A Lie Repeated : What's really going on in Tibet

I don't often agree with leftists, but in this instance, I'll make an exception:

As a lifelong activist who has worked on human rights issues around the globe, I hold the view that the best representatives of a culture are its people; that people create their own history, and in the case of the colonized or the oppressed that history is often rewritten by the oppressor. I do not assume that simply because a country is communist or socialist or capitalist that its practices toward its own people or its foreign policies are more or less honorable; beyond all the rhetoric, the reality of a situation can always be measured by the affected people themselves.

"A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth."
-Chairman Mao



The Tibet issue is one that the left has found to be somewhat of a conundrum, for the simple reason that most other popular human rights struggles can be easily linked to a larger struggle against U.S. or European imperialism. Therefore these struggles - be it in Palestine, or East Timor, or Colombia, fit nicely into the larger - and often rather myopic - worldview of the leftist.

However, Tibet is a case in which the struggle for basic rights and nationhood is being carried out against a communist government, so it has brought with it a host of questions for the leftist, who naturally leans towards socialism or communism as an ideological example of a system that stands in contrast to the 'imperialist west'.

China, the country that invaded Tibet in 1950, has stood as one such example- though the Chinese government's practices over the last 53 years and its current bent towards totalitarian capitalism would tend to defy any labeling as a positive example. Nonetheless, China's history of socialism and revolution remains as something of an inspiration for the Western left, and therefore certain historians- predominantly scholars with some form of Marxist or Maoist agenda- have seen the current popularity of the movement for Tibetan statehood and have taken it upon themselves to give a glimpse into the grim reality of 'old Tibet.'

The most recent historian to embrace this view of 'old Tibet' is Dr. Michael Parenti, a Yale scholar who, in the course of his career, has written on a variety of populist causes. To be fair, Parenti stops short -barely- of condoning the Chinese occupation. He does however, cast a decidedly unflattering view of life in pre-1950 Tibet.

In his writing on Tibet, Parenti shares something in common with all of his predecessors -Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart
Gelder among them- in that his writing on Tibet is essentially argumentative. He is not writing in order to give an unbiased history of a nation, he is writing in order to prove a point. In this case, the point he is trying to prove is that the society of 'old Tibet' was a terrible place, and that the resistance movement that is so visible today is essentially a movement to re-establish this despicable regime.

In Parenti's words, old Tibet was "a social order that was little more than a despotic retrograde theocracy of serfdom and poverty, so damaging to the human spirit, where vast wealth was accumulated by a favored few who lived high and mighty off the blood, sweat, and tears of the many. For most of the Tibetan aristocrats in exile, that is the world to which they fervently desire to return. It is a long way from Shangri-La."

I have chosen to dissect this thesis because it houses many of the common arguments presented by Chinese government propagandists on Tibet, as well as many of the arguments that modern day Marxists and Maoists regularly hurl at Tibet activists on internet chat rooms and at protests. As we will see, the flawed premise of this thesis illuminates how the far left has gone woefully off the mark in its efforts to undermine the legitimate struggle for Tibetan rights and statehood.

Again, I am a firm believer in people's history. And the core problem with Parenti's position is that it is simply at odds with the statements, testimony, and shared history of the Tibetan people themselves - the people Parenti is supposedly defending. The view of Tibet that Parenti ascribes to has been commonly put forward by Chinese government officials - particularly the ones in the ministry of propaganda. Once upon a time it was a view embraced by a handful of British historians - most of them turn of the century explorers and colonists in their own right. But it has always been an outsider's view, completely divorced from the reality of how Tibetans of all walks of life view their own society and their own history.

In his descriptions of old Tibet, Parenti predominantly draws on the work of four historians - Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart Gelder. The fact that all of these historians had a romantic predilection towards Maoism and drew mostly on Chinese government statistics should surely be cause for concern as far as their legitimacy as source material. One certainly wouldn't trust the Indonesian government's party line on Aceh or East Timor. Or, for that matter, the U.S. government's continued assertion that the Iraqi people welcome the current American occupation. Such manipulations of public sentiment, in which an occupation is presented as 'the will of the people,' are – as a rule – only employed to further the agenda of the occupier.

For the most part, Parenti and the handful of historians who have adopted the view of old Tibet as a despotic feudal theocracy have had little if no contact with actual Tibetans either in or outside Tibet. Therefore, they have no real way of gauging the sentiments of the Tibetan people. Neither Parenti, Strong, Grunfeld, nor the Gelders speak Tibetan - or Chinese for that matter- so the body of historical literature on the Tibet issue that is available to them is extremely limited. Tom Grunfeld never went to Tibet until after his book was published. Anna Louise Strong – a diehard Marxist – was given a tightly monitored Chinese government tour of Lhasa and then went on to proclaim that "a million Tibetan serfs have stood up! They are burying the old serfdom and building a new tomorrow!" One might say that one doesn't need to go to Paris to know the Eiffel tower exists. However, before dismissing an entire culture's history as despotically repressive it is perhaps worth speaking to a few of its representatives.

Instead, Grunfeld repeatedly draws on the writings of a handful of British colonial explorers, who - as explorers often do - wrote down every piece of suspicious folklore and hearsay as fact. Grunfeld's source material for his depictions of Tibetans as cannibals, barbarians, and superstitious fanatics is no more credible than are the testimonials of early European explorers to Africa who spun yarns of three-headed natives. None of these depictions are corroborated by traditional Tibetan, Chinese, or Indian histories, which of course were not available to Grunfeld because of his lack of interest in learning the local language.

Grunfeld also makes extensive use of the writings of Sir Charles Bell, who he quotes regularly and with no apparent regard for context. Bell's stance was actually that Tibetans had been brutalized by the Chinese army and that Tibet was an independent nation of far greater 'character' than its neighbor. This seems to elude Grunfeld, who chops up Bell's sentences in order to isolate the worst and most sensational aspects of Tibetan society and present them as fact. Grunfeld also makes cultural blunders that would make freshmen history students squirm. As award-winning author Jamyang Norbu points out in his brilliant essay The Acme of Obscenity, Grunfeld even mistranslates the Tibetan word for 'Tibet'!

Parenti does little better in his treatment of history, erroneously stating that the first Dalai Lama was installed by 'the Chinese army'. One would presume that a Yale Ph.D. would know the difference between Chinese and Mongols. But apparently, in the Parenti-Grunfeld-Strong school of history, one word is as good as another and a Chinese is as good as a Mongol, as long as the point gets across.

With such evisceration of history as common practice it quickly becomes obvious that none these historians' writings on Tibet exist to illuminate true Tibetan history. In fact, neither Grunfeld, nor Strong, nor Parenti seem remotely interested in the specifics of the culture they're discussing.

For example, as Tashi Rapgey points out in her dissection of Tom Grunfeld's 'Making of Modern Tibet', the three social classes that Grunfeld and Strong lump Tibetans into - landowners, serfs, and slaves - have no relation to the actual breakdown of Tibetan society. It is a completely arbitrary classification that has no basis in reality-Tibetan society was never classified along these terms. Certainly a historian writing on the caste system in India would not reclassify Indian society according to their own liking or invent names to suit their own vision?

There were indeed indentured farmers in old Tibet. There were also merchants, nomads, traders, non-indentured farmers, hunters, herders, warlords, bandits, monks, nuns, musicians, theater actors and artists. Tibetan society was a vast, multi-faceted affair, as societies tend to be. To reduce it to three base experiences – and non-representative experiences at that – is to engage in the worst form of reductionism.

Not only are Strong and Grunfeld's breakdowns of Tibetan society grossly
miscategorized, their observations and criticisms are entirely removed from chronological and temporal reality. Folklore from hundreds of years ago, local myths, explorer's whimsy, and selective historical incidents are presented all together as static truth. Every single bad thing, every monstrosity real or imagined that occurred in Tibet between 1447 and October 6, 1950 is 'how it was' in 'old Tibet.' Fundamentally, this is not history. It is the crudest form of argumentative politics, drawing on selective quotes from non-native history - quite often the history of the occupiers themselves - and presenting it as fact.

In fact the entire notion of 'old Tibet' or Tibet under the Dalai Lamas as a static is erroneous. Life under the 13th Dalai Lama was drastically different that life under the 6th or the 5th. By the time the 13th Dalai Lama came along, for example, the Tibetan government had banned the death penalty – it was one of the first countries in the world to do so. But somehow, in the mind of Grunfeld and Parenti and Strong, Tibetans are to be held accountable for the actions of their distant predecessors.

That there was an imbalance of wealth in Tibet is quite true (There still is, only now the Chinese are the wealthy ones). Tibetans waged war, robbed each other, had strict laws and engaged in corporal punishment like all societies have done at various points in their history. But what is insidious about highlighting solely these aspects of Tibetan society is that these historians -Strong and Grunfeld particularly; Parenti is somewhat excused from this particular outrage-seem to be using 'how it was' in 'old Tibet' as a justification for invasion and occupation, just as the United States used the 'savagery' of the native populations as an excuse for their liquidation. This is the politics of the colonist to the core, in which the native is dehumanized and debased in order to make occupation more palatable, even necessary, or 'civilizing.' Strong does not even conceal her glee at the 'smashing' of old Tibet. Politics aside, its rather frightening to think of celebrating the demise of a culture that one hasn't had any direct contact with, whose existence one has only read about in books.

The romanticism that historians like Strong and Grunfeld hold for the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet and the smashing of the old ways is based on an inherently flawed presumption that the invasion was some kind of people's revolution. The Chinese government line, which Strong and Grunfeld and even Parenti seem to have bought into -is that the Tibetan people, and particularly the Tibetan peasantry, welcomed the occupation and in fact that it was they themselves who 'overthrew the landlords.' Such a supposition has no basis in fact.

The Chinese army rolled into Chamdo in Eastern Tibet in October of 1950 and decimated the 8,000-man Tibetan fighting force that was assembled to resist them. That there were Tibetans who initially greeted the arrival of the Chinese is without question; that these Tibetans were the vast minority is also without question. Legitimate histories of Tibet, such as Tsering Shakya's 'Dragon in the Land of Snows' corroborate this fact.

Whatever romantic picture the Chinese government's propaganda department paints of enslaved peasants casting off the bonds of feudalism, there is little in the way of factual evidence to support this. Most of the evidence produced by Beijing comes in the form of testimonials recorded by party cadres, whose questionable nature as a source of objective information should not even have to be mentioned, especially coming from a government that excels in 'extracting testimonials.' These testimonials are written in such propaganda-speak that it is nearly impossible to read them with a straight face; even more impossible to imagine anyone actually uttering the words.

Oddly enough, in contrast to the Chinese government line that it was the Tibetan peasantry who readily embraced communism, communism was in fact much more popular - as it is in this country - among the educated elite. The Tibetan communist party was a creation of sons of wealthy aristocrats; the Tibetan peasantry on the other hand were the ones who eventually formed the brunt of resistance to Chinese government rule.

Whatever the case, Tibetan opinion towards Beijing quickly cooled after the signing of the 17-point agreement in 1951, and certainly was not favorable by 1959, when a popular Tibetan uprising threatened China's very grip on the nation. This resistance was for the most part carried out by Khampa tribesmen in Eastern Tibet, who had suffered some of the most brutal treatment at the hands of the Chinese government. That these fighters were for a time funded by the CIA does not – as Parenti seems to presume – represent some kind of trump card that de-legitimizes the aims, aspirations, and existence of the Tibetan resistance movement. The CIA used the Tibetans just as it has it used nationalist movements in dozens of countries around the world; with little thought for the local people and as a means of waging their own cold war. The Tibetan resistance fighters, who came from poor frontier villages in Eastern Tibet, were happy to have anyone on their side. They had no way of knowing the larger political framework that they had been sucked into. Ironically, it was the Dalai Lama who put an end to this resistance, by calling on the fighters to drop their arms and embrace nonviolent means of conflict resolution.

As for the reality of the subsequent Chinese occupation, which every legitimate human rights organization in the world has labeled with terms like 'cultural genocide', it should hardly need further exposition. One of the most telling historical documents of the time is the Panchen Lama's 70,000 word treatise to Chairman Mao on behalf of the Tibetan people. Not only is this document considered by serious historians to be one of the only reliable texts from that time period, it illuminates the extraordinary kow-towing that was necessary in order for even an elevated Chinese official such as the Panchen Lama to speak to Chairman Mao at that time. Apparently, Mao was not interested in listening to the day-to-day problems of the 'serfs' he 'liberated'. The Panchen Lama was sent to prison for suggesting that people in Tibet were starving; the average Tibetan peasant who offered the same criticism to his local Chinese official did not fare nearly as well.

In his article Parenti again quotes Tom Grunfeld - whose idealism of the cultural revolution should automatically remove him from use as an unbiased source of historical data on the Chinese occupation of Tibet - and asserts that 'slavery and unpaid labor disappeared under Mao'. This sentence simply has no place in any legitimate historical writing. Perhaps Parenti would like to sit down and have a chat with the relatives of the thousands of Tibetans who were worked to death by Chinese soldiers at the infamous Borax mine in Changthang. I've met them myself, and they are far more deserving of a platform on Tibetan history and cultural issues than Parenti. Mao's forced sedentarization of Tibetan nomads was certainly not a liberation; nor was the government-enforced switch to growing foreign cereal crops which resulted in widespread famine in many regions of Tibet.

But again, the true testament to the fact that Tibetans have been far from content under Chinese rule lie in the actions of the people themselves. Ever since the Chinese invasion and occupation there has been substantial popular resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet. This resistance has taken many forms over the years - leafleting, public demonstration, mass non-cooperation, economic boycott, and armed uprising are all forms of protest have been practiced by Tibetans inside Tibet, at the risk of their own lives.

The Chinese government has faced phenomenal opposition from the Tibetan people, certainly far more opposition than the Lhasa government ever faced from its own population, which does not do much to further the argument that 'old Tibet' was a terribly repressive society. Nor does the fact that Tibetan refugees continue pour out of Tibet at a rate never seen prior to 1959. In a classic case of uninformed conjecture, Parenti supposes that Tibetan refugees never left prior to 1959 because the 'systems of control' were so deep and that Tibetans were 'afraid of amputation'. Any quick glance at a map of Tibet, with its vast, unpatrolable borders, or any basic knowledge of the structure of Tibetan society would quickly reveal that Tibetans - should they have wanted to escape their 'feudal masters' - would have had little problem doing so.

But perhaps there is no more telling testament to the Tibetan people's sentiment towards their own culture than the fact that in the early 1980's- when the Chinese government finally relaxed some of its draconian policies towards Tibet- the first thing Tibetans set about doing is rebuilding and repopulating monasteries - the very symbols of 'old Tibet.' The next thing they did was take to the streets and protest for freedom and for the Dalai Lama's return. This is not the behavior of a people who are trying to cast off their old ways. It sounds more like a people who are trying to get their culture back.

This brings up again the essential flaw in Parenti's reasoning-it is not based on the experience of Tibetans. The actuality is that there is now and always has been a people's movement of Tibetans- in fact the vast majority of Tibetans both inside and outside Tibet- who overwhelmingly support the Dalai Lama and more specifically are in favor of Tibetan statehood. This movement cannot simply be dismissed as incidental, or foreign-backed, or primarily aristocratic in nature. The argument that the Tibetan resistance is driven by aristocrats is fairly essential for Parenti et al because without it they would be forced to recognize the existence of this movement-and the existence of such a movement would suggest that perhaps the Tibetan people themselves are more enamored of the Dalai Lama than they ever were of Mao.

The Tibetan resistance, both historically and currently, has been made up of Tibetans from across the social spectrum. The Khampa fighters in the late 50s and early 60s were certainly not aristocrats, nor was Thrinley Chodron, a nun who led a bloody resistance battle against Chinese forces in 1969. The Tibetans who took to the streets and were gunned down in the late 80s were not former aristocrats. Nor are the hundreds of Tibetans currently languishing in Drapchi prison for expressing their desire for statehood.

Currently, there are over 150,000 Tibetans living in exile around the world. There are nomads-in-exile, farmers-in-exile, truck drivers-in-exile. To characterize this entire group as aristocrats or former aristocrats is ludicrous. In New York City alone, there are nearly 5,000 Tibetan refugees. I'm quite certain that Ngawang Rabgyal at the Office of Tibet, who is charged with helping this refugee community find jobs in the outer reaches of Queens, would raise an eyebrow at the description of Tibetan refugees as 'aristocrats.'

The notion that the Tibetan community in exile longs to return to a 'Shangri-la' and re-establish their aristocracy is a banal and uninformed argument that has nothing to do with the real and stated aspirations of the Tibetan freedom movement. First of all, Tibetans never called their country Shangri-La; it was an outsider, James Hilton, who first did that. They never saw their country as a paradise and the Tibetan community is certainly not seeking to reestablish the same political system that existed in pre-1959 Tibet (nor would it be possible). The Dalai Lama has all but abdicated his position as future leader of Tibet – despite the fact that 98% of Tibetans both in and outside Tibet would elect him in a heartbeat – saying that he would rather attend to his religious duties than be a political leader. The Tibetan Kashag is now made up of democratically elected officials and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile –- which, whether Parenti cares to acknowledge their existence or not, is a legitimate entity charged with the welfare of 150,000 refugees – has already outlined a democratic structure for the future government of Tibet.

The movement for Tibetan statehood permeates all segments of Tibetan society. Nomads in western Tibet, herders in Changtang, farmers in Amdo, merchants in Lhasa– the vast majority of Tibetans are vocal – as much as they can be – about their nationalist aspirations. Anyone who has spent time around Tibetans inside or outside Tibet knows this as fact. This fact does not have to be footnoted; it is experiential history.

By way of personal testimony, before I ever became involved in the Tibetan political struggle I went to Tibet myself. I was there during a period of martial law and at certain sensitive locations I had to be escorted by Chinese guides, who made a half-hearted attempt to show me the 'feudal torture chambers' of old Tibet and a statue of a liberated serf 'breaking the chains of bondage'; the guides barely seemed to believe it themselves. But even they could not produce Tibetan citizens who would rail against the Dalai Lama or speak of how they had 'cast off the bonds of
feudalism'. I know of no traveler to Tibet who has heard this type of testimony. There are Tibetans in government positions in Lhasa who will give you this line; and there are probably some Tibetans in Tibet who believe it. But again, for the vast majority of Tibetans, this is simply not part of the their experience. Get any Tibetan nomad, farmer, peasant, or monk a few hundred yards away from their local party cadre and the first thing they'll do is ask for a picture of the Dalai Lama; the second thing they'll do is ask you to help them free their country.

And there's the core of the matter: 'old Tibet', the Tibet that existed pre-1959, simply does not represent to the average Tibetan what it does to Michael Parenti, Tom Grunfeld, and Anna Louise Strong. Scholars like Parenti and Grunfeld and Strong, with limited source material and no firsthand experience, see old Tibet as a horrible place; but the bottom line is they're not Tibetan. And if Tibetans themselves don't see their past as a past of feudal lords and merciless repression, then do they really need scholars like Parenti to tell them what their past is all about?

Saying debasing things about a culture is certainly not extraordinarily difficult; seen through the lens that Parenti and Grunfeld apply to Tibet, most if not all societies would come up short, as would many resistance movements. The real story then, is not what these historians have to say, but why they have chosen to say it in the way they say it.

Many Tibetans do welcome commentary and criticism on aspects of their society; I have certainly been privy to many heated arguments on old Tibet and on the future direction of Tibetan politics. But that is because I have taken the time to really get to know Tibetan society. Perhaps what is most striking about the history that Parenti and Grunfeld and Strong present is the tone with which they speak of Tibetan culture, without ever having experienced it. The facts they deliver are clearly not being presented in order to help Tibetan people. They are fairly serious charges, and as objective as the authors pretend to be, these charges are delivered with venom.

Oddly, Parenti - like Grunfeld - seems taken aback at the emotional response that his writing has evoked among Tibetans and their supporters. It would seem fairly obvious to anyone with any common sense that dismissing an entire culture - particularly one in dire peril -and making statements that run completely contrary to everything the vast majority of its people know from firsthand experience would illicit an emotional response. Perhaps these scholars are surprised because they have forgotten that words carry weight, and that their actions actually have tangible results in the real world. In the Tibet movement, the results have been clearly measurable - Tibetan activists, who should be focused on returning basic rights to a people whose lack of freedoms is documented by every major human rights organization in the world, instead find themselves in the position of having to defend the actions of a bygone society. Former torture victims are accosted by nineteen year old American college students who have never been to Tibet, never met a Tibetan, and surely never had anyone in their family tortured with electric cattle prods. This, for a people who are in a very real struggle for rights, is not only extremely upsetting, it serves to forward the agenda of their oppressor.

It is no secret that the Chinese government views propaganda as a key weapon in its efforts to undermine the movement for Tibetan rights and statehood. Chinese state run media - whose use of manufactured and manipulated history is indisputable - regularly debases and assails Tibetan culture and specifically the Dalai Lama, who is dismissed with regularity - and relish. The Tibetan refugee population is treated with equal disdain, the Tibetan government-in-exile, which, again serves the very real function of looking after the welfare of 150,000 refugees and lobbying international institutions for rights and recognition, is dismissed entirely. Luckily for Tibetans, Beijing's Orwellian rants about Tibet - labeling the Dalai Lama a "serpent" and "the chief villain" - have bordered on the hilarious. That is, until recently. Now the war of words has spilled over into more legitimate circles.

Recognizing that Tibetans and the Tibetan struggle are generally well-perceived in the west, and seeking to win the war of perception,
Beijing's propaganda strategy has now grown, with regular meetings on external and internal Tibet-related propaganda. One key element of the new propaganda strategy is to make greater use of Tibet scholars, both Chinese and Western. In 2001 a leaked Chinese Government memo from the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Meeting on Tibet-Related External Propaganda stated "Effective use of Tibetologists and specialists is the core of our external propaganda struggle for public opinion on Tibet..."

With this as the political backdrop, levying ill-researched and unsubstantiated charges at Tibetan culture - in fact the very charges often employed by their Chinese occupiers to delegitimize their entire society - is a dangerous game indeed. It is one thing to offer criticisms of a culture or religion that is not fighting for its very survival. It is quite another to rewrite the history of a people who are already the victims of a propaganda war at the hands of one of the largest propaganda machines in the world.

What surprises me most about the far left's flawed take on Tibet is how quickly a piece of propaganda turns into 'scholarship,' how a piece of hearsay becomes fact if given a footnote. Mao said 'a lie told a hundred times becomes the truth.' Sadly, in the case of the new Tibet 'scholarship', a lie footnoted once has already become truth. A pool of bad information now exists, ready for any scholar with an agenda to draw from and appear legitimate. Few will bother to look beneath the surface, at the highly questionable source of this information-colonists, oppressors, and outsiders, writing a history that they have no place writing. And what gets lost in the mix, as always, is the voice of the Tibetan people themselves.

There is one statement in Parenti's thesis that summarizes how completely disconnected he is from any kind of Tibetan reality. In his thesis, he states that old Tibet was a society that was 'damaging to the human spirit.' Any person who has spent any time with the Tibetan people would laugh at the irony. Being with Tibetans of all walks of life, inside and outside of Tibet, one is always struck by the incredible, contagious spirit of Tibetan culture. From the Khampa drinking songs to the picnics that are the preferred activity of all Tibetans, Tibetan society is known for its passion and exuberance. This spirit is something that grows directly from the culture that Parenti is so intent on debasing. This spirit is what the Chinese government has tried so desperately to crush – making the singing of freedom songs illegal and prohibiting traditional Tibetan festivals. The struggle against totalitarianism is precisely a struggle for spirit, and I'm willing to wager that a populist like Mr. Parenti would find far more joy drinking chang and singing songs with a party of exiled Tibetans than he ever would at a Chinese cadre meeting; sadly, he won't ever get to find out. He's chosen his bedfellows, and more power to him. In the end it is the Tibetan people who will be the arbiters of their own fate. By the time that fate is decided Parenti will be long gone, onto some other issue, and Tibetans will be no worse off because of it.

The critiques of Tibet as an excuse for Chinese imperialism are pretty nonsensical in the sense that even where abuses existed, they also existed in China. Death by slicing was ended in the early 20th century. The selling of women and children into bondage was common in China until the early 20th century. The Communists slaughtered millions of landowners when they won power in 1949 and starved tens of millions to death with Rube Goldberg economic schemes - where dissenting officials were executed (or more likely beaten to death in order to extract confessions of being capitalist roaders) for their apostasy. Does this mean that China is fit only to be ruled by foreigners - just as Tibetans are fit only to be ruled by Chinese, in the Han version of things as they ought to be?

The monetary value of time

An academic explains why people don't take the train when they can drive instead:

Thought Experiment

One day in 1974 or so, I was sitting in my car (actually my thesis adviser's university car) inching across the George Washington Bridge on my way to Manhattan to meet a class where I was the teaching assistant. Suddenly I asked myself "Why am I doing this?" After all, I had alternatives. A bus ran right by the Lamont Observatory where I spent most of my time and went reasonably directly to the uptown bus terminal in Manhattan. From there I could take a subway straight to Columbia University. So as mass transit goes, it was a pretty straight shot. So why was I driving? Well, for openers, the mass transit really didn't save much time, especially counting waiting time at both ends and the transfer from bus to subway. And it was impossible to do anything productive riding mass transit. Plus there was no privacy or peace and quiet, which I finally decided was the major factor for me. And people in those days worried a lot about subway muggings (realistically, on the 7th Avenue IRT in the daytime, a minor risk), but carjacking was unheard of, so there was a safety issue.

Since I have never, in the 30 years since, seen any article by advocates of mass transit that bothered to ask why people don't take mass transit despite all its supposed advantages, I thought it might be useful to explain why people prefer to drive instead of take the bus. Most advocates of mass transit dismiss drivers as selfish, short-sighted and unconcerned about the environment instead of asking whether mass transit itself is to blame for its own problems.

After this page was linked by another site, I got a number of responses that suggested a bit of clarification is in order. This page is not calling for abandonment of mass transit or extolling the virtues of the automobile. It is an attempt to lay out what mass transit is up against if it is to succeed. Pretending that the economic issues I describe can be made to go away is a guaranteed recipe for failure. They won't. Lots of people seem determined to illustrate the is/ought fallacy in action.

Also I've gotten a number of responses from people who say the factors I outline here don't apply because they spend their time on the bus or subway reading or relaxing. This amounts to an attitude all too common in environmentalism: everything will be just fine once people get enlightened and see things the way I do. But don't take my word for it - see the exchange at the end of this page. If you have access to a user-friendly mass transit system and can use the commute time productively, bully for you. I'm trying to explain why so many other people don't see it that way.
The Value of Time

Apart from the cost of wages, economic planners rarely acknowledge the value of individual time, but that has absolutely no impact on the reality that people themselves do put value on their time. As John Naisbitt pointed out in Megatrends, one of the first thing people do when they acquire some affluence is begin to buy back their time. They hire out boring or unpleasant tasks like food preparation, housekeeping, child care and repairs. (Home delivery services are even enjoying a bit of a resurgence as two-earner families find themselves increasingly pressed for time.) Failure to recognize the value of time to individuals leads to unproductive results.

Nowhere is this issue clearer than in attempts to deal with the problems caused by the automobile. Critics of the automobile point out that in addition to the direct costs of the automobile like fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, there is the cost of highway construction, environmental damage, tax subsidies, defense of oil supplies, and so on – a host of “hidden costs.” For example, The International Center for Technology Assessment, in The Real Price of Gasoline, and Stephen H. Burrington in Road Kill: How Solo Driving Runs Down the Economy, both estimated the real cost of driving a car at about a dollar a mile. They estimated the cost of a bicycle at twelve cents a mile.

I live eight miles from campus. At a dollar a mile by car, it costs $16 to commute. It takes about 20 minutes each way, so figuring my salary at $25 an hour, the cost comes to about $33. Occasionally I bicycle. It takes 45 minutes each way. The cost of bicycling alone is only $2 a day, but the time cost is $37. It costs $39 a day to commute by bicycle. By mass transit, I have to walk to the bus stop, go downtown, transfer, and travel a winding route to campus. Total fare is $2.50, and counting time walking to and waiting at the bus stop at either end, it takes at least 45 minutes to make the trip by bus, bringing the total cost to around $40.

There are plenty of good reasons to encourage mass transit, but arguments about the hidden costs of the automobile fall on deaf ears because people, unconsciously or not, factor time and convenience into their decision making. The average driver knows perfectly well why she drives.

The cost of a transportation system is first of all, any flat fare. Call that F. Then there's a cost per mile (call it C) and the mileage (M). The value of your time we can call S (salary per hour), and the time it takes to travel is T. So we have Cost = F + CM + ST. Time will be mileage divided by your speed (V), so we have Cost = F + CM + SM/V = F + M(C + S/V). We can see that cost increases with mileage (obviously), high time value (every minute traveling costs more) and low speeds.

Conclusion 1: Transportation Costs Less at High Speeds. High-speed commuter rail is a great solution if there's easy access at both ends. If you have to drive five miles to a transit station only to find the commuter lot full, you may as well drive. HOV (high occupancy vehicles) and mass transit lanes on freeways are another good approach to this issue. The best features of HOV lanes for private vehicles is they offer a positive incentive to carpool (you get to pass all the solo drivers), rather than the negative penalties that are the only solution many advocates of mass transit seem capable of imagining.

Corollary: Low Speed Limits Raise the Cost of Travel. They may cut fuel consumption and costs of accidents, but the time cost rises steeply. Where I live, a nearby suburb has a four lane street with a speed limit of 25 miles an hour. It could easily be raised to 40 with no significant safety risk.

Corollary: Interruptions Raise the Cost of Travel. How much gasoline is burned daily by cars stopping and accelerating at stop signs where there is clearly no oncoming traffic, or waiting at empty intersections for traffic lights? Probably half of all stop signs could be changed to yield signs. And it should be legal to proceed through a red light if there is no oncoming traffic. Accidents would be wholly the responsibility of the driver going through the light. School buses should be required to wait for traffic to clear before turning on their signals and discharging students.

Let's assume, as critics of the automobile say, that a car costs $1 a mile and also assume a car averages 20 miles an hour in city traffic. The cost of operating a car becomes M(1 + S/20). If we assume a bicycle costs 1/8 as much per mile and goes 10 miles an hour, then the cost of riding a bicycle is M(1/8 + S/10). The extra cost of driving a car per mile is:

Cost (car M=1) - Cost (bicycle M=1) =

(1 + S/20) - (1/8 + S/10) = 7/8 - S/20.

If the cost difference is positive, bicycle is cheaper. If it's negative, a car is cheaper. When the cost difference is zero, both forms of transportation are equal. Call that the break-even point. That happens when S/20 = 7/8, or S = 17.5. If S is less than 17.5 ($17.50 an hour or $35,000 a year) then the cost is positive, otherwise it's negative; it costs more to go by bike than by car.

Conclusion 2: Slow Transportation Penalizes Affluent Customers. And these are the people most likely to have their own cars and to move further from work.

Corollary: Affluent Customers Will Not Use Mass Transit. It's not that they're selfish, or that they don't care about the environment. It's not cost-effective. The higher your salary, the more wasteful mass transit is. The only significant exception is commuter rail provided the fares offer a savings over driving and parking and the comfort and privacy allow relaxation or work en route.

Corollary: Infrequent Transit Schedules Discourage Use of Mass Transit. Duh. Or maybe not. My city is considering cutting frequency as a "cost-saving" measure.

If we assume the fare on a bus is $2, and there's no extra cost per mile, and buses average 15 miles an hour (because of stops and less direct routes), then the cost becomes 2 + S/15. The extra cost of driving is Cost (car) - Cost (bus) = M(1 + S/20) - (2 + SM/15) = M - 2 - MS/60. This is a bit harder to analyze because it's mileage-dependent. We can find the break-even point by making the cost zero and solving for S: S = 60(1 - 2/M). If M = 2, S =0; it always pays to drive because the cost of driving beats the flat fare. Regardless of how big M is, S is never greater than 60; if you earn over $120,000 a year, it always pays to drive. If M = 4, S = 30, and the break-even point is $60,000 a year. If you earn less, it pays to use mass transit.

But if the fare is $5, as it can be for long commutes, then S = 60(1 - 5/M). It never pays to take the bus for commutes less than 5 miles. For S = 30 ($60,000) a year, the break-even point is 10 miles - any longer than that and it pays to drive.

Conclusion 3: Flat Fares Discourage Use of Mass Transit for Short Commutes A fair number of cities seem to have figured this out and have free-travel zones downtown, unlimited travel passes, and similar offsets.

If traveling by car really does have high indirect costs not shared by public transportation, the case for making all mass transit free is so compelling you really have to wonder why advocates of mass transit don't propose it. Also, since a major cause of urban sprawl and congestion is the middle class moving to the suburbs, the obvious cure is to eliminate the problems that drive the middle class out. Unless there's some master plan to have buses, ambulances and fire trucks all get around on light rail, most of the indirect costs of the automobile will still plague mass transit. We can hope to lessen the dependence on petroleum, and hence ease prices and maybe reduce the defense threat. We might also hope to reduce the costs of road repair, reduce air pollution, and lessen the impact of the automobile.

There's a good reason why people who play the "hidden costs" game never factor in the value of personal time saved - it tips the balance so sharply in favor of existing technology that alternatives simply cannot compete. (Actually, when people say they "cannot" compete, they usually mean they will not compete because they don't think the rewards are great enough. Mass transit can compete against the private auto but it would require subsidies to the hated middle class and suburbs.)

One correspondent added:

An important wrinkle that I feel is missing from your analysis; Time saved in transit is added to my free time with my family, not to time at work. I value my time outside work much more than my hourly wage. That is why when my employer wants me to work more, he has to pay me time and a half. Or, when another firm wants to buy my extra hours, I charge them double to triple my hourly rate. (emphasis added)

Therefore, your point is stronger than you present. The time I save by driving is extremely valuable to me. Much more than my hourly wage. I think I'm not alone.

Funny how evil corporations routinely recognize the value of personal time by paying higher than normal salaries for overtime, but enlightened mass transit advocates, who care so much about people and the good of society, somehow just don't get it.
Additional Factors
Exact Change

Is there a single, more stupid tactic for discouraging mass transit than requiring exact change? Especially when fares change frequently enough that a new user can't find out the fare except by calling the transit company? Hopefully, rechargeable fare cards will become universal enough to remedy this problem. Systems like BART and many European systems that use vending machines for fare, of course, don't have this problem.
Fixed Costs

In addition to the per-mile indirect costs of owning a car, there are fixed costs that exist whether you drive the car or not. Chief among these is depreciation. Depreciation is not that much of an issue for people who buy used cars and drive them as long as possible, but for those who buy new cars and trade them in regularly it's a major cost. Depreciation has to be added to the cost of whatever transportation the individual uses. If the person drives, depreciation is part of the cost of driving, obviously. If the person uses mass transit, depreciation is still part of the cost of using mass transit because the person has a car sitting in the garage unused, but still declining in value. In fact, all hidden costs have to be added to the cost of mass transit - you still pay taxes to pave roads and defend oil supplies whatever you do. Only out of pocket expenses count in determining the cost-effectiveness of mass transit versus the automobile, because the indirect and "hidden" costs are still there whatever mode of transport you use.

Once someone decides to buy a car, the economic balance shifts sharply in favor of driving. The only way to shift the economic balance in favor of mass transit is to create a system where it becomes feasible for large numbers of people to give up owning a car. A few moments' thought will suffice to reveal the requirements for such a system:

1. The out of pocket costs must be the same or less for public transport as for private transport. You might get away with a slight overage if public transport offers a real premium in convenience or comfort, but it had better be a clear advantage to the consumer.
2. The time costs have to be comparable. This means:
1. Actual travel time has to be comparable. The convoluted fractal routes that buses typically travel to access the largest possible area with the fewest routes are a guaranteed recipe for a failed mass-transit system.
2. The schedule has to be frequent enough that transfers have negligible time impact. If you occasionally have to run errands en route, the transfer time factor demolishes mass transit.
3. The schedule has to be frequent enough that waiting time at the trip origin has negligible time impact.
4. The system has to be dense enough that transit time from the final stop to the destination has negligible time impact. Walking half a mile in the pouring rain negates anything positive mass transit has to offer (and no combination of rain protection will keep you dry in a real downpour.)
3. The system has to be more dependable than a private automobile. This means:
1. Work stoppages and strikes are absolutely impermissible. I met some folks recently who saved on the outrageous hotel prices in Venice by staying in nearby Padua. Then, when it came time to catch their cruise ship, the trains were out because of a strike to protest President Bush's visit to Rome. Because, you know, people traveling from Padua to Venice are directly responsible for the war in Iraq and globalization. And labor activists wonder why unions fell out of favor in the U.S.
2. The system has to have enough peak capacity to carry all passengers in reasonable comfort. Sitting down. With elbow room and a modicum of personal space.
3. Routes have to be simple and absolutely fixed. Far too many systems vary routes with time of day, use the same number for different routes, omit stops or entire segments of the route at times, or change routes frequently. When I'm in a city and have a choice of rail or bus, I take rail every time, simply because you can't rip up tracks capriciously and reroute them. (I did see a city once where it happened - would you be surprised if I said it was Sofia, Bulgaria?)
4. Information about the system has to be available everywhere. Every stop must have a map of the whole system with schedules and fare information, and the information must be current. Areas between stops must have frequent signs to the nearest transit stops.
5. The system layout has to be predictable. Ever been in a city and walked to a major artery hoping to find a bus stop, only to find the buses don't run on that street? Instead the buses run down some residential street because the system is trying to cover the most ground with the fewest buses, or some alderman lives there and wants convenient bus transportation. And how about that system of identifying routes by the end of the line? Boy, that sure makes navigating mass transit in a strange city a breeze!
6. Transportation has to be available at all times - 24/7/365. If you even occasionally find yourself going places on holidays or odd hours when transit is either unavailable or infrequent, you'll opt to get a car.
7. Car pooling? If the passengers all have similar origins and destinations, it's an option. But if people need to vary their schedules, run errands en route, be out of town on business, and so on, it won't work. The lack of flexibility is probably the main impediment to car pooling.
4. The system has to be absolutely safe. Law enforcement needs to be thorough enough, the penalties for crime severe enough and the judicial system hard-nosed enough that nobody would even think of committing a crime on a bus or subway.

Cargo

In New York City, someone who lives alone might be able to buy groceries every single day and tote them home. But what about someone with five kids? What about someone who needs to transport sheets of plywood or drywall, concrete blocks or sacks of fertilizer? In a few places, buses have provisions for carrying bicycles, but for the most part people who have frequent needs to haul cargo have no real alternative to the automobile. Delivery services might alleviate this problem somewhat.
Groups

While visiting my parents in the San Francisco Bay Area some years ago, we decided to take a trip to Fisherman's Wharf via the BART system. There were six of us altogether. We found the lot at the BART station full, so we drove in to San Francisco. Even counting bridge tolls and parking, it only cost a little more than riding BART.

When transporting a group, cars almost always beat mass transit. Mass transit systems that fail to recognize that the unit of travel is the group, not the individual, are doing more to promote automobiles than Detroit ever could.
A Visit to Philadelphia

I don't share W. C. Fields' dark view of Philadelphia. I like the city very much. Putting it far above average for large cities is its direct rail link from the airport to downtown (that's changing as more and more cities come on line). So on a recent trip to Philadelphia, I booked a motel close to the airport to save expenses and took the train to the convention center downtown.

Both ways the train I intended to take was canceled, meaning I had to wait an extra half hour. At both ends of the trip there were fare machines out of service (although conductors will collect fares on the train). There was a bus link from the airport to my motel, and once I found the bus schedule that part of the trip worked smoothly. The buses actually were right on schedule. But it took a number of tries on the automated phone system to get the inbound schedule, and the Visitor Center downtown didn't have printed schedules. What, post the schedules at the bus stops? Are you mad? They needed those big plastic panels for advertising. At least the stops did indicate the lines that stopped there. And there was the able bodied panhandler working the transit station downtown. All day. He hit me up coming and going, four hours apart.

On the whole, I got where I needed to go, but this anecdote illustrates all the minor indignities that mass transit advocates expect people to endure for the sake of society. And this is the state of affairs in a city with excellent mass transit. And we wonder why people prefer their cars.

Oh, and then I got the credit card bill for "long distance" calls from the airport to downtown to get schedule information. Factor that into the cost of mass transit because the information wasn't posted at bus stops or in the phone book, and the transit system didn't have a toll-free number.
Conclusions

In New York City, it can make sense not to own a car. Parking is prohibitive, the risk of damage from on-street parking is severe, and the transit system beats driving much of the time. In Moab, Utah, fuhgeddaboutit.

In sparsely-populated areas, there simply is no practical alternative to the automobile. People who live in those places need cars to get around and haul cargo. People who need to get to places not served by mass transit also have no alternative to the automobile. So what are the possible solutions?

1. Inexpensive Rental Cars. The cost of auto rental has come down to the point where it's pretty affordable, but it needs to come down still further to make it a really viable alternative to using the private auto.
2. Inexpensive Taxis. These need to be considered part of the overall public transit system. Fares need to be competitive with comparable distances on mass transit, and availability needs to be great enough to avoid significant time penalties.

Both of these have to be convenient and flexible enough that the time required to call a taxi or rent a car doesn't discourage use.

At off-peak times, there simply is no practical alternative to the automobile. The remedies are the same.

People who haul cargo have no practical alternative to the automobile. Remedies include inexpensive delivery services, but frequently bulk cargo purchases include small items or unanticipated on-the-spot purchases. Inexpensive shipping from the point of sale, or cheap truck rental, are additional possible remedies.

The only way to diminish reliance on the automobile is to create a mass transit system that is superior to the automobile by the standards of automobile users. In many circumstances the most effective system is the automobile and the only way to cut use of private automobiles is by supplying public automobiles, like rental cars and taxis. The sci-fi vision where you go up to a vending area, pop in a credit card, and drive off in a waiting car, needs serious consideration. Where density is high enough, the only way to cut reliance on private autos is with mass transit that is competitive with automobiles in out of pocket cost, speed, and convenience.

Attempts to promote mass transit through coercion will inevitably fail. Trying to make mass transit more competitive by raising auto registration fees, parking fees, bridge and tunnel tolls, gasoline taxes, and the like, will inevitably be seen for what it is: artificial manipulation of the marketplace to coerce drivers into using mass transit. Trying to encourage mass transit use by penalizing private auto use amounts to an open admission that mass transit cannot compete with the automobile.

Voodoo Economics won't work. I have to pay taxes to build roads and defend our oil supplies whether I drive or not, and fire trucks, ambulances, and delivery vehicles need streets to drive on. Pretending that I somehow avoid those "hidden costs" by taking the bus is beneath stupid. Telling me that 45 minutes in a crowded, lurching bus is better or a more effective use of my time than 20 minutes in my car is a couple of levels below that.

Wishful thinking won't cut it. It will do absolutely no good to say all these problems will go away if we can somehow persuade Americans to accept higher density and move back in from the suburbs. Suburbs began to sprawl back in the days of streetcars. Americans do not want to live in high density settings. Why not just accept it and plan accordingly?

Studies have repeatedly shown two things: the more transportation is available, the more people spread out. Second, commuters start to get irritable when commute times exceed half an hour. Basically, commuters move out to a distance where they feel the time cost is acceptable, and get angry when the rules change. Moral: Americans like to spread out until other individuals do not seriously impinge on their freedom of action. Deal with it.
What Gated Communities Teach Us

I consider gated communities (and their cousins, the restricted covenant communities) loathsome. Whenever I hear about some homeowner embroiled in a dispute with his homeowners' association, I am torn between despising the homeowners' association for being so petty, and the homeowner for being so stupid as to live in such a place. But they are growing in popularity, and that has something to tell us, and we'd better figure out what that is. What do these communities offer?

* Safety. Covenant communities merely merge into the surrounding neighborhoods, but gated communities are walled cities. Paradoxically, concern over crime seems to get worse as society gets safer and crimes, being rarer, become more newsworthy. Nevertheless, crime is a principal reason why affluent people leave cities. So if you want to revitalize the cities, extirpate street crime (people don't triple bolt their doors against inside traders or crooked lobbyists). Not reduce, not contain, not deter, extirpate it. Eliminate from public discourse any notion that crime is ever justified.
* Decorum. Covenants don't merely regulate gross misbehavior; they manage fine details. Most of the people governed by them don't see it as intrusive to have to mow their lawns at specified intervals because they do that anyway. So people who don't share the covenanters' values may see such communities as repressive, but the covenanters themselves don't because they prefer to live that way. They want to live among people who share their standards of behavior to a high degree.
* Personal Space. Americans like to spread out and always have. But what's wrong with living in an apartment complex and having lots of park space nearby? Why does it have to be personal space? Because personal space can be controlled. Your kid can pitch a tent in the back yard or build a tree fort (not in a lot of covenant communities, though). You can sit in your back yard and not worry about twenty people with loud radios and foul mouths parking right next to you. You don't have to worry about having your favorite picnic spot taken by someone else.

If you want to persuade people to move back into high density settlements, you had better figure out why so many people choose to live in restricted communities, and then see to it that the high density settlements offer the same advantages. Nobody has a right to disruptive, annoying, or anti-social behavior.

Incidentally, gated communities are murder on traffic patterns because they lack through streets and therefore channel large volumes of traffic into restricted arteries.
The End of Cheap Oil

What will happen when oil hits its peak (as it is close to doing?). Will that affect the decision to drive? Possibly. But consider:

* Transit companies don't get fuel for free - they will have to raise fares to cover the extra cost. They may also cut routes and frequency to cut costs, adding to all the negatives that keep people off mass transit in the first place.
* Generally speaking, when costs go up, mass transit systems cut schedules, raise fares, and generally do everything imaginable to discourage mass transit use.
* Between the higher cost of living and higher taxes, people strapped for income will probably resist attempts to subsidize mass transit.
* There will be pressure to increase social spending to help poor people cover home heating and cooling. Taxes will go up.
* People forced to work second jobs to cover the increased cost of living will face a killer time cost. Their free time will be so diminished they will not want to spend it riding a bus. And they may well be forced to drive to get from job to job on time.

Prognosis: we may see a marginal shift to mass transit among users for whom the negatives aren't too severe: they're close to transit at both ends of the trip and the time and out-of-pocket costs are not too dissimilar. Car pooling is an obvious win-win, and if it's made easier, it may well take off. If you own a used car, cutting your mileage extends the life of the car and decreases repairs.
Europe Leads The Way

Europeans use mass transit far more than Americans because of the high population density, and dense and long-established transit systems. So how transit-friendly is Europe?

A Eurail Select Pass for five countries and ten days of rail travel is $748. That's $1500 for two people. I found a Volkswagen Passat (midsize) for ten days for $672. Toss in another $400 for gas and it's $1072. You do the math.
And America Follows

From this morning's paper, an article on traveling across America by train. Cost of a sleeper car from Portland, Oregon to New York City: $1792.90.

Drive: 3000 miles at 20 miles per gallon = 150 gallons of fuel, say $500. Three nights in good lodgings, another $500. Total: $1000. Your car will depreciate whether you drive or go by train. Of course, on a train you don't have driving fatigue and can read, watch the scenery, or chat. But then again, by driving you get to see all the scenery by day if you choose. Back in 1989 I took my family from Wisconsin to San Francisco and back by train. Even without sleepers it was a remarkably nice experience. But we found a rock bottom last-minute fare.

Fly? Boo, hiss, huge carbon footprint. Also $300 if you book in advance and catch a good fare. Plus the value of three days' time not spent traveling. Of course, if you want to see the country from the ground, that's not a factor.

Amtrak wonders why more Americans don't take the train.

R Lee Ermey on his life and times - and the relationship between defeatism and morale

Joe Mammy has an interesting interview with R Lee Ermey, the Marine who played the tough-as-nails drill instructor in "Full Metal Jacket":

“I’m Gunnery Sergeant Hartman your senior drill instructor...”

Like many people, that was my introduction to R. Lee Ermey the former drill instructor turned actor, advocate and host of the History Channel’s “Mail Call.” There’s a short list of the great Hollywood badasses today and Ermey continues to make a run at the top (if Eastwood does another “Bridges of Madison County” the title is his…) with roles like Hartman, the creepy Sheriff Hoyt (from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake) supporting roles in films like “Seven” and “Dead Man Walking,” as well as a bevy of television roles (including Hugh Laurie’s father in “House” and Sergeant Hobo 678 in the classic but overlooked “Invader Zim”).

I’d always envisioned the Gunny as a tough-as-nails, take no prisoners sort, however when I got a hold of him he had just completed collecting toys for needy children. Ermey seemed like a bit of strange alchemy: part bulldog and part Santa Claus. So grab your choice of cool (or warm) beverage and sit back and check out my conversation with Lee Ermey.
*****

Joe Mammy: Looking over your career, if you looked back to 1961 where it all started for you as far as the military and everything, could you have ever imagined it would have come out the way it has?

R Lee Ermey: Oh hell, my objective was to be successful no matter where I had to go or what I had to do. I may have chosen different paths but I honestly and firmly believe that there’s no way I was going to be on welfare.

Joe: I was doing some reading—and maybe you can put this to rest, there seems to be a lot of urban myths surrounding you—how exactly did you get into the military?

RLE: Well, I had a bit of a problem and the judge recommended that I should look at the military very closely or he might have to send me where the sun doesn’t shine. Well, there really wasn’t much contest. I ended up in the Marine Corps simply because the Air Force and the Navy wouldn’t have me because I had a juvenile record, but it was probably the best thing. I guess the good Lord channeled me in this direction.

Joe: From there it sounds like you got into acting, was it Thailand you went to?

RLE: No, no. As a matter of fact I did the comedy clubs here in California for a while. I got retired out of the Marine Corps, all I owned was what I had in my sea bag and I didn’t have a car, I had a little money in pocket because I’d been hurt, I’d been in the hospital for awhile. I’d been an instructor for the last four years, five years in the Marine Corps and in order to be a good instructor you damn near have to be a stand up comic so I put together a script and I went up and did the comedy clubs for awhile. Then I heard they were going to do Vietnam War shows over in the Philippines and I ended up going over there. The only reason I went to college was to take advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, but I never ever finished a semester. I got so busy doing films, advertisements, and commercials that I just got so busy I dropped out of college, but I’ve been busy ever since.

Joe: Would you consider comedy your first love or just where you got your start?

RLE: speaker If you watch any shows that I do there’s a certain amount of humor involved. I prefer doing comedy. I would rather do feature films that are geared toward comedy. I feel more comfortable with it. I have a certain amount of wit and pretty good timing. Even “Full Metal Jacket,” you watch “Full Metal Jacket” you get some laughs out of that and I wrote most of it. I just feel more comfortable with comedy but I do anything. I can do just about anything you can think of.

I just finished a film called “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning” and I starred in the show so that’ll give you a kind of idea, but if you watch that you get some laughs from the character as well even though he is deep, deep dark black, so black that his humor's not just black humor, it’s nearly purple it’s so black—

Joe: That’s the Sheriff Hoyt character from the first one?

RLE: Yes, and I was able to write it all this time. Nobody in Hollywood can write for my Ermey-Hotycharacter because no one is perverted enough, I guess, to understand my character. I know the character inside and out. I created the character in the remake—there was nothing written for the character in the remake. Basically I came up with everything I did in the remake. I had to develop and evolve the character. That warm, cuddly, lovable Sheriff Hoyt—he was what the critics raved about after the remake was done, so when New Line decided that they wanted to do a prequel they called me up and asked me if I would star in the prequel.

Joe: That’s good. That character had the most psychologically interesting and disturbing element in the entire film as far as I was concerned.

RLE: Well the thing is Sheriff Hoyt is a sexually perverted homicidal maniac. He’s a crazy man. I’ve always been one that I will take a character as far over the top as I can without falling off the other side and so I push my character to the limit. Well, if you’re a sexually perverted homicidal maniac there is no limit, is there? So he’s a crazy bastard anyway. Basically it gives me a license to do anything as crazy and as sick as I wanna do. I’m certainly not politically correct and I think that’s basically what the critics enjoyed about Sheriff Hoyt was the fact he really didn’t have any rules that he lived by. He doesn’t have any guidelines. Like I say, I like to push the character right to the limit and with Hoyt there was no limit so I could get by with murder and I loved it. I love the character. I would say—I’m convinced in my own mind that he’s one of the most colorful fun characters that I’ve ever played in my life and I’ve done what 72, 74 films, something like that.

Joe: I always get a kick out of the people who really work in Hollywood versus the really big names—you guys are out there just grinding away. That’s one thing I’ve always appreciated about what you’ve done. You manage to land these really interesting characters and make them even more interesting. Even in the smaller parts like in the old “Brisco County Jr.” show and more recently when you showed up in “House”—

RLE: Oh yes.

Joe: Are those the kind of roles that you enjoy because it allows you that kind of flexibility?

RLE: speaker I’m going to have fun with House’s father in “House,” yes, and the show’s a great show. I need for the producers and directors of “House” to back away a little bit and let me do my thing, you know? That’s always a problem, you know? Some producers and some directors in Hollywood really are very hesitant to let you do much that’s not written because it seems to me they have a lack of confidence on their part; you know what I’m saying?

The really good roles I’ve done have been characters I’ve put together, that I’ve manufactured with directors that would just let me have my head and let me go for it. Most damn directors and producers have this political correct thing, you know? “Oh no, we can’t do that, that would—“ or “Oh my God, nobody’s ever done that—" All that is as far as I’m concerned is a display of lack of confidence on their part.

Joe: You’re definitely not a shy guy—

RLE: Oh no, hell, I’ll climb that wall. I think that’s why I’m where I’m at today because I pushed my way through to the point where I try to be off-the-wall colorful and unpredictable and that’s just my style. It’s always been my style and that’s the way I like to do things.

One of the worst things a director can tell me is “less is more.” You’ve heard that, right? That’s sick. That is sad.

Joe: You’ve worked in some amazing films, “Full Metal Jacket” of course is the first to come to mind, but other films like “Seven” or “Dead Man Walking” you’ve had some really intense parts but aren’t as overstated as some of the ones you may be known for. How do you choose your roles; do you look forward to those roles?

RLE: I look forward to all of them. My main objective is to get the directors and producers to let me give them the best character I can give them, you know? In a few cases that isn’t allowed because of the lack of confidence they have. I’ve actually had producers and directors call other producers at two o’clock in the morning and ask if Lee Ermey can change two words in this damn dialogue. The two words we would replace them with of course have the exact same meaning the only difference is they’re words I would use or my character would use rather than some fifty cent word that some damn writer wrote down.

I look at it from this angle as well, that writer locks himself away in his little room Ermeythere and he writes for ten or twelve or fifteen different characters, I’m only worried about one character. I can concentrate on one character and I’m a pretty good writer. Most of the roles I’ve done throughout the years have been my own writing. I didn’t get here by being a dunce or a loser; I work hard at what I do. If I didn’t think it was ten times better than what the writer had to write I wouldn’t even suggest it, you know what I’m saying?

Joe: Is that characteristic of your experience in Hollywood that it has its own little culture that doesn’t necessarily seem to interact with actual culture at times?

RLE: speaker For instance, you’ve got a writer writing for a character that’s a military character, right? This writer’s never been in the military. The only thing he knows about the military is through a few military shows he’s seen. So a military guy is chosen to do the role, I mean, c’mon, who better can write for that military character? The writer doesn’t even know the jargon for chrissakes. I mean, the writer’s calling this Marine a soldier for chrissakes, you know? It’s totally disgusting in a lot of instances, but then when you approach the director to correct the matter, the director is just totally dumbfounded because he’s never been in the military either, right? He wouldn’t know his left from his right and he couldn’t be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but yet because of their incompetence and their lack of confidence they don’t want to allow that actor, who has been in the military, to change one word of that dialogue, you see what I’m saying? Because if it happened to be something the producer might not like, well they might lose their job or they might be chastised, see what I’m saying? It’s kinda delicate; it’s a bit touchy in a lot of cases.

I think that if somebody hires me to do a goddamned character in their movie that they should at least have the goddamn confidence in me and my ability to pull this character off to let me have a little bit of headway and a little range so that I can improve the character. It really, really aggravates me to think that somebody would hire me and then think that I’m going to be their damn puppet that they can shove their hand up my butt and make my arms work and my mouth move the way they want it to. You see what I’m saying?

Joe: Yeah, nice mental image if nothing else. How did “Mail Call” come about, as far as your involvement with it? Was it something you came up with and pitched or was it something you were approached to do?

RLE: I was approached with it, and then I helped pitch it a little bit. Digital Ranch is Ermey-MailCallthe producers and they direct the show. The owner of Digital Ranch—it’s a small production company, small but busy and very, very good—directs each and every episode. I am given total creative freedom. Actually what the History Channel had in mind when we got geared up to do the show was they expected an Ollie North to come on board and flat out “here’s the news, the whole news, nothing but the news,”—no humor, no nothing, just pitching documentary film footage and I came on and put humor in it and actually the History Channel was a bit upset there for a while. They didn’t think that would work: “Oh my God, this is not the comedy channel, this is the History Channel.” And we’re one of the highest-rated shows on the History Channel. After an episode or two the folks at the History Channel realized that they had a winner and they backed off and we get along just fine.

Joe: It’s been fun for me, I’ve never been in the military but I come from a military town, I’ve got friends in the military, some of the best I’ve known have come from the military and the specials you’ve done in the last couple of seasons have been really powerful, like when you returned to Vietnam, or some of the World War II specials. How much of that has been an opportunity for you to explore some of these things and come in contact with these people and situations?

RLE: Much of it; a lot of it. The way the Vietnam show was supposed to have ended was I was supposed to be paddled down the river, the Perfume River, by an old mamasan in a little sanpan. I said, “Hey, this is not where this show should end. We should end this show at the Wall in Washington DC with me shining the emblem.”

It’s a joint effort, the Mail Call show. Rob Lihani, who is the director, producer and part-owner of Digital Ranch that produces the show spent seven years in the military himself. He and I together, we put our heads together, we’re pretty much an unstoppable force when it comes to dealing with the military. I guess the proof is in the pudding. It’s our show and it’s a give and take situation. Rob Lihani, even though he is the director and producer, listens to me as much as I listen to him and we cooperate with one another and we do what’s best for the show. The trouble is with many shows it’s written and that’s the way we’re going to do it, you know what I’m saying? In other words, there’s no creativity about it, this is the way the damn writer wrote it and this is the words we’re going to say and this is what we’re going to do regardless of whether that actor comes up with an idea that might be ten times better, that director and that producer stand their ground and it’s just sad. It’s too bad and I see it all the time in Hollywood where the producers and directors won’t even listen to reason, won’t even take suggestions from the actors and it’s a sad situation.

speaker But in my case with “Mail Call” it’s a joint effort. We even take recommendations from the cameraman for chrissakes. It’s a little small group we have. There’s only about six or seven of us that go off and do these shows in Imo Jima and Vietnam and so on and so forth, and everyone’s input is welcome, you know what I’m saying. Everyone has a vested interest. People are pretty loyal. We find this great cameraman and we want to keep him with us. So we had the same crew over and over for the show and we trust these people and they have a vested interest in this show's success as much as anyone else in the show. When they have a suggestion we listen to the suggestion, we weigh the suggestion, we figure out whether their suggestion has merit and if it would be better to do it the way they suggest or if it would be better to be left alone. Most of the guys don’t have a military background, but sometimes, you’d be surprised, some of the guys come up with some pretty doggone solid, logical ideas.

Joe: speaker It’s true. It’s different than the standard show. A friend of mine recently got into the show and thinks it’s a great show because they answer questions you want to know the way you like to hear it. Part of that appeal is in the reader mail when you have current and former military personnel writing in. How is the feedback from both the folks in the military and former military people?

RLE: The feedback is tremendous. You know, number one, the History Channel does support us very well. They’re behind us 100%. They’re a bunch of great guys and gals up there at the History Channel and they give us all the support in the world. It’s a wonderful channel. I love history, and how many people in America really do like history? We like to look back and see what’s going on and even on to the future.

When we first started the show, of course the Marine Corps knows me and has known me, I’ve been with Marine Corps for 45 years and I’ve always been with the Marine Corps and supported the Marine Corps so they’ve always been there for us. I want to do a show about a 155 Howitzer—bang, the door’s wide open, we go in and do the show. But, say for instance when we wanted to do a show about mid-air refueling with the KC-135’s, the Air Force drug their feet and drug their feet and they weren’t sure and they didn’t trust us. It took us about two months just to get the clearances and everything so that we could do the show on George Air Force Base. Then we finally got the “Okay you c’mon and do it,” and they didn’t trust us and they watched us close. After about eight or ten, fifteen episodes had aired with the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the Marine Corps, the Army—all branches of the military, we suddenly started getting phone calls. “Hey, how about you guys comin’ up here and doing this?” or “How would the Gunny like to ride in an F-15? We’re up here in Oregon, we’d like the Gunny to come up here and do this with the Oregon Air National Guard.” But we won over the trust of the military.

We’ve even been invited up to Guantanamo Bay and do a show on what’s going on over there as far as the bad guys being confined over at Gitmo and the reason being is that the military has watched our show and realize that we call a spade a spade. We shoot from the hip. We don’t embellish. We don’t stretch people’s imaginations. We tell the damn story the way it is. The military—they’re quite honorable people. You know as well as I do, you live up at Minot so you deal with Air Force personnel on a daily basis up there for chrissakes and you realize that they’re honorable people. All the military ever has asked and all they requested and all they ever wanted was that if you go and tell our story go and tell the truth, tell it the way it is. Don’t exaggerate, don’t capitalize on a small mistake we may have made years ago, tell our story, tell the truth about us. A lot of shows go in and by the time they got this footage edited that they’ve shot they make the Air Force look like a bunch of fools, you know?

That’s something that over the years the media has done to the military so many times that the military has mistrusted the media and I don’t blame them at all. But they know, because they watch the show and they know that they can trust us and they know we call the shots the way we see them and we’ve gained the trust of the military to the point where we’re invited—we don’t even have to call them, they call us: “Hey, we’ve got USS Salt Lake City nuclear submarine here in port, would ‘Mail Call’ like to come down and do a show on that?”

They want their story told. Each branch of the military and each section of each branch of the military, be it 155 Howitzers, be it an A1 Abrams main battle tank, or be it 81mm mortar, each of these units that have these different components and these different weapons take huge pride in their product, in their weaponry, in their ability to wage war if that’s the case. All they want and all they ever request is that they be kept honorable and the story be told the way that it is, not the way some civilian liberal or some scum-sucking dirtbag wants to embellish it, you know what I’m saying.

Joe: It definitely comes through on the show. It seems like it’s the voice of today’s soldier. It doesn’t seem to have the political agenda as much as showing the guys who are out there doing it and this is a show that reflects what they do.

RLE: And the main thing that I’d like to stress is that we do not do this show for political gain. We do this show to pass on the knowledge to interested Americans, you know? Mom and dad—how many people, how many families in America today don’t have a niece, nephew, uncle, cousin, sister, brother in the military? And these families are hungry for information about what little Johnny is doing in the military. What is boot camp like these days? We’ve heard little Johnny is involved with this particular weapon or piece of equipment, gee I wonder how it really works and how it operates? We went to Iraq and did a one hour special live via satellite and people tuned in not only to gain the knowledge that we were going to give them about what was actually going on in Iraq but maybe they would catch a glimpse of little Johnny and his unit over there.

How much of that is a motivator is that for mom and dad and the family back home sitting there watching “Mail Call” on TV and their brother is doing his thing and he’s on TV and they’re proud of him and he’s wearing his uniform properly and he’s over there fighting for his country and he’s patriotic. How proud is that mother and father, how proud is that family of little Johnny when they see him on the History Channel on “Mail Call”? You see what I’m talking about? It means a lot to the guys and gals who are fighting the war and it means a tremendous amount to the mom, dad and the family back home as well.

We like to think we’re an informative show and an interesting show and some of the neatest stuff we do—I like going into some of the modern technology and getting into some of that stuff. It’s more interesting sometimes for me than it is anybody else. It’s fun for me. I’m having a great time doing the show. I love the History Channel; I love the folks up there that I’m working for and with. I love the military. I have huge tremendous respect for our men and women in uniform. They’re the patriots of this country. They’re the ones who step up to the plate and are willing to put their lives on the line so that the rest of us have the right to vote, the right to our own opinions, the right to publish things in the newspaper or our thoughts and opinions. You know, I don’t know how else I can say it; I respect those men and women that actually have the guts to step up to the plate so that some of the other people in America who don’t have the guts can sleep well at night.

And another thing that upsets me very much is I keep hearing these damn politicians talking about the poor go into the military. You know what, it’s a way to pull yourself out of the ghetto and become a respectable American, a respectable human being and a successful human being on top of that. And racially, boy I’ll tell ya, the military is so racially balanced there is no other employment in America that’s more racially balanced where people get along with one another. When your life is on the line it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether that guy on that machine gun laying down that base of fire is black, green, purple, or red or whatever color that he is—he’s got your back and that’s the important thing. I think a lot of civilian companies could actually learn from the military, I really do, as far as the racial aspects go in this country.

Joe: You’ve spent a lot of your time—I have the poseable figure that the proceeds were donated to charity, you work with Toys for Tots. What does it mean for you to give back to both the military and to the community?

RLE: speaker There’s not too many Sergeant Majors and Generals in the military, especially in the Marine Corps—and I am a bit partial of course, I respect them all, but the Marine Corps is my family, I figure I am where I am today is simply because of the leadership and the guidance and the role models I had when I was on active duty in the Marine Corps. I still say “I’m Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey, United States Marine Corps, V.A.—very active” because I remain just as active today as I ever was back in the old days when I was actually boots on the ground. The Marine Corps gave me a life, plain and simple. They taught me to be a respectable human being and I’ll always honor that, plain and simple. I do eight to ten Marine Corps Birthday Balls every year as guest of honor or guest speaker. Any Sergeant Major in the Marine Corps knows he can call my personal number and ask me to attend or come motivate the troops or attend a function they’re having with the troops and if that day on my calendar doesn’t already have an appointment on it, I’ll make every effort that I can to get down there and do that with them. That’s the way it is. The Commandant of the Marine Corps has my personal number and if he needs me to do anything he calls me up and he asks me to do it and I get it done.

And another thing I want to mention too: I’m an Independent. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. I’m a middle-of-the-road guy and I call on logic and common sense, okay? I didn’t vote for John Kerry, however, if John Kerry was our president right now I’d be just as firmly behind him and support him just as firmly as I do George W. Bush and his administration and I wish more people would be like that. I can’t understand—I’m drifting further right all the time simply because that’s all I hear the far left doing is taking shots at our troops and telling our troops via the media that we’re losing the war, that we should pick up and run. That’s the biggest morale killer in the world. That’s what they did to us in Vietnam and now damned if they’re not doing it to us here. They say it doesn’t hurt morale? Baloney it doesn’t hurt morale—you bet it does. I keep hearing the left talk about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq. The only damn similarity is the far left’s attempts to pull the plug and destroying the morale of the troops; that’s the only thing anywhere similar between the two wars.

Joe: Right now you’re doing work with the Toys for Tots program, could you tell me more about that in closing?

RLE: speaker Well I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I religiously come down and spend the last two weeks before Christmas down at San Diego which I consider my home port. I spend a lot of time in San Diego, love the people down here. I work with 4th Tank Battalion; I’ve gone through a lot of ‘em. I’ve watched ‘em come and I’ve watched ‘em retire but I’m always here. Toys for Tots, the way we work it is we collect toys—been going on since 1946. I’ve been doing it for many, many years. It’s something I do every year and kinda makes me sleep a little better every night.

The toys that the Marine Corps collects for Toys for Tots in each community stay right there in that community unlike other charities. They collect toys and they collect money and gain financially in some communities and that goes out to other communities. Well Toys for Tots is not like that; it’s a community effort. I go to Chicago every year, I do Toys for Tots there and then I come down to San Diego and I’ll be here until the 19th or 20th, and then I’ll go home and I’ll go to Wal-Mart and do my shopping. I’d just like to pass the word for Toys for Tots; it’s a community effort that helps your community. The toys don’t go some place else to some other community, it stays right there in your community. It’s a community situation, a community effort.

Joe: Well, for me, and a friend of mine who was in the military say “Make sure the Gunny knows that we all appreciate his efforts on our behalf for everything he goes out there and does” so I wanted to pass on a thank you and thank you for your time and good luck to you.

RLE: speaker Okay fine, Semper Fi. Ya’ll have a great rest of the day. Oorah! Take care now.

China to end tax breaks for foreign investors

Chinese government officials now see the country as having reached the status of an ideal locale for foreign direct investors (i.e. those who build plants in-country) and have decided to end the tax breaks that lured them in despite China's many negatives from a foreign investor's standpoint. Will foreign investors continue flocking to China, given its pervasive corruption and onerous requirements* for foreign investors? Or will they divert their investments to China's regional (and out of region) competitors?

China appears close to ending tax breaks long enjoyed by foreign companies, a sign the government believes such incentives are no longer necessary to boost investment and growth.

Since the 1980s, China has offered reduced tax rates to woo foreign investors. These days it is having little trouble persuading them to set up shop or expand, thanks to the country's powerful export-manufacturing base and its robust economic growth -- which officials on Thursday said registered at 10.7% for 2006, surpassing 10% for the fourth straight year. Last year alone, Beijing says foreign companies poured $69.5 billion into Chinese operations.

Indeed, officials now worry that the rapid expansion of foreign-owned manufacturing businesses is using up scarce land and straining supplies of key raw materials. China is also focusing on developing its own domestic champions that can compete with multinationals. In a strategy document issued last year, the government said it will be more selective in foreign investment, and aim for quality, not quantity.

As a result, the government appears increasingly likely to pass a long-discussed tax law during China's annual legislative session in March that would, among other things, equalize tax rates for local and foreign companies. China's current official rate is generally higher than Hong Kong's and Singapore's, but lower than those of many European countries, and roughly in line with those of other developing nations.

According to a draft of the proposed "Enterprise Income Tax Law" that has been circulating among businesses in recent weeks, the tax rate for foreign and domestic companies will be set at 25%, and most existing tax holidays will be phased out over five years. Currently, the corporate-income tax rate is 33%, but local governments and development zones have often offered foreign companies rates as low as 15% to set up in their jurisdictions.

"Where I think the law has got its greatest impact is on the brand new investor," said Brendan Kelly, a tax partner in the Shanghai office of Baker & McKenzie LLP. Most foreign companies now operating in China are aware that they will have to deal with higher taxes in the future, he said. But "someone new to the marketplace may have been expecting a lot of tax holidays, and they may find it surprising how heavily this will impact them."

Compared with the wealth of incentives that are offered now, the draft law allows for only a few exceptions. Small companies with minimal profits would qualify for a 20% tax rate, while high-technology companies considered to be of national importance would still be granted a 15% rate. The new law would also permit areas with large ethnic-minority populations to offer income-tax breaks.

Wang Li, deputy commissioner of the State Administration of Taxation, said Wednesday that the law will be submitted to the National People's Congress, China's legislature, when it meets starting March 5. If passed, as now seems likely, the law could take effect in 2008. Mr. Wang, speaking at a news briefing, didn't comment on the contents of the draft law, which hasn't been officially released by the government, and which could still change before being adopted.

"In the past, having different tax policies for foreign and domestic companies was necessary, and played an important role in attracting foreign investment and stimulating economic growth," Mr. Wang said. However, he said, problems with the current system have since become apparent, such as the way it permits domestic companies to lower their taxes by setting up offshore, and the need for change has become more apparent.

Tax authorities first proposed a unified 25% income-tax rate in mid-2001. Domestic companies, more of which have been paying the statutory 33% rate, were eager supporters. But local governments, worried that the loss of tax breaks would hurt their economic-development programs, resisted.

* Among other things, foreign investors are required to hand over their technology to Chinese companies via joint-venture requirements. They are also not allowed to take their machinery with them if they decide to move their factory to some other country.

How will the upcoming housing bust affect the economy?

Goldman Sachs is pessimistic:

The US Federal Reserve will need to slash interest rates three times this year as the housing slump goes from bad to worse and the American consumer begins to buckle, Goldman Sachs has warned.

"Americans have shown a complete lack of self-control. The personal savings rate is at its lowest point ever, and has actually been negative since April 2005.

"We believe that housing will soon become the proverbial 'straw that breaks the camel's back'," said David Kostin, the investment bank's US strategist.

Goldman Sachs said homeowners had treated windfall gains from rising house prices as if they were "recurring income", using home equity withdrawls to subsidize over-stretched lifestyles. This artificial boost to spending has already dropped from 7pc to 4pc of GDP over the last year, and is likely to halve again in 2007.

The US Federal Reserve will need to slash interest rates three times this year as the housing slump goes from bad to worse and the American consumer begins to buckle, Goldman Sachs has warned. ‘Americans have shown a complete lack of self-control. The personal savings rate is at its lowest point ever, and has actually been negative since April 2005.

Commenting on the article, MA writes:

I treat my place as though I were buying a car… just need to pay it off.

At current prices, buying a house is like buying a car - a Lamborghini, except you're actually getting a Honda Accord, despite paying premium prices. The reason these people are having to do home equity loans is because they've exercised no discipline - not in their consumption of luxury goods, but in their consumption of homes. Home prices are the reason for this debt. Buying overpriced homes is included in consumption, not in savings. And the mortgage payment is probably the biggest item in any homeowner's budget. Which is why I believe consumption will hold up and savings will increase as home prices collapse. Consumers will no longer chase overpriced homes and the exorbitant interest payments (at these home price levels, don't think of a mortgage payment as an investment - it's simply an oversized credit card bill) that come with them.

Lessons from the Quran

The first American Muslim Congressman was sworn in using a copy of the Quran that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. This Quran's background is a little more complicated than Ellison may be aware of:

Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United States congressman. True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the Quran, the Muslim book of jihad and pledged his allegiance to the United States during his ceremonial swearing-in.

Capitol Hill staff said Ellison's swearing-in photo opportunity drew more media than they had ever seen in the history of the U.S. House. Ellison represents the 5th Congressional District of Minnesota.

The Quran Ellison used was no ordinary book. It once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and one of America's founding fathers. Ellison borrowed it from the Rare Book Section of the Library of Congress. It was one of the 6,500 Jefferson books archived in the library.

Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Quran because it showed that "a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.

There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic "Barbary" states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.

Ellison's use of Jefferson's Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.

Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African and Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.

The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal villages had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to kill off as many of the "non-Muslim" older men and women as possible so the preferred "booty" of only young women and children could be collected.

Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as concubines in Islamic markets. Islamic law provides for the sexual interests of Muslim men by allowing them to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as their fortunes allow.

Boys, as young as 9 or 10 years old, were often mutilated to create eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the Middle East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along major African slave routes so the necessary surgery could be performed. It was estimated that only a small number of the boys subjected to the mutilation survived after the surgery.

When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the "Dey of Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.

Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate treaties with the four Barbary States. Congress appointed a special commission consisting of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.

Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the new America government tried to appease the Muslim slavers by agreeing to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve seized American ships and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.

Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers" ambassador to Britain.

The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress' vote to appease.

During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress.

Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.

The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.

In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves.

During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.

Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn, with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."

It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put and end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a "visionary" wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim book of jihad.

How are rubber bands made?

In China, they are occasionally made from recycled materials - from a source you may find surprising:

A WOMAN surnamed Yu was surprised to find that a rubber band she had purchased to tie up her hair had been made out of a used or sub-standard condom, Chinanews.com.cn reported.

The woman from Qingdao, Shandong Province, said the product was of acceptable quality, having good flexibility.

The Qingdao government has launched an investigation into two stalls in the city's market that were selling the goods.

State-appointed prophylactics manufacturer Qingdao Shuangdie Group confirmed that the rubber bands were made out of bits of used and abandoned or low-quality condom.

Engineer Zhang Fan of Qingdao Shuangdie Group said there was strict control over production of condoms. Only eight plants had been appointed to undertake such production.

State regulations required rejected materials and shoddy products to be broken down and sent to a plastics factory in Beijing, the engineer said.

The hawkers at the stalls claimed the rubber bands had been procured from Yiwu in Zhejiang Province.

An investigation in Yiwu carried out by Zhejiang Jinhua Quality Supervision Bureau found that several stalls were selling the condom-made rubber bands. But most vendors claimed to be unaware of the fact.

By looking at the package of rubber bands, bureau officials were able to track down the wholesalers, who turned out to be a couple operating out of Qinyang, Henan Province.