Bitten by bytes

It appalls but does not completely surprise me that a 3-month-old Korean girl slowly starved to death while her feckless parents haunted a nearby internet café playing computer games; the horrible irony is that the game that addicted them was a simulation in which they raised a virtual child online.

The article from the Guardian Online cited yet other instances of the same social evil:

A 22-year-old Korean man was charged last month with murdering his mother because she nagged him for spending too much time playing games. After killing her the man went to a nearby internet cafe and continued with his game, said officials. In 2005 a young man collapsed in an internet cafe in the city of Taegu after playing the game StarCraft almost continuously for 50 hours. He went into cardiac arrest and died at a local hospital.

Admittedly, distraction from the obligations of the immediate was not born with the Internet. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift satirized absent-minded thinkers who needed minders to follow them around through the day and periodically tap them on the shoulder to remind them where they were. A guilt-ridden Mark Twain confessed in his Autobiography that his oldest son's death was his fault; sunk deep in thought as he took a carriage ride one winter day with the toddler, Clemens did not notice that the blanket had slipped off the boy's bare legs; his son caught a chill and died shortly after.

Perhaps the difference with the Internet is that it is interactive and that there is an immediate payoff; this, plus the distraction from tedium, must be among the reasons that people text while driving. As long as people are obsessed with the world online, they could do worse than to spend their time addressing one of the next great issues in national security: the ease with which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, can be assembled, chillingly detailed last week in Newsweek by P.W. Singer:

At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

When we invaded Iraq, I explained to my worried son, then 14, why Saddam couldn't send planes to bomb us as we could bomb Baghdad. Times are changing: Singer's article mentions that a 77-year-old blind man in Canada designed a drone that flew across the Atlantic to Ireland. These home-made gadgets actually gain from being less advanced than the machinery of our current defenses:

Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.

According to a robotics expert cited in the article, an amateur could build a machine for less than $50,000 that could shut down Manhattan. Actually, our own government nearly achieved that when some nitwit let Air Force One fly over the city for a photo opportunity last year, panicking thousands.

Getting back to UAVs, the "Popular Mechanics" aspect isn't the only problem; even worse, it seems that overlooked and easily exploitable security flaws aren't limited to the Giant of Redmond:

More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.

Until this Terminator-like future arrives, one can still take refuge in the quiet pleasures of an art museum (though the guard at the Phillips Collection in Washington nearly assaulted me last year when my flash went off as I photographed Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party), but according to Newsweek staffer Jennie Yabroff, art appreciation can have its own hazards:

Stendhal syndrome isn't included in the draft version of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, released last month, but with proposed additions including "apathy syndrome" and Internet addiction, it's probably only a matter of time. The affliction takes its name from the 19th-century French writer, who was overcome after visiting Florence's Basilica di Santa Croce. In 1989 an Italian psychiatrist named Graziella Magherini published La Sindrome di Stendhal, describing more than 100 tourists who suffered dizziness and heart palpitations (some requiring hospitalization) after seeing the Florentine sights. According to Magherini, great art can make you sick.

Yabroff cites Stendhal's own account of the experience that caused Magherini's diagnosis:

Stendhal visited Florence in 1817: maybe he was suffering Grand Tour pressure to have a properly edifying travel experience. But what actually happened? He writes, "On leaving the Santa Croce church, I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall."

I doubt that any age has ever equalled ours for discovering previously unknown disorders and tagging them with clinical names, but I think there may be something to this. What happens if a work of art really grips you? If it is sufficiently powerful, it may affect the viewer, on a smaller scale, like the feeling described in Sylvia Plath's poem, "Mystic":

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?

How many transformative experiences can one endure in a single day? As my son wisely observed after we had toured the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, "I think I'm all museumed out for now."

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

What shall it profit a man, if he gains the world and has no clue?

I won't say I'm glad I'm not wealthy. Samuel Johnson once rebuked his longsuffering friend, Hester Thrale, for repeating a rather fatuous moral from David Garrick: "I'd smile with the simple and feed with the poor." Johnson rightly replied, "Nay, madam, I'd smile with the wise and feed with the rich," although he might have added that one doesn't always find both in the same place.

When West Virginia businessman Jack Whitaker won his record lottery payout in 2002, I noticed that his granddaughter's name was Brandi Bragg, and since Bragg is my maternal grandmother's maiden name, I facetiously suggested that my family call Whitaker and tell him we were long-lost cousins. Of course, his own buffoonish decline since and poor Brandi's pathetic end just 2 years later are a cautionary tale about the influence of riches without a sufficient sense of purpose.

On the two occasions in my own life when I suddenly acquired rather sizable cash windfalls, I noticed that, if anything, my new and temporary fortunes only made me even more irascible and peremptory than usual, so I'm not sure that wealth would be my best condition. I would at least want to avoid the frame of mind of the two museum-goers that I read about in The American Scholar 20 years ago: seeing some priceless artifact, an Etruscan drinking vessel or the like, one expressed her admiration for it, while the other replied, "Yes, but if I bought it, where would I put it?"

I was reminded of this today on reading Peter Plagens' survey of the impact of the recession on the world of contemporary art, published a week ago in Newsweek:

Right up until last September, even the greenest postgraduate painter showing for the first time in a barely reputable gallery was asking—and getting—$10,000 to $20,000 per picture. The number of still-living (not to mention merely middle-aged) contemporary artists commanding a cool million dollars for a single work at auction is edging toward 100. Anecdotes about art-world excess are legion. A collector at an art fair was shown a previously undiscovered canvas by a midlevel abstractionist from the 1960s and told that the price was under $100,000. "Well, I suppose I could enjoy that," she said to the dealer, "if I were poor."

Well we must all keep up our standards, certainly.

I would like to have enough money not to worry about whether Courvoisier is costing me too much, to buy books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and to collect black and white photography and antique clocks. I don't know if this will ever happen. But I certainly want to avoid the trap of the "vanishing wealthy" that I heard interviewed a few years ago in an investigative feature on NPR.

The reporter, an enterprising young woman, asked who was considered financially well off in today's society. First, she approached a two-paycheck couple in a nice suburb in Northern New Jersey, with a combined income of $100,000 (which is most certainly not wealthy, especially if you're raising a family). The wife replied, "Well off? Good heavens, no! Sure, we have our kids in private schools and give them music and ballet lessons, but we live from paycheck to paycheck."

Next, the reporter approached a businessman in the same area with an income of $325,000. "Well off?" the man exclaimed, clearly annoyed. "Are you kidding me? You should see the taxes I pay!"

Finally, the reporter talked her way into a 4-storey brownstone, the single-family home of a $1 million-a-year investment banker and his wife and children. "Wealthy?" the wife reflected. "Well no, not really. I actually don't have that many designer dresses in my closet."

The reporter was almost speechless. "Well if you're not wealthy," she exclaimed, "who in the world is?

The wife replied, "Oh, I don't know—perhaps someone with $20 or $30 million."

For another interesting look at the contemporary art world, see Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock, the story of a feisty, truck-driving grandma from the Midwest who became convinced that her $50 thrift shop purchase was a genuine lost Pollock (of whom she had never heard). Needless to say, the art world, including still-living patrons and collectors who had known Pollock, were having none of that.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

No bailout bargain

It would be nice if the economy would have a Clive Huggins moment. Clive was my late father, and, having been raised in the Depression, was always fearful of the prospect of paying too much for something; thus, he was often punished by the rule that says you get what you pay for. The Christmas trees he brought home looked like the last survivors of a worldwide drought, while he grumbled that he had overpaid. I, on the other hand, being perfectly willing to pay a premium price where I can afford it (though, on my budget, such willingness is more often a state of mind than an actual monetary transaction) and am likely to gain real quality by doing so, sometimes find myself buying perfectly creditable items for absurdly low prices. When that happens—e.g., paying $85 for $250 luggage or $18 for a $120 lounging robe—I call it a Clive Huggins moment. One of the largest Christmas trees I ever had, a tree so large I actually had to block one of the doors of my apartment to find a place to set it up, cost me $2, which was ridiculously low even for 1974.

Jeffrey Garten, writing in Newsweek recently, was convinced that we are trying to nickel-and-dime our way out of the current financial crisis and that nothing but an investment of $1 trillion, or 7% of GDP over the next 2 years, will give the economy the necessary infusion of capital and inspire consumer confidence once more:

The fundamental issue is fear. Despite the colossal problems in the U.S. economy, the dollar continues to strengthen, which just shows that investors fear other markets even more. Billions of dollars are flowing into three-year U.S. Treasury bills, whose interest rate is zero, so investors are merely trying to minimize losses, not make money. Clearly, the governments have not succeeded in restoring calm. Their efforts look improvised, confused and ineffective to the average consumer or investor. The poster child for this problem is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in the United States. The bitter congressional debates over the program and its shifting purpose—from buying toxic assets to injecting cash—has left the public feeling that Washington isn't quite sure what it is doing. For many weeks now, the Treasury and the Fed have appeared to be constantly on the brink of unveiling yet another new program, leaving the impression that even they don't believe the current ones will work.

I only wish someone could figure out the ratio of fear to real potential economic damage. Of course the government needs to spend, but how much? The exasperating thing is the extent to which the crisis is driven by emotion. I think of this, for instance, when I read of homeowners who, we are told, are still stuck paying on homes that are now worth less than the balance of the mortgage. So? My Saturn Ion is worth less than what I owe on it, even at the 0% APR financing I obtained from a desperate car dealer last year (another Clive Huggins moment), but that doesn't keep it from getting me to work, and I am still making payments. There is a real economic crisis—no argument there—and an additional amount of hand-wringing that is no doubt making the situation potentially much worse than it needs to be.

Actually, psychology is as interesting in figuring out how we got here as it is in figuring out how to get out of this mess. Henry Blodget, once notorious as a Wall St. tech stock analyst forced out of his occupation after the dot.com meltdown by Eliot Spitzer (never mind), provides a very incisive analysis of why there will always be economic bubbles and why perfectly intelligent, well-intentioned people will miss them until it's too late, in his article "Why Wall Street Always Blows It" in the current Atlantic:

...most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t.

One of the biggest culprits, as Blodget points out, is the recurring belief that "it's different this time" in a way that is supposed to make caution irrelevant:

Those are said to be the most expensive words in the English language, by the way: it’s different this time. You can’t have a bubble without good explanations for why it’s different this time. If everyone knew that this time wasn’t different, the market would stop going up. But the future is always uncertain—and amid uncertainty, all sorts of faith-based theories can flourish, even on Wall Street.

In the 1920s, the “differences” were said to be the miraculous new technologies (phones, cars, planes) that would speed the economy, as well as Prohibition, which was supposed to produce an ultra-efficient, ultra-responsible workforce. (Don’t laugh: one of the most respected economists of the era, Irving Fisher of Yale University, believed that one.) In the tech bubble of the 1990s, the differences were low interest rates, low inflation, a government budget surplus, the Internet revolution, and a Federal Reserve chairman apparently so divinely talented that he had made the business cycle obsolete. In the housing bubble, they were low interest rates, population growth, new mortgage products, a new ownership society, and, of course, the fact that “they aren’t making any more land.”

In hindsight, it’s obvious that all these differences were bogus (they’ve never made any more land—except in Dubai, which now has its own problems). At the time, however, with prices going up every day, things sure seemed different.

In fairness to the thousands of experts who’ve snookered themselves throughout the years, a complicating factor is always at work: the ever-present possibility that it really might have been different. Everything is obvious only after the crash.

The other deadly ingredient in bubbles is that investment professionals won't keep their jobs if they restrict themselves to prudent courses leading to merely reasonable returns; the same competition that fuels a free market also drives each fund manager to chase larger and larger returns for his investors, on peril of a forced retirement. Blodget cites the instance of fund manager Julian Robertson, whose Tiger Management company lost 66% of its assets to withdrawals by disgruntled investors and finally closed its doors because Robertson correctly anticipated the tech stock meltdown and moved his investors' funds elsewhere (where returns were lesser, though on safer ground).

In other words, we don't want the slick mortgage broker, the BMW-driving realtor, or the glib investment pitchman to do the right thing for us but the thing, instead, that will make us feel as well off as our neighbors occupying the houses that they also couldn't afford. Frankly, I wonder if the Dutch had the right idea when they went nuts over tulip bulbs in 1634; the Semper Augustus bulb was commanding prices equal to that of a house on the Amsterdam market, but at least that was a product of nature.

Actually, Jane Bryant Quinn quotes financial advisor Steve Leuthold in a recent column as saying that investors should buy just about anything at this point, on the grounds that it is likely to be a bargain. That was certainly true of the $22.99 box of firelogs I talked an exasperated Kroger manager into selling me for $5.99 yesterday, after it had been mislabeled, but I don't think that's what Leuthold meant. If stocks scare you too much, perhaps you could consider bidding on Jeff Koons's metal "Hanging Heart" sculpture, a colossal piece of kitsch that recently sold for $27 million, which proves that a fool and his money are soon parted. I think my best buy today was ordering Facing Mount Kenya from Amazon.com on the advice of the Kenyan clergyman of the church I have been visiting; an ethnographic study done at the London School of Economics by a young Jomo Kenyatta in the 1930s, it is supposed to be a very insightful analysis of Kikuyu life and culture. I got it for just $1.75.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Barack Jindal

I voted for Obama and would be delighted to see him fulfill his apparent promise. After the sheer boneheadedness of the officers of government my fellow Republicans had been content to elect, it was time for a change. I heartily agreed with Christopher Buckley's explanation for his defection:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of "conservative" government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

Exactly. Still, don't throw out your Republican campaign literature yet, Christopher; like 10-year-old Cameron Bright reappearing as Nicole Kidman's deceased husband in Birth comes the Gipper reborn—or so many are beginning to hope—as a 36-year-old up-and-comer restoring competence and honesty to a state nearly as corrupt as Rod Blagojevich's Illinois. The comparisons are a bit of a stretch; Reagan never pretended to a résumé that included graduating from Brown at 21 and completing a Rhodes Scholarship at 23, but this most quintessentially American of 20th-century Presidents would certainly warm to a small boy, a son of Indian immigrants, who suddenly announced at age 5 that he would answer to no name but Bobby because that was his favorite character on The Brady Bunch. Republicans today, as described in Andrew Romano's piece in a recent issue of Newsweek, are flocking to the young Governor of Louisiana for a combination of style and substance, as Grover Norquist describes it:

First of all, he's brilliant....Two, he's from an immigrant community, so that speaks to immigrant experience, period. Three, he's a Catholic who lives his values instead of shouting at you about them. Four, he's a principled Reagan Republican. Five, he's from the South but doesn't look like a Southern sheriff. And he's got more successes as a governor, already, one year in, than George W. Bush or Obama had when they ran for president. He's exactly what we need.

I don't want Jindal to run as a sort of rebuke or comeuppance to Barack Obama; if the President-elect is as principled as he is intelligent, if he governs wisely and well, if he can truly effect needed changes in energy, the economy, and healthcare without incurring a ruinous debt, if he can restore our damaged credibility among nations, more power to him. No, I want Jindal to enter the arena because more nearly-matched competition puts each contestant on his mettle and forces voters to be very sure of why they are choosing one over the other; I want him to run also so as to put to rest for good the idea that the incoherent, swaggering, shoot-a-moose-from-a-helicopter style of another governor is seen once and for all as the tasteless national joke that it is.

Jindal claims he has no intention of running in 2012, and if he really means that, he needs to be reminded that Iowa is not in his jurisdiction, but whenever he chooses to run, can he win? There are at least two points of vulnerability: his uncompromising opposition to abortion under any circumstances whatsoever, and his self-attested participation in an amateur exorcism at Brown.

The majority of voters—even self-described pro-choice advocates, it seems—do not wish to see the wanton taking of unborn life for convenience but wish only to see abortion, as the phrase goes, become "safe, legal, and rare." It has to be a comfort even to those who are strongly pro-life, as I am, that the incidence of abortion has actually declined since the early 1990s. I hope for a cultural change of the type that caused the rate of smoking to drop by half over the past 40 years: the emergence of a culture that regards unborn life with such care and reverence as to see abortion as a regrettable choice and avoid it if possible; a blanket refusal to so much as consider it even for medical necessity is not likely to win votes for a candidate for national office. As to the rest of his religious views, I can only trust that someone with a biology degree from Brown will exercise his apparently considerable intelligence and not resort, for political or any other reasons, to the asinine prescription to "teach the controversy" to public school students, a controversy that would never have existed but for the perverse refusal of the scientifically ignorant to assent to what they don't want to understand.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Not a retreat, but a backward advance

ServiceMaster®, which, until recently, contemplated building a new 100-acre $122 million corporate headquarters in Memphis, will lay off 50 headquarters employees instead. A company spokeswoman, who must have done her Master's in the works of Orwell, explained that this was a way to "Lead the market and grow the company."

If ServiceMaster merely found themselves short of office space, they might have relocated to Dubai (surely one of the world's largest potential markets for TruGreen® lawn care), a country that owns 20% of the London Stock Exchange and where 42 million square feet of office space were under construction recently, according to Christopher Dickey in Newsweek. In line with ServiceMaster's thinking, Dubai opened its Atlantis resort with a celebrity-packed event, featuring a $20 million fireworks display that was visible from space, while it laid off 500 immigrant workers and construction on its unfinished skyscrapers began to shut down, a ripple effect of the world financial crisis and falling oil revenues.

Speaking of fireworks visible from space, the latest flashpoint in the abortion issue is the discovery that choice is open not only to pregnant women but to health-care providers who don't approve of terminating pregnancy at will, an exercise of choice that many pro-choicers have greeted with astonishment and outrage. As described by attorney and columnist Dahlia Lithwick:

What does it tell us about the state of the abortion wars, that battles once waged over the dignity and autonomy of pregnant women have morphed into disputes over the dignity and autonomy of their health-care providers?

What it suggests to me, Dahlia, is that framing the entire matter in terms of "choice" was always a too-simple and, ultimately self-defeating approach; it was always just a matter of time until actors who were philosophical opponents of "reproductive freedom" suddenly realized that they had freedom as well and decided to exercise it. Just as the state's right to execute a criminal does not compel a doctor to participate in the execution, the legal right to terminate pregnancy cannot compel a pharmacist, nurse, or doctor to participate.

Of course Lithwick is well aware of this already and is specifically concerned about two emerging legal issues in the contest. She sees the first as both superfluous and harmful:

The first dispute concerns a new rule purporting to protect the "right of conscience" of American health-care workers. Under a new midnight regulation crammed through by the Bush Department of Health and Human Services and poised to become law any day now, any health-care worker may refuse to perform procedures, offer advice or dispense prescriptions, if doing so would offend their "religious beliefs or moral convictions." Congress has protected the right of physicians to opt out of providing abortions for decades. This new rule, which President-elect Obama can overturn (although it may take months), is far broader. It allows one's access to birth control, emergency contraception and even artificial insemination to turn on the moral preferences of a pharmacist, nurse or ambulance driver.

True, it does, and legal and medical relief that no one for 500 miles around will willingly provide, is hollow, but in a free society, that can't be helped. In a free society, laws have much more to do with prohibiting behavior than compelling it; my religious neighbor who believes that prayer is the sovereign remedy for all ills may not prevent me from going to the hospital, but neither is he compelled to drive me there. Of course we're talking specifically about health-care providers, not the public at large, and it is argued that a health-care provider who refuses to provide legally recognized services at discretion is at best acting with a lack of integrity but that, again, begs the question of whether the only morally defensible position is to support human intervention at will in reproductive matters, a position that many—including many in health care—find objectionable. Whatever the merits of that belief, it is as much their right to hold it—and act on it—as it is the right of a woman to terminate or a couple to use contraception. The nurse's or pharmacist's freedom does not end where someone else's preferences begin.

Lithwick is on much more solid ground with the second issue she raises:

The second dispute involves a South Dakota law that went into effect last summer after an appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction. The law requires physicians providing abortions to read from a state-mandated script advising the patient that she is about to "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with whom she has an "existing relationship." The doctor must have her patient sign each page of a form indicating that she has been warned of the "statistically significant" risks of the procedure, including "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." These "risks" are almost completely unsupported by the scientific literature. A new comprehensive study released by Johns Hopkins found "no significant differences in long-term mental health between women in the United States who choose to terminate a pregnancy and those who do not." The disparity between the empirical data and the mandatory script thus forces physicians into a Hobson's choice between providing patients with accurate medical information, and possible license suspension and misdemeanor charges.

Even as someone who is strongly pro-life, I find the South Dakota law preposterous. As to psychological consequences to women, I'm not convinced of the virtually risk-free picture portrayed by the Johns Hopkins study, but the South Dakota script has other issues that render it absurd, and the doctor's legal duty to get it signed equally so. Without being explicitly religious, it comes as close as possible to giving the force of law to philosophical pronouncements about the present state of a fetus that simply can't be proven. The reasons for objecting to abortion on demand cannot and must not rest on near-metaphysical speculation about when consciousness and "personhood" begin but upon the fetus's potential value as a whole human life, a value that is likely to be realized unless we or nature intervene. If South Dakota isn't careful, the likely result of such a misbegotten law will be to leave citizens with no health-care providers but Native American shamans, the doctors all having fled to venues governed by more reasonable statutes. Of course the obvious approach should be for the doctor to administer the script but only after advising the patient that he or she is doing so only under legal compulsion and that it represents an unwarranted interference in the administration of health-care. Certainly, doctors who believe that a specific abortion decision is a mistake also have a right to present their views—voluntarily—and no one should prevent them. Awkward as it may be, it's part of what a free society is about.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

No nail clippers? Admit them.

Several dozen climate activists entered a secured area of Stansted Airport, near London, a couple of days ago at 3 a.m., and chained themselves to fences, delaying the opening of a nearby runway for 3 hours, which disrupted dozens of flights. They had used an old fire engine, and security officers apparently waved them through. As The Economist commented:

It's no good stopping passengers carrying a pair of nail scissors in their hand luggage if you haven't got effective control of your runway, where the scope for disruption—and worse—is enormous.

A similar confusion seems to affect discussions of gay marriage, calling to mind nothing so much as the warning about "Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." Conservative Christians present themselves as protecting marriage, while they drive the divorce rate higher than among any other segment of the population. Gay men, meanwhile, argue for their right to enter into an arrangement that, whatever else it means, is supposed to stand for lifelong monogamy, a tendency that, for gay men, seems in notoriously short supply. As gay activist Mark Simpson candidly acknowledges, with true British understatement, "Gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example?"

Exactly. (I don't know whether lesbian couples in general are more committed or not, and let's admit, at once, with readers of the Boi from Troy gay blog, that the roving eye is mostly a male trait for straights and gays alike; quite enough peccadilloes are chargeable to Bill Clinton without suspecting him of wanting to hit on Elton John.)

Of course there are exceptions to everything, and committed and responsible couples may be found anywhere, but my gut reaction in hearing gay men, at least, demand the right to enter legally recognized lifelong monogamous relationships has been akin to what I would feel hearing peace demonstrators demand ROTC scholarships.

The question, as at Stansted, is whether there is a runway to protect and where it lies, and the issue seems to turn on the word "marriage." Frankly, it reminds me of the time, at age 8, when I told my father quite seriously that I intended to write to President Kennedy to protest the fact that the word "day" referred both to the 24-hour period and the hours of sunlight; I objected to the ambiguity and wanted a law passed to clarify it.

Dislike of gays and their practices is not exclusively an Evangelical Christian issue, of course; my Pakistani Muslim cabdriver in Vancouver a few years ago conceded that gays were welcome to frolic together (he expressed it more colorfully) but not in his cab or on public beaches. In any case, conservative Christians argue that the Bible and Christian tradition condemn homosexuality, and they do, but we are not a theocracy and not all religious violations can result in legal prohibitions, or else blasphemy would be a crime. Newsweek devotes a a sensitive and reasonable article in this week's issue to "The Christian Case for Gay Marriage," which is rather like arguing the Vegan case for roast beef; there is none. After making many categorically sound points about the dangers of literalism in Biblical interpretation, the otherwise perceptive reporter duly goes off the rails with a quote from Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, who argues for gay marriage on the grounds that "The Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."

Well, no, it's not, and Brueggemann's mistake is characteristic of those, to paraphrase Mencken, haunted by the fear that the Bible might actually mean what it says; who would prefer to interpret it as a vague and permissive general benevolence toward all. The promise of redemption in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures is, indeed, inclusive, but always on condition of meeting stated requirements, and same-sex intimacy doesn't make the cut. Brueggemann is certainly in tune with the spirit of this age, but not of the apostolic one; see, for instance, the following, from St. Basil the Great: "He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers" (Letters 217:62 [A.D. 367]); or this, from St. John Chrysostom:

All of these affections [in Rom. 1:26–27] . . . were vile, but chiefly the mad lust after males; for the soul is more the sufferer in sins, and more dishonored than the body in diseases" (Homilies on Romans 4 [A.D. 391]).

"[The men] have done an insult to nature itself. And a yet more disgraceful thing than these is it, when even the women seek after these intercourses, who ought to have more shame than men" (ibid.).

The whole appeal to religion is not a little strange to begin with; as I mentioned in my first post, I'm at a point in my life where I have no religious belief at all, but unwillingness to assent to the claim that a Disembodied Spirit spoke the planets into existence need not deprive one of the ability to see Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for what they are: systems of belief and ritual based on the perceived need to cleanse the impurity of mankind and propitiate the inexorable righteousness of a Creator. Those elements of religion may be decidedly inconvenient, but they cannot be cut out for convenience or, if they are, the name "Christian" should be abandoned as well.

Having said that, again, we aren't living in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whatever legal protections and financial advantages may accrue to couples in legally recognized relationships can't be denied in an enlightened state worthy of the name, to otherwise law-abiding, consenting adults on grounds ultimately traceable to religious objections, any more than a Catholic should be formally barred from the Presidency. Gays, like polygamists, may have to bypass the word "marriage" for tactical reasons, but their detractors have similarly got to become more clearsighted about the difference between their personal morals and public policy.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

The last shall be first

No doubt Axl Rose thought he was scoring a point with irony when he named his long-gestating album Chinese Democracy, but the Chinese could as readily turn the tables by releasing one called, with equal justice, "American Solvency." China is devoting $586 billion, or 18% of its GDP, to stimulate its own economy; to reach an equivalent level of expenditure, our government would have to shell out $2.4 trillion, and by the time we finish rescuing enterprises "too big to fail," we may have spent not much less than that!

We are still the world's premier military power, but as Fareed Zakaria points out, in this week's Newsweek, economic growth is bestowing power of a different kind:

...the Obama administration should study the National Intelligence Council's newly published forecast, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World." "The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025," the document says, owing to the rise of emerging nations, a globalizing economy and a dramatic power shift. "In terms of size, speed and directional flow, the transfer of global wealth and economic power now underway—roughly from West to East—is without precedent in modern history." Some have seized on the fact that emerging markets are slumping to argue that the era of Western dominance isn't over yet. But the rise of the non-Western world—which began with Japan in the 1950s, then continued with the Asian tigers in the 1960s, China in the 1980s and India and Brazil in the 1990s—is a broad and deep trend that is likely to endure.

For some countries, the current economic crisis could actually accelerate the process. For the past two decades, for example, China has grown at approximately 9 percent a year and the United States at 3 percent. For the next few years, American growth will likely be 1 percent and China's, by the most conservative estimates, 5 percent. So, China was growing three times as fast as the United States but will now grow five times as fast, which only brings closer the date when the Chinese economy will equal in size that of the United States. [Emphasis added.] Then contrast China's enormous surplus reserves to America's massive debt burden: the picture does not suggest a return to American unipolarity.

The "rise of the rest," as I have termed it, is an economic phenomenon, but it has political, military and cultural consequences. In one month this past summer, India was willing to frontally defy the United States at the Doha trade talks, Russia attacked and occupied parts of Georgia, and China hosted the most spectacular and expensive Olympic Games in history (costing more than $40 billion). Ten years ago, not one of the three would have been powerful or confident enough to act as it did. Even if their growth rates decline, these countries will not return quietly to the back of the bus.

The President-elect has certainly given economic issues their due, with the appointment of a team of major players to address the crisis, but Steve Fraser argues in Salon that Obama's group of former Clinton appointees comprises "change only the brainiacs from Hyde Park and Harvard Square could believe in." To be so fond of invoking FDR and the crisis of 1932, Fraser writes, the new group seems to have forgotten the extent to which the members of Roosevelt's team of rivals were sometimes ideological opponents of each other:

Roosevelt was no radical; indeed, he shared many of the conservative convictions of his class and times. He believed deeply in both balanced budgets and the demoralizing effects of relief on the poor. He tried mightily to rally the business community to his side. For him, the labor movement was terra incognita and—though it may be hard to believe today—played no role in his initial policy and political calculations. Nonetheless, right from the beginning, Roosevelt cobbled together a Cabinet and circle of advisors strikingly heterogeneous in its views, one that, by comparison, makes Obama's inner sanctum, as it is developing today, look like a sectarian cult.

Heterogeneous does not mean radical. Some of FDR's early appointments—as at the Treasury Department—were die-hard conservatives. Jesse Jones, who ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Hoover administration creation, retained by FDR, that had been designed to rescue tottering banks, railroads and other enterprises too big to fail, was a practitioner of business-friendly bailout capitalism before present Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was even born.

But there was also Henry Wallace as secretary of agriculture, a Midwestern progressive who would become the standard bearer for the most left-leaning segments of the New Deal coalition. He was joined at the Agriculture Department—far more important then than now—by men like Mordecai Ezekiel, who was prepared to challenge the power of the country's landed oligarchs.

That's all very well, and it's a safe bet that Obama could certainly have added variety to his Cabinet by summoning Phil Gramm to renew his warning about a nation of whiners, but I think Fraser is missing at least part of the point. A Cabinet-level rivalry of the Hamilton-Jefferson type no doubt shows opposing ideas in their most striking light, as they strive for dominance, but would hardly suit the professed "no drama" operating principle of the new President. Besides, without at all detracting from the place of Roosevelt among the great men of history, the new Administration need not relearn the lessons of 1932 (or at least, the rest of us fervently hope not). Just as it wasn't necessary for Stephen Jay Gould to travel to the Galapagos Islands to follow in Darwin's footsteps and verify natural selection anew, one hopes the new Administration can discover and apply sound solutions without having to learn the remedies for recession all over again.

Whatever may be said about Obama's economic team, one hopes that in implementing his announced goal of "greening the White House," either the President-elect or his wife selects a better team of interior decorators than the group invited by Tampa Bay Online to submit proposed redesigns of famous White House Rooms; the sketch for a new Green Room, by Kemble Interiors, seems to have been commissioned to reflect the esthetic of McDonald's and might be labeled "Change I Can't Conceive of."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Seems, madam? Nay, it is.

Mark Steyn correctly wonders, concerning the photo of the Mumbai terrorist patrolling the train station with an assault rifle, what it takes for the Western media to overcome their absurd penchant for politically correct euphemisms and call him a gunman instead of a "suspected" gunman. The habit of thought is pernicious and seems to show up everywhere; my company newsletter, on a rare snowy day in the South, warned us about "challenging" weather conditions, as though calling it "bad" weather might hurt Jack Frost's feelings and provoke a lawsuit.

Speaking of warnings, just as U.S. intelligence was warned before 9/11 that terrorists could pilot airplanes into buildings, the Indian government was warned two years ago that terrorists were receiving maritime training and that coastal defenses should be ramped up; as the Washington Post reports:

A December 2006 letter written by a Mumbai Intelligence Bureau official and obtained by The Post says that hundreds of operatives from Lashkar-i-Taiba had received maritime training.

Members of the group "are being trained to handle large boats, laying of mines in coastal zones and planting of explosives under dams, bridges, ships etc.," says the letter, which was marked "secret."

"[T]hey are being taught navigational techniques, rescue operations, surveillance methods, concealment of explosives and underwater attack on enemy's coastal targets/vessels," the letter says.

Sriprakash Jaiswal, minister of state for home affairs, told reporters Friday that India's state governments were warned to boost coastal security two years ago.

The Washington Post also printed this thoughtful article by a former editor of the Times of India, reminding us that Muslim extremism is exacerbated by its opposite number among radical Hindus, as well as by repressive police tactics, while Doug Saunders writes in the Globe and Mail that in a land with India's history of terrorism, comparisons to 9/11 may be a little too easy. Rich Lowry points to the poverty and illiteracy existing alongside the new and more prosperous India: "Young Muslims score more poorly on literacy tests than Hindu 'untouchables.'" Newsweek's background piece on counter-terrorism in India, by two members of the Council on Foreign Relations, is an informative account of the many terrorist groups operating there and the government's uneven response. According to the article, "'India lacks a coherent strategic response to terrorism; there is no doctrine, and most of our responses are kneejerk,' says retired Major General Sheru Thapliyal, who works at the Center for Land Warfare Studies in New Delhi."

Minister Jaiswal resorted to the common trope of saying that the Indian government would now have to be on a "war footing," and one elephant in the room in any discussion of terrorism is whether framing counterrorism as a "war on terror" helps the problem or makes it worse. Those who advocate a police-oriented approach are sometimes seen as temporizers, trying to evade the severity of the problem. I think that the term "war" should be reserved for hostile engagements involving military force between recognized states, where there are known military objectives and the outcome can be conceived of in terms of concrete gains or losses of sovereignty, territory, resources, or other specific goals. To those conditions, the United States should add, as its Constitution does, that a war is military action pursuant to a formal declaration sought from Congress by the President.

Absent these conditions, "war" is at best a metaphor and at worst a misnomer. President Johnson declared a "War on Poverty," but that didn't involve searching people's luggage in airports and confiscating extra pairs of shoes that were then donated to the poor. India's counterterror efforts are not the only ones characterized by kneejerk reactions, and it's time to abandon an approach that absurdly commits everyone to a "war" with no foreseeable and definable end, using military tactics that can't win against a multitude of groups of uncertain identity, over conditions that are as old as civilization itself. As Newsmax.com reported recently of a Rand Corporation study :

The study examined how terrorist groups since 1968 have ended, and found that only seven percent were defeated militarily.

Most were neutralized either through political settlements (43 percent), or through the use of police and intelligence forces (40 percent) to disrupt and capture or kill leaders.

"Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory," the report said.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Do the duty that lies nearest to you, and the next will become clear

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is claiming that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai were of "foreign origin," an obvious dig at Pakistan, though the group claiming responsibility calls itself Deccan Mujahideen, an equally obvious reference to a feature of Indian geography. It is likely that at least a part of Singh's finger pointing is to cover the government's embarrassment that the terrorists traveled undetected through one of the world's busiest harbors , one that has been a center of world commerce and crucial to Indian defense for 300 years and that now serves as headquarters of the Indian Navy's Western Command. (Indeed, the HMS Minden, the British man-of-war on which The Star-Spangled Banner was written in 1812, had been built in Mumbai Harbor.) Local fishermen did in fact confront the intruders, according to Newsweek, tipped off by their comparatively lighter skin and failure to speak the local Marathi dialect, but were brushed off by the armed group.

As one American visitor commented, “The navy should be ashamed. A terrorist vehicle sails past their territory, and they don’t even know.” Meanwhile, a retired Indian Admiral follows his Prime Minister's lead in the art of sharing blame: “The police should have set up a marine force in Mumbai to patrol the harbor and the valuable ground installations....That’s not the navy’s job.” It's at least comforting to know that that kind of thinking is not confined to FEMA.

If anyone in the Indian government had been a fan of British and American thrillers, he or she would have learned that the idea of a terrorist attack from a harbor with inflatable craft was used 30 years ago by Frederick Forsythe in The Dogs of War , while John Grisham used a similar device to put an assassin ashore in The Pelican Brief. In any case, Mumbai Police and Indian government commandos fought bravely last night, and the chief anti-terrorism officer of the Mumbai Police was killed in the fighting. The terrorists seem to have based their attack on a search for British and Americans, and as always, I admire the understatement of the Brits, one of whom commented, "It was not the most pleasant experience."

Similar fortitude was required of another group of Englishmen who traveled here in 1620. For a look at modern Americans trying to live as they would have in 1628, watch the 2004 PBS series Colonial House . For an account of the difficulties the original Pilgrims faced in getting out of England at all, see a 1995 documentary filmed on location at the sites that were important to their early struggle. For a history of the Plymouth settlement, as well as a sobering account of the violence that ensued between the next generation of colonists and their Native American neighbors, culminating in King Philip's War, read Nathaniel Philbrick's excellent Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.

Those who want a close look at Pilgrim life without the hardships of the Colonial House group should visit Plimoth Plantation, a living museum with costumed reenactors. I have never been there but saw an interesting news feature on it some years ago. One of the most amusing features of Colonial House was the dilemma faced by the modern colonists when one family simply stopped attending church and the rest of the colony had to decide whether to expel them. I call it amusing because, even though church attendance is no more my preference than that of the defaulting family in the program, they had known that such observance would be an expected part of their participation before they ever volunteered in the first place.

Though it was only for an evening, I used to visit an annual Pilgrim service held every year on the night before Thanksgiving in a local United Church of Christ, the descendant of the Pilgrims' Congregational churches. Members of the congregation dressed in Pilgrim costume, sang psalm texts a capella, listened to a lengthy sermon, and were awakened, if they dozed off, by a bircher patrolling the church with a rod that he used to nudge them, and whose stern and silent progress terrified my then-5-year-old daughter. Members would also be called up and rebuked before the congregation for sleeping and other faults, being reminded of the story of Eutychus, who tumbled from a window to his death, as we are told in the Acts of the Apostles, when he fell asleep during a sermon of St. Paul, whose prayer then brought him back to life. When she heard this, my daughter began tugging my sleeve and urgently whispering to me to ask if they had thrown him out the window. I explained that it was an accident, since he had apparently been sitting near the window and there were no bars to prevent him from falling. She thought a moment and then asked, "Well after St. Paul brought him back to life, where did he sit the next time?"

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

All a-twitter

From the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims and the site of the martyrdom of Becket comes a sensible dissent on Twitter®. Still, if Hugh de Morville had Twittered his sovereign on the question of what he was doing right then, Henry Plantagenet would have died with at least one less burden on his conscience and need not have repaired to Canterbury to be whipped. Using more traditional media, crusading editor Tom Gish, owner of the Whitesburg, Kentucky Mountain Eagle, served, with his wife, Pat, as the conscience and scourge of strip mining companies, unresponsive school boards, and heavy-handed police (the paper's offices were fire-bombed after Gish exposed police brutality in 1974). I had never heard of Gish, who died Friday at 82, but listened to this feature from NPR last night, a fine tribute to his life and work.

Meanwhile, the much-maligned mainstream media does its part with this article by Daniel Gross in Newsweek, pointing out, first, something that ought never to have needed to be said: that the subprime crisis cannot be blamed on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977:

In recent months, conservative economists and editorialists have tried to pin the blame for the unholy international financial mess on subprime lending and subprime borrowers. If bureaucrats and social activists hadn't pressured firms to lend to the working poor, the narrative goes, we'd still be partying like it was 2005 and Bear Stearns would be a going concern. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has repeatedly heaped blame on the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 law aimed at preventing redlining in minority neighborhoods. Fox Business Network anchor Neil Cavuto in September proclaimed that "loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

This line of reasoning is absurd on several levels. Many of the biggest subprime lenders weren't banks, and thus weren't covered by the CRA. Nobody forced Bear Stearns to borrow $33 for every dollar of assets it had, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't coerce highly compensated CEOs into rolling out no-money-down, exploding adjustable-rate mortgages. Banks will lose just as much money lending to really rich white guys like former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld as they will on loans to poor people of color in the South Bronx.

More importantly, Gross describes the work of ethical subprime lenders, and no, apparently, that is not an oxymoron. Part of a "community finance" movement, small banks and credit unions, of the sort whose chief officers don't make millions or get pictured in Business Week, are changing their communities for the better, instead of turning them into urban and suburban wastelands. Newsweek describes one example:

"We're in business to improve people's lives and do asset building," says Linda Levy, CEO of the Lower East Side Credit Union. The 7,500-member nonprofit, based on still-scruffy Avenue B, doesn't serve the gentrified part of Manhattan's Lower East Side, with its precious boutiques and million-dollar lofts. The average balance in its savings accounts is $1,400. The typical member? "A Hispanic woman from either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic in her late 40s or early 50s, on government assistance, with a bunch of kids," Levy says. Sure sounds like subprime. But the delinquency rate on its portfolio of mortgage and consumer loans is 2.3 percent, and it's never had a foreclosure.

What have these modest enterprises discovered that MBAs from the Wharton School have not?

What sets the "good" subprime lenders apart is that they never bought into all the perverse incentives and "innovations" of the late subprime lending system—the fees paid to mortgage brokers, fancy offices and the reliance on securitization. Like a bunch of present-day George Baileys, ethical subprime lenders evaluate applications carefully, don't pay brokers big fees to rope customers into high-interest loans and mostly hold onto the loans they make rather than reselling them. They focus less on quantity than on quality. Clearinghouse's borrowers must qualify for the fixed-rate mortgages they take out. "If one of our employees pushed someone into a house they couldn't afford, they would be fired," says CEO Bystry.

Speaking of the causes of the subprime crisis, Gross also wrote in praise of Timothy Geithner as "The Un-Paulson" in Slate last week, and in its October issue, Harper's printed a first-person account of "trashing out":

...a phrase we use to describe the process of entering a home that has been foreclosed upon by the bank, and that the bank would like to sell, and hauling all of what the dispossessed owner has left behind to the nearest dump, then returning to clean the place by spraying every corner and wiping every inch of glass, deleting every fingerprint, scrubbing the boot marks off the linoleum, bleaching the cruddy toilets, sweeping up the hair and sand and dust, steaming the stains out of the carpet (or, if the carpet is unsalvageably rancid, tearing it out), and eventually, thereby, erasing all traces of whoever lived there, dispensing with both their physical presence and the ugly aura of eviction....

And speaking of trashing out, the never-bashful Christopher Hitchens has this and a great deal more to say about the President-elect's projected appointment of Senator Clinton as Secretary of State:

A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers?

All too true, though I still think it may be a shrewd move on Obama's part: the Secretary will either rise above herself or not and will do so on the world stage. As Someone Else once said to an associate of uncertain loyalties, "That thou doest, do quickly."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

More matter and less art

Michael Kinsley wonders if there are too many blogs, and perhaps this one was the last straw, though I tried to choose a title that would let Kinsley off the hook. In any case, he observes, quite validly:

The opportunity for us all to express an opinion is wonderful. Having to read all those opinions isn't....Many readers may be reaching the point with blogs and websites that I reached long ago with the Sunday New York Times Magazine—actively hoping that there isn't anything interesting in there, because then I'll have to take the time to read it.

Opinions abound, but I for one found it worthwhile to read an article in which Nancy Gibbs lists several good reasons for the Obamas to send their daughters to the distinguished Sidwell Friends private school in Washington, where Chelsea Clinton also attended; I have no doubt that their decision was sound, though I would still have been happy to see the Obamas encourage by example the work of Michelle Rhee, the feisty, reforming Chancellor of D.C. schools.

The Obama daughters are promised a puppy in their new home, which should be easier to maintain than the bear cubs that Jefferson kept when he was there; meanwhile, other city dwellers are turning to urban chicken farming. As described in Newsweek:

Over the past few years, urban dwellers driven by the local-food movement, in cities from Seattle to Albuquerque, have flocked to the idea of small-scale backyard chicken farming—mostly for eggs, not meat—as a way of taking part in home-grown agriculture. This past year alone, grass-roots organizations in Missoula, Mont.; South Portland, Maine; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Ft. Collins, Colo., have successfully lobbied to overturn city ordinances outlawing backyard poultry farming, defined in these cities as egg farming, not slaughter. Ann Arbor now allows residents to own up to four chickens (with neighbors' consent), while the other three cities have six-chicken limits, subject to various spacing and nuisance regulations.

Newsweek acknowledges that there could be drawbacks:

That quick growth in popularity has some people worried about noise, odor and public health, particularly in regard to avian flu. A few years back in Salt Lake City—which does not allow for backyard poultry farming—authorities had to impound 47 hens, 34 chicks and 10 eggs from a residential home after neighbors complained about incessant clucking and a wretched stench, along with wandering chickens and feathers scattered throughout the neighborhood. "The smell got to be unbelievable," one neighbor told the local news.

Some parts of China are apparently carrying on the Salt Lake tradition; as the Journal of Infectious Diseases notes, "China plays a huge role in the global poultry industry, with a poultry population of 14 billion birds, 70%–80% of which are reared in backyard conditions." Admittedly, China's public health practices are not ours, and in any case, sophisticated Americans want to flavor their urban lives with authentic experiences of nature; as K.T. LaBadie, a major figure in the movement, noted, slaughtering a chicken is "messy, but real."

No doubt, though for my money, if LaBadie is simply looking for meaningful existential encounters, she should volunteer in a hospice or read Dostoevsky. I'm sure we all appreciate fresh eggs, but I see no more reason to set up a chicken coop so that my quiche will be just right than I do to skin my own rabbit to make a pair of mittens for my grandnephew.

As Jared Diamond notes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, living in proximity to animals has always been "a bonanza for microbes." (See pages 205–210 of that book for a description of animal pathogens and their emergence as contagious diseases in humans.) A guide to small-scale chicken production published by the World Poultry Science Association describes the ways that infection can spread:

Pathogens can multiply rapidly in a chicken flock and be passed from bird to bird...via saliva, droppings or contaminated eggs. They can also be spread via humans and animals (rats, birds, flies), on boots, feed bags, equipment, bicycle- or car tyres. Some viruses can even be spread by air, on wind and dust. Other birds (ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl) can carry pathogens without showing any signs of disease, and can pass them on to chickens. The most notorious case of this is avian influenza. (p. 52)

Frankly, it doesn't surprise me that the URL to this document contains the rather ominous title, "Journey to Forever."

To be fair, the 84-page guide is a clearly written list of effective procedures for ensuring health and safety for humans and poultry alike. If the lady in the apartment downstairs, whose free-range dogs do their best to fertilize our apartment parking lot, ever decides to cultivate chickens, I have my doubts as to how closely she is likely to comply with this guide, or any other.

In any case, it seems the experts overrule me; Newsweek notes, "As GRAIN, an international sustainable agriculture group, concluded in a 2006 report: 'When it comes to bird flu, diverse small-scale poultry farming is the solution, not the problem.'" Public health officials believe that if avian flu turns up in the United States, it is much more likely to appear in factory-farmed poultry than in your neighbor's back yard.

I don't know enough to contradict them and can only hope their judgment in this matter is sounder than that of Alan Greenspan. Actually, I have a turkey in my apartment right now, which I won in a trivia contest last night, though it is confined to my freezer; I'll deliver it to my brother's home Tuesday morning, and my sister-in-law can have a "real experience" preparing it.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.