By: Azazel

As I come in for yet another day on the docks the hopelessness of my fellows surrounds me like a shroud – every day we come here, load and unload the cargo of big business for shit wages and no benefits to speak of so that we might eek out an existence while some fat cat executive sits on a gold-plated sofa and complains about how ungrateful we are for being here: “Don’t you know just how hard it is to get a job today?” he asks, “you should consider yourselves lucky to have such an opportunity.”

Yeah, lucky – ever since our union sold us out we’ve been struggling to keep roofs over our collective heads.  “The company is struggling,” the union reps say.  “Profits are down and all of us have to make sacrifices – look, the CEO just sold one of his three corporate jets!  Everyone is cutting back!”  Well, the executive can make a decent living without his goddamn jet: those 10-15% reductions in salary and the loss of medical insurance place most of us on the edge of a razor!

“Jorge!” calls out a familiar voice – I turn about to see that Dmitri Stavros, a man I’ve known since I first started working here nearly five years ago, has come to bring me the day’s news and rumors.  “Did you not hear?” he says in his thick Mediterranean accent, “The word going around is that there’s going to be a strike: after all the concessions we’ve made the union finally wants to stand its ground, or so people believe…”

Yes, the executives would want us to believe that – every time the word “strike” comes up in a union meeting strange things happen.  It’s not uncommon for union officials that seriously contemplate such things to be suddenly added to the missing persons list or die under “unusual circumstances”:  One that comes to mind right away involves an organizer that just happened to get crushed under a freight container the day before the strike was scheduled – a cable on the crane just happened to “break loose” as he was spotting the position on the dock for the crane operator (who originally started work here as a scab during the last strike – which is more than a little suspicious considering that he’s also the brother of the shift manager, but I digress…).

Bottom line, such occurrences have prevented any kind of protest action against corporate from ever getting off the ground – yet we’re still expected to believe that our union effectively represents us and has our interests at heart.  What a joke!

“I wonder who’s going to be the next unfortunate soul to meet his fate before this one too is called off?” he sarcastically wonders allowed – “Ah well, better get cracking: our quotas have been raised again, as usual, and the bosses are just looking for an excuse to be rid of us veteran workers – our positions are better filled by the young and dumb types that work for half the pay.”  We both have a laugh at our pathetic plights and get to work for slave drivers that are slowly tearing out pieces of our souls…

***

The day is done and I return to my home – a dilapidated house on the edge of the slums.  Thanks to the crash in real estate my cousin and I got this place cheap while the nation was celebrating the inauguration of it’s first black president.  For a while I bought into the hype and believed that things were looking up – too bad I did not recognize that the new president, as with the house (with it’s rusted plumbing, asbestos ceilings and termite-ridden frame), were not all they were cracked up to be.  In both instances I was sold a bill of goods.

As I come through the front door of this building which I had sunk countless hours into repairing to the point of habitability, I find my cousin Jeffe – a man I would have long ago thrown out if I didn’t need the money he brings in from his drug trade.  While I have nothing against personal use, I find the thought of deriving profit from the sale of poison offensive and would not tolerate it if I myself were not struggling to get by: I suppose that makes me something of a hypocrite, but at least I can admit to myself that I’m too poor to afford morals.

“So, how goes the work on the docks?” he inquires of me as he slouches over an old sofa I had reupholstered at least twice.  “They cracking that whip over you even harder than usual?” he says sarcastically, knowing full well what goes on there.  I respond by telling him that at least I’m earning an honest, legal living to which he quips “honest and legal trades might build character, but they don’t make much bread – which is why you need me.”  As much as my pride is hurt I can’t deny the truth of his words: nonetheless I can feel the guilt of my own complacency towards his deeds eating away at my soul and I badly need to purge myself of it – thus I grab a sandwich out the fridge for a quick supper, reach for my coat and prepare to leave for church (as I have done at least three times a week since I was a boy).

As I head for the door, Jeffe quips to me that God has forsaken us – that there’s no one looking out for us but ourselves.  I try to make a snappy comeback of my own, but I’m tired: the youth of abundant faith I once was is now long gone – all that remains is a weary man hoping for salvation from himself and a world of pure evil that surrounds him.

I leave the house and begin walking through the neighborhood on my way to church – taking in the sight of deterioration that surrounds me.  When I first came here there were a number of local businesses that were flourishing: taquerias, hair salons and other specialty shops lined the streets – sure, they took a hit to their business during the housing crash but we believed that genuine change was right around the corner and that the worst was behind us.  Over the years those shops closed up and were replaced with liquor stores, crack houses and brothels (and now even the liquor stores are struggling – what does it say about a society when one can’t even afford the booze to drown his troubles in?); my heart sinks when I look at the rot around me, but there’s no escaping it.

After about six blocks I reach the old church – even here the rot is visible as one looks at the statue of Christ on the front lawn worn away by erosion from acid rain and peeling varnish on the doors leading to the sanctuary.  However, inside I find a place of solitude: a refuge from the evils of the world that surround me – it’s here that I’ve spent many hours in prayer and confessed my sins, even my sins of necessity, to the priest so that I might be unburdened of all that which weighs down my soul.

However, it’s become harder to get that solace I seek here – year by year by year my faith in the wisdom of God has been wearing away just like the statue out front.  During times of prayer I find myself thinking such terrible thoughts such as “if the wicked go unpunished, then perhaps they are meant to succeed – if that’s so, is God wicked for preordaining their success?”  I try to purge these blasphemous notions from my mind, yet they continue to pop up even as I partake of the Eucharist: as the body and blood of the Lord pass through my mouth, all I could think of was the bosses down at the docks eating me and the fruits of my labor – wondering if, at heart, all men are cannibals.  These unholy imaginings are driving me to insanity!

Failing to find comfort at church, I head home – passing the same stench and decay once more – and drink myself to sleep.  The last thought that goes through my mind before finally passing out is “God, if you’re there, please end the suffering and misery we endure.”  And all fades to black…

***

I come to work the next morning with a slight hangover and resume a dull, miserable existence – slaving for the pittance that the company deems fit to give me once again.  As I report for the shift I hear a number of my co-workers speaking among themselves: they say that the strike is off (surprise…) after a few key union officials changed their votes on the matter – allegedly after death threats were made against them.  Regardless of what the real reason for calling it off was, it’s apparent that the union no longer offers so much as the appearance of resistance to corporate and its ever-increasing demands on labor.

I try to forget about the weak and helpless union and focus on my work – I need to make an honest living as a matter of pride!  I refuse to debase myself as my cousin has done: I refuse to take part in criminal activities to support myself – and if that means I must toil away under working conditions that are increasingly overbearing, then that’s what I must do!

After my shift I check the performance postings at the office – I’m barely making the minimum quota to stay employed, but then again so are all the veteran workers: people who once posted well above quota regularly and received incentive bonuses for doing so are now struggling just to keep pace – it’s as though we are rats on a wheel running ever faster only to go nowhere.  And the young bloods among us; most will be gone by the end of the month – there’s no point in old timers like me worrying about them when we are barely keeping our heads above water.

I leave the office feeling even more dismayed than I was before – with performance expectations constantly rising, wages shrinking, benefits disappearing and the union impotent I can’t tell you how much longer I will even have a job.  Another three months?  Six months, maybe?  How long until I’m broken and entirely reliant on Jeffe?  To lose my position here will only validate everything he’s done, and such a thought is almost as terrifying to me as being thrown out on the streets – such a vindication of his drug-dealing lifestyle can only break my spirit and crush what little dignity I have left!

As my shift comes to a close I feel my heart sink into my chest as my mind whirls over what I will do when the walls close in on me, then Dmitri approaches me and says that he has something he wants to discuss over a drink – I ask him for details, to which he replies “not here, the walls have ears.”  Dmitri isn’t usually the secretive type so I know whatever he has to say is important: I agree to meet him and discuss the matter – after fetching my things from the locker room I head out to the bar we agreed upon, take a table in the back and await Dmitri for a full five minutes before he arrives; after we order ourselves a couple of scotches Dmitri informs me of some startling events.

“As you already know,” he begins “the union has officially declared the strike is off.  However, there are a few of us that are planning to declare one on our own – if the union won’t act we will.”  After pausing to sip some scotch he continues on, telling me about a handful of ex-union reps that are organizing a large portion of the workers in secret: the plan is that in about two weeks anywhere between one quarter and one third of the labor force will simply not report in for their shift and gather at a park in the center of the city – from there, the plan is to march towards city hall and air their grievances before the nation.

After processing this for a minute, I have some concerns about the march.  “While the plan is bold, and certainly boldness is needed right now,” I reply to his outlined plans, “I fear that this will end badly – you do remember what happened to the Citizens Against Police Brutality march last year, yes?  The police shot over 100 people that day!”  I take a sip of my own scotch, put my head in my hands and listen in utter amazement to the words coming out of my own mouth: “if we’re going to do this, we need something to keep the police at bay – we need weapons.”  I’m looking down at the table, realizing that I’m starting to sound like my cousin now and I half-expect Dmitri to distance himself from me for such remarks.

As I look up from the table I see seriousness written all over Dmitri’s face – “allow me to tell you a story” he says with a demeanor like an undertaker.  “Some years ago in my native Greece I was a trucker: we had been saddled with all manner of expenses we couldn’t pay out of pocket and our union resorted to strike – around this time the economy was just starting to show the signs of decay.  Our company refused to meet our demands, the strike continued and eventually the president threatened to call out the army to break the strike; we had no choice but to accept the terms dictated to us.”

From there, he tells me the details of how a civil war broke out and how he and a few members of his family escaped to the U.S. believing that things were better here – only to find out that we were on the same downward spiral.  “Back then,” he continues, “I thought that trouble could be outrun if I just stayed ahead of it: but now, I have nowhere left to run – I can’t go back to Europe, Canada is closing its borders and Mexico is experiencing non-stop drug-related violence.  I can’t run anymore, so fighting is our only option.”  He takes another sip of his scotch, looks me in the eye and presents me with the question I was hoping he wouldn’t ask; “can you get those guns?”

This is not an easy thing for me to do – over the last few years firearms restrictions have tightened to the point where one needs to acquire a license to even buy a gun (such licenses start at $300 for basic shotguns and go up from there).  Also, sales of various weapons have been prohibited altogether: any rife that holds more than five rounds is considered an “assault rife,” any shotgun that holds more than two rounds is considered a “combat shotgun,” any handgun that holds more than seven rounds is considered a “high capacity” weapon – and all are prohibited to civilians by law.  In short, there’s no way I can get the weapons needed to fend off the cops through any legal channel.

I take a deep breath, think over my response carefully and reply in one single word – “yes.”  Jeffe has all the illegal contacts for tactical weapons and equipment and keeps a few caches at various locations to defend his drug-running business: if anyone can get me those weapons, he can.  I feel a knot form in my stomach at the thought of relying on him and his wicked ways yet again, but I know I don’t have much choice; without some means to keep law enforcement at bay, we are defenseless and will in all likelihood be killed when the establishment runs out of patience for us.

Shortly after this conversation we part ways – Dmitri tells me that he intends to meet with a few other key workers to plan out the details of the strike, but all I want to do is rid my soul of the guilt I just had placed upon it.  I return to the church, I light candles and say prayers but I gain no relief from it: all I can think about are the words of my cousin about how God has forsaken us – that there’s no one looking out for us but ourselves.  Failing to find any comfort in my faith, I head back home to humble myself before the resident drug dealer and ask for his help…

***
I’m now standing in an apartment with a camcorder overlooking the city streets – my eyes scan over the throngs of people that have assembled with the striking dock worker one moment then turn inwards to see men armed with heavy military-grade hardware: and in this moment I quietly whisper to myself “how did I end up here?”  Of course, I know damn well what happened but I’m still in a state of shock and disbelief that it has come to this: I could only get so many weapons from Jeffe’s contacts (no easy feat considering that these Back Flag people have so many associates to supply: biker gangs, Libertarian militias and even some crazy new drug kingpin with a street name I can’t pronounce) – mostly M2 Berretta handguns and tactical shotguns with half a dozen M16A2 rifles.

After going through the arduous task of getting enough firepower to equip about two dozen of the 500 or so striking workers, the organizers voted to throw me out (only Dmitri dissented) – they believe me to be some kind of provocateur because I don’t believe that we should be defenseless against an assault by the police (assaults they claim don’t happen without provocation – HA!).

So here I am – once again relying on the contacts Jeffe has to provide security for the protest.   I’m no longer officially a part of it: These men they sent for what they call an “active defense” in the event of police brutality are by far some of the most frightening individuals I’ve known – the large black man (who apparently is the leader) has a look in his eye that can kill just by glancing, the young fellow they keep referring to as “Tater” (must be an inside joke) appears overly eager to shoot at the police every time they come into view; as though he has a vendetta or something against them.  Then there’s the man with the grenades – the way he holds that launcher it looks like he was born with it attached to his arm and the way he calmly glances down at the streets like a hawk searching for prey keeping his hand just below the trigger of his weapon – it creeps me out!

To be honest, if Jeffe didn’t vouch for these people I would run at the first opportunity – but now the die is cast and there’s nothing I can do but wait and record these events for future reference.  I just hope that these guerrillas don’t take me for a liability when all this is over as I would hate to have them for enemies.

God help me…

By: Mike

So, bearing in mind that you only read the little tale after agreeing to keep it quiet, I will start…………………..

The year before last, I decided to take my good lady to Ireland and to visit some of the places where I used to holiday as a boy and youth. Being now in our late 70’s and having been married for over 40 years we decided that we were in no hurry to get anywhere and had plenty of time to take in the sights and sounds of the fair isle.

So there we were stepping off the plane at Dublin Airport, going through the usual rigmarole in getting out of the terminal and collecting our hired car. We headed south to my home town on the east coast………..

The first major shock was that there were so many cars compared to the last time I had been over and the new motorways heading in all directions caused me some problems. Road signs in Ireland can, to say the very least, be quite confusing. However, we reached my sister’s home and settled in.

The next morning, with the promise of a beautiful bright June day greeting us, we headed west to Galway. Once again the quality of the motorways surprised and confused me but we reached Athlone in good time. Having had a wonderful lunch there we continued and within a couple more hours we reached Galway. We chose Salthill on the outskirts as our base and had no problem in finding a first rate Bed and Breakfast. We intended to stay a few nights and then continue on to Achill Island further north.

It was that first night there that the story really begins. We visited a couple of the old pubs that I used to visit when I was younger and fond of my beer. There was Irish singing and music in the first but a little too noisy for us so we moved on. We came to a backstreet pub where everything was soft, quite and very comfortable. Although there was some singing, it was not very loud. Some of the older men were also reciting old poems and telling some beautiful old Irish stories. Some I remembered from my schooldays and they brought back some wonderful memories…………

All in all, it was a beautiful evening and it was quite late when we returned to where we were staying. After a very comfortable and restful night, it was decided that her ladyship (my good wife) would spend the day shopping in Galway whilst I would take the car and my fishing gear to Lough Corrib which was a short distance out of the city of Galway. I hired a boat and was looking forward to a fair day’s fishing.

As I may have said, it was a beautiful sunny day with not a cloud in the sky. The lake was like a milk-pond with barely a ripple on the water. There was little or no sound other than the occasional splash of a trout or salmon jumping in the distance. The birds were in great song. I was at peace with the world and happy with my surroundings.

As I rowed up the lake I was suddenly met by a strange mist on the water which rapidly surrounded me. I quickly lost all sense of direction and rowed slowly trying to get out of the mist hoping beyond hope that I would quickly get my bearings. I had no such luck and as the minutes passed by I was getting more lost…………

I had been rowing for almost an hour when suddenly I came out of the mist and entered an area of the lake that was totally strange and eerie to me. Everything seemed different and the colours were more vibrant than when I started. There was no sign of any buildings on the shoreline and in fact, no sign of life whatsoever……………………….

I turned the boat towards the nearest shore and rowed towards it. When I was about three hundred yards from what looked like a pebble beach and where I intended to land, I began to hear human voices. When I say human voices, I should add that they appeared to be children’s voices echoing across the water…….

As I pulled the boat up onto the pebble beach a group of children made their way towards me. They were dressed as if they were having a fancy-dress party and all looked about ten years old. As they spoke rapidly I recognised that they were speaking Gaelic but far too rapidly for me to understand only the occasional word or two. I spoke in English and asked for directions back to the boat-house. They began to laugh…………..

A taller youth came from higher up the beach and asked me more or less in Gaelic what was my problem. I could not think of the Irish word for ‘lost’ so told him so in English. He laughed and spoke back to me in broken English. He said “Lost is it, you are? Sure now, didn’t I think that you were one of the lucky ones to find us”. “What do you mean?” I asked puzzled. “Sure now, haven’t you reached the end of the rainbow and found yourself in Tir na nOg” he replied in quite a matter of fact tone of voice.

Now it might have been fifty years since I left school where I learned Gaelic, but I knew damn well what Tir na nOg meant. The Land of the Young or more romantically in Irish myth as The Land of Eternal Youth. I laughed at the thought and must admit that I came out with a word that should never be used in front of children. He stepped back and looked at me as if puzzled………….

“And would you be doubting my word?” he asked. “Certainly not” I lied, “I was merely laughing at the children’s clothes”. “Oh that” he answered “sure we have no need for finery here. By the way, my name is Fioneen”. “Hello Fioneen” I replied “and mine is Michael”. “Welcome to Tir na nOg” he said at the same time as giving a low bow. “Would you be hungry?” he asked. “If it pleases you” I answered and followed him up the embankment.

When we reached level ground I could see several thatched cottages and gardens containing all types of flowers in blossom. Once again, I noticed that there was not a single adult to be seen. We entered one of the cottages and there was a table laden with all types of food. It looked inviting and he offered me a seat.

I ate some of the food which was delicious and drank some fresh milk. As I did so, Fioneen and several of the others watched with interest. When finished, I thanked him for the food and drink then said “I don’t mean to be rude Fioneen, but could you direct me back to the boathouse, my wife will be worried if I am too late”.

There were gasps from several of the children and Fioneen seemed quite shocked. “Sure won’t you be staying?” he asked in surprise. “No, no” I answered “I have got to get back”. “And would you not like to be young and healthy again like the rest of us and spend your time in such a peaceful place”. “Not without her ladyship” I answered. “You would not like to stay in such a wondrous place where you will never age again, never have aches and pains and never be sick. In a place where the sun always shines and it never rains or snows nor frosts. You mean you would give all that up for her ladyship?” he asked.

“It is very tempting Fioneen, but no, I certainly would not” I answered in honesty. “She must be a fine woman for you to forego such an offer Michael me boy” Fioneen had a smile on his face as he spoke. “Tis true Fioneen” I replied “not for all the time in the world would I swop her”.

“So be it then Michael. You know, you will never get another chance to come and join us” Fioneen had a sad look upon his face. “Thank you Fioneen” I replied “for your kind offer but sure I will take life as it comes – come what may”.

With that he walked me back to the shore and the boat. As he pushed the boat away and I took up the oars, there was a clap of thunder and a bright flash of lightning. As I quickly looked back to the shore to see if anyone was injured I was shocked to see that there was no one there. There was nothing to suggest that I had been ashore and certainly no sign of any living thing, human or otherwise……………………….

I rowed in the direction that Fioneen had told me and once again I was shrouded in mist. However, this time as I came out of it I could see the houses not far away and the boathouse from where I had hired the boat. I made my way there quickly.

I sat in the car for a good hour thinking about what had happened and although I was happy that the event had taken place, I was a little unsure as to whether or not I had just fallen asleep out on the lake and imagined the wondrous place and people that I had seen.

Tir na nOg – what a magical thought. A place where it never rains, the sun always shines. A place where there is no illness, pain or death……………Magic…….

Now and again, I think of what happened and still, if offered the same choice again – to live in the Land of Eternal Youth or continue as I am – I would definitely make the same choice – after all I don’t know what I would do without Her Ladyship, God Bless Her…………………

Michael Artwork By:Mary Daniels

By: Renee Y. Brown

By: Maya

Hunger pangs strike the one in need,
A glance into the empty pantry is saddening,
Wonderment of how to’s are consistent,
Cringing thoughts of accumulated debt
Refusal to accept failing the family,
Or even losing the house.

Not just any home, a very special house,
A place to feed and shelter the family,
Whose idea of purchase made oblivious to debt,
Where job security kept payments consistent,
Nary a thought of a result so saddening,
To think of a time, there wasn’t a single need.

Others face obstacles far more saddening,
A lack of clean water, an urgent clinical need,
or even a roof over their head, let alone a house.
But, why brood over others? This victim is the family.
Where hearts thumped harmoniously, before the debt,
And the love was unquestionably consistent.

One cannot wrap broken wings around the family,
Whose feathers have fallen, like shingles from a house.
The sight of a hunched eagle; somber and saddening,

He has lost hope, a revitalization he’ll need,
Where sustenance shall be consistent,
A chance to overcome the trepidation of debt.

How can one manage to keep optimism consistent,
When at an inability to eliminate or alleviate debt?
Unfathomable blameworthiness anticipated from family,
As glares and scowls occur during discussions of house.
Once held in high esteem, now overlooked for need.
Pressured, incapable, incompetent, truly saddening.

Wary were he, cautious of credit card debt,
No finance fees; he was due date consistent.
Woe to the people who have the need,
To spend frivolously. It’s quite saddening,
when it becomes you, and your house.
Yet to imagine the worst, your own family.

One last can awaits the family; shelved in the house,
Its need to be opened and eaten is saddening,
Pointed finger consistent towards debt.

By: Mike

I mentioned in a recent post that in Ireland, the Wren is known as the King of All Birds. With Christmas rapidly approaching, I feel that the story about the wren deserves telling.

Over this side of the pond, December 26th is known as ‘Boxing Day’ but in Ireland it is still known (and still used by yours truly) as Saint Stephen’s Day – a day on which the little Wren takes pride of place.

The common brown wren is one of the tiniest birds in the British Isles. (The crested wren is even smaller and rarer). It has a strange way of life. In spring, the male will make numerous nests, usually in ivy on the side of an old tree but sometimes in ivy on walls. He then goes ‘on the pull’. As soon as he finds a female he takes her to one of his many mossy, circular nests with a hole in the side and invites her in. If she likes it, they mate and he, like some men, clears off looking for another female. The nest can contain up to twelve tiny white eggs. The male plays no further role in the feeding or care of the young. The hen may in fact have up to three broods each year. The sad part is that as many as 95% of wrens die during a very severe winter.

It is claimed that the wren’s name comes from the Druid’s who revered the little bird. They claimed that the wren was sacred to their bull god Taranis and was under his protection. It is further claimed that its nest is always protected by The Thunderer – Taranis and that whoever steals wren’s eggs will have their home struck by lightning. Not only that, but their hands will shrivel up……………………..

There are many legends about the wren in Irish folklore. The one that holds most sway for me is the time when an Irish army was sneaking up on a band of sleeping Vikings. A wren began to eat some crumbs from a battle drum of the Vikings and his rat, tat, tat from his pecking awoke the drummer boy who sounded the attack. The Irish soldiers were badly defeated.

The relevance with St. Stephen is said to have come about when he was hiding from his enemies and the wren began singing close to the hiding place. He was captured and stoned to death.

Throughout Ireland in ancient times, on St. Stephen’s Day, boys dressed up in fancy clothes, but mainly women’s clothing, would ‘stone’ a wren and tie the dead body to a highly decorated holly bush or small pine tree. They would then parade it through the streets in revenge for the death of St. Stephen.

The festivities died out in the mid 1900’s but apparently it has been resurrected and nowadays in many cities and towns throughout Ireland, the Wrenboys as they are known, but it now includes girls, use a dummy wren and have large parades with plenty of singing and dancing, not to mention drinking. Any money collected, unlike in the olden days, is given to charity.

Here are two of the many variations to the song they sing:

OR

The wren, the wren, king of all birds,
Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze,
Although he is little, his family is great,
I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat.
My box would speak, if it had but a tongue,
And two or three shillings, would do it no wrong,
Sing holly, sing ivy – sing ivy, sing holly,
A drop just to drink, it would drown melancholy.
And if you draw it of the best,
I hope in heaven your soul will rest;
But if you draw it of the small,
It won’t agree with these wrenboys at all.

And this is my version of how he was Crowned…………..

The Crested Wren, our smallest bird,
An old man told me, and it might seem absurd,
That it became the King of All Birds,
And this is how. These are his words.

Soon after God created them,
A meeting was called by a scrawny old hen,
To elect as King, one of their kind,
No rules were set, or yet defined.

Some of the fowl of smaller wing,
Knew that they would not be king,
When a decision by the majority,
That flight was what the test would be.

‘’Distance?’ asked the Albatross,
‘No, no, no’ cried the Owl, the boss,
‘Height – then we will have to fly,
High, high, high, into the sky’.

The hen jumped off a fallen tree,
It’ll never do, it was plain to see,
That her leap of about four feet,
Would not the record ever beat.

The goose took up the challenge, bold,
Tried to take off, but rolled and rolled,
Until she splashed down in the lake,
The old hen cackled ‘For Heaven’s sake’.

The blackbird and the mistle thrush,
Flew off and with a hurried rush,
They reached quite high, but would not win,
For the Eagle watched with a sly grin.

When most had tried their level best,
To get much higher than the rest,
The swallow on its screaming wing,
Was first so far: he might be King.

It was then that the Eagle made his bid,
But did not notice where the shrewd Wren hid,
And as he soared among the clouds,
Was watched from below by the feathered crowds.

The Eagle reached a mighty height,
Then screamed out loud with wild delight,
‘I am the King, it’s plain to see,
No one on earth will outdo me’.

Then from his feathers, flew the Wren,
And climbed twelve feet and only then,
‘You are beaten Eagle’ he was heard to sing,
Came back to Earth, and was crowned King.

The moral of this story then:
The Great Bald Eagle, or scrawny old Hen,
Is no better than the Wren or Tit,
It’s not your size – it’s what you do with it.

By: Jane Stillwater

In honor of Kim Jung-Il’s passing Jane Stillwater regails us with stories of her visti to North Korea in 2008.

Because NK’s Dear Leader just passed away, I dug out some of my old photos of Pyongyang

The city was a nice place to visit and North Koreans DO want to live there — because the alternative of living in the countryside is rather nasty.

There were wide avenues and almost no cars. People walked and used public transportation a lot. No huge gaseous cloud of CO2 here.

Kim Jong Il was sick even back then — and he is my age. Life is short, start doing good deeds ASAP before you end up like Kim — dead. That seems to be the moral of this tale.

North Korea from the air is a very green and lovely country — like Ireland or something. Our plane flew in over miles and miles of verdant farmland — with the fields surrounded by what looked like electrified fences. But I didn’t see any cattle.

At the airport, much to my surprise, everything there looked totally NORMAL. You coulda been in any mid-sized airport anywhere in the world. “What were you expecting? That North Koreans were going to have horns and tails?” Yeah. And I guess I was also expecting the airport to look like the Stone Age or something. Sure, it wasn’t as fancy as the Beijing airport — but it was NORMAL. Airline counters, computers, restaurants, souvenir shops and customs agents. No bunkers, tents or grass huts. And no little green men.

Then we got on a bus just like the bus that took us to the airport in Shenyang — just like the bus that takes people to the airport in San Francisco. The DPRK appears to be westernized, up-to-date, modern and NORMAL. Get over it, Jane.

I guess that the U.S. media’s effort to turn North Koreans into “The Other” has worked, even on me. But why am I so surprised that North Koreans are just normal people like the rest of us? I found out in Israel/Palestine that not all Palestinians were mad bombers and in Afghanistan I discovered the Afghans were the nicest people on earth. And even in Iraq and Zimbabwe I found lots of new friends.

“You notice that all the buildings appear to be built relatively recently?” someone asked. Yes. And they all look alike too. “That’s because most of the buildings here were flattened by the Americans back in the 1950s. The entire city was destroyed.” There are no really old buildings here.

And I had somehow thought that everyone here would be wearing native dress. Not true either. Everyone is wearing western-style clothes. Not many cars. And it’s a warm evening and everyone is out walking.

“There’s a revolving restaurant on top of our hotel,” said our guide. “And as you can see, there are many tourist buses in the parking lot — so remember your bus number.” Buses for tourists? The DPRK is a tourist destination? Does nobody besides me think that is weird? And the hotel was even more strange — a 46-story four-star hotel set up to accommodate thousands of tourists. And all this in a country that is supposed to be poverty-stricken. No signs of poverty so far.

“I want to go to the big 60th anniversary celebration,” I argued over dinner.

“I want to go to the DMZ!” pouted one man in our group. Apparently we can do both.

This is it. We’re actually driving around the DPRK in a tour bus. So far, the entire city seems to be composed of Soviet-style housing blocks, Soviet-style massive monuments and Soviet-style office blocks.

“Today we are going to go to a Buddhist temple and climb a mountain,” said our guide, as we drove through the streets of Pyongyang. Everyone who lives here seems to be walking everywhere. There are very few cars. “But we do have a subway. It’s the deepest one in the world — 120 meters deep.” All the people we drive by look relatively happy, look like they could be walking down the street in one of San Francisco’s Asian communities. I still can’t get over how normal it all looks here — in a country that has been totally cut off from the world for the last 60 years. I wonder where they get their clothes. Wal-Mart or JC Penney, it looks like.

We drive 160 km — about two hours — to Mount Myohyang. It is one of the country’s five famous mountains. It is 800 meters high. So far I love the DPRK! The only things I haven’t liked so far were the mosquitoes that flew into my room last night — how do mosquitoes fly up to the 26th floor? — And the wake-up call loudspeaker at 6 am that seemed to be designed to wake up the entire city.

The streets are very wide here. Tree-lined avenues, greenery, parks and Lots of high-rises and open spaces. Did I mention that the capital city has three million residents? But it’s not congested. Why not? There’s hardly any cars.

This place is so GREEN.

I’ve decided that my basic attitude toward the DPRK is that, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The North Korean leaders appear to not like Bush and Cheney. Hey! I don’t like Bush and Cheney too!

“Our rainy season is in July and August. We also grow corn, rice and beans.” Soy beans. “Potatoes, cabbages and radishes.”

The countryside is lush. Poplars and birches line the roads — giving the countryside an almost French flavor. Not that I’ve ever actually been to the French countryside. “23 million people live in the DPRK.”

“Some areas are covered with snow in the winter.” One guy in our group is a skier. “Yes, we have a sky resort.” I’m not interested at all. I went skiing once when I was in seventh grade, discovered that snow was cold and never went back.

“The universities, factories, farms, etc all are run by the government.” Sounds like China 30 years ago. And just look at China now.

According to the Lonely Planet guide, 30% of the DPRK’s budget goes to the military. In America, however, it is 54% — and rising.

Did I mention that the freeway to the mountain is bordered with flowers? Marigolds, cosmos, daisies, black-eyed-susans, poppies, columbines. Gladiolas. Lovely.

More corn fields. And rice fields, a lush green highlighted by white cranes. I bet they don’t have to deal with Monsanto shoving genetically-modified seeds down their throats here.

On one level, I am well aware that the DPRK is pretty much a dictatorship but on another level, I like that everything seems so — organized. And un-complex. I wouldn’t mind living here, out in the country, for the rest of my life. It’s so peaceful — as long as I didn’t have to get my hands dirty a lot. And I would definitely miss having DSL.

We’ve been driving for an hour through some of the most bucolic countryside ever. And on a four-lane freeway — two lanes each way; we have yet to see another car. Works for me. Imagine a whole country that pretty much runs successfully without cars. Heck. That’s the wave of the future. North Korea appears to be doing fine without cars. So now we know that it’s do-able.

In America, we are being choked to death by cars.

I think that the DPRK has something very important to teach Americans. But who would have thought it would be that?

In North Korea, the average citizen’s basic identity doesn’t come from what kind of car he or she drives. Sure, it would be nice to have a car, but without owning a car, their basic sense of who they are is still secure.

“80% of the territory in the DPRK is mountainous area,” said our guide.

Apparently last year the DPRK suffered from major flooding and there was much damage to the crops. International aid organizations sent food and all tourist groups were cancelled for a few weeks. Apparently canceling the tourist groups had a big impact because there is a growing tourist business here in the summertime, especially involving Australians and Europeans. But Americans? Not so much. “It’s harder to get in here if you are an American.” Tell me about it. It took me six whole months to get a visa. Yet another country added to the list of those who have been antagonized by Cheney and Bush.

“No, you are wrong, Jane,” said someone in our group. “It’s a list of countries that have been antagonized by every president since World War II ended and American industrialists took over America.” Well, let’s not argue about that. We’d have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt and beyond if that were the case.

Then we arrived at the mountain — only it was a series of mountains. “Next we will go to the International Exhibition Hall.” It had lots of marble walls and bronze doors. “Here are exhibited the gifts received by our Great Leader Kim Il Sung — sent from the leaders of countries all over the world.” It was like a giant antique store. There were lots of vases and sculptures and paintings and clocks. Ceremonial swords. A chandelier from Kuwait. A miniature crystal train set from Russia. A rhinoceros horn from Zimbabwe. Fascinating.

The next room contained photos of all the wildlife received by the Great Leader, sort of a photographic zoo. Giraffes. Zebras. Monkeys. Lots of peacocks. Then there was a gallery of plant photos, another roomful of vases, silverware, paintings, statues, scrolls, lacquer ware, mirrors and — oh look! There’s a piano.

Then there was the Southeast Asian room. Buddhas from Cambodia, stuff from Vietnam. Balinese puppets, batik from Indonesia.

More rooms, more gifts. North Korean school children, my tour group and me all tried to take this all in. “It would take all day and all night to see it all,” said our guide — so we hurried along. “This exhibition hall was built in 1978.” Then there was another large room, holding what turned out to be “souvenirs”. Now we were just hurrying through room after room. OMG! There’s a whole train! One coach was from Joe Stalin and one coach was from Chairman Mao. Next? A roomful of European gifts. Beer steins, pewter flatware, Greek statues, Viking boats, knick-knacks. Ah, the African room. Then the Latin American room. And a silver plate from Billy Graham. Go figure.

“Then this is the last room, containing a statue of our Great Leader,” a wax figure dressed in real clothes. Very life-like.

The second exhibit hall was all constructed of marble too and contained gifts given by various heads of state to Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader.

Afterwards we went up to the observation deck on the roof of the hall and some high school boys offered me their chair. Boy I really have reached little-old-lady status.

Next stop: A 400-year-old Buddhist temple. They had some big-ass old statues of various bodhisattvas. 20 feet tall. Carrying swords and trampling demons. Then a bunch of gilt Buddhist statues, etc. And a very holy-looking monk who I was totally honored to meet. Highlight of the trip — so far.

Then I was forced to deal with a squat toilet.

Tomorrow we are going to a world-famous circus. Hey, this is supposed to be some hard-scrabble nation that’s been demonized as being totally evil — not the latest hot tourist destination!

“Let’s cut short our visit to the Buddhist temple and go hike up the mountain,” someone suggested and then everyone got all excited except me. Will I get a wheelchair on the mountain too?

Sure, the country folk here have a hard life. But all around them lays the beauty of nature. But there are other countries in the world where people live in even prettier places — like in the DRC — yet they have no education, no healthcare and no physical or economic security. Plus in the DRC, women there face the horror of rape every single day of their lives.

And there are even more than several places in the USA where this is all true too — no education, no security, no healthcare. Plus the voting machines don’t even work.

The only real danger I’ve faced in the DPRK so far has been from mosquitoes.

But in all honesty, I can’t really say if the people in the countryside get free healthcare like the people in Pyongyang do. But I’m assuming that they get education because one of the school groups we met at the Great Leader’s Exhibit Hall were obviously children raised in the country. They all had farmers’ tans.

Even though the trail up the mountainside wasn’t very primitive — it was paved with asphalt — I had to stop half-way up and fall by the wayside and contemplate some rocks for about an hour while the rest of the group persevered on up to a magnificent waterfall of epic proportions. How do I know? They all showed me their photos of it.

Then there was also a weekend camping event for children up on the mountainside and the kids were all happy and smiley-faced and cute. The future of a country is always pointed out through its children and these ones looked like they had a bright future. Good.

On the long bus ride back to the city, we only saw one checkpoint while nearing the capital and it was mainly just a table and chair, manned by one person. This is a hecka big difference from, say, the checkpoint outside of Ramallah in Palestine. THAT checkpoint is totally out of control — ten football fields wide and taking all day to get through.

Back in Pyongyang, it was after dark. Night in the capital city is weird. Imagine Washington DC with no cars and not streetlights — but lots of trees and parks and people strolling around. The low levels of energy use in this country never cease to amaze me. This is definitely no Las Vegas. They simply do not pig out.

At dinner, we had fun telling each other ghost stories about all the rumors, innuendos and hot gossip we’d ever heard about current and past leaders of the DPRK. “The Lonely Planet said that the life of a political prisoner here was ‘hell on earth’.” Is this still true? Or have things mellowed out? Sometimes as things get better economically, the old, harsh ways relax — as new generations who have experienced happy childhoods grow up. Too bad that the opposite seems to be happening in the U.S.

“And remember the famines? I heard that a million people died of starvation.” I’d heard that too — that things got so bad in one province that they just sealed it off one winter and came back in the spring to see if anyone had survived.

Then there are the stories about how the past president had been dead for five years before anyone in the DPRK was told, or that the current president was dead and some actor had taken his place — like the stories they tell about Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. Then there are the kinky stories. You gotta love kinky stories. Which brought up the stories about George Bush and that former male prostitute who spent 20 nights in the White House — and don’t even get me started on Sarah Palin stories!

Aha! The Lonely Planet has set us straight. “Surprisingly, the presidency rested with [the dead president even after his death was announced officially], making him the world’s only dead head of state.” So, He WAS dead while still president. But everyone here also knew he was dead too.

Apparently, according to several other tourists I’ve talked to – there are tons of tourists here! – The 1995 floods and resulting famines WERE extreme and extremely large numbers of people did die. “Stories of stunted children with swollen bellies fighting over grains of rice in the mud are famous all over the world.” What a fascinating and complex place this is! And today we are going to see even more of it.

“I am SO not a morning person,” I profusely apologized to my wonderful roommate. I thought I had given her the room key and that she had gone off for a walk and left me locked out, so I waited outside our door and inwardly stormed and raged at the injustice of it all. Crap. I had to pee!

“But, Jane,” she reminded me, “you have the key.” And I did. In my pocket. I’m just all burned out. This has been a hectic seven days. I’m losing it. I seriously considered spending the day hiding under the bed today but I’d better not. I’d just hate myself when I got back to Berkeley – that I didn’t take the tour of the capital city and ride on the world’s deepest subway.

I read some more from the Lonely Planet guide. “Trying to get a sense of day-to-day life is a challenge indeed. It’s difficult to overstate the ramifications of half a century of Stalinism – and it is no overstatement to say that this is the most closed and secretive nation on earth. Facts meld with rumor about the real situation in the country….” But you gotta admit that the rumors and gossip here are first class!

Then we ran into a tour group of Canadian corporate executives that had come here for a tennis and golf vacation!

According to the Lonely Planet, up to three million people died of starvation during the 1990s floods. That’s almost one in seven North Koreans. That’s sad. And apparently this place has a three-caste system, based on political attitudes. If you are hostile to the government, you might end up in a labor camp. That’s almost like when Bush fired all those U.S. attorneys in America who didn’t support the neo-can regime.

“The ‘neutrals’ have little or nothing and generally live the hard lives of farmers out in the countryside but they are not persecuted. While the ‘loyalist’ enjoy many more material things.” They get to live in the capital city, have access to education, don‘t have to perform strenuous physical labor for the most part, and are not in any danger of starving. And at the top, according to the Lonely Planet, there is also a fourth caste. “The Kim dynasty and its vast array of courtiers, security guards, staff and other flunkies are rumored to enjoy great wealth and luxury.”

But what is the real truth here? Guess what? I’m definitely not going to find out in only four nights and five days.

It’s now Monday morning in North Korea’s capital city and people are walking and biking to work. Get over it, America. Don’t be so snobbish. You’re next. I bet you anything that, if it keeps going the way our economy and environmental limitations are now heading, in ten years America will be like this too – less cars, less electricity, more rationing, more militarization and more Stalinism. We may even pass the DPRK on our way down – or it may pass us on its way up.

Next stop? The birthplace of the country’s first president, Kim Il Sung. “I have heard that if you drink water from this well three times,” another tourist told me after we got there, “you may become rich and the president of the country. But if you drink it four times? You may get loose bowels.” Apparently this is a well-known joke in the DPRK.

“Next we are going to visit the Pyongyang subway system, completed in 1973. It runs on over 35 kilometers of track and has 17 stations.”  A sign on the subway wall read, “If the Americans invade our country, we will defeat them.” Too late. We’ve already invaded! The tourist invasion.

The escalator down to the subway platform went so deep that my ears popped. Twice. And we were given free rein to take photos. Yaay! Now I can show the folks back home how well-dressed everyone here is.

I’m still fascinated by the clothes here. The shoes are stylish and some of the ladies are almost chic in a Wal-Mart sort of way. Where do these clothes come from? Are they made here? Made abroad? Who designs them? Do they put out a DPRK Vogue?

“The clothes are made here.” I’m impressed. They don’t dress as fresh-off-the-boat here as one would think. The women don’t, that is. With regard to the men, they are like men in most of the rest of the world – they don’t pay that much attention. Geeks and nerds. You’d think you were at M.I.T or something except I didn’t see any pocket-protectors.

One member of our tour group said that the U.S. has frozen the DPRK’s assets outside of the country and they are not even allowed to buy food from the outside world with it. That’s cold — especially since I just read in the Lonely Planet that as many as 15 million people may have starved to death in the 1990s. That’s totally cold. 15 million dead of starvation? I could make a bad joke here about how at least the North Koreans were respectful enough not to resort to cannibalism because if they had, not that many people would have starved. Sorry. That’s not funny at all. There is NOTHING funny about 15 million people starving to death.

We then stopped at a HUGE monument “to the workers”. It was very Stalinist but a hecka photo op. Next comes the DPRK war museum. I almost got in a fight with my guide about that. “The Lonely Planet says that North Korea started the war.”

“No! No! No!” the guide practically screamed. “The Americans started it!” We are about to find out who is right. After all, Bush swears up and down that Saddam Hussein is responsible for the Iraq “war” disaster. And even Hitler blamed the Poles for his Blitzkrieg. Show me the proof.

Apparently, right after World War II the U. S. military moved in and seized the area south of the DPRK from the Japanese, killing 478,000 North Koreans in the process. I’ve never heard that before. This is interesting, to hear the view of the North Koreans. And the Americans continued to threaten a full invasion of all of the DPRK.

The war went on from 1950 to 1953. According to our guide, these were grisly times, as General Walker ordered as many people in North Korea as possible killed by American troops. They were bombed, slaughtered, dropped down mine shafts, buried alive, whatever. The DPRK’s capital was leveled. And even women and children fought back.

Americans used chemical bombs. Napalm. An article from the New York Times said, “The use of napalm far exceeds its use in World War II…. The U.S. Army’s chemical corps shipped more than 17,000,000 pounds of napalm to the far east.” Five times the amount of napalm used in World War II. They also dropped bombs containing poisonous insects – and fleas. Fleas?

There were photos of an all-woman anti-aircraft hunting team and we saw many of the planes that they had shot down, perhaps 20 or 30. That made me sad — that so many Americans had to die in that useless senseless war. And it also brought home to me that North Korea was a country that had continually experienced war devastation at a level that Americans can only try to imagine.

And then the circus started. Tightrope walkers. Balancing acts. Those guys are crazy. Then they had cute little jump-roping bears and a lady who did a triple on the flying trapeze. We all clapped and clapped and clapped.

Then as our bus drove through the city, I couldn’t help but think as I watched people walk by, “These are the lucky ones – and they know it.” Lucky to be here in the capital city and not out in the countryside or off in some gulag. I forget a lot about how lucky I myself am – to be living in Berkeley, in a place of my own, and not in Iraq or the Congo or something. I forget because I rarely think about the horrors of Iraq or the Congo. But perhaps the people of the capital here know about the alleged 15 million people who starved to death just miles away from them. And, if so, I imagine that they truly appreciate how lucky they are.

I gotta learn to be more appreciative. But should I be appreciative that I don’t live here? Not necessarily. The residents of Pyongyang seem to live a pretty good life. Except for having no internet of course.

Then we went to visit a middle school. Good grief! At an assembly they were holding, two girls were playing accordions. And they were good too. The DPRK’s got talent! And some other musical groups also came onto the stage of the multi-purpose room. And they were good too. And they were having fun. Even I was having fun.

Then the students came off the stage, took our hands and taught us how to folk dance. And I have the pictures to prove it. Then we visited a classroom. About 30 kids per class. And I have the pictures to prove that too. Three girls and I practiced our English together. Our visit to the circus had been nice – but this was more meaningful.

“Now we are going to drive to the Arch of Triumph,” said our guide,” and then we will have dinner at the revolving restaurant back at the hotel.” Is it bedtime yet? I’m worn out.

“Today is our national holiday,” said our guide. “It is the DPRK’s equivalent of the American Fourth of July. And also your trip to the DMZ has been cancelled.” What! No DMZ? That’s not fair!

Apparently there are tensions in the DMZ today. Rats. I wanna see tensions.

“Today we will be traveling to a visit a dam,” said our guide after I had gotten back on the bus. “It will be an hour and 15 minute drive from here. The dam was built in the 1980s, to prevent the rivers from flooding. It cost 40 billion U.S. dollars to build.”

“Does it generate electricity?”

“No. We use coal-powered generators.”

“Do they have coal here in the DPRK?”

“Yes. Lots of coal. And lots of other metals too – such as gold, silver and iron.” So that’s what those people I saw squatting in the river on our road trip to the mountains were doing – panning for gold. I saw a one-ounce Chinese panda gold coin for sale at the hotel but it cost 1006 Euros. That’s twice as much as gold costs in America. “I just bought a gold coin at the hotel gift shop for 40 Euros,” I overheard someone say. Dream on. If that was real gold, we could buy it all up and be rich rich rich! I’m sorry but I don’t have that kind of money karma. If I did, I’d be down by the river panning for gold too.

Then we drove into Nampo on the way to the dam and landed right in the middle of that city’s huge September 9 celebration. The whole place had a festive atmosphere and the streets were filled with lines of uniformed school children and women in “cupcake” dresses – that’s the name that one of our group gave to the DPRK’s female national dress.

The main plaza of Nampo was filled with over a thousand people. Only DPRK nationals were allowed to attend the capital city’s September 9 celebration – maybe because the country’s president would be there – and so our tour group hadn’t been able to secure tickets. But here in Nampo, we tourists were able to attend — if only unofficially, as our bus drove past the plaza.
Cupcake dresses, school children and flowers were everywhere.
Perhaps this city was also bombed and fought over during the DCRP-American war because so far I’ve only seen Soviet-style buildings and monuments here.

On our right are ships and Islands. On our left are many mountains framing the shore – and some large ships. That means that there must be a drawbridge or something here so that the ships can get through to the bay. Also there are some truly jankety fishing boats here – rusted hulls, ancient engines.

We talked with one German guy at breakfast back at our hotel this morning who said that he got his visa within five days of applying for it in Germany. I guess it’s just hard for us Americans to get visas.

In a video at the dam we saw, there had been a scene with the DPRK’s president and Jimmy Carter. “Carter made a deal to take the DPRK off the U.S. short list in exchange for giving up the quest for nuclear weapons,” said a tour group member. “And then Bush came along and screwed up the deal. Now, eight years later, Bush is trying to negotiate the same deal that Carter had made back in the 1990s.”

“Was this before or after 9-11?” I asked.

“Before.” Well. That explains it. Bush’s backers were probably looking for a war even back then so that they could go on with the business of making weapons like they had in the good old days of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. Ah, how the Bushies seemed to long for the good old days of Vietnam!

I bet that Bush thought he could get something going with North Korea — and perhaps even China if he was lucky. But then 9-11 happened and Bush got his wars without having to declare war on the poor DPRK.

Which leads me to believe that maybe the North Koreans might have been right after all and that Americans had also provoked the DPRK into war back in the 1950s as well. Just like Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to start the Vietnam War, Reagan lied about Granada to start a war there and Bush lied about Iraq. There’s a pattern here.

“The main meal in the DPRK is lunch,” said our guide. So we sat down and ate nine courses. The restaurant also served rice vodka and rice beer. They served us kimchee, mussels, breaded veal, salad greens, pot stickers, marinated pork, stir-fried pork, red bean cakes, clear noodles with egg, beef with chard, breaded potatoes, cucumbers and rice. “Does anyone want those extra pot stickers?” I asked. No? Feed a cold, starve a fever. I just ate 14 pot stickers.

Then suddenly there we were — at the famous American spy ship that was captured by the DPRK navy in 1968. 83 U.S. sailors were taken prisoner, including eight officers. “The boat was a civilian research vessel,” stated President Johnson, but evidence to the contrary was found on the ship — evidence indicating that it was a military ship, spying on North Korea.

An American crewman aboard the Pueblo had stated that the ship had been ordered to sail closer to the DPRK, apparently into its actual territorial waters — and had done this 17 times before. “The statement of President Johnson had proved to be a lie,” said a video that we saw onboard. Johnson then tried to cover his tracks by accusing the DPRK of aggression, trying to shift the responsibility to the DPRK. The U.S. threatened out-and-out war on the DPRK.

North Korea then tried negotiations, seeking an apology — and if they didn’t get one, then the crew would be put to death. The crew members pleaded for their lives and eventually Johnson backed down and eleven months after the vessel’s capture, Johnson finally apologized. Even Johnson admitted that it was the only such apology in American history. And the U.S. promised never to do it again. Then the video showed the sailors crossing over some bridge to a pro-American country.

“The DPRK will never back down against unwarranted aggression!” said the video. But apparently the U.S. is still doing the same thing because a data-collecting American torpedo was discovered off the coast of the DPRK in 2004.

The document read, “[The United States]…shoulders full responsibility and solemnly apologies for the grave acts of espionage…and gives firm assurance that no U.S. ships will intrude again in future into the territorial waters….”

“The BBC just reported that the president of the DPRK might be dead,” said one tour group member. We get the BBC in our hotel rooms. “No one has seen him since August. But if he were dead, then who would replace him?”

“He does have a son but the son apparently disgraced himself a few years ago when he was caught sneaking into the Japanese Disneyland and with a forged passport.” Sounds like a man of good judgment to me.

“The BBC also said there was a huge military parade today.” Oh, you mean the one right beneath our hotel window? The one that consisted of about 200 olive-drab-painted trucks? Apparently the trucks were going to be used to carry participants to the mass games tonight — not a parade.

On our way to the mass games, the highlight of our trip, we got stuck in traffic. Traffic? You go without seeing a car for hours at a time and now suddenly there’s traffic and we are going to miss the mass games? “Are we close enough to walk?” someone asked our guide.

“It’s not a traffic jam,” our guide replied. “It’s a military parade.” Oh. Not just the personnel carriers that went past our hotel this morning? And the BBC was right?

“The mass games are like a cross between the Radio City Rockettes, the American Ballet Theater, the Super Bowl, a Busby Berkley movie, a circus, a flower show and a Maoist production of ‘The East is Red‘.” That pretty much sums it up. Wow.

Last night at the hotel, something happened that I am still trying to sort out the meaning of. The BBC had announced that the DPRK’s president didn’t appear at the September 9 celebration, hasn’t been seen since last August and might be seriously ill or even dead. And apparently someone in our tour group told a North Korean that she had met in our hotel lobby about this, and the North Korean was totally horrified. Apparently North Koreans love their current president very much and this statement that he might be in poor health shocked this person to the core.

“It’s like some stranger coming up to you and informing you out of the blue that your father was seriously ill — your father, who you dearly love.” It was really unsettling to the North Korean back at the hotel. I felt really bad for her. North Koreans feel very strongly about their current president.

Now that I think about it, I feel very strongly about the man who is currently occupying America’s White House. And if someone had just told me that George Bush was seriously ill, I too would have been devastated — that now he might not be able to serve time in jail.

After touring the monuments and experiencing an intense hour or two of people-watching, we all went to the airport to fly back to Shenyang. There were lots of tears at the departure gates. We all loved our guides.

So. I spent five days in the DPRK and what have I learned? Not much. One would have to be Superman and have X-ray vision to know everything about the DPRK after just five days. It is a very complicated country. But I do know that I will miss the friends that I made there very much.

Okay. No more getting maudlin. Time to focus on Shenyang. “Want to go for another massage?” asked a member of our group. Me? Turn down a cheap two-hour massage? Like that’s ever going to happen. But for the most part, the big neon-lit word that is flashing across my brain right now is “Internet Café!” I’ll have five whole days of e-mails to sort through — over 200 a day.
Back at the hotel in the DPRK, I talked with a guy who knew more about North Korea than I did — which isn’t very hard to do even after I just spent five whole days in that country.

“40% of the citizens of the DPRK are malnourished,” he said, “and the reason for that is that they are unskilled agriculturally.” Still and all, 40% malnourishment is way up from 40% death by starvation — assuming that the rumors of 15 million having starved to death in the 1990s are true. The official DPRK government figure is three million deaths, so it would probably be at least double that. But in any case, that’s a whole lot of dead people.

Last night at the banquet, I got an earful of hot gossip. “One of our tour group had a secret camera and was caught taking pictures of soldiers.” someone said. We had been asked to refrain from taking photos from the bus when we had first arrived in the DPRK, and to not take any photos of soldiers.

“This guy was seen holding this tiny camera down low and when they checked his memory card, he had about 50 photos taken from the bus and 15 of them were of soldiers and bridges. I think that he was a CIA plant,” said one group member.

The guy was stupid to do that — or impolite at the best. He deliberately broke a clearly-spelled-out rule. What had he been thinking? He could have gone to jail as a spy. But was he actually CIA? We may never know.

“I don’t think that he was,” said another group member. “I think he was just an over-enthusiastic tourist. Plus if he actually HAD been CIA, he would never have been caught.” The DPRK authorities simply gave him a lecture and asked him to delete his memory card.

And speaking of censorship, another group member announced that Sarah Palin had just published a list of 95 books she wanted banned in the United States — and two of them were by an author in our group! That’s hot gossip. But when I checked it out on the internet later, it said that, “Palin did indeed ask the librarian of her town if she would be willing to ban books and when the librarian said no, Palin worked to get her fired. But no specific list of books was mentioned.” I want to get MY books banned by Sarah Palin. Maybe that would kick-start my sales.

We also talked about the health of the president of the DPRK. “Yahoo News says he had a ‘circulatory problem’ in his brain and was operated on.” A stroke. How in the world do they find out stuff like that?

“Every time there’s a holiday in the DPRK,” someone else said, “American media trots out the same old story that the president is dying, ill or already dead.” Speculating on DPRK politics is endlessly fun. Speculating on ANYTHING in the DPRK is endlessly fun.

By: Bill the Butcher

It was Deepwinter.

The land was locked in snow; it lay like a blanket, clothing the trees and filling up the ravines, turning everything into a featureless mass of white. There was nothing, no place, that was free of the snow. It was easy to imagine, in the depth of Deepwinter, that the snow had lain like that for eternity and that it was only a fantasy that there had ever been a time without it. It was even easier to imagine that the snow would never melt again.

The snow ruled over everything. It ruled the lives of the Tribe, too, as surely as it did those of the animals of the forest who slept away Deepwinter if they could or hunted despairingly for food if they could not. It was Deepwinter that was the time of renewal, when the Tribe marked the passage of time and the end of phases in its existence. Even more than Highsummer, Deepwinter was the most important part of the life of the tribe.

It was Deepwinter.

In the caves where the Tribe had shut itself in, the People huddled around the fires and stoked the flames with some of the increasingly scarce fuel; the walls ran with the condensation of their breath and the air was fuggy with their exhalation and the smell of their bodies and their clothing. But they noticed none of these things, because they were used to them and because old Kutti was talking. When she talked, everyone listened.

“So it was in those days,” she was saying, “the old, who could no longer work their share, used to take their leave of the Tribe and walk away into the snows of Deepwinter. They would do this as a gesture of kindness to the Tribe, because they had generosity in those days. Yes, they had moral fibre.” She paused to sigh, and nobody dared suggest that she, being old and no longer able to work, should do what she praised and take herself off into the snowbound wilderness.

“And it is in the deepest of Deepwinter,” she continued, “on the night when the cold is at its most intense and the snows at their thickest, that the Cannibal Spirit walks the land. Just on that one night of all the cycle of the seasons she walks, and any human creature that is abroad on that night is lost beyond redemption, never to be seen again.” She paused again, and put a piece of boar fat into her toothless mouth.

“Bekur had been a young man once,” she resumed, “and he had been a great hero. Oh, he had been young, and strong, and in the Highsummer of his life he had fought and hunted; he had made maidens sigh for him and bedded them and fathered many children for the Tribe, and he had brought on himself all manner of glory. Oh, he had been someone for the Tribe to be proud of, had Bekur.

“But time passed and the seasons went by, and Bekur grew older and his strength began to ebb; he took to sitting by the fire while the young men, among whom were his children’s children, went a-hunting or to war. And little by little his eyes began to dim and his teeth to wear away; his hearing worsened and his hands, which had once been so clever at making things when he had had no other work to do, began to lose their cunning.

“And Bekur decided, although he was held in such high esteem in the Tribe that none would have ever suggested it, that he would leave the People and go out on his own into the snows of Deepwinter, while he still had enough of his senses and strength left to leave this life on his own terms, dying as he had lived, according to his own desires.

“So, one night, when the snows had the world in their grip and the People slept in their caves, Bekur rose from his place by the fire, and picked up the great old bronze knife that had been his companion through a lifetime of hunting and combat, and he tucked it into his belt. He pulled on his fur-lined jacket and hat, and his heavy old boots and then – pausing only to pick up a bag of smoked meat from the cave’s larder – he passed like a ghost between the rows of sleepers and out of the cave’s entrance. There was a sentry, but he, too, slept at his post; and no one saw him go.

“It was Deepwinter; and the snow had fallen all the day. Before dawn, it would fall again.

****************************************************

Bekur paused outside the cave to get his bearings. It had been a while since he had been outside, and the blanket of snow changed every part of the familiar topography, sculpted a new world for him to explore.

High above his head, the sky was cloudless for the moment, except for long wisps of cirrus, and brilliant moonlight rained down on the world. The moon glittered on the snow, so that the land was brighter than the sky; it gleamed on the ice that covered the stream down in the valley, and, when he breathed out, it turned his breath into a gleaming cloud of tiny ice crystals.

It was quite amazingly cold.

It was the cold that got him going, because he could no longer bear the bite of it settling through his thick clothing down into his bones. The cold was like a living thing that twined about him, embraced him, and tried to draw him into itself. He felt its teeth inside his lungs with every breath he took, gnawing him from the inside. He felt its hands run over his body, testing him, prodding and pinching. The cold promised death. The cold was death. It whispered to him, and told him that it would claim him before the morning. It would have driven him back into the shelter of the cave if he had waited another instant, so he took one last look around and plunged down the slope towards the stream.

Down where the frozen strip of water lay, the snows that had slid down the sides of the valley all Deepwinter had hardened and packed themselves so that it was like walking on a hard floor. His boots sank above the ankles in the previous day’s fall of soft powdery snow. When he turned for one last look back at the cave, he could see his footmarks imprinted deeply enough to show up in the moonlight.

Bekur had not left the cave without a specific destination in mind. He did not plan to wander in the snow until exhaustion and exposure claimed him. He knew of a place, far down the river where the cliffs arose on either side, where he could stay alone, and hunt for himself, and live as long as he could, without being a burden to anyone. It was a long walk, and he had not gone that way in many a long year, but it was the place he had decided on, before he had ever left the cave.

He started walking along the side of the frozen river. The wind had begun to rise, whipping along the ground, raising a fine flurry of snow as it blew. And if he had thought the cold intense before, it was as nothing to what it was like now; it sliced through his body like a million knives. The wind rose and rose; when he looked up, he saw that the sky was now full of shredded clouds, and the stars appeared and disappeared as though the wind was ripping them out of the sky.

It was clearly impossible to remain on the riverside, so, reluctantly, because it was much harder going and would take up so much more time, he left the river and went up the side of the valley into the shelter of the trees. He didn’t go far into them, because it was dark there and because the snow was deep-piled and treacherously slippery. He just moved far enough that the wind could not get at him with quite the same force. On his right the moon still shone on the frozen river, and the banks were white in the moonlight. It was all so white and so beautiful that he paused again, and came to the edge of the trees, for a good look, a thing of beauty to take with him to eternity should he not survive the night. Because the wind stung his eyes if he looked down the river, he chose to look back.

There were footprints on the snow.

He saw them at first without really noticing; the wind had blurred the prints and brushed them mostly away. He looked at them and looked away at the moonlit slopes across the river, then when he looked back the wind dropped a little and he saw them. Then he thought that they were his own prints, but he had moved off the bank long enough to have moved far too long a distance to be able to see his own footprints now. Then he saw something else and the sight made him feel a different kind of cold lay icy hands on his spine: the prints were still being formed. Even as he watched, they were still being formed, but there were no feet forming them. When he looked beyond them he could see the broad stretch of the frozen river, and the forested sides of the valley, and in the distance, he could just see the slopes where the caves of the Tribe were.

Not for no reason had Bekur, in his youth, won renown as someone with the bravery of a wild boar. As steadily as his old legs could bear him, he stepped out on to the river bank and walked towards the advancing prints. As he did, the wind stopped suddenly. As though a door had been closed somewhere, it completely fell away.

Whatever it was that was making the footprints stopped.

He actually saw the small puff of snow thrown up by the last step. It hung on the air in a little cloud, and then fell slowly back on to the bank. An instant later, something invisible rushed past him, through him, and over him, cold as the wind that had stopped, and much, much stranger. He felt it in every particle of his body, although just for an instant; and instinctively, turned after it, but there was nothing there to see.

Then he went to the nearest print and stood looking down at it. For the moment he decided to ignore what he could not understand and try to understand what he could.

It was a woman’s foot, he saw at once, and it was bare. Only a woman’s foot was so small, so elegant, and so delicately arched. But, he wondered, what woman would be out barefoot in Deepwinter, when the snow lay on the ground like this?

Then he bent for a closer look, and, for the briefest moment, fear shivered through his soul.

There were claws at the ends of the toes. He could see the marks clearly, now that he had bent low enough to put his old eyes almost to the snow. The clouds overhead had cleared, and the moon shone down with its milky light, and the shadows it threw showed clearly in the snow. The prints left by the invisible feet of a woman had the marks of claws like those of a beast of prey.

Then he remembered that he had nothing, really, to fear; for him, life was over in any case, and death today or tomorrow made a difference only to him. With that, fear departed, and a different, nameless emotion took hold; not fear, not hate, nor courage, just something he had never felt before and so had no name for. He straightened slowly, and, slinging his bag of food over his shoulder, he gripped his bronze knife with the other hand and began walking along the river, in the direction the footprints had been taking.

Although the wind had died, it was growing even colder; a great frost had gripped the land, and even as he walked he could feel the freezing snow crunch under his old boots. But in a way he had ceased to feel the cold. It had no meaning for him any longer, just as his decision to leave the Tribe no longer had any meaning. All that he thought of was to find out what it was that had made those footprints with the claws.

Bekur was not ignorant. Although a hero, a man of action, who had fought and hunted and rutted all his life with apparently no thought for anything else, he knew enough of the traditions and legends of the Tribe to know of what might be waiting for him at the end of the trail. If he had been anyone else, or if he had been younger with a life still worth the living, he would have turned back and hidden in the woods and hoped the night would warm up and pass, howsoever it could, without incident. But he was Bekur, and he was at the end of his life, and so he went on.

As he walked, the land began to rise on both sides, more and more, so that the valley became more like a gorge. He knew these places; he had hunted and loved here, but that was in Midspring and Highsummer. He had never been here on a Deepwinter night before, when no Tribesperson ever, without the strongest reasons, ventured out of the caves. Just here, the river made a wide turn to the north, to his left. The slope on the left almost touched the river, so that he could not see past the bend. He knew that just past the bend the land flattened out again, into a valley, but the snow and the Deepwinter night had so changed everything that it seemed as if the landscape he knew had changed forever.

Then he rounded the bend and stopped, looking up, his mouth open in a soundless scream.

She was huge. She was much taller than he could ever have imagined, towering over him, staring down at him from eyes of total blackness, the blackness of the night sky between the stars. She was pure beauty, and from her head to her feet she was the colour of ice, and all she wore was the cloak of her ice-coloured hair.

“You have been seeking me,” she said. He heard the words within his mind, and it was as though her voice was the voice of the ice, too. If cold had a voice, if snow and ice could speak, that is what she would have sounded like. And the voice filled him, echoed through his being, and it was the voice that filled eternity, a voice that came from the depths of the Hell of ice and the pitiless sky above. It was the voice of Deepwinter.

He tried to say something, whether to agree with her or disagree he did not know. He could say nothing, think nothing. He was nothing.

“You are nothing,” she agreed. “You have never been anything. And yet – in you lies the capacity for greatness. Come to me.”

“What?” he could speak again, but all he could utter was the foolish bleat.

“Do you know me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I know you, mistress, Cannibal Spirit. I know you.”

“Then you know that I can complete you, make you whole,” she said. Her black eyes bored through him. “I have done so to many – more than you can count. Come to me.”

He took one step toward her, and then another. She stood waiting, a hand raised for him, and her breasts shone in the moonlight. “Come,” she said.

He looked up at her eyes. Her eyes were black and deep and full of the utter peace that knows no happiness and no sorrow. “Come,” she said, and her voice rustled through him.

Now he was no longer old and frozen and very, very afraid. Now he was the Bekur of old, young and strong, and afraid of nothing and no one, and she was comely and lovely and full of promise of happiness. No longer aged and wrinkled, his hand came up to meet hers. Their fingers reached out to touch.

And then – then, at that moment before their fingers touched – he remembered the footprints he had seen, the prints her bare feet had left in the snow, and he remembered the claws.

It was as though someone had restored sight to him. He saw again then, with the dim and blurred eyes of age but more clearly than the eyes of youth. He saw her hand stretched towards his, with the talons at the ends of the fingers; and he saw her ice-coloured lips part, and then he saw her teeth.

“Come,” she whispered, and the teeth glistened in the moonlight.

“No,” he said aloud. He took one step back.

She stood where she was and watched him calmly. “That is not an answer,” she said. “A rat does not say ‘no’ to a god.”

“I came out here to die,” Bekur whispered. The whisper dried to silence in his mouth.

“Death is simple,” came her voice, the voice that rustled through the universe. “I offer much, much more than death. I offer the wine of eternal youth and of immortal being.”

And then Bekur saw the she was no longer alone; even as he looked at her, he seemed to see another landscape within her, of snow and ice. And in that landscape within her, were people: men and women, young and healthy-looking all of them, who came and went and gesticulated to him and smiled warmly, and wished to make him welcome.

It was as though she was sucking him into that world; everything seemed to blur and whiten for a moment and then he stood on a white plain of snow, but it was not the same snow that he had stood on. Before him rose a Gate, a dark Gate that at the same time looked welcoming and gentle, for all that it was topped by a death’s head. And those men and women were, suddenly, all around him, with their friendly smiles and welcoming arms. That was not all of it: he knew these people. He knew them all. They were of the Tribe, or of other Tribes of this land, people whom he had met. But they were not old and wizened and toothless: they were young and strong and full of vitality.

“Come to us, and be like us,” they said, and smiled. “Come along with us and be like us.”

“Come, Bekur.” He heard the voice, and it sent his heart racing, so that he was almost afraid to look. But slowly he turned his head. It was Charpoka.

And it was not Charpoka as he had seen her last, bent with the years and almost blind, who had vanished quietly from the cave the previous Deepwinter. It was Charpoka as she had been once, glowing with health and vitality, the same as she had been when she had – so long ago now! Bekur thought, feeling his aged limbs suddenly heavy – taught him about love and how to please a woman. There had been a time when they had both assumed he would take her as mate. But time had passed and he had grown to fame among the Tribes, and far above such a girl as she, for girl she had been, despite her womanly knowledge, and they had grown old apart. And one night she had crept from her place and walked into Deepwinter, and she had never been seen again.

Until now.

“Bekur,” this new young Charpoka said, taking him by the arm. Her naked body was not icy, as he had thought; it was warm and full of life. “Bekur, come to the Gate, and be one of us. Come.”

He looked at her and he allowed her to urge him towards the black portal with the grinning skull atop. The others followed and flanked him, old friends and onetime rivals and those who had once been enemies but in this place could be enemies no longer; he saw even his old parents, restored to a youth in which he had never known them, smiling and laughing and beckoning to him from under the arch of the Gate.

“What lies within the Gate?” he asked.

“All that you ever wanted, Bekur,” Charpoka said, moving her naked body. “All you’ve ever wanted. Youth and health and life everlasting. Me.”

“You? But…” he scarcely knew how to articulate the things that were in his mind at that moment. He looked at her again, then, at her lovely oval face, unmarked by time and experience, and she brought her face to him, raised her lips to his.

“Kiss me,” she said.

It was then he really saw her, as she was – saw the serrated teeth and the black eyes without expression, the flat black eyes of something dragged up from deep under the water, something that belonged to another world.

He realised then that it was not Charpoka, and he tried to pull away from her. He shook himself, clenching his eyes shut from the sight of her eyes and teeth, and an instant later he was standing upon the river bank, before the ice-coloured lady clothed in her ice-coloured hair.

“I may be old and weak and a shadow of what I used to be,” he said, “but still, what I am, is I; not something else, something I cannot recognise.” He began backing away.

In an instant something happened to the face of the ice-coloured woman. The lovely planes and curves of it fell in on themselves, shrank, and transformed. The lips peeled back from her teeth, and her eyes seemed to grow until they filled their sockets; pools of utter blackness. In an instant more, Bekur was looking on a countenance very much like that of a skin-covered skull.

“This is what you have chosen,” the skull-face said.

“I have chosen,” he said, and began walking away. Because she stood between him and his planned destination, he began trudging back through the snow towards the caves of the Tribe. He had expected her to pounce on him, but when he looked back over his shoulder there was nothing there, except a shadow that stood upright and swaying gently in the moonlight. “You can kill me now if you wish,” he said. “I shan’t submit to you.”

For the last time that night, he heard her voice. “They always submit,” she said evenly. “They think they escape, but they never do. They always return, one day.”

The wind began to pick up again as old Bekur made his way back to the cave of the Tribe. It howled like a live thing, shredding the sky and stripping away the stars, and he hid his head between his shoulders as the wind lashed at him, but he made his way back before morning. The sentry still slept; nobody knew he had gone from his place.

And all the way back, he never looked back to see if invisible footsteps were following him.

***************************************************************

“What happened to Bekur?” the listeners asked.

Old Kutti chewed at another piece of fat. “I was very young girl in those days,” she said. “I remember how he used to sit, by the fire, so old that it seemed that he was older than the stars. He used to sit there and warm himself all day long, even in Highsummer; and he used to say the cold had entered his bones and would never go away.” She paused. “And sometimes he used to tell the story, but only to a few of us, and only very reluctantly. He was not proud of it.”

“And what happened to him at last?” asked someone. “Did he die there beside the fire?”

“No,” Kutti said. “He went out again, one Deepwinter night many Deepwinters after the first time he had gone out to die, and nobody ever saw him again.”

*********************************************************

Bekur stumbled in the snow.

He could hardly walk anymore now, at least in snow like this. The cold had become one with him. He was the ice and cold; he no longer even felt it. The sky was black, and the snow that had fallen earlier had already begun to freeze over, and he no longer had even the eyesight to pick his way; so he stumbled and blundered through the night, with no longer a thought of finding his haven by the cliffs, seeking only oblivion – or something else.

He became aware of her by degrees. At first he felt the silence, as the wind died and the night stilled. Then he saw the footprints, but they preceded him now, and then at last he knew she stood before him and he raised his eyes.

“You know who I am,” she said, and her smile seemed kindly.

“I know, lady.”

“You thought again of what you wanted.”

“It’s not the same world,” he said. “The men and women of my youth are gone, and the young make fun of what we held sacred. It is not the same.”

“So you came out again, before it is too late.”

He bent his head to acknowledge the words. There was truth in them.

“Come to me,” she said, and he came.

By: Mike

“Come Casper, please try to keep up with us” Melchior looked over to Balthasar and raised his eyes up to the heavens. “Let him be” Balthasar looked back over his shoulder and quietly said to Melchior “The signs are telling us that the time is close and that we near the place. If we camp here tonight, I have a feeling that we should be there by late tomorrow”. Melchior looked up into the evening sky and saw the star that they had been following for many months since it had first appeared in the heavens. “You could be right my friend – soon it will be so”.

Melchior was the eldest and senior of the three and the most experienced in the secret art of astrology. It was he who had first identified the mystical star that shone bright in the westerly sky and had convinced his fellow princes to partake of the journey.

Ancient stories had foretold of such a phenomenon and forecast the star’s appearance to announce that a new King of the Jews would be born under its bright light. Balthasar, who had been a student under Melchior for several years, answered the call without hesitation whilst Casper, the younger of the three by many years, reluctantly decided to join them. He was much too fond of the good life back home in the college at Saveh in the capital city of his beautiful homeland, Persia. He was in fact tired of the camel ride and homesick for his comforts……..

They erected their tent and lit a fire as the temperature dropped signalling a chilly night. “Keep yourself well wrapped up Casper” Balthasar called to his younger friend “I do not want your father and mother to claim that we did not look after you”. “Why on earth did we not bring some of our many servants with us” Casper called back “It would have made the journey all the more comfortable”.

Melchior slept badly so during the night he left the tent and went outside. In the distance he saw the bright lights of a city and from his reckoning and the parchment map he carried, he decided that it must be Jerusalem. However, he did not awaken the others to tell them the news.

Dawn broke late, it being just past the winter solstice, and he lit a fire. It was while they were having a light breakfast that he told the others about Jerusalem. Casper was delighted as it meant that he could soon sleep in a proper bed for the first time in many months. An hour later they recommenced their journey.

After several hours they rode their camels up to the gates of what was indeed a great city. When the Roman Captain of the guard heard that three ‘royal visitors‘ were about to enter the city, he called out the guard and greeted them according to their rank. News of their arrival had preceded them and they were expected. King Herod, the provincial governor, who ruled the city and surrounding lands for the Romans was delighted that he was about to be visited by such guests and instructed that they be given the best residence available and when rested they be brought straight to his palace.

An hour later, they were escorted into Herod’s private quarters. After pleasantries had been exchanged, Herod asked “And what is the nature of your travels. I have heard of your adventure and was curious to hear the reasons from your own lips”. Melchior replied with some element of surprise in his voice. “But sire, we came to partake of the celebrations”. Herod was puzzled “Celebrations?” he asked. “Yes” spoke Casper “we came to pay our respects to the one who is to be born King of the Jews”. “I know of no such event” Herod genuinely told them, “I am afraid that your journey has been in vain”. Casper showed signs of total disappointment at the thought of resuming the journey but Melchior and Balthasar merely looked at each other and said not a word.

“As you say sire” Melchior spoke softly “but with your permission we will continue to search for a little longer”. “By all means” Herod appeared puzzled “and if you find him, please send me a message that I too may pay my humble respects”. With that the three Magi left Herod, returned to their temporary residence, packed their belongings and left the city. Casper had a look of doom on his face……….

As soon as Herod had confirmation from his Captain of the guard that they had left the city, he sent an urgent message to the Jewish Chief Priest to attend promptly. When he arrived Herod came straight to the point. “Tell me what you know about a King of the Jews that has or is about to be born”. “I know of no such event having taken place sire” the Priest said. Herod then related what the three Magi had told him.

The Chief Priest hesitated then began slowly as if searching his mind for the correct text. “It is written sire, that such a one would be born of the Jews”. He again hesitated as if searching for the exact words of the ancient ones: he continued “Out of Judah will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people – Israel”. Herod brought his fist hard down on the table beside him and called his Captain of the guard.

“The three princes who just left, in which direction did they go?” he asked. “To the west sire” his subordinate answered. “I want you to take your fastest horse and give chase. When you find them, tell them that the place they are looking for is in the land of Judah. Tell them I will follow shortly to give praise. Have them followed to see where exactly they go and with whom they meet”. With that the Captain left.

Upon realising that they were indeed being followed and fearing what Herod might do, the three Magi changed direction and made their way by a circular route to where they were directed by the star. As evening and the darkness arrived, the star that they had been following shone brighter than any night previously. They followed and it led them to some caves on the outskirts of the village known as Bethlehem.

Melchior was the first to speak. “My friends” he said to his companions “the time is right and we are close to the one we seek. I do not understand why a King would be born in such surroundings but be that as it may, He is nearby”. They went from cave to cave which were used as shelter for animals. On looking into the final cave, they were greeted by a bright light – a light far brighter than the torch therein could possibly have provided. As they entered they saw a young woman lying on the straw close to a donkey and some chickens. A tall bearded man stood nearby whilst close-by in a basket used for feed for the animals, wrapped in white cloth, lay a child.

All three stood in silence as they looked-on in awe……..

It was Casper oddly enough who was first to make a movement. He moved over to the manger wherein lay the baby, knelt down in the straw and spoke softly. “My Lord and my God” was all he said as he was joined by his two friends. All three knelt in silence and the baby’s parents watched as the three men dressed in such finery looked down at their newborn son.

Again it was Casper who made the first move. He returned to their camels and brought forward a small trunk. He took it back into the cave and handed his friends each a small packet. He placed his own small purse beside the child. “Gold my Lord” he said “so that you may never need for anything”. Melchior produced a container of Frankincense and added “So that you may always smell like a King, my Lord”. Balthasar placed a small container of Myrrh. He quietly whispered as if to prevent the child’s parents from hearing him, “For your anointment sire, when your death comes as the stars have further foretold”.

As they continued to look at the child for quite a time, others began to arrive at the cave entrance. There were shepherds from nearby hills and fields, workers from the nearby houses and children who had been awoken by their parents to come and see the three princes in their fine robes. All stood at the entrance craning their necks to see what was happening.

“Balthasar and Casper” Melchior spoke softly “It is time to leave, our duty is done and that which the great star foretold has come to pass”. The others nodded in agreement and all three quietly left the cave.

As they began to ride their camels back in the direction of Jerusalem, they were suddenly confronted by a man dressed all in white carrying a bright torch. “Good sires” the person spoke with authority “do not return to Herod but take a different route back to your own country. For if you tell him of what you saw, he will do his utmost to kill the child and every other child of a similar age throughout the land. Do not speak of what you saw this night. Now go in peace”…………….

The three Magi were indeed wise men – they did as they were asked by the stranger and although Herod was furious when he discovered what they had done, the baby known as Jesus survived by escaping with his parents to a distant safe land……….

By: Amnesia Grok

I’m sitting here on a Saturday afternoon & I’m reading about the end.

As in THE END.

As in predictions of the final curtain, visions of destruction. Trumpets & seals & cups & oodles of 7’s. Th-th-the-that’s all f-f-folks!

The earth, it will end in fire & in water & it will end in asteroids & in Mexicans.

Generation after generation, all riled up about an end that never knocked. Layer upon layer of dusty eschatologies, disproven by default.

Paul was all riled up & his eyes were struck blind & his hair was on fire.

& he said if you weren’t already married then don’t even bother getting married now!

There’s no time!

Tell everyone before it’s too late!

There was a real sense of urgency about it.

How many bad dates have to come & go before there’s just a collective yawn?

What if things just go on & on & on &…

Way past the point where there is any point to be had?

& everything gets older & worse & the sky less blue & the grass isn’t hardly green at all no more? & the Lincoln Memorial cracks & the paint on the barn fades & no one bothers to write new songs or to clean the animals’ cages?

On & on, without even the vague hope of a fiery end or some new Hitler to capture our attention for a minute or two?

That guy out there howling in the street? You know, the one with the sandwich board that reads //The End is Near\\?

He could turn out to have been an optimist!