Notebook:
Baumann, Paul
his studied distance from the ongoing Middle East negotia- ceal how much in the magazine was his own work. In one tions in Washington, must have made it abundantly clear to of these,...
...The doubters think all moments are inauspicious for putting their feet on the path of peace...
...And it's defimatted hair as though he were demonstrating the luxuriousness nitely not as hot as New York in August...
...This seemed to have a pretween two peoples whose energies, respect for learning, and dictable effect on the citizenry...
...It was strange because it didn't quite seem to tit...
...I need some- could hear the sirens of police cars caught in traffic on their thing to eat," he announced...
...During my week of travail, Errol repeat the whole routine, including the maniacal laugh...
...He finally fell away only to affix policeman on a motor scooter had placed himself in the midhimself immediately to one of Xanadu's more prosperous look- dle of this mounting drama...
...When the Asian man offered some ing citizens walking in the opposite direction...
...But if not now, when...
...He finished more ship-shape Olivia de Havilland...
...IF here is an old Mexican saying: "Poor Mexico, so However, turning down one relatively quiet street I encoun- far from God and so close to the United States...
...And it NAF 1'A SOUTH OF THE BORDER struck me as even stranger that one of the policemen was at HIGH STAKES, BIG HOPES, REAL FEARS least a head shorter than the handcuffed man, who himself was not tall...
...Unquestionably, the nay-sayers in each camp can conjure dire scenarios: in one, Israel is ultimately and fa- FLEA-ING NEW YORK tally threatened by a full-fledged and fully armed Palestinian CITY OF INEXPLICABLE ERUCTATIONS state...
...How did he know about my flea...
...My week seemed to culminate in two other incidents...
...But on this August mornFreud describes the unheimlich (the uncanny) as experi- ing the dress code was more relaxed, and nearly every bench encing something as both strange and yet eerily familiar was occupied by some prostrate and sockless casualty...
...One short and very scruffy panhandler latched on our apologies...
...Three black women, one with a baby in This indifference is nothing new...
...One particularly brutal night I killed what I took to be a gnat, or worse a flea, as it limped across the rather thin tuft of hair on my chest...
...Congress, special interest groups, and the public debate whether NAFTA is "good" for us but remain selectively ignorant of NAFTA's importance for Mexico...
...Where, I wondered, did he get what was obviously It was familiar because it contained his very own words...
...There is no time like the present to begin the long and ar- If he last week in August was unbearably hot and duous effort to finally build trust and establish confidence be- humid in New York...
...Father Kenan Osborne may have felt and Broadway, the man who usually proffers his paper cup unheimlich when he read the last paragraph of my review to those entering the CitiBank branch was compulsively of his Ministrv (PauIist Press) in the September 10, 1993, sweeping the sidewalk like a distraught burgher hurrying to issue...
...At 96th at the same time...
...I'm homeless...
...political capital on the outcome...
...Crowley altogether...
...manage...
...I got up and went out for coffee...
...This was innocuous enough until way to the scene...
...C.S.C., discloses that in the early years Shuster sometimes In the colder months the vagrants who sleep on the benchsigned Commonweal articles with assumed names to con- es along Broadway's median strip are usually concealed under sheets or blankets, so at dawn it sometimes looks as though, the shrouded figures of the dead have been lined up as in a CORRECTION Matthew Brady Civil War photograph...
...What I had included as a quote from Osborne's text suit- The week was punctuated by such doleful incongruities...
...What is the wealth- sort of explanation to the cop, one of the women screamed iest country in the world...
...Hesitantly, I asked him if he need- more true and foreboding, as the North American ed directions...
...But NAFTA's fate, either way, will have Commonweal 24 September 1993: 5...
...in the other, Palestine remains a rump state unable to govern itself or to achieve economic viability...
...While slow to understand Mexico's problems with poverty, we're quick to exploit its wealth through direct and indirect investment or, when necessary, invasion...
...Shuster answered the senator and incivil war to maintain their turf in what will soon become formed him that unfortunately Mr...
...The senator wrote a couPalestinian state...
...At another station a man was being led away in handcuffs THE VIEW FROM MEXICO by two undercover policemen...
...press coverage has concentrated, as always, on what's at what...
...She was On the subway a barefoot man in remarkably filthy clothes forcibly shouted down by the policeman...
...I resorted to reading a book on the failed promise of Vatican II, but even this venerable narcoleptic didn't do the ET CETERA trick...
...No more than Arafat and "About two weeks later," the book reports, "a letter arthe PLO can the Israeli government guarantee that dissidents, rived from Senator Heflin at the Commonweal office addressed and the West Bank settlers in particular, will not work to sub- to Paul Crowley and challenging him to a duel over the revert the agreements, perhaps even turning to violence and a marks he had made...
...And though Israel will always have an overwhelming military advantage should the agreement break down, NOTEBOOK there will be no return in the eyes of the world to the political status quo ante...
...he suddenly burst out laughing like a practiced extra in a hor- The quality of public life in New York can be as oppressive ror film...
...Crowley had just left the Palestinian-controlled territory and ultimately part of a United States for a tour of Pakistan...
...Maybe I had missed whatever excitement surrounded the arrest, but I was struck by how matter-of-fact everyone on the subway platform seemed...
...Our ignorance, prejudice, and arrogance are reflected in the way we refer to Mexican immigrants as "illegal aliens," when most of them are migrating to lands we took from them...
...Had I been justly rebuked...
...The Caribbean, I underwith a flourish by piling up rings of white foam on his thickly stand, is not the wealthiest place in the world...
...The Editors to me for two whole blocks, conducting his interrogation in a hoarse stage whisper...
...This is a sensible precaution, and I usually observe it...
...open shop...
...olent confrontation...
...I looked tomonweal Managing Editor George N. Shuster (On the Side ward the window and all the pigeon droppings piled up on the of Truth, University of Notre Dame Press), Thomas E. Blant, ledge outside...
...he demanded to know over and over again...
...PAUL BAUMANN of a shampoo in a TV commercial...
...at least it had a oddly similar political experiences could make at last an oasis predictable effect on me...
...I able for highlighting got tacked onto the end of the re- couldn't walk but a few blocks without being badgered by a view...
...A white said, "I have nothing today...
...On an- Flynn was starring in Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, both other train, an anxious young man reached into the plastic bag playing at the Thalia, a recently reopened revival house at 95th he was carrying and took out a can of insecticide or insect re- Street...
...Sleep was difficult to of democracy and prosperity in the Middle East...
...It is an unspoken rule that you do not meet a stranger's eyes in New York...
...We're often both patronizing and heavy-handed in trying to dictate Mexico's domestic and foreign policy, lecturing sanctimoniously on its corruption, its responsibility for our drug problem, how it should vote in the United Nations, what price it should set for its oil, what role it should play in the third world...
...He lifted a brown paper bag concealing a bottle, Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, moves toward took a swig, narrowed his eyes, and burped at me...
...tered a reasonably well-dressed young man staring at me in what For many in Mexico today, this has never seem.A d I took to be a plaintive way...
...The United States seized over half of Mexico's territory more than a century ago, and since then, it seems to Mexicans, we have tried to buy what we didn't take...
...I heard him begin...
...In the distance you besieged us with the usual petition...
...a new broom...
...But for U.S...
...ple of letters further, inquiring about Crowley's eventual reThis catalogue of pros and cons only emphasizes the larger turn, and Shuster eventually apologized that he had lost contact point: the peace process is a high-risk venture for both Israelis with Mr...
...Those eloquent words were not my own derelict, scoffed at or taunted by some contemptuous drinkers DENNIS M. DOYLE on a stoop or in a doorway...
...It doesn't surprise Mexicans that the U.S...
...Did they know about the flea, I We hope Dennis Doyle and Kenan Osborne will accept wondered...
...Naturally, I soon imagined A PEN NAME IS MIGHTIER THAN A PIS- myself infested, every twitch of hair on my legs a new beachTOL In his just-published biography of longtime Com- head upon which to battle the maurauding vermin...
...I, too, longed to unfurl my sails for the Caribbean in pellent and sent people scurrying as he sprayed himself from pursuit of "heavily laden" Spanish galleons, not to mention the head to toe...
...Congress...
...In one tions in Washington, must have made it abundantly clear to of these, bylined "Paul Crowley," Shuster ridiculed a rethe Israelis that he was not investing his meager supply of cent stance of Senator Thomas Heflin of Alabama...
...and Palestinians...
...That's how hot it was...
...stake for the United States-the fear of lost jobs, environmenThe next day I was hurrying down another of the narrow tal degradation, increased migration, and import surges-the little streets that crisscross lower Manhattan when I came upon question of what NAFTA means for Mexico has hardly arisen a crowd of fifty or more people gawking at some sort of vi- north of the Rio Grande...
...Sorry," I her arms, were gesturing wildly at an Oriental man...
...I'd wake up an hour or more before dawn, listen to the slow grinding noise of the fan, and be unable to fall back asleep...
...More disconcerting, he would stumble a few feet and as a humid August heat wave...
...It was, I must its January 1 ratification deadline in the U.S...
...What is the wealthiest country in the 4: 24 September 1993 Commonweal world...
...While report, a menacing burp...
...even louder, pointing belligerently at the man...
Vol. 120 • September 1993 • No. 16
