God and the Survivor - The Prayer Dilemma

Over the September 11 weekend, Terry Gross interviewed several New York City firemen who had been involved in the rescue of persons caught in the Twin Towers ten years ago. This is not the kind of program, or interview, that I would ordinarily listen to, anticipating that it would be either another occasion for patriotic flag-waving or a mawkish, self-serving tale of personal heroism. But, as it turned out, the stories of the firemen I heard were not even close to either of my narrow, prejudiced expectations.

An interview that particularly impressed me was that of Deputy Chief Jay Jonas of the New York Fire Department. A captain on 9/11, Jonas led his men up the stairs of the North Tower in an attempt to rescue people. Upon reaching the 27th floor they heard a huge roar; to get some sense of what was happening, he and one of his men left the stairway, entered the nearby floor area and went to the widows on the north and south sides of the building; there they discovered that the South Tower had collapsed. Jonas immediately directed his men to retrace their steps and get out of the building as soon as possible. Not all of the men heard his report that the other tower had collapse, so some of them were perplexed and a little irritated; after all, they hadn’t rescued anyone and they had just trudged up 27 floors with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs.

Part way down the stairway, they found Josephine Harris, who could barely walk. She was crying, and urged the firemen to go on without her. Knowing that rescuing her would slow them down and increase the chance that all die in the collapse, Jonas nonetheless decided to take her with them.

When they got to the fourth floor, the North Tower, the one from which they were trying to escape, began to collapse. (The towers were designed to fall in a catastrophic event, not like a falling tree, but in pancake fashion, floor upon floor.) Because the top of the tower where the collapse began was 1,300 feet above them (about a quarter of a mile), Jonas and his men at first could only discern a slight noise and a slight rumble. The noise, the vibration and the debris grew louder and more severe as each floor collapsed on the floor below it. Because of the tremendous force of the vibrations as the collapse proceeded, one of his men was eventually thrown two floors down the stairwell. But when the collapse reached the fifth floor, one floor above them, it suddenly stopped. There was so much debris below, there was no place for the bottom floors to collapse to. Jonas found himself trapped between the ground and the fifth floor with 12 firefighters, one port authority officer and Josephine Harris.

A short time later, a sliver of bright sunlight fell into the space in which they were trapped. It was then that Jonas realized that, standing in the stairwell near the fifth floor, he was actually standing on what had become the top of the North Tower, which had suddenly opened to the sky above. He would later realize that everyone above the fifth floor and everyone below the fourth floor had been killed. Eventually, however, Jonas, all his men, and Josephine Harris, were able to get out of the building alive.

This story was recounted by Chief Jonas in an articulate, clear, almost matter-of-fact manner, without much discernable emotion. He had a deep, resonant Irish voice, with a certain masculine vibrato to it, and he was warm and easy to listen to. But what struck me was his humility. That, too, was evident in his voice. Jonas’ humility was not prefaced upon a belief that God had bestowed some exceptional grace on him. He didn’t go on and on about how God looked down and saved him, his men, and Josephine Harris. Chief Jonas, whatever his personal religious or spiritual orientation, didn’t go there.

Here’s what he said (from the transcript):

TERRY GROSS: You say . . . that you don't like it when people say to you: You survived because God was with you. Why don't you like it when people say that?

CHIEF JONAS: Well, first of all it's a little pompous to say that you are a miracle, you know. But second of all, by them saying that God was with me that day you're also kind of saying that God was not with them that day, and that's certainly not the case.

You know, I think of the one radio transmission between Chief Pete Hayden and Captain Paddy Brown. Chief Hayden is talking to him as we're coming down the stairs and I'm hearing this over the radio. Pete Hayden is calling Captain Paddy Brown on the radio. He says Command Post to Ladder 3, get out of the building. Get out of the building. And Paddy Brown gets on the radio and he says I refuse the order, which is unbelievable, you know, that somebody would say that. He says I refuse the order. I'm up here on the 44th floor and I've got too many burnt people with me. I'm not leaving them. You know, it still sends shivers up my spine hearing that. And...

GROSS: I take it he did not survive.

JONAS: No. Paddy Brown, all the men from Ladder 3 and all the people that they were treating all died in the collapse.

One of the several things that really impressed me in this statement is that Chief Jonas implicitly expressed, if you will, a valuable insight into the meaning, and the theology, of prayer.

Years ago, I was taught as a young Catholic seminarian that there are four basic kinds of prayer: petition, contrition, thanksgiving, and adoration. They’re stated here in ascending order of inherent virtue; that is, petition, by which the person praying asks for something, is at the bottom of the list, while adoration, which has no object other than the love of God, is at the top.

Unlike prayers of penance and praise, prayers of petition and thanksgiving have a built-in problem. When we pray to God “for something,” we often, though not always, through no fault of our own, are asking God to favor us in a way that will result in his disfavoring someone else. Similarly, when our prayer is one of thanksgiving, it often entails expressing gratitude for some benefit or advantage that someone else did not receive, again often through no fault of our own.

While this view of prayer may seem blasphemous to some, to me it’s simply a reflection of sheer existential reality. It is obvious, there for all to see. Nonetheless, those who pray for favors of one kind or another surely believe their prayers will be efficacious; that is, that they will make a difference, otherwise they wouldn't pray that way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by petitioning God for some specific outcome they are asking God to “change his mind.” But if they’re not asking him to alter the course of events to coincide with the prayer, according to one well-known Catholic theologian, they are acting on the belief that “God sees everything in an eternal ‘instant,’ and that he has already factored in our prayer in determining and guiding the course of our human and personal histories.” [Fr. Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Harper Collins 1994)] Either way, they believe that their prayer did, in fact (i.e., in reality), have an effect — even if their prayer wasn’t “granted.”

That said, I don’t know if there are any theologians who share my outlook, but I do know one author and humorist: Mark Twain (no theologian, he). My outlook is much the same as that Twain hit on a century ago in his famous “The War Prayer,” written during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Of prayer, he wrote:

God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

Good examples of what I mean here abound in competitive sports. Ubiquitous in professional and college sports — football, basketball, hockey, tennis, to name a few — are the celebratory prayers offered by players after achieving some objective: scoring a touchdown, hitting a three-point shot, scoring a shot on goal, or winning a set. The players make the sign of the cross, point skyward toward god in the heavens, or go down on bended knee in prayerful submission.

But what are these athletes really saying?

It seems to me that what they’re saying goes something like this: “Thank you, God, for permitting me to intercept the opposing quarterback’s off-balance wobbly pass, for allowing my teammates to smash block into the turf those trying to tackle me, and for letting me give a stunning straight-arm into the face of the last opposing player, thus helping me run unscathed into the end zone for the touchdown.” In other words, thank you for favoring me and not my opposition, which perhaps, on paper anyway, should have won the game. The point is that, in sports there are winners and there are losers, and if God has set up a big-time win for my team, he has necessarily set up a big-time loss for the other guys.

But isn’t this the prototype for all prayers of petition and thanksgiving?

The answer, I think, is yes. It is illustrated by the parody of a prayer for soldiers as they go into battle, probably the most frequently quoted lines in "The War Prayer." Similar to athletic competition at least in this respect, war is (or used to be anyway) a one side wins/one side loses undertaking, and, as Mark Twain makes dramatically clear, prayer is thereby rendered problematic. While we might like to think a prayer for the safety and well-being of a soldier is good, kind, and compassionate — not to mention patriotic, Twain saw it in all its stripped-down horrific unpleasantness, and made it part of a forceful argument that both the Christian religion and humanism are incompatible with war.

The War Prayer begins with a brief supplication for the soldiers on our side:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

Then this, what that really means to the enemy combatants and non-combatants stated in the stark terms of what actually happens in war:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of the summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protect their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

I have a close friend, a former fundamentalist and (later) Methodist minister, who told me that lately he has become uneasy about saying grace before and after meals. Assume for the moment, he says, that the world’s food supply is finite and, as a practical matter, that at present it’s not only finite but inadequate to feed the entire world population; or, if that’s not accurate factually, that those with more than enough food simply don’t distribute their surplus effectively to those in need. In all of these scenarios, my friend feels that the clear implication of thanking god for the food we eat is to also thank him for not giving it to someone less fortunate — i.e., someone starving. He’s very much aware that today one-third of the world’s population is properly fed, one-third is under-fed, and one-third is starving. Why should he fall in the properly fed group, he wonders, as opposed to the group that is under-fed or starving? And just how can he presume to thank God for putting him in the first group rather than the last? In today’s world, only so many people can get enough food, you know. For my friend, this is a very real religious and moral dilemma.

This is precisely the dilemma Chief Jonas did not permit himself to fall into. If the fact that he survived the collapse of the North Tower was a miracle, was he to presume that his friend Captain Paddy Brown and all the others — firefighters, policemen, office workers — who didn’t make it not worthy of such a miracle? If he labeled it a miracle, he wondered, wouldn’t he have been saying just that? Wouldn’t he have been saying that he was the preferred firefighter that day? Chief Jonas had the humility to know that he was not, in fact or in spirit, or in any other way, shape or form, that day or any other day, a person preferred by God over everyone else. He just knew that.

I do not, of course, know whether Chief Jonas was or is now a “man of prayer,” as they say. That’s his business, not mine. Indeed, the way in which he approached the dilemma may be, for him, a way of praying; and then again, it may not. That, too, is his business. But I do think that if he is a man of prayer, his approach to prayer and his relationship to his God is a cut more salutary and a lot more mature, if you will, than that of most of us.

For me, however, no longer a man of prayer in the traditional religious sense, I am more than content to admire Chief Jonas, first for his courage, and then for his humility. For me personally, I don’t believe he was preferred by God, but I do feel he is inspiring as a human being.

Nice Gun You've Got There, Sir

War requires no motivation, but appears to be ingrained in human nature and is even valued as something noble.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)

To declare war “normal” does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and souls. Nor does the idea that war is normal justify it. . . . Though “war is normal” shocks our morality and wounds our idealism, it stands solidly as a statement of fact.

James Hillman (1926- )
A Terrible Love of War (2004)

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, May 21, I watched the Preakness Stakes on TV. As you know, the Preakness is the second of three horse races comprising the Triple Crown. It follows the Kentucky Derby by two weeks and precedes the Belmont Stakes by three. It takes place at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore. This year marked the 136th running of the Preakness, and it paid the winner a million dollars.

In it’s inimitable manner, each year the television networks turn the Preakness (and the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes) into a super-spectacle, the coverage beginning two or three hours before the start of the race. Every conceivable aspect of preparation is the subject of some kind of reporting, from the last workout and final bath of the favored horses to locker room interviews of the leading jockeys as they’re dressing for the race. The coverage goes on and on and on.

Everyone in the crowd of over a hundred thousand seems to enjoy the color, the exuberant atmosphere, and the sheer excitement of this esteemed race — not to mention the drinks, single malt scotch for the well-to-do, bottomless mugs of beer for the blue-collared infielders. On this warm spring afternoon, most of the folks in the wealthy seats are dressed to the hilt: the men in blue blazers or cream-colored suits and yellow ties and many of the women showing cleavage and sporting large colorful, cumbersome hats. The thoroughbred horses are some of the most beautiful animals on the face of the earth. The Preakness is a big deal for horse lovers and sports fans of all stripes, even those like me who don’t know a thing about horses or horse racing, but who nevertheless like to watch the horses and the jockeys and every year try to take in each of the three Triple Crown races.

About 30 minutes before the start of the race, Bob Costas, NBC’s premier sportscaster, stands on a dais where the winning owner will soon receive the coveted Woodlawn Vase (pronounced correctly, "Vase" rhymes with “blahs”) and where the winning horse will be draped with the traditional blanket of Black-Eyed Susans, Maryland’s state flower. Costas says something important about the race, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Later, when the time would come for presenting the Vase and the flowers, the dais would be crowded with owners, family members, the jockey, sportswriters, the Governor of Maryland, and Bob Costas. At this point, however, Bob Costas stands there by himself.

Or almost by himself. For behind him at the rear of the dais, the only other person present, is a soldier standing at rigid attention, his presence ignored by Costas. The solder’s resplendent dark blue uniform is adorned with medals and multi-colored ribbons that cover most of the left side of his chest. He also wears white gloves and a military hat with a polished black visor. I think I spotted a paratroopers’ badge pinned somewhere among his medals, but I can’t be sure. He is a handsome, African-American man. He remains stolidly expressionless and never moves a muscle. He never looks anywhere but straight ahead. In his right gloved hand, he is holding the top part of a gun, a rifle of some kind, the base of which rests on the floor of the dais. Mounted on the gun, directly in front of his chest, is a long silver-colored, shiny, bayonet. It gleams in the bright Maryland sunshine.

Taking this in, I paused and, forgetting Bob Costas, said to myself: “O.K. What’s wrong with this picture? What the hell is a guy with a gun and a bayonet doing smack in the middle of a frigging horse race?”

Well, I thought, you can bet he isn’t there to protect anyone, certainly not Bob Costas. And he isn’t there to protect any particular thing, not even the Woodlawn Vase. They have security people to do things like that, guys in plain dark suits and sunglasses, guys that aren’t exactly known for walking around carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. He is there, I concluded, as a symbol, as a slick and subtle reminder that we Americans are warriors, that we’re a nation of warriors.

Oh, my. A warrior nation? Yep, that's right. Think about it. We Americans have a non-stop torrid love affair with war. We can hardly do without it; we are the military-industrial complex par excellence. It's become so commonplace that we don't realize it, but the fact is that we’ve been at war continuously for the past 70 years and we don’t show signs of stopping. As the Indian writer Arundhati Roy noted soon after we invaded Iraq: “Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan.” [Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Cambridge 2003)].

I mean, really. A gun and a bayonet at a horse race?

"Alternatives to Waterboarding"

On Thursday, May 12, the Traverse City Record-Eagle ran a political cartoon on its editorial page as it does most every day. The cartoon, entitled “Alternatives to Waterboarding,” depicts a hooded person bound to a chair being interrogated by two military-type men, apparently American soldiers. The two interrogators are positioned on either side of the prisoner, one sitting and one standing. A single light bulb, hanging from a cord above the prisoner, illuminates the prisoner and one of the interrogators; the other stands in the shadows. The standing interrogator holds a hand puppet in the shape of a small rabbit or bunny with long ears and a funny face.

The sitting interrogator says this to the prisoner: “OK Muhammad — If you don’t tell us about the next terrorist plot I’ll instruct Mr. Bunny to zubber your tummy.” The cartoon was created by Brian Fairrington and apparently syndicated by Dayrl Cagle’s Political Cartoon Index. It may be viewed at: http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons-/PCcartoons-/fairrington.asp.

After thinking about the cartoon and discussing it with some friends, I wrote Mr. Fairrington the following email message on Monday, May 16:

Mr. Fairrington -

Your cartoon, "Alternatives to Waterboarding" appeared in the Traverse City Record-Eagle on Thursday, May 12. Perhaps there's an irony we missed, but my friends and I were appalled at the message you appeared to communicate. For one thing, the cartoon is racially and religiously offensive, and for another it exalts torture.

Did we miss something? If not, your cartoon conveys about as stupid a message as we can imagine.

Steve Morse

Later that day, I received the following reply from Mr. Fairrington:

OK, so you disagree with the premise of the cartoon. However, I fail to see how the cartoon is "racially and religiously offensive.." Can you explain this?

Soon after that, I replied to Mr. Fairrington as follows:

It's racially and religiously offensive because it uses a captive named "Muhammad" as a stereotypical terrorist. Muhammad is the founder of the religion of Islam and is considered by Muslims to be a messenger and prophet of God, on the one hand, and the name "Muhammad" is very common in the Islamic and Arab Middle East and throughout the world, on the other.

Yes, I do disagree with your premise that torture is just fine. — "I'll tell Mr. Bunny to zubber your tummy?" Whew.

I heard nothing further from Mr. Fairrington.

Had Mr. Fairrington inquired regarding the cartoon’s potential for irony, I would have replied that had it been so intended, the irony would have been in the depiction of the two interrogators as complete idiots (fat, big noses, shaved heads, etc.). They could easily be said to fit “Abu Gharib”-types — dopey, domineering, and morally depraved. The message, then, would have been that anyone who considers waterboarding anything other than a form of torture and talks of “zubber[ing] your tummy” as a legitimate alternative interrogation technique is indeed stupid.

But there was no irony. As Mr. Fairrington revealed, there was nothing ironical about his depiction of the interrogators. It was intended to say just what it appeared to say. It was straightforward and, well, according to him, accurate. Apparently he intended to portray American interrogators as torturers (and stupid ones at that), to compare waterboarding to playing with bathtub toys, and to depict persons with names like "Muhammad" as stereotypical terrorists.

All of which, of course, is nonsense. As for stereotypes, they're just that, nothing more; and often as not, they're wrong. The writer-comedian Lance Crouther once said: "There's a stereotype that black people are lazy. I don't know if that's true, but I know that a lot of white people went all the way to Africa to get out of doing work."

So Much for the News Today, April 29, 2011

The Business Section of the Record-Eagle today carried three main stories. First, Exxon’s profits in the first quarter of 2011 are up 69 percent, by nearly $11 billion. The nation’s second largest oil company, Chevron Corporation, is expected to announce a 25 percent increase in profits to $5.69 billion for the same period. The article also noted that the price of a gallon of gas is now above $4 in eight states and the District of Columbia. Second, Chrysler is set to repay $7.5 billion in bailout money received from the U.S. and Canadian governments. The payments will be made from a refinancing arrangement involving new bank loans and a bond sale that will take place later this year. Finally, Dow Chemical has reported a first quarter increase of 34 percent in net income over last year on revenue that increased 10 percent to $14.73 billion during the first three months of the year.

In Michigan news, after “an hour of spirited debate,” the Michigan House of Representatives voted to slash business taxes by $1.7 billion over the next two years “while shifting the burden to seniors, children and the poor.” “Instead of paying about $2 billion annually into the state’s general fund,” the article continued, “businesses would pay about $300 million. Only about a third of businesses would pay the corporate income tax. Businesses would continue to pay property taxes.” The vote was 56-53 along party lines, although six Republicans voted against it. (All three Republican representatives from our general area voted for it.) The bill, pushed by Governor Snyder, now goes to the GOP-led Senate.

Meanwhile, on the front page, the Record-Eagle reported that the Grand Traverse Board of Commissioners changed their minds and voted to reverse an earlier decision to yank 22 parking meters from in front of the Government Center. A week before the meters had been ordered removed on the motion of Commissioner Dick Thomas after he had been ticketed for a parking violation.

Our legislators at work for us. Right?

Not.

High School Drug Sweeps: Legal? A Good Idea?

On November 18 at the Library in Traverse City, the ACLU of Northwest Michigan presented a lecture on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The speaker was Mark Fancher, a staff attorney and director of the ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Work Group which in 2009 issued a report entitled, “Reclaiming Michigan’s Throwaway Kids: Students Trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

After the lecture, I was approached by a parent of a student at Traverse City Central High School on a related subject. I was asked if I had heard about the “drug sweep” that had taken place at the school the day before. I had not. The man said that though his daughter had not been “busted,” he wondered whether such a sweep, conducted with drug-sniffing dogs, was legal.

Reading about it in the paper the following morning, I guessed that this parent’s question might be one on the mind of many other parents, students, and interested members of the community. Here is the answer.

Searches of students by school officials on school property are governed, like all searches, by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That Amendment does not prohibit all searches, only those that are “unreasonable.” An illegal search occurs “when an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable is infringed.” The starting point, of course, is that there must be what the courts consider to be an actual “search.”

The current state of the law is that a dog sniff of an inanimate object is not a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. For example, the Supreme Court has held that the use of a trained canine to sniff unattended luggage is not a search. It is different, however, when dogs are used to sniff a person’s body, mainly because the level of intrusiveness is greater (as everyone knows, dogs often sniff parts of the body that cause personal embarrassment, and some persons have an irrational fear of dogs). Moreover, people naturally consider their own bodies to be private — private to them — and they feel that expectation of privacy should be respected by others, most certainly by government authorities (including police and school officials).

Many “drug sweeps” conducted in school buildings are thus permissible under the Constitution because they are conducted by drug-sniffing dogs of school lockers, previously detached backpacks, and cars parked in school parking lots, and not of a student’s person. With respect to student lockers, courts have generally held that they belong to the school and therefore students do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy for items stored in them. And with respect to backpacks, students cannot be ordered to remove them from their person in order that the dogs can sniff them; that would violate their Fourth Amendment rights.

That’s a general statement of the law: the drug sweep at Central High School was probably legal. But was it a good idea?

As Mark Fancher made clear in his talk last week, the “school-to-prison pipeline” is a disorder in our educational system, currently of epidemic proportions, that is the result of a number of factors, one of which is the criminalization of students. Many persons my age and younger went through their entire 12 years of public education without ever experiencing the presence of police officers in the school building; today, that experience is commonplace and, as the ACLU report indicates, the police are often called in to handle what were once considered routine disciplinary matters. As Traverse City police Captain Steve Morgan told the Record-Eagle, “Usually the schools will request [a drug sweep] once or twice a year. We never go unless the school officials request us. We’ve probably been to all the area secondary schools at one time or another.”

But what exactly is the effect on the students, whether or not they are busted? Does it encourage trust and respect between students and teachers, between students and administrators, between young people and the police? What does it feel like when you’re 16 years old to be treated much like a criminal — which is to say, to be ordered around by police officers and to have your locker, your backpack, or your vehicle randomly searched without your permission?

Apart from the anger and resentment it likely caused, was the drug sweep cost effective? At Central High last week there were police officers and police dogs from three counties effecting a lock down, disrupting classes and interfering with other activities — for what? The paper reported that the sweep netted one arrest: one student was charged with possessing about two grams of marijuana. Though the belongings of every student may not have been searched, it still amounted to one arrest in a student body of 1,500. One out of 1,500 (an arrest percentage of 0.067%) is not a particularly good effectiveness indicator, is it? Now I’m not so naive to assume that none of the students at Central High ever uses marijuana, but it’s also clear that the school does not have a widespread, over-the-top drug problem on its hands either. Simply put, it was not a good use of taxpayer money.

Nelson Mandela said: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Think about it, administrators, teachers, and parents at Central High School. You can bet the students are.



[Note: The 74-page report of the Racial Justice Work Group of the ACLU of Michigan is available for downloading at www.aclumich.org.]

Department of Hilarious Moments:Maintaining a Sense of Humor in Difficult Times

The well-known and well-respected war correspondent, Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times on Tuesday of this past week, reported on the secret talks that have been going on for the last three months between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war in Afghanistan. The talks seemed to be showing promise, Filkins wrote, “if only because of the repeated appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Askhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.”

Mr. Mansour was considered so critical to the success of the talks that NATO and Afghan officials held three meetings with him, he was flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and taken to the presidential palace for an official audience with President Hamid Karzai and, to top it off, he was given “a sizeable sum of money to take part in the talks — and to help persuade him to return.” (The amount is estimated to have been in the low six figures.) Even General Petraeus was on board, commenting favorably on the progress the talks were making with his participation, and Mr. Filkens himself was cautioned not to reveal the presence of Mr. Mansour at the negotiations for security reasons.

Then something strange and unexpected happened. At a recent meeting in Kandahar a man who knew Mr. Mansour personally was brought into the negotiating room and given a seat at the table. What followed probably went something like this:

The NATO official said to the man, “Please present yourself to Mr. Mansour.”

“Fine,” he replied, “but where’s Mr. Mansour?”

“He’s right there. He’s seated across from you.”

“Er, no, sir, he’s not. That’s not Mr. Mansour. I’ve never seen that man before. I don’t know who he is.”

[The reaction of the NATO official has not been released and is considered classified.]

There you have it. As it turned out, Mullalh Askhtar Muhammad Mansour was not really Mullah Askhtar Muhammad Mansour after all.

Dexter Filkins was thus compelled to conclude: “In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.”

Well, okay, you say, but what happened to the imposter after his cover was blown? The answer: to complete this military version of the keystone cops, somehow the guy was left unattended and he simply walked back over the border into Pakistan into the mountains from whence he came. Nobody (on our side) knows where he is — or, for that matter, who he is.

After the fact, an unnamed Western diplomat said, “It’s funny but not funny because the consequences are so staggering.”

To the contrary, I know full well that these negotiations were at least thought to have been important stuff, but come on, you all, we have to admit it — this episode in the war in Afghanistan is totally, flat-out hilarious.

Sources: Dexter Filkins, “Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor: Setback in NATO Effort: Man Purporting to Be Insurgents’ No. 2 Got Western Money,” New York Times A1 (November 23, 2010); Maureen Dowd, “The Great Game Imposter,” New York Times A23 (November 24, 2010).

Elect This Man!

I welcomed the news that a man by the name of Jason Gillman is running for the Grand Traverse County Commission. Jason, it appears, is a Republican and “a Tea Party activist.” Recently, he turned his attention to what is known as the state’s “Bridge Card” program which provides food assistance to the poor.

Jason doesn’t like the program. “The shame is the overall mismanagement of the environment that Michigan’s in,” he said. “A little too much government involvement has caused what we’re in.” More specifically, Jason says that “I don’t think folks should be buying soda.”

For the moment, forget that 6,117 residents of Grand Traverse County, Jason’s constituency, depend on the program. Forget that over the past year those enrolled in our five-county area increased by 33%, and that the number enrolled in Leelanau County alone, where I live, increased by 47%. Forget that unemployment rates soared this year in the region (the rate in Grand Traverse County jumped from 11.6% in 2009 to 12.4% this year, and reached 14.9% in Benzie County this summer). Forget that nationally the ranks of the long-term unemployed exploded by over 400% - from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million last June. Forget that in 2008-09 median household incomes plummeted in Michigan a whopping 6.9%, which was more than twice the national average of minus 2.9% and greater than any other state. Forget that the co-chairman of Food Rescue of Northwest Michigan said recently that "there doesn't seem to be a limit to the need." Forget that a Kingsley woman told the Record-Eagle that, without the Bridge Card program, “We wouldn’t make it. I wouldn’t be able to feed my kids.” Just forget all that.

Jason’s political and economic ideology provides that the poor should be reduced to and assisted only at a subsistence level, if at all. They shouldn’t have old televisions, worn-out electrical appliances, beat-up cars, decent clothing, or adequate health care. Or, for that matter, enough to eat.

But Jason’s over-the-top really brilliant idea was captured in the following report in Sunday’s Record-Eagle: “Gillman would rather see more people go to work and fewer rely on state assistance.”

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that by now someone else would have thought of that! I mean, really. Like most Tea Partiers, hey, this guy Jason is a frigging genius!

So don’t waste a moment, Grand Traverse County! Get him on board the County Commission! Vote for Jason Gillman!