Every morning the orange-robed young monk crossed one leg, then another, bowed his sheared head over the sole of either foot and mumbled what I assumed were Sanskrit words over them, as the order was clearly part of the Mahayana tradition. I learned from my friend Isamu Yamada that the monk prayed his feet would not inadvertently kill an unsuspecting insect or, if they accidentally did, would cause it to be reborn into a higher consciousness. The ritual, repeated day after day in sunshine or inclement weather, was born out of an inner discipline the monk learned from his earliest training. Its result was a cheerful, humble individual who went about his daily tasks — even the most menial — with enthusiasm. He was acutely aware — perhaps as I would never be — of his community and his responsibility to it.

It was 1969. The Vietnam War was in full swing and beginning to bleed into Laos and Cambodia. For me, it was a war of vivid images: the Eddie Adams photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street, faces of young men standing in lines at the military airport awaiting transport to Saigon, the seemingly endless stream of B-52 aircraft coming and going from the airstrip near where my family lived, and the June 1963 news photo of Quang Duc, the first Vietnamese monk to immolate himself. The monk troubled me. I had a copy of the news photo, illuminated by a hippie artist and torn from the pages of an underground newspaper, tacked to a bulletin board in my room. More than anything I wanted to understand what would make a human set himself on fire. It seemed unthinkable to me.

It was part of the reason I paid such close attention to the young monk who prayed over his feet opposite my bus stop. I often wondered if he was — whether he recognized it or not — following a path that would eventually lead to death by immolation. Why did he live in community, set apart from his peers, those chattering, uniformed high school students I saw spill off commercial buses in groups of threes and fours during restless afternoons spent prowling movie theatres and purported “black market” alleyways? He hardly seemed much older than me, yet he had given up everything I valued — freedom, individuality and sexuality — for the pipe dream of religion or to satisfy the whims of his believing family. Had Quang Duc followed the same instruction against his will, instruction that led, not to his being raised to a loftier consciousness, but to his being doused with gasoline and devoured by flames?

The young monk never passed my bus stop without smiling and nodding his head at me. Isamu Yamada bowed slightly at his passing. A smile from a monk, Isamu Yamada said, was like a blessing. It meant you would have good fortune throughout the day. Superstitious nonsense, I responded. But I had to grudgingly admit I looked forward to the gentle greeting, and I was disappointed on days when the bus arrived earlier than the toothy blessing.

I have narrated this much of the story often enough, occasionally to the interest and curiosity of hearers; I have seldom — perhaps never — related the rest of the story, mainly because I was too ashamed of my behavior to tell it.

One day, after the orange robe passed, I suggested to Isamu Yamada that we ditch school and follow the monk on his rounds. After bribing my companion and translator with a free lunch and an hour at a Pachinko parlor, he agreed. We stowed our books down the street at his house (both his parents worked outside the home) and traipsed off after our quarry. In his bright orange robe, he was easy prey. We could have easily followed at a distance without much effort, but the longer we pursued, the more distance frustrated me. Before long, we found ourselves within earshot of the monk. I am certain he knew we were tailing him, but he did not acknowledge our presence. Instead, he pressed on toward the town’s residential section.

:::

There, at the home of a sympathizer, he obtained a large bowl that he carried in the crook of his arm, holding it against his body. Into it he began emptying smaller bowls of what looked like vegetables and rice from the little pagoda-like altars at house after house of those believers who contributed to the well-being of the monastery. The area was not very affluent; in fact, my mother’s maid, Kieko, who earned a mere $3.50 for a hard day’s labor, might have lived there. It seemed bad enough to me that Westerners were exploiting the island’s poor — that this religious charlatan, with his prayer beads and his bobbing, smiling head, was taking food from their tables seemed worse. I found myself wanting to erase the smile from his face. The more his bowl filled, the angrier I got.

Finally, I muttered under my breath to Isamu Yamada, “I’m going to knock him on his ass.”

I increased the pace of my step to a very brisk walk, barely hearing Isamu Yamada’s astonished, “What?!” behind me. As I neared the monk, I became aware of his stride and the location of his hips and shoulder. I was seeking his center of gravity, looking — as I did during street football games — for the place and time when he was most vulnerable. All I needed do was wait until his right foot bore his full weight, then place my left foot in front of his and bring my 160 pounds to bear on his back and shoulder. I was so near to him that I could smell the odor of his skin. I focused all my attention on his hips and shoulder. My adrenaline surged. When the time came, I struck with all my might, leaning into the task as hard as I could.

It was a classic takedown. The great bowl sprang from his grip and flew forward in the air, spilling its contents over the sidewalk and street. The young monk sprawled forward, catching the weight of his fall on his elbow and knees: He fell hard. I could almost hear the rasp of his skin on the concrete. He lay still for a moment, then turned and pulled himself to a seated position on the ground. Isamu Yamada had run forward and rattled off something in Japanese to the monk. He glared at me:

“How could you do such a thing!”

He assisted the monk to his feet, all the while talking to him in Japanese.

A long gash in the skin of the monk’s forearm and elbow dripped blood on the ground; one of his knees was badly scraped; his food was strewn over the sidewalk and street and the bowl he had carried was broken into several pieces.

He smiled at me, brought his hands together in front of his chest, bowed, and said something to me in Japanese.

“What did he say?” I asked Isamu Yamada.

My friend was shaking with anger: “He says he is sorry he got in your way,” he spat at me. “He wants you to forgive him.”

I don’t believe I ever felt more humiliated. A part of me understood how completely sinister my behavior had been and wanted to atone for the evil deed; another part wanted to slap the monk into Western reality. I felt utterly condemned. I muttered something in English and tried to press a few dollars on the monk. He refused my offer and apologized again; then he shrugged off Isamu Yamada’s assistance and bent to gather the ceramic shards from the street and sidewalk. When Isamu Yamada and I tried to help, he shook his hand and waved us away. In Japanese, he said, “The responsibility is mine.” Isamu Yamada gripped my forearm and led me down the street away from the catastrophe. Once we were back in town he told me he was going home: He didn’t want to be seen with me. More than a week passed before he would speak with me again.

I gathered my books at Isamu Yamada’s house, then wandered down to the seawall, where I sat in the sand with my back against the cinder blocks and listened to the roar of the waves and watched a group of hippies having a picnic. I considered my arrogance and what it cost me in emotional currency.

For more than a week I could not bring myself to catch the bus at my usual stop, but walked a good 8 or 12 blocks to another. One morning, running late, I could not avoid a return to my usual place. There I turned my back on the monastery and talked non-stop with Isamu Yamada (we were speaking, but had not returned to mutual trust). As usual, the young monk passed, his elbow still bandaged after our collision; he bowed and smiled. I found I could not look him in the eye.

In fact, over the remaining several months I rode that bus, I was never again able to meet his gentle gaze.

Two nights ago in a dream I followed the sound of music, a somber, otherworldly meditation that drew me into the back yard, over the tall wood fence, through the yards of backfence neighbors, across the sales lot of a mobile home dealer, over the asphalt river of a broad county road, through the parking lots and uninspired brick buildings of a community college, over chainlink and barbed wire and four lanes of concrete interstate highway past more chainlink and barbed wire, until finally — finally! — I came to an oasis of woods — oaks and hickories and pines and maples — a space that would pass, in the absence of civilization, for non-tropical rain forest. There, in the cool dense shadows of a glade I came upon hundreds of Great Apes — gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans — gathered together in a vast circle, playing musical instruments of their own making and singing in voices that were nothing like their usual screeching, chattering depictions, but were warm and lyrical and, above all, resigned. The apes were playing a funeral dirge. Their own.

In my dream I stood for long minutes listening to the bleak, hypnotic, percussive sound until I began to understand its meaning, and I heard the long history of a simple people who lived in trees and foraged for food and warred among themselves and with men until technology came, with its rapacious appetite and its enormous greed, and slowly ground down the bones of the ancients, distilling them into what remained: Little more than a great symphony orchestra and a handful of prisoners in zoos. I was so moved by their dirge that I stripped off all my clothing, covered my body in mud, colored my hair with ash, and uttered a primal scream out of the despair in my gut. In that moment I was the last representative of my tribe, consumed with loneliness, aching for a companionship that simply did not exist, understanding that, when I breathed my last it would not simply be my final exhalation, but the death rattle of all my people, the genocide of my kind. It is finished. Amen.

•

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…” begins one of my favorite books, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen’s memoir of her experience as the owner of a coffee plantation in Kenya. A number of preferred reads are centered in what Henry Stanley called the “Dark Continent,” including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa. There is, in each of them, a strong appreciation of Africa’s natural beauty, coupled with a thoroughly paternalistic attitude toward the land and its people. From the Victorian era deep into the 20th century, Europeans migrated south, planted colonies, plundered them, polluted indigenous cultures and then fled back to their “civilizations” when their luck turned sour or their investments proved less than profitable. As Chinua Achebe expressed in an essay entitled “The Role of the Writer in the New Nation” for Nigeria Magazine in 1964, “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; …their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, …they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that African people all but lost during the colonial period, and it is this that they must now regain.” Nearly a half-century later, much of Africa remains oppressed, ravaged by war, famine, and epidemic disease. In many areas the dignity Mr. Achebe envisioned is as elusive as ever. In such a fragile environment, one is hard pressed to prefer apes over humans: After all, aren’t humans of greater value than their “lesser” kin?

Truth is, we seem to blithely ignore both the relatively quick genocide of Great Apes and the slow destruction by HIV/AIDS of African humans, preferring, instead, to invest in the creation of new and improved weapons of mass destruction. So neoconservatism has as its ultimate goal not the preservation of life, but its abolition. Perhaps it takes a little too seriously the REM lyric, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” Or maybe there is truth in the notion that the neocons believe they are hastening the Second Coming of Christ. Whatever the case, to hear the Vice Fund tell it, investing in self-destruction is quite profitable. How this relates to the extinction of Great Apes may not be immediately clear, but consider this: If we care so little for the preservation of our own species, and choose profit over survival, why should we be expected to care about the loss of a few higher primates? The world lost passenger pigeons and dodo birds at the turn of the 20th century. It is simply moving a little higher up the food chain at the turn of the 21st.

•

When I was a kid, accepted wisdom concerning the Neanderthal peoples was this: They were distant ancestors in a chain that passed from Great Apes through homo erectus and homo neanderthalensis to homo sapiens. According to the convention, in my distant past there existed a series of blood kin Neanderthals. Science in the 1960s said they were as much a part of my family tree as my own mother and father. But the accepted wisdom was mistaken. Nearly all anthropologists now agree that Neanderthals were “an evolutionary dead end,” and DNA evidence seems to support their view. Neanderthals were a very different species from modern humans.

Still debated is how exactly Neanderthal man ceased to exist. Some claim lower birth rates and higher morbidity rates caused the decline in Neanderthals; others blame the climate or environmental changes. I agree with those who hold the view that modern man simply exterminated his Neanderthal neighbors. Considering we have been for centuries quite willing to kill our homo sapiens brothers and sisters for something as simple as the amount of melanin in their skin, it is little wonder that, competing with a different species for territory and food, we would resort to violence. It’s our modus operandi.

That interpretation, as distasteful as it sounds, goes a long way toward explaining why we have succeeded as a species for long centuries where others have failed. We’ve been smart at winnowing out everything that got in our way. From tiny bacteria to great beasts, we’ve met them all and taken them out; at our technological acme, we can now eliminate hundreds of thousands of our own kind with the utterance of a single bomb. If homo sapiens are good at anything, they are good at this: We are perhaps the best killers on the planet.

It may well be the reason Gaea spewed us up in the first place. Maybe she is tired of these squirmers squirming over her crust; maybe she longs, as a dog longs to rid himself of fleas, to purge herself of these wrigglers wriggling. Perhaps homo sapiens are her answer to the problem — a gang of highly specialized killers who, in their bloodlust, will eventually destroy even themselves. Perhaps my sentimental belief that we should stop encroaching on the habitat of the Great Apes, that we have a moral obligation to those humans dying of HIV/AIDS in Africa is exactly that: A sentimental belief. It could be those who deride me as a “tree-hugger” and a “knee-jerk liberal” are on the money. This isn’t Disneyland. We’re here to do a job. Let’s get on with it.

But the notion chafes at everything I’ve come to believe in 48 years, and at the teaching of a man whose birth we seem hell-bent on forgetting in our lust for a perfectly commercialized holiday season. He points toward a higher way, a nobler evolutionary path: “Love your enemies,” he says. “And pray for those who spitefully use you.” His closest disciples define love not in the way we take lives, but in the way we lay down our lives. In other words, this man, this radical preacher, this rebel Jesus (to quote Jackson Browne) wants homo sapiens to live utterly opposing their deadly natures. Taken at his word, he is the anti-Rambo. No wonder neocons twist his sermons and distort his teachings. He is not one of them. Not even remotely.

•

In my dream one of the Great Apes, a gentle orangutan, is named Jesus. He makes one promise, one guarantee to his apostles: “If you follow me,” he says, “you will suffer persecution.” None of his disciples question what he means by it. He is talking about physical suffering and death. “And then, the resurrection,” he says.

Outside, on this late-December morning, shoppers are scurrying from place-to-place, buying presents and hanging tinsel, hastening, hurrying. The great carol of the day is not “Silent Night” nor “Noel” but the hustle and bustle of consumerism. It’s what we know in the world of plastic Jesuses and one too many pontificators interpreting his teaching. I suppose the condemnation reaches all the way down to me. He said it most eloquently himself: “Turn the other cheek.” The best acknowledgement of it is not in repeating the words, but in doing it. In turning the other cheek. We aren’t big on cheek-turning in the beginning of the 21st century. We’re much better at revenge.

In the orchestra of my dreams, bonobo drummers keep a steady rhythm, and I imagine a procession of humans carrying the corpse of the last Great Ape, perhaps a gorilla, from the wild to its final resting place.

The corpse looks remarkably human.

•

For those who have read this far, thank you. I hope your holidays are happy ones. For insight into how I arrived here, I offer the following links:

• UNAIDS
• Countdown to extinction for world’s great apes
• Orangutans Headed Toward “Catastrophe”

Of all the cats, she is the most affectionate, rubbing against my ankles and pressing her long, dark fur into my touch. She is a social cat. She appreciates music, prefers Mozart or James to Telemann and Counting Crows. She will not endure Beethoven, and leaves the room in a haughty huff during the opening bars of the Eroica. We have come to a compromise over Pearl Jam. She tolerates them, but only once. If I repeat a CD, she leaves her favorite spot on the sofa, leaps up on my desk and glares. The signal is clear: One of us must relent. The few times I overruled her, she uttered an angry yammer and prissed out of the room.

Molly is the most vocal of the four cats. Rocky lost his powers of speech when a veterinarian accidentally destroyed his vocal cords while intubating him prior to surgery. His blocked urethra was opened and his distended bladder was emptied, but he came away from the procedure mute. Now he simply croaks and squeaks. Max talks, but only to fake mice and genuine insects that fall prey to him. He’ll hold a frenzied moth at bay by pinning a wing with his front paw, and he’ll very politely explain how he is sorry for all his carnivorous urges before eating it. Scruffy never talks. Like the Sphinx, she keeps all her wisdom to herself.

Molly demonstrates no such restraint. Like a feline blogger with an axe to grind, she talks loudly and about everything. “Mouse?” she asks. Where is the toy mouse? And why aren’t we playing fetch? Throw the mouse. Mouse is her favorite word, and she repeats it again and again during the course of any conversation: Mouse!

“Out!” she says, standing at the back door. This, of course, means, “I have been standing here behind your chair for a good three minutes and I expect you to pay attention to my every whim and open this door right now!” Outside, on the back step, she says, “Out!” I am out! Let me in! I’m tired and I need a nap! Once inside, she pauses at my chair and tells me the whole story of her outdoor adventures; or, if I have been lax in opening the door, she tells me off in no uncertain terms while crossing the office, never looking back, making her way to her food dish or the water trough.

“How?” she asks. How did this food dish get empty? How come there is no water for me to drink? How long has it been since somebody scraped out this litter box?

If mouse is her favorite noun, now is her favorite adverb. She has no patience. Everything must be done now. “Now, now, now, now, now,” she says.

Ow! is her only complaint. Ow! You’ve stepped on my tail! Ow! That’s my paw! Ow! Watch where you’re sitting. The operative part of her discourse is clear: Molly will not budge. If anyone moves, I will do the moving. Like all the women I love, she makes her own determinations and bends them only after sustained negotiation.

She is open to negotiation. If she sprawls across the loveseat so I cannot occupy it, I’ll rub her head and shoulders, scratch round her neck, and gently persuade her that it is in her best interests to relent. She does so by degrees, as a reminder that she is not acquiescing, but simply compromising in the moment. Tomorrow I might not be as fortunate. “I understand, darling,” I tell her.

She stretches and kneads the sofa, arches her back so I’ll rub down the length of her spine. “I like you this afternoon,” her loud purr tells me. “I like you a lot.”

Tomorrow I might not be so lucky. “I’m thinking!” she’ll shrug. “I’m busy. Leave me alone.” Fortunately, I understand this behavior; I’ve done it often enough myself. But because we mostly live in the moment, today’s rebuff will be diminished by tomorrow’s small intimacies.

“Now!” she’ll tell me. Scratch me there! And I’ll realize again that her vocal warmth is worth the price of her small silences.

The sturdy red dog in question is built like a Labrador retriever, down to his half-long wavy coat. Only, in an accident of genetics, his fur is neither blond nor chocolate, but of a dark auburn color that makes him ineligible for pedigree. Normally, he is all wags-friendly and nearly quivers with excitement when I call him from across the street. He is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a “pack dog”. He doesn’t much care whether the others in his cadre are canine or human, he wants to be included. If he surfed the Web, the list of friends in his social network would be enormous. He’d know everybody and everybody’d know him.

There isn’t a kid on the block who doesn’t recognize him by name and greet him with a hearty hello whenever he’s near. He lopes up to each of them, from the largest to the smallest, with a demeanor so amiable that not even the least child is frightened by him. If a dog can be described as “smiling,” he’s the one. There is no malice whatsoever in him.

So it came as quite a surprise when, on a long walk late this afternoon, the red dog suddenly bowed up, raised his hackles and growled under his breath.

“What’s up, boy?” I asked him.

He stood still, snarling, frozen in the position of a warrior ready at a moment’s notice to spring into action. His eyes locked onto something in the distance. I followed his gaze and finally noticed the skinny German police dog coming up the street.

I’d seen the poor fellow before — his ribs showing like the rack of a xylophone, his disposition sour and surly — scrounging for food in garbage cans in the neighborhood. I thought of taking him in and feeding him, but when I approached he warned me off with a not-very-polite grrn and skulked away.

Most days the German police dog hung out with a gang of evil-temepered mongrels, among them a one-eyed pit bull who was a known biter and who, it was rumored, had fought in an illegal dog ring. Sure enough, standing with the red dog at the top of the hill, I picked the others out of the landscape one-by-one. To get past them would be no mean trick, and there was no way home but past them.

“What do you think, boy? Think we can muddle through?”

I wondered how I’d fight off the big one-eyed bruiser if he turned on me, and in my imagination I kept seeing those grainy black-and-white magazine photographs of people with dog bites. Pit bulls left wicked wounds. They were trained for it.

There was nothing left but do it. I started forward and the red dog reluctantly came alongside, eventually walking a little in front of me, my guardian. Along the way I picked up a couple of good-sized rocks and kept my eyes locked on the pit bull. From a distance he looked 80-pounds big, but he grew in my estimation as we neared him until, within a few hundred feet, I could have sworn he weighed 400 pounds and had a mouth as wide and deep as a commercial dumpster.

The red dog kept getting farther and farther ahead of me, nearing the Cyclops. He got within a few yards of the cur and held his ground, daring the other to come forward. Forward he came, his head lowered in an attack position, the huge jaws arcing from side to side ahead of the movement of his enormous shoulders.

Just when I thought the moment would turn violent, the red dog smiled and sniffed the air. The pit bull, caught off guard by his opponent’s sudden gentleness, hitched a step and sniffed in return. The two approached one another, sniffing and snorting from head to tail. Following their greeting the red dog loped back in my direction, the Cyclops trailing, and — I kid you not — the red dog introduced us. I dropped one of my rocks and offered the pit bull the back of my hand to sniff; a moment later he lowered his massive head for a friendly rub.

We walked through the pack without a scratch. The rest simply followed the behavior of the alpha dog and sniffed around us, then went about the business of foraging food. Cyclops stayed with us halfway home before turning back to the pack.

The moral of the story is this: Put your money on the red dog. He makes friends of his enemies.

I should have learned his name, and shame on me for not knowing it. Because Winston was hopelessly in love with me.

He was a 7-year-old capuchin monkey, a stocky little fellow who looked for all the world like a gorilla if a gorilla was the size of a ten-month-old human child. He was the color of milk chocolate, broad at the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with powerful arms that were twice the length of his stubby, muscular legs. What differentiated him from the average gorilla was his face: It was blanched white and sported two black, liquid, very human eyes under an Eddie Munster widow’s peak. He lived in a cage, a six-foot metal cube containing a dead section of a tree and a female capuchin, much smaller, stoop-shouldered, who looked like a different species of animal, though her face was also white and her hairline equally dramatic. By his ferocious temper and frequent white-fanged, barking displays of testosterone, Winston kept his female companion sufficiently cowed to suit him. He was the absolute master of his too-tiny domain.

Winston’s prison (for, indeed, it was the worst kind of prison) was located in a mom-and-pop pet store in a north Alabama township, and I often visited him there when purchasing cat food or as a diversion on a gloomy afternoon. Over the course of a nearly year-long aquaintance, Winston grew to recognize me, then to know me, and then to anticipate my arrival. I have no clue how it happened, whether I reminded him of his mother or my cologne contained the squeezings from a female monkey gland or I had been, in a previous life, the Marilyn Monroe of capuchin monkeys, but eventually Winston came to love me, and love me with an unrequited passion that burned in his eyes and rolled off his lips in squeaks and grunts.

Our affair started simply enough. One day, quick as a flash, Winston reached a paw outside his cage, grabbed my shirt sleeve, pulled my hand to the steel bars, pressed his cheek to it and stared up at me with a pensive expression on his face. He looked heartsick. He clung to my hand and rolled his eyes and made purring noises deep in his throat.

The owner of the pet shop, working a newspaper crossword, glanced up over her reading glasses and warned, “You’d better get your hand away from there. That monkey bites.” A half-minute later she said, a little astonished, “I’ve never seen him do that before.”

It was a good three minutes before I was able to gently extricate my hand from Winston’s, and even then he looked as though I had taken his best friend from him. He climbed to the top of the cage and watched my every move, chattering as I walked down the cat food aisle, screeching as I picked up a 10-pound bag of Science Diet Regular and carried it to the checkout counter, and hissing when I interacted with the pet shop owner. Her name, I learned, was Carol, and she and her husband had “adopted” Winston and Elizabeth after their original owners had been arrested for importing illegal exotic animals into the United States. By the time they were discovered, both capuchins were too old and too tame to be released back into the wild.

“We thought it would be like adopting a couple of babies,“ Carol told me. “It isn’t. They’re a lot of work.”

Winston swung from side to side on his cage bars, howling plaintively.

“I’ve never seen him behave that way,” Carol said and shook her head.

I gave Winston’s cage wide berth as I left the store; I swear he watched me get into my car and back out of the drive.

From that point on the ritual was the same: Whenever I’d enter the store I’d stop by Winston’s cage, give him my hand, and let him make love-eyes and sing to me. If I happened to be in the company of my then-roommate — a charming brunette with a dazzling smile — the little monkey would moan, screech and spit until she moved away from me, and only when she had gone an appropriate distance would he resume his courtship. It became something of a novelty in the store. Carol and her husband often stopped customers and said, “Look. Winston has a crush on this guy. Watch him.” And Winston and I would go into our routine.

Of course, love has its trials, and my relationship with the little capuchin proved the rule. One day I happened into the building when Carol was cleaning his cage and Winston was free in the store. He was standing atop of a stack of dog food cans and, when he saw me enter the building, he dashed off them, tumbling several tins to the floor, springing over three shelving units and onto my back, wrapping his simian arms around my neck and pressing the side of his face into my ear. His display of affection so startled me that I screamed a little and nearly lost my footing. We were both rattled, but Winston clung to me as though I was the last vine to Paradise. It was all I could do to move him to the front of my body, adjusting his grip so he did not strangle me. His hug was all arms and legs, and his muscles were like steel bands. He was determined not to turn loose. In fact, after a 15-minute union, it took the combined efforts of husband, wife, my roommate and and me to pry away the little fellow. Back in his cage, he shrieked and whined and pouted, and it was only after I offered him my hand that he settled down. Following that experience, I never entered the store without first checking through the glass door to see whether Winston was locked safely away.

So it went. I started bringing him toys and treats, and he loved me faithfully and groomed my hands and wrote little songs he sang from the back of his throat in cooing monkey couplets. When I took a position in Atlanta so my roommate would be closer to her family, I visited Winston and told him goodbye, promising I’d visit the first chance I got. It was the last time I saw him.

Like all star-crossed love affairs ours ended in tragedy. During the six months before I returned for a visit, Winston died. It seems his owners left him in the store one winter weekend and the heater failed in their absence. Due to exposure, Winston caught fatal pneumonia. His mate died a month later, presumably of loneliness. I asked Carol a number of questions about the pair and she finally cut me off: “They were pets,” she said. “Nothing more.”

But driving back to my motel in a gray drizzle I couldn’t help remembering that Winston’s affection had never failed. Not once in all the time I knew him.

We’ll start with a review of the soldiers’ oath, a pledge made by everyone who enters the United States military. It’s pretty simple, really:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

I want to stress a very simple point here: Soldiers agree to support and defend the Constitution. Not the United States themselves, nor their elected officials, nor even the citizens of the nation, but the contract we, the people, have agreed will govern us. I constructed that last phrase quite carefully. We, the people, are not ruled by our elected officials, but by the document that circumscribes even their conduct.

In fact, within the framework of the Constitution, we govern ourselves, and our citizen soldiers vow to support the Constitution even before they agree to follow the orders of the President or their officers. This hierarchy is important because, if officers or presidents prove to be domestic enemies of the Constitution, soldiers are no longer obligated to serve them. They are, rather, sworn to defend the Constitution against them.

It is important to recall that, while the constitution was drafted by remarkable people, they were first and foremost a group of rebels that had lived under the rule of a tyrant, and they were determined not to let their newly conceived government become the tool of despots. After trying out and rejecting Articles of Confederation, they drafted and adopted the present document. But it was still suspect. To spell out immunities provided individual citizens who would serve as watchdogs insuring elected officials did not exceed their legal limitations, the new Senate and House of Representatives immediately ratified ten amendments to the constitution: the Bill of Rights.

Regardless of how else one interprets it, the Bill of Rights is about ordinary citizens preventing the abuse of power by elected officials. The amendments were ratified because the infant government recognized that, to succeed, it needed two things: First, a clear definition of the powers of government adminstrators (the Constitution itself) and, second, an informed, vigilent, somewhat suspicious citizenry with the right to demand its elected officials toe the line. It is clear from the way the Constitution is constructed that its framers believed one part of the equation wouldn’t work without the other.

Many in today’s society, instructed by tradition and nationalism rather than a critical understanding of the Constitution, believe supporting their elected officials in any and all their actions is, in fact, patriotism. This is especially — perhaps dangerously — true of their attachment to the seated president and his advisors. But the reality, as abstracted by the Constitution, is quite the opposite: The Constitution both approves of and encourages dissent, because dissent lets elected officials know that unconstitutional abuses of power will not be tolerated. Who defines the abuse of power? Certainly Congress and the Supreme Court, but also (and perhaps more importantly) a well-educated citizenry, a citizenry informed by a free press and expressing itself through free speech. Let me say the following quite clearly: Any agency attempting to compromise those freedoms — especially during times of national distress (war, for example) — is anti-American. A well-informed citizenry validates the actions of soldiers on the battlefield precisely through exercising the rights guaranteed by the Constitution that the army is sworn to protect and defend.

Let me repeat that last statement: If soldiers on the battlefield are executing the lawful mandate prescribed by the Constitution — ie. its support and defense — then those at home exercising their constitutional rights are encouraging them, making their work purposeful. If, on the other hand, soldiers on the battlefield are operating outside the lawful mandate prescribed by the Constitution, then voices of dissent are their best chance of being extracted from unconstitutional hazard.

Lately, George W. Bush and his cabinet officials have done an astounding job of disinformation, convincing those informed by tradition and nationalism that their critics are “demoralizing American troops and putting them at risk.” In fact, most of the administration’s critics are simply insisting that it act circumspectly, according to constitutional mandate. Far from putting troops at risk, the administration’s critics want to insure they are not deployed haphazardly, nor being used as pawns in the quest of an American empire that is clearly outside both national and international law. Calling this dissent “un-American” is either badly misinformed, deliberately misleading, or both.

A second response to criticism is the “why don’t you move to Iraq?” or less venomous “you should be glad you were born in America” sleight-of-hand. Certainly I am fortunate that the Constitution guarantees my right to free speech, but the guarantee comes with the responsibility to exercise it in defense of that freedom. So while I rank myself among the privileged, I am also among the obligated. By implication, the Constitution requires that I speak out against its abuses, whether the president, his cabinet or those informed by tradition and nationalism like it or not (and perhaps especially if they don’t like it).

My question in answer to their criticism is this: What are you gentlemen hiding? If your actions are constitutional, why worry about criticism? Why expand the ability of government to pry into the privacy of individual citizens while continually cloaking your own actions in secrecy? Why stifle dissent that, according to your estimation, has no teeth?