A Joy Ride With Ralph Nader
The Mercedes Gelaendewagen is the fastest, most expensive and all-around most blazingest sport utility vehicle in the world, and when your faithful correspondent was recently offered the chance to drive one, he jumped at it. This is because your correspondent is most definitely not in league with the self-flagellating, I'm-perfectly-happy-with-my-Corolla-lying, NPR-pledge-week-donating S.U.V.-bashers who have made life unbearable, or at least mildly annoying, for the millions of red-blooded men who cruise the Main Streets of America in S.U.V.'s designed to ford wide rivers and haul sheep and goats.
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Microbes on the Move
In late November 1995, while on a reporting trip to the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, I was bit repeatedly by mosquitoes. This is not uncommon, and I paid it no mind--I was already suffering from what I believed to have been shigella, a nasty gastrointestinal parasite, and I was feeling miserable anyway.
It wasn't until early December, while hiking in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda, that I began to suffer from a prostrating fever and severe shakes. A short while later, atop a mountain, I fell unconscious. This was an unfortunate place to fall unconscious, for two reasons. One, while unconscious, I was attacked by fire ants. Two, the Ugandan parks service owns no medevac helicopters, so once I awoke--the paroxysm of fever having subsided for the moment--I had to crawl down the mountain with the help of a very kind park official, who told me he would lose his job if I died on him.
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You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape
Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City and rents trucks from U-Haul.
The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA, but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's supply of Turtle Wax?"
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Israel's Y2K Problem
Yehuda Etzion, rebel, settler, archterrorist of the Jewish underground, thin like Jesus and hostage to the fever-dream of imminent redemption, parks his car by a rocky switchback on the western slope of the Mount of Olives. He leads me up the incline, to the chalk-colored ground where he comes to pray and to look to the west upon what one day, he believes, will be his. Just below is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed and arrested. Just to the north is Mount Scopus, where the prophet Jeremiah watched the Babylonians burn Jerusalem. Immediately behind us is a house of modern prophecy, home to American evangelical Christians who have come on one-way tickets to the Promised Land. They are here to watch the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ, and they are here to encourage the Jews to rebuild their Temple, the Throne of David on which the Christ will sit.
On the other side of the ridge, the eastern slope of the mountain drops off into the Judean desert, the caldron of prophecy and hallucination. Even here, on the western slope, the sun beats down on us like a spotlight. We look out before us, to the walled Old City and, at its heart, the 35-acre man-made platform--the Temple Mount to Jews; the Haram al-Sharif, or noble sanctuary, to Muslims--that is the single-most-explosive piece of real estate on the planet. And we look at the building that dominates the platform--the 1,300-year-old Dome of the Rock.
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Prisoners
