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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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Month: April 2006
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In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal
Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic Society
An early Christian document portrays Judas as Jesus' closest ally.
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Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic Society
The Gospel of Judas, found near these caves, may provide much material for Christian theologians to debate in the years ahead about the time before Jesus' death.
In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal
Correction Appended
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.
In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.
"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them," Jesus confides to Judas in the document, which was made public at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.
Though some theologians have hypothesized the "good Judas" before, scholars who have translated and studied the text said this was the first time an ancient document lent specific support to a revised image of the man whose name in history has been synonymous with treachery.
Scholars say the release of the document will set off years of study and debate. The debate is not over whether the manuscript is genuine on this the scholars agree. Instead, the controversy is over its relevance.
Already, some scholars are saying that this Gospel sheds new light on the historical relationship between Jesus and Judas. They find strands of secret Jewish mysticism running through the beliefs expressed by some branches of early Christianity.
But others say the text is merely one more scripture produced by a marginalized Christian cult of Gnostics, who lived so many years after Jesus' day that they could not possibly produce anything accurate about his life. For these reasons, the discoveries are expected to intrigue theologians and historians of religion and perhaps be deeply troubling to some church leaders and lay believers.
"We will be talking about this gospel for generations to come," said Marvin Meyer, a professor of religion at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.
The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, its wanderings through Europe and Long Island, and now its translation, were announced by scholars assembled by the National Geographic Society. The 26-page Judas text is believed to be a copy in the Coptic language, made around A.D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the society, said the manuscript, or codex, was considered by scholars to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text found in the past 60 years. Previous major discoveries include the Dead Sea Scrolls, which began coming to light in the late 1940's, and the Nag Hammadi monastery collection of Gnostic writings found in 1945 in Egypt.
The latter, including gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, have inspired recent Gnostic scholarship and shaken up traditional biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs among early followers of Jesus. Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
"These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was," said Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics.
Mr. Garcia said, "The codex has been authenticated as a genuine work of ancient Christian apocryphal literature," citing extensive tests of radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and multispectral imaging and studies of the script and linguistic style. The ink, for example, was consistent with ink of that era, and there was no evidence of multiple rewriting.
"This is absolutely typical of ancient Coptic manuscripts," said Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at the University of Mnster in Germany. "I am completely convinced."
Experts said the handwriting appeared to be that of a single professional scribe. He is anonymous, as is the original author in Greek.
The word "gospel" means "good news," and generally refers to accounts of Jesus' life. Though someone is named in each, the titles are not necessarily those of the true authors. The consensus of scholars is that the four canonical gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were probably not written by any of the original disciples or first-person witnesses to the life of Jesus, although they were probably written within the first century.
Scholars have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what was probably an early version in a treatise written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in 180. He was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics, whose writings proliferated in the second through fourth centuries.
"They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas," Irenaeus wrote.
Unlike the four standard gospels, the Judas document portrays Judas Iscariot as alone among the 12 disciples to understand Jesus' teachings.
Karen L. King, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is not involved in the Judas project, said this gospel might well reflect the debates that arose in the early centuries.
"You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus' death was all part of God's plan, then Judas's betrayal was part of God's plan," said Dr. King. The standard gospels either give no motivation for Judas's betrayal or attribute it to the pieces of silver or the influence of Satan.
At least one scholar, James M. Robinson, said the new manuscript did not contain anything likely to change traditional understanding of the Bible. Dr. Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was thegeneral editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi collection. "Correctly understood, there's nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas," he said.
Dr. Robinson noted that the gospels of John and Mark both had passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.
In a key passage in the new-found gospel, Jesus had talks with Judas "three days before he celebrated Passover." That is when Jesus is supposed to have referred to the other disciples and said to Judas: "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
By that, scholars said, Jesus seems to have meant that in helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Rodolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script, which was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back. The manuscript was a mess of more than 1,000 brittle fragments.
The effort, organized by the National Geographic Society, was supported by Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American foundation.
The 66-page codex also contains a text titled James, a letter by Peter and pages provisionally called Book of Allogenes, or Book of Strangers.
Discovered in the 1970's in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. Dr. Robinson, of Claremont, said that an Egyptian antiquities dealer offered to sell him the codex in 1983 for $3 million, but that he was unable to raise the money.
The manuscript moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N.Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was then given the name Codex Tchacos.
When efforts to resell the codex failed, Ms. Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation. Ted Waitt, founder and former chief executive of Gateway, said the Waitt Institute gave the geographic society a grant of more than $1 million for the restoration.
Officials of the project announced that the codex would ultimately be returned to Egypt and housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. For now, the Gospel of Judas will be the center of attention in a television show, magazine article, two books and an exhibition by National Geographic.
Correction: April 8, 2006
An article yesterday about the implications of the discovery an early Christian manuscript that portrays Judas Iscariot in an unconventional light misidentified the material of which the manuscript was made. It is papyrus, not parchment.
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Nascar Fans Trade the R.V. for a Condo
Chris Rank for The New York Times
Richard Scott watches the sun set over the Atlanta Motor Speedway from a penthouse condominium owned by Jim and Muriel
April 13, 2006
Nascar Fans Trade the R.V. for a Condo
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
HAMPTON, Ga. The sound of automobile traffic was deafening. Inside Jim and Muriel Dollar's two-bedroom penthouse condominium here, a party was going on, and the guests leaned in close in their theater-style leather chairs to make themselves heard, their drinks set in cup holders that occasionally vibrated ever so slightly.
But no one seemed to mind the noise or the tremors. In fact, some had binoculars in their hands to get a close-up view of what was going on nine stories below. That was because the apartment's floor-to-ceiling windows looked directly onto the racetrack of the Atlanta Motor Speedway, where cars were roaring by at speeds up to 190 miles per hour.
"It's the best seat in the house," said Mr. Dollar, 65, the president of a concrete construction company in Norcross, Ga., gazing out at the jet-black oval on a recent Saturday. Anyone who doubts that the traditionally blue-collar sport of Nascar has gone upscale need look no further.
The Dollars are among the dedicated fans who have forsaken the track infield the home of tricked-out R.V.'s, makeshift barbecue pits and parking spaces passed down from generation to generation to root for Jimmie Johnson or Dale Earnhardt Jr. from the plush confines of apartments that, in some cases, cost $1 million or more.
The Dollars said they paid $500,000 for their condo when they bought it about eight years ago.
There have been condos at Nascar tracks for several years, but it is only recently that the market for those second homes has become almost as active as that of a hot New York City neighborhood.
The building pace is accelerating, prices for some condos have more than tripled, and now with Las Vegas getting into the act the number of Nascar condos around the country is expected to almost double in the next few years.
In March, Speedway Motorsports Inc. announced plans to build 120 units at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway at prices ranging from $600,000 for a one-bedroom condo to $4.5 million for a three-bedroom penthouse. At three other tracks it owns the Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., the Atlanta Motor Speedway and the Texas Motor Speedway near Fort Worth the company has built a total of 174 condo units in the past couple of decades.
Some 15 percent to 20 percent are owned by corporations, and the rest by individuals.
The Trophy Towers, as the Las Vegas condominium building is called, will have a swimming pool, a workout room and a spa. Each of the 120 units will feature stainless steel appliances, oversize bathtubs and panoramic views of both the track and the Las Vegas Strip. One feature may be heavy-duty soundproofing. Apparently, the roar of the action is an acquired taste.
The International Speedway Corporation, which owns or operates 11 racetracks around the country, is conducting a feasibility study on a possible mixed-use development across the street from the Daytona International Speedway, which could include offices, restaurants and up to 100 loftlike apartments.
No one seems to doubt that Nascar fans can afford the prices of the condos the race-car world's equivalent of golf manors on the 18th hole.
Nascar research shows that the sport's following has grown 19 percent since 1995, to 75 million, 22 percent of whom are estimated to have household incomes topping $70,000.
The ever more elaborate condos are part of a trend that has seen tracks add amenities like high-end spas where fans can get $75 facials in between races.
Trackside condos, built adjacent to the course and often located near a turn to give a good view of the action below, are a step up from the luxury boxes that are now a standard feature at most sports stadiums.
But although the condos come with all the trappings of a second home, most owners occupy them for no more than a few weekends a year, typically bringing family, friends and business clients for big racing weekends.
At the Dollars' 1,600-square-foot penthouse, the chef arrived around 11 a.m. for the Nextel Cup Series race. He tied a black apron around his waist and began preparing a spread on a speckled brown and white stone countertop that had been shipped from Brazil and hoisted into the home by a crane.
Before the starting flag fell, chicken and goat cheese tamales with chipotle salsa and cilantro sour cream, baked Vidalia onion dip with crostini, jumbo lump crab cakes, carved beef tenderloin and Gruyre in a puff pastry were ready to be dished out.
A group of burly guests clients of Mr. Dollar's construction company strolled up the spiral staircase to a rooftop terrace to take in the panoramic view of the track and thick wafts of fuel.
"Look at all those high-end trailers out there," said Bill Jaynes, 62, an electrical contractor from Fayetteville, Ga., motioning out the condo's windows toward the track's infield, where hundreds of trucks, mobile homes and R.V.'s including one with Oriental rugs were the scene of a giant tailgate party. "It's millions of dollars out there."
Sinking into the brown leather couch beneath the large flat-screen TV, Mr. Jaynes said, "If this is a redneck sport, I want to be a part of it."
Ken Barbee, 65, the retired owner of a plastic injection molding company, liked Nascar so much he decided to live full time at the racetrack.
After separating from his wife in 1994, Mr. Barbee moved into a two-bedroom condo at Lowe's Motor Speedway in North Carolina and has called it home ever since.
"For me, being single, living alone, it's the greatest place in the world," he said.
The condo was also a good investment. Mr. Barbee bought the unit in 1990 for $140,000 and estimated its current value at $450,000. "I should have bought two or three," he said.
When the Tara Place Condominiums at the Atlanta Motor Speedway went on the market in the 1990's, a basic two-bedroom condo on the sixth floor was listed at $250,000, said Beverly Currie of McDonough, Ga., who helped sell the first units and now handles many of the resales. The penthouses ranged from $455,000 to $495,000.
Now, Ms. Currie has a handful of listings ranging from $350,000 for a basic two-bedroom unit to about $1.5 million for a penthouse. Each comes with at least five tickets, which are required for entrance to the apartment building on race days, and V.I.P. parking passes. Some owners who bought their condos early get as many as 33 tickets.
Trackside condos took a while to catch on. "People thought it was so crazy," said H. A. Wheeler, president of Speedway Motor Sports and head of the Lowe's Motor Speedway, where the first condominiums went up in 1984. "They were just laughing at it."
Some apparently still are. Bill Young, 64, a business owner from Wichita, Kan., said he could have snatched up one of the condos when they were first built. Instead, he said, he is happier in the infield, where he pays about $2,000 each for a handful of parking spots and entertains guests from his $400,000 motor home.
"You feel the race down in the infield," he said. "You're kind of isolated in the condos."
But Jim Dollar seems to prefer it that way. "It's not like sitting in the stands," he said of his penthouse view. "You have a lot of your friends up, and it's just a big party."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Does the Quick-Fix Oxygen Facial Really Work?
G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
Michelle Peck, who has performed hyperbaric oxygen facials on Madonna, demonstrates on Evie Evangelou, a spa publicist. The treatment is supposed to make skin look dewier and smoother.
April 6, 2006
Skin Deep
Does the Quick-Fix Oxygen Facial Really Work?
By NATASHA SINGER
EVIE EVANGELOU, a spa publicist and consultant in New York City, has scoured the world for new and unusual beauty regimens to lure clients to Now, a spa that is scheduled to open on Madison Avenue in May. Last week Ms. Evangelou discovered a treatment courtesy of Madonna that she says could be the next big thing: the hyperbaric oxygen facial. Madonna has recommended it on her Web site and in an interview with Harper's Bazaar.
The facial involves a machine that sprays atomized moisturizers onto the skin using a stream of pressurized oxygen. The treatment is supposed to hydrate skin immediately, making the face appear smoother and plumper.
"So many celebrities are doing the treatment because it temporarily diminishes all the tiny imperfections that would otherwise be visible on high-definition TV," said Michelle Peck, a masseuse from Los Angeles. Ms. Peck is referred to as Madonna's personal oxygen treatment facialist on the Web site madonna.com. She came to Manhattan last week to demonstrate the facial on Ms. Evangelou and other spa managers, a trip sponsored by the maker of the oxygen compressor used in the facials.
As trendy as the oxygen facial may be, there is no hard evidence of its effectiveness, and academic experts are skeptical. Dr. Christopher B. Zachary, a professor and the dermatology department chairman at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, bluntly labeled it "snake oil."
"The concept that high-pressure oxygen would do anything to help the skin is such nonsense as to be laughable," said Dr. Zachary, who has not examined the oxygen-compression machine himself.
He suggested that the plumping or swelling effect might be mild inflammation caused by the blasts of compressed oxygen. "If you wanted puffy eyes, you could also go out for a hard night's drinking," he said.
The status of oxygen facials embraced by some doctors, spas and beauty mavens with little or no scientific evidence is typical of many cosmetic treatments that do not claim to alter the skin. Manufacturers are not required to conduct studies or submit such devices for approval to the Food and Drug Administration. Consumers are on their own in deciding whether to embrace the treatments, or rather, they are influenced by marketing, magazines, celebrity tastes and in some cases early-adopter doctors.
The lack of clinical evidence on oxygen facials has not prevented prominent dermatologists from offering them for up to $500. Six weekly treatments, followed by monthly "maintenance" treatments, are recommended to keep the face looking dewy and juiced up, Ms. Peck said.
Dr. Bradford R. Katchen, a dermatologist in New York City who just bought an oxygen compressor for his office, said the treatment is most appropriate for film or television actresses or for people who plan to attend a special event.
"It's the ultimate hydration therapy that makes your skin look better instantly and stay that way for a few days," said Dr. Katchen. The facials may provide a moisture boost that makes skin smoother so that it is easier to apply makeup, he said.
Since the 1930's doctors have used hyperbaric meaning high-pressure oxygen inhalation chambers to force pure oxygen into the blood stream and tissue of oxygen-deprived deep-sea divers. The spas and dermatologists promoting these facials describe them as a way to force oxygen and moisturizers temporarily into aging skin.
"We hope that the oxygen is creating a pressure bubble that drives vitamins and nutrients into the skin," said Dr. Fredric Brandt, a dermatologist in Miami and New York City. "But we have no data to support that." After he learned about the treatment from one of Madonna's personal assistants, Dr. Brandt ordered the machine for his Miami office, where aestheticians began offering oxygen facials last month, he said.
Americans have had about 20,000 oxygen facials in the last year, said Anthony McMahon, the chief executive of Intraceuticals, the Australian company behind the oxygen compressor and its treatment products.
The theory of the facial is that pressurized oxygen speeds the skin's absorption of moisturizing agents like hyaluronic acid (a carbohydrate that attracts water), Mr. McMahon said. But Intraceuticals, which has sold the $10,000 oxygen compressors to about 100 spas and dermatologists in the United States, has not run any clinical tests to see how the treatment works on the skin's top and underlying layers, he noted.
"We haven't run any medical-style clinical trials because we are not making any biological claims," Mr. McMahon said. "The instant results speak for themselves."
Last week in a hotel room in Manhattan, Ms. Peck demonstrated the facial on the right side of Ms. Evangelou's face. First she poured a protein solution into the nozzle of the compressor and carefully sprayed it around Ms. Evangelou's right eye and along the creases that run from her nostrils to the outer corners of her lip. As the treatment progressed, these areas seemed to swell slightly.
Then Ms. Peck poured a hyaluronic acid solution into the compressor and sprayed the mist in short parallel strokes all over the right side of Ms. Evangelou's face and along her jaw line. After Ms. Peck was finished, she led Ms. Evangelou into the bathroom so that they could both examine her face in the mirror.
"Look how smooth and more awake you look on that side," Ms. Peck said. "Do you see how one of your eyes looks a lot more open than the other, and the apple of your cheek is plumped up?"
Cecilia Brown, the manager of the Now spa, who works with Ms. Evangelou, agreed that she could see a marked change. "You look lopsided," Ms. Brown said as she pointed to the right side of Ms. Evangelou's face. "This side looks swollen."
Ms. Evangelou seemed please with her plumped-up look. "We are buying this machine for the spa right away," she said.
Others are taking a more skeptical approach to high-pressure oxygen facials. Dr. Katchen said he sees it as a new technology that in the absence of scientific data from Intraceuticals he plans to test on himself.
"It's a spa device with limited benefits," said Dr. Katchen. "It has no more and no less validity than a facial."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
"Casino Jack" Abramoff
Illustration by Edward Sorel
The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington So this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack Abramoff -- right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new American century -- will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The End. There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and "Casino Jack" Abramoff will disappear for a few years of weightlifting and Talmudic study.
En route to his day of reckoning, Abramoff really did travel each and every right-wing highway, from Jo-burg in the old days to the Bush White House. But he's being sentenced for only the last few miles of that trip. It's almost an insult to a criminal of Abramoff's caliber that the charge he'll go to jail for is a low-rent wire-fraud scheme committed in a pickpocket capital like Miami Beach. In that one, Jack and his cronies claimed to have $23 million in assets when he didn't have a dime, and he persuaded financial backers to purchase a $147.5 million cruise-ship casino empire. A nice score for a Gotti child, maybe, but a bit gauche for the wizard of the Republican fast lane.
The other charges are a little more respectable. He took tens of millions from Indian tribes that sought relief from Washington on gaming-industry questions, illegally pocketed millions in lobbying fees and evaded taxes on his ill-gotten gains. He also used their money to provide, in exchange for favors, a "stream of things of value" to elected officials, including golf junkets to Scotland, free meals and other swag.
It's that last bit that made Abramoff a national celebrity, the poster boy for the way the Bush administration does business and the most feared name around in a Washington political society that is still waiting with bated lizard breath for the other shoe to drop. To most Americans, Jack Abramoff is the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came through the window in the middle of the night and stole their voice in government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much of a symbol of his generation's Republican Party as Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater was of his.
He was an amazingly ubiquitous figure, a sort of Zelig of the political right -- you could find him somewhere, in the foreground or the background, in almost every Republican political scandal of the past twenty-five years. He carried water for the racist government of Pretoria during the apartheid days and whispered in the ear of those Republican congressmen who infamously voted against anti-apartheid resolutions. He organized rallies in support of the Grenada invasion, showed up in Ollie North's offices during Iran-Contra, palled around with Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi and the Afghan mujahedin.
All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.
He is a living museum of corruption, and in a way it is altogether too bad that he is about to disappear from public scrutiny. In a hilariously tardy attempt to attend to his moral self-image, lately he has been repackaging himself as a fallen prophet, a humbled super-Jew who was guilty only of going too far to serve God. He was the "softest touch in town," he has said, a sucker for causes who "incorrectly didn't follow the mitzvah of giving away at most twenty percent." Then he shows up a few weeks before sentencing with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter, claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to "save the world."
There is no evidence yet that anyone is going to call him on any of this bullshit, and we can see where all of this is going. He'll go away now for his Martha Stewart fitness tour, and a few years from now he'll slide straight into his own prime-time family show for cable's inevitable Orthodox Channel and a $14 million deal from HarperCollins for his 290-page illustrated manual of marriage and intimacy for devout Jewish couples.
No other outcome is really possible, given the logic of the American celebrity world. What is unknown, as yet, is whether America will learn any lessons from the here-and-now of the Jack Abramoff story. For that to happen, we would all have to take a good, hard look at the remarkable life story he is now temporarily leaving us to consider.
Abramoff is a man defined by his connections. As an individual -- as a lone dot on a schematic diagram, an intersection of crossed strands in a web -- Jack Abramoff is a nobody, just another pompous Washington greedhead distinguished only by the world's silliest Boris Badenov fedora ("That was between me and God," Abramoff now says of the infamous hat). But let him loose in society, and magic happens. Jack Abramoff's instinctive political talent was for first locating and then inveigling himself into the disreputable backroom deal of the hour. He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history.
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The story about Jack Abramoff and the elementary school election, the one first reported by The Los Angeles Times, is true. It only seems like apocryphal bullshit. Born in Atlantic City to Frank Abramoff, an affluent Diner's Club executive who would go on to represent golfer Arnold Palmer, Jack moved with his family to Beverly Hills as a boy and grew up attending one of the more prestigious elementary schools in the country, the Hawthorne School. And it was here, at this same fancy-pants school that would one day be home to a chubby girl named Monica Lewinsky, that Jack got his start in politics by being disqualified from a race for student-body president for cheating.
"Jack was a very, very, very smart boy with a straight-A average," recalls Milton Rowen, the then-principal of the school. "We had certain rules about the amount of money that could be spent, and there was no electioneering outside of the school . . . He had his mother come up with hot dogs in her car and give them out to the kids.
"He was a very nice boy," the eighty-seven-year-old now says, laughing. "But he hot-dogged it."
Still, even with that setback, Abramoff was already off and running on a course that would lead him straight to the political underworld. Like Watergate vets Donald Segretti, Dwight Chapin, Gordon Strachan and Ron Ziegler before him, Abramoff throughout his youth would be drawn to student politics, running (and losing) again for student-body president at Beverly Hills High before becoming head of the Massachusetts College Republicans while at Brandeis University in the Boston suburb of Waltham.
Abramoff was part of the first wave of young people who came back to the Republican Party en masse during the so-called Reagan Revolution. The year 1980 was a time of resurgence for a party that just four years before had been in a post-Watergate death spiral; the Moral Majority had just been founded, and new-right prophets like Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie were attracting a fresh generation of young people to the brash, piss-in-your-face, fuck-the-poor ideas emanating from places like the Heritage Foundation and Bill Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom. Among their other converts at this time were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, a pair of ambitious students from Harvard and Emory University, respectively.
After Reagan's 1980 landslide win, those two, along with Abramoff, would work together at the College Republicans National Committee, and when Abramoff succeeded Norquist as CRNC chief he would win a national reputation as a hard-liner with his Lenin-esque pronouncement that it wasn't the job of young Republicans to "seek peaceful co-existence with the left." The take-no-prisoners stance of the twentysomething student leader: "Our job is to remove them from power permanently."
All accounts point to Abramoff as the prototypically humorless Animal House campus villain. A thick-necked champion weight lifter (he still holds the Beverly Hills High bench-press record) with a square jaw and exquisite hygiene, the man-child Abramoff also had the kind of sadistic jock temperament that impresses coaches and corporate recruiters alike. "The football coach was always afraid that Jack was going to kill somebody if he hit him head-on," Rowen says. By the time he went away to Brandeis, he'd already undergone a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, having found religion at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles (after seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a youngster, Abramoff says), and so he arrived in 1970s Massachusetts the rarest of East Coast campus creatures: a moralizing weight lifter with short hair and a passion for Republican politics.
The Abramoff story, in fact, confirms in the most dramatic way every vicious popular stereotype about campus conservatives. Kids who get involved with lefty politics on campus almost always graduate straight into some degrading state of semi-employment -- the defining characteristic of lefty student movements is how few doors they open for you. Another defining characteristic of the student left is its persistent, unquenchable and irrational suspicion that the campus Republicans hold their meetings in the offices of someplace like the Rand Corporation, where they have their buttocks branded with Sumerian symbols in secret ceremonies that upon graduation will gain all of them entrance to the upper ranks of corporate and governmental privilege.
That was Jack Abramoff. Like those famed USC student "ratfuckers" who went on to hold the ultimate panty raid in the Watergate Hotel, Abramoff and his close friends Norquist and Ralph Reed (the one-time head of the Georgia College Republicans used to sleep on Abramoff's couch) never really abandoned the laughable training-wheel secrecy and capture-the-flag gamesmanship of student politics. His buttocks freshly branded, Abramoff in 1983 traveled to Johannesburg on behalf of the CRNC and immediately parlayed his student experience into a real job as a sort of frontman for South African intelligence services. He was the young progressive's paranoid nightmare come shockingly true: absurd campus Republican proto-geek effortlessly transformed at graduation into flesh-and-blood neo-Nazi spook.
It is not easy to find anyone who actually encountered Abramoff during his South Africa experiences, although one source who was involved with South African right-wing student politics recalled "Casino Jack" as a "blue-eyed boy" who rubbed people the wrong way with his arrogant demeanor. On his first trip to Johannesburg in 1983, Abramoff met with leaders from the archconservative, pro-apartheid National Students Federation, which itself is alleged to have been created by South Africa's notorious Bureau of Security Services. Together with NSF member Russel Crystal -- today a prominent South African politician in the Democratic Alliance, an anti-African National Congress party -- Abramoff subsequently, in 1986, chaired the head of a conservative think tank called the International Freedom Foundation.
The creation of the IFF officially marked the beginning of the silly phase of Abramoff's career. According to testimony before Democratic South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, the IFF was not a conservative think tank but actually a front for the South African army. Testimony in sealed TRC hearings reportedly reveal that the IFF was known by the nickname "Pacman" in the South African army and that its activities were part of a larger plan called "Operation Babushka," designed to use propaganda to discredit the ANC and Nelson Mandela at home and abroad. Among other things, Abramoff managed during this time to funnel funds and support from the IFF to a variety of stalwart congressmen and senators, including Rep. Dan Burton and Sen. Jesse Helms, all of whom consistently opposed congressional resolutions against apartheid. These members of Congress would deny knowing that the IFF's money came from the South African government, because that, of course, would have been illegal; Abramoff himself denied it too, although he has been largely quiet on the subject since the TRC testimony in 1995.
In a hilarious convergence of ordinary workaday incompetence and pointlessly secretive cloak-and-dagger horseshit, Operation Babushka's grand opus would ultimately turn out to be the production of the 1989 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Red Scorpion, in which American moviegoers were invited to care about an anti-communist revolutionary targeted for execution by a sweat-drenched jungle version of Lundgren's overacting Ivan Drago persona. The film, which Abramoff wrote and produced, was instantly derided by critics around the world as one of the stupidest movies ever made.
Veteran character actor Carmen Argenziano, who played the heavy, Col. Zayas, in Red Scorpion, recalls the "Cimino-esque" film shoot in Namibia as one of the most surreal experiences of his career. "It was pretty weird," he says. "What was going on was fishy, and then in the middle of production the word spread that there was some kind of weird South African/CIA connection. And that bummed everyone out."
Argenziano, whom history will likely absolve for being, with Lundgren, one half of the film's only memorable scene, which also perhaps represents the apex of Jack Abramoff's literary career (Argenziano: "Are you out of your mind?" Lundgren: "No. Just out of bullets"), laughs almost nonstop as he recalls his Namibia experiences.
"We were all staying in this hotel called the Kalahari Sands in Windhoek, the capital," he says. "There was this huge new escalator in the hotel. I guess it was the only one in the country, because little African kids kept coming in to stare at it. But the South Africans we had on the shoot [Abramoff was reportedly provided free labor by the South African army] kept shooing them away, literally pushing kids off the escalator, shouting these racist words at them. Wasn't exactly good for morale."
The Eighties show Abramoff involved in a series of almost comic backroom escapades, the most famous being the organization of a sort of trade convention for anti-communist rebel leaders in Jamba, Angola. There are not many facts on the record about this incident, but what is known smacks of an articulate young Darth Vader putting out scones and lemonade at a sand-planet meeting of the leading bounty-hunter scum in the universe. Under the auspices of the Citizens for America, a group founded by Rite Aid drugstore magnate and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman at the request of Ronald Reagan, Abramoff helped organize a meeting of anti-communist rebels that included Angolan UNITA fighters, Afghan mujahedin, Laotian guerrillas and Nicaraguan Contras.
Some reports speculate that the meeting was convened so that one of the Americans -- perhaps Abramoff or Lehrman -- could pass along a message of support from the White House. But it's more likely that this will be just another Abramoff episode to remain shrouded in mystery. Twenty-one years later, Lehrman won't say what it was all about, noting that "I do not recall if there was a White House message discussion" and adding only that "there were very many anti-communist individuals present in Jamba."
Abramoff's CFA experience was extensive enough, however, to make him a character in the Iran-Contra scandal. His ostensible role was to raise support for the Contras through the CFA. "Abramoff was a bit player in Iran-Contra," says Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who served as a special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Iran-Contra investigation. "That's where he learned that the money wasn't in the ideological skulduggery world. It was in the go-buy-the-government world." But, Blum adds, Abramoff's experiences with various conservative foundations and nonprofits during this period proved valuable later on. "This is when he made all his connections," he says. "It was through them that he learned that it was much more lucrative to work in the commercial end of politics."
Abramoff, Norquist and Reed were all in their mid-to-late twenties, and all were experiencing paradigmatic life changes. While Abramoff was joining such groups as the Council for National Policy, the CFA and the United States of America Foundation, Norquist was founding Americans for Tax Reform, the organization he would later ride to prominence as a fat, hygienically deficient tax-policy oracle. Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington -- and by 1985 he, too, had found his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.
There is a common thread running through almost all of Abramoff's activities during this tadpole period of his in the Eighties. Suggested in his every action is an utter contempt for legal governmental processes; he behaves as if ordinary regulations are for suckers and the uncommitted. If the government won't step up to the plate and sign off on support for the Contras, you go through channels and do it yourself. If you really want to win an election, you find ways around finance laws and spending limits. And if you want to oppose a national anti-apartheid movement on the country's campuses, don't waste time building from the ground up; go straight to Pretoria and bring home a few million dollars in a bag.
One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff's obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious dealmaker" Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation -- as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them -- not even good at being criminals.
* * * *
All of Abramoff's late-career capers -- the inner-city youth charity that actually bought sniper scopes for Israeli settlers, the academic think tank that turned out to be a lifeguard in a shack on Rehoboth Beach, the "check's in the mail" fleecing of his own tailor out of a bill for suits -- they all exude the same infuriating "Check out the brains on us!" vibe.
Take the infamous Naftasib scheme of 1997-98. The short version of this story is that Abramoff and Tom DeLay met with a bunch of shady Russian oil executives in 1997; the Russians then sent $1 million to a British law firm called James and Sarch; James and Sarch then sent a million to the pompously named nonprofit "U.S. Family Network," which in turn sent money to numerous destinations. It went to a lobbyist agency called the Alexander Strategy Group that was run by DeLay's ex-chief of staff, Edwin Buckham; the agency would subsequently hire DeLay's wife at a salary of $3,200 a month. It went toward the purchase of a luxury D.C. town house that DeLay would use to raise money. And it went toward the purchase of a luxury box at FedExField, which Abramoff used to watch the Redskins. If you follow the loop all the way around, the quid pro quo probably involved DeLay's 1998 decision to support an IMF loan to Russia, whose economy collapsed that year and would rely on an IMF bailout to survive. A Maryland pastor named Christopher Geeslin, who briefly served as the U.S. Family Network's president, would later say that Buckham told him that the $1 million from the Russians was intended to influence DeLay's decision regarding funding for the IMF. DeLay ended up voting to replenish IMF funds in September of that year, right at the time of the bailout.
Is this smart? Sure, if you're fucking ten years old. If your idea of smart is turning an IMF loan into Redskins tickets, then, yeah, this is smart. But another way to look at it is that these assholes got themselves Redskins tickets by giving $18 billion to one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. I'd call that buying at a premium.
That's the most striking characteristic of Abramoff and his crew of ex-student leaders; nearly thirty years out of college, no longer young at all, the whole bunch of them are still Dean Wormer's sneaky little shits, high-fiving one another for executing the brilliant theft and pre-dawn public hanging of the rival college's stuffed-bear mascot. That whole adolescent vibe permeates the confiscated Abramoff e-mails, the best example of which being this exchange between Jack and his "evil elf" aide Michael Scanlon regarding their lobbying fees for the Coushatta Indian tribe:
Scanlon: Coushatta is an absolute cake walk. Your cut on the project as proposed is at least 800k.
Abramoff: How can I say this strongly enough: YOU IZ DA MAN
Again, these assholes affirm every stereotype about campus conservatives. They don't spend enough time being kids when they're supposed to, so they do it when they're balding, middle-aged men with handles and back hair -- using Washington and Congress as their own personal sandbox.
They figured out how to beat everything. Everything about the Abramoff story suggests that at some point, he and his buddies Norquist, Reed and DeLay took a long, hard look at the American system, war-gamed it and came up with a master plan to strike hard at its weakest points. In the end, almost all of the Abramoff scams revolved around the vulnerability of the national legislature to outside manipulation. Once Abramoff and his cabal figured out how to beat Congress, everything else fell into place.
Case in point: Abramoff's remarkable success in defeating H.R. 521, a 2001 House bill that would place the Guam Superior Court under the control of a federally controlled Supreme Court. Led by Judge Alberto Lamorena, Guam Superior Court justices hired the lobbyist to defeat the bill, which would have unseated them as the chief judicial authorities of the island. It says something for Abramoff's ability to bring out the worst in people that he managed to get a group of sitting judges to pay him $324,000 in public funds in $9,000 installments so as to avoid detection.
Despite the $324,000 fee, Abramoff could not prevent the House Resources committee from unanimously recommending H.R. 521 for passage. Would the superlobbyist finally fail? No, of course not. Given what we know about Abramoff's tactics, we'd be naive not to conclude that he could lean on DeLay and then-Whip Roy Blunt to stall the bill in the congressional machinery. On May 27th, 2002, just five days after the Resources committee made its recommendation, an Abramoff-linked PAC wrote two checks for $5,000 -- one to Blunt, one to DeLay. H.R. 521 never reached the floor.
The Guam incident certainly shows how easily the whole Congress was controlled by a small gang. The DeLay Republicans, along with Abramoff, were apparently the first to recognize the opportunities for corruption presented by the House leadership's dictatorial control over key committees, in particular the Rules committee. Now, a single call to a lone Tom DeLay could decide the fate of any piece of legislation, pushing it through to a vote or gumming it up in the works as needed. The other 430-odd congressmen were window dressing.
I asked Rep. Louise Slaughter if the Guam case, which showed that just two men could quash a bill, proved that Congress was especially vulnerable to manipulation by the likes of Abramoff.
"Absolutely," she said. "And the thing is, we have no idea how many incidents like that there were. What else didn't get to the floor? We have no idea. No way of knowing."
Even more ominously, Abramoff would eventually come under fire in Guam following the mysterious removal of Guam Attorney General Frederick Black, who had seen the fate of H.R. 521 and decided to investigate Abramoff's role in it.
"The thing that really worries me about Guam is the prosecutor who was plucked off the case," says Slaughter, a New York Democrat who has spearheaded her party's lobby-reform drive. "It makes you wonder what really went on there."
At the very least, Abramoff's relationship with White House procurements officer David Safavian shows that he made at least some inroads into the world of White House patronage. Abramoff took Safavian on one of his famous Scotland golfing junkets and reportedly was receiving help from Safavian in leasing government property. Safavian was working on the distribution of millions in federal aid to Katrina-affected regions when he was arrested, which raises all kinds of questions about what else might have been going on.
"There were so many contracts, from Katrina to Iraq -- God knows what really went on in there," says Slaughter.
Once Congress was conquered, Abramoff, Norquist, et al., apparently discovered a means for turning it into a pure engine for profit. The game they may have discovered worked like this: One lobbyist (Abramoff, say) represents one group of interests -- for example, the Malaysian government. Then, a lobbyist friend of Abramoff's (say, Norquist) represents an antagonist to Abramoff's client, in this case, let's say dissident leader Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim asks Norquist to press his case against the Malaysian state in Washington; Norquist complies and uses his contacts to raise a stink on the Hill. Abramoff's client, unnerved, turns to Abramoff to make the problem go away. Abramoff dutifully goes to the same friends Norquist applied to in the first place, and the problem does indeed go away. In the end, everyone is happy and both lobbyists have performed and gotten paid. Abramoff apparently pulled this kind of double-dealing scheme more than once, as he and Ralph Reed appear to have run a similar con on the Coushatta and Tigua Indian tribes, who were on opposite sides of a gaming dispute.
An idiot might call a scheme like this clever. But that's only true if you don't consider what really happened here: Dozens of people conspiring to reduce the U.S. Congress to the level of a Belarussian rubber stamp for the sake of . . . what? A few million dollars in lobbying fees? And not even a few million dollars apiece but a few million dollars split several ways. Shit, even Paris Hilton can make a million dollars in this country without blowing up 200 years of democracy. How smart can these guys be?
Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and many others in the House, to lie back and open their legs all the way for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions. In the Third World, corrupt politicians at least get something for selling out the people -- boats, mansions, villas in the south of France. If you offered the lowest, most drunken ex-mobster in the Russian Duma $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 in soft money for his vote, he would laugh in your face; he might even be insulted enough to shoot you. But Jack Abramoff apparently got any number of congressmen to play ball for the same kind of money.
They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America's journalists like Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.
They targeted Congress, the courts, the integrity of elections, and the free press, and in every corner they found willing partners who could be had for a few bucks and a package of golf tees. That doesn't mean Jack Abramoff was so very smart. No, what that says is that America is no longer trying very hard. And when Jack Abramoff hears his sentence, ours will certainly be made plain soon after. Jack Abramoff was the Patient Zero of Washington corruption. He's the girl at school that everyone got a piece of, including two janitors in their forties. It strains all credulity to think that he's been talking to the Department of Justice for months and yet prosecutors still have to "encircle" a lone congressman, Bob Ney, as has been reported. If Ney is the big target the government made a deal with Abramoff for, we'll know we've been had again.
"If you're venal and cunning enough, like him, you can do it," says Slaughter, when asked if the American system has become easy to beat. "But he had a lot of help."
MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone Magazine
Posted Mar 24, 2006 11:42 AM -
Preventable Disease Blinds Poor in Third World
Mariella Furrer/Think, for The New York Times
After undergoing surgery for trachiasis on both her eyes, Mare Aleghan, 42yrs old, sits in a house in Forgera, Ethiopia, where she and her daughter were accommodated for free by a stranger.
March 31, 2006
On the Brink | Trachoma
Preventable Disease Blinds Poor in Third World
By CELIA W. DUGGER
ALEMBER, Ethiopia Mare Alehegn lay back nervously on the metal operating table, her heart visibly pounding beneath her sackcloth dress, and clenched her fists as the paramedic sliced into her eyelid. Repeated infections had scarred the undersides of her eyelids, causing them to contract and forcing her lashes in on her eyes. For years, each blink felt like thorns raking her eyeballs. She had plucked the hairs with crude tweezers, but the stubble grew back sharper still.
The scratching, for Mrs. Alehegn, 42, and millions worldwide, gradually clouds the eyeball, dimming vision and, if left untreated, eventually leads to a life shrouded in darkness. This is late-stage trachoma, a neglected disease of neglected people, and a preventable one, but for a lack of the modest resources that could defeat it.
This operation, which promised to lift the lashes off Mrs. Alehegn's lacerated eyes, is a 15-minute procedure so simple that a health worker with a few weeks of training can do it. The materials cost about $10.
The operation, performed last year, would not only deliver Mrs. Alehegn from disabling pain and stop the damage to her corneas, but it also would hold out hope of a new life for her daughter, Enatnesh, who waited vigilantly outside the operating room door at the free surgery camp here.
Mrs. Alehegn's husband left her years ago when the disease rendered her unable to do a wife's work. At 6, Enatnesh was forced to choose between a father who could support her, or a lifetime of hard labor to help a mother who had no one else to turn to.
"I chose my mother," said the frail, pigtailed slip of a girl, so ill fed that she looked closer to 10 than her current age, 16. "If I hadn't gone with her, she would have died. No one was there to even give her a glass of water."
Their tale is common among trachoma sufferers. Trachoma's blinding damage builds over decades of repeated infections that begin in babies. The infections are spread from person to person, or by hungry flies that feed from seeping eyes.
In large part because women look after the children, and children are the most heavily infected, women are three times more likely to get the blinding, late stage of the disease.
For many women, the pain and eventual blindness ensure a life of deepening destitution and dependency. They become a burden on daughters and granddaughters, making trachoma a generational scourge among women and girls who are often already the most vulnerable of the poor.
Trachoma disappeared from the United States and Europe as living standards improved, but remains endemic in much of Africa and parts of Latin America and Asia, its last, stubborn redoubts. The World Health Organization estimates that 70 million people are infected with it. Five million suffer from its late stages. And two million are blind because of it.
A million people like Mrs. Alehegn need the eyelid surgery in Ethiopia alone. Yet last year only 60,000 got it, all paid for by nonprofit groups like the Carter Center, Orbis and Christian Blind Mission International.
As prevalent as trachoma remains, the W.H.O. has made the blinding late stage of the disease a target for eradication within a generation because, in theory at least, everything needed to vanquish it is available. Controlling trachoma depends on relatively simple advances in hygiene, antibiotics and the inexpensive operation that was performed on Mrs. Alehegn.
But the extent of the disease far exceeds the money and medical workers available. In poor countries like this one, faced with epidemics of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, a disease like trachoma, which disables and blinds, has difficulty competing with those big killers.
Dr. Abebe Eshetu, a health official here in Ethiopia's Amhara region, described the resources available for trachoma as "a cup of water in the ocean."
Nowhere is the need greater than across this harsh rural landscape.
As dawn broke one day last year, hundreds of people desperate for relief streamed into an eyelid surgery camp run by the government and paid for by the Carter Center. Some of the oldest had walked days on feet twisted by arthritis to get here.
The throng spread across the scrubby land around a small health clinic. They wrapped shawls around their heads to shield themselves from sun and dust, made all the more agonizing by their affliction. Their cheeks were etched with the salty tracks of tears.
'Hair in the Eye'
Typical of those was Mrs. Alehegn, led stumbling and barefoot through stony fields by Enatnesh, who worriedly shielded her mother under a faded black umbrella.
As they waited their turn, Mrs. Alehegn explained that her troubles began more than 15 years ago when she developed "hair in the eye," as trachoma is known here. The pain made it impossible for her to cook over smoky dung fires, hike to distant wells for water or work in dusty fields, the essential duties of a wife.
Gradually the affliction soured her relationship with her husband, Asmare Demissie, who divorced her a decade ago, so he could marry a healthy woman.
"When I stopped getting up in the morning to do the housecleaning, when I stopped helping with the farm work, we started fighting," Mrs. Alehegn said.
The operation she had come for is still exceedingly rare in Ethiopia. Only 76 ophthalmologists practice in this vast nation of 70 million people. Most work in the capital, Addis Ababa, not in the rural areas where trachoma reigns.
Because of the extreme doctor shortage, nonprofit groups have paid for the training of ordinary government health workers over two to four weeks to do the eyelid surgery. The Carter Center, which favors a month of training, estimates the cost at $600 per worker, plus $800 for two surgical instrument kits for each of them.
Those trained make an incision that runs the length of the eyelid's underside, through the cartilagelike plate, then lift the side of the lid fringed with the eyelashes outward. Then they stitch the two sides back together. The patient is given a local anesthetic.
The operation cannot undo the damage already done to corneas, which makes the abraded eyes vulnerable to infections. But it can stop further injury. And because the disease often takes decades to render its victims blind, the operation can save a woman's sight and halt disabling pain.
For Mrs. Alehegn, the surgery was her second. Her plight is typical, for trachoma is both a disease of poverty and a disease that causes poverty.
After separating from her husband, she, Enatnesh and another daughter, Adelogne, then just 4, moved to a small, poor piece of land belonging to Mrs. Alehegn's family. About a year later, Mrs. Alehegn scraped together enough money for her first eyelid surgery. But as she aged, the underside of her eyelids scarred by past trachoma infections continued to shrink, turning her lashes inward again.
In recent years, her poverty was so dire she could not afford to have the surgery again. Her only income was the dollar or so a week that Enatnesh collected when she went to market to sell the cotton fabric her mother wove. They were so poor they could not afford even 15 cents for soap.
"If I get my health back, it means everything," Mrs. Alehegn said. "I'll be able to work and support my family."
The others who journeyed to the camp told many such stories of hardship. In a land where early death is commonplace, some of those with the disease see their wounded eyes, ceaselessly leaking tears, as a kind of stigmata of sorrow.
Banchiayehu Gonete, an elderly widow, said three of her eight children had died young. The bitterest loss was of her eldest daughter, carried off by malaria at 40 with a baby still inside her. It was this daughter who had plucked her in-turned lashes, cooked for her and kept her company.
"God killed my children," said Mrs. Gonete, old and wrinkled, but unsure of her age. "I feel this pain as part of my mourning."
Nearby, Tsehainesh Beryihun, 10, sat with her grandmother, Yamrot Mekonen. Trachoma ended the girl's childhood years ago.
When her parents divorced, her mother gave Tsehainesh, then just a baby, to her paternal grandmother. As the old woman's sight failed, Tsehainesh became her servant. Since she was 7, she has fetched water, cooked, cleaned, collected dung and wood for the fire and swept the dirt floors, her grandmother said.
The girl sees her half brothers and sisters, the children of her father's second marriage, happily dashing to school, while she lives apart, her days filled with the grinding work of tending to a sickly, demanding old woman.
Her grandmother explained that the girl owes her. "I've supported her this far," Mrs. Mekonen said impassively, "so now it's her turn to support me."
Tsehainesh wept bitterly as her grandmother spoke, refusing to utter a word.
Ending Disability and Dependency
To break this cycle of debilitation and dependency, the goal is not eradication of the eye infections themselves, which most agree is neither practical nor necessary, but rather to reduce their frequency and intensity, a more achievable goal. This would avoid development of the devastating late stage of trachoma, called trichiasis, that makes surgery the sufferers' only salvation.
Toward that end, the World Health Organization has approved a strategy known as SAFE, an acronym that stands for surgery, antibiotics, face washing and environmental change, notably improved access to latrines and water.
Already, some researchers say, the growing use of antibiotics around the world to treat infections, even those unrelated to trachoma, has probably contributed to trachoma's decline. That is true even in very poor countries where there is no organized effort to tackle the disease, like Nepal and Malawi, they say.
The use of Zithromax, an antibiotic manufactured by Pfizer, has proved a breakthrough. The most common alternative is a cheap, messy antibiotic ointment that has to be applied twice daily to the eyes for six weeks. Zithromax, in contrast, can be taken in a single dose making compliance easier and distribution to millions simpler.
By 2008, Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, will have donated 145 million doses for trachoma control. Its contribution is administered by the International Trachoma Initiative, a nonprofit group. The drug has been provided in 11 of the 55 countries where trachoma remains a problem.
But globally, the World Health Organization estimates that at least 350 million people need the antibiotics once a year for three years to bring infection rates under control.
That equals more than a billion doses of azithromycin, the generic name for Zithromax. Trachoma is so rampant here in Ethiopia that an estimated 60 million people, or 86 percent of the country's population, need the drug.
Pfizer has not officially announced any additional donations, but Dr. Joseph M. Feczko, a Pfizer vice president, says the company will provide whatever is needed. "There's no cap or limit on this," he said. "We're in it for the long haul."
But even free drugs cost money to distribute. No global estimates are available for carrying out the SAFE strategy for trachoma control, but the Ethiopian government, beset by competing social problems, would have to come up with $30 million to reach even half the people who need the antibiotic, and $20 million more for public education on basic hygiene.
For now, the aim here is a more modest effort at localized control, but even that will not be easy.
An Ancient Scourge
Chlamydia trachomatis, the microorganism that causes trachoma, has been a source of misery for millennia, thriving in poor, crowded and unsanitary conditions. In ancient Egypt, in-turned eyelashes were plucked, then treated with a mixture of frankincense, lizard dung and donkey blood. In Victorian England, infected children were isolated in separate schools.
At the turn of the century, doctors at Ellis Island used a buttonhook to examine the undersides of immigrants' eyelids. Those with signs of trachoma were often shipped back to their home countries.
Swarming Musca sorbens flies play an ignominious role in spreading the disease. They crave eye discharge and pick up chlamydia as they burrow greedily, maddeningly into infected eyes.
"They cluster shoulder to shoulder around an infected eye," said Paul Emerson, the entomologist who did pioneering work on the role of the flies in spreading trachoma and who now runs the Carter Center's trachoma control program.
So inescapable, so persistent are they here in the Amhara region that children learn not to bother shooing them away. Even at the surgery camp, flies buzzed through the chicken wire that covered the windows of cramped operating rooms, harassing trachoma victims at the moment they sought relief.
Once the eggs of a female fly are ripe, she lays them in her preferred breeding medium, human feces, plentiful because most people here go to the bathroom outdoors.
But the flies cannot breed in simple, inexpensive pit latrines, Mr. Emerson said. He said he does not yet know why, but he thinks that a competing species that does thrive in latrines may eat the Musca sorbens maggots.
Ethiopia is now making a national effort to get people to build latrines, training thousands of village health workers to spread the word. It is also teaching children the importance of face washing in school.
But soap and water are scarce, too. Women often walk hours a day to wells to carry home precious pots of water balanced on their heads. And soap is a luxury for the poorest of the poor.
For those like Mrs. Alehegn, with late stage trachoma, surgery will continue to be necessary.
When her operation was complete, the health worker who performed it, Mola Dessie, pressed white cotton pads on Mrs. Alehegn's eyes to soak up the blood and applied antibiotic ointment to prevent infection. Then he covered her eyes with bandages.
Enatnesh wrapped her mother's head in a dingy cloth and slipped her stick-thin arm around her mother's waist to lead her away.
Mrs. Alehegn, who is illiterate, says she hopes that once she heals she will be able to weave more cloth, earn more money and do the domestic chores, leaving Enatnesh freer to pursue an education. "I don't want her to live my life," she said.
Despite her dependence on her daughter, Mrs. Alehegn has allowed the girl to go to school. Enatnesh, though having fallen behind, is a diligent fifth grader at age 16, who proudly said she is ranked 5th out of 74 students in her class. She dreams of being a doctor.
Two days after her mother's surgery, Enatnesh led the way to her father's sturdily built hut a couple of hours walk away. There, as his second wife swept the compound and Enatnesh's 9-year-old half-brother sat in the shade, Mr. Demissie, 58, offered a regretful explanation for his decision to divorce his first wife.
He, too, had developed "hair in the eye," he said. And like his wife, he, too, had been forced to stop working. If they had not separated, he reckoned, they would both have died. Finally, Mr. Demissie decided to save himself.
His sick wife would never find anyone else to marry, he realized. But for him, a new, hardworking wife would provide a second chance. And after his marriage, he got the surgery to prevent his own blindness.
"If we had not been sick," he said sadly, "we would have raised our children together."
As he spoke, Enatnesh listened sorrowfully, her hand cupped over her mouth, her head bent low.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Questions for George Saunders
Hal Silverman for The New York Times
April 9, 2006
Questions for George Saunders
The Stuff of Fiction
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: Your new collection of short stories, "In Persuasion Nation," presents America as a commerce-saturated but happy place where children go to live with market-research firms and giant Twinkies run through fields of flowers. Is it fair to call you an ecstatic appreciator of trash culture?
Excuse me. Can we require readers to read my books before they continue with this interview?
No, I am afraid not. What are you hoping they might gain?
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
But more awake to what, exactly? To talking Dorito chips, which play a part in the title story in your new collection?
Everything in the world is holy and unholy at the same time. If we didn't have that part of us that craved Doritos, then they wouldn't exist. I'm actually working on a story now that is all product names. There's not even a verb.
But some product names double as verbs. Like Bounce. Or Shout, the stain remover.
Or Pampers. What about Swiffers? That sounds like a verb.
What are Swiffers?
You get this handle and there's this box of citrus-scented wet towels that you put on there. How is that for an articulate description? It's this thing that you put on the end of a thing!
Although you're often described as a dark satirist of American culture, your work is essentially a nostalgia fest. Like Pop Art, it drips with sentiment about things it pretends to ridicule.
When I was a kid, I took "The Brady Bunch" and "The Partridge Family" very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
It's true that "The Brady Bunch" creates its own imaginative universe, somewhat like fiction or any art form. You cannot say that about today's reality shows.
I agree, "The Brady Bunch" can seem utopian compared to "American Idol" or "The Bachelor" or "Swapping Grandma" or "America's Bravest Hottie Midgets."
What is the connection between television and the arc of our lives?
I don't think it is a coincidence that we got into Iraq in the wake of Monica Lewinsky and O. J. and the round-the-clock television coverage of them. There has got to be a causal connection between the kind of small-bite thinking that we started to accept around the time of Monica and our incredible gullibility vis--vis Iraq.
Can you tell us about your background as a former engineer from Chicago?
When I was younger, I had this idea that I would write the big novel and get the big score. Instead, I went to this college called the Colorado School of Mines, and the best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.
These days you're teaching at Syracuse University and you've published two other short-story collections, "Pastoralia" and "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." Might you try writing a novel in the future?
I just did. It's very innovative. It is only 25 pages long.
Ha, ha. I see you've also published a children's book, "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip," which will be rereleased this month.
I wrote it for my two daughters when they were little. That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters. It's that Martin Buber "I and Thou" thing. Even this lowly wino was once somebody's beloved son. Or should have been.
How much do you think we owe that wino?
Chekhov put it best. He said every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet, with a hammer, to remind him that not everyone is happy.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Today's Papers
Three Feet Higher
By Joshua Kucera
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006, at 5:32 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with the release of the long-awaited federal government guidelines for rebuilding New Orleans and a $2.5 billion plan for levee reconstruction. Under the plans, 98 percent of the population in the New Orleans area would be able to return to their homes. The top nonlocal New York Times story is the Zacarias Moussaoui trial and the first public playing of the cockpit recording of United Flight 93. That story also led the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox and was fronted by USA Today. The Los Angeles Times leads, at least online, with a follow-up to its amazing stories of flash memory drives with highly sensitive U.S. military data being sold in bazaars in Afghanistan.
USA Today leads with the FBI's caseload of white-collar and drug crimes dropping dramatically. Since 2001, when the bureau started focusing more on terrorism, the overall number of FBI-led prosecutions has declined 25 percent. At the same time the number of terrorism-related cases and convictionsstill a small portion of the FBI's total workloadhas risen rapidly. But the paper notes that the average prison sentence for the terrorism cases is half that for drug convictions. One analyst suggests the bureau may be padding its numbers by labeling immigration violations as terrorism.
The post-Katrina New Orleans plan would require most homeowners to raise the levels of their houses to 3 feet above the grounda curious figure, given that the water was so much higher than that in so much of the city. One expert calls the 3-foot requirement "wacky." Less wacky is the cost of raising a house that muchabout $60,000, according to USA Today. The NYT emphasizes the relative lenience of the rebuilding guidelines, given many residents' worries that parts of the city would be abandoned. The WP focuses instead on the possibility that Louisiana may have to pay as much as $900 million of the levee-reconstruction costs.
The tape of Flight 93which was played as the culmination of the prosecution's case that Moussaoui should get the death penaltydepicted an "animalistic" struggle in the cockpit as passengers tried to break in to thwart the hijacking plot. The descriptions of the tape are riveting, so those of us not in the courtroom can only imagine how it was to actually hear it. Still, none of the papers really address what relevance the tape had to the Moussaoui case. As the Post puts it, "The trial seemed an afterthought yesterday amid the drama of the recording."
In the latest episode in the flash drive series, the Times reporter buys a drive for $40 containing detailed information about Afghan spies employed by the United States. Intelligence seems to be one of the few things the military doesn't overpay forone Afghan spying on al-Qaida gets $15 for every successful mission. Among other helpful information on the drive: the layout and defense plans of a (formerly) "low-visibility" special operations base in southern Afghanistan. The top U.S. commander in the country has ordered a review of how soldiers keep track of computer hardware.
The LAT also fronts a poll showing that a large majority of Americans supports an immigration plan that would both tighten enforcement of the border and create a guest-worker program, rather than an enforcement-only approach. Any plan containing amnesty seems not to have been polled. The same survey showed 49 percent of Americans planned to vote for a Democrat in the Congressional elections this fall, and 35 percent for Republicans. It also showed that 40 percent of Americans don't support military action against Iran even if Tehran continues to get closer to having nuclear weapons, as opposed to 48 percent who would support an attack.* If the U.S. attacks, a fearless 25 percent favor sending in ground troops.
The Post fronts, and LAT stuffs, another general piling on the criticism of Donald Rumsfeld. This time it's a former division commander in Iraq.
The conflict in Darfur could be spreading: Early-morning wire reports say there has been heavy fighting inside Chad's capitol. Chadian rebels based in Darfur are clashing with government forces and appear to be intent on taking the capital. France is bolstering the contingent of 1,200 troops it maintains in Chad.
Michael Jackson is close to a deal that would involve him selling one of his prized assetshis share in a catalog of 4,000 songs including most of the Beatles' hits, the NYT reports. Jackson bought the publishing rights to the songs for $47.5 million in 1984 but is in "a lengthy slide toward insolvency," as the Times puts it, and is trying to stave off bankruptcy by refinancing hundreds of millions in loans. The catalog also includes songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and Garth Brooks.
Correction, April 13, 2006: This article originally and incorrectly stated that a Los Angeles Times poll found that 48 percent of respondents would not support military action against Iran if the country continued to develop nuclear weapons materials, while 40 percent of respondents would support military action. In fact, 48 percent of respondents stated that they would support military action, while 40 percent would not. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
U.N. Atomic Agency Investigates Iran's Claims
Islamic Republic News Agency, via Reuters
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who said on Wednesday that Iranian scientists had enriched uranium to a high level.
U.N. Atomic Agency Investigates Iran's Claims
The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency said during a visit to Tehran today that inspectors took samples to confirm that Iran had enriched uranium to 3.5 percent, a low level used to fuel nuclear power stations.
The collection of samples is part of a routine verification process in nuclear inspection.
Hoping to help Iran avoid a confrontation with the West, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the agency, held talks with Iranian officials today at the start of visit intended to persuade Iran to take measures to reassure the international community, including the suspension of uranium enrichment until "outstanding issues are clarified."
But the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, set the stage for the visit by declaring earlier today that Iran would refuse to talk with Dr. ElBaradei about its right to perform enrichment, and he lashed out again at Western critics.
"Our answer to those who are angry about Iran obtaining the full nuclear cycle is one phrase we say: Be angry and die of this anger," he said in comments to the IRNA news agency in Iran.
With nationalistic fanfare, Mr. Ahmadinejad announced Tuesday that Iran had joined the group of nuclear nations after successfully enriching uranium to 3.5 percent at the laboratory level and said Tehran was determined to develop its nuclear program on an industrial scale.
"I cannot confirm that," Dr. ElBaradei said, when asked about the enrichment.
"Our inspectors have taken samples," he said in remarks that were reported by news agencies after he held talks with Iranian officials. "They will report to the board."
Iran tried to use the announcement to political advantage and position itself as having accomplished a step in its nuclear program that was unstoppable, despite Western pressure to suspend it.
Dr. ElBaradei held talks today with Ali Larijani, the chief nuclear negotiator. An I.A.E.A, spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming, told CNN in an interview broadcast from Tehran that no commitments to suspend enrichment were made by Iran "at this point."
Iran's announcement brought criticism from several Western nations and to a lesser degree from Russia and China. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for "strong steps" against Iran and for the United Nations Security Council to take action when it convenes again on the issue.
The White House has asserted that Iran is secretly trying to develop fuel for nuclear weapons and said after Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks on Tuesday that Iran was "moving in the wrong direction."
Iran argues that it has the right to pursue a nuclear program that it says is for industrial purposes.
The deputy head of Iran's atomic energy organization, Muhammad Saeedi, said Wednesday that Iran would defy international pressure and rapidly expand its ability to enrich uranium for fuel by said pushing to put 54,000 centrifuges on line a vast increase from the 164 the Iranians said Tuesday that they had used to enrich uranium to 3.5 percent.
Western nuclear analysts said Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions. They said nothing had changed to alter current estimates of when Iran might be able to make a single nuclear weapon, assuming that is its ultimate goal. The United States government has estimated that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020.
The head of Russia's nuclear agency, Sergei Kiriyenko, flatly declared today that Mr. Saeedi's plans for a quick increase in production was not realistic.
"Industrial uranium enrichment is out of the question," given the state of Iran's program, he told Russia's state news agency.
China announced today that it would send a high-level envoy to Tehran and Moscow for talks on the issue, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. "China is concerned about the statement by the Iranian side and is worried about the way in which things are developing," said Liu Jianchao, a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Dr. ElBaradei is required to report back to Security Council members by April 28 on whether Iran has agreed to the demand late last month that it shut down its nuclear facilities within 30 days.
Today, the American ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, said Washington was waiting for the outcome of the talks between Dr. ElBaradei and the Iranian government. "When we get information on that we will consider what to do next," he said.
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