SPQR

The Battle of Cannae and the whole history of the Second Punic War have mesmerised generals, pundits and historians ever since. Probably no war has been refought so often in so many studies and lecture rooms or been scrutinised so intently by the military men of the modern world, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Field Marshal Montgomery and Norman Schwarzkopf. Its causes remain as clouded in speculation and second-guessing as they ever were. Retrospectively it became for the Romans another clash of superpowers, and the stuff of epic poetry. Virgil’s Aeneid even gives it a mythic origin in Roman prehistory, when the Carthaginian queen Dido, abandoned by her lover Aeneas (on his way to found Rome), throws herself to her death onto a funeral pyre – cursing him and his whole race. In reality, it is hard to fathom either the Roman or the Carthaginian aims. Carthage, in its prime position on the North African coast, with impressive harbours and a grander cityscape than contemporary Rome, had wide trading interests in the western Mediterranean and might well have had reason to distrust the growing power of its Italian rival. Ancient and modern writers have pointed, in varying degrees, to Rome’s provocation of Hannibal in Spain and Hannibal’s grudge against Rome for its victory in the First Punic War. At the latest count, there are more than thirty versions of what really lay behind the conflict.
For many analysts, the strategic choices of the Romans and Carthaginians have been particularly intriguing, and revealing. On Hannibal’s side, these go far beyond the favourite puzzles about what elephant route he might have taken across the Alps or whether his reported trick of breaking open Alpine rocks by pouring vinegar on them could ever have worked (probably not). The main issue has always been why on earth, after the stunning victory at Cannae, he did not go on to take the city of Rome while he had the chance but instead gave the Romans time to recover. Livy imagines one of Hannibal’s officers, by the name of Maharbal, saying to him: ‘You know how to win a victory, Hannibal; you don’t know how to exploit it.’ Montgomery is only one of the many later generals who have agreed with Maharbal. Hannibal was a brilliant soldier and dashing adventurer who had the final prize within his grasp, but for some unfathomable reason (loss of nerve or some flaw of character) he failed to take it. Hence his tragic glamour.
The eventual victory of the Romans highlights a much more down-to-earth clash of strategy and military style, between on the one hand Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator – the last three names, ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism – and on the other Scipio Africanus. Fabius took command after Cannae, avoided pitched battle with Hannibal and played a waiting game, combining guerrilla tactics with a scorched-earth policy, to wear down the enemy (hence ‘delayer’). For some observers, this canny strategy largely won the day. Despite his close association with Africanus, Ennius credited Fabius with ensuring Rome’s survival: ‘One man alone restored the state to us by delaying [cunctando],’ he wrote. George Washington, the ‘American Fabius’, as he has sometimes been called, opted for similar tactics at the start of the American War of Independence, harassing rather than directly engaging the enemy, and even the British left-wing Fabian Society adopted his name and example – the message being, ‘if you want the revolution to be successful, you must, like Fabius, bide your time’. But there have always been those who have thought Fabius a slowcoach or a ditherer rather than a clever strategist, in contrast to the much more dashing Scipio Africanus, who eventually took over the command and persuaded the senate to allow him to move the war into Africa and finish Hannibal off there. In describing that senate meeting, Livy scripts a largely imaginary debate between the cautious, elderly Fabius and Africanus, the energetic rising star. It polarises not only their different approaches to the war but also different ways of understanding Roman virtus. Did ‘manliness’ necessarily mean speed and vigour? Could it be heroic to be slow?
Retrospective generalship can be misleading, however, especially when it comes to re-creating what happened in any individual battle. Talk of tactics, and all the splendid military diagrams that usually accompany it, offers a highly sanitised version of Roman warfare and suggests that we know more about the face of Roman battle than we do – even about such a momentous engagement as Cannae. It is true that there are lengthy accounts in Polybius (who may have consulted eyewitnesses), Livy and other historians, but these are incompatible in details, hard to follow and in places almost nonsensical. We do not even know where exactly the battle took place, and the different proposed sites are the result of trying to match up conflicting versions in ancient writers with the layout of the land, as it might have been then, not forgetting the changed course of the nearby river. What is more, despite the almost mystical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae, which are still on the syllabus of military academies, they amounted to little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy. This was the one trick that ancient generals always tried if they could, for it offered the best chance of encircling the opposition and the only reliable way of killing or capturing them in large numbers.
Indeed, it is hard to see how more sophisticated tactics could have been deployed in an ancient battle with more than 100,000 men on the field. How the commanders could have issued effective instructions to their armies or how they could even have known what was going on in different areas of the fighting are almost complete mysteries. Add to that the polyglot forces, whether multinational mercenaries or non-Latin-speaking allies of the Romans, strange star turns (some of the Gauls apparently fought naked), cavalrymen trying to manoeuvre and fight without the benefit of stirrups (a later invention) and, in some engagements (though not at Cannae, as Hannibal’s had all died by then), wounded elephants running wild and charging back into their own lines, and the picture is chaos. Aemilius Paullus may have had this in mind when he remarked: ‘A man who knows how to conquer in battle also knows how to give a banquet and organise games.’ He is usually taken to have been referring to the connection between military victory and spectacle; but he may have also been hinting that the talents of a successful general did not go far beyond basic organisational expertise.
Nevertheless, Cannae was indeed a crucial turning point in the Second Punic War, and in the longer history of Roman military expansion, precisely because the Romans lost so many men there and nearly ran out of cash. The basic bronze coin – the as – was reduced in weight over the course of the war, from almost 300 grams to just over 50. And Livy tells how in 214 BCE individual Romans were called upon to pay directly to man the fleet: a nice indication of the patriotism that surrounded the war effort, of the emptiness of the public treasury, but also of the cash that there still was in private hands, despite the crisis. Almost any other ancient state in that position would have been forced to surrender. Nothing underscores better the importance of Rome’s enormous reserves of citizen and allied manpower than the single fact that it continued to fight the war. To judge from Hannibal’s actions after Cannae, he perhaps saw this point too. It may not have been a loss of nerve that dissuaded him from marching on Rome. Realising that allied manpower sustained Rome’s strength, he directed himself to the slow process of winning over the Italian allies – with some success, but never in sufficient numbers to undermine Roman durability.
That must also have been in Polybius’ mind when he chose to insert into his Histories a long digression on the strength of the Roman political system, as it was at the time of Cannae. His overall aim was to explain why the Romans had conquered the world, and part of that explanation lay in the strength and stability of Rome’s internal political structures. His account is the first more or less contemporary description of Roman political life to survive (Polybius was looking back fifty years or so but also mixing in observations of his own time); and at the same time it is the first attempt at a theoretical analysis of how Roman politics worked, one that sets the agenda even now.

and

The empire’s new horizons also helped to create – or at least to define with much sharper edges and ideological significance – the image of the ‘old-fashioned Roman’. That down-to-earth, no-nonsense, hardy, warts-and-all character plays his part in our stereotype of Roman culture even now. The chances are that he was largely a creation of this period too.
Some of the most outspoken voices of the third and second centuries BCE became famous for attacking the corrupting influence on traditional Roman behaviour and morals of foreign culture in general, and Greek culture in particular; their targets ranged from literature and philosophy to naked exercise, fancy food and depilation. In the forefront of the critics was Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Elder’), a contemporary and rival of Scipio Africanus, whom Cato criticised for, among other things, cavorting in Greek gymnasia and theatres in Sicily. He is also supposed to have dubbed Socrates a ‘terrible prattler’, to have recommended a Roman medicinal regime of green vegetables, duck and pigeon (rather than anything to do with Greek doctors, who were liable to kill you) and to have warned that Roman power could be brought down by the passion for Greek literature. According to Polybius, Cato once remarked that one sign of the deterioration of the Republic was that pretty boys now cost more than fields, jars of pickled fish more than ploughmen. He was not alone in these views. In the middle of the second century BCE another prominent figure successfully argued that a Greek-style theatre being built in Rome should be demolished, as it was better and more character forming for Romans to watch plays standing up, as they had traditionally done, rather than sitting down in decadent Eastern fashion. In short, so these arguments went, what passed for Greek ‘sophistication’ was no more than insidious ‘softness’ (or mollitia in Roman jargon), which was bound to sap the strength of the Roman character.
Was this a simple conservative backlash against newfangled ideas being brought into Rome from outside, a bout of ‘culture wars’ between traditionalists and modernisers? In part, perhaps, it was. But it was also more complicated, and interesting, than that. For all his huffing and puffing, Cato had taught his son Greek, and his surviving writing – notably, a technical essay on farming and agricultural management, and substantial quotations from his speeches and from his history of Italy – shows that he was well practised in the Greek rhetorical tricks that he claimed to deplore. And some of the claims being made about ‘Roman tradition’ were little short of imaginative fantasy. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that venerable old Romans had watched theatrical performances standing up. The evidence we have suggests quite the reverse.
The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites.
That is exactly what we see, in a particularly vertiginous form, in the story Livy, among others, tells of how the Great Mother goddess was brought into Rome with tremendous fanfare from Asia Minor in 204 BCE, towards the end of the Second Punic War. This was a very Roman occasion. A book of Roman oracles that was supposed to go back to the reign of the Tarquins recommended that the goddess Cybele, as she was also known, be incorporated into the Roman pantheon. The range of deities worshipped in Rome was proudly elastic, and the Great Mother was the patron deity of the Romans’ ancestral home – Aeneas’ Troy – and so, in a sense, belonged in Italy. They sent a senior deputation to collect the image of the goddess and transport her back, and they chose, as the oracle had insisted, ‘the best man in the state’ to receive her in Rome – who turned out to be another Scipio. He was accompanied in the welcoming party by a noble Roman woman, in some accounts a Vestal Virgin, and the image was taken from the ship and passed from the coast to the city, hand to hand, by a long line of other women. The goddess was temporarily lodged in the shrine of Victory until her own temple was built. It would be the first building in Rome, so far as we know, constructed using that most Roman of materials, and the one on which so many of the Romans’ later architectural masterpieces relied: concrete.
Nothing could have pleased Cato more – except that not everything was quite as it seemed. The image of the goddess was not what the Romans could possibly have been expecting. It was a large black meteorite, not a conventional statue in human form. And the meteorite came accompanied by a retinue of priests. These were self-castrated eunuchs, with long hair, tambourines and a passion for self-flagellation. This was all about as un-Roman as you could imagine. And forever after it raised uncomfortable questions about ‘the Roman’ and ‘the foreign’, and where the boundary between them lay. If this was the kind of thing that came from Rome’s ancestral home, what did that imply about what it was to be Roman?

and parenthetically
Many Roman portraits in the second and first centuries BCE present their subjects as elderly, wrinkled and craggy. Now often known as the ‘veristic’ (or hyper-realistic) style, it is, in fact, a deeply ‘idealising’ form of representation, celebrating a particular version of how a Roman should look in contrast to the youthful perfection of so much Greek sculpture.
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SPQR

Second, the Romans did not plan to conquer and control Italy. No Roman cabal in the fourth century BCE sat down with a map, plotting a land grab in the territorial way that we associate with imperialist nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a start, simple as it sounds, they had no maps. What this implies for how they, or any other ‘precartographic’ people, conceived the world around them, or just over their horizons, is one of history’s great mysteries. I have tended to write of the spread of Roman power through the peninsula of Italy, but no one knows how many – or, realistically, how few – Romans at this date thought of their homeland as part of a peninsula in the way we picture it. A rudimentary version of the idea is perhaps implied by references in literature of the second century BCE to the Adriatic as the Upper Sea and the Tyrrhenian as the Lower Sea, but notably this is on a different orientation from ours, east–west rather than north–south.
These Romans saw their expansion more in terms of changing relationships with other peoples than in terms of control of territory. Of course, Rome’s growing power did dramatically transform the landscape of Italy. There was little that was more obviously transformative than a brand-new Roman road striking out across empty fields, or land being annexed and divided up among new settlers. It continues to be convenient to measure Roman power in Italy in terms of geographical area. Yet Roman dominion was primarily over people, not places. As Livy saw, the relations that the Romans formed with those people were the key to the dynamics of early Roman expansion.
There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.
The results may well have been unintended, but they were ground-breaking. For this system of alliances became an effective mechanism for converting Rome’s defeated enemies into part of its growing military machine; and at the same time it gave those allies a stake in the Roman enterprise, thanks to the booty and glory that were shared in the event of victory. Once the Romans’ military success started, they managed to make it self-sustaining, in a way that no other ancient city had ever systematically done. For the single most significant factor behind victory at this period was not tactics, equipment, skill or motivation. It was how many men you could deploy. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the Romans had probably not far short of half a million troops available (compare the 50,000 or so soldiers under Alexander in his eastern campaigns, or perhaps 100,000 when the Persians invaded Greece in 481 BCE). This made them close to invincible in Italy: they might lose a battle, but not a war. Or as one Roman poet put it in the 130s BCE, ‘The Roman people has often been defeated by force and overcome in many battles, but never in an actual war on which everything depends.’
There were, however, other far-reaching implications of the way the Romans defined their relations with other peoples in Italy. The ‘allies’, who were committed to no more than supplying manpower, were the most numerous, but they were only one of the categories concerned. To some communities over wide areas in central Italy, the Romans extended Roman citizenship. Sometimes this involved full citizen rights and privileges, including the right to vote or stand in Roman elections while also continuing to be a citizen of a local town. In other cases they offered a more limited form of rights that came to be known (self-explanatorily) as ‘citizenship without the vote’, or civitas sine suffragio. There were also people who lived on conquered territories in settlements known as colonies (coloniae). These had nothing to do with colonies in the modern sense of the word but were new (or expanded) towns usually made up of a mixture of locals and settlers from Rome. A few had full Roman citizenship status. Most had what was known as Latin rights. That was not citizenship as such but a package of rights believed to have been shared since time immemorial by the Latin towns, later formally defined as intermarriage with Romans, mutual rights to make contracts, free movement and so on. It was a halfway house between having full citizenship and being a foreigner, or hostis.
How this complicated mosaic of statuses had originated is again hard to know. Roman writers of the first century BCE, followed by modern legal scholars, tended to treat them as part of a highly technical, carefully calibrated system of civic rights and responsibilities. But that is almost certainly the product of later legal rationalisation. It is inconceivable that the men of the fourth century BCE sat down to debate the precise implications of civitas sine suffragio or the exact privileges that went with belonging to a ‘Latin’ colony. Much more likely, they were improvising their new relationships with different peoples in the outside world by using, and adjusting, their existing, rudimentary categories of citizenship and ethnicity.
The implications, however, were again revolutionary. In extending citizenship to people who had no direct territorial connections with the city of Rome, they broke the link, which most people in the classical world took for granted, between citizenship and a single city. In a systematic way that was then unparalleled, they made it possible not just to become Roman but also to be a citizen of two places at once: one’s home town and Rome. And in creating new Latin colonies all over Italy, they redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’. This model was shortly extended overseas and eventually underpinned the Roman Empire.

William S Burroughs... advice

 I think I have $60 left. That's $2 per day for this month. Wouldn't be so bad if I didn't need junk. I spend $2 per day on junk alone. And I give Kiki 500 per day pocket money, and I have to feed him. He found work for three weeks, but the job gave out. His mother is sick and she can't work so he has to support her. My 500 goes, usually, to his mother. Then he will want another 500 to see a football game or a movie. Well enough of all this dreary ledger so inexorably in the red. [ . . . I have started writing a Chandler-style, straight, action story about some super Heroin you can get a habit on one shot with it or something similar. I'm not even sure yet. But it starts out 2 detectives come to arrest me. I know I am to be used in experiments with this drug. (They don't know this.) To save myself I kill them both. That is where I am now. On the lam. Waiting to score for 1/2 ounce of junk to hide out with, the alarm is going out right now; to every precinct, every prowl car, etc., etc. Don't ask me what is going to happen I just don't know. May turn allegorical or even sur-realist. A ver.9 I read interesting case. England. 2 naval Lieutenants. Good friends. Drinking. One hits a shot glass every time at six feet with his pistol. The other picks up a hat and holds it in his hand, and says "shoot it." The Lieutenant shot a hole in it. Later on the 2nd party puts the hat on his head and says, "Now try it." Then, at a distance of six feet, the Lt. in the first part takes careful aim at the very top of the hat and fires (there were witnesses) hitting his friend in the head. Friend may live, though. I am amazed by exact similarities. I am quite a good shot and accustomed to handle guns. I aimed carefully at distance of 6 feet for the very top of the glass. Do you know the story of Mike Fink? He'd been shooting shot glasses off the bar all afternoon. Finally a young friend of his put a shot glass on his head and Mike missed and killed the boy. The bartender did not believe it was an accident because Mike was known as a good shot. He got his own gun and shot Fink dead. (Another case in Durango, Mexico. Politico in whore house tried to shoot glass off whore's head. Killed her.) I mean there is something odd here. The Lt. saying just like me "But how could I miss at that distance?" I don't understand it. May yet attempt a story or some account of Joan's death. I suspect my reluctance is not all because I think it would be in bad taste to write about it. I think I am afraid. Not exactly to discover unconscious intent. It's more complex, more basic and more horrible, as if the brain drew the bullet toward it. Did I tell you Kells' dream the night of Joan's death? This was before he knew, of course. I was cooking something in a pot, and he asked what I was cooking and I said "Brains!" and opened the pot showing "what looked like a lot of white worms." I forgot to ask him how I looked, general atmosphere etc. To summarize, I pass along one of my specialized bits of wisdom like "always use poultry shears to cut offfingers": "Never participate in active or passive role in any shooting things off of, or near one, or knife throwing or anything similar and, if a bystander, always try to stop it." I told you of horrible, nightmare depression and anxiety I had that whole day, so that I asked myself continually: "What in God's name is the matter with me?" One more point. The idea of shooting a glass off her head had never entered my mind, consciously, until, out of the blue so far as I can recall—I was very drunk, of course —I said: "It's about time for our William Tell act . . . Put a glass on your head, Joan." Nothing led up to the idea. From then on I was concentrating on aiming for the very top of the glass. Note all these precautions as though I had to do it like the original William Tell. Why, instead of being so careful, not give up the idea? Why indeed? In my present state of mind I am afraid to go too deep into this matter.

More Manet

 The second, begun the previous November and painted on a canvas almost six feet high by five feet wide, was a biblical episode entitled The Dead Christ with Angels. Manet had painted a few religious scenes in his career, though these were done not out of any special feelings of piety or devotion so much as from a love of the works of Italian Renaissance artists like Titian and Tintoretto. Manet had a particular affection for Tintoretto, a sixteenth-century Venetian, some-times known as Il Furioso, who was renowned for his fa presto {"work quickly") style of painting in which he applied his pigments with brush-popping vehemence. Tintoretto's Self-Portrait, which featured the mournful
face of the gray-bearded, baggy-eyed artist hovering against a pitch-dark face background, was one of Manet's favorite paintings. He made a copy of the work in the Louvre and thereafter, as if paying court to a wise old sage, never failed to seek out the original on his visits to the museum. Tintoretto was predominantly a religious artist who, among his many scenes from the New Testament, depicted several of the dead Christ. Likewise, Manet's Dead Christ with Angels depicts precisely what its title describes—the figure of the dead Christ slumped between two winged, female figures. One of the angels has lifted the muscular, half-naked body of the crucified Christ into a sitting position, while the other weeps as in a Lamentation or a Pieta. Still, despite its allusions to Tintoretto and other Renaissance painters, Manet's work included touches that were unconventional to the point of eccentricity: one of his angels sported orange robes and unfolded a pair of blue wings, while—strangest of all—Christ's loincloth was pink.* The Dead Christ with Angels was idiosyncratic for reasons beyond its unique choices in color. For some reason Manet placed the wound from the spear on Christ's left side rather than, as the Scriptures record, his right. Furthermore, an inscription in the foreground referred viewers to the verse in the Gospel of Saint John that recounts how the grief-stricken Mary Magdalen, having told the disciples that Christ's body is missing, returns to the tomb to see "two an-gels in white sitting where the body of Christ had lain." Yet Manet's work, with its curious disjunction between the text and the painting, cannot be taken for a straightforward presentation of the Resurrection, since the body of Christ, slumped lifelessly on the shroud, has neither gone missing from the tomb nor been resurrected. Was Manet simply confusing a Lamentation scene with a Resurrection? Or was he making a more abstruse and controversial point about religion and Christianity? The jurors would evidently have much to ponder.

Beauty in 1920 by A Huxley

 three beauties of the eighteen-eighties and three of the nineteen-twenties. The comparison was most instructive. For a great gulf separates the two types of beauty represented by these two sets of photographs. I remember in If, one of those charming conspiracies of E. V. Lucas and George Morrow, a series of parodied fash-ion-plates entitled "If Faces get any Flatter. Last year's stand-ard, this year's Evening Standard." The faces of our living specimens of beauty have grown flatter with those of their fashion-plate sisters. Compare the types of 1880 and 1920. The first is steep-faced, almost Roman in profile; in the con-temporary beauties the face has broadened and shortened, the profile is less noble, less imposing, more appealingly, more alluringly pretty. Forty years ago it was the aristocratic type that was appreciated; today the popular taste has shifted from the countess to the soubrette. Photography confirms the fact that the ladies of the 'eighties looked like Du Maurier drawings. But among the present young generation one looks in vain for the type; the Du Maurier damsel is as extinct as the mesozoic reptile; the Fish girl and other kindred flat-faced species have taken her place. Between the 'thirties and 'fifties another type, the egg-faced girl, reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the Ladies' Keepsake this invariable type prevails—the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates are terribly aban-doned and provocative. And because one expects so much in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier' age, one is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty's, "Youth on the Prow and Pleas-ure at the Helm." The naiads are of the purest egg-faced type. Their hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and their faces are impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on. It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into the world complete with flowing draperies. It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the ovi-form girl have vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The contemporary hand, with its two mid-dle fingers held together and the forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product. Above all, the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no fashion-plate had more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely
haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those provocative feet in Suckling's ballad: Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out.
It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. Today the fashion-plate is always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more radically. On the text, "the feet of the young women," it would be possible to write a profound philosophical sermon. And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to men-tion another curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside, decrescendo, toward the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf was an even crescent, with its greatest pro-jection opposite the middle of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf is forced upon one's atten-tion by almost every minor picture-maker of the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for in-stance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don't hold much with the beau ideal. The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot, the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any chemical change.

Making Gays the Enemy from Blumenthal

 Under Reconstructionist rules of engagement, lying, deception, and stealth are considered legiti-mate tactics and are even encouraged. There is no requirement for Christians to be truthful "in acts of war?' Rushdoony wrote. "Spying is legitimate, as are deceptive tactics?' Indeed, deception has proved essential to the success of the Ahmansons' campaign to undermine mainline churches. The National Council of Churches—the governing body of the mainline Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches—is one of America's most effective progressive institutions. During the past fifty years, the NCC has advanced civil rights, environmentalism, and peace movements. The NCC's symbolism as a liberal bulwark made it a natural target. Progressive Methodist minister Andrew Weaver explained three years before his death in 2008, "NCC church members' influence is dispro-portionate to their numbers, and [they] include remarkably high
numbers of leaders in politics, business, and culture. . . . A hostile takeover of these churches would represent a massive shift in American culture, power and wealth for a relatively small investment?' In 1981, when the Reagan administration ratcheted up military support for anti-Communist juntas in Central America, a group of anti-Communist Democratic operatives and right-wing moneymen responded by organizing a Washington think tank called the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) to mount an "inside-outside" at-tack on the mainline churches' social activism. In short order, the new outfit shopped material to the mainstream press alleging that the NCC was diverting collection plate donations to Communist guerrillas. In 1982, this propaganda and pressure translated into two devastating and false reports in Reader's Digest and on CBS's 60 Minutes about NCC's purported Communist links. (Twenty years later, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt described the broadcast on the NCC as the greatest regret of his long and illustrious career. "The next morning I got a congratu-latory phone call from every redneck bishop in America and I thought, `Oh my God, we must have done something wrong last night and I think we probably did,'" Hewitt told CNN's Larry King in 2002.) In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, the IRD changed tactics, replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue. The group's shift of focus from the red menace to the lavender one was made possible by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Ahmansons throughout the 1990s and by a grant of over $1 million in 2000 and 2001—the same year Roberta Ahmanson told me she was "inveigled" into joining the IRD's board of directors. The Ahmansons' money was promptly funneled into a smear campaign against the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson, the first openly gay man ever consecrated as a bishop by the Episcopal Church. The IRD cranked up its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast in August 2004, generating a column by Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes titled "The Gay Bishop's Links?' Barnes, who neglected to mention his membership on the IRD's board of directors in his column for the neoconservative magazine, falsely alleged that the website of a gay youth group Robin-son founded contained links to "a pornographic website," and he claimed without independent sourcing that Robinson "put his hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting "several years ago." The IRD circulated the column to various cable news networks, but only Fox News (which also employed Barnes as a regu-lar pundit and host of a talk show) agreed to broadcast it. Although a panel of bishops investigating the charges discredited Barnes's smear, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and divide it from its global affiliates. In May 2007, eleven ultraconservative congregations from Northern Virginia bolted from the Epis-copal Church and joined forces with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by the demagogic Archbishop Peter Akinola. In a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Akinola has managed to grow his congregation while replacing tradi-tional church concerns about social justice with hysteria about homo-sexuality. Akinola spent much of 2006 lobbying Nigeria's legislature to pass a bill meting out five-year prison terms to any gay people who dared to gather—or even touch one another—in public. As the IRD pressed its exploitation of homosexuality to divide Episcopal congregations, it initiated a parallel campaign accusing the mainline Presbyterian Church of anti-Semitism for its protests against Israel's continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The IRD complemented this new tactic by mailing out 100,000 copies of Likud-nik Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh's tract "Islamic Imperialism" to pastors. With this tactic, at an expense of $1.5 million, the Christian Right raised Islamophobia as its new wedge for the post-9/11, post-Bush era. For Ahmanson, the quest to transform the United States into Calvin's elitist "church of the elect," or what Rushdoony called a "spir-itual aristocracy," is not solely a political endeavor. Before Ahmanson and his wife were galvanized into funding conservative advocacy groups, mainline church schisms, and Far Right moral crusades, they had been paralyzed by their own social handicaps and unresolved psychological issues. Emotional fulfillment was unattainable for the Ahmansons until they embraced Rushdoony's inverted vision of free will: "The flight from freedom is always first of all the flight from God, who created man to be responsible and to exercise dominion over the earth under him. The choice is always God or slavery." By exchanging
free will for Reconstructionist mandates—by "doing what God wants him to do," as Roberta Ahmanson told me her husband does—Ahmanson ironically experienced his first sense of liberation. Ahmanson's identification with Tolkien's hero, Frodo, illuminates his sensibility. Both Frodo and Ahmanson were socially withdrawn boys who lost their parents at an early age. Just as Frodo found the childless Bilbo Baggins to nurture him, teach him Elvish, and pass along to him the One Ring that would ultimately have to be de-stroyed to save the world, Ahmanson found Rushdoony. Like Frodo, who gained a sense of camaraderie from the Fellowship of the Ring that was formed to protect him, Ahmanson gathered around himself a wife, a social network, and a community by throwing down the gauntlet against an evil secularism. Without the drama that flowed from their respective missions to save civilization, Frodo and Ah-manson would have never fulfilled many of their most basic needs. In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to Howard Ahmanson, he attempted to show his independence and demonstrate his own reasoning by placing special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often as-sumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ah-manson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, linger-ing, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead." For crisis-wracked individuals such as Ahmanson, radical Chris-tian conservatism is more than politics and more than a style.

Travels With My Aunt

She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was some-thing classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse's knee in the lounge of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers. `Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,' Aunt Augusta said. 'A very fat man. I don't know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It's easier to feel at home with a fat man. Perhaps travelling with me you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.' `I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,' I said jokingly. `You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard Honest Jo Pulling, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long. `Is that why you have travelled so much, Aunt Augusta?' 'At first I travelled for my living,' Aunt Augusta replied. `That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone, and in my case I never got on very well with Angelica. The two A's we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister's name fitted her. A saint she may well have been, but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic.'
and
 I asked her what her boy-friend's project was. 'He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment — say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity — do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate —you wouldn't break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in 'another.' The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supple-ment came back to me. I said, 'Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?' `Not Heinz, Campbell's,' Tooley said. 'That was Andy War-hol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. "Of course," I said, "Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell's are long like English pillar-boxes." I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn't the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn't put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn't an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age — only he didn't call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn't have been any use at all. It wouldn't have been noticed.'
and
Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer. I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek. 'I didn't mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,' I said. 'You resemble your father more than your mother. He be-lieved no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.' 'And my mother?' I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue. 'She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.'
and
He was not singing and I doubt whether he was praying. `Mark my footsteps, good my page,' the sergeant sang lustily, `Tread thou in them boldly,' and the voices in the gallery rose ardently to the unexpected competition from below. At last the proper service began, and I was glad when the Athanasian Creed, which they invariably inflict on us at Christ-mas, was safely over. 'As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three' uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.' (Sergeant Sparrow coughed several times in the course of it.)
and
 The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Corrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge was continually heaving the lead. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ship's draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further. I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stone's throw — or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who having once known prison enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl. His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, 'I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straw for cold drinks. Not in the Argen-tine. I thought I'd make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldn't sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they won't drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you,' he said happily. `So what do you do now?' He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, 'I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.'

Mussolini's Abyssinian Adventure

From the Dark Valley
MUSSOLINI had long dreamed of setting the "Dark Continent" alight. As a youth he had been shocked by the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adowa in 1896, when the Emperor Menelik administered the most dev-astating rebuff ever suffered by a European power in Africa. The figures—"ten thousand dead and seventy-two cannon lost"—hammered in Mussolini's head for years afterwards.' Like D'Annunzio, he regarded this disaster as a "shameful scar,"2 a stigma on the Italian body politic that could only be washed away with blood. Revenge would be sweet, righting a cosmic wrong whereby black savages had defeated the forces of white civilisation. Revenge would also be compensation, in the shape of the last independent African country, for the meagre pickings Italy had obtained at Versailles. An empire would bring dignity to the State, virility to the regime and glory to the Duce. As it was, Italy had only a few tattered colonies, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, Libya and the Dodecanese, which bore no comparison to the splendid possessions of Britain and France. Mussolini felt the hurt deeply. Only an imperial power could be great, Mussolini considered, and as early as 1932 he laid out four large relief maps in the Via del Impero showing how Rome had once embraced territory stretching from Hadrian's Wall to the first cataract of the Nile, from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules. Aggression was the fulfilment of Fascism, in Mussolini's view, the proof that it had not become as decadent as the democracies, and Italian newspapers soon began to laud "the poetry of hatred and the beneficent hygiene of war."3 Finally African conquest would be a Roman triumph worthy of Augustus, a dazzling monument to Mussolini's personal prestige. These were the visceral motives inspiring him to embark on what King Victor Emmanuel was to call "the greatest colonial war in history."4 But Mussolini was also prompted by more immediate considerations. In 1932, when he secretly commissioned General Emilio De Bono to prepare for the Abyssinian adventure, the Duce was preoccupied by the Depression.
Faced with the example of Libya, Italy's largest colony, which repaid only a tithe of what it cost to have and to hold, he could hardly hope that a conquered Ethiopia would come to his rescue economically. Poor, remote and landlocked, Ethiopia could by no means fulfil the classic role of a colony—to be a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods. On the other hand, in an era of protectionism Italians could easily be persuaded of the advantages of having an exclusive economic domain in Ethiopia, just as the Japanese had been convinced about Manchuria. Mussolini, indeed, resented the flourishing Japanese trade with Ethiopia and scotched a royal dynastic marriage which would have strengthened this Afro-Asian axis. Furthermore he had every incentive to divert the attention of Italians from the parlous state of their own country by reviving their long-felt fas-cination for the "lure of Africa."' He appreciated the possibilities of channelling internal frustration into external violence. He saw the chance of mobilising patriots behind the regime and he reckoned that militant nationalism could invigorate moribund Fascism. In 1932 he declared that Fascism carried "the anti-pacifist attitude into the life of the individual. 'I don't give a damn'—the proud motto of the fighting squads . . . sums up a doctrine which is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit which accepts all risks." Mussolini visualised that Ethiopia would provide living-space for a population he was encouraging to expand and which could no longer find an outlet in the United States. He may also have hoped to relieve unemployment by his call to arms and men. At any rate many Italians saw an escape from the rigours of the Depression in the fer-tile cotton-growing regions of Gojjam and Jimma, among the rich coffee plantations of Kaffa and Sidamo, amid the gold and platinum of Yubdo and Birbir.
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Moreover, when the Crown Prince and future Emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Makonnen (otherwise known by his bap-tismal name, Haile Selassie, which means "Power of the Trinity"), visited Europe a couple of years later he had been greeted more cordially in Italy than anywhere else. A tiny figure, only five feet four inches tall, Ras Tafari made up in dignity what he lacked in stature. As one of his American advisers put it, "he invariably looked out upon the world as from an inner eminence."n Aloof, arrogant, austere, he modelled his public behaviour on that of the Emperor Hirohito. Even abroad he acted like a deity receiving homage, preserving an Olympian calm not least in the face of racist slights. Most foreigners were struck, however, by the refinement of Ras Tafari's appearance: close-cropped curly hair, high brown forehead, trim crisp beard, long hawkish nose and large black eyes which alone betrayed his moods, sparkling with humour, glittering with disdain, suffused with melancholy. Though he spoke jerkily in a low, grating voice and his minute, exquisitely-shaped hands sometimes toyed with a jewelled ring or a gold fountain pen, Ras Tafari possessed the imperial gift of immobility. In the words of the journalist George Steer, he appeared "at all times, even in the middle of war, completely detached and poised above the melee, pursuing his quiet, rather delicate and well-dressed life without noting overmuch the noise which surrounded him."" What went on behind this impassive exterior was a mystery. Ras Tafari had learned French from his tutor and imbibed more than a smattering of Western culture at mission school. But his most formative experiences had been in securing the succession to an empire where the norm was intrigue, murder and civil strife. He understood something of the modern world, favoured progressive schemes including the building of model prisons and was the first Ethiopian to fly. But he stemmed from the legendary world of Prester John, dispensed medieval punishments such as mutilation and identified himself with a people who believed that war-planes could be made to crash by spells. He encouraged the introduction of modern medi-cine but took precautions to protect his family from witchcraft. Dressed in a black, gold-embroidered silk cloak, white suit and solar topi, and carry-ing an elegant ebony walking-stick, he went to church in his red Rolls-Royce, but also presided over feats at which squatting warriors hacked from bleeding oxen carcasses carried in on a pole.
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and
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The war which we have begun on African soil is a war of civilisation and liberation. It is a war of the people. The Italian people feels it as its own. It is the war of the poor, of the disinherited, of the proletariat. Against us are ranged the forces of conservatism, of selfishness, and of hypocrisy. We have taken on a hard fight against these forces. We shall continue this fight to the end.55 The rhetoric may have been catchpenny but Italians backed it with gold. On the same day they participated in one of the most successful ceremo-nies ever dreamed up by the Fascists—the donation of wedding rings to the war effort.
Mussolini's Abyssinian Adventure
4W'
The statuesque Queen Elena, unkindly said to be twice the size of the pocket monarch she had married, initiated this "Day of Faith." Shortly before 9:oo A.M. she entered the crowded Piazza Venezia, where she was greeted by Party Secretary Starace, supreme architect of pageants. Hud-dled against the rain squalls in a trilby-style hat, fox-fur wrap and long black velvet coat, she mounted the broad white steps of the massive Victor Emmanuel monument, which was guarded by young Fascists. She threw her own ring and her husband's into one of three smoking bronze urns—the suggestion being that the metal was melted down for instant use. Then she was given two dark steel bands, each inscribed with the motto "Gold to the Fatherland," which were blessed by Monsignor Bartolomasi. The Queen next laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and, hold-ing a lighted taper, delivered a short speech which was broadcast to the nation. In a low, clear voice, which at times trembled with emotion, she said:
In ascending to the Sacrarium of the Altar of the Fatherland, together with the proud mothers and wives of our dear Italy, to lay on the Altar of the Unknown Warrior the wedding ring, symbol of our first joys, and of the greatest renunciations, as the purest offering of devotion to the Fatherland, bowing ourselves down to the earth as if to commune in spirit with our glorious sons who fell in the Great War [here she gave a Fascist salute which was imitated by all present], we invoke together with them before God, "Victory" Young sons of Italy, who are defending her sacred rights and are opening new paths for the brilliant march of the Fatherland, we wish that you may bring about the triumph of Roman civilization in the Africa which you have redeemed.
The crowd cheered ecstatically: "Long live the Queen," "Long live the House of Savoy."56 Led by Rachele Mussolini, 250,000 Romans followed the royal example. Mostly women, all wearing black, some in fur coats but many in tattered clothes and hatless, they queued for hours to pay their solemn tribute. In Milan, in Naples, in Trieste, all over the country the same patriotic scene was acted out. Correctly interpreting the Pope's Del-phic utterances as tacit support for the Catholic "colonisers of Africa,"57 clergy gave their gold crosses and chains. Jews surrendered their own holy artifacts, including the' gold key of the ark of the law from their synagogue in Rome. Pirandello handed over his Nobel Prize gold medal. Old opponents of Fascism were reconciled and even Benedetto Croce contributed his senatorial emblem. When Prince Doria's Scottish wife refused to give up her ring, she was assaulted; it became difficult to wear anything but a band of steel. Some of those were doubtless acquired in exchange for cheap rings... jewelers were stripped of their stock.

From the Times

On Shinto by Nicholas Kristoff
Japan is usually described as a Buddhist or Shinto nation, but most Japanese adhere to a sort of folk religion that mixes Buddhism and Shintoism. The Okuyama family, for example, keeps a Buddhist altar in the living room and makes daily offerings, but in the next room is a Shinto altar to other gods.

Like most women in Omiya, Mrs. Okuyama wore a supposedly divine sash from the fourth month of her pregnancy. Typically, the gynecologist writes a few lucky words on the sash, and helps pick an auspicious "day of the dog" on the traditional calendar to begin to wear it. The sash has pictures of dogs on it, and the idea is that it will allow the woman to give birth as easily as dogs do. ...

Shintoism has been the traditional faith of Japan since ancient times. Buddhism arrived from China in the sixth century. Christianity followed in the 16th century, but after making inroads was brutally suppressed in the 17th century and has never recovered.

Under the military rulers in the early part of this century, Shintoism was the formal state religion and centered on venerating the Emperor as a living god. But Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity after World War II, during the American occupation, and there is now no official religion in Japan.

Today Japanese turn to Buddhism mainly at times of death; Shintoism is more evident in marriages and daily life.

When Mrs. Okuyama's elder daughter was taking high school entrance examinations last year, the family took her to the nearby Shinto Head Shrine. When residents want to improve their brain power -- or simply ease a headache -- they pat the holy boulder at the Head Shrine and then touch their heads. Or they drink the holy water. ...The Head Shrine is an example of the practicality of Shintoism, which focuses on venerating the gods of nature.

To Japanese farmers, every natural feature can contain a spirit: a big rock, a tall tree, a creek, a hill, a rice paddy. A bad harvest or unexplained death may mean the gods are angry, so Shinto priests are often summoned to conduct purification rituals. ....Folk religion also has a darker side. Older people in Omiya say they remember decades ago when people would put hexes on one another.

The idea was to go out in the middle of the night with a straw doll representing the person to be hexed. Then one pounded a long nail through the doll into a tree, and the victim would suffer terrible misfortune.

According to one elderly resident, frustrated wives sometimes used to put hexes on their husbands. Divorce was inconceivable, and talking back to their husbands might result in a beating, so a hex was the most satisfying way of getting even.

To Americans who have a vague notion of Zen Buddhism, Mr. Kondo may come as a surprise. He has never heard of the Zen riddle of "the sound of one hand clapping." And he chuckles when asked how often he meditates in a Zen position.

"I hardly ever sit in the Zen position," he said. "I'm overworked. I don't have time to meditate."

Buddhist temples are often criticized for being businesses almost as much as religious institutions, especially for the hefty sums they charge for funerals. Some also run businesses on the side; one runs a night club.

"People say those monks are so greedy and charge so much that no one can afford to die," admitted Mr. Kondo. "But we have an expression: that we will accept just a blade of grass as payment."

When pressed, Mr. Kondo quickly conceded this was just an expression. His fee for a funeral is $1,000 for himself, plus an expected $1,000 donation to provide a Buddhist name for the deceased, plus numerous other charges. All told, the bereaved family typically pays $4,000 or more.

The Japanese tendency to mix religions sometimes puzzles Westerners, some of whom who have trouble seeing how one can believe in more than one faith at a time. Likewise, the distinction between the human and spiritual worlds is hazy, so it is possible to believe that Mr. Hiraiwa died of kidney disease -- and also that he was done in by a fox devil.

The zone between the human and divine spheres is filled with a moral gray area. Christianity, Judaism and Islam use moral imperatives, albeit subject to wide interpretation, to inspire in believers a sense that something is right or wrong. In contrast, Japanese religion is more reluctant to reach a judgment.

Japan is not torn by great moral arguments -- over abortion, for example -- that are often fought by people elsewhere with a passionate sense of moral conviction.

To some social critics, this implies the lack of a moral compass, the absence of an ethical core. Yet Japanese religion can be described as a broad tolerance in matters of ethics and spirituality.

Pressed on whether they really believe in a tree spirit or rice-paddy god, younger Japanese often have trouble answering. Intellectually they may doubt it, just as Americans doubt the existence of ghosts, at least in daylight. But young Japanese may still feel uncomfortable about living in a home with a door at its "devil's gate" -- a direction from which evil can enter.

Some Japanese point out that Shinto and Buddhist beliefs can be effective -- in building a sense of community, in comforting the bereaved -- even if they are not literally true. Mr. Kondo, the Zen monk, said he did not believe in the Head Shrine -- but does not doubt its effectiveness.

"If a son sees his mother go a long way to the Head Shrine to pray for him, then maybe he'll think, 'Mom really cares for my future; gee, I better study really hard,' " Mr. Kondo said. "Then that may lead to the boy passing his college entrance examinations."

Most people in Omiya say that a soul is in a Buddhist waiting period for 50 years, and that it then becomes a Shinto god. But Mr. Nishi says his wife became a goddess almost immediately after death.

"These offerings," he said simply, "are to the goddess that my wife has become."

Mr. Nishi, like many older people in Omiya, frets that young people are not as pious as their elders. Religion is no longer as important a part of village life, and there is the risk that future generations will not sweep the gravestones, pour water over the headstones to slake the spirits' thirst or even make the daily offerings to the shrines in the home.

"Young people have a less religious mind," complained Yasuichi Funase, a Shinto priest at the Fire Prevention Shrine in Omiya. "That may be one reason why people commit more crimes now. And why there are cases like Aum Shinrikyo."

Aum Shinrikyo, the cult accused of organizing the nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in March, is often mentioned among elderly people in Omiya as a symbol of the declining faith in traditional Shintoism and Buddhism.

For Mr. Nishi, changing attitudes mean there is no guarantee that when he has become a god, his descendants will offer him food and drink at the altar each day.

"I have this great worry about the future," Mr. Nishi sighed. "I'm pretty confident of my son. But his wife is a Jehovah's Witness, and when she comes here she won't pray at this altar."

Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians are rare in Japan, numbering just 1 percent of the population. But other new faiths are present -- one of them, Tenrikyo, even has a small temple in Omiya -- and the pressures of urbanization mean that many Japanese are no longer in touch with the natural world that is the backdrop of Shintoism.

Also an article on Chechens being deported from Stalin's Russia to Central Asia in 1944 for collective collaboration with Nazis. Khrushchev allowed them to return 13 years later but a third of their original 450,000 were dead.

On the reverse an editorial (1/28/96) on George HW Bush avoiding turning over a diary requested by a special counsel for 6 years- contrasting that with the uproar over the Clintons complying with a request for billing records from the Rose Law Firm with all due diligence.