Well, President Obama's school speech succeeded in two ways. First, he made sense to the kids and urged them to keep some good attitudes about school and studying. Second, he did make the far right look like total fools for their reaction. Glad to see it happen.

Dumbest Thing I Ever Said

In 1966 I owned an old, decrepit Chevrolet Corvair, a small American car with the engine in the rear. It was not a good car. Evidently, it was either too old or previous owners had never taken care of it properly. But I had bought it for very little money, which had been my objective.

This car's major problem was that it burned more oil than gasoline. I used to pull into gas stations and quip: “Fill the oil and check the gas.”

I had a theory that this engine was so clogged up with gunk that if it ever got cleaned it would leak ALL the oil directly into the cylinders and totally smoke out the surrounding twenty yards. So I would fill the oil with a very specific type.

One day I pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant (1966, remember?) for a quart of non-lubricating oil. I had not realized what I said so I really wondered when he looked at me VERY strangely and asked: “What kind of oil?”

“Non-lubricating.”

Holding back his snickering, he turned to the other attendant in the garage and shouted as loudly as he could: “Hey, Joe! We got a guy here that wants non-lubricating oil!”

Only then did I realized what I had asked for. I leaned against the car’s roof and tried to hide my face with my arms. I’m sure I was quite red when I finally turned back to the attendant and corrected myself. “Oh, shit! I meant to say non-detergent oil. What the hell was I thinking?”

But the damage was done. I got the oil I wanted, but I suspect those attendants are still joking about me, and that all of Newport, Rhode Island, knows that there’s a guy out there that once ordered non-lubricating oil!

UNITY AND DIVERSITY

Kwanzaa is an African American cultural holiday (i.e., not a religious holiday) which was invented to celebrate and amplify family, community, and culture. The name of the holiday comes from a Swahili phrase for “first fruits” – “matunda ya kwanza.” The extra “a” in Kwanzaa is there to distinguish the American festival from the Swahili word. People emphasize a different one of the Seven Principles on each of the seven days: Umoja or Unity, Kujichaguliya or Self-determination, Ujima or Collective Work and Responsibility, Ujamaa or Cooperative Economics, Nia or Purpose, Kuumba or Creativity, and Imani or Faith. For full details of the holiday, you can Google “Kwanzaa” or go to the History Channel: http://www.history.com/minisites/kwanzaa/.

This year we celebrated the first night of Kwanzaa with some very dear friends. Many different kinds of people were part of this evening’s observance: Blacks, Whites, American Indians, Latinos, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and who knows what else. Along with the pouring of libations and the lighting of candles, we went around the room so elders could share their ideas on Unity with the children present. As we ate a wonderful feast afterward, I continued thinking about the principle of Unity and the things people said, and decided to write something concerning unity and diversity.

The reason I choose to emphasize “unity and diversity” is that we celebrated and discussed unity, we were such a diverse group, and a number of the comments blended that diversity into the remarks about unity. The first speakers talked about maintaining the unity of the African American community and of the family. I mentioned that I believed that unity was also beauty. After all, all people are beautiful. I believe that the Creator deliberately made us all different, with our tremendous variety of skin colors, religions, cultures and points of view. I believe this is part of the challenge the Creator gives us: to enjoy - no to embrace - this variety, to glory in such diversity, and to learn to live in unity with our differences. This is the challenge given to us; the promise given to us is that living in unity adds an even greater beauty and meaning in our lives.

But the purpose of diversity is much more important than the fun and the beauty of being able to get along with each other. The challenge/fun part is the bait for a crucial aspect of life. In every endeavor, the greater the diversity, the greater the number of options we have and the greater the probability of success. It boils down to this: when you have more options, you have a better chance of finding something that works. For example, if your only option is to go naked, then you can only live in a very restricted area of the planet. But if you can build shelter and make clothing, your inhabitable area jumps to be several times larger.

Can you see where I’m heading?

Biologically, the greater the gene pool, the better the chance the human race has for finding combinations of physical characteristics that enhance survivability. In this respect, our tremendous physical/racial diversity is a great gift. It practically guarantees that we can survive - unless, of course, we outsmart ourselves and ruin the whole planet, then we don’t have much chance at all. But in just about all other scenarios, our diversity guarantees that the human race can live in various environments, can find someplace on the planet to survive. That’s the physical side of this gift.

Along with physical evolution, we have also been given the gift of socio-cultural evolution. We have developed a thousand times as many cultural variations as we have physical. This unfathomable diversity of social options gives us so many opportunities to do things differently, that we ought to be able to find many, many possible ways to do things. But we have to be smart enough to realize that all this cultural material is out there for us to embrace, to learn, to adopt and adapt, to use.

This socio-cultural diversity also gives us the means to see ourselves and our world(s) with different eyes, to imagine a great variety of possible worlds and a tremendous number of potential solutions to each of our problems.

But if we insist on living only as we are, we are doomed. If we never wake up to realize that there are thousands of ways of doing things other than our present white, male, raging capitalist, international corporate enslavement, then we might as well hang it up and slit our throats right now.

To survive, we must try embracing-learning-loving our neighbors, with their different races and cultures and attitudes and perspectives. We must finally grow up enough to accept all that the Creator has given to us. Only then will we be able to unify ourselves enough to learn from each other about our diversity, and then to combine unity and diversity to create beautiful new worlds and vibrant new lives.

By the way, we should do this not for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren, and THEIR…. You get the idea.

And this is just one of the different perspectives most of the other cultures on the planet give us.

Happy New Year, Brothers and Sisters!

The First PCs Ever – NOT

Control Data Corporation was a very good place to work. Even though it was a gigantic corporation, it kept all work groups small (no more than 15 or so people to a manager). The pay was decent. The benefits were great. And everything was fairly loose. I was a technical (hardware repair) instructor for most of my 20 years with CDC, and when we were not in the classroom teaching, it was very easy to get part of a day off without having to take vacation or sick time.

In 1975 I was selected to be part of a special group within Engineering Services (our repair division). CDC and the University of Illinois had created the PLATO Computerized Education system. This consisted of a number of gigantic (for those days) Cyber super-computers feeding specially-developed software using the TUTOR programming language. Students took lessons at PLATO terminals, huge boxes with red plasma screens and rear-projection slide projectors for photographic displays, connected via modems or audio-coupling devices to the mainframe. Illinois, then Delaware and a number of other universities had been using PLATO lessons for a long time. Illinois’s chemistry department even had a simulation of lab work which drew clouds of smoke and printed a large “BOOM!” on the screen if the student performed an incorrect chemical operation. Then he/she could press the NEXT key on the keyboard and try the lesson again. When the student finally got it right, he/she could move into the actual lab.

CDC decided that they wanted us to utilize this technology to train our repair people in the field, thus reducing the costs of having folks come to Minneapolis for school. A number of us were sent to learn how to program in TUTOR, and we set to work creating two technical training courses. It was highly successful. Everyone was so pleased that a few of us were chosen to develop more courses in an ongoing program.

As we worked with this system, it seemed that it was ideal technology for public school systems. But there were a couple drawbacks. Either the school system had to get their own local Cyber system (EXPENSIVE!) or they had to pay long-distance telephone costs for a line connecting each and every PLATO terminal in their school (perhaps 15-20 of them?) going to the Cyber mainframe located elsewhere (also quite expensive).

In 1976, we geniuses came up with a great solution. CDC already had what was then classified as “intelligent terminals,” small systems that could perform a lot of operations independently, collect data, then automatically call the mainframe to upload data for processing and hang up. We suggested that CDC create intelligent PLATO terminals that could call the mainframe, have a student sign in for their personal assignments, collect their data, and hang up the phone line. Then the student could work for 45 minutes or an hour at their lessons. When the lesson was complete, or the class time was over, the student could sign in once more and upload their work, test results, etc., and sign off again. Thus a school could get by with considerably less on-line telephone time, saving money, and still allowing their kids to use this great new technology.

Hindsight says that in time, in a very short time, we would have developed the first desktop personal computer (perhaps by some other name) on which students could run a program to study. We would have beaten Apple on the market by a couple-three years!

Management at Control Data wouldn’t buy the plan. Their response was: “We can’t do that! We’re trying to sell super-computers!”

Within ten years, around 1985, CDC was using Zenith PCs as the user interface on their newest super-computers. So the technical types had been smarter and more far-seeing than management. And in my opinion, this was a major reason why CDC went out of business in 1990.

Ah, the clarity of hindsight!

End of the World

Evidently these right-wing fundamentalist characters who have taken over the Republican Party don’t care what they do with the earth or how we affect the environment. They are proving this, for example, by not even recognizing that global warming exists. Let the ice caps melt! Let the coastal areas submerge! Let the people die from terrible hurricanes! So what? Lets cut more forests! Drill more oil in the arctic! Forget alternative energy!

I could never understand how they could feel this way. Then someone clued me in: These folks sincerely believe that Armageddon is just around the corner! We might as well use up all the natural resources on the planet because we won’t be here much longer!

Suddenly it all made sense. Either the end of the world is almost here or we’re going to make it happen ourselves.

We have to stop these insane people before they provide us with a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do you realize how many times in European/American history people were convinced the world was coming to an end? The major difference between then and now is that we did not have the ability to end the world ourselves. What if Armageddon is not coming this time either? The path on which our leaders are taking us will guarantee the end of the world. And the rest of us will have no choice in the matter.

The book of Genesis says that God gave man dominion over the earth. Hey! Knock, knock! Is anybody in there? In analyzing the language in which this was written, that giving of dominion means that we were given the responsibility to take care of the earth, NOT use it all up or mistreat it!

For my part, I certainly would rather stand there on Judgment day knowing that I did all I could to preserve the earth, love its peoples and try to live in harmony with all. As the American Indians (and others) put it, we have the job of keeping the circle intact. NOT to do this is insanity. These people controlling our country are not religious; THEY ARE INSANE! And we are either insane or careless or uncaring for electing them.

So, the writing is on the wall, or rather in the heavens, on the land, and in the ever-encroaching seas. This November, we must vote these crazies out of office. We must allow sanity to regain control of our government. And I’m not just pushing for a Democrat victory; there actually are a lot of sane Republicans out there. We, as a people, have just taken control away from them.

The people of this country must wake up to what they are doing before the crazies can control every election in every state and municipality. Vote! Vote whenever you have the opportunity! Vote your conscience, not somebody else’s agenda. Vote to help Mother Earth recover from some of the recent damage. We CAN slow down global warming and we CAN come up with alternative energies, transportation, housing, etc., by electing candidates who are willing to work at such solutions.

Remember: Mother Earth WILL win! The question is whether we will be around to help her celebrate the victory. And God will judge us on how well we help her.

Super-Corporations

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see a documentary film called The Corporation. (And I have recently seen another such documentary named Supersize Me, but that’s another story.) The following is a combination of what I saw/learned from this film and what I know from history.

Some History

Film: Originally, companies were incorporated to do ONE thing – manufacture clothing, or sell something, or DO something (like run a railroad.)

History: In the mid-1800s they began to expand. One of the first that comes to mind is that the railroads demanded land so they could have stations, yards, and coaling & watering stops. They sold the remainder of their land to settlers, thus creating their own markets, their own reasons for existence. Other corporations did similar things. This was the beginning of their diversification.

History: Corporations have always opposed workers rights, health, reasonable pay and hours. Higher wages and benefits reduced profits. Workers reacted by going on strike – corporations cannot make ANY profit if they are not producing. At times this led to open warfare: reference the Haymarket Riots.

Film: The 14th Amendment, forbidding any entity to deny rights granted by the federal government, was intended to provide for civil rights for the newly freed African Americans. Corporations went to court and used this amendment to get recognized legally as persons. This gave them a whole lot of immunities they never had before. Out of the two hundred and some 14th Amendment cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court, only nineteen were concerned with African Americans.

History: Corporations had long been considered “artificial persons” because they could do things people did, like buy land, sell items or services, etc. In 1886 The Southern Pacific Railroad was involved in a case fighting some taxation in Santa Clara County, California (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.). Before the Supreme Court hearing started, Justice Waite commented “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” And so it was done on the opinion of a single judge and there was no argument about it.

With the immunities granted through 14th Amendment protections, corporate powers grew.

Film: During the 1930s, IBM leased card reader analysis machines to Germany. This evidently helped them keep track of military data, but it also helped the Nazis catalog every individual person placed in a concentration camp. That’s bad enough. When the US entered the war and Germany was an enemy of terrible force, IBM kept their equipment in place, even inside the camps like Auschwitz, and sent technical people to maintain the machines! So they aided the enemy throughout the war just to keep their profits rolling in.

Health Dangers

Film: Monsanto has developed BGH, Bovine Growth Hormone, a genetically-engineered recombinant hormone, to increase the production of milk. The FDA has approved this stuff, but Canada and Europe have banned it. The cows get sick with continued use. The udders get inflamed and grow so large that they drag on the ground. Cows become infected and pus gets into the milk (is this the real reason why milk MUST be pasteurized?), along with the antibiotics used to try to fight the infections. Furthermore the hormone is passed on in the milk to human consumers. What does this do to the people, especially children, who drink the milk? Might this be why kids are maturing at increasingly early ages? There are certainly cancer dangers to children from this stuff.

On another topic, but related in a discussion of corporations ignoring our health, the film Supersize Me shows that fast food (McDonalds in this case) ignores healthy food – even salad dressings have extra sugar.

Film: In Cochabamba, Bolivia, an American corporation demanded that the town’s water supply be privatized before a World Bank loan was approved. The government of Brazil sided with the corporation.

Nobody has the ability to control today’s huge global / multi-national corporations. If one country tries, all the corporation has to do is move their headquarters / incorporation location somewhere else. There will always be some country willing to pick up some tax income from the corporation without trying to control them. But, there can be some controls - see below.

What can we do?

First – buy organic milk. Yes it is more expensive but it is healthy and it lasts longer! We have found that it doesn’t spoil as quickly. So it can be affordable in the long run if the milk doesn’t get used quickly in your home.

Join a Co-op. But they can be expensive. Who can afford them? Becoming a member helps, but then there is a requirement to do volunteer work there.

Select corporations that are local. In Minneapolis we have two large grocery chains, Rainbow and Cub. With the internet so available, we can investigate them. A half hour on the web brought out this information: Rainbow is owned by Fleming Industries and while Cub is owned by SuperValu. I could not find any owners above them – but they may just be well hidden. Fleming is based in Oklahoma, SuperValu in Minnesota. The latter also buys all refrigeration equipment from a Wisconsin company that builds the units in Minnesota. Our family’s choice is to shop at the home company, Cub.

What else can you do?

Some California groups have gotten the corporate status nullified in their state for companies that refuse to clean up pollution. This means that the company can no longer do business in that state.

Boycotts have been known to be effective, but they must be widely done (nationally) and they take a long time to make the corporation buckle under..
Some small towns have capped the number of multi-nationals in their town, township, or county.

Buy locally grown food at your farmer’s market. Note that this may take some investigating and logical thinking. Bananas in Minnesota will never be a local crop. Find out where they come from, how they are grown, etc.

The internet is there for you to use. Do so.

Know what you are eating and using.

Come up with new ideas and options.

Do not believe all the corporate baloney about being socially responsible; it’s a smoke screen. It costs them a pittance in comparison to the extra profits reaped.

Live by the motto: “DO NO HARM.”

Remember Our History

This is a little bit late, but still relevant. Some time ago, the news informed us that the United States was indeed running interrogation (torture) camps in a number of other countries so that American laws need not be applied. This is supposedly necessary to win the war against terrorism. In my opinion, it is simply proof that we are being governed by a corrupt regime and that we have fallen as low, in principle if not in degree, as our 20th-century enemies.

If you cannot believe that statement, consider this. When we were fighting against Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan for the very existence of our way of life in the early 1940s, we never needed such torture camps to get information or to win the war. When we were in a cold war against the Soviet Union, from Stalin's regime on, we never needed such camps either. In both cases, against enemies whom we conceived to be almost as powerful as we were (thus a cold war policy called MAD - mutual assured destruction), we believed that our rule of law, that our sense of justice and fair play, that our ethical and polite (if firm) treatment of prisoners of war, and that our interrogation practices were completely and properly defined by the Geneva Conventions on conduct in warfare (or the equivalent that was operant at the time). We need to remember our history.

And we won, at least in some part, because of that behavior. I once met a man in Naples who had been a soldier in North Africa. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in New Jersey. He said he never felt threatened and was never fearful because he knew that the Americans would treat him right. How many other Italians and Germans, when things got bad in their own countries, were willing to surrender because they knew they would be well treated by the Americans, British and French?

Now, Al Qaida or any other such terrorist organization, is definitely nowhere near as powerful as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union. There is no need to change the way we behave in response them. Let's recall the experiences of two countries who have gone through similar (actually, worse) terror-related situations. Israel lives with terrorism as a daily part of its existence. How do they handle it? And in the 1950s-60s France suffered horribly from terrorism (Algerians fighting for their independence). How did they handle it? It boggles my mind that we condemn France for not blindly following us, rather than conferring with them to learn how they lived with terrorism on a daily basis. We need to remember our history....

Also, by treating our prisoners humanely, and allowing them to let their families know how they are being treated, we may just negate some of their propaganda. This has worked before. Over and over again. Review our history.

Why has the administration changed the way we treat prisoners of war? Even with the abuses during Viet Nam, the government made a show of maintaining a legal stand against those abuses. It seems to me that the recent aberrant behaviors, beginning in 'Nam and escalating to what is now going on, might be because our leaders know that there is no way to win wars like these: grass roots conflicts based in the desire of a people to govern themselves in accordance with their own principles and beliefs. We need to remember history....

My God! America exists because it fought exactly the same kind of war against Britain from 1776 to 1783! Again, we must remember our history....

I want my country to return to its honorable and ethical behavior of strict observance of the Geneva Conventions.

Oh, yes, just for the record - I served in the US Navy from July 1960 to October 1969 (longer than required or requested) and achieved the rate of Chief Petty Officer (which I declined in order to leave the service). I served at a time when we were indoctrinated with the Geneva Conventions and worked at how we could follow them, even though we knew that if we were ever captured we probably would never have their protections in return; even so, the Geneva Conventions still dictated OUR practices.

NaNoWriMo

Well, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is just about over. We had one month (November) to write 50,000 words or more. It's designed to get writers off their ass, and get us PRODUCING. Get that story on "paper." Smooth it out later. Just WRITE! I have already uploaded what I wrote to the official NaNoWriMo site, and have been declared a "winner." That is, I got over 50,000 words; my count came in at a bit over 57,700 words (roughly 290 pages).

The name of my novel is Needle in the Haystack. It is about Criminal Investigation Division (CID) agents trying to bust a drug ring in 1961-62 on ships and bases around Norfolk, Virginia. The ship on which the sea-going action is centered is the imaginary Sumner-class destroyer USS Hestek, nicknamed the "Old Haystack" by her crew. It is based on an event that occurred aboard one of the ships I served on (which, by the way, was not homeported in Norfolk). But, of course, I expanded on that basic kernel - a lot!

This was a very interesting experience, to just do a dump of words. It was actually easier than I thought it would be, maybe because I really believed that I had a deadline and worked like it truly meant something. I have never written this way before - perhaps that's why I took years to "finish" my other (unpublished) novel. But this was written quickly; now I can go back and adjust the story line a bit, then edit it. One rewrite. Then comes the most difficult part: getting it published. Wish me luck.

Acadians

OK, my favorite subject.

We were the "other French colony" - comprising present day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Maine. As such we bore the brunt of British colonal attacks out of Boston and New York.

My g-g-g-g-g-g-grandfather (Barthelemy Bergeron d'Amboise) had come from France with the military and fought in Hudson Bay and in New York. He married into a family that had been granted the whole Passamaquoddy Bay, where the St. Croix river flows into the Bay of Fundy. He and his wife (Genevieve Serreau de St-Aubin) were "given" Campobello Island for their home after their wedding. They lived there, on and off, for about 25 years, until they moved to the area that is now Fredericton, NB. Barthelemy was a privateer in wartime and a sea-going merchant along the Fundy in peace time. The English called him a pirate and smuggler. His son who was my g-g-g-g-g-grandfather was also a sailor and merchant.

The next one in my family tree was a real hero. After the deportation by the English in 1755 (in French it's called "The Great Insanity") a group of families tried to stay in the Fredericton NB area, but were constantly attacked by soldiers and rangers. The latter were from Massachussetts, wanted more land up there and had a veangeance thing for all the past wars. Quebec would attack the English, and all they saw was Frenchmen, so they'd attach Acadia because it was close and easy to get to. The Rangers were especially nasty, killing women and babies if they couldn't get anyone else. (One of their leaders later became a Massachussetts hero of the American Revolution.)

After about 10 years of this, Michel Bergeron, a carpenter with a lot of woodsman skills (he had Indian uncles), led a group of ten extended families through the forest all summer, up to the St. Lawrence River. They wintered in a small village there, then canoed upriver to a spot across from Three Rivers (Trois Rivieres), where they settled. Then Michel worked in the city for cash so the families could buy tools, seeds, and food to live on until the next crop came in. For his selfless work, he was given a long life (he died at age 96 in the early 1800s) with lots of family. My paternal grandfather came from the region that Michel had settled.

I am working on a book about these first three generations of Bergerons in the Americas. I just found out about these people 10-12 years ago and have made their story my passion. If I ever go back for my Master's Degree, I'd like to study the relationships between black, white and Indian people in New England and Acadia. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, every Acadian has SOME Indian in their family tree, but once they got to Quebec, they didn't like to talk about it. The Acadians who became Cajuns in Louisiana very quickly mingled with Indian folks down there.

I have a paper published on the internet that will form the basis for the book. It is called Three Acadian Generations: The First Bergeron d'Amboises in the Americas. See www.acadian.org/bergeron.html. I try to keep the "d'Amboise" part with the name as much as possible, because one branch of the family has kept it, or a variation, as its family name. I have a cousin in New Hampshire named Joe Damboise.

Poetry Time

Shock and Awe – 1961 and 2000-What?

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, how’d you do your thing?

How could you be in the noise and the crowd,
Sit there for just one short hour,
Come back with your special power
And might?
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
You said you don’t even know
How your songs ever came out so.
You certainly never tried to make them great.
But wait!
That music must have beeeeen
Just a-blowin’ in the wind.

But more important still,
You started rearrangin’
Our conscience and our will
‘Cause the times, they were a-changin’ -
wakin’ feelings in the numb,
transformin’ marchers’ fear,
givin’ voices to the dumb,
makin’ politicians hear,
movin’ power to the people
chanting we shall overcome.

You put some simple words to music in your head
And changed the world once before.
Now we’re in another war
‘cause politicians lied,
Continued with that song that says God is on our side.
And it keeps on goin’ like a rollin’ stone
So we’re headed for a complete unknown.

We need to discover how you did it back then
‘cause we really must start the stones a-rollin’ again.
Look out, kid, it DOES matter what you did.
Now we got to get this movement on the wing
So, hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, how’d you do your thing?

Story Time – Real Muslims

In November of 1962, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, my ship pulled into Karachi, Pakistan, for a well-earned rest. We would relax here for a while and enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner.

One day, a Saturday, as I was standing watch on the quarterdeck, I was called on to recruit volunteers to go to a tea party to be given that afternoon by the Pakistani Navy at PNS (Pakistani Naval Station) Dilawar, a local navy base. Few of these hard-drinking woman-chasing American sailors wanted any part of a tea party. Now, I was also always on the lookout to learn more about people and their culture and history. I expressed my regret that I had the duty and couldn’t go, but the officer of the watch suggested I get a standby. This turned out to be easy because I had already stood my watch, and the ship only needed a body in case of fire or some other emergency.

We had tea and a number of tidbits – tiny bananas, some very spicy tarts, a sweet cookie, etc. All of us there were very conscious of being the strangers in a strange land. The food was different. The tea had milk and sugar in it. And we had been constantly warned throughout the Muslim world not to ever eat with our left hand or offer it (or anything in it) to another person. (In the old days, in the desert with little or no water, the left hand had been used for certain personal cleanliness functions and was therefore soiled. The functions changed with time, but not the customs of politeness.)

Then they put on a magic show with some fabulous tricks. One trick was writing in any language on a piece of paper. Two guys wrote something, then the papers were burned after being folded and sealed in envelopes. Two small slates were scribbled on with chalk and the ashes were placed between them. When the plates were taken apart, the ashes had disappeared and writing was on the slates, one message on each – the same language, the same handwriting, the same size as had been written on the papers.

Another trick involved a rope which had been cut before our eyes. The ends were placed together and zip! The rope was whole – no knots – perfectly, as if it was just made. Then the two loose ends of the rope were placed together, and zip! The rope was a loop – no knots, as if it had been made that way.

A ring was borrowed and made to disappear. Then a sailor was asked to unwrap a ball of twine about three inches in diameter and four inches long. The twine had covered a whole egg, which was then broken. It held a nut inside. The nut was busted open and there was the ring.

Another ring was made to disappear and a sailor was asked to cut open a grapefruit. The ring was inside.

On the bus on the way back I met a Pakistani sailor from Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), who had been sitting behind me during the magic show. His name was H. U. Ahmed. We made friends instantly, so I offered to show him around my ship. He got a big kick out of the coke machine, how it worked automatically. He even asked me to buy a second one so he could watch more closely! Then we talked for quite some time, during which I expressed my interest in learning more about Pakistan and its people. So we made arrangements to meet the next day about 1400 (2:00pm); we would go to the movies (Pakistani style) and then to the international trade fair here.

On Sunday afternoon, I left the ship before Ahmed arrived to watch a show on the pier being put on for the Americans: a fight between a cobra and a mongoose. The handler had a leash on the mongoose and turned the cobra loose. This was of some concern to me at first, but that cobra wasn't interested in anything else than his mongoose enemy. The mongoose started snarling and the cobra started hissing and spitting as soon as they saw each other. As the two were placed facing each other, the mongoose couldn’t show his real stuff (running round and round the cobra, which watched the furry little rodent, which made the snake dizzy). However, it did run back and forth a little, and then we saw how fast the mongoose was, for it suddenly attacked. In the blink of an eye, it held the cobra’s head between its needle-toothed jaws. The snake writhed violently, wrapping itself around the animal’s body, but to no avail. The serpent’s head was soon crushed, and the mongoose kept gnawing, probably until the handle pulled it off or until the snake’s head fell off.

I didn't see that part of the show, because Ahmed arrived and we prepared to go to the “Bengali film.” We went to the theater and Ahmed bought the tickets for a show that would begin in an hour or so. He paid for both of us (“My treat!” he said.). Then we went to have tea and more of those great cookies. He paid.

“You are my guest,” he smiled.

The movie had been made in Bengal (East Pakistan at the time, now Bangladesh) but was in Urdu, the official language of the country and the main language spoken in West Pakistan. The name of the movie was “Chanda” (emphasis on the last syllable). It portrayed the struggle of modern thinking against old customs.

{The movie’s story line – skip if you don’t want all the details: A stranger comes into a region of Bengal. He fell in love with Simki. Also, he saved the life of Chanda, the local king’s daughter, and she fell in love with the stranger. Many struggles and hardships occurred, including the imprisonment of Simki – I don’t remember why, and my notes don’t help – and her release by Chanda, who had a bit of pull since she was the king’s daughter. There was also a villain, of course, and he wanted to have his way with Simki, by force if necessary. And so the stranger battles the villain and kills him by throwing him over a cliff. Now it was against the law for a local woman to fall in love with an outsider, and so Simki was condemned to death by cobra bite. Chanda, who also loved the stranger and felt that even if she lived she wouldn’t have a chance of getting him (against the law, remember?), so she took Simki’s place and died. Chanda was delivered to the sea by the stranger (as burial). The death of his daughter made the kind realize how bad that law was, and he repealed it, and so Simki and the stranger lived happily ever after.}

This movie, a fairy-tale story that was crude by American Hollywood standards, was in its 33rd week of play, and was a favorite hit of the Pakistani people. Ahmed and I sat in the very back row so we wouldn't bother any one; he translated the story for me, just about line for line, in a loud whisper.

Next we went by taxi (which Ahmed paid for) to the outskirts of the city, to the P.I.F., the Pakistani International Fair, a good sized trade fair. We ate sugar cane (which Ahmed bought), getting at the sugar by biting off a chunk of the cane, chewing on the inside pulp until the sugar was gone, then spitting out the remains. Ahmed also bought some some “pan” (pahn) for us, a very spicy and aromatic mixture of shredded spices and herbs (including betel) wrapped up in a large leaf. It is chewed for a long time to extract the good tastes and releasing the aromas. The red juice acts as a breath freshener and helps the digestion. We saw a number of displays and Ahmed explained everything he could from his part of the world.

At one point, we almost had a fight. I wanted to buy some souvenirs and gifts for folks back home and again he insisted that he should pay for them. I refused.

“But you are my guest!” he persisted. We got around the problem when I explained that I was willing to accept his paying for me as his guest, but these were things for others whom he didn’t know and who weren’t with us. So he resigned himself to letting me pay for my souvenirs.

By the way, Ahmed made about 100 rupees a month. At the time, I was making over six times that amount.

But this isn’t the end of the story. Ahmed got me back into the city and we were waiting for a bus that would take me back to my ship. However, he had watch-standing duties to perform, so he asked another Pakistani sailor, a chief petty officer, to escort me. I replied that once I got on the right bus I would be all right, but, no, I was a guest, and would be escorted. So I said good-bye to Ahmed and got onto the bus – the Chief had already paid for me.

One of my “hobbies” was to collect as complete a set of coins and bills as possible from every country I visited. But since Ahmed had paid for everything, I’d had no chance to get any coins at all (I had bills from my money changing on board my ship). The buses in Karachi are British style, with conductors in the aisles to make change and collect fares. So I asked the Chief if he would have the conductor make some change for me. He asked why and I explained. Then, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of coins. He started going through them, extracting different ones, asking “Do you have one of these? How about one of these? Here, take two of these, they’re small.”

And so I got my coins from Pakistan.

I have often marveled at the treatment of guests by people in other countries and prayed that visitors to our country could find Americans who were as selfless and generous. And when people today begin to rail about how horrible those Muslim people are, I shake my head and tell them this story. Ahmed and the Chief, not the terrorists, are the real Muslims, following the real teachings of Islam.

He's a poet...!

Sample of my poetry - the only thing I've ever memorized. I prefer to expend my energy performing my poetry (not reading it). Here it is:

SNOWFLAKES AND CINDERS

Why, oh disillusioned people, do you dare

Depart from searching for the snowflake rare

To build a life of cinders, mud and sand,

When graceful crystals melt no longer on your hand?

Notice of reading by some of the best poets of color around (they let me read with them), the poets of Guild Press:

Sunday, October 23, 2005, 4-6pm
Heritage Community Center
(Heritage Park Housing, Olson Hwy & Bryant Ave N, Minneapolis)