Christmas Ramble

This was meant to be an obligatory 'I hate it when people say Happy Holidays' entry, but I'm not quite in the mood. This year, I've discovered that I'm not really one way or the other about the war on Christmas. We've lost that war, and there won't be a rematch, so we might as well move on.

If you don't believe me, let me ask you a couple of questions: do you think about people getting upset when the word 'Christmas' is mentioned on TV? (I'm not asking you if you care that they're upset; I'm asking if you think of it). Are you somewhat surprised when you hear Christmas music being played in a shopping mall or store, then turn to your friend and say, "Hey, it's nice they're playing Christmas music"? Do you get a momentary sinking feeling in your gut (the kind of gut-speak that hits you when you think you've lost your wallet) when you hear the word 'God'?

Now, answer those same questions, but insert the words "Ramadan," or "Buddha," or "Kwanzaa," or "Allah," or "Chanuka." Case closed. The war's over. Saying those words in place of "God" and "Christmas" is more mainstream than Christmas nowadays. Words don't count without meaning, which is to say emotion. The very fact that you have to say "I'm glad they're playing Christmas music" is a sign that the culture has changed for good.

Another example in that vein come from that buffoon on Fox News, Alan Combs. He was giving an interview and when his guest opened with, "Merry Christmas to you," Combs replied with something like, "Thank you for that. I'm not offended. No war on Christmas here."

What a loser. He fell right into the trap the Unserious always do: not being able to see his own pathetic irony even whilst choking on it like last year's turkey dinner. Or in Combs' house, probably tofu with a side order of sanctimony.

The war on Christmas was fought from the inside. It is a self-inflicted injury. Indeed, it is strange that those on the Left despise Christianity and want nothing to do with it. Jesus was all about suffering. Apparently he suffered for everyone's sins, including theirs. It is strange that the Unserious don't dig that. Their idea of a good time is mental self-flagellation on a grand scale.

They beat themselves up for pollution, global warming, AIDS, homelessness, cigarette smoking, Big Macs, oil that powers their SUVs, trees in the forest, owls that live in the trees, trees that fall on trucks and kill a family of four. On and on. Baby seals but not baby humans. Baby ducks but not baby houseflies. Turtles, but not termites. Whales in the ocean, but not poor people in Darfur. I suppose anything is worth saving, as long as you care to look at it as a pet and not a pest.

It makes sense that sooner or later, they would confront the main foundation of Western Culture. No, not football. Christianity. Why bother chipping away at issues like the environment, abortion, and Japanese whaling rights? Going after Christianity is an assault on all Western beliefs at once. Tear it down, and you make every other issue stand naked in the shower.

Ronald Reagan once said that if the US did not stand as one nation under God, it would fall apart. Nobody in the audience booed, and it didn’t make the news as a negative piece about religion in politics. Today, if Harper or Bush did that they’d be villified. Hero of the Left JFK was a warmonger, a womanizer, and loved nukes. If he’d drank more, he would have been my kind of guy. He also said the word ‘God’ a lot, and was the first Catholic president. Today, the Left would cream him for all of the above.

Ben Stein has pointed out that the idea of the United States being an athiest country is relatively recent, but is picking up speed at a frightening pace. That can be applied to all Western countries. England, where they ban their national flag in prisons (it has a cross on it) lest it offend a Muslim inmate. Canada, where Stockwell Day was dragged through the mud as a ‘fundamentalist’ because he liked to take Sundays off and go to church. If that’s the case, then 25 years ago every shopowner in Burlington, Ontario was a fundamentalist. When I was growing up, the only store open on a Sunday was a Becker’s where I could get a freezy.

I was talking to an Australian guy once, and I made mention that Canada was a Christian country. Well, you might as well have clubbed a baby seal right in front of him. But let's face reality: every Western culture has had Christianity as its bedrock faith for the past 1500 years at least. The other religions were more or less around, but they had nothing to do with our ancient regal monarchs, or the founding of any constitution. Islam made a go of it at one point, until they got their asses kicked, and it only became trendy to mention Chanukah in December about 40 years ago.

I remember when I was a kid that the Happy Holidays thing hadn't happened yet. Back then, cards said Merry Christmas, then Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, then Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah. Then the guys at Hallmark probably got tired of surfing the PC tide and said, "Hell with it. Write Happy Holidays on it, print a billion, and sell them into the next century."

I still find it funny that all of these cards are still called Christmas cards. More irony to choke on. We all run around wishing everyone a happy whatever-the-hell, but when it comes to slipping pieces of cardboard into the mail, we still say, "Shit, I forgot to buy Christmas cards." When are we going to start calling them Holiday cards? My guess is 2010. Damn, I forgot. They’re Greeting Cards.

But greeting what?

Christmas Ramble (II)

Life is beautiful because it makes me laugh. You can keep your flowers blooming in the sunshine, and you can throw out the pretty poems. It's laughter that makes the world a damned nice place. Problem is, I have a comedian's bent of only laughing about what makes me angry. It's an old comedy rule: if you want to write a funny routine, don't think about what makes you laugh; think about what makes you angry, and then attack.

I knew a comedian once who made a joke about Poles during his routine. After the show, the hotel management asked him what he was thinking, told him that guests had complained, asked him to explain himself, so forth.

He was a British comedian, and he had a great Limey accent. He looked down at his fingernails for a moment, studied them, and shrugged. Then he looked up at the authoritative figures around him and purred, "Sometimes comedy is...cruel."

When I heard that, I hit the floor.

That comedian wasn't wrong. Comedy is cruel. At it's root, comedy is a mean art. Completely sado-masochistic. Anything in it's path, including the comedian himself, is apt to be spliced down the middle with a blowtorch. I say 'himself,' because women aren't inherently funny. Once in a while a Lucielle Ball or a Phyllis Diller comes along, but most of the time all we get is Ellen DeGeneres. A few yucks and then their shows have to break out the lesbian storyline to try and shock the viewers back into their seats. If the comedian isn't a lesbian, then they try the other route: they get her pregnant. Nine months of semi-giggles later, and the show goes in the can.

The last couple of weeks have had plenty of laughs in. There was Ahmandinejad saying for the 100th time that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust never happened. There was Jimmy Carter releasing a book that compared Israel with Apartheid South Africa. There was the usual lame response from the politicians, saying that anti-Semitism is bad. There was Kofi Annan, saying that the US has to get in step with the rest of the world and stop causing so much trouble. And there was me, laughing.

Laughing, because as that English guy might have said, "What proper fools we are." A Holocaust-denying madman in the desert wants to blow Israel sky high, while the Left's idiot of an elder statesman says the Israelis are the problem. Meanwhile, the leader of the UN says not one word about Iran wanting to vaporize the Jewish state. Instead, he takes a potshot at US foreign policy. And when it's time for us to speak up, we say the usual mumbo-jumbo. Come on, you know the mantra by now. Two words. Outrage and condemnation.

Please. Like the Unserious or the bigots care if we're outraged. It makes no difference to them, because they know that talk is cheap. And condemnation? That won't even get you a cup of coffee at Denny's.

I'm getting pretty tired of anti-Semitism. I don't need to go into the history books to look for it (though I have), and I don't need to read the papers to find it (though I do). No, I look back at examples from my own life, and it is shocking how deeply imbedded anti-Semitism still is. In fact, it has been so shocking for so long, that I've come to realize that it will never end. It will always be around, this curious little monster that is so invasive, some people don't even realize they have the disease.

I was brought up in a Catholic school, and my parents are what you would call 'conservative.' But guess what? I didn't hear one anti-Jewish slur in my household or in my school. One of the great lies of our day is that Christians blame Jews because Jews were the Christ killers. I don't know anyone alive who has told me that they dislike Jews for that reason.

In grade 11, we had to study other religions. Our teacher put Catholicism on the back burner, and we went over Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, and every other 'ism.' I can't remember one slight being levelled at any of those creeds. No one poked fun at the Jews, and our teacher never taught us that they were all that different from us.

When I left that class, I mainly thought Jews were different simply because they didn't read the New Testament and because they didn't believe Jesus was a bigshot. Fine by me. I don't think my friends and I ever discussed it outside of class. We were too busy planning the next party or, this being a Catholic school, watching kilts swish to and fro.

My mom dragged me to Church until I was about fourteen years old. Though my memory of those years is foggy, I'm pretty sure that I would remember a priest railing against another group of people. Not one of them did, ever. I heard a lot of boring sermons in my time, most of them revolving around not doing drugs or committing some sin or other. But fiery rhetoric about Christ-killers didn’t make it to the podium.

My first glimpse of Holocaust-denial came from two people in my high school. I didn’t know they too well. They were friends of a friend and we were killing time, waiting for her. I’m pretty sure they weren’t Christian, but they might have been. Anyway, they were a boy and a girl, and the girl had a German mom. Somehow WWII got brought up, and being young we thought we knew everything about it. I mentioned the Holocaust. The girl looked at me with hooded eyes and said something like, “There’s still an argument about whether that even happened.”

The guy nodded. I was dumbstruck. Not by the guy. It was pretty obvious he wanted to get into her pants, so he would have agreed with her if she’d said the earth was flat. But the girl was a young, vivacious, attractive, smart-sounding chick. I knew she was a grade ahead of me in school, and I therefore knew that she’d already taken Mr. Canham’s class on the war. I knew she’d seen the pictures I’d seen, and read the texts I’d read, and heard Mr. Canham’s lectures on the subject. And learned nothing.

In University, I had a Jewish girlfriend. I was visiting her family and they were all downstairs watching the tube while I took a break and perused the old man’s library. I found a book on Hitler and the Holocaust. I sat down and read it (I already considered myself a WWII history buff and still keep up with it today). And you know, the whole time I’m reading it, I’m thinking about my girlfriend. For the first time, the war became emotional for me. I’m thinking about someone putting a bullet in my girlfriend’s head, or lighting her on fire, or making her eat crap in a ghetto.

While I was leafing through the book, she walked in. She’d told me once that she didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. Her father had lived through it, and it upset her too much. So I closed the book and looked up at her sheepishly. And then I started to cry. Just like that.

You see, when she walked in the room she was early twenties, pretty as hell, smart as a whip, and had the damnedest smile. It was obvious she had come into the room to see me. Not because she had any big news, not because the TV show they’d been watching was a bore, not because of anything. Just to see me. And I looked up at her face and thought of all those people who died at the hands of those murderous sonsofbitches, and for a moment I saw her there, in a ghetto, persecuted. And I started crying.

She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that if someone laid a hand on her head, I would kill him. Kill him. And you know what she did? She laughed. She put the book away and put her hand to my face, and she told me that no one was going to lay a hand on her head, so relax. She played it so matter-of-factly, and she never brought it up again.

Imagine the dignity in that. The courage, to be the one to say, “There-there, everything’s going to be all right,” when victomhood was hers for the taking. Instead, she comforted me. Incredible.

As time went on, I met a lot of sonsofbitches. I met a Greek man some years ago, and he became a good buddy of mine. And, as anti-Semites do, he waited until we were good friends to open up his thoughts. He told me that Hitler had all the right answers about the Jews. He told me that I didn’t understand it now, but I would when I was older. He wasn’t my friend after that.

I once met a Hungarian girl and I asked her if she was Jewish. She looked utterly revolted. Her face changed into a snarl. She told me no, and then asked, “Do I look Jewish?” And she was worried. Worried that I would say yes. If I had, it might have destroyed her twisted self-image for life. Instead, I told her I didn’t know what Jews looked like, changed the subject, and didn’t talk to her again.

Anti-Semitism runs deep. I don’t know where it grows, but it doesn’t grow in the church. Neither does it grow at the movies. I like Charles Krauthammer a lot, but he was way off when The Passion of the Christ came out. Charles said that it would spread anti-Semitism, and was a massive setback for Jews.

Sorry, Charles, but you were overreacting. I’ve met a lot of Europeans, and therefore a lot of anti-Semites (that isn’t to say that Europeans have cornered the market, though they might; they just expose it much more readily). Two hours of cinema are no going to make someone hate Jews. The Christ-killer theory is a load of bull on both sides of the coin. Anti-Semites are not born of it, which means Jews shouldn’t look to it as a reason for anti-Semitism. I firmly believe that all Jew-haters I have met learned their stuff at a very young age, too young to be let into violent movies made by Mel Gibson.

But what does all this have to do with Christmas?

Good question. I guess I’m just looking back at Christmas past, and bemoaning the fact that Christmas is taking a nose-dive in the popular culture as a spiritual event. Not because I am all that spiritual, but because I liked it when other people were. I liked knowing that people were praying, and giving a little thought to what the spirit of Christmas meant. More than that, I liked knowing that they didn’t have to feel any kind of guilt about it. Christians are not all racist, anti-Semite, whackos. They’re just people.

Christianity is painted as some sort of cult nowadays, which is as sad as it is wrong. Evil things have been done in the name of Christianity before, but it is self-evident that more good has been done than evil. Every Christmas movie, message from the Queen, Christmas story, and Christmas carol sends messages of love, forgiveness, joy, and hope. Can an evil, cynical faith inspire such messages? If so, how? Certainly a Spanish Inquisition from hundreds of years ago doesn’t outweigh Mother Theresa and so many others like her. Does it? Should one feel guilty for praying for someone on December 25th?

I sure know that we don’t need to feel any from the Jews. An email arrived from another old Jewish girlfriend of mine, wishing me a Merry Christmas. If she is supposed to be different because she is a Jew, she doesn’t know that. All she knows is that she is happy for me because I am celebrating something. And she acknowledges that by celebrating me as a person she has known and loved.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas to her. And you.

Thinking Of You

This has been a hell of a long week, with a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Anyway, I just wanted to drop my friends and family a line and tell them that I'm thinking of them, loving them, and wishing them well as Christmas comes up to smack us in the kisser a lot sooner than we thought it would.

And Pete, have a great, big CC and ginger for me, would you?

Later.

A Study in Senility

Well, what did we expect?

At least the Iraq Study Group (ISG) showed some courage. They decided to drop a bomb of surrender on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It takes chutzpah for the Unserious to do something like that, and it helped turn the evening news into the most bizarre show around: a clip of ISG members saying the US should go to thug regimes Iran and Syria with hat in hand, begging for help, followed by a clip of Roosevelt saying he was going to open up a can of whup-ass on the Japanese.

No coalition of the willing for Roosevelt. Back then, there wasn't much talk of making sure Tonga's security council vote would allow Americans to defeat their enemies. Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, Solomon Islands. Not too many Polish and French (they'd already surrendered) running around during those battles. It was all red, white, and blue. A Japanese admiral said the Americans were filled with a 'terrible resolve,' a resolve which took them all the way to final victory.

65 years on, it would seem that many Americans still have a terrible resolve, though not in the way that Yamamoto meant it. When he said those words, he knew a determined enemy was advancing constantly, and wouldn't give up until they'd won the day. He had little doubt that within a couple of years, Roosevelt's boot would be up his ass. He was wrong. It was Truman's.

No, the resolve today is terrible because there isn't any. The 79 articles that these ISG has-beens came up with is a recipe to do nothing on the one hand, and to appease dictators on the other. It is a shameful, embarrassing document (you can find it on Jim Baker's website; I'd give you the address, but I don't want to help his counter go up).

When former Secretary of State and ISG-man Lawrence Eagleburger was asked today what he thought of the New York Post (good for you, Post) calling them a bunch of "Surrender Monkeys," he replied with a stern, "That was probably thought up by some 20-year-old punk."

Maybe. But does that mean the punk's wrong?

You were a 20-year-old punk yourself once, Larry. At least, I hope so. Being a punk means taking a stand and sticking it to the man once in a while. Punkness takes heft and attitude. Punkness requires, oh, not asking the President of your nation to go to an Axis of Evil country four years later and beg them for help when you know damn well that they're the ones behind this insurgency in Iraq. You're not a punk anymore, Larry, you're just a regular, arrogant coward.

Arrogant, because you think you know it all and can toss others off with one-liners involving the word 'punk.' Coward, because the only new issues in the document you signed involve running away as fast as possible, screwing Israel over by making this a Palestine question, and having a meeting of minds with a dictatorship that hangs people for being gay. (And Larry, nobody uses 'punk' anymore. Just how many times beyond 79 do you have to prove that you are out of it?)

His next flippant comment on Fox News proved what an old fool he is. When asked what he would do if the President didn't take action on even one of the ISG's recommendations, Larry said it was the President's decision. For his part, Old Larry would return to his stamp collection and come back to chat with Fox News once in a while if they wanted him to, hardee-har-har.

That's great. Thanks for your service, Larry. You worked nine months on a report to the US President, and you now place it's importance somewhere behind your stamp collection and being a hack for the cable news networks. Please, Larry. Go back to collecting stamps. Mail someone a letter that contains your last original thought, before it dies of loneliness.

I didn't hold out much hope for the ISG. It sounded pathetic to begin with, the way 'study group' sounded lame whenever a university professor made me go over to a homely girl's apartment on a Saturday to compare notes. There we'd be, the such-and-such study group, put together by a prof who went around the room repeating one through five over and over, until all the ones had to meet at John's, all the twos at Jenny's, etc.

I detested study groups. Every time a professor said the magic words, "Let's split up into groups," I wanted to do a header off the fifth floor of the social science building.

Most of my study groups were garden variety. A couple of gay guys, the homely girl who served Doritoes and owned a lot of teddy bears, a token feminist or two, and me. We'd chat for a few hours about our homework, I'd say a couple of things to piss off the feminists, and then I'd try to get to the bar by last call. Point is, every study group I've seen has been a joke. People walk in with their beliefs firmly in place, and they walk out with them a couple of hours later.

Nobody changes their minds during a study group. Certainly no one learns very much. In fact, I only ever agreed to sign any study group's papers because I knew it was a waste of time to argue a point and, as said, I wanted to make last call. Besides, it wasn't like I was concerned with not getting a good grade. If you had a gay guy and a couple of feminists on your team, there wasn't a chance in hell the prof would give you less than a B+.

A couple of hours of study group pretty much ensured that I would sign anything put in front of me. After nine months, I'm not the least bit surprised that these 10 old-timers found a consensus. Nine months? My God, after nine months of study group, I would have signed away my heterosexuality, told you I wore ladies underwear, and sang 'I Feel Pretty' from the top of my university residence. I'm amazed these old buffoons lasted so long. When a stamp collector is one of your heavy hitters on foreign policy, you begin to wonder who gave them the code to get out of the old folks home in the first place.

By now you're thinking that I'm ripping on the elderly too much. You're right. I am. And they deserve it. Look at it this way: all of that old thinking is long gone. It's over. Those rules of foreign policy and diplomacy are out the window. For one, it is pretty hard to practice diplomacy when the groups you are talking to don't have any diplomats. For another, these terrorists and Islamic fascists don't care what Baker and Eagleburger say.

When Baker was talking to the Russians, he knew they were full of crap, but at least they pretended to listen. Today, the Islamic fascists say, "You want peace? To hell with you. Die, infidel scum!" And we go running to the evening news for analysis of what the terrorist meant by that. Well, he means he wants you to die. Olive branches extended in their direction end up buried in your throat.

In Baker and Eagleburger's day, foreign policy meant two things: Communism and the United States. That was it. The rest was merely details. Name me one important conflict that took place post-WWII that didn't involve some influence of the US and USSR. Name one. (Sorry, British guys, the Falklands don't count. Be real).

Don't cheat by handing me Israel and the Arabs. They were both being supplied by the big boys, and the big boys had a vested interest in which side won, lost, or stayed static. Korea and Vietnam? Wrong. Just because the soldiers didn't speak Russian doesn't mean they weren't partnered up with the Russkies behind the bedroom curtain. Do you think those cute AK-47s were grown in the rice paddies?

The members of the ISG are old, and they are out of their league. This game is faster, younger, and far more uncertain. When Eagleburger was making the rounds, the world spun very slowly. If he talked to a Russian ambassador, the Russian ambassador would get back to him in months with nothing new to say. If the talks went badly, well, we'll have more talks next year. And hey, if those talks don't work out, no big deal. The chances of us ever attacking each other face to face are extremely remote. One thing about the Cold War, there weren't too many American or Russian civilians being killed by the other side.

The ISG group proved their irrationality by talking about the conditions in Iraq getting worse and worse, spiraling out of control. Okay, fine. But tell me, lead foot, exactly what is your definition of 'spiral'? Because you didn't seem to be too quick in getting that report onto the President's desk.

The old boys' diplomacy network is over. We don't have time for nine month reports, conferences next summer, Pan-Arab talks. I'm sorry, Larry and Jim, if you miss the good old days of flying around and rubbing elbows with other guys in expensive suits. I apologize if you miss chatting with your foreign policy buddies over caviar and champagne. You can't drag your old methods into this fight. It distracts us, and it weakens us. Like you, the guys we're fighting while you're collecting stamps also wear pricey vests to wedding parties, except theirs explode and wipe out entire families.

Today's enemy doesn't talk. They blow things up. There is no evidence that they want to hear from us unless it is to accept our conversion to Islam and a capitulation to their terms. To treat them as Eagleburger and Baker treated past foreign dignitaries is lunacy.

The Iraq Study Group was another lesson, and it was a good one. It's time to kiss the old-timers good-bye. They're past their foreign policy prime, seeing a diplomatic world they used to see, living in the dreamland of lost memories. Listening to them is as foolish as it is dangerous.

Say good-night, Larry.

Threesome

Her some,
Me some,
She some,
In sum.

Football (Black &) Blues

Travel makes the days go by faster. I can't decide if that is because I'm busy seeing all kinds of neat, interesting things (statues of famous people, old churches, girls in bikinis, puddles of barf outside a Shanghai nightclub), or if it's just because I miss football.

One thing about football is that it helps you mark the time. From kickoff on Sunday afternoon, to the last whistle on Monday night, all you think about is football. You eat it in the form of chilli and cheese. You drink it in the form of Budweiser beer (unless you had a particularly hard Saturday night, in which case you drink football in the form of orange juice and aspirin). You sleep it in the fitful rest of a man who took a lousy quarterback in the fantasy draft.

The remainder of the week is nothing more than waiting for football to come back around again. You check the injury reports, the stats, the blogs. You watch SportsCenter for the 18th time, never realizing that the highlights won't change: the receiver who dropped the touchdown pass and blew the spread along with your fifty bucks will still drop the damn pass, no matter how many times you watch it.

Football is a love/hate affair. Sometimes it is as boring as a young woman, other times as torturous as a Motley Crue reunion tour. But always it is what we want it to be: a game filled with the expectation of victory, and a chance to watch someone get his clock cleaned.

That is, unless you're traveling.

Travel is a hell of a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot about many people and places. One thing you learn very quickly is that nobody watches football beyond the borders of North America. Not only that, but the sad sacks call a completely different game by the same name.

It would seem to make sense. A bunch of wimps running around on a field kicking a beach ball to each other. They use their feet a lot, so hey, the game is called football. Once in a great while, these masters of the Olympic event 'jogging' will even kick the ball towards a barn-sized net. And, once in an even greater while, the ball will go into said net. After that, the fans sing a song and beat the crap out of each other. Where do I sign up?

When there is more violence in the stands than there is on the field, the activity you are playing is a game, not a sport. And when the game you are playing is 90 minutes long but can still end in a 0-0 tie, you are playing an extremely stupid game at that.

I'm a little bit tired of hearing that sooner or later, soccer is going to be a popular sport in the United States and Canada. It isn't. It never will be. Everytime I sit down to watch a football game in a foreign country (relegated to the back of the bar with the small TV, sans volume) some European loudmouth thinks it's time for a soccer discussion. It goes something like this:

"What are you watching, mate?"

"Football," grumbles the irritable Canadian, as he picks up his tuna sandwich because the place doesn't serve wings.

"That ain't football. That's rugby for women."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Football is what you call soccer."

"Yeah."

"Soccer's big in America now. It's going to be bigger than baseball."

"Why's that?" asks the very irritable Canadian, though he already knows the answer because he's heard it five hundred and sixty-two times before.

"All the kids are playing it. When they grow up, they'll play soccer."

563.

I would wager that right now, some poor Canadian is sitting in a Norwegian bar that has satellite reception, and he is listening to the same garbage.

To the Euro-weenies, let's put something on the record: the kids who play soccer are there because their parents won't let them play a violent sport. Football and hockey are out, and fastballs scare the hell out of mothers, so baseball's out, too. Unless you're over six feet tall by the time you hit grade 11, basketball is also a no-go. That leaves soccer. Your passionate game of kick-the-ball-around is there to raise the self-esteem of children that wouldn't have amounted to a damn on the grid iron, and to keep hockey players in shape during the off-season.

People are not going to watch soccer in North America. It's made up of all the people that got cut from the other sports. Sure, there might be a few kids that played soccer as their first choice, but who the hell wants to watch a guy like that play anything? And just because we did something as kids doesn't mean we're going to keep doing it as adults. Using the old 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' might have worked while hiding in the cushion fort, but it doesn't go over so well on the nightclub circuit.

One thing that does fascinate me about soccer and its fans are the songs they sing. Before the game and after, they trash the USA to no end and make fun of the sports they play. But during the game, virtually all of the songs the Europeans sing (yes, including the O-lay, O-lay, O-lay ditty) were written by American composers. Weird.

Euro-boobs aren't the only ones who don't watch football, yet complain about it constantly. South Africans and Australians are even worse, because they play rugby.

I dig rugby. It's a tough game to play. It was the forerunner of football. Indeed, the Canadian Football League was known as the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884, then the Canadian Rugby Union, then the Canadian Football Council, and finally the Canadian Football League in 1958.

The Canadian and American games were both born from rugby, and one of the first recognized football games took place between Harvard and McGill University. There isn't enough time to go into all the ways that the American and Canadian games diverged, but there is enough time to tell the bonehead from Tennessee whom I met that the CFL didn't start in the 1970's, and they didn't change the 4-down rule to 3-downs 'just to be different.' The 4th down appeared in American college ball in 1912. The Canadian game simply kept the 3-down format.

Football came from rugby, but it was a much tougher game than rugby from the start. On-field deaths were not unknown, and a closed fist punch to the face was a legitimate way to bring a man down.

Aussie Rules football might look tough, until you notice that the highlights you see are the only hits that took place in the entire game. Rugby itself is missing two critical elements: the football rule that allows you to hit a man as hard as you can, anywhere on his body, without needing to use your arms, and the ability to blindside the man even if he doesn't have the ball.

Rugby tackles hurt. Football tackles are devastating. But it is the rugby player and rugby fan who freaks out whenever the subject of which sport is 'tougher' comes up. Football fans and players pay this argument no mind for two reasons: we know football is tougher, and we don't watch rugby, anyway.

The pads argument is usually the first to come out. Rugby fans complain that football players wear pads and helmets. This argument stuns me with its idiocy. Do the rugby fans mean to tell me that a game that requires armour in order to avoid serious injury or death is less tough than the one that does not? And do they believe that football started with all of this armour in the first place? Fat chance.

The history of football is actually a history of governing councils trying to keep young men from killing each other. Americans and Canadians took rugby and turned it into the most cruel, barbaric sport imaginable. Since then, it has been a struggle to keep it as sane and safe as possible while still allowing men to beat each other's brains in.

As far as I know, rugby has not changed any of its major rules in decades. The absence of helmets and flak jackets on their players is proof positive that the game is not, on the whole, life threatening (rugby does not allow a tackle above the shoulders, nor does it allow 'hitting,' that is, tackling without using the arms to wrap up).

A quick look at football's history tells you why the game was almost banned on more than one occasion. In 1892, Harvard used a new formation against Yale called the 'flying wedge.' It was developed, oddly enough, by a chess master.

The front line of the offense would interlock their arms and plow forward, the ball carrier behind them. Defenders would have to rip this wall apart to get to the man. It must have been Dislocated Shoulder City. Any defender who fell down was trampled beneath the wedge. Add the face punch into the mix, and these college students would have been a bloody mess.

Which they were. Seven players were carted off the field in what one paper called "a dying condition." There were so many injuries to Yale that they took it personally. The two schools broke off all official contact for the next two years.

The brutality got worse. Wedge formations and the act of dragging your ball carrier forward (in effect standing him up for an especially painful hit) made the game lethal. By 1900, serious injuries and on-field deaths were a regularity.

There's no way that football could be started from scratch today. It's incredible that it lasted at all. Remember that these were college students. Pro football was still small time, and the NFL didn't yet exist. Mothers were shipping their boys off to Yale, Harvard, and Rutgers to get an education, and then watching them come home in a pine box.

1905 was a bad year. 18 college students died playing football, and the game was banned in a number of schools. President Roosevelt finally stepped in and told colleges to clean up the game, or he'd campaign to have football banned outright.

Taking heed, nineteen colleges got together and drummed up some new rules. If you've ever wondered how the NCAA got it's start, now you know (it was originally called the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States; its specific purpose was to find a way to keep football, and its players, alive). The 1906 meeting invented the neutral zone, wrote up some new laws about tackling, and also codified the laws for the forward pass. With the formal entry of the forward pass, football kissed rugby good-bye.

The new rules were a good idea, but they didn't help much. In 1908, 33 more college players would die playing with the pigskin. Someone has pointed out that with a limited number of schools playing ball at the turn of the century, you had close to a 50/50 shot of buying the farm stepping on the football field. Tough odds.

If the internet, television, and SportsCenter had existed back then, football would have been as dead as the players it killed. No one would have stood for endless highlights of college kids being carried off the field, dead and broken. If it happened just once today it would be dreadful, and the second guessing of the game would be extreme. But thirty-three times in one season?

What's incredible is that our forebears stood for it, and that college students still wanted to play the game. Helmets, pads, and various rule changes throughout the years have made the game safer, but only safer in the quotation mark sense. Today, about 8 players a year get killed playing football. That's from all levels combined, making it small potatoes compared to the old days, though a staggering number of injuries flood the locker rooms each weekend.

Concussions, for one. 40 000 of them are reported annually among high school players alone, and those are only the kids that get treated. Concussions are such a certainty that NFL teams have a chart for each player. If a player gets nailed in the head, they know what questions to ask that particular man in order to find out if he's still got all his marbles. And even if he does, that's not to say that he'll have them later on. Former players report nausea and forgetfulness well after they retire, a chronic symptom of having your head kicked in. It will be with them for the rest of their lives.

But, hey, who needs helmets?

It's insane for us to love this game. Absolutely crazy. But love it we do. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that football is by far the sport with the most injuries, and also the sport with the highest television ratings and fan attendance. Perhaps.

Traveling puts me through intense football withdrawal. I love the game, brag about it, want to jam it down a Euro-weenie's throat every time they crack wise. It says something about me and my culture that I long to see a man carry a ball over a white line, even if he has to destroy himself to do it.

But then, what does it say about the player?

Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

Here's a short story from a while ago that you might dig. All rights reserved to the Global Coyote.

Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

He cracked up when they told him that he couldn’t use a hand at his knee to denote a well-hung man. It was the 8th Annual Physically Challenged Conference. He was in the twentieth row. In the front were the people in wheelchairs. At the back were the blind. The blind weren’t allowed in the front anymore because the guide dogs got nervous when the palsied walked by. The deaf…well, the deaf just had to deal, didn’t they?

His name was Harry, and he could feel his mind splitting down the middle when the officious looking woman behind the podium reached down beneath her hemline and showed him the ‘well-hung’ sign. The interpreter to her left did the same, though it made more sense for the interpreter to do it, because he had the anatomy to make it mean what it meant.

The woman told the audience that the well-hung sign was offensive and was now to be stricken from the language.

Harry fumed. He had, indeed, had enough. Last year, at the 7th Annual, they’d told the deaf that they couldn’t use a limp wrist for the homosexual sign. Then the nose-thing for a Jewish person. Ditto the boob-motion for a woman. And now the well-hung sign.

It put Harry over the edge. Not only was he a proud, deaf man, he was also hung like a moose. The censorship of the deaf offended him almost as much as the censorship of the well endowed. Using the well-hung sign had let Harry feel like a human being these past 20 years. It had been that long since the snowblower accident had taken his hearing. Damned if he was going to let the powers that be take away his manhood.

When he left the convention, he knew he was crazy. Just like that. He’d felt the tear in his brain open wide. His deaf friends had said good-bye the old-fashioned way: saying it aloud for the lip readers, and signing it for the sign police.

It was the sign police that drove Harry nuts. They made him out to be a fashionable Rain Man. They wrote articles about him and how people should feel sorry for him. They shouted at him in Burger King when he ordered fries. They asked him if he needed help opening doors. They mimed icebergs when he ordered scotch straight up, and they flapped their arms like seagulls when he asked where he could take a well-hung leak.

The sign police were everywhere. The sign police were everybody. The second they saw him using sign language, they cooed as if he were a child, then asked if he needed any assistance. Being deaf, he couldn’t hear them, and so the woodpecker would land on his shoulder, tap-tap-tap. He would turn, and there they’d be: the soccer mom, the school teacher, the politician, the security guard, the theater usher, the doorman, the coat check girl. The sign cop.

The sign police knew what was good for him. They loved him as they loved a dim-witted child. They knew, deep down, that he needed them.

But not anymore.

He was quite out of his mind when he committed his first kidnapping. It was a fast food cashier. She didn’t ask him which soft drink he wanted. Instead, she went to the machine and pointed at each selection, one by one, nodding earnestly. When she got to Pepsi, he smiled. When she got off her shift later that night, he bonked her on her earnest little head and put her in the U-Haul.

The next day, the shoe store clerk got the nod. The shoe clerk blew it by holding his hands four feet apart when Harry said that he wore a size 13. Bonk-bonk, in the U-Haul.

Later that afternoon, the Helpful Passerby took a sap to the noggin. The Helpful Passerby had seen Harry signing to one of his deaf buddies on a street corner. When the traffic signal said ‘walk,’ the Helpful Passerby pulled a woodpecker and pointed Harry across the road. Harry bonked him on the head in a parking lot two blocks later. U-Haul.

The hot dog vendor at Shea ran out of luck when he waved at Harry fifteen times to tell him that his hot dog had arrived. Bonk-bonk...bonk-bonk (the vendor was tough), and into the U-Haul.

The week progressed. The U-Haul got crowded. He took three Helpful Passersby and a mime from the park. He bonked a woman after a date because she insisted on clapping along to songs and mouthing the words for him. He went to Hoboken and sapped the woman who had told him that deaf people shouldn’t use the well-hung sign anymore. He U-Hauled a stereo salesman just out of spite.

By the end of the week, the U-Haul was chock full of people. They were trussed up with duct tape and nylon rope. They weren’t going anywhere. Harry gave them sips of water through tiny holes in the tape. He didn’t bother to feed them. He found it fun to watch them try and talk beneath their gags while he pointed to his ears and shrugged his shoulders.

The drive out to the woods was peaceful. Harry followed the speed limit and used his turn signals. He tooted his horn a couple of times just for the hell of it. When he got into the forest he found a space to pull off. He waited a half-hour. Only two cars went by in all that time. Perfect.

It took him an hour to get all of the people out of the U-Haul and into the woods. Some of them fought and kicked and writhed. The ones that hadn’t eaten in a few days were easier to manage. He laid them all on the ground.

It was a nice day. Birds were out, though of course Harry couldn’t hear them. He whistled anyway, while the people watched. He found a suitable tree. He pounded metal stakes into the ground at three-foot intervals. He laid the people down in a row, and tied them to the stakes with more nylon rope, immobilizing them.

He stuck his finger in his mouth and tested the wind. Then he fired up the chain saw. It was a big Black & Decker. He guessed that it was noisy, judging by the looks on the people’s faces. Their eyes were open wide. Harry pointed to the chain saw, then his ear, then shrugged. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes.

He began cutting. Debris flew. The chain saw cut like a machete through newspaper. Harry laughed. This was fun. He was thinking about the dumb-ass riddle. If a tree falls in the forest…

He put his back into it, making more cuts, smelling the smell of gasoline and death. Vengeance from the Deaf Man. Revenge of the Poor Guy In the Corner.

When he was finished, the tree was on the verge. He’d cut a fairly neat triangle out of its side. It was on the brink of falling. The environmental people that always hung out at the Physically Challenged expos wouldn’t be happy, but that was acceptable.

Harry dug his heels into the ground while the people stared at him. He pushed. He heaved. The wood gave way. The shadow fell over the people’s faces as the timber came down to meet them. The tree fell in the forest. It crashed to the ground with an earth shaking thud.

Not a peep, Harry signed.

You Can Be Serious

Most of the people I know are of the multi-culti ilk, the types that sit around and give a little Bush-bashing over supper, talk about how wonderful it is to live in multi-ethnic Canada, and mutter uncomfortably when someone mentions Jesus (unless they're swearing; people that have decided Christianity is for the birds still use it when they spill their coffee. "Christ, that's hot!")

I know so many multi-culti left wing weirdos (and those are the majority of my friends) that I sometimes wonder how Bush, Howard, and Harper managed to get into power. The answer is that the people who voted for them are serious, while the people who bash them all the live long day are not. Serious people don't harp on about things, they get on with their lives and do what needs doing, and then they vote. Unserious people eventually turn into blowhards, railing against their enemies without doing anything about it.

Back in 2004, a girlfriend of mine asked me who was going to win the US Presidential election. I said Bush. She thought I was nuts. She worked in a health spa and saw 14 clients a day. Every one of them told her that they hated Bush and that he was going to get ousted from power. They gave her the usual Alec Baldwin insight into why Bush would blow it: he's dumb. I repeated that he would win.

After he won, she asked me how I could have been so certain. I told her that I hadn't been too sure, but once she'd told me that every gym rat and fat lady in need of a deep cleansing facial massage hated Bush, I knew he was a shoo-in. Serious people go to work, feed their kids, don't want to be blown up by terrorists, and only freak out about their skin if they're caught in a grease fire. Serious people think about serious things. Fat ladies with bad skin read People magazine under the hair dryer and regurgitate whatever the New York limousine liberal writes in the op-ed.

It is ironic that the left wingers who pretend to champion multi-culturalism and a kinder, gentler hand are more unaccepting than the people they despise.

Take the evening news. If Bush comes on the screen, it is normal for the left winger to say, "Look at this moron." Just like that. They don't care who in the room might disagree with them. They take it as self-evident that Bush is a moron, and that you'll agree with them.

The same people that say, "Never talk about religion and politics," are the people that talk about religion and politics all the time. If the Pope gets a write-up in the paper saying that abortion is bad, the person reading the paper will tell the room that the Pope's an ass without any second thoughts whatsoever.

I knew a guy who once showed me a cartoon map of the United States. Instead of being called 'the United States,' the cartoonist had written, 'Jesusland.' When the guy showed it to me, he was chuckling. When I didn't laugh, he smirked and said, "Oh, you're one of those."

One of what? If he meant that I was one of those people that don't laugh at lame gags, he was spot on the money. If he meant I was one of those people that take pity on losers like him, he was right again.

Because none of the above examples are serious. They're not arguments, they're opinions put together using the Frankenstein technique: a little David Letterman, a little CNN, a little CBC, and voila: Bush is a dummy, the Pope hates women, and the United States is a collection of Bible thumping imbeciles.

I am always nervous whenever too many people believe the same thing, and I am extremely nervous when their views on a subject can be wrapped up in one statement. "Bush is a dummy." Okay, but he beat your hero Al Gore in all of his college grades, so does that mean I don't have to believe in global warming anymore? Because Al Gore, by your definition, is a dummy?

Serious people look for answers. They seek them out. If they see a word in the paper that they don't understand, they don't complain that the egghead who wrote the piece uses too many 'big words.' They look it up.

Unserious people believe anything that is repeated often enough, and feel it is their duty to repeat it, too. And when they run up against someone who doesn't know the mantra, they feel confused and frightened. And, as these bleating sheep are so fond of telling us, we fear what we don't understand. Unserious people cannot face their own pathetic irony.

Unserious people are afraid of issues that can only be discussed, never acted upon. Global cooling in the '70s becomes global warming in the '80s, which becomes climate change in the '90s. That's three major shifts in the argument in as many decades. How are we supposed to act on it if we can't even make up our minds what it is we're acting upon? The unserious people aren't concerned with that. They're concerned with the idea that they're concerned. They merely want to talk. It makes them feel good. Action takes guts. Unserious people don't have them.

But what about the congressional elections, you ask? Yes, what about them. They're being trumpeted as a victory for the left, and a backlash against Bush. Or, more specifically, as a backlash against Bush's ideals. (Never make the mistake in thinking that someone dislikes another person because they know the person. I don't know Bush personally, and probably neither do you. It's his ideals you like or dislike, not the man himself; put Clinton's words in Bush's mouth and, with the exception of Monica Lewinsky, people would change political parties overnight).

I'm not so sure about a leftist victory in the election, per se. The Democrats gained the House and the Senate, but not by very much. The country is still coming up 50/50. If Bush had fired Rumsfeld before the election instead of after (the biggest gaffe of his presidency), the Republicans would have taken it in a walk.

But they lost, and it would be easy to assume that the Party of the Unserious (that would be the Democrats) are proven correct: that the country should pull out of Iraq. Really? Is that what the election said? I don't think so. I think the election results showed that people are just a hair more ambivalent about the war, not about being there in the first place, but with how it is being fought.

I was at an interview a few weeks ago, where someone was asked what they thought of the Hiroshima bomb site. The answer was, "If we did stuff like that more often to people that screwed with us, we wouldn't be having this problem in Iraq right now." The whole room got uncomfortable, and people cleared their throats, and somebody changed the subject.

But what about that? You don't hear too much of that stuff in the man-on-street interviews produced by CNN. But the opinion must be out there. Dig deeper. Do your homework. Look around.

The Iraq question has a magnifying effect on people, showing them to be serious on the one hand, or unserious on the other. Anyone who thinks Iraq is not intrinsically tied into the war on Islamic fascism is either incredibly ignorant, or pro-fascist. This is the supreme war of our generation. This is bigger than the Cold War, and bigger than Nazi Germany.

In the Cold War, some relatively sane guys had their hands on the button, and they were prepared to use it only if the other guy did first. With Nazi Germany, at least we knew where these guys were, and we were pretty sure that if we knocked over Berlin, they'd surrender.

It's interesting to note that back during the Cold War, there were marches against nuclear weapons, movies made about the world going up in smoke, and pop stars making anti-nuclear statements between bong hits.

Today, with Iran saying they're going to wipe Israel off the map, and the North Koreans test firing rockets into the Sea of Japan, nobody gives a damn about nukes. Why? Because the people who yawn at the idea of Israel being obliterated aren't serious Western citizens. They are, in fact, pro-fascist, and anti-West. There can be no other explanation. All of Israel's enemies are racist, totalitarian regimes, bent on her destruction. To not care what these regimes plan on doing, to not march against them for the first time in history, shows that you implicitly support what they stand for.

Can there be any question of this? Imagine sitting in your office in Iran. You watch as hundreds of thousands protest against Bush sending troops to Iraq. You watch every news agency from CNN to Al-Jazeera rake the Americans over the coals for tying a leash to a prisoner's neck. The outrage and condemnation are far louder than when an insurgent's prisoner has his head sawed off. In Italy, the rainbow flags drip from the windows, with Pace ('Peace') written across them. From New York to Sydney to London to Tokyo, the unserious march shoulder to shoulder, decrying their own governments.

You tip back your chair, shoot your aide for some insult or other, and flip the channel. It only gets better. Your enemy's newspapers expose classified information. The UN, based in the city where two buildings were knocked down by people you call martyrs and heroes, invites Hugo Chavez to attendance. There, he calls the President of the country he is visiting 'Satan,' then hops the next plane home without fuss.

You yourself step in front of the cameras and declare that Israel must be destroyed, that Jews should move back to Europe, and that the Holocaust never happened. And you mention in passing that you want to develop nuclear technology to bring the electric bill down.

In France an average of 80 cars a day are burned by Muslim 'youths,' who just never seem to get old. In Madrid, boom, in London, pow.

Death and mayhem, and blood running through the streets. Then, perhaps to test the waters one last time, to see just how hypocritical and ignorant the Unserious of the West are, you pull out the big guns. While the lesbian Rosie O'Donnell on the View tells the American housewife that Christianity is as bad as Islamic fundamentalism, hundreds gather outside in Kermanshah, Iran to watch a homosexual man hang for the crime of sodomy.

And after all of this, the world and Rosie say...nothing. At least, not to each other. But to you, the racist, fascist, immoral dictator, the silence is deafening approval for the words you say and the acts you commit. How could it be taken otherwise?

His name was Shahab Darvishi, by the way, the homosexual man who came up against Islamic justice. Sodomy, like rape, murder, adultery, blasphemy and espionage, are capital offences in Iran. And before the ladies get too happy with the death-for-rape deal, you might want to know that you need four eyewitnesses to prove rape. And even then, as happened recently to a gang rape victim, the woman might receive 96 lashes for reporting said rape, because it means admitting she was alone with a man not her husband.

It should be plain that this is a battle of ideologies. This is Freedom vs. Fascism, and Good vs. Evil. Serious people know this. The Unserious should too, because it is summed up in one little line that even their feeble minds could grasp, were it not for their blind hatred of the man in the White House.

No matter how many clitorises are clipped from the crotches of young girls, no matter how many heads are cut off, no matter how many cars burn in France, no matter how many Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims themselves are gunned down in the street. The Unserious have tuned out this information. They receive their orders from the fascists, and they march accordingly.

Until, perhaps, it's their cousin or sister that gets blown to smithereens on a downtown bus. Which is exactly why the Americans and others (we Canadians chickened out) are in Iraq right now. It's the oldest lesson in the book. Fight in someone else's backyard. I don't care if the Americans are there for two hundred years, I just hope they have the willpower to stay there. Better that volunteer soldiers slug it out in Iraq, than scores of women and children are decimated at a shopping mall in Philadelphia.

If the Americans were to pull out of Iraq, it would be the singular greatest defeat in the history of the world. Do the Unserious really believe that 3000 dead soldiers requires a Super Power running away from bands of murderers and thugs bent on knocking down our buildings, hacking off our heads, and mutilating our children? Nevermind what they would do to the Iraqi civilians immediately after an American withdrawal. Can they be serious?

This is a battle of wills. A car bomb here, a car bomb there, and sooner or later the Yankees and the Brits will run away. But how far do you run? If you aren't there to keep an eye on your enemy, exactly how long is it until they have their eye on that shopping mall in Philly? Tell me where you run to then.

Seriously.

Thanks for the Refresher, Mr. Donne

So here I am at 33, and there's lots of things I should be thinking about. When am I going to settle down? When am I going to raise a family? When am I going to get some responsibilty? There's probably a lot of good answers to those questions, but I've only got one: "Screw you." Everyone might want the UN to run the world, but they don't run me. I'm a Canadian man. I have a God given, red-and-white right to live the way I want to live.

Can somebody tell me what the hell I was thinking with that last article? And not one of you wrote to stop me.

Here's what went down. I was feeling high and mighty when I wrote that. Top of the world, ma, and all the rest of it. I posted the article, then went down and cracked a beer. I ended up playing an all night game of Texas Hold 'Em poker. Yes sir, just me and boys on my birthday. Beer, poker, and rock 'n roll on the box. Absolute perfection for an independent tough guy like me, huh?

Well, the fates love that kind of of talk. They wait in the wings and cackle and laugh, and they fall all over themselves while we tempt them ever closer to the stage, until they say, "This must be our cue. I mean, how long can we let the fool go on?"

The poker game broke up, and I ended evens. I hit the sack and went to sleep feeling like a man's man. I got up and went to the computer to check the mails. And wouldn't you know it, an email from the first love of my life. University sweetheart. I hadn't heard from her in a long, long time. When I think of her, I still get a smile on my face.

So I open the mail and there it is in the first couple of lines. It's a happy birthday note. Yup, the ladies still like to write me on my birthday. Damn, I'm good.

Then she gives me some news. She's had a baby. A little girl. And I'm happy as hell for her...and then it turns bitter-sweet...and then I start thinking about life. You know, like all of the family and responsibility stuff I said "Screw you" to about eight hours before.

So I saunter down the hall, mulling it over. I'm thinking to myself, "I must be right. I couldn't have written all that unless I was right. Right?"

I bump into my buddy Chris. He was at the poker game the night before. He's another man's man. Complains when there are no hot girls around, doesn't let anyone get too close, enjoys telling a dirty joke over a double shot on the rocks, has shoulders like a linebacker.

We go get a cup of coffee. I lay out my story for him, how the fates have done me in just as I was thinking what a cool cat I was. I thought Chris would be the perfect pick-me-up. He'd set me straight. He'd tell me another one of his awful jokes, and then he'd say, "Chicks suck," and punch me in the arm and I'd feel all better.

"Me and my buddy promised that neither one of us would get married till we were 32," he says. "Then my friend went and got married at 28. I'm 31. I've been thinking for three years, 'Did he outgrow me? And when am going to grow up? And what's this all for, anyway?'"

So we sat there for a half-hour, two men's men, and talked like sissies.

Thanks for cheering me up, Chris. Way to go.

I know what happened. I dropped too many names in that article. Nietchze, Hemingway, MacDonald. You'll think I'm crazy, but one of them heard me. They were up there in one of the exclusive literary pubs, the kind of place where Dan Brown would get his ass kicked if he walked in.

They were all sitting around a table and MacDonald says, "Hey, get this. There's a guy down there who thinks he's got it all figured out."

"Idiot," Nietchze says. "I figured it out, but I went insane to do it."

"Well," MacDonald says, "he thinks he's got it licked. And get this, he calls himself 'independent.' Wears it like a badge right on his sleeve. And he quotes us to prove it."

That draws a bunch of laughs from the whole pub. Shakespeare sighs, and Twain spits.

"Huh," goes Hemingway. And he leans his chair back and calls out, "Hey, Donne. Guess this guy didn't read your piece on no man being an island. You know, 'in and of himself,' and all that crap."

And John Donne wanders over, looks way down at me holding my pair of jacks, and says, "Oh, he's read it. Shall I send him a reminder?"

I got it, Johnnie, I got it.

A Coyote Looks at 33

So this is what it looks like, the view from floor 33. When I was 13, I remember being pissed at my parents for something or other. I remember telling my brother (who's five years older than me), "You're lucky. You can move out anytime you want."

Eighteen seemed like a lifetime back then. When I was 17, I thought 30-year-old women were as ancient as Ghandi. When I was 22, I thought I knew what Hemingway was talking about, and I was pretty sure that I had the world by the ass.

Nietchze was no dummy. He had a line that went something like this: "When you're thirty, you look back at your youth and laugh at how young you were. Then you're sixty, and realize that 30 was youth."

That's well put. A friend of mine was mad at his girlfriend the other day, and I asked him how old she was. He told me she was twenty-five, and I said, "Well, she's young."

But when exactly does "young" stop? When I was twenty-five and in love with an outright bitch from LA, it sure felt like love to me. I didn't feel that young. Indeed, after going through a few months of hell with her, I felt plenty old. Then I got to 27 and fell for a dancer with long-long legs. When I jerked her around, nobody asked how old she was (22), they simply told me I was a goof. Youth is the excuse of idiots. Age is the excuse of idiots who haven't learned any better.

John D. MacDonald probably said it best. "The heart stays young." I have no doubt that a 70-year-old man still looks at a young lady's ass with the same eyes he had on five decades ago. I know I will. Hell, with what the teenage girls are wearing these days, the cops would lock me up if they could read my mind.

My great-gandmother lived until she was 106. She saw the first automobile, the first airplane, the first lunar landing, the first compact disc. But I'll bet she didn't feel that old when she cashed it in. I'll bet she looked back on her life and, when her heart started to fail and her feet turned black, she thought exactly what John D. did following the "heart stays young" stuff: "Please, not yet. Oh, please. Not yet."

I've been accused of being a fairly independent person, and I guess I'll stand by that. Sentimentality feels good when I've had enough vodka, but it bothers me during family holidays. It shouldn't. My family never fights, and in fact my entire extended family is probably the poster child for how people should act over Thanksgiving. I guess I just never really liked holidays this past decade because (with the exception of my immediate family; and doesn't that say something?) everyone asks me questions about when I'm going to get a real life.

That's a good question. I'm 33 as of tonight, and I still have no clue. Gordon Lightfoot's songs are probably a fair description of how I look at life, and I make no apologies for that. I have more money than the guys in Gord's songs, but like them, I can easily answer some asshole over turkey dinner, "You don't know me. Son of the sea am I. If you find me feeding daisies, please turn my face up to the sky. Whatever I was, you know it was all because, I've been on the town, washing the bullshit down."

I harken back to Travis McGee (and in case you haven't guessed, my father and the writers he gave me are the biggest influences on my life), where he scolded himself for something stupid, then shrugged and said, "Well, you chose to live on the underbelly of life. Get used to it."

That's healthy. I think that's a lot more healthy than going with the flow and toeing the party line that modern days have handed us. I really don't give a damn who clubs a seal in the head, and I enjoy veal more than you'll ever know. When a ship spills oil and the SUV-driving soccer mom sings the blues, I yawn and have another beer. Sue me. I've done a lot of yawning and drinking in my time, and loved every minute of it. Most of my memories involve the nighttime, and my education of life has come at the hands of a taxi driver around 3 AM. And I'm all right with that. In fact, though I can get down on myself, I'm probably the luckiest sonofabitch alive.

I'm 33, but I've seen more than most men will in their lifetimes. It wasn't on purpose. Nobody gets lucky on purpose, ask your average movie star. Good luck, like everything good, is unpredictable. Nobody walks into a bar thinking they'll land the nicest blonde in the joint, but when it happens we don't say we're sorry.

Here's to me and mine. I don't feel old. In fact, I don't feel young. But I do feel. And I know a lot of people who don't, from people in their teens, to people with one foot in the grave.

Me and my father stopped by a graveyard a few months ago. There was row upon row of graves dated in the early 1920's. It was obvious evidence of the Spanish Flu. Kids aged six months were dropped into the ground and buried over. They never got to taste whiskey. They never made love. None of them got the chance to see how beautiful Venice is, or how bad it smells.

The dude in prison who screwed it up at 21 by robbing a liquor store, the guy who knocked up a girl at 16 and worked the rest of his days in the mill to raise the child, the woman who married at 18 and regretted it for the rest of her life. Those are the people I live for, drink for, see for, love for.

And man, have I loved. Truly loved. And been loved back. Sometimes it hurt, but mostly it was wonderful. I've dropped a lot of names, so I won't stop now by ripping off Kurt Vonnegut's epitaph from Slaughterhouse-Five: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." We all know that's a lie, but those of us who have lived a decent life know that it feels true.

I have an uncle who likes to hop on his high horse now and then. He heard my tales of adventure and fun, and he replied with a stern, "Well, when is the point of no return?"

I got his drift. He's a lawyer, a politician, so forth. What he wanted to know was, "When are you going to knock off this crap and get a real job?" My immediate answer is that the point of no return is between a Swedish girl's legs, but I doubt he'll find the humour. My diplomatic response is that I try to be as kind as I can while I live the life I want to lead, for as long as I want to lead it.

The reason I love America is that they invented the phrase, "It's a free country." You can do whatever the hell you want, as far as they're concerned. That's right up my alley. Canadians more or less live by it, but they feel guilty for it, which is completely beyond me. It's probably because they don't want to be Americans. I often feel sorry for my country. We try so damn hard not to be the people we are most alike. I have been to every Commonwealth country there is, and I will tell you now that we don't drive like them, speak like them, think like them. We are so akin to our southern neighbours that it's a joke. Our national guilt would be laughable, were it not so disapointing. Still, we try. We do.

So here I am at 33, and there's lots of things I should be thinking about. When am I going to settle down? When am I going to raise a family? When am I going to get some responsibilty?

There's probably a lot of good answers to those questions, but I've only got one: "Screw you." Everyone might want the UN to run the world, but they don't run me. I'm a Canadian man. I have a God given, red-and-white right to live the way I want to live. If you aren't happy with that, then you aren't Canadian or American, in which case I don't give a damn what you have to say. With the exception of the Aussies, the rest of you sold out on your heritage and your beliefs. Leave me and my friends alone. Or we'll tell you to. Firmly.

So here I am, guys (and yeah, this is probably for guys; you morons who got married kept telling me that you live vicariously through me so often that I finally went and looked up what 'vicariously' meant), and I wish you were with me. We're getting old, but for me, it gets more fun all the time. Of all the lessons I've learned about aging, I think Hank Williams Jr. taught me the only thing that can't be denied: "Hangovers hurt more than they used to."

Gotta go. Working on one now.

Lest Neil Forgets

I don't have much time tonight, as I'm kicking back with some rum and listening to music. I was enjoying the reverie for a bit, when an old song came up on the shuffle. It was Neil Young's Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.

The lyrics he sings are pretty good, if you hate yourself for using toilet paper and styrofoam. In Neil's book, mentioning these things count as social commentary, as if I am supposed to feel guilty for wiping my ass with anything but a handful of pine needles.

Anyway, the Rockin line that struck me the most was:

I Don't feel like Satan,
But I am to them,
So I'll try to forget it anyway I can.

That is a perfect summation of the West today, isn't it? And Neil wrote it back when he was supposedly 'cutting edge.'

I watched a documentary today that showed me all kinds of ways that Islamic facists think I am Satan, and want to kill me and you. And I thought, "These guys are nuts." But the thought crossed my mind that we'd stand up to them, or at least hold them off. I thought, "Sooner or later, your oil wells are going to give one big burp, we'll move on to sunflower oil or some damn thing, and you can go back to being....well, whatever you were before you made the headlines in 2001. Hopefully by then you'll let a doctor look at your wife's flesh before she dies of some common ailment."

But that's not going to happen. This documentary showed me how exactly like Nazi Germany the Islamic fascists are, with the added bonus of religion to back them up. Jihad, like life, is cheap. So they're here to stay.

Especially when one of our brave social commentators says, "I'll try to forget it anyway I can," when someone calls him Satan.

"Anyway he can." Meaning what? Getting drunk? Can't do that, they'll chop your head off for throwing back a Budweiser. Getting laid? Prostitutes are buried up to their necks and stoned to death for practicing the oldest profession. Praying to God? Which God, my friend? Because unless it's the dude that told Mohammed he was descended from Abraham (talk about 'hijacking' a religion a thousand years later), you're going to be sent to the mass grave with the other infidels.

Listen: if someone calls me or mine Satan, I'll kick their ass. If they step on my flag, I'll give them a knee that will bother them for the rest of their life. But who's going to speak for me?

Not our popular front. Not Neil. He's too busy forgetting it when someone calls him Satan.

Not me. Not ever.

See You Later, Alligator

P.W. Botha died last night, on All Hallow's Eve, at age 90. If the South Africans were the sort to observe Hallowe'en, they might find that ironic: one more demon coming out to bow before disappearing into the night.

Botha was the South African leader during Apartheid's heyday, and helped to sing the first few bars of its swan song, though not by choice. He came from an Afrikaner background, and had the peculiar Afrikaans accent: not quite English, not quite Dutch, not quite anything. When a person with a heavy Afrikaans accent speaks English, it is impossible to tell if it isn't some warped form of German.

He entered politics at age 20, going on to become defence minister in 1966, and finally Prime Minister in 1978. His run for election that year is notable in that he made promises to alleviate Apartheid, even going so far as to tell whites that they would have to "adapt or die."

It sounded pretty good, but it never amounted to much. Reading about him today, you'll find a lot of blame placed on his cabinet and his National Party, that they wouldn't let him accomplish his anti-Apartheid goals. It's a historical axiom that blame and evil fades with time, until they are more or less painted over with the expression, "Those were the times." Caesar, Khan, Attila, Napoleon, they have great publicists today, but in their "time" they were ruthless men. Stalin's getting better press every day. Hitler may take a while. Botha, for his part, should have a pretty rosy portrait in a few years.

Described as pragmatic nowadays, one looks back and shivers at his major accomplishments. In 1983, Botha pushed through a new constitution (voted on, as always, by whites-only) that turned him from Prime Minister to President. As a sop to the coloreds and Indians, he gave them a House of Representatives, and a House of Delegates, respectively. The whites got the House of Assembly. Matters of "national responsibility" (whatever that might mean) and racial issues were left solely in the hands of the President and his cabinet.

He formed a special forces unit to conduct covert operations against anti-Apartheid groups. He passed anti-freedom of speech legislation to suppress criticism of the government. Under his watch, two thousand people would die, and around twenty-five thousand people would be detained without trial. Many of them were tortured on infamous Robben Island, just off the coast of Cape Town.

During his tenure, Botha came to be known as Die Groot Crocodile (Afrikaans for the Great Crocodile), and had a penchant for finger-wagging when he talked. Depending on which articles you read (again, history beginning to cloud over), the Croc nickname is a tribute to his stubbornness, or an allusion to his ferocity.

It is a laugh to hear of him described as a man who would have done more if only he could, or as any sort of people's man. When it comes to freedom, there is really only one factor that matters: the vote. The fact that he wasn't prepared to give it blacks is really all one needs to know about the man. He took that belief with him to the grave.

If you aren't reading this in South Africa, or have never visited the place, you may be confused about what black means. Black is not black in the North American sense. It is more tribal than racial in meaning. In South Africa, black is considered African. Colored is a mix of anything, whether it be black/white, white/Indian, and so forth (it can even be quite specific: Cape Colored means you're a person of mixed race that comes from the Cape). Indian is, of course, Indian, descendents of people from the sub-continent who came over for jobs in agriculture. In South Africa, the entire population uses terms that would get you punched in the jaw in Canada.

In any event, nobody of any hue beyond white had it good under Botha. I remember talking to a South African who told me that it floored him the first time he sat down next to an Indian man in a movie theater. This was after Apartheid ended. He was shocked not because he didn't like Indians, but rather because he had never seen anyone but white people in a movie theater. He was 60 years old. It was 1994.

Hubris eventually caught up with Botha. The US, the UK, and the Commonwealth passed sanctions against South Africa, and the economic punishment was telling. In the late 80's the rand went through the roof, riots were becoming the norm, the world recoiled at scenes of violence, Artists Against Apartheid made South Africa a rock 'n roll whipping boy.

In 1989 Botha suffered a stroke which would give him a limp for the rest of his life. Then his political side turned against him. He made a statement saying that since his cabinet no longer agreed with him, he would step down as President.

He was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, the man that would free Mandela and oversee the first real democratic election in South African history. The National Party took a beating at the polls, leaving the African National Congress (ANC) in charge of virtually everything. Overnight, the political landscape of South Africa went from white to black. Botha must have struggled not to have another stroke.

He faded into obscurity after that, bobbing up only a few times in the press. He was called before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People were to come forward, confess to crimes, give witness to others, and generally expose the truth behind Apartheid. Botha declined the invitation. As President, he had been head of the State Security Council until his resignation. His confession probably would have been a long one.

He never showed up to testify and was cited for contempt. He didn't pay the fine, and the conviction was overturned on appeal, the courts perhaps playing Ford to Botha's Nixon.

It didn't matter much. The Crocodile moved to a town called Wilderness, and lived out the rest of his days in seclusion. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission blamed him for a ton of human rights violations, but he was unapologetic. His last public statement about the Commission was that they merely wanted him to be a symbol of "his people," and that they wanted to humiliate him as that symbol.

Perhaps it never entered his head how lucky he was. The Truth Commission was set up so there would be no punishment. That was Mandela's deal: get the truth out, and move on. New constitution, new flag, new national anthem. They could have hanged Botha, but they let him walk without a fuss. Was that more of a disgrace for him? That he wasn't an enemy worth hanging? That he and his ideals could just be forgotten? He never said.

Married twice, he had two sons and three daughters. When asked for a statement about Botha's death, the ANC decided to think of them: "The ANC wishes his family strength and comfort at this difficult time."

A short statement, but enough.

Happy Hallowe'en, Devil Worshipper

From AOL News:

BOISE, Idaho (Oct. 28) - A black cat won't cross your path this Halloween, not if a northern Idaho animal shelter can help it. Like many shelters around the country, the Kootenai Humane Society in Coeur d'Alene is prohibiting black cat adoptions from now to Nov. 2, fearing the animals could be mistreated in Halloween pranks - or worse, sacrificed in some satanic ritual.

This is what we worry about these days, is it?

Last night I was out in Thailand, where they're cat crazy. Cats are everywhere. I stopped in at a joint for a cold beer, and a black cat was on the bar, flat on his back, getting some zzz's. He was probably the coolest cat I'd seen in my life. Jet black, just lying there with all four paws up, lounging to the rock music coming over the box.

For a laugh, I asked the Thai lady behind the bar how much she wanted for him. She told me 1000 baht, or around thirty bucks. Another guy came in and I pointed at the cat. I told him how much the cat cost.

"1000 baht?" the guy said. "For what, the BBQ?"

I swear on all the books that the cat jerked its head up, looked at me and the other guy, and then took off like a bat out of hell.

That's a smart cat. Earlier that night I happened by a hotdog stand and looked at their wares. From left to right, the selection was thus: cockroach, grub, cricket, scorpion, and something I couldn't recognize. In a place like that, cats beware.

But in northern Idaho?

More from AOL News:

The shelter's executive director, Phil Morgan, said that while the risk may be remote, the policy will remain just in case.

"It's kind of an urban legend. But in the humane industry it's pretty typical that shelters don't do adoptions of black cats or white bunnies because of the whole satanic sacrificial thing," Morgan said. "If we prevent one animal from getting hurt, then it serves its purpose."

"The whole satantic sacrificial thing." That's almost as dubious as "kind of an urban legend." Well, which is it? An urban legend, or not?

I'm willing to bet that Morgan has no firsthand evidence of a sacrificial rite being performed on a cat, black or otherwise. If he did, he wouldn't have to tell us that it was "kind of an urban legend." He'd be able to say, "Last year ten cats were slaughtered and I won't allow that to happen again."

But he can't. Because it's a crock.

Morgan isn't entirely to blame. The latest laws and rules being passed are for our own protection. Protection from living the life we want, that is. Morgan's just going with the flow. Kids can't play tag in school. You can't ride a bicycle without a helmet. People in Omaha are being told to call 911 if they see someone light a cigarette in public. All massive concerns.

I watched a news conference the other day, where four people were being held as 'people of interest' in the murder of a Florida family. The man behind the podium read off each individual's name and, without a hint of embarrassment, told us their criminal histories. More than a dozen felonies between them, and a slew of misdemeanors. Not one of them had a clean rap sheet. Two of them had been arrested and charged with other crimes as recently as a few months ago.

That a lawman can stand there without shame and tell the nation that a family is dead because they didn't lock up these scumbags when they had the chance(s) is amazing. The press should have been all over him for that. They let it slide, because we're used to it. Letting lowlifes off the hook is our stock in trade.

Imagine standing in front of your boss and saying the following: "As you know, the company's going under because I was late to work three times. Then I didn't bother to call John to make sure something was being done. Then I goofed off for a weekend so I could go fishing. Then I went to Vegas and got some hookers on the company's dime. Well, you're not going to like this, but I cheated on the tax forms and now we're going bankrupt."

Would your boss let it get to the 'bankrupt' stage, or would you be canned after the fishing trip? Should we allow the cops and judges to let it get to the 'family murdered in Florida' stage?

The real concern is when we stop looking at evidence, and start basing our rules on feelings. "I once heard an urban legend that cats are sacrificed to Satan. I like cats. Therefore I will ban anyone from adopting a black cat over Halloween."

The implied argument here is that you're the Satan worshipping criminal. Morgan went on to say the shelter "is happy to adopt out animals. Would-be black-cat owners will simply have to wait a few days." Just like that, you practice black magic and you're on a waiting list that would make the anti-gun crowd applaud. Try explaining that to your kid. "I'm sorry, sweetie, we can't pick up Muffy till after the weekend because the nice man is afraid you'll disembowel her in Lucifer's name."

We'd better start worrying more about the people that want to kill Florida families, and less about the urban legends. After meeting that cat in Thailand, I can tell you that the cats can take care of themselves.

Time we did the same.

Tunnel Rat

Saigon is another in a line of 'communist' cities that I've visited lately, none of them resembling anything close to communist. Tianjin was certainly a communist city. You could tell by the rundown buildings, the filth, and the poverty. But then, even Tianjin served Budweiser.

Before heading into Saigon for the night, I decided to check out the Cu Chi tunnels. They're leftovers from the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lived in them, cooked in them, sometimes fought in them. After crawling around in the tunnels myself, I have come to the firm conclusion that war is a dirty business. It's also muggy. When fourteen people are crawling around in a tunnel fifteen feet underground, filling it with carbon dioxide and who knows what else, it can get steamy. And we were only tourists.

The tour started out with the Obligatory Video. It's the one where you sit and listen to the latest propaganda from the company that is selling you the tour. Nine times out of ten, tours have an environmental axe to grind: the Grand Canyon you're visiting will only remain a pristine wilderness if people stop visiting it. Or, Niagara Falls was a much better place before human beings existed. Or, Hawaii's volcanoes knock over houses in a symbolic gesture of taking back the island.

The gist of the Cu Chi video was this: during the war, Americans killed women and children with impunity, and they bombed the greenery because Americans are mean people who don't respect the earth. That's pretty telling. This last part told me that someone in the Cu Chi region has a firm grasp of modern propaganda: nobody gives a damn about women and children (Darfur), but tell them a tree might die and they will freak out (Alaskan pipeline).

The video was black and white. I wasn't sure if it was old, grainy film stock, or if it was just bad videography. In any event, it had a lot of scenes of Vietnamese people blowing away Americans and winning the day. Except there were no Americans on the screen. The shots were always of smiling Vietnamese women holding rifles incorrectly, or a man making a homemade bomb. Then the video would cut to an explosion of dirt flying in the air, and the narrator would say that the Americans had run away.

Whatever. Propaganda videos don't bother me much these days. Virtually every news channel on TV is an anti-American propaganda piece. Anchormen at the CBC have made entire careers out of it. But for the record, I'm pretty sure the Yanks never lost a pitched battle in Vietnam (yes, even the beloved Tet Offensive, where the Americans creamed them), and not many GIs were pot smoking losers that hated their own country. Most of those people were in Canada, trying to get a job at the CBC.

I didn't catch the end of the Cu Chi video. Me and a couple of Americans left the room, not out of protest, but because we needed a smoke.

Our guide took us on a trip through the jungle. He pointed out a couple of hidden trapdoors. One led to a tunnel. Another led to a pit full of spikes. One thing about the Vietnamese, they sure knew how to make a booby trap. There was the 'fish trap,' where your foot would fall through and your calf would be embedded with spikes. There was the 'rolling trap,' where your leg would be mashed like a sausage. There was the 'chest impaler,' where a board of spikes would fall down from a tree and clobber you in the breadbox.

It wasn't all doom and gloom, however. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire off any old weapon you want. They have a collection of them beside the beer counter: machine guns, shotguns, AK-47s. After downing a quick brew, a few people from our tour decided to let fly. I didn't bother to enlist in our little army; I'd fired weapons before.

I wandered down to watch the action. It was interesting to see how many males thought they knew how rifles worked, and it was comical to see them all line up right where the ejected cartridge casing was going to hit them in the face. The Vietnamese guy holding the rifle told them to get out of the way. Then he told a young lady to come up and give it a shot.

The guide was careful. He didn't take his hands off the weapon until the girl had it pointing down the range. Then he stayed very, very, very close to her, making sure she didn't do something stupid like say, "Quick, take a picture," and point the thing at us.

She prepared to fire. She squinted. She tensed. She actually looked pretty cute. I don't know what it is about a woman in hot pants holding an assault rifle, but it isn't the worst thing you'll ever see.

She pulled the trigger.

Click.

The guide was indeed being careful. He'd forgotten to cock the thing for her. He pulled the slide back.

She tensed again. BANG.

A word about firearms. If you've never fired one, they're amazingly loud. The movies don't do them justice. I had a good laugh when I heard Spielberg going on about how real he wanted Saving Private Ryan to sound. If he had tried that, he would have deafened the entire audience within the first five seconds of the film.

Standing near a powerful assault rifle when it goes off is painfully loud. They're an ugly weapon, not built for pretty. When they go off, your ears ring and you wonder what hit you. You also wonder how the hell people fight a war when a hundred of those things are going off all around them.

When the young lady on our tour pulled that trigger, everyone winced and the women jumped a foot in the air. One of them screamed. As I said, weapons are loud. They also stink. One rifle will cover an entire group with the unmistakable stench of cordite.

A few people took a turn each. Bam, bam, bam, firing down the range. The change that came over them was evident: before coming down to the range from the beer counter, they'd been all smiles and laughs. Now they were plugging their ears and frowning. Others walked away without firing a shot. Seeing and hearing deadly things close up is not as fun as people think it is. It doesn't make you a braver, tougher person. It makes you a cautious person.

Thinking of that AK-47 firing a bullet into an American GI was an image that probably came up for a few of them. It isn't a nice image. The guide himself was all chuckles. While the people frowned and plugged their ears, he entertained himself by catching the ejected casings in mid-air as they came out of the rifle.

We made it to the tunnels after sampling some rice wine. I didn't bother to ask why there was a rice wine hut on the tour. At first I thought it was because the VC drank a lot of rice wine before going into battle, much like the Japanese had done during WWII. I was wrong. The reason there was a rice wine hut on the tour was because they were selling rice wine. Five bucks for a great big bottle. It tasted like gasoline, it burned your stomach, and it instantly made me want to shoot somebody. Powerful stuff.

The tunnels were our last stop. During the Vietnam War, there were miles and miles of them, some of them going more than thirty feet into the ground. Throughout the maze, there were living spaces, storage areas, hospitals, you name it. Americans who went into them would be greeted by booby traps, spiders, rats, and enemy soldiers waiting to stab you to death in the dark. I read once that some of the tunnel rats, as the American interloper was known, would go nuts from the stress of going down those holes.

I don't know if I could have done it. Who can know that, except for a diagnosed claustrophobic? All is know is, tunnels are very tiring to crawl through, they're hot, and they stink.

Our tourist tunnel had been smoothed out since the war. The guide told us they were quite safe. We were only going to go fifteen feet underground. The tunnel was about three feet high. It would be shoulder-width. There were no rats or snakes, but there might be spiders. That raised eyebrows.

Two people bailed out immediately. As we descended a set of dirt steps into the ground, two young ladies came walking back past me. One said, "No way." The other said, "Fuck that."

When I got the bottom of the steps, I was greeted by a trapdoor, minus the door. I dropped down into darkness. A small red light was set into the wall, but it didn't do anything for my vision. There was an immediate left turn in front of me. The guide had told us to expect a sharp turn after every trapdoor. They'd been built to muffle a grenade being dropped down the hole.

I was on my hands and knees, the ceiling of the tunnel brushing my back. The tunnel smelled of dirt and sweat. I felt my way along the wall and made the turn. I could hear my group up ahead, but I couldn't see them. Once in a while there was a flash of light as the guide turned his flashlight back towards us, and I could make out the silhouette of someone's butt up ahead of me.

The air got muggy. We went down at an angle. Someone in our group had the worst B.O. of all time, and it threatened to gag me once or twice. I could not imagine making this crawl knowing that there might be an enemy soldier up ahead with a bamboo spike in his hand, dying to drive it home.

Turn, turn, turn. And quite a few of them, too. Whoever had constructed these tunnels was not a fool. For a tourist like me, they were a simple pain in the ass. For an invader, every turn would be considered a deathtrap. There would be no way to know what was around every corner.

I bonked my head against the wall. I hadn't seen it coming. I felt around with my hands. No way out. Trapped. I reached up, and discovered there was a hole in the ceiling. I stood up, and bonked my head against the ceiling of the next level. Between AK-47s and tunnels, the tour should come with a free bottle of Excedrin.

I crawled through the hole. I could hear people up ahead. I heard the guide say, "It's okay." I knew he was at least ten people and two corners ahead of me, but he sounded five feet away. Noise in the tunnel carried far, and I suddenly regretted saying, "That guy stinks," a little while ago.

It brought up another thought of the American invader. There's no way they snuck up on their enemy in the tunnels. It must have been primal warfare. Wits, and knives, and fists, and the gun as a last resort, deafening you and alerting the entire tunnel system to your presence. And once you did that, how to escape? How do you run when you can't even walk?

We reached a bottle neck. My friend Matt was jammed up. His voice was shaking a bit in the dark. He said he was stuck, that he had to take his knapsack off his chest. Claustrophobia was closing in on him. Only later did he tell me that he'd done the tour to face his fear of tight places. Tight, dark places were another matter.

"You're all right," I said. "You've got plenty of room," I lied.

He pushed his way through. I crawled forward and heard him disappear around another corner. Then I felt what he'd been afraid of. I say felt, because I hadn't seen it. It was a good bottleneck, and it had me by the shoulders. My knees were hurting more, and my shirt was soaked through. Sweat was dripping off my face like a salt shower.

I pushed forward and slipped through. I shuddered to think of a fat person getting jammed in there, yelling for help, and not being able to see help coming.

Light.

I'd reached an exit, steep steps leading ten feet up to the surface. I saw two people climbing the steps, breathing hard, congratulating themselves. I yelled ahead into the darkness. I got a yell in response. So push on. If you're going to crawl through an old war tunnel, you might as well crawl through the whole thing.

More dirt, more heavy breathing, more sweat. The tunnel past the first exit was narrower. That first exit must have been for the people who felt the rest of the tunnel getting a bit too tight. These tunnels had been made to fight American soliders and scare the crap out of American tourists.

And the Vietnamese lived like this for years. Crawling around in the dark, dragging rifles and ammunition, food and water, perhaps wounded Marines. It was Iwo Jima flattened to pancake proportions, the tunnels spreading out around the country. They would lie in wait. And wait. And wait. And when the time came, up they'd come, out of the ground, looking to kill somebody in a green uniform.

They may never have won a pitched battle, but they certainly inflicted enough pain and misery upon their invaders. The Americans got their digs in too, but leaving Vietnam was probably a wise decision no matter how you felt about communism. People who dig tunnels underground and fight a smash-and-grab guerilla war are not going to surrender, it's just that simple. I only had to crawl through the tunnels; the willpower to dig them and make house must have been extraordinary.

The answer to the tunnels, of course, would have been to cut off their head. We can't go into all the reasons the Americans didn't nail North Vietnam to the wall, but the fact is, they didn't. Hence the tunnels lived on throughout the war and lasted to be the pain in the ass they were for the Americans.

And for me. I finally got out the other end after twenty-five more meters of darkness. A shaft of daylight looks blue when it's coming down into the tunnels. It is deceiving, too, because it looks closer than it is.

Finally up and out, fresh air tasting as good as a dry martini. I looked down into that black mouth, then looked at the faces of my group. They were all sweating, laughing, and taking pictures. They couldn't wait to get out of that hole. We drank Tiger beer and said that it had been interesting, hot, and stank like hell, and we were better off outside than inside.

That the Vietnamese couldn't wait to get back into that hole during the war speaks volumes. To them, that hole was home.