Ferdinand Waldo Demaro, The Great Imposter

Home_____Ferdinand Waldo Demaro, The Great Imposter

He was the Great Imposter, and his exploits became a bestselling biography, followed by a 1961 movie. Bold, downright audacious, Ferdinand Waldo Demara pretended his way into challenges that would leave others drenched in sweat.

He didn't choose small deceptions. He was often drawn to situations in which discovery was quite dangerous to him. The danger itself seemed to whet his appetite for life on the edge. Consider these:

He faked his way into becoming a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Korean War.

He doctored credentials and bamboozled interviewers so that he became a guidance counselor in an American maximum security prison.

With a phony PhD he taught applied psychology at a Pennsylvania college.

The list doesn't end there. He was also civil engineer, sheriff's deputy, assistant prison warden, hospital orderly, lawyer, child-care expert, and Trappist monk, editor, cancer researcher. These are only some of his roles.

In the Royal Canadian Navy, his role as physician Joseph Cyr was perhaps his most challenging. He performed risky operations at sea during the Korean war. Under severe battle conditions, he worked on patients needing tooth extraction, amputation, and a bullet removed from a lung. He was blessed with keen intelligence and a photographic memory, and before the operations he retreated to his quarters, intensely studying medical books. He also administered heavy doses of penicillin to guard against patients' infections. Eventually the Canadian Navy learned of his false identity but didn't doubt his credentials as a physician. The ship's captain, whose tooth Demara extracted, was among those attesting to his character. He was discharged honorably.

Did he lie and defraud because of an amoral personality? No, strangely, his quest was partly spiritual. A faithful Roman Catholic, as a boy he had fallen in love with the Catholic church and its trappings. He mouthed the names of priestly vestments, Amice, Alb, Cincture, Maniple, Chasuble, and dreamed some day of becoming a bishop. When feeling troubled or in need, he prayed with different words, those describing a bishop's clothing: miter, gloves, ring, surplice, cassock, tunic.

His life of course took a different direction, though he did pretend to be a Trappist monk who had sworn to vows of silence. This, because he desperately wanted to live the pious life of a monastic. How did a man who would turn from the tranquil world instead assume some highly tense roles?

He also sought respectability, however temporary. He seems to have been conflicted, wanting peace on the one hand while seeking power and authority on the other. He entered monasteries, desperate for a pious life, only to be kicked out because of his troublesome behavior. The rejection sent him seeking elsewhere, this time for the respect and attention he craved, which came from positions of authority.

This craving seems the key to understanding him, and is illustrated by one situation which combined both aspects of his personality, the spiritual and the cynical, the would-be contemplative and the arrogant anti-authoritarian.

The situation. Although he finished only the ninth grade, he faked his way into graduate theology courses, and earned straight A's in them. Of that experience he says,

"I knew I could do it but I had to have it proven to me. That experience really changed me. No matter how I might feel I still can't work up any respect for acquired learning. I can for character but not learning. A man with a good mind who trusts it can learn anything he needs to know in a few months."

Certainly his achievement is remarkable, but he took theology, not graduate physics courses, and he assumed that "acquired learning" is falsely based on the authority of institutions, which he sees fit to unmask as so much pretentiousness.

He strikes an interesting contrast between character and learning, as if they are distinct attributes. He disdained scholarship almost as if it called into question the character of the professor, which is strange, twisted logic. His conception of character is curiously unfortunate: the man behind a mask has less suspect character than the fellow without a mask. It seems he would undermine authority while seeking it himself.

Given the pretension he saw in the world, he became a pretender, somebody who put the lie to authority by showing how easily it can be assumed as prison warden, surgeon, or whatever. Demara observed that

"In any organization, there's a lot of unused power laying around which can be picked up without alienating anyone."

"If you want power and want to expand, never encroach on anyone else's domain; open up new ones."

Demara operated under two cardinal rules:

The burden of proof is on the accuser.

When in danger, attack.

For example, after being accused of a forgery, he explained "The ordinary faker would at least try to explain his way out at best. But I managed to plant a doubt, and once there was that doubt, for the time being, at least, the moral advantage was on my side. So I was outraged, of course." By the time anyone's suspicions became serious, Demara was off to his next role. He offers simple advice for the aspiring imposter:

[Use an] innocent bumpkin opening [and] ask such simple and naïve questions that the person would have to have an especially dismal view of humanity in order to figure this was the first step of chicanery.

Always use the biggest names [because] people are reluctant to bother important people on routine matters. And they don't suspect a fraud to use obvious names.

The irony is that Demara could exploit basic human decency while regarding this as a test of his character.

At least two books were written about Demara: The Great Imposter, by Robert Crichton and The Rascal and The Road, a sequel also by Crichton. A film, The Great Imposter (1962) appeared with Tony Curtis as the fraud. Demara believed himself slighted by Crichton's rendering of his life and planned an autobiography, but he died, lonely and deeply depressed, of a heart attack on 8 June 1982 at age 59. Dr John Zane, a friend and physician, said of Demara that he died a "broken man who felt his talents were wasted."

At the time of his death he was employed as a hospital priest in California.

The Korean Veterans Association of Canada has an interesting page on him.

Home_____Lukoil, Vladimer Putin, &
Russian Gas Stations in the USA

< Just you and me, kid. Together we'll change this stinking world so that some day the oil moguls can take over.

September 27, 2003, Washington -- In possibly the greatest show of political power ever to attend the grand opening of a gas station, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed up in Chelsea yesterday with Sen. Chuck Schumer to help inaugurate the first Russian-owned chain of petroleum stops in America.

There was no ribbon-cutting at the opening of the Lukoil station at 10th Avenue and 24th Street, but the diminutive Russian leader shook hands with nervous-looking employees, drank a cup of coffee - spiked with skim milk - and sampled a Krispy Kreme doughnut in the station's Kwik Farms convenience store.

Schumer said the Russian-drilled petroleum from Lukoil - which bought out Getty Petroleum Marketing Inc. in 2000 - would be a boon the United States because it could help free America from dependence on oil from the OPEC nations, many of which are hostile Middle Eastern states.

"I hope it does cause problems for OPEC," Schumer said. "I hope OPEC is hurt by this so they don't have a stranglehold on the oil market anymore."

Lukoil says it gets its oil primarily from fields in western Siberia and the northern Caspian Sea.

Lukoil, which controls the second-largest oil reserve of any company, also gets oil from South America and from Iran and Egypt.

Before the war, Lukoil had a contract with Saddam Hussein to drill in Iraq, but the dictator voided it before his ouster because Lukoil talked with the United States about keeping its interests in the Gulf region after any possible conflict.

The company now hopes to return to Iraq, although its contract situation remains in limbo.

"The more competition there is in oil, especially against OPEC - the better New York will do, and the better America will do," Schumer said.

Putin spent about 15 minutes at the station, which had a bright-red color scheme that made it seem like more of a Soviet creation than that of a newly emerging capitalist country.

Lukoil President Vagit Alexperov told reporters, "Through today's action, America will have a new source of energy."

Lukoil now controls 1,300 former Getty-owned stations, including 122 in New York City, which it will slowly begin to rebrand as red-painted Lukoil stations.

The takeover of Getty was the first time a Russian oil company ever took over a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

"If Lukoil is successful and Russia is successful, then the price of oil will come down," Schumer said.

When a reporter noted the prices at the station were not exactly cheap: $1.95 for regular and $2.09 for super, Schumer said, "The prices aren't going to come down in a day."

Confederates in the South. Way south in Brazil

Confederates in the South. Way south in Brazil at Santa Barbara d'Oeste

Each year they hold their Southern heritage festivals. Descendants of Os Confederados, they play the part at these events. Visitors will find the men dressed in Johnny Reb uniforms, the women as Southern Belles. The visitor will notice a certain irony in terms of what the South stood for. Some of these men and women are of mixed parentage. Some of them still speak English with a Southern accent, although most speak only Portuguese.

A band plays Dixie while the the gentlemen and ladies eat fried chicken, then later dance. Gentlemen bow to ladies, offer their arm, then, her hand daintily hooked inside his elbow, he escorts her onto the dance floor. The band begins and they dance quadrilles, first maybe a Schottische then a Mazourka.

One gentleman, with the unlikely name Frederico, explains that they are trying to preserve their culture. 23 years old, he is dressed as a Confederate general.

Few in the states remember today the Great Confederate Migration after the Civil War, but, fearful of their fates under Yankee rule, thousands fled for places below the United States border. Some emigrated to Mexio, others went to Brazil, where an estimated 6,000 people emigrated.

Brazil lured the most Confederates because it encouraged immigration even before war's end with offers of land ownership, and help with transportation. They were encouraged to seek a new life in a country where slavery remained legal and cotton could again become king.

Passage cost $20 to $30, with a voyage over several weeks. Families brought tents, light weight furniture, farming supplies, seeds, and provisions to last six months. Land was offered at 22 cents an acre, with four years credit, and rich farmland was promised.

Former slave owners, women who had never cooked a meal or washed a garment were cooking and washing over an open campfire. Malaria was prevalent, and a drought ruined most of the first crops in the colony of Rio Doce.

Some of them settled in Americana, Brazil, others in Santa Barbara d'Oeste. They went elsewhere as well: Campinnas, Sao Paulo, Juquia, New Texas, Xiririca, and Rio de Janeiro. One colony settled in Santarem, in the north deep up the Amazon River. In such towns Confederate flags fly today without controversy.

In a graveyard outside Americana, 400 Confederate settlers lie buried under pine, eucalyptus, mango, and palm trees. Jimmy Carter's wife, Rosalyn, has an ancestor buried there, W.W. Wise, her great-uncle. Near his, another tombstone epitaph reads Roberto Stell Steagull--once a Rebel, Twice a Rebel, & Forever a Rebel. Born 1899, died 1985.

Pictures of a festival

Home_____Driving Mr. Albert: The Man Who Found Einstein’s Brain

Steven Levy said that he had almost a religious experience when he found it in Wichita, Kansas. A journalist for a magazine, New Jersey Monthly, he knew it had been missing since Einstein’s death. Yes, missing. The most brilliant mind of all time was buried without his head intact when he died in 1955. By 1978, when Levy’s editor told him to find it, the trail had gone cold. People speculated as to where it might be, but nobody had found it. After some investigation, Levy concluded rather logically that the brain might still be in the possession of the man who did the autopsy, the pathologist who examined the great scientist’s corpse.

Levy tracked the former Princeton pathologist, Dr Thomas S Harvey, to Wichita, Kansas. The day he chatted with Harvey in the physician’s office, he asked the man about the brain. Harvey, after some time, admitted that he had it. Where? asked Levy. Here, replied the doctor. Here? Yes, right here. Rather sheepishly he told Levy that it was in the very office where they sat.

He walked to a box marked Costa Cider and pulled out two big mason jars. Awestruck, Levy then gazed at the brain that changed the world, as the journalist put it. Most of the brain, except for the cerebellum and parts of the cerebral cortex, had been sliced.

Before he died at 76, Einstein had wanted his body cremated but granted that his brain be examined by science. Clearly, that didn’t happen until the brain was found. In 1985 a study examined Einstein’s brain against eleven men who died at age 64. The scientists examined the ratio of glial cells to neurons (nerve cells), in Einstein’s brain and compared them to the control group of men. They found nothing to indicate a remarkable difference.

In 1996 a study revealed that Einstein’s brain weighed 1,230 grams as compared to the average adult male brain at 1,400 grams. The physicist’s cerebral cortex was thinner than five control brains while his neurons were denser.

A 1999 paper revealed that the surface of Einstein’s brain had unusual groove patterns on both right and left parietal lobs, as compared to the brains of 35 men, average age 57. This lobe area is thought important for math and spatial reasoning. His brain had a much shorter lateral groove, which was partly missing.

What does all this prove? Nothing, really. Nothing at all. He was a genius who allowed that he didn’t know where his ideas came from. You can’t find the mind in the brain. No ideas, just meat is there. You can’t slice the mind on a dissecting table.

Don't get me wrong. Some day science may find a solid physical correlation between brain matter and genius. I suppose that the information will be useful.

But I find something else more useful. I speak of the mystery of life, of consciousness. It is that which pervades our being as the source of our lives. It is the fount of life. Some call it mystery. Others call it God.
______________________
A good read--Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain, by Michael Paterniti.

Home_____Ahmed Chalabi, The Man Iraqis Love To Hate

Ahmed Chalabi was the Pentagon's sweetheart. He has friends in high places, among them Paul WoIfowitz and Richard Perle. State Department had also been infatuated with him until certain people came to see him in a different light. Iraqi lore has him being smuggled out of Jordan in the trunk of a car. Why? Because he embezzled millions from a Jordanian bank. That's where the account below begins. According to it, Chalabi now wants to make good with Jordan.

In an Arabic article published in Elaph Mr Chalabi would pay 100 million Jordanian dinars in exchange for dropping Jordanian government allegations over Al Batra Bank. The Jordanian government accused him of fraud when he was bank manager. He was sentenced in absentia to a minimum of 22 years imprisonment after he fled Jordan.

After Saddam's fall, Jordanian media and government resurrected the issue. At that time Chalabi denied the charges and claimed persecution for his anti-Saddam position.

If innocent, why would he offer to pay 100 million dinars? Since he is now a high mucky-muck on the Iraq Governing Council, he should first explain himself to Iraqis. The Iraqis might ask him to exchange money with Iraq. He would give them his dinars while they repaid Iraqis for the money stolen when Saddam's daughters escaped to Jordan.

The main information comes from Hammorabi, Friday 14 Nov 2003.