WILD SURMISE

FEBRUARY 1991 #23

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

THERE BE DRUMS

It is with immeasurably deep sorrow that we find the nation once more at war.

Those of you who have been with us since June 1985 will remember that Wild Surmise was started because of the Vietnam war. At that time, we had reason to suspect that veterans of the war were dying at a greater rate than would be expected for Then and women of the same age. In short, the Vietnam war was still killing Americans.

For over a year, all our questions directed to the proper informed sources were deflected. Either nobody knew about these deaths or those who knew were taking care to guard a secret.

After some years, a study was done; the ongoing deaths were found, documented and published. From that time, wild Surmise had no ongoing purpose, but retreated like a dragon into its lair guarding our one pebble of truth, surviving only to assure that the truth not be forgotten.

War is so terrible that those who wage it, physically uninjured, continue to die of the after effects for years after.

If war is so horrible that it is not worth fighting even for the victors, that would seem to be something important to know. It would be the most important thing to know about war, the first thing to learn and the last to be forgotten. It should be the first thing said when the subjedt comes up for discussion and the final thing said when the subject is laid to rest: any war, any century.

If war has emotional effects that kill years after, it is a lesson that likewise should never be lost. It should not be up to an obscure, occasional, informal newsletter with a limited circulation to keep that lesson alive.

The peace movement that finally put an end to the Vietnam war was very large and very well publicized. The form of that movement was often offensive. Peace was equated with communism, sexual promiscuity, filthy body habits, deafening music, drug use, self righteousness, failure of rational debate and with random lashing out at places like institutions of learning that should properly have been a forum for debate and treating those institutions, and the notion of rational debate and dissent, as the enemy.

If anything could have given peace a bad name, such a movement did.

Then there was the "peace sign." It was a blank clock face with hands at twelve, four, six and eight. Years after it had been abandoned, I read an article by a liberal, who said in a shrill tremolo voice that the conservative forces had identified that sign as "Nero's Cross," an upside down cross with broken arms. My reaction was, "I hadn't heard that. Nor have T ever heard any other widely agreed upon meaning for this 'Peace sign.'"

slowly over the years, the itpeace Sign" vanished, random riots subsided, people began to wash again and communism dried up and blew away. some other elements of that age remain as scars, but I for one never doubted that there was still a peace movement, just a little more grown up.

I was wrong.

We are at war again.

Iraq, a tyrannical little oil sheikhdom, overran Kuwait, another tyrannical little oil sheikhdom. The United States pushed a resolution through the United Nations that Iraq must withdraw or be pushed out by force. Iraq did not. The United Nations forces led by the United states have begun to push, and people have started to die.

What is worse, the newspapers and television report that the American people are in favor of this war, some say eighty and some say ninety percent. AriQng those I ask, more like ninety percent seem to be opposed, although I concede there has been some softening as the fighting has gone on.

Newspapers are in the business of telling you what you want to hear. They must do so in order to stay in business. One of the sweet uses of obscurity is that Wild Surmise is under no such pressure. We can say what we believe. You can cancel your subscription, but that is free.

We should not be in this war.

Do not think for an instant that we do not love and admire our troops over there. For years we have spoken up for a better understanding and better treatment of men at war. They make a great sacrifice. They make it gladly. They do their part valorously. But never confuse the valor of the warrior and the wisdom of the one who calls for a war.

Do not think for an instant that I have any patience with the man Saddam Hussein of Iraq who ordered the invasion of Kuwait. He invaded a rich smaller country solely as a means of extending his own personal power, already far too great.

That would be bad enough. But he than had the audacity to claim that he had done this in order to free the Palestinians. That was a dastardly act. That makes a liveable peace so much harder to achieve

No one can doubt that the situation of the Palestinians is dire. There is some justification for likening it to the situation of Southern Blacks in the 1850's. There is no prospect that Husseien's bid to help them, proclaimed after the fact of the invasion of xuwait, will do the Palestinians any good.

But that is beside the point. It is the cynical dishonesty that matters. For his own political ends, in order to curry favor in the world's eye, Hussein claims to be acting on behalf of people who sorely need a good friend. He is taking personal advantage of their plight.

So when I say I do not like him, you can believe The

Here are the reasons we are told we are in this war: 1) We need the oil. 2) We cannot allow the world to think that any country can invade another and get away with it. 3) Iraq is about to become a nuclear power. 4) Saddam Hussein is so bad he has to be stopped and his power broken. I will address them in turn.

No we don't need the oil. There is more oil slopping around than we care to burn. Sure we will run out in time. If we had good sense, we would tax oil as a luxury, which it is. We would tax coal as a vice, which it resembles in the amount of harm it does.

The oil is not going to run out in Hussein's lifetime. (Dictators don't live as long as the rest of us.) We are going to burn ALL the oil sooner or later. If the tax on it is high, we will burn it slowly. If the tax is low, we will burn it rapidly. If the oil of Iraq and Kuwait do not come on the world market this generation, the next generation will be happy to have it.

We don't need the oil now, and if some supplier is willing to store his share for a couple decades, we will all be better off some day down the road.

Yes, we need a reliable supply of energy. We need some sort of energy policy so that poor slobs like me don't have to remember to keep the tank of the car full just in case supplies drop all at once. But we can plan around Iraq and Kuwait, and just now we do not need their oil at all.

2) We cannot allow the world to think that any country can invade another and get away with it.

Hussein points out Cand we scream at him to shut up) that Israel still holds pieces of territory in Jordan and Egypt that she won during the Six Day War. Hussien fails to pointout (or else we have shut him up effectively) that Israel invaded Lebanon and the world did not get together and fight Israel for it. The last I heard, Israel was still in Lebanon in a little strip along the southern border.

She holds onto that little strip so as to keep anything from Lebanon from invading Israel itself. So you may not think it is that important. But if principles are not important in the case of Israel, then they should not be important in the case of Iraq.

At the extreme, there is the question of Palestine itself, which was invaded and destroyed much as Kuwait has been. That is an extreme example if only because emotions run extreme on the case. Think instead about the RUssian invasion and destruction of Afghanistan. That was not so long ago.

But the case closest to the heart is the matter of the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. At the time a half million American troops had been sent to Saudi Arabia to fight for the rights of the Emirs of Kuwait, the duly and constitutionally elected parliament of the nation of Lithuania was meeting behind barricades because of the arrival of Soviet troops.

Those Russian troops have killed people in Lithuania.

All right, it was wrong for Iraq to knock off Kuwait. But there is a very good rumor that we invited them too. The Iraqis asked the American ambassador what if there was a change in the boundary. The answer was that Arab borders are Arab problems and the United States is not concerned. One again Paleface speaks with forked tongue.

I'm sorry about the rich Kuwait chaps. I'm truly sorry. But you know something? They blew it. It's their own fault.

certainly anybody can make a mistake. But to make a mistake and hold to it for decades makes you liable for the consequences. At any time since the 1950's the Kuwait government could have come around the United States and said, "We are a little place. We are bait in a tank of sharks. Please come put a big military base in our country. We will rent you the land for a dollar a year. Help us.'

We would have tripped all over ourselves getting over there. But they didn't say it, didn't say it even while they were being taken over. They are full time professional politicians. They just lost, that's all.

Even better, they could have set up in their country a republic. Held free elections. Established an independent judiciary. They could have been free. Then we might say we were ready to fight for Kuwait. As it is, we are just ready to fight for the oil sheiks of Kuwait. That is not the same thing.

North Vietnam established that the United States could not be depended on to keep one little country from invading and annexing another. Naked aggression. It has happened before. Sometimes we have resisted it. Generally we have not. Resisting it this time will prove nothing about the next tine. certainly it proves nothing if Russia continues to do to the Baltics what Saddam is doing to Kuwait.

3) Iraq is about to become a nuclear power.

There are agreements that nations strike. There are deals, contracts, treaties. Nations get together and form compacts. One or those treaties is a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. It is an agreement among nations not to seek or have nuclear weapons. Iraq has signed such a treaty. Iraq, yes Saddam Hussein, has complied with all demands for inspection under the terms of the treaty.

So there is an effective way to keep Iraq out of the nuclear arms business. That is to sign and work with such a treaty.

There is another way to keep Iraq out of the nuclear arms business. That is to blow up anything we can find that Iraq has that might be radioactive.

Blowing it up, of course, releases into the air we breathe the very radioactivity that makes nuclear weapons so dreaded. 0, well yes, nuclear weapons make explosions, too. But that happens when they are bombed as well. An air strike on a nuclear facility comes all around to making your nuclear nightmare a reality.

Israel has already, almost ten years ago, made an air raid on Iraq for just that purpose. It is hard to believe they have lost the taste for such adventures, if you did should think an air raid to be a better way to achieve peace.

But at a deeper level, if the purpose is to make a safer world by discouraging the use of nuclear weapons, there is one enemy you have that is far greater than any single pile of fissionable material. That enemy is the perception that the world is divided into two kinds of power: nuclear and conventional. And that a nuclear power is so terrible that she can invade Afghanistan or Lebanon or Lithuania with impunity. A non-nuclear power is not allowed to go play with the big boys.

By punishing Iraq and not the Soviet Union for similar acts of naked aggression, we make the message quite clear: germ warfare and chemical warfare are not enough. To have full rights as a member of the community of nations, you need nukes. That seems like hardly the message we want to deliver.

4) Saddam Hussein is so bad he has to be stopped and his power broken.

This is another case of a nation starting a great war and reaching around for an excuse. Legally our presence in Saudi Arabia is under the umbrella of the United Nations. We are there to enforce United Nations policy, even if we did a lot of arm twisting to get that policy to be what we wanted. That policy gives us absolutely no call to enter Iraq or to subvert Saddarn Hussein. If we do that, it is on our own. And if we do that after having fought Iraq white in Kuwait, then we are in the position of having tricked the United Nations. Be that as it may, Saddam may still be bad without limit.

How bad is he?

well he has used poison gas against his own people the Xurds. But that was back when he was our ally; or at least we were supporting him then against Iran. The Kurds should have their own country. Gassing them was about as bad as a thing could be. But it is a puny kind of principle on our part to overlook such things when the man is useful to us and then remember them later when we are seeking cause against him.

Well again, they say he causes people to be tortured.

I once chatted with a man who told me about questioning prisoners. I make no representation as to what country was involved, and this was not confirmed by a second observer, so it is only rumor. I

will affirm, however, that it is my belief that no one has gone to war over what happened

This is what happened. Three German prisoners (Ox, now at least you know it wasn't Germany doing this) would be bound in chairs. They would go up to the first man and ask him who his commanding officer was and what he had been up to. Being a brave young man with two friends there to watch him, he would only give his name, rank and serial number. They then hit him over the head with a hammer, killing him. Then they asked the second man the same thing. He would make the same answer, so they would hit him over the head the same way. The third man generally talked.

Such are the cruel uses of power.

Don't you remember what part of the world this is happening in? This is not Delaware we are talking about. Look at the competition. And forgive me the spelling in what follows. I took no notes at the time.

Think about Iran next door. The Ayatollah Khomeini ruled there. He made an even greater effort to "satanize" the United States than we have made to satanize Hussein. He permitted our diplomatic staff to be held hostage for years for no reason I could see except for hate of us. He died in office as an adult. Every previous Persian head of state for two thousand years was either murdered, fled for his life, or died in infancy. That means the current leader, All Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is the first leader they have had in all that time who has not been a murderer.

The Shah of Iran, that old ally of ours, was such an embarrassment that after HE ran for his life we could not even take him into this country to be treated for cancer. We pulled in an IOU from Panama and asked them to look after the man. Noriega of Panama, a friend at the time, we have now arrested.

Syria to the north is no better. They have been poking their naked aggression into Lebanon longer and harder than Israel.

Do you remember Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge of Cambodia? They executed their countrymen by the millions. Wells were unusable for the skulls floating in them. They are still in business.

Remember Idi Amin of Uganda and Colonel Kadaffi of Libya.

A friend writes us that Burma is dying. The military dictatorship has sold the rights to the great virgin forests to Thailand. The Thais are clear-cutting the trees and the generals are pocketing the cash. Burma has never known hunger. That will change.

Remember Castro? Dictator of Cuba? Ruined that nation and sent armies to Africa. still in business right off the Florida keys.

On one television program I saw someone from Amnesty International asked whether Hussein was not the worst torturer in the world. The answer was that Hussein was bad enough, but he should not be compared to others because it would make him look too good.

Bad man. Bold bad man. I fear and loathe such. Yet he does not stand high on the horizon.

This is no Hitler, no Stalin, no Antichrist. This is just another rabid skunk.

Those are the reasons we are told we are in the war. Not one of them holds water for more than a routine diplomatic exercise.

None is a temptation for war. And war needs more than temptation. War needs at the very least overwhelming, unequivocal urgency.

There are other possible causes, not mentioned, which may be reasons. 1) It might be personal with Hr. Bush. 2) It might be to protect Israel. B) It might lie with the American people.

We will address these possible causes.

1) It is personal with Hr. Bush.

There was a time last fall when war looked inevitable. Trag, with an army of half a million, had walked across Kuwait and stood at the gates of Saudi Arabia. No force at band seemed capable of saving Saudi. While we can do without Iraq and Kuwait, the free world would find it hard to do without oil from Saudi and the little emirates to her South.

Thecently, a Florida newspaper published a picture of southern Kuwait. The picture had been taken from a Russian satellite. The location was southern Kuwait, identifiable by a part of the edge of the Persian Gulf. The time was September, confirmed by the presence of oil fires apparently burning out of control. We were told there were half a million Iraqi troops tbere at the time. But there were no troops at all. The only air field had no planes or trucks, bore no stacks of supplies. The few roads were blocked with drifted sand. There were no tent cities, tanks, revetments, trenches, latrines, mess halls, trash heaps. The were not five hundred men living in that stretch of desert, let alone five hundred thousand.

I do not yet know what to make of the picture. It seems that the military is noticing the same problem. Iraqi troop concentrations are very hard to find. Either they are trivial compared to our reports or they are masters of invisibility. There is no middle ground.

I accepted then and accept now that there was an enormous Iraqi presence, although I am still troubled by that picture.

We rushed to Saudi's defense. There was a time when the few troops we could muster were far smaller than the waiting power they were sent to thwart. We checked the news almost hourly.

It seemed that at any moment the invasion would be on and we would never get ahead of it. But we built and built until we had the largest force ever to be armed with sophisticated weapons, a force that could prevail over any other ever arrayed save only a nuclear missile strike. But the invasion never came.

president Bush made a few phone calls, isolated Iraq diplomatically, strategically and economically, and built his countervailing army. I took to strutting about and saying to friends, "How 'bout thet George Boosh?" Manyts the time I looked at the map and thought how had I been president we would probably already be at war. But Bush held his hand, husbanded his power and kept the peace

It seemed to have the mark of a master strategist. It seemed to be too cool and steady to understand. But I was not surprised. That's why we voted for the guy.

Bush has been variously portrayed as a Yankee patrician of old fashioned values and as a gutless wimp. Then, back in the old days, he seemed to be a bluff honest administrator. An effective man to do a hard but straightforward job. A man to be trusted with power because he had no personal agenda that he was ready to sign in somebody else's blood.

After Abraham Lincoln, no Republican president has ever led this nation into a major war. For Republicans, there had always the posture of loathe to hurt but unafraid to strike. It had always worked and even in this dangerous time seemed, against all e~pectation, to be working again. The strong person with the clear eye and steady nerve does not have to waste that strength fighting.

On January 16, hours after the time the United Nations had said force might be used if needed, the United States began an intense bombardment of Iraq. I felt deeply betrayed.

I felt betrayed first by my old friend Mr. Bush. I felt betrayed even though he had talked tough, for that was part of his job. I felt betrayed even though Bush had manifestly grown impatient with the economic isolation he himself had so masterfully engineered, for the economic isolation would be more effective against a nation that had to maintain itself on a war prepared footing.

But mostly I felt betrayed by my own analysis of the situation. I really didn't think he was going to do it. I still don't know why he did it. Had I believed it, I would have spoken sooner. The time to speak against war is when there is peace, and in that I failed and here apologize. But the time to accept war as inevitable and to be afraid to speak the truth is never, and on that point I do not flinch.

Why did he do it? Some say it was to get our minds off the economic crisis. That crisis is real enough. If you subtract the national debt from the gross domestic product each year you will probably find that the much vaunted ten years of steady economic growth we have just had is in tact economic decline. (Check the numbers. If we are wrong, let us know.) Let me make that simpler. Imagine the country is a household. The gross domestic product is what people earn. The debt is what they have spent over and beyond what they have earned

Now there is American money invested abroad. Some of that in turn earns money. That in part at least balances out our trade deficit with the rest of the world. But there is not enough to balance the national debt.

Make it simpler. You earn a hundred dollars a week. You spend one hundred one dollars a week. Over ten years what you spend rises to one hundred thirty dollars a week, but you still earn no more than the one hundred. THAT is our problem.

But it is not Mr. Bush's problem. He suggests, he hoots, he shouts, he does deals. But in the end the congress gives him a budget, and he must sign it. The war will make the budget worse. It will get the budget off the front pages, but it will not make the debt go away. It will still be an embarrassment to everyone who has been associated with it.

Why did he do it? To get our minds off the Savings and Loans problem? I understand Bush's own son is tied up in one of those failed Savings and Loans. If so, the war will not make that go away. such things are investigated by a bureaucracy. Whatever else you say about a bureaucracy, you can be sure that it never sleeps, never loses interest, never lets the big picture draw its attention. If there is a problem, the bureaucracy will root it out, war or no war

Besides, we don't think the man did that. Been wrong before. But there is no invitation to start a war to cover up such a problem. It just wouldn't work.

Why did he do it? To prove he is not really a wimp? Give me a break. The man is the most powerful human being that ever lived. No one could be that insecure about his manhood and wield that kind of power. Things would have shown up long ago that proved his judgement to be worthless.

Why did he do it? Perhaps it was to stimulate the economy. There are those even now who think that war stimulates a economy. This one will not.

Before World War II, there was about thirty percent unemployment among men. Women hardly worked. of the available work force, sixty five percent of them did not earn money outside the home. Right now as many women work as men, and unemployment is less than six percent. In other words, relatively speaking₁ there were eleven times as many available to work then as now.

But that is not the whole story. Those sixty five percent were by and large literate, drug free, from stable homes, spoke a common language, felt part of the national community and lived in a society that had a very Spartan social safety net. If you could not find work you would probably not live well. compare those people with our present six percent and you will see a difference, not all of which consists of a much more generous safety net now in existence.

The economy could grow back then by putting more people to work. It can grow now only by making people more productive. That means either investment in tools or investment in training. A war is not going to provide either. The effect of war will probably be devastating on our economy.

Besides, it makes one gag to write it, but Mr. Bush got the congress to give its blessing to his war. He may have given away the whole farm doing deals, but he got their blessing. It was sure a lot easier than getting them to give him the budget he wanted, wasn't it?

This war is not personal with Mr. Bush.

2) It might be to protect Israel.

When you are looking for the cause of an event, always remember to think who profits from that event. In war, the one who profits is generally the one who manages not to get involved.

In this case Israel is avoiding getting involved, with the help of a lot of urging, help and outright cash from ~r. Bush. Israel's condition looks enviable. Her loses, terrible as they are, are fewer than Florida traffic deaths over any similar period of time. She can sit, uncomfortable and in danger to be sure, but hardly devastated, while an enormous army openly hostile to her is blasted to smithereens.

She even has the luxury of looking good to the world for her restraint for not going instantly for revenge. She will seek her revenge in due course, she seems to say, when Iraq has been rendered helpless. Besides, now is not a convenient time for Israel to put planes over Iraq. The United states would have to open safe corridors or Israeli planes would be mistaken for the long sought Iraqi air arm and shot down.

Israel is defended by American patriot missiles, which are not perfect, but have been very good and will probably get better as experience builds. With American troops on her soil, American money in her pocket and American praise in her ears, Israel watches an enemy be destroyed.

But it is not a winning situation. For it is not the war that Israel needs most to win but the peace. Quite simply, she has more enemies in that part of the world than does anybody else. The conquest of Kuwait was no tactical threat to her, nor was it a strategic threat once the embargo on Iraq was imposed. But the turmoil that could follow the war could destroy her.

There is a greater threat than that.

In the United States, it seems that the single group most wholeheartedly in favor of this war is Southern White Males. Well we Southern White Males do have a few things you should know about. For one thing, we don't much like liars. For another thing, we tend to be Bible Belt and take the Bible seriously.

If you do some casual reading of the Bible, you will notice a lot of prophesies and histories. And you will notice conspicuously that God is on the side of Israel. That predisposes the Southern White Nale to side with Israel. There is, however unimportant, an impression among such that we are even now fighting for Israel.

Well you ought to know (because we have said it before) but most Southern White Males don't realize that THE ISRAEL IN THE BIBLE AND MODERN ISRAEL ARE NOT THE SAME COUNTRY. Historically and archaeologically, there was a country called Israel which has vanished without a trace and there was an adjacent country called Judea, the people of which became the Jews and established the modern country named after Judea's next door neighbor. The Bible describes how Israel and Judea had a common source. But the Bible too makes a clear distinction.

If Southern White Males fight a long and bitter war for Israel and find out it is the WRONG ISRAEL, they could get SOME KIND OF MAD. The threat is that just when Israel is in her greatest need, the Southern White Male decides he has been tricked and does not come to her aid. The world would then be faced by a nuclear power (as Israel is and Iraq is not) with her back against the wall.

No amount of foreign aid or adulation in the papers or batteries of Patriot missiles could make up for the dangers inherent in that situation.

This war does not benefit Israel.

3) It might lie with the American people.

It may simply be that the United States needs to fight a war every twenty years.

That has gone on this whole century. World War I was around the nineteen tens. World War II rolled about the thirties - came actually in the forties. The Korean war came in the fifties. Vietnam war dominated the sixties and into the seventies. This war comes in the nineteen nineties.

There is no rational reason for us to be in it, either from the point of view of the president, the legislature or the American people. Then consider the risks.

First you have a half million of your bright young people in an environment that might kindly be called lunar. If the organization of the military were to crack and the enemy were to prevail, the climate and culture there might assure there were no American survivors. A single air burst of a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world might, just might, deliver enough of an electromagnetic shock to paralyze our computers and open that crack.

Second you have one billion, count them one billion, Muslims who look to Saudi Arabia as the home of Mecca, their holy city. If we are perceived as having desecrated their land, our enemies will outnumber us four to one.

Third, you have the pilgrimage to Mecca that comes some tine this year. If an excitable group of pilgrims decides that the ruling family of Saudi is corrupt, there might be a revolution. Since Saudi, like the United States, has an enormous population of alien nationalities, they are already unstable. A religious revolution could close the oil fields to our use for a lifetime.

Fourth, in drawing this huge army to Arabia, we have all but dismantled NATO, our old alliance in Europe. The Soviet Union has already shown signs of wanting the Baltics back. If they get them back, they may decide they want Poland and Germany as well and that we are too preoccupied with Iraq to care.

Fifth, this Than Saddam has consistently failed to fall in with our plans. His air force was supposed to be knocked out by the south Carolina National Guard in six hours. Two weeks later, the south Carolina National Guard is still ready to fight, but Saddam won't come out and play.

Sixth, the oil spilling into the Persian Gulf may well kill the Gulf biologically. It may foul our water supply there. Or it may, incredible as it sounds, get big enough to catch the whole Gulf afire.

Suppose the oil were to build to the point it would burn, as it will at some concentration. Then suppose Iraq were to ignite it in a ring, say two hundred miles across. The rising hot air would draw air from a distance to fan the flames. Air could not come from inside the ring for long before an intense low pressure area developed there, increasing that rate at which the oil evaporated. As distant air came in, rotating with the rotation of the earth, the coriolis effect would make it spin at speeds of up to hurricane force. No ship within the ring could survive. Where this cyclone of fire drifted ashore, temperatures would be at blast furnace levels and the wind force enough to lift heavy machinery. If it drifted over our troops, the effect would be extreme

Seventh, war is always unpredictable. In this case Saddam Hussein seems intent on making it more so.

Of course he cannot win. Iraq is only fifteen million people. With our greater sophistication, we effectively out number them a hundred to one. But what we risk is what we send there, and so far that is a half million Americans and our allies.

We do not want to see Americans hurt. We do not want to see American allies hurt. We do not want to see Iraqi civilians hurt, and in all common decency, we do not want to see Iraqi soldiers hurt either- After all, they didn't have any more say in whether this war got started than we did.

In a war of a million fighters, somebody will get hurt.

Think for a minute, just for a minute, whether the present war would have happened had Russia still been a credible threat to the United States. Probably not. Somebody would have played off something against somebody else, and the whole thing would have turned into a chronic, boring, bloodless, expensive, wonderful stalemate. But the Soviet Union is gone as a power so far from her own shores. The war goes along on a strictly American timetable.

Twenty years have passed. It is time for another war.

If you must look for a cause, look for what characterizes America the most. That is immigration. We have given up a settled culture for one that changes at random. Thus the twenty year cycle is not the characteristic of any one race or group. The cycle is inherent in the human. Tt is the length of a generation. Every generation must have its war unless strong and compelling traditions stop it.

If history is a guide, this war will be followed by an onslaught of Arab immigration. It has always happened before. It will set the cycle spinning anew.

We can see the cycle turning, as even the most casual observer may. We see no cause. Immigration may be part of it, but if so it is because immigration unmasks inherent behavior.

Captain Ahab hated cod. cod would not fight Ahab but only manifested Himself in reality, in such things as the white whale. Reality, the white whale, was not God but was Godts mask. So Ahab, unable to strike God directly struck God by striking the mask. He struck through the mask.

The twenty year cycle is not the war. The twenty year cycle may only be the mask. But like Ahab, we may strike through the mask.

Many years ago, during the last war, I heard a doctor lecture. In ancient Hippocratic tradition he began with the story of a patient. I think he made the story up, but no matter. The patient came to the hospital with chest pain. An EKO showed the patient was having a heart attack. He was treated with morphine, and the pain went away. Later he was found to be short of breath. A chest x-ray showed he had pulmonary edema. He was treated with diuretics and the pulmonary edema went away. Later he was found to have low blood pressure. A catheter pressure reading revealed he was having cardiogenic shock. He was treated with pressor agents, and the blood pressure came back up. (This was before the days when cardiac catheterization and emergency coronary surgery were available.)

Then, as the story went, the patient was found dead in bed. It was assumed that the patient had died of an electrical event, an arrhythmia. "This," the old doctor said, "Used to be considered an appropriate way to die. His pain, his complications were all treated successfully. But it was assumed that there was nothing that could be done for the electrical event. But that is not true. It would, in theory, be possible to put a person with a heart attack on a monitor and have it watched, and to treat that electrical event the instant it occurred. The outcome might be much better than the outcome of the other complications."

At the time, there was no coronary care unit in the world. They are now routine treatment.

But his point was that if you know the timing, if you know when something is going to happen, then you ought to be there waiting for it when it does.

It may be that the driving force of wars is territory. It is hard for people to give up territory. Lincoln could not give up the South. England could not give up the sudetanlands. Argentina could not give up the Falkiands. Hussein could not give up the Kurdish lands to the Kurds nor the Shat al Arab water shed to Iran. Russia cannot give up the Baltics. We cannot give up Kuwait.

But land is always being kicked around. Wars, our wars, show up on schedule. We must strike through the mask. We must strike at the schedule itself.

What is a strenuous activity with no purpose engaged in by organized groups of people according to set rules according to a time table? It is a sport.

This kind of war that turns up at periodic intervals for no reason is then a sport. We want to make an end of the schedule. There must be no more such gaines.

How? Well for a first step, we need to recognize that there is no need for this war. It helps nobody. And we need to stop it.

We need to pull back. Keep the economic sanctions in place so that Saddam Hussein never profits from his adventure. Keep a military presence in Saudi so Hussein can move no further south. Consider that our tens of thousands of air strikes have taken their toll on Iraqi strength. Then stop fighting. Just stop.

Since no problems are solved by this war, no problems will be caused by abandoning it. We can sit it out.

The trouble will be the next war. what is needed is some institution committed to peace. So far, the only effective peace movement has been churches. Our considered position is that churches have no place in politics. We are no more ready to abandon a war because a church told us to than to prosecute one because a church told us to. But we certainly agree with what they say.

But there is need for an institution whose sole purpose is peace, an institution that can survive the decades that roll past, as wild Surmise can not and anyway failed to act in time. There should be an institution that has as the next item on its agenda, once this engagement has broken off, to start working on preventing the next war. The war of 2010. But first this one needs to stop.

Then we can get on with the more important business of loving each other, our planet and our differences

Editor's note:

WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative inatter.

We should like to take this occasion to welcome a number of readers who heard about us through the UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN.

We got real serious last year about retesting the work of Fisseau, an obscure French scientist of the last century, who produced the part of Einstein's theory of relativity that seems so strange. After some months and more money than even old Moneybags is willing to talk about, our total progress consisted of finding that the name is spelled Fizeau.

Among those who helped get this issue out was M's mother, who did some proof reading, providing a bit of the acid bath treatment. When an errant "k" in one article produced the sentence, "Watching the starks was of great interest in Sumer," she noted, "I'm sure it was."

Unexpected events have caused us to move this issue up and to change the lead article. What follows immediately was to have been the lead. You may want to put off reading it and give yourself a break.

Copyright February, 1991, WILD SURMISE

SCOTCH IRELAND AND THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY

Grandfather kept his stereoptican near his tidy old desk in his wonderful house on Dosier street steeped in the echoes of the ages. Grandfather himself had the white hair, the regal bearing, the tender heart, the incandescent latent temper, the modesty, poise and nobility of Robert E. Lee. In the utter safety and tranquility of that home a child could lose himself in the contemplation of Beethoven sonatas on the 78 rpm record player, of books and musical instruments, of a small white wax rabbit that smelled of wintergreen, or of pictures.

He kept the stereoptican in a cardboard carton along with a stack of old photographs that were mounted in pairs on cardboard. When a card was placed in the holder, the scene could be inspected in three dimensions. One day I went running to my father.

"What's this? It says Giant's Causeway."

"It's a natural rock formation.

"Where is it?"

"It's in Northern Ireland."

"What is it made of?"

"Basalt."

"Did Giants make it?"

"No."

"What did?"

"It was a lava flow."

"Why did it harden that way?"

"That's just the way it did."

I returned to looking at it, luminous in the old large format black and white picture, full of depth in the stereoscope. My mind remained full of question, but I could think of nothing else to ask.

Great Britain, and to an even greater extent Ireland, is surrounded by high rock cliffs, against which the ocean expends its energy harmlessly. Characteristically, although of course not invariably, a gentle rolling fertile land rises abruptly into beetling stone ramparts turned against the sea, as if deliberately to protect the gentle fields and 'neadows behind.

I suppose from time immemorial, people have drawn inspiration from such scenes. People have fancied themselves as that rugged headland, proof against the winter storm, sheltering some beloved family or idea. Perhaps over the eons more people have stood up for what they believed than would have, had the coastlines of the world all been gentle, rich tidewater deltas, fertile, malarial, opulent but treacherous.

I do not know.

But there never was another cliff facing the sea like Giant's Causeway. For when the lava flow cooled it shrank. And as it shrank it cracked. And as it cracked it broke into a hexagonal pattern. And those hexagonal cracks propagated down into the substance of the rock and cut in into tall narrow columns of stone many yards high.

The hexagonal pattern is not strict. Some are irregular, some columns have different numbers of sides. But the overall image that hits the eye, even to this day, is of a geometrically regular array of columns, close packed like a honeycomb, all marching down into the sea.

It is almost like a crystal, but it is not really crystal. It is more like the cracks you may see in dried mud. But while the mud may break into polygons a couple inches across but less than an inch deep, the basalt has broken into polygons a foot or two across and yards deep. And dried mud on the surface of the earth does not last for the thousands of years that the basalt has lasted.

I do not think it is indestructible. Looking at it now and comparing my memory of the photograph, I think there has been visible deterioration even in the last few decades. Thousands of years ago, it would have been even more striking, the angles sharper, the straight lines longer, the surfaces flatter. But it is still most impressive. There is not another like it.

For a million years, more or less, depending on your authority, anatomically modern humans did little more than run around and thump mammoths over the head and draw their pictures on cave walls.

Those cave paintings are still to be seen, although now closed to the public, since the circulation of fresh air has been seen to destroy then. But eventhe most casual observer of a few photographs of the paintings must adnit that they represent art of a very sophisticated sort. whoever did those paintings loved those animals, held them close to the artist's very soul, longed to capture them, honor them, record them. Spent a lifetime developing the skills and techniques to celebrate them in their power, their beauty and their mystery.

People have squabbled and will squabble for years over the meaning, the purpose and the techniques involved. Will puzzle over the social context and why some paintings seem to be in places where the acoustics are just so. But about the care, the devotion to the art~ here there can be no debate. The artist loved the model.

Love is the perception in another of what one understands as the best in oneself. The artist shared with those beasts, felt as part of the same world, even though humans would eventually hunt down and kill the last of those mammoths, destroying their very world, their very way of life.

Before that day came₁ people had already entered what is now Britain. The English Channel, the French Sleeve, had already opened separating Great Britain from the continent, separating one undistinguished group of hunters from other undistinguished groups of hunters. No permanent settlement had been made in Ireland, where the cold brine waves already crashed and seethed among the towering columns of Giant's Causeway.

They did some other things, those ancients. They made some little stone carvings of fat women. And there is one remarkable small stone carving from that time called the "Dancing Venus." It is a thin young woman with right foot pointed down and the left foot against the right knee. One hand is on the hip and the other hand on her head. And it looks for all the world like she is dancing wearing silk pyjamas. Couldn't be, of course.

So it was not just hunting and cave paintings.

When the last of the great game herds was destroyed, people in Europe turned to agriculture. They say agriculture came out of the East, somewhere around Asia Minor or Eastern Europe. They say that in the ancient city of Jericho, the one mentioned in the Bible as destroyed by Joshua, there is a brick tower ten thousand years old. That makes Jericho the oldest city of all. And it means that brick architecture and agriculture effective enough to warrant building a tower must go back at least that far.

Ten thousand years is not a long time compared with the length of time people hunted the big game animals. Tt is easy to say, "Tsk, tsk. Those primitive hunters. In a mere million years they destroyed their own economic base and drove the herds they depended on to extinction." Well our own economic base is petroleum, and if we do not drive it to extinction in the next hundred years, we will have defied most predictions.

Ten thousand years ago, driven by necessity, people developed agriculture. For the next four thousand years nothing much happened except slow expansion as populations grew to the size that the fertility of the soil could support and then people started moving on. Agriculture arrived in Britain and grew there, too.

Then about six thousand years ago, little boats began to ply the waters between the Scottish Lowlands and Northern Ireland. It isn't far. Fourteen miles? We have lakes in Florida as big. It wouldn't have been the first boat. Maybe not the second. But within a few days of the first landing, they would have set out to explore the coast. And there one summer day, a little craft of leather drawn over a stick frame rounded the headline and landed at Giant's Causeway.

Imagine the sensation. You see, these people had never seen a straight line before.

will be an edge as long as your finger. Open a skull and you will

find the straight sinus, again about as long as a finger. Indeed,

a bowstring is straight and as long as your arm, but a little

pressure from the hand and that string will bend.

In every case, the straight line is a triviality compared to life. What is your crystal against a mammoth, your bowstring against a tree? It was life, it was living forms that represented order on the vast scale.

There are some ideas that are so deeply ingrained that it is hard to imagine an alternative. One culture will treat women with a degree of respect so deep and sincere that they are incredulous that another culture regards women as inferiors. Each culture will think of the other that it can't be serious. One culture will regard authority with an innate respect, so that each individual looks around eagerly for an authority to obey; if that person finds himself the authority, he really believes that it is a big deal. Another culture will regard an authority as a burden to be born only so long as it is clearly useful.

In those early times, people thought that the world was alive. The mammoth was alive. The sky was alive. The sea was alive. The crops were alive. The stones were alive. There was simply no alternative. So of course an abstraction was alive too. The storm is alive. The storm is a representative of the abstraction Storm. The abstraction is alive. So there is a god of storms. So there is a god of agriculture and one of war.

And there, in all its wet, primal, stark innocence lay the Causeway. Vast. Bigger than the mammoth. Bigger than a whale. Bigger than a tree. Dwarfing any living thing. flegular, geometrical, parallel lines marching on and on, each parallel with the next and with the next. The eye instantly saw that it could go on forever, as far as the mind could grasp. There was but one word for it.

Blasphemy.

Here was something that was not alive, yet was not trivial. Here was abstraction that had no personality. Here was cold, hard fact. This was no god. But this was real.

The world at that moment could then be divided into two groups. The nations and the Scotch Irish. You see there has never been a Scotchireland, but there have been scotch Irish. By now the reason should be obvious. A There six thousand years ago, the humans of the world had already divided themselves into nations. Since the nations were different, different languages, customs, appearances, obviously the nations were abstractions. Abstractions, until the discovery of the Causeway, were alive.

So every nation chose some living thing to represent itself. That thing might be an animal, a god or a king. Often the distinction between god and king got mixed up. Indeed, kings may act like animals. But the nation had a human, or at least a living face with which it identified.

But now there was this group of people, hitherto just any old bunch from the Lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland, who bad seen that not every abstraction is alive. They could not be a nation in the ordinary sense of the term. They could not accept a king or bow before an idol. They knew better. And for that reason, they have not been accepted by those who did bow and have thus been the object of endless attempts at extermination.

Such troubles were far from the minds of those first adventurers. For the sources of such troubles were far away and the causes unimagined. The business at hand was td understand this thing, this Causeway. Of course it was too much at first. There were so many things about it. Straight lines. Parallel lines. Polygons, Prisms. Equal areas. Equal volumes. Hexagonal close packing. It is also quite pleasant to walk around on it. And it has lots of places to sit.

There is evidence that they were thinking about such things, for within two hundred years they were setting stones on end. Two hundred years seems like a long time, but against the long history of human existence, even against the thousands of years of agriculture, two centuries is but a watch in the night when it is gone. Those vertical stones, many still standing, serve no obvious purpose. They are not idols in the sense of representing any living thing. They serve no obvious function in keeping people fed and warm. They are something to think about. Perhaps they always were meant to be something to think about

Things continued to happen fast. within two more centuries, the structure at Newgrange had been completed. Newgrange (the name is modern), built in the valley of the Boyne north of Dublin, was an ambitious project, more ambitious than the walls of Jericho, far more ambitious than anything that had been built before.

When it was new, the structure was shaped like a drum or a hatbox, about eighty yards across and fifteen high. A narrow, slowly rising, stone lined passageway entered it from the east penetrating some sixty feet to a cruciform chamber. Above the chamber was a high vault of stone, six sided at the base and rising to a point. The vault was made of stones set without mortar or cement of any sort. The stones were tilted so that water percolating down through the structure was deflected outward. The roof of the chamber would not leak for thousands of years.

The front of this structure, this building, was covered with a layer of quartz. Granite stones were set in the quartz in some pattern no longer recoverable. Around the bottom of the structure was a curb of boulders. Many of the stones used in the construction were carved in intricate designs

The monument has been carefully excavated and restored so far as possible to its original condition. While the excavation was going on, the local people came by and mentioned that according to tradition at a certain time of the year the sun was supposed to shine all the way to the back of the cruciform chamber deep inside the mound.

The story did not seem plausible, because excavation had indicated that the structure had been sealed by the original builders and the opening was not discovered until the seventeen hundreds. By that time, Newgrange was only a fairy knoll, a quaint little mound evidently artificial and evidently very old, but without any opening that could have admitted light for any distance. Indeed, it was not until the recent excavation that an opening now dubbed the "roof box" was discovered right above the ancient door.

In other words, for the story to have been true, it would have to be an oral tradition going all the way back to the original builders almost six thousand years before. Everyone knows that oral traditions are to be treated with respect. But six thousand years? Not possible

Still, it seemed easy enough to check. A quick glance at a compass was enough to show that if light did, indeed, penetrate deep into the structure, it would have to be around sunrise in the winter. So somebody got up before first light one cold December day and squeezed through the tunnel to the chamber and waited.

Just at dawn, a blindingly bright pencil of sunlight came through the roof box, slanted between two of the great stones that formed the roof of the tunnel and then reached all the way to the inmost recess of the ink dark cruciform chamber and splashed in brilliant refulgence upon the back wall.

Three hundred generations of grandmothers had been right.

Every year, for two weeks around the winter solstice, when the eastern sky is clear the spectacular light show occurs.

Compare Newgrange with Giant's Causeway. One is natural, the other not. But given the quartz facing on the monument together with the light effect, the whole structure is like a very precisely cut enormous crystal. Newgrange is not a copy of the Causeway. But it is as if somebody saw the Causeway and had the idea of this great edifice of cut jewel.

Newgrange did not stand in its original condition long. The builders who placed it there may have lived to see the retaining walls collapse, the mound slump, the openings covered with earth.

There were a few human bones found in the structure when it was first opened, but not many. There were satellite tombs around the major monument that had the bones of very many people. Perhaps the bones were only kept in the monument for a short time and then were later transferred to the tombs. Perhaps the bones were of people who had entered the place alive but were trapped by some catastrophe like the collapse of the front wall.

Perhaps the people buried there were the kings and leaders, but that does not seem likely. Had they gone to such trouble to make an imposing tomb, they would have also expected to be buried with rich grave goods. None were found. Besides, there is no other evidence in that culture of the kind of hierarchy that such a burial would imply.

Two hundred years after Newgrange was built and fell, they were building Stonehenge. Stonehenge is in England on Salisbury plain. It is a ring, the most imposing part being great sandstone pillars topped with lintels of the same stone.

Stonehenge recalls Newgrange in its size, general round shape and in the fact that Stonehenge, too, is aligned with the sun. Stonehenge represents a great advance over Newgrange: the stones of Newgrange are decorated but otherwise are pretty much natural rocks and boulders selected and brought in from the fields, but the stones of Stonehenge are dressed rock, quarried out, cut to size and cut to fit.

Newgrange, the bulk of it, was a pile of smooth river rocks held together by layers of sod and faced with a layer of stone. When the sod let go, the whole thing gave way. No danger of that at Stonehenge. They had learned a lesson.

Not only does Stonehenge go forward technically, being a more secure structure, it also reaches back to Giant's Causeway. The vertical stones of Stonehenge recall the vertical columns of basalt.

Within two hundred years of Stonehenge, megalithic structures of great stones were built all the way across Europe, and the great pyramids of Egypt were being started.

So things moved very fast. Two centuries from Giants Causeway to the vertical stones of Ireland. Two centuries to Newgrange. Two centuries to Stonehenge. And then two centuries to the pyramids. That's not bad time for a humanity that had taken four thousand years from the advent of agriculture just to stand its first stone on end.

There are obvious parallels between the pyramids and the monuments that had gone before. Of course there had been tombs in Egypt before the the pyramids, low flat topped things called inastabas. Then they had taken to stacking mastabas one atop then other to make a step pyramid.

The first real pyramid was a radical departure. Tt was a steep sided aggressive thing, spearing upward for all the world like a giant polished version of the standing stones of Ireland. It was like Newgrange in at least one important respect. It promptly fell over.

Then they got serious and built the squat, durable classical pyramids we all know so well.

Consider the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Ignore for the moinent the outer shape. There is a central chamber, much like the central chamber at Newgrange. There is a tunnel to the chamber. And there is a separate opening for light to enter the chamber, this time not the winter sun but a northern star. The chamber is supported and protected by the great mass of the monument. As at Newgrange, this was originally covered with an outer decorative layer of white stone.

But while the supporting structure of Newgrange was a pile of round river rock held in place by layers of turf, the supporting structure of the pyramid was a carefully placed stack of great stones that had been quarried, cut to size and dressed. The builders were using techniques developed for Stonehenge.

As if to drive home the connection, the ancient Egyptians also put up great post and lintel temples like Xarnac, modeled roughly on the Stonehenge tradition, again recalling the natural colonnades at Giant's Causeway. And they put up obelisks that look again like giant replicas of the first standing stone put up so soon after the discovery of Giant's Causeway.

At the same time in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, the great civilization of Sumer began to stir. Writing, medicine, law, government,. Many modern things can be traced to Sumer. But one thing for sure antedates it. Astronomy. watching the stars was of great interest to Surner. So while Egypt got the architecture, Sumer got the science.

They say that the architect of the great pyramid was executed so that no one would ever build another like it. For whatever reason, after this initial burst of innovation, experiment and creativity, both Egypt and Surner stayed for a long time at about the same level of development.

It had been the greatest southern and western expansion Scotchireland would ever have. something had happened back home, too. For in this period, the great buildings of Newgrange and Dowth, of Stonehenge and Avebury were begun. Such ambition would not be renewed for a long time.

But while there are technical similarities between ancient Egypt and the older culture, there were enormous differences in style.

For one thing there is the matter of pictures.

The constructions of the ancient Egyptians were rich with pictures. Compared with the rugged earnestness of the cave paintings, the Egyptian pictures are a little stiff, a little stylized. But they are beautiful, colorful, detailed, explicit, varied renditions of the world physical and the world spiritual.

Newqrange was decorated too. But the decorations at Newgrange are flat, geometrical. They are strikingly similar to the knitted decorations on an Aran sweater. There is nothing in them that suggests a human or animal. No hint of a living thing. The Egyptian decorations teem with life. They are naturalistic. They celebrate nature and people and daily experience.

The difference could hardly be due to a lack of skill on the part of the Newqrange artists. Good naturalistic art was already many millenia old. The Newgrange artists shunned pictures of life.

Then there is the matter of hierarchy. There is no question that Egypt had a strong central governinent centering around the pharaoh. The great pyramid appears to have been the pharaoh's tomb. In contrast, there is no evidence at all for a hierarchy among the Newgrange builders. To be sure, a few bones were found in the monument and many were found nearby. But there is no reason, except by analogy with Egypt, to regard those buried inside as kings.

The Newgrange structure, whatever else it is, is an observatory. Those inside it, then, were observers. Whether they were expected to do their observing alive or dead is not clear. As mentioned, they may have been trapped by accident. But there is no compelling reason to assume that kings existed in that time and place, or any system of government capable or ruling by force.

Then there is the matter of warfare. The Egyptians celebrated their feats of war, their armies, their chariots. There is no evidence of anything like warfare in all the British Isles at the time of Newgrange.

Then there are the gods, part animal and part human. They are strongly featured in Egyptian art. There is no hint of these lesser deities in Britain at the time.

So there were two worlds that collided in Egypt and Sumer. The one was ancient, naturalistic, hierarchical, military, polytheistic. The other was new, rational, abstract, peaceful, cooperative, technical.

One would think that this cold northern mind was not a passionate one. Subsequent events suggest otherwise.

Moses.

There is no archaeological trace of him. There is only the biblical record. But what a record it is. Born of foreigners in Egypt, victim of what on the surface of it looks like an infanticide attempt, raised in the royal household as if crown prince of the land, murderer, renegade. One day he met a burninq bush.

The important thing was not what it looked like. The important thing was that it impelled him to action. And it said, after a brief conversation, I AM THAT I AM.

Prompted by a bush that called itself "I AM," Moses went back to the land where he was wanted for murder and tore it apart with the strength of his conviction.

"I am" · .. what? I am myself, T suppose. I am real. I am what

is. I am simple objective truth. I am what is left when you get rid of all the lies.

Thus spoke God, Moses reports. And half of all the earth believe it to this day. This was a remarkable insight to come out of Egypt. Egypt where a thing was anything but what it seemed. Egypt where a desert was the most productive land ever. Egypt where makeup was everywhere. Egypt where the dead were housed and fed. Egypt where wonderful likenesses of people were made out of simple paint. Egypt where cats and men were worshipped as immortal gods. Where one god was a man with the head of a hawk and another god the sun with a lot of hands sticking out. Get rid of all the imitations, and what would be left?

Noses led his band out of Egypt. One day they stopped by a mountain and Moses went up to chat with cod again. When he returned, Moses had the law, as dictated by his God, but as understood by himself. There were ten rules.

The first says: Thou shalt have no other gods before ine! No surprise there. Pharaoh might have said as much. Jealous of competition. Notice it does not say, "There are no other gods." Moses would not have been prepared for that.

Number three: Do not take the name of God in vain! Well, yes, the Pharaoh might have said something like that. Four: Keep the Sabbath! Well now that is really quite odd. We do, of course. At least he goes on to elaborate on it a little.

Five: Honor thy parents Six through ten: Don't kill, commit adultery, stealf bear false witness or covet! Good rules, no question. Nothing difficult to understand there.

But the second commandment, really a continuation of the first: THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME. THOU SHALT NOT MAKE UNTO THEE ANY GRAVEN IMAGE, OR ANY LIKENESS OF ANY THING THAT IS IN THE HEAVEN ABOVE, OR THAT IS IN THE EARTH BENEATH, OR THAT IS IN THE WATER UNDER THE EARTH; THOU SHALT NOT BOW DOWN THYSELF TO THEN, NOR SERVE THEM.

Aha. That is it. That is the key rule. Do not worship idols. Do not even make any likeness of any thing. How could he possibly have been prepared for that, coming from Egypt with its wealth of statues and pictures? How could he have given it such emphasis, so that the whole rest of the law seems like an afterthought?

The story is that while Moses was receiving the law, the people were busy making a golden calf to worship, that Moses tore up his first set of notes and what we have is a second version. But the story is also quite clear that the second version was just like the first

So it was until recently a mystery where Moses might have got his preparation for this great law. For believe what you will about Moses existing or not, you must still come to grips with the fact that the document exists and the document links a man from Egypt with its plethora of images with a command to make no images.

The answer to the mystery already lay beneath a grassy knoll, wet with dew and shrouded with mist. There are no images at Newgrange of anything that is in the sky above or on the earth beneath or in the water below.

somehow, along with the technology, that spirit got to Egypt, too, and survived, probably with the help of grandmothers. In other words while the dominant culture of Egypt received and used the architectural and astronomical skills from Newgrange, the dominant culture did not accept the Newgrange idea that pictures are forbidden. That idea, that pictures are forbidden, must have survived by oral tradition for centuries, just as did the knowledge of the light effect at Newgrange

About six centuries passed and a new voice was heard, this time in Persia. Zoroaster. He taught many things. Among those things were a strict monotheism, impatience with lies and the coming of a day of judgement when the dead would rise at the command of God. The teachings of Zoroaster were picked up by the Persian empire and spread throughout the vast Persian empire, that empire that was centuries old before the rise of Rome, lived to see Rome fall and never knew the day when Rome was as mighty.

The Persians conquered Babylon, and it was there that the Jews encountered and accepted a strict monotheism.

The Zoroastrians were astronomers. In that it in nothing else, one can trace their tradition back to Newgrange and to Giant's Causeway. Zoroastrian monotheism recalls the great commandment of Moses, traditionally counted as the first two commandments, "Make not images." And Zoroastrian dislike of untruths recalls the great vision of Moses, "I am what is~"

Zoroaster expected a cosmic event when cod's truth should be revealed. It was in the looking upward, in the expectation, the yearning for, the excitement in, the greeting-already-from-afar this great cosmic event that Zoroaster spoke something that was both new in all recorded history and yet linked him most strongly with that forgotten knoll in Ireland; Newgrange is an observatory, a place of waiting for light.

Around this time, the Greek civilization flourished. And the Creeks got into everything. They hauled in art and architecture from Egypt. They fought the Persians. They dealt with the Minoans, a people much like those of Scotchireland in that they organized on a large scale but show no sign of having used coercion to hold their society together. And the Creeks traded with Britain, where the builders of Newqrange and Stonehenge, now deep into the gloaming of their day, were still putting a few touches on Avebury. Within three more centuries they would be overrun by that warrior race, the Celts.

The culture had lasted, basically uninterrupted, for three and a half thousand years. small surprize that the young vigorous Greek culture found the Britons and not the other way. But it would be a bit of a surprise if the creeks had not been impressed, has made no murmur of their contact.

Whether that murmur exists depends on a bit of geography. Imagine you are a navigator with a ship propelled by rowers and perhaps simple sails, not the best of such ships., but a pretty average one, suitable for typical commerce at the time of ancient Greece. Your five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, boldly to go where no Greek has gone before.

You will probably have a fairly easy time of it exploring the calm waters and light variable winds of the Mediterranean, for which your vessel was designed. But when you press of past the Gates of Hercules, Gibraltar on your right and the Atlas mountains on your left, the coast of Europe swings away sharply in one direction and the coast of Africa sweeps sharply the other. You must make a choice.

The obvious choice is to follow the coast of Africa. This keeps you in sight of land until you reach cape Bojador and pull away from shore to clear the reefs. Here you are caught by the ocean current that forever aye forever flows westward and away from the shore while the trade winds, powered by the heat of the tropics and the coriolis effect of the turning earth, carry you with the current

Technically it would not be impossible to get back. Once, just once before, it was done. One of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt decided to conquer Abyssinia, which he defined as all of Africa south of Egypt. So he sent a boat load of Phoenicians down the coast of the Red Sea with orders to sail all the way around Africa and come back to the Nile and tell him how big Abyssinia was so the Pharaoh could put together an army of the right size.

Africa is bigger than Trans-Ural Asia. The crew was many years on the trip. They would stop and plant grain to raise crops for food. When they got back to the Nile, the Pharaoh decided Abyssinia was too big.

Those Phoenicians came past Cape Bojador, but they had certain advantages. For one thing, on their long trip they had become very good at their work. For a second thing, they were used to handling nasty surprises. For a third, when they saw they were making no headway, they knew exactly what to do to fall back to their last camp, from which they could make another assault or, if nothing else worked, press on overland past the offending Cape and, as they had done so many times, build themselves another boat and start out again.

You might, with great dexterity, do the same thing and return alive. But it really doesn't do much to help you explore further, does it?

Your second choice might be to strike boldly out into the Atlantic. There you are faced with storms, again with wind and currents that take you westward, and with the prospect of trying to come back, upstream and upwind, and make landfall on an unlit, uncharted continent, perhaps arriving at night and working without any sort of chart or navigational aid.

In short, you have but one choice. You must follow the coast of Europe. So you leave the Gates of Hercules, follow that coast of the Iberian peninsula, then the margin of the Bay of Biscay, the coast of France, until you enter the French Sleeve. And there you find islands about the size of the Dakotas with lofty cliffs, some colored, some glaringly white.

That is the way to reach the lost Continent of Atlantis of creek legend, that land so advanced in science and politics, but which had fallen upon hard times. It is also a fair description of how to get to the British Isles.

Atlantis of legend was militarily aggressive and politically as repressive as Efrafa in the story Watershi~ Down. That does not ring true for a place as little interested in war as ancient Britain, but the geography is right, the science is right and Greek trade goods of the time are to be found in Britain along the English Channel.

In the making of images, the Greek spirit reached far far back. Perhaps not since the images of the mammoths, done of earth pigments blown through river reed, not since then was there such love evident of the artist for the model and the art. Indeed while the mammoth artist generally gave his best attention to animals and left his humans only crudely specified stick figures, the ancient Greek artist gave his best attention to the human form, defining and celebrating that form as never done before or since. It was still image making. And the Greeks too had their monsters, half human half animal.

The Greek temple, with its colonnade so reminiscent of Giant's Causeway, seems to have been adopted from Egypt, although the Greek style has clean lines perhaps a trifle more like the original than the Egyptian adaptation. But the real reflection of Giant's Causeway is not in Greek architecture so much as in Greek mathematics.

The Greeks, for the first time, developed the notions of straight lines and flat planes, of parallels and polygons, of equal lengths and equal volumes, the concepts that crowd upon the mind when the eye contemplates Giant's Causeway. And no other natural object suggests these things. Either the Greeks saw that causeway or they were told about abstractions that had been lifted from it.

The Greeks also came up with a new idea, so startling in its departure from the habits of the recorded ancient world as to boggle the mind. They came up with the notion of a democracy.

The idea is that the people tell the government what to do. That idea is so shocking that it is not in fact accepted widely today. We generally think that we elect a government and the government tells us what to do and an independent judiciary tells the government whether it is all right to tell.us that.

The test is the election. If the policy making officials are elected, then you have a democracy. If a supreme court that is not elected sets policy, then it is an oligarchy. Some times in this country, we have seen the limits of democracy tested.

Properly, it is the people who set policy.

The relationship between democracy and military adventurism is this: no two republics have ever fought a serious war, no free country has ever destroyed another free country, with only one single exception.

Peace and freedom. Two separate yet most intimate things. Thank the ancient Greeks. Thank Scotchireland, ancient Britain, where those ideas probably came from

The Greek democracy did not last long. Some say it did not have much popular support, that it was the toy of the rich and educated. At all events, Greece was overrun by Macedonia to the north. Then the armies of Alexander swept all the way to India, carrying Greek culture and science along, but forgetting democracy, the most precious, the most fragile flower of all.

Rome arose.

The early Roman republic owed nothing directly to Scotchireland. That culture was already in eclipse. The Romans knew of nothing to the north but warring Celtic tribes, hierarchical, polytheistic, ruthless, male dominated, a project for the military but no challenge to the soul. The Romans looked to Greece as a model for their republic. They also brought along the Greek colonnaded temple in token along with Greek art, medicine, philosophy and anything else that could be copied.

In the matter of democracy, the Romans were quite serious. Even in the last depraved writhings of their empire they still scorned the word "rex," "king," as a label for their autocratic ruler.

During the Roman heyday, a few Zoroastrians did a very strange thing. Politically, there were no stirrings. The Persian empire was older than Rome barring an interruption by Alexander, stronger than Rome, had in tact just had a rather successful war with Rome. But these men decided that the time had come. They left the comfortable precincts of Babylon, ventured to the turbulent Roman colony of Judea, found a stable where a young woman had just had a baby and hailed that baby as the Son of cod.

They must have been an impressive sight. The king of Judea, in an action that has been described as Eta bankrupt Mideastern policy" ordered mass infanticide. Imagine the impact on the little family itself.

The baby grew up to be a man, teaching a Zoroastrian expectation of a coming day of Cod, with the rising and judging of the dead, a day of cosmic change, marking the beginning of a new and just universal order.

Jesus, as we call him, did one more thing. He resolved the now ancient conflict between those who wanted an image of God and those who considered all images to be temptations to evil: Moses, Zoroaster and the forgotten builders to the north. The resolution was this, "If you must have one, take an authentically good human being and let that be your image."

The sources of the ideas in the teaching of Jesus are to be found among the writing of the Hebrews, the Persians and the Greeks, and however much each of these owes to the builders of Scotchireland, there is no direct connection between Jesus and the north. Maybe. There is one tiny little thing.

Mathew chapter 16 begins: The pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. 0 ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

So spoke the master. The trouble is that at the latitude of Judea, it doesn't work. Winds are variable. Storms may come from any direction. If anything, the trade winds bring the weather from the east. A red sky means that the air is clear in the direction of the sun but cloudy near where you are. In order for the meteorologic prediction to work, you must have prevailing westerlies.

Imagine the Pharisees and Sadducees putting their heads together and muttering, each waiting for one of the others to say, "I don't know what he's talking about, do you?"

But at Giant's Causeway, where the storms come harrowing in from the North Atlantic, that little rule, "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight" might be a life saver.

The teaching of this Jesus spread fast, faster than the teachings of Zoroaster, taster than the spread of monolithic architecture across Europe. Very soon it was known in Rome.

Meanwhile the Romans, their cumbersome democracy discarded, were having a fine time of it, turning their enemies to allies, their allies to colonies, their colonies to slaves and throwing slaves into the arena to fight as gladiators.

The gladiatorial games were an unfortunate thing. They were cruel and pointless. They were directly, conspicuously, in the tradition of the great cave paintings. Man grapples with beast. Man is the image of beast. strength and courage are celebrated. If you must have an image of nature take as your image a real man screaming, disemboweled by a lion. The same scene was recorded on those cave walls.

Notice that the subject is "man" not "human." This warlike image of the human is a male dominated one. If you have any doubt of that, recall that the astronomical syrrtbol for Mars, god of war, is a male symbol. The astronomical symbol for Venus, goddess of sex, is a female symbol. The assumption is that war is the business of Then and sex the business of women.

It is not true that war and hate are the same thing, any more than it is true that sex and love are the same. But war is certainly an invitation to hate as sex is strongly linked to love. At the extreme, one might say that Then are hate driven and women love driven; this would hardly be fair. Men love and women hate quite vigorously on occasion.

Nor should it be thought for a second that members of a warlike society have more physical courage then members of a less warlike group. while the group may be warlike, it may be because the individual members are docile, sheeplike. What more craven act could there be than to kill another person just because somebody told you to?

Of course if you thought in your heart it was the right thing to do, that might be different might be wrong but might be different. And if your community had decided it needed to be done, you might go along with that decision. That would be somewhat different from ~ust doing what you were told. But warlike people are not braver, nor are the men of a male dominated society more manly.

It has been said that the Scotch Irish are a warrior-ethic, male dominated people. Ignore that. It is just hate mail. Scotch Irish women, like Scotch Irish men have always been independent and autonomous of spirit. The book Albion's Seed, one of the better recent American history books, describes the scotch Irish as being male dominated. Yet the marriages described are between spirited people, the matriarch is the acknowledged ruler, teenage girls are allowed great license, the girl decides whom she wants as a husband and the group enforces it ... and all children are spoiled. By the book's own description, the Scotch Irish woman at no time brooks any impediment to her will.

And how did the Scotch Irish woman handle this personal freedom, how discharge this responsibility? For three centuries among the scotch Irish, unwed mothers and broken homes were virtually unknown phenomena, a record for which I know of no match from any other civilization.

As for warlike, the Scotch Irish in six thousand years have never conquered anybody. They have moved in where they were not wanted, indeed, but have never actually subdued and ruled another people. The unfortunate southern Blacks had been captured by warlike people like Anglo Saxons.

For another thing, remember their music. The songs of Northern Ireland, "Londonderry Ayre," "The Green Glens of Antrim," "The Mountains of Mourn" are hauntingly sweet and sentimental compared

to rollicking Irish tunes like "John peal" and "The Irish Washerwoman." Compare the brisk marching cadence of "Yankee Doodle" and its subject matter with the sweet yearning of "Dixie" when you sing it slowly. Warriors should be made of sterner stuff.

Do not divide the world between male dominated fear driven and nurturing love dominated.

It makes the point too strong. Monotheistic world: cool, rational, peaceful, democratic, scientifid, literate, kind, egalitarian, abstract, long attention span. Polytheistic word:

brutal, bloody, military, authoritarian, hierarchical, reveling in power, enjoying gore or any other shocking thing, ignorant, indifferent to pain, male dominated, image gazing, short attention span. The book versus the television.

There may be something to that. But there are many softening points. For one thing, most of the important differences between people are genetic, hereditary. There are different answers to the question₁"What is it to be human?" certainly it is not evil just to have different genes. The laws and rules for one group of people are probably not proper for another group.

Next, remember that most of the world, historically, has been polytheistic, image gazers. If you include all those who spend more time watching television than reading books, that is not about to change any time soon. Hard standard it would be, to write off most of the world as below average.

Next, remember there is another side to a naturalistic approach to the universe. Animals can be loved and cared for as well as unleashed on helpless people in an arena. Naturalistic people can be "people persons₁" very interested in others on a personal scale, not prone to be drawn from the cuddly things in life off to the cold abstractions of the mountain top, the cliff over the sea.

Finally, if we destroy ourselves in the next forty years, will it be because we spent too much time in front of the television slavering after the next shock, the next blood letting, or because we spent too much time in the laboratory developing the technology that would make it more deadly? And if you say that the real enemy, the real destroyer, is the rampant materialism that leads us to fight wars for oil and stand by while people make money laying waste the great forests of the earth, pollute the seas and destroy the cultural diversity of the land, where did that materialism come from? Does it go back to Newgrange or does it go back to the cave paintings? I do not know.

Rome devoured her neighbors, growing fatter and stronger as she went. Greece fell. Africa fell. Spain fell. Gaul fell. Central Europe fell except for a little clutch of Dutch. Britain fell. Then in the north of Britain Borne hit the pict.

A stone age people. The old ones. The Scotch Irish. Builders of those ancient monuments. Still alive four thousand years on; five centuries after the eclipse of their culture still there.

Rome bit them hard, went reeling back, built a wall not so much to protect against the Picts as the keep their own from deserting to the Picts. And then there were the scots, a solid Celtic warrior tribe, at peace with the Pict and ready to fight Rome any time, any place. The first thing said by a Scot (or else it was a Pict) was about the Romans, "They make a desert and they call it peace." These people in the Scottish lowlands had different ideas about peace than the imposition of an empire.

Stunned, shaken, as if blinded by light Rome fell back, turning ever inward. The old enthusiasm for power, for conquest, for the gladiatorial games was gone. More and more of the Romans turned to the new Christian religion. But peace, real peace, had not returned the the lowlands.

Five centuries after the time of Christ, Columba, son of an Ulster chieftain in Northern Ireland, embraced Christianity. He began to convert the picts. The spark he struck lit all Europe.

There were at the time of Columba, as there are now, standing stones in Ireland older than Newgrange. The stones had carvings and the stones were revered, but as would be discovered at Newqrange, there were no images, no likenesses. The carvings were symbols without being idols.

Legend has it that Columba carved crosses of the stones and told the people they might go on and revere these ancient things, only now as tokens of Christianity.

If the legend is true, then Columba was not only a great teacher but was a forger of consummate skill and mastery. The crosses he inserted among the ancient signs are of the same depth as the old markings. They show about the sarne degree of weathering. The edges are handled about the same. And generally the impression is that the cross has pride of place, standing more or less top and center, surrounded by lesser symbols. Those lesser symbols are of more than passing interest. Recall that the culture that raised those stones then spread to Mesopotamia, where the first recognized writing is found. We may, in fact, be looking at the oldest written record.

If the legend is not true, then the cross may date back to the time or the other carvings it resembles. This is something that, in theory at least, could be tested. Modern assay techniques can tell how old a carving is only approximately. But the most likely ages for those crosses are either over six thousand years or less than fifteen hundred years. And the other carvings are, apparently over six thousand years old. It really ought to be possible to tell whether the crosses are contemporary with the old symbols or are more recent.

The floor plan of the Newgrange monument is, of course, a cross, so there is a hint that the symbol is very old.

Some of those early monks built huts called beehive huts because of their general resemblance to old fashioned beehives. These huts were made of dry stone built into a chamber, the stones themselves sey at angles so that rainwater was deflected outwards. The huts were often built near old standing stones called "Ogham stones" Cpronounced Orne stones)

Reflect for a moment on the central chamber at Newgrange, which had been buried for thousands of years by this time. That chamber, too, was built of stones set the same way. In other words, although no such chamber can be found built between, say three thousand BC and five hundred AD, the technique, the knowledge how to build them still survived. And although Newqrange was only a hill, with no known chamber, both the Christian beehive huts and the Newgrange monument have standing stones nearby.

Along the edges of the Ogham stones are scratches which are now known to represent letters of an alphabet. This alphabet is understood to be contemporary with the earliest Christians. If the prehistoric Britons used an alphabet, it has not yet been discovered. But it might not be too much to hope that it might be some day. After all, the Irish do have a love of recording things that is just as impressive as their love of stories. It is said that there is a greater existing literature in Celtic than in Latin, even including medieval Latin.

So much for your notion of the literate Babylonians and flomans and your unlettered northern tribes. Even without a fraction of the power and resources of the ancient empires, even without a dry climate that tended to preserve every artifact, Celtic people simply wrote more things and kept more writing than flame. Most has never been translated, very little published in our modern imperial world.

As Christianity spread across Britain west to east, it met the Anglo Saxons marching east to west. Anglo Saxons, a Germanic tribe, had the same old warrior traditions, the same old tiresome pantheon of pagan gods, the same male dominance, the ferocity and love of violence that has expressed itself as history.

It is said that when pagan Anglo Saxon domination of Britain seemed assured, the picts and Celts rallied under a leader called Arthur and beat the Saxon to a standstill. There is evidence that the people under Arthur started a building that was to have the same cruciform plan as Newgrange.

After their initial repulse, the Anglo Saxons adopted Christianity, renewed their assault and won control, driving the old inhabitants west into Ireland and north into Scotland.

About this time, a most momentous life was lived. The prophet Mohammed came out of Arabia preaching a strict monotheism, preaching the Christ would return judgement day, and teaching total abhorrence of all idols and images. His followers today number about a billion. They may be the purest of the followers of Newgrange, Moses and even Christ. Why they are not called Christian is beyond, me, seeing that they believe in Christ and his teachings. Politics is a strange and powerful thing. I would not say I approve of everything Arabian, but I would call them Christian.

Five hundred more years, about a thousand years ago now, and three things happened pretty close together. For one thing, the Anglo Saxons were conquered by the Normans, who were Norse that had settled in northern France. Let us all recite in unison: fierce, warlike, male dominated, organized, ruthless, image making, hierarchical, pantheon of pagan gods. Actually, the Normans had already converted to Christianity, but if you want a clue as to how deep that change ran, consider that the days of the week are still named after Norse gods.

The second thing, started then and continuing for centuries, would be the building of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. These were great stone buildings with lots of stained glass. They were placed so that the alter was in the east, figuring that when Christ returned, he would come out of the east so they had better all be facing that way.

Compare the plan of the Gothic cathedral with that of Newgrange. Both were built to a heroic scale. Both had a cruciform floor plan. Both played tricks with light. In the Gothic cathedral, that light came though the stained glass windows; at Newgrange the light was admitted through the roof box, which was closed with blocks of quartz. Both were oriented with the sun. Now the door of the cathedral lay in the west, while the door at Newgrange was placed at the east. But how one got in was less important than what the light did. In the cathedral the light effect was transmitted light, while at Newgranqe it was reflected light, bouncing off the back wall.

The technical advance that the Gothic cathedral boasted above the Romans was the complete vault. The Romans at the Pantheon had made a very beautiful vault, but they had not managed to close the top; they left a big round hole in the roof. The Gothic cathedral had a central vault, a nave, that was closed. But they could do this only by piling on flying buttresses to stabilize the vault. At Newgrange, the mass of the mound itself serves the purpose of the flying buttress.

It may be objected that while the Newgrange structure is mostly opaque that the Gothic cathedrals were mostly glass. But remember, the initial Newgrange structure had a quartz facing. If they could, they might have admitted light in equal splendor. As it was, they certainly evoked the notion of a crystal city: "And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire, the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx: the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.' That is from Revelation. The designers of the Gothic cathedrals had read it. The designers of Newgrange cannot have read it but must have had the same vision.

The central chamber at Newgrange is cruciform with a six sided vault rising above it, recalling Giant's Causeway. One of the great towers of the well loved cathedral Chartres has an eight sided structure supporting a six sided structure. This was not the usual arrangement, but Chartres is an unusual cathedral; it is dedicated to the Virgin.

Six sided buildings are rare, but another in which one might see, perhaps too eagerly, a reflection of the basalt columns is Raglan Castle of Wales. Tt was said to be a gathering place of the bards. Its great library, now lost, were said to hold a treasure of Celtic literature as well as the original manuscripts of shakespear. The great towers of Raglan were hexagonal.

The family that built Raglan, already ancient at that time, had and still has as a motto, "Ung je servirai₁" which can be translated, "One will I serve." That can only mean, "I serve only God" and by implication, ~I serve no king or other earthly master." That, of course₁ is pure treason. The fiercely independent spirit of the Scotch Irish is not a subtle thing.

Of course while Newgrange is innocent of naturalistic images, the cathedral reveled in them. The Newgrange builders would have been shocked, Moses would have been shocked, Christ would have been shocked, Mohammed would have been shocked. I am shocked

And I am shocked with myself, for I have always reveled in the vigor, the beauty and the mystical whisperings of the decorations of those old churches. such things are forbidden to make or look upon. And worse, I have never had time for modern abstract nonrepresentational art. It is hardly modern, is it? And it is permitted. Perhaps if it were prettier, perhaps if the artist loved it more, I should as well.

And again about the same time, the weary ricts, after five thousand years in pursuit of their vision, got tired of getting stomped on by every fierce warlike gang that came along and threw in their lot with their valorous old allies the Scots. It was a good strategy. It should have worked.

After all, what was it to be plot, to be Scotch Irish? Surely it was not a racial thing; was it not learned? Had it not all started with reflection upon a real object, the Giant's Causeway, the decision that this, too, was real, was part of nature, that the conceptual world was thus proved to be as valid as the world of appetite? Could one then not put such notions aside? Could not one say, "This Christianity carries the best of the ancient ideas. It is now shared by all Europe. Can we not now discard the ancient and share with the others in what is new?"

Alas, customs millenia old are not easily to be discarded, nor can intellectual persuasion transcend the genetic makeup of the person with intellect; this applies to the pict and the others as well.

The Picts and Scots interrnarried, discarding Plot tradition and language. It seems that what Was left of the plots was where it had always been in the Scottish lowlands and In Northern Ireland.

Over the next five hundred years darkness began to spread from two directions. For one thing₁ there was the gradual assertion of the Church at Rome over its authority over everything that was Christian. The Orthodox church, the older and more conservative of the two, took then as now the position, "We are all Christians. Can we not love each other for that? Can we not accept that our differences are less than our similarities? That it is only our own sin that keeps us apart? Will you not join with us in what we share and keep for yourselves whatever you love that you do not find among us?"

The church at Rome took the position, "But you're wrong, don't you see? You're not really Christian. WE are RIGHT."

I do not propose this dialogue to be accurate, but I suggest that that is what it looked like to the Scotch Irish. If there was conflict between two relatively authoritarian regimes sitting next door to each other on the Mediterranean, you could be pretty sure there was going to be trouble in the tameless north.

The second spread of darkness was from the political side. Two mighty kingdoms, Scotland and England, stuck on a single island like cocks in a pit, fought it out for seven centuries. Their battlefield was the Scottish lowlands

First one side would say, The lowlands are out of control. The people there have no loyalty to the king of the other side. The place is OURS." A campaign would be launched. The lowlands would be overrun. Legions of lowlanders would be hanged. The conquering king would try to impose his will by what nowadays would be called a policy of genocide. It wouldn't work. The children of the Pict were constitutionally incapable of obeying the law.

What legitimacy did such law have anyway? It was just a strutting of brute strength. You would not serve such a king unless you were frantically looking for someone to serve. The Scotch Irish never felt any such need. Reivers they were called. Thieves. Scofflaws. fluffians. Borderers. Outlaws. Hang thein all.

But they were tough. And they didn't scare easily. And they were smart. And they kept coming back against the king and the foreign law. And within fifty years, the other side would say, "The lowlands are out of control...."

It has never been safe to flout authority.

Those five hundred terrible years of double twilight ended about five centuries ago in the renaissance. The bright spot was that a Frenchman known now as Calvin decided that maybe the Church at Rome didn't own cod after all. Maybe a person's soul was a matter between himself and cod. Maybe this Roman authoritarian regime was optional.

But on the other hand night fell. England and Scotland unified. They could now pursue a coordinated policy against the lowlands, a policy against which even the Scotch Irish could not prevail.

So while the Protestant reformation, following the lead of Calvin, spread rapidly across Scotland, highlands and lowlands as well, the crushing power of the United Kingdom exterminated the last ragged bands of Scotch Irish resistance. Most died. Some fled to Northern Ireland with the blessing of the English monarch.

Long would it take to tell of the troubles in Northern Ireland from then to this very day. The Celtic Irish were not happy to see their ancient foe returninq. The treatment of the Scotch Irish at the hands of the Irish and the treatment of the Irish at the hands of the Scotch Irish was as grim as the treatment of everybody at the hands of the English.

For instance, for many years, if you were Presbyterian in Ireland, you could not be legally married. Your children were legally illegitimate and could not inherit. This was a terrible blow to the Presbyterians, who at the time were stricter about sexual practices than almost any culture ever.

With their backs almost against Giant's Causeway. Their families shattered by the civil law. Their linen mills closed by government edict. Their farms flourishing but at the expense of having to plow while being shot at. The Scotch Irish cast up their options.

There was no good one and one bad one. America was accepting immigrants. Life there was dangerous. Most died soon after arriving if not on the way. But it wouldn't be any worse from that standpoint than where they were, and maybe something would turn up when they got there.

Like the Puritans, the Anglicans and the Quakers before them, the Scotch Irish arrived in an avalanche. They were urged out westward by William Penn, who regarded all men as his brothers, but was happy to have the sturdy Scotch Irisb between the Indians and his other brothers. The Indians skirmished with them, but by and large the '¹backcountry" of America became the 'frontier¹' as the Scotch Irish moved exuberantly On.

By about two hundred to two hundred fifty years ago, they were well established in their new home. They then said a few things: We like it. We'll keep it. Who needs England? Who needs a king? Let's revolt.

New England, densely populated and well organized, was able to get the English out of their area fairly soon. But before the Scotch Irish came, no one had breathed a word about revolution. It was a Scotch Irish project. Some even called it, "More lowland troubles." Only this time it worked

It went almost without saying that the new country should be a republic. Stroll about the capital, Washington, and look at the architecture. There are the classical colonnades, the image of Giant's Causeway. There is the Washington Monument. Some would have you believe that it is a phallic symbol. That could hardly be farther from the truth. It is an Ogham stone. It is an Egyptian obelisk. It is an ancient monolithic stone. It is the very antithesis of a symbol of the world as a biological reality.

During the brief existence of the southern Confederacy as an independent nation, substantial progress was made toward getting rid of the unwelcome institution called slavery. This time it went absolutely without saying that the new country should be a republic. One of the abiding irnages of that Confederacy is the home with the row of columns, still recalling Giant's Causeway.

I skip over, since you either have seen it or will not care, the way the Protestant churches, so many of them in the United States, sell out to the old image making culture. First it is the fans provided by a funeral home with little devotional pictures, then the robes for the choir, then the robes for the preacher, then the pretty communion plates, then the beautiful communion trays, and at last the old colored stained glass windows replaced with new windows with pictures, pictures of saints, pictures of Christ, pictures of gods.

Let us go back in imagination to Ireland, the green grass, the grey mists, the ancient knolls, the sweet people. For say what you will about hierarchy, it is a wonderful thing to be among people who expect people to depend upon each other. To leave behind your stern protestant independence of spirit, if you ever had any and have any left, and greet people in the old natural way of the mammoth hunters.

Go back and talk to the solitary stones. For as surely as they are there, they were put there for a purpose. And as surely as that purpose was neither food nor shelter, it was to communicated something. Whisper to them in the gathering dark. Ask them their secret. Is it not, "Use your brain. Look at the world that is really there. Think about that. Love that. Use that to stand on your own two feet, even as I do."?

Look at the strange ancient markings on them and reflect that if you are Scotch Irish you are forbidden to make or look upon more representational images, that each time you look at a picture you should pray to be forgiven. If you are not Scotch Irish, that burden may not be upon you for the heritage of your consciousness may go farther back, and it cannot be true that all laws are meant to apply to all people and all times.

Co to Newgrange. Perhaps some midwinter day they will let you enter before dawn, but I understand the waiting list is years. Co to Newgrange and stand before the door and the roofbox. In front of you is a stone with a strange truple spiral pattern. It looks very much like the tchurinqa stones of the Australian Aborigine. The Aborigine will tell you the the tchuringa means something, that it is writing, although I have never heard of a tchuringa alphabet or dictionary. Can we decipher the doorway stone? It must be something important, because the same spiral pattern is in the inner chamber, where that shaft of sunlight reaches on the summer solstice. It is not flat against the back wall, but turned edgewise to the light.

Something stirs in the mind. Edgewise. I have knocking about in the study somewhere a book T bought in New Orleans. The dealer called it a "fore edge" book. It is very old. The text is a reprinting of a far older text that starts out describing a preCopernican universe, marveling out how fast the stars must be moving to get all the way around in twenty four hours.

If you examine the book casually you will find no pictures. But if you are willing to mistreat the interesting old artefact, flip back the covers and grab the pages in you hands. Now roll the pages down so they fan very slightly, like a great deck of cards. Now look at the edge and you will see a nice little hand painted scene of a village and a church.

After the book was printed, the pages were rolled, clamped into place, the scene painted and allowed to dry. Then the book was unclamped and the edges gilded, so that the painting is obscured when the book is closed

The cheerful dealer, who had a bit of the sniffles and looked like he could use some fresh air, explained that the painting had probably been done in Ireland, since that was the place most such work had been done.

In painting, there is a technique of painting a figure elongated, so it cannot be recognized except as seen fron the edge. The picture, "The Ambassadors'⁹ by flolbein has a skull at the feet of the two standing men obscured in this way.

And they say there is a rock a mile long on the surface of Mars that would look like a face from a certain point on the surface but does not look like a face from above. So far as I know, no terrestrial artist has even done that trick in three dimensions. It was done first on Mars, whether by nature or by intent far beyond our imagining.

Perhaps it is not the triple spiral that is the message. Perhaps the message is concealed, to be read only from the edge. It may even be written in Ogham, which alphabet is now known. If not the outer pattern, then the inner.

But one would have to go there to tell. The imagination only goes so far.

So the stones speak, and we listen and conjecture what could be meant over so long a span. The amazing thing is that we can recognize anything at all. Yet elements of what these builders knew seem to turn up at crucial moments of history ever since.

And there stands the monument and its inner chamber, where they waited. Living or dead, they waited. For something. For dawn at the winter solstice. They waited. What did they feel? what did they think? You know perfectly well what they were thinking. You know full well what they were doing.

They were waiting for the sun to come up Christmas morning.

And go to Giant's Causeway to wander among the ancient spires of basalt and think about the six thousand year adventure of the mind and spirit that started there.

MILD SURPRISE

For reasons not of my own, I was in charge of a large institution for a period of some hours. It seemed to me I was a bit young to be running a place of such size, but it was only overnight. What could go wrong? I busied myself with what chores they brought, and I hoped to get some sleep that night, too.

Along about ten o'clock, one of the supervisors Caine to see me. I looked at her sleepily. she said, "There is a Than in our area who is threatening to kill one of the women."

"Right," said I. "Call something I can handle."

the police. obviously that's not

"We generally take care of our own problems," she said stiffly. "How?"

"There is a locked unit."

"Good. Take him there. Sort it out in the morning."

"He won't go. And we can't force him. He has an unstable neck fracture. If he is disturbed, it will cut his spinal cord and paralyze him from the chin down."

I was beginning to feel unhappy.

"Well surely you have some sort of sedation for him. This didn't just happen tonight."

"He's suspicious. Won't take his medication. Thinks we're trying to poison him."

In my present frame of mind, I could see the strength of his position.

"All right, then. Call security. Have them escort him to the unit."

"You ARE security."

Nine more hours and I was out of there. The thing to do was stall for time. Perhaps I could ask her to do things she couldn't do, and we could carry on until daylight.

"All right. I will need six men. I want them long on strength and short on judgement."

"There aren't six other Then in the building."

Good. "Scour this place. Turn them up~ I don't care how long it takes you~ T want those six men. When you have them, I want you to insert them onto the floor. One by one. Very tactfully. No threats of any kind. I just want them there. Come back when you have done all that."

She left so quickly I didn't see her move. I turned my attention to other matters and hoped the sun would come back bQfore she.

Too soon, too soon she returned. Not a half hour had passed. She was jubilant with success. The men had been found and had already wandered casually onto the floor, one by one.

I had a plan. Ny plan was to walk as slowly as possible any maybe there would be a break in my favor. T got up, moving like a swimmer in molasses.

Despite my best efforts, we were at the elevator almost at once. The elevator was waiting; she had shut it off. The doors flashed closed, and we went up to the floor with the surge of a leaping tarpon. We stepped off.

As we started down the hall, I tried to whisper, "point him out to me when you see him." But since I was barely moving and she running, I could not get her attention. I need not have wondered if I could find him.

The supervisor beelined to her desk and vanished into the background. In the center of the brightly lit floor stood a tall fit young man in a neck brace. He was smoking and was obviously agitated.

I took an instant dislike to the neck brace. I knew perfectly well that he was no happier having to wear the brace than I was having to look at it. But there is some instinct that is totally unfair that seizes on anything that marks a person as different. I recognized the instinct and discounted it, but it was there all the same.

The neck brace of course was not my problem. It was the broken neck that was my problem. The brace only helped. His size and evident strength were problems, too.

And there was my goon squad. Yes there were six of them. Big meaty fellows. Lounging against the wall. Chatting with animation. Playing checkers in the corner. Nobody was looking at us.

I approached the neck brace. He took a short audible puff on his cigarette.

"You've come to grab and lock me up, haven't you? Huh? You think you've got enough Then to do it? You think you can do it? You think there are enough people in this whole building to do it?"

"Uh?"

"You think I'm crazy, don't you? But I know. You're not fooling me. You're going to try to get me, aren't you. You're going to try to take me and lock me up."

"Urn. I'd like to talk to you about that."

"Yeah. Sure. You'd like ... WHAT? You want to TALK?"

"Something like that. There's go~ to be a place around here somewhere where we can get out of this traffic."

The supervisor at the desk didn't actually move, but she somehow dropped her protective coloration and became visible for an instant.

"There's a conference room two doors down on your right." she faded into the background again. We made for the room.

It was a small windowless room with a tiny desk and two chairs. I started in and then realized that that would put him between me and the door.

"I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to go in first."

He didn't nod, of course, but he went in first without objection. He sat on the steel folding chair with his back to the wall.

I sat down next to the door. It tended to close, so I held it open with one foot.

"I don't mean to corner you."

"That's all right. We paranoids don't mind being in corners. That way nobody can come up behind us."

"I'm sure."

"So what are you doing? Why are you here? Why do you want to lock me up like a caged animal? Huh?"

"They tell me you were going to hurt One of the women."

"I didn't hurt anybody."

"But I understand you said you might."

"Yes. I said something. But what's that? It's only talk. what does it mean?"

"That depends on what you said."

"Oh."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd kill her."

There went my chance of saying it was all a trifling little misunderstanding and of going back to the relative safety of my own office. They tell me one way of telling how serious a person's ideas are is to find out how concrete and specific they are.

"How?"

"Put a pencil through her head."

An image appeared in my mind of a human skull and all the little paper thin places a pencil might go through. I shook the picture away.

"Look. I'm supposed to be in charge here. I can't let you just go around hurting people."

"But I'm a crazy. It doesn't matter what a crazy says. If I'm not crazy you can't lock me up. If I am crazy it doesn't mean anything what I say."

I was beginning to lose track of the fact that the last thing at all I wanted to happen was for this conversation to end. I had my back to the open door and my goon squad beyond that. I could hardly ask for a better way to confront my excited and unhappy friend here. If this could only drag out a few more hours I could walk away.

"I don't know if there is anything wrong with you at all. I don't know anybody who thinks so except you."

"I've got full disability for psychosis."

The neck brace and his own tension were getting past my guard. Now was the time to take an exhaustive personal history from him. Instead I returned to the business at hand.

"Look. If a parrot or a record player were sitting here on the desk and that parrot or record player were to threaten me, I would not be worried about it. Neither the parrot nor the record player would actually have the means of doing any such thing. But when you say it, it is obvious that you are quite capable of doing exactly what you say."

He thought about that a moment. When he spoke again, a slight edge had dropped from his voice and the speed of his voice dropped to merely animated.

"Do you want to know the truth?"

I made a scooping gesture with one hand to indicate my vulnerability to his offer. His eyes gleamed.

"I'm not really crazy. I'm just pretending to be crazy so I get full disability. See?"

"On that basis, would you accompany me to the locked unit?" "What?"

"Well if I'm going to transfer you to a secure place like that, I am going to have to justify doing it. I am going to have to say that you are a dangerous and unpredictable person, and that I had to do it for everybody's safety. That statement of mine will support your case for being disabled."

Suddenly it got real quiet. It was still just the two of us talking, but it was as if a hurricane in the background had suddenly ceased.

Time to move. We got up and made our way to the elevator. I invited him to take a corner in back. This was the moment I didnrt want. Alone at night in a huge building with a strong and unpredictable but fragile person. The doors closed. The elevator settled toward the earth, stopped, and the daors parted. If he was going to do anything wild, it would be right now.

And there was my goon squad. Yes there were six of them. Big meaty fellows. Lounging against the wall. chatting with animation. Playing checkers in the corner. Nobody was looking at us. They had run the stairs.

They fell in behind us as we made our way to the unit. I don't see what anybody has against people coming along behind them. I liked it.

The supervisor had made the phone call. We were expected. I saw that he was seen to and made comfortable. Then I borrowed a pen, sat down at a desk and set about keeping my promise to him. I never did make occasion to thank the men who had helped me, my show of force.

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