President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is without doubt one of the most active and influential ex-presidents in American history.

After leaving office, he established the nonprofit Carter Center, tasked with advancing human rights around the world. Through his and the center’s work, Carter has helped monitor more than 60 democratic elections, worked with governments in sub-Saharan Africa to develop sustainable agriculture, negotiated for peaceful conflict resolution in various countries, and worked to eradicate diseases such as Guinea worm and river blindness. For these and other efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Carter — whose presidency was highlighted by achievements in international diplomacy such as the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, the Panama Canal treaties, and the arms-reducing SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union — is also the author of 20 books. The most recent, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, is a wide-ranging critique of how fundamentalism, both religious and political, is influencing American policy at home and abroad.

President Carter recently spoke with Mother Jones from his office at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

MotherJones: In your book, you talk about the intersection in recent years of religious and political fundamentalism. What is the origin of this merger?

Jimmy Carter: I think it was in 1979, when future fundamentalists took control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is a very important religious and political factor in this country. After that, the Southern Baptist Convention had almost diametrically opposite basic principles than it had previously followed, and there’s been an evolution within the Convention toward a more and more rigid and strict creed that embodies the fundamentalist principles that I mention in the book.

Now, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the elementary principle of fundamentalism has existed for ages, and it obviously permeates other religions as well, such as Islam and Hinduism and others. But this trend continued and, parallel to it, there was in effect a merger of the fundamentalist Christian leaders and the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And for the last 25 years or so, that merger has become more pronounced and more evident.

MJ.com: Which of the two strains of fundamentalism do you see as leading the other?

JC: I wouldn’t say leading, but both are influencing each other. In the past, there have been two parallel premises for the separation of church and state. One obviously is what Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, when he said we should build a wall between the church and state. And in the Christian faith, we all remember that Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” This also indicates that there should be a clear separation.

But those premises have been publicly disavowed or challenged by Pat Robertson on the religious side, and even by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court [William Rehnquist]. But nowadays, with the allocation of billions of dollars through what President Bush calls a faith-based initiative, taxpayers’ money is distributed to churches and other religious institutions that will comply with the basic principles of the present political administration. And there’s no doubt that in public conventions and in individual church speeches and sermons, there’s been a prevalent inclination to endorse candidates, primarily Republican candidates.

MJ.com: At this point, 25 years in, do you expect this to remain a permanent situation?

JC: In the last few months at least, I would guess, there has been a reconsideration by many American citizens that that trend was not advisable for our country. This is indicated, at least to some degree, by public-opinion polls. And obviously the popularity in polls of some Republican leaders has deteriorated as well. So there’s been a re-thinking in many ways. I think part of it has been caused by some of the practical political decisions that were ill advised and were supported by the religious fundamentalists.

All of us Christians worship the Prince of Peace, but the fundamentalists I referred to earlier publicly supported what I consider the unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. That was one indication of a very radical departure. The reception of public funds to go into the religious activities of a church is almost unprecedented, at least within the Baptist faith, which I share. Other aspects are the almost complete refusal of the fundamentalist Christian leaders to condemn even the torture of prisoners and the intrusion on Americans’ privacy and rights as protected under the U.S. Constitution. On those kinds of issues, formerly characterized by a separate opinion on public events between the religious community and the political community, the difference has been eliminated.

MJ.com: The definition of fundamentalism you provide in the book includes the unwillingness to cooperate or negotiate with others. Where do you see that tendency as most dangerous at the moment?

JC: The danger comes when those kinds of principles are applied on the international scene. That brought about a whole gamut of things. One, obviously, is the unprecedented preemptive war that President Bush has declared to be a policy of our country. Another is the total abandonment, and often the derogation, of every nuclear-arms agreement that has been negotiated by previous presidents, beginning in the time of Dwight Eisenhower.

At home, it brought about the deterioration of our commitment to environmental quality. Another [effect] is the enormous preference that has been given in tax laws recently to the extremely rich at the expense of working-class and poorer people. Then there’s the implied melding of science and religion, where even the president himself has expressed the opinion that religious beliefs should be taught in scientific classrooms. That’s unprecedented. And there is a unique and special emphasis—which is a recent development too—within the religious community, an obsession with the condemnation of homosexuality. Now, in the bible homosexuality is condemned, but along with divorce and greed and callousness toward poor people. So its elevation to a highest priority among some religious groups has been very disturbing to me.

One point I believe is important, looking at the political side once more, is that this is not a Democratic-versus-Republican or a liberal-versus-conservative concern. This is a departure in all those points, compared to all previous Republican presidents—compared to George Bush Sr. or Ronald Reagan, compared to Gerald Ford or Dwight Eisenhower, as well as the Democratic presidents. It’s a radical departure.

MJ.com: As you know, the Bible stresses the need to help the poor, and yet the government appears to have moved away from that notion in recent years.

JC: I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And one point that is made openly by some so-called neoconservatives is that we need to drive the nation into debt – which they’ve done grossly – to prevent future administrations from having the funding flexibility to increase government services to the poor. Whether in the field of housing or education or health care or social services, there’s a deliberate idea there that is quoted quite freely in some of the right-wing political periodicals.

MJ.com: Do you think the Hurricane Katrina disaster has changed that dynamic at all?

JC: If it is, I haven’t seen the results of it. There has been some verbal recognition of the plight of the poor, but when you look at the total commitment and the sending out of the poorest people in the Katrina region, help has been pretty well absent. I think this has been a scandalous thing for the Bush administration, something that has been acknowledged not just by critics like me but by the Congress itself. The reaction of FEMA – which used to be a sterling organization – and the neglect of the poorest people suffering in New Orleans and other places has been a complete embarrassment.

MJ.com: You mentioned the Iraq war, and you were an early critic. Given the situation as it stands now, are you at all hopeful about the prospects for a stable democracy emerging?

JC: Well, I’m hopeful. I pray that there will be a successful democratic system established in Iraq that can keep the country together and avoid further violence. I think what we should do is get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and this can be done in a number of ways. I think one of the best ways would be for us to surreptitiously ask the new leaders of Iraq to publicly request that the U.S. troops withdraw. Then, instead of taking the initiative and saying we have failed in Iraq, we could say that we are honoring the new democracy established in Iraq. That’s one scenario that could lead to a withdrawal of U.S. troops within a year. But my own belief is that no one in the top levels in Washington now intends to ever pull all the American troops from Iraq. I think there was a strong motivation to go into Iraq to establish a permanent military presence there of some kind. And I don’t believe there’s anyone in the top levels in Washington who’s willing to relinquish the privileged position we have in the acquisition and marketing of Iraqi oil, to open it up to France or Russia or China.

So I think there’s still a strong feeling in Washington to retain a strong permanent military and economic presence in Iraq. My belief is that a lot of the violence that continues in Iraq right now between different religious groups is caused in part by the continued presence of American troops. I believe that if American troops withdrew, almost immediately the level of violence would decrease.

MJ.com: Having monitored many elections yourself, what other conditions do you think must be in place for a viable democracy to work in Iraq?

JC: I don’t think we can start the election procedure all the way over. Now I think the decision is going to be up to the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds to try to work out some sort of arrangement among themselves based on ethnic and religious backgrounds, similar to what has existed for several generations in Lebanon. There the president comes from one group, the prime minister comes from another group, and you have some degree of autonomy depending on whether people live in a certain place or have a certain ethnic or religious background. That’s what we still hope for. Based on the previous election held in Iraq last December, that’s still a hopeful possibility, and it would certainly be my preference.

MJ.com: As you note in your book, the situation in Iraq poses a conflict of American values, in the sense that promoting democracy could, for example, lead to an elected government that takes away things such as women’s rights. How does America walk that line?

JC: We can’t completely control what the Iraqis prefer in their social policies. Obviously, we saw the terrible circumstances in Afghanistan when the Taliban made women almost complete servants and debased them. Under Saddam Hussein of course, and even under the former Shah of Iran, there was a more enlightened treatment of women, as there is in Egypt and some other Muslim countries. What I understand, though, is that the strong inclination of the Shiite plurality – they don’t quite have a majority – in the new government is to implement sharia law as far as women’s dress is concerned and the subjugation of women to an acknowledged male domination. From what I understand, that’s under consideration in the draft of the new constitution. Unfortunately, we can’t just go in and order the Shiites to change their basic beliefs that women should wear veils or shouldn’t be educated and so forth. I deplore this, but it’s not something the United States can control.

MJ.com: There’s been a somewhat similar conflict in the Palestinian territories, where a democratically held election led to the victory of Hamas, which the United States lists as a terrorist organization. What can the United States do in this case?

JC: The Carter Center monitored that election, as well as the two previous Palestinian elections. They’ve been open and safe elections, as good as any we’ve seen in the world. [The Palestinian election in January was the 62nd one the Carter Center had monitored.] We’re familiar with the situation there, and most of us expected that Hamas would win a plurality, but the fact they won a majority was a surprise to everyone.

Now, I don’t believe it’s even possible under U.S. law for the United States to deal directly with a government where the ministers and parliament are Hamas members. That’s illegal under our laws. However, the president of the Palestinian government is still Mahmoud Abbas, who represents the Fatah Party. He is a moderate, respected, honest—and was anointed a couple years ago by the United States and Israel as their main interlocutor. He is still in charge of the PLO; since Arafat died, he’s the head of it. The only political organization that Israel has ever acknowledged is the PLO. And I noticed recently that Abbas was in Norway, calling strongly for peace talks to begin immediately with Israel and saying, accurately, that he has the legal authority to speak for the Palestinians as president and as head of the PLO. So there’s nothing that happened in January that prevents the initiation or resumption of peace talks.

MJ.com: In previous interviews you’ve proposed that the United States continue to give aid to the Palestinian people while not dealing with the Hamas government.

JC: That’s what I think the United States should do. We can’t deal directly with the Hamas government. But I think we should have the same degree of generosity to the Palestinian people who are suffering horribly in their own land. This could be done through UNESCO, through the United Nations Human Rights Organization, through UNICEF, or even through the government of Jordan. Just to finance the payment of schoolteachers or nurses or ambulance services or food distribution to people. This could be done almost completely independently of who is in parliament and who the ministers might be. That’s what I’ve advocated, not just for the United States but also for Europe. I hope there will be some modification in the present actions, which will cause Palestinians to suffer even more than they have in the past and maybe even ultimately create a violent reaction from their hopelessness.

MJ.com: Even looking back at Iraq in the 1990s, the sanctions there seemed to hurt public opinion about the U.S. more than they did Saddam Hussein.

JC: That’s true. That was ostensibly focused on Saddam Hussein, but we make the same mistakes in other places. Unfortunately, we do the same thing in Cuba. The animosity against Fidel Castro means we have an embargo against travel, commerce, tourism, and the sale of food and medicine to the Cuban people. This doesn’t hurt Castro; in fact, it hurts the people who are already suffering under his dictatorship. And it tends to make him a hero, where he can blame all of his own self-induced economic problems on the United States. So I think whenever we have a bludgeon to economically use sanctions against people in an attempt to hurt the dictator in charge, it’s counterproductive.

MJ.com: On the flip side, you note in the book that the American public thinks the country spends much more money on international aid than it actually does.

JC: Polls show that Americans think we spend 10-15 percent of our gross income to help other people, and we spend much less than one half of one percent. And we spend less on a per-capita basis, compared to our income, than any other industrialized nation in the world. And in addition to this stinginess with which we allocate government funds to help humanitarian assistance to needy people, we put horrendous restraints on how our own dollars are expended. For example, we’re very interested in trying to control AIDS in Africa, but the Congress puts strings on the money, such as you can’t spend it on family planning or the use of condoms. Anybody in his right mind knows that one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of AIDS is for people who have sex to use condoms.

Another thing is that in the last 20 years or so, beginning with President Reagan, we have shifted to letting almost all the USAID [United States Agency for International Development] funds go to American contractors. It used to be that within USAID, we had experts employed by the U.S. government who made sure the money was spent wisely and efficiently. Now that money goes almost exclusively to American contractors who set up offices in foreign countries. They receive the money and dole it out with enormous waste.

MJ.com: By comparison, what have you found effective in your own work that other organizations could learn from?

JC: One thing is that, since I have been president, I’m able to deal directly with the leaders of African governments. I go into the country and let it be known what we want to do in advance, and I ask the president to meet with me and to have his prime minister there as well as his whole cabinet. I negotiate a contract between the Carter Center and, for example, the government of Uganda or Mali or Burkina Faso. That’s the first thing. Whereas if the World Health Organization or UNICEF wanted to do this, they would probably – through no fault of their own – be limited to dealing with the minister of health. That’s one advantage we have. A second is we have a policy of not sending a large bureaucracy into a country. We usually send in one expert who represents the Carter Center. And all of the workers are local people, Kenyans or Nigerians or Tanzanians. They are the ones who actually do the work in the villages, with us teaching them and providing assistance. And a third thing we do that makes our work effective is I don’t put my name on anything when we deal with these diseases. In Africa for instance, we generally call it Global 2000, so the local village leader can say, “My Global 2000 program eradicated Guinea worm.” Or increased the production of corn or wheat. And the president can say the same thing. I think those three things – dealing with the top leadership, depending on local people we train to do the work, and we don’t try to take credit for it.

Tuvalu Map

FUNAFUTI, TUVALU – Karl Tili joined the Tuvalu Philatelic Bureau in 1976, when the former Ellice Islands colony first began to produce its own stamps in the early years of self-government leading up to independence. He got to see firsthand how the stamp industry quickly established itself as one of Tuvalu’s leading sources of revenue and employment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, producing limited supplies of collectible issues for enthusiasts in some 60 countries. Before a decline in the mid-1980s, the bureau boasted dozens of employees and took up two buildings just southwest of the capital’s village center on Funafuti atoll.

The bureau’s one-floor blue building now houses just a handful of workers, while most of its sales come from standing-order accounts overseas or sales to the country’s rare visitors. Now the bureau’s general manager, Tili is hoping to change that by creating a second heyday for Tuvalu stamps. In September, he accompanied the country’s finance minister on a trip to China, where he marketed his nation’s collectibles to the world’s fastest-growing market. He’s also working with the local schools to teach Tuvalu’s youth about the industry’s heritage by organizing tours of the bureau, and talks excitedly about his dream to start a program where the bureau will set aside stamp collections for young Tuvaluans as both a history lesson and an investment.

Even if he can muster the funding and resources, though, he questions whether he will be able to implement these plans before he winds up leaving Tuvalu for good. Like many of his countrymen, he is torn between trying to plan his future in this small Pacific nation while simultaneously considering when to find a new home, knowing the effects of climate change will gradually make Tuvalu uninhabitable. Three of his eight children have already migrated to New Zealand, and he says he regularly advises bureau staffers to start planning for their own departures.

“There’s a lot of things happening now, where we have to look at the next 10 or 20 years and think, what would we be like?” he says. “Do we still have enough to survive on an island like this? That’s why I encourage migration. For those who can go, go. Those who can pay for a return ticket, that’s all. It might cost 10 grand or more, depending on where you’re going and if your family’s going. But this is the time to start working on those papers, not leave it until late.”

Scientific estimates vary on exactly when it will be too late – when the worsening annual floods, erosion, salination of ground water, increased tropical storms and periods of drought will make it virtually impossible for Tuvalu’s people to survive here. But finding visual evidence that climate change is already damaging Tuvalu is not a difficult task.

On both ends of Funafuti atoll’s Fongafale islet – the boomerang-shaped piece of land that houses about half the island nation’s population – the land is narrow enough that one can look straight ahead and simultaneously observe both the surf of the Pacific Ocean on one side and the aquamarine waters of the lagoon on the other. Piles of coral, bleached by warmer waters and still showing the detail of the organisms they once were, now form small hills along the outer edges of Fongafale.

Flooded dugouts dot the land throughout the central village Vaiaku and its surroundings. Known colloquially as the “borrow pits,” these pools date to World War II, when the American military used Tuvalu as a staging ground for attacks against Japanese-held islands to the north and excavated the pits, using the coral deposits as material to build an airstrip. That airstrip is still in use and dominates the islet’s landscape, with structures such as the national bank, soccer field and weather station built along its sides. But the Americans never returned to fill the pits, which now resemble a series of lakes – full of standing water from the ever-rising water table that sits beneath the low-lying land. Basically unusable, the borrow pits have become common sites for pig pens and waste dumping, turning into breeding grounds for mosquitoes, rats and cockroaches in the process.

Across the vast saltwater lagoon from Fongafale, Funafuti now has only a seawater-filled gap where a storm destroyed one of its small, uninhabited islets in 2005. Other areas on that side of the atoll now feature offshore palm trees with trunks surrounded by water. While the trees slowly die, they mark sites where rising Pacific tides have already carried away whole chunks of those islets.

“With the action of high seas and high level of seas, we realize now that some of the coastal lands owned by our own people are lost; they no longer exist,” says Tavau Teii, Tuvalu’s deputy prime minister and minister of natural resources. “And that is an effect. You see, we have our land system; it’s extended-family ownership. The last five years or ten years or so, there’s quite a lot of plots of land being lost. It’s being eaten away. That’s the level of the sea getting higher, as well as frequent strong winds and there’s a lot of land going into the sea.”

The reality of those impacts forces the government here, much like Tili and other businesspeople, to work simultaneously on two tracks.

In international forums, Tuvalu continues to negotiate for other countries to accept its people as migrants and to work toward recognition of its people as potential environmental refugees under international law. New Zealand currently takes up to 75 Tuvaluans a year (as well as seasonal workers), while the small island of Niue actively seeks Tuvaluan immigration and there is palpable hope that the new government of Australia will be more open than its famously anti-immigration predecessor. Tuvalu’s labor department actively encourages migration, and remittances from Tuvaluans abroad remain a major source of revenue for families here.

Of course, one problem with migration is that it further divides what is already a small population. Between 10,000 and 12,000 people currently live on Tuvalu’s nine islands – less than a third of 1 percent of even New Zealand’s population – and a number of people here express concern that migration could spell the end of Tuvalu’s distinct culture if it scatters its adherents.

“I just don’t like it because they’re driving people away,” says Silafaga Lalua, who edits the nation’s fortnightly newspaper, Tuvalu Echoes. “Of course, people have their plans and would like to go somewhere that’s more safe for their children or their families. But to me, it’s just like we are abandoning our own little island. Besides, there’s a lot of other issues that come from relocation. To me, maybe if the government invests in somewhere, buys a big piece of land somewhere and relocates the people right there to keep them together. Because the language and the culture is just going to die away, and the traditions, if people just go by themselves to wherever they want to go to.”

While actively encouraging migration, Tuvalu’s leadership is also trying to make the country habitable for as long as it can. To that end, Teii explains, the government is studying various types of sea walls to construct as temporary solutions. Already, concrete blocks line the area behind Funafuti’s main hotel, near the main jetty that locals and visitors use to enter the lagoon for swimming or boating. Past the working pier on the northern curve of Fongafale, a manmade fill connects what had once been a separate islet, providing easy road access to additional home plots, a palm-filled picnic area and what’s since become a rubbish dump on the islet’s northernmost segment.

Tuvalu’s alkaline soil makes it difficult to grow crops, and the encroaching saltwater is already damaging the staple taro and pulaka (swamp taro) crops. Root vegetables that grow in deep pits that make use of the underground freshwater table, their production is already suffering as saltwater contaminates some pits and kills the vegetables. Tuvaluans can only keep limited livestock – mostly pigs and poultry – and the expectation of prolonged droughts means those animals must compete with people for already-scarce rainwater. Tuvalu uses a filtering installation provided by the government of Taiwan to desalinate seawater for everyday use, but it has limited capacity. Other water comes in the form of bottles from Fiji, just as canned imports – primarily from Australia – increasingly make up for the shortcomings of locally produced food. Without access to recycling facilities, however, Tuvaluans send those cans and bottles into ever-growing dumps, a practice that further decreases the amount of usable land on the islands.

The reality in a place with such limited resources is that these short-term solutions can create their own long-term problems, assuming there’s even a long term here. It’s not uncommon to hear civil servants here describe in detail a program they’d like to implement before expressing doubt that funding and time will ever allow them to do so.

Even a simple plan, like Tili’s goal of creating an archive of stamp collections for young Tuvaluans, must account for Tuvalu’s precarious position.

“We want to put up one place, where there’s air conditioning, just like the post boxes they have in five-star hotels for jewelry or things that are important; then we’ve locked everything up,” he muses. “Then just before we sink, we can say, ‘Jeff or Joe Brown, you take your collection. Go to New Mexico or go to Alaska and live there. And hope and pray that the value of the thing will give you more money for your future.’”

John Key

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – When the Nazis annexed Austria in the early stages of Hitler’s quest to dominate Europe, Ruth Lazar’s family knew their very survival depended on fleeing the country.

Now, seven decades after she became a refugee from her homeland, her son could become the leader of his.

Polls suggest John Key, leader of New Zealand’s center-right National Party, heads into this fall’s election as the favorite to be named the country’s next prime minister. If elected, Key would be the third prime minister of Jewish descent in New Zealand’s young history. (Julius Vogel served two terms as premier in the 1870′s and Francis Bell, the country’s 20th prime minister and first born in New Zealand, was the son of a Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity).

The legacy of his mother, who passed away in 2000 at age 77, is on his mind as Key recognizes the extraordinary position he’s in these days. “Her story was simply part of the family background that I learnt in bits and pieces as I was growing up,” Key told World Jewish Digest in a phone interview. “So I was certainly aware of her story, but the impact grew as I got older, and I realized just how brave and strong she had been and how much she had sacrificed for the sake of her family.”

Ruth Lazar was just a teenager at the time of the Anschluss, and had recently lost her father to a heart attack. Luckily, her aunt Lottie Karpales was able to get to Great Britain, where she paid a British soldier to marry her and make her a citizen. Though the marriage was only a paper one, it was legally binding and allowed Lottie to obtain British visas for her family back in Austria.

Ruth, along with her grandmother, mother and older brother, moved to the United Kingdom in early 1939, just before the start of World War II and the destruction of European Jewry.

Ruth Lazar married George Key, a British World War II veteran, in 1948, and the couple soon moved more than 11,000 miles south from Britain to New Zealand, initially settling in Auckland. “My understanding,” Key says, “is that, after the war, they wanted to start a new life. And New Zealand was a long way away from Europe.”

The couple had three children, but George died in 1967 when John was only six, and Ruth relocated again. The family moved to Christchurch, the largest city on the country’s South Island. That’s where John grew up, went on to attend the local University of Canterbury, and launched what would become a successful business career.

One thing Ruth gave up with the move was her synagogue attendance. She did not practice her faith while her children were young, but began again after they’d left home. Key says he does not consider himself religious, but identifies as Jewish through his mother and has been active in fundraising and other activities with the Jewish community here. (It is also worth noting that candidates’ religious views don’t play nearly the role in New Zealand politics that they do in the United States. The current Labour prime minister, Helen Clark, is agnostic).

John Key made his fortune in the business world. At just 24, he became a currency trader in Wellington, and then was recruited by the Bankers Trust in Auckland. After seven years there, he joined Merrill Lynch, a financial management company. He worked for them in Singapore, Great Britain and Australia, becoming the company’s head of foreign exchange and becoming a millionaire a few times over in the process. Key says that work helped prepare him for his eventual shift to the public sector.

“There are many similarities between politics and business,” he says. “My international business experience has given me a firm grasp of what’s important, including being focused on what really matters and not letting yourself get distracted, earning the trust of people and the importance of effective communication of your vision.”

That track record made him an attractive candidate for the National Party, which is the mainstream conservative party in New Zealand’s multiparty parliamentary system. So when party leaders learned he’d always been interested in politics, they actively recruited Key to stand for election to Parliament. In 2002, he won election as MP for Helensville, a newly drawn district in fast-growing northwest Auckland, capturing majority support in a three-way race.

Just as he had in business, Key rose quickly in the political realm. His financial background made him an obvious choice to become National’s deputy finance spokesman just a year after he arrived in Parliament, and by 2004 he had moved up to finance spokesman.

When National leader Don Brash resigned his post in November 2006, Key was the clear choice to replace him. Days before that, polls showed 17.3 percent of the population already considered Key their preferred prime minister, and National MP’s chose him uncontested to lead their caucus. At 45, he was now one of the youngest party leaders in the country’s history.

National has often struggled with its identity since Clark and the Labour Party were elected to power in 1999. Key is generally seen as having moved the party to the center, making it a more viable choice for moderate voters unhappy with inflation, a housing crunch and the recent scandals that have embroiled a number of Labour MP’s. He is personally affable, has consistently earned high approval ratings from the public since becoming party leader, and has made a point of trying to expand National’s base.

“I approach issues in a practical, no-nonsense way,” he says. “I’m interested in what works, not blind ideology. That is what I hope has come through in the policies we have released so far – sensible and pragmatic ideas and approach. I am also keen to see the National Party better reflect the makeup of our society. That was seen in our party list released on August 17, which introduced more ethnic candidates with a good chance of making it into Parliament.”

Internationally, he says he wants a “bipartisan” foreign policy, with New Zealand increasing aid to the Pacific region and looking to increase economic opportunities in Asia. He has also promised to continue the country’s celebrated policy of remaining a nuclear-free zone.

On the domestic front, Key wants to provide tax cuts, raise education standards, and cut government spending with the goal of decreasing inflation. He sees the “brain drain” of roughly 80,000 people emigrating annually as a major problem, and improving economic prospects at home as the best antidote.

“I will measure my success on whether I make a meaningful difference to the living standards and lives of New Zealanders,” he says.

His approach has paid dividends in the polls so far. In March 2007, Key became the first challenger to poll ahead of Clark as preferred prime minister since she assumed office. One year later, he held a slight lead in that department while his party had taken an 18-point lead over Labour. The most recent polling data, released August 25, shows National holding steady at about 48 percent support, with Labour gaining at the expense of minor parties to reach 37 percent.

Former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, the last National member to hold that job, famously called Key one of the candidates she “deliberately sought out and put my head on the line – either privately or publicly – to get them in there.” For her part, incumbent Clark has run against Key by highlighting the short length of his career in the public sector and saying he’s too inexperienced to trust in the top job.

“There’s this guy who has been in Parliament for a second term,” she said in a July pre-campaign speech. “He has no background in public life. He’s spent years out of New Zealand. Heaven knows what he did. He made an awful lot of money, but he’s a bit of an unknown quantity and that is what the Kiwi electorate will focus on.”

As a former English colony still part of the Commonwealth, New Zealand’s government uses the Westminster system. The prime minister is not elected directly, but the leader of the party with majority support takes the office. It also means the incumbent gets to choose an election date, and announce it at least six weeks beforehand. In late September, Clark selected November 8 as the election date.

“The current polling shows that there is a strong mood for change in the public,” Key says. “After nine years of Labour, we have not made the step-change in economic performance required to keep up with the living standards of other countries such as Australia. We can, and must, do better.”

If the New Zealand public agrees with that view, John Key will assume office in Wellington this fall. And, in the process, he will get to add another historic chapter to his family’s remarkable story.

Vailima

Throughout his 30s, Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson traveled the world in search of a new home, one where the climate and lifestyle might ease the pain of the tuberculosis that had afflicted him since childhood. In 1888, he found such a treasure while visiting the islands of Samoa, and soon bought a 400-acre estate in the village of Vailima on the main island of Upolu. There he’d spend the final few years of his short life writing novels, short stories, and nonfiction collections in the humid tropics of the South Seas.

As a writer, I naturally jumped at the chance to see Stevenson’s grave when, on my first full day in the Samoan capital of Apia, my host suggested driving out for a visit.

Vailima was only a few miles away, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what Stevenson saw in the place. The huge two-story villa where he lived–a picturesque island dwelling with wide verandas and walls made from gorgeous native timber–sat within an expanse of lush green land, just a short walk from a dense and colorful jungle. The Samoan government had used the estate for various purposes over the years before turning it into a Stevenson museum, which today is one of the nation’s most popular man-made attractions. Curators used photos taken by Stevenson as guides for restoring the interior: from a study with tapa-papered walls and woven floor mats to an upper-level medicine room where the ill writer received treatments to individual bedrooms for each of his family members that would make any city dweller jealous. No wonder Stevenson wanted his final resting place located where he’d spent the last part of his life.

What my host neglected to mention earlier was that, while Stevenson was buried on the land he owned, the land he owned included one of the nation’s higher peaks. In fact, the author’s will stipulated a resting place at the very top of Mount Vaea.

The hike to the top involved a steep incline up to a 1,500-foot-high peak. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if not for two things: Not knowing we’d be hiking, I was hardly dressed for the occasion, wearing jeans and sandals rather than actual shoes, and that the monsoon-like rain that overpowered the whole island the night before had left the entire trail full of wide pools of water and soupy mud that stuck like tar.

Although the trail included a few areas where trampling by previous hikers had smoothed out particularly steep patches, it noticeably lacked any kind of railing to hold, and the nearest trees were just far enough out of reach to prove useless. With water collected in deep puddles throughout the way, walking in sandals made it more than a bit difficult to find a foothold, requiring more upper-body balance than a walk to a burial site should. Throughout the hike, it was impossible to ignore the fact that a team of Samoan pallbearers made the exact same trek with the added burden of hoisting the remains of a great writer in a presumably heavy wooden casket. Though, in our defense, said pallbearers most likely had dry ground to walk upon.

The good news was that the top of the mountain proved worth the trip. Granted, the nominal attraction was Stevenson’s grave, topped by a white stone gently littered with island moss and inscribed with the author’s poem “Requiem” (in English and translated into Samoan), but the view was the real draw, providing an opportunity to look over the jungle canopy at the full expanse of Upolu. From there, it was possible to see the island’s villages overwhelmed by thick foliage and other peaks in the distance. I was able to survey the fantastic scenery that had been impossible to enjoy on the way up.

The journey down proved a lot more hazardous than the way up, with footholds even harder to come by and the steepness of the mountain a bigger obstacle. Our group’s descent involved plenty of falling into one another like dominoes and (for a few of us) wiping out in the thick mud. Still, everyone managed to avoid falling completely down the mountainside, and some fancy acrobatics saved my camera from the damage my body sustained. The hike proved thoroughly worth it, and I know the next time I walk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s shoes, I’ll make those shoes a pair of hiking boots.

The first federal election held after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill became law featured record amounts of spending, the rise of powerful new outside funding groups and the emergence of super-rich individual donors who spent millions to influence the outcome. Final filings were due yesterday, and while the official totals are still being certified, the best estimate puts the price tag of this election at $4 billion, with more than $1.5 billion of that spent on the presidential race. But assessing the finance landscape of the 2004 race — and gauging the success of McCain-Feingold — is more complicated than the spending levels make it appear.

McCain-Feingold, signed into law by President Bush in March 2002 as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, was designed to put an end to the unlimited “soft money” contributions both parties raised from corporations, unions and individuals. The law’s language did not specifically address the kind of 527 groups that became so powerful and spent more than $400 million in the 2004 cycle. “The law had next to zero effect on these outside organizations. That’s the point that often gets missed,” explains Aron Pilhofer of the Center for Public Integrity. “McCain-Feingold was singularly focused on national party soft money. In that respect, it has worked and is working exactly as intended. These groups existed before McCain-Feingold, and they would’ve existed whether McCain-Feingold passed or not.” He adds that corporations, long a source of soft money for both parties, were mostly absent from the list of 527 contributors.

But some of the newest and largest 527 groups were able to raise record sums of money by exploiting a loophole in the new campaign-finance rules. Groups registering under section 527 of the tax code are by definition tax-exempt political organizations, a category with no shortage of members. “If you’re looking at the Republican National Committee, it’s a 527,” explains Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, a group advocating campaign finance reform. “Or if you’re looking at President Bush’s or Sen. Kerry’s campaign committees, those are 527 committees.” Well-known advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, Emily’s List, the Club for Growth, the AFL-CIO and the League of Conservation Voters have also operated 527 committees to handle election activity, such as issue advertising, get-out-the-vote drives and other efforts.

The difference between those longtime 527s and the likes of Progress for America and The Media Fund, two organizations that came to prominence in this election cycle, is that these latter groups didn’t register with the FEC as political committees designed to influence federal (as opposed to state and local) elections. In this way, they raised funds above the contribution limits set by federal campaign-finance laws; wealthy individuals were able to contribute as much money as they wanted. The dominant new 527s refrained from expressly calling for one candidate’s defeat or election in their ads, but it was hard to argue they weren’t designed to influence federal races. “Only in this election have we seen these types of 527s formed not just around a general set of elections but around a specific election, the presidential race,” Pilhofer adds. “We haven’t really seen a group like ACT [America Coming Together] before. We haven’t seen a group like Media Fund before. These were groups that clearly formed for one purpose and for one purpose only, and that was to elect or defeat George Bush.”

By bypassing contribution limits, the anti-Bush 527s raised and spent enough money early on to offset Bush’s vaunted fundraising advantage (the president had raised roughly $186 million by the end of March). “The most visible and important groups, including MoveOn and the Media Fund, approached the 2004 cycle with the assumption that the anti-Bush side — they started this before there was a Democratic nominee — would need help in the March through August period,” says David Magleby, dean of the political science department at Brigham Young University. “Having watched previous presidential cycles, they correctly anticipated that a presidential candidate would emerge largely broke from the primary election phase…So in many ways, this was an election in which politics was a team sport, and the team on the advertising included these other groups, which denied the Republicans the knockout punch they expected to get in the March to August period.”

It took the pro-Republican side longer to make the same sort of impact, but this approach to fundraising was a bipartisan effort. The Progress for America Voter Fund ran its first television ad in July, and went on to spend more than any other 527 on the pro-Bush side. Just after the Democratic National Convention made Kerry’s service in Vietnam a selling point for his candidacy, Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth launched its first ad in August. Andy Horne, the group’s secretary, says the organization first started coming together during the Democratic primaries, when it appeared Kerry might win the nomination. As Magleby explains, “they were disciplined and organized. They held their fire until the moment was ripe; then they acted and had an impact on the race. At a minimum, they changed the rhythm of the campaign.”

The FEC hasn’t yet announced how much 527 groups wound up spending on the presidential race. “But if you take ACT and Media Fund on the Democratic side and Progress for America and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the Republican side, you’re going to get well over $150 million in four groups,” predicts Steve Weissman of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. “And that’s likely to be half or more than half of all 527 spending.”

Both McCain and Feingold argue that the success of 527s in raising money beyond federal contribution limits is a failing of enforcement on the part of the FEC. In May, the FEC chose not to rule on whether 527 groups could accept unlimited contributions from individuals. “We believe the current federal election law requires these groups to register as political committees and stop raising and spending soft money,” Feingold said in September, when he and McCain introduced a new “527 Reform Bill” they hope to pass in the next Congress. Both senators have also supported Reps. Christopher Shays and Martin Meehan — who sponsored the House version of what became the BCRA and will do the same with the 527 bill — in a lawsuit brought against the FEC in September accusing the agency of subverting the law by failing to enforce it — to make groups like The Media Fund and Swift Boat Veterans register as federal committees. Wertheimer and others argue the unlimited fundraising of 527s is already illegal under existing laws. “The soft money system was really illegal in the first place; the FEC adopted improper regulations that created it,” he says. “But we needed to pass a law to overcome what they were authorizing illegally. It’s the same situation. Frankly, what we have to do here is get a law that already says this is illegal activity, we have to either get a court interpretation, or we have to re-enact it. Which is absurd, but is what you wind up with when you’re dealing with the FEC.”

A certain percentage of the old soft-money contributions likely went to the 527 groups, and a successful effort to close that loophole would prevent that. But it’s not as if all the old soft money simply got redirected to 527s in this election. “It isn’t that the same people who gave before are now using the 527 loophole,” Weissman says. “Nor is there a very strong relationship between the people who are giving to the 527s and what they gave to the parties through soft money. I was looking up George Soros. He gave about $27 million to the 527s. And he and his family hardly gave $1 million over the past few elections to the Democrats.” Certainly, the increased interest in this election drove fundraising on both sides; Soros himself declared he would spend his entire $7 billion fortune if it guaranteed a Kerry victory.

As for “hard money,” BCRA allowed the parties themselves to raise more money in this election cycle, since the law raised giving limits from $1,000 to $2,000 for an individual contribution to a candidate, and from $25,000 per year to $95,000 per two-year cycle to candidates, PACs and party committees combined. CFI estimates both the Democratic and Republican parties raised more overall in hard money than they did in hard and soft money combined in either the 2000 or 2002 elections, for an estimated total of $1 billion, 12 percent more than when they were able to gather six- and seven-figure soft-money checks (though some party committees saw dropoffs).

Perhaps more important — and much harder to gauge — is the impact of another category of tax-exempt groups: those filing under sections 501c of the tax code. Unlike 527s, these non-profit groups do not exist primarily to influence elections, but can (depending on the type of organization) spend money on issue ads, get-out-the-vote drives, and lobbying efforts. Examples include social welfare groups, unions and business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Unlike 527s, they are required to get their status okayed by the IRS and they have to meet various compliance standards. And unlike 527s, those that choose to participate in politics don’t have to disclose where the money comes from.

“If you want to spend big, to affect the election by spending money beyond contribution limits, right now you have two choices,” says Taylor Lincoln of Public Citizen, who released a recent report on 501c activity in the two previous elections. “One is a 527. The pro of that is it’s the more accepted way to affect elections. They don’t have to be cute about how they’re spending money; they’re admitting what they’re up to. The downside is you have to say who you are. Or you give to a 501. The advantage is there’s no fingerprints on your money. The disadvantage is it’s conceivably sort of murky in getting around the law.” If Congress manages to close the 527 loophole, he cautions, that could make 501cs more attractive. “Politically, the 501s occupy something of a strange space. Those who want to get 527 legislation through aren’t very eager to take on 501s, because 501cs are a whole other kettle of fish with their constituency and there’d be a great deal of resistance to regulating the 501cs.”

What happens next? It’s hard to say. Some of the other 527 groups active in this election will likely disappear, while others will probably stick around. “My guess is ACT and MoveOn will continue,” Magley says. “I think they’ve also learned some lessons of things they can do well, and that those in the effort and funded the effort will likely want to continue those goals of voter registration, voter mobilization, the marriage of the Internet and politics. Those are big-picture agenda items that I think groups like ACT and MoveOn will continue to want to do.” As for the Swift Boat Veterans, spokesperson Jennifer Webster says the group isn’t sure if it will remain together, though it might continue “working on educating the public about the POWs from the Vietnam era.” Obviously, any changes to the regulation process would impact how those and other outside groups participate in the next election, and there’s always the possibility that a future race without George Bush would automatically cut down on fundraising by both sides. The BCRA took soft money away from the parties, but this election proved taking big money out of a politics is a much larger challenge.

So, in an arrangement–unveiled on August 19 by the Democratic National Committee–that seeks to weaken Iowa and New Hampshire’s clout, Nevada’s caucuses will come between them, and South Carolina’s will come shortly thereafter. Iowa gets to keep its first-in-the-nation caucuses, but its impact will supposedly diminish with more elections crammed into the front of the schedule. According to the Democrats’ new plan, voters in more reliably conservative states will counteract the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, producing a more centrist and “electable” nominee.

But, even if moving to the center is key to the Democrats’ salvation (for more on that debate, visit any blog frequented by Democrats), the analysis here is wrong: Iowa and New Hampshire don’t produce liberal partisans who turn off swing voters. In fact, voters in New Hampshire, and especially Iowa, tend to select safe, fairly moderate candidates whom they think stand the best chance of defeating the GOP nominee in November.

First, a little history. After the fiasco of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the party altered its nominating system to shift the power away from the party bosses in “smoke-filled rooms” and toward delegates selected by primary voters. Party leaders already worried that giving more say to decentralized masses of rank-and-file Democrats would produce problematic candidates. But, in Iowa, the eight contested cycles since then produced Edmund Muskie, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Iowa favorite son Tom Harkin, Al Gore, and John Kerry. New Hampshire made the same choice in five of those contests, deviating only with Gary Hart in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Paul Tsongas in 1992 (the latter two were from neighboring Massachusetts).

That’s hardly a bunch of fringe candidates, and, in most cases, the winners defeated more liberal opponents. Muskie was the establishment’s choice for vice president to Hubert Humphrey in 1968, the establishment’s choice to deliver the party’s 1970 midterm address, and the establishment’s candidate in 1972. Carter entered the 1976 primary as an underdog, but more liberal candidates like Mo Udall, Birch Bayh, and Fred Harris split their constituency in both states (Carter’s early successes prompted an “Anybody but Carter” movement by liberal voters in later primaries). As an embattled incumbent in 1980, Carter thumped Ted Kennedy–the face of liberalism to both supporters and critics–in both states. In 1984, former veep Mondale won in Iowa because Hart cast his lot with New Hampshire–spending more days there than any other candidate–to win its primary. Both 1988 and 1992 were essentially regional votes (Gephardt and Paul Simon took first and second in Iowa in 1988 because they were from neighboring Missouri and Illinois; Dukakis and Tsongas dominated New Hampshire from their homes next-door; in 1992, Harkin was Iowa’s own senator), but neither state launched a candidate into the rest of primary season with an insurmountable lead. In 2000, despite a lower approval rating–and a 20-point-higher disapproval rating–Gore held off the equally funded Bill Bradley, who was more progressive on issues from national health care to gay rights. And, in 2004, Kerry (and centrist John Edwards) outpaced the grassroots favorite, Howard Dean.

It’s also worth noting that the two Democratic nominees most often maligned by party centrists–George McGovern and Dukakis–weren’t the products of Iowa or New Hampshire. McGovern placed second in both contests in 1972 (23 percent of the vote in Iowa, 37 in New Hampshire), trailing Muskie by about 10 points each time. The race was Muskie’s to lose, and he did so only after the Republican-manufactured “Canuck letter” and his emotional public defense of his wife sunk the campaign. That left McGovern and George Wallace in the race, and Democrats quite understandably preferred the antiwar candidate to the segregationist one. (By that point, too, being against the war wasn’t so radical: Nixon was in peace talks and the war’s approval rating nationwide had already fallen to 34 percent.) As for Dukakis, he managed only 22 percent in Iowa; he won New Hampshire in part because it bordered his state, but he didn’t truly secure the nomination until he dominated the first-ever Super Tuesday the next month. Ironically, Super Tuesday had been created by nine Southern states specifically to boost the chances of Southern conservatives against candidates like, well, Michael Dukakis.

What’s more, exit polls indicate that, contrary to critics’ complaints, voters in both states clearly care about how candidates play nationally. In 2004, New Hampshire voters ranked the ability to beat Bush as the second-most important quality for a candidate in a CNN exit poll (behind “Stand Up for Beliefs,” which favored Dean). Kerry took 62 percent in the “Can Beat Bush” category. Iowa–where electability was the second-most important factor again–had a similar result, with Kerry seven points ahead of Edwards on who could best beat Bush. In 2000, an entrance poll in Iowa found Gore winning among voters who cared most about strong leadership, experience, and the ability to win in November–all by larger margins than his overall caucuses victory. Going back to 1984, a New York Times/CBS News poll of Iowa caucus voters found that 69 percent of those who backed the victorious Mondale ranked his ability to beat Reagan as one of the top two reasons for their support.

Of course, it’s obvious from these examples that Iowans and Granite Staters–like any number of experts and pundits–can be blatantly wrong with their predictions of electability. But they still seem to value potential winners more than the ideologically pure. Given that we’re talking about two true swing states (both went for Gerald Ford in 1976, both for Bill Clinton twice, and they split in 1988, 2000, and 2004), voters are as likely there as anywhere to have a sense of what plays to the undecideds. Certainly more than voters in South Carolina, which has voted Democratic just once since 1960.

There are plenty of reasons to tweak the primary system: Iowa and New Hampshire are sorely lacking in racial diversity, and their regional candidates can have a nationwide advantage (of course, that problem could occur in any state whose primary comes early). There’s also a good case that two small states shouldn’t wield such influence over the nomination, but giving four small states such influence isn’t much better. If anything, the new calendar will simply decide the nominee even faster by giving candidates less time to adjust to an early result. And, from an ideological perspective, it’s hard to imagine the new system resulting in candidates more “mainstream” than the safe choices produced by the existing schedule. It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.

Jefferson got the size right. The description? Not so much. The animal he named Megalonyx (giant claw) was actually one of the giant ground sloths that very slowly roamed America during the last ice age. And while Jefferson later agreed with this alternative diagnosis, his error wasn’t a complete waste. The Megalonyx marked one of the first important fossil finds in the United States, and it prompted the first and second scientific papers on fossils published in North America. In honor of the president’s contribution, the sloth’s name was later formalized to Megalonyx jeffersonii.

2. A BONE-HEADED APPROACH

To this day, the Brontosaurus remains one of the most popular and recognizable dinosaurs in history – an impressive feat for an animal that never existed. The confusion started in 1879, when collectors working in Wyoming for paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh found two nearly complete – yet headless – sauropod dinosaur skeletons. Wanting to display them, Marsh fitted one specimen with a skull found nearby, and the other with a skull he found in Colorado. Voila! – the Brontosaurus was born.

Unfortunately for Marsh, the skeletons were later exposed as adult specimens of a dinosaur already discovered, the Apatosaurus. The error was formally corrected in 1903 by Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum, and scientific papers haven’t called the animal Brontosaurus since. Seventy more years passed before researchers determined that the skulls Marsh borrowed really belonged to the Camarasaurus, a discovery of his archrival, Edward Drinker Cope. Pop culture, however, missed the memo altogether.

3. GETTING YOUR HEAD SCREWED ON RIGHT

Paleontology’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, Marsh and Cope had a nasty and long-running professional rivalry. Although they’d actually started out as friends (with each even naming a discovery after the other), by 1870 their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. A year earlier, Cope had assembled a skeleton of the sea reptile called Elasmosaurus. However, in his rush to publish his discovery, he placed the head on the wrong end, giving everyone the impression that the animal had a very long tail instead of a very long neck. Marsh poured ample salt in that wound by making fun of Cope’s error in print (suggesting he rename the animal “twisted lizard”) and constantly ridiculing it at parties and exhibitions. Given the stakes, he might as well have slapped Cope across the face with a glove and insulted his mother. As it was, all Cope could do was try and buy up all the published examples of his posterior-backwards construction.

The feud only grew from there. The two men fought over allegations that, on a tour of Cope’s digging operations in New Jersey, Marsh bribed collectors to send key fossils to him. And in 1877, a part-time collector in Utah incited a whole new string of cutthroat arguing by trying to sell bones from his site to both of them. Other feud highlights included a series of snippy “he said, he said” pieces in the New York Herald and the time the Smithsonian confiscated much of Marsh’s fossil collection after Cope accused him of misusing tax dollars to hoard fossils for himself.

For all the angst it caused them, though, Marsh and Cope’s constant one-upmanship was great for science. During their 20-some years of bickering, the two added 136 new species (including Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus) to the nine that had previously been discovered in North America.

4. PULLING TEETH

Henry Fairfield Osborn was a giant in the field of paleontology, but he also has one giant mistake to his name. In 1922, while serving as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn received a fossil of a tooth found in Nebraska. Suffering from a bout of overconfidence, the normally careful scientist published a paper announcing (based on one tooth, mind you) that he’d discovered Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, the first anthropoid ape unearthed in North America.

Taking into account that all of this was happening just three years before the Scopes Monkey Trial, word of a missing link was a pretty big deal. Add to that British anatomy professor Sir Grafton Elliott Smith touting the discovery as a potential breakthrough, and artist Amedee Forestier drawing a famously speculative picture of the “Nebraska Man” (and Woman) in the widely read Illustrated London News. Although Osborn never hypothesized where (or if) his ape fit into the evolutionary chain, he used the discovery to fuel his war of words with anti-evolution blowhard William Jennings Bryan. Osborn made sure to note the irony of the tooth having come from Bryan’s home state, and even suggested calling the ape Bryopithecus in honor of “the most distinguished primate which the state of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

Unfortunately, in this particular case, said distinguished primate got the last laugh. Upon further examination, it was determined that the tooth belonged to a millennia-old peccary – otherwise known as an ancient pig. In fairness to Osborn, the similarities between human and peccary teeth had already been noted in scientific literature, so it wasn’t that wild a guess. Of course, that didn’t stop creationists from pouncing on the mistake.

5. CREATING A MONSTER

Long before there was a science called paleontology, people were trying to come up with explanations for giant bones found in the ground. And often, those explanations pointed to mythological creatures. Of all the fairy-tale creatures accused of inhabiting the ancient world, the griffin might claim the most direct connection to actual fossils. Usually depicted in folklore as a lion with an eagle’s head and wings, the griffin was said to fiercely guard its gold. The hybrid animal appears consistently in the art of ancient Rome, Greece, and Persia, and its legend apparently originated with Scythian nomads who wandered east toward Mongolia’s Gobi desert.

So how do fossils fit in? The Gobi is filled with the fossils of both the Protoceratops, a lion-size dinosaur with a birdlike beak, and of the similarly beaked Psittacosaurus. And while there were no massive hoards of gold around, the skeletons were often found guarding something arguably more valuable – hoards of eggs. The ancients were wrong about griffins, but that may have had more to do with misdiagnosing evidence than with legend or superstition.

6. TALK ABOUT YOUR STALE FOOD

Herodotus is considered the world’s first historian, but he came this close to also being the world’s first paleontologist. While traveling in Egypt, he noticed that the bricks used to build the pyramids had unusual, circular shapes petrified in them. What he saw were the sediment-preserved remains of ancient single-celled organisms. Of course, what he thought he saw were the remains of lentils eaten by the pyramid builders after a hard day of lugging around 2-ton pieces of stone.

Herodotus was pretty far off, but he redeemed himself later in his book Histories. In it, he noted that he saw shells in Egypt’s mountains, and rather than attribute them to a shellfish feast for pyramid builders, he correctly surmised that the animals lived in a sea that once covered the desert. “The Delta,” he wrote, “is formed of the deposits of the river, and has only recently, if I may use the expression, come to light.” Regardless, by overlooking the importance of the organisms he found, Herodotus unintentionally delayed for centuries the discovery of one of science’s most important fields. He made his observations in the 5th century BCE, and it took until the 1700s for serious thinkers to realize they were looking at extinct animals. We’re just saying, he could have saved us all a lot of time.

7. LADY IN RED

When it comes to the battle between faith and science, it’s hard to be more conflicted than William Buckland. Both an ordained Anglican priest and a top-notch anatomist, Buckland holds the claim to fame for finding the oldest human remains on record – only he didn’t believe that’s what he’d found. As a Biblical literalist, Buckland strongly supported the notion of Noah’s flood. So, when he made a groundbreaking discovery by digging up prehistoric elephant and hyena bones in a Yorkshire cave in 1822, he concluded that they simply belonged to animals that had perished in the flood.

But that wasn’t all. A year later, while excavating a Welsh cave full of prehistoric animal remains, Buckland found a human skeleton deep in the sediment. Stained red by the surrounding iron and wearing ivory beads, the “Red Lady of Paviland” was, according to Buckland, a woman of ill-repute linked to the nearby remains of a Roman camp (as it couldn’t possibly be as old as all the other bones around it). Later research identified it as a 27,000-year-old man, but Buckland was too caught up in his religious devotion to accept the idea of ancient people in his homeland (or that a man would wear such extravagant jewelry).

8. A TENDER SUBJECT

The first time a scientist attributed a fossil to an actual dinosaur was 1677, when museum director Robert Plot identified a bone fragment found in Oxfordshire, England, as part of the thigh bone of a (human) giant. Nearly 100 years later, scientist Richard Brookes gave the unknown species the unfortunate name Scrotum humanum because, well, the fossil did resemble a giant man’s nether regions when positioned a certain way. Naturally, it was (drum roll, please) William Buckland who found other pieces of the dinosaur nearby and gave the specimen the more suitable name Megalosaurus. Don’t worry, though. Buckland didn’t abandon his flood theory; he just figured this was a really big lizard that had drowned. He did, however, make the fossil the subject of the first-ever formal scientific paper on dinosaur remains.

9. IGUANA FIX THIS

After its discovery in 1822, the Iguanodon became one of the first dinosaurs to achieve celebrity status. Depending on whom you believe, the massive plant-eater’s tooth was found by either Dr. Gideon Mantell or his wife. Regardless, Gideon was the one who realized the fossil came from an extinct category of reptile much larger than any still around.

Thanks to Mantell’s obsessive drive to find more bones, Iguanodon turned into a bit of a sensation, helped along by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who made life-size models of Mantell’s animal. Most famously, at an 1853 dinner at London’s Crystal Palace, 21 prominent scholars dined inside Hawkin’s scale model of an Iguanodon.

These sculptures were true to Mantell’s description of the animal. Unfortunately, that vision was terribly, terribly wrong. Among the mistakes? The animal walked on all fours (it turned out to be a biped) and had a horn on its nose (the hornlike bone was actually a spiked thumb). The Iguanadon has since undergone a massive makeover, as did Mantell. After his wife left him, he moved to London and became a full-time paleontologist. In 1838, he sold his fossil collection for the then-massive sum of 4,000 pounds (about $20,000).

10. FOR THE BIRDS

There’ve been plenty of hoaxes in paleontology, from Piltdown man to the Cardiff Giant. Yet what makes the story of the Archaeopteryx so painful is that it wasn’t a fake at all. The animal’s crime? Sharing features with both birds and dinosaurs, and being discovered around the time that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was stirring up so much trouble.

The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found in 1860, and it was nothing more than an impression of a feather. Though initially skeptical, German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer verified that it was an ancient feather – but maybe not from a bird. So, a month later, when the same limestone quarry yielded a headless reptilian skeleton with the imprints of attached feathers, von Meyer looked pretty smart. While a number of key scientists needed to see it for themselves before believing the thing was real, other anti-Darwin paleontologists (most notably Andreas Wagner of Germany and Sir Richard Owen of Great Britain) jumped at the chance to dismiss the animal as a full-on reptile rather than a step on the evolutionary path to birds. But they were wrong. Later, when the clear reptile-bird link became indisputable, anti-evolutionists went from nitpicking the classification to calling the whole thing a hoax. As recently as 1990, physicist Lee Spetner famously (and falsely) claimed that the feathers were added to a reptile fossil by making impressions in cement and adding it to the mix. Despite efforts to smear their good name, six Archaeopteryx skeletons have now been found, all with the same bird-reptile blend.

In 1922, a geologist and paleontologist from Danville named William Gurley commemorated his late mother with a major gift to the Art Institute of Chicago—about 4,000 drawings from his private collection; Gurley, the director of the Illinois State Museum, a natural history museum in Springfield, loved European art but could afford only prints when he began collecting. When he died, in 1943, his wife gave the rest of his stash, some 2,000 more pieces, to the museum, which found it difficult to assess immediately due to its sheer volume. It wasn’t until the 1980s that curators began thoroughly cataloging the donations—and found a rare sketch by Raphael (see number 5 on the following page), one of only a few works by the Renaissance genius then known to exist in the United States.

Just as that masterwork was buried among the Art Institute’s possessions, the Prints and Drawings collection, tucked away on the first floor of the main building, is a hidden gem with about 60,000 prints and another 11,500 drawings. Only a small sample is ever on display at one time in the museum’s general galleries; the rest of the works reside in the collection, where they are available for anyone to view in the Goldman Study Center by appointment. (The collection is open to the public from 1:30 to 4:15 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Make a reservation in advance by calling 312-443-3660; the collection allows only four appointments per day, and visitors must be 18 or older.)

The Art Institute ranks with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as having the most diverse prints-and-drawings collections outside of Europe, where the top museums—notably the Louvre, the Prado, and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—own most of the world’s best examples of the arts. Albrecht Dürer was one of the first great printmakers, and the Art Institute has a set of his master prints. Produced in 1513 and 1514, three remarkably detailed prints—Knight, Death, and the Devil; St. Jerome in His Study; and Melencolia I—are considered the peak of the German artist’s work. The collection also comprises a wide range of works by Rembrandt, including his late religious prints such as The Supper at Emmaus; The Descent from the Cross; The Entombment; and Presentation at the Temple. Francisco Goya, the prolific Spanish painter and printmaker, narrowly avoided the Inquisition after making Los Caprichos, a set of 80 engravings, many of which bitterly mocked the church and the monarchy, and satirized the foibles of Spanish society. The Art Institute has a rare set of etchings that predates the first printed edition.

Requesting works to view can be intimidating—after all, where does one start? But curator Suzanne McCullagh recommends that novices relax and take an exploratory approach. “If you don’t have any sense of what you want to see, grab a great name and ask for it—you’ll find that usually we have it,” she says, adding that you can also narrow the field by subject matter or zero in on a particular medium (such as pastel, ink, or charcoal). When asked to pick her favorites, McCullagh chose eight pieces by some of art history’s most impressive names, spanning nearly six centuries.

EIGHT GREAT WORKS

1. PABLO PICASSO
Minotauromachia (1935)
One of just two works from the 20th century that McCullagh included among her selections, this etching by Picasso is the best and most widely known of his many Minotaur studies. This impression is the final proof before the published version.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “This is one of the most ambitious in scale of all his Minotaur studies. By this version, [the composition] looks almost as it will in the final, with great details like the girl’s candle illuminating the scene.”

2. ALBRECHT DÜRER
Young Steer (ca. 1493)
Dürer, the famous German painter and mathematician, was among the first to elevate woodblock printing as a tool for creating art. This small ink sketch is noteworthy for how realistically he drew the emaciated bull, at a time when such detail was still unusual.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “The anatomy is very exact, and you worry about this animal. He really uses line to suggest the ribs, and the bones are visible through the skin.”

3. JACKSON POLLOCK
Untitled (1944)
Possessing the haphazard look of a Pollock painting, this drawing is actually rendered in ink—green, black, and bright purple—to achieve a calligraphic quality.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “It’s most unusual for its coherence and its extraordinary use of color.”

4. PISANELLO
Sketches of the Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, a Monk, and a Scabbard (1438)
This pen-and-brown-ink work came from a sketchbook, most of which now sits in the Louvre. A closer look also reveals a distinctive bull’s-head watermark that helped date the work.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “Pisanello drew this for a visit by the emperor. . . . Because [the emperor] was short, he was often depicted on his horse.”

5. RAPHAEL
Upraised Right Hand with Palm Facing Outward (1518-20)
Probably a study for a portrait of Saint Peter found in the Vatican, this chalk drawing of a hand is on a short list of Raphael’s last known drawings before his death in 1520 on his 37th birthday.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “This is characteristic of his late drawing style—–very subtle, very structural.”

6. EDGAR DEGAS
Café Concert (The Spectators) (1876-77)
Degas depicts the scene of a crowded concert in brightly colored pastels. The complicated tableau includes details like the man in the center about to spill his beer and a singer visibly warm from the stage lighting.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “This piece just came in this summer and it’s a really fine example of Degas’s use of color.”

7. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN
The Three Crosses (1660-61)
Rembrandt’s Crucifixion scene went through five versions. In the final, the artist covers some of the figures on the sides with an etching technique called dry point, obscuring them and creating a sense of chaos.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “There’s a lot of detail in this print. If you look at the figure on horseback in front of the cross, it’s clearly inspired by a medallion Pisanello rendered based on the horse-and-rider figure in his drawing [see number 4].”

8. JEAN ANTOINE WATTEAU
The Old Savoyard (ca.1715)
Watteau was a French painter known for a light-hearted style that helped inspire the Rococo movement. The Art Institute has several of his drawings, including this example, a dignified chalk portrait of a Savoy street performer lugging his marmot box.
McCULLAGH SAYS: “You feel the elevation of this individual despite his anonymity.”

FREE FOR ALL
Get in free to the Art Institute during the month of February and year-round on Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. During the summer through Labor Day, the museum stays open an hour later, and Friday evenings are also free. 111 S. Michigan Ave.; 312-443-3600, www.artic.edu

Gibraltar

You’ve heard all about Palestine and Tibet, Quebec and Chechnya. But those aren’t the only places that want to be sovereign. Here are 10 more would-be countries looking forward to paying U.N. dues.

1. SAVING UP FOR INDEPENDENCE: Greenland

Like a recent college graduate, Greenland wants to be on its own but just can’t afford it yet. Denmark took control of the ice-capped landmass in 1721 and has been gently nudging it out the door for decades. In 1953, the Danes upgraded Greenland from a colony to an overseas county and gave it representation in parliament. And in 1979, they backed off even further, handling little more than Greenland’s foreign policy and defense. Yet, Denmark still pays about half of Greenland’s domestic budget, at a cost of about $650 million annually. Polls in Denmark show that the majority of the population supports the idea of letting Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants vote for independence. In other words, Greenland can be free if it wants.

Strangely, global warming may give Greenland the financial boost it needs to leave Denmark. As Arctic ice melts, the island’s natural resources will become more accessible. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Greenland’s northeast coast alone could produce more than 30 billion barrels of oil, and a few major oil companies have already bought permits to explore the land. The mining of gold, zinc, and other minerals is on the rise, too. Last year, aluminum giant Alcoa announced its intention to build the world’s second-biggest smelter there. Plus, Greenland is investigating how to use the melting ice to expand its hydroelectric power industry. If it all adds up, Greenland may be moving away from the motherland sooner than it thought.

2. COLD FEET: Alaska

For decades, a well-organized separatist movement has campaigned to turn America’s largest state into its own nation. The bitterness dates back to 1958, when Alaska’s citizens were given a simple yes-or-no vote on statehood. Many Alaskans felt they were denied more options on the issue, prompting a land developer named Joe Volger to organize a re-vote that would offer Alaskans four possibilities – remain a territory, become a state, take commonwealth status, or become a separate nation.

Using the vote as his platform, Volger ran for governor in 1974 – and soon made a habit of it. With colorful slogans such as, “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions,” Volger spearheaded the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), and his campaign twice topped 5 percent of the vote. More surprisingly, former U.S. interior secretary Wally Hickel got elected governor on the AIP ticket in 1990. Unfortunately for the party, Hickel only ran on the ticket because he lost the Republican primary. Never a supporter of the plebiscite idea, Hickel left the AIP and rejoined the Republicans in 1994.

Today the AIP continues to draw about 4 percent of voters statewide. And in 2006, the AIP took part in the first-ever North American Secessionist Convention, joining other groups from Vermont, Hawaii, and the South. As for Vogler, he was murdered in 1993 – reportedly the result of an argument over a business deal. On a brighter note, honoring his wish to never be buried in U.S. soil, Volger was laid to rest in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

3. WHEAT POWER: Australia’s Hutt River Province

For an island-continent, Australia has had a hard time keeping its people together. The Northern Territory never opted for official statehood, and the state of Western Australia tried to secede in the 1930s. In fact, a slice of Western Australia is still trying to go it alone.

The area belongs to a wheat farmer named Leonard Casley, who claims his farm is its own nation. In the 1960s, Casley disagreed with Australia’s policy on wheat-production quotas, and his legitimate complaint soon dissolved into madness. On April 21, 1970, Casley declared his 29-square-mile wheat farm an “independent sovereign state” and named it the Hutt River Province.

Since declaring independence, Casley has dubbed himself Prince Leonard of Hutt and his wife Princess Shirley. Stranger still, he prints his own stamps and periodically publishes an online newspaper, called The Hutt River Independent, filled with “national” news. He even gives out visas and stamps passports.

Unfortunately for Casley, the Australian government hasn’t taken his secession seriously. In 1997, he became so offended by Australia’s dismissive position that he declared war on the motherland. To date, Casley has successfully defended his territory – mainly because the enemy has never bothered to invade.

4. ONE MAN IS AN ISLAND: Sealand

If the existence of Sealand proves anything, it’s that one country’s trash can be another man’s treasure. After World War II, Great Britain abandoned a series of military bases off its eastern coast. Seeing potential in one of the empty forts, former Major Roy Bates decided to claim it for his family. Then in 1966, he dubbed the island Sealand and declared independence. The following year, he fired warning shots at British naval vessels that dared to breach his waters.

When the British government brought Bates to court following the incident, they found they couldn’t arrest him. Sealand was in international waters, just far enough off the coast to fall outside of British jurisdiction, so the island effectively got its sovereignty. But that was hardly the last time Bates had to fight for Sealand. In 1978, while Bates was abroad in Britain, a group of Dutch businessmen came to the island to supposedly discuss a deal. Instead, they kidnapped Bates’ son and captured the fort. Naturally, Bates returned with a small army, fought the invaders, imprisoned them, and negotiated their release with their home country.

5. BUYER’S REMORSE: Somaliland

Depending whom you ask, Somaliland has been independent since 1991. The United Nations and African Union, however, have refused to recognize the largely stable and self-governing region because they still consider it part of chaotic Somalia. So, why the confusion?

The situation dates back to 1960, when the colonies of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland became independent and then joined forces to form the Republic of Somalia. But buyer’s remorse set in rather quickly for the British region, as the Italian portion assumed most of the power. In a few short years, Somalia saw a presidential assassination, a military coup, and a civil war. By 1991, the situation had become so desperate that Somalia’s central Mogadishu government finally collapsed. In the ensuing chaos, a group of human rights activists called the Somali National Movement took control of the formerly British portion and declared independence as Somaliland. Since then, the region has governed itself through a series of democratic elections, while the rest of Somalia has been in constant upheaval.

After 17 years of pseudo-independence, there is hope for recognition. Organizations such as the International Crisis Group have urged the African Union to give Somaliland sovereignty and, in 2007, one Rwandan official even seemed open to the idea. Perhaps the fact that Somaliland doesn’t need to worry about disturbances from the rest of Somalia bolsters its case. The current president, Abdullahi Yusuf, says that he won’t bother Somaliland until he “successfully restores peace and security to Somalia.” Unfortunately, that could take a while.

6. BETWEEN A ROCK AND HARD PLACE: Gibraltar

Great Britain acquired Gibraltar from Spain in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and Spain has been trying to get it back ever since.

The truth is, Britain would love to grant independence to the 2.5-square-mile territory, but there’s a catch. According to the treaty, Spain gets the territory should Britain ever relinquish it. And the people of Gibraltar don’t want that. In 1967, Gibraltar’s citizens voted on which country they’d rather belong to. With a 96 percent voter turn-out, they favored Britain over Spain 12,138 to 44. Of course, Spain didn’t take kindly to the decision and closed its border with Gibraltar, cutting it off from Europe by land for 16 years.

More recently, talks between Spain, Britain and Gibraltar produced a 2006 agreement in which Spain agreed to ease its customs process and restrictions on air traffic. And in 2007, a new constitution gave Gibraltar greater autonomy under the crown, setting aside the Utrecht fight for another day.

7. NOT-SO SYRUPY SWEET: Vermont

Alaska isn’t the only state that yearns to break away. In Vermont, a group called The Second Vermont Republic wants the state to return to independence. After all, Vermont was a republic from 1777 to 1791, when it became the 14th state in the nation.

The guiding principles of The Second Vermont Republic are generally progressive, with a focus on equality, green energy, sustainable agriculture, and strong local government. While most people in Vermont endorse these values, secession has been a tough sell. Still, the state independence movement is gaining ground, and one poll estimates that 13 percent of the populace supports the idea. Of course, the state’s disenchantment with current American politics may have something to do with those high numbers. In March 2008, two Vermont towns voted to arrest President Bush and Vice President Cheney should they ever show their faces there.

8. CHILE CONDITIONS: Easter Island

Positioned about halfway between Tahiti and Chile, Easter Island is the most geographically isolated spot on Earth. Yet, its motherland of Chile has still managed to erode the island’s native Polynesian culture from 2,300 miles away.

In 1888, Chile annexed the island that Polynesians call Rapa Nui. Before long, the Chilean government had turned most of the land over to sheep herders and relocated many of the Rapanui people to the western edge of the island. Then, under the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the native Polynesian language was banned until 1987. The results were effective. Today, more than one-third of the island’s people are transplants from Chile, and most schools and media outlets use Spanish.

Fed up with the bullying, native Alfonso Rapu led an armed rebellion in 1965 to force Chile to return some of the land to the Rapanui. Fearing international attention, Chile relented, and Easter Island was allowed its own democratic elections. Rapu’s brother Sergio became the first indigenous governor in 1984 and helped restore native culture, including the moai (the giant stone statues the island is famous for). Today, a Rapa Nui Parliament on the island pushes for decolonization and bilingual education. But with Chile still ruling supreme from two time zones away, that independence may take a while.

9. THE COUNTRY WITHIN A COUNTRY WITHIN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION: Abkhazia

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the republic of Georgia laid claim to the region of Abkhazia, located on the Black Sea. The Abkhaz population, however, wanted autonomy. The conflict escalated into a gruesome war in the early 1990s that drove ethnic Georgians out of Abkhazia. For the first time in decades, the Abkhaz became a majority in their own land, and ever since, it’s been a self-governing region within Georgia.

The matter is complicated by the fact that Russia supports independence for the region and has even sent peacekeeping forces to the area. But the Russians are trying to meddle with Abkhaz affairs, too. In 2004, Russia backed a former KGB agent for president of Abkhazia, but he lost the election. For now, Abkhazia continues to rule itself as it pushes for international recognition.

10. THE SLOW STROLL TOWARD INDEPENDENCE: Aruba

Considering Aruba’s laid-back image, it’s fitting that the island’s march toward independence has been more of a stroll.

Aruba is in the Lesser Antilles island group off the northern coast of Venezuela. The Netherlands control other nearby islands, but the Dutch largely leave them alone. While Aruba hasn’t had problems with the Netherlands, it’s had embittered relations with many of the other islands – particularly with Curacao, one of the more populous and more powerful islands in the chain. In the 1940s, Aruba began to distinguish itself from the rest of the Netherlands Antilles. By 1976, it had a new flag and a new national anthem. The following year, more than 80 percent of Arubans voted in favor of independence, which the Netherlands granted to them in 1986. The catch? Aruba would be cut off from Dutch funding within 10 years.

As planned, the Aruba Island Council passed laws allowing for secession, with full independence to follow a decade later. But as the deadline approached, the island’s economic reality and lack of natural resources quickly dawned on Aruban leadership. Sheepishly, Aruba asked the Netherlands to postpone independence. For now, the island continues to hold the same complicated status it adopted in 1986.

Terry Jones

Terry Jones made his name as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, writing and performing some of the most innovative and absurd comedy ever seen on TV.

Beginning in 2001, Jones — who has also written scholarly books about Chaucer and children’s books — has turned his pen on George Bush and his “war on terror”. His new book, Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror, compiles a series of wickedly satirical columns Jones published in Britain’s The Observer, The Guardian and The Independent during the past three years.

In one column, he takes pointers from Donald Rumsfeld’s approach to information extraction (“The thing is if people don’t say where they’re going after choir practice, this country is at risk. So I have been applying a certain amount of pressure on my son to tell me where he’s going. To begin with I simply put a bag over his head and chained him to a radiator…”)

Another column finds him losing patience with two neighbors he’s convinced are plotting something terrible against him. Because the police require evidence to act, Jones invokes Bush’s doctrine of preemption, “since I’m the only one on the street with a decent range of automatic firearms.” In others, he congratulates American forces for their success in making Osama bin Laden “look haggard,” questions whether a leprechaun or a fairy godmother feeds Tony Blair his strategy, and laments that a “war on an abstract noun” is unwinnable.

Jones recently spoke with MotherJones.com from his home in London.

MotherJones.com: How did you come to write these columns?

Terry Jones: I think it was rage. It was just blind rage (laughs). This was after 9/11, and I just couldn’t believe what our great leaders were doing. It seemed like every action they took was designed to have exactly the opposite effect of what they said they were going to do.

Like Bush, after 9/11, says the right thing: “We’re going to catch the evil perpetrators of this evil deed.” But if you’re going to catch the perpetrators of an evil deed, what you need is secrecy and speed to nab them red-handed. What you don’t do is say when you’re going to look for them — “we’re going to look in two months’ time.” Or where you’re going to look — “we’ll look in Afghanistan.” Or what you’re going to do — “we’re going to bomb you.” I mean, by that time, all the evil perpetrators would leave the country, I would’ve thought. Now, as a result, they haven’t caught the evil perpetrators, and the whole thing’s a joke.

Instead of treating it as a crime — which is what they should have done, getting the FBI and Interpol and everybody onto it — they’ve elevated it into a war. So they’ve elevated the status of the evil perpetrators like Osama bin Laden. He’s put up as of an equal footing with the United States itself. They’ve increased his prestige and reputation to no end, the perfect way of recruiting more people to his agenda.

MJ.com: It seems like the so-called “war on terror” has gotten many people, including yourself, much more politically active. Why is this happening now, as opposed to, say, during the Reagan-Thatcher years?

TJ: That’s a very good point — we should’ve been as outraged by that as well. I suppose it’s really the sheer effrontery of what’s going on now. Also, I think people feel more pulled into it because of 9/11. I think, for myself, it was when you saw Blair going along with Bush’s agenda in invading Iraq. You saw two million people taking the streets of London to protest against this and say “don’t do it,” and Blair just goes ahead. He prepares this dodgy dossier, which is full of manipulated intelligence in order to persuade people that it’s a reasonable thing to invade Iraq. And yet by doing that action, instead of making us safer from terror attacks, he’s actually putting us on the front line. So I think we feel exposed and we feel vulnerable because of these actions that our leaders are taking with total disregard for the safety of their own people.

Blair, in particular, angers me because at least I can see Bush’s agenda. It’s stated by the Project for the New American Century, in their report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” which was published in September 2000. They state their agenda quite clearly, and they say that removing the regime of Saddam Hussein is secondary to the importance of establishing an American force presence in the Middle East. They actually state this as their intention before Bush gets into power, so we can see that’s the neocons’ agenda. But for Blair, what does Blair get out of it? It’s just mind-blowing that he puts his entire country on the line for terrorist attacks for no good reason. It’s gobsmacking (laughs).

MJ.com: Any idea what Blair does get out of going along?

TJ: Well, I suppose he gets a nice pat on the back from George Bush, and a red carpet when he goes there. And he probably gets a very nice Christmas card. But he doesn’t get much else.

MJ.com: One subject you address in your columns is the intimidation, in America, of anyone who criticized the government after 9/11. Did you see that same kind of thing in Britain?

TJ: No, it wasn’t the same here. I think it was because we weren’t so intimately involved in 9/11. And although the government went through and passed equally draconian laws and downsized civil liberties to no end, the same level of patriotism wasn’t called into play because it wasn’t us who’d been attacked. I’m sure that if the House of Parliament were blown up, or something like that, probably the same thing would’ve happened here.

MJ.com: How, then, were your columns received?

TJ: Generally, they got great reactions from people. There was one of them, the one about the neighbors, that went around a lot on the Internet — I’ve been sent it several times by friends. (laughs) Oddly enough, I did give up at one point, because I’d originally been writing them for The Observer and then The Observer went pro the invasion of Iraq. And I started finding with my columns that they’d say, “Great column. We love it.” And then suddenly, “Oh sorry, it’s been bumped because Princess Diana’s butler’s given us something.” (laughs) So I kept finding my pieces bumped at the last minute, and I sort of slightly gave up at that point. Then I got so exasperated again that I made contact with The Guardian — with Seamus Milne, who’s the commentary editor there — and he’s been publishing me ever since.

MJ.com: It seems like comedy writers who discuss the war often lose a lot of their humor, while your columns are still very satirical and focus on the absurdity of all this.

TJ: It’s quite often that I start something and can’t see the funny side of it, so I don’t write it. (laughs) Sometimes there isn’t much of a funny side, but generally I feel that my only qualification for making comments on these affairs and what’s going on is if I can infuse a bit of humor into it. Otherwise, I mean, what do I know? I don’t know anything more than anybody else. It’s just some of this stuff is so blindingly obvious that I feel like someone should just be saying it.

For me, the actual issues are so simple when you get rid of all that blather that they speak. I think one of the problems is that the politicians just keep going on and on and on with the same things and, unfortunately, the press eventually gives up. And voices of protest are sort of one-off, while the politicians keep going on reiterating the same things. Just little things like the actual vocabulary they use. For example, in Iraq it’s always “the national security guard” being blown up by “insurgents.” Now, if we were in wartime France, we’d be talking about the “brave resistance fighters” blowing up the “collaborators.” It’s all in what you choose to call people, because the press accepts the nomenclature that the government imposes.

MJ.com: The Bush administration has been particularly good at, as you call it, “making grammar the first casualty of the war.”

TJ: It’s so embedded now, isn’t it? Things down to the election in Iraq, the “democratic elections” in which it’s a secret where you go to poll; it’s a secret whom you’re going to vote for, who most of the candidates are; and a secret who’s going to vote because they don’t dare say who they are. I mean, what kind of a democracy is that? It’s just so ludicrous you can’t believe it.

MJ.com: In the introduction to your book, you note that the columns are published as they first appeared, “with ignorance of what would happen next.” How troubling is it to you that many of your predictions were more prescient than those from the American and British governments?

TJ: (laughs) It’s absolutely baffling, isn’t it? Because it’s really just common sense. I think for the two million people in London who protested Blair taking us into an invasion of Iraq, they knew it was a stupid thing to do and they’ve been proved right. And yet, you look at Tony Blair and he’s still saying exactly the same stuff, “It’s the right thing to do. We got rid of Saddam Hussein, that’s what we meant to do.” But even that, the whole thing about Saddam Hussein being a threat to our nation. Weapons of mass destruction. What would he have done with them? Was he going to bomb England? I mean, if he bombed England or if he’d bombed America, Iraq would’ve been wiped off the face of the earth. Why should he want to do that?

MJ.com: One of your columns draws parallels between the conduct of the “war on terror” and the way the British government handled the IRA in its heyday. How would Tony Blair have reacted to that threat?

TJ: In the 1980s and ’90s, we were living with bombs going off in London. Nothing so dramatic as 9/11, of course, but we were certainly living under the threat of bombs. And if the British government had reacted the same way then, they would have said, “We’ll declare war on all terrorists and we’ll go bomb the places where they come from.” So we’d bomb Dublin or places like Philadelphia or Boston. It’s ludicrous to think you can deal with terrorism by dropping bombs. Terrorists don’t go around in camps, they’re often cells living behind knit curtains in very respectable places.

MJ.com: In another piece, you critique George Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address through the lens of a Hollywood script reader. What would you say about his inaugural address?

TJ: I did actually start doing one on his latest inaugural address, because what amazes me about it is he’s basically just declared war on the rest of the world. But nobody seemed to really notice. He said it in a very nice way, so maybe they missed what he was talking about. Basically, he said that America can take out any government it doesn’t like and do whatever it likes. It’s stunning. It’s people’s reaction to it that’s been extraordinary to me, that nobody’s taken notice of what he’s actually saying.

MJ.com: Were you surprised to see him re-elected?

TJ: I kind of assumed that he’d get in again. I thought, well, if a friend of his has made all these voting machines that they’re going to use, and has sworn that he will do everything he possibly can to get Bush re-elected, I don’t see how he can’t get re-elected. (laughs) I hear from friends in the States that they genuinely thought Kerry had a chance, and that the exit polls were saying one thing but the final result was totally different. But from here, I just assumed Bush would get it in again; I just thought they wouldn’t do it as obviously as they did last time.

MJ.com: What about Blair’s future? Do you reckon he’ll still be around?

TJ: Fortunately, Blair’s at a point where it seems nobody trusts him, but I suspect he’ll get in again. Really, it’s just because there’s no alternative. We’ve really got into a one-party state here in Britain. There’s no real democracy because there’s no debate. There’s a certain amount of debate in the columns of the newspaper, but not in Parliament. Talking about how everybody could be so wrong, the only person who resigned from the government when Blair declared he’d invade Iraq was [foreign secretary] Robin Cook. How come? How come only he and very few other MPs spoke out against it? There’s no diversity of opinion in the places where it counts.

MJ.com: Your other most recent book, Was Chaucer Murdered? just came out in the U.S. for the first time. As someone who’s studied him extensively, what do you think Geoffrey Chaucer would make of all this?

TJ: I think it would be familiar to him. (laughs) Part of my book talks about the usurpation of Henry IV, when he usurped and murdered Richard II. Henry IV comes in with the help of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel — a very powerful man who was sort of the Kissinger of his day. Henry’s unpopular, he’s a traitor, a disgrace to man by his actions, and Arundel’s also not at all popular. So what they do is declare war on heresy. They find a common enemy, and heresy suits Arundel because he can define “heresy” any way he likes. And basically, under the banner of declaring a war on heresy, he can just pick up all his enemies, all the people he doesn’t like and anyone who opposes the regime. And they equate heresy with being against the regime, so it’s perfect cover. Chaucer wasn’t a politician, but he was a diplomat who went on various diplomatic jaunts for Richard II. So I think he’d be very familiar with everything going on now.

MJ.com: So the idea of declaring war on an abstract noun is really something of a tradition?

TJ: (laughs) You could say there’s a bit of a background. It goes back at least to the 14th century and probably further, and we’re seeing it again today.