The Unmentionable Odour of Death

It was written nearly thirty years ago; it was controversial then, and it’s controversial now.

Or it may be that the author, Larry Kramer, has a peculiar talent for rubbing people the wrong way; in his book Faggots, he criticized the disco-loving, druggy, superficial lifestyle of the seventies and eighties. News flash—it was a period when some of us were having a lot of sex with a lot of people, not all of whom we knew.

So when Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, in 1985, he had already pissed off a substantial portion of the gay community by making a quite unequivocal statement: gay men were going to have to stop having sex.

OK—let’s back up and revisit those days. For a generation now, AIDS has been a chronic and manageable disease for—you listening, here?—those people blessed to live in developed societies and blessed to have health insurance. But it really isn’t possible to imagine the sheer terror and fear that some of us lived with for the first decade of the epidemic.

Consider the times: Stonewall, yes, had happened a decade and a half earlier, in 1969, but having gay sex was illegal in many, many states and cities. In 1998, for example, a Texas sheriff arrested two gay men who were having sex in their bedroom—the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which at long last threw out the sodomy laws in 2003. And in how many states was sodomy still a crime? Ten.

But it was hardly that being gay—or acting on it—was illegal. Being gay was treated as either the darkest sin imaginable, or as the most horrifying consequence possible of bad parenting. It was shame, dishonor, a disgrace. Oh, and did I mention that if your parents ever, ever found out, it would crush them, ruin them, flail them for every minute of their—very likely—now shortened lives?

“You must never tell the parents, it would kill them,” wrote Eric, my eldest brother, when I wrote to tell him I was gay.

It has to be said, coming out is as much an internal as an external process. Which is to say that you have to weed out a number of prejudices, assumptions, habits, ways of thinking. We had come out to everyone, or so we thought, but had we shed all those years of crushing negativity?

The other problem? We were having a lot of sex in a lot of sleazy places—parks, bathrooms, the baths, and of course, the backrooms of bars. And a lot of us didn’t feel too good about it; there was a good deal of shame and guilt left in us, which came stinging back to us those mornings after those nights of drugs and orgies.

To be fair, there were relatively few outlets besides the bars and the baths: they were virtually the only outlets for gay men, besides the gay choruses. And to come out was to put a wall between you and the straight world—yes, you had straight friends, whom you saw and with whom you hung out before…

…you headed out to the bars.

Since it was denied us, we had decided that we didn’t want it: marriage, we argued, was a heterosexist, patriarchal system enforcing submission and subjugation on women (in heterosexual relationships) or on the more compliant party in a gay or lesbian relationship. So unbridled sex was part of being “liberated,” of fighting off the repressive, heterosexual stereotypes that we had decided we were above living.

“Hey, Jorge, when did you move to San Francisco?”

“1989,” says Jorge, taking a break from mopping the floor.

“Wow—right in the worst years of the epidemic,” I say, “so what was it like.”

“Terrible, horrible. You would see deadly ill, pale, gaunt, skeletal figures everywhere. They were everywhere in San Francisco, not hidden away, but everywhere. I remember seeing this handsome guy coming out of his house, and coming down the steps to get on to his motorcycle. And then I realized—he was carrying his partner on his back, so I stopped to help. And the partner was so weak that the healthy one feared that he couldn’t hold on, so he strapped his sick lover to him, and they rode off to the hospital together.”

People were dying agonizing deaths—and very often the people who were dying were cared for, if they were cared for at all, by someone who was also infected. Friends abandoned you; family abandoned you.

Not, of course, in all cases. But a lot of gay men ended up in New York or San Francisco for a very good reason—the climate in those cities being considerably more welcoming than, say, Macon, Georgia. Not a few parents were dealing with the discovery that their son was gay at the same time that they were hearing that he had a death sentence.

“The only treatment was AZT,” said Jorge—and getting that was a struggle: any nurse who had access to the drug in the clinics was besieged with requests to steal it.

Death was everywhere, in medieval proportions; skeletons walked the streets, and had to be carried up steps. The black marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma disfigured faces; it was routine to see the bones of the lower arms under the saggy skin of the victims.

The fear was of backlash. They hated us, the thinking went, they’re terrified of this disease. The Alex Joneses of the day were saying it outright—they (for me, we) should be quarantined, for the sake of everyone, especially the children.

Hysteria time—is it safe to eat with someone who has AIDS? What about going to the beach? What happens if a mosquito bites the guy lying next to me—and he has AIDS—and then the mosquito bites me? What if a kid—often a hemophiliac—starts to bleed, and my kid comes into contact with it?

Since nobody had any idea what was going on, nobody could give answers, and so the health “experts” were issuing vague reassurances that made the situation worse.

And they knew nothing because, guess what? Nobody was funding research, because—and it was hard in the general hysteria of the time not to be paranoid—it was after all a “gay” disease, so who cared? When the Legionnaires got sick in Philadelphia, or wherever it was, how much money did they spend? But a bunch of sick faggots? Huh—they’ll let us die with smiles on their faces!

Yes, for a time, it was very much “us versus them,” and it had to be, if anything was going to change. Reagan was dozing away in the White House, the FDA was perfectly happy with a testing process that took over a decade, the mayor of New York was an unmarried gentleman—Ed Koch—whom everybody thought…well, here’s Gay City News:

He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.

The article, by the way, is titled “Ed Koch: Twelve Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in the Closet.”

And certainly one of the men who never forgave Koch was Larry Kramer, who cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and later Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And Kramer was never one to worry about getting into someone’s face and screaming. Which, in fact, turned out to be the right thing to do, as well as necessary. In the clips below, you see people “dying” on Wall Street, or in the office of the FDA or the New York Commissioner of Health. For all his stridency, for all his arrogance, Kramer had a part to play.

And so in 1985, Kramer came out with his play The Normal Heart, which features a man quite intentionally resembling the author. Which means that for much of the play, it’s an extended rant against, on the one hand, a bureaucracy perfectly content to watch the eradication of a generation of gay men, and those gay men themselves, who won’t stop fucking. And after years of having various people hold the film rights to the play, it’s finally been made into a movie, and will show on May 25 on HBO.

Not everyone is happy, of course. One critic, Charles O’Malley, notes that Kramer’s play is mawkish, sentimentalizing what was a decade long horror scene. And it’s all about upper-class gay men—no women, no people of color. And the message is anti-sexual and self-hating.

O’Malley fears that seeing this film will somehow assuage the liberal hearts of some viewers—that was then, this is now; O’Malley quotes Manohla Dargis: “it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.”

Yes or no? I won’t know until I see the film, since it’s been years since I’ve seen the play. But I have gone to reread September 1, 1939—the W. H. Auden poem from which Kramer took the title, “The Normal Heart.” And came across this fragment, which only hints at how terrible those days really were….

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

The Redwoods of Wisconsin

It was a day to wake up thinking about the American chestnut tree.

Why?

Well, the American chestnut was once called “the redwood of the East,” since it could grow up to 70 feet tall, it grew straight, and the wood resisted rot and mildew. In fact, as you can see in the video below, one tree could provide enough wood to build a barn and a house.

And they were all over Appalachia, accounting for perhaps 25% of the forest canopy. Here, take a look:

That’s a serious tree, right? Unfortunately, the tree is extinct, though there are millions of specimens growing from Georgia to Maine.

How can that be?

In 1904, the legend goes, a botanist introduced the Chinese Chestnut into the New York Botanical Gardens, and those tree were infected with a fungal blight, to which the Chinese chestnut had resistance. But the American chestnut? It had none, and soon, almost all trees were afflicted with a canker that grew around the tree, killing off anything above. The tree, however, could still sprout, but those sprouts too would be infected. So what was once a majestic tree now exists as a shrub. If lucky, the tree can make it up to 25 feet or so before succumbing—a far cry from the 100 feet of the trees before the fungus arrived.

Rapidly, the trees fell ill and died; it’s a rare person who may have seen one. But here’s the good news: there are two groups taking two separate paths working to save the tree. The first group is the American Chestnut Foundation, located in Asheville, North Carolina, which started out cross-breeding American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts. Then, they bred up to six generations of trees exclusively with the American chestnut; now they have achieved trees that are 94% American. And they’ve planted 14,000 on 30 acres of rural Pennsylvania. By the way, one of the cool benefits of sending 300 bucks to the American Chestnut Foundation—besides being able to brag to your friends that you’re a “chestnut leaf annual sponsor”—is that you might (if they’re available) get four chestnut seeds of your own to plant. However, first you have to sign an agreement; here’s a summary from the Foundation’s website:

The Germplasm Agreement is a standard agreement used by many universities when someone is testing plantings such as TACF’s Restoration Chestnuts. In fact, the agreement is very similar to agreements used by the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University and several other universities that are involved in agricultural and forestry research.

This agreement in no way dictates any control over your property or does the agreement keep you from eventually harvesting your trees for lumber.Since these trees are unproven, it is critical that test plantings or the subsequent seeds produced by your trees not be planted without TACF knowing the location of the plantings. Otherwise we can’t evaluate the progress of the plantings.

The other group working on the chestnut is at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and they’ve chosen another strategy: inserting a blight-resistance gene (from wheat, of all things) into the American chestnut. And they, too, seem posed for success. So as The New York Times points out, it seems to be a matter of time. We’ll know, probably in ten years or so.

Can’t wait? Well, anybody near La Crosse, Wisconsin should consider contacting the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and begging, pleading, doing-whatever-you-can to see what was, at least in 2003, the largest strand of American chestnuts in the world. Located in the West Salem area, well, here’s that the DNR had to say:

There are thousands of mammoth chestnut trees standing on 60 acres of private forestland in La Crosse County. These trees comprise the largest remaining stand of American chestnut in the world.

Sadly, the Wisconsin chestnuts were hit by the blight, despite being quite far out of the natural habitat (they were brought from the east by Martin Hicks, an early settler), but the grove is being monitored by scientists from UW-La Crosse, Michigan State, and West Virginia University. So though the strand has been reduced, there’s hope for a comeback.

Dr. William MacDonald, of West Virginia University, said this about the chestnut blight: it was "the single greatest catastrophe known in recorded North American forest history."

Today’s good news?

In a decade, it might be over!

P.S. Disinclined to spend three hundred dollars on four nuts? Well, unbelievably, you can plant 8 to 12 in seedlings by ordering from a nursery in Wisconsin. Not this year—I called and learned that they were out of stock. But next year, yes. When I asked how the nursery had obtained the seedlings, the response was a bit vague. Best of all is the price: $8.49, which goes down to 2.99 if you order 250 saplings. Where do these saplings come from? The man at the nursery wouldn’t say, but here’s what the website said:

These seedlings are grown from chestnuts collected from a large orchard of very old American Chestnut trees which have never displayed symptoms of the blight even though the blight has affected all the other trees in the region.  It is uncommon to see this happen and leads us to believe that the parents may have some natural built in blight resistance.

Here’s the link…

http://www.chiefrivernursery.com/store/American-Chestnut-6-12-Seedlings.html 

Surge Music

What kind of friends do I have? For the last fifty years or so, they’ve probably all been running around, listening to Pavel Chesnokov, and sniggering to each other that, “hah, Marc still hasn’t caught on yet!” Damn it, guys, have I ever held back on you?

All right, let’s be charitable: you could be just as ignorant as my computer, but if so, you’d seriously be missing out on some beautiful music especially if, like me, you have a taste for Russian liturgical music.

At least, that’s what it turns out it’s called; I knew it only as all that gorgeous, mystical, complicated yet lulling music that—usually—all-male choirs sing. What I didn’t know was how complicated the whole affair is.

I am presuming, Dear Reader, that you had something else to do in your college days other than to pursue advanced studies in music theory, but me? Well, I hung out in conservatories a fair amount, and while it’s true that I spent more time in the practice rooms than the classrooms, I’m still unable to tell you what this, stolen from Wikipedia, really means:

Znamenny Chants are not written with notes (the so-called linear notation), but with special signs, called Znamëna (Russian for "marks", "banners") or Kryuki ("hooks"), as some shapes of these signs resemble hooks. Each sign may include the following components: a large black hook or a black stroke, several smaller black 'points' and 'commas' and lines near the hook or crossing the hook. Some signs may mean only one note, some 2 to 4 notes, and some a whole melody of more than 10 notes with a complicated rhythmic structure.

The stolp notation was developed in Kievan Rus' as an East Slavic refinement of the Byzantine neumatic musical notation.

The most notable feature of this notation system is that it records transitions of the melody, rather than notes. The signs also represent a mood and a gradation of how this part of melody is to be sung (tempo, strength, devotion, meekness, etc.) Every sign has its own name and also features as a spiritual symbol. For example, there is a specific sign, called "little dove" (Russian: голубчик (golubchik)), which represents two rising sounds, but which is also a symbol of the Holy Ghost.

Here is my best—and it’s not very good—translation. Think of a language, such as English, which works with letters. By combining three letters—c-a-t—we can create in everyone’s mind the animal now sleeping (wouldn’t he just?) on a pile of mail in the chair in front of me. And that’s also how Western music works, with notes arranged on a page. These notes tell you the speed and the pitch; other instructions tell you the overall speed of the piece (fast or slow) and how loudly or softly to sing.

There’s another—not very good, but who am I to say—way to do language, and that is to assign an image, a picture, that will represent a cat. That seems to me to be the equivalent of what the Russian chants use. Am I right? Sorry, but it’s my best guess. My second guess, by the way, is that this music has been handed down for centuries, and that the Znamëna are serving as general aids to the memory.

What I do know is that this music—and very frequently music spun off from it, think Arvo Pärt—is both mesmerizing and lulling. You want it to go on forever, and in a sense it does, for even when a piece ends, some part of it is still rolling out into the expanding heavens.

And when I say, “music spun off from the tradition,” I go straight back to Chesnokov, the professor of choral composition at the Conservatory of Moscow, and the director of the choir at the Cathedral of the Divine Savior, also in Moscow. And here is where the story darkens, since Chesnokov, after having written over 400 sacred compositions, was barred from writing church music after the Communist Revolution. That was bad, but he switched to secular music.

The final blow, however, came when the Russians decided in 1931 to tear down the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, of which Chesnokov was choir director. Chesnokov was desolate, and stopped composing music for the rest of his life. He died in 1944, in what was probably the darkest part of World War II.    

The story has a semi-happy ending: the cathedral was rebuilt and closely resembles the original. Here it is!

Famous in Cyprus

“Never a dull moment,” said Lady, looking up from painting her houses. We were sitting in her other store, Mi Pequeño San Juan. I was there, since there had been a mini-hurricane the night before; the water had backed up in the street, to such an extent that the pipes draining the roofs became vents for the street water. So the Poet’s Passage now has a swimming pool on the roof. What doesn’t it have?

Electricity.

OK—so Stephan and Naïa, tutor and tutee respectively, had moved to the front window, where there was sufficient light. I speak briefly to Zorba, Lady’s brother, who lives above the café and, now, under the swimming pool. He was up from one to five in the morning, coping with the situation.

It’s odd, the stuff that happens in the tropics that never seems to happen anywhere else. Where else does it rain so hard that the street water backs up the drains and floods the roofs? Or consider what Zorba reported:

“The transformers began exploding so bad it sounded like a war zone….”

Well, it’s been an improbable week, starting on Saturday, when a woman came into the café, eager to meet Lady, who is a poet as well as house painter. Lady had left a few minutes before to go to the movies with Naïa, and the woman was crestfallen. So she fell back on second best: me.

“I’m from Cyprus, but I’m here for a convention of chiropractors,” she said. So we chatted; she’s a music teacher and a poet, but not, it turned out, a chiropractor. That’s her husband.

“Hey, Marc, did you know I’m famous in Cyprus?” said Lady casually, a couple days later.

“What?”

“Yeah, there was this lady hanging around the café, and she couldn’t wait to meet me. Elizabeth kept calling me, asking when I was going to get there.”

Elizabeth being the manager of the gift shop….

“So she says everybody in Cyprus—well, everybody who reads poetry, that is—knows me and reads me. And when they heard she was going to Puerto Rico, they all got jealous and told her she HAD to meet me. Who knew? I’m famous in Cyprus!”

“Wow!”

“So then she asked, would I be willing to go to Cyprus, to give a lecture? So I told her: two first class tickets, and a week’s stay in a hotel. You wanna go?”

This is, of course, improbable.

As was my reaction, several hours later.

It was Monday, you see, and I had woken late, and was out of sorts. And then I had gone to the café, which now has air conditioning (after a couple months without), but Internet? It had checked out several days before.

All of that created a peculiarly excellent agar for a petri dish overflowing with….

A.   Envy

B.    Resentment

C.    Self-Pity

D.   Annoyance

E.     All of the above, and by the way? This is the answer….

Why, I raged, should Lady get to be famous in Cyprus when I have written what the six people who have read Iguanas say is a great, a wonderful, a landmark book, destined to blaze brightly against the literary skies of not just Wisconsin, not the United States, but verily, the entire world—and assuredly the whole of the solar system. What was so special about her? What about me? Sure, she’s been at it for twenty years, and I only drifted in the door—and the back door at that—a couple years ago, but WHAT ABOUT ME! At this point, I am raging in circles in the living room.

“Dammit, people love her poetry so much, they’ve even tattooed it on themselves! Remember that lady who came into the coffee shop and peeled her shirt down? And there it was—still red and glistening: Little by Little. Dammit, and then Lady has to sit down and remark that it’s the SECOND time someone has tattooed her poetry on themselves. Dammit!”

The cats scatter….

I stormed up the street, and tore into her shop.

“I just want you to know,” I said meanly, “that if the entire ISLAND of Cyprus came outside and begged me to be famous there, I WOULD SAY NO!!!”

“Marc?”

Well, I thought of Franny, who had once remarked, “well, we’re just going to have to meet at my current level of immaturity….” She had been playing a board game with Tyler, her 10-year old grandson, and there was a dispute about the rules. He dug his heels in, she dug her heels in, and if Jeanne hadn’t dragged Franny off by the ears to the kitchen, they’d still be at it.

“Well, I would,” I said defensively, and then turned to go.

Lady knows—sometimes words don’t help things; she hugs me instead.

“Hey, Marc, you see that lady over there?”

It’s the next morning, and yes, I had seen the lady, and had noted that she was cachectic—a fancy way of saying that she was looking only slightly better than your average concentration camp victim.

“She’s only got twenty days to live—that’s what her husband told me. He called and asked if it would be OK if they came from Portland and spent her last days in the café. See? Her whole family is there….”

It comes back to me—those days of waiting for the end, of holding on and letting go, of having your love torn out of you, wrenched away, of screaming silently and going away to wail in the woods and coming back and coping again until the next time you had to vent it.

There’s something else as well, something almost unbearable to say: you want your loved one to die.

Not all of you, not even most of you. But there is a part of you saying, “if it has to be—and I know perfectly well that it does—then for God’s sake GET IT OVER WITH! Because I cannot stand this pain, and it’s doing her no good at all anyway….”

You’re living with every last nerve ending firing standing next to a volcano in a hurricane. Oh, and did I mention the earthquake? In these moments, you are as close to the life source as you will ever be.

And they had come to Lady’s café? At such a moment?

OK, I decide.

She can be famous in Cyprus….

Ode to Wal-Mart

It’s a curious matter—for the last two days, I have had waking dreams in which I was back working at Wal-Mart. OK—that’s explicable: after you have spent seven years of immersion therapy, you don’t come out of it unchanged.

Immersion because, physically, the building swallowed you up. True, it was capable of holding 600 workers, or so, plus providing a cafeteria and a huge auditorium, but it only had five or six windows, all of which were in the cafeteria. But so photophobic were we—note that pronoun there—that we kept them covered with translucent hurricane shutters, no matter what time of the year, or what chance there could be of a hurricane.

It was more than that. There was never a meeting in which the corporate “culture” wasn’t trotted out, but it was a culture honored in word only. Don’t think, however, that there wasn’t a true culture operating—one very much against the official, expressed culture. It wasn’t about doing your work or producing something, it was about going along with the herd, sending defensive emails, printing them, and then producing them, if anyone attacking the herd happened to single you out for the kill.

You ran, ideally, as much inside the herd as possible, since obviously the people on the outside, or—God forbid—the stragglers behind, were the logical victims to be picked off. And it was also true—you didn’t want to be out front. So that meant never, ever thinking outside the box, no matter how often it was urged on you.

This was a lesson lost on me. At one point in some meeting, the quality assurance lady gave a talk in which she stressed that fruits and vegetables must be rigorously kept away from meats, with their potentially leaking cellophane packages. All of that dripping blood, you see, is a perfect medium….

‘So why do we have the shopping carts that we do?’ I was thinking.

“You see, we have the basket on the right side of the cart in red, with pictures of meat cuts and chicken and so on—so that we don’t have to translate into Chinese or Korean or whatever for our foreign markets. And on the left side, we have a green basket, with pictures of bananas and apples and oranges. See? We’ll be an industry leader! We’ll save countless lives! We’ll reduce the number of food poisoning incidents by 333%!”

“We’ll see, Marc….”

That was five years ago, and if you go, as I did last week, into Wal-Mart today? The same stupid carts from the 1950’s, in which fruit and vegetables and meats can fornicate as much as we people ever did in the sixties.

Even after two-and-a-half years away from it, I still think of it, occasionally, and that makes sense to me. But here’s my question—why was it that yesterday, I dreamed of being chased down, and told that there was an important meeting, an urgent meeting, a mandatory meeting, at which everybody but guess-who was? And when I got to the meeting? The topic was poetry.

Yes, poetry. And the good Human Resources ladies (my apologies to the other three men in department) had done their best, which…

…wasn’t very good.

One speaker was awful, in fact. She was cowering behind a PowerPoint presentation with mutilated, hideous slides that were unreadable and anyway swung about unpredictably. Oh, and the speaker was mumbling into the microphone and painfully nervous.

This morning’s dream?

Elizabeth, the woman who first hired me, has told me to go to Sam’s Club, where I am to teach math. OK—do that, leave for lunch, get back, start to grade the tests that I have given. Except that—being math—I have no idea what answer is right. Elizabeth reappears and tells me that she’s sure I’ll have some pertinent remarks about poetry.

I protest—I know nothing about poetry. “Certainly, you do,” she returns. At this point I wake up.

I wake up wondering—has Wal-Mart decided to do to poetry what they did to the grocery business, which was to trample it? Or am I to write poems about Wal-Mart?

Confession: I have just made the attempt, and there isn’t much there.

It was a time in my life when the poetic impulse, or any creative impulse, was thoroughly squelched. Except that, in a curious way, it wasn’t. I am perhaps the only person you’ll ever meet who designed and created an office-wide ESL website in PowerPoint, complete with narrated lessons, quizzes, games. I devised a word-of-the-day scheme that I remember, even now, as being quite beautiful. And then, of course, there were all those batty but good ideas—like the new and improved shopping cart—that somehow never got anywhere.

I am the person least suited to corporate America, and after I got used to that realization, I then realized: the ax would fall when it would fall, so really, there wasn’t much sense worrying about it. I could have tried harder, I suppose: tried to fit in more, gone to more meetings, learned to love the box. But why bother?

Fear and lethargy

Walked hand in hand down

The grey-clad aisle,

Past the cubicles where

Bamboo shoots pointed up

To the florescent lights,

Where workers slouched

Eyes glazed, minds numbed

Their hands caressing the mouse…

And Crest snuggled, in

Three thousand stores,

Six inches to the left of

The Colgate, though in fact

The two had hated each other for years,

Despite their wives having gone to

School together….

And their kids?

After never having spoken,

They developed a strange

Taste for dope,

Which could be satisfied,

After hours

Underneath the gondola,

That metal rack that sails

Down the aisles of

Big box stores,

Propelled by mustachioed black-haired

Blue and white striped burly

Consumers, ardent, burning           

Maddened to sample the new

16-ounce Crest—24 hour cavity protection!

O Sole Mio, sing the packages,

And the waves recede,

All passion spent.

Right! Did it!

The Mufti Speaks Out!

Yeah?

I can give you the standard line, because I’m a liberal, I’m (mostly) politically correct, and, besides, who hasn’t heard it? So here goes:

Islam is a religion of peace and love, there is no place either in the Quran or in the practice of the religion for violence against women or those who do not share the faith.

Then it goes further: Islam, unlike Christian religions, is non-hierarchical. There is no pope, no Archbishop of Canterbury who speaks for the believers. Rather, each Imam is the spiritual head and teacher of a mosque or university. Yes, some mosques for historical or theological reasons are more important than others, and thus some imams are more prominent than others, but no imam speaks for all.

How convenient!

I say this because the world has sat around for three weeks and watched as the Nigerian government did nothing about getting the 276 still-missing kidnapped girls freed from their captors, members of a group called Boko Haram. The group attacked the girls at bedtime in their boarding school, and the scene must have been horrific. And the head of the group issued a rambling-à la-bin-Laden speech promising to sell these girls in the marketplace. Oh, and that’s no idle threat, since Nigeria is a major…well, here’s NBC News on the subject:

The Global Slavery Index, an annual survey by the Australian anti-trafficking group the Walk Free Foundation, ranks Nigeria fourth on its list of nations with the highest number of people living in “modern slavery,” behind India, China and Pakistan.   

Right—so all the world has to sit around and watch this atrocity, but that’s not all. Because God forbid we should even breathe the suggestion—I’ll take a sledgehammer to the keyboard after I write this—that there’s something more than usually blood thirst about Islam. Readers, you’re my witnesses—I have more than once tsk-tsked the Catholic Church, and I refuse to comment on reports that this blog was more than a little responsible for the unprecedented resignation of Ben 16, or whatever the number was. My point? Not too many Christians out there are carrying out attacks on girls’ schools.

Oh, and there’s another thing. Since no one can speak for this religion, and since you, Dear Reader, are very likely doing other things, like working to pay your bills and raising children, then you have to assume that some imams out there are speaking out and decrying this atrocity….

Are they?

It’s hardly scientific, what I’m doing, but it’s more than I’ve seen anyone else do. I googled “top imams“ and got this link from ranker.com.

Are they really the top imams? Who knows, but I took each one of the top ten and googled his name (a curious lack of women in the group, by the way) and the words “Boko Haram.” And—perhaps unfairly—I gave them just one page of search, under the assumption first that it was a fairly narrow search and, second, that it was certainly topical.

So here it goes:

1. Abdul Rahmen al-Sudais is described in Wikipedia thus:

Abdul Rahman Ibn Abdul Aziz as-Sudais (Arabic: عبد الرحمن السديس‎ (ʻAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʻAbd al-Aziz as-Sudais), born Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1960)[1] is the imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the "Islamic Personality Of the Year" in 2005. Al-Sudais has called for efforts to combat terrorism,[2][3] preached Islam's opposition to "explosions and terrorism",[4] and has called for peaceful inter-faith dialogue.

OK—the Google search turned up nothing related to Boko Haram, but did, at the bottom of the page, have this:

Despite his sectarian, racist incitements that Jews are “scum…rats…pigs and monkeys,” the chief cleric of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Sudais, has been welcomed and invited to preach at the East London mosque in Whitechapel tonight, Tuesday evening, 4 August 2009.

Al-Sudais, who has close ties to the Saudi elite, has also insulted Christians and Hindus, referring disparagingly to Christians as “cross-worshippers” and Hindus as “idol worshippers”.

He has been banned from Canada for his anti-Semitism.

Guys? The imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca has been banned in Canada? Not looking good.

2. Abdul Rauf, whom you will know as the Ground Zero imam. In fact, the search was a bit problematic, since there are a basketball player and a Nigerian politician with almost identical names. So I added “Imam Abdul Rauf Boko Haram” and hit the enter button.

And I’m pleased to tell you, the Imam has been tweeting up a storm: “Six reasons the World Should Demand Action” he tweeted yesterday. But any public statements? New conferences? Op-Ed pieces? No, though there was this:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Accused of Embezzling Millions from Mosque Fund

Right—when a bunch of his guys abscond with over two hundred girls, what did this guy do? He tweeted!

3. Imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen is a Danish guy, and half of the search results were in…Danish. Right, but there didn’t seem to be anything much in the way of denunciations on the screen, though I dropped in on the Wikipedia article on him, and discovered that he was convicted and sentenced to over a year in prison for “buying and selling 5kg of hashish.” But look, he was 29 at the time (though he had converted to Islam a year earlier….)

4. No, there’s nothing recent about this guy from Queens—but I do give you this, from the Wikipedia article on him….

Ahmad Wais Afzali (b. 1972 (age 41–42)) is an imam, formerly from Queens, New York. He was deported from the United States in 2010 as part of a plea bargain after lying to the American FBI regarding a conversation he had held with acquaintance Najibullah Zazi,[1] a man later convicted of terrorism charges in the United States.

Guys?

5. Imam Ahmed Yassin—OK, this guy was a problem, though maybe it’s just that my brain has gotten dazed by so much ole-time religion. The problem? I kept getting results for Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and I didn’t think I wanted that. But I pursued the sheik, and he may be our man. And who was he? A founder of Hamas, who died in 2004.

OK—look, I was going to be fair. My father, I have no doubt, would have gotten all the way down the list of the top ten imams: he would have found some imam willing to step up to the plate and bat one for religious moderation. And in fact, I can report that the Egyptian mufti (and wouldn’t it be fun, by the way, to be a mufti? Just for a day or two, you know, kind of check it out…)....

Sorry, I was about to tell you that the mufti has come out and “slammed” Boko Haram! Hah! Take that!

I started out skeptical, but guess what? That’s fallen completely by the wayside!

Whew….

So, unable to endure any more, I have called my sports consultant, who happens to be my brother.

“Johnny, what do you call it when one team is getting slaughtered and nobody can stand it any more?”

“The mercy rule.”

Mercy, indeed!