24 December 2002

Manger Square

Vicky Barker is in good voice this morning. It is Christmas Eve and there are some important gestures happening around the world. The President of the United States has given me the afternoon off. Not me alone, of course, it is the entire Federal Workforce. Because of the various work schedules in force, flex-time, compressed schedule, part-time, it took seven e-mails on the office system to get the implications straight for the Agency time-keepers. I will take the time to go out to the silent house in the County and set up the computer I bought my younger son, and drop off the packages from my parents for the boys. They are elsewhere, in the bosom of their mother's family. That is the ghost of Christmas Present.

I'm glad Vicky is back. She is my favorite reader on the World Service, her accent the purest mid-Atlantic. I have nothing against Emilio San Pedro. I just find Vicky more approachable. As the BBC turns over to National Public Radio the focus changes on the news. Carl Castle is stolid and American, and they continue the Christmas theme. But I am lost in the delicate warp and weft of the World Service.

The Israelis have pulled back from Manger Square in Bethlehem. The World Service interviewed the Mayor, who said it was a pretty somber season at the birthplace of Christ. The pull-back is only a respite, and the troops will be back. There are no decorations and no Christmas trees in the square this year. The Church of the Nativity, built above the dark grotto where the Prince of Peace was born still shows the scars of the siege earlier this year, when Muslim militants held out there. The Church has many scars. The last time I was there it was somber, too. It was 1990 and that year's Intifada had driven away the tourists. We arrived in the West Bank town at dusk from Jerusalem. It was cold in the car because someone had smashed the front passenger's window out with a chunk of the Old City wall. I have the jagged stone on my bookcase today, traveling down the years with me. Manger Square was gray in the dying light. As we walked from the old Mercedes toward the entrance I cou! ld see that the entrance had once been much larger, that different stones had been added to lower the lintel and make the door much smaller.

Our guide told me it was to prevent horsemen from entering the sacred precinct while mounted.

Other troops are on the move. Vicky tells me that American Air Defense personnel are arriving in Israel to conduct training on air defense missile batteries. The BBC reporter asked if this referred to the Arrow missile, and the subject matter expert Effraim Imber replied, somewhat peeved, that he was of course referring to the Patriot Pac II anti-air missile system. The World Service then did a feature on the poor performance of the missiles in the Gulf War. You don't get news like this elsewhere.

The Christmas and War theme wove erratically through the years. I heard Winston Churchill's voice on scratchy vinyl echo down the years from the West Portico of the White House, six weeks after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. He had words of hope for a United States reeling from defeat all across the Pacific. Susan Stanburg from National Public Radio told me he enjoyed many cigars and several brandies during his visit, and attended holy services with FDR. Garrison Keeler reported on the Writer's Almanac about the pause in the fighting on the Western Front in World War One long ago.

The BBC had been a little more circumspect. In this week of anniversaries for them, 70 years of the World Service this week, they paused to note that on a Christmas Even in 1922 the BBC broadcast the first play ever written for the brand new medium of radio. It was a the brainchild of the Special Projects unit of the legendary pioneer of the shortwave, Arthur Burrows. The play was named "The Truth About Father Christmas" and was set in a Welsh coal mine. For authenticity they had the actors wear buckets over their heads to give an authentic echo. The text of the play has been lost to history, all that remains is a program note from the BBC archives. But I suspect there was no irony in the play, and the story was probably uplifting and instructive. Irony as we know it was not invented until 1929.

We have perfected our radio irony over the years, I suppose because there is so much to be ironic about. The North Koreans have dismantled the last of the video monitoring gear at the Yongbyon reactor site, the fuel rods glowing there under water in the holding pool. The eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency are blinded, the same week that a South Korean President is elected with on a Sunshine platform of rapprochement with the North. The IAEA is calling an emergency meeting and Seoul is nervous.

It has been a hell of a year to bring us to this Christmas Eve. The BBC wrapped it's collective tongue and held on to irony for the dance-off. They reported that a Boy Scouts were having a major regional Jamboree in Thailand. Thousands of young men between 14 and 18 years of age are gathering for an encampment to celebrate Lord Baden-Powell's vision of Scouting as a means of inculcating values and virtue. The end of the story was that the Thai Ministry of Health issued all the young men condoms. I'm not sure Arthur Burrows would have written it that way. Maybe we need a little less irony in the world, but then, what would I write about? I am the child of an ironic age, after all. We will have our challenges after New Year's Eve, and there will be irony aplenty for the World Service to report.

So let me leave that to the next year and end the holy season of 2002 with something that is straight from the heart. Let us honor and remember him who was born for Peace so long ago in the Manger Square.

Merry Christmas, and God bless us, every one.