CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I woke up one night in my bed, fully awake, fully aware of everything, clearly not asleep, and absolutely unable to move a muscle, other than my eyes. Even my breathing was involuntary, because I eventually wanted to yell or scream, but could not. It felt as if someone had encased me in Lucite, or poured clear concrete over me (while still allowing me to breathe). I felt that there was a malevolent presence in the room. I had no sense of up or down and felt like I was slowly falling and spinning. The two windows beyond the foot of my bed were backlit by ambient moonlight, and took on, to me, the appearance of evil glowing eyes floating at the foot of my bed. I was terrified beyond explanation, even now at 43, when I have a much richer vocabulary. My entire body sweated in terror, even though it was a cool evening. I was so terrified and the feeling of an evil presence was so unequivocal that I assumed that I had either died or was about to die, and not in any good way, with no warm comforting light at the end of the tunnel with loving relatives waiting for me. No, I was going to die, and die horribly. I knew it.

Eventually my repeated attempts to scream started to generate small movements in my throat. Through countless repeated attempts I was finally able to squawk out a tiny sound…this was the beginning of the end of the paralysis, and with each new breath I was able to make louder and louder sounds until I was screaming with all my might (or so I thought). I slowly regained the ability to move my limbs, and eventually sat up, waiting for one or more of my family members to come and see why I had been shrieking my head off. But they didn’t. It was then that I realized that what I perceived as screaming had actually been muffled squeaks, but they had been enough to snap me out of it. I didn’t wake my family up, because I didn’t know what I would tell them. When I laid back down the feeling started to come back, so I spent the rest of the night awake and alert (to say the least).

This event lasted for what seemed like hours, but I really don’t know how long it lasted. I had trouble sleeping for several years after this episode, because I would feel it starting to happen again and would force myself to stay awake.

Over the years I have only told a few people about this event, as it just seemed so strange, and since it occurred in the fringes of sleep, could easily be explained away (by someone who hasn’t experienced it) as “just a bad dream”. I knew it wasn’t a dream, but other than that I had no understanding of what had occurred to me.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, when Peter Jennings hosted an ABC special called “UFO: Seeing Is Believing” in prime time. Being an aficionado, but not a “believer”, in UFOs and aliens I TiVo’d it and watched it. As the show progressed, somewhere in the latter third, they interviewed alien abduction survivors, many of whom talked about being abducted from their beds in the middle of night, stricken by a strange paralysis and fear.

ABC, in the spirit of exploring all sides of the issue, also interviewed sleep specialists, who said that what these people were actually experiencing was something called “sleep paralysis”. The symptoms are the inability to move, the feeling of a malevolent presence, a skewed perception of the passage of time, and tremendous feelings of fear and/or impending death. It turns out that the phenomenon of sleep paralysis is fairly well known, and occurs when the body is partially awakened from REM sleep. According to what I have read, during REM sleep the body immobilizes the skeletal muscles to prevent the dreamer from “acting out” their dreams.

What happens during sleep paralysis is that the dreamer actually wakens from a consciousness point of view, but the skeletal muscles remained in their self-paralyzed state, rendering the person awake and immobile. Since the person is hovering between sleep and wakefulness, the mind is also open to suggestions (where the fear and feeling of malevolence comes from), and has a skewed sense of the passage of time.

As I heard this explanation my jaw literally hung open. Here, after 30 years, was the completely plausible explanation for what had happened to me all those years ago! It was quite an epiphany, and a relief, and the banality of the whole thing greatly appealed to my logical nature.

This was something I had lived with for 30 years, and I had always questioned myself about it. What had happened? Why had it happened? Did it actually happen? Was I sublimating some other horrific memory and putting this one in its place? For 30 years I had these questions. They didn’t haunt me, or anything, but they certainly hung there as a great, big, fat, direct personal experience for which I could concoct no logical explanation. It was my one truly great “paranormal” experience. And come to find out, it was just “normal”.

I can easily see how “UFO abductees” sought therapists and hypnotists to help them “unlock” what happened during their episodes, and given the suggestible state I was in, I can easily see where someone could “remember” an alien abduction during the episode, whether or not it happened. I’m not saying that UFO abductees are or aren’t being abducted, just that I’m pretty sure now that some of them are experiencing sleep paralysis, and then through hypnosis and/or false memory implantation are remembering things that never really occurred.

I’m writing this article in the hopes that others may read this and experience the same relief that I do now. Particularly young people (like I was when it happened to me) who may be living in fear of a malevolent presence stalking them in their dreams. Take a look around the web and you’ll find that sleep paralysis, while certainly not something fun to experience, is simply a strange state of your body and mind that has no evil intent.

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Beyond the Gates of Splendor tells an incredible, nearly unbelievable true story that spans 50 years in the lives of five families and a violent and isolated Ecuadorian tribe. If you think you might see it but don’t know the whole story, I urge you to stop reading and go, then come back here.

Really, I mean it. This is the kind of movie that is best experienced with no prior knowledge. I know, I know, you’re wondering how you’ll know it’s your kind of movie if you don’t what the hell it’s about. I’ll have to ask you to trust me here and just go. Go on, go.

Last warning, the next paragraph tells the tale, and as interesting as the story is to tell I sincerely hope you get to experience it on the big screen. Final warning. Here we go.

The Story

Back in the mid-50’s a group of five young, newly married, husband-and-wife couples moved to the jungles of Ecuador to do missionary work. Now, I personally have a problem with missionaries who go to other cultures with the express purpose of telling them that their belief system is wrong and the missionary’s is right, and the natives need to change to be “saved”. I find the implied cultural superiority to be distasteful, presumptuous, and disrespectful.

However, I do have a grudging respect for people who are so sincere in their beliefs that they will uproot their families and travel to remote, unsafe parts of the world and live spartan lives in order to do (what they think is) good. Also, even though their primary motivation is soul-saving, missionaries do *actual* good by bringing things like medical care, nutritional education, etc, that does bring real benefits.

Parking my high horse.

Now, these five families were spread out among different stations in the remote jungles of Ecuador, connected to each other by the radio and airplane. They talked frequently, got together when they could, and had a sense of community with each other. Several of the couples married while in Ecuador, and several of the couples either brought their children, or had children while there.

The Ecuadorians they dealt with on a daily basis told tales of the fierce Waodani tribe that lived in the deepest, darkest parts of the surrounding jungle, and killed with murderous efficiency at the slightest perceived affront. The Waodani had fought the burgeoning oil company presence to a standstill with their vicious “spearing raids”, where they would swoop into oil company stations and slaughter everyone there. With their crude wooden spears and a few pilfered machetes, the fierce and fearsome Waodani halted, however temporarily, the march of “civilized” progress in the Ecuadorian jungle.

The Waodani were not just a fearsome foe to outsiders, but were also prone to settling their interpersonal conflicts with spearings and machete murders. Anthropologists who later studied the tribe were able to trace back five generations of the Waodani, and determined that 60% of all adult deaths over that time were caused by homicide perpetrated by other members of the tribe.

The filmmakers are able to communicate the brutal nature of the Waodani existence because surviving tribe members agreed to be interviewed. They tell mesmerizing tales of a seemingly endless string of spearings, and each tale is punctuated by specific descriptions of how many times the deceased was speared, where the spears entered and/or exited, if entrails were exposed, how long the spear-ee lived after the spearing, and most stories end with the natives gesturing and saying (in their own unique language) that “it happened right over there under that tree”…or “they speared my father in his hammock while I was sleeping on his chest”…or “so-and-so was acting crazy, so we had to kill him and when he was dead we were happy”. These killings are related with what seems like about the same amount of angst a typical American would have when relating the story of a non-fatal car accident…shaken, but not stirred.

The five missionary men hatch a plan to try to establish peaceful contact with the Waodani. The pilot of the group figures out that if he hangs a bucket from a rope from the plane, then circles the plan tightly, he can use the harmonics of the twirling rope to gently lower the bucket down and have it stay mostly in one spot for a while. The men use this method to give gifts to the Waodani. After a few sessions, the Waodani begin putting their own gifts back into the bucket.

After a few sessions of this the men then head out and land the plane on a sandbar near the Waodani village, and bring as a gift a small scale model of the plane. Frankly, I was awed by the simple ingeniousness of this method of building trust with the Waodani. A delegation of Waodani, a man and two women, approach them and over the course of several days a rapport is established. The missionaries nickname the Waodani man “George”, and even go so far as to take him for a plane ride over his village. George shows no apparent fear, and even shouts down to his tribesman “hey, it’s me up here!” (or words to that effect).

But, through a series of unfortunate events, the tribe comes to see these five missionaries as a threat, and a spearing party heads down to the river and kills all of them.

In Hollywood, this would be the end of an interesting, but often told, tale. But in this case, the reality is that these killings were just the beginning of the story.

After the killings, the wives decide to stay in Ecuador to continue their missionary work. Then, some time later a group of Waodani women emerge from the jungle, saying that they have fled the tribe out of fear for their lives. One of the surviving tribeswomen relates the harrowing tale of fleeing the jungle and heading for the area of the foreigners, and having them raise their rifles as she approached, but she simply shut her eyes and ran at them even though she thought they would kill her. When they didn’t shoot her she signaled for the other, younger women to come out.

The missionary widows hear about these tribeswomen and end up meeting and befriending them, and beginning to learn about the language and culture (and horrors) of tribal life. It turns out that several years earlier another Waodani tribeswoman had done the same thing, and was now living the life of an Ecuadorian peasant rather than a jungle tribeswoman. The widows and the expat tribeswomen bond, and soon another delegation, made up of men and women, exit the jungle and approach the missionaries. They express remorse for the killings, as they found they were triggered by stories that they later learned were untrue. They invite the widows to come and visit them, and one of them does, taking along her five year old daughter.

Incredibly, they end up living with the Waodani for years, and they are also joined by some of the other missionary widows. Through their interactions with the Waodani, they express the horror with which most of the rest of the world views murders, and actually begin to convince the tribe that the vendettas and revenge murders have to stop, or it will spell the end of the Waodani. Astonishingly, village by village, the Waodani agree to stop the killings.

The anthropologists who later studied the Waodani express that this was an amazing cultural transformation. The Waodani way of life was unchanged except for this facet, no new tools were introduced, no technology, no farming techniques, none of the hallmarks of cultural dilution. Just the stopping of the killings, with the transformation going from the first village to the last in the course of a few months. And the change has been permanent, at least to date.

One of the women ended up living out her life with the Waodani, leaving only for cancer treatments, but returning to the tribe to die when she learned she was terminal. The five year old daughter lived there for years, and later returned when she was baptized because she wanted to be baptized in the river by the village, and she wanted her adopted Waodani family there. In an astonishing case of irony or joyfulness, the two Waodani who held her arms and leaned her back for her baptism were two of the men from the party that killed her father.

As a grown man, the son of one of the murdered missionaries returned to the Waodani with his two sons, and lived with them for years, as well. When his son returned to the States and was graduating from high school, he asked that one of the Waodani elders come to his graduation. He called this Waodani “grandfather” in the Waodani language. In another ironic/joyful instance, this man he called grandfather had also been in the party that killed his grandfather.

The Film

The film is mesmerizing from the beginning to the end. The film starts by telling a bit about the Waodani and their ways, but then immediately jumps to modern-day interviews with the surviving widows and children. The widows begin by telling how they met their husbands, what they were like, how they ended up in Ecuador, what life was like as a missionary, what it was like to raise kids in the environment, etc. All of this is very quaint and might even be boring except for the fact that you can’t help but notice they aren’t talking to any of the husbands, plus for some reason you’ve been told about a tribe of murderous Ecuadorian tribespeople, and your mind starts making connections.

As the story progresses, you don’t have to imagine much, because there are photographs and films of their missionary life. Some of these films and photos are so clear and relevant that you begin to suspect that perhaps they were “dramatic recreations”, but as they switch from the widows today back to the films of yesterday, they are unmistakably the same women at a younger age.

There are even films and photos taken by the husbands at Palm Beach, which was their name for the strip of riverbank where they landed their plane to visit the Waodani. We see film of George and the two women, photos of the men and George, film of one of the Waodani women performing a detailed inspection of the plane.

We also see film and photos of the search parties that searched for and found the men. We see non-gory photos of their bodies.

The current-day interviews are also riveting. They interview one of the other missionary pilots, who led the expedition to find his friends. His breakdown on camera while relating the tale is heart-wrenching. The wives also alternate from glowing happiness when relating the good times, to soul-anguishing tears when relating the dark times. The interviews with the kids and grandkids are less painful, because as children they didn’t quite experience the full horror of what happened, and they also were instrumental in the peaceful reconciliation with the Waodani.

There is also a funny and heartwarming denouement, where the Waodani grandfather comes to the United States for the grandchild’s graduation. They show Grandfather going through grocery stores, riding the walkways of airports, and doggedly attempting to understand the myriad of different faucet configurations in American bathrooms.

This footage is interspersed with an interview with his wife back in the Ecuadorian jungles, where she expresses her disbelief in his description of airport walkways (“they stand on the trail, and the trail moves”), and his assertion that they have no gardens, but instead get food from giant “food houses” (grocery stores). She laments how fat he was upon his return. He sticks by his assertion that the way food is taken from the food house is by getting the attention of the check out girl and getting her to smile at him (after first being ignored). The narrator tries to explain that he had to give her something (his credit card), but the slyly logical old Waodani says, “yes, but you didn’t fool me because she gave it right back to you!”.

In an amazing footnote to the story, it seems that initially the Waodani refused to participate in the documentary, ostensibly because of their shame over their prior way of life and the murders of the missionaries. However, during their travels in the US and interactions with missionary family members, the Waodani became aware of the Columbine school shootings. The shootings struck a chord with the tribe, and they hoped that by telling their story they could help others learn by their example of turning away from violence.

So, the story is amazing. The film is amazing. Do yourself a favor and go find this film. Here in Houston it was showing on one screen of one google-plex theater, not at the art houses, and I fear it will not be long in release.

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Tony Jaa is the next great martial arts star. That fact is very clear after seeing Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior. He has the charisma of Bruce Lee, the charm of Jackie Chan, and the grace and menace of the bastard love child of Jet Li and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In this film he does all his own stunts, a la Jackie Chan, and they are wild, eye-popping moves. And just in case you miss them, the director films them from several angles, and plays them back repeatedly, sometimes in super-slo-mo, so you can see that it was all done with physics, not with wires, pixels, or mirrors. At first this replay action took me out of the flow of the film, but after a couple of times I got used to it and grew to expect it because some of the moves were so unbelievable they just have to be re-experienced immediately in order to grok the fullness.

Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I’m no fanboy of martial arts films. I’ve never seen a Bruce Lee film all the way through, just bits and pieces, and my favorite part of Jackie Chan’s films is always the outtakes at the end. But I have seen enough of these kinds of films to get the basic storyline, where the reluctantly violent hero tries in vain to achieve his task with a minimal of bloodshed, but his vile opposition won’t let him hang up his guns.

That same storyline applies here. Tony Jaa plays Ting, a young and naive country boy who goes to the big city to retrieve a macguffin that has deep sacred meaning to his village. Along the way he runs into a former village-mate, now a bottom-rung hustler in the big city, who reluctantly (and comedically) “helps” our hero. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But what sets this movie apart is the fighting and stunt work. Mind boggling is the only way to describe it. This movie is worth seeing just for these facets. However, the script is actually engaging and the story is intriguing, and they (thankfully) subtitle the movie instead of overdub the voices, so the true personality of the characters comes through.

So, even if you’re not a fan of martial arts movies, I think this one is worth a look. And try not to groan and yowl out loud with the action on the screen, I dare you. I also dare you to try and get the tune “Mmm-bop” out of your head once you replace “Mmm-bop” with “Ong-bak”. Go on, I double dare you.

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In The Machinist, Christian Bale plays an emaciated machine shop worker who never sleeps and apparently also never eats. Bale is scary-thin here, and it’s not camera trickery. Throughout the movie he becomes thinner and more haggard, and near the end there are flashbacks to previous points in his character’s life when he had a more normal weight. These were filmed sometime before or after Bale’s dramatic weight loss, and the contrast on screen between the thin and normal Bale is almost incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, that dramatic weight change by the lead actor was the most interesting part of this film for me. The picture doesn’t suck, or anything, but it’s really just a trumped-up, big-budget Twilight Zone episode which would have fit nicely in a 60 minute running time. Unfortunately the picture is stretched out longer (and thinner, pun intended) than is necessary, which left me antsy for the damn thing to finish.

The story follows Bale’s character through his life as he doesn’t sleep and finds that stranger and stranger things keep happening to him. Are they hallucinations? Is he dreaming? Is he the victim of conspiracy? What is real and what isn’t? Who is real and who isn’t? The movie flirts with making all of these questions very interesting, but unfortunately settles for making them mildly engaging.

The plot is interesting, however, so I won’t spoil it by talking about it in any more detail. Bale does a good acting job in his role, as does the rest of the cast. The film has a suitably washed-out, foreboding look to it, and the ending was pretty strong when compared to the rest of the film. However, as a package, the whole thing is just slightly above average.

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I absolutely disagree with any offensive actions that purposely target innocent civilians. In America, the loss of an innocent life is perhaps the most tragic occurence imaginable. When a child is abducted, when an enraged husband murders his wife and children, when a drunk driver kills a family, or when a serial killer is on the prowl, we are all filled with great sadness for the victims, pity for their loved ones, anger at the perpetrators, and consumed by the need for swift justice.

One of the reasons that Americans cherish life so much is that life in America is a wonderful thing, for most of the people, most of the time. In general we have good health, long life spans, living wages, personal and religious freedom, humane working conditions, rich culture, freedom to travel, benign government, low crime rates, and are generally free from peril. In America, life is good. In fact, life may be the single most important possession for an American. Staying alive means more happiness, wisdom, joy, love, and fun. And about the only thing that all Americans can agree is worth dying for is preserving our freedom and the American way of life.

So when we experience the callous murder of innocents by terrorists, we can only see them as evil madmen, because only a crazy, evil person would purposely destroy innocent life. Not only destroy innocent life, but then hope to gain something from its destruction. Only a maniac would expect to be rewarded for doing the most unthinkable thing imaginable. Right?

The Worth of a Life

Well, maybe. But stop for a moment and consider that the most recent statistics show that the average life expectancy in Afghanistan is 40. And it’s not much different in the rest of the Middle East. And the lucky(?) 50% who live to be 40 endure 40 hard, cruel years of struggle, strife, poverty, disease, and then an untimely death. For people in this position it is reasonable to assume that their most precious possession is their knowledge that Allah will take them to paradise when they die, if they live and die by the teachings of Islam. And one of the most sure ways to achieve paradise is to die serving Allah while defending Islam and fighting infidels.

Now, that viewpoint may not make sense to the Judeo-Christian masses in the US, who tend to look down their noses at the callous, cowardly, and misguided actions of “terrorists”. However, before we (Americans) go casting stones, let’s take a look back at our own history…at the birth of this very (great) nation…and ponder the view the civilized world had of our forefathers, shall we?

History of the World, Part I

At the time of the Revolutionary War, England strode the Earth as the one and only superpower. Their intentions, while imperialistic, were mostly benign, and they seemed to struggle through the march of history with the intention of doing good, making right, and enforcing justice. Sound familiar?

But then one day a bunch of uppity colonists decided that they had had enough of the yoke of the Crown, and decided to throw it off. Notwithstanding the fact that England had single-handedly taken the risks and made the investments necessary to build “The Americas” into a prosperous little colony, the locals figured that it was time for a change. To hell with loyalty, law, property, and gratitude. Let’s just take this entire continent, and the only reason we don’t view it today as thievery is because we won the Revolutionary War, and history is written by the winners.

But how did we win? How did a raggedy bunch of out-gunned, out-trained, out-numbered, and out-strategized colonists defeat the greatest army in the world? By playing dirty, that’s how. So dirty, in fact, that our actions were labelled as cowardly, evil, misguided, and cruel by the entire civilized world. Again, sound familiar?

And what did we do that was so awful? Well, for one we did not fight the war as we were expected to fight, which was lined up in ranks on the field of battle and slowly killing each other face to face like gentlemen until attrition and superior body count determined the victor. I mean, that was how war was fought at that time. But we didn’t do that, because there is absolutely no way we could have won a conventional war against the greatest conventional war machine of its day.

No, what we (or our forefathers) did was to fight dirty. Hide behind trees. Crouch behind rocks. Snipe from the trees. Attack the flanks. Attack from behind (unheard of)!! Attack at night. Sneak around like cowardly criminals committing murder (in the eyes of the civilized world of the time). To face each other as gentlemen on the field of battle was war, but to sneak around and kill someone was cowardly murder.

Again, sound familiar?

The Slippery Slope

Now, I’m not claiming that the use of un-gentlemanly tactics against soldiers is the same thing as terrorists exploding bombs in (or crashing planes into) areas populated by innocent civilians who are simply going about their daily lives. A soldier knows that he is putting his life in harms way. So do government agency employees and peace officers. Not that this makes it right to target soldiers and peace officers with terrorist acts, but at least we (Americans) could have a glimmer of understanding of the aims and goals of a group that targeted armed and prepared targets rather than unarmed, unprepared innocents.

However, the point at which I’m driving is that tactics employed by our forefathers against the British were about as far outside of the accepted practices of war as are the actions of the terrorists of today. The terrorists of today could never hope to defeat the US armed forces in any sort of conventional warfare, so they are using the tools available to them regardless of how cowardly we perceive them to be.

However, the terrorists have crossed one very clear boundary because of the fact that they target civilians and innocents. For that they are to be condemned, but they should not be dismissed simply as maniacs and/or fanatics. Whatever we think of their actions, we should also be sure to actually take a look at their side of the story, as they certainly have a story to tell.

A Tale of Two Regime Changes

After the events of 9/11, the United States zeroed in on the Taliban of Afghanistan as the harborers of terrorists and the dismantlers of freedom and progress. The Taliban ruled by their strict interpretations of Islamic law, pushed Afghani women into subservience, did away with secular education, and even went so far as to demolish ancient stone carvings that represented gods in whom they did not believe.

And the United States invaded Afghanistan, deposed the Taliban, and have worked to institute freedom and democracy in the country, with what appears to be some success. The Taliban were clearly unfit to join the ranks of world leaders, and there has been no hue and cry surrounding their overthrow, and no resistance of any note from the Afghani people. Also noteworthy is the fact that Afghanistan is a very poor country (no oil) whose major export is heroin. Also noteworthy is the fact that no Western companies can make any legitimate dollars off of heroin.

Contrast that with Iraq. Now, Saddam Hussein was definitely NOT a good guy. However, he did have women and Christians in his government, regardless of how puppet-like it was. He embraced secular Western values and education. However, he was also despotic and evil, but no more so than the leaders of many, many other countries around the world. And he certainly was not among the worst. And, oh, just in case you forgot, the CIA orchestrated his rise to power in Iraq in the first place.

However, the United States determined that he was developing weapons of mass destruction and that he had links to Al Qaeda. And so, for the greater good, we invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein. The deposing seemed easy, but in reality our forces were the victims of a massive judo throw, where our enemy simply stepped aside and then used our own momentum against us. After our “victory” we Americans were jubilant, but it did not last. Over time we realized that the scattered resistance was actually more cohesive than we first thought. And better organized. And smarter. And more persistent. And now, many many months after our “victory”, Iraq is a hostile zone where American troops are in constant peril from the endless stream of well-coordinated attacks by “insurgents”.

Oh, and while this is going on, Halliburton (et al) are making billions and billions of dollars in Iraq. And the country’s oil reserves will certainly be…er…liberated? Protected? Preserved? Plundered, maybe? Also, Saddam Hussein is the guy who tried to take on George Bush Sr. He hated Bush Sr., in fact, so much so that he had a tile mosaic set into the floor at the entrance to Baghdad’s largest hotel. Now, given that fact that showing the bottom of your shoe or touching someone with it are one of the gravest insults in Iraq, you can see what his goal was with the mosaic…and endless stream of people stepping on Bush Sr’s face.

Family Feud

But Bush Jr. took care of all that. In fact, if one were looking for a story that fit the facts it would be hard to find one more fitting than the one that says that we invaded Iraq to both settle a Bush family score and to enrich Cheney’s former(?) company. I am a red-blooded American and it’s hard for me to dismiss this particular story. In fact, given the boondoggle that Iraq has become, coupled with the revelation that all of our “proof” of Iraq’s development of WMDs and involvement with Al Qaeda seems to have been forged, falsified, and/or non-existent, this story seems to me to be the most plausible.

And I am a freedom-loving American. I love this country. I worship the Constitution. I’m a moderate and not a card carrying member of any political party. I think this is the greatest nation in the history of the world. I think that, as a whole, we have gotten it right. Our founding fathers were a bunch of geniuses and put in place a system that works. Almost all the time. Almost.

But not now. Our current administration seems to be going about this all wrong. And if I (as well as nearly 50% of Americans) think that, can you imagine what your average Middle Easterner thinks? We Americans are predisposed to love our country, and half of us think our Middle East policy is wrong, bordering on criminal. Your average Middle Eastern person has no reason at all to even like America, so imagine how our current administrations blundering about in Iraq appear to them?

I think it looks to them about what the actions of England looked like to our founding fathers. A benign but clueless superpower whose main interest appears to be keeping control and keeping the profits flowing.

Oversimplification

And I think we in the US make the mistake of painting all Islamics with the same brush. Can you imagine if the world did that to us? If you think the US government is corrupt, would you like for everyone to judge you based on the actions of the Oklahoma City bombers? If you are Catholic, would you like for everyone to judge you based on the actions of some pedophilic priests? If you are pro-life, would you like to be judged based on the actions of those who set off bombs in clinics? If you’re a Pistons fan would you like to be judged based on the actions of a couple of drunken fans? I know that I, as a Texan, hate being stereotyped as an ignorant, inbred racist every time some ignorant, inbred racist from Texas decides to perpretrate a hate crime.

And guess what? All Islamics are not civilian-killing fanatics, either. Most do not like the US, it’s true, but what have we done that they should? But most also do not engage in cowardly terrorist attacks, either.

The Solution

Do I have the solution for terrorism? Of course not. However, one thing that America is doing right is not negotiating with nor compromising with terrorists. I agree with that strategy 100%. However, what America is doing wrong is completely ignoring the causes of terrorism, and using the criminal acts of terrorists to invalidate the legitimacy of their issues. And that, my friends, is not a workable strategy. We (America) need to take a cold, hard, unemotional look at the very real injustices and exploitations that are creating such a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. We should not take this look in order to appease the terrorists, but to do the right thing. The most noble and productive thing that the United States could do in this terror-ridden world is to face up to the fact that our own greed and corruption have contributed to the problem. Our complicity does not excuse the terrorists in any way, but by the same token their criminal acts do not mean that there are not actual problems that need to be addressed.

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When I first heard about this film I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo behind South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut, were making a movie about America’s role as police force to a world terrorized by, well, terror…and they would make it using not animation, not actors, but…marionettes? I figured it had to be a joke, and they were just punking us all. Believe me, they weren’t.

Team America: World Police may be the most subversively intelligent political satire that I have seen since…well…Dr. Strangelove. Part of me is almost embarrassed to make that comparison, but it is nonetheless valid. Strangelove is an undisputed masterpiece, and when viewed today it is very easy to marvel in a clinical way at how groundbreaking, offensive, daring, and dangerous it would have been to the politically naive Ward Cleavers of that day. However, it is not the least bit controversial, offensive, or groundbreaking to the jaded audiences of today, who have seen it all. But we haven’t seen it all, and Team America proves it.

Just as Strangelove shocked the sensibilities of the America of its day, Team America will shock you, if you go see it. And I highly recommend that you do, but leave the kiddies at home (but take the later teens, who might actually learn something amid all the cursing, stereotypes, violence, and puppet sex). In today’s political era where every supposed “news” outlet proudly wears its affiliations on its sleeve (FOX is conservative/Republican, CNN is liberal/Democrat, etc), it’s nice to experience balanced political commentary, which is exactly what Team America is, if you have an open mind.

Parker and Stone attack the hegemonic hubris of America-as-latter-day-Roman-Empire, with our government’s proclivity of presuming to tell the rest of the world how to run its business (to our advantage, of course). But they also attack the rise of celebrity/activists, who presume to tell world leaders how to run the world, presumably using the insight they gleaned from scripts someone else wrote but that they nobly memorized (or read from cue cards).

In both cases, Team America hits the bull’s-eye with laserlike accuracy. One might think that if Parker and Stone are smart enough to see North Korea as a greater threat to world security than Middle-Eastern terrorism that the US government would be, too, but one would be wrong. One might think that celebrities would understand that the even though people listen to and report what they say, their opinions are no more valid or informed than anybody else’s, but one would, again, be wrong. One might think that there are no great truths to be learned by watching a drunken marionette collapse in a pool of his own vomit, but one would, again, be wrong.

The film itself is painfully funny, in that I laughed so hard that it hurt. It’s almost impossible to offend me with creative works, but Team America had me covering my eyes (but peeking through my fingers) more than once. I wasn’t offended in the “morally outraged” sense, but in the “I don’t think I’m old enough to see this” sense (I’m 43).

And the songs…my god, the songs. If you couldn’t understand how Trey Parker’s song Blame Canada from the South Park movie got nominated for an Academy Award (look it up), then prepare for more surprises. I doubt any of the songs from Team America will be nominated, but that’s only because they all contain curse words (and bad ones). Well, and the film skewers Hollywood so deftly that I doubt Hollywood would choose to reward them for it. But the songs may be the best part of the film.

Kim Jong Il’s (singing and spoken voice by Trey Parker) rendition of “I’m So Lonely” is a Cole Porter-esque ballad about the loneliness and misunderstanding that only a ruthless dictator can understand (which is why he’s so lonely). The patriotic, country twang of “Freedom Isn’t Free” probably makes Tobey Keith wish it were his song, because it’s played so straight that it could be a New Country hit, which make its ridiculousness even funnier. And the Team America theme song is pretty funny itself, but that’s really all I can say about it because I can’t even mention the title in this column. And do yourself a favor and stay through the end credits.

Oh, and to top it all off the film is also a dead-on spoof of testosterone-charged, Bruckheimer-esque, mindless action films. And if you thought it would be impossible to have marionettes perform complicated martial arts moves, well, you’d be right. But the aimless flailing and twitching that is used instead is HILARIOUS.

Speaking of the marionettes, intentionally lame puppet-fu notwithstanding, the puppets actually do some great acting. Their surprisingly flexible faces are able to emote, and the masterful string pulling allows them to demonstrate surprisingly convincing body language. Also, I didn’t notice any cheats, and all puppet movement seemed to actually be traditional puppet string pulling. They even left in some mistakes and awkward movements, perhaps because of the tight editing schedule, perhaps just to prove that it was all pure puppetry. The sets are also quite ornate, and the level of detail is overwhelming, if you can manage to tear your eyes away from the main action and peruse the background.

All in all this is an amazing and funny film. I think that Parker and Stone are making it clear that they actually have cogent points to make, but that they are smart enough to know that the first step in being heard is to put butts in the seats. They do this with humor and prurience, but those are not the points of their work. However, many, many (many, many, many, many, many) people are unable to see past the surface of their works and see the actual messages.

My suggestion is to treat their films like you would a piece of sausage. If you were to go through the bits and pieces of sausage and actually identify all the parts that make up the whole, I’m sure you would be disgusted (lips, hooves, and assholes, anyone?). However, if you take a good piece of sausage as a whole, and just savor the flavor of ALL the ingredients, it usually tastes pretty good. Even the disgusting parts add to the delicious flavor. Just like in Team America: World Police.

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The current Kobe Bryant case has highlighted the rape shield laws of Colorado, which protect the identity and sexual history of the accuser in rape trials. Rape shield laws are enacted to protect women from the embarrassment and degradation they might feel if their identity and sexual history, as well as the specifics of their rape charges, were made public. The goal is to make it easier and thus more likely for women to come forward when they have been victimized in this way. In the past, the public nature of our criminal justice system sometimes drove women to decide not to report incidents of sexual assault.

I think these laws have had their intended effect, for the most part, but I feel that they are unfair to the accused, in many instances. For example, in the Kobe Bryant case, my understanding of the facts is that Kobe checked into a hotel, and then invited one of the staff members, a 19 year old young women, to give him a private tour of the facilities. She agreed, and provided the tour. According to the accuser’s own testimony, during the tour Kobe flirted openly with her, and she was flattered by the attention. He then invited her up to her room, and she also agreed, and went willingly alone with him to his room. Up to this point, the facts are clear, undisputed, and publicly known.

Behind Closed Doors

After this point, however, the two were behind closed doors and nobody but them really knows what happened. She says that he raped her, and he says that they had consensual sex. One of them is lying, and either way it is a tragedy. The evidence does show that they had sex, but does not clearly show anything else. She had some minor injuries, but nothing that couldn’t also have resulted simply from an energetic tryst (or from her having other encounters before or after the one with Kobe).

In this particular instance, where it is simply he-said/she-said, I do not agree with the rape shield laws. There is no evidence of a crime other than the young woman’s accusations. Kobe has no history of any behaviors of this kind. Also, there is evidence that the young woman had sexual relations very soon before and very soon after her encounter with Kobe. The evidence was strong enough that the judge permitted it into evidence, even though in most cases a victim’s sexual history is inadmissible.

And now, as the criminal charges seem to be slipping away (editors note: actually have been dropped due to the young woman’s refusal to testify), the young woman has filed a civil suit for monetary damages. In civil cases the burden of proof is lower, as evidenced in the O.J. Simpson saga (where he was acquitted on criminal charges, but lost the civil case). In the O.J. case there were mountains of evidence against him, he had a history of physically abusing the victim, and many (including myself) are convinced that he did it. However, his lawyers managed to win the case, so officially he is innocent of criminal charges. The family of Nicole Brown Simpson then took O.J. to civil court and won a large monetary judgment, and also a small measure of vindication. In the O.J. case, I understand and applaud the use of the civil courts after the failure of the criminal justice system.

But the Kobe Bryant case is completely different. There is no mountain of evidence that he’s wiggling out of via lawyerly tricks. There’s not even convincing evidence that a crime has been committed. There is nothing but the statements of the accuser and some “evidence” that may or may not be relevant. And the accuser is not even waiting for the criminal case to conclude before starting her civil case (for money).

Remember the Constitution?

Obviously, there is no way that I (nor anyone other than Kobe and his accuser) can know what happened in that hotel room. In my opinion, rape shield laws should not be used in cases such as these, as all it takes is the word of an anonymous accuser to forever taint the standing and reputation of the accused. Rape is the only crime of which I am aware where the accuser can remain anonymous. I understand that rape is different from other crimes, and even though the Constitution-lover in me is appalled, intellectually, by the thought of secretive court proceedings, I see that these laws can serve the greater good, if used properly.

Reality Check

In my opinion, rape shield laws should require some sufficiency of evidence at a preliminary hearing in order to be invoked. During the hearing both parties should remain anonymous and the prosecution should have to show:

• Proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed.
• Sufficient evidence that the accused was the perpetrator.

If the prosecution can show the above, then I am tolerant of rape shield laws, as they help to address the horrifying aftermath of a despicable crime. However, in the Kobe Bryant case, it’s clear that while Kobe was certainly involved in the incident, there appears to be little or no evidence that an actual crime has taken place. And in this case, I feel that the accuser should have to abandon her claim to anonymity and publicly stand behind her accusations, particularly if the action is in civil courts in pursuit of monetary damages.

Harsh Punishments

All that being said, I am also very much in favor of the harshest possible penalties for sexual assault and rape convictions. I am not a criminal, but I can visualize dire circumstances where I might rob, steal, hurt, or even kill. These are highly unlikely scenarios and would depend on extreme situations, such as the collapse of civilization, but I can see myself stealing or killing to keep my family alive.

However, there are no situations – extreme, hypothetical, or otherwise – where sexual assault can be justified, or the character of the perpetrator defended. There can be no extenuating or mitigating circumstances. Sexual assault is heinous and evil, and demonstrates something irretrievably wrong with the perpetrator. Most rapists assault multiple victims, and continue their evil ways even after incarceration. There is no treatment or rehabilitation that can “cure” someone that is twisted and evil enough to commit a crime like this. I would support and applaud the treatment of rape as a capital crime, with life imprisonment or even the death penalty as the appropriate responses.

Fair Trials

However, the trials must be fair. Yes, rape shield laws create a situation where more rapists will be taken off the streets. However, it also creates a situation where more falsely accused innocent people will lose their reputations, or be wrongfully incarcerated, due to false charges. The American justice system is built on the foundation that we err on the side of releasing the guilty and strive to never punish the innocent. There are many documented cases where women have lied about the identify of their rapists, or the nature of the events.

For example, Linda Fairstein, head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, says “there are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen.” Also, the FBI’s official statistics say that 9% of all rape accusations are “unfounded”. This only includes cases where the accuser recants or the evidence directly contradicts her story, and does not include cases dismissed for lack of evidence. The most common reasons given for the false accusations are spite or revenge, or to provide an alibi for questionable behavior or a surprise or unwanted pregnancy.

These are not trivial numbers. The zeal to protect victims and convict rapists should be balanced against the fact that people will always attempt to pervert the justice system for their own reasons. Given these facts, I think that rape shield laws should be tempered with the reality checks suggested above. This will provide equal protection under the law to all of us.

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We went into The Forgotten knowing almost nothing about it other than what we saw on the few, brief trailers we had seen on television. We had a day off, headed to the theater, and decided to let fate play a hand by picking the next available, acceptable movie, which turned out to be The Forgotten. The film stars Julianne Moore, Gary Sinise, Anthony Edwards, and Dominic West, and follows the travails of Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore’s character) as she attempts to deal with the grief of losing her son in a plane crash.

One of the other parents at her local park, named Ash Correll (played by Dominic West), also lost his daughter in the same crash, which was of a plane headed to a summer camp that both kids were going to attend. They do a little reserved commiserating, but really only know each other distantly as parents of one of their kids acquaintances.

Telly is undergoing psychotherapy to help with her grief. Her doctor is played by Gary Sinise. She has been fixated on her son’s death for the nearly two years since it happened, spending several hours a day in his room, pulling his belongings out to look at, watching videotapes of him, and generally not getting on with life on the schedule that those around her would consider normal.

But then, one day, she has either a breakthrough or a breakdown, where her husband and doctor tell her that she never had a son, and that all of her memories of him are delusional and were brought about by a miscarriage that caused her to snap. Based on the film up until this point, it seems obvious that they are trying to pull one over on her, and I started to get quite annoyed that she didn’t just go down to her son’s school and ask any of the 200 kids there if they remembered him.

But she doesn’t do anything like that, at least not at first. But over time she does. She eventaully talks to her neighbor, a fairly anonymous lady who we saw interacting with Telly’s son in flashback, but the neighbor appears not to know who she’s talking about. At this point I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, as this neighbor did not appear to be anyone that the husband/doctor could get to and convince her to play along with their charade.

Telly finally heads over to Ash’s apartment, which she had been to once before when her son and his daughter had a play date. At least, that’s what Telly remembers, but the guy has no recollection of her, her son, or his (alleged) daughter. When Telly vigorously attempts to convince him that he had a daughter, Ash surreptitiously calls the cops to come get this crazy lady out of his apartment and into some kind of help.

At this point I was confused enough to be very interested in just where the hell this story was going. The story wasn’t confusing in a sloppy way, but in a very deliberate way, that engaged me in the way that a well-done mystery does. As Telly is being escorted out of Ash’s place by the cops, some official looking feds show up, say they’re from the NSA, and take Telly into custody. That was a real head-spinner, and very unexpected. While this is going on, Ash has realized that Telly lit a slow fuse of recognition in him about his daughter, and suddenly all of his memories of her come flooding back. He races downstairs and manages to wrest Telly from the custody of the feds, and the chase is on.

At this point you may be thinking that I’m giving the whole story away. Believe me, I’m not. In fact, right up until this point in the film I was on the verge of walking out because the story seemed to be so implausible (even given the suspension of disbelief granted to films). But from this point on the movie starts moving in some very unexpected directions that make the story make a whole lot more sense.

These new directions also make this a much better film that it first appears to be. But overall it is ultimately disappointing because while the film is slightly above average, it could have easily been very good, or even great, if the creative forces behind it had just stuck to the artistic principals of the first 2/3 of the film. But the ending falls into the trite, simple, overblown, ridiculous ruts that seem to please studio execs and not scare middle-America, and so the very interesting first parts of the film are wasted. What a shame.

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Combine Sex in the City, the Stepford Wives, and The Gilmore Girls, add a dash of Twin Peaks, and you have the recipe for Desperate Housewives, based on what we saw in the pilot tonight. The story focuses on the ladies of the house along a stretch of Wisteria Lane in an unnamed, but hyper-American, upscale suburb. The primary characters run the gamut of stereotypical suburban American ladies, and include the single mom (replete with wise-beyond-her-years teenage daughter), the Martha Stewart-esque “perfect” housewife (replete with desperately unhappy husband and children), the former model who married for money (and regularly gets her lawn trimmed by the yard boy, if you know what I mean, and I think you do), the former high-powered executive who abandoned corporate life to become a full-time mom (replete with three little boys who make the Tasmanian Devil look like a narcoleptic sloth overdosing on Ritalin), and the divorced slut.

The pilot was entertaining, sly, surprising, and quirky…things that I like. To those of you who understand what this means, you can understand everything you need to know about this show by hearing that the theme music is done by Danny Elfman.

The pilot sets the stage for the series with a voice-over by one of the ladies. She happens to be the one who appears to be the most strong and the most normal of the bunch. Things kick into gear when she promptly commits suicide. Her voice-over persists after her death, and provides running commentary on the goings-on of the neighborhood, while providing only tantalizing clues as to the reasons for her self-off-age. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t because of suburban malaise, or anything else mundane and/or every day. The reasons for her suicide are hinted at by the end of the pilot episode, but nothing is revealed or explained.

There’s also a new guy on the block, a single plumber who is renting one of the houses. He may or may not be more or less than he seems, but I couldn’t quite figure out how a plumber could afford to live on this street (notwithstanding what they charge).

Round things out with one of the wives attempting to kill her husband (maybe accidentally, maybe not, but she does apologize to him), and one of the husbands taking a pickaxe to the bottom of his drained pool to dig up…who knows what…and you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on with this series.

The stories go in unexpected directions, the show is funny (but isn’t a comedy), some of the situations are textbook soap opera (but it isn’t a soap), bizarre things happen (but it’s not The X-Files), and several crimes are committed (but it’s not a police procedural). It’s an interesting mix of all of these things, and more, and the pilot was very interesting and entertaining. Based on buzz, we had set TiVo to record the pilot, and we have now set up a Season Pass to be sure we get all the episodes. If they live up to the standards of the pilot, this should be an excellent show.

The only thing I don’t like about Desperate Housewives is that it’s so quirky, strange, original, and entertaining that it’s almost guaranteed to get cancelled. Unfortunately, and I don’t mean to generalize here, the American network TV viewing public are pretty much a bunch of easily spooked sheep who quiveringly cling to the middle-of-the-road, who just want to get their Survivor on and don’t really want anything that challenges their intellect or sensibilities. This show will do both.

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I can’t quite figure out why there’s not more chatter and hubbub surrounding mad cow disease. I have theories, such as the fact that if the facts were made clear to everyone there might be massive public panic (plus the possible collapse of the commercial beef industry). For all intents and purposes, mad cow disease looks like it will be the AIDS of this century. We appear to be on the precipice of an epidemic, but nobody is talking about it.

What Is It?

Cows get something called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which is known informally as Mad Cow Disease. Diseased cattle can transmit the affliction to humans, where it manifests itself as something called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). In both cases, what happens is that malevolent particles, called prions, drill through the actual tissue of the brain, consuming grey matter and slowly eroding the function of the brain until the infected person (or cow) becomes a slobbering, staggering idiot with no memories, no higher brain functions, no voluntary (or involuntary, eventually) muscle control, no self-awareness, no nothing. In 100% of the cases the person finally becomes bedridden and then dies. Slowly. Painfully.

CJD cannot be positively diagnosed in a living person. The only way to make a diagnosis is by examining the brain of someone who has died. The brain will be riddled with holes, hence the term “spongiform”. Once you catch it, you are dead. Period.

How Do You Get It?

Humans contract CJD by eating the nerve tissue or marrow of infected cows. The disease is transmitted by particles called prions, which are an abnormal form of normal protein. Prions have the wonderful characteristic of not being alive, which means that they cannot be killed by any reasonable means, and so retain their full infectious power even in fully cooked or cured beef. I’ll repeat, you cannot cook beef to make it safe from mad cow disease. Any time you eat ground beef from the grocery store, fast food joint, or restaurant, you are playing Russian Roulette. There are no tests to determine that beef is safe before it is sold. There is no way to treat or prepare the beef to make it safe if it contains any infected nerve tissue.

Who Has It?

But who has this disease? Well, that’s almost impossible to tell, as it appears to have a long incubation period, measured in years, even decades. That means that there could be dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of infected people in the world today displaying no symptoms, unable to be diagnosed, and unable to be cured.

Why Should I Be Worried?

First of all, if you are a vegetarian, you probably have nothing to worry about (for the most part, more below the Conjectures section). Also, if you never eat ground beef from the grocery store, fast food place, or restaurant, then you’re probably okay (see Conjectures). However, if you eat ground beef (that you haven’t ground yourself from whole, muscular cuts of beef like steaks or roasts) regularly, then you are running the risk of infection. Why is it risky to eat ground beef? Well, first of all, in the US it is now legal for cattle producers to sell their sick cows to feed companies, and for those companies to process these sick and dying animals into feed protein that is fed right back into the cattle population.

Think about that for a moment. You are a cattle rancher, trying to make a profit. You see that some of your cows are feeling a bit poorly. Nothing major, but just not looking right. You know that by the time you get them to the meat processor, they will probably be so obviously sick that the processor will be forced to reject them (by law). That means you have fed, raised, and shipped the cow, and now get nothing for it, except the additional expense of trying to dispose of it. However, you have another option. At the first sign of illness you can sell your cow to a feed producer. You’ll get much less than the market value of a healthy cow, but at least you get SOMETHING for your troubles.

So, what do you think the ranchers do? They do the economically sound thing and cut their losses, that’s what they do. And pour all those wonderful, indestructible, infectious prions back into the cattle population. Legally.

So, then what is the extent of the infected cattle population? That is unknown, and currently unknowable, because most cows don’t live long enough to develop symptoms. That’s right. Any or all of the healthy looking cows that we eat could be infected, and it is undetectable.

More importantly, what is the extent of the infected human population? Again, that is not very well known, as the medical community is only recently becoming aware that some deaths previously attributed to things like Alzheimer’s disease might actually have been caused by CJD. In fact, Pittsburgh Veterans hospital did autopsies of 50 or so patients whose deaths had been classified as being due to Alzheimer’s. Upon examination, it was determined that 5% of the patients actually had CJD at the time of their deaths. Think about that statistic. That’s one out of twenty people. This study has not been widely publicized, and there have been no other publicly announced studies of this kind (that I can find as of this writing).

Okay, Now I’m Worried. But What Can I Do?

This is a tough one. My wife and I have stopped eating commercially processed ground beef, for example. We bought a meat grinder and sometimes grind up steaks or roasts to make our own hamburgers, because we still get a burger jones every now and then. The issue with commercially ground beef is that, as most of us know, hamburger is not usually made from premium cow parts. Lots of lesser parts make it into the mix, including, unfortunately, random bits and pieces of nerve tissue and marrow. Cow muscle tissue (steaks, roasts) doesn’t contain any nerve tissue, normally, and so is safer than ground beef of unknown makeup.

Conjecture

However, if one starts with the fact that prions are virtually indestructible, the issue becomes more difficult. For example, if a restaurant cooks your steak (or grilled veggies) on the same grill where a hamburger has been cooked, it’s absolutely possible that prions from the hamburger can drip onto the grill and then hitch a ride on your steak (or veggies!). Remember, cooking doesn’t kill prions or render them any less infectious. Following this logic thread makes it easy to start slipping into paranoia, but the truth is that the world should be more paranoid about this threat. NOBODY is talking about this issue. NOBODY is doing anything about it. Why is that?

Well, one reason for that may be that the powers that be know that there is nothing that can be done. It’s too late to warn people, because the meat supply has been contaminated for so long that they can’t stop it now. The people who have it, have it, and they are going to die from it, and it would serve no purpose at this point to start a panic about something for which nothing can be done.

Also, another reason you don’t hear much about this is because of what happened to Oprah Winfrey. If you recall, in 1996 Oprah had a show about mad cow where she covered some of the very same topics in this article, and suddenly found herself staring down the business end of a big old civil lawsuit brought about by the beef industry. After six years, and $1,000,000 in legal fees paid by Ms. Winfrey, the suit was dismissed. Yes, free speech won out, but it certainly wasn’t free. Now, we all know the power and influence that Oprah wields in the world, so imagine the political clout of a group that can drag her through the courts for six years, and have the whole thing end quietly and under-reported.

My personal opinion is that this problem is more widespread than the powers-that-be imagine, and the threat is certainly not being investigated nor treatments or prevention being explored to the degree necessary. If you recall the gradual public awakening to the threat of AIDS, you might find the current reaction to CJD to be eerily similar. A fatal disease spread by something that everybody does, with a long incubation period so that it becomes widespread before it is publicly acknowledged with any fervor. Delays in funding research into the detection, prevention, and cure of the disease. Widespread public ignorance as to the true nature of the disease. The consequences with AIDS are millions infected and dying around the world, and no cure in sight.

What will the toll be for mad cow?

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