Edwin Fothingham

August 11, 2005
She’s So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

THE woman’s long black hair whipped across her pale face as she danced to punk rock at the bar. She seemed to be the life of the party. Little did she know that she was igniting a girl crush. Susan Buice was watching, and she was smitten.

Ms. Buice, 26, and the dancer (actually a clothing designer) happen to live in the same Brooklyn apartment building, so Ms. Buice, a filmmaker, was later able to soak up many other aspects of her neighbor’s gritty yet feminine style: her layered gold necklaces; her fitted jackets; her dark, oversize sunglasses; and her Christian Dior perfume.

“I’m immediately nervous around her,” Ms Buice said. “I stammer around her, and it’s definitely because I think she’s supercool.”

Ms. Buice, who lives with her boyfriend, calls her attraction a girl crush, a phrase that many women in their 20′s and 30′s use in conversation, post on blogs and read in magazines. It refers to that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished. And while a girl crush is, by its informal definition, not sexual in nature, the feelings that it triggers – excitement, nervousness, a sense of novelty – are very much like those that accompany a new romance.

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What’s new is the current generation’s willingness to express their ardor frankly.

“Historically, talking about these kinds of feelings has gone in and out of fashion,” said Paula J. Caplan, a sociologist who this fall will teach a course about the psychology of sex and gender at Harvard. Women have not been this blunt in expressing their crushes for several generations, Dr. Caplan said.

The phenomenon has been little studied, but some social scientists say they are glad that it is being discussed more, because it can be a window into how women mature emotionally.

“It’s a little bit like when you’re in elementary school and you first fall in love with someone,” said Leslie Hunt, 34, who manages an arts internship program in New York and who once had such a potent crush on woman that she became sweaty in her presence.

Still, a crush is a relatively mild form of infatuation. People have killed themselves over true love, said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on human love. Think of Romeo and Juliet. With a girl crush, Dr. Fisher said, “you won’t kill yourself if she doesn’t want to jump rope with you.” For that reason, girl crushes can give women safe and valuable experience in the emotions of love.

Dr. Fisher, the author of “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love,” said girl crushes are as natural as any other kind of love. But they are romantic without being sexual. Love and lust are distinct urges, Dr. Fisher said.

This was one of the findings she and colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the State University at Stony Brook made when they analyzed brain scans of people 18- to 26-years-old who were experiencing new love. Love and lust, it turned out, could be mapped to several separate parts of the brain.

“The brain system for romantic love is associated with intense energy, focused energy, obsessive things – a host of characteristics that you can feel not just toward a mating sweetheart,” Dr. Fisher said, adding that “there’s every reason to think that girls can fall in love with other girls without feeling sexual towards them, without the intention to marry them.”

Wendy Lim, 26, a student at Harvard Business School, experienced such feelings about a year ago when she met another young woman in a Boston bar. The woman was open and outgoing, and when the evening was over, Ms. Lim very much wanted to talk to her again. “I remember at the end of the night wanting her phone number,” Ms. Lim said, who felt awkward about asking. “I wouldn’t ask a guy for his number.”

As it turned out, the woman asked Ms. Lim for her number. The two saw each other again, and Ms. Lim’s crush quickly blossomed into friendship, a friendship the women now cherish.

Crushes are typically fleeting, and infatuation often turns to friendship in this way. Lisa Lerer, a journalist, and Laila Hlass, a law student, both 25 and both of New York, started their friendship several years ago with a mutual crush. “We’re still in love,” Ms. Lerer said, “but the wooing period is over.”

Tammea Tyler, 28, assistant director of child development services at the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York, has a crush that looks as if it soon will make the change. The object of her infatuation is a colleague, Denise Zimmer, senior executive for government operation, who is 48.

Ms. Tyler said she admires Ms. Zimmer’s intellect and her inner strength. “She really knows her stuff, and there’s something almost sexy about that,” Ms. Tyler said. “There’s just something really sexy and powerful.”

Ms. Zimmer, when a reporter told her about Ms. Tyler’s feelings, said: “I was very surprised. Sometimes, when you don’t have a direct relationship with someone, you don’t really understand how they’re observing you.”

And while Ms. Zimmer did not say she had a reciprocal crush, she did say that she considers Ms. Tyler talented and grounded and that “it’s exciting to work with someone who has shown that kind of interest.” She added, “It’s a mutual respect.”

Once a crush is revealed, it can change the dynamics of a relationship. “I think that I will be more sensitive and more focused on sharing things with her that I think will help her achieve some of the goals that she has,” Ms. Zimmer said.

Sometimes, though, a girl crush is so strong it makes the object of affection uneasy, killing the possibility of friendship.

Jane Weeks, 44, a freelance art and creative director in Truckee, Calif., knows what it is like to be the object of another woman’s crush. She has encountered a few women who have eagerly adopted her tastes in food and interior design, her favorite colors, even her hairdresser. “At first it’s flattering you’re inspiring them,” she said. “When they parrot back parts of yourself, it’s extremely uncomfortable.”

Ms. Weeks, an outdoorswoman who has hiked through the Andes from Argentina to Chile, said some women are more enamored with what she represents – “some National Geographic chick” – than with who she is. “When you’re on a pedestal, there’s no way but down,” she said. “And it’s lonely up there. You can’t share your weaknesses.”

Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the relationship expert at PerfectMatch.com, said she also has been a frequent subject of girl crushes – from her students. Some have made it obvious by bringing gifts, including earrings, flowers and even poems. But Dr. Schwartz does not encourage her students to look at her with starry eyes. She would rather they look to her for guidance on developing their careers.

“You’re a hero because they think you’ve done something unimaginably powerful,” Dr. Schwartz said. “Your job is to show them that they own something equally special.”

Perhaps the last time that young women were as willing as they are now to admit to their attraction to each other was in the 19th century. “Back when Louisa May Alcott was writing, women were writing these letters to each other,” Dr. Caplan said. “They wrote: ‘I miss you desperately. I long to hug you and talk to you all night.’ ” Referring to another woman as a girl crush, she said, is not dissimilar to that 19th century behavior.

But such impassioned expressions of affection were uncommon, for instance, in the 1960′s and 70′s, when homophobia was even more rampant than it is today, Dr. Caplan said. Women were often uncomfortable admitting to strong feelings for other women, fearing that their emotions would seem lesbian, she said. And those same women, older now, can still be shy about expressing their emotions for each other. “Women my age are more likely to say ‘I adore’ or ‘I value’ my women friends,’ not girl crush,” she said.

As for men, to the extent they may feel such emotions for each other, Dr. Caplan said they are less likely than women to express them. They are not reared to show their emotions. “A man talking about emotions about another man? Everybody’s homophobic feelings are elicited by that, and that’s because men aren’t supposed to talk about feelings at all,” Dr. Caplan said.

Susan Malsbury, 24, who lives in Brooklyn and is a booking agent for bands, said that because a girl crush has the potential to become an important part of one’s life, she cannot help but feel a tinge of excitement whenever she meets a fascinating woman to add to her collection of crushes.

“They’re better than boy crushes,” Ms. Malsbury said, with more than a hint of mischief in her voice. “You don’t have to break up with them after two weeks.”

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August 16, 2005
Passenger Plane Carrying 160 People Crashes in Venezuela
By BRIAN ELLSWORTH
and JUAN FORERO

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 16 — An airliner carrying 160 passengers and crew members crashed into a mountain in northern Venezuela early today after reporting engine trouble, killing all aboard, aviation authorities said.

The plane, an MD-82 made by McDonnell Douglas and operated by West Caribbean Airways of Colombia, was carrying French vacationers to Martinique from Panama when the pilots reported engine problems to Venezuelan air-traffic controllers at 3:07 a.m., the authorities in Venezuela said. Ten minutes later, the controllers lost radio contact.

The plane crashed in the Sierra de Perija mountain range just inside Venezuela’s rugged northwestern border with Colombia, Venezuela’s interior minister, Jesse Chacon, said. The remains of the plane were spread across a wide swath not far from the town of Machiques, which is about 90 miles southwest of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city.

West Caribbean Flight 708 first reported problems to controllers at Maiquetía Símon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas, according to Francisco Paz, president of the country’s aeronautical authority, the National Civil Aviation Institute.

“They asked what kind of problems they were having, and the pilots indicated that it was a technical problem in the engines,” Mr. Paz told Union Radio in Caracas. “Ten minutes after this communication with the tower, the signal was lost.”

Delfín García, an official with the search and rescue division of the National Aviation Institute, said that the pilots had, upon reporting problems with one engine, asked for permission to descend to 31,000 feet. Mr. García said the pilots then reported trouble with the second engine and asked to go down to 14,000 feet.

“It started to fall at a speed of 7,000 feet a minute,” Mr. Chacon, the interior minister, said.

Rural residents of the Perija range reported hearing a loud explosion.

A spokesman at the French Embassy in Caracas, Felipa Lozano, said most of the 152 passengers were French. They were traveling from vacation in Panama to Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean where many lived. The eight crew members were Colombian.

A field hospital was set up but by late morning, with rescuers having reached the crash scene, it was becoming increasingly clear that there were no survivors. Military helicopters were dispatched to the crash site, which is located between two farms, to ferry bodies to a morgue in Maracaibo.

“We hope to find someone alive, but as you know no one usually survives these kinds of accidents,” Col. Castor Perez Leal of the National Guard told Venezuela’s Globovision television. “We are prepared for the worst.”

The authorities did find the flight recorder, which investigators hoped would provide details of Flight 708’s journey. But the so-called black box had not been examined as of early this afternoon, and the authorities said that it was too early to tell what might have prompted the engines to falter.

In Paris, President Jacques Chirac said that he was “deeply saddened” by the crash and had directed the French Foreign Ministry to open a crisis center for the relatives of those aboard the aircraft. The French government, noting that many of the passengers lived in Martinique, dispatched the minister in charge of French territories, Francois Baroin, to the island.

“The president, in the name of all the French, expresses his sad condolences and his profound compassion to the families of the victims and to those close to them,” Mr. Chirac said in a statement issued in Paris.

West Caribbean, which began flying in 1998, is based in the Colombian city of Medellin, mainly offering service to northern Colombian and the Caribbean. In March, a twin-engine plane crashed during take-off from the small Colombian island of Providencia, killing eight people.

According to Agence-France Presse, the French transport minister, Dominique Perben, said that West Caribbean’s MD-82 had been inspected twice by the French authorities in Martinique over recent months and that no mechanical problems had been detected.

Martinique is one of four overseas departments administered by France; the others are Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Reunion.

Brian Ellsworth reported from Caracas for this article, and Juan Forero reported from Bogotá.

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Joseph J. Delconzo for The New York Times

SUMMER EXILE Alexis Waller with Millicent and Wick. Once she shifts to the Jersey Shore, Mrs. Waller rarely returns to New York

Jill C. Becker for The New York Times

CHILD’S PLAY Allie DeMarco at a pool in the town where she and her mother and sister spend the summer

Joseph J. Delconzo for The New York Times

STAY-AT-SUMMER-HOME MOM Alexis Waller and her children at their Jersey Shore vacation house. Her husband joins them on weekends

August 12, 2005
Every Friday a Reunion
By STEPHANIE STROM

IT’S twilight, and Kelly DeMarco is making her usual last-minute Friday rounds.

The first stop is Tom Bailey’s Market, where she picks up a selection of cold cuts and some cheese, and then on to the Bottle Shop for a bottle of Conundrum, her favorite wine, and a couple of bottles of rosé. She has already laid in plenty of what she calls “man food,” meaning anything that can be cooked on a grill, and caffeine-free Diet Coke, in preparation for the arrival of her husband, Michael, from New York City.

“I once tried to feed Hubby chicken salad on a Friday night,” she said. “Never again.”

The DeMarcos’ daughters, Allie, 10, and Charlotte, who just turned 9, have washed away the last vestiges of their afternoon at the beach and wait impatiently, hair slicked back and skin gleaming in Hawaiian print dresses, for their dad’s red sports car to pull into the driveway.

When it finally does, at about 8:30 p.m., they attack before he has a chance to climb out, high-pitched voices crying, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Hugs muffle their attempt to tell him as much as they can as quickly as possible about everything that’s happened since he left on Sunday evening- about how their new kitten got out and the candy that’s waiting for him from their trip to Hershey Park and the afternoon’s tiff at the beach.

If you asked Charlotte what is the best part of summer, she’d tell you horses and riding, then pause for a moment. “My other favorite thing is when my dad comes,” she’d say. “I just like it.”

The DeMarcos are a modern-day version of the family in “The Seven Year Itch,” the Billy Wilder classic in which Richard Sherman dispatches his wife, Helen, and son, Ricky, to Maine and returns to his Manhattan apartment to discover Marilyn Monroe has moved in upstairs.

The crucial difference, Mr. DeMarco says, is that no one like Marilyn Monroe lives in his building, and even if she did, he travels too much to know it. “I haven’t spent seven consecutive nights in any bed in 10 years,” he said.

The trip to the Jersey Shore has defined Mr. DeMarco’s summer weekends since 1998, when the family purchased a house there, but for Mrs. DeMarco and the girls, the weekend is effectively three months long. “I’ve only been back to the city once, to play a trick on Michael” – packing the refrigerator in their apartment with the Diet Coke that he chain drinks – “and pick up something I thought I needed, and when I got there, I asked myself why I’d made the trip,” she said.

Mr. DeMarco noted that it is a historic migratory pattern. “When you look back to, say, 1905, people planned their lives around the seasons and said to themselves, what’s good for my family in the summer heat?” he said. “They went to places like Bar Harbor, Kennebunkport, Amagansett, Cape Cod, where there was nice air, pleasant weather and great opportunities for outdoor activities. I took that exact same approach and asked, what’s good for my family in 2005? Is it better for them to be in Manhattan sweltering or at the shore?”

No one seems to track the numbers of families who spend their summers this way, with the men toiling away in “the city” and the women and children elsewhere at carefree play. But even in these days of the two-career family and increasingly harried commuting, there are still a good number of people whose summer existence has a vintage quality to it. The clothing and cars and jobs are different – not surprisingly, many of the husbands spend their days attending to matters of high finance and the legal work that accompanies it – but otherwise, it is easy to imagine Beaver and Wally and June spending their summers in exactly this way.

And while one does hear rumors of the husband who packs the kids into the S.U.V. and lights out for the beach, leaving his wife to commute, he is a rare and shy breed along the lines of the ivory-billed woodpecker. No, by and large, this particular sojourn is a mother-and-child phenomenon, and the few men who happen to be hanging around during the week, perhaps taking a bit of vacation with their families or just playing hooky from work, seem oddly out of place.

They couldn’t, for instance, go to the midweek parties put together by Alexis Waller and five friends who all spend the summer along the Jersey Shore. Always on Wednesdays, “when the husbands aren’t around,” they are all-women parties, with invitees instructed to bring “a bottle, a bite or a buddy.”

On a recent Wednesday, 125 women turned out dressed all in white (the theme was summer white). White tablecloths, white flowers, white candles, white teeth to set off glorious summer tans. And though some of the parties have ended with a late-night dip in the pool or ocean, on this night they whiled away the evening with glasses of chilly white wine and soft chatter.

Mrs. Waller first came to the Jersey Shore when she was dating her husband, John, driving down from New York City each weekend. They continued that practice after their first child, Wick, now 10, was born. That changed after the arrival of their second child, Millicent, about a year later. “It was just too much to schlep back and forth with two small children,” Mrs. Waller said. Soon Colt, who’s now 5, arrived, buttressing that rationale.

Like Mrs. DeMarco, she decamps shortly after school is out and doesn’t return to the city unless she has to. This summer, for instance, she has been back once, to take Colt to a doctor’s appointment.

It is, in many ways, an idyllic existence, with time marked by the tide pools and the jingle of the ice cream truck, as one shore resident put it. The major pressure is shuttling the children to their various activities – junior lifeguard classes and horseback riding lessons and basketball camp – on time. Front lawns are littered with children’s bicycles, waiting for their owners to be summoned home for dinner. People sit on their porches as evening melts into night, sipping something cool and swapping stories across their yards, and the proprietors of the mom-and-pop shops in the two- or three-block long “business districts” in the string of towns that line the shore greet their customers by name, even those who are just summer residents.

The sleepy informality disguises a sophisticated surveillance system with which any child who’s ever done something he wasn’t supposed to do is well acquainted. “In New York, I hardly let Wick go to the lobby alone, but here everyone knows everyone and we all kind of keep an eye out for each other,” Mrs. Waller said.

Her husband, John, usually drives in from the city on Fridays around midday and is greeted with much the same excitement and furor that attends Mr. DeMarco’s arrival, as three children vie for his attention. Friday night is usually family night in the Waller summer household. “John doesn’t like it when I plan for us to be out both evenings,” Mrs. Waller said.

Saturday is Dad’s Day, when Mr. Waller rises early before sun and heat can conspire to sap the will to exercise, then mounts an expedition on bicycles with Wick, Millicent and Colt. They head for Mueller’s Bakery nearby to get in line for doughnuts. Stuffed, they go crabbing or kayaking and take a few dips in the ocean or pool before noon, when Mr. Waller takes it easy with a book, perhaps grabbing a nap.

SATURDAY evenings on the Jersey Shore seem to be largely devoted to parties, like the one the DeMarcos attended early in the summer at the home of Louise and Joe Miller. About 125 people mingled inside and outside their house, enjoying margaritas and crab appetizers and other finger foods before tucking into a grilled buffet dinner.

Each family expects to hold a similar party each summer. They tend to be casual affairs, with guests arriving on bikes and wearing the latest fashions from Target and Banana Republic rather than pulling up in Maseratis and wearing Dolce & Gabbana, as in the Hamptons.

Often, smaller gatherings that are entirely impromptu occur at that time of evening when mothers go in search of misplaced children and end up staying wherever they find them to watch the sun set over a glass of wine.

“There’s no scene here,” said Mrs. Waller, who, as president of the Associates Committee of the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, knows a scene when she sees one. “There might be a fund-raiser for the local church or Save Barnegat Bay, but usually it’s just a party at someone’s house. It’s nice not to have that kind of pressure.”

Mr. DeMarco got a rowboat for Father’s Day, which for $5 can be chained on the shores of a nearby lake, and on weekends, he and the girls take it out for a spin. They bring along treats for the ducks, which are so spoiled they waddle up to the window of any car idled by the lake and beg for food. “It’s great to be out here with them,” he said. “We’re all more relaxed, and I know that Kelly likes it out here so I don’t feel so badly about all the travel I have to do for work.”

Home alone in the city, he tends to work longer hours and just have dinner at his desk. Sometimes, he said, he goes to work out or grabs dinner with a friend. “All the talk about bachelor life is just that, talk,” he said. “It’s a little lonely.”

During the week, Mr. Waller also spends more time than usual at work. He often heads to JG Melon, the Upper East Side burger joint, for drinks and dinner, with other abandoned dads, his sister-in-law or friends. He calls Mrs. Waller sometime after 9 p.m., and by 10 p.m., they are both in bed.

Mrs. Waller also rarely goes back into the city, but when she does, she is always surprised by the way her husband has made their apartment his own. “A chair will be in a different place because he likes it better there, and I never realized that he wanted to move it,” she said. “It’s always interesting to see how we have compromised with each other without even knowing that’s what we were doing.”

This month, the Waller children are going into business selling the eggplants, squash, celery, string beans, strawberries and other natural delights they’ve tended this summer. They’re calling their stand We Be Growin and set it up along the street. “Last year, we made a hundred bucks!” Wick said, though his mom recalled a more modest profit. “I think we can do even better this year.”

An air of somberness infects Sunday evenings, brought about by the impending departure of dads. Most leave after dinner, their cars driving up the Garden State Parkway looking ever so much like a migrating metal herd. But some hold out until the wee hours of the next morning, catching one last sunrise as its turns the ocean into a sheet of aluminum foil.

Mr. DeMarco shares the final meal of the weekend with his family, which he says is usually a rather subdued dinner, and heads back to the city around 9 p.m. “That way, I get home with just enough time to fall into bed and go to sleep,” he said. “And then the whole schedule starts all over again.”

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Jeff Divine

Trestles, a famous and famously packed Southern California surfing spot

August 14, 2005
Grand Central Terminal, in the Curl
By JIM RUTENBERG
MONTAUK, N.Y. —

Ah, to surf in Montauk, N.Y., home to some of the best waves in the Northeastern United States. Those gently rolling peelers, those green speckled cliffs over yonder, those people in the water fiercely competing for the same waves. Ack!

On a sunny day the most popular point break here – not too long ago an idyllic surf destination just for those plenty in the know – can turn into something akin to the Long Island Expressway on a Friday night, with all of its gridlock and fender benders.

Want a wave? There are already five others on it – or a bright orange kayak bearing down on you, ready to take your head off. A friend had just such a near-miss here a couple of weeks ago. Think you have one to yourself? One of the many (many, many, many) newer members of the tribe is liable to breach age-old etiquette prohibiting dropping in on a wave somebody is already riding and smash up your board in the process. It is no wonder that the old-timers here and elsewhere around the nation are making for a sore bunch these days.

An estimated surge in new surfers to 2.4 million from 1.5 million in the last decade, according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, is just the beginning. With every passing year the ranks of newer ocean-riding sports seem to grow just as much, just as fast. There are the ocean kayakers; the kite surfers who strap their feet into boards that are powered by giant parachutes worthy of an Apollo capsule; the “tow-at” surfers who water ski behind WaveRunners that drop them directly into the breakers, giving them a distinct advantage over the purists who paddle themselves into waves.

“You can just see that the use of surf breaks is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Steve Pezman, the publisher of The Surfer’s Journal, who has been recording the growth and evolution of surfing for nearly four decades. “Meanwhile the resource has remained consistent, which at best has a kind of moderate carrying capacity for a quality experience.”

The increase in tension at local breaks in the United States has been particularly acute this summer, as good waves have been uncharacteristically hard to come by because of a lack of favorable wave-generating weather on both coasts (hurricanes are brewing in the Atlantic and Pacific, promising to break the trend, at least for a few days, this week).

Dan Shoemaker, a surfer who recently converted to kite-boarding in San Diego, said he looked on in shock when a surfer recently punched a friend of his in the face after a particularly tense day between surfers and “kiters,” whose wind power helps them, too, to breeze past their arm-powered forebears. “We try to every extent possible to give wave to the surfers, but you can feel the tension,” he said.

The anger can just as easily be directed toward fellow traditional surfers.

Witness this recent Internet posting on NewYorkSurf.com in response to one visitor’s message asking for advice about where to surf when in the Hamptons: “Drown yourself,” wrote someone with the Internet handle awesome-at-falling.

But woe to awesome-at-falling. Such angry locals, who for so long held the line against overcrowding by harassing outsiders, have been overwhelmed in many spots by the forces most frequently blamed for the boom in surfing and its offshoots, including the media obsession with surf-based water sports; the marketing sophistication of surf-related businesses; and perhaps most significant, Internet monitoring services that let wave prospectors use a few clicks to identify the perfect time to hit the surf.

So where localism – itself a black mark on the sport – has failed, government is starting to step in.

Some municipalities in Long Beach Island, N.J., are refusing to allow certain surf instructors to teach in their waters because of the crowds they bring, The Asbury Park Press reported last week. Surf camps became so numerous in San Onofre, Calif., that the State Department of Parks and Recreation decided to scale back the number of instructional permits. “We had three camps operating simultaneously with 120 foamy boards in the water,” said Steve Long, a superintendent for the state parks department in San Clemente. “That was intolerable for the average recreational surfer.”

Taking another approach, Gov. Richard J. Codey of New Jersey announced in June that the state would spend $40,000 to create new surf breaks along the coast using artificial reefs.

Of course, the best solution rests with the ocean adventurers themselves: mutual respect; devotion to rules that have governed surfing since the second guy showed up in the line-up; and generosity toward your fellow man or woman. In short, sharing.

Not a chance.

These are humans we’re talking about, chasing the same high.

Chris Dixon contributed reporting from Laguna Beach, Calif., for this article.

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Mario Tama/Getty Images

Edith Shain, 87, gets a chaste kiss on the cheek from Carl Muscarello, 78. They have been identified as the nurse and sailor whose photograph became a symbol of V-J Day. A statue beside them is a more exuberant recreation of the original embrace.

August 15, 2005
V-J Day Is Replayed, but the Lip-Lock’s Tamer This Time
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

A hot, angry mob of photographers stood pressed together yesterday on a platform in Times Square, shouting orders at a tiny old lady.

“This way!” hollered one photographer.

“One more time!” yelled another.

“You got to kiss him on the lips!”

“She doesn’t want it!” said another.

The woman, Edith Shain, 87, smiled politely but refused to grant the man by her side a kiss on the lips as she says she did 60 years earlier in the Alfred Eisenstadt photograph that captured the euphoric end of World War II. In that picture, a sailor dips a nurse in an embrace that Mr. Eisenstadt likened to “sculpture.”

But yesterday, each time Carl Muscarello, 78, pulled Ms. Shain in for a kiss, he got her cheek.

The photographers moaned. The event organizers pleaded. The sun beat mercilessly down. Then, finally, Ms. Shain relented.

A kiss was exchanged between the diminutive woman and the former New York police detective that held all the passion of brushing elbows. It was hardly the spontaneous picture of elation captured in 1945, but the cameras clicked and rolled, their operators satiated.

The re-enacted kiss was staged by the Times Square Alliance to commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, when thousands of ebullient New Yorkers spilled into the streets to celebrate the Japanese surrender. Veterans also gathered yesterday aboard the aircraft carrier-turned-museum Intrepid.

Vintage aircraft flew over, a memorial wreath was tossed into the Hudson River and a swing band played 1940′s favorites.

An aluminum statue depicting the famous kiss drew crowds yesterday afternoon to Broadway and 43rd Street, where organizers handed out white sailor caps and roses, encouraging people to join in the kiss re-enactment.

“Who do we have to kiss?” asked Bernice Bohlman, 71, of Mastic Beach on Long Island, who came upon the scene on her way to see “Wicked.” “Anyone? O.K., give me one,” she said, taking a rose.

The event drew more than the spontaneous partaker. Marc Hermann, 23, a freelance photographer, came dressed in an authentic Navy wool uniform, 1940′s-era sailor shoes and a military watch. “The best way to learn about it is by doing it,” he said.

Mel Levey, 20, came to meet Ms. Shain. “It’s part of humanitarian history,” said Mr. Levey, , a junior at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

“Humanitarian?” asked his friend, Beth Sutey, also a West Point junior.

“Well, it’s like pop culture,” he said. “The poster’s more famous than the fact that it was the end of the war.”

By far, the most perfect kiss re-enactment came in the form of the statue, which depicts a brawny sailor holding a lithe blond nurse in white heels and deep surrender.

Ms. Shain, a more shrunken version of the nurse, stepped on stage in white New Balance sneakers and an imitation nurse uniform, beaming at the crowd. As the heat bore down, Ms. Shain grabbed the statue and held onto it, steadying herself with the taller nurse while answering questions from reporters.

Ms. Shain was a part-time nurse at the Doctors Hospital in 1945 when she heard reports of the surrender on the radio at work and headed to Times Square to celebrate with a friend.

“I didn’t walk very far before the sailor grabbed me,” she said. “It was the time to do that.

“The happiness was indescribable,” she said. “It was a very long kiss.”

Her shyness about kissing is nothing new, she said, though a recent eye ailment caused her to be especially careful yesterday, she said.

During the original kiss, she closed her eyes and then rushed home, telling no one. She saw the photograph on the cover of Life magazine the following week, but kept her secret until 1980 when she contacted the magazine.

Mr. Eisenstadt met with her and confirmed his belief that she was the nurse.

The identity of the sailor has been a trickier matter. Ms. Shain says she has been approached by 20 sailors who claim to be the one she embraced. As for whether Mr. Muscarello is the one, she says only: “I can’t say he isn’t. I just can’t say he is. There is no way to tell.”

Mr. Muscarello said he had had a few beers that day. “Everyone was kissing everyone so I decided to join in the fun,” he said. “I saw Edith and she looked very appealing, so I went to her and I planted a hug and a kiss.”

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Nicole Bengiveno/ New York Times

Meg Gaines traveled to Texas and California looking for ways to treat her ovarian cancer.

August 14, 2005
Awash in Information, Patients Face a Lonely, Uncertain Road

By JAN HOFFMAN
Nothing Meg Gaines endured had prepared her for this moment. Not the six rounds of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer that had metastasized to her liver. Not the doctor who told her, after Ms. Gaines was prepped for surgery, that he could not operate: a last-minute scan revealed too many tumors. “Go home and think about the quality, not the quantity, of your days,” he said.

Not the innumerable specialists whom Ms. Gaines, then 39 and the mother of two toddlers, had already mowed through in her terrified but unswerving effort to save her own life. Not the Internet research and clinical trial reports, all citing the grimmest of statistics. Not the fierce, frantic journey she made, leaving home in Wisconsin to visit cancer centers in Texas and California.

Now, just about out of options, Ms. Gaines faced an excruciating decision. Her last-ditch chemotherapy regimen did seem to be working. Three medical oncologists thought she should stick with it. But two surgical oncologists thought she should first try cryosurgery, injecting liquid nitrogen into the tumors to shrink as many as possible, and then following up with chemotherapy, allowing it to be more effective.

The catch? Ms. Gaines’s chances of even surviving the procedure were uncertain.

“Who will decide?” she asked a surgeon from Los Angeles.

The doctor then recited what has become the maddening litany of medical correctness: “We’re in the outer regions of medical knowledge,” he said, “and none of us knows what you should do. So you have to make the decision, based on your values.”

Ms. Gaines, bald, tumor-ridden and exhausted from chemotherapy, was reeling. “I’m not a doctor!” she shouted. “I’m a criminal defense lawyer! How am I supposed to know?”

This is the blessing and the burden of being a modern patient. A generation ago, patients argued for more information, more choice and more say about treatment. To a great extent, that is exactly what they have received: a superabundance of information, often several treatment options and the right to choose among them.

As this new responsibility dawns on patients, some embrace it with a sense of pride and furious determination. But many find the job of being a modern patient, with its slog through medical uncertainty, to be lonely, frightening and overwhelming.

Many prostate cancer patients can choose a passive treatment, like watchful waiting, or a more aggressive therapy, like radiation or surgery; each has differing risks and different patterns of side effects. Women with breast cancer often hear conflicting advice from the experts: lumpectomy or mastectomy? Some patients with heart disease can be told by one doctor that they need a bypass, by another that they need angioplasty and by a third that drugs would be just fine. Infertility patients face a blizzard of options.

Such quandaries do not apply only to life-rattling illnesses. Last summer, with the second joint of his left big toe painfully throbbing from gout, Carl Schneider, a law professor at the University of Michigan who had already consulted his internist and a rheumatologist, leaned wearily against a hospital wall as three other doctors argued over which regimen he should follow. One doctor handed him a 20-page Internet printout that cited gout treatment studies, none of them definitive.

“At 57, it’s a little late to be starting medical school,” Mr. Schneider remarked acidly. “But the burden still falls on me, having to pick among opinions.”

The job of being a modern patient includes not only decision making, of course, but often coordinating doctors, medical records and procedures, as well as negotiating with insurance companies, who are often the ultimate arbiters over which treatment options will be covered.

As Ms. Gaines was being treated for cancer she had to wage such a battle. Before she had her diagnosis, her H.M.O. gynecologist laparoscopically removed what appeared to be a cyst on her ovary. But during the procedure, the cyst, which turned out to be a malignant tumor, burst, sending cancer cells into her abdomen. She then wanted to be treated by a specialist, but her insurance plan did not have a gynecological oncologist on its roster. So Ms. Gaines spent months fighting to transfer her care to an out-of-network doctor. Finally the insurers relented, but only after the specialist agreed to perform her surgery at the H.M.O.’s regional hospital, not his own.

Like many patients, Ms. Gaines did not turn to a primary care doctor to help coordinate her care or aid with decisions. Increasingly, that soul-healing doctor-patient relationship has become harder to sustain. Whipsawed by insurance plans, patients frequently switch physicians. Pressed by diminishing reimbursements, those doctors are building ever larger, more unwieldy practices, with less time for each patient.

The strain has left doctors themselves feeling exhausted, angry and heartbroken.

“My visits are almost ludicrous,” said Dr. John Russo, an internist in West Orange, N.J., who sees 5,000 patients a year. “But economically you have to see so many more patients than you should, just to keep the lights on. You can’t sit and talk and really get an entire history. So you do what you were taught as a resident: do more tests, don’t spend more time with patients, getting to know them.”

Ms. Gaines was out of time. She had to make a decision. She felt the chill of mortality and the full weight of nearly a year of drastic operations, blood clots, a punctured lung, chemotherapy, research, traveling, countless specialists and unanswerable questions bearing down on her.

“Who’s in charge here?” she thought that night, wishing someone would just issue her marching orders. “Oh. I am.”

When Doctor Knew Best

A generation ago, most of the diagnostic tests that monitored Ms. Gaines’s cancer did not exist. Nor did the range of treatments. After the cancer had been found, most likely her primary care doctor or local oncologist would have told her what to do. And Ms. Gaines would have obeyed.

Until the late 1960′s, patients perceived doctors, then almost exclusively white men, as unassailable figures of authority. They knew best. But during the social and cultural upheaval that ushered in the women’s rights, civil rights and consumers’ rights movements, the paternalistic authority of the physician became deeply suspect. Women fought to join the conversation. Challenging the mystification of medicine, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” a landmark guide. Women changed conventional wisdom about the prevalence of hospital deliveries, hysterectomies and mastectomies.

With the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965, health care began to be seen as a right, not a privilege. Patients repositioned themselves as consumers of health care, entitled to as much information as possible. Support groups sought to empower patients with booklets and questions for doctors.

In response, many patients became insatiable consumers of medical information. In a New York Times/CBS News poll of 1,111 adults in February, 44 percent of patients who received a diagnosis sought additional information about their treatment from sources others than their physicians, including the Internet, friends and relatives, and other doctors.

Although the push has been on for patients to become more knowledgeable about their care, as they read unfiltered information, they can become more flustered. Shauntel Anderson, 24, a baby sitter in the Bronx who learned she had cardiac arrhythmia, had to choose between continuing her medication or being hospitalized for a procedure known as a catheter ablation.

“I did research for two or three weeks,” Ms. Anderson said. “I went to 15 or 20 Web sites because I needed to know everything they were going to do to me. But the Web was messing me up: I got confused because I didn’t understand it.” Her cardiologists then suggested a few helpful sites. She chose the ablation.

The drive among patients to become better informed has been fueled, in part, by the array of options that often accompanies diagnoses, many so new that gold-standard treatments, backed up by randomized trials, have yet to emerge.

But hope is a potent elixir. Patients with good insurance or other financial resources have quickly learned how to find medical centers that could offer them the latest procedures, like the cryosurgery Ms. Gaines sought out, which had no long-term experience behind it at the time.

A patient’s research does not have to be any more extensive than turning on the television. The eruption of pharmaceutical advertising has introduced millions to medical conditions that were once discussed only in the privacy of a consultation, and to the promises of new approved treatments. And inevitably following these promises is the prompt: “Ask your doctor.”

At the same time, medical science itself is widely perceived to be in a Renaissance period. Basic research in fields like biotechnology has received deep bipartisan federal support. As the results continue to unfold, patients with major and minor health problems can choose from a fresh array of options: some good, some bad, some redundant and some virtually miraculous.

In the Times/CBS poll, slightly more than half the patients who received a diagnosis were given multiple treatment options. One-third made the decision on their own, with those between the ages of 45 and 64 most likely to do so.

Whether patients make a decision by themselves or at the behest of a doctor, the fact that the choice is theirs has become known among bioethicists as patient autonomy – the right of governance over one’s own body. The term is symbolic of the pendulum swing away from the paternalism common through the 1960′s. Patients began seeking second and even third opinions.

Floyd Allen, a social worker with CancerCare, a support organization, says that the prostate cancer patients he counsels become exasperated: “For the people who have insurance, they’re angry about having to shop around for opinions, and the folks on Medicaid are mad because they can’t afford to shop around.”

By the 1980′s, opinion seeking could even turn into doctor-shopping for specific procedures. Patients started suing doctors, an escalating conflict leading to, among other things, high malpractice premiums, Congressional debates and, in the examining rooms, overcautious conversations between litigation-alert doctors and patients.

Within the past decade, the shift in the doctor-patient conversation – from, “This is what’s wrong with you, here’s what to do,” to “Here are your options, what do you want to do?” – became all but complete. Baby boomers had gotten what they had asked for. And then some.

“People want to feel a part of their health care,” said David Mechanic, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University. “But they don’t want to be abandoned to making decisions all on their own. When a doctor says, ‘Here are your options,’ without offering expert help and judgment, that is a form of abandonment. “

The Doctor Is Out

In the 11 years since Rick Sommers received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, medical advancements have raised and dashed his hopes, and ultimately led to a schism with his neurologist.

Mr. Sommers, 45, a former marathon runner and New York D.J., went through the shock that many patients experience, after two neurologists determined the cause of his numbness and tingling.

“The doctors are trying to map out exactly what is wrong with you,” he said, “and they’re giving it to you in sophisticated neurologic terms. It’s like being in a foreign country: you don’t speak the language, and you’re trying to find directions.”

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease in which the immune system can go haywire and cause neurological disturbances, called exacerbations. The disease can stay dormant for years at a time, and then flare up. In Mr. Sommers’s case, his arm goes dead, and his hand feels like it is on fire.

In 1994, there was a waiting list for the one treatment available. Mr. Sommers became a patient of a leading specialist, and went on a double-blind study for a new drug, not knowing whether he was getting it or the placebo. Over the next two and a half years, he took four pills a day.

“I thought I was being proactive, and I had a fantasy that maybe we were on the cutting edge of something,” he said.

He still had the occasional exacerbation, which required rugged outpatient treatment. There was no way to know whether the pills staved off even more attacks. One morning he was in his apartment, paying bills, idly listening to CNBC. The anchor, announcing company news, said that over the weekend, researchers reported that the test drug had flopped. “I slumped in my chair,” Mr. Sommers said. “I felt devastated. I spent two and a half years in this study, and this is how I’m finding out it’s not working?”

In the years since the disease was diagnosed in him, multiple sclerosis patients have gained access to more information, more specialists and more treatment options. In addition to a phalanx of alternative remedies, at least five drugs that try to prevent exacerbations are on the market. Mr. Sommers has been taking one for the last few years. And he has tried about 10 different medications for symptoms related to multiple sclerosis.

But with all the good news, there is still no cure. Patients can be even more confused, tantalized by the treatments and the plethora of sources of information. Mr. Sommers receives an electronic newsletter from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, a patient support group, and sets his computer’s stock watch for advisories on companies researching drugs.

Early detection for M.S. has improved, which means that more patients are seeking treatment. Clinics are filling rapidly. Mr. Sommers had to make appointments with his neurologist four months in advance.

“It’s hard to get a hold of the doctors at the clinic,” he said. “My own doctor is so overtaxed. He’s pushed, he’s pulled, he’s torn, he’s frantic, he does the best he can. But whenever I saw him, I felt like I was taking up his time. The waiting room has gotten so cramped! There are a lot more hoops to jump through before you can get to the doctor: I got more personal care 11 years ago.”

His disease is progressing. He has not been able to run in five years. Sometimes, even walking is hard. But given the stress of going in for a checkup, Mr. Sommers decided to give up on his neurologist of more than a decade. It had been nine months since his last visit.

“I wondered if he thought about me when I wasn’t there,” Mr. Sommers said. “I wrote a heartfelt note to my doctor to let him know why I wasn’t coming back. But I never heard from him.”

Even though he recently found a new neurologist, he does not know if this doctor will become the medical cheerleader and adviser that he longs for. “So my gatekeeper is my girlfriend, not my doctor,” Mr. Sommers said. “We hash it all out, we figure out the options. She has a good, clear focused head about this stuff.”

The Researcher

Last summer, as doctors tried to figure out why her husband’s urine had turned the color of cola, Joyce Rich went to work figuring it out herself.

Mrs. Rich, 58, a nursery school teacher from New City, N.Y., had to do something with her nervous energy. Like so many people who, when threatened by illness, feel frightened and helpless, she turned into a formidable Googling machine. Doing the homework gave her the comforting illusion of having a measure of control.

“I can’t go into these things ignorant, although in a way I am,” Mrs. Rich said. “I would feel as if I just wasn’t doing my part.”

Mrs. Rich kept meticulous journals of questions and recommended urologists. She made copies of every test result, lugging them to every consultation. “With our luck,” she said, “I was afraid they would lose the reports, so I delivered them myself. Besides, I never know if I’m going to stay with the doctor I am seeing, so I make sure I have our records ready for the next one.”

Shortly after her husband’s illness was diagnosed, she sat trembling in the beauty parlor and confided to her hairstylist, “Ira has kidney cancer!”

Google search: kidney cancer. Results: 10,300,000. And counting.

Her hairstylist called around for referrals. Mrs. Rich’s manicurist was particularly helpful: her best friend just had a kidney removed. The manicurist gave her pages of online research.

Mr. Rich, 59, is not robust. He had already undergone open-heart surgery. Removing his kidney laparoscopically was preferable for his overall health. But the tumor was in an atypical location, making the procedure even trickier. Mrs. Rich took her list of doctors to the public library and checked résumés, how often the surgeon had performed the procedure, the number of malpractice suits and their resolution.

“I wasn’t aware how often doctors change specialties and narrow their field,” said Mr. Rich, a high school guidance counselor. “They do one thing, and then you call them and they’re doing something else.”

Finally, Mrs. Rich narrowed her list to six. Then, the very process that had helped her feel in control now made her feel more helpless than ever. She had come to the end of her research, with absolutely no idea how to decide. At last she turned to the first place she could have gone and saved herself so much trouble, Mr. Rich’s longtime internist. The Riches were lucky to have a doctor willing to be their guide. He did not bother with a menu of options. Without polite shilly-shallying, he gave them just one name.

“It was such a relief,” Mrs. Rich said. He sent the Riches to a specialist who was not even on her list. “Cleveland?” Mrs. Rich gasped, “I thought Cleveland comes to New York!”

In retrospect, said Mrs. Rich, who was thrilled with the specialist, “You start this process, and you hope you get all the information you need to make a valid and intelligent decision. But you really don’t. And that’s where your doctor comes in handy.”

So Little Time

With patients having so much medical information, being a primary care doctor these days means donning armor daily. Here comes the public, bearing pharmaceutical brochures, sheaves of Internet printouts, pages of time-consuming questions: Vioxx? Total body scans? Why didn’t you recommend a carotid artery Doppler?

Uh-oh, the 11 o’clock news had a three-minute special on pain management. Or the estrogen update du jour. Ask your doctor! The phones will start at 6 a.m., the call-back list will balloon. Inquiring patients will be angry that their calls were not returned.

But besieged doctors first call those with emergencies, then consulting doctors, laboratories, pharmacies, insurance companies and, oh, yes, they also start seeing patients who have scheduled visits.

Doctors feel the benefits and burdens of medical information being so accessible to patients. Yes, studies show that the more informed patients are about their care, the more likely their health will improve.

But the information that patients bring to the office visit is often half-baked. Doctors must spend precious moments in an already constrained time slot re-educating them.

Dr. Russo, the West Orange, N.J., internist who sees 5,000 patients a year, applauds patients who do their homework. But, he noted, especially when patients are researching treatment options, they flop down in his office, feeling inundated.

“The patients are stressed, they’re so confused, and it’s in our laps,” Dr. Russo said. “They are deserving of guidance.”

He is the generalist; his job is to diagnose problems. Then he refers patients to specialists who, he hopes, will help them with the daunting decisions.

Patients struggle to find their way, Dr. Russo said, but “there isn’t one person to walk them through the process.”

It is impossible to overestimate the bracing impact of that old-fashioned guide, the doctor who can be a patient’s constant, her Pole Star.

Judy Brown, 46, a community volunteer in Nashua, N.H., who suffers from acute migraines, has tried dozens of preventive and pain-relief medications. Yet she has remained with the same headache specialist, who acts as her primary care doctor, for 17 years. A neurologist with a large patient load who does extensive research, he nonetheless always returns her calls, even when he is on vacation.

“I don’t think anyone will cure me,” Mrs. Brown said softly. “But my doctor helps me cope. And that means the world to me.”

Patients who have a continuing relationship with a personal physician, studies show, have greater survival rates and lower health costs. Conversely, the more medical personnel involved in the patient’s care, the greater the likelihood of error.

But though that primary relationship is so fundamental for patients, the medical establishment is gradually turning away from it. The number of medical students eschewing careers in internal and family medicine and instead pursuing specialties is increasing. Among the reasons they give are the declining prestige of primary care doctors, the eroding doctor-patient relationship, the financial hardships of maintaining a practice and the drain on family life.

A study in the May issue of Academic Medicine showed that among third-year residents in 2003, 27 percent chose careers in primary care medicine rather than pursuing a subspecialty, down from 54 percent in 1998. Only 19 percent of first-year students said they intended to be generalists.

“I can imagine patients feel lonely, ‘My doctor didn’t follow me,’ ” Dr. Russo said. “I wish I could. I wish I had the time to sit down with them.”

Making the Decision

When Meg Gaines was a little girl, her father, a lawyer, was transferred to Belgium; the family arrived scarcely 20 years after the end of World War II. She grew up keenly aware of European history, visiting concentration camps and battlegrounds, learning about military strategies.

What was the best way to fight her war against cancer, she asked herself that night in 1995, as she struggled to decide about treatment. Stay the course with chemotherapy or risk the cryosurgery first, which, back then, was a relatively experimental and possibly lethal procedure?

“What made sense to me was to bring in the air force and bomb the hell out of the tumors and weaken them,” Ms. Gaines said. “Then go in with the infantry. And so I decided to do surgery plus chemo, not just chemo.”

As it happened, the Los Angeles surgeon found only one big tumor. The others, which had earlier scared off the liver surgeon in Wisconsin, were just blood density irregularities and benign cysts.

Eighteen months after Ms. Gaines’s cancer was detected, she returned to her job, teaching criminal law and supervising students defending prisoners. The job was the same, but she had changed.

Over the next few years, Ms. Gaines did a lot of thinking and a lot of talking about her experience as a patient, about how brutally difficult it had been to gather information, find doctors and make decisions. She helped found the Center for Patient Partnerships, which opened in 2001, based at the law school of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It helps patients with cancer and other serious illnesses find doctors and make informed decisions, even as it trains student volunteers from disciplines like law, business, public policy and medicine how to be advocates for patients.

“You can get good health care,” Ms. Gaines said. “But there isn’t good relay, getting you to the resources and the resources to you.” She meets with panicky, bewildered patients and occasionally shares with them her story, if only to make one point: “I tell patients all the time: ‘I know this is hard to believe, but you want to know who is managing your health care? It’s you or no one.’ “

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August 14, 2005
A Nation in Blood and Ink
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq —

Inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, a group of prominent Iraqis has struggled for weeks to complete the country’s new constitution, haggling over the precise meaning of words like “Islam,” “federalism” and “nation.”

Out on the streets, meanwhile, a new bit of Arabic slang has slipped into the chatter of ordinary Iraqis: “allas,” a word that denotes an Iraqi who leads a group of killers to their victim, usually for a price. The allas typically points out the Shiites living in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods for the gunmen who are hunting them. He usually wears a mask.

“The allas is from the neighborhood, and he had a mask on,” said Haider Mohammed, a Shiite, whose relative was murdered recently by a group of Sunni gunmen. “He pointed out my uncle, and they killed him.”

The uncle, Hussein Khalil, was found in a garbage dump 100 yards from the spot where his Daewoo sedan had been run off the road. Two bullets had entered the back of Mr. Khalil’s skull and exited through his face.

Around the same time, someone found some leaflets, drawn up by a group called the Liberation Army. “We are cleansing the area of dirty Shia,” the leaflet declared.

The rise of the allas (pronounced ah-LAS) stands as a grim reminder of how little can be reasonably expected from the Iraqi constitution, no matter how beautiful its language or humane its intent.

In 28 months of war and occupation here, Iraq has always contained two parallel worlds: the world of the Green Zone and the constitution and the rule of law; and the anarchical, unpredictable world outside.

Never have the two worlds seemed so far apart.

From the beginning, the hope here has been that the Iraq outside the Green Zone would grow to resemble the safe and tidy world inside it; that the success of democracy would begin to drain away the anger that pushes the insurgency forward. This may have been what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was referring to when, in an interview published in Time magazine this month, she said that the insurgency was “losing steam” and that “rather quiet political progress” was transforming the country.

But in this third summer of war, the American project in Iraq has never seemed so wilted and sapped of life. It’s not just the guerrillas, who are churning away at their relentless pace, attacking American forces about 65 times a day. It is most everything else, too.

Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man’s land, menaced by bandits and brigands. With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.

With armed guards in tow, I drove across the no man’s land the other day to pay a visit to Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister. Unlike many senior Iraqi officials, who have long since retreated into the Green Zone, Mr. Chalabi still lives in a private home. To get there, you must pass through a series of checkpoints at the outskirts of his neighborhood, manned by guards and crisscrossed by concrete chicanes. At the entrance to Mr. Chalabi’s street, there is another checkpoint, made of concrete and barbed wire, and more armed guards. Then, in front of Mr. Chalabi’s house, stands yet another blast wall. When Mr. Chalabi walks into his front yard, even inside his own compound, a dozen armed guards surround him.

Inside his house, Mr. Chalabi described one of his most recent efforts, to help broker a cease-fire in the city of Tal Afar, 200 miles to the north.

“I had all the sheiks here with me,” he said.

On my way home, I noticed that a car was following me. Three times, the mysterious car accelerated to get close. Two men inside: a young man, maybe in his 30′s, and a bald man behind the wheel. As the car drew close, my chase car – a second vehicle, filled with armed guards, deployed to follow my own – cut the men off in traffic. I sped away.

Americans, here and in the United States, wait for the day when the Iraqi police and army will shoulder the burden and let them go home.

One night last month, according to the locals, the Iraqi police and army surrounded the Sunni neighborhood of Sababkar in north Baghdad, and pulled 11 young men from their beds.

Their bodies were found the next day with bullet holes in their temples. The cheeks of some of the men had been punctured by electric drills. One man had been burned by acid. The police denied that they had been involved.

“This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened,” Adnan al-Dulami, a Sunni leader, said.

An Abandoned Swing Set

For much of last year, the soldiers of the First Cavalry Division oversaw a project to restore the river-front park on the east bank of the Tigris River. Under American eyes, the Iraqis planted sod, installed a sprinkler system and put up swing sets for the Iraqi children. It cost $1.5 million. The Tigris River Park was part of a vision of the unit’s commander, Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, to win the war by putting Iraqis to work.

General Chiarelli left Iraq this year, and the American unit that took over had other priorities. The sod is mostly dead now, and the sidewalks are covered in broken glass. The sprinkler heads have been stolen. The northern half of the park is sealed off by barbed wire and blast walls; Iraqis are told stay back, lest they be shot by American snipers on the roof of a nearby hotel.

The Elusive Consensus

Zalmay Khalilzad, the new American ambassador here, has publicly prodded the Iraqis to finish the constitution by Aug. 15, the date they set for themselves. On several occasions, Mr. Khalilzad has described the Iraqi constitution as a national compact, a document symbolizing the consensus of the nation.

And there’s the rub. When the Americans smashed Saddam Hussein’s regime two and half years ago, what lay revealed was a country with no agreement on the most basic questions of national identity. The Sunnis, a minority in charge here for five centuries, have not, for the most part, accepted that they will no longer control the country. The Shiites, the long-suppressed majority, want to set up a theocracy. The Kurds don’t want to be part of Iraq at all. There is only so much that language can do to paper over such differences.

Last week, one of the country’s largest Shiite political parties held a ceremony to commemorate the death of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a moderate Shiite cleric who was assassinated by a huge car bomb two years ago. The rally was held in the Tigris River villa once occupied by Tariq Aziz, one of Mr. Hussein’s senior henchmen. Nowadays, the house is controlled by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the dominant parties in the Shiite coalition that heads the Iraqi government.

Inside a tent where the ceremony unfolded, a large poster depicted three men: Mr. Hakim, the dead ayatollah; Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the nation’s most revered Shiite leader; and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the late ayatollah’s brother and, as the head of the Supreme Council, perhaps the country’s most powerful political leader. The portraits stood as a kind of trinity, symbolizing the fusion of Islam and politics.

Outside the tent, a third member of the Hakim family stood in a receiving line. Amar al-Hakim, Abdul-Aziz’s son and heir to the family dynasty, seemed in an upbeat mood. Like most Shiite political leaders here, Mr. Hakim seemed untroubled by the disputes in the constitution.

“We can all get along,” Mr. Hakim said, smiling, “but I don’t think we have to give anything up.”

For Each a Militia

Throughout the ceremony, Mr. Hakim’s compound was guarded by members of the Badr Brigade, the party’s black-booted Iranian-trained militia. When the Americans were in charge here, they leaned hard on Mr. Hakim to disband it. But in one of his first official acts, Mr. Hakim publicly legalized his own private army.

With all the hubbub at Mr. Hakim’s house, it was easy to miss what was going on in the house next door. Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and Kurdish leader, was getting ready to hold a dinner for the country’s senior political leaders, Mr. Hakim included, to break the logjam over the constitution. Mr. Talabani’s house, too, was guarded by a militia, but a different one from Mr. Hakim’s. Here, it was the pesh merga who stood by with their guns, loyal only to Mr. Talabani.

The pesh merga fighters, milling about outside Mr. Talabani’s villa and smoking cigarettes, said they had come all the way from the mountains of Kurdistan to protect their boss. None of them spoke a word of Arabic. To them, Baghdad was a foreign land.

‘We Should Get Together’

Amid such bleakness, it is a wonder that anyone comes forward at all. Yet still the Iraqis do, even at the threat of death. One of them is Fakhri al-Qaisi, a dentist and Sunni member of the committee charged with drafting the constitution. Dr. Qaisi knows people close to the Sunni insurgency and, as such, has come under suspicion by the Americans and the Shiite-dominated government.

By Dr. Qaisi’s count, the Americans have raided his home 17 times, once driving a tank into his dental office. Members of the Badr Brigade, the Shiite militia, recently killed his brother-in-law, Dr. Qaisi said, and appear to be aiming at him too. Now, because he has joined the constitutional committee, he has begun receiving death threats from Sunni insurgents as well.

“Everyone wants to kill me!” Dr. Qaisi said with a laugh, seated in a Green Zone lounge during a break from constitution drafting. “The Americans want to kill me, the Shiites want to kill me, the Kurds want to kill me and even the insurgents.”

“Every night, a different car passes by my house,” he said.

To protect himself, Dr. Qaisi has taken to spending nights in his car, though he allows that he sometimes stops by his home during the day to visit one of his three wives.

For all his problems, and all the problems facing Iraq, Dr. Qaisi expressed a firm belief that national reconciliation in Iraq was still possible, if leaders like himself could show the strength to give a little.

In this regard, as in so many others here, it’s impossible to know. In the middle of a conversation, Dr. Qaisi stopped talking, recognizing that at the table next to him was Abu Hassan al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr Brigade. That’s the organization that Dr. Qaisi believes killed his brother-in- law, and the same group, he believes, that would like to kill him now.

Dr. Qaisi rose from his seat, and so did Mr. Amiri.

“It’s so nice to see you,” Dr. Qaisi said. “We should get together.”

The two men embraced, and kissed each other’s cheeks.

“Yes,” Mr. Amiri said, his arms wrapped around Dr. Qaisi. “We really should.”

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August 13, 2005
Vast Archive Yields New View of 9/11
By JIM DWYER
This article was reported by Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn and Ian Urbina and written by Mr. Dwyer.

Faced with a court order and unyielding demands from the families of victims, the city of New York yesterday opened part of its archive of records from Sept. 11, releasing a digital avalanche of oral histories, dispatchers’ tapes and phone logs so vast that they took up 23 compact discs.

For the first time, about 200 accounts of emergency medical technicians, paramedics and their supervisors were made public, revealing new dimensions of a day and an emergency response that had already seemed familiar.

In details large and small, the accounts of the medical personnel – uniformed workers who were often overlooked in many of the day’s chronicles, but were as vital to the response and rescue efforts as any others – provide vivid and alarming recollections.

They spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a “mass casualty incident,” the crisis gathered speed by the minute.

With the lines of command sundered, many of those interviewed said, they became their own bosses. They found themselves shepherding crowds away from the towers, serving as trauma counselors, bandaging people inside a bank lobby, and packing their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, the burned.

As scores of city and private ambulances arrived, an orderly system for treating patients never developed.

Some medical triage centers were set up blocks from where the injured were leaving the towers. A medical chief arrived at the main fire command post and found the chief of the Fire Department cursing his nonfunctioning radio.

A team of medics told how they tried to treat a firefighter, Daniel Suhr, who had been hit by a woman falling from one of the towers, but realized he had no vital signs and had catastrophic injuries.

Nevertheless, they continued to work on him, carrying out hopeless resuscitation efforts, in deference to two shocked firefighters who accompanied him in the ambulance.

“They kept yelling, ‘Danny, Danny, Danny!’ ” said Richard L. Erdy, an emergency medical technician who treated Firefighter Suhr.

Another paramedic recalled seeing one of his colleagues, Carlos Lillo, helping patients, staring at the North Tower and breaking into tears. Mr. Lillo’s wife, Cecilia, worked there. She survived. He did not.

The newly released records capture a moment in history as seen through thousands of eyes, and as told in hundreds of voices – some halting, some confident, almost all disbelieving. No single document could be definitive about an event that swept across so many lives, but the release of these accounts – one CD alone encompassed more than 12,000 pages of oral history transcripts – begins to fill in major parts of the day’s history.

The oral histories were gathered in 2001 on the instructions of Thomas Von Essen, who was fire commissioner on Sept. 11. The New York Times sought copies under the freedom of information law in early 2002, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration refused, leading to litigation. Earlier this year, the state Court of Appeals ordered the release of most of the materials.

Eight families of people killed at the trade center, represented by the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, joined the suit to seek the release. Since then, the interest has grown, and the Fire Department has sent CD’s to 460 families.

“Today we are one step closer to learning what happened on 9/11 in N.Y.C. – where we excelled, where we failed,” said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, died in the South Tower.

In particular, the records released yesterday provide the most detailed view yet of the operations of the Emergency Medical Services, which became a division within the Fire Department in 1996.

“I just think a lot of people don’t realize what we, E.M.S., went through,” Alan Cooke, an emergency medical technician, told interviewers for the Fire Department.

A spokesman for the department said major changes had been made since the terror attacks. “There has been vast improvement in communications,” said the spokesman, Francis X. Gribbon. “There is no question that E.M.S. personnel are more prepared today to handle a large-scale emergency in this city.”

In his 64-page oral history, Zach Goldfarb, who had just finished an overnight tour of duty as the citywide chief of operations when the first plane struck, said that even the deaths of some medical workers were overlooked in the tally and recognition of the responders who died.

The Fire Department lost 341 firefighters, officers and a deputy commissioner. In addition, two paramedics employed by the department died, bringing its total losses to 343. But Chief Goldfarb said six emergency medical responders from private hospitals also died.

“We keep talking about the losses on this job from an E.M.S. standpoint and we say there were two, Carlos Lillo and Ricardo Quinn,” Chief Goldfarb said. “There were six other E.M.S. professionals that died in this incident on our mission.”

He said the emergency medical network was “a hodgepodge of voluntary hospitals and voluntary ambulances and commercial ambulances.”

He added: “But you know what? They all came in to do our mission and I think that they need to be recognized as such, and I think it’s a disgrace to us that we’re not counting the names of these six dead people.”

In his account, Chief Goldfarb said he decided not to report to the South Tower, as ordered, believing that it was too hazardous to cross West Street. Finding about 30 paramedics and E.M.T.’s on West Street, he sent them into the World Financial Center. A few minutes later, the South Tower collapsed. Mr. Quinn, who died, had originally been among those 30 people.

As the E.M.S. workers set out for the trade center that morning, more than a few went without being called. Still others decided to make extra preparations. Among them, Chief James Martin recalled the lack of supplies after the 1993 bombing of the trade center.

“I filled the car up with several bottles of water, and I brought my little radio charger,” Chief Martin said. “Knowing that the new 3,500 radios were out there but we didn’t have chargers for them, I threw that in.”

Chief Goldfarb had written a report on the 1993 response, and he worried about the effects of merging the medical service into the Fire Department. Just a month before Sept. 11, 2001,, he had spoken with a fire chief about the 1993 attack.

“I told him, for reasons I won’t go into now, the response would be very different if we had to relive this thing, different not necessarily in a positive way,” Chief Goldfarb said in his oral history. “So here we are four weeks later and we were actually living it.”

Lt. Rene Davila was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, unsure if his agency had done any “preplanning” now that it was part of the Fire Department. In any case, he said, he did not relish being in command.

“You know you see that guy on ’911′ or something like that, and he’s a hero or something and he’s a big shot or whatever,” Lieutenant Davila said. “Well, I was given the opportunity to be that guy, and I immediately did not want it.”

He shouted himself hoarse, he said, trying to ensure that patients were not simply loaded into ambulances but were “triaged” – that their injuries were evaluated and that the most seriously hurt were taken care of first.

John Rothmund, an emergency medical technician, spoke of the trouble finding any supervisors. “No brass,” he said. “So me and my partner tried to find authority figures, and there was really none around.”

Improvisation, not routines, became the order of the day. Arriving at the corner of West Broadway and Vesey Street, a paramedic, Manuel Delgado, saw part of an airplane crush the front of a police car. He and a doctor drove a bleeding police officer to NYU Downtown Hospital, then returned eventually to a triage area on the north side of the trade center.

“There was just a stream of people running, running, running, and basically at this point our triage was, if you’re walking, keep walking, and if people are being carried or people were falling, we would move forward,” Mr. Delgado said.

They collected a badly burned woman in a red dress, he recalled, then a man who had serious burns over most of his body.

“He was carried out halfway and I guess collapsed or someone dropped him and just ran,” Mr. Delgado said. “We picked him up and started bringing him out.”

He continued: “We had more patients than we had ambulances. We were stuffing four and five people in an ambulance at this point. I mean, it was just to get people out of there with minimal treatment. There was nothing you could do.”

The demands of the moment consumed every bit of the attention of the medical workers. “Once you got there, I didn’t even notice the time,” Lt. Patrick Scaringello said. “Couldn’t tell the time.”

The relations between city and private ambulance services, always tense, were also badly strained by the surge of ambulances that came to the scene. “Actually, the biggest downfall to this whole thing was probably the communications with the private” ambulances, said Justin Lim, an emergency medical technician. “They had no clue what to do.”

A radio system that enabled the private hospitals and their ambulances to communicate with other city emergency agencies had been tested during the preparations for Y2K – the millennium – but the project languished, according to hospital officials. (The city now hopes to better integrate its medical service with the other responders, in part by having the dispatchers for each agency work side by side. Two new buildings, at a cost of $1.375 billion, will open next year, according to Gino Menchini, the city’s technology commissioner.)

With the collapse of the South Tower, the first to fall, at 9:59 a.m., any semblance of an orderly system vanished. Inside a bank on Broadway and Murray Street, medical crews were treating people.

“They all panicked and they all stampede out,” said Felipe Torre, a medical technician. “We followed out, because everybody was wanting to get out. The walls shook and then we felt it.”.

At a triage area on the corner of West and Vesey Streets, a medical technician, Faisel Abed, worked for an hour on patients, until the collapse of the South Tower. “With the grace of God, we had gotten all the people out of there,” he said.

A group of the medical chiefs met, in part by chance, outside the Embassy Suites Hotel in the World Financial Center and went into the lobby to set a new plan for control. But when they tried to communicate the plan to the entire force, they could not contact the dispatchers.

“I think that probably the biggest impression I got out of this whole thing was this is probably as close to being in an infantry unit that gets overrun,” said Joseph Cahill, a paramedic. “We are scattered everywhere. Nobody knew where anybody was. Nobody knew who was in charge. It really felt for a moment that I was in ‘Apocalypse Now,’ where Martin Sheen goes: ‘Where is your C.O.? Ain’t that you? No. Uh-oh.’ “

The first fatality among firefighters had been Firefighter Suhr, hit by the falling woman. As the paramedics who brought him to the hospital headed back to the trade center, a nun and an emergency room doctor climbed into the ambulance. As they drove, they encountered an emergency medical technician walking toward them out of a cloud of smoke. The buildings were now down and he was holding his helmet.

They asked where his partner was, and the wandering medic responded that he had left him. “I’m looking for my father,” he explained. “He was in the World Trade Center.”

“We said, ‘Why don’t you get in the back with us?’ ” recalled Soraya O’Donnell, an emergency medical technician.

Michelle O’Donnell contributed reporting for this article.

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Josh Cochran

August 14, 2005
‘Friedrich Nietzsche’: The Constructive Nihilist
By WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ”Listen!” he shouts at the beginning of ”Ecce Homo,” and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ”For I am such and such a person. For heaven’s sake do not confound me with anyone else.” The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ”Why I Am So Wise,” ”Why I Am So Clever,” ”Why I Write Such Excellent Books.” Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence of ”such a person’s” books.

Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Prussia, in 1844, and died, having gone insane, in 1900. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig and was self-educated (and dis-educated) thereafter. But who, really, was he?

Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed ”most purely in the form of a persistent question,” and that ”Nietzsche’s procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal,” perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger’s own devoted explications of Nietzsche. That arch-muse Lou Salomé, who knew him not only as a thought machine but also as a lover of sorts, stated the case more intimately when she wrote, ”In Nietzsche the most abstract thoughts habitually could reverse themselves into the power of moods which could carry him off with immediate and unpredictable force.”

Ecce homo, behold the man! As we peer down time’s long barrel to try to see him, his hand keeps turning the kaleidoscope.

Curtis Cate’s new biography assists in the beholding, by rebuilding who Nietzsche was out of as many shards as possible, retelling his life in vivid snatches while presenting the labors of his mind. As Nietzsche would have informed us, such a project cannot but be a failure, yet what a pleasing and admirable failure it is! Anyone who summarizes in a handful of pages, as Cate has bravely done, not only each of Nietzsche’s books but the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted, is asking the world to pick nits. Nits will be picked. No matter. This is a warmly intelligent introduction to Nietzsche.

Any decent biography is a work of drama. What then are the dramatic moments of Nietzsche’s life, the ones we most anticipate the telling of and judge the biographer by? Well, obviously the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship and its end is such a moment. The romance with Lou Salomé is another. Then there’s the tumble into madness and the relationship with his sister Elisabeth, who disarmingly tells us that ”the fact that I had spent the greater part of my life in the company of so superior a person as my brother robbed me of . . . self-confidence” and who found the confidence nonetheless to refashion her brother’s image to suit her ends. Finally, there’s Nietzsche’s moment of responsibility, hypothetical or not, for the intellectual climate that brought about National Socialism. How well does Cate do in regard to each of these?

Start with Wagner. Cate brings him alive in all his titanic egotism and ambition. We come to understand, and perhaps to be touched by, the composer’s notion that the opera house built to his specifications at Bayreuth could actually raise the level of German culture. In this context, Nietzsche’s wavering impulse to sacrifice his philology professorship to stump for Wagner’s project makes amusing sense.

Here and everywhere, Cate succeeds in exciting our compassion for his hero. Particularly moving is the spectacle of a savagely independent intellect, whose utterances are so fiery that they should have been printed in red ink, abasing itself to timidly ask the Wagners’ permission to play its own composition on the piano, a piece that finds no favor with them.

H. L. Mencken, who wrote an introduction to the published Nietzsche-Wagner correspondence, considers it ”quite possible,” as Elisabeth opined, ”that it was Wagner’s snuffling gabble about Christianity that finished” the friendship. ”After those walks at Sorrento there was nothing for” Nietzsche ”to do save make his bow, click his heels together and say goodbye.” Cate shows that it was over before then, faithfully detailing the gradual widening of the personal, moral and aesthetic gulf between the two men. Liberal quotations help us feel some of the complexities — for instance, Nietzsche’s poignant claim that ”it was the aging Wagner I had to resist: as regards the authentic Wagner, I will to a good extent become his heir.”

Now, what about Salomé, that hourglass-waisted Russian girl in the dark dress who inspired Nietzsche’s attempt to be bravely nonconformist in action as well as in thought — and who hurt him so deeply?

Her ménage with Nietzsche and their mutual friend Paul Rée was supposed to be platonic. Excluding a hand-kiss or two, it was, at least between Salomé and Nietzsche — just as well, since our hero must have had syphilis in his bloodstream by then, a possible souvenir of his time spent as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War. At any rate, the end was as hindsight-predictable as the end of the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship. There quickly came the moment when Salomé stormed at Elisabeth: ”It was your noble, pure-minded brother who first had the filthy intention of a wild marriage!” — meaning a more physical ménage. (Well, why not? Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato.)

Unfortunately, Cate fails in both charity and justice to Salomé, a brilliant woman whose books about Nietzsche and Rilke I have read with great admiration. Repeatedly dismissing her with the adjectives ”narcissistic” and ”willful,” he finds it sufficient to tell the story thus: Her father was a ”god on earth” type, and Nietzsche’s romantic timidity disappointed her expectation of ”the kind of man-god-on-earth Lou secretly craved to meet (and also feared as a challenge to her intellectual ‘freedom’).” It’s likely she did lead Nietzsche on, but he played a similarly unexalted part in the affair, and at the end he was peppering her with pompous threats: ”If I now reject you, it is a terrible verdict on your entire being.” Salomé was more than a spoiled, neurotic 19th-century bimbo, and Cate should have quoted from the analysis of Nietzsche she published in 1894. After all, he’d revealed his soul to her! Here is one of her insights: ”All his thinking had a forceful impact upon his inner life, so that the fullness of the inward and contending experiences threatened to burst the circumscribed boundaries of his personality.” This sentence hauntingly yet compassionately encompasses not only Nietzsche’s inadequacy as a lover but also his final madness.

This gruesome end Cate details understatedly, and his book builds up to it with equally understated anecdote. Heidegger refers to 1887 as ”the year in which everything about him radiates an excessive brilliance and in which therefore at the same time a terrible boundlessness advances out of the distance.” Cate’s account is more muted. Between the lines I sense a sincere sadness and discomfort about what became of Nietzsche, whom the author so clearly reveres.

When he turns his attention to Elisabeth, once again Cate is taciturn, perhaps out of embarrassment. Most of the time she’s not much more than ”his efficient sister Elisabeth,” who rents apartments for him, reads to him, etc. What did her brother really feel for her? Was she essentially a convenience who at times became an annoyance? And how should we judge her? (A very un-Nietzschean question!) If we could better understand her, we might better be able to consider the related matter of Nietzsche’s posthumous Nazi career.

The short version is this: As her brother turned ever more militantly against conventional pieties, then vainly dabbled with Lou Salomé, Elisabeth felt abandoned. Cate quotes this letter: ”I must now try to build a new kind of life-happiness, but oh, it is so difficult.” A year later his shocking philosophy had begun to achieve a tincture of material and social success, at which point she called him ”a conqueror, mighty, magnificent!!” Meanwhile, she built life-happiness with a more unequivocal anti-Semite, her husband, Bernhard Forster; became widowed; acquired financial obligations and met them while coincidentally becoming the keeper of her brother’s flame.

Cate’s empathy and sympathy for his subject make this a first-rate biography. But just as one can allow oneself to be spellbound by the plea of a defense lawyer without necessarily dismissing the prosecution’s case, so one can admire Cate’s loyalty to Nietzsche while declining to accompany the two of them into the elitist heights. Cate, who has written biographies not only of André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — both brave in war, one passionately egotistical and the other fraternally moral — but also, rather surprisingly, of George Sand, reveals his own biases honestly in the preface: ”It is easy to reproach Nietzsche for having . . . contributed to the deluge by weakening the floodgates of traditional morality. But the troubling question remains: what will happen to the Western world if the present drift cannot be halted, and to what sordid depths of pornographically publicized vulgarity will our shamelessly ‘transparent’ culture, or what remains of it, continue to descend?” Pornographic vulgarian that I am, I feel skeptical that the level of culture was a great deal higher for most people in Nietzsche’s time. There was better education to be found then, to be sure, but also more conventionality, more idols. Cate would halt Zarathustra’s descent from the mountaintop; he has closed his ears to Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead, and long dead.

This brings us to the question that must be asked about Nietzsche in our post-Holocaust epoch. Cate admits that some of the philosopher’s bellicose aphorisms had a ”fateful . . . impact . . . on future generations of ‘disciples,’ particularly in Germany.” In World War I, 150,000 copies of ”Thus Spake Zarathustra” were printed up for the Kaiser’s army. The Nazis, for their part, distributed it to the Hitler Youth and laid a deluxe copy in the Tannenberg Memorial.

Was Nietzsche an anti-Semite? That depends on how one rotates the barrel of the kaleidoscope. Nietzsche was plentiful in his praises of individual Jews, as Cate eagerly proves. But the editor of the letters, who of course is Elisabeth, cannot deny that ”attacks upon the Jews are often to be found in his letters to Wagner which expressed Wagner’s views on the subject rather than his own.” What could her brother’s motive have been? ”Hyper-courtesy,” Elisabeth replies.

It simply can’t be wished away that a philosophy among whose central tenets is that it not be applicable to most of us (”Where the people eats and drinks, even where it reveres, it usually stinks. . . . Indeed, a moral system valid for all is basically immoral”), a philosophy that smashes all existing idols and erects its own idol — namely, a ”realism” which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral — becomes convenient to cruel elitists.

Our semi-invalid of an ex-professor in his blue-lensed spectacles was obviously a great man, a constructive nihilist. His bravery in this regard is a precursor to Freud’s: sad and disgusting aspects of our humanness might as well be faced. As for tearing down idols, received wisdom does sour into unwisdom, so why not have a revolution every now and then? In 1874 Nietzsche imagined a Mephistophelean figure whose ”negation and destruction” is actually ”an outpouring of that powerful longing for deliverance and salvation.” He cannot be blamed for the literalized incarnation of that figure in Hitler, about whom he might (I hope) have written at least what he wrote about Wagner: ”That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price — dreadful tendencies!” Alas, Nietzsche exhibited some of those same tendencies — for instance, the intoxication of deliberate irrationality. It was his posthumous misfortune, and perhaps his shame, to be appropriated by ruthless politicians in the service of literally murderous conformity.

William T. Vollmann’s most recent book is ”Europe Central,” a novel.

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