But the presence
of the missionaries raises a more basic question: what were they doing there
in the first place? What on Earth gives some people the right to decide that
their view of God or nature or destiny is the right one? What permits them to
conclude that other people pointlessly labor with false gods and false values
and need to see the light? What profoundly arrogant sense of the correctness
of their ideas empowers missionaries to wrestle with the lives of strangers
who may be wearing weirdo native gear? And the same applies to potential converts
wearing the college sweatshirts encountered by the pairs of young Mormon missionaries–prim
in their white shirts, men with thin black ties–earning their bones of
piety by roaming State College USA for lost souls in deep sophomoric peril.

In the fuss
over the human loss and its political implications, what was largely overlooked
is the extraordinary vanity and presumption that underlie the zeal of missionaries.
They make it their goal and active business to disrupt the most fundamental
ideals and values of the people on whom they inflict themselves. The measure
of missionary success is how much dissatisfaction they can create among the
often-poverty-stricken people they encounter. Missionaries only fail when their
victims are holywaterproof.

Missionaries
are frank imperialists. But because they operate in the spiritual realm, they
continue to enjoy a fuzzy kind of permission to conduct a kind of business that
is largely impossible in other less ethereal spheres of life.

Think about
how extraordinary what they do actually is. They are likely to have to spend
considerable time learning the language of the people with whom they are going
to live. They may experience physical threats from people opposed to their mission
or confounded by its presumption. They may have to endure living conditions
that are treacherously inferior to those they could enjoy at home. This is a
real sacrifice even if no one asked them to make it–the dead missionaries
lived on a cramped houseboat in northern Peru. They have to live among people
whose central philosophies of life they are obligated to directly challenge.
And they have to do so in return for wholly conjectural rewards that are mainly
in the realm of spirit. As one associate of the dead missionary said, "If
I get scared and run off, the people on the river don’t get saved. The
goal is to get my ticket to heaven, and take as many people with me as possible."

Even though
that one-way ticket to heaven may be the primary goal for their personal growth,
missionaries are usually concerned with practical matters too, such as drilling
water wells, providing medical facilities and establishing schools that provide
education along with religious assertions. These obviously worthwhile activities
might not exist were they not the religious icing on the cake of practicality.
No other private person, or even social service organization except a missionary
one, might even consider providing such difficult services in such difficult
places.

But it seems
objectionable and kind of cheap to help people only because you think their
moral and spiritual lives are seriously imperfect and they should accept your
particular set of beliefs. The same issue plagues the awkward Bush plan to supply
funds to domestic religious groups providing social services of various kinds.
The fear exists that these groups will want to deliver salvation with soup and
strive to convert the souls of those whose bodies benefit from public money.
The separation of church and state has graced American history. While this maladroit
and unduly pious initiative is not the worst threat in the world to it, it achieves
few benefits that could not be otherwise accomplished.

The same is
true outside the U.S. The greatest spread of the missionary movement accompanied
the imperial expansion of recent centuries, largely or at least most massively
of Europe. That period of history is fortunately over. But religious elements
of it continue, and continue to insult the integrity and honor of the groups
with which they interfere. The amazing conflicts generated by social differences
in the flavor of souls continue their dispiriting grip over the sense of human
well-being in dozens of communities around the world. Muslims in Bosnia trying
to return to their homes and rebuild a shrine are beaten and the structure trashed.
The Pope treks to Syria in what was defined as an ecumenical crusade and while
he’s there the boss of Syria announces that Catholics and Muslims must
now unite smoothly against Christ-killer Jews.

Even though
there’s currently a massive and intricate global fuss about globalization,
few of the whiners about the process see that one of its initial features was
the missionary movement. This has been going on for hundreds of years, well
before McDonald’s produced a Triple Fry-up or Starbucks a Double Malibuccino.
The first defined globalizers were not seeking the almighty dollar. They were
serving the Almighty. They trashed local customs, costumes and credos in the
process, without understanding the meaning of their subversive impact or the
power of their psychopathic jungle righteousness.

People can
and do believe what they like and in sensible countries such as this one they
can properly do so, so long as they don’t violate the rights and wrongs
of fellow citizens. It is a hard-won arrangement, and it works. But the same
high standards of civility should apply to other countries too, even more strictly.
Those who claim that they are civilizing others should not be given visas. It
is almost a toxicity case for the World Health Organization. The missionaries
on the Amazon who suffered that awful death continue to play gospel music on
loudspeakers as they cruise the river. They should shut them off and come home.

In
1992 I published a book called The Pursuit of Pleasure in which I argued
that there were evolution-based reasons for seeking out what provided pleasure.
Included, of course, was food. In addition, I suggested that the wine with which
it is often associated might also, when consumed in moderation, have moderate
but real health benefits over and above the tastiness and convivial buzz it provided.

Needless
to say, this was a popular assertion among people in the wine industry. One result
was that I was asked to convey this glad message at a meeting at the National
Press Club in Washington to advocate the so-called Mediterranean diet in conjunction
with sensible consumption of wine–which is a traditional part of that diet.

The
person describing the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet was Dimitrios
Trichopoulos, professor of epidemiology and public health at Harvard University.
When we completed our respective talks we shared a cab to Washington’s National
Airport en route back to our home bases. On the way I asked Dr. Trichopoulos,
"If I faithfully follow the Mediterranean diet, how much longer will I live?"
He seemed taken aback by the remark and said something like, "That’s
a very interesting question. Perhaps we should put a graduate student on the problem."

I
don’t know if he ever did. But a lengthy article by Gary Taubes in the March
30 issue of Science, the premier American scientific publication, suggests
that the answer to my question, "How much longer will I live?" is, "Not
much." And if the analysis is correct, it will have an explosive impact on
the vast industry in this country, and in fact the world, that is based on the
notion that fat is bad and that consuming it will kill you.

As
Taubes points out, 50 years of mainstream nutritional research and hundreds of
millions of research dollars have not proved that if you eat a low-fat diet you
will live longer. Certainly your cholesterol levels will be lower. But the link
between diet and longevity remains undemonstrated.

The
individual steps of what happens in your body when you have cheese or a steak
are well known. Your cholesterol levels will elevate. This increases the likelihood
that the cholesterol will congeal and attach itself to your arteries and hence
clog them–a malady called atherosclerosis. In turn, this will increase the
risk of heart disease and heart attacks, which will diminish your expectancy of
life.

This
is now the utterly accepted medical and nutritional orthodoxy. It has gripped
the society, in practice and symbolically, in a form of brain-and-mouth disease.
Countless people are embarked on more or less strict diets in which consumption
of a tablespoon of olive oil or pat of butter or hunk of lambchop is the sign
not only of a kind of moral depravity but also a reckless disregard for personal
survival. Fat has become the devil’s weapon. And people who pursue a monogamous
relationship with low-fat carbs and steamed vegetables will regard a date with
a steak as equivalent to an act of flamboyant multi-partner adultery.

However,
while the individual steps of the effect of fat have been demonstrated, the whole
chain of events and their impact has not been. Among people not already at risk
for heart disease (like enthusiastic smokers with high blood pressure), according
to Taubes and the research of which he is the accountant, the evidence is weak
that sharply reduced consumption of saturated fats will increase longevity more
than a few weeks, perhaps as much as three months. As long ago as 1969, the National
Heart Institute stated plainly, "It is not known whether dietary manipulation
has any effect whatsoever on coronary heart disease." In fact, the authors
of the report in which this was the conclusive sentence were concerned that, because
fat is so important to cell membranes and the brain (which is 70 percent fat),
too little fat could be a more serious medical deficit than too much. There is
some evidence that very low cholesterol levels are associated with increased risk
for auto accidents and aggressive interaction. Japanese physicians have found
that low levels were associated with hemorrhagic stroke, and may counsel their
patients to raise their levels.

Since
the beginning of the 70s Americans have dropped their consumption of fat to about
34 percent of their calories, down from more than 40 percent beforehand. The incidence
of heart disease does not seem to have declined, according to a 10-year study
reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998. Nonetheless, the
treatment of heart disease has improved enormously–with more than 5.4 million
heart-related procedures compared with 1.2 million in 1979. This may provide the
questionable impression that it is dietary change that is responsible for improved
coronary experience.

Furthermore,
the replacement of fat-containing foods by carbohydrates may have contributed
to an epidemic of obesity and then diabetes among Americans. The term "fat-free"
on a product appears to provide permission to consume large portions of it, producing
an intake well beyond what seems to be necessary to balance energy consumed and
energy used. Taubes describes how the principal political supporter of the low-fat
push in the public arena was Sen. George McGovern, who had himself gone through
the severely low-fat Pritikin diet program. McGovern then held two days of committee
testimony in 1976 on the subject, and followed up by commissioning a former labor
reporter for the Providence Journal, who had no scientific background,
to produce the first "Dietary Goals for the United States."

In
1977 two government agencies took up the fat/death drama, but only one, Agriculture,
had public impact when it reiterated the McGovern findings, though ample contrary
evidence was available and ignored. The National Academy of Sciences report on
the same subject was far less media-worthy, because all it said was that Americans
should eat carefully, modestly and less. But it did not emphasize killer fat as
the main mealtime Mephistopheles.

The
issue became even more complex when the differences became clearer between HDL–good
cholesterol–and the bad, LDL. Some foods increase both at the same time,
and some, such as fats like olive oil, stimulate the good flavor of cholesterol.
Little of this is reflected in current government recommendations about what is
good to eat. Taubes provides what is in effect an almost hilarious deconstruction
of the nutritional effect of a porterhouse steak. After broiling, the meat is
about half fat, half protein. Some 51 percent of the fat turns out to be monounsaturated,
and 90 percent of that is the kind of benign fat, as in olive oil. Some 45 percent
of the fat is indeed saturated–bad–but one-third of that is stearic
acid–neither good or bad. The remaining 4 percent is polyunsaturated–good.
In sum, as much as 70 percent of porterhouse fat will improve cholesterol
levels compared with an alternative dose of bread, rice, pasta or potatoes.

I’ve
argued here before that human beings did not evolve to eat the carbohydrate foods
to which peasants had to turn when they could no longer hunt and gather–mainly
rice and the grains. A Rutgers graduate student, Matt Sponheimer, published a
convincing report in Science several years ago on his analysis of our ancestral
teeth, which revealed clear evidence of meat-eating.

But
it is important to be prudent about the material I’ve described here–there
will undoubtedly be a major controversy about it, as there should be. I remain
very wary of uncritical consumption of high-fat meats such as prime beef, which
may indeed in large quantities be difficult for the evolved human system to process
(wild game has about 3 percent animal fat, and prime beef closer to 36 percent).
And it seems to me that the Atkins-type diets that replace carbohydrates with
foods such as bacondoublecheeseburgers may be seriously ill-advised.

Nevertheless,
humans evolved as omnivores, and we seem well-equipped to eat well-balanced and
moderate diets of the foods that were in our environment as we evolved–animals,
fish, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries and honey when we could get it.
Ample fruits, vegetables and nuts may deliver protective impacts, and are obviously
one sign of the current good gastronomic fortune of North Americans–our temperate
climate provides us with a good cross-section of an ideal grocery store. And it
would be irresponsible to avoid stressing exercise as a factor in healthy nutrition–we
were born to run for our dinner.

It
appears that people who are committed to low-fat diets almost invariably turn
to high-carbohydrate regimes, many components of which provide physiological stimuli
to increased hunger. Perhaps a dab of fat will do you, to provide a satisfying
experience with food and transform it from battle rations into a calmly sensible
aspect of the pursuit of pleasure.

At the same
time, as Laurie Goodstein of the Times has reported, there appear to
be sharp differences between clergy with dark skin who look forward to help
with their considerable burdens, and those with light skin, who are more concerned
that government meddling in their communal affairs will not be worth any amount
of money. And even among dark-skinned clergy in New York City, there is concern
that the faith-based initiative is camouflage for government withdrawal from
providing traditional welfare. Otherwise, why change an ongoing system?

Let’s
leave aside the nontrivial issue of separation of church and state, because
it is surely possible for people of good will to set acceptable limits on the
links between churches and governments. Of course there are many already–such
as those involving taxation or its absence. There is some prospect that rather
than fight about who gets how much money and for what, if the program gets under
way the various groups that qualify for assistance will cooperate to ensure
that fairness is served and that no group achieves a special advantage because
of its seniority, influential membership, ethnicity or skin color, political
connections, or whatever.

This is by
no means impossible. The initiative could produce an interfaith colloquium in
communities that will serve everyone in good stead. If all the groups involved
share a commitment to the value and power of religion, here could be a forceful
source of social integration. But is it likely? In the mini-phone directory
for the relatively homogeneous neighborhood in which this newspaper is located,
there are 44 different groups defined as churches, and five synagogues. There
happen to be no mosques in the area, at least not yet. The churches range from
the Moonies to Byzantine Catholic to Evangelical Free to Roman Catholic to the
Ocean Church on 8th Ave. Should all these entities qualify for federal funding
as they presumably now qualify for tax status, are they likely to be in accord
about what dollars they should get to serve residents of the same neighborhood?
And we cannot forget that many faithful organizations are also evangelical.
They are eager to gain as much constituency in any community as they can.

As much as
religious organizations may broadly share a common source, the bitterly dolorous
history of interreligious strife everywhere from the Balkans to Indonesia to
Lebanon is not an automatic encouragement. Faith is by definition imprecise
and conjectural. Almost inevitably it is a richer source of doctrinal and other
disputes than if clear and defined issues of "market share" are in
question. In fact, prudent social policy might well be to limit opportunities
for religious competition rather than to set them in place and mandate them
by legislation.

The initial
grumblings of the likes of Pat Robertson, who represent large established groups,
must indicate real concern that simply by being defined as a religious entity,
otherwise marginal groups will secure social and financial status that more
established folk might regard as unwarranted. When the seductive alchemy of
voting blocs is added to the story, as in the Hillary Clinton enthusiasm for
upstate Hasids whose leaders were jailed for stealing public money and who were
pardoned by President Clinton, then the possibility is decisively enhanced for
dangerous corruption of both religious and political groups. And when the business
of tapping the public purse becomes an industry, the community runs the risk
of raising up the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Jim Bakkers of the world, whose
ability to manipulate public sentiment and tax exemption violates the very essence
of religious meaning and standards.

All this may
be dramatic enough. But far more significant for the quality of life of people
involved in all this is utterly undramatic–in fact the opposite: filling
in the forms. This is the time of year when countless people go through conniptions
filling in a government form–the one that has to accompany paying money
to the government. Consider how much more complicated would be completing a
form to receiving money from the government. Anyone who works in a university
or welfare agency or school board or similar well-meaning organization who has
to apply to the federal government for funds knows with acute intimacy the seemingly
endless and ramified data that are required.

There is an
understandable need for the government to act fairly, and be seen to act fairly.
This imposes enormous demands for information on those who benefit from its
coffers. But the search for fairness and transparency can produce paperwork
nightmares for everyone involved.

However thoughtful
and skillful may be Dr. John DiIulio, who will run the program with his associates,
it is almost inevitable that, for example, churches applying for money for a
few staffers and some orange juice money for an afterschool program will find
that they will have either to hire or train people to make the application.
They will have to boast as much bureaucratic skill as the officials who will
read and judge the paper they are sent. This may not turn out as badly as some
commentators appear to fear. But it may. And for a government committed to reducing
the role and size of its intervention in people’s lives, turning active
religious centers into bureaucratic beehives seems perversely inappropriate.

It’s rethink
time.

Finally the violence of
her decision was abated when the Mayor’s prostate cancer became public
knowledge and the association of private parts–the bodily bits that are
designed to fit together–with a theatrical event almost obsessed with private
parts clearly became an unendurable burden to all concerned. So she dropped
her plan.

Meanwhile, the show is a
large national event. It has been performed at countless colleges, often as
part of the yearly "take back the night" seances that are now common
features of the collegiate feminist calendar. For a while it was linked, through
the capital letter V, with Valentine’s Day. Presumably it was supposed
to serve as a political antidote to the sentimental heterosexual romanticism
associated with Feb. 14.

Now it has moved on to more
poignant matters. The V is attached to Violence. The show is heralded as a feature
of efforts to end violence against women. Who can be against that? Evidently
no one, because the latest incarnation of the presentation is weirdly called
"Take Back the Garden"–an evening at Madison Square Garden this
Saturday, Feb. 10. At least 70 actors ranging from Oprah to Calista Flockhart,
all with vaginas and all relatively well-known, will be present and perform
the piece and music in some fashion or another. The evening is underwritten
by the usual array of companies and funds collected will "benefit programs
to end violence toward women and girls."

Other groups have also piggybacked
on the success of the play. Because I’ve contributed to it, I was on a
Planned Parenthood list advising me with great pleasure that the organization
will be staging the play for fundraising–a bitterly wrongheaded decision,
since many potential male contributors will find the entire adventure dispiriting
or at least confusing. But this is par for the Planned Parenthood course of
paying hardly any attention to the males who are directly part of the problem
it seeks to address. Now it is also running the risk of alienating them rather
than just ignoring them.

But what are the monologues
about? As nearly everyone knows by now, author Eve Ensler interviewed a number
of women on the subject of their genitalia, with responses from thwarted resistance
to discussing the matter to outbursts of warm relief at finally having been
asked about the subject. She decided to collect an array of comments, as well
as existing literary material, and had the effective idea of inviting changing
casts of well-known women to read the words.

When I saw it, the largely
female audience responded with whoops of joy and applause for broken taboos.
Clearly the piece resonated with many women and offered a legitimate opportunity
to engage in candid discussion of matters that many had presumably felt unable
to do in the past. That in my opinion it lacked art and heart seemed to have
no effect on its reception. The fact that had men created it it would have almost
surely been vilified as a sexist affront appeared to have no relevance whatever.
It was a female dick joke instead. Evidently, that was and is okay. And Donna
Hanover had thought until medical decency intervened that a public person with
some broad responsibility could be associated in public with a self-satisfied
cavalcade of revelation about matters of high privacy.

There was one especially
troubling bit. It was read by the formidable singer Audra McDonald, who shouldn’t
waste her talent on this sort of thing. It was about an older woman, who from
the text and its reader seemed to have dark skin. She is well-off, has a car,
a fine apartment, a sleek selection of grownup drinks. The story is told from
the point of view of a young girl she befriends, who is happily astonished to
see a woman of her group with such clear signs of prosperity and personal pleasure.
Not only that, but she and the woman engage in sweet and agreeable interaction
with the body parts that are the subject of the evening.

The girl seemed to be about
15. The description was of formal statutory rape. Did anyone protest? Was there
any scrutiny of the matter by anyone? Evidently not. Political sentimentality
overrides all, even lubricious violence against a girl.

The entire episode of the
Monologues is intriguing. It appears to foreshadow an increasingly normalized
and acceptable sexual apartheid in this society. While Madison Square Garden
has been by no means a gender-equal venue, given what remains disproportionately
male attendance at sporting events, I cannot recall an event there in which
there was an explicit emphasis on male sexuality. Certainly not one in which
more than six dozen of the participants were men of public note. The personal
has clearly become political, and appears to have sharply changed the rules
of public discourse for women and about women.

While there are a few wan
men’s studies programs at universities, it is women’s studies that
has carried the pedagogical and administrative day, and it also appears to be
the working rule that members of women’s studies programs will be women.
Certainly nearly all the students are female, and the salience of the kind of
attention to women the Monologues reflects may in part account for the
increase in female enrollment in universities, up to more than half the overall
student population–56 percent to be exact.

Of course, much of this
turnabout is fair play. Men used to be the majority of students, and at some
good institutions the only students. Curricula certainly provided wholly inadequate
attention to the behavior of women, while their concerns were regarded as soft.
Little effort was made to accommodate childbearing to the successful career,
and there were informal barriers to female entry to a host of professional schools.
It’s time such inequities disappear, both for equity itself and because
women have the same need to prepare themselves to earn a living as men do–perhaps
even a greater need, since so many of them will become mothers without husbands.

Nevertheless, the kind of
segregationist sexual narcissism implied by the Monologues may well have
odd costs. If nothing else, many women still associate with many men, who may
be bewildered by their partners. Half the children women have will be boys.
There are no separate countries to which the combatants in the sex war can return
when it is over.

Advertisements for the play
contain the bathroom-humor tag line "Spread the Word." Maybe don’t.
A monologue is one thing, a dialogue quite another.

The
episode is interesting in itself. But it also underscores the strange power
of the continuities of acrimonious history. Since I grew up in Montreal, some
of the intense force that Premier Bouchard faced was very familiar. I once described
Montreal as a city in which everyone defined themselves as a member of a minority
group, including the French-speaking majority. The community was in chronic
search for equipoise, with the French-speakers afflicted by the economically
dominant English-speakers, the latter by Americans, and the smaller groups such
as Jews, Greeks, Italians and Chinese having to negotiate carefully among the
larger groups.

The
Francophone sector is historically interesting because it arrived from France
before the French Revolution. For several hundred years it was one of the most
conservative of Roman Catholic strongholds. Its politics were dominated by a
brittle but effective system involving an alliance of politicians and clergy,
with the economic elite that was largely English-speaking in uneasy collusion.
For example, the premier during the 50s maintained control of newsprint and
the owners of the English papers protected their own interests by failing wholly
to challenge the draconian politics of the regime. Because they were an easy
target, poor Witnesses of Jehovah were hounded from corner to corner–a
popular Bible-thumping trick for political consumption, but a legal travesty
by any standard. During the Second World War, some strident French-Canadian
nationalists–while others served fully and admirably–resisted the
draft, and publicly protested any obligation to fight, ostensibly to protect
either English royalty or Jews.

During
the war itself, the major Francophone newspaper Le Devoir announced that
the Vichy government in France was the best France had ever had, and that the
collaboration of the Vichy regime in actions against French Jews was "essential
to protect the state." As a small Jewish kid growing up under these circumstances,
I learned that when you walked into a Francophone neighborhood you had to adjust
your scarf because your neck hair stood up straight. And not only was there
this matter of the war, but regular assurances were provided that because Jews
had killed Christ, remedial justice was surely appropriate. It was believed
that Montreal had more churches per capita than anywhere else in Canada, and
also the highest ratio of home renters to owners.

It
was actually a rather grim political environment overall, even if the bars stayed
open later than anywhere else in Canada. But it changed massively in the 1960s,
as other places did too, and more so. A new liberalism in politics, the arts,
sexuality and the economy produced a turbulent and immensely fruitful pageant
of changes that had seemed unimaginable just 10 years before. The international
Expo of 1967 and an inventive if spendthrift mayor, Jean Drapeau, turned Montreal
into a vibrant center. Frenchness became a prideful matter of elegance and deftness,
not negation and caution. Business had always been a second-rate occupation
for French-speakers, well below law, medicine and the church. But new energy,
confidence, educational initiatives and skill produced internationally competitive
companies such as Bombardier. Quebec joined the world as an equal economic partner.

Small
wonder numerous Quebecois–largely Francophone, but also with some English-speaking
support–decided this was an opportune moment to establish a separate Nation
of Quebec. Dozens of entities from Kazakhstan to Kashmir to Kosovo have had
the same idea, and the army of flags of member states outside the UN building
grows ever larger.

The
result in Quebec was a vast swirl of political forces. They led on the one hand
to martial law imposed by the Ottawa federal government after some kidnappings
and bombing, and on the other to several orderly referenda asking the citizenry
if it wanted to separate from Canada. None of these passed, but those committed
to separation continued to bide their time. And Lucien Bouchard was one of them.

But
there’s always something. Native Canadian tribes decided that if Quebec
could leave Canada, they could leave Quebec. Linguistic purists sought to fight
English by requiring all public signs to display French twice the size of English.
A spirit of contentious primordialism persisted, despite the fact that the lives
of Quebecers were broadly comparable to those of other North Americans. And
this is what has resurfaced in the Bouchard episode.

A
70-year-old former would-be candidate for election to the Provincial Assembly
spoke fairly explicitly about what he considered the disloyalty of Jews and
similarly recent arrivals to Quebec. His aria was very familiar, and would have
been to people in the 1940s. It was like a cunning virus that stays irritating
enough to cause a minor malaise but not enough to kill or severely damage the
body. In this case the body politic has sustained a cold negative force for
decades. When the Assembly censured the candidate, another group of traditionalists
demanded that he be allowed to speak as he wished and receive an apology.

This
finally triggered the Premier’s exit. The ensuing turmoil was marked by
an important Francophone manifesto from 1000 people, published in provincial
newspapers, rejecting the bigoted remarks and the bitterness that animated them.
This was largely the new generation of activists who wanted to open the windows
of the national house they were planning. The glum candidate has now withdrawn
from politics, and while the separatist movement is in understandable and major
disarray, at least an important point has been made.

Yet
who would have thought protest against generations-old bigotry would have been
necessary in a fluid global age? Must communities depend for acts of political
principle on the history of family extermination of the friends of leaders?
According to the distinguished Montreal writer Ann Charney, Quebec has consistently
shown itself in surveys to be the most tolerant and secular-minded among the
provinces of Canada, which makes the unperturbed persistence of viral bigotry
the more remarkable.

The separation of church
and state has been a powerful stimulus for national effectiveness in this country.
It has permitted people to believe what they want to believe or don’t want
to believe. It encourages people to engage in religious activities as private
endeavors. It provides a bubble of protection from interference by civil authority
for the lawful behavior of religious groups. This is so serious that Caesar
doesn’t even collect taxes from the sacred realm. The system has been effective
for centuries and appears to remain durable.

One of its features is that
it is traditionally indecent for political figures to seek votes on the explicit
basis of religion. It has been a central American contribution to healthy international
dialogue that Americans don’t do Jihad. If anyone wanted to take on the
United States they had to do so because they hated or feared it or didn’t
like its movies or its starlets or its burgers. But they could not raise their
sword to decapitate our national gods because, as Washington politicians are
fond of saying about policies they don’t like, we don’t have a dog
in that fight.

Now there is a danger that
we do and that they can try. Both George Bush and Al Gore waxed lyrical about
the leadership of Jesus and Joe Lieberman confessed to moral excellence because
of his religion. These glistening pieties not only made normal digestion difficult
but they were exceptionally maladroit positions to establish with the world
watching.

Especially in those parts
of the world composed of Jihad summer camps, as in Pakistan or elsewhere. There,
young warrior pietists are trained in regimes that make Army Ranger drill sergeants
seem like guidance counselors in Berkeley, CA. There are 14 private armies in
Pakistan all eagerly producing commando suicide fighters enrolled perhaps at
age 14 and once fully engaged in their noble work unlikely to survive more than
four years. From a remarkable report in the Los Angeles Times of Dec.
28 by Robin Wright, we learn that these individuals decide that "Jihad
gives life purpose. Without it we are useless." Some 2200 recruiting stations
gather together thousands of youngsters who live in some 128 or more self-sustaining
compounds after demonstrating their readiness to serve and Make a New Start
by destroying their families’ television sets. Very serious young men,
obviously.

Some of the stimulus for
this emerges from the desperate state of Pakistani civic life–itself the
only country explicitly formed on religious grounds and which has endured decades
of corrupt government and collapsing institutions. But the overriding justification
for the effort of the Jihadi is religious zeal and a commitment to establishing
Taliban-like conditions first in Muslim communities such as those in Nigeria
and Indonesia and then–Kansas.

Osama bin Laden’s team
may receive the best publicity of the killer groups. But his is only one of
a number and competition among them for attention and choice assignments is
surely not impossible. They have no capital city and no formal structure but
are everywhere. By definition, groups inhaling the gas of religion have a fertile
source for conflict, namely arguments about perfection and how to achieve it.
And it would not be the first time if innocent bystanders are dragged into struggles
and suffer from the skillful murderousness of trained owners of fine weapons.
This is to say nothing of what such temptestuous manipulations of religious
symbolism will mean for the stability of the arch-monarchies in the Gulf region.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have
already formed, on Dec. 31, the Gulf Cooperation Council for military purposes.
But it is not clear how much of its activity will focus on the challenges to
authority from the elusive empire of Jihad or how easy it will be to separate
the religious fundamentalists supporting the system from those determined to
destroy it.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas
it has become clear that the world’s security situation has taken a sharp
turn for the really worse, because of these recent entrants to the battle for
truth and perfection. In late December the UN approved a joint U.S.-Russian
(!) resolution asking the Taliban please to hand over bin Laden or endure an
international embargo on their enthusiasm for armaments. The presidents of India
and Kazakhstan among others have stimulated efforts to create regional antiterrorist
alliances and 2001 will be marked by an intense effort to generate international
cooperation against shadowy enemies whose principal goal is to be enemies of
those they define as evil. And they are increasingly skilled and experienced
and lethal.

That’s why the pious
politicians who so eagerly murmured about their fabulous rectitude during the
election should shut up about it. It is now becoming dangerous. Their theatrical
sanctimony may attract threats to us all.

It is all very well for
the conservative wing of the government-to-be to be thrilled by the granite
traditional beliefs of some Cabinet appointees and by the thought that at last
moral purity will sweep the land like a brisk spring wind from the North Atlantic.
In the stately alternation of U.S. government between secular lawyers and pious
deacons, it appears to be the turn of the latter group. That’s how the
system worked itself out.

But let’s not attract
the wrong kind of attention for unnecessary reasons of self-righteous sentimentality.
America has enough enemies because it is strong, rich, amusing, noisy, you can
buy cheese at midnight, drive for days without hitting water, adventurers pay
smugglers to sneak them into Arizona rather than Afghanistan. This truly bothers
people. Now that politicians have their votes and jobs and parking spaces, perhaps
they will leave off their theological musings because someone with a Kalashnikov
or Scud or anthrax cocktail and a headset tuned to his own line to divinity
may take dangerous offense.

The nail salon is a perfect
location for dealing with both issues at relatively modest cost. The omnipresent
mirrors and the attention of the attendants provide to the client a sense of
unostentatious luxury and at least temporarily elevated personal importance.
It’s the equivalent of "getting your hair done" without provoking
any uncertainty about which style and cut to aim for. It is all quite straightforward.

And yet there’s more
to it, rather a lot more. Among all the primates, including us, grooming interactions
are highly satisfying and appear to generate positive impacts on mental and
physical health. If you survey a group of nearly all the varieties of primates–a
few are almost always solitary–you will see the individual animals in a
clump, and very often they are in direct physical contact, perhaps carefully
inspecting each other’s skin, perhaps removing insects, perhaps mining
for flecks of salt from dried sweat, which they then consume.

It’s obvious that these
interactions are gratifying, and animals excluded from them are usually the
lowest-ranking members of the group. The higher the status, the more the grooming
is the general rule. Subdominants appear willing to groom the dominant animals,
and the bonds of social structure may be as well reflected by picking fleas
as more aggressive interactions.

And the animals are expert
groomers. They appear to know what works to create social affinity. It can be
a quite striking skill. Once I visited a friend who was doing research on chimps
at the London Zoo and she gave me to hold a juvenile, which was in itself a
generous emotional experience. But then the creature did something I thought
remarkable. About three months earlier I had endured a fairly clear cut on the
top of my hand, near the thumb. It had healed well and, I thought, completely.
But not to the chimp, who instantly perceived the nearly invisible memoir of
the wound and began with sweet enthusiasm to pick away any invisible insects
and then licked the area intently. And it was only a first date. You had to
be there. But you also had to melt.

Grooming is clearly not
solely part of the entertainment industry. Some fascinating research on capuchin
monkeys of Central and South America by a Columbia University graduate student
in anthropology, Ximena Valderrama, and several coauthors reveals that the animals
have learned that if they smear their bodies with a kind of 4-inch millipede,
the insects’ chemicals with which they defend themselves also provide stronger
insect repellency than any known human product. Since they live in an area afflicted
with bountiful mosquitoes, their mastery of primate pharmacology provides remarkable
benefit to their quality of life. These mosquitoes are not only as annoying
as only mosquitoes can so vilely be, but also they carry the eggs of a miserable
fly that lodges beneath the skin until they emerge as maggots, bringing infection
and pain. To prevent all this, the capuchins rub the millipede over their entire
bodies. They pass the desirable millipedes from one to the other, like a 1960s
spliff. If an individual animal is unable to secure an insect of his own, he
will rub his body against an already-repellent chum. While the animals are normally
hierarchical about resources and grooming, in this matter they seem to be completely
egalitarian. Everyone gets the medicine in a kind of universal monkey healthcare.

For some reason, the nail
salons reminded me of a dazzling piece of research on the behavior of doves
by Mei-fang Cheng of the Institute for the Study of Animal Behavior at the Rutgers
University campus at Newark. With jaw-dropping virtuosity, Dr. Cheng was able
to develop astonishingly punctilious techniques for studying the interaction
between events in the brain, the endocrine system and the behavior of this tiny
bird. She found an unexpected feature of the creature’s sexual repertoire.
Among songbirds and the dove too usually it’s the male who bursts into
song to advertise his desirability to females and to allow them an opportunity
for comparison shopping. They will then make their reproductive choices on the
basis of what they decide must be a male’s health, hierarchical position
and the quality of the territory he is able to control.

But these females very occasionally
sing too. And when they burst into song they also trigger ovulation!

This is extraordinary. It
is reminiscent of the rabbit, which is such a famous and prolific reproducer
because, with deft natural efficiency, the female begins to ovulate when she
copulates.

When I first encountered
this study of singing and ovulating doves, what flashed through my mind was
Maria’s timeless celebration as she faced her mirror in West Side Story–"I
Feel Pretty." What a song! and what an assertion of sexual pride and confidence!
And is there some connection between preparing for a date and the internal turmoil
of reproductive readiness? Of course the cycles of humans are nothing like those
of rabbits and doves. However, there may be more impact of social events on
deep physiology than we expect. Everything we learn about human beings suggests
that this is so.

Is this what the nail salons
are about? Of course not. And yet there is a hauntingly plausible trinity of
connection between doves, capuchins and people. Next time you pass one of their
sleekly clean windows, look inside a salon and ask: What is going on in there?
What are those well-dressed apes doing?