What's in a Word?

I'd like to digress from my usual talk of Middle Eastern culture, to rant a bit about the national leadership of the Boy Scouts of America. I know, I know, it's been done, but now it's personal.

Considering the ongoing mess in the Middle East, I think everyone, and young people especially, should learn all they can about the region. What better way to get started than by reading an exciting action/adventure novel set there during an important recent historical event. (See Sandstorm sidebar). Right?

So I tried to sell the book to BSA for their scout shops and catalog, only to be told that, while they enjoyed the book greatly, they were unable to stock it. It had, they said, "some objectionable content." Pressing for details, they said in Chapter 4, brash, wise-cracking sixteen year-old Aussie Brian tells his pals he has to take "a massive piss." Ouch. I was so stunned by this I forgot to ask whether I could have passed the test by using "massive pee." How about "massive whiz?" Maybe just "massive tinkle?"

I shouldn't have been surprised, knowing the BSA national leadership stance on social issues. I was willing to overlook this to give the boys a taste of a part of the world they may be asked to go fight in, in a few years. Or maybe I just wanted to sell a few books. But --- would I have left out the part about piss, pee, whiz, tinkle, had I known their position? Hell no.

Trouble By the Numbers

A couple of days ago, I learned two new things about Iraq.

One, I learned my much-loved grandson had received the call to go toBaghdad in July, to help save America from someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.

Then I read that the U.N. estimates the Iraqi death toll for the first eleven months of 2006 was 34,452. There are two interesting things about this number. First, they didn't estimate "approximately 34,000." They said 34,452. Hard not to believe a number derived with such precision. The other interesting thing to note is that the total population of Iraq is about one-eleventh the population of the USA. So, if the same calamity was happening here in our country, on a per-capita basis we would have lost about 380,000 Americans to terrorism last year. It's figures like that which drive home the enormity of the catastrophe we unleashed on these people.

Follow the Leader

In 1978, just prior to the revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran, I spent a couple of weeks there on a business trip. Outside my hotel window at night, I saw dozens of young men studying under the lamps in a small park. When I went down to talk to them, I found they had all studied English and ALL professed a strong desire to come to the United States. They bought me tea and pastries and were the most hospitable people I’d met anywhere in the world.
Less then two years later, the Shah was out, Ayatollah Khomeini was in and a mob of students stormed the U. S. embassy and imprisoned our people for 444 days. I watched in amazement as young people who looked exactly like the ones who had befriended me in the park were shaking their fists and chanting, “Death to America.” It was a dramatic example of the collective mentality overcoming individualism in the Middle East.