by Michael House, FRGS

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol and it’s not working with drugs.”

KINGS SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—3/19/12—A brave and wise senior police officer has called for the decriminalization of all illicit narcotics and an end to the UK’s failed “war on drugs.”

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, made his controversial pitch to his local police assembly last year. He was later supported by General Lord Ramsbotham, former Chief Inspector of Prisons.

In the 1920s, the US introduced a policy of prohibition of the sale of alcohol. The result was the relentless growth of gangsterism, violence and crime, generally. The experiment was abandoned in 1933. Al Capone was put out of business overnight. It is time Britain abandoned her home-grown prohibition, which the Home Office estimates costs £15 billion a year.

Decriminalize street narcotics: it’s the logical, thrifty, ethical thing to do.

Britain’s policy on banning the sale of dangerous narcotics is a mess. The most dangerous drug in Britain is tobacco. It kills over 100,000 people a year and maims many more. It is perfectly legal.

Alcohol kills a few thousand every year as well. Over half of all violent crime in the UK is attributable to alcohol. It is not only legal, but the government encourages 24-hour drinking and the “YOB culture” that goes with it.  Libertarians argue that the government has no right to interfere in the realm of what people choose to put into their bodies. That argument has obvious flaws. But if it applies to alcohol and tobacco, it applies equally to heroin and cocaine.

Cannabis has a long history in the Caribbean as a medicine used on islands where doctors are few and far between. It is a well-recognized pain-killer, effective in conditions for which nothing else works. It doesn’t kill anyone, but can be dangerous for people with mental health problems, although not as dangerous as alcohol. Possessing cannabis carries a maximum 2-year prison sentence in the UK. Supplying it carries a maximum of 14 years.

Heroin and cocaine are dangerous, and do kill people, but far fewer than tobacco or alcohol. They are seriously addictive, especially heroin. Huge volumes of acquisitive crime—robberies, burglaries and thefts—are carried out by addicts who cannot otherwise afford their next fix. An estimated 60 percent of recorded crime is drug-related. Because drugs are illicit, there can be no quality control; hard drugs are sometimes mixed with potentially lethal cutting agents. Gangs fight and kill in turf wars over territory. Gun crime grows, with offenders getting younger and younger. Kids see dealers in their flashy cars and want to emulate them. There are three routes to rapid wealth for working-class kids: footballer, pop-singer or drug-dealer.

Our overflowing prisons are filled with dealers and, in particular, drug-couriers, bringing in heroin and cocaine from abroad. Sentences have escalated over the years, with no discernable deterrent effect. Send a dealer to jail and there will soon be another to take his place. A tragic by-product of illegality is that young men and women (more often women) from dirt-poor countries, or working-class Brits who are promised a free holiday, all expenses paid, bring drugs into the country. Often, they swallow them in supposedly impermeable containers—if the containers burst, they die. They are often caught and receive savage prison sentences, often in double figures, for a large consignment. Some of the foreigners are so poor than they are able to send money home to their families from their meager prison earnings.

Police and Customs often triumphantly announce major drugs seizures. The result is that street prices go up, addicts become ever-more desperate for money, and yet more people are robbed and burgled.

Young people rebel—it is in their nature to do things their elders disapprove of. Because they are illegal, drugs are glamorous. Kids use cannabis and like the feeling. It is illegal, but it does them no harm. Therefore, the other drugs that are illegal are probably harmless as well, right? Wrong. By the time they find out the truth, it is too late. And, of course, it brings the law into disrepute when it is openly flouted: 500,000 youngsters use ecstasy every weekend. In a survey, 30 percent of 15-43-year olds admitted having used cannabis in the previous 12 months. If a law is unenforceable, drop it.

There are two possible routes to dealing with the drugs epidemic. One is to destroy supply by destroying demand. Send every user to jail, followed by compulsory rehab. Really make deterrence work. Of course, if parking illegally were punished by death, people wouldn’t park illegally. But there has to be a sensible balance in a civilized society. Zero tolerance would mean billions spent on new jails and on rehab centers and their staff. Thousands of middle-class parents would not relish having to visit their offspring in prison. This option might conceivably work but, for other reasons, it is a non-starter.

So we can go on as we are, sticking our fingers in the dyke as the floodwaters rise around us. Or we can decriminalize. We can license drug production, introduce quality control, tax drugs and sell them at registered outlets or prescribe them to addicts.

The huge savings on prisons (it costs more to keep a kid in detention for a year than to send him to Eton for a year) and police resources, and the revenue raised in taxation, can be spent on rehabilitation centers and sensible education campaigns. Don’t tell boys that heroin will kill them; tell them it makes their breath stink and makes them unattractive to women. Tell girls that drugs will make them spotty and give them wrinkles.

Courage and imagination can beat the scourge of drugs. But no British government will risk being crucified by the tabloid press.

Personal Note: I have no axe to grind here. The changes I propose would probably halve my income.

by Michael House, FRGS

KINGS SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—2/19/12—

Day 8, 25^th December, continued.

In the evening, after a 360 kilometre drive, we arrived at the Mountain View Hotel, Lalibela. At 8,745 feet, it has majestic views over a wide and deep river valley. The four-story structure is recessed from the bottom to the top, each room having its own balcony and flowerbeds.

Why is Lalibela the most popular tourist destination in Ethiopia? I want you to imagine yourself standing on top of a rock which is as big as a football field and as deep as an ocean liner. It is the 12^th century, and you are the local king, with a whim of iron. You say to yourself, “What a good spot to create a church!” So, you have carved a trench in the rock in the shape of a cross, about 30 feet deep, so that there is an enormous cross-shaped chunk of rock in the middle. You then start to carve into the central rock to hollow out a church, with pillars and doors and windows. So you end up with a church carved from the solid rock, below the level of the ground. Repeat the exercise eleven times in various designs.

St. Michael’s Rock Church, Lalibela.

What you end up with is the Eighth Wonder of the World, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an amazing subterranean compound of churches, linked by a tangled maze of passages and tunnels, with hermit cells and stone graves dotted about the enclosure. Each church is different, with precise carving and minute decoration. One of the earliest foreigners to visit Lalibela, Francisco Alvarez, a Portuguese missionary who came here in 1521, wrote: “It wearied me to write more of these works, because it seemed to me they will accuse me of untruth . . . there is much more than I have already written, and I have left it that they may not tax me with being falsehood.”

Day 9, 26^th December.

A morning spent at the aforementioned churches. Visiting eleven churches in one morning, however phenomenal, is too many. But could we do today what they did a thousand years ago? In one of the churches, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be an exorcism: a priest with a stick was beating the devil out of a young man.

Looking out of the hotel, we could see on a neighboring hill what looked like a giant concrete mixer. I assumed it was a building site for another hotel. However, it turned out to be a completed, futuristic restaurant. It had been created by an elderly Scottish lady called Susan, who was tired of teaching English in Addis, and wanted a new challenge. It had only been open two months, and Susan had assembled a staff of locals whose only qualifications were a cheerful attitude and a capacity for hard work. She had trained them into a highly efficient workforce. The food was superb. One of our number requested pizza, which they had never tried cooking before. The first effort was mediocre, the second better, and the third excellent. Susan’s attitude was—tell us what you want to eat, and we’ll have a crack at it. She was one of the most remarkable people we encountered in Ethiopia. Her Bubble & Squeak was superb. I regret I didn’t sample her Toad in the Hole.

The Concrete-Mixer Restaurant, Lalibela.

Day 10, 27^th December.

Visited the monastery of Yemirhane Kristos, built in a cave under a huge chunk of granite. Again, the paintings were superb. I particularly like one painted on hide, of a Muslim shooting at a Christian who was up a tree collecting fruit. A diabolical dragon awaits its prey at the base of the tree. Then, back for lunch at Susan’s Concrete Mixer: shepherd’s pie and crepes. In the evening, we went to a local home for a traditional meal followed by the full coffee ceremony.

Day 11, 28^th December.

Another highlight of the trip: two days of hiking, staying in village lodges. A long drive to the trailhead, delayed because the driver of our bus seemed to think that pouring water into the overheated radiator without coolant was a good idea. It wasn’t, the bus gave up the ghost, and we had to wait for another one. As usual, children appeared from nowhere, eager to relieve us of pens, money and plastic bottles.

We eventually got to the starting point, and enjoyed a four-mile walk across lovely landscapes, arriving at a tiny hamlet above a gorge just as the sun was setting. Our main luggage was carried by mules. The north isn’t all grotesque rock formations. There are wide alpine plateaux, edged around by near-vertical plunges into river gorges, almost dry by the end of the year.

One of the villagers had some of the undyed woollen runners I mentioned in Part 1, so I bought one for 400 birr (about £12 or $18.). After a simple meal around a smoky eucalyptus fire, we slept soundly in a round flint and mud hut with a thatched roof.

Eucalyptus was introduced by the emperor Menelik II at the end of 19^th century, to combat deforestation. It is fast-growing, can be harvested every ten years and, when cut down, regrows from the roots. A proclamation was issued in 1913 to replace it with mulberry because it is a very thirsty tree, but it never happened, and eucalyptus is a prominent and pleasing feature of the Ethiopian landscape. And it makes a good fire.

These hikes from village to village are arranged in conjunction with the organization, Tourism in Ethiopia for Sustainable Future Alternatives (TESFA). They are a chance to see the country on foot rather than on wheels, and provide income to the remote village communities where hikers stay.

Day 12, 29^th December.

Awoke to birdsong and fresh coffee. Chilly at 10,000 feet until the sun comes up. (By way of comparison, Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the British Isles, is a paltry 4,409 feet.) After our short stroll yesterday, today’s hike is a testing 15-odd miles, along paths that are far from easy going. We started along narrow cliff-edge paths, crossed wide prairie fields where the harvest was in full swing, along stony alleys between the hayfields, rather like Greek mule tracks but with larger and sharper stones. They are deliberately constructed for the rainy season, when paths would become impassible mud-cauldrons without a hefty rocky base. These were the “highways” of Ethiopia before the first road was built.

We visited a school, where all the children lined up to shake our hands and to be photographed. Letters and words were painted on rocks scattered about the playground, a clever form of subliminal teaching. The vitality and enthusiasm of pupils and teachers was heartwarming. It brought out the latent schoolteacher in several members of our group, who started to conduct impromptu classes in odd corners. The children, who speak the local language of Tigray, learn English before they are taught the national language, Amharic.

A schoolroom in Tigray.

Eventually, we trudged wearily into our mountain hamlet. The view from the latrine must be one of the finest vistas from any lavatory in the world. But the steps up to the hut started about six feet from the cliff edge, so being caught short in the night was inadvisable. Another candle-lit supper around blazing eucalyptus; then bed.

A loo with a view, Tigray.

Day 13, 30^th December.

Last half-day of the trek: back to the trailhead, for a long drive south to the shores of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, home of hippos, crocadiles and papyrus boats like those pictured on the scrolls of ancient Egypt.

Tana is the biggest lake in Ethiopia, and its main attraction, apart from the glorious setting, is a number of tiny islands, many of them home to ancient monasteries and churches. We visited one island, which was semi-tropical, unlike the north, with coffee bushes, brightly coloured parrots (and malarial mosquitoes). Every few yards on the path up to the church was another stall selling tourist stuff. Many had Maria Theresa thalers dated 1780 which, apart from bars of salt, were the only currency in 19^th-century Ethiopia. Their high silver content and the Austrian Empress’s decolletage made them very popular. In 1868, when General Sir Robert Napier brought his invading force to rescue European hostages from mad Emperor Theodore, he had thousands of fake thalers minted. So it’s hard to tell which are genuine. I bought a splendid copper bell, which now sits on my mantle in King’s Sutton.

Another highlight of Lake Tana was the flight of the pelicans. We stayed at Bahir Dar on the southern tip of the lake, near where the Blue Nile flows out and, on two days, as we were having our lunch at a lakeside restaurant, a long line of pelicans flew across from right to left in front of us, in perfect line formation. I stopped counting at 50.

A disappointment was one of Africa’s most spectacular waterfalls, the Tis Isat (“Water that Smokes”), about 20 miles from Tana, where the Nile plunges 150 feet down a sheer rock face. The river is 1,300 feet wide above the waterfall, narrowing to just 120 feet. The opening of a recent hydro-electric plant means that the thundering waters with the spray and rainbows are now reduced to a trickle, as 95 percent of the water has been diverted. Apparently, the plant is turned off on Sunday mornings, for the tourists and, occasionally, for visiting big-shots. Not worth a detour, and potentially tragic for the nascent tourist industry at Bahir Dar.

This is a wonderful country. The people, the landscapes, the culture, the history, the animals, and the birds all combine to make it a fantastic holiday destination. It is most certainly not the land of desert and famine of Western myth.

PS Normal polemical service will be resumed shortly. The Chinese continue to murder Tibetans; Bashar Assad of Syria continues to slaughter his people, protected in the United Nations by the dictators who rule Russia and China; Spanish fascists persecute a brave judge who tried to expose the horrors of the Franco regime. And here in the UK, millionaire premier Cameron makes the poor pay for the financial crisis while the people who created it continue to reward themselves with seven-figure bonuses. In the US, uber-loony presidential candidate Ron Paul talks of “honest rape.” You couldn’t make it up.

by Michael House.

“Etiope . . . hathe a riche contrey. In it be many trees aromatikes and many mynes of fyne gold, and the people of this contrey be so riche that ther be many marchantes housys covered with golde as we do here cover our houses with leade, and that thei have ther dores and wyndowes and marmoldes (pillars) covered with gold.”

—Roger Barlow, “A Brief Summe of Geographie,” 1540

KINGS SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—1/30/12—We left our hero enjoying the spectacular scenery and wildlife in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia. On the way back to Simien Lodge, we were politely waylaid by a clever shopping opportunity. A group of local children had laid out for sale various items of basket-work, horn cups and jewelry. These kids clearly understood how the Western mind works. They sat apart from their wares, making no attempt to sell anything, so we had to ask how much things were. This lack of hassle made us far more likely to examine the stuff closely and make purchases, so several sales were made.

The Lodge, which claims to be the highest hotel in Africa (10,700 feet—may well be true) provides tukals, the traditional round, thatched-roofed native huts, but with modern refinements. After an excellent evening meal, we switched on our flashlights and headed out to look for our huts, among those dotted about the compound. There was no moon, only myriad stars, so the flashlights were essential—no light pollution here.

Day 4, 21^st December. Another glorious, sunny day, but extremely cold in the early morning. We had a long drive ahead of us to Axum, for hundreds of years the capital, supposed home of the Ark of the Covenant and the center of an ancient civilization waiting to be uncovered.

People who know say the drive from the National Park to Axum is one of the most dramatic in Africa. The roads are rudimentary, and 280 kilometres took 12 hours, but no one minded. Among the delays was the dynamiting of rocks for a new stretch of road, a landslide being cleared and many diversions into stony dust-bowls because the rains had washed away sections of road. Add to that the flocks of animals that felt it was their country and they would walk where they liked, and it was slow going.

An Ethiopian vista.

All the more opportunity to enjoy the glorious vistas. Combine the buttes and mesas of Arizona and New Mexico with the foothills of the Himalaya, throw in a few Grand Canyons, mix with the Meteora of northern Greece, and you have the Highlands of Ethiopia. Symmetry is completely absent. The fingers of rock, the cones, the great plugs of granite, are scattered randomly around the plunging and soaring cliffs. My poor vocabulary cannot do the landscape justice.

We stopped at a tea-house in the middle of nowhere for the coffee ceremony. Ethiopia is the home of coffee. When ripe, the fruit of the coffee bush is a deep red. Within it is a green coffee bean. A shallow metal bowl is heated until red-hot, then the coffee-beans are roasted. The priestess presiding then goes around the congregation, wafting the fumes over us to demonstrate the quality of the coffee. The beans are then put into a pestle and ground by hand. The coffee is brewed and, once you have tasted it, you will never again waste your money at Starbucks. It is superb. As the Greeks say, coffee should be drunk black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love. And here, it is.

We arrived at Axum at 6.30 and climbed the hill to the Yeha Hotel, wonderfully situated on a wooded hilltop above the town. We sat on the terrace sipping gins and tonics and watched the sun go down. (Yeha is the site of a remarkable temple, at least 2,500 years old, built of huge granite blocks without mortar, with walls 30 feet high, in its way as remarkable as the Parthenon or the mighty walls of Mycenae.)

Day 5, 22^nd December. Axum is an enigma. It was the center of a vast empire in north Africa between the 1^st and 7^th centuries AD, and a major force in world trade with its own port of Adulis. But the site was inhabited at least 500 years earlier, as evidenced by shaft graves found in 1992. The dates are vague because only a tiny proportion of Axum has been excavated, and no substancial results have been published since 1913. Scores of Axumite sites in Tigray Province await exploration. The empire stretched from Yemen to the Sudan. A 3^rd-century Persian writer, Manni, bracketed it with China, Rome and Persia as one of the four great kingdoms of the world. My wife, who is an archaeologist, says Axum feels like Mycenae and Troy before Schliemann, or Knossos before Evans.

The stelae field at Axum.

The stelae field at Axum are like nowhere I have ever seen. We were shown around by a local enthusiast who had been part of the recent German excavations on what is essentially virgin ground. The solid granite monoliths, single slabs of carved rock are, in some cases, taller than the obelisks of Egypt. The tallest, which may have collapsed during erection, is 109 feet high and weighs 500 tons. There are 75 of various shapes and sizes in the main field. The tallest standing stele is a 78-foot, solid block of granite, which was transported 4 kilometres from the quarry, presumably by elephants. It is engraved with a door and nine windows, vertically, supposed to represent the nine palaces built by King Ezana, the first Christian king of Axun, to whom it is attributed. How it was raised to the vertical remains one of the mysteries of archaeology.

Apart from the stelae, the enclosure contains the vault tombs of many kings of Axum, with very fine precision masonry, huge blocks of granite without mortar. (Sorry, this is beginning to read like a guide-book.)

One last “site.” In the Chapel of St. Mary of Tsion, near the modern cathedral, is supposed to live the Ark of the Covenant. The guardian lives in the chapel and never leaves. He is the only person allowed into the Holy of Holies to see the Ark. The priest selected as guardian holds the office until he dies. In the 60s, a priest appointed guardian refused to serve, fled from Axum into the hills and was brought back in chains to fulfill his gloomy destiny. Women are not allowed in the chapel.

The site museum is excellent. Displayed are the crowns and vestments of successive emperors, as well as ancient bibles exquisitely hand-illustrated in colours that have lost none of their brilliancy.

A priest shows a painting from an ancient Bible.

Day 6, 23^rd December. A transit day, driving from Axum to the Gheralta Lodge in the remote northeast corner of Tigray Province. En route, we visited the Yeha Temple (see above) and one of the celebrated rock-cut churches of Tigray. These are hewn from the solid sandstone or built into caves on inaccessible cliff-faces. They have been described as “the greatest of the historical-cultural heritages of the Ethiopian people.” They were unknown to the outside world until very recently, when a serious attempt was made to locate and catalogue them. Fewer than ten were listed in 1963 but, ten years later, the number had shot up to 153. They are difficult to get to, difficult to get into (travelers in Greece will be familiar with “the key problem” when visiting Byzantine churches), and the priests can be rapacious and reluctant to allow ferengi* to enter. But they are worth the effort. The frescoes are almost univerally ancient and stunning. The locations are magnificently mysterious—one is visited by being hauled up a sheer cliff in a basket.

There were no problems at the church we visited—the priest not only welcomed us, but posed in the doorway in his ceremonial robes and with his processional cross. Many birr (the Ethiopian currency) must have changed hands.

The main road was paved, so the going was much easier than on previous drives. En route, we encountered the salt caravans of the Danikil Depression. First a mule train, each mule carrying two large slabs of salt, to be sold in the towns in Western Ethiopia. Then, a train of camels appeared with their slow, swaying gait and their look of superiority (because they alone know the hundredth name of God). We stop to take photos, and children appear as if sprung from the earth. They ask for pens, cash, and plastic bottles. One of our group conducts an informal English lesson on parts of the body.

We stop for a picnic lunch on a ridge far above a deep river valley. Sandwiches, bananas, wine and our guide’s mother’s home-made pannetone—his mother is Italian; his father Ethiopian. Someone produces a premature Christmas cake (carried from England!).

My day off.

Day 7, 24^th December. A lazy day at the wonderful Gheralta Lodge, reading, sunbathing, watching wildlife and strolling about. The lodge stands on its own in a few acres of alpine meadow at around 7,000 feet, overlooking a valley thousands of feet below and fringed with dramatic, jagged peaks. It is largely self-sufficient, with its own vegetable gardens, and our dinner wandering around, enjoying its last day on earth. It has an excellent library of hard-to-find books about Ethiopia. A perfect place to relax after six hectic days.

In the evening, we were treated to an exuberant display of local dance by a troupe of six men and two women, enormously energetic. Also a solo recital on the masinko, a sort of one-string lyra, basically a wooden box with a stick attached to it, which sounds like a soul in torment.

Day 8, 25^th  December. Warm sunny Christmas day, the first we’ve had since Sri Lanka, 2004, when the tsunami almost got us. A long drive south through stunning countryside to Lalibela, unsurprisingly the country’s number one tourist destination, for reasons that will be explained in Episode Three.

* Ferengi and similar terms are Arabic names for European traders, or for Westerners in general. The name is likely derived from the Arabic word faranj or ifranj, or Persian farangi, meaning “Franks.” In Ethiopia, ferenj or ferenji has the same meaning, as does farang in Thai. The source of the name is likely from the Byzantine Greeks who were the Westerners’ neighbors; this usage spread to the Near East, Asia, Africa and even China. Greeks still sometimes use fra[n]gkoi (φράγκοι) as an exonym for Western Europeans, and the Modern Greek term ferengios (φερέγγυος, ο φέρων- εγγύηση, ο δυνάμενος να εγγυηθεί) literally translates as “the able to [“bear” (=carry)] guarantee (himself),” the trust-worthy, and not only in a financial way. The term was used as a partially derogatory term in India to denote the British. (Source: Wikipedia)

(To be continued.)

by Michael House

“That amazing unknown country, Prester John’s fabled land of inaccessible mountain barriers and bottomless chasms, and wild, war-loving beautiful folk.”—George MacDonald Fraser

BACK IN LONDON England—(Weekly Hubris)—1/23/12—Fraser was writing about Ethiopia in 1868, when Britain sent an expeditionary force to rescue hostages held by mad, brilliant Emperor Theodore (Teeodros), who took his own life when the Brits were closing in on his amba (flat-topped fortress with vertical sides, like the leg of an up-turned table) at Magdala.

At the Addis Museum, I bought a T-shirt depicting this extraordinary man, an inspired general who united briefly the warlord-ridden tribes of Abyssinia, but a latter-day Caligula for insane cruelty. He was a kingly man of immense presence, his hair set in the cane-rows now so popular with young Afro-Caribbean males. The story goes that he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, which the buffoons at The Foreign Office failed to answer, so Theodore seized and tortured British citizens living in the country. Magdala is now a center for the weaving of handsome, undyed flatweave rugs of brown, grey and black sheep’s wool, with striking geometric designs, one of which now sits in my London hallway. But I digress.

Market traders in Gondar.

 Day 1: Sunday, 18December Evening flight to Addis on Ethiopian Airlines, on an elderly but serviceable plane. No sleep because of yowling children. First Class is called Cloud Nine. Landed in Addis as the sun rose. Still a bit chilly at 8,000 feet. Addis is an artificial construct, chosen as the capital by the Negus (Emperor) Menelik in 1887, after the capitals had wandered over the empire for centuries. The name “Addis Ababa” means “new flower.” Not very apposite today.

Having had no sleep, I naturally went for a walk after arriving at the hotel. The streets were broad and largely empty, with some westernized buildings, the legacy of the Italian occupation from 1936. Despite dire warnings in the guide books about hostility to “farangis,” active pick-pockets, con-artists and aggressive beggars, I encountered nothing more hostile than a few friendly waves across the road. The climate was pleasantly warm.

My group, led by a cool and efficient young man of mixed Ethiopian and Italian ancestry, Dario, lunched at a restaurant where we ate the local way. A large, circular platter is provided, coverd with various offerings, mainly meat in different guises. Rolls of a pancake-like substance are used to scoop up the food and eat it—no cutlery. After, a waitress poured soap and hot water over our hands, and another waitress produced warm towels. All very civilized. Happily, steaks are no longer cut from live animals and eaten raw (see James Bruce, Travels, 1790.)

Then a visit to the cathedral, where Haile Selassie is buried. The last emperor was murdered in 1975 by the dictator, Colonel Mengistu, and buried next to a latrine, ending 3,000 years of rule by the supposed descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. His remains were exhumed after Mengistu fell, and decently re-interred. In the cemetery outside, there is a handsome memorial to Sylvia Pankhurst, the great suffragist campaigner, who later made Ethiopia her home. Northern Ethiopia is almost entirely Christian, an emperor having adopted the religion in the third century AD.

The National Museum was far more interesting, housing Lucy, arguably the oldest hominid yet found by archaeologists, 3.2 million years old. The ethnological section appealed to me especially. I loved the old, carved neck-rests used by the Oromo people of the south. They have—or had—extraordinarily elaborate hairstyles, held in place by oil and butter. Rather than use pillows, to preserve their hair, they slept with their necks on intricately carved rests, thus keeping their coifs in order.

Representation of the Devil in the Debre Birhan Selassie Church, Gondar.

Day 2: Monday, 19December Holidays can be hard work. Having missed a night’s sleep, we were up at 4.30 a.m. for the one-hour flight to the old capital of Gondar. Not only did we have to check in 2 hours before the flight, I had to take my boots off twice for security checks. I hope, as the tourist industry develops, the airports will become more user-friendly.

Gondar was the capital from 1635. Before, Ethiopia had had no capital as such, the emperor and his court wandering around the country, fighting wars and living off the land. After a period of great upheaval, including war with a Muslim usurper, Abdul Grayn, and violent religious conflict between the established Orthodox Church and an emperor who wanted to convert the country to Catholicism, the Emperor Fasilidas wanted to create stability. So he chose a small hilltop village in the foothills of the Simien Mountains as his new capital.

Gondar is a friendly, laid-back town. Its chief glories are the Debre Birhan Selassie church, said to have the finest frescoes in Ethiopia—which is saying a lot—and the Royal Enclosure. As in Byzantine churches in Greece, the frescoes in this church, covering every inch of wall and ceiling, taught an illiterate population the myths of religion. There is a particulary fine and scary Devil within the flames of Hell, and there are graphic depictions of what lies in wait for sinners—religion as a mechanism of social control.

The Royal Enclosure, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, houses a collection of medieval-style castles unique in sub-Saharan Africa. There are six small, self-contained castles, built for occupation rather than defense, with a complex of connecting tunnels. Each of Fasilidas’s five successors added his own creation to the family enclave. Some have been beautifully restored. One sad relic is the Royal Archive Building. The Italian occupers used it as a military HQ, and the RAF bombed it into a picturesque ruin. The compound is huge and peaceful, with a profusion of trees. It is a lovely place for bird-watchers. A slice of history, preserved in aspic.

Then to the local market. There is no famine in the Ethiopian highlands: everywhere, huge piles of food, herbs and spices. Iron tools were being smelted and fashioned. Lambskin bellows made the charcoal fire glow, then a tool was heated until red-hot. Next it was beaten into shape, three men with sledge-hammers hitting it in rotation.

I liked Gondar very much. But a visitor in 1868 would have seen a reeking, smoking ruin, with a forest of crosses on which Theodore had crucified in their hundreds the population of the town. The priests called down curses on his head and he had them burned alive. The sin of the people was that they had protected rebels against Theodore’s rule. So when the young women of the town greeted his army’s arrival by singing and dancing, he decided that the singing had been a signal for the rebels to flee, and consigned the women to the flames. Every inhabitant was murdered (see Dr. Henry Blanc, A Narrative of the Captivity in Abyssinia, 1868).

Priests passing the time at the Debre Birhan Selassie Church, Gondar.

 Day 3: Tuesday, 20 December Drove into the Simien Mountains National Park, for one of the most magical days of the trip. The drive was rather grim—road-building in Ethiopia is a work-in-progress, Chinese engineers much in evidence. Mostly on dirt-tracks. Every child waves at passing farangis, so my arm began to ache after a while. When we stopped, children appeared as if out of the ground, wanting to shake hands and asking for pens, sweets and money. Stupid tourists have turned most children into beggars. But it is all very good-natured, perhaps more a game than anything else.

We climbed into the foothills, where the harvest was in full swing. The scenes were biblical. Threshing was done in a timeless way, three or four cattle—the ancient Egyptian breed with the humped necks, called zebu—driven endlessly round in a circle to trample the corn. Likewise, winnowing—tossing the grain in the air over and over, so that the chaff would blow away. Progress was frequently halted as mixed herds of goats, fat-tailed sheep, oxen, donkeys, mules and, occasionally, camels were driven along the road.

We arrived at the eco-lodge, at 10,700 feet, the highest in Africa, in the early afternoon. We were housed in traditional round, stone-and-dung-walled huts with thatched roofs: very comfortable.

The highlight of the day was a hike into the mountains, during which we encountered a troup of about 50 Gelada Baboons. They were utterly fearless, treating us as if we were a herd of antelope rather than humans. They were mainly grazing, which they do by grubbing up and eating the roots of grasses. There were grizzled elders digging up the grass, and babies play-fighting and grooming. We could go within a few feet of them and they showed neither fear nor hostility. As time passed, they moved towards a cliff-face below the plateau, where they spend the night to avoid marauding hyenas and big cats. It was an utterly captivating afternoon. Huge lammergeiers floated on the thermals above the canyon, seeking prey.

Gelada baboons in The Simien Mountains.

PS I see “Newt” Gingrinch has won the South Carolina Republican primary. But are the American people ready for an amphibian in the White House? Especially after three years of a President without a backbone?

(To Be Continued . . .)

by Michael House

KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—12/12/11—In a week’s time, I am going away for my first holiday of the year. I’m going trekking in Ethiopia. There will be no newspapers in English, no TV, no radio. My mobile phone does nothing except make and receive calls, and take photos, so I shall receive no tweets, twitters, pokes or any of the other witless activities that constitute “social” networking. Here are some of the things I shall not miss.

I shall not miss reading about the latest Teabagger who becomes the favorite to beat the boring Mormon for the Republican Presidential nomination.

(Digression: if Sarah Palin and her like knew what “Teabagger” means in Britain, they would not so describe themselves: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tea%20bagger).

The Polemicist’s taking Christmas off from worrying about Bush and his dim-witted heirs.

It was, of course, very satisfying to see Crazy after Crazy bite the dust: mass-murderer Rick Perry; Palin-lite Michelle Bachmann (earthquakes and hurricanes are God’s way of getting our attention); serial groper Herman Cain; now, all history.

But the bottom of the barrel is being well and truly scraped: Newt (of the living-dead) Gingrich is the new standard-bearer of the extreme Right. Republicans are apparently prepared to overlook his adulteries, his attempt to impeach Clinton while conducting an affair, his divorcing his wife while she was recovering from cancer, his disciplining by Congress for ethical lapses and his “contract with (or should that be on) America.” To say nothing of that stupid grin and smug, fat face.

To all Republicans: please, please choose him as your candidate.

I shall not miss reading about ex-KGB thug Vlad (The Impaler) Putin, apparently blaming Hilary Clinton for the fact that many Russians object to his rigged elections, the ballot-stuffing, the multiple voting, the gagging, harrassing and framing of opposition leaders. I understand that the vote for his party this time bagged only 95 percent of the electorate, a dramatic fall from the 137 percent in the last Duma election. This kleptocrat dictator, having served eight years as President, and having then put a stooge in place for four years to keep the seat warm, intends to go for another eight of stealing state assets, assassinating political opponents and nosy journalists, and protecting fellow-dictators at the United Nations.

I shall not miss headlines in the gutter press praising David Cameron for vetoeing a new European Union treaty on the ground that it would regulate the vultures in the City of London and stop their creating another financial disaster.

Yet again, we are the odd-one out of 27 EC nations.

I seem to remember a famous headline from the 1930s: “Fog in the English Channel—Continent isolated.”

Cameron is unpopular with his Right-Wingers in Parliament because they think he is conceding too much on policy to his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats—despite their agreeing to vicious austerity measures which make the poor carry the burden of the crisis created by the bankers.

So, he has to throw them a bone from time to time. Most of them are ferociously anti-European Little Englanders, so Cameron’s defiance of the evil, cheese-eating, surrender-monkey Frogs and the sinister, power-crazed Krauts is just what the doctor ordered.

Last night, I watched the final episode of David Attenborough’s incredible series on the North and South Poles, “Frozen Planet,” subtitled “On Thin Ice.”

Almost unbelievably, the BBC, when selling the series to US TV channels, had given them the option of not showing the last episode (which depicts how global warming is melting the ice caps and eroding the glaciers, with the inevitable result that sea levels will rise and low-lying land will be swamped) for fear the Americans would refuse to buy the series because of the risk of offending the half-wits who pretend that global warming isn’t happening.

The episode will be shown on the Discovery Channel on March 18^th, 2012: don’t miss it.

So . . . I shall not miss the US’s disgraceful conduct at the Durban Climate Change Conference, where the planet’s second largest polluter refuses to support a legally binding treaty on emissions. While the greatest catastrophe facing our planet slowly unfolds, the American government buries its head in the sand.

This prompts the question: in what way is Obama an improvement on Bush?

Happy Christmas, everybody!

by Michael House

KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—11/21/11—The Dalai Lama has long ruled out armed struggle. So Tibetans under the jackboot of the Chinese army of occupation have few ways of resisting the invaders. An occasional monk shouts “Free Tibet,” and disappears into the gulag’s prison system for many years or forever. Very rarely, the gentle Tibetans are pushed too far and riot. But resistance is sporadic and uneffectual.

Recently, a handful of brave monks and nuns have found a new way of bringing their message to the world. The Tibetan community in exile calls them “the burning martyrs.”

The burning martyrs of Tibet.

In the last month, seven have set fire to themselves.There have been eleven in all. Most have died. The center of the protest is Sichuan, part of Greater Tibet, although not part of what is laughingly called the “Tibet Autonomous Region.” The map of Tibet was redrawn by the Chinese to exclude vast swathes of eastern and southeastern Tibet.

It is said that lists are circulating in Tibetan monasteries in China of dozens of young people prepared publicly to burn themselves in protest at Chinese rule. The center of the protest is the Kirti monastery in Aba county, Sichuan. A monk from the monastery said “the situation is suffocating and there is no other way to demonstate anger.”

Reactions are mixed among Tibetans in exile. The Karmapa, third in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai and Panchen lamas (the latter kidnapped by the Chinese as a child and, if still alive, imprisoned somewhere in China), has expressed strong disapproval of the self-immolations: “These desperate acts . . . are a cry against the injustice and repression under which they live. But I request the people of Tibet to preserve their lives and find other, constructive ways to work for the cause of Tibet.”

He is right. Every Tibetan life is precious. Tibetans are few in number compared to their oppressors.

The Dalai Lama has expressed deep sorrow at the deaths, but has not appealed for them to stop. He has led prayers for those whohave set fire to themselves. The Chinese lie machine has interpreted this as “terrorism in disguise.”

The officially-declared policy of the Chinese government is to allow freedom of worship, including for Tibetan Buddhists. The reality is utterly different. Repression of monasteries has steadily been ratcheted up, year by year. How desperate do you have to be to kill yourself by this dreadful method?

The world, conscious of China’s power and wealth, looks the other way.

How should rape victims be treated? Looked after, counseled, helped to put the awful trauma behind them? Not under the medieval Islamic laws of Afghanistan. There, they are thrown into prison and only released if they agree to marry their rapists.

Assadulah Sher Mohammed raped his 19-year-old relative, Gulnaz. She was unwise enough to report the crime to the police. She was hauled before an Islamic court and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for adultery. She gave birth to her rapist’s child on the floor of her prison cell in Kabul’s infamous Pul-e-Charkhi Prison. Gulnaz has resigned herself to marrying the rapist becuse she wants to get out of prison and does not want her daughter to grow up without a father.

No doubt, her marriage will not be noticeably more unpleasant than that of many women in that barbaric, Islam-ridden country.

The story has an equally shameful sequal. The European Union made a documentary film about the crime, and about another woman, Farida, who escaped from an abusive husband and was convicted of adultery. The film has now been supressed. Gulnaz had hoped the film’s release would help to save other women from a similar fate.

The EU suppressed the film, “In-Justice,” days before it was due to be screened, citing concerns about the women’s safety and “relations with justice (sic) institutions.”

Scene from suppressed film, “In-Justice.”

The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) (http://www.rawa.org/women.php) said the EU’s action was “treason against Afghan women.” It accused the EU of “support for warlords and mafia drug-lords seated in ministries . . . instead of voicing our ill-fated people’s pains.”

Were the Taliban really much worse than the present regime? Is Afghanistan worth the life of a single British or American soldier?

by Michael House

LONDON England—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—Jimmy Carter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. His religiosity is cloying, his smile is so cheesy you feel it must be insincere, and his all-round saintliness makes George W. Bush’s raffishness seem positively appealing. He is almost literally too good to be true.

But at 87, he can be said to have done more good in the world than any living American.

The 39th President, still hard at work.

When Carter ceased to be the most powerful man on earth, he and his wife Rosalynn went back to live in the small ranch house they built in 1961, in the town (more accurately the street) of Plains, Georgia. They live there still.

Almost every ex-president, after leaving office, sets up a memorial library, a foundation, some sort of brick-and-mortar monument to his greatness. Carter set up the Carter Center in Atlanta, to advance human rights, peace negotiations and disease prevention and eradication.

The guinea worm is a debilitating parasite which affected 3.5 million people worldwide when Carter decided to eradicate it. Last year, there were just 1,797 cases. The disease is set to be the second ever to be eliminated, after smallpox.

The Carter Center also has in its crosshairs on river blindness, trachoma and elephantiasis. The Center targets problems that others ignore. So, while money is poured into HIV, AIDS and malaria research, unfashionable diseases that affect the poorest of the poor are off the radar.

Jimmy Carter has always lived up to his liberal and religious beliefs. The family housekeeper for 40 years first came to work for then-Governor Carter as a convicted murderer on day-release. She was tasked with looking after the Carters’ three-year-old daughter, Amy. A deeply religious man, Carter still teaches Sunday school most Sundays at the Baptist Church in Plains.

Not content with the Carter Center, in 1984, the couple set up the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project to carry out home-building in poor areas around the world. This autumn, Carter is in Haiti, helping to build 100 homes.

The energy of the man is prodigious. Perhaps he inherited it from his celebrated mother Miss Lillian, who became a Peace Corps volunteer at the age of 68. In April, he was in North Korea trying to negotiate an agreement on its nuclear program, following up on his visit in 1994, when he persuaded Kim Il-sung to agree to a nuclear weapons freeze.

Carter is a very persuasive man, as Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin found out when, at Camp David in 1978, he somehow secured the signing of the Peace Accords, only the second peace treaty that Israel had ever signed.

Other successes of his presidency were the Panama Canal Treaty, that probably averted war in South America by returning the canal to Panama, and reducing America’s dependence on imported oil by half—30 years before global warming gained real traction.

But the greatest triumph of his presidency was the avoidance of war, legal or illegal: during his tenure, no countries were invaded, no bombs were dropped, no service personnel killed, no civilians slaughtered. After the staff of the American embassy in Teheran were held hostage, Carter came under enormous pressure to retaliate militarily. If he had bombed Teheran, he would probably have been re-elected. But thousands of innocent civilians could have been killed as well as the hostages themselves. He did the right thing rather than the popular thing—and paid the price.

After leaving office, he pledged not to use his position to make money: no corporate directorships; no high-paid speechmaking. He simply set to work to make the world a better place.

Carter was the first high-profile individual to call for the closure of Guantanamo. He condemned the invasion of Iraq as “based upon lies and misinterpretations.”

In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No one has deserved it more.

A great president, and a great man . . .

by Michael House

KING’S SUTTON  England—(Weekly Hubris)—10/3/11—My brother, Doctor Richard House, who is senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Roehampton, South London, is as energetic as I am lazy. In 2006, he galvanized academics, educators and child experts into supporting a campaign to reverse the remorseless premature adultification of children.

He has now recruited over 200 distinguished signatories to support a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper making the case that things have got worse since 2006. With apologies to that newspaper, I reproduce it in full below.

Forcing children into premature adulthood manifests itself in many ways: the sale of sexualized clothing to little girls; seven-year old boys engaged in cage-fighting for the pleasure of sick adults; starting school too early; remorseless educational testing and evaluation at too early an age; exposure to violent cartoons and to disgusting pop lyrics which degrade women; being permitted/encouraged to live life though the computer, the television and the mobile phone in the bedroom, rather than playing in the fresh air, etc., etc.

The text of the letter follows:

“Five years ago, your newspaper published a letter signed by more than 100 experts, arguing that children’s well-being and mental health were being adversely affected by modern technological and commercial culture. Since then, several high-profile reports on the state of childhood in Britain have agreed that our children are suffering from a relentless diet of ‘too much, too soon’—with UNICEF finding Britain to have the lowest levels of children’s well-being in the developed world, and Britain coming out near the top of international league tables on almost all indicators of teenage distress and disaffection.

“Although parents are deeply concerned about this issue, the erosion of childhood in Britain has continued apace since 2006. Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in outdoor activity. The time has come to move from awareness to action. We call on all organizations and individuals concerned about the erosion of childhood to come together to achieve the following: public information campaigns about children’s developmental needs, what constitutes ‘quality childcare,’ and the dangers of a consumerist screen-based life-style; the establishment of a genuinely play-based curriculum in nurseries and primary schools up to the age of six, free from the downward pressure of formal learning, tests and targets; community-based initiatives to ensure that children’s outdoor play and connection to nature are encouraged, supported and resourced within every local neighborhood, and the banning of all forms of marketing directed at children up to at least age seven.

“It is everyone’s responsibility to challenge policy-making and cultural developments that entice children into growing up too quickly—and to protect their right to be healthy and joyful natural learners. Top-down, political approaches to change always have their limitations, no matter how well-intentioned. It is only by coming together as a unifying voice from the grass roots, therefore, that we can hope to interrupt the erosion of childhood, and find a more human way to nurture and empower all our children.”

Dr. House commented on the letter to a Telegraph reporter:

The letter, which is signed by 228 people, was circulated by Dr Richard House, senior lecturer at Roehampton University’s Research Centre for Therapeutic Education. It calls for major reforms to save children from a “relentless diet of ‘too much, too soon’.”

This should include a public information campaign highlighting children’s developmental needs, the requirement to promote high quality child care and the dangers of a “consumerist, screen-based lifestyle.”

The group also criticizes the education system, saying that five-year-olds should be given a play-based curriculum in the first full year of school instead of formal lessons. The comments will be seen as a criticism of Coalition plans to subject all children to a reading test at the end of their first year in school.

The letter calls for a ban on all forms of marketing directed at children up until at least the age of seven.

Dr. House told the Telegraph: “The inexorable momentum of modern technological life is such that despite the awareness raised through the September 2006 Telegraph open letter on ‘toxic childhood,’ matters have improved very little.

“We also live in an age of seemingly ever-mounting anxiety; and when the adult world is unable to contain and process its own anxieties in a mature way, they inevitably get projected on to children, resulting in countless well-intentioned but often highly inappropriate intrusions into children’s experience that leave children’s true needs misunderstood and neglected.”

Publication of the letter coincides with the publication of a book, Too Much, Too Soon?, featuring 23 essays on early learning and the erosion of childhood.

Are things even worse in the US?

Please comment.

2011: Judicial lynching of Black man in the state of Georgia, USA, after 22 years on death row.

2011: Judicial lynching of teenager in Iran, in front of a baying mob.

Spot the difference?

by Michael House

KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—9/12/11—Demented Christians, whose interpretation of “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is “thou shalt force thy female neighbor to be an incubator against her will,” never give up trying to subvert Roe v. Wade. In a previous column, I listed some of the wheezes dreamed up by the anti-choice bigots which they have managed to push thought state legislatures to make abortion more difficult in the US.

They rationalize their behavior by peddling the myth that a fetus is a human life rather than part of a woman’s body. Men who will never go though the agonies of childbirth, and women who have given birth and see no reason why others should be let off what they have gone through, conspire to control women through their biological functions.

Keeping women in their place has always been a major religious imperative.

In the UK, we have a relatively civilized abortion law. But the anti-choice brigade has recently dreamed up a new trick to put obstacles in the way of women wanting terminations. The protagonists are Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP, a sort of Sarah Palin with brains, and Frank Field, a renegade Labour MP who has got religion.

They are trying to insert into a parliamentary bill a clause that forces women to seek counseling from an organization other than that which will carry out the operation. They are the public face of the cleverly-named “Right To Know” campaign. (Sadly, the Right To Know does not extend to the right to know how much funding for the campaign comes from extremist evangelical groups in the US.)

The idea is that abortion clinics (which are charities) profit from every abortion they carry out, and that there is a “conflict of interest” when the clinics counsel women seeking an abortion.

DSK: laughing all the way out of the pokey.

So, under the guise of providing women with impartial information, the clause seeks to slow down the process and put obstacles in the way of a termination. It is easy to guess the kind of organizations that would be delighted to offer their services as “impartial” counselors.

Perhaps this principle should be applied to all surgical procedures.

You are in agony with toothache. Your dentist advises you to have a rotten tooth extracted. But he/she will benefit financially from the extraction. So, the law forces you to go to another dentist, who will charge you to advise you as to whether the extraction is really necessary or whether there is a viable alternative. The same would apply to any other operation, thus bringing the health services to a standstill.

But why not?

If the doctors who work in abortion clinics cannot be trusted to give impartial advice because of some notional financial conflict of interest, why trust surgeons and dentists if they, or the organizations for which they work, will profit from a procedure?

The government, alive to the risk of alienating women voters, is opposing the clause, which is unlikely to be passed here.

But the bigots never give up.

Dominic Strauss-Khan is an individual for whom the term “dirty old man” could have been coined personally. The ex-head of the International Monetary Fund and one-time future President of France, has an appalling reputation for hitting on women. The world did not know this until recently, because the French press applies the rule of omerta to the sexual, extra-curricular activities of politicians.

He was accused of raping a chamber-maid in his hotel suite. He agrees that sexual activity took place, but that it was consensual.

Apparently, when Strauss-Khan emerged naked from the bathroom, the 32 year-old maid was so turned on by his 62-year old pot-bellied physique that she could not resist having sex with him.

Her injuries and his conduct afterwards notwithstanding, the New York prosecutors concluded that the case should not go to trial because the maid’s credibility was compromised. She had lied to the police and had dubious associates in her background.

The message to would-be rapists is clear: Find a woman with a credibility problem, with a skeleton in her closet, and you can rape her without fear of prosecution.

Why not let a jury decide?

by Michael House

“Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other remedies.”

—Winston Churchill

KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—8/22/10—Extreme Republicans habitually wrap themselves in the flag. “God Bless America” is never far from their lips. Yet, what sort of patriotism is it that would destroy their country’s economy in order to undermine a hated and despised President?

What is the foundation of the visceral loathing that these freaks have for Barack Obama? He is no more liberal than Kennedy, LBJ, Carter or Clinton. What sets him apart from these four? Does anyone really need to ask the question?

Embedded in the DNA of these people is a deep-seated abhorrence of the notion of deferring to a Black man. A Black man cannot be a proper President of the US of A. He has to be an alien/Muslim/communist/terrorist. He has to go, even if America goes down with him.

The lunatic fringe is becoming the entire carpet.

The more subtle weirdos indulge in a system of campaigning invented by an Australian right-winger, so-called “dog-whistle politics.” The idea is that dogs can hear frequencies that the human ear cannot. So, you dress your propaganda in words to which ordinary people cannot directly object, but the meaning of which your supporters understand only too well. So, when extreme Republicans say. “Let’s take back America,” their supporters hear, “Let’s kick the nigger out of the White House.”

But the less evolved of the knuckle-scrapers cannot manage anything so clever. They can’t avoid letting the cat out of the bag. So, a mammal by the name of Doug Lamborn, a Tea Bagger from Colorado, refers to Obama as “the tar-baby.” It wouldn’t surprise me if he were also a creationist. Evolution seems to have passed him by.

Uber-buffoon Rush Limbaugh has described Obama as “uppity.” Tactfully, he left the “n” word out.

I have just come across a loopy website called “Ministers-Best-Friend.com,” and I here share its central theme with you.

1) Obama: Seven Shocking Quotes against Christ & Christianity
Obama: Seven shocking Quotes against Christ & Christianity

2) Obama: Seven Radically Racist Quotes against Caucasians
Obama: Seven Radically Racist Quotes

3) Obama: Amazing Anti-American, Anti-Patriotic Quotes
Obama: Seven Anti-American, Anti-Patriotic Quotes

4) Obama: Evidence of His being a Muslim and His Devotion to Islam
Obama: Evidence of His being a Muslim

We have people like this in Britain. But no one elects them to anything. No one grants them the power to wreck the economy (we leave that to bankers). The lunatic fringe remains just that—a fringe.

In Germany in the 1920s, industrial collapse, unemployment and the evaporation of the wealth of the middle class destroyed the Weimar Republic and led to Fascism. The National Socialist Party began as a tiny handful of malcontents. In the 1928 election, it won to 2.6 percent of the votes. By 1933, it had beome the largest party in the Reichstag with 37 percent.

It is not enough to ridicule and deride the Tea Party Movement. No doubt, German liberals in the 20s thought “it couldn’t happen here.” But it did. This movement must be crushed before it gets its hands on any more of the levers of power.

Otherwise, don’t be poor in America. Don’t be sick in America. Don’t be Black in America. Don’t be gay in America.

The 20^th century’s beacon of hope will have become the 21^st century’s horror story. A giant failed state.

I sure hope Churchill was right.