Come back!

If you see any of these little things humming around, tell them how very very very very very grateful you are, and that you want them to come back!

God in the Zoo

At various points in my life, I’ve called myself a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, and a Spinozan. I have never found God an indifferent proposition in any guise, although I have often thought that the habit of attributing the name God to objects of such vast and conflicting variety must say something about, at the very least, our systems of classification. I won’t get all deconstructive on your ass (as the policeman said to the monkey), but it is no accident that the signifier which floats so freely in a system built, ostensibly, to fix the meanings, is that of the creator of the structure itself. From the speaker of the word comes the word 'confusion'.

As a middle aged man working on being a sage, of course, my meditations naturally turn to the Gods or Goddesses. And being a perennial, low carat, glue sniffing punk, my inclination is to mix and match my divinities, scratching the cosmic record – which is why, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot of the spirits at the portals of each sense.

Which is by way of pointing LI readers to Anthony Gottlieb’s review of the recent spate of atheist books – by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris in the New Yorker.

It is much more learned and witty than Terry Eagleton’s mishandling of Richard Dawkins. Gottlieb is less eager to show his cards, or to try to make books on religion automatically into books on theology. Gottlieb’s handle on that contretemps reflects LI’s own attitude:

“For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.”

That is a neat little paragraph, partly because one of the themes of Gottlieb's piece is that you can't trust the polls about people's religious beliefs - while, at the same time, Gottlieb does like to quote polls about people's religious beliefs. There is a slight inconsistency there, but the real point is that religious belief is not about yes and no responses to questions that are formed in order to facilitate quantification. When the questions are left open, the responses then become much more difficult to quantify over. So the contradictory attitude towards polls is - almost- justified.

Gottlieb is an editor at the Economist, a magazine that likes to think that it is still plugged into the Edinburgh enlightenment. The tone he strikes is Humean – that is, Gottlieb is repelled by zealotry more than he is attracted to advocating one or another belief about God’s existence. He approves of Hume’s openendedness about the whole God question – although of course that openendedness is derived, partly, from a justified fear of legal and professional prosecution on Hume’s part. After all, in his youth a man was actually executed for disbelief, a fact given great play in James Buchan’s excellent book on the Edinburgh enlightenment. Here’s Gottlieb’s Hume:

“Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.

In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.”

Gottlieb’s taste is towards just such ‘cheerfulness’ – but one man’s jovial Hume is another man’s lukewarm countenancer of religion’s many and varied oppressions. And those oppressions, in turn, are about the class composition of society. There is a cheerfulness that comes with eating well and disbelieving the credo that supports the social order one both benefits from and defends, and that cheerfulness can turn vinegary and cynical if the order is shook the least bit. Oddly, Gottlieb doesn’t mention Paine. Hitchens has to be understood, or at least, I suspect, understands himself, as working in the tradition of Paine – and definitely Paine dispensed with the elite culture and cheerfulness of Hume and the discussions of the philosophe and spread light as he saw it in vulgar language among the vulgar. But Paine was never an atheist, and was offended by the term. Of course, the Age of Reason was used to batter his reputation into dust in America, which was just starting to flirt with one of cycles of panic revivalism. On the other hand, The Age of Reason sold astonishingly well. It competed with the Bible in the first decades of the 19th century – and of course, the Bible is always being given away, so it has an unfair advantage. The notion that churches, mosques and temples – and the whole order of clerisy – are oppressors whose very bread and butter depends on imposture is something that Paine, more than any other historical figure, spread abroad. Of course, anti-clericalism was a standard tenent of the philosophes, and it became a mark of ‘liberalism’ in Spain, Italy and France in the 19th century, but it was Paine who gave it the vernacular it had in working class culture.

Iraq was not a doomed enterprise, but a U.S. crime

It has become fashionable for those who originally supported the war but turned against it – like Matt Yglesias – to push a strange sort of deterministic anti-war critique that has caught on elsewhere as well in the liberal side of the blogsphere.

Yglesias’ version is smart in many ways. Today, he uses a version of it to defend Bremer:

“I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there's been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything's fine, it's just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.

The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he's refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has -- that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce.”

Now, if the idea is that the catastrophe in Iraq is just due to a few bad American leaders, then of course that isn’t true. But the notion of the “doomed enterprise” is romantic nonsense, and has the additional negative externality that it washes away all responsibility from the actors involved. While the U.S. had no business, right, or need to invade Iraq, once Iraq was invaded, there were a number of courses of action that presented themselves. Not every action braided into the disaster that has impacted with such mind boggling force on the Iraqis. Allowing Iraq to be looted and calling it the price of freedom, and then disbanding the army and most of the security forces was not forced upon the U.S. by the gods above. In fact, in Gulf War I, the U.S. devised a coalition that actually had force – the members of the coalition could impact and even change U.S. actions. The French basically forced George Bush I to protect Northern Iraq from Saddam’s army. The lesson that his pea brained son took from this was never involve the U.S. in an arrangement in which the U.S. does not have supreme power. That, of course, was at the root of the evil of the occupation. The U.S. had a responsibility, once Baghdad fell, to consult with the U.N. and submit to the appointing of a U.N. approved interim government. At that point, the U.S. military should have been subordinate, taking orders from, that interim government. Almost surely, that interim government would have been more interested in the security of the Iraqis than the benefits accruing from giving them a flat tax – one of Bremer’s comic opera achievements.

It is definitely true, as Yglesias points out, that the U.S. war goals were internally incoherent. They were logically incoherent, insofar as they promoted democracy in Iraq and the supreme rule of a foreign occupying power in Iraq. They were psychologically incoherent as they premised paying for the foreign occupying power with Iraq’s own money while at the same time promoting the alliance of Iraq and the U.S. – as though massive resentment about the looting of Iraq’s wealth to go to the richest country in the world wouldn’t be the result of that plan. The second plan was scotched, the first was never meant seriously. But the U.S. miscalculated, as it became apparent in 2004 that the American forces would simply be fighting everybody if they didn’t start on the road to elections. When, as I have lamented until I am tired of lamenting, the anti-war party fell apart, refusing to become an anti-occupation party and freezing time in a perpetual quest to go back to Spring, 2003, the chance for pushing back against U.S. policies in Iraq in the country was missed. The reason for this was the palpable fear of seeming anti-American. But that reason was fucking lame. The Iraqis became the victims of the inability of the anti-war movement to scream out loudly about the looting of Iraq, the deadly insouciance and moral turpitude of disbanding Iraq’s security forces, the thrusting of insane shock therapy economic policies on the country. It won’t do now to look back at those things as inevitable concomitants of the occupation, for which nobody is to blame. The blame is with the U.S. Let’s all say that in a rousing manner. The blame is with the U.S. This fucking country was directly responsible for the violence that ensued in Iraq. This fucking country promoted sectarianism by way of the usual occupier’s divide and conquer methods it introduced from the minute it touched Iraqi soil and airlifted the comic opera militia of Chalabi into the country. This fucking country was the first to make a mockery of Iraq’s judiciary by using it as an instrument of arbitrary arrest, as per Bremer’s hard on against Sadr. This fucking country couldn’t seem to gather the army together in POW camps and demobilize and remobilize it, but had plenty of time for herding ordinary Iraqis en masse into prison camps like Abu Ghraib. As a general rule, when a state invades a second state and the first state is absolutely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the second state, the first state is going to make a hash of governing the second state. However, this doesn't mean that it is necessarily going to unleash mass murder on an unprecedented scale in the second state. For that, you need to be especially bad.

There was no deterministic doom at work here, as in a Faulkner novel. Let’s cut the crap.

Always read nir rosen

Right after the invasion of Iraq, Lujai told me, Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad’s hospitals but did not know how to manage them. “They were sectarian from the beginning,” she said, “firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the problems started. They wanted to separate Sunnis. The Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement” — that is, to the Shiite faction loyal to Moktada al-Sadr.

Following the 2005 elections that brought Islamist Shiites to power, Lujai said, the Sadrists initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The minister of health and his turbaned advisers saw to it that in hospitals and health centers the walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics like Sadr, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Shiite religious songs could often be heard in the halls. In June of last year, Ali al-Mahdawi, a Sunni who had managed the Diyala Province’s health department, disappeared, along with his bodyguards, at the ministry of health. (In February, the American military raided the ministry and arrested the deputy health minister, saying he was tied to the murder of Mahdawi.) Lujai told me that Sunni patients were often accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors treated them, the special police from the Ministry of the Interior would arrest the Sunni patients. Their corpses would later be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.”

On Sept. 2, 2006, Lujai’s husband went to work and prepared for the first of three operations scheduled for the day. At the end of his shift a patient came in unexpectedly; no other doctor was available, so Adil stayed to treat him. Adil was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later, his dead body was found on the street.

As she told me this story, Lujai began to cry, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband’s murder and was told: “He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Two weeks later she received a letter ordering her to leave her Palestine Street neighborhood.

On Sept. 24 she and her children fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife and their four children. They gave away or sold what they could and paid $600 for the ride in the S.U.V. that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, as many as 20 other doctors also fled.
- Nir Rosen, NYTM

Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't shake it loose. These days, everyone "knows" that the Coalition Provisional Authority made two disastrous decisions at the beginning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly disband the Iraqi army. The most recent example is former CIA chief George J. Tenet, whose new memoir pillories me for those decisions (even though I don't recall his ever objecting to either call during our numerous conversations in my 14 months leading the CPA). Similar charges are unquestioningly repeated in books and articles. Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.
Like most Americans, I am disappointed by the difficulties the nation has encountered after our quick 2003 victory over Saddam Hussein. But the U.S.-led coalition was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the country's equivalent organizations to give it any chance at a brighter future. – L.Paul Bremer

LI was impressed that Nir Rosen touches, however lightly, on the story of class in Iraq – for the peculiarity of the Iraq war, as we have often emphasized and expect, one day, some heavier honcho in the punditosphere will pick up, is that the U.S turned against its one natural constituency in Iraq – the upper class – from the beginning of the occupation, thus rapidly making itself irrelevant as anything more than a random force in Iraq. Rosen’s article is great. Bremer’s article is why the Washington Post needs competition. When a paper uses its editorial page as a white house corkboard, pinning up the self-serving lies penned by self-deluded failures to actions that were near that fine edge between dumb and pathological imbecility – well, that paper needs competition. Fred Hiatt and Marty Peretz are, I suspect, one person, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is very depressing that Hiatt has the ear of the public with his position. Is there a worse editor in the U.S.?

ps - Rosen's piece also contained a paragraph of such pure Bushism that LI must quote it. It is a treat, in a way. Since Idi Amin and Mobutu, there have been few world leaders willing to venture so far into the most impudent of excuses for mass murder. Lucky Ducky Americans are seeing, in their leadership, a resurgence of the rhetoric of Kampala in the 70s. Truly refreshing.

“What I find most disturbing,” Bacon went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he [John Bolton] told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.” Bolton likewise did not share the concerns of Bacon and others that the refugees would become impoverished and serve as a recruiting pool for militant organizations in the future. “I don’t buy the argument that Islamic extremism comes from poverty,” he said. “Bin Laden is rich.” Nor did he think American aid could alleviate potential anger: “Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home. The governments don’t want them to stay.”

The United States is really just beginning to grapple with the question of Iraqi refugees, in part because the flight from Iraq is so entwined with the vexed question of blame. When I read John Bolton’s comments to Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, they mainly agreed with him. Sauerbrey maintained that “refugees are created by repressive regimes and failed states. The sectarian violence has driven large numbers out. During the Saddam regime, large numbers of Iraqis were displaced, and the U.S. resettled 38,000 Iraqis. We would take 5,000 a year at given points in time. After 2003, there was great hope, and people were returning in large numbers. The sectarian violence after the mosque bombing in February 2006 is what turned things around. The problem is one caused by the repressive regime” of Saddam Hussein. She did add, “We take the responsibility of being a compassionate nation seriously.

Ah, that last sentence is such whipped cream! One does so wish that there were some curse that would cause vampires like Sauerbrey, Bolton, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the horde to fall, frothing, on the ground, crumbling as the rays of the sun hit their disgusting bodies. Alas, they will end up well fed and having their assistants pen nice little op ed pieces for the Washington Post. America, Night of the Living Dead, 2007.

memes and hooks

LI is a pretty jaded reviewer. One of the things we like about doing anonymous reviews for Publishers Weekly is seeing the hooks we put in the reviews spread out to other reviewers. Amazon provides a big megaphone. So we noted that two reviewers we don't much care for - Kakatuni in the NYT and Dirda in the Washington Post - echo, in their disparaging reviews of Delillo's Falling Man, themes we set going in ours, mercifully and mysteriously pretty much as we wrote it up there on Amazon. We liked Falling Man - and though I don't really care to look it up, I would bet Dirda liked that awful, jello sweet Jonathan Safron Foers novel about 9/11. Dirda has terrible taste in contemporary American novelists - sorta Sub Michael Wood - without the eloquence to make me care one way or another.

Let's get out of afghanistan

“It is not clear whether the Ghanikhel raid was a case of mistaken identity or a successful anti-terrorist operation that also became a human tragedy.”

LI’s question to ponder this weekend is: what the hell is the U.S. still doing in Afghanistan?

In 2001, LI supported the attack on Afghanistan for the standard vanilla tit for tat reasons. But wars in the humanitarian intervention era ( “On your door I am a-knocking/with my toolbox and my stocking”) are sticky things, so sticky that the soldiers never seem to find the conditions just right to actually leave. Now, this is much to the satisfaction of all bien pensant people in D.C., and like a good little war, it is tossed into the forgettery of the back of the A section for bored householders to peruse if they will – although what’s the fucking point of that?

Occasionally the news comes from the front that things are going swimmingly, or they are going backwards, or that American marines have become so adroit at their anti-terrorist operations that they have permanently protected villagers in remote valleys from the insidious Taliban:

“On Tuesday, a senior U.S. military commander issued a formal apology to the families of 19 civilians who died in a March 4 incident in Batikot, in Nangahar province. A squad of Marines, ambushed by a suicide bomber, sprayed indiscriminate gunfire at cars and pedestrians.”

The Afghan war has some adorable characteristics, which you’d expect of a five year old. Five year olds love to build sand castles and destroy them. They love finger painting. Oh, and they love indiscriminate air warfare too!

“Almost every day, warplanes drop bombs, shoot rockets and fire cannon rounds into suspected enemy locations in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Generally, there tend to be more airstrikes in Afghanistan than in the war in Iraq. Since the beginning of this month, according to data released by Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, B-1 heavy bombers have struck Afghanistan four times, F-15 fighters have done so twice, and A-10 ground-attack jets have fired their cannons three times. Also, a British Royal Air Force Harrier jet carried out bombing.

The airstrikes and casualties are a direct result of the stepped-up Taliban insurgency, which employs suicide bombs and often uses civilian areas as hiding places. Yet according to diplomats and human rights groups, the tough military response is weakening Afghan support for foreign troops and playing into the insurgents' hands. President Hamid Karzai, sharply rebuking his foreign allies, declared recently that such civilian deaths were "no longer acceptable."”

The technostructure of war in America has been a win win on many fronts – it distributes money to the right array of companies, it keeps the budgets high, it makes a symbolic statement to the rest of the world, and it expresses pretty well the inexorable logic of the dialectic of vulnerability that the U.S. has been committed to since Hiroshima. It is a form of offshoring the war. However, although it is marvelous, it can’t do one thing: it can’t win a low intensity war. It can only delay losing a low intensity war. That Bush is presiding over two defeats makes him a remarkable American president in many ways – that he pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory in Afghanistan is, well, it is why his fans love him. Bush is like a Jesus figure, if you can imagine Jesus, at the wedding in Cana, turning water into radioactive urine and urging the guests to drink up.

So let’s add things up. First, you have to advance an essentially colonialist enterprise by manufacturing an election. Check – this is where Karzai comes from. Then you essentially bungle the one chance you have to actually force the enemy to surrender, or to break him. Check – the Pentagon’s nursing of the escape of Al Qaeda and much of the Taleban leadership into Pakistan was a sort of foresighted action, to guarantee that the war wouldn’t stop, because if the war stops, you might actually have to… gasp … withdraw. Then you need to wait around, let the economic situation plummet, produce amazingly liberal legislation for show in the capital which just happens to be in complete disconnect with the culture at large – this has the double advantage of maintaining the humanitarian label and making the powers you have propped up in the capital look like complete and utter puppets, which increases their dependence on the occupation – and finally, voila, you have the situation of an openended occupation that will feed on itself until those people in the mountains find the stingers to take down some of those bombers. Then things can get merrier.

It should be pointed out to establish LI's fucking non-partisan cred here that Clinton’s wars in the 90s actually put in place the elements that have grown to full fledged malignancy here. The party divide disguises a fundamental continuity. The bombing wars that avoided any American casualties seemed free and fun – save of course for a buncha landlubbers bleeding to death in the villages – but it turns out that they had no ending bracket. Occupation just goes on forever.

It is long past time to have an exit strategy for Afghanistan that actually makes sense – that is, that comes to an exit. You know what an exit is, don’t you Uncle Sam? Or does it have to leave muddy boot prints on your butt?

and it rained trash for two thousand years...

LI is always interested in trash. Humans have always left a non-supply line behind them of stuff other than our scat and mortality – it goes along with being tool using beasties. But the heaping helpings of trash that issue daily from the courses of the average American/European/Latin American/Asian/African are producing a sort of global coral reef of garbage, a carapace over the planet.

So we found this NYT article a timely treat, and we liked the f/x chart mapping the average mile of garbage along the road. Here are a few grafs:

“In California and across the nation, where some freeway shoulders have come to resemble weekend yard sales, the nature of road debris has changed, and litter anthropologists are now studying the phenomenon. Where “deliberate” litter used to reign — those blithely tossed fast-food wrappers and the like — “unintentional” or “negligent” litter from poorly secured loads is making its presence felt.

Steven R. Stein, a litter analyst for R. W. Beck, a waste-consulting firm in Maryland, attributes the change to more trash-hauling vehicles, including recycling trucks, and the ubiquity of pickup trucks on the country’s highways. In 1986, Mr. Stein said, two-thirds of the debris was deliberate, but surveys now show the litter seesaw balanced.

He said the two most recent surveys indicated a further increase in unintentional litter. In Georgia, which recently quantified its litter, 66 percent of road debris comes from unintentional litter, largely unsecured loads. A study in Tennessee last year showed that 70 percent of the state’s debris was unintentional.”

Bikers know. I had to bike deep into South Austin a couple of days ago. This means taking my life in my hands and pedaling far down Lamar, an experience akin to being a rabbit on some acreage the beaters are bearing down on. Bikes, in Texas, are hunted things. As you travel the major miles that are being humped over by SUVs and trucks without number, you see what all that portage costs. It isn’t just the perpetually cracked road, the omnipresence of broken glass, the oil slicked dust. Traffic sheds its skin every day, the skin consisting of every container you have ever drunk out of or broken your fingernails trying to tear open, of old magazines, of pipe, of splintered wood, of nails. Long ago I learned that ordinary street bike tires would last about two weeks on the Austin streets. My bike has mountain tires. As I headed out past the tangle of highways around Ben White, I even nearly ran over a diamond back rattler – whether alive or dead, I didn’t stop to find out. I am spooked by suburbia anyway – it always makes me feel like the man who fell to earth – and rambling over potentially tirepoppin stuff while cars as big as small whales go whizzing by you is one way to play the scales on your nerves. Although I shouldn’t exaggerate – I don’t worry too much about one of those whales socking me. If it happens, it happens.

An even better place to study the rain of trash is the path underneath the overpass leading to the lake that I jog every other day. Mopac is, what, fifty, seventy feet above the path? It is like a rain forest there, if you substitute, for drops of water, every kind of human trash. Trees will be shrouded not by the nets the net caterpillar spins – a pest around here – but by mysterious sheets of plastic and vinyl windripped from some truck. Ribbons, string, bags are distributed with abandon, to never decay eventually on the ground. It has all become part of the ecology, like the perpetual susurration of the cars themselves.

But we have to move around in this world:

“A 2004 report on vehicle-related road debris by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety underscored the hazards: In North America, more than 25,000 accidents a year are caused by litter that is dumped by motorists or falls out of vehicles.

“It’s really a problem of individual motorists’ not understanding the aerodynamics of what wind can do to a mattress,” said Scott Osberg, the foundation’s director of research.

Two years ago, a horrifying incident in Washington State led to the passage of Maria’s law, named for Maria Federici, 24, who was blinded and disfigured when a piece of a shelving unit flew off a trailer and crashed through her windshield. Before the accident, Washington drivers with unsecured loads received a traffic citation and a $194 fine. The tougher law made it a gross misdemeanor if an unsecured load caused an injury, carrying with it a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $5,000 fine.

Accident statistics alone may not accurately reflect the frequency of such incidents. Last year, a fatality in Washington State, in which a driver swerved to avoid a flying shelf and hit another car, was classified as a collision.”