NYTimes articles...
Nov. 26th, 2005 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Those who supported Shrubboy are starting to doubt
Even Supporters Doubt President as Issues Pile Up
By KATE ZERNIKE
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 22 - Leesa Martin never considered President Bush a great leader, but she voted for him a year ago because she admired how he handled the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Then came the past summer, when the death toll from the war in Iraq hit this state particularly hard: 16 marines from the same battalion killed in one week. She thought the federal government should have acted faster to help after Hurricane Katrina. She was baffled by the president's nomination of Harriet E. Miers, a woman she considered unqualified for the Supreme Court, and disappointed when he did not nominate another woman after Ms. Miers withdrew.
And she remains unsettled by questions about whether the White House leaked the name of a C.I.A. agent whose husband had accused the president of misleading the country about the intelligence that led to the war.
"I don't know if it's any one thing as much as it is everything," said Ms. Martin, 49, eating lunch at the North Market, on the edge of downtown Columbus. "It's kind of snowballed."
Her concerns were echoed in more than 75 interviews here and across the country this week, helping to explain the slide in the president's approval and trustworthiness ratings in recent polls.
Many people who voted for Mr. Bush a year ago had trouble pinning their current discontent on any one thing. Many mentioned the hurricane and the indictment of a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, which some said raised doubts about the president's candor and his judgment. But there was a sense that something had veered off course in the last few months, and the war was the one constant. Over and over, even some of Mr. Bush's supporters raised comparisons with Vietnam.
"We keep hearing about suicide bombers and casualties and never hear about any progress being made," said Dave Panici, 45, a railroad conductor from Bradley, Ill. "I don't see an end to it; it just seems relentless. I feel like our country is just staying afloat, just treading water instead of swimming toward somewhere."
Mr. Panici voted for President Bush in 2004, calling it "a vote for security." "Now that a year has passed, I haven't seen any improvement in Iraq," he said. "I don't feel that the world is a safer place."
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll in mid-November found that 37 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush, the lowest approval rating the poll had recorded in his presidency. That was down from 55 percent a year ago and from a high of 90 percent shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
An Associated Press/Ipsos poll earlier in the month found the same 37 percent approval rating and recorded the president's lowest levels regarding integrity and honesty: 42 percent of Americans found him honest, compared with 53 percent at the beginning of this year.
Several of those interviewed said that in the last year they had come to believe that Mr. Bush had not been fully honest about the intelligence that led to the war, which he said showed solid evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"I think people put their faith in Bush, hoping he would do the right thing," said Stacey Rosen, 38, a stay-at-home mother in Boca Raton, Fla., who said she voted for Mr. Bush but was "totally disappointed" in him now. "Everybody cannot believe that there hasn't been one shred of evidence of W.M.D. I think it goes to show how they tell us what they want to tell us."
Mark Briggs, who works for Nationwide Insurance here, said he did not want to believe that the president "manipulated" intelligence leading the country into war, but believed that, at least, Mr. Bush had misread it.
Still, however much he may disagree with Mr. Bush's policies, Mr. Briggs said, he admires the president for standing by what he says.
"There is the notion of leadership and sticking with the plan, which I believe in," he said. "George Bush is clear and consistent. He made a tough decision to go to war - and others voted for it, too. And I think he's right: those people may be trying to rewrite history."
Kacey Wilson, 32, eating lunch with Ms. Martin, said she, too, had concerns about the death toll from the war, but she felt that Mr. Bush spoke the truth, even if it might not be what the country wanted to hear. "I like his cut-and-dry, take-no-prisoners style," Ms. Wilson said. "I think people are used to more spinning."
Others, though, saw arrogance in that approach.
"We need to not be so stubborn," said Vicky Polka, 58, a retired school principal in Statesboro, Ga., who voted for Mr. Bush and described her support for him as "waning." "Something's not going right here. We need to resolve this. I hate to say it, but I think Iraq is going the way of Vietnam."
Few people said they were following the leak scandal, which led to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Mr. Cheney's former aide. Some who could cite main characters and events dismissed it as little more than political theater. Even fewer said they had paid attention to other scandals preoccupying Washington: the indictment of Representative Tom DeLay, the powerful Texas Republican, and the guilty plea by his former spokesman.
But several people said that the leak scandal had left them with the sense that the president was not leveling with the public about his involvement.
"He has to give us more information," said Phil Niemie, 51, an elementary school principal eating lunch with his family in Columbus. "The longer it goes without closure, it begins to trigger those Nixon Watergate years. I felt the same way with Clinton."
But for Mr. Niemie, who voted for Mr. Bush, and others, the leak scandal raised the biggest doubts about Vice President Cheney.
"A lot of problems tie back to some of Cheney's shenanigans," Ms. Martin said. "It just seems like he could have done better for vice president the second time around."
In Atlanta, Selena Smith, a director at an advertising agency, echoed others when she said she thought too much time had already been spent on the investigation.
"The war is more important to me now," said Ms. Smith, 46. "What's the plan? Give us something to hang our teeth on. What's really top of mind for me is how many people are getting killed across the creek, and how are we going to get them home?"
Here in Ohio, the most hotly contested state in the 2004 election, the heavy toll on a local Marine battalion had played out on television and in newspapers throughout the summer's end, and the majority of two dozen people interviewed here said they wanted to see the troops come home.
Some, though, faulted Americans as having short attention spans.
"Anything that takes more than a couple of months, we get bored with," said Rich Canary, 35, an information technology specialist here. "Progress has been made. The Iraqis have a constitution. They're actually creating their own country. When you hear the soldiers talk, they feel what they're doing is important."
And there was much division about how to end the war. Some military families said it was important to finish the task the troops had begun; others said they resented accusations of being unpatriotic when they criticized the war. Some who said their approval of the president had not wavered nevertheless argued for a quick end to the war, while some of Mr. Bush's strongest critics said it would destabilize Iraq to withdraw the troops anytime soon.
"Too many people would get hurt," said Laurence Melia, 28, a salesman from Newton, Mass., who campaigned against President Bush last year. "There has to be a last foot on the ground in the end, and there might be more problems if we run away too fast."
In Houston, Geoff Van Hoeven, an accountant, said he thought the war in Iraq had aggravated the terrorist threat by creating "a breeding ground for Al Qaeda." Still, Mr. Van Hoeven said a quick withdrawal was not possible, "because America's going to be perceived as extremely weak and unreliable coming in, and when the going gets rough, they pull out."
Even those who voted against Mr. Bush a year ago saw little satisfaction in his woes.
"Part of me enjoys watching him squirm," said Shirley Tobias, 46, sitting with a colleague from Netscape at a coffee shop in Grandview, a suburb of Columbus. "But he's squirming on our behalf. We're all in this together."
On the Latke/Hamentash debates
Such Sound and Fury! Tradition! Einsteins in Food Fight of Words
By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, Nov. 24 - The international law expert declared hamantaschen a violation of the Geneva Conventions, symbolizing the eating of an ancient enemy. But the linguistics professor, posing as Plato, said Hermogenes, a k a hamantasch, "clearly had the better idea" than Cratylus, stand-in for latkes.
And the Irish statistician with the unpronounceable name - the token non-Jew on this year's bill - revealed secret data documenting a clear public preference for latkes.
"It's almost insulting to your intelligence to go through these," the statistician, Colm O'Muircheartaigh, a professor of public policy, said of the inscrutable table of numbers displayed on a big screen behind him that supposedly factored in freshness and whether the snacks were made by mother or other. "So I won't."
As the law expert, Eugene Kontorovich, said, "What's great about the Latke-Hamantasch Debate is that at a time when so much academic inquiry is spent on esoteric and irrelevant matters, the debate focuses on the big questions."
Big questions, indeed. Sweet or savory? Round or triangular? Baked or fried?
These and other profound ponderables have made the debate a sacred, if silly, annual tradition at the superserious University of Chicago since 1946, chronicled in a new anthology, "The Great Latke Hamantash Debate" (University of Chicago Press). At Tuesday's extravaganza, complete with costumes and a klezmer band, the book's editor, Ruth Fredman Cernea, welcomed a packed auditorium to "a night of exquisite absurdity."
"The things that make this what it is are so deep in Jewish tradition - being able to laugh at yourself, being able to laugh at the seriousness of life," Ms. Cernea, an anthropologist, explained in an interview. "In Jewish tradition, scholarship is serious, but it's also irreverent. Challenging the text, making fun of the text, is encouraged."
Hence, Mr. Kontorovich's extensive references to County of Allegheny v. A.C.L.U., 492 U.S. 573, 585 n. 26 (1989), what he called the Supreme Court's "most recent and definitive pronouncement on potato pancakes." The idea is not so much to determine which iconic Jewish snack is superior - the book leans heavily latke, as did Tuesday's debaters - but to celebrate their very Jewishness and inject some levity into the lethal rigor of the campus.
"Nobody ever persuades anybody," said a laughing Ted Cohen, the philosophy professor who has made fun of speakers for two decades as the debate's moderator. "I'm not at all clear what the point is, but it's certainly not that."
Mr. Cohen, for the record, is a latke man, favoring the potato pancake fried in oil that marks Hanukkah's miracle of a drop of oil lasting eight days. Hamantaschen, three-cornered Purim pastry most often filled with prune or poppy, represent the ears (or hat or purse, depending whom you ask) of the evil Haman, whose plot to kill the Jews was unraveled. The debate always comes just before Thanksgiving - just before the onset of first-term final examinations and the frigid Chicago winter.
It started as a fireside schmooze in the living room of the Hillel House, a postwar vehicle for Jewish students and faculty members to celebrate their culture rather than squelch it. By 1965, the crowd of 700 was more than double the number that attended High Holy Day services on campus. Now, the tradition has spread to more than a dozen campuses.
Here at Chicago, where 15 percent of the 4,500 undergraduates - and, Mr. Cohen estimated, "112 percent" of the faculty - are Jewish, it overflows the largest auditorium, with devotees pinning "I {sheart} Hamentaschen" buttons on their T-shirts, including ones that proclaim U.C. the university "where fun goes to die." Despite its reputation, Mr. Cohen noted, Chicago is not only where the atom was first split but also where Second City, the improvisational comedy giant, was born - not that long after the latke-hamantasch debate.
Among the eminent Hyde Park humorists - and debaters - highlighted in the book are the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who said the matter could be settled by the equation L=qH2/3; Hanna Holborn Gray, then the university's president, who explained that Machiavelli was not only Jewish but loved the latke; and Allan Bloom of the Committee on Social Thought, whose talk was titled, not surprisingly, "Restoring the Jewish Canon."
There have been dissertations on "The Hamantasch in Shakespeare" and "The Hermeneutics of the Hamantasch;" feminist critiques that take both sides (Judith Shapiro, now president of Barnard College, suggested that Haman was a transvestite, "his aggressive machismo" overcompensation); and odes like this one by the linguist Edward Stankiewicz:
But I, I am in a blissful state
When I see a well-stacked latke plate.
And what is in a hamantasch?
A hamantasch is but a nash!
On Tuesday, the debate began in the audience even before the speakers, in academic robes and funny hats, paraded with all their pomp and circumstance under the competing latke and hamantasch banners.
"They made hamantasch Republican!" said Will Cohen, 19, a sophomore sociology major, recalling in horror a political analogy from last year's debate.
His friend Al Shaw, 20, who is studying philosophy, said, "They should be," adding, "They're doughy."
Mr. Cohen, betraying his blue-state sympathies, countered, "But the latkes are greasy and slimy."
Mr. Shaw interrupted, "And working class," adding, "Only the rich elite eat a hamantasch."
Onstage, one debater used the latke-hamantasch divide as a metaphor for Chicago's baseball rivalry, vilifying the Purim pastry as the poppy-laced North Side scourge that accounted for the slugger Sammy Sosa bulking up when he abandoned the White Sox for the Cubs.
Mr. Kontorovich, the visiting law professor, said he had been constructing his argument in his head for at least a decade, since his days as an undergraduate here, while Mr. O'Muircheartaigh, who began his talk in Gaellic, said he tasted the first latke of his life - and hamantasch, too - after last year's debate.
Long before Rabbi David Rosenberg, the Hillel director, counted the postdebate ballots - 72 latke, 44 hamantasch, 2 disqualified for unexplained reasons - the winner was clear: people were searching the empty chafing dishes for scraps of burnt potato, while boxes of hamantaschen sat yet unopened.
On saving the surviving WTC staircase
Survivors Begin Effort to Save Stairway That Was 9/11 'Path to Freedom'
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
These were the final steps.
After hundreds of workers made a terrifying floor-by-floor descent from their offices in the sky on 9/11, as the twin towers shuddered and rained ruin, they found a gangway to safety from the elevated plaza down the Vesey Street stairs.
"They were the path to freedom," recalled Kayla Bergeron, the chief of public and government affairs for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Her own 68-story journey ended as she walked down that staircase with Patty Clark, a senior aviation adviser at the authority, hand in hand for the last few yards to Vesey Street.
These are the final steps in another sense. The Vesey Street staircase, also called the "survivors' stairway," is the World Trade Center's last above-ground remnant.
It escapes much public attention because, from the street, it is almost unrecognizable.
Closer up, however, two flights of stairs come into view, next to what looks like a concrete slide but was once the base of an escalator. The upper steps still have their crisp granite treads. The lower steps are as craggy as a Roman antiquity. They convey a sense of human scale on the gigantically emptied landscape of ground zero.
But they also stand within the outline of the future Tower 2, an office building planned by Silverstein Properties. That is why a preservation effort has begun. Possibilities include moving the staircase elsewhere on the trade center site, making it an architectural feature attached to or enclosed by Tower 2, or - far less likely - redrawing the Tower 2 outline to avoid it.
"It's certainly a very significant remembrance of what happened that day," said Charles A. Gargano, vice chairman of the Port Authority, on a visit to the staircase last week with Ms. Bergeron and Ms. Clark. "Somehow I would hope that it can be preserved somewhere in the site, if not within Building 2."
The World Trade Center Survivors' Network hopes the stairs can stay rooted. "There's a great power in their being where they were," said Gerry Bogacz, a founding member of the group. "After the south tower collapsed, that was the only way anyone could get off the plaza."
Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and Frank E. Sanchis III, the senior vice president of the Municipal Art Society, have also asked that the staircase be permanently preserved in place.
"There will never be another original element of the World Trade Center complex in its original street-level location," they wrote to the site's developer, Larry A. Silverstein, on Nov. 10.
Silverstein Properties had no comment.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Clark and Ms. Bergeron separately made their way down more than 40 stories of 1 World Trade Center, the north tower, and found each other on the 23rd floor. As they reached a landing in a stairwell on the fourth or fifth floor, the south tower collapsed. There was a terrific noise, then a violent vibration. "At that point," Ms. Bergeron said, "I thought we were going to die."
Ms. Clark looked up to see the stairwell itself twisting. Then the lights went out. "You just closed your eyes and you prayed that it be over," she said, adding, "And then it stopped and the lights came back on."
Getting out of the tower proved hellish, too, through calf-high water, under dangling electrical wires, by a dim emergency light that faded to darkness. They felt their way along a row of lockers, until a firefighter opened a door.
What greeted them outside was a dust cloud so opaque and white that it appeared luminous. "It was light," Ms. Clark said, "but you could not see." Rather than dash across the open plaza, they made their way under the protective eaves of the United States Custom House and 5 World Trade Center to Vesey Street.
"What we had to walk over getting out of 1, if we had to negotiate out to Church Street - I'm not certain that we'd be having this conversation," Ms. Clark said.
Their trial did not end when they reached the Vesey Street staircase. A large man ahead of Ms. Clark began to clutch his chest. "I hit him," she recalled. "I'm like: 'Buddy, keep going. You cannot have gotten this far and not get out of here.' "
At the base of the stairs, Ms. Clark said, a Port Authority police officer heading back into the building stopped to allow the man to use his respirator - a gesture that may have saved the officer's life.
Speaking personally, Ms. Clark called the Vesey Street staircase a "monument to all of us" that embodies the metaphorical power of steps.
"It's religious. It's literary," she said. " 'Ladder of success.' 'Jacob's ladder.' It's all of those things. 'Step program.' It's all very much woven into how we explain things. 'Stairway to heaven.' "
Ms. Clark said: "Your image of the World Trade Center is two towers piercing the sky. This is the only thing that's above grade. And the only remnant that was part of that thing that pierced the sky."
On the Irish Lack of Thatch
Thatched Irish Roofs Are Falling Down
By BRIAN LAVERY
DONABATE, Ireland - Seamus Heaney, enthralled with the work of a roof thatcher, wrote that the man worked for days above the rafters, "pinning down his world, handful by handful. ... And left them gaping at his Midas touch."
Mr. Heaney wrote those lines in 1969, when thatched-roof cottages numbered in the hundreds of thousands and were an unavoidable feature of the Irish landscape, not to mention postcards and tourist brochures. These days, cottages are still on the postcards, but tourists have a hard time finding them, and the list of thatchers in the yellow pages has dwindled from dozens to a handful.
Plainly put, Ireland's traditional thatched roofs are facing extinction. The latest warning from a conservation group, in a new government-sponsored study, estimates that only 1,300 thatched-roof buildings remain in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. If more disappear, thatchers will go out of business, and the remaining roofs will rapidly fall apart.
For years, the government contributed to the problem by encouraging people living in thatched cottages to save on maintenance costs by covering the thatch with corrugated tin. But the homes topped with reed or straw no longer represent the rural poverty that generations of Irish people wanted to forget. Now, thatched roofs are occasionally tacked onto pubs and suburban homes as a startlingly incongruous status symbol.
When it comes to the cottages, though, it seems that few people in wealthy 21st-century Ireland have any interest in living in 18th-century homes with one bedroom and thick walls made of mud. Cottage dwellers are quick to list their advantages - cool in summer, warm in winter, environmentally sound - but the easily damaged roofs must be replaced about once a decade, and the earthen floors guarantee dampness.
"It's very difficult for some people to imagine limiting themselves to the amount of space available in a thatched house," said Colm Murray, architecture officer with the government's Heritage Council. "They hearken back to the times when people had to make their way in the world with the materials readily available to them."
Even those materials are in short supply, since the oats and wheat used in thatch must be harvested with antique farm equipment to avoid damaging the straw. Local farmers provide just 30 percent of the necessary amount each year, leaving thatchers to import the rest, mostly from Poland and Turkey.
To learn the craft now, aspiring thatchers must travel abroad or pick it up on the job, usually from a relative. John Brereton, a 53-year-old thatcher, followed his father - and grandfather and great-grandfather - into the trade, and now works in partnership with his son.
"When I started, at first I couldn't stick it because you needed so much patience," he said over a cup of tea in a cottage whose roof he was repairing in this seaside town north of Dublin, an area once dominated by thatched homes. "You start with a handful of straw, and you look up and say, 'When am I going to finish this?' It takes about 5,000 handfuls of straw to thatch a house."
Back up a ladder after his break, Mr. Brereton took clumps of straw that he had twisted together and shoved them into a large divot where he had cut away rotted thatch. Next spring, he will replace the entire roof, a job that costs about $16,500, about half of which is covered by public grants intended to help preserve the houses.
Down below, members of the family that has owned the cottage since it was built in the 1700's acknowledge that it makes little sense for modern living, but insist they will never sell. Ann Savage was born in the house 60 years ago and grew up in its two rooms with her parents, two siblings and grandmother. "It's very important to our lives," she said.
The cottage was passed on through Mrs. Savage's female ancestors, and women in the family now live there as an informal rite of passage after marriage. Her daughter, Vivienne Goodwin, lived in it for nine years, and remembers crying when she moved out to make room for the current occupant, her younger sister.
"We did have a lot of problems, with flooding and damp, but you just get over that," Mrs. Goodwin said, her eyes tearing up. Running water and an indoor toilet were installed in the 1970's, but the cottage still lacks central heating. "You sacrificed all those things living here because it was just so nice," she said. "It was fantastic."
Mr. Brereton's traditional Irish method of thatching, with its shaggy look and rough technique, also faces modern challenges. In contrast to Ireland, Britain saved its thatched roofs through aggressive conservation efforts after World War II and formal training programs, so its style of thatching developed while Ireland's remained relatively static.
Peter Childs, a Briton who has worked in Ireland for a decade, employs those techniques here because the roofs last longer and have a cleaner, more tightly woven look. Government officials encourage homeowners to use native methods, but they acknowledge that any method of thatching is preferable to seeing the craft disappear.
"The government is starting to realize that our heritage will be lost," Mr. Brereton said. "But it's nearly too late."
Rules and tattoos in prison
A Prison Makes the Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
BATH, Ontario, Nov. 18 - The Bath Institution is a long way from Alcatraz.
It is a medium-security federal prison, and its inmates are allowed to keep the keys to their cells. Many have their own kitchens, and they move freely from the gym to the cabinet-making shop. Drug addicts can clean their needles with bleach, and condoms are readily available.
Now the institution has opened a tattoo parlor, and Mark Hewitt, a 37-year-old inmate in jail for breaking into factories, couldn't be happier.
"You're excluded from society, so the way to fit in here is to get a tattoo, to blend in and be one of the crew, to be safer," said Mr. Hewitt, who for years had been clandestinely puncturing prisoner biceps with sewing needles, guitar strings and homemade ink sometimes made from burnt polystyrene.
While he says he has always been careful, such practices have contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis C and H.I.V. in prisons in Canada and around the world. Now Mr. Hewitt has been trained by the government to take his art form out of the dark and seamy corners of the jail and into a sterile-looking cinder-block room that looks almost like a dental clinic.
Mr. Hewitt's parlor is part of a pilot project by the Correctional Services of Canada that began in August and now includes five federal prisons across Canada. A sixth, in a woman's prison, is scheduled to open this month. More than 120 inmates have already taken part, paying about $5 per two-hour session.
Officials here and in the United States say they believe that the pilot project is the first of its kind in the world, another step in a trend of harm-reduction techniques spreading to one degree or another in prisons in many countries. The pilot program, expected to continue through at least 2007, is expected to cost the government roughly $100,000 per prison.
Tattooing has traditionally been banned in prisons because tattoos are often used to identify inmates with gangs and hate groups. But inmates have managed to get around the bans; 45 percent of Canadian inmates acquire a tattoo while in prison, according to government statistics. That rate has held steady over the last decade despite the widespread knowledge that diseases are spread through reused tattoo needles and ink.
"You don't want your prisons acting as a pool of infection for the general population," said Joanne Barton, a senior health officer working on the program. "The prevalence of H.I.V. is 7 to 10 times higher in federal penitentiaries than in the general Canadian population, and for hepatitis C the prevalence is 30 times higher."
Ms. Barton stressed that tattoos connected with hate groups and gangs were prohibited, along with tattoos on the face, neck and genitals. While she acknowledged that illicit tattooing would continue, she said at least now prisons in the pilot project were distributing information on safer techniques.
But the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers strongly opposes the pilot as a potential danger to its members.
"This program is doomed for failure," said Sylvain Martel, the union's national president. "Needles will be used against corrections officers."
Mr. Martel also said "we already have evidence" that inmates are stealing needles, ink and other paraphernalia from the parlors to be used in illicit tattooing. Prison supervisors say that they have no knowledge of that, adding that there is a careful inventory before and after tattooing sessions.
Whether legal or not, tattooing is not going to disappear from prisons. Tattoos serve many functions, aside from gang identification. Inmates typically make their bodies a collage of their life, complete with pictures or representations of loved ones and important events like funerals they cannot attend. To understand the importance of tattoos here, one only has to look at Tracy Rivet's body.
On his right arm is a tattoo displaying a decaying skull with hair flowing out of its mouth. On his chest there is a Christian cross that commemorates his deceased father. And on his left arm there is a wizard and a skull that cover up another tattoo of the name of his former wife. Now he is getting his entire back tattooed with a giant eagle, a symbol of freedom.
Like many convicts with tattoos, Mr. Rivet has hepatitis C, a debilitating chronic infectious disease that costs the Canadian government more than $20,000 a year per inmate to treat.
"I always let doctors, nurses and females know about my disease," said Mr. Rivet, who is serving a five-year sentence for first-degree manslaughter, after killing two people while driving drunk. "But only about 50 percent of the inmates are careful," he added, referring to sharing tattoo needles and reusing homemade ink.
The Canadian experiment is being watched closely by other prison systems looking for ways to control infections. It may work best in prisons like Bath, where inmates say gangs do not have a significant presence. Other Canadian prisons where tattoo programs are being tested, in Quebec and the Prairie provinces, have larger gang problems.
The corrections department in the Spanish province of Catalonia has reviewed the guidelines used in the Canadian program as it prepares to open its own pilot program. One corrections department in Australia has also considered starting a pilot, and the idea could eventually migrate south of the border.
"If there was a way to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks," said Joey Weedon, director of governmental affairs of the American Correctional Association, "it's certainly a model that correctional administrators in the United States would look at and possibly attempt to copy."
On Thanksgiving food, and the Pilgrims
They Held Their Noses, and Ate
By JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS
San Marcos, Tex.
NO contemporary American holiday is as deeply steeped in culinary tradition as Thanksgiving. Not only is the day centered on a feast, but it's also a feast with a narrowly proscribed list of foods - usually some combination of turkey, corn, cranberries, squash and pumpkin pie. Decorated with these dishes, the Thanksgiving table has become a secular altar upon which we worship America's pioneering character, a place to show reverence for the rugged Pilgrims who came to Plymouth in peace, sat with the Indians as equals and indulged in the New World's cornucopia with gusto.
But you might call this comfort food for a comfort myth.
The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist - the colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the settlers' culinary existence.
Understanding this paradox requires acknowledging that there's no evidence to support the holiday's early association with food - much less foods native to North America. Thanksgiving celebrations occurred irregularly at best after 1621 (the year of the supposed first Thanksgiving) and colonists observed them as strictly religious events (conceivably by fasting).
It wasn't until the mid-19th century that domestic writers began to play down Thanksgiving's religious emphasis and invest the holiday with familiar culinary values. Sarah Josepha Hale and her fellow Martha Stewarts of the day implored families to "sit down together at the feast of fat things" and raise a toast to the Thanksgiving holiday. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the cornucopia-inspired myth was, as a result of these literary efforts, in full bloom.
This secular transition laid the foundation for families to adopt what had become familiar American foods as the holiday's bountiful centerpiece. Popular as they might have been in 19th-century America, however, the earthy victuals that Thanksgiving revisionists arranged on the Pilgrims' fictional table were foods that Pilgrims and their descendants would have rather avoided.
The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to have forgotten that their Puritan forebears migrated to New England with strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards.
Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of savagery.
From the colonists' perspective, Native Americans grew crops in an entirely corrupt manner. They typically prepared fields by setting fire to the underbrush and girdling surrounding trees. Afterward, they planted corn, gourds and beans willy-nilly across charred ground, possibly throwing in fish as fertilizer. To the Indian women who tended the plants with clamshell hoes, the ecological brilliance of this arrangement was abundantly clear: the cornstalks stretched into sturdy poles for the beans to climb upon, the corn leaves fanned out to provide squash with shade, and the beans enriched the soil with extra nitrogen. But the English, blinded by tradition, never got it - they just looked on in horror.
Where were the fences? The neat rows of cross-sectioned grain? The plows? Where were the carts of dung? The team of oxen? The yokes? Why were perfectly good trees left to rot? Why not burn them to power a fireplace? And those fish! Why not salt them down and export them to Europe for a tidy profit? What was wrong with these people? The collective English answer - "everything" - honed the colonists' distaste for foods, especially corn and squash, that they quickly judged best for farm animals.
A similar culinary misunderstanding developed over meat. To be sure, the English frequently hunted for their meals. But hunting was preferably a sport. When the English farmer chased game to feed his family, he did so with pangs of shame. To resort to the hunt was, after all, indicative of agricultural failure, poor planning and laziness.
Thus the colonists reacted with extreme disapproval when they saw Indian men adorned with paint disappearing into the woods for weeks at a time to track down protein. Making the scene even more primitive was that the women who stayed behind spent their time tending crops, lugging water from the creek, and toiling away at odd jobs that the English valiantly considered men's work. The elk, bear, raccoon, possum and indeed the wild turkeys that the men hauled back to the village were, for all these reasons, tainted goods reflective of multiple agricultural perversions.
They were also, much to the settlers' chagrin, entirely unavoidable. The methods that colonists condemned as agriculturally backwards - and the food these methods produced - became necessary to their survival. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how carefully they tended their crops and repaired their fences and fattened their cattle and furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn't allow it.
The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques not only sent colonists deep into the woods galloping after game and grubbing corn from unbound, ashen fields, it also provoked severe cultural insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians."
This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native American victuals - even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn't until after the Revolution, when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged individualism.
Today, of course, we proudly evoke this native American heritage by crowding the table with turkey, corn, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie as if they had always been there. That they weren't shouldn't be a cause for chagrin, but a reminder that Americans have survived in some measure because we are endlessly adaptable and capable of overcoming our deepest prejudices - even if the Pilgrims wouldn't have approved.
Even Supporters Doubt President as Issues Pile Up
By KATE ZERNIKE
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 22 - Leesa Martin never considered President Bush a great leader, but she voted for him a year ago because she admired how he handled the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Then came the past summer, when the death toll from the war in Iraq hit this state particularly hard: 16 marines from the same battalion killed in one week. She thought the federal government should have acted faster to help after Hurricane Katrina. She was baffled by the president's nomination of Harriet E. Miers, a woman she considered unqualified for the Supreme Court, and disappointed when he did not nominate another woman after Ms. Miers withdrew.
And she remains unsettled by questions about whether the White House leaked the name of a C.I.A. agent whose husband had accused the president of misleading the country about the intelligence that led to the war.
"I don't know if it's any one thing as much as it is everything," said Ms. Martin, 49, eating lunch at the North Market, on the edge of downtown Columbus. "It's kind of snowballed."
Her concerns were echoed in more than 75 interviews here and across the country this week, helping to explain the slide in the president's approval and trustworthiness ratings in recent polls.
Many people who voted for Mr. Bush a year ago had trouble pinning their current discontent on any one thing. Many mentioned the hurricane and the indictment of a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, which some said raised doubts about the president's candor and his judgment. But there was a sense that something had veered off course in the last few months, and the war was the one constant. Over and over, even some of Mr. Bush's supporters raised comparisons with Vietnam.
"We keep hearing about suicide bombers and casualties and never hear about any progress being made," said Dave Panici, 45, a railroad conductor from Bradley, Ill. "I don't see an end to it; it just seems relentless. I feel like our country is just staying afloat, just treading water instead of swimming toward somewhere."
Mr. Panici voted for President Bush in 2004, calling it "a vote for security." "Now that a year has passed, I haven't seen any improvement in Iraq," he said. "I don't feel that the world is a safer place."
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll in mid-November found that 37 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush, the lowest approval rating the poll had recorded in his presidency. That was down from 55 percent a year ago and from a high of 90 percent shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
An Associated Press/Ipsos poll earlier in the month found the same 37 percent approval rating and recorded the president's lowest levels regarding integrity and honesty: 42 percent of Americans found him honest, compared with 53 percent at the beginning of this year.
Several of those interviewed said that in the last year they had come to believe that Mr. Bush had not been fully honest about the intelligence that led to the war, which he said showed solid evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"I think people put their faith in Bush, hoping he would do the right thing," said Stacey Rosen, 38, a stay-at-home mother in Boca Raton, Fla., who said she voted for Mr. Bush but was "totally disappointed" in him now. "Everybody cannot believe that there hasn't been one shred of evidence of W.M.D. I think it goes to show how they tell us what they want to tell us."
Mark Briggs, who works for Nationwide Insurance here, said he did not want to believe that the president "manipulated" intelligence leading the country into war, but believed that, at least, Mr. Bush had misread it.
Still, however much he may disagree with Mr. Bush's policies, Mr. Briggs said, he admires the president for standing by what he says.
"There is the notion of leadership and sticking with the plan, which I believe in," he said. "George Bush is clear and consistent. He made a tough decision to go to war - and others voted for it, too. And I think he's right: those people may be trying to rewrite history."
Kacey Wilson, 32, eating lunch with Ms. Martin, said she, too, had concerns about the death toll from the war, but she felt that Mr. Bush spoke the truth, even if it might not be what the country wanted to hear. "I like his cut-and-dry, take-no-prisoners style," Ms. Wilson said. "I think people are used to more spinning."
Others, though, saw arrogance in that approach.
"We need to not be so stubborn," said Vicky Polka, 58, a retired school principal in Statesboro, Ga., who voted for Mr. Bush and described her support for him as "waning." "Something's not going right here. We need to resolve this. I hate to say it, but I think Iraq is going the way of Vietnam."
Few people said they were following the leak scandal, which led to the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Mr. Cheney's former aide. Some who could cite main characters and events dismissed it as little more than political theater. Even fewer said they had paid attention to other scandals preoccupying Washington: the indictment of Representative Tom DeLay, the powerful Texas Republican, and the guilty plea by his former spokesman.
But several people said that the leak scandal had left them with the sense that the president was not leveling with the public about his involvement.
"He has to give us more information," said Phil Niemie, 51, an elementary school principal eating lunch with his family in Columbus. "The longer it goes without closure, it begins to trigger those Nixon Watergate years. I felt the same way with Clinton."
But for Mr. Niemie, who voted for Mr. Bush, and others, the leak scandal raised the biggest doubts about Vice President Cheney.
"A lot of problems tie back to some of Cheney's shenanigans," Ms. Martin said. "It just seems like he could have done better for vice president the second time around."
In Atlanta, Selena Smith, a director at an advertising agency, echoed others when she said she thought too much time had already been spent on the investigation.
"The war is more important to me now," said Ms. Smith, 46. "What's the plan? Give us something to hang our teeth on. What's really top of mind for me is how many people are getting killed across the creek, and how are we going to get them home?"
Here in Ohio, the most hotly contested state in the 2004 election, the heavy toll on a local Marine battalion had played out on television and in newspapers throughout the summer's end, and the majority of two dozen people interviewed here said they wanted to see the troops come home.
Some, though, faulted Americans as having short attention spans.
"Anything that takes more than a couple of months, we get bored with," said Rich Canary, 35, an information technology specialist here. "Progress has been made. The Iraqis have a constitution. They're actually creating their own country. When you hear the soldiers talk, they feel what they're doing is important."
And there was much division about how to end the war. Some military families said it was important to finish the task the troops had begun; others said they resented accusations of being unpatriotic when they criticized the war. Some who said their approval of the president had not wavered nevertheless argued for a quick end to the war, while some of Mr. Bush's strongest critics said it would destabilize Iraq to withdraw the troops anytime soon.
"Too many people would get hurt," said Laurence Melia, 28, a salesman from Newton, Mass., who campaigned against President Bush last year. "There has to be a last foot on the ground in the end, and there might be more problems if we run away too fast."
In Houston, Geoff Van Hoeven, an accountant, said he thought the war in Iraq had aggravated the terrorist threat by creating "a breeding ground for Al Qaeda." Still, Mr. Van Hoeven said a quick withdrawal was not possible, "because America's going to be perceived as extremely weak and unreliable coming in, and when the going gets rough, they pull out."
Even those who voted against Mr. Bush a year ago saw little satisfaction in his woes.
"Part of me enjoys watching him squirm," said Shirley Tobias, 46, sitting with a colleague from Netscape at a coffee shop in Grandview, a suburb of Columbus. "But he's squirming on our behalf. We're all in this together."
On the Latke/Hamentash debates
Such Sound and Fury! Tradition! Einsteins in Food Fight of Words
By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, Nov. 24 - The international law expert declared hamantaschen a violation of the Geneva Conventions, symbolizing the eating of an ancient enemy. But the linguistics professor, posing as Plato, said Hermogenes, a k a hamantasch, "clearly had the better idea" than Cratylus, stand-in for latkes.
And the Irish statistician with the unpronounceable name - the token non-Jew on this year's bill - revealed secret data documenting a clear public preference for latkes.
"It's almost insulting to your intelligence to go through these," the statistician, Colm O'Muircheartaigh, a professor of public policy, said of the inscrutable table of numbers displayed on a big screen behind him that supposedly factored in freshness and whether the snacks were made by mother or other. "So I won't."
As the law expert, Eugene Kontorovich, said, "What's great about the Latke-Hamantasch Debate is that at a time when so much academic inquiry is spent on esoteric and irrelevant matters, the debate focuses on the big questions."
Big questions, indeed. Sweet or savory? Round or triangular? Baked or fried?
These and other profound ponderables have made the debate a sacred, if silly, annual tradition at the superserious University of Chicago since 1946, chronicled in a new anthology, "The Great Latke Hamantash Debate" (University of Chicago Press). At Tuesday's extravaganza, complete with costumes and a klezmer band, the book's editor, Ruth Fredman Cernea, welcomed a packed auditorium to "a night of exquisite absurdity."
"The things that make this what it is are so deep in Jewish tradition - being able to laugh at yourself, being able to laugh at the seriousness of life," Ms. Cernea, an anthropologist, explained in an interview. "In Jewish tradition, scholarship is serious, but it's also irreverent. Challenging the text, making fun of the text, is encouraged."
Hence, Mr. Kontorovich's extensive references to County of Allegheny v. A.C.L.U., 492 U.S. 573, 585 n. 26 (1989), what he called the Supreme Court's "most recent and definitive pronouncement on potato pancakes." The idea is not so much to determine which iconic Jewish snack is superior - the book leans heavily latke, as did Tuesday's debaters - but to celebrate their very Jewishness and inject some levity into the lethal rigor of the campus.
"Nobody ever persuades anybody," said a laughing Ted Cohen, the philosophy professor who has made fun of speakers for two decades as the debate's moderator. "I'm not at all clear what the point is, but it's certainly not that."
Mr. Cohen, for the record, is a latke man, favoring the potato pancake fried in oil that marks Hanukkah's miracle of a drop of oil lasting eight days. Hamantaschen, three-cornered Purim pastry most often filled with prune or poppy, represent the ears (or hat or purse, depending whom you ask) of the evil Haman, whose plot to kill the Jews was unraveled. The debate always comes just before Thanksgiving - just before the onset of first-term final examinations and the frigid Chicago winter.
It started as a fireside schmooze in the living room of the Hillel House, a postwar vehicle for Jewish students and faculty members to celebrate their culture rather than squelch it. By 1965, the crowd of 700 was more than double the number that attended High Holy Day services on campus. Now, the tradition has spread to more than a dozen campuses.
Here at Chicago, where 15 percent of the 4,500 undergraduates - and, Mr. Cohen estimated, "112 percent" of the faculty - are Jewish, it overflows the largest auditorium, with devotees pinning "I {sheart} Hamentaschen" buttons on their T-shirts, including ones that proclaim U.C. the university "where fun goes to die." Despite its reputation, Mr. Cohen noted, Chicago is not only where the atom was first split but also where Second City, the improvisational comedy giant, was born - not that long after the latke-hamantasch debate.
Among the eminent Hyde Park humorists - and debaters - highlighted in the book are the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who said the matter could be settled by the equation L=qH2/3; Hanna Holborn Gray, then the university's president, who explained that Machiavelli was not only Jewish but loved the latke; and Allan Bloom of the Committee on Social Thought, whose talk was titled, not surprisingly, "Restoring the Jewish Canon."
There have been dissertations on "The Hamantasch in Shakespeare" and "The Hermeneutics of the Hamantasch;" feminist critiques that take both sides (Judith Shapiro, now president of Barnard College, suggested that Haman was a transvestite, "his aggressive machismo" overcompensation); and odes like this one by the linguist Edward Stankiewicz:
But I, I am in a blissful state
When I see a well-stacked latke plate.
And what is in a hamantasch?
A hamantasch is but a nash!
On Tuesday, the debate began in the audience even before the speakers, in academic robes and funny hats, paraded with all their pomp and circumstance under the competing latke and hamantasch banners.
"They made hamantasch Republican!" said Will Cohen, 19, a sophomore sociology major, recalling in horror a political analogy from last year's debate.
His friend Al Shaw, 20, who is studying philosophy, said, "They should be," adding, "They're doughy."
Mr. Cohen, betraying his blue-state sympathies, countered, "But the latkes are greasy and slimy."
Mr. Shaw interrupted, "And working class," adding, "Only the rich elite eat a hamantasch."
Onstage, one debater used the latke-hamantasch divide as a metaphor for Chicago's baseball rivalry, vilifying the Purim pastry as the poppy-laced North Side scourge that accounted for the slugger Sammy Sosa bulking up when he abandoned the White Sox for the Cubs.
Mr. Kontorovich, the visiting law professor, said he had been constructing his argument in his head for at least a decade, since his days as an undergraduate here, while Mr. O'Muircheartaigh, who began his talk in Gaellic, said he tasted the first latke of his life - and hamantasch, too - after last year's debate.
Long before Rabbi David Rosenberg, the Hillel director, counted the postdebate ballots - 72 latke, 44 hamantasch, 2 disqualified for unexplained reasons - the winner was clear: people were searching the empty chafing dishes for scraps of burnt potato, while boxes of hamantaschen sat yet unopened.
On saving the surviving WTC staircase
Survivors Begin Effort to Save Stairway That Was 9/11 'Path to Freedom'
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
These were the final steps.
After hundreds of workers made a terrifying floor-by-floor descent from their offices in the sky on 9/11, as the twin towers shuddered and rained ruin, they found a gangway to safety from the elevated plaza down the Vesey Street stairs.
"They were the path to freedom," recalled Kayla Bergeron, the chief of public and government affairs for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Her own 68-story journey ended as she walked down that staircase with Patty Clark, a senior aviation adviser at the authority, hand in hand for the last few yards to Vesey Street.
These are the final steps in another sense. The Vesey Street staircase, also called the "survivors' stairway," is the World Trade Center's last above-ground remnant.
It escapes much public attention because, from the street, it is almost unrecognizable.
Closer up, however, two flights of stairs come into view, next to what looks like a concrete slide but was once the base of an escalator. The upper steps still have their crisp granite treads. The lower steps are as craggy as a Roman antiquity. They convey a sense of human scale on the gigantically emptied landscape of ground zero.
But they also stand within the outline of the future Tower 2, an office building planned by Silverstein Properties. That is why a preservation effort has begun. Possibilities include moving the staircase elsewhere on the trade center site, making it an architectural feature attached to or enclosed by Tower 2, or - far less likely - redrawing the Tower 2 outline to avoid it.
"It's certainly a very significant remembrance of what happened that day," said Charles A. Gargano, vice chairman of the Port Authority, on a visit to the staircase last week with Ms. Bergeron and Ms. Clark. "Somehow I would hope that it can be preserved somewhere in the site, if not within Building 2."
The World Trade Center Survivors' Network hopes the stairs can stay rooted. "There's a great power in their being where they were," said Gerry Bogacz, a founding member of the group. "After the south tower collapsed, that was the only way anyone could get off the plaza."
Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and Frank E. Sanchis III, the senior vice president of the Municipal Art Society, have also asked that the staircase be permanently preserved in place.
"There will never be another original element of the World Trade Center complex in its original street-level location," they wrote to the site's developer, Larry A. Silverstein, on Nov. 10.
Silverstein Properties had no comment.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Clark and Ms. Bergeron separately made their way down more than 40 stories of 1 World Trade Center, the north tower, and found each other on the 23rd floor. As they reached a landing in a stairwell on the fourth or fifth floor, the south tower collapsed. There was a terrific noise, then a violent vibration. "At that point," Ms. Bergeron said, "I thought we were going to die."
Ms. Clark looked up to see the stairwell itself twisting. Then the lights went out. "You just closed your eyes and you prayed that it be over," she said, adding, "And then it stopped and the lights came back on."
Getting out of the tower proved hellish, too, through calf-high water, under dangling electrical wires, by a dim emergency light that faded to darkness. They felt their way along a row of lockers, until a firefighter opened a door.
What greeted them outside was a dust cloud so opaque and white that it appeared luminous. "It was light," Ms. Clark said, "but you could not see." Rather than dash across the open plaza, they made their way under the protective eaves of the United States Custom House and 5 World Trade Center to Vesey Street.
"What we had to walk over getting out of 1, if we had to negotiate out to Church Street - I'm not certain that we'd be having this conversation," Ms. Clark said.
Their trial did not end when they reached the Vesey Street staircase. A large man ahead of Ms. Clark began to clutch his chest. "I hit him," she recalled. "I'm like: 'Buddy, keep going. You cannot have gotten this far and not get out of here.' "
At the base of the stairs, Ms. Clark said, a Port Authority police officer heading back into the building stopped to allow the man to use his respirator - a gesture that may have saved the officer's life.
Speaking personally, Ms. Clark called the Vesey Street staircase a "monument to all of us" that embodies the metaphorical power of steps.
"It's religious. It's literary," she said. " 'Ladder of success.' 'Jacob's ladder.' It's all of those things. 'Step program.' It's all very much woven into how we explain things. 'Stairway to heaven.' "
Ms. Clark said: "Your image of the World Trade Center is two towers piercing the sky. This is the only thing that's above grade. And the only remnant that was part of that thing that pierced the sky."
On the Irish Lack of Thatch
Thatched Irish Roofs Are Falling Down
By BRIAN LAVERY
DONABATE, Ireland - Seamus Heaney, enthralled with the work of a roof thatcher, wrote that the man worked for days above the rafters, "pinning down his world, handful by handful. ... And left them gaping at his Midas touch."
Mr. Heaney wrote those lines in 1969, when thatched-roof cottages numbered in the hundreds of thousands and were an unavoidable feature of the Irish landscape, not to mention postcards and tourist brochures. These days, cottages are still on the postcards, but tourists have a hard time finding them, and the list of thatchers in the yellow pages has dwindled from dozens to a handful.
Plainly put, Ireland's traditional thatched roofs are facing extinction. The latest warning from a conservation group, in a new government-sponsored study, estimates that only 1,300 thatched-roof buildings remain in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. If more disappear, thatchers will go out of business, and the remaining roofs will rapidly fall apart.
For years, the government contributed to the problem by encouraging people living in thatched cottages to save on maintenance costs by covering the thatch with corrugated tin. But the homes topped with reed or straw no longer represent the rural poverty that generations of Irish people wanted to forget. Now, thatched roofs are occasionally tacked onto pubs and suburban homes as a startlingly incongruous status symbol.
When it comes to the cottages, though, it seems that few people in wealthy 21st-century Ireland have any interest in living in 18th-century homes with one bedroom and thick walls made of mud. Cottage dwellers are quick to list their advantages - cool in summer, warm in winter, environmentally sound - but the easily damaged roofs must be replaced about once a decade, and the earthen floors guarantee dampness.
"It's very difficult for some people to imagine limiting themselves to the amount of space available in a thatched house," said Colm Murray, architecture officer with the government's Heritage Council. "They hearken back to the times when people had to make their way in the world with the materials readily available to them."
Even those materials are in short supply, since the oats and wheat used in thatch must be harvested with antique farm equipment to avoid damaging the straw. Local farmers provide just 30 percent of the necessary amount each year, leaving thatchers to import the rest, mostly from Poland and Turkey.
To learn the craft now, aspiring thatchers must travel abroad or pick it up on the job, usually from a relative. John Brereton, a 53-year-old thatcher, followed his father - and grandfather and great-grandfather - into the trade, and now works in partnership with his son.
"When I started, at first I couldn't stick it because you needed so much patience," he said over a cup of tea in a cottage whose roof he was repairing in this seaside town north of Dublin, an area once dominated by thatched homes. "You start with a handful of straw, and you look up and say, 'When am I going to finish this?' It takes about 5,000 handfuls of straw to thatch a house."
Back up a ladder after his break, Mr. Brereton took clumps of straw that he had twisted together and shoved them into a large divot where he had cut away rotted thatch. Next spring, he will replace the entire roof, a job that costs about $16,500, about half of which is covered by public grants intended to help preserve the houses.
Down below, members of the family that has owned the cottage since it was built in the 1700's acknowledge that it makes little sense for modern living, but insist they will never sell. Ann Savage was born in the house 60 years ago and grew up in its two rooms with her parents, two siblings and grandmother. "It's very important to our lives," she said.
The cottage was passed on through Mrs. Savage's female ancestors, and women in the family now live there as an informal rite of passage after marriage. Her daughter, Vivienne Goodwin, lived in it for nine years, and remembers crying when she moved out to make room for the current occupant, her younger sister.
"We did have a lot of problems, with flooding and damp, but you just get over that," Mrs. Goodwin said, her eyes tearing up. Running water and an indoor toilet were installed in the 1970's, but the cottage still lacks central heating. "You sacrificed all those things living here because it was just so nice," she said. "It was fantastic."
Mr. Brereton's traditional Irish method of thatching, with its shaggy look and rough technique, also faces modern challenges. In contrast to Ireland, Britain saved its thatched roofs through aggressive conservation efforts after World War II and formal training programs, so its style of thatching developed while Ireland's remained relatively static.
Peter Childs, a Briton who has worked in Ireland for a decade, employs those techniques here because the roofs last longer and have a cleaner, more tightly woven look. Government officials encourage homeowners to use native methods, but they acknowledge that any method of thatching is preferable to seeing the craft disappear.
"The government is starting to realize that our heritage will be lost," Mr. Brereton said. "But it's nearly too late."
Rules and tattoos in prison
A Prison Makes the Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
BATH, Ontario, Nov. 18 - The Bath Institution is a long way from Alcatraz.
It is a medium-security federal prison, and its inmates are allowed to keep the keys to their cells. Many have their own kitchens, and they move freely from the gym to the cabinet-making shop. Drug addicts can clean their needles with bleach, and condoms are readily available.
Now the institution has opened a tattoo parlor, and Mark Hewitt, a 37-year-old inmate in jail for breaking into factories, couldn't be happier.
"You're excluded from society, so the way to fit in here is to get a tattoo, to blend in and be one of the crew, to be safer," said Mr. Hewitt, who for years had been clandestinely puncturing prisoner biceps with sewing needles, guitar strings and homemade ink sometimes made from burnt polystyrene.
While he says he has always been careful, such practices have contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis C and H.I.V. in prisons in Canada and around the world. Now Mr. Hewitt has been trained by the government to take his art form out of the dark and seamy corners of the jail and into a sterile-looking cinder-block room that looks almost like a dental clinic.
Mr. Hewitt's parlor is part of a pilot project by the Correctional Services of Canada that began in August and now includes five federal prisons across Canada. A sixth, in a woman's prison, is scheduled to open this month. More than 120 inmates have already taken part, paying about $5 per two-hour session.
Officials here and in the United States say they believe that the pilot project is the first of its kind in the world, another step in a trend of harm-reduction techniques spreading to one degree or another in prisons in many countries. The pilot program, expected to continue through at least 2007, is expected to cost the government roughly $100,000 per prison.
Tattooing has traditionally been banned in prisons because tattoos are often used to identify inmates with gangs and hate groups. But inmates have managed to get around the bans; 45 percent of Canadian inmates acquire a tattoo while in prison, according to government statistics. That rate has held steady over the last decade despite the widespread knowledge that diseases are spread through reused tattoo needles and ink.
"You don't want your prisons acting as a pool of infection for the general population," said Joanne Barton, a senior health officer working on the program. "The prevalence of H.I.V. is 7 to 10 times higher in federal penitentiaries than in the general Canadian population, and for hepatitis C the prevalence is 30 times higher."
Ms. Barton stressed that tattoos connected with hate groups and gangs were prohibited, along with tattoos on the face, neck and genitals. While she acknowledged that illicit tattooing would continue, she said at least now prisons in the pilot project were distributing information on safer techniques.
But the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers strongly opposes the pilot as a potential danger to its members.
"This program is doomed for failure," said Sylvain Martel, the union's national president. "Needles will be used against corrections officers."
Mr. Martel also said "we already have evidence" that inmates are stealing needles, ink and other paraphernalia from the parlors to be used in illicit tattooing. Prison supervisors say that they have no knowledge of that, adding that there is a careful inventory before and after tattooing sessions.
Whether legal or not, tattooing is not going to disappear from prisons. Tattoos serve many functions, aside from gang identification. Inmates typically make their bodies a collage of their life, complete with pictures or representations of loved ones and important events like funerals they cannot attend. To understand the importance of tattoos here, one only has to look at Tracy Rivet's body.
On his right arm is a tattoo displaying a decaying skull with hair flowing out of its mouth. On his chest there is a Christian cross that commemorates his deceased father. And on his left arm there is a wizard and a skull that cover up another tattoo of the name of his former wife. Now he is getting his entire back tattooed with a giant eagle, a symbol of freedom.
Like many convicts with tattoos, Mr. Rivet has hepatitis C, a debilitating chronic infectious disease that costs the Canadian government more than $20,000 a year per inmate to treat.
"I always let doctors, nurses and females know about my disease," said Mr. Rivet, who is serving a five-year sentence for first-degree manslaughter, after killing two people while driving drunk. "But only about 50 percent of the inmates are careful," he added, referring to sharing tattoo needles and reusing homemade ink.
The Canadian experiment is being watched closely by other prison systems looking for ways to control infections. It may work best in prisons like Bath, where inmates say gangs do not have a significant presence. Other Canadian prisons where tattoo programs are being tested, in Quebec and the Prairie provinces, have larger gang problems.
The corrections department in the Spanish province of Catalonia has reviewed the guidelines used in the Canadian program as it prepares to open its own pilot program. One corrections department in Australia has also considered starting a pilot, and the idea could eventually migrate south of the border.
"If there was a way to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks," said Joey Weedon, director of governmental affairs of the American Correctional Association, "it's certainly a model that correctional administrators in the United States would look at and possibly attempt to copy."
On Thanksgiving food, and the Pilgrims
They Held Their Noses, and Ate
By JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS
San Marcos, Tex.
NO contemporary American holiday is as deeply steeped in culinary tradition as Thanksgiving. Not only is the day centered on a feast, but it's also a feast with a narrowly proscribed list of foods - usually some combination of turkey, corn, cranberries, squash and pumpkin pie. Decorated with these dishes, the Thanksgiving table has become a secular altar upon which we worship America's pioneering character, a place to show reverence for the rugged Pilgrims who came to Plymouth in peace, sat with the Indians as equals and indulged in the New World's cornucopia with gusto.
But you might call this comfort food for a comfort myth.
The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist - the colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the settlers' culinary existence.
Understanding this paradox requires acknowledging that there's no evidence to support the holiday's early association with food - much less foods native to North America. Thanksgiving celebrations occurred irregularly at best after 1621 (the year of the supposed first Thanksgiving) and colonists observed them as strictly religious events (conceivably by fasting).
It wasn't until the mid-19th century that domestic writers began to play down Thanksgiving's religious emphasis and invest the holiday with familiar culinary values. Sarah Josepha Hale and her fellow Martha Stewarts of the day implored families to "sit down together at the feast of fat things" and raise a toast to the Thanksgiving holiday. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the cornucopia-inspired myth was, as a result of these literary efforts, in full bloom.
This secular transition laid the foundation for families to adopt what had become familiar American foods as the holiday's bountiful centerpiece. Popular as they might have been in 19th-century America, however, the earthy victuals that Thanksgiving revisionists arranged on the Pilgrims' fictional table were foods that Pilgrims and their descendants would have rather avoided.
The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to have forgotten that their Puritan forebears migrated to New England with strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards.
Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of savagery.
From the colonists' perspective, Native Americans grew crops in an entirely corrupt manner. They typically prepared fields by setting fire to the underbrush and girdling surrounding trees. Afterward, they planted corn, gourds and beans willy-nilly across charred ground, possibly throwing in fish as fertilizer. To the Indian women who tended the plants with clamshell hoes, the ecological brilliance of this arrangement was abundantly clear: the cornstalks stretched into sturdy poles for the beans to climb upon, the corn leaves fanned out to provide squash with shade, and the beans enriched the soil with extra nitrogen. But the English, blinded by tradition, never got it - they just looked on in horror.
Where were the fences? The neat rows of cross-sectioned grain? The plows? Where were the carts of dung? The team of oxen? The yokes? Why were perfectly good trees left to rot? Why not burn them to power a fireplace? And those fish! Why not salt them down and export them to Europe for a tidy profit? What was wrong with these people? The collective English answer - "everything" - honed the colonists' distaste for foods, especially corn and squash, that they quickly judged best for farm animals.
A similar culinary misunderstanding developed over meat. To be sure, the English frequently hunted for their meals. But hunting was preferably a sport. When the English farmer chased game to feed his family, he did so with pangs of shame. To resort to the hunt was, after all, indicative of agricultural failure, poor planning and laziness.
Thus the colonists reacted with extreme disapproval when they saw Indian men adorned with paint disappearing into the woods for weeks at a time to track down protein. Making the scene even more primitive was that the women who stayed behind spent their time tending crops, lugging water from the creek, and toiling away at odd jobs that the English valiantly considered men's work. The elk, bear, raccoon, possum and indeed the wild turkeys that the men hauled back to the village were, for all these reasons, tainted goods reflective of multiple agricultural perversions.
They were also, much to the settlers' chagrin, entirely unavoidable. The methods that colonists condemned as agriculturally backwards - and the food these methods produced - became necessary to their survival. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how carefully they tended their crops and repaired their fences and fattened their cattle and furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn't allow it.
The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques not only sent colonists deep into the woods galloping after game and grubbing corn from unbound, ashen fields, it also provoked severe cultural insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians."
This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native American victuals - even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn't until after the Revolution, when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged individualism.
Today, of course, we proudly evoke this native American heritage by crowding the table with turkey, corn, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie as if they had always been there. That they weren't shouldn't be a cause for chagrin, but a reminder that Americans have survived in some measure because we are endlessly adaptable and capable of overcoming our deepest prejudices - even if the Pilgrims wouldn't have approved.
