Josephus’s Jumble, the 21st Century Edition: October 2007

Josephus’s Jumble, the 21st Century Edition: October 2007

October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care

October
And Kingdoms rise
And Kingdoms fall
But you go on…

– U2

As my loyal readers probably know, I am a direct descendant of the historian Flavius Josephus. Aside from writing such seminal works as War of the Jews (c. 75), Josephus wrote a column for The Titus Times. He called his column, “Josephus’s Jumble.” In the first column of every month, Josephus reviewed the past month. It is my honor and privilege – and some might argue, my birthright – to resurrect Josephus’s Jumble, the 21st century edition.
     Are You Ready to Jumble?

MARATHONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

It’s a cool morning as I write this. Forty-six degrees. A strong wind chill. I can almost see my breath. I’m wearing a ski hat. My building doesn’t emit heat until November.
     Why is this relevant to the Jumble? This coming weekend marks an annual tradition in New York, the running of the marathon. Hopefully the temperature remains cool. Hopefully the month of November doesn’t begin the way October did. October began with the Chicago marathon crossing the line into crisis.
     Eight a.m. on October 7, as the race began, and the temperature hovered in the 70s. “That’s a little warm for southern Illinois,” Tom Skilling, the chief meteorologist at WGN-TV, explained. “But not so unseasonable. We’re usually about ten degrees cooler.”
     Two hours later, the temperature reached eight-eight degrees. “A warm weather cell blew up from the Gulf [of Mexico],” Tom Skilling explained. “We get those kinds of patterns quite frequently. But what was so surprising was the speed of the pattern. We expected the hot weather to hit us the next day. We expected seasonable temperatures on marathon day.”
     By eleven a.m., the mercury had soared into the 90s. “But what made it truly awful was the humidity index,” Skilling said. “Ninety-five degrees felt like one hundred and seven.”
     According to Frank Shorter, one of America’s most experienced and decorated runners as well as a participant in this year’s Chicago marathon, there was another force at work. “Lake Michigan was like glass,” he described. “I realized early in my run that I wasn’t being cooled by any wind. Even though the temperature/humidity index was in the danger zone, it was the stillness that slammed the door on the runners, and ultimately on the race itself.”
     Three hours into the marathon, the organizers had a difficult decision to make. “It was a tough call,” Carey Pinkowski, the marathon’s director, said. “It’s my responsibility to make a decision on people’s health and on public safety. All the indications were that it was only going to get worse.”
     Pinkowski stopped the run at half past eleven. At that time of the morning, three and a half hours into the race, there were still thousands of people out on the course. One of those runners, Dawn Dowell, had reached the 19-mile mark. “I had no faculties whatsoever,” she reported.
     She made this statement from the emergency room of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, hours after the event. “I could not provide my address or my phone number,” she continued. “I could not remember my middle name. I was scared.”
     “Why didn’t you stop?” a reporter asked her.
     “I didn’t realize what was going on,” she replied. “I was delirious.”
     According to Dr. Martin Lucenti, an emergency room physician at Northwestern Memorial, Dawn Dowell’s core body temperature had risen to one hundred and seven degrees. At those temperatures, he reported, people stutter and mumble, unable to answer simple questions. Brain cells are in danger too. “Anything in that vicinity is a big red flag,” Dr. Lucenti said. “We saw a lot of red flags.” Three hundred and two red flags – or runners – to be exact.
     Chad Schieber never made it to Northwestern Memorial. He collapsed around the 18th mile. He lost his pulse very fast and he died on the racecourse. Matt Schieber described his cousin Chad as “a police officer in such good shape. To have this news today is pretty much incredible.”
     Incredible indeed. But with global warming in full effect and with marathons now a multi-billion dollar business, a tourist attraction, and a weight loss technique, isn’t this a sign of things to come?

THE NEVER-ENDING SAGA OF A PROFESSIONAL DOPER

What is it about professional dopers? Some stick to their innocence despite the weight of massive evidence against them (Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton, Ben Johnson). Some claim that they took substances without knowing what they were putting into their bodies (Marion Jones, Barry Bonds). And then there are those who just won’t go away (Lance Armstrong again, Barry Bonds seemingly forever). Why won’t they leave us alone?
     Witness the never-ending saga of Floyd Landis. He won the 2006 Tour de France. In the 16th stage of that race, he absolutely cracked, finishing ten minutes back of the yellow jersey. In the 17th stage, on the very next day, he went on a stunning solo attack of one hundred and twenty kilometers. He made up all but thirty seconds of the overall deficit. He eventually won the Tour.
     Four days after the Tour, he tested positive for synthetic testosterone. According to the test, his hormone testosterone to hormone epitestosterone ratio came in at 11:1. In previous tests, Landis registered a 4:1 ratio. Only a synthetic source could cause such a jump.
     How did Floyd Landis respond to the triple effect? Excuse #1: he blamed the ratio on “an excess of whiskey” consumed the night before.
     Nearly laughed out of the interview room, he segued to excuse #2: his body, he claimed, had a tendency to produce an excessive amount of testosterone during times of exorbitant stress.
     Landis is 32-years-old. He’s been a professional cyclist for over a decade. He’s been tested countless time. Certainly, his body has undergone times of exorbitant stress before. And yet he’s never tested higher than 4:1.
    Again, Landis encountered the guffaws in the interview room. According to an unnamed source within the Landis defense team of lawyers, he nearly used excuse #3: Mennonites produce an enormous amount of testosterone.
     I suppose he realized that the Mennonite excuse wouldn’t fly. Or ride, as the case may be.
     In May 2007, arbitration between Landis and the United States Anti-Doping Agency began. In September the arbiters found Landis guilty of doping. He was stripped of his victory in the Tour de France.
     But Floyd Landis will not go away. On October 11, he filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration in Switzerland over the stripping of his title. “This is as much about vindication of his own character as it is about some Tour goal or some bike race,” Maurice Suh, Landis’s primary lawyer, proclaimed. “There has been a financial and emotional toll on [Landis] through this case. He just didn’t feel like simply walking away.”

ATTENTION, MR. LANDIS

On October 29, a suicide bomber on a bicycle killed 28 policemen in Iraq as they prepared for their morning training routine. The response among colleagues was shock and sorrow. “I lost 12 friends who were with me having tea 30 minutes ago,” Wisam Wahid al-Majmaie said, according to the New York Times. “Twelve friends,” he repeated the number, his voice tailing away.
     Please do us all a favor, Landis: Walk away and consider yourself lucky.

MORE ROMNEY S.B.

At a campaign stop in South Carolina, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was in the midst of criticizing the Democrats in their “battle in the global war on terror. Just look at what Osama – uh – Obama said yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”
     Are you confused yet?
     Mitt Romney might have said “Osama – uh – Obama” but in fact he wasn’t talking about anything candidate Barack Obama had ever said. Mitt Romney was talking about the new audiotape released by Osama bin Laden, calling on insurgents in Iraq to unite.
     After the event, the Romney camp tried to backpedal. “Governor Romney misspoke,” the campaign announced. “He was referring to the recently released audiotape of Osama bin Laden and misspoke when referencing his name. It was just a brief mix-up.”
     The repetition of the word misspoke set off my internal skepticism mechanism. I called on Kevin Madden, Romney’s spokesman, for clarification. “You’re talking about two letters in those names,” he responded. “An ‘S’ and a ‘B.’ It’s just a slip of the tongue. An easy mistake. Is that so strange?”
     Yes, Kevin, not only is it strange to equate Osama with Obama but your clarification effort is pure B.S., or S.B. in the Mitt Romney way of speaking.
     The incident reminded me of the first George Bush and his emphasis on the name Saddam during the First Gulf War. Bush made sa-DOM into SAD-am. The first pronunciation in Arabic means one who confronts. The second means a barefoot beggar.

DEFYING ALL IDEAS OF JUSTICE

Speaking of George Bush, our current president urged the House Foreign Affairs committee to table a “controversial” resolution. The resolution, essentially symbolic, officially defines the slaughter of Armenians during the First World War as genocide. “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” Bush said. Actually 1914, but what’s a little historical accuracy to George Bush? “But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to relations with a key ally in NATO and to the war on terror.”
     The implications behind George Bush’s statement are clear. Relations with Turkey are at an all-time low and the politics of the day far outweigh the judgments of history.
     George Bush of course didn’t mention that relations with Turkey are at an all-time low due to Bush foreign policy.
     In his statement, both real and implied, George Bush got it wrong. Here’s the history. The modern nation known as Turkey might have been founded in 1923 but, for all intents and purposes, it began in 1911 when a military junta seized control of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. First reports of the genocide, from December 1914, told of hundreds of Armenians hanged in the streets of Erzurum, in modern-day northeast Turkey. A few months later, Turkish soldiers lay siege to the Armenian city of Van (modern-day eastern Turkey). The siege mentality spread all the way to Istanbul. In April 1915, Turkish soldiers hanged some 250 Armenian leaders. That opened up the floodgates. What followed was the first genocide of the modern era.
     The New York Times catalogued these events – 145 articles in fact appeared in the newspaper. American eyewitnesses, missionaries mainly, provided chilling testimony. In Aleppo, then a part of greater Turkey, a missionary named Jesse Jackson (no relation to our Jesse Jackson, to be sure) described the scene. There were Armenian deportees jammed into railway cars. “Old men and old women, young mothers with tiny babies and children, all huddled together like so many sheep or pigs – human beings treated worse than cattle.” In his estimations, no more than 15 percent could have survived the journey.
     In Orumiyeh, on the modern-day Turkish/Iranian border, a missionary named William Shedd described the scene. The governor of the area “delighted in nailing horseshoes to his victims’ feet.” Meanwhile, his forces resorted to “beating and starvation [of the Armenian population], extraction of teeth, branding with hot irons, stabbing in the face with sharp irons, burning of hair and beard.”
     In Caucasia, another missionary named Richard Hill saw “children dying by the hundreds” whose “frenzied mothers would fling them into the fields, so as not to see their dying agonies.”
     Another missionary, Leslie Davis, described a road in Turkey as “lined with arms or legs or even the heads sticking out. Most of them had been partially eaten by dogs.” In the lake nearby, he saw “hundreds of bodies and many bones.” He estimated that ten thousand corpses lay scattered on the shores.
     Another missionary, Myrtle Shane, saw “rows of young women nailed naked to crosses, and others dismembered for sport. Women who escaped came back to beg at our doors, fingers off, hands off, faces and bodies mutilated.”
     An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died in the genocide.
     Turkey’s leaders at that time – and now – insisted that the brutality was a by-product of the First World War. The Armenians, the Turkish line went, were actively sympathetic to the Allies. Collaborators even. Collaborators had to be punished.
     One American tried to do something. His name was Henry Morgenthau and he was the American ambassador to Turkey. Not only did he publicize the genocide by pressuring his contacts at the New York Times to publish these eyewitness accounts, not only did he try to push President Wilson to act, but he helped form an aid organization called the Committee on Armenian Atrocities. That committee raised $100 million, the equivalent of one billion today.
     Ambassador Morgenthau spent twenty-six months overall in Turkey. Bitter and worn out, he resigned. Near the end of his efforts he admonished the Turkish government, “Our people will never forget these massacres. You are defying all ideas of justice.”
     President Wilson decided not to go to war against Turkey, even as he did so against Germany. The United States offered only passing rebukes of the genocide. During the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles (1919), there was talk of punishing the Turks for the genocide. There was talk of denying the Turks their own nation. Idle talk.
     Why is this relevant today? The genocide in Armenia taught the world how to eradicate the biological substance of a people. Conversely, the genocide in Armenia taught the world that perpetrators go unpunished.
     The genocide in Armenia became the genocide in Nanking. The genocide in Armenia became the Holocaust. The line runs straight from Armenia to the local, more recent genocides. Pol Pot in Cambodia. Idi Amin in Uganda. Pinochet in Chile. Rwanda, Darfur, and on and on.
     Had Turkey been properly punished at Versailles, even denying Turkey the right to exist, would the world have learned a lesson? If Turkey is punished today, denied for instance the right to enter the European Union, will that dissuade future mass murderers thinking genocidal thoughts? If America, the supposed beacon of freedom, continues to look the other way, what will be the effect on freedom – and freedom movements – elsewhere?
     This, George Bush, is why history far outweighs the politics of the day. Your little moment is a tree stripped bare. Meanwhile, kingdoms rise. And kingdoms fall. And history pushes on.

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The Gonzo Journalism of Brian Josepher

Josephus’s Jumble, the 21st Century Edition: October 2007