Superbug by Maryn McKenna

The case studies in this book are frightening and might be especially so for those who have had staphylococcus infections like boils, strange forms of cellulitis which only responded IV antibiotics or have spent abnormal amounts of time recovering from surgery for unknown reasons. Such was the rising sense of panic in my breast as I read along, it took me several days to get through the first chapter of this book. As the story of each new case of anti-biotic resistant staph infection ( Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus- MRSA) unfolded , along with a recognition of how things might have been, I had to put the book aside and reach for something a little less personal and discomforting. Never-the-less, by my indomitable will always to learn something no matter horrible the subject, I prevailed and completed the book.

We are all colonized by various types and strains of staphylococcus bacteria. In fact, such is the evolutionary adaptability of this bacteria, it is safe to say that most of us are even colonized by antibiotic resistant types and strains of it, even if we'd never used an antibiotic or been near a hospital. We have it but it has not yet made us ill.

Bacteria have an array of strategies for evolving- surviving - altering their DNA. Everybody thinks of mutation but this is a random process and slow; the genetic equivalent of waiting for all the cherries to line up in a slot machine. Bacteria have faster strategies. They can trade entire DNA segments by opening their membranes to each other ( conjugation). They can receive them via phages, viruses that infect bacteria ( transduction) or they can pick up, from their environments, free DNA released by other bacteria that have died or broken open (transformation). Thus, so far, they have been able to defeat every counter-measure modern science in its infinite wisdom has thrown against them. They can do it so quickly that during the last twenty years big Pharma has cut back its investment to discover new types and strains of antibiotics. Since each new anti-biotic is overcome by resistant bacteria in short order, their applicability rapidly deteriorates, along with the profits to be gained from selling them. Drugs like Viagra or any number of pain-killers and anti-depressants are far more marketable.

At this stage there is no point in going off the deep end. Many anti-biotics still work against many of the common strains of staphylococcus, even against most MRSA, albeit in higher doses and longer courses of treatment. And medicine doesn't quit just because the “wonder” of antibiotics has worn off. It has its surgical interventions which, though it may be costly and mutilating, used along with various life-support systems, buys time and the chance for numerous combinations of antibiotics and the miracle of the body's own mysterious healing powers to work their magic. Gradually, over the years, Medicine has also developed some useful preventive strategies, however much the fragmentation, lack of communication and the dumb persistence of old habits in American medical practice has made this so difficult.

One preventive strategy has been an attempt to get doctors to quit prescribing antibiotics for conditions that cannot be cured by them, like most of the earaches and sore-throats of children, which are usually viral in nature. Doctors are also advised to curtail prescribing powerful, broadly acting antibiotics when weaker, more narrowly focused ones might do just as well. This slows down staph's ability to mutate, transduce and transform their resistance. The monitoring of initial campaigns to this effect showed some effects- doctors prescribed less- but progress was hard to maintain. Many doctors tend to give their patients what they expect and , furthermore, conservative treatments which require follow-ups tend to be time consuming and costly. Quantifying results in terms of fewer MRSA infections is also difficult in the short term.

Three are three basic types of MRSA: those that are generated in hospitals, those that are generated in the community and those associated with animal husbandry, especially pigs, but also horses and chickens. MRSA appeared first in hospitals, in their most destructive strains, since that was where antibiotics were used most extensively ( the more they are used the more rapidly the bacteria evolve). MRSA then began to appear, principally in populations of poor people, among prisoners and in schools and athletic facilities. The deadly, virtually untreatable “Superbug” of the title of this book is “a cross" between the in-hospital and in-community strains of MRSA. Although there is clear evidence that some MRSA-like strains jump from factory farmed animals to human beings, gathering a sufficient amount to overcome the objections of that powerful interest has been difficult.

Some of the most effective measures for preventing the spread of MRSA in hospitals, besides identifying and keeping an accurate, published record of their presence- not at all a universal practice- is pre-screening and isolation. Many patients and medical personnel arrive at the hospital colonized by MRSA though it may not be effecting their health in the least. It is actually possible to de-colonize these patients with short courses of anti-biotic treatment and re-colonize them with more benign forms of staph which thus replace beleaguered MRSA. Patients with MRSA can also be isolated by various procedures to keep them from infecting other patients and staff. Thorough and routine sterilization of hospital rooms, equipment and supplies is vital. Imposing rigorous standards of hand-washing among nurses, staff and physicians is an extremely effective preventive measure but, as experience has shown, often very difficult and costly to impose consistently, either in terms of overcoming habits, normal patterns of inattention in all human behavior and labor-hours consumed. Although it does not de-colonize its patients, the biggest single endorser of screening and isolation is the Veterans Health Administration, the most socialized health care system in the U.S.A.. Its record of success is similar to some systems in Scandinavia.

Dangerous outbreaks of MRSA have occurred in association with contact sports. Although organizations like the NFL have the means to take very effective countermeasures- using anti-bacterial surfaces in their locker-rooms, super-heating their laundry, restricting the sharing of equipment, spraying and pre-screening, most public schools lack this ability. It is amazing the extent to which kids these days do not use the shower facilities in their schools athletic facilities, how poorly maintained these facilities and regular bathrooms are, often lacking even soap or sanitary towels. However, in some districts, where prior victims MRSA or their surviving relatives have become active, improvements have been made.


Poor neighborhoods , nursing homes and prisons remain among the most intractable environments for transmission of MRSA. These populations are often composed of individuals whose health is already comprised, are crowded together and have very little access to any ( or the best sorts of ) health care. For some this might actually be an encouraging situation since they are healthy, are not crowded together and have access to health care. Therefore, it would seem, they are much less likely to contract a MRSA infection. Frankly, these facts ( along with the fact that I am assiduous hand-washer) helped to calm the fear I experienced when I first started to read the case studies in this book. But ( I now proceed entirely in the author's own words)...

For a very long time, no one wondered what the effect might be of so many prisoners picking up MRSA in jail and carrying with them when they are released. In 2006, though, a group of epidemiologists at the University of Maryland became interested in a vast increase in MRSA in the main jail in Baltimore and wondered what its impact on the surrounding city might be. They used a measure called “epidemiological weight,” a calculation that assesses how much risk an outbreak in a self-contained group poses to its larger setting, based on how many people join the group, become infected without receiving treatment, and exit the group, as well as how fast or slowly that churning happens. Because hospitals have hundreds of patients staying for weeks, while jails have thousands of people staying for years, the researchers assumed that hospitals would feed the larger epidemic, while prison outbreaks would harm only those inside. Their calculations revealed that assumption to be wrong.

MRSA in correctional facilities affects a wider segment of the population than prisoners, and reaches neighborhoods far beyond the ones where the former prisoners lived. About 750,000 people go in and go out of correctional institutions in the United States every day. They are administrators, guards, cleaners, and cooks, and they have enough close contact with prisoners to be vulnerable to their infections, as well. Jails and prisons are “superspreaders”, seeding MRSA into society at large. Of course reforming health care in our jails and prisons is not a high priority, and often a matter of lengthy and contentious lawsuits.


Superbug; The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna; Free Press, 2010

Chickenshit by Paul Fussell

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant "paying off of old scores"; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of the ordinances.

Chickenshit is so called- instead of horse or bull- or elephant shit- because it is small- minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war. Its victims, generally, have it coming for disagreeing on matters of taste: asking questions sergeant couldn't answer, interposing a 'liberal' observation, uttering mild remonstrances in combat, being a Jew, the 'long hair', the artist, - the 'so-called intellectual'- one who sneers at sports, the 'smart ass', the 'stuck up, the foreigner, anyone conceived to be “not our crowd”, being “sloppy or in the U.K., 'slack'.

Because chickenshit shifts the emphasis from reality to appearance, its favored terms of approbation are smartness and swank [ today we have 'Smart Diplomacy'].


Chickenshit is for 'keeping the men on their toes' , frustrating their plans for a good time. For the victims it has its own serial psychological structure generating maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance. Its stages are nervous waiting, last-minute flurry, final resignation , the sagging aftermath... the official power to inconvenience but as a Vietnam veteran once noted, 'The needle is only so long, you can escape from it by going forward into combat. ( Donald Pfarrer in Neverlight)


It would be hard not to notice the proximity of Allied chickenshit to certain stigmata of Fascism, all sorts of opportunities for irony present themselves and much of the writing from World War Two tends not so much to convey news from the battlefield as to expose the chickenshit lurking behind it , like Catch-22. Exceptions are to be found in popular fiction, the works Leon Uris and Herman Wouk, for example. Their audience being untrained in the irony of a world in which blunders are more common than usual, in their novels, especially Wouk's overproduced ones, there are few blunders or errors and everyone does what he was supposed to do, with minimal chickenshit. (Result: Victory).


The more verbally confident poetry of World War One emerged from a proud verbal culture, where language was trusted to convey and retain profound, permanent meaning, while the later world from which the laconic notations of Uris and Wouk arise is one so doubtful of language that the responsible feel that only the fewest words, debased as they have been by advertising, publicity, politics and the rhetoric of nationalism, should be hazarded. In his poem Memorial to the Great Big Beautiful Self-Sacrificing Advertisers, Frederick Ebright concludes with the line “there is dignity in silence”


It was not just among soldiers and journalists that uncertainties about the War's meaning arose; that no very precise ideological appeal would work on the wartime audience was a fact accurately sensed by ad-men...Clearly, any attempt to define that new world ("that we are fighting to make ready") would result in bafflement , dispute and severe loss of confidence in Carnation products. Vagueness was all.


The post- war survey found that 14% of the bombs dropped never went off (ironically balancing out the large number of U.S. anti-tank mines that went off when they weren't supposed to) Was sabotage behind these failures? No, simply error. It is hard to embrace ironies like this because the human mind, avid for clear meaning, experiences frustration and pain when confronted by events which seem purposeless or meaningless. Even more today, in wartime everything you might hear and read during a day might be false, planted to be passed on to deceive either you or the enemy. Living in wartime thus resembled living in a play, with nothing real or certain. You literally did not know for sure what was going on, and you had to take on faith the public appearance of things, costly as this might prove for perceptual or intellectual life."


In reality, war is opposed to every reasonable conception of what life is for, every ambition of the mind or delight in the senses. Both civilians and soldiers were right to perceive in war, as Dwight MacDonald has said, "the maximum of physical devastation accompanied by the minimum of human meaning". It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.

Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell; Oxford Paperbacks 1989

History of the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan

I would compare the Beat Generation to a freight train, with Allen Ginsberg as the locomotive that pulled the others along like so many boxcars. It is really the story of this one man's desire to gather a circle of friends around him, people he loved and who could love him. What united these people was not only love of literature, but also Ginsberg's supportive character, a trait that often verged on obsession. It was their friendship that they shared, not any one common literary style, philosophy, or social theory. At the center of all those friendships was the strongly cohesive glue that was Allen Ginsberg.

Ginsberg was the unofficial literary agent of the whole crowd, supporting them when he could afford it, encouraging them to write and put their writings into publishable forms, promoting their works to established, independent and self-publishing enterprises, organized public readings and symposiums. The threat of government intervention and repression in the arts persisted well into the 1960s and this forced Ginsberg to take direct political action on a number of occasions. For this purpose, he founded the Committee on Poetry, to help pay legal fees in cases such as N.Y.C's attempt to ban poetry readings in the city's coffee houses. All the money Ginsberg received from his readings went directly into this non-profit foundation, while he supported himself on what little income was left. Later he decided to continue funding COP for the support of worthy causes and to fund individual poets in dire straits. Over the years, he was able to help dozens of down-and-out artists financially. The fund helped Lenny Bruce pay for his court battles; it also provided legal support to Ed Sanders when his Peace Eye Bookstore was raided by the police.

As the years went by and the decades passed, Ginsberg gained respectability and was asked to organize the poetics program at Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, which he named the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He spent a part of every year teaching in Boulder at little or no pay but managed, at one point or another, to bring all his friends into the writing program there. In 1987 Ginsberg was hired by Brooklyn College to fill a chair in their English Department and shortly thereafter inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters where he worked to bring in several members of his own circle including Robert Creeley, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Amiri Baraka. Ginsberg rarely failed to support his friends even when they found it impossible to help themselves or turned their backs to him.

The biggest publicity break for the so-called Beat Generation of writers came with the publication of Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. Published abroad and shipped to the U.S. It was temporarily seized by U.S. Customs, although the U.S. Attorney General subsequently decided not to prosecute the case. However, on June 3, 1957, The San Francisco Police Department raided the City Lights bookstore, grabbed the new U.S. Printed edition, and arrested the bookstore's manager. They claimed it was obscene and would be harmful if it fell into the hands of children. The courts had recently ruled that not everything in America had to be written for children, but the district attorney ignored that and pressed on, bringing the case to trial. From that moment on, the press covered the story in great detail and Americans became much more generally aware of the new spirit of artistic freedom and vitality that was growing in places like North Beach and Greenwich village.

The judge found that Howl was not obscene because it had “ some redeeming social value." The case set a precedent allowing many other important literary works like Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to be published without fear of censorship. Publishers and his writer friends began listening more carefully Ginsberg' entreaties.
…...............................................................

Beat was a word in common usage during the late 1940s and familiar to most jazz musicians and hipsters around the seedier fringes of Times Square. The circle of Allen Ginsberg's friends had frequently heard people like Herbert Huncke using the word to refer to themselves and others who were tired of the status quo, maybe even tired of life in general and the continual frustration and despair that came with living in America in those times.

In the 1940s Jack Kerouac hung out with John Holmes; they spent many nights discussing their craft over quarts of beer. Together they enrolled in Elbert Lenrow's classes in literature at the New School of Social Research in Greenwich Village. One evening after class they had a philosophical conversation about their own generation. They compared it to Hemingway's “lost generation” but felt that the word lost didn't sum up their times. In the course of the conversation Holmes urged Kerouac to characterize the current situation, and Jack responded by saying that he felt their minds were furtive, chock-full of hidden motives, and that as a result it was a “beat” generation. After some reflection Holmes agreed that it was the best name for the young people who had come through World War II. They were weary, they had been beaten down by society, the war, the need to conform to the times, behind which lurked some sort of spiritual longing.

In November 1952, the New York Times commissioned Holmes to write an article about the young writers of his generation. In that article, Holmes recalled the conversation he and Jack had had about it being a “beat generation.” The article became the first to use that phrase in print. Although Holmes credited Kerouac in his article, Jack himself sulked and pouted and even at one point refused to speak with Holmes. He wrote to John, “I have ask'd that my name be withdrawn from all yr. councils- I have my own new ideas about the generation, this isn't 1948, there's nothing beat about these sleek beasts & middleclass subterraneans.”

In spite of Ginsberg's continuing efforts to find a publisher for Jack's books, Kerouac was mad at Allen too. He was beginning to consider him part of a giant Jewish conspiracy that kept his books from being published while books in a like vein which he considered inferior, like Holmes' Go, found audiences. At the very first moment the public first heard about the Beat Generation, Kerouac, the man who coined the phrase and would become synonymous with it, was beginning to distance himself from the group and would continue to do so till the end of his life.

After the Howl trial in San Francisco, and the realization that the public was hungry for information and work by this “new” literary phenomena, editors at Viking press at last came to understand the commercial potential of On The Road: the story of a young man coming of age as he ricocheted back and forth across the country, “dreaming of the immensity of it”, with his inexhaustible friend, in search of kicks, atonement and redemption . And Kerouac had managed to employ a new spontaneous style, which he had first recognized in the letters of Neal Cassady, to craft a book original in both style and content. The basic story of people leaving their pasts behind and striking out on their own in search of something was not new but one of the longest traditions in literature, and Kerouac's genius was in writing a story in which the stated search for Dean Moriarity's father was not actually the true goal. Through his wanderings, he discovered that everyone he encountered along the way was a reflection of God. There are no villains in Jack's stories, only angels. The irony of the story is that Sal wants to settle down and give up the road. This struck a chord with millions of readers for nearly fifty years after its first publication.

Although On The Road got a good first review in the N.Y. Times harsh criticisms of Kerouac and the Beat Generation soon followed. Articles with titles like “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” and “The Cult of Unthink” ( Robert Brustein) began to appear regularly in the press. Even the few reporters who were more sensitive to the Beat writers wrote articles like “Here to Save Us, But Not Sure from What.” Even Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip featured a character named Ginzbird, “the most irritable unidentified flying object on earth.”

No one was more outspoken in his criticisms of the Beats than Norman Podhoretz who, ironically, was once a classmate and colleague of Ginsberg and Kerouac and knew them personally. In one of his first essays castigating the new group, he wrote, “this notion that to be hopped-up is the most desirable of all human conditions, lies at the heart of the Beat Generation ethos.” He criticized Kerouac for “his simple inability to express anything in words.” Podhoretz declared the Beats to be “young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can,” and believed that “the spirit of the Beat Generation is the same which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns.”

Critics defined who the Beats were and what they represented to suit their own agendas. For whatever reasons, they felt the need to pigeonhole everyone into a single category. And as if the harsh criticism wasn't enough, Herb Caen overheard Bob Kaufmann playfully invent the work beatnik and used it pejoratively in his Column in the San Francisco Chronicle. The term shortly became synonymous with juvenile delinquent, or other oddballs, troublemakers, weirdos and rebellious punks trying to avoid getting jobs. The character of Maynard G. Krebs in the television program The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis became , in the popular media, the quintessential beat (nik). The qualities that made Maynard memorable- laziness, insipience, sloppiness, lack of ambition, and a self-conscious jazz vocabulary – were a caricature that had little to do with the Beat Generation.

Even though Kerouac was the original icon and King of the Beat Generation he found it hard to deal the criticism and mockery . He wanted to be accepted as the serious and important writer that he considered himself to be. In many interviews he tried to clarify the Beat Generation phenomena as he saw it to be but his views were ignored or dismissed by the press. He continued to drink heavily and bitterly distance himself from his former friends. Allen Ginsberg, using his early experience as an ad and public relations man, transformed himself into an icon of counter-culture and continued to use every opportunity fame presented to promote the literary works of his friends.

Who's Afraid of Edward Albee? by Mel Gussow

Edward Albee emerged from the position of a silent witness to the Greenwich Village avant garde art scene through-out the 1950s to an acclaimed playwright after the Off-Broadway production of the one-act play The Zoo Story, which was double-billed with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, first in German at the Berlin Arts Festival in 1959 and then at the Provincetown Playhouse a year and a half later.

Albee and his agent had some initial difficulties getting this play produced in America. For example, when the Actor's Studio read the play their verdict was 12 to 4 against taking it up, though Norman Mailer rose from his seat after the performance and called it the best fucking one-act play he ever saw. Eventually, however, Richard Barr who had a keen interest in producing new and adventuresome works on and off Broadway took the option for $250. After generally positive reviews from the critics in New York, a very positive response from the theatrical community itself – and of course its great popularity with audiences- The Zoo Story was soon playing in theaters across the nation, in Europe and was set to tour South America in a cultural exchange program arranged by the U.S. Department of State.

Albee's success did not occur in a vacuum. A seismic shift was occurring in American theater at the time. In the 1950s Off-Broadway was alive with new plays beginning with Circle in the Square and its revivals of Tennessee William's Summer and Smoke and Eugene O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh. They also produced Jean Genet's The Balcony and The Blacks. These successes even encouraged Broadway itself to be more daring. They put up Ionesco's Rhinoceros and proved hospitable to works by Brendan Behan, Harold Pinter and Arthur Kopit. Albee joined the later, along with Jack Richardson, Jack Gelber and Arnold Weinstein as the celebrated radical leaders of the new American theater. Albee, however, became something of a lightning rod for reaction and criticism.

Robert Brustein of The New Republic made his debut as a critic of Albee by calling The Zoo Story 'Beat Generation claptrap”. Later, Joseph Hayes of the New York Sunday Times would pose some heated questions about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

"Are all the children [ of the so-called 'serious writers' ] the braying monsters of those in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?. Is marriage itself the stultifying trap, the wasteland of illusion and cruelty and betrayal described in this play and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...Does the waspish bitchiness of the dialogue in Virginia Woolf correspond to a recognizable pattern of speech in a marriage or to some other relationship out and beyond the experience of most of us? If we respond positively to these visions, then the forces of darkness and despair and destruction have moved that much closer.”

Naturally, there are always critics who will regard themselves as the indispensable guardians of theatrical virtue but the outcry wasn't confined to their front doorsteps. When The Zoo Story was performed with Strindberg's Miss Julie for a week in July at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, John M. Lupton, a state senator, compared the plays to “all the filth we export in our B movies and dirty plays.” These two plays, along with William's Sweet Bird of Youth and John Van Druten's I am a Camera were on their way to South America as part of a cultural exchange program. There was a great to-do in Westport. Ladies formed committees, sent telegrams to the Secretary of State (Dean Rusk), protesting that The Zoo Story was a disgrace, that “it falsified the America we all know and love, that it was, in fact, thinly disguised communist propaganda. At one point, Prescott Bush ( Dubya's grandfather ), got up on the floor of the U.S. Senate and denounced The Zoo Story as “filthy'- and demanded to know why it was going to represent America in Argentina.


In 1963, with the announcement that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf- which ran for two years on Broadway, giving 664 performances and earned a profit of $750,000- was going to be done in England, Albee immediately collided with the Lord Chamberlain, who at that time was still the official English censor. His role, Albee said, was “to make plays safe for the Royal family, if they ever went to the theater.” Producers Clinton Wilder and Donald Albery met with the Lord Chamberlain for a hilarious hour of absolutely filthy conversation in which the central concern seemed to be the use of the word “bugger”. But ultimately his Lordship requested pages and pages of changes. They couldn't say “screw baby” but could say 'hump the hostess" , because hump was in Shakespeare. They were allowed only three 'Jesus Christs” out of ten. 'Scrotum' was forbidden, 'privacies' substituted. 'Cheese' must be used for 'Jesus', 'bastard' for 'bugger', 'bowel' for 'right ball' and 'propaganda machine' for 'screwing machine'. In the end Albee told the actors to simply forget the Lord Chamberlain's requests, and for the most part that is exactly what they did.

On seeing the movie version of the play, Geoffrey Shurlock, the head of Hollywood's Production Code Administration, refused to give it a seal of approval, but he was overruled by the Production Code Review Board, which said that the film “is not designed to be prurient" and was “largely a reproduction of the play.” In its statement the board added that “this exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open for language or other material.” In fact, the ruling proved to be a turning point in the fight against censorship.

But the spirit of censorship and ad hominem criticism continued. Albee's adaptation of a novel by James Purdy, Malcolm , drew some incredible fire. Robert Brustein called the play “Albee's most deeply homosexual work... as Albee gets closer and closer to his true subjects – the malevolence of women, the psychological impact of Mom, the evolution of the invert- he tends to get more abstract and incoherent until he is finally reduced to a nervous plucking at broken strings.” His review was printed after the show had closed, coinciding with an infamous essay by Stanley Kauffmann in the Sunday Times. The headline on Kauffmann's piece was HOMOSEXUAL DRAMA AND ITS DISGUISES. In it he said that “three of the most successful playwrights of the last twenty years are reputed homosexuals and because of them postwar American drama presents a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage and society.” It was his charge that they invented “a two-sex version of the one-sex experience”; in other words, homosexuals were incapable of writing believable female characters.

“An absolutely preposterous notion- that gays were writing about gays, but disguising them as straights and writing about men, but disguising them as women. Tennessee Williams knew the difference between men and women as well as I do,” wrote Albee twenty-five years later. “ One of the reasons Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was so good and such a success was precisely because it reflected a deep understanding of women and insisted that marriage means something.” (A.R. Gurney Jr.)

At an Out Write conference of gay writers in San Francisco in 1991 Albee said that being a homosexual was one factor in his identity and personality and made a distinction between being a gay writer and a writer who is gay... "In my own writing I have a couple of gay characters, but I never felt the need to write about a gay theme. I want to write about our society in general- I don't think being gay is a subject, any more than being straight is a subject.” “Edwards configuration of qualities is individual,” said Martha Coigny. “He is a person who leads a political life in order to write plays about what he chooses to write about. If that makes him a bete noir to the political gay activists, so be it.”

But the controversy and 'fear' associated with the works of Edward Albee are largely the result of his style- an odd combination of the natural and the surreal, brilliantly written, which may sometimes appear to be 'empty at the core'- and his subject matter.

As he himself recognized, “The commercial theater is not a rational or even decent place to work in, its disappointments are real and its rewards slippery at best.” And he did not choose to write about the “happy problems” that dominate so much of the theater of his and to a large degree our own times. His subject was almost invariably about how we lie to ourselves and each other, how we try to live without the cleansing consciousness of death, about death and dying itself, about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, how they skid through their lives asleep at the wheel- not the stuff of a box office smash. In light of his subject matter the amount of commercial success Edward Albee did achieve is actually quite extraordinary.


Furthermore, Albee was a ferocious American, a curmudgeon; impatient and furious at what he considered stupidities. He was usually unable to approach a play from the view point of an actor , understand the problems of a performer. Most of the time he did not work well in the ensemble mode and insisted, as the writer, on absolute control over the production of all his plays. He nearly destroyed himself with alcohol, as epitomized in the notorious contretemps with Joe Papps in 1978 at a dinner party given by Mel Gussow in Greenwich Village. But he survived, came back with Three Tall Women and is still alive today.

Law of the Jungle by John Otis

In 2007 no hostage had ever fled from one of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's southern jungle camps and survived. During forced marches, the prisoners were tethered together by the neck. And once they arrived at their bivouacs, the rain forest proved to be a natural barrier, one so thick and menacing that much of the time the guerrillas didn't even bother fencing in their prisoners.

The great game was not so much breaking away from their captors as navigating the maze of tree trunks, underbrush, waterways, and muskeg stocked with poisonous snakes, malarial mosquitoes, and hungry jaguars. For the desperate runaway, the jungle was a lethal obstacle course.

“Prisoner, do not regret your jail,” intoned Jose Eustasio Rivera in The Vortex, his nightmarish novel about indentured Colombian rubber tappers. “You know nothing of the torture of wandering unfettered in a prison like the jungle, a green vault walled in by immense rivers. You don't know the torments of the shadows...The chains that gnaw at your ankles are more merciful than the leeches in this swamp.”

Among the hostages , however, John Frank Pinchao was a rare bird. He was a loner, and some of his fellow prisoners described him as arrogant and petulant. “John always seemed to be on the fringe of any group,” the American Marc Gonsalves said. “The one person he could communicate with was Ingrid Betancourt”.

Betancourt treated Pinchao like a reclamation project. She encouraged him to pursue his ambitions and schooled him in everything from Colombian politics to the proper way to hold a spoon at the dinner table. She also described her failed escape attempts, which moved something inside the policeman. “Ingrid was a very important person in my life,” Pinchao said. “She taught me how to dream.”

By the spring of 2007, Pinchao had been held hostage for more than eight years. In his absence, his girlfriend had given birth to their son. Desperate to get home and with a prisoner exchange seemingly ruled out, he readily agreed to join Betancourt and Luiz Perez on their next breakout. At the time, Betancourt was teaching French to Pinchao and Perez and so classes provided the cover to make their plans.

Pinchao had always hated exercise because it made his knees ache. But at the urging of Betancourt and the Americans, he began taking part in their daily routine of sit-ups, pull-ups, steps, and weight lifting. That spring, Pinchao became suddenly obsessed with learning to swim. Though he wasn't very good at it, Pinchao could at least tread water. But just in case, he scrounged a gallon-size plastic water jug to use as a flotation device.

Pinchao and his co-conspirators found a collaborator among the FARC with a GPS device, offering him $225,000 for his help. They began storing food downriver from their camp. Perez gathered tarps, mosquito nets, fishing lines, and other supplies, Pinchao began hoarding the heavier food supplies for what they figured could be a journey of up to forty-five days. Bentacourt and Perez fooled their guards by putting on extra cloths, forcing them to make the loops of chains around their arms, legs and necks a little looser, which allowed them to slip them off at will. Pinchao broke his by twisting a piece of wood through one of the links.

Everything seemed set but a few days before their planned breakout, Perez and Betancourt backed out. So Pinchao gathered up the food and other supplies and, On the night of April 28, set off on his own. “He was the mouse of the group,” Keith Stansell said. “But he had the biggest balls or anybody.”

The Apaporis was a blackwater river that meandered fourteen hundred miles southeast into Brazil before joining the Amazon. “I didn't know it was the Apaporis,” Pinchao said. “But I knew that every river pours into a bigger river and that rivers run into the sea. And I figured at some point along the river there had to be people. So I swam as much as I could and then would get out and walk when I was tired.” Sometimes he couldn't tell whether he was swimming or drowning.

While resting on the shore on day two, Pinchao thought he spotted a guerrilla search party. In a panic, he thrashed his way deeper into the jungle. When he finally stopped to rest, he was lost. Where was the river?

Pinchao spent the next six days wandering in circles searching for the Apaporis. He followed tributaries that led nowhere. He discovered a colony of monkey's who began pelting him with branches. One night he scrambled up a tree as a jaguar prowled nearby. He gashed his hand and worms took up residence in the infected tissue. Before escaping, he had secretly hoarded farina, toasted yucca flour that was a jungle staple, but his supply was now drenched and rotting. He complemented his diet by splitting open small palm trees for their fibrous white hearts. Once, he found a bird's egg on the ground and immediately sucked it dry. At night he built rough shelters out of foliage and jammed leaves under his cloths to protect himself from bug bites. But he rarely slept as night-time downpours forced him to jog in place to prevent hypothermia.

Low on food and hope and his left hand badly infected, Panchao was very much alive. After nearly a week of floundering in the jungle, a dark and desperate time, some unseen force brought him back to the river. He vowed never to let it out of his sight again. To move faster, he consider building a raft by strapping together branches and driftwood with vines. But he couldn't pull the logs out of the swift current. On the eleventh day, a military plane circled overhead. Pinchao jumped up and down screaming. He also used his tiny mirror to send a signal to the aircraft but a rescue team never arrived.

On the fourteenth day, Pinchao thought he heard the voices of guerrillas on patrol. Desperate for any kind of human contact, he began screaming, but the voices faded away. Then, he spotted a fisherman in a canoe. He called for help and the man agreed to hide the ragged policeman in the bottom of his boat as he paddled downriver.


Around the same time of his escape, intercepts of FARC radio messages tipped off the Colombian authorities in Bogota that a hostage had escaped. The commander of the anti-narcotics police for the region figured the fugitive would opt for a water route and positioned a joint army-police rescue team in Pacoa, a collection of wood plank and thatched roof huts,( a prime recruiting post for FARC), down river. But they grew tired of waiting and on May 15th the commander had ordered his choppers to fire up and head home. All the troops couldn't fit in one trip so after dropping off the first batch of troops the Black Hawks sped back to the village. In a few more minutes the last of the government forces would be gone and Pacoa would revert to its former status of no-man-land. Suddenly, Colonel Ruiz's satellite phone rang. One of his agents was calling from the banks of the Apaporis.

“I've got Pinchao,” he screamed. “ I've got Pinchao!”

He looked like an emaciated castaway. After surviving the equivalent of a seventeen-day Iron Man competition on a diet of yucca flour, palm hearts and river water, John Frank washed into Pacoa clinging to a log and tipping the scales at eighty-eight pounds. The policemen embraced the waterlogged survivor, then bundled him aboard one of the Black Hawks bound for Mitu. As he was led through the rebuilt town and taken past the exact spot where FARC had captured him, Pinchao burst into tears and began screaming the words that he'd been waiting to get out of his system for eight soul-numbing years: “Ill-born guerrilla sons of bitches!”

“ It is not the chains we wear around our necks that torment us. It is the anger produced by the perversity of the bad and the indifference of the good.”

Colombian Police Colonel Luis Mendieta, held hostage by the FARC since 1998.-

The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson

This is a very long narrative ( 850 pages) of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in Europe, composed by a history professor at Hull University. The point is to provide a comprehensive background for the 16th and 17th century institutions, economies, ethnic and religious diversities of the people involved in the conflict, in the provision of which the various causes and consequences are examined and balanced, principally for the benefit of other historians whose narrow focus on particular events and personalities during this epoch period tend to distort their over-all perspectives and conclusions about the war. Frankly, though it would be nice to have this book in my personal library as a point of reference to dip into as the occasion arose, there is no way I could read this book from cover to cover over the course of even a few weeks and retain all the benefits of the knowledge it has to offer or could be applied in a practical way. Never-the-less, he makes several points in the introduction which are worth saving.

Historiographically ( henceforth in the author's own words), the late 18th and early 19th century Romantic interpretation of the war established three elements that still shape writing today. One is the Gothic preoccupation with death, decline and destruction, with Germany usually presented as the helpless victim of foreign aggression. Atrocity stories were culled from folk tales and contemporary fiction, notably The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen, which was rediscovered by the Romantic poets as the first authentic German novel and reissued in numerous 'improved' editions in the early nineteenth century.

The reappearance of these tales in historical novels and paintings, as well as school history lessons, reinforced folk memory and family tradition, not only in Germany but in other countries affected by the fighting. The Thirty Years War became a benchmark to measure all later wars. The inhabitants of eastern France interpreted each subsequent invasion in the light of the stories told about the Swedes and Croats who devastated their region in the 1630s. Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in centuries.

In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced ' the destruction that had been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch.' For this reason, he went on, Hitler's successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion survey's carried out in the 1960s revealed that German's placed the Thirty Years War as their country's greatest disaster ahead of both world wars, the Holocaust and the Black Death.

The impact of TV undoubtedly shifted this perception in the later twentieth century, especially through the dissemination of photographic images of more recent carnage. Nonetheless, even in the twenty-first century, German authors could assert that 'never before and also never since, not even during the horrors of the bombing during the Second World War, was the land so devastated and the people so tortured' as between 1618 and 1648.

The second feature established by nineteenth century historiography is the air of tragic inevitability. This is already apparent in Schiller's Wallenstein, which presents its central figure as an idealistic hero seeking peace but doomed to be murdered by his closest associates; the sense of unstoppable decent into chaos that emerged in writing after the Napoleonic Wars. The long term failure of the European economy to peacefully transition from feudalism to capitalism was thought to have begun in “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, exploding into violent revolts and international conflict across Europe after 1600.

Disagreements over interpretations of the events of the War in the Austrian Empire produced the third and probably the most influential element in 19th century German writing. Two competing narratives emerged, each associated with one of the possible future Germanys- the “greater” and the “Lesser” German alternatives each with clear religious associations that were transposed onto the dispute over the country's past. The assumption that the Thirty Years War has been a religious conflict seemed so self evident it was scarcely questioned.

The Thirty Years War, continues the author, was an extremely complex event. The problems of interpretation derive from attempts to simplify it by overemphasizing one facet to the detriment of others. Religion, for example, certainly provided a powerful focus of identity, but it had to compete with political, social, linguistic, gender and other distinctions. Most contemporary observers spoke of Imperial, Bavarian, Swedish, or Bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant, which are anachronistic labels used for convenience since the nineteenth century to simplify accounts. The war was religious only to the extent that faith guided all early modern public policy and private behavior but there is a need to distinguish between militant and moderate believers.

All believers were convinced their version of Christianity offered the only true path to salvation and the sole correct guide to justice, politics and daily life. Moderates, however, were more pragmatic, regarding the desired reunification of all Christians within a single church as a general, distant goal. Militants saw this goal within their grasp and were not only prepared to use force rather than persuasion but also felt personally summoned by God to do so. They interpreted the Bible in providential, apocalyptic terms, relating current events directly to the text. For them, the conflict was a holy war; a cosmic showdown between good and evil in which the ends justified almost any means.

During the Thirty Years War militants remained in the minority, largely experiencing the war as observers or victims of defeat and displacement. Nonetheless, then as now, militancy proves especially dangerous when combined with political power. It creates a delusional sense in those who rule of being chosen by God for a divine purpose and reward. It encourages the conviction that their norms alone are absolute, their form of government is automatically superior to all the others and their faith is the only really true religion. Such fundamentalists demonize 'the other'' as evil in the psychological equivalent of declaring war, cutting off the possibility of dialogue or compromise. They no longer feel obliged to treat opponents as human beings. Problems to which they have contributed are blamed entirely upon the enemy.

Such self-confidence is inherently dangerous to themselves as well as their enemies. The belief in divine assistance encourages fundamentalists to take risks, convinced that the mounting odds are merely part of God's plan to test their faith. They remain convinced that ultimate victory is theirs by right. This can stiffen resolve and motivate stubborn resistance, but it is poorly suited to achieving military success. Fundamentalists have no real knowledge of their opponents, whom they make no effort to understand. These beliefs certainly shaped key decisions, including the Defenestration and the elector Palatine's decision to join the Revolt. Militants' influence was at times disproportionate to their numbers, but this does not mean we should interpret the conflict through their eyes nor regard the war itself as inevitable.

The Cold War by John Lukacs

This is how the cold war began : the Russians swallowed up Eastern Europe; and then it went on for forty years during which they had serious problems digesting some of it; and it ended with their disgorging just about all of it. One of the results of the cold war was the American obsession with the evils of Communism that became the principle element in American politics with long-lasting effects. What may belong here is at least a suggestion that the cold war between America and Russia might have been-at least in one important way- due to a reciprocal misunderstanding.

Americans believed, and feared, that, having established Communism in Eastern Europe, Stalin was now ready to promote, and wherever possible, impose Communism in Western Europe, which was not really the case. Stalin, who knew and understood the weak appeal of Communism beyond the Soviet Union, was anxious about America's overwhelming power in and after 1945, and thought that the Americans were ready to challenge and upset his rule over Eastern Europe, which was also not the case.


Was Stalin insatiable? Yes and no. So far as his rule over his own people and over his acquired domains went, yes; but so far as the rest of the world, and particularly Western Europe, went, probably no. There is no evidence that either in 1945 or after he aimed or even wished to have the Red Army march farther into Europe, or to establish Communist regimes in Western Europe or even Western Germany. This was not so only because he was statesman enough to be cautious. It was so, too, because of his knowledge of the weakness of International Communism.

Even in Russia itself, sometime in the 1930s, Stalin – entirely contrary to Marx and Lenin- recognized the importance of the state over an internationalist ideology. There are myriad evidences of this. In this case - as also in others- Stalin's nationalism followed Hitler's. And then, even before the war, his rhetoric of nationalist patriotism, his dissolution of the Comintern, his restoration of the prestige and of some of the powers of the Russian Orthodox Church, his evocation of historic tsarist generals, and other precedents were the results not of his calculations but of his genuine inclinations.

That – the weakness of international communism and the strength of Russian nationalism- was the reason of the “iron curtain”. The increasingly rigid separation of Eastern Europe from the West. Had he agreed ( as some in the U.S. State Department hoped as late as 1946) to an interpretation of the Yalta Declaration of Liberated Europe and of his sphere of interest to allow governments in Eastern Europe that would be categorically and necessarily pro-Russian but not necessarily Communist, there might not have been much, or any, of a cold war. We may even plausibly speculate that if something like that had occurred, Russia could have been a recipient of American generosity, perhaps even of a super-Marshall plan. But could Stalin agree to something like that? No- he was not that kind of man. No: but not because of his Marxist or Communist or ideological extremist, as so many still believe and say and write.

Stalin knew that sooner or later a non-Communist Poland or Czechoslovakia or Hungary, no matter how carefully their governments stayed and kept within their categorical requirements of a pro-Russian policy, would be gradually growing closer to the West, connected by a thousand small threads, some more important than others. It was safe, and to him better, to impose on these people rulers who were totally subservient to and [economically] dependent on Russia – and to close them off from the rest of Western Europe, no matter how Americans and others might protest.


The odd thing is that in Europe the turning point of the cold war came in 1956, at the time of the Hungarian Revolution, which stunned and shocked the Russian leadership; but it also gave them a recognition of relief: the Americans were not ready or willing to really challenge or even attempt to alter the division of Europe. That is turning point of American-Russian relations in Europe. That it coincided with a peak of - understandably because of the brutal Russian suppression of Hungary – American popular hostility for Communism and Russia is, again, another instance of the irony of history ( or, perhaps, of the melancholy history of what goes under the name of “public opinion”).


After 1956 in Europe the enmity of the two Superpowers was gradually winding down, until the political division of Europe and of Germany ended with the withdraw of the Russian Empire in 1989 – and the end of the cold war meant also the end of an entire historical century, of the twentieth century, dominated by the effects and the results of two world wars.

* * * *

Somewhere, in the middle of the heart of Europe, in the black shadows of the Alpine mountains, in a small town along a quick flowing cold river, amid a gnarled and dark-browed people, with their minds less and less dependent on the tattered shroud of their Catholic religion or on their sense of loyalty to a once old-German but now tattered monarchy, a lonely sullen boy came into this world, his heart bitten with rage and ambition, desperately alone as he grew more and more conscious of his destiny of being a German. And then discovering – relatively late, in his thirtieth year- that his bitterness and rage and hate were there in the hearts and the minds of thousands of other people around him, too; that God ( a God of history? Or the God of Germandom?) had given him the power to speak, a talent to touch their minds and hearts, for the sake of something large and hard.

And then this odd and uneasy young man, surer of his ideas than of himself, became the solitary leader of a small party. And then of a larger party. And then of a veritable movement. And then of the largest national party athwart Germany. By then he was convinced that he could – democratically, legally, and inevitably – step over all the obstacles to become chancellor of Germany.. the unquestioned and unquestionable head of a great nation, largely united behind him, becoming the strongest and greatest power in Europe as he subdued and silenced each of his opponents, older men of an older world.

He was not one fortunate person riding atop a great wave; he was more than a figurehead of a nation; more even than a standard dictator. A strange phenomena, breaking through myth and mist on occasion with hoarse cries, unfathomable by many of his enemies, matching them with the force of his hatreds, with his instincts that were powerful enough to make him a master of war and even a statesman of a kind, on occasion. And thus he and his Germans withstood the greatest empires of the world, the British, and the Russian and the American Empires, perhaps as many as five hundred million people ranged against a Germany of eighty million – until the very end, here and there even for a few days and nights after his immolation of himself under the ruins of his capital city of Berlin.

He alone began the Second World War. It also ended with him. Not only in Europe. Had he not conquered Western Europe there would have been no Japanese thrust against the French and Dutch in the Far East, had there been no Atlantic war between Germany and Britain there would have been no Pacific war of Japan against the British Empire and the United States, surely not in 1941. The Second World War was Hitler's war. So was the cold war: even before his final assault on Moscow Hitler counted on the enmity between the liberal democracies and 'the devouring monster of international communism” to wrestle his ambitions from jaws of defeat. But for him, the cold war came too late!



And now I must proceed to this dismissal: to a dismissal of a widespread and untruthful view of the twentieth century. This belief that this century was marked by the struggle of Democracy against Communism ( or of "Freedom” against “Totalitarianism”. If that were so, then the Second World War, the war against Hitler's Nationalist Socialist Germany, was but an unnatural episode, interrupting the greater “epic” confrontation of Democracy against Communism.

What nonsense this is. The two great world wars were the two mountain ranges that dominated the entire history of the twentieth century. Communist rule in Russia was a result ( and only one of the results) of the First World War. The so-called cold war between Democracy and Communism (more precisely: between the United States and the Soviet Union) was a consequence of the Second World War. Hitler's war. ( So was the dissolution of the great colonial empires, of the British, French, and Dutch, a consequence of the two world wars). And then, hardly more than forty years after victory ( and there could have been no victory without Russia), the Soviet Empire fell apart, one Communist government disappearing after another, the Russian empire reduced to a size smaller than it had been more than three hundred years ago. Had Hitler's Germany won the war in 1940 or 1941 (and it came very close to that), there is no reason to believe that the Third Reich, that Germany's empire, would have collapsed by 1989 (exactly one hundred years after Adolf Hitler was born).

Consider something else, too: that comparing the quantity of Stalin's or Mao Tse-tung's victims with that of Hitler's results in a, necessarily imprecise, list of numbers – and it tells us nothing. Germany was in the heart, in the center, part and parcel of European and Western civilization, culture, traditions.
Russia (and of course China) were not. Stalin had a predecessor-, Ivan the Terrible. Hitler had none. His and German Nationalist brutality were unprecedented. Russian brutality was not.