Saturday, September 21, 2013

Audi Alteram Partem




     A few years back, my oldest son brought home an armload of Latin books from the library. He was going to teach himself Latin. I glanced through the books—heavy sledding. 
      "You know," I told him, "the biggest Latin publisher in the United States, Bolchazy-Carducci, is in Wauconda. I bet they have some kind of self-taught course we could use."
     And so they did. Three hundred dollars later, we had the Artes Latinae CD-rom disc, plus a workbook and study guide. And so we began Our Latin Summer, sitting side by side at my computer, drilling pronunciation, taking quizzes. Okay, it wasn't throwing the old pepper around in the front yard, but it would have to do. We pressed forward religiously, an hour a day, for weeks, months, longer than any sane people with no particular need to learn an ancient language would. 
     Eventually we lost steam. In Latin, they trill their Rs like Puerto Ricans. I'd never have attempted the language had I known—that's what eventually drove me away from speaking Russian, in part. My mouth just doesn't want to do it -- the best I could attempt was a kind of D dragged backwards across my pallet. It was work, though after we stopped, I missed it.
      I had liked learning the timeless idioms. Vestis virum reddit -- "clothes make the man." Manus manum lavat  -- "one hand washes the other," which ended up being the title of the first chapter in my Chicago book. Everything sounds better in Latin.
     Such as the sentence above, AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM, emblazoned in big letters across the back of the judicial chambers on the 18th floor of the Michael Bilandic Building on LaSalle Street.
     It doesn't mean anything particularly poetic. 
     "'Hear the other side,'" explained Patrick Cronin, manager of security for the court. It reminds the judges to hear the other side. It's also on the wall in the courtroom down in Springfield." He had opened the downtown courtroom so I could take some pictures -- my column in the Sun-Times Sunday is about sitting in on some of the oral arguments before the Illinois Supreme Court, which is convening in Chicago for its entire term for the first time, well, ever, while their building is being remodeled in Springfield
     I don't want to wax poetic about our justice system. It is heavily skewed by money, by race. But still, the theory, the concept is there. Our courts fall short, time and time again. We still have those insane mandatory minimum sentences largely in place. But at least the goal is there to fall short of.  There is something beautiful about seeing that slogan, in big metal letters, directly across from the bench where the seven high justices sit. At least the sign at the back of the courtroom doesn't say PECUNIAE OBEDIUNT OMNIA -- "All things obey money." Not yet anyway. 

The British Museum


 

Friday, September 20, 2013

The Winged Toolmaker



      If man is, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, homo faber—Latin for "man the (tool) maker"—then herons could be referred to as avis faber, "bird the toolmaker," since they are one of the few birds that actually craft objects for their use.
     Avid fishermen (or, I suppose, fisherbirds), herons will break off bits of twig with their sharp beaks and toss them into the water as lures, then snap up the fish who come to investigate.  Their long necks can coil and strike, just like a snake, and they devour not just fish, but frogs, turtles, large insects, small mammals such as voles, and even other birds. Just about anything that comes their way.
     Herons, such as this Great Blue Heron spied last week at Beck Lake, in the Cook County Forest Preserve between Glenview and Des Plaines, are known as solitary birds, as opposed to geese that are seen in honking abundance this time of year and best avoided (I tried to get a picture with some low-flying geese flapping by in the background of the Great Blue but, being geese, they refused to cooperate).
Great Blue Heron, Beck Lake, 9/14/13
     While Great Blue Herons often go about their business alone, they return at night to loose colonies known, rather delightfully, as "heronies." So no need to try to befriend them—they have their pals, hidden away. Great Blue Herons are actually a variety of white heron, and the largest heron in North America.
      I spied this fellow in the shallows. Impossible to tell if it's a male or female—Great Blue Herons are "monomorphic," meaning the male and female have the same color plumage, and they also share duties rearing the next generation.
     A very modern habit, though they are considered ancient birds, birds that "look like prehistoric ghosts," to use Diana Wells' lovely phrase. She quotes a 9th century writer, who believed the high-flying herons reach altitudes where they "behold forever, the countenance of God."
     Whatever they are looking at, they are not only pleasant to behold themselves, but good omens, too. Herons, being predators, are considered signs of ecological health. Score one for the Cook County Forest Preserve.
      The Great Blue Heron's actual scientific name, by the way, is nowhere near the one I imagined: ardea herodias. Ardea being, sensibly enough, Latin for "heron." And Herodias -- the surprise in the whole story -- being Greek, the name of a notorious Queen of Galilee. It was Herodias who asked for John the Baptist's head on a platter, supposedly, and encouraged her daughter Salome to dance with the bloody souvenir. How this dread figure's name got assigned to so beautiful and benign a bird, well, I'm working on that. My hunch is: blame the heron's omnivorous appetite. If you are willing to eat almost  anything, people notice, and say unkind things about you.


Thursday, September 19, 2013

Three dimes

Hotel Pattee; Perry, Iowa 

     Walking south on LaSalle Street Wednesday, I reach into my pocket, feel something, pull out a dime. Must have got in there when I scooped some change off the night table.
      "Mr. Hart, here is a dime. Call your mother. Tell her there is serious doubt about your becoming a lawyer."
     I can hear the words as clearly as if Professor Kingsfield had spoken them in my ear, though it is just memory, echoing off the coin. John Houseman's mellifluous voice in "The Paper Chase."
    A popular movie, to people of my generation—released 40 years ago next month, incredibly. About the struggles of first year law students at Harvard Law School, it made a big impression on me. I remember the first time I saw it, in the fall of 1978, at Northwestern's A&O Film series. I remember who I saw it with, Leah Moskowitz, a fellow Northwestern freshman. I was affected, not for the legal aspect, but for the ambition. The students, so hungry to learn, to strive, to achieve. That was me. My date, however, shrugged it off, at least in my recollection. I remember gazing at her, dumbfounded, almost offended. You didn't like it? You're kidding me. We never went out again.
      "Mr. Hart, here is a dime..." How could that sentence slumber in my mind for so long? True, it was a dramatic high point—Kingsfield is throwing the hero, played by Timothy Bottoms, out of class. But I saw the movie, what, maybe three times? Once in 1978. Again in the late 1980s when VCR tapes took hold, and one more time, showing it to my boys in the 2000s—who like Leah Moskowitz, were indifferent.
      And why should it bubble up now?* I've handled many dimes over the decades. Why this moment? The more I look at the dime, the more comes back. My grandmother's voice, over the telephone mounted on the wall in our kitchen in Berea, a few months after I saw "The Paper Chase." I was home for winter break.
    "A lady I play poker with," she said, in her thin, reedy voice. "Has a granddaughter at Northwestern. You two should meet."
     I was always ready to meet anybody willing to meet me. The grandmother angle was worrisome, true, but I could work with it.
      "Sure," I said. "What's her name?"
     "Leah," she said. "Leah Moskowitz."
     "Shit grandma," I said, before I could stop myself. That wasn't going to happen.

    Those images, hiding amidst the trillions of neural connections. I put the dime away, these thoughts rattling around, blocking out LaSalle Street. Worried. Memory is the prison old people build for themselves then live in, squatting in the smoldering ruined palace of their lives, rooting around in the ash. The images kept wafting up, unbidden, like wisps of smoke. I could see Leah Moskowitz, 18, porcelain skin, very white, probably 85 pounds. It made me almost want to track her down, call her. "You know, in my memory you're still 18." Flattering? No, creepy. Note to self: don't be creepy.
    You have to be careful unspooling the past. The assumption is that other people care, and usually they do not care. A common affliction of men my age is to view the present as a mere pretext to dig up these non-sequitur memories. To be interested not in what is but in what was. "Funny you should mention Belgium, I spent a month in Belgium once..." And off they go. They're bores. Note to self: try not to become a bore.

    A block later my hand goes back in my pocket.  Two dimes. Twenty cents, sitting on my open palm. That's what comic books cost when I was a kid. "Captain America." God, I loved those. He was my favorite, and I carefully gathered an unbroken run of issues. Why Captain American though, and not another?
     Pondering,  I plunge my hand back in my pocket, bring it out. Three dimes. Thirty cents.  A candy bar....
      The key is knowing when to stop. Though it's difficult. Leah Moskowitz ...  she looked like a china doll. Never saw her again, at least not so it stuck. But with a little online digging, I find she changed her name—that's why I decided it's okay to use her maiden name here; any embarrassment for having seen a movie with me 35 years ago most likely won't get back to vex her. And oh, look at this. After Northwestern, she graduated from Harvard Law School, and spent her career as a lawyer. Maybe she liked that movie more than she let on.

*The above was written, and posted, and I was in the midst of tweeting the "Here is a dime" quote when it struck me: hmmm, I had just left the morning session of the Illinois Supreme Court, having spent 90 minutes listening to legal proceedings. Maybe that had something to do with it. 





Wednesday, September 18, 2013

"That's not tellable, mother."






     She kept the news until after dinner. An admirable restraint; I would have blabbed it immediately. But I am a blabber in a family that can maintain their silences.
     I was sipping my tea and polishing off a piece of plum banana bread Tuesday night. The older boy was digging into some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. The younger had absented himself to the television.
     "So I went to walk the dog with Mrs. M...." my wife began, mentioning the name of the mother of one of the friends of our high school senior. "We talked about homecoming." 
     He continued eating. I sorted through my dusty high school memories. Homecoming? When is homecoming? In the spring? Is it spring now? No, it's September. The leaves are just beginning to change.
     "A group is going out for homecoming...." 
     Still nothing from him. Me, slow on the uptake, thought she was inquiring whether he might want to think about going to homecoming too, perhaps even latching onto his friend's group. He should be a good sport and go with them. I was about to jump in and say something encouraging: "Life is to be lived, son." Or words to that effect. 
      "...and that group is coming here, apparently, at some point afterward, for a bonfire," she said. I had a flash: unfair! Why would his friends come here for a bonfire if he weren't part of the group? That's mean! And then, as she continued, it dawned on me. Ohhh. He did know. The group already included him. And his friend's mother obviously knew. And my wife learned earlier in the day, by accident. And now I was finding out, because I happened to be in the room. 
     "I'd like to be informed of these things," she said. "I'll set out dessert." 
     "Dessert won't be necessary," he informed her, with asperity. "We're going out to eat."
     "Maybe s'mores...." 
     That gave him pause.
     "S'mores..." he allowed.  "S'mores might be nice." 
     "And something about a football game...."  she continued, pointing out that his friend is obviously comfortable telling his mom much more than our son seems able to tell us.
     A brief silence. I sipped my tea. These conversations go on around me as if I'm not there, and by the time I think of something to add, they're usually over. While I was mulling, the stone spoke. 
     "That's not tellable, mother," he snapped. "Some vague plans in the far future."
      Those were his exact words, verbatim. 
     "It's Sunday," she said. "Or a week from Sunday." 
     I want to tuck his phrase away, in an electronic bottle, for future reference. Twenty years from now, after my wife and I spend an awkward 10 minutes in front of the giant WallSkype, trying to pry a bit of information out of him about when he might take a break from the Shanghai Co-Prosperity International Improvement Zone and visit his old parents in the Illinois Agricultural Province ("I'd speculate on an estimated visit window, mother, but we have an accelerated production schedule for expanding the plasma field. You know that....") The wall will go dark, for a moment, then revert to some generic natural scene—wind blowing through fields of wheat. An elderly couple sitting on a worn, lumpy sofa gazing at a glowing wall.  
    "That's not tellable, mother," I'll mutter, still staring straight ahead, emitting a kind of wheezing half chuckle. "Some vague plans in the far future," my wife will add, shaking her head, smiling slightly. 
     Until then, I'm glad my wife had the conversation with Mrs. M. Otherwise, he might have just disappeared for a few hours a week from Sunday, and we'd have learned of the plans when I looked through the kitchen window and saw flames in the back yard.



Photo above: White wall, Middlebury College campus, Middlebury, Vermont. August, 2013

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

When do you play?





A girl plays tether ball at Union Station, August 26, 2013, part of the Active Union Station experiment set up with the Metropolitan Planning Council to try to better use space in the Great Hall.



     Children play.  Adults play at something. I'd never say, "I'm going to go play." That would be weird, and would beg for elaboration. Going to go play what? Grown up play has to have an object, a point—Scrabble, racquetball, cards. Or with something. I go play with the dog. I used to play with the boys. No more. 
      Adult play needs a reason, an excuse. Children just play, period. They play because they have the time, and the energy, and they're supposed to. Adults have finite stores of both time and energy, though I'm wondering if we may still have an infinite need to play, unsatisfied and slumbering, buried within us.  Maybe we're supposed to play but just don't know it.
     Maybe we need to play far more than we do. 
     In what way? First from a purely physical point of view. Play is active.  The dictionary definition of "play" surprised me. I expected something about fun, or distraction, or relaxation, but the New Shorter Oxford definition begins, "Active bodily exercise; brisk or vigorous action of the body or limbs, as in fencing, dancing, leaping, etc." I guess that fits into the standard way we use the word — "We were playing badminton." 
     Perhaps trying to fill the gap caused from our missing play, adults exercise. This often makes for grim business. All that solitary jogging. All those intense young people on their treadmills, all facing the same direction, isolated together in their private agonies. If you turned them loose in a gym, they wouldn't know what to do. They wouldn't be bold enough to chase each other, or cook up games, the way kids would. They would just stand there and stare at each other, or start gawping at their phones, if they had them.
     What is lacking is permission. That's what sports give us. Adults wouldn't go to the park and run around. But we'd play softball with our pals. As if the bat and ball matters, which they obviously do, to us. When somebody says they are playing a sport, no one replies, "Why?" The reason is implicit. Sports are important, though really they are just play layered with a veneer of organization and meaning. 
     Later in the Oxford definition -- which goes on for the better part of two-densely packed pages—comes that kind of play: "A particular diversion or amusement, a game." Adults lose our ability to frolic, but we can still compete, and a desire to win replaces a desire to just move. I can't say it's an improvement.
     So the secret to play, for adults, is to get permission (ironic. Kids, who have no authority over themselves, generally, can still play without permission. Adults, who are supposedly autonomous, need somebody to say it's okay for them to play. You'd think it would be the other way around). That's why adults who don't ordinarily start playing games in public will play games on their phones, because the games are there, ergo it's okay. A kind of permission. If I pulled out a handful of jacks and a ball and started playing on the train, people would look at me strangely because it would be something I had come up with on my own. A transgression. But some balloon game on my phone is okay because the makers of the phone put the game there.
      I used to have a friend at work. Every week or two, we'd go to lunch, then swing by the ESPN Zone to play a game we both loved—Hydro Thunder, a boat racing arcade game. I'm certain neither of us would do that on our own. It would seem odd, solitary, almost sad. But together it was epic, a contest, allowable. Plus the restaurant encouraged it.  
      The boys were good for a dozen years of permitted play, of throwing balls and wrestling and Super Soaker fights. Now I'm lucky to get a game of "Settlers of Catan" in once every three months. Thank God I have a dog who, among her many unexpected benefits, is always ready to play. We tug-o-war over lengths of rope, over a stuffed bear she is fond of. Not only is play a possibility, it is an obligation. I have to play with her, to be a good owner. She almost demands it. On our morning walk, she'll do her business, then, heading back home, I will look at her, and she will look at me, and then we'll both break into a mad dash toward the house. For some unknown canine reason she snaps at the leash until she grabs it in her teeth, then we stop, and face off. She goes "grrr" and pulls and I go "grrr" and pull back; for a moment it's nip and tuck, then I let her have her victory, dragging me forward a foot or two. Then we stop, our play over, the game complete, and go inside the house together for breakfast. 





Monday, September 16, 2013

"Can you help us please?"


     I don't write about the poor as much as I should. Wrapped in my comfy middle class bubble, it's too easy to spend my time toddling off to operas, raising tomatoes and focusing on cool objects, and I usually don't think to gaze beyond my sphere at the suffering all around. Part is no doubt due to my personality—it's not a natural inclination for a self-centered, bookish guy. Though, in my defense, when the opportunity comes my way, I leap at it. 
    Last year, I ran into someone who works for the Night Ministry, and told him I've always wanted to write about their work with poor communities. Why it took that chance encounter, and I did just call them (or they call me, for that matter) says something about the accidental way a lot of stories come about. Anyway, I went out with their mobile care van, which led to this column about children being fed by the Night Ministry. While reporting the story, I heard that the Crib, their Halsted Street shelter is filled almost every night, and the surplus young people are given CTA cards and tossed out into the street, so I went back to write this column
      Last week I heard from the Night Ministry, with this story about a very sick woman and two concerned cops. I couldn't reach the cops -- police despise the media, and their whole besieged, wall-of-blue thing keeps them from acting like a public agency with a responsibility to discuss openly what they do. But even not talking to the officers involved, I decided I had enough of a story to put in the paper, as my Monday column. 

     You go to the police for help, not the other way around. They don’t come to you for aid, generally. But that was what two 14th District Chicago Police officers did last week.
     “They were very hesitant,” said Nancy Schreiber, a nurse with the Night Ministry, working at its medical clinic bus in Humboldt Park last Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
     “They came to the door of the bus and said, ‘Can you help us please?’ I’ve never been approached by the police to help them before. They said, ‘We have this woman and we don’t know what to do.’”
     Schreiber followed the officers to a bus shelter near California and Division.
     In her 12 years with the Night Ministry, the last line of assistance for Chicago’s impoverished, Schreiber has seen much that medical professionals rarely see: trenchfoot, frostbite, gangrene, untreated fractures, gashes that victims sutured themselves with clear tape. “These people are so marginalized, they hesitate to seek health care,” she said. “These people just suffer.”
     The woman the cops brought Schneider to was certainly suffering, lying on a bus stop bench, covered with huge open sores.
     "She looked 70," said Schreiber, who later found the woman is 53. "Probably 80 pounds soaking wet. She had these lesions all over."
     Schreiber immediately realized what she was seeing: MRSA - methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection common with the homeless.
     "I see it all the time," said Schreiber, who ran back to the bus, filled a shopping bag with bandages and ointment and tape. "I knew what she needed right now was to take care of those wounds." She also grabbed their intern Megan Libreros, 25, a student at UIC's Jane Addams College of Social Work, in her second week on the job. Her job was to talk to the woman. "She was really worked up and did not want to go to the hospital," said Libreros.
     The police officers offered to take the woman to Cook County hospital. "Which is very unusual," said Schreiber, who told her, 'You're in a great deal of pain. The only thing to help you would be IV antibiotics. You really need to go to a hospital."
     "I can't do that," the woman answered.
     She had been to county, she said, and while they treated her well, on the third day she went into the hall to look for a nurse, and they locked her in restraints. An ambulance was also out of the question.
     "If we call an ambulance, it'll take them to nearest hospital, which is Norwegian [American Hospital]," said Schreiber. "They are very punitive to homeless people. They don't give them treatment, push them out of emergency room and then bill them extraordinary amounts. We don't send anyone there anymore because they are not treated with any respect." (I called Norwegian and talked to their spokeswoman and she had no comment.)
      The woman was wearing what looked like pajamas, the thin material sticking to the wounds when the nurse tried to pull it back.
     "Every time, the wounds would open up," said Libreros. "She was screaming with pain," This was the point where some cops would have tipped their hats and gone about their business. But these guys stuck around.
     "They were really nice," Libreros said. "They really cared about her and tried to make sure she got the best care she needed. I've been doing this for a few years, I've had a lot of bad experiences working with the Chicago Police. But they were great."
     "What's wonderful is the involvement of the police," said Schreiber. "The humanity, overwhelmingly positive, above and beyond the call of duty. I called the station, trying to get their names. They haven't called back." That's typical. I called the 14th district a few times, too, plus news affairs, knowing they'd never respond, and they didn't.
     The cops on the scene, however, did what was necessary - maybe. "I believed that death was imminent, she was so toxic from these wounds," Schreiber said. "One would be stressful; she had them everywhere."
     Schreiber told the cops the woman was in no condition to decide. So they took her to St. Mary's - at least they said they were.
     "We called St. Mary's, and have no way of knowing if she got treatment or what happened after the police left with her," said Schreiber. "It was heartwarming, to see how these two gentlemen tried to help her."
     Libreros was able to learn a little about the woman, her name and history. She had a place to stay up until July. Then a Social Security check didn't arrive. A reminder that people on the street are just that.
     "They are people," Libreros said. "They are not different from any of us. They're either down on hard times or have mental illness. We're all really close to being in that place someday. No telling what in her life took a turn and went wrong. That could be me in 10 years, or you, or anybody else."



      

Sunday, September 15, 2013

The Old Lie


   
     President Obama rose to power as an effective speaker. I haven't heard him give a bad speech yet, and last week's was no different. As I listened to him explain Tuesday why we need to make a limited air strike against Syria, why he could order it as president, but wants Congress's approval, as icing on the cake, it seemed to me the whole argument hinges on poison gas being an unacceptable weapon, as if it differs in some important and fundamental way from bullets and bombs and missiles. 
     Does it? And if it does, where did that distinction come from? I had a vague belief that it can be traced to World War I, but that's about all I knew, and I decided to look into the matter a bit. The result is in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times. 
     One element that didn't make its way into the column is this—one truth that echoes loudly from World War I, gas or no gas—is the insanity of war, the horrendous human cost for muddled and minor political motives. World War I is not the war to invoke when proposing ill-conceived military jaunts. Claiming they will be quick and easy only makes it worse. They're always supposed to be quick and easy, at the start. When the war to end all wars began in August, 1914, everybody thought it would be over by Christmas, and young men raced to enlist, lest they miss the fun. When President Obama invokes gas, he unknowingly invokes Wilfred Owen's haunting poem "Dolce et Decorum Est," which I've linked to below. When you look at what World War I was like, it's amazing that anybody ever fought another war.  But that's people for you. They forget. Even smart people like Barack Obama forget. Two bloody and dubious Middle East wars barely come to a close, and we're already lurching toward our next one. Saying it will be quick and easy. As always.

     What’s so bad about poison gas?
     Bad enough that the United States could sit on its hands, uttering a few feeble protests, while 100,000 Syrians were killed through conventional means. But 1,300 civilians were murdered Aug. 21 in a poison gas attack, and that spurred us to action, or to near action.
     Where’s this distinction coming from?
     It’s a century-old revulsion. People associate poison gas with the horrors of World War I, but its use in warfare was already illegal according to international law — and already produced by most major powers anyway — in the late 19th century.
     What World War I did was loosen qualms against using poison gas. The outbreak of war in 1914 saw the last gasp of military chivalry: there really was a spontaneous Christmas truce in Flanders in 1914, with soldiers meeting in No Man’s Land to shake hands, sing carols and exchange gifts. Using poison gas was seen as “cowardly.”
     But by spring 1915, the wholesale trench warfare slaughter made such notions laughable. The First Battle of Ypres cost 100,000 lives. By the second clash outside the flattened Belgian city, qualms against gas were set aside. On April 22, 1915, the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine gas from 5,700 cylinders across a five-mile line into a wind blowing toward French Moroccan troops, who saw the green cloud coming, then were suffocating, vomiting blood, burying their faces in the dirt seeking relief.
     Most of the French front line died or fled in panic, opening a four-mile gap in Allied defenses which the Germans, understandably reluctant to charge into their own gas - they had gas masks but didn't trust them - and lacking reserves, did not take advantage of. Raw Canadian troops, outnumbered but improvising respirators from handkerchiefs soaked in urine, rushed to fill the breech and held their line, a feat of bravery that, at the time, was deemed glorious and predicted to be "the theme of song and story as long as the world endures" but, of course, wasn't.
     So why did poison gas seem so awful in a war that saw the first general use of machine guns and armored tanks and aerial bombing and flame throwers? Gas was silent. It could linger on battlefields for days. Heavier than air, it crept into basements and trenches, the very places where soldiers fled expecting a degree of safety. It killed men in "horrid and unendurably painful ways," often blinding them. Gas masks didn't always work. The Germans later introduced mustard gas, which didn't suffocate, but burned, invisible, and soldiers could be exposed and not even know it for days (that's why WWI soldiers always look so overdressed, in leggings and wraps; the practice was to cover every inch of exposed skin).
     Plus, it hadn't been used. "The novelty of poison gas," wrote Michael S. Neiberg. "Its unnatural greenish and yellow colorations, and its use in contravention of international law all lent gas an air of barbarity and savagery that other weapons never had."
     To top it off, while all nations had it, gas had been first used effectively by the Germans, one of the "heinous devices created by these demons of depravity," to quote W.C. King's post-war book "Germany's Crime Against Humanity." The British called mustard gas "H.S.," for "hun stuff."
     So poison gas was bad because our enemy used it - that's what history remembers, a bit of lingering propaganda. Though the U.S. military, loath to lose any weapon, tried to rehabilitate poison gas after the war.
     "War is abhorrent to the individual, yet he accepts blowing men to pieces with high explosive, mowing men down with machine guns, and even sinking a battleship in mid-ocean with its thousand or fifteen hundred men being carried to certain death," Earl J. Atkisson, head of the U.S. 1st Gas Regiment, wrote in 1925. "However, to burn the skin of a man outrages all his civilized instincts."
     The bottom line is that any weapon that depends on the wind is of limited strategic use. Thus it is gas' undependability, more than anything else, that places it in a special category of disapproval. If it worked better, we'd find it in our hearts to use it. Land mines are devastating against civilians, too, in a sense worse than gas, since they remain a threat for years after being deployed. The world is nearly united against land mines, but the U.S. feels it needs mines to hem in the North Koreans, so we refuse to join all land mine bans. Morality has its limits.
     Gas is bad because all weapons of war are bad. That President Barack Obama would single it out in this fashion is more a quirk of history than any absolute ethical point. Odd that we would risk war over some century-old propaganda. Then again, it's been done before.

Wilfred Owen, Britain's great martyr poet of World War I, wrote a haunting poem about a gas attack, Dolce et Decorum Est. For those whose Latin is a little rusty, "dolce et decorum est, pro patria mori" means "sweet and proper it is, to die for one's country."