The Terrorists' Veto
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
NOTE: This is the version of this editorial that will appear in print in the March 2006 edition of Zenger's Newsmagazine. A previous version published to this blog was a first draft.
Since the Islamist terrorists of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda (“The Base”) attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 I’ve written a lot of words critiquing the bizarre combination of bullying and idiocy that has characterized the U.S. response. I’ve asked embarrassing questions like why, when the people who actually did 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the U.S. retaliated by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve opposed the blatant violations of civil liberties by the U.S. government both at home — the USA PATRIOT Act, the “special registration” requirements imposed on legal immigrants from 25 countries (all but one of them with Muslim majorities) and the recently revealed secret, illegal wiretaps against American citizens — and abroad: the detention centers at Guantánamo and Bagram, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the “extraordinary renditions” of alleged terror suspects to countries where they would be tortured and the network of secret prisons set up by the CIA.
What I haven’t really dwelled on — partly because it hadn’t seemed necessary, given the way America’s mainstream media have covered these stories, and partly because I didn’t want to be put in a position of appearing to condone racist or religious prejudice against Muslims and Middle Easterners — is that there really is a “clash of civilizations,” or at least a clash of cultures and values, between the West and radical Islam. The West believes in freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and it’s made at least some progress towards acknowledging racial and gender equality. Radical Islam believes in none of those things. The West believes in what Thomas Jefferson called “a wall of separation” between church and state. Radical Islamists believe in Islam as a total system that dictates not only religion but law, politics and even family life. Christianity was founded by a prophet who said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.” Islam was founded by a prophet who not only represented himself as the “messenger of God” but sought and achieved the power of a Caesar.
The flaming (literally and figuratively) controversy over the cartoon caricatures of Muhammad published by Jyllands-Posten, a small-circulation newspaper hitherto unknown outside of its native Denmark, last September has highlighted the gulf between the Western world and radical Islam. The West doesn’t always live up to its proclaimed ideals — the above catalogue of human-rights abuses by the Bush administration in the name of the “war on terror” proves that — but radical Islam still believes in ideas the West gave up long ago: heresy trials, witch hunts, the Inquisition and the idea that “respect” for their religion should be enshrined in civil law and that even nonbelievers who criticize or ridicule Islam should be punished, often with death.
Among the restrictions of Islam is a rule that not only is the Prophet Muhammad not to be ridiculed or made fun of, either in word or image, he is not to be depicted visually at all. The Islamists who are filling the streets in protest against the Jyllands-Posten images of their prophet and torching the embassies of Denmark and other European countries whose newspapers have reprinted the cartoons are attempting to force the rest of the world to abide by the laws of their religion. Free-speech attorneys use the phrase “the hecklers’ veto” to refer to meetings in which hostile members of the audience shout down a speaker so he or she cannot get his message out. What we are seeing in the cartoon controversy is a far more sinister version of the hecklers’ veto: the terrorists’ veto.
The demonstrations against European newspapers and governments in the Muslim world didn’t just “happen” spontaneously. They were organized last December at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC), which consists of leaders from 56 Muslim nations, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia — Islam’s holiest city and one non-Muslims are barred from visiting at all. A press release on the OIC’s Web site, http://www.oic-oci.org/, dated February 11, paraphrased the group’s secretary-general, Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as saying “that the OIC Member States expect from the EU [European Union] to identify Islamophobia as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents in the future.” To me, that seems to mean that the governments of the world’s Muslim countries expect the governments of Europe to police their citizens to make sure that no caricatures or images of Muhammad ever darken the pages of a European newspaper again.
Such demands are nothing new to radical Islam and its practitioners. When Salman Rushdie published his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, and it contained an irreverent account of Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel as well as a much more vicious caricature of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (referred to in Rushdie’s book only as “The Imam”), Khomeini issued a fatwa — a religious decree — that said it was the sacred duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Rushdie. The author spent over a decade in England under what was essentially house arrest, with a security guard provided by the British government to protect him against Muslim assassins, while two people who had done translations of his book actually were murdered. More recently, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh — great-grandnephew of the famous painter — was brutally murdered by a Muslim extremist in protest against his 15-minute film attacking Islam’s treatment of women.
The climate of fear that resulted was so powerful that, when Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose sought an illustrator for a children’s book about Muhammad, three artists turned him down outright and the one he hired insisted on anonymity. It was this experience that led Rose to commission 12 Danish cartoonists to draw cartoons both depicting and commenting on Muhammad, creating the layout that was published last September and sparked the current controversy. “I was concerned about a tendency toward self-censorship among people in artistic and cultural circles in Europe,” Rose told Newsweek. “That’s why I commissioned these cartoons, to test this tendency and to start a debate about it.”
Alas, instead of rising to the “debate” Rose called for, all too many officials in Western governments and media companies are caving in to the Islamists’ demands. An editor who reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in a major French paper was fired. French president Jacques Chirac asked his country’s publications not to publish the cartoons and told his Cabinet he condemned “all obvious provocations likely to dangerously kindle passions.” In the U.S., virtually no newspapers, TV stations or mainstream media Web sites have shown the cartoons. CNN, which for a year after 9/11 had a policy that deaths of civilians in the U.S. attack on Afghanistan could not be reported unless the on-air journalist immediately reminded viewers that 3,000 people had been killed by radical Islamic terrorists on 9/11, now piously insists that they’re not showing the cartoons on screen or Web page “out of respect for Islam.”
It’s not like our hands are entirely clean on these issues. In the U.S. we’ve had former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson openly calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and saying that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was God’s revenge against him for pulling the Israeli occupation forces out of Gaza. We’ve had Christians equally incensed over works of art like Andrés Serrano’s Piss Christ — a crucifix displayed in a jar of the artist’s urine — and Chris Ofili’s feces-smeared painting of the Virgin Mary. But at least they pursued their grievances through the political process — attacking the public subsidies given to those artists and the museums which exhibited them — rather than threatening to kill the artists and blow up the museums.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the cartoon controversy is that righteous revulsion over the Islamists’ demands that we censor ourselves in the name of a religion we don’t believe in will only fuel the uglier aspects of the “war on terror”: more “special registration” programs and long-term detentions targeting people from Muslim countries, restrictions on immigration, racial profiling of Arabs and others from majority-Muslim countries and racist hate crimes against them. Certainly people in Muslim countries have plenty of legitimate grievances against the West, from the European colonization of the Middle East after World War I to the formation of Israel on Palestinian land and Israel’s subsequent quasi-fascist occupation against Palestinians, the U.S. aggression against Iraq and our treatment of most of the Middle East as if it were a giant ATM that dispensed oil instead of cash. But these do not justify the violence being inflicted on European embassies or the dark threats of “another 9/11” aimed at getting us to give up our right to freedom of expression where Islam is concerned. Muslims need to come together, reject both the demands and the tactics of the radical Islamists and learn to live in a free world in which the right to practice one’s own religion comes with the obligation to tolerate others who criticize or even ridicule it.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Alternative AIDS Activist Appears on Primetime TV
Maggiore Questions Official Claim Her 3-Year-Old Died of “AIDS”
news analysis by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Reprinted from Zenger's Newsmagazine issue #135, January 2006 (incorporating a correction suggested by Christine Maggiore in the letter printed below)
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Alternative AIDS activist Christine Maggiore, founder of the Alive and Well AIDS organization and author of What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, appeared on the ABC-TV Primetime news show aired December 8 to challenge the official finding of the Los Angeles county coroner that her 3 1/2-year old daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, died last May of AIDS-related encephalitis and pneumonia. Maggiore not only has the veiled threat of a criminal prosecution for neglect hanging over her, she’s been the subject of a series of highly critical articles in the Los Angeles Times, the first of which, published September 24 — nine days after the coroner’s report was released — bore a headline that summed up the paper’s view of the case: “A Mother’s Denial, a Daughter’s Death.”
Maggiore, whose career as an AIDS activist began when she tested “HIV-positive” in 1992, formed Alive and Well in 1995 after encountering the alternative scientific view of AIDS — which regards it as a long-term breakdown of the immune system caused by various lifestyle and toxic factors, not an infectious disease caused by HIV or any other virus — and deciding it better explained her own experience than the mainstream view. She met her husband, filmmaker Robin Scovill, in 1996 and they had two children. One, Charlie, is now a healthy, happy, exuberant eight-year-old boy. The other, Eliza Jane, also seemed perfectly healthy until she contracted an ear infection in April of this year. She struggled with the infection for three weeks, and Maggiore saw three pediatricians — her regular one, Dr. Paul Fleiss; another California-based doctor, Jay Gordon; and Philip Incao, a member of her group’s advisory board and a holistic pediatrician based in Colorado — who were unable to treat the infection or save Eliza Jane’s life.
According to Maggiore, her daughter’s final decline started when, on Dr. Incao’s recommendation, she gave Eliza Jane amoxicillin, an antibiotic commonly used in children. After just the third dose, Maggiore told Primetime host Chris Cuomo, “her complexion went from rosy to kind of ashen, and she felt cold. And she was agitated. She was looking around the room nervously. I would say, ‘Eliza Jane? Eliza Jane?’ And she would look at me and hold my eyes for a moment, and I didn’t know what to say except, ‘E. J., I love you.’”
When the coroner’s autopsy report was released September 15, Maggiore demanded a copy of it so she could have it reviewed by Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, another member of Alive and Well’s medical advisory board and an Iraqi émigré with a Ph.D. in toxicology. Al-Bayati reviewed the coroner’s report and wrote a report of his own, dated October 25, that claimed Eliza Jane died not from anything related to AIDS or HIV, but from an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin. Al-Bayati was shown on the Primetime show confirming that statement, but his total appearance was a two-second sound bite and he was not questioned about why he came to his conclusion that amoxicillin, not AIDS, killed Eliza Jane.
In what was perhaps the most moving portion of the Primetime show, Maggiore told Cuomo that she could not directly answer the question of what she thought killed her daughter, but said through tears, “I believe that the unfortunate irony in this situation is that the one time we were asked to, and we complied, with mainstream medicine, we inadvertently gave our daughter something that took her life.”
Maggiore’s disillusionment with mainstream medicine began even before her “HIV-positive” diagnosis in 1992. Before that, doctors had mistakenly put her on heavy doses of thyroid medication until, just before her HIV antibody test result, one doctor realized she was being overdosed with these drugs and took her off of them. Maggiore later said that just when she was being told her positive HIV antibody test meant she was infected with an invariably fatal virus and she was just going to get sicker and die young, she was the healthiest she’d been in years because she was off the thyroid drugs — and that was the first indication she had that the prophesy of her impending doom from the so-called “AIDS virus” might not be accurate.
Further uncertainties arose when Maggiore took a second HIV antibody test, which came out negative. Over the next two years she took a number of tests, whose results ranged all over the map: positive, negative and “indeterminate” or “seroequivocal,” an in-between category her orientation as a mainstream speaker for AIDS Project Los Angeles hadn’t prepared her for at all. After contacting UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., she was exposed to the alternative view of AIDS and decided it made more sense than the mainstream one she was peddling as a volunteer. Before she adopted the alternative view, Maggiore had been a founding board member of a group called Women at Risk, made up of “HIV-positive” women; over the next five years, she watched as 11 of the original 14 Women at Risk board members who took anti-HIV medications died, while Maggiore and the two others who didn’t use the drugs lived.
By the time she met Robin Scovill and became pregnant with Charlie, Maggiore was determined to follow her own instincts and the advice of alternative researchers rather than the medical mainstream. She gave birth to both her children at home with the assistance of a nurse-midwife rather than go through a hospital, where she would have been forced to take the cell-killing anti-HIV drug AZT while still pregnant and to administer it to her children after they were born. She breast-fed both Charlie and Eliza Jane despite the warnings of mainstream doctors and researchers that she could be transmitting HIV to her babies in her breast milk. Maggiore also refused to have her children vaccinated, claiming that the vaccines would do more harm than good. Most galling for the AIDS establishment, Maggiore not only refused to have either child tested for HIV antibodies but set up a spinoff of her organization, Mothers Opposed to Mandatory Medicine (MOMM), to counsel other “HIV-positive” mothers and pregnant women on how to avoid mandatory testing and AZT treatments for themselves and their children.
Times Attacks, Maggiore Fights Back
Until last April, Maggiore’s strategy for her own and her children’s health paid off magnificently. Indeed, in public appearances she would offer herself and her healthy kids as evidence against the mainstream view of AIDS and especially the death sentence it pronounced on all those who tested “HIV-positive” and refused anti-HIV treatments. After Eliza Jane’s death, Maggiore withdrew from most of her activism, too shaken emotionally to continue. But the controversy over Eliza Jane’s autopsy — and in particular the highly critical article the Los Angeles Times published on the front page of its September 24 issue — brought back her fighting spirit and made her determined to defend not only her own actions as a mother but her underlying rejection of the HIV/AIDS model.
After the Times article ran, Maggiore wrote several responses, one in the form of a letter to the editor — which the Times refused to publish — and another, considerably longer one that she published on her group’s Web site, aliveandwell.org. “Medical records show that my daughter did not exhibit symptoms consistent with the coroner’s determination of pneumonia, AIDS-related or otherwise,” Maggiore wrote. “The three pediatricians who examined Eliza Jane in the days before her death all noted clear lungs. At a doctor visit on May 14, the day before she died, no cough or respiratory congestion was evident. When my daughter collapsed at home the next evening following her fourth dose of antibiotic, she did not have the blue lips or fingertips suggestive of life-threatening pneumonia.”
Maggiore said the coroner’s office was originally sympathetic towards her and her loss, but that abruptly changed after Eliza Jane’s memorial service on May 29. She’s convinced that the coroner’s office took a tougher attitude towards her once they learned of her “HIV-positive” status, her rejection of the HIV-AIDS model and her authorship of a book challenging the conventional wisdom about AIDS. “On June 28, one of my daughter’s pediatricians received a call from the coroner’s office demanding to know if he was aware of my book and HIV status,” Maggiore wrote. “Before hanging up, the doctor was threatened with a subpoena.”
The coroner’s dramatic change in outlook on the case, and the additional three months it took them to prepare the official autopsy report, led Maggiore to suspect that the official report attributing Eliza Jane’s death to AIDS-related pneumonia was a “diagnosis by association,” unsupported by blood tests, tissue samples or any other hard evidence. But, on the advice of her attorneys, she made no more public statements until Al-Bayati’s report was presented to her. According to a statement she posted to the aliveandwell.org Web site December 7, the day before the Primetime segment aired, Maggiore shopped Al-Bayati’s report around to other pathologists for review for nearly a month after she got it. Then she gave it to David Crowe of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, a Canadian alternative AIDS group similar to her own, “with instructions to post it on the Internet along with an invitation for professional comment.”
Maggiore had turned down previous requests from the media, but when ABC came calling in late November she accepted. She said she and her husband had “decided to share our side of the story, knowing it will be ‘balanced’ by opposing views, but with the hope that some truth will shine through.” Maggiore went with ABC because she felt they were the mainstream media outlet most likely to give her views a fair hearing — as they had, more or less, on a previous segment they’d done with her on the 20/20 program aired August 24, 2001 — and the person who was going to produce the report was “someone my husband and I genuinely respect.”
The Primetime report that finally aired revolved largely around the issue of whether Maggiore had been negligent by refusing to have her daughter given the HIV antibody test and not telling the pediatricians about her own HIV status. One of the pediatricians Maggiore called in, Dr. Jay Gordon, told Primetime, “If I had the knowledge that I have now, I would have asked the parents to have the child tested for HIV [antibodies]. That’s what I would have done.” (Oddly, the original Los Angeles Times article from September 24 said, “According to interviews and records, Gordon and [Dr. Paul] Fleiss have long known Maggiore’s HIV [antibody] status and that she breast-fed her children.”)
Though Maggiore, like most other alternative AIDS activists, regards the HIV antibody test as unreliable — her book includes a list (originally researched by another L.A.-based activist, Christine Johnson) of 64 potential causes for a false-positive result on the test, including such common infections as hepatitis, herpes, malaria and flu — that wasn’t the reason for not having Eliza Jane tested she gave to Primetime. “Why would I risk the stigma, the label, the toxic drugs?” she said. She also said she didn’t reveal her own HIV antibody status to the emergency-room doctors who made the futile last-ditch effort to save Eliza Jane’s life because “I wanted an unprejudiced evaluation of my daughter.”
Maggiore didn’t say it in so many words, but just about anyone who’s ever been involved in AIDS activism from an alternative perspective — especially those who’ve tested “HIV-positive” themselves — knows what she’s talking about. Alive and Well and similar groups in other cities constantly receive complaints from people labeled “HIV-positive” who can’t get doctors to focus on what’s really wrong with them because, once you’re tagged as “HIV-positive,” all too often everything that goes wrong with your health from then on is attributed to HIV. What’s more, people in that position are often subjected to massive pressure from doctors and other health professionals to go on anti-HIV drugs immediately, whatever symptoms they presented with in the first place and whether or not they are too ill to tolerate these often highly toxic medications.
To Test, or Not to Test?
Nonetheless, few aspects of Maggiore’s behavior irritated the mainstream representatives on the program — or the ones (some of them the same people) interviewed by the Los Angeles Times both for the initial article and a follow-up they published December 9, one day after the Primetime segment aired, than her refusal to have Eliza Jane tested for HIV antibodies. “The more we looked into it, it was, ‘Why wouldn’t they tell us this?’,” Captain Ed Winter of the L. A. County Coroner’s Department of Investigations, told Primetime. “Do I have an opinion about whether or not it was neglect? I think it possibly could be.”
Nancy Dubler, a bioethicist from Montefiore Medical Center in New York, who was first contacted by the Los Angeles Times and was relatively conciliatory in her quotes for the September 24 article (“There’s no easy answer” to the question of whether HIV antibody-positive mothers have the right to refuse testing and treatment for their kids, she said then), took a much harder line on Primetime. “She can take risks with her life, depending on what her values are,” Dubler said. “But for her to impose her values on a child is impermissible.” Asked what should happen when an HIV antibody-positive mother won’t test her child, Dubler told Primetime, “You have a few choices. One, you can take the child away from the mom. Two, you can take the child away from the mom. And three, you can take the child away from the mom.”
In another segment of Primetime, Maggiore and her husband were shown a videotape of the autopsy slides of Eliza Jane which contained a soundtrack commentary by Dr. James K. Ribe, senior deputy medical examiner at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Showing a series of textured blotches no one but an expert would likely be able to interpret, Dr. Ribe said, “That is the AIDS virus in the middle of Eliza’s brain” — a pretty astonishing comment, given how elusive HIV has been to attempts to photograph it by electron microscopy, the only way you can “see” a virus — “and it is HIV encephalitis, which is a viral infection of the brain. And that goes a long way to explain why Eliza was so sick, why she was so thin and wan when she finally came to autopsy.”
Showing another set of blotches, this time representing Eliza Jane’s lungs, Dr. Ribe said, “Those little black teacup-shaped things are an organism called Pneumocystis carinii, and that is seen only in patients who are severely immunodeficient, such as leukemia patients and AIDS patients. Their breathing becomes rapid and shallow, and sooner or later they run out of oxygen and collapse. It’s very treatable, and certainly Eliza, if she had been rescued early enough, probably days or a couple of weeks before, she would easily have been treatable and would easily have survived.”
“This is absurd.,” Maggiore said on camera to Primetime after watching Dr. Ribe’s tape. “To develop this type of pneumonia, you have to be immune-compromised. She did not have symptoms of encephalitis. She sat at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoon with the pediatrician and had a popsicle. Lucid, clear, healthy, except for an ear infection. I see nothing there that convinces me.”
Maggiore Questions Official Claim Her 3-Year-Old Died of “AIDS”
news analysis by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Reprinted from Zenger's Newsmagazine issue #135, January 2006 (incorporating a correction suggested by Christine Maggiore in the letter printed below)
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Alternative AIDS activist Christine Maggiore, founder of the Alive and Well AIDS organization and author of What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, appeared on the ABC-TV Primetime news show aired December 8 to challenge the official finding of the Los Angeles county coroner that her 3 1/2-year old daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, died last May of AIDS-related encephalitis and pneumonia. Maggiore not only has the veiled threat of a criminal prosecution for neglect hanging over her, she’s been the subject of a series of highly critical articles in the Los Angeles Times, the first of which, published September 24 — nine days after the coroner’s report was released — bore a headline that summed up the paper’s view of the case: “A Mother’s Denial, a Daughter’s Death.”
Maggiore, whose career as an AIDS activist began when she tested “HIV-positive” in 1992, formed Alive and Well in 1995 after encountering the alternative scientific view of AIDS — which regards it as a long-term breakdown of the immune system caused by various lifestyle and toxic factors, not an infectious disease caused by HIV or any other virus — and deciding it better explained her own experience than the mainstream view. She met her husband, filmmaker Robin Scovill, in 1996 and they had two children. One, Charlie, is now a healthy, happy, exuberant eight-year-old boy. The other, Eliza Jane, also seemed perfectly healthy until she contracted an ear infection in April of this year. She struggled with the infection for three weeks, and Maggiore saw three pediatricians — her regular one, Dr. Paul Fleiss; another California-based doctor, Jay Gordon; and Philip Incao, a member of her group’s advisory board and a holistic pediatrician based in Colorado — who were unable to treat the infection or save Eliza Jane’s life.
According to Maggiore, her daughter’s final decline started when, on Dr. Incao’s recommendation, she gave Eliza Jane amoxicillin, an antibiotic commonly used in children. After just the third dose, Maggiore told Primetime host Chris Cuomo, “her complexion went from rosy to kind of ashen, and she felt cold. And she was agitated. She was looking around the room nervously. I would say, ‘Eliza Jane? Eliza Jane?’ And she would look at me and hold my eyes for a moment, and I didn’t know what to say except, ‘E. J., I love you.’”
When the coroner’s autopsy report was released September 15, Maggiore demanded a copy of it so she could have it reviewed by Mohammed Ali Al-Bayati, another member of Alive and Well’s medical advisory board and an Iraqi émigré with a Ph.D. in toxicology. Al-Bayati reviewed the coroner’s report and wrote a report of his own, dated October 25, that claimed Eliza Jane died not from anything related to AIDS or HIV, but from an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin. Al-Bayati was shown on the Primetime show confirming that statement, but his total appearance was a two-second sound bite and he was not questioned about why he came to his conclusion that amoxicillin, not AIDS, killed Eliza Jane.
In what was perhaps the most moving portion of the Primetime show, Maggiore told Cuomo that she could not directly answer the question of what she thought killed her daughter, but said through tears, “I believe that the unfortunate irony in this situation is that the one time we were asked to, and we complied, with mainstream medicine, we inadvertently gave our daughter something that took her life.”
Maggiore’s disillusionment with mainstream medicine began even before her “HIV-positive” diagnosis in 1992. Before that, doctors had mistakenly put her on heavy doses of thyroid medication until, just before her HIV antibody test result, one doctor realized she was being overdosed with these drugs and took her off of them. Maggiore later said that just when she was being told her positive HIV antibody test meant she was infected with an invariably fatal virus and she was just going to get sicker and die young, she was the healthiest she’d been in years because she was off the thyroid drugs — and that was the first indication she had that the prophesy of her impending doom from the so-called “AIDS virus” might not be accurate.
Further uncertainties arose when Maggiore took a second HIV antibody test, which came out negative. Over the next two years she took a number of tests, whose results ranged all over the map: positive, negative and “indeterminate” or “seroequivocal,” an in-between category her orientation as a mainstream speaker for AIDS Project Los Angeles hadn’t prepared her for at all. After contacting UC Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., she was exposed to the alternative view of AIDS and decided it made more sense than the mainstream one she was peddling as a volunteer. Before she adopted the alternative view, Maggiore had been a founding board member of a group called Women at Risk, made up of “HIV-positive” women; over the next five years, she watched as 11 of the original 14 Women at Risk board members who took anti-HIV medications died, while Maggiore and the two others who didn’t use the drugs lived.
By the time she met Robin Scovill and became pregnant with Charlie, Maggiore was determined to follow her own instincts and the advice of alternative researchers rather than the medical mainstream. She gave birth to both her children at home with the assistance of a nurse-midwife rather than go through a hospital, where she would have been forced to take the cell-killing anti-HIV drug AZT while still pregnant and to administer it to her children after they were born. She breast-fed both Charlie and Eliza Jane despite the warnings of mainstream doctors and researchers that she could be transmitting HIV to her babies in her breast milk. Maggiore also refused to have her children vaccinated, claiming that the vaccines would do more harm than good. Most galling for the AIDS establishment, Maggiore not only refused to have either child tested for HIV antibodies but set up a spinoff of her organization, Mothers Opposed to Mandatory Medicine (MOMM), to counsel other “HIV-positive” mothers and pregnant women on how to avoid mandatory testing and AZT treatments for themselves and their children.
Times Attacks, Maggiore Fights Back
Until last April, Maggiore’s strategy for her own and her children’s health paid off magnificently. Indeed, in public appearances she would offer herself and her healthy kids as evidence against the mainstream view of AIDS and especially the death sentence it pronounced on all those who tested “HIV-positive” and refused anti-HIV treatments. After Eliza Jane’s death, Maggiore withdrew from most of her activism, too shaken emotionally to continue. But the controversy over Eliza Jane’s autopsy — and in particular the highly critical article the Los Angeles Times published on the front page of its September 24 issue — brought back her fighting spirit and made her determined to defend not only her own actions as a mother but her underlying rejection of the HIV/AIDS model.
After the Times article ran, Maggiore wrote several responses, one in the form of a letter to the editor — which the Times refused to publish — and another, considerably longer one that she published on her group’s Web site, aliveandwell.org. “Medical records show that my daughter did not exhibit symptoms consistent with the coroner’s determination of pneumonia, AIDS-related or otherwise,” Maggiore wrote. “The three pediatricians who examined Eliza Jane in the days before her death all noted clear lungs. At a doctor visit on May 14, the day before she died, no cough or respiratory congestion was evident. When my daughter collapsed at home the next evening following her fourth dose of antibiotic, she did not have the blue lips or fingertips suggestive of life-threatening pneumonia.”
Maggiore said the coroner’s office was originally sympathetic towards her and her loss, but that abruptly changed after Eliza Jane’s memorial service on May 29. She’s convinced that the coroner’s office took a tougher attitude towards her once they learned of her “HIV-positive” status, her rejection of the HIV-AIDS model and her authorship of a book challenging the conventional wisdom about AIDS. “On June 28, one of my daughter’s pediatricians received a call from the coroner’s office demanding to know if he was aware of my book and HIV status,” Maggiore wrote. “Before hanging up, the doctor was threatened with a subpoena.”
The coroner’s dramatic change in outlook on the case, and the additional three months it took them to prepare the official autopsy report, led Maggiore to suspect that the official report attributing Eliza Jane’s death to AIDS-related pneumonia was a “diagnosis by association,” unsupported by blood tests, tissue samples or any other hard evidence. But, on the advice of her attorneys, she made no more public statements until Al-Bayati’s report was presented to her. According to a statement she posted to the aliveandwell.org Web site December 7, the day before the Primetime segment aired, Maggiore shopped Al-Bayati’s report around to other pathologists for review for nearly a month after she got it. Then she gave it to David Crowe of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, a Canadian alternative AIDS group similar to her own, “with instructions to post it on the Internet along with an invitation for professional comment.”
Maggiore had turned down previous requests from the media, but when ABC came calling in late November she accepted. She said she and her husband had “decided to share our side of the story, knowing it will be ‘balanced’ by opposing views, but with the hope that some truth will shine through.” Maggiore went with ABC because she felt they were the mainstream media outlet most likely to give her views a fair hearing — as they had, more or less, on a previous segment they’d done with her on the 20/20 program aired August 24, 2001 — and the person who was going to produce the report was “someone my husband and I genuinely respect.”
The Primetime report that finally aired revolved largely around the issue of whether Maggiore had been negligent by refusing to have her daughter given the HIV antibody test and not telling the pediatricians about her own HIV status. One of the pediatricians Maggiore called in, Dr. Jay Gordon, told Primetime, “If I had the knowledge that I have now, I would have asked the parents to have the child tested for HIV [antibodies]. That’s what I would have done.” (Oddly, the original Los Angeles Times article from September 24 said, “According to interviews and records, Gordon and [Dr. Paul] Fleiss have long known Maggiore’s HIV [antibody] status and that she breast-fed her children.”)
Though Maggiore, like most other alternative AIDS activists, regards the HIV antibody test as unreliable — her book includes a list (originally researched by another L.A.-based activist, Christine Johnson) of 64 potential causes for a false-positive result on the test, including such common infections as hepatitis, herpes, malaria and flu — that wasn’t the reason for not having Eliza Jane tested she gave to Primetime. “Why would I risk the stigma, the label, the toxic drugs?” she said. She also said she didn’t reveal her own HIV antibody status to the emergency-room doctors who made the futile last-ditch effort to save Eliza Jane’s life because “I wanted an unprejudiced evaluation of my daughter.”
Maggiore didn’t say it in so many words, but just about anyone who’s ever been involved in AIDS activism from an alternative perspective — especially those who’ve tested “HIV-positive” themselves — knows what she’s talking about. Alive and Well and similar groups in other cities constantly receive complaints from people labeled “HIV-positive” who can’t get doctors to focus on what’s really wrong with them because, once you’re tagged as “HIV-positive,” all too often everything that goes wrong with your health from then on is attributed to HIV. What’s more, people in that position are often subjected to massive pressure from doctors and other health professionals to go on anti-HIV drugs immediately, whatever symptoms they presented with in the first place and whether or not they are too ill to tolerate these often highly toxic medications.
To Test, or Not to Test?
Nonetheless, few aspects of Maggiore’s behavior irritated the mainstream representatives on the program — or the ones (some of them the same people) interviewed by the Los Angeles Times both for the initial article and a follow-up they published December 9, one day after the Primetime segment aired, than her refusal to have Eliza Jane tested for HIV antibodies. “The more we looked into it, it was, ‘Why wouldn’t they tell us this?’,” Captain Ed Winter of the L. A. County Coroner’s Department of Investigations, told Primetime. “Do I have an opinion about whether or not it was neglect? I think it possibly could be.”
Nancy Dubler, a bioethicist from Montefiore Medical Center in New York, who was first contacted by the Los Angeles Times and was relatively conciliatory in her quotes for the September 24 article (“There’s no easy answer” to the question of whether HIV antibody-positive mothers have the right to refuse testing and treatment for their kids, she said then), took a much harder line on Primetime. “She can take risks with her life, depending on what her values are,” Dubler said. “But for her to impose her values on a child is impermissible.” Asked what should happen when an HIV antibody-positive mother won’t test her child, Dubler told Primetime, “You have a few choices. One, you can take the child away from the mom. Two, you can take the child away from the mom. And three, you can take the child away from the mom.”
In another segment of Primetime, Maggiore and her husband were shown a videotape of the autopsy slides of Eliza Jane which contained a soundtrack commentary by Dr. James K. Ribe, senior deputy medical examiner at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Showing a series of textured blotches no one but an expert would likely be able to interpret, Dr. Ribe said, “That is the AIDS virus in the middle of Eliza’s brain” — a pretty astonishing comment, given how elusive HIV has been to attempts to photograph it by electron microscopy, the only way you can “see” a virus — “and it is HIV encephalitis, which is a viral infection of the brain. And that goes a long way to explain why Eliza was so sick, why she was so thin and wan when she finally came to autopsy.”
Showing another set of blotches, this time representing Eliza Jane’s lungs, Dr. Ribe said, “Those little black teacup-shaped things are an organism called Pneumocystis carinii, and that is seen only in patients who are severely immunodeficient, such as leukemia patients and AIDS patients. Their breathing becomes rapid and shallow, and sooner or later they run out of oxygen and collapse. It’s very treatable, and certainly Eliza, if she had been rescued early enough, probably days or a couple of weeks before, she would easily have been treatable and would easily have survived.”
“This is absurd.,” Maggiore said on camera to Primetime after watching Dr. Ribe’s tape. “To develop this type of pneumonia, you have to be immune-compromised. She did not have symptoms of encephalitis. She sat at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoon with the pediatrician and had a popsicle. Lucid, clear, healthy, except for an ear infection. I see nothing there that convinces me.”
Christine Maggiore’s Response to the Above Article
To be published in the March 2006 edition of Zenger's Newsmagazine
Thank you for publishing your insightful analysis of the ABC PrimeTime segment on the tragic death of my daughter Eliza Jane[Zenger’s #125, January 2006]. . I noticed one small error of substantial significance in an otherwise superb article and would appreciate an opportunity to correct that misunderstanding and clarify a few related points.
Under the subhead “To Test, or Not to Test,” Zenger’s reports that I “irritated mainstream [AIDS] representatives” by “refus[ing] to disclose [my] HIV status to Eliza Jane's treating physicians or to have Eliza Jane tested.” While it is true that my informed decisions about testing and treatment have angered faithful followers of mainstream AIDS dogma, the notion that I withheld information about my testing history from any of our family’s doctors is false. This erroneous idea has apparently taken hold at high levels and is one of many baseless assertions that drive the ongoing police investigation into my daughter’s death.
In reality, all three of Eliza Jane’s pediatricians have known my HIV testing status since our initial visit, and two have read my book challenging conventional thinking on AIDS. The notion that I opposed orders to have Eliza Jane tested is also false — none of our pediatricians ever recommended that E.J. or her brother Charlie take a so-called HIV test. I attribute their admirable position on this matter to a long-standing practice of respect for a parent’s right to informed decisions and to our family’s long-standing record of excellent health.
Further on in the same paragraph, Zenger’s quotes Captain Ed Winter of the Coroner’s Department of Investigations, who suggests I should be charged with negligence for failing to volunteer my HIV status to his office. From what I understand, the duty of a coroner is to determine a cause and manner of death based on a thorough and unprejudiced examination of all physical evidence pertaining to the deceased. Since my HIV status does not affect the physical evidence and should not influence the interpretation of medical data in the case, the only negligence I see is on the part of the coroner’s office in determining a cause of death that defies their own findings at autopsy and disregards the established medical literature. Pneumonia is defined as “inflammation of the lung caused by disease” and their autopsy clearly states there was “no inflammation” of my daughter?s lungs. Their report also fails to explain the manner of my daughter's death and contains no evidence that she ever lacked oxygen.
With regard to remarks Zenger’s cites from coroner James K Ribe’s interview with ABC News, although correctly quoted, Ribe’s sensational statement about finding “the AIDS virus in the middle of Eliza’s brain” is false and without scientific merit. The slide Ribe shared with television viewers showed a tissue sample that responded positively to testing for p24, a non-specific protein associated with HIV that in no way equates with or substitutes for the finding of actual virus. Ribe’s claim that Eliza Jane had “a viral [encephalitis] infection of the brain” is also without medical basis, defying all medical records, including Ribe’s own. A CAT scan done at the emergency room shows no swelling or damage to her brain, and fluid from a spinal tap performed that night was clear. More to the point, Ribe’s autopsy report confirms there was no damage to or swelling of the brain, and notes that even after months of attempts, no microbe ever grew in her spinal fluid culture.
The most ridiculous remarks by Ribe went unaired, however, after ABC News agreed he contradicted medical and hospital records as well as his own autopsy report. Included among Ribe’s more bizarre statements: Eliza Jane’s lungs were “full of herpes lesions” when no lesions of any kind were found in her lungs at autopsy or in microscopic examination of lung tissue; that my daughter had shrunk into the third percentile for growth when all records, including the autopsy report, refute that notion; that she was severely immune compromised when medical records show no clinical symptoms of immune suppression and Ribe’s report shows a higher than normal lymphocyte count; and that due to lack of immunity, her body stopped growing while her head increased in size, deforming her into some kind of midget monster. Aside from having no medical evidence to substantiate this cruel and outrageous portrayal of Eliza Jane, the photos of my daughter posted at www.ejlovetour.com tell another story.
At this point readers may ask what part truth plays in autopsy conclusions, police investigations, and the justice system. Some unsettling answers are a mere Google search away where less-than-major media cover other cases involving the sudden death of children. These underreported stories reveal a systemic willingness to stray outside the bounds of medical evidence and underplay the devastating consequences to families who’ve suffered unfathomable loss upon unfathomable loss. A barely mentioned news item from this February 9 notes that a U.S. court of appeals overturned the conviction of a grandmother charged in the death of her infant grandson by SBS, that other vacant syndrome, “Shaken Baby.” In Smith v. Mitchell, prosecutors armed with dubious evidence supplied by the LA County Coroner insisted that shaking caused the child’s death “even though the physical examination of the brain during and after autopsy could not demonstrate that fact.” Citing a lack of sufficient medical evidence and miscarriage of justice, the court finally threw out the charges. We are left to imagine — if we dare — the pain and suffering endured by this family and wonder what, if any, punishment awaits the real perpetrators of injustice.
Mirroring many aspects of my own case is that of Sally Clark, a U.K. mother recently exonerated after serving three years of a life sentence for the alleged murder of her toddler son. Based on the prejudicial assumption that Clark caused the child’s sudden death, the coroner reported evidence subsequently found to be nonexistent, misinterpreted data to favor his predetermined conclusions, and withheld laboratory results showing the boy died of septicemia, not smothering as he had accused. To anyone following my story, the Clark case may sound familiar: Based on a prejudicial assumption (my lack of adherence to AIDS dogma allegedly caused my daughter’s sudden death), the coroner cites a fatal case of pneumonia (despite missing evidence of inflammation), misinterprets data to favor his conclusion (the reduced size of Eliza Jane’s thymus gland supposedly indicates AIDS while a smaller thymus in another deceased child in another Ribe autopsy goes unreported as a sign of anything), and withholds laboratory results during the police investigation (the coroner's office has yet to provide our attorney with information on what HIV-related diagnostics were performed on Eliza Jane post mortem).
Will I end up in the slammer like grieving mom Sally Clark? Or spend years seeking justice like grandma Smith? In a world where newspapers, news shows and coroners act with so little regard for facts, it’s hard to say. But as long as truth still rules the day at publications like Zenger’s, I may stand a chance of surviving the unfathomable accusations and the unfathomable loss.
Thank you for pointing out the many flaws and fallacies in the mainstream take on my family’s tragedy and for allowing me to share further insights on the topic with Zenger’s readers.
Christine Maggiore
Los Angeles
To be published in the March 2006 edition of Zenger's Newsmagazine
Thank you for publishing your insightful analysis of the ABC PrimeTime segment on the tragic death of my daughter Eliza Jane[Zenger’s #125, January 2006]. . I noticed one small error of substantial significance in an otherwise superb article and would appreciate an opportunity to correct that misunderstanding and clarify a few related points.
Under the subhead “To Test, or Not to Test,” Zenger’s reports that I “irritated mainstream [AIDS] representatives” by “refus[ing] to disclose [my] HIV status to Eliza Jane's treating physicians or to have Eliza Jane tested.” While it is true that my informed decisions about testing and treatment have angered faithful followers of mainstream AIDS dogma, the notion that I withheld information about my testing history from any of our family’s doctors is false. This erroneous idea has apparently taken hold at high levels and is one of many baseless assertions that drive the ongoing police investigation into my daughter’s death.
In reality, all three of Eliza Jane’s pediatricians have known my HIV testing status since our initial visit, and two have read my book challenging conventional thinking on AIDS. The notion that I opposed orders to have Eliza Jane tested is also false — none of our pediatricians ever recommended that E.J. or her brother Charlie take a so-called HIV test. I attribute their admirable position on this matter to a long-standing practice of respect for a parent’s right to informed decisions and to our family’s long-standing record of excellent health.
Further on in the same paragraph, Zenger’s quotes Captain Ed Winter of the Coroner’s Department of Investigations, who suggests I should be charged with negligence for failing to volunteer my HIV status to his office. From what I understand, the duty of a coroner is to determine a cause and manner of death based on a thorough and unprejudiced examination of all physical evidence pertaining to the deceased. Since my HIV status does not affect the physical evidence and should not influence the interpretation of medical data in the case, the only negligence I see is on the part of the coroner’s office in determining a cause of death that defies their own findings at autopsy and disregards the established medical literature. Pneumonia is defined as “inflammation of the lung caused by disease” and their autopsy clearly states there was “no inflammation” of my daughter?s lungs. Their report also fails to explain the manner of my daughter's death and contains no evidence that she ever lacked oxygen.
With regard to remarks Zenger’s cites from coroner James K Ribe’s interview with ABC News, although correctly quoted, Ribe’s sensational statement about finding “the AIDS virus in the middle of Eliza’s brain” is false and without scientific merit. The slide Ribe shared with television viewers showed a tissue sample that responded positively to testing for p24, a non-specific protein associated with HIV that in no way equates with or substitutes for the finding of actual virus. Ribe’s claim that Eliza Jane had “a viral [encephalitis] infection of the brain” is also without medical basis, defying all medical records, including Ribe’s own. A CAT scan done at the emergency room shows no swelling or damage to her brain, and fluid from a spinal tap performed that night was clear. More to the point, Ribe’s autopsy report confirms there was no damage to or swelling of the brain, and notes that even after months of attempts, no microbe ever grew in her spinal fluid culture.
The most ridiculous remarks by Ribe went unaired, however, after ABC News agreed he contradicted medical and hospital records as well as his own autopsy report. Included among Ribe’s more bizarre statements: Eliza Jane’s lungs were “full of herpes lesions” when no lesions of any kind were found in her lungs at autopsy or in microscopic examination of lung tissue; that my daughter had shrunk into the third percentile for growth when all records, including the autopsy report, refute that notion; that she was severely immune compromised when medical records show no clinical symptoms of immune suppression and Ribe’s report shows a higher than normal lymphocyte count; and that due to lack of immunity, her body stopped growing while her head increased in size, deforming her into some kind of midget monster. Aside from having no medical evidence to substantiate this cruel and outrageous portrayal of Eliza Jane, the photos of my daughter posted at www.ejlovetour.com tell another story.
At this point readers may ask what part truth plays in autopsy conclusions, police investigations, and the justice system. Some unsettling answers are a mere Google search away where less-than-major media cover other cases involving the sudden death of children. These underreported stories reveal a systemic willingness to stray outside the bounds of medical evidence and underplay the devastating consequences to families who’ve suffered unfathomable loss upon unfathomable loss. A barely mentioned news item from this February 9 notes that a U.S. court of appeals overturned the conviction of a grandmother charged in the death of her infant grandson by SBS, that other vacant syndrome, “Shaken Baby.” In Smith v. Mitchell, prosecutors armed with dubious evidence supplied by the LA County Coroner insisted that shaking caused the child’s death “even though the physical examination of the brain during and after autopsy could not demonstrate that fact.” Citing a lack of sufficient medical evidence and miscarriage of justice, the court finally threw out the charges. We are left to imagine — if we dare — the pain and suffering endured by this family and wonder what, if any, punishment awaits the real perpetrators of injustice.
Mirroring many aspects of my own case is that of Sally Clark, a U.K. mother recently exonerated after serving three years of a life sentence for the alleged murder of her toddler son. Based on the prejudicial assumption that Clark caused the child’s sudden death, the coroner reported evidence subsequently found to be nonexistent, misinterpreted data to favor his predetermined conclusions, and withheld laboratory results showing the boy died of septicemia, not smothering as he had accused. To anyone following my story, the Clark case may sound familiar: Based on a prejudicial assumption (my lack of adherence to AIDS dogma allegedly caused my daughter’s sudden death), the coroner cites a fatal case of pneumonia (despite missing evidence of inflammation), misinterprets data to favor his conclusion (the reduced size of Eliza Jane’s thymus gland supposedly indicates AIDS while a smaller thymus in another deceased child in another Ribe autopsy goes unreported as a sign of anything), and withholds laboratory results during the police investigation (the coroner's office has yet to provide our attorney with information on what HIV-related diagnostics were performed on Eliza Jane post mortem).
Will I end up in the slammer like grieving mom Sally Clark? Or spend years seeking justice like grandma Smith? In a world where newspapers, news shows and coroners act with so little regard for facts, it’s hard to say. But as long as truth still rules the day at publications like Zenger’s, I may stand a chance of surviving the unfathomable accusations and the unfathomable loss.
Thank you for pointing out the many flaws and fallacies in the mainstream take on my family’s tragedy and for allowing me to share further insights on the topic with Zenger’s readers.
Christine Maggiore
Los Angeles
Friday, February 17, 2006
The Terrorists’ Veto
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission
Link to view the Muhammad cartoons: http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/
If the current controversy over the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication last September of 12 cartoons caricaturing Muhammad, the prophet and “messenger of God” whose revelations are at the heart of Islam, means anything at all, it’s that the rivalry between the largely Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim world really is “a clash of civilizations” — or, at the very least, a clash of cultures and values. Though the West has its own dark history of burning heretics, running inquisitions and doing witchhunts, at least in the last 250 years our proclaimed values have been those of the Enlightenment: human rights, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The First Amendment embodies both arms of the Enlightenment’s attitude towards religion; it guarantees everyone the “free exercise” of religion, while prohibiting the government from passing laws that favor any one religion over another.
Those have never been the ruling values of the Muslim world. Jesus Christ essentially proclaimed the separation of church and state when he said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, and unto God that which is God’s.” Muhammad not only represented himself as the “messenger of God” but fought and won a bloody war to gain the power of a Caesar. Christianity and Judaism speak to religious and spiritual concerns. Islam is a total system of submission (the literal meaning of the Arabic word “islam”) that has no limits; it not only rules its believers’ spiritual lives but provides a framework for how they shall be governed and how their families shall function. Though Islam — or at least some tendencies of it in some countries at some times — has granted a grudging tolerance to other religions (particularly the other Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Judaism), it has never believed in the freedom of conscience. In power, it has consistently demanded that those it rules, whether they believe in it or not, submit to its laws, doctrines and restrictions.
Among the restrictions of Islam is a rule that not only is the Prophet Muhammad not to be ridiculed or made fun of, either in word or image, but he is not to be depicted visually at all. The Muslims who are filling the streets in protest against the Jyllands-Posten images of their prophet and torching the embassies of Denmark and other European countries whose newspapers have reprinted the cartoons are shock troops in an attempt to force the rest of the world to abide by the laws of their religion. Free-speech attorneys use the phrase “the hecklers’ veto” to refer to meetings in which hostile members of the audience shout down a speaker and disrupt the proceedings so he or she cannot get his message out. What we are seeing in the cartoon controversy is a far deadlier and more evil version of the hecklers’ veto: the terrorists’ veto.
The demonstrations against European newspapers and governments in the Muslim world didn’t just “happen” spontaneously. They were organized last December at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) in Mecca, Saudi Arabia — a city non-Muslims are barred from visiting at all, in a country where non-Muslim houses of worship are flatly banned. The OIC, which consists of leaders from 56 Muslim nations, was lobbied to get involved by a group of Danish Muslims called the European Community for Honoring the Prophet, whose spokesperson, Ahmed Akkari, a 28-year-old Lebanese immigrant to Denmark. Akkari said his group had worked for two months within Denmark to get the Danish government to take action against the newspaper, including circulating a petition that got 17,000 signatures, “but could get no action.”
Just what “action” he had in mind was revealed in a press release on the OIC’s Web site, http://www.oic-oci.org/, dated February 11, which paraphrased the group’s secretary-general, Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, “that the OIC Member States expect from the EU [European Union] to identify Islamophobia as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents in the future.” That means, in plain English, that the governments of the world’s Muslim countries expect the governments of Europe to police their citizens to make sure that no caricatures or images of Muhammad ever darken the pages of a European newspaper again.
Such demands are nothing new to Islam and its practitioners. When Salman Rushdie published his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, and it contained an irreverent account of Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel as well as a much more vicious caricature of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (referred to in Rushdie’s book only as “The Imam”), Khomeini issued a fatwa — a religious decree — that said it was the sacred duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Rushdie. The author spent over a decade in England under what was essentially house arrest, with a security guard provided by the British government to protect him against Muslim assassins, while two people who had done translations of his book actually were murdered.
The climate of fear that resulted was so powerful that, when Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose sought an illustrator for a children’s book about Muhammad, three artists turned him down outright and the one he hired insisted on anonymity. It was this experience that led Rose to commission 12 Danish cartoonists to draw cartoons both depicting and commenting on Muhammad, creating the layout that was published last September and sparked the current controversy. “I was concerned about a tendency toward self-censorship among people in artistic and cultural circles in Europe,” Rose told Newsweek. “That’s why I commissioned these cartoons, to test this tendency and to start a debate about it.”
The threat against Europe’s newspapers today is essentially the threat against Salman Rushdie writ large, aimed not only at one author but against the entire concept of a free press. And when Muslim activists demand that Western blood must be shed to avenge the insult on their Prophet, they are all too believable. In the last five years, four major Western cities — New York, Washington, D.C., Madrid and London — have been successfully attacked by Islamic terrorists. Everyone in the world knows what the threat of “another 9/11” means. The aim, as shown by the statements and actions of the OIC as well as the demonstrators themselves, is to terrorize the Western world into submission (“islam”) with the threat of further violence.
And so far, it’s working. An editor who reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in a major French paper was fired. French president Jacques Chirac asked his country’s publications not to publish the cartoons and told his Cabinet he condemned “all obvious provocations likely to dangerously kindle passions.” In the U.S., virtually no newspapers, TV stations or mainstream media Web sites have shown the cartoons at all. CNN, which for a year after 9/11 had a policy that deaths of civilians in the U.S. attack on Afghanistan could not be reported unless the on-air journalist immediately reminded viewers that 3,000 people had been killed on 9/11, now piously insists that they’re not showing the cartoons on screen or Web page “out of respect for Islam.”
At least the Boston Phoenix was honest. Its editors admitted that they decided not to print the Jyllands-Posten cartoons “out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.”
It’s not like our hands are entirely clean on these issues. In the U.S. we’ve had former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson openly calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and saying that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was God’s revenge against him for pulling the Israeli occupation forces out of Gaza. We’ve had Christians equally incensed over works of art like Andrés Serrano’s Piss Christ — a crucifix displayed in a jar of the artist’s urine — and Chris Ofili’s feces-smeared painting of the Virgin Mary. But at least they pursued their grievances through the political process — attacking the public subsidies given to those artists and the museums which exhibited them — rather than threatening to kill the artists and blow up the museums.
That’s the basic difference between the West and the Muslim world. We don’t always live up to our ideals of freedom and human rights — indeed, the Bush administration has run roughshod over them in pursuit of the so-called “war on terror” — but the Islamic world doesn’t value freedom and human rights at all. We need to put them on notice that this is the 21st century; that we don’t burn witches and heretics at the stake anymore; and that the freedom to practice one’s religion (or none at all) includes the freedom to ridicule someone else’s religion and the need to react in a calm, measured fashion when one’s own religion is the subject of ridicule. Jyllands-Posten and its editors have performed a rare act of courage, they deserve to be commended for it, and those cartoons ought to be emblazoned on every newspaper front page, TV screen and Web page everywhere in the civilized world until Islam’s practitioners learn to get over it and get their heads out of the Middle Ages.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission
Link to view the Muhammad cartoons: http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/
If the current controversy over the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication last September of 12 cartoons caricaturing Muhammad, the prophet and “messenger of God” whose revelations are at the heart of Islam, means anything at all, it’s that the rivalry between the largely Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim world really is “a clash of civilizations” — or, at the very least, a clash of cultures and values. Though the West has its own dark history of burning heretics, running inquisitions and doing witchhunts, at least in the last 250 years our proclaimed values have been those of the Enlightenment: human rights, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The First Amendment embodies both arms of the Enlightenment’s attitude towards religion; it guarantees everyone the “free exercise” of religion, while prohibiting the government from passing laws that favor any one religion over another.
Those have never been the ruling values of the Muslim world. Jesus Christ essentially proclaimed the separation of church and state when he said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, and unto God that which is God’s.” Muhammad not only represented himself as the “messenger of God” but fought and won a bloody war to gain the power of a Caesar. Christianity and Judaism speak to religious and spiritual concerns. Islam is a total system of submission (the literal meaning of the Arabic word “islam”) that has no limits; it not only rules its believers’ spiritual lives but provides a framework for how they shall be governed and how their families shall function. Though Islam — or at least some tendencies of it in some countries at some times — has granted a grudging tolerance to other religions (particularly the other Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Judaism), it has never believed in the freedom of conscience. In power, it has consistently demanded that those it rules, whether they believe in it or not, submit to its laws, doctrines and restrictions.
Among the restrictions of Islam is a rule that not only is the Prophet Muhammad not to be ridiculed or made fun of, either in word or image, but he is not to be depicted visually at all. The Muslims who are filling the streets in protest against the Jyllands-Posten images of their prophet and torching the embassies of Denmark and other European countries whose newspapers have reprinted the cartoons are shock troops in an attempt to force the rest of the world to abide by the laws of their religion. Free-speech attorneys use the phrase “the hecklers’ veto” to refer to meetings in which hostile members of the audience shout down a speaker and disrupt the proceedings so he or she cannot get his message out. What we are seeing in the cartoon controversy is a far deadlier and more evil version of the hecklers’ veto: the terrorists’ veto.
The demonstrations against European newspapers and governments in the Muslim world didn’t just “happen” spontaneously. They were organized last December at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) in Mecca, Saudi Arabia — a city non-Muslims are barred from visiting at all, in a country where non-Muslim houses of worship are flatly banned. The OIC, which consists of leaders from 56 Muslim nations, was lobbied to get involved by a group of Danish Muslims called the European Community for Honoring the Prophet, whose spokesperson, Ahmed Akkari, a 28-year-old Lebanese immigrant to Denmark. Akkari said his group had worked for two months within Denmark to get the Danish government to take action against the newspaper, including circulating a petition that got 17,000 signatures, “but could get no action.”
Just what “action” he had in mind was revealed in a press release on the OIC’s Web site, http://www.oic-oci.org/, dated February 11, which paraphrased the group’s secretary-general, Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, “that the OIC Member States expect from the EU [European Union] to identify Islamophobia as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents in the future.” That means, in plain English, that the governments of the world’s Muslim countries expect the governments of Europe to police their citizens to make sure that no caricatures or images of Muhammad ever darken the pages of a European newspaper again.
Such demands are nothing new to Islam and its practitioners. When Salman Rushdie published his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, and it contained an irreverent account of Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel as well as a much more vicious caricature of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini (referred to in Rushdie’s book only as “The Imam”), Khomeini issued a fatwa — a religious decree — that said it was the sacred duty of all Muslims worldwide to kill Rushdie. The author spent over a decade in England under what was essentially house arrest, with a security guard provided by the British government to protect him against Muslim assassins, while two people who had done translations of his book actually were murdered.
The climate of fear that resulted was so powerful that, when Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose sought an illustrator for a children’s book about Muhammad, three artists turned him down outright and the one he hired insisted on anonymity. It was this experience that led Rose to commission 12 Danish cartoonists to draw cartoons both depicting and commenting on Muhammad, creating the layout that was published last September and sparked the current controversy. “I was concerned about a tendency toward self-censorship among people in artistic and cultural circles in Europe,” Rose told Newsweek. “That’s why I commissioned these cartoons, to test this tendency and to start a debate about it.”
The threat against Europe’s newspapers today is essentially the threat against Salman Rushdie writ large, aimed not only at one author but against the entire concept of a free press. And when Muslim activists demand that Western blood must be shed to avenge the insult on their Prophet, they are all too believable. In the last five years, four major Western cities — New York, Washington, D.C., Madrid and London — have been successfully attacked by Islamic terrorists. Everyone in the world knows what the threat of “another 9/11” means. The aim, as shown by the statements and actions of the OIC as well as the demonstrators themselves, is to terrorize the Western world into submission (“islam”) with the threat of further violence.
And so far, it’s working. An editor who reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in a major French paper was fired. French president Jacques Chirac asked his country’s publications not to publish the cartoons and told his Cabinet he condemned “all obvious provocations likely to dangerously kindle passions.” In the U.S., virtually no newspapers, TV stations or mainstream media Web sites have shown the cartoons at all. CNN, which for a year after 9/11 had a policy that deaths of civilians in the U.S. attack on Afghanistan could not be reported unless the on-air journalist immediately reminded viewers that 3,000 people had been killed on 9/11, now piously insists that they’re not showing the cartoons on screen or Web page “out of respect for Islam.”
At least the Boston Phoenix was honest. Its editors admitted that they decided not to print the Jyllands-Posten cartoons “out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.”
It’s not like our hands are entirely clean on these issues. In the U.S. we’ve had former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson openly calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and saying that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was God’s revenge against him for pulling the Israeli occupation forces out of Gaza. We’ve had Christians equally incensed over works of art like Andrés Serrano’s Piss Christ — a crucifix displayed in a jar of the artist’s urine — and Chris Ofili’s feces-smeared painting of the Virgin Mary. But at least they pursued their grievances through the political process — attacking the public subsidies given to those artists and the museums which exhibited them — rather than threatening to kill the artists and blow up the museums.
That’s the basic difference between the West and the Muslim world. We don’t always live up to our ideals of freedom and human rights — indeed, the Bush administration has run roughshod over them in pursuit of the so-called “war on terror” — but the Islamic world doesn’t value freedom and human rights at all. We need to put them on notice that this is the 21st century; that we don’t burn witches and heretics at the stake anymore; and that the freedom to practice one’s religion (or none at all) includes the freedom to ridicule someone else’s religion and the need to react in a calm, measured fashion when one’s own religion is the subject of ridicule. Jyllands-Posten and its editors have performed a rare act of courage, they deserve to be commended for it, and those cartoons ought to be emblazoned on every newspaper front page, TV screen and Web page everywhere in the civilized world until Islam’s practitioners learn to get over it and get their heads out of the Middle Ages.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk
John Francis, Ph.D. Explains His 17 Years of Silence
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Thank you for being here.” Ordinarily that would be nothing more but a nice, generic way for a speaker to introduce him- or herself before a public lecture. But at the lecture John Francis, Ph.D. gave February 14 at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest, it had a unique personal meaning for the man who said it. According to Francis, when he spoke those words in public on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, it was the first time he had spoken at all — publicly or privately — in 17 years.
Dr. Francis’s story — also told in his 2004 book Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time — began on January 17, 1971, when two oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay.and spilled 840,000 gallons of crude, much of it ending up on the Bay Area’s beaches. At that time Francis was a 25-year-old dreadlocked African-American hippie living with a girlfriend named Jean in a small Marin County town called Inverness (pop. 350). Francis got the radical idea that the reason oil tankers and spills exist was that people use fossil fuels for transportation, and if individuals gave up that convenience and started moving themselves around in ways that didn’t involve combustion — walking, bicycling, sailing — the need for oil and the environmental risks of using and moving it would end.
This didn’t sit especially well with his girlfriend, an heiress to part of the Standard Oil fortune who was expecting a large settlement from her lawsuit against the company, and even on Francis’s part it might have remained an idle dream. Then something else happened: a deputy sheriff named Jerry Tanner, with whom Francis had become “kind of a friend” even though their main contact was that Tanner “would always be poking around in our yard looking for things that were growing,” suddenly died in a boating accident. His wife and son, who’d been in the boat with him, miraculously survived.
“When he died we picked some peas, gave them to his widow and walked eight miles to the ocean,” Francis recalled. “I felt we needed to do more walking, and we walked 20 miles to the Lion’s Share nightclub in San Anselmo where the Youngbloods were playing.” Having had no idea how long it took to walk 20 miles, Francis and his partner arrived at the club at 1 a.m. just as the Youngbloods were playing their final song of the night — their biggest hit, the era-defining song “Get Together.” (It’s the one with the famous lines, “C’mon people, smile on your brother, everybody get together and try to love one another right now.”)
Francis and Jean spent the night in town, walked back in the morning and, on their return, Francis “had an epiphany,” he remembered. “I thought of Jerry Tanner, who was about my age — 26 — and had a wife, a family, a house with a picket fence and a great job. He’d had everything, and just like that he was gone.” Francis decided he wasn’t going to wait until his girlfriend got her money to live the way he wanted to, if only because he might die before that happened. Instead, he said, “I decided everything was in the here and now, and I just kept walking.”
As soon as he got to a phone, Francis called his parents in Philadelphia, where he’d been born in 1946. He recounted the conversation for his audience: “’Hi, Mom. Johnny. I’m happy. I just wanted to call to say I’m not coming back to Philadelphia any time soon. No, I’m O.K. I’ve given up riding in cars, planes, trains, anything with a motor that uses oil.’ My dad said, ‘Why didn’t you do that when you were 16?’ I said I didn’t know about the environment then.”
Francis’s silence began on his 27th birthday — February 23, 1973 — and its origins were as sudden and unexpected as those of his decision to give up motorized transportation. “I was getting the dickens from my friends,” he remembered, “so on my 27th birthday I decided to be quiet for just one day. I walked to the ocean and listened to the water, and it changed me as a person because I started listening. I realized I hadn’t really been listening before. I’d just listened enough to hear something I disagreed with, and then I didn’t listen anymore. So once I started listening, I started to learn things and thought, ‘Maybe I should keep quiet a little while longer because this is something I should explore.’”
He sent a postcard to his parents — his anti-verbalization rule only encompassed talking, not writing — to tell them they shouldn’t expect any more phone calls from him. They reacted to that about the way they had to his decision not to use motor vehicles. “My mom wrote back, ‘Your dad will be on the next plane,’” Francis recalled. “They thought I’d been taken in by a strange religious cult and they should go out and deprogram me. My dad saw me walking and said, ‘Come on, get in the car. We’ll drive to the hotel.’” Francis’s only response was to wiggle his fingers in a gesture that meant no thanks, he’d rather walk.
Once Francis arrived at his dad’s hotel they had a conversation — with Francis writing out his side of it the way Beethoven’s friends had to do when he became completely deaf — “and I tried to tell him I was reading, writing and painting,” Francis remembered. “We wrote things back and forth, and I think it was the first time we really communicated. My dad called my mom and said, ‘He’s healthy. He walks everywhere, doesn’t talk, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. Let’s just leave him out there because this won’t work back East.’”
Francis, predictably, took that last remark as a challenge and decided to work his way across the country. He apprenticed with a boat builder in San Francisco so he’d know how to make himself a sailboat when he needed to travel over long distances by water. He carried little or no money, supporting himself as a street musician with the banjo he took with him, and which he’d learned to play by picking up lessons from people he met along the way. At one point, in Washington state, he built a boat on one side of Puget Sound, sailed it across and sold it on the other side.
Eventually Francis’s odyssey took him back to school. He’d dropped out of college years before but now, excited by the new discipline of environmental studies, he got his bachelors’ degree at Southern Oregon University, his masters’ at the University of Montana and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in Ann Arbor. And he did it all while remaining true to his commitment never to speak or ride in a motor vehicle — until he had to speak before the committee of professors as the final step towards his Ph.D. They were willing to accommodate him, but fortuitously he had decided to start talking again and had chosen the 20th anniversary celebration of Earth Day in 1990 as his vocal coming-out party.
In the meantime, just as an oil-tanker accident had started Francis on his journey of intellectual and spiritual discovery in the first place, another — the Exxon Valdez incident in March 1989 — provided the seeds of his subsequent career. Naturally enough, he had chosen to write his Ph.D. thesis on oil spills — and after the Exxon Valdez accident he was suddenly the nation’s foremost authority on them. He was appointed the worldwide good-will ambassador for the environment by the United Nations and got a job with the U.S. Coast Guard to write policies under the 1970 Resources and Accident Management Act for dealing with oil spills.
There was just one catch: the Coast Guard wanted him in Washington, D.C. immediately — and Francis, who got the offer while staying with his parents in Philadelphia, still wasn’t using motorized transit. “I told them I could get there on my bike in two months,” Francis recalled. “They said O.K.” On the job, he would ride his bike to inspect oil tankers — and the commander who was his direct superior would ride his bike to accompany him. When he’d visit oil tankers he’d meet corporate officials who questioned how anyone could understand their industry when he went so far out of his way not to use their product, but the memory he carried with him the longest was a conversation with the personnel manager who’d hired him.
“After I’d been there six months, the personnel guy said, ‘Dr. Francis, we see you’re just a regular person with ideals, but what really surprised us was that, when you showed up, you were Black,” Dr. Francis remembered. “I said, ‘That’s what needs to change.’ The environmental movement isn’t all-inclusive, and it needs to be.” Dr. Francis recalled that they wanted to keep him on, but after six months he was getting restive, so he sailed through the Caribbean to Venezuela. There he would finally break his commitment never to use a motor vehicle again.
“As I was walking through Venezuela, I walked through a prison town called El Dorado, and on the other side the Guardia Nacional was waiting for me,” he remembered. “The commander thought I wanted to kick him out of his bungalow and take over, and he told me to spend the night in town. I slept in a tent that night and the next morning I walked past the main gate with my banjo wrapped up in something green. I got stopped: ‘Pasaporte! Pasaporte!’ I said, ‘I don’t need to show you a passport. I’m Dr. Francis, an ambassador from the U.N. I’m walking around the world, and if you don’t believe me ask your commandant, Jesús.”
As he walked away from the camp, Francis said, he started shouting the words of the old spiritual Dr. Martin Luther King had quoted in his 1963 March on Washington speech — “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we’re free at last!” Then he found himself wondering just what he was free from and why he’d had the fantasy that he had been a prisoner and had escaped. “One hundred miles later, I figured out that my decision not to use motorized vehicles had been appropriate at one time, but now it had become a prison. It had calcified. … There are moments I have to revisit my decisions to do a certain thing and be a certain way.”
Today Dr. Francis’s plan is to retrace his walking journey across the U.S., this time with the support of a wide range of organizations — from the Sierra Club to the Rotary to the United Steel Workers — mobilizing to use his trip as a way to build support for the environmental movement. He says the current President’s relentlessly anti-environmental policies are just another call to arms for us to take personal responsibility for protecting the environment now that it’s obvious the government isn’t going to do it for us. “It’s all about doing what we’re going to do,” Dr. Francis says. “I think we all can make a tremendous difference, even by just being nice to each other.”
John Francis, Ph.D. Explains His 17 Years of Silence
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Thank you for being here.” Ordinarily that would be nothing more but a nice, generic way for a speaker to introduce him- or herself before a public lecture. But at the lecture John Francis, Ph.D. gave February 14 at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest, it had a unique personal meaning for the man who said it. According to Francis, when he spoke those words in public on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, it was the first time he had spoken at all — publicly or privately — in 17 years.
Dr. Francis’s story — also told in his 2004 book Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time — began on January 17, 1971, when two oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay.and spilled 840,000 gallons of crude, much of it ending up on the Bay Area’s beaches. At that time Francis was a 25-year-old dreadlocked African-American hippie living with a girlfriend named Jean in a small Marin County town called Inverness (pop. 350). Francis got the radical idea that the reason oil tankers and spills exist was that people use fossil fuels for transportation, and if individuals gave up that convenience and started moving themselves around in ways that didn’t involve combustion — walking, bicycling, sailing — the need for oil and the environmental risks of using and moving it would end.
This didn’t sit especially well with his girlfriend, an heiress to part of the Standard Oil fortune who was expecting a large settlement from her lawsuit against the company, and even on Francis’s part it might have remained an idle dream. Then something else happened: a deputy sheriff named Jerry Tanner, with whom Francis had become “kind of a friend” even though their main contact was that Tanner “would always be poking around in our yard looking for things that were growing,” suddenly died in a boating accident. His wife and son, who’d been in the boat with him, miraculously survived.
“When he died we picked some peas, gave them to his widow and walked eight miles to the ocean,” Francis recalled. “I felt we needed to do more walking, and we walked 20 miles to the Lion’s Share nightclub in San Anselmo where the Youngbloods were playing.” Having had no idea how long it took to walk 20 miles, Francis and his partner arrived at the club at 1 a.m. just as the Youngbloods were playing their final song of the night — their biggest hit, the era-defining song “Get Together.” (It’s the one with the famous lines, “C’mon people, smile on your brother, everybody get together and try to love one another right now.”)
Francis and Jean spent the night in town, walked back in the morning and, on their return, Francis “had an epiphany,” he remembered. “I thought of Jerry Tanner, who was about my age — 26 — and had a wife, a family, a house with a picket fence and a great job. He’d had everything, and just like that he was gone.” Francis decided he wasn’t going to wait until his girlfriend got her money to live the way he wanted to, if only because he might die before that happened. Instead, he said, “I decided everything was in the here and now, and I just kept walking.”
As soon as he got to a phone, Francis called his parents in Philadelphia, where he’d been born in 1946. He recounted the conversation for his audience: “’Hi, Mom. Johnny. I’m happy. I just wanted to call to say I’m not coming back to Philadelphia any time soon. No, I’m O.K. I’ve given up riding in cars, planes, trains, anything with a motor that uses oil.’ My dad said, ‘Why didn’t you do that when you were 16?’ I said I didn’t know about the environment then.”
Francis’s silence began on his 27th birthday — February 23, 1973 — and its origins were as sudden and unexpected as those of his decision to give up motorized transportation. “I was getting the dickens from my friends,” he remembered, “so on my 27th birthday I decided to be quiet for just one day. I walked to the ocean and listened to the water, and it changed me as a person because I started listening. I realized I hadn’t really been listening before. I’d just listened enough to hear something I disagreed with, and then I didn’t listen anymore. So once I started listening, I started to learn things and thought, ‘Maybe I should keep quiet a little while longer because this is something I should explore.’”
He sent a postcard to his parents — his anti-verbalization rule only encompassed talking, not writing — to tell them they shouldn’t expect any more phone calls from him. They reacted to that about the way they had to his decision not to use motor vehicles. “My mom wrote back, ‘Your dad will be on the next plane,’” Francis recalled. “They thought I’d been taken in by a strange religious cult and they should go out and deprogram me. My dad saw me walking and said, ‘Come on, get in the car. We’ll drive to the hotel.’” Francis’s only response was to wiggle his fingers in a gesture that meant no thanks, he’d rather walk.
Once Francis arrived at his dad’s hotel they had a conversation — with Francis writing out his side of it the way Beethoven’s friends had to do when he became completely deaf — “and I tried to tell him I was reading, writing and painting,” Francis remembered. “We wrote things back and forth, and I think it was the first time we really communicated. My dad called my mom and said, ‘He’s healthy. He walks everywhere, doesn’t talk, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. Let’s just leave him out there because this won’t work back East.’”
Francis, predictably, took that last remark as a challenge and decided to work his way across the country. He apprenticed with a boat builder in San Francisco so he’d know how to make himself a sailboat when he needed to travel over long distances by water. He carried little or no money, supporting himself as a street musician with the banjo he took with him, and which he’d learned to play by picking up lessons from people he met along the way. At one point, in Washington state, he built a boat on one side of Puget Sound, sailed it across and sold it on the other side.
Eventually Francis’s odyssey took him back to school. He’d dropped out of college years before but now, excited by the new discipline of environmental studies, he got his bachelors’ degree at Southern Oregon University, his masters’ at the University of Montana and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in Ann Arbor. And he did it all while remaining true to his commitment never to speak or ride in a motor vehicle — until he had to speak before the committee of professors as the final step towards his Ph.D. They were willing to accommodate him, but fortuitously he had decided to start talking again and had chosen the 20th anniversary celebration of Earth Day in 1990 as his vocal coming-out party.
In the meantime, just as an oil-tanker accident had started Francis on his journey of intellectual and spiritual discovery in the first place, another — the Exxon Valdez incident in March 1989 — provided the seeds of his subsequent career. Naturally enough, he had chosen to write his Ph.D. thesis on oil spills — and after the Exxon Valdez accident he was suddenly the nation’s foremost authority on them. He was appointed the worldwide good-will ambassador for the environment by the United Nations and got a job with the U.S. Coast Guard to write policies under the 1970 Resources and Accident Management Act for dealing with oil spills.
There was just one catch: the Coast Guard wanted him in Washington, D.C. immediately — and Francis, who got the offer while staying with his parents in Philadelphia, still wasn’t using motorized transit. “I told them I could get there on my bike in two months,” Francis recalled. “They said O.K.” On the job, he would ride his bike to inspect oil tankers — and the commander who was his direct superior would ride his bike to accompany him. When he’d visit oil tankers he’d meet corporate officials who questioned how anyone could understand their industry when he went so far out of his way not to use their product, but the memory he carried with him the longest was a conversation with the personnel manager who’d hired him.
“After I’d been there six months, the personnel guy said, ‘Dr. Francis, we see you’re just a regular person with ideals, but what really surprised us was that, when you showed up, you were Black,” Dr. Francis remembered. “I said, ‘That’s what needs to change.’ The environmental movement isn’t all-inclusive, and it needs to be.” Dr. Francis recalled that they wanted to keep him on, but after six months he was getting restive, so he sailed through the Caribbean to Venezuela. There he would finally break his commitment never to use a motor vehicle again.
“As I was walking through Venezuela, I walked through a prison town called El Dorado, and on the other side the Guardia Nacional was waiting for me,” he remembered. “The commander thought I wanted to kick him out of his bungalow and take over, and he told me to spend the night in town. I slept in a tent that night and the next morning I walked past the main gate with my banjo wrapped up in something green. I got stopped: ‘Pasaporte! Pasaporte!’ I said, ‘I don’t need to show you a passport. I’m Dr. Francis, an ambassador from the U.N. I’m walking around the world, and if you don’t believe me ask your commandant, Jesús.”
As he walked away from the camp, Francis said, he started shouting the words of the old spiritual Dr. Martin Luther King had quoted in his 1963 March on Washington speech — “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we’re free at last!” Then he found himself wondering just what he was free from and why he’d had the fantasy that he had been a prisoner and had escaped. “One hundred miles later, I figured out that my decision not to use motorized vehicles had been appropriate at one time, but now it had become a prison. It had calcified. … There are moments I have to revisit my decisions to do a certain thing and be a certain way.”
Today Dr. Francis’s plan is to retrace his walking journey across the U.S., this time with the support of a wide range of organizations — from the Sierra Club to the Rotary to the United Steel Workers — mobilizing to use his trip as a way to build support for the environmental movement. He says the current President’s relentlessly anti-environmental policies are just another call to arms for us to take personal responsibility for protecting the environment now that it’s obvious the government isn’t going to do it for us. “It’s all about doing what we’re going to do,” Dr. Francis says. “I think we all can make a tremendous difference, even by just being nice to each other.”
Monday, February 13, 2006
Why We Fight: A Radical Film
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
— Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 1961
The very idea of a President of the United States — especially a Republican who had not only fought in war but had actually led an army to victory — warning about “unwarranted influence” from a “military-industrial complex” seems like something out of science fiction today, so thoroughly has what Eisenhower warned about happened. “The total influence [of the military-industrial complex] — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government ,” Eisenhower also said publicly — while privately, as he prepared to leave office, he was telling his aides, “I’m really scared of what will happen when Kennedy gets in. He doesn’t know the military like I do. He’ll hear all the scare stories and think we really need all those weapons.”
Eisenhower’s speech — so often quoted in sound bites, so little read in context — forms the spine of a new film by documentarian Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight. Inspired by the war in Iraq, it nonetheless goes way beyond it, showing in no uncertain terms that the policy of the American government since World War II has been to maintain a massive military establishment and use it to project power worldwide and essentially boss around other countries, threatening them with military invasion or economic destruction if they didn’t do what we said. As Jarecki shows in his film, even Eisenhower, who ended his Presidency warning about the military-industrial complex, began it by signing on to the CIA’s plot against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Muhammad Mossadegh, which overthrew him and put the Shah of Iran back on the throne. This created a repressive dictatorship that lasted 26 years and so totally suppressed any liberal dissent that when it finally collapsed in 1979, the only force around to take its place was the Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Jarecki — whose brother Andrew Jarecki directed some less politically charged documentaries, including Capturing the Friedmans and Just a Clown — released a film called The Trials of Henry Kissinger in 2002. Directed by Jarecki and written by Alex Gibney (whose most recent release was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Kissinger movie was really more a liberal than a radical film. Jarecki portrayed Kissinger as a uniquely evil figure who had moved U.S. foreign policy in a particularly sinister direction, not as merely one cog in a machine aimed at assuring U.S. domination over the world.
Judging from Why We Fight, Jarecki has learned better. His new film exposes the continuity of America’s foreign policy since the end of World War II — fabled as (in Studs Terkel’s phrase) “the good war,” the last one in which the U.S. fought an unambiguous villain. It’s hard even now to conceive of any way the dictatorial, genocidal war machines of Germany and Japan could have been defeated in any other fashion than all-out military force — yet the outcome of World War II also ended U.S. isolationism forever (despite President Bush’s recent attempt to revive it as a straw man to be taken down in his 2006 State of the Union speech) and left us the world’s strongest military power.
It’s a status we’ve gone out of our way to maintain ever since. One of the most powerful shots in Why We Fight takes place on the floor of Congress and features various legislators describing the military weapons produced in their districts, savoring names like “the F-35 joint-strike fighter” and “the FA-22 Raptor” with an almost lubricious delight. As Jarecki pointed out in an interview with David Brancaccio for the PBS-TV program NOW, this is no accident: it’s a deliberate strategy the defense industry calls “political engineering.”
“A part of the B-2 bomber is made in every single state in the United States,” Jarecki explained. “Why? Because they want to make sure not just that they get the program going, but that they keep it going, and that whenever the B-2 comes up for review, everybody on the Congressional oversight committee is getting a piece of the action. … Everybody in that Congress has a job in their home district that they’re trying to protect.”
Another eye-dropping sequence in Why We Fight is a montage of various presidents, from both major political parties — Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes — using strikingly similar language to explain to the American people why we have to go to war in Viet Nam/Grenada/Iraq/Kosovo/Afghanistan/Iraq (again) or wherever to protect “freedom,” “democracy” and other foundational American values. Indeed, Jarecki took his title from a series of orientation films the great director Frank Capra made for the U.S. Army in 1943 to indoctrinate American soldiers newly enlisted or drafted in what the war they were going to be fighting in was all about,
This part of Why We Fight seems almost like an out-and-out adaptation of Norman Solomon’s recent book War Made Easy, detailing not only all the campaigns that have been aimed at the American people to “sell” them on every war the U.S. has fought since 1945 but the lies at the heart of each one, notably the all-embracing one that this country only goes to war to defend “freedom.” Jarecki’s film not only details that “freedom” — its preservation and protection — is the all-purpose excuse every U.S. government uses as the excuse for fighting a war, he also shows how successful the propaganda has been. When he asked ordinary Americans his titular question, “Why do we fight?,” as he told Brancaccio on NOW, “Invariably, almost to a man or child, the first word out of people’s mouths was, ‘Freedom.’ You sort of stop and wonder , ‘Well, in a free society, what does it say if everybody gives the exact same answer to the question?’”
To their credit, most of Jarecki’s interviewees did start to have their doubts once he asked them follow-up questions, Perhaps the most extraordinary response was one he got from a man who was obviously wrestling with his suspicion that it was all about oil, intellectually conceding it might be while emotionally rejecting the idea that his beloved country could possibly send young people to kill or die for something that trivial, But the film still seems rather creepy in its depiction of the American people and how easily a government can “ring their chimes” to win their support for its military adventures.
Most of the critical attention on Why We Fight has focused on its more bizarre storylines — particularly that of Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York City police officer with an accent that makes it seem like he’s just stepped off the set of Law and Order or NYPD Blue. Sekzer’s story began on September 11, 2001, when his son was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center — which Sekzer witnessed from a subway car on his way into the city, from an angle in which the famous twin towers blended into one so he couldn’t be sure which one was hit. On learning that his son was dead, Sekzer decided that the way to achieve closure was to seek a particularly macabre sort of revenge: ask the U.S. military to paint his son’s name on a bomb and drop it on the enemy in Iraq. After getting the bureaucratic runaround from the other services Sekzer got his son memorialized on a bomb by the Marines — only to turn bitterly against the war after President Bush conceded in a speech that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks.
But there are plenty of other moving characterizations, too, including former Reagan defense aide Karen Kwiatkowski and Eisenhower’s heirs, son John S. D. and daughter Susan. Expert testimony is given by retired UCSD professor Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and the man most closely identified with the comparison of America’s current role in the world to that of the ancient Roman Empire — which began as a representative republic and ended as a dictatorship when the burdens of maintaining an empire (money, resources and human lives) proved too much for the people to bear willingly — and Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who provides context not only for America’s war policy but the repression at home and abroad, including the USA PATRIOT Act (and the illegal Bush wiretaps, unknown to the public when this film was made), the internments at Guantánamo and elsewhere, the tortures at Abu Ghraib and the so-called “extraordinary renditions” of alleged terrorism suspects to other countries for torture, that has accompanied them.
Though a bit long and overwhelming — Why We Fight at times seems like the sort of film that should come with a study guide so people seeing it can absorb its information and “get” the connections at their leisure — Jarecki’s truly radical film is a must-see for any American concerned about their country and its future.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
— Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 1961
The very idea of a President of the United States — especially a Republican who had not only fought in war but had actually led an army to victory — warning about “unwarranted influence” from a “military-industrial complex” seems like something out of science fiction today, so thoroughly has what Eisenhower warned about happened. “The total influence [of the military-industrial complex] — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government ,” Eisenhower also said publicly — while privately, as he prepared to leave office, he was telling his aides, “I’m really scared of what will happen when Kennedy gets in. He doesn’t know the military like I do. He’ll hear all the scare stories and think we really need all those weapons.”
Eisenhower’s speech — so often quoted in sound bites, so little read in context — forms the spine of a new film by documentarian Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight. Inspired by the war in Iraq, it nonetheless goes way beyond it, showing in no uncertain terms that the policy of the American government since World War II has been to maintain a massive military establishment and use it to project power worldwide and essentially boss around other countries, threatening them with military invasion or economic destruction if they didn’t do what we said. As Jarecki shows in his film, even Eisenhower, who ended his Presidency warning about the military-industrial complex, began it by signing on to the CIA’s plot against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Muhammad Mossadegh, which overthrew him and put the Shah of Iran back on the throne. This created a repressive dictatorship that lasted 26 years and so totally suppressed any liberal dissent that when it finally collapsed in 1979, the only force around to take its place was the Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Jarecki — whose brother Andrew Jarecki directed some less politically charged documentaries, including Capturing the Friedmans and Just a Clown — released a film called The Trials of Henry Kissinger in 2002. Directed by Jarecki and written by Alex Gibney (whose most recent release was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Kissinger movie was really more a liberal than a radical film. Jarecki portrayed Kissinger as a uniquely evil figure who had moved U.S. foreign policy in a particularly sinister direction, not as merely one cog in a machine aimed at assuring U.S. domination over the world.
Judging from Why We Fight, Jarecki has learned better. His new film exposes the continuity of America’s foreign policy since the end of World War II — fabled as (in Studs Terkel’s phrase) “the good war,” the last one in which the U.S. fought an unambiguous villain. It’s hard even now to conceive of any way the dictatorial, genocidal war machines of Germany and Japan could have been defeated in any other fashion than all-out military force — yet the outcome of World War II also ended U.S. isolationism forever (despite President Bush’s recent attempt to revive it as a straw man to be taken down in his 2006 State of the Union speech) and left us the world’s strongest military power.
It’s a status we’ve gone out of our way to maintain ever since. One of the most powerful shots in Why We Fight takes place on the floor of Congress and features various legislators describing the military weapons produced in their districts, savoring names like “the F-35 joint-strike fighter” and “the FA-22 Raptor” with an almost lubricious delight. As Jarecki pointed out in an interview with David Brancaccio for the PBS-TV program NOW, this is no accident: it’s a deliberate strategy the defense industry calls “political engineering.”
“A part of the B-2 bomber is made in every single state in the United States,” Jarecki explained. “Why? Because they want to make sure not just that they get the program going, but that they keep it going, and that whenever the B-2 comes up for review, everybody on the Congressional oversight committee is getting a piece of the action. … Everybody in that Congress has a job in their home district that they’re trying to protect.”
Another eye-dropping sequence in Why We Fight is a montage of various presidents, from both major political parties — Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes — using strikingly similar language to explain to the American people why we have to go to war in Viet Nam/Grenada/Iraq/Kosovo/Afghanistan/Iraq (again) or wherever to protect “freedom,” “democracy” and other foundational American values. Indeed, Jarecki took his title from a series of orientation films the great director Frank Capra made for the U.S. Army in 1943 to indoctrinate American soldiers newly enlisted or drafted in what the war they were going to be fighting in was all about,
This part of Why We Fight seems almost like an out-and-out adaptation of Norman Solomon’s recent book War Made Easy, detailing not only all the campaigns that have been aimed at the American people to “sell” them on every war the U.S. has fought since 1945 but the lies at the heart of each one, notably the all-embracing one that this country only goes to war to defend “freedom.” Jarecki’s film not only details that “freedom” — its preservation and protection — is the all-purpose excuse every U.S. government uses as the excuse for fighting a war, he also shows how successful the propaganda has been. When he asked ordinary Americans his titular question, “Why do we fight?,” as he told Brancaccio on NOW, “Invariably, almost to a man or child, the first word out of people’s mouths was, ‘Freedom.’ You sort of stop and wonder , ‘Well, in a free society, what does it say if everybody gives the exact same answer to the question?’”
To their credit, most of Jarecki’s interviewees did start to have their doubts once he asked them follow-up questions, Perhaps the most extraordinary response was one he got from a man who was obviously wrestling with his suspicion that it was all about oil, intellectually conceding it might be while emotionally rejecting the idea that his beloved country could possibly send young people to kill or die for something that trivial, But the film still seems rather creepy in its depiction of the American people and how easily a government can “ring their chimes” to win their support for its military adventures.
Most of the critical attention on Why We Fight has focused on its more bizarre storylines — particularly that of Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York City police officer with an accent that makes it seem like he’s just stepped off the set of Law and Order or NYPD Blue. Sekzer’s story began on September 11, 2001, when his son was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center — which Sekzer witnessed from a subway car on his way into the city, from an angle in which the famous twin towers blended into one so he couldn’t be sure which one was hit. On learning that his son was dead, Sekzer decided that the way to achieve closure was to seek a particularly macabre sort of revenge: ask the U.S. military to paint his son’s name on a bomb and drop it on the enemy in Iraq. After getting the bureaucratic runaround from the other services Sekzer got his son memorialized on a bomb by the Marines — only to turn bitterly against the war after President Bush conceded in a speech that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks.
But there are plenty of other moving characterizations, too, including former Reagan defense aide Karen Kwiatkowski and Eisenhower’s heirs, son John S. D. and daughter Susan. Expert testimony is given by retired UCSD professor Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and the man most closely identified with the comparison of America’s current role in the world to that of the ancient Roman Empire — which began as a representative republic and ended as a dictatorship when the burdens of maintaining an empire (money, resources and human lives) proved too much for the people to bear willingly — and Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, who provides context not only for America’s war policy but the repression at home and abroad, including the USA PATRIOT Act (and the illegal Bush wiretaps, unknown to the public when this film was made), the internments at Guantánamo and elsewhere, the tortures at Abu Ghraib and the so-called “extraordinary renditions” of alleged terrorism suspects to other countries for torture, that has accompanied them.
Though a bit long and overwhelming — Why We Fight at times seems like the sort of film that should come with a study guide so people seeing it can absorb its information and “get” the connections at their leisure — Jarecki’s truly radical film is a must-see for any American concerned about their country and its future.
Limonade Tous les Jours: Charming Romantic Comedy
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine. All rights reserved.
“There is no such thing as an original play,” author Charles L. Mee writes on his Web site, http://www.charlesmee.org . Limonade Tous les Jours, Mee’s 2002 play now running through February 26 at Diversionary Theatre under the auspices of MOXIE, the plucky women-led company that last brought us the fabulous Dog Act, proves his point. The plot of Limonade is about the oldest story imaginable — two mismatched people meet under chancy circumstances, find enough of a sexual bond to tumble into bed together, then have to work out whether they want the relationship to continue and, if so, under what circumstances — but Mee’s charming writing and MOXIE’s light, infectious production nonetheless give it the power to move us.
In Limonade, the mismatched couple are Andrew (D. W. Jacobs), a middle-aged American tourist who’s come to Paris to get over a bad divorce; and Ya Ya (played by MOXIE co-founder Jo Anne Glover), a twenty-something chanteuse in a local coffeehouse with her own recent exit from a non-working marriage with an older man who made her take his mistress for walks so he could have sex with yet a third partner in their home. Mee, a veteran playwright who was born in 1938 and premiered at least one script in San Diego (The War to End War at Sledgehammer in 1993), makes the most of the obvious contrasts between his two lovers — generational, national, cultural — and keeps us in genuine suspense as to how their relationship is going to turn out and whether or not it has a future.
MOXIE’s director, Esther Emery, calls Limonade “a love story about two people who know for sure that they shouldn’t be together,” but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Through much of its running time — an uninterrupted 80-minute single act — the play is driven by Ya Ya’s maddening style of speech, full of sentences that contradict themselves almost before they’ve quite got out of her mouth. Her first speech of any length — reproduced below as it appeared in the complete text of Limonade on Mee’s Web site, which published the play as if it were poetry (which in a way it is) — illustrates her character:
I mean, not that I have anything against older men
quite the opposite in a way
only I was married to an older man
and he took such a patriarchal position
and then I
I found I liked it
I invited it
so we had almost a sado masochistic relationship
which I found I just loved
he had other lovers
he treated me like dirt
he wanted always to handcuff me to the bed
and it seems I not only fell into a sort of dependent role
but I had sought it all along
so now
I’m trying to go straight
you know
grow up
have a relationship with another grownup person
as a grownup person
if I have any relationship at all
and at the moment I don’t have one at all
and don’t want one
because I’m still recovering
and you?
Most of the visually stunning elements in Emery’s direction, Nick Fouch’s scenic design and Jennifer Setlow’s lighting, are actually specified in Mee’s script, including the beautiful visual projections that suggest a forested park. Andrew, the prototypical American tourist, carries a video camera with him throughout and some of the projections, especially the ones in which the actors’ faces appear, represent the footage he has shot. The set is a series of rotating platforms and curtains that suggest outdoor cafés, bistros and the nightclub in which Ya Ya performs. For more intimate scenes, furniture — specifically the bed Andrew and Ya Ya have sex in and the bathtub in which they bathe together later in the play (there’s nudity but it’s tastefully done) — emerges from the back wall.
Limonade is vividly realized by MOXIE’s cast. Jacobs projects just the right mix of diffidence and desperation to be credible as Andrew — his obvious distress at suddenly finding himself in an affair with a woman younger than his daughter is perhaps the most moving part of his performance — and Glover is equally adept at projecting the irresistible force-of-nature quality Mee gave Ya Ya. One aspect this show has in common with Dog Act is that the performers — some of them, at least — are also required to have professional-quality singing voices. Ya Ya is shown singing two of her cabaret songs, one in English and one (Edith Piaf’s classic “La Vie en Rose”) in French, and a third performer, Arme Chandrru, generally impersonates waiters and store clerks but also has to deliver a coloratura countertenor aria as atmospheric background for a dance Andrew and Ya Ya do together. He’s damned good in a spot that, according to reviewers of other productions, hasn’t always come off as well as it does here.
Special kudos go to costume designer Mary Larson (especially for the lovely silver dress Ya Ya picks on a shopping trip), vocal coach — and local theatre fixture in her own right — Leigh Scarritt, and dialogue coach Danielle Cervantes, who managed to help Glover find a voice for Ya Ya without sounding silly, as all too many American actors attempting foreign accents do. Though a bit talky at times — reflecting the theatre convention that two people having trouble connecting emotionally have to tell us that they’re having trouble connecting instead of making each other (and us) suffer through the silences of real people in a similar situation — Limonade is as delightful and sweet as the drink for which it’s named. MOXIE’s press kit says they intended this production as a Valentine’s Day present to San Diego audiences. Valentine accepted, with deepest gratitude.
Limonade Tous les Jours plays through Sunday, February 26 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. Performances are at 2 and 7 p.m. on Sundays and 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Tickets are $15 on Fridays and $25 all other nights. A special “pay what you will” performance is being given Wednesday, February 22 at 8 p.m. For reservations or information, please call MOXIE Theatre at (760) 634-3965 or visit www.moxietheatre.com
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine. All rights reserved.
“There is no such thing as an original play,” author Charles L. Mee writes on his Web site, http://www.charlesmee.org . Limonade Tous les Jours, Mee’s 2002 play now running through February 26 at Diversionary Theatre under the auspices of MOXIE, the plucky women-led company that last brought us the fabulous Dog Act, proves his point. The plot of Limonade is about the oldest story imaginable — two mismatched people meet under chancy circumstances, find enough of a sexual bond to tumble into bed together, then have to work out whether they want the relationship to continue and, if so, under what circumstances — but Mee’s charming writing and MOXIE’s light, infectious production nonetheless give it the power to move us.
In Limonade, the mismatched couple are Andrew (D. W. Jacobs), a middle-aged American tourist who’s come to Paris to get over a bad divorce; and Ya Ya (played by MOXIE co-founder Jo Anne Glover), a twenty-something chanteuse in a local coffeehouse with her own recent exit from a non-working marriage with an older man who made her take his mistress for walks so he could have sex with yet a third partner in their home. Mee, a veteran playwright who was born in 1938 and premiered at least one script in San Diego (The War to End War at Sledgehammer in 1993), makes the most of the obvious contrasts between his two lovers — generational, national, cultural — and keeps us in genuine suspense as to how their relationship is going to turn out and whether or not it has a future.
MOXIE’s director, Esther Emery, calls Limonade “a love story about two people who know for sure that they shouldn’t be together,” but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Through much of its running time — an uninterrupted 80-minute single act — the play is driven by Ya Ya’s maddening style of speech, full of sentences that contradict themselves almost before they’ve quite got out of her mouth. Her first speech of any length — reproduced below as it appeared in the complete text of Limonade on Mee’s Web site, which published the play as if it were poetry (which in a way it is) — illustrates her character:
I mean, not that I have anything against older men
quite the opposite in a way
only I was married to an older man
and he took such a patriarchal position
and then I
I found I liked it
I invited it
so we had almost a sado masochistic relationship
which I found I just loved
he had other lovers
he treated me like dirt
he wanted always to handcuff me to the bed
and it seems I not only fell into a sort of dependent role
but I had sought it all along
so now
I’m trying to go straight
you know
grow up
have a relationship with another grownup person
as a grownup person
if I have any relationship at all
and at the moment I don’t have one at all
and don’t want one
because I’m still recovering
and you?
Most of the visually stunning elements in Emery’s direction, Nick Fouch’s scenic design and Jennifer Setlow’s lighting, are actually specified in Mee’s script, including the beautiful visual projections that suggest a forested park. Andrew, the prototypical American tourist, carries a video camera with him throughout and some of the projections, especially the ones in which the actors’ faces appear, represent the footage he has shot. The set is a series of rotating platforms and curtains that suggest outdoor cafés, bistros and the nightclub in which Ya Ya performs. For more intimate scenes, furniture — specifically the bed Andrew and Ya Ya have sex in and the bathtub in which they bathe together later in the play (there’s nudity but it’s tastefully done) — emerges from the back wall.
Limonade is vividly realized by MOXIE’s cast. Jacobs projects just the right mix of diffidence and desperation to be credible as Andrew — his obvious distress at suddenly finding himself in an affair with a woman younger than his daughter is perhaps the most moving part of his performance — and Glover is equally adept at projecting the irresistible force-of-nature quality Mee gave Ya Ya. One aspect this show has in common with Dog Act is that the performers — some of them, at least — are also required to have professional-quality singing voices. Ya Ya is shown singing two of her cabaret songs, one in English and one (Edith Piaf’s classic “La Vie en Rose”) in French, and a third performer, Arme Chandrru, generally impersonates waiters and store clerks but also has to deliver a coloratura countertenor aria as atmospheric background for a dance Andrew and Ya Ya do together. He’s damned good in a spot that, according to reviewers of other productions, hasn’t always come off as well as it does here.
Special kudos go to costume designer Mary Larson (especially for the lovely silver dress Ya Ya picks on a shopping trip), vocal coach — and local theatre fixture in her own right — Leigh Scarritt, and dialogue coach Danielle Cervantes, who managed to help Glover find a voice for Ya Ya without sounding silly, as all too many American actors attempting foreign accents do. Though a bit talky at times — reflecting the theatre convention that two people having trouble connecting emotionally have to tell us that they’re having trouble connecting instead of making each other (and us) suffer through the silences of real people in a similar situation — Limonade is as delightful and sweet as the drink for which it’s named. MOXIE’s press kit says they intended this production as a Valentine’s Day present to San Diego audiences. Valentine accepted, with deepest gratitude.
Limonade Tous les Jours plays through Sunday, February 26 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. Performances are at 2 and 7 p.m. on Sundays and 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Tickets are $15 on Fridays and $25 all other nights. A special “pay what you will” performance is being given Wednesday, February 22 at 8 p.m. For reservations or information, please call MOXIE Theatre at (760) 634-3965 or visit www.moxietheatre.com
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Grass-Roots Supervisor Candidate Speaks to Queer Dems
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Though the predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club had a long agenda at its January 26 meeting — including appearances by San Diego City Councilmember Donna Frye (her first before the club since losing the November 2005 mayoral election to Jerry Sanders) and Lemon Grove School District board member George Gastil, whom the club endorsed for the Assembly seat currently held by Republican Shirley Horton — one highlight of the meeting was the talk by Richard Barrera. He’s running for Ron Roberts’ seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors as a virtual unknown, who’s never sought or held elective office before, and club members before the meeting were openly skeptical of the promises made on the campaign flyer he distributed — but Barrera’s remarks indicated not only a broad agenda for his potential constituents but knowledge and insight into how to get things done.
“The biggest question that comes up when I go door-to-door is people ask me, ‘What does the County do?’,” Barrera told the club. “The County does a lot of things, but its number one responsibility is to manage nearly all the health and human services programs funded by the federal and state governments to help people.” Barrera added that the problem with the current Board of Supervisors — all five of whom are Republicans who have been in office since 1994 or earlier — is that they really don’t believe in that mission, and therefore they don’t do a very good job at it.
“This Board has maintained the attitude that if you are struggling, it’s your own fault; you must be doing something wrong if you need help,” Barrera said. “There are 400,000 San Diego County residents without health insurance. Only nine percent of all San Diego County families can afford the median-priced house. We’ve got 100,000 senior citizens living alone with no source of services. Three out of every four working people make less than $10 an hour — less than the wage needed to support a family and meet basic needs. So how are you supposed to make it in San Diego on less than $10 an hour? And when they need some support, this Board gives them the attitude, ‘You’re a welfare case.’”
Barrera’s leaflet outlined an ambitious agenda to deal with these problems — including affordable home ownership and health care, pre-school and after-school programs and a “community-building approach” to social services for senior citizens — and left some club members scratching their heads at how he proposed to implement it and where he’d get the money to pay for it. In his presentation, Barrera claimed he knew a source for the money: resources already made available to the county by the federal and state governments, but which the current Board of Supervisors either doesn’t pursue or actively rejects.
The incident that made him decide to run for Supervisor illustrated just what Barrera was talking about. As an union organizer for in-home caregivers, who do housekeeping and personal care for senior citizens and people with disabilities and thereby enable to them to live independently at about one-tenth the cost of keeping them in nursing homes, Barrera had organized a group of caregivers to speak to the Board and demand a pay raise. According to Barrera, there was a state program the Board could have taken advantage of to raise the pay of home-care workers from $9 to $10.50 an hour; all they had to do was agree to advance one-sixth of the additional cost and the state would not only pick up the other five-sixths but would reimburse them. But the Board refused.
One of the people Barrera had recruited to speak before the Board and demand the raise for his caregiver was an 85-year-old man named Ambrosio whose home-care worker is his grandson, Ernesto. “If I didn’t have him, I would die,” Ambrosio told the Board — in Spanish, because he doesn’t speak English. “But he should be going to college, and all we’re asking for is enough of a wage increase so Ernesto can afford the books to go to school.” Ambrosio added that if Ernesto didn’t get the raise he would be tempted to let his grandson take another job to pay for school, even at the cost of his own life. Then, Barrera recalled, he got up to translate Ambrosio’s remarks — and just then the chair of the Board decided the two had talked long enough and cut him off.
“Rather than honoring Ambrosio for getting up at 6 a.m. and coming all the way there to talk to them, they cut him off,” Barrera said. “We need a different voice up there. We cannot afford to have the same five people bullying and intimidating people. We need a voice up there that regards Ambrosio and his grandson Ernesto not as welfare cases, but as heroes.”
Donna Frye’s return to the club was an even more emotional experience. “I want you to know how happy you’ve made me, how kind and generous this community has been to me,” she said. She officially announced her candidacy for re-election to the District 6 City Council seat — something she said she hadn’t yet done to any previous group she’s spoken to — and pooh-poohed the allegations by the San Diego Union-Tribune that Frye is in trouble in her district because her opponent, mayor Jerry Sanders, carried it in the runoff.
In fact, Frye and Sanders have got along surprisingly well, she said. “The second day he was in office he took me to lunch,” she said. “It is a very good working relationship despite all the nasty things he said about me during the campaign.”
The club also heard from North County Congressional candidate Jeeni Criscenzo, who’s taking on Darrell Issa in the Republican-dominated 49th district. She said that, precisely because the registration was so lopsided against her and Issa is the richest man in Congress, “I’m perfectly free to say what I want because I’ve got nothing to lose.” She lampooned the “advisors” and “consultants” who’ve come out of the woodwork as she’s done unexpectedly well in early polls to tell her to be more “moderate” and soft-pedal her opposition to the war in Iraq.
Noting that Republicans in general attack Democrats for allegedly not understanding “the severity of the threat” of terrorism after 9/11, Criscenzo said that the threat she’s most concerned about is the way the Bush administration is using terrorism as an excuse to attack Americans’ civil liberties. “We do need a Congressmember who understands the severity of the threat,” she said. “We need courage. The opposite of fear isn’t hope, it’s courage. I can’t offer you courage, but I can be a role model. We’re all tired of people who say what you want to hear during a campaign and then do what their biggest contributors want after they’re elected.”
Criscenzo boasted of her role in organizing the Thanksgiving vigil against the war in North County. “We got a lot of threats to our physical safety, but we proved we could stand silently and not respond,” she said, adding that the generally positive media coverage of the event proved that the press “got it.” She also talked about how she’d fielded questions about same-sex marriage and medical marijuana at candidates’ forums, saying that once two people — regardless of their genders — decide to make a lifetime commitment to each other “that brings us closer to God,” and citing the example of her own mother, who went through terminal cancer and used marijuana to control her own pain in the final stages. Criscenzo said she would like to ask County Supervisor Bill Horn — who’s spearheading the Board of Supervisors’ attempt to get California’s medical marijuana law thrown out by the courts — “what he would do if that was his mother.”
Another candidate who showed up for the meeting was former club board member Ted Weathers, who was appointed to the Superior Court as a judge by former governor Gray Davis and now has to stand for election to a full term. He circulated petitions to get his name on the ballot and joked that the judge he replaced was a hard-Right Republican known as “’Lysol Larry’ Stirling” — because in the 1980’s he once had his courtroom sprayed with Lysol after a person with AIDS had appeared before him.
Lorena Gonzalez, who narrowly lost the District 2 City Council seat to Republican Kevin Faulconer in a special election earlier in January, also appeared before the club and said she hadn’t yet decided to run again in the regular election for the seat, scheduled for later this year. She thanked the club for having endorsed her in the primary as well as the runoff and said, “I have never felt so welcome to a group I was new to.”
The club also heard from George Gastil, Lemon Grove school board member and candidate to replace Republican Shirley Horton in the 78th Assembly district, and chose to endorse his candidacy despite the possibility that another Democrat might run for the nomination in the primary. “This race is very important and also very close,” Gastil said, noting that it’s the only one in San Diego County that’s considered a “swing” seat that could go to either major party. In 2004, Horton squeezed out a narrow victory against Democrat Patty Davis largely, Gastil said, because Arnold Schwarzenegger came down and campaigned for her; this time, Gastil added, Schwarzenegger has fallen in popularity so much isn’t likely to be as helpful to Horton and might even cost her votes if he gets involved in the race.
Finally, the club heard from former City Councilmember John Hartley and Greg Bolian of the Clean Elections Campaign in San Diego. They are seeking a ballot initiative in the city of San Diego similar to those in Maine and Arizona, whereby candidates for office would be given the so-called “clean option.” They would qualify for public funding by obtaining signatures and $5 contributions from a minimum number of voters, and then their campaigns would be fully funded by public money provided they agreed to accept no further private contributions.
Hartley and Bolian admitted that their proposal wouldn’t control so-called “independent expenditure” campaigns by corporations, labor unions and political action committees, which legally can raise and spend as much money on an election as they want to so long as they aren’t coordinating their campaigns with the candidates or the official campaign organizations. They said their group is currently fine-tuning their proposal based on what their pollsters tell them is most likely to pass. Other questions still unanswered is where the money would come from in the city’s already shaky budget, how much each candidate would get and whether there’d be an increase — as there is in the Arizona law — in case a wealthy candidate puts a large amount of his own money into a race and thereby effectively tries to buy his or her way into office.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Though the predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club had a long agenda at its January 26 meeting — including appearances by San Diego City Councilmember Donna Frye (her first before the club since losing the November 2005 mayoral election to Jerry Sanders) and Lemon Grove School District board member George Gastil, whom the club endorsed for the Assembly seat currently held by Republican Shirley Horton — one highlight of the meeting was the talk by Richard Barrera. He’s running for Ron Roberts’ seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors as a virtual unknown, who’s never sought or held elective office before, and club members before the meeting were openly skeptical of the promises made on the campaign flyer he distributed — but Barrera’s remarks indicated not only a broad agenda for his potential constituents but knowledge and insight into how to get things done.
“The biggest question that comes up when I go door-to-door is people ask me, ‘What does the County do?’,” Barrera told the club. “The County does a lot of things, but its number one responsibility is to manage nearly all the health and human services programs funded by the federal and state governments to help people.” Barrera added that the problem with the current Board of Supervisors — all five of whom are Republicans who have been in office since 1994 or earlier — is that they really don’t believe in that mission, and therefore they don’t do a very good job at it.
“This Board has maintained the attitude that if you are struggling, it’s your own fault; you must be doing something wrong if you need help,” Barrera said. “There are 400,000 San Diego County residents without health insurance. Only nine percent of all San Diego County families can afford the median-priced house. We’ve got 100,000 senior citizens living alone with no source of services. Three out of every four working people make less than $10 an hour — less than the wage needed to support a family and meet basic needs. So how are you supposed to make it in San Diego on less than $10 an hour? And when they need some support, this Board gives them the attitude, ‘You’re a welfare case.’”
Barrera’s leaflet outlined an ambitious agenda to deal with these problems — including affordable home ownership and health care, pre-school and after-school programs and a “community-building approach” to social services for senior citizens — and left some club members scratching their heads at how he proposed to implement it and where he’d get the money to pay for it. In his presentation, Barrera claimed he knew a source for the money: resources already made available to the county by the federal and state governments, but which the current Board of Supervisors either doesn’t pursue or actively rejects.
The incident that made him decide to run for Supervisor illustrated just what Barrera was talking about. As an union organizer for in-home caregivers, who do housekeeping and personal care for senior citizens and people with disabilities and thereby enable to them to live independently at about one-tenth the cost of keeping them in nursing homes, Barrera had organized a group of caregivers to speak to the Board and demand a pay raise. According to Barrera, there was a state program the Board could have taken advantage of to raise the pay of home-care workers from $9 to $10.50 an hour; all they had to do was agree to advance one-sixth of the additional cost and the state would not only pick up the other five-sixths but would reimburse them. But the Board refused.
One of the people Barrera had recruited to speak before the Board and demand the raise for his caregiver was an 85-year-old man named Ambrosio whose home-care worker is his grandson, Ernesto. “If I didn’t have him, I would die,” Ambrosio told the Board — in Spanish, because he doesn’t speak English. “But he should be going to college, and all we’re asking for is enough of a wage increase so Ernesto can afford the books to go to school.” Ambrosio added that if Ernesto didn’t get the raise he would be tempted to let his grandson take another job to pay for school, even at the cost of his own life. Then, Barrera recalled, he got up to translate Ambrosio’s remarks — and just then the chair of the Board decided the two had talked long enough and cut him off.
“Rather than honoring Ambrosio for getting up at 6 a.m. and coming all the way there to talk to them, they cut him off,” Barrera said. “We need a different voice up there. We cannot afford to have the same five people bullying and intimidating people. We need a voice up there that regards Ambrosio and his grandson Ernesto not as welfare cases, but as heroes.”
Donna Frye’s return to the club was an even more emotional experience. “I want you to know how happy you’ve made me, how kind and generous this community has been to me,” she said. She officially announced her candidacy for re-election to the District 6 City Council seat — something she said she hadn’t yet done to any previous group she’s spoken to — and pooh-poohed the allegations by the San Diego Union-Tribune that Frye is in trouble in her district because her opponent, mayor Jerry Sanders, carried it in the runoff.
In fact, Frye and Sanders have got along surprisingly well, she said. “The second day he was in office he took me to lunch,” she said. “It is a very good working relationship despite all the nasty things he said about me during the campaign.”
The club also heard from North County Congressional candidate Jeeni Criscenzo, who’s taking on Darrell Issa in the Republican-dominated 49th district. She said that, precisely because the registration was so lopsided against her and Issa is the richest man in Congress, “I’m perfectly free to say what I want because I’ve got nothing to lose.” She lampooned the “advisors” and “consultants” who’ve come out of the woodwork as she’s done unexpectedly well in early polls to tell her to be more “moderate” and soft-pedal her opposition to the war in Iraq.
Noting that Republicans in general attack Democrats for allegedly not understanding “the severity of the threat” of terrorism after 9/11, Criscenzo said that the threat she’s most concerned about is the way the Bush administration is using terrorism as an excuse to attack Americans’ civil liberties. “We do need a Congressmember who understands the severity of the threat,” she said. “We need courage. The opposite of fear isn’t hope, it’s courage. I can’t offer you courage, but I can be a role model. We’re all tired of people who say what you want to hear during a campaign and then do what their biggest contributors want after they’re elected.”
Criscenzo boasted of her role in organizing the Thanksgiving vigil against the war in North County. “We got a lot of threats to our physical safety, but we proved we could stand silently and not respond,” she said, adding that the generally positive media coverage of the event proved that the press “got it.” She also talked about how she’d fielded questions about same-sex marriage and medical marijuana at candidates’ forums, saying that once two people — regardless of their genders — decide to make a lifetime commitment to each other “that brings us closer to God,” and citing the example of her own mother, who went through terminal cancer and used marijuana to control her own pain in the final stages. Criscenzo said she would like to ask County Supervisor Bill Horn — who’s spearheading the Board of Supervisors’ attempt to get California’s medical marijuana law thrown out by the courts — “what he would do if that was his mother.”
Another candidate who showed up for the meeting was former club board member Ted Weathers, who was appointed to the Superior Court as a judge by former governor Gray Davis and now has to stand for election to a full term. He circulated petitions to get his name on the ballot and joked that the judge he replaced was a hard-Right Republican known as “’Lysol Larry’ Stirling” — because in the 1980’s he once had his courtroom sprayed with Lysol after a person with AIDS had appeared before him.
Lorena Gonzalez, who narrowly lost the District 2 City Council seat to Republican Kevin Faulconer in a special election earlier in January, also appeared before the club and said she hadn’t yet decided to run again in the regular election for the seat, scheduled for later this year. She thanked the club for having endorsed her in the primary as well as the runoff and said, “I have never felt so welcome to a group I was new to.”
The club also heard from George Gastil, Lemon Grove school board member and candidate to replace Republican Shirley Horton in the 78th Assembly district, and chose to endorse his candidacy despite the possibility that another Democrat might run for the nomination in the primary. “This race is very important and also very close,” Gastil said, noting that it’s the only one in San Diego County that’s considered a “swing” seat that could go to either major party. In 2004, Horton squeezed out a narrow victory against Democrat Patty Davis largely, Gastil said, because Arnold Schwarzenegger came down and campaigned for her; this time, Gastil added, Schwarzenegger has fallen in popularity so much isn’t likely to be as helpful to Horton and might even cost her votes if he gets involved in the race.
Finally, the club heard from former City Councilmember John Hartley and Greg Bolian of the Clean Elections Campaign in San Diego. They are seeking a ballot initiative in the city of San Diego similar to those in Maine and Arizona, whereby candidates for office would be given the so-called “clean option.” They would qualify for public funding by obtaining signatures and $5 contributions from a minimum number of voters, and then their campaigns would be fully funded by public money provided they agreed to accept no further private contributions.
Hartley and Bolian admitted that their proposal wouldn’t control so-called “independent expenditure” campaigns by corporations, labor unions and political action committees, which legally can raise and spend as much money on an election as they want to so long as they aren’t coordinating their campaigns with the candidates or the official campaign organizations. They said their group is currently fine-tuning their proposal based on what their pollsters tell them is most likely to pass. Other questions still unanswered is where the money would come from in the city’s already shaky budget, how much each candidate would get and whether there’d be an increase — as there is in the Arizona law — in case a wealthy candidate puts a large amount of his own money into a race and thereby effectively tries to buy his or her way into office.
Bird Flu, Whooping Cough Topics at Gay Leather Meeting
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It might have seemed an incongruous topic for a Gay men’s Leather group, but “Papa” Tony Lindsey, founder of the San Diego League of Gentlemen, decided to make the group’s February 3 meeting a presentation on two major disease threats — and not AIDS or STD’s, either. Lindsey said he picked the topic to draw on the expertise of two club members, San Diego County health promotion specialist Everardo Aguilar and former American Red Cross and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) health educator Mitch Metzner. Metzner’s presentation was on the potential for a worldwide bird flu pandemic on the order of the 1918 killer influenza, which took the lives of up to 150 million people, while Aguilar spoke on a seemingly more prosaic but still real health threat: adult pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough.
Metzner began by distinguishing potentially lethal strains of influenza from the so-called “seasonal flu” we’re all used to. He also described flu as a disease that incubates in animals, especially wild birds and pigs, and said new strains of flu frequently transmit from birds through pigs to humans before evolving to a point where they can move from human to human without an animal being involved. “Ducks infect other ducks and give it to farm animials, like chickens or pigs, and then to humans,” Metzner explained. “Sometimes a flu strain goes straight from birds to humans.” That, he said, was what the 1918 flu did — and what scientists are currently worried bird flu will do, too, though he stressed that contrary to some of the scare stories in the media no human has yet caught bird flu directly from another human.
“Pigs are an important player in the exchange of human diseases,” Metzner said. “We have enough genetic material in common to be able to exchange skin and other parts [including the implantation of pig arteries in humans to replace badly clogged ones and thereby prevent heart disease]. An intelligent disease like the flu can exchange genetic material [between lethal and non-lethal strains], so the virus can adapt itself to spread easily from person to person like seasonal flu does.”
Metzner said the current strain of bird flu “first appeared in China in 1996, and in 1997 six people died. In 2003 there was a more widespread incidence. December [2005] and January [2006] have been very significant months. Turkey and Iraq both have cases in humans, and the disease there was recognized in humans before it was recognized in wild birds.” He said the disease spreads through the air or by touching contaminated surfaces, and the virus can transmit over distances of six feet and remain alive outside a host for up to two days.
According to Metzner, by examining tissue samples from three victims of the 1918 flu epidemic — including two from people who died in Alaska and whose bodies were frozen in ice, thereby preserving them — scientists determined that the bird flu virus of today is genetically similar to the one responsible for the 1918 pandemic. “Symptoms are similar to those of seasonal flu, but they don’t include runny noses and the other cold-like symptoms of seasonal flu and they can include diarrhea,” Metzner explained. “The incubation period is one to four days and a child can spread it six days before symptoms show or up to 21 days after. The people most at risk are 65 or older.”
What’s worrying many people in disease prevention, Metzner said, is whether or not people today would accept the kinds of sweeping public-health interventions that took place to stop the 1918 epidemic. These included closing schools, banning all indoor public gatherings, and forcing people to wear face masks whenever they went outside on pain of arrest if they didn’t. Metzner said that the level of trust in government was far higher in 1918 than it is today and therefore it was easier to enforce regulations like these. “The chaos surrounding Hurricane Katrina has made people in the government concerned that people won’t follow measures like closing all bars and public gatherings,” Metzner said.
He also pointed to globalization as a complicating factor; whereas most advanced countries used to produce their own medicine, today drug-making is farmed out all over the world. Tamiflu, the only drug so far proved effective against bird flu, is made in only one country — Switzerland — and the chemical components that go into it are made elsewhere and shipped there. A pandemic could get in the way of medicine production by wreaking havoc with the transportation system, and could also encourage countries to block exports of medicines in order to serve their own populations first — leaving non-producing countries like the U.S. without the drugs.
According to Metzner, governments are already spending a lot of money to develop bird flu vaccines to try to stop the epidemic before it starts — or at least slow it down and control it. The city of San Diego, cash-strapped as it is, has allocated $500 million to the San Diego Zoo to develop a response to bird flu, including draining all the ponds in the zoo and locking up their birds in indoor enclosures to keep them from contracting the disease themselves and spreading it to humans. But Metzner admitted that so far, human intervention has never stopped an incipient epidemic, and he said even ordinary seasonal flus are becoming harder to treat. He explained that last year only 10 percent of seasonal flu cases were resistant to the two most common antiviral drugs; this year it’s over 90 percent.
Metzner said a bird flu pandemic has the potential to be more deadly than the one in 1918 because “there are far more people now. Also, there are twice as many chickens and pigs in China as there were in 1918. Nobody alive today is immune to the 1918 strain and they’re making vaccines based on what they think the virus will be like.” One potentially bright spot, according to Metzner, is that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has just announced a test for bird flu that will produce results in four hours instead of two weeks.
Aguilar’s presentation was focused mainly on challenging two myths about whooping cough: that it’s strictly a disease of children, and that the standard vaccines given to most U.S. children still protect them in adulthood. Based on original research by Dr. Mark Sawyer, medical director of the County of San Diego’s immunization program, and the program’s lead nurse, Sue Hunt, his presentation focused on what pertussis is and how it can be diagnosed and treated.
“Pertussis is a bacterial infection caused by Bordatella pertussis,” Aguilar explained. “It goes into your lungs and creates a poison, a toxin, that attaches to the cilia— the little hairs that dirt and other things out of your lungs — and paralyzes them. So you cough and can’t stop, and with babies and young children there’s a distinctive ‘whooping’ sound when they catch their breaths between coughs. Adults don’t normally get that sound, so it’s often not diagnosed accurately.” The infection is characterized by a chronic cough that can last up to three and one-half months — the “hundred-day cough,” it’s often called — and the symptoms can also include vomiting, choking and loss of sleep due to continual coughing.
According to Aguilar, there’s another reason why pertussis wasn’t considered a major health threat in adults; it’s only in the last few years that scientists have discovered the immunity to it from childhood vaccinations doesn’t last into adolescence and adulthood. “Pertussis is not a ‘childhood disease,’ and it can spread quickly through the community,” he explained. “It can affect teens, adults, families and senior citizens. It’s highly contagious and is airborne through the particles that come out of your mouth when you cough.”
Aguilar said that San Diego County’s pertussis case levels have increased rapidly, from about 75 in 1997 to a spike of 225 in 2002. After a dip the next two years, they leaped again to at least 369 in 2005 — “at least,” Aguilar explained, because the records for last year are incomplete and some new cases may still be discovered. While most of the cases are in babies under six months old — Aguilar said that was because they’re too young to have been vaccinated — 23 percent of the county’s most recent cases occurred in 10- to 14-year-olds and 20 percent in adults over 30.
“The good thing about pertussis is that it’s a bacterial infection and therefore antibiotics are useful,” Aguilar said. The front-line treatment is a 14-day course of erythromycin, and if that doesn’t work there are three other drugs used in sequence: azithromycin (five days), clarithromycin (seven days) and Septra or Bactrim (14 days). So far, Aguilar said, no cases of antibiotic-resistant pertussis have been recorded. He said a pertussis vaccine for adults was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late 2005, the so-called “Tdap” booster given along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines, but people with compromised immune systems or chronic illnesses shouldn’t use it.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
It might have seemed an incongruous topic for a Gay men’s Leather group, but “Papa” Tony Lindsey, founder of the San Diego League of Gentlemen, decided to make the group’s February 3 meeting a presentation on two major disease threats — and not AIDS or STD’s, either. Lindsey said he picked the topic to draw on the expertise of two club members, San Diego County health promotion specialist Everardo Aguilar and former American Red Cross and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) health educator Mitch Metzner. Metzner’s presentation was on the potential for a worldwide bird flu pandemic on the order of the 1918 killer influenza, which took the lives of up to 150 million people, while Aguilar spoke on a seemingly more prosaic but still real health threat: adult pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough.
Metzner began by distinguishing potentially lethal strains of influenza from the so-called “seasonal flu” we’re all used to. He also described flu as a disease that incubates in animals, especially wild birds and pigs, and said new strains of flu frequently transmit from birds through pigs to humans before evolving to a point where they can move from human to human without an animal being involved. “Ducks infect other ducks and give it to farm animials, like chickens or pigs, and then to humans,” Metzner explained. “Sometimes a flu strain goes straight from birds to humans.” That, he said, was what the 1918 flu did — and what scientists are currently worried bird flu will do, too, though he stressed that contrary to some of the scare stories in the media no human has yet caught bird flu directly from another human.
“Pigs are an important player in the exchange of human diseases,” Metzner said. “We have enough genetic material in common to be able to exchange skin and other parts [including the implantation of pig arteries in humans to replace badly clogged ones and thereby prevent heart disease]. An intelligent disease like the flu can exchange genetic material [between lethal and non-lethal strains], so the virus can adapt itself to spread easily from person to person like seasonal flu does.”
Metzner said the current strain of bird flu “first appeared in China in 1996, and in 1997 six people died. In 2003 there was a more widespread incidence. December [2005] and January [2006] have been very significant months. Turkey and Iraq both have cases in humans, and the disease there was recognized in humans before it was recognized in wild birds.” He said the disease spreads through the air or by touching contaminated surfaces, and the virus can transmit over distances of six feet and remain alive outside a host for up to two days.
According to Metzner, by examining tissue samples from three victims of the 1918 flu epidemic — including two from people who died in Alaska and whose bodies were frozen in ice, thereby preserving them — scientists determined that the bird flu virus of today is genetically similar to the one responsible for the 1918 pandemic. “Symptoms are similar to those of seasonal flu, but they don’t include runny noses and the other cold-like symptoms of seasonal flu and they can include diarrhea,” Metzner explained. “The incubation period is one to four days and a child can spread it six days before symptoms show or up to 21 days after. The people most at risk are 65 or older.”
What’s worrying many people in disease prevention, Metzner said, is whether or not people today would accept the kinds of sweeping public-health interventions that took place to stop the 1918 epidemic. These included closing schools, banning all indoor public gatherings, and forcing people to wear face masks whenever they went outside on pain of arrest if they didn’t. Metzner said that the level of trust in government was far higher in 1918 than it is today and therefore it was easier to enforce regulations like these. “The chaos surrounding Hurricane Katrina has made people in the government concerned that people won’t follow measures like closing all bars and public gatherings,” Metzner said.
He also pointed to globalization as a complicating factor; whereas most advanced countries used to produce their own medicine, today drug-making is farmed out all over the world. Tamiflu, the only drug so far proved effective against bird flu, is made in only one country — Switzerland — and the chemical components that go into it are made elsewhere and shipped there. A pandemic could get in the way of medicine production by wreaking havoc with the transportation system, and could also encourage countries to block exports of medicines in order to serve their own populations first — leaving non-producing countries like the U.S. without the drugs.
According to Metzner, governments are already spending a lot of money to develop bird flu vaccines to try to stop the epidemic before it starts — or at least slow it down and control it. The city of San Diego, cash-strapped as it is, has allocated $500 million to the San Diego Zoo to develop a response to bird flu, including draining all the ponds in the zoo and locking up their birds in indoor enclosures to keep them from contracting the disease themselves and spreading it to humans. But Metzner admitted that so far, human intervention has never stopped an incipient epidemic, and he said even ordinary seasonal flus are becoming harder to treat. He explained that last year only 10 percent of seasonal flu cases were resistant to the two most common antiviral drugs; this year it’s over 90 percent.
Metzner said a bird flu pandemic has the potential to be more deadly than the one in 1918 because “there are far more people now. Also, there are twice as many chickens and pigs in China as there were in 1918. Nobody alive today is immune to the 1918 strain and they’re making vaccines based on what they think the virus will be like.” One potentially bright spot, according to Metzner, is that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has just announced a test for bird flu that will produce results in four hours instead of two weeks.
Aguilar’s presentation was focused mainly on challenging two myths about whooping cough: that it’s strictly a disease of children, and that the standard vaccines given to most U.S. children still protect them in adulthood. Based on original research by Dr. Mark Sawyer, medical director of the County of San Diego’s immunization program, and the program’s lead nurse, Sue Hunt, his presentation focused on what pertussis is and how it can be diagnosed and treated.
“Pertussis is a bacterial infection caused by Bordatella pertussis,” Aguilar explained. “It goes into your lungs and creates a poison, a toxin, that attaches to the cilia— the little hairs that dirt and other things out of your lungs — and paralyzes them. So you cough and can’t stop, and with babies and young children there’s a distinctive ‘whooping’ sound when they catch their breaths between coughs. Adults don’t normally get that sound, so it’s often not diagnosed accurately.” The infection is characterized by a chronic cough that can last up to three and one-half months — the “hundred-day cough,” it’s often called — and the symptoms can also include vomiting, choking and loss of sleep due to continual coughing.
According to Aguilar, there’s another reason why pertussis wasn’t considered a major health threat in adults; it’s only in the last few years that scientists have discovered the immunity to it from childhood vaccinations doesn’t last into adolescence and adulthood. “Pertussis is not a ‘childhood disease,’ and it can spread quickly through the community,” he explained. “It can affect teens, adults, families and senior citizens. It’s highly contagious and is airborne through the particles that come out of your mouth when you cough.”
Aguilar said that San Diego County’s pertussis case levels have increased rapidly, from about 75 in 1997 to a spike of 225 in 2002. After a dip the next two years, they leaped again to at least 369 in 2005 — “at least,” Aguilar explained, because the records for last year are incomplete and some new cases may still be discovered. While most of the cases are in babies under six months old — Aguilar said that was because they’re too young to have been vaccinated — 23 percent of the county’s most recent cases occurred in 10- to 14-year-olds and 20 percent in adults over 30.
“The good thing about pertussis is that it’s a bacterial infection and therefore antibiotics are useful,” Aguilar said. The front-line treatment is a 14-day course of erythromycin, and if that doesn’t work there are three other drugs used in sequence: azithromycin (five days), clarithromycin (seven days) and Septra or Bactrim (14 days). So far, Aguilar said, no cases of antibiotic-resistant pertussis have been recorded. He said a pertussis vaccine for adults was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late 2005, the so-called “Tdap” booster given along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines, but people with compromised immune systems or chronic illnesses shouldn’t use it.
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