Back to Rick’s!

            It feels so great to get back to this spot and to put the day-to-day grind behind me. To get away from Lawrence and the stale American homefront for a while. A KU Final Four basketball cap on my head and an FDNY baseball cap on Janet’s, cold beverages in our hands ...

 
~

April 30, 2002

Amsterdam, Holland

Queensday in Amsterdam:

A Terror War Street Party

                        It felt so good getting back out on these streets that I somehow allowed the great Dutch national holiday of Queensday to swallow me up whole in its revelry. Janet and I joined our Amsterdam friends Mark and Bart and took a combat-free 12-mile party hike to just about everywhere a person could go in central Amsterdam in one day.

            We didn’t keep a low profile.

            We didn’t ever once think about our security awareness.

            In fact, we ignored the US State Department travel warning altogether in nearly every regard.

            Except that part about varying our route.

            Because on Queensday in Amsterdam , we’d have had a difficult time varying our route any more than we did on this day.

 

 

                        Queensday was a hoot!

            The day began in typically bizarre Queensday fashion when a couple of Dutch youngsters set up a Horn-In-A-Can sidewalk stand right under our regular room at the Hotel Sint Nicolaas. The huge Dutch windows in that room were no match for the noise that comes from a horn-in-the-can stand...

            We were barely conscious when we first heard them setting up on the sidewalk three floors below and advertising their stock by letting off a few long demonstration blasts from their horn-in-a-can samples. The salesmen did a little bit of barking, but most of their time was spent filling the air with the noise they were selling;

 

  AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNKKKK!!
             AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNKKKK!!!
                AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNKKKK!!!

 

            Then it got quiet as we heard a customer approach. We heard a little murmuring as the horn-in-a-can deal was made. Soon we heard the customer (now in possession of his own horn-in-a-can and at the controls) fire off a couple of short practice blasts;

 

            AUUUUUUUUUNNNKK!!!

              AUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNKK!!!

 

            And as the customer walked away down the brick street we could hear him exercising his horn-in-a-can as he went. The horn blasts getting longer and softer as the horn blower got the hang of his can and got farther and farther away from Janet and me in our bed in room 23 at the Hotel Sint Nicolaas. Still trying to hang onto a quickly vanishing sleep.

 

             AUUUUUUNNNKK!!!
                AUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNKK!!!
                   AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNKK!!!

                      AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNKK!!!

                                             AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNKK!!!

 

            The second time that happened both Janet and I woke up together laughing out loud. A great way to start Queensday in Amsterdam . And after a bath in our favorite bathtub in the world, some breakfast, and a coffee --- we headed out from the Sint Nicolaas up past the train station and down the rainy but already bustling Damrak boulevard to meet Mark and Bart on Voorburgwal canal.

            On the way down the Damrak --- shortly after discovering that goofy orange hats and sidewalk sales were Queensday holiday traditions --- I bought myself a goofy orange Queensday hat from a sale booth. I was hell-bent to squeeze Queensday dry of its fun, and so I had to be properly attired for the mission.

            We met Mark and Bart inside at Rick’s Cafe because a steady light rain was falling and it was too wet to sit outside on the terrace. Amsterdamers weren’t letting the rain bother them much though, the bands and beers firing up all over town despite the weather, and so we ordered an early-morning round of drinks and watched the Queensday parade gather steam out the second floor windows of Rick’s Cafe.

            And instead of just sitting and watching the invigorating Amsterdam street parade go by me (which is my want to pleasurably do when I’m in town and uninspired by art), I joined in with the holiday fun and barely used the only camera I packed along for the day. And then only digging it out for a snapshot or three along the way.

            Queensday is the national day of play, not work --- so I decided I’d just take the day off...

            Amsterdam, on any typical day, is the culture capitol of the Western world. A social cornucopia of sensory street theater flowing through the most sexy, most alive, and most creatively cutting edge streets on the face of the Earth. But on Queensday, the bawdy Amsterdam personality explodes and everyone gets in on the act --- even the nerds, and the business stiffs, and the Amsterdam street photographers who all need a break from obsessing about math, money, and the streets of World War III.

            Queensday is officially a celebration in the honor of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands --- and God Save the Queen! But over the years the national holiday has become much more. Now it’s everything Dutch and in such quantities and at such volume that it makes peoples heads spin.

            Yes! And by all means, God save the queen!

 

            While strolling and drinking and dancing and buying sidewalk sale stuff all over Amsterdam , I saw the damnedest things. Like I do every working day on the streets of this special place. But today there was just so much more of it ...

            I remember early on in the walk seeing a mother race past me weaving in and out of foot traffic on her Dutch bike with three of her children dangling off the back rack, the handlebars, and the front bumper --- all four of them wearing goofy orange hats and each one of them blowing Queensday noisemakers. The one on the rack on the back of the bicycle was blasting a horn-in-the-can as he blew by the thousands of people parading around in every direction, some with their costumed pets. I saw one dog made up to look like the Young Elvis and a twin dog with it dressed up as the Old Elvis. I saw one parrot dressed up to look like Queen Beatrix and another one who had on a well-fitted black and white tuxedo, toped by a goofy orange hat a lot like the one I was wearing. I saw a dog in a bike basket made up to look like Yoda who flashed past us and then over a bridge past an oncoming pack of 14 gaily-costumed dogs being walked by a single transvestite dressed in orange platforms, an orange mini skirt, a black belt, a stuffed orange blouse, and of course a goofy orange and black hat.

            There are more canals in Amsterdam than any other city in the world (including Venice ) and today they were all full of every conceivable boat made by man and owned by Amsterdamers. All the familiar Amsterdam glass-topped tourist boats were afloat, but instead of the usual tourist excursions, many had been rented out today for private canal parties. And there was also a navy of small work barges in the water (with the day off for Queensday) hauling around gangs of beer-guzzling, pot-smoking, big orange hatted, horn-in-the-can blowing partygoers instead.

            Boats of every size and description cramming the canals and barely enough room on the jammed streets for people to walk much less to accommodate that stampede of tiny orange cars (so small you could fit three or four of them inside your average dumpster) dodging the parading throng as they zigzagged through the crowd about halfway through our eight-hour stroll.

            When we got to the Museaumplein we followed a flowing throng and ended up under the walking tunnel at the entrance to the Rijksmuseum (where everyone screams at the top of their lungs from beginning to end as they flow through the tunnel,) and then we ended up at the big Queensday stage and got to see a part of the first appearance by the mega rock and roll group Queen (that makes sense!) since the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991. We stopped for a little while and listened, but there were old tin cans and other stuff to buy at sidewalk sales and full beer cans to guzzle on the streets and half of the city still to stagger through. So we only watched the band for a couple of songs and to hear a little chatter from the stage.

            We headed over to Vondel Park next (the Amsterdam equivalent of New York ’s Central Park ), a place reserved for kids. A place where kids perform and kids sell stuff at mostly kid sidewalk sales. There I bought some more old tin cans from sidewalk sales and watched some of the most clever ways for kids to separate drunken adults from the change in their pockets.

One bright young lad (no doubt part of an enterprising free market lineage) set up his own pari-mutuel betting racetrack at Vondel Park . A fish-racing racquet I wished I’d have thought of first.

            He had a watertight rectangular wooden box on a card table made out of inch-thick painted plywood about four feet long, two and a half feet wide, and about five inches deep. It was full of water and had four lane dividers down the length made out of cut pieces of quarter-inch paneling. On one end of the box (four inches from the end) the little Queensday gangster had a starting gate with a handle on top. And waiting inside each of the four starting boxes were four thoroughbred goldfish. On the other end of the box was a painted finish line.

            At the end above the goldfish stalls was a shelf with four betting circles painted on it numbered 1 through 4 to show bettors where to place their coins.

            The kid would bark into his cupped hands to gather a crowd;

            “BET ON THE WINNING FISH AND DOUBLE YOUR MONEY,” he’d bellow. “A WINNER EVERY RACE! ONLY A SINGLE EURO TO PLAY --- YOU CAN’T WIN IF YOU DON’T PLAY...”

            Soon he’d have a big eager crowd assembled and soon there’d be four Euros down on the betting shelf. He’d collect the money, pull up the starting gate, officiate the race, and then hand the winner his cut of the take.

            When crowds were thickest and self-collecting, he’d be starting up to three races per minute. Making about 50 to 100 Euros an hour for the house.

 

            God save the Queen ...

 
~

May 1, 2002

Amsterdam, Holland
 
A Swing to the Right

 

                        Aside from the “Have Sex, Not Guns” Graffiti I noticed scrawled on a wall in the embassy district yesterday, Queensday 2002 was nearly World War III-free. I hardly heard a mention of it all day.

In many ways Europeans this spring are still just as concerned with the specter of another attack as Americans are and now are more engaged in dissecting the difference that makes one culture seem rich, tolerant, and generous and another culture appear hopeless, intolerant, and backward.

            There’s real fear in Holland and in post-September 11 Europe this season among the working class and intellectuals alike, that the continent is just too crowded now with sometimes anti-productive immigrants. That things have been going from bad to worse in the streets for a while. That the aftermath of September 11 has brightened the star of the anti-immigration movement --- hateful or prudent, either way, --- and that makes my Dutch friends who have always been part of the solution feel conflicted, disjointed, and ill at ease.

            Many in post September 11 Europe are growing weary of dealing with the immigration issue (some call it the immigration problem), and in some parts of Europe the anti-immigration issue has begun to surface in the form of right-wing anti-immigration parties.

            Most Europeans automatically determine that these groups are hateful and should be shunned. Others say they’re misunderstood and should have the chance to talk about reasonable immigration limitations. Many just want the whole issue to go away, wishing that September 11 hadn’t given some of their countrymen the opportunity to propose tightening European borders to outsiders. Wishing the terror war didn’t have them suspiciously eyeballing Muslims (who after all --- could be radical jihad warriors and who just might have filled that baby carriage they’re rolling down the sidewalk across the street with C-4 explosives and called it a baby buggy bomb).

 

            For Allah man ... for jihad baby ...

 

            France is absolutely freaking out this week because the Socialist Party (the global pride of France ) was beaten a week or two ago by a right-wing (and rumored-to-be hateful) candidate named Jean-Marie le Pen in runoff elections to decide who would challenge Jacques Chirac for the French presidency. Just freaking out are the French, that a man who could be molded by his own views and by a CNN Breaking News media blitz into the image of Adolph Hitler --- who could have come from the same streets as they come from and who could have garnered enough votes among their neighbors to spank the street-loving Socialists!

            And in an article I read in the New York Times on the airplane last Friday I also found out that there were other right-wing movements gaining strength around the EU. There was the active party of Joerg Haider in Austria (Gulp!) and there were rumblings of a movement gaining strength in Denmark .

             And there’s even an anti-immigration candidate right here in Holland, who Dutch media pundits think may just win enough seats in the up-coming May 15 Dutch elections to help form a ruling coalition.

This Dutchman from Rotterdam named Pym Fortuyn (as I’ve read in the newspapers) is a little bit different than the other anti-immigration politicians. The press has not yet been able to use this guy’s own words or deeds against him to definitively label him hateful --- although his platform was created expressly to be opposed to the tolerant Dutch immigration policies and although he’s publicly called the religion of Islam backward for its refusal to assimilate. And many in the press have admitted openly that they have thus far been baffled by his right-wing credentials contrasted against the fact that this anti-immigration candidate (perhaps a bigoted war-mongering Nazi after all) is openly gay.

            That intriguing and disarming wrinkle has totally thrown the liberal Dutch media off its stride and has somewhat softened the candidate’s hard viewpoints in the eye of a tolerant and gay-friendly Dutch public.

            It’s not that all of my Dutch friends bitch a lot about the influx of the fascinating Asian and Arab immigrant cultures that color their lives and that supply the country with service workers who motor the Dutch economy. But most of the Dutch I come in contact with at one time or another over the past several years have reluctantly lamented about how the new immigrants, (particularly these new Muslim immigrants) refuse to assimilate.         

            And some fear they never will.

            The Asian-Arab Muslim culture is very different than the Western secular culture, and the bubbling local tension between conservative Asian and North African guest residents and liberal northern European hosts has been building slowly here ever since I first showed up on these streets in the fall of 1982.

 

 
~

May 3, 2002

Not in Kansas Anymore

 

The Streets of the West vs The Streets of Islam:

 

Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Run Amok

 

                        The streets of Amsterdam are sexy, uninhibited, phallic, and often outrageous in excess.

            They represent how invigorating streets can get. Soft drugs and the sex industry are tolerated here because sex and soft drugs are everywhere on the planet and everywhere they hope to control them they fail. So here in this place on these streets they let that all happen out in the open and here in this place they have little trouble because of it. Violent crimes are rare here by comparison to other Western cultures and this attitude that breeds happiness and security also breeds individualism.

            Individualism that comes from a culture that encourages expression and encourages getting as much out of life as possible without hurting anyone else along the way while you’re at it.

            Party till dawn.

            Kick out your heels.

            Paint the town red.

            Just do it --- but don’t rain on somebody else’s parade while you’re doing it or there’s going to be trouble!
            Amsterdamers come from a sexually liberated culture that’s encouraged them to express their creative individualism and they aren’t afraid to get as free as the world will allow them to get. And really --- they aren’t hurting anyone, are they? Because if someone doesn’t like it they can just go live in a more conservative and older part of Holland or of the EU. Like Rotterdam, London, Paris, or Berlin. They should stay away from Prague and Barcelona (too progressive) but perhaps they’d enjoy Belgrade...

 

 

            The streets of Peshawar, Pakistan on the other hand -- as I found out during the war -- are not the kind of places where you’d catch someone skating naked down the street or where you’d see a transvestite take a tragic glamour walk across town in full transvestite regalia.

 

 

 

   

 

 

            Individualism is frowned upon in Pakistan (and sometimes still killed off with stones) and off-color demonstrations of radical individualism out on the street in public without express written permission of the powers that be is more-or-less prohibited.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                        
 

 

 

                                   

 

 

 

 

            In Peshawar, on the other hand, you won’t be hassled when you go out for a quiet dinner somewhere and have to deal with wild youth firing up a fatty at the next table, dancing in the aisles, talking trash, and taking the lord’s name in vein. In Pakistan you can peacefully eat out with your friends and then get home in time for family prayers. That is, if you’re a man.

             Or a woman looking for trouble.           

            The streets of Peshawar after dark have few women on them. It’s too dangerous. Too illogical in a male-dominated place where the streets often sell machine guns, heroine, and hate.

            Of course, even a place as open and free as Amsterdam has it’s down sides, because the West can really be a superficial place (sometimes) that’s too often hard to stomach. A world of augmented breasts and senseless obsessions with celebrity freak shows and Royal soap operas. A place where most of the people (some of the time) root for celebrity marriages to crash and burn just for the sake of their our own wicked entertainment.

            But on the other hand --- the streets of Amsterdam are tolerant and liberated. Content, wealthy, sophisticated, and uninhibited. A place where women and men can be whatever they want, regardless of where they were born. And the streets of Peshawar (though happy and civilized for the many who are meek and wise enough to avoid trouble) are intolerant to foreigners and suppressive to the individual.

            Inhibited, conservative, hopeless for many, and too often violent.

 

 

 

            You don’t get T & A or Bailey’s on ice on Islamic streets. Not like you do on the Western street. Hell --- walking down some streets on the edge of tribal Pakistan, you’re lucky if you can see one in five woman’s faces or even the bare elbows of a single man. The sexual revolution hasn’t done much damage to people who live in Peshawar (in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) at least not out on the street where one can see it. Not this early in the new digital era of the uncensored global satellite TV revolution, the one that’s raging right now in all of Islam, where even fools have learned how to pirate the satellite feeds and who get to watch programming in their houses away from the mullahs much more explicit than a naked skater’s bum shining for all the world and God to see, flowing freely up Damstraat here in Sin City.

 

 
~

Sunday

May 5, 2002

Amsterdam, Holland

 

Common Bloodlust
at the European Office

 

                        There’s an incomprehensible common bloodlust out on the streets of the world today. One that rears its ugly head in various ugly forms.

             This week in Amsterdam ... it’s soccer riots.

            The neighborhood had been dreading this evening for days because they knew there was going to be trouble. The local side  --- Ajax Amsterdam (who I root for exclusively in European club football) had beaten a team from Utrecht for the Dutch Club Championship and the whole town closed down around 6 p.m. to make room for the riot.

            There were brick-throwing soccer hooligans, baton-wielding police, tear gas, and enough paddy wagons to haul everyone away who deserved to be caged. All culminating in tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

            Soccer hooligans are of a special bloodlust breed and I’ve studied them in the pits under the most reveling of circumstances --- accidentally getting myself caught up to my eyeballs in them as part of a throng of several hundred manically rude British soccer punks in the fall of 1982 just after the Falkland War. Riding on an overnight train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen with these shirtless, Union-Jack draped, bloodlust drunk (still all jacked-up from England’s military spanking of Argentina in the war which they all watched the season before on TV) louts. Then marching with these soccer terrorists to a football match that turned into one of the most notorious and bloodiest fan riots in soccer hooligan history.

But that’s another story...

            Tonight as bad-or-worse was happening in Amsterdam just a hundred yards around the corner and up the street from me, I was so close I could smell the tear gas. But at the time of the riot I found myself contentedly sitting upstairs at Rick’s Wild Style Cafe, at my favorite window table reading today’s International Herald-Tribune, writing in my journal, and enjoying another Bailey’s on ice with a smoke. I’d been to guerrilla war zones and to World War III last December, and I’d been right in the middle of one of the most notorious soccer riots in history. I was tired of violence and still put off by the magnitude of this latest era of fighting.

I started reading my newspaper and I lost myself in it and I forgot altogether what was happening outside on the street. At one point I left my seat to go to the WC and on my way through the bar I noticed film on the TV sets of a confrontation at Dam Square between riot police and a mob. Petra the waitress and Jim the bouncer told me from behind the bar that the local CNN affiliate clip was a live shot from just around the corner on the square, happening right now. We all stood there slack-jawed and watched as the cameraman backed down Damstraat toward us as he tried to stay in safer sectors of the bottle and brick-throwing melee. Just as he got as far as the Middle East Sharma stand 45 feet away at the corner (within spitting distance if we’d have just bothered to step outside the door) the picture up on the TV screen flipped to a commentator explaining the soccer riot to her viewers.

            I went to the toilet and then went back upstairs to my table and after awhile I watched out the window as a wave of soccer revelers fled across the bridge. I began to wonder if the police had made another charge and might be chasing the hooligans down Damstraat. Just then I saw even more rioters than before run across the bridge and up the street toward the Achterburgwal canal, and the sight of all that action outside the window of my European Office made me so curious about what was happening that I left the window seat and went down the stairs to watch the TV to see if CNN could tell me.

            But the news people were already on to a more serious rumor, (something about the Dutch flower industry moving all its flower farms in the next 15 years to partner farms in China so Holland can use the Netherlands for all the extra people...)

            During this war I’ve had to endure so many TV horrors --- trapped in a 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box world --- including soccer riots. During World War II (just down the street and up the canal) Anne Frank was trapped for years in a crawl space.

 

            I guess it’s not even close...

~

May 7, 2002

Amsterdam, Holland

Assassination on the Europe Front:
The Day Holland Made A Messy Right Hand Turn ...

 

                        Janet and I decided that today would be a perfect day to get out of Amsterdam for a day trip and to take the looping Dutch city-tour train that circles central Holland and makes stops in Utrecht , Rotterdam , The Hague and Haarlem.

            On our way out of town we passed near the Amsterdam outskirt village of Hilversum (the broadcast center of the Netherlands between Amsterdam and Utrecht ) where the shortwave Radio Netherlands (Radio Amsterdam) broadcasts I get back in Kansas originate from.

            At Utrecht Janet and I got off the train and took an hour-long walk. We walked around the huge Dom Tower Church and I showed her the town and the restaurants and cafes I’d gotten to know in Utrecht during the two-month-long Dutch language course I took there at the University of Utrecht during my nine-week fall 2000 Amsterdam in the Rain shoot.

            Then we got back on the loop and took the train to Rotterdam. The place Amsterdamers love to hate. The place my Amsterdam friends tell me lives to work rather than works to live --- like people should. A place with inferior soccer teams and an outlook on life not much worthy of an Amsterdamers time.

            We walked from the train station into the city and found some lunch at a falafel stand on the street and afterward ended up at an Arabic cafe where the menus were in both Arabic and Dutch but where none of the eight people present spoke either English or Dutch. We ordered beverages and coffees by pointing to a menu and after enjoying our stop we took an hour-long walk and tram ride to see the Erasmus Bridge , probably my favorite scenic stop in Rotterdam. A sweeping single-anchor suspension bridge so graceful and kinetic in its design, so light in its movement and lilt, that it’s referred to locally as, the Swan.

            After a return tram ride through downtown, we jumped back on a train and headed to The Hague where we toured around the historic Noordeinde Palace and the Dutch Parliament and the charming antique streets there. Stopping at a cafe to pound down some more coffee and to take a load off our feet.

            During our visit to the parliament we ran into the tail end of a political rally by supporters in favor of that gay Dutch anti-immigration candidate I’d been reading about.

            After jumping another train we ended up in Haarlem , a place Janet and I have visited together on several occasions on the way back from North Sea coastal adventures at Zandvoort beach. We made two stops in Haarlem . One at Sint Bavokerk (Saint Bavo) Square for an outdoor beer and another on the way back to the train station at a bar that also doubled as a coffeeshop.

            It was there that Janet and I experienced a September 11-like moment in reverse --- sort of. A moment we never would have quite understood on September 10 of last year.

            The cafe was another Middle-Eastern joint, this one crowded with about 20 or 30 immigrant patrons, mostly Arabic and Asian men stopping by for a beverage or a smoke after work. Language was also a bit of a problem up at the bar, but we were able to order after one of the customers was summoned from his party who could speak both Dutch and English and also Arabic. Janet and I sat on high stools at a small round table at one of the front streetside windows and we’d been there for several minutes when suddenly the TV set --- tuned into the local CNN news affiliate --- gave some astonishing news.

            The whole cafe got deathly quiet and the bartender turned the TV up near full volume so everyone could hear the newsbreak.

 

            Then we all just went slack-jawed...

 

            For Janet and I, it was reminiscent of the afternoon of September 11 when we shared being attacked with the Dutch and other Europeans, but this time the attack was in Holland and it was our turn to commiserate with our Amsterdam friends.
 

            Here’s what we heard happened, as we knew the story by the end of the night; [5]

* Pym Fortuyn, the openly gay Dutch anti-immigration candidate was assassinated by a lone gunman this afternoon in Hilversum , 12-miles southeast of Amsterdam, after taping a radio interview there.  The gunman was arrested and described by police as a white man of Dutch nationality.

* Shortly after the announcement of the assassination, police in The Hague clashed with hundreds of Fortuyn supporters near Parliament as the cabinet held emergency talks about postponing the May 15 national elections in the Netherlands. Protesters smashed shop windows, and at least two cars were set ablaze in a parking garage under government offices. Police in riot gear dispersed the angry crowds with dogs and water canons, and detained several of the rioters.

* Dutch 3-FM Radio said that one of Fortuyn’s answers during the radio interview proceeding his death in Hilversum included his ironic statement that, “I’m not going to die very soon. I’m going to live to be 87 ...”

* Ad Melkert, the new leader of the ruling Labor Party said about the assassination; “It’s a low point for Dutch democracy.” The assassination was believed to be the most prominent killing of a European politician since Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in Stockholm in 1986. In Dutch history, the first leader of the Dutch republic, who led the war for independence from Spain , William the Silent, was the last Dutch politician to be assassinated --- more than 400 years ago in 1584 in the city of Delft.

* Other parties (following Pym Fortuyn’s lead and legacy) pledged to re-examine Holland ’s generous refugee and immigration policies. (About 1 person in 8 in the Netherlands comes from a non-Dutch background, and nearly half of those come from Islamic backgrounds).

 

    On the way back to Amsterdam after hearing word of the assassination, I found a September 11 photography book for sale at the Haarlem train station called Oh, my God! I bought a copy and spent the train ride back to town reading it and thinking about the implications of today’s shooting and how it related to what happened the last time I was in Amsterdam last September. About how once again I’d just (for the second time in three days) watched CNN report to me about street violence happening just around the corner from me on the Europe front.

 

 
~

June 14, 2002

Lawrence, Kansas

 
Flag Day

 

            It was too hot to go outside today, and without the benefit of a hooked-up cable TV (and only listening to overseas radio all day) I didn’t realize that today was Flag Day until nearly midnight. But alas, I had no flag to fly anyway.

            Maybe next year ...

 

 ~~~
June. 22, 2002 to August 26, 2002

Summer Heat

 

~
June 22, 2002
Lawrence, Kansas

An End to the Season of Aplomb:

 

(I Couldn’t Help But Notice)  

 

 

Headline News *

Time and Newsweek both released finger-pointing editions of their magazines calling September 11;

The most massive failure of military and

  intelligence readiness in America ’s history.

 

 

 

                        I couldn’t help but notice lately that while I was busy cheering for Jayhawk basketball glory and wandering around the streets of the European theater, and while the civilized world was winding down its war machine in Afghanistan and finishing up the recovery at Ground Zero and while Bush was trying to start new wars with just about everyone else, humanity (as a whole) had largely backslid out of the September 11 shock that had dulled its senses and left it meek with grief and sorrow and much too polite for its own good.

            Beware the fury of a patient man, as the saying goes ...

             I couldn’t help but notice the slide because I’ve seen people going out of their way to bitch more and whine more and have less patience with others and to be more full of self-serving and petty concerns than they’d been while they were grieving. I noticed it out in public and several people in my life in a matter of a couple of weeks time even tried to pick silly unnecessary fights or start feuds with me. Short and petty and unreasonable about meaningless things that added up to nothing. Selfish and petty, just like they’d been last September 10 --- before the world came together in historical proportions of surrealistic civility, understanding, gracious compassion, and aplomb.

            A rare and precious worldwide condition of grace I never thought I’d witness in my lifetime on this planet. Fading now, if not destined to be gone for good in a very short while. Perhaps to be rekindled at the one-year anniversary for a few days then shelved away for all time.

            The stink at the end of the September 11 compassion dividend was so thick that it seemed as if I could do nothing to avoid it. Perhaps the timing had to do with the Ground Zero site cleanup coming to an end. Or perhaps it was the ongoing fatiguing threat of another (overdue?) attack that has everyone on edge. Polls in the newspapers show that 80 percent of New Yorkers still expected additional attacks to occur at any moment, so perhaps exhaustion from fear and worry was the problem. Or perhaps the breakdown in good will was just inevitable and the season of aplomb simply ran its natural course during these past nine months.

            A season of politeness, patience, compassion, and an unprecedented reaching out to one another at a dignified level directly proportional to the magnitude of the massacre we’d all suffered through. I could remember no other time so long as nine months in my life when events had so dramatically affected our collective mood.

            So I guess I should consider myself lucky that the world even got to unite for that long at any one point in my lifetime ...

 

            And now I suppose it’s all downhill from here ...

 

 
~

(Independence Day)

July 4, 2002

Lawrence, Kansas

 

The Year the Kelly Cabin Got it Right

 

 

 

 

                        The local newspaper (the Lawrence Journal-World) ran a person-on-the-street column and asked the question:

 

“Do you feel more patriotic this Fourth of July in light of the events of Sept. 11?”

 

*The four answers were:

*          “No. America needs to take responsibility for certain situations it has contributed to globally. Part of the Sept. 11 thing was evening the score.”

*          “Yeah, I think so. It seems like the country has come together since Sept. 11.”

*          “I’d have to say I feel a little bit less patriotic than usual this Fourth. It began with the (contested Bush) election and then our government’s response to the Sept. 11 occurrence.”

*         “I don’t feel more patriotic ... ... ... Stuff like that happens in other places all the time. I think it’s kind of turned into a marketing  thing.”

~

                        In 1776 our founding fathers formed a more perfect union and deemed that high explosives be carelessly played with by regular Americans as if they were toys. In order to celebrate and in order to give homage to the founding fathers. The founding fathers who hung their asses out on the line (victory, or death by hanging) and then signed the Declaration of Independence just so the Kelly cabin could eventually get the whole thing right. A night of Fourth of July fireworks at the Kelly cabin that finally justified the declaration and the independence and those freedom and liberty things (and all that other red white and blue stuff) just so the Kelly Boys and their entourage could finally get the whole American Independence Day fireworks thing right.

            When the Kelly Boys were growing up in Lawrence , Kansas they’d be blasted awake on their birthdays by their mother who’d roll a live firecracker under their bedroom doors. Thereafter, a whole generation of Kelly Boys has been desperately trying to perfect the whole Fourth of July fireworks celebration at Lone Star Lake.

            Janet and I were out for the long weekend to paint the cabin and sleaze away the holiday and to do some bird watching. And as we do every other year, we decided to skip the city fireworks display at the Kansas River put on by the Jaycees in favor of getting another chance to watch the Kelly Boys at the lake. The stories run thick over the decades of the Kelly’s quest to get the whole thing just right. Police and sheriff posses sent out to control the Kelly Boy’s outbursts, but failing miserably; bottle rocket and roman candle firework fights across the cove against other cabins or amongst themselves if there were no convenient common enemy; inflicting the exposed with both sea and land attacks from canoes and from several different docks simultaneously. And all this accomplished at the peril of mosquitoes, chiggers, leaches, premature explosions, the cops --- and this year accompanied by a creepy screaming Barn Owl in the woods along the lakeshore that gave the ostentatious festivities an added spooky edge.

            Over the many years, the Kelly Boys did it up gooood! (sometimes collectively shooting off more than $1000-dollars worth of sparks for the benefit of 10 or 20 people), but they never thought they’d gotten it perfectly right --- not until July, 4, 2002. And I dare say that not since the founding fathers has such a small group of regular Americans made such a large impression on the sky...

            There was the usual hour or so of just bottle rockets from the porch as the crew and lucky observers warmed up for the battle over cold beers and a few hot, brutal, bloodthirsty games of backgammon. Then there was the usual cranking-up of the festivities as nighttime fell and the party forgot all about petty bloodlust board games and lingering fears of the night and climbed down the ridge to the dock where roman candles were already crackling over the lake shore, competing this holiday with that creepy screaming Barn Owl --- who at one point seemed to be answering our every bottle rocket scream for scream.

            The fireworks were as good as they usually are, and so was the Kelly Boys’ pyromania act. But then one of them came walking ceremoniously down the steps from the cabin carefully carrying a last missile as if it were the Holy Grail. A special firework he’d apparently been saving for the finale. A rocket package he auspiciously announced was called, “One Big Motha.”

            Well, Brett lit the thing off on the dock (now littered with drifting piles of burnt red firecracker paper, the wreckage of dozens of spent rocket launchers, and the assorted empty beer bottles and cigarette packages you’d expect to find at such an orgy) and then all hell broke loose. And when all hell breaks loose at an American Fourth of July fireworks celebration (as any regular American knows), you’re really getting it done by the founding fathers.  

 

BAM! --- Bam!!---BAM!!---Bam!!---BAM---Bam!!---BAM!!...

went the incredible multi-colored and multi-stage explosions as the Kelly Boys stumbled backward to avoid the powerful explosions.

 

            It was the most spectacular single amateur firework display I’ve ever seen --- exploding directly over my head in every conceivable direction. Perhaps more powerful and awesome and bigger and more multi-colorful than seventy-percent of professional fireworks I’ve ever witnessed.

            And after it finished it’s twenty-second run to resounding calls of “author, author” from a disembodied neighbor’s voice across the lake cove, the Kelly Boys were ecstatic! So pumped up in the aftermath of the battle that they danced around together in a circle for a half a minute or so, all jabbering inside their own ecstasies like a band of truant boys who’d gotten away with letting the air out of the principal’s tires.

            It took the hour that it took to get around to climbing up the ridge to the farmer’s field above the lake to set off the last firework --- a 10,000-firecracker string that crackled for about 15 minutes into the Douglas County night (way past the holiday noise curfew) --- for the Kelly Boys to stop high-fiving and squealing wildly about that “One Big Motha” firework.

 

            And while driving back to our cabin in the middle of the night, I couldn’t help but notice that no one (not even me) had brought up September 11 or the war or the Independence Day TV terror scares all night ...

 

 
~

July 14, 2002

Lawrence, Kansas

 

 

 BREAKING NEWS*[6]

                        I heard a report on the news today that four men were convicted in Pakistan yesterday for the kidnap-murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl last winter in Karachi.

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[1] Associated Press

[2] Associated Press

[3] Associated Press

[4] See New York Front sources on Source Page at back of book

[5] See New York Front sources on Source Page at back of book

[6] CNN