in the sand, and then he pulled her down close to him. The camera now moved in for a close-up of their faces, ticking away for a few long seconds, but Sinatra and Lisi did not stop kissing, they just lay together in the sand wrapped in one another's arms, and then Virna Lisi's left leg just slightly began to rise a bit, and everybody in the studio now watched in silence, not saying anything until Donohue finally called out: - -"If you ever get through, let me know. I'm running out of film." - -Then Miss Lisi got up, straightened out her white dress, brushed back her blonde hair and touched her lipstick, which was smeared. Sinatra got up, a little smile on his lips, and headed for his dressing room. - -Passing an older man who stood near a camera, Sinatra asked, "How's your Bell & Howell?" - -The older man smiled. - -"It's fine, Frank." - -"Good." - -In his dressing room Sinatra was met by an automobile designer who had the plans for Sinatra's new custom-built model to replace the $25,000 Ghia he has been driving for the last few years. He also was awaited by his secretary, Tom Conroy, who had a bag full of fan mail, including a letter from New York's Mayor John Lindsay; and by Bill Miller, Sinatra's pianist, who would rehearse some of the songs that would be recorded later in the evening for Sinatra's newest album, Moonlight Sinatra. - -While Sinatra does not mind hamming it up a bit on a movie set, he is extremely serious about his recording sessions; as he explained to a British writer, Robin Douglas-Home: "Once you're on that record singing, it's you and you alone. If it's bad and gets you criticized, it's you who's to blame -- no one else. If it's good, it's also you. With a film it's never like that; there are producers and scriptwriters, and hundreds of men in offices and the thing is taken right out of your hands. With a record, you're it...." - -But now the days are short -I'm in the autumn of the year -And now I think of my life -As vintage wine -From fine old kegs.... - -It no longer matters what song he is singing, or who wrote the words -- they are all his words, his sentiments, they are chapters from the lyrical novel of his life. - -Life is a beautiful thing -As long as I hold the string.... - -When Frank Sinatra drives to the studio, he seems to dance out of the car across the sidewalk into the front door; then, snapping his fingers, he is standing in front of the orchestra in an intimate, airtight room, and soon he is dominating every man, every instrument, every sound wave. Some of the musicians have accompanied him for twenty-five years, have gotten old hearing him sing "You Make Me Feel So Young." - -When his voice is on, as it was tonight, Sinatra is in ecstasy, the room becomes electric, there is an excitement that spreads through the orchestra and is felt in the control booth where a dozen men, Sinatra's friends, wave at him from behind the glass. One of the men is the Dodgers' pitcher, Don Drysdale ("Hey, Big D," Sinatra calls out, "hey, baby!"); another is the professional golfer Bo Wininger; there are also numbers of pretty women standing in the booth behind the engineers, women who smile at Sinatra and softly move their bodies to the mellow mood of his music: - -Will this be moon love -Nothing but moon love -Will you be gone when the dawn -Comes stealing through.... - -After he is finished, the record is played back on tape, and Nancy Sinatra, who has just walked in, joins her father near the front of the orchestra to hear the playback. They listen silently, all eyes on them, the king, the princess; and when the music ends there is applause from the control booth, Nancy smiles, and her father snaps his fingers and says, kicking a foot, "Ooba-deeba-boobe-do!" - -Then Sinatra calls to one of his men. "Hey, Sarge, think I can have a half-a-cup of coffee?" - -Sarge Weiss, who had been listening to the music, slowly gets up. - -"Didn't mean to wake ya, Sarge," Sinatra says, smiling. - -Then Weiss brings the coffee, and Sinatra looks at it, smells it, then announces, "I thought he'd be nice to me, but it's really coffee...." - -There are more smiles, and then the orchestra prepares for the next number. And one hour later, it is over. - -The musicians put their instruments into their cases, grab their coats, and begin to file out, saying good-night to Sinatra. He knows them all by name, knows much about them personally, from their bachelor days, through their divorces, through their ups and downs, as they know him. When a French-horn player, a short Italian named Vincent DeRosa, who has played with Sinatra since The Lucky Strike "Hit Parade" days on radio, strolled by, Sinatra reached out to hold him for a second. - -"Vicenzo," Sinatra said, "how's your little girl?" - -"She's fine, Frank." - -"Oh, she's not a little girl anymore," Sinatra corrected himself, "she's a big girl now." - -"Yes, she goes to college now. U.S.C." - -"That's great." - -"She's also got a little talent, I think, Frank, as a singer." - -Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, "Yes, but it's very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo." - -Vincent DeRosa nodded. - -"Yes, Frank," he said, and then he said, "Well, good-night, Frank." - -"Good-night, Vicenzo." - -After the musicians had all gone, Sinatra left the recording room and joined his friends in the corridor. He was going to go out and do some drinking with Drysdale, Wininger, and a few other friends, but first he walked to the other end of the corridor to say good-night to Nancy, who was getting her coat and was planning to drive home in her own car. - -After Sinatra had kissed her on the cheek, he hurried to join his friends at the door. But before Nancy could leave the studio, one of Sinatra's men, Al Silvani, a former prizefight manager, joined her. - -"Are you ready to leave yet, Nancy?" - -"Oh, thanks, Al," she said, "but I'll be all right." - -"Pope's orders," Silvani said, holding his hands up, palms out. - -Only after Nancy had pointed to two of her friends who would escort her home, and only after Silvani recognized them as friends, would he leave. - -THE REST OF THE MONTH was bright and balmy. The record session had gone magnificently, the film was finished, the television shows were out of the way, and now Sinatra was in his Ghia driving out to his office to begin coordinating his latest projects. He had an engagement at The Sands, a new spy film called The Naked Runner to be shot in England, and a couple more albums to do in the immediate months ahead. And within a week he would be fifty years old.... - -Life is a beautiful thing -As long as I hold the string -I'd be a silly so-and-so -If I should ever let go... - -Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it? - -Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone. diff --git a/tests/corpus/getting-in.md b/tests/corpus/getting-in.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7bdbbb3a4..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/getting-in.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,81 +0,0 @@ -Getting in -*The New Yorker* -By Malcolm Gladwell - -The social logic of Ivy League admissions. - -1. - -I applied to college one evening, after dinner, in the fall of my senior year in high school. College applicants in Ontario, in those days, were given a single sheet of paper which listed all the universities in the province. It was my job to rank them in order of preference. Then I had to mail the sheet of paper to a central college-admissions office. The whole process probably took ten minutes. My school sent in my grades separately. I vaguely remember filling out a supplementary two-page form listing my interests and activities. There were no S.A.T. scores to worry about, because in Canada we didn’t have to take the S.A.T.s. I don’t know whether anyone wrote me a recommendation. I certainly never asked anyone to. Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club. - -I put the University of Toronto first on my list, the University of Western Ontario second, and Queen’s University third. I was working off a set of brochures that I’d sent away for. My parents’ contribution consisted of my father’s agreeing to drive me one afternoon to the University of Toronto campus, where we visited the residential college I was most interested in. I walked around. My father poked his head into the admissions office, chatted with the admissions director, and—I imagine—either said a few short words about the talents of his son or (knowing my father) remarked on the loveliness of the delphiniums in the college flower beds. Then we had ice cream. I got in. - -Am I a better or more successful person for having been accepted at the University of Toronto, as opposed to my second or third choice? It strikes me as a curious question. In Ontario, there wasn’t a strict hierarchy of colleges. There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs—like computer science at the University of Waterloo—that were world-class. But since all colleges were part of the same public system and tuition everywhere was the same (about a thousand dollars a year, in those days), and a B average in high school pretty much guaranteed you a spot in college, there wasn’t a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and—most important—how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard. - -There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did. Wherever there was one Harvard graduate, another lurked not far behind, ready to swap tales of late nights at the Hasty Pudding, or recount the intricacies of the college—application essay, or wonder out loud about the whereabouts of Prince So-and-So, who lived down the hall and whose family had a place in the South of France that you would not believe. In the novels they were writing, the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end, he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis. Once, I attended a wedding of a Harvard alum in his fifties, at which the best man spoke of his college days with the groom as if neither could have accomplished anything of greater importance in the intervening thirty years. By the end, I half expected him to take off his shirt and proudly display the large crimson “H” tattooed on his chest. What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently? - -2. - -In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high—school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex. - -As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.” - -The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn. - -The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on “Race and Color,’ “Religious Preference,’ “Maiden Name of Mother,’ “Birthplace of Father,’ and “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ ” - -At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that “undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent. - -If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it. - -Starting in 1953, Arthur Howe, Jr., spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his guidance: - -The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being “mediocre in comparison with many others,” was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, “we just thought he was more of a guy.” So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more. - -At Harvard, the key figure in that same period was Wilbur Bender, who, as the dean of admissions, had a preference for “the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physical vigor and coordination and grace.” Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of “pansies,’ “decadent esthetes’ and “precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems.” - -By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard’s admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.) Information from interviews, references, and student essays was then used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Competition, critically, was within each docket, not between dockets, so there was no way for, say, the graduates of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant to shut out the graduates of Andover and Exeter. More important, academic achievement was just one of four dimensions, further diluting the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. Athletic ability, rather than falling under “extracurriculars,” got a category all to itself, which explains why, even now, recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower. And the most important category? That mysterious index of “personal” qualities. According to Harvard’s own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the nineteen-sixties, a rejection rate of ninety-eight per cent. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5 per cent. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the nineteen-eighties, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates’ files. “This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness,” read one. Another comment reads, “Seems a tad frothy.” One application—and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile—was notated, “Short with big ears.” - -3. - -Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful. - -At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road. - -The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? It’s quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasn’t let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears. - -“As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.” - -Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. You’ll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn you’re good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. “I can see why families are really concerned about this,” Krueger went on. “The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. That’s an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.” - -Bender was succeeded as the dean of admissions at Harvard by Fred Glimp, who, Karabel tells us, had a particular concern with academic underperformers. “Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter,” Glimp once wrote. “What are the effects of the psychology of feeling average, even in a very able group? Are there identifiable types with the psychological or what—not tolerance to be “happy’ or to make the most of education while in the bottom quarter?” Glimp thought it was critical that the students who populated the lower rungs of every Harvard class weren’t so driven and ambitious that they would be disturbed by their status. “Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the “happy-bottom-quarter’ policy was born,” Karabel writes. - -It’s unclear whether or not Glimp found any students who fit that particular description. (He wondered, in a marvellously honest moment, whether the answer was “Harvard sons.”) But Glimp had the realism of the modelling scout. Glimp believed implicitly what Krueger and Dale later confirmed: that the character and performance of an academic class is determined, to a significant extent, at the point of admission; that if you want to graduate winners you have to admit winners; that if you want the bottom quarter of your class to succeed you have to find people capable of succeeding in the bottom quarter. Karabel is quite right, then, to see the events of the nineteen-twenties as the defining moment of the modern Ivy League. You are whom you admit in the élite-education business, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard. Was that change for the better or for the worse? - -4. - -In the wake of the Jewish crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students—that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.” - -It’s easy to find fault with the best-graduates approach. We tend to think that intellectual achievement is the fairest and highest standard of merit. The Ivy League process, quite apart from its dubious origins, seems subjective and opaque. Why should personality and athletic ability matter so much? The notion that “the ability to throw, kick, or hit a ball is a legitimate criterion in determining who should be admitted to our greatest research universities,” Karabel writes, is “a proposition that would be considered laughable in most of the world’s countries.” At the same time that Harvard was constructing its byzantine admissions system, Hunter College Elementary School, in New York, required simply that applicants take an exam, and if they scored in the top fifty they got in. It’s hard to imagine a more objective and transparent procedure. - -But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough. - -Most élite law schools, to cite another example, follow a best-students model. That’s why they rely so heavily on the L.S.A.T. Yet there’s no reason to believe that a person’s L.S.A.T. scores have much relation to how good a lawyer he will be. In a recent research project funded by the Law School Admission Council, the Berkeley researchers Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie Shultz identified twenty-six “competencies” that they think effective lawyering demands—among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal-research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on—and the L.S.A.T. picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn’t we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students? - -This search for good lawyers, furthermore, is necessarily going to be subjective, because things like passion and engagement can’t be measured as precisely as academic proficiency. Subjectivity in the admissions process is not just an occasion for discrimination; it is also, in better times, the only means available for giving us the social outcome we want. The first black captain of the Yale football team was a man named Levi Jackson, who graduated in 1950. Jackson was a hugely popular figure on campus. He went on to be a top executive at Ford, and is credited with persuading the company to hire thousands of African-Americans after the 1967 riots. When Jackson was tapped for the exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, he joked, “If my name had been reversed, I never would have made it.” He had a point. The strategy of discretion that Yale had once used to exclude Jews was soon being used to include people like Levi Jackson. - -In the 2001 book “The Game of Life,” James L. Shulman and William Bowen (a former president of Princeton) conducted an enormous statistical analysis on an issue that has become one of the most contentious in admissions: the special preferences given to recruited athletes at selective universities. Athletes, Shulman and Bowen demonstrate, have a large and growing advantage in admission over everyone else. At the same time, they have markedly lower G.P.A.s and S.A.T. scores than their peers. Over the past twenty years, their class rankings have steadily dropped, and they tend to segregate themselves in an “athletic culture” different from the culture of the rest of the college. Shulman and Bowen think the preference given to athletes by the Ivy League is shameful. - -Halfway through the book, however, Shulman and Bowen present “” finding. Male athletes, despite their lower S.A.T. scores and grades, and despite the fact that many of them are members of minorities and come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than other students, turn out to earn a lot more than their peers. Apparently, athletes are far more likely to go into the high-paying financial-services sector, where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup. In what can only be described as a textbook example of burying the lead, Bowen and Shulman write: - -One of these characteristics can be thought of as drive—a strong desire to succeed and unswerving determination to reach a goal, whether it be winning the next game or closing a sale. Similarly, athletes tend to be more energetic than the average person, which translates into an ability to work hard over long periods of time—to meet, for example, the workload demands placed on young people by an investment bank in the throes of analyzing a transaction. In addition, athletes are more likely than others to be highly competitive, gregarious and confident of their ability to work well in groups (on teams). - -Shulman and Bowen would like to argue that the attitudes of selective colleges toward athletes are a perversion of the ideals of American élite education, but that’s because they misrepresent the actual ideals of American élite education. The Ivy League is perfectly happy to accept, among others, the kind of student who makes a lot of money after graduation. As the old saying goes, the definition of a well-rounded Yale graduate is someone who can roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street. - -5. - -I once had a conversation with someone who worked for an advertising agency that represented one of the big luxury automobile brands. He said that he was worried that his client’s new lower-priced line was being bought disproportionately by black women. He insisted that he did not mean this in a racist way. It was just a fact, he said. Black women would destroy the brand’s cachet. It was his job to protect his client from the attentions of the socially undesirable. - -This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years. In the nineteen twenties, when Harvard tried to figure out how many Jews they had on campus, the admissions office scoured student records and assigned each suspected Jew the designation j1 (for someone who was “conclusively Jewish”), j2 (where the “preponderance of evidence” pointed to Jewishness), or j3 (where Jewishness was a “possibility”). In the branding world, this is called customer segmentation. In the Second World War, as Yale faced plummeting enrollment and revenues, it continued to turn down qualified Jewish applicants. As Karabel writes, “In the language of sociology, Yale judged its symbolic capital to be even more precious than its economic capital.” No good brand manager would sacrifice reputation for short-term gain. The admissions directors at Harvard have always, similarly, been diligent about rewarding the children of graduates, or, as they are quaintly called, “legacies.” In the 1985-92 period, for instance, Harvard admitted children of alumni at a rate more than twice that of non-athlete, non-legacy applicants, despite the fact that, on virtually every one of the school’s magical ratings scales, legacies significantly lagged behind their peers. Karabel calls the practice “unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst,” but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Aren’t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience. - -In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears. diff --git a/tests/corpus/happiness-is-a-worn-gun.md b/tests/corpus/happiness-is-a-worn-gun.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3ece3632d..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/happiness-is-a-worn-gun.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,111 +0,0 @@ -Happiness is a Worn Gun -*Harper's Magazine* -By Dan Baum - -In the 1943 noir thriller The Fallen Sparrow, John Garfield asks the police inspector whether his permit to carry a gun is still valid. - -“Good for a year,” the cop says wearily. “Why did you want to carry a gun?” - -“To shoot people with, sweetheart!” Garfield snarls, as the cop’s face falls comically. - -I think about the ambivalence of that line every time I strap on my .38—mixing the brutality of shooting people with that wise-guy sweetheart. It’s so endearingly American. - -Garfield’s were the days when people who wanted a concealed-weapon permit had to convince the police to issue one. Merchants in rough neighborhoods, bodyguards to the rich, and the well connected could usually manage it. The rest went unarmed, or carried illegally. That’s how it was for generations: if you wanted permission to carry a gun, you had to have a good reason. - -Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes. - -Good thing or bad? Most people can answer that question instinctively, depending on how they think about a whole matrix of bigger questions, from the role of government to the moral obligations we have to one another. Politically, the issue breaks along the expected lines, with the NPR end of the dial going one way and the talk-radio end the other. - -The gun-carrying revolution started in Florida, which in 1987 had a murder rate 40 percent higher than the national average. Another state might have reacted to such carnage by restricting access to guns, but Florida’s legislature went the other way. Believing that law-abiding citizens should have the means to defend themselves, it ordered police chiefs to issue any adult a carry permit unless there was good reason to deny it. In the history of gun politics, this was a big moment. The gun-rights movement had won just about every battle it had fought since coalescing in the late 1960s, but these had been defensive battles against new gun-control laws. Reversing the burden of proof on carry permits expanded gun rights. For the first time, the movement was on offense, and the public loved it. The change in Florida’s law was called “shall-issue”—as in, the police shall issue the permit and not apply their own discretion. Six states already had such laws, but Florida’s became the model for the twenty-nine others that followed. Most of these states recognize the permits of other shall-issue states. Nine remain “may issue” states, leaving the decision up to local law enforcement. Alaska and Arizona have laws allowing any resident who can legally own a gun to carry it concealed with no special permit. And one—can you guess which?—is silent on the whole issue, meaning anybody over sixteen from any state can walk around secretly armed inside its borders. (Most people guess Texas, but it’s Vermont.) Only two states, Wisconsin and Illinois, flatly forbid civilians to carry concealed guns.[1] - -[1] The implications of the Supreme Court’s recent McDonald decision—which established that the Second Amendment confers the right to bear arms on the local level, and not just the federal—remain unclear. -I got hooked on guns forty-nine years ago as a fat kid at summer camp—the one thing I could do was lie on my belly and shoot a .22 rifle—and I’ve collected, shot, and hunted with guns my entire adult life. But I also grew up into a fairly typical liberal Democrat, with a circle of friends politely appalled at my fixation on firearms. For as long as I’ve been voting, I’ve reflexively supported waiting periods, background checks, the assault-rifle ban, and other gun-control measures. None interfered with my enjoyment of firearms, and none seemed to me the first step toward tyranny. As the concealed-carry laws changed across the land, I naturally sided with those who argued that arming the populace would turn fender benders into gunfights. The prospect of millions more gun-carrying Americans left me reliably horrified. - -At the same time, though, I was a little jealous of those getting permits. Taking my guns from the safe was a rare treat; the sensual pleasure of handling guns is a big part of the habit. Elegantly designed and exquisitely manufactured, they are deeply satisfying to manipulate, even without shooting. I normally got to play with mine only a few times a year, during hunting season and on one or two trips to the range. The people with carry permits, though, were handling their guns all the time. They were developing an enviable competence and familiarity with them. They were living the gun life. Finally, last year, under the guise of “wanting to learn what this is all about,” but really wanting to live the gun life myself, I began the process of getting a carry permit. All that was required was a background check, fingerprints, and certification that I’d passed an approved handgun class. - -I live in Boulder, Colorado, a town so painstakingly liberal that the city council once debated whether people are “owners” or “guardians” of their pets. “Guardians” won. Bill O’Reilly regularly singles out Boulder for his trademark contempt as a place even more California than California. I expected to have to drive some distance to find a class, but it turned out that half a dozen shooting schools operate in the Boulder area, with classes so overbooked I had to wait a month for a vacancy. The number of carry permits issued annually in Boulder—Boulder!—has risen eighteenfold since 2001; almost 3,000 of us, about 1 percent, carry guns, and 900 more apply every year. I began examining more closely the aging hippies milling about Whole Foods. - -I ended up taking two gun-carry courses. The first sent me an enrollment-confirmation email on November 5, the day that Major Nidal Hasan killed thirteen people and wounded thirty others at Fort Hood in Texas. The next day, Jason Rodriguez of Orlando, Florida, used a handgun to kill one person and wound five others at the office of his former employer. He told reporters, “I’m angry.” - -The classes I took taught me almost nothing about how to defend myself with a gun. One, taught by a man who said he refuses to get a carry permit because “I don’t think I have to get the government’s permission to exercise my right to bear arms,” packed about twenty minutes of useful instruction into four long evenings of platitudes, Obama jokes, and belligerent posturing. “The way crime is simply out of control, you can’t afford not to wear a gun all the time,” he told us on several occasions. We shot fifty rounds apiece at man-shaped targets fifteen feet away. The legal-implications segment was taught by a cop who, after warming us up with fart jokes, encouraged us to lie to policemen if stopped while wearing our guns and suggested that nobody in his right mind would let a burglar run off with a big-screen TV. It’s illegal to shoot a fleeing criminal, he said, “but if your aim is good enough, you have time to get your story straight before I [the police] get there.” Thank you for coming; here’s your certificate of instruction. The other class, a three-hour quickie at the Tanner Gun Show in Denver, was built around a fifteen-minute recruiting pitch for the NRA and a long-winded, paranoid fantasy about “home invasion.” “They’re watching what time you come home, what time do you get up to go to the bathroom, when you’re there, when you’re not,” said the instructor, Rob Shewmake, of the Florida company Equip 2 Conceal. “They know who lives in the house. They know where your bedroom is, and they’re there to kill you.” (Eighty-seven Americans were murdered during burglaries in 2008; statistically, you had a better chance of being killed by bees.) - -Both classes were less about self-defense than about recruiting us into a culture animated by fear of violent crime. In the Boulder class, we watched lurid films of men in ski masks breaking into homes occupied by terrified women. We studied color police photos of a man slashed open with a knife. Teachers in both classes directed us to websites dedicated to concealed carry, among them usacarry.org, an online gathering place where the gun-carrying community warns, over and over, that crime is “out of control.” - -In fact, violent crime has fallen by a third since 1989—one piece of unambiguous good news out of the past two decades. Murder, rape, robbery, assault: all of them are much less common now than they were then. At class, it was hard to discern the line between preparing for something awful to happen and praying for something awful to happen. A desire to carry a gun seemed to precede the fear of crime, the fear serving to justify the carrying. I asked one of the instructors whether carrying a gun didn’t bespeak a needlessly dark view of mankind. “I’m an optimist,” he said, “but we live in a world of assholes.” - -At the conclusion of both classes, we students were welcomed into the gun-carrying fraternity as though dripping from the baptismal font. “Thank you for being a part of this, man. You’re doing the right thing,” one of the Boulder teachers said, taking my hand in both of his and looking into my eyes. “You should all be proud of yourselves just for being here,” said the police officer who helped with the class. “All of us thank you.” As we stood shaking hands, with our guns in our gym bags and holding our certificates, we felt proud, included, even loved. We had been admitted to a league of especially useful gentlemen and ladies. - -Partly, gun carriers are looking for political safety in numbers. Alongside a belief in rising crime lies a certainty that gun confiscation is nigh. I had a hard time finding cartridges for my hunting rifle the past two seasons because shooters began hoarding when Barack Obama was elected president. Since then, the gun industry has had its best sales on record. At the Tanner show, posters of Obama’s stern face over the words firearms salesman of the year were as common as those of him in Joker makeup over the word socialism. Looking for a holster for the .38 I planned to?carry, I stopped at the table of a big man wearing a cargo vest and a SIGARMS cap and idly picked?up one of his Yugoslav AK-47s. “Buy it now!” he barked. “Tomorrow they may not let you!” I must have looked skeptical; he reached across the table, snatched the rifle from my hands, and slammed it down. “You don’t think he’s waiting for his second term?to come and get them?” he said. “You’re dreaming.” - -Shooters see their guns as emblems of a whole spectrum of virtuous lifestyle choices—rural over urban, self-reliance over dependence on the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, patriotism over internationalism, action over inaction—and they hear attacks on guns as attacks on them, personally. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sound like groups even the NRA could support: who wouldn’t want to prevent violence? But the former was called, until 1989, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, and the latter wants to prohibit the “military-style semi-automatic assault weapons” popular among shooters. From the point of view of gun enthusiasts, it’s not gun violence these groups want to end, but gun ownership. Another gun-show vendor—wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed alcohol, tobacco, and firearms should be a convenience store, not a federal agency—was yelling to potential customers that they’d better buy guns now because the “liberals want to take away your gun and your McDonald’s both.” As I headed for a table heaped with old holsters, I picked up a free copy of the NRA’s America’s 1st Freedom magazine. Its editorial captured perfectly the class-based resentment that permeates modern gun culture, characterizing the opposition as “those who sip tea and nibble biscuits while musing about how to restrict the rest of us.” - -Beyond mere politics, gun carriers are evangelizing a social philosophy. Belief in rising crime, when statistics show the opposite, amounts to faith in a natural order of predators and prey. The turtle doesn’t apologize for his shell nor the tiger for his claws; humans shouldn’t be bashful about equipping to defend themselves. Men and women who carry guns fill a noble niche between sheep and wolf. “Sheepdogs” is the way they often describe themselves—alert, vigilant, not aggressive but prepared to do battle. - -In both classes, and in every book about concealed carry that I read, much was made of “conditions of readiness,” which are color-coded from white to red. Condition White is total oblivion to one’s surroundings—sleeping, being drunk or stoned, losing oneself in conversation while walking on city streets, texting while listening to an iPod. Condition Yellow is being aware of, and taking an interest in, one’s surroundings—essentially, the mental state we are encouraged to achieve when we are driving: keeping our eyes moving, checking the mirrors, being careful not to let the radio drown out the sounds around us. Condition Orange is being aware of a possible threat. Condition Red is responding to danger. - -Contempt for Condition White unifies the gun-carrying community almost as much as does fealty to the Second Amendment. “When you’re in Condition White you’re a sheep,” one of my Boulder instructors told us. “You’re a victim.” The American Tactical Shooting Association says the only time to be in Condition White is “when in your own home, with the doors locked, the alarm system on, and your dog at your feet. .?.?. The instant you leave your home, you escalate one level, to Condition Yellow.” A citizen in Condition White is as useless as an unarmed citizen, not only a political cipher but a moral dud. “I feel I have a responsibility, and I believe that in my afterlife I will be judged,” one of the Boulder gun instructors said. “Part of the judgment will be: Did this guy look after himself? It’s a minimum responsibility.” - -Just as the Red Cross would like everybody to be qualified in CPR, gun carriers want everybody prepared to confront violence—not only by being armed but by maintaining Condition Yellow. Hang around with people committed to carrying guns and it’s easy to feel guilty about lapsing into Condition White, to begin seeing yourself as deadweight on society, a parasite, a mediocre citizen. “You should constantly practice being in Condition Yellow all the time,” writes Tony Walker in his book How to Win a Gunfight. Of course, it’s not for everyone; the armed life in Condition Yellow requires being mentally prepared to kill. As John Wayne puts it in his last movie, The Shootist. “It’s not always being fast or even accurate that counts. It’s being willing.” - -Whoa: wrong example. The policeman helping with the Boulder class was adamant. “Hollywood,” he intoned, “will get you killed.” Real gunfights are nothing like the ones on-screen. They happen instantaneously and at arm’s length, with no time for clever repartee, diving for cover, or even aiming. “There is nothing sexy about a gunfight.” - -Alas, the very word “gunfight” is sexy. The first American narrative movie, The Great Train Robbery, made in 1903, is all gunfight and ends with a villain shooting straight at the camera. All we know about carrying and using a gun—at least at first—is what we learn from the movies and television. How else did I pick up that insouciant way of swinging open my revolver’s cylinder to check its loads, that casual manner of jamming it up into my shoulder holster or down the small of my back? The gun I chose to wear concealed, a second-generation Colt Detective Special .38, is one I grew up watching just about every fictional dick and gunsel use, from Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo to Detective McGarrett on Hawaii Five-O. (I’m old; younger guys prefer their own generation’s TV guns: the Glocks of CSI; or the SIG Sauer P228 Jack Bauer carries on 24.) I know it’s foolish to conflate Hollywood with reality, and when I’m armed I try to discipline my mind back to my training. But anyone who tells you he has no fantasy life constructed around his gun either has been packing it for as long as he’s been watching television or is flat-out lying. - -Having carried a gun full-time for several months now, I can attest that there’s no way to lapse into Condition White when armed. Moving through a cocktail party with a gun holstered snug against my ribs makes me feel like James Bond—I know something you don’t know!—but it’s socially and physically unpleasant. I have to remember to keep adjusting the drape of my jacket so as not to expose myself, and make sure to get the arms-inside position when hugging a friend so that the hard lump on my hip or under my arm doesn’t give itself away. In some settings my gun feels as big as a toaster oven, and I find myself tense with the expectation of being discovered. What’s more, if there’s a truly comfortable way to carry a gun, I haven’t found it. The revolver’s weight and pressure keep me constantly aware of how quickly and utterly my world could change. Gun carriers tell me that’s exactly the point: at any moment, violence could change anybody’s world. Those who carry guns are the ones prepared to make the change come out in their favor. - -Living in Condition Yellow can have beneficial side effects. A woman I met in Phoenix told me carrying a gun had made her more organized. “I used to lose my stuff all the time,” she said. “I was always leaving my purse in restaurants, my wallet in the car, my sunglasses at friends’ houses. Once I started carrying a gun—accepted that grave responsibility—that all stopped. I’m on it now.” - -Like her, I’m more alert and acute when I’m wearing my gun. If I’m in a restaurant or store, I find myself in my own little movie, glancing at the door when a person walks in and, in a microsecond, evaluating whether a threat has appeared and what my options for response would be—roll left and take cover behind that pillar? On the street, I look people over: Where are his hands? What does his face tell me? I run sequences in my head. If a guy jumps me with a knife, should I throw money to the ground and run? Take two steps back and draw? How about if he has a gun? How will I distract him so I can get the drop? It can be fun. But it can also be exhausting. Some nights I dream gunfight scenarios over and over and wake up bushed. In Flagstaff I was planning to meet a friend for a beer, and although carrying in a bar is legal in Arizona, drinking in a bar while armed is not. I locked my gun in the car. Walking the few blocks to the bar, I realized how different I felt: lighter, dreamier, conscious of how the afternoon light slanted against Flagstaff’s old buildings. I found myself, as I walked, composing lines of prose. I was lapsing into Condition White, and loving it. - -Condition White may make us sheep, but it’s also where art happens. It’s where we daydream, reminisce, and hear music in our heads. Hard-core gun carriers want no part of that, and the zeal for getting everybody to carry a gun may be as much an anti–Condition White movement as anything else—resentment toward the airy-fairy elites who can enjoy the luxury of musing, sipping tea, and nibbling biscuits while the good people of the world have to work for a living and keep their guard up. Gun guys never stop building and strengthening this like-minded community. When I mention that I’m carrying, their faces light up. “Good for you!” “Right on!” “God bless you!” The owner of a gun factory in Mesa, Arizona, spotted the gun under my jacket and said, with great solemnity, “You honor me by wearing your gun to my place of business.” - -I was crossing the corner of Dauphine and Kerlerec Streets in New Orleans late one evening with my gun under my jacket. (Louisiana is one of the states that recognizes a Colorado permit.) I wasn’t smelling the sweet olive, replaying in my head the clackety music of Washboard Chaz, or savoring the residuum of dinnertime’s oysters Pernod. I was in Condition Yellow and fully aware of two scruffy guys lounging in a doorway up ahead. “Can you help us out?” one asked. I made my usual demurral and walked on. When I got about fifteen feet away, one of them yelled, “Faggot!” - -I’ve never been one to throw down because someone called me a name. But it’s possible that in the old days I’d have yelled something back. At the very least, I’d have felt my blood pressure spike. - -This time, I didn’t become angry or even annoyed. A Zen-like calm overtook me. I felt no need to restrain myself; my body didn’t even gesture in the direction of anger. Pace Claudio, my hand meant nothing to my sword. Rage wasn’t an option, because I had no way of knowing where it would end, and somehow my brain and body sensed that. I began to understand why we don’t hear a lot of stories about legal gun carriers killing one another in road-rage incidents. Carrying a gun gives you a sense of guardianship, even a kind of moral superiority. You are the vigilant one, the sheepdog watching the flock, the coiled wrath of God. To snatch out your gun and wave it around would not only invite catastrophe but also sacrifice that righteous high ground and embarrass you in the worst possible way. I don’t know how many gun carriers have read Robert Heinlein, but all of them can quote him: “An armed society is a polite society.” - -But is it a safer society? In 1998, John Lott, later a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, published a book with the provocative title More Guns, Less Crime. Violent crime had been dropping in states with shall-issue laws, he argued, because the concealed-carry revolution left criminals unable to know who is and who is not armed. The gun rights lobby lofted Lott on a pedestal, academics attacked him, and a heated round of my-data-set-can-beat-up-your-data-set ensued. Lott turned weird, first by claiming to have conducted a large national survey that he couldn’t prove to have done, and then by inventing an online alter ego named Mary Rosh to blog his praises. Still, he is widely quoted. - -Shall-issue may or may not have contributed to the stunning drop in violent crime since the early Nineties. The problem with the catchy More Guns, Less Crime construction, though, is that many other things may have helped: changing demographics, smarter policing, the burnout of the crack-cocaine wave, three-strikes laws, even—as suggested by Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner—legalized abortion. And crime dropped more in some states that didn’t adopt shall-issue laws than in some that did. - -But shall-issue didn’t lead to more crime, as predicted by its critics. The portion of all killing done with a handgun—the weapon people carry concealed—hasn’t changed in decades; it’s still about half. Whereas the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., can produce a list of 175 killings committed by carry-permit holders since 2007, the NRA can brandish a longer list of crimes prevented by armed citizens. I prefer to rely on the FBI’s data, which show that not only are bad-guy murders—those committed in the course of rape, robbery, and other felonies—way down but so are spur-of-the-moment murders involving alcohol, drugs, romantic entanglements, money disputes, and other arguments: the very types of murders that critics worried widespread concealed-carry would increase. - -One number that jumps out from the FBI’s 2008 data is how many alleged criminals were shot dead by civilians: 245, not many fewer than were shot by cops. I found that statistic amazing until I reflected on how seldom police are present when a crime is occurring. i carry a gun because a cop is too heavy, goes the bumper sticker. - -Law enforcement tends to oppose shall-issue laws, at least institutionally. A group of Iowa sheriffs agitated against a shall-issue law their governor signed in April, and Ohio’s Fraternal Order of Police is objecting to a bill designed to open bars, stadiums, and other venues to concealed guns. Every street cop I’ve met lately, though, sees it the other way. “Absolutely I want more people armed,” one told me in Las Vegas. “If I’m shooting it out with a bad guy, and an armed citizen can step in and throw fire downrange, I’m all for it.” At traffic stops, a person’s concealed-carry permit pops up on the computer. “That tells me they’ve been checked out,” he said, “that they’re probably someone I don’t have to worry about.” - -The inclination nationwide is still to make concealed-carry permits easier, not harder, to get, and the recession may be helping the cause. In Ohio, a judge recently suggested that, in the face of law-enforcement budget cuts, people should “arm themselves.” An Ohio concealed-carry activist told the Toledo Blade that he thinks hard economic times are “causing all these law-enforcement officers, whether they’re police officers or sheriff’s deputies, to get laid off, and people realize they’re in a situation where they may have to be responsible for their own safety.” - -Whatever the reason, the handgun industry is pleased with the legal drift, given that the Obama-panic bubble is fading and the long-term industry trend is bleak. Young adults buy markedly fewer guns than older people. They want to be urban and digital, and guns are the opposite of that. A big push by the industry to feminize the shooting sports has fallen flat; only in hunting has women’s participation increased, and even there just by a little. The bright spot in the industry remains small handguns and all of their accoutrements—holsters, belts, purses, and an entire line of clothing, 5.11 Tactical, designed to conceal weapons. Back in the mid-Nineties, when handgun sales were falling fast, Shooting Industry magazine wrote, “Two bright rays of sunshine gleam through the dark clouds of the slump in the firearms market. One is the landslide of ‘shall-issue’ concealed-carry reform legislation around the country. The other is the emergence of a new generation of compact handguns.” Shall-issue saved the handgun business; sales were half again higher in 2007 than in 2000, and much of that growth was in concealable weapons. At the gun-industry trade show in Las Vegas in January, the people crowding Ruger’s enormous booth were a lot more focused on the new high-tech pocket guns than on what one salesman derisively called the “Dirty Harry” guns—flamboyantly gigantic weapons—that were the hot item a decade ago. “Anymore it’s the small personal defense gun where the action is,” said Robert Robbins, a Smith & Wesson salesman, as he let me dry-fire a brand-new line of lightweight, scandium-framed pocket revolvers. “People are perceiving it’s a more dangerous world, and they’re thinking, ‘I should get one now before it gets harder.’?” His face clouded and his voice dropped. “It’s mostly older people, to be frank. The younger people tend to be more liberal. They’ve been led to believe the police are going to be there for them, that guns are bad and made for killing. They’re fed that crap, and they believe it.” - -Now that they’ve largely won the concealed-carry fight, gun-rights activists have begun a new offensive: “open-carry.” Advocates for wearing guns in plain view hold armed picnics and urge people to wear their guns visibly wherever it’s legal. Forty-three states let citizens carry openly, including some that remain reticent on concealed-carry and one—Wisconsin—that doesn’t allow concealed-carry at all. Open-carry became a national issue last year, when people displaying guns showed up at New Hampshire and Arizona rallies attended by President Obama. Reporters seemed surprised that police made no arrests, but open-carry is legal in both states and none of the gun carriers made threats. The open carriers are pushing it; in at least six states, citizens have sued police after being stopped for wearing a gun. In January, a group of California activists began wearing unloaded guns openly to Starbucks, but if they were expecting to get arrested or thrown out they were disappointed. They drank their lattés and left. Starbucks, a company official told reporters over and over, respects California state law, which as of this writing allows open carry as long as the guns are unloaded. - -When I called Mike Stollenwerk, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is a cofounder of opencarry.org, he told me right away he thinks displaying a gun outside a presidential event is for “the Tea Party nutties.” He wants more people carrying handguns openly because “we want everybody to have that right.” Wearing guns openly so you can wear guns openly sounds to me like the old Firesign Theatre joke about the mural depicting the historic struggle of the people to finish the mural. Open-carry is already legal almost everywhere. But Stollenwerk said the movement is about changing culture rather than law. “We’re trying to normalize gun ownership by openly carrying properly holstered handguns in daily life,” he said. - -I’ve tried carrying openly a few times, wearing a loaded, long-barreled .45-caliber revolver in a hip holster to Safeway, Home Depot, Target, Whole Foods, and my local Apple Store. The only person who objected was my wife (“For Christ’s sake!”). Nobody else said a word. The kids at the Apple Store, in their rectangular-framed glasses and blue T-shirts, stood right beside me as I played with an iPad for half an hour. It isn’t possible that they didn’t see the big handgun. More likely, it didn’t interest them: a World War I revolver is pretty dull competition for a touch-screen device running a 1 GHz A4 chip and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. At Target, I made a point of standing for a long time directly in front of a security guard. Nothing. What he saw was a balding, middle-aged man in pleated pants and glasses with a tired old gun on his hip—not a particularly threatening sight. He may have figured I was a useless cop or a ranger from the city’s vast parks system. Either that, or the sight was so incongruous that he and everybody else in Target failed to register it. Then I stopped at a gritty little Mexican grocery I like, for some tortillas and crema, and everybody noticed, their eyes flicking over my belt and going wide. “Señor, is it real?” a chubby little boy asked as I locked up my bicycle. In Mexico, almost nobody gets a license to own a handgun, let alone wear one. “¿Por qué la pistola?” a man at the meat counter asked. “¿Por qué no?” I answered. He shrugged and walked away, shaking his head—not like I was dangerous, more like I was simply a gabacho fool. Overall, I felt less safe with the gun openly displayed than with it concealed. I worried that someone would knock me on the back of the head and steal it, or that some genuinely aggressive nutcase would challenge me to draw. Mostly, though, I felt obnoxious. In all likelihood, I was making somebody silently anxious. It remains to be seen how Stollenwerk’s open-carry strategy will work. I suspect it will backfire, that instead of acclimating people it will frighten them, and that they’ll eventually ask their legislators to put a stop to it. - -Even in shall-issue states, guns—whether visible or concealed—are often barred from places where they seem especially inappropriate: college campuses, schools, bars, parks, churches. The list can vary from town to town. When I take a long road trip, I keep a sheaf of gun-law printouts on the front seat so I don’t inadvertently walk into the wrong place with my concealed revolver. In Boulder, it’s a nuisance to keep taking my gun off and finding a place to stow it when I’m going to visit the university library, toss a Frisbee in a schoolyard, or see a movie on campus. I’ve been checked out, fingerprinted, and trusted by the state with a carry permit; having to ditch my gun feels vaguely demeaning. To those already feeling slighted, gun-free zones are a continual insult. - -Someone bent on killing people isn’t going to be dissuaded by a no firearms sign on the door. Gun carriers tend to think that such rules serve only to alert the malevolent to good places for mass shootings. And they’re right that no matter how stringent our background checks, we’ll never do a perfect job of keeping guns out of the wrong hands. Guns are well-made things; the rifle I hunt with was made in 1900, the revolver I carry was made in 1956, and both are as lethal today as the day they were built. So even if the United States were to ban the import, manufacture, and sale of new ones—unlikely—there would still be some 250 million privately owned guns in the United States. Unless we’re willing to send the police door-to-door to round them all up, the country is going to be awash in firearms for years to come. Thugs will push guns into the faces of convenience-store clerks, lunatics will shoot up restaurants, aggrieved workers will spray their offices with bullets, and alienated students will open fire at school. The question that interests gun activists is how we’re prepared to respond. A Republican legislator in Wisconsin wanted to arm teachers so they could cut down Columbine copycats, and college students in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia are agitating for the right to carry concealed weapons on campus so they can defend themselves against the next Virginia Tech–style shooter. An armed civilian might be even more useful during a massacre than a police officer; cops hit the people they’re aiming at less than half the time—in some departments much less. That might be because criminals identify police by their uniforms and so get the first shot off. A civilian might have the element of surprise. - -My friends who are appalled at the thought of widespread concealed weapons aren’t impressed by this argument, or by the research demonstrating no ill effects of the shall-issue revolution. “I don’t care,” said one. “I don’t feel safe knowing people are walking around with guns. What about my right to feel safe? Doesn’t that count for anything?” - -Robert Bork tried out that argument in 1971, in defense of prosecuting such victimless crimes as drug abuse, writing in the Indiana Law Journal that “knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral.” It’s as bad an argument now as it was then. We may not like it that other people are doing things we revile—smoking pot, enjoying pornography, making gay love, or carrying a gun—but if we aren’t adversely affected by it, the Constitution and common decency argue for leaving it alone. My friend may feel less safe because peopleare wearing concealed guns, but the data suggest she isn’t less safe. - -To the unfamiliar, guns are noisy and intimidating. They represent the supremacy of force over reason, of ferocity over refinement, and probably a whole set of principles that rub some people the wrong way. But a free society doesn’t make people give a reason for doing the things they want to do; the burden of proof falls on those who would forbid. I started out thinking widespread concealed-carry was a bad idea. But in the absence of evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns is harmful, I come down on the side of letting people do what they want. - -Why shouldn’t being prepared to defend oneself be on the list of skills we expect of modern citizens? I’ve encountered five reasons not to wear a gun: you think it so unlikely you’ll be attacked it’s not worth the trouble or the sacrifice of Condition White; you expect the police to come to your aid in the event of trouble; wearing a gun makes you feel less safe instead of more; you’ve decided you couldn’t take a life under any circumstance; or you don’t want to contribute to a coarsening of society by preparing to kill at a moment’s notice. - -It’s true that crime is down, but it’s certainly not nonexistent; hideous things happen to good people every day. We carry fire insurance even though fire is uncommon; carrying a gun may be no more paranoid. Expecting police protection is delusional; they’ll usually do no more than show up later to investigate. Carrying a gun is unsafe for those who haven’t been properly trained, but a good class and regular practice can fix that. Only the last two reasons strike me as logically complete arguments not to go armed. Being willing to die rather than kill is an admirable and time-honored philosophical position. I’m not certain, though, how many of us would hold to it when the fatal moment was upon us. I, for one, count myself out. I’m willing. - -At least I think so. Those who write about and teach defensive gun use say an incident, if it happens, will go down something like this: - -I will draw my gun from its holster if I reasonably believe myself or another person to be in imminent danger of death or grievous bodily injury. I will fire two bullets into the center of the attacker’s chest. My 125-grain hollowpoints will not only carve permanent cavities through his body, they’ll also send out pressure waves that might rupture his solid organs—his liver, spleen, and kidneys. If he’s going to die, he’ll likely die on the spot or within a day. I will be sure to have my hands empty and raised by the time the police show up, because they’ll be scared and liable to shoot anyone holding a gun. The only way to win a gunfight, goes the saying, is not to be there when it happens. I can expect the police to arrest, handcuff, and jail me. If I’m not charged, or I’m acquitted, the attacker or his family will probably sue me. I use hollowpoints, I will say on the stand, because they deliver more energy to the target and are therefore more likely to stop the attack—and the shooting—quickly. Also, being more likely to stay in the attacker’s body or embed themselves in walls without passing through, hollowpoints are less dangerous to bystanders, which is why police use them. I didn’t cock the revolver, yell “Freeze,” or shoot to wound, because if I’d had time to think about doing any of that I’d have had time to run away. But the poor guy only had a knife, the plaintiff’s lawyer might say, to which I’ll respond that a man with a knife can close twenty-one feet in a second and a half—less time than it takes to draw and fire. Then it will be up to the jury -to decide my fate. The gun carrier’s ethic holds that it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. - -That said, I will probably stop carrying my gun. It’s uncomfortable, distracting, and freaks out my friends; it’s not worth it. I miss Condition White. If I lived in a dangerous place, I might feel different, and I may continue wearing a gun when I travel to such places (at least to the ones that allow it). That some people think going unarmed makes me a traitor to the Second Amendment doesn’t bother me at all. And if I’m a burden to society because I cannot jump in and stop a crime, well, I’m not qualified in CPR, advanced first aid, maritime lifesaving, or firefighting either. Social parasite that I am, I’m content to leave emergency response to the pros. - -We may all benefit from having a lot of licensed people carrying guns, if only because of the heightened state of awareness in which they live. It’s a scandal, though, that people can get a license to carry on the basis of a three-hour “course” given at a gun show. State requirements vary, but some don’t even ask students to fire a weapon before getting a carry permit. We should enforce high standards for instruction, including extensive live firing, role playing, and serious examination of the legal issues. Since people can carry guns state to state, standards should be uniform. States should require a refresher course, the way Texas does, before renewing a carry permit. To their credit, most gun carriers I’ve talked to agree that training should improve, even if some of them get twitchy at the idea of mandates. The Second Amendment confers a right to keep and bear arms. It does not confer a right to instant gratification. - -Going armed has connected me with an entire range of values I didn’t use to think much about—self-reliance, vigilance, muscular citizenship—and some impulses I’d rather avoid, like social pessimism and irrational fear. It has militarized my life; all that locking and loading and watching over my shoulder makes me feel like a bit player in the perpetual global war in which we find ourselves. There’s no denying that carrying a gun has made my days a lot more dramatic. Suddenly, I’m dangerous. I’m an action figure. I bear a lethal secret into every social encounter. I have to remind myself occasionally that my gun is not a prop, a political statement, or a rhetorical device, but an instrument designed to blow a ragged channel through a human being. From a public-safety standpoint it may matter little that lots of people are carrying guns now, but if accessorizing with firearms becomes truly au courant, the United States will feel like a different place. We’ll be less dreamy and more secretive. We’ll spend more energy watching one another and less on self-obsession. We’ll be a little more on-task, more cognizant of violence and prepared to participate therein. We’ll also be, in our own minds, a little sexier as we make ourselves more dangerous. We’ll be carrying guns for exactly the reason John Garfield did: to shoot people with, sweetheart. diff --git a/tests/corpus/hope-change-reality.md b/tests/corpus/hope-change-reality.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7f18bc2cf..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/hope-change-reality.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,177 +0,0 @@ -Hope. Change. Reality. -*GQ* -By Wil S. Hylton - -A few days after Rahm Emanuel resigned as White House chief of staff in October, I stopped by the Justice Department to see Eric Holder. I had been meeting with the attorney general periodically for about a year (since he was named one of GQ's Men of the Year last December), and I knew from our conversations, as well as from Holder's friends and family, that the last few months had been a bumpy ride. But I also knew that many of Holder's frustrations on the job could be linked to his thorny relationship with Emanuel. I wondered if things were looking up. - -On the fifth floor of the Justice building, I took a seat at the long table outside Holder's office and was studying a portrait of Bobby Kennedy on the wall when Holder bounded into the room with a grin, slapped my hand into a shake, and said, "How you doing, man? Are you avoiding me?" - -Up close, the attorney general is very different from the brisk and prosecutorial figure one finds on daytime C-SPAN. There is something almost whimsical about him, some half-hidden smile that always seems to linger near the corner of his mustache, as though he is watching the world from one step away. - -Since his appointment in February 2009, Holder has become a vanguard for the administration's progressive wing. He has promised to end the policy of indefinite detention at Guantánamo by prosecuting some of its most notorious detainees; to investigate torture by the CIA; and to revitalize the department's most neglected offices, like the long-suffering Civil Rights Division. He has even tried to extend his influence beyond the DOJ, declaring his opposition to the death penalty and gun rights despite a constitutional obligation to enforce both. - -Naturally, all of this has made Holder a favorite target of the right, and in the buildup to this month's election, the attorney general became a wedge issue unto himself, with his name plastered on Tea Party posters, newspaper ads, and television commercials. Yet Republicans may be the least of Holder's problems. Even as he has rankled the right, he has also alienated many of his allies in the administration—and none more visibly than Emanuel, whose relentless deal-making has clashed with Holder's principles time and again. - -Of course, the job of any attorney general straddles a unique and tipsy political fulcrum: On the one hand, he is a member of the president's team, expected to share his political goals. On the other, he is the nation's top cop, required by oath to leave politics at the door. The balance between these can be difficult to strike, and the surest sign of an independent AG is often the irritated White House six blocks away. Still, Holder is a special case. Inside Obama's West Wing, Emanuel's hostility toward Holder has become so pitched at times that the president has had to intervene. "Occasionally, Rahm would cross the line about Eric," says a source with access to White House deliberations, "and the president would tell him, 'Rahm, knock it off.' " Inside Holder's circle of advisers, the frustration with Emanuel has been equally palpable. When I asked the attorney general's closest friend, Steve Sims, a man Holder describes as his "consigliere," about the political pressure emanating from Emanuel's office, Sims, who had been relaxing on the sofa of his Chevy Chase home, jumped from his seat and shouted, "They need to shut the fuck up and let him do his job! He is not a political animal!" And when I asked Holder's brother, Billy, about Emanuel, he sighed deeply and shook his head. "Man, that guy…" he sputtered. "That guy's an animal. He's a beast." - -Now that Emanuel has stepped down, the mood among Holder loyalists is triumphal. Former White House counsel Greg Craig, an ally of Holder's on several key issues, was recently heard on an open microphone predicting, "If Rahm goes, Eric survived," and in my own conversations with congressional, White House, and DOJ sources, I heard the same prognosis at least a dozen times. Yet after following Holder's trajectory for the past year, the forecast seems far from certain. If anything, Emanuel's departure brings into focus the more elusive question that has surrounded the Obama White House since day one: how much Emanuel actually drove administration policy, and how much he only reflected it. I had come to Holder's office to find out: Did Rahm's departure signal a new opening, or was the problem never with Rahm at all? - -··· -From the outset, Obama's choice of Holder was designed to highlight his commitment to an independent Justice Department. Unlike former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, Holder wasn't an old friend of the president, hadn't ever worked for him before, and didn't hail from the same political hometown. And unlike attorney general John Ashcroft, whose career lay in tatters before his appointment, Holder's qualifications were beyond reproach: At 57, he had worked for the DOJ most of his adult life, including a dozen years in the Public Integrity section, half a dozen as a U.S. attorney, and four as Janet Reno's second in command. - -Yet if Holder was relatively new to Obama, he shared with the new president a worldview rooted in a common experience. Both were men of color and children of immigrants, and both had thrived in the mostly white upper reaches of public life, even while struggling to maintain their connection to, and identity within, the African-American community. - -Raised in the neighborhood of East Elmhurst, Queens, Holder grew up in a thriving nexus of African-American culture. As a kid in the 1950s and '60s, his neighbors included Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Willie Mays, and Malcolm X. "Louis Farrakhan lived midway up the block," Holder's brother, Billy, recalled recently. "And when Muhammad Ali was Cassius Clay, he brought Malcolm's daughters to the store up the street to buy candy. He signed a brown paper bag for me—if only I could find that now!" - -As Billy spoke, we were standing outside the old house, watching traffic cruise down Twenty-fourth Avenue. Periodically a car would slow and a neighbor would shout to Billy, who would either burst out laughing or trot into the street for a high five. With just twenty-two months between the Holders, Eric and Billy remain uncommonly close. When the attorney general is summoned before Congress, he frequently asks his brother to join him, and on some issues, he trusts no one more. But temperamentally the two could not be farther apart. Eric is cerebral, reserved, meticulously spoken. Billy is all heart; having stayed close to home for most of his life, he retains a strong Queens accent and disposition. I had met up with him at a nearby McDonald's, where he was hectoring the staff to be vigilant about trash, and as we stood outside his childhood home, he was wearing his regular work clothes: faded blue Dockers that he hems himself and a white button-down shirt with the Golden Arches on the chest. - -From a young age, Billy said, Eric was pushed toward a different path. Beginning in the fifth grade, he was removed from the local school and sent to a gifted program in Manhattan, making the hour-long commute each day at age 10. "He was in an all-black world here," Billy said, "and he was plucked out and taken to an all-white world. And you've gotta remember, we're talking about the 1950s, not a superliberal time. But he never spoke about it. He had to go through it alone." - -It wasn't until Holder arrived at Colum­bia University in the fall of 1969 that he connected with four other African-American students who could relate to his somewhat prismatic experience. On weeknights, they studied until the small hours; on weekends, they delved into the Harlem scene and immersed themselves in the activism of the times—marching in the streets for housing and education, coaching a youth football team, mentoring kids in the Manhattan Valley projects. "We took over the ROTC lounge in Hartley Hall and created the Malcolm X Lounge," says Steve Sims, laughing. - -Today the imprint of those years is unmistakable in Holder's thinking. After thirty-five years in the nation's capital, in some of the loftiest corners and corner offices of the federal government, he retains a surprisingly shoe-leather approach to public service. In January, I found him celebrating his one-year anniversary as attorney general, over the long weekend of Martin Luther King's birthday, not on a decompression jaunt to his parents' homeland of Barbados but in the musty basement of a downtown church, spooning gobs of warmed-over egg onto plates for the city's homeless. "I'm Eric," he said to the bedraggled guests, wandering among tables with refills of juice. And last fall, I opened up the morning paper to discover that Holder had dashed out of town on short notice—to confront an episode of school violence. A kid in Chicago named Derrion Albert had been assaulted by classmates on his way home from school, punched and pummeled until he collapsed on the sidewalk and died, and Holder, who saw footage of the incident on TV, canceled his schedule on a Tuesday at 3 p.m., hurried home to pack a bag, and by 7:30 the following morning was entrenched in meetings with the mayor and community leaders. But when I called the White House senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to learn more about Holder's trip, she seemed almost as surprised as I was. "I asked him what was on his schedule, and he had some really, really important things," Jarrett said. "But he just felt it was important for him to be there as an African-American man." - -For Holder, the position of attorney general had always loomed in the distance like a grail—the pinnacle of influence for a public-service lawyer. Yet the decision to accept Obama's offer was not as easy as it may seem. After three decades of grueling hours on a government paycheck, he was finally enjoying the private sector—spending evenings and weekends at home and taking his family on proper vacations. "He was finally earning money!" says Billy. Nor was Holder's wife, Sharon, eager to give up her husband to another all-consuming, eighty-hours-per-week job that paid a tenth of his current salary. - -Ultimately, what convinced Holder to accept the position had as much to do with George W. Bush as Barack Obama. In the span of eight years, the Bush administration had transformed the DOJ in ways that offended Holder deeply. Nowhere was the change more visible than inside the Civil Rights Division, which Holder calls the department's "crown jewel." Since its creation in the 1950s, the CRD had always been on the forefront of America's quest for equal rights, a place where the nation's standards of fairness were etched into case law, one difficult decision at a time. Yet under the Bush team, the CRD had become a bastion of discrimination itself. - -Atop half the CRD's offices sat a man named Bradley Schlozman—32 years old, four years out of clerkship, with a right-wing fervor matched only by his disdain for the office he was assigned to help lead. Within days of arriving at the CRD, Schlozman set out to purge liberals from its staff—isolating some of the most experienced lawyers, assigning their cases to younger and more conservative attorneys, and when the older lawyers complained or quit, replacing them with even more young conservatives. Throughout, he was explicit about his plans, writing to friends that the CRD was a cesspool of "commies," "pinkos," and "mold spores" and explaining that his real intention "is to gerrymander all these crazy libs right out of the section." And so he did. Between 2003 and 2007, nearly three-quarters of the CRD's lawyers quit, and according to an internal review completed in 2008, of the ninety-nine lawyers Schlozman hired to replace them, roughly two-thirds were outspoken conservative activists, and the other third were either apolitical or vague in their beliefs. Only two of the ninety-nine confessed to liberal ideas. - -Predictably, as the CRD staff veered right, so did its work. During the same four years, the number of cases involving racial discrimination against minorities and gender discrimination against women were cut in half. Meanwhile, cases of reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians shot up. When I asked the current head of the Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, who was first hired by the administration of George H. W. Bush, what went wrong under the son, Perez became visibly agitated. "The whole process of decision-making was completely obliterated!" he said. "Hiring processes were hijacked! They weren't allowed to bring certain kinds of cases. They weren't allowed to make certain kinds of arguments. I think history will judge the prior administration as the darkest hour in the division's history." - -As a graduating law student in 1976, Holder had applied for a job at the CRD and been rejected; the competition was fierce, and he was offered a position in another division instead. To see the flood of lawyers now leaving the CRD was, Holder told me, almost unimaginable. "It was hard to believe," he said. "It was a disgrace! Seventy percent of the career attorneys left! Think about that. Seventy percent. Seven. Oh." While other areas of the Bush administration's policy troubled Holder—including the establishment of secret prisons and the legal netherworld of Guantánamo Bay—it was the demolition of the CRD that caught him in the most personal place and made it impossible to decline the appointment as attorney general. - -But as we sat in his office one afternoon, Holder confessed that he never imagined how much of his time would be consumed by other issues entirely. "The biggest surprise I've had in this job," he said, "is how much time the national-security issues take. Those are the primary things that I have to deal with in a post-9/11 world. From an eight-thirty meeting every morning, to the threat screen for the last twenty-four hours, to meetings during the course of the day. And almost inevitably there's something that I take home at night that is national-security related. Our National Security Division didn't even exist when I was last here!" - -··· -To the extent that Holder did think about the national-security issues he would inherit, he had every reason to believe that his own views mirrored the president's. During the 2008 campaign, no other issue defined Barack Obama like his promise to restore America's commitment to international law. Other items may have topped his domestic agenda, but as a symbol of what Obama's candidacy meant, of what his election signified to the world, nothing conveyed his message of "change" like the pledge to repair American justice. - -"Obama promised change on a variety of fronts, but the central front was the rule of law," says Georgetown law professor and civil-liberties scholar David Cole. "He promised to restore our standing in the world by restoring our commitment to constitutional and international law." - -To Obama, the Justice Department under George W. Bush was not just part of the administration's misguided thinking after September 11; in many cases, it was the root cause of that thinking. From the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the gruesome interrogation practices at Guantánamo, many of the most damaging blows to American prestige could be traced to the doorstep of the DOJ. At the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), lawyers had spent years dismantling the checks and balances that traditionally constrain a president's power. In a series of memos between 2001 and 2004, attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee developed a legal framework that would grant the White House almost unlimited power. As commander in chief, they argued, the president was immune to the law. He was not subject to the oversight of Congress or the review of the courts. He could send troops anywhere he wanted and order them to do whatever he liked. If that meant invading a country against the will of Congress or torturing prisoners in defiance of the law, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. "Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants, than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements," the lawyers wrote. "Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of battlefield combatants would violate the Constitution." - -Of course, the claim that Congress cannot oversee the treatment of prisoners is precisely the opposite of what the Constitution actually says. The founding document gives Congress not only the right to "make rules regarding captures on land and water" but also the task of "organizing, arming, and disciplining" the military. Still, Yoo and Bybee went further. Having exempted the president from the law, they next set out to examine some of the things he might get away with—producing a detailed description of ten torture methods that they believed he was at liberty to order, such as wall-slamming and waterboarding. - -Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama was clear in his condemnation of these policies, positioning himself as a constitutional scholar devoted to restoring the rule of law. "No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient," he bellowed in a speech during the summer of 2007. "That is not who we are, and it's not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." By the time of his election fifteen months later, Obama's campaign literature promised not only to ban torture but to offer enemy combatants access to the courts. "The right of habeas corpus allows prisoners to ask a court to determine whether they are being lawfully imprisoned," one campaign document explained. "Recently, this right has been denied to those deemed 'enemy combatants.' Barack Obama strongly supports bipartisan efforts to restore habeas rights." - -Separately, Holder was advocating the same policy. "Our government authorized the use of torture," he said in a 2008 speech, "secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused 'enemy combatants,' and authorized the use of procedures that both violate international law and the United States Constitution.… We owe the American people a reckoning." - -Yet as Holder settled into the Justice Department in February 2009, that "reckoning" would become the first test of his independence as attorney general. On the campaign trail, Obama had blasted torture as illegal, but as president he had little incentive to prosecute the crime, which would be distracting and politically costly. At the DOJ, however, Holder was experiencing just the opposite pull. If the abuse of prisoners seemed illegal from the outside, on the inside he was privy to a host of new evidence that painted an even more damning picture. As he flipped through the pages of one report, Holder told me, reading descriptions of field agents holding a power drill to the head of one prisoner, strangling another, battering some, waterboarding others, and threatening to rape their wives and children, he was filled with "a combination of disgust and sadness." - -"I have a great love for this country," he told me as we sat in his office one day. "I believe in the concept of this country. I believe in the rightness of the way we do things. And when confronted with the things I saw in that report—to think that Americans did those kind of things—that's totally at odds with what I believe about our country. At a fundamental, very personal, emotional level, it was inherently un-American." - -It was also almost certainly illegal. Under the U.S. criminal code, torturing anyone, anywhere, for any reason is a crime, and anyone who "conspires to commit" torture is guilty under the same statute. By crafting the administration's torture policy, Yoo and Bybee could be implicated in thousands of criminal acts. "The memos are criminal," says attorney Ben Wizner of the ACLU's National Security Project. "They weren't written to explain the law—they were written to evade the law. They were part of a criminal conspiracy to create immunity for war crimes." - -But as Holder considered launching an investigation, he immediately began to feel pushback from the White House. Behind the scenes, as Jane Mayer has reported in The New Yorker, Emanuel barked to an intermediary, "Didn't he get the memo that we're not relitigating the past?" And appearing on the Sunday-morning talk shows in April, Emanuel pressed the issue publicly, insisting that the authors of the torture memos "should not be prosecuted. This is not a time for retribution." At the White House podium, press secretary Robert Gibbs chimed in, "Those that followed the legal advice and acted in good faith on that legal advice shouldn't be prosecuted." - -To call these comments inappropriate would be to praise the White House with faint damnation. Just a few years earlier, the Bush team had ignited a national scandal when political operatives tried to influence U.S. attorneys, yet the Obama administration had gone a step further, allowing operatives to apply political pressure on the attorney general himself. What's more, the pressure would continue for months. As late as August of last year, while Holder was still evaluating the evidence, Gibbs continued to rail against the investigation from the White House podium. "The administration has been very clear," he declared on August 20. "A hefty litigation looking backward is not what we believe is in the country's best interest." - -So when Holder revealed four days later that he was assigning veteran prosecutor John Durham to investigate torture by the CIA, observers on both ends of the political spectrum held up the decision as proof of Holder's independence. Congressmen John Conyers and Jerry Nadler issued a press release "applauding" the decision, while congressman Pete King of New York erupted, "It's bullshit. It's disgraceful. You wonder which side they're on. Either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party, or he's lost control of his administration." As if to reinforce the message, White House spokesman Bill Burton addressed reporters outside the president's compound on Martha's Vineyard, declaring Holder "a very independent attorney general." - -Behind closed doors, however, a very different picture emerged. In his private conversations with Durham, Holder had dramatically limited the scope of the investigation—so much, in fact, that the prosecutor was forbidden to examine the torture policy at all. As the attorney general told me himself, "The instructions that I shared with John were that anybody who went by the OLC memos, that's fine. The question is: Are there people who went beyond those memos? Who exceeded those memos? And if there are, should we be investigating them?" - -But when I spoke with lawyers following the case, I found that many of them were unaware of those instructions. In June, for example, ten months after the investigation began, I was chatting with the ACLU's Ben Wizner, who has followed the torture issue closely, when I realized that he was still laboring under the illusion that Durham might be investigating the OLC lawyers. "After all," Wizner said, "we don't know for sure what Durham's mandate is." - -I mentioned that I had asked Holder myself, and Wizner said, "What did he say?" - -"That it's limited to rogue agents," I said. - -"Just the people who went outside the memos?" "Right." - -"But not the architects?" - -"Right." - -Wizner exhaled loudly. "Well," he said, "then it's on him." - -What I didn't mention is the other thing Holder told me: that the reason he limited the investigation was politics. "You only want to look back at a previous administration if you feel you really have to," Holder said. "Because it has a potential chilling effect. If people who work in this administration today think that four years from now, or eight years from now, the decisions they make are going to be examined by a successor administration, you don't want that to happen. So that's a political consideration." - -In this, Holder was undoubtedly right. To ignore evidence of a crime by the last administration, so that the current administration won't be examined in the future, is a political consideration indeed. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last. - -··· -It took only three months for Holder and the White House to clash again, this time over the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. By now, Holder's indictment of the September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Obama's decision to overrule the attorney general and suspend the case, have been widely discussed in other pages. But the machinations behind those events remain far more complex than most accounts portray. - -The roots of the administration's KSM decision extend even before Obama took office. In the months leading up to the inauguration, lawyers on the transition team had been drafting a series of presidential orders, including one that would close Guantánamo prison. But when Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Obama's lawyers that he would be scouring those orders for clues about where to send detainees in the future, Obama instructed his team to write another order addressing that question directly. In particular, the new order established a special task force, which included Holder, Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to write guidelines by which prisoners would be sent to either military or civilian court. For Obama, those guidelines were essential to bring decision-making into a clear legal framework. "The president said time and again, 'I don't want it to appear that the military commissions are a place where we try people we can't convict in civilian court,' " recalls a senior White House source. - -The guidelines that emerged from the task force last summer erected clear rules: If the crime is committed against a civilian target on U.S. soil, the case goes to civilian court; if the crime is against U.S. troops overseas, the case goes to a military commission. And one of the first detainees to go through the new guidelines was KSM. Since most of the victims of September 11 were civilians and the attacks took place on U.S. soil, the guidelines steered KSM into civilian court. "We had the protocol and applied it," Holder said. "There were a small number of factors, and we went through them all." - -Still, Holder asked for an additional layer of confidence. Before committing to a civilian trial, he approached the U.S. attorneys most likely to handle the case with a question: Could the prosecutors obtain a conviction without using any of Mohammed's own statements? That meant throwing out everything KSM had admitted while being tortured as well as every other statement he had made in six years of custody—even voluntary comments, years after the torture stopped. The U.S. attorneys assured Holder that they could still win. - -For Holder the decision also had a personal significance, one that he would have to wrestle alone. As an opponent of the death penalty, he is routinely forced to set aside his own views and make peace with the law. Each time he faces a death-penalty case, he goes through a minor ritual: "I bring the case file home," he said. "I wait until Sharon's in bed, the kids are in bed, and I sit at the table in my kitchen, the breakfast nook, and I spread the stuff out. I don't want to be distracted. TV's off. No one else is around. And I pore through all that material just to make sure that, to the extent I can, I'm comfortable with the decision that I make." He added, "I'm trained as a lawyer to put aside my personal feelings and apply the law, and in some instances that's easy to do, but when it comes to those death-penalty decisions, it's really difficult. You're talking about the life of a human being." - -Holder knew that the decision to try KSM in civilian court would make the death penalty more likely. Mohammed referred to himself as the "director" of the attacks and was expected to plead guilty. In a military commission, it's unclear whether a prisoner who pleads guilty can be put to death, but in civilian court, he definitely can. In late October, with the case hanging in the balance, Holder took the KSM file home. He waited for the house to fall quiet, unfolded the materials, and considered the details one last time. "I did everything the same as any other death-penalty case," he told me. Once again Holder made his peace with the law. On November 13, 2009, he announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other September 11 conspirators would be tried in Manhattan federal court. He instructed prosecutors to seek the death penalty. - -The political furor that erupted next took Holder completely by surprise, as New York politicians worked each other into a frenzy over a litany of imagined disasters—the cost of increased police and traffic downtown, the heightened risk of a terror attack. As Senator Chuck Schumer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg lobbied Rahm Emanuel to intervene, Republicans joined the firestorm. Led by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former military lawyer himself and one of the crucial votes to close Guantánamo prison, Republicans deluged the White House with outrage that KSM would be tried as a common criminal. "Lindsey was calling Rahm all the time," says a White House source. "And Rahm would say, 'Hey, look, you've gotta call Eric about this.' " - -According to people familiar with Emanuel's thinking, the chief of staff was not so much opposed to civilian courts as he was agnostic. What mattered to Emanuel was a conviction, which would serve justice and the president's political interests. Where that conviction took place was incidental. "He didn't understand why Eric thought it was so important to use the civilian courts," says a source familiar with the White House internal debate. "If there's political pressure against it, why not try the case in a military commission? Politically there was no upside to keeping it in civilian court. There was only downside. Rahm's position was, 'We're going to lose Lindsey, and then we can't close Guantánamo, and it's gonna be Eric's fault.' Everything is personal with Rahm." - -After two months of frantic phone calls between the White House, Schumer, Graham, and Holder, Obama finally pulled the plug. Citing national-security concerns, he invoked the right to choose the trial venue himself. In doing so, Holder aides point out, Obama upended his own detainee policy before a single prisoner had been tried. After going to great lengths to inject structure and law into the process, after assigning senior cabinet officials to devise a coherent system of rules, he then revoked those rules and returned the detainees to a state of legal limbo. - -"It was wildly unfortunate," says David Ogden, Holder's former deputy attorney general. "The president gave that decision to the attorney general. The attorney general made it. Then the White House had to deal with a political reality in Congress. And the situation was assessed as being politically untenable." Others are less forgiving, calling Obama's capitulation an insult to Holder and a regression to the arbitrary policy of the Bush years. "There is an important principle at stake here," Holder told me. "You don't shy away from using this great system for political reasons. It hampers our ability as we interact with our allies if we don't stand for the rule of law when it comes to a case that is politically difficult to bring." Among Holder's political allies, the blame for KSM lay not with Rahm but Obama. "Rahm was critical," says one former White House official. "But the president ultimately made the call." - -··· -In the months since Holder lost custody of the trial, his place in the administration has only become more conflicted. In some respects, he has enjoyed an extraordinary year. With an infusion of more than one hundred new employees at the Civil Rights Division, for example, and a budget increase of $22 million per year, the CRD has grown faster and accomplished more than at any other time since the 1960s. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the criminal section brought a record number of cases, the housing section brought its largest case in history, and the CRD won the largest settlement ever awarded in a lending-discrimination suit, more than $6 million on behalf of 2,500 African-American homebuyers. But the most telling measure of the CRD's recovery may be its staff. "Virtually every section is bringing back people who were here before," says division head Tom Perez. "The diaspora have returned." - -Yet on national security, Holder continues to struggle for footing. In case after case, he seems to have reconciled himself to policies that he would have once condemned. In January, after a review by the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that the authors of the torture memos had committed professional misconduct, Holder allowed the supervisor of that office, David Margolis, to overturn the committee's conclusion and absolve the lawyers of wrongdoing. Sources close to Holder say that he was disappointed by Margolis's decision and believed the finding of misconduct was correct—but was unwilling to overrule a nonpolitical employee on such a sensitive issue. That seems reasonable, except that other DOJ sources say it's ridiculous to portray Margolis as nonpolitical. "His whole approach," one longtime DOJ insider told me, "is skewed by his desire to protect the department from embarrassment." - -In April, Holder watched his nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, where the torture memos originated, withdraw from consideration after more than a year of painful stalemate in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although Dawn Johnsen refuses to blame Holder or Obama for allowing her nomination to fail, she says a primary objection among Senate Republicans was her opposition to torture. As a law professor during the Bush years, Johnsen was vehement in her criticism of the OLC opinions. "That played a big role in the failure of my nomination," she told me from her cell phone as she made the long drive home to Indiana this summer. "But I have no regrets about taking those positions." Two Republican staffers on the committee confirmed Johnsen's explanation. Six years after the OLC memos, the only lawyer to be punished for the torture policy is one who strenuously opposed it. - -This summer, Holder watched the administration's first terror trial, of the child soldier Omar Khadr, begin—not in civilian court in view of the world, but on the Guantánamo base itself, using a hastily revised rule book that Pentagon lawyers did not unveil until the morning of the first hearing, and with a handful of the most respected Guantánamo journalists banned from observing the proceedings and ordered off the base—an absurdist spectacle that one DOJ official described to me as "making the case against military commissions for us." - -Of the fifty-seven habeas hearings that have taken place at Guantánamo, some thirty-eight prisoners have been set free by a judge. Yet the Holder Justice Department is denying habeas hearings to the prisoners at every other U.S. facility, including more than 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Despite clearly promising to grant habeas to enemy combatants, Holder and Obama now insist that they never intended to do any such thing. Only the prisoners who happen to be housed in Guantánamo, they say, have a right to court. Prisoners who were shipped anywhere else have an entirely different set of legal rights—which is to say, none at all. - -And in September, Holder found himself in perhaps the most surprising position of all—defending the administration's right to assassinate a U.S. citizen, even if he hasn't been convicted of any crime. According to a Justice Department brief filed in the case of Anwar al Awlaki, a radical Imam who was born in the U.S., the Obama Administration now claims it has the right to assassinate a citizen based on suspicion alone. - -All of which raises the fundamental question that surrounds Holder's legacy at Justice: Given his failure to provide a "reckoning" for torture, given his refusal to extend the rule of law to enemy combatants, given his inability to defend citizens against assassination by their own government, and given that he has already accomplished the thing that initially brought him to the DOJ, what, precisely, keeps him in the job now? - -On my last meeting with Holder, I decided to ask him whether the administration had ever seriously intended to grant court hearings to enemy combatants. "Did you even discuss it?" I asked. - -Holder shrugged. "We took a view with regard to whether habeas applied at Bagram, and the courts upheld us," he said, "but there have been cases at Guantánamo." - -"Thirty-eight of those cases, you've lost," I pointed out. "Doesn't that make you question whether you should offer habeas to the 600 prisoners at Bagram?" - -"No," he said. "I mean, I think people in the theater of war are different than what you have in Guantánamo." - -"What's the difference between a longtime Bagram prisoner and a longtime Guantánamo prisoner?" I asked. "Isn't there any duration after which they deserve a hearing?" - -"In the past," he said, "a detainee could be held for the duration of the conflict." - -"You've got to admit, that seems outrageously broad. This conflict could go on forever." - -"But see, that's the deal," Holder said. "This conflict is different from what we have experienced in the past, where there were formal declarations of war, and nations were fighting nations. Now it's something different. So we've tried to apply the traditional law to this new situation." - -"But before the inauguration," I said, "both you and the president said that habeas should apply to enemy combatants." - -"I'm not sure I ever opined on that," Holder said. - -"I could read you a quote." - -Holder laughed uncomfortably. - -"Here's the quote: 'Our government authorized the use of torture, approved secret electronic surveillance without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants,' and a few other things." - -Holder was silent. "But I was talking about Guantánamo," he said. "I'm pretty sure I was talking about Guantánamo." - -This seemed wrong, but I changed the subject. "What about the Awlaki case?" I asked. "How do you feel about the argument that the government can kill a citizen without a trial?" - -Holder nodded, thinking. Then he said slowly, "I'm not saying there's a policy like that, but a couple of things strike me. First off, there's no denial on his part that he's an active operational terrorist. Two, he has the ability to make use of the courts. He chose not to do that. His father filed on his behalf. And the notion that the courts intervene in an armed struggle seems inconsistent with the separation of powers." - -"If you wanted to listen to his telephone calls, you'd need a court order," I pointed out. "But not to kill him?" - -"The law is pretty clear that a person who becomes an active participant in the Al Qaeda effort is subject to the same treatment as one who is actively engaged in battle against us." - -"But that's what a court would have to determine, isn't it? Whether he's with Al Qaeda or not." - -"Well," Holder said, "we went through a whole series of reasons why that lawsuit should fail. The lawsuit just doesn't hold water." - -As we went back and forth, I began to realize that it was impossible to know how much of Holder's argument he really believed, and how much he was merely willing to say. Like any good political appointee, he was prepared to defend the policy whether he liked it or not. And in that case, maybe it didn't matter what he supported; promoting the policy was supporting it. I was reminded of something one of his friends had told me, a former DOJ official who has known Holder since the beginning of his career: "Eric has this instinct to please. That's his weakness. He doesn't have to be told what to do—he's willing to do whatever it takes. It's his survival mechanism in Washington." - -And then I remembered another moment, months earlier, sitting in his office on the heels of the KSM decision. Holder seemed deflated and tired, and in an attempt at humor, I pointed to the painting of Bobby Kennedy and made a joke about the independence of the attorney general. Holder bristled. "Some people say Bobby was pretty independent," he snapped. - -I nodded, and he seemed to relax. "But yeah," he said, pointing at another painting across the room. "By contrast, Elliot Richardson." - -As Nixon's third attorney general, Richardson lasted only five months, resigning in protest when the president ordered him to fire the Watergate prosecutor. "He has just one year under his name," Holder mused. "There's no dash. There's no hyphen. He lasted just a number of months, but he did the job. He did the absolute right thing. When asked to do something he felt was inconsistent with his oath as attorney general, he resigned." - -Holder paused. - -"So," he said quietly. "He's a hero." diff --git a/tests/corpus/last-american-hero.md b/tests/corpus/last-american-hero.md deleted file mode 100644 index 34c369301..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/last-american-hero.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,371 +0,0 @@ -The last American hero is Junior Johnson. Yes! -*Esquire* -By Tom Wolfe - -Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog! - -Seventeen thousand people, me included, all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock-car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile stock-car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front. This is not to say there is no preaching and shouting in the South this morning. There is preaching and shouting. Any of us can turn on the old automobile transistor radio and get all we want: - -"They are greedy dogs. Yeah! They ride around in big cars. Unnh-hunh! And chase women. Yeah! And drink liquor. Unnh-hunh! And smoke cigars. Oh yes! And they are greedy dogs. Yeah! Unnh-hunh! Oh yes! Amen!" - -There are also some commercials on the radio for Aunt Jemima grits, which cost ten cents a pound. There are also the Gospel Harmonettes, singing: "If you dig a ditch, you better dig two..." - -There are also three fools in a panel discussion on the New South, which they seem to conceive of as General Lee running the new Dulcidreme Labial Cream factory down at Griffin, Georgia. - -And suddenly my car is stopped still on Sunday morning in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in the history of the world. It goes for ten miles in every direction from the North Wilkesboro Speedway. And right there it dawns on me that as far as this situation is concerned, anyway, all the conventional notions about the South are confined to...the Sunday radio. The South has preaching and shouting, the South has grits, the South has country songs, old mimosa traditions, clay dust, Old Bigots, New Liberals -- and all of it, all of that old mental cholesterol, is confined to the Sunday radio. What I was in the middle of -- well, it wasn't anything one hears about in panels about the South today. Miles and miles of eye-busting pastel cars on the expressway, which roar right up into the hills, going to the stock-car races. In ten years baseball -- and the state of North Carolina alone used to have forty-four professional baseball teams -- baseball is all over with in the South. We are all in the middle of a wild new thing, the Southern car world, and heading down the road on my way to see a breed such as sports never saw before, Southern stock-car drivers, all lined up in these two-ton mothers that go over 175 m.p.h., Fireball Roberts, Freddie Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, Richard Petty, and -- the hardest of all the hard chargers, one of the fastest automobile racing drivers in history -- yes! Junior Johnson. - -The legend of Junior Johnson! In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper still operators of all times, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a famous stock-car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963, for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and throughout the rural South, for that matter. There is all this about how good old boys would wake up in the middle of the night in the apple shacks and hear an overcharged engine roaring over Brushy Mountain and say, "Listen at him -- there he goes!", although that part is doubtful, since some nights there were so many good old boys taking off down the road in supercharged automobiles out of Wilkes County, and running loads to Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, or wherever, it would be pretty hard to pick out one. It was Junior Johnson specifically, however, who was famous for the "bootleg turn" or "about-face," in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car's rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the agents by sight in a very short time. They would rag them practically to their faces on the subject of Junior Johnson, so that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there's no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes -- but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it's another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then -- Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong! -- gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson!, with a gawdam agent's si-reen and a red light in his grille! - -I wasn't in the South five minutes before people started making oaths, having visions, telling these hulking great stories, and so forth, all on the subject of Junior Johnson. At the Greensboro, North Carolina, Airport there was one good old boy who vowed he would have eaten "a bucket of it" if that would have kept Junior Johnson from switching from a Dodge racer to a Ford. Hell yes, and after that -- God-almighty, remember that 1963 Chevrolet of Junior's? Whatever happened to that car? A couple of more good old boys join in. A good old boy, I ought to explain, is a generic term in the rural South referring to a man of any age, but more often young than not, who fits in with the status system of the region. It usually means he has a good sense of humor and enjoys ironic jokes, is tolerant and easygoing enough to get along in long conversations at places like on the corner, and has a reasonable amount of physical courage. The term is usually heard in some such form as: "Lud? He's a good old boy from over at Crozet." These good old boys in the airport, by the way, were in their twenties, except for one fellow who was a cabdriver and was about forty-five, I would say. Except for the cabdriver, they all wore neo-Brummellian wardrobe such as Lacoste tennis shirts, Slim Jim pants, windbreakers with the collars turned up, "fast" shoes of the winkle-picker genre, and so on. I mention these details just by way of pointing out that very few grits, Iron Boy overalls, clodhoppers or hats with ventilation holes up near the crown enter into this story. Anyway, these good old boys are talking about Junior Johnson and how he has switched to Ford. This they unanimously regard as some sort of betrayal on Johnson's part. Ford, it seems, they regard as the car symbolizing the established power structure. Dodge is a kind of middle ground. Dodge is at least a challenger, not a ruler. But the Junior Johnson they like to remember is the Junior Johnson of 1963, who took on the whole field of NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Grand National racing with a Chevrolet. All the other drivers, the drivers driving Fords, Mercurys, Plymouths, Dodges, had millions, literally millions when it is all added up, millions of dollars in backing from the Ford and Chrysler Corporations. Junior Johnson took them all on in a Chevrolet without one cent of backing from Detroit. Chevrolet had pulled out of stock-car racing. Yet every race it was the same. It was never a question of whether anybody was going to outrun Junior Johnson. It was just a question of whether he was going to win or his car was going to break down, since, for one thing, half the time he had to make his own racing parts. God! Junior Johnson was like Robin Hood or Jesse James or Little David or something. Every time that Chevrolet, No. 3, appeared on the track, wild curdled yells, "Rebel" yells, they still have those, would rise up. At Daytona, at Atlanta, at Charlotte, at Darlington, South Carolina; Bristol, Tennessee; Martinsville, Virginia -- Junior Johnson! - -And then the good old boys get to talking about whatever happened to that Chevrolet of Junior's, and the cabdriver says he knows. He says Junior Johnson is using that car to run liquor out of Wilkes County. What does he mean? For Junior Johnson ever to go near another load of bootleg whiskey again -- he would have to be insane. He has this huge racing income. He has two other businesses, a whole automated chicken farm with 42,000 chickens, a road-grading business -- but the cabdriver says he has this dream Junior is still roaring down from Wilkes County, down through the clay cuts, with the Atlas Arc Lip jars full in the back of that Chevrolet. It is in Junior's blood -- and then at this point he puts his right hand up in front of him as if he is groping through fog, and his eyeballs glaze over and he looks out in the distance and he describes Junior Johnson roaring over the ridges of Wilkes County as if it is the ghost of Zapata he is describing, bounding over the Sierras on a white horse to rouse the peasants. - -A stubborn notion! A crazy notion! Yet Junior Johnson has followers who need to keep him, symbolically, riding through nighttime like a demon. Madness! But Junior Johnson is one of the last of those sports stars who is not just an ace at the game itself, but a hero a whole people or class of people can identify with. Other, older examples are the way Jack Dempsey stirred up the Irish or the way Joe Louis stirred up the Negroes. Junior Johnson is a modern figure. He is only thirty-three years old and still racing. He should be compared to two other sports heroes whose cultural impact is not too well known. One is Antonino Rocca, the professional wrestler, whose triumphs mean so much to New York City's Puerto Ricans that he can fill Madison Square Garden, despite the fact that everybody, the Puerto Ricans included, knows that wrestling is nothing but a crude form of folk theatre. The other is Ingemar Johansson, who had a tremendous meaning to the Swedish masses -- they were tired of that old king who played tennis all the time and all his friends who keep on drinking Cointreau behind the screen of socialism. Junior Johnson is a modern hero, all involved with car culture and car symbolism in the South. A wild new thing -- - -Wild -- gone wild. Fireball Roberts' Ford spins out on the first turn at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, spinning, spinning, the spin seems almost like slow motion -- and then it smashes into the wooden guardrail. It lies up there with the frame bent. Roberts is all right. There is a new layer of asphalt on the track, it is like glass, the cars keep spinning off the first turn. Ned Jarrett spins, smashes through the wood. "Now, boys, this ice ain't gonna get one goddamn bit better, so you can either line up and qualify or pack up and go home -- " - -I had driven from the Greensboro Airport up to Wilkes County to see Junior Johnson on the occasion of one of the two yearly NASCAR Grand National stock-car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway. - -It is a long, very gradual climb from Greensboro to Wilkes County. Wilkes County is all hills, ridges, woods and underbrush, full of pin oaks, sweet-gum maples, ash, birch, apple trees, rhododendron, rocks, vines, tin roofs, little clapboard places like the Mount Olive Baptist Church, signs for things like Double Cola, Sherrill's Ice Cream, Eckard's Grocery, Dr. Pepper, Diel's Apples, Google's Place, Suddith's Place and -- yes! -- cars. Up onto the highway, out of a side road from a hollow, here comes a 1947 Hudson. To almost anybody it would look like just some old piece of junk left over from God knows when, rolling down a country road...the 1947 Hudson was one of the first real "hot" cars made after the war. Some of the others were the 1946 Chrysler, which had a "kick-down" gear for sudden bursts of speed, the 1955 Pontiac and a lot of the Fords. To a great many good old boys a hot car was a symbol of heating up life itself. The war! Money even for country boys! And the money bought cars. In California they suddenly found kids of all sorts involved in vast drag racing orgies and couldn't figure out what was going on. But in the South the mania for cars was even more intense, although much less publicized. To millions of good old boys, and girls, the automobile represented not only liberation from what was still pretty much a land-bound form of social organization but also a great leap forward into twentieth-century glamour, an idea that was being dinned in on the South like everywhere else. It got so that one of the typical rural sights, in addition to the red rooster, the gray split-rail fence, the Edgeworth Tobacco sign and the rusted-out harrow, one of the typical rural sights would be...you would be driving along the dirt roads and there beside the house would be an automobile up on blocks or something, with a rope over the tree for hoisting up the motor or some other heavy part, and a couple of good old boys would be practically disappearing into its innards, from below and from above, draped over the side under the hood. It got so that on Sundays there wouldn't be a safe straight stretch of road in the county, because so many wild country boys would be out racing or just raising hell on the roads. A lot of other kids, who weren't basically wild, would be driving like hell every morning and every night, driving to jobs perhaps thirty or forty miles away, jobs that were available only because of automobiles. In the morning they would be driving through the dapple shadows like madmen. In the hollows, sometimes one would come upon the most incredible tar-paper hovels, down near the stream, and out front would be an incredible automobile creation, a late-model car with aerials, continental kit overhangs in the back, mudguards studded with reflectors, fender skirts, spotlights, God knows what all, with a girl and perhaps a couple of good old boys communing over it and giving you rotten looks as you drive by. On Saturday night everybody would drive into town and park under the lights on the main street and neck. Yes! There was something about being right in there in town underneath the lights and having them reflecting off the baked enamel on the hood. Then if a good old boy insinuated his hands here and there on the front seat with a girl and began...necking...somehow it was all more complete. After the war there was a great deal of stout-burgher talk about people who lived in hovels and bought big-yacht cars to park out front. This was one of the symbols of a new, spendthrift age. But there was a great deal of unconscious resentment buried in the talk. It was resentment against (a) the fact that the good old boy had his money at all and (b) the fact that the car symbolized freedom, a slightly wild, careening emancipation from the old social order. Stock-car racing got started about this time, right after the war, and it was immediately regarded as some kind of manifestation of the animal irresponsibility of the lower orders. It had a truly terrible reputation. It was -- well, it looked rowdy or something. The cars were likely to be used cars, the tracks were dirt, the stands were rickety wood, the drivers were country boys, and they had regular feuds out there, putting each other "up against the wall" and "cutting tires" and everything else. Those country boys would drive into the curves full tilt, then slide maniacally, sometimes coming around the curve sideways, with red dirt showering up. Sometimes they would race at night, under those weak-eyed yellow-ochre lights they have at small tracks and baseball fields, and the clay dust would start showering up in the air, where the evening dew would catch it, and all evening long you would be sitting in the stands or standing out in the infield with a fine clay-mud drizzle coming down on you, not that anybody gave a damn -- except for the Southern upper and middle classes, who never attended in those days, but spoke of the "rowdiness." - -But mainly it was the fact that stock-car racing was something that was welling up out of the lower orders. From somewhere these country boys and urban proles were getting the money and starting this sport. - -Stock-car racing was beginning all over the country, at places like Allentown, Langhorne, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and out in California and even out on Long Island, but wherever it cropped up, the Establishment tried to wish it away, largely, and stock-car racing went on in a kind of underground world of tracks built on cheap stretches of land well out from the town or the city, a world of diners, drive-ins, motels, gasoline stations, and the good burghers might drive by from time to time, happen by on a Sunday or something, and see the crowd gathered from out of nowhere, the cars coming in, crowding up the highway a little, but Monday morning they would be all gone. - -Stock-car racing was building up a terrific following in the South during the early Fifties. Here was a sport not using any abstract devices, any bat and ball, but the same automobile that was changing a man's own life, his own symbol of liberation, and it didn't require size, strength and all that, all it required was a taste for speed, and the guts. The newspapers in the South didn't seem to catch on to what was happening until late in the game. Of course, newspapers all over the country have looked backward over the tremendous rise in automobile sports, now the second-biggest type of sport in the country in terms of attendance. The sports pages generally have an inexorable lower-middle-class outlook. The sportswriter's "zest for life" usually amounts, in the end, to some sort of gruff Mom's Pie sentimentality at a hideously cozy bar somewhere. The sportswriters caught on to Grand Prix racing first because it had "tone," a touch of defrocked European nobility about it, what with a few counts racing here and there, although, in fact, it is the least popular form of racing in the United States. What finally put stock-car racing onto the sports pages in the South was the intervention of the Detroit automobile firms. Detroit began putting so much money into the sport that it took on a kind of massive economic respectability and thereby, in the lower-middle-class brain, status. - -What Detroit discovered was that thousands of good old boys in the South were starting to form allegiances to brands of automobiles, according to which were hottest on the stock-car circuits, the way they used to have them for the hometown baseball team. The South was one of the hottest car-buying areas in the country. Cars like Hudsons, Oldsmobiles, and Lincolns, not the cheapest automobiles by any means, were selling in disproportionate numbers in the South, and a lot of young good old boys were buying them. In 1955, Pontiac started easing into stock-car racing, and suddenly the big surge was on. Everybody jumped into the sport to grab for themselves The Speed Image. Suddenly, where a good old boy used to have to bring his gasoline to the track in old filling-station pails and pour it into the tank through a funnel when he made a pit stop, and change his tires with a hand wrench, suddenly, now, he had these "gravity" tanks of gasoline that you just jam into the gas pipe, and air wrenches to take the wheels off, and whole crews of men in white coveralls to leap all over a car when it came rolling into the pit, just like they do at Indianapolis, as if they are mechanical apparati merging with the machine as it rolls in, forcing water into the radiator, jacking up the car, taking off wheels, wiping off the windshield, handing the driver a cup of orange juice, all in one synchronized operation. And now, today, the big money starts descending on this little place, the North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Speedway, a little five-eighths-of-a-mile stock-car track with a Coca-Cola sign out by the highway where the road in starts. - -The private planes start landing out at the Wilkesboro Airport. Freddie Lorenzen, the driver, the biggest money winner last year in stock-car racing, comes sailing in out of the sky in a twin-engine Aero Commander, and there are a few good old boys out there in the tall grass by the runway already with their heads sticking up watching this hero of the modern age come in and taxi up and get out of that twin-engine airplane with his blond hair swept back as if by the mother internal combustion engine of them all. And then Paul Goldsmith, the driver, comes in in a 310 Cessna, and he gets out, all these tall, lanky hard-boned Americans in their thirties with these great profiles like a comic-strip hero or something, and then Glenn (Fireball) Roberts -- Fireball Roberts! -- Fireball is hard -- he comes in a Comanche 250, like a flying yacht, and then Ray Nichels and Ray Fox, the chief mechanics, who run big racing crews for the Chrysler Corporation, this being Fox's last race for Junior as his mechanic, before Junior switches over to Ford, they come in in two-engine planes. And even old Buck Bake -- hell, Buck Baker is a middling driver for Dodge, but even he comes rolling in down the landing strip at two hundred miles an hour with his Southern-hero face at the window of the cockpit of a twin-engine Apache, traveling first class in the big status boat that has replaced the yacht in America, the private plane. - -And then the Firestone and Goodyear vans pull in, huge mothers, bringing in huge stacks of racing tires for the race, big wide ones, 8.20's, with special treads, which are like a lot of bumps on the tire instead of grooves. They even have special tires for qualifying, soft tires, called "gumballs," they wouldn't last more than ten times around the track in a race, but for qualifying, which is generally three laps, one to pick up speed and two to race against the clock, they are great, because they hold tight on the comers. And on a hot day, when somebody like Junior Johnson, one of the fastest qualifying runners in the history of the sport, 170.777 m.p.h. in a one-hundred-mile qualifying race at Daytona in 1964, when somebody like Junior Johnson really pushes it on a qualifying run, there will be a ring of blue smoke up over the whole goddamned track, a ring like an oval halo over the whole thing from the gumballs burning, and some good old boy will say, "Great smokin' blue gumballs god almighty dog! There goes Junior Johnson!" - -The thing is, each one of these tires costs fifty-five to sixty dollars, and on a track that is fast and hard on tires, like Atlanta, one car might go through ten complete tire changes, easily, forty tires, or almost $2500 worth of tires just for one race. And he may even be out of the money. And then the Ford van and the Dodge van and the Mercury van and the Plymouth van roll in with new motors, a whole new motor every few races, a 427-cubic-inch stock-car racing motor, 600 horsepower, the largest and most powerful allowed on the track, that probably costs the company $1000 or more, when you consider that they are not mass produced. And still the advertising appeal. You can buy the very same car that these fabulous wild men drive every week at these fabulous wild speeds, and some of their power and charisma is yours. After every NASCAR Grand National stock-car race, whichever company has the car that wins, this company will put big ads in the Southern papers, and papers all over the country if it is a very big race, like the Daytona 500, the Daytona Firecracker 400 or the Atlanta and Charlotte races. They sell a certain number of these 427-cubic-inch cars to the general public, a couple of hundred a year, perhaps, at eight or nine thousand dollars apiece, but it is no secret that these motors are specially reworked just for stock-car racing. Down at Charlotte there is a company called Holman & Moody that is supposed to be the "garage" or "automotive-engineering" concern that prepares automobiles for Freddy Lorenzen and some of the other Ford drivers. But if you go by Holman & Moody out by the airport and Charlotte, suddenly you come upon a huge place that is a factory, for God's sake, a big long thing, devoted mainly to the business of turning out stock-car racers. A whole lot of other parts in stock-car racers are heavier than the same parts on a street automobile, although they are made to the same scale. The shock absorbers are bigger, the wheels are wider and bulkier, the swaybars and steering mechanisms are heavier, the axles are much heavier, they have double sets of wheel bearings, and so forth and so on. The bodies of the cars are pretty much the same, except that they use lighter sheet metal, practically tinfoil. Inside, there is only the driver's seat and a heavy set of roll bars and diagonal struts that turn the inside of the car into a rigid cage, actually. That is why the drivers can walk away unhurt -- most of the time -- from the most spectacular crackups. The gearshift is the floor kind, although it doesn't make much difference, as there is almost no shifting gears in stock-car racing. You just get into high gear and go. The dashboard has no speedometer, the main thing being the dial for engine revolutions per minute. So, anyway, it costs about $15,000 to prepare a stock-car racer in the first place and another three or four thousand for each new race and this does not even count the costs of mechanics' work and transportation. All in all, Detroit will throw around a quarter of a million dollars into it every week while the season is on, and the season runs, roughly, from February to October, with a few big races after that. And all this turns up even out at the North Wilkesboro Speedway with the Coca-Cola sign out front, out in the up-country of Wilkes County, North Carolina. - -Sunday! Racing day! Sunday is no longer a big church day in the South. A man can't very well go to eleven o'clock service and still expect to get to a two o'clock stock-car race, unless he wants to get into the biggest traffic jam in the history of creation, and that goes for North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, same as Atlanta and Charlotte. - -There is the Coca-Cola sign out where the road leads in from the highway, and hills and trees, but here are long concrete grandstands for about 17,000 and a paved five-eighths-mile oval. Practically all the drivers are out there with their cars and their crews, a lot of guys in white coveralls. The cars look huge ...and curiously nude and blind. All the chrome is stripped off, except for the grilles. The headlights are blanked out. Most of the cars are in the pits. The so-called "pit" is a paved cutoff on the edge of the infield. It cuts off from the track itself like a service road off an expressway at the shopping center. Every now and then a car splutters, hacks, coughs, hocks a lunga, rumbles out onto the track itself for a practice run. There is a lot of esoteric conversation going on, speculation, worries, memoirs: - -"What happened?" - -"Mother-- condensed on me. Al brought it up here with him. Water in the line." - -"Better keep Al away from a stable, he'll fill you up with horse manure." - -"...they told me to give him one, a cream puff, so I give him one, a creampuff. One goddamn race and the son of a bitch, he melted it...." - -"...he's down there right now pettin' and rubbin' and huggin' that car just like those guys do a horse at the Kentucky Derby...." - -"...They'll blow you right out of the tub...." - -"...No, the quarter inch, and go on over and see if you can get Ned's blowtorch...." - -"...Rear end's loose...." - -"...I don't reckon this right here's got nothing to do with it, do you?..." - -"...Aw, I don't know, about yea big...." - -"...Who the hell stacked them gumballs on the bottom?..." - -"...th'ow in rocks...." - -"...won't turn seven thousand..." - -"...strokin' it...." - -"...blistered...." - -"...spun out..." - -"...muvva...." - -Then, finally, here comes Junior Johnson. How he does come on. He comes tooling across the infield in a big white dreamboat, a brand-new white Pontiac Catalina four-door hard-top sedan. He pulls up and as he gets out he seems to get more and more huge. First his crew-cut head and then a big jaw and then a bigger neck and then a huge torso, like a wrestler's, all done up rather modish and California modern, with a red-and-white candy-striped sport shirt, white ducks and loafers. - -"How you doing?" says Junior Johnson, shaking hands, and then he says, "Hot enough for ye'uns?" - -Junior is in an amiable mood. Like most up-hollow people, it turns out, Junior is reserved. His face seldom shows an emotion. He has three basic looks: amiable, amiable and a little shy, and dead serious. To a lot of people, apparently, Junior's dead-serious look seems menacing. There are no cowards left in stock-car racing, but a couple of drivers tell me that one of the things that can shake you up is to look into your rearview mirror going around a curve and see Junior Johnson's car on your tail trying to "root you out of the groove," and then get a glimpse of Junior's dead-serious look. I think some of the sportswriters are afraid of him. One of them tells me Junior is strong, silent -- and explosive. Junior will only give you three answers, "Uh-huh," "Uh-unh," and "I don't know," and so forth and so on. Actually, I find he handles questions easily. He has a great technical knowledge of automobiles and the physics of speed, including things he never fools with, such as Offenhauser engines. What he never does offer, however, is small talk. This gives him a built-in poise, since it deprives him of the chance to say anything asinine. "Ye'uns," "we'uns," "h'it" for "it," "growed" for "grew," and a lot of other unusual past participles -- Junior uses certain older forms of English, not exactly "Elizabethan," as they are sometimes called, but older forms of English preserved up-country in his territory, Ingle Hollow. - -Kids keep coming up for Junior's autograph and others are just hanging around and one little old boy comes up, he is about thirteen, and Junior says: "This boy here goes coon hunting with me." - -One of the sportswriters is standing around, saying: "What do you shoot a coon with?" - -"Don't shoot 'em. The dogs tree 'em and then you flush 'em out and the dogs fight 'em." - -"Flush 'em out?" - -"Yeah. This boy right here can flush 'em out better than anybody you ever did see. You go out at night with the dogs, and soon as they get the scent, they start barking. They go on out ahead of you and when they tree a coon, you can tell it, by the way they sound. They all start baying up at that coon -- h'it sounds like, I don't know, you hear it once and you not likely to forget it. Then you send a little old boy up to flush him out and he jumps down and the dogs fight him." - -"How does a boy flush him out?" - -"Aw, he just climbs up there to the limb he's on and starts shaking h'it and the coon'll jump." - -"What happens if the coon decides he'd rather come back after the boy instead of jumping down to a bunch of dogs?" - -"He won't do that. A coon's afraid of a person, but he can kill a dog. A coon can take any dog you set against him if they's just the two of them fighting. The coon jumps down on the ground and he rolls right over on his back with his feet up, and he's got claws about like this. All he has to do is get a dog once in the throat or in the belly, and he can kill him, cut him wide open just like you took a knife and did it. Won't any dog even fight a coon except a coon dog." - -"What kind of dogs are they?" - -"Coon dogs, I guess. Black and tans they call 'em sometimes. They's bred for it. If his mammy and pappy wasn't coon dogs, he ain't likely to be one either. After you got one, you got to train him. You trap a coon, live, and then you put him in a pen and tie him to a post with a rope on him and then you put your dog in there and he has to fight him. Sometimes you get a dog just don't have any fight in him and he ain't no good to you." - -Junior is in the pit area, standing around with his brother Fred, who is part of his crew, and Ray Fox and some other good old boys, in a general atmosphere of big stock-car money, a big ramp truck for his car, a white Dodge, number 3, a big crew in white coveralls, huge stacks of racing tires, a Dodge P.R. man, big portable cans of gasoline, compressed air hoses, compressed water hoses, the whole business. Herb Nab, Freddie Lorenzen's chief mechanic, comes over and sits down on his haunches and Junior sits down on his haunches and Nab says: - -"So Junior Johnson's going to drive a Ford." - -Junior is switching from Dodge to Ford mainly because he hasn't been winning with the Dodge. Lorenzen drives a Ford, too, and the last year, when Junior was driving the Chevrolet, their duels were the biggest excitement in stock-car racing. - -"Well," says Nab, "I'll tell you, Junior. My ambition is going to be to outrun your ass every goddamned time we go out." - -"That was your ambition last year," says Junior. - -"I know it was," says Nab, "and you took all the money, didn't you? You know what my strategy was. I was going to outrun everybody else and outlast Junior, that was my strategy." - -Setting off his California modern sport shirt and white ducks Junior has on a pair of twenty-dollar rimless sunglasses and a big gold Timex watch, and Flossie, his fiancée, is out there in the infield somewhere with the white Pontiac, and the white Dodge that Dodge gave Junior is parked up near the pit area -- and then a little thing happens that brings the whole thing right back there to Wilkes County, North Carolina, to Ingle Hollow and to hard muscle in the clay gulches. A couple of good old boys come down to the front of the stands with the screen and the width of the track between them and Junior, and one of the good old boys comes down and yells out in the age-old baritone raw curdle yell of the Southern hills: - -"Hey, hog jaw!" - -Everybody gets quiet. They know he's yelling at Junior, but nobody says a thing. Junior doesn't even turn around. - -"Hey, hog jaw!..." - -Junior, he does nothing. - -"Hey, hog jaw, I'm gonna get me one of them fastback roosters, too, and come down there and get you!" - -Fastback rooster refers to the Ford -- it has a "fastback" design -- Junior is switching to. - -"Hey, hog jaw, I'm gonna get me one of them fastback roosters and run you right out of here, you hear me, hog jaw!" - -One of the good old boys alongside Junior says, "Junior, go on up there and clear out those stands." - -Then everybody stares at Junior to see what he's gonna do. Junior, he don't even look around. He just looks a bit dead serious. - -"Hey, hog jaw, you got six cases of whiskey in the back of that car you want to let me have?" - -"What you hauling in that car, hog jaw!" - -"Tell him you're out of that business, Junior," one of the good old boys says. - -"Go on up there and clean house, Junior," says another good old boy. - -Then Junior looks up, without looking at the stands and smiles a little and says, "You fish him down here out of that tree -- and I'll take keer of him." - -Such a howl goes up from the good old boys! It is almost a blood curdle -- - -"Goddamn, he will, too!" - -"Lord, he better know how to do an about-face hisself if he comes down here!" - -"Goddamn, get him, Junior!" - -"Whooeeee!" - -"Mother dog!" - -A kind of orgy of reminiscence of the old Junior before the Detroit money started flowing, wild combats d'honneur up-hollow -- and, suddenly, when he heard that unearthly baying coming up from the good old boys in the pits, the good old boy retreated from the edge of the stands and never came back. - -Later on Junior told me, sort of apologetically, "H'it used to be, if a fellow crowded me just a little bit, I was ready to crawl him. I reckon that was one good thing about Chillicothe. - -"I don't want to pull any more time," Junior tells me, "but I wouldn't take anything in the world for the experience I had in prison. If a man needed to change, that was the place to change. H'it's not a waste of time there, h'it's good experience. - -"H'it's that they's so many people in the world that feel that nobody is going to tell them what to do. I had quite a temper, I reckon. I always had the idea that I had as much sense as the other person and I didn't want them to tell me what to do. In the penitentiary there I found out that I could listen to another fellow and be told what to do and h'it wouldn't kill me." - -Starting time! Linda Vaughn, with the big blonde hair and blossomy breasts, puts down her Coca-Cola and the potato chips and slips off her red stretch pants and her white blouse and walks out of the officials' booth in her Rake-a-cheek red showgirl's costume with her long honeydew legs in net stockings and climbs up on the red Firebird float. The Life Symbol of stock-car racing! Yes! Linda, every luscious morsel of Linda, is a good old girl from Atlanta who was made Miss Atlanta International Raceway one year and was paraded around the track on a float and she liked it so much and all the good old boys liked it so much, Linda's flowing hair and blossomy breasts and honeydew legs, that she became the permanent glamour symbol, of stock-car racing, and never mind this other modeling she was doing...this, she liked it. Right before practically every race on the Grand National circuit Linda Vaughn puts down her Coca-Cola and potato chips. Her momma is there, she generally comes around to see Linda go around the track on the float, it's such a nice spectacle seeing Linda looking so lovely, and the applause and all. "Linda, I'm thirstin', would you bring me a Coca-Cola?" "A lot of them think I'm Freddie Lorenzen's girl friend, but I'm not any of 'em's girl friend, I'm real good friends with 'em all, even Wendell," he being Wendell Scott, the only Negro in big-league stock-car racing. Linda gets up on the Firebird float. This is an extraordinary object, made of wood, about twenty feet tall, in the shape of a huge bird, an eagle or something, blazing red, and Linda, with her red showgirl's suit on, gets up on the seat, which is up between the wings, like a saddle, high enough so her long honeydew legs stretch down, and a new car pulls her -- Miss Firebird! -- slowly once around the track just before the race. It is more of a ceremony by now than the national anthem. Miss Firebird sails slowly in front of the stands and the good old boys let out some real curdle Rebel yells, "Yaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhoooooo! Let me at that car!" "Honey, you sure do start my motor, I swear to God!" "Great God and Poonadingdong, I mean!" - -And suddenly there's a big roar from behind, down in the infield, and then I see one of the great sights in stock-car racing. That infield! The cars have been piling into the infield by the hundreds, parking in there on the clay and the grass, every which way, angled down and angled up, this way and that, where the ground is uneven, these beautiful blazing brand-new cars with the sun exploding off the windshields and the baked enamel and the glassy lacquer, hundreds, thousands of cars stacked this way and that in the infield with the sun bolting down and no shade, none at all, just a couple of Coca-Cola stands out there. And already the good old boys and girls are out beside the cars, with all these beautiful little buds in short shorts already spread-eagled out on top of the car roofs, pressing down on good hard slick automobile sheet metal, their little cupcake bottoms aimed up at the sun. The good old boys are lollygagging around with their shirts off and straw hats on that have miniature beer cans on the brims and buttons that read, "Girls Wanted -- No Experience Required." And everybody, good old boys and girls of all ages, are out there with portable charcoal barbecue ovens set up, and folding tubular steel terrace furniture, deck chairs and things, and Thermos jugs and coolers full of beer -- and suddenly it is not the up-country South at all but a concentration of the modern suburbs, all jammed into that one space, from all over America, with blazing cars and instant goodies, all cooking under the bare blaze -- inside a strange bowl. The infield is like the bottom of a bowl. The track around it is banked so steeply at the corners and even on the straightaways, it is like...the steep sides of a bowl. The wall around the track, and the stands and the bleachers are like...the rim of a bowl. And from the infield, in this great incredible press of blazing new cars, there is no horizon but the bowl, up above only that cobalt-blue North Carolina sky. And then suddenly, on a signal, thirty stock-car engines start up where they are lined up in front of the stands. The roar of these engines is impossible to describe. They have a simultaneous rasp, thunder, and rumble that goes right through a body and fills the whole bowl with a noise of internal combustion. Then they start around on two build-up runs, just to build up speed, and then they come around the fourth turn and onto the straightaway in front of the stands at -- here, 130 miles an hour, in Atlanta, 160 miles an hour, at Daytona, 180 miles an hour -- and the flag goes down and everybody in the infield and in the stands is up on their feet going mad, and suddenly here is a bowl that is one great orgy of everything in the way of excitement and liberation the automobile has meant to Americans. An orgy! - -The first lap of a stock-car race is a horrendous, a wildly horrendous spectacle such as no other sport approaches. Twenty, thirty, forty automobiles, each of them weighing almost two tons, 3700 pounds, with 427-cubic-inch engines, 600 horsepower, are practically locked together, side to side and tail to nose, on a narrow band of asphalt at 130, 160, 180 miles an hour, hitting the curves so hard the rubber burns off the tires in front of your eyes. To the driver, it is like being inside a car going down the West Side Highway in New York City at rush hour, only with everybody going literally three to four times as fast, at speeds a man who has gone eighty-five miles an hour down a highway cannot conceive of, and with every other driver an enemy who is willing to cut inside of you, around you or in front of you, or ricochet off your side in the battle to get into a curve first. - -The speeds are faster than those in the Indianapolis 500 race, the cars are more powerful and much heavier, and the drivers have more courage, more daring, more ruthlessness than Indianapolis or Grand Prix drivers. The prize money in Southern stock-car racing is far greater than that in Indianapolis-style or European Grand Prix racing, but few Indianapolis or Grand Prix drivers have the raw nerve required to succeed at it. - -Although they will deny it, it is still true that stock-car drivers will put each other "up against the wall" -- cut inside on the left of another car and ram it into a spin -- if they get mad enough. Crashes are not the only danger, however. The cars are now literally too fast for their own parts, especially the tires. Firestone and Goodyear have poured millions into stock-car racing, but neither they nor anybody so far have been able to come up with a tire for this kind of racing at the current speeds. Three well-known stock-car drivers were killed last year, two of them champion drivers, Joe Weatherly and Fireball Roberts, and another, one of the best new drivers, Jimmy Pardue, from Junior Johnson's own home territory, Wilkes County, North Carolina. Roberts was the only one killed in a crash. Junior Johnson was in the crash but was not injured. Weatherly and Pardue both lost control on curves. Pardue's death came during a tire test. In a tire test, engineers, from Firestone or Goodyear, try out various tires on a car, and the driver, always one of the top competitors, tests them at top speed, usually on the Atlanta track. The drivers are paid three dollars a mile and may drive as much as five or six hundred miles in a single day. At 145 miles an hour average that does not take very long. Anyway, these drivers are going at speeds that, on curves, can tear tires off their casings or break axles. They practically run off from over their own automobiles. - -Junior Johnson was over in the garden by the house some years ago, plowing the garden barefooted, behind a mule, just wearing an old pair of overalls, when a couple of good old boys drove up and told him to come on up to the speedway and get in a stock-car race. They wanted some local boys to race, as a preliminary to the main race, "as a kind of side show," as Junior remembers it. - -"So I just put the reins down," Junior is telling me, "and rode on over 'ere with them. They didn't give us seat belts or nothing, they just roped us in. H'it was a dirt track then. I come in second." - -Junior was a sensation in dirt-track racing right from the start. Instead of going into the curves and just sliding and holding on for dear life like the other drivers, Junior developed the technique of throwing himself into a slide about seventy-five feet before the curve by cocking the wheel to the left slightly and gunning it, using the slide, not the brake, to slow down, so that he could pick up speed again halfway through the curve and come out of it like a shot. This was known as his "power slide," and -- yes! of course! -- every good old boy in North Carolina started saying Junior Johnson had learned that stunt doing those goddamned about-faces running away from the Alcohol Tax agents. Junior put on such a show one night on a dirt track in Charlotte that he broke two axles, and he thought he was out of the race because he didn't have any more axles, when a good old boy came running up out of the infield and said, "Goddamn it, Junior Johnson, you take the axle off my car here, I got a Pontiac just like yours," and Junior took it off and put it on his and went out and broke it too. Mother dog! To this day Junior Johnson loves dirt-track racing like nothing else in this world, even though there is not much money in it. Every year he sets new dirt-track speed records, such as at Hickory, North Carolina, one of the most popular dirt tracks, last spring. As far as Junior is concerned, dirt-track racing is not so much of a mechanical test for the car as those long five- and six-hundred-mile races on asphalt are. Gasoline, tire, and engine wear aren't so much of a problem. It is all the driver, his skill, his courage -- his willingness to mix it up with the other cars, smash and carom off of them at a hundred miles an hour or so to get into the curves first. Junior has a lot of fond recollections of mixing it up at places like Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, one of the minor league tracks, a very narrow track, hardly wide enough for two cars. "You could always figure Bowman Gray was gonna cost you two fenders, two doors, and two quarter panels," Junior tells me with nostalgia. - -Anyway, at Hickory, which was a Saturday night race, all the good old boys started pouring into the stands before sundown, so they wouldn't miss anything, the practice runs or the qualifying or anything. And pretty soon, the dew hasn't even started falling before Junior Johnson and David Pearson, one of Dodge's best drivers, are out there on practice runs, just warming up, and they happen to come up alongside each other on the second curve, and -- the thing is, here are two men, each of them driving $15,000 automobiles, each of them standing to make $50,000 to $100,000 for the season if they don't get themselves killed, and they meet on a curve on a goddamned practice run on a dirt track, and neither of them can resist it. Coming out of the turn they go into a wild-ass race down the backstretch, both of them trying to get into the third turn first, and all the way across the infield you can hear them ricocheting off each other and bouncing at a hundred miles an hour on loose dirt, and then they go into ferocious power slides, red dust all over the goddamned place, and then out of this goddamned red-dust cloud, out of the fourth turn, here comes Junior Johnson first, like a shot, with Pearson right on his tail, and the good old boys in the stands going wild, and the qualifying runs haven't started yet, let alone the race. - -Junior worked his way up through the minor leagues, the Sportsman and Modified classifications, as they are called, winning championships in both, and won his first Grand National race, the big leagues, in 1955 at Hickory, on dirt. He was becoming known as "the hardest of the hard-chargers," power sliding, rooting them out of the groove, raising hell, and already the Junior Johnson legend was beginning. - -He kept hard-charging, power sliding, going after other drivers as though there wasn't room on the track but for one, and became the most popular driver in stock-car racing by 1959. The automobile companies had suddenly dropped out of stock-car racing in 1957, making a devout covenant never again to capitalize on speed as a selling point, the Government was getting stuffy about it, but already the presence of Detroit and Detroit's big money had begun to calm the drivers down a little. Detroit was concerned about Image. The last great duel of the dying dog-eat-dog era of stock-car racing came in 1959, when Junior and Lee Petty, who was then leading the league in points, had it out on the Charlotte raceway. Junior was in the lead, and Petty was right on his tail, but couldn't get by Junior. Junior kept coming out of the curves faster. So every chance he got, Petty would get up right on Junior's rear bumper and start banging it, gradually forcing the fender in to where the metal would cut Junior's rear tire. With only a few laps to go, Junior had a blowout and spun out up against the guardrail. That is Junior's version. Petty claimed Junior hit a pop bottle and spun out. The fans in Charlotte were always throwing pop bottles and other stuff onto the track late in the race, looking for blood. In any case, Junior eased back into the pits, had the tire changed, and charged out after Petty. He caught him on a curve and -- well, whatever really happened, Petty was suddenly "up against the wall" and out of the race, and Junior won. - -What a howl went up. The Charlotte chief of police charged out onto the track after the race, according to Petty, and offered to have Junior arrested for "assault with a dangerous weapon," the hassling went on for weeks -- - -"Back then," Junior tells me, "when you got into a guy and racked him up, you might as well get ready, because he's coming back for you. H'it was dog eat dog. That straightened Lee Petty out right smart. They don't do stuff like that anymore, though, because the guys don't stand for it." - -Anyway, the Junior Johnson legend kept building up and building up, and in 1960 it got better than ever when Junior won the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500, by "discovering" a new technique called "drafting." That year stock-car racing was full of big powerful Pontiacs manned by top drivers, and they would go like nothing else anybody ever saw. Junior went down to Daytona with a Chevrolet. - -"My car was about ten miles an hour slower than the rest of the cars, the Pontiacs," Junior tells me. "In the preliminary races, the warmups and stuff like that, they was smoking me off the track. Then I remember once I went out for a practice run, and Fireball Roberts was out there in a Pontiac and I got in right behind him on a curve, right on his bumper. I knew I couldn't stay with him on the straightaway, but I came out of the curve fast, right in behind him, running flat out, and then I noticed a funny thing. As long as I stayed right in behind him, I noticed I picked up speed and stayed right with him and my car was going faster than it had ever gone before. I could tell on the tachometer. My car wasn't turning no more than 6000 before, but when I got into this drafting position, I was turning 6800 to 7000. H'it felt like the car was plumb off the ground, floating along." - -"Drafting," it was discovered at Daytona, created a vacuum behind the lead car and both cars would go faster than they normally would. Junior "hitched rides" on the Pontiacs most of the afternoon, but was still second to Bobby Johns, the lead Pontiac. Then, late in the race, Johns got into a drafting position with a fellow Pontiac that was actually one lap behind him and the vacuum got so intense that the rear window blew out of Johns' car and he spun out and crashed and Junior won. - -This made Junior the Lion Killer, the Little David of stock-car racing, and his performance in the 1963 season made him even more so. - -Junior raced for Chevrolet at Daytona in February, 1963, and set the all-time stock-car speed record in a hundred-mile qualifying race, 164.083 miles an hour, twenty-one miles an hour faster than Parnelli Jones's winning time at Indianapolis that year. Junior topped that at Daytona in July of 1963, qualifying at 166.005 miles per hour in a five-mile run, the fastest that anyone had ever averaged that distance in a racing car of any type. Junior's Chevrolet lasted only twenty-six laps in the Daytona 500 in 1963, however. He went out with a broken push rod. Although Chevrolet announced they were pulling out of racing at this time, Junior took his car and started out on the wildest performance in the history of stock-car racing. Chevrolet wouldn't give him a cent of backing. They wouldn't even speak to him on the telephone. Half the time he had to have his own parts made. Plymouth, Mercury, Dodge and Ford, meantime, were pouring more money than ever into stock-car racing. Yet Junior won seven Grand National races out of the thirty-three he entered and led most others before mechanical trouble forced him out. - -All the while, Junior was making record qualifying runs, year after year. In the usual type of qualifying run, a driver has the track to himself and makes two circuits, with the driver with the fastest average time getting the "pole" position for the start of the race. In a way this presents stock-car danger in its purest form. Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve -- of how fast a man is willing to take a curve. Many of the top drivers in competition are poor at qualifying. In effect, they are willing to calculate their risks only against the risks the other drivers are taking. Junior takes the pure risk as no other driver has ever taken it. - -"Pure" risk or total risk, whichever, Indianapolis and Grand Prix drivers have seldom been willing to face the challenge of Southern stock-car drivers. A.J. Foyt, last year's winner at Indianapolis, is one exception. He has raced against the Southerners and beaten them. Parnelli Jones has tried and fared badly. Driving "Southern style" has a quality that shakes a man up. The Southerners went on a tour of Northern tracks last fall. They raced at Bridgehampton, New York, and went into the corners so hard the marshals stationed at each corner kept radioing frantically to the control booth: "They're going off the track. They're all going off the track!" - -But this, Junior Johnson's last race in a Dodge, was not his day, neither for qualifying nor racing. Lorenzen took the lead early and won the 250-mile race a lap ahead of the field. Junior finished third, but was never in contention for the lead. - -"Come on, Junior, do my hand -- " - -Two or three hundred people come out of the stands and up out of the infield and onto the track to be around Junior Johnson. Junior is signing autographs in a neat left-handed script he has. It looks like it came right out of the Locker book. The girls! Levi's, stretch pants, sneaky shorts, stretch jeans, they press into the crowd with lively narbs and try to get their hands up in front of Junior and say: - -"Come on, Junior, do my hand!" - -In order to do a hand, Junior has to hold the girl's hand in his right hand and then sign his name with a ballpoint on the back of her hand. - -"Junior, you got to do mine, too!" - -"Put it on up here." - -All the girls break into...smiles. Junior Johnson does a hand. Ah, sweet little cigarette-ad blonde! She says: - -"Junior, why don't you ever call me up?" - -'I'spect you get plenty of calls 'thout me." - -"Oh, Junior! You call me up, you hear now?" - -But also a great many older people crowd in, and they say: - -"Junior, you're doing a real good job out there, you're driving real good." - -"Junior, when you get in that Ford, I want to see you pass that Freddie Lorenzen, you hear now?" - -"Junior, you like that Ford better than that Dodge?" - -And: - -"Junior, here's a young man that's been waiting some time and wanting to see you -- " and the man lifts up his little boy in the middle of the crowd and says: "I told you you'd see Junior Johnson. This here's Junior Johnson!" - -The boy has a souvenir racing helmet on his head. He stares at Junior through a buttery face. Junior signs the program he has in his hand, and then the boy's mother says: - -"Junior, I tell you right now, he's beside you all the way. He can't be moved." - -And then: - -"Junior, I want you to meet the meanest little girl in Wilkes County." - -"She don't look mean to me." - -Junior keeps signing autographs and over by the pits the other kids are all over his car, the Dodge. They start pulling off the decals, the ones saying Holly Farms Poultry and Autolite and God knows whatall. They fight over the strips, the shreds of decal, as if they were totems. - -All this homage to Junior Johnson lasts about forty minutes. He must be signing about 250 autographs, but he is not a happy man. By and by the crowd is thinning out, the sun is going down, wind is blowing the Coca-Cola cups around, all one can hear, mostly, is a stock-car engine starting up every now and then as somebody drives it up onto a truck or something, and Junior looks around and says: - -"I'd rather lead one lap and fall out of the race than stroke it and finish in the money." - -"Stroking it" is driving carefully in hopes of outlasting faster and more reckless cars. The opposite of stroking it is "hard-charging." Then Junior says: - -"I hate to get whipped up here in Wilkes County, North Carolina." - -Wilkes County, North Carolina! - -Who was it tried to pin the name on Wilkes County, "The bootleg capital of America"? This fellow Vance Packard. But just a minute.... - -The night after the race Junior and his fiancée, Flossie Clark, and myself went into North Wilkesboro to have dinner. Junior and Flossie came by Lowes Motel and picked me up in the dreamboat white Pontiac. Flossie is a bright, attractive woman, saftig, well-organized. She and Junior have been going together since they were in high school. They are going to get married as soon as Junior gets his new house built. Flossie has been doing the decor. Junior Johnson, in the second-highest income bracket in the United States for the past five years, is moving out of his father's white frame house in Ingle Hollow at last. About three hundred yards down the road. Overlooking a lot of good green land and Anderson's grocery. Junior shows me through the house, it is almost finished, and when we get to the front door, I ask him, "How much of this land is yours?" - -Junior looks around for a minute, and then back up the hill, up past his three automated chicken houses, and then down into the hollow over the pasture where his $3100 Santa Gertrudis bull is grazing, and then he says: - -"Everything that's green is mine." - -Junior Johnson's house is going to be one of the handsomest homes in Wilkes County. Yes. And -- such complicated problems of class and status. Junior is not only a legendary figure as a backwoods boy with guts who made good, he is also popular personally, he is still a good old boy, rich as he is. He is also respected for the sound and sober way he has invested his money. He also has one of the best business connections in town, Holly Farms Poultry. What complicates it is that half the county, anyway, reveres him as the greatest, most fabled night-road driver in the history of Southern bootlegging. There is hardly a living soul in the hollows who can conjure up two seconds' honest moral indignation over "the whiskey business." That is what they call it, "the whiskey business." The fact is, it has some positive political overtones, sort of like the I.R.A. in Ireland. The other half of the county -- well, North Wilkesboro itself is a prosperous, good-looking town of 5,000, where a lot of hearty modern business burghers are making money the modern way, like everywhere else in the U.S.A., in things like banking, poultry processing, furniture, mirror and carpet manufacture, apple growing, and so forth and so on. And one thing these men are tired of is Wilkes County's reputation as a center of moonshining. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax agents sit over there in Wilkesboro, right next to North Wilkesboro, year in and year out, and they have been there since God knows when, like an Institution in the land, and every day that they are there, it is like a sign saying, Moonshine County. And even that is not so bad -- it has nothing to do with it being immoral and only a little to do with it being illegal. The real thing is, it is -- raw and hillbilly. And one thing thriving modern Industry is not is hillbilly. And one thing the burghers of North Wilkesboro are not about to be is hillbilly. They have split-level homes that would knock your eyes out. Also swimming pools, white Buick Snatchwagons, flagstone terrasse-porches enclosed with louvered glass that opens wide in the summertime, and built-in brick barbecue pits, and they give parties where they wear Bermuda shorts and Jax stretch pants and serve rum collies and play twist and bossa nova records on the hi-fi and tell Shaggy Dog jokes about strange people ordering martinis. Moonshining...just a minute -- the truth is, North Wilkesboro.... - -So we are all having dinner at one of the fine new restaurants in North Wilkesboro, a place of suburban plate-glass elegance. The manager knows Junior and gives us the best table in the place and comes over and talks to Junior a while about the race. A couple of men get up and come over and get Junior's autograph to take home to their sons and so forth. Then toward the end of the meal a couple of North Wilkesboro businessmen come over ("Junior, how are you, Junior. You think you're going to like that fast-backed Ford?") and Junior introduces them to me, from Esquire Magazine. - -"Esquire," one of them says. "You're not going to do like that fellow Vance Packard did, are you?" - -"Vance Packard?" - -"Yeah, I think it was Vance Packard wrote it. He wrote an article and called Wilkes County the bootleg capital of America. Don't pull any of that stuff. I think it was in American Magazine. The bootleg capital of America. Don't pull any of that stuff on us." - -I looked over at Junior and Flossie. Neither one of them said anything. They didn't even change their expressions. - -Ingle Hollow! The next morning I met Junior down in Ingle Hollow at Anderson's Store. That's about fifteen miles out of North Wilkesboro on County Road No. 2400. Junior is known in a lot of Southern newspapers as "the wild man from Ronda" or "the lead-footed chicken farmer from Ronda," but Ronda is only his post-office-box address. His telephone exchange, with the Wilkes Telephone Membership Corporation, is Clingman, North Carolina, and that isn't really where he lives either. Where he lives is just Ingle Hollow, and one of the communal centers of Ingle Hollow is Anderson's Store. Anderson's is not exactly a grocery store. Out front there are two gasoline pumps under an overhanging roof. Inside there are a lot of things like a soda-pop cooler filled with ice, Coca-Colas, Nehi drinks, Dr. Pepper, Double Cola, and a gumball machine, a lot of racks of Red Man chewing tobacco, Price's potato chips, OKay peanuts, cloth hats for working outdoors in, dried sausages, cigarettes, canned goods, a little bit of meal and flour, fly swatters, and I don't know what all. Inside and outside of Anderson's there are good old boys. The young ones tend to be inside, talking, and the old ones tend to be outside, sitting under the roof by the gasoline pumps, talking. And on both sides, cars; most of them new and pastel. - -Junior drives up and gets out and looks up over the door where there is a row of twelve coon tails. Junior says: - -"Two of them gone, ain't they?" - -One of the good old boys says, "Yeah," and sighs. - -A pause, and the other one says, "Somebody stole 'em." - -Then the first one says, "Junior, that dog of yours ever come back?" - -Junior says, "Not yet." - -The second good old boy says, "You looking for her to come back?" - -Junior says, "I reckon she'll come back." - -The good old boy says, "I had a coon dog went off like that. They don't ever come back. I went out 'ere one day, back over yonder, and there he was, cut right from here to here. I swear if it don't look like a coon got him. Something. H'it must of turned him every way but loose." - -Junior goes inside and gets a Coca-Cola and rings up the till himself, like everybody who goes into Anderson's does, it seems like. It is dead quiet in the hollow except for every now and then a car grinds over the dirt road and down the way. One coon dog missing. But he still has a lot of the black and tans, named Rock... - -Rock, Whitey, Red, Buster are in the pen out back of the Johnson house, the old frame house. They have scars all over their faces from fighting coons. Gypsy has one huge gash in her back from fighting something. A red rooster crosses the lawn. That's a big rooster. Shirley, one of Junior's two younger sisters, pretty girls, is out by the fence in shorts, pulling weeds. Annie May is inside the house with Mrs. Johnson. Shirley has the radio outside on the porch aimed at her, The Four Seasons! "Dawn! -- ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!" Then a lot of electronic wheeps and lulus and a screaming disc jockey, yessss! WTOB, the Vibrant Voice of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It sounds like station WABC in New York. Junior's mother, Mrs. Johnson, is a big, good-natured woman. She comes out and says, "Did you ever see anything like that in your life? Pullin' weeds listenin' to the radio." Junior's father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr. -- he built this frame house about thirty-five years ago, up here where the gravel road ends and the woods starts. The road just peters out into the woods up a hill. The house has a living room, four bedrooms, and a big kitchen. The living room is full of Junior's racing trophies, and so is the piano in Shirley's room. Junior was born and raised here with his older brothers, L.P., the oldest, and Fred, and his older sister, Ruth. Over yonder, up by that house, there's a man with a mule and a little plow. That's L.P. The Johnsons still keep that old mule around to plow the vegetable gardens. And all around, on all sides like a rim, are the ridges and the woods. Well, what about those woods, where Vance Packard said the agents come stealing over the ridges and good old boys go crashing through the underbrush to get away from the still and the women start "calling the cows" up and down the hollows as the signal they were coming... - -Junior motions his hand out toward the hills and says, "I'd say nearly everybody in a fifty-mile radius of here was in the whiskey business at one time or another. When we growed up here, everybody seemed to be more or less messing with whiskey, and myself and my two brothers did quite a bit of transporting. H'it was just a business, like any other business, far as we was concerned. H'it was a matter of survival. During the Depression here, people either had to do that or starve to death. H'it wasn't no gangster type of business or nothing. They's nobody that ever messed with it here that was ever out to hurt anybody. Even if they got caught, they never tried to shoot anybody or anything like that. Getting caught and pulling time, that was just part of it. H'it was just a business, like any other business. Me and my brothers, when we went out on the road at night, h'it was just like a milk run, far as we was concerned. They was certain deliveries to be made and..." - -A milk run -- yes! Well, it was a business, all right. In fact, it was a regional industry, all up and down the Appalachian slopes. But never mind the Depression. It goes back a long way before that. The Scotch-Irish settled the mountains from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, and they have been making whiskey out there as long as anybody can remember. At first it was a simple matter of economics. The land had a low crop yield, compared to the lowlands, and even after a man struggled to grow his corn, or whatever, the cost of transporting it to the markets from down out of the hills was so great, it wasn't worth it. It was much more profitable to convert the corn into whiskey and sell that. The trouble started with the Federal Government on that score almost the moment the Republic was founded. Alexander Hamilton put a high excise tax on whiskey in 1791, almost as soon as the Constitution was ratified. The "Whiskey Rebellion" broke out in the mountains of western Pennsylvania in 1794. The farmers were mad as hell over the tax. Fifteen thousand Federal troops marched out to the mountains and suppressed them. Almost at once, however, the trouble over the whiskey tax became a symbol of something bigger. This was a general enmity between the western and eastern sections of practically every seaboard state. Part of it was political. The eastern sections tended to control the legislatures, the economy and the law courts, and the western sections felt shortchanged. Part of it was cultural. Life in the western sections was rougher. Religions, codes, and styles of life were sterner. Life in the eastern capitals seemed to give off the odor of Europe and decadence. Shays' Rebellion broke out in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts in 1786 in an attempt to shake off the yoke of Boston, which seemed as bad as George III's. To this day people in western Massachusetts make proposals, earnestly or with down-in-the-mouth humor, that they all ought to split off from "Boston." Whiskey -- the mountain people went right on making it. Whole sections of the Appalachians were a whiskey belt, just as sections of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were a cotton belt. Nobody on either side ever had any moral delusions about why the Federal Government was against it. It was always the tax, pure and simple. Today the price of liquor is sixty-percent tax. Today, of course, with everybody gone wild over the subject of science and health, it has been much easier for the Federals to persuade people that they crack down on moonshine whiskey because it is dangerous, it poisons, kills, and blinds people. The statistics are usually specious. - -Moonshining was illegal, however, that was also the unvarnished truth. And that had a side effect in the whiskey belt. The people there were already isolated, geographically, by the mountains and had strong clan ties because they were all from the same stock, Scotch-Irish. Moonshining isolated them even more. They always had to be careful who came up there. There are plenty of hollows to this day where if you drive in and ask some good old boy where so-and-so is, he'll tell you he never heard of the fellow. Then the next minute, if you identify yourself and give some idea of why you want to see him, and he believes you, he'll suddenly say, "Aw, you're talking about so-and-so. I thought you said -- " With all this isolation, the mountain people began to take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong sense of family, clan, and honor. People would cut and shoot each other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like Turks that way. - -In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson's side porch. - -Detroit has discovered these pockets of courage, almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for Everyman -- making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks -- by discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course, very few stock-car drivers have ever had anything to do with the whiskey business. A great many always lead quiet lives off the track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from Elmburst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced these, the most daring men in sports. - -Cars and bravery! The mountain-still operators had been running white liquor with hopped-up automobiles all during the Thirties. But it was during the war that the business was so hot out of Wilkes County, down to Charlotte, High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Salisbury, places like that; a night's run, by one car, would bring anywhere from $500 to $1000. People had money all of a sudden. One car could carry twenty-two to twenty-five cases of white liquor. There were twelve half-gallon fruit jars full per case, so each load would have 132 gallons or more. It would sell to the distributor in the city for about ten dollars a gallon, when the market was good, of which the driver would get two dollars, as much as $300 for the night's work. - -The usual arrangement in the white liquor industry was for the elders to design the distillery, supervise the formulas and the whole distilling process and take care of the business end of the operation. The young men did the heavy work, carrying the copper and other heavy goods out into the woods, building the still, hauling in fuel -- and driving. Junior and his older brothers, L.P. and Fred, worked that way with their father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr. - -Johnson, Senior, was one of the biggest individual copper-still operators in the area. The fourth time he was arrested, the agents found a small fortune in working corn mash bubbling in the vats. - -"My Daddy was always a hard worker," Junior is telling me. "He always wanted something a little bit better. A lot of people resented that and held that against him, but what he got, he always got h'it by hard work. There ain't no harder work in the world than making whiskey. I don't know of any other business that compels you to get up at all times of night and go outdoors in the snow and everything else and work. H'it's the hardest way in the world to make a living, and I don't think anybody'd do it unless they had to." - -Working mash wouldn't wait for a man. It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn't it have been something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you want them and not have to smuggle all that copper and all that sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a coppersmith and a plumber and a cooper and a carpenter and a pack horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in this world, all at once. - -And live decent hours -- Junior and his brothers, about two o'clock in the morning they'd head out to the stash, the place where the liquor was hidden after it was made. Sometimes it would be somebody's house or an old shed or some place just out in the woods, and they'd make their arrangements out there, what the route was and who was getting how much liquor. There wasn't anything ever written down. Everything was cash on the spot. Different drivers liked to make the run at different times, but Junior and his brothers always liked to start out from 3 to 4 a.m. But it got so no matter when you started out you didn't have those roads to yourself. - -"Some guys liked one time and some guys liked another time," Junior is saying, "but starting about midnight they'd be coming out of the woods from every direction. Some nights the whole road was full of bootleggers. It got so some nights they'd be somebody following you going just as fast as you were and you didn't know who h'it was, the law or somebody else hauling whiskey." - -And it was just a business, like any other business, just like a milk route -- but this funny thing was happening. In those wild-ass times, with the money flush and good old boys from all over the county running that white liquor down the road ninety miles an hour and more than that if you try to crowd them a little bit -- well, the funny thing was, it got to be competitive in an almost aesthetic, a pure sporting way. The way the good old boys got to hopping up their automobiles -- it got to be a science practically. Everybody was looking to build a car faster than anybody ever had before. They practically got into industrial espionage over it. They'd come up behind one another on those wild-ass nights on the highway, roaring through the black gulches between the clay cuts and the trees, pretending like they were officers, just to challenge them, test them out, race...pour le sport, careening through the darkness, old Carolina moon. All these cars were registered in phony names. If a man had to abandon one, they would find license plates that traced back to...nobody at all. It wasn't anything, particularly, to go down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau and get some license plates, as long as you paid your money. Of course, it's rougher now, with compulsory insurance. You have to have your insurance before you can get your license plates, and that leads to a lot of complications. Junior doesn't know what they do about that now. Anyway, all these cars with the magnificent engines were plain on the outside, so they wouldn't attract attention, but they couldn't disguise them altogether. They were jacked up a little in the back and had 8.00 or 8.20 tires, for the heavy loads, and the sound -- - -"They wasn't no way you could make it sound like an ordinary car," says Junior. - -God-almighty, that sound in the middle of the night, groaning, roaring, humming down into the hollows, through the clay gulches -- yes! And all over the rural South, hell, all over the South, the legends of wild-driving whiskey running got started. And it wasn't just the plain excitement of it. It was something deeper, the symbolism. It brought into a modern focus the whole business, one and a half centuries old, of the country people's rebellion against the Federals, against the seaboard establishment, their independence, their defiance of the outside world. And it was like a mythology for that and for something else that was happening, the whole wild thing of the car as the symbol of liberation in the postwar South. - -"They was out about every night, patrolling, the agents and the State Police was," Junior is saying, "but they seldom caught anybody. H'it was like the dogs chasing the fox. The dogs can't catch a fox, he'll just take 'em around in a circle all night long. I was never caught for transporting. We never lost but one car and the axle broke on h'it." - -The fox and the dogs! Whiskey running certainly had a crazy gamelike quality about it, considering that a boy might be sent up for two years or more if he were caught transporting. But these boys were just wild enough for that. There got to be a code about the chase. In Wilkes County nobody, neither the good old boys nor the agents, ever did anything that was going to hurt the other side physically. There was supposed to be some parts of the South where the boys used smoke screens and tack buckets. They had attachments in the rear of the cars, and if the agents got too close they would let loose a smoke screen to blind them or a slew of tacks to make them blow a tire. But nobody in Wilkes County ever did that because that was a good way for somebody to get killed. Part of it was that whenever an agent did get killed in the South, whole hordes of agents would come in from Washington and pretty soon they would be tramping along the ridges practically inch by inch, smoking out the stills. But mainly it was -- well, the code. If you got caught, you went along peaceably, and the agents never used their guns. There were some tense times. Once was when the agents started using tack belts in Ardell County. This was a long strip of leather studded with nails that the agents would lay across the road in the dark. A man couldn't see it until it was too late and he stood a good chance of getting killed if it got his tires and spun him out. The other was the time the State Police put a roadblock down there at that damned bridge at Millersville to catch a couple of escaped convicts. Well, a couple of good old boys rode up with a load, and there was the roadblock and they were already on the bridge, so they jumped out and dove into the water. The police saw two men jump out of their car and dive in the water, so they opened fire and they shot one good old boy in the backside. As they pulled him out, he kept saying: - -"What did you have to shoot at me for? What did you have to shoot at me for?" - -It wasn't pain, it wasn't anguish, it wasn't anger. It was consternation. The bastards had broken the code. - -Then the Federals started getting radio cars. - -"The radios didn't do them any good," Junior says. "As soon as the officers got radios, then they got radios. They'd go out and get the same radio. H'it was an awful hard thing for them to radio them down. They'd just listen in on the radio and see where they're setting up the roadblocks and go a different way." - -And such different ways. The good old boys knew back roads, dirt roads, up people's back lanes and every which way, and an agent would have to live in the North Carolina hills a lifetime to get to know them. There wasn't hardly a stretch of road on any of the routes where a good old boy couldn't duck off the road and into the backcountry if he had to. They had wild detours around practically every town and every intersection in the region. And for tight spots -- the legendary devices, the "bootleg slide," the siren and the red light.... - -And then one day in 1955 some agents snuck over the ridges and caught Junior Johnson at his daddy's still. Junior Johnson, the man couldn't anybody catch! - -The arrest caught Junior just as he was ready to really take off in his career as a stock-car driver. Junior says he hadn't been in the whiskey business in any shape or form, hadn't run a load of whiskey for two or three years, when he was arrested. He was sentenced to two years in the Federal reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. - -"If the law felt I should have gone to jail, that's fine and dandy," Junior tells me. "But I don't think the true facts of the case justified the sentence I got. I never had been arrested in my life. I think they was punishing me for the past. People get a kick out of it because the officers can't catch somebody, and this angers them. Soon as I started getting publicity for racing, they started making it real hot for my family. I was out of the whiskey business, and they knew that, but they was just waiting to catch me on something. I got out after serving ten months and three days of the sentence, but h'it was two or three years I was set back, about half of '56 and every bit of '57. H'it takes a year to really get back into h'it after something like that. I think I lost the prime of my racing career." - -But, if anything, the arrest only made the Junior Johnson legend hotter. - -And all the while Detroit kept edging the speeds up, from 150 m.p.h. in 1960 to 155 to 165 to 175 to 180 flat out on the longest straightaway, and the good old boys of Southern stock-car racing stuck right with it. Any speed Detroit would give them they would take right with them into the curve, hard-charging even though they began to feel strange things such as the rubber starting to pull right off the tire casing. And God! Good old boys from all over the South roared together after the Stanchion-Speed! Guts! --pouring into Birmingham, Daytona Beach, Randleman, North Carolina; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Weaverville, Hillsboro, North Carolina; Atlanta, Hickory, Bristol, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Asheville, North Carolina; Charlotte, Myrtle Beach -- tens of thousands of them. And still upper- and middle-class America, even in the South, keeps its eyes averted. Who cares! They kept on heading out where we all live, after all...even outside a town like Darlington, a town of 10,000 souls, God, here they come, down Route 52, up 401, on 340, 151 and 34, on through the South Carolina mesas. By Friday night already the good old boys are pulling into the infield of the Darlington raceway with those blazing pastel dreamboats stacked this way and that on the clay flat and the Thermos jugs and the brown whiskey bottles coming on out. By Sunday -- the race! -- there are 65,000 piled into the racetrack at Darlington. The sheriff, as always, sets up the jail right there in the infield. No use trying to haul them out of there. And now -- the sound rises up inside the raceway, and a good old boy named Ralph goes mad and starts selling chances on his Dodge. Twenty-five cents and you can take the sledge he has and smash his car anywhere you want. How they roar when the windshield breaks! The police could interfere, you know, but they are busy chasing a good old girl who is playing Lady Godiva on a hog-backed motorcycle, naked as sin, hauling around and in and out of the clay ruts. - -Eyes averted, happy burghers. On Monday the ads start appearing -- for Ford, for Plymouth, for Dodge -- announcing that we gave it to you, speed such as you never saw. There it was! At Darlington, Daytona, Atlanta -- and not merely in the Southern papers but in the albino pages of the suburban women's magazines, such as The New Yorker, in color -- the Ford winners, such as Fireball Roberts, grinning with a cigar in his mouth in The New Yorker Magazine. And somewhere, some Monday morning, Jim Paschal of High Point, Ned Jarrett of Boykin, Cale Yarborough of Timmonsville and Curtis Crider from Charlotte, Bobby Isaac of Catawba, E.J. Trivette of Deep Gap, Richard Petty of Randleman, Tiny Lund of Cross, South Carolina; Stick Elliott of Shelby -- and from out of Ingle Hollow. - -And all the while, standing by in full Shy, in Alumicron suits -- there is Detroit, hardly able to believe itself, what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the fastnesses of the Appalachian hills and flats -- a handful from this rare breed -- who have given Detroit...speed...and the industry can present it to a whole generation as...yours. And the Detroit P.R. men themselves come to the tracks like folk worshipers and the millions go giddy with the thrill of speed. Only Junior Johnson goes about it as if it were...the usual. Junior goes on down to Atlanta for the Dixie 400 and drops by the Federal penitentiary to see his Daddy. His Daddy is in on his fifth illegal distillery conviction; in the whiskey business that's just part of it; an able craftsman, an able businessman, and the law kept hounding him, that was all. So Junior drops by and then goes on out to the track and gets in his new Ford and sets the qualifying speed record for Atlanta Dixie 400, 146.301 m.p.h.; later on he tools on back up the road to Ingle Hollow to tend to the automatic chicken houses and the road-grading operation. Yes. - -Yet how can you tell that to...anybody...out on the bottom of that bowl as the motor thunder begins to lift up through him like a sigh and his eyeballs glaze over and his hands reach up and there, riding the rim of the bowl, soaring over the ridges, is Junior's yellow Ford...which is his white Chevrolet...which is a White Ghost, forever rousing the good old boys...hard-charging!...up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold onto the whole pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior! diff --git a/tests/corpus/lessons-from-late-night.md b/tests/corpus/lessons-from-late-night.md deleted file mode 100644 index 94abb0c68..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/lessons-from-late-night.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,115 +0,0 @@ -Lessons from late night -*The New Yorker* -By Tina Fey - -In 1997, I realized one of my childhood dreams. (Not the one where I’m being chased by Count Chocula.) I flew to New York from Chicago, where I was working as a performer at Second City, to interview for a writing position at “Saturday Night Live.” It seemed promising, because I’d heard that the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity. I arrived for my job interview in the only decent clothes I had: my “show clothes”—black pants and a lavender chenille sweater from Contempo Casuals. I went up to the security guard at the elevator and I heard myself say, “I’m here to see Lorne Michaels.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. This must be how people feel when they really do go to school naked by accident. - -I went up to the seventeenth-floor offices, whose walls were lined with archival photographs from the show—Jane Curtin ripping her shirt open on “Weekend Update,” Gilda Radner in a “Beach Blanket Bingo” sketch, Al Franken’s head shot! Then I sat on a couch and waited for my meeting with Lorne. About an hour into the wait, some assistants started making popcorn in a movie-theatre popcorn machine—something that I would later learn signalled Lorne’s imminent arrival. To this day, the smell of fresh popcorn causes me to experience stress, hunger, and sketch ideas for John Goodman. - -The only advice anyone had given me about meeting with Lorne was “Whatever you do, don’t finish his sentences.” A Chicago actress I knew had apparently made that mistake, and she believed it had cost her the job. So, when I was finally ushered into his office, I sat down, determined not to blow it. - -Lorne said, “So, you’re from . . .” - -The words seemed to hang there forever. Why wasn’t he finishing the sentence? If I answered now, would it count as talking over him? I couldn’t remember how normal human speech patterns worked. Another five seconds went by, and still no more sentence from Lorne. Oh, God! When I flew back to Chicago the next day, they were going to say, “How was your meeting with Lorne Michaels?” And I would have to reply, “He said, ‘So, you’re from,’ and then we sat there for an hour and then a girl came in and asked me to leave.” - -After what was probably, realistically, ten seconds, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I blurted out, “Pennsylvania. I’m from Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia,” just as Lorne finally finished his thought—“Chicago.” I was sure I had blown it. I don’t remember anything else that happened in the meeting, because I just kept staring at the nameplate on his desk that said “Lorne Michaels” and thinking, This is the guy with the Beatles check! I couldn’t believe I was in his office. I could never have guessed that in a few years I’d be sitting in that office at two, three, four in the morning, thinking, If this meeting doesn’t end soon, I’m going to kill this Canadian bastard. Somehow, I got the job. - -During my nine years at “Saturday Night Live,” my relationship with Lorne transitioned from Terrified Pupil and Reluctant Teacher, to Small-Town Girl and Streetwise Madam Showing Her the Ropes, to Annie and Daddy Warbucks (touring company), to a bond of mutual respect and friendship. Then it transitioned to Sullen Teen-Age Girl and Generous Stepfather, then to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Jackson, then, for a brief period, to Boy Who Doesn’t Believe in Christmas and Reclusive Neighbor Who Proves That Miracles Are Possible, then back to a bond of mutual respect and friendship. - -I’ve learned many things from Lorne—in particular, a managerial style that was the opposite of my usual Bossypants mode. Here are some Things I Learned from Lorne Michaels: - -(1) Producing is about discouraging creativity. - -A TV show comprises many departments—costumes, props, talent, graphics, set dressing, transportation. Everyone in every department wants to show off his or her skills and contribute creatively to the show, which is a blessing. You’re grateful to work with people who are talented and enthusiastic about their jobs. You would think that in your capacity as a producer your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm. You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, and people from the props department show up with a bran cake in the shape of Santa Claus sitting on a silver platter that says “Welcome to Denmark” on it. “We just thought it would be funny,” they say. And you have to find a polite way to explain that the character is Jewish, so her eating Santa’s face might have negative connotations, and the silver tray, while beautiful, is creating a weird glare on camera, and maybe let’s just go with the bran muffin on the white plate. - -And then sometimes actors have what they call “ideas.” Usually, this involves the actor talking more, or, in the case of a more experienced actor, sitting more. When an actor has an idea, it’s very important to get to the core reason behind it. - -(2) Figure out if there is something you’re asking the actor to do that’s making him or her uncomfortable. - -Is the actor being asked to bare his or her midriff, or make out with a Dick Cheney look-alike? (For the record, I have asked actors to do both, and they were completely game.) Rather than say, “I’m uncomfortable breast-feeding a grown man whom I just met today,” the actor may speak in code and say something like “I don’t think my character would do that.” Or “I’ve hurt my back and I’m not coming out of my dressing room.” You have to remember that actors are human beings. Which is hard sometimes, because they look so much better than human beings. Is there someone in the room the actor is trying to impress? This is a big one and should not be overlooked. If a male actor is giving you a hard time about something, immediately scan the area for pretty interns. - -(3) The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty. - -This is something Lorne has said often about “Saturday Night Live,” but it’s a great lesson in not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke until the last possible second, but then you have to let it go. - -You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I’m from a generation in which a lot of people died on waterslides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live television. - -What I learned about bombing as an improviser at Second City was that, while bombing is painful, it doesn’t kill you. What I learned about bombing as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” is that you can’t be too worried about your permanent record. Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets. But you’re also going to write some real shit nuggets. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday. - -(4) When hiring, mix Harvard nerds with Chicago improvisers and stir. - -The staff of “Saturday Night Live” has always been a blend of hyper-intelligent Harvard boys1 (Jim Downey, Al Franken, Conan O’Brien) and gifted, visceral, fun performers (John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, Horatio Sanz, Bill Murray, Maya Rudolph). Lorne somehow knew that too many of one or the other would knock the show out of balance. To generalize with abandon, if you had nothing but Harvard guys the whole show would be made up of commercial parodies about people wearing barrels after the 1929 stock-market crash. “Flenderson’s Poverty Barrels: Replacing Clothes Despite Being More Expensive Since . . . Right Now. Formerly known as Flenderson’s Pickles and Suspenders: A Semiotic Exegesis of Jazz Age Excess and the Failings of the Sherman Antitrust Act.” - -If you had nothing but improvisers, the whole show would be made up of loud drag characters named Vicki and Staci screaming their catchphrase over and over: “YOU KISS YOUR MUTHA WITH THAT FACE?” - -Harvard boys and improv people think differently because their comedy upbringing is so different. If you’re sitting in the Harvard Lampoon Castle with your friends, you can perfect a piece of writing so that it is exactly what you want and you can avoid the feeling of red-hot flop sweat—especially because you won’t even be there when someone reads it. But when you’re improvising eight shows a week in front of drunk, meat-eating Chicagoans you experience highs and lows. You will be heckled, or, worse, you will hear your heartbeat over the audience’s silence. You will be bombing so hard that you will be able to hear a lady in the back putting her gum in a napkin. You may have a point to make about the health-care system in America, but you’ll find out that you need to present it through a legally blind bus-driver character or an exotic dancer whose boobs are running for mayor. (I would like to see that sketch, actually.) Ultimately, you will do whatever it takes to win the audience over. - -If Harvard is Classical Military Theory, Improv is Vietnam. - -This is all to say that Harvard boys and people from Second City or the Groundlings (the L.A. improv group) make beautiful comedy marriages. The Harvard guys check the logic and grammatical construction of every joke, and the improvisers teach them how to be human. It’s Spock and Kirk. (I guess if you want to tie all my metaphors together it would be Spock wearing a baldric and staying up all night to write a talk-show sketch with a mentally ravaged Rambo Kirk.) - -I have tried to apply this lesson when hiring people for “30 Rock,” and it has worked well so far. Our current staff makeup is four Harvard nerds, four performers turned writers, two regular nerds, and two dirtbags. - -(5) Television is a visual medium. - -Lorne has said this to me a lot. It basically means “Go to bed. You look tired.” You may want to be diligent and stay up with the writers all night, but if you’re going to be on the show you can’t. Your street cred with the staff won’t help anybody if you look like a cadaver on camera. - -(6) Don’t make any big decisions right after the season ends. - -This is the same advice they give people who’ve just come out of rehab. After a gruelling period of work (or what passes for gruelling work in our soft-handed world), you will crave some kind of reward. But don’t rush into a big decision, like a new house or a marriage or partial ownership of a minor-league baseball team, which you may later regret. The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it. - -(7) Never cut to a closed door. - -Lorne said this once in exasperation over some sketch I can’t remember. The director had cut to a door a moment too soon, before the actor entered, and in that moment Lorne felt we had “lost the audience.” This can mean a lot of things. Comedy is about confidence, and if people in the audience sense a slip in confidence they’re nervous for you and they can’t laugh. Lorne would have preferred that the camera cut follow the sound of the actor knocking on the door. Which is to say that the sketch should lead the cutting pattern, which is to say that content should dictate style, which is to say that in TV the writer is king. - -Or—and this is a distinct possibility—it doesn’t mean anything and he was just in a grouchy mood. - -(8) Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning. - -This one is incredibly helpful. We work long hours on these shows, and, no matter how funny someone’s writing sample is, if that person is too talkative or needy or angry to deal with by the printer in the middle of the night, steer clear. That must be how I got through that first job interview. I was not dynamic, but at least I wasn’t nuts. - -(9) Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy. - -There were many times in my nine years at the show when I couldn’t understand why Lorne didn’t just tell people to knock it off. Eccentric writers would turn in sketches that were seventeen minutes long, immature performers tried fits and tears when their sketches appeared later in the show than they’d wanted. My instinct would have been to pull these culprits aside and scold them like a schoolmarm. “Please explain to me why your sketch should get to be three times longer than everyone else’s.” “How dare you pitch a fit about what time your sketch is on? Some people didn’t get to be in the show at all.” But there is not one management course in the world that recommends self-righteousness as a tool. - -Lorne has an indirect and very effective way of dealing with the crazies. It is best described by the old joke that most people know from “Annie Hall.” A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “My brother’s gone crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the psychiatrist says, “Have you told him he’s not a chicken?” The man replies, “I would, but we need the eggs.” Lorne knows that the most exhausting people occasionally turn out the best stuff. How do I explain the presence of crazy people on the staff if we’re following Rule No. 8? Easily: these crazy people are charming and brilliant and great fun to see at three in the morning. Also, some people arrive at the show sane, and the show turns them crazy. - -In fairness to others, I will use myself as an example. In October, 2001, Manhattan was a tense place to work. One Friday morning, I was sitting in my tiny dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza trying to write jokes for “Weekend Update.” I was reading a thick packet of newspaper clippings, looking for something fun to say about Afghanistan, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the anthrax postal attacks: it was grim. Then Lester Holt came on MSNBC on the TV hanging in the corner and said, “Breaking news. Anthrax has been found at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. C.D.C. officials are investigating the potentially deadly substance, which was found in a suspicious package addressed to NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw.” If you have decent reading-comprehension skills, you will remember from the beginning of this paragraph that I, too, was at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. “Nope,” I thought. “I give up.” I put on my coat, walked downstairs past my friends and co-workers without saying anything. I walked right past the host for that week, sweet Drew Barrymore, without telling her what I had heard. I just went to the elevator and left. Then I walked home and waited to die. Several hours later, Lorne called and said gently, “We’re all here. You and Drew are the only ones who left. And Drew came back a few hours ago, so . . . we’re ordering dinner, if you want to come back in.” It was the kindest way of saying, “You’re embarrassing yourself.” - -I got back to work that evening just in time to find everyone assembled on the studio floor. Andy Lack, the head of NBC News, was giving the crew an emergency briefing. Nothing is scarier, by the way, than a bunch of adults being very quiet. Lack explained that the C.D.C. would be “swabbing” workers from the second floor to the sixth floor. (Remember all those fun catchphrases from 2001? “Swabbing,” “cutaneous,” “Cipro,” “I am Zoolander.”) - -As I watched from the audience balcony, I felt tremendous affection for everyone there. It was as if we were all a family and, if we had to go, at least we’d all go together. I guess I forgot that just a few hours earlier I had booked it out of there, leaving them all to die. (I have a uniquely German capacity to vacillate between sentimentality and coldness.) The point is Lorne did not do what I would have done, which is to say to me, “You’re being crazy. Get back in here. Do you think you’re more important than everybody else?” He also didn’t coddle me, which is what I would have done if I were trying to overcompensate for my natural sternness. “Are you O.K.? If you need to take a couple of days off, I’m sure we can manage, blah, blah, blah.” Instead, he found a way for me to slip back in the door as if my mental breakdown had never happened. “We’re ordering dinner. What do you want?” He knew how to get the eggs. - -People sometimes ask me about the difference between male and female comedians. Do men and women find different things funny? I usually attempt an answer that is so diplomatic and boring that the person will just walk away. Something like “There’s a tremendous amount of overlap in what men and women think is funny. And, I hate to generalize, but I would say that at the far ends of the spectrum men may prefer visceral, absurd elements, like sharks and robots, while women are more drawn to character-based jokes and verbal idiosyncrasies.” Have you walked away yet? - -Here’s the truth: There is an actual difference between male and female comedy writers, and I’m going to reveal it now. The men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars. One of the first times I walked into the office of my old boss Steve Higgins, he was eating an apple and smoking a cigarette simultaneously. (When I started at “S.N.L.,” you could still smoke in an office building. I might not be young.) I had been there only a few weeks, and Steve had been very encouraging and supportive. I forget what we were talking about, but I went to get a reference book off a high shelf in his office. When I reached to move a paper cup that was in front of it, Steve jumped up. “Don’t touch that,” he said. “Hang on.” He grabbed the cup, and a couple of others like it around the office, and took them out of the room to dump them. - -“Oh, yeah, that’s pee in those cups,” my friend Paula Pell later informed me. I could not believe it. I had come from Second City, which was by no means clean—it would not be unheard of to see a rat giving birth in an overstuffed ashtray, for example. But I had never heard of anyone peeing in a cup except at a doctor’s office. Maybe you’d do it on a road trip if it was too far between rest stops. I had definitely never heard of anyone peeing in a cup and leaving it on a bookshelf in his office to evaporate back into his body through the pores on his face. - -I told a male co-worker about what I had seen. Was it not the grossest thing he had ever heard? He answered matter-of-factly that he occasionally did it, too. He said it was just something guys did when they were too lazy to go to the bathroom. The bathroom, I should point out, was about as far away as you are from this magazine. I started to feel as if I were from space. - -I called my boyfriend, Jeff, back in Chicago. “You grew up way out in the country with a bunch of brothers. Did you ever pee in cups and, like, leave them around?” Jeff was incredulous. “What! No. That’s disgusting.” A thousand points for Jeff. - -Once I became aware of this practice, I started noticing cups in other places. In the “Weekend Update” offices—which were like the smarter but meaner older brother of the regular writers’ offices—there weren’t any cups. There was a jar. It was a jar of piss with a lid on it, and, judging by its consistency, I suspect that the writers sometimes spat into it. Or that one of them was terribly ill. You could see it when you came in the door, backlit by the afternoon sun, and at first I thought it was a test. If you saw the piss jar and dared to ignore it and continue into the room, you were welcomed. “Welcomed” is too strong a word. You were . . . one of the guys? Nope, you know what? I’m just projecting. It couldn’t have been a test, because they really didn’t give a fuck whether you came into the room or not. - -Not all the men at “S.N.L.” whizzed in cups. But four or five out of twenty did, so the men have to own that one. Anytime there’s a bad female standup somewhere, some idiot Interblogger will deduce that “women aren’t funny.” Using that same math, I can deduce that male comedy writers piss in cups. - -Also, they like to pretend to rape each other. It’s . . . don’t worry about it. It’s harmless, actually. - -To continue with this science of broad generalization, pissing in cups may show that men go into comedy to break rules. Conversely, the women I know in comedy are all dutiful daughters, good citizens, mild-mannered college graduates. Maybe we women gravitate toward comedy because it is a socially acceptable way to break rules. Have you left me for the cheese tray yet? - -If you have not, now I will tell you the story of my proudest moment as one of the head writers at “S.N.L.” At the beginning of each season, the staff would write commercial parodies—the fake commercials that you have enjoyed over the past thirty-six years, such as “Schmitts Gay” and “Colon Blow.” I wish I had written either of those, but I didn’t. (I did write “Mom Jeans,” “Annuale,” and “Excedrin for Racial-Tension Headaches,” if that helps.) - -Each writer would submit two or three commercial-parody scripts, and the producers and head writers would then pick which ones would be shot. In a normal show week, every sketch is read aloud by the cast at a “table read” in front of the whole staff. The room is packed with writers, designers, stage managers, musicians, etc., so you have a nice big audience. Everyone can hear where there are laughs, and everyone has a sense of which sketches could work. The commercial parodies didn’t get that treatment, and choosing which ones to produce always brought out the worst in people. - -I would read the packet of forty scripts and pick the ones I liked. Dennis McNicholas, the other head writer, would pick the ones he liked. Not surprisingly, we each preferred the ones our friends had written. There was an unspoken rule that you never pushed for your own pieces, ever. - -Then we would each separately corner the producers—Steve Higgins and Tim Herlihy—and try to get them to agree with us. We would continue this square dance of selling each other out for a week or so, only to find that Jim Signorelli, the long-standing director of the commercial parodies, had already started shooting the ones he liked, without asking us. It’s a miracle anything ever got done. - -There was one parody script that I really fought for. It was back when “classic” was a big advertising trend. Coke Classic. Reebok Classic. The very funny Paula Pell had written a script called “Kotex Classic.” The idea was that Kotex was trying to revive those old nineteen-sixties sanitary napkins that hooked to an elastic belt. It featured the women in the cast enjoying fun “modern gal” activities with giant sanitary napkins poking out of the tops of their low-rise jeans. It seemed to me to be an excellent parody of nostalgia-based marketing while also being a little shocking and silly. I kept bringing it up in meetings only to be told that it would be “too difficult to produce.” Paula and I weren’t sure what that meant, so we kept pressing. Finally, Steve Higgins and Jim Signorelli sat down with us and asked us to explain the idea. “How would we see the pad? Is it a thing that comes up the front? Would we have to zoom in on it? Wouldn’t the girls have to take their pants off? Would we see blood?” - -For me, this was what Oprah would call an Aha! moment. They didn’t seem to know how cumbersome a sanitary-napkin belt was. It was the moment I realized that there was no “institutionalized sexism” at this place—sometimes the guys just literally didn’t know what we were talking about. In the same way that I was not familiar with the completely normal custom of pissing in jars, they had never been handed a bulging antique Kotex product by the school nurse. But they trusted Paula and me, so we made the commercial, and the commercial worked. - -Two things were reassuring about this. One, that we were heard. And, more important, I realized that during all those years when I was sure that boys could tell when I had a maxi pad the size of a loaf of bread going up the back of my pants they actually had no idea. ♦ - -1I say Harvard “boys” because they are almost always male, and because they are usually under twenty-five and have never done physical labor with their arms or legs. I love them very much. diff --git a/tests/corpus/love-app.md b/tests/corpus/love-app.md deleted file mode 100644 index 492a63b4a..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/love-app.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,153 +0,0 @@ -The love app -*The New Yorker* -By Lauren Collins - -Among twenty-five million, they were two, speeding toward the glowing span of the Wonhyo Bridge on a warm spring night, the scooter trailing pink balloons. They were born in Seoul in 1985 and 1992. They were natives of the most wired city in the world, a megalopolis that is nearly twice as dense as New York but maintains the wide margins of the suburbs—roomy restaurants, boulevards lined with trees. The city belonged to them, beaming its vital signs at speeds of more than fifty megabits per second to its citizens, who bunched and flowed in near-instantaneous reply. Their smartphones were lanterns, illuminating the urban grid. Bubbles within windows within browsers within screens: it was as though, through some mathematical trick, the smaller the interface the more freedom it afforded. - -It was May. Jimin, a computer engineer with serious eyes and a square jaw, was finishing up his degree at Seoul National University, having taken off several years to perform military service. He had been a detection analyst, interpreting intelligence signals. Jiyeon (Yundi), a sophomore, had a heart-shaped face and a chic, whimsical way of dressing: that night, she was wearing a floral do-rag in her long black hair. They had first met in February, on a student ski trip to Phoenix Park Ski World. Jimin was staying with nine boys. Yundi was staying with seven girls. The boys’ room had called the girls’ room on the hotel phone—since they were strangers, this was the only way to communicate; the boys had got a list of girls’-room numbers from the trip’s chaperones—and asked if they wanted to do a bangting (“room-meeting”), a type of group blind date. The gathering, in Room 206, had been raucous, not a moment to get to know someone. Jimin and Yundi remembered having exchanged a high five. - -Three months later, the university held a spring fair. Students bounced on trampolines and belted out songs to a karaoke machine. Jimin and some friends were sitting on the grass, eating scallion chicken and drinking a sweet rice wine called makoli. Yundi walked by, and Jimin invited her to join them. Eventually, he asked her to pass him some chicken. When she handed him the plate, he complained, teasingly, that she’d given him only scallions. They’d have to eat chicken together sometime, he said. She told her friends afterward, “He’s twenty-nine, but he’s so cute!” - -Yundi took the subway home from the festival. As she sat on the train, debating whether it would seem too forward to friend Jimin on Facebook, her phone—a Samsung Galaxy in a pearlescent case—dinged, and a push notification appeared, announcing that Jimin wanted to be her friend. - -Within weeks, Jimin and Yundi were wildly in love. One afternoon, Jimin attended an event at which someone was handing out balloons. He tied them to the back of his motorbike, thinking it would look like a newlyweds’ car, and picked Yundi up after her classes. From campus, they headed north, passing rail yards and fish markets; apartment buildings filled with housewives snapping up the online-auction bargains of the day (bags of oranges, puffy jackets, belly-button-lint removers); clothing stores packed with customers pouting in front of mirrors, as they posed for chakshot, pictures of themselves trying on outfits, which they sent to their friends, who would message back with a yes or a no; soju bars; cram schools; PC bangs, the smoke-filled, twenty-four-hour gaming centers that were quickly becoming futuristic anachronisms, populated by dwindling numbers of adolescent boys slurping instant noodles in front of humming terminals. (Now that the Internet was so fast at home, no one needed to go to bangs to compete in multi-player games.) - -Yundi held on tight to Jimin. Beneath them, in the subways, the 4G LTE network provided cellular service, even though no one talked on the phone or sent texts anymore, preferring to chat on the mobile-messaging app KakaoTalk. The WiMax connection was fast enough to stream music videos. Passengers watched live television, via DMB, and read comic books, the best of which were now available exclusively through the Internet search providers who commissioned them. Trains arrived every ninety seconds, announced by piped-in birdsong. On the platforms were kiosks with forty-six-inch touchscreens. They showed movie trailers, monitored exchange rates, dispensed coupons, and made restaurant recommendations. Nearby, a resident could order groceries from a virtual supermarket by scanning QR codes that corresponded to the desired items, which would be delivered to his house in a matter of hours. A commuter who needed to connect to a bus could check the availability—not on a bus schedule but on a digital map that charted buses in real time. Even though millions of people rode buses, you hardly ever saw crowds waiting at a bus stop. - -The technologies seemed to trigger urges in addition to transmitting them, as though the city’s inhabitants and its machines had merged into a single nervous system, dendrites intermingling with optical fibres. A stranger once thrust his smartphone into a pretty woman’s hand and ran off, hoping that she would feel obliged to track him down in order to return it. - -The joyride ended at Han River Park, which encircles Seoul’s main financial district. Jimin and Yundi spread out a blanket at the foot of the Wonhyo Bridge and stared at the lights of the 63 Building, a skyscraper that seemed to take the form of two people leaning back to back. There was no one to bother them. As distant traces of music wafted down the shoreline, it was nice simply to enjoy the river breeze and the moon. - -The digital world is everywhere and nowhere, a supranational empire that transcends physical borders. Still, there are places that seem closer to its center, places where the pull of the network is particularly strong. Ninety-eight per cent of households in South Korea have access to broadband (versus sixty-eight per cent in America), and seventy-three per cent of the population uses a smartphone (versus fifty-six per cent of Americans). Seoul is a sort of terrestrial embassy for the virtual universe. The city is to high-tech wizardry as Milan is to fashion, or Los Angeles to film. Everything seems a few seasons ahead. - -Value Creators & Company (V.C.N.C.), a startup based in Seoul, has created an app for couples like Jimin and Yundi. It’s called Between, “a beautiful space where you can share all your moments only with the one that matters.” It provides a private system by which couples exchange voice and text messages, share photo albums, and post notes on a memo board. A user can send her girlfriend a “sticker”: some, such as a pink bunny blowing kisses, are free; others can be bought from the sticker store for two dollars each. The app’s prize feature is called Memory Box. It’s the color of pine, with a cutout handle—an online depository for photos, notes, and the sorts of keepsakes that once nested in the corners of underwear drawers but now often seem to evaporate, dispersed among e-mail, voice mail, text, and social networks. You can have only one contact on Between—your significant other. If Facebook is a high-school reunion and Twitter is a cocktail party, Between is staying home with a boxed set and ordering pizza. - -Since Between launched, in November of 2011, the app has been downloaded 4.5 million times. (Recent competitors include Couple, which offers a “thumbkiss” feature, and an app called Avocado, because “Avocado trees don’t self-pollinate—they need another tree nearby to bear fruit.”) Between has attracted modest followings in countries like Japan and the United States, but in South Korea more than half of twentysomethings have used it. Each month, Between users send one another a collective eight hundred million messages and spend an average of four hundred and fifty minutes using the app. In South Korea, Between has become a synecdoche for commitment: whereas a boy might once have asked the object of his affections, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?,” he now says, “Do you want to Between?” - -In April, while the K-pop supergroup Girls’ Generation was conducting a backstage interview for a television show, the phone of one of the group’s members, Hyoyeon, emitted a telltale bloop—the sound that notifies a Between user that she has received a message from her beloved. Gossip sites lit up with the news: “Hyoyeon confirms that she has a boyfriend on TV broadcast!” More recently, a member of Block B, a boy band, released a song called “Ogeul Ogeul” (the title translates roughly as “Cheesy Cheesy”). The lyrics relate a suitor’s apology to his girlfriend, who keeps complaining that he takes too long to reply to her texts. He vows, “We can take photo-booth pictures in Myeong-dong / have a rest, eat dinner / and then add another memory to Between.” - -On a sizzling August day, I arrived at Between’s offices, in a modest mid-rise building in Seoul’s Gangnam district. Erin Chang, a sweet and scary-efficient twenty-six-year-old who works in business development, greeted me in the lobby. Chang has a perfect command of Korean and English—she grew up in Seoul and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania—and she translated whenever the situation required it. She also introduced me to some couples who used Between. She led the way to the elevator (a nameplate indicated that the building’s other tenants included an I.B.M. On-Demand Contact Center and something called the Get Rich Project) and then to a large room on the fifth floor, where Between’s twenty-one employees were, unsurprisingly, sitting in front of their computers. Earlier this year, V.C.N.C. raised three million dollars from venture-capital investors, but the headquarters still felt appealingly pre-corporate. A large modular bookshelf hosted a plastic jack-o’-lantern and a desultory collection of coding guides. In the kitchenette, there were fewer kiwis than forty-ounce bottles of beer. The orange and chartreuse bean bags of the reading corner, topped by a cushion in the shape of a dog bone, seemed a decent stab at the self-consciously wacky décor of Silicon Valley. In the middle of the room, six product designers huddled around an iMac, trying to rejigger the way Between’s “album view” function worked, so that a user could search his photos by date. Nearby, a woman was mocking up a flyer, to be posted on Facebook, for a “guerrilla event” that Between was holding that weekend. “Hot summer, Between wants to meet you! :) ,” it read. - -Four of Between’s five co-founders—Jake Park, Brad Kim, Lako Cho, KJ Woo, and James Lee—met as students at Seoul National. (They go by English names in their professional lives, because they feel that it helps them avoid the sense of hierarchy encouraged by the many honorifics of the Korean language.) They knew that they wanted to develop an app, and began to think about what was missing from their online lives. Intimacy, they concluded. - -“For Between, we started from some deeper things,” Cho told me, as we drank grape sodas in a conference room. “We wanted the offline person to translate into the mobile person.” Three of the founders had girlfriends; to supplement their firsthand experience, they turned to self-help books, which emphasized memory and communication as the keys to fulfillment. They thought: two people. “It’s the smallest unit, but, at the same time, probably the most valuable relationship you’ll have in your life, because it’s the basis of the family,” Chang explained. - -The founders conceived of Between as a sort of online sanctuary, an antidote to what Park has called “social-network fatigue.” Between would be the framed photograph you keep on your desk, except that it would also be the desk and all its contents. A sort of sacred space, where love letters don’t mingle with tuition bills, Between seems to encourage reflection. “I want to be a confident, capable man that every Seoul National student looks up to,” Seung Hyun-lee, a user I met, wrote in a memo to his girlfriend. “I will never do anything that makes me look empty or shallow.” He explained, “If it’s a serious message, I want to do it on Between, because if I do it somewhere that I’ve written other messages it lightens it.” One of the highest compliments that the founders have received from a user is that Between feels like a quiet beach. - -Cho had come up with a model by which to explain, in the manner of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and facilitate the progression of love in the digital age. He called it the Empty Room Theory: - -1. Let’s assume two people who are interested in each other (maybe or maybe not at the beginning of the relationship) are in the same room. This room shouldn’t interfere with their relationship much. It should make them feel like there are only two of them secluded in this place. -2. The first behavior this couple will exhibit will be “having a conversation.” This is the chatting function of Between. Chatting is the most instant way of communication you can do via mobile. -3. After that, they may start taking photos to remember the moments they share together. Photo is not as instant as chatting, but it is a great tool for sharing your emotions or memories in the most visual way. -4. They have shared quite a few memories about happy and sad moments with chatting and photos. Now they might write longer letters to really convey their deep feelings. This is the memo function of Between. Memo is a much slower way of communication compared with photos or chatting, but it conveys the deepest and truest message. -“In my ideal world, I want to memorize everything in my lifetime,” Cho said, longingly. “Photos and locations, but also sounds and smells.” - -Young lovers, particularly in South Korea, are a formidable constituency. The taxonomy of blind dates is dizzying: in addition to a bangting, you can go on a sogaeting (kingdom, blind date; phylum, one on one; class, organized by friends or colleagues) or what Koreans call a meeting (blind date, group, a bunch of guys and girls go out to drink and play games). It is not unusual for your boss to set you up (and, if all goes well, you may get taken to a place called the Love Factory Café). Once formed, couples mark every hundred days of their relationship with outings and presents. On November 11th, they exchange Pepero, cookie sticks (side by side, they resemble the number eleven) that often function as meet-cute props, in the manner of the strand of spaghetti in “Lady and the Tramp.” Singles, meanwhile, have Black Day: they eat a plateful of black-bean noodles to console themselves for their lack of Valentine’s Day gifts. - -In Seoul, I dropped in at Rainbow Stitch, a boutique dedicated to his-and-hers clothing. It stocked everything from identically polka-dotted tank tops to board shorts and bikinis made from the same Hawaiian-print fabric. (Urban legend tells of a couple in hysterics at the airport: the woman had burst into tears when her boyfriend sat on the wrong side of her and their T-shirts—featuring a slogan that spanned their chests—couldn’t be read properly.) I had gone there at the suggestion of Simon Stawski, a Canadian expat who, with his wife, Martina, runs the popular blog Eat Your Kimchi. “We always describe Korea as having the technology of 2050 with the mentality of 1950,” Stawski told me. - -Jake Park, the chief executive of V.C.N.C., has described Between as “a digital couple ring.” Certain ideals—transparency, monogamy—are embedded in its structure. The interface that each partner sees is identical, an insistently placid cocoon of minimalist graphics and muted pinks and blues. The emotional palette—as evidenced by a collection of original emojis—ranges from single roses to bouquets of hydrangeas, Tiffany boxes, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. One of the advantages of using a private app is that you don’t accidentally send a message that was meant for your lover to someone else, but Between is more snuggling than sexting. The design of the software nudges users to constantly express their love. “Some of my friends are married now, and they kind of want to ignore their wives,” KJ Woo told me. “But, on Between, you can see if someone’s gotten a message you sent them, because the red heart next to it disappears once it’s been read.” - -To some people, Between provides welcome ballast to the free-floating sensation of interacting online. For others, it sounds like a digital handcuff. (Between’s founders considered adding a location-tracking feature, but they decided it was too stalkerish.) A one-e-mail-address, one-account policy makes it difficult to maintain multiple relationships. Woo continued, “A user complained to customer service, ‘I have to use two user names and log in and out to date different men.’ ” The app offers its users the style of online romance while providing the protection of an old-fashioned courtship. Four million people are walking around wearing couples’ outfits that only they can see. - -It was July. Not long after Yundi fell in love with Jimin, she left for an extended trip with her family. Her parents hadn’t met Jimin, but they saw all the pictures that the couple posted on Kakao and Facebook. - -For two weeks, as she travelled through Europe, Yundi sent pictures on Between, just for Jimin: there she was, throwing a coin over her shoulder into the Trevi Fountain; in Holland, in front of a windmill, making windmill ears with her fingers; outside a Tyrolean castle, her plastic poncho inflating in the wind as though she were a doughboy. In Florence, she posed outside the Duomo, lifting her hands to her cheeks to form a little megaphone. As church bells rang, she used a paintbrush app to superimpose words on the image so that they seemed to be coming out of her mouth. She drew a heart around them and pressed send: “Ti amo, Jims.” - -The time difference meant that, whenever they woke up, there was a memo waiting, like a letter slipped under the door. Yundi wrote, from Venice: - -I woke up at 5:30, and, at 7:30, started sleeping on the bus. I was so bored that I started watching a lot of movies. Our driver was Italian, so he talked a lot. People bought a lot of olives in Venice. Makoli is so expensive here, and the data roaming sucks, so I couldn’t really talk to you on Between. -Jimin replied: - -Oh, they sell makoli there? Funny. -They exchanged reams of memos. Yundi normally thought that the term “soul mate” was trivial, but she and Jimin felt that they might spend their lives together. They started a list that they called the “soul-mate memo.” They were both only children. Their mothers had had them very young, their little fingers were short, and they hated cucumbers. They both owned a Galaxy, they both used Android, they both got a lot of mosquito bites, they both liked attention, they both had to hold a pillow to go to sleep. They had seventy-two things in common. They decided to find more when Yundi got back to Seoul. - -It is easy to forget that when the Korean War ended, in 1953, South Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries, with a per-capita income of less than eighty dollars a year. In 1961, Park Chung-hee seized power in a coup. Presiding over a military dictatorship, he carried out an ambitious program of industrialization that helped transform South Korea into the world’s fifteenth-largest economy—“the miracle on the Han River.” When the Internet came along, the country was well positioned to exploit its possibilities. James Larson, the author of several books on telecommunications in South Korea, writes, “While Vice-President Gore spoke about the ‘information superhighways,’ Korea set about to actually build them.” - -Mobile phones came early to South Korea, eclipsing landlines by 1999. (This didn’t happen in the U.S. and China until 2003.) But data services were expensive, and a series of protectionist measures enacted by the government meant that South Koreans’ choice of smartphones was limited largely to those manufactured by Korean companies. In 2008, fewer than one per cent of South Koreans used smartphones. Honduras and Guinea-Bissau had the iPhone before South Korea. In November of 2009, when the government finally allowed Apple to enter the market, commentators spoke of “iPhone shock.” Soon, the domestic manufacturers had improved their products and made their prices competitive. - -One day, I visited Jong-Sung Hwang, the head of the national I.T. Policy Group at Korea’s National Information Society* Agency. “We experienced huge changes in the nineteen-seventies,” he said, when I asked about the origins of South Korean technophilia. “People who moved fast benefitted big.” Looking forward, Hwang detailed Smart Seoul 2015, a seven-hundred-and-ninety-two-million-dollar plan to make Seoul the world’s most sophisticated municipality, if it isn’t already. Among other initiatives, the plan calls for free Wi-Fi at ten thousand intersections, public parks, markets, and bus stops (“You shouldn’t be able to walk more than five minutes in any direction without access”) and mandatory recycling logged by an R.F.I.D. tag issued to each household (“South Koreans like learning something new”). Schools are phasing out paper textbooks in favor of tablets. “We think digital technology is not a luxury but a basic right for city living,” Hwang said. - -South Korea—despite its infrastructure, its openness to adaptation, and its education system, which consistently ranks among the top in the world—has yet to produce behemoths like Google and Twitter (neither of which is especially popular with South Koreans, who prefer to search with Naver, a Korean-language search engine, and to social-network with Kakao, a mobile platform that offers everything from messaging to games). South Korean technology companies have a reputation as “fast followers,” leading in manufacturing but lagging in innovation. Digital life, while thriving, is more heavily regulated than in most democracies: you need a state-issued identification number to use the Internet at Starbucks, and political discussion, particularly in support of North Korea, is often censored. In 2010, South Korea blocked @uriminzok (“our people”), a Twitter feed run by the North Korean government. “The expansive controls on online speech established in South Korea . . . prevent citizens from accessing valuable expressive, historical, political, and artistic online content,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2011, in an open letter to Korea’s Communications Standards Commission. - -This year, in the hope of establishing a South Korean Silicon Valley, the newly elected President, Park Geun-hye (she is Park Chung-hee’s daughter), pledged almost a hundred million dollars in subsidies and grants to startups. “The creative economy puts priority on human creativity,” President Park said, in April, as she welcomed Bill Gates to the Blue House, Korea’s Presidential residence. “The government needs to extend opportunities for talented people so that they can establish businesses by taking risks.” - -Couples can buy and exchange romantic “stickers” that blow kisses or fume or pout. -Couples can buy and exchange romantic “stickers” that blow kisses or fume or pout. -COURTESY BETWEEN -It was August. Yundi had cut her hair after she got back from Europe. It was wavy now, and tinted auburn. She had a green half-moon on every other fingernail. She was so into using Between that she had applied for an internship with the company, and was accepted. One afternoon, she wore a floral circle skirt, a white Guess T-shirt, and coral-colored lipstick. She carried a colorblock tote. Jimin had on shorts and a navy-blue Guess shirt. They both wore beige baseball caps embroidered with pixellated monkeys. His rooted for the Dodgers, hers for the Yankees. Yundi loved it when he wore his hat backward—she thought it made him look like a rascal. They had been together for seventy-nine days. - -At a coffee shop, Jimin presented Yundi with an exquisitely wrapped box. Inside, a Super Soaker water gun lay on a bed of iridescent tinsel. Yundi squealed and did a little dance that always appealed to Jimin. They had recently seen a movie in which Bruce Willis gives his girlfriend a gun, and they were going to the Caribbean Bay water park the next week. - -The trip was part of a bucket list that they had decided to compile. They shared it on Between and edited it daily. To do: go to Jeju Island, do a piggyback ride, go on a trip in a camping car, throw a party, stage a solo piano recital, go back to Room 206 at Phoenix Park. Jimin wanted to go on a theme date where they’d wear hats and dark glasses and set the timers on their cameras so it looked like they were being chased by paparazzi. - -The summer was a daze. At the water park, they floated on inner tubes down a lazy river, laughing as they soaked unsuspecting tourists with the water gun. They went to baseball games and ate in restaurants. They sent each other a hundred messages or more a day; on weekends, when they were together, they sent fewer. When they video-chatted, they took screen shots. Yundi found the screen shots to be very natural, in a way that was different from the posed pictures they took while they were out on dates. Looking at them made her realize how happy she was when she talked to Jimin. - -Jimin, who had a new job, had to spend his birthday in Yongin, at a company workshop. Yundi showered him with gifts. She made origami—lips, a heart. She used Photoshop to draw a series of black-and-white portraits of the two of them that formed an animation—she highlighted their hair in neon colors, in a way that brought to mind Clementine, in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” She called the sequence “How to Kiss.” Yundi sent a video of herself singing a song to Jimin. She also sent him a grid of photographs in which she held up handwritten speech bubbles. “I love you,” they read. “Thank you for being born.” Jimin bragged about it all day to his co-workers. He and Yundi didn’t believe in mil-dang (“push-pull”), the Korean version of hard to get—why push away the person you loved? - -One day, Yundi smelled smoke on Jimin’s breath after he came out of the bathroom. She hadn’t asked him to stop smoking—he had declared that he wanted to quit, to be a better boyfriend. Yundi didn’t really care about the cigarettes. She took the fact that Jimin had started smoking again as a sign that he loved her less. She got mad and, despite his apologies, left. - -When she got home, she checked her phone. There was a memo from Jimin: - -I made a really big mistake today. I don’t even have enough time to make my girl laugh, but I made her cry. (Sorry.) From August 23, 2013, I will really, really quit smoking, and I will never make her cry. Love, Jimin. -The combination of technological prowess and couples culture makes South Korea a particularly advanced laboratory for the study of digital love. One Saturday morning, I joined a handful of Between employees for the “guerrilla event” that they’d been planning. Their aims were anthropological as well as promotional: they wanted to glean information from users about why, how, and when Between fit into their romantic lives. (Between’s expertise has appealed to American startups looking to enter the Asian market—when Uber, the taxi-hailing app, launched in South Korea recently, it offered Between users a discount.) The heat wave persisted. We all donned turquoise Between T-shirts that soon turned a deeper shade of green. We began at Deoksugung, a complex of ancient palaces near City Hall—a notorious date spot. (What a date spot needs, more than anything, is to be known as a date spot.) Couples, noticing the T-shirts, flocked toward the group. The ones who had R.S.V.P.’d via Facebook received personalized thank-you notes, which an employee’s girlfriend had calligraphed and illustrated. “Hi! How are you? This is Between,” one of them read. “Between is rooting for your beautiful romance!” - -“Back hug!” an employee yelled, calling out his favorite pose as he snapped a couple’s photograph. (Later, Between published a gallery on its Facebook page.) - -We moved on to Cheonggyecheon, a park bisected by a sunken stream. People sat on the banks, cooling their feet. A guitarist was performing “My Way.” A swarm of couples materialized: couples drinking iced coffee, couples wearing backpacks, couples carrying stuffed animals, couples dressed all in red. - -A girl in a striped shirt—her boyfriend was wearing one, too—approached and said, “I use Between every day, and there was an error yesterday.” - -I wasn’t really paying attention. I was sending pictures of a butterfly to my husband, using Between’s chatting function. - -Bits of conversation floated over—the intense, sometimes unsettling fragments of love in the digital age. Among the things I heard, that afternoon and that week: - -“It was an explosion of my emotion.” - -“I actually deleted the app once, when we had a huge fight.” - -“He thinks it’s humiliating for a guy to hold a girl’s handbag, but he does it when I ask him.” - -“That one was too weird to upload to Facebook.” - -“He has a very old-fashioned hobby, which is collecting CDs.” - -“In the beginning, I would make sure all the photos were perfect.” - -“Now I kind of regret having deleted it.” - -One girl’s phone passcode was 5148, and her boyfriend’s was 5368: on a keypad, each formed half of a heart. - -The users shared their memos: - -“I wish all of my shoes had shoelaces, so that you could tie them for me.” - -“I took this photo because my mom wanted to see your face.” - -Another couple had imported a thirty-page document to their Memory Box. It was called OurFuture. - -About a year after Between launched, a letter arrived in the mail at headquarters. (The actual mail.) “Thanks to your app, we were able to exchange many words of love with each other,” a user had written. “And now we are getting married.” The user went on to invite the entire staff of Between to the wedding. - -Sherry Turkle, the director of the M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self, has spent three decades considering the ways in which technology affects relationships, thought, and attachment. In “Alone Together” (2011), she writes, “We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.” - -Turkle writes persuasively about the ways that the “continual partial attention” that our devices induce (and demand) denature human connections, even tenuous ones. “At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee,” she writes. “These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.” In her view, romantic relationships, the most intimate of intimacies, are particularly susceptible to being diminished by the “emotional shorthand” that the digital world demands. “A lot of people are going through the torments of the damned,” Turkle said recently, over the telephone. She spoke of college students who can’t send a text without a ghostwriter; online daters paralyzed by the tyranny of choice; a woman who was unable to stop herself from opening Tinder, the hookup app, when her boyfriend got out of bed in the middle of the night. - -“I think we’re on a learning curve,” Turkle told me. “ ‘Alone Together’ represents us at the darkest moment. I wrote that book when people were saying, ‘Don’t be silly, this is our greatest achievement.’ Eric Schmidt, then the C.E.O. of Google, was telling people that, in the future, you’ll never have to be lonely or bored again.” - -Anyone who has experienced the jittery expectancy that texting can incite—accompanied by phantom vibrations and the ability to sense that your screen has lit up, even under a pile of ten coats—knows that communications can thwart communication. When the text arrives, the Pavlovian anxiety of waiting momentarily subsides, but the angst over what to make of the content escalates. “Analyze!” the call goes out, as messages are forwarded and phones are passed around tables, as though Rosa Mexicano were Bletchley Park. Falling in love turns into an exercise in code-breaking. - -At the Samsung exhibition store in Seoul, I encountered an app called Textat, a “sentiment analysis service”—a sort of automated HeTexted.com—that uses algorithms to parse a correspondent’s text messages, in order to establish his “current emotional state.” The readout includes a list of the top five sentences that the correspondent has used to show affection, and a graph of how many texts he has sent daily, weekly, and monthly. (There is something creepy about the way technology acts as a third wheel in relationships, but who knows? A few years ago, it would have seemed pathological to send an e-mail to someone who was in the same house, or even the same bed; now not so much.) - -When things go wrong in a relationship, the persistence of the online world’s memory is often painful. Facebook suggests that you friend your former girlfriend; Gmail auto-fills her e-mail address each time you type the first letter of her name. There’s a paradox implicit in products like Between—technologies intended to help people regain what they’re losing because of technology. At least to people who came of age in an era when the wholesale destruction of the artifacts of a relationship required fire, it is jarring to find—wedged among updates on voice-mail upgrades and Halloween stickers—a notice entitled “How to: Disconnect & reconnect your relationship.” Originally, you could delete a Between account with the touch of a button. But, faced with an average of three hundred restoration requests a day from “dramatic deleters,” Between has instituted a policy that tries to chart a middle course between instant gratification and lasting regret: the data of a user who chooses to “Disconnect Partner” remain hidden but available (“Restore Memories”) for thirty days. - -Turkle writes, “When interchanges are reformatted for the small screen and reduced to the emotional shorthand of emoticons, there are necessary simplifications.” But aren’t there complications as well—ways in which the digital world enriches and amplifies our romantic experiences? Many of the couples I met in Seoul seemed to use Between as a sort of personal trainer for their love lives, reminding them of their commitment, and cheering them on when they reached their goals. The concept of physical separation obtains even in notional space, and the online world, with its infinite area, can offer a sense of clarity and expansiveness. If the online world has come to feel like sprawl, a medium like Between proposes a sort of new urbanism—the information superhighway with corner stores and bike lanes. “Offline relationship > online relationship,” Erin Chang wrote to me in an e-mail. She appended what she said was one of the Between team’s favorite quotes, from the British pop philosopher Alain de Botton: “True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.” - -Several years ago, if you had asked me whether smartphones were just modern delivery systems for a static set of feelings, I would have said yes, but after my husband and I spent two years commuting between two countries I came to think that they enlarged our repertoire: we could send a text that said, “I miss you,” we could share videos of a duck that kept landing on the roof, we could take a picture of a good meal or a funny headline (a shot without commentary of a newspaper that says “Panther on the Loose” was more amusing than an e-mail saying, “I saw a newspaper today that said there was a panther on the loose”). Simon Stawski, of Eat Your Kimchi, suggested that the way a couple communicates online amounts to “a new language of love.” If so, emojis constitute a surprisingly eloquent register. They seem not only to express feelings but also to create new ones—hundreds of micro-sentiments expressing delicate gradations of emotional weather. There’s the yellow character that somehow combines the serenity of the man in the moon with the manic cheer of a smiley face, blowing a kiss. The flamenco dancer who seems to shimmy. The blameless hatching chick. The oddly endearing pile of shit. Writing “Why didn’t you clean the bathroom?” is obnoxious; gets the point across but is also flirtatious. There is no word for “bashful face with pinkening cheeks that obliquely suggest I’m both embarrassed and pleased.” You just have to send a text. - -It was November. Yundi was back in school, struggling with her assignments. Overseeing part of a project designing solid-state drives, Jimin was working long hours and, often, on weekends. - -Jimin didn’t know it, but Yundi was going through a hard time. It wasn’t really about him. She felt stalled, a little bored with her life. She stayed up late watching movies, unsure how to channel her artistic impulses. - -Occasionally, when Yundi felt this sense of ennui take hold, she went on Between and immersed herself in the splendor of the digital world that she and Jimin had created. It was all there: the night they rode by the Han River on a motorcycle with pink balloons, the soul-mate memo, the water-gun fight, the birthday animation, the bucket list. Even the reminder of the time that Jimin had smoked in the bathroom remained. They did not want to delete their traces. Yundi sat on the train, head bent, her phone in her hands as though it were an illuminated manuscript. ♦ - -*An earlier version of this article referred to Korea’s National Information Security Agency; it is the National Information Society Agency. diff --git a/tests/corpus/m.md b/tests/corpus/m.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1fb31bd1a..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/m.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,709 +0,0 @@ -M -*Esquire* -By John Sack - -One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders—they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam. - -No matter. What agonized M this evening wasn't what was in its cards but what was in the more immediate offing—an inspection! indeed, its very first inspection by its jazzy young Negro captain. So this evening M was in its white Army underwear waxing the floor of its barracks, shining its black combat boots, turning the barrels of its rifles inside out and picking the dust flecks off with tweezers, unscrewing its eardrums—the usual. The air was thick with the smell of floor wax and rifle oil, a moist aroma that now seemed to M to be woven into the very fabric of Army green. Minutes before, the company had heard a do-or-die exhortation by its bantamweight sergeant, Sergeant Milett. Get yourself clean for my sake, Milett had told M. "I've got a wife, three kids at home. I leave in the dark, I come home in the dark. I haven't talked to them in thirty-six hours. I don't know, maybe they're dead," using psychology, leaning against a two decker bed, reaching an arm through the iron bedstead, beseechingly. "Well …" making a joke of it, "I left them enough food, I shouldn't have to worry," and getting to the point, "I got a boss downstairs, he got a couple bars on his collar, he is the boss I work for. Tomorrow afternoon he will inspect us: don't make a jackass out of me!" - -And all you've got to do is follow the chart! and M company, now in its fourth quick month of Army life and last of infantry training at a large and bleak Eastern camp, had known what Milett meant. The chart appeared in the Soldier's Handbook and it bore the enacting signature of the Army's adjutant general, none other. The insides of a guy's green footlocker (the general had commanded) should be like so; and what a proud inspection they'd have if M would just faithfully comply! The general had ordered that Pepsodent or whatever brand of tooth powder a boy enjoyed must go to the rear of the footlocker, left, it mustn't be dirty or dusty, and it must be bottom backwards so the words TOOTH POWDER appeared upside-down, who would have thought it? The general had charged that a fellow's SHAVING CREAM go to the right while his razor, his blade, his toothbrush, and his comb all covered down on his soap dish; and everything must lie on his whitest towel, the general had declared. To this Army-wide order of battle a mere master sergeant in M's training camp had dared add an innovation: he allowed that a Bible might lie in that footlocker in between the handkerchiefs and the shoe polish, rightside-up. This would be optional, a matter of a man's conscience; but other deviations from the archetypical footlocker, the wall locker, the steel combat stuff to be laid on a soldier's bunk, or the soldier himself—would be gigged, Milett had reminded everyone, and gigged would mean no going home Saturday night; no passes. - -"So … try. Follow the chart," he had pleaded and hurried to where his wife and his children, whew, still lived, and M, a body of two hundred and fifty American boys of all shapes and sizes and wild idiosyncrasies, most of them draftees, some of them volunteers—M company was getting its house in order conscientiously, in some cases even willingly. But not in Private Demirgian's. Demirgian thought it was idiotic, all this footlocker, wall locker, fleck-of-fluff-on-your-shoelace stuff—senseless, most of M would agree but Demirgian alone conspired with himself to get discharged; out, a consummation that he tried to effect by exercising his will-o'-the-wisp power. Demirgian built castles in Spain, in Armenia, in any area M wasn't—he dared to have madly escapist flights of imagination because his intuition secretly assured him that they'd come to naught. He had said to himself once, I could walk in front of somebody's rifle. He had thought he could fall downstairs and tell the doctors, "My brain—it's loose, it's rattling around inside my head," he had come a cropper playing football once and that is how Demirgian's brain had felt, he knew the symptoms. As yet, none of his schemes had become a clear and present danger to M's staying at full strength—but Demirgian had a new thought tonight. His fancy had seized on something that a hard-eyed private had said in the course of a ten o'clock whiskey break, a private who'd been an assistant policeman, a meter maid or something, in Youngstown, Ohio, who had said, a blow in precisely the right part of a jaw would break it. Demirgian, his intellect stimulated and his inhibition paralyzed by two J&B's, now replied, "Yaa!" or words to that effect. - -"Twenty dollars!" the former policeman cried, whipping a wallet out of his vast Army fatigue pocket, slapping a bill of that denomination on the windowsill, clenching his other fist. "Twenty dollars says I can do it." - -"Yaa! There was a guy twice as big as you, he hit me right here and he couldn't break it." - -"That's not where I'm going to hit you, Demirgian! Where is your twenty?" - -"I'll owe it," already conceding. - -"Twenty dollars, Demirgian!" said Youngstown's finest, slapping his green gauntlet down again. He had picked up the bill while nobody watched, apparently—he liked its brave sound on the concrete windowsill, smack! the sound of Demirgian's jaw cracking like a chicken's wishbone. He didn't like Demirgian anyhow. Demirgian didn't stand tall, as soldiers should. Demirgian slouched, he carried his head tilted like a damn violinist, and when he talked it rolled like a basketball on a rim, nature imitating Brando's art. - -"I'll give you an IOU!" - -"Shake! Raise up your chin," and Demirgian did. "A little toward the window," and Demirgian did—Demirgian in some dentist chair, his head tilted, jaw slack, eyes resting tensely on the orange NO SMOKING that was stenciled on M's concrete wall. All of M's sleeping quarters were interior decorated like any city apartment house in its cellar, where the washing machines are. The lengthy low building looked from the outside as though people inside might be working at lathes, and over the black door it announced to all humanity, "M" in black paint. - -"Dammit—more to the right." - -"I'm waiting. I'm waiting," Demirgian said while in some buried subconscious area he may have thought, my friends better rescue me—which seconds later they did. - -"Easy! Yesterday at the 45 range he said to shoot him in the toes," his buddy Sullivan said, stepping between them. "All he wants is get discharged." - -"Sure," Demirgian agreed. He had been telling himself, well … either that or I'll make twenty dollars, the Army hadn't paid him in months, something was wrong at the finance office. - -"You won't get out of the Army with a broken jaw," Sullivan talking. - -"Sure—I won't be able to eat. I'll waste away." - -"Crazy. They'll have you wired up in one day. You want to get out of the Army, get him to break your foot." - -"Can you break my foot?" Demirgian asked, but there is a tide in men's affairs. Already the former policeman was telling his friends yes! he had been drinking whiskey but he wasn't drunk, he would straight-line any of them—twenty bucks! but M was back getting ready for that inspection. All of this happened—do understand. Demirgian is real, so is everyone in this narrative, even the Chillicothe milkman: all about him shortly. Names and hometowns [appear at the end of the story], middle initials too, apologies to Ernie Pyle. - -Anyhow. By two in the morning, all of M's fingernails clean, its blankets as tight as a back plaster, its boots luminous, its combat equipment Brillo-bright and displayed on its bunks in harmony with the general's chart, M company fell asleep in its sleeping bags on the only place left to it—the floor, as infinitesimal iotas of dust silently came to rest on its handiwork. - -M was awakened at four o'clock. Today it devolved on the Chaplain to keep it from falling asleep again just after breakfast, for he would be giving M the day's first class. Though his subject—"Courage"—wasn't one notably rich in Benzedrine content, the Chaplain, a Protestant major, intended to say things like, "I suggest to you that it takes a man with courage of conviction to—" and here he would strike the flat of his palm against his wooden podium (his pulpit, he called it), jerking M out of its stupor in time to hear him finish his sentence, the text to this surprising gesture—"—to put your foot down." He had many tricks, this Chaplain; sometimes he made noises but he had silences, too. He intended to say today, "Do you know what takes courage in a foxhole? It is this," and then he would say " … ," he would say nothing, eons of empty time would go by while everyone's eyes popped open to see if the bottom had dropped out of the universe; and then the Chaplain would say, "It isn't the noises that get you, it's the silence." Also the Chaplain would have movies. - -M got to his great concrete classroom at eight o'clock on this piercingly cold winter morning. In the vast reaches above it, sparrows sat on the heating pipes and made their little squeaking sounds. A sergeant shouted, "Seats!" and as M sat down on the cold metal chairs it shouted back in unison, "Blue balls!" or so one thought until one learned that M had shouted "Blue bolts!" the nickname of its brigade. M was a shouting company. It built up morale, its high-stepping Negro captain believed; also it kept M awake. Breakfast, lunch, and supper at M were a real bedlam because as each soldier entered the busy mess hall he had to left face and stand at attention, and bellow at a sergeant the initials signifying whether he had been drafted or had joined the Army voluntarily. "US, Sergeant!" "RA, Sergeant!" After the meals, the sergeants totaled up each category before reporting it to the mess sergeant, who filed it one whole month before throwing it away. - -"Good morning, men," said the Chaplain. He wore his wool winter field clothes with his black scarf, the symbol of the chaplains corps. - -"Good morning, sir! Blue bolts! On guard! Mighty mighty Mike! Aargh!" M shouted back. The expression Blue bolts—we've been through that. The brigade's motto was On guard, and Mike is phonetic alphabet for M; and Mighty it perfunctorily called itself. Aargh was needed for reasons of rhythm, like coming back to the tonic at the close of a song. - -Both hands on his pulpit, the Chaplain now pushed it forward a few inches across the black linoleum. Scree-e-ch! and everyone in M sat blue-bolt upright as the Chaplain began speaking. He said, "Courage. … " - -But at this instant a very important event was happening one hundred miles away. And if M had only known what a fragile vessel all of its hopes reposed in that morning, its thoughts would have leapt from the Chaplain's lecture and fled across the intervening states to settle upon (a fanfare, please) … the Chillicothe milkman! His name was Elmer Pulver. His was the route east of the N&W tracks in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1950, when the Korean war began. Elmer in his creaky horse-drawn cart, bringing in newspapers from the gate, rapping on the door cheerily, tat-a-tat-tat, closing the gate behind him so the dog couldn't get out, the nicest, most up-and-coming milkman in town, giving little tasty chips of ice to the same Chillicothe children who would be draft eligible when he was a major in the U.S. Army in Washington, in 1966. Pulver was called up in 1951, but he chose to be an officer instead. Having asked for the infantry first, tanks second, artillery third, he was granted none of these, and as a young lieutenant of engineers, having asked for Korea, he was flown away to Germany—ah, the whimsical they! By 1966, Pulver, now a major and still terribly nice, had been given a desk in the Pentagon's windowless inner rings, also an old wooden swivel chair and a new task: every (would you believe it? every) man in the Army, after he was through training would be assigned to a duty station by Major Pulver. Far from being three horrid witches on a heath somewhere dancing around a pot, they would be Elmer Pulver. - -This winter morning he had a stack of those stiff IBM cards the size of an old British pound note, one apiece for every soldier in M. These cards had green edges, and Pulver had a second deck of colorless IBM cards, one apiece for everywhere on earth that the Army had an opening for riflemen. Seated at his swivel chair, Pulver now took a corncob from its round rack, filled it with tobacco, lit it, and started fingering through his IBM's. Doing it the Army way, he would need to take absolutely any green card and white card and fasten them together with a paper clip: rifleman and assignment and on to the next, another day, another dollar. But the Major was a nice person; he knew he had human beings of many kidneys there in his busy fingers and though it meant working overtime—today was a Saturday, the Pentagon was strange and empty—he wanted to put each soldier where he'd be happiest. And on each boy's IBM card there was a code letter signifying where on this varied planet he would truthfully hope to be stationed next. - -Some of M wanted the dolce vita in Europe. Some had opted for sunny Hawaii or the Caribbean's warm waters. A few adventurous souls had elected Japan. Were the IBM cards to be believed, none of M's two hundred and fifty soldiers wanted to go to Vietnam—but this wasn't so, the cards weren't right. Bigalow wanted to go to Vietnam. He wanted this for that stock American reason, making money—for in Vietnam's jungles he would earn $65 a month combat pay, which he figured would add to $780 after his twelve months' tour of duty. This he figured to put into IBM: where, he figured, in a few thrifty years it would appreciate to $1,000, which—but beyond that Bigalow hadn't figured. But thus far in his Army career, Bigalow hadn't made his preference known to the proper authorities, no fault of his. Many nights earlier, a tall PFC from personnel office had gathered M together in its dayroom—a rumpus room, an area whose bright green pool and ping-pong tables a soldier saw whenever he was on detail to shine the linoleum beneath them; otherwise it was kept behind a steel chain, off limits. That night, though, it had been opened extraordinarily to let that PFC give everyone some little grey mimeographed forms. "Awright!" he had said. "Now! Those who would like to go to Europe write down Europe," no promises made. He himself had taken one mimeographed form and curled it around his index finger, and while he spoke he wiggled it like a swizzlestick in a highball glass or a pencil making O's: a gesture by which he might mean the Army's having its people eternally fill in mimeographed forms. In fact, M had filled in forms so habitually that within minutes it would forget forever ever having completed this. "Awright," said PFC Swizzlestick. "Those who want the Caribbean … " and similarly for Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Okinawa, and Bigalow's coveted Vietnam. Then he had gathered up the mimeographed papers and cabled them to the Pentagon, but Bigalow was on KP that evening, standing in white clouds of steam and washing pans. So the code letter on his green IBM card was an X, meaning no known preference. - -Puffing his corncob and thumbing through his second deck of cards, Pulver now learned that in one month the Army had vacancies in Germany and in Vietnam—no place else. Now it happened this freezing Saturday that he had brought his blond and eightyear- old son, Douglas, to the Pentagon (in a week it was Lisa's turn) and to satisfy Douglas' curiosity he showed him the IBM cards, explaining that a soldier who wanted to go to Europe would and that a soldier would go to Vietnam who wanted it—though none did. "Supposing he wants to go to Japan?" Douglas alertly asked, and Pulver explained that though there were no openings that month in this pretty land of geisha girls and cherry blossoms, though there were no Japanese slots he would do his level best by that soldier and order him to Vietnam, since he seemed interested in the Orient and could stop in Japan itself, perhaps, going over or coming back. "Supposing he wants Hawaii?" Douglas said, and Pulver replied: the same, he would go to Vietnam. "Daddy! I can do it myself—please," Douglas said, but Daddy chuckled and said no, and as Douglas sat across from him with a set of crayons drawing some colorful jet airplanes his father began to clip cards together, the green and the white. At noon Douglas ate a hamburger at his desk, Pulver had a roast-beef sandwich on white bread at his. - -At noon an apprehensive M waited in its tidy barracks for Captain Amaker's arrival. Amaker, though, was innocently upon the turnpike in his white Triumph convertible gaily driving to New York City. Ha ha! it had been a trick, really the Captain had never been under the walnut shell. Sly old Milett, that cunning sergeant, had simply made M scrub itself harder by invoking Amaker's awesome name—Amaker who really intended to be in Harlem that afternoon digging the jams there with a friend who pulled down $50 an hour sitting in chairs with an Olivetti and looking over his shoulder as though to say, "As long as you're up, get me a Grant's," in the studios of Ebony magazine's photographers. Instead, M would have its adequacy appraised by that fox in sheep's clothing, Sergeant Machiavelli—Milett. He started inspecting the barracks at two o'clock. He wasn't in any very aggravated mood until a moment later, when his fingers moved across the very first soldier's footlocker in order to open it. And then Milett recognized from the almost imperceptible impedance that it gave to his fingertips the presence of that loathsome substance to whose annihilation he had devoted much of his Army career. He cried out "Dust!" and stretching his fingers wide enough to hold a basketball he pushed them at the face of the footlocker's unfortunate owner, whose name was Private Scott. "Goddam! This is a shame," Milett cried, and Scotty looked truly contrite, eyes on the floor. Usually he was a fun-loving guy, a Negro. The day before Swizzlestick's poll he had watched Hawaiian Eye, and on the mimeographed questionnaire he had written, "Hawaii," so that he could dance with the lulu girls. - -"Dust! … Dust! … Dust! … All of them!" Milett said, hurling himself from locker to locker and giving each the fingertip test, a furious Pancho Gonzales forehand. "This is a court-martial offense! You aren't ready for inspection!" he screamed—and suddenly his face wasn't purple, his skin wasn't bedsheet tight, the Sergeant was no longer angry. He laughed. He had realized, this whole thing was ridiculous—ridiculous, that a man should present himself for inspection with his footlocker dusty. "You people … you people," laughing, taking his handkerchief out, wiping the filth from his fingers. "You better wake up, you people don't wake up now you'll never wake up. Only with a bad-conduct discharge. And," his head shaking incredulously, "this is just a sergeant's inspection, suppose it had been the Captain himself!" Cap-tain-him-self is how he pronounced it; quick little quarter-notes. Milett was a Puerto Rican. Three times the Caribbean had knocked down the house where he'd grown up; immigrating to Harlem, shining people's shoes so he could take his girl to the movie but worrying what if she should see me shining shoes, washing his hands with Borax but thinking if I touched her maybe she'd smell it—ten years, and then he had found the Army, where a life to be proud of lay within a man's aspirations: even a Puerto Rican's. He said to M now, "I was a PFC," pronouncing it pee-eff-see. "When the officer opened my locker he had to use sunglasses! because I didn't have a towel there, I had aluminum foil all around! And he said to me, You're going to make it some day." Milett's eyes shone as he remembered, there was silverfoil behind his irises. What he couldn't reconcile himself to and couldn't forgive was that M didn't have initiative—M didn't really care. - -His punishment: no passes that Saturday afternoon. With those melancholy words Milett went to his rooms on the Army post, where he told the day's happenings to his shapely, sweater-wearing wife, showing her the tainted handkerchief. Demirgian and most people went to sleep on their brown Army blankets. Pulver finished his work, and after driving Douglas home he took the family's beagle, Socks, to the veterinarian's, who gave it shots against hepatitis, distemper, and other diseases of dogs. - -"I hate to see-e-e, de ev'-nin' sun go down. … " At the enlisted men's club, a baldheaded man picked concernedly on his banjo, bending over it as though to loosen a knot in one string. He seemed to be thinking … almost … almost. On center stage in their spangled dresses the Barnes sisters did their little dance, and Prochaska, one of M's few emissaries on the club's folding seats, sang quietly along, tapping his visored hat against one knee. "Oh, I hate to see-e-e. … " At seven that evening Milett had given M its passes—but Prochaska couldn't leave, he didn't have the money, they hadn't paid him in months. Something was wrong at the finance office. - -Well … that's all right, Prochaska thought. He was happy pinging, and he thought that the Barnes sisters were two really good-looking girls. A pity—he would have liked buying them hamburgers after the show, but Shirley and Wanda had other enlisted men's clubs to do their little dance at. Prochaska had supper without them but that's all right, he thought—he liked eating hamburgers. Prochaska liked everything, really. He liked turning over the soil on his family's Iowa cornfield, he liked to go camping in Minnesota, canoeing on the soda-water rivers and smelling the fish frying at night. Had he believed more in religion, he would have thanked God for these bounties, but he believed in his country and that is what Prochaska thanked. Grateful to America he had joined the Army as other men might tithe to their churches. He was eighteen years old; still, one could imagine his honest face and thin-rimmed spectacles engraved on some friendly curlicued bottle label, some liniment that all folk in the county swore by, Old Doc Prochaska's Tonic. - -In a word, he was a soldier who in mediocre war novels would die in the next chapter to last. Prochaska knew he could be killed in Vietnam but he told himself—eating alone in the dark Paradise restaurant just off post, drinking a Coke from a glass, the jukebox strumming a song about a lonely soldier writing his mother from Vietnam itself—he told himself, that's all right, better me than someone with a wife or a family. His mother was already dead; one winter morning, lighting a stove in their Iowa farmhouse, not knowing that the chimney was choked with ice, she had been wounded fatally when the stove exploded and his father had been burned, half a year in the hospital. Prochaska was seven then. He had been prescient about this—he had dreamt of it three nights earlier. Prochaska had presciences often. - -The song on the jukebox was to become Prochaska's favorite: - -My dearest mama, they just gave us time to write, -I miss you and there's something on my mind tonight, -At mail call I received your letter here today, -But I don't understand the things you say. -You tell me there are people marching in our streets. … -Prochaska knew about them. On his Christmas vacation he and a tall pleasant buddy, Morton by name, had gone to the City, where a lady in Times Square had given them white leaflets saying that we were strafing the Asian countryside, killing the men, women, and children. Another leaflet of hers purported to show a little Cambodian girl burned by American soldiers' napalm. Prochaska had smiled at this. He knew American soldiers better—they liked children. Politely, he and Morton had given the leaflets back. - -… marching in our streets, -The signs they carry say that we don't fight for peace, -There's not a soldier in this foreign land who likes this war, -Oh, mama! tell them what we're fighting for. -That was the song's title, What We're Fighting For. - -Tell them that we're fighting for the Old Red, White, and Blue! -Did they forget Pearl Harbor, and Korea too? -Another flag must never fly above our nation's door. … -Exactly … exactly, Prochaska thought. That is why he had enlisted—it would be Vietnam first, Thailand after that, Hawaii next, California—Iowa. He wanted his children to share his blessings, to sing and go fishing in Minnesota and have hamburgers and Coke. - -… above our nation's door, -Oh, mama! tell them what we're fighting for. -His sentiments exactly. Prochaska began to have presciences again, he knew he was being sent to Vietnam and he was happy about that. And happy that a day or two earlier he had given the mills of the gods one small furtive push. Out on the range firing his automatic rifle for record, he had—cheated, he had inserted two more bullets in his chamber and fired them at his target. He thought now, I've got a high score, I've qualified to go to Vietnam. He put another dime in the flashy jukebox, playing his song again. - -It became colder. M was on maneuvers now. This meant living in tents and tearing about on four square miles of mock battlefields mornings, afternoons, and evenings, guns at the ready, helmets on, learning how to acquit oneself in the enemy's presence. And this meant—ugh! getting dirt on one's combat boots, it meant acquiring water-drops in one's canteen and hard round flecks of coagulated gravy on one's mess kit, it meant in one's rifle! a residue of carbonlike matter, this and just twenty-four hours after M would finish maneuvering, back in its dusty barracks with all this execrable stuff, the Major himself would inspect it. - -"I wouldn't worry—he shouldn't be bad," Prochaska was telling guys, "a major hasn't the time," untrue. For even as M settled into its cold foxholes its captain stood slightly aside on the battlefield saying uh-huh … uh-huh as the Major enumerated his expectations, cap-a-pie. He told him, "The first thing is the brass," meaning the little yellow U.S. buttons, "I want 'em five-eighths of an inch," meaning from the collar's edge, "I'm really tight on that. Then—the necktie," simulating on his blue infantry scarf, "it should be up real tight. Then going down. The rifleman's medal—is it centered? The pocket buttons. … " His name was Major Small. A good officer, a veteran of Vietnam, well liked by his soldiers, his tragedy was to be at that uncertain stage in his Army career when, no longer a captain, he wasn't yet a lieutenant-colonel, he had nothing to do but command a battalion—that is, nothing to do. His rank afforded him such narrow creative outlets as recommending that the urinal tubes be marked URINAL TUBES and noting, after his last visit to this practice battlefield, that a sergeant was sucking a toothpick. On getting the Major's fault-finding letter, the college-educated lieutenant in charge of this maneuver area had written a restrained answer, "It doesn't appear that the man with the toothpick was corrected early," but then he had found himself scribbling, "I am sure if I went into any area I would sooner or later find people taking a break from the rigors of their diurnal duties," and then he had scrawled, "Res Ipsa Loquitur," hoping the Major had to look it up. Unlike President Lincoln, the Irish lieutenant had really fired his letter off, though he routed it through a chain of command that he knew would shudder and fire it back before it could settle s-s-s-s! on the Major's desk. - -Better a sabbatical in Torremolinos, waiting out the lieutenant-colonelcy list and writing the Memoirs of a Company-Grade Officer. But regulations forbade it. " … All right," the Major was saying, "on down. Are the boots polished?" the Major touching abruptly on rock bottom, giving M's captain a parting wink and, pausing to tell a private to shave, quitting the field. - -By then, M was in its foxholes and waiting to be mock attacked. The sky was the color of factory fumes and under it the empty battlefield stretched and stretched, it seemed a man might need a month to cross it, crows would be the only living creatures. M had some blank ammunition in its cold rifles, and after expending this it had orders to cry bang! bang! bang! enthusiastically. The young lieutenant, whose attaboy way of talking would make him an excellent boy scout camp counselor in civilian life, though he was an insurance salesman, was jogging from one bleak foxhole to another, giving each man a love-tap on his helmet, urging him on. "Hey there!" he said to Scotty, of the dusty footlocker. "I've got your position spotted—know why? Your mess kit! I could hear it rattling 'way off. Fill it with something!" the lieutenant said. "Fill it with leaves—pine needles—a pair of mitten liners—newspaper—toilet paper—cotton—old powder puffs," he seemed to be saying, "ticker tape—feathers," and Scotty paid attention, trying to remember everything the lieutenant was telling him to fill his mess kit with, so it wouldn't rattle. The lieutenant gave him a love-tap and moved to another Negro soldier, who appeared to have frozen to death inside his foxhole. "Hey, young man—are you cold?" he asked. "Yes, sir," words from the grave. "Where are you from?" "Newark, sir." "Well—doesn't it get this cold in Newark?" "No, sir." "Well, weren't you this cold playing b-ball?" "What, sir?" "Playing basketball?" "No, sir." "Well—weren't you out in the street?" "No, sir, we were in the gym." "Well—weren't you in the streets sometimes?" "In the summer, sir." The lieutenant shrugged, and giving him no tap he moved on to Williams, also a Negro, a gentle Florida boy whose imagination was always getting jerked out of its innocence whenever the Army spelled out to its soldiers what it expected of them. "Attaboy—keep yourself down in the foxhole. Nothing above it," said the lieutenant. "Only your head." - -Only my head. Are they serious? Williams said to himself. Could it be that of his body's I-don't-know-how-many bones the Army would have him expose the very one that was most sensitive to enemy fire? Were common sense and soldiering so alien, then? A hand or an elbow, now—if duty required it, Williams believed he would wave it over his foxhole selflessly, a proof through the night of something or other; but a head? They get you there they've got you, he thought. Rather, he would choose to be safely stowed and watching through—well, a periscope, as events out in no-man's-land would take their wonted course. A periscope: he remembered he had been bought one at seven, it was painted blue and yes! it had little yellow comets on it, he had stolen around Florida spying on his three little brothers and three sisters, none of them the wiser. A periscope could be fitted to his rifle sight, the rifle could be held above his foxhole—hmm. Williams thought about this as the mock enemy army attacked, as a Choctaw Indian sergeant shouted through a loudspeaker, "Americans—surrender! You don't surrender we'll cut off your fingers!" - -That night at chow, Williams talked periscopes with a more sophisticated Philadelphia friend of his, Hofelder, both of them sitting on the frosted battlefield. In their narrow mess kits the pale vegetables were merging into one another like water colors. Except for its tasting cold, the supper was no better or worse than M's usual diet—at this moment, frankly, give or take adjustments for time zones, the whole American army was being served the same thing, the master menu it was called. Williams and Hofelder were eating this master menu except that at M the pot roast had been deleted, and frankfurters substituted, when Williams broached his revolutionary idea. - -"Yeah, but you could just see in front of you," Hofelder said. "You couldn't see on your flanks." - -"Well … " said Williams. - -"There's no sense looking in front if they're going to jump in your foxhole behind." - -"Well … maybe it wouldn't work. But maybe it would," said Williams. - -"They gave me one of those things, I wouldn't use it I'd throw it away." - -"Well … it might not be good. But it might not be bad," said Williams, thoughtfully chewing his oatmeal cookie. - -In the distance they could hear little Swiss cowbells tinkling—actually it was soldiers finishing chow and washing their mess kits in the steaming cans. And there were other conversations in the darkness, of course. All were the ordinary bivouac ballads ("I don't care who, I say that any girl can be made." "Not if she's a Christian." "I don't care if she's Christian, Jewish, Buddhist … ") but that night in Williams' cold squad tent a most extraordinary topic of talk arose, briefly insinuating itself amidst the more usual ones. Vietnam, and it cropped up almost naturally. M had gotten back at nine o'clock; now, huddling stiffly over a potbellied stove, the wind blowing the bare electric-light bulb crazily about, his shadow skittering over the dirt floor, a soldier from Texas had muttered, "Close the door," as somebody walked in. "Were you born in a barn?" - -And a second soldier had said, "He was born in a cave. That's why he leaves the door open." - -And a third soldier had said, "Now it's so cold, for twelve months we'll be where it's a hundred degrees at night." - -And that was about it, the topic seldom rose again throughout maneuvers, Vietnam was far in the future—weeks. The last words in the conversation were Yoshioka's, a boy born in California of Japanese parents who seldom wrote him, a boy of heavy spirit who'd had it on good authority (a sergeant's) that the Army didn't send Orientals to Vietnam because other soldiers might fire at them mistakenly. Yoshioka now said, "Shit," his favorite figure of speech, an idiom that in Yoshioka's voice slid by degrees down the scale and curled back on itself like a scorpion's tail or the corners of his concomitant mouth. "I'm not going to be there—I'm an Oriental," he announced, and then people talked of the cold again. - -Needless to say, Yoshioka had answered Swizzlestick's questionnaire by asking to go to Japan—he had a grandmother there. Williams had asked for Europe, none of those dangerous foxholes, and Hofelder had been on KP. - -Demirgian thought no! no no no! they could torture him, court-martial him, ta-ta-ta-ta the firing squad, anything! but I'm … not … getting … a haircut! No! His buddies were coming in from the barber's like crazy-people, throwing their arms about, kicking their footlockers, howling out to the gods, "How can I go home this weekend" or "How can I get married now," Demirgian alone remaining a mammal: he had simply said no—no! With a hammerlock his sergeant could hold him in the barber chair, zip! with electric clippers it only takes fifteen seconds, but they had a policy no roughing a trooper and certainly no wrenching his wallet from his pants pocket to give the barber his seventy five cents, union scale. Demirgian hurling himself free, the barber was poorer by a fourth of his minute-by-minute wages when he drove his Cadillac from the post, whose general himself had muttered once, "I should be in that business." - -The thing had been a sergeant's idea—the haircuts. With the Major due to inspect M tomorrow, with the footlockers parallel, the toilet articles in each of them congruent with the next's, still the sergeant had known that his sense of symmetry would be betrayed by those uncontrolled towers of protoplasm who would stand by the very aisles the Major walked through—some of them brachycephalic, some prognathic, some of them different colors. Cosmetic surgery being ridiculous, at least he could order M into one harmonious state of bald-headedness. Demirgian knew—he would stick out tomorrow like a porcupine in a pumpkin patch, he foresaw that, he imagined the Major coming to him, saying, "Soldier, don't you know to take your hair off in an officer's presence?" or something as withering, eyeing him coldly. If that happened Demirgian thought he couldn't contain himself, him an individualist, an Armenian, he thought he would scream terrible things at the Major, his heart sank as he saw himself tearing his uniform off, throwing his combat stuff on the floor, dumping his footlocker over. … - -… Why not? If that didn't get him out of the Army, would anything do it? Demirgian thought. And so the next morning Demirgian stood at his green footlocker steeling himself against the Major's fateful question, determined to follow his natural bent. - -Truth to tell, the Major himself didn't look forward to inspecting M; it would be a distasteful duty. For every soldier he came to was meant to bring his rifle to the crisp position of inspection arms, saying, "Sir! Private so-and-so, such-and-such platoon," and M being what it was … well. When the Major started with Scotty everything went smoothly, Scotty was easygoing, but as he came to the second footlocker the soldier there absolutely shouted, "Sir! Private Pender! Third platoon!" and covered the Major with little drops of water that had to remain there—for as inspecting officer, dressed in his Army greens, his campaign ribbons a rainbow, the Major thought it would be ludicrous if he were constantly seen to be wiping his face with his handkerchief. "You don't have to sound off quite so loudly," he said to Pender, who happened to be the camp's heavyweight boxing champion, "try it conversationally," but he had two hundred and fifty more soldiers to go. At length he came to a boy whose contorted face, an iron boiler almost ready to pop, promised an even lustier reception than most. Resignedly the Major stood there—but Demirgian was waiting too, waiting for that special question. Whole geologic eras seemed to pass, canyons eroded, the dinosaurs became extinct, until one of the parties to this awful silence finally broke it, whispering, "My name is Major Small." - -Taken unawares, Demirgian said, "Uh … " and then he said, "Sir … Private Demirgian." - -"Try to remember to say that," the Major said and walked on, leaving Demirgian in a state of flusteredness and in the Army. - -One hundred and five people in M would be going to Vietnam—close to half. When the messily typed list of their names and serial numbers came in, the company's good big brotherly first sergeant retired into his sunny office and, opening the manila envelope, actually turned pale. He ran through the names by leaps and bounds and after putting them in again, closing the envelope quickly, twisting the little red string around those two brown cardboard buttons, shoving it all into a desk drawer, locking it, and pocketing the little key, he reflected that he couldn't keep his awful secret forever, that there'd be a day of reckoning when M must be told all—by him, First Sergeant Doherty. He knew about lost battalions, the Japanese death marches, the charge of the light brigade, one didn't become a soldier without understanding that there'd be—times, but never had Doherty's own career been touched by tragedy so closely as now. He said to himself, if only—if only I had some good news to give them, as well! just as a good family doctor might say you've got asthma—now you can live in Arizona. And then there arose in the reaches of Doherty's mind the dawn of an extraordinary idea. Something that he could do for M's unfortunate boys, and hurrying to the next sunny office he said, "Sir … " and he broached his thought to the Captain—who, though he admired it, saying it wasn't within his authority to approve, brought it up with the Major—who, with a heartfelt I-would-if-I could, channeled it to the Colonel—who, cautiously routing it to the General, recommended his ratification: while at the bottom of this mighty pyramid, Doherty waited and waited, his high hopes tempered by knowing that no first sergeant in this camp's history, no matter how solicitous he was toward the Vietnam bound, had ever managed to do this fantastic thing. - -Meanwhile … the General had other business. What he gave priority to was that infantry classes should be more effective, and calling his trim colonels and majors to Doughboy hall he lectured them on what he meant effective, this is General Ekman. He said, a classroom isn't the place for a hut! two! three! four! stomach in! chest out! sergeant—no, when a sergeant taught he should be relaxed, colloquial, he should use gestures to make his point, similes from baseball, basketball, anything if it works. "Look at me—I have my hands in my pocket," the General said, barely suppressing a smile. "Is there any man who can't understand me because of my hands in my pocket? If so," with a wink, "I'm going to take them out," and the colonels and majors chuckled, getting the point. Back at their desks, they paraphrased this to their captains, who simplified it and passed it to their lieutenants, until when the sergeants who actually taught these infantry classes drank at this bucket of Pierian wisdom only a drop remained: be more effective. This the husky sergeants interpreted to mean stand at attention and shout even louder. "Let us" the Choctaw Indian sergeant, standing as stiff as a cannon barrel, would say in his stark classroom—"Let us begin by observing the lines a this map!" his neck almost paralyzed, "Here is … correction! Here! is the prow liner ploint!" for who can stand at attention shouting the probable line of deployment, his stomach sucked in the ferocious sergeant style? - -But there was a sergeant who dared to be natural—a Sergeant Foley. Forty years old, bald-headed, an Irish-storyteller sort of guy, whenever officers were not watching he stood at his blackboard relaxed, his hands in his green fatigue pockets, sometimes bringing a fist out to gesture with—he spoke in words you could almost smell, old leathery words, words from the floor of pine forests, keeping an eye on the classroom doors lest any colonels or majors, stopping by, should find him in these disgracefully unsoldierly postures. "I knew a guy in Korea," he would say, laughing a little. "Out in front of his foxhole was this little—tiny—evergreen-tree. But when morning came it was just an ever-tree because he was so scared of it, he'd shot off all the green!" - -This snowy day in the windy Klondike shack that was Foley's classroom, he was teaching M something important—going on night patrols. "Now if you're going out to infiltrate a quartermaster laundry company," he began, smiling but serious, "well … you can take flashlights along. But if you're going to another rifle company, you'll want to be careful, and you'll take advantage of every—little—lousy thing there is," unpleasant for Foley to say, worse for M not to have heard. "If your rifle doesn't work, are you going to stand there with a finger up? You do, you know how you're coming back to the States. In a wooden overcoat. If you haven't anything else to hit Charlie with," Charlie being our enemy in Vietnam, Victor Charlie, the VC, "stick—your—thumb—right in his eyes and push it to the back of his head!" Foley gave his instructions with a rueful September smile—for it was ludicrous, two people who hadn't been introduced gouging each other's eyes out, Swift would have thought so, Brecht, but Foley didn't start this war, he only taught about it. "That's the way to take care of those people. Grab 'em by the balls, if you're grabbing them you're going to feel no pain." - -Seated on a cold classroom bench, one of Foley's pupils hung on his every diabolical word: Russo his name was. Small and round and wild-eyed, the Quixotic victim of too many late-late shows on television, Russo had suddenly lied and joined the Army when he was sixteen, and he sat whispering heroic things like "Aargh!" as Foley spoke. But behind Russo two older soldiers played tic-tac-toe and a third whispered, "I got winners." Demirgian's friend Sullivan toyed with his rifle-repair tool, musing, this could be a deadly weapon. Crack-k-k! Put someone's eye out. Standing not sitting, Prochaska tried not to fall asleep after a night of walking in circles in a military manner, mounting guard, and another boy from guard duty now slowly sensed that a rifle-repair tool was jabbing him in the ribs as Sullivan told him, "Wake up," Sullivan had had guard duty too. Demirgian—guard duty too—leaned over his spiral notebook drawing a long zigzag line, his ball-point pen never leaving the paper: a style of art he had arrived at at twelve, independently of Paul Klee. First he drew a caret mark, ^, and bridging it he drew another ^ beneath it, until his small stack of ^'s began to resolve themselves into sergeant's chevrons. Around them, Demirgian's unrelenting pen delineated an arm, with hairpin turns it made fingers, it curved over a hairless head, dropped into a hideous smile, and after pursuing its wayward course down to a belly it manifested itself as a pair of legs, terminating on the left combat boot—whereupon, Demirgian saw he had left something out. Again putting pen to paper, Demirgian wrote on the sleeve where the service stripes go, the word DUMB. - -"That's all one line," he whispered, letting Sullivan see it. - -"One line?" and tracing it with his finger, "Yeah … it's all one line. Captain?" - -"Sergeant!" said Demirgian, his feelings hurt. What he held against Foley was that he kept harping on the topic of Vietnam—Vietnam—Vietnam, sure he had to motivate people but enough's enough! Demirgian thought, the word was being drained dry. Like most of M, on the crest of whose bell-shaped curve were written the lines, What the hell, somebody's got to go—like most of M, Demirgian would ardently rather be in Vietnam than be sitting listening to sergeants talking about it, inspecting his footlocker, telling him to pick up matches and clean his boots—anyplace was better than M, anyhow it wouldn't be cold. Still … there were other romantic places, and when Swizzlestick had polled him Demirgian had written "Europe" on one of those mimeographed forms, "Caribbean" on another, and "Korea" on a third, he wasn't taking chances. - --- Up front, Foley and his night patrol were in the attack, "Go on—you're firing from the hip, if you see somebody in a hole, he throws a grenade, go down in the hole with him! that's what you've got that knife on the end of your rifle for!" - -"Aargh! Fix bayonets!" Russo yelled under his breath. - -"Then— you— leave— and get lost in the woods just as fast as you can. Because old Charlie is going to be after you!" - -"Hey," Sullivan whispered to a friend. "How's your wife and my kids?" - -His lecture over, Foley put a Technicolor movie on, whose narrator also talked straight from the shoulder. He said, "I'm Sergeant Crowley and I'm taking out a night patrol," and he said, I'm getting my men ready, they're putting on camouflage, I'm giving them mud and dirt and ashes and burnt cork, they're rubbing it onto their boots, their clothes, their rifle barrels, their belt buckles, their bayonets. … Demirgian laughed and laughed, he couldn't help it. Foley smiled too, he understood, but another sergeant with three battle stars and two purple hearts noted Demirgian's frivolousness and only snarled. "Watch and see!" he said, meaning Demirgian, meaning Vietnam. "He's the one who'll be dead in one week! Watch and see!" - -Dark and early on a Friday morning, M company, innocent of any acquaintance with how very special a day this would be, was awakened its usual way by a sergeant walking through its Hadean rooms shaking the beds and saying, "Let's go … let's go … let's go, gentlemen." At four in the morning there was something about the barracks that was— low, it was like a bare light bulb at the bottom of a mine shaft, one in which big brown caterpillars slept on the walls. Of course it was black outside. A transistor radio that had distantly played rock-and-roll through the night now shouted "Go! Go! Go!" to some unimaginable audience, and an announcer chortled, "It's cold and windy and by George! I'm going to tell you, it's going to be cold all day—the high in the twenties!" Someone in M said "Damn," and others muttered things about two sorts of 'uckers from under the brown blankets that still hadn't moved. Wherever that radio station was, it wasn't on M's planet, where time ran at a fraction of that speed. The news was that Johnson had met his senior advisers again, amid indications that he would do thus-and-so in South Vietnam. - -For breakfast M ate a master menu, no foods deleted, no victuals substituted, and then it shuffled outside for a six-o'clock flag ceremony, forming its shadowy ranks on the snow. In front of M stood Doherty, its first sergeant, his doldrums not quite driven away by two black coffees that he had drunk beneath the mess hall's peeling fresco of Roman charioteers while he gloomily ran a thumbnail down a manila envelope and muttered to himself, "Bad day at Black Rock … Bad day at Black Rock." Now a bugle sounded, issuing from a drab signal corps MX-39A/TIQ-2 record player at the adjutant's office a half-mile away. M saluted. Somewhere in the night an American flag was rising, but M saw only its desolate barracks lights and above them in the south the cold constellations of Sagittarius, Scorpio, and Libra. When the music ended, Doherty dropped his salute and spinning around to the company said, "At ease! The following enlisted personnel have received orders for Vietnam—when I call your name answer and fall out to the dayroom. Arrington!" There was silence. "Arrington!" - -"He's on KP," said a voice, and Doherty continued hastily down his list. - -Thus did M company come to apprehend its destiny. Later that day it would have theories why this or that soldier had or hadn't been chosen, phrases like shuffle the cards, names in a hat, darts on a dartboard, and you-you-you would be heard through the noisy barracks, but never would M guess that the moving finger had been its own; for Swizzlestick's mimeographed forms had long before been papered over in its memory by a dozen others. One shrewd theory that day would owe to a Florida boy, an alligator hunter name of Newman who couldn't reconcile himself to a random universe. Observing that he himself, Williams of Florida, Morton of Texas, and Yoshioka of California were on Vietnam orders, he would reason that the Army sent people there from the Southern tier of states, who would acclimate to the heat quicker—a plausible hypothesis that would have several adherents. Of course it was coincidence, Newman had asked for Japan and Williams had been given a bum deal: he was near the bottom of the green IBM deck, and Pulver, smoking his corncob pipe and reaching the card of that gentle Negro periscope operator, had realized he hadn't enough places left in Europe for every soldier who wanted one. At last letting his fingers obey the haphazard electrical impulses emanating from his cerebellum, skipping over Williams he had given a European assignment to the next soldier down, another tall Negro who already stood at the first sergeant's door to ask to be transferred to Vietnam. When he had written down "Europe," he hadn't been thinking that it snowed there. - -Demirgian went to the telephone booth and called home. "Jirier—" he said to his younger brother, slipping his bloody handkerchief back in his pocket, speaking quietly. His handkerchief had gotten that way after his nose began bleeding when he started crying after he stopped laughing, the first of his three violent reactions to the news he now gave to Jirier: "I've got orders to Vietnam." His lady-killing friend Sullivan, who still dreamt he would go to the Caribbean, dating girls in yellow bikinis, fell out to the clamorous dayroom to learn if Doherty's cry of "Sullivan!" meant him or M company's one other Sullivan. - -"Which one is RA 1146 … " Doherty began. - -"Here, Sergeant," Sullivan said. - -"All right, the other Sullivan may leave," and Sullivan thought, what the hell—? looking hurt, falling back on the ice-cream vending machine. Bigalow, who wanted Vietnam but couldn't notify the Pentagon because he was washing pans—Bigalow was wreathed in smiles, but then he was always smiles, he looked like one of those faces on porcelain Bavarian beer mugs that smile and smile self-satisfiedly whether a mug is full or empty. Not finding anything by Bigalow's name but an X meaning no known preference, Pulver had assigned him to Vietnam. Hofelder, the Philadelphia boy who didn't think much of periscopes, getting over a fever, had happily left his sickbed to be with the buddies he would go to Vietnam with, little guessing that an hour later the personnel office would have a cable from Pulver reassigning him to Fort Lewis, Washington. Russo, the Lochinvar who joined when he was sixteen, stood in the noisy dayroom and made quick soldierly stabs and butt strokes with a mimical bayonet. He was going to Vietnam gleefully, though he wasn't even of age to be in the Army. We're all in it together—M was happy about that, and there was hearty shaking of hands, slapping of backs, as M watched the dayroom filling with the same sea of familiar faces that had blotted the rest of the universe out, literally! except in the lonely toilet and shower stalls, for eight weeks, and which would be snugly around it in the year to come. Most boys in M were happy to go where they'd have friends, where the sergeants wouldn't order them around and it wouldn't snow—honored, if a little surprised, that America had found them equal to the manly task of defending it. - -Someone said, "What's the matter with Chaska?" Since everyone in M wore his family name stenciled over his shirt pocket, naturally he was known by some pleasant diminutive of it—Scotty, Willy, Sully, Demirge, Yoyo for Yoshioka, or Chaska for Prochaska, who now stood leaning across the upper deck of his bunk, sobbing, his shoulders making his iron bedstead rattle, his voice choking on the words, "This is too much. My nerves … my nerves are gone," and "This is the first nervous breakdown I've ever had," and "I'd like to just go outside and freeze to death," and "I've never thought of killing myself but I am now," pushing and pulling his green fatigue cap through his hair. Prochaska's state had nothing to do with orders to Vietnam, in fact he wasn't going. On polling day, remembering the nice seventeen-year-old Swedish girl at the Paradise restaurant who served him well-done hamburgers, he had written "Sweden" on Swizzlestick's mimeographed form—Swizzlestick, knowing that Sweden was neutral with no American troops stationed there, had changed it to Europe, and Pulver had assigned him to Germany. No—Prochaska was at this extremity because of a chain of circumstances starting at the very soldier who asked, "What's the matter with Chaska?" Some nights before, ironing his Army greens, that careless fellow had burned Prochaska's hand with the iron, causing a raw wound. Naturally enough, Prochaska didn't want to put this painful hand in a tub of hot water frothing with GI lye-soap when he was assigned to do KP in K company's kitchen on this momentous Friday morning. It happened, though, that K's was the very kitchen that the General had given his monthly award to—a wooden plaque bearing a bronze shield with a quasi-heraldic device on it, a chef's cap imposed on a stirring spoon dexter on three saucepans—a plaque that K's burly mess sergeant anxiously wished to retain in its place of honor over the vegetable steamers, his name was Sergeant Soda. So when Prochaska, told to plunge his wounded member into the pots and pans in that alkaline vat, politely had to demur, is everyone still with us? Soda was understandably annoyed that a rival company had jeopardized his kitchen's preeminence by sending him KP's who were half-crippled, and Soda's culinary staff took its revenge by riding on Prochaska mercilessly, yelling at him, "Hurry up! Faster! Let's go! Let's get on with it," as he scrubbed the little lines of cement between the glazed tiles on Soda's floor. Unable to take it and fleeing back to M's friendly sanctuary, Prochaska now leaned on his bunk in tears, trying to collect himself. He moaned, "I used to like KP, it was lots of fun. But now … I wish I were going to Vietnam, just so I could get out of this!" - -As indeed he would have. Because—with the upper echelons now approving—all the men assigned to Vietnam were to get their weekend passes that afternoon, this had been Doherty's good news. He broke it to M's expeditionary force when it had gathered in the fluorescent dayroom. He said, eight o'clock that morning they'd have their communism class, nine o'clock they'd have a two hours' review of Army drill, the left face right-face business, the last lesson in their infantry training, twelve o'clock they'd be back to eat master menu, and when the grey barracks had been tidied up they'd have— passes, they'd have Friday as well as Saturday night to be with their families before going to war, though it meant missing the Colonel's own inspection. Sunday they'd—Doherty said sternly that they'd be back by Sunday midnight, Monday to Wednesday they'd fill in mimeographed forms, get their underwear dyed forest green, Thursday they'd graduate, Friday they'd leave to Vietnam. "Now! We had to go as high as Brigadier General Ekman," Doherty said. "Men, you can show your appreciation for those three-day passes by getting back on Sunday night!" - -"Yes, Sergeant!" M replied—the passes were all it thought about. - -"You aren't back you will be court-martialed. Men," Doherty's voice dropping, "this isn't just being awol. This is called missing a movement. Men," dropping, dropping, like a phonograph record with the plug pulled, "I think it holds something like six years and a DD," a dishonorable discharge. "You don't want to miss that movement. Miss it," his voice going back to speed again, "and you'll have the DD over you all your life! And! Since you won't get a decent job neither will your kids! Cause they didn't have a decent education! And they won't be eating properly! Cause you won't have the money! NOW! IS EVERYONE COMING BACK ON SUNDAY?" - -"Yes, Sergeant!" M replied. - -"Men--" it was the Captain speaking, "Men, they're making a guinea-pig of my company. You guys can be selfish and not come back on Sunday or come back too pooped to pop. Then you'll upset the applecart, they'll never give us three-day passes again." - -"Remember what's coming up behind you!" Doherty put in. "Fifteen thousand guys and you'll be meeting them all through life. Fifteen thousand guys who won't be able to say bye-bye if you're not back on Sunday!" - -"You've got my ass hanging on a lamppost," the Captain cried. "You can lower me down or leave me there! So—ARE YOU GUYS COMING BACK ON SUNDAY?" - -"Yes … sir!" M shouted back. - -"All right. I'll be waiting for you," the Captain concluded. - -And then M went to its communism class, and then it went out to practice marching, a barrel-chested Negro sergeant calling the cadence: the real thunderous voice of authority! His breath made steam as he called into the morning air, "Hold your head and shoulders high! Mighty Mike is passing by! Am … I right or wrong?" - -"You're right!" M shouted back, its right feet adding a drumbeat, striking the snow-covered ground. - -"Delayed cadence! Mike cadence! Company cadence! Count!" the sergeant sang out. - -And everyone answered, "M … I … K … E! M … I … K … E! Migh … ty Mike! Migh … ty Mike! Fight fight FIGHT!" as little wisps of wind-blown snow curled around their marching feet. - -Saturday night. M's sweet-sorrow night. Do not believe that a soldier on these storied occasions has a loved one in his arms—no. Sullivan's girl was in Stowe doing parallel turns, and Sullivan sat reconciledly on a stool in his mother's yellow kitchen murmuring, "Commonwealth 6-1234" and "Adams 2-2000" into an imaginary telephone. His giggling youngest sister, her braces glittering happily, her fingers nimbly scribbling marks on a set of stiff IBM cards, was crying to Sullivan, "Ooh … faster" practicing to become a telephone operator. Williams' girl friend waited in Florida lovelorn, a can of Williams' favorite creamed corn in the Frigidaire, the Army's finance office having put the two asunder. Something was wrong at Finance, it hadn't paid Williams for months, on Saturday he couldn't leave camp, and he went to the movies with California's lonely Yoshioka: Beachball, the movie's name. Bigalow met a girl at a YMCA dance and touché! Bigalow kissed her goodnight, his greenwood tree the portico to her boardinghouse, his feet turning numb in the snow, his home was in Oregon and $141 away. But in Greenwich Village that winter's evening in the if-I-had-a-hammer-loud pad of four cuckoo defrocked monks, one soldier who really swung was a PFC whose relevance is that he worked eight to five at the finance office, managing M's pay. M's long history of indigence should not be laid to this happy PFC, though. No beatnik himself, he was devoted to his dusty little adding machine except—alas, the servant of two sergeants, he was a GI first, a pay clerk second. Friday at camp he had pulled KP, Saturday he had watched a movie on guerrilla warfare: no exaggeration, the tenth time. Sunday the dingy finance office wouldn't be open, Monday he would have the snow shoveling detail, Tuesday morning all systems go! the PFC could work on M's old musty pay records, his raincloud-colored fluorescent lights flickering till after midnight, his adding machine making its lonely metallic sounds, but Wednesday he would have the laundry detail, Thursday he would see more movies, Friday he—but Friday, M would go to Vietnam. This had been the PFC's predicament for many months. - -With a real physical telephone, Sullivan called up his schussing girl friend's friend, Debbie, and asked her to the Saturday night movies, he couldn't go parking with her, in conscience. Across town in his family's crazily gabled house, Demirgian sat with his schoolmates as they played whist at a round oaken table—whist! Once it was hula hoops, the Beatles, now in Massachusetts the teen-agers were playing knock-whist and eating knackwurst as they talked of civilian times. "Remember the assistant principal— Mr. Silvia? Saliva we called him? Mr. Spit? Remember … " Demirgian was saying, playing a club, wearing a soft yellow jersey. - -"What do you learn in the Army?" a friend of his interrupted, winning the trick, raking the cards in, clack! - -"How to catch monkeys," Demirgian answered, and as their game of whist hung in sudden abeyance he explained to his awed cronies how to survive in the jungle on monkey meat. Hollow out a coconut, Demirgian said, quoting a class on the basics of Robinson Crusoeism. Tie it to something, put in a chunk of coconut white, and hide, Demirgian continued. "Well—so the dumb monkey, when he puts in his hand thinking gee, I got me a nice piece of coconut, the dumbbell can't pull it out because of his fist, he hasn't the smart to let go. And you're hiding behind a tree, you're there with a bat beating the monkey over the head. I mean, not that it's cruel or anything but well: you've got to eat." Though he laughed bitterly, really Demirgian wept to be in an organization so lost to decency that it taught him to hit monkeys, helpless monkeys with a paw stuck in a coconut. - -Out in the Demirgians' crowded living room, a TV cowboy rode across Marlboro country to the accompaniment of unauthentic Western music. Nya-a-a-a, Armenian woodwinds, music to belly-dance to, music to charm snakes, for Demirgian's dark skinned family doubled its Saturday-night pleasures by looking at television while it listened to records, and eating purple grapes and figs, and drinking coffee from tiny china cups. Demirgian's mother was Greek, his father was Turkish, a rug repair man. Demirgian himself was Armenian, there was a genealogical reason for this but as soon as one grasped it, f-f-f-t it slipped away, leaving a riddle. Demirgian was born in Jaffa; his father was in Astrakhan that day repairing shoes, his mother was a war refugee in Istanbul, obstetricians in all three cities delivered the little rascal, consulting with one another by phone. Or something—it wasn't clear. Demirgian came to America when he was ten, so young that his Eastern heritages fast deserted him, leaving only the residue of three incompatible accents —a dialectal slag, a kind of duh-uh in his pronunciation that to those who didn't know him sounded dopey. And leaving him a real Oriental marketplace of withered old uncles and bosomy aunts, many of these incomparables now in Demirgian's living room eating his mother's grapes on the pretext of wishing her firstborn good-bye. Speaking in Turkish, her voice rising above the come-with-me-to-the- Casbah music without becoming shrill, an aunt of Demirgian's asked the gathering, "And where will Varoujan live?" Varoujan being Demirgian's first name. "In the baraka?" thinking of the French barracks in 1939 in Syria. - -"I think not," Demirgian's mother replied, the wild pipes of Yerevan continuing nya-a-a-a. "In the rear there might be baraka but in the forward areas, I think he would live in istihkam," remembering the deep Turkish trenches in 1914 at Tchanak Kale. "Yes—he would live in istihkam in the bataklik" in trenches in the swamps, a feat of Army engineering that the aunt tried politely to conceive of for five whole seconds, chewing a pistachio nut before changing the subject. - -"And what will Varoujan eat? I have read," she continued, "that in Vietnam there are no other foods besides rice and fish." - -"Varoujan doesn't like fish," Demirgian's mother said. "I have explained to him that he could eat grass if the liquid in it is watery, though not if the liquid is milky." - -"And what did Varoujan say?" - -"Varoujan said yes, the Army had told him that. I explained that he should put these grasses in water until they are tender." - -"But--!" said Demirgian's aunt. "I have read that in Vietnam there is no water that one may drink." - -"Woman!" Demirgian's father put in. "You yourself say there is rice in Vietnam. It follows there must be rice fields, does it not? Fields require water—it follows there must be water in Vietnam!" - -"Victoria meant drinking water," Demirgian's mother explained sweetly. "But there is water, in the vines and bamboo, the Army told Varoujan that. And that there are monkeys to eat, Varoujan knows how to catch them. And rabbits to eat, as well. And lizards and snakes. So it seems to me, Varoujan will have other things to eat besides rice," pausing, take a pensive sip of Turkish coffee. "Varoujan doesn't like to eat snakes, I don't think. I shall tell him if he doesn't like snakes to decline them." And so this pleasant seminar continued into the snowy night, none of Varoujan's relatives aware that he'd folded his whist deck and silently stolen off to Sullivan's midnight going-away party, on the other side of Newton, Massachusetts. - -Comes the dawn— I'll be gone— I just gotta have a honey holding me tight— but Debbie had to be home at twelve and Sullivan drove her there in her tight skinny-rib sweater, minding his manners. Meanwhile, bringing their own bottles Sullivan's friends collected at his home, but when their guest of honor walked in the front door he seemed to be shorn of spirit. It was after twelve. For weeks the Army had kept Sullivan rolling like a tired jalopy with a dead battery, by pushing on him relentlessly—tonight Sullivan had stopped dead. "Hey," a friend of his cried when he shambled in, "they're letting you go to Vietnam? I thought we wanted to win this war," everyone in the living room laughing. - -Sullivan answered "Mmf," sinking down in the armchair, his black raincoat on, chin on his chest, a sea of weariness surging through him like the fluids of a broken boil. From a far room he could hear Chillerama on a television set; Sullivan guessed that his mother was close to crying and watching it tenaciously. Strange people with no letters of introduction would come to her home taking her daughters away, the Army would now abduct her only son, leaving her with the black-and-white cat, Jerome. - -"So tell us! How do the guys all feel about Vi-et-nam?" a boy with a J&B asked Sullivan loudly. - -" … They'll go if they've got to." - -"But they don't really want to?" - -" … No, they don't." - -"Hey, are they scared about going?" - -" … Yes." - -"Are you scared about going?" - -" … Yes." - -"The little guy, is he scared also? Huh?" - -" … Yes." - -"Are you two going to be together?" - -" … Yes. We're going to share a foxhole," Sullivan said wearily. - -" … Always together, until forever," Demirgian mumbled, half waking up, looking around, half falling asleep again. - -"Ladies and gentlemen. Our flying time to Saigon will be approximately eighteen hours. Your attention is invited to the NO SMOKING and SEAT BELT signs. Please comply when the signs are lighted. … " - -M company was crossing to Vietnam on a passenger airline and it didn't like the stewardesses. One of those girls in blue incredibly couldn't get it straight between the words cereal and syrup. "Miss, may I have some cereal," Sullivan kept begging her, the stewardess answering "There" and pointing a firm school-marm's finger at Sullivan's syrup. Another of those imperfect angels said, "Look, there are other people on this plane!" when a melancholy soldier, McCarthy by name, it was he who'd gotten married two weeks earlier, asked for an inoffensive glass of milk. Over and over the stewardesses would serve M breakfast: nothing else, their protocol being that it wouldn't be lunchtime till it was noontime, an hour which never caught up with M's upholstered plane as it flew the jetstreams west. Outside of Seattle the earth became dark, it was black over the Aleutians, it was so inky black in Tokyo at some impossible hour of morning, √ -1 o'clock, that all Yoshioka saw of his ancestral home was a dozen blue runway lights, it was black in Manila, the runway lights making frail blue streaks on a stack of aluminum Army coffins, bound the other way. Walking into the night to stretch, Demirgian said, "Those stewardesses aren't so sharp." - -McCarthy seconded it, "Ask me, they're a bunch of duds." - -Sullivan put in, "A couple of OJT stewardesses," soldier talk for on-the-job trainees. - -Dear sirs, McCarthy thought, once he was back in his blue reclining seat, conceiving a self-restrained letter to the officers of the airline. I am a private in the US Army and I had the pleasure to fly on one of your chartered planes to Vietnam. Well—it was scarcely a pleasure, McCarthy thought, not with those cruel stewardesses, still one mustn't be discourteous. I was very disappointed with the flight. I found the stewardesses very … searching for a word, sharp, and hard to get along with, something was faulty there, what was it? Well—were the stewardesses sharp or weren't they? Demirgian had said, "Those stewardesses aren't sharp." Essentially affirming this, McCarthy had somehow lost Demirgian's negative—a paradox. I found the stewardesses very cross, try it again, very harsh and hard to get along with. They were no comfort at all on the flight, and I feel I should bring this to your attention. Yours truly, but the stewardesses didn't have writing paper. - -Meanwhile, the plane had landed at Saigon's own Cimmerian airport, and lo! through the wrinkled seats of its khaki trousers M company sensed an unmistakable gravity pull it to Vietnam's legendary soil, the root of M's very being. "Gentlemen," the stewardess began, all ladies having timidly deserted them in Manila, "the temperature on the ground is 84 degrees, the local time is four-thirty A.M. Please remain seated until. … " M had no cause to feel in terra incognita this morning, lost in the horse latitudes. True: one week earlier, Hofelder could catalog all he knew of Vietnam's phenomena in three quick sentences, "It's near China. It isn't a very making-money country. The people must eat rice because there's a lot of rice paddies," but in its interlude of filling in mimeographed forms and getting its green steel helmets, in its vast concrete classroom with its infinitesimal sparrows on the heating pipes M had assimilated two full mornings of practical geography; the Army called them orientations, no pun. First, M had seen a distant one-reeler movie. Its grim narrator had observed that the Vietnamese live in an explosive situation, one in which peacefulness does not meet the challenge of today's needs. After the movie a lieutenant had materialized in this tunnel with a map of M's crescent-shaped destination: it seemed to be tinted red in its communist areas, pink in contested areas, and white in areas where the Vietnamese people had freedom, it looked like the splotchy diseased liver of some rabbit that the sergeants who taught jungle survival classes had told M don't eat. The same remote lieutenant had then screened some Kodachrome slides, the front row whistling loud and lecherously at six Vietnamese nymphs in those pretty pink and blue things of theirs, the lieutenant's oral caption being that Saigon was VD City. Next a prim little captain from the medical corps had taken up Vietnam's endemiology, telling M that it would encounter environmental dangers there that had attendant the need for individual adjustments if M was to meet these dangers successfully, the captain absolutely screaming this as a-r-r-r, the fiendish ground crew of a super sabre jet fighter tested her wild-blue-yonder faculties with one terrible nearby roar. The captain screamed rapidly, to get through his dangers in one fleeting hour. He warned M that cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever may occur whenever fecal material is ingested by new susceptibles. The incidence—the incidence of tuberculosis is particularly high among prostitutes, he noted. Clonorchiasis and paragonimiasis arise in the livers and lungs of consumers of flukes, and hepatitis, malaria, tapeworm, typhus, dengue, and plague are other maladies he said to beware of. The captain said do yourselves a favor, don't go petting the dogs because they've got rabies. "Everyone's told you the bad things—I'm going to tell you the good things," cried a Negro sergeant first class who M later applauded, one soldier even shouting hooray and Sullivan even laying aside his I'm the Last Kamikaze Pilot Alive to pay close heed. "There's a lot of good-looking girls in Vietnam," the sergeant explained. "I want you to go out of the Capitol hotel! Make a left! One block—make a left! Half a block, cross the street, don't get hit by a taxi—first bar on the right! The Black Cat! Ask for Judy and tell her I sent you," environmental dangers be damned. - -From a red-faced master sergeant with the voice of a squawky $10 public-address system, M had heard an extraordinary talk: for in two cluttered months of basic training, two of infantry training, no other sergeant had addressed himself to this vital matter— how to avoid dying. "You can trust no one! No one! Man, woman, or child!" the sergeant, whose name was Admire, cried, "Let's say—you're on a trip to Saigon, you're sitting there in the Happy Bar. A guy comes in in civilian clothes, he puts a package under your stool. Get up and move! Move! Or you're in the streets out shopping. A guy throws a present to you—throw it back! Or at your hotel—a guy parks a garbage truck and saunters away. Watch out! Or a cute little kid on a bicycle leans it against the wall. It may blow up!" Then having shepherded M through its port of disembarkation, Admire had turned on the Kodachromes and related the further perils of the combat zone. He began, "Now this is a punji pit. Each of those bamboo sticks is sharp—is sharp, and there's buffalo dung on every one. There are thousands of these pits in the country! You— will— see them! What advice can I give you against them? Don't— fall— in them! This next is a punji foot-trap. Now each of those sticks is barbed—I said barbed! When the medic tries to remove one, it might just smart! Just a bit! There are thousands of these in Vietnam! You— will— see them! Don't— step— on them!" Admire had further words to the wise and eagle-eyed but no real advice against the sudden mortars or mines, the inconspicuous mosquitoes or scorpions—or cobras. "There's a little one they've got there called Mr. Two-foot," he stated loudly. "If he bites you in the thumb, don't reach in your pocket for a razor blade or a knife! If he bites you anywhere, lie— down— quickly! Because you're dead!" - -Throw it back. Don't fall in. Lie down quickly. Each of Admire's travel tips had been another revelation to Williams, whose innocent civilian wits had never foreseen hazards that he couldn't simply meet by keeping in a low crouch. "You guys don't want me in Vietnam—I'm a coward," Williams announced when Admire's lecture was over, exaggerating the state of awareness it had brought him to. - -"Well: we're all cowards," one philosophical soldier said. - -"Look at it this way," Williams again. "We're walking along. We're supposed to keep quiet. I see a boa constrictor standing up on his belly I'm going to scream. … " - -… Four-thirty in the morning as Williams exited the plane at Saigon's black airport, there were no boa constrictors on the ramp. M walked across the dark concrete without encountering punji pits. In a way, Demirgian was sorry about that, disillusioned that on the bottom side of earth the grass seemed to be green and space was Euclidean. It was such a waste! Flustered stewardesses, $30,000 pilots, all that expenditure of highoctane fuel and still someone could say (and did), there's the Big Dipper. Demirgian wished it were anything else, the Southern Cross or Halley's comet or anything to make crossing half the lines of longitude a bit more glamorous, "No—I think it's the orange bowl," he said, gazing at Vietnam's starry sky. "And that thing there, that ought to be the moon. The bright thing with the watermelon shape. In tropical climates it only comes out watermelon shaped. … " - -A pity—Vietnam wasn't for poets. Blood in Vietnam still circulated. Gravity worked. If dropped, things fell, and call it a thin imagination, call it common sense, but M had no anxieties as it walked across the jet-black airport toward a low brown building, Americans were everywhere, Americans in grey uniforms, Americans in shadowy trucks and jeeps. Daylight came, a little American captain bicycling by, bibbidy bobbidy, riding it one-handed to keep returning salutes, and Sullivan said to Demirgian, "What a fairy— what a fink," phrasing the sentence just as he would in the United States. M went to the brown building and filled in mimeographed forms, then it ate master menu in which the scalloped potatoes had been deleted and creamed potatoes had been substituted. M company had come to Vietnam. - -Within hours it would go up country. An earnest sergeant warned M, "Keep alert!" as M hoisted its duffel bags and itself onto a big open-topped Army truck. "If we pass somebody on the road, if he has something in his hand, I don't care if he's this tall or that tall, girl, boy, it doesn't matter, look to see what it is! And if you don't know, bring it to my attention—fast," looking M square in the eyes. Perhaps M mightn't have ignored this had M seen bushy-bearded men in cloaks behind the greenery or heard weird ipcress sounds, but in this ordinary Army camp it seemed a paranoiac's advice. And candidly, as M drove through the bumpy streets of Saigon with their outboard motor putput traffic sounds and cooking smells, as M rode in its airy truck standing, squatting, and sitting on its duffel bags, it saw about fifty thousand Oriental persons to its right and left and forty thousand had funny things in their hands, wooden boxes, yellow wickerwork baskets, bottles of—what? crockery bowls. Twenty thousand people were hurrying by with little twitchy steps—suspicious. Another twenty thousand were standing still—that was worse. There were one thousand characters in tinny Lambretta trucks who parked them and strolled away, and five thousand citizens on bent-looking bikes and rusty motor-bikes who leaned them against the Mediterranean-looking walls. On one garbage congested street, a child with no pants on who seemed to be playing with empty beer cans rolled one beneath M's truck, M never giving it serious thought. Saigon or Seville, to see a conspiracy in every handbag and handlebar—that way madness lies, one might as well enlist in the Birch society. A curious fact is that M wasn't armed, the "Keep alert" sergeant having no Army rifles to issue it. M's steel helmets were still ambiguous bulges in its duffel bags, and though there were spare helmets in the truck, rustiness had stuck them together, and Bigalow had none while his Russian-born buddy, Dubitsky, had three, like a little Chinese pagoda. "I know," the earnest-eyed sergeant had said, aware that he couldn't fight America's national mania, "I know you've never seen the scenery, you'll want to look around," and there he had spoke true, the only recalcitrant on this Saigon-and- its-environs sight-seeing bus being that boy of sixteen, wild-eyed Russo, who carried a bowie knife long enough to use in dueling and shouted over his shoulder, "Stay awake, fellas—here comes another hay wagon," and other no less faintly ridiculous things. "I got my eye on that guy," he yelled to his unconcerned friends as a young pedestrian pulled a cylinder no bigger than a cigarette from his black pajama pocket, set it on fire, and smoked it. - -The bustling people, the blue-and-yellow taxis, everything in Saigon appeared to be about two-thirds life-size, and their colors concentrated as at amusement parks. "Looka! This is like Coney Island without the rides," one soldier cried in an ecstasy of identification as Saigon's little brown splinter-board shops with their peeling red and yellow signs went by, and "This must be the suburbs," as the houses gave way to pale green fields, and "There's a water buffalo!" If only Prochaska had been on this outing, M might be singing Clementine as it drove through the yellow villages where old toothless women peered and children waved, the palm trees, lush and opaque, were nearly in ducking distance, the drab wooden slats in the truck rattling, the dead weight of duffel bags settling down, it squeezed M's feet, it trapped M's feet, the tires roaring, the dust rising, from out of the tall grasses the communists would rush, the band would be ambushed one month later, the French horn, flute, and baritone player shot, the drummer escaping unscathed—and M drove gaily past the high barbed wire and into its division's camp. - -Imagine anything: now color it dust, red dust, and that was M's division area, the size of a practice battlefield. M's old dust avenger, fierce Milett, would go berserkers here, for dust was on every canvas tent, red dust lay on the sandbags, the punching-bag shaped water bags, red dust was on every soldier one minute after his reaching here. The temperature was maybe 100 degrees. Climbing from its truck and trudging to some designated tents, M dropped its duffel bags on its narrow cots as whoosh! pillars of red dust rose from the canvas, and going tardily outside again it waited and waited. Russo began to look like a short round man in a sauna bath. He sat on the dusty ground saying, "I'm going to write a letter. Dear sergeant. You were right. It is hot." - -Yoshioka came to have a complexion like a bar of wet laundry soap. He turned to the "Keep alert" sergeant and asked, "Any action around here?" - -"Oh no," Demirgian answered him. "It's very quiet." - -"Shit," Yoshioka said, his favorite word collapsing as usual like an unstrung balloon, "What do you know? You just got here," but M company was to have an answer soon enough. - -"Fall in!" And as M formed ranks in the sunlight a buck sergeant made it deafeningly clear that the joyride was truly over. Like artillery fire his commands hit M one after another, "Troops! Atten … tion! First rank, right … face! Forward … harch! Troops … halt! Right . … face! Second rank, left … face! Forward … harch! Troops … halt! Left … face!" until he had M deployed in a line perhaps as wide as a city street. "Forward … harch! Route step … harch! Troops … halt!" he ordered, and M was up against the camp's barbed wire, standing there in the 100 degrees, staring out at what perils God only knew, waifs at the wire of a concentration camp wondering what now? And then the sergeant gave the command Demirgian almost dreaded to hear. The sergeant shouted, "About … face!" - -About face! In two crammed months of basic training, Demirgian hadn't had trouble with right face, it was child's play, or left face, a walkaway, and dress right dress—a lark! the guys all bashing each other around in ranks, biff! bam! with the Army's jolly consent. But about face—that had been a dark and mystifying thing. Whenever his drill sergeant had given his alarming order about … Demirgian had shifted faintly to his left foot, and face, Demirgian had slipped his right foot behind it, then Demirgian rose on the tiptoes of both black boots and swung himself daintily around and—aww! why didn't it work? For it didn't ever (try it). Old Sergeant Tisdale, Demirgian's haggard mentor in basic training, a frail and grey-cheeked career soldier, had manifested patience— patience. A graduate of the local school for sergeants, he had earned his right to his Smokey-the-bear drill sergeant's hat by learning that he must bellow forward … march in three distinct syllables that wouldn't be mistaken for port … arms and to scream right … face in two syllables lest a soldier with wax in his ears go to the ridiculous parade … rest. In the lesson on about … face, Tisdale had learned that it wasn't by any means a tour de force demanding a Nureyev's coordination—no, that the saddest sack in the Army could master it if he would remember one pithy word, one open-sesame that Demirgian's cadaverous sergeant now resolved to impress upon his most troublesome stump (a stupid trainee under military protection) one autumn evening. Poor old clubfooted Demirgian reporting in, Tisdale had stood him on his royal-blue scatter rug, a $2.98 scatter rug he had bought at Sears so that the Demirgians of this world wouldn't leave any ugly scuff marks as they writhed to the right, left, and about on his office's linoleum, and in his high quick squeaking voice the sergeant had told Demirgian his magic word. The word was youwilltakeyourrightfootandplaceitapproximatefourinchesbehindyourleftfootandslightlyt otheleftofyourleftfootandpivotonehundredandeightydegreesontheheelofyourleftfootandth eballofyourrightfootturningtoyourright. Demirgian listened attentively, then he rose rooster-like on his toes and—no no no, Tisdale had said, listen again, his voice getting shriller, his patience starting to churn up and whitecaps appearing, his conscience whispering to him, Bambi, your daughter, she's mucking up her fifth-grade homework tonight, she couldn't do fractions, he wasn't home to help her—Demirgian's fault. Despairing, Tisdale had broken his cabalistic word in twain, he cracked it in two less labyrinthine halves, he screamed it by the numbers, one! p … two! all in vain, Demirgian still turned like any gauche civilian. Demirgian came to hate the sergeant. Demirgian wanted to kill him, to push him down the black barracks stairs, it wouldn't be difficult— or a bayonet in his withered tummy, aargh! When he left basic training, when Demirgian took up infantry at M, nothing had changed—oh, the electric switches in those barracks were black instead of sickly green, there were other names on the bed frames and it wasn't masking tape but Scotch tape holding them to the steel, but about face was still just one! p … two! a countdown to spastic disaster, ready, get set, stumble! Once, Demirgian was shown a movie on close-order drill, the narrator, Murrow, called it a symbol of discipline, Demirgian saw undisciplined armies falling all over their bootstraps, Belgian civilians in helter-skelter land, Chinese, who couldn't about face, lying like pick-up sticks in the streets of Shanghai dead or unhappy-looking, Demirgian just couldn't buy it but there was Murrow intoning, discipline— discipline— discipline, you've got to have discipline if you're to become s— but there the film had broken. And here was Demirgian at high noon in the combat zone, a sergeant screaming at him, "About … face!" - -Demirgian turned around. - -"All right—" the sergeant roared, "move out! pick it up! get it the first time you needn't do it again!" and M disposed itself onto its first professional mission on Vietnam's red soil, Demirgian picking up two small cigarette butts, Yoshioka getting an old match, and Sullivan slinking left obliquely to his tent, a minute ahead of his comrades-in-arms. - -That night M lay on its taut canvas cots and listened to noises—o-o-o-o-o things going over, b-o-o-m exploding, ta-ta-ta-ta machine guns, and automatic rifles, dive bombers, a-a-ark tropical birds, lions and tigers, banshees, the spheres of the heavens rolling against each other like empty oil drums, the stars falling and bouncing along the plains: and M wasn't afraid. Experience had anesthetized it to these sounds of battle during its winter of Army training, its many years of John Wayne. M guessed that all of this racket was American made and wasn't aimed at its tents, that it was meant for some conjectured enemy out yonder—it was right. "That's a mortar," Russo explained with no hysteria. "That's—artillery." - -"Well: I wish they'd quit it. I want to sleep," Williams. - -"What is that?" Sullivan. By this he didn't mean the distant war-movie sounds but a pretty civilian smell that was rising mysteriously from Demirgian's cot. - -"Jade East—I like it," Demirgian explained. O-o-o-o-o! B-o-o-m! - -"Oh. I like Canoe," Sullivan said. - -"I don't," Demirgian said. "It smells like dead roses." - -"I like Old English," Sullivan said. - -"I don't like that," Demirgian said. "I don't like English Leather either." - -"I meant English Leather. I like that," Sullivan said. - -"I don't like that," Demirgian said. "It's getting too common." - -"I use Brut regularly. That's mine," Sullivan said. - -And CRUMP! The tent tottered as Russo calmly declared, "That's a mortar." M's division had started to rummage for communists in the no-man's-land a few yards beyond M's inky-black sleeping area. - -"Mother," said Sullivan, not very disturbed. "Hey, take it easy on my bed." - -"Some guys like to play cowboys and Indians," Demirgian added. "I like to play this," but he spoke a trifle louder than he needed to. If truth be told, Demirgian was getting scared: it took a man of vision to turn reality about, to see that the equations of parabolic flight must bow to parity, that a whistling can of TNT could go both this-a-way and that-a-way and that M's uneventful side of the barbed wire might someday have its o-o-ms and crumps. Soon, Demirgian would learn to exorcise his anxieties the poet's way, on the cardboard wrappers of C-ration cans he would learn to write cathartic verses, one of his rhymes ending, "You hear the fear yet never shed a tear, every morning … every morning … every morning." But tonight, Demirgian took a sip of J&B from a pint bottle and simply turned up his transistor radio, its music insulating him from Vietnam's alien noises, his perfume from Vietnam's dusty smells. - -"I got the freight— train— blues," Demirgian heard, from the armed forces radio station back in Saigon— CRUMP! "Lordy lordy lordy, I got them to the bottom of my rambling shoes. … " CRUMP! The commercials were for US Savings Bonds and for God. - -Doesn't it get a little lonely sometimes … -Out on a limb … -Without Him. … -"The pre … ceding," the radio announcer cried, "was presented by— the Armed— Forces— Chaplains Board!" CRUMP! And so it went on M's first night at war: the radio, the tinkling of dog tags as M turned in its sleep, soldiers snoring, and things that go CRUMP in the night. - -At four o'clock M was awakened to go on KP. Demirgian was incredulous: and asking himself when in his slow advance toward the cannon's mouth the folderol would cease, if ever, he authorized himself to march M to the murky kitchen, crying in his outraged voice, "Close it up there! Guide around that sandbag! Got to spit-shine your boots tonight! Got to polish your brass! There'll be a diagram tonight, how to lay out your duffel bag! Hut! two three four. … " CRUMP! - -Actually, M wouldn't stay at this thunderous division camp—it would fill in yellow forms, then go by helicopter deeper into the boonies to where its assigned battalion was. M was still in: the Army called it the pipeline, and at this critical turn in the tubing Bigalow dripped out. Called through a squawk box to the dusty personnel tent and told to hie himself to the public-information tent to be interviewed for a writing job, Bigalow, the smiling soldier of fortune whose one ambition in Asia was to strike it rich, perceived he was at a fork in life's road. With one year in a line company he might become sergeant, a corporal got $163.50 a month but a sergeant got $194.10, one and one-half years of that dollar a day, another share of IBM. On the other hand, being where the caissons roll had certain weak points. One thing, Bigalow hadn't been trained to fire rifles but to work a mortar, a steel contraption the size and shape of a drainage pipe out of whose open end Bigalow was to lob explosives at communist soldiers a mile, two miles away (CRUMP). But if Charlie came any nearer—say to the same lively trench—Bigalow, short of banging him on the head with his drainage pipe, would need to defend himself with a sidearm, a little stick-em-up pistol that he had never yet fired successfully. One miserable day in infantry training, Bigalow had stood with his quaint pistol squinting along its sights at a great quantity of rain, in whose far reaches he could sometimes spy a little shimmering bull's-eye, as ghostly as moiré. But every time Bigalow raised his little wet pistol to bring this apparition to earth, his poncho behaved like a sail and Bigalow's outstretched arm became a boom, it swung to leeward and Bigalow's watery target remained inviolate of bullet holes. Dripping wet, the skinny lieutenant in charge of this fiasco had reported back to a major, a bear of a man whose nickname was Iron Mike. - -"Sir—" the lieutenant had said, saluting, standing in Iron's office but shrinking into the door jamb, a haven with the added advantage of holding him at rigid attention— "Sir, the men couldn't grasp the pistol." - -"What do you mean, couldn't grasp? It's your job to teach them!" - -"I did, sir, but the men couldn't grasp it. … " - -A real dilemma. Bigalow sought out the serious-eyed "Keep alert" sergeant to ask his advice. "I don't know why anyone would want to be on the line," the sergeant said in some amazement—he had been there months. "You don't care about being wet because you're never dry. Your clothing rots. You reach in, pull out your undershirt and throw it away. And you're being shot at. And wounded. And when you're healed and I mean half healed you're sent right back to the line." - -"Yes. But do you make rank?" Bigalow asked. - -"I say better to be alive and a corporal than a sergeant and dead. Think about it— think about it." - -Bigalow continued to meditate about it, though when he walked into the public information tent and handed his yellow form to a captain sitting by a dusty typewriter, the captain just shouted, "You went to Arizona! I went to Nevada!" and Bigalow was a publicist before he could meditate further. But destiny hesitated over Bigalow's best friend, Dubitsky. Also a college boy (Scranton) and also a candidate for a public information job, Dubitsky's dossier gave the young captain pause. "So. So personnel sent you here," he said experimentally, not very confident there was a slot in public information for a man who'd studied philosophy with the Jesuits, who spoke Ukrainian fluently and four other languages but couldn't type. "Uh … see anything special in the personnel tent?" he asked. - -See anything? How could Dubitsky help it, the tent had been practically built of them! "I saw a lot of playmates of the month, sir," Dubitsky said. - -"Which month did you see?" - -"I was looking at November, sir." - -"November. Uh, what was November wearing?" All right—what do you ask a man whose last written work was a paper on Dewey's pragmatism? - -"Sir, November had sort of a lace negligee. It was over one of her legs though it wasn't over the other." - -"Which of her legs was or wasn't it over?" - -"Sir, I think it was her right leg it wasn't over." - -"Well, we want to be accurate here. We don't want you writing about the general saying the negligee was over the wrong leg." - -"Yes sir. The negligee wasn't over her right leg." - -"Hell," a public-information colonel interrupted, looking up from a Michigan rummy game board that his mother had just mailed him. "Hell, can he spell?" - -Minutes later, two happy former mortar men reappeared at the tent where the rest of M was stuffing its duffel back in its dark green bags, Bigalow smiling mindlessly and speaking for both. "Hey—did you hear about us? We're going to be newspaper reporters." - -"Cowards," said a jealous unconverted mortar man, continuing to pack. - -"I bet we get more medals than you do!" - -"Yeah, a yellow one for being yellow." - -"The enemy was all around me!" Demirgian began to cry in mock heroics. He was ashamed that two friends should be so tolerant of tedium as to make their home in an area where they'd sometimes pick up cigarette butts and do KF. "All around me! And all I had was my Lindy ball-point pen. They lunged at me. … " - -" … They pinned me to the wall!" another boy continued. "I pulled out my ballpoint pen! I stabbed! I stabbed! I stabbed … " and then M climbed aboard its helicopters, its duffel bags in the center aisles like a string of gristly sausages and it rose deafeningly toward the north as Bigalow, Dubitsky, and McCarthy, the critical epistoler, who providentially had found himself a niche as the bartender at the officers club, stayed behind in their comparative sanctuary. - -Who will go drive with Fergus now, and pierce the deep wood's woven shade … M's lovely battalion area reminded one of poetry. Tall trees like sycamores had been planted in vanishing rows in some serene decade, and bowers receded everywhere that M turned its eyes, dark and tranquil naves. The cuckoos sang, and in this idyllic place M seated itself in an arc on the dappled ground to hear its battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, a light-skinned Negro with shining eyes, welcome it to its journey's end, to its 1966 home. "I know you've heard about this battalion—what've you heard?" the colonel asked, leaning forward for a reply. One hand rested tensely on his pistol holster, the other on his canteen case, not a stance to encourage a frank answer—answer wrong, and it seemed he would fire from both hips, bang! squirt! the fastest draw in the East, his idiot respondent falling over wetly dead. "Now, I know you've heard about us, out with it!" the colonel said—he was known throughout his battalion as Colonel Smoke. - -How to answer him? One attentive weekend in Vietnam and M had learned: the fate of this battalion was to encounter Charlie everywhere it went, its casualty rate was something wild—it was Vietnam's jinx battalion, so word-of-mouth proclaimed. Furthermore, in that edifying weekend M's sharp ears had heard of the Operation itself: how on Monday next, its whole ill-omened battalion had orders to get on its grey-green helicopters and go into Charlie's heartland, go behind Charlie's lines, for seven days M would walk through the Michelin rubber plantation, the same inferno where a regiment of Vietnamese had been annihilated one morning when M was in basic training learning its right shoulder arms. Not surprisingly, M had become privy to the Operation even though the mimeographed order for it was marked, SECRET. - -"You!" said the colonel, turning his fiery eyes on one of M's mortar men. - -"I heard—sir, I heard you've had most of the action." - -"You heard we got killed and wounded, didn't you? But you also heard this, didn't you? That we killed a lot of VC! And there's no battalion in Vietnam that has killed as many VC as we have! And this is our job in Vietnam, we're here to kill the VC!" M listening silently, none of its faces revealing whether the colonel's words had reassured it. "Now this battalion is good—know why? Why, because we help our buddies. We don't let buddies of ours down. I want you troops to say, if there's anywhere in the world I want to get wounded it's in this battalion. Because my buddies'll bring me in, they're not going to leave me," M not moving an eyelash. "And this isn't just on the battlefield! Even if you're on KP and you don't do it, then who has to do it? Your buddy! Suppose—if you goldbrick, if you get VD, if you get yourself sick, then who's got to do your job? Your buddy!" - -Where? Sullivan asked himself, and he could almost hear the tires squealing as his psyche swerved onto the pretty detour the colonel had indicated. Where in this forest primeval could anyone get VD? peering through the bowers curiously. Already the colonel had oriented Sullivan as to his snug situation: his battalion was part of an iron circle, its radius a Herculean mile and a half, spirals of barbed wire transfixed its perimeter, trip wires abounded, Charlie, beware of mines, and mighty artillery was zeroed in, phantoms, super sabres, and freedom fighters knew the coordinates, in a sturdy sandbagged bunker Sullivan was to stand glaring at no-man's-land through a cautious slit, all the arsenal of America's genius at his fingertips, rifles, machine guns, recoilless rifles as long as the cannons, death rays, you name it, Sullivan would have it, nuclear bombs—so where were the girls? he wondered. The colonel was coming to that. He explained, in the very center of this American bastion lay a little droll Vietnamese village of thirty-two hundred souls, many of whom, most of whom, all of whom, who knows? were communists, some so dedicatedly red as to slip through the dark forests shooting American soldiers in their backs, a month ago they'd killed another lieutenant-colonel. A weird war. - -"Now in this village are whores," the colonel continued. "And they're VC whores. And they've got VD a hundred percent. And you've brought fine young healthy bodies here, you'll want to take healthy bodies home to the States. You'll not want to bring filth to your wives or the girls you'll marry. And something else about whores! I said you're here to kill VC. Well, there's another reason: you're here to win the minds and hearts of the Vietnamese to the loyalty to their government. And you'll not be doing this if you're chasing whores. You'll not be doing this if your uniform's sloppy, if your shirttail's out," the colonel warming to the topic closest to his heart, the mania that he was named Smoke for, "if your button's unbuttoned. If you don't shave, if you don't cut your hair, the Vietnamese will call you just what you are: a bum, and a bum's a bum anywhere in the world, especially so in the East, and … " five minutes more in this evangelistic vein and the colonel disappeared, poof! in a flash of fire, leaving M standing in line at the adjutant's pretty tent to fill in mimeographed wills. - -Nobody spoke much. It wasn't just Smoke's fire-and-brimstone speech that subdued M, it was also the sudden unearthly silence that he left behind him in this arcadian place. Sullivan stared at the leafy treetops, then at his wristwatch, thinking, I should get a new strap, this one is falling apart. Demirgian stood asking himself how long, how long would the Army's fashion consciousness abuse his patience, Demirgian playing a while with a rubber band and finally snapping it lightly on Morton's neck. - -"Now where did you get that?" Morton asked him pleasantly, laughing a little, turning around. That was Morton's way—always agreeable no matter what, had Demirgian sunk a stiletto into his neck Morton's response would've been the same, "Now where did you get that," had Demirgian shot a rifle round into his spinal column, wound the sling around Morton's throat, and tugged it with might and main, be assured that Morton would have gasped politely, "All right now, enough's enough," before expiring, with a smile. Umbrage just wasn't one of Morton's humors, Morton felt no basic need to assert himself since he didn't believe there were any sides to human nature so scoundrelly as to do him harm. Probably he was blessed—definitely Morton was pleasant. A worthy friend for Prochaska, accompanying him to Times Square on their vacation and copying his courtesy in giving the little Vietnik lady her leaflets back. A few Fridays earlier, when M's compassionate first sergeant had given it its last Godspeed passes, the sergeant had refused one to Morton, telling him with melancholy basset eyes, "Son, you're not going to Texas, not on a three-day pass!" and Morton had gone complaisantly to his iron bed, where a dozen of his friends, a sergeant even, had crowded around him urging him to sign out to Philadelphia, to Rye, to anywhere and go to Texas, shh! but Morton had merely chuckled, saying it wouldn't be right. Downstairs on the dayroom's sofa, the captain, first sergeant, and operations sergeant were cudgeling their wits to intuit whether a man might really fly to Texas and back on a three-day weekend. - -"We did it up in thirty-six hours," the operations sergeant was telling them, coming to the point of his unutterably stupefying story, a Mercury sedan, the tires squealing, coffee in paper cups, "and we really were hitting it!" "Mmm," said M's captain as he programmed the number thirty-six into his cerebrations. "Twenty years ago a man couldn't do that," the operations sergeant philosophized. "And ten years from now there'll be planes, they'll do it at two thousand miles an hour!" - -"Wow!" said M's first sergeant, the three leaders at last putting their faith in this shrinking planet and summoning Morton downstairs in midafternoon, giving him a three day pass to Fort Worth. Arriving there in time for dinner and taking his librarian mother for an evening stroll, Morton had reported to her that he was leaving to Vietnam and to bury him in a silver coffin with a pea-green velvet lining if he should die. - -"How you talk!" his mother had replied, but Morton had gone pleasantly on, never supposing that his death while a teen-ager was a prospect that he might reasonably be peeved about, as well as routinely concerned with. He said to tell the funeral parlor no shoes, but to consign him to his grave in his black one-button continental suit, a black dyed carnation in its lapel, his white ruffled formal shirt, and a black bow-tie around his neck, against which Demirgian was now snapping a rubber band two feet long. - -"Oh! how you talk!" Morton's mother had said. - -"Now, where did you get that?" Morton asked Demirgian. - -"Where do you think I got it? From a rubber tree," Demirgian answered, indicating a trunk from out of which a putty-colored grue was rather disturbingly oozing—for that's what the "sycamores" were, rubber trees, and M's new bosky home was a rubber plantation: and the Vietnamese in the village tapped the trees, providing American automobile drivers with rubber tires and killing American lieutenant-colonels evenings. - -In this and every Army battalion there are three companies, and M was in Vietnam to help bring all three to strength. After willing his $10,000 benefit to his father, Morton was sent to one company, Demirgian to another, Williams, who didn't like boa constrictors or foxhole brims, to a third—M, in whose warm plasma each of its little coagula had felt eternally cared for, M was being pulled apart like a taffy-ball by some unconcerned clerk-typist. New boys at the boarding school, girls at the "get-acquainted" dance on the lonely squeaking chairs, strangers in a strange land, M's quiet privates went to their sunless bunkers one by one. The old soldiers laughed—how they laughed, they doubled up, they tummy-clutched, they looked at M's name-tags and har-har-harred. "Hey Sullivan! You an Irishman?" - -" … Yes." - -"You better be with a name like Sullivan! Har har har! And your name: Demon?" - -" … Demirgian." - -"Virgin? Your name is Virgin? Har har har!" Above, with a noise like a loud flapping sail, a grey-green helicopter with a red cross on its breast was flying by. "Hey look! There come a few more bodies in! Har har har." - -"Har har har. I guess he is really hauling one!" - -"One my ass! Har har har!" - -And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep. The old-timers were not being cruel on purpose. Half a year—they'd been in Vietnam one half year, they'd walked, they'd walked, there'd be a mine, the Oklahoma private they'd given their Cration cookie to was dead, and they'd walked further: and these (of course) were the empty jungle boots that M was filling. This afternoon the old-timers had given themselves a rest, they'd been to the Vietnamese village and risen to their state of high hilarity, forgetting themselves beneath the corrugated roofs. They hadn't brought home filth—far from it, they'd brought back laundry, but they'd had Bamouiba beers at the plywood tables and they'd escaped reality by playing the cavaliers with the civilian sex: with Vietnamese girls who were whores, perhaps, with betel-black laundry ladies, with peanut, pop, and Bamouiba vendors, but mostly with the smooth-skinned Vietnamese children, who giggled and tweaked their ears, transcending thoughts of war. A source of innocent but intoxicating merriment. - -"Girlsan: this beer warm. No good! Number ten!" Colloquy between the two great cultures of Vietnam is held neither in Vietnamese, as the Americans imagine, or in English, as the Vietnamese infer. The two converse in pidgin Japanese, where san is mister or miss and ichiban is number one—the best. "Girlsan: beer number ten!" - -"Beer number one! You number ten!" - -"And you babysan of Ho Chi Minh." - -"No Ho Chi Minh! He number ten! Number one thousand! You dien cai dau," real Vietnamese meaning loco in the coco. - -"Girlsan, I no dinky dow! You dinky dow … " the merry old soldiers going back to their workaday world in the early evening in that unaccustomed euphoria that M had felt so bullied by. - -"Monday you come laundry?" some of the girls in the Vietnamese village had asked them. - -"No. Monday we go Michelin plantation," some of the veterans had answered. - -"Number one!" some of the girls had declared. - -Monday morning for thirty gay minutes, for the first time in its corporate history, M could experience pleasant weather. The temperature at M's altitude was 70, and through the sides of its swift helicopters there came one of those summer-in-a-sports-car and hair rumpling breezes. With its whole silent battalion and three battalions more, M was in combat clothes and being lifted out toward the Michelin rubber plantation, a forest where the communists, all busy little beavers, had been whittling bamboo stakes for several days, dipping them in buffalo dung, urinating on them, putting them in punji pits, in foot traps, in mad little Batman traps in trees, whiz! out of bushes, pop! out of ferns—aargh! and burying mines, and hiding grenades, and step on the wires and "Look out!" grinning old Foley had told M back in its infantry training, two weeks earlier, "Look out! here it comes! five whole gallons of flaming gasoline!" Through some diabolical means, the communists at the Michelin plantation had learned of the Operation the week before, although it was classified SECRET. - -M, in its pleasant helicopters, would have a few tricks itself, mainly a new black nasty-looking rifle with a bullet that was a real terror, it tumbled end over end in flight. Sunday afternoon, Demirgian's squad sergeant held one between his thumb and index finger, gazing at it long and philosophically—Hamlet, in some unwritten scene, contemplating his bare bodkin. "This … " the sergeant had soliloquized, "this but a small little old job here. But it bring nothing but death," turning it with his thumb, thinking, a real sensible bullet, thinking of the skinny blue-tick hound that his uncle in Louisiana dog-hunted with: a real sensible hound, his uncle had declared, whenever it treed a raccoon it would circle round the trunk, the coon couldn't escape. "This job," the squad sergeant had continued, "it might make two or three circles in you 'fore it comes out. Hit you in the 'tomach, liable to come out the top of you' head. Charlie now, he'll do anything he can to get this weapon. He'll risk one hundred men just to get one of these weapons." - -Well. That is just peachy-keeno, Demirgian had thought, though he also caught himself thinking, Yeah? Let him just try. Demirgian's whole wild imagination had never foreseen a sergeant quite like his. The man was a Negro, short, with a chest like a sousaphone. In his teeth, which had gold veneering, with little hearts and stars of enamel flirtatiously peeking through, he was always clenching half a cigar, Demirgian had never seen his sergeant with one whole virgin cigar. Besides his drooping black moustache he had a tuft of scruffy Hassidic hair on his left cheek, keep it—it's lucky, his grandma had pleaded when he was three, and though the other kids had called him Fuzzy-face and Army officers had blanched, Demirgian's fabulous sergeant wouldn't shave it away. His real name was Gore—Sergeant Gore. - -"Okay," he had told Demirgian's squad the afternoon before the Operation, - -"What this is suppose' be about is getting off the 'copter. Run five meters and drop, because we don' want nobody getting hit by the 'peller. Get out and 'sperse. The first five minutes you can't hear nothing 'cept pop! pop! pop! flying over you' head. If anybody hit, just don' get panic' and jump up because then you'll get hit worser. Just yell medic. Just be cool, cool as you can, cool and calm, don' get shook up and crack up, just be cool," Sullivan biting his nails, Demirgian with eight yellow straws in his busy fingers intently weaving a place mat. "Okay, something else. Now we been talking to Colonel Smoke. He say, infantryman like a rabbit. If you catch a rabbit don' throw him in a briar patch because that's his home. So when we're in the woods, Smoke say that's our home. So we goin' take our toothpaste, we goin' take our shaving cream, shave like we do at home. Now when we come back. When we come back Smoke say to put on rank," for everyone from M was automatically a PFC. "Me, I'm goin' find myself another kind of stripes, because those yellow stripes, Charlie see those he's goin' say, I'm goin' get me a buck sergeant. But when we come back we got sewing to do. … " - -… The trees became larger, the brown ground was closer, slowly M's helicopters were coming down. Even without its black rifles to carry, M had a real baggage problem: everyone wore his ammunition pouches, two canteens, a shovel to make foxholes with, a gas mask, a pack—on his pack suspenders, like boutonnieres, he had hand grenades, while each of the veterans had cigarettes or toilet tissues under a strap on his steel helmet, where they wouldn't get soggy crossing the streams. Yoshioka, by act of God an assistant machine gunner, had three incredible links of bullets pendulating from his neck to his kneecaps, he looked like Wonga the king of Tonga in his boar's-tooth beads. Demirgian had an outstanding canteen cup: he had been issued it after a week of his drinking coffee from a pan, where it sloshed around like a strange dark lunar sea, he was ignorant that it was collapsible, though, and he'd hung the cumbersome thing over his belt buckle at a mendicant angle, give to the Salvation Army. In his backpack Demirgian had a can of Old Spice Shaving Cream. Sullivan had Rise mentholated and Macleans Toothpaste. Neither of these infantrymen had Jade East or Brut. Morton had Palmolive and "Get down!" said Sergeant Gore. The helicopters took off again and Demirgian found himself lying on a patch of hard dry dirt in a flat field. He was thinking, I guess this is a rice paddy, the first he had ever observed—anyhow, it was surely no rubber plantation. Ha ha! the whole secret Operation order had been a trick, it was a subterfuge and Smoke himself hadn't been set straight till the evening before. M wasn't anywhere near the Michelin funland, in keeping with a truly secret order it was twelve merciful miles to the south, hooray for the American Army (author's note). - -"Damn! Damn! Damn! I've lost a platoon," Demirgian's normally serene captain was hurrying by and muttering, but he meant that he had misplaced it, nothing dire. If truth be told, the communists were so surprised by the Operation's popping out of the floor like a Punch and Judy puppet in this unadvertised place—so taken by surprise they weren't even there, and Demirgian had nobody to shoot at—nobody did. Sunshine shone. Barn swallows darted about. Really the invasion area was quite picnicky: a big warm waffle, a lot of dried-out paddies lying in a square grid of grassy dikes, one or two feet high. Demirgian was sitting at the angle where two such dikes crossed and thinking, so … ? when do we do something? Destiny's abandoned child, he happened to be just where abscissa and ordinate intersected, where x=o and y=o and all the forces and fortunes of war canceled out to just about nothing. On all sides of Demirgian, including up, episodes of some interest seemed to be entering history's pages, but coming between them and Demirgian was a consistent half a mile of insignificant and insulating space. Half a mile beneath Demirgian, who could say? Maybe some little red imps were sticking their spears in real communists. Half a mile above him, Smoke, the Negro battalion commander, was sitting in his private helicopter and circling clockwise, looking for a lost platoon. "Goddamit," Smoke could hear Demirgian's captain say on his field radio, referring to the platoon's young lieutenant, "he got on the wrong lift!" - -"That son of a bitch," Smoke replied. "He has his head up his ass and locked," turning to his left and telling his pilot, Fu Manchu, to keep on circling—well, the helicopter pilot certainly looked like Fu, his head had been shaved bald, his black moustache hung to below his chin. He was a warrant officer. - -Half a mile back of Demirgian's tranquil oasis, the battalion's operations officer was sitting on a carton of C-rations and spinning the knobs of his radio to inquire about some horrifying noises that carried across the sizzling paddies from the cavalry troop half a mile to Demirgian's right. At last the officer radioed to Smoke, half a mile above Demirgian, "All that activity is recon by fire," meaning that the wags in the cavalry had ridden to some astonished Vietnamese village in their thirty-five-thousand-pound horses and were firing into it with 50-caliber machine guns, the bullets as big as hot dogs, great big Oldenburg pop-art bullets, this being the cavalry's rip-roaring way of ascertaining if any communists resided there—if so, they'd doubtless return fire. With prudence, the other Vietnamese, householders would have toddled away. Half a mile to Demirgian's left, in a village whose ten or a dozen skedaddled families had been succeeded by Morton's company, Bigalow, now wearing a black-and-white PIO on his arm, public information office, was sitting beneath a shady poncho and lunching with a girl whose camouflaged helmet wore a lovely nest of red bougainvillea blossoms. Bigalow offered her some C-rations. - -"No thanks, I'm not having any," the girl replied prettily, not wishing to eat until the cool of the afternoon—the temperature was in the 100's. - -"Uh … where do you live?" Bigalow asked her. - -"I've a little villa in Saigon," she answered, giving Bigalow a sisterly smile. She said her name was Beverly Deepe, of the New York Herald-Tribune. - -Not far away, Morton was burning down Vietnamese houses, having been asked to. "Stop burning those houses!" Smoke yelled into his radio, hitting the ceiling (the plexiglass, rather) half a mile above Demirgian's helmet. Fu was still flying him in a clockwise circle, his motionless hand on the cyclic stick, his whiskers becoming frowzy in the breeze and his thoughts going, ugh, I'll have to paste 'em down with Mexican moustache wax tonight, well, it was better than gasoline-resistant helicopter grease, which he had used for four months. "Stop burning those houses!" Smoke cried to his captains. "There's no VC in those houses!" The captains told their lieutenants, don't burn those houses if there's no VC in them—the lieutenants told their sergeants, if you burn those houses there better be VC in them—the sergeants told their men, better go burn those houses because there's VC's in them, and Morton kept striking his C-ration matches. Or something or other—anyhow, soon there wasn't a Vietnamese farmhouse that wasn't just a layer of smoldering black dust. - -Bored old Demirgian was still waiting on orders. Half a mile in front of him, something extraordinary happened in Williams' company, there was a gunshot! bang! and a young boy named Higdon started to bleed. "Sergeant, I've shot myself," Higdon said to his squad leader—he was truly mortified. - -"What have you did?" the sergeant cried, but Higdon, his hot pistol still in his inexperienced hand, had almost fainted. - -"Dust-off! This is three-zero!" the excited operations officer cried into his radio from his C-ration carton half a mile behind Demirgian's relaxed back. "Dust-off!" meaning the red-crossed helicopter, "Dust-off, that is the location there! Over!" When the helicopter had landed noisily half a mile in front of Demirgian's very eyes, a gentle medic put Higdon on board and a correspondent for Stars and Stripes interviewed the operations officer. - -"A sniper?" - -"Well, a bullet." - -Seconds later, thirty degrees cooler, his bleeding stanched, pale Higdon was being lifted to the field hospital, and Higdon's mimeographed form was being sped to the dusty division camp. There the facts and figures bearing on his misadventure were brought into an air-conditioned Army trailer as dark as a refrigerator room and translated into neo- Babylonian cuneiform on a white IBM card, which then was sacrificed to the only IBM accounting machine in any of this planet's combat areas, the pride of M's division. A wan custodian tapping the icy-blue START button, the IBM machine began to whirr, chewing up twenty-five casualties every ten seconds and typing a current catalog of their curricula vitae in alphabetical order on paper as wide as piano rolls. Higdon's cool little card was just two seconds from the IBM machine's teeth as whirr, the machine typed, - -HICKMAN DALLAS E SGT -followed by a bleak row of code numbers whose tale was that Hickman had been slightly wounded, that he was single and lived in Ohio. Then, Higdon's card was a second away and whirr went the frigid machine, typing, - -HICKMAN DALLAS E SGT -this version of Hickman's misfortune insisting that he had been killed, that he was married and lived in the hills of West Virginia. Whirr, went the IBM machine, above it a chilly little sign, "Talk about confusion! Did ya' ever have one of those crazy days when everything goes right?" Whirr, and it swallowed Higdon in one frosty bite. - -HIGDON FRED S JR PFC -it typed, with a row of shivering numbers to say that Higdon was wounded in a part of his body other than his head, torso, arms, or legs (it was Higdon's foot). Then the air conditioned machine typed WHA, meaning wounded—hostile action, and even before the mighty Operation had ended, Higdon, still in his hospital, his other wrapped in white bandages, was awarded the purple heart by the direction of President Johnson. - -And! And there sat Demirgian at the dead center of this campaign, the calm eye of that whirlwind, the omphalos of all events, cleaning his fingernails. If anything, Demirgian felt a bit foolish—from where he sat, every disparity between this Operation and another dull training exercise was adventitious, the principal shade of difference was it wasn't snowing. Reaching between his scratchy combat shirt and his T-shirt, Demirgian pulled out Saturday's Stars and Stripes, and sitting back against his dikes he read, - -About a mile from the headquarters the MP swerved his -truck to avoid a taxi and crashed into a shop, killing a -woman and injuring two children. -Demirgian read, - -"I believe it is now too late for disagreement as to whether -we should be in South Vietnam," Stennis said in a Senate -speech. -Demirgian read, - -Ky is turning out to be a better premier than U.S. and -Vietnamese officials expected. -Demirgian read, - -Dagwood, guess what—Pauline is going to marry Richard. -Demirgian read, - -But in common decency, widder—yo' oughta mourn yore -husbin fo' at least a week!! Yo'd give a dog that courtesy!! -A roach!! -Then, into the midst of his current-events class came Sergeant Gore. "Let's move," he said, and Demirgian got to his tingling feet, telling himself, there's the Army, hurry up and wait! Demirgian moved a mile and he dug himself a foxhole—all this was Monday. - -Tuesday, Demirgian lay under his rubber poncho outside of his ragged foxhole, listening to two friends gripe. "Damn," said a specialist-four, a boy whose modernistic rank was equal to corporal, "We've got to sew those stripes on once we're back." - -"And," said a sergeant, "we're not allowed to sew them, we've got to stitch' them." - -"What do you mean, what's the difference?" - -"Well, sew is by hand. Stitch is by machine." - -"What do you mean, where do we get machines?" - -"We don't, that's the thing. We've got to stitch them by hand. … " - -That same Tuesday, Sullivan was assigned to KP, serving a bird colonel medium rare roast beef and pouring him grapefruit juice—and that was Tuesday. - -Wednesday, Demirgian walked into an ambush. No! no one in this battalion ever is ambushed, it had been shown syllogistically by Smoke! One: an ambush is unexpected— two: in this battalion we expect anything—three: it stands to reason that no one in this battalion is ambushed! Still, when one fierce communist company opened up on Demirgian with rifles, carbines, machine guns, recoilless rifles, grenades, and rifle grenades from behind some evergreen trees and people commenced bleeding and dying all about him, Demirgian was—may we say surprised? Surprised, then. Demirgian had started that day by shaving, brushing his teeth in his GI canteen water, and climbing aboard an APC: in combat, an APC being scarcely what it was in training, in the States. There it was a pill, an aspirin-phenacetin-caffeine pill, an all-purpose capsule such as the wise young medic had prescribed when Scotty had reported in for sick call with a temperature reading of 108 degrees. The medic had diagnosed Scotty's complaint as a case of holding his Winston cigarette against his thermometer in the hopes of being excused from training that wintry day, and he had laughingly given Scotty an APC, the medicinal kind. Scotty, incidentally, had never got close to combat. Thwarted in his wish to dance with Hawaii's lulu girls, he had thrown himself from an Army airplane the very morning the Operation had begun, Scotty having gone to Georgia to become a paratrooper instead of a straight-leg soldier in the Far East. - -No, an APC wasn't a pill but an armored personnel carrier, a crazy tank-like truck that the cavalry used to carry infantrymen over the paddies. Demirgian's idle platoon, six of it from M, had been attached to the cavalry this Wednesday morning, and standing in these fabulous steel Conestoga wagons it had driven east to a jungle that the playful cavalrymen knew as Sherwood forest, the same evergreen woodland where Charlie's rifle company lay in ambush, as dumb coincidence would have it. The temperature was in the 100's and clouds were few, the water on some of the paddies daintily reflecting them, a Fragonard effect. Once when their APC's passed by some yellow Vietnamese houses where a sniper or two mightn't inconceivably lurk, the prudent cavalrymen paused and burned the pathetic little hamlet down, an act that any American whose heart goes out to the homeless will censure with a vehemence that is proportional to his range from the houses in question. Demirgian joined in with gusto, throwing his hand grenades into the thatch. Far from seeing this as senseless, Demirgian's inevitable GI point of view was, finally! finally he could do something with a clear bearing on America's war effort, clear in a physical sense if hazy around the edges in the sense of grand strategy. Demirgian might now be a wolf on the fold, but a mickey-mouser, that he joyfully wasn't. His patriotic duties done, Demirgian read a copy of Stars and Stripes as the APC rolled on. His chariot had a steel skin and black rubber tractor treads as tough as an old bull elephant's foot, yellow straw stuck in the tiny cracks. Its scowling driver sat amid steel and watched the paddies through a guess what? periscope, and a brawny cavalry sergeant with a talcum of brown dust on his cheeks stood at that Oldenburg machine gun, two burly hands on its wooden handles, thumbs on its trigger. Coming near Sherwood forest, the cavalrymen told Demirgian to walk ahead with his black rifle to protect the APC. - -Walking with his platoon toward the opaque forest, the APC's snug as a bug in a rug behind him, Demirgian was reminded of the poem by Robert Frost, Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, good infantry tactics, that. Credit a white puppy with saving Demirgian's life. Frightened by this rowdy cavalry column, it ran from behind a haystack and along the evergreens, hippity-hop on its spindly legs, the sergeant who didn't look forward to stitching shouting, "Hey! Look at that damn dog!" and Demirgian's whole teen-aged platoon opening fire, everything it had. Bang, in a leg, then leaping, landing, stumbling along on its other three, with a bang bang bang the doggie died. Having all been reared in poor Asian villages where to waste meant to want, the communist troops in the underbrush could not conceive of a land so lavishly endowed that it had treasure to spare against man's best friend. Assuming this mighty barrage was meant for themselves, the communists began to return fire before Demirgian had walked over the last little paddy-dike into their killing zone. When the bullets started coming at him with their slapping sounds, Demirgian was—surprised. No such thing had happened to him before. Oh, the Arab boys in Lebanon had thrown stones and dirty Doug in his shop mathematics class had missed Demirgian with an iron chair, he was in fistfights sometimes but rifles? machine guns? slap? slap? slap? never. Demirgian had never seen honest-to-God communists until now—in fact he still didn't, peer as he might into the dense woods, the source of this infernal racket. "Get your ass down" the stitching sergeant screamed and Sullivan, lying behind the dike and thinking, not at all frenziedly, will I see Pam again? or Debbie, for that matter, thinking detachedly and tugging on Demirgian's gas-mask bag insistently tried to bring Demirgian to earth, but sturdy Demirgian kept standing there amid the slap! the horsewhip sounds like Washington crossing the Delaware, curious and desirous to see some flesh in that jungle to fire his black rifle at. Some soldiers Demirgian knew seemed to be dead already: a medic was dead, another friend was mortally wounded, neither had been in M company. The cavalry lieutenant was lying down, a bullet that the ghostly communists had aimed at his chest having struck his Star of David with the force of a battering-ram, a novel intercession. Another of those enemy poltergeists sent a bullet through a sergeant's helmet with an ear-shattering ping-g, in here, out there, the helmet ripping apart like a wet paper bag, the bullet missing the sergeant's head, strangely enough. - -Slap! Slap! Slap! like a violent bit of applause or a vicious swipe at an insect. Demirgian aside, M was lying on its stomachs back of the knee-high dikes: out of the fire and into the frying pan, as it were. But here in M's grassy asylum, the celebrated effects of a baptism of fire, a cold sweat, a heart like a kettledrum, an unreliable sphincter, a shrinking-in of the nerves like a jellyfish pulling up its tentacles—the legendary symptoms were all surprisingly mild. The truth is that M had never had quite the imagination to conceive of itself as dead, a deficit of imagery that one more month in Vietnam was to partially redress. Demirgian's surplus of imagination came to the same thing, and amid these dangerous slapping sounds it carried him beyond fears of dying to fantasies of wondrously surviving. Paying no heed to the stitching sergeant's lonely cries of "Get your ass down," Demirgian's stubborn inquisitiveness now turned to his right to the mystifying clouds of purple which came out of his fatherly platoon sergeant. By chance, a bullet hitting that old sergeant's shoulder had also ignited a purple signal flare on his suspenders, and while Demirgian's platoon sergeant was taking off these flashy suspenders, slap! another bullet went through his heart and he died. A soldier crawled to him crying, "Hey! Doc!" but that soldier was shot as well. By then Demirgian had learned how valor and discretion needn't be incompatible and he had gotten down behind his dike, a good soldier obeying orders who still hadn't seen a communist. From time to time he raised himself to peer or to fire his rifle with a hopeful bang! into the forest—at what, Demirgian kneweth not. - -In this way, Demirgian came to appreciate the eerie nature of his generation's war. On many, most of the veterans in Vietnam, one will discern an uneasy flitting of the eyes or an irresolute twitch at the corners of the mouth, it testifies how they've been a year in the field boxing shadows, taking up arms against a sea of unseen essences, locked in mortal combat with an insubstantial Kafkan vapor—that battle to the death, an act whose only redeeming virtue had been to make ordinary Roman men into heroes, now makes men bewildered little Wozzecks instead. When silver airplanes started to divebomb the trees, Demirgian could only lie behind his dike observing a colony of black termites eating a grey beetle. Taking his insect repellent from his pants pocket, Demirgian directed a fine needle spray at one of these conspicuous enemies of man, a termite who stopped in the midst of its verminous meal to look at Demirgian bug-eyed. Its shower bath continuing the termite turned and fled to Demirgian's right, oblivious of the super sabre jets that now dove in from there to drop their bombs with a spherical boom on the terrified evergreen trees. You dumb bunny, Demirgian said to his termite, you're trying to get away from the stuff and it's all over you, the dizzy little pismire at last giving way to panic and falling over a precipice two inches high, out of its misery. Boom! As the silver bombers kept giving the vegetable kingdom a ruthless beating, a curious grey-green caterpillar happened along, and Demirgian squashed it with a brown twig while he said to that aborted butterfly, Well—survival of the fittest and you're not fit. Boom! Boom! Boom! Well behind Demirgian, a Vietnamese in black pajamas emerged from a haystack running in panic to Demirgian's left, his arms in the skies signaling, I surrender, and when an enraged cavalryman with a steel machete tried to wreak his vengeance on this anthropomorphous raw material a more self-collected boy rescued him. Taken prisoner, the Vietnamese was found to be nothing more nefarious than a scared farmer of sixty-four reverend years. His name is Nguyen Van Mang. - -By now Charlie's spooky rifle company had spirited itself away, the first mellow boom of the dive bombers apparently being the cock's crow. Demirgian's unique Negro sergeant rose to his feet saying, "Let's get back to the 'PC," and from then on Wednesday had no worse sounds to offer M than a single hoarse but hyperbolical scream, I'm wounded! It arose from a boy whose neolithic jaw, a counterweight for some unseen bascule bridge, had kept his mouth irremediably open as he raced to the APC and tripped over a paddy-dike, biting his lip. - -"Is it bleeding?" he cried as M rode bumpily and blissfully back to its foxholes, Sullivan eating a C-ration fruit cake, Demirgian doing the puzzle page in the Junction City Union. "Nya-a!" showing them his uninteresting wound. - -That night in their welcome holes, the hard-bitten veterans of M company, hale and moderately hearty and happy at how little scared they'd been, listened to their transistor radios as the armed forces station made its very first mention of the Operation: contact had been sporadic and US casualties light, the station said. And then the DJ played jazz—and that was Wednesday. - -Thursday, Williams, the gentle Florida periscope operator, achieved immortality of sorts: he really saw a communist, large as life and twice as spunky, an experience that no other trooper in M's alert battalion was to enjoy throughout this Operation. This special communist was staring at Williams from a bush no farther than the other side of a pingpong table, staring at him down the grey barrel of a rifle, in fact. "Ho!" Williams shouted in consternation: but to begin at the beginning. - -On Thursday, Demirgian's deserving platoon had given itself a siesta as Williams' company and Morton's company walked through the dark jungle of Sherwood forest, slow going, all sorts of tangly things, little red ants, their mission being to destroy Charlie's source of strength: the communist stores of rice. Every time Williams' snail paced friends came to one in the underbrush they burned it—two or three tons of this brown, riverlike stuff could keep Charlie's battalion marching on its stomach a week, the idea being. A gay little Vietnamese soldier was along to sanction any or all burnings or blowings up, first having satisfied himself that the rice in each cache was truly communist, the soldier having been trained in this mystic art. Once as their machetes cut through the vegetation, Williams' slow-gaited friends came to a stock of Vermont like maple candy in laundry-soap sized bars. But being in a cave it just wouldn't burn. An inventive sergeant began to throw the sugary stuff to the ants—but no, too, time consuming. Hand grenades? Now he had maple sugar with holes. Nausea-inducing gas? Nothing doing, it might be against the Geneva convention. At last the patient sergeant radioed the Army engineers, who blew up the maple candy with TNT. Bigalow was on this safari in his flack capacity, a story! he told himself, but he guessed that he couldn't write it, a public-information sergeant having told him no such predatory doings would pass Army censorship. "You're not going to win friends among Vietnamese farmers," Bigalow's sergeant had explained. - -Even with machetes, moving through this jungle was like searching a big attic closet on a summer morning, old moist bathrobes drawing across one's face and rusty clothes hangers snagging in one's hair, corrugated cardboard beneath one's feet. Furthermore, in this wildwood there were snipers around shooting at people, a rustling in the leaves and a slap! But what really bedeviled Williams' and Morton's companies as they pushed along weren't their human enemies but ants, little red ants which hadn't seen juicy Westerners in a quarter century, even the French army hadn't dared go to this treacherous place. Morton would tell himself, Oh—! here comes another one, as still another cackling ant threw itself out of the foliage onto his neck, and Morton would roll it off with sweating fingers, his black rifle in his other hand, pressing it to instant death. Morton would feel guilty about his extraordinary acts of self-assertiveness; a Baptist, he didn't think God set anything on this earth without having His reason, maybe in little red ants there was a liquid to cure malaria, cancer, doctors would find it some day, Morton piously believed. At night he would justify his steady slaughter by telling himself, it shouldn't make any difference—there were so many of them. He would remonstrate with Russo, the sixteen-year-old desperado who swore that if he had been in those insect infested woods that day (he hadn't, he had fainted from the heat)—that he would cry, "Die!" to every ant he butchered, laughing like Mephistopheles. Morton would smile at Russo tolerantly, saying that all God's ants should be killed with kindness. - -Bigalow—now Bigalow was a soldier first, a PIO reporter second, and squeezing his ants between his thumb and index finger he mechanically cast their lifeless bodies to the jungle floor. But as Bigalow inched along he also speculated whether there mightn't be a story in them, How to Kill Ants, by PFC Vaughan A. Bigalow. He thought, One way is to throttle your ant by pushing a grain of sand into its throat with a toothpick. A second way … a microscopic punji pit, a careless ant expiring horribly on the point of a pin. In practice Bigalow killed his ants conventionally: indifferently, paying no mind to their dying agonies while he walked along with the friend who once had twitted him about his ball-point pen, I stabbed! I stabbed! I stabbed! "Bigalow," the boy remembered in this incongruous place, "tell Dubitsky he owes me five dollars." - -"All right," said Bigalow, slapping a neck-ant. - -"And Bigalow. You've got a pair of my khakis." - -"You're right," said Bigalow, dropping his dead ant down. - -"And Bigalow? If the captain doesn't get us out of here, you can have the other pair, too." - -But Williams—! It never occurred to Williams' gentle mind to kill these ants: if one of them bit he just brushed it off without taking his grim revenge. And such was Williams' nonbelligerent temper when he had that sudden brush with his Communist, a Vietnamese with a white shirt and hair—black hair, Williams would never forget his bushy hair. Resting in a little jungle hole, a gully, hearing a twig crack, turning around, Williams saw this black-haired intruder and shouted, "Ho," ducking instinctively into his hole. A bullet burned across his shoulder blade and Williams cried out, "Oh," burying his startled face in the dirt, holding his black rifle high above him like an African's spear, shooting it at the trees one-handed, bang! bang! bang! and crying, "Sergeant! sergeant! sergeant! come here!" My kingdom for a periscope! - -"What's the matter?" Williams' sergeant called and he hurried to this clamorous scene. - -"Keep shooting!" Williams shouted, doing exactly that, his face still plowing into the dirt. "I seed one!" - -"Where?" - -"Out there! He shot me," jerking his head up, spying the evergreen trees but no more black-haired communist. - -"Whereabouts?" - -"Here—in the shoulder!" - -"Nothing. Maybe a ricochet breezed across it." - -"Sergeant, that was no ricochet! I'm hit, I know I'm hit!" - -"Rock steady!" said Williams' unruffled sergeant. "You aren't hit, you've nothing to worry about, you're okay. Rock steady." - -Williams got dazedly to his feet and stared around. He told his sergeant, "Okay, I'll try." - -"Can you make it through the jungle?" - -"I'll try." - -But as Williams resumed his death march through the tangled vines, the tendrils plucking at his shoulders, pulling at his feet, he feared to see that black-haired man staring at him from every bush, he imagined the vines to be black hair, black hair to be condensing from the shadowy air. Red ants fell on Williams' sleeve, and Williams dully brushed them off, I get through this I'm never going back—never! - -His black-haired nemesis or someone else was shooting Americans all their arduous way through the forest, slap! and slap! killing two of them, wounding many. Coming to the bright paddies at last, Williams' friends were plenty mad at the communists—believe it! Taking their wild revenge, the irrepressible privates went through a yellow Vietnamese village like Visigoths, like Sherman's army, burning the houses, ripping the clothes, breaking the jars, the rice running out on the muddy floor, "I won't leave this to the goddam gooks!" One private shot himself a dog; when a sergeant yelled, "You're a real good goddam soldier" he only laughed. Somebody lit a lighter, "The lieutenant doesn't want you to," "F--- the lieutenant," the house was in black tongued flames. Somebody used a grenade launcher, there was nothing left. - -The following calm morning, Williams went along the foxholes to talk to his sergeant, a young-looking boy from the East. "Now, I don't want you to think I'm a comprehentious objector," Williams began, his sergeant taking him quietly aside. - -"Do you mean a com—conscientious objective?" - -"I don't want you to think I'm one of those. I'll do anything you want me to: except'n to kill somebody." - -"Well," said Williams' sergeant gently. "Don't you think you're giving up too easy?" - -"No, Serge, I've tried, I've tried, I've made up my mind. I haven't got it in me to kill, I found that yesterday." - -"Well, there ain't none of us wants to kill someone. But if it's something that's got to be done, somebody's got to do it, that's all." - -"Serge, I'm just no use in the jungle unless'n I can kill someone. I just ain't going back in the jungle—I just ain't going back." - -"Well, somebody got to go back in that jungle, Charlie ain't coming out," Williams' patient sergeant concluded. - -In the weeks after that at M's sylvan rubber plantation, the soft light slipping through the tall trees, the birds in the leaves, a monkey—the weeks after that, Williams' sergeant made sweet remonstrances, Williams' first sergeant made terrible threats, a court martial, six years at hard labor, a dishonorable discharge, but neither the stick nor carrot could change Williams' simple belief, kill or be killed was the law of that jungle and he wanted neither of them. "The spunkless wonder" his bitter lieutenant called him at dinner in the officers tent, thinking, he's selfish, he's unpatriotic, he says that he's scared—well, so everyone is scared, there's a war on, but Williams won't do his part! The lieutenant could tolerate this in the Vietnamese, but Williams—he was an American! - -An ambulance having been called for, Williams was taken to the rubber plantation's bright landing strip. Then a red-crossed helicopter and a second Army ambulance took him to the dusty, insufferably hot little tent where his division's psychiatrist sat, engrossedly patting a handkerchief on his sweat-soaked arms and elaborately folding it into quarters and sixteenths prior to his sliding it into his pants pocket. "Well, Williams? What's your problem?" the psychiatrist began. He was a redheaded captain. - -"I don't want no part of this killing people," Williams replied. - -"How did this come about?" Distantly the psychiatrist was thinking, autism— association—ambivalence—affect, the four signs of schizophrenia they had taught him at Colorado. One of those telltale a's—well, we're none of us perfect. Two of them, uh-oh, three of them, zap! a medical discharge for poor old psychotic Williams. - -Williams sat in a chair by the doctor's little desk, the same catty-corner furniture arrangement at which he had once sought work at the VC, the Virginia Carolina Mining Corporation, $1.97 an hour. All that Williams knew of psychiatrists he had acquired on television: he believed that his redheaded doctor would give him some bright-colored blocks to put together in two minutes, schizophrenia he hadn't heard of, three of those a's would be gibberish to Williams, association might mean the Knights of Pythias or the NAACP, neither of which he had joined. In all innocence he sat in that sweltering tent and answered the doctor's friendly questions. Williams' father had drowned. He had had headaches for a month after. He lived with his mother, but he had a girl. Kathernell was her name. He wanted to marry her, and someday he would. - -Ten minutes later the doctor wrote "No illness found" on Williams' mimeographed form and sent Williams back to his rifle company, where the captain made him a cook instead of a combat soldier and where he learned to mix water, flour, lard, and dark brown gravy base to make gravy. - -But back to Friday of the Operation. - -Friday the long awaited happened—M's battalion killed somebody, at last. "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" wild-eyed sergeants had cried to M in training, in America. "To kill!" M had learned to shout fiercely back. "The enemy is dedicated—he won't scare away," old Smoke, its battalion commander, had said to M, eyes aflame. "You've got to kill him." And on Friday morning M inevitably killed, doing its climactic job with mixed feelings, one understands, some of its soldiers queasy in the presence of waxy death, some of them impassive. M had guessed it would be this way—in training camp, Hofelder would think of a communist running at him savagely, he had asked himself, could I really kill him? but a buddy of Hofelder's had simply laughed, saying, "Shucks. I'm me and he's he," meaning that if I kill a fellow that is his worry, not mine. The episode was again the doing of Demirgian's platoon, again it had climbed on those hot APC's and had driven bump—bounce—bump to Sherwood forest and beyond, burning more yellow houses as it went. In actual fact, the cavalry's big lieutenant-colonel had given his captains the order, insure that positive identification be made: a sniper in the house destroy it, otherwise spare it. But through the iteration of imperatives and abolition of qualifiers and a wise apprehension that the colonel couldn't be serious, his order had been almost unrecognizable when it got through channels to Demirgian's Sergeant Gore. Gore had heard the order as, "Kill everything. Destroy everything. Kill the cows, the pigs, the chickens—everything." - -"Well, sir. You can't destroy everything," Gore had told the glum second lieutenant who relayed this. - -"That's what the cavalry said," the lieutenant had answered unenthusiastically. - -"Sir, I won't kill the women and children," Gore had told him. - -But as their APC's rolled by the doomed villages, there were no women or children to be seen, men neither—they'd fled. The burly cavalrymen and Demirgian's platoon had been traveling since seven—weird, Sullivan thought as the morning got hotter, observing that his steel vehicle was always in sunshine, never in shade, although there were scores of small white sheep-clouds in the blue above him: a Vietnamese weather mystery. But the wonder of wonders was Demirgian. An unaccustomed competence seemed to have stolen across Demirgian's appearance: his eyes level, his rifle at a steady angle of attack, he even reminded one of that paragon of infantrymen that had been painted like a rampant lion on each of their training camp's objets d'art, even on the insides of teacups at the officers mess. Wednesday had satisfied Demirgian's romantic heart, it had confirmed Demirgian's faith: if he didn't stand in lines but stayed in cavalry columns, if he didn't shoulder a rifle to salute with but to shoot with, ah! then the American Army needn't be closed to life's grander moments. Getting into the spirit of his fierce orders, Demirgian shot at a water buffalo and heartily fired tracers into the yellow haystacks to kindle them. Newman, M's old philosophical alligator stalker, climbed from his APC to ignite one yellow farmhouse, but since he had seen distant women and children running from it one minute before, Newman had serious doubts about his task. He said to his sergeant, "Now, why do this? They'll just build another tomorrow," but really Newman was thinking, I burn their house, that'll just make them communists, won't it? Smoke himself had asserted so. Still, Newman obeyed his orders, using his Army matches, closing the cover before striking them, the cover inscribed, "Where liberty is, there is my home—Benjamin Franklin," the apocalypse drove on. - -Then it was that the incident happened. A cavalryman, seeing a sort of bunker place, a hut above, hole below, and hearing some voices inside it, told Demirgian to throw a grenade in. Dermirgian hesitating, -----, a soldier we have met before, though not by name, jumped from his APC and flipped in a hand grenade himself. It rolled through the door hitting a sort of earthen baffle before it exploded, and ----- gasped as ten or a dozen women and children came shrieking out in their crinkled pajamas: no blood, no apparent injuries, though, and ----- got onto his carrier again, it continued on. The next APC in the column, with Yoshioka aboard, drove up to this hovel, and a Negro specialist four, his black rifle in his hands, warily extended his head in, peering through the darkness one or two seconds before he cried, "Oh my god!" - -"What's the matter," said a second specialist, a boy on whose machine gun Yoshioka was assistant. - -"They hit a little girl" and in his muscular black arms the first specialist carried out a seven-year-old, long black hair and little earrings, staring eyes—eyes, her eyes are what froze themselves onto M's memory, it seemed there was no white to those eyes, nothing but black ellipses like black goldfish. The child's nose was bleeding—there was a hole in the back of her skull. - -"Sir," said a cavalry sergeant, his thumb on the press-to-talk switch of his olive drab radio, his captain on the line, "Sir, there's a little girl, a civilian girl, who is wounded. Can we have a dust-off?" The sergeant hoped for a helicopter to bring the gazing child to one of Vietnam's cluttered civilian hospitals, where the patients lie three to a bed with weird afflictions like missing arms and legs and holes in parts of their bodies. "Roger," said the cavalry captain, but then the seven-year-old shuddered and died. "Sir," said the cavalry sergeant, "the little girl died." - -"Roger," said the captain and the APC's moved on, pausing only for Yoshioka's machine gunner to give the other children chewing gum and to comfort the girl's mother as best he could, "We're sorry," the mother shaking her head embarrassedly as though to say please—it could happen to anyone, a piece of shrapnel sticking out of her shoulder; the medic gave her a bandage before he left. - -One doesn't doubt, in the many months to come M would see operations with a greater share of glory (and it would see many, the Army would need fifteen hundred operations as vast as this to cover all Charlie's territory, and Charlie might still be back the following evening)—more glorious operations, but this first Operation of M's had come to its melancholy close, and M's tired battalion was to kill, wound, or capture no other Vietnamese, communist or otherwise, estimated or actual, in the day-and-a-half remaining. Most of M was truly ashamed about the seven-year-old. A cavalry lieutenant had no misgivings, telling himself, these people don't want us here anyhow, why should I care about them?, a thought that he bitterly volunteered in conversation. In his innocent past, the lieutenant had gone through the empty-looking yellow Vietnamese villages without taking care to destroy them first, a man, a woman, a boy opening fire on him, killing one or two Americans, men for whose lives he was responsible. Vietnam had shown to the lieutenant's satisfaction the line where compassion must end, caution begin. - -Yoshioka had stood by the bunker watching the girl die. He felt no special affinity toward Asia's troubles, though he was Oriental and his mother had been at Hiroshima, but being an American he did like children—he turned away, his face waxily paralyzed. Life hadn't taught him to phrase his thoughts with any great felicity, and Yoshioka simply told himself his favorite vivid word and promised himself to think of other things. But that he couldn't do, for three Fridays later, jumping from a dusty Army truck, seeing a glistening wire between two bushes, declaring, quite phlegmatically, "There's a mine," a sergeant reaching his hand out to keep soldiers back, reaching his hand out, reaching his hand, reaching—three Fridays later in the black explosion Yoshioka was freakishly wounded the same way as that staring child. The sergeant who touched the trip wire was killed, the Negro who'd found the little girl was killed, M's old alligator hunter was pierced by the whistling pieces of steel and evacuated, and "Yokasoka's dead," soldiers were saying that night at their rubber plantation, still not getting his name right, not knowing how Yoshioka lay in a Saigon hospital marginally alive, huge Frankenstein stitches on his shaven head, his acne caked with blood, a hole in his throat to breathe through, bubbles between his lips, the soles of his feet a queer pale yellow, his head thrashing right and left as though to cry no-no-no, his hand slapping his thigh as though he'd heard some madcap story, a sheet around the bed frame to hold him in—a jar of clear liquid dripping into him, a brownish-yellow liquid dripping out, a PFC shooing the flies away and sucking things out of his throat hole with a vacuum machine, a modest Navajo nurse pulling the sheet up over his legs, a doctor leaning over him whispering, "Bob? You're in a hospital. You're going to be on your litter a while. You're going to be traveling some. First you'll be on a plane. … " - -It chanced that the bed next to Yoshioka's was a crib, inside it a stuffed red-polkadot puppy and a wide-eyed Vietnamese girl of two. Tiny white plaster casts like dinner candles kept her from picking her moist upper lip, where Yoshioka's gentle and good Samaritan doctor had operated to correct a cleft, an ugly defect since her birth. - -Saturday, the last scheduled day of the Operation and the fiftieth since the day when Milett had told M, "I've got a wife, three kids at home," Saturday, M had nothing to do but push little squares of cotton through its rifle barrels. Demirgian said, "I cleaned it yesterday," and with a specialist-four he sat cross-legged on the grass by his foxhole doing the crossword puzzle in Stars and Stripes, his curved back to the communists, if any. "Appellation of Athena. That's a good one," Demirgian murmured. - -"Room in a harem," the specialist countered softly. - -"Ten down?" Demirgian. - -"Nine down," the specialist. - -"Ten down is girl's name is Ann." - -"Nine down." - -"Nine down is room in a harem." - -"Like a bedroom? - -"Nine down is what?" Demirgian asked the elements. - -Sullivan sat reading The Unanswered Questions About President Kennedy's Assassination. Russo was lying down: his beloved bowie knife had vanished in the woods like Excalibur in the lake, Russo had heat exhaustion besides, and under a coconut tree he whispered to his friends his secret age, hoping they might betray him to the authorities. Morton sat in his foxhole and ate his C-rations, pleasantly asking his friends about why they burned Vietnamese houses—he felt funny about it. Friday morning Morton had asked a squad leader, "Sergeant, should I burn this house?" "Here, this'll help it," the sergeant had answered, giving him a jar of kerosene from the kitchen shelf. All right: an order's an order, Morton had accepted that, but then the sergeant had said, "That's enough," and Morton's disobedient friends had lazily stayed behind, burning the whole village to a tiny replica of Lidice—now, Morton was good-naturedly wondering why. His friends, all of them old-timers in Vietnam, guaranteed to Morton that he would be less studious of the sensitivities of Vietnamese after a few experiences of their trying to kill him. One of his friends said, "All these people, the VC come and take their brothers and fathers away, so if they've got family in the VC of course they'll be VC sympathizers." Another friend said, "Look at it this way. You burn their house, if they're not a VC now they'll be one later," by which he meant go ahead and burn it, a tight little circle of reasoning that made even Morton blink. A third of his friends said simply, "I burn because I hate. I hate Vietnam. I hate it because I'm here. I hate every house, every tree, every pile of straw and when I see it I want to burn it." He seemed surprised to learn that the rest of Morton's friends had intellectual reasons, as well. - -"Well," said Morton, laughing, "I guess in a few months I'll be burning houses too!" But that wasn't to happen. Because two weeks later, walking down a dusty road, there was a noise and Morton died, killed by one of Charlie's mines, his legs in the dirt at raggedy-ann angles, he seemed to have three or four legs. "We held divine memorial services in his honor," the Chaplain wrote to Morton's mother and father in Texas. "Many were the generous tears as we reflected upon this profound truth, - - -Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. -It may," the Chaplain wrote in his standard letter, "also be of comfort for you to remember that Billy was serving in a noble cause, helping good people to live in freedom here and all over the world. You remain in my prayers," the Chaplain wrote to Morton's parents, who buried him in his one-button suit. - -"Site of the Taj Mahal," the specialist-four was saying. - -"India! India!" Demirgian cried. - -"Too many letters," the specialist told him. Once they were through with the puzzle, they turned to the news and discovered a story on the Operation, several days old, on the front page. - -"Gee," Demirgian said, "I didn't think they'd write so much about this." - -"The division," the specialist said, reading out loud, "was in the midst of its biggest campaign of the Vietnam war, hey I didn't know that, after pouring thousands of troops into a rugged wooded area … " - -"Wooded!" Sullivan looked up and cried. - -"The battle-hardened division … " "Battle-hardened! Ha!" - -" … relying heavily on the element of surprise to catch a huge Vietcong force believed to be holing up in the district, launched its drive with lightning speed at daybreak Monday morning. Troops and tanks, along with armed personnel carriers, have swept into the area to close off the entire circle. Another force of troops is sweeping through the woods to the east. …" - -"Caught in the crossfire!" Sullivan cried, and M's merriment continued until a sergeant with three stripes above, two rockers below, striding up to this defense perimeter, told Demirgian's platoon to quit goofing and to police up the area around its foxholes. Out into no-man's-land Demirgian walked, telling himself that the Army is the Army is the Army … but thinking it with a newfound equanimity and getting himself an old C-ration peanut-butter lid, a C-ration chicken-and-noodles can, and an empty carton of Marlboro cigarettes that had been brutally ripped open, and some months later Demirgian was— - -Some months later, Sullivan was on orders to Saigon, by grace of God a guard in this American brothel. McCarthy was at the dusty division camp mixing dry martinis, and Williams was making gravy on the rubber plantation, wondering, why doesn't Kathernell write? Newman was still in the field hospital hunting his notional alligators. A convert to candor, Russo was in Yonkers with an honorable discharge, a marshal in the Memorial Day Parade, and Bigalow was Alabama-bound to learn to fly helicopters, $298.20. Prochaska was on the Riviera on three weeks' leave. Yoshioka was in California dazedly alive, and Morton was in Texas dead and buried, but Demirgian—Demirgian was still in his fighting squad, the general called it best in battalion, Demirgian was in for specialist four and likely he would make sergeant in 1966. While he still had seen no communists, neither had he met a Vietnamese who cared a fig about communists or a feather about his fighting them. On operations, Demirgian swung through the jungle on Tarzan vines, he gazed at the high yellow flames, he found the American Army good. Without any qualms he told himself, I'd like to burn the whole country down and start again with Americans. One fourth of Demirgian's tour of duty was safely over and done. diff --git a/tests/corpus/my-genome-my-self.md b/tests/corpus/my-genome-my-self.md deleted file mode 100644 index 7c108cdc5..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/my-genome-my-self.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,133 +0,0 @@ -My Genome, My Self -*The New York Times* -By Steven Pinker - -ONE OF THE PERKS of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for vocational interest (closest match: psychologist), intelligence (above average), personality (open, conscientious, agreeable, average in extraversion, not too neurotic) and political orientation (neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian). I have M.R.I. pictures of my brain (no obvious holes or bulges) and soon will undergo the ultimate test of marital love: my brain will be scanned while my wife’s name is subliminally flashed before my eyes. - -Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. The opportunity arose when the biologist George Church sought 10 volunteers to kick off his audacious Personal Genome Project. The P.G.P. has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits. - -The Personal Genome Project is an initiative in basic research, not personal discovery. Yet the technological advance making it possible — the plunging cost of genome sequencing — will soon give people an unprecedented opportunity to contemplate their own biological and even psychological makeups. We have entered the era of consumer genetics. At one end of the price range you can get a complete sequence and analysis of your genome from Knome (often pronounced “know me”) for $99,500. At the other you can get a sample of traits, disease risks and ancestry data from 23andMe for $399. The science journal Nature listed “Personal Genomics Goes Mainstream” as a top news story of 2008. - -Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. It could usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which drug regimens are customized for a patient’s biochemistry rather than juggled through trial and error, and screening and prevention measures are aimed at those who are most at risk. It opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance. - -The pitfalls of personal genomics have already made it a subject of government attention. Last year President Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, outlawing discrimination in employment and health insurance based on genetic data. And the states of California and New York took action against the direct-to-consumer companies, arguing that what they provide are medical tests and thus can be ordered only by a doctor. - -With the genome no less than with the Internet, information wants to be free, and I doubt that paternalistic measures can stifle the industry for long (but then, I have a libertarian temperament). For better or for worse, people will want to know about their genomes. The human mind is prone to essentialism — the intuition that living things house some hidden substance that gives them their form and determines their powers. Over the past century, this essence has become increasingly concrete. Growing out of the early, vague idea that traits are “in the blood,” the essence became identified with the abstractions discovered by Gregor Mendel called genes, and then with the iconic double helix of DNA. But DNA has long been an invisible molecule accessible only to a white-coated priesthood. Today, for the price of a flat-screen TV, people can read their essence as a printout detailing their very own A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s. - -A firsthand familiarity with the code of life is bound to confront us with the emotional, moral and political baggage associated with the idea of our essential nature. People have long been familiar with tests for heritable diseases, and the use of genetics to trace ancestry — the new “Roots” — is becoming familiar as well. But we are only beginning to recognize that our genome also contains information about our temperaments and abilities. Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life. - -Over the years I have come to appreciate how elusive the answers to those questions can be. During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me? - -As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed — and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time. Now I say that my formative years were a time of raging debates about the political implications of human nature, or that my parents subscribed to a Time-Life series of science books, and my eye was caught by the one called “The Mind,” or that one day a friend took me to hear a lecture by the great Canadian psychologist D. O. Hebb, and I was hooked. But it is all humbug. The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story. - -An obvious candidate for the real answer is that we are shaped by our genes in ways that none of us can directly know. Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life. - -This hardly seems radical — any parent of more than one child will tell you that babies come into the world with distinct personalities. But what can anyone say about how the baby got to be that way? Until recently, the only portents on offer were traits that ran in the family, and even they conflated genetic tendencies with family traditions. Now, at least in theory, personal genomics can offer a more precise explanation. We might be able to identify the actual genes that incline a person to being nasty or nice, an egghead or a doer, a sad sack or a blithe spirit. - -Looking to the genome for the nature of the person is far from innocuous. In the 20th century, many intellectuals embraced the idea that babies are blank slates that are inscribed by parents and society. It allowed them to distance themselves from toxic doctrines like that of a superior race, the eugenic breeding of a better species or a genetic version of the Twinkie Defense in which individuals or society could evade responsibility by saying that it’s all in the genes. When it came to human behavior, the attitude toward genetics was “Don’t go there.” Those who did go there found themselves picketed, tarred as Nazis and genetic determinists or, in the case of the biologist E. O. Wilson, doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific conference. - -Today, as the lessons of history have become clearer, the taboo is fading. Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture. Today it is the humane democracies of Scandinavia that are hotbeds of research in behavioral genetics, and two of the groups who were historically most victimized by racial pseudoscience — Jews and African-Americans — are among the most avid consumers of information about their genes. - -Nor should the scare word “determinism” get in the way of understanding our genetic roots. For some conditions, like Huntington’s disease, genetic determinism is simply correct: everyone with the defective gene who lives long enough will develop the condition. But for most other traits, any influence of the genes will be probabilistic. Having a version of a gene may change the odds, making you more or less likely to have a trait, all things being equal, but as we shall see, the actual outcome depends on a tangle of other circumstances as well. - -With personal genomics in its infancy, we can’t know whether it will deliver usable information about our psychological traits. But evidence from old-fashioned behavioral genetics — studies of twins, adoptees and other kinds of relatives — suggests that those genes are in there somewhere. Though once vilified as fraud-infested crypto-eugenics, behavioral genetics has accumulated sophisticated methodologies and replicable findings, which can tell us how much we can ever expect to learn about ourselves from personal genomics. - -To study something scientifically, you first have to measure it, and psychologists have developed tests for many mental traits. And contrary to popular opinion, the tests work pretty well: they give a similar measurement of a person every time they are administered, and they statistically predict life outcomes like school and job performance, psychiatric diagnoses and marital stability. Tests for intelligence might ask people to recite a string of digits backward, define a word like “predicament,” identify what an egg and a seed have in common or assemble four triangles into a square. Personality tests ask people to agree or disagree with statements like “Often I cross the street in order not to meet someone I know,” “I often was in trouble in school,” “Before I do something I try to consider how my friends will react to it” and “People say insulting and vulgar things about me.” People’s answers to a large set of these questions tend to vary in five major ways: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness (as opposed to antagonism) and neuroticism. The scores can then be compared with those of relatives who vary in relatedness and family backgrounds. - -The most prominent finding of behavioral genetics has been summarized by the psychologist Eric Turkheimer: “The nature-nurture debate is over. . . . All human behavioral traits are heritable.” By this he meant that a substantial fraction of the variation among individuals within a culture can be linked to variation in their genes. Whether you measure intelligence or personality, religiosity or political orientation, television watching or cigarette smoking, the outcome is the same. Identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins (who share half their genes that vary among people). Biological siblings (who share half those genes too) are more similar than adopted siblings (who share no more genes than do strangers). And identical twins separated at birth and raised in different adoptive homes (who share their genes but not their environments) are uncannily similar. - -Behavioral geneticists like Turkheimer are quick to add that many of the differences among people cannot be attributed to their genes. First among these are the effects of culture, which cannot be measured by these studies because all the participants come from the same culture, typically middle-class European or American. The importance of culture is obvious from the study of history and anthropology. The reason that most of us don’t challenge each other to duels or worship our ancestors or chug down a nice warm glass of cow urine has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with the milieu in which we grew up. But this still leaves the question of why people in the same culture differ from one another. - -At this point behavioral geneticists will point to data showing that even within a single culture, individuals are shaped by their environments. This is another way of saying that a large fraction of the differences among individuals in any trait you care to measure do not correlate with differences among their genes. But a look at these nongenetic causes of our psychological differences shows that it’s far from clear what this “environment” is. - -Behavioral genetics has repeatedly found that the “shared environment” — everything that siblings growing up in the same home have in common, including their parents, their neighborhood, their home, their peer group and their school — has less of an influence on the way they turn out than their genes. In many studies, the shared environment has no measurable influence on the adult at all. Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings reared apart, and adoptive siblings reared in the same family end up not similar at all. A large chunk of the variation among people in intelligence and personality is not predictable from any obvious feature of the world of their childhood. - -Think of a pair of identical twins you know. They are probably highly similar, but they are certainly not indistinguishable. They clearly have their own personalities, and in some cases one twin can be gay and the other straight, or one schizophrenic and the other not. But where could these differences have come from? Not from their genes, which are identical. And not from their parents or siblings or neighborhood or school either, which were also, in most cases, identical. Behavioral geneticists attribute this mysterious variation to the “nonshared” or “unique” environment, but that is just a fudge factor introduced to make the numbers add up to 100 percent. - -No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. Even in the simplest organisms, genes are not turned on and off like clockwork but are subject to a lot of random noise, which is why genetically identical fruit flies bred in controlled laboratory conditions can end up with unpredictable differences in their anatomy. This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance. - -The discoveries of behavioral genetics call for another adjustment to our traditional conception of a nature-nurture cocktail. A common finding is that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the microenvironments that best suit their natures. Some children naturally lose themselves in the library or the local woods or the nearest computer; others ingratiate themselves with the jocks or the goths or the church youth group. Whatever genetic quirks incline a youth toward one niche or another will be magnified over time as they develop the parts of themselves that allow them to flourish in their chosen worlds. Also magnified are the accidents of life (catching or dropping a ball, acing or flubbing a test), which, according to the psychologist Judith Rich Harris, may help explain the seemingly random component of personality variation. The environment, then, is not a stamping machine that pounds us into a shape but a cafeteria of options from which our genes and our histories incline us to choose. - -All this sets the stage for what we can expect from personal genomics. Our genes are a big part of what we are. But even knowing the totality of genetic predictors, there will be many things about ourselves that no genome scan — and for that matter, no demographic checklist — will ever reveal. With these bookends in mind, I rolled up my sleeve, drooled into a couple of vials and awaited the results of three analyses of my DNA. - -The output of a complete genome scan would be a list of six billion A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s — a multigigabyte file that is still prohibitively expensive to generate and that, by itself, will always be perfectly useless. That is why most personal genomics ventures are starting with smaller portions of the genome that promise to contain nuggets of interpretable information. - -The Personal Genome Project is beginning with the exome: the 1 percent of our genome that is translated into strings of amino acids that assemble themselves into proteins. Proteins make up our physical structure, catalyze the chemical reactions that keep us alive and regulate the expression of other genes. The vast majority of heritable diseases that we currently understand involve tiny differences in one of the exons that collectively make up the exome, so it’s a logical place to start. - -Only a portion of my exome has been sequenced by the P.G.P. so far, none of it terribly interesting. But I did face a decision that will confront every genome consumer. Most genes linked to disease nudge the odds of developing the illness up or down a bit, and when the odds are increased, there is a recommended course of action, like more frequent testing or a preventive drug or a lifestyle change. But a few genes are perfect storms of bad news: high odds of developing a horrible condition that you can do nothing about. Huntington’s disease is one example, and many people whose family histories put them at risk (like Arlo Guthrie, whose father, Woody, died of the disease) choose not to learn whether they carry the gene. - -Another example is the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE). Nearly a quarter of the population carries one copy of the E4 variant, which triples their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Two percent of people carry two copies of the gene (one from each parent), which increases their risk fifteenfold. James Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA and who was one of the first two humans to have his genome sequenced, asked not to see which variant he had. - -As it turns out, we know what happens to people who do get the worst news. According to preliminary findings by the epidemiologist Robert C. Green, they don’t sink into despair or throw themselves off bridges; they handle it perfectly well. This should not be terribly surprising. All of us already live with the knowledge that we have the fatal genetic condition called mortality, and most of us cope using some combination of denial, resignation and religion. Still, I figured that my current burden of existential dread is just about right, so I followed Watson’s lead and asked for a line-item veto of my APOE gene information when the P.G.P. sequencer gets to it. - -The genes analyzed by a new company called Counsyl are more actionable, as they say in the trade. Their “universal carrier screen” is meant to tell prospective parents whether they carry genes that put their potential children at risk for more than a hundred serious diseases like cystic fibrosis and alpha thalassemia. If both parents have a copy of a recessive disease gene, there is a one-in-four chance that any child they conceive will develop the disease. With this knowledge they can choose to adopt a child instead or to undergo in-vitro fertilization and screen the embryos for the dangerous genes. It’s a scaled-up version of the Tay-Sachs test that Ashkenazi Jews have undergone for decades. - -I have known since 1972 that I am clean for Tay-Sachs, but the Counsyl screen showed that I carry one copy of a gene for familial dysautonomia, an incurable disorder of the autonomic nervous system that causes a number of unpleasant symptoms and a high chance of premature death. A well-meaning colleague tried to console me, but I was pleased to gain the knowledge. Children are not in my cards, but my nieces and nephews, who have a 25 percent chance of being carriers, will know to get tested. And I can shut the door to whatever wistfulness I may have had about my childlessness. The gene was not discovered until 2001, well after the choice confronted me, so my road not taken could have led to tragedy. But perhaps that’s the way you think if you are open to experience and not too neurotic. - -Familial dysautonomia is found almost exclusively among Ashkenazi Jews, and 23andMe provided additional clues to that ancestry in my genome. My mitochondrial DNA (which is passed intact from mother to offspring) is specific to Ashkenazi populations and is similar to ones found in Sephardic and Oriental Jews and in Druze and Kurds. My Y chromosome (which is passed intact from father to son) is also Levantine, common among Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Oriental Jews and also sprinkled across the eastern Mediterranean. Both variants arose in the Middle East more than 2,000 years ago and were probably carried to regions in Italy by Jewish exiles after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, then to the Rhine Valley in the Middle Ages and eastward to the Pale of Settlement in Poland and Moldova, ending up in my father’s father and my mother’s mother a century ago. - -It’s thrilling to find yourself so tangibly connected to two millenniums of history. And even this secular, ecumenical Jew experienced a primitive tribal stirring in learning of a deep genealogy that coincides with the handing down of traditions I grew up with. But my blue eyes remind me not to get carried away with delusions about a Semitic essence. Mitochondrial DNA, and the Y chromosome, do not literally tell you about “your ancestry” but only half of your ancestry a generation ago, a quarter two generations ago and so on, shrinking exponentially the further back you go. In fact, since the further back you go the more ancestors you theoretically have (eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and so on), at some point there aren’t enough ancestors to go around, everyone’s ancestors overlap with everyone else’s, and the very concept of personal ancestry becomes meaningless. I found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity. - -As fascinating as carrier screening and ancestry are, the really new feature offered by 23andMe is its genetic report card. The company directs you to a Web page that displays risk factors for 14 diseases and 10 traits, and links to pages for an additional 51 diseases and 21 traits for which the scientific evidence is more iffy. Curious users can browse a list of markers from the rest of their genomes with a third-party program that searches a wiki of gene-trait associations that have been reported in the scientific literature. I found the site user-friendly and scientifically responsible. This clarity, though, made it easy to see that personal genomics has a long way to go before it will be a significant tool of self-discovery. - -The two biggest pieces of news I got about my disease risks were a 12.6 percent chance of getting prostate cancer before I turn 80 compared with the average risk for white men of 17.8 percent, and a 26.8 percent chance of getting Type 2 diabetes compared with the average risk of 21.9 percent. Most of the other outcomes involved even smaller departures from the norm. For a blessedly average person like me, it is completely unclear what to do with these odds. A one-in-four chance of developing diabetes should make any prudent person watch his weight and other risk factors. But then so should a one-in-five chance. - -It became all the more confusing when I browsed for genes beyond those on the summary page. Both the P.G.P. and the genome browser turned up studies that linked various of my genes to an elevated risk of prostate cancer, deflating my initial relief at the lowered risk. Assessing risks from genomic data is not like using a pregnancy-test kit with its bright blue line. It’s more like writing a term paper on a topic with a huge and chaotic research literature. You are whipsawed by contradictory studies with different sample sizes, ages, sexes, ethnicities, selection criteria and levels of statistical significance. Geneticists working for 23andMe sift through the journals and make their best judgments of which associations are solid. But these judgments are necessarily subjective, and they can quickly become obsolete now that cheap genotyping techniques have opened the floodgates to new studies. - -Direct-to-consumer companies are sometimes accused of peddling “recreational genetics,” and there’s no denying the horoscopelike fascination of learning about genes that predict your traits. Who wouldn’t be flattered to learn that he has two genes associated with higher I.Q. and one linked to a taste for novelty? It is also strangely validating to learn that I have genes for traits that I already know I have, like light skin and blue eyes. Then there are the genes for traits that seem plausible enough but make the wrong prediction about how I live my life, like my genes for tasting the bitterness in broccoli, beer and brussels sprouts (I consume them all), for lactose-intolerance (I seem to tolerate ice cream just fine) and for fast-twitch muscle fibers (I prefer hiking and cycling to basketball and squash). I also have genes that are nothing to brag about (like average memory performance and lower efficiency at learning from errors), ones whose meanings are a bit baffling (like a gene that gives me “typical odds” for having red hair, which I don’t have), and ones whose predictions are flat-out wrong (like a high risk of baldness). - -For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around. My novelty-seeking gene, for example, has been associated with a cluster of traits that includes impulsivity. But I don’t think I’m particularly impulsive, so I interpret the gene as the cause of my openness to experience. But then it may be like that baldness gene, and say nothing about me at all. - -Individual genes are just not very informative. Call it Geno’s Paradox. We know from classic medical and behavioral genetics that many physical and psychological traits are substantially heritable. But when scientists use the latest methods to fish for the responsible genes, the catch is paltry. - -Take height. Though health and nutrition can affect stature, height is highly heritable: no one thinks that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just ate more Wheaties growing up than Danny DeVito. Height should therefore be a target-rich area in the search for genes, and in 2007 a genomewide scan of nearly 16,000 people turned up a dozen of them. But these genes collectively accounted for just 2 percent of the variation in height, and a person who had most of the genes was barely an inch taller, on average, than a person who had few of them. If that’s the best we can do for height, which can be assessed with a tape measure, what can we expect for more elusive traits like intelligence or personality? - -Geno’s Paradox entails that apart from carrier screening, personal genomics will be more recreational than diagnostic for some time to come. Some reasons are technological. The affordable genotyping services don’t actually sequence your entire genome but follow the time-honored scientific practice of looking for one’s keys under the lamppost because that’s where the light is best. They scan for half a million or so spots on the genome where a single nucleotide (half a rung on the DNA ladder) is likely to differ from one person to the next. These differences are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”), and they can be cheaply identified en masse by putting a dollop of someone’s DNA on a device called a microarray or SNP chip. A SNP can be a variant of a gene, or can serve as a signpost for variants of a gene that are nearby. - -But not all genetic variation comes in the form of these one-letter typos. A much larger portion of our genomes varies in other ways. A chunk of DNA may be missing or inverted or duplicated, or a tiny substring may be repeated different numbers of times — say, five times in one person and seven times in another. These variations are known to cause diseases and differences in personality, but unless they accompany a particular SNP, they will not turn up on a SNP chip. - -As sequencing technology improves, more of our genomic variations will come into view. But determining what those variants mean is another matter. A good day for geneticists is one in which they look for genes that have nice big effects and that are found in many people. But remember the minuscule influence of each of the genes that affects stature. There may be hundreds of other such genes, each affecting height by an even smaller smidgen, but it is hard to discern the genes in this long tail of the distribution amid the cacophony of the entire genome. And so it may be for the hundreds or thousands of genes that make you a teensy bit smarter or duller, calmer or more jittery. - -Another kind of headache for geneticists comes from gene variants that do have large effects but that are unique to you or to some tiny fraction of humanity. These, too, are hard to spot in genomewide scans. Say you have a unique genetic variant that gives you big ears. The problem is that you have other unique genes as well. Since it would be literally impossible to assemble a large sample of people who do and don’t have the crucial gene and who do and don’t have big ears, there is no way to know which of your proprietary genes is the culprit. If we understood the molecular assembly line by which ears were put together in the embryo, we could identify the gene by what it does rather than by what it correlates with. But with most traits, that’s not yet possible — not for ears, and certainly not for a sense of humor or a gift of gab or a sweet disposition. In fact, the road to discovery in biology often goes in the other direction. Biologists discover the genetic pathways that build an organ by spotting genes that correlate with different forms of it and then seeing what they do. - -So how likely is it that future upgrades to consumer genomics kits will turn up markers for psychological traits? The answer depends on why we vary in the first place, an unsolved problem in behavioral genetics. And the answer may be different for different psychological traits. - -In theory, we should hardly differ at all. Natural selection works like compound interest: a gene with even a 1 percent advantage in the number of surviving offspring it yields will expand geometrically over a few hundred generations and quickly crowd out its less fecund alternatives. Why didn’t this winnowing leave each of us with the best version of every gene, making each of us as vigorous, smart and well adjusted as human physiology allows? The world would be a duller place, but evolution doesn’t go out of its way to keep us entertained. - -It’s tempting to say that society as a whole prospers with a mixture of tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors and so on. But evolution selects among genes, not societies, and if the genes that make tinkers outreproduce the genes that make tailors, the tinker genes will become a monopoly. A better way of thinking about genetic diversity is that if everyone were a tinker, it would pay to have tailor genes, and the tailor genes would start to make an inroad, but then as society filled up with tailor genes, the advantage would shift back to the tinkers. A result would be an equilibrium with a certain proportion of tinkers and a certain proportion of tailors. Biologists call this process balancing selection: two designs for an organism are equally fit, but in different physical or social environments, including the environments that consist of other members of the species. Often the choice between versions of such a trait is governed by a single gene, or a few adjacent genes that are inherited together. If instead the trait were controlled by many genes, then during sexual reproduction those genes would get all mixed up with the genes from the other parent, who might have the alternative version of the trait. Over several generations the genes for the two designs would be thoroughly scrambled, and the species would be homogenized. - -The psychologists Lars Penke, Jaap Denissen and Geoffrey Miller argue that personality differences arise from this process of balancing selection. Selfish people prosper in a world of nice guys, until they become so common that they start to swindle one another, whereupon nice guys who cooperate get the upper hand, until there are enough of them for the swindlers to exploit, and so on. The same balancing act can favor rebels in a world of conformists and vice-versa, or doves in a world of hawks. - -The optimal personality may also depend on the opportunities and risks presented by different environments. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. An environment that has worms in some parts but mousetraps in others could select for a mixture of go-getters and nervous nellies. More plausibly, it selects for organisms that sniff out what kind of environment they are in and tune their boldness accordingly, with different individuals setting their danger threshold at different points. - -But not all variation in nature arises from balancing selection. The other reason that genetic variation can persist is that rust never sleeps: new mutations creep into the genome faster than natural selection can weed them out. At any given moment, the population is laden with a portfolio of recent mutations, each of whose days are numbered. This Sisyphean struggle between selection and mutation is common with traits that depend on many genes, because there are so many things that can go wrong. - -Penke, Denissen and Miller argue that a mutation-selection standoff is the explanation for why we differ in intelligence. Unlike personality, where it takes all kinds to make a world, with intelligence, smarter is simply better, so balancing selection is unlikely. But intelligence depends on a large network of brain areas, and it thrives in a body that is properly nourished and free of diseases and defects. Many genes are engaged in keeping this system going, and so there are many genes that, when mutated, can make us a little bit stupider. - -At the same time there aren’t many mutations that can make us a whole lot smarter. Mutations in general are far more likely to be harmful than helpful, and the large, helpful ones were low-hanging fruit that were picked long ago in our evolutionary history and entrenched in the species. One reason for this can be explained with an analogy inspired by the mathematician Ronald Fisher. A large twist of a focusing knob has some chance of bringing a microscope into better focus when it is far from the best setting. But as the barrel gets closer to the target, smaller and smaller tweaks are needed to bring any further improvement. - -The Penke/Denissen/Miller theory, which attributes variation in personality and intelligence to different evolutionary processes, is consistent with what we have learned so far about the genes for those two kinds of traits. The search for I.Q. genes calls to mind the cartoon in which a scientist with a smoldering test tube asks a colleague, “What’s the opposite of Eureka?” Though we know that genes for intelligence must exist, each is likely to be small in effect, found in only a few people, or both. In a recent study of 6,000 children, the gene with the biggest effect accounted for less than one-quarter of an I.Q. point. The quest for genes that underlie major disorders of cognition, like autism and schizophrenia, has been almost as frustrating. Both conditions are highly heritable, yet no one has identified genes that cause either condition across a wide range of people. Perhaps this is what we should expect for a high-maintenance trait like human cognition, which is vulnerable to many mutations. - -The hunt for personality genes, though not yet Nobel-worthy, has had better fortunes. Several associations have been found between personality traits and genes that govern the breakdown, recycling or detection of neurotransmitters (the molecules that seep from neuron to neuron) in the brain systems underlying mood and motivation. - -Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with “approach related” personality traits like novelty seeking, sensation seeking and extraversion. A gene for another kind of receptor, DRD2, comes in a version that makes its dopamine system function less effectively. It has been associated with impulsivity, obesity and substance abuse. Still another gene, COMT, produces an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, the home of higher cognitive functions like reasoning and planning. If your version of the gene produces less COMT, you may have better concentration but might also be more neurotic and jittery. - -Behavioral geneticists have also trained their sights on serotonin, which is found in brain circuits that affect many moods and drives, including those affected by Prozac and similar drugs. SERT, the serotonin transporter, is a molecule that scoops up stray serotonin for recycling, reducing the amount available to act in the brain. The switch for the gene that makes SERT comes in long and short versions, and the short version has been linked to depression and anxiety. A 2003 study made headlines because it suggested that the gene may affect a person’s resilience to life’s stressors rather than giving them a tendency to be depressed or content across the board. People who had two short versions of the gene (one from each parent) were likely to have a major depressive episode only if they had undergone traumatic experiences; those who had a more placid history were fine. In contrast, people who had two long versions of the gene typically failed to report depression regardless of their life histories. In other words, the effects of the gene are sensitive to a person’s environment. Psychologists have long known that some people are resilient to life’s slings and arrows and others are more fragile, but they had never seen this interaction played out in the effects of individual genes. - -Still other genes have been associated with trust and commitment, or with a tendency to antisocial outbursts. It’s still a messy science, with plenty of false alarms, contradictory results and tiny effects. But consumers will probably learn of genes linked to personality before they see any that are reliably connected to intelligence. - -Personal genomics is here to stay. The science will improve as efforts like the Personal Genome Project amass huge samples, the price of sequencing sinks and biologists come to a better understanding of what genes do and why they vary. People who have grown up with the democratization of information will not tolerate paternalistic regulations that keep them from their own genomes, and early adopters will explore how this new information can best be used to manage our health. There are risks of misunderstandings, but there are also risks in much of the flimflam we tolerate in alternative medicine, and in the hunches and folklore that many doctors prefer to evidence-based medicine. And besides, personal genomics is just too much fun. - -At the same time, there is nothing like perusing your genetic data to drive home its limitations as a source of insight into yourself. What should I make of the nonsensical news that I am “probably light-skinned” but have a “twofold risk of baldness”? These diagnoses, of course, are simply peeled off the data in a study: 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and I have the T. But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept. - -Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do. The gene that lets me taste propyl­thiouracil, 23andMe suggests, might make me dislike tonic water, coffee and dark beer. Unlike the tenuous genes linked to personality or intelligence, this one codes for a single taste-bud receptor, and I don’t doubt that it lets me taste the bitterness. So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves. I’ve acquired a taste for Beck’s Dark; others enjoy saunas, rock-climbing, thrillers or dissonant music. Similarly, why don’t I conform to type and exploit those fast-twitch muscle fibers (thanks, ACTN3 genes!) in squash or basketball, rather than wasting them on hiking? A lack of coordination, a love of the outdoors, an inclination to daydream, all of the above? The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself. You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others. - -Even if personal genomics someday delivers a detailed printout of psychological traits, it will probably not change everything, or even most things. It will give us deeper insight about the biological causes of individuality, and it may narrow the guesswork in assessing individual cases. But the issues about self and society that it brings into focus have always been with us. We have always known that people are liable, to varying degrees, to antisocial temptations and weakness of the will. We have always known that people should be encouraged to develop the parts of themselves that they can (“a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”) but that it’s foolish to expect that anyone can accomplish anything (“a man has got to know his limitations”). And we know that holding people responsible for their behavior will make it more likely that they behave responsibly. “My genes made me do it” is no better an excuse than “We’re depraved on account of we’re deprived.” - -Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time. - -The real-life examples are almost as futile. When the connection between the ACTN3 gene and muscle type was discovered, parents and coaches started swabbing the cheeks of children so they could steer the ones with the fast-twitch variant into sprinting and football. Carl Foster, one of the scientists who uncovered the association, had a better idea: “Just line them up with their classmates for a race and see which ones are the fastest.” Good advice. The test for a gene can identify one of the contributors to a trait. A measurement of the trait itself will identify all of them: the other genes (many or few, discovered or undiscovered, understood or not understood), the way they interact, the effects of the environment and the child’s unique history of developmental quirks. - -It’s our essentialist mind-set that makes the cheek swab feel as if it is somehow a deeper, truer, more authentic test of the child’s ability. It’s not that the mind-set is utterly misguided. Our genomes truly are a fundamental part of us. They are what make us human, including the distinctively human ability to learn and create culture. They account for at least half of what makes us different from our neighbors. And though we can change both inherited and acquired traits, changing the inherited ones is usually harder. It is a question of the most perspicuous level of analysis at which to understand a complex phenomenon. You can’t understand the stock market by studying a single trader, or a movie by putting a DVD under a microscope. The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about. - -So if you are bitten by scientific or personal curiosity and can think in probabilities, by all means enjoy the fruits of personal genomics. But if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test. And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of François La Rochefoucauld: “Our enemies’ opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.” diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/__init__.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/__init__.py deleted file mode 100644 index 54cbb0ed1..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/__init__.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -"""Pull articles from The New Yorker's archives.""" diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/items.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/items.py deleted file mode 100644 index 425d56e32..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/items.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1,15 +0,0 @@ -# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- - -"""Stuff to pull from a New Yorker article.""" - -import scrapy - - -class NewYorkerItem(scrapy.Item): - - """Pull the title, author, text, and link.""" - - title = scrapy.Field() - author = scrapy.Field() - text = scrapy.Field() - link = scrapy.Field() diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/pipelines.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/pipelines.py deleted file mode 100644 index 14d796a13..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/pipelines.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ -# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- - -"""Pipeline for extracting info from New Yorker archives.""" - -from bs4 import BeautifulSoup -import string - - -class NewYorkerPipeline(object): - - """Define the pipeline.""" - - def process_item(self, item, spider): - """Process the item.""" - exclude = set(string.punctuation) - filename = item['title'][0].lower() - filename = ''.join(ch for ch in filename if ch not in exclude) - filename = filename.replace(" ", "-") - - with open(filename + ".md", "a+") as f: - f.write(item['title'][0] + "\n") - f.write("*The New Yorker*\n") - f.write("By " + item['author'][0] + "\n\n") - - soup = BeautifulSoup("\n".join(item["text"])) - text = "\n".join(soup.findAll(text=True)).strip() - text = text.replace("\n\n\n", "\n\n") - text = text.replace("", "") - text = text.replace("\n ", "\n") - text = text.replace('span id="incorrect">', "") - text = text.replace("\n*\n", "*\n") - text = text.replace('\n**\n', "**\n") - f.write(text.encode("utf-8")) - - return item diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/settings.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/settings.py deleted file mode 100644 index ec6084c82..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/settings.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- - -"""Settings for the spider.""" - -BOT_NAME = 'newyorker' -DOWNLOAD_DELAY = 1.00 -SPIDER_MODULES = ['newyorker.spiders'] -NEWSPIDER_MODULE = 'newyorker.spiders' -ITEM_PIPELINES = { - 'newyorker.pipelines.NewYorkerPipeline': 100, -} diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/__init__.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/__init__.py deleted file mode 100644 index 28ec55ebe..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/__init__.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -"""Defines the spiders.""" diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/newyorker_spider.py b/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/newyorker_spider.py deleted file mode 100644 index 1f37eadd3..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/newyorker/spiders/newyorker_spider.py +++ /dev/null @@ -1,42 +0,0 @@ -"""Define a spider.""" - -import scrapy -from newyorker.items import NewYorkerItem - - -class NewYorkerSpider(scrapy.Spider): - - """Visit the archives of The New Yorker and pull out articles.""" - - name = "newyorker" - allowed_domains = ["newyorker.com"] - - start_urls = [] - base_url = "http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/reporting/page/" - for i in range(1, 182): - start_urls.append(base_url + str(i)) - - print start_urls - - def parse(self, response): - """Get articles if any exist on this page.""" - for sel in response.xpath( - '//article[@itemtype="http://schema.org/Article"]'): - - item = NewYorkerItem() - - item['title'] = sel.xpath( - '//article//header/hgroup/h1/text()').extract() - - item['author'] = sel.xpath( - '//article//header/hgroup/h3/span/a/text()').extract() - - item['text'] = sel.xpath( - '//article//div[@class="articleBody"]//p').extract() - - yield item - - # Get full text link. - url_selector = '//article/div[@itemprop="description"]/a/@href' - for url in response.xpath(url_selector).extract(): - yield scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse) diff --git a/tests/corpus/newyorker/scrapy.cfg b/tests/corpus/newyorker/scrapy.cfg deleted file mode 100644 index dc593acd7..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/newyorker/scrapy.cfg +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -# Automatically created by: scrapy startproject -# -# For more information about the [deploy] section see: -# http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/scrapyd.html - -[settings] -default = newyorker.settings - -[deploy] -#url = http://localhost:6800/ -project = newyorker diff --git a/tests/corpus/pandoras-briefcase.md b/tests/corpus/pandoras-briefcase.md deleted file mode 100644 index 308324c0d..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/pandoras-briefcase.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ -Pandora's briefcase -*The New Yorker* -By Malcolm Gladwell - -On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The body was of an adult male dressed in a trenchcoat, a uniform, and boots, with a black attaché case chained to his waist. His wallet identified him as Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines. The Spanish authorities called in the local British vice-consul, Francis Haselden, and in his presence opened the attaché case, revealing an official-looking military envelope. The Spaniards offered the case and its contents to Haselden. But Haselden declined, requesting that the handover go through formal channels—an odd decision, in retrospect, since, in the days that followed, British authorities in London sent a series of increasingly frantic messages to Spain asking the whereabouts of Major Martin’s briefcase. - -It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. Spain was a neutral country, but much of its military was pro-German, and the Nazis found an officer in the Spanish general staff who was willing to help. A thin metal rod was inserted into the envelope; the documents were then wound around it and slid out through a gap, without disturbing the envelope’s seals. What the officer discovered was astounding. Major Martin was a courier, carrying a personal letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, in London, to General Harold Alexander, the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. Nye’s letter spelled out what Allied intentions were in southern Europe. American and British forces planned to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in North Africa, and launch an attack on German-held Greece and Sardinia. Hitler transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the German military command sent an urgent message to the head of its forces in the region: “The measures to be taken in Sardinia and the Peloponnese have priority over any others.” - -The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake, and the frantic messages between London and Madrid a carefully choreographed act. When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history. - -The story of Major William Martin is the subject of the British journalist Ben Macintyre’s brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining “Operation Mincemeat” (Harmony; $25.99). The cast of characters involved in Mincemeat, as the caper was called, was extraordinary, and Macintyre tells their stories with gusto. The ringleader was Ewen Montagu, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker and the brother of Ivor Montagu, a pioneer of table tennis and also, in one of the many strange footnotes to the Mincemeat case, a Soviet spy. Ewen Montagu served on the so-called Twenty Committee of the British intelligence services, and carried a briefcase full of classified documents on his bicycle as he rode to work each morning. - -His partner in the endeavor was a gawky giant named Charles Cholmondeley, who lifted the toes of his size-12 feet when he walked, and, Macintyre writes, “gazed at the world through thick round spectacles, from behind a remarkable moustache fully six inches long and waxed into magnificent points.” The two men coördinated with Dudley Clarke, the head of deception for all the Mediterranean, whom Macintyre describes as “unmarried, nocturnal and allergic to children.” In 1925, Clarke organized a pageant “depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns and ‘fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find.’ He loved uniforms, disguises and dressing up.” In 1941, British authorities had to bail him out of a Spanish jail, dressed in “high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not supposed to even be in Spain, but in Egypt.” Macintyre, who has perfect pitch when it comes to matters of British eccentricity, reassures us, “It did his career no long-term damage.” - -To fashion the container that would keep the corpse “fresh,” before it was dumped off the coast of Spain, Mincemeat’s planners turned to Charles Fraser-Smith, whom Ian Fleming is thought to have used as the model for Q in the James Bond novels. Fraser-Smith was the inventor of, among other things, garlic-flavored chocolate intended to render authentic the breath of agents dropping into France and “a compass hidden in a button that unscrewed clockwise, based on the impeccable theory that the ‘unswerving logic of the German mind’ would never guess that something might unscrew the wrong way.” The job of transporting the container to the submarine that would take it to Spain was entrusted to one of England’s leading race-car drivers, St. John (Jock) Horsfall, who, Macintyre notes, “was short-sighted and astigmatic but declined to wear spectacles.” At one point during the journey, Horsfall nearly drove into a tram stop, and then “failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle.” - -Each stage of the deception had to be worked out in advance. Martin’s personal effects needed to be detailed enough to suggest that he was a real person, but not so detailed as to suggest that someone was trying to make him look like a real person. Cholmondeley and Montagu filled Martin’s pockets with odds and ends, including angry letters from creditors and a bill from his tailor. “Hour after hour, in the Admiralty basement, they discussed and refined this imaginary person, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses,” Macintyre writes. “In the evening, they repaired to the Gargoyle Club, a glamorous Soho dive of which Montagu was a member, to continue the odd process of creating a man from scratch.” Francis Haselden, for his part, had to look as if he desperately wanted the briefcase back. But he couldn’t be too diligent, because he had to make sure that the Germans had a look at it first. “Here lay an additional, but crucial, consideration,” Macintyre goes on. “The Germans must be made to believe that they had gained access to the documents undetected; they should be made to assume that the British believed the Spaniards had returned the documents unopened and unread. Operation Mincemeat would only work if the Germans could be fooled into believing that the British had been fooled.” It was an impossibly complex scheme, dependent on all manner of unknowns and contingencies. What if whoever found the body didn’t notify the authorities? What if the authorities disposed of the matter so efficiently that the Germans never caught wind of it? What if the Germans saw through the ruse? - -In mid-May of 1943, when Winston Churchill was in Washington, D.C., for the Trident conference, he received a telegram from the code breakers back home, who had been monitoring German military transmissions: “MINCEMEAT SWALLOWED ROD, LINE AND SINKER.” Macintyre’s “Operation Mincemeat” is part of a long line of books celebrating the cleverness of Britain’s spies during the Second World War. It is equally instructive, though, to think about Mincemeat from the perspective of the spies who found the documents and forwarded them to their superiors. The things that spies do can help win battles that might otherwise have been lost. But they can also help lose battles that might otherwise have been won. - -In early 1943, long before Major Martin’s body washed up onshore, the German military had begun to think hard about Allied intentions in southern Europe. The Allies had won control of North Africa from the Germans, and were clearly intending to cross the Mediterranean. But where would they attack? One school of thought said Sardinia. It was lightly defended and difficult to reinforce. The Allies could mount an invasion of the island relatively quickly. It would be ideal for bombing operations against southern Germany, and Italy’s industrial hub in the Po Valley, but it didn’t have sufficient harbors or beaches to allow for a large number of ground troops to land. Sicily did. It was also close enough to North Africa to be within striking distance of Allied short-range fighter planes, and a successful invasion of Sicily had the potential to knock the Italians out of the war. - -Mussolini was in the Sicily camp, as was Field Marshal Kesselring, who headed up all German forces in the Mediterranean. In the Italian Commando Supremo, most people picked Sardinia, however, as did a number of senior officers in the German Navy and Air Force. Meanwhile, Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—the German armed-forces High Command—had a third candidate. They thought that the Allies were most likely to strike at Greece and the Balkans, given the Balkans’ crucial role in supplying the German war effort with raw materials such as oil, bauxite, and copper. And Greece was far more vulnerable to attack than Italy. As the historians Samuel Mitcham and Friedrich von Stauffenberg have pointed out, “in Greece all Axis reinforcements and supplies would have to be shipped over a single rail line of limited capacity, running for 1,300 kilometers (more than 800 miles) through an area vulnerable to air and partisan attack.” - -All these assessments were strategic inferences from an analysis of known facts. But this kind of analysis couldn’t point to a specific target. It could only provide a range of probabilities. The intelligence provided by Major Martin’s documents was in a different category. It was marvellously specific. It said: Greece and Sardinia. But because that information washed up onshore, as opposed to being derived from the rational analysis of known facts, it was difficult to know whether it was true. As the political scientist Richard Betts has argued, in intelligence analysis there tends to be an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance, and this is the dilemma posed by the Mincemeat case. - -As Macintyre observes, the informational supply chain that carried the Mincemeat documents from Huelva to Berlin was heavily corrupted. The first great enthusiast for the Mincemeat find was the head of German intelligence in Madrid, Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal. He personally flew the documents to Berlin, along with a report testifying to their significance. But, as Macintyre writes, Kühlenthal was “a one-man espionage disaster area.” One of his prized assets was a Spaniard named Juan Pujol García, who was actually a double agent. When British code breakers looked at Kühlenthal’s messages to Berlin, they found that he routinely embellished and fictionalized his reports. According to Macintyre, Kühlenthal was “frantically eager to please, ready to pass on anything that might consolidate his reputation,” in part because he had some Jewish ancestry and was desperate not to be posted back to Germany. - -When the documents arrived in Berlin, they were handed over to one of Hitler’s top intelligence analysts, a man named Alexis Baron von Roenne. Von Roenne vouched for their veracity as well. But in some respects von Roenne was even less reliable than Kühlenthal. He hated Hitler and seemed to have done everything in his power to sabotage the Nazi war effort. Before D Day, Macintyre writes, “he faithfully passed on every deception ruse fed to him, accepted the existence of every bogus unit regardless of evidence, and inflated forty-four divisions in Britain to an astonishing eighty-nine.” It is entirely possible, Macintyre suggests, that von Roenne “did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.” - -These are two fine examples of why the proprietary kind of information that spies purvey is so much riskier than the products of rational analysis. Rational inferences can be debated openly and widely. Secrets belong to a small assortment of individuals, and inevitably become hostage to private agendas. Kühlenthal was an advocate of the documents because he needed them to be true; von Roenne was an advocate of the documents because he suspected them to be false. In neither case did the audiences for their assessments have an inkling about their private motivations. As Harold Wilensky wrote in his classic work “Organizational Intelligence” (1967), “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” Wilensky had the Bay of Pigs debacle in mind when he wrote that. But it could just as easily have applied to any number of instances since, including the private channels of “intelligence” used by members of the Bush Administration to convince themselves that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. - -It was the requirement of secrecy that also prevented the Germans from properly investigating the Mincemeat story. They had to make it look as if they had no knowledge of Martin’s documents. So their hands were tied. The dated papers in Martin’s pockets indicated that he had been in the water for barely five days. Had the Germans seen the body, though, they would have realized that it was far too decomposed to have been in the water for less than a week. And, had they talked to the Spanish coroner who examined Martin, they would have discovered that he had noticed various red flags. The doctor had seen the bodies of many drowned fishermen in his time, and invariably there were fish and crab bites on the ears and other appendages. In this case, there were none. Hair, after being submerged for a week, becomes brittle and dull. Martin’s hair was not. Nor did his clothes appear to have been in the water very long. But the Germans couldn’t talk to the coroner without blowing their cover. Secrecy stood in the way of accuracy. - -Suppose that Kühlenthal had not been so eager to please Berlin, and that von Roenne had not loathed Hitler, and suppose that the Germans had properly debriefed the coroner and uncovered all the holes in the Mincemeat story. Would they then have seen through the British deception? Maybe so. Or maybe they would have found the flaws in Mincemeat a little too obvious, and concluded that the British were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that they were trying to deceive Germany into thinking that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets—in order to mask the fact that Greece and Sardinia were the real targets. - -This is the second, and more serious, of the problems that surround the products of espionage. It is not just that secrets themselves are hard to fact-check; it’s that their interpretation is inherently ambiguous. Any party to an intelligence transaction is trapped in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called an “expression game.” I’m trying to fool you. You realize that I’m trying to fool you, and I—realizing that—try to fool you into thinking that I don’t realize that you have realized that I am trying to fool you. Goffman argues that at each turn in the game the parties seek out more and more specific and reliable cues to the other’s intentions. But that search for specificity and reliability only makes the problem worse. As Goffman writes in his 1969 book “Strategic Interaction”: - -The more the observer relies on seeking out foolproof cues, the more vulnerable he should appreciate he has become to the exploitation of his efforts. For, after all, the most reliance-inspiring conduct on the subject’s part is exactly the conduct that it would be most advantageous for him to fake if he wanted to hoodwink the observer. The very fact that the observer finds himself looking to a particular bit of evidence as an incorruptible check on what is or might be corrupted is the very reason why he should be suspicious of this evidence; for the best evidence for him is also the best evidence for the subject to tamper with. -Macintyre argues that one of the reasons the Germans fell so hard for the Mincemeat ruse is that they really had to struggle to gain access to the documents. They tried—and failed—to find a Spanish accomplice when the briefcase was still in Huelva. A week passed, and the Germans grew more and more anxious. The briefcase was transferred to the Spanish Admiralty, in Madrid, where the Germans redoubled their efforts. Their assumption, Macintyre says, was that if Martin was a plant the British would have made their task much easier. But Goffman’s argument reminds us that the opposite is equally plausible. Knowing that a struggle would be a sign of authenticity, the Germans could just as easily have expected the British to provide one. - -The absurdity of such expression games has been wittily explored in the spy novels of Robert Littell and, with particular brio, in Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet.” In the latter, a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?” - -The genius of that parody is the final line, because spymasters have always prided themselves on knowing where they are on the “I-know-they-know-I-know-they-know” regress. Just before the Allied invasion of Sicily, a British officer, Colonel Knox, left a classified cable concerning the invasion plans on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo—and no one could find it for two days. “Dudley Clarke was confident, however, that if it had fallen into enemy hands through such an obvious and ‘gross breach of security’ then it would probably be dismissed as a plant, pointing to Sicily as the cover target in accordance with Mincemeat,” Macintyre writes. “He concluded that ‘Colonel Knox may well have assisted rather than hindered us.’ ” In the face of a serious security breach, that’s what a counter-intelligence officer would say. But, of course, there is no way for him to know how the Germans would choose to interpret that discovery—and no way for the Germans to know how to interpret that discovery, either. - -At one point, the British discovered that a French officer in Algiers was spying for the Germans. They “turned” him, keeping him in place but feeding him a steady diet of false and misleading information. Then, before D Day—when the Allies were desperate to convince Germany that they would be invading the Calais sector in July—they used the French officer to tell the Germans that the real invasion would be in Normandy on June 5th, 6th, or 7th. The British theory was that using someone the Germans strongly suspected was a double agent to tell the truth was preferable to using someone the Germans didn’t realize was a double agent to tell a lie. Or perhaps there wasn’t any theory at all. Perhaps the spy game has such an inherent opacity that it doesn’t really matter what you tell your enemy so long as your enemy is aware that you are trying to tell him something. - -At around the time that Montagu and Cholmondeley were cooking up Operation Mincemeat, the personal valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey approached the German Embassy in Ankara with what he said were photographed copies of his boss’s confidential papers. The valet’s name was Elyesa Bazna. The Germans called him Cicero, and in this case they performed due diligence. Intelligence that came in over the transom was always considered less trustworthy than the intelligence gathered formally, so Berlin pressed its agents in Ankara for more details. Who was Bazna? What was his background? What was his motivation? - -“Given the extraordinary ease with which seemingly valuable documents were being obtained, however, there was widespread worry that the enemy had mounted some purposeful deception,” Richard Wires writes, in “The Cicero Spy Affair: German Access to British Secrets in World War II” (1999). Bazna was, for instance, highly adept with a camera, in a way that suggested professional training or some kind of assistance. Bazna claimed that he didn’t use a tripod but simply held each paper under a light with one hand and took the picture with the other. So why were the photographs so clear? Berlin sent a photography expert to investigate. The Germans tried to figure out how much English he knew—which would reveal whether he could read the documents he was photographing or was just being fed them. In the end, many German intelligence officials thought that Cicero was the real thing. But Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, remained wary—and his doubts and political infighting among the German intelligence agencies meant that little of the intelligence provided by Cicero was ever acted upon. - -Cicero, it turned out, was the real thing. At least, we think he was the real thing. The Americans had a spy in the German Embassy in Turkey who learned that a servant was spying in the British Embassy. She told her bosses, who told the British. Just before his death, Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service during the war, told an interviewer, “Of course, Cicero was under our control,” meaning that the minute they learned about Cicero they began feeding him false documents. Menzies, it should be pointed out, was a man who spent much of his professional career deceiving other people, and if you had been the wartime head of M.I.6, giving an interview shortly before your death, you probably would say that Cicero was one of yours. Or perhaps, in interviews given shortly before death, people are finally free to tell the truth. Who knows? - -In the case of Operation Mincemeat, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something false was actually true (even though, secretly, some of those spies might have known better), and Germany acted on it. In the case of Cicero, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while, depending on whether you believe the word of someone two decades after the war was over—and in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all. - -The idea for Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre tells us, had its roots in a mystery story written by Basil Thomson, a former head of Scotland Yard’s criminal-investigation unit. Thomson was the author of a dozen detective stories, and his 1937 book “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” begins with the body of a dead man carrying a set of documents that turn out to be forged. “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” was read by Ian Fleming, who worked for naval intelligence. Fleming helped create something called the Trout Memo, which contained a series of proposals for deceiving the Germans, including this idea of a dead man carrying forged documents. The memo was passed on to John Masterman, the head of the Twenty Committee—of which Montagu and Cholmondeley were members. Masterman, who also wrote mysteries on the side, starring an Oxford don and a Sherlock Holmes-like figure, loved the idea. Mincemeat, Macintyre writes, “began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist, and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist.” - -Then, there was the British naval attaché in Madrid, Alan Hillgarth, who stage-managed Mincemeat’s reception in Spain. He was a “spy, former gold prospector, and, perhaps inevitably, successful novelist,” Macintyre writes. “In his six novels, Alan Hillgarth hankered for a lost age of personal valor, chivalry, and self-reliance.” Unaccountably, neither Montagu nor Cholmondeley seems to have written mysteries of his own. But, then again, they had Mincemeat. “As if constructing a character in a novel, Montagu and Cholmondeley . . . set about creating a personality with which to clothe their dead body,” Macintyre observes. Martin didn’t have to have a fiancée. But, in a good spy thriller, the hero always has a beautiful lover. So they found a stunning young woman, Jean Leslie, to serve as Martin’s betrothed, and Montagu flirted with her shamelessly, as if standing in for his fictional creation. They put love letters from her among his personal effects. “Don’t please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays,” she wrote to her fiancé. “Now that we’ve found each other out of the whole world, I don’t think I could bear it.” - -The British spymasters saw themselves as the authors of a mystery story, because it gave them the self-affirming sense that they were in full command of the narratives they were creating. They were not, of course. They were simply lucky that von Roenne and Kühlenthal had private agendas aligned with the Allied cause. The intelligence historian Ralph Bennett writes that one of the central principles of Dudley Clarke (he of the cross-dressing, the elephants, and the fourteen Nigerian giants) was that “deception could only be successful to the extent to which it played on existing hopes and fears.” That’s why the British chose to convince Hitler that the Allied focus was on Greece and the Balkans—Hitler, they knew, believed that the Allied focus was on Greece and the Balkans. But we are, at this point, reduced to a logical merry-go-round: Mincemeat fed Hitler what he already believed, and was judged by its authors to be a success because Hitler continued to believe what he already believed. How do we know the Germans wouldn’t have moved that Panzer division to the Peloponnese anyway? Bennett is more honest: “Even had there been no deception, [the Germans] would have taken precautions in the Balkans.” Bennett also points out that what the Germans truly feared, in the summer of 1943, was that the Italians would drop out of the Axis alliance. Soldiers washing up on beaches were of little account next to the broader strategic considerations of the southern Mediterranean. Mincemeat or no Mincemeat, Bennett writes, the Germans “would probably have refused to commit more troops to Sicily in support of the Italian Sixth Army lest they be lost in the aftermath of an Italian defection.” Perhaps the real genius of spymasters is found not in the stories they tell their enemies during the war but in the stories they tell in their memoirs once the war is over. - -It is helpful to compare the British spymasters’ attitudes toward deception with that of their postwar American counterpart James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was in London during the nineteen-forties, apprenticing with the same group that masterminded gambits such as Mincemeat. He then returned to Washington and rose to head the C.I.A.’s counter-intelligence division throughout the Cold War. - -Angleton did not write detective stories. His nickname was the Poet. He corresponded with the likes of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams, and he championed William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He co-founded a literary journal at Yale called Furioso. What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time.” Angleton saw twists and turns where others saw only straight lines. To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, in a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors.” - -Angleton had a point. The deceptions of the intelligence world are not conventional mystery narratives that unfold at the discretion of the narrator. They are poems, capable of multiple interpretations. Kühlenthal and von Roenne, Mincemeat’s audience, contributed as much to the plan’s success as Mincemeat’s authors. A body that washes up onshore is either the real thing or a plant. The story told by the ambassador’s valet is either true or too good to be true. Mincemeat seems extraordinary proof of the cleverness of the British Secret Intelligence Service, until you remember that just a few years later the Secret Intelligence Service was staggered by the discovery that one of its most senior officials, Kim Philby, had been a Soviet spy for years. The deceivers ended up as the deceived. - -But, if you cannot know what is true and what is not, how on earth do you run a spy agency? In the nineteen-sixties, Angleton turned the C.I.A. upside down in search of K.G.B. moles that he was sure were there. As a result of his mole hunt, the agency was paralyzed at the height of the Cold War. American intelligence officers who were entirely innocent were subjected to unfair accusations and scrutiny. By the end, Angleton himself came under suspicion of being a Soviet mole, on the ground that the damage he inflicted on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of his imagined Soviet moles was the sort of damage that a real mole would have sought to inflict on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of Soviet interests. - -“The remedy he had proposed in 1954 was for the CIA to have what would amount to two separate mind-sets,” Edward Jay Epstein writes of Angleton, in his 1989 book “Deception.” “His counterintelligence staff would provide the alternative view of the picture. Whereas the Soviet division might see a Soviet diplomat as a possible CIA mole, the counterintelligence staff would view him as a possible disinformation agent. What division case officers would tend to look at as valid information, furnished by Soviet sources who risked their lives to cooperate with them, counterintelligence officers tended to question as disinformation, provided by KGB-controlled sources. This was, as Angleton put it, ‘a necessary duality.’ ” - -Translation: the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can’t be trusted. If this sounds like a lot of trouble, there’s a simpler alternative. The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it. ♦ diff --git a/tests/corpus/prison-without-walls.md b/tests/corpus/prison-without-walls.md deleted file mode 100644 index 02ae21d92..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/prison-without-walls.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,109 +0,0 @@ -Prison without walls -*The Atlantic* -By Graeme Wood - -ONE SNOWY NIGHT last winter, I walked into a pizzeria in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, with my right pant leg hiked up my shin. A pager-size black box was strapped to my sockless ankle, and another, somewhat larger unit dangled in a holster on my belt. Together, the two items make up a tracking device called the BI ExacuTrack AT: the former is designed to be tamper-resistant, and the latter broadcasts the wearer’s location to a monitoring company via GPS. The device is commonly associated with paroled sex offenders, who wear it so authorities can keep an eye on their movements. Thus my experiment: an online guide had specified that the restaurant I was visiting was a “family” joint. Would the moms and dads, confronted with my anklet, identify me as a possible predator and hustle their kids back out into the cold? - -Well, no, not in this case. Not a soul took any notice of the gizmos I wore. The whole rig is surprisingly small and unobtrusive, and it allowed me to eat my slice in peace. Indeed, over the few days that I posed as a monitored man, the closest I came to feeling a real stigma was an encounter I had at a Holiday Inn ice machine, where a bearded trucker type gave me a wider berth than I might otherwise have expected. All in all, it didn’t seem like such a terrible fate. - -Unlike most of ExacuTrack’s clientele, of course, I wore my device by choice and only briefly, to find out how it felt and how people reacted to it. By contrast, a real sex offender—or any of a variety of other lawbreakers, including killers, check bouncers, thieves, and drug users—might wear the unit or one like it for years, or even decades. He (and the offender is generally a “he”) would wear it all day and all night, into the shower and under the sheets—perhaps with an AC adapter cord snaking out into a wall socket for charging. The device would enable the monitoring company to follow his every move, from home to work to the store, and, in consultation with a parole or probation officer, to keep him away from kindergartens, playgrounds, Jonas Brothers concerts, and other places where kids congregate. Should he decide to snip off the anklet (the band is rubber, and would succumb easily to pruning shears), a severed cable would alert the company that he had tampered with the unit, and absent a very good excuse he would likely be sent back to prison. Little wonder that the law-enforcement officer who installed my ExacuTrack noted that he was doing me a favor by unboxing a fresh unit: over their lifetimes, many of the trackers become encrusted with the filth and dead skin of previous bearers, some of whom are infected with prison plagues such as herpes or hepatitis. Officers clean the units and replace the straps between users, but I strongly preferred not to have anything rubbing against my ankle that had spent years rubbing against someone else’s. - -Increasingly, GPS devices such as the one I wore are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that, in the United States at least, traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace. According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently incarcerated—enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983, the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion. In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year. - -This might make some sense if crime rates had also tripled. But they haven’t: rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rules—politically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates. The vogue for incarceration might also make sense if the prisons repaid society’s investment by releasing reformed inmates who behaved better than before they were locked up. But that isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in. - -Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain. - -Moreover, such a change would in fact be less radical than it might at first appear. An underappreciated fact of our penitentiary system is that of all Americans “serving time” at any given moment, only a third are actually behind bars. The rest—some 5 million of them—are circulating among the free on conditional supervised release either as parolees, who are freed from prison before their sentences conclude, or as probationers, who walk free in lieu of jail time. These prisoners-on-the-outside have in fact outnumbered the incarcerated for decades. And recent innovations, both technological and procedural, could enable such programs to advance to a stage where they put the traditional model of incarceration to shame. - -In a number of experimental cases, they already have. Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians. - -There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society. - -IN THE 18TH CENTURY, the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a hypothetical prison. Inside the Panopticon (the name is derived from the Greek word for “all-seeing”), the prisoners are arranged in a ring of cells surrounding their guard, who is concealed in a tower in the center. The idea is that the guard controls the prisoners through his presumed observation: they constantly imagine his eyes on them, even when he’s looking elsewhere. Bentham promoted the concept of the Panopticon for much the same reasons that spur criminal-justice innovation today—a ballooning prison population and the need for a cheap solution with light manpower demands. Whereas the guard in Bentham’s day had only two eyes, however, today’s watcher can be virtually all-seeing, thanks to GPS monitoring technology. The modern prisoner, in other words, need not wonder whether he is being observed; he can be sure that he is, and at all times. - -The hub of the American penal system’s largest open-air Panopticon is in the Indianapolis suburb of Anderson, population 57,496, at the call center of a company called BI Incorporated. The firm manufactures and services the ankle device I test-drove, as well as a suite of other law-enforcement gadgets designed to track offenders. Though BI has a handful of rivals in the monitoring business, it is the most prominent and best-known, with 55,000 offenders wearing BI anklets at any given moment. (The company monitors another 10,000 using lower-tech means: for instance, by having them call from particular landlines at designated times.) - -I drove to Anderson from Indianapolis, past clapboard houses and cornfields, to visit BI’s offices, located on a few discreet and highly secure floors above the local branch of KeyBank. I was buzzed up to meet Jennifer White, the BI vice president in charge of monitoring. From her office window, we looked out not on the backs of the 30,000 offenders this branch monitors, but on the sedate midwestern bedroom community that is, by her description, “a little bit less happening than Muncie,” 20 miles away. Even the sleepy streets of Anderson have their secrets, though. White told me that below us were about 120 criminals with BI anklets—roughly one for every 500 residents in the town. - -White, an Indiana native, has been at BI since 1988. Over a turkey salad from Bob Evans, she explained that the company’s first “clients” (as the monitored are always called) were not human beings but Holsteins. In 1978, BI began selling systems that allowed dairy farmers to dispense feed to their cows automatically. The company fitted a radio-frequency tag on each cow’s ear so that when the cow approached the feed dispenser, a sensor in the latter caused it to drop a ration of fodder. If the same cow returned, the sensor recognized the unique signal of the tag and prevented the cow from getting a second helping until after enough time had passed for her to digest the first. (The worlds of bovine and criminal management have in fact been oddly intertwined for many years. Just as modern abattoirs have studied the colors that can distract and agitate cows during their final moments—thus ruining their meat with adrenaline—prisons have painted their walls in soothing shades to minimize anxiety and aggression in their inmates.) - -In the 1980s, BI expanded into “tethering people.” As an early mover in the outpatient prison industry, BI grew fast, and the Anderson office contains a one-room museum of the bulky devices from its early days, some the size of a ham-radio set. The company now counts tracking people as its core business, and as a sideline it facilitates their reentry into society, through treatment programs and counseling. BI monitors criminals in all 50 states, “everyone from people who owe child support to ax murderers,” White told me. Most use the lowest-tech tracking equipment, a radio-frequency-based technology that monitors house arrest. The system works simply: you keep a radio beacon in your home and a transmitter around your ankle. If you wander too far from your beacon, an alert goes out to the BI call center in Anderson, which then notifies your probation officer that you have left your designated zone—as Martha Stewart allegedly did during her BI-monitored house arrest in 2005, earning a three-week extension of her five-month sentence. - -The truly revolutionary BI devices, though, are the new generation of GPS trackers, which monitor criminals’ real-time locations down to a few meters, enabling BI to control their movements almost as if they were marionettes. If you were a paroled drunk driver, for instance, your parole officer could mandate that you stay home every day from dusk until dawn, be at your workplace from nine to five, and go to and from work following a specific route—and BI would monitor your movements to ensure compliance. If your parole terms included not entering a bar or liquor shop, the device could be programmed to start an alert process if you lingered near such a location for more than 60 seconds. That alert could take the form of an immediate notice to the monitors—“He’s at Drinkie’s again”—or even a spoken warning emanating from the device itself, instructing you to leave the area or face the consequences. Another BI system, recently deployed with promising results, features an electrostatic pad that presses against the offender’s upper arm at all times, chemically “tasting” sweat for signs of alcohol. (In May, starlet Lindsay Lohan was ordered to wear a similar device, manufactured by a BI competitor, after violating her probation stemming from DUI charges.) - -To see the BI systems at work is to realize that Jeremy Bentham was thinking small. The call center consists of just a few rows of desks, with a dozen or so men and women wearing headsets and speaking in Spanish and English to their “customers” (the law-enforcement agents, as distinguished from the tracked “clients”). Each sits in front of a computer monitor, and at the click of a mouse can summon up a screen detailing the movements of a client as far away as Guam, ensuring not only that he avoids “exclusion zones”—schoolyards or bars or former associates’ homes, depending on the circumstances—but also that he makes his way to designated “inclusion zones” at appointed times. - -As a fail-safe against any technological glitch, whether accidental or malicious, BI is immensely proud of its backup systems, which boast an ultrasecure data room and extreme redundancy: if, say, a toxic-gas cloud were to wipe out the town of Anderson, the last act of the staff there would be to flip the switches diverting all call traffic to BI’s corporate office in Boulder, Colorado, where a team capable of taking over instantly in case of disaster is always on duty. - -I asked Jamie Roberts, a call-center employee who had previously been a BI customer as a corrections officer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to show me a parolee on the move, and in seconds he pulled up the profile of a criminal in Newport News, Virginia. The young man’s parole officer had used a Microsoft Bing online map to build a large irregular polygon around his high school—an inclusion zone that would guarantee an alert if he failed to show up for class on time, every day. Roberts showed me one offender after another: names and maps, lives scheduled down to the minute. There was a gambler whose anklet was set to notify Roberts if the client approached the waterfront, because he might try his luck on the gaming boats; an addict who couldn’t return to the street corners where he used to score crack; and an alcohol abuser who had to squeeze himself into an inclusion zone around a church basement for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting from 9 to 10 p.m., three times a week. - -A strict parole officer could plausibly sketch out a complete weekly routine for his parolee, with specific times when he would have to leave home and specific stations he would have to tag throughout the week. He might allow, or even require, the parolee to go to the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, and go for a jog along an authorized route every morning. Roberts pulled up another Bing map for me, and set in motion a faster-than-real-time playback of one client’s day. As his dot carefully skirted the exclusion zones around a school and a park, staying away from kids because of the absolute certainty that BI would report him if he did not, his life on the outside looked fully set out in advance, as if he moved not on his own feet but on rails laid by his parole officer. For BI clients, technology has made detection of any deviation a near certainty—and with detection a swift response, one that often leads straight back to the Big House. - -CRIMINALS TYPICALLY DIFFER from the broader population in a number of ways, including poor impulse control, addictive personality, and orientation toward short-term gratification rather than long-run consequences. More than a fifth of all incarcerated criminals are in for drug offenses, and a large portion of the others abuse legal and illegal substances. If one were to design a criminal-justice system from scratch with these characteristics in mind, it would be difficult to come up with something less effective than what we have today. - -Take the world of supervised release, for example. With some exceptions (BI clients prominent among them), parolees and probationers know that if they violate the terms of their release, they are unlikely to be caught—and even less likely to be punished. So, impulsive as many of them are, they will transgress, perhaps modestly at first, but over time with growing recklessness, until many have resumed the criminal habits—drug use, theft, or worse—that got them arrested in the first place. - -This prevailing condition is something Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading advocate of non-prison alternatives, calls “randomized severity”: some transgressors will be punished for violations, sometimes quite harshly, but others will not be punished at all, whether because their delinquencies go undetected or because judges, police, and parole officers decline to pursue the severe penalties that could apply. In his 2009 book, When Brute Force Fails, Kleiman argues that such capricious enforcement undermines efforts to reduce crime, and moreover that tough penalties—such as the long sentences that have contributed to clogged prisons—don’t do much to help, despite their high cost. The alternative, Kleiman suggests, is a paradigm called “swift and certain” justice, first proposed by Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century: immediate, automatic penalties—though not necessarily severe ones—doled out by credible, identifiable figures. - -One way to achieve this result is through monitoring devices like those supplied by BI. But a pioneering judge in Hawaii has demonstrated that it can also be accomplished without the technological assist. In the early 2000s, Steven Alm, a circuit judge in Honolulu, grew increasingly frustrated with what he viewed as a farcical probation system. The majority of the cases he saw were drug-related offenses, including property crimes such as burglaries and thefts from tourists’ rental cars. Many of the defendants in his court received probation, but once they were back on the street, they might as well never have been convicted. Drug tests, for instance, were scheduled a full month in advance, even though the test could detect meth use only within the previous three days. Despite this, probationers still tested positive about half of the time, indicating that they couldn’t stay clean for even that short interval. - -One reason for the backsliding, presumably, was that violators knew that in practice they had little to fear. Probation officers had limited time and resources, and to ask for a convict’s probation to be revoked would require a great deal of work. Moreover, officers weren’t always eager to send someone to prison for five years just for getting high. Since the probationers viewed the enforcers of their probation as lenient, overworked, and somewhat unpredictable, they correctly assumed there was a good chance they could get away with toking up at will. - -Then, in 2004, Judge Alm decided to test the “swift and certain” paradigm. “It’s something we always talk about in the sociology classes,” he told me. “It just never happens in the criminal-justice system.” Alm, a former U.S. attorney who was born in Hawaii, instituted what academics such as Kleiman describe as one of the most innovative and successful alternatives to incarceration in recent years. The basic tenet will be familiar to anyone who has ever trained a puppy: punishment must be consistent and immediate, in order to maintain a clear linkage between transgression and consequences. Alm began by assembling 34 probationers chosen because their profiles suggested they were especially incorrigible. He told them: “Everybody in this courtroom wants you to succeed on probation. But for you not to be in prison means you are making a deal with me to follow the rules. If you don’t want to follow the rules, tell me now, and I will send you to prison.” - -The rules were simple: each probationer had to call in to the courthouse every weekday to find out whether he was required to come in for an observed urine test. These tests occurred frequently, and if a probationer ever failed a test or failed to report for a test or a meeting with his probation officer, he was locked away for two days and hauled before the judge for immediate continued sentencing. The justice system under Alm was a consistent and unforgiving machine, dispensing instant punishment for every transgression. The effect was to make life on the outside a little more like life on the inside, with strict, regular monitoring of everyone in the system. If you used illegal drugs, you would be caught. - -Alm worked with Kevin Takata, a supervisor in the prosecutor’s office, to come up with a form that reduced the paperwork time for demanding a probation modification from hours or days to minutes. And rather than require a complete overhaul of the terms of a violator’s probation, the judge simply handed down jail time. In practice, the sentences were not especially long—days or weeks, in most cases—but, as Kleiman argues, it was not the duration of punishment but the certainty that was crucial. - -The results of Alm’s program, called Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or HOPE, astonished everyone. The probationers shaped up quickly, and over time they showed remarkably little inclination to go astray. The urine tests came back dirty a tenth as often as before. “We discovered that most of these guys can stop using on their own,” Alm explained, given the discipline imposed by HOPE. For most probationers, the strict observation was as good as, or better than, any drug-treatment program. It generally took no more than one stint in jail before an offender realized that the consequences of a relapse were real; second violations were unusual. And according to a study co-authored by Kleiman, recidivism—that is, arrests for the commission of new crimes, rather than just violations of probation—dropped by half. - -Alm was inherently skeptical that prison is the appropriate remedy for many types of offenses. “You don’t want to send a 20-year-old who’s driving a stolen car and has a little dope on him when he’s caught to prison,” he said. “He’s not going to come out better. I belong to the school of judge-thought that says we should be sending to prison the people we are afraid of, or who won’t stop stealing.” - -Probation officers started volunteering their problem cases to Alm’s court, and now all of his cases—more than 1,300—are HOPE probationers. Still more remarkable, the demands of the program—constant testing, appearances before the judge—have not overwhelmed the court system. Violators come in to see the judge, and attorneys complain about having to show up for hearings over even the smallest violations of probation. But overall, the court’s volume of work per offender has declined, as has the cost to the state. “You can get someone out working, versus having the state lock them up at a cost of $35,000 per year,” explained Myles Breiner, the president of Hawaii’s association of criminal defense lawyers. “Who wants to spend more money on the Corrections Corporation of America?” - -Outside Hawaii, prison analysts are cautiously optimistic. “Certainly it should be tried in other jurisdictions,” said Gerald Gaes, a social scientist and former director of research at the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., though he was quick to caution that certain aspects of Hawaii may make the state unique in the U.S. criminal-justice system, and therefore its experience may not be generalizable to the country at large. To date, no other state has attempted a program as streamlined as HOPE, or as capable of meting out swift and certain punishment. But Alm is evangelizing aggressively. This year, he met with Attorney General Eric Holder and testified before a House subcommittee on crime about the possibility of expanding HOPE nationwide. “Down the road, I’m convinced: probation, pre-trial, parole,” he said. “We try to use best practices. Well, this truly is the best practice.” - -ALM’S PROGRAM CERTAINLY seems effective—much like BI’s technological solution to a similar set of problems. But as I stood in the security line at the courthouse where HOPE probationers report to urinate each morning, I couldn’t help but wonder how much the constant monitoring takes over their lives, and whether this carefully demarcated kind of freedom is more wearying than it appears. Some of the probationers had come in from an hour away to take their test, and they all had to monitor, on pain of incarceration, whether there was ever a whiff of spliff in the air at their friends’ places. - -Back on the mainland, I asked law-enforcement officers and BI personnel, who have installed hundreds of monitoring anklets, how their clients first reacted when they felt the cinch of the band around their ankle and knew that, from that moment, they would be under constant surveillance. In most cases, Jennifer White told me, “they are just relieved to be at home and with their families and working.” Some were even grateful, because the device gave them an excuse to avoid criminal friends: after all, no one wants to commit a crime with an accomplice who’s being monitored. But not all were so upbeat. Some cursed. Others wept. - -If the future of prisons is to be turned inside out, with criminals in the wild and their guards in a suburban midwestern office, how will the experience of being a convict change? The psychology of incarceration is well known not only to researchers, but to readers of Dostoyevsky and viewers of Oz. But to have your every step monitored as you make your way through life, ostensibly free—well, that is, so to speak, a brave new world. - -In Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian British prison-state famously brainwashes a sociopathic youth into feeling physically ill at the very thought of inflicting pain. But he ultimately crumbles at the violence around him, and the state is forced to un-brainwash him. BI is of course installing its devices on the ankle, not in the mind. But the real purpose of any form of Panopticon justice—that is, the certainty of discovery and punishment—is to force the criminal to monitor himself. The Panopticon effectively outsources the role of prison guard to the prisoners themselves. And to be constantly on watch may wear at the psyche in ways difficult to predict. In a boast that could also serve as a warning, Bentham himself described his Panopticon as offering “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” - -In February, I visited Trenton, New Jersey, to observe a BI client in his native environment and to find out how life is for a man in a prison without bars. The New Jersey State Parole Board monitors about 250 sex offenders via GPS, and has had great success, in terms of cost and results, as a BI customer. The board’s public-information officer, Neal Buccino, offered to introduce me to a local child-molester, who allowed me to attend his regular parole meeting on the condition that I not use his real name. I will call him Mick. - -Mick was 57, with a bad back, rotten teeth, and hepatitis. He’d worn a BI tracker for two years. When he walked in from the icy streets of Trenton, my eyes darted to the electronic components hanging off his leg and clothing, and I sympathized with him immediately. Mick had tried to kill himself a few months earlier in a bout of depression, possibly brought on by poverty and estrangement from his son and daughter, both of whom he had been convicted of molesting. He was tall and lanky, with glasses and a moustache, and, in the way of some depressives, was disarmingly funny. If I’d met Mick in the hallway of my apartment building, I would have thought he was there to fix the heater. - -His parole officer, an intelligent young guy named John Goldin, meets Mick weekly to confirm where he has been, and why. He started by checking off the signs that Mick had kept away from kids and continued living his desperate and carefully observed life. “Any contact with police?” Goldin asked. “Drugs? Alcohol? Minors?” - -Mick gave four quick, weary Nos. - -Did Mick still plan to go fishing to supplement the $480 he had left over from his monthly disability payment after he paid child support? Were bedbugs still feasting on him and the other residents of his rooming house? Why had he gone to Broad Street on Wednesday? - -Mick answered the questions with the resignation of someone who had become used to explaining every minute of his life to a man barely half his age. Yes, he was going to start fishing again. The bedbugs were gone for now. He’d gone to Broad Street to visit the TD Bank and count the loose change he’d found on the street. - -As for the anklet itself, he told me his diabetes made him worry about where the band rubbed his skin. “I can’t afford no infections,” he said. In the summer, when the weather was hot and he didn’t wear long pants to conceal his tracker, he said the stares were constant: “I get tired of people asking me every day, ‘That a phone?’ I mean, shut the fuck up.” - -Mick said he had trouble visiting his mother in her retirement home, because she worried about explaining why her son always wore a device on his leg. “She gets upset, and I can’t say that I blame her,” he said dejectedly. “It feels like it has grown into my skin sometimes.” It seemed also to have grown into his brain. - -WHATEVER ITS MERITS, the idea of increasing the number of free-range felons such as Mick is unlikely to make for good politics. Willie Horton still haunts the dreams of every aspiring politician. Even Steven Alm says it was largely his reputation as a former prosecutor and “hanging judge” that enabled him to institute HOPE, since no one could plausibly accuse him of being soft on crime. “I’m convinced this is one of those Nixon-in-China things,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been a career prosecutor, there’s no way the law-enforcement people would have gotten on board.” - -Nevertheless, there are moves under way to experiment with HOPE-like programs outside Hawaii. In addition to the conversations Alm has held with Attorney General Holder, legislation introduced by Representatives Adam B. Schiff (a California Democrat) and Ted Poe (a Texas Republican) would establish a competitive grant program to provide seed money for HOPE-style probation systems. Small programs are in place in Nevada and Oregon, and Alaska launched its own effort this summer. And the market for monitoring devices seems destined to expand, as the technology involved becomes more widespread and hardware costs continue to fall. Already, I have an application on my iPhone that broadcasts my exact location to selected friends at all times. If I were ever convicted of a crime and forced to submit to GPS tracking, I would, in theory, need only to add my probation officer to my Google Friends list and keep my phone handy. (When I showed the app to BI’s Jennifer White, she had trouble fathoming that anyone would use such a thing without a court order. “Do you keep that on all the time?” she asked suspiciously.) And with prison costs rising, and the pernicious effects of incarceration becoming clearer all the time, the problem of selling prisons without walls will presumably grow easier over time. - -There are also, of course, worries about the creeping power of government, and the routinization of surveillance. Right now, BI monitors mostly offenders who have done something seriously wrong, and although its anklets enable parole and probation officers to lay down very specific location itineraries, in practice most just mark off home and work spaces. But there is no reason, as the technology gets cheaper and the monitoring ever more fine-grained, why electronic monitoring could not be used to impose an ever wider range of requirements on an ever wider range of “criminals.” A serious felon might have every second of his day tracked, whereas a lighter offender like myself—recently caught lead-footed by a traffic camera—might be required to carry a tracker that issues an alert any time I move faster than 65 miles per hour. (If such an intervention sounds far-fetched, recall that many jurisdictions in the United States already require convicted drunk drivers to pass an ignition-mounted Breathalyzer test before they can start their cars.) - -The technology is already largely in place for such forms of Big Brother surveillance. In theory, they’d require little more than a creative judge to impose them, and someone behind a monitor in an office somewhere to enforce them. And that’s before you even begin spinning out the science-fiction scenarios, which themselves might not be so very far off. Right now the electrostatic patches made by BI and others monitor the sweat of parolees only for alcohol. But why stop there? Despite some practical hurdles, they could perhaps be upgraded to taste other substances, such as amphetamines or other drugs. And if patches can ensure that certain foreign substances remain out of the bloodstream, why not ensure that others are added to it—pharmaceuticals, say, to inhibit libido or muzzle aggression or keep psychosis at bay. They could even, again in theory, police the natural substances in our sweat, our hormones and neurotransmitters, the juices that determine our moods and desires. No machine currently exists that could sniff out criminal intent, or schizophrenia, or sexual arousal, from the armpits of a parolee or probationer, but the forward march of technology suggests that such a device is far from impossible, and that perhaps someday routine monitoring by authorities could be used to map convicts not just geographically but emotionally as well. If, for instance, the parole officer for a convicted rapist saw that his charge was in a state of highly elevated aggression, fear, and arousal, he might ask the police to pay an immediate visit to deter a possible crime—or, perhaps, interrupt a consensual encounter. - -Future generations of devices could also be programmed to interact more directly with a client’s immediate surroundings. They might, for instance, react to the radio-frequency chips embedded in commercial products for the next generation of retail checkout scanners, and sound a warning if a parolee approached cigarettes like those he once shoplifted, or the liquor he liked to abuse. Or anklets could be set up to react with one another, preventing ex-cons from getting together without sounding an alert. Monitors could even be sold to store owners or other private citizens to let them know when particular categories of criminals set foot on their property. - -These are the kinds of possibilities that give privacy advocates nightmares. Erik Luna, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, is a critic of mandatory sentencing and other measures that have packed U.S. jails, but he urges caution when viewing electronic monitoring as an alternative. “There should be a general concern about the extent of the power of the state to follow and track individuals and gather information about their lives,” Luna says. “What is the minimum ambit of privacy, to maintain the level of human dignity that a liberal form of government should provide?” - -At the same time, if the people being monitored are those who would otherwise be in prison, then the infringement on their privacy is substantially less intrusive than that entailed in being required to sit in a cell all day. BI’s White made exactly this point when I raised the question with her. “They are doing their time in lieu of incarceration,” she said, with some exasperation. When I asked whether the privacy concerns of inmates should be considered at all, her answer, in essence, was no: “A person’s rights, when they are incarcerated, or a ward of the state, are different from yours and mine.” - -And what of our rights, those of us outside the realm of the criminal-justice system? If the past several years in the shadow of a war against terrorism have taught us anything, it is that, once available, surveillance technologies rarely go unused, or un-abused. Could yesterday’s warrantless wiretapping become tomorrow’s clandestine cell-phone tracking? The technology already exists: even a cell phone that lacks a GPS can be traced to within a few city blocks. Once the legal and technical infrastructures were in place to allow the monitoring of criminals, it would be a relatively simple step to extend that monitoring to any person the government considered, for whatever reason, to be “of interest.” - -For now, of course, none of these scenarios is close to taking place. Even HOPE, a narrow, low-tech program, is limited to Hawaii, and the number of convicts wearing BI’s anklets still make up a tiny fraction of those serving time, even outside prison walls. When close monitoring of probationers and parolees emerges as an ever more obvious alternative to expensive incarcerations, we would be wise to remain vigilant against Orwellian abuses. But potential drawbacks and pitfalls notwithstanding, it seems likely that the invasive surveillance model, combining tracking technology and the Kleiman/Alm paradigm of “swift and certain” justice, could offer an alternative to much of the waste—in human as well as economic terms—of our current, dysfunctional system. - -In a way, the goal of Panopticon justice is as old as morality itself. It aims to install a tiny voice in each offender’s head, a warning that someone is watching and that wrongdoing will be punished. Most of us call that tiny voice a conscience. But for some that voice is overwhelmed by other, louder voices expressing need or impulse or desire, voices less bound by reason or consequence. If a device strapped to an ankle can help restore the balance, can amplify the voice of conscience relative to the others, is that such a bad thing? For optimists of human nature, it is a melancholy realization that the highest function of humanity can be, to some extent, outsourced to a plastic box. But the American criminal-justice system has become in many ways a graveyard of optimism. And surely it is better to outsource the fragile voice of conscience to a plastic box than to do what our brick-and-bar prisons so often do, which is to extinguish that voice altogether. diff --git a/tests/corpus/rape-of-american-prisoners.md b/tests/corpus/rape-of-american-prisoners.md deleted file mode 100644 index ec264b4ac..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/rape-of-american-prisoners.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,212 +0,0 @@ -The rape of American prisoners -*The New York Review of Books* -By David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow - -Adults who want to have sex with children sometimes look for jobs that will make it easy. They want authority over kids, but no very onerous supervision; they also want positions that will make them seem more trustworthy than their potential accusers. Such considerations have infamously led quite a few pedophiles to sully the priesthood over the years, but the priesthood isn’t for everyone. For some people, moral authority comes less naturally than blunter, more violent kinds. - -Ray Brookins worked for the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), the state’s juvenile detention agency. In October 2003, he was hired as head of security at the West Texas State School in Pyote. Like most TYC facilities, it’s a remote place. The land is flat to the horizon, scattered with slowly bobbing oil derricks, and always windy. It’s a long way from the families of most kids confined there, who tend to be urban and poor; a long way from any social services, or even the police. It must have seemed perfect to Brookins—and also to John Paul Hernandez, who was hired as the school’s principal around the same time. Almost immediately, Brookins started pulling students out of their dorms at night, long after curfew, and bringing them to the administration building. When asked why, he said it was for cleaning.1 - -In fact, according to official charges, for sixteen months Brookins and Hernandez molested the children in their care: in offices and conference rooms, in dorms and darkened broom closets and, at night, out in the desert. The boys tried to tell members of the staff they trusted; they also tried, both by letter and through the school’s grievance system, to tell TYC officials in Austin. They did so knowing that they might be retaliated against physically, and worse, knowing that if Brookins caught them complaining he could and would extend their confinement,2 and keep on abusing them.3 They did so because they were desperate. But they were ignored by the authorities who should have intervened: both those running the school and those running the Texas Youth Commission.4 Nor did other officials of the TYC who were informed by school staff about molestation take action. - -Finally, in late February 2005, a few of the boys approached a volunteer math tutor named Marc Slattery. Something “icky” was going on, they said. Slattery knew it would be futile to go to school authorities—his parents, also volunteers, had previously told the superintendent of their own suspicions, and were “brow beat” for making allegations without proof5—so the next morning he called the Texas Rangers.6 A sergeant named Brian Burzynski made the ninety-minute drive from his office in Fort Stockton that afternoon. “I saw kids with fear in their eyes,” he testified later, “kids who knew they were trapped in an institution where the system would not respond to their cries for help.”7 - -Slattery had only reported complaints against Brookins, not against Hernandez, but talking to the boys, Burzynski quickly realized that the principal was also a suspect. (Hernandez, it seems, was less of a bully than Brookins. When a boy resisted Brookins’s advances in 2004, he was shackled in an isolation cell for thirteen hours.8 Hernandez preferred to cajole students into sex with offers of chocolate cake, or help getting into college, or a place to stay after they were released.9) The two men were suspended and their homes searched—at which point it was discovered that Brookins was living on school grounds with a sixteen-year-old, who was keeping some of Brookins’s “vast quantity of pornographic materials” under his bed.10 Suspected semen samples were taken from the carpet, furniture, and walls of Brookins’s office. He quickly resigned. In April, Hernandez was told he would be fired, whereupon he too resigned. - -When the TYC received Burzynski’s findings, it launched its own investigation. The internal report this produced was deeply flawed. Investigators didn’t interview or blame senior administrators in Austin, though many of them had seen the warning signs and explicit claims of abuse at Pyote. But agency officials saw how damning the story was. Neither their report nor Burzynski’s was made public.11 - -The Rangers forwarded Burzynski’s report to Randall Reynolds, the local district attorney, but he did nothing. Even though it’s a crime in all fifty states for corrections staff to have sex with inmates of any age, prosecutors rarely bring charges in such cases. For a time, from the TYC’s perspective, the problem seemed to go away. The agency suspended Lemuel “Chip” Harrison, the superintendent of the school, for ninety days after concluding its investigation—he had ignored complaints about Brookins and Hernandez from many members of the staff—but then it promoted him, making him director of juvenile corrections. Brookins found a job at a hotel in Austin, and Hernandez, astonishingly, became principal of a charter school in Midland. - -Rumors have a way of spreading, though, however slowly. Eventually some reporters started digging, and on February 16, 2007, Nate Blakeslee broke the story in The Texas Observer. Doug Swanson followed three days later in The Dallas Morning News, starting an extraordinary run of investigative reporting in that paper: forty articles on abuse and mismanagement in the TYC by the end of March 2007, and to date more than seventy.12 Pyote was only the beginning. The TYC’s culture was thoroughly corrupt: rot had spread to all thirteen of its facilities. - -Since January 2000, it turned out, juvenile inmates had filed more than 750 complaints of sexual misconduct by staff. Even that number was generally thought to underrepresent the true extent of such abuse, because most children were too afraid to report it: TYC staff commonly had their favorite inmates beat up those who complained. And even when they did file grievances, the kids knew it was unlikely to do them much good. Reports were frequently sabotaged, evidence routinely destroyed.13 - -In the same six-year period, ninety-two TYC staff had been disciplined or fired for sexual contact with inmates, which can be a felony. (One wonders just how blatant they must have been.) But again, as children’s advocate Isela Gutierrez put it, “local prosecutors don’t consider these kids to be their constituents.”14 Although five of the ninety-two were “convicted of lesser charges related to sexual misconduct,” all received probation or had their cases deferred. Not one agency employee in those six years was sent to prison for sexually abusing a confined child.15 And despite fierce public outrage at the scandal, neither Brookins nor Hernandez has yet faced trial. In the face of overwhelming evidence, but with recent history making their convictions unlikely, both claim innocence. - -Texas is hardly the only state with a troubled juvenile justice system. In 2004, the Department of Justice investigated a facility in Plainfield, Indiana, where kids sexually abused each other so often and in such numbers that staff created flow charts to track the incidents. The victims were frequently as young as twelve or thirteen; investigators found “youths weighing under seventy pounds who engaged in sexual acts with youths who weighed as much as 100 pounds more than them.”16 A youth probation officer in Oregon was arrested the same year on more than seventy counts of sex crimes against children, and one of his victims hanged himself.17 In Florida in 2005, corrections officers housed a severely disabled fifteen-year-old boy whose IQ was 32 with a seventeen-year-old sex offender, giving the seventeen-year-old the job of bathing him and changing his diaper. Instead, the seventeen-year-old raped him repeatedly.18 - -The list of such stories goes on and on. After each of them was made public, it was possible for officials to contend that they reflected anomalous failings of a particular facility or system. But a report just issued on January 7 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) should change that. Mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), and easily the largest and most authoritative study of the issue ever conducted, it makes clear that the crisis of sexual abuse in juvenile detention is nationwide. - -Across the country, 12.1 percent of kids questioned in the BJS survey said that they’d been sexually abused at their current facility during the preceding year. That’s nearly one in eight, or approximately 3,220, out of the 26,550 who were eligible to participate. The survey, however, was only given at large facilities that held young people who had been “adjudicated”—i.e., found by a court to have committed an offense—for at least ninety days, which is more restrictive than it may sound. In total, according to the most recent data, there are nearly 93,000 kids in juvenile detention on any given day.19 Although we can’t assume that 12.1 percent of the larger number were sexually abused—many kids not covered by the survey are held for short periods of time, or in small facilities where rates of abuse are somewhat lower—we can say confidently that the BJS’s 3,220 figure represents only a small fraction of the children sexually abused in detention every year. - -What sort of kids get locked up in the first place? Only 34 percent of those in juvenile detention are there for violent crimes. (More than 200,000 youth are also tried as adults in the US every year, and on any given day approximately 8,500 kids under eighteen are confined in adult prisons and jails. Although probably at greater risk of sexual abuse than any other detained population, they haven’t yet been surveyed by the BJS.) According to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which was itself created by PREA, more than 20 percent of those in juvenile detention were confined for technical offenses such as violating probation, or for “status offenses” like missing curfews, truancy, or running away—often from violence and abuse at home. (“These kids have been raped their whole lives,” said a former officer from the TYC’s Brownwood unit.20) Many suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, and learning disabilities. - -Fully 80 percent of the sexual abuse reported in the study was committed not by other inmates but by staff. And surprisingly, 95 percent of the youth making such allegations said that they were victimized by female staff. Sixty-four percent of them reported at least one incident of sexual contact with staff in which no force or explicit coercion was used. Staff caught having sex with inmates often claim it’s consensual. But staff have enormous control over inmates’ lives. They can give inmates privileges, such as extra food or clothing or the opportunity to wash, and they can punish them: everything from beatings to solitary confinement to extended detention. The notion of a truly consensual relationship in such circumstances is grotesque even when the inmate is not a child. - -Nationally, however, fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished. A quarter of all known staff predators in state youth facilities are allowed to keep their positions.21 - -The biggest risk factor found in the study was prior abuse. Some 65 percent of kids who had been sexually assaulted at another corrections facility were also assaulted at their current one. In prison culture, even in juvenile detention, after an inmate is raped for the first time he is considered “turned out,” and fair game for further abuse.22 Eighty-one percent of juveniles sexually abused by other inmates were victimized more than once, and 32 percent more than ten times. Forty-two percent were assaulted by more than one person. Of those victimized by staff, 88 percent had been abused repeatedly, 27 percent more than ten times, and 33 percent by more than one facility employee. Those who responded to the survey had been in their facilities for an average of 6.3 months. - -Just as the BJS report on sexual abuse in juvenile detention facilities shows that problems like the ones at Pyote aren’t limited to Texas, two previous BJS reports, on the incidence of sexual abuse in adult prisons and jails, show that abuses in juvenile detention are only a small part of a much larger human rights problem in this country. Published in December 2007 and June 2008, these were extensive studies: they surveyed a combined total of 63,817 inmates in 392 different facilities. - -Sexual abuse in detention is difficult to measure. Prisoners sometimes make false allegations, but sometimes, knowing that true confidentiality is almost nonexistent behind bars and fearing retaliation, they decide not to disclose abuse. Although those who responded to the BJS surveys remained anonymous, it seems likely, on balance, that the studies underestimate the incidence of prisoner rape.23 But even taken at face value, they reveal much more systemic abuse than has been generally recognized or admitted. - -Using a snapshot technique—surveying a random sample24 of those incarcerated on a given day and then extrapolating only from those numbers—the BJS found that 4.5 percent of the nation’s prisoners, i.e., inmates who have been convicted of felonies and sentenced to more than a year, had been sexually abused in the facilities at which they answered the questionnaire during the preceding year: approximately 60,500 people. Moreover, 3.2 percent of jail inmates—i.e., people who were awaiting trial or serving short sentences—had been sexually abused in their facilities over the preceding six months, meaning an estimated total, out of those jailed on the day of the survey, of 24,700 nationwide.25 - -Both studies divide these reports of abuse in two different ways. They ask whether the perpetrator was another inmate or one of the facility’s staff. And they differentiate between willing and unwilling sexual contact with staff, although recognizing that it is always illegal for staff to have sex with inmates. Similarly, they distinguish between “abusive sexual contact” from other inmates, or unwanted sexual touching, and what most people would call rape. The results are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. Overall, the more severe forms of abuse outnumber the lesser ones in both surveys. And the reported perpetrators in both jails and prisons, as in juvenile detention, are more often staff than inmates. - - - -The prison survey estimates not only the number of people abused, but the instances of abuse. In our opinion, the BJS’s methodology here undercounts the true number. Inmates who said they had been sexually abused were asked how many times. Their options were 1, 2, 3–10, and 11 times or more; that answers of “3–10” were assigned a value of 5, and “11 or more” a value of 12. We know of no reason to think that answers of “3–10” should be skewed so far toward the low end of the range, however—and inmates are sometimes raped many more than twelve times. Bryson Martel, for example: - ->When I went to prison, I was twenty-eight years old, I weighed 123 pounds, and I was scared to death…. [Later] I had to list all the inmates who sexually assaulted me, and I came up with 27 names. Sometimes just one inmate assaulted me, and sometimes they attacked me in groups. It went on almost every day for the nine months I spent in that facility. - -Because of these attacks, Martel contracted HIV. “You never heal emotionally,” he said.26 - -Methodology aside, though, this question about frequency was an important one to ask, precisely because rape in prison is so often serial, and so often gang rape.27 The BJS estimates that there were 165,400 instances of sexual abuse in state and federal prisons over the period of its study, an average of about two and a half for every victim. Had it made a similar estimate on the basis of data from its youth study using the same method, it would have found that juvenile victims were abused an average of six times each. Especially when thinking about the effects on a child, it’s awful to realize that these numbers are probably too low. - -What little attention the BJS reports on adult victims have received in the press has so far mostly been devoted to the prison study, not the one on jails. On June 23, 2009, the day the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission released its report, both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran editorials praising it, and both referred to the 60,500 number as if that represented the yearly national total for all inmates.28 However, we believe that these papers missed the true implication of the BJS reports, and that the jail study is the more important of the two. - -This is partly because the study of jails answers more questions, and does more to help us understand the dynamics of sexual abuse in detention—beginning with the racial dynamics.29 Of white jail inmates, 1.8 percent reported sexual abuse by another inmate, whereas 1.3 percent of black inmates did. But when considering staff-on-inmate abuse, the situation is reversed. 1.5 percent of white inmates reported such incidents, but 2.1 percent of black inmates did. Overall, a black inmate is more likely to suffer sexual abuse in detention than a white one, 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent. The study did not report the race of perpetrators.30 - - -Advocates have long known that victims of sexual abuse in detention tend to be those perceived as unable to defend themselves, and the jail study confirms this. Women were more likely to report abuse than men.31 Younger inmates are more likely to be abused than older ones, gay inmates much more than straight ones, and people who had been abused at a previous facility most of all. (See Table 3 for more detail.) Those targeted for abuse are also likely to be vulnerable in ways the BJS did not address in this report. Often they have mental disabilities or mental illness,32 they are disproportionately likely to be first-time and nonviolent offenders,33 and most simply, they are likely to be small.34 - -Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically. - -There is another, starker reason why the jail study is the most important. Jail is where most inmates get raped. On first glance at the reports it doesn’t look this way. But—and this is what the press seems to have missed—because the BJS numbers come from snapshot surveys, they represent only a fraction of those incarcerated every year. People move in and out of jail very quickly. The number of annual jail admissions is approximately seventeen times higher than the jail population on any given day.35 - -To get the real number of those sexually abused in jails over the course of a year, however, we can’t simply multiply 24,700 by seventeen. Many people go to jail repeatedly over the course of a year; the number of people who go to jail every year is quite different from the number of admissions. Surprisingly, no official statistics are kept on the number of people jailed annually.36 We’ve heard a very well-informed but off-the-record estimate that it is approximately nine times as large as the daily jail population, but we can’t yet be confident about that. - -Even if we could, though, we still couldn’t just multiply 24,700 by nine. Further complicating the matter, snapshot techniques like the BJS’s will disproportionately count those with longer sentences. If Joe is jailed for one week and Bill for two, Bill is twice as likely to be in jail on the day of the survey. Presumably, the longer you spend in jail, the more chance you have of being raped there. But even that is not as simple as it seems. Because those raped behind bars tend to fit such an identifiable profile—to be young, small, mentally ill, etc.—they are quickly recognized as potential victims. Very likely, they will be raped soon after the gate closes behind them, and repeatedly after that. The chance of being raped after a week in jail is likely not so different from the chance of being raped after a month. Probably more significant (at least, statistically) is the difference in the number of times an inmate is likely to be raped. - -What is the right multiple—are five, six, seven times 24,700 people molested and raped in jail every year? We don’t know yet, but we hope to soon. PREA requires the BJS to conduct its surveys annually. The BJS has revised its questionnaire to ask those who report abuse how long after they were jailed the first incident took place; it is also collecting data on the number of people jailed every year and the lengths of time they serve. Together, this new information should lead to much better estimates. - -We do know already that all the BJS numbers published so far, which add up to almost 90,000, represent only a small portion of those sexually abused in detention every year. And that is without even considering immigration detention, or our vast system of halfway houses, rehab centers, and other community corrections facilities. Nor does it include Native American tribal detention facilities operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or corrections facilities in the territories. - -In 1994, in Farmer v. Brennan, the Supreme Court angrily declared that “having stripped [inmates] of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside aid, the government and its officials are not free to let the state of nature take its course.” Rape, wrote Justice David Souter, is “simply not ‘part of the penalty’” we impose in our society.37 But for many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, whether they were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors or simply awaiting trial, it has been. Most often, their assailants have been the very agents of the government who were charged with protecting them. - -Beyond the physical injuries often sustained during an assault,38 and beyond the devastating, lifelong psychological damage inflicted on survivors, rape in prison spreads diseases, including HIV.39 Of all inmates, 95 percent are eventually released40—more than 1.5 million every year carrying infectious diseases, many of them sexually communicable41—and they carry their trauma and their illnesses with them, back to their families and their communities. - -Prisoner rape is one of this country’s most widespread human rights problems, and arguably its most neglected. Frustratingly, heartbreakingly—but also hopefully—if only we had the political will, we could almost completely eliminate it. - -In the second part of this essay we will discuss the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission’s report, which analyzes the dynamics and consequences of prisoner rape, shows how sexual abuse can be and in many cases already is being prevented in detention facilities across the country, and proposes standards for its prevention, detection, and response. Those standards are now with US Attorney General Eric Holder, who by law has until June 23, 2010, to review them before issuing them formally, following which they will become nationally binding. We will discuss the attorney general’s troubling review process, the opposition of some corrections officials to the commission’s standards, and why some important corrections leaders are so resistant to change. - -—February 10, 2010 - -1 -Nate Blakeslee, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” The Texas Observer, February 23, 2007 (published on the Web on February 16). This was the first story in the press about the troubles at Pyote, and is probably still the single best account of them.↩ - -2 -“At TYC, an inmate’s length of stay is determined by a complex and controversial program known as Resocialization,…[which] is composed of specific academic, behavioral, and therapeutic objectives. Each category has numbered steps, known as phases, that the offender must reach…. Inmates have complained that TYC guards often retaliate against them by lodging disciplinary actions that cause phase setbacks.” (Holly Becka and Gregg Jones, “Length of Stay Fluid for Many TYC Inmates,” The Dallas Morning News, March 24, 2007.) At Pyote, more advanced phases also meant greater privileges: access to “hygiene items,” for example (Burzynski, Report of Investigation, p. 52).↩ - -3 -After Burzynski began his investigation, the school superintendent determined that at least 25 students had been kept at the facility without adequate cause. (Report of Investigation, p. 63). Brookins also seems to have pursued at least one student after his release from juvenile detention. (Report of Investigation, pp. 73–74.)↩ - -4 -Nate Blakeslee, “New Evidence of Altered Documents in TYC Coverup,” The Texas Observer, March 11, 2007. See also Blakeslee, “Hidden in Plain Sight.”↩ - -5 -Tish Elliott-Wilkins, Summary Report for Administrative Review, p. 6.↩ - -6 -The Texas Rangers Division is a law enforcement agency with statewide jurisdiction; typically, Rangers become involved in cases that local authorities are unwilling or unable to handle properly.↩ - -7 -Emily Ramshaw, “Lawmakers Lambaste TYC Board for Failing to Act,” The Dallas Morning News, March 8, 2007.↩ - -8 -Burzynski, Report on Investigation, p. 7. TYC policy states that when students are placed in shackles, administrators must reiterate their approval every thirty minutes; Brookins, however, “told security staff not to bother him about the situation until the next morning.”↩ - -9 -Burzynski, Report on Investigation, pp. 32 and 36.↩ - -10 -“Accused TYC Official Lived with Boy,” The Dallas Morning News, March 8, 2007. Both Brookins and the boy denied that they were having a sexual relationship.↩ - -11 -The TYC did, however, send a copy of the report to its board of directors; and it later turned out that Governor Rick Perry’s office had been warned about sexual abuse in the TYC by multiple sources. See Ramshaw, “Lawmakers Lambaste TYC Board for Failing to Act”; Nate Blakeslee, “Sins of Commission,” Texas Monthly, May 2007; and Doug J. Swanson and Steve McGonigle, “Mistakes, Mismanagement Wrecked TYC,” The Dallas Morning News, May 13, 2007.↩ - -12 -For an index of these, see www.shron.wordpress.com/texas-youth-commission-scandal/. The paper also put a number of video interviews on its Web site, available at www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/photography/2007/tyc/.↩ - -13 -See Gregg Jones, Holly Becka, and Doug J. Swanson, “TYC Facilities Ruled by Fear,” The Dallas Morning News, March 18, 2007: - -Brenda Faulk, 45, a correctional officer at [the Crockett State School] from 1997 until 2005, said it was common for documentation of abuses—broken bones, black eyes, concussions—to go missing. Photographs of injuries would vanish from infirmary files. Logbook pages would disappear. -See also Christy Hoppe and Doug J. Swanson, “TYC Sex Assaults Ignored,” The Dallas Morning News, March 5, 2007. In 2006, the Department of Justice investigated the TYC’s Evins Regional Juvenile Center and found that “Evins fails to adequately protect the youths in its care from youth and staff violence”; incidents of staff-on-youth violence were often recorded by the facility’s security cameras, but according to its own investigator, “in about two-thirds of the cases, the video of an incident has been deleted before he is able to secure a copy for his investigation.” (Wan J. Kim, “Letter to Rick Perry, Governor, Texas, Regarding Investigation of the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, Edinburg, Texas,” March 15, 2007, available at www.justice.gov/crt/split/documents/evins_findlet_3-15-07.pdf.)↩ - -14 -See Blakeslee, “Hidden in Plain Sight.”↩ - -15 -See Doug J. Swanson, “Sex Abuse Reported at Youth Jail,” The Dallas Morning News, February 18, 2007.↩ - -16 -See Bradley J. Schlozman, “Letter to Mitch Daniels, Governor, Indiana, Regarding Investigation of the Plainfield Juvenile Correctional Facility, Indiana,” September 9, 2005, available at www.justice.gov/crt/split/documents/split_indiana_plainfield_juv_findlet _9-9-05.pdf.↩ - -17 -See “Teens’ Abuser Gets Locked Up for Life,” The Oregonian, October 14, 2005.↩ - -18 -See “Herald Watchdog: Juvenile Justice: State Put Disabled Boy in Sex Offender’s Care,” Miami Herald, October 20, 2005.↩ - -19 -See www.ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ojstatbb/ezacjrp.↩ - -20 -See Doug J. Swanson, “Sex Abuse Alleged at 2nd Youth Jail,” The Dallas Morning News, March 2, 2007. The article goes on to say that most inmates in Texas juvenile facilities “don’t have criminal records because they are adjudicated as delinquent in a civil hearing and committed to TYC for open-ended periods…. About 60 percent of them come from low-income homes. More than half have families with criminal histories, and 36 percent had a childhood history of abuse or neglect. Some 80 percent have IQs below the mean score of 100.”↩ - -21 -See “Sexual Violence Reported by Juvenile Correctional Authorities, 2005–06,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, available at www.bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/svrjca0506.pdf.↩ - -22 -See National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 71.↩ - -23 -This opinion is shared by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission: see its report, pp. 1, 39, and 40. The commissioners were commenting on adults, but children may be even more likely to underreport abuse.↩ - -24 -In the prison study, however, “the size measures for [state] facilities housing female inmates were doubled to ensure a sufficient number of women to allow for meaningful analyses of sexual victimization by gender.” And inmates younger than 18 were excluded from the surveys of adult facilities.↩ - -25 -Prison inmates had been in their current facilities for an average of 8.5 months prior to taking the survey; jail inmates had been in theirs for an average of 2.6 months.↩ - -26 -See www.justdetention.org/en/action updates/AU1009_web.pdf.↩ - -27 -According to the jail study, 20 percent of incidents of staff-on-inmate sexual abuse involved more than one perpetrator, and 33 percent of inmate-on-inmate incidents did.↩ - -28 -“Rape in Prison,” TheNew York Times, June 23, 2009, and “A Prison Nightmare: A Federal Commission Offers Useful Standards for Preventing Sexual Abuse Behind Bars,” The Washington Post, June 23, 2009.↩ - -29 -It is impossible to understand life behind bars without considering racial dynamics—and above all, the unconscionable demographic composition of those we incarcerate in this country. For more on this, see David Cole’s excellent article in these pages, “Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?,” The New York Review, November 19, 2009.↩ - -30 -Since some inmates report abuse by other inmates and by staff, the percentages given do not amount to the totals. 3.2 percent of Hispanic inmates reported sexual abuse in jail; of those who said their race was “other,” which includes American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders, 4.1 percent did; and 4.2 percent of inmates who are two or more races (excluding those of Hispanic or Latino origin) reported abuse.↩ - -31 -“The number of incarcerated adult women increased by 757 percent from 1977 to 2007.” (National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 44.) And many of these women have been raped before going to prison. In the Washington Corrections Center for Women, for example, “more than 85 percent of women in the facility had reported a history of past sexual abuse.” (Report, p. 63.) “Studies found that from 31 to 59 percent of incarcerated women reported being sexually abused as children, and 23 to 53 percent reported experiencing sexual abuse as adults.” (Report, p. 71.)↩ - -32 -National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 7. Robert Dumond, a researcher and clinician who is an expert on sexual abuse in detention, told the commission: - -Jails and prisons in the United States have become the de facto psychiatric facilities of the twenty-first century,” housing more mentally ill individuals than public and private psychological facilities combined. The data back up this assertion: a survey of prisoners in 2006 suggests that more than half of all individuals incarcerated in State prisons suffer from some form of mental health problem and that the rate in local jails is even higher. (Report, p. 73.) -↩ -33 -“More than half of all newly incarcerated individuals between 1985 and 2000 were imprisoned for nonviolent drug or property offenses.” (National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 44.)↩ - -34 -See David Kaiser, “A Letter on Rape in Prisons,” The New York Review, May 10, 2007.↩ - -35 -See Todd D. Minton and William J. Sabol, Jail Inmates at Midyear 2007 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008), p. 2; available at www.bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/jim07.pdf. Local jails made an estimated 13 million admissions during the twelve months ending June 29, 2007; the jailed inmate population on that day was 780,581. The same logic applies to the prison survey results, but there is much less turnover in the prison population. It also applies, more forcefully, to the results of the juvenile detention survey.↩ - -36 -Neither do there seem to be good statistics on the annual number of admissions to prison. We do know that as of June 30, 2008, counting both prisons and jails, the US incarcerates about 2.4 million people on any given day. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Jail Inmates at Midyear 2008—Statistical Tables,” available at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/jim08st.pdf. See also Heather C. West and William J. Sabol, Prison Inmates at Midyear 2008—Statistical Tables, Bureau of Justice Statistics, available at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/contentpub/pdf/pim08st.pdf.) This is more than any other country in the world, either on a per capita basis or in absolute numbers. Including those in immigration and youth detention and those supervised in the community (in halfway houses and rehabilitation centers, on probation or parole), more than 7.3 million people are in the corrections system on any given day. The cost to the country is more than $68 billion every year. (See National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 2.)↩ - -37 -Farmer v. Brennan, 511 US 825 (1994).↩ - -38 -According to the jail study, approximately 20 percent of those sexually abused also suffered other physical injuries in the process; approximately 85 percent of that number suffered at least one serious injury, including knife and stab wounds, broken bones, rectal tearing, chipped or knocked-out teeth, internal injuries, and being knocked unconscious.↩ - -39 -“In 2005–2006, 21,980 State and Federal prisoners were HIV positive or living with AIDS. Researchers believe the prevalence of hepatitis C in correctional facilities is dramatically higher, based on [the] number of prisoners with a history of injecting illegal drugs prior to incarceration…. The incidence of HIV in certain populations outside correctional systems is likely attributable in part to [sexual] activity within correctional systems. Because of the disproportionate representation of minority men and women in correctional settings it is likely that the spread of these diseases in confinement will have an even greater impact on minority men, women, and children and their communities.” (National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, pp. 129–130). The commissioners seem to be saying here, as delicately as they can, that they suspect prisoner rape has contributed to the way HIV infection in this country has shifted demographically: i.e., to the way AIDS has changed from being a predominantly gay disease to a predominantly black one.↩ - -40 -National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 26.↩ - -41 -National Prison Rape Elimination Commission Report, p. 134.↩ diff --git a/tests/corpus/superman.md b/tests/corpus/superman.md deleted file mode 100644 index 37faded77..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/superman.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,137 +0,0 @@ -Superman comes to the market -*Esquire* -By Norman Mailer - -For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made. - -If that Democratic Convention which has now receded behind the brow of the summer of 1960 is only half-remembered in the excitements of moving toward the election, it may be exactly the time to consider it again, because the mountain of facts which concealed its features last July has been blown away in the winds of High Television, and the man-in-the-street (that peculiar political term which refers to the quixotic voter who will pull the lever for some reason so salient as: "I had a brown-nose lieutenant once with Nixon’s looks," or "that Kennedy must have false teeth"), the not so easily estimated man-in-the-street has forgotten most of what happened and could no more tell you who Kennedy was fighting against than you or I could place a bet on who was leading the American League in batting during the month of June. - -So to try to talk about what happened is easier now than in the days of the convention, one does not have to put everything in -- an act of writing which calls for a bulldozer rather than a pen -- one can try to make one’s little point and dress it with a ribbon or two of metaphor. All to the good. Because mysteries are irritated by facts, and the 1960 Democratic Convention began as one mystery and ended as another. - -Since mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal (why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known), the psychic separation between what was happening on the floor, in the caucus rooms, in the headquarters, and what was happening in parallel to the history of the nation was mystery enough to drown the proceedings in gloom. It was on the one hand a dull convention, one of the less interesting by general agreement, relieved by local bits of color, given two half hours of excitement by two demonstrations for Stevenson, buoyed up by the class of the Kennedy machine, turned by the surprise of Johnson’s nomination as vice-president, but, all the same, dull, depressed in its over-all tone, the big fiestas subdued, the gossip flat, no real air of excitement, just moments -- or as they say in bullfighting -- details. Yet it was also, one could argue -- and one may argue this yet -- it was also one of the most important conventions in America’s history, it could prove conceivably to be the most important. The man it nominated was unlike any politician who had ever run for President in the history of the land, and if elected he would come to power in a year when America was in danger of drifting into a profound decline. - -Depression obviously has its several roots: it is the doubtful protection which comes from not recognizing failure, it is the psychic burden of exhaustion, and it is also, and very often, the discipline of the will or the ego which enables one to continue working when one’s unadmitted emotion is panic. And panic it was I think which sat as the largest single sentiment in the breast of the collective delegates as they came to convene in Los Angeles. Delegates are not the noblest sons and daughters of the Republic; a man of taste, arrived from Mars, would take one look at a convention floor and leave forever, convinced he had seen one of the drearier squats of Hell. If one still smells the faint living echo of carnival wine, the pepper of a bullfight, the rag, drag, and panoply of a jousting tourney, it is all swallowed and regurgitated by the senses into the fouler cud of a death gas one must rid oneself of -- a cigar-smoking, stale-aired, slack-jawed, butt-littered, foul, bleak, hard-working, bureaucratic death gas of language and faces ("Yes, those faces," says the man from Mars: lawyers, judges, ward heelers, mafiosos, Southern goons and grandees, grand old ladies, trade unionists and finks), of pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history? A legitimate panic for a delegate. America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity. A delegate is a man who picks a candidate for the largest office in the land, a President who must live with problems whose borders are in ethics, metaphysics, and now ontology; the delegate is prepared for this office of selection by emptying wastebaskets, toting garbage, and saying yes at the right time for twenty years in the small political machine of some small or large town; his reward, one of them anyway, is that he arrives at an invitation to the convention. An expert on local catch-as-catch-can, a small-time, often mediocre practitioner of small-town political judo, he comes to the big city with nine-tenths of his mind made up, he will follow the orders of the boss who brought him. Yet of course it is not altogether so mean as that: his opinion is listened to -- the boss will consider what he has to say as one interesting factor among five hundred, and what is most important to the delegate, he has the illusion of partial freedom. He can, unless he is severely honest with himself -- and if he is, why sweat out the low levels of a political machine? -- he can have the illusion that he has helped to chooses the candidate, he can even worry most sincerely about his choice, flirt with defection from the boss, work out his own small political gains by the road of loyalty or the way of hard bargain. But even if he is there for more than the ride, his vote a certainty in the mind of the political boss, able to be thrown here or switched there as the boss decides, still in some peculiar sense he is reality to the boss, the delegate is the great American public, the bar he owns or the law practice, the piece of the union he represents, or the real-estate office, is a part of the political landscape which the boss uses as his own image of how the votes will go, and if the people will like the candidate. And if the boss is depressed by what he sees, if the candidate does not feel right to him, if he has a dull intimation that the candidate is not his sort (as, let us say, Harry Truman was his sort, or Symington might be his sort, or Lyndon Johnson), then vote for him the boss will if he must; he cannot be caught on the wrong side, but he does not feel the pleasure of a personal choice. Which is the center of the panic. Because if the boss is depressed, the delegate is doubly depressed, and the emotional fact is that Kennedy is not in focus, not in the old political focus, he is not comfortable; in fact it is a mystery to the boss how Kennedy got to where he is, not a mystery in its structures; Kennedy is rolling in money, Kennedy got the votes in primaries, and, most of all, Kennedy has a jewel of a political machine. It is as good as a crack Notre Dame team, all discipline and savvy and go-go-go, sound, drilled, never dull, quick as a knife, full of the salt hipper-dipper, a beautiful machine; the boss could adore it if only a sensible candidate were driving it, a Truman, even a Stevenson, please God a Northern Lyndon Johnson, but it is run by a man who looks young enough to be coach of the Freshman team, and that is not comfortable at all. The boss knows political machines, he know issues, farm parity, Forand health bill, Landrum-Griffin, but this is not all so adequate after all to revolutionaries in Cuba who look like Beatniks, competitions in missiles, Negroes looting whites in the Congo, intricacies of nuclear fallout, and NAACP men one does well to call Sir. It is all out of hand, everything important is off the center, foreign affairs is now the lick of the heat, and senators are candidates instead of governors, a disaster to the old family style of political measure where a political boss knows his governor and knows who his governor knows. So the boss is depressed, profoundly depressed. He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have too little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation which had thousands -- or was it hundreds of thousands -- of people demonstrating in the long night before Chessman was killed, and a movie star, the greatest, Marlon the Brando out in the night with them. Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz. - -"I was seeing Pershing Square, Los Angeles, now for the first time…the nervous fugitives from Times Square, Market Street SF, the French Quarter -- masculine hustlers looking for lonely fruits to score from, anything from the legendary $20 to a pad at night and breakfast in the morning and whatever you can clinch or clip; and the heat in their holy cop uniforms, holy because of the Almighty Stick and the Almightier Vagrancy Law; the scattered junkies, the small-time pushers, the queens, the sad panhandlers, the lonely, exiled nymphs haunting the entrance to the men’s head, the fruits with the hungry eyes and jingling coins; the tough teen-age chicks -- 'dittybops' -- making it with the lost hustlers … all amid the incongruous piped music and the flowers -- twin fountains gushing rainbow colored: the world of Lonely America squeezed into Pershing Square, of the Cities of Terrible Night, downtown now trapped in the City of lost Angels … and the tress hang over it all the like some type of apathetic fate." - --- JOHN RECHY: Big Table 3 - -Click here to read the six other greatest Esquire stories ever published -- in their entirety. - -Seeing Los Angeles after ten years away, one realizes all over again that America is an unhappy contract between the East (that Faustian thrust of a most determined human will which reaches up and out above the eye into the skyscrapers of New York) and those flat lands of compromise and mediocre self-expression, those endless half-pretty repetitive small towns of the Middle and the West whose spirit is forever horizontal and whose marrow comes to rendezvous in the pastel monotonies of Los Angeles architecture. - -So far as America has a history, one can see it in the severe heights of New York City, in the glare from the Pittsburgh mills, by the color in the brick of Louisburg Square, along the knotted greedy facades of the small mansions on Chicago’s North Side, in Natchez’ antebellum homes, the wrought-iron balconies off Bourbon Street, a captain’s house in Nantucket, by the curve of Commercial Street in Provincetown. One can make a list; it is probably finite. What culture we have made and what history has collected to it can be found in those few hard examples of an architecture which came to its artistic term, was born, lived and so collected some history about it. Not all the roots of American life are uprooted, but almost all, and the spirit of the supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable, that essence of a new postwar SuperAmerica is found nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles’ ubiquitous acres. One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child. One knows that if the cities of the world were destroyed by a new war, the architecture of the rebuilding would create a landscape which looked, subject to specifications of climate, exactly and entirely like the San Fernando Valley. - -It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard; as one travels through the endless repetitions of that city which is the capital of suburbia with its milky pinks, its washed-out oranges, its tainted lime-yellows of pastel on one pretty little architectural monstrosity after another, the colors not intense enough, the styles never pure, and never sufficiently impure to collide on the eye, one conceives the people who live here -- they have come out to express themselves, Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work, no, it is all open, promiscuous, borrowed, half bought, a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men -- one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men. And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps. - -So this is the town the Democrats came to, and with their unerring instinct (after being with them a week, one thinks of this party as a crazy, half-rich family, loaded with poor cousins, traveling always in caravans with Cadillacs and Okie Fords, Lincolns and quarter-horse mules, putting up every night in tents to hear the chamber quartet of Great Cousin Eleanor invaded by the Texas-twanging steel-stringing geetarists of Bubber Lyndon, carrying its own mean high school principal, Doc Symington, chided for its manners by good Uncle Adlai, told the route of march by Navigator Jack, cut off every six months from the rich will of Uncle Jim Farley, never listening to the mechanic of the caravan, Bald Sam Rayburn, who assures them they’ll all break down unless Cousin Bubber gets the concession on the garage; it’s the Snopes family married to Henry James, with the labor unions thrown in like a Yankee dollar, and yet it’s true, in tranquility one recollects them with affection, their instinct is good, crazy family good) and this instinct now led the caravan to pick the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for their family get-together and reunion. - -The Biltmore is one of the ugliest hotels in the world. Patterned after the flat roofs of an Italian Renaissance palace, it is eighty-eight times as large, and one-millionth as valuable to the continuation of man, and it would be intolerable if it were not for the presence of Pershing Square, that square block of park with cactus and palm trees, the three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day-a-year convention of every junkie, pot-head, pusher, queen (but you have read that good writing already). For years Pershing Square has been one of the three or four places in America famous to homosexuals, famous not for its posh, the chic is round-heeled here, but because it is one of the avatars of good old masturbatory sex, dirty with the crusted sugars of smut, dirty rooming houses around the corner where the score is made, dirty book and photograph stores down the street, old-fashioned out-of-the-Thirties burlesque houses, cruising bars, jukeboxes, movie houses; Pershing Square is the town plaza for all those lonely, respectable, small-town homosexuals who lead a family life, make children, and have the Philbrick psychology (How I Joined the Communist Party and Led Three Lives). Yes, it is the open-air convention hall for the small-town inverts who live like spies, and it sits in the center of Los Angeles, facing the Biltmore, that hotel which is a mausoleum, that Pentagon of traveling salesmen the Party chose to house the headquarters of the Convention. - -So here came that family, cursed before it began by the thundering absence of Great-Uncle Truman, the delegates dispersed over a run of thirty miles and twenty-seven hotels: the Olympian Motor Hotel, the Ambassador, the Beverly Wilshire, the Santa Ynez Inn (where rumor has it the delegates from Louisiana had some midnight swim), the Mayan, the Commodore, the Mayfair, the Sheraton-West, the Huntington-Sheraton, the Green, the Hayward, the Gates, the Figueroa, the Statler Hilton, the Hollywood Knickerbocker -- does one have to be a collector to list such names? -- beauties all, with that up-from-the-farm Los Angeles décor, plate-glass windows, patio and terrace, foam-rubber mattress, pastel paints, all of them pretty as an ad in full-page color, all but the Biltmore where everybody gathered every day -- the newsmen, the TV, radio, magazine, and foreign newspaperman, the delegates, the politicos, the tourists, the campaign managers, the runners, the flunkies, the cousins and aunts, the wives, the grandfathers, the eight-year-old girls, and the twenty-eight-year-old girls in the Kennedy costumes, red and white and blue, the Symingteeners, the Johnson Ladies, the Stevenson Ladies, everybody -- and for three days before the convention and four days into it, everybody collected at the Biltmore, in the lobby, in the grill, in the Biltmore Bowl, in the elevators, along the corridors, three hundred deep always outside the Kennedy suite, milling everywhere, every dark-carpeted grey-brown hall of the hotel, but it was in the Gallery of the Biltmore where one first felt the mood which pervaded all proceedings until the convention was almost over, that heavy, thick, witless depression which was to dominate every move as the delegates wandered and gawked and paraded and set for a spell, there in the Gallery of the Biltmore, that huge depressing alley with its inimitable hotel color, that faded depth of chiaroscuro which unhappily has no depth, that brown which is not a brown, that grey which has no pearl in it, that color which can be described only as hotel-color because the beiges, the tans, the walnuts, the mahoganies, the dull blood rugs, the moaning yellows, the sick greens, the greys and all those dumb browns merge into that lack of color which is an over-large hotel at convention time, with all the small-towners wearing their set, starched faces, that look they get at carnival, all fever and suspicion, and proud to be there, eddying slowly back and forth in that high block-long tunnel of a room with its arched ceiling and square recesses filling every rib of the arch with art work, escutcheons and blazons and other art, pictures I think, I cannot even remember, there was such a hill of cigar smoke the eye had to travel on its way to the ceiling, and at one end there was galvanized-pipe scaffolding and workmen repairing some part of the ceiling, one of them touching up one of the endless squares of painted plaster in the arch, and another worker, passing by, yelled up to the one who was working on the ceiling: "Hey, Michelangelo!” - -Later, of course, it began to emerge and there were portraits one could keep, Symington, dogged at a press conference, declaring with no conviction that he knew he had a good chance to win, the disappointment eating at his good looks so that he came off hard-faced, mean, and yet slack -- a desperate dullness came off the best of his intentions. There was Johnson who had compromised too many contradictions and now the contradictions were in his face: when he smiled the corners of his mouth squeezed gloom; when he was pious, his eyes twinkled irony; when he spoke in a righteous tone, he looked corrupt; when he jested, the ham in his jowls looked to quiver. He was not convincing. He was a Southern politician, a Texas Democrat, a liberal Eisenhower; he would do no harm, he would do no good, he would react to the machine, good fellow, nice friend -- the Russians would understand him better than his own. - -Stevenson had the patina. He came into the room and the room was different, not stronger perhaps (which is why ultimately he did not win), but warmer. One knew why some adored him; he did not look like other people, not with press lights on his flesh; he looked like a lover, the simple truth, he had the sweet happiness of an adolescent who has just been given his first major kiss. And so he glowed, and one was reminded of Chaplin, not because they were the least alike in features, but because Charlie Chaplin was luminous when one met him and Stevenson had something of that light. - -There was Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive as she explained in the firm, sad tones of the first lady in this small town why she could not admit Mr. Kennedy, who was no doubt a gentleman, into her political house. One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been as she spurned the possibilities of a young suitor. - -Jim Farley. Huge. Cold as a bishop. The hell he would consign you to was cold as ice. - -Bobby Kennedy, the archetype Bobby Kennedy, looked like a West Point cadet, or, better, one of those reconstructed Irishmen from Kirkland House one always used to have to face in the line in Harvard house football games. "Hello," you would say to the ones who looked like him as you lined up for the scrimmage after the kickoff, and his type would nod and look away, one rock glint of recognition your due for living across the hall from one another all through Freshman year, and then bang, as the ball was passed back, you’d get a bony king-hell knee in the crotch. He was the kind of man never to put on the gloves with if you wanted to do some social boxing, because after two minutes it would be a war, and ego-bastards last long in a war. - -Carmine DeSapio and Kenneth Galbraith on the same part of the convention floor. DeSapio is bigger than one expects, keen and florid, great big smoked glasses, a suntan like Man-tan -- he is the kind of heavyweight Italian who could get by with a name like Romeo -- and Galbraith is tall-tall, as actors say, six foot six it could be, terribly thin, enormously attentive, exquisitely polite, birdlike, he is sensitive to the stirring of reeds in a wind over the next hill. "Our grey eminence," whispered the intelligent observer next to me. - -Bob Wagner, the mayor of New York, a little man, plump, groomed, blank. He had the blank, pomaded, slightly worried look of the first barber in a good barbershop, the kind who would go to the track on his day off and wear a green transparent stone in a gold ring. - -And then there was Kennedy, the edge of the mystery. But a sketch will no longer suffice. - -"…it can be said with a fair amount of certainty that the essence of his political attractiveness is his extraordinary political intelligence. He has a mind quite unlike that of any other Democrat of this century. It is not literary, metaphysical and moral, as Adlai Stevenson’s is. Kennedy is articulate and often witty, but he does not seek verbal polish. No one can doubt the seriousness of his concern with the most serious political matters, but one feels that whereas Mr. Stevenson’s political views derive from a view of life that holds politics to be a mere fraction of existence, Senator Kennedy’s primary interest is in politics. The easy way in which he disposes of the question of Church and State -- as if he felt that any reasonable man could quite easily resolve any possible conflict of loyalties -- suggests that the organization of society is the one thing that really engages his interest." - --- RICHARD ROVERE: The New Yorker, July 23, 1960 - -The afternoon he arrived at the convention from the airport, there was of course a large crowd on the street outside the Biltmore, and the best way to get a view was to get up on an outdoor balcony of the Biltmore, two flights above the street, and look down on the event. One waited thirty minutes, and then a honking of horns as wild as the getaway after an Italian wedding sounded around the corner, and the Kennedy cortege came into sight, circled Pershing Square, the men in the open and leading convertibles sitting backwards to look at their leader, and finally came to a halt in a space cleared for them by the police in the crowd. The television cameras were out, and a Kennedy band was playing some circus music. One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards. For one moment he saluted Pershing Square, and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in the underground history of the world, and then with a quick move he was out of his car and by choice headed into the crowd instead of the lane cleared for him into the hotel by the police, so that he made his way inside surrounded by a mob, and one expected at any moment to see him lifted to its shoulders like a matador being carried back to the city after a triumph in the plaza. All the while the band kept playing the campaign tunes, sashaying circus music, and one had a moment of clarity, intense as déjà vu, for the scene which had taken place had been glimpsed before in a dozen musical comedies; it was the scene where the hero, the matinee idol, the movie star comes to the palace to claim the princess, or what is the same, and more to our soil, the football hero, the campus king, arrives at the dean’s home surrounded by a court of open-singing students to plead with the dean for his daughter’s kiss and permission to put on the big musical that night. And suddenly I saw the convention, it came into focus for me, and I understood the mood of depression which had lain over the convention, because finally it was simple: the Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate. - -Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation. - -The twentieth century may yet be seen as that era when civilized man and underprivileged man were melted together into mass man, the iron and steel of the nineteenth century giving way to electronic circuits which communicated their messages into men, the unmistakable tendency of the new century seeming to be the creation of men as interchangeable as commodities, their extremes of personality singed out of existence by the psychic fields of force the communicators would impose. This loss of personality was a catastrophe to the future of the imagination, but billions of people might first benefit from it by having enough to eat -- one did not know -- and there remained citadels of resistance in Europe where the culture was deep and roots were visible in the architecture of the past. - -Nowhere, as in America, however, was this fall from individual man to mass man felt so acutely, for America was at once the first and most prolific creator of mass communications, and the most rootless of countries, since almost no American could lay claim to the line of a family which had not once at least severed its roots by migrating here. But, if rootless, it was then the most vulnerable of countries to its own homogenization. Yet America was also the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance -- that every man was potentially extraordinary -- knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington; Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson; Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway; Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; America believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators; even lovers, by the time Valentino died. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another -- is there a county in all of our ground which does not have its legendary figure? And when the West was filled, the expansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life. The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun. And this myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators -- politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators -- would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die. Indeed a quarter of the nation’s business must have depended upon its existence. But it stayed alive for more than that -- it was as if the message in the labyrinth of the genes would insist that violence was locked with creativity, and adventure was the secret of love. - -Once, in the Second World War and in the year or two which followed, the underground river returned to earth, and the life of the nation was intense, of the present, electric; as a lady said, "That was the time when we gave parties which changed people’s lives." The Forties was a decade when the speed with which one’s own events occurred seemed as rapid as the history of the battlefields, and for the mass of people in America a forced march into a new jungle of emotion was the result. The surprises, the failures, and the dangers of that life must have terrified some nerve of awareness in the power and the mass, for, as if stricken by the orgiastic vistas the myth had carried up from underground, the retreat to a more conservative existence was disorderly, the fear of communism spread like an irrational hail of boils. To anyone who could see, the excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self: free-loving, lust-looting, atheistic, implacable -- absurdity beyond absurdity to label communism so, for the moral products of Stalinism had been Victorian sex and a ponderous machine of material theology. - -Forced underground again, deep beneath all Reader’s Digest hospital dressings of Mental Health in Your Community, the myth continued to flow, fed by television and the film. The fissure in the national psyche widened to the danger point. The last large appearance of the myth was the vote which tricked the polls and gave Harry Truman his victory in ’48. That was the last. Came the Korean War, the shadow of the H-bomb, and we were ready for the General. Uncle Harry gave way to Father, and security, regularity, order, and the life of no imagination were the command of the day. If one had any doubt of this, there was Joe McCarthy with his built-in treason detector, furnished by God, and the damage was done. In the totalitarian wind of those days, anyone who worked in Government formed the habit of being not too original, and many a mind atrophied from disuse and private shame. At the summit there was benevolence with leadership, regularity without vision, security without safety, rhetoric without life. The ship drifted on, that enormous warship of the United States, led by a Secretary of State whose cells were seceding to cancer, and as the world became more fantastic -- Africa turning itself upside down, while some new kind of machine man was being made in China -- two events occurred which stunned in the confidence of America into a new night: the Russians put up their Sputnik, and Civil Rights -- that reluctant gift to the American Negro, granted for its effect on foreign affairs -- spewed into real life at Little Rock. The national Ego was in shock: the Russians were now in some ways our technological superiors, and we had an internal problem of subject populations equal conceivably in its difficulty to the Soviet and its satellites. The fatherly calm of the General began to seem like the uxorious mellifluences of the undertaker. - -Underneath it all was a larger problem. The life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far, and the energies of the people one knew everywhere had slowed down. Twenty years ago a post-Depression generation had gone to war and formed a lively, grousing, by times inefficient, carousing, pleasure-seeking, not altogether inadequate army. It did part of what it was supposed to do, and many, out of combat, picked up a kind of private life on the fly, and had their good time despite the yaws of the military system. But today in America the generation which respected the code of the myth was Beat, a horde of half-begotten Christs with scraggly beards, heroes none, saints all, weak before the strong, empty conformisms of the authority. The sanction for finding one’s growth was no longer one’s flag, one’s career, one’s sex, one’s adventure, not even one’s booze. Among the best in the newest of the generations, the myth had found its voice in marijuana, and the joke of the underground was that when the Russians came over they could never dare to occupy us for long because America was too Hip. Gallows humor. The poorer truth might be that America was too Beat, the instinct of the nation so separated from its public mind that apathy, schizophrenia, and private beatitudes might be the pride of the welcoming committee any underground could offer. - -Yes, the life of politics and the life of the myth had diverged too far. There was nothing to return them to one another, no common danger, no cause, no desire, and, most essentially, no hero. It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself. Roosevelt was such a hero, and Churchill, Lenin and DeGaulle; even Hitler, to take the most odious example of this thesis, was a hero, the hero-as-monster, embodying what had become the monstrous fantasy of a people, but the horror upon which the radical mind and liberal temperament foundered was that he gave outlet to the energies of the Germans and so presented the twentieth century with an index of how horrible had become the secret heart of its desire. Roosevelt is of course a happier example of the hero; from his paralytic leg to the royal elegance of his geniality he seemed to contain the country within himself; everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich. The sexual and the sex-starved, the poor, the hard-working and the imaginative well-to-do could see themselves in the President, could believe him to be like themselves. So a large part of the country was able to discover its energies because not as much was wasted in feeling that the country was a poisonous nutrient which stifled the day. - -Too simple? No doubt. One tries to construct a simple model. The thesis is after all not so mysterious; it would merely nudge the notion that a hero embodies his time and is not so very much better than his time, but he is larger than life and so is capable of giving direction to the time, able to encourage a nation to discover the deepest colors of its character. At bottom the concept of hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress, to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for it sees a country as all-but-trapped in its character until it has a hero who reveals the character of the country to itself. The implication is that without such a hero the nation turns sluggish. Truman for example was not such a hero, he was not sufficiently larger than life, he inspired familiarity without excitement, he was a character but his proportions came from soap opera: Uncle Harry, full of salty common-sense and small-minded certainty, a storekeeping uncle. - -Whereas Eisenhower has been the anti-Hero, the regulator. Nations do not necessarily and inevitably seek for heroes. In periods of dull anxiety, one is more likely to look for security than a dramatic confrontation, and Eisenhower could stand as a hero only for that large number of Americans who were most proud of their lack of imagination. In American life, the unspoken war of the century has taken place between the city and the small town; the city which is dynamic, orgiastic, unsettling, explosive and accelerating to the psyche; the small town which is rooted, narrow, cautious and planted in the life-logic of the family. The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it. But since America has been passing through a period of enormous expansion since the war, the double-four years of Dwight Eisenhower could not retard the expansion, it could only denude it of color, character, and the development of novelty. The small town mind is rooted -- it is rooted in the small town -- and when it attempts to direct history the results are disastrously colorless because the instrument of world power which is used by the small-town mind is the committee. Committees do not create, they merely proliferate, and the incredible dullness wreaked upon the American landscape in Eisenhower’s eight years has been the triumph of the corporation. A tasteless, sexless, odorless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result. Eisenhower embodied half the needs of the nation, the needs of the timid, the petrified, the sanctimonious, and the sluggish. What was even worse, he did not divide the nation as a hero might (with a dramatic dialogue as the result); he merely excluded one part of the nation from the other. The result was an alienation of the best minds and bravest impulses from the faltering history which was made. America’s need in those years was to take an existential turn, to walk into the nightmare, to face into that terrible logic of history which demanded that the country and its people must become more extraordinary and more adventurous, or else perish, since the only alternative was to offer a false security in the power and the panacea of organized religion, family, and the F.B.I., a totalitarianization of the psyche by the stultifying techniques of the mass media which would seep into everyone’s most private associations and so leave the country powerless against the Russians even if the denouement were to take fifty years, for in a competition between totalitarianisms the first maxim of the prizefight manager would doubtless apply: "Hungry fighters win fights." - -Some part of these thoughts must have been in one’s mind at the moment there was the first glimpse of Kennedy entering the Biltmore Hotel; and in the days which followed, the first mystery -- the profound air of depression which hung over the convention -- gave way to a second mystery which can be answered only by history. The depression of the delegates was understandable: no one had too much doubt that Kennedy would be nominated, but if elected he would be not only the youngest President ever to be chosen by voters, he would be the most conventionally attractive young man ever to sit in the White House, and his wife -- some would claim it -- might be the most beautiful First Lady in our history. Of necessity the myth would emerge once more, because America’s politics would now be also America’s favorite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s best-seller. One thinks of the talents of writers like Taylor Caldwell or Frank Yerby, or is it rather The Fountainhead which would contain such a fleshing of the romantic prescription? Or is it indeed one’s own work which is called into question? "Well, there’s your first hipster," says a writer one knows at the convention, "Sergius O’Shaugnessy born rich," and the temptation is to nod, for it could be true, a war hero, and the heroism is bona fide, even exceptional, a man who has lived with death, who, crippled in the back, took on an operation which would kill him or restore him to power, who chose to marry a lady whose face might be too imaginative for the taste of a democracy which likes its first ladies to be executives of home-management, a man who courts political suicide by choosing to go all out for a nomination four, eight, or twelve years before his political elders think he is ready, a man who announces a week prior to the convention that the young are better fitted to direct history than the old. Yes, it captures the attention. This is no routine candidate calling every shot by safety’s routine book ("Yes," Nixon said, naturally but terribly tired an hour after his nomination, the TV cameras and lights and microphones bringing out a sweat of fatigue on his face, the words coming very slowly from the tired brain, somber, modest, sober, slow, slow enough so that one could touch emphatically the cautions behind each word, "Yes, I want to say," said Nixon, "that whatever abilities I have, I got from my mother." A tired pause…dull moment of warning, "…and my father." The connection now made, the rest comes easy, "…and my school and my church." Such men are capable of anything.) - -One had the opportunity to study Kennedy a bit in the days that followed. His style in the press conferences was interesting. Not terribly popular with the reporters (too much a contemporary, and yet too difficult to understand, he received nothing like the rounds of applause given to Eleanor Roosevelt, Stevenson, Humphrey, or even Johnson), he carried himself nonetheless with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell ended the round. There was a good lithe wit to his responses, a dry Harvard wit, a keen sense of proportion in disposing of difficult questions -- invariably he gave enough of an answer to be formally satisfactory without ever opening himself to a new question which might go further than the first. Asked by a reporter, "Are you for Adlai as vice-president?" the grin came forth and the voice turned very dry, "No, I cannot say we have considered Adlai as a vice-president." Yet there was an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man present in the room with all his weight and all his mind. Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver; Kennedy seemed at times like a young professor whose manner was adequate for the classroom, but whose mind was off in some intricacy of the Ph.D. thesis he was writing. Perhaps one can give a sense of the discrepancy by saying that he was like an actor who had been cast as the candidate, a good actor, but not a great one -- you were aware all the time that the role was one thing and the man another -- they did not coincide, the actor seemed a touch too aloof (as, let us say, Gregory Peck is usually too aloof) to become the part. Yet one had little sense of whether to value this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself. And his voice gave no clue. When Johnson spoke, one could separate what was fraudulent from what was felt, he would have been satisfying as an actor the way Broderick Crawford or Paul Douglas is satisfying; one saw into his emotions, or at least had the illusion that one did. Kennedy’s voice, however, was only a fair voice, too reedy, near to strident, it had the metallic snap of a cricket in it somewhere, it was more impersonal than the man, and so became the least-impressive quality in a face, a body, a selection of language, and a style of movement which made up a better-than-decent presentation, better than one had expected. - -With all of that, it would not do to pass over the quality in Kennedy which is most difficult to describe. And in fact some touches should be added to this hint of a portrait, for later (after the convention), one had a short session alone with him, and the next day, another. As one had suspected in advance the interviews were not altogether satisfactory, they hardly could have been. A man running for President is altogether different from a man elected President: the hazards of the campaign make it impossible for a candidate to be as interesting as he might like to be (assuming he has such a desire). One kept advancing the argument that this campaign would be a contest of personalities, and Kennedy kept returning the discussion to politics. After a while one recognized this was an inevitable caution for him. So there would be not too much point to reconstructing the dialogue since Kennedy is hardly inarticulate about his political attitudes and there will be a library vault of text devoted to it in the newspapers. What struck me most about the interview was a passing remark whose importance was invisible on the scale of politics, but was altogether meaningful to my particular competence. As we sat down for the first time, Kennedy smiled nicely and said that he had read my books. One muttered one’s pleasure. "Yes," he said, "I’ve read…" and then there was a short pause which did not last long enough to be embarrassing in which it was yet obvious no title came instantly to his mind, an omission one was not ready to mind altogether since a man in such a position must be obliged to carry a hundred thousand facts and names in his head, but the hesitation lasted no longer than three seconds or four, and then he said, "I’ve read The Deer Park and…the others," which startled me for it was the first time in a hundred similar situations, talking to someone whose knowledge of my work was casual, that the sentence did not come out, "I’ve read The Naked and the Dead…and the others." If one is to take the worst and assume that Kennedy was briefed for this interview (which is most doubtful), it still speaks well for the striking instincts of his advisers. - -What was retained later is an impression of Kennedy’s manners which were excellent, even artful, better than the formal good manners of Choate and Harvard, almost as if what was creative in the man had been given to the manners. In a room with one or two people, his voice improved, became low-pitched, even pleasant -- it seemed obvious that in all these years he had never become a natural public speaker and so his voice was constricted in public, the symptom of all orators who are ambitious, throttled, and determined. - -His personal quality had a subtle, not quite describable intensity, a suggestion of dry pent heat perhaps, his eyes large, the pupils grey, the whites prominent, almost shocking, his most forceful feature: he had the eyes of a mountaineer. His appearance changed with his mood, strikingly so, and this made him always more interesting than what he was saying. He would seem at one moment older than his age, forty-eight or fifty, a tall, slim, sunburned professor with a pleasant weathered face, not even particularly handsome; five minutes later, talking to a press conference on his lawn, three microphones before him, a television camera turning, his appearance would have gone through a metamorphosis, he would look again like a movie star, his coloring vivid, his manner rich, his gestures strong and quick, alive with that concentration of vitality a successful actor always seems to radiate. Kennedy had a dozen faces. Although they were not at all similar as people, the quality was reminiscent of someone like Brando whose expression rarely changes, but whose appearances seems to shift from one person into another as the minutes go by, and one bothers with this comparison because, like Brando, Kennedy’s most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others. - -"The next day while they waited in vain for rescuers, the wrecked half of the boat turned over in the water and they saw that it would soon sink. The group decided to swim to a small island three miles away. There were other islands bigger and nearer, but the Navy officers knew that they were occupied by the Japanese. On one island, only one mile to the south, they could see a Japanese camp. McMahon, the engineer whose legs were disabled by burns, was unable to swim. Despite his own painfully crippled back, Kennedy swam the three miles with a breast stroke, towing behind him by a life-belt strap that he held between his teeth the helpless McMahon … it took Kennedy and the suffering engineer five hours to reach the island." - -The quotation is from a book which has for its dedicated unilateral title, The Remarkable Kennedys, but the prose is by one of the best of the war reporters, the former Yank editor, Joe McCarthy, and so presumably may be trusted in such details as this. Physical bravery does not of course guarantee a man’s abilities in the White House -- all too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination -- but the heroism here is remarkable for its tenacity. The above is merely one episode in a continuing saga which went on for five days in and out of the water, and left Kennedy at one point "miraculously saved from drowning (in a storm) by a group of Solomon Island natives who suddenly came up beside him in a large dugout canoe." Afterward, his back still injured (that precise back injury which was to put him on crutches eleven years later, and have him search for "spinal-fusion surgery" despite a warning that his chances of living through the operation were "extremely limited"), he asked to go back on duty and became so bold in the attacks he made with his PT boat "that the crew didn’t like to go out with him because he took so many chances." - -It is the wisdom of a man who senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risking his life. It is the therapy of the instinct, and who is so wise as to call it irrational? Before he went into the Navy, Kennedy had been ailing. Washed out of Freshman year at Princeton by a prolonged trough of yellow jaundice, sick for a year at Harvard, weak already in the back from an injury at football, his trials suggest the self-hatred of a man whose resentment and ambition are too large for his body. Not everyone can discharge their furies on an analyst’s couch, for some angers can be relaxed only by winning power, some rages are sufficiently monumental to demand that one try to become a hero or else fall back into that death which is already within the cells. But if one succeeds, the energy aroused can be exceptional. Talking to a man who had been with Kennedy in Hyannis Port the week before the convention, I heard that he was in a state of deep fatigue. - -"Well, he didn’t look tired at the convention," one commented. - -"Oh, he had three days of rest. Three days of rest for him is like six months to us." - -One thinks of that three-mile swim with the belt in his mouth and McMahon holding it behind him. There are pestilences which sit in the mouth and rot the teeth -- in those five hours how much of the psyche must have been remade, for to give vent to the bite in one’s jaws and yet use that rage to save a life: it is not so very many men who have the apocalyptic sense that heroism is the First Doctor. - -If one had a profound criticism of Kennedy it was that his public mind was too conventional, but that seemed to matter less than the fact of such a man in office because the law of political life had become so dreary that only a conventional mind could win an election. Indeed there could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable. It was the changes that might come afterward on which one could put one’s hope. With such a man in office the myth of the nation would again be engaged, and the fact that he was Catholic would shiver a first existential vibration of consciousness into the mind of the White Protestant. For the first time in our history, the Protestant would have the pain and creative luxury of feeling himself in some tiny degree part of a minority, and that was an experience which might be incommensurable in its value to the best of them. - -As yet we have said hardly a word about Stevenson. And his actions must remain a puzzle unless one dares a speculation about his motive, or was it his need? - -So far as the people at the convention had affection for anyone, it was Stevenson, so far as they were able to generate any spontaneous enthusiasm, their cheers were again for Stevenson. Yet it was obvious he never had much chance because so soon as a chance would present itself he seemed quick to dissipate the opportunity. The day before the nominations, he entered the Sports Arena to take his seat as a delegate -- the demonstration was spontaneous, noisy and prolonged; it was quieted only by Governor Collins’ invitation for Stevenson to speak to the delegates. In obedience perhaps to the scruple that a candidate must not appear before the convention until nominations are done, Stevenson said no more than: "I am grateful for this tumultuous and moving welcome. After getting in and out of the Biltmore Hotel and this hall, I have decided I know whom you are going to nominate. It will be the last survivor." This dry reminder of the ruthlessness of politics broke the roar of excitement for his presence. The applause as he left the platform was like the dying fall-and-moan of a baseball crowd when a home run curves foul. The next day, a New York columnist talking about it said bitterly, "If he’d only gone through the motions, if he had just said that now he wanted to run, that he would work hard, and he hoped the delegates would vote for him. Instead he made that lame joke." One wonders. It seems almost as if he did not wish to win unless victory came despite himself, and then was overwhelming. There are men who are not heroes because they are too good for their time, and it is natural that defeats leave them bitter, tired, and doubtful of their right to make new history. If Stevenson had campaigned for a year before the convention, it is possible that he could have stopped Kennedy. At the least, the convention would have been enormously more exciting, and the nominations might have gone through half-a-dozen ballots before a winner was hammered into shape. But then Stevenson might also have shortened his life. One had the impression of a tired man who (for a politician) was sickened unduly by compromise. A year of maneuvering, broken promises, and detestable partners might have gutted him for the election campaign. If elected, it might have ruined him as a President. There is the possibility that he sensed his situation exactly this way, and knew that if he were to run for President, win and make a good one, he would first have to be restored, as one can indeed be restored, by an exceptional demonstration of love -- love, in this case, meaning that the Party had a profound desire to keep him as their leader. The emotional truth of a last-minute victory for Stevenson over the Kennedy machine might have given him new energy; it would certainly have given him new faith in a country and a party whose good motives he was possibly beginning to doubt. Perhaps the fault he saw with his candidacy was that he attracted only the nicest people to himself and there were not enough of them. (One of the private amusements of the convention was to divine some of the qualities of the candidates by the style of the young women who put on hats and clothing and politicked in the colors of one presidential gent or another. Of course, half of them must have been hired models, but someone did the hiring and so it was fair to look for a common denominator. The Johnson girls tended to be plump, pie-faced, dumb sexy Southern; the Symingteeners seemed a touch mulish, stubborn, good-looking pluggers; the Kennedy ladies were the handsomest; healthy, attractive, tough, a little spoiled -- they looked like the kind of girls who had gotten all the dances in high school and/or worked for a year as an airline hostess before marrying well. But the Stevenson girls looked to be doing it for no money; they were good sorts, slightly horsy-faced, one had the impression they had played field hockey in college.) It was indeed the pure, the saintly, the clean-living, the pacifistic, the vegetarian who seemed most for Stevenson, and the less humorous in the Kennedy camp were heard to remark bitterly that Stevenson had nothing going for him but a bunch of Goddamn Beatnicks. This might even have had its sour truth. The demonstrations outside the Sports Arena for Stevenson seemed to have more than a fair proportion of tall, emaciated young men with thin, wry beards and three-string guitars accompanied (again in undue proportion) by a contingent of ascetic, face-washed young Beat ladies in sweaters and dungarees. Not to mention all the Holden Caulfields one could see from here to the horizon. But of course it is unfair to limit it so, for the Democratic gentry were also committed half en masse for Stevenson, as well as a considerable number of movie stars, Shelley Winters for one: after the convention she remarked sweetly, "Tell me something nice about Kennedy so I can get excited about him." - -What was properly astonishing was the way this horde of political half-breeds and amateurs came within distance of turning the convention from its preconceived purpose, and managed at least to bring the only hour of thoroughgoing excitement the convention could offer. - -But then nominating day was the best day of the week and enough happened to suggest that a convention out of control would be a spectacle as extraordinary in the American scale of spectator values as a close seventh game in the World Series or a tied fourth quarter in a professional-football championship. A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation’s board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat. It is a reminder that no matter how the country might pretend it has grown up and become tidy in its manners, bodiless in its legislative language, hygienic in its separation of high politics from private life, that the roots still come grubby from the soil, and that politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation. - -So. The Sports Arena was new, too pretty of course, tasteless in its design -- it was somehow pleasing that the acoustics were so bad for one did not wish the architects well; there had been so little imagination in their design, and this arena would have none of the harsh grandeur of Madison Square Garden when it was aged by spectators’ phlegm and feet over the next twenty years. Still it had some atmosphere; seen from the streets, with the spectators moving to the ticket gates, the bands playing, the green hot-shot special editions of the Los Angeles newspapers being hawked by the newsboys, there was a touch of the air of promise that precedes a bullfight, not something so good as the approach to the Plaza Mexico, but good, let us say, like the entrance into El Toreo of Mexico City, another architectural monstrosity, also with seats painted, as I remember, in rose-pink, and dark, milky sky-blue. - -Inside, it was also different this nominating day. On Monday and Tuesday the air had been desultory, no one listened to the speakers, and everybody milled from one easy chatting conversation to another -- it had been like a tepid Kaffeklatsch for fifteen thousand people. But today there was a whip of anticipation in the air, the seats on the floor were filled, the press section was working, and in the gallery people were sitting in the aisles. - -Sam Rayburn had just finished nominating Johnson as one came in, and the rebel yells went up, delegates started filing out of their seats and climbing over seats, and a pullulating dance of bodies and bands began to snake through the aisles, the posters jogging and whirling in time to the music. The dun color of the floor (faces, suits, seats, and floor boards), so monotonous the first two days, now lit up with life as if an iridescent caterpillar had emerged from a fold of wet leaves. It was more vivid than one had expected, it was right, it felt finally like a convention, and from up close when one got down to the floor (where your presence was illegal and so consummated by sneaking in one time as demonstrators were going out, and again by slipping a five-dollar bill to a guard) the nearness to the demonstrators took on high color, that electric vividness one feels on the side lines of a football game when it is necessary to duck back as the ball-carrier goes by, his face tortured in the concentration of the moment, the thwomp of his tackle as acute as if one had been hit oneself. - -That was the way the demonstrators looked on the floor. Nearly all had the rapt, private look of a passion or a tension which would finally be worked off by one’s limbs, three hundred football players, everything from seedy delegates with jowl-sweating shivers to livid models, paid for their work that day, but stomping out their beat on the floor with the hypnotic adulatory grimaces of ladies who had lived for Lyndon these last ten years. - -Then from the funereal rostrum, whose color was not so rich as mahogany nor so dead as a cigar, came the last of the requests for the delegates to take their seats. The seconding speeches began, one minute each; they ran for three and four, the minor-league speakers running on the longest as if the electric antennae of television was the lure of the Sirens, leading them out. Bored cheers applauded their concluding Götterdämmerungen and the nominations were open again. A favorite son, a modest demonstration, five seconding speeches, tedium. - -Next was Kennedy’s occasion. Governor Freeman of Minnesota made the speech. On the second or third sentence his television prompter jammed, an accident. Few could be aware of it at the moment; the speech seemed merely flat and surprisingly void of bravura. He was obviously no giant of extempore. Then the demonstration. Well-run, bigger than Johnson’s, jazzier, the caliber of the costumes and decoration better chosen: the placards were broad enough, "Let’s Back Jack," the floats were garish, particularly a papier-mâché or plastic balloon of Kennedy’s head, six feet in diameter, which had nonetheless the slightly shrunken, over-red, rubbery look of a toy for practical jokers in one of those sleazy off-Times Square magic-and-gimmick stores; the band was suitably corny; and yet one had the impression this demonstration had been designed by some hands-to-hip interior decorator who said, "Oh, joy, let’s have fun, let’s make this true beer hall." - -Besides, the personnel had something of the Kennedy élan, those paper hats designed to look like straw boaters with Kennedy’s face on the crown, and small photographs of him on the ribbon, those hats which had come to symbolize the crack speed of the Kennedy team, that Madison Avenue cachet which one finds in the bars like P. J. Clarke’s, the elegance always giving its subtle echo of the Twenties so that the raccoon coats seem more numerous than their real count, and the colored waistcoats are measured by the charm they would have drawn from Scott Fitzgerald’s eye. But there, it occurred to one for the first time that Kennedy’s middle name was just that, Fitzgerald, and the tone of his crack lieutenants, the unstated style, was true to Scott. The legend of Fitzgerald had an army at last, formed around the self-image in the mind of every superior Madison Avenue opportunist that he was hard, he was young, he was In, his conversation was lean as wit, and if the work was not always scrupulous, well the style could aspire. If there came a good day…he could meet the occasion. - -The Kennedy snake dance ran its thirty lively minutes, cheered its seconding speeches, and sat back. They were so sure of winning, there had been so many victories before this one, and this one had been scouted and managed so well, that hysteria could hardly be the mood. Besides, everyone was waiting for the Stevenson barrage which should be at least diverting. But now came a long tedium. Favorite sons were nominated, fat mayors shook their hips, seconders told the word to constituents back in Ponderwaygot County, treacly demonstrations tried to hold the floor, and the afternoon went by; Symington's hour came and went, a good demonstration, good as Johnson's (for good cause -- they had pooled their demonstrators). More favorite sons, Governor Docking of Kansas declared "a genius" by one of his lady speakers in a tense go-back-to-religion voice. The hours went by, two, three, four hours, it seemed forever before they would get to Stevenson. It was evening when Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota got up to nominate him. - -The gallery was ready, the floor was responsive, the demonstrators were milling like bulls in their pen waiting for the toril to fly open -- it would have been hard not to wake the crowd up, not to make a good speech. McCarthy made a great one. Great it was by the measure of convention oratory, and he held the crowd like a matador, timing their oles!, building them up, easing them back, correcting any sag in attention, gathering their emotion, discharging it, creating new emotion on the wave of the last, driving his passes tighter and tighter as he readied for the kill. "Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats, do not leave the prophet without honor in his own party." One had not heard a speech like this since 1948 when Vito Marcantonio's voice, his harsh, shrill, bitter, street urchin's voice screeched through the loud-speakers at Yankee Stadium and lashed seventy thousand people into an uproar. - -"There was only one man who said let's talk sense to the American people," McCarthy went on, his muleta furled for the naturales. "There was only one man who said let's talk sense to the American people," he repeated. "He said the promise of America is the promise of greatness. This was his call to greatness....Do not forget this man....Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you not the favorite son of one state, but the favorite son of the fifty states, the favorite son of every country which has not seen him but is secretly thrilled by his name." Bedlam. The kill. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Adlai Stevenson of Illinois." Ears and tail. Hooves and bull. A roar went up like the roar one heard the day Bobby Thompson hit his home run at the Polo Grounds and the Giants won the pennant from the Dodgers in the third playoff game of the 1951 season. The demonstration cascaded onto the floor, the gallery came to its feet, the Sports Arena sounded like the inside of a marching drum. A tidal pulse of hysteria, exaltation, defiance, exhilaration, anger, and roaring desire flooded over the floor. The cry which had gone up on McCarthy's last sentence had not paused for breath in five minutes, and troop after troop of demonstrators jammed the floor (the Stevenson people to be scolded the next day for having collected floor passes and sent them out to bring in new demonstrators) and still the sound mounted. One felt the convention coming apart. There was a Kennedy girl in the seat in front of me, the Kennedy hat on her head, a dimpled healthy brunette; she had sat silently through McCarthy's speech, but now, like a woman paying her respects to the power of natural thrust, she took off her hat and began to clap herself. I saw a writer I knew in the next aisle; he had spent a year studying the Kennedy machine in order to write a book on how nomination is won. If Stevenson stampeded the convention, his work was lost. Like a reporter at a mine cave-in I inquired the present view of the widow. "Who can think," was the answer, half frantic, half elated, "just watch it, that's all." I found a cool one, a New York reporter, who smiled in rueful respect. "It's the biggest demonstration I've seen since Wendell Willkie's in 1940," he said, and added, "God, if Stevenson takes it, I can wire my wife and move the family on to Hawaii." - -"I don't get it." - -"Well, every story I wrote said it was locked up for Kennedy." - -Still it went on, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, the chairman could hardly be heard, the demonstrators refused to leave. The lights were turned out, giving a sudden theatrical shift to the sense of a crowded church at midnight, and a new roar went up, louder, more passionate than anything heard before. It was the voice, it was the passion, if one insisted to call it that, of everything in America which was defeated, idealistic, innocent, alienated, outside and Beat, it was the potential voice of a new third of the nation whose psyche was ill from cultural malnutrition, it was powerful, it was extraordinary, it was larger than the decent, humorous, finicky, half-noble man who had called it forth, it was a cry from the Thirties when Time was simple, it was a resentment of the slick technique, the oiled gears, and the superior generals of Fitzgerald's Army; but it was also -- and for this reason one could not admire it altogether, except with one's excitement -- it was also the plea of the bewildered who hunger for simplicity again, it was the adolescent counterpart of the boss's depression before the unpredictable dynamic of Kennedy as President, it was the return to the sentimental dream of Roosevelt rather than the approaching nightmare of history's oncoming night, and it was inspired by a terror of the future as much as a revulsion of the present. - -Fitz's Army held; after the demonstration was finally down, the convention languished for ninety minutes while Meyner and others were nominated, a fatal lapse of time because Stevenson had perhaps a chance to stop Kennedy if the voting had begun on the echo of the last cry for him, but in an hour and a half depression crept in again and emotions spent, the delegates who had wavered were rounded into line. When the vote was taken, Stevenson had made no gains. The brunette who had taken off her hat was wearing it again, and she clapped and squealed when Wyoming delivered the duke and Kennedy was in. The air was sheepish, like the mood of a suburban couple who forgive each other for cutting in and out of somebody else's automobile while the country club dance is on. Again, tonight, no miracle would occur. In the morning the papers would be moderate in their description of Stevenson's last charge. - -One did not go to the other convention. It was seen on television, and so too much cannot be said of that. It did however confirm one's earlier bias that the Republican Party was still a party of church ushers, undertakers, choirboys, prison wardens, bank presidents, small-town police chiefs, state troopers, psychiatrists, beauty-parlor operators, corporation executives, Boy-Scout leaders, fraternity presidents, tax-board assessors, community leaders, surgeons, Pullman porters, head nurses and the fat sons of rich fathers. Its candidate would be given the manufactured image of an ordinary man, and his campaign, so far as it was a psychological campaign (and this would be far indeed), would present him as a simple, honest, dependable, hard-working, ready-to-learn, modest, humble, decent, sober young man whose greatest qualification for President was his profound abasement before the glories of the Republic, the stability of the mediocre, and his own unworthiness. The apocalyptic hour of Uriah Heep. - -It would then be a campaign unlike the ones which had preceded it. Counting by the full spectrum of complete Right to absolute Left, the political differences would be minor, but what would be not at all minor was the power of each man to radiate his appeal into some fundamental depths of the American character. One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony. And this, this appeal to the psychic direction America would now choose for itself was the element most promising about this election, for it gave the possibility that the country might be able finally to rise above the deadening verbiage of its issues, its politics, its jargon, and live again by an image of itself. For in some part of themselves the people might know (since these candidates were not old enough to be revered) that they had chosen one young man for his mystery, for his promise that the country would grow or disintegrate by the unwilling charge he gave to the intensity of the myth, or had chosen another young man for his unstated oath that he would do all in his power to keep the myth buried and so convert the remains of Renaissance man as rapidly as possible into mass man. One might expect them to choose the enigma in preference to the deadening certainty. Yet one must doubt America's bravery. This lurching, unhappy, pompous and most corrupt nation -- could it have the courage finally to take on a new image for itself, was it brave enough to put into office not only one of its ablest men, its most efficient, its most conquistadorial (for Kennedy's capture of the Democratic Party deserves the word), but also one of its more mysterious men (the national psyche must shiver in its sleep at the image of Mickey Mantle-cum-Lindbergh in office, and a First Lady with an eighteenth-century face). Yes, America was at last engaging the fate of its myth, its consciousness about to be accelerated or cruelly depressed in its choice between two young men in their forties who, no matter how close, dull, or indifferent their stated politics might be, were radical poles apart, for one was sober, the apotheosis of opportunistic lead, all radium spent, the other handsome as a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream. So, finally, would come a choice which history had never presented to a nation before -- one could vote for glamour or for ugliness, a staggering and most stunning choice -- would the nation be brave enough to enlist the romantic dream of itself, would it vote for the image in the mirror of its unconscious, were the people indeed brave enough to hope for an acceleration of Time, for that new life of drama which would come from choosing a son to lead them who was heir apparent to the psychic loins? One could pause: it might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do. - -Yet if the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might come to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American. If the nation so voted. But one knew the unadmitted specter in the minds of the Democratic delegates: that America would go to sleep on election eve with the polls promising Kennedy a victory on the day to come, yet in its sleep some millions of Democrats and Independents would suffer a nightmare before the mystery of uncharted possibilities their man would suggest, and in a terror of all the creativities (and some violences) that mass man might now have to dare again, the undetermined would go out in the morning to vote for the psychic security of Nixon the way a middle-aged man past adventure holds to the stale bread of his marriage. Yes, this election might be fearful enough to betray the polls and no one in America could plan the new direction until the last vote as counted by the last heeler in the last ambivalent ward, no one indeed could know until then what had happened the night before, what had happened at three o'clock in the morning on that long dark night of America's search for a security cheaper than her soul. diff --git a/tests/corpus/swingers.md b/tests/corpus/swingers.md deleted file mode 100644 index 909644d3c..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/swingers.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,155 +0,0 @@ -Swingers -*The New Yorker* -By Ian Parker - -On a Saturday evening a few months ago, a fund-raiser was held in a downtown Manhattan yoga studio to benefit the bonobo, a species of African ape that is very similar to—but, some say, far nicer than—the chimpanzee. A flyer for the event depicted a bonobo sitting in the crook of a tree, a superimposed guitar in its left hand, alongside the message “Save the Hippie Chimps!” An audience of young, shoeless people sat cross-legged on a polished wooden floor, listening to Indian-accented music and eating snacks prepared by Bonobo’s, a restaurant on Twenty-third Street that serves raw vegetarian food. According to the restaurant’s take-out menu, “Wild bonobos are happy, pleasure-loving creatures whose lifestyle is dictated by instinct and Mother Nature.” - -The event was arranged by the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, an organization based in Washington, D.C., which works in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect bonobo habitats and to combat illegal trading in bush meat. Sally Jewell Coxe, the group’s founder and president, stood to make a short presentation. She showed slides of bonobos, including one captioned “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR,” and said that the apes, which she described as “bisexual,” engaged in various kinds of sexual activity in order to defuse conflict and maintain a tranquil society. There was applause. “Bonobos are into peace and love and harmony,” Coxe said, then joked, “They might even have been the first ape to discover marijuana.” Images of bonobos were projected onto the wall behind her: they looked like chimpanzees but had longer hair, flatter faces, pinker lips, smaller ears, narrower bodies, and, one might say, more gravitas—a chimpanzee’s arched brow looks goofy, but a bonobo’s low, straight brow sets the face in what is easy to read as earnest contemplativeness. - -I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. He was a musician and a former practitioner of “metaphysical counselling,” which he also referred to as clairvoyance. He said that he had encountered bonobos a few years ago at Georgia State University, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist known for experiments that test the language-learning abilities of bonobos. (During one of Wind’s several visits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, was also there; Gabriel played a keyboard, another keyboard was put in front of a bonobo, and Wind played flutes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of “unconditional love.” They were “tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.” Chimps, by contrast, led brutish lives of “aggression, ego, and plotting.” As for humans, they had some innate stock of bonobo temperament, but they too often behaved like chimps. (The chimp-bonobo division is strongly felt by devotees of the latter. Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and “got shit for it.”) - -It was Wind’s turn to perform. “Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,” he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump. “Help bonobo and bonobo will help you.” - -In recent years, the bonobo has found a strange niche in the popular imagination, based largely on its reputation for peacefulness and promiscuity. The Washington Post recently described the species as copulating “incessantly”; the Times claimed that the bonobo “stands out from the chest-thumping masses as an example of amicability, sensitivity and, well, humaneness”; a PBS wildlife film began with the words “Where chimpanzees fight and murder, bonobos are peacemakers. And, unlike chimps, it’s not the bonobo males but the females who have the power.” The Kinsey Institute claims on its Web site that “every bonobo—female, male, infant, high or low status—seeks and responds to kisses.” And, in Los Angeles, a sex adviser named Susan Block promotes what she calls “The Bonobo Way” on public-access television. (In brief: “Pleasure eases pain; good sex defuses tension; love lessens violence; you can’t very well fight a war while you’re having an orgasm.”) In newspaper columns and on the Internet, bonobos are routinely described as creatures that shun violence and live in egalitarian or female-dominated communities; more rarely, they are said to avoid meat. These behaviors are thought to be somehow linked to their unquenchable sexual appetites, often expressed in the missionary position. And because the bonobo is the “closest relative” of humans, its comportment is said to instruct us in the fundamentals of human nature. To underscore the bonobo’s status as a signpost species—a guide to human virtue, or at least modern dating—it is said to walk upright. (The Encyclopædia Britannica depicts the species in a bipedal pose, like a chimpanzee in a sitcom.) - -This pop image of the bonobo—equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty—has flourished largely in the absence of the animal itself, which was recognized as a species less than a century ago. Two hundred or so bonobos are kept in captivity around the world; but, despite being one of just four species of great ape, along with orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees, the wild bonobo has received comparatively little scientific scrutiny. It is one of the oddities of the bonobo world—and a source of frustration to some—that Frans de Waal, of Emory University, the high-profile Dutch primatologist and writer, who is the most frequently quoted authority on the species, has never seen a wild bonobo. - -Attempts to study bonobos in their habitat began only in the nineteen-seventies, and those efforts have always been intermittent, because of geography and politics. Wild bonobos, which are endangered (estimates of their number range from six thousand to a hundred thousand), keep themselves out of view, in dense and inaccessible rain forests, and only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, in the past decade, more than three million people have died in civil and regional conflicts. For several years around the turn of the millennium, when fighting in Congo was at its most intense, field observation of bonobos came to a halt. - -In recent years, however, some Congolese and overseas observers have returned to the forest, and to the hot, damp work of sneaking up on reticent apes. The most prominent scientist among them is Gottfried Hohmann, a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany. He has been visiting Congo off and on since 1989. When I first called Hohmann, two years ago, he didn’t immediately embrace the idea of taking a reporter on a field trip. But we continued to talk, and in the week after attending the bonobo fund-raiser in New York I flew to meet Hohmann in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. A few days later, I was talking with him and two of his colleagues in the shade of an aircraft hangar in Kinshasa’s airport for charter flights, waiting for a plane to fly us to the forest. - -It was a hot morning. We sat on plastic garden chairs, looking out over a runway undisturbed by aircraft. The airport seemed half-ruined. Families were living in one hangar, and laundry hung to dry over makeshift shelters. A vender came by with local newspapers, which were filled with fears of renewed political violence. European embassies had been sending cautionary text messages to their resident nationals. - -Hohmann is a lean, serious, blue-eyed man in his mid-fifties. He has a reputation for professional fortitude, but also for chilliness. One bonobo researcher told me that he was “very difficult to work with,” and there were harsher judgments, too. He lives in Leipzig with Barbara Fruth, his wife and frequent scientific collaborator, and their three young children. Three or four times a year, he flies to Kinshasa, where he charters a light plane operated by an American-based missionary group. The plane takes him into the world’s second-largest rain forest, in the Congo Basin, and puts him within hiking distance of a study site called Lui Kotal, where he has worked since 2002. When Hohmann first came to Congo—then Zaire—he operated from a site that could be reached only by sweating upriver for a week in a motorized canoe. “People think it’s entertaining, but it’s not,” he told me, as we waited. “It’s so slow. So hard.” He added, “You always think there’s going to be something round the next bend, but there never is.” He is an orderly man who has learned how to withstand disorder, an impatient man who has reached some accommodation with endless delay. - -Hohmann makes only short visits to Lui Kotal, but the camp is run in his absence by Congolese staff members on rotation from the nearest village, and by foreign research students or volunteers. Two new camp recruits were joining Hohmann on this flight: Andrew Fowler, a tough-looking Londoner in his forties, was an experienced chimpanzee field worker with a Ph.D.; Ryan Matthews was a languid Canadian-American of thirty who had answered an online advertisement to be Lui Kotal’s camp manager, for three hundred euros a month. We had all met for the first time a few days earlier, in a café in the least lawless neighborhood of Kinshasa, where Hohmann had flatly noted that, of all the overseas visitors he had invited to Lui Kotal over the years, only one had ever wanted to return. Fowler and Matthews were a bit wary of Hohmann, and so was I. We had exchanged small talk over a pink tablecloth, establishing, first, that the British say “bo-noh-bo”; Americans, “bahn-obo”; and Germans something in between. - -Fowler and Matthews had just taken their last shower before Christmas. They would be camping for at least nine months, detached from their previous lives except for access, once or twice a week, to brief e-mails. Fowler, emanating self-reliance, was impatient for the exile to come; he had brought little more than a penknife and a copy of “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Matthews was carrying more. As we discovered over time, his equipment included a fur hat, a leather-bound photo album, an inflatable sofa, and goggles decorated with glitter. Matthews is a devotee of the annual Burning Man festival, in the Nevada desert, and this, apparently, had informed his African preparations. - -Matthews would be keeping accounts and ordering supplies. Fowler’s long-term plan was to find a postdoctoral research topic about bonobos, but his daily duty, on this trip, was to be a “habituator”—someone able to find the community of thirty or so bonobos known to live near the camp, and stay within sight of them as they moved from place to place, with the idea that future researchers might be able to observe them for more than a few seconds at a time. Fowler called it “chimp-bothering.” (Watching bonobos, I understood, is not like ornithology; there’s no pretense that you’re not there.) It gave an insight into the pace of bonobo studies to realize that, nearly five years after Hohmann first reached Lui Kotal, this process of habituation and identification—upon which serious research depends—remained unfinished. - -“There’s a satisfaction for a scientist to come home at night with his notebook filled,” Hohmann said with a shrug. “The most happy people are always the ecologists. They go to the forest, and the trees are not running away.” He and his colleagues were still “racing through the dark, trying to get I.D.s,” and most of the interesting bonobo questions were still unanswered. Is male aggression kept in check by females? Why do females give birth only every five to seven years, despite frequent sexual activity? In the far distance, such lines of inquiry may converge at an understanding of bonobo evolution, Hohmann said, and, beyond, the origins of human beings. “It’s a long path, and, because it’s long, there are few people who do it. If it was quicker and easier? There are hundreds of people working with baboons and lemurs, so it’s not so easy to find your niche. A student working with bonobos can close his eyes and pick a topic, and it can’t be wrong.” - -We finally boarded a tiny plane. Our pilot was a middle-aged American with a straight back and a large mustache. As we took off, Matthews was speaking on a cell phone to his mother, in New Jersey—enjoying the final moments of reception before it was lost for the rest of the year. The Congo River was beneath us as we rose through patches of low clouds. Suddenly, the plane seemed to fill with clouds, as if clouds were made of a dense white mist that could drift between airplane seats. The pilot turned to look—the fog seemed to be coming from the rear of the cabin—and then glanced at Hohmann, whose seat was alongside his. “Is that O.K.?” the pilot asked, in the most carefree tone imaginable. Hohmann said it was, explaining that liquid nitrogen, imported to freeze bonobo urine, must have been forced out of its cannister by the change in air pressure. Meanwhile, Matthews told his mother, “The plane seems to be filling with smoke,” at which point his phone dropped the call. - -We flew inland, to the east. The Congo River looped away to the north. Bonobos live only south of the river. (Accordingly, they have been called “left-bank chimps.”) The evolutionary tree looks like this: if the trunk is the common ape ancestor and the treetop is the present day, then the lowest—that is, the earliest—branch leads to the modern orangutan. That may have been about sixteen million years ago. The next-highest branch, around eight million years ago, leads to the gorilla; then, six million years ago, the human branch. The remaining branch divides once more, perhaps two million years ago. And this last split was presumably connected to a geographical separation: chimpanzees evolved north of the Congo River, bonobos to the south. Chimpanzees came to inhabit far-flung landscapes that had various tree densities; bonobos largely stayed in thick, gloomy forest. (Chimpanzees had to compete for resources with gorillas; but bonobos never saw another ape—one theory argues that this richer environment, by allowing bonobos to move and feed together as a leisurely group, led to the evolution of reduced rancor.) From the plane, we first looked down on a flat landscape of grassland dotted with patches of trees; this slowly became forest dotted with grassland patches; and then all we could see was a crush of trees barely making way for the occasional scribble of a Congo tributary. - -After three hours, we landed at a dirt airstrip in a field of tall grass and taller termite mounds. There were no buildings in sight. We were just south of the equator, five hundred miles from Kinshasa, and three hundred miles from the nearest road used by cars—in a part of the continent connected by waterways or by trails running through the forest from village to village, good for pedestrians and the occasional old bicycle. The plane left, and the airstrip’s only infrastructure—a sunshade made of a sheet of blue plastic tied at each corner to a rough wooden post—was dismantled in seconds, and taken away. - -Joseph Etike, a quizzical-looking man in his thirties who is Hohmann’s local manager, organized porters to carry our liquid nitrogen and our inflatable sofa. We first walked for an hour to Lompole, a village of thirty houses made of baked-earth bricks and thatched roofs, and stopped at Etike’s home. “People were amazed when Gottfried first came to the village, and asked about the bonobos,” Etike recalled, standing beside his front door. (He spoke in French, his second language.) “They’d never heard of such a thing.” His salary was reflected in his wardrobe: he was dressed in jeans and sneakers, while his neighbors wore flip-flops and battered shorts and Pokémon T-shirts. I asked Etike how local people had historically thought of the bonobo. “It depends on the family,” he said. “In mine, there was a story that my great-great-grandfather became lost in the forest and was found by a bonobo, and it showed him the path. So my family never hunted them.” But the tradition was somehow not fully impressed on Joseph as a boy, and when he was seventeen someone gave him bonobo meat, to his mother’s regret. How did it taste? “Like antelope,” he said. “No. Like elephant meat.” - -One afternoon in 1928, Harold Coolidge, a Harvard zoologist, was picking through a storage tray of ape bones in a museum near Brussels. He examined a skull identified as belonging to a juvenile chimpanzee from the Belgian Congo, and was surprised to see that the bones of the skull’s dome were fused. In a young chimpanzee (and in a young human, too), these bones are not joined but can shift in relation to one another, like broken ice on a pond. He had to be holding an adult head, but it was not a chimpanzee’s. Several similar skulls lay nearby. - -Coolidge knew that this was an important discovery. But he was incautious; when the museum’s director passed by, Coolidge mentioned the skull. The director, in turn, alerted Ernst Schwarz, a German anatomist who was already aware that there were differences between apes on either side of the Congo. And, as Coolidge later wrote, “in a flash Schwarz grabbed a pencil and paper,” and published an article that named a new subspecies, Pan satyrus paniscus, or pygmy chimpanzee. This was the animal that eventually became known as the bonobo. (In fact, bonobos are barely smaller than chimpanzees, except for their heads; but Schwarz had seen only a head.) “I had been taxonomically scooped,” Coolidge wrote. He had the lesser honor of elevating Pan paniscus to the status of full species, in 1933. - -Live bonobos had already been seen outside Congo, but they, too, had been misidentified as chimps. At the turn of the century, the Antwerp zoo held at least one. Robert Yerkes, a founder of modern primatology, briefly owned a bonobo. In 1923, he bought two young apes, and called one Chim and the other Panzee. In “Almost Human,” published two years later, he noted that they looked and behaved quite differently. Panzee was timid, dumb, and foul-tempered. “Her resentment and anger were readily aroused and she was quick to give them expression with hands and teeth,” Yerkes wrote. Chim was a joy: equable and eager for new experiences. “Seldom daunted, he treated the mysteries of life as philosophically as any man.” Moreover, he was a “genius.” Yerkes’s description, coupled with later study of Chim’s remains, made it plain that he was Pan paniscus: bonobos had a good reputation even before they had a name. (Panzee was a chimpanzee; but, in defense of that species, her peevishness was probably connected to a tuberculosis infection.) Chim died in 1924, before his species was recognized. - -For decades, “pygmy chimpanzee” remained the common term for these apes, even after “bonobo” was first proposed, in a 1954 paper by Eduard Tratz, an Austrian zoologist, and Heinz Heck, the director of the Munich zoo. (They suggested, incorrectly, that “bonobo” was an indigenous word; they may have been led astray by Bolobo, a town on the south bank of the Congo River. In the area where Hohmann works, the species is called edza.) In the thirties, that zoo had three members of Pan paniscus, and Heck and Tratz had studied them. By the time their paper, the first based on detailed observations of bonobo behavior, was published, the specimens were dead, allegedly killed by stress during Allied air raids. (The deaths have been cited as evidence of a bonobo’s innate sensitivity; the zoo’s brute chimpanzees survived.) As Frans de Waal has noted, Heck and Tratz’s pioneering insights—they wrote that bonobos were less violent than chimps, for example—did not become general scientific knowledge, and had to be rediscovered. - -Twenty years passed before anyone attempted to study bonobos in the wild. In 1972, Arthur Horn, a doctoral candidate in physical anthropology at Yale, was encouraged by his department to travel alone to Zaire; on the shore of Lake Tumba, three hundred miles northwest of Kinshasa, he embarked on the first bonobo field study. “The idea was to gather all the information about how bonobos lived, what they did—something like Jane Goodall,” Horn told me. Goodall was already famous for her long-term study of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, and for her poise in the films made about her by the National Geographic Society and others. Thanks, in part, to her work, the chimpanzee had taken on the role of model species for humans—the instructive nearest neighbor, the best living hint of our past and our potential. (That role had previously been held, at different times, by the gorilla and the savanna baboon.) At this time, Goodall had confidence that chimpanzees were “by and large, rather ‘nicer’ than us.” - -Horn’s attempt to follow Goodall’s model was thwarted. He spent two years in Africa, during which time he observed bonobos for a total of about six hours. “And, when I did see them, as soon as they saw me they were gone,” he told me. - -In 1974, not long after Horn left Africa, Goodall witnessed the start of what she came to call the Four-Year War in Gombe. A chimpanzee population split into two, and, over time, one group wiped out the other, in gory episodes of territorial attack and cannibalism. Chimp aggression was already recognized by science, but chimp warfare was not. “I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge,” Goodall later wrote. She would wake in the night, haunted by the memory of witnessing a female chimpanzee gorging on the flesh of an infant, “her mouth smeared with blood like some grotesque vampire from the legends of childhood.” - -Reports of this behavior found a place in a long-running debate about the fundamentals of human nature—a debate, in short, about whether people were nasty or nice. Were humans savage but for the constructs of civil society (Thomas Hobbes)? Or were they civil but for the corruptions of society (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)? It had not taken warring chimps to suggest some element of biological inheritance in human behavior, including aggression: the case had been made, in its most popular recent form, by Desmond Morris, in “The Naked Ape,” his 1967 best-seller. But if chimpanzees had once pointed the way toward a tetchy but less than menacing common ancestor, they could no longer do so: Goodall had documented bloodlust in our closest relative. According to Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard and the author, with Dale Peterson, of “Demonic Males” (1996), the Gombe killings “made credible the idea that our warring tendencies go back into our prehuman past. They made us a little less special.” - -Meanwhile, bonobo studies began to gain momentum. Other scientists followed Horn into the Congo Basin, and they set up two primary field sites. One, at Lomako, three hundred miles northeast of Lake Tumba, came to be used by Randall Susman, of Stony Brook University, and his students. Further to the east, Takayoshi Kano, of Kyoto University, in Japan, made a survey of bonobo habitats on foot and on bicycle, and in 1974 he set up a site at the edge of a village called Wamba. Early data from Wamba became better known than Lomako’s: the Japanese spent more time at their site and saw more bonobos. Susman, however, can take credit for the first bonobo book: he edited a collection of papers given at the first bonobo symposium, in Atlanta, in 1982. - -In the winter of 1983-84, in an exploration that was less gruelling but as influential as any field research, Frans de Waal turned his attention from chimps to bonobos, and spent several months observing and videotaping ten bonobos in the San Diego Zoo. He had recently published “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes” (1982), to great acclaim, and, as de Waal recently recalled, “Most people I talked to at the time would say, ‘Why would you do bonobos if you can do real, big chimpanzees?’ ” Among the papers that drew on his studies in San Diego, one was particularly noticed in the academy. In “Tension Regulation and Nonreproductive Functions of Sex in Captive Bonobos,” de Waal reported that these apes seemed to be having more sex, and more kinds of sex, than was really necessary. He recorded seventeen brief episodes of oral sex and four hundred and twenty equally brief episodes of face-to-face mounting. He also saw forty-three instances of kissing, some involving “extensive tongue-tongue contact.” - -In the late nineteen-eighties, Gottfried Hohmann was an ambitious scientist in his thirties; he spent nearly three years in southern India, researching vocal communication in macaques and langurs. “But it was difficult then to get funding for India,” Hohmann told me. “And the bonobo thing was just heating up. Frans’s paper really affected everyone” in the scientific community. “Tongue-kissing apes? You can’t come up with a better story. Then people said to me, ‘We want you to go in the field.’ ” Hohmann ran his hand back and forth over his head. “So,” he said. - -We were sitting on a wooden bench at the edge of a forest clearing barely larger than a basketball court, talking against a constant screech—an insect tinnitus that the ear never quite processed into silence. Trees rose a hundred feet all around, giving the impression that we had fallen to the bottom of a well. Two days after our plane touched down, we had reached Lui Kotal. In the intervening hours, which were inarguably more challenging for the three newcomers than for Hohmann, we had first camped in a violent rainstorm, then followed some unflagging porters on a trail that led through the hot, soupy air of the forest, and along waist-high streams that flowed over mud. We had then camped again, before crossing a fast-flowing river in an unsteady canoe. - -Now, at five in the afternoon, the light at Lui Kotal was beginning to fade. People who work there make do with little sun—and with a horizon that is directly overhead. Around us, the wall of vegetation was solid except where broken by paths: one led back to the village; another led into that part of the forest where Hohmann and his team have permission to roam—an area, six miles by five, whose boundaries are streams and rivers. In the clearing stood a dozen structures with thatched roofs and no walls. Some of these sheltered tents; a larger one was a kitchen, where an open fire was burning; and another was built over a long wooden table, beside which hung a 2006 Audubon Society calendar that had been neatly converted—with glue, paper, and an extravagant superfluity of time—into a 2007 calendar. At the table sat two young American volunteers who were not many weeks away from seeing the calendar’s images repeat. Pale, skinny men in their twenties, wearing wild beards, they looked like they needed rescuing from kidnappers. Three others were less feral, and had been in the camp for a shorter time: a young British woman volunteer, an Austrian woman who had recently graduated from the University of Vienna, and a Swiss Ph.D. student attached to the Max Planck Institute. - -Hohmann, shirtless, was in an easy mood, knowing that much of the logistical and political business of the trip was now done. Before leaving the village, I’d seen something of a bonobo researcher’s extended duties. The men of Lompole had convened around him, their arms crossed and hands tucked into their armpits. Hohmann remained seated and silent as an angry debate began—as Hohmann described it, between villagers who were unhappy about the original deal that compensated the village for having to stop hunting around Lui Kotal (this had involved a bulk gift of corrugated iron, to be used for roofs) and those who worked directly for the project and saw the greater advantage in stability and employment. Hohmann had finally got up and delivered a forceful speech in Lingala, Congo’s national language. He finished with a moment of theatre: he loomed over his main antagonist, wagging his finger. “It’s good to remind him now and then how short he is,” Hohmann later said, smiling. - -By 1989, Hohmann told me, he had read enough bonobo literature to be tempted to visit Zaire. Even if one left aside French kissing, he said, “the bonobo allured me. I thought, This is a species.” By then, thanks to field and captive studies, a picture of bonobo society had begun to emerge, and some peculiar chimpanzee-bonobo dichotomies had been described. Besides looking and sounding different from chimpanzees (bonobos let out high whoops that can seem restrained alongside chimpanzee yelling), bonobos seemed to order their lives without the hierarchical fury and violence of chimpanzees. (“With bonobos, everything is peaceful,” Takeshi Furuichi, a Japanese researcher who worked with Kano at Wamba, told me. “When I see bonobos, they seem to be enjoying their lives. When I see chimpanzees, I am very, very sorry for them, especially for the high-ranking males. They really have to pay attention.”) In captivity, at least, male bonobos never ganged up on females, although the reverse sometimes occurred. The bonds among females seemed to be stronger than among male chimpanzees, and this was perhaps reinforced by sexual activity, by momentary episodes of frottage that bonobo experts refer to as “genito-genital rubbing,” or “g-g rubbing.” And, unusually, the females were said to be sexually receptive to males even at times when there was no chance of conception. - -“We said, ‘We have to answer: Why is it like this?’ ” Hohmann said. “The males, the physically superior animals, do not dominate the females, the inferior animals? The males, the genetically closely related part of any bonobo group, do not coöperate, but the females, who are not related, do coöperate? It is not only different from chimpanzees but it violates the rules of social ecology.” - -Hohmann flew to Zaire and eventually set up a small camp in Lomako Forest, a few miles from the original Stony Brook site. His memory is that Susman’s camp had been unused for years, but Susman told me that it was still active, and that Hohmann was graceless in the way that he took over the forest. And although Hohmann said that he worked with a new community of bonobos, Susman said that Hohmann inherited bonobos that were already habituated, and failed to acknowledge this research advantage. Whatever the truth, the distrust seems typical of the field. The challenges of bonobo research call for chimpanzee vigor, and this leads to animosities. Susman told me that Hohmann was the kind of man who, “if he was sitting by the side of the road and needed a filter for his Land Rover, people would drive right by. Even if they had five extra filters in the trunk.” - -When a researcher has access to a species about which little is known, and whose every gesture seems to echo a human gesture, and whose eyes meet a human gaze, there is a temptation simply to stare, until you have seen enough to tell a story. That is how Hohmann judged the work of Dian Fossey, who made long-term observations of gorillas in Rwanda, and the work of Jane Goodall, at least at the start of her career. “They lived with the apes and for the apes,” he said. “It was ‘Let’s see what I’m going to get. I enjoy it anyway, so whatever I get is fine.’ ” And this is how Hohmann regarded the Japanese researchers, for all their perseverance. The Wamba site had produced a lot of data on social and sexual relations, and Kano published a book about bonobos, which concluded with the suggestion that bonobos illuminated the evolution of human love. But “what the Japanese produced was not really satisfying,” Hohmann said. “It was narrative and descriptive. They are not setting out with a question. They want to understand bonobos.” Moreover, the Japanese initially lured bonobos with food, as Goodall had lured chimpanzees. This was more than habituation. At Wamba, bonobos ate sugarcane at a field planted for them. The primatological term is “provisioning”; Hohmann calls it opening a restaurant. (As an example of the possibly distorting impact of provisioning, Hohmann noted that the Wamba females had far shorter intervals between births than those at Lomako.) - -Hohmann’s first stay at Lomako lasted thirteen months. Halfway through, Barbara Fruth, a German Ph.D. student, flew to join him; they eventually married. (Up until then, “I was not thinking of having a family,” Hohmann said. “I was just doing what I did. I said, ‘I don’t have the time, and who’s crazy enough to join me?’ ”) Hohmann and Fruth flew back and forth between Germany and Lomako, and the bonobos eventually became so habituated that they would sometimes fall asleep in front of their observers. The Max Planck Institute is not a university; it supports an academic life that many professors elsewhere would find enviable—one of long-term funding and no undergraduates. Hohmann was able to publish slowly. Though not immune to the charms of ape-watching, he was at pains to set himself precise research goals. How did bonobos build nests? How did they share food? As one of his colleagues described it, Hohmann wanted to avoid being dirtied by the stain of primatology—a discipline regarded by some in biology as being afflicted by personality cults and overextrapolation. The big bonobo picture might one day emerge, but it would happen only after the rigorous testing of hypotheses in the forest. When a publisher asked Hohmann for a bonobo book, he responded that it was too soon. “Gottfried’s one of those people who don’t want to risk being criticized, so they make absolutely certain that they’ve completely nailed everything down before they publish,” Richard Wrangham told me, with a mixture of respect and impatience. - -In 1997, not long after the birth of their first child, Hohmann and Fruth decided to live in Congo full time. They leased a house in Basankusu, the nearest town to Lomako with an airstrip. Hohmann had already picked up the keys when civil war intervened. The troops of Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader and future President, were at that time making a long traverse from west to east—they eventually reached Kinshasa, and President Mobutu Sese Seko fled. One day, when Hohmann was at Lomako without his wife, soldiers from the government side turned up and gave him a day to leave. “They wanted to get everyone out of the area who might help the rebels,” Hohmann said. (Around the same time, the Japanese researchers abandoned Wamba.) Hohmann took only what he could carry. On his way back to Kinshasa, he was interrogated as a suspected spy. - -The bonobo fell out of the view of scientists at the very moment that the public discovered an interest. In 1991, National Geographic sent Frans Lanting, a Dutch photographer, to photograph bonobos at Wamba. “At the time, there were no pictures of bonobos in the wild,” Lanting recently told me. “Or, at least, no professional documentation.” On his assignment, Lanting contracted cerebral malaria. But he was stirred by his encounter with the bonobos. “I became sure that the boundaries between apes and humans were very fluid,” he said. “You can’t call them animals. I prefer ‘creatures.’ It was haunting, the way they knew as much about you as you knew about them.” It became his task, he later told Frans de Waal, “to show how close we are to bonobos, and they to us.” - -Many of his photographs were sexually explicit. “National Geographic found the pictures of sexuality hard to bear,” Lanting said. “That was a place the magazine was not ready to go.” The magazine printed only tame images. Not long after, Lanting contacted de Waal, who had recently taken up a post at Emory, as a professor of primate behavior and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Agreeing to collaborate, they approached Geo, the German magazine. As de Waal recently told me, laughing, “Naturally, Geo put two copulating bonobos on the cover.” Not long afterward, Scientific American printed an illustrated article. In 1997, the Dutchmen brought out a handsome illustrated book, “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape.” - -By this time, the experiments of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh had drawn the public’s attention to Kanzi, a bonobo said to be unusually skilled at communicating with humans. (Savage-Rumbaugh’s claims for Kanzi have been a source of controversy among linguists.) But de Waal’s book established the reputation of the species in the mass media. Lanting’s photographs, since widely republished, showed bonobos lounging at Wamba’s sugarcane field, trying yoga stretches, and engaging in various kinds of sexual contact. A few pictures showed bonobos up on two feet. (As a caption noted, these upright bonobos were handling something edible and out of the ordinary—cut sugarcane, for example—suggesting a pose dictated by avidity, like a man bent over a table in a pie-eating contest.) In his text, de Waal interviewed field researchers, including Hohmann, and was fastidious at the level of historical and scientific detail. But his rhetoric was richly flavored, and emphasized a sharp contrast between bonobos and chimpanzees. “The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power,” he wrote. “The bonobo resolves power issues with sex.” (“If chimpanzees are from Mars, bonobos must be from Venus,” de Waal wrote on a later occasion.) Bonobos were more “elegant” than chimpanzees, he said, and their backs appeared to straighten “better” than those of chimpanzees: “Even chimpanzees would have to admit that bonobos have more style.” - -In a recent conversation, de Waal told me, “The bonobo is female-dominated, doesn’t have warfare, doesn’t have hunting. And it has all this sex going on, which is problematic to talk about—it’s almost as if people wanted to shove the bonobo under the table.” “The Forgotten Ape” presented itself as a European tonic to American prudishness and the vested interests of chimpanzee scientists. The bonobo was gentle, horny, and—de Waal did not quite say it—Dutch. Bonobos, he argued, had been neglected by science because they inspired embarrassment. They were “sexy,” de Waal wrote (he often uses that word where others might say “sexual”), and they challenged established, bloody accounts of human origins. The bonobo was no less a relative of humans than the chimpanzee, de Waal noted, and its behavior was bound to overthrow “established notions about where we came from and what our behavioral potential is.” - -Though de Waal stopped short of placing bonobos in a state of blissful serenity (he acknowledged a degree of bonobo aggression), he certainly left a reader thinking that these animals knew how to live. He wrote, “Who could have imagined a close relative of ours in which female alliances intimidate males, sexual behavior is as rich as ours, different groups do not fight but mingle, mothers take on a central role, and the greatest intellectual achievement is not tool use but sensitivity to others?” - -The appeal of de Waal’s vision is obvious. Where, at the end of the twentieth century, could an optimist turn for reassurance about the foundations of human nature? The sixties were over. Goodall’s chimpanzees had gone to war. Scholars such as Lawrence Keeley, the author of “War Before Civilization” (1996), were excavating the role of warfare in our prehistoric past. And, as Wrangham and Peterson noted in “Demonic Males,” various nonindustrialized societies that were once seen as intrinsically peaceful had come to disappoint. Margaret Mead’s 1928 account of a South Pacific idyll, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” had been largely debunked by Derek Freeman, in 1983. The people identified as “the Gentle Tasaday”—the Philippine forest-dwellers made famous, in part, by Charles Lindbergh—had been redrawn as a small, odd community rather than as an isolated ancient tribe whose mores were illustrative. “The Harmless People,” as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas referred to the hunter-gatherers she studied in southern Africa, had turned out to have a murder rate higher than any American city. Although the picture was by no means accepted universally, it had become possible to see a clear line of thuggery from ape ancestry to human prehistory and on to Srebrenica. But, if de Waal’s findings were true, there was at least a hint of respite from the idea of ineluctable human aggression. If chimpanzees are from Hobbes, bonobos must be from Rousseau. - -De Waal, who was described by Time earlier this year as one of the hundred influential people who “shape our world,” effectively became the champion—soft-spoken, baggy-eyed, and mustachioed—of what he called the “hippies of the primate world,” in lectures and interviews, and in subsequent books. In “Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are” (2005), he wrote that bonobos and chimpanzees were “as different as night and day.” There had been, perhaps, a vacancy for a Jane Goodall figure to represent the bonobo in the broader culture, but neither Hohmann nor Kano had occupied it; Hohmann was too dour, and Kano was not fluent in English. Besides, the bonobo was beyond the reach of all but the most determined and best-financed television crew. After 1997, that Goodall role—at least, in a reduced form—fell to de Waal, though his research was limited to bonobos in captivity. At the time of the book’s publication, de Waal told me, he could sense that not everyone in the world of bonobo research was thrilled for him, “even though I think I did a lot of good for their work. I respect the field workers for what they do, but they’re not the best communicators.” He laughed. “Someone had to do it. I have cordial relationships with almost all of them, but there were some hard feelings. It was ‘Why is he doing this and why am I not doing this?’ ” - -De Waal went on, “People have taken off with the word ‘bonobo,’ and that’s fine with me”—although he acknowledged that the identification has sometimes been excessive. “Those who learn about bonobos fall too much in love, like in the gay or feminist community. All of a sudden, here we have a politically correct primate, at which point I have to get into the opposite role, and calm them down: bonobos are not always nice to each other.” - -At the Lui Kotal camp, which Hohmann started five years after being expelled from Lomako, the people who were not tracking apes spent the morning under the Audubon calendar, as the temperature and the humidity rose. Ryan Matthews put out solar panels, to charge a car battery powering a laptop that dispatched e-mail through an uncertain satellite connection. Or, in a storage hut, he arranged precious cans of sardines into a supermarket pyramid. We sometimes heard the sneezelike call of a black mangabey monkey. For lunch, we ate cassava in its local form, a long, cold, gray tube of boiled dough—a single gnocco grown to the size of a dachshund. A radio brought news of gunfire and rocket attacks in Kinshasa: Jean-Pierre Bemba, the defeated opposition candidate in last year’s Presidential elections, had ignored a deadline to disarm his militia, and hundreds had been killed in street fighting. The airport that we had used had been attacked. The Congolese camp members—including, at any time, two bonobo field workers, a cook, an assistant cook, and a fisherman, working on commission—were largely pro-Bemba, or, at least, anti-government, a view expressed at times as nostalgia for the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Once, they sang a celebratory Mobutu song that they had learned as schoolchildren. - -“It was so easy for Frans to charm everyone,” Hohmann said of de Waal one afternoon. “He had the big stories. We don’t have the big stories. Often, we have to say, ‘No, bonobos can be terribly boring. Watch a bonobo and there are days when you don’t see anything—just sleeping and eating and defecating. There’s no sex, there’s no food-sharing.’ ” During our first days in camp, the bonobos had been elusive. “Right now, bonobos are not vocalizing,” Hohmann said. “They’re just there. And if you go to a zoo, if you give them some food, there’s a frenzy. It’s so different.” - -Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?” De Waal has argued that, even if captive bonobo behavior is somewhat skewed, it can still be usefully contrasted with the behavior of captive chimpanzees; he has even written that “only captive studies control for environmental conditions and thereby provide conclusive data on interspecific differences.” Stanford’s reply is that “different animals respond very differently to captivity.” - -In the wild, bonobos live in communities of a few dozen. They move around in smaller groups during the day, in the pattern of a bus-tour group let loose at a tourist attraction, then gather together each night, to build new treetop nests of bent and half-broken branches. But they stay in the same neighborhood for a lifetime. When Hohmann found bonobos on his first visit to Lui Kotal, he could be confident that he would find the same animals in subsequent years. On this trip, the bonobos had been seen, but they were keeping to the very farthest end of Hohmann’s twenty-thousand-acre slice of forest: a two-hour walk away. (“They are just so beautiful,” Andrew Fowler, the British habituator, said, after seeing them for the first time. “I can’t put it any other way.”) There was talk of setting up a satellite camp at that end—a couple of tents in a small clearing—but weighing against the plan was the apparently serious risk of attack by elephants. (Forest elephants headed an impressive lineup of local terrors, above leopards, falling trees, driver ants, and the green mambas that were sometimes seen on forest paths.) So the existing arrangement continued: two or three people would go into the forest and hope to follow bonobos to their nest site at night; the following day, two or three others would reach that same point before dawn. - -When I went out one morning with Hohmann and Martin Surbeck, the Swiss Ph.D. student, the hike began at a quarter to four, and there were stars in the sky. We walked on a springy path—layers of decaying leaves on sand. I wore a head torch that lit up thick, attic-like dust and, at one moment, a bat that flew into my face. We stepped over fallen tree trunks in various states of decay, which sprouted different kinds of fungus; after an hour or so, we reached one on which local poachers had carved a graffiti message. Poachers, whose smoked-bonobo carcasses can fetch five dollars each in Kinshasa’s markets, have often been seen in the forest, and their gunfire often heard. Their livelihood was disrupted last year when Jonas Eriksson, a Swedish researcher on a visit to Lui Kotal, burned down their forest encampment. I was later given a translation of the graffiti: “JONAS: VAGINA OF YOUR MOTHER.” - -Hohmann stopped walking at half past five, at a point he knew to be within a few hundred feet of where the bonobos had nested. Bonobos sleep on their backs—“maybe holding to a branch with just one foot, and the rest of the body looking very relaxed,” Hohmann had said, adding that “nest-building is the only thing that sets great apes aside from all other primates.” (He speculates that the REM-rich sleep that nests allow may have contributed to the evolution of big brains.) We would hear the bonobos when they woke. When we turned off our flashlights, there was a hint of light in the sky, enough to illuminate Surbeck using garden clippers to cut a branch from a tree and snip it into a Y shape about four feet long; he tied a black plastic bag across the forked end, to create a tool that hinted at a lacrosse stick but was designed to catch bonobo urine as it dripped from treetops. Surbeck’s dissertation was on male behavior: he would measure testosterone levels in the urine of various bonobos, in the hope that power structures not easily detected by observation would reveal themselves. (If an evidently high-ranking male had relatively low testosterone, for example, that might say something about the power he was drawing from his mother. A male bonobo typically has a lifelong alliance with its mother.) - -There was a rustle of leaves in the high branches, like a downdraft of wind. To walk toward the sound, we had to leave the trail, and Surbeck cut a path though the undergrowth, again using clippers, which allowed for progress that was quieter, if less cinematic, than a swinging machete. We stopped after a few minutes. I looked upward through binoculars and, not long afterward, removed the lens caps. The half-light reduced the forest to blacks and dark greens, but a hundred feet up I could see a bonobo sitting silently in the fork of a branch. Its black fur had an acrylic sheen. It was eating the tree’s small, hard fruit; as it chewed, it let the casing of each fruit fall from the corner of its mouth. The debris from this and other bonobos dropped onto dead leaves on the forest floor, making the sound of a rain shower just getting under way. - -In the same tree, a skinny bonobo infant walked a few feet from its mother, then returned and clambered, wriggling, into the mother’s arms—and then did the same thing again. And there were glimpses, through branches, of other unhurried bonobos, as they scratched a knee, or glanced down at us, unimpressed, or stretched themselves out like artists’ models. Hohmann had plucked a large, rattling leaf from a forest-floor shrub that forms a key part of the bonobo diet, and he began to shred it slowly, as if eating it: bonobo researchers aim to present themselves as animals nonchalantly feeding rather than creepily stalking. He and Surbeck made solemn, urgent notes in their waterproof notebooks, and whispered to one another. They were by now aware of some twenty bonobos above us, and could identify many by name (Olga, Paulo, Camillo). A fact not emphasized in wildlife films is that ape identification is frequently done by zoomed-in inspection of genitals. A lot of the conversation at Lui Kotal’s dinner table dealt with scrotal shading or the shape of a female bonobo’s pink sexual swelling. (“This one is like chewing gum spit out,” Caroline Deimel, the Austrian, once said of a female.) - -At about six-thirty, the bonobos started moving down the trees—not with monkey abandon but branch by branch, with a final thud as they dropped onto the forest floor. Then they walked away, on all fours, looking far tougher—and more lean and muscular—than any zoo bonobo. An infant lay spread-eagled on the back of its mother, in a posture that the scientific literature sweetly describes as “jockey style.” (A bonobo’s arms are shorter than a chimpanzee’s, and its back is horizontal when it walks. A chimpanzee slopes to the rear.) As the last of the bonobos strolled off, we lost sight of them: the undergrowth stopped our view at a few feet. We walked in the direction they seemed to have gone, and hoped to hear a call, or the sound of moving branches. Hohmann told me that bonobos sometimes gave away their position by flatulence. The forest was by now hot, and looked like a display captioned “SNAKES” in a natural-history museum: plants pulled at our clothes, trees crumbled to dust, and the ground gave way to mud. - -We heard a sudden high screech ahead—“Whah, whah! ”—and then saw, coming back in our direction, a reddish blur immediately followed by black. We heard the gallop of hands and feet on the ground, and a squeal. Hohmann told me in a whisper that we had seen a rare thing—a bonobo in pursuit of a duiker, a tiny antelope. “We were very close to seeing hunting,” he said. “Very close.” The bonobo had lost the race, Hohmann said, but if it had laid a hand on the duiker in its first lunge the results would have been bloody. Hohmann has witnessed a number of kills, and the dismembering, nearly always by females, that follows. Bonobos start with the abdomen; they eat the intestines first, in a process that can leave a duiker alive for a long while after it has been captured. - -For a purportedly peaceful animal, a bonobo can be surprisingly intemperate. Jeroen Stevens is a young Belgian biologist who has spent thousands of hours studying captive bonobos in European zoos. I met him last year at the Planckendael Zoo, near Antwerp. “I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ” - -Stevens went on to recall a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo whose penis had been bitten off by a female. (He might also have mentioned keepers at the Columbus and San Diego zoos who both lost bits of fingers. In the latter instance, the local paper’s generous headline was “APE RETURNS FINGERTIP TO KEEPER.”) “Zoos don’t know what to do,” Stevens said. “They, too, believe that bonobos are less aggressive than chimps, which is why zoos want to have them. But, as soon as you have a group of bonobos, after a while you have this really violent aggression. I think if zoos had bonobos in big enough groups”—more like wild bonobos—“you would even see them killing.” In Stevens’s opinion, bonobos are “very tense. People usually say they’re relaxed. I find the opposite. Chimps are more laid-back. But, if I say I like chimps more than I like bonobos, my colleagues think I’m crazy.” - -At Lui Kotal, not long after we had followed the bonobos for half a day, and seen a duiker run for its life, Hohmann recalled what he described as a “murder story.” A few years ago, he said, he was watching a young female bonobo sitting on a branch with its baby. A male, perhaps the father of the baby, jumped onto the branch, in apparent provocation. The female lunged at the male, which fell to the ground. Other females jumped down onto the male, in a scene of frenzied violence. “It went on for thirty minutes,” Hohmann said. “It was terribly scary. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Shrieking all the time. Just bonobos on the ground. After thirty minutes, they all went back up into the tree. It was hard to recognize them, their hair all on end and their faces changed. They were really different.” Hohmann said that he had looked closely at the scene of the attack, where the vegetation had been torn and flattened. “We saw fur, but no skin, and no blood. And he was gone.” During the following year, Hohmann and his colleagues tried to find the male, but it was not seen again. Although Hohmann has never published an account of the episode, for lack of anything but circumstantial evidence, his view is that the male bonobo suffered fatal injuries. - -On another occasion, Hohmann thinks that he came close to seeing infanticide, which is also generally ruled to be beyond the bonobo’s behavioral repertoire. A newborn was taken from its mother by another female; Hohmann saw the mother a day later. This female was carrying its baby again, but the baby was dead. “Now it becomes a criminal story,” Hohmann said, in a mock-legal tone. “What could have happened? This is all we have, the facts. My story is the unknown female carried the baby but didn’t feed it and it died.” Hohmann has made only an oblique reference to this incident in print. - -These tales of violence do not recast the bonobo as a brute. (Nor does new evidence, from Lui Kotal, that bonobos hunt and eat other primates.) But such accounts can be placed alongside other challenges to claims of sharp differences between bonobos and chimpanzees. For example, a study published in 2001 in the American Journal of Primatology asked, “Are Bonobos Really More Bipedal Than Chimpanzees?” The answer was no. - -The bonobo of the modern popular imagination has something of the quality of a pre-scientific great ape, from the era before live specimens were widely known in Europe. An Englishman of the early eighteenth century would have had no argument with the thought of an upright ape, passing silent judgment on mankind, and driven by an uncontrolled libido. But during my conversation with Jeroen Stevens, in Belgium, he glanced into the zoo enclosure, where a number of hefty bonobos were daubing excrement on the walls, and said, “These bonobos are from Mars. There are many days when there is no sex. We’re running out of adolescents.” (As de Waal noted, the oldest bonobo in his San Diego study was about fourteen, which is young adulthood; all but one episode of oral sex there involved juveniles; these bonobos also accounted for almost all of the kissing.) - -Craig Stanford, in a 1997 study that questioned various alleged bonobo-chimpanzee dichotomies, wrote, “Female bonobos do not mate more frequently or significantly less cyclically than chimpanzees.” He also reported that male chimpanzees in the wild actually copulated more often than male bonobos. De Waal is unimpressed by Stanford’s analysis. “He counted only heterosexual sex,” he told me. “But if you include all the homosexual sex then it’s actually quite different.” When I asked Hohmann about the bonobo sex at Lui Kotal, he said, “It’s nothing that really strikes me.” Certainly, he and his team observe female “g-g rubbing,” which is not seen in chimpanzees, and needs to be explained. “But does it have anything to do with sex?” Hohmann asked. “Probably not. Of course, they use the genitals, but is it erotic behavior or a greeting gesture that is completely detached from sexual behavior?” - -A hug? “A hug can be highly sexual or two leaders meeting at the airport. It’s a gesture, nothing else. It depends on the context.” - -At Lui Kotal, the question of dominance was also less certain than one might think. When I’d spoken to de Waal, he had said, unequivocally, that bonobo societies were dominated by females. But, in Hohmann’s cautious mind, the question is still undecided. Data from wild bonobos are still slight, and science still needs to explain the physical superiority of males: why would evolution leave that extra bulk in place, if no use was made of it? Female spotted hyenas dominate male hyenas, but they have the muscle to go with the life style (and, for good measure, penises). “Why hasn’t this levelled out in bonobos?” Hohmann asked. “Perhaps sometimes it is important” for the males to be stronger. “We haven’t seen accounts of bonobos and leopards. We don’t know what protective role males can play.” Perhaps, Hohmann went on, males exercise power in ways we cannot see: “Do the males step back and say to the females, ‘I’m not competing with you, you go ahead and eat’?” The term “male deference” has been used to describe some monkey behavior. De Waal scoffs: “Maybe the bonobo males are chivalrous! We all had a big chuckle about that.” - -Hohmann mentioned a recent experiment that he had done in the Frankfurt zoo. A colony of bonobos was put on a reduced-calorie diet, for the purpose of measuring hormones in their urine at different moments in their fast. It was not a behavioral experiment, but it was hard not to notice the actions of one meek male. “This is a male that in the past has been badly mutilated by the females,” Hohmann said. “They bit off fingers and toes, and he really had a hard life.” This male had always been shut out at feeding time. Now, as his diet continued, he discovered aggression. “For the first time, he pushed away some low-ranking females,” Hohmann said. He successfully fought for food. He became bold and demanding. A single hungry animal is not a scientific sample, but the episode showed that this male’s subservience was, if not exactly a personal choice, one of at least two behavioral options. - -The media still regularly ask Frans de Waal about bonobos; and he still uses the species as a stick to beat what he scorns as “veneer theory”—the thought that human morality is no more than a veneer of restraint laid over a vicious, animal core. Some of his colleagues in primatology admit to impatience with his position—and with the broader bonobo cult that flattens a complex animal into a caricature of Edenic good humor. “Frans has got all the best intentions, in all sorts of ways, but there is this sense in which this polarizing of chimps and bonobos can be taken too far,” Richard Wrangham said. Hohmann concurred: “There are certainly some points where we are in agreement; and there are other points where I say, ‘No, Frans, you should go to Lomako or Lui Kotal, and watch bonobos, and then you’d know better.’ ” He went on, “Frans enjoyed the luxury of being able to say field work is senseless. When you see wild bonobos, some things that he has emphasized and stretched are much more modest; the sex stuff, for example. But other things are even more spectacular. He hasn’t seen meat-sharing, he has never seen hunting.” - -“I think Frans had free rein to say anything he wanted about bonobos for about ten years,” Stanford told me. “He’s a great scientist, but because he’s worked only in captive settings this gives you a blindered view of primates. I think he took a simplistic approach, and, because he published very widely on it and writes very nice popular books, it’s become the conventional wisdom. We had this large body of evidence on chimps, then suddenly there were these other animals that were very chimplike physically but seemed to be very different behaviorally. Instead of saying, ‘These are variations on a theme,’ it became point-counterpoint.” He added, “Scientific ideas exist in a marketplace, just as every other product does.” - -At the long table in the center of the camp, I showed Hohmann the “Save the Hippie Chimps!” flyer from the Manhattan benefit. He was listening on headphones to Mozart’s Requiem; he glanced at the card, and put it to one side. Then, despite himself, he laughed and picked it up again, taking off the headphones. “Well,” he said. - -We were at Lui Kotal for three weeks. “If you stay here, the hours become days, become months,” Martin Surbeck said. “It all melts.” We had two visitors: a Congolese official who, joined by a guard carrying an AK-47, walked from a town twenty-five miles away to cast an eye over the camp and accept a cash consideration. He stayed for twenty-four hours; every hour, his digital wristwatch spoke the time, in French, in a woman’s voice—“Il est deux heures.” - -I saw the bonobos only one other time. I was in the forest with Brigham Whitman, one of the two bearded Americans, when we heard a burst of screeching. In a whisper, Whitman pointed out Dante, a senior male, sitting on a low branch. “He’s one of the usual suspects,” Whitman said. “Balls hanging out, that’s his pose.” Whitman ran through Dante’s distinguishing characteristics: “He’s very old—perhaps thirty—and missing most of his right index finger. His lips are cracked and his face is weathered, but his eyes are vibrant. He has large white nipples. His toes are extremely fat and huge, and his belly hair is redder.” He was the oldest male. “Dante just gets his spot and he doesn’t move. He just sits and eats.” - -We followed Dante and a dozen others throughout the afternoon. They climbed down from trees, walked, and climbed back up. Small, non-stinging bees congregated in the space between our eyeballs and the lenses of our binoculars. In the late afternoon, Dante and others climbed the highest trees I had seen in the forest. It was almost dark at the forest floor, but the sun caught the tops of the trees, and Dante, a hundred and fifty feet up, gazed west, his hair looking as if he’d just taken off Darth Vader’s helmet, his expression grave. - -In the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, the Easter display was a collection of dazed live rabbits and chicks corralled by a low white wicker fence. At an outdoor bar, the city’s diplomatic classes gave each other long-lasting handshakes while their children raced around a deep, square swimming pool. I sat with Gottfried Hohmann; we had hiked out of Lui Kotal together the day before. As we left the half-light of the forest to reach the first golden patch of savanna, and the first open sky, it had been hard not to feel evolutionary stirrings, to feel oneself speeding through an “Ascent of Man” illustration, knuckles lifting from the ground. - -By the pool, Hohmann talked about a Bavarian childhood collecting lizards and reading Konrad Lorenz. He was glad to be going home. He has none of the fondness for Congo that he once had for India. Still, he will keep returning until retirement. He said that in Germany, when he eats dinner with friends who work on faster-breeding, more conveniently placed animals, “I think, Oh, they live in a different world! People say, ‘You’re still . . . ?’ I say, ‘Yes. Still.’ This big picture of the bonobo is a puzzle, with a few pieces filled, and these big white patches. This is still something that attracts me. This piece fits, this doesn’t fit, turning things around, trying to close things.” - -Because of Hohmann’s disdain for premature theories, and his data-collecting earnestness, it had sometimes been possible to forget that he is still driving toward an eventual glimpse of the big picture—and that this picture includes human beings. Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos share a common ancestor. Was this creature bonobo-like, as Hohmann suspects? Did the ancestral forest environment select for male docility, and did Homo and the chimpanzee then both dump that behavior, independently, as they evolved in less bountiful environments? The modern bonobo holds the answer, Hohmann said; in time, its behavior will start to illuminate such characteristics as relationships between men and women, the purpose of aggression, and the costs and benefits of male bonding. - -At Lui Kotal, there were no rocks in the sandy earth, and the smallest pebble on a riverbed had the allure of precious metal. It is not a place for fossil hunters; the biological past is revealed only in the present. “What makes humans and nonhuman primates different?” Hohmann said. “To nail this down, you have to know how these nonhuman primates behave. We have to measure what we can see today. We can use this as a reference for the time that has passed. There will be no other way to do this. And this is what puts urgency into it: because there is no doubt that, in a hundred years, there won’t be great apes in the wild. It would be blind to look away from that. In a hundred years, the forest will be gone. We have to do it now. This forest is the very, very last stronghold. This is all we have.” ♦ diff --git a/tests/corpus/ted-williams.md b/tests/corpus/ted-williams.md deleted file mode 100644 index f3391c37a..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/ted-williams.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,392 +0,0 @@ -What do you think of Ted Williams now? -*Esquire* -By Richard Ben Cramer - -Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing." - -"Sure there is," says the scribe. - -"Oh, yeah? Who?" - -"Well, God made the fish." - -"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back." - -IT WAS FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation's notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust. - -Ted was never the kind to quail. In this epic battle, as in the million smaller face-offs that are his history, his instinct called for exertion, for a show of force that would shut those bastards up. That was always his method as he fought opposing pitchers, and fielders who bunched up on him, eight on one half of the field; as he fought off the few fans who booed him and thousands who thought he ought to love them, too; as he fought through, alas, three marriages; as he fought to a bloody standoff a Boston press that covered, with comment, his every sneeze and snort. He meant to dominate, and to an amazing extent, he did. But he came to know, better than most men, the value of his time. So over the years, Ted Williams learned to avoid annoyance. Now in his seventh decade, he had girded his penchants for privacy and ease with a bristle of dos and don'ts that defeat casual intrusion. He is a hard man to meet. - -This is not to paint him as a hermit or a shrinking flower, Garbo with a baseball bat. No, in his hometown of Islamorada, on the Florida Keys, Ted is not hard to see. He's out every day, out early and out loud. You might spot him at a coffee bar where the guides breakfast, quizzing them on their catches and telling them what he thinks of fishing here lately, which is "IT'S HORSESHIT." Or you might notice him in a crowded but quiet tackle shop, poking at a reel that he's seen before, opining that it's not been sold because "THE PRICE IS TOO DAMN HIGH," after which Ted advises his friend, the proprietor, across the room: "YOU MIGHT AS WELL QUIT USING THAT HAIR DYE. YOU'RE GOING BALD ANYWAY." - -He's always first, 8:00 A.M., at the tennis club. He's been up for hours, he's ready. He fidgets, awaiting appearance by some other, any other, man with a racket, where upon Ted bellows, before the newcomer can say hello: "WELL, YOU WANNA PLAY?" Ted's voice normally emanates with gale and force, even at close range. Apologists attribute this to the ear injury that sent him home from Korea and ended his combat flying career. But Ted can speak softly and hear himself fine, if it's only one friend around. The roar with which he speaks in a public place, or to anyone else, has nothing to do with his hearing. It's your hearing he's worried about. - -Ted Williams can hush a room just by entering. There is a force that boils up from him and commands attention. This he has come to accept as his destiny and his due, just as he came to accept the maddening, if respectful, way his opponents pitched around him (he always seemed to be leading the league in bases on balls), or the way every fan in the ball park seemed always to watch (and comment upon) T. Williams's every move. It was often said Ted would rather play ball in a lab, where fans couldn't see. But he never blamed fans for watching him. His hate was for those who couldn't or wouldn't feel with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage, or sorrow. If they wouldn't share those, then there was his scorn, and he's make them feel that, by God. These days, there are no crowds, but Ted is watched, and why not? What other match could draw a kibitzer's eye when Ted, on the near court, pounds toward the net, slashing the air with his big racket, laughing in triumphant derision as he scores with his killer drop shot, or smacking the ball twenty feet long and roaring, "SYPHILITIC SON OF A BITCH!" as he hurls his racket to the clay at his feet? - -And who could say Ted does not mean it be seen when he stops in front of the kibitzers as he and his opponent change sides? "YOU OKAY?" Ted wheezes as he yells as his foe. "HOW D'YA FEEL?...HOW OLD ARE YOU?...JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEART HA HA HAW." Ted turns and winks, mops his face. A kibitzer says mildly: "How are you, Ted?" And Ted drops the towel, swells with Florida air, grins gloriously, and booms back: - -"WELL, HOW DO I LOOK?...HUH?...WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?" - -It is another matter, though, to interrupt his tour of life, and force yourself on his attention. This is where the dos and don'ts come in. The dos fall to you. They concern your conduct, habits, schedule, attitude, and grooming. It's too long a list to go into, but suffice it to recall the one thing Ted liked about managing the Washington Senators: "I was in a position where people had to by God listen." - -The don'ts, on the other hand, pertain to Ted, and they are probably summed up best by Jimmy Albright, the famous fishing guide, Ted's friend since 1947 and Islamorada neighbor. "Ted don't do," Jimmy says, "mucha anything he don't want to." - -He does not wait or bend his schedule: "I haven't got my whole career to screw around with you, bush!" He does not screw around with anything for long, unless it's hunting fish, and then he'll spend all day with perfect equanimity. He does not reminisce, except in rare moods of ease. He does not talk about his personal life. "Why the hell should I?" - -His standing in the worlds of baseball and fishing would not net him an invitation a night, but he does not go to dinners. One reason is he does not wear ties, and probably hasn't suffered one five times in a quarter century. Neither does he go to parties, where he'd have to stand around, with a drink in his hand, "listening to a lot of bullshit." No, he'd rather watch TV. - -He does not go to restaurants, and the reasons are several: They make a fuss, and the owner or cook's on his neck like gnat. Or worse, it's a stream of sportsfans (still Ted's worst epithet) with napkins to sign. At restaurants you wait, wait, wait. Restaurants have little chairs and tables, no place for elbows, arms, knees, feet. At restaurants there's never enough food. Lastly, restaurants charge a lot, and Ted doesn't toss money around. (A few years ago he decided $2.38 was top price for a pound of beef. For more than a year, he honed his technique on chuck roast and stew meat. Only an incipient boycott by his friends, frequent dinner guests, finally shook his resolve.) - -The last reason is seized upon unkindly by restaurateurs in Islamorada and nearby Keys: "No, he doesn't come in. He's too cheap. He'd go all over town, sonofabitch, and he'd pay by check, hoping they wouldn't cash the check, they'd put it on the wall." - -But this is resentment speaking, and it is Ted's lot in life to be misunderstood. Some are put off, for instance, by the unlisted phone, by the steel fence, the burglar alarm, and KEEP OUT signs that stud his gates when he swings them shut with the carbon-steel chain and the padlock. But his friends think nothing of it. A few have his number, but they don't call, as they know he's got the phone off the hook. No, they'll cruise by; if the gates are unchained, if they see his faded blue truck with the bumper sticker sign IF GUNS ARE OUTLAWED ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS, if it's not mealtime and not too late and there's nothing they know of that's pissing Ted off, well, then...they drive right in. - -And this is the way to meet Ted: by introduction of an old friend, like Jimmy Albright. It's Jimmy who knows where to park the car so it won't annoy Ted. It's Jimmy who cautions, as we throw away out cigarettes, that Ted won't allow any smoke in his house. It's Jimmy who starts the ball rolling, calls out "Hiya, Ted!" as the big guy launches himself from his chair and stalks across the living room, muttering in the stentorian growl that passes with him as sotto voce: "Now who the hell is THIS?" - -He fills the door. "Awright, come on in. WELL, GET THE HELL IN HERE." He sticks out a hand, but his nose twitches, lip curls at a lingering scent of smoke. Ted's got my hand, now, but he says to Jimmy: "S'that you who stinks, or this other one, too? Jesus! Awright, sit down. Sit over there." - -Ted wants to keep this short and sweet. He's in the kitchen, filling tumblers with fresh lemonade. Still, his voice rattles the living room: "D'YOU READ THE BOOK?" He means his memoir, My Turn at Bat. "Anything you're gonna ask, I guarantee it's in the goddamn book....Yeah, awright. I only got one copy myself. - -"Where's the BOOK?" he yells to Louise Kaufman, his mate. Ted thinks that Lou knows the location of everything he wants. "HEY SWEETIES, WHERE'S THAT GODDAMN BOOK?" - -Lou has raised three sons, so no man, not even Ted, is going to fluster her. She comes downstairs bearing the book, which she hands to Ted, and which he throws to the floor at my feet. He growls: "Now, I want you to read that. And then I'm gonna ask you a key question." - -I ask: "Tomorrow? Should I call?" - -"HELL NO." - -"Jimmy says he'll arrange a meeting." - -Ted says: "HOW'S THAT LEMONADE?" - -"Good." - -"HUH? IS IT?...WELL, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?" - -In the car, minutes later, Jimmy explains that Ted won't talk on the phone. "Ted gimme his number twenty-five years ago," Jimmy says. "And I never give it yet to any asshole." We both nod solemnly as this fact settles, and we muse on the subject of trust. I'm thinking of the fine camaraderie between sportsmen and...wait a minute. Jimmy and Ted have been friend forty years now. - -Does that make fifteen years Ted didn't give him the number? - -I'm glad it's over. Before anything else, understand that I am glad it's over...I wouldn't go back to being eighteen or nineteen years old knowing what was in store, the sourness and bitterness, knowing how I thought the weight of the damn world was always on my neck, grinding on me. I wouldn't go back to that for anything. I wouldn't want to go back....I wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived.... -— Ted Williams, with John Underwood: My Turn at Bat - -SAN DIEGO WAS A SMALL TOWN, and the Williams house was a small box of wood, one story like the rest on Utah Street. It was a workingman's neighborhood, but at the bottom of the Great Depression a lot of men weren't working. Ted's father was a photographer with a little shop downtown. Later he got a U.S. marshal's job, in gratitude for some election favors he'd done for Governor Merriam, and that remained his claim to fame. Ted never saw much of him. His mother was the strength in the family, a small woman with a will of steel who gave her life to the Salvation Army. She was always out on the streets, San Diego or south of the border, the Angel of Tijuana, out fighting the devil drink, selling the War Cry or playing on a cornet, and God-blessing those who vouchsafed a nickel. Sometimes she'd take along her elder boy, and Ted hated it, but he didn't disobey. He was a scrawny kid and shy, and he tried to shrink behind the bass drum so none of his friends would see. There was school, but he wasn't much good there. History was the only part he liked. And then he'd come home, and his mother was out, and sometimes it was 10:00 at night, and Ted and his brother, Danny, were still on the porch on Utah Street, waiting for someone to let them in. - -Soon home lost its place at the center of Ted's life. There wasn't much in the little house that could make him feel special. It wasn't the place where he could be the Ted Williams he wanted to be. North Park playground was a block away, and there, with one friend, a bat, and a ball, Ted could be the biggest man in the majors. The game he played was called Big League: one kid pitched, the other hit to a backstop screen. "Okay, here's the great Charlie Gehringer," Ted would announce, as he took his stance. Or sometimes it was Bill Terry, Hank Wilson, or another great man he'd never seen. "Last of the ninth, two men on, two out, here's the pitch...Gehringer swings!" Ted swung. Crack! Another game-winning shot for the great...the Great Ted Williams. - -They were just the dreams of a kid, that's all. But Ted went back to the playground every day. First it was with a friend his own age, then the playground director, Rod Luscomb, a grown man, a two-hundred-pounder who'd made it to the Cal State League. Ted pitched to Luscomb, Luscomb to Ted. At first they'd always tell each other when they were going to throw a curve. But then Ted started calling out: "Don't tell me, just see if I can hit it." Crack! Ted could hit it. "Listen, Lusk," Ted used to say. "Someday I'm going to build myself a ball park with cardboard fences. Then, I'm going to knock 'em all down, every darn one, with home runs." But Ted wasn't hitting homers with his scrawny chest, those skinny arms. Luscomb set him to push-ups, twenty, then forty, fifty, then a hundred, then fingertip push-ups. Ted did them at home on Utah Street. He picked his high school, Herbert Hoover High, because it was new and he's have a better chance to make the team. When he made it, he came to school with glove hung like a badge on his belt. He carried a bat to class. And after his last class (or before), it was back to the playground. Then in darkness, home for dinner, the push-ups, and the dreams. - -There were no major leagues in San Diego. There was no TV. He had no more idea of the life he sought than we have of life on the moon. Maybe less, for we've seen the replays. Ted had to dream it all himself. And how could he measure what he'd give up? He wasn't interested in school, didn't care about cars, or money, or girls. He felt so awkward, except on the field. There, he'd show what Ted Williams could do. Now Hoover High went to Pomona for a doubleheader, and Ted pitched the first game, played outfield in the second, and hit and hit, and Hoover won, and wasn't it great? There was an ice cream cart, and Ted ate eighteen Popsicles. His teammates started counting when he got to ten. But Ted didn't mind them making fun. That's how good he felt: him hitting, and Hoover winning, and the big crowd. Gee, that's the governor! And Ted found himself in the governor's path, the man who'd tossed his father a job, and he had to say something, and the awkwardness came flooding back, he felt red in his face. So Ted grabbed tighter on his bat and he barked at Merriam: "HIYA, GOV!" - -Of course people called him cocky. But he only wondered: Was he good enough? At seventeen, as high school closed, he signed with the local team, the Coast League Padres. They offered him $150 a month and said they'd pay for the whole month of June, even though this was already June 20. So that was Ted's bonus -- twenty days' pay. He didn't care: he was a step closer, and each day was a new wonder. - -He rode the trains, farther from home than he'd ever been. He stayed in hotels with big mirrors, and Ted would stand at a mirror with a bat, or a rolled-up paper, anything -- just to see his swing, how he looked: he had to look good. He got balls from the club, so many that his manager, Frank Shellenback, thought Ted must be selling them. No, Ted took them to his playground, got Lusk and maybe a kid to shag flies, and hit the covers off those balls. - -Best of all, there were major leaguers, real ones, to see. They were old by the time they came to the Coast League, but Ted watched them, almost ate them with his eyes, measured himself against their size. Lefty O'Doul was managing the San Francisco Seals, and he was one of the greats. Ted stopped Lefty on the field one day. He had to know: "Mr. O'Doul, please...what should I do to be a good hitter?" And Lefty said: "Kid, best advice I can give you is don't let anybody change you." Ted walked around on air. After that, in bad times, he'd hear O'Doul's voice telling him he'd be okay. The bad times were slumps. If Ted couldn't hit, the world went gray. In his second year with San Diego, Ted hit a stretch of oh-for-eighteen. He hung around the hotel in San Francisco, moping. He didn't know what to do with himself. He got a paper and turned to the sports. There was an interview with O'Doul. The headline said: WILLIAMS GREATEST HITTER SINCE WANER. And Ted thought: I wonder who this Williams is? - -It was a newspaper that told him, too, about Boston buying his contract. The Red Sox! Ted's heart sank. It was a fifth-place club and as far away as any team could be: cold, northerly, foreign. Still, it was big league, wasn't it? - -He had to borrow $200 for the trip east; there were floods that spring, 1938. He got to Sarasota, Florida, about a week late. And when he walked into the clubhouse, all the players were on the field. - -"Well, so you're the kid." - -It was Johnny Orlando, clubhouse boy. The way Johnny told it, he'd been waiting for this Williams. "Then, one morning, this Li'l Abner walks into the clubhouse. He's got a red sweater on, his shirt open at the neck, a raggedy duffle bag. His hair's on end like he's attached to an electric switch....'Where you been, Kid?' I asked him. 'Don't you know we been working out almost a whole week? Who you supposed to be, Ronald Colman or somebody, you can't get here on time?'" Johnny gave Ted a uniform, the biggest he had in stock. But as Ted grabbed a couple of bats, his arms and legs stuck out, the shirttail wouldn't stay in his pants. - -"Well, come on, Kid," Johnny said, and he led the bean pole out to the field. From the first-base stands, a voice yelled: "Hey, busher, tuck your shirt in! You're in the big leagues now." - -Ted wheeled around, face red. "Who's the wise guy in the stands?" Johnny told him: "That's Joe Cronin, Kid, your manager." Ted put his head down and made for the outfield. It wasn't the reception he'd expected, but at least he had his nickname. Everyone heard Johnny show him around. "Look here, Kid. Go over there, Kid." It stuck right away; it was a role, he knew. And soon Joe Cronin would fill the spot Rod Luscomb had held in Ted's life. Cronin was only thirty-one, but that was old enough. He was a hitter and a teacher, a manager, counselor, and Ted was ever the Kid. - -Cronin had come from Washington, one of the Red Sox's imported stars. The owner, Tom Yawkey, was buying a contender. Along with Cronin, the Hall of Fame shortstop, Yawkey raided Washington for Ben Chapman, a speedy right fielder and .300 hitter. From the Browns, Yawkey got Joe Vosmik, a left fielder who would hit .324. From the A's, Yawkey bought two old greats, Lefty Grove and Jimmy Foxx, along with Doc Cramer, another .300 hitter, for center field. - -These were the finest hitters Ted had seen. He couldn't take his eyes off the batter's box. But the presence of all those hitters in camp meant one thing of terrible import to Ted: no nineteen-year-old outfielder was breaking in, not that year, and the veterans let Ted know it. Vosmik, Chapman, and Cramer, rough old boys all of them, made sure he had his share of insults. He lasted about a week, until the club broke camp for the first game in Tampa. - -Ted wasn't going to Tampa. He was headed to Daytona Beach, where the Minneapolis farm team trained. Ted saw the list and the shame welled up, turned to rage. He yelled to the veteran outfielders: "I'll be back. And I'll make more money in this fucking game than all three of you combined." When he walked to the bus stop with Johnny Orlando, he asked: "How much you think those guys make?" And Johnny said: "I don't know, maybe fifteen thousand apiece." Ted nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. He had his salary goal now. Then he borrowed $2.50 from Johnny for the bus trip to the minors. - -In Minneapolis, Ted led the league in everything: average, home runs, runs batted in, screwball stunts....There were tales of his conduct in the outfield, where he'd sit down between batters, or practice swinging an imaginary bat, watching his leg-stride, watching his wrist-break, watching everything except balls hit to him. If he did notice a fly ball, he'd gallop after it, slapping his ass and yelling, "HI HO SILVER!" He was nineteen, and fans loved him. But if there was one boo, the Kid would hear it, and he'd try to shut the sonofabitch up for good. Once, when a heckler got on him, Ted fired a ball into the stands -- and hit the wrong guy. That was more than the manager, poor old Donie Bush, could stand. He went to the owner, Mike Kelley, and announced: "That's it. One of us goes. Him or me." Kelley replied, quick and firm: "Well, then, Donie, it'll have to be you." - -By the time Ted came back to Sarasota, the Red Sox were banking on him, too. They traded Ben Chapman, the right fielder who'd hit .340 the year before. Ted told himself: "I guess that shows what they think of ME." It was like he had to convince himself he was really big league now. Even after a good day, three-for-four, he'd sit alone in the hotel with the canker of one failure eating at him. If he screwed up, or looked bad, the awkwardness turned to shame, the shame to rage. As the team headed north, Ted was hitting a ton, but it wasn't enough. At the first stop, Atlanta, Johnny Orlando pointed out the strange right-field wall -- three parallel fences, one behind the other. Johnny said: "I saw Babe Ruth hit one over that last fence...." Ted vowed right there he'd do it, too. But the next day, he couldn't clear one fence. Worse still, he made an error. In the seventh, he put the Sox up with a three-run triple, but it wasn't enough. He had to show what Ted Williams could do! When he struck out in the eighth, he went to right field seething. Then a popup twisted toward his foul line. He ran and ran, dropped the ball, then booted it trying to pick it up. Rage was pounding in him. He grabbed the ball and fired it over those right-field walls. By the time the ball hit Ponce de Leon Avenue and bounced up at a Sears store, Cronin had yanked Ted out of the game. - -Even Ted couldn't understand what that rage was to him, why he fed it, wouldn't let it go. He only knew that the next day in Atlanta, he smashed a ball over those three walls and trotted to the bench with a hard stare that asked Johnny Orlando, and anyone else who cared to look: Well, what do you think of the Kid now? - -He had a great first year in the bigs. On his first Sunday at Fenway Park, he was four-for-five with his first home run, a shot to the bleachers in right-center, where only five balls had landed the whole year before. There were nine Boston dailies that vied in hyperbole on the new hero. TED WILLIAMS REVIVES FEATS OF BABE RUTH, said the Globe after Ted's fourth game. - -From every town he wrote a letter to Rod Luscomb with a layout of the ball park and a proud X where his homer hit. He was always first to the stadium and last to leave after a game. He took his bats to the post office to make sure they were the proper weight. He quizzed the veterans mercilessly about the pitchers coming up. "What does Newsom throw in a jam? How about Ruffing's curve?" It was as if he meant to ingest the game. He only thought baseball. On trains, he'd never join the older guys in poker games or drinking bouts. At hotels, it was always room service, and Ted in his shorts, with a bat, at a mirror. - -His roomie was Broadway Charlie Wagner, a pitcher with a taste for fancy suits and an occasional night on the town. One night, 4:00 A.M., Wagner was sleeping the sleep of the just when, wham, CRASH, he's on the floor, with the bed around his ears, and he figures it's the end. He opens his eyes to see the bean-pole legs, then the shorts, and then the bat. Ted's been practicing and he hit the bedpost. Does he say he's sorry? No, he doesn't say a damn thing to Wagner. He's got a little dream-child smile on his face and he murmurs to himself: "Boy, what power!" - -He ended up hitting .327 and leading the league for runs batted in, the first time a rookie ever won that crown. He finished with thirty-one home runs, at least one in each American League park. There was no rookie of the year award, but Babe Ruth himself put the title on Ted, and that seemed good enough. - -And after the season, he didn't go home. San Diego had lost its hold. His parents were getting a divorce, and that was pain he didn't want to face. He didn't want to see his troubled brother. He didn't want to see the crummy little house with the stained carpet and the chair with the hole where the mice ate through. He had a car now, a green Buick worth a thousand bucks. He went to Minnesota. There was a girl there he might want to see. Her dad was a hunting guide, and he could talk to her. And there was duck to hunt. As many as he wanted. And he could go where he wanted. And do what he wanted. He was twenty-one. And Big League. - -Everybody knew 1940 would be a great year. Ted knew he'd be better: now he'd seen the pitchers, he knew he could do it. Tom Yawkey sent him a contract for $10,000, double his rookie pay. "I guess that shows what they think of ME." - -No one thought about this, but pitchers had seen Ted, too. And this time around, no one was going to try to blow a fastball by him. Cronin was having an off year and Double-X Foxx was getting old and would never again be batting champ. So the pressure fell to Ted. If they pitched around him and he got a walk, that wasn't enough, the Sox needed hits. If he got a hit, it should have been a homer. A coven of bleacherites started riding Ted. And why not? They could always get a rise. Sometimes he'd yell back. Or he'd tell the writers: "I'm gonna take raw hamburger out to feed those wolves." The papers rode the story hard: O Unhappy Star! Then he told the writers: "Aw, Boston's a shitty town. Fans are lousy." Now the papers added commentary, pious truths about the Boston fans as the source of Ted's fine income. So Ted let them have it again: "My salary is peanuts. I'd rather be traded to New York." That did it. Now it wasn't just a left-field crowd riding Ted. It was civic sport. He doesn't like Boston, huh? Who does he think he is? - -Writers worked the clubhouse, trying to explain the Kid. Big Jimmy Foxx, a hero to Ted, said: "Aw, he's just bein' a spoiled boy." The great Lefty Grove said if Williams didn't hustle, he'd punch him in the nose. Of course, all that made the papers. Now when writers came to his locker, Ted didn't wait for questions. "HEY, WHAT STINKS?" he'd yell in their faces. "HEY! SOMETHING STINK IN HERE? OH, IT'S YOU, WELL, NO WONDER WITH THAT SHIT YOU WROTE." So, they made new nicknames for him: Terrible Ted, the Screwball, the Problem Child. Fans picked it up and gave him hell. It didn't seem to matter what he did anymore. And Ted read the stories in his hotel room and knew he was alone. Sure, he read the papers, though he always said he didn't. He read the stories twenty times, he'd recite them word for word. He'd pace the room and seethe, want to shut them up, want to hit them back. But he didn't know how. - -And Ted would sit alone in the locker room, boning his bats, not just the handle, like other guys did, but the whole bat, grinding down the wood, compressing the fiber tighter, making it tougher, harder, tighter. He would string the ball, he'd show them. He'd shut them up. Jesus, he was trying. And he was hitting. Wasn't his average up? Wasn't he leading the league in runs? He was doing it like he'd taught himself, like he'd dreamed. Wasn't that enough? What the hell did they want him to be? - -What else could he be? Some players tried to help, to ease him up a bit. Once, Ted gave Doc Cramer a ride, and they were talking hitting, as Ted always did. It was at Kenmore Square that Cramer said: "You know who's the best, don't you? You know who's the best in the league? You are." And Ted never forgot those words. But neither could he forget what was written, just as he couldn't forget one boo, just as he'd never forget the curve that struck him out a year before. Why didn't they understand? He could never forget. - -And one day he made an error, and then struck out, and it sounded like all of Fenway was booing, and he ran to the bench with his head down, the red rising in his face, the shame in his belly, and the rage. Ted thought: These are the ones who cheered, the fans I waved my cap to? Well, never again. He vowed to himself: Never again. And he could not forget that either. - -LOU IS IN A MIAMI HOSPITAL for heart tests. Ted says I can drive up with him. He figures we'll talk, and he'll have me out of his hair. We start from his house and I wait for him on the porch, where a weary woman irons. The woman is filling in for Lou and she's been ironing for hours. Ted may wear a T-shirt until it's half holes and no color at all, but he wants it just so. The woman casts a look of despair at the pile and announces: "She irons his underpants." - -Ted blows through the back door and makes for the car, Lou's Ford, which he proclaims "a honey of a little car, boys!" When Ted puts his seal of judgment on a thing or person, by habit he alerts the whole dugout. We are out of Islamorada on the crowded highway, U.S. 1, the only road that perseveres to these islets off the corner of the country, when Ted springs his key question. "You read the book? Awright. Now we're going to see how smart YOU are. What would YOU do to start, I mean, the first goddamn thing now, the first thing you see when you're sitting in the seats and the lights go off, how would YOU start the movie?" - -Ted is considering a film deal for My Turn at Bat. He is working the topic of moviedom, as he does anything he wants to know. Now as he pilots the Ford through Key Largo, he listens with a grave frown to some possible first scenes. "Awright. Now I'll tell you how it's supposed to start, I mean how the guy's doing it said....It's in a fighter plane, see, flying, from the pilot's eye, over KOREA, Seoul. And it's flying, slow and sunny and then bang WHAM BOOOOMMM the biggest goddamn explosion ever on the screen. I mean BOOOOOMMM. And the screen goes dark. DARK. For maybe ten seconds there's NOTHING. NOTHING. And then when it comes back there's the ball park and the crowd ROARING... and that's the beginning. - -"Sounds great, Ted." - -"Does it? LOOK IT THIS NOW. I wonder where he's goin'. Well, okay, he's gonna do that. Well, okay -- I'm passing, too. Fuck it." Ted is pushing traffic hard to be at the hospital by 2:00, when Lou's doctors have promised results from the heart tests. He is trying to be helpful, but he'd edgy. - -"How long have you and Lou been together?" - -"Oh, I've known Lou for thirty-five years. You shouldn't put any of that shit in there. Say I have a wonderful friend, that's all." - -"Yeah, but it makes a difference in how a man lives, Ted, whether he's got a woman or not -- " - -"Boy, that Sylvester Stallone, he's really made something out of that Rocky, hasn't he?...." - -"So Ted, let me ask you what -- " - -"LOOK, I don't wanta go through my personal life with YOU, for Christ's sake. I won't talk to you about Lou, I won't talk to you about any of it. You came down here and you're talkin' about me, as I'm supposed to be different and all that...." - -"Do you think you're different?" - -"NO, not a damn bit. I'm in a little bit different POSITION. I mean, I've had things happen to me that have, uh, made it possible for me to be different. DAMN DIFFERENT in some ways. Everybody's not a big league ballplayer, everybody doesn't have, uh, coupla hitches in the service, everybody hasn't had, uh, as much notoriety about 'em as I had ALL MY LIFE, so...." - -"So...." - -"I wanna go NORTH. I'm gonna go up here and go farther down. I made a mistake there, GODDAMNIT, HOW THE HELL DO I GET ON THE FUCKIN' THING? I'll make a U-turn...." - -"Ted, I think you were more serious about living life on your own terms...." - -"Well, I wanted to be alone at times. It was the hustle and the bustle of the crowd for seven months a year. So sure, I wanted a little more privacy, a little more quiet, a little more tranquility. This is the fucking left we wanted." - -"Yeah, but it's not just privacy, Ted. I'm not trying to make it seem unnatural. But what you toss off as a little more privacy led you off the continent, so far off in a corner that -- " - -"Well, lemme tell you about Koufax. He got through playin' baseball, he went to a fuckin' little shitty remote town in Maine, and that's where he was for five years. Everybody thought he was a recluse, he wasn't very popular just 'cause he wanted to be alone and he finally moved out. Lemme tell you about Sterling Hayward, Hayden. HELL of an actor. And still he wanted to be ALONE, he wanted to TRAVEL, he wanted to be on his BOAT GOIN' TO THE SOUTH SEAS. So, see, that's not way outa line!....I guess I'll take a right, that oughta do it. Eight seventy-four, do you see 874 anyplace? Go down here till I get to Gilliam Road, or some goddamn thing....Fuck, 874's where I wanted to go, but looked like it was puttin' me back on this fuckin' turnpike, shit. So, you know, seeking privacy and, uh, seeking that kind of thing...what road is this?" - -"We're on Killian....So privacy, you don't think that's what?" - -"Unusual, for Christ's sake. Shit." - -"I don't think it's unusual either." - -"WELL, YOU'RE MAKIN' A PROJECT OUT OF IT!" - -"No, I don't think it's unusual....You don't think you're exceptionally combative?" - -"Nahh, me? Not a bit. Hell, no. THAT SAY KENDALL? Does it? Well, I made a hell of a move here. HELL of a move! See, 874 is right off there, hospital's down here...." - -"You're a half-hour early, too." - -"Here it is, right here, too. Best hospital in Miami. Expensive sonofabitch, boy. Christ. I'm all for Medicare. And I've always thought that, ALWAYS thought that. Shit. WELL, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? Where ARE you going, lady? Cunt!" Ted takes the parking space vacated by the lady and tells me he'll be back in an hour. - -When he comes back he has good news about Lou: all tests are negative, her heart is fine. "Gee, I met the big cardiovascular man, he came in and I met him." Ted sounds twenty years younger. - -He's walking to the car when a nurse passes. "GEE, WASN'T IT A SHAME," Ted suddenly booms, "THAT ALLIGATOR BIT THAT LITTLE GIRL'S LEG OFF?" He casts a sly sideward glance at the nurse to see if she's fallen for his favorite joke. - -"Honey of a little shittin' car!" he sings out as we hit the road. Now there is no fretting with traffic. Ted makes all the turns. Along the way, he sings forth a monologue about cars, this car, this road, this town of Homestead, that house, his house, the new house he's planning in central Florida, up on a hill, just about the highest point in the whole goddamn sate, what a deal he's getting there, Citrus Hills, HELL of a deal; about his hopes for his kids, his daughter, Claudia, only fourteen, who lives in Vermont with her mother, Ted's third wife, who was too much of a pain in the ass to live with, but gee, she's done a hell of a job with those kids, HELL of a job, the little girl is an actress, she had the lead in the Christmas play and she was so good, the papers up there all said she bears watching, SHE BEARS WATCHING, and her brother, Ted's boy, John Henry, he's picking colleges now, he's a good boy and Ted's critical, but he can't see too much wrong with that boy, and even the big daughter, Bobby Jo, she's thirty-eight already, still can bust Ted's chops pretty good, boys, but she's straightening out now; and these islands, there's bonefish here, used to be wonderful, years ago, there was NOTHING, NOTHING except a few of the best fishermen God ever made, and a narrow road between bay and sea, just a little shittin' road, and some women who weren't half bad on the water of off it either, and the world here was empty and the water was clear and you could have a few pops of rum, maybe get a little horny, go see friends, that's all there was here, a few friends, thirty, thirty-five years ago, when this place was young, when he first fished with Jimmy and he met Lou.... - -"Gee, I'm so fuckin' happy about Louise," Ted says. "Goddamn, she's a great person. Have more fun with her than...Goddamn." - -THEY BOOED IN BOSTON? Well, not in Detroit, the 1941 All-Star Game, with all the nation listening in. Ted doubled in a run in the fourth, but the National League still led 5-3, going into the ninth. Then an infield hit, a single, a walk, a botched double play, and here it was: two out, two on, bottom of the ninth. Here's the Great Ted Williams. Claude Passeau, the Cubbie on the mound, sends a mean fastball in on his fists. Williams swings! When the ball made the seats, Ted started jumping on the base path. DiMaggio met him at home plate, Bob Feller ran out in street clothes, Cronin jumped the box-seat rail, the dugout emptied. The manager, Del Baker, kissed him on the forehead. They carried the Kid off the field. - -He was showing them all now; after the All-Star break, Ted was still hitting more than .400. Sure, guys hit like that for a month, but then tailed off. No one in the league hit like that for a year, not since the Twenties, and each day the whole country watched. Writers from New York joined the Sox. Life brought its new strobe-light camera to photograph Ted in his shorts, swinging like he did in front of the mirror. Ted was on national radio: "Can you keep it up, Kid?" It was murderous pressure. By September, he was slipping, almost a point a day. On the last day, the Sox would have two games in Philadelphia. Ted had slipped to .39955. The way they round off averages, that's still .400. Cronin came to Ted on the eve of the twin bill and offered: "You could sit it out, Kid, have it made." But Ted said he'd play. - -That night, he and Johnny Orlando walked Philadelphia. Ted stopped for milk shakes, Johnny for whiskey. Ten thousand people came to Shibe Park, though the games meant nothing. Connie Mack, the dour and penurious owner of the A's, threatened his men with fines if they eased up on Williams. But Ted didn't need help. First game, he got a single, then a home run, then two more singles. Second game, two more hits: one a screaming double that hit Mr. Mack's right-field loudspeaker so hard that the old man had to buy a new horn. In all, Ted went six-for-eight, and .406 for his third season. That night, he went out, he went out for chocolate ice cream. - -Who could tell what he'd do the next year: maybe .450, the best ever, or break the Babe's record of sixty homers. He got a contract for $30,000, and he meant to fix up his mother's house. He'd have more money than he'd ever expected. He was the toast of the nation. But then the nation went to war. - -Ted wanted to play. He'd read where some admiral said we'd kick the Japs back to Tokyo in six months. What was that compared to hitting? A lawyer in Minnesota drew up a plea for deferment, and Ted okayed the request: he was entitled, as his mother's support. When the local board refused deferment, the lawyer sent it up for review by the presidential board. That's when the papers got it. In headlines the size of howitzer shells, they said Ted didn't want to fight for his country. Teddy Ballgame just wanted to play. - -Tom Yawkey called to say he could be making the mistake of his life. The league president told Ted to go ahead and play. Papers ran man-on-the-streets polls. In Boston, Ted was bigger news than war in the Pacific. At spring training, Joe Cronin said he'd be on his own with fans. "To hell with them," Ted spat. "I've heard plenty of boos." Still, he remembered the venomous letters that said he was an ingrate or a traitor. The one that hurt the most said nothing at all: it was just a blank sheet of paper, yellow paper. - -Opening day in Boston, reporters sat in the left-field stands, out there with soldiers and sailors, to record reaction to Ted. The Kid treated the day as a personal challenge. His first time up, two on, two strikes, he got a waist-high fastball and drilled it into the bleachers. All the fans rose to cheer, servicemen among them. The Kid was back, and Fenway was with him. "Yeah, 98 percent were for me," Ted said later, as he scraped his bat. A writer said: "You mean 100 percent. I didn't hear a boo." Ted said: "Yeah, they were for me, except a couple of kids in the left-field stand, and a guy out in right. I could hear them." - -In May, he enlisted for Navy wings and that shut up most of the hecklers. Still, he was always in a stew of contempt for some joker who said something unfair. It seemed Ted courted the rage now, used it to bone his own fiber. Now there was no awkwardness, no blushing before he blew. It was automatic, a switch in his gut that snapped on and then, watch out for the Kid. One day in July, a fan in left was riding Ted pretty hard. Ted came to bat in the fifth: he took a strange stance and swung late, hit a line drive, but well foul into the left-field seats. Next pitch, again he swung late, hit another liner, but this stayed fair -- and Ted didn't run, barely made it to second. Cronin yanked him out of the game, fined him $250 for loafing. But Ted wasn't loafing, the hit caught him by surprise. He's been trying to kill the heckler with a line drive foul. - -Ted loved the service, its certainty and ease. He never had a problem with authority. It was drawing his own lines that gave him fits. He had his fears about the mathematics, navigation problems, and instrument work. But at Amherst College, where the Navy started training, he found his mind was able, and he was pleased. And he loved the feel of an airplane. He was good, right from the start. There was coordination in it, and care: those were natural to him. And he was a constant student, always learning in the air. But he was proudest of his gunnery, the way he could hold back until the last pass, then pour out the lead and shred the sleeve. That wasn't study, that was art. He got his wings near the top of his class and signed on as an instructor at Pensacola, Florida. He was happy, and good at his job. Strangely, in uniform, he was freer than before. - -On the day he was commissioned (second lieutenant, U.S. Marines), he married that daughter of the hunting guide, Doris Soule from Minnesota. Now, for the first time, he'd have a house, a place on the coast near the base. And now, on off days, he'd scrape up some gas stamps, grab his fly rod, find a lonesome canal, and lose himself in a hunt for snook. But back at the base, Ted would grab a cadet and take him up in his SNJ, and the new guy of course was goggle-eyed, flying with Ted Williams, and Ted would make his plane dance over the coast, then he'd dive and point, and yell to the cadet: "That's where the Kid fished yesterday." - -Orders came through slowly for him. What base commander would give him up as ornament and outfielder? At last he got combat training and packed up for the Pacific. But Ted was just getting to Hawaii when Japan folded. So he packed up again for Boston, and now he felt he was going to war. - -He came back like he owned the game. Opening day, Washington, after a three-year layoff: crack, a four-hundred-foot home run. And then another and another, all around the league. By the All-Star break in '46, he was hitting .365, with twenty-seven home runs. In the All-Star Game, Ted alone ruined the National League: four straight hits, two homers, and five runs batted in. - -And the Red Sox were burying the American League. Tom Yawkey's millions were paying off. The team as a whole was hitting .300, and Ted was hammering the right-field walls. In the first game of two in Cleveland, he hit three homers, one a grand slam when the Sox were behind, the second with two on to tie, the third in the bottom of the ninth to win 11-10. As Ted came up in the second game, Cleveland's manager, Lou Boudreau, started moving men: the right fielder backed toward the corner, center fielder played the wall in right-center; the third baseman moved behind second, and Boudreau, the shortstop, played a deep second base; the second baseman stood in short right, the first baseman stood behind his bag. There were eight men on one half of the field (the left fielder was alone on the other) and Ted stood at home plate and laughed out loud. - -There never had been anything like it. He had bent the nature of the game. But he would not bend his own, and slap the ball for singles to left. He hit into the teeth of the Shift (soon copied around the league), and when he slumped, and the Sox with him, the papers started hammering Ted again, his pride, his "attitude." At last, against the Shift in Cleveland, Ted sliced a drive to left-center, and slid across the plate with an inside-the-park home run, first and last of his career. The Sox had their first pennant since 1918. But the headlines didn't say, SOX CLINCH. Instead, eight-column banners cried that Ted stayed away from the champagne party. "Ted Williams," Dave Egan wrote in the Record, "is not a team man." And when St. Louis pulled the Shift in the Series and held Ted to singles, five-for-twenty-five, a new banner read: WILLIAMS BUNTS. And the Red Sox lost the Series, first and last of his career, and after the seventh game, in St. Louis, Ted went to the train, closed his compartment, hung his head, and cried. When he looked up, he saw a crowd watching him through the window. The papers wrote: "Ted Williams cannot win the big ones." The Associated Press voted him number two in a poll for Flop of the Year. - -It seemed like Ted couldn't laugh anymore, not in a ball park. He said he was going to Florida to fish. He didn't want to see a bat for months. Soon that was a pattern: one year, before spring training, he tucked in a week in the Everglades. Next year, it was a month. Year after that, longer. In early 1948, the papers discovered that Doris was in a Boston hospital to deliver Ted's first child. But where was the big guy? In Florida? FISHING? The mothers of Boston pelted the press with angry letters. "To hell with them," Ted said. He didn't come north for two days. And two days later, he was back fishing. In two years, he'd moved Doris and his daughter, Barbara Joyce, to a house in Miami, the first he'd ever owned. Hut he never stayed home there either. He heard about some men in the Keys catching bonefish with light fly tackle. When Ted tried this new sport, he found a love that would last longer than any of his marriages. - -The Keys were empty, their railroad wrecked by a hurricane in 1935. There were only a few thousand souls on one road that ran for a hundred miles; the rest was just mangrove and mosquitoes, crushed coral islands, and shining water. In Islamorada -- a town of one store, a bar, a restaurant, one gas pump -- a few fishing guides, led by Jimmy Albright, were poling their skiffs over shallows that only they knew, hunting bonefish and inventing an art as they went along. These were Ted's kind of men, who'd sneer or scream at a chairman of the stock exchange if he made a lousy cast. Islamorada was a strange meritocracy: if you could not play a fish, tie a fly, cast a line through the wind, you were no one in this town. - -Ted could do it all, brilliantly. The guides didn't make much fuss about his fame, but they loved his fishing. His meticulous detail work, always an oddity at Fenway Park, was respected here as the mark of a fine angler. Ted had the best tackle, the best reels, best rods, the perfect line, his lures were impeccable. He'd work for hours at a bench in his house, implanting balsa plugs with lead so they'd sail off a spinning rod just so, then settle in the water slowly like fly. He could stand on the bow of a skiff all day, watching the water for signs of fish, and soon he was seeing them before the guides. His casts were quick and long, his power was immense. He never seemed to snap a line, never tangled up, his knots were sure, his knowledge grew, and he always wanted to know more. He'd question Jimmy relentlessly and argue every point. But if you showed him something once, he never needed showing again. He fished with Jimmy week after week, and one afternoon as he stood on the bow, he asked without turning his head: "Who's the best you ever fished?" Jimmy said a name, Al Mathers. Ted nodded, "Uh-huh," and asked another question, but he vowed to himself: "He don't know it yet, but the best angler he's had is me." - -Every winter, he'd fish the flats, then head north to make his appearance at the Boston Sportsmen's Show. He'd spend a few days doing fly-casting stunts and then take a couple of hours, at most, to tell Tom Yawkey what he wanted for a contract. His salary was enormous. He was the first to break Babe Ruth's $80,000. Ted didn't care for the money as much as the record. It was history now that was the burr on his back. The joy was gone, but not the dream. - -Every day, every season, he was still first to the ball park, where he'd strip to shorts and bone his bats; still first out to the cage, where he'd bark his imaginary play-by-play: "Awright, Detroit, top of the ninth..." Then back to his locker for a clean shirt and up at a trot to the dugout, to clap a hostile eye on the pitcher warming up, to pick apart his delivery, hunting for any weakness. No, Ted would not give up on one game, one time at bat, a single pitch. No one since Ruth had hit so many home runs per times at bat. No one in the league hit like Ted, year after year: .342, .343, .369, .343.... It seemed he never broke a bat at the plate, but he broke a hundred in the clubhouse runway. If he failed at the plate he'd scream at himself, "YOU GODDAMN FOOL!" and bash the cement, while the Sox in the dugout stared ahead with mute smiles. Once, after a third strike, he smashed the water pipe to the cooler with his bare fists. No could believe it until the flood began. And on each opening day, Ted would listen to the national anthem and he'd feel the hair rise on the back of his neck, and his bands would clench, and he'd vow to himself: "This year, the best ever." - -In the 1950 All-Star Game, he crashed the outfield wall to catch a drive by Ralph Kiner. His elbow was broken, with thirteen clips off the radius. Surgeons thought he was through, but Ted returned in two months. His first game back, once again: home run, and four-for-four. But Ted could tell as weeks went by that the elbow was not the same. The ball didn't jump off his bat. So all next winter, Ted stayed in the Keys, where he poled a skiff, hunting bonefish and rebuilding his arm. He was pushing thirty-three now, just coming to know how short was his time. But then, after the '51 season, he was called back to the Marines, drafted for a two-year hitch in Korea. It seemed like his time was up. - -TED'S LIVING ROOM HAS A WIDE white armchair, into and out of which he heaves himself twenty times a day; the chair has a wide white ottoman onto which he'll flop, as whim dictates, one or both of his big legs. From this chair, he roars commands and inquiries, administering the house and grounds. Across the room, a big TV shows his National Geographic specials. At his side, a table holds his reading correspondence. At the moment, these piles are topped by Yeager: An Autobiography, and teachers' reports on his son, John Henry. To Ted's right, ten feet away, there's a doorway to the kitchen, through which Lou can supply him and let him know who that was on the phone. To his left and behind, a grand window affords a view of a patio, his dock, some mangrove, and some Florida Bay. Finally, ahead and to the right, in a distant semicircle, there are chairs and a couch for visitors. - -"NOW WE'RE GONNA SEE HOW MUCH YOU KNOW, SONOFABITCH," Ted is shouting at Jack Brothers. Jimmy Albright is there, too. The shouting is ritual. - -"Ru-mer. R-U-M-E-R." Brothers contends he is spelling the name of the first spinning wheel. But Ted had hurled himself up to fetch a fishing encyclopedia, and now he's back in the chair, digging through to the section on spinning. Just so things don't get dull, he says: "Where'd you get that HAIRCUT? D'you have to PAY FOR IT?" - -Ted and Jimmy began this colloquy in the early Truman years. Jack helped heat it up when he drifted down from Brooklyn a few years after the war, before Islamorada got its second restaurant or first motel, not to mention the other ten motels, the condos, gift shops, Burger King, or the billboard to proclaim this place: SPORTFISHING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. These elders are responsible for a lot of history here, as they helped create flats fishing and turn it into a sport/industry (which they not quietly deplore). Jimmy and Jack were teachers of the first generation of saltwater anglers. Ted is the star of that generation, and its most ferocious pupil. - -"Here. HERE! 'Mr. Brown began importing SPINNERS, starting with the LUXAR....' THE LUXAR, WANNA SEE? GO AHEAD, SONOFABITCH!" - -"Yeah, but that don't say the first spinning reel manufactured." Brothers grins in triumph. "Sonofabitch, with your books!" - -"This is the goddamn HISTORY, Brothers. Not a FUCKING THING about RUMOR, RHEUMER, RHOOOMAN...I GUESS YOU DIDN'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT SPINNING REELS, DID YOU?" - -Ted is always the one with the books. He wants answers, not a lot of bullshit. Ted is always reading history, biography, fact of all kinds. He doesn't like much made of this, as he's tender on the subject of his education. Once in a camp in Africa, while he and his coauthor, John Underwood, gazed at the night sky, Ted turned from the stars and sighed: "Jeez, I wish I was smart like you." - -Now he reports to his friends on his college tours with his son, John Henry: "So we get to Babson and I like it. Babson's a pretty good school, boys. HELL of a school, but, uh, they got dorms, boys and girls all in one dorm, see, and I look on the walls and they're written all over, Fuck this and Fuck that, I'm thinking, Gee, right out there on the walls. It just seemed, you know..." - -"Liberal?" Jimmy suggests. - -"Well, I like to see a place with a little more standards than that. So we get to Bates. We got this German girl to show us around, see? And she was a smart little shit, two languages, and she's telling us what she's studying, aw, a smart little shit! She give us the tour, see, and John Henry loved Bates, LOVED it. We get back to the office and she goes out. I don't know, she musta told someone, told some of her friends, who she just showed around, see? Then somebody told her. She didn't know, see.... - -"Well, a minute later, she's back with some kid and he says, OH, Mr. Williams! And OH this and OH that. And then we start talking. And how about this, how about that, and how would John Henry like to come for a weekend, get the feel of the place, you know...." - -Ted stops for a moment and thinks to himself. He doesn't really have to finish the thought for his friends, who can see him beaming in his big chair. So he just trails off, to himself: - -"...boy mighta thought the old man wasn't gonna...you know, around a college....Well!" - -THE MAYOR AND THE RED SOX held a day for Ted when he left for flight school. Three weeks into the '52 season, at Fenway, they gave him a Cadillac, and made a donation to the Jimmy Fund, a charity for sick children that Ted supported. They gave him a Ted Williams Memory Book, with signatures of four hundred thousand fans. For his last at bat, bottom of the seventh, he gave them a three-run homer to win the game 5-3. He threw a party that night, at his Boston hotel. The crowd was mostly cooks and firemen, bellhops, cabbies, ice cream men. Ted never liked a smart crowd. Smart people too often asked: "Oh, was your father a ballplayer?" "Oh, what did your mother do?" Ted didn't like to talk about that. - -He was just Captain Williams, U.S. Marines, at his flight base at Pohang, Korea. He had a shed for a home and a cot with inner-tube strips for springs. The base was a sea of mud, the air was misty and cold, and he was always sick. He was flying close air support, low strafing, and bombing runs. His plane was a jet now, an F-9 Panther, but he couldn't take much joy from flying. He was in and out of sick bay. Doctors called it a virus, then pneumonia, but his squadron was short of pilots, so he always flew. - -On a bombing run, north of the 38th parallel, Ted lost sight of the plane ahead. He dropped through clouds, and when he came out, he was much too low. North Koreans sent up a hail of bullets. Ted's place was hit and set afire. The stick stiffened and shook in his hand; his hydraulics were gone. Every warning light was red. The radio quit. A Marine in a nearby F-9 was pointing wildly at Ted's place. He was trying to signal: "Fire! Bail out!" But Ted's biggest fear was ejecting; at six three, wedged in as he was, he'd leave his kneecaps under his gauges. So the other pilot led him to a base. Ted hauled his plane into a turn and he felt a shudder of explosion. One of his wheel doors had blown out. Now he was burning below, too. He made for a runway with fire streaming thirty feet behind. Koreans in a village saw his plane and ran for their lives. Only one wheel came down; he had no dive breaks, air flaps, nothing to slow the plane. He hit the concrete at 225 miles per hour and slid for almost a mile, while he mashed the useless brakes and screamed, "STOP YOU DIRTY SONOFABITCH STOP STOP STOP." When the F-9 stopped skidding, he somersaulted out the hatch and slammed his helmet to the ground. Two Marines grabbed him on the tarmac, and walked him away as the plane burned to char. - -He was flying the next day, and day after. There weren't enough pilots to rest a man. Ted was sicker, weak and gaunt. Soon his ears were so bad he couldn't hear the radio. He had flown thirty-seven missions and won three air medals when they sent him to a hospital ship. Doctors sent him to Hawaii and then to Bethesda, Maryland, where at last they gave him a discharge. His thirty-fifth birthday was coming up, he was tired and ill. He didn't want to do anything, much less suit up to play. But Ford Frick, the commissioner, asked him to the '53 All-Star Game, just to throw out the first ball. - -So Ted went to Cincinnati, sat in a sport coat in the dugout. Players greeted him like a lost brother; even Ted couldn't hear a boo in the stands. Tom Yawkey was there and Joe Cronin; they worked on the kid. The league president asked him to come back; the National League president, too. Branch Rickey sat him down for a talk; Casey Stengel put in a plea. Ted when to Bethesda to ask the doctors, and then he told the waiting press to send a message to the fans at Fenway: "Warm up your lungs." He took ten days of batting practice and returned with the Red Sox to Boston. First game, Fenway Park, bottom of the seventh: pinch-hit home run. - -Ted Williams was the greatest old hitter. In two months, upon return from Korea, he batted .407 and hit a home run once in every seven at bats. For the next two years, he led the league (.345 and .356), but injuries and walks robbed him of the titles: he didn't get the minimum four hundred at bats. In 1956, he lost the title in the season's last week to twenty-four-year-old Mickey Mantle (who finished .353 to Ted's .345). The next year, Mantle had an even better season, but Ted, at age thirty-nine, pulled away and won, at .388, more than twenty points ahead of Mantle, more than sixty points ahead of anyone else. With five more hits (say, the leg hits that a younger man would get), it would have been .400. As it was, it stood at the highest average since his own .406, sixteen years before. In 1958, Ted battled for the crown again, this time with a teammate, Pete Runnels. They were even in September, but then, once again, Ted pulled way to win at .328. For the final fifty-five games (including one on his fortieth birthday), he batted .403. - -He accomplished these prodigies despite troubles that would have made most men quit. In 1954, he made spring training for the first time in three years, but he wasn't on the field a minute before he fell and broke his collarbone. He was out six weeks and had steel bar wired into his clavicle. (First day back, twin bill in Detroit: two home runs, eight-for-nine, seven RBIs.) In 1955, Doris alleged in divorce court that he'd treated her with "extreme cruelty" and constant profane abuse. Boston papers ran the story under two-inch headlines: TED GETS DIVORCE, with a "box score" on the money, the house, the car, and "Mrs. Ted's" custody of Bobby Jo. In 1956, Ted came forth with his Great Expectorations. In a scoreless game with the Yankees, in front of Fenway's biggest crowd since World War II, he was booed for an error, and he let fans know what he thought of them: he spat toward the right-field stands and spat toward the left, and when fans rained more boos on his head, he leaped out of the dugout and sprayed all around. "Oh, no, this is a bad scene," Curt Gowdy, the Sox broadcaster, mourned to his microphone. Tom Yawkey heard the game on the radio, and Ted got a $5,000 fine (tying another Babe Ruth record). Boston writers said Ted ought to quit. But Ted was in the next game, Family Night, and at his appearance, fans gave him a five-minute ovation. (He then hit a home run in the bottom of the eighth and clapped his hand over his mouth as he scored the winning run.) In 1957, grippe knocked him flat and stuck him in his hotel for seventeen days in September. He came back and hit four consecutive home runs. In 1958, ptomaine from bad oysters wrecked opening day, then he injured an ankle, pulled a muscle in his side, and hurt his wrist twice. In September, after a called third strike, Ted threw his bat and watched in horror as it sailed to the stands and clonked a gray-haired lady on the head. Ted sat in tears in the dugout and had to be ordered to his place in left field. But over the next twenty at-bats, he hit .500. - -Now the switch in his gut was always on. The Red Sox gave him a single room and barred the press from the clubhouse for two hours before each game. But it wasn't outside annoyance that was fueling Ted's rage. He'd wake up in the middle of the night, screaming obscenities in the dark. He kept himself alone and pushed away affection. There were plenty of women who would have loved to help. But Ted would say: "WOMEN?" and then he'd grab his crotch. "ALL THEY WANT IS WHAT I GOT RIGHT HERE." Now the press didn't cover just explosions on the field. The American wrote him up for shredding a telephone book all over the floor when a hotel maid failed to clean his room. "Now tell me some more," wrote Austen Lake, "about Ted's big, charitable, long-suffering spirit." Roger Kahn reported a scene when Ted was asked about Billy Klaus, the shortstop who was coming back after a bad year. "You're asking ME about a BAD YEAR?...OLD T.S.W., HE DON'T HAVE BAD YEARS." - -But old Ted had a terrible year in 1959. A pain in his neck turned to stiffness, and he was in traction for three weeks. When he came out, he could barely look at the pitcher. He average languished below .300 for the first time in his career. For the first time, he was benched for not hitting. The sight of the Kid at plate was pathetic; even the papers softened. They started summing up his career, treating him like an old building menaced by the wrecking ball. He finished at .254 and went to Tom Yawkey. "Why don't you just wrap it up?" Yawkey said, and Ted started to boil. No one was going to make him retire. Ted said he meant to play, and Yawkey, who loved the Kid, offered to renew his contract: $125,000, the highest ever. No, Ted said, he'd had a lousy year and he wanted a cut. So Ted signed for $90,000 and came back one more time. - -Opening day, Washington: A five-hundred-foot home run. Next day, another. He slammed his five-hundredth in Cleveland, passed Lou Gehrig and then Mel Ott. Only Foxx and Ruth would top him on the all-time list. At forty-two, Ted finished his year with twenty-nine homers and .316. Talk revived that Ted might be back. But this was really quits. On his last day at Fenway, a headline cried: WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? And though the day was dreary and the season without hope, ten thousand came out to cheer him and hear him say goodbye. There was another check for the Jimmy Fund and, this time, a silver bowl. And Ted made a speech that said, despite all, he felt lucky to play for these fans. And when he came up in the eighth and they stood to cheer, he showed them what Ted Williams could do. He hit a Jack Fisher fastball into the bullpen in right field. And he thought about tipping his cap as he rounded first but he couldn't, even then, couldn't forget, so he ran it straight into the dugout, and wouldn't come out for a bow. - -Now it was no hobby: Ted fished harder and fished more than any man around. After his divorce from Doris, he'd made his home in Islamorada, bought a little place on the ocean side, with no phone and just room for one man and gear. He'd wake before dawn and spend the day in his boat, then come in, maybe cook a steak, maybe drive off to a Cuban or Italian joint where they served big portions and left him alone. Then, back home, he'd tie a few flies and be in bed by 10:00. He kept it very spare. He didn't even have a TV. That's how he met Louise. He wanted to see a Joe Louis fight, so Jimmy took him to Lou's big house. Her husband was a businessman from Ohio, and they had a TV, they had everything. Lou had her five kids, the best home, best furniture, best car, and best guides. Though she wasn't a woman of leisure, she was a pretty good angler, too. She could talk fishing with Ted. Yes, they could talk. And soon, Lou would have a little money of her own, an inheritance that she'd use to buy a divorce. She wanted to do for herself, she said. And there was something else, too. "I met Ted Williams," Louise said. "And he was the most gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life." - -Now Ted's life was his to make, too. He signed a six-figure deal with Sears, to lend his name to their line of tackle, hunting gear, and sporting goods. Now, when Hurricane Donna wrecked his little house on the ocean, he bought his three-bedroom place on the bay, near Louise's house. Now he bought a salmon pool on the Miramichi, in New Brunswick, Canada, and he fished the summer season there. In Islamorada, he was out every day, fall, winter, spring. He wanted the most and biggest -- bonefish, tarpon, salmon -- he called then the Big Three. He wanted a thousand of each, and kept books on his progress. He thought fishing and talked fishing and taught fishing at shows for Sears. He felt the joy of the sport, still. But now there was something else: the switch that clicked when he'd get a hot fish that ran and broke off his lure: Ted would slam his rod to the deck, or break it in half on the boat. "HERE, YOU LOUSY SONOFABITCH..." He'd hurl the rod into the bay. "TAKE THAT, TOO." - -He married again in 1961, a tall blond model from Chicago, Lee Howard. They'd both been divorced, and they thought they'd make a go. Ted brought her down to the Keys. But he still wasn't staying home: he'd be out at dawn without a word on where he'd go, or what he planned, and then he'd come home, sometimes still without words. Sometimes there was only rage and Lee found she was no match. After two years, she couldn't take it. She said: "I couldn't do anything right. If we went fishing, he would scream at me, call me a ---- and kick the tackle box." - -So Ted found another woman, one to meet him, fire with fire. Her name was Dolores Wettach, a tall, large-eyed, former Miss Vermont. He spotted her across the aisle on a long plane flight. He was coming from fishing in New Zealand. Dolores had been in Australia, on modeling assignment for Vogue. He wrote a note: "Who are you?" He wadded it up, tossed it at her. She looked over, tossed one back: "Who are you?" He tossed: "Mr. Williams, a fisherman," and later told her his first name was Sam. It wasn't until their third date that she found out he'd done anything but fish. When he found out she was a farm girl who loved the outdoors as much as he, he figured he'd met his match. In a way, he had. She learned to fish, she could hunt, could drink, could curse like a guide. And when they fought, it was toe to toe, and Ted who slammed out of the house. They had a son, John Henry, and daughter, Claudia. But that didn't stop the fights, just as it hadn't with Bobby Jo, the daughter he'd had with Doris. Ted would tell his friends he wasn't cut out for family. He was sick at heart when Bobby Jo left school and didn't go to college. He would seethe when any woman let him know that he'd have to change. What the hell did they want? When Dolores became his third divorce, Ted was through with marriage. - -TED MADE THE HALL OF FAME in 1966. His old enemies, the writers, gave him the largest vote ever. So Ted went north to Cooperstown, and gave a short speed outside the Hall. Then he went back to Florida. He never went inside. They gave him a copy of his plaque. It listed his .406 year, his batting titles, slugging titles, total bases, walks, home runs. It didn't say anything about the wars, the dream, the rage, the cost. But how much can a plaque say? - -There are no statistics on fans, how they felt, what they took from the game. How many of their days did Ted turn around? How many days did he turn to occasions? And not just with hits: there was a special sound from a crowd when Ted got his pitch, turned on the ball, whipped his bat in that perfect arc -- and missed. It was a murmurous rustle, as thousands at once let breath escape, gathered themselves, and leaned forward again. To see Ted suffer a third strike was an event four times more rare, and more remarkable, than seeing him get a hit. When Ted retired, some owners feared for attendance in the league. In Boston, where millions came through the years to cheer, to boo, to care what he did, there was an accretion of memory so bright, bittersweet, and strong that when he left, the light was gone. And Fenway was left with a lesser game. - -And what was Ted left with? Well, there was pride. He'd done, he felt, the hardest thing in sport: by God, he hit the ball. And there was pride in his new life: he had his name on more rods and reels, hunting guns, tackle boxes, jackets, boots, and bats than any man in the world. He studied fishing like no other man, and lent to it his fame and grace, his discerning eye. He had his tournament wins and trophies, a fishing book and fishing movies, and he got his thousand of the Big Three. Jimmy Albright says to this day: "Best all around, the best is Ted." But soon there were scores of boats on the bay, and not so many fish. And even the Miramichi had no pools with salmon wall to wall. And Ted walked away from the tournaments. There wasn't the feeling of sport in them, or respect for the fish anymore. Somehow it had changed. Or maybe it was Ted. - -Last year, Ted and Lou went up to Cooperstown together. This was for the unveiling of a statue of the Kid. There are many plaques in the Hall of Fame, but only two statues: just the Babe and him. And Ted went into the Hall this time, pulled the sheet of his statue and his looked at his young self in the finish of that perfect swing. He looked and he looked, with the crowd got quiet, and the strobes stopped flashing. And when he tried to speak, he wept. - -"HEY, WHERE THE HELL IS HE?" It's after 4:00, and Ted's getting hungry. "I'M GONNA CALL HIM." - -Lou says, "Don't be ugly." - -"I'm not ugly," Ted insists, but quietly. He dials, and bends to look at me. "Hey, if this guy doesn't come, you can eat. You wanna eat here?" Then to the phone: "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?" - -"Ted, don't be mean." - -"I'm not. YEAH. TOMORROW? WELL, OKAY BUDDY." Ted has had a successful phone conversation. Quick, and to the point. - -"Awright, you can eat. Hey, sweetie, take him up so he can see." - -There are no mementos in the living room, but Lou has put a few special things in a little room upstairs. Most of the pictures have to do with Ted, but the warmth of the room, and its character, have to do with Louise. This is no shrine. It is a room for right now, a room they walk through every day, and a handsome little place, too. Now it is filled with her quiet energy. "Here's Ted Williams when I met him," she says. "And if that isn't gorgeous, I'll eat my hat." And here's an old photo of Lou in shorts, with a fly rod, looking fragile next to a tarpon she pulled from Florida Bay. She does not seem fragile now. She is spry and able. She has been with Ted ten years straight, and that speaks volumes for her strength and agility. She gets angry sometimes that people do not credit Ted with tenderness -- "You don't know him," she says, and her voice has a surprising edge -- but she also knows he'll seldom show it. So here she shows a lonely young Ted with a little suitcase, off to flight school. Here's Ted and Tom Yawkey, and look: Mr. Yawkey had pictures of Ted behind him, too. "Here he is in Korea," says Louise. "You know, when he landed that place, the blood was pouring from his ears. I have to tell people that...because he's so loud. Big, too." Lou picks up a cushion of a window seat. There are pictures beneath. "See, he's done so many things...." - -"Hey, you want a drink?" Ted is calling. "TED WILLIAMS IS GONNA HAVE A DRINK." - -Soon he flops into his chair with a tumbler, and hands over a videotape. He wants it in the VCR. He says: "This is the most wonderful guy. Hell of a guy. Bill Ziegler. I got him into the majors...." That was when Ted came back in '69 to manage the Senators. Bill Ziegler was the trainer. - -"So he had a son and named him Ted Williams Ziegler. You're gonna see him now. IS IT IN? HEY, YOU LISTENING?" The tape shows Ziegler's two sons batting. Ziegler sends the tapes for analysis. The sound track sends out a steady percussion: thwack...thwack...thwack. Both boys get wood on the ball. "I'm gonna show you the first tape he sent, and I'm gonna ask what's the difference. See this kid, I told him his hips, he's got to get them OPEN." - -From the kitchen, Lou protests: "Ted! Not now. Wait for me!" - -"SEE?...." Thwack. "Ground ball. A little slow with his bands." - -From Lou: "Okay, okay, I don't know nothin'." - -"HANDS THROUGH!" Thwack. "Center field, always to center, see where his hips are pointed? He's got to [thwack] OPEN 'EM UP." - -From Lou, coming in, wiping her hands as she watches: "He doesn't step into it like Ted Williams." - -Ted pretends he doesn't hear. "Hips come through OPEN...." - -"He doesn't bring his hands around like you do, honey." - -"Yeah, he's got to. GROUND BALL! See, when I'M up" -- and now Ted takes his stance in the living room -- "I'm grindin'...." Now his hands are working. "I got the bands cocked. COCKED!" And here's the pitch. "BAMMMM!" says Ted, as he takes his cut and asks: "We got Bill Ziegler's number? WHERE'S HIS NUMBER?" - -Ted is yelling on the phone in the kitchen, and Lou is in the living room, fitting her thoughts to small silences. "When Ted talks [thwack] it's always right now...." - -"BILL, I WANNA SEE HIM ON HIS FRONT FOOT MORE, AND THE HANDS QUICK, QUICK...." - -"You know, the baseball players...it's not macho, they're just...athletes, just beautiful boys...." - -Ted hangs up and throws himself into his chair: "AWRIGHT, MAJOR LEAGUE! LET'S SET IT UP." That means dinner. Lou's cooking Chinese. Ted's still watching Ziegler's kids. "Ground ball. You don't make history hittin' 'em on he ground, boys." Now he pulls away from the TV. "Sweetie," he sings playfully. "We got any sake-o?" Lou sings, "Not tonight-eo." Ted sings: "Well, where's the wine-o?" - -Lou says grace while all hold hands. Then we set to food, and Ted is major league. "It's good, huh?" he says between mouthfuls. "Well, isn't it? HEY! Aren't you gonna finish that rice?" - -He's finished fast and back in his chair. "We got any sweets?" - -A little album on the coffee table has pictures from Christmas. John Henry gave his letter of acceptance from Bates as his present to Ted. It's got Ted thinking now about the car he's got to buy so John Henry can take a car to school. "Got to have a car...." He's thinking aloud so Louise can check this out. "Course, there's gonna have to be rules...." He's working it over in his mind, and he muses: "Maybe say that other than school...he can't take the car if his mother says no...." Lou is in a chair across the room. She'd nodding. "HAVE to be rules," Ted says, "so he doesn't just slam out of the house...slam our and JUMP IN THE CAR...." - -Something has turned in his gut, and his face is working, growing harder. There's a mean glitter in his eye, and he's thinking of his elder daughter, walking away from him.... - -"SLAM OUT...LIKE MY DAUGHTER USED TO...." - -His teeth are clenched and the words are spat. It's like he's turned inward to face something we cannot see. It is a fearsome sight, this big man, forward, stiff in his chair, hurling ugly words at his vision of pain...I feel I should leave the room, but too late. - -"...THAT BURNED ME..." - -The switch is on. Lou calls it the Devil in him. - -"...A PAIN IN MY HAIRY RECTUM!" - -"Nice," says Lou. She is fighting for him. She has not flinched. - -"Well, DID," he says through clenched teeth. "AND MAKES YOU HATE BROADS!..." - -"Ted. Stop." But Ted is gone. - -"...HATE GOD!..." - -"TED!" - -"...HATE LIFE!" - -"TED!...JUST...STOP!" - -"DON'T YOU TELL ME TO STOP. DON'T YOU EVER TELL ME TO STOP." - -Lou's mouth twists up slightly, and she snorts: "HAH!" - -And that does it. They've beaten it, or Lou has, or it's just gone away. Ted sinks back in his chair. His jaw is unclenched. He grins shyly. "You know, I love this girl like I never..." - -Lou sits back, too, and laughs. - -"SHE'S IN TRAINING," Ted says, "I'M TEACHIN' HER..." - -"He sure is," Lou says, like it's banter, but her voice is limp. She heads back to the kitchen, and Ted follows her with his eyes. - -Then he finds me on his couch, and he tries to sneer through his grin: "WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING? HUH? - -"...JESUS. YOU'RE LIKE THE GODDAMN RUSSIAN SECRET POLICE! - -"...OKAY, BYE! YEAH, SURE, GOODBYE!" - -Ted walks me out to the driveway. As I start the car, Lou's face is a smile in the window, and Ted is bent at his belly, grabbing their new dalmatian puppy, tickling it with his big hands while the dog rolls and paws the air. And as I ease the car into gear, I hear Ted's voice behind, cooing, very quiet now: "Do I love this little dog, huh?....Yes, this little shittin' dog....Yes, yes I love you....Yes, I do." diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-accidental-universe.md b/tests/corpus/the-accidental-universe.md deleted file mode 100644 index 5a1226e12..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-accidental-universe.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,67 +0,0 @@ -The Accidental Universe -*Harper's Magazine* -By Alan Lightman - -In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. - -The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings. - -This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles. - -It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.” - -The scientists most distressed by Weinberg’s “fork in the road” are theoretical physicists. Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy. An example of a fundamental principle in physics, first proposed by Galileo in 1632 and extended by Einstein in 1905, is the following: All observers traveling at constant velocity relative to one another should witness identical laws of nature. From this principle, Einstein derived his theory of special relativity. An example of a fundamental parameter is the mass of an electron, considered one of the two dozen or so “elementary” particles of nature. As far as physicists are concerned, the fewer the fundamental principles and parameters, the better. The underlying hope and belief of this enterprise has always been that these basic principles are so restrictive that only one, self-consistent universe is possible, like a crossword puzzle with only one solution. That one universe would be, of course, the universe we live in. Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the past few years, they agreed that the entire universe, the one universe, is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood. - -However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science. - -“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory. These theories of the 1970s and 1980s required the specification of a couple dozen parameters corresponding to the masses of the elementary particles, and another half dozen or so parameters corresponding to the strengths of the fundamental forces. The next step would then have been to derive most of the elementary particle masses in terms of one or two fundamental masses and define the strengths of all the fundamental forces in terms of a single fundamental force. - -There were good reasons to think that physicists were poised to take this next step. Indeed, since the time of Galileo, physics has been extremely successful in discovering principles and laws that have fewer and fewer free parameters and that are also in close agreement with the observed facts of the world. For example, the observed rotation of the ellipse of the orbit of Mercury, 0.012 degrees per century, was successfully calculated using the theory of general relativity, and the observed magnetic strength of an electron, 2.002319 magnetons, was derived using the theory of quantum electrodynamics. More than any other science, physics brims with highly accurate agreements between theory and experiment. - -Guth started his physics career in this sunny scientific world. Now sixty-four years old and a professor at MIT, he was in his early thirties when he proposed a major revision to the Big Bang theory, something called inflation. We now have a great deal of evidence suggesting that our universe began as a nugget of extremely high density and temperature about 14 billion years ago and has been expanding, thinning out, and cooling ever since. The theory of inflation proposes that when our universe was only about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, a peculiar type of energy caused the cosmos to expand very rapidly. A tiny fraction of a second later, the universe returned to the more leisurely rate of expansion of the standard Big Bang model. Inflation solved a number of outstanding problems in cosmology, such as why the universe appears so homogeneous on large scales. - -When I visited Guth in his third-floor office at MIT one cool day in May, I could barely see him above the stacks of paper and empty Diet Coke bottles on his desk. More piles of paper and dozens of magazines littered the floor. In fact, a few years ago Guth won a contest sponsored by the Boston Globe for the messiest office in the city. The prize was the services of a professional organizer for one day. “She was actually more a nuisance than a help. She took piles of envelopes from the floor and began sorting them according to size.” He wears aviator-style eyeglasses, keeps his hair long, and chain-drinks Diet Cokes. “The reason I went into theoretical physics,” Guth tells me, “is that I liked the idea that we could understand everything—i.e., the universe—in terms of mathematics and logic.” He gives a bitter laugh. We have been talking about the multiverse. - -While challenging the Platonic dream of theoretical physicists, the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine­tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist. - -If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.” - -Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. - -The explanation is similar to the explanation of why we happen to live on a planet that has so many nice things for our comfortable existence: oxygen, water, a temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and so on. Is this happy coincidence just good luck, or an act of Providence, or what? No, it is simply that we could not live on planets without such properties. Many other planets exist that are not so hospitable to life, such as Uranus, where the temperature is –371 degrees Fahrenheit, and Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid. - -The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.” - -Some physicists remain skeptical of the anthropic principle and the reliance on multiple universes to explain the values of the fundamental parameters of physics. Others, such as Weinberg and Guth, have reluctantly accepted the anthropic principle and the multiverse idea as together providing the best possible explanation for the observed facts. - -If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between. - -The most striking example of fine-tuning, and one that practically demands the multiverse to explain it, is the unexpected detection of what scientists call dark energy. Little more than a decade ago, using robotic telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Hawaii, and outer space that can comb through nearly a million galaxies a night, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. As mentioned previously, it has been known since the late 1920s that the universe is expanding; it’s a central feature of the Big Bang model. Orthodox cosmological thought held that the expansion is slowing down. After all, gravity is an attractive force; it pulls masses closer together. So it was quite a surprise in 1998 when two teams of astronomers announced that some unknown force appears to be jamming its foot down on the cosmic accelerator pedal. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from each other as if repelled by antigravity. Says Robert Kirshner, one of the team members who made the discovery: “This is not your father’s universe.” (In October, members of both teams were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.) - -Physicists have named the energy associated with this cosmological force dark energy. No one knows what it is. Not only invisible, dark energy apparently hides out in empty space. Yet, based on our observations of the accelerating rate of expansion, dark energy constitutes a whopping three quarters of the total energy of the universe. It is the invisible elephant in the room of science. - -The amount of dark energy, or more precisely the amount of dark energy in every cubic centimeter of space, has been calculated to be about one hundred-millionth (10–8) of an erg per cubic centimeter. (For comparison, a penny dropped from waist-high hits the floor with an energy of about three hundred thousand—that is, 3 × 105—ergs.) This may not seem like much, but it adds up in the vast volumes of outer space. Astronomers were able to determine this number by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe at different epochs—if the universe is accelerating, then its rate of expansion was slower in the past. From the amount of acceleration, astronomers can calculate the amount of dark energy in the universe. - -Theoretical physicists have several hypotheses about the identity of dark energy. It may be the energy of ghostly subatomic particles that can briefly appear out of nothing before self­annihilating and slipping back into the vacuum. According to quantum physics, empty space is a pandemonium of subatomic particles rushing about and then vanishing before they can be seen. Dark energy may also be associated with an as-yet-unobserved force field called the Higgs field, which is sometimes invoked to explain why certain kinds of matter have mass. (Theoretical physicists ponder things that other people do not.) And in the models proposed by string theory, dark energy may be associated with the way in which extra dimensions of space—beyond the usual length, width, and breadth—get compressed down to sizes much smaller than atoms, so that we do not notice them. - -These various hypotheses give a fantastically large range for the theoretically possible amounts of dark energy in a universe, from something like 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter to –10115 ergs per cubic centimeter. (A negative value for dark energy would mean that it acts to decelerate the universe, in contrast to what is observed.) Thus, in absolute magnitude, the amount of dark energy actually present in our universe is either very, very small or very, very large compared with what it could be. This fact alone is surprising. If the theoretically possible positive values for dark energy were marked out on a ruler stretching from here to the sun, with zero at one end of the ruler and 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter at the other end, the value of dark energy actually found in our universe (10–8 ergs per cubic centimeter) would be closer to the zero end than the width of an atom. - -On one thing most physicists agree: If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little more and the universe would accelerate so rapidly that the matter in the young cosmos could never pull itself together to form stars and thence form the complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little less and the universe would decelerate so rapidly that it would recollapse before there was time to form even the simplest atoms. - -Here we have a clear example of fine-tuning: out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: The multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds. - -The concept of the multiverse is compelling not only because it explains the problem of fine-tuning. As I mentioned earlier, the possibility of the multiverse is actually predicted by modern theories of physics. One such theory, called eternal inflation, is a revision of Guth’s inflation theory developed by Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, and Alex Vilenkin in the early and mid-1980s. In regular inflation theory, the very rapid expansion of the infant universe is caused by an energy field, like dark energy, that is temporarily trapped in a condition that does not represent the lowest possible energy for the universe as a whole—like a marble sitting in a small dent on a table. The marble can stay there, but if it is jostled it will roll out of the dent, roll across the table, and then fall to the floor (which represents the lowest possible energy level). In the theory of eternal inflation, the dark energy field has many different values at different points of space, analogous to lots of marbles sitting in lots of dents on the cosmic table. Moreover, as space expands rapidly, the number of marbles increases. Each of these marbles is jostled by the random processes inherent in quantum mechanics, and some of the marbles will begin rolling across the table and onto the floor. Each marble starts a new Big Bang, essentially a new universe. Thus, the original, rapidly expanding universe spawns a multitude of new universes, in a never-ending process. - -String theory, too, predicts the possibility of the multiverse. Originally conceived in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force but soon enlarged far beyond that ambition, string theory postulates that the smallest constituents of matter are not subatomic particles like the electron but extremely tiny one-dimensional “strings” of energy. These elemental strings can vibrate at different frequencies, like the strings of a violin, and the different modes of vibration correspond to different fundamental particles and forces. String theories typically require seven dimensions of space in addition to the usual three, which are compacted down to such small sizes that we never experience them, like a three-dimensional garden hose that appears as a one-dimensional line when seen from a great distance. There are, in fact, a vast number of ways that the extra dimensions in string theory can be folded up, and each of the different ways corresponds to a different universe with different physical properties. - -It was originally hoped that from a theory of these strings, with very few additional parameters, physicists would be able to explain all the forces and particles of nature—all of reality would be a manifestation of the vibrations of elemental strings. String theory would then be the ultimate realization of the Platonic ideal of a fully explicable cosmos. In the past few years, however, physicists have discovered that string theory predicts not a unique universe but a huge number of possible universes with different properties. It has been estimated that the “string landscape” contains 10500 different possible universes. For all practical purposes, that number is infinite. - -It is important to point out that neither eternal inflation nor string theory has anywhere near the experimental support of many previous theories in physics, such as special relativity or quantum electrodynamics, mentioned earlier. Eternal inflation or string theory, or both, could turn out to be wrong. However, some of the world’s leading physicists have devoted their careers to the study of these two theories. - -Back to the intelligent fish. The wizened old fish conjecture that there are many other worlds, some with dry land and some with water. Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove. - -Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture. - -“We had a lot more confidence in our intuition before the discovery of dark energy and the multiverse idea,” says Guth. “There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.” - -One wonders whether a young Alan Guth, considering a career in science today, would choose theoretical physics. diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-case-for-reparations.md b/tests/corpus/the-case-for-reparations.md deleted file mode 100644 index 3eaceb64b..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-case-for-reparations.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,371 +0,0 @@ -The case for reaparations -*The Atlantic* -By Ta-Nehisi Coates - -I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses” - -Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law. - -In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.” - -The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system. - -Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.” - -When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping. - -This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.” - -Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education. - -Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17. - -“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.” - -The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program. - -It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.” - -Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service. - -Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law. - -Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years. - -In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait. - -Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself. - -The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.” - -Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. - -Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. - -“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.” - -The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth: - -"Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable." - -In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.” - -The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.” - -Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto. - -Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy. - -“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was. - -“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.” - -But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme. - -The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.” - -In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.” - -Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations. - -II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree” - -According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. - -North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.” - -In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.” - -The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them. - -This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous. - -And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.” - -The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back. - -Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country. - -With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating. - -One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. - -The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.” - -The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative. - -The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality. - -III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony” - -In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature: - -> The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude. - -> WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives. - -Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous. - -“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.” - -As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ” - -Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.” - -In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job: - ->Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.” ->Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?” - -In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court. - -But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.” - -Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us. - -Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” - -A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested. - -“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.” - -That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy? - -One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge. - -In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look. - -There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810. - ->We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse. -IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From” - -America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.” - -When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676. - -One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves. - -This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance. - -For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America. - -“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” - -In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.” - -The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country. - -Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.” - -Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family. - -When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed: - ->The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence. - -In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.” - -V. The Quiet Plunder - -The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent. - -“This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” - -In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.” - -Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished. - -The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. - -“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” - -The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” - -In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.” - -But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.” - -The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline. - -Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” - -That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” - -The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. - -“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued. - -The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals. - -VI. Making The Second Ghetto - -Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means. - -Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks. - -It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans. - -In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods. - -Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away. - -In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out. - -When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived. - -VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way” - -Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract. - -To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators. - -“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.” - -Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972. - -Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks.” - -Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ” - -In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’ - -“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.” - -Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ” - -I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments. - -“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.” - -“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected. - -“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.” - -Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone. - -“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ” - -VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty” - -On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.” - -Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.” - -Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.” - -We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys. - -“That’s their corner,” he said. - -We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.” - -Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.” - -From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast. - -Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference. - -After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.” - -The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. - -This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.” - -Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this. - -Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject. - -The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured. - -“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records. - -Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them. - -The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ” - -IX. Toward A New Country - -When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region. - -“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.” - -Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” - -When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body. - -And this was just one of their losses. - -Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races. - -To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte. -Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. - -Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. - -The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. - -And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. - -On some level, we have always grasped this. - -“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech. - ->Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. - -We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. - -And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. - -Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. - -What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. - -X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” - -We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge. - -In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people. - -“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ” - -Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.” - -Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition. - -Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!” - -Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted. - -Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.” - -Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia. - -Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.” - -The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.” - -Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes. - -Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name. - -Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said: - ->For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses. - -Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ” - -A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them. - -John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. - -In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen. - -“Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches.” -“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.” - -Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.” - -“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” - -In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods. diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-cost-conundrum.md b/tests/corpus/the-cost-conundrum.md deleted file mode 100644 index f8936da28..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-cost-conundrum.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,213 +0,0 @@ -The cost conundrum -*The New Yorker* -By Atul Gawande - -It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here. - -McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns. - -The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. Our country’s health care is by far the most expensive in the world. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control. Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance. It’s also devouring our government. “The greatest threat to America’s fiscal health is not Social Security,” President Barack Obama said in a March speech at the White House. “It’s not the investments that we’ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.” - -The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers. - -From the moment I arrived, I asked almost everyone I encountered about McAllen’s health costs—a businessman I met at the five-gate McAllen-Miller International Airport, the desk clerks at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a police-academy cadet at McDonald’s. Most weren’t surprised to hear that McAllen was an outlier. “Just look around,” the cadet said. “People are not healthy here.” McAllen, with its high poverty rate, has an incidence of heavy drinking sixty per cent higher than the national average. And the Tex-Mex diet has contributed to a thirty-eight-per-cent obesity rate. - -One day, I went on rounds with Lester Dyke, a weather-beaten, ranch-owning fifty-three-year-old cardiac surgeon who grew up in Austin, did his surgical training with the Army all over the country, and settled into practice in Hidalgo County. He has not lacked for business: in the past twenty years, he has done some eight thousand heart operations, which exhausts me just thinking about it. I walked around with him as he checked in on ten or so of his patients who were recuperating at the three hospitals where he operates. It was easy to see what had landed them under his knife. They were nearly all obese or diabetic or both. Many had a family history of heart disease. Few were taking preventive measures, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, which, studies indicate, would have obviated surgery for up to half of them. - -Yet public-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are so high. (Or the reason that America’s are. We may be more obese than any other industrialized nation, but we have among the lowest rates of smoking and alcoholism, and we are in the middle of the range for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.) - -Was the explanation, then, that McAllen was providing unusually good health care? I took a walk through Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, in Edinburg, one of the towns in the McAllen metropolitan area, with Robert Alleyn, a Houston-trained general surgeon who had grown up here and returned home to practice. The hospital campus sprawled across two city blocks, with a series of three- and four-story stucco buildings separated by golfing-green lawns and black asphalt parking lots. He pointed out the sights—the cancer center is over here, the heart center is over there, now we’re coming to the imaging center. We went inside the surgery building. It was sleek and modern, with recessed lighting, classical music piped into the waiting areas, and nurses moving from patient to patient behind rolling black computer pods. We changed into scrubs and Alleyn took me through the sixteen operating rooms to show me the laparoscopy suite, with its flat-screen video monitors, the hybrid operating room with built-in imaging equipment, the surgical robot for minimally invasive robotic surgery. - -I was impressed. The place had virtually all the technology that you’d find at Harvard and Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, and, as I walked through that hospital on a dusty road in South Texas, this struck me as a remarkable thing. Rich towns get the new school buildings, fire trucks, and roads, not to mention the better teachers and police officers and civil engineers. Poor towns don’t. But that rule doesn’t hold for health care. - -At McAllen Medical Center, I saw an orthopedic surgeon work under an operating microscope to remove a tumor that had wrapped around the spinal cord of a fourteen-year-old. At a home-health agency, I spoke to a nurse who could provide intravenous-drug therapy for patients with congestive heart failure. At McAllen Heart Hospital, I watched Dyke and a team of six do a coronary-artery bypass using technologies that didn’t exist a few years ago. At Renaissance, I talked with a neonatologist who trained at my hospital, in Boston, and brought McAllen new skills and technologies for premature babies. “I’ve had nurses come up to me and say, ‘I never knew these babies could survive,’ ” he said. - -And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average. - -Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality. Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s. McAllen costs Medicare seven thousand dollars more per person each year than does the average city in America. But not, so far as one can tell, because it’s delivering better health care. - -One night, I went to dinner with six McAllen doctors. All were what you would call bread-and-butter physicians: busy, full-time, private-practice doctors who work from seven in the morning to seven at night and sometimes later, their waiting rooms teeming and their desks stacked with medical charts to review. - -Some were dubious when I told them that McAllen was the country’s most expensive place for health care. I gave them the spending data from Medicare. In 1992, in the McAllen market, the average cost per Medicare enrollee was $4,891, almost exactly the national average. But since then, year after year, McAllen’s health costs have grown faster than any other market in the country, ultimately soaring by more than ten thousand dollars per person. - -“Maybe the service is better here,” the cardiologist suggested. People can be seen faster and get their tests more readily, he said. - -Others were skeptical. “I don’t think that explains the costs he’s talking about,” the general surgeon said. - -“It’s malpractice,” a family physician who had practiced here for thirty-three years said. - -“McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere. - -That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down? - -“Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted. - -“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures. - -The surgeon came to McAllen in the mid-nineties, and since then, he said, “the way to practice medicine has changed completely. Before, it was about how to do a good job. Now it is about ‘How much will you benefit?’ ” - -Everyone agreed that something fundamental had changed since the days when health-care costs in McAllen were the same as those in El Paso and elsewhere. Yes, they had more technology. “But young doctors don’t think anymore,” the family physician said. - -The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder. - -Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars. - -I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago? - -Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill. - -And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization. - -“Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly. - -To determine whether overuse of medical care was really the problem in McAllen, I turned to Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has three decades of expertise in examining regional patterns in Medicare payment data. I also turned to two private firms—D2Hawkeye, an independent company, and Ingenix, UnitedHealthcare’s data-analysis company—to analyze commercial insurance data for McAllen. The answer was yes. Compared with patients in El Paso and nationwide, patients in McAllen got more of pretty much everything—more diagnostic testing, more hospital treatment, more surgery, more home care. - -The Medicare payment data provided the most detail. Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits. The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine. - -This is a disturbing and perhaps surprising diagnosis. Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse. For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care. - -In a 2003 study, another Dartmouth team, led by the internist Elliott Fisher, examined the treatment received by a million elderly Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything, they seemed to do worse. - -That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens. Are we better off for it? No one knows for sure, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, some hundred thousand people die each year from complications of surgery—far more than die in car crashes. - -To make matters worse, Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed. - -In an odd way, this news is reassuring. Universal coverage won’t be feasible unless we can control costs. Policymakers have worried that doing so would require rationing, which the public would never go along with. So the idea that there’s plenty of fat in the system is proving deeply attractive. “Nearly thirty per cent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without negatively affecting health outcomes if spending in high- and medium-cost areas could be reduced to the level in low-cost areas,” Peter Orszag, the President’s budget director, has stated. - -Most Americans would be delighted to have the quality of care found in places like Rochester, Minnesota, or Seattle, Washington, or Durham, North Carolina—all of which have world-class hospitals and costs that fall below the national average. If we brought the cost curve in the expensive places down to their level, Medicare’s problems (indeed, almost all the federal government’s budget problems for the next fifty years) would be solved. The difficulty is how to go about it. Physicians in places like McAllen behave differently from others. The $2.4-trillion question is why. Unless we figure it out, health reform will fail. - -I had what I considered to be a reasonable plan for finding out what was going on in McAllen. I would call on the heads of its hospitals, in their swanky, decorator-designed, churrigueresco offices, and I’d ask them. - -The first hospital I visited, McAllen Heart Hospital, is owned by Universal Health Services, a for-profit hospital chain with headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and revenues of five billion dollars last year. I went to see the hospital’s chief operating officer, Gilda Romero. Truth be told, her office seemed less churrigueresco than Office Depot. She had straight brown hair, sympathetic eyes, and looked more like a young school teacher than like a corporate officer with nineteen years of experience. And when I inquired, “What is going on in this place?” she looked surprised. - -Is McAllen really that expensive? she asked. - -I described the data, including the numbers indicating that heart operations and catheter procedures and pacemakers were being performed in McAllen at double the usual rate. - -“That is interesting,” she said, by which she did not mean, “Uh-oh, you’ve caught us” but, rather, “That is actually interesting.” The problem of McAllen’s outlandish costs was new to her. She puzzled over the numbers. She was certain that her doctors performed surgery only when it was necessary. It had to be one of the other hospitals. And she had one in mind—Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, the hospital in Edinburg that I had toured. - -She wasn’t the only person to mention Renaissance. It is the newest hospital in the area. It is physician-owned. And it has a reputation (which it disclaims) for aggressively recruiting high-volume physicians to become investors and send patients there. Physicians who do so receive not only their fee for whatever service they provide but also a percentage of the hospital’s profits from the tests, surgery, or other care patients are given. (In 2007, its profits totalled thirty-four million dollars.) Romero and others argued that this gives physicians an unholy temptation to overorder. - -Such an arrangement can make physician investors rich. But it can’t be the whole explanation. The hospital gets barely a sixth of the patients in the region; its margins are no bigger than the other hospitals’—whether for profit or not for profit—and it didn’t have much of a presence until 2004 at the earliest, a full decade after the cost explosion in McAllen began. - -“Those are good points,” Romero said. She couldn’t explain what was going on. - -The following afternoon, I visited the top managers of Doctors Hospital at Renaissance. We sat in their boardroom around one end of a yacht-length table. The chairman of the board offered me a soda. The chief of staff smiled at me. The chief financial officer shook my hand as if I were an old friend. The C.E.O., however, was having a hard time pretending that he was happy to see me. Lawrence Gelman was a fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist with a Bill Clinton shock of white hair and a weekly local radio show tag-lined “Opinions from an Unrelenting Conservative Spirit.” He had helped found the hospital. He barely greeted me, and while the others were trying for a how-can-I-help-you-today attitude, his body language was more let’s-get-this-over-with. - -So I asked him why McAllen’s health-care costs were so high. What he gave me was a disquisition on the theory and history of American health-care financing going back to Lyndon Johnson and the creation of Medicare, the upshot of which was: (1) Government is the problem in health care. “The people in charge of the purse strings don’t know what they’re doing.” (2) If anything, government insurance programs like Medicare don’t pay enough. “I, as an anesthesiologist, know that they pay me ten per cent of what a private insurer pays.” (3) Government programs are full of waste. “Every person in this room could easily go through the expenditures of Medicare and Medicaid and see all kinds of waste.” (4) But not in McAllen. The clinicians here, at least at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, “are providing necessary, essential health care,” Gelman said. “We don’t invent patients.” - -Then why do hospitals in McAllen order so much more surgery and scans and tests than hospitals in El Paso and elsewhere? - -In the end, the only explanation he and his colleagues could offer was this: The other doctors and hospitals in McAllen may be overspending, but, to the extent that his hospital provides costlier treatment than other places in the country, it is making people better in ways that data on quality and outcomes do not measure. - -“Do we provide better health care than El Paso?” Gelman asked. “I would bet you two to one that we do.” - -It was a depressing conversation—not because I thought the executives were being evasive but because they weren’t being evasive. The data on McAllen’s costs were clearly new to them. They were defending McAllen reflexively. But they really didn’t know the big picture of what was happening. - -And, I realized, few people in their position do. Local executives for hospitals and clinics and home-health agencies understand their growth rate and their market share; they know whether they are losing money or making money. They know that if their doctors bring in enough business—surgery, imaging, home-nursing referrals—they make money; and if they get the doctors to bring in more, they make more. But they have only the vaguest notion of whether the doctors are making their communities as healthy as they can, or whether they are more or less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere. A doctor sees a patient in clinic, and has her check into a McAllen hospital for a CT scan, an ultrasound, three rounds of blood tests, another ultrasound, and then surgery to have her gallbladder removed. How is Lawrence Gelman or Gilda Romero to know whether all that is essential, let alone the best possible treatment for the patient? It isn’t what they are responsible or accountable for. - -Health-care costs ultimately arise from the accumulation of individual decisions doctors make about which services and treatments to write an order for. The most expensive piece of medical equipment, as the saying goes, is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps. Doctors do. - -If doctors wield the pen, why do they do it so differently from one place to another? Brenda Sirovich, another Dartmouth researcher, published a study last year that provided an important clue. She and her team surveyed some eight hundred primary-care physicians from high-cost cities (such as Las Vegas and New York), low-cost cities (such as Sacramento and Boise), and others in between. The researchers asked the physicians specifically how they would handle a variety of patient cases. It turned out that differences in decision-making emerged in only some kinds of cases. In situations in which the right thing to do was well established—for example, whether to recommend a mammogram for a fifty-year-old woman (the answer is yes)—physicians in high- and low-cost cities made the same decisions. But, in cases in which the science was unclear, some physicians pursued the maximum possible amount of testing and procedures; some pursued the minimum. And which kind of doctor they were depended on where they came from. - -Sirovich asked doctors how they would treat a seventy-five-year-old woman with typical heartburn symptoms and “adequate health insurance to cover tests and medications.” Physicians in high- and low-cost cities were equally likely to prescribe antacid therapy and to check for H. pylori, an ulcer-causing bacterium—steps strongly recommended by national guidelines. But when it came to measures of less certain value—and higher cost—the differences were considerable. More than seventy per cent of physicians in high-cost cities referred the patient to a gastroenterologist, ordered an upper endoscopy, or both, while half as many in low-cost cities did. Physicians from high-cost cities typically recommended that patients with well-controlled hypertension see them in the office every one to three months, while those from low-cost cities recommended visits twice yearly. In case after uncertain case, more was not necessarily better. But physicians from the most expensive cities did the most expensive things. - -Why? Some of it could reflect differences in training. I remember when my wife brought our infant son Walker to visit his grandparents in Virginia, and he took a terrifying fall down a set of stairs. They drove him to the local community hospital in Alexandria. A CT scan showed that he had a tiny subdural hematoma—a small area of bleeding in the brain. During ten hours of observation, though, he was fine—eating, drinking, completely alert. I was a surgery resident then and had seen many cases like his. We observed each child in intensive care for at least twenty-four hours and got a repeat CT scan. That was how I’d been trained. But the doctor in Alexandria was going to send Walker home. That was how he’d been trained. Suppose things change for the worse? I asked him. It’s extremely unlikely, he said, and if anything changed Walker could always be brought back. I bullied the doctor into admitting him anyway. The next day, the scan and the patient were fine. And, looking in the textbooks, I learned that the doctor was right. Walker could have been managed safely either way. - -There was no sign, however, that McAllen’s doctors as a group were trained any differently from El Paso’s. One morning, I met with a hospital administrator who had extensive experience managing for-profit hospitals along the border. He offered a different possible explanation: the culture of money. - -“In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of medicine,” he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage would be a lot less. - -He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained. - -No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not. You must pay attention to insurance rejections and government-reimbursement rules. You must think about having enough money for the secretary and the nurse and the rent and the malpractice insurance. - -Beyond the basics, however, many physicians are remarkably oblivious to the financial implications of their decisions. They see their patients. They make their recommendations. They send out the bills. And, as long as the numbers come out all right at the end of each month, they put the money out of their minds. - -Others think of the money as a means of improving what they do. They think about how to use the insurance money to maybe install electronic health records with colleagues, or provide easier phone and e-mail access, or offer expanded hours. They hire an extra nurse to monitor diabetic patients more closely, and to make sure that patients don’t miss their mammograms and pap smears and colonoscopies. - -Then there are the physicians who see their practice primarily as a revenue stream. They instruct their secretary to have patients who call with follow-up questions schedule an appointment, because insurers don’t pay for phone calls, only office visits. They consider providing Botox injections for cash. They take a Doppler ultrasound course, buy a machine, and start doing their patients’ scans themselves, so that the insurance payments go to them rather than to the hospital. They figure out ways to increase their high-margin work and decrease their low-margin work. This is a business, after all. - -In every community, you’ll find a mixture of these views among physicians, but one or another tends to predominate. McAllen seems simply to be the community at one extreme. - -In a few cases, the hospital executive told me, he’d seen the behavior cross over into what seemed like outright fraud. “I’ve had doctors here come up to me and say, ‘You want me to admit patients to your hospital, you’re going to have to pay me.’ ” - -“How much?” I asked. - -“The amounts—all of them were over a hundred thousand dollars per year,” he said. The doctors were specific. The most he was asked for was five hundred thousand dollars per year. - -He didn’t pay any of them, he said: “I mean, I gotta sleep at night.” And he emphasized that these were just a handful of doctors. But he had never been asked for a kickback before coming to McAllen. - -Woody Powell is a Stanford sociologist who studies the economic culture of cities. Recently, he and his research team studied why certain regions—Boston, San Francisco, San Diego—became leaders in biotechnology while others with a similar concentration of scientific and corporate talent—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York—did not. The answer they found was what Powell describes as the anchor-tenant theory of economic development. Just as an anchor store will define the character of a mall, anchor tenants in biotechnology, whether it’s a company like Genentech, in South San Francisco, or a university like M.I.T., in Cambridge, define the character of an economic community. They set the norms. The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not. - -Powell suspects that anchor tenants play a similarly powerful community role in other areas of economics, too, and health care may be no exception. I spoke to a marketing rep for a McAllen home-health agency who told me of a process uncannily similar to what Powell found in biotech. Her job is to persuade doctors to use her agency rather than others. The competition is fierce. I opened the phone book and found seventeen pages of listings for home-health agencies—two hundred and sixty in all. A patient typically brings in between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred dollars, and double that amount for specialized care. She described how, a decade or so ago, a few early agencies began rewarding doctors who ordered home visits with more than trinkets: they provided tickets to professional sporting events, jewelry, and other gifts. That set the tone. Other agencies jumped in. Some began paying doctors a supplemental salary, as “medical directors,” for steering business in their direction. Doctors came to expect a share of the revenue stream. - -Agencies that want to compete on quality struggle to remain in business, the rep said. Doctors have asked her for a medical-director salary of four or five thousand dollars a month in return for sending her business. One asked a colleague of hers for private-school tuition for his child; another wanted sex. - -“I explained the rules and regulations and the anti-kickback law, and told them no,” she said of her dealings with such doctors. “Does it hurt my business?” She paused. “I’m O.K. working only with ethical physicians,” she finally said. - -About fifteen years ago, it seems, something began to change in McAllen. A few leaders of local institutions took profit growth to be a legitimate ethic in the practice of medicine. Not all the doctors accepted this. But they failed to discourage those who did. So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers. - -The real puzzle of American health care, I realized on the airplane home, is not why McAllen is different from El Paso. It’s why El Paso isn’t like McAllen. Every incentive in the system is an invitation to go the way McAllen has gone. Yet, across the country, large numbers of communities have managed to control their health costs rather than ratchet them up. - -I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question. - -“I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said. - -Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day. - -The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay. - -The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible. - -“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible. - -No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs. - -“When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,” Cortese told me. - -Skeptics saw the Mayo model as a local phenomenon that wouldn’t carry beyond the hay fields of northern Minnesota. But in 1986 the Mayo Clinic opened a campus in Florida, one of our most expensive states for health care, and, in 1987, another one in Arizona. It was difficult to recruit staff members who would accept a salary and the Mayo’s collaborative way of practicing. Leaders were working against the dominant medical culture and incentives. The expansion sites took at least a decade to get properly established. But eventually they achieved the same high-quality, low-cost results as Rochester. Indeed, Cortese says that the Florida site has become, in some respects, the most efficient one in the system. - -The Mayo Clinic is not an aberration. One of the lowest-cost markets in the country is Grand Junction, Colorado, a community of a hundred and twenty thousand that nonetheless has achieved some of Medicare’s highest quality-of-care scores. Michael Pramenko is a family physician and a local medical leader there. Unlike doctors at the Mayo Clinic, he told me, those in Grand Junction get piecework fees from insurers. But years ago the doctors agreed among themselves to a system that paid them a similar fee whether they saw Medicare, Medicaid, or private-insurance patients, so that there would be little incentive to cherry-pick patients. They also agreed, at the behest of the main health plan in town, an H.M.O., to meet regularly on small peer-review committees to go over their patient charts together. They focussed on rooting out problems like poor prevention practices, unnecessary back operations, and unusual hospital-complication rates. Problems went down. Quality went up. Then, in 2004, the doctors’ group and the local H.M.O. jointly created a regional information network—a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area. Again, problems went down. Quality went up. And costs ended up lower than just about anywhere else in the United States. - -Grand Junction’s medical community was not following anyone else’s recipe. But, like Mayo, it created what Elliott Fisher, of Dartmouth, calls an accountable-care organization. The leading doctors and the hospital system adopted measures to blunt harmful financial incentives, and they took collective responsibility for improving the sum total of patient care. - -This approach has been adopted in other places, too: the Geisinger Health System, in Danville, Pennsylvania; the Marshfield Clinic, in Marshfield, Wisconsin; Intermountain Healthcare, in Salt Lake City; Kaiser Permanente, in Northern California. All of them function on similar principles. All are not-for-profit institutions. And all have produced enviably higher quality and lower costs than the average American town enjoys. - -When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue. - -There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems. - -Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check. - -This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen. - -One afternoon in McAllen, I rode down McColl Road with Lester Dyke, the cardiac surgeon, and we passed a series of office plazas that seemed to be nothing but home-health agencies, imaging centers, and medical-equipment stores. - -“Medicine has become a pig trough here,” he muttered. - -Dyke is among the few vocal critics of what’s happened in McAllen. “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen,” he said. - -We began talking about the various proposals being touted in Washington to fix the cost problem. I asked him whether expanding public-insurance programs like Medicare and shrinking the role of insurance companies would do the trick in McAllen. - -“I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. “But it won’t make a difference.” In McAllen, government payers already predominate—not many people have jobs with private insurance. - -How about doing the opposite and increasing the role of big insurance companies? - -“What good would that do?” Dyke asked. - -The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: “They’d have more of their own money on the line, and that’d drive them to bargain with you and other surgeons, right?” - -He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing? Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.” - -Instead, McAllen and other cities like it have to be weaned away from their untenably fragmented, quantity-driven systems of health care, step by step. And that will mean rewarding doctors and hospitals if they band together to form Grand Junction-like accountable-care organizations, in which doctors collaborate to increase prevention and the quality of care, while discouraging overtreatment, undertreatment, and sheer profiteering. Under one approach, insurers—whether public or private—would allow clinicians who formed such organizations and met quality goals to keep half the savings they generate. Government could also shift regulatory burdens, and even malpractice liability, from the doctors to the organization. Other, sterner, approaches would penalize those who don’t form these organizations. - -This will by necessity be an experiment. We will need to do in-depth research on what makes the best systems successful—the peer-review committees? recruiting more primary-care doctors and nurses? putting doctors on salary?—and disseminate what we learn. Congress has provided vital funding for research that compares the effectiveness of different treatments, and this should help reduce uncertainty about which treatments are best. But we also need to fund research that compares the effectiveness of different systems of care—to reduce our uncertainty about which systems work best for communities. These are empirical, not ideological, questions. And we would do well to form a national institute for health-care delivery, bringing together clinicians, hospitals, insurers, employers, and citizens to assess, regularly, the quality and the cost of our care, review the strategies that produce good results, and make clear recommendations for local systems. - -Dramatic improvements and savings will take at least a decade. But a choice must be made. Whom do we want in charge of managing the full complexity of medical care? We can turn to insurers (whether public or private), which have proved repeatedly that they can’t do it. Or we can turn to the local medical communities, which have proved that they can. But we have to choose someone—because, in much of the country, no one is in charge. And the result is the most wasteful and the least sustainable health-care system in the world. - -Something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or McAllen—the Mayo model is losing. In the sharpest economic downturn that our health system has faced in half a century, many people in medicine don’t see why they should do the hard work of organizing themselves in ways that reduce waste and improve quality if it means sacrificing revenue. - -In El Paso, the for-profit health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the table.’ ” - -As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future. ♦ diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-devils-bait.md b/tests/corpus/the-devils-bait.md deleted file mode 100644 index 6238fa322..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-devils-bait.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,209 +0,0 @@ -The Devil's Bait -*Harper's Magazine* -By Leslie Jamison - -For Paul, it started with a fishing trip. For Lenny, it was an addict whose knuckles were covered in sores. Dawn found pimples clustered around her swimming goggles. Kendra noticed ingrown hairs. Patricia was attacked by sand flies on a Gulf Coast beach. Sometimes the sickness starts as blisters, or lesions, or itching, or simply a terrible fog settling over the mind, over the world. - -For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange ailment, and no one — or hardly anyone — believed them. But there were a lot of them, reportedly 12,000, and their numbers were growing. Their illness manifested in many ways, including fatigue, pain, and formication (a sensation of insects crawling over the skin). But the defining symptom was always the same: fibers emerging from their bodies. Not just fibers but fuzz, specks, and crystals. They didn’t know what this stuff was, or where it came from, or why it was there, but they knew — and this was what mattered, the important word — that it was real. - -The diagnosis originated with a woman named Mary Leitao. In 2001, she took her toddler son to the doctor because he had sores on his lip that wouldn’t go away. He was complaining of bugs under his skin. The first doctor didn’t know what to tell her, nor did the second, nor the third. Eventually, they started telling her something she didn’t want to hear: that she might be suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, which causes a parent or caregiver to fabricate (and sometimes induce) illness in a dependent. Leitao came up with her own diagnosis, and Morgellons was born. - -She pulled the name from a treatise written by the seventeenth-century English physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne, who described - -that Endemial Distemper of little Children in Languedock, called the Morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh hairs on their Backs, which takes off the unquiet Symptoms of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions. - -Browne’s “harsh hairs” were the early ancestors of today’s fibers. Photos online show them in red, white, and blue — like the flag — and also black and translucent. These fibers are the kind of thing you describe in relation to other kinds of things: jellyfish or wires, animal fur or taffy candy or a fuzzball off your grandma’s sweater. Some are called goldenheads, because they have a golden-colored bulb. Others simply look sinister, technological, tangled. - -Patients started bringing these threads and flecks and fuzz to their doctors, storing them in Tupperware or matchboxes, and dermatologists actually developed a term for this phenomenon. They called it “the matchbox sign,” an indication that patients had become so determined to prove their disease that they might be willing to produce fake evidence. - -By the mid-2000s, Morgellons had become a controversy in earnest. Self-identified patients started calling themselves Morgies and rallying against doctors who diagnosed them with something called delusions of parasitosis (DOP). Major newspapers ran features posing some version of a question raised by the New York Times in 2006: “Is It Disease or Delusion?” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a full-scale investigation soon afterward. - -In the meantime, an advocacy organization called the Charles E. Holman Foundation started putting together an annual Morgellons conference in Austin, Texas, for patients, researchers, and health-care providers — basically, anyone who gave a damn. The foundation was named for a man who devoted the last years of his life to investigating the causes of his wife’s disease. His widow runs the conference. She’s still sick. The conference offers Morgies refuge from a world that generally refuses to accept their account of why they suffer. As one presenter wrote to me: - -It is bad enough that people are suffering so terribly. But to be the topic of seemingly the biggest joke in the world is way too much for sick people to bear. It is amazing to me that more people with this dreadful illness do not commit suicide . . . - -The CDC finally released its study, “Clinical, Epidemiologic, Histopathologic and Molecular Features of an Unexplained Dermopathy,” in January 2012. Its authors, in association with the so-called Unexplained Dermopathy Task Force, had investigated 115 patients, using skin samples, blood tests, and neurocognitive exams. Their report offered little comfort to Morgellons patients looking for affirmation: - -We were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition . . . or wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestation. - -The authors suggested, with some delicacy, that patients might be treated for a number of “co-existing conditions,” such as drug abuse and psychosomatic disorders. - -The bottom line? Probably nothing there. - -The Westoak Woods Baptist Church, on Slaughter Lane, is a few miles south of the Austin I’d imagined, an Austin full of Airstream trailers selling gourmet doughnuts, vintage shops crammed with taxidermied animal heads and lace, melancholy guitar riffs floating from ironic cowboy bars. Slaughter Lane is something else. It’s Walgreens and Denny’s and eventually a parking lot sliced by the spindly shadow of a twenty-foot-tall cross. - -The church itself is a low blue building. A banner for the 2012 conference reads: searching for the uncommon thread. By the entrance, a cluster of friendly women greet new arrivals. On each of their matching shirts, the letters dop are slashed out in red. Most of the participants at the conference, I will come to realize, give the wholesome, welcoming impression of no-nonsense Midwestern housewives. I will also learn that 70 percent of Morgellons patients are female — and that women are especially vulnerable to the isolating disfigurement and condescension that accompany the disease. - -The greeters direct me past an elaborate buffet of packaged pastries and into the sanctuary, which is serving as the main conference room. Speakers stand at the pulpit with their PowerPoint slides projected onto a screen behind them. Each cloth-covered pew holds a single box of Kleenex. The room has one stained-glass window — a dark-blue circle holding the milky cataract of a dove — but its panes admit no light. - -This gathering is something like a meeting of alcoholics or Quakers. Between speakers, people occasionally just walk up to the pulpit and start sharing. Or else they do it in their chairs, hunched over to get a better look at one another’s limbs. They swap cell phone photos. I hear people talk about drinking Borax and running sound waves through their feet, about getting the disease from their fathers and giving it to their sons. I hear someone talk about what her skin is “expressing.” I hear someone say, “It’s a lonely world.” - -I discover that the people who can’t help whispering during lectures are the ones I most want to talk to; that the coffee station is useful because it’s a good place to meet people, and also because drinking coffee means I’ll have to keep going to the bathroom, which is an even better place to meet people. The people I meet don’t at first glance look disfigured. But up close, they reveal all kinds of scars and bumps and scabs. - -I meet Dawn, a nurse from Pittsburgh, whose legs show the white patches I’ve come to recognize as formerly scabbed or lesion-ridden skin. Antibiotics have left a pattern of dark patches on her calves that once got her mistaken for an AIDS patient. Since her Morgellons diagnosis, Dawn has continued working. - -“I was so angry at the misdiagnoses for so many years,” she says, “being told that it was anxiety, in my head, female stuff. So I tried to spin that anger into something positive. I got my graduate degree. I published an article in a nursing journal.” - -I ask her about this phrase, “female stuff.” It’s like heart disease, she explains. For a long time, women’s heart attacks were misdiagnosed or even ignored because doctors assumed that these patients were simply anxious or overly emotional. I realize Dawn’s disease has been consistently, quietly embedded in a tradition that goes all the way back to nineteenth-century hysteria. She says her co-workers — the nurses, not the doctors — have been remarkably empathetic. Now they come to her whenever they find something strange or unexpected in a wound. She’s become an expert in the inexplicable. - -I ask Dawn what the hardest part of her disease has been. At first she replies in hesitant, general terms — “Uncertain future?” — but soon she settles on a more specific fear. “With the scars and stuff that I have from this,” she says, “what guy’s gonna like me?” - -When Dawn talks about her body as something that’s done her wrong, I fall into the easy groove of identification. Her condition seems like a crystallization of what I’ve always felt about myself — a wrongness in my being that I could never name and so pinned on my body, my thighs, my face. This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons. - -But my willingness to turn Morgellons into metaphor — a physical manifestation of some abstract human tendency — is dangerous. It obscures the particular and unbidden nature of the suffering in front of me. I feel how conveniently these lives could be sculpted to fit the metaphoric strictures of the essay itself. - -I once had a specimen of my own. It was a worm in my ankle — a botfly larva from Bolivia — that was too far under the skin to see. I remember my voice in the Yale–New Haven ER saying, “There’s a worm,” and I remember how everyone looked at me: kindly and without belief. Their doubt was like humidity in the air. They asked if I’d recently taken any mind-altering drugs. The disconnect felt even worse than the worm itself — to live in a world where this thing was, while other people lived in a world where it wasn’t. - -It was almost a relief to finally see the worm, bobbing out of my ankle like a tiny white snorkel. I finally knew it was real. It’s the Desdemona Problem facing Othello: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. You eventually start wanting the worst to happen. - -I still remember the shrill intensity of my gratitude when a doctor verified the worm’s existence. Desdemona really had fucked Cassio. It was a relief. The doctor pulled out the worm and gave it to me in a jar. The simultaneity was glorious: the worm was gone and I’d been right about it. I had about thirty minutes of peace before I started suspecting there might be another one. - -I spent the next few weeks obsessed with the open wound on my ankle, looking for signs of a remaining worm. None emerged, but I didn’t give up looking. Maybe the worm was tricky. It had seen what had happened to its comrade. I inspected the incision relentlessly for signs of eggs or movement. Anything I found was proof: a stray bit of Band-Aid, a glossy patch of bruised skin or scab. - -It’s easy to forget how Sir Thomas Browne insisted on the value of those “harsh hairs” covering the backs of his Languedoc urchins. He suggested that these strange growths quelled the “unquiet Symptoms of the Disease.” Which is to say: physical symptoms can offer their own form of relief — they make suffering visible. - -I don’t know what causes the pain of Morgellons, the rustling on the skin, the threads and lesions. I only know what I learned from my botfly and its ghost: it was worse when I didn’t have the worm than when I did. - -A woman named Kendra, from Memphis, called a Morgellons hotline thinking she might be crazy. Now she’s here at the conference. She sits on the church steps and smokes a cigarette. She says she probably shouldn’t be smoking — gesturing at the church, and then at her scarred face. - -Her cheeks show sores covered with pancake makeup. But she’s pretty and young, with long, dark hair and a purple boatneck shirt that makes her look like she’s headed somewhere else — the swimming pool, maybe — not back into a dim Baptist church to talk about what’s living under her skin. - -She says the scientific presentations have all gone over her head, but that she’s looking forward to tomorrow’s program, an interactive session with a high-powered microscope. That’s why she came all this way. She’s seen things — what she initially mistook for hairs and now thinks are fibers — but the microscope will see more. She’ll get proof. She can’t get it anywhere else. She doesn’t have medical insurance, and doctors don’t believe her anyway. “I’ve messed with a part of my chin,” she confesses. “It’s almost like trying to pull out a piece of glass.” Something raw and reddish has been chalked with beige powder. - -She makes a point of telling me she never had acne as a teenager. She wasn’t one of the facially marred until suddenly she was. Now, at the conference, she’s among others like her, and this helps. - -Folie à deux is the clinical name for shared delusion. Morgellons patients all know the phrase — it’s the name of the crime they’re charged with. But if folie à deux is happening at the conference, it’s happening en masse: an entire churchful of folks having the same nightmare. - -I ask Kendra if she ever doubts herself. Maybe she’s afraid of something that’s not actually happening? - -“It’s a possibility,” she says, nodding. “But at the same time, you know, I think I’ve got a pretty good head on my shoulders. I don’t think I’ve totally lost all my marbles.” - -She admits that coming here has made her a little bit afraid. In two years, will she be showing up in the emergency room with all the skin peeled off her chin? Spitting up bugs in the shower? In twenty years, will she still find her days consumed by this disease? - -“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,” Susan Sontag writes, “in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Most people live in the former until they are forced — for certain spells of time — to take up residence in the latter. Right now Kendra is living in both. She tells me she’s meeting a friend downtown for sushi tonight. She can still understand herself outside the context of this disease: someone who does ordinary things, looks forward to the events of an ordinary life. - -But Kendra feels a growing affinity with this community, the refuge and consolation that it offers. “We can’t all be delusional,” she says. - -Before the afternoon session begins, we get a musical interlude. A young man wearing jeans and flannel — somebody’s Texan nephew-in-law — performs a rockabilly song about Morgellons. “We’ll guarantee you tears and applause,” he sings. “Just take on our cause.” It seems like he’s only doing this as a favor to his wife’s step-aunt. Yet he launches bravely into each new song, most of them some combination of battle cry, rain dance, punch line, lament. “Doctor, doctor, won’t you tell me what’s the matter with me?” he sings. “I got things going wild in my body, can’t you see?” - -The star of the session is a physician from Laurieton, New South Wales, known casually around the conference as “the Australian.” In his talk, he responds directly to the recent CDC report, which he calls a “load of hogwash” and a “rocking-horse-dung pile.” He contrasts the good guys (doctors who listen) with the bad guys (doctors who don’t.) The Australian listens. He is one of the good guys. - -He aims to get the crowd fired up, and he succeeds. He offers himself to the room as a fighter. He coins a new piece of jargon: DOD, for delusions of doctors. This gets applause and a couple of hoots from the back. - -The Australian might be an egomaniac or a savior, probably both. But what matters is the collective nerve he hits, the specter he summons — of countless fruitless visits to countless callous doctors. One senses a hundred identical wounds across this room. Not just from glass and fibers but also from smirks and muttered remarks, hastily scribbled notes, cutting gazes. I’m moved less by the mudslinging than by the sense of liberation underneath the crowd’s applause. - -This isn’t an essay about whether Morgellons disease is real. That’s probably obvious by now. It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It’s about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to speak of empathy when you trust the fact of suffering but not the source? - -Calling Morgellons “real” generally means acknowledging there is actual, inexplicable stuff coming up through human skin. “Real” means a fungus, parasite, bacterium, or virus — anything that might persuade the skeptical medical establishment that these patients aren’t simply making the whole thing up. - -The notion of “making it up” is also complicated, and could mean anything from intentional fabrication to hypochondria to an itch-scratch cycle that’s gotten out of hand. Itching is powerful: the impulse that tells someone to scratch lights up the same neural pathways as chemical addiction. An itch that starts in the brain feels just like an itch on the skin, and it can begin with something as simple as a thought. It can begin from reading a paragraph like this one. Itching is a feedback loop, and it testifies to the possibility of symptoms that dwell in a charged and uneasy space between body and mind. - -That’s why “self-excoriation” is such a taboo phrase here, and why patients are so deeply offended by any accusation that they’ve planted fibers in their own skin. These explanations pin the blame back on them, suggesting not only that the harm inflicted is less real, but also that it’s less deserving of compassion or aid. In contrast, parasites and bacteria are agents of otherness, granting the legitimacy of external struggle. - -This insistence on an external source of damage implies that the self is a single coherent entity, a unified collection of physical, mental, and spiritual components. When really, the self — at least as I’ve experienced mine — is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated nor consistently serving its own good. - -During one discussion of possible bacterial causes of Morgellons, a woman raises her hand to make what initially seems like an incongruous point. “Maybe there are no autoimmune diseases,” she says. “They just don’t make sense.” Why, after all, would a body fight itself? Perhaps, she suggests, what seems like an autoimmune disorder is simply the body anticipating a foreign invader that hasn’t yet arrived. This logic, too, is predicated on a vision of the self as a whole, united, its parts working in concert — yet it betrays a lurking sense of the body’s treachery, a sense of sickness as mutiny. - -What does it look like when the self fights itself? When a human being is broken into warring factions? Perhaps it looks like the experimental cures I see here: scraping or freezing the skin, hitting it with lasers or defibrillators, dousing it with acid or lighter fluid, taking cocktails of antiparasitic medicines meant for animals three times our size. - -But I wonder why this fracturing of the self shouldn’t warrant our compassion just as much as a diseased body. Or maybe even more. - -I duck out of the second afternoon session and fall into conversation with two men involved in a tense exchange near the cookie tray. Paul is a blond Texan wearing a silver-studded belt and stiff jeans. Lenny is from Oklahoma, a well-coiffed man with a curled mustache and a dark tan. Both wear flannel shirts tucked into their pants. - -Paul is a patient, and Lenny is not. Lenny’s here because he thinks he may have found the cure. A woman came to him with the disease all over her knuckles and he treated it with a laser. “I turned it on that,” he says, “and it killed it.” - -I ask if he’s a dermatologist. - -“Oh no!” he says. “I’m an electrician.” - -This woman had two years of pain, Lenny says, and nothing helped her until he did. About twenty minutes into the conversation, he also mentions she was a meth addict. He assures us that his laser cleaned her out until there was “no sign left” of any fibers. Paul has a strange look on his face as Lenny describes the cure. “You didn’t heal her,” he says finally. “It’s a virus.” - -Lenny nods, but he’s clearly taken aback. He wasn’t expecting resistance. - -“I’ve been dealing with this for eight years,” Paul continues. “And I would’ve chopped off my hand if that would have stopped it from spreading to the rest of my body.” - -Paul looks worse than anyone else I’ve seen. He has his own name for his illness — the Devil’s Fishing Bait — because, he says, he got it on a fishing trip. Sometimes he refers to it as a virus, other times as a parasitic infestation, but the sense of sinister agency remains the same. - -Paul’s disease is different in that you can see it. His right ear is the most obvious sign of his affliction. It’s a little twisted, almost mashed, and it has the smooth, shiny texture of scar tissue all along the juncture between ear and jaw. His face is dotted with red pockmarks; the skin is stained with milky patterns, and he’s got teardrop scars around his eyes. - -Paul says he came home from the fishing trip with his legs covered in chigger bites. “You could feel the heat coming out of my pants,” he says. His whole body was inflamed. I ask about his symptoms now. He simply shakes his head: “You can never tell what’s coming next.” - -I ask whether he gets support from anyone in his life. He does, he says. That’s when he tells me about his sister. - -At first, she wasn’t sympathetic. She assumed Paul was on drugs when he told her about his symptoms. But she was the one who eventually discovered Morgellons, just about a year ago, and told him about it. - -“So she’s become a source of support?” I ask. - -“Well,” he says. “Now she has it, too.” - -They experiment with different treatments and compare notes: freezing, insecticides, dewormers for cattle, horses, dogs. A liquid-nitrogen compound he injected into his ear. Lately, he says, he’s had success with root beer. He pours it over his head, his face, his limbs. He tells me about arriving at the ER one night with blood gushing from his ear, screaming because he could feel them — them again, uttered with such force — tearing him up inside. One of the ER doctors did a physical examination and noted that his mouth was dry. Paul told the doctor it was from shouting at them for help. - -Paul doesn’t seem overly impressed with the conference. Mainly because it hasn’t offered up a cure, he says, though there’s a trace of satisfaction in his disappointment, as if certain suspicions have been confirmed. - -I sit behind him during the day’s final presentation. I can see he isn’t paying attention to the speaker. He’s looking at photographs on his computer. They’re all images of his face, mostly in profile, focused on his ear. He shows them to the middle-aged woman sitting beside him, and points to a photo of a small metal implement that looks like a pair of tongs: a taser. A few moments later, I hear him whisper, “These were all eggs.” -When I leave the church, I find sunlight waiting outside our windowless rooms. The world has been patient. Springtime in Austin is grackles in the trees; a nearly invisible fluttering of bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge and a waft of guano in blue-washed twilight. Austin is beautiful women everywhere, in scarves and boots, and wind-blown oak leaves skittering across patios where I eat oysters on ice. People with narrative tattoos smoke in the heat. I find a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary with an empty beer bottle and a bag of Cheez-Its buried in the gravel. - -I walk among the young and healthy and I am more or less one of them. I am trying not to itch. I am trying not to take my skin for granted. But I can’t quiet the voices of those who no longer feel they belong anywhere. I spend a day in their kingdom and then leave when I please. It feels like a betrayal to come up for air. -Doubting the existence of Morgellons hasn’t stopped me from being afraid I’ll get it. Before the conference, I told my friends: “If I come back from Austin thinking I have Morgellons, you have to tell me I don’t.” Now that I’m here, I wash my hands a lot. I’m conscious of other people’s bodies. - -Then it starts happening, as I knew it would. After a shower, I notice small blue strands like tiny worms across my clavicle. I find what appear to be minuscule spines, little quills, tucked into the crevice of a fortune line on my palm. - -If you look closely enough, of course, skin is always foreign — full of bumps, botched hairs, hefty freckles, rough patches. The blue fibers are probably just stray threads from a towel, or from my sleeve, the quills not quills at all but smeared ink on the surface of the skin. But it’s in these moments of fear that I come closest to experiencing Morgellons the way patients do. Inhabiting their perspective only makes me want to protect myself from what they have. I wonder if these are the only options available to my crippled organs of compassion: I’m either full of disbelief or I’m washing my hands in the bathroom. - -I’m not the only person at the conference thinking about contagion. One woman stands up to say she needs to know the facts about how Morgellons is really transmitted. She tells the crowd that her family and friends refuse to come to her apartment. She needs proof they can’t catch the disease from her couch. It’s hard not to speculate. Maybe her family and friends are afraid of catching her disease — or maybe they’re keeping their distance from what they understand as her obsession. - -Kendra tells me she’s afraid of getting her friends sick whenever she goes out to dinner with them. I picture her at the sushi place — handling her chopsticks so carefully, keeping her wasabi under strict quarantine, so that this thing in her won’t get into anyone else. - -The specter of contagion serves a curious double function. On the one hand, as with Kendra, there is a sense of shame at oneself as a potential carrier of infection. But on the other hand, the possibility of spreading this disease also suggests that it’s real — that it could be proven to exist by its manifestation in others. - -This double-edged sword of fear and confirmation is on full display at the Pets with Morgellons website, one of the oddest corners of the Morgellons online labyrinth. In a typical entry, a cat named Ika introduces herself and her illness: - -I have been named [for] the Japanese snack of dried cuttlefish. . . . Typically I am full of chaotic energy, however lately I have been feeling quite lethargic and VERY itchy. My best friend/mommy thinks that she gave me her skin condition, and she is so very SAD. I think she is even more sad that she passed it on to me than the fact that she has it covering her entire face. - -The litany of sick animals continues. A sleek white dog named Jazzy sports itchy paws; two bloodhounds are biting invisible fleas; a Lhasa apso joins his owner for stretches in an infrared sauna. Another entry is an elegy for an Akita named Sinbad: - -It appears that I got the disease at the same time that my beautiful lady owner got it. And after many trips to the vet they had to put me down. I know it was for my own good, but I do miss them a lot. I can still see my master’s face, right up close to mine, when the doc put me to sleep. . . . I could sniff his breath and feel the pain in his eyes as tears rolled down his face. But, it’s ok. I’m alright now. The maddening itching is finally over. I’m finally at peace. - -Who knows what happened to Sinbad? Maybe he really did need to get put down; maybe he was old, or sick with something else. Maybe he wasn’t sick at all. But he has become part of an illness narrative — like lesions, or divorces, or the fibers themselves. He is irrefutable proof that suffering has happened, that things have been lost. -The second day of the conference kicks off with a Japanese television documentary about Morgellons — known over there as cotton-erupting disease. We see a woman standing at her kitchen counter, mixing a livestock antiparasitic called ivermectin into a glass of water. The Japanese voice-over sounds concerned, and a conference participant reads an English translation: the woman knows this drug isn’t for human consumption, but she’s using it anyway. She’s desperate. We see a map of America with patches of known cases breaking out like lesions over the land, a twisted manifest destiny. - -Just as fibers attach to an open wound — its wet surface a kind of glue — so does the notion of disease function as an adhesive, gathering anything we can’t understand, anything that hurts, anything that will stick. “Transmission by Internet,” some skeptics claim about Morgellons: message boards as Pied Pipers, calling all comers. It’s true that the Internet made it possible for knowledge of Morgellons to spread, and transformed its sufferers into a self-contained online community. - -A woman named Sandra pulls out her cell phone to show me a photo of something she coughed up. It looks like a little albino shrimp. She thinks it’s a larva. She photographed it through a jeweler’s loupe. She wants a microscope but doesn’t have one yet. She put the larva on a book to provide a sense of scale. I try to get a good look at the print; I’m curious about what she was reading. - -Sandra has a theory about the fibers — that the organisms inside her are gathering materials to make their cocoons. This explains why so many of the fibers turn out to be ordinary kinds of thread, dog hair, or cotton. Creatures are making a nest of her body, using the ordinary materials of her life to build a home inside her. - -Once I’ve squinted long enough at the shrimpish thing, Sandra brings up a video of herself in the bathtub. “These are way beyond fibers,” she promises. Only her feet are visible, protruding through the surface of the water. The quality is grainy, but it appears the bath is full of wriggling larvae. Their forms are hard to feel sure about — everything is dim and a little sludgy — but that’s what it looks like. She says that a couple of years ago, there were hundreds coming out of her skin. It’s gotten a little better. These days when she takes a bath, only two or three come out. - -I’m at a loss. I don’t know whether what I’m seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they’re not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren’t worms — or about the world, or human bodies, or this disease, if they are. I do know that I see a bunch of little wriggling shadows, and for now I’m glad I’m not a doctor or a scientist, because leaning into this uncertainty lets me believe her without needing to confirm my belief. I can dwell with her — for just a moment, at least — in the possibility of those worms, in that horror. - -I catch sight of Kendra watching Sandra’s phone. She’s wondering if this is what her future holds. I want to comfort her, to insist that everyone’s disease turns out a little different. She tells me about sushi last night: it was good. Turns out she bought a painting. She shouldn’t have, she says. She can’t afford it. But she saw it hanging at the restaurant and couldn’t resist. She shows me a picture on her phone: lush, braided swirls of oil paint curl from the corners of a parchment-colored square. - -I think but don’t say: fibers. - -“You know,” she says, voice lowered. “It reminds me a little of those things.” - -I get a sinking feeling. It’s that moment in a movie when the illness spreads beyond its quarantine. Even when Kendra leaves this kingdom of the sick, she finds sickness waiting patiently for her on the other side. She pays $300 she can’t afford just so she can take its portrait home with her. -The organizers are holding a lottery to give away some inexpensive microscopes: a handful of miniature ones like small black plums, and their larger cousin the EyeClops, a children’s toy. I win a mini, but I’m sheepish as I head up to the stage to claim it. What do I need a scope for? I’m here to write about how other people need scopes. Everyone knows this. I’m given a small, square box. I imagine how the scene will play out later tonight: examining my skin in the stale privacy of my hotel room, facing that razor’s edge between skepticism and fear by way of the little widget in my palm. - -I give my miniscope to Sandra. I give it to her because she is sick of using her jeweler’s loupe, because she is sad she didn’t get one, and because I feel self-conscious about winning one when I wasn’t even looking for fibers in the first place. - -“That’s so generous,” she says. - -But maybe it wasn’t generous. Maybe it was the opposite. Maybe I’d just taken hours of her life away and replaced them with hours spent at the peephole of that microscope, staring at what she wouldn’t be able to cure. - -“I can be myself only when I’m here” is something I heard more than once at Westoak. But every time I left the church, I found myself wishing these patients could also be themselves elsewhere, could be themselves anywhere. I think of Kendra, terrified by the same assurances that offered her validation. She had proof of fibers in her skin but no hope of getting them out, only a vision of what it might look like to be consumed by this disease entirely — a thousand bloody photographs on a laptop, or a soup of larvae on her phone. - -A confession: I left the conference early. I actually, embarrassingly, went to sit by the shitty hotel pool. I baked bare-skinned in the Texas sun, and I watched a woman from the conference come outside and carefully lay her own body, fully clothed, across a reclining chair in the shade. -I’ve left the kingdom of the ill. Dawn and Kendra and Paul and Sandra remain. But I still feel the ache of an uncanny proximity. “Some of these things I’m trying to get out,” Kendra told me, “it’s like they move away from me.” Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something, and what we’re trying to purge resists our efforts. These demons belong to all of us: an obsession with our boundaries and visible shapes, a fear of invasion or contamination, an understanding of ourselves as perpetually misunderstood. - -But doesn’t this search for meaning obfuscate the illness itself? It’s another kind of bait, another tied-and-painted fly: the notion that if we understand something well enough, we can make it go away. - -Everyone I met at the conference was kind. They offered their warmth to me and to one another. I was a visitor to what they knew, but I have been a citizen at times, and I know I’ll be one again. Now my skepticism feels like a violation of some collective trust. The same researcher who told me about “the biggest joke in the world” also told me this: “When I heard of your interest, I felt genuine hope that the real story would be told accurately and sensitively.” I can’t forget this hope. I don’t want to betray it. - -(“Sit down before fact as a little child,” wrote the nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Huxley, in a passage quoted by one of the speakers at Westoak, “and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” -I want to follow humbly; I want to believe everyone. But belief isn’t the same thing as compassion, or sorrow, or pity. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that the words pity and piety were completely distinguished. And what I feel toward this disorder is a kind of piety — an obligation to pay homage, or at least accord some reverence to these patients’ collective understanding of what makes them hurt. Maybe it’s a kind of sympathetic infection: this need to go-along-with, to nod-along-with, to agree. - -Paul said, “I wouldn’t tell anyone my crazy-ass symptoms.” But he told them to me. He’s always been met with disbelief. He called it “typical.” Now I’m haunted by that word. For Paul, life has become a pattern and the moral of that pattern is: You’re destined for this. The disbelief of others is inevitable and so is loneliness; both are just as much a part of this disease as any fiber, any speck or crystal or parasite. - -I went to Austin because I wanted to be a different kind of listener than these patients had generally known: doctors winking at their residents, friends biting their lips, skeptics smiling in smug bewilderment. But wanting to be different doesn’t make you so. Paul told me his crazy-ass symptoms and I didn’t believe him. Or at least, I didn’t believe him the way he wanted to be believed. I didn’t believe there were parasites laying thousands of eggs under his skin, but I did believe he suffered as if there were. Which was typical. I was typical. In writing this essay, how am I doing something he wouldn’t understand as betrayal? I want to say, I heard you. To say: I pass no judgments. But I can’t say these things to him. So instead I say this: I think he can heal. I hope he does. diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-running-novelist.md b/tests/corpus/the-running-novelist.md deleted file mode 100644 index cad4feda1..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-running-novelist.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,85 +0,0 @@ -The running novelist -*The New Yorker* -By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel - -A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. - -Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so busy with side jobs that I was actually a few credits short of graduating and was still officially a student—I had opened a little club near the south entrance of Kokubunji Station. The club had stayed there for about three years; then, when the building it was in closed for renovations, I moved it to a new location, closer to the center of Tokyo. The new venue wasn’t big—we had a grand piano and just barely enough space to squeeze in a quintet. During the day, it was a café; at night, it was a bar. We served decent food, too, and, on weekends, featured live performances. This kind of club was still quite rare in Tokyo back then, so we gained a steady clientele and the place did all right financially. - -Most of my friends had predicted that the club would fail. They figured that an establishment that was run as a kind of hobby couldn’t succeed, and that someone like me—I was pretty naïve and, they suspected, didn’t have the slightest aptitude for business—wouldn’t be able to make a go of it. Well, their predictions were totally off. To tell the truth, I didn’t think that I had much aptitude for business, either. I just figured that since failure was not an option, I had to give it everything I had. My strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can handle a lot physically. I’m more of a workhorse than a racehorse. I grew up in a white-collar household, so I didn’t know much about entrepreneurship, but fortunately my wife’s family ran a business and her natural intuition was a great help. - -The work itself was hard. I was at the club from morning till night and I left there exhausted. I had all kinds of painful experiences and plenty of disappointments. But, after a while, I began to make enough of a profit to hire other people, and I was finally able to take a breather. To get started, I’d borrowed as much money as I could from every bank that would lend to me, and by now I’d paid a lot of it back. Things were settling down. Up to that point, it had been a question of sheer survival, and I hadn’t had time to think about anything else. Now I felt as though I’d reached the top of a steep staircase and emerged into an open space. I was confident that I’d be able to handle any new problems that might crop up. I took a deep breath, glanced back at the stairs I’d just climbed, then slowly gazed around me and began to contemplate the next stage of my life. I was about to turn thirty. I was reaching the age at which I wouldn’t be considered young anymore. And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel. - -I can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. It was at 1:30 P.M., April 1, 1978. I was at Jingu Stadium, alone in the outfield, watching a baseball game. Jingu Stadium was within walking distance of my apartment at the time, and I was a fairly devoted Yakult Swallows fan. It was a beautiful spring day, cloudless, with a warm breeze blowing. There were no benches in the outfield seating area back then, just a grassy slope. I was lying on the grass, sipping a cold beer, gazing up occasionally at the sky, and enjoying the game. As usual, the stadium wasn’t very crowded. It was the season opener, and the Swallows were taking on the Hiroshima Carp. Takeshi Yasuda was pitching for the Swallows. He was a short, stocky pitcher with a wicked curveball. He easily retired the side in the top of the first inning. The lead-off batter for the Swallows was Dave Hilton, a young American player who was new to the team. Hilton got a hit down the left-field line. The crack of bat meeting ball echoed through the stadium. Hilton easily rounded first and pulled up to second. And it was at just that moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel. I still remember the wide-open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and, whatever it was, I accepted it. - -I didn’t have any ambition to be a “novelist.” I just had the strong desire to write a novel. I had no concrete image of what I wanted to write about—just the conviction that I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and starting to write, I realized that I didn’t even own a decent fountain pen. So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor pen. A small capital investment on my part. - -By that fall, I’d finished a two-hundred-page handwritten work. I had no idea what to do with it, so I just let the momentum carry me and submitted it to the literary magazine Gunzo’s new-writers’ contest. I shipped it off without making a copy, so it seems I didn’t much care if it wasn’t selected and vanished forever. I was more interested in having finished the book than in whether or not it would ever see the light of day. - -That year, the Yakult Swallows, the perennial underdog, won the pennant and went on to defeat the Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. I was really excited by this, and I attended several games at Korakuen Stadium. (Nobody had actually imagined that the Swallows would win, so their home venue, Jingu Stadium, had already been taken over by college baseball.) It was a particularly gorgeous autumn. The sky was clear and the ginkgo trees in front of the Meiji Memorial Gallery were more golden than I’d ever seen them. This was the last fall of my twenties. - -By the following spring, when I got a phone call from an editor at Gunzo telling me that my novel had made the prize’s short list, I’d completely forgotten having entered the contest. I’d been so busy with other things. But the novel went on to win the prize and was published that summer under the title “Hear the Wind Sing.” It was well received, and, without really knowing what was going on, I suddenly found myself labelled a new, up-and-coming writer. I was surprised, but the people who knew me were even more surprised. - -After this, while still running the jazz club, I produced a medium-length second novel, “Pinball, 1973.” I also wrote a few short stories and translated some by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both “Hear the Wind Sing” and “Pinball, 1973” were nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, but in the end neither won. I didn’t care one way or the other. If I had won the prize, I’d have been taken up by interviews and writing assignments, and I was afraid that this would interfere with my duties at the club. - -For three years I ran my jazz club—keeping the accounts, checking the inventory, scheduling my staff, standing behind the counter mixing cocktails and cooking, closing up in the wee hours of the morning, and only then being able to write, at home, at the kitchen table, until I got sleepy. I felt as if I were living two people’s lives. And, gradually, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. I had enjoyed the process of writing my first two books, but there were parts of both that I wasn’t pleased with. I was able to write only in spurts, snatching bits of time—a half hour here, an hour there—and, because I was always tired and felt as if I were competing against the clock, I was never able to concentrate very well. With this scattered kind of approach I was able to write a few interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from complex or profound. I felt as if I’d been given this wonderful opportunity to be a novelist, and I had a natural desire to take that opportunity as far as I possibly could. So, after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business and focus solely on writing. At this point, my income from the jazz club was significantly more than my income as a novelist, a reality to which I resigned myself. - -Most of my friends were adamantly against my decision, or at least had doubts about it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it while you write your novels?” But I couldn’t follow their advice. I’m the kind of person who has to commit totally to whatever I do. If, having committed, I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out I’d always have regrets. - -So, despite everyone’s objections, I sold the club and, a little embarrassedly, hung out my sign as a novelist. “I’d just like to be free to write for two years,” I explained to my wife. “If it doesn’t work out, we can always open up another bar somewhere. I’m still young and we’ll have time to start over.” This was in 1981 and we still had a considerable amount of debt, but I figured I’d just do my best and see what happened. - -So I settled down to write my novel and, that fall, travelled to Hokkaido for a week to research it. By the following April, I’d completed “A Wild Sheep Chase.” This novel was much longer than the previous two, larger in scope and more story-driven. By the time I’d finished writing it, I had a good feeling that I’d created my own style. Now I could actually picture myself making a living as a novelist. - -The editors at Gunzo were looking for something more mainstream, and they didn’t much care for “A Wild Sheep Chase.” Readers, though, seemed to love the new book, and that was what made me happiest. This was the real starting point for me as a novelist. - -Once I had decided to become a professional writer, another problem arose: the question of how to keep physically fit. Running the club had required constant physical labor, but once I was sitting at a desk writing all day I started putting on the pounds. I was also smoking too much—sixty cigarettes a day. My fingers were yellow, and my body reeked of smoke. This couldn’t be good for me, I decided. If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape. - -As a form of exercise, running has a lot of advantages. First of all, you don’t need someone to help you with it; nor do you need any special equipment. You don’t have to go to any particular place to do it. As long as you have a pair of running shoes and a good road you can run to your heart’s content. - -After I closed the bar, I resolved to change my life style entirely, and my wife and I moved out to Narashino, in the Chiba prefecture. The area was pretty rural back then, and there were no decent sports facilities around. But there was a Self-Defense Force base nearby, and the roads were well maintained. There was also a training area in the neighborhood near Nihon University, and if I went there early in the morning, when nobody else was around, I could use the track. So I didn’t have to think too much about what activity to choose. I just took up running. - -Not long after that, I also quit smoking. It wasn’t easy to do, but I couldn’t really run and keep on smoking. My desire to run was a great help in overcoming the withdrawal symptoms. Quitting smoking was also like a symbolic gesture of farewell to the life I used to lead. - -At school I had never much cared for gym class or Sports Day, since these involved activities that were forced on me from above. But whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had. Since I wasn’t that athletic or coördinated, I wasn’t good at the kind of sports where things are decided in a flash. Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life. I can say the same thing about me and studying. For my entire education, from elementary school through college, I was never interested in things that I was forced to study. As a result, although my grades weren’t the kind you have to hide from people, I don’t recall ever being praised for a good performance or a good grade, or being the best in anything. I began to enjoy studying only after I had made it through the educational system and become a so-called “member of society.” If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace, I was reasonably efficient at acquiring knowledge. - -The best thing about becoming a professional writer was that I could go to bed early and get up early. When I was running the club, I often didn’t get to sleep until nearly dawn. The club closed at twelve, but then I had to clean up, go over the receipts, sit and talk, and have a drink to relax. Do all that and, before you know it, it’s 3 A.M. and sunrise is just around the corner. Often I’d still be sitting at my kitchen table, writing, as it started to get light outside. Naturally, by the time I woke up for the day, the sun was already high in the sky. - -Once I began my life as a novelist, my wife and I decided that we’d go to bed soon after it got dark and wake up with the sun. To our minds, this was a more natural, respectable way to live. We also decided that from then on we’d try to see only the people we wanted to see, and, as much as possible, get by without seeing those we didn’t. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow ourselves this modest indulgence. - -In my new, simple, regular life, I got up before 5 A.M. and went to bed before 10 P.M. Different people are at their best at different times of day, but I’m definitely a morning person. That’s when I can focus. Afterward, I work out or do errands that don’t take much concentration. At the end of the day, I relax, read, or listen to music. Thanks to this pattern, I’ve been able to work efficiently now for twenty-seven years. It’s a pattern, though, that doesn’t allow for much of a night life, and sometimes this makes relationships with other people problematic. People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations. But, at that point, I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number of readers. My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure that each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist? I don’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense my relationship with them is a conceptual one, but I’ve consistently considered it the most important thing in my life. - -In other words, you can’t please everybody. - -Even when I ran the club, I understood this. A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business. - -After “A Wild Sheep Chase,” I continued to write with the same attitude that I’d developed as a business owner. And with each work my readership—the one-in-ten repeaters—increased. Those readers, most of whom were young, would wait patiently for my next book to appear, then buy it and read it as soon as it hit the bookstores. This was for me the ideal, or at least a very comfortable, situation. I went on writing the kinds of things I wanted to write, exactly the way I wanted to write them, and, if that allowed me to make a living, then I couldn’t ask for more. When my novel “Norwegian Wood” unexpectedly sold more than two million copies, things had to shift a little, but that was quite a bit later, in 1987. - -When I first started running, I couldn’t run long distances. I could run for only about twenty or thirty minutes. Even that left me panting, my heart pounding, my legs shaky. I hadn’t really exercised for a long time. At first, I was also a little embarrassed to have people in the neighborhood see me running. But, as I continued to run, my body began to accept the fact that it was running, and I gradually increased my endurance. I acquired a runner’s form, my breathing became more regular, and my pulse settled down. The main thing was not the speed or the distance so much as running every day, without fail. - -So, like eating, sleeping, housework, and writing, running was incorporated into my daily routine. As it became a natural habit, I felt less embarrassed about it. I went to a sports store and purchased some running gear and some decent shoes. I bought a stopwatch, too, and read a book on running. - -Looking back now, I think the most fortunate thing is that I was born with a strong, healthy body. This has made it possible for me to run on a daily basis for more than a quarter century now, competing in a number of races along the way. I’ve never been injured, never been hurt, and haven’t once been sick. I’m not a great runner, but I’m a strong runner. That’s one of the very few gifts I can be proud of. - -The year 1983 rolled around and I participated in my first road race. It wasn’t very long—a 5K—but for the first time I had a number pinned to my shirt and waited in a large group of other runners to hear an official shout, “On your mark, get set, go!” Afterward, I thought, Hey, that wasn’t so bad! That May, I did a fifteen-kilometre race around Lake Yamanaka, and, in June, wanting to test how far I could go, I did laps around the Imperial Palace, in Tokyo. I went around seven times, for a total of 22.4 miles, at a fairly decent pace, and my legs didn’t hurt at all. Maybe I could actually run a marathon, I concluded. Later, I found out the hard way that the toughest part of a marathon comes after twenty-two miles. (I have now competed in twenty-six marathons.) - -When I look at photographs of me that were taken back in the mid-eighties, it’s obvious that I didn’t yet have a runner’s physique. I hadn’t run enough, hadn’t built up the requisite muscles; my arms were too thin, my legs too skinny. I’m impressed that I could run a marathon at all with a body like that. (Now, after years of running, my musculature has changed completely.) But even then I could feel physical changes happening every day, which made me really happy. I felt that, even though I was past thirty, I and my body still had some possibilities left. The more I ran, the more my potential was revealed. - -Along with this, my diet started to change as well. I began to eat mostly vegetables, with fish as my main source of protein. I had never liked meat much anyway, and this aversion now became even more pronounced. I cut back on rice and alcohol and began using only natural ingredients. Sweets weren’t a problem, since I had never much cared for them. - -When I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it’s not always easy to see things this way. - -I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble. - -In other words, let’s face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness. - -When I tell people that I run every day, some are quite impressed. “You must have a lot of will power,” they tell me. Of course, it’s nice to be praised like this—a lot better than being disparaged. But I don’t think it’s merely will power that makes one able to do something. The world isn’t that simple. To tell the truth, I don’t even think there’s much correlation between my running every day and whether or not I have will power. I think that I’ve been able to run for more than twenty-five years for one reason: it suits me. Or, at least, I don’t find it all that painful. Human beings naturally continue doing things they like, and they don’t continue doing what they don’t like. - -That’s why I’ve never recommended running to others. If someone has an interest in long-distance running, he’ll start running on his own. If he’s not interested in it, no amount of persuasion will make any difference. Marathon running is not a sport for everyone, just as being a novelist isn’t a job for everyone. Nobody ever recommended or even suggested that I be a novelist—in fact, some tried to stop me. I simply had the idea to be one, and that’s what I did. People become runners because they’re meant to. - -No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel lethargic and don’t want to do it. On days like that, I try to come up with all kinds of plausible excuses not to run. Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he had retired from running. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!” - -Now that I look back on it, I can see what a dumb question it was. I guess that even back then I knew how dumb it was, but I wanted to hear the answer directly from someone of Seko’s calibre. I wanted to know whether, although we were worlds apart in terms of strength and motivation, we felt the same way when we laced up our running shoes in the morning. Seko’s reply came as a great relief. In the final analysis, we’re all the same, I thought. - -Now, whenever I feel like I don’t want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You’re able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours. You don’t have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? Compared with that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Then I lace up my running shoes and set off without hesitating. (I say this knowing full well that there are people who’d pick riding a crowded train and attending meetings over running every day.) - -At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist. ? diff --git a/tests/corpus/the-school.md b/tests/corpus/the-school.md deleted file mode 100644 index eab16dc91..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/the-school.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,651 +0,0 @@ -The School -*Esquire* -By C.J. Chivers - -# September 1. Afternoon. The Gym. - -Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all. - -Throughout the day he had memorized the bomb, down to the blue electrical wire linking it to the network of explosives the terrorists had strung around them hours before. Now his eyes wandered, panning the crowd of more than eleven hundred hostages who had been seized in the morning outside the school. The majority were children, crouched with their parents and teachers on the basketball court. The temperature had risen with the passing hours, and their impromptu jail had become fetid and stinking with urine and fear. Many children had undressed. Sweat ran down their bare backs. - -His eyes settled on his captors. Most of the terrorists had left the gym for defensive positions in the main school building, leaving behind a handful of men in athletic suits or camouflage pants. These were their guards. They wore ammunition vests and slung Kalashnikov rifles. A few were hidden behind ski masks, but as the temperature had risen, most had removed them, revealing faces. They were young. Some had the bearing of experienced fighters. Others seemed like semiliterate thugs, the sort of criminal that had radiated from Chechnya and Russia's North Caucasus during a decade of war. Two were women wearing explosive belts. - -Kazbek studied the group, committing to memory their weapons, their behavior, their relations to one another, and the configuration of their bombs. A diagram of their handiwork had formed in his head, an intricate map that existed nowhere else. With it was a mental blueprint of the school, in which he had studied as a boy. This was useful information, if he could share it, and Kazbek thought of fleeing, hoping he might give the Special Forces gathering outside a description of the bombs and defenses. Already Kazbek assumed this siege would end in a fight, and he knew that when Russia's soldiers rushed these rooms, their attack would be overpowering and imprecise. He knew this because he once was a Russian soldier himself. - -He evaluated the options. How does my family get out? Escape? Passivity? Resistance? His wife, Irina Dzutseva, and their sons, Batraz, fifteen, and Atsamaz, seven, were beside him. Kazbek was a tall man with neat dark hair and a mustache, and Batraz, who was growing tall as well, had the hint of a beard. Kazbek had made him remove his shirt, exposing a boyish frame. He hoped this would convince the terrorists that, unlike his father, Batraz was not a threat, and he would not be rounded up with the men. Kazbek's mind was engaged in this sort of agonizing calculus, trying to determine the best way to save his children from a horror with too many variables and too many unknowns. How best to act? Yes, he had information to share. But even if he escaped, he thought, the terrorists might identify his wife and sons. And then kill them. They had already shot several people, including Ruslan Betrozov, who had done nothing more than speak. No, Kazbek thought, he could not run. He also knew that any uprising by the hostages would have to be swift and complete. There were few terrorists in the gym, but by Kazbek's count at least thirty more roamed the school. How could all of these terrorists be overcome by an unarmed crowd, especially when even before rigging the bombs the terrorists had created an immeasurable psychological advantage? "If any of you resists us," one had warned, "we will kill children and leave the one who resists alive." There would be no resistance. Who, after all, would lead it? Already the adult male captives were dying. Many had been executed. Most of the others were in the main hall, kneeling, hands clasped behind their heads. - -Kazbek was lucky. The terrorists had overlooked him during the last roundup. He had been spared execution. - -Now his mind worked methodically. He wanted no one to see what he planned to do. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his hand moved over the floor to the blue wire. Kazbek was forty-three. He had been a Soviet sapper as a younger man. He knew how bombs worked. He also knew how to disable them. The bomb overhead was part of a simple system, an open electric circuit rigged to a motor-vehicle battery. If the terrorists closed the circuit, current would flow from the battery through the wires and detonate the bombs. But if Kazbek pulled apart the wire inside its insulation, no current could flow. Then, he knew, if the circuit snapped closed, the bomb above his family would not explode. Kazbek had spent much of the day folding the wire back and forth, making a crimp. It was only a matter of time. - -He lifted the wire. Back and forth he folded the notch, working it, looking directly at the men who would kill him if they knew what he was doing. He would disconnect this bomb. It was a step. Every step counted. His mind kept working. How does my family get out? - -# 9:10 a.m. The Schoolyard. - -Morning marked a new school year at School No. 1 in Beslan, beginning with rituals of years past. Returning students, second through twelfth graders, had lined up in a horseshoe formation beside the red brick building. They wore uniforms: girls in dark dresses, boys in dark pants and white shirts. The forecast had predicted hot weather; only the day before, the administration had pushed the schedule an hour earlier, to the relative cool of 9:00 a.m. Students fidgeted with flowers, chocolates, and balloons, waiting for the annual presentation, when first graders would march before their schoolmates for the opening of their academic lives. - -Zalina Levina took a seat behind the rostrum and greeted the milling parents. Beslan is an industrial and agricultural town of about thirty-five thousand people on the plain beneath the Caucasus ridge, part of the Russian republic of North Ossetia and one of the few places in the region with a modicum of jobs. For the moment, work seemed forgotten. Parents had come to celebrate. Irina Naldikoyeva sat with her daughter, Alana, four, and glimpsed her son, Kazbek, seven, in the formation with his second-grade class. Aida Archegova had two sons in the assembly. Zalina was baby-sitting her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Amina. They had not planned on attending, but the child had heard music and seen children streaming toward the school. "Grandma," she had said, "let's go dance." Zalina put on a denim dress and joined the flow. Already it was warm. The first graders were about to step forward. The school year had begun. - -The terrorists appeared as if from nowhere. A military truck stopped near the school and men leapt from the cargo bed, firing rifles and shouting, "Allahu akhbar!" They moved with speed and certitude, as if every step had been rehearsed. The first few sprinted between the formation and the schoolyard gate, blocking escape. There was almost no resistance. Ruslan Frayev, a local man who had come with several members of his family, drew a pistol and began to fire. He was killed. - -The terrorists seemed to be everywhere. Zalina saw a man in a mask sprinting with a rifle. Then another. And a third. Many students in the formation had their backs to the advancing gunmen, but one side did not, and as Zalina sat confused, those students broke and ran. The formation disintegrated. Scores of balloons floated skyward as children released them. A cultivated sense of order became bedlam. - -Dzera Kudzayeva, seven, had been selected for a role in which she would be carried on the shoulders of a senior and strike a bell to start the new school year. Her father, Aslan Kudzayev, had hired Karen Mdinaradze, a video cameraman for a nearby soccer team, to record the big day. Dzera wore a blue dress with a white apron and had two white bows in her hair, and was on the senior's shoulders when the terrorists arrived. They were quickly caught. - -For many other hostages, recognition came slowly. Aida Archegova thought she was in a counterterrorism drill. Beslan is roughly 950 miles south of Moscow, in a zone destabilized by the Chechen wars. Police actions were part of life. "Is it exercises?" she asked a terrorist as he bounded past. - -He stopped. "What are you, a fool?" he said. - -The terrorists herded the panicked crowd into a rear courtyard, a place with no outlet. An attached building housed the boiler room, and Zalina ran there with others to hide. The room had no rear exit. They were trapped. The door opened. A man in a tracksuit stood at the entrance. "Get out or I will start shooting," he said. - -Zalina did not move. She thought she would beg for mercy. Her granddaughter was with her, and a baby must mean a pass. She froze until only she and Amina remained. The terrorist glared. "You need a special invitation?" he said. "I will shoot you right here." - -Speechless with fear, she stepped out, joining a mass of people as obedient as if they had been tamed. The terrorists had forced the crowd against the school's brick wall and were driving it through a door. The people could not file in quickly enough, and the men broke windows and handed children in. Already there seemed to be dozens of the terrorists. They lined the hall, redirecting the people into the gym. "We are from Chechnya," one said. "This is a seizure. We are here to start the withdrawal of troops and the liberation of Chechnya." - -As the hostages filed onto the basketball court, more terrorists came in. One fired into the ceiling. "Everybody be silent!" he said. "You have been taken hostage. Calm down. Stop the panic and nobody will be hurt. We are going to issue our demands, and if the demands are implemented, we will let the children out." - -Rules were laid down. There would be no talking without permission. All speech would be in Russian, not Ossetian, so the terrorists could understand it, too. The hostages would turn in their cell phones, cameras, and video cameras. Any effort to resist would be met with mass executions, including of women and children. - -When the terrorist had finished, Ruslan Betrozov, a father who had brought his two sons to class, stood and translated the instructions into Ossetian. He was a serious man, forty-four years old and with a controlled demeanor. The terrorists let him speak. When he stopped, one approached. - -"Are you finished?" he asked. "Have you said everything you want to say?" - -Betrozov nodded. The terrorist shot him in the head. - -# 9:20 a.m. The Administrator's Office. - -Irina Dzutseva, Kazbek Misikov's wife, huddled near the desk, embracing Atsamaz, her first-grade son. Atsamaz was quiet and waiflike but dressed like a gentleman in black suit and white shirt. Irina could feel his fear. They hid amid papers and textbooks, listening to the long corridor. Doors were being opened, then slammed. They heard gunshots. Atsamaz clung to a balloon. "Where are Papa and Batik?" he asked. "Were they killed?" - -The first graders and their parents had been standing at the main entrance and were among the first to see the attack. Irina had turned back into the school and bolted down the corridor as the shooting began, charging down the hall in high heels, pulling her son by his hand. She heard screams and a window shatter. Glass tinkled on the floor. The corridor was long and still; their footfalls echoed as they passed each door, the entrance to the gym, the cafeteria, and the restrooms. At the end of the hall they rushed upstairs to the auditorium and crouched behind the maroon curtain on the stage with other mothers and students. Balloons were taped to the ceiling. Posters decorated the wall. Behind the curtain was a door, and they pushed in and settled into an office packed with books. Short Stories by Russian Writers. Methods of Teaching. Literature 5. Irina looked at the others: four adults and six children. They were cut off and could only guess at what was happening outside. They sat in the stillness, waiting to be saved. - -After about half an hour, someone pushed against the door. A child called out hopefully: "Are you ours?" - -The door swung open. Three terrorists stood before them, beards hanging beneath masks. "God forbid that we are yours," one said, and the group was marched down to the gym with terrorists firing rifles into the ceiling. - -In the gym they encountered a scene beyond their imagination. Almost the entire student body had been taken captive, a mass of distraught human life trapped as if it were under a box. Children's cries filled the air. The gym was roughly twenty-eight yards long by fifteen yards wide, and its longer sides each had a bank of four windows, ten feet by ten feet, with panes made from opaque plastic. Light came in as a glow. A wide streak of blood marked the area where Betrozov's corpse had been dragged. Irina hurried with Atsamaz to the far corner and found Batraz, her older son. She understood that their lives would be leveraged in a test of wills against the Kremlin. Hope rested with negotiations, or with Russia's security forces, not known for tactical precision or regard for civilian life. The last time a Chechen group had seized hundreds of hostages, at a theater in Moscow in 2002, Russian commandos attacked with poisonous gas. At least 129 hostages died. - -Two young women wearing explosive belts roamed the wooden floor, wraithlike figures dressed in black, their faces hidden by veils. Irina shuddered. Russia has an enduring capacity to produce ghastly social phenomena; these were the latest occurrence of the shahidka, female Islamic martyrs who had sown fear during the second Chechen war. The Russian news called them black widows, women driven to militant Islam and vengeance by the loss of Chechnya's young men. The hostages noticed an incongruity: The black veil worn by one shahidka framed the neatly sculpted eyebrows of what seemed a teenager who had recently visited a beauty salon. - -Two terrorists entered the room with backpacks and began unloading equipment: wire and cable on wooden spools, bombs of different sizes, including several made from plastic soda bottles and two rectangular charges, each the size of a briefcase. With pliers and wire cutters, they set to work, assembling the components into a system. Their plans became clear. Many of the small bombs would be daisy-chained together and hoisted above the crowd, and a line of larger explosives would be set on the floor. The hanging bombs served two purposes: They were a source of mass fear, forcing obedience from the hostages underneath. And elevation ensured that if the bombs were to explode, they would blast shrapnel down from above, allowing for no cover. Virtually everyone would be struck by the nuts, bolts, ball bearings, and nails packed inside. The terrorists assigned the tallest hostages, including Kazbek, who is six foot three, to lift the bombs. The choice of suspension showed malign ingenuity: They strung cables from one basketball hoop to the other, dangling the bombs on hooks. Kazbek realized the terrorists had inside information. Not only had they planned the basketball hoops into their design, but the cables and wires were precut to size, as if they knew the dimensions before they arrived. The bombs were a custom fit. - -The weight of the rig at first caused bombs to sag near the children's heads. "Do not touch them," a terrorist warned, and then instructed Kazbek and others to pull the slack out of the system. The network was raised higher, higher, and then nearly taut, until the deadly web was up and out of reach. Kazbek assessed the trap: It was like a string of Christmas lights, except where each bulb would go was a suspended bomb. A terrorist stood on the trigger, and the system was connected to a battery. If the triggerman were to release his foot, Kazbek knew, the circuit would close. Electricity would flow. The bombs would explode. - -# Afternoon. The Main Hall. - -Aslan Kudzayev carried a chair through the long blue hall under the watch of his guards. He was hurrying through his tasks. He had been put in a work gang the terrorists formed from adult male hostages and ordered to barricade the classroom windows. The terrorists worried that Russian Special Forces would attack. The hostages proved to be a useful labor pool. Aslan wore white pants, a white shirt, and white shoes. He was thirty-three and lanky, with short brown hair. As he lugged the chair, a terrorist with a bandaged arm pointed a Makarov 9mm pistol in his face. Aslan stopped. "You have short hair," the terrorist said. "You are a cop." - -Aslan shook his head. "No," he said. "No." - -The terrorist told him to empty his pockets, and Aslan showed him a wallet, money, and keys. He owned a building-supply store. Nothing about him said cop. The terrorist signaled him to return to work. - -Once the windows were blocked, the men were ordered to sit in the hall, hands behind their heads. By now the terrorists were emerging as individuals; the hostages were forming a sense of their captors. There were the leaders and the led, and the led were organized into teams. Some specialized in explosives. Others were jailers, controlling the hostages in the gym. The largest group was in the main building: a platoon preparing to fight off a Russian assault. They had come with packs of food, coffee, and candy, as well as sleeping bags, gas masks, and first-aid kits. Each had a rifle and wore a vest bulging with ammunition. Some had hand grenades. A few had 40mm grenade launchers mounted under their rifle barrels. - -Aslan began to understand their command structure. All of them deferred to a light-footed and muscular man with a bushy reddish beard whom they called the Colonel. He paced the corridor with a cocky strut, his shaved head topped with a black skullcap, exuding the dark charisma of the captain of a pirate sloop. He was charged with energy and power and seemed fired with glee. Beneath him were midlevel commanders, including a Slav who used the name Abdullah and had pointed the pistol at Aslan's face. Aslan grudgingly marveled at their discipline and skill. They had taken the school, laced it with bombs, and made it a bunker in half a day. Say what you want about these bastards, but they are not stupid, he thought. They know what to do. - -He and two other hostages were ordered to their feet and taken down the hall to the library, where they were given axes and picks and told to tear up the floorboards. Aslan wondered whether the terrorists had a cache of weapons under the planks, but he could see nothing in the hole he made and was led back to sit. Captive in the corridor, growing tired and cramped, Aslan realized he had come to the end of his life. He fell to reverie. Slowly he reviewed the things that made him what he had been: his marriage, the birth of his two daughters, the success of his business. He felt regret that he had not yet had a son. An Ossetian was supposed to have a son. Now and then he was startled by nearby rifle fire, but he could not tell where it came from. He returned to daydreaming. He thought: What will they say at my funeral? - -# Early Afternoon. The Gym. - -The terrorist was sick of Larisa Kudziyeva. She had been shouting, even after they had ordered everyone to be quiet. She was lean and beautiful in a quintessentially Caucasus way, with fine skin and dark hair and brown eyes, a look intensified by her black blouse and skirt. She did not look her thirty-eight years. The terrorist was one of the young men guarding the hostages. He wore his mask. He walked toward her to quiet her, for good. - -Larisa had spent the first hours of captivity tending to Vadim Bolloyev, a father who had been shot near the right shoulder. He lay on the basketball court silently, holding in his pain. His white shirt was soaked red. He was growing weak. "Why did they shoot you?" she had asked him. - -"I refused to kneel," he said. - -Larisa urged him to lie back and placed her purse under his head. She inspected his wound. The bone had been shattered. Blood flowed freely. She tried using a belt as a tourniquet but could not position it. Sweat beaded his forehead. His son, Sarmat, six, sat beside him in a white shirt and black vest, watching his father slip away. - -Larisa had not wanted to come to school that day. Her six-year-old son, Zaurbek, was starting first grade, but she had asked Madina, her nineteen-year-old daughter, to bring him. Her husband had died of stomach cancer in April. She was in mourning and felt no urge to celebrate. But after they left, Larisa looked outside at the crowds moving to the school. Go with them, a voice told her, and she rushed to her balcony. "Wait for me!" she called down. - -Now she leaned over a bleeding man, struggling to save him. Her daughter was enrolled at a medical academy. "You are a future doctor," Larisa whispered. "What do I do?" - -"There is no way to save him," Madina said. "His artery is damaged. He needs an operation." - -Larisa felt fury. She would not let him die. She shouted at a terrorist across the room. "We need water and bandages!" she said. No one answered. She shouted again. She was breaking rules. The terrorist approached. "Why are you yelling?" he said. - -"I need bandages," she said. - -"Are you the bravest person here, or the smartest?" he said. "We will check." His voice turned sharp: "Stand up!" - -Bolloyev grabbed her shirt. "Do not go," he said. Larisa slipped free and stood, and the terrorist shoved her with his rifle toward a corner where confiscated cameras and phones had been piled and smashed. - -"What are you doing?" she demanded. - -He ordered her to kneel. "No," she said. - -For this Bolloyev had been shot. "I told you," he said. "Get on your knees." - -"No," she said. - -For a moment they faced each other, the terrorist and the mother, locked in mental battle. She looked into his mask; freckles were visible near his eyes. A hush fell over the gym. The hostages had seen Betrozov's murder. Now came Larisa's turn. The terrorist raised his Kalashnikov, past her chest, past her face, stopping at her forehead. He pressed the muzzle against her brow. Larisa felt the circle of steel on her skin. - -Bolloyev propped himself on an elbow. Larisa's children looked on. She reached up, grasped the barrel, and moved it away. "What kind of spectacle are you playing here, and in front of whom?" she snapped. "There are women and children here who are already scared." - -The terrorist paused. Thinking quickly, she tried to convince him that Ossetians were not enemies of Chechens, a difficult task, given that enmity between Ossetians, a Christian people with a history of fidelity to Moscow, and the Islamic Chechens and Ingush, who have long been persecuted, is deep. "Your children rest in our sanatoriums," she said. "Your women give birth here." - -"Not our wives and children," the terrorist said. "They are the spawn of Kadyrov." - -The word stung. Kadyrov-the surname of former rebels who aligned with Russia and became the Kremlin's proxies. The separatists despised them with a loathing reserved for traitors. Larisa was stumped. Abdullah had been rushing across the gym; he stepped beside them. "What is happening here?" he said. - -"This guy wants to execute me because I asked for water and bandages for the wounded," she said. Abdullah studied the two: his young gunman, the woman who stared him down. - -"There is nothing for you here," he said. "Go back and sit down and shut up." - -She pointed to his bloodied arm. "Your arm is bandaged," she said. "Give me some of those bandages." - -"You did not understand me?" he said. "There is nothing for you here. Go back and sit down and shut up." - -Larisa returned to her place. Her children stared at her. Bolloyev lay back down. His lips were violet, his forehead coated in sweat. His death could not be far away. She was enraged. - -# Afternoon. The Gym. - -Zalina Levina could not console her granddaughter, Amina, and did not know what to do. She had stripped the pink skirt and red shirt from the toddler's sweaty skin. It was not enough. Amina cried on, filling Zalina with dread. The terrorists had grown more irritable, and their threats were multiplying. "Shut your bastards up or I will calm them down fast," one had said. Zalina worried the child would be shot. - -Zalina knew Chechnya firsthand, having lived in Grozny, its capital, before the Soviet Union collapsed. She remembered its mountain vistas and orderly atmosphere. The city had industry, a university, an oil institute, a circus, a soccer stadium, and rows of apartment buildings on tree-lined streets. She also remembered its brutality. Nationalism had sprouted anew as Moscow's grip weakened. Old animosities reemerged. In the early 1990s, before the first Chechen war, a group of Chechen men had stolen her brother-in-law's car. "We give you a month to leave," one had said, "or we will return and burn down your house." The family fled to Beslan, sixty-five miles away, across what would become a military front. Zalina thought she had escaped the war. - -Now Amina kept crying and Zalina's anxiety grew. There seemed no reason for hope. The terrorists were demanding a withdrawal of federal troops from Chechnya, and if the hostages knew anything about Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, they knew he was unlikely to do this. Putin's success rested in part on his reputation for toughness. He was not one to grant concessions, certainly not to separatists, for whom his disdain was well-known. - -As they waited, the hostages were miserable in the heat. The gym was too crowded to allow for much movement, which forced them to take turns extending their legs. Others leaned back-to-back. The terrorists gave little relief. Sometimes they made everyone display their hands on their heads, fingers upright, like rabbit ears. Other times, when the gym became noisy with crying children, they selected a hostage to stand, then warned everyone: Shut up or he will be shot. But silence, like a federal withdrawal, was an almost impossible demand. Children can stay quiet for only so long. - -Amina cried and cried. I have to save this child, Zalina thought. She opened her dress and placed a nipple under Amina's nose. Zalina was forty-one years old and not the toddler's mother. But she thought that maybe Amina was young enough, and a warm nipple familiar enough, that any nipple, even her dry nipple, would provide comfort. Naked and sweaty, Amina took the breast. She began to suck. Her breathing slowed. Her body relaxed. She fell asleep. Be still, Zalina thought. Be still. - -# Afternoon. The Gym. - -Larisa Kudziyeva's defiance made her known to her captors, and in the hours after she was nearly shot, she noticed a terrorist staring at her. He was not wearing a mask and often turned his eyes toward her. He was just less than six feet tall, thick-armed and meticulous, possessing a seriousness the other terrorists seemed to respect. His camouflage pants were pressed. His black boots were laced tight. He had a freshly trimmed beard and eyes that lacked some of the bloodlust evident in the others. Larisa thought he must be in his early thirties, old enough to have waged guerrilla war for ten years. He was a negotiator and spent much of the time talking on a mobile phone with Russians outside. Between calls his eyes settled on Larisa. - -Her anger had not subsided. She had kept working on Bolloyev, pressing rags to his wound. Each came away soaked. The blood grew sticky and spoiled in the heat; Larisa never knew a man's blood could smell so bad, like a butcher's drain. She shouted for aid again, for water, for bandages, but no one listened. As he was dying, Bolloyev asked for his daughters, who were also in the gym, and Larisa called to them. The terrorists punished her by posting a shahidka beside her with a pistol and instructions to shoot if she made another noise. Bolloyev weakened further and asked his son, Sarmat, to recite his address and names of relatives, as if he knew he would die and wanted the boy to rehearse his lines to rescuers, should they find him alone. - -As Bolloyev faded, pallid and shivering, Abdullah ordered him dragged away. "Where are you taking him?" Larisa demanded. - -"To the hospital," he said. - -She knew it was not true, and fumed. Later, as the temperature soared, she took a group of children to the bathroom. Returning, she sat beside the one who stared. There was a connection here. She intended to use it. - -"You are probably the only person who can tell us something about our fate," she said. - -He looked at her, up close for the first time. She had washed away Bolloyev's blood. "You will stay here until the last federal troops leave Chechnya," he said. - -"That is not a one-day matter," she said. - -"Once negotiations start, you will have everything," he said. "Food. Water. Everything." - -He sat with his rifle and phone, an underground fighter who had stepped into view. Men like this lived in Russia's shadows, biding time, praying, emerging on occasion to kill. Once a constant presence on television, they had disappeared into their insurgency. Now the hostages' lives were under his control. "What is your name?" she asked. - -"Ali," he said. It was not a name common to the mountains. - -"Is that a name or a nickname?" - -"I see you are a wise woman," he said. - -"Answer the question," she said. "A man should have a name. This is what differentiates him from an animal." - -"It is a nickname," he said. "Now I am Ali. In the previous time, I was Baisangur." - -"And your real name?" she said. - -"I no longer need it," he said. "There is not a person left alive who can call me by my name." - -Baisangur -- a legendary Chechen warrior who had fought Russia in the nineteenth century, part of a generation revered in separatist lore. The most famous of these fighters had been Imam Shamil, whose name passed through generations to Shamil Basayev, the one-footed separatist commander whose wisecracking practice of terrorism made him Russia's most wanted man. Basayev planned hostage seizures and recruited shahidkas; the terrorists in this gym prepared under his command. Baisangur's martial pedigree was more pure. The original Shamil had been captured and accepted a pardon from the czar. Baisangur fought to his death. - -Yes, once he had been Baisangur, and before that he used his real name. But years ago, Ali said, as Russia was trying to quell their rebellion, a warplane took off from this area and dropped bombs on a Chechen village. There were no men where the bombs landed. But the village was not empty. It was crowded with families. Those bombs, he said, exploded among his wife and five children. Everyone who loved him was dead. He looked at Larisa, the incandescent one. "My wife looked just like you," he said. "Even twins do not look so alike." - -Larisa needed information; she pushed. "What is the name of your village?" she asked. - -"You do not need to know it," he said. "You do not know what is happening in Chechnya." - -# August 30. Shortly After Dawn. Chechnya. - -The road to Grozny runs southward across a plain toward the sparkling and snowcapped Caucasus ridge, a setting so empyreal that had history been different it might be a land of fable. As the road continues on, crossing the swirling Terek River, bunkers and checkpoints appear, first occasionally and then frequently, from which sunburned Slavic soldiers look wearily out. Chechnya is a dot on Russia's vastness, an internal republic the size of Connecticut. But the Kremlin covets and fears it, and has flowed soldiers and police over its borders, ringing it with layers of security and denying most access to outsiders. It is a war zone and a region whose recent inner workings are largely unknown. - -Short of the capital, the terrain becomes steep and scarred with artillery trenches, from which Russian batteries long ago fired their barrages. The city beyond these hills is a ruin, a warren of rubble and shattered buildings in which many of the remaining inhabitants camp in the wreckage of their homes. In the annals of recent conflict, few places have seen such a multiplicity of horrors and then fallen so swiftly from the public discourse. After Chechnya declared independence in 1991, prompting Russia to invade three years later, the Chechens became a source of fascination in the West. They were tribesmen who merged mountain traditions with modern life, an Islamic people speaking their own language, bound by ancient codes of honor and hospitality, and seeking independence as they fought armored columns in front of their homes. Their symbol was the wolf, but they were underdogs, local people who seemed to win skirmishes against a world power with little more than rifles and the force of will. - -No matter those moments of military success, the Chechens' separatist urges have led nearly to their destruction. Russia and the rebels signed a cease-fire in 1996, and the Russian military withdrew, leaving behind a rebel-led government. Chechen independence and self-governance had been born. The result was disastrous. The young government, which inherited formidable problems and had little aid or revenue, was largely abandoned by the Kremlin, which seemed eager for it to fail. Inexperienced and prone to internal quarrels, it proved barely capable of governing and flashed an affinity for ancient notions of Islamic law, going so far as to show public executions on TV. Crime soared, corruption was unchecked, and ransom kidnappings became common enough to have the feel of an approved line of work. - -Whatever the merits of the conventional portrait of the Chechen rebel, war and rackets warped many of them out of popular form, leading them to lives of thuggery and organized crime. Chechnya's people waited for autonomy to improve their lot. But nationalism led to warlordism, and warlordism to more sinister associations. Some prominent commanders, including Shamil Basayev, allied themselves with international Islamic movements that had taken root in Pakistan and Afghanistan, steering the republic deeper into isolation and attracting foreign jihadis to the slopes of the Caucasus. With Basayev's blessing, a dark-maned Arab field commander who used the name Ibn al-Khattab and had fought in Afghanistan and Tajikistan opened training camps in the mountains. Recruits arrived from Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus, especially from nearby Ingushetia, and from Turkey, Central Asia, and Arabia. They studied weapons, tactics, and the manufacture of bombs. Under the sway of fighters, autonomous Chechnya was recognized by only one foreign government: Afghanistan's Taliban. - -Spurred by Prime Minister Putin, who was soon to become president, Russia sent its armor back to Chechnya in 1999. This time Russia fought unsparingly. With little regard for life or property, its military surrounded Grozny and pounded the capital with rockets, artillery, and aircraft, collapsing the city around the rebels. Sweeps and barrages destroyed villages and towns. The destruction was of an order not seen since World War II; Grozny's sagging hulks invited comparisons to Warsaw, 1944. The city fell early in 2000, and Putin, by then president, declared the battle ended. A new policy took shape. Russia would garrison troops and equipment and provide money, instructions, and political support. But local administration was to be handed over to Chechens deemed sufficiently loyal, a formula flowing from the institutional memory of a weakened empire. The appointment of proxies was accompanied by a message that became more hollow the more it was repeated on state TV: There is no war. We have won. - -No verified casualty counts exist for the wars, but all agree the human toll has been vast, ranging from tens of thousands of Chechens killed to more than two hundred thousand. Setting aside the numbers, the years of violence and atrocities made clear that as public policy, little could be less wise than extensive killing in Chechnya, where tradition asks blood to be washed in blood. Chechens are bound by adat, an oral code that compels families to avenge the killing of their relatives. By the time President Putin claimed victory, enough blood had been spilled for a fury lasting generations. It mixed not just tribal urges for revenge and independence but racism and militant Islam. - -The war that did not exist continued. Unable to defend Grozny conventionally, the rebels formed guerrilla bands, hiding amid the local populace and in nearby Russian republics and traveling between Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, where the Chechen diaspora is large. Islamic unrest expanded through Russia's territory in the Caucasus, and underground jamaats with connections to the Chechens formed in at least six of the region's internal republics. A rhythm emerged. Almost daily the separatists or their allies would stage small attacks or plant mines, and occasionally they would mass for large raids. In response to a spreading insurgency, the Russians set out to annihilate it, raiding homes in search of young men and generating complaints of rape, torture, robbery, and abduction. Macabre profiteering took hold, including sales of corpses back to families for burial. - -Terrorism had been part of the separatists' struggle since before the first war. Basayev's debut was as an airplane hijacker in 1991; mass hostage-taking began in 1995. But as death tolls rose and separatists were driven further underground, more turned to terrorism, then suicide terrorism. The rebels destroyed Chechnya's seat of government with a truck bomb in 2002 and assassinated the Kremlin-backed president in 2004. At the center was Basayev, sardonic and lame. His terrorist group, the Riyadus-Salakhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, included ethnic fighters from the Caucasus and foreigners, including Arabs and a few Europeans. - -A nationalist turned nihilist, Basayev made clear he thought Russian civilians were fair targets. After scores of hostages died at the theater in Moscow, he suggested Russia suffered what it deserved. "It turned out that these were innocent civilians who had gone to the theater for recreation," he wrote. "In this regard, you have to ask yourself: Who are the more than three thousand children aged under ten who died during the three years of the brutal and bloody war in Chechnya? Who are the more than four thousand children who lost their legs, arms, eyes, who ended up paralyzed? Who are the thirty-five hundred missing people who have been abducted from their homes or detained in the streets by the Russian occupiers and whose fate remains a mystery? Who are the two hundred thousand slain women, elderly, ill, children, and men? Who are they?" - -Blood meets blood. Such were the rules in Basayev's war. And this time he was not sending terrorists to a theater. He had ordered them to a school. - -# Evening. The Execution Room. - -Sometime after 5:00 p.m., while sitting in the hall with other male hostages, Aslan Kudzayev overheard the terrorists listening to the news on a radio. The announcer was discussing the siege, and Aslan understood that the world knew the students of Beslan were hostages. It was his first taste of the outside world since the siege had enveloped them, and it gave him a vague sense that they would be helped. - -A few minutes later the Colonel appeared and ordered him and Albert Sidakov, another hostage, down the hall. Their walk ended in a literature classroom on the second floor, where eight dead men, broken by bullets, lay in a pool of blood. A portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the revolutionary poet, hung on the far wall, which had been chipped by bullet impacts. Aslan understood. Throughout the day, men had been led off in small groups. Those who had not returned had been taken here and shot. As he and the others had sat downstairs, fingers interlocked behind their necks, the terrorists had realized the job of fortifying the school was done. Male hostages had become expendable. They were being culled. - -"Open the window and throw these corpses out," the Colonel said. - -Aslan and Albert lifted the first body to the sill and shoved it out. They moved to the next. So this is how Aslan would spend the last minutes of his life: When the eighth body was pushed onto the grass, he knew, he and Albert would be shot. Time was short. He glanced around the room. The Colonel was gone. A lone terrorist guarded them. Aslan assumed the terrorists would not throw out the bodies themselves, for fear of snipers. He and Albert were valuable for a few minutes more. They pushed out two more of the bullet-riddled men, including one who seemed to still be alive. Aslan leaned and pretended to retch. - -The terrorist had removed the magazine from his Kalashnikov and was reloading it, round by round. "Let's jump out the window," Aslan whispered to Albert. - -Albert was silent. "Let's jump," he whispered again. - -"How?" Albert said, looking overwhelmed. - -Aslan realized that if he was going to leap, he was going to leap alone. Their guard's rifle was unloaded. This was it. He bent to another corpse, then rushed toward the bloody sill. He hit in a push-up position and propelled himself out. The drop was eighteen feet, and he descended and slammed onto the bodies in a crouch. A bone in his foot popped. He rolled toward the school wall, reducing the angle the terrorist would have to fire at him, and began crawling away from the window. He worried the terrorist would drop a grenade. Gunfire sounded. - -The terrorist's mask appeared in the window. The wall was nearly two feet thick, making it difficult for him to fire near the foundation without leaning far. He opted to try. His barrel blasted. Bullets thudded near Aslan. Bits of soil and grass jumped beside him. He scurried to the building's corner. Before him was a parking lot. He crawled on, putting cars between him and the window. The terrorist did not know where he was and fired into several cars, searching. - -Aslan heard shouts. At the edge of nearby buildings, local men with the police and soldiers waved him to safety. He was so close, but an instant from death. The police had been told that if they harmed a terrorist, hostages would be executed in return. They held their fire. More bullets struck cars. A soldier threw a smoke grenade, hoping to obscure the terrorist's line of sight. It sent up a plume, which drifted the wrong way. Someone threw another, and a third, and a cloud rose between Aslan and his tormentor. He crawled with all of his speed and reached a railroad ditch in front of the school. He rolled in and lay still on the dirt. His white outfit was covered with grass stains and blood. Aslan was out. His wife, two daughters, and mother-in-law were still inside. - -# Evening. The Main Hall and Execution Room. - -Karen Mdinaradze was not supposed to be here. He kneeled in the hall, his nose near the plaster, hands behind his head. Male hostages were lined up the same way to his right. To his left was a thin older man. Beyond him stood a shahidka, keeping watch. - -Karen's luck was worse than bad. He was not a resident of Beslan. He was a videographer, hired to videotape Aslan's daughter Dzera during her role as bell ringer. He had not wanted the job, but Aslan persisted, and finally Karen gave in. He had been framing the girl in his viewfinder when the terrorists arrived. So far he was untouched, but he suffered a banal affliction. Karen was highly allergic to pollen, and many children had come to school with flowers and had carried them to the gym when they were captured, surrounding him with irritants. His eyes had reddened. His breathing was short. He felt luck running down. At about 3:00 p.m. a terrorist ordered him to the hall. Although he looked strong-he was built like a wrestler-his allergies drained him. Fatigue settled over him with the arrival of dusk. - -The woman near him exploded. - -There had been no warning. One second she was standing there, a veiled woman in black. The next she was not, having been torn apart in a roaring flash. The explosives cut her to pieces, throwing her head and legs into the geography classroom. Much of her flesh splashed along the walls. Shrapnel and heat shot out from the belt, striking the men in the corridor as well as another terrorist who guarded them, who was knocked to the floor. The other shahidka was also pierced with shrapnel. She fell, blood running from her nose. Karen felt heat and debris smack his left side. His left eye went dim. But the older man between him and the shahidka had absorbed much of the shrapnel, creating a shadow in which Karen was spared the worst. He was briefly unconscious, but came to, slumped forward against the wall. He thought he was dying and traced his palms along his face and head. His eyelid was torn, and he had shrapnel in his face and left calf. Heat had seared his salt-and-pepper hair, making it feel like brittle wire. Someone handed him a handkerchief and he wiped his face, pulling out plaster. "If I die, tell my mother and wife I love them very much," he told the man. - -He surveyed the gruesome space. The thin man beside him, who had shielded him, breathed fitfully. His hips and legs faced the wrong direction, as if his lower spine had spun around. Karen knew he was in the last minutes of life. The injured terrorist had been set on a door removed from its hinges, and Abdullah knelt beside him, reading in Arabic in the lilting rhythm of prayer. Someone produced a syringe. The terrorist was given an injection, became still, and was carried away. After a few minutes a terrorist addressed the wounded. "Go to the second floor and we will provide you medical assistance," he said. - -Karen stood with those who were able and limped upstairs to the Russian-literature classroom, and saw dead hostages piled on the floor. The injured men were given an order: "Lie down." - -Their lives ended in an instant. A masked terrorist stepped forward, shouted, "Allahu akhbar!" and fired bursts from fifteen feet away, sweeping his barrel back and forth. The air filled with their cries and the thwacks of bullets hitting heavy flesh. The men rolled and thrashed. Errant bullets pounded the wall. At last the hostages were motionless, and the terrorist released the trigger. He pulled a chair to the door and straddled it with the hot barrel resting in front of him. He was listening. A moan rose from the pile. He fired again. - -He remained for a few minutes, watching, listening. The room fell still. The night was warm. He rose and walked away. - -# Night. The Palace of Culture. - -Outside the school, Russia's local and federal authorities struggled to react to the hostage crisis, whose scale and ferocity had overwhelmed them. - -Although the main Beslan police station was practically next to the school, its officers had not mustered a coordinated effort to aid the women and children. Federal soldiers from the 58th Army in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia's capital, had flowed into Beslan during the day, joined by commandos from the former KGB, members of the famed units known as Alpha and Vympel. But so far the most anyone had done was form a disorganized perimeter, a cordon with uncertain orders and under uncertain command. The tactical leaders on the ground, in fact, seemed so unschooled in tactics that their cordon's outer limit was within range of the terrorists' small-arms fire, and families of the missing, who roamed the edges, were occasionally exposed to the 40mm grenades the terrorists fired out. A sense of logistics escaped these officials as well. No fire-fighting equipment was staged. There were few ambulances. Many of the soldiers were lightly equipped, without the helmets or body armor they would need in a close-quarters fight. - -Just beyond the window from which Aslan Kudzayev had leapt, within earshot of the executions, a vigil had formed. Relatives massed at the Palace of Culture, a grandly named Soviet movie house, consoling one another and worrying over the possibility of a Russian assault. They were a living picture of fear. Some were numb. Some were despondent. Hundreds paced. Many displayed the deflated calm of the helpless, people whose families were at stake but who had no influence over what came next. Now and then gunfire would sound. There would be a collective flinch. A few women would wail. Every few hours, Russian and local officials would leave the administration building, walk past the statue of Lenin, and brief the families in the palace. Each time they assured them they were doing all they could. And each time they said the terrorists had seized roughly 300 hostages, which was a lie. - -# Night. The Execution Room. - -Karen Mdinaradzelay in the spreading pool of blood. It was dark. The room was quiet. The terrorist had fired without taking precise aim, relying on the automatic rifle to cut through the pile of men, and had missed one man. As bullets killed everyone around Karen, he fell behind a man who must have weighed 285 pounds. This man had been struck. Karen was not. He survived his own execution. After his executioner walked away, he lost sense of time. He saw the chair in the doorway and the open window and wanted to leap out. But he heard footsteps and was afraid. - -In time the terrorist returned with two more hostages and ordered them to dump the bodies. Corpse by corpse they lifted the dead to the sill and shoved them out. The pile grew on the grass below. Three corpses remained when they came to Karen. He did not know what to do. He assumed the two men would be shot when their task was done and assumed he would be shot if he was discovered alive. But he knew he could not be thrown out the window; the drop was eighteen feet. The men bent to lift him. He felt a pair of hands clasp behind his neck and hands tighten on his ankles. He rolled forward and stood. - -The men gasped. Karen rocked on his feet. - -The terrorist told Karen to come near and stared at him, eyes moving under his mask as he surveyed his intact frame. "You walk under Allah," he said. - -"Now throw out the rest of the corpses and I will tell you what to do next." - -Two bodies remained, including that of the heavy man behind whom Karen had fallen. He lifted him by the belt as the other two took the legs and head and pushed him out. Another terrorist appeared, and the two captors pointed excitedly; Karen realized they had decided not to kill him. The three hostages were ordered downstairs to wash, then led to the gym. - -Karen sat. His head was cut and bruised, his left eye blinded, his clothes drenched in blood. A woman near him whispered -- "Did they hit you with a rifle butt?" -- and he passed out. - -# September 2. Before Dawn. The Bathroom. - -Zalina Levina rose at midnight. Rain was falling. Many of the children slept. The terrorists had not granted bathroom privileges for hours, but now the gym was quieter, and she wanted to try again. The bathroom was not lined with bombs; she thought she might hide with her granddaughter there. None of the terrorists stopped her, and she carried Amina into the room and sat. Her neighbor Fatima Tskayeva was already there, cradling her baby, Alyona, as rain pattered outside. - -Whispering in the darkness, Fatima told of signs of dissent in the terrorists' ranks. The shahidkas, she said, seemed to have been deceived, as if they had not known they would be targeting children. One of them had used the bathroom in the evening, and was menstruating and upset. Now, Fatima said, the shahidkas were dead, killed in an explosion hours before. Fatima also said that some of their captors were capable of compassion. Her other daughter, Kristina, ten, whose heart was weak, had fainted earlier. Abdullah had picked up the girl and given her a tablet of validol, an herbal medicine for tension and heart pain. None of this made sense to Zalina, and she wondered about her own daughter. What would she think of Zalina bringing Amina to the school? Amina was not a student. There was no reason for her to be here. I have to save this child, she thought. - -Under a desk stacked in the barricade she saw a lump of dried chewing gum. Zalina peeled it free, rolled it into a ball, and put it in her mouth. Slowly she worked it between her teeth, softening it with saliva. A faint taste of sugar spread on her tongue. It was food. She kept pressing and rolling it between her teeth, restoring it to something like what it had been. The gum absorbed more saliva and softened. It was ready. She plucked it from her lips and fed it to the toddler in her arms. - -# Morning. The Gym. - -The Colonel stormed onto the court. Negotiations, he said, were failing. Russia was not responding, and was lying, saying only 354 hostages were in this room. "Your president is a coward," he snarled. "He does not answer the phone." - -For these reasons, he said, he had announced a strike. There would be no more water and no food for the hostages. Bathroom privileges had ceased. The terrorists had told Russia's negotiators, he said, that in solidarity with their cause the hostages had agreed to these terms. - -# Late Morning. The Gym. - -Abdullah pulled aside Larisa Kudziyeva, the commanding presence in a gym full of fear. He wanted to know who she was. A Chechen, or perhaps a member of another of the Islamic mountain people in the Caucasus? - -"Do you have your passport with you?" he asked. - -"Why should I bring my passport to a school?" she said. - -"Are you Ingush?" he asked. - -"No," she said. - -"What is your last name?" - -"Kudziyeva." - -He studied her black clothes. "Why are you dressed like that?" he asked. - -"It is how I choose," she said. Her defiance was almost reflexive. - -Abdullah proceeded with his offer. The shahidkas were dead, but an explosive belt remained. This hostage, who could look into her executioner's barrel without flinching, was a candidate to wear it. - -"We will release your children, and if you have relatives, we will release them, too," he said. "But for this you will have to put on a suicide belt and a veil and become one of our suicide bombers." - -Larisa wondered about the shahidkas. "Where are yours?" she asked. - -"Yesterday your soldiers tried to storm the building and they died," he said. It was a lie. - -"I am afraid I may spoil everything -- I am not a Muslim," she said. "How much time do I have to decide?" - -"You have time," he said. "Sit down and think." - -She returned to her children. The women nearby were curious. The temperature had risen again. The crowd was weak. "What did he want?" a woman asked. Larisa told them. "Do it," the woman said. "Maybe they will let us go." - -# Afternoon. The Gym. - -Kazbek Misikov felt the wire separate between his fingers. His task was done: Inside its insulation, the wire had broken. But chance contact, he knew, might still allow a spark to jump across, and he needed to be sure the two ends could not meet incidentally. This required a finishing touch, and Kazbek grasped the blue plastic on either side of the crimp and stretched it like licorice, putting distance between the severed ends inside. - -Now a new problem presented itself. Stretching the plastic had turned it a whitish blue. The defect was obvious. The terrorists had inspected the wires and bombs several times, and if they checked again, they would discover his subterfuge. - -He felt a surge of worry. He and his wife had made it this far and had agreed on a plan: If the Russians attacked, Irina would help Batraz, their older son, and Kazbek would help Atsamaz, their first grader. Atsamaz was exhausted and dehydrated. Kazbek often looked into his eyes, and at times they seemed switched off. But he had found a way to keep him going. Other adults had whispered that it was possible to drink small amounts of urine. Kazbek had collected their pee. "I want a Coke," Atsamaz had said when told to drink it. - -"After we leave, I will buy you a case of Coke," Kazbek said. The boy drank. - -Now Kazbek had put them in fresh danger and would have to take another risk. When a terrorist strolled past him, he addressed him politely. "This wire lies across the passage," he said. "They are tripping on it. Neither you nor we need these to explode." - -"What can be done?" the terrorist said. - -"If we had a nail, the wire could be hung," Kazbek said. - -The terrorist returned with a hammer and spike. Kazbek stood and drove the spike into the wall. He lifted the wire from the floor and laid a few turns around the shank, taking care to wrap with the whitish-blue section. He put a wooden spool on the spike and pressed it tight. The severed portion of wire was hidden. Kazbek had succeeded. He sat back with his family beneath the disconnected bomb. - -# Afternoon. The Bathroom. - -Zalina Levina and Fatima Tskayeva hid in the bathroom with their small children. Hours passed; more breast-feeding mothers with babies pushed in, seeking relief from the heat. The place became a nursery. - -Abdullah passed by and taunted them. "Maybe we have something to tell you," he said. Fatima begged for information. He laughed. Two hours later he offered a hint. "If they let him come in, maybe we will let the breast-fed children out," he said. - -Zalina's mind whirled. Who was coming? - -At about 3:00 p.m., a new man passed the door. He was tall and well built, with a thick mustache and graying hair. He wore a clean gray sport coat. They recognized him at once: Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, a republic bordering Chechnya, and a decorated Soviet veteran from Afghanistan. Aushev commanded respect among both his people and Chechnya's separatists. But he had been ousted by Putin, replaced by a loyalist from the KGB. Aushev's career stalled. In the nursery, he was the most important man in the world. - -Zalina felt hope. Aushev! she thought. We will be let go! Applause sounded in the gym. Aushev stopped before them. A terrorist pointed in. "Here are the women with breast-fed children," he said. - -"Do you know who I am?" Aushev asked. - -"Of course," a mother said. He turned and left. The women rose, holding their babies, shaking with anticipation. They had been captives for more than thirty hours, without food, with little water, and with no sleep. There had been shooting and explosions. Their babies could take no more. Soon they might start to die. Abdullah stood at the door. "We will release you," he said. "But if you point out our photographs to the police, we will know immediately, and we will kill fifty hostages. It will be on your conscience." - -"Now," he said, "one breast-fed child with one woman." He motioned for them to go. - -Fatima was near the door. She did not move. "Let me take all of my children," she pleaded, reminding Abdullah of her two others, including Kristina, with the weak heart. "You helped her yourself," she said. "Let us all go." - -"No," he said. - -"Let my children out. I will stay." - -"No." - -Fatima sobbed now. "Then let Kristina leave with my baby," she begged. - -Abdullah's anger flashed. "I told you, bitch, no," he said. "Now I am not releasing anyone because of you." - -He looked at the other women. "Everyone back to the gym," he said. Panic flowed through Zalina. Sweeping up her granddaughter, she stepped past Abdullah. Rather than turning left for the gym, she turned right, toward the main school. She had decided. I am leaving, she thought. Let them shoot me in the back. - -Another terrorist blocked her. "Where are you going?" he said. - -She tilted her head at Abdullah. "He allowed me," she said, and brushed past. The main hall was a few yards away. The walk seemed a kilometer. Zalina passed through the door and saw Aushev by the exit at the end of the hall. She moved toward him. He waved her on. - -Zalina walked barefoot in quick strides, Amina's cheek tight to her own. Her heart pounded. Would she be shot? She did not look back. The corridor was littered with bits of glass. She did not feel it nicking her feet. Behind her the other women followed. A chain of mothers and babies was making its way out, twenty-six people in all. - -Zalina focused on the door. She passed Aushev, who stood with the Colonel. "Thank you very much," she said. The exit was barricaded with tables, and a terrorist slid them aside and opened the door. Air tumbled in, and light. She stepped out. - -Behind her in the corridor, Fatima Tskayeva wailed as she carried Alyona, her infant. She could not go any more. Sobbing, she handed the baby to a terrorist in a black T-shirt and mask. She had two more children here. She had decided to stay. The terrorist carried Alyona down the hall to Aushev and handed him the child. Fatima's cries pierced the corridor. - -Outside, Zalina rushed Amina past the place where the assembly had been the day before. Discarded flowers were on the ground. A man shouted from a roof. "There are snipers," he said. "Run!" - -The line of women followed, and together they approached the perimeter. An aid station was waiting with medicine, food, and water. Zalina knew nothing of it. She trotted for her apartment, which was inside the perimeter, reached the entrance, climbed the stairs, and stood at her door. She had no key. She banged. It had been a mistake to bring Amina to school. It had been a mistake to have been taken hostage. But the terrorists had mistaken her for a breast-feeding mother. It was their mistake that she was out. They were free. Amina was alive. Who had a key? She descended the stairs to the entrance. Four Russian troops approached. - -"Give me the child," one said, extending his arms. Amina saw their camouflage and began to howl. "Do not touch her," Zalina snapped. "No one will touch her." - -# Evening. The Gym. - -Karen Mdinaradze slipped in and out of consciousness. Once he awoke to see a woman over him, fanning him, another time to find children cleaning his wound with a cloth soaked in urine. He awoke again. A teenaged girl thrust an empty plastic bottle to him and asked him to urinate in it. - -"Turn your eyes away," he said, and he pressed the bottle against himself and slowly peed. He finished and handed the bottle back. The girl and her friends thanked him and quickly poured drops to wash their faces. Then each sipped from the bottle, passing it among themselves, and returned it to him. Karen's dehydration was advanced; his throat burned. He poured a gulp of the warm liquid into his mouth and across his tongue, letting it pool around his epiglottis. The moisture alleviated some of the pain. He swallowed. - -He looked at the bottle. A bit remained. A very old woman in a scarf was gesturing to him, asking for her turn. He passed the bottle on. - -September 3. Past Midnight. The Weight Room. - -Irina Naldikoyeva picked her way by the hostages dozing on the floor. Her daughter, Alana, was feverish. The gym was connected to a small weight-lifting room, which had become an informal infirmary. Irina asked permission from a terrorist to move Alana there. He nodded, and she carried the drowsy child and laid her on the room's cool floor. Perhaps fifty people rested in the space, mostly children and elderly hostages. - -A water pipe was leaking, and, unsolicited, a small boy came to them and gave Alana a cup of water. She drank thirstily and lay down. Gradually her breathing slowed and deepened. She drifted to sleep. Irina returned to the gym, retrieved her son, and placed him beside his sister. - -After several hours caressing the children, Irina dozed off, the first time since they were taken hostage that she had slept. Her father appeared. He had died several months earlier, but his face hovered before her, an apparition with gray hair. He did not speak. Nor did she. They looked into each other's eyes. - -After perhaps twenty minutes, she woke. Her father, Timofey Naldikoyev, had been a gentle man, quiet and kind. She had never dreamed of him before. She wondered: What does it mean? - -# Morning. The Gym. - -Forty-eight hours after the hostages had been taken captive, the survivors were sliding to despair. They were beginning their third day without food, and their second without water. Almost all had slept only in snatches through two nights. They were dehydrated, filthy, weak, and drained by fear. They slumped against one another and the walls. The terrorists seemed tired, too, frayed and aware that their demands were being ignored. They had become nastier and drove the hostages out of the weight room to the gym, shoving some with rifles. - -As the sun climbed and the temperature again began to rise, the two terrorists who specialized in explosives roamed the court. Their explosives were arranged in at least two circuits-the more visible one connecting the hanging bombs. A second circuit wired together a string of bombs on the floor, including two large bombs. The terrorists moved this second chain near one of the walls. Irina Naldikoyeva watched, struggling to stay alert. She was massaging her son, waiting for a sign. - -# Minutes After 1:00 p.m. The Gym. - -The explosion was a thunderclap, a flash of energy and heat, shaking the gym. Twenty-two seconds later a second blast rocked the gym again. Their combined force was ferocious. Together they blew open the structure, throwing out the plastic windows, splattering the walls with shrapnel, and heaving people and human remains through the room. One of the blasts punched a seventy-eight-inch-wide hole through a brick wall twenty-five inches thick, cascading bricks and mortar onto the lawn. It also lifted the roof and rafters above the hole, snapping open a corner of the building like a clam before gravity slammed the roof back down. Much of the ceiling fell onto the hostages below. - -Scores of hostages were killed outright. Their remains were heaped near the fresh hole and scattered across the basketball court. But most survived, hundreds of people in various states of injury. At first they hardly moved. Many were knocked senseless. Some were paralyzed by fright. Others, worried about another blast, pressed to the floor. At last they began to stir, and escape. - -Dzera Kudzayeva, the first-grade girl who was to have been the bell ringer, had been near the blast that knocked out the wall. She had been asleep under her grandmother, Tina Dudiyeva, whose body had seemed to rise above her with the shock wave. The child stood now, and seeing sunlight through the hole, she scampered out, over the shattered bricks and onto the lawn. She began to run. She had arrived on Wednesday in a dress with a white apron and ribbons; she left now in only panties, filthy, streaked in blood, sprinting. She crossed the open courtyard and lot and came to the soldiers who ringed the school. She was free. The sound of automatic weapons began to rise. - -The hole was only one route. The pressure of the explosions had thrown the windowpanes clear of their frames, exposing the room to light and air. The hostages reacted instinctually. A desperate scramble began. The sills were a little more than four feet above the floor, and throughout the room many of those who were not badly injured rushed to the sills, pulled themselves up, and dropped out to the ground. - -Karen Mdinaradze had been unconscious on the floor and had not been struck by shrapnel. He woke, heard moaning, and found himself surrounded by gore. Human remains had rained down; two girls near him were covered by a rope of intestine. He saw people hurdling the windows, mustered his energy, stumbled to the sill, and followed them out. - -He landed in the courtyard and ran in a panicked human herd. A mother weaved in front, pulling her small boy. Bullets snapped overhead. They dashed across the courtyard toward the far corner, following those in front toward a gap in the fence. The mother went down. Her son stopped. "Mama!" he screamed. Karen bent and scooped the boy with his right hand as he ran past, pulling him tight like a loose ball. He charged for the fence opening and passed through it and out of the line of fire. Beside him was a small metal garage. He placed the boy inside. The mother ran around the corner. She had not been shot. She had stumbled. She fell atop her boy, sobbing. Soldiers, police officers, and local men were hunched and running toward them; Karen stumbled on, one-eyed and bloody, until a man hooked an arm under him and steered him down the street to an ambulance, which drove him away. - -The first rush of escapes was over. Back in the gym, Aida Archegova had been leaning against the wall opposite a large bomb and had been stunned by the explosions. A piece of ceiling had fallen on her. She woke to glimpse her older son, Arsen, eleven, scrambling out. She recognized him by his blue briefs, which she had folded dozens of times. She did not see her younger boy. She pushed aside the ceiling and scanned the room. Where is Soslan? Gunfire boomed. A terrorist stood at the door, shouting. "Those who are alive and want to live, move to the center of the gym," he said. - -Aida picked her way through the corpses and mortally injured, looking for Soslan. He was not among them. A boy about four years old told her he was looking for his brother. She took his hand and led him to the door and told him to wait. Another boy approached her, and a girl about twelve. "I am scared," the boy said. The girl said her sister was dying. Bullets zipped through the gym, the tracers glowing red, smacking walls. "Lie down here and wait," she said. "You may be killed." - -Terrorists clustered in the hall, and Abdullah approached and ordered the hostages to follow. They formed a line, and he led them down the long hall to the cafeteria, a light-blue room where perhaps forty hostages were sitting or lying on the floor. Terrorists ducked behind barricades at the windows, firing out. Buckets of water rested on the table, with cookies and salted cabbage. The children took bowls and dipped them. Some drank six or seven bowls, unable to slake their thirst, and then began to eat with their hands. - -Abdullah ordered the women to the windows. "Put the children there as well," he said. Aida froze. Bullets buzzed and popped through the air, pecking the brick facade, pocking the plaster walls. "If children are there, then they will not shoot and you will be safe," Abdullah said. - -Six large windows faced the front of the school, each with steel bars, which prevented escape. Aida stepped to a middle window, lifted a boy who appeared to be about seven, and laid him on the sill. She took her place beside him. She made a highly visible target, her black hair falling on a red blouse. Her feet were on broken glass. The Russians were advancing. Abdullah ordered her to shout to them. She found a piece of curtain and held it through the bars, waving it. Other mothers were being used the same way. Beside her, Lora Karkuzashvili, a waitress at a local restaurant, frantically waved a strip of cloth. They were human shields. "Do not shoot!" the women screamed. "Do not shoot!" - -# 1:10 p.m. The Gym and the Weight Room. - -Atsamaz stood over his unconscious father. "Papa!" he shouted. "Papa!" - -His father, Kazbek, was stunned. Inside his haze he heard the boy and remembered his agreement with his wife. He was to get Atsamaz out. He opened his eyes. The bomb overhead had not exploded. It still hung there. He saw Atsamaz and looked for his wife, Irina, crawling to Batraz, their older son, who was curled lifelessly on the floor. She rolled him over. "Batik!" she screamed. - -Both of her eardrums had been ruptured, making even her own voice seem muffled. "Batik!" she shouted. He did not move. He was wearing only black pants. Blood ran from his left knee. "Batik!" - -Batraz stirred. Irina cradled him, urging him toward alertness. - -The survivors were in motion. At the opposite wall, children were going out the window, using the body of a fat old woman as a step. One by one they scrambled over the corpse, becoming silhouettes in the window frame, and then were gone. Tracers zipped in; Kazbek worried his family would be shot. - -He wrapped Atsamaz with his arms and lurched to the weight room. Putting Atsamaz down, he saw that the boy was covered in someone else's blood. Kazbek inspected himself. A chunk of his left forearm was gone, as if it had been cut away with a sharp scoop. Blood pulsed from the wound. His right arm was injured, too; a bullet, he thought, must have passed through it. - -He felt weak. If he were to keep bleeding like this, he knew, he did not have much time. He pulled a bright orange curtain toward him, made bandages, and tried to stop his bleeding. His head was injured, too, with cuts and burns. After dressing his arms, he tied a piece across his scalp, making a garish turban, and sat down. There were three windows, each covered with bars. They were trapped. - -About a dozen hostages were in the room, including Larisa Kudziyeva and her family, and Sarmat, Vadim Bolloyev's small son. Larisa had been at the entrance to the weight room at the instant of the first explosion, standing beside Ibragim, one of the terrorists. The blast had knocked them to the floor together and entangled their legs. Ibragim had seemed surprised. After the second blast, he rolled free of Larisa and stood. "Are you blowing us up?" she asked him. - -"No, it is yours," he said. - -Ibragim disconnected a bomb at the doorway and rested it on the floor. "Make sure the children do not touch it," he said to her, and left. - -The terrorists had staged equipment in the weight room, and Larisa rummaged through their backpacks, finding candy, raisins, dried apricots, and cookies. She handed food to the hostages. The battle flowed around them; they devoured the terrorists' supplies. A boy came to Larisa. "Where is my mother?" he said. - -"At this moment I am as good as your mother," she said. "Sit. Eat." - -Kazbek was slumped on a wrestling mat, fighting for consciousness. His bandages were soaked. Shooting roared at the windows. He knew Russian soldiers were closing in. Soon they will be tossing grenades through windows, he thought, and then asking who is inside. His wife was nearby. Blood ran from her ears. A bone in her neck had been cracked. The building shook from explosions, and he was falling asleep. He saw Irina's face, her soft cheeks and warm brown eyes. It was beautiful. - -"Do not die!" she said. - -# 1:25 p.m. The Gym. - -Irina Naldikoyeva had been lying among corpses for at least twenty minutes, covering her son, Kazbek. Her niece, Vika Dzutseva, fifteen, was beside her, in a sleeveless blue dress, with Alana. Flames were spreading in the ceiling. The children wore only soiled briefs. - -The children had been asleep on the floor at the moment of the first explosion, and were protected. But the first blast sent shrapnel into Irina's leg; the second sent more metal into her neck and jaw. She was light-headed and unsure what to do. Helicopters thumped overhead. She worried one would be disabled and slam into the gym. She had watched other hostages being led away and was wary of following the terrorists, but was running out of choices. The gym was afire. - -Abdullah entered, looking for survivors. "Those who are alive, stand and go to the cafeteria," he shouted. His eyes met Irina's. This means you. - -She took Kazbek by his hand and told Vika to take Alana, and they made their way to him. Broken bodies were packed in a wide arc around the hole in the wall, so many that Irina and Vika had trouble finding places to put down their feet. Several times they had to lift the children over the tangle. - -In the main hall Vika collapsed with Alana, but a terrorist drove Irina on to the cafeteria, where she looked in and saw bloodied hostages and terrorists firing through the windows. Her instinct was to hide. She kept moving, heading upstairs to the auditorium and slipping behind the maroon curtain on the stage. Perhaps twenty hostages were there. A girl came to Irina, tore off a piece of her black skirt, and bandaged her leg. Irina held Kazbek and waited. Bullets pecked against the school's outer walls. - -# Before 2:00 p.m. The Coach's Office. - -With so many armed terrorists inside, School No. 1 was difficult for rescuers and the Special Forces to approach, especially because they had been caught unprepared. At the moment of the first explosion, two T-72 tanks had been parked with engines off on Kominterna Street, one block east of the school. Their crews had reacted with as much astonishment as the civilians clustered nearby, and argued over what to do. Inside a five-story apartment building overlooking the gym from the northeast, a Russian sniper team had also been taken unaware, and rushed to a balcony to see what had happened. They began to provide covering fire to hostages climbing out. A group of Special Forces soldiers, who had been rotated from the perimeter to a training range at a nearby army base, began speeding back, scrambling to a fight that had started while they were out of position. - -Along the uneven perimeter, held by a disorganized mix of Ossetian police officers, traffic cops, conscript soldiers, local men with rifles, and Special Forces teams, disorder and confusion reigned. Some men were ordered to advance, while men beside them were ordered to hold their fire. Gradually, however, a sense that the final battle had begun took hold, and the men moved forward. Volleys of bullets smacked into the school, kicking up red dust. Litter bearers followed. - -After an hour the Russians were pressing near the gym, and the volume of their fire, coming from so many directions, had begun to reduce the terrorists' numbers and push them out from many rooms. Several terrorists were injured, and others were dead. The gym, with flames crackling on its ceiling, had become untenable to defend. The terrorists were making a stand in the cafeteria, where the windows had iron bars. - -For this they wanted hostages as shields, and Ibragim returned to the weight room to retrieve the group hiding there. He was a dark-haired young man, appearing younger than twenty-five, wearing a T-shirt and an ammunition vest. He entered the room and shouted at the hostages on the floor. Kazbek was there, wrapped in orange bandages, looking near death. Others looked capable of walking out. "Those who want to live, come," he shouted. No one complied. - -"Get the people out!" he shouted. "The ceiling is on fire." - -"You leave," Larisa said. "We will stay." - -"The roof will collapse," he said. - -Larisa worried that if they did not follow his orders, Ibragim would begin to kill. She led a group to the door and was joined by Ivan Kanidi, the school's physical-education instructor. Ibragim signaled for them to move low along the wall, ducking at windows so no one would be shot. Heat radiated from above. Flaming pieces of ceiling fell. Larisa's daughter, Madina, held three children by the hand, but a boy shook free to hide among the dead. - -Ibragim forced them on, mustering more hostages he found alive on the floor. At the far end of the gym, he directed them to the coach's office, where he looked out the window to see what he could of the Russian advance. When he turned, Ivan Kanidi lunged. - -Ivan was seventy-four years old, but he retained the muscularity of a lifelong athlete. He seized Ibragim's rifle with two thick hands, trying to rip it from his grasp. The rifle barrel swung wildly as they struggled and spun. "Get the children out!" Ivan shouted. - -"Let go, old man, or I will kill you!" Ibragim snarled. - -Back and forth they fought, pushing and pulling each other around the room by the rifle. Basketballs and other sports equipment littered the floor. After what seemed a minute, Ivan fell backward with the rifle in his hands. He was a nimble man, big-chested but lean, with a finely trimmed gray mustache. Before he could turn the rifle, Ibragim drew a pistol and shot him in the chest. He was motionless. Ibragim leaned down, retrieved his rifle from the dead man's hands, and looked at the group. "Everybody out," he said. - -They began the walk to the cafeteria. Kira Guldayeva, a grandmother Ibragim had rousted from the gym, was suspicious, and when Ibragim looked away, she pulled her grandson, Georgy, six, into a classroom. Larisa and Madina remained under Ibragim's control, arriving at the cafeteria under his escort. - -The place was a horror. Each element of the siege -- from the capture of the children to the enforced conditions of their captivity among the bombs to the murders of their fathers and teachers in the literature classroom to the explosions that ripped apart people by the score -- had been a descent deeper into cruelty, violence, and near-paralyzing fear. Now they had reached the worst. Women stood at windows, screaming and waving white cloths. Bullets struck the walls. Dust and smoke hung in the air. Glass covered the floor, much of it splattered with blood. The room stunk of gunpowder, rotting food, and sweat. Terrorists raced through the haze, bearded, whooping, firing, and yelling instructions. Larisa had her son, Zaurbek, by the hand, and apprehended their new conditions; Madina had the two children she had brought from the weight room. She did not know their names. They rushed around a corner near the dish-washing room, where at least twenty other hostages were massed tight. Two girls were trying to squeeze themselves into a massive soup pot. Dead women and children were strewn on the kitchen tiles. The Kudziyeva family took a place on the floor. - -# Just After 2:00 p.m. The Weight Room. - -Kazbek Misikov tried to focus. He had fainted from blood loss, but Atsamaz revived him by dumping water on his face. He knew he had to rally himself. Roughly a dozen hostages remained in the weight room, but only three were adults, and he was the only man. Heat and orange glow emanated from the gym. Sounds of battle boomed outside. They were in a seam, forgotten but alive. - -The barred windows offered no escape. Irina found paper and made a sign with red lipstick. DETI, it read, Russian for "children." She held it up at a window so they would not be shot. Kazbek staggered beside her, put his head at the window, where it was exposed. "There are children here!" he shouted. "Do not shoot!" - -He was wearing a bloody turban and wondered if he would be mistaken for an Arab. Peering into the narrow alley, he saw the district prosecutor looking back. They both were startled. "Alan!" Kazbek said. - -The prosecutor rushed to the window. "What can we do?" he said. - -He was accompanied by a man with a rifle, and Kazbek asked him to aim at the door, in case a terrorist returned. He was weak but managed to lift a barbell and pass it between the bars. The men outside used it as a lever and popped the frame free. An escape route was open. Irina started handing out children: First the little ones, and then the adults helped her with a badly burned teenage girl. When the last child was out, the adults followed. - -The Misikovs emerged behind the school. Soldiers passed them going the other way, rushing to penetrate the building through the hole they had made. The fire in the gym roof, which had spread slowly, was now a conflagration. Smoke rose over the neighborhood. Kazbek moved woozily to a stretcher, lay down, and slipped out of consciousness. - -The children were handed from rescuer to rescuer in a chain. Atsamaz was passed along with the others until he ended up in the arms of Slavik, his uncle, a face he knew in the chaos. Slavik embraced him. Atsamaz realized he had been saved. He clung to the man. "Papa promised me I could have a Coke," he said. - -# After 2:00 p.m. The Cafeteria. - -Less than fifteen minutes after Irina Naldikoyeva and her son found refuge in the auditorium, the terrorists forced them downstairs to the cafeteria and its tableau of misery. Hostages crowded the room, partially dressed, soiled, riddled with shrapnel, shot, burned, dehydrated, and stunned. Irina saw her niece, Vika, slumped beneath a window, her long black hair matted with sweat. "Where is Alana?" she asked. - -"Here," Vika said, pointing to a child, naked except for dirty panties, curled under a table. - -Bullets were coming in from the Russians firing outside. Irina grabbed her children and scrambled with them along the floor, stopping against a large freezer, panting. A terrorist handed her a bucket of water, and she tilted it and gave each child a drink. They gulped voraciously. At last it was her turn, and she put the bucket to her lips, poured the cool water onto her tongue, eager for it to hit her parched throat. But instead the water splashed onto her floral blouse. Irina did not understand and reached under her chin and felt the place where shrapnel had passed through. The bottom of her mouth was an open hole. Blood and water soaked her torso. She put the bucket aside. - -Around her were at least six dead children, and she knew this place was not safe. She crawled to the dish-washing room, pushed the children under the sinks, and lay her body across them. Bullets kept coming. Some skipped off window frames or iron bars and whirred by, ricochets. One plunked the sink above her son. - -A terrorist was on his back on the floor, motionless with his mouth open, showing gold teeth. His head had been bandaged. In the cupboards along the floor were more small children, hiding with pots and pans. The terrorist stood and lurched back to fight. On the other side of the door, Lora Karkuzashvili stood at a window. Aida Archegova was to her right. Abdullah was ducking and shooting, moving between them. Ibragim was in the corner, firing through the bars, his arms streaked in blood. Volleys of bullets came back in. Lora was struck in the chest, dropped, and did not move. Aida was standing, shouting and waving a cloth. A boy sat beside her, exposed. "Do not shoot!" Aida screamed. - -Aida had been at the window for at least twenty minutes; somehow the bullets missed her and the child. She did not know his name; only once had he spoken. "I do not want to die," he said. Every chance she had, she put him on the floor. Always Abdullah told her to put him back. But Abdullah looked away again, and Aida swung the boy off the sill and placed him under a table. She stood upright and felt a tremendous slap on the left side of her face. The impact spun her head. Much of her jaw was gone. She had been hit. She looked at Abdullah, who was using her for cover. "May I sit now?" she tried to ask. "I am bad." - -"I do not care if you are bad or good," he said. "Stand if you want to live." - -She was dizzy. There was an explosion. Aida fell. - -Everyone was wounded, cowering, or dead. A creaking and rumbling sounded outside, and the turret of a T-72 tank appeared near the fence bordering the school grounds. Its barrel flashed. There was a concussive boom. The entire facade shook. Dust fell from the ceiling. The shell had struck another room. - -# Mid-Afternoon. The Gym. - -Pushed away by flame, sniper fire, and charging infantry, the terrorists yielded the gym. The place in which they had confined more than eleven hundred people, the pen with its matrix of bombs, was no longer theirs. Flames rolled along its ceiling and roof. Beneath the fire, on the basketball court, corpses and gravely injured hostages were spread across the floorboards, partially dressed or nearly naked, twisted into unnatural shapes. Heat seared the room. - -For a long time almost no one moved, but at last Marina Kanukova, a first-grade teacher who had been feigning death with a third-grade girl, stirred. The heat had become too much, and she had heard a soldier's voice telling those who were alive to crawl to safety. The bodies were too thick to crawl over, so she took the child by the hand, crouched, and with flames roaring overhead they stepped across the dead to the weight room, where they were met by soldiers and local men, who directed them out a window. Behind her, bit by bit, coals and the flaming roof were dropping onto the injured and the dead. The air filled with smells of burning plastic and roasting hair and flesh. - -Flanked by the Special Forces, a BTR-80 had arrived on the gym's western side. An eight-wheeled armored vehicle with a 14.5mm machine gun on a turret, it rolled toward the door where the hostages had first been forced into the school, its gun firing as it advanced, and rammed the wall and windows. - -Soldiers and local men climbed into the bathroom and freed a group of screaming, terrified hostages, many slicked in blood and shit. Teams of soldiers pushed into the school. The Russians were inside at last, possessing opposite ends of the gym. Their storm had come late. On the basketball court, burning bodies were before them by the score. - -# Mid-Afternoon. The Cafeteria. - -The survivors slumped in the corner by the dish-washing room, perhaps twenty-five people crammed in a tiny space. Still the bullets kept coming. A crash sounded along the outside wall; they noticed that the iron bars on the window in the left corner were gone. Three Russian commandos climbed in. - -They were a fit and nimble trio, carrying rifles and wearing body armor and helmets. They stood among the dead and the injured, weapons ready, blood, broken glass, and spent shells around their feet. One of them bled from his hand. "Where are the bastards?" one whispered. - -A door to the storerooms swung open. Ibragim was there. Simultaneously, the commandos and the terrorist opened fire over the hostages. Ibragim stepped aside, then reappeared, holding two hand grenades. Bullets hit him as he let them go. - -Time seemed to slow. - -Larisa Kudziyeva watched one of the grenades, a smooth metal oval about the size of a lime, as it passed over her, fell to the floor, and bounced off the kitchen tile toward the soldiers. Her son was beneath her and her daughter beside her. She squeezed the boy, threw her leg and arm over him, and swung her other hand over her daughter's face. - -A hand grenade is a small explosive charge surrounded by a metal shell, whose detonation is controlled by a fuse with a few-second delay. When the charge explodes, it shatters the metal exterior, turning it into bits of shrapnel that rush away at thousands of feet per second, accompanied by a shock wave and heat. It can kill a man fifteen yards away. The nook was less than six yards across. - -The grenade exploded. - -After the wave of metal hit her, Larisa was encased in something like silence, a state in which the absence of sound was overlaid by the ringing in her ears, leaving her to feel an effect like a struck crystal glass. How easy it is to die, she thought. But she did not die, not immediately, and as if in a dream she ran an arm over her son, who was beneath her. He was alive. "Mama," he said. "Mamochka." - -The shrapnel had blasted the right side of her face, tearing part of it off, and ruined her right arm. Larisa did not want the boy to see what had become of her and turned away and raised her left hand to her face. Her fingertips felt wet flesh and exposed bone. The bone fragments were sharp enough to prick. She passed out. - -Her daughter crawled to her. A teacher beside Larisa was missing a leg. One of the commandos was dead. The children Madina had escorted in were dead. One of Larisa's neighbors was dead. Another teacher was dead. The grisly mess extended through the room. - -Larisa looked dead, but Madina checked her pulse, finding life. More commandos climbed in. They told the survivors to follow them out. "My mother is still alive," Madina said. - -"We will take care of her," a soldier said. - -Madina picked up her little brother, handed him out the window to a man outside. The man helped her down, too, and the brother and sister ran out into the neighborhood. They were saved. - -Inside the dish-washing room, Irina Naldikoyeva had felt the wall shake, but she remained on top of her children, holding them down, unsure what had happened. There were two doors into the tiny room, and after a few minutes a man's head appeared along the floor at one of them. It was a commando, crawling. He wore a helmet. His face was sweaty. Irina understood: Russians were inside. The children hiding with the pots understood, too. The cupboard doors flew open and they scuttled out and bounded past him, looking for a way out. - -Irina followed with Kazbek and Alana, out the door, past the mangled corpses, to the window. She handed out the children and then shinnied down. She was out, in autumnal air, standing on grass. She walked unsteadily and turned the corner at the first house on Kominterna Street. She did not know where her children had gone. She sat on the ground. Someone came and led her away. - -# Late Afternoon. A Classroom. - -Kira Guldayeva hid with Georgy in the classroom as the sound of gunfire rose and fell. Six Kalashnikovs were stacked against the wall. Camouflage clothing was strewn on the floor. The walls were streaked with blood, as if during the battle injured terrorists had congregated here. Kira pulled Georgy close. He was a small boy, wearing only underpants. She checked him for injuries and found tiny holes where shrapnel had entered his back, buttocks, and one of his feet. Blood beaded from each wound. Her injuries were worse, a catalog of the afternoon's hazards: She had been shot twice, and one bullet had passed through her arm. Shrapnel had struck her shoulder. She had been burned. - -She sat for a long time, afraid the terrorists might return and wondering when the rescuers might reach them. "Stay here," she told the boy, and crept to the door. - -A Russian soldier stood across the hall. They appraised each other, two faces in the chaos. He dashed toward her. - -As he crossed the open, gunfire boomed. A bullet slammed into his head. He staggered into the room, dropped his rifle, grasped for his helmet, and collapsed. He did not move. His dropped rifle pointed at Kira and Georgy; she pushed it away with a board. - -Another soldier followed him in and leaned against the wall. He was injured, too. "Lie down," he said to them, and began applying a bandage to his leg. A microphone hung at his throat, into which he spoke in clipped tones. More soldiers entered. The school was falling under Russian control. - -They put Kira and Georgy on stretchers, and she was handed through a window. Litter bearers ran with her, tripped, and dropped her to the ground. "Where is the boy?" she screamed. "Where is the boy?" - -# Late Afternoon. The Cafeteria. - -Larisa Kudziyeva awoke, unsure how much time she had spent on the floor. The hostages near her were all dead. She tried to move, but her right arm felt as if someone were atop it. - -Much of her face was gone; soldiers stepped past her as if she were a corpse. They seemed calmer, having for the moment taken control of the room. One stood above her, a blurry form. She raised her left hand to wipe blood from her eyes. He glanced down, surprised. "Girl, be patient," he said. "They will bring stretchers." - -His voice sounded kind. If he can call me girl when I look like this, she thought, then I can wait. She drifted to sleep. - -# Late Night. A Hospital Room in Vladikavkaz. - -Nikolai Albegov arrived at the door and surveyed his son's wife. He was sixty-six, a retired truck driver, fidgeting where he stood. The thin frame of Irina Naldikoyeva, his daughter-in-law, was extended on the bed. Her head and her neck were wrapped in gauze. She was foggy from painkillers. An IV snaked into her arm. - -Throughout Beslan and Vladikavkaz a fresh horror was descending. The morgue in Beslan was overflowing, and bodies were laid on the grass. Vladikavkaz's morgue also had a growing display of corpses waiting to be claimed. The dashes out of the school, and the rescues, had been so spontaneous and disorganized that many families were not sure whether their spouses and children had survived. The families also heard of blackened remains encased on the basketball court under the collapsed roof. The living roamed among the dead, peering at the unclaimed, looking for their own. - -Nikolai's family had been spared this. For nine years Irina had lived in his home. She had borne the family a son and a daughter and performed much of the daily labor. Nikolai kept one of the most traditional households in Beslan, and under the mountain customs he observed, he was the khozyain, the elder of his domain. Irina was not allowed to address him. She had never spoken to him unless he had asked her a question. They had never embraced. - -He stood at the door in a suit, a leathery, strong-handed old man in his very best clothes, assessing the woman who had come into his home. He did not yet know what had happened in the school. But she had brought his family out. Tears ran down his dark face. He walked to her bed, found a spot on her face where there was no bandage, and gave her a kiss. - -# September 4. Evening. A Hospital Room in Vladikavkaz. - -The doctor assessed Larisa Kudziyeva. Twice they had operated on her, but she had remained in a coma. Shrapnel had cut too many holes through her; blood transfusions leaked out. Her blood pressure had sunk. She was near death. The hospital was overwhelmed with patients, and at last Larisa was triaged. Nurses washed her and put a tag on her toe. - -But Larisa Kudziyeva would not die, and hours later another doctor found her alive where she had been left for dead. Early on September 4 she was put back on an operating table. Much of her eye socket was gone. The right side of her face was mashed. Her right arm was shredded and broken in three places. Her middle finger was snapped. Her side had absorbed a shock wave and shrapnel blast. But the metal had missed her main arteries and her right lung. She stabilized before sunrise. - -Now she was awake, barely. The surgeon questioned her, running through a simple neurological exam. - -"What is your birthday?" he asked. - -"The fourteenth," she said. - -"What month?" - -"May," she said. It was true. But it was not. - -"No, forget that day," the doctor said. "Your birthday is September fourth." - -Epilogue. - -The Beslan siege claimed a greater toll of human life than all but one act of modern terrorism, the destruction of the World Trade Center. The terrorists' actions and the bungled rescue efforts ended with the deaths of 331 people, not counting the 31 terrorists the Russian government says were killed. Among the dead were 186 children and 10 members of Russia's Special Forces, whose individual acts of courage were undermined by the incompetence of their government's counterterrorism response. More than seven hundred other people were injured, most of them children. - -The siege ended with no victor. Faith in Russia's government, and the ability of its security agencies to protect its citizens, has been shaken. Sympathy for Chechen independence has shrunk. Even some of Chechnya's separatist fighters, men claiming loyalty to Shamil Basayev, have questioned the utility and rationale of such tactics, although the underground rebel government, unwisely, has not distanced itself from Basayev, who was appointed its first deputy prime minister in 2005. His retention of such a post, no matter his earlier guerrilla prowess, discredits the separatists and is grounds for shame. - -The Russian and North Ossetian parliaments have opened investigations into the terrorist act, which thus far have led to inconclusive findings and drawn accusations of cover-ups from survivors and the bereaved. Official lies have eroded public confidence, including the insistence during the siege that only 354 hostages were seized, and an enduring insistence that the T-72 tanks did not fire until all the survivors were out, which is false. It remains unclear, and a source of acrimonious debate, what caused the first two explosions and the fire in the gym, although the available evidence, on balance, suggests that the blast damage and the majority of the human injury were caused by the terrorists' bombs. There is similar uncertainty about the reason behind the explosion of the shahidka. Other points of contention include what help, if any, the terrorists received from inside Beslan, whether the terrorists hid weapons in the school before the attack, how many terrorists were present, and whether several of them escaped. A third of the dead terrorists have not been publicly identified, and their names are officially unknown. Ibragim was killed; this is clear. But many hostages, including Larisa Kudziyeva and Kazbek Misikov, have studied the known pictures of the dead terrorists and insist that Ali, previously known as Baisangur, and others were not among the dead and were not seen on the last day of the siege. - -Almost all of the surviving hostages remain in North Ossetia, and many continue to receive treatment, including Larisa, who had endured fourteen surgeries through early April 2006 and is expecting two more. Aida Archegova, who became a human shield after searching for her son Soslan, was rescued and later learned that Soslan escaped. Her face has been rebuilt, with bone from her hip grafted to fashion a replacement jaw. She has never again seen the boy who was a human shield with her and does not know whether he is alive. Sarmat Bolloyev survived. Lora Karkuzashvili, the human shield shot in the chest by rescuers, did not. Alina Kudzayeva, the wife of Aslan Kudzayev, who jumped from the window of the literature classroom, was freed with their nineteen-month-old daughter and other breast-feeding mothers; the remains of her mother, Tina Dudiyeva, who shielded Dzera, the bell ringer, were found in the gym. Albert Sidakov, who opted not to jump with Aslan, was killed, as were both sons of Ruslan Betrozov, the man who stood to translate the terrorists' instructions. Fatima Tskayeva, who sent out her infant but stayed behind with her two other children, died with her daughter Kristina. Makhar, Fatima's three-year-old son, was saved. Karen Mdinaradze, who survived execution, was questioned by a detective at the hospital, who thought that he might be a terrorist masquerading as a fleeing hostage; he was eventually treated properly. His ruined left eye has been replaced with an artificial one. Even up close it looks real. Kazbek Misikov and his family recovered from most of their injuries, although Kazbek's arms remain damaged and he is classified an invalid. On January 22, 2006, his wife, Irina Dzutseva, gave birth to a third son, Elbrus, who is named, like his father, for a mountain that soars above the others on the Caucasus ridge. diff --git a/tests/corpus/two-heads.md b/tests/corpus/two-heads.md deleted file mode 100644 index 250cd809e..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/two-heads.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,182 +0,0 @@ -Two Heads -*The New Yorker* -By Larissa MacFarquhar - -It’s a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It’s low tide, and the sand is wet and hard-packed and stony. This early on a Sunday, there are often only two people here, on the California coast just north of San Diego. Patricia Churchland is throwing a rubber ball into the ocean for her two dogs (Fergus and Maxwell, golden retrievers) to fetch. Her husband, Paul Churchland, is standing next to her. They are both wearing heavy sweaters. They are in their early sixties. They are tall—she is five feet eight, he is six feet five. They come here every Sunday at dawn. - -Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself—the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife’s back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person). - -Paul and Pat met when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and they have been married for almost forty years. They are both Canadian; she grew up on a farm in the Okanagan Valley, he, in Vancouver. They have two children and four grandchildren. They live in Solana Beach, in a nineteen-sixties house with a small pool and a hot tub and an herb garden. Each summer, they migrate north to a tiny island off the Vancouver coast. Both are professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. They have been talking about philosophy together since they met, which is to say more or less since either of them encountered the subject. They test ideas on each other; they criticize each other’s work. At this point, they have shaped each other so profoundly and their ideas are so intertwined that it is impossible, even for them, to say where one ends and the other begins. Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person. Some of their theories are quite radical, and at the start of their careers the Churchlands were not always taken seriously: sometimes their ideas were thought silly, sometimes repugnant, verging on immoral. In those days, they formed a habit of thinking of themselves as isolates aligned against a hostile world, and although they are now both well established in their field, the habit lingers. - -“For the first twenty-five years of our career, Pat and I wrote only one paper together,” Paul says, “partly because we wanted to avoid—” - -“We wrote more than that,” Pat says. - -“Together? I thought ‘Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine’ was the first.” - -“There was ‘Functionalism, Intentionality, and Whatnot.’ ” - -“O.K., so there’s two. In the early stages, when Pat wrote her papers she said, ‘Paul, you really had a lot of input into this, should we put your name on it?’ I’d say, ‘No, I don’t want people saying Pat’s sailing on Paul’s coattails.’ ” - -The guiding obsession of their professional lives is an ancient philosophical puzzle, the mind-body problem: the problem of how to understand the relationship between conscious experience and the brain. Are they different stuffs: the mind a kind of spirit, the brain, flesh? Or are they the same stuff, their seeming difference just a peculiarly intractable illusion? And if they are the same stuff, if the mind is the brain, how can we comprehend that fact? What can it possibly mean to say that my experience of seeing blue is the same thing as a clump of tissue and membrane and salty liquid? - -Think of some evanescent emotion—apprehension mixed with conceit, say. Then think, That feeling and that mass of wet tissue—same thing. Or think of the way a door shutting sounds to you, which is private, inaccessible to anyone else, and couldn’t exist without you conscious and listening; that and the firing of cells in your brain, which any neuroscientist can readily detect without your coöperation—same thing. The terms don’t match, they don’t make sense together, any more than it makes sense to ask how many words you can fit in a truck. That is the problem. - -In the past, it seemed obvious that mind and matter were not the same stuff; the only question was whether they were connected. Everyone was a dualist. In the seventeenth century, Leibniz thought that mind and body only appeared to interact because God had established a perfectly synchronized harmony between them (an ingenious theory impossible to refute). Descartes believed that the mind was composed of a strange substance that was not physical but that interacted with the material of the brain by means of the pineal gland. Nowadays, few people doubt that the mind somehow is the brain, but although that might seem like the end of the matter, all that’s necessary to be clear on the subject, it is not. It is not enough to imagine that the brain houses the mind (in some obscure cavity, perhaps tiny intracellular pockets), or gives rise to the mind (the way a television produces an image), or generates the mind (a generator producing current): to imagine any of those things is to retain the idea that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. The problem is not one of knowledge; the problem is our obdurate, antediluvian minds that cannot grasp what we believe to be true. - -Some philosophers think that we will never solve this problem—that our two thousand years of trying and failing indicate that it’s likely we are no more capable of doing so than a goat can do algebra. Others believe that someday a conceptual revolution will take place, on a par with those of Copernicus and Darwin, and then all at once it will be clear how matter and mind, brain and consciousness, are one thing. Paul and Pat Churchland believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists, and that our present knowledge is so paltry that we would not understand the solution even if it were suddenly to present itself. “Suppose you’re a medieval physicist wondering about the burning of wood,” Pat likes to say in her classes. “You’re Albertus Magnus, let’s say. One night, a Martian comes down and whispers, ‘Hey, Albertus, the burning of wood is really rapid oxidation!’ What could he do? He knows no structural chemistry, he doesn’t know what oxygen is, he doesn’t know what an element is—he couldn’t make any sense of it. And if some fine night that same omniscient Martian came down and said, ‘Hey, Pat, consciousness is really blesjeakahgjfdl!’ I would be similarly confused, because neuroscience is just not far enough along.” Philosophers have always thought about what it means to be made of flesh, but the introduction into the discipline of a wet, messy, complex, and redundant collection of neuronal connections is relatively new. Nowadays, it seems obvious to many philosophers that if they are interested in the mind they should pay attention to neuroscience, but this was not at all obvious when Pat and Paul were starting out, and that it is so now is in some measure due to them. -“I don’t know if it’s me or the system, but it seems harder and harder to make a mockery of justice.” - -The Churchlands like to try, as far as possible, not only to believe that they themselves are thoroughly physical creatures but also to feel it—to experience their thoughts as bodily sensations. They have never thought it a diminishment of humanness to think of their consciousness as flesh—quite the opposite. And they are monists in life as they are in philosophy: they wonder what sort of organism their marriage is, its body and its mental life, beginning when they were unformed and very young—all those years of sharing the same ideas and the same dinners. When they met, Paul and Pat were quite different, from each other and from what they are now: he knew about astronomy and electromagnetic theory, she about biology and novels. But as time went on they taught each other what they knew, and the things they didn’t share fell away. Their family unity was such that their two children—now in their thirties—grew up, professionally speaking, almost identical: both obtained Ph.D.s in neuroscience and now study monkeys. Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain—differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit. This is not a fantasy of transparency between them: even one’s own mind is not transparent to oneself, Paul believes, so to imagine his wife’s brain joined to his is merely to exaggerate what is actually the case—two organisms evolving into one in a shared shell. - -“It’s funny the way your life is your life and you don’t know any other life,” Pat says. “I don’t know what it would have been like if I’d been married to—” - -“A patent lawyer?” - -“Something like that. It’s hard for me to imagine.” - -“I think the two of us have been, jointly, several orders of magnitude more successful than at least I would have been on my own,” Paul says. “I’d like to understand that better than I do; I presume it’s got something to do with the brain. You could say, well, we exchanged a lot of oxytocin, but that’s probably one per cent of the story.” (Oxytocin is a peptide produced in the body during orgasm and breast-feeding; when it is sprayed into the noses of experimental subjects, they become more trusting and coöperative.) “To what extent has Pat shaped my conceptual framework and hence my perceptions of the world, and to what extent have I done that for her? I think the answer is, an enormous extent. But I don’t know how to unwind it.” - -“We’ve been married thirty-six years, and I guess we’ve known each other for forty-two or something like that. That’s a long time.” - -“Thirty-seven years. Weren’t we married in ’69? Almost thirty-eight.” - -“That is a long time.” - -The tide is coming in. A few more people have arrived at the beach—there are now a couple of cars parked next to the Churchlands’ white Toyota Sequoia. Pat and Paul walk up toward the road. The dogs come running out of the sea, wet and barking. - -Pat Churchland grew up in rural British Columbia. Her parents owned an orchard—in the summer the Okanagan Valley is hot enough for peaches. “We used to regale people with stories of life on the farm because they thought it was from the nineteenth century,” Pat says. - -“You had chickens, you had a cow,” Paul says. - -“We didn’t have an indoor toilet until I was seven. We had a two-holer, and people actually did sit in the loo together. I know it seems hilarious now.” - -When Pat was a teen-ager, she worked in a fruit-packing plant. Neither of her parents was formally educated past the sixth grade. In her understanding of herself, this kind of childhood is very important. To her, growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere means that you have no patience for verbiage, you are interested only in whether a thing works or not. And if it doesn’t work you had better figure out how to fix it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you. - -When Pat went to college, she decided that she wanted to learn about the mind: what is intelligence, what it is to reason, what it is to have emotions. She found that these questions were not being addressed in the first place she looked, psychology—many psychologists then were behaviorists—but they were discussed somewhat in philosophy, so she started taking philosophy courses. She met Paul in a Plato class, her sophomore year. She soon discovered that the sort of philosophy she was being taught was not what she was looking for. At the time, in the nineteen-sixties, Anglo-American philosophy was preoccupied with language—many philosophers felt that their task was to untangle the confusions and incoherence in the way people spoke, in the belief that disagreements were often misunderstandings, and that if our concepts were better sorted out then our thinking would also be clearer. This held no great appeal for Pat, but one thing led to another, and she found herself in philosophy graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. The department was strong in philosophy of science, and to her relief Pat found people there who agreed that ordinary language philosophy was a bit sterile. At Pittsburgh, she read W. V. O. Quine’s book “Word and Object,” which had been published a few years earlier, and she learned, to her delight, that it was possible to question the distinction between empirical and conceptual truth: not only could philosophy concern itself with science; it could even be a kind of science. - -After a year, she moved to Oxford to do a B.Phil. Philosophy at Oxford at the time was very far from Pittsburgh—quite conservative, not at all empirically oriented. Nobody seemed to be interested in what she was interested in, and when she tried to do what she was supposed to she was bad at it. It was all very discouraging. She was beginning to feel that philosophy was just a lot of blather. “The idea seemed to be that, if you analyzed your concepts, somehow that led you to the truth of the nature of things,” she says. “It was just garbage.” She was about to move back to Canada and do something else entirely, maybe go into business, but meanwhile Paul Churchland had broken up with the girlfriend he’d had when they were undergraduates and had determined to pursue her. He came over to Oxford for the summer, and they rented a little house together on Iffley Road. Paul had started thinking about how you might use philosophy of science to think about the mind, and he wooed Pat with his theories. - -At Pittsburgh, where he had also gone for graduate school, he had learned to be suspicious of the intuitively plausible idea that you could see the world directly and form theories about it afterward—that you could rely on your basic perceptions (seeing, hearing, touching) being as straightforwardly physical and free from bias as they appeared to be. He concluded that we cannot help perceiving the world through the medium of our ideas about it. It’s not just a matter of what we pay attention to—a farmer’s interest might be aroused by different things in a landscape than a poet’s—but of what we actually see. In the course of that summer, Pat came to look at philosophy quite differently. “I stayed in the field because of Paul,” she says. “Gradually, I could see all kinds of things to do, and I could see what counted as progress.” Philosophy could actually change your experience of the world, she realized. And if it could change your experience of the world then it had the potential to do important work, as important as that of science, because coming to see something in a wholly different way was like discovering a new thing. - -Paul didn’t grow up on a farm, but he was raised in a family with a practical bent: his father started a boat-works company in Vancouver, then taught science in a local high school. His mother took in sewing. - -“I guess I have long known that there was only the brain,” Pat says. - -“When you were six years old?” Paul says. - -“Well, no, of course not.” - -“I remember deciding at about age eleven or twelve, after a discussion with my friends about the universe and did God exist and was there a soul and so forth,” Paul says. “I’d been skeptical about God. My parents weren’t religious. I would ask myself, What do you think thinking is? And I’d say, I guess it’s just electricity.” -“Charles is based on an old Ukrainian folktale.” - -Paul as a boy was obsessed with science fiction, particularly books by Robert Heinlein. He vividly remembers “Orphans of the Sky,” the story of a young man named Hugh Hoyland. Hugh lives in a world called the Ship, which is run by scientists—all except for the upper decks, where it is dangerous to venture because of the mutants, or “muties,” who live there. One day, Hugh is captured by an intelligent two-headed mutie named Joe-Jim, who takes him up to the control room of the Ship and shows him the sky and the stars. All at once, Hugh realizes that what he had been told were inscrutable religious metaphors were in fact true: the Ship is not the whole universe after all but merely a thing inside it, and it is actually making some sort of journey. He tries to explain this to the scientists, but they tell him he is talking nonsense. How could the Ship move when the Ship is all there is? “Orphans of the Sky” is a classic philosophical fable, a variant of Plato’s story about prisoners in a cave who mistake shadows cast on the wall for reality. Its moral is not very useful for day-to-day work, in philosophy or anything else—what are you supposed to do with it?—but it has retained a hold on Paul’s imagination: he always remembers that, however certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that both are completely wrong, and that reality lies in some other place that he hasn’t looked because he doesn’t know it’s there. - -Paul’s father had a woodworking and metal shop in the basement, and Paul was always building things. He planned eventually to build flying saucers, and decided that he was going to be an aerodynamical engineer. He stuck with this plan when he got to college, taking courses in math and physics. But the summer after his first year he found himself hanging around with a group of friends who could make sophisticated arguments about the existence of God. Paul was at a disadvantage not knowing what the ontological argument was, and he determined to take some philosophy classes when he went back to school. Although he was trained, as Pat was, in ordinary language philosophy, by the time he graduated he also was beginning to feel that that sort of philosophy was not for him. When he got to Pittsburgh, Wilfrid Sellars became his dissertation adviser. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, a few years before Paul became his student, Sellars had proposed that the sort of basic psychological understanding that we take for granted as virtually instinctive—if someone is hungry, he will try to find something to eat; if he believes a situation to be dangerous, he will try to get away—was not. Concepts like “beliefs” and “desires” do not come to us naturally; they have to be learned. Nor were they simply descriptive: we do not see beliefs, after all—we conjecture that they are there based on how a person is behaving. No, this kind of ordinary psychological understanding was something like a theory, a more or less coherent collection of assumptions and hypotheses, built up over time, that we used to explain and predict other people’s behavior. - -In writing his dissertation, Paul started with Sellars’s idea that ordinary or “folk” psychology was a theory and took it a step further. If folk psychology was a theory, Paul reasoned, it could turn out to be wrong. It had happened many times, after all, that understandings that felt as fundamental and unshakable as instincts turned out to be wrong. Our folk geology—the evidence of our eyes and common sense—told us that the earth was flat, and while it still might look that way we accepted that it was an illusion. Our folk biology told us that if we slammed a hand in a door we would feel pain at the point of contact—and, while we still felt pain in the hand, we now knew that the pain signal had to travel away from the hand to the brain before we experienced it. Folk psychology, too, had suffered corrections; it was now widely agreed, for instance, that we might have repressed motives and memories that we did not, for the moment, perceive. Surely it was likely that, with progress in neuroscience, many more counterintuitive results would come to light. How probable was it, after all, that, in probing the brain, scientists would come across little clusters of “belief” neurons? It wasn’t that beliefs didn’t exist; it was just that it seemed highly improbable that the first speakers of the English language, many hundreds of years ago, should miraculously have chanced upon the categories that, as the saying goes, carved nature at its joints. It might turn out, for instance, that it would make more sense, brain-wise, to group “beliefs about cheese” with “fear of cheese” and “craving for dairy” rather than with “beliefs about life after death.” - -Mental life was something we knew very little about, and when something was imperfectly understood it was quite likely that we would define its structure imperfectly, too. It was only rarely that, in science, you started with a perfectly delimited thing and set out to investigate it; more often, your definition of what it was that you were looking at would change as you discovered more about it. (“Consider the medieval physicists who wondered what fire could be,” Pat says. “They identified a range of things that they thought were instances of fire: burning wood, the sun, comets, lightning, fireflies, northern lights. They couldn’t give a definition, but they could give examples that they agreed upon. Jump now to the twentieth century. The category of fire, as defined by what seemed to be intuitively obvious members of the category, has become completely unstuck. Turns out that burning wood is actually oxidation; what happens on the sun has nothing to do with that, it’s nuclear fusion; lightning is thermal emission; fireflies are biophosphorescence; northern lights are spectral emission.”) - -Why, Paul reasoned, should we assume that our everyday psychological notions are any more accurate than our uninformed notions about the world? Why should we suppose introspection to be infallible when our perception is so clearly fallible in every other way? Paul speculated that it might, someday, turn out that a materialist science, mapping the structure and functions of the brain, would eliminate much of folk psychology altogether. Some folk categories would probably survive—visual perception was a likely candidate, he thought. Attention, perhaps. Representation. But not much more than that. - -Pat and Paul married in 1969 and found jobs together at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. - -“Winnipeg was basically like Cleveland in the fifties,” Pat says. “Very innocent, very free. The kids look back on those years in Winnipeg as being . . .” - -“A great bonus?” - -“Yes. Despite the weather. You’d just go out on your front steps and holler when it was dinnertime. You’d have no idea where they were.” - -“There wasn’t much traffic. The kids were like a flock of pigeons that flew back and forth from one lawn to another.” - -The University of Manitoba was not the sort of place to keep close track of a person’s publications, and, for the first time, Pat and Paul felt that they could pursue whatever they liked. Pat decided that if she was ever going to really get at the questions she was interested in she had to know more about the brain, so she presented herself to the medical school and asked permission to study neuroanatomy and neurophysiology with the medical students. - -While she was at Oxford, she had started dipping into science magazines, and had read about some astonishing experiments that had been performed in California on patients whose corpus callosum—the nerve tissue connecting the two cerebral hemispheres—had been severed, producing a “split brain.” This operation had been performed for some years, as a last-resort means of halting epileptic seizures, but, oddly, it had had no noticeable mental side effects. Then someone had come up with the idea of stimulating the hemispheres independently, and it had been discovered that the severing did indeed produce some rather strange results. If the word “hat,” for instance, was shown only to the right side of the visual field (controlled by the verbally oriented left hemisphere), the patient had no trouble saying what it was, but if it was shown to the left (controlled by the almost nonverbal right hemisphere), he could not—indeed, he would claim not to have seen a word at all—but he could select a hat from a group of objects with his left hand. - -“It was amazing that you could physically separate the hemispheres and in some sense or other you were also separating consciousness,” Pat says. “In one way, it shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, if you think that the mind is the brain. On the other hand, the fact that you can separate a sense of self—that was tremendously important. People had done split brains before, but they didn’t notice anything. They thought, What’s this bunch of tissue doing here—holding the hemispheres together? But you don’t need that, because they’re not going to go anywhere, so what is it? You had to really know the physiology and the anatomy in order to ask the questions in the right way.” -“He just won ‘The Best Meaning of Life’ award.” - -“There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it’s only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!” Paul says. - -“Well, it wasn’t quite like that. It wasn’t like he was surprised. It just kind of happened.” - -Some of the experiments sounded uncannily like cases of spiritual possession. One patient had a pipe placed in his left hand that he could feel but not see; then he was asked to write with his left hand what it was that he had felt. His left hand began very slowly to form the letters “P” and “I”; but then, as though taken over by a ghost, the hand suddenly began writing quickly and fluently, crossed out the “I” and completed the word “PENCIL.” Then, as though the ghost had been pushed aside again, the hand crossed out “PENCIL” and drew a picture of a pipe. It seemed, the experimenters concluded, that the left hemisphere, impatient with the left hand’s slow writing, had seized control of the hand and had produced the word “PENCIL” as a guess, based on the letter “P,” but then the right hemisphere had taken over once again and corrected it. There appeared to be two distinct consciousnesses inside a person’s head that somehow became one when the brain was properly joined. Or one self torn in two. - -At the medical school in Winnipeg, Pat was assigned a brain of her own, which she kept in the lab in a Tupperware pot filled with formaldehyde. Later, she observed neurosurgeries, asking the surgeon’s permission to peer in through the hole in the scalp to catch a glimpse of living tissue, a little patch of a brain as it was still doing its mysterious work. She attended neurology rounds. The first neurological patient she saw was himself a neurosurgeon who suffered from a strange condition, owing to a lesion in his brain stem, that caused him to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. He would sob and shake but at the same time insist that he was not feeling in the least bit sad. This made an impression on her, partly because she realized how it would have flummoxed a behaviorist to see this complete detachment of behavior and inward feeling and partly because none of the neurologists on the rounds were surprised. The condition, it appeared, was not all that uncommon. She encountered patients who were blind but didn’t know it. “That really kicked the slats out of the idea that you can learn very much about the nature of the mind or the nature of the brain by asking what’s imaginable,” she says. “It’s not imaginable to me that I could be blind and not know it, but it actually happens. So its being unimaginable doesn’t tell me shit!” - -Each evening, after the children were in bed, she would teach Paul everything she had learned that day, and they would talk about what it meant for philosophy. They later discovered, for instance, that the brain didn’t store different sorts of knowledge in particular places—there was no such thing as a memory organ. Even dedicated areas like the visual cortex could be surprisingly plastic: blind people, and people who could see but had been blindfolded for a few days, used the visual cortex to read Braille, even though that would seem to be a thoroughly tactile activity. All this boded well for Paul’s theory that folk-psychological terms would gradually disappear—if concepts like “memory” or “belief” had no distinct correlates in the brain, then those categories seemed bound, sooner or later, to fall apart. - -Gradually, Pat and Paul arrived at various shared notions about what philosophy was and what it ought to be. They agreed that it should not keep itself pure: a philosophy that confined itself to logical truths, seeing itself as a kind of mathematics of language, had sealed itself inside a futile, circular system of self-reference. Why shouldn’t philosophy concern itself with facts? Why shouldn’t it get involved with the uncertain conjectures of science? Who cared whether the abstract concepts of action or freedom made sense or not? Surely it was more interesting to think about what caused us to act, and what made us less or more free to do so? Yes, those sounded more like scientific questions than like philosophical ones, but that was only because, over the years, philosophy had ceded so much of the interesting territory to science. Why shouldn’t philosophy be in the business of getting at the truth of things? - -They were confident that they had history on their side. In the classical era, there had been no separation between philosophy and science, and most of the men whom people now thought of as philosophers were scientists, too. They were thought of as philosophers now only because their scientific theories (like Aristotle’s ideas on astronomy or physics, for instance) had proved to be, in almost all cases, hopelessly wrong. Over the years, different groups of ideas had hived off the mother sun of natural philosophy and become proper experimental disciplines—first astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, psychology, and, most recently, neuroscience. Becoming an experimental discipline meant devising methods that allowed propositions to be tested that had previously been mere speculation. But it did not mean that a discipline had no further need of metaphysics—what, after all, would be the use of empirical methods without propositions to test in the first place? Philosophy could still play a role in science: it could examine the concepts that scientists were working with, testing them for coherence, and it could serve as science’s speculative branch, imagining hypotheses that were too outlandish or too provisional for a working scientist to bother with but which might, in the future, yield unexpected fruit. - -In 1974, when Pat was studying the brain in Winnipeg and Paul was working on his first book, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher at Princeton who practiced just the sort of philosophy that they were trying to define themselves against, published an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Imagine being a bat, Nagel suggested. You are small and covered with thin fur; you have long, thin arms attached to your middle with webbing; you are nearly blind. During the day, you hang upside down, asleep, your feet gripping a branch or a beam; at dusk you wake up and fly about, looking for insects to eat, finding your way with little high-pitched shrieks from whose echoes you deduce the shape of your surroundings. “Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far),” he wrote, “it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” - -The purpose of this exercise, Nagel explained, was to demonstrate that, however impossible it might be for humans to imagine, it was very likely that there was something it was like to be a bat, and that thing, that set of facts—the bat’s intimate experience, its point of view, its consciousness—could not be translated into the sort of objective language that another creature could understand. Humans might eventually understand pretty much everything else about bats: the microchemistry of their brains, the structure of their muscles, why they sleep upside down—all those things were a matter of analyzing the physical body of the bat and observing how it functioned, which was, however difficult, just part of ordinary science. But what it is like to be a bat was permanently out of the reach of human concepts. - -This shouldn’t be surprising, Nagel pointed out: to be a realist is to believe that there is no special, magical relationship between the world and the human mind, and that there are therefore likely to be many things about the world that humans are not capable of grasping, just as there are many things about the world that are beyond the comprehension of goats. But if the bat’s consciousness—the what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat—is not graspable by human concepts, while the bat’s physical makeup is, then it is very difficult to imagine how humans could come to understand the relationship between them. To describe physical matter is to use objective, third-person language, but the experience of the bat is irreducibly subjective. There is a missing conceptual link between the two—what later came to be called an “explanatory gap.” To argue, as some had, that linking consciousness to brain was simply a matter of declaring an identity between them—the mind just is the brain, and that’s all there is to it, the way that water just is H2O—was to miss the point. - -Nagel’s was the sort of argument that represented everything Pat couldn’t stand about philosophy. “Various philosophers today think that science is never going to be able to understand consciousness,” she said in her lectures, “and one of their most appealing arguments—I don’t know why it’s appealing, but it seems to be—is ‘I can’t imagine how you could get pain out of meat, I can’t imagine how you could get seeing the color blue out of neurons firing.’ Now, whether you can or can’t imagine certain developments in neuroscience is not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world—it’s a not very interesting psychological fact about you.” But when she mocked her colleagues for examining their intuitions and concepts rather than looking to neuroscience she rarely acknowledged that, for many of them, intuitions and concepts were precisely what the problem of consciousness was about. Those were the data. Most of them were materialists: they were convinced that consciousness somehow is the brain, but they doubted whether humans would ever be able to make sense of that. - -Part of the problem was that Pat was by temperament a scientist, and, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out, in science a counterintuitive result is prized more than an expected one, whereas in philosophy, if an argument runs counter to intuition, it may be rejected on that ground alone. “Given a knockdown argument for an intuitively unacceptable conclusion, one should assume there is probably something wrong with the argument that one cannot detect,” Nagel wrote in 1979. “To create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.” The divide between those who, when forced to choose, will trust their instincts and those who will trust an argument that convinces them is at least as deep as the divide between mind-body agnostics and committed physicalists, and lines up roughly the same way. - -When Pat first started going around to philosophy conferences and talking about the brain, she felt that everyone was laughing at her. Even thoroughgoing materialists, even scientifically minded ones, simply couldn’t see why a philosopher needed to know about neurons. Part of the problem was that, at the time, during the first thrilling decades of artificial intelligence, it seemed possible that computers would soon be able to do everything that minds could do, using silicon chips instead of brains. So if minds could run on chips as well as on neurons, the reasoning went, why bother about neurons? If the mind was, in effect, software, and if the mind was what you were interested in, then for philosophical purposes surely the brain—the hardware—could be regarded as just plumbing. Nobody thought it was necessary to study circuit boards in order to talk about Microsoft Word. A philosopher of mind ought to concern himself with what the mind did, not how it did it. Moreover, neuroscience was working at the wrong level: tiny neuronal structures were just too distant, conceptually, from the macroscopic components of thought, things like emotions and beliefs. - -As far as Pat was concerned, though, to imagine that the stuff of the brain was irrelevant to the study of the mind was no more than a new, more sophisticated form of dualism. Software and hardware, immaterial spirits and pineal glands—it was Descartes all over again, she would fume to Paul when she got home. This was what happened when a bunch of math and logic types started talking about the mind, she thought—they got all caught up in abstractions and forgot that humans were animals. The mind wasn’t some sort of computer program but a biological thing that had been cobbled together, higgledy-piggledy, in the course of a circuitous, wasteful, and particular evolution. Yes, of course neuroscience felt pretty distant from philosophy at this point, but that was only—why couldn’t people see this?—because the discipline was in its infancy. The connections hadn’t been filled in yet. What she objected to was the notion that neuroscience would never be relevant to philosophical concerns. That seemed to her just plain stupid. - -When Nagel wrote about consciousness and the brain in the nineteen-seventies, he was an exception: during the decades of behaviorism, the mind-body problem had been ignored. But then, in the early nineteen-nineties, the problem was dramatically revived, owing in part to an unexpected rearguard action launched by a then obscure long-haired Australian philosopher named David Chalmers. Chalmers is a generation younger than the Churchlands, and he is one of a very few philosophers these days who are avowedly dualist. He believes that consciousness isn’t physical. It’s pretty easy to imagine a zombie, Chalmers argued—a creature physically identical to a human, functioning in all the right ways, having conversations, sitting on park benches, playing the flute, but simply lacking all conscious experience. So if one could imagine a person physically identical to the real David Chalmers but without consciousness then it would seem that consciousness could not be a physical thing. - -Maybe consciousness was actually another sort of thing altogether, he thought—a fundamental entity in the universe, a primitive, like mass, time, or space. This theory would be a kind of dualism, Chalmers had to admit, but not a mystical sort; it would be compatible with the physical sciences because it would not alter them—it would be an addition. As Chalmers began to develop his theory of consciousness as a primitive, the implications started to multiply. Once you had separated consciousness from biology, a lot of constraints simply disappeared. If consciousness was a primitive like mass or space, then perhaps it was as universal as mass or space. Perhaps even systems like thermostats, he speculated, with their one simple means of response, were conscious in some extremely basic way. You could start talking about panpsychism—the idea that consciousness exists, in some very basic form, in all matter, even at the level of the atom. On the face of it, of course, he realized that panpsychism sounded a little crazy. And there was a pretty good philosophical argument against it (of the customary form: either it’s false or it’s trivial; either you are pushed into claiming that atoms are thinking about cappuccinos or you retreat to the uninteresting and obvious position that atoms have the potential to contribute to larger things that think about cappuccinos). But he found it appealing anyway, and, despite its mystical or Buddhist overtones, it felt to Chalmers, at root, naturalistic. He liked the idea that humans were continuous with the rest of the world, even the inanimate parts of it, even stones and rivers—that consciousness penetrated very deep, perhaps all the way down into the natural order of things. - -Right from the beginning, Pat was happy to find that scientists welcomed her. They certainly were a lot friendlier to her than many philosophers. When she started attending neuroscience conferences, she found that, far from dismissing her as a fuzzy-minded humanities type, they were delighted that a philosopher should take an interest in their work. At a conference in the early eighties, she met Francis Crick, who, having discovered the secret of life, the structure of DNA, as a young man, had decided that he wanted to study the other great mystery, consciousness. - -“Francis discovered Pat at a meeting back East and was amazed that a philosopher had all the same prejudices that he did,” Paul says. “He invited her out to the Salk Institute and, on hearing that she had a husband who was also interested in these things, invited me to come out, too. We came and spent, what was it, five days?” - -“Yes, we did.” - -“He was still having weekly meetings with you when he knew he was dying. You would come home despairing at making headway with him.” - -“He thought the strategy of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness was likely to be fruitful, but I became very skeptical of it. It seemed to me more likely that we were going to need to know about attention, about memory, about perception, about emotions—that we were going to have to solve many of the problems about the way the brain works before we were going to understand consciousness, and then it would sort of just fall out.” - -“He was one of the people who made the problem of consciousness respectable again,” Paul says. “Some people in science thought that it was a ghost problem. The behaviorists thought talk of inner subjective phenomena was a waste of time, like alchemy.” - -“There were lots of neuroscientists who thought consciousness was such a diffcult issue that we’d never get there.” - -The psychologist and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran turned up at U.C.S.D. as a junior faculty member around the same time Pat and Paul arrived. Paul met him first, when Ramachandran went to one of his talks because he was amused by the arrogance of its title—“How the Brain Works.” Then Pat started observing the work in Ramachandran’s lab. She saw him perform a feat that seemed to her nearly as astonishing as curing the blind: seating at a table a patient suffering from pain in a rigid phantom arm, he held up a mirror in such a way that the patient’s working arm appeared in the position of the missing one, and then instructed him to move it. As if by magic, the patient felt the movement in his phantom limb, and his discomfort ceased. Pat spent more and more time at Ramachandran’s lab, and later on she collaborated with him on a paper titled “A Critique of Pure Vision,” which argued that the function of vision was not to represent the world but to help a creature survive, and that it had evolved, accordingly, as a partial and fractured system that served the more basic needs of the motor system. - -These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now. “Although some of Churchland’s views have taken root in mainstream philosophy, she is not part of it,” Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University, wrote in a review of one of her books. “Unfortunately, Churchland . . . approaches many conceptual issues in the sciences of the mind like the more antiphilosophical of scientists.” Although she tried to ignore it, Pat was wounded by this review. But it was true; in some ways she had simply left the field. Although she often talks to scientists, she says she hasn’t got around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years. These days, she often feels that the philosophical debate over consciousness is more or less a waste of time. - -There is one area of traditional philosophy, however, in which Pat still takes an active interest, and that is ethics. She and Paul are the two philosophers in an interdisciplinary group at U.C.S.D. that is trying to drum up funding for research into the implications of neuroscience for ethics and the law. - -“I think the more we know about these things, the more we’ll be able to make reasonable decisions,” Pat says. “Suppose someone is a genetic mutant who has a bad upbringing: we know that the probability of his being self-destructively violent goes way, way up above the normal. How do we treat such people? Do we wait until they actually do something horrendous or is some kind of prevention in order? Should all male children be screened for such mutations and the parents informed so that they will be especially responsible with regard to how these children are brought up?” - -“Why not?” Paul says. “I guess they could be stigmatized.” - -“There’s a guy at U.S.C. who wanted to know what the activity of the frontal cortex looked like in people on death row, and the amazing result was this huge effect that shows depressed activity in frontal structures. These people have compromised executive function. Now, we don’t really know whether it’s a cause or an effect—I mean maybe if you’re on death row your frontal structure deteriorates. But of course public safety is a paramount concern. We don’t want these people running loose even if it’s not their own fault that they are the way they are.” - -“Well, given that they’re such a severe danger to the society, we could incarcerate them in some way,” Paul says. “We could put a collar on their ankles and track their whereabouts. We could say, We have to put this subdural thing in your skull which will monitor if you’re having rage in your amygdala, and we can automatically shut you down with a nice shot of Valium. It’s like having somebody who’s got the black plague—we do have the right to quarantine people though it’s not their fault. Heinlein wrote a story—” - -“We’re back to Heinlein! How funny.” - -“This just reminded me. He had wild, libertarian views. The story concerned how you treated people who were convicted by criminal trials. Either you could undergo a psychological readjustment that would fix you or, because you can’t force that on people, you could go and live in a community that was something like the size of Arizona, behind walls that were thirty feet high, filled with people like you who had refused the operation. The story was about somebody who chose to go in. What annoyed me about it—and it would annoy you, too, I think—was that Heinlein was plainly on the side of the guy who had refused to have his brain returned to normal. He tells this glorious story about how this guy managed to triumph over all sorts of adverse conditions in this perfectly awful state of nature.” - -Paul stops to think about this for a moment. - -“You and I have a confidence that most people lack,” he says to Pat. “We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward.” - -“I’m not so sure,” Pat says. - -It’s been a long time since Paul Churchland read science fiction, but much of his work is focussed far into the future, in territory that is almost completely imaginary. For instance, both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not “pain” but something more complicated—first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile’s complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine. - -Paul and Pat, realizing that the revolutionary neuroscience they dream of is still in its infancy, are nonetheless already preparing themselves for this future, making the appropriate adjustments in their everyday conversation. One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’ ” Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way—their students now talk of psychopharmacology as comfortably as of food. - -When their children, Mark and Anne, were very young, Pat and Paul imagined raising them according to their principles: the children would grow up understanding the world as scientists understood it, they vowed, and would speak a language very different from that spoken by children in the past. Paul told them bedtime stories about boys and girls escaping from danger by using science to solve problems. He took them outside at night and showed them how, if they tilted their heads to just the right angle, so that they saw the ecliptic plane of the planets as horizontal, they could actually see the planets and the earth as Copernicus described them, and feel, he told them, “at home in the solar system for the first time.” Then, one evening when Mark was three or four, he and Paul were sitting by the fire—they had a fire every night in Winnipeg in the winter—and Paul was teaching him to look at the flames like a physicist. He told him how the different colors in the fire indicated different temperatures, and how the wood turned into flame and what that meant about the conversion of energy. The boy was fascinated; but then it occurred to Paul that if he were to sit in front of a fire with a friend his age they would barely be able to talk to each other. He suddenly worried that he and Pat were cutting their children off from the world that they belonged to. Better to wait until the world had changed, he thought. - -Neither Pat nor Paul feels much nostalgia for the old words, or the words that will soon be old. They appreciate language as an extraordinary tool, probably the most extraordinary tool ever developed. But in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, in which humans are just one animal among many, and not always the most successful one, language looks like quite a minor phenomenon, they feel. Animals don’t have language, but they are conscious of their surroundings and, sometimes, of themselves. Pat and Paul emphatically reject the idea that language and thought are, deeply, one: that the language we now use reflects thought’s innate structure; that thought can take only the form in which we humans now know it; that there could be no thought without language. Moreover, the new is the new! It is so exciting to think about revolutions in science leading to revolutions in thought, and even in what seems, to the uninitiated, to be “raw feeling,” that, by comparison, old words and old sentiments seem dull indeed. - -In recent years, Paul has spent much of his time simulating neural networks on a computer in an attempt to figure out what the structure of cognition might be, if it isn’t language. Linguistic theories of how people think have always seemed to him psychologically unrealistic—requiring far too sophisticated a capacity for logical inference, for one thing, and taking far too long, applying general rules to particular cases, step by step. In order to operate at the astonishing speed at which biological creatures actually figure things out, thinking must take place along parallel, rather than serial, paths, he believes, and must be able to take immediate advantage of every little fact or rule of thumb it has gleaned from experience in the past. Thinking must also be distributed widely across the brain, since individual cells continually deteriorate without producing, most of the time, any noticeable effect. It seems to him likely that thinking takes place simultaneously along millions of different neural pathways, each of which was formed by a particular stimulation in the past and which is, in turn, greatly or minutely altered by the new experience of the present. All of these pathways, connecting each neuron to millions of others, form unique patterns that together are the creature’s memory. When the creature encounters something new, its brain activates the pattern that the new thing most closely resembles in order to figure out what to do—whether the new thing is a threatening predator or a philosophical concept. Humans being animals, cogitating on the highest level is, Paul believes, just an esoteric form of ordinary perception. - -Sometimes Paul likes to imagine a world in which language has disappeared altogether. We know that the two hemispheres of the brain can function separately but communicate silently through the corpus callosum, he reasons. Presumably, it will be possible, someday, for two separate brains to be linked artificially in a similar way and to exchange thoughts infinitely faster and more clearly than they can now through the muddled, custom-clotted, serially processed medium of speech. He already talks about himself and Pat as two hemispheres of the same brain. Who knows, he thinks, maybe in his children’s lifetime this sort of talk will not be just a metaphor. - -If, someday, two brains could be joined, what would be the result? A two-selved mutant like Joe-Jim, really just a drastic version of Siamese twins, or something subtler, like one brain only more so, the pathways from one set of neurons to another fusing over time into complex and unprecedented arrangements? Would it work only with similar brains, already sympathetic, or, at least, both human? Or might a human someday be joined to an animal, blending together two forms of thinking as well as two heads? If so, a philosopher might after all come to know what it is like to be a bat, although, since bats can’t speak, perhaps he would be able only to sense its batness without being able to describe it. ♦ diff --git a/tests/corpus/vanishing-blonde.md b/tests/corpus/vanishing-blonde.md deleted file mode 100644 index faaaf422b..000000000 --- a/tests/corpus/vanishing-blonde.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,235 +0,0 @@ -The case of the vanishing blonde -*Vanity Fair* -By Mark Bowden - -From the start, it was a bad case. - -A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her. - -And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual. - -Miami-Dade detectives learned that she had been living for months at the Airport Regency Hotel, eight miles from where she was found. It is one of those crisply efficient overnight spots in the orbit of major airports that cater to travelers needing a bed between legs of long flights. She was employed by a cruise-ship line and had severely cut her finger on the job, so she was being put up at the hotel by her employers while she healed. The assault had begun, she said, in her room, on the fourth floor. She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con? - -The police detectives did what they could at the hotel, combing the woman’s room for evidence, interviewing hotel employees, obtaining images from all of the surveillance cameras for the morning of the crime, going over the guest lists. The hotel had 174 rooms, and so many people came and went that it would have taken months working full-time to run checks on every one of them, something beyond the resources of a police department in a high-crime area like Miami-Dade. The sex-crimes unit set aside the file with no clear leads, only more questions. After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case. - -So the action was all headed toward civil court. The hotel engaged a law firm to defend itself from the woman’s lawsuit, and the firm eventually hired a private detective named Ken Brennan to figure out what had happened. - -Foote was not pleased. It was usually a pain in the ass to have a private detective snooping around one of his cases. Brennan was right out of central casting—middle-aged, deeply tanned, with gray hair. He was a weight lifter and favored open-necked shirts that showed off both the definition of his upper pecs and the bright, solid-gold chain around his neck. The look said: mature, virile, laid-back, and making it. He had been divorced, and his former wife was now deceased; his children were grown. He had little in the way of daily family responsibilities. Brennan had been a cop on Long Island, where he was from, and had worked eight years as a D.E.A. agent. He had left the agency in the mid-90s to work as a commodities broker and to set up as a private detective. The brokering was not to his taste, but the investigating was. He was a warm, talkative guy, with a thick Long Island accent, who sized people up quickly and with a healthy strain of New York brass. If he liked you, he let you know it right away, and you were his friend for life, and if he didn’t … well, you would find that out right away, too. Nothing shocked him; in fact, most of the salacious run-of-the-mill work that pays private detectives’ bills—domestic jobs and petty insurance scams—bored him. Brennan turned those offers away. The ones he took were mostly from businesses and law firms, who hired him to nail down the facts in civil-court cases like this one. - -He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery. - -The job in this case was straightforward. Find out who raped and beat this young woman and dumped her in the weeds. Had the attack even happened at the hotel, or had she slipped out and met her assailant or assailants someplace else? Was she just a simple victim, or was she being used by some kind of Eastern European syndicate? Was she a prostitute? Was she somehow implicated? There were many questions and few answers. - -# Vanishing Act - -‘I used to be a cop and a federal agent,” Brennan told Detective Foote, introducing himself at the Miami-Dade police sex-crimes-unit offices. Foote had long strawberry-blond hair, which he combed straight back, and a bushy blond mustache. He was about the same age as Brennan, who read him right away as a fellow member of the fraternity, somebody he could reason with on familiar terms. - -“Look, you and I both know there’s no fucking way you can investigate this case,” Brennan said. “I can see this through to the end. I won’t step on your dick. I won’t do a thing without telling you about it. If I figure out who did it, you get the arrest. I won’t do anything to fuck it up for you.” - -Foote saw logic in this and did something he ordinarily wouldn’t do. He shared what he had in his file: crime-scene photos, surveillance footage from the hotel security cameras, the victim’s confused statement. Foote had interviewed a couple of hotel staff members, but they hadn’t seen a thing. He’d gone about as far as he could with it. He thought, Good luck. - -The insurance adjuster had fared no better than Foote. As Brennan reviewed the adjuster’s detailed summary of the case in early November of 2005, eight months after the victim had been found, it was easy to see why. The woman’s memory was all over the map. First she said she had been attacked by one man, then three, then two. At one point she said their accent might have been not Hispanic but “Romanian.” There was no evidence to implicate anyone. - -The hotel had a significant security system. The property was fenced, and the back gates were locked and monitored. There were only a few points of entry and exit. During the night, the back door was locked and could be opened only remotely. There were two security guards on duty at all times. Each exit was equipped with a surveillance camera. There was one over the front entrance and one over the back, one in the lobby, one at the lobby elevator, and others out by the pool and parking lot. All of the hotel guests had digital key cards that left a computer record every time they unlocked the door to their rooms. It was possible to track the comings and goings of every person who checked in. - -Brennan started where all good detectives start. What did he know for sure? He knew the victim had gone up to her fourth-floor room at the Airport Regency at 3:41 A.M., that she had used her key card to enter her room at about the same time, and that she had been found at dawn in the weeds eight miles west. Somewhere in that roughly three-hour window, she had left the hotel. But there was no evidence of this on any of the cameras. So, how? - -The victim was colorfully present on the video record, with her bright-red puffy jacket and shoulder-length blond curls. She had been in and out all night. After months of living in the hotel, she was clearly restless. She made frequent trips down to the lobby just to chat with hotel workers and guests, or to step outside for a smoke, and the cameras caught her every trip. She had gone out to dinner with a friend and returned around midnight, but she wasn’t done yet. She is seen exiting the elevator at about three in the morning, and the camera over the front entrance catches her walking away. She told investigators that she had walked to a nearby gas station to buy a phone card because she wanted to call her mother back in Ukraine, where people were just waking up. Minutes after her departure, the camera catches her return. The lobby camera records her re-entering the hotel and crossing the lobby. Moments later she is seen entering the elevator for her final trip upstairs. A large black man gets onto the elevator right behind her, and the recording shows them exchanging a few words. The police report showed her entering her room 20 minutes later, which had led to much speculation about where she was during that time. The victim had no memory of going anywhere but directly to her room. Brennan checked the clock on the camera at the elevator and found that it ran more than 20 minutes behind the computer clock, which recorded the key swipes, solving that small mystery. After she entered the lobby elevator, she was not seen again by any of the cameras. - -The surveillance cameras were in perfect working order. They were not on continually; they were activated by motion detectors. Miami-Dade detectives had tried to beat the motion detectors by moving very slowly, or finding angles of approach that would not be seen, but they had failed. No matter how slowly they moved, no matter what approach they tried, the cameras clicked on faithfully and caught them. - -One possibility was that she had left through her fourth-floor window. Someone would have had to drop her out the window or somehow lower her, presumably unconscious, into the bushes below, and then exit the hotel and walk around to retrieve her. But the woman showed no signs of injury from such a drop, or from ropes, and the bushes behind the hotel had not been trampled. The police had examined them carefully, looking for any sign of disturbance. It was also possible, with more than one assailant, that she had been lowered into the grasp of someone who had avoided disturbing the bushes, but Brennan saw that such explanations began to severely stretch credulity. Sex crimes are not committed by determined teams of attackers who come with padded ropes to lower victims from fourth-floor windows. - -No, Brennan concluded. Unless this crime had been pulled off by a team of magicians, the victim had to have come down in the elevator to the lobby and left through the front door. The answer was not obvious, but it had to be somewhere in the video record from those cameras. “Needless to say, the big mystery here is how this woman got out of the hotel,” read the summary of the case prepared by the insurance adjuster. It was a mystery he had not been able to crack. - -Brennan penciled one word on the memo: “Disguise?” - -He began studying the video record with great care, until he could account for every coming and going. Whenever a person or a group arrived, the camera over the front door recorded it. Seconds later, the entries were captured by the lobby cameras, and then, soon after, by the elevator cameras. Room-key records showed the arrivals entering their rooms. Likewise, those departing were recorded in the opposite sequence: elevator, lobby, front door. The parking-lot cameras recorded cars coming and going. One by one, Brennan eliminated scores of potential suspects. If someone had left the hotel before the victim re-entered her room, and did not return, he could not have attacked her. Such people were eliminated. Those who entered and were not seen to leave were also eliminated, and likewise anyone exiting the hotel without a bag, or carrying only a small bag. Brennan eliminated no one without a clear reason, not even women or families. He watched carefully for any sign of someone behaving nervously, or erratically. - -This painstaking process ultimately left him with only one suspect: the man seen entering the elevator behind the victim at 3:41 A.M. He was a very large black man with glasses, who looked to be at least six four and upwards of 300 pounds. He and the woman are seen casually talking as they enter the elevator. The same man emerges from the elevator into the lobby less than two hours later, at 5:28 A.M., pulling a suitcase with wheels. The camera over the front door records him rolling the suitcase out toward the parking lot at a casual stroll. He returns less than an hour later, shortly before dawn, without the bag. He gets back on the elevator and heads upstairs. - -Why would a man haul his luggage out of an airport hotel early in the morning, when he was not checking out, and then return to his room within the hour without it? That question, coupled with Brennan’s careful process of elimination, led him to the conclusion that the victim had been taken out of the hotel inside the big man’s suitcase. - -But it seemed too small. It looked to be about the size that air travelers can fit into overhead compartments. But the man himself was so big, perhaps the size of the bag was an illusion. Brennan studied the video as the man exited the elevator and also as he left the hotel, then measured the doorways of both. When he matched visible reference points in the video—the number of tiles to each side of the bag as it was wheeled out the front door, and the height of a bar that ran around the inside of the elevator—he was able to get a close approximation of the suitcase’s actual size. He obtained one that fit those measurements, which was larger than the bag on the video had appeared to be, and invited a flexible young woman whose proportions matched the victim’s to curl up inside it. She fit. - -He scrutinized the video still more closely, watching it again and again. The man steps off the elevator rolling the bag behind him. As he does, the wheels catch momentarily in the space between the elevator floor and the ground floor, just for a split second. It was hardly noticeable if you weren’t looking for it. The man has to give the bag a tug to get it unstuck. - -And that clinched it. That tiny tug. The bag had to have been heavy to get stuck. Brennan was now convinced. This is the guy. No matter what the victim had said—that she had been attacked by two or maybe three men, that they were “white,” that they spoke with accents that sounded Hispanic or perhaps Romanian—Brennan was convinced her attacker had to be this man. - -The detective was struck by something else. His suspect was entirely collected. Cool and calm, entering the elevator with the woman, exiting with the suitcase, pulling it behind him out to the parking lot, then strolling back less than an hour later. Brennan had been a cop. He had seen ordinary men caught up in the aftermath of a violent crime. They were beside themselves. Shaking. Panicky. If a man rapes and beats a woman to the point where he thinks she’s dead, and then hauls the body out to dump it in the weeds, does he come strolling back into the same hotel as if nothing happened? An ordinary attacker would have been two states away by noon. - -What this man’s demeanor suggested to Brennan was chilling. - -He’s good at this. He’s done this before. - -# The “Mercury” Man - -Brennan called a meeting at the hotel on November 17, 2005. The owners were there, the insurance adjusters, and the lawyers—in other words, the people who had hired him. They met in a boardroom. On a laptop screen, Brennan pulled up the image of the large man pulling his suitcase off the elevator. - -He said, “This is the guy that did it. That girl is inside that suitcase.” - -There was some snickering. - -“How do you come up with that?” he was asked. Brennan described his process of elimination, how he had narrowed and narrowed the search, until it led him to this man. - -They weren’t buying it. - -“Didn’t the victim say that she was attacked by two white guys?” one of them asked. - -“I’m telling you,” said Brennan. “This is the guy. Let me run with it a little bit. If you’re willing to give me the resources, I’ll track this guy down.” - -He told them that it was a complete win-win. The hotel’s liability in the civil suit would go way down if he could show that the woman had not been attacked by a hotel employee. “What could be better?” he said. “Think how good you’ll look if we actually catch the guy responsible. You’d be solving a horrible crime!” - -They seemed distinctly unmoved. - -“Look at how cool this guy is,” he told them, replaying the video. “He just raped and beat a woman to death, or thinks he has, and it’s not like he’s all nervous and jittery. He’s cool as a clam! Tell me the kind of person who could do such a thing and be this nonchalant. This ain’t the only time he’s done this.” - -A discussion ensued. There were some in the room who wanted to find the rapist, but the decision was primarily a business calculation. It was about weighing the detective’s fee against a chance to limit their exposure. Brennan didn’t care what their reasons were; he just wanted to keep going. Old instincts had been aroused. He had never even met the victim, but with her attacker in his sights, he wanted him badly. Here was a guy who was walking around almost a year later, certain he had gotten away with his crime. Brennan wanted what all detectives want: the gotcha! He wanted to see the look on the guy’s face. - -It was close, but in the end the hotel suits decided to let him keep working. Having overcome their skepticism so narrowly, Brennan was even more determined to prove he was right. - -The hotel’s records were useless. There were too many rooms and there was too much turnover to scrutinize every guest. Even if the hotel staff remembered a 300-pound black man with glasses, which they did not, there was no way to tell whether he was a registered hotel guest or a visitor, or if he was sharing someone else’s room. Even in cases where they photocopied a guest’s driver’s license, which they did not do faithfully, the image came up so muddy that there was no way to make out the face. - -So he went back to the video. Now that he knew whom he was looking for, Brennan scrutinized every appearance of his suspect, at the elevator, in the lobby, at the hotel restaurant, at the front door. In one of the video snippets at the elevator, the suspect is seen walking with a fit black man wearing a white T-shirt with the word “Mercury” on the front, which meant nothing to Brennan. His first thoughts were the car company, or the planet, or the element. There was nothing there he could work with. The manner of both men on the snippet suggested that they knew each other. They walked past the elevator and turned to their right, in the direction of the restaurant. So Brennan hunted up video from the restaurant surveillance camera, and, sure enough, it captured the two entering. As Brennan reviewed more video, he saw the big black man with the other man quite frequently, so he suspected that the two had been in town together. The man in the T-shirt had an ID tag on a string around his neck, but it was too small to read on the screen. Brennan called NASA to see if they had a way to enhance the picture. He described the camera and was told that it couldn’t be done. - -Again, back to the video. In the restaurant footage, the man in the T-shirt is momentarily seen from behind, revealing another word, on the back of the T-shirt. The best view comes in a split second as he sidesteps someone leaving, giving the camera a better angle. Brennan could see the letter V at the beginning of the word, and O at the end. He could make out a vague pattern of script in the middle, but could not be sure of the exact letters. It was like looking at an eye chart when you need stronger glasses; you take a guess. It looked to him as if the word was “Verado.” It meant nothing to him, but that was his hunch. So he Googled it and found that “Verado” was the name of a new outboard engine manufactured by Mercury Marine, the boat-engine manufacturer. - -There had been a big boat show in Miami in February, when the incident happened. Perhaps the man in the white T-shirt had been working at the show for Mercury Marine, and if he had, maybe his big friend had, too. - -Mercury Marine is a subsidiary of the Brunswick Corporation, which also manufactures billiards and bowling equipment and other recreational products. Brennan called its head of security, Alan Sperling, and explained what he was trying to do. His first thought was that the company might have put its boat-show employees up at the Airport Regency. If it had, he might be able to identify and locate the man in the picture through the company. Sperling checked, and, no, Mercury’s employees had stayed at a different hotel. Brennan racked his brain. Had any of the crews who set up the company’s booth stayed at the Regency? Again, the answer was no. - -“Well, who got those shirts?,” Brennan asked. - -Sperling checked and called back two weeks later. He said the only place the shirts had been given away was at the boat show’s food court. The company in charge of food for the show was called Centerplate, which handles concessions for large sporting events and conventions. It was a big company with employees spread across the nation. Brennan called the head of human resources for Centerplate, who told him that the company had put up some of its people at the Regency, but that it had hired more than 200 for the boat show, from all over. - -“Somebody has to remember a big black guy, 300 pounds at least—in glasses,” said the detective. - -A week later, the man from Centerplate called back. Some of their workers did remember a big black man with glasses, but no one knew his name. Someone did seem to recall, he said, that the company had initially hired the man to work at Zephyr Field, home of the New Orleans Zephyrs, the minor-league baseball team in Metairie, a sprawling suburb. This was a solid lead, but there was a bad thing about it: Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city just months earlier, and the residents of Metairie had been evacuated. It was a community scattered to the winds. - -# Good News, Bad News - -Brennan was stubborn. He was now months into this effort to identify and find the man responsible for raping and beating a woman he had never met. There was no way that what he was being paid for the job was worth the hours he was putting in. Nobody else cared as much as he did. What the hotel’s insurers really wanted, Brennan knew, was for him to tell them that the victim was a hooker, and that she had been beaten by one of her johns, which would go a long way toward freeing them from any liability. But this wasn’t true, and he had told them at the outset that the truth was all they would get from him. Detective Foote was openly skeptical. He had given Brennan all the information he had. He had more pressing cases with real leads and real prospects. - -But Brennan had a picture in his head. He could see this big man with glasses coolly going about his business day to day—smug, chatting up the girls, no doubt looking for his next victim, comfortable, certain that his crimes left no trail. - -Katrina was the bad thing about the New Orleans lead, but there was also a good thing. Brennan had a buddy on the police force there, a Captain Ernest Demma. Some years earlier, on a vacation to the French Quarter with his kids, Brennan had risked his hide helping Demma subdue a prisoner who had violently turned on him. - -“The guy had broken away from me,” Demma recalled, “and out of nowhere comes this guy in a black jacket flying down the sidewalk, who runs him down, tackles him, and held the guy until my men could subdue him. He was fantastic.” It was the kind of gesture a cop never forgets. Demma dubbed Brennan “Batman.” New Orleans may have been down for the count, but when Batman called, Demma was up for anything. - -The captain sent one of his sergeants out to Zephyr Field, where the club was working overtime to get its storm-ravaged facility ready to open the 2006 season. Demma called Brennan back: “The good news is: I know who this guy is.” - -“What’s the bad news?” - -“His name is Mike Jones, there’s probably only a million of them, and he doesn’t work there anymore, and nobody knows where he went.” - -Still, a name! Brennan thanked Demma and went back to the Regency database, and, sure enough, he found that there had indeed been a guest named Mike Jones staying at the hotel when the attack occurred. He had checked in on February 14, seven days before the rape and assault, and he had checked out on the 22nd, one day after he was seen rolling his suitcase to the car. The full name on his Visa card was Michael Lee Jones. The card had been canceled, and the address was for a Virginia residence Jones had vacated years earlier. He had left no forwarding address. Brennan lacked authority to subpoena further information from the credit-card company, and the evidence he had was still too slight to get Miami-Dade police involved. The phone number Jones had left with registration was a number for Centerplate. - -But the trail was warm again. Brennan knew that Jones no longer worked for Centerplate, and the people there didn’t know where he was, but the detective thought he knew certain things about his prey. Judging by the nonchalance he showed hauling a young woman’s body out of the hotel stuffed in a suitcase, Brennan suspected that this was a practiced routine. The Centerplate job had kept him moving from city to city, all expenses paid, a perfect setup for a serial rapist with a method that was tried and true. If Jones was his man, then he wouldn’t give up an arrangement like that. If he wasn’t employed by Centerplate anymore, where would somebody with his work experience go next? Who was facilitating his predation now? Brennan got some names from Centerplate and went online and compiled a list of the food-service company’s 20 to 25 top competitors. - -He started working his way down the list, calling the human-resources department for each of the competing firms, and one by one he struck out. As it happened, one company on the list, Ovations, had its headquarters in the Tampa area, and Brennan was planning a trip up in that direction anyway, so he decided to drop in. As any investigator will tell you, an interview in person is always better than an interview on the phone. Brennan stopped by and, as he can do, talked his way into the office of the company’s C.O.O. He explained his manhunt and asked if Ovations employed a 300-plus-pound black man with glasses named Michael Lee Jones. - -The executive didn’t even check a database. He told Brennan, who was not a law-enforcement official, that if he wanted that information he would have to return with a subpoena. All the other companies had checked a database and just told him no. He knew he had finally asked in the right place. - -“Why would you want someone working for you who is a rapist?” he asked. He was told there were privacy issues involved. - -“Get a subpoena,” the executive suggested. - -So Brennan got a fax number for Ovations and called Detective Foote at Miami-Dade; before long a subpoena spat from the machine. It turned out that Ovations had an employee named Michael Lee Jones who fit the description. He was working in Frederick, Maryland. - -# The Interrogation - -Michael Lee Jones was standing behind a barbecue counter at Harry Grove Stadium, home of the minor-league Frederick Keys, when Detective Foote and one of his partners showed up. It was an early-spring evening in the Appalachian foothills, and Foote the Floridian was so cold his teeth were chattering beneath his mustache. - -When Brennan had called him with the information about Jones, Foote was impressed by the private detective’s tenacity, but still skeptical. This whole effort more or less defined the term “long shot,” but the name and location of a potential suspect was without question the first real lead since the case had landed on his desk. It had to be checked out. The department had a requirement that detectives traveling out of town to confront suspected criminals go as a team, so Foote waited until another detective had to make such a trip to the suburbs of Washington. He got the detective to agree to take him along as partner. Together they made the hour-and-a-half drive to Frederick to visit Jones in person. - -Foote had called Jones earlier that day to see if he would be available. The detective kept it vague. He just said he was investigating an incident in Miami that had happened during the boat show, and confirmed that Jones had been working there. On the phone, Jones was polite and forthcoming. He said he’d been in Miami at that time and that he would be available to meet with Foote, and gave him directions to the ballpark. - -Jones was a massive man. Tall, wide, and powerful, with long arms and big hands and a great round belly. His size was intimidating, but his manner was exceedingly soft-spoken and gentle, even passive. He wore clear-rimmed glasses and spoke in a friendly way. Jones was in charge of the operation at the food counter and appeared to be respected and well liked by his busy employees. He was wearing an apron. He steered Foote and the other detective away from the booth to a picnic area just outside the stadium. - -As Foote recalled it later, he asked Jones about meeting women in Miami, and Jones said he had “hooked up” once. The detective asked him to describe her. “I only have sex with white women,” Jones said. - -Foote asked if he had had sex with anyone at the Airport Regency, and Jones said no. He said that the woman he had had sex with in Miami had been working at the boat show, and that they had hooked up elsewhere. - -“Any blonde women?,” Foote asked. - -“No.” - -“Foreign accent?” - -Jones said the woman he had sex with in Miami had been German. - -Foote was not making Jones as a suspect. The big man acted convincingly, like someone with nothing to hide. The detective was freezing in the evening air. Foote preferred coming right to the point; he was not given to artful interrogation. Besides, he felt more and more as if the trip had been a waste of time. So he just asked what he wanted to know. - -“Look, I’ve got a girl who was raped that week. Did you have anything to do with it?” - -“No, of course not!” said Jones, appropriately shocked by the question. “No way.” - -“You didn’t beat the shit out of this girl and leave her for dead in a field down there?” - -“Oh, no. No.” - -“Are you willing to give me a DNA specimen?,” Foote asked. - -Jones promptly said he would, further convincing the detective that this was not the guy. Do the guilty volunteer conclusive evidence? Foote produced the DNA kit, had Jones sign the consent form, and ran a cotton swab inside Jones’s mouth. - -He called Brennan when he got back. - -“I’m telling you, Ken, this ain’t the guy,” he said. - -“No, man, he’s definitely the fucking guy,” said Brennan, who flew up to Frederick himself, traveling with his son, and spent time over a three-day period talking to Jones, who continued to deny everything. - -Months after he returned, the DNA results came back. Brennan got a call from Foote. - -“You ain’t gonna believe this,” said Foote. - -“What?” - -“You were right.” - -Jones’s DNA was a match. - -Brennan flew up to Frederick in October to meet Foote, who arrested the big man. It had been 11 months since he took the case. Foote formally charged Jones with a variety of felonies that encompassed the acts of raping, kidnapping, and beating a young woman severely. The accused sat forlornly in a chair that looked tiny under his bulk, in an austere Frederick Police Department interrogation room, great rolls of fat falling on his lap under an enormous Baltimore Ravens T-shirt. He repeatedly denied everything in a surprisingly soft voice peculiar for such a big man, gesturing broadly with both hands, protesting but never growing angry, and insisting that he would never, ever, under any circumstances do such a thing to a woman. He said that he “never had any problems” paying women for sex, and that he “did not get a kick” out of hurting women. He did admit, once the DNA test irrevocably linked him to the victim, that he had had sex with her, but insisted that she was a “hooker,” that he had paid her a hundred dollars, and that when he left her she was in fine shape, although very drunk. They showed him pictures of her battered face, taken the day she was found. - -“I did not hurt that girl,” Jones said, pushing the photos away, his voice rising to a whine. “I’m not violent.… I never hit a fucking woman in my whole fucking life! I’m not going to hurt her.” - -Brennan asked him why a man would roll his suitcase out to the parking lot and stash it in his car at five in the morning, two days before he checked out of the hotel. - -“I couldn’t remember if we were leaving that day or the next day. I wasn’t sure.… For some reason, I thought, Fuck it, it’s time to go.” - -Brennan was able to trip Jones up with only one small thing. Jones said that his suitcase had only his clothes, shoes, and a video game in it, but when the detective noted the extra tug Jones had needed to get it off the elevator, Jones suddenly remembered that he had had a number of large books in it as well. He said he was an avid reader. - -When Brennan asked him to name some of the books he had read, Jones could not. He could not name a single title. - -But Jones was unfailingly compliant, and his manner worked for him. Even with the DNA, the case against him was weak. He had ample reason for not having volunteered initially that he had paid a woman for sex—he had a prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute—so that wouldn’t count against him, and if he had had sex with the victim, as he said, it would account for the DNA. The fact that Jones had willingly provided the sample spoke in his favor. In court, it would come down to his word against the young woman’s, and she was a terrible witness. She had picked Jones out of a photo lineup, but given how foggy her memory of the night was, and the fact that she had seen Jones before, unlike the other faces she was shown, it was hardly convincing evidence of his guilt. Her initial accounts of the crime were so much at odds with Brennan’s findings that even Foote found himself wondering who was telling the truth. - - -Miami prosecutors ended up settling with Jones, who, after being returned to Miami, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in return for having all of the more severe charges against him dropped. He was sentenced to two years in prison, an outcome that Brennan would have found very disappointing if that had been the end of the story. It was not. - -# Three More Hits - -Brennan never doubted that Jones was a rapist, and given what he had observed, first on the surveillance video and then after meeting him in person, he was convinced that sexual assault was Jones’s pastime. - -“This ain’t a one-fucking-time deal,” Brennan told Foote. “I’m telling you, this is this guy’s thing. He’s got a job that sends him all over the country. Watch him on that video. He’s slick. Nonchalant. He’s too cool, too calm. You’ll see it when you put his DNA into the system.” - -The “system” is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The F.B.I.-administered database now has well over eight million DNA offender profiles. Local, state, and federal law-enforcement officials routinely enter DNA samples recovered from convicts and from the scenes and victims of unsolved crimes, and over the years the system has electronically matched more than 100,000 of them, often reaching across surprising distances in place and time. It means that when a DNA sample exists a case can never be classified as entirely “cold.” - -Michael Lee Jones had left a trail. The Miami-Dade police entered Jones’s DNA into CODIS in late 2006, and several months later, which is how long it takes the F.B.I. to double-check matches the system finds electronically, three new hits came up. - -Detective Terry Thrumston, of the Colorado Springs Police Department sex-crimes unit, had a rape-and-assault case that had been bugging her for more than a year. The victim was a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who had been picked up early in the morning on December 1, 2005, by a stranger—a very large black man with glasses, who had offered her a ride and then talked his way into her apartment and raped her, holding his hand tightly over her mouth. Thrumston had no leads, and the case had sat for two years until DNA collected from the victim matched that of Michael Lee Jones. - -There were two victims in New Orleans. One of them, also a blonde, had been partying in the French Quarter a little too hard, by her own admission, and very early on the morning of May 5, 2003, she had gone looking for a cab back to her hotel when a very large black man with glasses pulled his car over to the curb and offered her a ride. As she later testified, he drove her to a weedy lot and raped her. He pressed his large hand powerfully over her face as he attacked her, and she testified that she bit his palm so hard that she had bits of his skin in her teeth afterward. When he was finished, he drove off, leaving her on the lot. She reported the rape to the New Orleans police, who filed her account and took DNA samples from the rapist’s semen. The case had sat until CODIS matched the specimen with Michael Lee Jones. The other New Orleans victim told a similar tale, but failed to pick Jones’s face out of a photo lineup. - -Jones, it turns out, had been in both Colorado Springs and New Orleans on the dates in question. So in 2008, as his Florida sentence drew to a close, he was flown to Colorado Springs to stand trial. It was a novel prosecution, because the Colorado woman had died in the interim, of causes unrelated to the crime. As a result, Deputy District Attorney Brien Cecil had no victim to put on the stand. Instead he fashioned a case out of two of the other rapes, calling as witnesses the Miami victim and one of the New Orleans victims, both of whom supplemented the DNA evidence by pointing out Jones as their attacker in the courtroom. Cecil argued that their cases showed a “common plan, scheme, or design” that was as much Jones’s signature as his trail of semen. - -The New Orleans victim proved to be a very effective witness. Her memory was clear and her statements emphatic, the outrage still evident six years later, along with her chagrin at the poor judgment she had displayed that night. The Miami victim, on the other hand, was every bit as bad on the stand as the Miami prosecutors had feared. One of Jones’s lawyers made much of the different stories she had told police. Her struggles with English further confused matters. - -Jones pleaded not guilty to all charges in the Colorado case. He argued through his lawyers (he did not testify) that the sex had been consensual, and that the woman claiming rape had been a prostitute. But where jurors in Colorado might have been able to accept two prostitutes in different states at different times unaccountably filing rape charges after turning a trick, and in both cases immediately describing their attacker as a huge black man with glasses, they clearly choked on a third. There was no evidence that any of the victims were prostitutes. And then, of course, there was the DNA. - -Michael Lee Jones is serving what amounts to a life sentence at the Fremont Correctional Facility, in Colorado. He received a term of 24 years to life for one count of sexual assault with force, and 12 years to life for the second count, of felonious sexual contact. He is 38 years old and will not be eligible for his first parole hearing until 2032. The state estimates his term will last until he dies. - -His Miami victim won a $300,000 settlement from the hotel and the hotel’s security company. - -Ken Brennan is back doing his private-detective work in Miami. He is enormously proud of the efforts that have locked Jones away. “The cases they got him on, they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” he predicted. “Once other jurisdictions start checking their DNA files on cases when this guy was at large, I guarantee you they will find more.” - -So far his hunches have been pretty good. -