absolutely alex’s adventures & times

Perhaps all parents and parents-to-be should be made to sign a Hippocratic Oath-type of pledge and held accountable, so that fewer children would be victimized or harmed.

Shock and horror do not begin to express the feelings of revolt one gets from reading about the case of the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in a windowless underground cellar in the family-owned building, raped her and fathered seven children with her.

The most chilling part of this story is that Josef Fritzl managed to get away with it for 24 years and looked like he could have gotten away with it totally, had it not been for one of the children getting critically ill.

The woman, Elisabeth, was forced to live with three of her children in the narrow and low-ceilinged confines of the bunker, robbed of sunlight and contact with other human beings, with a television and radio as their windows to the outside world. 

The other three children were taken by Fritzl to live with his family in the real world.

If the story of the Fritzls sounds inexplicable, it is not unique. It is the third similar type of case in Austria. 

Natascha Kampusch, now 20 years old, was held in an underground cell for eight years before she escaped in 2006.

There was one other case of a couple in Vienna, who caged their mentally retarded daughter for years in a cellar.

How is it that people could stay kidnapped and abused for such long periods without anyone suspecting anything?

How does it reflect on the community in the town of Amstetten where the episode occurred, when Fritzl’s actions went about undetected for about a quarter of a century?

In a town where everyone was said to know everybody else’s name, how could it be that the neighbors stayed unaware?

What does it say about the folks if they were too self-involved to realize the heinous acts going on in their neighborhood? Or were they only too happy to look the other way, mind their own business and carry on with their own lives?

The country’s social services were recorded as having been to the Fritzl household 21 times when Elisabeth’s three children were adopted by Fritzl and his wife. Why did they not investigate the strange appearance of the children at the Fritzls’ doorstep further, when they knew of Elisabeth’s disappearance?

And how could Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie be totally ignorant the entire time? Didn’t the fact that Fritzl brought back three children in succession, claiming that Elisabeth had run away and left them to her parents, ring any alarm bells? Would it not have been noticeable how often Fritzl disappeared to the basement? Why did Rosemarie so readily believe her husband’s line that Elisabeth had run away to join some cult?

How were the seven children, with one who died soon after birth, delivered? Did Fritzl do it all by himself? 

There were other tenants in the building the family lived in. Eight flats were rented out. Did these people not hear or see anything at all, children crying or playing? Did they not wonder why the old man went so frequently to the basement?

Fritzl was supposed to have been extremely cautious, buying clothes, food and other supplies for his three prisoners in other towns so that he would not raise suspicions.

While he was trained as an electrical engineer, he installed a 300kg, 1m high and 2m wide steel door at the cellar to keep his victims locked in. Could he have had the strength and the ability to handle such a heavy door all by himself? He was also said to have knocked down some walls in the cellar to enlarge it when more children were born. Was it possible that nobody noticed? Were there accomplices who abetted him in his evil pursuits?

Fritzl went away on vacation to Thailand in 1998 for four weeks. Again, how did he stock up on what would be a substantial amount of food and supplies for the victims without being noticed by anyone?

At 73, Fritzl is near the end of his life and no amount of punishment brought down by the law would affect him for very much longer. 

Some people have suggested the death penalty for him. Austria though, does have that but to have him executed would have been too easy a way out for him anyway. The monster should be put away in an isolated, windowless cell to give him a taste of what life must have been like for his daughter and three grandchildren.

Meanwhile, his daughter Elisabeth and her children, will have to carry the horrors and the scars till the end of their days. Her eldest child is still gravely ill, possibly sent to the hospital too late for her undisclosed condition to be treated successfully. 

The two other kids, one at 18, and another aged five, will face a long and tough road towards getting over the trauma and the adjustments they would have to make to live in a strange new world.

“They have to develop a tolerance for daylight and also to develop a sense of spatial awareness,” Berthold Kepplinger, who heads the neuropsychiatric clinic in Amstetten where the family is being treated, said about the children.

“When the sunbeams struck his face, he squealed loudly,” the chief inspector of the regional police in Lower Austria Leopold Etz told the media, in a heart-rending reference to the five-year old boy.

Never having left the basement cellar, the children had initially thought they had gone up to heaven when they first got out, as their mother had told them that heaven was above where they lived. 

Besides getting used to other people, the children would also have to learn to speak, as their verbal skills were reportedly limited, although their mother had taught them the language.

One cannot but feel heartbroken for the ordeals of Elisabeth and her children, and the long road to normalcy they would have to take, if that was even possible.

In the meantime, the government and people of Austria have a lot of soul-searching to do as to how cases like this could happen right under their noses, and not just once.

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While we celebrate Memorial Day with our backyard barbecues, I thought I’d share this poignant, heartfelt and devastating commentary by a father who’s lost a son in the Iraq war, first published in the Washington Post.

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I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.

By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, May 27, 2007; B01

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the “the-surge-is-already-working” school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. “The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others — teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks — to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier — brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His son died May 13 after a suicide bomb explosion in Salah al-Din province.

Oh yeah, our lives are mundane but we like it that way if it means staying out of jail, Paris Hilton, thank you very much.

No, you don’t enliven our mundane lives, despite what your spoilt little pea brain might think.

And I fancy you even much less as “inspirational” to young people around the world.

The soon-to-be-jailed heiress has reportedly backed an online petition for her pardon from a 45-day jail sentence after being found guilty of violating her probation for a drink-driving conviction, giving those above two reasons as the basis for her pardon.

I say, go to jail Paris, it’ll do you some good. You’d be able to experience a genuinely “mundane” existence there so that you won’t ever dare describe our lives that way again.

Hey, we might not have your cash but at least we can read – we would know when our licenses are suspended and take a cab instead. Heck, with your type of money, surely you could afford a chauffeur?

Part of having mundane lives means turning up in court punctually. If you’d been as mundane as us, you might have learnt to show respect to the courts and might not have pissed Judge Michael Sauer off so much. Who knows, he might even not have ordered you thrown in the slammer.

You should also know that having mundane lives means reading our own violations charges and understanding them. We don’t have armies of lawyers, assistants and publicists to read for us, so that we won’t risk missing out on reading the really important stuff. And end up in jail. Or are you really that dumb?

Anyway, you’re not a minor, for crying out loud. You’re 26. It’s time to grow up and be an adult. Take responsibility for your actions and go obediently to jail. Have fun living a mundane life.

I can’t even lie about my age. I would dearly love to, as the numbers only seem to go up while the lines just keep deepening.

I can’t lie about how I feel either. I’m not one of those bare-faced, smooth-tongued, lightning-fast thinking types who can tell someone straight-faced that I loved his book, cooking, song, etc, without feeling like barfing my guts out immediately after. And looking like I need to barf.

No wonder I can’t play poker.

You can thus imagine my shock – and perverse fascination, hell, even a sneaking admiration – at news of what Marilee Jones has done. She was the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 28 years. Except that she lied about her qualifications to get there.

She claimed to have degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In reality, Ms Jones did not even possess an undergraduate degree. Not from those places, or any other higher learning institutions.

This story amazes me on various levels. Firstly, that nobody at MIT bothered to check her credentials. In its defense, MIT said that Ms Jones started out at an entry-level position in MIT’s admission office, which did not strictly require a degree. So when she was made dean of admissions after 18 years, MIT didn’t bother to look over the resume she had submitted earlier.

I don’t know about you, but how did she not live a life of fear? If I were her, I’d jump every time the phone rang, every time the boss said she wanted to “talk to me about something”. I wouldn’t be able to sleep well at night. I’d be so afraid of being found out all the time. I’d be such a wreak I wouldn’t be able to work.

Surprise, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of people in prominent positions embellishing their qualifications. Resume padders who were caught include RadioShack’s CEO David Edmondson and eyecare company Bausch & Lomb’s CEO Ronald Zarrella. Mr Edmondson resigned, but Mr Zarrella kept his job, although he lost a bonus.

Ms Jones’ audacity went beyond her work at MIT. She had capitalized on her position to write a well-received book about college admissions. Based on the book’s success, Ms Jones had been in demand on the college admissions speech-making circuit. Ironically, one of the book’s theme is “living a life of integrity”.

However, this episode highlights the fact that credentials and higher degrees aren’t necessary proof that a person can perform. Ethical breach or not, Ms Jones was credited with having excelled at her job, such as redesigning the college application forms to emphasize on students’ personalities and interests rather than accomplishments.

It’s high time we looked at other criteria besides educational qualifications or where a college degree was issued. This might just slow the frenzy that’s college admissions season. I’m presenting the often argued case that at 17 or 18, lots of people haven’t found their stride or place in this world and late bloomers might just miss out in the wake of the hysteria of getting into the “right” college.

It might be too late for Ms Jones at MIT, but maybe some other institution should hire her to spot the fake resumes out there. Hey, if she had us all fooled for so long, she must have been tremendous at it right? Who better then, than her?

Just last week, the place where I have recently made home – Mexico City – took a monumental legislative step. Women who are 12 weeks pregnant, or less, now have the right to abort their pregnancies. No more will they be jailed and tagged as criminals, thanks to 46 brave legislators, who voted to decriminalize early-term abortion.

Monumental, as Mexico City is the capital of one of the largest Roman Catholic populations in the world, second in fact, to Brazil. A little over 90 per cent of the Mexican population is Catholic. Out of Mexico’s 100 million, around 20 million people live in Mexico City. With stakes this high, it’s no wonder the Pope himself wrote to Mexican bishops asking them to oppose the measure.

Ground-breaking, too, if you factor in the “machismo” mentality pervasive in this country. The law can in fact be interpreted as a victory for women, who now have the freedom to take control of and make decisions over their own bodies and reproduction. Before, abortion was only allowed in cases of rape or if a woman’s life was at risk from the pregnancy.

Groups championing women’s rights have been campaigning for this change for years. They cite the estimated 200,000 illegal abortions done annually, and the 1,500 who die from botched procedures.

Weeks before the vote for the legislation, supporters of both sides of the issue were demonstrating passionately on the streets outside the assembly building. Riot police had to be mobilized to keep both sides from slugging it out. Death threats were also reportedly made against legislators supporting the change in law.

As a woman, I welcome the ability to choose. Since as long as I can remember, I had supported making abortion legal, my religion notwithstanding. I firmly believe that my body is mine and it’s nobody’s business but my own. Hence I applaud the progressiveness of the Mexico City legislative assembly.

But at the same time, I am conflicted about the innocent fetuses that will be terminated, probably when the pregnancy could be due to ignorance, or worse, folly.

Ideally, babies ought to be born to people ready and willing to give them happy homes. I’m old enough to know that that’s not always the case. Why bring another child to this world when one doesn’t have the resources, or worse, the inclination to give it a proper upbringing?

Perhaps the best way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and that unpleasant visit to the doctor’s office – legal or otherwise – is to educate people. About contraception, about the reality and responsibilities of raising a child.

Meanwhile, I’d admit that I’m still not sure which side of the debate I stand unequivocally on. I’m just glad that there’s a choice available for me.