by Val Ross
Meanwhile, over at the Entertaining Comics group, Charlie Gaines’s son Bill and his team were gleefully pushing deeper into the territory of bad taste. One early 1950s EC comic, Crime SuspenStories, featured a cover showing an axe murderer, hatchet still dripping, standing over a headless woman’s body. Gaines thought that one was so outrageous it was funny.
Fredric Wertham did not. This particular issue became one of his major pieces of evidence in his crusade against comics. He used it in his book Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954. Things came to a head in May of that year. The U.S. Senate decided to hold a special session on links between mobsters and the comics industry. Bill Gaines and Fredric Wertham were called to testify. Would this be a clash of the titans?
Wertham spoke to the Senate hearings first. He told chilling case histories of psychopaths who loved horror fantasy. He misquoted comic-book plots and zeroed in on some of the insults the characters threw at one another. When it came to teaching violence and race hatred, he declared, “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”
Then it was Bill Gaines’s turn to speak. He was a chubby man, and had been taking pills to lose weight. They made him dozy just when he needed his wits about him. As the senators lobbed questions at him, he felt himself fading away. He actually mumbled that he considered the headless corpse on the cover of Crime SuspenStories in “good taste – for a horror comic.” Before he left the room, Gaines knew he had been a disaster. He went home and took to his bed for three days.
In the end, the Senate decided that it couldn’t do much about comics without infringing on constitutional principles of free speech. It agreed to stop short of banning comic books after the industry agreed to police itself by adopting a new Comics Code. The Code promised that there would be no more bloody axes, no more offensive slang, no more showing policemen or judges in ways that invited disrespect. The Code even asked comics to drop the word “weird.” Without weirdness the fun was gone, so Bill Gaines closed down EC’s comics business. In rebellion, he and his pals invented Mad Magazine, which was both gross and goofy. Mad got him into trouble too – but because Mad was a magazine, it was outside the Comics Code.
As for Fredric Wertham, for a generation comics fans hated his name. They cursed him as the man who had killed off some of the world’s wildest flights of imagination. Thanks to him, Superman and Batman were like lonely war veterans in a wholesome world of Archie and Daffy Duck.
In his old age, Fredric Wertham had a change of heart. In 1974, in his last book, The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication, he explained that comic-book fans were very nice kids after all. This book didn’t sell nearly as well as his earlier hysterical, scare-mongering shockers.
But then, horror and fantasy are much more fun to read than simple common sense. Wertham should have learned that much, at least, from the writers he had attacked.
Days of the Taliban
DURING LONG PERIODS of violence and war, when those in authority want to bring their chaotic world under control, often they start by trying to control reading.
t is late September 2001, and the summer heat still bakes the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan. Nelofer Ayub is stifling inside her burqa, the pale blue robe that covers her from head to foot. The burqa’s only opening is a cloth cage, a sort of netting, around her eyes. The sixteen-year-old has been wearing a burqa since the Taliban took over Kabul more than five years ago – that is, all her teenaged life. It’s hard for her to see her feet – or anything except what’s directly in front. As she walks she’s afraid she will trip, so she concentrates on staying close to her brother, Ahmed. This burqa smells like a sweaty tent, but Nelofer doesn’t dare flap the cloth to let in more air. She cannot draw attention to herself. Afghanistan’s rulers, a gang of black-turbaned men (they call themselves Taliban, “religious students”), have passed laws saying that females may not go out unless accompanied by a male relative. The Taliban have also decreed that girls may not attend school.
And Nelofer is on her way to a secret school, to break that law.
After the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2002, girls were allowed into classrooms again. But many girls in developing countries still lack the money or opportunity to go to school. It’s estimated that of the world’s 120 million children who cannot go to school, two-thirds are girls.
If one of the Taliban stops her on the street and discovers what she’s up to, she knows, she will be beaten – or worse. The Taliban, with their whips and clubs, enforce an extreme form of Islam, one that insists that women be kept veiled in public and always obey the wishes of their menfolk. According to the Taliban way of thinking, if females want to learn to read, it is a sure sign that they are not religious. As for females who can already read, the Taliban assume that they must have been taught by the communists who used to rule Afghanistan.
Nelofer can remember the early 1990s, when the Afghan communists and their Soviet Russian protectors ran this part of her country. People complained, and some openly loathed the communists. But she can also remember that girls went to school in those days, and that women, tens of thousands of Kabul women wearing Western clothes, their faces bare, went off to work in offices and as doctors and lawyers and teachers. It’s hard to believe that, back then, her parents and their friends dreamed of getting rid of the Soviet-backed communists, and spoke about how the city would be liberated by religious warriors from the wild countryside.
In 1992 the Russian Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, leaving the local communists to fight alone. Civil war between different Afghan factions got bloodier; the noise of gunfire got closer and closer. Gradually, thanks to money and support from Pakistan, the United States, and rich Saudi Arabians like Osama bin Laden, the Taliban emerged as the one group that could beat the others. Their leader was one of Osama’s sons-in-law, a rough, heavily bearded, one-eyed warrior named Mullah Omar. It was said that the only book he had ever read was the Koran, the holy book of Islam. It was said that he was proud to be ignorant – he thought it meant he was simple and pure of heart.
Nelofer also remembers 1996, when the Taliban swept into Kabul. “All sisters who are working in government offices are hereby informed to stay home until further notice,” the radio announced, the day after the Taliban’s white flag went up over the city. “All sisters are seriously asked to cover their faces and the whole of their bodies when they go out.” At the University of Kabul, eight thousand female undergraduate students learned that their education had come to a sudden end. Any female who showed her face or showed that she could read was assumed to be a communist, and the Taliban’s enemy.
Nelofer and her brother, Ahmed, are not communists. Their father has a small business importing goods. (Under the Taliban’s strict religious rules, this sometimes gets him into trouble – like the time he brought in cases of shampoo with a picture of a pretty woman’s face on the label. Angry young men in black turbans, who call themselves religious police, made her father and his workers scribble out the faces on the labels with felt-tipped pens. They said it was against the law of God to show images of a woman’s face.) As for Nelofer’s mother, who used to teach grade one, the Taliban told her she couldn’t work at all. Since they took over, she has sat at home, feeling sick and depressed.
And Mother, still having a husband, is one of the lucky ones! It’s estimated that there are fifty thousand widows in Kabul, women whose husbands died in the civil wars. Since women can now only go out in public with a male from their family, many widows have to stay in their houses – or risk being whipped by the religious police.
Nelofer can imagine how terrible it must be for a mother to hear her child clamoring for food or a chance to play in the park, and to know she doesn’t dare go out the front door. Occasionally Nelofer sees women begging for bread. But not all the beggars in burqas are helpless; some are spies. They could be watching today – now – as Nelofer and her brother go into this battered apartment building and mount the stairs to t
he one place where Nelofer can let her mind out of its cage.
For one of these apartments is a secret school. The girls come at different times, by different routes and on different days each week, to disguise their activities. The woman who runs the school, Mrs. Fazel, is taking a huge risk by teaching her five students. She believes that teaching children is not a sin, but the moral thing to do.
Nelofer enters the apartment, two almost bare rooms whose windows are covered in paint. (The Taliban ordered all windows painted so no one could see women inside their homes.) The only furniture is a cupboard full of pieces of cloth and boxes of needles and thread. If the religious police do burst through the door, the girls will appear to be sewing clothes – one of the few activities women are allowed to do.
Nelofer’s cousin Feroza used to attend a mosque school near the city of Ghazni, run by a religious teacher. “From eight a.m. until four p.m., we sat on the floor – there were no chairs – and we learned Arabic so we could read the Koran,” Feroza told Nelofer once. “He never taught us what we were reading. We could read the sounds, that’s all.” When Feroza turned ten, the religious teacher kicked her out of school. “He said I should not study any more. He said, if girls study, they become witches.” After that, a friend of the family came to visit her parents once a month to teach her and her cousins to read Pashto and Dari, the languages of Afghanistan. He brought simple books, and taught history, geography, and mathematics.
All across Afghanistan, girls have found ways to study in secret. One United Nations official estimates that more than twenty-five thousand girls and women across Herat province alone have been able to find some kind of lessons, right under the Taliban’s noses. But secret schools have almost no books. The Taliban have banned all books with pictures, and all books from Europe, America, or countries (such as Iran) that practice Shia Islam, a different form of the religion. When the Taliban find private libraries in people’s houses, they dump the books in trucks and cart them away to be burned in huge public bonfires.
Once Mrs. Fazel’s apartment had a bookshelf of books in Persian, Arabic, and English. All you can see on the shelves now is those heaps of sewing. But beneath the piles of sewing are stapled photocopies – homemade, illegal, dangerous books.
They don’t look like much, these books, but they are the delight of Nelofer’s life. They tell the girls about history – real history, not communist or Taliban propaganda. They tell of a wide and wonder-filled world beyond the girls’ burqa cages. They tell of such people as En-hedu-anna, the high priestess of Ur, who wrote poems to a goddess of love and war more than four thousand years ago. They tell of Alexander the Great, who came through Afghanistan with his Greek soldiers (and his beloved copies of Homer) over two thousand years ago, and named a city Alexandria-in-Arachosia – now it’s called Kandahar. After the Greeks came the Mongols, and then, in the 1800s, the British tried to control this country, and after them, the Russians. Sooner or later, the Afghans drove them all out.
Nelofer’s favorite history lesson was the day Mrs. Fazel told the girls about a remarkable woman from the 1400s. Her name was Queen Gower Shad, her husband was a descendant of Genghis Khan, and she ruled until she was in her eighties. Her empire stretched almost from China to Turkey. Queen Gower Shad built fine libraries and religious colleges covered in delicately painted tiles the color of the bluest skies. Travelers said her libraries were among the most beautiful buildings in the world.
When Nelofer reads about women like Gower Shad, she looks around her so-called school with its painted-over windows and anxious students, and she wonders how her country has come to this – from being enriched by great civilizations, to living under the Taliban’s cult of ignorance and cruel oppression. What would Queen Gower Shad make of this?
Afghan girls are no longer afraid to be photographed. Some have faces that reveal their Mongol ancestors; others, with fair hair and light eyes, may be descended from the Greeks who invaded the region under Alexander the Great.
She also reads that Gower Shad was the patron of a great poet, Hakim Jami, who studied Plato and other Greek philosophers, and wrote some of the loveliest poems in classical Persian. One of Nelofer’s favorite passages includes the lines “It is in the nature of Beauty to reveal herself, and to remain morose behind a veil; For Beauty does not tolerate being hidden and, if imprisoned, will peep through the window of her cell….”
Jami’s poem comforts Nelofer when, at the end of class, she has to put her smelly burqa back over her head. As she creeps carefully downstairs to meet Ahmed, watching warily through her cloth cage, she tells herself, “If imprisoned, Beauty will peep through the window of her cell.”
Ahmed is in a strange mood when he meets her outside the apartment building. He too has been doing something forbidden – listening to the BBC World Service, British radio news. He speaks in a low but excited voice. “On September n, some men hijacked airplanes and flew them into skyscrapers in New York City,” he says. “The buildings came crashing down. Thousands of people were killed.” There’s more; the radio says the Americans think these terrorists were working for Osama bin Laden – the man behind the Taliban – who now lives here in Afghanistan, near his son-in-law, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Maybe the Americans will attack Afghanistan, says Ahmed. Maybe there will be another war. “Maybe,” he whispers, “maybe they will drive out the Taliban.”
Nelofer is shocked. She hates the thought of another wave of outsiders barging into her country, and she is alarmed by the prospect of more bloodshed, more destruction. But for the first time in a long while, she wonders if she can see a future without a burqa – without the cage that has confined her for the past five years. She wonders if she can see a future in a bigger, wider world – the one she knows only through her reading.
Access Denied
CODES AND CODE-BREAKING techniques have come a long way since the time of Mary, Queen of Scots. After some inventors came up with machines that could create hugely complicated codes, other inventors developed machines that could crack the codes. These so-called computers evolved into the supercomputers that generate today’s so-far unbreakable military ciphers. Have we finally found a way to block people from reading what we don’t want them to read?
ou know this scene from a spy movie or a science-fiction thriller: The hero sits down in front of a computer to check out a vital clue, to unmask a treacherous villain. Suddenly, up pops a chilling message: ACCESS DENIED. With a shock, the hero realizes that all that desperately needed information is locked up behind an electronic wall The machine has said, You can’t read this.
For thousands of years, people have been creating devices to prevent other people from reading texts they want to keep secret. The ancient Greeks of Sparta used a coding tool called a skytale (ski-ta-le) to send secret messages in times of battle. The skytale consisted of a wooden stick and a strip of leather wound round it like the stripes on a candy cane. Soldiers would write their messages on the strip along the length of the stick, and then unwind the strip. That broke up the pattern of the message, separating the words and making them meaningless – until the strip was delivered to some other Spartan who wound it around a stick of the same thickness, restoring the words to a meaningful pattern.
All messages are patterns of meaning, and recognizing something about their pattern is the key to breaking a code. More than a thousand years ago Arab cryptanalysts (kryptos is Greek for “secret”) understood that in any language, certain letters and common words appear frequently; they used “frequency analysis” to break codes by recognizing their most frequently occurring parts.
Around 1460, a very clever Italian inventor named Leon Alberti (he was also the author of the first major book on architectural design) came up with a plan for a coding machine: alphabets on movable disks. Through a simple turn of the disks, ABCDEFG on disk 1 might line up with PQRSTUV on disk 2 and HIJKLMN on disk 3. If you wanted to code the message BAD FEED (warning your friends not to feed their horses), you
would substitute for B the letter Q from disk 2 and for A the letter H from disk 3, and then go back to disk 2 for the “D.” The entire message would read QHS MTLS. Alberti’s double substitution system meant that frequency analysis (the strategy that cracked Mary, Queen of Scots’ code) would be difficult, because common letters like E or A would be written in more than one way.
In the time of Frederick Douglass, Confederate officers in the American Civil War carried versions of Alberti’s code disk. But not until World War I did people develop a seriously complicated version. On August 26, 1914, a German cruiser ran aground on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and the Russians seized German navy codes. They shared this information with the English, and it gave them the power to decode many German messages right through to the end of the war. In the mid-1920s the German military command learned that their enemies had been decoding their messages, and realized that they had to come up with a better coding system, a better machine – one so complex that no human analyst could possibly beat it.
The Enigma cipher machine created new codes each day for military messages, yet it could fit neatly into a wooden carrying case. The Nazis were convinced that Enigma’s codes were unbreakable.
A German inventor, Arthur Scherbius, had already produced just such a machine: the Enigma, a fearsome thing that looked like a typewriter with a box on top. Inside were scrambler disks that rotated each time one of the alphabet’s twenty-six letters was typed in. In his first version, Scherbius put in three scrambler disks, which meant there were 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576 possible settings. To unscramble a message coded by an Enigma machine, you needed to know the day’s settings – for example, that today disk I was rotated so that W was at the top (and the alphabet started from there), and that today disk 2 had C at the top and disk 3 had Q at the top. If you set your own Enigma to the same “WCQ” key and typed in the scrambled version, out would come the decoded message. But anyone without that day key would have to spend days trying possible versions – and by that time there would have been several new keys.
