23 February 2003

From the Top

It is early Saturday and I am working through the blear. I successfully mastered the coffee-pots operating system ("ON") and was preparing to throw down a couple Cavalettis for breakfast. I was thinking about a woman I know and wondering about the future. I am playing on the keyboard, not writing seriously, at least not yet. I have no news on the radio. The weekend routine is different. Most mornings I awake with a vivacious red-head. She gets me stoked, engages my mind, focuses me on the day to come. She is Vicki Barker, and she lives across an ocean and orchestrates the morning show on the BBC World Service.

Weekends are different. I listen to the classical music show "From the Top" that features teen prodigies from all around America. It is fun. The audience hoots and hollers with the enthusiasm I would normally associate with a rock concert. Then the kids launch into complex and highly technical performances of the old composers. Chris O'Reilly is the interlocutor of what he bills as the "top showcase of classical music for young performers in the country." He gets the kids to open up and talk about themselves and how they arrived at this first glimpse of their futures. Then they play Vivaldi, or Beethoven or something rally obscure. It is juvenile and touching and scary-mature all at the same time.

This morning the performers are from Central Pennsylvania, where the Socotras came from a long time ago, and where we still return for internment when time's winged chariot finally runs us down.

Outside there is a fog alert and the world is awash in dark water. White peaks of dirty snow protrude, the compacted drifts left by the plows looking like bleached ribs. The cars whoosh through the pools throwing plumes behind. There are flood warnings for later today. Here the sky is low but does not descend to the fifth floor. Out there on the weekday road to work I suspect it is gathered into the swales and the turns are quite treacherous. I am content to be here at home, a single light on, the music in the background and the bed still rumpled, beckoning.

I have to figure out the news myself this morning, looking for the Unifying Field Theory that will bring it all together. I had the help of my friends at the New York Times. The Times is reinventing itself, arriving in the e-mail queue with the tide of daily spam which invites me to purchase Viagra, increase the size of my cock and lower my mortgage rate. This morning there are ten commercial invitations, one personal note and the e-headlines from the gray Paper of Record. The Times has been undergoing a bit of culture-shock of late, trying to shed some of the grayness. Newsweek did a piece on the phenomenon. Advocacy journalism is new for them, at least the up front part, in your face. Why they picked poor Tiger Woods and his failure to protest the exclusivity of the Augusta National Country Club as a cause celebe is beyond me. Isn't there something bigger in the world to get up in arms about? I ran down this morning's list, seeking the link between it all.

The national news has a logical enough string. People want to have fun. People want to go out. Sometimes shit happens. It happened in Chicago and it happened Thursday in Rhode Island. PAM BELLUCK and PAUL von ZIELBAUER just might be young enough to have been one of the crowd at the Station Club in West Warwick. They provided an update on the death toll this morning, and it has only become more mind boggling. The count this morning is now 96 dead and 187 injured. They report that it is the deadliest nightclub fire in this country in a quarter century. In 1990 a fire in a social clud in the Bronx killed 87. There happened to be a TV news crew in the club filming a story on, of all things, nightclub safety, when the wall behind the stage erupted in flame. The clips of the partiers and the staff is eerie enough, but as the first chords of the first song of Great White's set begins, the rhythm guitarist is looking over his shoulder at something he knows is really, really really wrong. There were 350 people in the club. Just under a third of those present are dead. By my rough calculations, that means 80% of those in the clips were either going to be dead or hurt within the three minutes it took for the place to go up in flames. The camera crew made it out OK.

Given the delicate political situation regarding the connections of the owners of the Epitome Club in Chicago, I am sure that both Mayor Daley and the Rev. Jackson are relieved by the diversion of attention to the East Coast.

The saddest story is from the upper south. JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN rang in with the grim news from North Carolina that the desperate second heart and lung transplant on Jésica Santillán, a 17-year-old Mexican immigrant, failed. According to Dr. Karen Frush, the teen-ager is now in a vegetative state with "severe and irreversible brain damage." There are fevered denials as well, butthe fact remains that the first transplant was botched when the surgical team failed to check the blood type on the donated organs. They were incompatible, and as they were being rejected, a feverish search went on to make it right. There is no word on what, if anything, has or may be recycled.

That story at least seemed to be a stand-alone, unlikely to be connected to some chain that would wind up impacting my life. Though this is a mysterious world. I was comforted to find the casus belli for the next Gulf War. Hans Blix and his merry inspectors have decided that the range of a particular class of Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles slightly exceeds the capricious limits established by the Security Council. Saddam has already denied it, saying that, well, if you put an actual warhead on the rocket then the range comes down to something legal. So, if Saddam doesn't destroy them the Americans and the British will invade. Or maybe it will be about something else.

I scrolled down the list of stories, hoping to follow a thread. Terror swirls around the Iraq crisis. I know there has to be a link between the two. I just can't figure out what it is. Times correspondent MARC LACEY filed from Nairobi two days ago, claiming investigators have evidence linking some of the same al Qaida operatives to the 1998 American Embassy bombings and those on the resort on the Silver Strand in Mombasa last November. He notes that although four Qaeda members were convicted in 2001 for their role in the attacks they never completely eradicated the cell. The attacks killed 224 people, and wounded hundreds. Almost all of them Kenyans. Lacey claims that at least two members of that cell may have gone on to plan the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa on Nov. 28 that killed 11 Kenyans, 3 Israelis and at least two of the scumbag suicide bombers. Faulty tactics or expired shelf-life on two surface-to-air missiles caused attackers to bare miss a charter plane leaving Kenya for Israel the same morning. Investigators are seeking a man suspected of helping to bomb the hotel in connection with the embassy bombings. They have been looking for him since 1998, and I suspect they will be lookiing for a while longer.

JAMES BENNET reported from JERUSALEM the same day. He says that Israeli forces shot two more Palestinians while repelling separate attacks on Jewish targets in the Gaza Strip. The deaths brought to at least 30 the number of Palestinians who have died violently since Saturday, when militants from Hamas blew up an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip, killing the four soldiers inside.

ERIC LICHTBLAU and JUDITH MILLER had more to say about the Palestinian question, this time the part that lives in the U.S. They filed a report from Florida claiming the cops have suspected for years that a Florida computer science professor named Sami Al-Arian was a kingpin in the money-raising arm of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That organization has been linked to more than 100 killings, including two Americans. That is three times the number of Palestinians who were killed this week. Dr. Al-Arian has been under investigation since 1994, and although I don't know if Eric and Judith talked to JAMES BENNET, I bet if they got together for a drink they could connect the dots pretty well. The problem is that financing for terrorist groups is an old and honored tradition here in America, and in fact right here in Our Fair City. I enjoy a pint down at the Dubliner periodically, a foine traditional pub near union Station. The President and the Speaker of the House used to go there to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day. But they stopped going there after the police got a tip about the rocket launchers in the basement that were headed for the Provisional Wing of the IRA. But the bar is still open.

It seems like Sami forgot the key rule of terrorist fundraising: don't screw around on American soil while you are raising money to screw with people overseas. The Clinton Administration, according to Eric and Judith (I wonder if she is Judy in the newsroom?) was slow to take action against the Palestinian him because of legal, political and operational roadblocks. No such roadblocks existed for Sami's brother-in-law. He was busted in 1997 and deported. But he didn't have a Green Card and Sami did, probably because he had a critical skill and got one of the waivers, like the Pakistani Veterinarians who are working as inspectors for the Federal Department of Agriculture. The usual suspects are rallying around the embattled professor. They say he is being persecuted because of his advocacy of Palestinian causes. His lawyer calls him a political prisoner.

Finally, from the Left Coast, BARBARA WHITAKER reports the wacky City Council of Los Angeles voted 9-to-4 to became the largest city to oppose a unilateral war against Iraq. More than 100 other cities and counties have passed similar resolutions. They do not have a count on individual apartments, but I am going to caucus later this morning when I finally wake up.

I'll let you know the vote turns out.