Volume CCXXXV, Number 98 October 16, 2005

Editors' Note: Recently the New York Times Magazine decided to lighten things up a little by adding a new section they called the "Funny Pages." The idea of adding funny pages to a Sunday newspaper struck us as so novel and brilliant that we did not hesitate for one instant to steal it for ourselves.

building comix

Stylized Life by Alison Porchnik

gazed out from the balcony of my eight-room Riverside Drive apartment over the Hudson with a pang of existential sorrow.

The pre-war penthouse had sufficed when there was only Sheldon – my husband – and I. The housekeeper commuted days from Queens – or was it Brooklyn? – and we had plenty of space for ourselves and our fabulous friends.

Then along came perfect little Max and her even more perfect sister Zoe, plus a full-time live-in au pair from Slovenia (or was it Slovakia?), and suddenly our little apartment was bursting at the seams. I had to move my painting studio to another apartment that Sheldon maintained next door – a temporary expedient that my husband bore with surprisingly ill grace.

Yes, we were faced with the choice that sooner or later all New Yorkers must grapple with: buy a country house or move to the suburbs?

The suburbs: even the word made my flesh crawl. Vapid power moms scooting around in minivans. A cultural wasteland of lawnmowers, birthday parties and desperate housewives. How my mother put up with it all those years in Great Neck I'll never know.

How could we bear to leave the élan vital of New York? The restaurants where the mâitre d' greeted you by name even as the bridge-and-tunnel crowd waited glumly at the bar? The three-minute walk to Zabar's?

The intellectually stimulating multicultural preschool to which Max and Zoe were admitted after Sheldon built that new wing?

Of course my husband was "too busy" to help when it came time to scout houses in Bedford. It turned out that five million dollars would barely suffice to pick up a teardown on just a few acres. Everything would have to be ripped out and redone.

So then I looked at country houses upstate. I was taken with the fantasy of a little country cottage deep in the woods where I could build a charming studio in my garden. Of course, there would have to be enough room for my adorable children, their au pair, the housekeeper, our stylish weekend guests and Sheldon's Ferrari collection. (Men!)

Finally we found our dream house: a cute 15-room manor house on 100 acres in Rhinebeck. It's much more low-key than the Hamptons and the river view is even nicer than the one from our city apartment. I put in many long hours directing the construction of my garden and my studio. Now I spend weekends painting in my garden while Max and Zoe gambol in the fresh country air with their au pair. Sheldon says he'll check the place out one of these weekends as soon as his latest fund closes.

Who says there are no happy endings in the big city?

Alison Porchnik is a writer and artist in New York.

Help Judy find Scooter!

WHY WE FIGHT

Corruption pervades government in Basra

BASRA, Iraq -- The insurgency roiling much of Iraq has not taken hold in this southern metropolis, where Shi'ite Arabs hold sway and religious law is firmly ensconced. Basra is facing a different threat: pervasive, murderous, gangland-style corruption.

News of unsolved killings and vanished public funds vie for attention in the conservative Shi'ite Muslim heartland, where three rival Islamist religious parties -- all of which ran for office on a platform of using Islamic values to root out corruption -- dominate the provincial government.

On Tuesday night, American journalist Steven Vincent was kidnapped and killed after he wrote a series of articles denouncing corruption and accusing police hit squads controlled by Islamic clerics in a rash of unsolved slayings. Two weeks ago, the deputy governor was killed; the rumor on the streets of Basra was that he was about to expose financial improprieties on the provincial council.

''You can't describe it with words, they are so corrupt," said Dr. Adel Makee al-Yassiry, a cardiothoracic surgeon and deputy director of Basra's 10-story teaching hospital, describing the Islamist political parties in the provincial government. ''They have militias, and they will kill those who show documents exposing corruption," he said. ''People are afraid they will be murdered if they expose corruption."

Yassiry is an Islamist, and he supports the ideals of the parties in power. But like many in Basra, he is dismayed by the corrupt bureaucrats in the civil service who have gutted Basra's public service budget, undermining the rule of the Islamic leaders he calls ''respectful and honest men."

Corruption is so rife that even though the government has awarded new contracts to collect garbage, there is more trash on the streets of Basra now than at the end of the punishing three-week siege of Basra during the US-led invasion in March 2003.

The killings may also rival those from that period. But instead of war or insurgency, the homicide rate is driven by almost-daily assassinations. According to Basra politicians, many of the homicides are tit-for-tat killings of Islamist party officials; some hit squads target Ba'athists, and another fraction of the killings seem to be part of continuing tribal feuds that predate the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

According to coroner's records, 1,176 homicides were committed in Basra in the past nine months. Witnesses say many of the killers are wearing police uniforms and driving police cars, and they often assassinate their targets in broad daylight.

Most of the assassinations remain unsolved, and a majority of the police force (one-half to three-quarters, the police chief recently estimated to reporters) are actually Islamist militia fighters loyal to their sponsoring political party, rather than to the government. . . .

In Basra, most of the Shi'ite majority subscribe to varying shades of fundamentalism. The major debate among the political elite is whether to force or persuade the public to live by the dictates of Sharia, or Islamic law.

The province's Sunni minority (estimated at 25 percent of the 2 million population) has kept a low profile since leading Sunni academics and former Ba'ath Party officials began to fall in an assassination campaign last year.

Women like Anwar Mohammed Ridha al-Jabor, director of a public radio station, said she faces continual harassment for such activities as driving, which many of Basra's leading imams believe should be forbidden for women.

''It's already an Islamic republic here in Basra, but no one wants to say it out loud until the constitution is written," Jabor said.

The faithful have taken Islamization seriously: Liquor stores have been firebombed, almost no women dare go out without the veil, and restaurants have stopped playing music or serving beer.

Reconstruction has lagged. Rusted Iraqi Army tanks line many roads in and out of the city, memorials of the 2003 invasion. Warehouses and office buildings bombed and looted during the invasion (and some from as far back as the 1980-88 war with Iran) lie in shambles.

Weeds and garbage clog the open sewage-filled canals and ditches. Basrans have to buy drinking water from the ubiquitous stalls along the main roads.

Hundreds of squatters swelter in the 120-degree summer heat in an abandoned Labor Federation office building near the Shatt al-Arab waterway, still waiting for the public housing promised them by the government. Electricity and gas are in short supply, even though 80 percent of Iraq's oil production comes from the province's Rumaila oil field.

Bribes are a standard part of doing business at the six ports in Basra Province, which contain Iraq's only ports. Corruption has also allegedly deeply penetrated the police force. The police chief declined to be interviewed last week, while he faced a weeklong probe by a delegation from the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad.

– The Glob, August 8, 2005 via boston.com.