x - 31 Louis Sheehan

After more than 200 foreigners were kidnapped in the Delta in 2007, foreign oil companies pulled out their nonessential employees and increased security rather than rely on the undermanned Nigerian Navy. With foreign vessels no longer an easy target, pirates have been forced to look elsewhere for their victims.

They found them in the defenseless fishing trawlers that chug up and down the coastlines, never far enough from shore to be out of reach of the pirates’ gun-mounted speedboats.

The surge in deadly attacks on fishing crews caused the Nigerian Trawler Owners Association to call the fleets of its members, nearly 200 vessels, back to shore in February. That meant a work stoppage for an estimated 20,000 workers and the drying up of the bulk of the local fish market.

Although the domestic fish market accounts for just 20 percent of all the fish consumed in Nigeria, that percentage has steadily decreased over the past five years as a result of the rise in violence offshore, according to a 2007 study by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Comfort Ajayi, 50, a fish seller, works in a market in Lagos amid rows of empty tables. “These tables are usually completely full,” she said. “We’re only selling imported fish now. No local. It’s affecting us very much.”

After weeks of protests and negotiations, the Nigerian Navy assured fishing companies that their fleets would be protected. Boat owners warily sent their trawlers back out to sea. “There is no way that they can say security anywhere is 100 percent,” said Rear Adm. Ishaya Ibrahim. But he said the navy was doing its best to protect the fishermen. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us

“We beefed up the security accordingly to guarantee them free and peaceful fishing activities,” Admiral Ibrahim added.

But just days after the admiral’s promise, three trawlers were attacked.

The bulky fishing trawlers are no match for the speedboats and weapons that the pirates use. The pirates who attacked the Mareena took radar and sonar equipment, radios, cellphones, the crew’s money and mattresses and even their shoes and socks.

“How can we send them back out to sea when we can’t guarantee their safety?” said Paul Kirubakaran, manager of Seabless, one of the larger fishing companies operating in Nigeria.

Now many fishermen are wondering if it is worth going back out to sea. “I’m scared,” said Godwin, 34, a fisherman who gave only his first name. “I can’t sail, I’m afraid.”

“They are killing us,” he said. “I’ve been sailing 15 years and the pirate thing got worse last year. Before if they came, if you gave them fish or money, they will leave you. Now they’ll kill you. Before you go on a fishing vessel you have to think twice.”

Recently, another trawler was attacked in the Delta. Pirates fired at the boat and then robbed it. No casualties were reported.

Shamil U. Odamanov used to call his parents almost daily from Moscow, where he worked as a laborer after moving from his village in Russia’s North Caucasus region in search of a better job. Then, just over a year ago, the phone calls stopped.

Now, to the family’s horror, they think they know why. They have identified Mr. Odamanov, 24, as the man beheaded in a video of a double killing apparently carried out by members of a Russian neo-Nazi group last year.

“It’s not only that he’s similar, it is him, period,” Umakhan Odamanov, Mr. Odamanov’s father, said by telephone from his home in Dagestan, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus. The Odamanovs, who have lived in Dagestan for generations, are Kumyks, a tiny ethnic group native to the region. Investigators have said that Shamil Odamanov is probably one of the two victims in the video, dark-skinned men who appear kneeling below a Nazi flag before they are killed.

Though initially considered a fake, the video, which originally appeared on Russian ultra-nationalist Web sites in August, spread quickly across the Internet and was shown in edited versions on national television. It shoved the problem of violence against ethnic minorities into the foreground of national discourse, if only for a short time.

The police are investigating several individuals, some from nationalist groups, in connection with the killings, but no suspects have officially been identified, Vladimir I. Markin, the spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said in an interview.

In February, a court found Viktor Milkov, a student from Adygei, in southern Russia, guilty of helping to circulate the video and sentenced him to a year in prison. He claims an unknown person e-mailed the video to him.

The police have not yet found the victims’ bodies, Mr. Markin said, nor have they identified where the murders took place.

Attacks against ethnic minorities in Russia have steadily increased over the last several years, as more and more immigrants from abroad or from Russia’s poorer ethnic enclaves have moved into large urban centers in search of work.

Mr. Odamanov was among them. He left his home village of Sultanyangiyurt in Dagestan about two years ago and moved to Moscow to look for a job “and possibly a bride,” his father said.

In his regular calls home, he frequently complained about run-ins with skinheads, who sometimes stalk the low-income residential areas around Moscow, harassing dark-skinned people.

In late March 2007 Mr. Odamanov called “to wish me a happy birthday,” his father said. “That was the last time I heard from him.”

The next time he saw his son was in the video. He was tied, kneeling next to another man and wearing the black Adidas jacket and shirt given to him by his brother, Artur, Mr. Odamanov said.

Set against a soundtrack of heavy metal music, the video opens with the title “Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan.” There are initially shots of the countryside that investigators now believe is somewhere in the Kaluzhkaya region, about 120 miles southwest of Moscow.

“We were arrested by National-Socialists,” the two bound men mumble through their gags. Louis J. Sheehan

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In the next scene, one of the captors, in camouflage and wearing heavy black gloves, yells, “Glory to Russia!” then plunges what looks like a large knife into the neck of the man thought to be Mr. Odamanov. He is decapitated in seconds.

Then the second man, whom the police have not identified, is shot in the head and crumples face first into a shallow grave. In the final scene, two men in camouflage, wearing black masks, give Nazi salutes.

There were about 600 violent racist attacks, including 80 murders, reported in Russia in 2007, according to the Sova center, an organization that monitors hate crimes in Russia. The number of attacks this year reached 232 as of June 1, 57 of which were murders.

Human rights groups have often accused officials of ignoring the problem of racist violence in Russia, though, in Moscow at least, a recent spike in murders of dark-skinned people has prompted a noticeable response among law enforcement agencies.

“Moscow prosecutors have definitely started to more actively engage this problem, beginning from last year,” said Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director of the Sova center.

The Interior Ministry announced last week that the police had arrested more than 50 people this year who were thought to be involved in xenophobic attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the cities with the highest levels of racist violence.

Still, the number of attacks nationwide continues to grow steadily by about 15 to 20 percent each year, as it has for about the last five years, Mr. Verkhovsky said. Moreover, he said, the percentage of murders is growing as teenagers involved in violent nationalist groups grow into adults.

“They simply take their affairs more seriously,” he said.

Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries.

“This loss of top predators could hold serious implications for the entire marine ecosystem, greatly affecting food webs throughout this region,” said the lead author of the study, Francesco Ferretti, a doctoral student in marine biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

Particularly troubling, the researchers said, were patterns indicating a lack of females of breeding age, which are essential if populations are to recover even with new conservation measures.

“Because sharks are long-lived and slow to mature, they need fully grown females to keep their populations reproductively healthy,” said Heike K. Lotze, a study author who is at Dalhousie.

The study is scheduled for publication in the journal Conservation Biology and was posted on Wednesday at lenfestocean.org by the Lenfest Ocean Program, a private group in Washington that paid for the research.

The study focused on five species for which there were sufficient records to chart a long-term trend — hammerhead, blue and thresher sharks and two types of mackerel sharks. The Mediterranean is home to some 47 shark species, and similar declines are presumed to have occurred in many of them.

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Populations have declined worldwide, but experts say the Mediterranean — bordered by many countries with diverse rules and fished intensively for centuries — has had bigger losses of sharks and other large predatory fish, including tuna.

The region’s long-term decline was revealed by sifting decades of catch records and other scattered sources of data, which showed that over time the Mediterranean ecosystem had been utterly transformed. With top-tier predators removed, the populations of other fish and invertebrates have shifted drastically.

In November, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that more than 40 percent of shark and ray species in the Mediterranean were threatened with extinction because of intense fishing pressure.

Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the “innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe,” he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well. On a single day, Thursday, May 15th, the Times contained the following. The lead article was about the earthquake in China, now estimated to have killed more than fifty thousand people. It was titled “Tiny Bodies in a Morgue, and Unspeakable Grief in China,” and was accompanied by a photograph of two parents sitting next to their dead child. A story about the recent cyclone in Myanmar estimated the number of deaths at anywhere between 68,833 and 127,990. The journalist mentioned a man named Zaw Ayea, twenty-seven, who found his sister’s body; his mother and two younger brothers are missing. He cannot speak: “He stares straight ahead with a strangely placid expression on his face. His friends say he has been in shock since the cyclone.”

And the minor stories, on this day? At least ten people killed in a bomb attack west of Baghdad, in Abu Ghraib; a policeman killed in a bomb attack in northern Spain (probably ETA terrorists); a possible missile strike on a Pakistani border village that killed about a dozen people (this may well have been the work of an American drone); and a piece about a radical Islamic cleric, resident in Italy but “transferred,” perhaps thanks to American help, by the process of “extraordinary rendition,” to a jail in Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. His wife told an Italian court, “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beat up, especially around his ears. He was subjected to electroshocks to many body parts.”

A large proportion of life involves our refusing to put our ear to the mundane heart chamber, lest we die from hearing “the roar which lies on the other side of silence.” It is considered almost gauche to wave the flag of general suffering in other people’s faces, as Dostoyevsky does repeatedly in his novels, most famously in “The Brothers Karamazov,” when the rebellious Ivan confronts his pious brother Alyosha with a list of degradations, some of which Dostoyevsky had got from real accounts—Turkish soldiers tossing babies on their bayonets in front of the mothers, parents punishing their five-year-old girl for wetting her bed by locking her all night in a freezing outhouse and smearing her face with excrement. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

For the lucky few, there is reason to hope that life will be a business of evenly rationed suffering: stern parents perhaps, a few humiliations at school, then a love affair or two gone wrong, maybe a marriage broken. Our parents will die, and farther off, ideally deferred, will come our own steady demise. Plenty of suffering for a life, certainly, but most of us subsist on the plausible expectation that fortune will draw a circle around that personal portion, and that the truly unbearable—murder, rape, dead children, torture, war—will remain outside the cordon. Norman Rush, in his novel “Mortals,” calls this “hellmouth”: “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Without warning, and yet always feared. Job, whom God places into hellmouth to test him, knew that paradox: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

Theologians and philosophers talk about “the problem of evil,” and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is “theodicy,” which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics. Still, if polls are correct, about eighty per cent of Americans ought to be engaged in such antiquarianism. Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee, might profit from intense classes in theodicy. “God protected this campus,” one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.”

Antique and abstract it may be, but thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. I know this, because it was how I began to separate myself from the somewhat austere Christian environment I grew up in. I remember the day, in my late teens, when I drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper, on one side of which I wrote my reasons for belief in God, on the other my reasons against. I can’t remember the order of my negatives now, but the inefficacy of prayer was likely at the top. Here was a demonstrable case of promises made (if you have faith, you can move a mountain) but not kept (the mountain not only stays put but suddenly erupts and consumes a few villages). During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

God “suffers with us,” I was told; he feels our pain. If Christ was God incarnate, then God suffered on the Cross. He walks with us in our suffering. This has been the great twentieth-century addition to the familiar arguments, which is perhaps unsurprising, amid so much carnage. The Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, in his book “On Belief,” that when God abandoned Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he abandoned himself. Christianity, he asserts, returns at this moment to the story of Job, the man abandoned by God: “It is Christ (God) himself who has to occupy the place of Job. . . . Man’s existence is living proof of God’s self-limitation.” A God whose power has been so drastically limited, and who sounds so like us in our abjection, might be loved, but why should he be worshipped? Twenty-five years ago, as I hunched over my piece of paper with its vertical line, I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.

Another attempted consolation is that God intended us to have free will, and free will requires the liberty to do bad as well as good. If we were unable to err, our relation to God would be robotic, meaningless in its hapless obedience. It is regrettable that Hitlers are allowed to exist; but universal freedom is a higher good than the release from local pain. This is still the best available response to the theodicy problem. But even at sixteen I could see an enormous, iridescent flaw in this colorless argument: it is that the Bible is full of divine intervention, full of infringements of free will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and brings plagues, and spares the firstborn of the Israelites (while conveniently murdering the Egyptians’), and, if you accept the New Testament, anoints his son as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. We pray to him precisely because we believe in the power of such intervention. But when we actually need his intervention—say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps—he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested “free will.”

They were at it again when the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in 2004. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a distinguished theologian, wrote an article at the time, reminding his Anglican communion that such tragedies challenge faith. But then he circled around a kind of physicist’s version of the free-will argument when he cautioned that “the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. . . . So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.” Well, there would be something odd if you had never read the Bible. But one of the repeated indices of God’s power, as invoked in many of the Psalms, is his ability to control the waves—after all, the Psalmist knew that a great flood had consumed the world, at God’s command, and that the Red Sea had been divinely parted. How dangerous would things have to get before divine intervention was justified? To this, the Gospels can reply succinctly: not very. For when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, and things took a stormy turn, Jesus appeared, walked on water, and calmed the storm. Perhaps the disciples just meant more to Jesus than a few hundred thousand Asians.

There is something adolescent about such complaint; I can hear it like a boy’s breaking voice in my own prose. For anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in. Bart D. Ehrman’s new book, “God’s Problem” (HarperOne; $25.95), is highly adolescent in tone. Its jabbing subtitle, “How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer,” sounds as if it should be furiously triple-underlined on the dust jacket. Ehrman has been the favorite academic of the new wave of atheism since his book “Misquoting Jesus” (2005) became an unlikely best-seller. He is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, and is obviously a fine teacher, because his books are naturally pedagogic. “Misquoting Jesus” is a lucid, painstaking introduction to the unreliability of the Bible as a text, especially the New Testament. It summarizes the scholarly consensus on passages like Jesus’ defense of the adulteress, when Christ asked those without sin to cast the first stone at her. Ehrman argues, along with most recent scholars, that this story is almost certainly not original to John’s Gospel but “probably a well-known story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point was added in the margin of a manuscript.” It is not found in the oldest manuscripts of John, and is written in a different style from the rest of the Gospel. Louis Sheehan

What warmed up Ehrman’s reputation on the New Atheists’ circuit, though, was probably not so much his diligent textual labors as what he revealed in the book’s introduction. Readers learned that he had been reared in a conservative family in Kansas, was “born again” in high school, attended the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, in Chicago, and then Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater. When he was at Princeton Theological Seminary, prolonged reflection on the textual status of the Gospels began to weaken his religious certitude. But, in coyly declaring that the book was “the end result of a long journey,” he left readers to reach their own conclusions about his ultimate destination. In his new work, there is no such reticence. “I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian,” he announces on the third page. “The subject of this book is the reason why.” In a nutshell: “I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. . . . The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith.”

If he no longer believes, of course, suffering should not be a theological “problem.” But the rebel is stuck, as Dostoyevsky knew well, in an aggrieved nostalgia for belief. For the believer, theodicy is merely “the problem of evil”; for the rebel, theodicy is also “the problem of theodicy,” and protest, even rage, is the loudest tone. Throughout the book, Ehrman recounts gigantic tragedies—the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the five people who die of malaria every minute—and then bawls in horror and hatred: “How could God allow it to happen? . . . How could God allow this to happen to anyone, let alone his ‘chosen people’?” Later: “It is hard to believe that God inflicts people with cancer, flu, or AIDS in order to make sure they praise him to the end. Praise him for what? Mutilation and torture? For his great power to inflict pain and misery on innocent people? . . . What kind of God is this?”

This full-throated anger is very far from the sterile laboratories of the professional theodicists, where white-coated philosophers quite often crush suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q . (“Let P be the proposition that God is benevolent, and let Q be the existence of what Levinas calls useless suffering.”) But this entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised is what gives the book a rough power. Ehrman rightly dislikes the philosophers of theodicy, calling their work obtuse and disconnected from life, but he also, in a revealing moment, distinguishes himself from “recent agnostic or atheist authors.” Unlike them, he says, “I do not think that every reasonable and reasonably intelligent person will in the end come to see things my way when it comes to the important issues in life.” He is too polite to say it, but one of the weaknesses of otherwise useful atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that, lacking nostalgia for lost belief, they also lack the power to imagine why anyone would ever have professed it.

Awash in negative belief, Ehrman unabashedly fights his God, and wants to discover what the Bible has to say about suffering. He is a lucid expositor, the weaknesses of his book being the aural clatter of the lecture room (“Still, most Jews didn’t buy it, and this was a major source of pain to Paul”) and its limited perspective. He seldom connects Biblical passages with the larger philosophical or literary traditions. You will find no Pierre Bayle or Rousseau or Schopenhauer here, and no Milton, or Hardy, or Camus. The early Church Fathers are hardly mentioned. There is almost a sense that Ehrman, fearing scholasticism, does not want to get sucked into the philosophical history of theodicy. It is also true that, as Ehrman says, theodicy as such does not exist in the Bible. Nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest. “Ancient Jews and Christians never questioned whether God existed,” Ehrman notes. “What they wanted to know was how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world.”

So Ehrman concentrates on what you could call the first responders to hellmouth—the Prophets, the Psalmists, the Apocalypticists—and he is often illuminating. He separates three large strands in the Biblical writings: the idea that suffering is a punishment for sinful behavior; the idea that suffering is either ultimately redemptive or some kind of test of virtue; and the idea that God will finally vanquish evil and establish his kingdom of peace and harmony. We are probably most familiar with suffering as punishment, since it runs throughout the Hebrew Bible. Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience. The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again—what the English comedian Eddie Izzard calls the Etch A Sketch approach. (Izzard, whose standup routines often circle around religion, is very funny, also, about the unjust deaths of all those animals. What would constitute, say, a wicked giraffe? “I will eat all the leaves on this tree. I will eat more leaves than I should and then other giraffes may die.”) The Israelites, of course, are alternately rescued and abandoned by their jealous God, depending on the quality of their disobedience. And the Prophets majestically harp on punishment as a consequence of sinfulness—the oppression of the poor, sexual deviance (Amos), worship of false gods and idols (Hosea). Military defeat, captivity, and exile are the retributions for this alleged errancy.

This strain may be the least fashionable of all Biblical responses to suffering, except among evangelicals like Pat Robertson, who seemed perfectly happy to ascribe Ariel Sharon’s stroke to his surrender of Gaza to the Palestinians. But it widely persists in a slightly transferred form, as Ehrman points out. Judaism was a religion of sacrifice, in which the proffered gifts were seen as an atonement for sin. Punishment is bought off, effectively, by the garnishing of one’s wages. “Because sin brings horrible judgment in the manifestation of God’s wrath, this wrath needs to be averted,” Ehrman writes. “It is averted by the proper sacrifice of an animal.” It is not entirely clear how this atonement worked. “Whatever the answer to the question of mechanics, the Israelite temple cult was focused on sacrifice as a way of restoring a lost relationship with God, broken by disobedience.” Eventually, this religion of atonement would offer the very largest sacrificial lamb, God’s own son, as a scapegoat for the sins of the world. As Ehrman puts it, “a relatively simple formula” undergirds Paul’s salvationism: “sin leads to punishment; Christ took the punishment upon himself; therefore, Christ’s death can atone for the sins of others.” Ehrman might have added that Kierkegaard has it right when, in “The Sickness Unto Death,” he gloomily writes that Christianity “begins with the doctrine of sin.”

The second major Biblical response is the notion of suffering as a test or something otherwise improving. Ehrman mentions that when Joseph, after his travails in Egypt, finally is confronted by his traitorous brothers he rather piously tells them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Abraham was tested by God when he was commanded to kill his son Isaac, and Job, after a period of affliction and loss, was restored to health and prosperity as a reward for his righteousness. Isaiah speaks of “the servant of the Lord,” whose suffering will heal the nation of Israel. Once again, it is Christianity that greedily fattens itself on the scattered suggestions of the Hebrew Bible, reading Isaiah’s suffering servant as nothing less than the suffering Messiah, and turning Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac into a harbinger of God’s completed sacrifice of Jesus. (The libretto for Handel’s Messiah may represent the purest form of this Christian overreading.) For Paul, in Romans 5:3-4, “Tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope.”

It is now widespread, this rather repellent idea that suffering is dimly watermarked by redemption; that behind our pain lies His plan. (Most monstrously, a televangelist named John C. Hagee has argued that the Holocaust was God’s way of achieving the greater good of allowing the Jews to reclaim Israel.) The believer talks about providence; the secularist about how clouds have silver linings. The dazed survivor of an accident tells the TV crews that he thinks God has something special in mind for him. Newspapers run pieces about how estranged relatives were at last brought together by tragedy. Simone Weil, in her essay on affliction, says that pain is like the moment when an apprentice hurts himself for the first time on the job; at such moments workers say, “It is the trade entering his body.” Affliction, she implies, similarly trains us. If so, it also kills us, as it killed her. And, theologically, one has to remember that all this apparently useful suffering is supposedly taking place under God’s watch. In the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle likened this godly surveillance to a father who lets his son break his leg just so that he can show off his skill by mending it. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Ehrman is bluntly commonsensical: “The reality is that most suffering is not positive, does not have a silver lining, is not good for the body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive, outcomes.”

In the Biblical world, God did not simply gaze—our modern diminishment of him—but also acted. Ehrman’s third category of response to suffering concerns the apocalyptic and messianic certainty that God was involved in an epic battle with evil which he would eventually win, allowing the final establishment of his Kingdom. Deftly summarizing the current scholarly conclusions, Ehrman sees the apocalyptic strain in Biblical Judaism (as in, say, the Book of Daniel) as a response to different foreign oppressions in the second century B.C.E., and again in the first century B.C.E. The greatest Jewish apocalyptic, Jesus, seems to have believed in the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom—not up in Heaven but here on earth. Ehrman remarks that the inversions of the beatitudes (the poor shall inherit the earth, and so on) make sense because it is the poor and the lowly who will be rewarded in this approaching utopia. Paul, too, believed in this fearful imminence, though one notes that already, less than a hundred years after Jesus’ death, this Kingdom is half-etherealized: for Paul, it is above, not here on earth. Eternal life is now in Heaven, secure for those who have faith in Christ.

Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.” In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God’s mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything that we went through on earth will suddenly seem “worth it.”

But Heaven is also a problem for theodicists who take the freedom to choose between good and evil as paramount. For Heaven must be a place where either our freedom to sin has been abolished or we have been so transfigured that we no longer want to sin: in Heaven, our will miraculously coincides with God’s will. And here the free-will defense unravels, and is unravelled by the very idea of Heaven. If Heaven obviates the great human freedom to sin, why was it ever such a momentous ideal on earth, “worth” all that pain and suffering?

The difficulty can be recast in terms of the continuity of the self. If we will be so differently constituted in Heaven as to be strangers to sin, then no meaningful connection will exist between the person who suffers here and the exalted soul who will enjoy the great system of rewards and promises and tears wiped from faces: our faces there will not be the faces we have here. And, if there were to be real continuity between our earthly selves and our heavenly ones, then Heaven might dangerously begin to resemble earth. This idea haunted Dostoyevsky, who wrote a chilling fable about it called “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” in which the protagonist, on the verge of suicide, has a dream in which he has died and ended up on a pristine Greek island, a heavenly utopia where there is no sin. Then this man tells his first lie, and eventually utopia is corrupted: Heaven is just Eden all over again, and man is busy wrecking it.

“Come quickly, Lord” is the great refrain of both the Old Testament and the New. But the problem for Jews is that the Messiah never came, and everything stayed the same (or got worse), while the problem for Christians is that the Messiah did come, and everything stayed the same (or got worse). Jews and Christians are dependent, in different ways, on an always deferred Second Coming. Heaven—because it comes next and is not now—is, as so often in religious thought, a solution that merely creates another problem. If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty or so years we spend on earth not having the tears wiped from our faces? ♦

Pound turns up five times in Peter Gay’s big survey of the modern movement in literature and the arts, “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy”—once in connection with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (which Pound edited), once as the author of an anti-Semitic sentiment (one of many), and three times as the originator of the slogan “Make It New” (which suits the theme of Gay’s account). Pound’s poetry and criticism are not discussed; no reader of Gay’s book would have any idea of what his importance or influence as a writer might be. Gay’s is a commodious volume with a long reach, “From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond”; still, a handful of passing references seems a sharp decline in market value for a writer who was once the hero of a book called “The Pound Era.”

Pound’s aspirations for literature were grand. He believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone. He was vain and idiosyncratic, but he had no wish to be a prima donna. No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes. “A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help,” Joyce called him. It’s true that he was flamboyant, immodest, opinionated, tactless, a pinwheel of affectation; he made people crazy and he became crazy himself. Gertrude Stein’s description of him is frequently invoked: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” In his devotion to the modernist avant-garde, though, he was selfless. “A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main,” Wyndham Lewis wrote about meeting Pound. “Going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.”

Pound’s own work, on the other hand, has had a difficult reception. The “It” in “Make It New” is the Old—what is valuable in the culture of the past. A great deal of Pound’s poetry therefore takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion, and quotation. He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment, but it is a line of his own invention—a “tradition” that includes, among others, John Adams, Confucius, Flaubert, the Provençal troubadours, and Benito Mussolini. Not, prima facie, a canon. This means that to understand what Pound is doing you often need to have read the same writers, studied the same languages, and learned the same history that Pound read, studied, and learned (or rely on the commentary of a person who has). Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

This is especially the case with the work on which he spent fifty-four years and staked his reputation, “The Cantos of Ezra Pound”—“a cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length,” as he once described it. So it is very easy for the average underprepared reader to get Pound wrong, and he desperately did not want to be misunderstood. Opacity and ambiguity can be deliberate effects in modernist writing: sometimes the text goes dark, reference becomes uncertain, language aspires to the condition of music. In Pound’s case, though, any obscurity is unintentional. Clarity is the essence of his aesthetic. He sometimes had to struggle against his own technique to achieve it.

There is another problem with Pound, which is that he was a Fascist. The term gets abused freely in discussions of modernist writers, a number of whom were reactionaries—Gay calls these “the anti-modern modernists”—and some of whom were anti-Semites, but very few of whom were actually Fascists. Pound is one of the very few. His obsession with the Jews (there are some anti-Semitic passages in his early prose, but nothing systematic) dates from his interest in the views of the founder of the Social Credit movement, Major C. H. Douglas, around 1920. (Social Credit was an economic reform movement aimed at the elimination of debt—hence Pound’s attacks on usury and on Jews as moneylenders and financiers of wars, a classic type of anti-Semitism.) Pound’s infatuation with Mussolini dates from a concert given by Olga Rudge, a violinist who was Pound’s longtime mistress, at Mussolini’s home, in 1927, where he came up with the idea of enlisting Mussolini as a patron of the avant-garde. Six years later, Pound had a private audience with Il Duce, at the Palazzo Venezia, in Rome, and presented him with a copy of “A Draft of XXX Cantos,” which Mussolini graciously acknowledged with the remark “Ma questo è divertente” (“How amusing”). Pound concluded that Mussolini had an intuitive grasp of the significance of his poetry.

In 1941, Pound began delivering broadcasts from the Rome studios of Ente Italiana Audizione Radio, attacking the Jews, Roosevelt, and American intervention in the war. The broadcasts continued through the Allied invasion of Italy, in 1943. In 1944, he wrote two propagandistic cantos—which are known as the Italian Cantos, and which were for many years omitted from the New Directions edition of the complete “Cantos”—praising the Fascist fighting spirit. In 1945, he surrendered to American officials on a charge of treason and was imprisoned in an Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa. He was brought to the United States, but, thanks to the intercession of friends and of Dr. Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C., he was spared a trial, on psychiatric grounds (although he never received a specific diagnosis). He spent twelve years in St. Elizabeths, where he acquired a number of disciples, including John Kasper, a segregationist associated with the neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. In 1958, the indictment was dismissed and Pound returned to Italy. When he walked off the boat, in Naples, he gave the Fascist salute.

Pound’s politics are not incidental to his achievement. Italian Fascism is integral to “The Cantos,” and the section called “The Pisan Cantos,” which Pound composed in the Army Disciplinary Training Center, at a time when he had every expectation of being executed, is, formally, an elegy occasioned by the death of Mussolini at the hands of Italian partisans (“Ben and la Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano”). Like most classical elegies, it is as much about the poet as about the departed; it is suffused with memories, and spiked with anger at the indifference of the world. It won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, and although the award was (and remains) controversial, “The Pisan Cantos” is the finest thing that Pound ever wrote. It’s the one place in his work where his learning is fused with genuine personal feeling.

Parts of “The Pisan Cantos” have been read as a recantation:

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”

          Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,

Half black half white

Nor knowst’ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity

          How mean thy hates

Fostered in falsity,

          Pull down thy vanity,

Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,

Pull down thy vanity,

          I say pull down.

This may sound repentant, but it is not the poet speaking to himself in the second person. The lines are addressed to the American Army (“Half black half white”): the prisoner is raging against his captors. Pound laments, but he does not regret. “The Pisan Cantos” is a Fascist poem without apologies.

A. David Moody does not deal with the political side of the Pound problem in the first volume of his biography, “Ezra Pound Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work” (Oxford; $47.95), because he takes us only to 1921, the year Pound left London, first for Paris and then for Rapallo, where he lived until he surrendered to the Americans. Pound was born in 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, a fact useful to English satirists, whose ridicule Pound abetted by occasionally speaking and writing in a kind of homemade cowboy/Yankee drawl. But Pound was not really a Westerner; he spent less than two years in Hailey, where his father, Homer, briefly registered mining claims. The family moved to New York and then to Wyncote, near Philadelphia, which is where Pound was reared and educated. Homer worked in the Philadelphia Mint; Pound’s mother, Isabel, was a New Yorker. Pound spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to Hamilton College, graduating in 1905.

Pound came to Europe in 1908, when he was twenty-two, after getting kicked out of the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania. (Later in his career, he several times applied to Penn to receive his doctorate on the basis of work published, but was turned down.) Pound resisted the philological approach to literature that he was taught at Penn, since philology considered itself a science and above critical judgment, and Pound was consumed with a passion for critical judgment. He thought that the whole purpose of studying the past was to discover the principles of good writing—“the search for sound criteria,” he called it—and his early poetry is a kind of creative philology, consisting largely of promiscuously free translations and reanimations of the literature of half a dozen expired traditions: Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, medieval Italian, eighth-century Chinese, and fourteenth-century Japanese. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

 (After decades of frustratingly under-edited New Directions reprints, virtually all of Pound’s poetry and translations, apart from the “Cantos,” are available in a single Library of America volume, expertly edited, with annotation, by Richard Sieburth.)

Moody’s book is a biography more of the work than of the man. Pound’s love affairs, friendships, and quarrels and the intellectual and artistic culture within which he operated are mentioned, but they’re not endowed with much explanatory power. Moody treats Pound as a poet whose primary concern was writing poetry, and his pages are devoted mainly to patient, intelligent, and prudently sympathetic readings of the contents of the twenty-one books Pound produced between 1905 and 1920, beginning with “Hilda’s Book,” which he wrote for his girlfriend Hilda Doolittle (later the poet H.D.), and ending with the work he called his “farewell to London,” the self-deprecating satire “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Given the enormous variety of Pound’s production in this period, Moody’s gloss is elegant: he thinks that Pound (with a little help from his friends) grounded poetry in the everyday. He did this in two ways. He campaigned, as a prolific and bumptious critic, against the aesthetes and the Symbolists—the avant-garde of the late nineteenth century. And he formulated an aesthetic that was intended to preserve poetry’s privileged status, but without the Symbolist’s mysticism or the aesthete’s cult of the beautiful. Pound took the merely poetical out of poetry. He did not believe that (in the words of the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) “all art is quite useless.” He thought that poetry had a kind of power. He believed, Moody says, “that ‘the perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word’ would energize the motor forces of emotion and will and illuminate the intelligence, and that the result would be more enlightened living.”

“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” was the formula of the movement that Pound invented, in 1912: Imagism. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In the Imagist model, the writer is a sculptor. Technique consists of chipping away everything superfluous in order to reveal the essential form within. “It took you ninety-seven words to do it,” Pound is reported to have remarked to a young literary aspirant who had handed him a new poem. “I find it could have been managed in fifty-six.” He claimed that his best-known short poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” took a year and a half to write, and that he had cut it down from thirty lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The form “made new” here is, of course, the haiku: two images juxtaposed to evoke a sensation—in this case, according to Pound, the sensation of beauty. It’s important to recognize, though, that the subject of the poem is not “these faces”; the subject is “the apparition.” (Otherwise, the first three words would be superfluous, subject to the Imagist razor.) The faces are not what matters. What matters is the impression they make in the mind of a poet. That is where the work of association takes place. This is what poets do: they connect an everyday x with an unexpected y. “Apparition” also reminds us, as Hugh Kenner pointed out in “The Pound Era,” that the poem takes place under the ground: the people are experienced as ghosts, the subway as a visit to the underworld. (Kenner thought that the association with petals alludes to the Persephone myth, the cycle of death and rebirth.)

When Pound abandoned Imagism, around 1914, he did so noisily, and in the name of another doctrine, which he (along with Wyndham Lewis) named Vorticism. The trope in a Vorticist poem is the Vortex—although, as Moody rightly says, a Vortex is just an Image by another name. The key notion now is energy. (Pound and Lewis had very much in mind Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, an artistic and literary movement that had a vogue in England shortly before the war. They affected to despise Marinetti as a showman, but they were, stylistically, his imitators.) Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound explained in BLAST, the magazine that he and Lewis produced, and that ran for two issues. “All experience rushes into this vortex. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” The cluster of associations triggered by the apparition of the faces—Odysseus’ descent into Hades, Dante’s visit to the Inferno, Persephone and Demeter—is present in the twentieth-century subway, but only for those who can see. “Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius,” Pound wrote.

As Moody concedes, somewhat reluctantly, not every reader is a genius, and this can lead, in Pound, to many conundrums. Moody spends several pages, for example, puzzling out the opening lines of Canto IV:

Palace in smoky light,

Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,

ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!

Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!

Most readers will get the reference to Troy, but the rest is, well, Greek. Moody thinks that the palace in the first line is Agamemnon’s (although there is nothing about “smoky light” that would make this necessary, and other commentators have seen an allusion to Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women”). “ANAXIFORMINGES” is from a poem by Pindar; “Aurunculeia” is from a poem by Catullus; Cadmus was the brother of Europa and the founder of Thebes. Even with the allusions identified, there remains the question of what to make of this particular cluster. What about Troy, Agamemnon, Cadmus, and so on makes for significance? Moody works it out (something to do with cities, women, music, and ravishment), but, by the end, any notion of the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” has vanished. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The perception of relations is anything but swift.

The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on “the perfect word,” le mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

“When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish,” Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. (“Palace in smoky light”: could this be Buckingham Palace in the fog?) So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: “is” does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind. In “The Cantos,” Pound became the prisoner of his own technique, and he must have found his poem unfinishable (he never did end it) because he couldn’t control the significances his images unleashed. “New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos,” the critic Daniel Albright has said, “so the story of ‘ The Cantos’ comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound’s writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound’s interpretations of what he had already written.” The poem kept metastasizing meaning, a Vortex battening on itself.

“He was in his own way a hero of his culture, a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions,” Moody says about Pound. This seems fair. Pound was, in the end, a poet’s poet—he looked like a poet—and, despite the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics, he does stand for something. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important. If you are a poet, or any serious kind of writer, you have to believe that, whether you think Pound’s formula is workable or not. Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy.

Pound was also, and by his own account, a failure.

That I lost my center

          fighting the world.

The dreams clash

          and are shattered—

that I tried to make a paradiso

                    terrestre,

he wrote in notes for the final cantos. Kenner’s title was deliberately ironic: the point of “The Pound Era” is that a Pound era never happened. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The hopes of the pre-war avant-garde, the artistic excitement of the years between 1908 and 1914, when the modernist movement spread throughout Europe, died in the trenches and the camps. “Dreams clash and are shattered”: two wars of annihilation destroyed the aspirations of poets and painters to be the authors of an earthly paradise. Pound was, in a way, a war casualty, too; but he outlived almost all his literary and artistic contemporaries. He died in 1972, in Venice, at the age of eighty-seven. In his last years, he did not speak. ♦

The idea of Original Sin – that we are all implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity – does not sit well with the modern mind. But then neither does the idea of sin itself. According to our therapeutic culture, people like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin may have sinned, but the rest of us are victims of circumstance and maladjustment. Why even talk about sin? As for the idea that we all have to suffer because our first parents chose to sample a piece of fruit – that obviously doesn't resonate either. One could even define the Enlightenment, which began with 18th-century thinkers like Rousseau and Kant, as a rejection of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

And yet, as Alan Jacobs notes in "Original Sin," his strangely entertaining cultural survey, some very smart people have concluded that there is no better explanation of the darker side of human behavior. Blaise Pascal, who was certainly a genius, thought that without this particular belief we lack any possibility of understanding ourselves. G.K. Chesterton opined that Original Sin is the only Christian doctrine that requires no explanation: Just look around! And the French novelist Georges Bernanos made a point worth pondering, one that has not been disproved by history, that "for men it is certainly more grave, or at least much more dangerous, to deny original sin than to deny God."

Mr. Jacobs presents an impressive gallery of thinkers convinced of the reality of a hereditary stain in human nature. He starts with St. Augustine, who saw evidence for Original Sin "everywhere, from the angry cry of a baby to his own tendency to be distracted from prayer." There are classic Protestants like Luther and John Bunyan, as well as the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in the Gulag came to realize that the real fault line ran not between the guards and prisoners but within each human soul.

Of course, they are all Christians. When we turn to modern thinkers who take a dim view of religion – Marx, Freud, the current batch of evolutionary psychologists – Mr. Jacobs sees a pattern: They dismiss the idea of Original Sin but then try to sneak it through the back door and give it another name.

Kant, who had little use for Christian revelation, talked about "the crooked timber of humanity." For Marx, human behavior was skewed by immemorial social arrangements. Freud talked about the dark forces of the subconscious.  http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

One way or another, these thinkers were wrestling with the question that God directed to Adam and Eve after the Fall: "Where are you?" In other words: Why are we not where we ought to be?

Mr. Jacobs treats the biblical account of the Fall with disappointing brevity, moving quickly on to Milton's poetic version in "Paradise Lost." But there are provocative ideas to be mined from the opening chapters of Genesis, even if you're not particularly religious. In just seven biblical verses the devil speaks twice, and all is ruined. Whatever your belief about the devil, his offer to Adam and Eve is something to think about: If you eat the fruit, he says, you shall be gods, knowing good and evil. In other words, you can create your own reality. Why not enjoy a radical autonomy wherein the truth is determined not by the nature of things but by your own individual will?

The author of Genesis suggests that this is a formula for unhappiness: Genuine freedom is anchored in objective truths that we ourselves do not invent. Otherwise there is going to be a mess. And indeed in the chapters of Genesis that follow, which may have a substratum of historical truth – there was, for example, an enormous flood in the Mesopotamian basin at the dawn of history – mankind lurches from catastrophe to catastrophe.

The rest of Mr. Jacobs's book is an absorbing, if serendipitous, history of how mankind has dealt with the fact of its own waywardness. We seem to know what is good, but behave otherwise. What to do? There are the mischievous dreamers, like Rousseau, who think that innocence is simply a matter of organizing society properly. Rousseau was the intellectual godfather of the French Revolution, which taught us that revolutionists have their own dark side and that replacing faith with "reason" can involve a high body count. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, replacing reason with faith doesn't work either. You need both.

Mr. Jacobs observes that, while revolutions usually self-destruct, the melioristic schemes of the 19th century – better sanitation and schooling – did improve things, and for this we should be grateful. Problems occur when we go too far in regulating human behavior. "Original Sin" has a wonderful chapter on Robert Owen, the 19th-century English industrialist who migrated to America to found a utopian community called New Harmony. Owen abolished private property, with the result that a black-market economy instantly appeared. In fact, writes Mr. Jacobs, "all hell broke loose."

Which brings us back to the Garden of Eden. In an easy, fluent style, Mr. Jacobs makes the case that we're setting ourselves up for a fall whenever we think that mankind can get things exactly right.

Robert Scott Lazar (January 26, 1959), or Bob Lazar, is a physicist and owner of a mail-order scientific supply company who claims to have worked from 1988 until 1989 at an area he alleges exists called "S-4" (Sector Four). http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

He claims that S-4 is situated at the edge of the (dry) Papoose Lake bed, near Groom Lake, Nevada, about 15 miles from Area 51. Lazar claims this area was devoted to the study and back-engineering of extraterrestrial space vehicles. In a series of interviews, he provides supposed details on the origin of the alleged craft and their mode of propulsion.

In November 1989, Lazar appeared in a special interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS to talk about the several aspects and implications of his work at S-4. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Bob Lazar says he was initially introduced to work at S-4 by Dr. Edward Teller. He claims his tasks consisted of the scientific investigation of the propulsion system of one of nine disc-shaped aircraft, as a general part of the ongoing reverse engineering project taking place at S-4.

Lazar claims that he initially thought the saucers were secret, terrestrial aircraft, whose test flights must have been responsible for many of the UFO reports. However, Lazar stated that, gradually, on closer examination and from having been shown multiple briefing documents, he came to the conclusion that the discs must have been of extraterrestrial origin. In his filmed testimony, Lazar claims that this impression first hit him after he boarded the craft under study and examined their interior.

For vehicular propulsion Lazar claims that an unexpectedly stable element with atomic number 115 served as nuclear fuel. The onboard Element 115 or Ununpentium reactor reportedly provided an enormous energy source for the triad of gravity-field generators located in the bottom section of the craft. The energy conversion rate of this reactor supposedly allowed a craft at least 20 years' operation on less than a quarter-kilogram of Element 115.

An additional property of Element 115 also allowed its reactor to produce a very minuscule Gravity-A wave which was fantastically amplified and channelled through the gravity-distortion devices to provide lift and propulsion for the alleged alien vehicles. Gravity-A is distinguished from Gravity-B in that Gravity-A acts only between atomic nuclear components and is vastly more powerful than the Gravity-B which we all know from our own everyday experience.

Lazar further claimed that he was given introductory briefings describing the historical involvement by extraterrestrial beings with this planet for 10,000 years. He claimed that the beings originated from the Zeta Retuculi 1 and 2 star system and are therefore referred to as Zeta Reticulans, and are what many people refer to as the "Greys".

Lazar's claims are considered unreliable by many scientists on the basis that terrestrial experiments that have produced element 115 indicate that it has half-life on the order of seconds rather than years, something that would most likely make the element useless as a fuel source.  Lazar, however, claims that an isotope achievable only under distant stellar formation may be more stable than one resulting from collision of stable elements by conventional means. Lazar claims that advances in nuclear physics may result in a more stable isotope of element 115 being developed.

    * Lazar says he has degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, skeptics report that his name does not appear on the alumni roll of either institution. The yearbooks from that time neither contain identity photos nor other references to Bob Lazar. Lazar alleges this is the result of the government's erasure of his past identity for reasons of secrecy. In August 1990, reporter George Knapp investigated Robert Lazar's background and was presented with a W-2 tax slip showing payments from the Department of Naval Intelligence (see image), which many claim corroborates Lazar's claim that he worked for the US Navy, although The Department of Naval Intelligence has not formally existed since World War II, and has since then been known as the Office of Naval Intelligence. Another problem with Lazar's story is that his stated income on the form is less than $1,000, which indicates that most likely he was not working in a scientific capacity.

    * On his commercial United Nuclear website, Bob Lazar writes in the 'about'-section: "Bob had previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (specifically in the Meson Physics facility ), involved with experiments using the 1/2 mile long Linear Particle Accelerator." Critics have argued that the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory could not back up this claim: the experimental laboratory denied ever having employed Lazar. Investigative reporter George Knapp, however, found Bob Lazar's name among that of other scientists in the 1982 Los Alamos phone book, indicating Lazar did work there as a technician.

      Knapp also dug up a 1982 Los Alamos Monitor n