What I Think About When I Think About Salem

You’re probably familiar with the band, a group I have much affection for. Some of their work I find very interesting, some I do not.

What I always think of when I hear their music; the first paragraphs from an old essay, “The Devil in Long Island”, by Ron Rosenbaum, a writer I sometimes disagree with, but always read. I am unaware if any band members are from the much low land mass.

“He wondered every once in a while what life would be like without a second story and how it was people managed to get along in ranch-style or split-level houses without running amok once a year or so.” Thomas Pynchon, from “Low-lands”

It would be foolish to believe that a single story could sum up the entire range of bizarre and sensational behavior that is Long Island Babylon. Particularly a story that doesn’t even mention Amy or Sol, Joey or “Joel the Ripper,” little Katie Beers or Howard Stern, much less the “Homeroom Hit Man,” the “Angel of Death” nurse, the Islip Garbage Barge or Geraldo Rivera.

Nonetheless, I feel that the story of the unprintable Satanist Ritual Killing Ground Photo comes close.

Some years ago in Northport — not far from the birthplace of Pynchon, who is, far more than the frequently invoked F. Scott Fitzgerald, the true literary avatar of the Long Island soul — two allegedly angel-dusting, devil-worshiping teen-agers were branded as “ritual cult murderers” of another teen-ager in the Aztakea woods.

It was one of the first such episodes in what would become an overhyped national trendlet, and perhaps the first signal that something sinister was stirring out there behind the split-level shutters of Long Island’s suburbs. But this particular story about the unprintable photo, one I heard from a former Newsday editor who swears it’s true, isn’t about the killing itself; rather about something that happened the night after the death became public.

It seems the paper had dispatched a photographer to get a nighttime shot of the supposedly spooky, satanist ritual killing ground out there in the woods, something that would capture the diabolical horror of it all. But when certain pictures came out of the darkroom, they just weren’t . . . suitable. Unusable. Not because they were too terrifying (at least not terrifying in a Luciferian way). But because many photographs of the alleged cult coven’s killing circle prominently featured a large boulder, across the face of which was scrawled the following somewhat-less-than-terrifying cult slogan:

SATIN LIVES!

More Sentences I Liked

The vessel was just comfortable for two people; there was room only for necessities, and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his special philosophy considered necessary. They reduced themselves, apparently, to four essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers, if he should want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he should faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die.

“The Sins of Prince Saradine” by G.K. Chesteron, a man of many disagreeable notions and many agreeable sentences.

But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark — I mean, that the centre of it is simple, however much the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus, in Hamlet, let us say, the grotesqueness of the grave-digger, the flowers of the mad girl, the fantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost and the grin of the skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain tragic figure of a man in black.

“The Queer Feet” by G.K. Chesterton

If a little hoochie tunnel leading straight to the Miz’s presence hadn’t opened right at that moment, causing her to sprint from my side, I was going to ask her, “What’s it all about?”

“Leaving Reality” by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Not to mention that in our minds the basement was now permanently a onetime BDSM sex dungeon, and not a mutual-consent swinger dungeon, either.

“Peyton’s Place” by John Jeremiah Sullivan

After comedian Sarah Silverman riffed at TED 2010 that her wish to adopt a terminally ill “retarded baby” made her an “amazing person,” [TED organizer Chris] Anderson, who had invited her, tweeted to his million-plus followers that she had been “god-awful,” and AOL co-founder Steve Case tweeted, “Shame on you.” (In an ensuing tweet war, Silverman schooled both Anderson—“a barnacle of mediocrity on Bill Gates’ asshole”—and Case—“should be nicer to the last person on earth w/ an AOL account.’)”

“Those Fabulous Confabs” by Benjamin Wallace

So frequently did gazes slip to reëxamine my badge that I came to know what it must be like to have cleavage.

“Magic Mountain: What Happens At Davos?” by Nick Paumgarten

This is admittedly a little hard to parse, because Santorum uses a handful of words differently than many people would use them.

“What Santorum Didn’t Say” by Greg Marx

At lunch, the most common question, aside from ‘Which offensive dick-shaped product did you handle the most of today?’ is “Why are you here?” like in prison.

“I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave” by Mac McClelland. It is one of the only funny lines in a grim, essential piece of reporting that makes me grateful that it was written, and will dissuade me from ordering anything from Amazon, which may not be the actual warehouser featured, but which no doubt runs under similar conditions.

Flambeau drove the blade of his spade through the whistling grass into the wet clay below. Then he seemed to stop and lean on it as on a staff.

‘Go on,’ said the priest very gently. ‘We are only trying to find the truth. What are you afraid of?’

‘I am afraid of finding it,’ said Flambeau.

“The Honour of Israel Gow” by G.K. Chesterton

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Joan Didion”

I originally wanted to write a reaction to Caitlin Flanagan’s piece on Didion, but I think I’m a little too free with my venom, even in those moments when I believe it righteous, perhaps those moments most of all. Such bile would add very little to the world, while this essay by Abby Mims instead gives a good sense of what one writer’s work meant to many. There is the sentimental belief that tragedy necessarily brings forth eloquence, when the first is an inherent part of this life, while the other is the result of very hard work applying one’s gifts. Ms. Mims has respectively, the misfortune and fortune of both.

Anthony Shadid 1968-2012

A great journalist, whose brave work I greatly appreciated, in a bleak time when overseas are stripped bare or dismantled entirely. I, along, with other humble readers knew that there were would be good, trustworthy work below his byline.

A good overview of his achievements and wide travels can be found here, a Slate listing of articles available on the invaluable Longform. A page at the New York Times devoted to rememrance; epitaphs from distinguished colleagues Jon Lee Anderson, Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, and George Packer; finally, Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress has an excellent overview of his writing, supplementing and surpassing the Slate / Longform collection, “The Best Of Anthony Shadid: 20 Great Pieces By 2-Time Pulitzer Middle East Reporter”.

French Politics: More Forgiving, More Literate, Obviously Sexier Than American Politics

From Philip Gourevitch’s excellent “No Exit: Can Nicolas Sarkozy—and France—survive the European crisis?”

Of course, everyone in the Parisian chattering classes knew that the two men had a tangled history. A decade or so earlier, Carla Bruni had dated [Bernard-Henri] Lévy’s close friend Jean-Paul Enthoven, before taking up with his son, Raphaël Enthoven—who was married at the time to none other than Lévy’s daughter, Justine. Everyone knew about this, in large part, because Justine, a novelist, had told the whole story in a thinly disguised roman à clef, “Nothing Serious,” which became a sensational best-seller. “A father, a son—in France, it’s seen very badly,” a Parisian socialite told me. But then Bruni stayed with Raphaë l for years, and had a child with him. In the socialite’s view, that put an end to the scandal, because it became a love story. “Love forgives everything,” the socialite said. “You can take the son of your lover if it is a love story. If it is Phaedra and Hippolytus, it is O.K. If it is Racine, O.K. If it is just a drink, a Coca, and you go together—unforgivable.” It was the same with Bruni and Sarkozy, the socialite said: “Obviously, a love story, to be a love story, lasts four or five years.”

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert

(I post this here not out of any support of the Assad dictatorship, but its opposite – to give some insight into the good public relations a dictatorship can buy. I copy it in the belief that this example of supplicancy should get as wide an exposure as possible, and encourage those to copy and paste it. I hope that the Syrian revolution is successful, and that it ends in stability and a participatory democracy, rather than sectarianism or another tyranny that promises “stability”. I was informed of the article via Max Fisher at The Atlantic, The Only Remaining Online Copy of Vogue’s Asma al-Assad Profile and it is copied from here. I leave out pictures, for the time being, as I think they’re incidental to the content.)

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert

by Joan Juliet Buck

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.

Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.

“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.

It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla. In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.

The first lady works out of a small white building in a hilly, modern residential neighborhood called Muhajireen, where houses and apartments are crammed together and neighbors peer and wave from balconies. The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist and his diplomat wife, both Sunni Muslims. They spoke Arabic at home. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College, and spent holidays with family in Syria. “I’ve dealt with the sense that people don’t expect Syria to be normal. I’d show my London friends my holiday snaps and they’d be—‘Where did you say you went?’ ”

She studied computer science at university, then went into banking. “It wasn’t a typical path for women,” she says, “but I had it all mapped out.” By the spring of 2000, she was closing a big biotech deal at JP Morgan in London and about to take up an MBA at Harvard. She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash. They had known each other forever, but a ten-year age difference meant that nothing registered—until it did.

“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends, or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” explains the first lady. “What do you say—‘I’m dating the son of a president’? You just don’t say that. Then he became president, so I tried to keep it low-key. Suddenly I was turning up in Syria every month, saying, ‘Granny, I miss you so much!’ I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage. I couldn’t say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a really big deal. He wouldn’t accept my resignation. I was, like, ‘Please, really, I just want to get out, I’ve had enough,’ and he was ‘Don’t worry, take time off, it happens to the best of us.’ ” She left without her bonus in November and married Bashar al-Assad in December.

“What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project.” She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. “It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do.” Her staff are used to eating when they can. “I have a rechargeable battery,” she says.

The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”

In 2005 she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.

And then there’s her cultural mission: “People tend to see Syria as artifacts and history,” she says. “For us it’s about the accumulation of cultures, traditions, values, customs. It’s the difference between hardware and software: the artifacts are the hardware, but the software makes all the difference—the customs and the spirit of openness. We have to make sure that we don’t lose that. . . . ” Here she gives an apologetic grin. “You have to excuse me, but I’m a banker—that brand essence.”

That brand essence includes the distant past. There are 500,000 important ancient works of art hidden in storage; Asma al-Assad has brought in the Louvre to create a network of museums and cultural attractions across Syria, and asked Italian experts to help create a database of the 5,000 archaeological sites in the desert. “Culture,” she says, “is like a financial asset. We have an abundance of it, thousands of years of history, but we can’t afford to be complacent.”

In December, Asma al-Assad was in Paris to discuss her alliance with the Louvre. She dazzled a tough French audience at the International Diplomatic Institute, speaking without notes. “I’m not trying to disguise culture as anything more than it is,” she said, “and if I sound like I’m talking politics, it’s because we live in a politicized region, a politicized time, and we are affected by that.”

The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was there: “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”

Damascus evokes a dusty version of a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque at night looks exactly like St. Mark’s square in Venice. When I first arrive, I’m met on the tarmac by a minder, who gives me a bouquet of white roses and lends me a Syrian cell phone; the head minder, a high-profile American PR, joins us the next day. The first lady’s office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights in a bubble of comfort and hospitality. On the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.

“I like things I can touch. I like to get out and meet people and do things,” the first lady says as we set off for a meeting in a museum and a visit to an orphanage. “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you. My husband gave me back something I had lost.”

She slips behind the wheel of a plain SUV, a walkie-talkie and her cell thrown between the front seats and a Syrian-silk Louboutin tote on top. She does what the locals do—swerves to avoid crazy men who run across busy freeways, misses her turn, checks your seat belt, points out sights, and then can’t find a parking space. When a traffic cop pulls her over at a roundabout, she lowers the tinted window and dips her head with a playful smile. The cop’s eyes go from slits to saucers.

Her younger brother Feras, a surgeon who moved to Syria to start a private health-care group, says, “Her intelligence is both intellectual and emotional, and she’s a master at harmonizing when, and how much, to use of each one.”

In the Saint Paul orphanage, maintained by the Melkite–Greek Catholic patriarchate and run by the Basilian sisters of Aleppo, Asma sits at a long table with the children. Two little boys in new glasses and thick sweaters are called Yussuf. She asks them what kind of music they like. “Sad music,” says one. In the room where she’s had some twelve computers installed, the first lady tells a nun, “I hope you’re letting the younger children in here go crazy on the computers.” The nun winces: “The children are afraid to learn in case they don’t have access to computers when they leave here,” she says.

In the courtyard by the wall down which Saint Paul escaped in a basket 2,000 years ago, an old tree bears gigantic yellow fruit I have never seen before. Citrons. Cédrats in French.

Back in the car, I ask what religion the orphans are. “It’s not relevant,” says Asma al-Assad. “Let me try to explain it to you. That church is a part of my heritage because it’s a Syrian church. The Umayyad Mosque is the third-most-important holy Muslim site, but within the mosque is the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. We all kneel in the mosque in front of the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. That’s how religions live together in Syria—a way that I have never seen anywhere else in the world. We live side by side, and have historically. All the religions and cultures that have passed through these lands—the Armenians, Islam, Christianity, the Umayyads, the Ottomans—make up who I am.”

“Does that include the Jews?” I ask.

“And the Jews,” she answers. “There is a very big Jewish quarter in old Damascus.”

The Jewish quarter of Damascus spans a few abandoned blocks in the old city that emptied out in 1992, when most of the Syrian Jews left. Their houses are sealed up and have not been touched, because, as people like to tell you, Syrians don’t touch the property of others. The broken glass and sagging upper floors tell a story you don’t understand—are the owners coming back to claim them one day?

The presidential family lives surrounded by neighbors in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.”

The old al-Assad family apartment was remade into a child-friendly triple-decker playroom loft surrounded by immense windows on three sides. With neither shades nor curtains, it’s a fishbowl. Asma al-Assad likes to say, “You’re safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe.” Neighbors peer in, drop by, visit, comment on the furniture. The president doesn’t mind: “This curiosity is good: They come to see you, they learn more about you. You don’t isolate yourself.”

There’s a decorated Christmas tree. Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All three go to a Montessori school.

Asma al-Assad empties a box of fondue mix into a saucepan for lunch. The household is run on wildly democratic principles. “We all vote on what we want, and where,” she says. The chandelier over the dining table is made of cut-up comic books. “They outvoted us three to two on that.”

A grid is drawn on a blackboard, with ticks for each member of the family. “We were having trouble with politeness, so we made a chart: ticks for when they spoke as they should, and a cross if they didn’t.” There’s a cross next to Asma’s name. “I shouted,” she confesses. “I can’t talk about empowering young people, encouraging them to be creative and take responsibility, if I’m not like that with my own children.”

“The first challenge for us was, Who’s going to define our lives, us or the position?” says the president. “We wanted to live our identity honestly.”

They announced their marriage in January 2001, after the ceremony, which they kept private. There was deliberately no photograph of Asma. “The British media picked that up as: Now she’s moved into the presidential palace, never to be seen again!” says Asma, laughing.

They had a reason: “She spent three months incognito,” says the president. “Before I had any official engagement,” says the first lady, “I went to 300 villages, every governorate, hospitals, farms, schools, factories, you name it—I saw everything to find out where I could be effective. A lot of the time I was somebody’s ‘assistant’ carrying the bag, doing this and that, taking notes. Nobody asked me if I was the first lady; they had no idea.”

“That way,” adds the president, “she started her NGO before she was ever seen in public as my wife. Then she started to teach people that an NGO is not a charity.”

Neither of them believes in charity for the sake of charity. “We have the Iraqi refugees,” says the president. “Everybody is talking about it as a political problem or as welfare, charity. I say it’s neither—it’s about cultural philosophy. We have to help them. That’s why the first thing I did is to allow the Iraqis to go into schools. If they don’t have an education, they will go back as a bomb, in every way: terrorism, extremism, drug dealers, crime. If I have a secular and balanced neighbor, I will be safe.”

When Angelina Jolie came with Brad Pitt for the United Nations in 2009, she was impressed by the first lady’s efforts to encourage empowerment among Iraqi and Palestinian refugees but alarmed by the Assads’ idea of safety.

“My husband was driving us all to lunch,” says Asma al-Assad, “and out of the corner of my eye I could see Brad Pitt was fidgeting. I turned around and asked, ‘Is anything wrong?’ ”

“Where’s your security?” asked Pitt.

“So I started teasing him—‘See that old woman on the street? That’s one of them! And that old guy crossing the road?

That’s the other one!’ ” They both laugh.

The president joins in the punch line: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”

After lunch, Asma al-Assad drives to the airport, where a Falcon 900 is waiting to take her to Massar in Latakia, on the coast. When she lands, she jumps behind the wheel of another SUV waiting on the tarmac. This is the kind of surprise visit she specializes in, but she has no idea how many kids will turn up at the community center on a rainy Friday.

As it turns out, it’s full. Since the first musical notation was discovered nearby, at Ugarit, the immaculate Massar center in Latakia is built around music. Local kids are jamming in a sound booth; a group of refugee Palestinian girls is playing instruments. Others play chess on wall-mounted computers. These kids have started online blood banks, run marathons to raise money for dialysis machines, and are working on ways to rid Latakia of plastic bags. Apart from a few girls in scarves, you can’t tell Muslims from Christians.

Asma al-Assad stands to watch a laborious debate about how—and whether—to standardize the Arabic spelling of the word Syria. Then she throws out a curve ball. “I’ve been advised that we have to close down this center so as to open another one somewhere else,” she says. Kids’ mouths drop open. Some repress tears. Others are furious. One boy chooses altruism: “That’s OK. We know how to do it now; we’ll help them.”

Then the first lady announces, “That wasn’t true. I just wanted to see how much you care about Massar.”

As the pilot expertly avoids sheet lightning above the snow-flecked desert on the way back, she explains, “There was a little bit of formality in what they were saying to me; it wasn’t real. Tricks like this help—they became alive, they became passionate. We need to get past formalities if we are going to get anything done.”

Two nights later it’s the annual Christmas concert by the children of Al-Farah Choir, run by the Syrian Catholic Father Elias Zahlawi. Just before it begins, Bashar and Asma al-Assad slip down the aisle and take the two empty seats in the front row. People clap, and some call out his nickname:

“Docteur! Docteur!”

Two hundred children dressed variously as elves, reindeers, or candy canes share the stage with members of the national orchestra, who are done up as elves. The show becomes a full-on songfest, with the elves and reindeer and candy canes giving their all to “Hallelujah” and “Joy to the World.” The carols slide into a more serpentine rhythm, an Arabic rap group takes over, and then it’s back to Broadway mode. The president whispers, “All of these styles belong to our culture. This is how you fight extremism—through art.”

Brass bells are handed out. Now we’re all singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” 1,331 audience members shaking their bells, singing, crying, and laughing.

“This is the diversity you want to see in the Middle East,” says the president, ringing his bell. “This is how you can have peace!”

February 25, 2011 9:03 a.m.

In Iowa, Politics Is Everything

From “What Stephen Bloom Is Missing About Iowa”, by Lynda Waddington, a response to “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life” by Stephen Bloom.

In Iowa, more than any other state except maybe New Hampshire, “think globally, but act locally” isn’t just a catch phrase. Those are words to live by. Residents understand that politics ranging from the local park board to the White House are symbiotic relationships that impact us all.

It is not possible to offer an assessment of anything in the state — agriculture, immigration, religion, education, etc. — without also acknowledging and including the political ramifications.

While I know many western Iowans who do not agree with ever-inflammatory U.S. Rep. Steve King, they cannot deny the Washington pork he provides is beneficial.

[Stephen] Bloom correctly notes that suicide rates in rural areas are higher than in urban centers and that behavioral health services (as well as other specialized health care) are not readily available, a subject I researched for more than a year while working as a political reporter. He does not note, however, that rural advocates, as part of an Iowa-centric regional hub, advocated and won approval for a rural emergency hotline service as a part of the Farm Bill. Although the hotline, which many believed would save hundreds of lives, came with a price tag of less than 1 percent of the total Farm Bill appropriations, it was never funded. Members of Congress saw the need for the program, but never carried through.

A state where politics is of importance and connected to everything, a representative who can at least be expected to bring in the federal cash, a simple hotline to provide assistance for the beleaguered – especially military veterans – that remains unfunded.

These may be contradictions, in life, in Ms. Waddington’s piece, bless her heart, or both.

Opium Notes

Via one of the best sites on the web, longform, I came across this old but very good piece by Nick Tosches on his search for opium, but not just opium, an opium den, but not these things either maybe, but a refuge from words, a refuge from the future, a place in the past, but a past of only memories. Of all things, it made me think of Once Upon A Time in America, which begins and ends in an opium den, where Noodles (Robert De Niro) moves through a vast pool of memories, an escape from a present which tightens tighter and tighter around him. Tosches starts off his journey in a world burdened with too many words, “cassis”, “melange”, “violets”, “vanilla”, he is reduced to one word, ya-p’iàn in Cantonese, a word that lies between a pian and a phian in Cambodian, and finally, none at all:

We lie back and smoke; and now, wordlessly, we understand each other perfectly in the eloquence of a silence that not only contains all that has ever been and all that ever will be said, but also drosses the vast babel of it, leaving only the ethereal purity of that wordless poetry that only the greatest of poets have glimpsed in epiphany.

As always with Tosches, his writing shames me that I eat too narrowly and taste too little. However, the best piece of description here is not gustatory, but the vividness of a thing before it’s eaten.

Later, amid the crowded stalls of the night market, we watch as an elderly Chinese man hands over a small fortune in cash to another elderly man, a snake seller much esteemed for the rarity and richness of poison of his stock. The snake man pockets the money, narrows his eyes, and with a studied suddenness withdraws a long, writhing serpent from a cage of bamboo. Holding it high, his grasp directly below its inflated venom glands, its mouth open, its fangs extended, he slashes it with a razor-sharp knife from gullet to midsection, the movement of the blade in his hand following with precise rapidity the velocity of the creature’s powerful whiplashings, which send its gushing blood splattering wildly. Laying down the blade, the snake man reaches his blood-drenched hand with medical exactitude into the open serpent, withdraws its still-living bladder, drops it into the eager hands of his customer, who, with gore dripping from between his fingers onto his shirt, raises the pulsing bloody organ to his open mouth, gulps it down, and wipes and licks away the blood that runs down his chin.

For Tosches, opium and opium dens are very difficult to find in the eastern Asia – China, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Thailand – of today. He may have had better fortune in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

From The Ayatollah Begs To Differ, by Hooman Majd, a very good travelogue, history, and essential book for a closer sense of the country.

Shir’ e is made from the charred remnants of previously smoked opium and is the preferred method of drug taking among the hardest of hard-core opium addicts in Iran, who number in the hundreds of thousands. Boiling the burned opium in water, removing the scum, and then straining the gooey residue results in an opiate perhaps tens of times more potent than fresh, raw opium, itself by far the most popular drug in Iran. Always plentiful and almost a part of Iran’s heritage (and widely used in the courts of previous dynasties), opium under the fanatically pro-Western and anti-traditionalist Shah was mainly used by provincial Iranians, the lower classes, and a handful of the landed gentry who stubbornly clung to the past and the seductive habit inherited from their forefathers. The modernism the Shah promoted in the 1960s and ’70s (along with a huge increase in tourist and student travel to Europe and the United States) meant that among the young at least, Western, and therefore cool, drugs such as marijuana and cocaine replaced the backward, and now plebeian, domestic high. In my maternal grandfather’s house in the 1960s, as traditional a household as there could be in Tehran, I had witnessed my great-grandmother, well over ninety years old, eating, yes, eating, her daily dose of opium. Her dementia, quite advanced as far as I was concerned since she never seemed to recognize me, not even a few minutes after I told her whose child I was, was noticeably improved after she swallowed the little brown pellets, although I now think it may have been more because she was just too high to be a nuisance to anyone. My mother used to tell me she was taking her medicine, but I heard enough about her taryak, “opium” in Farsi, to know better.

People of my generation stayed away from opium or, if they indulged, preferred to keep it private lest they be viewed by their ganja-smoking friends as hopelessly square. The Islamic Revolution, which inverted class distinctions and frowned upon anything Western, changed things a bit when it inadvertently caused a resurgence in the use of opium as a recreational activity, perhaps because of the ban on alcohol and the ready availability of opium (although illegal) as a substitute, but also perhaps because the old-fashioned, and particularly Iranian, customs were now in vogue. Drug use in general, though, has escalated dramatically since the revolution first intentionally created a modern republic without bars, pubs, or real public entertainment, and unintentionally a birthrate that has produced far more employable youths than the economy can provide jobs for. And although opium tops the list in terms of favored drugs, heroin, crack, and even crystal meth, known as sbeesbeh, or “glass” are becoming commonplace among the working and middle classes.

Lying on the floor, one smokes shir’e upside down: unless you’re an expert, you need an assistant to guide the inverted pipe to the open flame. One puff and your head starts floating, pain now an adversary that appears vulnerable to conquest; two or three puffs and you experience a high that is serenely beautiful: problems fade completely away, anxiety and pain surrender, and nothing, you think, can take away the beauty. Not even a full-scale invasion by the U.S. military.

When it was my turn at the pipe, I lay down on the carpet and rested my head on a dirty pillow. The voiceless man painstakingly prepared
the makeshift pipe by kneading and twisting a thick paste on its tip over and over, softening the shir’ e by bringing it close to the Bame
and then quickly pulling it away several times. A gentle prod was my signal that the pipe was ready: I drew the smoke in short inhales until
it completely filled my lungs, and then exhaled slowly. The cooler had been switched off to avoid any twentieth-century interference with the
purity of the occasion, and although the heat in the room was now the equivalent of a turned-up sauna, I felt surprisingly comfortable. I
begged off a third drag and instead moved away and sat up on the carpet, mumbling profuse thank-yous. I tried unsuccessfully to cross my legs, but they were happier stretched out, so I leaned on a big pillow and slowly drank a cup of tea with a few sugar cubes, sugar that I knew would be the only guarantee that I wouldn’t throw up, for opium, like heroin, dramatically lowers the blood sugar level-perhaps the one side effect that can diminish the seductiveness of the drug.

When I returned to the house after washing my hands under a faucet by the pond, I could infer from the conversations all around me
that another guest was due any minute. I sat down on the carpet again and lit a cigarette to keep myself awake. When the curtain was swept
aside just a short while later, a tall young mullah walked into the room. He quietly removed his turban and abba, or “cloak” and sat down to a steaming-hot glass of tea quickly delivered by the twelve-year-old boy. My astonishment at his presence, for al the Ayatollahs agree that opium and other drugs are haram, “forbidden” by Islam, grew to amazement as I watched him finish his tea and go over to the pipe and burner.

He calmly spent the next hour puffing away, drinking tea, fingering his beads, and occasionally answering questions of religious philosophy,
none of which I fully understood. And while he was busy pontificating, the other men, one by one, took the opportunity to perform their
afternoon prayers: facing Mecca, they bowed and kneeled in the cramped room, carefully avoiding my outstretched limbs, and mumbled verses from the Koran as PMC blared the latest Iranian pop hit, the cleric calmly smoked away, and I continued to struggle to stay fully awake.