I was twenty miles north of Phoenix hiking along Cave Creek in the springtime glory of the Sonoran desert. Alone by the flowing stream, I sat awestruck by the magnificent display of Mexican gold poppies, purple lupine, and assorted orange and red flowers. I was so entranced by the breathtaking palette, the symphony of gurgling water, that I imagined myself floating away on a magic carpet of blooms.

The only distraction was a discarded plastic water bottle in front of me. With everything in the world becoming commodified and disposable, I think we will destroy this natural wonder. Looking at the plastic bottle I think about a segment on TV’s 20/20 that I watched the night before, about plasticizing people. This patented process, discovered by the German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, is called plastination. Von Hagens found a way to vacuum out a corpse’s fat and body fluids, and then to forcibly impregnate it with liquid plastic. His work was done entirely with volunteers who gave him permission to display them after their death. Von Hagens became famous through his globe-trotting human body exhibition, called “Body Worlds,” which displayed skinless corpses in flexible poses, exposing their musculature and internal organs.

Von Hagens plastination process has been duplicated and now there is a demand for plastic people. The 20/20 program reported that businesses are using the corpses in advertising campaigns, and production companies rent them to be filmed in commercials. These bodies by the way are not all volunteers, they are executed Chinese prisoners, bought and shipped to plastination processors.

When all living things become commodities preserved in plastic, it reduces our appreciation of the sanctity of life. Awe is the mechanism by which we open ourselves to our souls; don’t wait to buy poppies in plastic . . . go out into the desert, woods, mountains, streams and be awed by the aliveness of what’s real.

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Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport was the site of field tests for the new “backscatter” X-ray machine. The machine, the size of a doublewide freezer, bounces low-radiation X-rays off you to produce a photo-quality image of you as if you were undressed.

You stand in front of the machine, putting your feet inside the outlines, and hold your arms up. You do the front first and then you turn around for the backside view. This machine makes its unnecessary for security people to have to pat you down, and it better scrutinizes every nook and cranny in your body. This machine can pick up things non-metallic: it can recognize explosives, a ceramic knife, even your plastic IUD.

The TSA officer directing you doesn’t see your near naked image; it’s transmitted to a security person in some remote room. I jiggled a bit hoping the dance would animate my privy parts and provoke a smile to my unseen examiner, but I was told to stand still.

I didn’t like the experience, and it’s not because I consider nakedness scandalous; as a matter of fact, I quite like getting naked. Last year, when more than 18,000 people stripped off their clothes and posed nude for the photographer Spencer Tunick in Mexico City’s famous Zocalo square, I wanted to participate in the record-setting event.


I didn’t like being strip-searched by a machine as an act of patriotic duty in the fight against terrorism. If I get naked for my country, I’d like to do it with 100,000 Americans in front of the White House, promoting peace instead of escalating paranoia (and I’d like Spencer Tunick to immortalize the performance).

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Phoenix, Arizona was a frenzy of celebratory joy last week as it prepared for the Super Bowl. This was not just about a football game (the best I’ve ever seen by the way); it was a gathering of prominent glitterati from the worlds of sports, music, movies, politics, and big business. Every night of the week preceding the game, there was an assortment of party venues — some free, others easily affordable, and some high-ticket settings in chi-chi nightclubs hosted by hip-hop celebrities. There was room for everyone, and it was the first time I’ve seen all sides of this town come together in a communal celebration of joy.

We don’t celebrate joy together in community much anymore...... we hardly do it as families. We need to be doing it more, though, because it’s part of our nature. Since antiquity, people have craved live events that celebrate joy, because such events renew the bonds that tie people together.

Nowadays, maybe the only way such gatherings can occur in big cities is if they’re sponsored by business interests and produced as Hollywood extravaganzas. There is no question that this kind of commercialization tends to carnivalize such events.

We celebrated Super Bowl Sunday as a big extended family party, gathering in a pillow-laden “lounge” that featured a movie-screen size HDTV, open bar, hors d'oeuvres and gourmet pizza.

I stretched out with my grandkids, and got absorbed by the exciting game and the animated betting action that accompanied virtually every play. They wanted to know how anybody could keep track of all the action, so we got into bookmaking, odds, and the mathematics of risk and pay-off.

This is exactly how I learned math as a kid. . . when I took my weekly nickel for milk at school and gambled it instead on three baseball players who between them would get six hits. If I picked Ted Williams, Stan Musial and Jackie Robinson, it was almost even money, maybe 3:2, or 5:3, but long-shots with unknown players could get you 15:1, maybe 25:1.

Sitting with my grand kids, philosophizing about how much risk you are willing to take if the pay-off is enough, eating good food, listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, laughing, and dancing — it was a little piece of heaven.


Even if Super Bowl was a choreographed carnival, it brought together people in an atmosphere of joyful anticipation to celebrate life. That’s something we need to do more regularly, and we don’t have to wait for commercial sponsorship. Let’s find more reasons for spontaneous celebrations on a smaller scale.

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Heath Ledger’s death last week at the age of 28 transformed him from an acclaimed actor into a cultural icon. The general public as well as the famous and powerful paid tribute to him; tens of thousands signed his memorial page on Facebook. There were eulogies from movie idols, music legends, politicians, and athletes, extolling his virtues.

To be cut down in the prime of one’s life forces the young to face their own mortality. It doesn’t matter whether that untimely death is intended or not; when someone who has so much to live for dies, it captivates our attention.

How do we make sense of such untimely death? The first thing we do is immortalize those who die young; they live forever in our minds as a way to shield us from our own mortality. The second is that we look at our lives and the choices we’ve made about how we’ve pursued fame and fortune. It’s a reminder of Achilles’ dilemma when he learns from his mother that he has two options in this life: he can either live, or die young and earn everlasting fame. Achilles chooses fame, and upon his early death he is mourned by mortals and Gods.

When a superstar dies young, it may also be comforting to the majority of us who never achieve such fame that the choices we have made have been more life-affirming.

I mourned Heath Ledger’s passing not only because he was a young man of talent, but a man of courage. In Brokeback Mountain he chose to play a gay role in a homophobic world. You have to mourn the loss of people with courage, because they help us see the world from a new perspective. May his light continue to illumine the earth.

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