Tag: Jeemes Akers

ChatGPT: Revisiting the AI Issue                                                   

“In one of his lectures, [Joseph] Weizenbaum pointed out that we are incessantly striking Faustian bargains with this [AI] technology. In such contracts, both sides get something: the devil gets the human soul; humans get the services that delight us. Sometimes, the trade-off works for us, but with this stuff, if we eventually decide that it does not, it will be too late.”  

                                                                                         John Naughton[1]

“There’s plenty of inaccurate information on the web already, but ChatGPT readily generates fresh falsehoods. Its underlying algorithms don’t draw directly from a database of facts or links but instead generate strings of words aimed to statistically resemble those seen in its training data, without regard for the truth.”

                                                                                             Will Knight[2]

“ChatGPT is to consumer tech what the Beatles were to music.”

                                                        Bespoke Investment Group analysts[3]

By my own count, this is my seventh missive dealing with the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). In previous missives, I have provided AI primers, tried to explain how AI is changing the face of war, and explored why the Chinese, in particular, are so excited about the future prospects of AI. I have written more about AI than any other topic, with the exception of those missives touching on my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. As a result, my attention was especially drawn to the latest flurry of articles, media reports, speculation, disruptive technology claims, and dire warnings surrounding recent announcements regarding ChatGPT (and the broader topic of “generative AI”).

Why, you may ask, am I so interested in this topic? 

Most of you know by now that I am close to self-publishing the first novel in a futuristic techno-Christian troika called The Prawnocous Trilogy. In brief, the books deal with how a group of Christian youths, (the biblical remnant, or as I call the group in my novels, “The Society”), living some 30-35 years in the future, deal with an increasingly techno-paganist world. The novels have been a labor of love: I’ve been working on them, and updating the technology involved, for the last three decades. The novels feature drones, new medical diagnostic tools, robotic-humanoids, new virtual reality devices, body-powered communications, and identification systems, and global technological megacorporations, among others.

As I write and think about the future—and what it will mean for my children and grandchildren—the most difficult futuristic piece for me to fit into the puzzle has been how to gauge the progress to be made by artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, will AI advance exponentially toward the so-called “singularity” (that point where computer-based intelligences become indistinguishable from human-based intelligence); or will it proceed in sporadic “starts and fits” of breakthroughs. (What we are seeing today suggests the latter.) And if so, in either event, what will the world look like in 30-35 years?

From our present perceptual vantage point, it looks like AI will become the skeletal framework upon which the other advances—in biogenetics, communication technologies, the metaverse, quantum applications, etc.—will hang.

(All of that assumes the absence of a totally unpredictable, but game-changing, “Black Swan” event over the next three decades.)

For these reasons, AI-related topics have preoccupied my thinking for decades.

What makes this quest especially unusual is that my three professions—college history professor, intelligence analyst and lawyer—rely on much different spheres of thinking.

But it is the future, and what it holds for believers, that turns my wheels. It is the way I am wired …

That brings us to today’s ChatGPT topic.

          What is ChatGPT?

          It is a viral chatbox—search bot—that has generated feverish excitement in today’s internet world, largely because of the hope it can reinvent search engines. ChatGPT-3 (Chat Generative pre-Trained Transformer) is a third generation, autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.[4]  ChatGPT can provide complex and sophisticated answers to questions by synthesizing information found in billions of words scraped from the web and other sources to train its algorithms.[5] The chatbox is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models. Moreover, the chatbox has become a huge success: the AI conversational tool amassed 100 million users just two months after it launched.[6]

          What are transformers (the “T” in GPT)? They are specialized algorithms for finding long-range patterns in sequences of data. Because a transformer requires a massive amount of data, it is trained in two stages: first, generic data which is easier to gather in large volumes and second, fine-tuned on tailored data for a specific task. Transformers were first developed by researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google in 2017. Since then, transformers have become pervasive across dozens of technologies.[7]

          Let me try to cut through the considerable hype around ChatGPT—especially over the last week—to make four points. First and foremost, it is a new system. The algorithm at the core of the bot, called GPT, was first developed by OpenAI (more below) in 2018 with a more powerful version GPT-2 revealed in 2019.[8] GPT is a machine learning model designed to take in text and then predict what comes next. The first commercial version of the technology, GPT-3 has been available for developers to use since June 2020 and launched as a prototype in November 2020. The biggest leap in GPT-3’s abilities come from OpenAI having humans provide feedback to the system.[9]

Secondly, and in my view most importantly, ChatGPT’s release to developers less than four months ago triggered an AI/chatbox “arms race” among major tech giants. Today (Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023), Microsoft announced—during an artificial intelligence event at its Redmond. Washington corporate headquarters—that it will “reimagine” its Bing search engine, using ChatGPT, as a step in bringing AI to the masses.[10] Sanya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, hailed the event as a paradigm shift for on-line search capabilities, and acknowledged “a new arms race starts today.”[11] What are Microsoft’s improvements? A new chat-style interface with a sidebar in addition to the usual list of links, a “feedback box,” a summarization of different viewpoints, and greater interoperability.[12] According to some sources, the announcement put Microsoft at the forefront of next wave of technological innovation: generative artificial intelligence.[13] Investors responded immediately as Microsoft shares climbed 7% on the announcement.[14]

What is behind Microsoft’s efforts? Bing was the world’s second most popular search engine in 2022, controlling a mere 3.04% of market share, according to Statcounter. Of course, the most popular search engine is Alphabet’s Google, with about 92.6% of the market. In third place is Yahoo (1.24% market share), followed by the Russian search engine Yandex (1%).[15]

Google, not to be outdone, and under intense pressure from ChatGPT, tried to preempt Microsoft’s announcement. In the words of one industry insider, “Google isn’t about to let Microsoft or anybody else make a swipe for its search crown without a fight.”[16] And so yesterday (Monday, Feb. 6, 2023), Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, wrote in a blog post that Bard is available to “trusted testers” and is designed to put the “breadth of the world’s knowledge” behind a conversational interface.[17] Bard will use a smaller version of a powerful AI model called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), that was first announced by Google in May 2021 and based on a technology similar to ChatGPT. Interestingly enough, Picai did not announce any plans to integrate Bard into the search box that powers Google’s profits, but rather opted in his blog for a more cautious approach to enhance conventional searches. Moreover, this chatbot will be launched in a few weeks, with no firm timeline.[18] 

The Chinese high-tech corporation Baidu also has entered the generative artificial intelligence fray with an announcement today (Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023) revealing concrete plans to launch a chatbox to rival ChatGPT. The announcement prompted a jump in the premarket trading of 15%. Baidu’s AI chatbox will be called “ERNIE Bot,” for English users, with plans to complete internal testing by March 2023, before making it available to the public. Baidu, the Chinese company which most resembles Google, has a core business in online search and advertising.[19] Another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, announced its own AI-powered chatbot.[20]

Thirdly, ChatGPT is the brainchild of one of today’s most interesting research organizations. OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research laboratory, founded in December 2015, consisting of both non-profit and for-profit subsidiary corporations. Its publicized mission is to conduct AI research to promote and develop AI in a way that benefits all of humanity. The organization was founded in San Francisco by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and others, who collectively pledged $1 billion (Musk resigned from the board in 2018 but reportedly remains a donor).[21] The research company, headquartered in the Pioneer Building in San Francisco, has less than 400 employees. OpenAI’s products include GPT-3, DALL-E, OpenAI Five and OpenAI Codex.

OpenAI owes its existence to a few scientists—including Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell—who maintained that the exponential growth of AI could lead to an “intelligence explosion” that could wipe out the human species. Elon Musk, for example, publicly portrayed runaway AI as humanity’s “biggest existential threat.”[22]

In recent years, OpenAI has received large infusions of cash from Microsoft: $1 billion investment in 2019, and a second multi-year investment in January 2023, reported to be $10 billion.[23]

Google’s counterpart in many respects to OpenAI is DeepMind, a UK-based AT start-up that Google acquired in 2014.[24]

Finally, there remain serious questions about ChatGPT. The first problem is an accountability issue. As Noah Smith observes:  

       “ChatGPT, the chatbox that has recently wowed the          world, is a parametric model, but I wouldn’t get too hung              up on that little detail. In terms of interpretability, a model         with 175 billion parameters is not really different from one.       with no parameters at all.”[25]

The next problem is what is being referred to as the “hallucination issue.” Some AI experts warn that that the ChatGPT tool does not understand the information it serves up and is inherently prone to making things up.[26] For example, Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of responsible AI, acknowledges that her company has not fully solved the hallucination problem.[27]  For an increasingly politically correct, Woke-driven world, besides hallucinating incorrect information, AI models trained on text scraped from the Web are prone to exhibiting racial and gender biases and hateful language.[28]

Other problems cited by the experts include: how to replace existing social media advertising income streams and monetize ChatGPT-type searches (running such searches can be 10 times as costly as a typical Google search because of the large and complex AI models involved)[29]; the uncertainty whether ChatGPT will radically change the way human beings search for answers; its potential to infringe on intellectual property rights; and—as a former college professor—the troubling problem of student plagiarism on campuses as ChatGPT use to write papers increases.

I’ll conclude with this thought from John Naughton. He suggests we may be overhyping the capabilities of ChatGPT: “If we know anything from history, it is that we             generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly under-              estimating their long-term implications. So it was with              print, movies, broadcast radio and television and the              internet. And I suspect we have just jumped on to the                  same cognitive merry-go-round.”[30]

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[1] I have taken this quote from John Naughton’s very interesting opinion piece, “ChatGPT isn’t a great leap forward, it’s an expensive deal with the devil,” The Guardian, Feb. 4, 2023. Naughton is the 76-year-old Irish senior research fellow at Cambridge University and the Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University. His most popular books are about the history of the internet and the future implications of technology.

[2] Will Knight, “The Race to Build a ChatGPT-Powered Search Engine,” WIRED, Feb. 6, 2023.

[3] Cited in Jack Denton, “ChatGPT Is ‘What the Beatles Were to Music.’ Time to Look Through the Haze of AI Fever,” Barron’s, Feb. 8, 2023.

[4] Luciano Floridi and Massimo Chiriatti, “GPT-3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences,” Minds and Machines (Commentary), published online Nov. 1, 2020.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Shirin Ghaffary, “Here Comes Bard, Google’s Version of ChatGPT,” Vox, Feb. 6, 2023.

[7] By far the best and most easily understood explanation of the technologies underlying ChatGPT is Karen Hao, “What is ChatGPT? What to Know About the AI Chatbot That Will Power Microsoft Bing, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 8, 2023.x

[8] Knight, “The Race.”

[9] Knight, “The Race.”

[10] Rachel Lerman and Nitasha Tiku, “Microsoft launches search engine ‘infused with AI,’” The Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2023..

[11] Aarian Marshall, “Microsoft Taps ChatGPT to Boost Bing—and Beat Google,” WIRED, Feb. 7, 2023.

[12] Ibid. See also, Joanna Stern, “I Tried Microsoft’s New AI-Powered Bing. Search Will Never Be the Same,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2023.

[13] Tom Dotan, “Microsoft Adds ChatGPT AI Technology to Bing Search Engine,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2023.T

[14] Ibid.

[15] Luc Olinga, “Microsoft Has a Last-Minute Mysterious Surprise,” TheStreet, Feb. 6, 2023.

[16] Will Knight, “Meet Bard, Google’s Answer to ChatGPT, WIRED, Feb. 6, 2023. Knight’s article offers an excellent comparison of ChatGPT-driven Bing and a future Bard.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid; see also, Ghaffary, “Here Comes Bard”: Zoe Kleinman, “Bard: Google launches ChatGPT rival,” BBC, Feb. 6, 2023; Rob Lenihan, “Google Has a ChatGPT Rival,” TheStreeet, Feb. 6, 2023.

[19] Jack Denton, “Baidu Enters the AI Race With ‘ERNIE Bot,’” Barron’s, Feb.7, 2023.

[20] Denton, “ChatGPT … Beatles.”

[21] See, among others: “Introducing OpenAI,” OpenAI, Dec. 12, 2015; John Markoff, “Artificial Intelligence Research Center is Founded by Silicon Valley Investors,” The New York Times, Dec. 11, 2015; and Karen Hao, “The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world,” MIT Technology Review, Feb. 17, 2020.

[22] Kelsey Piper, “Why Elon Musk fears artificial intelligence,” Vox, Nov. 2, 2018.

[23] Ryan Brown, “Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in creator of buzzy A.I. tool ChatGPT,” CNBC, Jan. 2023.

[24] Knight, “Meet Bard.”

[25] Noah Smith, “The Third Magic: A meditation on history, science, and AI,” Substack app, Jan. 1, 2023.

[26] Knight, “Meet Bard”; see also the views of Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University, cited in Knight, “The Race.”

[27] Marshall, Microsoft Taps.”

[28] Ibid.

[29] Knight, “The Race.”

[30] John Naughton, “The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now—but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel,” The Guardian, Jan. 7, 2023.

  GOD’S BLAST FROM THE PAST: PROMISE KEEPERS   

“Iron sharpeneth iron; So a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”

                                                                         Proverbs 27:17

“Our generation put a man on the moon; this generation has put a man in the girl’s bathroom.”

                                                                         Mario Murrillo                                                                              

A week ago today, I was walking through the North Myrtle Beach Boulineau’s IGA, following a meeting of a local Christian men’s group Bible study meeting. It had been a fantastic gathering: songs, testimonies, and a report on a local Christian educational effort sponsored, in part, by the group.

I was heading toward the parking lot with a man named Dan. He also had attended the meeting. He was a bit older than me.

“What a wonderful meeting,” I said.

“Yes indeed,” he replied, “reminds me of the old Promise Keepers’ meetings.”

Suddenly, it seems like many of the men around me are talking about Promise Keepers. What was Promise Keepers? In brief, it was an evangelistic Christian men’s organization founded in 1990 by Bill McCartney, then head football coach at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, that ended (for all intents and purposes) after a massive men’s rally on the National Mall in Washington D.C., in early October 1997. At the time, it was a men’s movement that our country desperately needed. The non-profit, non-denominational movement was dedicated to calling men to personal piety, equipping them to share their faith in Jesus Christ more openly, urging them to become more godly fathers and husbands at home, and encouraging men to pray for their country. During those years, the most widely publicized events held by the organization were mass rallies held at football stadiums and similar venues.

“I still remember a rally at RFK Stadium in Washington D.C.,” Dan recalled, “one side of the stadium shouted, ‘Jesus Christ,’” he said, “while the other side shouted ‘Is Lord!’”

That, in a nutshell, describes the Promise Keepers experience: men accustomed to shouting and acting crazy at a football game with no shame, were now vocal in their support of the message of Christ.

Any of us involved in those gatherings will never forget them.

The day before my conversation with Dan, Ima and I met Danny and Carolyn Kimball for lunch. The Kimballs worked at Alice Lloyd College during many of the years we were there—Danny headed the maintenance department and Carolyn the campus daycare service—their daughter attended The June Buchanan School, and our daughter Bethany was enrolled in the daycare. Our two families have kept in touch over the years.

Danny and I told stories about our common Promise Keepers experiences.

As I have written on several occasions, the campus environment at Alice Lloyd College—located along Caney Creek in a tiny hamlet named Pippa Passes, Kentucky—was a special place. There was a unique feeling of togetherness, mission, and purpose there among faculty and staff.

One of the many things that made the campus experience so special for me—especially during that narrow window of time—was a weekly gathering of a handful of men on campus. We typically met on Saturday mornings to study the Bible and discuss how we could be better husbands, fathers, and community members. Many of the materials we used as guidelines of those discussions were produced and disseminated by the Promise Keepers.

Those men, those brothers in Christ, and the spiritual truths and life’s experiences we exchanged, changed my life.

If I close my eyes, even after all these years, I can still see the faces of the men in our small group. Danny Kimball was our anchor, with his gentle South Carolina demeanor, steady faith, and ocean-sized heart. Bill Melton, our campus Director of Admissions in those years, brought his Colorado experiences and quiet spiritual nature to our gatherings. Bob Braden added texture to our meetings with his tumultuous family life. Carl Sode, one of my former college students and among my first hires as history teacher at the June Buchanan School, had burning passion to serve Jesus Christ that was an inspiration for the rest of us. David Huff, the most gifted science teacher I have ever been around, was a quiet, level-headed voice despite a host of heart-related issues. I rounded out our core group.

We also were joined by a handful of others from time to time: Neil Nutter, a college science professor added his age-related wisdom and depth of understanding; Jerry, Bill’s brother-in-law; Matt Meyers, a campus instructor; and Bobby Pollard, now the Principal at Knott County Public Schools (then our PE teacher at JBS), made contributions as well.

But it’s the massive rallies I remember most. At a Promise Keepers gathering in Knoxville, Tennessee, with Bill Melton and others, I still vividly remember thousands of men singing in unison Martin Luther’s Christian anthem “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

I will never forget that song.

Or the overpowering experience.

On another occasion, we took a van to Atlanta, Georgia for a Promise Keepers rally in the Georgia Dome. What an incredible gathering! There were so many men that huge crowds gathered at the nearest metro station at the conclusion of the sessions. Danny, Bob, Matt, and I decided we would walk back to the hotel. We thought we could beat the rain as dark gray-blue clouds started to gather. Instead, we got caught in a ferocious hailstorm—with ping-pong-sized ice balls bouncing off the pavement around us and pelting us as we ran—scurrying like frightened animals from one parking garage to another. We eventually made it back to the hotel, looking like a bunch of drenched rats.

Ah, but what a story to tell!

And all of us involved do so frequently.

We also attended the culminating rally of the Promise Keepers in Washington D.C. in October 1997. We took a van. My dad went with us. We slept on the floor of a church I had attended during my first tenure with the Agency (the church is long gone, and high-rise apartments stand there now). The church was within an easy walk of the Vienna Metro Station.

I am convinced there was at least a million men on the mall that day. I can still remember the tree our group huddled under as we watched the proceedings on huge screens scattered throughout the length of the mall. It was a powerful time of unity, prayer, repentance, and fellowship with other men from all parts of the country.

As I recall, it also was somewhat of a logistical marvel: from the vast array of outdoor toilets to the food that was distributed for the assembled men.

The original Promise Keepers disbanded after that gathering. McCartney had no intention of heading a new religious bureaucracy to replace local churches. Moreover, there were nervous rumors within the administration-friendly media—Bill Clinton had been elected for a second term—and on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that legions of Christian men gathered on the mall would descend on the White House to demand moral accountability at the highest levels of national leadership.

In the annuals of church history, I’m not sure you will find another example of such a large and successful church movement voluntarily disbanding itself.

But that’s exactly what happened.

To be sure, there have been recent efforts to revitalize the Promise Keepers as an organization, but it lacks, in my view, the energy, purpose and special calling of the original movement.

I can’t resist telling one more story related to the Promise Keepers. In those years, there was a smaller rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. I attended with a group of men from the Covenant Church in Northern Kentucky. (Ima and I attended there while I was in law school). We took sleeping bags with us and after the session, retreated to a local church which had graciously opened its church doors for us to stay overnight. I unfolded my sleeping bag in a corner of a large, spacious room downstairs in the church which was big enough to be used for large church gatherings, weddings, and other special occasions. Around me, scattered in their own sleeping bags, was probably at least fifty men from various churches in the area.

When I woke up in the morning, I was alone.

Perhaps I haven’t told you that I come from a family of loud snorers.

My mom and dad could rattle the rafters.

In short, my snoring had chased off all my companions.

Later the next morning, as we boarded the bus to return to Covenant Church, I heard the pastor’s son in the seat behind me. He described in vivid detail a loud, almost inhuman, noise during the night that forced him to move elsewhere in the assembly hall.

Along with the others.

He didn’t know the source of the noise, only that it was the loudest snore he had ever heard. I, of course, didn’t say a word.    

ODE TO WILLIAM (“BILL”) PHILLIPS   

“… I will never have it that God created any man, especially any Christian man, to be a blank, and to be a nothing. He made you for an end. Find out what that end is; find out your own niche and fill it. If it be ever so little, if it is only to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, do something in this great battle for God and truth.”

                                                                               Charles Spurgeon     

Belle Phillips called Imogene and I one morning last week to tell us that my good friend Bill Phillips had passed away, peacefully in his sleep, at 6:00 a.m.

Bill was 78 years old and had been sick for a long time.

“Sigh.”

I cannot imagine the first few years at Alice Lloyd College, located along Caney Creek, in the rural Appalachian Mountains, without Bill and Belle—and their three boys, Andy, Chris and Collin. Bill headed the Upward Bound project on campus, with his office located in the old Brown and Green Building. Upward Bound was a program designed during the LBJ “Great Society” years to encourage mountain high schoolers to attend college. Working in his office was a young lady who had just graduated from college herself, Imogene Bates.

Bill had a passion to see young people in the mountains succeed. He was, among other things: an educator, skilled communicator, a compassionate boss, an artist, a thinker, an outdoor enthusiast, an avid duck hunter, a loving husband, and a patient father. I looked at him as a mentor of sorts during those years.

He became one of my closest friends.

I will never forget him.

Bill loved football. He played on our faculty team in the ALC intermural gridiron wars waged on the college meadow. Today, it is hard to imagine the meadow the way it was in those years because of the new campus buildings. At one time, the meadow was the only flat piece of land on campus: on one end stood the small stone college library—with a flat roof where Miss June herself would occasionally watch the blood-letting on the field of play below—on the other end was the picturesque stone “Grender House.” The meadow’s boundary was marked on one side by a small stone wall running alongside the road that meandered through campus, a small road that ran next to the creek. On the other side was a sidewalk that ran in front of the campus store and a small frame house where I lived.

The field was small, but the competition was intense.

In those years, the faculty team was the campus football juggernaut.

It was supposed to be flag football.

When the faculty was involved, it always turned into hand-to-hand combat.

I remember walking into my college classroom one morning after one such contest and noticing one of my students, a big local kid named Aaron (if memory serves me correctly), sporting two puffy, swollen, black eyes.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean what happened to me?” Aaron said. “You did this!”

He was, of course, referring to the final play of the game late in the afternoon the day before. It was getting close to dusk and the clock was running out. The final play of the game was a quarterback sneak with me diving headlong into a pile of faculty and student flesh for the deciding touchdown. 

Oh, the stories I could tell about my fellow faculty teammates over the years! There was Richard Bushong and his homemade mouthpiece, toupee-less music master Richard Kennedy, teeth-rattling blocks by Charlie Whitaker, Ken Medders (who said he played tight end at Notre Dame but my first pass plunked him in the chest), Gary Gibson (if there was no college girls’ game), Dean Wally Campbell with his comb over, an injury-prone Dr. Jerry Davis, and a thin and svelte Fred Mullinax.

A couple years ago, I met former ALC student Freddie Spears for dinner. His most vivid memory of the college experience was a football game in the meadow. He recounted a play where President Davis and Fred Mullinax, on a double-team block, drove him into and over the stone wall (he claimed it was long after the whistle had blown the play dead). He laughed while telling the story.

In the interest of time and space, I’ll tell just one more story. There are probably hundreds to tell. This one involves Bill Philipps.

Bill was rushing the passer from one end and I from the other. We shed our respective student blockers and ran—full-speed—toward the college student playing quarterback. Probably the fleet-footed Johnny Spicer. He ducked and Bill and I crashed into each other in a collision as fierce and bone-crunching as anything you’ll see on Sundays in the NFL.

The hit was so memorable that Bill and I would talk about it for years afterward. I honestly thought I had broken a bone or two. We both limped to the sidelines after the play. In all my years playing peewee, high school and military service football, I have never experienced a tackle quite like that!

And friendly fire at that!

Ah, the memories!

To visit the Philipps household—they lived in the white Anderson house across the creek—was to enjoy the very best of Caney Creek hospitality in those years. Bill Melton—also a close friend of Bill’s—told me recently that such visits were among his most enduring memories of campus life. There was a special closeness of campus faculty and staff during those years, and Bill and Belle played a large role in creating that unique atmosphere.

Ima and I spent many evenings at the Phillips’ house playing Rook (after Belle put the boys to sleep).

And we weren’t the only ones.

Bill’s wife, Belle, was a terrific cook. Whether it be a breakfast of sausage, eggs, fluffy biscuits and gravy (or homemade jelly), or just a meal she would cobble together out of a seemingly empty refrigerator, her meals were always delicious. Even now, I start drooling when I think of her strawberry shortcake. (Belle and Jane Campbell spearheaded the group of campus ladies that prepared an absolute feast in the Hunger Din the evening prior to Ima and my wedding at the Caney Creek Baptist Church).

Bill left the college after the funding for the Upward Bound program played out. He subsequently managed and opened several Western Steer steakhouses from Knoxville to Pikeville, designed and built salad bars, and, much later, owned and drove a semi-tractor trailer rig.

Over the years, we visited the Philipps in various locations. When we took a group of JBS students to visit the World Fair in Knoxville, we stayed at their lakefront home. Ima and I even considered buying the small A-frame house next door to their home near Cherokee Lake; we loved them and the boys that much. We also visited the Phillips on a handful of occasions when they moved to Bill’s final stop—and the town of his childhood years—Savannah, Tennessee.

Our last visit with Bill and Belle was on our way out West on Ima’s post-retirement grand tour this summer. At the time, Bill was in poor health and had trouble breathing. His constant companion was a breathing machine. Coughing spells made conversation difficult. Bill and Belle insisted we sleep in their bed. On the wall was a piece of artwork I did for Bill and Belle many years ago—a mountain scene with morning fog rising over a lake. The walls were also decorated with an assortment of ducks (trophies of past hunting ventures), as well as Bill’s artworks portraying various ducks in flight.

Before we left, we took a picture of the four of us (Bill was in pajamas and toting his oxygen machine).

It remains one of our most treasured photographs.

I will miss hearing Bill say “like an old chip,” whenever I called to ask him how he was doing. I’ll miss talking to him about his beloved Tennessee Volunteers and Atlanta Braves. I’ll miss the loving way he teased Belle. I’ll miss him talking about his three boys. I’ll miss hearing his viewpoints on the various woes now besetting our country. I’ll miss floating my ideas for my novel with him. I’ll miss talking to him about God’s goodness.

I’ll miss praying for him …

Farewell my friend!

intelreform.org

SANDPIPER’S ODE   

“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something—”

                                                                        Elizabeth Bishop     

Last week I was walking on the beach and thinking of several people in my life—in particular, a former student and now CEO—and seeking a word for her hectic, chaotic life and a sudden, shattered personal relationship.

There was a chill in the air as the result of a recent cold front that has moved, like a Canadian refrigerator truck, into the area. I was wearing a thick sweatshirt and it almost wasn’t enough.

Despite the cold, the waves were churning.

Never-ending.

Then I saw it: a solitary sandpiper.

The thought came to me that if I were but to know more about this simple sandpiper,[1] I would know infinitely more about how God operated in His universe.

And decipher the dilemma facing my friend.

First and foremost, the sandpiper was so, so busy. Flittering about here and there, in perfect harmony with the incoming and outgoing waves, scampering on its little legs churning as fast as possible.

I have never seen a lazy sandpiper.

Secondly, God takes care of the sandpipers in His created universe. He equips each of them with a unique survival toolkit: they intuitively know when and where to peck for food, seaborne invertebrates, and other nutrients. This is the essence of Matthew 6:21-27, where Jesus—as part of the Sermon on the Mount—said, “Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

One essential part of the sandpiper’s toolkit is of particular interest to me. Sandpiper bills have built-in special sensory receptors—Herbst avian mechanoreceptors—found within densely packed pits in the bird’s beak. This essentially gives the sandpipers a “sixth sense” allowing them to detect the movement of worms or small invertebrates in the water and shallow sand, even several centimeters away from the bill.[2]

God’s creation is amazing.

Call me crazy, but I believe that Christian believers similarly can operate with a spiritual “sixth sense” in this world—and adroitly keep one step ahead of catastrophic pitfalls in this world; not to mention obtain daily sustenance—by walking in the spiritual gifts as described by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the church at Corinth.[3]

Thirdly, sandpipers operate on the fringes. The sandpiper’s busy legs always keep them one step ahead of disaster. As the foamy waves roar in, the sandpiper beats a hasty retreat. They are never inundated by the churning waves. Nor are they intimidated by them. Instead, as the waves begin their shimmering withdrawal back to the sea, the sandpiper chases after them: busily pecking at tumbling sandworms or other tasty seaborn morsels. Then, just ahead of the new waves, the dance begins anew.

Balancing on the fringes, it seems to me, is the key to living a successful life. Intuitively sensing when the ocean’s waves are coming is essential. At the same time, we must recognize the unique opportunities inherent in each wave (as well as the danger); the wave brings life, new food for growth, and new challenges. The joy of cashing in on life’s spiritual rewards—especially as the wave recedes and we chase it back to the sea—has very little meaning without the initial wave itself. 

In this way, I respectfully suggest, each of us reflect this wonderous rhymical interplay of sandpiper and sea—a true dance of nature—that has taken place since the dawn of time. In the natural rhythm of the beach, this “dance” is repeated every daylight hour by sandpipers everywhere, on every shoreline, at the edge of every ocean around the globe. Just one of myriad pieces of a natural waltz that reflects the constancy of God in His universe.

Like each one of us.

Then, finally, just as quickly as the sandpiper appeared it was gone. I walked up the shoreline in the hope I could catch sight of the little sandpiper again. But to no avail. Both the sandpiper and its fleeting bit of insight into God’s way of doing things were gone.

Just that quick.

Leaving only these scattered fragments of afterthought.

“Sigh.”

In the same way, it seems to me, we are prone to forget the subtle truths that God whispers into our spirit during special windows of time which, in turn, (and all-too-often) leave only fleeting memories of what took place.

 Here one moment and gone the next.

Just like the sandpiper.

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[1] Sandpipers belong to a large family, Scolopacidae, of migratory wading shorebirds, also called curlews, snipes, and calidris. Their bills have sensitive tips with numerous corpuscles of Hebst (avian mechanoreceptors), enabling them to locate buried prey items, which they typically seek with restless running and probing. For those interested in deeper research on the topic, see Theunis Piersma, Family Scolopediae (Snipes, Sandpipers and Phalarops), Vol. 3, (Lynx: Barcelona), 1996.     

[2] Christa Leste-Lasserre, “Bird beak extra sense evolved more than to million years ago,” New Scientist, Dec. 2, 2020. What science perceives as a specialty capability that took untold eons of time to evolve, I believe God created in a single miraculous act of creation.

[3] 1 Corinthians 12: 8-10.

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THREE WISE MEN   

“In Persia is the city of Saba, from which the Three Magi set out when they went to worship Jesus Christ; and in this city they are buried, in three very large and beautiful monuments, side by side. And above them there is a square building, carefully kept. The bodies are still entire, with the hair and beard remaining.”

                                                                                    Marco Polo[1]

“The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.”

                                                                                    Jay Leno

One of my favorite Christmas season memories is gathering with friends to sing Christmas carols as we strolled through the neighborhood. We did this on several occasions at our former house on East Juniper Avenue: called the “Christmas Street” by locals, where several neighbors decorated their houses in a honoring tradition tracing back to the tragic Yuletide death of a neighborhood youth. (I have written about this in a previous missive).

Among those songs I really enjoyed singing on those outings—or, in my case, tried to sing—was the classic We Three Kings of Orient Are written by John Henry Hopkins Jr. in 1857. I’ve loved that song as long as I can remember. The song was written while Hopkins was rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania and was for an upcoming Christmas pageant in New York City. Some claim the song is the first widely popular Christmas carol written in America.[2]

I was reminded of the well-known carol during a pre-Christmas church sermon last Sunday morning. The pastor stitched together several illustrations to make his point that believers must be receptive to God’s challenges in their lives, must listen for God’s voice, and must step out and act on what they’ve heard. One of the examples the pastor used was the three wise men mentioned in Matthew 2:1-12:

“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born             in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came            to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been     born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its     rising, and have come to pay him homage … When they    had heard the king [King Herod], they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its      rising, until it stopped over the place where the child         was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw      the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and  paid him homage. Then, offering their treasure chests,      they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.    And having been warned in a dream not to return to      Herod, they left for their own country by another path.”[3]

          As soon as the pastor mentioned the three wise men, and the fact that it may have taken as long as two years to make the trip, a small still voice whispered in my spirit: “do you have any idea how difficult it was for them to make the trip, the number of times they had to fight off robbers along the route, or the personal spiritual doubts they had to overcome?” In a short moment in time, I gained a new respect for these wise men mentioned in scripture and determined to learn more about them.

          I found that what I believe about these incredible men of faith has been a patchwork quilt of sermons I have heard (based on the scriptural passages above), traditional church teachings, and popular conceptions. First and foremost, the wise men from the East are only mentioned in the canonical gospel of Matthew. Why? The gospel of Matthew written (according to early church tradition) by the apostle and former tax collector, somewhere between 50-75 A.D., aimed to present Jesus not only as the Jewish Messiah but also genealogical son of David.[4] In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy and the Law, was the fulfillment of all messianic hopes and expectations; the gospel contains some 41 Old Testament citations. Thus, in Matthew’s account, it only made sense that royalty would make the long, arduous trip to bow, worship and present costly gifts to the future King-of-Kings.

          Why do we say there were three wise men? Matthew’s passage does not mention a specific number. Western Christendom traditionally assumes them to be three in number because of the three gifts enumerated in the text (reinforced by the messianic passages in Isaiah 60). Eastern Christianity, however, especially the Syriac church, maintains there were as many as twelve wise men.

          What type of individuals were they? In the Koine Greek they were magoi (from the Old Persian magu “Zoroastrian clergymen”). As part of their religious training, this priestly class carefully studied the stars and other physical phenomena. Several later translations refer to the men as “astrologers.”[5] Certainly, they were part of an educated religious elite who carefully studied the stars. The description of the three wise men as “kings” was of later vintage, an attempt to link the event with the prophecy in Psalms 72:10 “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations serve him.”

          And what about the so-called “Star of Bethlehem”? One of the most amazing things about these wise men, in my view, is that they had the patience, perseverance and spiritual maturity to keep their eyes focused on the star above them. How many times, I wonder, were they ridiculed in their quest? The star led them first to Jerusalem (where else would a King of Israel be located) and then, later, to the house in Bethlehem where Jesus and Mary were located. Over the years, I have been interested in the variety –not to mention spiritual motives—for the various explanations of the Christmas Star. On the spiritual side, for example, these range from “pious fiction;” to a prophetic fulfillment of the “Star Prophecy” in Numbers 24:17; and Origen’s view (one of the most influential of the early Christian theologians) that the timing of the Magi studies perfectly coincided with the prophetic appearance of a unique man in this world as well as the appearance of the star as foretold of old.

          As you can imagine, that just touches the surface.

          Moreover, as if that isn’t enough, there are an abundance of naturalistic explanations. One of the more interesting to me involves the German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Kepler was a key figure in the 17^th century Scientific Revolution—one of my favorite topics when I taught college-level Western Civilization classes—best known for his laws of planetary motion which, in turn, provided one of the foundations for Sir Isaac Newton’s breakthrough theory of universal gravitation.[6] Kepler had a notion that in God’s perfect creation, the planets themselves emitted musical notes of attraction which he sought to explain mathematically. A drastic departure indeed from today’s scientists who seek to drive the very God of creation out of creation itself. At any rate, Kepler held the view that three conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn created a nova which he linked to the appearance of the Christmas Star.

          Other naturalistic explanations for the Christmas Star have followed. Indeed, as late as 2014, an international colloquium on recent naturalistic theories for the Star of Bethlehem was held at the Netherland’s University of Groningen involving several noted scientists, theologians, and historians.[7] There is an amazing array of theories:  eclipses of the planet Jupiter by the moon in 6 B.C.; Jupiter’s retrograde motion; a supernova explosion on February 23 in 4 B.C. (now known as the PSR 1913+16 or the Hulse-Taylor Pulse, recorded by Chinese observers);[8] a comet viewed by Chinese and Korean stargazers around 5 B.C.; a new constellation rising; and many more. 

          There is a handful who still hold that the star’s appearance was miraculous: a special one-time creative work of God to glorify the entrance of His Son into this world.

          Count me among those.

          King Herod couldn’t see the Star. Neither could the Jewish religious elite in Jerusalem, even though they knew of the prophet Micah’s prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. The wise men obediently followed the Star to Bethlehem; the religious, legal and political leaders of the day didn’t.

          They couldn’t; their blinded eyes simply missed the Star.

          As always, this missive omits at least as much as it contains: the specialness of the Epiphany holiday (the celebration of the visit of the wise men in Western Christianity on January 6); Herod’s massacre of the innocents; the spiritual meaning of the three gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh; the traditional church identities of the three wise men—Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar; or the Eastern Orthodox Church traditions and iconography. Perhaps a future missive …

 In sum, after my brief spiritual encounter in church last weekend, I will never view a traditional Christmas nativity scene the same—especially as concerns depictions of the adoration of the three Magi. Of course, we live in a country where such public displays of the birth of Christ are under increasing attack by godless voices in the media, in national and local legislative bodies, in courts, in Hollywood, and the White House itself. But if history shows anything, the true meaning of the Christmas story—the hope of a child born in a manger (where else would the Lamb of God be born), the sacrifice and perseverance of the wise men, the offering of gifts, and the amazing Star—will endure until Christ Himself returns.

Amen.

---

[1] Marco Polo, The Book of the Million, book1, ch. 13.

[2] Doug Storer, “America’s first Christmas carol written in Huron,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg), Dec. 17, 1982. Citation from the Wikipedia article on the song.

[3] New Revised Standard Version.

[4] Here I have used Jack W. Hayford’s excellent Bible and study guide, Spirit Filled Life Bible (New King James Version), [Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville] 1991, pp. 1401-1406. Church tradition says that for 15 years following thew resurrection of Jesus, Matthew preached in Palestine and conducted various missionary activities in other countries.

[5] The list includes: New English Bible (1961), Phillips New Testament in Modern English (1972), Twentieth Century New Testament (1904, revised edition), Amplified Bible (1958), and The Living Bible (1962).

[6] One of my favorite biographical studies about Kepler is by Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler in 1960. The book is an excerpt from Koestler’s seminal study The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959). For students of the Cold War period, Koestler’s classic work Darkness At Noon (1940) is without peer. 

[7] The colloquium particularly discussed astronomer Michael R. Molnar’s theory that the star of the east was linked to ancient Greek astrological observations. See, Gordon Govier, “O Subtle Star of Bethlehem,” Christianity Today, Vol. 58, No. 10, p. 19 (Dec 22, 2014); as cited in the Wikipedia article on the Star of Bethlehem.

[8] See A.J. Morehouse, “The Christmas Star as a Supernova in Aquila,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 72:65 (1978).

THREE COURAGE EXEMPLARS                                        

“Yet there was something else about the man [in the water] that kept our thoughts on him, and, which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was there, in the essential classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines, the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, one supposes, on faith.”

                                                                            Roger Rosenblatt

                                                                            “The Uniqueness of Man”[1]

“Authorities moved fast when a daring lone demonstrator disguised as a construction worker draped two white banners over a busy Beijing overpass in October [2022], their message calling for the ouster of Chinese leader Xi Jinping just days before he would secure a historic third term.”

                                                                           Lily Kuo, et.al.[2]

“In the early 1960’s, the U.S. CIA sought out the Hmong and recruited them to fight a ‘secret war’ against the North Vietnamese communists and the Pathet Lao … After the War in 1975, the Hmong were singled out by the victorious communist governments of Laos and Vietnam. They were hunted down, taken to concentration camps, and persecuted… It is estimated that more than 10% (35,000) of the entire Hmong population in Laos died as a result of their involvement with the U.S. during the Vietnam War … an additional 20,000 Hmong died after 1975 because of persecution, starvation, chemical spray, drowning, and simply killed by the Pathet Lao.”

                                                                             Hmong American Center[3]

          As Ima and I crisscrossed this country during her post-retirement tour, I have grown to look for two things: words of honor and personal acts of valor.

As to words of honor—by which I mean the highest voluntary expression of personal respect from a human being to God, or to another human being—I found fragments everywhere on our trip: loving gestures between husband and wife, children to parents, family interactions, or special memories exchanged between old friends. One of the true tragedies of our contemporary culture is that we hear so few honoring words spoken.

I have found, over the years, that such honoring words are the surest indicators of vibrant relationships.

The second thing I am always on the lookout for are deeds of personal valor and acts of courage. With that in mind, I’d like to write about three courageous acts in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. All three of these “exemplars” came to my attention during our travels over the past few days.

The first showed up on my perceptual radar screen as Ima and I visited the beautiful mountain-top home of Jeff Davis, one of my former students. Jeff and Kayla live high atop Beech Mountain, North Carolina and they share an office in the picturesque village of Banner Elk at the base of the mountain. Jeff is a successful investor and fund-manager; Kayla is a gifted accountant. At one point in his life after school, Jeff lived with us in Herndon, Virginia, where he worked in the first Bush White House. Jeff’s dad—whom I’ve mentioned before in my missives—was the former and highly successful president of both the College of the Ozarks and Alice Lloyd College; it has been my privilege to work for him at both campuses.

At any rate, while we were sitting in Jeff’s living room he pulled out an old notebook. He had kept the notes from the “senior seminar” class I taught while I was the director of the June Buchanan School, co-located on the campus of Alice Lloyd College, in tiny Pippa Passes, Kentucky. Jeff has kept those notes intact well over thirty-five years. He even showed me a test where (in a “matching” section) I asked each of the five other students—Matt, Kenny, Arnie, Angie and Jamie—to match their favorite songs to each other, based on our class discussions.

I used to do crazy things like that in class!

Jeff’s notebook also contained several of my class handouts. Each of those handouts, in turn, were generated on my old Apple Macintosh 128K computer (the same model is now in the Smithsonian Museum). I used that computer—with information saved on hard discs—to generate all the documents and handbooks for the school. Subsequently, I used the same computer for the class notes put together by Bruce McGary and I during the Chase Law School years. The old Mac holds a special place in my heart.

One handout that was folded in Jeff’s class notebook garnered my special attention. I have remembered both the article and the event it commemorated over all these years. In January 1982, as one of the many bridges crossing the Potomac River was slammed with rush hour bumper-to-bumper traffic, a blue-and-green Air Florida plane approaching Washington National Airport clipped the bridge. Flight 90 went down in the frozen river waters.

As the nation watched on television, rescue helicopters swooped over the river trying to save survivors. A handful of heroes were made that day.

But one man stands out above the rest. He was balding, probably in his 50s, sported a large, “extravagant” moustache and remained unidentified. According to Rosenblatt’s account, he was the person “most responsible for the emotional impact of the disaster.” He became known simply as “the man in the water.” He was first seen clinging to the tail section of the plane with five other survivors. Each time the helicopter lowered a lifeline and flotation ring, he passed it to another passenger. As the article notes:

         “For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he       would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others.   He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgement he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what     was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in the world move    away from him, and he deliberately let it happen.”[4]

He probably didn’t intend to be a hero when the plane took off.

He rose above the adverse circumstances.

The man’s bravery and self-sacrifice riveted the attention of a nation.   

For me, it still does, even after all these years.

My second exemplar of true courage also involves a bridge. It took place a little over a month ago. In Beijing, deep in the heart of President Xi Jinping’s Communist China, a lone individual instigated a rare public protest. On October 13, 2022, garbed in a construction worker’s orange vest and yellow helmet, an unnamed protestor draped two white banners and burned tires over the busy Sitong Bridge overpass in Beijing’s Haidian District. He then chanted repeatedly through a loudspeaker: “Go on strike at school and work, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping! We want to eat, we want freedom, we want to vote!”[5]

The protestor was immediately arrested. News is hard to get in China. A 48-year-old scientist named Peng Lifa was arrested by authorities, with all his tweets and on-line messages immediately taken down.[6]

But the damage was done. Even as the Chinese party elites gathered in the nearby Great Hall of the People to extol President Xi and rubber-stamp his policies and unprecedented third term at the 20^th Party Congress, anti-Xi slogans echoing the Sitong Bridge banners began popping up in a number of Chinese cities.[7] Around the world, copycat demonstrations spread to over 350 campuses, many by Chinese ethnic students.[8] The protestor became known around the world as the “Bridge Man”—an echo back to the “Tank Man”—another nameless Chinese protestor of a different era who faced down a column of Chinese tanks leaving Tiananmen Square a day after the 1989 massacre.[9]

I still remember sitting in front of the television in my living room in Erlander, Kentucky (I was in law school then), mesmerized by the picture of the lone Chinese protestor facing down a line of tanks. The scene became one of the iconic images for my generation.

Back to the bridge. In the hours and days after the one-man protest, Chinese authorities furiously cracked down on any on-line mention of the incident: social media posts with the words “bridge” or “Beijing” vanished within hours, related tweets were taken down, and further pressure was brought to bear on informal jieli (“pass the baton”) collective on-line protests.[10]

No doubt, the “Bridge Man” is being interrogated as we speak.

The silence on his behalf in the rest of the world is deafening.

He knew the consequences of his decision (probably for him and his family).

That’s the way things work in authoritarian regimes.

Nor did his one-man protest initiate the type of chain-reaction crowd “boo” moment that toppled the 42-year-old Romanian Communist regime of Nicholae Ceausescu in late 1989. (Here I am referring to the Romanian dictator’s address to some 100,000 people in the city of Timisora to condemn a local revolt—the Party tried to pack the crowd, but about two minutes into the speech there was a single boo, joined then by a chorus of others, then jeers, then insults—the startled expression on Ceausescu’s face as the crowd refused to be silent remains one of the defining moments of 1989, and the revolutions that swept Communist regimes from Eastern Europe.)[11]

But then again, we don’t teach history anymore.

If that was the intent of the man on the bridge, it didn’t work.

“Sigh.”

My third exemplar of courage emerged from several conversations at the home of Xeng and Xi Ly. They now live outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, but for two decades were our neighbors in Sterling, Virginia.

And no one could ask for better neighbors.

Xeng and Xi are Hmong. They are two of an estimated 330,000 ethnic Hmong in the U.S. today. They both overcame the obstacles of learning English, have assimilated into the culture, are proud wage earners, and became legal citizens (just saying).

None of that was easy.

What sets them apart are their life stories: amazing examples of danger-filled flights from persecution, the powerful allure of freedom, and the mercy of God. Although the personal journeys of Xeng and Xi are powerful individual exemplars of courage in their own right, there is also a compelling back story: a “secret war” from 1971-1975, where American intelligence agencies covertly recruited Hmong tribesmen to fight in the jungles of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam;[12] a secret war that largely went unreported by mainstream U.S. media outlets; a secret aerial bombing campaign[13] where more bombs were dropped on Laos than the number dropped on all countries combined in World War II;[14] and, a secret embarrassment where we completely abandoned our Hmong allies and left them to their fate.

Against this backdrop are the stories of Xeng and Xi.

Xeng had worked for USAID and had received American assistance for his medical training. It made him a marked man. The immediate problem was getting across the Mekong River: he could not swim (eventually he bought his way aboard a boat). “I cannot explain how horrible it was,” Xeng told me, “to stay in Laos was a certainty of death, either today or tomorrow, but if you could survive the river crossing you had a chance to survive. Many used bamboo for floats, soldiers were on the banks and shooting, and—in the rapids below—others set out nets to snare the bodies and steal money out of the clothing.”

Xi’s escape was even more amazing. She was a very young girl at the time. She attempted to escape with her grandmother— “she had the money but I could speak the language”—but was captured and returned to her village. Eventually (after several close calls) they found a relative and a boat across the river. In Thailand they were by themselves in “a grassy field” before finding a place in a Thai resettlement camp. A nephew cleared off land to help them pay for scarce food supplies. The conditions in the camp were very poor and life in the camp was very difficult and hazardous. Xi told us about a young wife who was raped in front of her husband, “but they could say or do nothing.”

She first met Xeng there (he was helping provide medical care at the camp). “Who is that pretty young girl?” Xeng asked a relative. Their paths would cross again across the ocean, in the United States. Xi was in Philadelphia, struggling to learn English and make her way through school. She fondly remembers an American couple who patiently worked with her. On a class trip to Washington D.C. (for the Bicentennial) she “ran into” Xeng again (he knew she would be coming). Eventually they were married, before she finished school.

Xeng would rather talk about his father. He was a remarkable individual, who was a Hmong tribal leader of sorts, and at first refused to leave his tribe and his relatives in the jungle. According to Xeng, his father had a special “gift” of sorts and could predict things in advance. His father would eventually testify on Capitol Hill during the “yellow rain” hearings,[15] and he remained convinced to his dying day that his fellow tribesmen were victims of chemical agents.

Xeng still believes it too.

The personal stories of Xeng and Xi held us spellbound for the entire time of our short stay with them. They were such gracious hosts. Xi confidentially confided many other things that happened in private talks with Imogene.

This account, of course, barely touches the extent of their incredible experiences.

Ima and I treasure Xeng and Xi’s friendship and will always be amazed by their acts of courage.

And their love for their adopted country.

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[1] Roger Rosenblatt, “The Uniqueness of Man,” Time Magazine, Jan. 1982. One of my former JBS students (Jeff Davis) let me borrow my printed version of this article—still one of my personal favorites after all these years—during Ima and my visit to his and Kayla’s beautiful home on the top of Beech Mountain NC in Oct. 2022.

[2] Lily Kuo, Vic Chiang, and Theodora Yu, “One man’s bold protest against China’s leaders inspires global copycats,” The Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2022.

[3] “What were the Hmong’s Roles in the Vietnam War,” Hmong American Center (blog), Oct. 4, 2018.

[4] Rosenblatt, “The Uniqueness of Man.”

[5] “China congress: How one man on a bridge marred Xi Jinping’s big moment,” BBC, Oct. 21, 202;see also “Rare protest criticizes China’s president days before Communist Party congress,” NBC News, Oct. 13, 2022; Martin Pollard and Eduardo Baptista, “Rare political protest banners removed in Chinese capital,” Reuters, Oct. 14, 2022.

[6] Kuo, “One man’s bold protest”; Jenny Pan, “Chinese police arrest bridge protestor calling for citizens to ‘take down dictator Xi Jinping,” The Telegraph, Oct. 13, 2022.

[7] “Anti-Xi protest spreads in China and worldwide as Chinese leader begins third term,” CNN, Oct.  23, 2022.

[8] Kuo, “One man’s protest.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] Kuo, “One man’s protest”; see also: “’We all saw it’: anti-Xi Jinping protest electrifies Chinese internet,” The Guardian, Oct. 14, 2022; Yvette Tan, “China protest: Mystery Beijing demonstrator sparks on-line hunt and tributes,” BBC News, Oct. 14, 2022; Dake Kang, “China quashes social media about protest banners in Beijing,” Associated Press, Oct. 13, 2022; Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu, “China’s Internet Censors Race to Quell Beijing Protest Chatter,” The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2022.

[11] For those interested, see—among many others—Victor Sebetsyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Pantheon Books, NY: 2009.

[12] A sampling of the literature: Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, Shadow War: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos, Paladin Press, 1995; Timothy Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955-1975, Columbia University Press, 1993; Roger Warner, Backfire: The CIA’s War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam, Simon & Schuster, 1995.

[13] See, Christopher Robbins, The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in America’s Secret War in Laos, Crown, 1987.

[14] See, Pa Nhia Xiong, “The Secret War: The Forgotten Hmong Heroes,” (unpublished dissertation), California State University, Fresno, 2020.

[15] The “yellow rain” controversy is a fascinating topic. In the early 1980s, U.S. officials accused the then-U.S.S.R. of supplying T-2 mycotoxins to the Communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos which were, in turn, used against dissident groups in their own countries. Hmong refugees and others described sticky yellow substances dropped from helicopters that caused blisters, sores and skin infections—the so-called “yellow rain.” A UN investigation was inconclusive, and some scientists subsequently theorized that mass defecations of large bee swarms were the source of the substance. Many US documents relating to the controversy remain classified. The U.S. government has never retracted its allegations.

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