March 2007
The Villa of the Mysteries
I fell asleep in my brown chair by the window at Big Pink last night. I was reading a revisionist assessment of the art and architecture of buried Pompeii, the pretty little town on the shoulders of Mount Vesuvius that went to ashes in a single day in year 79 of the Common Era.
You know what we used to call it before correctness overcame us. Same year, though.
The artifacts that continue to come from the excavations- scavi- reveal a singular moment in history, when an entire city and all its secrets was sealed intact in the space of a few hours. The casual nature of the timing means that what lies below the ash is exactly as it was, not subject to the gradual wearing away and theft that goes with the passage of normal time.
This curiosity made Pompeii the subject of the best single course I took at college, and the topic of the best lesson I never learned. The professor was a man with a dry sense of humor who had the world exactly where he wanted it. He spent his summers on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, looking at dry bones, and gave slide shows about it the rest of the year in a pleasant university town.
Of the many lessons one learns at school, I clearly missed the crucial one. Life is not about making history, since it makes itself quite nicely. It is about finding something to do that permits a lot of time outside, in a pleasant place, and working hours that are not as onerous as those required to personally intervene in the great river of time.
Float with it, was the lesson I should have learned. Do not resist history.
The villas that were excavated had no names, since the scrolls of ownership did not survive the burning ash, only the stuff of everyday life. One of the most spectacular was called the Villa of the Mysteries, for the simple reason that those who dug it up were by turns horrified and amazed by the completely ordinary life of the Romans.
The ancients were quite matter-of-fact about some things that confound us today, and wrap us up in philosophical and moral knots. I envy them in a way. They had no Prophets to lead them, only a bevy of capricious deities, one for each season and circumstance.
While we are here, let us dispel two acts of history that could be more important than Britney Spears haircut, or the disposition of the earthly remains of Anna Nicole.
The eight sailors and seven Royal Marines from HMS Cornwall who were kidnapped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the northern Arabian Gulf did not stray out of Iraqi waters in the Shatt al Arab waterway that flows south out of Basrah. The boundary line is indistinct there, and has caused wars before. That is not what the kidnapping is about.
It is about the seizure by US troops of Iranian Consular officials a few months ago, and the mysterious disappearance in Turkey of Iranian General Ali Reza Asgari. He has some interesting history. He served in the Iranian government as a senior intelligence official until early 2005. He has profound information about Iran's national security infrastructure, its conventional weapons arsenal, previous acts of terrorism and ties to Hezbollah.
There is widespread unease in Tehran about what useful information he is conveying to the Brits and the United States. It verges on panic, and hence the need for bargaining chips, and that is the reason the sailors and Marines are on their way to Tehran.
The Iranian leadership is scared to death, since the general may be able to open up a long litany of embarrassments, going back to the capture and eventual transfer of Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad after his plane was sot down over Lebanon in 1986.
That includes the time of the murders of hundreds of American Marines and French troops in Beirut. There could be a casus belli in there somewhere, if you actually knew the full scope of what they had done, and hostage-taking is the natural response to crisis in Tehran.
After all, that was what current Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made their first big career moves. I think they will be all right, in the end, though there will have to be a ritual moment of embarrassment for the television, and something will happen somewhere that will not be seen.
Speaking of embarrassment, let me briefly provide the solution to the other major world crisis, which is the murder of Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan's national cricket team. The murder occurred at the Pegasus Hotel, the nexus of activity for the tournament being played on nine Caribbean islands.
My younger boy just returned unscathed from the lovely former colony that pulsates with color and rum and the sound of Bob Marley, everywhere. It is also the epicenter of Commonwealth sporting interest.
If European football is the world sport, Cricket is a truly the greatest multi-cultural legacy of the British Empire. I have watched earnest Indian boys protecting wickets in dusty cantonments north of Delhi with a passion that surpasses the understanding of modern Americans. Woolmer himself, English child raised in India, is an exemplar of the near-universal appeal of the game.
Except, of course, in America. Our attention span does not encompass an event as stupefying as a five-day test match, much less the abbreviated format played in a single day in Cup Play. We seem to think these days that a baseball game is too long, and have long forgotten why it was once truly the National Pastime.
Bob Woolmer died because he knew that the fix was on. Distraught that his talented team had lost to the sorry Irish, the second loss in a row, he had to be thinking of the cheating scandal that occurred when he was coach of the South African All-Blacks. In 2002, his Captain Hansie Cronje confessed to throwing matches for cash payments. He was banned from the game for life. There was no indication that Bob knew anything about it, but he was the first cricket skipper to bring in cameras and computers to analyze performance, and he must have suspected.
His Pakistan team walked off the pitch last august when they were accused of ball-tampering. It was the first time in 129 years of test play that a game had been forfeited. There is a sea of emotion about this, and huge money in the gambling trade. The temptations are vast. Bob was writing a book, and the galley proofs of it are reported missing.
So Bob is dead, and the facts are plain enough. We Americans will not have the time to devote to the story that it deserves. We can barely deal with bulging Bobby Bonds and Human Growth Hormone abuse. If it could all be sealed up in hot ash, and then investigated for a century or more, it might eventually all come out in some rational way.
But it will not. The story of Woolmer's murder may last longer than the time that the sailors and Marines are in Iranian custody, but probably not much longer.
It is unfortunate about the attention-span deficit. The Iranians are concerned that the world will find out what mischief they have been up to for the last few decades, and apparently think that it matters. They have the patience and subtlety to appreciate a test match that goes on for days, and still ends in a stalemate.
We don't, as a general rule. The American Marines who died at the barracks at Beirut might as well have been entombed at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. Which is a pity, don't you think?
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com