One of the book-related research tangents I’ve become ensnared in is the early history of parachuting. As you might suspect, the development of this important life-saving technology produced more than a few martyrs to the cause, as well as some heroes with complicated backstories. One of my favorite examples from the latter category is Carroll Eversole, an early airmail pilot who believed he could make a mint in the parachute development game. Like many inventors of that era, he saw nothing wrong with risking his neck to prove his technical savvy:
On February 18, 1921, Eversole was flying a dreaded twin de Havilland airplane from Minneapolis, Minnesota, when shortly after takeoff, and using a parachute, he bailed out of the airplane. A Chicago newspaper which wrote excitingly of this event, the first airmail pilot to survive a jump from a mail airplane, noted that the chute was “one of his own making.” Other witnesses remembered Eversole taking time to examine the parachute in detail before taking off. Officials investigated the crash and determined that Eversole had used the event to publicize the new parachutes, destroying an airmail airplane in the meantime. Eversole was quickly fired. His fellow pilots had mixed feelings about Eversole’s stunt. Few thought what he did was right, but none of them were sad to see a twin de Havilland airplane smashed into pieces.
Eversole had an alternate explanation for his post-jump dismissal: He claimed that he was fired for blowing the whistle on the drunkenness of U.S. Postal Service mechanics, whose incompetence led to the deaths of numerous airmail pilots. This excuse wasn’t enough to get his termination rescinded, but it did cause some USPS heads to roll.
What I’m missing is evidence that Eversole’s skydiving gamble ever paid off. Though his stunt was incredibly bold by modern standards, it was pretty much par for the course back in those days. More important, the market was flooded with worthy competitors; there is no single parachute design that trumps all others, given the personal preferences of pilots and the vagaries of aircraft. Based on the advertisement above, it seems that Eversole eventually ended up in some sort of business relationship with parachute manufacturer James Floyd Smith, a man known for his litigiousness. Here’s to hoping that Smith treated Eversole with the respect due a man who did something all-too-rare in modern capitalism: risk something more precious than borrowed money.
Getting thwacked by this Wired story I’m working on, which requires me to comprehend the nuances of both ribonucleic acid and artificial intelligence. Suffice to say, my brain’s full-up for the next twenty-four hours; see you back here shortly.
The loyalest of y’all may have noticed that I have a longstandingfascination with the legal system’s efforts to value the supposedly invaluable. Which is why I was struck by this recent tidbit out of the Solomon Islands:
THE High Court has ordered the Solomon Islands Government and the Ministry of Fisheries to pay Marine Exports Limited more than $10 million for damages. This was in relation to the government’s banning of dolphin export in 2005.
The court granted the order for loss from dolphin feeds in the sum of $2,073,600, order for loss of property (38 dolphins) in the sum of $7,527,733.75 and the order for exemplary damages in the sum of $500,000. The order for loss of profit (loss from contract) in the sum of $4,785,600 and the order for interest to be included were refused.
If I’m reading this judgment correctly, then the court valued each dolphin’s life at roughly $29,318. (I tossed out the damages awards and converted from Solomon Islands dollars to American dollars.) I reckon that means a dolphin has about fifteen times more intrinsic value than a heifer, but only 1/200th the value of a human being (at least according to the U.S. government). I have to think that lopsided equation might have been dramatically altered if the dolphins had proven themselves more capable spies.
Given my attraction to tales about how folks cope with nasty twists of fate, I was bowled over to discover this rarest of Korean War artifacts: a program from the 1952 prisoner-of-war Olympics held at Pyoktong, North Korea. In addition to containing numerous photos of the sports contested—such as tug of war, football, and bizarre gymnastics, the booklet offers the thoughts of various participants. Their enthusiasm for the whole endeavor can either be construed as touching or deeply ominous:
It is a great honer for me to introduce you to this splendid book. Here, told in pictures, is the story of the greatest spectacle of our stay here in North Korea,the Inter- Camp Olympics of 1952. Each page servers as a guide that shall enable you to relive all the spine-tilling excitement of that truly marvelous athletic meet.
From the very moment the opening cerimonies began on November 15 until the closing of the meet on November 26 we witnessed splendid performances, thrills galore, great enthusiasm, sincere and wholehearted sportsmanship, and perfect goodwill among the many nationalities represented there….
Another very important factor in making this an unforgettable occasion was the attitude of the Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers. Without their efforts such a tremendous undertaking could not have been possible, At all times the cooperation, generosity, enthusiasm, and selfless energy displayed by our captors was perfect and left absolutely nothing to be desired. The lenient treatment policy has long ago passes its title of lenient, it has instead become a brotherly love treatment for every one of us. The materials provided for the athletic meet, plus the grand array of expensive prizes and awards,were more than sufficent to prove the cincerity of the camp authorities of the Korean Peoples Army and the Chinese Peoples Volunteers in ensuring success of our first Inter-Camp Olympics
This book symbolizes the real will of all humanity to live in a spirt of brotherhood, in a world peace, free from fear, hatred, malace or antagonism. Here you can see vividly the harmonious atmosphere that pronailed at all times among men of various nationalities, races, creeds and colours.
So the question is, Should those who participated in these Olympics be condemned as collaborators, or hailed for keeping spirits aloft in the most trying of circumstances. A surprisingly even-handed discussion of that question can be found here.
And more photos of daily life in a Korean War POW camp here—with the caveat that the collection’s bounty of smiling faces tells only a stage-managed version of the truth.
Though Europeans are generally drinking a great deal less these days, the Scottish are bucking the trend. Per the chart above, alcohol consumption has been steadily rising in the land north of the border established by the Treaty of York. The question that no one seems able to answer with any degree of certainty is why Scotland’s thirst for hooch cannot be quenched. The Scottish government evidently believes the conclusions made in this 2008 study, which lays a lot of the blame on the declining prices:
here is strong evidence from over 50 studies conducted in 15 European countries, America, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere, that levels of alcohol consumption are closely linked to the retail price of alcoholic beverages. As alcohol becomes more affordable, consumption increases. As the relative price increases, consumption goes down. In Switzerland in 1999, a 30 to 50% reduction in taxation on foreign spirits, led to a 28.6% increase in consumption of spirits. There was no significant change in the consumption of wine or beer. In March 2004, Finland cut tax on alcohol (by one third) in an effort to reduce the level of cross-border shopping undertaken by Finns in other EU countries, particularly neighbouring Estonia, where the price of alcohol was much cheaper. Following the change, liver cirrhosis deaths were found to have risen by 30 per cent in just one year, as alcohol consumption increased by 10 per cent.
In Scotland, in real terms (taking into account disposable income), alcohol is 62% more affordable today than it was in 1980.
Scotland is trying to correct that problem with a new pricing law, which seeks to forbid discounts for buying alcohol in volume. But my hunch is that the only economic tactic that will truly work is the imposition of a minimum price per unit of alcohol. That would means the end of cheap fixes like The Purple Tin, which is basically the King Cobra of Scotland. If a unit of alcohol cannot be sold for any less than forty-five pence, many fewer will have the means to splurge on ten cans of high-alcohol lager. Which will hopefully mean a lot less of this.
A question, though: Has anyone studied what led to the decrease in Scottish alcohol consumption prior to the sharp WWI-related drop-off?
Taking a day to plow through edits on Chapters Three and Four of the forthcoming book. Need to have the first 50,000 or so words to my editor by February 27th, so I’ll be ducking out on occasion to enter the hardcore writing bubble. Back tomorrow with a post about the dispiriting trend in Scottish alcohol consumption.
By now you may have heard of the landmark federal conviction of Alfred Anaya, who played a key role in a drug trafficking ring that moved product from Mexico to the Midwest. What makes Anaya’s downfall so interesting is that fact that, by the government’s own admission, he never touched any drugs himself; his role was that of a master engineer, in charge of building secret compartments in the vehicles the operation used to transport its contraband.
The Feds have long been keen to bust men like Anaya, an effort complicated by the fact that there is no specific statute that bans the building of secret compartments. Anaya was tripped up by a series of wiretaps which revealed his knowledge of how the compartments would be used. Those wiretaps also hint at just how valuable Anaya’s services were to the organization:
Using wiretaps issued in another investigation, authorities intercepted calls involving known drug traffickers in which they discussed having hidden automobile compartments or “traps” built for them by defendant. References to detection by customs officials and the use of x-ray-interfering carbon paper and mirror-like surfaces provide evidence that the traps were intended for illegal drug-trafficking purposes. Other intercepted calls related to the possibility of defendant’s traveling to Mexico to fix a compartment that would not open.
In other words, Anaya’s skillset was so respected by his paymasters that they were willing to get him down to Mexico to open a single compartment, rather than hiring local talent to solve the problem. That’s a testament to the sophistication of Anaya’s work, and a clue as to why federal prosecutors considered him such a grand prize.
I plan on drilling deeper into the court documents to get a better sense of Anaya’s precise methods for creating world-beating traps. Amazing to me that something as simple as carbon paper could be so essential to foiling the zillion-dollar detection systems employed by Border Patrol agents.
I’m a few pages from the end of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, a study of Thatcher-era football hooliganism that doubles as a meditation on crowd dynamics. It’s perhaps best known for its opening set-piece, in which the author tags along with a bunch of Manchester United supporters on a depraved trip to Turin. But for me, the heart-and-soul of the book is the chapter set in Bury St. Edmunds, where Buford attends a disco sponsored by the racist National Front. In describing the terrifying late-night scene at a pub filled with skinheads, Buford does a masterful job of illustrating how one man’s idea of a crackling good time can be another man’s idea of absolute Hell:
Nick Griffin indicated that the volume should be turned up further, ad the music was now brutally loud. The room was hot and filled with smoke and smelled of dope. The air had grown heavy and damp. Sixty or seventy lads were in the middle of the room, clasped together, bouncing up and down, rubbing thir hands over each other’s heads and chanting in unison:
Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps.
Wogs out! White power!
Wogs out! White power!
Wogs out! White power!
They had taken off their shirt and were stripped to the waist, their suspenders dangling by their sides, knocking against their legs; sixty or seventy pale, narrow chests, covered in perspiration, pressed tightly together. They were bouncing so vigorously that they all fell over, tumbling on top of each other. I thought someone was hurt—a table had been knocked over—but they all clambered up over each other and, with difficulty, resumed their dancing. They fell over again, wet and hot. I don’t know if it was the drink or the drugs or the delirium of the dancing or that chorus, over and over again, but there was a menacing feeling in the air—sexual and dangerous. The people in the crush were not in control—the business of falling over was not intended and not one was finding it funny, as people might in the spirit of drunken merriment. Some of the lads appeared to be in a trance.
I can honestly think of no party that I’d like to attend less than this National Front disco. And given how the night ends, with his skull being bashed against a lampost by one of the intoxicated lads, I’m sure Buford is in no hurry to repeat the experience. Yet massive kudos to him not only for gaining access to this secretive world, but also for approaching it not with a sneer, but with an honest desire to understand how young men might be attracted to—or perhaps cajoled into liking—this belligerent form of fun. What he ends up reporting seems absolutely genuine, untinged by his personal abhorrence for the National Front’s odious politics. And yet that level-headed approach to the endeavor is what ultimately makes Buford’s account all the more affecting, and all the more damning.
Next up on the reading list, now that I’ve had my fill of horrific anecdotes from 1980s’ English soccer: The End of the Terraces.
A moved-up book deadline has me scrambling over these next few days, so I’m just gonna ease you into the holiday weekend with some Uzbek pop. I don’t understand a word, of course, but my hunch is the ladies of Shahrizoda are preaching against the evils of materialism. The highlight is around the 1:08 mark, when the group briefly operates a kebab grill at what I take to be an Ürümqi bazaar. As an old girlfriend of mine once said, there is nothing sexier than a woman toiling over a steaming-hot griddle full of meat. (She had a summer job at Carney’s at the time, so her axiom was somewhat self-serving.)
It’s a little hard for Americans to wrap their heads around alcoholism’s social toll in places like Mongolia, where the perpetually inebriated constitute a significant percentage of the potential workforce (and also commit the majority of crimes). So it will be interesting to see whether the government’s lead-by-example campaign makes any sort of impact on the problem:
It’s been a year since President Ts. Elbegdorj initiated the “Forward, to an Alcohol-Free Mongolia” campaign. On December 14, the Head of the Office of the President D. Battulga made a statement regarding the campaign’s accomplishments and effects during this period of time. Since the implementation of this alcohol-free idea, every event or ceremony involving the President should happen with no alcohol. The Alcohol Free Mongolia Association was formed, and so far the President has visited 10 provinces and made speeches concerning alcoholism and its negative impacts…
We clearly remember how the President welcomed the New Year with milk instead of champagne, and many people applauded and praised his action…Since April, every ceremony in the Wedding Palace has required the use of milk as the ceremonies are alcohol-free.
I have my doubts as to whether the average citizen will be inspired to give up drinking because their president abstains. The argument in favor of the program relies on evidence from a mid-1980s Soviet experiment, when Mikhail Gorbachev switched from vodka to orange juice at state functions. But the subsequent decline in alcohol consumption (since entirely reversed) probably had more to do with accompanying restrictions on access to drink than anything else. That sort of control was easy to accomplish in a nation with a state-run economy; in modern-day Mongolia, with its 91 distilleries, the road to relative sobriety will be much bumpier.
This memoir by the former bassist for Barbara Allen and the Tennessee Hot Pants includes a great vignette about playing Greenland’s Thule Air Force Base, where young men once scanned the skies for incoming Soviet ICBMs. Deprived of female companionship for months at a time, and surrounded by little but shiny white nothingness for most of the year, the base’s inhabitants made for less-than-inviting hosts when the Hot Pants showed up:
We were told that some of the service men there hadn’t seen a woman in over a year except for some of the entertainers who came and went. Therefore, each of us had to be assigned a body guard. The body guards were Danish civilians and traveled with us every place we went on the base. Trouble was, we needed more body guards to protect us from the body guards we already had. Those guys had, as the old saying goes, “Roman hands and Russian fingers”. My protector kept trying to get me to go off somewhere and have sex with him and I just laughed it off brushing away his hands at the same time.
Being in an all girl band was definitely a novelty. Each place we showed up the crowds were a bit rowdy and loud. However, that was nothing next to the reception we received when we opened our show in Thule Greenland. There were whistles, cat calls, applause, stomping, whooping and hollering. The stage was a large auditorium size and there was a space backstage for us to stay during our breaks. After our first set, I knew what that backstage area was for. What happened next came as a surprise. As soon as we stepped off that stage, hands came from all directions and my butt felt like I’d landed into a bed of lobsters. After escaping all the pinchers, I hurried back to the stage, body guard in tow, and ran behind the curtain. It wasn’t long before Barbara and the rest followed.
“What was that, a feeding frenzy?” I asked.
“Oh that happens to all women who come here.” the body guard answered in broken English.
One should perhaps never be surprised by the nature of political discourse in a country where the Simon and Garfunkel song “Cecilia” was once banned. Yet there is still something rather jarring about a leader who willfully disparages his own populace, as Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika did last week:
Mutharika challenged Malawians to appreciate that at [a] certain point a person’s life goes through hard times and currently several countries in the world were going through economic difficulties and Malawi was not exceptional.
“Problems are all over. Several countries are currently going through economic crisis even if you go to United Kingdom in Europe you will find problems.
“Why do you behave like chickens, it is a chicken that just cries kwe kwe kwe (mimicking chicken cry) whenever it hears something…We are not a nation of chicken[s],” said Mutharika in his usual defiant mood.
Perhaps the core spirit of Mutharika’s message isn’t too different from that of American presidents who’ve occasionally urged us to make sacrifices when times are tough. But his motivational technique is bizarre by our standards. Perhaps someone should hand him a fortune cookie that contains the axiom, “You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
Taking advantage of a brief lull in the Wired action to steal a day for the book. Back on Monday with a post about the history of submarine rescue, a teaser of which is posted above.
One more thing: If anyone can shed light on the real name of an Algerian secret policeman who went by the handle “No Nuts” in the early 1970s, I’d be much obliged if you could share your intel. He makes some cameos in my book, and I’d like to know more about him. At this point, all I have are vague suggestions that he may have had an unpleasant run-in with a mis-wired bomb during Algeria’s war of independence.
I should have mentioned long ago that noted Microkhan ally Nathan Thornburgh has launched a new project near-and-dear to my heart: Roads & Kingdoms, a site that operates under the hard-to-resist motto “Journalism, travel, food, murder, music.” The first several weeks’ worth of posts have focused exclusively on Burma, where Nathan and his co-creator traveled late last year. To their great credit, they made it all the way up to Myitkyina, a scrappy town that makes an important cameo in Now the Hell Will Start. Their photos and stories from up that way are pretty dang awesome.
But Roads & Kingdoms isn’t just about on-the-ground reporting; Nathan and his crew also delve into the data on occasion, such as in this great riff on the lethality of Burma’s highways and byways. The actuary in me loved this bit:
The dry genius of the ADB-ASEAN cost estimate is that it includes estimates for grief and human suffering in the aftermath of an accident. That’s $1,800 in societal grief for every death, $842 for a serious injury accident, $8.28 for a slight injury accident.
I keep on wondering how they tacked on that twenty-eight cents to the minory-injury estimate. And, more important, the factors that affect how those sorts of figures translate to more developed nations. Do the bean counters assume that grief is greater in places where violent death is rarer? Or are assumptions not part of the process here, and there is some sort of griefometer that automates the gathering of data?
Amid all the wearying hullabaloo over the Iowa caucus, the passing of a major figure in American history seemed to have slipped off the radar. Gordon Hirabayashi, who died at 93 on Monday, was one of a small handful of Japanese-Americans to legally contest the Roosevelt Administration’s internment policy—a policy that, in this project’s humble opinion, was a national shame of the highest order. The 1943 New York Times piece (PDF) recounting the failure of Hirabayashi’s lawsuit against the federal government did a good job of explaining his Kafkaesque situation:
Hirabayashi, born in Seattle twenty-five years ago was a senior at the University of Washington and had never been in Japan, whence his parents came. He was sentenced to serve three months for violating the curfew regulation and three months for failing to register for evacuation from the military area.
So much for the promise that anyone can reinvent themselves as an American. And yet Hirabayashi never lost faith that the internment scandal was just as an aberration, summing up his attitude in a quote that deserves to be remembered for the ages:
I was able to hold my head up high, because I wasn’t objecting and saying “no,” but was saying “yes” to a prior principle, the highest of principles.
Hirabayashi was finally vindicated over four decades later, when a federal appeals court overturned his conviction. Today, the righteousness of his legal cause seems every bit as obvious as the propagandistic Superman cartoon above seems cheesy. But let’s hope it doesn’t fade from memory should there be another public debate over the relative merits of expediency and basic civil rights.
Among the many bizarre books I’ve been reading for research purposes, few are stranger than Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Fire, the former Black Panther bigwig’s account of becoming a born again Christian in the late 1970s. Cleaver spends much of the book repudiating the Communist allies who once supported him, including the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung. To make clear his break from the past, Cleaver goes to great lengths to lampoon North Korean culture; this comical detail from Pyongyang is perhaps my favorite:
You could not say “Good Morning” or “Hello” to [the North Koreans] without their responding: “Yes, it is a beautiful day, thanks to the inspired teaching of our beloved revolutionary leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung, who has filed our lives with the truths of Marxist-Leninist analysis and daily supports our burdens and obligations.” That was good morning, and after six months it began to lose its novelty, but not the power to bore.
That passage reminded me of the Communist realm’s strange obsession with overhauling basic greetings. I first encountered this in the Czech Republic some years back, when it was explained to me that some old-timers still couldn’t stop saying “Honor work!” in lieu of “Goodbye.” (More on that phrase’s slow demise here.) As noted on Microkhan before, one must always be deeply suspicious of political movements that seek to revamp the minutiae of daily life. Even in the most dire of societies, the means of saying “hello” and “farewell” probably aren’t rotten to the core.
Thanks to all who patronized Microkhan this year, and hope you’ll stick around for the next 366 days (at least). Big plans for the forthcoming year, including some special longform projects, the revival of our long-lost “Bulletproof” series, and, of course, an increasing amount of clues and extras related to the next book. Stay with me, dear readers—gonna make this all worth your while.
Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz has long resided high atop my list of all-time athletic badasses, and not just because he mastered the most technically difficult event in all of track-and-field. When the Polish Kozakiewicz took gold in the pole vault at the 1980 Olympics, he did so in front of a hostile Moscow crowd that was pulling for local favorite Konstantin Volkov. When the Pole cleared the winning height, he fired back at the crowd with the famously rude gesture depicted above—a gesture that many Poles interpreted as a show of defiance against their country’s Soviet masters. It was, in effect, Poland’s version of the Black Power salute, a moment in which the political briefly invaded the supposed sanctuary of Olympic sport.
Contrary to most accounts of Kozakiewicz’s gesture, the pole vaulter did not immediately split for the West in order to avoid persecution at home. In fact, it took him another five years to defect to West Germany, a move that evidently shocked the Polish elite. Their expressions of consternation over Kozakiewicz’s move tell you all you need to know about Soviet myopia:
“I don’t understand why Olympic champion Wladyslaw Kozakiewicz asked for political asylum in West Germany,” Witold Dunski, a leading sports columnist, wrote in an article.
“All doors were open for him here,” he said. “He was not starving. He had a beautiful house on land presented to him by the town authorities, a house of dreams, unattainable for the average Pole.”
The writer apparently did not stop to consider that Kozakiewicz had become disillusioned with a system that made slightly better-than-average comforts wholly unattainable for “the average Pole.”
Video of Kozakiewicz’s Olympic-winning vault here, gesture included. And a very recent Polish-language interview with the man here. He still sounds like quite the firecracker, even via Google Translate.
Trying to take advantage of the slow week to hit my book-writing goal: 50,000 words by the time I knock off for lobster and ale on New Year’s Eve. So far today, I have managed to…get to the corner mailbox to return some Netflix DVDs. Not a promising start.
Put yourself in the shoes of a G.I. slogging his way across Italy or New Guinea in December 1943. You’ve been subsisting on tinned ham and cold coffee for days; your feet are bleeding; your best friend took a bullet to the skull on Thanksgiving. The last thing in the world you want to think about is the lovely, peaceful Christmas your people back home are preparing to enjoy. And then a leaflet like this or this comes raining out of the sky. The literature is obviously designed to make you second-guess your commitment to the Allied cause. But does it?
I’m fascinated by this collection of fake Christmas cards of wars past because the psychological concept behind them seems so shaky. The messages were obviously designed to push fatigued soldiers over the edge, by reminding them of all the familial comforts they were missing. But that approach to propaganda strikes me as laughably simplistic—if anything, I would think most American soldiers would take offense at the co-optation of their favorite holiday for such nefarious purposes. Also, even in the age before mass media, wouldn’t the mendacity of an image like this be apparent to even the most unaware G.I.? The attempt at changing the narrative seems terribly transparent.
I will confess, however, that I admire some of the artistic skill on display in the fake Christmas cards distributed by the Vietcong. Whoever they got to churn out the drawings did a nicely Cubist version of Santa Claus.
Invoking the khan’s prerogative to spend a day focusing on the book. But let’s be honest: Is there really anything I could write that would be as glorious as Lorenzo Lamas in an early ’80s Breakin’ knock-off? Methinks the answer is “no.”
It’s fair to say this has been a momentous week for Willie Gault, the former Chicago Bears wideout who was also a track star of great renown. Things started off great when police in Los Angeles found his stolen Super Bowl ring, but then took a turn for the worse—the much, much worse—after news emerged that he was being targeted by the SEC for fronting a pump-and-dump stock swindle.
To be frank, nothing about the latter revelation surprises me much, given what I learned from this 1986 profile of the man, yet another Sports Illustrated classic that helped steer me into the writing trade. One of the story’s opening anecdotes regards Gault’s efforts to put together that celebrated Super Bowl Shuffle video, a project that he may not have exactly done out of the goodness of his own heart:
There are still some players who think Gault’s best song and dance may have been the one he did to get them to Shuffle along at a net of only about $6,000 a man, after their donations. After the Illinois attorney general’s office launched an inquiry last January, Meyer registered the project as a charitable endeavor under state law. Some of the Bears accused Gault of getting them involved in a slick hustle, and worse, of lining his own pockets at their expense. “The guys were saying Willie was just doing it because he was getting money under the table,” says Dainnese Gault. “That hurt him. That was a job, getting all those guys together with all those egos. He had to literally drive the Fridge, Walter Payton and Jim McMahon down to that studio. I told Willie he should take more money than the rest of them for all the work he did.”
Gault says he didn’t, but others weren’t so sure. “They sold almost a million records and 170,000 videos, and we got $6,000,” said Bears linebacker Otis Wilson. “Wouldn’t you feel screwed?”
Wilson still seems convinced that Gault is the Baryshnikov of bunco artists. “Put it this way,” says Wilson. “If I had to trust him with my life or my wife, I wouldn’t trust him with either one.”
What I remember even more vividly than the profile, though, was this critical letter to the editor that appeared in the magazine a few weeks later:
Bruce Newman missed the boat in his reporting of an interview with me and my wife, Dainnese (Gault Is Divided Into Many Parts, Nov. 24). For example, he neglected to report on the most emphasized and important aspect of my wife’s and my life—God. Instead, he has painted a picture of a man who is quite the opposite of the man that I am.
WILLIE GAULT
Wilmette, Ill.
At the time, my little grade-school mind was blown by the conflict between writer and athlete. Did this mean that magazine stories weren’t wholly accurate reflections of reality? That writers sometimes stretched the truth in order to spin a better yarn? Or perhaps that some profile subjects didn’t like to see their greatest failings revealed for all to see, especially after they invested such great care in crafting their public facades.
Given what has gone down in Gault’s post-football career, including his dalliance with a certain money-making enterprise even bigger than his alleged stock scheme, I now tend to view that letter as the work of a man whose ego rules everything around him. I would have more sympathy if he’d at least made a nod to the brilliance of the story’s headline, “Gault is Divided Into Many Part,” a delectable play on a Julius Caesar quip.
While in Pittsburgh last week, I had a chance to catch up with an old friend who’s now an archaeology professor. He just returned to the Lower 48 after four years in Alaska, where he spent much of his time digging up the artifacts left behind by ancient inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands. On our third pint of the evening, the conversation turned to whale hunting, which I’ve always understood to be an essential part of Native Alaskan culture. My pal confirmed that this was the case, but added a new twist with which I was previously unfamiliar: the role of shamanism in the slaying of cetaceans.
For the Alutiiq people, whale hunting was not a communal activity. It was, instead, an activity pursued by loners reputed to have mystical powers, whose mastery of this arcane and lethal art condemned them to lifetimes of isolation. A Russian missionary of the 1880s provided a description of how, exactly, these shamans managed to take down whales despite their utter lack of metallurgical technology:
The pursuit of whales was encumbered witli many observances and superstitions. The spear-heads used in hunting the whale were greased with human fat, or portions of human bodies were tied to them, obtained from corpses found in burial caves, or portions of a widow’s garments, or some poisoned roots or weed. All such objects had their own special properties and influence, and the whalers always kept them in their bidarkas. The hunter who launched a spear provided with such a charm upon a whale at once blew upon his hands, and having sent one spear and struck the whale, he would not throw again, but would proceed at once to his home, separate himself from his people in a specially-constructed hovel, where he remained three days without food or drink, and without touching or looking upon a female. During this time of seclusion he snorted occasionally in imitation of the wounded and dying whale, in order to prevent the whale struck by him from leaving the coast. On the fourth day he emerged from his seclusion and bathed in the sea, shrieking in a hoarse voice and beating the water with his hands. Then, taking with him a companion, he proceeded to the shore where he presumed the whale had lodged, and if the animal was dead he commenced at once to cut out the place where the death-wound had been inflicted. If the whale was not dead the hunter once more returned to his home and continued washing himself until the whale died.
I am impressed not only by the bravery required to confront a whale armed with nothing more than a poison-tipped sliver of shale, but by the mental fortitude it took to live this hermit-like lifestyle. I have to wonder why anyone would volunteer for this service, knowing that, at best, they would die alone in a frozen cave, and then have their body cannibalized by the next whale shaman. My friend suggests that this life was not a choice, but rather something that was thrust upon young men deemed eccentric by their villages—perhaps due to what we today would call mental illness.
More on Alutiiq whale shamanism here, including the petroglyphs that the hunters created in their ample spare time.
The realist in me is resigned to the fact that little will change for North Korea’s long-suffering citizens in the wake of Dear Leader’s demise. But upon learning the news late last night, I immediately thought of a strangely optimistc scene from Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, one set in the immediate aftermath of Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994. It involves a university student named Jun-sang, who always considered himself an ardent believer in North Korea’s greatness. But then something unexpected happened one July day in Pyongyang:
In the courtyard, nearly three thousand students and faculty were lined up in formation, ranked by their year, major, and dormitory affiliation. The sun beat down with full force, and they were sweating in their short-sleeved summer uniforms. At noon a disembodied female voice, tremulous and sorrowful, came booming through loudspeakers. The loudspeakers were old and produced scratchy sounds that Jun-sang could barely understand, but he picked up a few words—”passed away” and “illness”—and he grasped the meaning of it all from the murmur going through the crowd. There were gasps and moans. One student collapsed in a heap. Nobody knew quite what to do. So one by one each of the three thousand students sat down on the hot pavement, heads in hands.
Jun-sang sat down, too, unsure of what else to do. Keeping his head down so nobody could read the confusion on his face, he listened to the rhythm of the sobbing around him. He stole glances at his grief-stricken classmates. He found it curious that for once he wasn’t the one crying. To his great embarrassment, he often felt tears welling in his eyes at the end of movies or novels, which provoked no end of teasing by his younger brother, as well as criticism from his father, who always told him he was “soft like a girl.” He rubbed his eyes, just to make sure. They were dry. He wasn’t crying. What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he sad that Kim Il-sung was dead? Didn’t he love Kim Il-sung?
Here’s to hoping that more than a few young North Koreans are experiencing similarly jarring epiphanies today.
I was reluctant to read my first Christopher Hitchens work, a thin volume that bore the decidedly loaded title The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I figured the flap copy told me all I needed to know about the author’s point of view, and that he’d written the polemic more as an exercise in contrarianism than a genuine attempt to alter our view of a then-living saint. I mean, who could possibly pick on a woman who had dedicated her life to helping the sick and needy?
Yet I gave The Missionary Position a go, and I’m so glad I did—the book is a masterclass in how to counter emotion with logic, a feat made possible by Hitchens’ legendarily deft way with words. I didn’t come away from the experience thinking that Mother Teresa was some sort of monster, but I did see her as thoroughly human—which, caustic title aside, was really Hitchens’ point. This line, in particular, is something that I’ve ended up turning to again and again, as perhaps the most insightful passage ever written about our species’ penchant for cloaking our true intentions:
All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all laims made by those who affect a merely “spiritual” influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naivety and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.
Above all, Hitchens was a true pro—a man who banged out top-notch copy with such stunning rapidity that he made all other writers seem like layabouts. In life he was envied; in death he’ll be missed.
In exploring the nuttiness of the Symbionese Liberation Army as part of my book research, I came across this bygone Congressional document: a transcript of a 1976 hearing entitled “Threats to the Peaceful Observance of the Bicentennial.” The artifact’s real gold is not to be found in the back-and-forth between various Congressmen and witnesses, but rather in the appendices that catalog pamphlets from the protest movements of the day. This was a difficult period for the organizers of popular discontent, given that both Vietnam and Watergate had vanished as rallying points. The focus of their ire was instead something that should sound quite familiar to contemporary ears: the concentration of wealth in very few hands, a situation made possible by the overly cozy relationship between industry and politics. It’s instructive to check out the typical rhetoric these protestors employed, to note the similarities and differences with today’s Occupy movement:
We’ve been robbed of the fruits of our labor by that class of parasites that runs the government and all of society for their profits and luxury. And even the gains of our struggle, like our unions, they try to turn against us. What is this “common interest” between us and the owners? For 200 years our hard work and all it has produced has carried a small handful of bosses and enabled them to live in riches and luxury, while this constant drive for profit has held back our labor from being used to meet the needs of the millions. Nothing has ever been handed to us by them, everything we ever got we had to fight for, even in so-called good times…
Now in this 200th year the bosses and politicians are hoping they can cool off our anger and struggle against these conditions by trying to play off our genuine feelings of pride in our hard work and its accomplishments. This is what’s really the point of their Bicentennial blitz and the calls for us to come to a July 4th festival in Philadelphia to celebrate life under this system which enables them to live like kings.
The bicentennial protestors’ core sentiment has a lot in common with what drives the Occupiers—the feeling that the wealthy few are totally oblivious to the increasingly difficult lives of the many. (See here for a bit of street-theater that would be right at home in Zucotti Park.) But take heed of the explicit notes of class conflict that echo the rhetoric employed by the totalitarian regimes of the ’70s—check out, for example, that line about labor being “held back” from providing for the masses. That sort of lingo obviously seems archaic in a post-Berlin Wall world, which is why—at least at its most successful—the Occupy movement has replaced broad ideology with heartfelt personal narrative. The movement’s participants may not convey a politically coherent message, but to criticize that aspect of the protests is to miss the point entirely; the participants are the message.
The other major difference between 1976 and today: the protestors back then were apparently really terrible artists.
I am regrettably a few days late in noting the untimely passing of Vasily Alexeev, the famed Soviet athlete who dominated the sport of weightlifting for most of the 1970s. Alexeev was an object of great fascination in the West, for he seemed to embody our deepest fears about the world behind the Iron Curtain: that somewhere east of Leningrad, the Communists were breeding supermen who would help the “Evil Empire” win the future. When we cast our eyes upon Alexeev’s bear-like frame and prodigious gut, we stared into the Cold War abyss. And, per Nietzsche, the abyss stared back and told us we were weak little girlie men whose great cities would soon be overrun by the Soviet hordes.
Yet we were also sucked into the mythology surrounding Alexeev’s physical prowess, as if the man himself emitted a gravitation field on par with that of Saturn. This was most evident in the rumors surrounding Alexeev’s appetite, particularly in regards to eggs. In one Canadian obituary, his pre-Olympic breakfast was reported as 26 eggs. Elsewhere, he is credited with devouring a 36-egg omelette, though more contemporary accounts detail a pre-noon diet of a dozen eggs plus an entire leg of lamb. (There are additional reports that he enjoyed his eggs whipped in milk.) Yet the reality, as observed by a young Tony Kornheiser, was somewhat more prosaic: At a New York deli, Alexeev was observed eating a mere “two orders of ham and eggs, five glasses of orange juice, and God knows how many rolls.”
I feel no sense of shame in asserting that I could have done likewise in my eating heyday. Though, obviously, Alexeev’s feats of strength have always been well beyond me. His water-skiing prowess, too.
You’ll have to make do with some Filipino disco today, since I’m absorbed in reporting for multiple projects. Just spent the better part of the morning trying to track down an amnesia victim, only to be frustrated by his overprotective 78-year-old mother. May have to Irish up this coffee to push through that early-in-the-day disappointment.
This blog has occasionally featured my half-baked ruminations on the symbolic power of tangible objects. I’ve always been puzzled by the extraordinarily high values that people can ascribe to non-personal items, as if those items’ absence or destruction might somehow affect the intangible ideas they embody. A great case in point is the developing spat over the fate of this cannon, currently a tourist attraction at the Arsenal of Brest in northwestern France. The weapon was taken from Algeria in 1830, and now the Algerians want it back. The cannon has deep sentimental value for both sides, as this pro-Algerian news item makes clear:
Merzoug Baba, a bronze cannon of twelve tons built in 1542, seven meters long with a range of about 5 km, defended Algiers for more than two hundred years, before being taken by the French in 1830 during the colonization.
The French have renamed it the “Consular”, in reference to two French consuls; missionary Father Jean Le Vacher, consul of Algiers, who was attached to the muzzle of the cannon and shredded in July 1683 (see painting above), in retaliation for the bombing of Algiers by Admiral Duquesne who claimed that all the Christian slaves be released, and the consul André Piolle in 1688 during a similar attack committed by Marshal Jean d’Estrees against Algiers.
For the Algerians, this gun is more than a symbol, it was the most powerful in the Mediterranean, and had defended Algiers for two centuries. It must find its place in Algiers by July 5, 2012 after 182 years of absence.
There’s clearly a lot of bad blood between these two nations, for screamingly obvious reasons. Yet I personally find it odd that the two former enemies would engage in such a heated diplomatic tussle over an antique cannon. This actually strikes me as a case where the vast majority of French and Algerian citizens could not care less about the matter, but jingoist voices are always heard loudest in the halls of power.
Good luck to them in sorting this all out. Might I propose a winner-take-cannon soccer match, with the loser getting the television revenues as a consolation prize?
It’s fair to say this has been a momentous week for 
While in Pittsburgh last week, I had a chance to catch up with an old friend who’s now an 
