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They only stone you if you confess

14 Nov

One of the worst qualities of the human species is its dastardly view of competing tribes.

For some reason, there is comfort in thinking that those outside the circle are monstrous barbarians capable of and responsible for numerous and unspeakable atrocities.

Get in close with these devils, however, and you generally find they are just like you; decent, with families and a respect for routine, calmness and peace.

To see things clearly, it helps to remember there are monstrous barbarians among all groups, but they are misfits who do not represent the norm.

A foreigner reading history may learn about the epidemic of lynching in America, but if he visited my town he would find no one there was involved in such things, or even capable of them.

Would he be surprised?

Recently I read an article that a group in Egypt is clamoring for sharia law. In random thought I wondered how many who advocate this form of Islamic governance really want to cut off someone’s hand for stealing bread. Most Americans, I’m sure, will think everyone who wants sharia supports cutting off the hands of thieves, as well as death by stoning for women who have committed adultery.

Perhaps I am both ignorant and naïve, but I would guess they don’t.

My guess is sharia brings comfort, predictability and harmony to the lives of devout Muslims; just as the 10 Commandments and Biblical law do for reverent Christians. I do know that in secular countries, Muslims use sharia on their own to settle family and business matters – without hurting anyone.

From what I now understand, sharia – like our own laws – is open to interpretation. In other words, there are ways around stoning and dismemberment.

And even if there is to be stoning and dismemberment, they cannot be administered on a whim.  There are rules and conditions.

For example, a Muslim woman can only be stoned for adultery if she either confesses or there are four male witnesses who saw the act being committed.

Is either likely?

The hand of a thief cannot be cut off if public property was taken, or if he stole because he was hungry or under duress. The stolen items cannot belong to his or her family, must be over a minimum value, and cannot have been taken from a public place. Also there must be reliable witnesses.

In short, there are fudge factors here.

I believe in secular law. Still, I’d like to understand how Islamic culture works among civilized people. I don’t understand sharia but am open to learning more.

Aside from the rare man willing to kill or maim his wife on any given day – and we have plenty of them in the U.S. – I don’t think Muslims routinely seek blood for justice.

Does anyone agree?

–By Lanny Morgnanesi

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Something I Learned Today

12 Nov

At a Veterans Day service, members from each branch of the military spoke. Each read from a military code then stood erect while the song of their particular service played.

The person from the Coast Guard said his branch is perhaps the least understood. He told the audience that the Coast Guard began as two separate, unrelated units and then later united.

One unit’s role was rescue. Members would row out to sinking ships and pick up sailors. The ships usually were caught in a storm, so the rowing was not all that easy. A great deal of bravery was involved.

The second unit used fast sailing vessels to catch smugglers and people trying to beat the government out of tariffs and duties.

When the Coast Guard formed, two very distinct and different missions were combined – life saving and law enforcement.

To this day, when you enlist in the Coast Guard, you immediately are empowered as a federal agent.

And that’s what I learned today.

–By Lanny Morgnanesi

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Afghanistan: Will lessons be learned?

13 Oct

When the war in Afghanistan started 11 years ago, I got a haircut.

My barber was a former Russian intelligence officer who served his country in Afghanistan. I wanted him to assess America’s chances.

“We leveled the place,” he said. “We turned it into a parking lot. We destroyed it. We did everything we could, and we still lost. You will, too.”

Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan, after an attack on a camel caravan from Pakistan

There was a time when the United States, for the sake of its image, could not leave a conflict without winning. Politicians refused to be blamed for a lost war. In the Vietnam era, with that war’s purpose forgotten and everyone tired of the slaughter, there were government recommendations to “declare victory and leave.”

Which is pretty much what President Nixon did.

We seem to have progressed since then and no longer require victory in war or even face saving. After $500 billion and 2,000 lives, our role in Afghanistan is ending. There will be no “Mission Accomplished” banners. Some who fought there aren’t even sure what the mission was.

But we still retain this idea that well-armed, well-financed invaders can defeat a local population that doesn’t want to be occupied and has a history of expelling invaders by simply not giving up.

Some in Washington, for sure, would like another test in Iran.

The United States attained its freedom by fighting a guerrilla war against a powerful, well-trained, well-armed, advanced nation. Yet we fail to recognize the power of the underdog or even devise the proper tactics against him.

Better to take the advice in a New York Times review of the book, THE GREAT GAMBLE: The Soviet War in Afghanistanby Gregory Feifer:

“Never underestimate fanatics who know the terrain.”

Now, with a lot less money to spend on arbitrary wars, we may finally take that lesson to heart.

By Lanny Morgnanesi

 

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God and Man on a Visit To Russia

8 Sep

I like to think of Jesus as a man so I can marvel at his God-like brilliance and ability to see and express truth.

If you think of him as God, then his acts and works would not necessarily be worthy of attention. Pavarotti, after all, received no praise for humming a pop tune, nor Einstein for giving correct change to the paperboy.

A god can easily transform water to wine; it is much more difficult for a man.

For me, one of Jesus’ greatest moments was when he was approached by spies trying to trick him into sedition. They coyly ask if it was acceptable to pay tribute to Caesar. Jesus, quick on his feet, asked them to produce a coin, which carried Caesar’s image.

Then came the unforgettable, genius response: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

In my last post I mentioned a rabbi named Joseph Krauskopf and his visit to Tolstoy in 1894. Today I’d like to discuss Krauskopf and his response when Tolstoy asked him about Jesus.

The intelligence and poetry of the answer brought to mind the “render” response.

In Russia at that time, Jews knew little of Jesus and those familiar with him cared not much for him. But Krauskopf struck Tolstoy as a different breed. The American rabbi from Philadelphia was an early member of the reformed movement and, among other things, advocated moving the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday as a way to bring Christians and Jews together.  He believed that all religions – including his own — contained good and bad, and that the good should be practiced and the bad eradicated.

Some Jews, I’m sure, refused to consider Krauskopf a Jew.

“What is your belief respecting Jesus?” Tolstoy asked.

Krauskopf told the writer, “I regard the Rabbi of Nazareth as one of the greatest of Israel’s teachers and leaders and reformers, not as a divine being who lived and taught humanly but as a human being who lived and taught divinely.”

Can we safely say that he who lives divinely is divine?

Sometimes we allow words and their interpretation to muddle or even destroy something that in its raw form and on its own is simply and clearly exceptional.

I would love to hear from others, Christians and Jews, on Krauskopf’s statement about Jesus.

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Tolstoy, who wrote of aristocracy, had much in common with the Occupy movement

5 Sep

My work recently brought me to the writings of a reformed rabbi named Dr. Joseph Krauskopf. He lived around the turn of the 20th century. While not well-known today, he was friends with presidents and world leaders during his day.

In today’s light it is easy to categorize him as a visionary and possibly a radical. What may be truer is that free thinking and free speech flourished more then than now, and that others at the time were expressing similar ideas – equality and dignity for all, women’s rights, the end of poverty, a government hand in the inspection of food and housing, world peace.

In 1894 Krauskopf traveled to Russia and met with Count Leo Tolstoy, known now as a great novelist; known then as an incredibly influential, larger-than-life, cultish leader of humanists. Krauskopf, in utter awe of the man, recorded every facet of the meeting. The account is fascinating and revealing. In one exchange, the Russian asks the rabbi if he had read “What to Do,” a work of non-fiction by Tolstoy calling for the liberation of the oppressed.

Krauskopf had not, but said he did read “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.”

Tolstoy, according to Krauskopf, described those books as trash and said he would prefer if the world instead read his “serious writings.”

But what I really want to report here is Tolstoy’s timeless description of the United States and its faults.

“You call yourselves a republic; you are worse than an autocracy. I say worse because you are ruled by gold, and gold is more conscienceless, and therefore more tyrannical, than any human tyrant. Your intentions are good; your execution is lamentable. Were yours the free and representative government you pretend to have, you would not allow it to be controlled by the money powers and their hirelings, the bosses and machines, as you do.”

I wish someone would read this from the podium at the Democratic National Convention, or from any podium for that matter.

What are your thoughts?

— Lanny Morgnanesi

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As its old enemy grows weak and it grows strong, China hasn’t forgotten World War II

23 Aug

Almost 11 years have passed and the war in Afghanistan is still a war. It has helped drain the treasury of a nation that doesn’t want to pay taxes.

An even bigger threat to that treasury and to global peace is occurring thousands of miles away in the Pacific. Its roots are deep, dating at least to 1937, when Japan invaded China.

The Chinese of today look at Americans and wonder how we can be friends with the Germans and the Japanese. We’ve forgotten World War II. They haven’t. Their country was occupied. Ours was not.

The hate never dissipated.

Around 1985, Chinese consumers were getting their first chances to buy televisions. Many were imported from Japan. Many didn’t work right. True or not, the perception was that Japan was dumping its faulty products on China. As the TVs failed, anger rose, then raged. Demonstrations were held to criticize the government for allowing this to happen and for being a party to this loss of face.

The protests continue.

E-mail has been circulating all over China calling for the boycott of Japanese products. One complaint in the e-mail is that the bosses of Japanese companies in China treat their Chinese employees like dogs. Beneath that remains the revulsion of doing business with a nation that murdered millions of Chinese and committed vicious, wide-scale atrocities that included massive gang rapes and burying people alive.

Americans don’t realize it, but almost 90 percent of Japan’s fighting forces in World War II were in China, not the islands we fought over.

While powerful back then, the Japanese of today are struggling to recover from a lengthy economic malaise.  As they do, they watch China grow wealthy and strong. Out of frustration, a bunch of them jumped in boats last weekend and landed on an Island that China claims. They planted Japanese flags.

This lit a fuse back in China, and several thousand took to the streets in protest.

All very interesting, and right now harmless. If, however, these skirmishes escalates and Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan also feel threatened, the U.S. could be lured in.

Anticipating the future, our presence in the Pacific already has grown. If the events of last week continue, it is likely to grow further.

Will there be a dialogue or will it just happen? In such a case, Americans will have to ask themselves: Is this our role, and are we willing to pay for it?

 

I think debate is needed now, while it is only pleasure craft and civilians taking over disputed islands, while decisions on budgets and taxes are still pending, and while national lunacy is still treatable.

This one could make Afghanistan look like a street fight.

Lanny Morgnanesi

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The day Elvis died — my story

18 Aug

 

Elvis Presley died 35 years ago on Aug. 16, 1977. It’s a day I’ll never forget.

I’d like to tell the story of that day. It involved a nearly naked lady who said she knew Elvis and pleaded with me to help her.

I rose early that morning, my first as a reporter for a suburban Philadelphia newspaper. As I shaved, I listened to the radio.  A contemporary rock station was playing an old Elvis song, which was odd, since he was pretty much a forgotten relic by then. Then there was another Presley tune, and another.

Within moments I learned from the DJ that the King had died. I thought that sad, since he had been so great and influenced so many, but I moved on. Bigger things awaited me. I was a journalist now.

No sooner had I settle into my desk than the phone rang. Pretty cool, I thought. Someone knows I’m here.

“Are you a reporter?” a woman on the line asked.

Not a good first call. From that one sentence I could tell she was drunk and high.

“Yes, I’m a reporter,” I said. “How can I help you?”

She threw a bunch of nonsense at me then said, “Please make them stop. I don’t want any of their money. I don’t want anything. Please make them stop and leave me alone.”

She sounded truly upset.

“Don’t want any of whose money?” I asked.

“Elvis’. I don’t want anything. Can you tell them that?

I was on the verge of hanging up.

“Tell who?” I asked.

“I don’t know. His lawyers. They keep threatening me,” she said.

This was all quite ridiculous but I kept talking because I had nothing else to do that morning and maybe there was a local angle to Elvis’ death. That would play well in the next day’s paper.

“Why would they threaten you?”

“They think I’m coming after their money because I had Elvis’ child. But I’m not. I don’t want the money.”

That busted the wacko meter.

“Look,” I said. “I have to go.”

She raised the level of her lethargic monotone.

“No, don’t go. You’re the only one who can help. Come visit me and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

There was more pleading, and I took her address. I told my boss what I was doing and where I was going. He laughed and looked at me with a combination of pity and loathing.

The woman’s working-class neighborhood was only a few minutes away. It had small houses but everything was neat and well-kept. Then I came upon a lawn that hadn’t been mowed for months. There were two cars up on blocks and several of the home’s shutters were hanging off the windows.

Unsurprisingly, this was the home of my caller.

I knocked on the door.

The woman who opened it looked like a zombie, with vacant eyes and blotchy skin and messy long hair. Her body, however, was magnificent. I knew that because I could see it.  All of it. She was wearing a nightgown as sheer as cellophane.

“Come in,” she said.

The immediate question to myself was: Do I stay or go?

My racing mind told me there was trouble ahead but also that this probably would never happen again for as long as I lived.

I would stay.

She pulled me in, sat me down, encircled me with vine-like arms and began kissing me with her putrid mouth.

After some difficulty, I pulled her off.

“I came here for a story,” I said, knowing there most definitely was not one. “Let’s hear your story.”

“Would you like a drink?” she said.

It was 10 a.m.

“No. Just tell me your story. Tell me about Elvis.”

And she proceeded to tell about where and how they met; the liking he took to her; how he came onto her strongly and how she yielded simply because he was Elvis.

“Do you have photos of you and him together?”

“Not really,” she said, walking over to a cabinet. “Just these, from about that time.”

They were photos of her, younger and very beautiful. She looked just like Priscilla.

“What happened since then?” I asked.

“This,” she said, turning the back of her neck to me and pulling up her hair to reveal a large surgical X. “I had an accident and an operation.”

I should have pursued this but didn’t.

“So you say you had a son with Elvis. Do you have his picture?

She did, a number of them.

In each and every one he looked just like a teen Elvis. Remarkable. It was starting to seem as if there might be some truth to all this.

As we continued to speak about the threatening calls, an uncomfortable noise came from the bedroom.

We were not alone.

Then he emerged. Zombie Number 2.

Beer can in hand, having probably digested a few Quaaludes (very popular at the time), a boy who could have been 18 or 15 shuffled out slowly like Frankenstein’s monster. His face was swollen, marked and bruised.

He never lifted his feet; he just slid them along. He looked straight ahead and not off to the side at us. But when he reached the spot where we were, he paused and ratcheted his head toward me.

“Are you the reporter?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well . . . I just want you to know  . . . that I’m not f—- her.”

Then he screamed and nearly cried, “But her old man thought I was and he beat the shit out of my face with a flashlight.”

Silence took over the room.

Then the boy said to me quietly, “You know . . . there’s something going on here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

Then, with utter contempt and a snarl he said, “You don’t know.”

Silence again.

It was broken by a knock on the door. I had been on an edgy alert the whole time but this sent me into an adrenaline-laced panic. My assumption was the woman’s husband had returned, armed this time with more than a flashlight.

I packed up my notepad and chose the window out of which I would jump.

The knocking continued. It was ignored by both boy and woman, as if it wasn’t there.

Finally, the door opened and a weak female voice was heard.

“Jimmy? Jimmy? Are you there?”

Jimmy’s mother stepped into the house. She was as frightened as I.

“Jimmy, it’s time to go. We are going now. Let’s go.”

He stayed put but she grabbed his arm and tugged and tugged and got him out the door.

I was right behind.

Back in the newsroom, I set my stuff down and planned to tell the story to my editor. Before I could, the phone rang.

“Is this Lanny, the reporter?”

“Yes,” surprised that my name was known.

“You don’t know me,” the male voice said. “I’ll admit this is kind of a strange call, but you may be the only person who can help me.”

Two in one day!

“How?” I asked.

“Listen, I’m not crazy or weird. I’m an actor in New York who is just trying to make a living. Things were going OK then all of a sudden there is this talk up here about me being Elvis’ son. Do you know anything about that?”

The weird had become bizarre.

“I might. But not much.”

Pause . . .

“Do you know my mother?” he asked.

“I think I just left her house.”

“What did she look like?”

I figured I would lie, but for some reason quickly changed my mind and asked, “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes,” he said.

So I told him, and not gently.

“Well, she was very high and she was very drunk.”

“That’s my mother,” he said.

We spoke a little longer and I took his number. I said I would call if I learned anything new.

At that point I stopped reporting and dropped the whole story. I was curious, but this wasn’t journalism. I had real work to do. I went over and told the tale to my editor, who gathered a crowd and made me tell it again. I must have told it five or six times that day, and many times after.

Of course, I never wrote a word of it for the paper, and the mystery of what really happened was never solved. I did call the police and told them what I had witnessed. They told me they knew about her. That’s how it was in those days. People knew, but not much was done.

About a week later I was leaving the newsroom to go out on a story. Normally I would leave by the rear entrance, but this day I went out the front, near the reception area. As I did, a visitor called my name.

“Lanny. Is that you?”

She was wearing clothes this time and was completely sober.

I was assaulted again by those vine-like arms and she tried to kiss me. I pulled away.

“You are gay. Aren’t you?” she said.

When I returned from my story I asked the person at the reception desk, “What was that woman doing here?”

“She placed a classified ad.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.”

It read:

“To the lawyers, representatives and family of Elvis Presley. I make no claims whatsoever to the estate of the deceased performer.”

***

EPILOGUE

Everything written here is true and exactly as it occurred. Had I intended this to be a fabrication I would have devised a better ending. The only untruth is the lie that this was my first day on the job. Actually, I had been a reporter for two years and possessed a master’s in journalism. I should have known better than to waste time on that crank call.

But had I acted wiser and more professionally, I would not have had this story to tell.

On the 35 anniversary of his death, may he rest in peace, Elvis Aaron Presley, and may all his children, however many there are, find happiness and success.

— Lanny Morgnanesi

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Go here to see your comrades in a bathing suit

22 Jul

There is a coastal beach resort in China called Beidaihe.  It’s  a summer retreat for top Communist officials. While vacationing, they seek alliances and plan political strategy for their big fall conference.

The resort was featured in a New York Times story today. It brought back memories because I once was there.

Years ago, before China got rich, I was living and working in Beijing. I traveled extensively in China and Beidaihe was the first town I visited that made me feel as if I were no longer in China.

Beidaihe may  have been somewhat seedy. but it was also bright, colorful and cheerful.  I liked it very much. In a way, it reminded me of the Jersey Shore.

At that time, few Chinese went on vacations. Evidence of this was the little stands in Beidaihe where visitors could rent bathing suits for the day. The women’s suits, if I recall, were very modest and dowdy.

The Times story points out that Beidaihe is known for political intrigue. The town is connected to the tale of Lin Baio, a top leader that some expected to replace Mao Zedong. Indeed, Mao is said to have sanctioned the succession by publicly telling Lin, “With you in charge, I’m at ease.”

But it was determined later that Lin may have been planning a coup. He tried to escape to Russia in a plane from Beidaihe. The plane crashed and all were killed. To this day, many consider the crash suspicious.

So, while in China, it was a common joke among the foreign workers to voice support for each other with the ironic, “With you in charge, I’m at ease.”

It always got a laugh.

I wish I could use it in the states, but it just won’t work.

Anyway, that’s my little story about Beidaihe.

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The very first iPad was made of wax

21 Jul

Antiquity is full of surprises and incredible technological wonders. It’s a shame to think how many have been forgotten or lost.

My surprise of the day came from learning that the ancient Greeks and Romans carried a portable, reusable tablet that was their equivalent of the iPad. It had two wood-framed pages that could be folded like a book. The pages were coated in wax, and writing was done with a wooden stylus.

To reuse, the wax pages were heated slightly and then smoothed over.

This was literally a “tabula rasa,” the cute Latin term used today to describe a blank slate or a person without preconceived ideas. There are references to such tablets in Homer and the device may date to the 14th century B.C. It is believed they were used by the Greeks and Romans and in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine. Evidence of them can be found up until the Middle Ages.

They ancients never lacked for technology and engineering.  They just did it differently; sometimes better. Our 20-year old highways may be crumbling, but the Roman aqueducts still stand.

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Sicily – Where A Single Onion was Lunch

26 May

Towns like these were left nearly empty by starving peasants who left for America.

By Lanny Morgnanesi

I’ve been paging through a 1992 book by Jerre Mongione and Ben Morreale called, “La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience.” In it, I learned something about blacks in the American South – mainly that Sicilians in Southern Italy may have had it worse.

By the year 1930, more than 4.5 million Italians had immigrated to the United States. When that many people leave a small country, the clear indication is that life there must be unbearable.

Still, there always are mixed feelings about leaving home.

During this era of the Great Departure, when there weren’t many people left in Sicily, village children would sing this in the streets:

Give me a hundred lire

And I’m off to America

Goddamn America

And the man who thought it up.

While America hasn’t always been the best place for some, there was never any measurable movement out. A huge migration occurred when industrialization in the North attracted blacks from the South, but the victims of segregation, discrimination and lynchings didn’t flee the country in vast numbers. Back to Africa movements never caught on.

In their prologue, Mangione and Morreale quote Booker T. Washington, an influential African-American leader from 1890 to 1915, who said this after visiting Italy:

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

It would seem that America, by comparison, is such a land of bounty that there is something even for those at the bottom. In Italy, the trickle down may have stopped way short of the bottom.

“La Storia” said that peasants who farmed other people’s land constantly battled starvation; that there just wasn’t enough food for them. After working hard in the fields, lunch, if there was lunch, often was a piece of bread and an onion. The book says that the new Italian immigrants in America took so well to cooking because food was something new and exciting for them.

I wish readers would share their thoughts on this one. Upon reading it, it was all new to me.


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