Let's Pray We Can Close the Pillow Gap Before It's Too Late

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 23, 2005)

Its designers say that if it works, the pillow could one day join rifles, flak jackets and helmets as part of the basic equipment soldiers carry into conflicts. – Associated Press article on sleep-inducing pillows Danish peacekeepers are testing in the Balkans

Pat Robertson, the American TV evangelist, knocked me from despair into depression last week when he told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, it could no longer count on God’s help. Dover citizens rejected God, Robertson said, when they voted to replace a school board that had required an introduction of so-called “Intelligent Design” into science classrooms.

“If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin,” he said. Proponents of Intelligent Design, or ID, hold that some life forms are too complex to have evolved by natural selection, as Darwin proposed, and must have been created by design.

Now, I know Robertson proved himself religiously insane long ago – he blamed the 9-11 attacks on America’s pursuit of “health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality”; he warned Orlando, Florida, it risked God’s wrath in the form of a hurricane for holding a Gay Pride Festival; he’s said Christians and Jews are the only people fit to hold public office.

But the man is 75 years old, and it’s depressing to think that someone so old has learned and matured so little. And he’s got one million daily viewers (his network says), and his show, the 700 Club, is translated into more than 70 languages. The weight of the stupidity is too much to bear, especially nights when I lie awake formulating arguments to counter all the world’s village idiots.

I was even preparing to give up my daily news fix, ready to be done with my habitual morning apoplexy, the natural result of a mathematically trained mind meeting the illogic and inconsistency of the normal news cycle. But my outlook suddenly brightened at the news that Danish soldiers are carrying pillows into battle in the Balkans. Actually, they are not carrying them into battle; they are using the pillows -- which rid the soldiers of unpleasant thoughts and ease stress through a mixture of nature sounds and acoustical music -- to rest from peacekeeping duties.

“You will not think about what is maybe happening with your wife at home, or your children. All thoughts will disappear, images will be created – forests, beaches, mountains. And then you will fall asleep,” said Maj. Helmer T. Hansen, the battalion surgeon serving the Danish soldiers.

This is a happy development. For once the pillows are proven – and the only complaint so far seems to be that the pillows may be too thick – armies and nations will begin competing with each other to have the best rested soldiers. Technicians and specialists will work in secret laboratories to design pillows for the deepest, quickest, most satisfying sleep – for it is logical that well-rested soldiers will perform better than the sleep-deprived, grizzled veterans of earlier wars.

National efforts that would previously have gone into making better missiles and bombs will pour into pillow technology. For is it not also logical that the best and latest killing weapons will be of no use if soldiers fall asleep beside the red buttons that fire them? “Who fell asleep while our soldiers were sleeping on the watch?” will be the new question parliaments and congresses demand war-losing ministers and presidents answer.

Inevitably, too, espionage and sabotage techniques will be developed to disguise and substitute sleep-depriving pillows for an opposing army’s sleep-inducing pillows. The trick pillows will make soldiers worry about whom their wives might be sleeping with, how late their children are out and where, if anyone’s put out the dog and taken in the cat. And, yes, when both armies have been first coddled to and then disturbed from their rest, pillow fights will break out.

As an American, what worries me is that Dover, PA, aside, US educators are still contending with this movement to introduce ID and Creation Science into classrooms. In Kansas, for example, the Board of Education recently approved ID as part of its high school “science” curriculum, and similar efforts are underway in several other states. The danger is obvious -- if American students are taught that life was designed according to purpose by an intelligent being or God, they will eventually come to the conclusion that if soldiers were meant to get a better night’s sleep, their ears would be fluffier … and America will fall behind in the pillow race … to the Danes!?

I was just about to start sleeping nights again.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi