The Tenth of September 2001

Please note a few changes in red-font, integrated after writing this essay to reflect information received subsequently. Links are in blue-bold font.

Things had been busy for the preceding couple of days, picking up my sister and a cousine at the Detroit-Metro Airport as well as getting ready for the funeral of my Uncle Henry McDonnell the next morning. I had been in Detroit for a few days because I visited my uncle at the very end of his life to thank him for being a good uncle and attentive god-father and to say good-bye. Of course, and again, I would show up in my father’s stead; this time for his beloved brother.

The pace of preparation had finally slowed during the visitation at a local funeral home. Toward the end of the evening, I took a few moments for myself to look at the photo portrait of my Aunt Marion and Uncle Henry on their wedding day. Since a decade has elapsed, the timing of events have scrambled from memory to meaning, from sequence to significance. They looked young, lovely, expectant – my Aunt Kit and Uncle Hank did.

Years later, I would watch a scene in the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” with Sam, the mortally wounded United States Marine, speaking with the Japanese Colonel who was comforting him with the last of the morphine available. Sam asked that officer, “Are you somebody famous?” 

Within three years, I would spend several hours in the combat hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, watching over another young United States Marine – Lance Corporal Langley – as he slowly slipped away from doctors who had tried everything to assure this boy a full life. The infantry squad whom that young man had saved single-handedly, with singular virtue and sacrifice, were hurting. Theirs was not yet the glory of combat in that room but the very human mixture of guilt, gratitude and grief.

Indeed, Sam’s wonderment in that cave in 1944 haunted me now six years before the Eastwood film flashed across the screens. You see, Hank McDonnell was much like Sam. He had learned to do the right thing – and he did so by joining the United States Army as a sergeant, fresh out of college. The differences were two. Hank McDonnell survived and he was gunned down on the beach, not of Iwo Jima, but of Okinawa, during that very bloody Spring of fifty-six years before 2001.

Hank’s squad had not made much headway when he watched the head of his radio-man shatter just feet away from him under enemy fire. Hank was soon to follow, striking the ground with at least one bullet inside him. He was probably dying and he could not move. For hours he lay there, exposed. For hours, he heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the soil around him. Hank prayed and through the battle-field courage and medical know-how of others, he lived.

Such bravery, perhaps inborn or perhaps the grace of the moment, set Hank McDonnell above most and apart from almost everybody. My Uncle Henry took that image of a friend severed savagely, of waiting for his turn to die, with him for the rest of his life. Dancing as they do, my memories quickly shifted ahead to the quiet celebration of Henry McDonnell's eightieth birthday in Tucson, where I showed up in the stead of my father.

My birthday gift for this occasion was a thin envelope, much like the one containing the rejection letter Hank had received from Yale when he was graduating from Andover; I suffered the same tritely teen-age agony four decades later at Choate. An envelope? And a thin one? Not much. But Henry McDonnell had earned everything I could afford to buy that he might value.

After a low-key dinner with Aunt Marion, my cousin Peter, and his truly magnificent wife, Paula, I gave my gift and held my breath, anxious to make the right impression. Uncle Henry opened the envelope perhaps annoyed that I had lamely given him $80 for eighty years. He read the form-letter from one of my heroes, then recently retired Senator Robert Dole, thanking me for a $100 contribution -- in the honor of Henry Egglesoe McDonnell, Jr -- to the World War II Memorial under construction in Washington, D.C.

Hank McDonnell welcomed that gift: I had made my father proud. Two months later, at a much larger family reunion to celebrate Uncle Henry’s birthday, I happened to be alone, walking out of the powder room, when Hank McDonnell, as close to crying as the night he said good-bye to his ‘kid’ brother, just hours before my father departed, said, in what sounded to me like a stern tone, “Ned, come here.”

Anxious as always and more than a little insecure, I watched my uncle reach into a drawer and take out a leather-bound box, the type that has the royal blue velvet lining, usually containing jewelry. Opening that box, Hank McDonnell showed me his medals: a bronze star and a purple heart and one other I did not recognize. His words were barely audible, “I have hardly ever shown these, Ned, but I wanted you to see them.”

The announcement of the brother of my Aunt Marion, an Episcopal priest of many years in South Carolina, that he would lead a time of prayer to honour my uncle, snapped me out of that momentary reverie. That an Episcopal priest – my Aunt’s brother – would exhibit the grace to salute Henry McDonnell by leading a prayer made me realize that Hank had been very fortunate. The wealth he had married into turned out to be as real as it had been apparent.
After the prayers, my sister and I were walking out of the visitation room to return to our hotel, since the emotion of the past days had left me tired. My cousine, Nancy McDonnell, who had – like her father – succeeded in business and, much again like Hank, understood the importance of a personal reserve, stood near the entrance, briefly alone. My intention had been to offer her a ride to the airport after the funeral, hoping that she would somehow decide for me whether I would head back to Manhattan tomorrow, the eleventh, or wait until the twelfth.

Instead, she stood there, her eyes deep in a daughter’s grief. Notwithstanding my stupid Charlie-Brown look of not having the words to say what I should be saying, Nancy McDonnell looked at me, winced in shaking her head subtly, and said,

“You know, Ned, it’s the end of an era…”

Letter #39 (and holding to keep it young) to FIENDS and familiares

Estimadas voluntarias y respetados compañeros,

As I stated in the PCM-connect web site, I am asking my younger Peace Corps brethren to suffer an old man’s fleeting fit of wisdom to be passed along to his counterparts of succeeding generations be they millennials or Gen-Xers or whatevers. I am asking you to consider reading through three writings, the links of which are posted in this letter. They discuss three key aspects of our world that my generation will leave to yours. Two writings came, as always, through the thoughtfulness of my generational contemporary, Mr Roy Rajan.

The first article is a brief history of the U.S. by the Strafor private intel service. It explains how we got to where we are today. Beautifully written and insightful, beware of Strafor’s ever-persistent bias of characterizing U.S. power and conduct as inevitable or somehow accidental. Duplicity and diplomacy were not quite so innocent as this re-issued Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. If you can not get directly to the article, please let me know and I will cut-paste the text directly below the torpor of this dismissive missive.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110824-geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire

The second selection is a series of ten articles from “Slate Magazine” studying the inequality that grew under my generation’s watch. This article remains relatively free from bias and even ventures to diagnose the root-causes. Though a long read, this series is well worth the effort since this inequality is becoming serious. Not only do the poor remain invisible – many by being in jail for petty crimes – the middle-class is becoming isolated, too. The fact that a disenfranchised middle class has engineered the majority of revolutions, often among the most blood-drunk, is reason enough to sit up and take notice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/

The last article is a typical anxiety spill over the perils of technology. Steven Vincent Benét held a prophetic distaste toward the information age and the Cold War during a short life that preceded both. But Mr Benét forgot one critical differentiator between man and machine: each one of us remains responsible for his or her privacy or lack of it. Neurotic needfulness is no excuse for forfeiting privacy. Accordingly, I sincerely implore you to think about the possibility that, as a people, we have, in our everyday preferences, effectively nullified the right of privacy – or shown its falsity – through the proliferation of social media, e-mails, blogs, etc.

Should this assertion of a negated right of privacy prove to be true, questions and implications galore will trouble your thinking in the years ahead. Did such a right of privacy ever really exist, at least implicitly? Or was it invented, not inferred, to suit political expediency? The answers might be unsettling for you. A couple of examples will suffice.

If the right to privacy has been devalued or belied, what will that mean for the widely accepted concepts underlying the Roe-versus-Wade Supreme Court decision or the popular aversion toward the “U.S.A. Patriot Act”? What will it mean for your children as they face the tasks, travails and bullies in the school-yard or on the inter-net? Could they become the road-kill of the information super-highway?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/

Finally, I ask you to indulge this, my, dubious invitation. Such a request on my time, when I was young, would have made me chafe or, worse, sniffle in contempt. Since, many (if not all) of you are destined to assume leadership responsibilities of some kind as your lives manifest continually, the few hours invested in these essays may give you a sense of what you are getting yourselves into through the mere slippage of time.

Thank you, adios…over and out.

Letter #38: Greed and Grief in modern Mexico

Walking into the science center where I serve in the Peace Corps this morning, I noticed the ordinarily jocund guard in a rather subdued state setting the three flags – those of the country, the national science council and the center itself – at half-mast. After I asked who had died, the kindly elder stated humbly, “Para las victimas del casino en Nuevo León…”.

Of course, three days before, I had heard President Calderón over the radio giving an impassioned speech out of step with our unfeeling time. The flags unfurled in the mournful remembrance of fifty-plus people burned to death by a narco-syndicate (i.e., the Zetas or the Gulf cartel). Analyses abound about whodunit and why (e.g., to knock off its balance the spin cycle of money-laundering through casinos); apparently what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. This penetrating pedantry, nevertheless, misses the point.

In a speech coloured by its somber eloquence, el presidente Calderón not only called on his countrymen to rally against this state of 'anarco', he also called out United States of America as the root-cause of such grim criminality. Not the U.S. government as much as its drug-users. That’s right: our country, high-or-wrong. Would organized crime still exist South of the border without the unrelenting demand for drugs from the North? Certainly. But nothing on the scale witnessed in that casino, on the streets and during the years of fear.

El presidente Calderón’s question here becomes obvious with even the slightest reflection. Why has American leadership – Democrat, Independent and Republican alike – been intent on trying everything to stop the commerce of drugs except to address the root-cause? When will a leader risk his or her popularity – even re-election – to call us all to account? Where is the statesman needed openly to ask that hardest of all questions: Why do so many of our fellows, living in the epicenter of the American Century, find their lives so empty that they resort to drugs?

To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton has begun to say publicly that the U.S. bears at least some of the responsibility for Mexico’s tragedy. One reason that the obvious question remains unasked reflects the likelihood of no answer. Until an incumbent national leader cries out with the pain afflicting his people, as have great leaders through the ages from King David to President Lincoln to Prime Minister Churchill, the suffering will continue. My upbringing included a stricture that I not criticize the status-quo unless I had a solution. Of course, I have no solution, either.

While many leading citizens are proposing the legalization or de-criminalization of drugs, I remain uneasy with that approach because distribution channels are already in place to encourage consumption in the future of 'black-market' substances (i.e., stronger than allowed) by under-age users (i.e., children in junior high on up). In any case, the perspective of focusing on behavior patterns still fails to address the void inside most people – that quiet desperation Thoreau could not finesse – that seduces many into looking for oblivion, god, rapture, peer approval or allayed curiosity, whichever comes first.

One used to say that when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches pneumonia. The Mexican dictator of the nineteenth century was far keener with his wit: “Poor Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United States.” Perhaps we can change that ugly fact of life, not only for our neighbors but for ourselves by treating addicts and recreational users as people in pain, defenseless against the nothingness or the hopelessness that stalks them patiently, day in and day out.

There are no magic answers here because drug users have as many reasons for, and behaviors associated with, drug consumption as there are users. But recalling the pragmatism of F.D.R. in the face of a darker challenge to our national well-being presents a refreshing response. We take our best shot at giving the poor hope, the wealthy purpose and the middle class a future.

If a national system of rehabilitation centers does not work, then we try stay-home-approaches. If de-criminalization does not diminish crime, we start indicting drug dealers to under-age kids for human trafficking as well. If schooling the poor does not curb use, then we offer scholastic aid to those making the effort to stay clean. For the poor at least, up-or-out has an entirely different meaning than for untenured academics or foreign service officers.

In short, we do what it takes within the limits of democratic constitutionalism. America has a reservoir of goodwill within her people that, once properly stimulated, can better the lives of diverse Americans of all flags, taking Bolivar’s dream to a long-delayed destiny.

Letter #37 to Fiends and Familiares: Mexico at one year

My group of Peace Corps is bumping into its first anniversary in Mexico. Before I arrived here for this tour, I had private fantasies of Hesse’s Siddhartha, not tending the ferry across the river, but teaching in some pueblo lost somewhere on the Baja peninsula.

Well, wisdom attained on other people’s money has not quite come to pass. Truth is that I am basically working on a traditional capacity-transfer project, living in a cosmopolitan city and enjoying the symphony with my novia at seven bucks a pop.

Nevertheless, in an engaging spirit of public service combined with a simple sense of a destiny not mine, I am writing down ten lessons from my first year so those who follow me have absolutely no excuse for being pathetic human beings.

PASCAL’S PAINFUL PARADOX. “Man is neither angel nor brute. The misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Learned that one the hard way this past year.

KILLING TIME, KILLING ME. Beware if you have not enough to do at first. Inventing activities to fill the time can wreak a peculiar vengeance. When you are ready to let the activity fade away, feedback comes galloping in, begging for the brain-murder to continue.

WHY MEXICANS ARE FRIENDLY. Because they are, stupid gringo.

NO ATHEISTS HERE. Gone are the scintillating sociopaths born without conscience, living without consequence and ready to die without continuity. Most so-called atheists here are people struck dumb, perhaps damned, by scrupulosity with no way out.

TRUTH of CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. Giggling punctuated by intermittent, delicately timed one-word slurs like ‘bueno’; ‘bien’; and, ‘verdad’. “¿And what do you do, blend?”

VINDICATION of SHAKESPEARE. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night. Included to make me look like some intelligent visionary and other good stuff.

THE GREATEST GAUNTLET EVER THROWN. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth…”

TIME TAKES TIME. I thought after a year, I would be fluent in Spanish. Nope. People often try my patience by urging my patience.

The SECRET behind PREENING POLITICOS: Intellectual struttiness where neurotic exhibitionism amazingly morphs into self-actualization.

TRITE NOISE. People my age may believe that “children should be seen and not heard”. The young volunteers have a better point. Oldsters should not be heard, either: they snore.

Some of these lessons come from fashionably disdained sources as most people are too modern to admit to the truth of anything written before 1900. Yet these same, these dull, lessons remind ‘yours truly’ that humility really is the currency of the realm during this magical Mexico tour.

Mexico labours under the heavy burdens of a withering despair always whispering: drug wars, acute poverty affecting 45% of the population, etc. Yet her people rarely fail to help me when I ask; her women know that dainty art, long lost in the United States, of making any man feel special; and, strangers invite me to parties at least once a week.

In closing, let me affirm that I fall so far short of reciprocating all that these lovely people do; one would have to resort electron microscopes to discern what, if any, progress I have really made. Mexico will certainly not make me a Saint or even a Mexican. Yet she will continue to make me happy. Thank you: good-bye!

Letters to Friends and Familiares #36: Culture Schlock-101

The first few months in Mexico proved to be mightily disconcerting. In so many ways, Mexicans acted with solicitude and courtesy. Women appreciated my closing the car door. Gentlemen would hold the office door open for me to spare the effort of using the identification card (here known as la credencial) to activate the sensor to unlock the door for me to open the door and for me to enter the building.

While such preter-techical activity saved me at most five seconds, the gesture mattered more. My Mexican counterparts in business, my novia (Angélica) and my few acquaintances displayed nothing but patience and courtesy with my mangled Spanish that sounded more like a phonetic fragmentation bomb.

At work, people included me in their parties and ‘chismes’ sessions of office gossip, which I usually avoided with diplomatic deftness, “Tengo que ir al baño” (i.e., “I gotta go to the can, man...”). Senior managers at the (one of twenty-seven) national science and engineering research centers where I serve made sure I had decent tasks that could conceivably help the institution.

And so I wondered what the HELL was wrong with me and why I kept getting mixed signals. Thanks to a fairly strict pair of parents, I had had the benefit of a solid upbringing – though four decades ago “upbraiding” was more contextually convincing – and so my manners and social instincts were fine, as evidenced by the warm and appreciative smiles coming my way from people of all walks of life in Querétaro.

Yet I kept slamming into mixed signals from these same otherwise delightfully authentic people. The first time I noticed was with the Human Resources liaison for the Peace Corps volunteers, an educated, glamorous and charming young lady. On a chilly December morning, we crossed paths and I said in Spanish my standard, “How are you?”, in the formal third person, being the polite prig that I am.

She said in her spritely way, “Just fine. Thank you. Good-bye!” I did not show my rather startled reaction and simply let this eerie cross-current swirl right on by.
This type of thing occurred repeatedly and I became increasingly unsure of my communications skills.

Yet everyone remained so forthrightly friendly in every other respect that I figured that acceptance of something beyond me would be the most constructive course. Then in March, I got worried. At eight o’clock in the morning, I ran into the man who tracks the schedules of the busses as they go by and asked how he was. He said, “Great! Thank you. Good-bye!”

Well I had been through this enough to know to let it go. Then at the entrance and the guard booth, I asked how the guards were. In unison they bellowed, “Fine, thank you, goodbye!” Now I was really worried. Next along came my Department Head and, upon the usual courtly exchange, he answered, “Well, thank you. Good-bye!”

When the administrative manager of the office – a woman of noble mien – said the same mixed message, that did it: I was officially unnerved. There must be something wrong with me. At ten-thirty in the morning, I ran across the street to the farmacía where I bought some deodorant, though I remember applying the ‘Old Spice Original’ just hours before, and some mints for my breath.

Of course, these Mexicans were being indirect and I had to do something about it. I called Angélica and asked her how she was hurriedly. She said in Spanish, “Happy to hear your voice. Thank you. Good-bye!” Since Angélica is fluent in English, I blurted out in my native tongue, “Don’t hang up until you explain something to me…” She protested that she had no intention of hanging up and asked me what was the matter.

Confusion nagged my every nerve. How could I smell bad or look worse over the telephone? So I asked in English, “What is with this business of saying, “I am fine. Thank you. Goodbye…”? That woman of my dreams had the temerity to laugh and laugh heartily. Crestfallen, I braced myself for her answer.

“Ned, we are saying ‘Bien. Gracias a Dios’ like thank God, not Gracias. Adios…” That’s culture shock for you, now isn’t it?

Letter to Friends and Familiares #36: Myths, Conformity and Idleness

Cultural assimilation is a heady topic these days. ‘Heady’ remains the apt word because it exists mostly inside people’s heads. Recently, I participated in a training session on “the process” of “cultural assimilation”. Like most giddy subjects of political correctness, this discussion – grounded firmly in academic studies – contained about 20% substance and 80% methane madness.

Before the discussion, the weighting assigned to substance might have been 5% but volunteers serving in the country-side really face challenges and, as I am delighted to report, they adapt admirably well. We even suffered through the tedium vitae of a survey on culture shock to “help” newly arrived volunteers. Nevertheless, the people leading this discussion are earnest, decent and well-educated.

They are also wasting time and, in Mexico at least, fast becoming intellectual anorexics pushing food around their plates to look busy. The topic is not altogether devoid of meaning as anyone living outside of her fatherland must face adjustments, especially when that person has to study a new language. Nevertheless, people have been away from home for centuries: been there, done that.

While we may not be a global village, for at least half the world, the inter-net has extended the psychology of globalism into a common expectation of experience. This common vision, together with a modest amount of human sensitivity to the (re)actions of others, should suffice to navigate the rather dull waters of being an expatriate.

So why this entire hullabaloo about the obvious? Easy question: such vacuous discussions provide the fodder for boring Ph.D. theses published into dreadful tomes desecrating hallowed book-stacks of the Library Congress. Credit should go to a fellow volunteer who perceptively observed that the cultural adaptation model was ‘re-up’ of the five (or was it six) stages of grief from the 1970s.

Only one word need describe that erstwhile tripe remains: ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

The only things interesting about Elisabeth Kübler Ross were the spelling of her first name and the umlaut in the first half of her hyphenated surname. The problem with linear models like these is, first, they are linear and, second, they reflect the reality of the person devising them. They serve one beneficial purpose of limited scope: providing means of support to an otherwise ill-equipped brainiac.

Anyone who has experienced the profound and riveting disintegration of genuine grief often finds the ‘simplistification’ of the Kübler-Ross model to be slightly condescending, perhaps downright demeaning. Grief is a living koän (i.e., the insoluble non-sense riddle of Zen) that breaks or grinds us down to an acceptance of certain latent limitations in ourselves and our lives.

So, too, with cultural assimilation. This re-tread, touted by professionals with the life experience to know better, trivializes the positive situation facing your typical migrant: the opportunity to collaborate with other people to expand his knowledge of language and manners as well as to widen her perspective. Collaboration with whom? Why, locals of course.

Cultural collaboration ought to be fun and reciprocal without the drudgery of falsely imputed tasks of overcoming ‘resistance’ or acknowledging ‘immunization’ or ‘denial’. We are discussing international living for pity’s sake, not some sort of syndrome or addiction. Most offensive is the petty tyranny of political correctness reigning down on anyone with the nerve to turn his nose up at this garbage.

People who do not buy into this spasm of the ‘glitterotten’ face labels like “out-of-touch” or “insensitive” or, worst of all accusations from liberal intellectual fascists, “well, he is, you know…” The little brat who decried the emperor’s nakedness was the Little Prince in my book even if he was damned as out-of-step with his more sophisticated and “grown-up” compatriots.

Letter #34 to Friends and Family: Good Friday re-visited

Yes, it has been three months since Holy Week and my sense of timing is as sharp as ever. Nevertheless, during an evening in Annapolis recently, Angelica and I celebrated Independence Day with my sister’s family as well as the Priest(ess) and her similarly ordered husband (of the Prunells' church) over dinner and fireworks.

What emerged from this few hours of chatting on everything from lapsed Catholicism to Bishop Spong was that Saint Ann’s Church of Annapolis, a mid-to-low Episcopal congregation, had re-enacted the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday 2011 for the first time in many years at the same time I was trudging around the Calesa colonia (i.e., neighborhood) of Querétaro on the “Viacrusis”.

The only difference between the two events that I could detect was that the temperature was twenty degrees higher in Querétaro and walking the good walk in México literally made me a red-neck. Of course, in April and May, I had the blog to end all blogs written out inside my head and, of equal course, I found myself too intellectually and inevitably indolent to do a damn thing about my spiritual insight.

Nevertheless, this parallel between two rather dissimilar groups got my attention since this nitty-gritty and not-so-pretty ritual – after all, it was re-enactment of the ghastly death of a young man – seemed to be addressing some deep-seeded need within the average human breast. I say 'breast' and not 'head' because sacramental acts hardly pertain to the intellect.

Interestingly, however, as the spiritual utility of ritual acts is realized (at least among my acquaintances), intellectual resistance frequently subsides into the irrelevant.

So this action ties, I think, into the sacramental side of Catholicism; that is, the ritual side (i.e. upper-church) Christianity. What do the sacraments mean? In actuality, I am referring to the “action” sacraments, primarily Holy Matrimony, Confession, Holy Communion and Extreme Unction.

Like these rituals, the “Viacrusis” entails the taking of action by at least one key party to it. These sacraments rang hollow for many years as I was struggling mightily to assert, establish and justify my intellectual pride.

Finally, after finding a very old, very Catholic book on the Church and its pre-Vatican II ways in my mid-twenties, sacraments began to hold a third possibility: perhaps, they represented the sacred syntax of a spiritual life in this material world. In all honesty, I still prefer the lower church practices of Unitarianism (not Christian) or Presbyterianism.

Yet I have found the services in lower churches often to be very long and sometimes tedious. And, for me at least, nothing else on Earth quite delights me as the high Anglo-Catholic services – in very limited doses – of Saint Mary’s Church or the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.

I wonder why.

Could it be that ‘walking-the-walk’ for two hours on Good Friday and a quarter of an hour every Sunday enraptures people far more rapidly than a group talking itself into a state-of-grace?

Could walking through ninety-five degree heat, walking in the sandals of that repudiated revolutionary, bring me closer to his humanity to afford a glimpse into His divinity?

Obviously, I really do not know because I am not a Christian. But Christians of diverse levels of education, intelligence and socio-economic status two thousand miles apart may have established a coincidental consensus.

What do you think?