May 26, 2006 My mother enjoys watching the weekday afternoon one-two punch of Dr. Phil & Oprah, and May 15th's Oprah focused on Sri Lanka, on Nate Berkus & his return to Arugam Bay after the tsunami swept away his partner. Nate's return to the Stardust Beach Hotel in Arugam Bay had been filmed, and there on national TV was Merete Scheller welcoming him back-the very Merete who had welcomed Rose & me back to her rebuilt Stardust three months previously. She recounted to us her own amazing-but-true story of quick thinking to avoid being trapped under a ceiling, then finding herself clinging to the top of a palm tree as the waters receded. Like so many people caught in the wave, she commented on how swiftly the waters rose, so swiftly that there was time only to react, not to think about how to react; and those who happened to react well were the ones who survived. Like so many people caught in the wave, including particularly Ranga, the exceptionally affable proprietor of Ranga's Beach Huts (another beachfront hostelry), she continued (to my eye) even now in something of a state of shock. As I write this, the ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers appears to have broken down completely, and another round of civil war looms. May peace eventually reach that troubled isle ...

Some few thousands of miles to the west of South Asia another war continues, one that has now claimed 2500 American, and untold Iraqi, lives. Václav Havel's comment, made in his book Living in Truth (London, Faber, 1987) about Western cold warriors trying to get rid of totalitarianism, applies precisely to today's Western neo-cons who are trying to extirpate Islamic terrorism, that they are like the "ugly woman trying to get rid of her ugliness by smashing the mirror which reminds her of it." "Even if they won, the victors would emerge from a conflict inevitably resembling their defeated opponents far more than anyone today is willing to admit or able to imagine."

Ebrahim Moosa, Prof. of Islamic Studies at Duke, makes a comment (in The Sun, April 2006, p12) about the "war on terror" that could equally well apply to Vietnam, or to the dozens of military interventions that the US has perpetrated on the rest of the world over the past couple of centuries: "The irony is that most Americans think they are moral, yet remain unconcerned about the immoral way their government exercises power. That's what I find hardest to understand: the level of self-delusion that Americans allow themselves. Then again, I suppose that if Americans really thought about what their government is doing, they might go crazy."

Inshallah, sanity will one day prevail ...

May 12, 2006 Excerpts from recent periodicals:

An article called "Dirty Little Secret," printed in Smithsonian magazine May 2006, on why so many slaves fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. One reason: many were promised, and received, both land & freedom for doing so. Lord Dunsmore, last Colonial governor of Virginia, proclaimed on Nov 7, 1775, a promise of outright liberty to all slaves who could escape from their plantations & would serve in some capacity with the British army. A war for "liberty" for the colonists of course was also a war to keep Africans in servitude; in fact, enlistment incentives offered to white recruits in Georgia & South Carolina included a bounty of a one slave, to be "paid" at the end of the war. No less a luminary than George Washington described Dunsmore as "that arch traitor to the rights of humanity" for promising to free slaves and indentured servants. Thomas Jefferson believed - and most modern historians concur - that at least 30,000 slaves escaped from Virginia plantations in attempts to reach British lines. African-Americans accounted for 20% the entire population of 2.5 million Colonists = half a million individuals. In Virginia they made up as much as 40% of the population, and the defection of 30,000 of these can't have but made a difference to the Colonists ability to farm, manufacture, and generally prosecute the war.

Also in the Smithsonian of May 2006, a brief history of the fork. I quote from p. 34: 'In the 11th Century, a Byzantine princess ate her sweetmeats with a forbidden object: a two-tined gold fork. At the time, the Church so opposed forks that after she succumbed to the plague, a Franciscan theologian called her untimely death "a just punishment from God."' The fork, long regarded as an evil implement which was associated with Satanism and hedonism, became widely used only in the last 200 years, after the Victorians began to regard the dinner knife (upon whose sharp tip meat & potatoes were skewered) as a "brutal instrument." They rounded off its point, and then began the fork's ascendancy.

Woodrow Wilson (quoted in The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2006) valued in authors "... innocence of the sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame at trying to know many things as well as from its pride in trying to know but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding facts which is contempt for large reassuring principles."

This comment is particularly relevant today, as we find ourselves inundated with information that contains precious little knowledge. Wilson was no saint; he intervened militarily in other countries affairs dozens of times, re-segregated the Federal government, and used loans to Britain & France to keep WWI alive long after the Allies should have sued for peace. Despite these flaws (as well as his audacity at having his wife run the country while he was still President after being incapacitated by a stroke), we can nonetheless appreciate the value of these his sentiments ...

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