He's Back!

Our first morning in Hanoi I put my Wachovia Bank card into the makeshift ATM machine on the front porch of our small hotel in the old part of town. As the card disappeared into the slot I remember thinking that if it ate it the next 10 days in this city where John McCain spent 5 nasty years could be a challenge.

When the screen flashed me a southern California greeting – Hi Blayney! – I was hugely reassured.

After a pause in which the machine sounded as if it were trying hard to finish our business, the screen read, Sorry, We’re Out Of Money. Everything here would likely take at least one extra step.

Hanoi, Viet Nam. Names that conjure ghosts I never expect to exorcise. A friend who was an intelligence officer during that war told me before we went that he had never been there, but he knew every inch of the city.

As Garrison Keillor says of Lake Wobegone, the men were all good looking and the women were above average. When I asked a friend from Vermont who has been living in Hanoi for several years (developing golf courses!) why, after the war we waged against them, they are so nice to us, he reminded me that they feel they won the war. As they do their longer struggle against the French.

What is so invigorating about traveling to a totally different culture with a totally different political system is how profoundly it undermines one’s certainties. I will likely bore you to distraction in future Zone Notes with all this. For the moment, two vignettes from our first 24 hours back in our own country that put a fine point on the business of perspective.

When we stepped out of the airport at LAX we were cold. Hanoi had been 10º warmer. We had hired a car to drive us down to San Diego (cheaper and much nicer than the commuter flight) and the woman who showed up was chipper and welcoming. In her 40s, LA slim and hair color, she told us she has 9 and 10 year old daughters.

Did you see terrible poverty over there? she wanted to know. And was it dirty? Before I could marshal a response, she spoke about the freedoms we have here and how much we take them for granted, when so many around the world live in poverty and are oppressed.

When I asked who would pick her daughters up from school while she drove us, she explained that they are living with her cousin right now. And she and her husband – they have been married 12 years – live with his parents, while they try to pull their lives together.

Somehow the conversation came around to Oprah whom she said she admired more than anyone else in the world. A woman who grew up in poverty and was abused who – she said – is the richest woman in the world. And she uses her money to help all sorts of people.

What do you suppose her support for Barak Obama will mean for his candidacy? I asked her.

She was silent. Then she asked me to repeat what I had asked.

Well, you know, I said, Oprah has gone on the road to support Obama in the primaries that are about to begin.

You’re going to think I am totally ignorant, she said, - bravely I thought – but I have no idea who that is.

When I explained, as briefly as I could, she asked, Are you a Democrat?

The next morning I went over to the Racket Stringing Workshop – one of the last cottage industries left in La Jolla – where I had dropped off my racket to be restrung before we went to Hanoi.

The RSW is in one of the cottages ordered from a Sears catalogue early in the last century, delivered by truck, that once dotted this now glitzy seaside town. It brought back every street I walked down in Hanoi, the narrow Mom and Pop stores, families and friends sitting on the sidewalk out front, eating. They shutter the store at 9pm and walk back into their small living quarters.

The Racket Stringing Workshop is dwarfed by multi-million dollar condos and the new science building of Bishop’s School.

I hope you guys never sell, I said, as I picked up my racket, expressing the sentiment of everyone who has done business with them for the past generation.

He smiled. Mark lives in the back, he said. He owns the store. Best offer he’s ever had was $600,000. For what? A down payment on one of those generic condos?

Viet Nam is said to be the fastest growing economy in the world. You drive through rural farmland – lush green rice paddies – suddenly a new gargantuan industrial park, a car factory, Canon, and a billboard with a rendering of another to be built next to it twice the size.

Our guide said there are 5 million people in Hanoi, and 4.5 million of them have motor bikes. You believe it. 5 years ago they had bicycles. Since I wasn’t driving, I found the chaos exhilarating.

Noisy, dirty, poor, the city is dynamic. I likely wouldn’t have the patience or wiles to survive. The rat that ran through the hotel dining room at breakfast delighted and horrified us. (A friend told me he was having dinner at Alfonso’s in La Jolla a few years ago and a rat ran across their table.)

You have the feeling you are watching the future unfold.

So we're off tomorrow for Hanoi in what we once called North Vietnam.

Now, simply Vietnam, one nation, which we tried - at the cost of 58,000 of our young people and untold of theirs - vainly to keep apart. I notice most of us still call it Saigon, while they call it Ho Chi Minh City.

For a man of my age - 67 - the idea of spending Christmas in N. Vietnam is still hard to absorb.

Assuming I make it home, I look forward to telling you what it was like.

May the solstice and your New Year be filled with mystery as rich and unimaginable as my spending the next 10 days in the country the name of which still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

What can we know, anyway? What do we need to know?

When I was a little boy growing up in Charlotte, maybe 9, one of the best parts of my week was watching the Friday Night Fights (The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports) on TV with my dad.

I can’t watch a boxing match now without flinching, probably haven’t actually seen one in decades. But just being there with him, sharing the excitement and know-how about the sport, way overcame whatever squeamishness I may have had then.

We knew a lot of the fighters, not personally, but from having followed their careers, seen them fight. We used to have little side bets about who would win. It meant being together for a couple of hours. My mom and sisters wouldn’t even come into the room.

A couple of years later, after we had moved to the Philippines, Rocky Marciano, the Brockton Bomber, went on a tour sponsored by the State Department, and when he came to Manila, thanks to the Philippine Manufacturing Company, my dad a VP, we had ringside seats.

Marciano (can you believe my spell check doesn’t know his name? What child compiled this spell check?) boxed 3 rounds each with two huge, perfectly sculpted black American guys. I remember one of them being named Something Golden.

Like most of Rocky’s opponents, both of them were bigger and far superior boxers. Marciano simply put his head down and moved inexorably across the ring toward each of them, absoring what, from first row ringside looked to be terrible punishment. The event was outdoors in a huge stadium and, like every night in Manila, it was murderously hot and nearly 100% humidity.

Every time one of the sparring partners hit Rocky with a jarring punch to the head, we were spattered with his sweat. I thought he would surely go down and be defeated before he even landed a punch. And I wondered if that would wreck the purpose of the State Department tour which was to entertain the Filipinos and to show off the World Boxing Champion.

I need not have worried. When Rocky finally maneuvered his opponent into the corner, he landed one astonishing hammer blow to his midsection, and when the poor man bent in half, Rocky delivered a punch to the side of his head that turned his legs to jelly and down he went.

We were standing next to Cus D’amato, Rocky’s manager, almost as famous as the fighter himself. I remember Cus making a grunt that had the air of businesslike satisfaction that the appointed task had been completed.

It was a truly awesome moment for me. And, I think, for my dad.

At the time, I never thought to consider what, if any, racial or national dimensions were played out.

But I may have been aware that the racial dynamic was opposite to the one we almost always saw on TV back in Charlotte.

There, the black (negro to us, then) fighters almost always defeated the white fighters. Even though it often seemed that the white man had landed more and harder blows.

When I asked my father about that, he explained to me in a calm, dispassionate way, what I took to be simply the irrefutable scientific facts of the matter. And, in fact, Dad represented them as having come from Dr. Mayer, our family doctor and icon, a learned and compassionate leader of the community.

I, and just about every other male between 8 and 80, was in love with his vivacious and unusually independent wife. I believe she had come from somewhere in eastern Europe and carried an air of sophistication that put her a rung above the southern belles.

“Dr. Mayer explained that black people have a thicker skull than white people, so they can absorb more punishment without consequence.”

Dr. Mayer’s imprimatur was enough for me, right up there with the preacher’s. I suppose I got the inference that a thicker skull left less space for brain, but, since we all understood that negroes were not as bright as whites, that hardly needed to be pointed out.

The information was passed along without rancor or any sense of intending to impugn. But it was delivered – and heard – as a simple matter of fact, offered under the highest authority as information one ought to have in navigating through one’s life. Like coming to a full stop at a stop sign.

I have no idea when or how I came to understand it as what everyone on earth would now call racism.

I do remember the first day of my freshman year in college discovering that the room next to mine on the top floor of the cinderblock dorm, was black. And wondering what to make of that.

(Turned out to be John Wideman, captain his last two years, of the basketball team, All Ivy, Rhodes Scholar and – I think – one of the most talented American novelists of my generation.)

Not long before Dad died, I gently tried a conversation with him about all that. When I mentioned the business about the relative thickness of the skulls of the different races – and put it into the context of watching Rocky Marciano take all that punishment that night in Manila, thinking we could laugh about our southern views in those days, and forgive ourselves for being creatures of our culture – my dad stiffened as if I had accused him of a dastardly deed.

And denied ever having said that.

Perhaps it was unkind, thoughtless of me to have brought it up. After all, he and I had both recovered as much as two white guys raised in the pre-war south could, from the racism that marked all of us. He had joined me in a couple of demonstrations in Boston in the 60s, joining hands with blacks as we all faced down the fierce opposition of Louise Day Hicks and the Boston Irish (oh dear, there we are again) to busing children from Dorchester and Roxbury into Southie.

What comes back to me now is not the deep racism that colored our picture of the world, but our comfortable certainty that these views were simply matters of fact. For all I know, most black Americans may have assumed the same thing. (Which, despite its having been turned upside down in recent decisions, is surely what Brown Vs. Board of Education really was about; that structural separation reinforced the assumption of both races that blacks in white schools would impede the white’s education)

Looking back at this now I wonder what I know now that will later look like that?

It's a term i haven't heard used for a while, maybe because I am so clearly on the western side of the gap now.

Conversations with friends are cluttered with references to the ways in which our children - now nearing middle age - experience and manage their lives differently from the way we do.

One of the seemingly most trivial, but with high impact on a daily basis, is the telephone.

When I was a boy there was the telephone company. Maybe I knew its name, maybe not. Didn't matter. There was just the telephone company, the people who brought a dial-tone into your home. In fact I remember the days before dial-tone, when you picked up the receiver and spoke with an operator who put your call through after you told her who you wanted to talk to.

You think today's high tech communications jeopardize our privacy? Try having to ask someone to put your call through. If you lived in a small town, she was someone you knew - and who knew you. And pretty much everything there was to know about you.

Ever hear of a party line?

I have had two of them. The first was in Charlotte (our number in 1946 was 54992). My mother complained that the lady with whom we shared the line was doing business over the phone, which was not allowed. I don't know how that dispute came out.

Our second party line was in the village in Vermont where we now live. We bought the house in 1980 and were thrilled to have a phone at all. I think there were different rings for the two of us so we would know not to pick up on the other person's ring. Unless we wanted to know what they were talking about. And to whom.

The first time I understood that our children had a different stance toward the telephone was when I learned they had phones in their rooms in college. With individual lines.

And when they came home they routinely - and without first asking - called their friends all over the country.

I was outraged. To me a long distance call was a luxury made only for the most drastic purpose.

Once, when I was in boarding school in this country and my parents were living in the Philippines, my sisters and I decided our big Christmas present to our parents was going to be a transoceanic phone call. We called the international operator and made a reservation several days in advance. On the appointed day the operator called us and alerted us that our call - a radio transmission - would likely go through sometime in the next several hours and we should remain close to our phone.

When it finally came through only the lower pitched male voices would carry over the radio connection. All I heard of my mother's voice was her sobbing. I think we paid nearly $50 for five minutes of international sobbing.

One of our children lives with his wife in Banda Aceh, on the tip of Sumatra in Indonesia, where the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people. Our other children routinely speak with them on Skype, through their computer, at no cost. We have done it a couple of times, but it defeats us. So we bought a phone card, pay less than we used to for calling from Charlotte to Winston Salem, and talk with him quite often.

Last week I came home to find a card attached to my doorknob saying I had missed my appointment to have my digital phone connected. And because I had missed my appointment my service would be interrupted.

So far as I know I never ordered such a thing. I had no idea what a digital phone was.

But my phone was dead.

I suppose I have now spent 8 hours navigating the shoals of competing phone companies, trying to sort out which one shut us off and which one might return our dial tone. After fiddling with the cable company that wanted to drill a few new holes through our walls and run fat wires around our small apartment, I am back to begging AT&T to take us back. AT&T; I think that's who gave us phone service in Charlotte in 1945.

Lacey and I each have cell phones. So we aren't out of business. But we still feel like amputees without our home phone, what for some reason is now known as a land phone. If we have cell phones which we can use to make phone calls anywhere to anywhere, why in hell do we need a land phone? Except for regarding that phone on the table in the hall as one of the signs of modern living?

Oh yeah, there's the internet connection. Yes, embarrassing as our kids find it, we still get through to the internet through a dial up.

Hell, man, one step at a time.

Crossing a busy street in downtown La Jolla, I have to detour around a ’57 Chevy convertible – top down - parked across the pedestrian walk. Perfectly restored, newly painted, the car evokes memories of the apex of my adolescent energy. In the driver’s seat a handsome, beautifully groomed black man of impressive dimension, expensive sunglasses, dripping gold from every appendage, massive shoulders rising above the back of the seat, suggesting maybe a professional athlete.

In the passenger seat a blond woman with glittering Hollywood bona fides. What I could see of her was dressed – in some measure – in a neckline that plunged too deep for me to see its finish above the car’s side panel.

My wife and children will tell you that when it comes to staring, I have no shame. But they’re wrong. I stare only when I think I can avoid being detected. Agonizing as it was, I kept walking, risking eyestrain and headache to keep the two of them in my peripheral vision as long as possible.

Just as I passed astern of them, the man spoke:

No, he said in a deep baritone, perfectly modulated voice, in fact I am putting your feelings ahead of my own. You may not see it that way, but that is exactly what I am doing here.

By the time she replied, if she did, I was out of my ageing ears’ range. I completed their exchange in my head a half dozen different ways.

The rest of my walk home I considered how it is that, though we all believe Nixon and then Reagan’s election, marked the close of the radical social and political experiment we now know as the 60s, all the social markers say that time left its indelible marks on us.

A tough professional athlete and his equally tough movie star girlfriend (my fantasy), their argument couched in the language and dynamic from that thoroughly therapized decade.

Once during that decade my therapist suggested I ask my parents to come with me to a session. Being loving people who wanted to do right by me, they came and dutifully sat through the humiliation of my unjust recital of their shortcomings.

Despite their brush with my world, I daresay my father and mother never once again spoke about whose feelings were being put ahead of whose.

In [Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s] Journals 1952 – 2000 (the critics hate it, I am loving it), he quotes a friend saying, Every President needs to remember that the lowliest clerk would make a better President – in retrospect.

The most radical Weatherman from that period could never have imagined the ad from last Sunday’s NY Times, for a men’s fragrance, Le Male. The left full page shows three semi-clad men in a gay cruising scene. On the opposite page an aqua colored bottle, shaped as a male body, with a bulge beneath the navel.

We’re talking NY Times here, not Hustle. Some will cluck and shake their head. But this is the reality. We have moved on.

Recently I listened to President Kennedy’s inaugural address, January 20, 1961. I would have told you I could practically recite it from memory, in JFK’s distinctive patrician Yankee accent.

No. His voice sounded odd, tinny. And the language too much like Bush’s confrontational language for my memory’s comfort.

Lacey and I will meet Oakley and Hayley – our son and daughter-in-law - for Christmas in Hanoi. They live in Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. Oakley’s cousin and his family live in Tokyo and suggested we all meet in the city whose name can still stir dread in me from those days.

We will spend Christmas Eve on a junk in Ha Long Bay, not far from where two of our ships - so Lyndon Johnson claimed - were attacked by N. Vietnamese, the incident that caused every Senator except Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening to vote for the resolution that became the pretext for the war in which 53,000 young Americans, and many more Vietnamese died.

If I had stopped and spoken with the couple in the ’57 Chevy I might have suggested they keep their powder dry for a few decades (not that I have) and discover how oddly the future rearranges things.

My gut has been acting badly the past few days. I am pretty sure I have a touch of diverticulitis, like my mother did. It has been very manageable over the decades, but recently, and especially this weekend, it visited me with renewed vigor.

The books all say diverticulitis (inflammation of little pockets in the small intestine) is one of the classic stress disorders. Lots of people have the pockets, but they stay quiet and out of sight until the owner gets stressed.

This is a little embarrassing.

What has stressed me out this weekend is a hassle with the phone companies.

I came home on Friday and found a notice hung on my doorknob, and a message on my answering machine, saying I had missed the appointment I had set up with the cable company to come and install a digital phone.

I didn't even know what a digital phone was (I do now) and I never asked for one.

The notice also said that because I had missed the appointment, my phone service would be interrupted.

Which it has been, for three days so far.

I called the company and said I hadn't ordered the new service. They said their records showed that I had. As the conversation unfolded - and it developed that I had never done the various tasks one must in order to switch from one phone company to another - they acknowledged they were as mystified as I was as to how this could have happened.

But happen it did. And we were now caught in the clutches of the consequences.

Being more pragmatic than brand loyal, I said I really didn't give a damn which phone company I had, so long as I got basic service for what I am used to paying. (Not much.) So they agreed that, because of the weirdness of the situation, they would make a special exception and send out a technician (where have the old phone guys gone?) between 7:30 and 9:30 Sunday morning. Begrudgingly, I agreed.

Nice young guy showed up at 8:30 Sunday morning. I was sad to see that this maybe 30 year old was carrying a large belly and was puffing from climbing the single set of stairs to our apartment.

He looked around and announced it was going to be a challenge to figure out how to wire up our old beach apartment for the digital phone. Lucky Lacey was there because I would probably - just wanting to get the thing done - have told him to do what drilling of holes and stretching of cable necessary to give us a phone. I hadn't understood that this phone gets its signal from a cable rather than through the old phone lines.

He had to stand there while Lacey and I did our Dagwood and Blondie number, arguing about what to do next. The poor guy may have worried that he was going to have to call 911 on a domestic violence problem. Finally I agreed with Lacey that drilling holes in our old apartment and stretching wire, just so we could have a phone, was dumb.

So we sent him away.

This morning I called AT&T, our old phone company, and spent over an hour with Barbara working out how to just get back to where we were when we left home on Friday morning.

I think - hope - we are on point, though Barbara explained that AT&T would now have to contact the cable company and ask them to surrender our number, and then their technician would come to make sure the wires all still work.

And, because we were returning and forsaking Time Warner for our old friends at AT&T, they would wave the $75 charge for doing all this. But it could be a week or so before we have a phone again.

So what? I keep telling myself. Both Lacey and I not only have cell phones, but I hate getting phone calls and talking on the phone.

I have no idea so what. But my gut tells me this isn't a trivial matter.

Not That You Asked; Late Night Rationalizations

Writing in my journal this morning I began to explore how I might explain and perhaps rationalize my lifelong attraction to God and worship.

Rationalize, because I know the militant atheists are right. The notion of a Great Being somewhere who transcends the natural world, is fantasy. Freud, much as he has been belittled and trashed in our time, was right when he called religion – as it is normally practiced and understood – an infantile wish projection. ( late in his life he may have had some second thoughts, as his mighty ego kept reminding him he was going to die, and perhaps because his split with Jung over religion was so painful for him.)

Many things have come together – in science, philosophy and in my own picture of things – to give me some peace about all this. It won’t be much comfort to believers (likely not to scientists or atheists either), but it may provide some cover for some, like me, formed in the past 70 years.

I am drawn to the recent insight that we humans may be a setup for the bacteria. The human genome turns out to be less than a third material unique to our species. The rest is all sorts of stuff, mainly bacteria. If you like purpose (another conceit of the human mind/imagination), how about that we evolved at the pleasure of the bacteria as a suitable host?

I have been mostly on the side of the climate change people and against those who say it either isn’t happening, or we don’t know what is happening, or whether it is of our making or part of a longer, larger cycle.

But several years ago I wandered into a lecture at Scripps Oceanographic, about the earth’s climate history. The lecturer described what is known about the past million years from drilling into the polar ice cap. I understood little of the technical language, but I did get it that the earth has – over the past million years – gone through many ice ages of roughly 150,000 years, separated by shorter – 10,000 year – periods of warming.

And we are a little past the 10,000 year point in the most recent warming period, during which our species has flourished.

It makes common sense that our profligate burning of fossil fuel (and the population explosion supported by our learning how to extract stored sunlight) has added a significant detritus to the atmosphere. But it is not clear whether we have the ability to alter – in our favor - the long term climate cycle of our planet.

I have been trying to work out why all this evidence of our being a phenomenon alongside all the others, not the purpose or crown of creation, here for a season, not forever, not in charge, cheers me up.

It is not about us.

That’s what the God hypothesis has always seemed to me to be about, that this creation we inhabit is not about us. God, (see, I still capitalize the divine name) is not some great being that fiddles with the natural order, but a name we invoke to acknowledge that all this is not about us, but a mystery in which are ourselves immersed. And our view is therefore myopic.

I admire science, love its curiosity and unflinching look into reality, whatever may emerge. But, by definition, as players in this drama and not its author, we can never have the perspective to see it in its entirety.

It’s the old Zen puzzle, trying to take out one’s eyes and stare at one’s self.

Worship may be a natural, built-in, piece of our genetic code. It acknowledges that we are not all-powerful (first of 12 steps in coping with addiction) and that in order to live here usefully without going insane, we may surrender our ego drive to be in charge.

Practicing religion – worship, ceremony – can serve a couple of purposes: it celebrates and gives thanksgiving (Eucharist) for the ineffable, life, which we did not earn. Evoke wonder about why we are, rather than not, why I was born rich in an impoverished world. Liberal religion, when it works, promotes humility and empathy rather than aggression.

And it provides expression for our fear – ego driven – of being immersed in an ether we neither understand nor control. And of our knowing we’ll die.

In the case of Christianity and resurrection – which virtually every religion has some version of – it is not, as our ego would have us believe, a promise that our individual identity, our ego, will survive our bodily death. But that we are a part of the natural order: birth – maturing – aging – death – composting, and death is not a tragedy, not the “last enemy” as Christian writing has called it. The antipodes of birth.

It is perfectly natural, apparently, now that we have evolved this ego (which has many useful purposes), to experience an adrenaline rush of fear/anxiety when we look straight on at our own death or the death of someone we love.

My purpose is not to attack or belittle the more usual understanding of God, religion and worship. It is to give me a chance to consider how it is that, despite rejecting the medieval world view that gave birth to our religion, I still look for ways to worship and express my awe at being here.

And why I look at death and find it not something to be overcome, the way we offer our billions of cells back for further creation.

Sung Evensong in the Anglican tradition, or a Eucharist with no attempt to make it palatable to the hungry human ego, sometimes work.

And writing this stuff to you.

Yesterday on our morning walk with the dog along the beach, there was a crowd lined up as if for a great sporting event.

It was.

At the Shores beach we usually see waves chest or shoulder high, and scores of surfers our at sunrise to get in some sweet rides before going to work. They are mostly good surfers, with a few beginners usually dotted among them. It is a popular break because it is consistent but rarely challenging or scary.

Not yesterday.

Many of those lining the Shores beach were usually in the water. This time they were spectators. As Dave, the elegant older surfer with the long white hair, said, "When the crest of the wave obscures the horizon, we less than perfect specimens become spectators for the young Turks."

All day long the traffic in town was gridlocked as people came to surf or watch.

It has been a year since we had a day like this. This afternoon it looks like it might be building again as we prepare for the storm out there that has been pushing all this water our way.

Who could watch such a thing and remain smug about the power of humans to manage the forces of this planet?

That's what gives the surfers the rush, taking a ride on this prodigious energy they have nothing to do with creating. And taking the risk of being buried by it.

Yesterday one of the best known and most respected surfers in California took a 60 foot wave off Pebble Beach. His body was found a few minutes later. Seems the force of the water tore his leash loose from his ankle and, separated from his board, he wasn't strong enough to stay above the white water, and drowned.

He was the best, the strongest, the most skillful we have among us.

Hoping you're not weary of my writing about this.

And if you are, that you agree it is a hard idea to grasp and one that - at least at first blush - may not seem appealing.

We humans - one of the most recent species to appear on the planet - are just that, another of the countless forms that have evolved over the eons. Most - I think I have seen the figure of around 99% - of those that have appeared, are gone. Have become extinct.

There is no reason to think we will not travel the same route.

What keeps us from acknowledging that is this ego thing in us that keeps working to persuade us that we are unique, unlike anything that has ever appeared here before. And, of course, on one sense that is true. Every new form is unique, in some way different from anything that has come before it.

But not because it doesn't share the same antecedents. We are product of the same process from which every other form emerged.

Recently we have discovered that viruses - which we have feared and battled - not only make up a significant portion of our genetic selves, but it looks to some as if what we humans are - and the reason we have appeared - is as host to bacteria and viruses.

I'm going to cut this short so you can think about it.

Turns out that some 100 million years ago the egg - the most advanced gestation vehicle - sloughed off some bacteria cells (virus?) and that blob of cells formed what became the lining of the placenta, that seemingly miraculous creation which made our appearance possible. The egg, once it was expelled from its mother's body, was unable to either to rid itself of toxins that built up, not receive nutrients.

The placenta - which does both - is what made it possible for the fetus to develop the brain that characterizes our species. And the placenta is heir of the organism we most fear. Virus.

Now, it is true that some viruses - like the AIDS virus - have proved lethal to us. And some say that if we do not develop a vaccine against it, AIDS will eventually wipe out 90% of the humans in Africa.

But if that should happen, the 10% that survive - those who may get the virus but, for reasons we don't yet understand, don't get sick, will eventually evolve a mutation that will become our biological heir. And, some say, that new being will be to us as we are to the chimpanzee.

It's not about us.