Thoughts stirred from high above

JOSEPH N. BELL

My wife and I spent last weekend in Palm Desert as the guests of

Bruce and Susan Sumner, rejoicing with our good friends and hosts in

the remarkable progress Bruce -- Newport Beach resident and former

Orange County Superior Court judge -- is making in his recovery from

a stroke.

We hung out much of the time on their patio, enjoying the desert

air with a late fall tang, diverted periodically by golfers chipping

into the water from the third fairway just below us. That was the

unplanned entertainment. The planned variety took us to the new

casino in downtown Palm Springs, but, best of all, to the Palm

Springs Air Museum.

There, for two happy hours that must have seemed much longer to my

companions, I communed with almost every airplane I flew for the Navy

in World War II, all in vintage condition, ready for flight. There

was the Stearman biplane -- the Yellow Peril -- in which I first

soloed, which must look every bit as primitive to the young people

examining these artifacts as the World War I planes once looked to

me. There was the sleek, dependable SNJ, in which I took my advanced

training and later instructed cadets about to get their wings. And

the sturdy SBD, with its perforated dive flaps and its gun mounted in

the rear cockpit.

They all looked larger than life, and I ran my hands over them,

bringing up memories through my fingertips. The SBD had been dug up

from the bottom of Lake Michigan, where it was lost in one of the

fiascos that never got into the public press. When I was going

through primary flight training at the Chicago suburb of Glenview, we

were losing so many Navy pilots in combat that desperate measures

were taken to speed up our training. One of the more desperate was

converting a Lake Michigan passenger cruiser into a jeep carrier for

pilots to practice carrier landings.

Unfortunately, the converted cruiser didn’t go very fast. So when

it turned into the wind to take on aircraft, there had to be a near

gale blowing to make the landings and take-offs safe. Sometimes,

under pressure to get pilots out to combat areas, that safety point

was fudged and planes ended up in Lake Michigan. That’s what happened

to the impeccably restored dive bomber at the Palm Springs Air

Museum. I don’t know how many planes the U.S. lost this way (pilots

were apparently able to get out), but as cadets training nearby, we

heard fantastically inflated rumors, all of which came back to me

vividly as I marveled that I had ever flown this monster.

But the most provocative part of the day was a complete surprise.

We had blundered in on the dedication of a huge new mural to

celebrate the Tuskegee Airmen, and some of them were there to take

part in the program. Their history brought back memories considerably

less benign than the restored aircraft. Their determination to defy

and overcome blatant and stupid prejudice -- widespread in this

country at the start of World War II -- that black men lacked the

intelligence, skill and courage to fly military aircraft made them

the first to break this color line.

It didn’t come easily. Only after they distinguished themselves in

combat with the Army Air Force and won two Presidential Unit

Citations were they able to break down some of the walls of

segregation that carried over into civilian life after the war. Now,

gay men and women who have also distinguished themselves are facing

the same blanket prejudice in the military.

The considerable progress we’ve made since World War II in

chipping away at discrimination has to be balanced against our

facility for cranking it up whenever a new minority appears to be

threatening.

This was distressingly illustrated when I returned home and read

the letters excoriating Lolita Harper for her tough, even-handed and

altogether wonderful column about the local people who are trying to

make refusal to buy a new U.S. stamp commemorating an Islamic holiday

a mark of patriotism.

The reaction to those first angry letters has filled the Forum

page for the past week. It has included an avalanche of grateful mail

from Muslims all over the world after the Council for American

Islamic Relations included Lolita’s column in its newsletter. Most of

the rest came from local letter writers strongly critical of Lolita’s

critics. So Lolita needs support from me about as urgently as Barry

Bonds needs more batting practice. But here goes anyway.

Like the Tuskeegee Airmen, who were lumped en masse into a

mythical and totally inaccurate view of our African American

citizens, so it has become popular in some Christian fundamentalist

circles to regard all Muslim Americans as somehow sharing

responsibility for the terrorist acts against this country. This

reasoning makes it possible to turn a stamp commemorating a Muslim

holiday dedicated to peace, tolerance and family values into a symbol

of hatred.

This argument has been deconstructed surgically by several Forum

letter writers, so let me add just two thoughts. One of the most

consistent myths used to support fundamentalist doctrine is to

portray the founders of this country as universally and unilaterally

committed to the concept of a Christian nation.

This is both false and simplistic. These were complex men with

complex views that can only be explored individually in historically

sound biographies. But President George Washington left little room

for doubt when his administration negotiated (and John Adams signed)

a treaty that said flatly: “The government of the United State is

not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Then, we have the complaint that the boycott-the-stamp activists

are being attacked for their religious views. What the authors of

this boycott don’t understand is that critics are not challenging

their personal religious convictions -- and never would. It is only

when these convictions -- which fundamentalists of all faiths,

including Christian, regard not as human opinion but absolute truth

-- are exported to influence social and political change that they

enter the marketplace of ideas and are open to challenge.

That’s where Lolita found them -- in the Pilot mail. And responded

by offering those responsible an opportunity to explain further their

reasons for urging recipients of their e-mail to “pass this along to

every patriotic AMERICAN you know.” And by giving the last word to

Rev. Dennis Short, president of the Newport-Mesa-Irvine Interfaith

Council, who assured her that “to blame the vast majority of the

devoutly religious and peace-loving adherents to Islam is just not

right.”

And not very Christian, either.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.