Bunch of Times articles
Jul. 6th, 2005 03:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on child prisoners
Arrested Development
By ARLIE HOCHSCHILD
Berkeley, Calif.
LAST month John Miller, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said that half the victims of human trafficking may be children under 18. Children are "at the center" of the problem of trafficking, which, Mr. Miller noted, is one of the great human rights issues of the 21st century. Yes, children should be at the heart of our concern for human rights. But that concern should start with the children detained in American prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.
Under international law, the line between childhood and maturity is 18. In communications with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon has lowered the cutoff to 16. For this reason among others, we don't know exactly how many Iraqi children are in American custody. But before the transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi interim government a year ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as young as 8.
Since that time, Human Rights Watch reports that the number has risen. The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody."
Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse.
According to Amnesty International, 13-year-old Mohammed Ismail Agha was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and detained without charge or trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at Guantánamo Bay. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation. "Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick at my door and yell at me to wake up," he told an Amnesty researcher. "They made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours."
A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For 2½ years, he was allowed no contact with a lawyer or with his family. Seventeen-year-old Akhtar Mohammed told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary confinement in a shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in January 2002.
A Pentagon investigation last year by Maj. Gen. George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled military guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to " 'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them." The children were screaming and the smaller one tried to hide behind the larger, the report said, as a soldier allowed the dog to get within about one foot of them. A girl named Juda Hafez Ahmad told Amnesty International that when she was held in Abu Ghraib she "saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg."
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Maj. General Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. "He told me he was almost 12," General Karpinski recalled, and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother."
Children like this 11 year old held at Abu Ghraib have been denied the right to see their parents, a lawyer, or anyone else. They were not told why they were detained, let alone for how long. A Pentagon spokesman told Mr. Hersh that juveniles received some special care, but added, "Age is not a determining factor in detention." The United States has found, the spokesman said, that "age does not necessarily diminish threat potential."
It's true that some of these children may have picked up a stone or a gun. But coalition intelligence officers told the Red Cross that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq are eventually found innocent and released. Many innocent children are swept up with their parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips from unreliable informants. "We know of children under 15," Clarisa Bencomo of Human Rights Watch told me, " held for over a year at Guantánamo Bay, whom the government later said were not security risks." Even if a child is found guilty, he or she should be treated humanely, rather than tortured or "rendered," as the C.I.A. puts it, to third parties that torture.
AMBASSADOR MILLER is right. Children matter. To really place them "at the center" of our human rights concerns, the United States should hasten to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, from which only we and Somalia abstain. And if the Pentagon must detain children, it should do so in separate facilities, with access to family, and under humane conditions that include the offer of rehabilitation and education.
Finally, the Pentagon should open all prisons to human rights inspectors. By taking these steps, the United States could begin to reverse some of the terrible harm that continues to be done to children in our name.
Arlie Hochschild is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy."
One on people who fled polygamy
After Fleeing Polygamist Community, an Opportunity for Influence
By NICK MADIGAN
HILDALE, Utah, June 23 - Carolyn Jessop escaped in the dead of night, her eight frightened children in tow.
The town she fled had been her home for her entire 35 years. It was the nation's largest polygamous community, run by an offshoot of the Mormon Church that she described as a "dangerous and destructive cult" that oppressed its women and children.
"Women in the polygamist culture are looked at as property, as a piece of meat," said Ms. Jessop, formerly one of seven wives of a motel owner, whom she was forced to marry when she was 18 and he was 50. "We're not looked upon as human beings with rights. The women are basically baby-producers. It's a difficult thing to break away from. You don't contest it."
But in a twist that might have seemed inconceivable when she ran away two years ago, Ms. Jessop and another escapee, Margaret Cooke, stand poised to join the board of a sect trust that owns almost all the property here and in adjoining Colorado City, Ariz. The board, like everything else, has always been run exclusively by men.
That women might share power with men over a place known for female submission - the makeup of the board will be finalized in a court hearing on July 21 - is almost revolutionary in the communities, home to as many as 8,000 sect members.
Evoking the wagon-train days of centuries gone by, almost every female here wears long braids and is covered from neck to ankles, usually in faded cotton dresses. Despite the searing heat, both sexes must wear long underwear. Men wear long pants and long-sleeved button-up shirts, and they cannot have facial hair.
Sect members do not talk to outsiders, and children are taught to run from people with cameras. Sometimes, men in pickup trucks accost photographers and threaten to destroy their equipment.
"Things were getting scary, spiraling out of control," Ms. Jessop said from her home in Salt Lake City.
Since she fled, much has changed for the sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had existed largely without interference from authorities.
The group's self-proclaimed prophet, Warren Jeffs, is a fugitive, indicted this month on sexual-abuse charges that he forced a 16-year-old girl to marry a 28-year-old married man. Opponents of Mr. Jeffs say he ordered hundreds of such unions, often between girls barely in their teens and men decades older.
One of his nephews, Brent Jeffs, 22, has sued him, claiming that Mr. Jeffs and two brothers repeatedly raped him in a church lavatory when he was a boy in the 1980's, with the explanation that the ordeal would help him become a man. The three told him that sodomy was "God's work," according to the suit, and warned that he would suffer the "pain of eternal damnation" if he told anyone.
A month ago, Arizona authorities raided the offices of the Colorado City Unified School District, a one-school operation controlled by Mr. Jeffs, as part of a criminal investigation into the misappropriation of millions of dollars of public money.
And last Wednesday, a probate judge in Salt Lake City, in suits over property rights, stripped Mr. Jeffs and several of his followers of power over the church trust, created in 1942 and called the United Effort Plan.
The judge is expected to replace the existing board with Ms. Jessop and Ms. Cooke and several banished male church members.
The women are supremely aware of the irony, though they have no illusions about immediately changing years of entrenched beliefs. But both vowed to end the practice of tossing people out of their homes, which was done when residents fell out of favor and Mr. Jeffs "reassigned" wives to new husbands.
"The board needed someone who loved the community and loved the people enough to protect them," said Ms. Cooke, who left in 1994, when she was 35, and settled in Salt Lake City. Ms. Cooke had eight children with her husband, a construction worker whom she was ordered to marry when she was 16 and he was 22. She barely knew him, and she divorced him in 1995.
At first, Ms. Cooke had no interest in joining the trust's board, she said, but then realized it might help the women who remain faithful to the sect's doctrines on polygamous marriages. The fundamentalist community here evolved after the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City officially renounced polygamy in 1890.
The stalwarts here, Ms. Cooke said, include her 26-year-old daughter. "She's totally going off on me," Ms. Cooke said. "She's still a part of it."
Ms. Cooke said most people here see the changes in the board as "a threat to Warren, who in their opinion is the prophet, and if you do anything to him, you're fighting God."
Mr. Jeffs, 48, a proponent of the credo that a man must have at least three wives to enter the "celestial kingdom," began to assume control in 1995, after his father, Rulon Jeffs, the previous prophet, had a stroke.
Former church members said Mr. Jeffs, a lanky, bespectacled man with a quiet voice and a penetrating stare, had as many as 70 wives of all ages. Almost all lived in a walled compound here that had surveillance cameras and was patrolled by armed guards.
The Hildale compound was quiet on Thursday, and many of the wall-mounted cameras that were apparent last year seemed to have been removed. Mr. Jeffs exacted tithes from his followers here and in Texas, Mexico and British Columbia. The local faithful dropped their envelopes of money into a slot in the wall.
His whereabouts are unknown, although many speculate that he is in Canada.
Since the indictment and Mr. Jeffs's disappearance, his surrogates appear to have cleaned out some of the businesses in town that are sect property. The newly denuded buildings include a potato processing plant and a chicken hatchery; other buildings have been removed entirely.
"Warren is starting to lose his grip on this place," said Gary Engels, a former detective in Adams County, Colo., who was brought out of retirement last year by the district attorney in Mohave County, Ariz., to investigate allegations of child abuse in the community.
Mr. Engels said authorities had failed by not looking into child abuse here years ago, although he acknowledged the difficulty in gleaning information from people who are taught that outsiders are apostates.
With the help of Sam Brower, a private investigator, Mr. Engels assembled enough evidence to result in the indictment against Mr. Jeffs. Other charges are being contemplated against some of his surrogates.
"Marrying a 14-year-old girl to a 50-year-old man is child abuse," Mr. Engels said, adding that once the wives are pregnant, "they're really trapped."
Lori Chatwin was the first local woman to speak publicly against Mr. Jeffs from her home here, in January 2004, rather than from exile. "It's a slow process," she said, "for his people to come out from under Warren's iron fist."
Ms. Chatwin and her husband, Ross Chatwin, a monogamous couple who have six children, won a court battle with the church trust, which tried to evict them for speaking out.
Ms. Chatwin's frankness has fractured relations with some of her relatives.
"The more wives you have, the more righteous you are," she said. "I'm not anti-polygamy under the right circumstances, but all those other crimes - the child abuse, the enforced marriages - hide in the cracks."
The authorities in Utah and Arizona conceded that the legal actions have been a long time coming.
"In the past, because of their remote location and their unusual beliefs, they have been left alone," said Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general. But in recent months, he said, largely as a result of news media attention, "there's been a level of scrutiny that didn't exist before."
That is small consolation to Pennie Petersen, 35, who ran away from Hildale at 14.
"This has been happening for 100 years," said Ms. Petersen, now a homemaker in Phoenix with five children. "My aunt Jeannine was forced into a marriage when she was 9 years old," she added, figuring the date as 61 years ago.
"They wanted to marry me off to a guy who was 48 - I was going to be his fifth bride," she said. Ms. Petersen, whose two younger sisters were married at 12 and 14, said she had tried to get the authorities to listen to her story years ago.
"I've been shouting this from the rooftops," she said. "I called the state agencies; pretty soon they weren't returning my calls. When a guy is in there sleeping with a 9-year-old girl, there's a problem. If I sacrifice my daughter on an altar and say God made me do it, do I not still go to jail?"
The few women who have left and are speaking out may serve as an example to those who remain, Ms. Petersen said.
"There's a lot of women saying, 'See? If she can do it, I can,' " she said. "What's awesome is that by getting these couple of cases, it's just snowballed. Before, no one would dare fight. These women need to know that you are not going to burn in hell if you leave."
One on atheist summer camp
Summer Camp That's a Piece of Heaven for the Children, but Please, No Worshiping
By SUSAN HANSEN
HAMILTON, Ohio, June 25 - Fresh from a week at Camp Quest in southern Ohio, Alex Houseman can boast that his badminton game is a little better, his archery skills are a little sharper and he can now crank out tie-dye T-shirts on demand.
All that, and 12-year-old Alex got a rare chance to be around other children just like him - children whose parents do not go to church or any other place of worship, and who do not necessarily believe in God.
At the public school he attends in Boone County, Ky., he said, he has learned to keep quiet about the fact that his family left the fundamentalist Christian church it used to belong to, that his father now considers himself an atheist, and that his mother, if she believes in God at all, does not do so in a conventional way.
At Camp Quest, on the other hand, he was not worried that his fellow campers would judge him. "It's good to know there are other people out there who don't believe in God," he said.
Providing a haven for the children of nonbelievers is what Camp Quest is all about. As the camp's official T-shirt announces, it's a place that's "beyond belief." More precisely, it claims to be the first summer sleep-away camp in the country for atheist, agnostic and secular humanist children.
Nearly two million American adults openly identify themselves as atheist or agnostic, according to a 2001 survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. As a group, they face more than their share of bigotry, said Edwin F. Kagin, Camp Quest's longtime director, and their children are often made to feel like outcasts.
Many of the two dozen campers who attended this year's session last week recounted experiences of being called names and otherwise harassed. For instance, Travis Leepers, 17, from Louisiana, reported that just about everyone he knows has expressed concern to him about his soul and has tried to convert him.
Sophia Riehemann, 14, from Bellevue, Ky., recalled how one of her schoolmates called her a devil-worshiper. "People get really confused sometimes," Sophia said. "They think that if we don't believe in God we believe in the devil."
At Camp Quest, children age 8 to 17 take part in all the usual summer camp activities. But in addition to horseback riding, organized water balloon fights and outdoor survival lessons, the camp's volunteer staff aims to promote a healthy respect for science and rational inquiry, while assuring campers that there is nothing wrong with not believing in the Bible and not putting stock in a supreme creator.
"We're serving as a night light in a dark and scary room," said Mr. Kagin, who started the nonprofit camp in 1996, along with other members of the Free Inquiry Group in the Cincinnati and northern Kentucky area, a secular humanist organization. The cost for the weeklong session is $650.
With his booming voice and his penchant for khaki-colored canvas hats and garb, Mr. Kagin, 64, looks like a summer camp director. Besides being director of the Kentucky chapter of American Atheists, he is also a certified Eagle Scout.
And in other ways - the unappetizing food, for example, or the 7:30 a.m. bullhorn calls badgering campers to wake up - Quest is much like any other summer camp. (It rents the cabins and other facilities from a Y.M.C.A.-owned camp.)
There are also obvious differences.
At the wooden barn that served as the main mess hall, the camp's program director, Fred Edwords, set up posters of famous atheists and free thinkers in world history like Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Margaret Sanger, and after meals he presented talks on the contributions they had made.
At the opening campfire ceremony, Mr. Kagin issued a set of challenges for campers to respond to in skits on the final night of camp. One such challenge: Help residents of the faraway planet Questerion understand how life on earth came into being. Another challenge: Prove that the two invisible unicorns in residence do not exist.
As in years past, camp leaders also worked on presentations in science and other natural (as opposed to supernatural) phenomena. This year's subjects were raptors and meteorology, including a demonstration of a portable weather station. Also, Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at the nearby College of Mount St. Joseph, talked to campers about creationism, arguing that the theories used to try to disprove evolution fail to hold up.
Not all the programming is a hit. "Some of the presentations are really boring," said Caitlin Fox, 13, from Mansfield, N.J., who thought the session on swords and other medieval weaponry dragged on too long.
For his part, Tomás Aguilar, 16, a Chicago native, thought the presentations on famous free thinkers like Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, could have used more balance. "Fred paints them in only a positive light," he said of the program director.
Tomás said he liked the way Mr. Kagin and other camp leaders tried to inspire critical thinking. But for him, the best thing about Camp Quest was seeing friends from previous years and getting to go swimming every day and run around. "I'm here just to have fun," he said.
Staff members conceded that sometimes the programming had been too didactic. In recent years, they said, they have adjusted the balance to include more activities that are purely fun. Also, as a new generation of camp leaders has taken over, different sorts of lectures have been added, including talks this year and last on various religions, to broaden campers' perspectives and keep the programming fresh.
With Mr. Kagin and his wife, Helen, retiring this year as the camp's leaders, other changes may also be in store. Still, the camp's new director, August Brunsman, 28, promised that the primary mission - giving the children of nonbelievers a sense of community - would remain the same.
Parents like Lev Pinskiy, a computer programmer from Brooklyn, are not looking for any major overhaul. In fact, Mr. Pinskiy, a Russian immigrant, values the camp so much that he let his son, Eugene, 11, skip the last week of school to attend this year's session.
"There's no other place like it in the United States, for sure," said Mr. Pinskiy, adding that he had searched the American Camp Association catalog in vain to find a nonreligious summer program that still offered all the activities of a traditional summer camp.
"This is a complete experience," added Mr. Pinskiy, who finally found Camp Quest by doing a Google search.
Sarah Silverman, 17, from Camp Hill, Pa., agreed. She liked Camp Quest so much that she has attended for three summers and is planning to return next year as a volunteer counselor.
Sarah has also been doing her part to recruit new campers.
"I tell my Christian friends they'd love it here," she said.
One on the flag and Native Americans
Live Free and Soar
By PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK
Boulder, Colo.
A week ago, at the conference of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) meeting at the Morongo Casino Resort, the evening banquet opened with a ceremony that begins most formal Indian gatherings. Several Indian men, often military veterans, march in with flags and place them on the stage. The American flag leads the procession. Last week, the Ute Mountain Ute Indian leader Ernest House carried in the Star-Spangled Banner, and then stood and faced it, as if reunited with a treasured comrade. After the others had left the stage, he gave the flag an intense salute and parted from its company.
Non-Indians familiar with the history of the invasion and conquest of North America might be puzzled or even troubled by this ceremony. No residents of this country have better reasons for anger at the imperial powers of this nation than do Indian people; no American citizens have a better-grounded historical reason to put the American flag at the end of the procession, or to refuse to carry it.
And yet, most native people are loyal and committed patriots. The American flag appears at ceremonies and rituals; stars and stripes are woven into beadwork and incorporated into powwow clothing.
Indian people, in other words, are complicated human beings, despite centuries of efforts to reduce them to narrow and simple stereotypes.
Patriotism is one element of that complexity. As a younger, more skeptical person, I might have mustered a patronizing sense that Indians serving in the military were a co-opted and exploited group. Now, guided by respect and consideration for their choices and privileged to watch veterans salute their flag, I have put aside the skepticism.
I take my bearings from the reality that these are people with an extraordinary knowledge of both the promise and the tragedy of this nation. "When I was about 30 years old," A. David Lester, director of CERT and a Muscogee Creek Indian, remembers, "the Blackfeet Indian leader Earl Old Person told me, 'One of our responsibilities is to teach our neighbors what it means to be American.' "
No one in these circles would advocate historical amnesia; making a peace with the injuries of the past is quite a different matter from forgetting those injuries. It is, in fact, a national misfortune that the Indian wars have faded from the memory of most citizens. We have surrendered the chance to learn lessons from the wars that might well guide our military and diplomatic policy today.
Much of what we have taken to calling "the lessons of Vietnam" - perhaps especially the difficulty of sequestering noncombatants from violence, as well as the complex moral choices raised by confronting guerrilla war - could just as easily have been learned as "the lessons of the Indian wars." If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever hints at even the slightest interest in exploring the historical meanings of the Indian wars, I will be on the next plane to D.C.
In the meantime, my mind lingers on the fact that many Indian tribes held mourning or honoring ceremonies on behalf of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. I think of a group of Lummi Indian artists, led by Jewell James, who carved totem poles to place in recognition of the 9/11 victims at the sites of the attacks.
And I hold on to the memory of the remarks made by the Yakama Indian thinker and speaker Ted Strong as he introduced the entrance of the color guard at the CERT banquet last week. "In true tribal custom," he said, "we will post the colors of our nations. The American flag represents our allegiance and commitment to the well-being of our land, our neighbors and our country. ... Our families and friends have fought and sacrificed their lives to secure human rights for us and our future generations."
Next in the procession, after the American flag, came a staff bearing eagle feathers and "representing all tribes," Mr. Strong said. "The eagle," he explained, "is symbolic of the human effort to live free and soar above the weaknesses on earth."
Paralysis enforced by bitterness and resentment is an understandable response to historical injury. But spending time in the company of Indian people in 2005 offers a spirit-raising chance to know what it means when human beings "soar above weakness" and choose life over defeat and despair.
A "lives" article on a burglar-proof car.
Burglar-Proof
By SETH KUGEL
MY car has never been one that would impress a woman.
As someone who lives in Washington Heights and works and parks all over the Bronx, I wanted a car that could nudge into small spaces and not attract attention. So I bought a 1992 pollution-gray Mazda Protégé that is often dotted with pigeon droppings, is missing three of four hubcaps and has decidedly unmasculine neon threads woven into the fraying seat cushions.
The seat-belt warning beeps at utterly random times. The door on the driver's side is dented and is so hard to open, I regularly have to slide in on the passenger side and shimmy across the front seat, taking care not to impale myself on the gearshift. I think it as a "Dukes of Hazzard"-for-losers moment.
The Mazda Protégé commercials, featuring a slick vehicle and the kid whispering "Zoom Zoom," always strike me as surreal; in my case, "Mooz Mooz" would be more like it.
When I pick up a woman for a date, I find myself making apologetic disclaimers, my favorite of which is a line I stole from a friend who drove a car held together largely with duct tape. "My car is 13 years old, has one hubcap, no stereo or air-conditioning," I announce. "But I'm not saying that to impress you."
By contrast, my interaction with the criminal element has been much less stressful, although it didn't start out that way. My car was broken into with great regularity. In the Bronx. In the Village. In my own neighborhood.
Why my car, I'd wonder. What do they see in it? As it turned out, two stereos, quarters for the meter, once even a half-full tin of Altoids. There were nine break-ins altogether: five times the locks were damaged, and four times the windows were smashed. The repair bills added up to several times the value of everything that was stolen.
My mechanic, Steve of S & T Auto on Third Avenue near Fordham Road, pities me, and for good reason: my car is worth less than the paint job on most of the vehicles that he works on. A couple of years ago, after fixing my lock a few times, and sending me off to get window glass replaced a few more times, he turned to me on the sidewalk outside his workshop and gave me the advice that would forever change my driving life: "Just don't lock it."
It was almost nutty enough to work, especially if I didn't leave anything of value inside the car, and got a stereo with a top that flipped off.
It took some getting used to, making sure not to lock the door when parking on the street. When friends got in the car and I urged them not to lock the door, I steeled myself for the invariable crazy looks. Even my neighbors had trouble wrapping their mind around my counterintuitive strategy: Several times I returned to my car to discover that someone had locked it for me; I imagine the person sitting contentedly in his apartment, lauding himself for having done a good deed for a careless neighbor.
But I could tell immediately that my twisted plan was working. A few days after putting it into effect, I arrived at my car one morning only to discover that while every piece of paper from the glove compartment had been thrown on the floor, the ashtray had been pulled out, and everything under the front seat (where I leave my own mess) had been strewn across the back seat, nothing was actually gone because there was nothing valuable to take.
THE intruders had also ransacked my trunk, but they didn't touch either the snow shovel or the ice remover. And I don't think they took a swig of the anti-freeze.
This strategy worked so well that I began to experiment: What items could I leave in the car that wouldn't attract thieves? The answer turned out to be: my Time Out New York restaurant guide, my $50 laminated Hagstrom atlas of New York, my Glade Vanilla Bean spray.
And although the thieves kept coming, I never had the feeling of violation I felt the time my apartment was ransacked. On the contrary: I was elated. Nothing was missing. The scoundrels were thwarted. Victory was mine.
Then one weekend afternoon, while I was parked outside of a rundown row of stores in Morrisania in the Bronx, a thief did manage to find something to steal: the bottom half of my car stereo. What good it did him without the top, I don't know, although I imagined some lurid Web site where car thieves could compare bottoms and tops of stolen stereo systems and make a match.
I remembered my old AM-FM cassette player with the broken antenna. Mono, not stereo. Could I leave that in the car? Would anyone want it?
I got my answer a few weeks later, when I went with a friend to a concert at Ibiza, a club in Kingsbridge in the Bronx, and left the car parked on Broadway. As had become my habit, I put my radio under the passenger seat.
When we got back to the car at 3 in the morning, something was clearly different. "Is that where you left your radio?" my friend asked.
It was not. My cassette player, resale value apparently negligible, was sitting on the driver's seat. But although thieves had obviously been rummaging around - papers were strewn everywhere - the cassette player was safe. I haven't taken it out of the car since.
The system isn't perfect. One recent morning, I got into my car and discovered that I'd had a visitor the night before. Whoever it was had left an empty bottle of Tropicana grapefruit juice, which, I determined after sniffing the contents tentatively, was now half full of beer. Had my Mazda become party central? And if so, did I care?
I did not. Members of the thieving trade, you are welcome to stop by my car, to take a seat, to relax. Just wipe your feet before you come in.
Arrested Development
By ARLIE HOCHSCHILD
Berkeley, Calif.
LAST month John Miller, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said that half the victims of human trafficking may be children under 18. Children are "at the center" of the problem of trafficking, which, Mr. Miller noted, is one of the great human rights issues of the 21st century. Yes, children should be at the heart of our concern for human rights. But that concern should start with the children detained in American prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.
Under international law, the line between childhood and maturity is 18. In communications with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon has lowered the cutoff to 16. For this reason among others, we don't know exactly how many Iraqi children are in American custody. But before the transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi interim government a year ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as young as 8.
Since that time, Human Rights Watch reports that the number has risen. The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody."
Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse.
According to Amnesty International, 13-year-old Mohammed Ismail Agha was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and detained without charge or trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at Guantánamo Bay. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation. "Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick at my door and yell at me to wake up," he told an Amnesty researcher. "They made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours."
A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For 2½ years, he was allowed no contact with a lawyer or with his family. Seventeen-year-old Akhtar Mohammed told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary confinement in a shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in January 2002.
A Pentagon investigation last year by Maj. Gen. George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled military guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to " 'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them." The children were screaming and the smaller one tried to hide behind the larger, the report said, as a soldier allowed the dog to get within about one foot of them. A girl named Juda Hafez Ahmad told Amnesty International that when she was held in Abu Ghraib she "saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg."
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Maj. General Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the prison's notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. "He told me he was almost 12," General Karpinski recalled, and that "he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother."
Children like this 11 year old held at Abu Ghraib have been denied the right to see their parents, a lawyer, or anyone else. They were not told why they were detained, let alone for how long. A Pentagon spokesman told Mr. Hersh that juveniles received some special care, but added, "Age is not a determining factor in detention." The United States has found, the spokesman said, that "age does not necessarily diminish threat potential."
It's true that some of these children may have picked up a stone or a gun. But coalition intelligence officers told the Red Cross that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq are eventually found innocent and released. Many innocent children are swept up with their parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips from unreliable informants. "We know of children under 15," Clarisa Bencomo of Human Rights Watch told me, " held for over a year at Guantánamo Bay, whom the government later said were not security risks." Even if a child is found guilty, he or she should be treated humanely, rather than tortured or "rendered," as the C.I.A. puts it, to third parties that torture.
AMBASSADOR MILLER is right. Children matter. To really place them "at the center" of our human rights concerns, the United States should hasten to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, from which only we and Somalia abstain. And if the Pentagon must detain children, it should do so in separate facilities, with access to family, and under humane conditions that include the offer of rehabilitation and education.
Finally, the Pentagon should open all prisons to human rights inspectors. By taking these steps, the United States could begin to reverse some of the terrible harm that continues to be done to children in our name.
Arlie Hochschild is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy."
One on people who fled polygamy
After Fleeing Polygamist Community, an Opportunity for Influence
By NICK MADIGAN
HILDALE, Utah, June 23 - Carolyn Jessop escaped in the dead of night, her eight frightened children in tow.
The town she fled had been her home for her entire 35 years. It was the nation's largest polygamous community, run by an offshoot of the Mormon Church that she described as a "dangerous and destructive cult" that oppressed its women and children.
"Women in the polygamist culture are looked at as property, as a piece of meat," said Ms. Jessop, formerly one of seven wives of a motel owner, whom she was forced to marry when she was 18 and he was 50. "We're not looked upon as human beings with rights. The women are basically baby-producers. It's a difficult thing to break away from. You don't contest it."
But in a twist that might have seemed inconceivable when she ran away two years ago, Ms. Jessop and another escapee, Margaret Cooke, stand poised to join the board of a sect trust that owns almost all the property here and in adjoining Colorado City, Ariz. The board, like everything else, has always been run exclusively by men.
That women might share power with men over a place known for female submission - the makeup of the board will be finalized in a court hearing on July 21 - is almost revolutionary in the communities, home to as many as 8,000 sect members.
Evoking the wagon-train days of centuries gone by, almost every female here wears long braids and is covered from neck to ankles, usually in faded cotton dresses. Despite the searing heat, both sexes must wear long underwear. Men wear long pants and long-sleeved button-up shirts, and they cannot have facial hair.
Sect members do not talk to outsiders, and children are taught to run from people with cameras. Sometimes, men in pickup trucks accost photographers and threaten to destroy their equipment.
"Things were getting scary, spiraling out of control," Ms. Jessop said from her home in Salt Lake City.
Since she fled, much has changed for the sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which had existed largely without interference from authorities.
The group's self-proclaimed prophet, Warren Jeffs, is a fugitive, indicted this month on sexual-abuse charges that he forced a 16-year-old girl to marry a 28-year-old married man. Opponents of Mr. Jeffs say he ordered hundreds of such unions, often between girls barely in their teens and men decades older.
One of his nephews, Brent Jeffs, 22, has sued him, claiming that Mr. Jeffs and two brothers repeatedly raped him in a church lavatory when he was a boy in the 1980's, with the explanation that the ordeal would help him become a man. The three told him that sodomy was "God's work," according to the suit, and warned that he would suffer the "pain of eternal damnation" if he told anyone.
A month ago, Arizona authorities raided the offices of the Colorado City Unified School District, a one-school operation controlled by Mr. Jeffs, as part of a criminal investigation into the misappropriation of millions of dollars of public money.
And last Wednesday, a probate judge in Salt Lake City, in suits over property rights, stripped Mr. Jeffs and several of his followers of power over the church trust, created in 1942 and called the United Effort Plan.
The judge is expected to replace the existing board with Ms. Jessop and Ms. Cooke and several banished male church members.
The women are supremely aware of the irony, though they have no illusions about immediately changing years of entrenched beliefs. But both vowed to end the practice of tossing people out of their homes, which was done when residents fell out of favor and Mr. Jeffs "reassigned" wives to new husbands.
"The board needed someone who loved the community and loved the people enough to protect them," said Ms. Cooke, who left in 1994, when she was 35, and settled in Salt Lake City. Ms. Cooke had eight children with her husband, a construction worker whom she was ordered to marry when she was 16 and he was 22. She barely knew him, and she divorced him in 1995.
At first, Ms. Cooke had no interest in joining the trust's board, she said, but then realized it might help the women who remain faithful to the sect's doctrines on polygamous marriages. The fundamentalist community here evolved after the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City officially renounced polygamy in 1890.
The stalwarts here, Ms. Cooke said, include her 26-year-old daughter. "She's totally going off on me," Ms. Cooke said. "She's still a part of it."
Ms. Cooke said most people here see the changes in the board as "a threat to Warren, who in their opinion is the prophet, and if you do anything to him, you're fighting God."
Mr. Jeffs, 48, a proponent of the credo that a man must have at least three wives to enter the "celestial kingdom," began to assume control in 1995, after his father, Rulon Jeffs, the previous prophet, had a stroke.
Former church members said Mr. Jeffs, a lanky, bespectacled man with a quiet voice and a penetrating stare, had as many as 70 wives of all ages. Almost all lived in a walled compound here that had surveillance cameras and was patrolled by armed guards.
The Hildale compound was quiet on Thursday, and many of the wall-mounted cameras that were apparent last year seemed to have been removed. Mr. Jeffs exacted tithes from his followers here and in Texas, Mexico and British Columbia. The local faithful dropped their envelopes of money into a slot in the wall.
His whereabouts are unknown, although many speculate that he is in Canada.
Since the indictment and Mr. Jeffs's disappearance, his surrogates appear to have cleaned out some of the businesses in town that are sect property. The newly denuded buildings include a potato processing plant and a chicken hatchery; other buildings have been removed entirely.
"Warren is starting to lose his grip on this place," said Gary Engels, a former detective in Adams County, Colo., who was brought out of retirement last year by the district attorney in Mohave County, Ariz., to investigate allegations of child abuse in the community.
Mr. Engels said authorities had failed by not looking into child abuse here years ago, although he acknowledged the difficulty in gleaning information from people who are taught that outsiders are apostates.
With the help of Sam Brower, a private investigator, Mr. Engels assembled enough evidence to result in the indictment against Mr. Jeffs. Other charges are being contemplated against some of his surrogates.
"Marrying a 14-year-old girl to a 50-year-old man is child abuse," Mr. Engels said, adding that once the wives are pregnant, "they're really trapped."
Lori Chatwin was the first local woman to speak publicly against Mr. Jeffs from her home here, in January 2004, rather than from exile. "It's a slow process," she said, "for his people to come out from under Warren's iron fist."
Ms. Chatwin and her husband, Ross Chatwin, a monogamous couple who have six children, won a court battle with the church trust, which tried to evict them for speaking out.
Ms. Chatwin's frankness has fractured relations with some of her relatives.
"The more wives you have, the more righteous you are," she said. "I'm not anti-polygamy under the right circumstances, but all those other crimes - the child abuse, the enforced marriages - hide in the cracks."
The authorities in Utah and Arizona conceded that the legal actions have been a long time coming.
"In the past, because of their remote location and their unusual beliefs, they have been left alone," said Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general. But in recent months, he said, largely as a result of news media attention, "there's been a level of scrutiny that didn't exist before."
That is small consolation to Pennie Petersen, 35, who ran away from Hildale at 14.
"This has been happening for 100 years," said Ms. Petersen, now a homemaker in Phoenix with five children. "My aunt Jeannine was forced into a marriage when she was 9 years old," she added, figuring the date as 61 years ago.
"They wanted to marry me off to a guy who was 48 - I was going to be his fifth bride," she said. Ms. Petersen, whose two younger sisters were married at 12 and 14, said she had tried to get the authorities to listen to her story years ago.
"I've been shouting this from the rooftops," she said. "I called the state agencies; pretty soon they weren't returning my calls. When a guy is in there sleeping with a 9-year-old girl, there's a problem. If I sacrifice my daughter on an altar and say God made me do it, do I not still go to jail?"
The few women who have left and are speaking out may serve as an example to those who remain, Ms. Petersen said.
"There's a lot of women saying, 'See? If she can do it, I can,' " she said. "What's awesome is that by getting these couple of cases, it's just snowballed. Before, no one would dare fight. These women need to know that you are not going to burn in hell if you leave."
One on atheist summer camp
Summer Camp That's a Piece of Heaven for the Children, but Please, No Worshiping
By SUSAN HANSEN
HAMILTON, Ohio, June 25 - Fresh from a week at Camp Quest in southern Ohio, Alex Houseman can boast that his badminton game is a little better, his archery skills are a little sharper and he can now crank out tie-dye T-shirts on demand.
All that, and 12-year-old Alex got a rare chance to be around other children just like him - children whose parents do not go to church or any other place of worship, and who do not necessarily believe in God.
At the public school he attends in Boone County, Ky., he said, he has learned to keep quiet about the fact that his family left the fundamentalist Christian church it used to belong to, that his father now considers himself an atheist, and that his mother, if she believes in God at all, does not do so in a conventional way.
At Camp Quest, on the other hand, he was not worried that his fellow campers would judge him. "It's good to know there are other people out there who don't believe in God," he said.
Providing a haven for the children of nonbelievers is what Camp Quest is all about. As the camp's official T-shirt announces, it's a place that's "beyond belief." More precisely, it claims to be the first summer sleep-away camp in the country for atheist, agnostic and secular humanist children.
Nearly two million American adults openly identify themselves as atheist or agnostic, according to a 2001 survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. As a group, they face more than their share of bigotry, said Edwin F. Kagin, Camp Quest's longtime director, and their children are often made to feel like outcasts.
Many of the two dozen campers who attended this year's session last week recounted experiences of being called names and otherwise harassed. For instance, Travis Leepers, 17, from Louisiana, reported that just about everyone he knows has expressed concern to him about his soul and has tried to convert him.
Sophia Riehemann, 14, from Bellevue, Ky., recalled how one of her schoolmates called her a devil-worshiper. "People get really confused sometimes," Sophia said. "They think that if we don't believe in God we believe in the devil."
At Camp Quest, children age 8 to 17 take part in all the usual summer camp activities. But in addition to horseback riding, organized water balloon fights and outdoor survival lessons, the camp's volunteer staff aims to promote a healthy respect for science and rational inquiry, while assuring campers that there is nothing wrong with not believing in the Bible and not putting stock in a supreme creator.
"We're serving as a night light in a dark and scary room," said Mr. Kagin, who started the nonprofit camp in 1996, along with other members of the Free Inquiry Group in the Cincinnati and northern Kentucky area, a secular humanist organization. The cost for the weeklong session is $650.
With his booming voice and his penchant for khaki-colored canvas hats and garb, Mr. Kagin, 64, looks like a summer camp director. Besides being director of the Kentucky chapter of American Atheists, he is also a certified Eagle Scout.
And in other ways - the unappetizing food, for example, or the 7:30 a.m. bullhorn calls badgering campers to wake up - Quest is much like any other summer camp. (It rents the cabins and other facilities from a Y.M.C.A.-owned camp.)
There are also obvious differences.
At the wooden barn that served as the main mess hall, the camp's program director, Fred Edwords, set up posters of famous atheists and free thinkers in world history like Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Margaret Sanger, and after meals he presented talks on the contributions they had made.
At the opening campfire ceremony, Mr. Kagin issued a set of challenges for campers to respond to in skits on the final night of camp. One such challenge: Help residents of the faraway planet Questerion understand how life on earth came into being. Another challenge: Prove that the two invisible unicorns in residence do not exist.
As in years past, camp leaders also worked on presentations in science and other natural (as opposed to supernatural) phenomena. This year's subjects were raptors and meteorology, including a demonstration of a portable weather station. Also, Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at the nearby College of Mount St. Joseph, talked to campers about creationism, arguing that the theories used to try to disprove evolution fail to hold up.
Not all the programming is a hit. "Some of the presentations are really boring," said Caitlin Fox, 13, from Mansfield, N.J., who thought the session on swords and other medieval weaponry dragged on too long.
For his part, Tomás Aguilar, 16, a Chicago native, thought the presentations on famous free thinkers like Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, could have used more balance. "Fred paints them in only a positive light," he said of the program director.
Tomás said he liked the way Mr. Kagin and other camp leaders tried to inspire critical thinking. But for him, the best thing about Camp Quest was seeing friends from previous years and getting to go swimming every day and run around. "I'm here just to have fun," he said.
Staff members conceded that sometimes the programming had been too didactic. In recent years, they said, they have adjusted the balance to include more activities that are purely fun. Also, as a new generation of camp leaders has taken over, different sorts of lectures have been added, including talks this year and last on various religions, to broaden campers' perspectives and keep the programming fresh.
With Mr. Kagin and his wife, Helen, retiring this year as the camp's leaders, other changes may also be in store. Still, the camp's new director, August Brunsman, 28, promised that the primary mission - giving the children of nonbelievers a sense of community - would remain the same.
Parents like Lev Pinskiy, a computer programmer from Brooklyn, are not looking for any major overhaul. In fact, Mr. Pinskiy, a Russian immigrant, values the camp so much that he let his son, Eugene, 11, skip the last week of school to attend this year's session.
"There's no other place like it in the United States, for sure," said Mr. Pinskiy, adding that he had searched the American Camp Association catalog in vain to find a nonreligious summer program that still offered all the activities of a traditional summer camp.
"This is a complete experience," added Mr. Pinskiy, who finally found Camp Quest by doing a Google search.
Sarah Silverman, 17, from Camp Hill, Pa., agreed. She liked Camp Quest so much that she has attended for three summers and is planning to return next year as a volunteer counselor.
Sarah has also been doing her part to recruit new campers.
"I tell my Christian friends they'd love it here," she said.
One on the flag and Native Americans
Live Free and Soar
By PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK
Boulder, Colo.
A week ago, at the conference of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) meeting at the Morongo Casino Resort, the evening banquet opened with a ceremony that begins most formal Indian gatherings. Several Indian men, often military veterans, march in with flags and place them on the stage. The American flag leads the procession. Last week, the Ute Mountain Ute Indian leader Ernest House carried in the Star-Spangled Banner, and then stood and faced it, as if reunited with a treasured comrade. After the others had left the stage, he gave the flag an intense salute and parted from its company.
Non-Indians familiar with the history of the invasion and conquest of North America might be puzzled or even troubled by this ceremony. No residents of this country have better reasons for anger at the imperial powers of this nation than do Indian people; no American citizens have a better-grounded historical reason to put the American flag at the end of the procession, or to refuse to carry it.
And yet, most native people are loyal and committed patriots. The American flag appears at ceremonies and rituals; stars and stripes are woven into beadwork and incorporated into powwow clothing.
Indian people, in other words, are complicated human beings, despite centuries of efforts to reduce them to narrow and simple stereotypes.
Patriotism is one element of that complexity. As a younger, more skeptical person, I might have mustered a patronizing sense that Indians serving in the military were a co-opted and exploited group. Now, guided by respect and consideration for their choices and privileged to watch veterans salute their flag, I have put aside the skepticism.
I take my bearings from the reality that these are people with an extraordinary knowledge of both the promise and the tragedy of this nation. "When I was about 30 years old," A. David Lester, director of CERT and a Muscogee Creek Indian, remembers, "the Blackfeet Indian leader Earl Old Person told me, 'One of our responsibilities is to teach our neighbors what it means to be American.' "
No one in these circles would advocate historical amnesia; making a peace with the injuries of the past is quite a different matter from forgetting those injuries. It is, in fact, a national misfortune that the Indian wars have faded from the memory of most citizens. We have surrendered the chance to learn lessons from the wars that might well guide our military and diplomatic policy today.
Much of what we have taken to calling "the lessons of Vietnam" - perhaps especially the difficulty of sequestering noncombatants from violence, as well as the complex moral choices raised by confronting guerrilla war - could just as easily have been learned as "the lessons of the Indian wars." If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever hints at even the slightest interest in exploring the historical meanings of the Indian wars, I will be on the next plane to D.C.
In the meantime, my mind lingers on the fact that many Indian tribes held mourning or honoring ceremonies on behalf of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. I think of a group of Lummi Indian artists, led by Jewell James, who carved totem poles to place in recognition of the 9/11 victims at the sites of the attacks.
And I hold on to the memory of the remarks made by the Yakama Indian thinker and speaker Ted Strong as he introduced the entrance of the color guard at the CERT banquet last week. "In true tribal custom," he said, "we will post the colors of our nations. The American flag represents our allegiance and commitment to the well-being of our land, our neighbors and our country. ... Our families and friends have fought and sacrificed their lives to secure human rights for us and our future generations."
Next in the procession, after the American flag, came a staff bearing eagle feathers and "representing all tribes," Mr. Strong said. "The eagle," he explained, "is symbolic of the human effort to live free and soar above the weaknesses on earth."
Paralysis enforced by bitterness and resentment is an understandable response to historical injury. But spending time in the company of Indian people in 2005 offers a spirit-raising chance to know what it means when human beings "soar above weakness" and choose life over defeat and despair.
A "lives" article on a burglar-proof car.
Burglar-Proof
By SETH KUGEL
MY car has never been one that would impress a woman.
As someone who lives in Washington Heights and works and parks all over the Bronx, I wanted a car that could nudge into small spaces and not attract attention. So I bought a 1992 pollution-gray Mazda Protégé that is often dotted with pigeon droppings, is missing three of four hubcaps and has decidedly unmasculine neon threads woven into the fraying seat cushions.
The seat-belt warning beeps at utterly random times. The door on the driver's side is dented and is so hard to open, I regularly have to slide in on the passenger side and shimmy across the front seat, taking care not to impale myself on the gearshift. I think it as a "Dukes of Hazzard"-for-losers moment.
The Mazda Protégé commercials, featuring a slick vehicle and the kid whispering "Zoom Zoom," always strike me as surreal; in my case, "Mooz Mooz" would be more like it.
When I pick up a woman for a date, I find myself making apologetic disclaimers, my favorite of which is a line I stole from a friend who drove a car held together largely with duct tape. "My car is 13 years old, has one hubcap, no stereo or air-conditioning," I announce. "But I'm not saying that to impress you."
By contrast, my interaction with the criminal element has been much less stressful, although it didn't start out that way. My car was broken into with great regularity. In the Bronx. In the Village. In my own neighborhood.
Why my car, I'd wonder. What do they see in it? As it turned out, two stereos, quarters for the meter, once even a half-full tin of Altoids. There were nine break-ins altogether: five times the locks were damaged, and four times the windows were smashed. The repair bills added up to several times the value of everything that was stolen.
My mechanic, Steve of S & T Auto on Third Avenue near Fordham Road, pities me, and for good reason: my car is worth less than the paint job on most of the vehicles that he works on. A couple of years ago, after fixing my lock a few times, and sending me off to get window glass replaced a few more times, he turned to me on the sidewalk outside his workshop and gave me the advice that would forever change my driving life: "Just don't lock it."
It was almost nutty enough to work, especially if I didn't leave anything of value inside the car, and got a stereo with a top that flipped off.
It took some getting used to, making sure not to lock the door when parking on the street. When friends got in the car and I urged them not to lock the door, I steeled myself for the invariable crazy looks. Even my neighbors had trouble wrapping their mind around my counterintuitive strategy: Several times I returned to my car to discover that someone had locked it for me; I imagine the person sitting contentedly in his apartment, lauding himself for having done a good deed for a careless neighbor.
But I could tell immediately that my twisted plan was working. A few days after putting it into effect, I arrived at my car one morning only to discover that while every piece of paper from the glove compartment had been thrown on the floor, the ashtray had been pulled out, and everything under the front seat (where I leave my own mess) had been strewn across the back seat, nothing was actually gone because there was nothing valuable to take.
THE intruders had also ransacked my trunk, but they didn't touch either the snow shovel or the ice remover. And I don't think they took a swig of the anti-freeze.
This strategy worked so well that I began to experiment: What items could I leave in the car that wouldn't attract thieves? The answer turned out to be: my Time Out New York restaurant guide, my $50 laminated Hagstrom atlas of New York, my Glade Vanilla Bean spray.
And although the thieves kept coming, I never had the feeling of violation I felt the time my apartment was ransacked. On the contrary: I was elated. Nothing was missing. The scoundrels were thwarted. Victory was mine.
Then one weekend afternoon, while I was parked outside of a rundown row of stores in Morrisania in the Bronx, a thief did manage to find something to steal: the bottom half of my car stereo. What good it did him without the top, I don't know, although I imagined some lurid Web site where car thieves could compare bottoms and tops of stolen stereo systems and make a match.
I remembered my old AM-FM cassette player with the broken antenna. Mono, not stereo. Could I leave that in the car? Would anyone want it?
I got my answer a few weeks later, when I went with a friend to a concert at Ibiza, a club in Kingsbridge in the Bronx, and left the car parked on Broadway. As had become my habit, I put my radio under the passenger seat.
When we got back to the car at 3 in the morning, something was clearly different. "Is that where you left your radio?" my friend asked.
It was not. My cassette player, resale value apparently negligible, was sitting on the driver's seat. But although thieves had obviously been rummaging around - papers were strewn everywhere - the cassette player was safe. I haven't taken it out of the car since.
The system isn't perfect. One recent morning, I got into my car and discovered that I'd had a visitor the night before. Whoever it was had left an empty bottle of Tropicana grapefruit juice, which, I determined after sniffing the contents tentatively, was now half full of beer. Had my Mazda become party central? And if so, did I care?
I did not. Members of the thieving trade, you are welcome to stop by my car, to take a seat, to relax. Just wipe your feet before you come in.
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Date: 2005-07-06 08:02 am (UTC)Dude. That's, like, HERE. ::eyes hometown:: Never heard of the thing, and it's HERE! Bet I know which YMCA camp they used, even.