The Pale Thin Line between Bravery and Cowardice
A perpetually frightened man mistakes a shadow as a ghost. He screams and runs around the house yelling to alert everyone else to the danger of the impending assault of the poltergeist. When he gets back to his room and peers carefully around the door he sees from a different perspective that it wasn’t a ghost at all come to capture his soul as he thought but just a shadow cast by a broomstick propped in the corner he had forgotten he had placed there.
Meanwhile he had put the house in an uproar. Everyone was terrified at this alleged succubus come to take their souls to the underworld. It was then that the original frightened man, understanding better than anyone by then that he had been frightened and raised the alarm over nothing, not wanting to admit that his fright was unjustified, adopted a soothing, calm demeanor. “Be calm fellows, I will protect you from this evil ghost that lurks in my room,” he said. Others wanted to see it but he wouldn’t allow it. He prohibited them all, barring the door with heavy locks and chains and shrouding all he did in secrecy. “No it is too terrible. It is a burden I must bear alone and not share. I will bravely protect you all.” He didn’t tell them that he was only protecting them from a shadow cast by a broomstick.
As months grew into years, confidence in this man grew as there were no other ghastly sightings. They assumed, and he encouraged them in the notion, that it was his vigilance and courage alone that was protecting them all from a further recrudescence of the ghost that had never existed to begin with. This is how the biggest coward in the house became the trusted leader of the rest.
As a general rule, the biggest chicken in the barnyard is usually the one that squawks first and squawks the loudest and squawks the longest.
Duplicity Doubled Down
There was a charlatan travel agent who, desperately needing money to cover his gambling debts, offered an absurdly cheap travel fare to Hawaii. It was deep in the heart of bitterly cold January and several cabin fever ridden citizens, desperate for the warmth of the sun and the sea, responded. Others, thinking the offer too good to be true, refrained. Still others, though suspicious, were finally deceived when the travel agent told them that the price was cheap because the money was going for a good cause, to support an orphanage of poor children. People on their lookout for greed in others will sometimes not see the deviousness behind pretended altruism, because it mirrors their own desires.
The picture this gifted salesman painted was of a vacation so cheap and gorgeous that, looking out on the cold and wintry scenery around them, eventually an entire planeload of people succumbed to the temptation of the vision of white sand beaches and balmy temperatures he portrayed. It was such a good deal, seven days and seven nights right on the beach, round trip tickets, meals, the works; and all to benefit such a good cause that they could hardly refuse. When they asked him, the agent reiterated to his potential clients that he personally was getting nothing for himself but the pure humanitarian satisfaction of helping kids.
They paid half their money up front which allowed the travel agent to temporarily absolve himself of the worst of his debt. But as he really was a bad travel agent and the price he offered for the trip to Hawaii really was too absurdly generous to pay for itself and because, of course, there were no orphans, he immediately began to scrimp on the package. For plane fare he didn’t go commercial but hired a fly-by-night, sleep all day charter. This was Dick and Don’s Cut Rate Air. It was run by two drunken and disreputable pilots who had been fired and blackballed from all legitimate commercial air travel for years.
Whether they were drunk this time or not was not immediately clear, but once the passengers were on board the rickety airliner, Dick and Don, after filing their flight plan for Hawaii, proceeded to fly off in exactly the wrong direction. Once above the clouds, of course, no one could tell. But as they finally descended through the clouds nearly out of fuel approaching Honolulu, so they said, the passengers were puzzled at the sights they saw. As the plane wended its way harrowingly into a white knuckled, stomach churning, life threatening landing, it became increasingly clear to the passengers that this was not Hawaii but somewhere in the middle of the turbulent North Atlantic. It was, as it turned out, a small island off the coast of Maine called Goat Island, nearly within sight of Newfoundland and several thousand miles in the opposite direction from where they thought they were heading.
When they realized what had happened they were naturally outraged and complained and demanded a refund and to either be taken to Hawaii or at least back home. To their astonishment Don and Dick chose merely to try and lie their way out of it. “This is too Hawaii,” they claimed. Have you every been? And if you haven’t how would you know? See this is an island, so if it’s not Hawaii it must be the next best thing. Actually this is one of Hawaii’s lesser known outer islands. Look at those emerald blue green waters and the white sandy beaches beneath the gathering palms. To illustrate, Don raised his arms expansively in the direction of the water to frame the forbidding scene.
But the only palms the passengers could see were the ones on his hands and through his arms, all they saw was a rocky shore looking out at the cold icy waves crashing against the rocks. In the distance the ice caps of ice bergs loomed. They begged to differ. “Even if we haven’t been to Hawaii we’ve seen pictures, we’ve talked to others, and this ain’t it.”
But Don and Dick had an infuriating way of not listening to coherent arguments as they gazed over the heads of their interlocutors and merely repeated the same inanities in slightly different formulation over and over. And their travel agent when they finally were able to get in touch with the deadbeat, actually backed the two inebriate pilots over the complaints of his own customers.
Dick and Don spent the next few days halfheartedly trying to appease the restive travelers, urging them to take advantage of their free time to sun bathe on the beach. Unfortunately, the weather was so cold and the wind so icy fierce, and all they had to wear - swim suits and sunglasses and sandals - was so entirely inappropriate to the environment that no one could stand the weather for more than a few moments at a time. Then Don and Dick regaled them with vomit inducing “pleasure trips” in a creaky boat around the island in the heavy seas, barely avoiding the rocks. The “sport” fishing excursion they went on consisted in helping haul in the heavy nets on what was clearly a commercial fishing boat. After several passengers were washed overboard, the passengers complained that this pleasant and relaxing vacation spot shouldn’t be so death defying. Demanding to be put ashore, no one ever dared risking their lives again in the icy, churning waters.
At their last thin effort at appeasement, Dick and Don even held a luau for the travelers. But instead of roast pig and poi it was clearly just one of the local road kill goats with a plastic apple in its gullet and Quaker oatmeal wrapped in raw seaweed suspended over a backyard barbeque set. The cocoanuts they were given to eat were really just compressed goat dung rolled into a ball. Meanwhile, in a cold driving rain, a couple of heavy women in heavy overcoats performed what looked like a combination of the twist and the funky chicken, called it the hula and sang romantic island songs out of tune to a scratchy radio playing country and western while the travelers huddled freezing under umbrellas by the roaring fire they couldn’t keep lit.
Back at Davey Jones’ Ye Olde Inn where their rooms consisted of small attached cottages woefully out of date as to amenities and dilapidated to the point of ramshackle, the tired, dismayed, disappointed passengers tried to take stock. They were disoriented, they felt like their travel agent had had them kidnapped as much as given them their dream vacation. They complained to everyone they saw, even the few penguins that washed up on shore, but all were blandly unmoved and shruggingly unwilling to help.
Slowly the very nature of their journey began to change. Rather than just tourists lazing about on sandy beaches their vacation was turning into a test of survival - more reality TV than vacation hideaway. In response to their many impassioned pleas to leave, Dick and Don met them with a blizzard of pre-rehearsed excuses. First they said the fierce weather was too inclement to risk trying to fly. Then they were told that the plane couldn’t leave until the runway was cleared of the wild boars and assorted gulls and seals which inhabited the runway. The gulls, they were told, would be sucked up onto the engine of the plane as it took off and could cause a crash.
Seeing that no one else on this godforsaken isle was going to do it, gamely the passengers set to work filling in the potholes. The animals that ran wild over the island had to be constantly frightened away or they would undo the work they’d just done. So, indomitably, they travelers determined to build a fence. But no sooner would they get the fence put up one day than the next day they would find it torn down again. Pot holes they filled in were successfully and mysteriously replaced by new potholes, seemingly freshly dug in other places.
They set guards out all night to make sure the work they did in the day would not be undone at night. But even that didn’t ultimately matter because then they were told by Dick and Don that there was a problem with the plane itself and parts had to sent away for to the mainland. They would have to be ferried over but the ferry was down too, and money was a problem for the pilots too, they claimed, so they couldn’t really afford all the parts they needed anyway.
In increasing desperation, when the disgusted passengers at last were able to locate their travel agent and demand he send a plane for them, he immediately washed his hands of all contractual responsibility for their plight. He claimed he had no money left because in his extreme generosity he had already given their money as well as his own to the kids, the poor orphan kids, but that if they took up a collection and sent him the second half of the money they still owed him he would see what he could do. This they did. They put their remaining cash together and sent it to him but never heard back. The island was nicknamed by the locals, in some previous conflation of French and English, L’roque. The side of it on which they were staying was called the Hard Place. They passengers found they were caught right between the two.
Believe it or not, after the first week was up, and the second passed and then a third until months had gone by, the poor passengers had become so disoriented and beaten down that they’d almost forgotten by then where home was. The poor lost travelers felt they were being continually stymied at every turn by unseen forces beyond their control. Their voices of outrage at their grievous mistreatment were always met with a soothing reply, a convenient excuse, a distant hope. Every complaint had a plausible explanation, every plan of leaving a counter which made it impossible to go.
Strapped of cash anyway, the travelers were further impoverished when most of them had had to buy warm clothes at severely inflated prices from the local merchants. Only later did they find out that Dick just happened to be the proprietor of the very store that was gouging them. They reported their suspicions to the local constabulary only to find out that the sheriff was Don’s mother and her sister owned the motel they were staying at.
Suspicions only deepened as conspiracy theories began to surface among them. They thought the entire island might be conspiring against them merely to soak them of their money and make a little money for themselves in the off season. Their worst fears seemed confirmed when they saw Don and Dick night after night in the local tavern, apparently drinking all the money the travelers had given them to buy parts for the plane, hobnobbing with all the other people on the island as if they were all old friends. If they were really so lost, how had Dick and Don happened to have “inadvertently” stumbled onto an island with which they were so familiar?
AS money problems continued they had to buy food and shelter on credit and eventually became indentured to the locals. To earn money so they wouldn’t be sent to jail or put on a chain gang, which was how they were threatened, they took employment painting and roofing for some of the locals. Others actually had to start building a new wing on the motel. In these endeavors they were credited almost nothing. When they saw the accounting, they were depressed to realize that they were actually being drawn more into debt to these people not less.
Others among the travelers, realizing there was no way out, merely began to go mad. A few, unable to accept the reality and falling prey to the constant bullying propaganda, decided maybe it really was Hawaii. These deluded people risked frostbite by running along the grey lava beach in freezing temperatures only in their swimming suits, luxuriating in the paradise that was present only in their mind.
The locals did their part to fuel the delusion by changing the name of the Davey Jones Ye Olde Inn, to the Davey Jones Ye Olde Polynesian Inn. Gazing out on the “Pearl Harbor Memorial” which was really just an old oil tanker run up and rusting on the beach amid its own oil spill, that no one had bothered to clean up, and had despoiled one whole side of the island: their patriotism of the poor insane passengers swelled within their breast at the site where a local guide seriously intoned – “World War II had infamously begun.”
Finally, the few remaining sane travelers had to come to the hard conclusion that Dick and Don hadn’t actually made a mistake at all. They also had serious doubts by then about their travel agent too, but knowing he might be their only salvation, they kept sending message after message back to him. When he replied at all, it was in comforting tones.
He told them that their suspicions were wrong about the islanders conspiring to trick and gouge them. He encouraged them to trust Don and Dick and not to give up hope. Stay the course, he said. For his part he assured them that he was doing absolutely all he could, at least all he could from the night clubs and the dog tracks he habituated, to get them back home as soon as possible. He was pretty busy he went on to say, building a large new wing on his spanking new house. There had been a disaster at the orphanage, a large uh, fire and he had had to, so as not to throw away all the benefits their generosity had previously provided the kids, sink all the money they had sent him for their return trip back into the orphanage. He was sure, he oozed, that that was what they would have wanted him to do. Surely they would not put be so cruel or greedy to put their petty problems on a par with the suffering these poor kids had to endure every day of their lives, would they? The disdain he displayed at their selfishness was obvious in his voice.
After a year of hardship something changed. Don and Dick actually received parts and pretended to get their broken plane fixed enough to fly. Unfortunately, they told the passengers, it was not fixed well enough yet to actually take the weight of passengers all the way to the mainland. They didn’t want to risk the travelers’ health but they promised they would get the plane fixed properly on the mainland and return as soon as they could to ferry the poor lost travelers off the island and set them toward their homes. The passengers really got their hopes up then and as a sign of their desperation, even gave the two charter pilots a bon voyage party and were waving wildly as the clunker of a plane took off. But as weeks passed and then months and nothing was heard from Dick and Don’s flying circus their hopes plummeted all over again.
It was not until another excruciatingly long year had passed that they received word that Dick and Don were returning soon. The castaway’s heard the sick sounding plane approaching from far off. They ran to the airfield eagerly, almost pathetically, in suspended belief. The locals, quite practiced in the game too, by now, ran out as well to greet the plane. The ersatz hula dancers were there in their heavy parkas, the locals had donned Hawaiian shirts over their coats, some of the women even carried leis of chicken wire and plastic flowers, and someone had crudely painted a giant “aloha” on the side of a metal shed.
This motley crew of mixed and cross expectation all watched in anticipation as the plane descended heavily through the clouds. When it touched down and lumbered along the potholed runway just as its tires blew out and the smoking engine’s propeller stopped spinning and actually fell off, the plane limped to a half-hearted halt, spent as your last dollar. The locals and travelers all gathered eagerly around the plane together, eyeing each other warily. But Dick and Don didn’t depart the plane, instead it was a group of strangers in sun glasses and shorts and sandals, carrying cameras, looking confused as they stepped off the plane.
“Hey, this doesn’t look like any part of Hawaii I’ve ever seen before,” the first one said. “Man, it’s freezing here, I thought it’d be warmer,” said a second. “Wow, I hope those orphans appreciate our donations and good intentions, ‘cause I wasn’t even sure there at the end that we were going to survive the trip,” another said just as some of the native island women stepped forward to place the makeshift leis over their heads. Meanwhile, someone began twanging on a makeshift ukulele and the hula women began to dance.
Which leads to the moral of the story: Lies persisted in soon compound and begin to take on a peculiar life and inevitable logic all their own.
The Second Coming
Once upon a time, there was a very holy man who lived in a cave. He was dressed in rags. His needs were so limited that he gave his goods to those needier than he was, though it was hard to imagine anyone who could be needier than he. He possessed no possessions and would fast and pray and live in the wilderness for days and weeks on end, forty days and nights at a time, without seeing anyone. Recently a terrible war had broken out around the area where he lived. He did not know this and would have cared even less. One day foreign soldiers from a great country far away came to his cave looking for others who had been engaged in nearby fighting.
The soldiers, accustomed to having their own lives threatened at every turn, were caught up in their own experience and on edge and harried. Some of their comrades in arms had just been killed by fighters in the nearby hills and they were in no mood for niceties and had no reason to trust this man. They threw him down and put a boot heel to the back of his neck while they searched his cave. Even though they found nothing there to incriminate him, neither was their anything, like evidence of employment or a family or associates who could vouch for him, to exonerate him. Such an idle, solitary and holy man was foreign to their experience. They asked him questions and handled him roughly but he did not speak their language. He tried to answer and disarm their fears about his intentions as best he could but they did not understand.
But as he refused to be roused to anger, smiled and bowed at their questions they finally decided that, due to the meekness and mildness of his demeanor, probably he was not guilty of anything. However, their orders were to rake up every able-bodied man in the region who could not be accounted for and leave it to others, who could question him in his own language, to sort out the good from the bad. And so, better safe than sorry, in an excess of caution they let confusion guide their actions and decided to take him into custody anyway. Thus others of higher rank would decide his fate, which nicely alleviated them of all responsibility if he turned out to be a lookout of some kind or a clever plant.
The man’s hands were shackled behind his back, he was hooded and shoved in with other hard core and blood thirsty murderers and criminals. Some of these, knowing he was not one of them, treated the holy man almost as roughly as the soldiers had. After several days and nights in a crude holding area the lot of them, now about twenty men, were piled into a truck and hauled off to an even ruder type of prison camp where they were incarcerated for interrogation.
The worst abuse here came at the hands of cruel mercenaries. These people, aptly suited to the function their services required, at the same time their nebulously defined positions rendered them beyond the reach of any known law, were astonishingly brutal. They went out of their way to try to shred all sense of pride and human dignity from their prisoners by employing the most dehumanizing techniques in order to disorient them and render them more malleable to their questioning. Since, having no respect for anyone with a different culture and religion, all prisoners were presumed guilty by them, some were beaten, all were abused and cursed at.
When it came the holy man’s turn to be questioned he had not eaten for days, was naked and cold and had been without sleep for almost a week. Of course they had no idea what he might have done but word had followed him from his cave that he might have been caught as a lookout in a territory rife with rebels. When he was questioned he was screamed at and struck repeatedly in places where bruises wouldn’t show. He answered truthfully and monosyllabically to all the questions that were asked of him over and over.
Finally, realizing that no answer would ever suit men who didn’t know the questions to ask or want to hear the answers given; he simply grew silent and retreated deeper within himself. But his lack of defiance and his defenselessness only enraged his captors more. They prided themselves on being able to create fear in their charges, breaking them of all will. This man was not broken. His pride remained intact and hidden from where they could reach it. Disgusted, that night they chained him to a wall, still naked, cold and unfed, and made sure he was unable to sleep.
Next day, the interrogators continued. Vicious dogs were employed to frighten the man, one getting away from his handler long enough to bite him several times on the hands and legs before he was gotten back under control. As if it had been his fault that he had been bitten, one soldier, to punish him, hit him harder than intended with a baton until blood flowed from the top of his head down his cheeks into his beard where it dried. His wrists were worn raw from the shackles and his knees were bruised and cut. They finally gave him a ragged piece of cloth to tie around his waist but that could do nothing to repel the bitter cold of the stone cell that ate at his health and resolve.
Days blended into weeks. Still, to all the repetitive questions he had no answers but those he had given from the start. The truth is that liars always have a better chance of appeasing unjust interrogators than those who tell the truth. The truthful and innocent are always the most unrewarding sort to interview. His interrogators should have known but didn’t seem to know that torture only elicits the answers the prisoner knows the interrogators wish to hear. So even consistency in honesty did him no good. His torturers took his humility for haughtiness, his dignity for arrogance, his simplicity for self-control and guile. Because he didn’t beg and try to please them with phony answers they wanted to hear and only told the truth, these stupid men marked him out as a troublemaker and liar.
Finally, after several months, having noticed the seminal dislike a few of the interrogators had for the holy man, one of the prisoners lied. In the way corrupt people have of blaming the innocent of things of which they themselves are actually guilty, to ingratiate himself with the guards and alleviate the pressure on himself, he accused the man of being a ringleader of the rebellion.
Being a liar himself and actually guilty of what he was accusing the holy man of doing, this man was able, of course, to weave a fabulously detailed and convincing tale of all that the holy man had allegedly done. At the same time, naturally, he proclaimed his own innocence. The military man in charge could see that the informant was lying and probably falsely accusing the holy man but the professional intelligence officers cared more about gathering information to give their superiors than they did whether that information was true or not.
As in any hierarchical system, they knew it was easier to leave it to higher ups to sort the truth from the lies rather than taking the responsibility of making the judgment themselves. In this way the decisions kept being removed farther away from those in the best positions to make them. Besides in this squealer these intelligence officers saw a man who might be corrupt enough to be used as a snitch or spy when he was released. This would generate more information, which would probably also be false, of course, with which to impress their superiors and justify their own existence. They made the liar’s future cooperation with them a condition of the deal that led to his release.
The officer in charge knew it was wrong but also knew that if he stood in the way of these special intelligence operators he might risk his own trouble with his superiors by being thought of as soft and so he washed his hands of the whole thing. When the dishonest snitch was released, having ostensibly accepted his story, the interrogators then felt compelled to accept his charges against the holy man at face value even though by then they didn’t really believe them either. Meanwhile as the snitch had really been one of the ringleaders of the rebellion all along, upon his release he immediately returned to his old ways and became a double agent, feeding the invaders false information while taking their money and learning their plans to use against them.
So the holy man was convicted of something and shipped out to a far away prison, now with an official internal condemnation on his secret record. He was sent on with certain really vicious men, as well as a few perfectly innocent ones and even some naïve fools who had merely gotten swept up in the war much as the holy man had. This new prison had the look of a dog kennel and so that’s exactly how the prisoners were treated, kept apart from one another and treated like mongrel dogs.
Never strong to begin with, after all these beatings and deprivations, by this time the holy man was even frailer and sicklier. This did not keep him from his devotions, however, as he continued to fast and keep to his spiritual regimen. In this place, though, such things were frowned on and they force fed him when he refused to eat the foreign tasteless food they put in front of him and interrupted him continually when they thought he was at his prayers. By then others had told the guards that he was some kind of a saint and had never been involved with the terrorists but they claimed there was nothing they could do about it at this point.
Their system had been set up to work only one way. There was no right of appeal or due process or legal representation or eventual trial which would have required real evidence of anything. Therefore there was no mechanism to actually release anyone, no matter how innocent of the initial charges they subsequently proved to be. Moreover the intelligence officers, who by then had already been betrayed by the snitch they’d released, steadfastly refused to admit their mistakes which might have triggered an investigation into their own incompetence. And so no reassessment of this perfectly innocent man’s guilt was ever officially countenanced.
So it was that the man languished in this jail for years. Despite all the rude abuse thrown at him, there remained a divine placidity around him, a smiling blissful acceptance which would surface from time to time through the grief and essential insanity of his surroundings. The other prisoners tried to seek him out for advice and sought his blessing. Several mysterious, unexplained instances of cures or of instances of the spontaneous appearance of food in some prisoners’ cells and other semi-miraculous occurrences were rumored but dismissed as superstition by the camp’s commandant.
Even one of the guards with a wife in the throes of a difficult labor beseeched the man to help him. According to the doctors the near fatal obstruction to the birth was magically removed at the very time the man in the cell far away had said it would be and the guard was told both mother and child were healthy and well.
A few other guards also understood his innocence, sensed the aura his phenomenal inner strength suffused and treated him with lenience and respect but, as is the case in any such system, other bullies who often gravitate to such positions of authority, took his meekness as a personal affront to their strength and went out of their way to insult and abuse him merely because they could. Hearing that he was allegedly a spiritual seeker they mocked him, called him little Mohammad (though he was not a Muslim) and King of the Arabs and were determined, as they put it, to beat the good out of him. They took his spiritual literature and urinated on it. They sent female officers to tempt him with obscene sexual acts and spit in his food which they then required him to eat. They unsuccessfully simulated drowning him to force him to admit to things he had never done. They tried in every way they could to break and intimidate him and when none of it worked this only inspired them to invent new ways to torture him.
Finally, succumbing to some of the infected wounds they had inflicted upon him which had never properly healed, the man grew weak and then weaker. Eventually he fell into a sort of sleeping coma that the doctors were unable to identify the source of. After weeks of this, he grew weaker still and finally one morning didn’t wake. Other prisoners and even many of the guards mourned his loss, only belatedly (as is invariably the remorseless way of all such things) realizing in his absence what the quiet dignity of his presence when he was still alive had actually represented.
Fearing a riot at the facility and a scandal if it the man’s innocence and legendary spirituality was ever discovered, the commandant of the facility ordered the body quickly removed to an annex of the barracks until a burial site could be arranged for the man. After several days the best they could come up with was to return him to the country from which he had been taken and let that tyrannical government take possession of his body and either cremate him or throw him into an open grave. After several days, when at last the paperwork was finished, a guard went into the cold room to check on him in preparation to boarding him on a plane to return home and he was dumbfounded to discover that the body was gone. Only an empty body bag remained. Guantanamo was in an uproar. They searched everywhere and nothing of the man’s body was ever located.
And this was how the second coming of Christ came to an end.
The three morals of this story are as follows: The ultimate test of the worthiness of power is not in its exercise but in its restraint. The greater the power, the greater the care which must accompany its use. And nations that misuse power don’t deserve to keep it.
