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Ramen 1.1, released today

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Today, I released Ramen 1.1. The ramen noodles area easy to make with the Atlas pasta press. In 1976, my folks purchased this from Macy’s for $45, which was quite a sum back then. Using an inflation calculator (link), this comes out to 167.72 today. The quality of this machine is astounding -I could stand on it and it wouldn’t break. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later.
Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing.
The soup was another issue. I have come across what seems to be a reasonable donkotsu recipe. The only problem was I bought only 2 ham hocks -no long bones were available at the local butchers. I boiled these with some ginger, garlic, leek, and onions, for 8 hours yesterday and got a pot of nearly pure protein. The flavor was okay, but not quite the full donkotsu taste. I experimented with flavoring with salt, soy, miso, miso+bonito, and found the last to give the best flavor.

Char Siu

The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here.

I called my friend who recommended using some off the shelf sauce and making it at home. I purchased a pork rib roast (with tenderloin on) for the purpose of cutting off the tenderloin for use with the ramen and eating the ribs for dinner. The char siu sauce (Hawaiian brand) was easily found at our local Asian grocery, and cooking was very easy in our convection oven. Our secondary convection oven is essentially an upright rotisserie, and roasts come out perfectly. The tenderloin provided a nice cut, but was not the same as the flavored Japanese-style roast pork.
The soup, now flavored as a miso soup, provided a mellow base for the ramen noodles which came out nice and springy, but definitely bland without the extra egg -it’s a lesson I’ll take to the next batch. The soup was garnished with char siu tenderloin slices, blanched spinach and flavored eggs. The marinaded eggs are soft boiled eggs left to sit in a marinade of Memmi sauce (a light sweet soy sauce that is used for creating a soup base), dash of sake, and chili peppers (my touch). These eggs were kept in a plastic bag overnight and cut in half with a string -creates a more elegant cut than a knife.
It was okay but not great. The soup has to be saltier and stronger prior to adding the noodles which dilutes the soup with some water. I am going to back off the donkotsu for a while and just get regular Yakibuta style ramen soup right. As a second effort, it is clearly an incremental improvement, and I learned how to make char siu. The ramen is not just noodles in a salty soup, but rather a kind of perfect kingdom of noodles, soup, and fixings. You want to get balance -the texture of chewing noodles and the intense flavor of the soup, the surprising pleasures of the fixings.

Today, I released Ramen 1.1. The ramen noodles area easy to make with the Atlas pasta press. In 1976, my folks purchased this from Macy’s for $45, which was quite a sum back then. Using an inflation calculator (link), this comes out to 167.72 today. The quality of this machine is astounding -I could stand on it and it wouldn’t break. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later.  Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing.  The soup was another issue. I have come across what seems to be a reasonable donkotsu recipe. The only problem was I bought only 2 ham hocks -no long bones were available at the local butchers. I boiled these with some ginger, garlic, leek, and onions, for 8 hours yesterday and got a pot of nearly pure protein. The flavor was okay, but not quite the full donkotsu taste. I experimented with flavoring with salt, soy, miso, miso+bonito, and found the last to give the best flavor. The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here.  I called my friend who recommended using some off the shelf sauce and making it at home. I purchased a pork rib roast (with tenderloin on) for the purpose of cutting off the tenderloin for use with the ramen and eating the ribs for dinner. The char siu sauce (Hawaiian brand) was easily found at our local Asian grocery, and cooking was very easy in our convection oven. Our secondary convection oven is essentially an upright rotisserie, and roasts come out perfectly. The tenderloin provided a nice cut, but was not the same as the flavored Japanese-style roast pork.  The soup, now flavored as a miso soup, provided a mellow base for the ramen noodles which came out nice and springy, but definitely bland without the extra egg -it’s a lesson I’ll take to the next batch. The soup was garnished with char siu tenderloin slices, blanched spinach and flavored eggs. The marinaded eggs are soft boiled eggs left to sit in a marinade of Memmi sauce (a light sweet soy sauce that is used for creating a soup base), dash of sake, and chili peppers (my touch). These eggs were kept in a plastic bag overnight and cut in half with a string -creates a more elegant cut than a knife.  It was okay but not great. The soup has to be saltier and stronger prior to adding the noodles which dilutes the soup with some water. I am going to back off the donkotsu for a while and just get regular Yakibuta style ramen soup right. As a second effort, it is clearly an incremental improvement, and I learned how to make char siu. The ramen is not just noodles in a salty soup, but rather a kind of perfect kingdom of noodles, soup, and fixings. You want to get balance -the texture of chewing noodles and the intense flavor of the soup, the surprising pleasures of the fixings.

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Yale Is Burning

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This made the rounds a few weeks ago, including a nice article on The New Yorker. Watching it, I had to smile. As a Harvard Alum, I can tell you there is no amount of glee at 86 Brattle Street that can match this gleeful video. You either get it or you don’t. They want to select for an even creamier crème de la crème. This goes beyond being able to understand and appreciate pink polo shirts, munching on pistachios, grapes, and brie with a Gewurztraminer, or liking to sing show tunes in the shower while being completely heterosexual.

If you don’t get it, you will snigger at this video and apply to Princeton. If you really don’t get it, you’ll stop watching when the singing starts and you’ll apply to a Big Ten School. If you get it, but don’t get in, you’ll be perfectly happy at Amherst. And so on.

This inspires me to hark back to college, to the time when I hijacked the microphone at Naples Pizza in New Haven and proclaimed, “Yale Sucks!” And now, we have proof.

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Park Icosahedron!

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Amaze your friends by downloading and printing out the Park Icosahedron. Fold along lines and glue the tabs down to form the 20 sided shape of mystery.

You can make two, attach to string and hang if from your rear view mirror! My gift to you. A great way to spend time with your kids…and ME!

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Dawn of the Dead -is all about us.

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I recently watched the remake of Dawn of the Dead on Hulu while on call. In general, I find the horror genre either to be a thinly veiled subcategory of Chick Lit or generally too scary to watch. The first category, the horror Chick Lit or Chick Flick, are all the romantic vampire stories and beauty with beast fables. They are dreck even when an auteur like Joss Whedon labors to make them watchable. Something dark lies in the feminine psyche for fantasies about blood sucking, pasty faced, pretty boy immortals sells. The latter, the truly scary horror, deals in the supernatural. In the heart of all rational people, there is a primitive spot that wonders if there is good and evil and not just cause and effect. When a film taps this, and reveals the frightening voids and yawning chasms presented by contemplation and imagining of evil, even this fairly rational and educated surgeon can get a twee scared watching The Grudge in the dark (she looks like an ex-girlfriend).

But zombie movies? Not so! For some reason, I love them because I’m a doctor. The slow zombie era of Cesar Romero came to an end with the fast zombies of 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later). Zombie movies appeal to my inner infectious disease expert. In some way, I deal with the necrosis and suppuration every week, and seeing hordes of diseased people doesn’t seem too scary. It then boils down to how the undiseased people react in these circumstances which entertains me: by denying, by panicking, by getting armed, by having sex (more denial), and by getting oddly rational. When HIV began killing people in the late 80’s, the response was not unlike the plot of a zombie movie. There was fatal ignorance and denial, followed by panic, then calls for concentration camps, followed a neurotic mix of hedonism, consumerism, prudishness, and rampant heterosexualism. The collective sigh of relief was the announcement by Dr. Ho of multidrug therapy, as conceptualized by the not-gay and not down-low Magic Johnson just staying alive.

The most recent remake of Dawn of the Dead makes great fun with these concepts. The survivors of the plague hole up in a shopping mall, and all the zombies congregate there and mill about outside the locked entrances. And its the same now in the time of the economic plague that I see hordes milling about at our local mall. Despite the recession, the place is always full. I think people go there because going to the mall and shopping is a talisman of normalcy. After the horrible events of 9/11, President Bush told everyone to go shopping. Shopping! And that is what I see going on, the continued shopping for a little slice of happiness, is not unlike the zombies congregating at the mall in Dawn of the Dead. “I think its some retained memory they have that brings them here,” says one of the characters.

As a medical student, I was assigned patients and was their intern, responsible for their health. Never mind that most of them had HIV and were crack abusers, making them somewhat unstable. I learned to have a conversation with them, those who in another era would have been called possessed and unclean. I took the lessons of the plaque dedicated to the twenty medical students who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, and understood implicitly the bargain I had to make. To be a good physician, I would have to take good care of all people. I performed central lines and spinal taps in poorly lit rooms on patients whose viral titres made them frankly toxic to be around with a needle, a scalpel, or broken glass (from lidocaine vials). I learned equanimity in the face of really horrible things like the gal who hid a roll of dollar bills in her abscess (pocket of pus) cavity on her lower abdomen. She’d pay for crack with those filthy bills and earned them by doing who knows what. If that trumps zombies, I don’t know what. I always wash my hands after touching money.

Eddie Murphy had a claymation animation sit-com in the 90’s called the PJ’s. It featured a crack addict who was spot on and completely true. Ironically, he was the straight man, and dished wisdom while eying the pigeons for a possible meal. The great tragedy in the AIDs/Crack epidemic of the 90’s was its victims who made to the hospital after living on the streets for years were incredible specimens. They had to be to survive for as long as they did. They were all tall, lean, and if you looked past the insanity, wear, tear, and grime, were usually good looking with good bone structure -think Na’Vi, twenty years after the aliens from Earth returns to Pandora, colonize them, and put them on reservations with their sensory pony tails cut and cauterized at the stump.

We forget that the heroes of the Zombie movies are in fact, the Zombies. Once infected and left to wander around for fresh brain, they are the perfect citizenry. Their behavior is predictable, and their intentions are true. They offer no political resistance by asking no questions, and their happiness lies in fresh brains. Substitute fresh brains for fresh fruit out of season, perfectly-red meat packed in styrofoam and plastic, and giant homes in the suburbs, and you have it. The real monsters in Zombie movies are the protagonists, they with their guns and fire, keeping the thronging mobs from their happiness and fulfillment.

So stop being a wet noodle! Go, run out and buy yourself some Zombie pickle and get happy! A good place to start: On January 27th, Apple will present their next great thing, by the way, you happy Zombie.

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I.D.D. -Irony Deficit Disorder, Unwanted Connectedness, and the Importance of Defending the Modern

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The Greatest American

As a middle school student, we were assigned Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. I laughed my guts out, but soon realized that many were appalled by the idea that Irish babies should be used to feed the poor. As I grew up, I read Vonnegut with the avidity that presaged the kind of fandom that we see kids have nowadays for video games, and for it, I was a bit of an outsider. The word I learned in medical school was concrete -most of the world is concrete. They can process black and white, but are blind to shades of gray. A pie in the face is funny, but a pie made of Irish babies, not so much.

You can see this in the audience for comedy -in the 90’s, it was fans of Leno versus Letterman (and now  O’Brien), Jeff Foxworthy versus Jerry Seinfeld, and Britney Spears versus Lady Gaga. It’s the divide that separates America into Walmart and Target. There are people who take Sarah Palin seriously and those who see a cosmic joke. It is with utmost seriousness that I propose a new DSM personality disorder -the Irony Deficit Disorder or IDD.

IDD is marked by a lack of curiosity of the world beyond the experience offered by life within earshot and immediate view. People with IDD have limited affect and rarely express themselves with their hands. They hew to orthodoxy and are great believers of world views constructed by dead people. They are suspicious of the new and generally feel uncomfortable around people who don’t share their background. IDD is found across the political and socioeconomic spectrum. People with IDD are easily offended. They will likely be offended by this piece. These people find change distressful and uncomfortable. At first, new things are regarded with disdain and suspicion, and the ethical and moral dimensions are weighed from the viewpoint of their particular flavor of orthodoxy. When change threatens to intrude, they usually have been able to withdraw from it and the world, but not anymore. The internet, which back in the halcyon days of the nineties offered a utopian view of world connectedness -a New World Order, functions as both the irritant and the balm to those with IDD.

Every country now has its native Taliban fighting the bare-legged, ochre-skinned, breast implanted, spangly-pole dancing march to progress. It is the loss of tribe, social norms, and social status to barbarian invaders talking, looking, and thinking differently and dictating change while secretly sneering at the rubes, or so it seems to the bitter IDD person. They look at their internet in shock and awe – How can it be not wrong for a man to kiss a man and marry a man? How can it be not wrong for a white girl to kiss a black man? Why are they trying to get me to eat that horrible looking food? Why do I have to look at that person dressed that way? Why are those signs not in my native language? Why do I have to pronounce that name the way they want to? How can it be not wrong to assert that America is a country whose only mention of God in the Constitution is in the separation of church and state? Their fears are straightforward –They are trying to change my core values and by extension, denigrate them.

Now, having IDD in no way handicaps that individual. These people buy Toyotas and GM cars, use Windows, and wear red Christmas sweaters embroidered with reindeer. They pay taxes and abide the law. In fact, they are the majority, and their concerns have to be respected up to the point where someone else’s rights are infringed. Those of us endowed with the third eye of irony and rationalism have a difficult position because we will always be in the minority and vulnerable (see Qin Dynasty -burying of the scholars and burning of the books, Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Gleichshaltung, McCarthy Hearings, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag, Taliban Kabul Soccer Stadium activities, the Iranian Election of 2009, The Glen Beck Show). A candle is mostly wax with a fine evanescent flame, easily blown out.

The bright lights of our world have to make a stand. Rather than retreat to Starbucks to grope out discontented tweets for a limited audience, we have to reach out and actively defend ourselves and our civilization which is the Modern Civilization. Rather than sneer behind our Kindle’s, we have to speak clearly for our Constitution and rule of law. We have to make our votes count and work with our like minded brethren in the opposing camp to come to rationale, workable solutions rather than digging trenches festooned with figures hung in effigy. The rational center must hold true to the convictions of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams.

You now have the tee box.

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The Automaton, a simulacron of a great golfer

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I have changed my mind about Tiger because I thought the man and the player (of golf) could be separated. I have decided that Tiger is no longer the greatest to have played the game. Through his actions, he has shown himself unworthy of the game which values moral and ethical behavior. The Rules of Golf are not just a list of crimes and punishment, but assume an internal moral compass that guides player. Players who abide by these Rules elevate themselves in the process. This includes players who call penalties on themselves on trangressions witnessed only by them. This valuing of honesty and ethical behavior is unique to golf where players have famously penalized themselves out of championships or, tragically, tour cards.

If Tiger behaved this way off the course, who knows what guided his behavior on the course in relation to golf. You can obey the law out of fear of punishment or out of internal ethics and morality. Tiger is no golfist, but revealed to be the golfing equivalent of Deep Blue, the chess playing supercomputer, a soul-less automaton. The events of the past several weeks shows that Tiger has no moral compass, and excels at this great game for entirely banal reasons of conditioning and training from childhood. By this measure, the average golfer who takes stroke and distance for going out of bounds even when playing by himself is a greater custodion of the sport than Tiger.

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The Lover

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The Lover

Stress tests are used to determine the quality of things. In medicine, we have a stress test that gives us an idea how strong a heart is. In auto manufacturing, there is the crash test. In professional golf, we now have the sex scandal.

The sex scandal is a stress test most often seen in the realm of politics. But the peccadilloes of a politician became passe after ten solid years going with the tapping of shoes in airport bathrooms sandwiched between Clinton and Berlusconi. This is a stress test that reveals dimensions to Tiger that we’ve never seen before.

Tiger married Elin, a beautiful woman, but his aloofness and occasional public displays -hugging wife/children after win, revealed little. The more cynical among us could only wonder -was this all scripted? There are plenty of wealthy men with exquisite trophy wives who are revealed to have predilections across the sexual spectrum -at least in movies and novels.

So what did the past week reveal. If we are to believe the rumors, Tiger likes women with a certain body type -athletic, muscular legs, size B cups, and serious lips. We also find that Tiger has a misunderstanding about the call history function and contacts program on his cell phone. The US Magazine’s voice mail audio reveals that the purported Tiger is worried that his wife is checking his phone call history and requests the woman that he is calling remove her name from her phone number. The problem is that names are not tagged with phone numbers, but do show up in call histories with names when said names are in the contacts directory. Meaning Tiger kept only one cell phone.

What does this reveal? It confirms Tiger’s legendary miserliness or naivete. Billionaires with mistresses usually keep separate cell phones for booty calls and keep it in the golf bag or with a trusted assistant like Stevie. They keep contacts for Ginger, Misty, and Nicki, under Frank, Otto, and Rocco.

If the rumors that he was assaulted with a golf club are true, that means that he took his punishment like a golfer who hits the ball out of bounds. I frankly think he was running for his life after being hit on the head with Elin slamming the club into the back window as he drove out of the garage. Passing out, he hits tree and hydrant.

But what does all of this say about us? Why all the schadenfreude? Why all the venom? First, there is the issue that if there was an assault, there was a felony, and to hide behind gates and walls of privilege stinks to a public that is economically stressed. Refusing the request of the FHP for an interview and all the second hand communication through blogs and lawyers is a poor substitute for a visit to our society’s confessor, Larry King. The second is our need to destroy heroes, crucify them, worship them when they’re dead but kick them when alive. And finally, the third is the need for men to vocally disown this and for women to narrow their eyes and purse their lips. I for one completely do not condone any of this. The cell phone stuff was given for informational purposes only.

As I have written previously on this blog, the half life of human desire is about 6 months. That romantic love, that dopamine rush of courtship which is pretty much the same reaction people get on crack, dissipates and we bond, replacing dopamine with oxytocin. Children help this bond. Ultimately, the strength of the bond is related to the strength of character of the parties involved. We should not be rubbernecking this terrible crash site, but rather focus on our own game. Keep your head still and your feet on the ground.

It goes without saying, I love my wife very, very much. Bad Tiger, Baaaad Tiger.

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Idiocracy -the greatest movie created by Fox, and buried by it

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SNC10668I just picked up Idiocracy from Amazon (link), finding this gem for all $4.99. It can be found on Youtube in bits and pieces. It is a brilliant indictment of our cultural decay. After it was made, it was released in only 7 cities and then conveniently buried. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the News Corporation, Fox, Fox News, 20th Century Fox, and much of the pro-Bush media likely had a hand in killing this movie which savages the corporate supported dumbassification of the land.

It can be interpreted as elitist, but elitist in the sense that smart people monopolize intelligence in an unfair way. The genius of this movie is that if you’re really stupid, you will laugh your ass off.

Nobelist Paul Krugman (they hand out those things to everyone these days) and NY Times columnist and Princeton Economics professor discusses the demise of American public education in his column today (link). Education was once celebrated. A generation ago, The Paper Chase was popular. Today, it’s variations on Jackass.

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The Eater of Golf Balls

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SNC10652

Steam rising from the beast

The HAC was played at the Tournament Club of Iowa (TCI –link). After 27 well fought holes, the South of Wilden crowd has won their first trophy in several decades. In my matches, paired with the stalwart MS, aka Cutter, we fought hard against our opponents, RT and TB, but driving accuracy, length, and good looks cannot match laser wedges and dropped twenty foot putts. My hat’s off to our opponents.

I have one comment to make about TCI. Designed by the inimitable Arnold Palmer, it is an anomaly in Iowa. Unlike much of Iowa which is flat as a tabletop, this area around Polk City above the dam is topographically more like the moderately hilly parts of Pennsylvania farm country. There are ravines and low buttes. Arnie, using his deep experience with golf as an instrument of pain, has created a monster that demands to be fed golf balls.

These are not subtle tricks of the light that cause golf balls to wink out into moderate rough like at Wakonda. No, its craters are like giant salad bowls filled with knee deep vegetation that swallow up those Titleists, Bridgestones, and Nikes like grains of table salt shaken into a green shag carpet.

Golf is about the mind. Each of us have fears that certain golf courses use to guide us away from our purpose of reaching the hole. I grew up playing golf in Florida, and I welcome water and sand. Florida, like Iowa, is usually flat, but water and beach sand are rare commodities here in Iowa and are usually my allies in matches against the land locked. Hills and elevation changes add a third dimension that I often find confounding on approaches, and the penalties of a lost ball are much higher than for water or sand.

But despite all this, everything is trumped by the ability to get the ball close and dropping that putt, and that is where I failed. It’s back to the lab.

SNC10657

dropping putts is the whole point of golf

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Three Wrongs Make a Wrong

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IMG_1186

Three Wrongs Make a Wrong

In confronting the disaster of 9/11/2001, we made three mistakes which in hindsight have left us with a war that will not end until the apocalyptic scenarios of three religions play out to the satisfaction of each creeds’ fanatics. The first mistake was framing the terrorist strike not as a criminal act but as the opening shots of a war. The second mistake was squandering the capital of sympathy and solidarity with many nations and exchanging it for the false security of a coalition of the willing all under the banner of “you are either with us or with them.” The third, and gravest error, was falling into the trap of accepting the terrorists’ world view -that we are in a final war of religions, a crusade for us and a jihad for them. 9/11 changed the world, and we will have to face the consequences of our decisions for generations.

9/11 was unprecedented as a criminal act perpetrated on the world’s largest stage. It was well executed, but the use of suicidal airplane attacks is not an original one. Tom Clancy in 1994 turned a 747 into a kamikaze that was piloted into a Joint Session of Congress. Despite the carnage on 9/11, it was a criminal act originating from a cell of religious fanatics who claim to speak for all Muslims and not the actions of a nation state. The first action should have been coordinating the FBI, CIA, along with the Justice and State department in dealing with this as a purely criminal matter -international in scope, but ultimately something to be tried in Federal court.

By declaring it an act of war, it elevated the criminals to nation-statehood. Because these terrorists could not be easily found, actual nation states (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) were attacked. Over a trillion dollars were spent when bribes, a handful of car bombs, well-aimed 50 caliber rounds, and a six pack of cruise missiles could have done the job. We didn’t need to conquer Baghdad to hand it to the Iranians. Afghanistan could have been cleared out and righted years ago before we mortgaged our moral capital. We are now left with a region of misbehaving puppets -ours versus Iran’s. The only ones left acting as their own agents with their mission and philosophy intact are the same people who attacked us.

The second mistake was taking the view that the world was black and white when it has always been shades of gray. Simpletons, religious fanatics, and transistors cleave to binary logic. At the time of the tragedy, nations almost universally joined in offering sympathy and condemnation of the crime. It was a crisis which offered many opportunities for positive action, creative diplomacy, and lasting peace. It was an opportunity which fatefully was lost in the rush for vengeance. The position that you are either with us or with the terrorists was frankly insulting to our friends who wanted to offer advice and encourage discussion and planning. By isolating us and watching us spend hundreds of billions in weaponry and incalculable costs in precious lives, sow hatred towards ourselves for generations to come, and tear ourselves apart socially and politically, all from the comfort of some cave (likely with satellite TV, internet, an espresso machine, and a Nintendo Wii), they have been winning this war. They have been winning by just surviving and waiting. Look at our country and think where it could be if instead of a trillion dollars conquering Babylon, we pushed a billion here and a billion there to get some nice targets. You don’t hunt turkey by making a lot of noise, and by blundering into Iraq and Afghanistan, we have flushed the turkey out of the kill zone.

The third and final mistake has implications for the survival of the species. All three Abrahamic religions pine for an end to this life that we have in stewardship of this unique and precious planet, to trade it all in for paradise explained variously as an eternal family reunion of those who didn’t go to hell, an eternal orgy with virgin girls for those righteously martyred, or an eternal time share in Boca. All three claim with absolute certitude that they are right and the others are wrong. All three have access to nuclear weapons. The moment that our war was declared a crusade, the implications of this struggle went from a search for perps to take back to Foley Square in lower Manhattan to a religious struggle of apocalyptic proportions. Our foreign policy became informed not by diplomacy and political history but the Book of John. This is not a little thing as people are constantly looking for signs on all sides. Where is the Mahdi/Moshiach/Messiah returned? Who is the anti-Christ? Who is the Whore of Babble-On? Everyone who has read Sun Tzu knows that you want to first set the battlefield. What should have been the greatest episode of Law and Order is grinding on as an ersatz prequel to Left Behind. So not Ancient Art of War!

But this is what we have begotten. Prosperity makes us soft, coarse, and ill-educated. I had the fortunate circumstances of private school education from high school to graduate school, and I met many very bright people, but also had to get on with many not so bright legacies who were allowed to pass and get the same degree with relative ease that I had to struggle mightily to get even the opportunity to get, being an immigrant. These idiot children of the wealthy, famous, powerful, or accomplished have to keep up the appearance of doing something important to fill that void left by daddy/mommy. They have invaded politics in a way to makes this decade the new Gilded Age. They are joined by equally uneducated not as well off individuals who enter politics to push their parochial, moral agendas whether on the right and left. This union of the empty suits is a root cause of the sclerosis in our politics.


But particularly loathsome to me are those who yammer about family values as they fellate strangers in airport bathrooms, who espouse hatred for foreigners, minorities, or gay people, who cynically whip up the anger and support of poor people who they view with contempt and whose interests they betray in every corporate dollar they take from their lobbyist, whom, it seems from the news, are perfectly happy giving away money while on their backs. Who is the whore?

I believe in fiscal conservatism in times of prosperity. I believe in intensive care and active resuscitation when the country is in extremis and about to go financially flat line. I believe that war should be fought violently and totally, but only as a last resort, and not in creating a Maginot line “over there” built with the bodies of our brave men and women. I believe in the goodness of people and that religion has its place in the heart and actions of believers and not as an instrument of tyranny for a theocratic fascist state.

I believe that 9/11 represents an impenetrable glass wall that we return every day to look back through to a happier time, to see ourselves innocent of Abu Gharib, of a broken Iraqi nation, of a divided America, of our abandonment of rights that extend back to the Magna Carta, and most of all to see those still alive on 9/10/2001. I fear the solution lies in declaring the determination to blot out anyone and their neighbor who would strike the homeland and establishing this as our doctrine, as we leave the poor people of Iraq and Afghanistan to their fate. The alternative solution, to act in diplomacy what we have already done in war, by treating these Barbary Pirates as a nation state and sit at a table to discuss options other than annihilation is a fool’s dream that needs a generation to pass. The maintenance of mutual annihilation (and peace) became another just another government process during the cold war after the dangerous early decades. Like the Klingons say, “Only Nixon could go to China.”