Mark Pine

This weekend, the NY Times ran a story on the Obama’s administration’s covert war on al Qaeda. But war is not the right word. What the reporters described is a clandestine Special Forces campaign.

The reporters wrote that the CIA has become a paramilitary organization, conducting attacks with missiles and other weapons, and the Pentagon has be come like the CIA, conducting spy missions. Private companies under government contract have also participated.

Such operations have played major roles in the wars Iraq and Afghanistan and in operations in Yemen. Congressional oversight has lagged, because existing legislation doesn’t apply to these special military programs, the Times reports.

I read the story with ambivalence. On the one hand, I know in my heart that if I were president, I would, like Obama, authorize any covert operation that could reasonably succeed in tracking down and eliminating Bin Laden and other terrorists.

On the other hand, I imagine and worry about the possible misuse of such capabilities by a future government of the United States. In the nightmare scenario I envision, Will Smith plays Robert Dean fleeing agents of the NSA in the 1998 movie “Enemy of the State.” Dean, an innocent bystander caught up in a rogue security operation, possesses a videotape showing a murder committed by the agents of the government.

In the most hellish scene, Smith runs and jumps from rooftop to rooftop, dashes up and down stairs, sprints down streets and through tunnels, etc., in Washington, DC, pursued by agents in helicopters, cars and on foot, all the while tracked by surveillance cameras.

Back when the movie was filmed, there were no drones. But if there were an actual Robert Dean today, he could be surveilled from on high by drones and targeted by missiles.

Ours is a nation that was founded in rebellion. The signers of the Declaration are reputed to have joined in rebellion because Benjamin Franklin told them, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

What would happen today if an unjust government misused its power against the citizenry? I don’t mean the stuff of Tea Party paranoia, which is making the rounds today on some networks on the internet. I mean suppose it really happened. What would happen if the government started using some of the awesome counterterrorism capabilities it is now developing to pursue al Qaeda on American citizens inside this nation?

I worry about that when I read a story such as this one in the Times Saturday. I applaud the aggressive pursuit of Bin Laden at the same time as I remember that the existence of al Qaeda itself is attributable to blowback from CIA clandestine operations. Could the blow one day come back to our own nation?

Using Predator and Reaper drones piloted by soldiers thousands of miles away, America has attacked militants in Pakistan more than 100 times, according to P.W. Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar on robotic war, in an article in this month’s issue of Scientific American. He writes:

The distancing of the human combatant from the theater of conflict may make wars easier to start and may even change how we view them. … A growing number of soldiers wake up, drive to work, sit in front of computers and use robotic systems to battle insurgents 11,300 kilometers away. At the end of the day “at war,” they get back in their cars, drive home, and as one U.S. Air Force officer put it, “Within 20 minutes, you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids.”

Virtually nonexistent a decade ago, robotic war happens frequently today. U.S. Forces invading Iraq in 2003 took no robots with them, but thousands of robots are now in use or on standby.

Military robots come in all sizes and shapes. Packbots, small ground vehicles used by the Army and the Marines to disarm explosives, were among the first. Other ground vehicles perform surveillance operations and can be outfitted with guns. The Air Force deploys drone aircraft to do surveillance and fire missiles. The Navy is developing unmanned helicopters and robotic patrol boats for its destroyers and littoral combat ships and unmanned underwater surveillance vehicles. SciAm has on its website two short videos showing some of these robots and explaining their use.

Robotic war is the American military version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On one hand, it’s wonderful that our nation can wage war effectively and precisely in a way that keeps our soldiers safe from harm. But on the other hand it conjures nightmare scenarios. Wars may indeed become easier to start when soldiers can be deployed without young men risking their lives. But that also means they can kill with impunity, even indifference.

With increasing computing power and artificial intelligence, military robots could begin to make decisions to kill. Robotic weapons systems already in existence react so quickly that the human participation in decision-making would be limited to the programming of the weapon at the start of battle. Singer writes that robots could become “war fighter associates” in which humans would “quarterback” the plays and the robots would autonomously execute them.

I remember reading a SciFi novel a long time ago about robot war among spaceships. The battles were waged entirely between onboard computers and happened so quickly that the humans never knew about them. They won or they lost and passed out of existence in an instant. It’s the stuff of terrors and phobias.

It’s not surprising that “a leading newspaper in Pakistan declared the U.S. to be ‘a principal hate figure’ and an ‘all purpose scapegoat’ because of the drone strikes, according to Singer. And robotic war casts a different light on America’s own home-grown militia movement, which seems to be preparing for insurrection against our government. It makes one think that these guys haven’t a clue or a chance against a government possessed of weapons systems that can surveil like eagles on high and strike like lightening below.

Linda Greenhouse, the former NY Times Supreme Court reporter and current legal columnist for the newspaper, has written “Before Row v. Wade,” a book on the history, events and debate leading up to the Court’s 1973 decision on abortion and the perennial struggle and debate that is its aftermath. Reva Seigel, a professor of law at Yale, is her coauthor.

“The initial impulse came from public health concerns and, to some degree from the elite of the legal profession. … At first, abortion was presented as a public health issue. Back alley, illegal abortions were a significant cause of death and injury. Here was really a medical problem that needed to be fixed,” Greenhouse explained during an interview at the Brennan Center for Justice, discussing the societal background of Roe v. Wade.

That is how I remember it. As a medical intern and resident in Washington, D.C., in the years just before and after the Supreme Court decision, I okayed many requests from women to have abortions. A woman would come to the clinic in the District, where abortion was legal but required a physician’s approval. She would explain her case, and I never refused.

In my view, laws that criminalized abortions and the women and doctors to engaged in them were wrong. It was a matter of public health and medical compassion. Prior to Roe, women who wanted abortions in states where it was illegal would do it themselves with coat hangers. Or they would seek out illicit “back alley” abortionists. The outcome was often permanent injury or even death. At least, that is what poor women would do. Women who could afford it would travel to Europe, where medical abortions were legal and safe.

The majority of abortions were undergone by women who wanted to avoid the disgrace of unmarried pregnancy, which was condemned in those days, or who were young and unready to have a child. For me, approving those decisions was also a matter of medical compassion. The Supreme Court apparently agreed in Roe:

The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

In the years since, a protracted war of attrition against the decision has been mounted by the Catholic church and religious fundamentalists. Pro-life partisans “use needlessly incendiary terms like ‘the mass slaughter of unborn children,’” wrote a reviewer for Salon.com.

In my view, there is no such thing as an unborn child, since a child is a creature that comes into the world at birth. For most of gestation, and particularly during the first trimester, when the right to abortion most clearly prevails, a human fetus lacks the capacities that we recognize as children. Indeed during most of human gestation, higher animals, like dogs and cats, have more of those capacities.

One especially nettlesome claim by anti-abortion crusaders is the assertion that that human life begins at conception, and it therefore is sacrosanct from that moment. In my view, human life does not begin at all. The ovum and the sperm of the mothers and fathers are alive, as indeed are the parents themselves. If it were maintained that the gametes are not alive, since they cannot survive and reproduce outside of a complete body, then by the same reasoning, the embryo and fetus are not alive, either.

Human life has no beginning. All human lives exist as links in long chains of life going back to the origin of life in the primordial eons of earth. We humans have insisted that our life is special, different, sacred, and higher by a quantum leap than all other forms of life on earth. But science has shown us over and over that we are not so special. Many other forms of life share our capacities to one degree or another. We are animals, too.

It is right that society enacts laws protecting human life in particular. Society could not exist without such laws. But the laws against murder apply to humans and not to fetuses. Society can exist and permit abortions during the first months of pregnancy, and it should permit them.

Education in this underprivileged, multiethnic Paris class is an emotional battle of wits—a duel of words and attitudes. The teacher, François, a man of convictions and good intentions, parries the constant disputatiousness and doubt of his mostly African-origin students. He struggles almost to trick them into learning—to teach them in spite of themselves. The students, in reaction, subvert his effort. It’s not that they don’t want to learn or don’t try to learn—they mostly do. But their object, it seems, is to learn while yet reducing François to a sense of his own irrelevancy and failure.

We, the audience, are stunned at the ceaseless conflict in its intensity and pointlessness and cannot help but wonder why it goes on. We understand the plight of alienated, disadvantaged minority youth, how they sense the rejection of the culture of the majority, the closure of the doors of opportunity against them. This Parisian classroom is not very different from many inner-city classrooms in America or other advanced nations, where the students see no point in the mastering the curriculum. The futility they feel is the very feeling they fight to infuse into their teacher.

Inevitably, François blunders. Frustrated and worn down, he blurts a slur at two girls. The consequences of the faux pas form the climax of the movie. One wonders how often François, the minority-school teacher, really tripped over his intensions and words and said such things, because in this film he essentially plays himself, as do the students. The actors are the actual people who lived in the situation portrayed.

Most fundamentally, I think, the circumstances of the story of the little classroom reflect the profound dislocations and discontinuities of the whole present world. Everything is changing. People are displaced from their countries of origin, ancient ways are falling by the wayside, divergent cultures clash in contact, technology transforms schools and places of work. Neither the teachers nor the taught know that the curriculum remains relevant. No one rests sure how to behave or what will be required.

It all waits for the complications of modern life to play out and settle down.

The Class (Fr.: Entre les Murs, 2008): The movie won numerous awards for its graphic portrayal of school life in an ethnic-minority Parisian school, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (2009), and the Golden Palm (Cannes Film Festival, 2008).

Just after getting married, the career of a young Japanese cellist, Daigo Kobayashi, collapses, when the classical orchestra he plays for goes out of business. Out of work, he returns with his wife, Mika, to the rural village of his birth. There the he finds work as an artist and performer of a different kind—a Nokanshi, one who prepares the bodies of the dead and places them in the coffin.

It may seem unlikely as the subject of a movie, but the story of the young musician learning the Japanese art of the coffiner and making it his life’s work is one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.

Okuribito (Eng.: Departures) won the Oscar in 2009 for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as many other awards. The title comes from the heading of the job ad in his hometown newspaper, to which Daigo responds, thinking of a job in a travel agency. At the Nokanshi’s office, he’s shocked and disgusted by the true nature of the work, but he accepts the position as assistant to the coffiner, who offers him a huge salary.

When my mom and dad died (not at the same time), I saw them lying in open coffins at the funeral establishments. I did not witness the cleaning and preparation of their bodies, which was done beforehand, out of sight, by the mortician. But in the Japanese practice, the grieving relatives and friends do see the last stages of the preparatory work, performed as part of a simple, elegant ceremony by the Nokanshi; they even participate and help the coffiner lay the body in the coffin.

Daigo holds back from telling Mika about the job, fearing she won’t approve. But she learns, of course. The plot of the film, to the extent that one exists, focuses on her rejection of him and that of their neighbors. Daigo is shunned.

As the story unfolds, first Daigo, then his wife, then the people of the village change their attitudes. We, the audience, see several encoffining ceremonies performed. The effect is remarkable, even astonishing: We experience the same transformation as the principle characters.

The ceremonies are peaceful yet powerful and deeply respectful of the remains. We do not see any of the departed die; we see only their bodies at rest. For the relatives, the coffining ritual eases acceptance of the death. They see the body and touch it; through the medium of the film, we, too, see and touch the corpse.

In fully embracing his new profession, Daigo must confront his past. He practices, after all, in the village of his childhood. In the film’s final rituals, the serenity of the ceremony is transmuted into acceptance of death itself, for the young Nokanshi, and perhaps for us, as well.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, has been out about a year, but I first got a chance to see it this weekend. (Netflix is great for catching up on movies I missed.)

It’s a film worth thinking about. Although it wasn’t entirely successful, what it attempted and what it succeeded in illuminate issues central to human life.

Benjamin, played by Brad Pitt, was born on the day World War I ended. Narrating his own story through the vehicle of his diary, Benjamin tells us that at birth he had the physical appearance and physiology of an octogenarian, and unlike all other babies, he lived his life growing younger. In contrast, his dearest friend for life, Daisy Williams (played by Cate Blanchette) grows old the usual way. They meet when they are chronological children, but since any liaison between them is obviously difficult, they succeed most fully only when both are in their 40s.

A lot of not-too-surprising but nonetheless unusual situations are encountered by a young man who is physically old at the beginning of his life but old and physically young at the end. Yet the story is more than a sci-fi fantasy.

Through the perspective of Benjamin aging retrograde, we see commonplace events of life in fresh light. We appreciate meaning and consequence in much we take for granted. When Daisy and Benjamin consider marriage, the circumstance that he will grow young while his wife and children age sharpens our understanding of marriage, what it requires, and how it is best lived. The film reveals life by backlighting it, presenting the negative image of it.

The movie spotlights the roles of coincidence and fate. When two people grow old together in the usual way, they have their lives for happenstance between them. But when one is growing younger, they are like trains passing, with only moments for chance occurrence.

At one point Daisy is badly injured. Benjamin the narrator recounts the day’s preceding events, showing how if any one had happened differently, the accident wouldn’t have occurred. It’s the clearest statement of the moral of the story.

Throughout the film, because Benjamin grows younger, we see how much of the way his life turns out depends on the precise but fortuitous synchronicities, which, if timed slightly otherwise, would have altered his course. It points to a law of coincidence operating in the universe.

But though the film inspires deep philosophy, it falls short as a film. Only Benjamin and Daisy have much depth of character; all the others are stereotypes. Even the leads behave rather predictably. The movie moves too slowly and lasts too long, seemingly trying to demonstrate in pace and length the critical role of time in the plot. Although the story line is often clichéd, it has its moments of poignancy and brilliance. Before seeing this film, I would not have suspected how stark the resemblance between the dementia of old-age and the helplessness and ignorance of infancy.

Yesterday, I wrote about the new book, The End of Overeating, by David Kessler, MD, the former Commissioner of the FDA. But I didn’t mention the most disturbing information in the book (at least to me).

Young children have begun to habitually eat to excess—Kessler calls it “conditioned hypereating,” because he understands it to be the result of stimulus-reward conditioned responses that the food industry inculcates in all of us, including children.

The stimuli are the advertising, packaging and appearance of food products to make them very tempting. The rewards are the sugar, salt and fat, that the industry packs into its prepared foods. Children as young as 2 to 4 are succumbing to the temptations and becoming conditioned hypereaters, just as older children and adults are.

Kessler interviewed Susan Johnson, a researcher at the Children’s Eating Laboratory of the University of Colorado. She studied how young children naturally balance food calories with their bodies’ energy needs. They used to compensate when fed extra food with concentrated calories by eating less later on. Kessler describes what Johnson told him:

In the 1980s, children ages two to four were compensating for about 90% of any extra calories added to their diet. By the 1990s, they were compensating for only about 45% of those added calories. In her own studies, Johnson sees three- and four-year-olds who are able to pack in very large meals, sometimes consuming as much as 800 calories in one sitting. … “I never saw children who ate and ate and ate until you finally had to cut them off and say, ‘You’re done.’”

Last week, ScienceDaily reported that rates of severe childhood obesity have tripled in the last 25 years, i.e., since the 1980s. The information came form the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which studied 12,000 children aged 2 to 19.

One third of the severely obese children had metabolic syndrome, a condition that increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes.

For the sake of our children, we have got to teach them to eat properly and prevent them from overeating. And that means blocking them from access to the high-calorie gorgeous goodies the food industry gets them to gorge on!

It used to be rumored that manufacturers made products with obsolescence incorporated into the design. For example, auto companies like GM—back when it was rich and dominant—planned their cars to wear out, so that consumers would be forced to buy new ones every few years. Cars were not made to last but to create the need to buy more cars.

Do food producers today do a similar kind of thing—design their products so that consumers will eat more and have to buy more? Are food products not made to nourish and satisfy but to create the need to buy more food products?

The End of Overeating, a new book by Dr. David Kessler, suggests that might be the case.

In an interview about the book with Nutrition Action Healthletter, the former commissioner of the FDA explains he wanted to understand “Why is it so hard for so many of us to resist eating if we’re not hungry?”

Obesity has increased dramatically in the United States, Kessler writes, especially since the 1980s. The average weight of a woman in her 20s in 1960 was 128 lbs. In 2000 it was 157. Similar gains occurred in women of other ages and in men.

Kessler blames the upsurge in weight on a phenomenon he calls “conditioned hypereating.” He describes and analyzes the problem from every possible angle—epidemiology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine and treatment—but especially from the perspective of product development, marketing, and advertising by the food industry.

In part, Kessler’s own obsession with food brought him to write the book, which he researched for a number of years. He ruefully admits being overcome by temptation in the presence of a chocolate chip cookie. And like many problem eaters, he yo-yoed up and down in weight for much of his life. The End of Overeating, therefore, is in part a case of physician-heal-thyself.

I worked at the FDA during the time of Kessler’s leadership in the 1990s. During those years, he took on two of the hugest problems of public health: helping to ensure good nutrition through food labeling and trying to regulate tobacco consumption, an effort which has recently born fruit. He has been a singularly important physician to our nation.

I have another connection to Kessler. Like him I was also a conditioned hypereater who yo-yoed. And like him, I’ve won a battle against overeating. But as we both have learned, it is a war that doesn’t end.

In trying to understand the neuronal basis of eating grossly beyond nutritional requirements, Kessler focused on the dopamine reward system. Also a physician, I thought I understood dopamine and how it works in the brain. But Kessler helped me to understand something I hadn’t grasped. The release of this neurotransmitter occurs in response to biologically important experiences, like eating and sexual activity, and then it activates brain pathways of reward. In so doing, it reinforces such behavior. But also, as Kessler explained, dopamine stimulates the behaviors necessary to be aware of and seek out rewarding experiences.

That, apparently, is what the food industry has learned and has capitalized on, since noticing and obtaining the rewarding experiences they market means buying more of their stuff.

Kessler recounts an interview with a food company executive who agreed to open up about industry practices. The informant said the industry navigates to “three points of the compass”—a food producers’ compass. The three points are sugar, salt, and fat. By using more and more sugar, salt and fat in its stuff, and by preparing the food in ingenious and tempting concoctions, the industry has enticed consumers to buy more and more and eat more and more … and also to become obese.

As Kessler explains in the Nutrition Action Healthletter interview:

We’ve known that dopamine would spike—and stay elevated—in response to drugs like cocaine or amphetamines. But with food, we thought you get a little dopamine elevation and then we would habituate—that is food would lose its capacity to activate our brains. But if you combine sugar and fat, that brain activation doesn’t always habituate…. Some people don’t get habituated. Their dopamine stays elevated.

The payoff of Kessler’s book, in terms of personal and public health, comes in the last section, which is devoted to what the doctor calls, “food rehab.” Indeed, there are some aspects of his program that are like drug addiction rehabilitation. Kessler describes many techniques conditioned hypereaters can use to decondition themselves.

I know at least one of those techniques works, because I discovered it myself and have used it successfully. With repetition and practice, I’ve learned to no longer see high-calorie temptations as things I want to eat. Although I still do overeat at times, I indulge in healthier food, like salads, whole-grain cereals, and nonfat dairy products.

As for the caloric concoctions that used to seem to so alluring, I now see them, as Kessler does: sugar and salt on top of fat on top of more sugar and more salt and more fat. Ugh! Disgusting!

I first saw this film as a college sophomore 45 years ago, when it first came out and was playing at the Thalia, an art movie house on the upper west side of Manhattan. Impressionable as I was, it hit me like a punch in the gut.

I thought about it from time to time all those decades. Now a senior and retired, and a new member of Netflix, I decided to watch the film again. Would it affect me as powerfully as the first time—or with age and experience, would I find it more predictable, less powerful and less profound than I did when young and naïve?

The effect was the same. Everything I remembered was confirmed on the second seeing. It is extremely powerful, flawlessly acted and perfectly imaged and photographed. It is one of the most profound works of art I’ve ever encountered.

A young and modern Japanese clerk from Tokyo vacations on a remote island in search of a rare insect. His hobby is photographing and trapping unusual specimens, which he mounts for display by pinning them to boards. Wandering among dunes on the beach, he stays too late for transport back to town. Some local villagers offer him one of their homes to stay the night. A widow keeps house at the bottom of a deep, huge sand pit. The modern young visitor descends a rope ladder, makes her acquaintance, and gratefully accepts a roof, a meal and a bed.

The next morning, the rope ladder is gone. He tries to climb out of the pit, but the sand slides down under his feet as he tries to claw his way up. He is trapped. He soon learns that the villagers intend him to stay. He will remain with the widow, to be her helpmate and companion.

Their joint occupation—their forced labor—is shoveling sand, sending buckets of it up to the rim of the pit. They have no choice. They must shovel to keep the shifting dunes at bay, and because the villagers require them to do this work.

To a young western person, whether Japanese or American, the situation is intolerable and tyrannical. Yet the young man from Tokyo has no free choice about it; he must remain with the young woman at the bottom of the sand pit. The story is about what happens to the man’s sense of outrage and injustice—how his relationship to the woman and the villagers changes and evolves. It begins with the man close-shaven and wearing modern, western clothes. It ends with him in a beard and a kimono.

I won’t give more of it away, but I will say that as a college sophomore I found it shocking and upsetting. Much is made of the young man’s erotic attachment to the young widow. As beautiful as this aspect of the film is, I believe the emphasis on this interpretation may reflect the Freudian dominance of psychological theory at the time of its debut. More important to the story and its meaning, I believe, was the relationship of modern Japan to its ancient traditions.

Years went by. I came to understand the ending as fitting, comprehensible, and profound. Suna No Onna is an accurate, inclusive metaphor for the nature of human life on earth. Time and again, I’ve thought back to the film and what it taught me. The second time, I found the presentation and the lessons no less moving and profound.

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara; Writer: Kôbô Abe (novel); Kôbô Abe (screenplay)
Release Date: 25 October 1964 (USA)

The influence of India is evident everywhere. We’ve felt the impact of Bangalore and Bollywood. We’ve taken their advice, listened to their news, watched their movies and read their books.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008, Free Press, paperback) is the latest Indian novel I’ve read. Previously, I read Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra and a few books by Salmon Rusdie. Adiga’s novel won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

It’s a story of class warfare (or the lack of it) in that nation. The first-person narrator describes himself as a self-made entrepreneur, and it’s the how of his self-making that culminates the story. He begins in rural India, among impoverished farmers in region around the Ganges River. He refers to his family and home—and, by extension, the poor of India—as “the Darkness.” Through persistence and cunning he gains a job as a driver to a rich man, a coal magnate, who lives among the comfortable and wealthy in “the Light.”

The narrator starts out without even a name, although he acquires several during the course of the story. For most of it he is Balram, the driver. And it’s the upstairs-downstairs relationship of master and servant that forms the largest part of the narrative. Always aware of his inferior status despite the occasional camaraderie and indulgence of a master educated in America, Balram is flawless in his subservience. His ostensible concern for his master’s well being is the foil that reflects and highlights the callousness and cruelty of the Indian upperclass.

But I wondered whether it’s truly darkness and light that separates the poor from the rich in India. That characterization implies a perceptual/mental/emotional difference. As an American unused to many coarse and crude aspects of life in poverty, what struck me in both The White Tiger and Sacred Games were differences of filth and cleanness and discomfort and ease. India seems an interesting and exciting place to visit, but I don’t plan on going soon. Could I endure some of the conditions I would experience and misery I would see.

The narrator’s account is presented as a letter to the Premier of China, a nation that thus far hasn’t provided such uncensored accounts of the life of its people. The Chinese official is making a visit to India, and the narrator explains to the guest how an Indian can rise above poverty to achieve success in business. In that sense, his is a story for the future of all the third world.

We Americans don’t have much sense of what living is like among the impoverished majority of our planet. The story points out that sooner or later all of humanity will rise up out the want and the squalor. But we should not expect the people who will meet us to show their love and gratitude. If we don’t try to keep them down and offer them a hand up, the most we should hope for is that when they get here, they don’t murder us and throw our bodies off to the side of the road out of their way.